Dearest Vicky, Darling Fritz

by John Van der Kiste

  Vicky still had problems with her mother, who persistently reminded her that she must never forget what she owed her country, in other words, England; ‘never forget those duties which you owe to it as well as to your new one!’ There was nothing, she maintained, in ‘these two-fold affections and duties which need ever clash; the interests are so much, and will in time get more united.’ They reached a crescendo when the Queen expressed indignation at the ‘extraordinary’ Prussian custom that a lady who was enceinte could not stand as godmother at a christening; ‘above all promise me never to do so improper and indecorous a thing as to be lying in a dressing gown on a sofa at a christening! as my daughter and an English Princess I expect you will not do it. . . . Let German ladies do what they like but the English Princess must not.’48

  Vicky had been placed in an impossible position. She told her mother quite rightly that while letters from home were a delight as well as a comfort to her, this ‘extended correspondence’ was taking up a good deal of her time.49 Her first duties, she had to point out, were in Prussia, and in fulfilling them to the utmost she was merely doing what her own country would wish and expect. ‘It would seem strange if a German princess married in England and insisted on having a christening there with the same customs observed as in her home. I fear I should make myself justly disliked if I showed a contempt for a custom which is after all an innocent one’.50

  Ernest Stockmar warned his father about Vicky’s problems and the Baron wrote to Lord Clarendon, who was visiting Berlin at the time, asking for his help. The Queen, he said, ‘wishes to exercise the same authority and control over her that she did before her marriage and she writes her constant letters full of anger and reproaches . . . and of her forgetting what is due to her family and country, till the poor child (as Stockmar called her) is made seriously ill, and put in a state dangerous to her in her actual condition.’51 The old Baron was evidently a little conscience-stricken, being as responsible as anyone else for having repeatedly advocated the marriage of Vicky and Fritz in the first place, and was now alarmed at the young wife’s plight. He asked Clarendon to discuss things with the Prince Consort, who admitted that he was perturbed at the Queen’s ‘aggressive system’. He had tried, without much success, to moderate the demands his wife was making on their daughter with her insistence on never-ending daily letters home. Unfortunately, he admitted, it was necessary to acquiesce to Queen Victoria to a degree, lest she should become too ‘excited to an opposition to her will’, and the madness of George III might be unleashed in her. However, that he said something to her on the subject can hardly be doubted, for her letters became less hectoring in future.

  There was another unfortunate legacy which Queen Victoria had left her eldest daughter. Vicky’s ignorance of the facts of life and her mother’s insistence on the proprieties left her totally unprepared for motherhood. That June she had written of her pride at the very thought of ‘giving life to an immortal soul’,52 but in the process her pride, physical strength and fortitude would be tested to the utmost.

  *Prince Albert was created Prince Consort by Letters Patent in June 1857.

  THREE

  ‘You belong to your country’

  Fritz and Vicky moved into Unter den Linden, Berlin, their official winter residence, on the eve of her eighteenth birthday in November 1858. Though she was unwell throughout autumn and winter, her physician Dr Wegner saw no grounds for concern. Regretting her inability to attend the birth herself, Queen Victoria sent Dr James Clark to Berlin. He had attended her last confinements, and when he examined Vicky, he likewise assured them that she would be her normal self again once the baby was born. Only the experienced midwife, Mrs Innocent, had any idea of what was in store. Arriving in Berlin soon after Christmas, she took one look at the expectant mother and feared they were ‘in for trouble.’1

  On the advice of Baron Stockmar and King Friedrich Wilhelm’s personal physician, Professor Johann Schönlein, Prince Wilhelm engaged the services of Dr Eduard Martin, a professor of gynaecology and obstetrics at the University of Berlin, as the man best qualified to assist. There was some professional jealousy between both men and Wegner, more courtier than physician, was reluctant to jeopardize the sensibilities of his royal patient by conducting the necessary examination, even at the risk of allowing nature to take its course by letting her and her child die. Mortality in childbirth was frequent and his professional reputation in Berlin would probably not have suffered had this been the outcome.

