Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires

by Justin C. Vovk

  The queen grew to love her York great-grandchildren immensely. She even insisted that they take long holidays with her at Osborne House. May’s eldest son, David, had vivid memories of his great-grandmother. As an adult, he recalled that “such was the majesty that surrounded Queen Victoria, that she was regarded almost as a divinity of whom even her own family stood in awe. However, to us children she was ‘Gangan,’ a childish interpretation of ‘great-grandmama.’”390 The birth of Prince Harry was not the only great-grandchild the queen received at that time. Less than a year earlier, on June 26, 1899, Tsarina Alexandra gave birth to her third daughter, Marie, at the Peterhof Palace, Russia’s eight-hundred-foot-long answer to Versailles. The arrival of another girl was deeply upsetting in Russia. Alexandra’s sister-in-law Grand Duchess Xenia summed up the public sentiment: “What a disappointment that it isn’t a son. Poor Alix!” Queen Victoria likewise understood the dynastic misfortune of another daughter. “I regret the 3rd girl for the country,” she wrote to the tsar. “I know that an Heir would be more welcome than a daughter.”391

  In England, May York found that, despite her consistent pregnancies, Queen Victoria began relying upon her more than ever. The queen was now nearly blind, and although she had innumerable relations upon which to rely, there was something about May that attracted her. The duchess’s critics accused her of being too simple and unaffected, too attached to the common man, to be a proper queen and empress. But Victoria saw her as a mirror for herself and had the utmost faith in her. “Every time I see them I love and like them more and respect them greatly,” the queen wrote of the Yorks. “Thank God! Georgie has got such an excellent, useful, and good wife.”392 May was eager to please, admitting as much to her old governess: “Only give me a chance, & I will do things as well as anybody—after all, why shouldn’t I?”393 Queen Victoria’s opinion of “Dear May” was that she was “so dear & und passt so gut zu uns” (“and fits in so well”).394

  While the Duchess of York was being groomed by Queen Victoria, Empress Augusta Victoria was weathering a difficult period in her life, one that has been studied by historians and psychologists alike for decades. Stress, overwork, and constant childbearing were taking their toll on the thirty-nine-year-old empress. She was also becoming concerned about her marriage. Though there was no doubt of the love between the emperor and empress, Wilhelm had taken to regularly traveling abroad, usually without his wife. For a woman whose identity was so intimately connected with her husband, this was upsetting. All these factors led the empress to a minor breakdown in 1897. Her children’s military governor, Major General Adolf von Deines, reported, “H.M. broke down from exhaustion and suffered not only a slight influenza attack, but such a nervous shock, that simply taking it easy will no longer help her.”395

  Although Wilhelm and his staff had hoped otherwise, Dona’s behavior did not improve after she recovered from her bout of influenza. On the contrary, the atmosphere within the Prussian royal family became even more highly charged. It comes as little surprise that one of the major catalysts continued to be Wilhelm himself. His announcement that he would be making his first visit to Britain in 1899 after five years sent Dona—normally the model of submissive, wifely behavior—into such a nervous fit that she claimed she was too ill to go. In what was becoming a common occurrence, she pressured her husband to cancel the trip altogether. As with his mother, Wilhelm had a complicated relationship with his English relatives and their country. Perhaps more than any other nation or its people, the emperor desperately craved British affections. Dona had come to resent having to share her husband with a country for which she held little love. In the broader picture, Dona’s refusal to join her husband in visiting Britain was based upon the ongoing, politically charged Boer War. The empress publicly sided with the Dutch against the British, who were portrayed as violent aggressors. She told Bernhard von Bülow, the German chancellor, that British “mammonism” was strangling “the brave and godly Boers.”396 In the end, Wilhelm refused to accept Dona’s recalcitrance. He flat out ordered her to accompany him, which she did in November along with two of their sons. The state banquet given for the Hohenzollerns in Saint George’s Hall of Windsor Castle was “unusually brilliant” but “very formal.”397 Dona sat next to the Prince of Wales, the person in the British royal family she hated the most.

