Britain’s perceived role as an international peacekeeper had largely grown throughout the nineteenth century along with her empire and her navy. Although her dominion over the waves advanced British self-interest, it also assisted other countries as world trade routes were safeguarded and the slave trade was blocked. But the supremacy that facilitated Pax Britannica did not just reside in the strength of her navy; it was interwoven into many facets of British culture. Britain was the industrial workshop of the world, the world’s banker, a leader in the arts, science and humanitarian reform, and above all, home to the mother of all parliaments: a constitutional monarchy that strictly limited the powers of the sovereign and was gradually extending the electoral franchise. The British model was pointing the way: enlightened, liberal democratic reform was a means of keeping at bay the unstable forces of revolution and war.
In the 1850s, with perhaps greater clarity than the queen’s ministers, Prince Albert grasped the potential of Protestant Prussia to unite all the German states under its banner and understood the power that this new country would wield in Europe. He could not imagine that a unified Germany under Prussian domination would exert its influence as a military dictatorship or autocracy. Vicky’s brilliant marriage to a future Prussian heir to the throne aimed at nothing less than to fashion the political development of Prussia-Germany along British lines. The young princess would nurture this seed of enlightened, liberal thinking on Prussian soil and help steer the new state towards a parliamentary constitutional monarchy.6 Her marriage was the first in a series of royal dynastic marriages that aimed to forge closer ties across Europe and facilitate peace.
Vicky and her father had always shared a special bond; her precocious intelligence and willingness to learn delighted her principled father, and formed a marked contrast to her lazy brother, Bertie. On her marriage to Prince Frederick in St James’s Palace in January 1858, Vicky became nothing less than a ‘royal missioner [sic] to Prussia’ to propagate the exalted ideals of her ‘adored Papa’s faith’.7 Prince Albert had not only mentored Frederick for many years but also personally coached his gifted daughter in politics to prepare Vicky for her future role, and he left her in no doubt about the seriousness of the task ahead.8 Fortunately, Vicky had strong feelings for her Prussian prince, but her marriage was not just a question of her health and happiness, Albert warned. At stake was ‘the future of your country and people and thereby one might almost say, the welfare of Europe’.9 British people shared the high hopes, lining the streets despite heavy snow to cheer as the ‘Daughter of England’ departed for Prussia: ‘God Save the Prince and Bride! God keep their lands allied.’10
However high-minded the aspirations for the foreign alliance, nothing could mitigate the pain of parting. For Albert, his oldest daughter’s marriage was a personal sacrifice to his ideals; nothing could replace her presence. He loved Vicky with an intensity that appeared to go beyond the usual father-daughter relationship. In the coming months the demands of his unending workload, which appeared increasingly self-inflicted, failed to provide relief. Vicky was gone and there was nothing in this world that could fill the dark void created by her absence. The seventeen-year-old bride in the militaristic Prussian court also suffered. ‘I think it will kill me to take leave of dear papa,’ Vicky had told the queen. Now she kept his picture close, as though the very sight of him could bring comfort. ‘I treasure your words up in my heart,’ she told her father, assuring him they would influence ‘the whole of my life’.11
When Prince Albert died on 14 December 1861, three years after his daughter left home, Queen Victoria’s desolation overwhelmed her family. Her first letter was to Vicky, ‘I am crushed, bowed down! . . . I feel I am living with Him [Albert] – as much as before – that He will yet guide and lead me.’ She could see nothing ahead but ‘an everlasting blank!’12 Weeks later it was as though she, too, had died: her life was ‘utterly extinguished’, she told her daughter. This second life was just a shadow, nothing less than ‘death in life’.13 But Vicky also felt ‘the future is gone’. Everything she had done was ‘in hopes of pleasing Papa’. She had trusted in his ‘unerring judgement’ and now felt stranded, adrift in Prussia, without her inspiration, the architect of her marital alliance and career.14 When Vicky returned to Osborne House there was little to bring her comfort. Grief was institutionalised in the daily routine of the household. Her father’s personal belongings were laid out for him each day, water was brought to his private rooms. Inwardly, ‘it is nothing but a great vault’, she told her husband. ‘The old life, the old customs have gone . . .’ Vicky found her mother ‘cries a lot . . . she always sleeps with Papa’s coat over her and his dear red dressing gown beside her and some of his clothes in the bed! . . . I keep asking myself involuntarily where he has gone, and always think that he will come back.’15
