Dearest Vicky, Darling Fritz (39 page)

On 7 January 1890 the Dowager Empress Augusta succumbed to influenza, aged seventy-eight. They returned to Berlin for the funeral at once, and Vicky went to see her mother-in-law for the last time, lying in state in the Schloss chapel, her palsied body wrapped in her ermine and gold cloak with a wedding veil on her head. She looked calm and peaceful, even young, Vicky thought; ‘the eyes that used to stare so and look one through and through were closed, which gave her a gentle expression I never saw in life.’
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The elderly Empress had left her daughter-in-law a characteristically small-minded legacy. During her lifetime Augusta had been the nominal head of the German Red Cross, but had shown no inclination for or interest in the work unlike Vicky, who had every reason to expect Wilhelm to ask if she would take the Empress’s place. It would have been a chance for Wilhelm to fulfil the promise he had made to Queen Victoria during his state visit to England – to do something to please his mama. But Augusta had already offered Dona the position, without telling Vicky. The snub rankled deeply, for Dona knew nothing at all about the work, whereas Vicky herself already had years of experience.

She consoled herself with seizing the opportunity to ‘do good’ and stop herself from brooding by looking after her charities, particularly the founding of a children’s hospital with a sum given her in Fritz’s memory by the citizens of Berlin, and lending her name and presence to fund-raising bazaars in the capital. If she gave the impression of being determined not to be consoled, it was because she intended to keep her husband’s name and ideals before the nation. In a sense, she was in perpetual mourning for the Germany that was never allowed to flourish because of his untimely death, and their dreams that never came to fruition. There could have been little greater contrast than that between her mother-in-law Augusta, who was admittedly sick and disabled by the time she was widowed and had less than two years to live, yet threw off all mourning as soon as possible and conveniently put aside her liberal principles, and Vicky, who held steadfast to her values – and suffered for it. Had Kaiser Wilhelm shown or allowed some kind of respect for his father, it would have eased her path. When her old adversary Bismarck resigned the Chancellorship in anger in March 1890 after a series of disagreements with Wilhelm, she felt no sense of elation, believing he had been dismissed for the wrong reasons, at a time when he could still have been of benefit to Germany and a guarantor of peace throughout the empire.

Appearances at functions in Berlin were a painful duty. She attended family dinners at the Schloss with great reluctance, as they made her feel so miserable. ‘There are so many things which make one feel so sore, that aggravate and wound one and rub one up the wrong way, that one would wish to run away and hide oneself and let one’s life flow on in peace. . . . No one feels for one or grieves or understands what one is going through. So much is said and talked which one so completely disagrees with and yet it is best to keep one’s opinion quite to oneself.’
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On 21 November 1890 Vicky celebrated her fiftieth birthday, a landmark not even her son could ignore. He gave a luncheon for her at the Schloss, though it was conducted in some haste as the gentlemen in attendance were anxious to get to another Court event immediately afterwards.

Two days earlier Moretta had been married to Prince Adolf of Schaumburg-Lippe, a good-hearted if uninspiring army officer distantly related to the Württemberg royal family. The wedding was overshadowed by an argument between Sophie and her brother. As wife of the heir to the Greek throne, she had announced she would enter the Greek Orthodox Church. In his capacity as head of the family, Kaiser Wilhelm vowed to forbid her to do such a thing, and if she persisted in doing so without his permission she would be barred from setting foot in Germany ever again. He entrusted the task of telling her to Dona, who was
enceinte
, as he assumed that Sophie would not dare to argue with his wife while she was in such a condition. Sophie firmly told her sister-in-law to mind her own business and was duly banished from Germany for three years.

Early in 1891 the Kaiser decided it was time to try and improve Franco-German relations. Having alienated Russia over the Reinsurance Treaty, he was faced with the likelihood of an alliance between two powerful hostile neighbours. He had never revised his unfavourable opinion of France as a nation, and the previous year he had refused to let his mother and sisters visit Queen Victoria while she was in Aix-les-Bains, on the grounds that he was duty-bound to uphold a law passed by his grandfather in 1887 forbidding any prince or princess of the Prussian house to cross the French frontier without the Emperor’s consent. However Vicky had been a regular visitor to Paris, and as a patron of the arts she would be less likely to attract hostility than him. He asked her to go and invite French artists in person to participate in an international art conference to be held in Berlin. When it was suggested by her old friend Count Münster, now German ambassador to France, she was so delighted to have a chance to be of use at last that she did not realize her son was using her to pull national chestnuts out of the fire.

