Dearest Vicky, Darling Fritz (26 page)

Fritz’s Court Marshal (or Chamberlain) Karl von Normann arranged a discreet consultation in his own apartments between his master and Eugen Richter, but nothing could remain secret from Bismarck for long, and Normann was dismissed on a trumped-up charge of having plotted an attack on the Chancellor’s position with the Crown Princess and Empress, and thus coming between the Emperor and his people. He was transferred as Minister to Oldenburg, and replaced in the household by Count Hugo von Radolinski, a devoted adherent of Bismarck. Fritz was powerless to do anything but assure Normann that once he was Emperor he would recall him. Once installed, Radolinski made it his mission to get rid of the Crown Princess’s Chamberlain, the faithful Count Götz von Seckendorff, who shared her political outlook and a love of sketching and painting. Despite a vicious campaign to undermine his integrity, Seckendorff retained his position in the household.

Bismarck’s suspicions about the Crown Princess’s political orientation were shared by Queen Victoria, who looked askance at her daughter’s enthusiasm for Gladstone and his fellow Liberals in England, telling her she was ‘such an extraordinary Radical that you even appear a republican at heart’.
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During the election campaign of 1884 Bismarck was keen to exploit any differences in the
Deutsche-Freisinnige Partei
ranks. The party was divided on Bismarck’s social welfare legislation, on the renewal of anti-socialist legislation, and over Bismarck’s intention to acquire German colonies in Africa. While Fritz endorsed a colonial policy for patriotic reasons he was concerned at its implications for Anglo-German relations, whereas Vicky firmly opposed it, seeing it as Bismarck’s means to gain support for other conservative policies. The Germans were always reproaching the English for their anti-German prejudices, she maintained, while they forgot that they themselves had ‘many more and much more deeply-seated ones about other countries, especially England! They imagine England is jealous of Germany’s attempting to have colonies. . . . This colonial sugar plum may easily turn into a bitter almond, and the beginning seems to me sad enough if it cannot be obtained without an estrangement between England and Germany.’
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On 25 January 1883 Vicky and Fritz celebrated their silver wedding. Gifts poured in from corporations and guilds throughout Germany, including paintings and sculpture by living artists, ivory and ebony cabinets, and from the
Reichstag
a magnificent carved oak dining-room suite. Collections were made nationally and in Berlin amounting to over one thousand marks, and presented to them by an official deputation for distribution to charities of their choice. A large sum went towards founding a children’s hospital in Vicky’s name.

Yet the occasion was marred by more family arguments. Vicky had requested a
tableau vivant
, like those in which she had eagerly participated as a girl to entertain her parents on anniversaries, and a Venetian ball to follow. They were both postponed for a few days by the sudden death of Fritz’s uncle Karl, and when they took place Dona spoilt matters; representing the Queen of Love who was to offer her parents-in-law a bouquet of flowers with a few words of thanksgiving as they sat on a dais between the Kaiser and Empress, she wore a tight dress which showed up her pregnant figure, her pallid face, and bright scarlet arms. For the ball she refused to wear a dress Vicky had given her, to show that she did not take kindly to what she considered to be her mother-in-law’s interference. At the performance she missed a vital cue, and was effortlessly upstaged by Ditta who, true to form, did not attempt to conceal her disdain of the sister-in-law whom she found slow and stupid, and had accepted as one of the family with the utmost reluctance.

Always sensitive to the feelings of others especially where family was concerned, Vicky had done her best to develop a more welcoming relationship with Dona than she had experienced in her early days of marriage from Augusta and her other in-laws, but her efforts were gracelessly rebuffed. She encouraged Dona to buy some attractive dresses instead of the unbecoming garments she usually chose, and to wear tight underclothes to restore her figure after the birth of her first son Wilhelm in May 1882. Dona replied coldly that there was no point in getting her shape back only to lose it again, as her husband intended to safeguard the imperial succession, a cruel remark to make to a woman who had lost two of her sons. Her mother-in-law, Dona knew, had a reputation for supposedly managing other people’s lives; she herself was not going to be dictated to.

