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.’17
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?’18 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!’19 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.’20
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.’21 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.’22 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?’23
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’.24 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.25
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.’26 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.’)27
Even after settling at Friedrichshof, Vicky continued to spend part of the winter at Berlin, more out of duty than inclination. She liked to keep an eye on her various charities, notably the Victoria Haus for retired British and American governesses, and children’s hospitals, and at the same time she found it easier to see her professor, politician, writer and artist friends in the capital. However she disliked the city and never felt really well or comfortable there; ‘I shrink so from all that is show and ostentation and which forces one into public when on
e’s feelings seem so sacred that one cannot bear to be amongst a quantity of people, some most well-meaning and others who have behaved so ill and now make a show of loyalty, the hypocrisy of which makes me sick’.28
As ever she found solace in visits to Britain, and her informality sometimes led to anxious moments for the family and court. At Osborne in 1896 the Queen’s equerry Frederick Ponsonby was awaiting her arrival when told that a German gentleman was anxious to see him. A man was ushered in and explained in broken English that he had to see the Empress immediately on her arrival. As soon as Her Majesty arrived, Ponsonby said, he would give his card to Count Seckendorff, who would arrange an interview. The man insisted he must see the Empress the moment she stepped ashore. Fearing he was either an anarchist or an escaped lunatic, Ponsonby sent a message to the detective at the gate, telling him that a German passing by in a few minutes had to be watched. A plain-clothes policeman who followed him reported that he was staying at the Medina Hotel, and seemed quiet and respectable if eccentric in his habits, but surveillance was maintained. The next day Vicky arrived, and when she got into a carriage with Princess Beatrice and drove off Ponsonby was astonished to see her wave and kiss her hand to the man as she passed. He was an eminent sculptor from Berlin and an intimate friend of hers, she had told him she would see him the instant she set foot in England and he had taken it literally.29
Her literary tastes and passion for books never ceased to amaze the family and court, as well as provoke arguments. On another visit to Osborne, Lady Ponsonby wrote to her husband of the Empress carrying off six books at a time and finishing them off in a couple of days. Both women regularly discussed their reading matter, and both were forthright personalities who might accept each others’ views with some reluctance. When Lady Ponsonby defended a book she had just read, the Empress ‘listened now and then, but puts on a second-century look which rather prevents one going on.’30 A discussion at dinner between Queen Victoria and her eldest daughter at Balmoral on the subject of novelist Marie Corelli proved an even more lively occasion. The Queen thought she was one of the greatest writers of the day, while the Empress called her work ‘trash’. To support her argument she asked Frederick Ponsonby for his opinion. Unaware that his sovereign was such an admirer, he said that notwithstanding the popularity of Corelli’s books, he thought the secret of her success was that her writings appealed to the semi-educated. The Empress clapped her hands and the subject was instantly dropped.31
Count Seckendorff had remained at the head of her household, as devoted as ever. As a gifted draughtsman who shared her love of art, he particularly enjoyed their expeditions abroad when both would sketch or paint side by side in the open air. A belief persisted in certain sections of Berlin society until his death in 1910 that he and the Empress Frederick had shared much more together, that they had been lovers or even secretly married. The liberal journalist Maximilian Harden published a tribute after her death in which he referred to her resting in the Friedenskirche, Potsdam, beside her first husband; and ‘a celebrated old general’, who had been a friend of Fritz, once remarked that he was convinced that the widowed Empress had married Seckendorff, as he was ‘a very charming gentleman and their tastes harmonise in everything.’32* Yet Vicky had loved Fritz passionately, and the possibility that she could have secretly taken a second husband cannot be taken seriously. When discussing similar gossip with her maid of honour Marie de Bunsen, regarding a theory that Baron Roggenbach and a princess of Wied were husband and wife, she dismissed it at once. To her it was merely ‘an unusually beautiful friendship, but of course people can’t be induced to believe it.’33
In 1897 Vicky returned to England for her mother’s Diamond Jubilee festivities. She was saddened by the absences of those who had attended the Jubilee celebrations of ten years previously; Fritz, the Duke of Clarence, Grand Duke Louis of Hesse and Henry, Beatrice’s husband, were all sorely missed. Nevertheless she wrote excitedly to Sophie of the celebrations, London streets beautifully decorated, immense crowds and tremendous enthusiasm, and the impressive scene in front of St Paul’s. It was good to be among family once again, though Buckingham Palace was ‘like a beehive, the place is so crammed we do not see very much of one another.’34
In September 1898 she was riding with Mossy when her horse took fright at a threshing machine and threw her off. Her coat caught in the pommel as she fell, and though her head and shoulders were on the ground, she was badly shaken but otherwise only bruised by the horse treading on her hand. She made light of the accident, and the doctors confirmed that her injuries were only superficial. For a few days she was confined to her room with a temperature and a swollen arm, restlessly moving from bed to sofa to keep the aches and pains at bay.
