Her lot was made even harder by the fact that Bismarck’s campaign against her had never abated, and she was always depicted as an English princess working for English aims. Frederick did his best to smooth his wife’s path, but his solicitude, so alien to the Prussian character, was twisted into pusillanimity and people declared that he grew “weaker every year.” Even his private secretary, Colonel Sommerfeld, turned against him. “You only have to look what she’s made of him,” he expostulated. “But for her he’d be the average man, very arrogant, good-tempered, of mediocre gifts and with a good deal of common sense. But now he’s not a man at all, he has no ideas of his own, unless she allows him. He’s a mere cipher. ‘Ask my wife’ or ‘Have you discussed the matter with the Crown Princess?’ and there’s no more to be said.”[47]
With this atmosphere, it is not surprising that the Princess often loathed her husband’s country. At times she felt that she could not bear the ugly streets of Berlin a day longer, the lack of elegance, the clicking army boots, the censoriousness, the sycophantic acceptance of despotism. Occasionally she poured out her heart to English friends. In the winter of 1879 Sir Howard Elphinstone, the Comptroller of Prince Arthur’s household, visited Berlin and called upon the Princess. “She spoke in a most disparaging tone of the German people,” he wrote to his wife. “There is no one of whom she could make a friend and she feared she was generally unpopular in consequence of the free-thinking tone she took up. There is no doubt the society here is made up of very small ‘sets.’ Each set is quite exclusive and will not even look at the other. The aristocracy as such is not to my liking, being very vain, small minded and decidedly dull. Of politics they are afraid to talk, of art and literature they know little. Consequently bitter tittle-tattle is their element, in which they excel.”
Sir Howard found the atmosphere almost as depressing as the Princess did, and each letter grew more depressed. “My stay here is a wretched one. I hate the place… There is not a chance of my staying willingly a day longer than I can help.” A party at the old Emperor’s dampened his spirits even further. “We first sat down at little round tables, and cups of tea were handed to us, and when these were cleared away Professor Homan gave us a chemical lecture. It was rather good, but too long I thought unfortunately. We then again sat down to the small tables and continued our supper, consisting of pate de foie gras on bread, oranges and ices. I need not tell you that I did not partake of this mixture…” Even the window displays distressed him. “Not a shop that contains a thing of state or that one could care about. The ornaments are simply hideous or vulgar. I have not seen a single thing that I should like to bring back as a present to you.”[48] Despite her dislike of Germany, Vicky wrote her mother repeatedly how blessed she was in her marriage. Unfortunately her relations with William continued to deteriorate and even her second son, Henry, was becoming difficult under the influence of his brother. Once she lamented to her mother: “The dream of my life was to have a son who should be something of what our beloved Papa was, a real grandson of his, in soul and intellect, a grandson of yours.
One must learn to abandon dreams and take things as they come and characters as they are — one cannot quarrel with nature, and I suppose it knows best, though to us it seems cruel, perverse and contrary in the extreme…”[49]
Cruel and perverse; the Crown Princess could never rid herself of the feeling that Providence was using her unfairly. She had expected to instruct and guide her son as her father had guided her, but now he praised Bismarck’s policies openly and seemed to care nothing for the mortification he caused her; while Dona, far from trying to heal the breach, played the role of an adoring slave approving whatever he did.
The truth was that William did not like his mother. He had never found her sympathetic and as he grew older he became increasingly critical. In many ways they were too much alike to be drawn to one another. Both were dogmatic, impulsive, and self-willed, but whereas the Princess had deep loyalties and a heart capable of pity, William was hard and unyielding. He resented his mother’s efforts to dominate him and suspected that her sentiment was only a trap to ensnare him. What he disliked most, however, was the same failing that she so often criticised in him: the fact that she always knew best about everything. When he differed with her, she told him that he was “green” and lectured him as severely as a child. One of the reasons he had been glad to marry was to escape from her vigilant concern.
