Bismarck was not troubled; the family quarrels amused him and he continued to employ William as an envoy, if only for the fun of keeping the Crown Prince permanently annoyed. In June 1886 he sent him to Gastein to a meeting of the three emperors. “We are rather horrified at hearing that William was at the interview of the Emperors at Gastein,” Vicky wrote wearily to Queen Victoria, “and that he is going to Skerniewski to see the Emperor of Russia! It is perhaps not true, but as such things are always arranged between the Emperor and William without consulting or informing us, it may be, and I need hardly say that it would make endless mischief and do endless harm. William is as blind and green, wrong-headed and violent on politics as can be… It is really rather hard upon us, and our position a very painful one. I still hope it may not be.” Frederick found it difficult to forgive his father for these slights and Baron von Holstein commented acidly: “The relations between the three generations of our royal family are remarkable, not to say comic. The Kaiser ignores the Crown Prince completely and so far as possible never informs him of anything. The Crown Prince, in turn, ignores Prince Wilhelm in the same way. At this year’s Rhine manoeuvres the father… treated the son as though he didn’t exist.”[57]
Where would it all end? In 1886 the old Emperor, who was in his ninetieth year, fell ill and a wave of panic swept through the Bismarck entourage. He had lived so long no one had faced up to the day of reckoning. What would happen to them when the Crown Prince came to the throne? Count Herbert Bismarck threw his hands in the air and declared it would be “all up with Germany anyway.” Count von Waldersee wrote to Baron von Holstein, at the Foreign Office, and suggested a coup d'etat against the Prince; and Holstein himself was said to recommend poisoning the Crown Prince![58] Only the Iron Chancellor kept his nerve. He had baited the Crown Princess too long to hope for any real reconciliation so he would continue as before. In the autumn of 1886 he announced that Prince William would be given access to the Foreign Office, a privilege always denied to Frederick. The Crown Prince begged Bismarck to reconsider his plan, insisting bluntly in a letter that his son’s lack of judgement “together with his leaning toward vanity and presumption and his overweening estimate of himself” made him totally unfit for the job.[59] But the Chancellor refused to change his mind.
The quarrel between Prince William and his parents reached its climax in a bitter tragedy. The drama began in January 1887 when the Crown Prince complained of hoarseness. At first his physician, Dr. Wagner, thought it was merely the aftermath of an attack of measles, but when March came and the hoarseness persisted he summoned a consultant, Dr. Gerhardt, a Professor of Medicine at Berlin University. Gerhardt diagnosed a small growth on the left vocal chord, which he treated locally, burning it off with a hot wire. He then suggested that the Crown Prince should take a rest cure at Elms. The Princess wrote to her mother cheerfully: “Fritz now eats and sleeps and looks well. Of course he takes no long walks and does not go uphill so as to fatigue or heat himself, and is asked to talk as little as possible…”
When the Crown Prince returned to Berlin in May, however, Gerhardt could find no sign of improvement; the growth had reappeared, the hoarseness remained and the wound caused by the treatment had not healed. He called Professor Ernst von Bergmann, an eminent surgeon, for consultation. This doctor gave an alarming verdict. He could not say whether or not the growth was malignant, but he believed that it should be removed by a surgical operation. “It cannot be got at from inside the throat,” the Crown Princess wrote to Queen Victoria, “as it may also exist under the larynx in a fold, where it cannot be reached. The celebrated surgeon, Professor Bergmann, is for operating from the outside, and you can imagine that this is not an easy operation or a small one. I own I was more dead than alive with horror when I heard this. The idea of a knife touching his dear throat is terrible to me. Of course Fritz is not to know a word about this. He is at times so very depressed… that he now often thinks his father will survive him, and I have fine work to make these passing sad thoughts clear away, which I am happy to say they do after a short while… My fear and dread is that a swelling of that kind, if not removed by some means or other, might in time develop into a growth of a malignant and dangerous character. I hope and trust and believe that there is no such danger present…”[60]
Now we come to the crux of the matter. The operation proposed by Gerhardt and Bergmann was known as “thyrotomy” and involved splitting the larynx. How serious was it? Months later the German doctors, loudly supported by Prince William, declared that it was not serious at all; that it could be performed successfully seven times out of ten, that it would not have rendered the Crown Prince speechless, but merely left him hoarse. This, however, was not the impression that the doctors gave at the time — either to the Crown Princess or to Prince Bismarck. On May 19th the Princess wrote to Queen Victoria: “I spent a terrible day yesterday; it is so difficult to appear unconcerned when one’s heart is torn… I am so distressed to think that his dear voice, which is so necessary to him in his position in the country and army etc., will be gone, and I know what an awful trial it will be to him…”[61]
Prince Bismarck took such a grave view of the operation that he intervened. “The doctors,” he wrote, “determined to make the Crown Prince unconscious and to carry out the removal of the larynx without having informed him of their intention. I raised objections, and required that they should not proceed without the consent of the Crown Prince… The Emperor, after being informed by me, forbade them to carry out the operation without the consent of his son.”[62] Bismarck arranged for further consultation and three more doctors were called in. They gave the opinion that cancer was present. Before recommending the operation, however, they decided to send for the eminent English laryngologist, Dr. Morell Mackenzie, whose text books had been translated into German and whose work was familiar to all of them.
