Of Princesses and their Memoirs

Just in case the newest addition to the British Royal Family, the Duchess of Sussex, is in need of some self-help reading, here is a tiara-full of memoirs written by princesses from the past.

• The beautiful Lady Craven; the original memoirs of Elizabeth, baroness Craven, afterwards margravine of Anspach and Bayreuth and princess Berkeley of the Holy Roman empire (1750-1828), edited by
A. M. Broadley and Lewis Melville (1914)

Elizabeth Craven’s was only a morganatic title, granted after her second marriage to the Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach. She was easily the most prolific writer in this bunch, but her memoirs were not collected and published for over eighty years after her death. It’s a wonder she had time to write, given her seven children and many affairs. But the book was worth the wait. She conversed with Voltaire and Samuel Johnson, witnessed the French Revolution, and dined with much of Europe’s royalty of the time.

If it’s the best in blue blood Regency gossip you’re interested in, look no further. Here is her sketch of Ferdinand IV, then King of Naples:

His features were coarse and harsh; yet the general expression of his countenance was rather intelligent, and perhaps even agreeable, although, separately taken, every feature was ugly. His conversation, his deportment, his manners, were, from an unpolished simplicity, rude in their nature, though rather pleasing; as they removed from the mind what is always to be expected from a sovereign, that habit of disguise, artifice, and concealment, which accompany the possessor of a throne. If he did not converse much with strangers, yet he always appeared to say what he thought; and, although destitute of art or elegance, he did not betray a want of understanding or of information. He reminded me of a rustic elevated by accident to the crown.

The two volumes of The beautiful Lady Craven are available on the Internet Archive: Volume 1 (link) and Volume 2 (link).

• Memoirs of an Arabian princess: an autobiography, by Emily Ruete (1886/1907)

Emily Ruete was born Salama bint Said, a Princess of Zanzibar and Oman, and grew up on the island of Zanzibar, where her father ruled–and profited from the busy spice trade. Much of the book is devoted to memories of her childhood, such as the excitement surrounding the arrival of ships returning from Europe:

For us children those ships symbolised delightful mystery, as they brought us all our lovely toys from Europe. Upon the fleet’s arrival a day would soon be fixed for the distribution of the goods among high and humble, old and young. Twenty or thirty boxes were full of playthings: horses, carts, dolls, whips, fishes and ducks that followed a magnet, musical boxes of all dimensions, concertinas, flutes, trumpets, mock guns, and what not. If we were displeased, woe to the delinquent captain; he was a plenipotentiary entrusted with full powers and no restrictions; he sailed under the one specific order to purchase the best regardless of expense.

When finally the division was enacted at Bet il Mtoni and Bet il Sahel, it took three or four days to get everything duly apportioned among several hundred persons. Eunuchs attended to the unpacking and sorting out, while a few of the Sultan’s elder daughters performed the allotment proper. Jealousy, envy, and malice were unfortunately more conspicuous on this happy occasion than at any other time of the year.

It was in Zanzibar that she met and became pregnant by a German trader named Rudolph Heinrich Ruete. He arranged for her to escape to Aden, where she had the child, and where they married. She took the name of Emilie (spelled Emily in the English translations of her book) and traveled with her husband to Germany, losing the baby to illness along the way. They had three more children after settling in Germany. Unfortunately, several years after their arrival, Rudolph slipped while stepping off a tram and was struck and killed. Left with few resources, she wrote her memoirs to raise some money, and later, agreed to assist Chancellor Bismarck in several intrigues involving German interests in East Africa. She died in Jena at the age of 79 in 1924. Christiane Bird published an account of her life, The Sultan’s Shadow: One Family’s Rule at the Crossroads of East and West, in 2010.

The 1886 English translation of her memoirs can be found on the Internet Archive (link), but it is better to read the superior translation, by Lionel Strachey, published in 1907, which can also be found there (link).

• Pleasures and palaces; the memoirs of Princess Lazarovich-Hrebelianovich (1915)

Princess Lazarovich-Hrebelianovich offers the new princess-to-be her closest example. Born Eleanor Calhoun, she was an American actress who appeared with great success in numerous productions in London’s West End and at the Theatre National in Paris before marrying a Serbian prince in 1903. Thanks to the Balkan war and then the First World War, her reign was brief, but there is no sense of resentment for lost glories in this book. Although the Times Literary Supplement sniffed that “If it were not written by a Princess, we should say that there were too many Kings and Queens in it,” the book is suffused with her spirit of playfulness, as in this anecdote of a royal reception at Kensington Palace:

Standing near the entrance to the royal marquee, under the grand old trees, were King Edward and Mark Twain, the king laughing at the remarks of the American wit and philosopher, who was slightly smiling. Mark Twain, it was remarked, wore his hat, which an Englishman would not have done while in talk with the king. It was a wide, soft white felt hat, matching his white hair, and he was also clad in creamy-white broadcloth made ample and easy, a subject for Fragonard. The king, on the contrary, was wearing a strange assemblage of garments of varying cut and hue, producing an effect the opposite of happy. A relative of his, admiring Mark Twain’s beautiful appearance, scrutinized the king’s costume with a puzzled look, and aware of his usual good taste, she ventured to say:

“I am looking, sir, at your purple waistcoat. Your coat is — a kind of — pea-green, and — and your — h-m-m — upon my word! Really, how did it happen?”

