Dearest Vicky, Darling Fritz

by John Van der Kiste

  Unlike her husband, she was glad that things had come to a head. For once they could do more than remain silent in the face of such drastic circumstances. ‘What is expected of you as a dutiful son and subject is so very difficult and severe, but this cannot be compared to what you would have to contend with if you stood idly by watching your father forfeit his popularity (a process that is already underway) and watching errors being committed that could threaten crown and country!’33 To her it was a golden if unexpected opportunity to see her husband’s accession lead to the establishment of government in Prussia after the British example.

  Fritz was not ready to embrace such radical changes, one of his reasons for opposing his father’s threat to abdicate. He knew that as King he would find himself caught between liberal and conservative forces, and would be confronted by entrenched reactionary opposition to his liberal views. It had already been made clear to him that the army would not let him ascend the throne if he allowed himself to become too closely identified with liberal aspirations, if only by means of a military conspiracy to remove him from the line of succession in favour of Prince Friedrich Karl, who would willingly be a tool of the Junkers and their clique. At the same time he would have been reluctant to cooperate with the radical liberal majority in parliament. His father’s abdication would have signalled the liberals’ victory in the constitutional conflict, and the first item on their agenda would have been demands for genuine parliamentary government. As he had no intention of sacrificing any powers of the crown to parliament, further conflict between both sides would have quickly followed. Moreover to find himself unexpectedly King of Prussia, by means which ran counter to his respect for the natural laws of succession, with a crowd of hostile reactionary ministers, a former King watching his every move, and a Queen Consort unpopular with the Court and her in-laws, would have been impossible.

  On 22 September Bismarck met the King, to be told gravely that if they could not come to some understanding, the act of abdication would be published forthwith. Bismarck had only one answer: ‘royal government or the supremacy of Parliament’.34 Next day he was proclaimed Minister-President of Prussia. The fears of Vicky and Fritz were confirmed; for the immediate future, while King Wilhelm reigned, Bismarck would rule. It was an appointment destined to have unforeseen consequences, not only for the hapless Crown Prince and Princess of Prussia, but also for both the map and the history of Europe for over half a century.

  *Accounts of events leading up to the confinement and birth in Daphne Bennett, Vicky (p.84ff), Hannah Pakula, An Uncommon Woman (p. 124ff), and John Röhl, Young Wilhelm (p. 4ff), all differ slightly but in crucial details. The above is based primarily on the latter, which as the most recently published and most detailed summary, based on the widest range of unpublished sources, can be regarded as the most accurate.

  FOUR

  ‘Youth is hasty with words’

  Vicky and Fritz were certain that if Bismarck was appointed, he would exacerbate the crisis by violating the constitution in order to secure the King’s army reforms. People everywhere, they knew, would be suspicious of reaction, distrust would be aroused on all sides of the political spectrum, and the King would have many difficult moments as the result of appointing such a ‘dishonest character’.1 In the Minister-President’s maiden speech to the parliamentary finance committee, he said that the German people looked to Prussia not for liberalism but for power. Prussia’s frontiers, as fixed by the Congress of Vienna, were not suitable for healthy development; her goal was the development of its power, and the great questions of the time would not be solved by speeches and majority decisions – that was the great mistake from 1848 to 1849 – but by iron and blood.2 His words were less a call to arms than an appeal to the Landtag finance committee to fund military reforms, as Prussian ability to assume leadership of the German confederation depended not just on military power but also on alliances and a strong foreign policy to weaken the alliances of Prussia’s enemies. His political adversaries, as well as subsequent German historians, saw it as his determination to achieve unification by war, and his implicit threat to resort to such means was clearly seen.