Mackenzie arrived on the evening of May 20th. He examined the Prince’s throat and said that the operation should not take place unless the growth was proved scientifically to be malignant. He asked that a fragment of the larynx should be examined by the celebrated anthropologist and pathologist, Rudolph Virchow. This was done and Virchow reported that he could find no evidence of cancer. Gerhardt and Bergmann protested hotly, declaring that the reason they had not sought the advice of a pathologist was because this science was in so elementary a state that it was not possible to exact proof one way or the other. They remained obdurate that their original diagnosis was correct. “I regard the matter with increasing anxiety,” Gerhardt told the Crown Princess. “Where M. Mackenzie removed a small portion it has grown again — the tumour is suppurating etc., on the other side of the throat, the other vocal chord, which hitherto has remained healthy, is attacked — there is already a considerable amount of damage done. If Dr. M. Mackenzie cannot assist and cure it there is no chance of recovery save in the operation known as ‘Taryngotomy.’ It would have to be performed under far less favourable conditions than would have been the case fourteen days ago. Therefore my only hope is that Dr. Mackenzie may be right in his opinion, and that his treatment may be successful, for we have nothing else to offer.”[63]
Mackenzie on the other hand was equally emphatic that it was not cancer. He declared brightly that it was simply a fibromatosis swelling; and if the Crown Prince would attend his clinic in London like “any ordinary mortal” he would cure him in two months. In view of Mackenzie’s reputation and his confidence, it is not surprising that the Crown Princess decided to follow his advice rather than Gerhardt’s. Would any wife have done differently? What hope and relief, she wrote her mother, the blessed Mackenzie had given her. However, she could not completely quell her forebodings, for she wrote the Queen that she would accompany Fritz to England the middle of June for his treatments; and would her mother mind if they brought their private papers, and stored them at Windsor for safe-keeping?
The royal couple arrived in England a week before Queen Victoria’s Jubilee, commemoratin
g her fifty years’ reign. When the day came, Prince Frederick felt well enough to take part in the procession. All eyes were upon him as he rode through the streets on a magnificent horse, dressed in white from head to toe, his silver breastplate and eagle-crested helmet gleaming in the sun, like a figure from Lohengrin. After the celebrations the couple spent two months in England then departed for Toblach in the Alps; and after that to Venice.
Soon letters were arriving from Berlin, pressing the Crown Prince to return. The old Emperor had fallen ill again, was failing rapidly and could not survive much longer. Prince William, alone and unchecked, was behaving as though he already wore the crown. It was not wise, friends said, for Prince Frederick to remain away from the capital. The Princess refused to listen. The only thing that mattered was beloved Fritz’s health, and she would not risk the damp Berlin atmosphere until he had thoroughly recovered. Every day she wrote to her mother, confiding her problems but trying to conceal the gnawing anxiety that never left her.
