by Theo Aronson
It was because of this deep love for her mother and her country that the Empress Frederick watched, with increasing anxiety, the maladroit behaviour of her son, Kaiser Wilhelm II, towards England.
The Kaiser's attitude towards his grandmother's country had always been ambivalent: rather in the nature of a love-hate relationship. He admired England, he envied her, he was attracted to her, he feared her. He criticized her with characteristic vigour yet his criticisms had never quite rung true. They had been shafts aimed at his Anglophile parents rather than at England herself. Now that his father, Kaiser Frederick III, was dead and his mother of no account, the Kaiser could allow his latent respect for Britain to emerge. In fact, of all the countries of Europe there was none with which he would rather be associated. What was more natural than that these two great Teutonic nations should stand together?
Two years after his accession to the throne, Wilhelm had forced his mentor, Prince Bismarck, to hand in his resignation. With the Chancellor out of the way, the Kaiser felt free to shape his own foreign policy. He thus began thinking in terms of a closer friendship with Britain.
The fact that the Queen of England was his grandmother gave Wilhelm opportunities for friendly overtures denied to other sovereigns. Indeed, once he had paid his first state visit to Britain there seemed to be no keeping him away. Every year saw him yachting at Cowes and every visit was followed by a gushing letter of thanks to his grandmother in which he would hint at a possible alliance between their two countries. Should 'the Will of Providence lay the heavy burden on us of fighting for our homes and our destinies,' ran one typically flamboyant outpouring, 'then may the British fleet be seen forging ahead, side by side with the German, and the "Redcoat" marching to victory with the Pomeranian Grenadier!'
Enamoured of uniforms, Wilhelm was always angling for yet another one. The Queen, who had already made him an Admiral of the Fleet, considered this 'tireless fishing for uniforms' regrettable. When, on giving way to his importunings, she made him an Honorary Colonel of the 1st Royal Dragoons, his delight was almost overwhelming. 'I am moved, deeply moved,' he enthused, 'at the idea that I now too can wear beside the Naval uniform the traditional British "Redcoat".'
Not quite everyone, though, shared Kaiser Wilhelm II's enthusiasm for closer relations between the two countries. Britain was determined to remain aloof from any Continental entanglements and a great many Germans, conscious of their country's growing might, saw no reason for allying themselves to anyone. Then, on a more personal level, the Kaiser's English relations were not nearly so enamoured of him as he seemed to be of them. Queen Victoria, finding his ebullience somewhat exhausting, once suggested that the British Ambassador in Berlin drop a hint to the effect that her grandson need not come to England every year.
And there was little love lost between the Kaiser and his Uncle Bertie – Britain's future King. It was largely his nephew's braggartly behaviour at Cowes that forced the Prince of Wales to abandon yachting in 1897. In fact, the Kaiser's arrogance tended to make the urbane Prince of Wales increasingly Francophile.
There was as yet no suggestion, however, that King Edward VII's England might one day look to France rather than Germany for friendship; during the 1890s such a possibility seemed remote indeed.
Yet Wilhelm, having decided to win Britain's friendship, was incapable of carrying through his scheme. He was too tactless, too boastful and too bellicose to win British confidence. With almost every step he took he seemed to bring the German Reich into conflict with British interests. The two countries clashed over colonial policy in Africa and the Far East; German promotion of a Berlin-to-Baghdad railway line roused British antagonism; the Kaiser's plans to build a powerful navy alarmed the Mistress of the Seas. In 1896, when Dr Jameson led his unsuccessful raid into the Transvaal Republic, the Kaiser saw fit to send a telegram to President Kruger, congratulating him on having repelled the band of British invaders. Willie's rashness earned him a stinging rebuke from his grandmother (it would have been more stinging still had she known that he had suggested sending German troops to the Transvaal) and raised a storm of indignation throughout England.
Although the Kaiser's fears that the incident had put an end to his little visits to Cowes were not justified, it did put an end to any hope of an alliance. Some politicians, in Britain and Germany, might still favour cooperation, but from now on public opinion in both countries was against it.
