Dearest Vicky, Darling Fritz (23 page)

Willy’s confirmation on 1 September 1874 at the Friedenskirche took place after an argument between Vicky and the Emperor. Her eyes were red and she made a great effort to keep herself from trembling as she watched her son calmly listening to long tedious addresses, and answering the forty prepared questions without hesitation or embarrassment. Henry was also going to school in preparation for a career in the navy, and later that week she and Fritz saw the boys leave home, to stay at Schloss Wilhelmshöhe under Hinzpeter’s surveillance and attend their schools as day pupils.

In April and May 1875 Vicky and Fritz enjoyed a short spring holiday in Italy. They visited King Victor Emmanuel and Crown Prince Umberto, and Vicky’s artistic talent throve under the guidance of Anton von Werner, staying in Venice at the time. It was a rude shock for them when they returned to Berlin in May to find Germany apparently on the verge of war again.

France had recovered quickly from the recent conflict, paying off her indemnity by September 1873, eighteen months before the date specified in the Frankfurt treaty. The subsequent departure of the last German soldier from occupied territory was soon followed by reorganization of the French army, and representatives of every political party in the country were talking of revenge. When Bismarck learnt that the government in Paris was purchasing thousands of cavalry horses from German stables, he published a decree suspending the export of any more. Shortly afterwards a meeting between King Victor Emmanuel of Italy and Emperor Franz Josef at Venice gave rise to rumours that an Austro-Italian-French coalition was being hatched, and Bismarck’s recent anti-Catholic legislation made the supposed alliance look like a threat to Germany. In April 1875 the
Kölnische Zeitung
published an article commenting on the threat to European peace posed by the French army and the Venetian encounter. Two more right-wing papers took up the theme, and stock exchanges all over the continent were shaken by the scare. The Grand Duchess of Baden drew the Kaiser’s attention to these articles and he wrote in some anxiety to Bismarck, who disclaimed any connection with the panic. Everything was calm by the time Vicky and Fritz came home, but after previous experiences they knew better than to place trust where it did not belong. In June Bismarck assured Fritz eloquently that ‘he had never wished for war nor intended it’ and blamed the alarm on the press. He wished he could believe the Chancellor, but as Vicky said, ‘as long as he lives we cannot ever feel safe or comfortable’.
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Kaiser Wilhelm wrote personally to Queen Victoria, assuring her that any thoughts of war had been entirely a fabrication by the newspapers, particularly
The Times
.

The affair cast a shadow over Fritz’s activities during the summer, including a visit to Vienna for the funeral of ex-Austrian Emperor Ferdinand, his opening of a horticultural exhibition at Koln, and another round of army inspections. He was sufficiently soured for once to complain about having to dash ‘from one (German state) to the other by rail, like a State messenger’ when he wrote to Prince Carol of Roumania that autumn. He was willing to fulfil his duties, ‘but there are limits, especially when one is no longer as young as one was’.
¹⁷
His hollow existence as a representative at Bismarck’s beck and call was beginning to make him feel old and weary before his time. Even allowing for his delicate health, for him to complain of feeling his age at forty-four, when his father had ascended the throne in his sixties and showed no sign of relinquishing it on the threshold of eighty, was disturbing. In a mood of depression at this time he told Hinzpeter that he felt he would never rule; the succession would skip a generation.
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In the following year another war scare came from the Balkans. When Slav nationalists rioted in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the summer of 1875, ministers representing members of the
Dreikaiserbund
agreed to fight if necessary in order to put down the revolt. Russia particularly favoured armed intervention, and the alliance would probably draw Germany and Austria into any ensuing conflict. With outward calm Fritz braved himself for the order to mobilize in a war he dreaded far more than the previous campaigns. The Slavs and Turks were dangerous enemies who thought nothing of stabbing their opponents in the back and torturing rather than taking prisoners; and, worst of all, it could have brought him face to face with British soldiers. Disraeli, his foreign minister Lord Salisbury and the British government distrusted Bismarck as much as they did Russia, whose threatened expansion in the Balkans would be at the expense of British trade routes to India and the far east.