If Dona was a disappointment to Vicky and Fritz, her husband was becoming downright incorrigible. With marriage increased his sickening air of self-importance, his admiration of Bismarck, and his taunts that his parents were ‘not German enough’. On the rare occasions when he visited his parents, it was usually with an enormous suite which made it impossible for them to talk to him alone. Though Ditta (who was now usually known as ‘Charly’ to her own generation, if not to her parents) led the life of a social butterfly at the head of Berlin’s ‘smart young things’, thinking of little but gossip, fine clothes and fashionable dinner parties, she had every sympathy with her parents and tried to reconcile them with her brother, whose childish and egotistical manner she resented. In March 1882 she was distressed by ‘a number of
appalling
scenes’ between Willy and their parents, owing to the former’s lack of consideration towards his mother, and she was ‘so beside myself at Papa’s appearance, he was literally ill with rage!’
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Even though Dona worshipped her husband, she was not above making similar occasional complaints in private about his immature behaviour.

Already convinced to some extent that his life no longer seemed to have any real purpose where Germany was concerned, Fritz was increasingly upset at being shut out by the close bond between Willy and the old Kaiser, and the sly way in which they made arrangements with each other behind his back. Regretting his son’s coldheartedness and vanity, he had been astonished by his evident lack of feeling at the time of Dona’s father’s death, though whether it was out of embarrassment at showing his feelings or whether because the death of the man to whose daughter he was about to become betrothed meant nothing to him, nobody could understand. Now Fritz was angered by his lack of common courtesy, notably his refusal to reply to friendly letters and telegrams. Matters came to a head during a father-and-son exchange in November 1883 when Fritz had a long discussion with him, asking how he could justify his inconsiderate behaviour? Willy told his father he had shown quite openly for a long time that he could not stand him. Taxed with the accusation that he kept everything from his parents, he defended himself by saying that his mother was always very outspoken when he tried to express his opinions on political matters which were contrary to her own.
¹⁰
Vicky was grieved by ‘his boundless egoism and his heartlessness’, and while she acknowledged that their opinions and views were totally different and probably always would be, all she asked for was ‘a bit of love & gratitude for all that I have suffered & done for him!’
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These arguments came just after Fritz had been asked to visit King Alfonso XII of Spain, and he wanted Willy to accompany him. He was furious when Willy wrote to the Kaiser, requesting he should not be allowed to go as such a trip could not be reconciled with his duties at home as a newly appointed battalion commander. The reason was that Willy did not want to be overshadowed by his father, whom he knew was more popular in other European countries than him. To Fritz’s despair, his father and Bismarck forbade Vicky to accompany him in order to prevent her from ‘causing mischief’ at the court of Madrid.

However King Alfonso and Queen Christina were the most gracious of hosts in their efforts to entertain him, though as an animal lover he would rather have foregone the ‘repulsive spectacle’ of a bullfight ordered in his honour; ‘If I had not been officially obliged to stay there, I would gladly have departed at the end of the first victim.’
¹²
He inspected the troops and barracks, paid several evening visits to the theatre, and was most impressed with the museums; ‘I employ these leisure moments in the contemplation of treasures that I shall probably never see again in my life.’
¹³
At the Prado he particularly enjoyed the masterpieces of the Italian and Spanish schools, particularly those of his favourite artist Velasquez, and the displays of armoury in the royal palace, the unique collection of Gobelin tapestries, and the Escorial, which he considered essential ‘in order to appreciate the past glories of Spain.’
¹⁴
Yet the occasion would have given him far more pleasure had either his art-loving wife, or an amenable, courteous son and heir, been by his side.

Vicky was increasingly worried by the way that frustrated years of waiting and a perpetual
Weltschmerz
(world-weariness) were telling on Fritz. His winter illnesses left him progressively weaker, he lost weight and looked pale. Observers were alarmed by his increasing depression and lack of interest in what he would do during his coming reign. Albrecht von Stosch, his close friend from military campaigns and adviser and a man who shared his cautious liberalism though too conservative for Vicky, thought him low and out of spirits, an old man before his time. ‘Strength not exercised dies away; he keeps aloof from activity and influence.’
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Three years later Professor Geffcken, a close friend of Vicky and Fritz, was saddened to find him increasingly pessimistic and bitter; ‘he complains about his wasted life, and I believe that the reason he feels this way is because he does not work.’
¹⁶
He paid little attention to affairs of state, was convinced that his day had passed, and felt he had become a mere parade horse, only fit for receiving foreign dignitaries.

