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

by Justin C. Vovk

  As her husband worked to steer the German ship of state, Dona continued to devote herself to being a model empress and Landesmutter. Though, after a decade in Prussia, Dona continued to be viewed by the country’s elite as provincial and unsophisticated, the same could not be said for the greater German population. In many ways, these ordinary citizens were the people with whom Dona connected the most. Her sparse childhood gave her great sensitivity to the hardships endured by others, especially women and children. Where the masses were concerned, their empress was a bridge between them and the monarchy. Her religious views were especially important in developing a rapport with the German people. Southern states like Bavaria may have been Roman Catholic, and though Wilhelm II tried to win German Catholic public opinion by making symbolic gestures, it was Prussia and the more dominant northern kingdoms that were almost fanatical in their adherence to German Lutheranism.

  Known as both the Prussian Union and the Evangelical Christian Church, German Lutheranism melded extremely well with Empress Augusta Victoria’s devoted, serious nature. Its forms and beliefs, bred into her since she was a small child, continued to strike a deep chord in Dona’s heart, even into adulthood. She was especially receptive to the core Lutheran belief in salvation by faith alone, not by good works and prayer. Unlike so many other rulers, the empress’s faith was at the very core of her being, and she looked upon matters of life, salvation, and eternity with seriousness. She interpreted biblical scriptures literally. According to one member of the Prussian court, “her view is that without religion no people can really be great, nor do they deserve the protection of Providence.”189 Not everyone saw Dona’s faith as a strength. Foreign observers, certain members of Berlin high society, and some southern Catholic political groups accused the empress of using Lutheranism to promote narrow-minded bigotry. It was reported by a contemporary that Dona dismissed those members of her household who were not committed members of the Evangelical Church. A more widely known incident took place in 1893, when the empress nearly caused an international incident when, during a visit to Rome, she refused to meet with the pope. Her feelings went well beyond the political arena. Wilhelm became friends with Albert Ballin, passenger division chief of the Hamburg-America Line. Ballin was responsible for naming his company’s newest ship, the Auguste Victoria, in the empress’s honor. Dona was impressed but disapproved of her husband’s friendship with Ballin because he was Jewish.

  As a woman who strictly subscribed to the tenets of Lutheranism and divinely appointed monarchy, the empress naturally believed that she and Wilhelm were called to rule by God’s will. In Prussia, the connection between the monarch and God was so strong that coronations were often forgone because it was an accepted fact that the king, the state, and God were already as one, and no ceremony was needed to show this. Wilhelm II took this ideal to a new level. His “belief in himself as the divinely appointed mediator between God and his subjects was absolutely central to his conviction that it was the emperor’s task, and his alone, to concentrate and reconcile in his person the divergent interests of regions, classes and confessions.”190 He and Dona were among the last rulers in Europe to claim they reigned by divine right. “We Hohenzollerns,” Wilhelm once announced, “are the bailiffs of God.”191

  The empress had a less self-centered but equally grandiose view of divine right as her husband. This belief in God-given authority extended into Dona’s general political views. Lamar Cecil, Wilhelm’s American biographer, described her conservatism this way:

  Dona’s ideas were undeviatingly conservative. She protested that she understood “little about politics,” which was probably true enough, and she never attempted, as had Wilhelm’s mother, to play a central role in affairs of state. But that did not mean that Dona cut herself off from politics, for she believed ardently in the maintenance of Hohenzollern prerogative, German superiority, and conservative principles. Modernity, whether in the arts, in religion, or in social behavior, was beyond the pale, and Dona was swift to view with suspicion all that was not solidly old-fashioned and German. When the Kaiserin thought that any traditional values were threatened, she did not hesitate to intervene, urging Wilhelm to act decisively to ensure their preservation.192

  At this point in her life, Dona’s faith was a source of strength because she was living through a difficult period that taxed her already sensitive nerves. In the summer of 1890, the Russian tsar sent Wilhelm a troika accompanied by three wild Asiatic stallions. It was clear that the horses had never been properly broken in, making riding in the troika especially dangerous. Dona begged Wilhelm not to use it but to no avail. Only when the Russian driver who had arrived along with it asked for more money was he let go, a German driver brought in, and the horses properly trained. Hot on the heels of the troika episode came a state visit by King Leopold II of the Belgians, a man Dona thoroughly hated. Disaster nearly struck when Leopold was seriously burned by boiling water while taking a bath; some historians have argued the king blamed Dona for his injury. During the visit, Leopold behaved so reprehensibly that Dona ordered the court chaplain to perform an exorcism on his apartments when he left. The final contretemps for Dona came that autumn. Against Wilhelm’s wishes, she surprised him and his retinue during a hunt at Hubertusstock. Dressed in a snow-white outfit, Dona’s arrival frightened the deer being hunted, causing the men to not catch anything that day. Wilhelm was furious and ordered Dona to eat alone that night with her lady-in-waiting.

