Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires

by Justin C. Vovk

  As a young girl, Dona had a natural artistic ability for drawing and sketching, though this was not stressed heavily at any point in her education. Her taste in music was typical for the period, embracing traditional German composers and operas. She showed little interest or taste for the more classical Italian pieces. A good and disciplined student, though not terribly bright, she did her best to be attentive in her lessons. History most appealed to her when it revolved around Germany, especially Prussia—proof that the indiscretions of the past, courtesy of Otto von Bismarck, had by now been more or less forgotten by her. Books and newspapers were noticeably omitted from her education. Religious tutoring in the Evangelical Lutheran faith impacted her greatly. The black-and-white nature of God, the devil, sin, and salvation appealed to her way of looking at the world. All indicators are that German was her first language, though she spoke English fluently. She may have been tutored in French, but how long these lessons were carried out is hard to determine. Like most princesses, she also excelled in handicrafts like knitting, sewing, and crochet. Beyond the formal lessons in the schoolroom at Primkenau, Dona was being taught other lessons by her father. The idea of a German prince personally educating his daughter was truly a modern one in the nineteenth century. The duke insisted on taking an active role in Dona’s upbringing. He insisted on a vigorous exercise regimen that began early each morning. In good and bad weather alike, Fritz took Dona and Calma on long walks in the vast forests surrounding the castle.

  Money continued to be a problem, even as Dona entered her adolescent years. Maintaining their large castle and its expansive grounds required so much money that the family could not even afford a formal carriage if they wanted to travel. When they wanted to go anywhere, the duke was forced to hire a local farmer to chauffeur them in a hand-drawn wooden cart sometimes pulled by a cow or a mule. Their own financial troubles did not stop the Holsteins from working to improve the quality of life for the peasants living around their estate. When the Holsteins arrived at Primkenau, the level of poverty was quite high. To help those less fortunate, Fritz provided jobs on his estate for those that wanted them. He later began donating considerable sums of money for the ducal chaplain to use to help those living nearby who suffered from serious needs. Even the meager pocket money Dona received was often saved up and distributed in large amounts by the local pastors at Christmas. Most of the time, Dona and her sisters went with the chaplain to give out money and tend to the needs of the local populations. It was normal for them to make long treks into the countryside on foot, loaded with money, gifts, and medicine. One particularly touching story about Dona recalled her “walking with her sister in the country lanes near Primkenau, [when] she saw an old woman dragging a little cart with great difficulty. The Princesses ran to her, and themselves dragged the cart up the hill.”65

  It was in this humble, picturesque setting in the summer of 1875 that seventeen-year-old Dona and her sister Calma were confirmed in the Evangelical Lutheran Church. The simple ceremony, which was presided over by a certain Pastor Meissner, was attended by only the duke, duchess, and their family and household. Meissner commented that he was “delighted at the answers given by his pupils” during the service.66 Now that Dona was officially recognized as a young woman, the duke and duchess decided it was time for her to appear at more well-connected courts. Since Fritz and Ada had little disposable income beyond what they needed to maintain Primkenau, these trips were often financed by their relatives in Coburg, Baden, and Carlsruhe. Dona was especially fond of visiting her uncle and aunt the Prince and Princess of Hohenlohe-Langenburg. The Holsteins were not so poor that traveling was limited to Germany. On more than one occasion, Dona visited the south of France, which had only recently become a popular vacation spot for royals. She seemed to display little affection for the French Mediterranean; her tastes were unfalteringly German.

  Dona’s travels also invariably took her to England to visit her uncle Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg and his wife, Princess Helena. As the third daughter of Queen Victoria, Helena was extremely wealthy—compared to Dona’s family. This wealth paid for the couple’s seventeenth-century home, Cumberland Lodge, in Windsor Great Park. As a guest at Cumberland, Dona naturally gravitated toward Helena, who was only twelve years older than herself, rather than her unseemly, middle-aged uncle. Christian—like many of the other Holsteins—had no claim to fame. The closest semblance he ever had to a career was serving in the Prussian army. He was stripped of his commission and banished from Prussia after the Second Schleswig War simply for being Fritz Holstein’s younger brother. Now middle-aged, he had no money, little hair, bad teeth, and smoked incessantly. In later years, he became especially eccentric after losing one of his eyes when he was accidentally shot in the face by his brother-in-law the Duke of Connaught. He amassed a large collection of glass eyes that he brought out at dinner parties to show his unlucky guests. “He would explain the history of each at great length,” recalled one witness, “his favourite being a blood-shot eye which he wore when he had a cold.”67