One of those most ardently in favour of an alliance was Wilhelm's mother, the Empress Frederick. Such an alliance was to have been the cornerstone of her husband's foreign policy; it had always been the Prince Consort's dearest wish. In mounting alarm Vicky watched the friendship which was developing between Russia and France. On the face of it, the association between reactionary Russia and republican France seemed an unlikely one, but the two countries had one powerful factor in common: a fear of Wilhelm II's Germany. The French and Russian fleets exchanged visits (Europe was diverted by the spectacle of the Tsar of All the Russias standing bare-headed while a French naval band blared out the revolutionary strains of the Marseillaise) and a secret military convention was agreed upon between the two nations.
When the French fleet, having just paid its visit to Russia, was invited to Portsmouth and its officers presented to Queen Victoria, the Empress immediately grasped the significance of the occasion. The fact that her mother had had to stand up while the 'horrid Marseillaise' had been played, appalled Vicky; not, one suspects, because of its violently revolutionary sentiments, but because of the fact that the incident pointed to the coming entente between Britain and France.
In the year 1898, forsaking for once her negative role, the Empress made one more effort to bring about the cherished alliance. In secret, she approached both her son and the British Ambassador, claiming that she had information to the effect that the time for a formal alliance was never more opportune than at present.
In this, as far as Britain was concerned, she was correct. Certain British statesmen were indeed ready for an approach to Germany. But by now Germany had lost interest. The Reich was becoming more self-sufficient by the day and its politicians resented what they considered to be Britain's patronizing attitude.
When the Empress Frederick spoke to the new Secretary of State, Bernhard von Bülow, of her fears that the building of a great German navy would put paid to all hopes of an entente with Britain, he treated the warning as another instance of her Anglomania. She was speaking, as usual, as Queen Victoria's daughter. 'She believed' he wrote in his memoirs, 'the best Germany could do was to make herself useful to England and England's high aims and at the same time ennoble herself by keeping in the course of English policy, like a tiny boat in the wake of a great frigate . . . .'
By the summer of 1899 the Empress had to admit the final fading of her dream. The gulf between the two nations was widening too fast. 'Such a thing as an alliance is too good to be true,' she sighed. Her beloved father's plans, mulled over at such length and with such optimism half a century before, had come to nothing.
2
Of absorbing interest to the Empress Frederick during the last decade of the century were the affairs of her daughter Sophie, Crown Princess of Greece. There was no aspect of Sophie's life in which her mother did not feel deeply involved. On her visits to Greece, Vicky had been enchanted by the country. Its landscape, its politics, its finances, its possibilities, all interested the Empress profoundly; her flow of advice to Sophie and her husband Crown Prince Constantine reveals the extraordinary extent of her knowledge. On no subject did the Empress Frederick not have a strong, original and practical opinion. She was forever sending the young couple suggestions for the improvement, not only of their own surroundings, but of the country's always precarious financial state. She could advise on babies, drains, furniture, shrubs, pottery, hospitals, water supplies, orange trees, marble quarries, roads, railways and military instructors. That Greece did not blossom into instant prosperity was through no lack of directives on
the part of the Empress Frederick.
How many of her mother's suggestions Crown Princess Sophie acted upon one cannot say. Her subsequent work for hospitals and afforestation were certainly inspired by the Empress but Sophie would have had to have been an exceptionally energetic person to have carried through all her mother's various schemes.
This she was not. Her health was delicate, she was easily depressed and her interests centred on her home and family rather than on national issues. For someone of Sophie's temperament, there were so many things to be despondent about. During the first years of her marriage, she had no real home of her own. A palace was being built for the Crown Prince but the country's perennially bankrupt state meant endless delays. When the couple finally moved in, in the autumn of 1898, work on the palace was still not finished and the household was obliged to put up with numberless inconveniences.