The king in answer laughed and named different tailors who had at different times, he said, sent him a garment, begging him to wear it, and he had put them all on at once, “to do the tailors a good turn.”

The Princess became a fierce advocate for Serbian victims of the war and published a book about their plight. She died in New York City in 1957 at the age of 92.

• Arabesque, by Princess Musbah Haidar (1944)

Princess Musbah’s father was Ali Haidar Pasha, a Sherif of Mecca, which meant he was a direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad. He was also an important member of the Ottoman court, and Arabesque provides an insider’s view of life in the final years before foundation of the Turkish republic. Her mother, Isobel Duncan, was the daughter of a British general serving as an advisor to the Ottoman Army, and her father served in various administrative posts in Istanbul, Syria, Medina, and Beirut.

In their book, Gender, Modernity and Liberty: Middle Eastern and Western Women’s Writings, Reina Lewis and Nancy Micklewright call Arabesque “a unique and extremely well-informed window onto the political and social events unfolding around her.” Princess Musbah shows the role of women in the Ottoman court to have been misunderstood by many Westerners: “[T]hese foreigners did not realise that many of the veiled ladies of the Harems were better born, better read, spoke several languages and dressed with a greater chic than some of their own most famous society women.” Ironically, one of the few Western women to express a different perspective was Lady Craven, who wrote in her memoir:

The women, who were very numerous, were like walking mummies. A large loose robe of dark green cloth covered them from the neck to the ground; over that was a large piece of muslin, which wrapped the shoulders and arms, and another which went over the head and eyes. All these coverings confound the shape and air so much, that any rank may be concealed under them. I never saw a country where the women may enjoy so much freedom and liberty as here, free from all reproach.

Arabesque is also full of wonderful details of the bustling life in the streets of Istanbul, Damascus, and Beirut, including the many temptations that they presented to a child:

On the shelves, which ran the length of the shop, were stacked gaily painted wooden boxes of sweets, and on the long counters stood big glass bottles, each one holding a different-coloured sweet, green, pink, brown, red. A fat smiling man asked Musbah which one she wanted. Haji Bekr himself. Musbah pointed at each one in turn–she wanted a taste from them all. Haji Bekr, with a laugh, put a large hand into each bottle and filled up a box for her. The variety of the sweets made one’s mouth water. The Turkish Delight, Rahoul Lacoum; akidas, a kind of hard boiled sweet; there were long, wriggly pink and white sticks; round rings like transparent glass of different flavours and colours; cakes of crushed nuts and pistachios, with sugar sparkling like crystals; there were kurabiyahs, macaroons stuck on sheets of paper.

The Ottoman Caliphate was abolished in 1924, forcing the break-up of Princess Musbah’s family. Her father went to Beirut; some relatives returned to Mecca; others joined the community of European royal exiles in Paris and on the Riviera. Her mother stayed in Istanbul to raise her daughters, and Musbah eventually married a British army officer like her grandfather and settled with her husband in England

• The Memoirs of Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester

“A sense of dedication is an excellent quality; so is a sense of humour. The two are not always found together in one person.” This judgment, from one of the reviews of The Memoirs of Princess Alice, sums up the mix of a near-Victorian commitment to duty and a Bright Young Things spirit of carefree fun. Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester was the daughter of the 7th Duke of Buccleuch and married Prince Henry, the Duke of Gloucester, making her (among many other things royal) Queen Elizabeth’s aunt. Before she died at Kensington Palace in 2004 at the age of 102, she had become the oldest member of the British royal household in history.

Her memoirs, as with her life, can be divided into two clear sections: life before and after royalty. As a young woman in the 1920s, she enjoyed all the recreations of the Jazz Age, including a year in Kenya amidst the parties, drinking, and affairs of the Happy Valley set. As Isabel Colegate wrote in her review for the Times, “Altogether there is more than one echo of Nancy Mitord in the author’s account of her growing up.”

As the wife of the third son of the King of England, however, she had to focus on raising a family and following wherever duty led Prince Henry (usually referred to as the Duke)–which included time in Australia in the late 1940s as the Governor General. A very private person by nature, she was never truly comfortable with the constant demands for public appearances such postings required, but she summoned what the Queen Mother called “the courage of a lion” on countless occasions–even if it was only for what one wit described as “doling out the last of the roly-poly pudding to a houseful of pensioners.”

Although the Duke was a man of dedication and responsibility himself, he also betrayed at times the consequences of being raised at the height of privilege:

The Duke was doing The Times crossword when the news was breathlessly broken to him by two of his daughters that they had just left the third in hospital with a broken collar-bone after all three had been in a car crash; he merely asked them for a three-letter work for sheep. He could not bear his tea to be too hot and nothing would prevent him from sloshing it from cup to saucer and back if it was. At home his valet poured his tea out for him at five to nine so that it should be cool enough for him to drink when he came down at nine. Unsuspecting guests who drank it were in trouble….

It’s anecdotes like these that led Hugo Vickers, a prolific biographer of British royalty and society, to include the memoirs on his list of best royal biographies for Five Books: “I reviewed the book when it came out. I just found myself laughing on every page. I was gripped and again it was this wry quality that attracted me.”