The situation in Russia remained dire. Any previous loyalty Gregor Gapon may have had toward the monarchy was now washed away in blood. “We have no tsar anymore,” he declared ominously. “Rivers of blood separate the Emperor from his people.”501 The day after the Bloody Sunday massacre, the Russian Social Democratic Party issued a bold statement against the monarchy: “Yesterday you saw the savagery of the monarchy. You saw the blood running in the streets … Who directed the soldiers’ rifles and shot against the breasts of the workers? It was the Tsar! the Grand Dukes, the ministers, the generals, the scum of the Court! … may they meet death. To arms, comrades! Seize the arsenals, depots and magazines of arms … destroy the police and gendarme stations and all the Governmental buildings. Down with the monarchic government!” Bloody Sunday proved to be “the first in a series of events to shake the tsarist empire.” The Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky declared, “The Revolution has come.”502
A few weeks later, revolutionaries succeeded in assassinating one of Nicholas II’s hated uncles. Grand Duke Serge, Saint Petersburg’s notoriously brutal governor, was murdered when his carriage was destroyed by a bomb thrown by Ivan Kalyaev, a member of the Social Revolutionary Party. In her grief, Serge’s wife, Ella, demonstrated true Christian integrity by going to visit Kalyaev in prison and even forgiving him. She went to the tsar begging him to pardon Kalyaev. “I admire this act,” recounted one of the grand dukes, “but I cannot grasp this incredible piety.” Ella’s plea to Nicholas II was to no effect. Kalyaev was executed shortly thereafter. Ella’s niece Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna recalled that she “gave proof of an almost incomprehensible heroism; no one could understand whence came the strength so to bear her misfortune.”503
Kalyaev’s execution did not deter the rapidly increasing revolutionary fever in Russia. A few weeks later, the secret police uncovered a plot in which assassins planned to masquerade as members of the imperial court choir. They intended to hide grenades under their robes during the upcoming Easter service and then later throw them into the midst of Nicholas, Alexandra, and their family. Even more jarring was the fact that the plot was discovered only a few short hours before the would-be assassins planned to carry out their mission.
Added to this ferment were the setbacks Russia was enduring in its war with Japan. The Russian economy had been weak for years and began to erode. The war already cost the empire nearly two billion dollars, and even that was not enough to provide meals for the soldiers or ammunition for their guns. The country’s overwhelming size compared to their tiny island adversary made Russia notoriously difficult to resupply, while the military leaders struggled to keep up with their Japanese counterparts. This fact came to the fore at the Battle of Mukden. Lasting from February into March 1905, 330,000 Russian soldiers fought, and almost 90,000 were killed: “Mukden was, in terms of the numbers involved, the biggest battle until then recorded.… Over six hundred thousand men, more than were ever engaged in any nineteenth-century battle, fought desperately for over two weeks instead of for a day.”504 The Russians were forced to retreat forty miles north and lost ninety thousand additional soldiers in the process.
Nicholas was anxious about the war’s outcome but was resolute in his determination to win it. “You may be sure that Russia shall fight this war to the end, until the last Jap is driven out of Manchuria,” he wrote to Wilhelm II.505 The war was indeed about to end, but in a disastrous defeat for Russia. Desperate to secure a massive victory after the fall of Port Arthur, the tsar’s Baltic Fleet took a nine-month, eighteen-thousand mile journey through the Arctic to Japan to wipe out their naval forces. But when they arrived at what became known as the Battle of Tsushima in May 1905, the Baltic Fleet was utterly annihilated in such a spectacular way that it sent shockwaves around the world. The “decisive battle” lasted “an incredibly brief forty-five minutes … The barrage of Japanese firepower resulted in the mind-boggling loss for Russia of six destroyers, twelve cruisers, eight battleships, and thousands of men.”506 According to one historian, the “battle of Tsushima was the greatest and most decisive naval action since Trafalgar a century before. Its effects, as far as the loser was concerned, were even more drastic. Not only did it end the war almost at once … it also marked the beginning of the slow end inside imperial Russia itself.”507
The news of the Russian defeat at Tsushima came as a crushing blow to Nicholas II, who was at a picnic with his family that afternoon. His sister Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna was with him and Alexandra when they received word of Japan’s devastating victory. She recalled that when Nicky was told, he “turned ashen pale … and clutched at a chair for support.” Alexandra, meanwhile, “broke down and sobbed.”508 With no alternative, Russia sued for peace with Japan, culminating in the Treaty of Portsmouth of 1905, which was negotiated by President Theodore Roosevelt. The Russo-Japanese War brought nothing but humiliation to Nicholas II and his reign, striking a blow from which the imperial dynasty would never recover.