The furniture, too, was a disappointment. Princess Sophie had ordered it, en bloc, from an agent of that indispensable supplier of furniture to Queen Victoria's Continental grandchildren, Maple of London. At the time of ordering, the Empress Frederick had warned her daughter of the dangers of such bulk buying. 'If the furniture is too much alike everywhere, the house easily has the appearance of a hotel or steamer. The charm of a house is, I think, to see that objects of furniture have been carefully and well selected, and not bought wholesale to save thought and trouble.'
But wholesale the furniture was bought and, once installed in the rooms of the new palace, it looked – as the Empress had said it would – undistinguished.
At the royal family's country estate at Tatoi, things were hardly better. The Crown Prince and Princess and their children were housed in a little cottage near the main building. As the cottage boasted neither bathrooms nor lavatories, Sophie was anxious to build another, more convenient one. She asked for plans of what she called her grandmother's 'adorable' cottage on the Osborne estate and of her cousin Georgie's cramped little house at Sandringham. She wanted to 'compare which is best'. Here, too, the building was subject to frustrating delays.
In addition to what the Empress called les petites misères de la vie ('which poison one's existence and sap one's strength for overcoming the serious trials one has to bear') Sophie battled against other problems. She was often homesick, bored and dispirited; her work for such things as hospitals and almshouses was frequently disheartening; she complained that she had no friends, that no one wanted to make the inconvenient journey to Athens to visit her. At times, she felt utterly overwhelmed by her difficulties.
Princess Sophie's occasional bouts of depression were as nothing, however, when set against the alarms of the year 1897: the year in which Greece went to war against Turkey.
The island of Crete, lying south of the Greek mainland and having a large Greek population, was ruled by Turkey. Greece was anxious to free the islanders from Turkish domination; on this subject public opinion in Athens was becoming increasingly voluble. Princess Sophie, caught up in the clamour, decided to appeal to Queen Victoria. Here, surely, was the opportunity for putting to good use the fact that she was the Queen of England's granddaughter. Sophie begged her mother, who was visiting Osborne at the time, to put the Greek case to Queen Victoria. The Empress, always quick to take up what she considered a just cause, suggested that Sophie approach her grandmother directly as well; 'do tell her how distressing the condition of the Greeks and Christians on the island is . . .' she instructed.
The Queen did not need much convincing, but there was very little that she could do. That Sophie was her granddaughter affected the Greek position not at all. Grandmama 'hopes and trusts affairs in Crete will be satisfactorily settled,' the Empress assured Sophie, 'but she does not say how.'
Victoria's hopes and trusts were ill-founded. In February 1897 the Cretans, encouraged by the Greeks, rose up against their Turkish masters. At once Greece sent troops, commanded by Tino's brother George, to help the insurgents. The Great Powers of Europe, anxious to preserve peace, dispatched naval patrols to Cretan waters and landed an international force on the island. Prince George of Greece was ordered to withdraw. When he failed to comply, he was issued with an ultimatum.
Throughout this turbulence, reactions amongst the members of Queen Victoria's family were hardly less stormy. Crown Princess Sophie was furious that British ships should be amongst those involved in restraining the insurgents. As for Vicky, her feelings were at fever pitch. 'Though there is no better Englishwoman than I am, and I am a devoted German too,' she exclaimed, 'yet on this occasion I feel more Greek than either! Yet, if there is one nation in the world that understands national liberty, that feels for others, it is just England . . . That it should be England that should have to "warn off" dear Georgie is too distressing'.
Queen Victoria's son and daughter-in-law, the Prince and Princess of Wales (whose brother was King George of Greece) were equally distraught. Still further complications arose from the fact that Sophie's brother, Kaiser Wilhelm II, favoured Turkey above Greece. Sophie's appeal for his help in 'this mass-murder of Christians and Mohammedans' fell on deaf ears. The Kaiser was courting the Sultan of Turkey at that stage; indeed, the Turkish army was in the process of being reorganized by German instructors. In his bombastic and self-righteous fashion, the Kaiser was making violent denunciations of Greek behaviour. His pronouncements enraged his sister Sophie still more.
