Physically and mentally Vicky was at a low ebb. Years of spending winters in unhealthy overheated palaces, attempts on the Kaiser’s life and rumours of threats on her and her husband, and above all her two recent bereavements, had brought her to the verge of a complete nervous breakdown, and she insisted she would probably not survive another winter in the city. As for wanting to get away for a few months, she told Fritz bitterly, his parents, particularly the Empress, treated her ‘as if I were committing a crime!!!’38 Yet she and Fritz stood firm, and on 1 September she and her court marshal Count Seckendorff travelled to Styria in Southern Austria. The local physicians diagnosed anaemia, debilitating rheumatism and severe depression. She did not return to Germany for nearly nine months.
For the first few days she was in the grip of deep depression at years of cumulative tragedies. When Queen Victoria suggested that so long an absence from all her ‘associations’ would be painful, she assured her mother that this would not be the case. The whole social and political atmosphere at Berlin had become intolerable for her. ‘Liberty, independence exist not and we have simply to obey, and have every sort of galling interference in our own home. The spirit of espionage, malevolence, and jealousy and malice is rampant and there are many wicked people whose harmful influence cripple and hinder one at every step one takes. . . . All this has worn away gradually a deal of my courage and a deal of my strength’.39
On 15 September, which would have been Sigi’s fifteenth birthday, she was filled with a sense of desolation and longing for her two youngest sons. As if her father’s death and her eldest son’s arm ‘were not sufficient misfortune for us’.40 Willy visited her in Venice in October and Fritz joined them a few days later for a series of walks and excursions. They hoped the growing estrangement between Vicky and Willy might heal, but he was unprepared to sympathize with her growing homesickness for England and aversion to their home at Prussia – ‘You know that I have nothing at Berlin to make my Life there anything but odious!’41 In a twentyeight-page letter she poured out her misery to her son – her mental and physical anxiety and fatigue, and her homesickness which she could forget in Italy but not in Berlin. It was an emotional cry for help which she might well have read through in a calmer frame of mind and torn up. But Willy took exception to her complaints about her lack of freedom of speech at Berlin, and the ‘very dangerous’ web of lies and espionage at the courts of Berlin and Potsdam. Her constructive suggestions for the betterment of Berlin, such as providing parks, gardens and squares, more schools and hospitals, more attention to housing for the poor, opportunities for art, and the improvement of museums, carried no weight with him. She ended by telling him to burn the letter, a plea which obviously fell on deaf ears.
He never answered it, finding it embarrassing or disloyal if not both. For her thirty-ninth birthday a fortnight later he wrote her a distant note of about four lines promising that he would congratulate her ‘properly’ in a day or two; he had no time that day as he was going hunting. This promised letter never arrived and she was furious, believing he could not be bothered to write. Charlotte readily took her side and tried her utmost to make peace, saddened at her brother’s cold-heartedness but suggesting to Vicky in mitigation that it was the fault of Hinzpeter who had done so much to ‘destroy his gentler emotions’ and turn him against his mother.
Willy had suffered intermittently for the best part of two years with a serious infection in his right ear. One specialist who examined him found a chronic abscess and a perforated eardrum, and another warned that there was a grave risk to his mental health if not his life if it should spread to the brain. Having lost one son through meningitis, the parents spent an anxious few months dreading the death of the other one from a similar disease. Prolonged periods of rest and care on Willy’s part effected a temporary cure, though he was warned that the condition could recur.
When Vicky returned to Berlin in May 1880, she was not surprised to find that nothing had changed for the better. ‘How the usual frigidness and bitterness of the people here pains me when one comes back’, she wrote to her mother.42 Though she was a little stronger in spirit after her long absence and better prepared to confront the challenges of a hostile environment, those around them, not least her husband, were aware that after the death of Waldie she would never be the same woman again. Even at the end of the year, she could still write to her friend Countess Marie Dönhoff that when she looked at her other children round the Christmas tree ‘I bitterly miss the two dear boys that were my pride and joy.’43 She had become more brittle, suffered increasingly from mood swings, was more vulnerable to depression, and less ready to accept opposition. With a husband who was gradually losing self-confidence, it was not an encouraging outlook for either of them. Yet for the moment they both had each other, and remained as devoted as ever – the one consolation they would have in the increasingly tragic times ahead.