  During Dona’s prolonged stay in England in 1878, she became acquainted with the tall, handsome Prince Wilhelm (“Willy”) of Prussia. He was the eldest child of Fritz Holstein’s old friend Crown Prince Frederick (“Fritz”) of Germany, and his wife, Vicky, Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter. Dona and Willy had first met in 1868, when the Holsteins visited Willy’s parents in Potsdam, but it was not until their encounter at Cumberland Lodge that they first really noticed each other. “It was there [at Cumberland], that William and I fell in love with each other,” Dona recalled later in life.68 Vicky had hoped for some time that her son would cross paths with Dona, whom she thought would make an excellent wife. “I hear much about your Cousins of Holstein!” she wrote to Willy in May 1878. “Victoria [Dona] is the favorite of Uncle Christian & Aunt Helena, & they also think her the prettiest which I fancy you do also!”69

  Dona and Willy’s relationship took a decisive turn in 1879. The prince was on a hunting trip at Görlitz, near Primkenau, when he received an invitation from Dona’s father to join him for a pheasant hunt. Willy accepted—at his parents’ insistence—and arrived in late April. One afternoon, when Willy was exploring the gardens around the castle, he came upon Dona, dressed in a white muslin gown with flowers in her golden hair. She was napping in a hammock tied between two rose garland firs. As she lay there, her “softly chiselled features, hair sombre gold in the shadow,” her lips were “half parted in a smile, as if her dreams were singularly pleasant ones.” Willy was instantly in love. “Dornröschen!” (“Sleeping Beauty!”) he muttered.70 Later, he penned a note to the Duke of Schleswig-Holstein, confessing, “Your daughter Dona, whom I so dearly adore, has so delighted me and carried me away with her whole being and her nature that I immediately resolved with great clarity and firmness to devote all my efforts to fighting for her hand. I can hardly describe to you how dear she has become to me over the last few days, and how difficult it was for me taking my leave of her to only be able to press her hand.”71

  Willy—officially named Frederick Wilhelm Victor Albrecht—was tall and handsome, with dark eyes and fair hair, but he and Dona had led radically different lives. Unlike the princess, he had spent his entire life being groomed for greatness. He was born on January 27, 1859, in Berlin—making him four months younger than Dona, an unusual occurrence in royal romances. At the time of his birth, he was second in line for the throne of Prussia. After the Franco-Prussian War and German unification of 1871, he also became second in line for the German imperial throne after his grandfather was crowned emperor. Thanks to the intermarriages of Europe’s royal houses, Willy was a first cousin on his mother’s side to Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt; the future king of England, George V; and the future queens Marie of Romania, Maud of Norway, and Victoria Eugenie of Spain. His own sister Sophie would become queen consort of Greece. As a grandson of Queen Victoria, he and Dona were second half cousins. By the time Willy was twenty,
his good looks and seemingly kind nature proved intoxicating to the impressionable Dona. This was hardly a surprising development considering the somewhat limited upbringing Dona experienced in which she was never really exposed to royal opulence. But like so much else in the Holstein family, the blossoming romance between Willy and Dona was overshadowed by tragedy.

  While staying at an inn near Wiesbaden in January 1880, Dona’s father, Fritz, died from cancer. His long and painful battle had been made worse by his doctor prescribing arsenic as a treatment. The strain of Fritz’s death pushed Ada over the edge. Still reeling from yet another blast of postpartum depression from the birth of her last child (a daughter, Feodora, who arrived in 1874) and plagued by an increasingly unstable and depressed personality, the death of her husband sent the Duchess of Schleswig-Holstein into a dark tailspin of grief. During Fritz’s funeral at Primkenau, her hysterics were so dramatic that her cries kept interrupting the vicar’s speech. Her relationship with Dona fell apart completely in the weeks that followed. Ada’s grief was made all the worse by her now-obvious bipolar disorder, causing her moods to become violent and erratic. According to one witness, the “situation leads daily to unpleasant scenes which the young lady [Dona] rides out with exemplary grace and submissiveness.”72 Little wonder then that Willy—and imperial Germany—proved alluring to Dona or that she accepted when Willy proposed on February 14, 1880, Saint Valentine’s Day.

