Having been widowed at the young age of 34, Prince Wilhelm, heir to the throne of Württemberg, soon found himself under pressure to re-marry. King Karl, the government and the press urged the prince to end his seclusion and delight the small German kingdom with the gift of a future queen. For a while the rather private Wilhelm played for time, though, and raised the emotional stakes. ‘I have never lost sight of what I owe to my position as prince and to my country,’ he declared, ‘but I was too happy with my first wife to render myself unhappy for the rest of my life with a marriage of convenience; even a prince cannot be expected to endure that. I do not wish to give my country the example of a cold, loveless marriage!’ 1 So, when Wilhelm eventually led Charlotte of Waldeck-Pyrmont to the altar in 1886, the good people of Württemberg had every reason to believe that this union was a love match. As the couple entered Stuttgart, the inhabitants of the Württemberg capital gave them an enthusiastic welcome.
The reality behind the beautiful façade presented by the two newlyweds was, however, rather less lovely. Within months of Wilhelm’s second nuptials he despaired of ‘this comedy that I have to perform in front of the world, always making coquettish jokes, it often makes me want to crawl up the walls’. What mattered, he concluded rather wearily, was that he and his wife succeeded in presenting the image of a tenderly loving couple. ‘We show ourselves together in the theatre, drive and walk together, if we feel like it’, he told a close confidant the following year. ‘But, but!!—If only I had never met her; she would have led a happy life alongside someone else, and I would at least have gone my own way quietly and—over time—even contentedly.’ 2
The sorry story of this royal heir’s matrimonial life illustrates that, for the individuals involved, being compelled to make a favourable impression on a wider public could be a very grinding task indeed. Living up to a public expectation of a loving married life, visible evidence of which had to be presented to the eager eyes of an ever-present audience, was a fairly standard part of a repertoire of royal behaviour. This was increasingly regarded as necessary to woo the subjects. The public’s expectations of the performance of their crowned betters were certainly very high. When, in September 1885, Copenhagen’s Illustreret Tidende explained the tasks of a royal prince to its readers, the weekly paper chose nothing less demanding than the standards of the fairy tale: ‘the King’s son still wanders amongst us in disguise, slaying the dragons of envy and narrow-mindedness, sharing people’s fate and circumstances and winning their trust and affection.’ 3
For all its sugary coating, this account powerfully reminds us of the new, varied and demanding range of public duties which heirs to the throne had to confront during the century that preceded the First World War. As the vehicles conveying notions and hopes associated with the future of their respective monarchical systems, the men and women whose birth or marriage predestined them one day to wear a crown had little choice. They had to engage with the task of managing and communicating the transformations of Europe’s monarchies in the course of the long nineteenth century. These institutions, remarkably sturdy survivors amid a tumultuous age, were clearly heeding the famous advice given by Tancredi Falconeri in Di Lampedusa’s The Leopard: ‘If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.’ Carefully veiled by ostensibly timeless traditions, Europe’s monarchical systems engaged in significant and multi-layered processes of change.
Perhaps the most fundamental shift which took place (albeit at different speeds and to varying degrees) across what remained an overwhelmingly monarchical continent, affected the ability of nineteenth-century monarchs to wield power. For Britain, Lord Esher famously described this process as one where a once powerful monarchy ended up having to settle for mere influence. 4 What is more, as Vernon Bogdanor has observed for the Victorian case, with ‘public opinion now being the motive force of government, there was a fundamental change in the character of monarchy. The means by which the sovereign could exert influence came to change.’ Once the crown had achieved the position of a ‘striking exemplar of the domestic virtues’, though, it could reap considerable rewards. Recognized by the public as a ‘moral force’, the monarchy emerged with its authority enhanced—rather than diminished—from this ‘transformation from power to influence’. For, if completed successfully, the change would make the monarch appear as the head of both the state and the nation. 5 Achieving this kind of superiority was anything but effortless, however, and there was something remarkable about the lengths to which nineteenth-century royal houses had to go in pursuit of it. Discussing the exertions Bavaria’s Wittelsbach dynasty made in the fields of memory politics and monumental architecture in order to awaken the pride of the Bavarian nation in its ruling family, Volker Sellin has drawn attention to the oddness of this development: ‘It is a peculiar phenomenon that a centuries-old dynasty, whose rule had, until recently, been legitimised in a quasi-self-evident fashion through timeless practice, now had to make such efforts to make itself remembered.’ 6