  There was another, more personal problem for Vicky and Fritz. Earlier that month the Prince of Wales had been betrothed to Princess Alexandra of Denmark. Her father Prince Christian was heir to the Danish throne, and on his accession the Schleswig-Holstein question would almost certainly create controversy. The duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, the latter with a large German population, had been ruled by Denmark since the London Protocol of 1852. With the growth of German nationalist feeling, the citizens of both were increasingly restless and the death of the present King, Frederik VII, would bring demands for recognition or self-government to a head, particularly on the part of Holstein and German areas of Schleswig, objecting to the administration of their Danish overlords. By marrying her heir to one of the country’s princesses, Britain was making her Danish sympathies evident. The knowledge that Fritz and Vicky had helped to bring the marriage about, probably thanks to the indiscreet Duke of Coburg, did nothing for their popularity in Prussia. The Duke, a fervent champion of German unification, called the match a ‘thunder-clap’ for Germany,3 and warned his niece that she had harmed herself as a result.

  Fritz and Vicky were anxious to distance themselves from Bismarck’s government and policies. Though a fortuitously-timed holiday away from Berlin might have been seen by some as politic but cowardly withdrawal, they would not have been able to do anything to advance the cause of liberalism by staying in Berlin at this difficult time. Queen Victoria had invited Alix to stay at Windsor in order to get to know her better, and wanted Bertie out of England. He was borrowing the royal yacht Osborne for a Mediterranean cruise, and it was suggested that Fritz and Vicky should join the party, in order to demonstrate that the Crown Prince’s absence from Germany would prove to the liberals that he neither condoned nor took part in plans by the new government to violate the constitution.4 They did not give it a second thought, and though the King complained when they asked his permission to go, he was glad to see the back of them. The presence of his ‘disobedient’ son and daughter-in-law in Prussia during the constitutional crisis was not required.

  Before their departure, on the advice of Vicky and Ernest von Stockmar, Fritz had written to Bismarck warning him that any attempt to violate the constitution would create an atmosphere of mistrust between crown and people, which would stifle the government in its domestic and foreign relations. Any solution to the conflict, he emphasized, must be achieved according to the constitution and the will of the people.

  They left Coburg on 6 October, and sailed from Marseilles a fortnight later. During the next few weeks they explored the ruins of Carthage, visited the Bey of Tunis, lunched in the open air at Syracuse in a grove of orange and lemon trees, gazed at the bay of Naples while Vicky sketched, and walked up the dormant Mount Vesuvius. Fritz guided her round the art treasures and churches at Rome, and they went to see the Pope. Afterwards the pontiff told Lord Odo Russell, English representative at the Vatican, that in the whole of his long life he had never been more favourably impressed by anyone than by the Crown Princess of Prussia. Vicky may have been similarly impressed by the Pope, but she was very scathing about what she called the ‘dumb foolery’ of High Mass – priests dressing and undressing, bobbing up and down, and mumbling Latin so fast as to be unintelligible, a ceremony which almost made her laugh.

  While they were away Bismarck had sought a compromise with parliament, as he hoped that the strife could be settled if minor concessions were made to the liberal opposition. Like Fritz, Bismarck was not opposed to the two-year service term, and he arranged a plan whereby conscripts could purchase their release from military service after two years, any funds thus raised to be used to attract volunteers; those who could not pay would serve a third year. This scheme was anathema to the King, who claimed that anything less than the three-year term would be fatal to the army. Bismarck then sugg
ested a further concession to the opposition by offering cabinet posts to three senior liberal deputies, but they insisted on the twoyear term as a condition of acceptance. Though Bismarck told the liberals in private that he would secure the King’s consent to the twoyear term, the liberals, well aware of their sovereign’s stubbornness on the issue, refused to enter the government.

  Having failed to effect a compromise between crown and parliamentary opposition, Bismarck had to find an alternative solution. On the King’s orders he withdrew the budget for 1863, which had been submitted to parliament with that for the previous year, thus preventing the opposition from voting down funds for the 1862 army reorganization. In a speech before the budget committee, he declared that if parliament refused further funds for the new year he would rule without a budget, a measure justified by the fact that parliament had no exclusive power over military estimates. It was therefore imperative that an agreement with the crown should be reached. Rejection of the budget by either power constituted an emergency, which empowered the government to govern without a budget, as the crown retained all rights not expressly allocated to parliament by the constitution. When progressive party member Rudolf Virchow declared that it was unconstitutional for the government to rule without a budget, Bismarck answered that the constitution made no provision for what was to happen if it was rejected by parliament. As the constitution was deficient in this aspect, the government was obliged to prevent a standstill of all business, and must continue even if that implied expenditure without lawful parliamentary enactment. This failed to persuade the liberals, who accepted the financial estimates for 1863 but rejected the figures for military expenditure. Bismarck dissolved parliament on 13 October, proclaiming a state of emergency and announcing that the government would rule without a budget approved by parliament, submitting a bill of indemnity only when normal conditions were resumed.

