Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires (18 page)

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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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“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].”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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Two weeks later, in December 1890, Dona went into premature labor with her sixth child. At the time, Wilhelm 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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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 Louise
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—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.”
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