The death of the Empress Frederick meant that Dona was no longer living in her predecessor’s shadow. She now felt that she could spread her wings and expand her influence into different areas without fear of criticism or comparison to Vicky. Her Christian faith provided an easy outlet. She became actively involved in building and restoring dozens of churches in and around Berlin. She also attended numerous rallies put on by the Reichstag’s right-wing Christian Democratic Party. Her flurry of activity was motivated by a strong desire to “not to be a nonentity, as people had prophesied would be the case.” She took up managing the Red Cross, as well as other charitable organizations that had been patronized by the first German empress, Wilhelm’s grandmother Augusta. She also became passionate about the education of women. She was credited for doing “more than anyone else in Germany to make public careers open to women as well as men, encouraging them to work for their own living.”509
By the time she was forty-seven years old, Dona’s famed regal bearing remained undimmed; she still looked “every inch a queen.” One of her contemporaries observed, “Her face has become quite lovely, with its wealth of snow-white hair, which she wears piled up high on the top of her brow, and which she likes to ornate with a diamond tiara or crown.”510 Her head and neck were often adorned with some of imperial Germany’s finest jewels; one of her ladies-in-waiting once remarked that her “only claim to beauty” was that she had “a neck and shoulders modelled [sic] by an artist’s hand to support the burden of crown jewels.”511 This was one way in which Dona created something of a unique style in Prussia, even though she was not generally a trendsetter. Her predecessors, the empresses Augusta and Vicky, were modest women when it came to fashion and rarely made use of the stunning crown jewels. Wilhelm was lavish in the gifts he showered upon his wife, who loved wearing the finest diamonds and gemstones. In particular, her pearls were “worth millions, for they are so large, so perfect in color and shape, so lavish in their profusion that few Regalias [sic] contain such treasures.”512
When it came to her family, Dona remained the center of their world. For her husband, she became his rock. Her moments of frantic anxiety had grown few and far between, replaced by a quiet submissiveness and determination to add strength, prestige, and stability to the imperial and royal House of Hohenzollern. For Emperor Wilhelm II, a man who was driven by sentiment and emotion, Dona’s influence started having a calming effect on him. One contemporary observed that the empress “acquired a considerable influence over her husband precisely by the way in which she effaced herself and subordinated all her thoughts and actions to his.” Dona made it a point to never offer advice to her husband but rather waited for him to come to her, which began to happen frequently. Count Axel Schwering, a member of the Prussian court, concluded that Wilhelm “learned, in consequence, to look up to” his wife “in many of the difficulties in which he found himself not infrequently entangled.”513
Dona’s support of her husband was not limited only to emotional issues. At some point in t
heir marriage, she had realized how fragile his ego truly was. In her efforts to be Wilhelm’s helpmate, she “did everything she could to ingratiate herself into her husband’s life, memorizing the uniforms of his various regiments, forcing herself to read books on military subjects that she knew interested him, and accompanying him on his daily horseback rides, his early morning calls on his officials, and (when he would permit it) his trips.”514
