Dearest Vicky, Darling Fritz (13 page)

Fritz and Vicky had gone to see Queen Victoria at Gotha, but the King recalled Fritz to Berlin because of the impending crisis. On 18 September, with tears in his eyes, he showed his son the deed of abdication and the draft of the speech in which he would announce that he was relinquishing the throne. It was a carefullyconsidered decision; God and his conscience, he said sadly, would not allow him to do anything else. If the ministry refused to accept his reforms, he would make way for his son.

Fritz, astonished, was overcome with sympathy for the ‘poor broken old man’. This was no threat to abdicate in the heat of the moment, and he did not appreciate that his father was only doing so because he knew that Fritz himself would spare no effort to implore him from taking such a drastic step. Moreover he was worried about the precedent that would be set if a Prussian sovereign could be forced or cajoled into abdication like this as a result of parliamentary decisions, and the threat it would pose to dynasty, crown and country. Much as he respected the institution of parliamentary government and the constitution, he revered the crown still more.

Though he was nominally opposed to the two-year term of military service, he tried to impress on his father that conceding on the two-year term would not be comparable with the consequences of relinquishing the throne. He tried to convince the cabinet to support the King so that abdication could be avoided, but the ministers remained resolutely divided on the two-year service term. He spent the next forty-eight hours trying to mediate between the King and his ministers, brokering a compromise; conceding part of the way on military training would be far preferable to abdication.

That evening he wrote to Vicky, who had remained in Gotha with Queen Victoria and Lord Clarendon, and explained everything; she was equally taken aback, but she guessed that the King was playing for high stakes and understood his son only too well to know what Fritz’s answer would be. Why, she suggested, should they not take the chance? They must not think of themselves, but of the fatherland and of their children who would otherwise one day have to make good where they had failed. If the King felt he could not take the necessary steps to restore order and confidence in Prussia without going against his conscience, she said, it would be only ‘wise and honest’ to leave it to others who could take over such duties without burdening their conscience. She could see no way out, and considered he should make the sacrifice for the sake of their country; if he did not accept his father’s decision, she believed that he would come to regret it one day.
³²

Unlike her husband, she was glad that things had come to a head. For once they could do more than remain silent in the face of such drastic circumstances. ‘What is expected of you as a dutiful son and subject is so very difficult and severe, but this cannot be compared to what you would have to contend with if you stood idly by watching your father forfeit his popularity (a process that is already underway) and watching errors being committed that could threaten crown and country!’
³³
To her it was a golden if unexpected opportunity to see her husband’s accession lead to the establishment of government in Prussia after the British example.

Fritz was not ready to embrace such radical changes, one of his reasons for opposing his father’s threat to abdicate. He knew that as King he would find himself caught between liberal and conservative forces, and would be confronted by entrenched reactionary opposition to his liberal views. It had already been made clear to him that the army would not let him ascend the throne if he allowed himself to become too closely identified with liberal aspirations, if only by means of a military conspiracy to remove him from the line of succession in favour of Prince Friedrich Karl, who would willingly be a tool of the Junkers and their clique. At the same time he would have been reluctant to cooperate with the radical liberal majority in parliament. His father’s abdication would have signalled the liberals’ victory in the constitutional conflict, and the first item on their agenda would have been demands for genuine parliamentary government. As he had no intention of sacrificing any powers of the crown to parliament, further conflict between both sides would have quickly followed. Moreover to find himself unexpectedly King of Prussia, by means which ran counter to his respect for the natural laws of succession, with a crowd of hostile reactionary ministers, a former King watching his every move, and a Queen Consort unpopular with the Court and her in-laws, would have been impossible.

On 22 September Bismarck met the King, to be told gravely that if they could not come to some understanding, the act of abdication would be published forthwith. Bismarck had only one answer: ‘royal government or the supremacy of Parliament’.
³⁴
Next day he was proclaimed Minister-President of Prussia. The fears of Vicky and Fritz were confirmed; for the immediate future, while King Wilhelm reigned, Bismarck would rule. It was an appointment destined to have unforeseen consequences, not only for the hapless Crown Prince and Princess of Prussia, but also for both the map and the history of Europe for over half a century.