  The complex marriage negotiations went forward under Ernest Stockmar, son of the famed Baron Christian Stockmar, who had negotiated the marriage between Willy’s grandparents, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. The queen was quite supportive of Willy marrying Dona, since she knew that Dona’s father had been a close friend of Fritz and Vicky’s. She also felt a personal connection to Dona’s family, beyond the one she already shared through her half sister, Dona’s grandmother Feodora, and her son-in-law, Dona’s uncle Christian. This was because, during the Second Schleswig War, she had vehemently supported Frederick VIII’s claim to the throne. Unlike in London, news of the romance was not received so well in Berlin, where most of the Hohenzollerns looked down on Dona as not being ebenbürtig enough to marry the heir to the German and Prussian thrones.

  The only person whose voice really mattered was Willy’s grandfather and namesake. As head of the House of Hohenzollern, Emperor Wilhelm I’s approval of the marriage was required. If Prussia orbited the Hohenzollerns, then the Hohenzollerns orbited the emperor. Wilhelm I was a shockingly simple man. Unquestionably a soldier, he had little use for the trappings of royalty. He slept on an army cot, ate off a card table, and marked the level of wine in his bottles to make sure the servants did not steal any of it. Born in 1797 just after the outbreak of the French Revolution, he was raised at a time when both Prussia and monarchism were under attack. As a young man, he became fiercely protective of both his homeland and the sanctity of royal blood. As such, when he was approached in 1880 with the news that his grandson wanted to marry the daughter of the Duke of Schleswig-Holstein, he shared his countrymen’s concern for her insufficiently royal family. He was further unnerved by Prussia’s—and Otto von Bismarck’s—history with the Holsteins. At one point, Bismarck was heard to unkindly call Dona “the cow from Holstein.”73

  The emperor acquiesced only when Bismarck, who had become indifferent to the match after Frederick VIII’s death, admitted that by marrying Dona, the sins they had committed over Schleswig-Holstein might be somewhat forgotten, if not forgiven. With his chancellor’s obsequious blessing, Wilhelm I gave his approval for the complex marriage negotiations to continue apace on one condition: Dona’s family must sign away all rights to the throne of the twin duchies forever, with the explicit understanding that Dona’s brother Ernest Günther, who was now the titular Duke of Schleswig-Holstein, and any descendants they might have would never again try to reclaim their lost rights. This was agreed upon, and the emperor offered the family an annual stipend of $75,000, an impressive sum for that era.

  The German emperor’s final approval put an end to any official anti-Holstein propaganda in Berlin, though a certain level of grassroots hostility toward Dona would continue for some time. With the emperor’s approval now official, the Hohenzollerns embarked on a summer vacation at the medieval Babelsberg Castle, on the banks of the river Havel near Potsdam. One night in June, the royal family, led by Wilhelm I and his cantankerous wife, Empress Augusta, officially announced their grandson’s engagement to a small party of fifty-four. That night, Willy recorded in his diary his feelings about the match. Though his words do not reveal any trace of love, they do show his admiration and respect for Dona. His entry also hints at some of the political undercurrents of the union.

  My marriage with the Princess Augusta Victoria of Schleswig Holstein Augustenburg [sic] has been decided upon and declared. I like the Princess. She is a charming, fresh, German girl, who will make a perfect Empress, and at the same time an excellent wife. My mother and father, as well as the Emperor and Prince Bismarck, are quite pleased at … my betrothal, which in a certain sense is a political event, because it puts an end to a feud [with the Holsteins] that has lasted for something like fifteen years, and has reconciled our House with one of the minor dynasties that have had to suffer through the rise of Prussia. I have thus fulfilled the injunction given to me by Prince Bismarck one year ago, to marry a German princess, and not to introduce another foreigner in our home [e.g., his English mother, Vicky].… As for my future wife, she need not fear that I shall ever be wanting in respect and consideration in regard to her. I shall know how to treat her, and honour in her a German Empress, and the mother of future German Emperors. But I shall certainly not allow her to have anything to do with my private affairs or those of the State.74

