The trauma of her his birth still haunted the Crown Princess. After thirty-six hours of a tortuous labour, during which the doctors gave up hope of saving either mother or child, the baby was found to be in the breach position and was forcibly removed by forceps. In the process, the nerves in his shoulder were badly damaged and consequently his arm failed to develop. For a boy in Willy’s position as heir to the Prussian throne the deformity was more than a handicap; it was a humiliation. Already Vicky had heard cruel muttering that a ‘one-armed man’ should never be king and she had watched helplessly as he endured various brutal and unsuccessful attempts to correct the abnormality. The painful treatments were exhausting, frequently leaving him too tired to study or attend his lessons. Consequently, his academic development was slow. He had difficulty writing and appeared, quite erroneously, to be intellectually inferior to other boys of his age.
“The poor arm is no better, and Willy begins to feel being behind much smaller boys in every exercise of the body. He cannot run fast because he has no balance, nor ride, nor climb, nor cut his food etc. I wonder he is good tempered about it.”[14]
Through sheer strength of will, after suffering numerous falls, he eventually learned to ride one-handed and became a competent horseman but even by the age of ten he had difficulty using a knife and fork and the resultant shame left him with a hatred of any sign of weakness and a need to exert his own superiority.
If the trauma of his birth explained Willy’s erratic behaviour, there was no apparent excuse for his equally tempestuous sister. Charlotte’s moods swung from total apathy to sudden tantrums and rages and her sense of her own importance led her to treat her social inferiors with disdain. She had deeply offended Queen Victoria, who insisted that all her servants should be treated with respect, by refusing to shake hands with her favourite ghillie, John Brown. The Queen wrote a strongly worded letter to Vicky expressing her disapproval of such behaviour but the Crown Princess could only respond by protesting that she was not to blame. She was well aware of her elder children’s arrogance but what could she do when their Hohenzollern grandparents spoiled them terribly and infused them with such Prussian pride?
Grey clouds gathered over the sea and the princesses assembled their children to return to the Grand Hotel. Archdeacon Dealtry of Madras had arrived to speak English with the elder Prussian boys and, as Willy and Henry prepared for their lesson, Vicky set up her easel to paint a portrait of the Archdeacon’s daughter, carried in the arms of an Indian servant.
Art was virtually the only one of Vicky’s many talents that had not been stifled since her marriage. Eleven years earlier, she had arrived in Berlin filled with high hopes for the future. Germany at the time comprised a number of independent kingdoms and grand duchies of which Prussia was the most dominant. For years, ideas had been mooted about a confederation of the various states and when Vicky married the liberal-minded Fritz, she believed that together they could realise her father’s vision of a peaceful and unified Germany governed along the lines of the British constitution. It did not take long to discover that few members of the Prussian court shared her dream.
Fritz’s father, first Regent then King, believed in an absolute monarchy and, when he appointed the formidable Otto Von Bismarck as Chancellor, all hopes of a more democratic society were dispelled. From the start, it was Bismarck’s intention to create a powerful German Empire rivalling its European neighbours in military supremacy and prestige. Within five years of Vicky’s wedding, he had annexed the disputed Danish duchies of Schleswig and Holstein before embarking upon the war with Austria, dragging other states – including Alice’s Hesse-Darmstadt – into the conflict.
In spite of the Prussian victory, the war had been even more disastrous for Vicky than it had been for Alice. In her anxiety about Fritz’s impending departure for battle, she gave birth to a premature baby, whom, to her mother’s satisfaction, she named Victoria Moretta. Vicky scarcely had time to recover from her confinement when tragedy struck the family. No sooner had Fritz left for the front when his son, two-year-old son, Sigismund, developed a fever.
The same age as his cousin, Ella, little ‘Sigi’ had a special place in his mother’s heart as the first of her children to be breast-fed. He seemed such a healthy child – ‘so pretty and merry and so wonderfully strong, with such a fine colour, always laughing and so lively,’[15] – that his illness was all the more shocking. To make matters worse, most of the court doctors had left with the army and by the time that meningitis was diagnosed, the child was beyond hope. His death in mid-June plunged the Crown Princess into the depths of despair.
“What I suffer none can know, few knew how I loved,” she wrote to Queen Victoria. “It was my own happy secret, the long cry of agony which rises from the inmost depth of my soul, reaches Heaven alone.”[16]
With Fritz far away and no one on hand to comfort her, Vicky’s grief took a rather macabre turn. Sealing the room in which Sigi had died, she placed an effigy of a baby in his cot and visited it regularly to the horror and disgust of the court.
The decisive Prussian triumph at Könnigratz did little to raise her spirits. She half-heartedly rejoiced in the honours that victory accorded her husband but military success brought small solace when she considered the plight of her sister in Darmstadt. Moreover, she could only watch in despair as Bismarck, claiming most of the credit for the Prussian triumph, urged the king to continue his belligerent ambitions further afield.