  The situation had not improved any later that year when Nicholas II and Alexandra paid a visit to Potsdam. It was one of the rare times that the tsar and tsarina ever set foot in Germany. Achieving the visit was no easy feat. It took Bernhard von Bülow months to convince the tsar to come to Potsdam. The visit was a failure at best. Wilhelm’s unpredictable personality took hold, which led him to overshadow the visit by signing a treaty with Britain over the disputed Samoan Islands in the Pacific. Nicholas, who had agreed to come out of familial loyalty to Wilhelm, was not impressed by this snub and responded with jokes that did not go over well at the Prussian court. Alexandra, whose health was poor the entire trip, was deeply offended when Dona personally insulted her by refusing to escort the tsarina to the Charlottenburg station when she and Nicholas returned to Saint Petersburg. This served as the last straw for Alexandra, who never wanted to lay eyes on Dona again.

  Two family deaths in 1900 only worsened Dona’s high-strung personality. The first loss was her mother, Ada, who died at Dresden in January, reportedly from pleurisy. “Now poor dear Aunt Ada has died,” the Empress Frederick wrote to her daughter Sophie, “and Dona seems in great grief, and to feel her poor Mother’s death even more than I expected. I am truly so sorry, she was an old friend of mine since our young days, she was 3 years older than I am. She was so kind-hearted and good-natured, and very pretty in her youth.”398 The second family death that affected the empress was that of her cousin Prince Christian Victor of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg, who died in October from enteric fever while he was serving with the British Sixtieth Rifle division in South Africa. “I could not believe it,” Queen Victoria wrote when she heard of her grandson’s death. “It seemed too dreadful and heart-breaking, this dear, excellent, gallant boy, beloved by all, such a good as well as a brave and capable officer, gone.”399

  For a woman so seriously concerned with matters of faith and eternity as Dona, the deaths of her unbalanced mother and soldier cousin may have plunged the empress deeper into emotional crisis. So what was the cause of Augusta Victoria’s apparently unbalanced mental state? Often considered the most demure, docile member of her family—both the Holsteins and the Hohenzollerns—her behavior in recent years seemed entirely out of character. When a closer look is given, one realizes that many factors were coming to bear on the empress’s life by this point. In October 1900, she turned forty-two. She began to suffer from a number of the ailments that befell her parents. In spite of these, she insisted on remaining physically active. In summer, she walked, played tennis, and went horseback riding. In winter, she and her sister Louise Sophie ice-skated. Out of love for her husband, she accompanied him as often as she could on as many of his long, hectic foreign trips to places she sometimes hated. She also delivered seven children in ten years, as well as suffering at least two miscarriages, possibly more.

  The personal activities, health problems, and frenetic lifestyle account for a certain amount of short-temperedness and irritability in Augusta Victoria; it has never been reported that she suffered from any mental disorder to the same degree as her mother. At most, she is consistently described as having a nervous disposition. This is a highly speculative but vague description. When all the factors are brought to bear, it is most likely that as the empress entered her forties, she was suffering from extended postpartum depression. It is probable that each successive pregnancy and delivery took its toll. These, followed by the miscarriages and Sissy’s birth in 1892, were the ultimate contributing factors. Casual observers assume postpartum depression simply means the new mother is melancholy. In a literal sense, this is something from which Dona never suffered, but her
other symptoms are more telling. In their 2008 book Our Bodies, Ourselves: Pregnancy and Childbirth, the Boston Women’s Health Collective describes a number of possible symptoms that can be present in postpartum depression, including low self-esteem, sleeping or eating irregularity, an inability to be comforted, exhaustion, withdrawal from social situations, little energy, and being easily frustrated or irritable400—all of which completely fit with Dona’s personality during this period of her life.

  Ultimately, trying to analyze the state of mind of an individual more than a century after the fact is fraught with difficulties. Writing in a similar vein in his semiacademic study of Wilhelm II, author Christopher Clark described the pitfalls this way: “as a means of accounting for behaviour, the psychoanalysis of dead persons is a fascinating but highly speculative exercise. The inherent difficulty of assessing the applicability of diagnostic categories … is compounded by the ambiguous and sometimes even contradictory character of the sources [author’s italics].”401 Rather than relying solely on subjective accounts, one must also look at physical evidence. Suffering from postpartum depression or not, Dona’s aforementioned symptoms led to a change in her physical appearance. Her blonde hair turned white. Her once flawless complexion became blotchy and wrinkled. “Poor dear,” said the courtesan Princess Daisy of Pless, “she looks more like the Emperor’s mother than his wife.”402 Even the New York Times ran a brief article on Dona’s condition: “From a high court official it is ascertained that Empress Augusta Victoria has greatly aged as of late, her hair being now entirely gray and thin, and her forehead furrowed.”403 Long sensitive about her appearance, she went on a drastic diet in a hurried effort to lose extra weight she thought she had gained.

