Dearest Vicky, Darling Fritz

by John Van der Kiste

  Even at this final stage, he could still make a physical effort when duty demanded. On 12 June his old friend King Oskar of Sweden arrived unexpectedly at Potsdam. Vicky begged him not to tire himself, but he wanted to receive his fellow sovereign properly. Putting on his uniform, which literally hung on him, carrying his helmet in one hand and leaning on his stick, he walked slowly into the sitting-room and listened for a few minutes to his guest’s conversation about his recent Spanish travels. However the King did not stay long; he was appalled at his host’s wasted appearance, haunted expression and greying, thinning hair. It was the last time Fritz was ever on his feet, and from then on he was confined to bed.

  By now Vicky was all but overwhelmed by the change in her husband, hardly sleeping and rarely leaving his room except to hide the tears she could not hold back. On the next morning some food went down the wrong way in Fritz’s throat and eventually through the canula. Mackenzie obtained a tube through which to feed him milk, but it was too late to do anything about the food which had gone into the lung, causing an inflammation and sending his temperature soaring. ‘I feel so like a wreck, a sinking ship,’ she wrote to Queen Victoria, ‘so wounded and struck down, so sore of heart, as if I were bleeding from a thousand wounds.’46

  One important action was not beyond him. In the afternoon he removed a key from the chain he always wore around his neck and pushed it down the front of Vicky’s dress. He made his meaning clear by pointing to a small black cashbox which contained family papers. She promised to look after it, and he smiled; now all his private papers were safe. The rest had gone to London with them before the Jubilee, except for a few in a parcel which was handed by Mackenzie the next day to an American correspondent who was invited to Potsdam to collect and deliver it to the British Embassy in Berlin. There it was passed by the Ambassador to the British Attaché, who was to ensure that it reached Windsor. It arrived there within a week, by which time these elaborate precautions were proved to have been justified.

  That same day, Fritz received Bismarck for the final time. The Chancellor said he had come to discuss the matter of Puttkamer’s successor, and Vicky asked him to write everything down on paper so the Emperor could read it first. After he had talked to the Emperor and was about to leave, Vicky returned to the latter’s room and he beckoned them both to his bedside. Taking his wife’s hand and placing it in that of their inveterate foe, he gave them an appealing look which no words could express. ‘Your Majesty may rest assured,’ said Bismarck, looking into his eyes, ‘that I shall never forget that Her Majesty is my Queen’. But Vicky had seen too much of the man to believe she could trust him; words were only words and not promises. As she led him stiffly out of the room she saw no sorrow or sympathy in his face, instead a look of illconcealed triumph. ‘Fritz after all was finished, so why waste time in sentimental lamentations!’47

  At 3 a.m. next day she was woken from a troubled sleep by a gentle sound in her room. Mackenzie had come to say that the Emperor’s pulse had become weaker and faster, his breathing was rapid and though suffering no apparent pain or discomfort, he was in a feverish state. Going downstairs quietly so as not to wake anyone, she stood outside his door; to go in at such an unusual hour would alarm him. He was tossing about restlessly from side to side, coughing every quarter of an hour, and the air went loudly through the canula. By dawn he had improved a little, but she hardly left his bedside all day.

  At 9 a.m. the three younger girls came to say good morning. It was Sophie’s eighteenth birthday, and with a supreme effort her father placed into her hands the bouquet he had ordered as her present. He looked so cheerful for a moment that she thought he must be getting better. Later that day telegrams were sent to the honeymooning Henry and Irene in Silesia, and to Charlotte and Bernhard, to warn them that the worst was expected before long. Willy and Dona came too, followed by a vast suite; they bullied Fritz’s servants and chose their rooms as if they owned the place already, but Vicky was too distraught to pay them much attention. From the Berlin Embassy Malet telegraphed to Queen Victoria at Balmoral that the worst was expected within the next twenty-four hours, but reassured her that ‘His Majesty’s head is quite clear and he is suffering no pain.’48

  During the night Vicky fetched a chaise-longue and placed it by his open door in the passage. There she lay during the hours of darkness, getting up from time to time to see how he was as he tossed about, coughing and struggling for breath.

