An American Princess: The Many Lives of Allene Tew(32)
That kingship never came to be, since against all expectation Wilhelmina managed to produce a daughter a year later. But Henry was still handsome. In short, Allene had found herself a seven-years-younger and very presentable husband, who, like her, was very well traveled—during his diplomatic career he’d been posted in Japan and Australia—and shared her great love of art. Aside from this—no mean feat for a girl who had taken her first steps in a livery stable in Jamestown—after the wedding she became one of the first Americans ever to be able to call herself a princess.
And finally—and perhaps this was the most important thing of all—with Henry and his motherless children, she would again have a family she could rightly call her own.
Incidentally, in his letter to the governess, Henry saved for last what could have been the most important detail for him: the financial consequences. In other words, money, something of which the prince had a chronic shortage.
Like most aristocratic German families, the Reusses had become impoverished since the end of the world war. After the collapse of the German front and the humiliating flight of Kaiser Wilhelm II in November 1918, a revolution had broken out that had toppled monarchies like domino pieces. Under the Weimar Republic that replaced the fragmented empire, aristocrats had to forfeit almost all their privileges and a large part of their land, which had traditionally provided their income.
For Henry’s family, there was also this unfortunate circumstance: the family estate, Trebschen, was located in Posen, a province in the northeastern corner of the former empire. As a consequence of the Treaty of Versailles, in which Germany was forced to give up a large part of its territory, this province came to lie right next to the Polish border. The once-wealthy area soon emptied out and became impoverished, and by the time Henry met Allene, the Reuss brothers could hardly keep their heads above water. Everything they owned that could be sold was already gone, what was left of their land had been mortgaged to the hilt, and the house itself, which had been a real pleasure ground before the war, was now so dilapidated that their sister, who lived with her reasonably solvent husband in Stonsdorf, no longer wanted to visit with her family.
Henry made ends meet with difficulty in Paris, where he had taken up his old profession of diplomacy after being seriously wounded in the war on the Russian front. But the children, who had become his responsibility after the death of their mother, still lived in the crumbling Trebschen with his older brother, simply because Henry didn’t have enough money to send them to a decent boarding school. What’s more, his lack of money was exacerbated by his desire to keep up the life of luxury he felt his position afforded him the right to, and by the fact that he sometimes entertained himself with drinking and gambling—as was well known in Parisian diplomatic circles.
But a permanent end would come to all of these worries, Henry elatedly wrote to the governess after his future marriage had become a public fact in the spring of 1929:
From next year onwards, I can finally give my children a better education than what has been possible so far in the remove countryside—supplemented with all kinds of healthy, practical matters of the modern time. One of my dearest wishes fulfilled so much sooner than I’d hoped. Languages, music, arts and sport, lots of sport!
Likewise in the deepest confidence, I would like to say, that as far as I can predict, there will be major changes at Trebschen—probably during the coming year.
His future wife had promised to pay off the loans the family had taken out against the estate, according to Henry, and to have the house and the surrounding park renovated. After this, his eldest brother would have a comfortable home again, and even Henry’s sister—whom the governess was very fond of—would be able to come back and stay with her family. But the governess had to stay mum about all this, of course, for the time being, since, as he wrote, “these affairs are being drawn up and considered at this time in a most careful, legal fashion, in this and all other respects.” In brief, negotiations were still in full swing.
Allene must have realized herself, however lonely and infatuated she might have been, that her German prince charming hadn’t courted her only for her pretty blue eyes and maternal instinct. Later, a friend of hers would describe the way she called a spade a spade during a joint visit to the former German emperor Wilhelm II, who lived in exile in Doorn in the Netherlands:
During her engagement to Prince Henry of Reuss, they were dining with the Emperor Wilhelm II at Doorn when the Kaiser, whose manners were always atrocious, demanded, not at all sotto voce: “What can a Prince of Reuss get out of marriage with an American?” Allene replied quite as audibly: “Sir, his bread and butter.” And the Emperor did not pursue the topic further.
But Allene didn’t doubt that a union partly forged upon financial motives could nevertheless be a happy one. Weren’t almost all of the marriages between British aristocrats and American heirs or heiresses based on dollars? For many of them, such as her friends the Grevilles, the results had been more than satisfactory.
As was often the case in Allene’s life, so closely followed by the society press, the news first broke in the New York Times: “Mrs. Burchard . . . is Reported Engaged to Prince Henry,” the paper reported on October 28, 1928. Although by then the couple had appeared many times together in public at social events within the American colony in Paris, rumors about the imminent engagement had been categorically refuted. But reporters caught the whiff of a good story and closely followed all of Allene’s movements from that moment on.