  Her husband made a show of being concerned for his wife’s well-being, but those close to the family suspected his motives were more from the public embarrassment Dona was causing him—at a moment’s notice, she would fly into a wild rage, directing most of her hostility at her husband. “The Kaiserin’s nerves are in a condition which worries me very much,” Wilhelm wrote.404 She accused him of not loving her and instead—and not entirely off the mark—of escaping her as often as possible. When Wilhelm announced he was planning on taking a Mediterranean cruise on a British yacht, she was “in despair and begged me to do what I could to prevent the journey,” Wilhelm recalled.405 The insecurity Dona endured in her marriage made her suspicious of the individuals who shared Wilhelm’s attention, his entourage. She even accused him of having a liaison with his closest friend, Count Philip zu Eulenburg (later Prince zu Eulenburg). Although this is almost certainly untrue, Eulenburg was so close to the emperor that Dona’s jealous reaction is not surprising. An older aristocrat—he was fifty-three to Wilhelm’s forty-one—who patiently indulged Wilhelm, Eulenburg gave him something he had lacked his entire life: a loving father figure. Despite the kindliness of Frederick III, Wilhelm had been raised in the shadow of his academician grandfather—Prince Albert—whom both his mother and grandmother treated with reverence approaching apotheosis. As a child, Wilhelm received the same vigorous, constricting education that had worked marvelously on Vicky but backfired on both himself and his uncle the Prince of Wales, who had been forced to attend both Oxford and Cambridge, as well as the Curragh military camp in Ireland. The outcome was that Dona’s husband was a man who desperately craved the approval of his contemporaries, especially older men.

  A tense atmosphere entered Dona’s marriage that had not been there before. For the first time, she reproved her husband in public for his decisions. During a trip to the imperial hunting district at Rominten in the autumn of 1900, there were “appalling scenes” between the emperor and empress over the educations of their sons Auwi and Oscar. “The poor dear Kaiserin really seems to be in a bad nervous condition,” Eulenburg reported to Chancellor von Bülow. Eulenburg watched in shock as Dona ran after her husband “like a madwoman” who was screaming and raving so much that the emperor did not know what to do.406 Later, Eulenburg noticed “all night long, the Empress made scenes with her weeping and screaming.” In another conversation, he told Bülow “with feverish agitation that the Empress was in such a nervous state that it would be very advisable if she were separated from the Kaiser soon.”407 Major General von Deines reported similar scenes when he spoke with Dona about her sons’ educations. “I have to deal with a nervously ill woman and an unreasonably anxious mother, who, despite many excellent qualities, hurts as least as much as she helps—strictly from anxiety.”408 Philip Eulenburg resented Dona’s relationship with Wilhelm, feeling it encroached on his personal status as the close friend of the emperor. Some three years after the incident at Rominten, he said that the empress’s “love for His Majesty is like the passion of a cook for her sweetheart who shows signs of cooling off. The method of forcing herself upon him is certainly not the way to keep the beloved’s affection.”409

  According to one court observer, Wilhelm “was alarmed that his wife might be suffering from a hereditary disorder which would make it necessary for her to be confined in a sanatorium, a development that would render the dynasty less an object of sympathy than one of enduring shame.” Later, when “he confided his woes to Eulenburg, he advised him to sleep in a separate bedroom and lock the door.”410 By the time winter came, Dona’s battle with postpartum depression seemed to have reached its end. What exactly happened to bring this about remains unclear, but by December, she appeared calmer and less easily agitated. Surviving historical evidence suggests the empress never again suffered from a clinical form of depression as it is recognized today; but for the rest of her life, her behavior would exhibit signs of an anxiety disorder of varying intensity.