  For several days Vicky had suffered from what Fritz discreetly called ‘pains of an unusual nature’ which had given them more than one false alarm. Her labour began shortly before midnight on 26 January, and he called Mrs Innocent. Soon Drs Wegner, Schönlein and Clark, the German midwife Fräulein Stahl, Countess Blücher, and Countess Perponcher, a lady of the bedchamber, were all on hand. Countess Blücher, an Englishwoman married to a German, was a confidante of Queen Victoria and Princess Augusta, and one of the few women in Berlin whom Vicky trusted implicitly. From her the mother-to-be had an urgently-needed crash course in the ‘intimacies’ of childbirth that Queen Victoria, with her disgust for anatomical details, had never given her daughter. Vicky put on some warm loose clothes and paced to and fro, supported by Countesses Perponcher and Blücher, and Fritz himself. That the father-to-be remained with his wife for so long before and during the birth was extremely unusual for the time. As the labour pains increased in severity, Wegner examined the patient and noticed that there was something not quite right about the position of the child. He sent a messenger to summon Dr Martin at once, and he reached Dr Martin’s residence as he was getting into his carriage, about to give a lecture at the university. At around the same time he received a note written by Fritz the previous evening, asking him to come and attend without delay as his wife was about to give birth. Instead of being handed to Dr Martin, as was presumably the intention, this note was posted in the mail.

  To his horror Dr Martin found Dr Wegner and his German colleague or colleagues in a corner of the room while the distraught Fritz held his semi-conscious wife in his arms, having put a handkerchief into her mouth several times to prevent her from grinding her teeth and biting herself. He administered chloroform and a baby boy was born at 2.45 p.m. Once he had delivered the baby, Martin devoted his attention to saving the mother, who was very weak. Fraülein Stahl was the first to notice that the infant had not yet uttered a sound, and she feared it was dead. She and Martin tried every method they knew, culminating in increasingly vigorous slapping, until at last a cry came from his lips. Fritz had fallen, exhausted and close to fainting, on the bed next to that of his wife. On hearing Martin’s dejected tone of voice as he announced the child was a prince, he too thought his firstborn was dead, until to his relief he heard the baby crying in the next room.*

  Though the child was alive, he was clearly not physically normal, and his left arm hung limply from its socket. The doctors referred to this injury in their reports on the birth, without considering the possibility of mental trouble. Recent medical analysis of their accounts has suggested that his hyperactivity in later life, and maybe a degree of brain damage, were caused by a ‘reduced blood flow to the brain during delivery’.2

  ‘In truth I could not go through such another’,3 Dr Clark admitted to Queen Victoria. The young mother wrote to Queen Victoria praising Dr Wegner’s tact and discretion, though she did not know what she would have done without Clark. Dr Martin, to whom she had initially taken a violent dislike, was ‘an excellent man’ in whose skill she felt ‘the greatest confidence’,4 but she could never absolve him completely from blame for the ‘bungling way’ in which she was treated.5

  The christening was postponed to give Vicky enough time to recover, and the infant was given the names Friedrich Wilhelm Victor Albert at a ceremony on 5 March. Though still weak for several weeks after her confinement, she was thrilled to be a mother, with none of Queen Victoria’s aversion to ‘ugly’ small babies and the ‘animal-like�
� characteristics of pregnancy. ‘I am so thankful, so happy, he is a boy,’ she wrote. ‘I longed for one more than I can describe, my whole heart was set upon a boy and therefore I did not expect one.’6 However it was hardly surprising that her natural pride as a first-time mother was wounded, and she must have reproached herself at having presented her husband with a son and heir who was not physically perfect. Twelve months of life in Prussia had shaken her self-confidence, and to make matters worse her baby and the future King – assuming he survived – was physically handicapped. On hearing of the birth an excited Prince Wilhelm told his family that they had ‘another fine young recruit’; when he knew more, he told Fritz coldly that he was not sure if congratulations on the birth of ‘a defective prince’ were in order. It was an unpromising start to motherhood for Vicky, but she adored her child and was bitterly upset when Augusta would not allow her to breast-feed him herself. Not content with insisting that Vicky should hand him over to a wet-nurse, in later life she told her grandson that his mother could not bear to nurse him because she found him repugnant with his misshapen arm.