SEVEN
‘He complains about his wasted life’
Vicky and Fritz were keen to see their eldest son suitably and happily married. During his university days they had encouraged Willy’s visits to his aunt Alice, her husband Louis and their children, hoping the homely atmosphere of Darmstadt would be a good influence on him and counteract the fawning, military ambience of Berlin. By the age of nineteen he had become besotted with their second daughter Elizabeth (‘Ella’), and during the last months of her short life Alice thought the young couple would be well-matched. She made no effort to dispel any impression among the rest of the family that a betrothal might soon follow.
Nevertheless Ella and her sisters did not take to their restless, showy cousin, and she had as good as pledged herself to her distant Romanov kinsman, Grand Duke Serge of Russia. Unlike her sister, Vicky felt such a marriage between first cousins was inadvisable as Alice’s younger son, the haemophiliac ‘Frittie’, had bled to death after what should have only been a minor fall, and the risk that any children of a marriage between the future German Emperor and Ella might suffer from the same condition was too great.* She had hoped for some time that he might instead marry one of the daughters of their old friend Duke Friedrich of Holstein, the nieces of Prince and Princess Christian, and granddaughters of Queen Victoria’s late half-sister Feodora. Once he became aware that a betrothal with Ella could never be, he started paying court to the Duke’s daughter Princess Augusta Victoria of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg, ‘Dona’, a plain, pious but even-tempered young woman three months older than himself.
Dona was not considered particularly aristocratic, rich or pretty, and Kaiser Wilhelm threatened to forbid the match until Bismarck withdrew his objections after her father’s death from cancer in January 1880. On personal grounds the Chancellor approved of this simple, unambitious woman, whose evident lack of cleverness placed her in a different class from the regrettable tradition of intelligent Hohenzollern consorts. When she and Willy were betrothed in February, the news was received coldly in Berlin, partly for reasons of lineage, and partly as the late Duke’s claim to the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, which had been dismissed by Bismarck after the war of 1864, was but a recent memory. Vicky knew the Berliners might not consider her grand enough, but as they made plain their dislike for everything foreign so much, she expected they would be pleased enough with a Princess bred, born and educated in Germany; ‘and more spite, ill-will, backbiting and criticism of the unkindest sort, she never can have to endure – than I have gone through for twenty-two years.’1
Willy’s sister Charlotte thought her brother too cold-hearted and incapable of being in love with anyone except himself. She found Dona silent, uncommunicative, very shy and a poor figure beside her more lively sister Caroline Matilda (‘Calma’), and also thought her brother-in-law Ernest of Saxe-Meiningen was in love with Dona and had hoped to marry her. She and Bernhard told Fritz with concern that Willy was ‘strangely cool’ about Dona, gave no sign of any affection for her or enthusiasm about the betrothal. Fritz shared her doubts, and fe
lt Willy was ‘not truly committed’ to the marriage.
Nevertheless Vicky saw the betrothal as an alliance between their dynasty and the Augustenbergs and a kind of atonement for past wrongs, and they admired him for his determination to marry Dona in the face of public disapproval. University and barracks life had given him too many airs and graces, and they were sure the domesticity of married life would cure him of this. Vicky approved of her mild temperament, writing to her mother, ‘I am so delighted that you think Victoria [Dona] so gentle and amiable and sweet’.2 Maybe she did not foresee that it would take more than a goodnatured disposition to act as a restraining influence on this eldest son. Meanwhile Charlotte was still not reconciled to her brother’s marriage. Vicky was disturbed by her hostile attitude and her apparent stirring up of feelings against Dona, and at length Fritz told her firmly that it boded ill for family unity if she kept her brother and sister-in-law at arm’s length instead of welcoming them. She was not the only one, for the ever-irascible Prince Karl and his son Friedrich Karl dismissed Dona as a parvenu and called the marriage a danger to the dynasty.