  No sooner had she been returned to grace in her husband’s affections than her convictions brought her into direct conflict with Wilhelm’s more moderate sister Sophie, now the crown princess of Greece. In November 1890, Wilhelm’s other sister, Moretta, was getting married to Prince Adolf of Schaumburg-Lippe. Tino and Sophie, who were now expecting their first child, came from Greece for the wedding. Once Moretta and Adolf had left for their honeymoon in Cairo, Sophie quietly told her family that she planned to convert from Lutheranism to the Greek Orthodox faith. Wilhelm took this as a personal affront. Furious, he could not find the words to confront his sister, so he asked Dona to do it. It is possible the emperor “thought Sophie would be more open to her sister-in-law than to him, and perhaps he thought she would not dare to argue with the heavily pregnant Empress,” who was well into her third trimester by now.193

  The meeting that followed was a disaster. Dona summoned Sophie to her apartments.

  “I hear you are thinking of changing your religion,” she said. “We shall never agree to that. If you have no feeling about it yourself, William, as Head of the Church and of our family, will speak to you.… You will end up in hell.”

  “That does not concern anyone here and I do not need to ask anyone,” Sophie shot back.194 “As for William,” she snapped, “I know him better than that, he has absolutely no religion. If he had, he would never have behaved as he did [when Fritz died].”195

  A disgusted Sophie stormed out of the meeting, slamming the door behind her. Dona became so hysterical that doctors had to be called in to calm her down. “The audacity of Dona to speak to Sophie like that!” Queen Victoria wrote indignantly.196 Angry at being humiliated, Dona implored her husband to intervene. The next day, he showed up at the Neues Palais dressed in full imperial regalia and threatened, “If my sister does anything like [converting] I will forbid her [from entering] the country.”197 Later, Wilhelm sent an angry letter to Vicky and to Sophie’s father-in-law, King George of Greece. He said that if Sophie went ahead with her conversion, she would be forbidden from entering Germany for the rest of her life. Both Queen Victoria and the Empress Frederick were fuming. In the queen’s eyes, it was not Wilhelm who was at fault but Dona. In a letter to Sophie, Vicky relayed the queen’s opinions: “I cannot say how grieved and distressed I am at what has happened, and which was so entirely unnecessary and uncalled for. I think it was all Dona’s love of interference.”198

  Two weeks later, in December 1890, Dona went into premature labor with her sixth child. At the time, Wil
helm was attending a performance of Tannhäuser at the Opera House on Unter den Linden. During the performance, the emperor received a note that his wife was in labor. He shot up out of his seat and immediately departed. The opera manager was informed why the emperor was leaving so abruptly, who then went and announced Dona’s accouchement to the audience. At the news, the people erupted into applause, cried out, “God save the Emperor and Empress!” and “long live the emperor and empress,” and sang the national anthem.199

  The onset of Dona’s labor pains brought with it greater anxiety than in the past. Her almost consecutive pregnancies made each successive birth that much more difficult; she had a particularly difficult time coming back from her delivery in 1888. Since then, she had suffered at least two miscarriages, maybe more, and her doctors had advised her to not have any more children—a warning she obviously did not heed. Whether or not Wilhelm ever knew of his wife’s miscarriages is not recorded. It is consistent with Dona’s character that she may have hidden her medical difficulties from her husband. What is certain, however, is that her latest accouchement was quickly becoming perilous. She fought to keep her screams under control as she struggled through some of the worst labor pains she had ever experienced. An entire team of doctors and nurses waited upon the laboring empress, who was forced to submit to paddles and forceps to retrieve the infant when it became lodged in the birth canal. The attending physicians were hesitant to intervene directly, since there was a dangerous precedent for those doctors who chose to do so. In 1817, when the delivery of Princess Charlotte—the heir to the British throne before Queen Victoria—turned perilous, the doctor at the time intervened, but when both mother and child perished, he committed suicide. Eventually, the decision to intervene in Dona’s delivery was made, and the child was saved—but at a high price.