  In the spring they moved into the Neue Palais at Potsdam, where Vicky could work on transforming musty, long-uninhabited rooms into a comfortable home, and restoring the overgrown garden. This change of residence coincided with matters taking a turn for the worse in central Europe, when Emperor Napoleon sought to use Italian unification to further his territorial ambitions. He agreed to help Piedmont in its war of independence against Austria in exchange for the Piedmontese states of Savoy and Nice. Austria, confident of military superiority, issued an ultimatum to the Sardinian government – disarmament or war – and invaded Piedmont at the end of April 1859, whereupon Napoleon sent the French army to join the Italians. Most of Europe was neutral; Napoleon’s intrusion was hard to justify, but Franz Josef was undeniably the aggressor. In Germany, however, where any French action was automatically suspect, opinion was naturally pro-Austrian; and victory for Italy and France, the German military knew, might lead to further French aggression on the Rhine.

  As a gesture of solidarity with the Austrian Emperor the Regent ordered partial mobilisation. Fritz, a trained soldier bored by enforced inactivity, had been waiting for the moment. He believed that Prussia’s reputation as a faithful ally was on the line, to say nothing of his own honour as a prince and officer. Vicky could not understand such an argument; to her it was ‘fine’ for the men to talk of defending their country, ‘of a soldier’s life being the only one that becomes a man, that death on the field of battle is the thing they wish for; they don’t think of their poor unhappy wives whom they have taken from their homes and whom they leave at home alone.’7

  While Fritz was preparing for the campaign in May, Vicky paid her first visit to England as a married woman, reluctantly leaving Willy with his nurse as Dr Wegner refused to let her take him. She was gratified to find a new bond with her mother; both women had had new babies comparatively recently, Queen Victoria’s youngest child Beatrice being only two years old. Now Vicky felt they were more like sisters than mother and daughter, noting with mild astonishment that they seemed more in harmony than ever before; ‘Mama shows a kindness & love for me that I have not hitherto known’.8 Perhaps she was subconsciously acknowledging that during childhood she had never felt herself to be her mother’s favourite. She desperately missed Fritz, writing to him that in her old room ‘I experienced the happiest moment of my life when you took me into your arms as your wife and pressed me to your heart; when I even think of that moment my heart beats madly and I have a terrible longing for you, and I think I would hug you to death if I had you here now.’9

  Meanwhile Fritz was given command of the First Infantry Division of Guards. They were still on their way to the war zone in Italy when news reached them of Austria’s defeat at Solferino on 24 June, and the subsequent peace treaty at Villafranca a couple of weeks later. Without having even seen a shot fired, he angrily returned home. A commission was appointed to oversee urgent army reform and he attended each meeting of the new military council, pledging himself to making the Prussian forces invincible. If Austria, confident of victory, could be defeated so heavily, then so could the Prussians if they suddenly found themselves at war. For several days, from dawn to dusk, he drilled and marched his troops with a severity they had never before known of him.

  Her husband’s sudden obsession with the army was the least of Vicky’s anxieties during what was becoming a difficult summer. In July she expressed a wish to consult a surgeon about Wilhelm’s arm which had failed to respond to gentle exercises, cold baths, and ‘invigorating embrocations’ that the doctors assured her would help. When his arms were measured at the age of six months the left was about a centimetre shorter than the right, and she was warned that this disparity would increase with time. Dr Langenbeck diagnosed a course of ‘animal baths’, with his arm being inserted twice weekly for half an hour in a freshly-slaughtered hare, a gruesome-sounding medieval remedy which was supposed to transfer the warmth and vigour of the animal to the arm. A less drastic solution was to tie his right arm to his side and leg for an hour each day to encourage him to use the left, but all he did was lie on his back on the floor and kick his legs in the air. He could not crawl, and not until he was fifteen months old did he take his first unsteady steps unaided.

  Worries about her deformed child were one thing; concern for her father was another. While visiting England in May she had been alarmed to see the Prince Consort looking so tired and aged. It was the last straw when Fritz returned home from his campaign that never was, angered by what he called Germany’s humiliation, blaming the Austrians for reaching an agreement without consulting their Prussian allies, and thinking of nothing but the army. She impulsively dashed off a desperate letter to her father asking what to do. He replied that she must remind Fritz that Prussia was less important than Germany; it was childish of him to behave as if the state was on the verge of war, and such action could bring the whole of Europe into armed conflict.10 However in his present frame of mind, war would have been welcome to Fritz, to obliterate the humiliating aftermath of the abortive Austrian campaign.

