Dearest Vicky, Darling Fritz (18 page)

Fritz’s success with one fellow-heir did not attend his meeting with the other. After the wedding he drove with the Tsarevich through the streets of St Petersburg. The latter, he noted, ‘never said a single sensible word, even when he did open his mouth.’
¹³
Alexander was by nature a suspicious character who did not yet know his guest well enough to be aware of his relationship with Bismarck, against whom like his bride he bore a grudge for the conquest of Denmark. However Fritz immediately disarmed the bride, telling her that it must be very unpleasant for her to see him at her wedding in the light of recent events.

By early the following year the possibility of conflict was looming once more, with Luxembourg the centre of controversy. After the war the French ambassador to Prussia, Count Benedetti, had asked Prussia to agree to French annexation of Belgium and Luxembourg as the price of France’s neutrality. King Wilhelm and Bismarck rejected the demand for Belgium, as to acquiesce in such a claim would incur British hostility. Luxembourg was a grand duchy under the sovereignty of the King of Holland, while belonging to the North German Confederation created by the treaties signed by the pro-Austrian states after the war, with the King of Prussia in control of all the armed forces. To Emperor Napoleon it would be a strategic addition to France, at a time when the Prussians had achieved victory in two short successive wars and were challenging the French for European supremacy. The people of Luxembourg did not regard themselves as Germans though the territory was used as a Prussian fortress, and King William III of Holland would probably not be averse to renouncing his sovereignty over it in return for the settlement of his debts. Bismarck informed Benedetti that he was prepared to be ‘obliging’ on the matter, but his prevarication provoked the French into an unfriendly attitude towards Prussia.

Vicky and Fritz feared that another war would be the result. In March 1867 the French put pressure on King William III to cede Luxembourg to France, but he was reluctant to do so without Prussian consent. German nationalists appealed to the government to prevent the cession of any German-speaking territory to the French, and Bismarck declared that his government would be seriously discredited if it agreed to such a move. To Vicky and Fritz, Bismarck was right for once. People were in ‘a wonderful state of excitement’ about Luxembourg, Vicky wrote, and she considered anything was preferable to giving France any part of Germany. ‘Should there be a war against France – which would be a dreadful calamity on the one side – the unity of Germany would be effected at once.’
¹⁴
A couple of weeks later, she reiterated that the aggression came from France. If peace could not be upheld, she thought it would be the lesser of two evils if armed conflict broke out now rather than later, ‘horrible as it is. A war with France will be a very different thing from a war with Austria but if our honour is at stake – for the sake of Germany we must not hang back.’
¹⁵

With the new German Confederation in its infancy, Bismarck was not ready for another war, and in May a European conference in London agreed to withdrawal of the Prussian garrison, and the affirmation of Luxembourg’s neutrality and independence. France was left with a feeling of humiliation and a bitter distrust of Bismarck. Nevertheless peace was cemented, temporarily at least, by a gathering of royalties in Paris at the international exposition in May. Though the Prussian royal family had nearly cancelled their visit because of the Luxembourg crisis, they were persuaded to reconsider and Fritz, Vicky, King Wilhelm and Queen Augusta duly attended, joining guests including the Prince of Wales, his brother Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, their sister Alice and her husband Louis, Emperor Franz Josef and Tsar Alexander II.

France’s furtive alliances with Italy and the Luxembourg affair had engendered considerable suspicion in Prussia, and much as Fritz liked the company of Napoleon and Eugenie on a personal level, he found it difficult to trust them. Though Vicky was equally obliged to try and separate political loyalties from personal friendship, she was quickly put at her ease by the attentions of her hosts, their charm and the trouble they took in order to entertain their guests. She was especially touched when Napoleon and Eugenie talked to her about her parents, and the Emperor diplomatically told her that the Prince Consort was the most distinguished and the most remarkable man he had ever known.

However she sank into a mood of intense depression as the first anniversary of Sigi’s tragic death came closer. A combination of this, the early weeks of a sixth pregnancy, and her abhorrence of late nights and suffocating ballrooms, all proved too much for her. She had stopped dancing when her son died, and shared the other guests’ appetite for endless social functions even less than usual. One evening, just before another ball, she begged Fritz to be allowed to go home. With a heavy heart he asked the King, who retorted that she would have to wait another few days. Defiantly she ordered her maids to pack and left for Germany that night, leaving Fritz to face his father’s wrath alone. He returned to Berlin with the King the day before the anniversary of his little son’s death.