“I rejoice as a Prussian at the heroic conduct of our troops but my joy is damped with the fear that they have shed their blood in vain. With such a man and such principles at the head of our Government how can I look forward to satisfactory results for Germany, or for us?”[17]
In a militaristic climate, there was little room for a liberal-minded and very English princess, whose insistence on clinging to her native customs and tactless comparisons of Britain and Germany did nothing to endear her to the court. Like Alice, she had shown initiative and imagination in her philanthropic activities. She had established homes and training schools for the unemployed, and organised schemes to provide them with temporary work. She had sponsored evening classes, arranged educational programmes in health and hygiene, founded schools of nursing, and an institute to train young women in a variety of trades; but her efforts were largely unnoticed or simply ignored. The Press drew attention only to her Englishness and her outspoken opposition to Bismarck until she became so unpopular that many Berliners were happy to believe that outlandish stories that the Chancellor fabricated about her.
If she hoped for support from Fritz’s parents, she was quickly disillusioned. As far as Fritz’s father was concerned, women had no business meddling in politics, and a Crown Princess’s sole purpose was to provide the country with heirs.
Unfortunately, Vicky did little help her own cause. Like Alice, she was prone to bouts of depression and illness, exacerbated by frequent pregnancies and the stifling of her many talents. Moreover, according to one of her English nieces, there was:
“…a curious trait in her character – she was never really satisfied with the moment itself. When she was in Berlin, everything in England was perfect: when she was in England, everything German was equally perfect.”[18]
Even in Cannes, as Alice wrote to Queen Victoria of the ‘heavenly blue sea’ and the beauty of the sunsets and countryside, Vicky complained of the expense of the place and the dullness of its architecture.
Her elder children, too, left her dissatisfied. It was frustrating for a woman of Vicky’s intellect to discover that her children were not great scholars. Impulsive Willy was hindered by his arm; Henry was lazy; and Charlotte was, in her mother’s eyes, ‘backward’ and ‘dull.’
Brilliant herself, the standards she set for her children were so far above their ability that Queen Victoria herself felt it necessary to intervene, urging Vicky not to press them so hard and to make allowance for their slowness in learning.
In response, Vicky wrote ef
fusively that, in spite of his ugliness, Henry was ‘a great darling’, and Willy was ‘very intelligent and good-looking’ but often a compliment was followed by a hint of disappointment:
“I am sure you would be pleased with William if you were to see him. He has Bertie's pleasant, amiable ways and can be very winning. He is not possessed of brilliant abilities, nor of any strength of character or talents, but he is a dear boy, and I hope and trust will grow up a useful man.”[19]
In the midst of their mother’s criticism, Willy, Charlotte and Henry ran to their grandparents for praise. The Prussian Queen Augusta made no secret of her contempt for her English daughter-in-law and actively encouraged Willy’s rising hostility towards her. The King, meanwhile, regaled his grandson with tales of past Prussian victories, filling his head with dreams of ruling a mighty empire surpassing that of his British grandmother. The giant Bismarck, ever willing to flatter the impressionable boy while privately viewing him with contempt, appeared to personify that dream and beside the Iron Chancellor the Crown Prince and Crown Princess seemed weak, unpatriotic and unworthy of respect or imitation. Proud of his Hohenzollern ancestry, Willy alternatively adored and despised his English mother, and Vicky could only take refuge in Fritz’s abiding love and the determination to keep her younger children free from the ‘Prussian influence.’
By the time of Moretta’s birth in 1866, Vicky, frustrated in her aspirations and increasingly isolated from Berlin society, had no option but to confine her many talents to her charitable works, the decoration of her home and the upbringing of her family. ‘Every moment she could spare…she spent with us,’ Moretta recalled, and consequently she was able to develop a deeper bond with her younger children than had been possible with their elder siblings.
Despite extreme shyness among strangers and an irrational fear of old ladies, Moretta, endeared herself to everyone by her cheerful affection and lack of precociousness; and Vicky wrote to the Queen with some relish that the little girl almost always spoke English and used very few German words. Before Moretta was eighteen months old, a fourth son, Waldemar, was born and he too, under Vicky’s care was so ‘dear’ and ‘honest’ that he soon became her favourite child.
The holiday in Cannes brought a brief respite to Vicky and Alice. Spending the time quietly together, they seized the rare opportunity of sharing memories of their idyllic childhood and confiding in one another their present troubles. Until then, Vicky had always believed that Alice’s life was so much easier and less complicated than her own, but now she began to understand that Alice, too, had her own share of difficulties.
The winter moved on and the return of Louis and Fritz on the 19th December brought a happy reunion of both families in time for Christmas. Yet, while the children listened intrigued to their fathers’ accounts of adventures in distant lands, both Alice and Vicky had reason to anticipate their return to Germany with some trepidation. With a heavy heart, Alice set out with her children to the ‘stifling’ atmosphere of Darmstadt, while for Vicky there came a brief respite as she and Fritz broke their journey in Paris. Entertained by the charismatic Emperor Napoleon III, and delighting in the Parisian culture, neither Vicky nor Fritz could have suspected that within seven months the Prussian Crown Prince would be leading his troops towards the French capital in the midst of a bitter war.
