Dearest Vicky, Darling Fritz

by John Van der Kiste

  The Grand Duchess also sided with her parents in their fears that Moretta might still disgrace the Hohenzollerns by marrying Sandro. Empress Augusta had prepared a codicil to the Emperor’s will stating he would disown his granddaughter and his daughter-in-law if she did, and when she left for Baden she asked Louise to get his signature on the document. Vicky had learnt of these plans from Albedyll, and realized that she had to safeguard her financial position should the worst come to the worst. After the Prince Consort’s death she had asked Queen Victoria not to include her in her will, because she would be well provided for as the future Queen of Prussia. Now it seemed she might be left a disinherited widow at the mercy of an allpowerful son, and perhaps an elderly father-in-law, both of whom despised her. Queen Victoria appreciated the danger and immediately set up a small fund for Vicky and Moretta just in case.

  Mackenzie suggested that the Crown Prince should come to England and be treated as a private patient in his London surgery. This suited the German doctors, as their patient’s absence would relieve them for a while of their responsibility for a valuable life, and place the burden more squarely on Mackenzie’s shoulders. Bismarck stood by the Kaiser who declared that he could not prevent his son, a grown man, from making such decisions. The only condition was that at least one German doctor, and preferably two, should accompany them and have a say as to how far the Crown Prince could be allowed to exert himself in the celebrations. Dr Wegner, the physician who had known him the longest, and Gerhardt’s assistant Dr Landgraf, were chosen. Wilhelm’s pride took a blow when he found he would be travelling to London as a mere guest among many other royalties and not as the sole Hohenzollern representative.

  The news that they were going to England was greeted with indignation in Berlin. Few expected the ailing Kaiser to live another year; what if he should die while his heir was abroad – and in England of all places? What if the Crown Prince was to have a relapse and be too ill to return home? According to Gerhardt there were reasons to believe that either was probable. At the beginning of June the only symptoms of illness Fritz displayed were a sore throat, which was attributed to the constant removal of portions from the swelling, and almost total loss of voice. Already he was writing everything he wished to say on a pad of paper he carried everywhere, in the hope that his gruff whisper would improve with rest. Yet Vicky was so uneasy that on 1 June she spoke privately to Gerhardt, who warned her pessimistically that every time a part of the growth was removed it grew again; the tumour was suppurating, and the right vocal cord was starting to deteriorate. If this was the case, and if Mackenzie could not cure it, the only hope of saving the Crown Prince’s life lay in an operation, without the same chance of success that it would have had a fortnight before. He could only hope that Mackenzie was right and that his treatment would work, for they had ‘nothing else to suggest’.10 Torn between so many conflicting opinions, Vicky found it hard to suppress her anxiety and keep calm in front of her husband, but she was sure they were right to go to the Jubilee; ‘one cannot be kept a prisoner here, or be prevented from following a useful course by the fear of what might happen.’11

  Vicky, Fritz and their three younger daughters left Berlin on 13 June, accompanied by the doctors, crossing the North Sea on the yacht Victoria & Albert and arriving at Sheerness two days later. With them they secretly took a collection of private papers for safe keeping at Buckingham Palace. At London they made for the Queen’s Hotel, Norwood, a better place to stay than the centre of the city where they would be in the thick of dust and heat. After a couple of quiet days there so Fritz could attend Mackenzie’s consulting-rooms for daily treatment, they moved to Buckingham Palace on 18 June for him to have two more days’ complete rest before the procession to Westminster Abbey.

  Though he was spared the ordeals of state banquets and receptions, he had the chance to meet various fellow guests, among them Constantine, Crown Prince of Greece, who was to marry their daughter Sophie two years later, and their friend Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria. They had much in common, as imperial heirs to two of the most reactionary powers in Europe, sharing liberal convictions that had brought them some degree of political isolation from their fathers’ governments. Rudolf had visited Berlin in March for the Emperor’s birthday festivities, to be entertained at the Neue Palais where he had spoken to his hosts on his distrust of Russian policies, particularly regarding Tsar Alexander III’s behaviour over Bulgaria. His fears of Russia’s expansionist ambitions and a desire to see the rest of Europe in strong mutual alliance impressed Fritz greatly, particularly as the Austrian ministers told him nothing and he too had to learn from secret meetings with his liberal allies. Rudolf’s distrust of Bismarck and Willy, five months his junior, bound the Crown Princes closer together.

