Dearest Vicky, Darling Fritz (22 page)

Some liberals looked askance at this rapprochement between their heir and the Chancellor, fearing that the latter was exaggerating such a threat in order to increase the power of his political office. Despite Vicky’s mistrust of Bismarck, by the end of the decade even she was convinced that his services would be indispensable during her husband’s coming reign, as she supported his foreign policy. As she told Queen Victoria, while she thought him ‘a misfortune for Germany and for the development of liberties, our trade &c. and certainly a danger for the Crown’, she believed he was ‘entirely for England, and has a sincere wish to be well with England, and that England’s power should on all occasions rise superior to Russia’s.’
⁶

It was ironic that while Fritz and Bismarck broadly agreed in several of their aims for government policy in the imperial era, the Chancellor did not hesitate to instigate many of the unpleasant stories about Fritz and Vicky. It suited him to portray the heir, a reluctant warrior but a war hero for all that, an intelligent ruler waiting in the wings despite a self-deprecating demeanour and lack of confidence in himself, as a weakling dominated by his more forceful wife who, he asserted, had the interests of her native England above all at heart. His spite toward anyone who ever opposed him robbed Fritz of his rightful reputation as a military commander. Many in Germany shared the opinion of Baron Hugo von Reischach, a Hussar who served under all three German Emperors, who spoke of him as ‘the leader in two wars’, thought him a superior general to his more famous cousin Friedrich Karl, and as dedicated to the army as his father. Regrettably such verdicts counted less than that of Bismarck, ever ready to distort the Crown Prince’s mistrust of the arrogant militarism of contemporary Prussia.

While Fritz may have disappointed some of the more progressive liberals and radicals, his own wife among them, by his caution and respect for the power of the crown, in some ways he was ahead of his time. With his respect for a free press, he surprised some of the authorities in class-conscious Berlin by receiving reporters and editors at the palace and making a point of seeking them out to talk to at official functions. He openly favoured the advancement of women and supported a petition, sent to the
Reichstag
in 1872, advocating that they should be allowed to pursue careers in such professions as the postal, telegraphic and railway services, bastions of male bureaucracy. Only his support enabled Vicky to start the Victoria Lyceum, a place where girls, still barred from universities, could attend scholarly lectures on an equal level with men. She gave him advice and support and kept up his spirits when he became depressed. In an aggressively patriarchal society where wives were expected to limit their activities to
Kinder, Küche und Kirche
(children, kitchen and church), this partnership left them vulnerable to Bismarck’s scorn.

In April 1873, a few weeks after his return from Wiesbaden, Fritz and Vicky were invited to the International Exhibition at Vienna, where they met the painter Heinrich von Angeli. After seeing his portraits in the exhibition Fritz and Vicky visited Angeli in his studio and invited him to Potsdam, thus aiding the start of his career as the foremost portrait painter to the royal European courts in succession to the dying Franz Xaver Winterhalter, and also an enduring friendship between the Austrian and his patrons. He came to the Neue Palais most years from 1873 onwards to paint and instruct his sitters, and as a trusted companion who enjoyed the company of the continent’s most enlightened heir and his consort, comparing their palace to the house of a private citizen, where the hosts and children made up a ‘simple and charming family picture’. He was impressed by Fritz’s quiet character, ‘never speaking a word more than is absolutely necessary in family conversation,’
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and noted that he never mentioned military or political topics at home.

After leaving Vienna in May they had a brief holiday at Venice, Milan and near the Italian lakes, before returning to Potsdam to prepare for the reception of the Shah of Persia, then touring the Western world like a travelling circus complete with a suite of ministers, attendants and a harem. On arrival he lived up to his eccentric reputation, and despite their initial doubts Fritz and Vicky were quite taken with him. He had no sense of time, and kept everybody waiting nearly an hour before appearing at a military inspection and other functions arranged in his honour. Unable to manage a knife and fork, he tore food apart with his bare hands at meals, spitting it out after chewing so he could examine the remains. Most of the family found him undignified and a great bore; the papers marked his visit with disparaging reports and anecdotes, though his admiration for England and everything English, and dislike of Russia, probably did much to colour his reception at court.