Chapter 3 – A Constant Increase
Hohenzollerns (Prussians)
Vicky (Victoria): Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter; Crown Princess of Prussia
Fritz (Frederick): Vicky’s husband, Crown Prince of Prussia
Children of Vicky & Fritz:
Willy (Wilhelm, William)
Charlotte
Henry
Moretta (Victoria Moretta)
Waldemar
Sophie
Mossy (Margaret)
Hessians
Alice: Queen Victoria’s second daughter.
Louis: Alice’s husband, heir to the Grand Duchy of Hesse-and-by-Rhine.
Children of Alice & Louis:
Victoria
Ella
Irène
Ernie
Frittie (Friedrich)
Alix
May
Queen Victoria, who considered all things relating to pregnancy and childbirth distasteful, frequently expressed astonishment at her eldest daughter’s alleged ‘baby-worship.’ While conceding that children could on occasions bring comfort to their parents, she claimed that the anxiety they wrought far outweighed the pleasure they gave and was therefore incapable of understanding Vicky’s delight in their ‘constant increase.’
But the constant increase continued apace. Seven months after leaving Paris, Vicky gave birth to her seventh child, Sophie – an ugly name in Queen Victoria’s frank opinion. Five days later, 19th July 1870, France declared war on Prussia and, for a second time in four years, Vicky had barely recovered from her confinement when she was faced the prospect her husband’s imminent departure for battle.
War against France was something for which Bismarck had long been planning and preparing; not only would it provide the Prussians with the opportunity of seizing the French territories of Alsace and Lorraine, but also it would draw together the German states, leading ultimately to unification. All that was needed was an excuse for war, and in the summer of 1870 the perfect situation arose as a result of the Prussian nomination of a candidate for the vacant Spanish throne.
Four years previously, a revolution in Spain had brought an end to the reign of the unhappily-married and allegedly promiscuous Queen Isabella. The unpopular queen abdicated in favour of her son, Alfonso, but the Spanish, dissatisfied with the dynasty, were considering alternative candidates from other ruling Houses. Several European princes had been suggested, but when the Prussians nominated Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, the French were appalled. Wary already of Bismarck’s designs along the Franco-German border, Napoleon III could not countenance the prospect of a Hohenzollern ruling Spain, and sent a minister to the Prussian King at the spa town of Ems, insisting that Prince Leopold’s name be withdrawn.
On Bismarck’s advice, the King accepted the demands but when the French went further, insisting on both an apology for having suggested Leopold in the first place and a guarantee that no other Hohenzollern candidate would ever be put forwards, they played straight into Bismarck’s hands. The Chancellor edited the so-called ‘Ems Dispatch’ and arranged for it to be published and circulated throughout Europe in the full knowledge that the insult would spur the French into making a declaration of war. The scheme proved successful. The whole of Germany responded to France’s perceived aggression with self-righteous indignation and for the first time a sense of unity pervaded the country.
Among the uniformed guests who gathered in Potsdam for Sophie’s christening on Monday 25th July 1870, were the rulers of several South German states who had joined the Prussian alliance. The disputes of 1866 were forgotten as Prussians and Hessians united against a common enemy. Even the Crown Princess was caught up in the atmosphere of patriotism and, in spite of her aversion to bloodshed, she had no doubt that the French had provoked the conflict, and the Germans had no option but to fight.
The morning after Sophie’s christening, before Vicky was awake, Fritz slipped quietly from their rooms and left at the head of his army.
In Darmstadt, too, there were echoes of 1866, as Alice, six months pregnant for a fifth time, watched Louis depart with the troops, knowing that he, as commander of a small division, would be far more exposed to enemy bullets than her brother-in-law, the Crown Prince of Prussia. At least she found comfort in the knowledge that this time she and Vicky were on the same side and could work together in making preparations for the care of the wounded.
No sooner had Fritz departed than Vicky set to work in Berlin and Homburg, applying Florence Nightingale’s theories of nursing to provide light and airy wards for the casualties. In Hesse, Alice established four base hospitals to which she paid daily visits, often
taking her elder daughters with her to assist in rolling bandages and talking with the injured soldiers.
So devoted was Alice to her duties that she barely had time to sleep but, rather than winning the admiration of the Hessians, her concern for the French prisoners-of-war earned her only ‘a heap of criticism’ and, in a foreshadowing of events which would later overtake her daughters, roused suspicion that both she and Vicky were secretly working for the enemy.
British neutrality angered the Prussians and it was widely observed in Berlin that, while the London newspapers claimed to support the Prussian cause, Queen Victoria’s government had made little attempt to dissuade the French from taking up arms. It was even suggested that the British were secretly backing the enemy – a suspicion which seemed to be confirmed when it was discovered that French ships were supplied with British coal, and French shells were manufactured in Birmingham.
As a result of this discovery, the English were, as Vicky told her mother, even ‘more hated than the French’ and the brunt of German anger was aimed at the English princesses. While Vicky was pleading with Queen Victoria to send British soldiers to support the Germans, Bismarck seized his opportunity to further denigrate the Crown Princess by accusing both Vicky and Alice of passing military secrets to their mother who was in turn passing the information to the enemy.
Queen Victoria's Granddaughters 1860-1918 Page 3