  After the dissolution he assured Fritz that, while his ministry would continue to do everything possible to resolve the conflict in a manner satisfactory to all, parliament’s uncooperative attitude could result in measures incompatible with the letter of the constitution. As minister-president he was frustrated by the perpetuation of the conflict and felt that the situation was becoming untenable, but even so he said he was committed to removing all barriers to compromise between crown and parliament. While professing a desire to work amicably with the Crown Prince, insisting that he was no reactionary and had no allegiance to any political party, nor any objection to the liberals, he had to take care not to adopt a liberal policy lest parliament interpret this as submission of the government to the will of parliament.

  The Prince and Princess of Wales were married on 10 March 1863 at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, with Vicky and Fritz among those present, Fritz as the groom’s best man. Highland-clad Willy took advantage of the occasion to give a foretaste of his future behaviour towards the family in England. Bored during the long service, he threw the dirk from his stocking on the chapel floor; when his uncles, twelve-year-old Arthur and nine-year-old Leopold, scolded him, he retaliated by biting them in the legs. Vicky and Fritz were pleased to hear that the King had kept a promise which he had verbally given them and attended a dinner given by the British Ambassador at the embassy in Berlin that same evening to celebrate the wedding. Bismarck had warned him that in view of Prussia’s attitude towards Denmark it would not be prudent, but to no avail.

  Fritz’s suspicions that Bismarck believed in the maxim ‘might is right’ were confirmed by his intervention against the Polish rising in the spring of 1863. Poland was a state east of Prussia, partitioned between Russia, Prussia and Austria, whose government considered such an arrangement was justified as the Poles could not be expected to provide strong government themselves. Throughout Germany, among radicals in Austria, and most other European nations there was much sympathy for the Poles, victims of Russian oppression. Vicky and Fritz shared the Liberals’ anger when Bismarck signed a treaty with Russia promising Prussian aid with putting down any trouble. It was tantamount to a declaration of unprovoked war, as the rebels had not taken up arms against the Prussian government, but only against the repression of Tsarist rule, and their action was confined to Russian Poland. Bismarck, however, told an aggrieved Fritz that, one day, they would be glad he had sought the Tsar’s gratitude. Ignoring the liberals’ demands for a declaration of strict neutrality, he mobilized Prussian regiments in the Eastern provinces to help crush the insurgents if necessary.

  By the spring of 1863, observers said that liberals were becoming alienated from the dynasty by their Crown Prince’s passive attitude towards the new regime, and some wanted him to be supplanted in the line of succession to the throne by his brother-in-law Frederick, Grand Duke of Baden. To save his reputation, he would be advised to break his silence. Further pressure to do so came in May when the King and Bismarck dissolved parliament after the opposition claimed a right to free speech without interruption from government ministers, and Bismarck proposed to issue an edict against the liberal press in a meeting of the ministerial council in May 1863. Fritz knew it was difficult to justify a decree against the press on constitutional grounds, and while he did not oppose it at the meeting, he made his feelings on the subject clear to his father.