She might have expected loyalty from her household at such a period, but the Crown Prince’s Court Chamberlain, Count Lynkar, seized the opportunity to ingratiate himself with the Bismarck clique, by writing singularly unpleasant letters to the Foreign Office. “Oh, this Crown Princess. I am glad for the Crown Prince’s sake that he will be alone for a few days. But it is a real rest-cure for me too. I cannot tell you how that woman gets on my nerves. Now, when it is so bitterly cold that all our teeth are chattering with the frost and the Princesses are going around with blue noses and their hands in mittens, she declared the weather is unbearably hot and has the windows opened; then, mark you, she puts on a great thick shawl… During our walks she runs ahead Eke a mad thing until the Crown Prince comes to a standstill, exhausted, and says: ‘I can’t go any further. My wife is racing ahead again.’ I stay with him then, but the Princess just walks on, saying with a soft upward glance: ‘You will walk really slowly, won’t you, dear Fritz, so that you don’t get too hot?’ and so on. I cannot bear to see that everlasting smile on her face — the woman has driven every good genius out of her house with that smile.”
No man had a more devoted wife than the Crown Prince, yet Baron von Holstein, reputed to possess the shrewdest brain in Berlin and destined to direct his country’s foreign policy during the fateful years from 1890 to 1906, apparently believed all the foolish, malicious gossip he heard, for here are some excerpts from his diary. “Sept. 24,1887. The Crown Princess’s behaviour is typical. Gay and carefree with but one idea — never to return to Prussia. I persist in my view, which is now shared by others, namely that from the very beginning she accepted the idea that the worst would happen. Judging by all I have heard of her in recent months, I am tempted to call her a degenerate or corrupt character… She has always despised her husband. She will greet his death as the moment of deliverance.”
“Nov. 9, 1887. The Crown Princess’s behaviour has been incredible. In Toblach Mackenzie said the Crown Prince was dangerously ill and must go at once to Cairo or Madeira. When the Crown Princess heard this she exclaimed: ‘That will never do. Where am I to stay? It would be all right if I could spend the winter in Rome, but not otherwise.’ Despite the doctors’ request she refused in Toblach to alter the time for lunch. As a result, just when the midday sun was at its height, the Crown Prince was sitting at table instead of being out of doors… In Munich she received a telegram from the hotel proprietor in Toblach advising them not to come because the climate was too harsh for the Crown Prince. She took no notice; she had there, as the Crown Prince himself put it, good subjects to paint, she wanted to go for walks and grow slimmer.”[64]
Early in November, while Holstein was recording these silly untruths, the couple moved from Venice to San Remo, on the Mediterranean, where the Crown Princess had rented a villa for the winter. They had been there less than twenty-four hours before the Crown Prince’s condition drastically changed for the worse. Mackenzie was summoned from England, and two more specialists called from Vienna and Berlin. After the patient’s throat had been examined the Crown Prince asked Mackenzie bluntly if he now thought it was cancer. “I am sorry to say, sir, it looks very much like it, but it is impossible to be certain.” When the doctor left the room and the stricken man was alone with his wife, he broke down for the first time. His anguish was not for himself but for her. “To think that I should have such a horrid, disgusting illness! that I shall be an object of disgust to everyone, and a burden to you all! I had so hoped to be of use to my country. Why is Heaven so cruel to me? What have I done to be stricken and condemned? What will become of you? I have nothing to leave you!” The Crown Princess tried to comfort her husband, but to her mother she wrote: “My darling has got a fate before him which I hardly dare to think of! How I shall ever have the strength to bear it I do not know!!”[65]
Two days later Prince William suddenly arrived, unbidden and unannounced, at San Remo. The moment he learned that doctors had been summoned hurriedly, he surmised that Mackenzie’s diagnosis was proving incorrect and that his father had cancer. From the beginning he had been indignant that his mother had chosen to follow the advice of an English specialist rather than heed the German consultants, but now dark suspicions, suggested to him by the Bismarck circle, began to gain control of his mind. Prince Bismarck believed that Mackenzie had known all along that the Crown Prince had cancer, but that the Crown Princess had implored him not to divulge it for fear that Frederick would give up the throne if he knew the truth. The implications of this theory were obvious and William accepted them fully; his mother had kept his father in ignorance of his fatal disease in order to acquire the title of Empress and to taste the delights of power if only for a moment: for this reason she had refused to allow the operation to be performed which, although it would have left him speechless and undoubtedly forced him to abdicate, might have prolonged his life for several years.[66]
