Dearest Vicky, Darling Fritz

by John Van der Kiste

  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’.22 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.23 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’24 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.26

  On the day after their return Fritz was commissioned to take temporary control of the government. The wounded Kaiser had insisted that his son could only represent him and was to rule according to his own principles, not to the Crown Prince’s, and shortly after regaining consciousness he had signed a bill ensuring that affairs of state would continue as before. When Fritz met Bismarck to discuss the form of these representative functions, Bismarck presented him with a document, Stellvertreter Urkunde, reflecting these conditions and thus denying him a decisive role in important matters of state, even as his father’s deputy. It was clear that his decisions would be subject to approval of, or either ignored by, the Chancellor, who would take notice of Fritz’s opinions on domestic and foreign policy only if they suited him. Unlike the regency of 1858 to which Wilhelm had been appointed as a result of his brother’s illness, Fritz was empowered to act just as a deputy until his father’s return to health. It placed a new strain on relations between both men during the Emperor’s convalescence, as Fritz knew that Bismarck was taking no chances and ensuring he would have no influence on state affairs.

  Vicky saw this in a positive light; because of political unrest after the two assassination attempts, she knew repressive measures would be undertaken to restore order, and as they were bound to be unpopular, she thought it as well that Fritz should not be considered responsible for them. It was better for it to be known that he was powerless to oppose conservative policies enacted during his regency.

  When Bismarck dissolved the Reichstag, during the ensuing election campaign the government press made much of the responsibility of the Social Democrats and their alleged left liberal allies for both assassination attempts. The conservatives gained seats at the expense of the liberal and progressive parties, which gave Bismarck a comfortable passage for his anti-socialist bill in the autumn. Though rejected by the centre and progressive parties, it was passed comfortably by the conservatives and national liberals. Its provisions included outlawing of the Social Democratic Party, to which Hödel had belonged, its meetings and assemblies forbidden, and socialists found guilty of breaking the law exiled. To Vicky it was part of a growing reactionary trend in German politics which violated liberal principles of equality before the law and freedom of assembly, though to Fritz socialism was an unhealthy movement to be eradicated.

  The Congress of Berlin opened on 13 June, to revise the unsatisfactory peace terms imposed by Russia on Turkey at the tr
eaty of San Stefano, and was dissolved a month later. Fritz took no part beyond welcoming foreign representatives to the city and addressing them at the gala dinner on the opening night. Though not consulted about negotiations at the conference table, there was little doubt that he approved of Russia’s aims of territorial expansion being thwarted, chiefly due to Disraeli’s and Andrassy’s protection of their own national interests; England took possession of the island of Cyprus, and Austria was permitted to occupy Bosnia and Herzegovina.

  Nobiling was in prison awaiting trial, and died a few weeks later of wounds self-inflicted before his arrest, but Hödel had already been arraigned and sentenced to death. According to Prussian law, executions had to be ratified by the sovereign before being carried out. The Kaiser had always opposed the death penalty and commuted such sentences passed to him for approval to life imprisonment. After the verdict on Hödel, gossips suggested that if the Crown Prince spared him, it would be due to the influence of his consort who wanted to encourage future attempts on her father-inlaw so that she and her husband could come to the throne sooner. Like his father Fritz was reluctant to sanction a death sentence, but the popular view was that it would be foolish to show leniency in such a case, especially as one attempt had so nearly succeeded and it seemed the time for stern measures. After a prolonged period of soul-searching he signed the death warrant on 8 August. General von Albedyll, head of the military cabinet, saw how much Fritz took the matter to heart, and believed he could not sleep on the night of the execution. He was obviously relieved on hearing it was all over, and pleased with a letter from his father thanking him for having spared him the ordeal. Hödel went unrepentantly to the scaffold, crying ‘Bravo for the Commune!’27 before the executioner’s act silenced him.

  When the Kaiser attended a military review at Kassel in September it was evident that he was recovering. He still trembled but was looking much fitter, as he appeared on horseback in public for the first time since June, and in a matter of weeks he was restored to full health. On 5 December Fritz relinquished the hollow regency and the Kaiser returned to Berlin, sobered by the thought that ‘this trial’ had been imposed on him in his own capital and by a fellow-Prussian, but apparently none the worse.

  It was believed that Fritz would be given some special position in the government in recognition of his recent duties, but this proved to be unfounded. The day after stepping down, he received a formal letter of thanks from his ‘affectionate father’, which was impersonal enough to be published in the papers. Wilhelm was certainly grateful to his son for having deputised for him, and had it been in his power perhaps he would have tried to give him something more substantial in return. Yet the shock of his attack had weakened what little resistance to Bismarck the infirmity of old age had left him, and he no longer had the stamina to argue privately with his Chancellor. Far from attempting to disagree with him, as he frequently had before, he was more than ever in the statesman’s clutches. Soon after the end of the regency he became convinced that Germany had been unfairly treated at the Congress, and that Fritz was responsible. He did not realize that his son had played no part, and when a guest at one of the Empress’s parties pointed out that Bismarck alone was to blame for what had taken place, he retorted that his Chancellor was only human. ‘It was but natural that he should try and make himself pleasant to the Crown Prince.’28

  After the Emperor resumed his duties, Bismarck revived a plan which had been mentioned the previous year, to make Fritz Statthalter or governor of Alsace-Lorraine. His motives for doing so were questionable. Some thought it an honest effort by the Chancellor to provide him with some official government duty, though others, including Fritz and Vicky themselves, saw it as a gesture to remove him from Berlin to prevent him from interfering with the conservative programme. Since 1871 the provinces had been governed by a dictatorship from Berlin, but after a few years the conservatives in the Reichstag felt that they should be granted some independence in the hope of uniting them more firmly to the empire. The question of appointing an officer to govern them, answerable only to the Emperor, was raised, and the Crown Prince was the obvious choice. When advised by more sympathetic sources that most of his decisions as Statthalter would be subject to Bismarck’s approval, and he would not have a free hand in filling the posts in his administration of the province, Fritz refused the post.