Like her husband, the empress was a creature of habit that rigidly followed a daily routine. She awoke every morning at 6:00 a.m. and joined Wilhelm for breakfast in their private dining room. This was their own personal space, into which even servants were not admitted. One member of their court described this as “the one hour which the All-Highest [Wilhelm] … devoted to domesticity, when husband and wife could gossip and discuss matters alone and in secret.”515 After breakfast, the empress reviewed the daily kitchen menus and consulted with each member of the household on the day’s plans. She then checked in with her children before the start of their lessons. Much of the day was then spent working at her desk. In her memoirs, Dona’s daughter, Sissy, recalled how busy her mother was: “My earliest childhood recollection of my mother evokes the picture of her never-ending writing. I can still hear the continuous scratch of her pen on her diary as I went into her sitting-room.”516
Dona’s children deeply loved and respected her. When it came to the children, she made it clear to her husband that she was in charge. She once told Poultney Bigelow, a childhood friend of Wilhelm’s, that though her husband was “German Emperor I am Empress of the nursery.”517 This was supported by a contemporary who observed that Dona, “even in the intimacy of her home life never forgets or allows others, even William II., to forget that she is an Empress.”518
No matter how busy or tired Dona was, she always made it a priority to check in on her children in their nursery before she went to bed. One evening, the princes were eager to receive a goodnight kiss from their mother, who was attending a function with Wilhelm and would not be home until late. The princes assured their mother they would remain awake for her, which they did until after midnight. When Dona asked the boys how they were able to stay up so late, Little Willy explained that he and his brothers tied a string to each other, and when one started falling asleep, the others would tug on the string to wake him up. It is not difficult to imagine that Dona’s children worshipped their mother. In their memoirs, letters, and reminiscences, they seem to have nothing but praise for her. Of all her children, Willy and Sissy left the most vivid recollections. In his memoirs published in 1922, the crown prince wrote of his relationship with the empress.
As far back as I can remember, the centre of our existence has been our dearly beloved mother. She has radiated a love which has warmed and comforted us. Whatever joy or sorrow moved us, she has always had for it understanding and sympathy. All that was best in our childhood, nay, all the best that home and family can give, we owe to her. What she was to us in our early youth, that she has remained throughout our adolesence and our manhood. The kindest and best woman is she for whom living means helping, succoring and spending herself in the interests of others; and such a woman is our mother.519
For Dona’s sons, she was their confidante, advisor, and intercessor. One of the main reasons for this was her accessibility. Any of the children could approach Dona at any time, but to speak to Wilhelm, they needed to apply for permission first from either their tutor or their military governor. A true soldier, Wilhelm was a strict disciplinarian who rarely indulged his sons, especially the oldest three. This strictness was somewhat surprising, given his own rowdiness as a child. At the wedding of George’s parents—the future King Edward VII and Alexandra of Denmark—young Willy, then aged four, caused a long string of embarrassments for his family. On the way to Saint George’s Chapel, he hurled his aunt’s muff out the carriage window. During the ceremony, he tried to toss the cairngorm from the head of his dirk across the choir. He bit his uncles Leopold and Arthur when they tried to restrain him. He also caused a shock by publicly addressing Queen Victoria as “Duck.”
