Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires (15 page)

As May settled into a round of official engagements, tragedy struck her family in April 1889 with the sudden death of her maternal grandmother, the Duchess of Cambridge. Mary Adelaide described the “great sorrow” of her mother’s “irreparable loss” to a friend: “We have thus far been wonderfully supported by the feeling that our beloved mother has at length been released from all her weary pain and suffering, and is now, as we dare hope, enjoying the rest, peace, and joy she so longed for!”
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Queen Victoria, who had been close with her aunt, mourned the loss deeply alongside her cousin. “The last one gone,” the queen commented, “who had the right to call me Victoria!”
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The official mourning period for the duchess did not last long because London was soon atwitter with the news that the queen was looking for a wife for her grandson Prince Albert Victor (“Eddy”) of Wales, who was second in line to the throne. Searching for a bride for the British heir typically involved something of a royal beauty pageant. Since the Royal Marriages Act passed by George III prevented a British heir from marrying a Catholic, a suitable bride had to be, and traditionally was, found in the German or Scandinavian courts. German princesses had been supplying English queen consorts for hundreds of years, but in this case, Queen Victoria was willing to look closer to home. Princess May—as a relative of the royal family, a Protestant princess with a German title, and a woman whose upstanding character and moral integrity were well established—was at the top of the list of candidates to be Eddy’s bride. Queen Victoria took notice of May’s fine qualities. She told her daughter Vicky, “May is a particularly nice girl, so quiet & yet cheerful & so vy carefully brought up & so sensible.”
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Along with other eligible princesses from Prussia, Mecklenburg, and Anhalt, May was in line for one of the most vaunted positions in the world: queen of England.

After a few years in Germany, Dona’s fairy-tale romance was beginning to lose its luster. Like most newlyweds, she and Willy began to discover each other’s idiosyncrasies—she was somewhat alarmed to learn that her husband kept a loaded pistol in his desk drawer at all times. She also found that he could be remarkably high strung. He was a hypochondriac who exasperated his retinue with one imagined ailment after another. For his part, Prince Wilhelm began to chafe with married life and looked for reasons to be away from his wife. Not long after the wedding, he started realizing Dona lacked the sophistication he craved in order to keep his attention. Willy opined that his wife’s simple tastes reflected her modest provincial upbringing, away from the fast-paced life of more fashionable, mainstream royal courts. He said publicly that you could always tell that Dona “was not brought up at Windsor but rather in Primkenau.”
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By Hohenzollern standards, Willy was considered a faithful husband, even though he kept a handful of mistresses in Vienna and Strasbourg that he visited when he was away on military exercises. These women nearly caused a scandal for the royal family when they threatened to publicize the details of their relationships with the prince after “he was notably ungenerous over recompensing them for services rendered.”
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Only after Otto von Bismarck paid these women off did they back down. There were also rumors that Caroline Seiffert, one of Willy’s mistresses, became pregnant in 1882 and gave birth to a daughter, but this has never been proven conclusively.

Making matters worse for Dona was her family’s recurring presence. It irritated Willy that his bipolar mother-in-law, Ada, made frequent visits to Potsdam, where she created one problem after another. Recent studies into neurology have led some to speculate that the eccentric Dowager Duchess of Schleswig-Holstein could also have instead suffered from encephalitis, the symptoms of which—hallucinations, headaches, and violent or antisocial tendencies—were consistent with her behavior. Whether bipolar or encephalitic, Ada Holstein was the archetypal nightmarish mother-in-law. She took to bathing herself publicly at the Marble Palace. She detailed for the palace staff her “remarkable system of washing” herself, which involved dividing her body into twenty-four “‘hemispheres,’ and required a complete set of bowl, ewer, soap dish and towel for each one.” At formal functions, Ada’s manic behavior caused more than one public relations catastrophe. On two different occasions, she “made unspeakable assaults upon her male neighbours at table.” When Dona and her ladies-in-waiting made efforts to calm the duchess, she responded by losing her temper, breaking glasses, and swearing “most obscenely.” In the end, Willy—probably with Dona’s full consent—declared that his mother-in-law could only visit three times a year. When she did, she could stay no longer than “one, two or three weeks, or as long as the household could stand it.” Willy found it easier to get along with Dona’s sisters, Calma, Louise Sophie, or Feodora. Although her brother Duke Ernest Günther of Schleswig-Holstein was pleasant enough, “he was also the sort of man who could not take a hint when it was time to terminate his visit. He was a clinger.”
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When Dona’s difficult relatives were not around, the daily routine that she and Willy settled into was perfect as far as the prince was concerned. His wife was forced to make the best of it. On a typical day, she would see her husband at breakfast. He would then dash off to his beloved military post, commanding the First Regiment of the Foot Guards, to which he was promoted by the emperor shortly before his wedding. The prince’s duties with the foot guards usually revolved around maneuvers, parades, or other similar activities. On rare occasions, he returned to the Marble Palace for lunch. On those afternoons, he took Dona for a ride into the countryside around Potsdam, but even these excursions were in the company of Willy’s aide-de-camp. Dona was forced to accept early on that hers would always be a crowded marriage. Since childhood, Wilhelm had a deep need for the company of men to receive their approbation, praise, and encouragement. The form that this took in his life was his paradomaniac obsession with the military. From the age of twenty, he wore almost nothing but military uniforms. For centuries, the Prussian court had been fiercely militaristic, with princes and kings spending their entire lives devoted to the army. Prussia’s very identity was its inextricable link between the monarchy and the military. Willy, in turn, idolized his warrior grandfather, Emperor Wilhelm I, and he strove to be exactly like him. Usually he saw his soldiers more frequently than his wife.