A few days later the gathering at Paris was overshadowed by the grim news that Napoleon’s puppet Mexican empire had fallen and his protégé Emperor Maximilian, brother of Franz Josef, had been captured and shot by rebels. The Empress Carlota, formerly Princess Charlotte, daughter of the late King Leopold of the Belgians and a second cousin of Vicky, had spent the previous few months in Europe begging for armed intervention to try and save him, but with the strain she had suffered complete mental collapse, and was destined to spend the rest of her sixty years confined in a castle near Brussels. There had been moments when Vicky similarly dreaded going the same way, as her mother had done after the Prince Consort’s death. That somebody like Charlotte, who had always seemed so calm and self-possessed, could lose her reason and be condemned to living a wasted life, was a frightening reminder of what might strike at any time.

Fritz had played a major role on Prussia’s behalf in the first two wars, and was much loved and respected by the officers and men who had fought under him. His words of comfort to the wounded and thanks to his troops after each battle made his genuine interest in their well-being self-evident, and while his kindly, diffident manner may have been less assertive than that of his brusque, impatient cousin Friedrich Karl, it made him more popular. As a war hero who was first in line to the throne, it was only natural that he should be given some recognition at home during the years of peace as part of his preparation for kingship. However Bismarck had other ideas, preferring to send him abroad on various ceremonial duties, so he was rarely at home. At first Vicky and Fritz were pleased, as it widened the circles in which his value and talents would be appreciated. In due course it became apparent that this was an attempt to banish him from Prussia as his presence was a constant criticism of Bismarck’s reactionary policies, and it was also an officially-approved way of keeping husband and wife apart. It was clear that Fritz’s stand at Danzig was no mere passing phase, and after the war of 1866 it was noticeable that the Crown Prince of Prussia was conspicuous by his absence from the political limelight. Apart from his military duties and regular attendance at crown council meetings, his only official function was as his father’s representative on politically inconsequential missions abroad.

Bismarck knew it was mainly Vicky’s influence that prevented him from making a disciple of her husband, despite the fact that in some ways, particularly their respect for monarchical power, Fritz and Bismarck had more in common with each other than he did with Vicky. His subtle campaign of vilification against her was partly his means of revenge, partly his way of destroying what little respect her in-laws still had for her. She was well aware of this, complaining to Queen Victoria that their children were ‘universally pitied for having the great misfortune of having me for their Mama with my “
unglücklichen englischen Ideen
” [unfortunate English ideas] and “
unpreussischen Gesinnugen
” [un-Prussian views]’.
¹⁶

By degrees they found themselves gradually isolated from their most trusted friends in Prussia, those whom next to her Bismarck most feared. These included Morier, Prince Hohenzollern (still wellrespected despite his resignation as Minister-President in 1862), and Baron Roggenbach, the Liberal Prussian representative at Frankfurt. Spies were planted in the Neue Palais; when a vacancy appeared in the household, Bismarck and his crony Moritz Busch filled the position with someone instructed to watch their employers carefully, and to report back on anything they saw or heard that might be of interest. By the time of the Paris exposition two such trained ‘servants’ were established in the accounts department, thus giving Bismarck the key to details of Fritz and Vicky’s domestic expenditure. The other staff reported obligingly on who visited the palace and Fritz had to stop inviting Morier, the only alternative being to risk his expulsion from Prussia on some trumped-up charge of interference. He was still welcome at Bornstädt, where he came regularly with discretion, warning Fritz and Vicky to take great care in all they did at the palace, in all they said to each other unless sure they were alone and nobody was listening at the door, and in not writing anything remotely inappropriate even in a ‘private’ diary except in cipher. Vicky had sometimes found her desk smelling of tobacco, or with the lock broken, and knew that dirty work was afoot.