Both Vicky and her mother felt charged with a renewed mission to carry out Prince Albert’s wishes. ‘His views about everything are to be my law!’ wrote Queen Victoria. ‘No human power will make me swerve from what he decided and wished.’16 Vicky felt no less strongly. In one respect the women were able to achieve this aim. Suitable dynastic matches had already been identified for Albert and Victoria’s next two children. Vicky in Berlin was well placed to advise on the short list and discreetly appraise the most eligible German royals. The next to be married was Queen Victoria’s second daughter, Alice, whose union to Prince Louis of the Grand Duchy of Hesse and by Rhine in July 1862, six months after Albert’s death, was ‘more like a funeral than a wedding’, observed the queen.17 It was Vicky who identified the stunningly beautiful Danish princess, Alexandra, as the most likely spouse to hold her brother Bertie’s interest and stop his errant behaviour. Bertie’s marriage in March 1863 still felt for the queen ‘far worse than a funeral to witness!’ without Albert at her side.18 This union rapidly extended British royal connections when, in the same year, Alexandra’s father became King Christian IX of Denmark and her brother became King George of Greece, while in 1866 her sister, Dagmar, married the future Tsar Alexander III. Four more of Queen Victoria’s younger children would marry German royals.
Despite these close ties of marriage, when it came to German politics, over the coming years the hopes of mother and daughter to fulfil Prince Albert’s goals withered in turn, each painful setback charted in Vicky’s letters home. ‘Your dear letters’, and the anticipation of them, ‘are one of the few things I care for now . . .’, the queen told her daughter.19 But these letters gave rise to increasing concern as the next crisis gradually took on an ominous shape in the form of Vicky’s formidable adversary: the reactionary Prussian firebrand, Otto von Bismarck.
In 1862 Vicky’s father-in-law, King Wilhelm I of Prussia, faced with a liberal majority in the Prussian Landtag, or representative assembly, failed to win approval for the budget to pay for the reforms of the army that he wished. Seeing this as a direct challenge to the authority of the Crown, Wilhelm I threatened abdication in September, only agreeing to stay if Otto von Bismarck, then Prussian ambassador to Paris, became prime minister. Vicky was appalled. Bismarck was an adventurer, she told her mother, ‘a most unprincipled and unrespectable character . . . a wicked man’. The idea of ‘that wretch’ governing the country ‘makes my hair stand on end!’20 At stake was the crucial idea of parliamentary government for Prussia. Bismarck was determined to preserve the principle of personal monarchy whereby the Crown retained control over both the executive and, crucially, the army.
Vicky felt the isolation of her position, ‘now we no longer have Papa who always wrote to us. I now feel completely cut off!’ Her father had always appeared to understand the context of Prussian politics. When her husband wavered, Vicky rushed in with the idealism of youth, failing to see the complexities, slowly enmeshing herself in Bismarck’s web. ‘Your success in future days rests solely on your firm insistence on the constitutional, liberal . . . principle,’ the queen guided her daughter in March 1862. Vicky remained unswerving in her c
ommitment to these ideals: ‘Our only duty is to make this dear country so perfect, strong and mighty by means of liberal practical constitution and by orderly and legal methods,’ she wrote.21 She hoped Prussia could become an example to other countries and win the confidence of Europe. But Bismarck soon outmanoeuvred the liberal-leaning heir to the throne and his wife. This was his moment and he seized it. In his eyes, an all-powerful, militaristic Crown was the key to Prussian strength, rather than a clique of civilian ministers. He promised his total allegiance to Wilhelm I and saw his own power as chief advisor to the Crown. It was not ‘Prussia’s liberalism’ but ‘Prussia’s might’ that would assure the country’s future, he famously announced on 30 September 1862 to the Chamber of Deputies. ‘The great questions of the times will not be solved by speeches and majority decisions, but by iron and blood.’