  Fritz awoke feeling reasonably fit and well on the morning of 21 June. Soon after 11 a.m. the procession began through London’s richly decorated streets, resplendent with triumphal arches, evergreens, flags and brightly-coloured drapery from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abbey. Six cream-coloured horses pulled an open landau containing the Queen, accompanied by Vicky and Alix. Behind the coach and its escort of Indian cavalry came the Queen’s three surviving sons, five sons-in-law and nine grandsons. Mounted on a white charger, Fritz in his uniform of the Pomeranian Cuirassiers, his eagle-crested helmet, silver breastplate and Garter star glinting in the sunshine, towered above them all. The Londoners’ cheering broke into a deafening roar as he saluted, but the more keen-eyed among them noticed how thin he had become. After the service at the abbey, all the princes and princesses moved forward to the Queen to pay her homage. When she stepped down from the coronation chair at the end, Fritz happened to be standing near her and she embraced him impulsively, lingering on his arm in a moment of deep emotion.

  His throat was still congested, and he had to continue daily treatment at Mackenzie’s surgery. On 28 June the doctor removed most of the growth, Wegner placed it in spirit in a sealed flask and sent it to Virchow at Berlin for examination. Nothing further could be proved about the disease, and the professor’s report could advance no new information. But away from the stifling atmosphere of Berlin, and surrounded by the reserved optimism of Vicky and the care of Mackenzie, Fritz felt he was on the way to recovery. Count Seckendorff reported that the Crown Prince was ‘doing well, and we all hope that Dr Mackenzie’s treatment will cure him entirely.’12

  From the Norwood hotel they went to Osborne, where the weather was so fine that they spent most of the daylight hours outside. Fritz could relax in the shade of a cedar tree beside the tennis court, watching Vicky and Moretta play with Seckendorff and Rowland Prothero, son of the local rector. On hot days they went to the beach, where Fritz sat on the sand while Vicky bathed in the sea. Some forty years later their niece Marie of Edinburgh, by then Queen Dowager of Roumania, recalled her uncle and aunt as she saw them at Osborne when a girl of eleven. Pretending to bombard her and her sisters with sand and dry seaweed, Fritz ‘was jolly and yet one somehow felt he was condescending’, while Vicky’s forced gaiety was apparent; ‘her smile had something in it of sunshine when the weather is not really warm.’13 With hindsight Marie should have known what an anxious time it was for them.

  Later that summer they moved to Scotland, staying in the Fife Arms at Braemar, and driving daily the few miles east to Balmoral. In the pure Scottish Highlands air Fritz became stronger and his voice steadily improved. He saw the Queen regularly and she was relieved to see how much better he looked. She did not know that Dr Mark Hovell, a senior surgeon at the throat hospital who was in attendance at Braemar, had examined him and was convinced the growth was malignant. While not so highly qualified or internationally famous as Mackenzie, Hovell was possibly the most skilled of all the doctors who attended the royal patient, but was brought in so late that Mackenzie was completely in command, in Britain at least, by the time he arrived. Lacking the self-assertive qualities and unguarded conviction that he was right, he said nothing for the time being.r />
  However Mackenzie was still confident, and in August Fritz wrote that the doctor ‘considered my sufferings at an end even though I undoubtedly required special care with rest and silence for a long time in order to avoid a relapse.’14 At his request, on 7 September Queen Victoria invited Mackenzie to lunch at Balmoral, and knighted him afterwards in the drawing-room. After laying down the sword she asked Mackenzie searching questions about the case, and was disturbed that he could tell her so little, apart from his theory that the illness ‘had been long coming on and had been entirely neglected.’15

  Meanwhile at Berlin the court, which had reluctantly allowed its heir to go to England for the Jubilee, was impatient for his return home, as the Kaiser was so weak that any mild infection or sudden heart attack could prove fatal. In liberal circles there were fears that Prince Wilhelm was gaining too much influence in state affairs during his father’s absence – not that the Crown Prince’s presence at Berlin had made much difference before – and wanted their champion to come back and take his rightful place in the capital. Vicky retorted that ‘it would be madness to spoil Fritz’s cure while he is in a fair way to recovery, but not well yet!’16