A few days later she went to Breslau for the wedding of her granddaughter Feodora to Prince Henry XXX of Reuss. Horrified by the recent assassination of her friend Elizabeth, Empress of Austria, stabbed by an anarchist in Geneva, she was already in low spirits. On the way she was unwell with severe lumbago, and the ceremony was further overshadowed by the absence of the Kaiser. His presence at manoeuvres nearby did nothing to dispel the impression that a rift between himself and Ditta had never healed, following a scandal at court some six years previously in which an indiscreet diary of hers containing ‘secrets’ about her brother and the Empress had been lost or stolen and fallen into his hands.
Later that month she went to Balmoral for what proved to be her last visit to Britain, but she was in such pain that she could only find relief in long walks which exhausted her ladies-in-waiting. While there she received confirmation from the doctor that she had cancer, which was too advanced to be operable. As Fritz had done eleven years earlier, she received the verdict with courage. She had survived a desperately unhappy period of widowhood, calumniated and ostracized beyond measure; she had built her own home in Germany, and found some peace of mind with family and friends; she had had the time to enjoy her collections of books and arts, to look after her charities, to see all her surviving children married, and welcome several grandchildren into the world. Yet the Germany of the day was not, and never would be, the empire that it might have been had it not been for her husband’s untimely death. At first she told nobody of her illness but her mother, Bertie, and Beatrice. An attack of dizziness alarmed her while she was visiting friends near Edinburgh, but otherwise she had no premonition of anything being seriously wrong with her. From England she went to Bordighera, on the Italian Riviera, and after staying at Florence and Venice she returned to Friedrichshof in May 1899.
Soon afterwards she told her Lord Chamberlain, the faithful Baron Reischach, in confidence. He could not believe her at first as she still looked so healthy, ‘sunburned and robust’,35 and when he realized she was telling the truth he broke down and wept. She assured him that she felt she would be able to resist the illness for another ten years, and that by the time she was seventy she would be ready to enter eternal rest.
From this time onwards her health began to deteriorate, and she was too ill to go to England for Queen Victoria’s eightieth birthday celebrations on 24 May. As her sufferings steadily increased, the doctors advised her to go abroad to a warmer climate. She chose her beloved Italy, but by the time she reached Trento the pain was so severe that she could get up and down the hotel stairs only with difficulty. It hurt her to lie down at night, and when she tried to sit up in a chair; walking was easier. Professor Renvers wanted her to be out of doors and have as much sun and fresh air as possible. By December her doctors realized that the persistent denial that she was suffering from anything worse than lumbago was beginning to sound hollow, and they thought it was essential that her family should be warned that the problem was more serious. She was also experiencing acute discomfort, it was announced, from neuralgia in the region of the spine and hips.
Returning to Germany in spring 1900 and temporarily improving, she celebrated her mother’s eighty-first birthday by inviting all her children, their spouses and seve
ral of their small children to Friedrichshof for luncheon. A few group photographs were taken to mark the occasion and to be sent to England. Vicky appeared in the centre of them all, a small white-haired figure clad in black, dwarfed by the imposing figures of her eldest son and Moretta, the tallest of her daughters.
In July she was horrified to hear that her brother Affie, who had succeeded their uncle Ernest as Duke of Saxe-Coburg Gotha in 1893, had cancer of the throat, and a few days later she was told of his death. It was a severe shock to mother and daughter, especially as by this time Queen Victoria’s former remarkably good health was beginning to give cause for concern. By the autumn Vicky was rarely free from pain, which frequent morphia injections, sometimes as frequently as every two hours throughout the night, did not always alleviate. ‘Never have the spasms been so frightfully violent as these last days,’ she wrote to Sophie. ‘If somebody had put me out of my misery I should have felt intensely thankful.’ Sleep was almost impossible, with frequent pain, ‘too violent, like ever so many razors driven into my back.’ By the time of her sixtieth birthday in November, it was clear that this would be her last. Her hands were so swollen that she had to dictate most of her letters to her daughters, who took turns to come to Friedrichshof and help look after her, while her legs were ‘shrunken and fallen away to nothing, a mere skeleton.’36
Dearest Vicky, Darling Fritz Page 30
