by Alan Palmer
This elusive quality - unexpected in someone whose caricature is so firmly etched on the mind - must intrigue any biographer. 'I am what I am and I cannot change', the Kaiser once told Bülow in a moment of pique. But what was he? And why?
1 - Thus Win all Men's Applause
Thursday, 27 January 1859, was a wintry afternoon in Berlin, light snow falling on a muffled crowd who had gathered expectantly beneath naked limes and chestnuts down Unter den Linden. Throughout the last two days gunners had stood by at the old palace of the Prussian kings, ready to let the world know when a child was born to the 'English Princess' Victoria, eighteen-year-old wife of Prince Frederick William: the battery in the Lustgarten would fire thirty-six rounds for a girl, a hundred and one for a boy. That afternoon, almost on three o'clock, the first of the saluting cannon broke the midwinter stillness of the city. It rattled the windows in the small palace at the corner of the Oberwaldstrasse, where the doctors were gathered around Princess Victoria's bed, and almost a mile away it shook the rooms in the Wilhelmstrasse where Victoria's father-in-law, Prince-Regent William, was in conference. The Regent broke off his conversation, hurried downstairs, hailed a public Droschke, and ordered it to take him to his son's palace. The cab was beneath the arch of the Oberwaldstrasse before the thirty-seventh gun let him know he had a grandson, third in line of succession to the Prussian throne. Soon the news was telegraphed to the Princess's mother and father at Windsor; and, as they rested after a late luncheon, Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort learnt that they too had now become grandparents for the first time. The baby was officially styled Prince Frederick William Albert Victor, names which in themselves linked the royal houses of Prussia and Great Britain. He was known in the family as 'Willy'. Eventually, seventeen years after Germany was proclaimed an empire in 1871, he became Kaiser William II. The world remembers him, with little sympathy or understanding, as the Kaiser.
In Berlin and in London there was rejoicing that evening and the next. Despite the bitter cold, Prince Regent William and his consort, Augusta, went on to the palace balcony and waved contentedly to the jubilant crowd below. There were cheers for Prince Frederick William when he emerged from the Oberwaldstrasse to ride the few hundred yards to his parents' residence. At Windsor, toasts were drunk, not only by the family, but by the household and domestic staff as well. In England people still thought of the new mother as the Princess Royal, eldest child of the sovereign and special favourite of her consort. At the princess's marriage, almost exactly a year before, the Poet Laureate had obliged Her Majesty with two extra stanzas for the national anthem: 'God bless our Prince and Bride, God keep their lands allied', the choristers had sung. Now, the birth of a son to the Princess Royal inspired less elegant turners of verse than Tennyson. When the curtain fell at one London music-hall on the first evening of the future Kaiser's life, the audience stood as the principal comedienne sang:
Hail the auspicious morn,
To Prussia's throne is born
A royal heir.
May he defend its laws
Joined with Old England's cause
Thus win all men's applause,
God save the Queen!
Never before in English history had the birth of a foreign prince aroused so much interest and enthusiasm. The Times, which had for several years been unsympathetic to Prussia, frowned magisterially at such display of public sentiment. On Friday morning the leading article warned readers not to attach undue significance to dynastic connections in assessing political prospects: but it added: 'Our own excellent Sovereign will not have her joy diminished by the reflection that the event which connects her more closely with a great Continental Throne is looked upon by the world as a guarantee of those principles which render her own dynasty secure in the affections of her people.' Happily the general mood in London was less portentous. When the House of Commons reassembled in the following week, the member for North Devon, Charles Trefusis, in moving the address on the Queen's Speech, hoped the birth of a royal grandson in Berlin would 'prove a happy augury of peace'; and the leader of the Opposition, Lord Palmerston, looked forward to a time when the newly born prince would serve 'as an ornament and 'advantage to the country of his birth and to the lineage from which he has sprung'. (1)
Within a few days of receiving the good news from Berlin, the Queen became aware that 'Vicky' - as the princess was known in the family - suffered considerably during a long and tortuous confinement. For several hours the life of mother and child hung in the balance, not least because of the strange pre-natal position of the baby. At one moment the doctors seemed in such despair that a private message advised the leading Berlin editors to have their presses set up obituary notices for the princess. The battle for her life continued while the cannon were firing their ceremonial salvoes, and the infant was left in the care of a German midwife, Fraulein Stahl, who made his lungs function at the last minute by administering a sharp smack. Only after the crisis had eased around the mother's bed was it seen that the baby's left arm was misshapen. At first it was assumed that the dislocation of the elbow joint and the shoulder socket might be healed by orthopaedic treatment. Nothing was said of the child's disabilities in any communication to Windsor, even though Queen Victoria sent an anxious telegram asking, 'Is it a fine boy?' Sir James Clark, the Queen's principal physician, returned from Berlin in the middle of February and told her about the defective arm, while reassuring her over the general state of Vicky's health. There still seemed no reason why the prince's injury should not be cured in the course of time.