As these examples from Württemberg, Britain and Bavaria show, members of Europe’s royal families had to extend and enhance their skill set if they wanted to maximize the benefits that could arise from the altered concept of the monarch’s role in politics and society. The establishment of ‘monarchical constitutionalism’—the constraining of a monarch’s power by (usually codified) constitutional law and the sharing of its exercise with elected parliaments—was uneven and staggered across post-Napoleonic Europe. 7 It nevertheless had a momentous effect on the monarchs’ duties. As old ligatures between rulers and ruled—such as a profound and widespread belief in the divine ordination of kingship—weakened, monarchy needed to justify itself in different ways. Amid this ‘legitimacy crisis of the European monarchies’ 8 the claim that the crown should continue to dispose in some fashion of the formidable powers of the modern state (armed forces, civil service, police, taxes, cultural and educational institutions), as well as the payment of civil lists to support courtly life, now needed to be legitimized afresh. There were two different yet complementary ways to achieve this: (i) by attaining the kind of public moral authority that gained a sovereign unparalleled love, as Queen Victoria smugly claimed for herself in 1844 9 ; and (ii) through being associated with effective government that could stand up to parliamentary and public scrutiny, for ‘at this present stage of history, only rule that guaranteed the happiness and peace of its subjects would be legitimate.’ 10
The application of relatively transparent criteria for governmental capability and efficaciousness, however, brought with it considerable risks; after all, the price of failure could be a forced abdication or the installation of a regent. To help them in this task monarchs needed allies. They tended to find them not amongst the new parliamentary bodies but within the administrative and governmental machinery of the modern state, amongst the ministers they appointed. In the constitutional system, monarchs were no longer the principal statesmen or leaders in battle—even if some of them may have harboured such ambitions. These functions were now fulfilled by the sovereign’s chief minister and his most senior general. Monarchical rule in the age of monarchical constitutionalism was thus increasingly based on, contained by and dependent on ministerial government. 11 The incremental loss of royal power, which was assumed by ministerial elites, elected parliaments and elements of the public, edged sovereigns towards having to carve out new roles for themselves: as Bogdanor’s analysis of the British case shows, these roles were public-facing.
Even for egregiously unambitious sovereigns, supine idleness did not amount to a viable strategy for dealing with these changed circumstances. The oft-quoted advice King Umberto I of Italy reportedly gave to his son—‘Remember, to be a king all you need to know is how to sign your name, read a newspaper and mount a horse’ 12 —thus needs to be taken with a large pinch of salt. Surrounded by subjects, whose joyous participation in royal events—as spectators, well-wishers, newspaper readers or collectors of patriotic trinkets—counted as a new form of legitimization, monarchs and their families had come under pressure to develop means to win, rather than command, hearts and minds. In this delicate game of wooing, royal mistakes or dereliction of duty would not go unpunished. After King Ludwig of Bavaria had failed to visit the town of Schweinfurt when he toured the surrounding region in 1865, the Schweinfurter Tagblatt crabbily warned ‘how quickly the popularity of a prince can be jeopardized by indolence and how very unjust neglect can disgruntle even the most faithful adherents of a principle’. Ludwig’s tendencies to shirk his public duties also worried the Munich Police Commissioner, who stated that such behaviour caused ‘love and respect to wane, without which no regent can rule effectively’. 13 The re-fashioning of monarchy thus presented the sovereigns with a stark consequence, as Markus J. Prutsch observes: ‘the more rational and economic the understanding of political institutions was, the more replaceable—and indeed superfluous—monarchs became if they did not meet public expectations.’ 14
Thus, while skills that related to traditional forms of monarchical rule—‘hard power’ techniques such as martial prowess or political ruthlessness—remained relevant, an array of new skills aimed at the acquisition and exercise of ‘soft power’ emerged as increasingly important for nineteenth-century monarchs. Hard power, according to the political scientist Joseph Nye, encompasses the means by which the compliance of others can be enforced—by coercion, force or payment, ultimately by the waging of war. Soft power, on the other hand, a term coined by Nye in 1990, revolves around the ability to make others want the same outcomes as you, the ability to shape the preferences of others; this is achieved by co-opting, persuading, charming, seducing or attracting them. ‘You can appeal to a sense of attraction, love, or duty in our relationship and appeal to our shared values about the justness of contributing to those shared values and purposes. If I am persuaded to go along with your purposes without any explicit threat or exchange taking place—in short, if my behaviour is determined by an observable but intangible attraction—soft power is at work.’ 15
The ability to wield soft power, Nye insists, rests on culture, which he defines as the ‘set of values and practices that create meaning for a society’. 16 This raises profound questions for the monarchies of nineteenth-century Europe. What were those societal values and practices that endowe...