The wedding took place on 27 February 1881 at a ceremony which, said Vicky, was ‘exhausting, suffocating and interminable as all the Berlin state weddings are.’3 She and Fritz were quite ‘knocked up’ by the end, and they never ceased to marvel at how the Kaiser and Empress retained their vitality throughout. However she admitted that the bride ‘looked charming and everyone was taken with her sweetness and grace.’4
Two weeks later Tsar Alexander II was assassinated and Fritz was sent to the funeral, despite anonymous letters that he and Vicky had received assuring him that if he went he would be the next victim. Even the Prince of Wales, who was going as well, urged him to resist the order. He had heard from his sister-in-law Marie, now Tsarina, that the family were living in a state of virtual police siege to protect them from the wave of street-fighting, stone-throwing and terrorist threats that had followed. Thanks to strict security the obsequies passed off without incident, as Vicky had been more confident than her husband that they would – as she wrote to Queen Victoria, ‘there could be no object in attempting the life of so many Foreigners at once.’5
At least Fritz and Vicky could take continued pleasure in his official capacity as a patron of the arts. After the Hohenzollern Museum was opened he accepted the patronage of the German Anthropological Society, under the presidency of the pathologist and Progressive Liberal member of the Reichstag, Professor Rudolf von Virchow. The society’s collections rapidly increased under his encouragement and the guidance of his old tutor Ernst Curtius, and he helped persuade the ministry to finance excavations in Greece and Asia Minor, as well as play a part in plans for their display in the Berlin Volkervunde (Ethnographical Museum). His proudest achievement was the Kunstgewerbe (Arts and Crafts Museum), inspired largely by the Victoria and Albert Museum at Kensington, which he and Vicky often visited when they were in England. It had started in 1867 as a small collection of industrial arts, to which they added their own collection of tapestries and porcelain after the Franco-Prussian war, and Queen Victoria presented a large consignment of rare Indian vases, ivories and lacquer articles from the Kensington museum. Opened on 21 November 1881, Vicky’s birthday, the ceremony was followed by a party for the architects, advisers and scholars who had contributed to its success.
In the 1881 elections the Progressives won an impressive victory at the expense of National Liberals and Free Conservatives. After Gladstone’s decisive Liberal victory in Britain the previous year, Vicky was encouraged by what looked like an increasingly democratic movement sweeping both countries, and made plain her enthusiasm for Gladstone, her mother’s bête noire, but Fritz was more cautious. He wondered if the British election results were a reflection of increasing British radicalism, but was reassured by Roggenbach and Stockmar that liberal victory owed less to revolutionary fervour than to support from the depressed agricultural population who hoped the Liberals would take more heed of their difficulties than the outgoing Tories.
After the elections Bismarck launched a campaign to break the growing strength of the Progressive party, partly to support his own power base and partly as he feared that continued electoral victories of the Progressives might accelerate a German republic. Gladstone and the English radicals, he averred, were impatient for the reign of Kaiser Friedrich who would surely encourage comparable democratization in Germany. As Chancellor he did not intend Germany to be ruled ‘after the English fashion’ and in January 1882 he issued a royal rescript against parliamentary government, signed by Kaiser Wilhelm as King of Prussia, proclaiming the sovereign’s right to personal control over the politics of members of his government, and stating that government officials could be dismissed from their posts if they did not hold aloof ‘from all agitation’ against the ministry. In England the Morning Post dismissed it as resembling one of King Charles I’s messages to the Long Parliament. Vicky was furious when Bismarck declared that the Crown Prince approved of the measure, though he had been horrified to read of it in the papers. To alienate the heir’s political supporters and tarnish his image with the public, articles appeared in the press asserting the heir’s satisfaction with Bismarck’s policies. As Vicky said, it was calculated to spread the impression that the Crown Prince would approve of everything that the government did ‘were it not for his English wife’.6 The papers suggested that progressive liberals, under the reign of Kaiser Friedrich, would pursue a disastrous foreign policy and an anti-Russian alliance, precipitating the possibility of war with Russia, and electors were advised to vote for right-wing parties in the interests of peace and stability.