Willy’s education at Kassel was not an unqualified success. His regular placing as tenth in a class of seventeen did not cure his passion for boasting, and far from treating him as one of them, his fellow-pupils looked up to their eventual ruler and flattered him endlessly. Moreover he had gone there with misgivings about the liberal notions of his parents. To him Bismarck was a hero whose policies of blood and iron had made Germany great; liberalism, so it seemed, had contributed nothing to the birth of the Empire. His history lessons had reinforced his faith in the Chancellor, and Hinzpeter had contributed his share by encouraging him to speak out. The boy had found fault with everything – the headmaster, the curriculum, the ‘lack of Germanism’ – largely for its own sake.

When it came to persuading her adolescent son as to the merits of her opinions, Vicky could be her own worst enemy. Her constant descriptions of herself as an Englishwoman and a free-born Briton did nothing to help her, particularly when she regularly used such phrases in letters to Willy. England, she told him, was ‘the freest, the most progressive advanced, & liberal & the most developed race in the world, also the
richest
, she clearly is more suited than any
other
to civilize other countries!’
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Hinzpeter warned her against this trumpeting of English superiority, but she failed to see that the end result was bound to be a defiant reaction.

For the time being, however, the volcano lay dormant, and nobody was more eager to help fight Willy’s battles than his parents. He was to come of age on 27 January 1877 and enter the First Regiment of Guards as a lieutenant, wearing the highest decorations that Russia, Austria and Italy could offer him. Britain stayed aloof at first, and not without reason. Queen Victoria had invited him to stay at Windsor during the previous autumn, and was so unimpressed with his demeanour that she decided to send him only the Grand Commandership of the Bath. A sulking Willy bullied Vicky into pressing her mother to send the Order of the Garter instead, the best that she could bestow. The examples of the other countries were on his side, as was precedent; his grandfather had awarded the Queen’s three elder sons – the Prince of Wales, the Duke of Edinburgh, and Arthur, Duke of Connaught – the Black Eagle. Lamely Vicky wrote that he would be satisfied with the Bath, but the nation would not. The Queen saw through this excuse, but hesitated to provoke a family quarrel and reluctantly gave her grandson the Garter. After receiving his Guards commission, he followed in his father’s footsteps and went to study at Bonn, reading eight subjects, including history, science, philosophy and art.

Ditta was no less of a worry. As a child she had often been naughty and backward. She had got her mother into trouble with Queen Victoria at Balmoral by refusing to shake hands with the Highland servant John Brown: ‘Mama says I ought not to be too familiar with servants.’
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Nor did she improve as she grew up, largely due to the Empress Augusta who petted and encouraged her by the sly method of not discouraging her spiteful remarks against her parents. At sixteen she was a typical Hohenzollern princess of the mould so dreaded by Vicky on her arrival in Prussia; vain, discontented, with an insatiable appetite for malicious gossip and all-night socialising.

In April 1877, shortly after she and Henry were confirmed, the Kaiser announced her engagement at a family dinner to the Hereditary Prince Bernhard of Saxe-Meiningen, son of Fritz’s childhood friend. He and Vicky were very pleased about the betrothal, and relieved to see her gain her independence, but Catherine Radziwill saw that the foolish and frivolous girl could not have been in love with anyone at the time; she was only marrying in order to escape a family life that was becoming irksome.
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Bernhard was a college friend of Willy, and in the spring all three were riding on the switchback railway in the Pfaueninsel, the royal pleasure-park on the Isle of Peacocks in the river Havel at Berlin, where Fritz had often played as a small boy. Bernard was standing behind her when Willy accelerated the controls for a joke. Terrified, Ditta held on to her brother’s friend, and imagined that she was in love with him.

A few weeks after the engagement was made public, Fritz and Vicky went to Kiel to see Henry enter the German navy on board the training ship
Niobe
. Henry was not measuring up to the standards required of him. The previous year, Vicky had complained of his being lazy and difficult to teach, slow, indifferent, and never reading a book unless made to. ‘He gives a great deal of trouble, and as his character is so weak, I often fear he will be led away when he grows older – to many a thing which is not right’.
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Perhaps a few months on board ship, she and Fritz hoped, would be the making of him.