More than sixty years later, the Kaiser himself wrote: 'One definite disability I did suffer from. At birth my left arm had received an injury unnoticed at the time, which proved permanent and impeded its free movement.' (2) The physical and psychological effects of this crippled arm undoubtedly left their mark on his character and therefore, indirectly, on the tragic history of the twentieth century. But it is probable that William himself, and many commentators, exaggerated the significance of the withered arm and neglected its causes. Had the arm itself - and only the arm - been injured by the child's violent birth, there would have been some ground for the medical optimists who recommended gymnastic exercise and electrical treatment. Yet, in reality, the damaged left arm was merely the outward physical form of a deeper disability. When Princess Victoria was five months pregnant she tripped over a chair leg in the old palace at Berlin and (as she wrote later) 'fell with violence on the slippery parquet'. Rightly or wrongly, she believed that this accident - about which she said little at the time - was responsible for 'all my misfortunes and baby's false position'. (3) In the early months of William's life, the doctors discovered that a neck injury had been caused in birth because the head was already tilted abnormally to the left. The damaged neck influenced the functioning of the cervical nerve plexus, thus leading to paralysis of the left arm. At the same time, the hearing labyrinth of the left ear was harmed, so that the young prince suffered, even as a child, from deafness on one side. As he grew older it became clear that his balance was also affected, presumably by damage to that part of the brain which lies closest to the inner ear. Determination and will-power enabled William, in the course of time, to conceal his bodily handicaps from casual eyes; but it is impossible to tell how far he was able to assume co-ordinated self-control of a damaged nervous system.
Ultimately it mattered little, except to the royal physicians, whether these injuries were the consequence of a pre-natal accident or of the difficult delivery. It was, however, especially tragic that the victim of such misfortune should be the offspring of families in which there was already a high incidence of mental instability. The young prince's great-uncle, Frederick William IV (still titular King of Prussia), was recognized as prematurely senile in the autumn of 1858 and was now playing out his last months of life at Potsdam, unaware of anything that happened beyond his palace walls. Moreover Prince William was the firstborn descendant both of Tsar Paul and of King George III, great-great-gran
dfathers whose minds frequently wandered into twilight worlds of suspicion and unreality. There were still living in German princely courts those who could remember England in the years when her sovereign was a Lear-like figure, hidden by the windows of Windsor. The possibility of an alleged hereditary madness manifesting itself within the family haunted the Prince Consort and, not surprisingly, his daughter in Berlin as well.
Yet, in those opening months of 1859, this particular fear lay dormant. Vicky, as she told her mother a shade tactlessly, was pleased and proud her first child should have been a son. The baby's baptism was arranged for the eve of Lent, 7 March, which was far sooner than Queen Victoria wished. She was angry because domestic political difficulties prevented her going to Berlin: 'Oh! dearest Uncle, it almost breaks my heart not to witness our first grandchild christened!', she wrote to King Leopold of the Belgians. 'It is a stupid law in Prussia, I must say, to be so particular about having the child christened so soon.' She was represented at the ceremonies in Berlin by Lord Raglan, son of the much criticized commander in the Crimea. As Vicky recalled later, he was one of the few guests who did not comment on how small and delicate the child appeared to be. The princess remained extremely sensitive despite her hopes of a successful cure: 'It went to my heart to see him half covered up to hide his arm which dangled without use or power by his side', she wrote. (4)
Victoria and Albert were both godparents, but the Queen was disconcerted to find they shared this honour with no less than forty other royal and princely sponsors. Although she consoled herself with the thought that godparents who were also grandparents must be reckoned in a special category of divine guardianship, she remained vexed by what she considered the strange behaviour of the Prussian court; and until Vicky crossed to England in May - her first visit home since her marriage - letters from Windsor to Berlin showed affection, solicitude and asperity in almost equal parts. The Prince Consort, on the other hand, was positively light-hearted in his comments, notably on the decision that the baby should be known as William: 'What epitaph history will attach to his name is in the lap of the Gods', he wrote to his son-in-law two days after the christening, 'not Rufus ... not the "Silent", not "the Conqueror", perhaps "the Great". There is none with this designation.' (5)
When Vicky returned to England in May she could not bring the delicate baby with her, and Victoria and Albert had to wait until September 1860 to see their grandson. By then William was twenty months old and had a sister of seven weeks, Charlotte, a healthy child born after an easy labour. The Queen and the Prince Consort, who were staying at Coburg, were delighted by William: 'He is a fine fat child, with a beautiful soft skin, very fine shoulders and limbs, and a very dear face', Victoria wrote, as though defying the comments of the Prussian doctors; and Albert is alleged to have perceived, even at this early stage, a high degree of intelligence in his grandson. Next August, Vicky and her husband - the royal families called him 'Fritz' - brought William and Charlotte to England and they were able to spend some gloriously hot days on the Isle of Wight. 'Osborne', wrote William sixty-five years later, 'is the scene of my earliest recollections', and he always claimed he could remember Grandpapa Albert, who 'used to like dandling me in a table napkin', a reminiscence which may have become embellished by family tales lovingly and frequently repeated. Vicky, Fritz and the children left Osborne on Friday, 16 August, just seventeen weeks before the Prince Consort died. William therefore possessed an advantage over Victoria's seventeen other grandsons: he alone among them had been seen by Albert, and praised by Albert, and petted by Albert. To Victoria he remained, as she told uncle Leopold, 'a clever, dear, good little child, the great favourite of my beloved Angel'. (6)