Vicky gave birth to their youngest son on 10 February 1868, her mother’s wedding anniversary, and named him Waldemar. Overjoyed with this fourth son, she was soon longing to become pregnant again, writing to Fritz that ‘All the pain of labour is nothing compared to the happiness of having such a dear little creature to hold & to nurse oneself.’
¹⁷

In April Fritz went to Rome for the wedding of Crown Prince Umberto of Italy to Princess Margharita of Naples. He was treated to an enthusiastic reception, and greeted everywhere with cries of ‘
Evviva Prussia, l’angelo protettore d’Italia!
’, while the press made much of his constant smile and martial bearing. After defeat in 1866 Austria had ceded Venetia to Italy, and a grateful King Victor Emmanuel conferred upon Fritz the Grand Cross of the Military Order of Merit of Savoy in recognition of his services to Italian unity. The wedding was followed by a court ball, where Princess Margharita was dancing with a banker’s son. When he accidentally stepped on her gown and tore the trimming, gasps of horror through the ballroom turned to astonishment as Fritz instantly produced a case from his coat pocket, took out a pair of scissors, knelt down and cut off the torn strip of lace. The Princess held out her hand to take it back, but instead he pressed it to his heart, folded it and replaced it in his pocket with the scissors. ‘He is a true knight,’ murmured the amazed onlookers, but a Stuttgart press reporter was less poetic: ‘These Prussians are sharp fellows, always armed, and ready for everything.’
¹⁸

Meanwhile Vicky and her sister Alice were staying at the home of the Duke of Coburg in Gotha, an occasion marred by Vicky’s illhealth. Since her marriage she had suffered numerous minor upsets on a regular basis, but a severe bout of illness at this time left her with a lasting legacy. After an attack of ‘severe neuralgic headache’ and excruciating pain, especially in the nerve above her eye, she was advised to take quinine as a remedy, but this produced a severe rash which turned her face bright red. Her ears, eyelids and nose were so swollen that for a few days she went temporarily deaf, her eyes were almost completely shut, and she could only breathe with difficulty. Well aware of how unsightly her ‘fire-red shapeless mass’ of a face looked, she felt obliged to hide herself from view until the worst of the trouble had subsided.
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From this time onwards the neuralgia, violent headaches and recurrent pains in her back, side and limbs persisted regularly. Sometimes she needed morphine injections to deaden the pain, and her eyes were so inflamed that she had to wear blue-tinted glasses. Extremes of temperature, excessive standing or sitting in overheated ballrooms, exposure to gaslight in the theatre, and walking outside with a cold wind blowing in her face, were liable to bring on or exacerbate these symptoms which sometimes left her at her wits’ end. Only many years after her death did the possibility emerge that she had inherited the excruciatingly uncomfortable though not life-threatening condition of porphyria from which her greatgrandfather King George III had suffered so severely. In her case the complaint was perhaps likewise responsible for affecting her mental reason and impairing her judgement to some degree.

In January 1869 Willy celebrated his tenth birthday, was awarded the Order of the Black Eagle and appointed Lieutenant in the First Regiment of Guards. Photographs of him standing proudly in his uniform showed his left arm looking almost normal, a tribute to the work of the tailor who made the left sleeve slightly shorter than the right, and to the boy’s tenacity in trying his best to overcome the handicap. By this time it was clear that all the treatment to which he had been subjected as a small boy had been in vain. He could not run fast, climb trees, or cut his food with normal cutlery. Because of his distorted sense of balance, the arduous business of learning to ride, a necessity for a future King of Prussia, had initially terrified him as he struggled to stay in the saddle.

A disastrous choice of tutor for Willy and Henry, Georg Hinzpeter, appointed in 1866, exacerbated the problem. This stern, humourless disciplinarian had little understanding of children; his principles as a governor were based on what he termed Prussian simplicity, which Fritz and Vicky believed would stop ‘that terrible Prussian pride and ambition’. While he condemned personal pride, he constantly held up to his charges the example of their country and her superiority to all others, at a time when Bismarck was making a mockery of the principles of democratic government and advancing her prestige with the sword. The boys spent twelve hours a day at their lessons, with breaks only for meals and physical exercise. For breakfast they ate dry bread, and when entertaining visitors for tea they had to offer their guests cakes without taking any themselves. Henry apparently suffered no lasting ill-effects, but the spartan regime left its mark on Willy.