In January 1874 Queen Victoria’s second son Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, married Marie, the only surviving daughter of Tsar Alexander II, and Vicky and Fritz were among the royal guests invited to St Petersburg. It was Vicky’s first visit to Russia, and she did not like the country, deciding she was ‘
profoundly thankful
’ she did not have to live there; ‘over the whole of Russia there seems to me to hang a dull, heavy, silent melancholy
very
depressing to the spirits!’
⁸
Nevertheless she got on well with the Tsar, who presented her with a glittering diamond and ruby bracelet as a memento of the occasion. Several months after their return Bismarck suggested that she had gone with the purpose of persuading the Tsar to conclude an Anglo-Russian alliance against Germany, and a grateful Tsar had presented her with the jewellery for this very reason. Though Emperor Wilhelm had the sense to exclaim that he did not believe it for a moment, he still regretted that he had allowed his daughterin-law to accompany her husband to St Petersburg.
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The whispering campaign against her was so firmly established among the Anglophobes and anti-liberal court circles that many others accepted the slander without question.

The ever more oppressive atmosphere of Berlin drove husband and wife increasingly to Bornstädt, away from spiteful gossip and the all-pervading aura of the Chancellor, to the joys of country life and friendly villagers who formed their impressions of the couple not on gossip and calumny but on what they saw at first-hand. Vicky always preferred fresh air and found court functions increasingly difficult to endure. She had never managed to master her overwhelming shyness, found it difficult to make small talk and much preferred good conversation on the wide range of subjects which interested her to the malicious gossip that other German princesses relished.

Her children were always welcomed by their English grandmother on visits to Windsor, Osborne and Balmoral. The younger ones loved these holidays almost as much as their mother did, and she had particularly high hopes for Waldie, in whom she saw something of the Prince Consort with his love of animals and interest in science and geology. Of all Queen Victoria’s grandchildren, he was the most keen when it came to looking for minerals and fossils on the Isle of Wight. When they were there he proudly collected fragments of fossilized coniferous wood, ammonite, and an iguanadon’s tooth, which Vicky carefully labelled and deposited in the museum at the Swiss Cottage where she had played and learned to cook during childhood. Yet it was on one of their English visits that the little imp gave Queen Victoria a nasty fright. Working in her room one evening she looked up from her papers to see the beady eyes of a small crocodile leering at her, and her screams brought the whole household running. Waldie had let his pet crocodile ‘Bob’ out of its box, and order was not restored until he rescued the wandering pachyderm, helpless with laughter as he did so.

Vicky was touched that the Queen never forgot her grandchildren’s birthdays, marking the occasions with gifts of ponies, or family heirlooms for the future such as candlesticks, silver plate or jewellery. The Emperor and Empress ignored their birthdays, so Queen Victoria’s thoughtfulness was appreciated all the more. Emperor Wilhelm displayed more fondness to them than the increasingly distant Empress, but he was a thrifty soul and his family obligations stopped short of sending presents.

The Queen did not always show the same affection at this time for the children’s parents, and on several of their visits to England after 1871 they were reduced to staying at the Prussian Embassy, or at Sandringham. Fritz, she informed her private secretary Sir Henry Ponsonby in 1874, was ‘rather weak & to a certain extent obstinate not
conceited
but absurdly proud, as all his family are, thinking no family higher or greater than the Hohenzollerns.’
¹⁰
Nine years later, writing to her granddaughter Victoria, Alice’s eldest child, she complained that he and Vicky were ‘
not
pleasant in
Germany
’, but ‘high & mighty there’.
¹¹
That her son-in-law and daughter were destined to succeed to an imperial throne while she was a mere Queen was sufficient cause for jealousy, even after her declaration as Empress of India in 1876.

The happy family circle was not destined to remain so much longer; almost imperceptibly, the forces that would set Willy against them were at work. In January 1873 ex-Emperor Napoleon died in exile at Chislehurst in Kent. Remembering the happy times she had known at the glittering French court, and touched by his pathetic downfall and disease-racked last years, Vicky was deeply upset. Willy found her emotional reaction hard to understand, as he recalled how desperate she had been when his father had gone to war against France. He asked Hinzpeter, whose careful choice of words made his charge believe that his mother was committing treason by mourning one of Germany’s most notorious enemies. The idea took root in the impressionable boy’s mind, and over the next few years he took all his confidential problems to the governor, whom he regarded as his best friend. This pleased Hinzpeter as, like many other German men with old-fashioned views, he disliked Vicky because she was a woman whose brains made him feel inferior.