What relief his freedom gave him! He loved the life of a Prussian officer, and now that he had his own household he was happy for the first time. Everything about the army delighted him; the conviviality of the mess, the study of tactics and strategy, the complicated exercises, the esprit de corps. He had begun as a lieutenant in the foot-guards and was promoted rapidly through the grades to the rank of colonel; then, a year after his marriage, transferred to the cavalry. The riding instructor was doubtful whether, with his crippled arm, he could reach the high and exacting standard of horsemanship required, but the Prince showed remarkable prowess. His grandfather the Emperor and his uncle “The Red Prince,” one of the finest horsemen in Europe, came to watch the manoeuvres. William led his cavalry unit through a series of dashing and complicated exercises without a mistake. “Well done!” cried the Red Prince. “I never thought you could do it!” The Old Emperor’s eyes filled with tears of pride, for this was a triumph worthy of any Hohenzollern prince. “Never,” wrote Hintzpeter, “was a young man enrolled in the Prussian army who seemed so physically unfitted to become a keen and brilliant cavalry-officer. The few who could estimate the significance of this victory of moral force over bodily infirmity felt justified in their proudest hopes for this royal personage.”[50]
Success strengthened William’s attachment for the army, but apart from this he found the atmosphere of the Junker mess, with its feudal outlook and talk of war, far more congenial than his parents’ home. For the first time he had companions who shared his own feelings and who believed passionately in Germany. For years he had been forced to listen to his mother’s insistence that everything in England was better, and to hear her bitter remarks about German provincialism, German intolerance, German absolutism. Now, at last, he had friends who, far from being ashamed of German autocracy, revelled in it; friends who revered Bismarck instead of calling him “a wicked man.”
Prince William was particularly taken with the sophisticated Quartermaster General, Count von Waldersee, who talked a great deal about war and hoped to become Chief of the Imperial General Staff. Waldersee was in close touch with the Chancellor’s son, the clever, ill-mannered Count Herbert Bismarck, who was too busy carrying out his father’s orders in the Foreign Office to think of marriage, and who reaped his reward in 1886 when he became State Secretary; and before long William found himself a member of the Chancellor’s family circle. The old man often invited the Prince to take meals with him — usually breakfast — and after these enormous repasts would recline on a sofa and allow William to light his pipe for him. He enchanted the Prince with his pungent, provocative observations and captivated him with his subtle flatteries. Once he remarked to a friend that William had such talents that one day he probably would be his own chancellor — and made sure that the friend repeated it back to William. All this increased the young Prince’s hero-worship and heightened his contempt for liberalism — even for the feeble powers of the Reichstag. “If his parents have trained him to be a constitutional monarch ready to bow to the rule of a parliamentary majority,” observed Waldersee in 1883, “they have failed. The very opposite would seem to be the result.”[51]
Now every time William went to his family home there was a row. His mother was horrified to learn that he was consorting with the Bismarcks and told him that he was betraying and insulting his father by making friends with a man who had done so much to harm him. At each meeting tempers flew and ugly exchanges took place, with the result that William avoided his parents as much as possible. Bismarck was delighted when he heard of the rift, and did
all that he could to further it. Until now William had only thought of his mother as a censorious and stubborn English diehard, an inevitable product of her upbringing, but gradually the Bismarcks and Count von Waldersee planted a different picture in his mind. They made him see his parents as the Iron Chancellor had depicted them over the years: the weak father dominated by the clever, strong-willed Princess who was working deliberately to further British aims to the detriment of Germany. William’s imagination flared up and his mother began to appear in the guise of a traitor. “To his grief,” wrote Waldersee, “he is able to see quite clearly that his mother has not become a Prussian Princess but has remained an Englishwoman — not merely as regards habits of life but in her heart, especially in relation to political matters. He knows that she is consciously in favour of English interests as against Prussian and German. With his own out and out Prussian feeling this hurts him deeply, and he often finds it difficult to curb his fiery temperament.”[52]
Waldersee played on the “fiery temperament” and excited the Prince still further by his talk of war. Germany would have to conquer France and Russia in turn, he said; but even more important — if she wished to be a great world power — she would have to break the might of England. William was so taken with this thought that when the Prince of Wales arrived in Berlin in 1883 for his sister’s Silver Wedding celebrations he greeted him coolly. He thanked him politely for his gift of a Highland costume; then he had his picture taken in it and sent copies to his friends with the words written underneath “I bide my time.” The British military attache, Colonel Swaine, found the incident so curious that he reported it to London.