In 1851 Prince Alexander of Hesse had married a lady-in-waiting of his sister Marie, then the wife of the Tsarevich, and was dismissed from the Russian army. Granted the title of Prince Battenberg, he and his wife had four sons and a daughter. The eldest, Louis, married Victoria of Hesse, Alice’s eldest daughter in April 1884, and Fritz and Vicky were among wedding guests at Darmstadt. Also there was Beatrice, Vicky’s youngest sister, who fell in love with the third son, Henry. Though Queen Victoria had initially hoped to keep this daughter in perpetual spinsterhood as her lifelong unofficial secretary and helpmeet, after her initial disapproval she consented to their betrothal, and stood her ground defiantly against those in Berlin who looked down on the Battenbergs.

In Berlin Vicky was her only champion; Fritz was inclined to disagree with her and take his father’s view; nothing the Queen said could alter the fact that Henry was only a minor German prince. For this his mother-in-law took him to task – fancy Fritz speaking of Henry ‘as not being of Geblut (stock), a little like about animals.’ How, she asked angrily, could Empress Augusta object, when the father of her son-in-law was the son of ‘a very bad woman’? If one enquired too deeply into the background of all the royal and princely families on the continent, ‘many black spots would be found’, and fresh blood had to be infused occasionally, or the race would degenerate physically and morally. Her most withering attack was reserved for Willy and Dona. As for the latter, ‘poor little insignificant Princess, raised entirely by your kindness to the position she is in – I have no words’; she had initially been illreceived in Berlin as a future Empress as the Augustenburgs were hardly of more noble birth than the Battenbergs. If the Queen of England thought someone good enough for her daughter, ‘what have other people got to say?’
¹⁷

They might have said nothing had it not been for the likelihood of a Battenberg-Hohenzollern marriage. In 1878 the Balkan state of Bulgaria was created by the terms of the Berlin congress, under the rule of Henry’s elder brother Alexander (‘Sandro’). Under his liberal uncle Tsar Alexander II in Russia his position was relatively safe, but the Tsar’s assassination brought his son, Alexander III, no admirer of Sandro, to the throne, and his mild dislike soon turned to implacable hatred of the young ruler. Then while on a tour of Europe in 1883, this handsome bachelor was presented to Fritz and Vicky at Potsdam. Meeting his hosts’ eldest unmarried daughter Victoria, whom Lady Ponsonby called ‘a kind of wild, Scandinavian woman, with much of her mother’s impetuosity and her eldest brother’s eccentricity’,
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he decided he had found a wife. Perhaps he was not so much in love, rather looking for a pretty, well-connected consort who would provide him with sons and thereby help him to secure his position.

He came along at the right time to fit into the equation, as for once Vicky’s matchmaking instincts let her get totally carried away. She had evolved a plan whereby England, Germany, Austria and Italy would unite to help and support Bulgaria, helping her to act as a barrier to Russian progress towards Constantinople. Should Russia consider war against such an alliance, the coalition would have to ensure that Bulgaria, Roumania, Serbia, Turkey and Greece did not help her, and that these countries should reach a ‘secret agreement’ with the others, who would try and isolate Russia and France from any other alliances, ‘but then live as far as possible in a peaceful & good relationship with them.’ Spain and Portugal had to be regarded as potential members of the alliance, so they would not go to the assistance of France. Germany, she felt, could do much to guide the Orient towards civilization, and invest considerable capital there in partnership with England.
¹⁹
Two years later she had not given up hope of this grand design, which would help to create ‘a new order in Europe’, with their three younger daughters wearing the crowns of Greece, Bulgaria and Roumania; German Protestant princesses ‘would not have a bad mission there, – & Germany would gain a decisive influence!’
²⁰
This audacious scheme could hardly be taken seriously; one can only suppose that her extreme frustration with her and Fritz’s life on the margins of German history provoked her into such ideas, but even so she must have realized that it was sheer fantasy.