  German opinion was the least of their troubles. On one of the last days in Scotland a row broke out between Seckendorff and the Chamberlain Count Radolinski. Like most other servants in the Crown Prince’s household, with the notable exception of Seckendorff, Radolinski’s attention came not from a desire to serve the Crown Prince and Princess, so much as to send Bismarck a secret weekly report on the activities of the household, and of the Crown Princess’s conversation in particular. In her anxiety she was completely deceived by his devoted manner, as was Fritz to some extent, until Seckendorff warned her to be on her guard. At the same time, he warned her that Radolinski was doing his best to get rid of him.

  For some weeks it had been rumoured that the Crown Princess was accepting her husband’s imminent demise philosophically if not with impatience, seeing it as ‘the gateway to freedom’,17 so she could spend the rest of her life with Seckendorff. Bismarck, Holstein, even Fritz’s loyal confidant Friedberg and others, were said to be convinced that she would regard her widowhood as a kind of deliverance. During their sojourn in the Highlands Radolinski told Sir Henry Ponsonby, Queen Victoria’s secretary, that the Crown Princess and her chamberlain were having an affair, and that she had prevented the operation on her husband so she could keep him alive just long enough to sample the privileges of being Empress. Ponsonby knew better than to fall for such stories and cold-shouldered him after that but other tales, though equally false, were far more easily believed. Even the Queen, who had evidently forgotten the ‘Empress Brown’ tittle-tattle, was moved to ask her secretary why her daughter found it necessary to take Seckendorff everywhere with her.

  By this time the Scottish weather was too damp and cold. Mackenzie advised them to avoid Berlin over winter, and in September Fritz said farewell to Britain for ever. News arrived from Germany that Kaiser Wilhelm was seriously ill, with a number of official functions being performed by the ageing wheelchair-bound Empress with her grandson Wilhelm’s assistance. Fritz was ready to leave for Berlin if his father was to die suddenly, as he would have to in the event of his accession, after which spending the autumn in a different, more temperate climate would be considered, though whether he would be permitted to go outside the German empire was doubtful. He considered returning to Babelsberg briefly to see his father again, but Vicky and Mackenzie persuaded him that to return to Germany while he was still convalescent would delay his recovery.

  They left for Toblach in the Austrian Tyrol, arriving on 7 September, the same day that Mackenzie was knighted. Already exhausted by the journey, Fritz found the air too cold and he was coughing badly, looked pale and suffered from insomnia. After one particularly bad night when he choked so much that Vicky dreaded he was in imminent danger of suffocation, a telegram to London brought Mackenzie and Hovell out at once. They moved south to Venice and later Baveno, on the shores of Lake Maggiore, and Fritz appeared better by the time of his fifty-sixth birthday. All the children except Willy and Ditta joined them, acting a short play and playing the piano, just as they had done in happier days at Potsdam. He was so heartened at this demonstration of affection towards him that Vicky had to force herself to remain cheerful while keeping secret a most unwelcome piece of news. That morning she had received a letter from a friend asking her to bring the Crown Prince back to Germany at once; there was talk of a plot to defy the law, exclude him from the succession, and put Wilhelm in his place.

  Undoubtedly part of the concern, sometimes bordering on anger, of the Berliners for their beloved heir, stemmed from the lack of public relations. Catherine Radziwill thought the greatest mistake Vicky ever made was to keep genuine knowledge of his condition from the public; the people would have pitied her and admired her courage if only they could have shared her trials with her instead of being left to guess and listen to idle rumour.18 Unfortunately she had to choose between either being completely open, or else keeping her agonies to herself so that her husband should not suffer unnecessarily from seeing negative reports in the press. Already there were too many of these, and she tried to check the papers before he received them, in order to help him avoid the prophecies of gloom which would depress him and therefore undo weeks of effort on her part. Sooner or later the public would be bound to know what danger he was in, but she was hardly to be blamed for drawing a veil of secrecy over his progress for as long as she did.