  Willy’s grandmother Empress Augusta understood all too well the difficulties faced by marrying a Hohenzollern prince. She cautioned Dona that Willy “needed much understanding love” and that it was “the serious and difficult task of his wife to help him understand the true nature of his high office.”75

  The apparently warm, congenial atmosphere at Babelsberg concealed a deeply divided family whose troubled epicenter was Willy himself. As a child, he “came under the influence of his tyrannical German grandmother, the Empress Augusta, who spoiled him, bribed him and stimulated the development of that ‘terrible Prussian pride’ that his parents had hoped to discourage.”76 As Willy grew older, his German grandparents used him as a weapon against Fritz and Vicky especially, whom they disliked and distrusted for her liberal ideologies. By the time Dona met Willy, he was a deeply flawed individual caught in a perpetual love-hate relationship with his parents that would only get worse with time and, in the process, would suck Dona in until she was a part of the struggle herself. Those around Willy considered it a stroke of luck that he had found someone as loving and supportive as Dona. Georg Hinzpeter, his childhood tutor, elatedly wrote to Dona when he heard the news of their engagement: “May I tell Your Royal Highness how greatly relieved I went home, convinced that my dearly beloved problem child has had the inestimable fortune to unite himself for life with someone who understands him and sympathizes with his weaknesses.”77

  Over the next few months, Willy carried out a trothplighting campaign through a daily exchange of letters. The bride-to-be, who was not normally given to public displays of affection, poured out a wellspring of emotions to her fiancé. She addressed him in a plethora of loving clichés like “heart’s treasure,” “Herzblatt,” or “Schatzi.” She ended her letters just as passionately. She closed one letter by writing, “I so look forward, my heart’s treasure, to the moment when I can kiss you again so ardently and look into your dear beautiful eyes.”78 During a visit to Cumberland Lodge after her engagement, Dona expressed her impatience to Willy at having to wait for her wedding.

  I thank you with my whole heart for your last 2 letters … I have kissed them instead of you, for you wrote me so many loving and kind things that my longing for you became all the grea
ter. I too cannot express how I am looking forward to the moment when after all the ceremonies we are completely alone with each other and I can flee into your arms after all the turmoil & excitement. It will truly be a happy feeling. And to obey, it will probably not be so bad, my heart’s treasure?79

  Leading up to her wedding, Dona could not contain her excitement. In one of her last letters to Willy before becoming his wife, she wrote, “Your sweet words did me such good that it was as if you gazed into my heart and had discovered the longing which so completely and especially fills my heart at this time in particular.”80 Willy was just as anxious as Dona was for the wedding day to approach. Shortly before the big day, he wrote to one of his aunts, “I hope with God’s help together with the incomparable Princess to make a Christian and good house like the one I see and revere of my grandparents.”81

  On Saturday, February 26, 1881, Dona made her triumphant entry into Germany’s capital. The procession in the streets of Berlin to welcome the princess proved to be a brilliant imperial pageant watched by tens of thousands of clamoring spectators. The black-and-white Prussian flag with its black crowned eagle decorated the buildings along Unter den Linden. The bride was preceded by unending lines of military officers, troops, and officials marching down Berlin’s main thoroughfare, led by the city’s master butchers as part of an ancient tradition. Next came the imperial carriage carrying Dona and Vicky, which was resplendently covered with gold and glass and drawn by horses dressed in the Prussian military livery. The smiling bride-to-be graciously waved to her future subjects, emanating a youthful enthusiasm that belied the fact that she was freezing cold wearing a dress that left her shoulders uncovered—a piece of traditional etiquette demanded by the uncompromising Prussian court. Behind Dona and Vicky’s carriage was Willy on horseback, dressed as a Captain of the Bodyguard. As they passed through the Brandenburg Gate, white doves were released from atop the monument as a seventy-two-gun salute boomed across the winter sky. The royal family made their way to Berlin’s primary palace, the Stadtschloss, with its awe-inspiring colonnaded grand entrance built beneath an equally impressive Romanesque dome. Waiting to welcome Dona when she arrived at the palace at 3:00 p.m. was the emperor, Fritz, and a full military honor guard. On entering, everyone signed the final marriage contract between the bride and groom. That night, celebrations took place “throughout the city, and dense joyous crowds paraded the streets until a late hour.”82 Few countries could match the magnificence of the welcome that Germany extended for the woman who would become its last empress.