In a passion of self-righteousness William went to his dying grandfather and told him that he had reason to doubt the integrity of the English physician looking after his father. He asked the old Emperor to authorise him to visit San Remo with a German doctor and to bring back a true report of the Crown Prince’s condition. Even the unscrupulous Count von Waldersee was shocked by this news. “Prince William came to me to-day at 11 a.m.; he told me that the news of the Crown Prince was really bad and that by the Kaiser’s command he was off to San Remo to-day in order to find out the truth of his father’s condition… It does not seem to me right that Prince William should go to San Remo. He can’t help and should he try to get rid of the English physician against his mother’s will he must fail in the effort; he will only give occasion for excited scenes and cause more distress to his father, already the object of much pity…”[67]
Nevertheless William went. “When I entered the Villa Zirio, situated on the Mediterranean, amid a grove of olives,” he wrote in his memoirs, “my arrival gave little pleasure to my mother. She was doubtless afraid that the house of cards on which she had set her life’s hope would now come tumbling down. Standing at the foot of the stairs, I had to allow the flood of her reproaches to pass over me, and to hear her decided refusal to allow me to see my father… My father’s condition, in my mother’s opinion, gave no cause whatever for alarm, but the stony expression on her face, utterly different from what it had been at Baveno — proof enough of the hard struggle between her iron will and her growing anxiety — gave the lie to what her lips uttered, and fell like a crushing weight upon my heart. Then I heard a rustling at the top of the stairs, looked up, and saw my father smiling a welcome to me. I rushed up the stairs, and with infinite emotion we held each other embraced, while in low whispers he expressed his joy at my visit. During the heavy days that followed we came in spirit very close to one another.”
The Crown Princess described the same scene, but gave a somewhat different picture. “You ask,” she wrote Queen Victoria, “how Willy was when he was here! He was as rude, as disagreeable and as impertinent to me as
possible when he arrived, but I pitched into him with, I am afraid, considerable violence, and he became quite nice and amiable and gentle (for him) — at least quite natural, and we got on very well! He began with saying that he would not go out walking with me ‘because he was too busy — he had to speak to the doctors.’ I said the doctors had to report to me and not to him, upon which he said he had the Emperor’s orders ‘to insist upon the right thing, to see that the doctors were not interfered with, and to report to the Emperor about his Papa!’ I said it was not necessary, as we always reported to the Emperor ourselves. He spoke before others and half turning his back to me, so I said I would go and tell his father how he behaved and ask that he should be forbidden the house — and walked away. Upon which he sent Count Radolinsky flying after me to say he had not meant to be rude and begged me to say nothing to Fritz ‘but that it was his duty to see that the Emperor’s commands were carried out.’ I instantly said that I had no malice, but I would suffer no interference. So it all went on quite smoothly and we had many a pleasant little walk and chat together.”[68]
On November 12th a bulletin was issued in Berlin announcing that the Crown Prince was suffering from cancer. The old Emperor was sinking, and all Europe now began to watch the macabre race with death between father and son. Neither Prince Bismarck nor Prince William, however, were content to play the role of spectator. They seized the moment to inspire a press campaign against Mackenzie and the Crown Princess. Her Anglo-mania, declared the newspapers, had prompted her to call in a second-rate English doctor rather than follow the advice of the German physicians. The operation recommended in May was of a minor character and probably would have effected a complete cure; now it was too late. Even William’s brother, Henry, echoed these accusations. “Henry maintains that his Papa is lost through the English doctors and me… the Princess wrote her mother. She spared herself nothing for every morning she insisted on seeing the press cuttings and many of them insinuated that she was responsible for the tragedy by preventing the operation in May, forcing Sir M. Mackenzie on her husband and keeping everyone else away. “They say I try to hide the gravity of the situation from him,” she wrote to her mother, “that he ought to feel more what danger he is in… Even good and well-meaning people have not le tact du cceur and would not try to save a person one moment’s agony or distress of mind. You know how sensitive and apprehensive, how suspicious and despondent Fritz is by nature! All the more wrong and positively dangerous (let alone the cruelty of it) to wish him to think the worst! We should not keep him going at all, if this were the case…”[69]
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