  As this personal crisis began to wind down for Wilhelm and Augusta Victoria, another royal scandal involving the Austrian imperial dynasty, the Habsburgs, came to the fore. This latest upheaval was caused when Emperor Franz Joseph’s nephew and heir, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, fell in love with a commoner. The object of his desire was the thirty-two-year-old Countess Sophie Chotek, a lady-in-waiting to the formidable Archduchess Isabella, whose husband, Archduke Frederick, was a senior member of the Austrian imperial family and one of the highest-ranking officers in the Austro-Hungarian military. Sophie, though descended from an aristocratic Bohemian family, was deemed wholly unacceptable to be an empress one day because she did not come from a royal house. In 1899, Franz Ferdinand told the emperor of his determination to make Sophie his wife, regardless of the imperial laws. Franz Joseph refused to consent to the controversial wedding because “by no stretch of the Habsburg family laws or standards could the Choteks be accepted as eligible for marriage into the Imperial house.”411

  After a few months, an impatient Franz Ferdinand took matters into his own hands and publicly declared he would marry no one but Sophie. The Austro-Hungarian monarchy nearly cannibalized itself as the imperial court divided into two factions—the traditionalists who were loyal to the emperor and wanted to stop the marriage at all costs, and the progressive liberals who were in favor of the match. With the prospect of permanently damaging the monarchy, and facing pressure from the German emperor, the tsar of Russia, and Pope Leo XIII, the emperor agreed to allow the wedding—but on one condition: it would be morganatic. Sophie could never share her husband’s titles or rank, she could never be empress when he ascended the throne, and any children they might have would be subject to the same restrictions.

  The emperor summoned his Crown Council, Privy Council, the Prince-Bishop of Vienna, the Prince-Primate of Hungary, and all the senior members of the imperial family to a special, elaborate ceremony at the Hofburg Palace in Vienna on June 28, 1900. With his hand on the Gospels, Franz Ferdinand swore the “oath of renunciation” on behalf of his wife and future children.412 Three days later, on July 1, Franz Ferdinand married Sophie in a private ceremony at Reichstadt in Bohemia. Neither Franz Joseph nor any other male members of the imperial family were present, including the groom’s brothers. The only members of the dyn
asty in attendance were Franz Ferdinand’s stepmother, Archduchess Maria Theresa, and her two daughters.

  Now that there was no possibility of Franz Ferdinand’s children ever inheriting the throne, attention shifted once again to a new heir: Franz Ferdinand’s younger brother, the dissolute playboy Archduke Otto. The notion that this archduke might one day rule as emperor was relished by no one. A member of the Prussian court remarked that Otto was a man “whom the nations of the dual monarchy, fearful of his possible succession to the throne, include in their daily prayers under the head of ‘Deliver us from all evil.’”413 For all the possible evils Otto could unleash upon Austria-Hungary, he offered the monarchy future security with his two healthy sons, Charles and Max, both of whom were eligible heirs to the throne, untainted by scandal. The boys were raised almost entirely by their pious mother, Archduchess Maria Josepha, the youngest daughter of King George of Saxony. Under his mother’s influence, Charles became respectable and unassuming. He was a boy of only thirteen when his uncle Franz Ferdinand married Sophie. At the time, there was little indication that this adolescent archduke would have a direct hand any time soon in charting the future of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

  By the winter of 1900/01, once the dynastic crisis of Franz Ferdinand’s controversial marriage had passed, things seemed to be settling down for Augusta Victoria and the Prussian royal family. They had finally taken up residence at the massive Neues Palais in Potsdam after the Empress Frederick relocated to a new home she had built—Friedrichshof, named for her late husband—near Kronberg, west of Berlin. The Hohenzollerns also began spending more time at the Stadtschloss in Berlin. Located at the end of Unter den Linden, the palace was designed by Andreas Schlüter in the late 1690s before Prussia was even a kingdom (that honor would not come until 1701). With its 650 rooms, the building was massive; the kitchens were nearly a mile away from the dining rooms. At the turn of the twentieth century, it underwent a badly needed, multimillion-dollar renovation. For decades, Prussian castles had been notoriously medieval. Upon moving to Prussia after her marriage in 1857, Dona’s mother-in-law, Vicky, was horrified by the lack of bathrooms, heating systems, or even sufficient lighting.