Amalie knelt before her dead husband's portrait and wept. The papers dealing with his estate had become too much. Years earlier, an empress had helped arrange their marriage. Now Amalie had three sons and no husband.
Amalie of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha was born on 23 October 1848 at Coburg, into a family whose French crown had already been lost. Her mother, Clémentine of Orléans, was a daughter of Louis-Philippe, King of the French. On 24 February, almost eight months before the birth, he had abdicated as revolution overtook Paris. By the time his granddaughter arrived, he was living in England.
The old king and his family had taken refuge at Claremont in Surrey, leaving a throne, a court and a life in France behind within weeks. Amalie was born after the flight and never knew the France her grandfather had ruled. For her mother, that world had been home.
But the loss of the French throne had not left Clémentine's children without connections. Their father, Prince August, belonged to the Coburg family, whose marriages reached into the royal houses of Britain, Belgium and Portugal. He and Clémentine lived in Vienna's Palais Coburg. Amalie grew up with the Orléans on one side and the Coburgs on the other. A republic in France had not put an end to royal matchmaking elsewhere.
When her own marriage came under discussion, Prince Leopold of Bavaria was a prospective husband. There was, however, another Bavarian prince who wanted to marry her: Duke Maximilian Emanuel in Bavaria, the youngest brother of Empress Elisabeth of Austria, known in the family as Sisi. Max loved Amalie, and his sister knew it. Helping him meant finding a way through a marriage arrangement that already involved somebody else.
Elisabeth had a daughter, Gisela. She invited Leopold to Gödöllő, where Gisela was staying, opening the possibility of a match with the emperor's own child. Leopold and Gisela became engaged. The intended marriage to Amalie fell away, and Max's hopes could proceed. It was an efficient piece of family management, although rather more people were involved than the two who would eventually marry at Ebenthal.
Gisela was sixteen when she married Leopold in Vienna on 20 April 1873. Her marriage made him the son-in-law of Emperor Franz Joseph. Amalie's future had been disentangled through a decision that also settled the future of a much younger woman. Affection and family advantage could fit within the same arrangement. The royal families of Europe had considerable practice at making room for both.
Amalie married Max on 20 September 1875 at Ebenthal in Lower Austria. She was twenty-six; he was twenty-five. Through the marriage she became a duchess in Bavaria and Elisabeth's sister-in-law. Had the first plan held, she would have married closer to power: Leopold's father, Luitpold, became Prince Regent of Bavaria in 1886. The man she married instead was the one who had wanted her.
Marriage did not immediately cure homesickness. Within a fortnight of the wedding, Amalie was missing her family badly despite Max's care and tenderness, and her mother wrote of her daughter's unhappiness at being so far from them. A husband could be kind and a new home could still feel foreign.
Their first son, Siegfried, was born at Bamberg in July 1876. The family made its home at Biederstein, near Munich, where Christoph followed in April 1879. The grand names and connections remained, but the marriage now had the ordinary responsibilities that no empress could arrange out of existence: pregnancies, children and illness.
During her pregnancy with Christoph, Amalie suffered pains and her doctor feared a miscarriage. Max wrote to her mother because she could not write herself. He reassured Clémentine, explained the prescribed rest, and apologised for the mistakes in his letter. It was a quieter kind of devotion than anything the matchmaking had required.
A third son, Luitpold, was born on 30 June 1890, eleven years after Christoph. By then Amalie and Max had been married for almost fifteen years, and the two older boys had a baby brother in the house.
Max died at Feldafing on 12 June 1893. He was forty-three, Amalie forty-four. Luitpold was eighteen days short of his third birthday. The marriage for which an empress had intervened ended after less than eighteen years. Amalie was left with his estate and the papers that came with it. The man who had once written to her mother when she was too ill to do it was gone.
She survived him by less than a year. On 6 May 1894, Amalie died at Biederstein, aged forty-five. Siegfried was seventeen and Christoph had just turned fifteen. The portrait she had knelt before was of their father. Now both parents were gone, and their youngest boy, Luitpold, was still only three.