It was sad that Willy felt unable to talk to his father, as they had been close to each other in the past. Like his brother-in-law Bertie, Fritz took to heart the differences which had prevented him from enjoying an easy relationship with his own father, and with this in mind he had wanted a good relationship with his sons from the start. But another of Bismarck’s schemes had borne fruit; in sending Fritz on representative missions around Europe and beyond, he was keeping him away from his son. The less Willy saw of his father, the more he would look upon him as a stranger as he grew up, and in due course this would make it easier for the Chancellor to turn him against his parents and their politics. It would also foster the impression that the Crown Prince was an ineffectual father, completely ruled by his wife when it came to bringing up the boy.

Vicky would never deny that she was certainly a demanding parent. Raised by a perfectionist father who had sent her to Prussia to produce a generation of reformers, she saw it as her duty to bring up the future Kaiser in the same image, with qualities she had been taught as necessary for moral and political leadership. Taught never to be satisfied with herself, she would not give up trying to encourage her own children, particularly the eldest and most important, in a similar fashion. She worried endlessly about their health and childhood illnesses, particularly Willy, who like his father was always susceptible to colds and nasal infections. In his case, the damage to his arm, shoulder and left ear had weakened his immunity to such complaints.

It need hardly be said that the experience of her first confinement had left her with a lasting mistrust of German doctors. This scepticism with regards to their abilities had been compounded when Sigi’s meningitis went unrecognized until it was too late, and from that time onwards, whenever she was in England she consulted English doctors. Back at home in Berlin and Potsdam, she always watched out for things the German doctors might not notice. Unlike their Hohenzollern cousins, Vicky and Fritz’s children were small and thin. She was always sensitive to any criticism of them, particularly of Willy’s deformed arm, and was outraged when Fritz’s cousin, the loud-mouthed Friedrich Karl, said openly that a onearmed man should never be King of Prussia.
¹²

Vicky and Fritz’s children lived a happy, homely existence as youngsters, which had more in common with the childhood life of Queen Victoria’s children than those of the average Prussian prince and princess of the age. The family spent winters in Berlin, summers in Potsdam, and took family holidays further afield, usually England, in July or August. Like Vicky, her children always keenly anticipated their annual departure for the country. In Potsdam the children rode on horseback with their mother most mornings, and on holidays went for long walks with their father. When he was at home he took his sons rowing or swimming, and when they were old enough all three went hunting together.

The children always had breakfast with their parents. In later years, the younger ones always came into their parents’ room promptly at 7 a.m. and sat on their bed having tea and toast. Princess Victoria later looked back fondly on this part of her life, during which her mother never neglected them even though she always seemed to be active and busy. ‘Every moment that she could spare away from the various duties which devolved upon her was spent with us. She carefully supervised and watched our upbringing both in the nursery and the schoolroom.’
¹³
Poultney Bigelow, the son of an American diplomat and one of Willy’s playmates, thought that no parents could have shown more interest in their children than the Crown Prince and Princess. Willy’s parents were usually there with ‘a smile and kind word’
¹⁴
when their children ate supper, though the Crown Princess had a sharp eye for napkins not properly tucked in or any lapse in nursery manners.

Fritz’s university education had seemed little short of revolutionary in the 1840s, and a proposal to send Willy to the Kassel
Gymnasium
(grammar school) in 1874 for three years also astonished the court. Contrary to popular belief, the idea was not Vicky’s but that of Hinzpeter, who wanted to bring the boys further under his control and therefore take them away from their parents, suggesting it in such a way that she soon believed it to be of her making. She agreed that it would surely prevent ‘that terrible Prussian pride’ from ensnaring Willy; he must not grow up with the idea that he was of ‘a different flesh and blood to the poor, the peasants and working classes and servants’.
¹⁵
The Kaiser complained that as the boy was his eventual heir, he should have been consulted first. He wanted Willy to stay in Berlin, to appear at manoeuvres and reviews as his father had done at the same age, and to be in the public eye as much as possible – just what Fritz and Vicky did not want. Yet it had been an error of judgment to keep the plan to themselves, and not let the Kaiser know until so near the time. Vicky did herself a disservice by not admitting that it had been Hinzpeter’s idea in the first place, since the old man had the same unbounded faith in the governor that she did. Either the thought of defying her father-in-law for the sake of what she believed to be right for her son carried her away, or else she knew Wilhelm to be so completely under Bismarck’s influence that he would not believe her if she denied all responsibility. The Empress took their part, which only hardened her husband’s opposition.