  That autumn he went down with influenza, only to be roused from his bed before he was better. The Regent had just published plans for army reform, demanding among other things an increase in conscription from two to three years, with extra taxation to finance it, and abolition of the Landwehr, a territorial army drawn mostly from the middle classes. Fritz was furious at not being consulted, and without waiting till he was well again he confronted his father. The latter, knowing his reforms would not meet with the Liberals’ approval and that he would have a struggle to see them through, took all his anxiety out on his son. He called Fritz a meddlesome amateur, while Fritz accused his father of keeping him out on a limb. Suffering badly from insomnia, he would get up at night and sit in a chair with a book until he dropped off; in the morning he woke up stiff, still tired and depressed.

  Vicky had to persuade him to come to England with her for a change of air. Leaving Willy again with his nurse, November saw them back at Windsor, celebrating the Prince of Wales’s eighteenth birthday and spending family evenings in the rooms where they had enjoyed their honeymoon. Fritz was soon at his most relaxed, and ill-inclined to argue with his weary-looking father-in-law. At the same time, the royal household were getting to know and like him even better. Prince Arthur’s governor, Major-General Elphinstone, had met him the previous year and found him a typical arrogant Prussian prince, but on this occasion they had a friendly conversation and afterwards the governor noted that ‘there was none of the hauteur I had previously ascribed to him.’11 Fritz was never haughty, but shyness on previous visits to his wife’s family had made him appear aloof to those who did not know him well.

  From the welcoming atmosphere of Windsor they returned to Berlin for a Christmas made intolerable by Wilhelm and Augusta’s endless squabbles. The reform proposals were now common knowledge, and everyone saw the Reg
ent’s programme, supported by all but the most moderate conservatives, as the military caste’s attempt to eliminate any ‘middle-class element’ from the officers in order to achieve complete control of the army. In pursuit of their aims they would not stop at overthrowing the Liberal ministry or even the constitution if necessary, and Wilhelm threatened to resign his position as Regent if thwarted.

  After what he had seen in the forces during the previous summer’s mobilization, Fritz was sympathetic to his father’s reforming zeal. The number of recruits had not risen since 1815, despite a considerable increase in the Prussian population since then, and for Prussia to pursue what might be regarded as a ‘progressive’ policy, it had to have a strong army. Nevertheless he did not support abolition of the Landwehr, he had been deeply hurt by his father’s failure to consult him on the proposals before publication, and he was dismayed at the unconstitutional obstinacy that was leading to a private war between the army officers and the liberals. Yet it did not stop him from being dragged into the controversy in the most unpleasant way possible. One morning he was summoned in secret to an anteroom in the council chamber, where some of the bolder conservatives and liberals were waiting for him. Tired of the Regent’s intractability, they intended to overthrow him and put his son in his place at the head of an army dictatorship. They had sorely misjudged Fritz’s character, for he had never been so shocked in his life. Without stopping to think of the consequences, he went at once to his father and told him everything. The Regent accused his son of treason, of instigating the conspiracy, and on being faced with failure, losing his nerve and confessing in order to save his skin.

  Fritz and Vicky felt that much of the ill-feeling between father and son was caused by jealousy. Their marriage was that rare, maybe even unique thing – a happy Hohenzollern marriage. It was simply not the done thing for husband and wife to go driving, walking, and going out in the evening together. None of the other princes or princesses even accompanied each other to church or the railway station. Fritz had always suffered from the cold, though he could not stand hot rooms as he kept losing his voice in them, and had the sense to wear a cloak or drive in a closed carriage during the bitter Berlin weather, much to the scorn of his relations. This, they said behind his back, could be ascribed to the influence of his English wife. It was hardly surprising if Prince Wilhelm looked at his daughter-in-law, saw the ghost of Elise Radziwill, and allowed himself to think of what might have been if he had not bowed to family tradition. In one sense, fate had dealt his son a better hand.