By the time of his visit to Osborne the 'great favourite' had already advanced one stage nearer the Prussian throne. Frederick William IV died at Potsdam on 3 January 1861 and was succeeded by his brother, the former Prince-Regent, who was crowned King William I of Prussia at an impressive ceremony in Königsberg the following October. The new king had taken an affectionate interest in his grandson ever since those first salutes in the Lustgarten brought him hurrying back to the Oberwaldstrasse. At times King William was intensely irritated by the good advice which he used to receive from London, especially while the Prince Consort was alive, and he occasionally snubbed his daughter-in-law whose English ways alienated so many figures at his Court. But the King, if vexed, was at least straightforwardly hostile: his consort, Queen Augusta, was devious, mischievous and totally unsympathetic to Vicky or to anything which seemed to emanate from Coburg or Windsor, King William told his grandson tales of the war against the great Napoleon, of the battle of Leipzig and of how at seventeen he had entered Paris beside Tsar Alexander I in 1814; Queen Augusta, on the other hand, fed the child's growing mind with hints of neglect and of affronts to Prussian tradition on the part of his mother. If William came to believe his mother preferred her other children, the blame rests almost entirely with Augusta and her bitterly jealous tongue. On one occasion the Crown Princess - as Vicky had now become - complained to Queen Victoria that William was encouraging his grandson to have ideas which 'were neither wholesome nor good'; but psychologically they were far less damaging than the muddled resentments stirred up by Grandmama Augusta and her ladies at Court.
Ultimately it was the grandmother at Windsor and Osborne who made the greatest impression on young William, even though he saw her so rarely. By the 1860s Queen Victoria's ascendancy was complete in Europe, despite her prostration after Albert's death. Although only forty-two when she was widowed, the Queen had already reigned longer than any of her contemporaries; she was not inclined to conceal feelings or change an opinion over questions of principle, for it did not occur to her that she could be wrong. Often she looked on lesser mortals with amiable condescension: 'Poor dear soul', she wrote of Augusta, after Vicky reported one particularly mischievous outburst, 'her worries and annoyances make her quite cross.' (7) But the Queen herself was both obstinate and proud. Nothing could convince her that Prussian physicians equalled in skill of diagnosis or treatment the talents of her royal doctors, Sir James Clark and Sir William Jenner. Fortunately she had taken a liking to Fritz when he first visited London in 1851, a few months short of his twentieth birthday, and she continued to look for his qualities as well as those of Vicky in their eldest son. So long as William was a child she treated him indulgently, smiling happily at his naughtiness, commending his courage when he had a tooth out, allowing him to play at Osborne with the miniature cannons on the fort in the grounds which Albert had designed for his own sons. In March 1863 the four-year-old prince was brought from Berlin to Windsor for the wedding of his uncle Bertie, the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII. William amused himself by throwing an aunt's muff out of a carriage window and a decorative stone from his dirk across the floor of St George's Chapel. When Prince Leopold - not yet ten, and also dressed in a kilt for the occasion - tried to restrain him, William caused a minor commotion by seeking to bite his uncle's leg. Yet whatever the younger generation may have felt about his behaviour, 'precious little William' was a delight to his grandmother, brightening momentarily the widow's gloom in which she enveloped herself. It is not until after William had twice stayed at Osborne without his parents that a warning note appears in the royal correspondence: on his sixth birthday the Queen told her daughter she hoped that 'our darling William', who 'is so dear and so good', would be brought up 'simply, plainly, not with that terrible Prussian pride and ambition, which grieved dear Papa so much'. (8)
There was, of course, also a specifically British pride, and it was around the young prince every time he went to Osborne. He found it exciting to look out from the windows of the house across the parkland to Spithead, where he could watch the warships sailing in and out of Portsmouth. But in Berlin, farther from the sea than anywhere in England, a different tradition predominated: the Prussian capital could not shake off the legacy of Frederick the Great. William I himself always behaved as though soldiering
was the true vocation of the House of Hohenzollern and, though Frederick had died in 1786 disillusioned and far from popular, dynastic sentiment perpetuated his achievements and he was remembered as the victor of Rossbach and Leuthen. When Treitschke began his history of nineteenth-century Germany, he declared, 'The twelve campaigns of the Frederician Era have left their mark for ever on the martial spirit of the Prussian people and the Prussian army'; and William I insisted that the first presentation of colours to new regiments after his accession should take place at a ceremony beside Frederick's tomb in Potsdam. Nor was this romanticized past so very remote. 'Those that knew him are still alive', the Crown Princess reminded her mother early in 1863; and added that she herself was acquainted with two of them.' (9)