Prince Bismarck did not want war and was irritated by Count von Waldersee’s wild talk. Germany was industrialising rapidly and developing markets all over the globe. Her population was increasing, her standard of living rising, and soon she might outstrip Britain as the world’s leading manufacturer. What Germany needed was a period of peace and security; Bismarck’s problem was how to achieve it. Two of her neighbours, Russia and Austria, were always at loggerheads over the Balkans, and if they went to war with each other Germany would find herself in an impossible dilemma; if she remained neutral Russia might stretch out to France for an alliance, and Germany would be in a trap; on the other hand if Germany took sides she would make an enemy of the defeated nation and a rival of the victor. The only solution was not to allow these contingencies to arise.
Bismarck’s policy, therefore, was to remain on friendly terms with Russia and Austria and, above all, to keep them on friendly terms with each other. In 1873 he managed to establish the League of the Three Emperors by which Russia, Austria, and Germany promised to consult each other in case of divergencies and to help each other if attacked. But these bonds were tenuous for Austria and Russia believed that the Ottoman Empire was on the verge of a break-up, and each was determined to get the largest share of the spoils. Bismarck nevertheless succeeded in persuading the two countries to come to a private arrangement before Russia attacked Turkey in 1877. However, when the war ended with Russian troops on the outskirts of Constantinople, and the Czar announced that Turkey had agreed to cede her Bulgarian provinces to him, and that he, in turn, proposed to expand the present Bulgaria into a large vassal state with ports along the Aegean, Europe rose in alarm. Austria was outraged and Britain said she could not permit it, as it would constitute a danger to the Suez Canal. The Russians finally were forced to submit the problem to a Congress, held in Berlin, with Bismarck acting as “the honest broker.”
Austria won the right to occupy and administer the Turkish provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Russia emerged with large territories between the Black and the Caspian Seas, and the recovery of Bessarabia which she had lost in 1856. But not Turkish Bulgaria. St. Petersburg was enraged and accused Bismarck of ingratitude in view of Russia’s neutrality at the time of the Franco-Prussian war. She increased her armaments and moved troops near the German frontier; and the Czar wrote to Bismarck warning him of “the disastrous consequences which might follow.” Consequently, in October 1879, Bismarck signed a secret alliance with Austria, by which both countries promised to defend each other in the event of a Russian attack. The object of this treaty was not only defensive but to prevent Russian expansion in the Balkans, and it remained the corner-stone of German foreign policy until the first world war.
Bismarck, however, had no intention of allowing Austria to expand in the Balkans any more than Russia, and worked hard to revive the League of the Three Emperors. He succeeded in 1881, and the clauses of the new treaty, which provided for a demarcation line in the Balkans, with Serbia in the Austrian sphere of influence and Bulgaria in the Russian, were so secret that he wrote them out in his own hand and kept them under lock and key. But the harmony soon began to disintegrate. Russia accused Austria of setting the Serbs against the Bulgarians, and although the treaty did not expire until 1887 the Czar became acutely hostile to Vienna. Bismarck concentrated all his attention on trying to patch up the crumbling bridge.