  For nearly two days afterward, the doctors feared for the empress’s life because of constant hemorrhaging. It took another month for her to begin to show signs of recovery. The child was Dona’s last son, whom Wilhelm named Joachim Francis Humbert, or simply Joachim for short. Wilhelm blamed the premature birth on Dona’s confrontation with Sophie. Vicky, with more than a touch of sarcasm in her writing, explained the situation to Queen Victoria: “The version here … is that I made a scene to Dona, announcing to her that Sophie had turned Greek, and in consequence, Dona had fallen ill, & the baby had been born too soon.”200 One of Wilhelm II’s biographers has noted “William instantly blamed his sister for upsetting Dona; though the probability is that Dona’s accumulated anxieties plus far too much riding and tight corseting had caused the premature birth.”201

  Even the happy occasion of a new baby, Dona’s recovery, and her manifold popularity for giving Prussia and the empire a sixth prince, was overshadowed by the immutable Hohenzollern family politics. When Joachim was christened, the Empress Frederick offered to hold her new grandson, “as the Empress Augusta or Emperor Wilhelm held all mine,” she recalled. But Dona denied her this, claiming, “William does not wish it as you are not the godmother.”202 Months after Joachim’s birth, there was continued hostility even toward Crown Princess Sophie, especially after she converted. Five months after the fact, Wilhelm wrote to his grandmother that “Sophy [sic] made poor Dona—in the highest state of expectancy—an awful scene [sic] in which she behaved in a simply incredible manner like a naughty child which has been caught doing wrong. My poor wife got ill and bore too early and was for two days at death’s door.” He finished with his usual melodramatic style, writing in big letters, “If my poor Baby dies it is solely Sophy’s fault and she has murdered it.”203

  Wilhelm and Dona’s intransigence toward Sophie’s conversion may have been consistent with Prussian ultraconservatism, but it did not earn them any points with their extended family. This fact was obvious when the emperor announced that he and his wife would travel to Britain in July 1891 for their first official state visit to the country. No one in the British royal family was happy about the visit. Queen Victoria was in the midst of hosting the wedding of one her granddaughters—Princess Marie Louise204—to Prince Aribert of Anhalt. The queen rightly believed that Wilhelm and Dona’s presence would upstage the bride and groom, but the imperial couple insisted on coming anyway. Victoria was livid, but her daughter-in-law the Duchess of Edinburgh pointed out that although the queen might decry “that dreadful tyrant Wilhelm who always takes things so badly and makes rows about anything,” once she saw him in person, the trouble would “all disappear.”205

  On July 4, the imperial yacht Hohenzollern arrived at the port town of Sheerness in Kent. Traveling abroad was never a small affair for the emperor and empress. Dona’s suite alone was typically smaller than her husband’s. It consisted of “ladies and gentlemen in waiting, marshals, equerries, masters of the hounds, valets, chamberlains, treasurers, her overseers of the plate, gun-chargers, mouth-cooks, and the cloud of footmen, couriers, coachmen, and grooms.” When Dona’s foreign tours did not include royal stops, she also brought her own linens for her bed and bathroom.206 On this particular visit, Dona’s personal suite numbered almost a hundred individuals. When they docked at Sheerness, they were met by the three highest-ranking men in the British royal family: the Prince of Wales, his son Eddy, and his brother the Duke of Connaught. As a sign of respect, all three were dressed in the uniform of the Prussian Hussars, accented by the gold sash of the Order of the Black Eagle. Upon taking the train to Windsor, Wilhelm and Dona were received by the rest of the royal family.