  In November 1878 diphtheria struck the Grand Ducal family of Hesse, claiming the life of Alice’s youngest daughter May. Just as the rest were recovering, Alice herself died four weeks later, on 14 December, the anniversary of the Prince Consort’s death. Vicky and Fritz were both forbidden by the Kaiser to attend the funeral for fear of infection. Maliciously the Empress commented at a tea-party a week later that it was just as well for Alice’s children that she had died because ‘like all English Princesses, she was a complete atheist’29 – a spiteful judgment on her friendship with the controversial theologian David Strauss.

  In March 1879 Fritz and Vicky went to England to attend the wedding of Louise, daughter of Friedrich Karl, to the Duke of Connaught. The bride’s father distinguished himself by his bad behaviour to his son-in-law’s family, complained that his daughter’s house did not have enough rooms, and told everyone that he had confidently expected his previous visit to England to be his last.

  Within a day or two of returning to Berlin, Fritz and Vicky were watching the younger children rehearsing a pantomime one afternoon when Waldie complained of a sore throat. He was the most appealing of their three sons, and gave promise of being everything the others were not. Although the Prince, Friedrich Karl, never cared much for his nephew and niece, even he admitted that Waldie was ‘the most delightful boy’30 he had ever seen. Yet for all his love of practical jokes and often unruly behaviour, he was a thin, undersized child who had inherited his father’s delicate health. A cold broke down his resistance to the dreaded diphtheria which had killed his aunt and cousin, ominous white patches appeared on his throat, and he could hardly swallow or close his mouth as his tonsils were so swollen. Vicky washed him with hot vinegar and water, changed his linen and clothes and put them all into a pail of carbolic water, wearing a mackintosh over her own clothes and spraying herself with carbolic acid before returning to the others to prevent the spread of infection. Tragically it was all to no avail and on 27 March he died.

  This second untimely death was the worst tragedy that Fritz and Vicky had yet to suffer. When they lost Sigi, Vicky had told Catherine Radziwill that to lose a child was not just a dreadful sorrow, but an unnatural one too – ‘we don’t bring our babies into the world in order to survive them!’31 Waldie’s birth had filled the gap left by his dead brother. Now they were distraught with grief. Not generally given to extravagant displays of emotion, Fritz threw himself on the small coffin at the funeral before Waldie was laid to rest beside the brother he had never known. Even the birth of a first grandchild, Charlotte’s and Bernhard’s daughter Feodora, born on 12 May, brought them no solace. Though he appeared outwardly indifferent, Willy was moved by the effect on his parents. The ‘distress and silent desperation’, he wrote to Georg II, Duke of Saxe-Meiningen, were hard to describe; ‘my poor father has grown old overnight and is so unhappy that he is almost apathetic to everything that happens around him. Mama has shown superhuman strength of character outwardly, but all too often she breaks down in her infinite sorrow.’32

  ‘Ours is indeed a grief which must last a lifetime,’ Vicky wrote to Lord Napier. ‘We can hardly realise yet that we have the lost the darling boy who was our pride and delight, who seemed to grow daily in health and strength, in intelligence and vigour of character. We had fondly hoped he would grow up to be of use to his country, and his family – we had planned and dreamt of a bright and useful future for him – of all that we dare not think now and will not repine, but the wrench is too terrible and Life can never be the same again. He is missed every hour of the day, and the House has lost half its life.’33

  To Carol of Rouman
ia, Fritz wrote that with Waldie’s death life had ‘lost what remaining joy it still had to offer us, and we can only gather satisfaction from the execution of our tasks and duties.’34 A combination of grief at the death of his youngest son, and the effect of years of frustration and the experience of a hollow regency, had given him little encouragement for the future. In a bleak mood of despair in May, he told Vicky that he considered himself henceforth ‘retired from political life’.35 Depression with having ‘been unable to take the reins during the best years of my manhood’ had disheartened him, and the death of Waldie had been what he called the final blow.36

  Vicky writhed with agonised fury when she read that an Orthodox Protestant minister, on hearing of their bereavement, remarked that he hoped it was a trial sent by God to humiliate her.37 She struggled through the next few weeks in shock, with hormonal upsets followed by giddiness, rheumatism and neuralgia. Dr Wegner recommended that she should spend the winter in a warmer climate, though Vicky feared that the Empress would never consent as it coincided with the social season. Soon there were more disquieting symptoms – noises in her head, uncontrollable shaking in her hands, and fear of imminent suffocation. In July she and Fritz agreed that it was essential for her to go away for the winter, to Styria and Italy. The Kaiser and Empress were strongly against the idea, and demanded she present her father-in-law with a medical certificate before he would approve what he scathingly called a ‘bathing trip’.