This was the situation in May 1884 when Prince Bismarck decided to send William to Russia to celebrate the coming-of-age festivities of the Czarevitch, the future Nicholas II. It amused him to mortify the Crown Prince by persuading the Kaiser to overlook the son he did not find congenial for the grandson he admired. Furthermore William seemed ideally suited by temperament to placate the despotic Alexander. In January 1884 Baron Holstein, a clever and sinister Foreign Office official, generally regarded as Bismarck’s “tool,” succinctly summed up the Prince’s character. “He is self-willed, devoid of all tenderness, an ardent soldier, anti-democratic, anti-English. He shares the Kaiser’s view on everything and has the greatest admiration for the Chancellor.”[53]
Prince William, of course, knew nothing of the secret clauses of the Emperors League but he was told that he must do everything to promote better relations between Germany, Austria, and Russia. His mission was a brilliant success. He arrived in St. Petersburg in February 1884 accompanied by Count von Waldersee, attended ceremonies and balls, watched military displays, invested the Czarevitch with the Order of the Black Eagle, and went bear hunting with Prince Radzivill. Most important of all, he charmed the Czar. Since Alexander’s father had been blown to pieces by an assassin’s bomb two years earlier, he had ruled with iron severity. It was not difficult for William, with his own imperious notions, to play convincingly on these sentiments. He argued that despite the dissensions between Austria and Russia the three emperors must work in the closest harmony to hold back the flood-tide of liberal democracy. The next day M. Giers, the Russian Foreign Secretary, called on Count Herbert Bismarck, who had travelled to St. Petersburg for the occasion, and said ecstatically: “I wish good luck to whoever it was who had the idea of sending Prince William… The Emperor is entirely taken up with him… He said to me yesterday: ‘Prince William expressed himself very well. We need a bond of friendship and a triple entente to combat the waves of anarchy.’ That is the first time the Emperor has said ‘triple.’ He has always and habitually said ‘dual,’ and even accentuated the dual alliance. This is a great triumph for Prince William. In two days he has reached a point to which all our diplomacy has failed to bring the Emperor in six months.” M. Giers was not over-optimistic for in September the Czar agreed to meet the Austrian Emperor and the German Kaiser at Skerniewski in Poland to discuss their problems. At the bottom of a letter to his father Count Herbert wrote: “Prince William is really excellent.”[54]
The Prince arrived home flushed with triumph, to find that the Prince of Wales was again in Berlin visiting his mother. Why had he come? No doubt to try and sabotage William’s good work. Britain was having trouble with Russia on the Afghanistan frontier and would like Germany’s support; German friendship with Russia was the last thing she wanted. Uncle Bertie probably would persuade the Crown Princess to try and undermine the cordial relations between Berlin and St. Petersburg by instigating an anti-Russian campaign in Berlin. William woul
d show them. Impulsively he sat down and dashed off a letter to Alexander telling him that the Prince of Wales had arrived in Germany to organise a conspiracy against Russia. “The visit of the Prince of Wales has yielded and is still bringing extraordinary fruit, which will continue to multiply under the hands of my mother and the Queen of England. But these English have accidentally forgotten that I exist! I swear to You, my dear cousin, that anything I can do for You or Your country I will do, and I swear that I will keep my word! But only it will take a long time and have to be done slowly.”
William’s letter was a mistake, for the one constant factor in Alexander’s character was deep family loyalty, and he was rather shocked by the young Prince’s allusions to his mother. Furthermore, his wife, the former Princess Marie of Denmark, was a sister of the Princess of Wales and the two families often met at Copenhagen. He doubted whether the pleasure-loving Bertie would trouble himself with a conspiracy. He regarded the Prince’s letter as both naive and unfilial, and gradually began to revise his opinion of him.
The Czar was not the only person who noted William’s disrespect for his parents. In 1885, a year after his Moscow trip, the Prince became embroiled in a fresh family row and talked so freely against his mother that even Count von Waldersee was critical. His sister, the Princess Victoria, became engaged to Prince Alexander of Battenberg, whom the Russians had created puppet ruler of Bulgaria. But Alexander had aroused the enmity of the Czar by refusing to do what he was told; and Bismarck, unwilling to jeopardise friendly Russo-German relations, had advised the old Kaiser to forbid the marriage. The Crown Princess, of course, did not know of the secret alliance behind the three emperors, which recognised Bulgaria as a Russian preserve, and regarded this act as pure spite. William sided with Bismarck and scenes took place which left him enraged with his mother. Waldersee told Holstein that the Prince was declaring wildly that when his father came to the throne it might be necessary to arrest his mother. “By what means this weak man [the Crown Prince] now completely under his wife’s thumb is to be brought to such a monstrous decision is not clear,” mused Holstein in his diary.[55] And Waldersee wrote uneasily: “the Prince has been very inconsiderate and above all very indiscreet regarding his mother… were the Crown Prince now suddenly to become Kaiser there would be nothing for it but to station him in some remote garrison.”[56]
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