Accompanied by Mossy, she arrived in Paris on 19 February 1891. A small but vociferous right-wing nationalist group in Paris, eager to make political capital out of her presence in order to discredit Germany, watched her carefully. When she paid discreet visits to Versailles and St Cloud, scenes of happier days in 1855 when she and her parents had visited the Emperor and Empress, but later of national humiliation and defeat for the French, the press claimed she had gone out of her way to insult France. The painters who had accepted invitations to exhibit in Berlin were accused of dishonouring their country, and when the German press replied in kind, feeling between both countries rose to such a pitch that Vicky and her daughter were advised to leave France at once. Though Count Münster had discussed the itinerary with her and accompanied her everywhere, he made no effort to defend her, and joined Kaiser Wilhelm in letting her take the blame for everything. She consoled herself with the reflection that ‘an impertinent set of mischiefmakers who do
not
represent French public opinion one bit’
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had been responsible, but it was a sad end to what would always remain her last role in representing Germany abroad in even a semi-official capacity.

Mossy had been her mother’s constant support since Moretta’s marriage, but Vicky would not dream for a moment of clinging to this youngest daughter, or insisting that any man she married would have to be prepared to make a home for himself and his wife with her, as Queen Victoria had done with Beatrice and Henry of Battenberg. At one stage there had been talk of a betrothal with the Tsarevich, or with her cousin Eddy, Albert Victor of Wales, Duke of Clarence, who had succumbed to influenza in January 1892 shortly after becoming engaged to May of Teck. These schemes, and an unreciprocated passion on her part for Max of Baden came to nothing, and in the summer of 1892 she was betrothed to Friedrich Karl (Fischy), son of Friedrich Wilhelm, Landgrave of Hesse. A cultivated, serious-minded young man, he proved a perfect partner for Mossy, and they were married in the Friedenskirche, Potsdam on 25 January, Vicky’s own wedding anniversary. The date brought back the saddest of memories, especially after the young couple had left on their honeymoon. Two days later she poured out her heart in a letter to Sophie, who had been unable to attend. Thinking of her own nuptials, she ‘had a heart-sick longing for dear Papa, to be able to throw my arms around his neck and say, now we are alone, in the house together once more, as we were when we were bride and bridegroom. But all was silence around me.’
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By the spring of 1894 Vicky’s home, Friedrichshof, was ready. The name had been suggested by Moretta, and the words
Frederici Memoriae
were carved over the main entrance porch. She had thoroughly enjoyed the four years during which it had been under construction as she watched her architect and workmen fashioning a country house in the way she had wanted. They soon knew better than to do anything without her approval, and regarded her with a mixture of irritation and admiration when she never hesitated to correct them, explain something or even seize a tool and show them exactly how it had to be done. Regardless of the weather she was outside, supervising and inspecting to make sure everything was or would be in the right place. She paid meticulous attention to the trees and shrubs best suited to the local soil and climate, planning carefully the locations of the rose gardens, rockeries, ponds and lawns, though she was so enthusiastic about choosing trees that there were far too many for the limited space, and several of them grew stunted.

The first day she spent at Friedrichshof, she wrote to Sophie, was extremely tiring, and there would be several more weeks of work before everything was in order. ‘What will you say when you see all you used to call the ‘dirty, ugly, horrid old rubbish’ which I used to collect on journeys, to your utter horror and despair and contempt now placed about the house?’
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She regretted that her daughters never appreciated her insatiable appetite for collecting paintings, autographs, coins, medallions, objets d’art and old fossils. The sheer extent of her collections was not the least of her problems. When she began arranging her personal library formed since childhood, including many books personally dedicated to her, there were barely enough shelves to place a third of them properly, though the plans had looked adequate on paper. Her photographs alone, all carefully annotated, took up about 300 albums.