As Prince Albert had foreseen, Germany was indeed unified by 1871, not peacefully as he had wished through diplomacy and the moral force of an enlightened Prussia, but through wars engineered by the ‘iron and blood’ Chancellor Bismarck. As late as 1866 the New York Times commented, ‘there is, in political geography, no proper Germany to speak of. There are Kingdoms and Grand Duchies and Duchies and Principalities . . . each separately ruled by an independent sovereign.’22 But in just a few years, Europe bent to the iron will of Bismarck, its boundaries re-drawn as a unified Germany had emerged, fashioned in blood, steel and astute diplomacy.
In 1864, under the scheming Bismarck, Prussia and Austria fought a war against Denmark, jointly gaining the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein in the Jutland Peninsula (now part of northern Germany). This war sharply divided the British royal family and tested new marriage ties. Vicky and the queen supported Prussia, but Bertie and his wife backed Denmark, which had an ancient claim to these two duchies. Princess Alexandra was in despair, crying and unable to sleep as her recently crowned father, Christian IX of Denmark, lost almost half of his country. Bertie was so vocal in his support for his wife that the queen felt obliged to remind her son and heir that he was bound to Germany ‘by so many ties of blood’.23 Nonetheless, this war began to undermine Queen Victoria’s faith in great foreign marriages. ‘Great alliances . . . are only a source of worry,’ she confided to Augusta, the Queen of Prussia, and she claimed to attribute ‘little political importance to them’.24
The war of Prussia and Austria against Denmark did not settle Bismarck’s ambitions. Two years later, the all-obliterating machine of the Prussian army was at war again, this time joining forces with Italy against the Austrians. Europe took note of advances in Prussian weapons technology as their army, now fully equipped with breech-loading needle guns, turned their firepower on their former ally. These guns, precursors of modern automatic rifles, could fire at a much faster rate than the traditional muzzle-loading muskets. The Prussians rapidly wrested exclusive control of Schleswig and Holstein from the Austrians in the north and annexed a swathe of territory including the kingdom of Hanover, the electorate of Hesse-Kassel, Nassau and the city of Frankfurt (areas of central Germany today). Four years later, Prussia fought a third war, this time against France, leading to the annexation of the Catholic South German states. Bismarck’s ill-judged land grab of Alsace and Lorraine, a part of northern France for almost 200 years, left a lasting legacy of French resentment. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1 finally sealed German unity as the many separate states of the Germanic peoples of northern Europe united under the banner of the Prussian House of Hohenzollern while retaining their individual monarchies, governments and parliaments.
Bismarck ensured that the vigorous new country of the German Reich would be dominated by a strong, authoritarian ruler at its helm. He turned his back on the Albertine vision, and in January 1871 Vicky’s father-in-law the king of Prussia was proclaimed Germany’s first emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm I. Although Wilhelm could not wield the absolute authority of the Russian tsar, his powers were remarkable. The emperor could appoint and dismiss ministers, including Germany’s chancellor, and control foreign policy and the army. There was a German imperial parliament, the Reichstag, whose members were elected by universal male suffrage, but in practice this had no executive authority since it could not initiate legislation or hold government ministers to account. For Vicky this parliament was little more than a fig leaf. But in the magnificent gilded palace of Versailles, a building that seemed to embody the very soul of humiliated France, the deed was immortalised at a ceremony in the Hall of Mirrors. The Hohenzollerns, the royal house of Prussia, became the imperial house of Germany, raised above the other royal and princely German dynasties. Bismarck’s Reich was now the leading power on the continent, an empire to respect, even fear.
Through Vicky’s British eyes, it was as though newly united Germany had been thoroughly ‘Prussified’. Her husband, Crown Prince Frederick, was now heir to a highly militarised semi-autocracy in which their liberal ideals were sidelined. Army chiefs operated largely independently of parliament and reported directly to the king-emperor. Bismarck and the military elite, rather than elected members of the Reichstag, held favoured positions. The Hohenzollerns’ friend, Alfred Krupp, ‘the Canon King’, ran the Krupp steel works in Essen whose improvements in the design of canon and weaponry had helped secure these victories and continued to supply the military on an industrial scale.