After being weakened by losses in the elections of 1882 the Progressive party aligned with the Secession Party, a breakaway grouping of former National Liberals, to form the Deutsche-Freisinnige Partei (German Free-Thinking Party). Among its leaders were Eugen Richter, Ludwig von Bamberger and Max von Forckenbeck, all personal friends of Fritz. In their words it was committed to the preservation of constitutional parliamentary order, the right to free speech and free elections, and increasing the power of the Reichstag in financial matters and regulation of church laws. To Vicky it gave promise of dismantling many of Bismarck’s more reactionary policies, while Fritz had reservations, perceiving its objectives at odds with his belief in constitutional liberalism and acceptance of a stronger parliament. Nevertheless with Vicky’s encouragement he sent a telegram to Bamberger congratulating him on the creation of the Deutsche-Freisinnige Partei. It became known as the Kronprinzen Partei or Crown Prince’s party, and the telegram gave the impression that he supported their goals. The National Liberal leaders were uneasy with his apparent support for such left-wing policies, and wondered if he still had the energy or commitment to compromise between them and his own ideas for a liberal Germany. Bismarck continued to suspect the dismantling of his conservative policies in the next reign under a ‘Gladstone ministry’, seeing the new grouping as a powerful opposition to his conservativeliberal minority alliance and as vocal supporters of the Crown Prince. The Chancellor’s security, he considered, depended on driving a wedge between the new coalition and the heir to the throne.
Fritz’s Court Marshal (or Chamberlain) Karl von Normann arranged a discreet consultation in his own apartments between his master and Eugen Richter, but nothing could remain secret from Bismarck for long, and Normann was dismissed on a trumped-up charge of having plotted an attack on the Chancellor’s position with the Crown Princess and Empress, and thus coming between the Emperor and his people. He was transferred as Minister to Oldenburg, and replaced in the household by Count Hugo von Radolinski, a devoted adherent of Bismarck. Fritz was powerless to do anything but assure Normann that once he was Emperor he would recall him. Once installed, Radolinski made it his mission to get rid of the Crown Princess’s Chamberlain, the faithful Count Götz von Seckendorff, who shared her political outlook and a love of sketching and painting. Despite a vicious campaign to undermine his i
ntegrity, Seckendorff retained his position in the household.
Bismarck’s suspicions about the Crown Princess’s political orientation were shared by Queen Victoria, who looked askance at her daughter’s enthusiasm for Gladstone and his fellow Liberals in England, telling her she was ‘such an extraordinary Radical that you even appear a republican at heart’.7 During the election campaign of 1884 Bismarck was keen to exploit any differences in the Deutsche-Freisinnige Partei ranks. The party was divided on Bismarck’s social welfare legislation, on the renewal of anti-socialist legislation, and over Bismarck’s intention to acquire German colonies in Africa. While Fritz endorsed a colonial policy for patriotic reasons he was concerned at its implications for Anglo-German relations, whereas Vicky firmly opposed it, seeing it as Bismarck’s means to gain support for other conservative policies. The Germans were always reproaching the English for their anti-German prejudices, she maintained, while they forgot that they themselves had ‘many more and much more deeply-seated ones about other countries, especially England! They imagine England is jealous of Germany’s attempting to have colonies. . . . This colonial sugar plum may easily turn into a bitter almond, and the beginning seems to me sad enough if it cannot be obtained without an estrangement between England and Germany.’8
On 25 January 1883 Vicky and Fritz celebrated their silver wedding. Gifts poured in from corporations and guilds throughout Germany, including paintings and sculpture by living artists, ivory and ebony cabinets, and from the Reichstag a magnificent carved oak dining-room suite. Collections were made nationally and in Berlin amounting to over one thousand marks, and presented to them by an official deputation for distribution to charities of their choice. A large sum went towards founding a children’s hospital in Vicky’s name.
Dearest Vicky, Darling Fritz Page 19