  On the morning of 15 June the family gathered with a sense of grim foreboding in the sickroom with the servants, some of whom never left their master’s side. The appearance of Werner, who had been asked to sketch Kaiser Wilhelm’s features immediately after death, was to the newspaper correspondents ‘a sign more eloquent than bulletins’.49 The German doctors showed little emotion as they waited for their master’s imminent demise. Only Mackenzie, weary from working long hours and wheezing with his recurrent asthma, looked unhappy. Ironically Hovell had been called back to England a week earlier to his own father’s deathbed. Fritz was not blind to the suffering of this most faithful of servants. As Mackenzie stooped over him to change the canula Fritz laid his hand gently on the doctor’s chest, and though too weak to utter the words he longed to say, looked up into his face with a mute glance of tender sympathy, as if to apologise for causing him physical suffering as well.

  Vicky would have given anything to spend these last moments alone with her beloved husband, but it was a privilege not granted to a reigning Emperor and Empress. He dozed for short periods, and when he regained consciousness it was usually to write with faltering hand a question on his pad, or with difficulty to mouth a few words; there was still so much he wanted to know. How was his pulse? Were the doctors satisfied with his condition? Vicky asked if he was thirsty, and when he nodded she gave him some white wine on a sponge. Then she asked if he was tired, and he nodded again. Towards mid-morning his strength was plainly ebbing. At about 11 a.m. his eyes glazed over, and she held a light to them but he did not blink. She took his hand, but he let it drop limply. He coughed hard, took three deep breaths, gave a jerk and closed his eyes tightly as if something was hurting him, then lay still. Mackenzie turned to her to say that his last struggle was over.50

  Almost numb with shock, Vicky took down from the wall a withered laurel wreath she had given him in 1871 and laid it on his chest, then his cavalry sabre which she placed on his arm, kissed his hands and folded them.

  ‘The wrench is too terrible – when two lives that are one are thus torn asunder, and I have to remain and remember how he went from me!’ she wrote to Queen Victoria that evening. ‘Oh, the look of his dear eyes, the mournful expression when he closed them for ever, the coldness and the silence that follow when the soul has fled. . . . Now all struggles are over! I must stumble on my way alone! I shall disappear as much from the world as possible and certainly not push myself forward anywhere!’51

  *Friedrich III of Hohenstaufen had reigned as Emperor of Germany, 1440– 93;Friedrich II (the Great) was King of Prussia, 1740–86.

  *Holstein, from whose account this report is taken, did not witness any such scene himself but based it on gossip from Radolinski and others when writing his memoirs twenty years later, by which time his memory was failing, he was seriously ill and within a few months of dying. This often-repeated tale is probably false.

  *It is probable that the Battenberg marriage was discussed between them. Queen Victoria’s journals were transcribed for posterity after her death by Princess Beatrice, and the originals destroyed. Beatrice was Alexander’s sister-in-law, and she was a particularly private person who felt strongly that such personal matters should not be handed down from generation to generation. Any discussion between Queen Victoria and Bismarck of the matter would certainly never have survived what Sir Henry Ponsonby’s son and biographer Arthur called ‘the blue pencil or even the scissors’.

  TEN

  ‘My life is left a blank’

  When Vicky left Fritz’s de
athbed to go into the garden for some roses to put on his bed, she saw men suddenly appearing with rifles at the ready from behind every tree and statue. An officer took her by the arm to lead her back into the house, and she was too astonished to resist. He told her he was acting on the orders of His Majesty Kaiser Wilhelm, who had to prevent important papers from leaving the house.