Later that summer she was writing with enthusiasm to Sophie of the horses in the stables, the cows and new-born calves in the fields, and the meadows filled with wild flowers. Every afternoon she came home with an armful of heather and flowers from the hedges and sides of the ditches, baskets and pocket handkerchiefs filled with blackberries and mushrooms; ‘you see your Mama is still like a baby over these things!’
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When she had to leave Kronberg every autumn she found the departure sad, and when she was travelling she felt ‘like a mussel without its shell.’
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Now she had a home of her own in Germany purchased with her personal funds, her sense of martyrdom lessened. Nevertheless her experiences had undoubtedly aged her, and photographs taken during the last years show a woman who looked rather older than her mid-to-late fifties. As a small girl Meriel Buchanan, daughter of Vicky’s friends Sir George Buchanan and his wife, recalled ‘a very old lady, always dressed in the deepest black, bearing a strong resemblance to Queen Victoria, her hair, which had lost its former bright colour, parted in the middle and brushed plainly back from her face.’
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Unlike Queen Victoria, Vicky did not suffer from lameness, remained an indefatigable walker until her last illness, and though she had inherited the family tendency to run to fat, never became as large around the waistline as her mother.

Under her own roof, she seemed much younger in spirit. One friend recalled her regularly going upstairs and downstairs more like a young girl than a woman of her age, and when she greeted the company assembled at table, ‘every compulsion of etiquette seemed to be instantly removed.’
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Dressing for dinner one night, Lady Georgina Buchanan was startled to be interrupted by her hostess who walked in unannounced. Vicky explained that she had come to make sure that everything was in order in her room, and then roared with laughter as she saw she had not chosen her moment too well. ‘Don’t be so shy, Lady Georgina,’ she reassured her. ‘What does it matter if you are only half-dressed?’
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At the same time the tone of her letters improved. She was no longer at the whim of a son who could eject her from ‘his’ residences, and slowly but surely old wounds were healing. By 1896 she could write to the Queen that her personal relations with Willy were good; ‘he is quite nice to me, and I have forgiven him with all my heart the cruel wrong he did me’.
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She was almost pathetically grateful for the small things that he did to give her pleasure, and such consideration as he showed her from time to time. Yet she had to admit that they seldom met and she still felt a complete outsider, unable to do any good (she was always modest about her charity work) and anxious about the future. His blundering follies and inane behaviour made her fear for the consequences for Germany, if not for Europe, under his rule. It was impossible not to think, if not to dwell, on what might have been.

Like his doctors and a few of his close friends, she dreaded the threat to Willy’s mental stability. The last years of her greatgrandfather, King George III, had been blighted by porphyria or, as everyone believed then, madness; in the first few weeks of widowhood her mother had feared losing her reason; and her second cousin Charlotte, widowed Empress of Mexico, had been confined for nearly thirty years bereft of her reason. In March 1888, the month of Fritz’s accession, the British surgeon John Erichsen had seen confidential notes from the then Crown Prince Wilhelm’s surgeon, expressing grave fears about his mental balance. While it was unlikely that he would become insane, he would always be subject to ‘sudden accesses of anger’, incapable at times of ‘reasonable or temperate judgment’, ‘some of his actions would probably be those of a man not wholly sane’, and his accession might be a danger to Europe.
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Vicky had few illusions about the course on which her son was set. With remarkable foresight, she confided her fears to Frau von Stockmar in 1892. The sovereign, she said, ‘should help in building up a strong, firm and sound edifice on a broad foundation, if Germany is not to slip down the steep path which leads to a Republic or even a Socialist state. The latter could never last, there would be chaos, then reaction, dictatorship and God knows what further damage.’
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On a visit to Palermo at around this time, Donna Laura Minghetti, stepmother of the future German Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow, was struck by her look of intense sadness. She explained that she mourned not only for her dear husband, but also for Germany. With a fixed stare, she went on to tell her firmly, ‘
Mon fils sera la ruine de l’Allemagne
.’ (‘My son will be the ruin of Germany.’)
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