Dearest Vicky, Darling Fritz (17 page)

It was arranged that they should meet at Coburg in August. The anniversary of the Prince Consort’s birth date had been chosen for the unveiling of a statue there to his memory. Though it was the first time that all nine brothers and sisters had been together since the wedding of the eldest in 1858, it was a joyless occasion. Fritz and Vicky felt uncomfortable as the terms of Gastein – signed a fortnight earlier – amounted to ill-disguised Prussian plunder, made all the worse as they were helpless to do anything about it. Bertie and Alix were still angry over the Danish defeat, and when introduced to Prince Karl Bertie was outwardly civil but Alix defiantly tossed her head, refusing to speak to him. Fritz could not blame her, but such incidents did not endear him to his uncles, who constantly reminded him of his part in introducing a Danish princess into his wife’s family. Then Queen Victoria was so incensed at the King’s ignoring her letters that she would not call on him, or even visit Queen Augusta at Koblenz, let alone invite her to the unveiling. The latter was deeply offended at what she took to be a personal insult.

Christian and Helena realized that if they rejected this chance of marriage they would regret it, and despite Alix’s injured pride at this partisanship of her father’s rivals, it was not long before Queen Victoria announced their engagement. In Berlin Queen Augusta scoffed at the ‘poor match’, and Bismarck sneered at another ridiculous gesture of what he called the ‘Anglo-Coburg faction’. When Vicky asked what her sister would like for a wedding present, their younger sister Louise mischievously suggested Bismarck’s head on a charger.
³⁹

After Fritz’s autumn manoeuvres he and Vicky visited England again, and on their way they stopped at Brussels to see King Leopold. Bedridden, pale and evidently dying but still mentally alert, he talked incessantly about family affairs and politics, expressed anger at Bismarck’s policies, commented on the uneasy peace of Gastein, and remarked that he was glad he would not live long enough to see the results. Realizing sadly that they had seen him for the last time they continued to London, staying at the Prussian Embassy, before going with some trepidation to call on Bertie and Alix, who had become reconciled to the approaching marriage after pressure from the rest of the family.

King Leopold died on 10 December, within a week of what would have been his seventy-fifth birthday. He was the last surviving member of the triumvirate which had brought about the Coburg-Hohenzollern marriage. With the Prince Consort, Baron Stockmar and now King Leopold gone, Vicky and Fritz were more isolated than ever in Bismarck’s Prussia. To whom, Fritz asked sadly, could they turn in future for wise and experienced counsel, especially in affairs of state?
⁴⁰

FIVE

‘An era of reaction will ensue’

B
y the first few weeks of 1866 Vicky and Fritz were almost certain that another war, with Austria, was just a matter of time. Officially they knew nothing, Vicky told her mother; Fritz was ‘kept
quite
out of it all, the King does not speak to him on the subject & the ministers
never communicate anything
to him.’
¹
Yet they knew Bismarck intended to challenge Austria’s status as the major European mainland power. He had already told Lord Augustus Loftus, British ambassador at Berlin, that it was his mission to force their neighbour and old ally ‘into concessions or to war’. In February 1866 King Wilhelm informed his ministers that Austria had not kept her part of the Gastein convention, and Bismarck said that a struggle for power between Prussia and Austria was inevitable, as the latter was an obstacle to Prussia’s mission to lead Germany.

In March 1866 Loftus assured the King that the British ministers were prepared to use their good offices towards a peaceful solution to any differences between Prussia and Austria. The King asked Fritz to write to Queen Victoria, accepting any offer of mediation her government might make. Believing that war was as good as forestalled, Fritz did so with delight, while Vicky assured her mother that she could be ‘the means of averting a European conflagration.’
²
This did not suit Bismarck, who told Loftus that as Austria was the party which threatened to disturb the peace, the British government and ministers should address themselves to Vienna. Bismarck further persuaded the King that Emperor Franz Josef’s wish to make the duchies independent contravened Prussian policy and also the Gastein convention. He was so persuasive that the King, bristling at Austria’s perfidy, wanted war at once, and Bismarck had to restrain him; Prussia was not yet ready.