The happiness Willy and Dona did enjoy was overshadowed by the political and personal dramas that played themselves out in the Prussian royal family. Willy’s bitter struggle with his parents, especially his mother, was like a poisonous cloud engulfing Potsdam. Before long, Dona found herself involved in the clash between her husband and his mother. The relationship between the two women began amicably enough. Vicky took it upon herself to mentor and guide Dona through life at the Prussian court, but what she failed to realize was that, through “shyness and fright,” Dona did not possess the psychological capacity to respond to her mother-in-law’s efforts.
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Vicky became “impatient with Dona’s slow mind and with occasional stupidities.” Since the crown princess did not hide her feelings, “Dona saw this and resented it.”
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This only reinforced the negative gossip Dona heard about Vicky and soon began criticizing her mother-in-law the same way Willy did. She was especially indignant at the way the crown princess was constantly interfering in every aspect of their lives. Nothing seemed to be off-limits. Dona wrote that she was “in complete despair” over her mother-in-law’s meddling. It especially bothered her, she told Willy, that Vicky openly declared “everything which you … have arranged with such trouble and such careful consideration and finally perhaps to your satisfaction to be ugly.”
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In what was shaping into a battle involving two strong-willed women, the crown princess let it be known that she disapproved of Dona’s ultraconservative nature. The problem between these two women was a clash of ideologies, one that played itself out in the prejudices and intricacies of the Prussian court. It was also a microcosm of the political divisions of Europe in the 1880s. Dona, conservative and increasingly distrustful of other ethnic groups, represented Prussia and Germany; while Vicky, with her liberal, parliamentary ideas, was the embodiment of all things English. When Queen Victoria asked her daughter why she had supported Willy’s marrying Dona if the princess was so difficult, Vicky replied, “Dona seemed to me the most likely to make an excellent wife & mother. We had great affection & esteem for her father. I
then
hoped and thought she might be grateful & affectionate to me … in
that
my hopes have been
completely
disappointed.”
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As time went on, Dona and Willy’s relationship with Vicky remained uneasy. In September 1886, Willy was struck with an excruciating inner ear infection after returning from a visit to Russia. His physician, Dr. Trautmann, informed Dona that the illness was “relatively insignificant,” but a few days later the infection spread.
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For a while, Willy’s life appeared in peril. An emergency surgery to save his life was barely successful; it took nearly two more weeks for him to show any sign of improvement. Terrified for her husband’s life, Dona perched herself at his bedside, holding his hand as she waited and prayed. “Dona is most devoted to him and never leaves him for one minute,” Vicky admitted to her mother. By the end of October, Willy had rallied. Dona stayed close to her husband throughout his convalescence. With his recovery, a degree of intimacy returned to their marriage. The drama of Willy’s illness also exacerbated the quarrel with his mother, who tried to take over as his nurse. “A little civility, kindness and
empressement
go a long way … but I never get them from him,” Vicky complained to her mother, “it is very painful to a soft-hearted Mama to feel so plainly that her own child does not care whether he sees her or no, whether she is well or ill, or away, etc.”
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Amid the ongoing frustrations of Dona’s life in Potsdam with her in-laws, her one refuge was her children. She fulfilled Willy’s paternal dreams by delivering four sons, one after the other. Little Willy was followed by Eitel-Frederick (“Eitel-Fritz”) in 1883, Adalbert in 1884, and Augustus Wilhelm (“Auwi”) in 1887. One courtier observed of Dona that “so frequent were the stork’s visits in the young household that [she] was unable to appear at the great Court festivals for three winters in succession.”
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Regardless, Dona “loved above everything else the numerous children who were born to her in quick succession, and was never so happy as when playing with them in their nursery.”
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From an early age, the little princes were inculcated with the traditional Prussian passion for the military. They “grew up surrounded by lead solders, by little cannons that discharged peas, and by every kind of plaything that had some near or remote bearing on real military science.” Little Willy “was allowed to run along the carefully raked walks of the parks with his noisy companions, to play at war in miniature; he was permitted to construct strongholds of sand, fortresses of pounded earth, and, by digging up the flower beds or grass plots sacrificed to his youthful and bellicose whims, he was able to enjoy a foretaste of the trenches of 1914.”
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Exactly eight weeks before Little Willy celebrated his sixth birthday, everything in his mother’s life changed forever. Ninety-one-year-old Emperor Wilhelm I died on March 6, 1888. His last words included an endorsement for Dona’s husband: “I have always been pleased with you, for you have always done everything right.”
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Willy, now crown prince of Germany and Prussia, confided in his diary, “William I., King of Prussia and First German Emperor, passed away this morning. At eight o’clock he passed into eternity so quietly that it was only when Doctor Leuthold approached him and closed his eyes that I knew that all was over.”
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Willy’s parents ascended the throne as Emperor Frederick III and Empress Victoria. “The sad news has just come that dear Emperor has passed away!” Vicky tearfully wrote to her mother from San Remo, where she was staying with Fritz, who was battling excruciating laryngeal cancer. She continued, “Fritz is deeply affected … I cannot tell you how anxious I feel and how nervous.… To think of my poor Fritz succeeding his father as a sick and stricken man is so hard!!”
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The next day, Vicky and Fritz held a brief ceremony in the drawing room at the Villa Zirio where the new emperor was sworn in. During the ceremony, he took off his Order of the Black Eagle and placed it on the shoulders of his wife, who burst into tears—along with Dona later on, Vicky was the only woman to ever be invested with the Black Eagle. The great tragedy for Fritz and Vicky was that they had so many dreams to reform Germany, but Fritz was so near death from cancer when he became emperor that everyone knew he would not last long.