  Already the papers were arguing between themselves. On Fritz’s birthday the Reichs-Anzeiger issued a statement that he was better, though it was necessary for him to spare his voice as much as possible and spend the winter in a warm climate so that, he could avoid catching cold as far as possible. Some of the other papers promptly contradicted the news of his improvement and announced that he was suffering from cancer, amounting to little more than vague confirmation of the widespread rumour, and some rightwing journals promptly revived the fictitious law which forbade an incurably sick man to wear the Prussian crown. Despite Vicky’s vigilant censorship Fritz’s eyes naturally strayed, and he was profoundly depressed at all the misinformed, speculative articles about himself.

  Within weeks there was a further setback. He did not improve at Baveno, and Vicky put it down to the humidity. At the beginning of November they moved further south to San Remo, on the Italian coast and close to the French border. The Villa Zirio stood on a mountain slope above the Riviera road, in an idyllic setting of palms and fruit trees, of roses and other flowers which bloomed all winter. Fritz’s apartments were a suite of rooms facing east and west to catch the sun. Above all it belonged to an Italian; the Berlin press had made much of the fact that their house at Baveno was leased by an Englishman.

  But Fritz was no better here either; he lost colour and appetite, and the heat irritated him. Vicky had to have his bed placed in a warm but sheltered area of the terrace and sit by his side fanning him, horrified to see how little interest he suddenly had in anything or anyone, even her. Then one morning, within a week of their arrival, she discovered new swellings on his throat, and he found it a strain to sit up. Panic-stricken, she summoned Mackenzie who examined Fritz the morning after his arrival at the villa, and discovered a new growth on the larynx larger than the previous swellings, with a distinctly malignant appearance. He told Fritz that the disease was more serious than he had thought; half-expecting it, Fritz wrote on his pad – his voice having gone for good – to ask if it was cancer. Mackenzie gravely replied: ‘it looks very much like it, but it is impossible to be certain.’19 Fritz thanked him for being so honest, but when he and Vicky were alone, his self-control went and he broke down. ‘To think that I should have a horrid, disgusting illness! that I shall be an object of disgust to everyone, and a burden of you all!’20

  This was the catalyst for the anti-English factions in Germany. For over twenty years aristocratic circles at court and archconservative
s alike had waited for the chance to get even with the Crown Princess, for what they considered to be her unwarranted interference in their politics and their country. Now they asserted that she had so set her heart on becoming Empress that she had kept the gravity of her husband’s illness a secret, afraid of their both being passed over in favour of their eldest son. She had refused to listen to German doctors, they said, preferring to summon an Englishman; she and Mackenzie had given him falsely optimistic hopes about his condition and, to satisfy her own whim, she had dragged him to London where he had exhausted himself in her mother’s Jubilee procession. Furthermore she and ‘her’ doctor had conspired to distrust the German physicians, thus preventing an operation on the sick man which might have saved his life.

  Almost without exception these allegations were totally without foundation. It was true that the Crown Prince and Princess had eagerly awaited their accession to the throne in order to help inaugurate a more democratic and cultural regime, but she had been assured that they could not be set aside in the succession, no matter what his physical condition. From that point of view, therefore, there was nothing to be gained by shielding the truth. On the other hand it was a deliberate falsehood to suggest that Vicky had called Mackenzie of her own accord; she had not even heard of him before the German doctors mentioned his name, but Bergmann and Gerhardt did not intend to lose face by admitting their responsibility for his appearance in the first place. Unfortunately Mackenzie’s own attitude did nothing to help her; he probably preferred to believe that he had been summoned to Germany by the Crown Princess, not by mere fellow-doctors; far from trying to dispel this impression, he told this to others, including his official biographer H.R. Haweis. As for giving Fritz false hopes, her answer was mere commonsense, as she had told Queen Victoria; ‘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.’21 Finally, the allegation that she had conspired with Mackenzie to the detriment of German medical knowledge was disproved by a letter the doctor published in Allgemeine Zeitung on 31 October, affirming that he had never been opposed to entering into consultation with his German colleagues; ‘should any unfavourable symptoms unfortunately develop, I should be the first to ask for the cooperation of one of your countrymen.’22