  On 31 May, before beginning a tour of military inspection in East Prussia, Fritz, fearful of what might happen next, wrote to his father begging him not to infringe the constitution, in return for keeping a promise not to oppose his views openly. Out of respect for his father, and a wish not to be identified with the opposition which wrongly considered him as one of its own, he had held his silence; but he felt justified in abandoning passive resistance on the grounds that it was his duty to speak if the King’s prestige and the welfare of Prussia were under threat. Such a measure, he said, was against the integrity of the constitution and would seriously endanger the standing of the crown. Vicky assured him that one day his father would thank him for telling him the truth and having the courage to act in accordance with his own opinions; ‘when feelings of duty and conscientiousness collide with your obligation to be obedient, you must satisfy the demands of your conscience before those of your father and King.’5 The King replied that Fritz’s ‘opposition speeches’ had spread abroad; now he had a chance to redeem himself by keeping his distance from the liberals and radicals, and allying himself with Conservative opinion.

  A decree was to be published empowering the suppression of newspapers and periodicals ‘for persisting in an attitude endangering the commonweal’; the offences listed included ‘undermining respect and loyalty towards the King’ and ‘exposing to hatred or contempt state institutions’.6 As the constitution guaranteed freedom of the press, Fritz replied on 3 June that he considered the cabinet proceedings illegal and contrary to state and dynastic interests. Receiving no reply to this, he wrote again the following day, apologizing for causing his father pain, but standing by his protest against such infringement of the constitution. He and Vicky were not alone in their views, which were shared by several of Bismarck’s colleagues.

  Undeterred, the King dissolved parliament and signed an edict silencing the opposition press. The liberals protested that this measure was unconstitutional as it was created while parliament was still in session and there was no ‘unusual emergency’, and on 4 June the Berlin city council voted to send a delegation to the King registering its disquiet at the government’s arbitrary behaviour. All protests were immediately suppressed by the government. None of the ministers bothered to notify the Crown Prince or Princess of the edict, and like everyone else they only learnt of it from the newspapers. Fritz immediately wrote to his father expressing his dismay. Unlike the liberals he did not attack it as unconstitutional, but he said that it went against the ‘true spirit of the constitution.’ While admitting that the opposition press posed a threat to the government, he suggested that the menace could have been assuaged without going to such lengths, and recommended that the decree should be rescinded as
it would incite the opposition to further protest.

  Vicky thought this response was too mild. When Fritz arrived in Danzig on 4 June, she and Leopold von Winter, Mayor of Danzig, argued that he stood to lose as much as his father in popular support unless he spoke publicly against the decree, adding that his silence on the subject would be interpreted as approval. His decision to speak on the subject was reinforced by the dismal mood of the public at Danzig, as he realized that they interpreted his silence as approval of the press edict.

  Vicky was adamant that he should not remain silent any longer. A parade by the Danzig garrison in his presence on 5 June was followed by a reception at the town hall. Winter, a former Berlin chief of police, had suggested that the Crown Prince ought to declare his views openly. Welcoming his royal guest on the platform he apologised for the lukewarm festivities in the town, owing to the gloom they all felt over the decree. Fritz then rose to his feet and said how he regretted the conflict between government and constitution. He knew nothing of the decrees; he was absent at the time, ‘and took no part in the deliberations which led to these ordinances. But we all, and I myself most of all, since I know best the noble and paternal aims and lofty sentiments of His Majesty the King – we all have confidence that . . . the kingdom of Prussia is advancing steadily towards that greatness which Providence has destined for our nation.’7

  His delivery of the address left him with mixed feelings. While he was glad to have a chance of proving his sincerity to the liberal cause, making it known that he was opposed to Bismarck and his unsavoury policies, and proving to the world that he had no part in his schemes, he feared that the speech could result in a complete break with his father. The King considered it verging on treason, writing him ‘a furious letter, treating him quite like a little child; telling him instantly to retract in the newspapers the words he had used at Danzig, charging him with disobedience, etc., and telling him that if he said one other word of the kind he would instantly recall him and take his place in the Army and the Council from him.’8 Fritz refused to retract his words, as he was well aware of the consequences of his behaviour, and asked his father to understand that he was standing by his convictions. As an officer in the army he was technically guilty of insubordination, and under military law liable to imprisonment. A precedent existed in the case of another Friedrich of Prussia in the previous century; as Crown Prince, Friedrich the Great had been imprisoned by his father for similar resistance.