Queen Victoria alone kept her head. To her, this battling between her children and grandchildren was a reminder of those terrible days when Bismarck's wars of unification had split her family into two just such warring sections: Vicky and Fritz on the one side and Bertie and Alix on the other. Again, she did what she could to keep the peace. 'Grandmama writes me to tell you how awfully sorry she is for you and Tino and Papa and Mama,' wrote the Empress to Sophie. 'She is so anxious and troubled, and as far as she may, and as she dare, she tries at ways to make peace and to soften asperities and cool down angry spirits.'
While protesting, through her ambassador, at Kaiser Wilhelm's public castigation of Greece, the Queen was anxious for Greece to comply with the ultimatum of the Great Powers. If Greece did not, she would find herself involved in a full-scale war with Turkey. This she could not afford.
But this is what happened. Greece, stubbornly refusing to evacuate Crete, encouraged her countrymen in Turkish-ruled Macedonia – on the Greco-Turkish border – to revolt. They did, and on 17 April 1897, Turkey declared war on Greece.
It was a short, inglorious campaign. The Greek army simply melted away in the face of the German-trained and officered Turks. Within three weeks all Greece lay open to the Turkish army. Both Queen Victoria and Kaiser Wilhelm II sent battleships to Pireaus in case the royal family needed to be evacuated.
Soundly beaten, Greece could do nothing other than accept the armistice terms arranged by the Great Powers. In these, the Kaiser had the chief say. In a telegram which Queen Victoria described as 'very grandiloquent', Wilhelm informed his grandmother that he was taking steps to initiate the armistice. Greece was obliged to withdraw her troops from Crete immediately and, by the terms of the peace which was signed later, had to pay Turkey four million pounds.
While still suffering from the humiliation of the Greek defeat, Crown Princess Sophie was faced with an even more dismaying experience: the sudden, and to her inexplicable, loss of popularity of the Greek royal family. The very people who had urged the King to go to war (the 'café 'politicians' as the Empress Frederick scathingly called them) now turned against him. The feeling was so violent that Tino was obliged to relinquish his command of the army. Worse still, public antagonism fixed itself on Sophie. The victorious Turkish army had been trained by Germans; therefore, as the Kaiser's sister, Sophie was partly to blame for the Greek defeat. To those who knew nothing of her appeals to Wilhelm, of the always unsympathetic relationship between brother and sister, of her fury at his public statements on the war, Sophie was little less than a traitor.
The accusations upset her consider
ably. Here again, she was given sound advice by her mother. The Empress knew all about unpopularity. It was, she told her daughter, a most fickle thing; it was easy 'to get a cry up against anyone'. Sophie was to take no notice of 'this rubbish'. One must remember, she told her daughter, 'that as gold tried in the fire comes out brighter and purer still, so those who are noble show their grandest qualities in misfortune'.
Crown Princess Sophie managed to survive this particular bout of public hostility; she was not to be so fortunate a second time.
With the war over, Crown Prince Constantine set about trying to reorganize the Greek army and to regain his lost reputation. It was no easy task. One of the chief stumbling blocks was his father, King George I. As so often happened between a sovereign and his heir, King George could not appreciate that his son was a grown man, capable of thinking for himself. In 1898 Tino turned thirty; three of his brothers were in the second half of their twenties. Yet the King insisted on treating his sons as children. Like his sister Alexandra, Princess of Wales, King George could not realize that his children had matured. He never took them into his confidence; he never asked their advice. About the government of the country, they knew almost nothing.
Even the Princess of Wales was alarmed by her brother's short-sighted and tyrannical behaviour. 'Aunt [Alix] thinks that Tino has been most unjustly used . . .' confided the Empress Frederick to her daughter Mossy. 'Aunt says the King has often very good reasons for what he thinks and does but never explains them to Tino!!'
As a result, the sons felt increasingly antagonistic towards their father. In his turn, the King resented the way in which his sons seemed to be in league against him. Princess Alexandra reported that 'the King complains that when the sons are together or with their Mama, and talking in an animated way, the moment he comes in the conversation ceases and every one is silent, or that they get up and go away and he feels that very much indeed.'