Knowing that Bismarck wielded more power than his sovereign, the Foreign Secretary, Lord Clarendon, insisted that the British government could do nothing; it was up to the Queen, if she wished, to use her influence. While the pacifist liberal majority in the
Landtag
suggested a European conference, Fritz wrote despondently to the Duke of Saxe-Coburg that ‘Fratricidal is the expression I employ to designate Bismarck’s resolve of forcing a war with Austria upon us.’
³
Two days later Queen Victoria informed Fritz that, much as she regretted the likelihood of war between Austria and Prussia, she would consider it even worse if her government was party to ‘so gross a violation of all the principles on which we pride ourselves in England, as the violent annexation of the duchies to Prussia against the known feelings and wishes of the People.’
⁴

Meanwhile in April Count Guido Usedom, Prussian Ambassador in Florence, negotiated an alliance with Italy by which the latter would join Prussia if war broke out between Austria and Prussia within three months, and in return she would receive possession of the province of Venetia, which was still under Habsburg domination though historically regarded as part of Italy. Bismarck had to act quickly, as the treaty effectively destroyed the German Confederation, the constitution of which forbade any member to ally itself with a foreign power against another. If he did not strike at once, Prussia would be taken to task for flouting the Confederation’s peaceful co-existence.

On the morning of 12 April Vicky went to Potsdam for her confinement, expected in a week, at the Neue Palais. Her labour began on the journey, and the train could not accelerate as another was immediately ahead on the same line. She was taken from the carriage in a state of collapse by her ladies and hurried into the palace, giving birth to a daughter hours later. Princess Frederica Amelia Wilhelmina Victoria (to be known as Victoria, or ‘Moretta’ in the family), was christened on 24 May, at a gloomy ceremony in the Friedenskirche at Potsdam. On the next day Fritz was due to leave to assume command of the Second Army in Silesia.

It was clear that the war would divide the family more thoroughly than the Danish conflict had done; already their German relations were taking sides. Austria’s allies included the Grand Duke of Hesse and his nephew Louis, Vicky’s brother-in-law, the blind King Georg of Hanover and his family. On Prussia’s side was Louis’s brother Henry, who had served with the Prussian army for several years, and commanded the Second Lancers. The Duke of Saxe-Coburg prudently remained neutral.

The day after Fritz left, twenty-one-months old Sigi became ill. Vicky initially thought his fretfulness was caused by teething troubles, but within twenty-four hours he was too weak to stand. Dr Wegner and his colleagues had gone with the army to the front, and all she could do was consult an inexperienced local junior practitioner who either failed to diagnose that the disease was meningitis, or else could do nothing to alleviate the symptoms of a disease which generally proved fatal. Sigi’s convulsions became increasingly severe and he died in agony on 18 June.

Deprived of her husband’s company during one of the most harrowing experiences a mother could ever know, Vicky was left to face this tragedy with only the other children and her servants for company, and she was shattered by grief. For once the King and Queen were deeply moved, and showed a degree of tenderness which she had never known from them before. Her anguish at the loss of the ‘little sunbeam in the house’,
⁵
the sight of his toys scattered around the cot, his clothes which she had lovingly made, the memories of his helpless struggle as he screamed for his distracted mother to soothe him, had touched even Queen Augusta. She had been fond of the child, and she left for the battlefront so she could give the heartbreaking news to Fritz in person. King Wilhelm granted him leave to return home for the funeral but he gently declined, saying that as he was in the service of the fatherland he would never forgive himself if they were attacked while he was absent from his post.
⁶
In her torment Vicky found this stoic denial hard to accept, acknowledging with some bitterness: ‘In you, of course, the soldier is uppermost.’
⁷
She prepared an anteroom of the Freedom Church in Potsdam with cushions, carpets, pictures and flowers for the funeral, which she attended in a state of deep shock, remaining dry-eyed and composed as if turned to stone.

A few days later she took the other children with her to the small town of Heringsdorf on the Baltic, wishing to get far away from court for a while. In the worst moments of her misery she turned to writing letters to Queen Victoria for solace, apologizing unreservedly for ‘wearying’ her mother with her sorrow. The Queen was sympathetic until Vicky wrote that she would give up ‘house & home, future & all’
⁸
to have her youngest son back, only to be told firmly that she should not tempt Providence.