Vicky may have had ‘a man’s head’ in her father’s estimation, but a great deal more was required to stand up to Europe’s pre-eminent statesman. Even before he came to power, Bismarck had the measure of her English views and her powerful influence over Crown Prince Frederick, and he took steps to isolate them both. When her husband was sometimes torn between his loyalty to his authoritarian Prussian father and his liberal English wife, Vicky urged him to challenge Wilhelm I and Bismarck. This only served to compound their difficulties and they were isolated, even ridiculed at court. Vicky lacked the guile to navigate the quicksands of German politics and could be dogmatic and outspoken. ‘Never were we untrue to our sacred flag,’ she wrote later.25 Her opinionated candour prompted one British minister to warn that the Crown Princess of Germany was ‘always clever, never wise’. Seeing her cherished papa’s vision pushed ever further out of reach, she poured out her frustrations privately to her mother. The scheming and all-powerful Bismarck was ‘the most mischievous and dangerous person alive’. His policies at times were ‘disgraceful’ and the German people ‘so blind and so short sighted as not to see the ruin and mischief which is being worked’.26 As her mission floundered, she lamented ‘I always feel like a fly struggling in a very tangled web and feelings of weariness and depression, often of disgust and hopelessness take possession of me’.27
It was not just in court politics that Vicky was outmanoeuvred. The impotence of her position in fulfilling her beloved father’s vision was underlined in deeply personal terms through the disturbing development of her oldest son, Prince Wilhelm. The arrival of a son in January 1859 within a year of her marriage appeared to seal the success of the alliance between Prussia and Great Britain. Hopes ran high, the flags of both countries dancing enthusiastically over the celebrations proclaiming the arrival of a child who would surely inherit the best of each kingdom. The British queen’s first grandson was a future heir to the German throne, the unity between the two countries embodied in his very name: ‘Friedrich Wilhelm’ after his Prussian forebears and ‘Albert Victor’ after his British grandparents. At the outset the young prince shouldered great expectations, but with each painful step through childhood he frustrated his parents’ vision, his faults charted in voluminous correspondence between his British mother and grandmother. The women’s doubts focused on the young prince’s character about which mother and daughter shared for many years an intimate understanding in a no-holds-barred exchange.
Vicky was dismayed to observe her son’s wild streak from an early age. Wilhelm was ‘too lively and violent’ to apply himself to walking and talking, she confided to her mother in early 1860.28 Shortly after hi
s second birthday she noted that he got so ‘violent and passionate that it makes me quite nervous sometimes’.29 Six months later, when Vicky visited Osborne House, the queen observed for herself that her German grandson was ‘so violent’ that her own youngest daughter, Beatrice (then aged four) was ‘rather afraid’ of him.30
Both Vicky and her mother made allowances for the fact that the young prince had suffered trauma at birth. Too late, the doctors had discovered that the baby was in a dangerous breech position and applied such force to free him that they caused permanent damage to a nexus of nerves in his neck, shoulder and arm. As the months passed it became clear that the prince’s left arm was not growing normally and was resistant to treatment no matter what fearsome cures were applied. The baby’s good arm was strapped to his side to encourage the use of his palsied arm. Another gruesome treatment was to plunge his damaged arm into a freshly slaughtered hare in the belief that the blood and heat of the animal might impart some rejuvenating quality. Electrical stimulation was tried, and most loathed of all by Prince Wilhelm, at the age of four, ‘a head stretching machine’ was used to counter the effect of his head being dragged downwards. All these approaches failed and eventually surgery was required to minimise the effects of the birth trauma. The various well-meant treatments were sufficiently traumatic that they may well have prepared the ground for the psychological problems that would plague the prince later in his life. Historians have not ruled out the possibility that the Prussian prince may have suffered slight brain damage at birth as well.31
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