Dearest Vicky, Darling Fritz (36 page)

Bismarck’s own description of his dealings with his new sovereign and consort was a masterpiece of courtliness. To Fritz’s biographer Margaretha von Poschinger, he recalled in his last years that they were ‘always on the best of terms’, and that ‘any differences of opinion between us were discussed with Their Majesties in the most friendly way.’ The Empress was ‘very clever and decided’, while the Emperor was ‘a very remarkable and estimable man, extremely amiable and friendly, yet none the less far-sighted, intelligent and decided.’ The Chancellor was impressed with his monarch’s kindly bearing and courage under such difficult circumstances, especially with the way Fritz always accompanied him to the door of the room after their audiences and opened it himself to let him out on taking his departure. ‘One day, as he was walking with me through the room, I noticed that he was shaking with pain and weakness, and had already stretched out my arm, as I thought he was about to fall, when he managed to seize the door-knob and steadied himself. Yet he uttered no complaint and bore his pains in manly silence.’
³⁵
He gave the impression of a man who would do what his sovereign wanted if only the ministers would let him, and though Fritz was not deceived he was too weak to argue.

In matters of foreign policy, Bismarck and Crown Prince Wilhelm were poles apart. The former was in despair over the heir’s ‘lust for war’ and evident obsession with declaring or participating in war against Russia, convinced that he would draw his sword at once if he could.
³⁶
Like the Emperor and Empress he was exasperated by the hawkish Waldersee and his influence on Crown Prince Wilhelm, and tried to separate the two men by finding the General a command in Hanover where he could do less mischief, but he had too many powerful allies. Vicky complained to Bismarck that nobody could approach Waldersee, as he, Moltke and Albedyll were ‘sticking together like a nest of rats.’
³⁷

While hardly the devoted son he made himself out to be in later years, Willy had some sympathy for his parents, and one incident during his father’s reign does him credit. Waldersee scoffed at the ‘petticoat rule which is being exercised indirectly through the sick Emperor’, and told him that it was unnecessary ‘to carry out the commands sent from Charlottenburg on the part of His Majesty the Emperor . . . considering that it is well known what is the true source which inspires them’. The Crown Prince reminded him that, like all other German officers, he had sworn the military oath of loyalty to the Kaiser, which implied ‘strict execution of every command’ from the sovereign. If one of them was to charge Count Waldersee with attempting to seduce the brigade commander of the 2nd Infantry Brigade of Guards (the Crown Prince) into disobedience and breach of his military oath, and sentencing him to be placed in front of a sandheap and shot, he would ‘execute the command to the letter – with pleasure.’
³⁸
At last Waldersee saw he had overstepped the bounds of propriety.

However if Kaiser Friedrich was generally an object of compassion, there was little for the Empress. As Colonel Swaine, the British military attaché in Berlin, observed with sadness, it was ‘as if a curse had come over this country, leaving but one bright spot and that is where stands a solitary woman doing her duty faithfully and tenderly by her sick husband against all odds.’
³⁹
Fortunately political allies were aware of her plight, and the
Freisinnige
party member Eugen Richter gallantly came to her defence whenever the
Reichstag
was in session. On 26 May he accused the government and nationalist parties of offending the Empress in every way possible, in speech and in print. They shouted him down and tried to stop him from speaking, but he would not be deterred, and he concluded by asking Bismarck what he would do if taunted with just one-hundredth part of the calumnies she had to bear.
⁴⁰
After he sat down, several of them mounted the rostrum in turn to declare that they never had the slightest desire to offend Her Majesty. When she read an account in the papers the next day, Vicky was alarmed that it might galvanize her political enemies into a new campaign of persecution against her.

She was distressed that Willy seemed to be doing everything he could to irritate them. After Bergmann stormed out of the case, the Crown Prince asked him to dinner ‘as demonstratively as possible, which considering his strange behaviour, is, to say the least, not very good taste.’ Their eldest son was ‘in a “ring”, a
côterie
, whose main endeavour is as it were to paralyse Fritz in every way.’
⁴¹

On 24 May, Queen Victoria’s birthday, Henry and Irene were married at Charlottenburg chapel. Among the guests were the Prince of Wales in his Prussian regimental uniform, the Grand Duke and Duchess Serge of Russia, and Prince and Princess Louis of Battenberg. Fritz had enjoyed helping to make arrangements and seeing to the invitations as far as his ebbing strength allowed, and welcoming the bride with her father and family the morning before, but on the day itself he was not so strong. While he waited for a signal that the family had assembled and were ready for him, the officiating clergy thought he was staying away in order to avoid overtiring himself. The court chaplain Dr Kogel was about to begin his address when the door opened and Fritz entered, wearing his general’s uniform with the Hessian Order and the Star of the Garter, his collar open to facilitate breathing through the canula, and a stick in his hand for support. He took his seat quietly on the right of the altar, between his mother and Vicky. When the bridal couple exchanged rings he stood up, and as the organist played the closing voluntary he walked out unaided.