At length she found an outlet for her feelings in making a waxen image of her dead son which she placed in his crib. Beside it she left his shoes, silver rattle and ball, as if just thrown aside by his hand. For several years she kept this shrine as a testament to the tragedy in a small locked room in the Neue Palais, which only family and a few select friends were allowed to see.

On 27 June the Silesian army won a victory over the Austrian forces, and the following week the combined forces of Moltke, chief of staff and the army of the Elbe, under Prince Friedrich Karl, met the Austrian troops near the town of Königgrätz. Fritz was summoned to bring his troops at once for an all-out attack. Until his arrival soon after midday, victory hung in the balance; by the evening over 40,000 Austrians were dead, wounded or taken prisoner, and the rest of the army was in retreat, while the Prussian forces lost less than 10,000. After the fighting, Fritz came face to face with his father who awarded him the Order
Pour le Mérite
, an honour usually conferred only for personal gallantry on the field of battle. It was the first decoration he felt he had truly earned, but it made no difference to his feelings at the carnage around them. ‘War is an appalling thing,’ he wrote in his diary that evening, ‘and the man who brings it about with a stroke of his pen at the “green table”, little reeks what he is conjuring with.’
⁹

The conflict was now effectively over, and Fritz waited at his headquarters for the council of war, called for 23 July. At first the King wanted to follow Austrian troops to Vienna and annihilate them there if necessary, and when told this was impracticable, he insisted that Prussia’s victory must mean territorial gain. He could not see Bismarck’s view that it would be folly to antagonize the Austrian empire unduly by depriving her of land, in case it was needed to help fight France or some other power in future. Bismarck had merely intended to expel Austria from the German Confederation, leaving Prussia as the undisputed superior power, and when he saw the King threatening to wreck his plans he stormed out of the council chamber. The situation was retrieved by Fritz, who assured them that he for one had never wanted war in the first place, was ready to support any plan for peace, and persuaded the King to ‘bite into this sour apple and accept a disgraceful peace.’
¹⁰

After the preliminaries of peace were signed on 26 July Fritz returned home, breaking his journey at the Friedenskirche in Potsdam, where his youngest daughter had been christened, and his son lay buried. Victories could not compensate for the loss of a child, he wrote; ‘in the midst of great events, the more sharply does such a piercing grief wound a father’s heart.’
¹¹
Vicky was still at Heringsdorf, and he joined them in the woods nearby, as she watched their children playing under the summer sun. Peace was formally signed at Prague on 22 August, by which Prussia formally annexed Schleswig, Holstein, the kingdom of Hanover, and the landgraviate of Hesse-Homburg.

After three months Vicky’s grief at the death of their youngest son was beginning to abate, thanks in no small measure to Queen Victoria’s insistence that she should snap out of it and count her blessings. In the exultation of victory she put aside her mourning dresses, which she would normally have worn for a year, in order to look suitably regal for the return of the Prussian army to Berlin. For all her hatred of war she could not help taking some pride in Prussia’s success, or at least her husband’s part in it. The present leadership under Bismarck, they still told themselves, was a temporary setback, but in the next reign a more enlightened regime would prevail.

In October Fritz went to St Petersburg to represent Prussia at the wedding of the Tsarevich, later Tsar Alexander III, to Princess Dagmar of Denmark. Vicky had her reservations about his going; she feared gloomily that her brothers had no ‘feeling of companionship’ for Fritz, as his tastes, occupations and interests were so different to theirs.
¹²
Yet the brothers-in-law got on much better than Fritz had dared to hope. Bertie had stopped in Berlin on his way to visit Vicky, and she found him very friendly and conciliatory; he had seen through her emotional letters to Queen Victoria, with their angry condemnations of Bismarck in one line and glowing praise for Prussian troops in the next. At the palace of Tsarskoe-Selo Bertie found in Fritz the same gentle, war-abhorring fellow who had acted as his best man, and whose medal-flaunting at Cologne the previous year had been no more than tactless oversight.