The emperor’s unflinching, demanding attitude toward his sons eventually led to strained relationships between the boys and their father. When any of them had committed some transgression, it was always the empress who went to her husband to smooth things out. When it came to these intercessions, Dona never made more than on behalf of her eldest son. The emperor and the crown prince never saw eye to eye, and it almost always fell to Dona to mediate. The concern of a loving mother, though, could not cover over Willy’s multitude of sins. Like Eddy of Clarence, Willy was famous for his libertine lifestyle, which was almost certainly a rebellion against his father’s dictatorial style of parenting. Just to annoy his father, Willy very publicly aligned himself with the Reichstag’s extreme political Far Right “who criticized the Kaiser for being insufficiently nationalist and aggressive, and upset his father even more by deliberately modelling himself on Edward [VII] and his English playboy style.” He made Wilhelm and Dona especially angry the last time he visited England, where he and King Edward were “unseemly romping in unlighted corridors” and a lady had “removed her slipper,”520 behavior that Dona decried as inappropriate. “My wife,” Wilhelm told his chancellor in 1908, “has a fanatical hate for the British majesties.”521 “The old fat king,” was how Dona once described Edward VII.522
Part of the princes’ deep love for Dona was rooted in her strong moral character, which time and experience began to make more balanced and less fanatical. When her children were young, the princes received Bible lessons. One day, when the teacher said, “There is no one without sin,” little Eitel-Fritz popped up and declared, “That is not true, for my mamma has never sinned.”523 Dona took delight in her close relationship with her children. All of the empress’s children grew to love outdoor activities like their mother. Dona was especially fond of tennis, which she played with her family. Wilhelm ensured that tennis courts were installed at each of the family’s residences. Her favorite outdoor activity, though, was riding. She made it a point to ride every day if possible. “She was a superb horsewoman,” Sissy recalled, “and it was from her that I inherited the passion for riding. But she had to put up with a lot of anxiety, particularly when I galloped away and jumped over obstacles she considered dangerous and which I did not.”524 The empress’s exemplary equestrian skills did not mean that accidents never happened. While riding in Sanssouci Park in Potsdam one afternoon in June 1908, Dona’s horse tripped and fell on its knee, throwing the empress. “Staff Surgeon Dr. Wiemuth and Prof. Wolff instituted an examination as soon as her Majesty arrived” back at the palace, reported the New York Times. “They found that she suffered no injury, except a severe bruise on the back of her right hand, which was bleeding.” Even though Dona was lucky that time, the same article reported that this was not an isolated incident.
This is the fourth time the Empress has had a fall within the last seven years. On one occasion she fell down an incline while in the upper Bavarian lake region. In 1903 she injured her arm in falling from her horse while riding in the Tiergarten, in Berlin … In the summer of 1907 her Majesty sustained another fall from vertigo while playing lawn tennis at Wilhelmshohe. It is understood that her Majesty is obliged to take unusual care of herself because of the fact that she is subject to sudden spells of faintness.525
Dona’s health, which had grown increasingly delicate, prevented her from taking a more hands-on approach with her younger children. Among her most crippling ailments were excruciating migraines that left her incapacitated for days. In this way, her life was strikingly similar to Alexandra of Russia’s. Both women were loving wives and mothers, but both were limited in their scopes of activity because of their health problems. Unlike Alexandra, who took morphine, arsenic, and Veronal for her pain, Dona allowed her physician to administer only chloroform in large doses. She suffered so much that sometimes she was given chloroform eleven times in a single day. As much as s
he railed against her infirmities, the ordinarily tireless empress was forced to reduce her busy schedule from time to time. In those instances when she could not be present at official functions, she was frequently represented by her sister Princess Louise Sophie, who was available whenever her husband, Prince Frederick Leopold, was away on active duty with his regiment in the Prussian army. To help ease her symptoms, Dona also visited the mineral spa at Bad Nauheim in Hesse every year. Although her health would continue to decline in the coming years, she counted herself fortunate that she did not suffer as severely as the empress of Russia. Nor did she let her illnesses interfere with her life the same way Alexandra did; Dona rarely succumbed when her husband or her family were around.
As the heir to both the Prussian and German thrones, Crown Prince Willy naturally received more attention than his brothers from their parents. Following in the Hohenzollern tradition, Willy received a strict education at the military academy at Plön in Schleswig-Holstein. Dona hated being separated from any of her children, but both she and Wilhelm believed firmly in all their children being taught strong discipline. After completing his studies at Plön, the crown prince attended university, but once this period in his life began, he shed all his inhibitions. Since the late 1890s, Willy had told his parents half a dozen times that he intended to marry one woman or another. This was especially painful for Dona, who was a firm believer in the sanctity of royal blood. For any of her sons, let alone the crown prince, to marry morganatically was unforgivable. One woman in particular, an American singer named Geraldine Farrar, caught the crown prince’s eye shortly after Queen Victoria’s death. When Willy told his parents he planned to marry her, the emperor exploded in shock, anger, and indignation. Dona used all her influence to dissuade her son from marrying his commoner fiancée. After an exhausting meeting that lasted more than two hours, the empress had succeeded.
Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires Page 26