  On July 10, the emperor and empress were hosted by the Lord Mayor of London. They were cheered by thousands of people as they drove through the city streets. Dona calmly waved while Wilhelm returned the salutes of the crowd. Wilhelm felt he was greeted with the proper respect due to “the most powerful of Continental monarchs.” He was equally pleased to learn “that no foreign ruler—not even Napoleon III on his visit after the victorious war in the Crimea in 1855—had ever been greeted with anything approaching” this level of enthusiasm. There was no doubt that Wilhelm was a smashing success with the British people, but Dona—who was dressed in frumpy brown and gray dresses—managed to offend almost the entire royal court. She created “a very disagreeable impression by her stiffness, rudeness and arrogance towards the royal family and even towards the Queen.”207 Wilhelm’s cousin Princess Marie of Edinburgh described Dona’s attitude toward foreigners as a “stereotyped graciousness which too much resembled condescension to be quite pleasant.”208 Her growing Anglophobia took hold, prompting her to compare everything to life in Germany. She also made no effort to hide the fact that she distrusted non-Germans. Given Dona’s performance during the visit, it surprised many when she decided to remain privately in England for a few weeks while Wilhelm embarked on a trip to Norway aboard the Hohenzollern. This is perhaps the only time in Dona’s life—aside from childhood visits to her family—that she took a holiday in England. Declaring it a personal family vacation, she took her six sons, their tutors, governesses, and staff to Felixstowe in Suffolk.

  Personal time with her children was tremendously important to Dona, whose family life was contented. She was devoted to each of her six sons yet had a unique relationship with each of them. Crown Prince Willy was brought up with more exacting discipline than his brothers, since he was the heir. There was a long-standing tradition of discord between fathers and sons in the Hohenzollern family. As far back as Frederick the Great and his father, King Frederick Wilhelm I, in the 1720s, Prussian rulers and their heirs had been viciously at odds. Wilhelm II had a difficult relationship with Frederick III, who had a difficult relationship with Wilhelm I, and so on. The Hohenzollern women tended to fall in line with their husbands as it pertained to raising their children, but Dona was more hands-on and affectionate with her sons than many of her predecessors. She was overly anxious and protective of Joachim, whose premature birth had left him sickly. Oscar was undoubtedly the empress’s favorite because she felt he had a chivalrous, brave personality. She also could not help b
ut have compassion when his older, stronger brothers picked on him. Auwi and Adalbert gave their mother little frustration. Her second son, Eitel-Fritz, though Dona unquestionably loved him, was showing signs that concerned her. Even at a young age, the prince—who was ironically Wilhelm’s favorite son—was becoming willful, stubborn, and mischievous, all traits that his mother could not abide. They were also traits that would get substantially worse with time.

  The birth of six sons meant that Dona was truly living in a man’s world. When she discovered at the end of 1891 that she was pregnant again, she earnestly hoped it would be a daughter. On September 13, 1892, she went into labor at the Marble Palace. Early the next morning, the Guards Field Artillery fired twenty-one shots over Potsdam to announce the birth of a daughter. Dona was overjoyed. She had a tradition that with the birth of each child, she kept a special diary for each day of their lives. “After six sons, God has given us our seventh child, a small but very strong little daughter,” she wrote in her daughter’s diary. “The pleasure over this little ray of sunshine was great, not just for us as parents and the nearest relatives, but indeed the whole nation rejoiced at the birth of the little girl. May she some day become a joy and a blessing for many and—as she has created happiness by her appearance—let her have happiness in life. Her father, who up to now had always wanted sons, was very happy and is marvelling still.”209 The following month, the infant princess was christened. The date chosen, October 22, was doubly significant: it was Dona’s thirty-fourth birthday. The baby was named Victoria Louise Adelheid Mathilde Charlotte. Like her mother, she was known officially by her first two names, Victoria Louise, but her family would affectionately call her “Sissy.”

  By 1891, May Teck had blossomed. Although not a classical beauty, she was stately and regal, standing at five feet seven inches tall. Her hair was most often described as light brown, but in the sunlight, it was noticeably golden. At her mother’s insistence, she wore her hair tightly braided atop her head, which had the unfortunate effect of making her appear more masculine and severe than she really was. It was her personality, which turned out so unlike either of her parents, that earned May a great deal of popularity. She was now nearly twenty-four, but despite her upstanding qualities, she had failed to garner very much attention from eligible bachelors. Her potential suitors were deterred by her family’s previous financial ruin and her morganatic blood. Most princes were obsessively concerned with royal rank and money and wanted nothing to do with her. Many people believed that May had a better chance of marrying a wealthy English aristocrat than ever finding a royal husband who would accept her family’s penury and low rank. Those who discouraged the idea that Princess May could ever have a glittering future were soon silenced because, in the winter of 1891, London was alive with gossip over the news of her engagement to Prince Eddy, whom the queen had created Duke of Clarence in 1890.