Before the end of April war had at last broken out between Russia and Turkey in the Balkans. Fritz and Vicky had hoped for peace throughout the year – ‘there has really been enough war!’ – but the latter’s fears that ‘the Russians will have their own way, and that they only mean to wait until spring comes, and brings them a more convenient opportunity for fighting’ were soon realized.
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Despite Bismarck’s pro-Russian policy, he was restrained from intervention largely through the Emperor’s reluctance to see his country at war again. Fritz took great interest in the course of the fighting as his cousin Carol of Roumania, who had been his orderly officer during the Danish war, was at the Russian front. In January 1878 the Turkish army was forced to surrender, and it was to a background of fragile peace that Fritz turned his attention once more to the immediate family circle.

Royalties from all over Europe including his brothers-in-law from England, the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Connaught, came to Berlin in February for a double wedding on the 18th; that of Ditta and Bernhard, and of Prince Friedrich Karl’s second daughter Elizabeth to the son of the Grand Duke of Oldenburg. It was an exhausting ceremony lasting for over six hours, but according to her uncle Bertie Ditta, looking ‘like a fresh little rose’
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in her silver moiré train, emerged from it all with the vitality of her seemingly ageless grandparents. Fritz and Vicky were surprised by the grace and lack of emotion their daughter showed at the signing of the register and the endless
Fackeltanz
or bridal torch dance. The excessive solemnity of the programme was lightened for them not so much by the bride’s outward calm as by Bertie’s presence. Having visited the court of Berlin more often than the rest of his relations except Alice (who was too ill to come this time), he saw much of the wearying atmosphere in which his brother-in-law and sister had to live. His cheerful manner and compliments to even the sourest of the German princesses made him an immediate success with everyone, and the Kaiser was flattered by the way in which his son’s guest had a good word for everything and everyone.

The following month the Sultan of Turkey concluded peace at San Stefano, by which a large amount of territory was ceded to Russia. In Britain Disraeli and Salisbury insisted that Europe would not recognise the treaty as it stood, and on the initiative of the Austrian Foreign Minister Julius Andrassy a congress at Berlin, under Bismarck’s presidency, was summoned to discuss the Eastern problem. For once the Kaiser had to suggest that his son and daughterin-law might like to accept an invitation from Queen Victoria to go and stay in England. Like his Chancellor he was normally impatient with them for visiting as often as they did, but Bismarck had been incensed by improving relations between Vicky and his master. The Crown Princess, he asserted, whose hatred of the Russians was well-known, would undoubtedly use her influence to stir Disraeli into making some sort of trouble when he arrived, and he asked the King to send her out of the country before the Congress opened.

With mixed feelings Fritz and Vicky left for England, staying with Bertie and Alix at Marlborough House and then at Hatfield House, Hertfordshire, with Lord Salisbury, whose other guests included Prince and Princess Christian and Disraeli. On the next day, 2 June, Count Münster, German Ambassador in London, handed Salisbury Bismarck’s official invitation to Britain to take part in the Berlin Congress. A few hours later their peace of mind was shattered when a servant came from Hatfield to bring news from Germany of a serious attempt on the Kaiser’s life.

During the previous month Max Hödel, a plumber’s employee, had fired at the Kaiser as he was driving in an open carriage through Berlin with the Grand Duchess of Baden, but he was unhurt. Three weeks later Karl Nobiling, a Doctor of Economics with suspected socialist sympathies, shot at him from the upper window of an inn overlooking the street. This time he was severely wounded; bullets penetrated his helmet and went into his neck, back and arm. With blood pouring down his face he was hastily rushed back to the Schloss, and over thirty grains of shot were removed from his body. The surgeon Dr Langenbeck was amazed that he had survived such a vicious attack, and doubted he would last the night.

Fritz and Vicky reached Calais shortly before midnight, within hours of the outrage, and they stepped onto the yacht with the gloomy news that the old man’s life was despaired of. Fritz was ‘in floods of tears’, while Vicky retained her composure; when asked why, by her shocked lady-in-waiting, she replied that it was necessary for her husband. On returning to Berlin they found the Empress similarly ‘calm and natural’, and certainly in a better frame of mind than those around her who had evidently ‘lost their heads’.
²⁵
As they drew nearer to Berlin, where anxious men and women were expecting the imminent proclamation of their second Kaiser, Fritz prayed that his father would be saved. Though he had long awaited his accession, the last thing he wished to do was to inherit it by the hand of an assassin. Besides, he and Vicky had heard rumours of anarchist plots to kill them all, and she had personally received threatening letters saying that she would be shot as well if she appeared in public.
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