While Field-Marshal von Moltke, now a sprightly eightyseven, paid tribute to his bravery, Herbert Bismarck told the Prince of Wales afterwards that a sovereign who could not take part in debates should not be allowed to reign. When he returned to England Bertie told the Queen angrily that he had felt like throwing the insolent young man out of the room. Official reports in government-controlled newspapers mentioned eagerly how the Empress had forced her husband to attend the ceremony, having built up his strength with wine and stimulants, and that those sitting near him in the chapel could hear his piteous gasps for breath; a quarter of an hour later they saw him in his invalid chair in plain dress, utterly exhausted.
⁴²
Such accounts were grossly exaggerated, but the day had obviously taken its toll of his remaining strength. He had stood the occasion without so much as coughing, and afterwards he drove around the park in his pony carriage for an hour and a half, but that evening his temperature rose and he spent the following day in bed.

On 29 May Willy led his Guards Infantry Brigade in a march past his father in the Charlottenburg Palace grounds. Fritz sat watching from his open carriage in full uniform, but huddled up in his overcoat. This may have been a gesture by Willy to atone for his previous misdemeanours, but his father found it a trial to be seen in such a pitiful state by his troops, as well as a brutal reminder that he was unable to take part in this or any similar functions as a reigning Emperor. Willy later maintained that his father had requested it, while according to Vicky it was their son’s idea and he ‘meant well, but it was most unfortunate, for Fritz only agreed with the utmost reluctance’.
⁴³

On 1 June the court moved from Charlottenburg to the Neue Palais, Potsdam. Here Fritz had been born, and here he had spent nearly every summer of his married life. More than anywhere else in Germany, except perhaps for the little cottage and farm at Bornstädt, this was his home. As they travelled there on the royal steamer
Alexandria
, he lying on a couch on deck with Vicky sitting beside him, the sun shone brightly and the banks were lined by cheering crowds. It was as if the well-wishers, waving and throwing flowers, had a premonition that this would be their last sight of him. As Moretta, Sophie and Mossy welcomed them on landing and helped their father into the carriage which was to drive them to the palace, he was evidently very happy to be home at last. Just before he and Vicky walked inside, he wrote on his pad that he wanted it to be known as Friedrichskron.

Their old home had never looked more lovely to them than it did in the days following, all the more so as they knew that they had so little time left together on earth; ‘the sun is always said to shine more beautifully just before setting.’
⁴⁴
Fritz’s sleep and appetite were poor, and meals were ‘a torment’. It had been arranged that they would go to Homburg in July, but with each passing day it was increasingly evident that he would not last that long.

Yet this slow death did not put an immediate end to everything Fritz enjoyed. On warmer days he would sit or lie on the balcony and admire the view, and sometimes they would go driving around the estate to see once again the trees and flowers which they had carefully tended for nearly thirty precious years during which only their love and devotion to each other had remained the same. Indoors he continued with his work of signing documents, writing letters, and reading the papers from beginning to end, showing Vicky with his finger or pencil anything that particularly impressed him. ‘What will become of me?’ he asked her on 11 June, four days before the end. ‘Do I seem to improve? When shall I be well again? What do you think? Shall I be ill long? I must get well, I have so much to do.’
⁴⁵

A week after their arrival at Friedrichskron he carried out the only important political act of his reign. The Minister of the Interior, the anti-Semite Robert von Puttkamer, one of the most reactionary members of the government, had been responsible for the official proclamation of Kaiser Wilhelm’s death in March without any allusion to his successor, and had been implicated in a case of corruption, namely thwarting electoral reform in order to save his brother’s seat in the
Reichstag
. To dismiss a colleague of Bismarck’s, and a closely related one at that – Puttkamer was a cousin of Princess Bismarck – was easier said than done, but when the Chancellor asked the Emperor to sign a bill prolonging the life of the
Reichstag
from three to five years in order to maintain a recentlygained conservative majority, the latter made assent conditional on Puttkamer’s departure. Fritz had won, but Bismarck held an ostentatious banquet two days later at which the ex-Minister was guest of honour. Privately the two men were too alike to be really friendly, and Puttkamer was an uncomfortable colleague whom the Chancellor suspected was waiting to step into his place, but the dinner party was little more than a deliberate act of defiance to get even with his dying master.

On the following Sunday, the choir of the Twelve Apostles Church in Berlin asked if they could sing their Emperor some choral music. It was arranged that they would stand outside his sitting-room, where he could sit and listen. When they began their performance Vicky was standing with them, but as they began an anthem Mackenzie beckoned her back, as Fritz was in tears; hearing it for the first time as Emperor had affected him deeply. When the choir had finished he wiped his eyes and, unaided except for his stick, got up and walked towards them to offer his thanks.

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