  During the previous twenty-four hours, while his father lay dying, Crown Prince Wilhelm had filled the grounds and corridors of Friedrichskron with officers preparing for a virtual state of siege. The palace was to be sealed off from the outside world by armed guards, establishing divisions at every gate of the park. Orders were issued that not even doctors or members of the imperial family could leave without a signed permit. All outgoing letters, telegrams and parcels were to be checked and censored. The new sovereign had to be dissuaded from issuing an order for the immediate arrest of Dr Mackenzie. He had anticipated the removal of some of his parents’ private correspondence, knowing that it was bound to show him in an unfavourable light, but though his soldiers ransacked every desk they could, they found nothing. Fearing something of the kind, Vicky and Fritz had ensured that everything was or would soon be safely at Windsor. General Winterfeld, formerly their devoted servant and now equally loyal to the new regime, searched his late master’s desk thoroughly for written evidence of ‘liberal plots’ while Wilhelm likewise went through his mother’s room, feverishly checking every drawer in her desk. Frustrated by his failure to find anything, he turned his attention to settling other scores. Contrary to normal practice, neither members of the clergy nor his father’s family were summoned for prayers or any form of service inside the death chamber.

  ‘Why does such pain not kill immediately?’ a distraught Vicky wrote in Fritz’s diary that evening.1

  In defiance of his father’s instructions and his grief-stricken mother’s pleas, Emperor Wilhelm permitted an autopsy to be conducted on his father’s body. He was determined to uphold the name of German medicine by proving that the diagnosis of the German doctors had always been right, and that Mackenzie was at fault. According to a hasty post-mortem, conducted with a verdict pronounced on the evidence of the naked eye, the whole of the larynx apart from the epiglottis had been destroyed and it consisted of one large, flat, gangrenous ulcer, with patches of septic bronchopneumonia present in the lungs.2

  General Waldersee remained graceless to the last. On the day after Kaiser Friedrich’s death he wrote in his diary of the late sovereign’s ‘weakness’ towards his wife, ‘his complete submersion in her being, his absolute subjugation to her will’, concluding that during his reign the Empress ‘ruled over us and was quite capable of destroying Germany & Prussia.’3 He overlooked the fact that almost everything the Emperor had tried to do, even the awarding of decorations, had been thwarted by the official world.

  Whereas the funeral of Kaiser Wilhelm I had been held a week after his death in order to give everybody adequate time for preparation, the obsequies for his successor and son were hurried through three days later, on 18 June, at the Friedenskirche. Kaiser Wilhelm II sent out no invitations to other European sovereigns or princes, though as the sad event had been anticipated for several weeks, some had been chosen by their heads of state to attend and were ready to travel to Berlin at once. Among them were Bertie and Alix and their elder son Eddy, Vicky’s brother-in-law Lord Lorne, her uncle, the Duke of Saxe-Coburg, and Grand Duke Vladimir of Russia, brother of Tsar Alexander III. To discourage spectators, Kaiser Wilhelm had the route of his father’s funeral procession cordoned off by soldiers. Before the obsequies began, clergymen waiting for the coffin to arrive stood around talking and laughing with Herbert Bismarck. His father had returned to his estates at Varzin, too busy to pay any last respects to his late master. Vicky and her daughters wisely absented themselves from this insulting display, and held a private service of their own at Bornstädt.

  Soon after the funeral the Kaiser curtly informed his mother that she would have to leave Friedrichskron, the palace she and Fritz had looked upon as home throughout their marriage. She asked if she could move to Sans Souci, a small villa in the park at Potsdam where Charlotte and Bernhard had lived, but this was refused. The Kaiser and his camarilla wanted her to go far away, she felt bitterly, in case she might try and gain some influence over him, or continually remind the public of what they had lost in his father. She was convinced that Fritz was missed less in Germany than in England. ‘My beloved husband was cheered and gratified beyond measure by the affectionate sympathy shown him from England during his illness’, she wrote to Lord Napier two months after his death. ‘Now he is taken from us, and my life is left a blank, but I feel gratefully that he is mourned and appreciated in my own dear Home he loved so well!’4

  Their son, she realized, was anxious to stamp his own personality on the era and ensure that his father was forgotten as soon as possible. When Queen Victoria wrote to remind her grandson that his mother was ‘the first after you’ as well as the first Princess after his Aunt Alix in Britain, he replied defensively that he was doing his utmost to fulfil his mother’s desire for a country home, but he needed Sans Souci to offer his visitors hospitality. The other palaces in Potsdam belonged to Empress Augusta, and only reluctantly did he concede that his mother could stay at Friedrichskron as a temporary measure.

  His attitude regarding the provision of a roof over her head was remarkably mean. If his treatment was calculated to make her so uncomfortable that she might even consider leaving Germany, he was going the right way about it, and in her darkest moments she suspected he would like to drive her away. His father had ensured that Empress Augusta would never need for anything; she had palaces in Berlin, Potsdam, and Koblenz, with their upkeep paid for by the crown, and an annual revenue of four million marks. Vicky was given her own palace in Berlin, and the Villa Liegnitz, the latter only temporarily, until he told her it must be vacated as his gentlemen-in-waiting would need it as a place to stay when they were in attendance on him. She was expected to maintain them herself out of an inheritance less than one-sixth of that provided for her mother-in-law, and had to fall back on her English dowry, which had helped to cover household expenses during her marriage, as Fritz was never well provided for until his accession. Though the income from the crown estates had been paid to him as Kaiser, his three months’ reign had given him no chance to build up any substantial capital to bequeath her. After his accession in March he had signed an order specifying that the living allowance for his mother and Vicky after his death should be increased, but when this mandate was published after his death, the normal proviso stating that the salaries of Vicky’s entourage should be paid by the crown was missing.

  Baron Reischach, head of her household, asked the head of the Privy Council to suggest to Kaiser Wilhelm that he should provide a living allowance for his mother proportionate to that granted to his grandmother. This was declined with the excuse that His Majesty was incurring considerable expenditure on his visits to European courts and on his forty-eight castles, and he could not be expected to increase his mother’s allowance as well. He also required a large amount to refurbish Friedrichskron, his father’s old home, which on his orders reverted to its old name of Neue Palais. Any reminders of the brief reign of Kaiser Friedrich III had to be ruthlessly swept aside.

  On 24 September she wrote to Queen Victoria that she was ‘sadder than ever, worn, worried & badgered. The sum that Fritz wanted me to have, to buy myself a place – and which they had as good as promised me in June – I am not going to have. The Hausministerium say the crown cannot afford it. Wilhelm did not even say he regretted it, & seemed to think it quite natural! I am glad in one way, as the less I am under obligations to the present system the better pleased I am, independence is a grand thing. How I shall get the place now, I do not yet know, but I think the Hausministerium will lend money at a low rate of interest &c.’5

  A few days later she was almost at her wits’ end. On the anniversary of her eng
agement, 29 September, she was particularly depressed, feeling she had nothing to hope for, except a chance that one day the truth about her and her husband and all they tried to do for Germany would come out. ‘This is our dear “Verlobungstag” – 32 [sic] years ago! Oh how it wrings my heart! How I pine & long for him, & for his kind words & looks, & for a kiss! It is all gone – & over. Day by day I feel more lonely & unprotected. No one to lean on, and the difficulties I have to face alone are really too terrible. Yesterday I felt very near putting an end to myself!’6

  Not before time, she had one stroke of good luck in her first few months as a widow. During the Franco-Prussian war she had spent some time at Homburg, the former home of her great-aunt Elizabeth, Landgravine of Hesse-Homburg, near the Taunus mountains in an area famed for its considerable natural beauty. A villa that had belonged to a wealthy wholesale tea-merchant came up for sale, and she was also left a substantial legacy by her friend the Duchess of Galliera. With this she bought the villa and 250 acres of land surrounding it, had it demolished and commissioned the building of a new Schloss on the site, under the supervision of the architect Ernst Eberhard von Ihne. All this happened just in time, for a few days after the purchase was completed Wilhelm ordered her out of the Villa Liegnitz.

  While her new home was being built, she had to live in the old palace at Potsdam during the winter (though she had to ask special permission each time), her dower house in the Schloss at Bad Homburg during summer, or her little farmhouse at Bornstädt. Permission was denied her for any modernization of the house at Homburg, surrounded by rubbish and weeds growing up to the front door, with no heating, drainage or indoor plumbing. She asked for these to be installed, only to be told that His Majesty could not afford to do so as he still needed to refurbish his palaces. Within five months of his accession he had demanded and received an increase to his annual income of six million marks, part of which was required to convert a warship into an imperial yacht, Hohenzollern. If his mother was not satisfied with her house, she was informed, she could remain in the palace at Berlin.