*
Accounts of events leading up to the confinement and birth in Daphne Bennett,
Vicky
(p.84ff), Hannah Pakula,
An Uncommon Woman
(p. 124ff), and John Röhl,
Young Wilhelm
(p. 4ff), all differ slightly but in crucial details. The above is based primarily on the latter, which as the most recently published and most detailed summary, based on the widest range of unpublished sources, can be regarded as the most accurate.

FOUR

‘Youth is hasty with words’

V
icky and Fritz were certain that if Bismarck was appointed, he would exacerbate the crisis by violating the constitution in order to secure the King’s army reforms. People everywhere, they knew, would be suspicious of reaction, distrust would be aroused on all sides of the political spectrum, and the King would have many difficult moments as the result of appointing such a ‘dishonest character’.
¹
In the Minister-President’s maiden speech to the parliamentary finance committee, he said that the German people looked to Prussia not for liberalism but for power. Prussia’s frontiers, as fixed by the Congress of Vienna, were not suitable for healthy development; her goal was the development of its power, and the great questions of the time would not be solved by speeches and majority decisions – that was the great mistake from 1848 to 1849 – but by iron and blood.
²
His words were less a call to arms than an appeal to the
Landtag
finance committee to fund military reforms, as Prussian ability to assume leadership of the German confederation depended not just on military power but also on alliances and a strong foreign policy to weaken the alliances of Prussia’s enemies. His political adversaries, as well as subsequent German historians, saw it as his determination to achieve unification by war, and his implicit threat to resort to such means was clearly seen.

There was another, more personal problem for Vicky and Fritz. Earlier that month the Prince of Wales had been betrothed to Princess Alexandra of Denmark. Her father Prince Christian was heir to the Danish throne, and on his accession the Schleswig-Holstein question would almost certainly create controversy. The duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, the latter with a large German population, had been ruled by Denmark since the London Protocol of 1852. With the growth of German nationalist feeling, the citizens of both were increasingly restless and the death of the present King, Frederik VII, would bring demands for recognition or self-government to a head, particularly on the part of Holstein and German areas of Schleswig, objecting to the administration of their Danish overlords. By marrying her heir to one of the country’s princesses, Britain was making her Danish sympathies evident. The knowledge that Fritz and Vicky had helped to bring the marriage about, probably thanks to the indiscreet Duke of Coburg, did nothing for their popularity in Prussia. The Duke, a fervent champion of German unification, called the match a ‘thunder-clap’ for Germany,
³
and warned his niece that she had harmed herself as a result.

Fritz and Vicky were anxious to distance themselves from Bismarck’s government and policies. Though a fortuitously-timed holiday away from Berlin might have been seen by some as politic but cowardly withdrawal, they would not have been able to do anything to advance the cause of liberalism by staying in Berlin at this difficult time. Queen Victoria had invited Alix to stay at Windsor in order to get to know her better, and wanted Bertie out of England. He was borrowing the royal yacht
Osborne
for a Mediterranean cruise, and it was suggested that Fritz and Vicky should join the party, in order to demonstrate that the Crown Prince’s absence from Germany would prove to the liberals that he neither condoned nor took part in plans by the new government to violate the constitution.
⁴
They did not give it a second thought, and though the King complained when they asked his permission to go, he was glad to see the back of them. The presence of his ‘disobedient’ son and daughter-in-law in Prussia during the constitutional crisis was not required.

Before their departure, on the advice of Vicky and Ernest von Stockmar, Fritz had written to Bismarck warning him that any attempt to violate the constitution would create an atmosphere of mistrust between crown and people, which would stifle the government in its domestic and foreign relations. Any solution to the conflict, he emphasized, must be achieved according to the constitution and the will of the people.

They left Coburg on 6 October, and sailed from Marseilles a fortnight later. During the next few weeks they explored the ruins of Carthage, visited the Bey of Tunis, lunched in the open air at Syracuse in a grove of orange and lemon trees, gazed at the bay of Naples while Vicky sketched, and walked up the dormant Mount Vesuvius. Fritz guided her round the art treasures and churches at Rome, and they went to see the Pope. Afterwards the pontiff told Lord Odo Russell, English representative at the Vatican, that in the whole of his long life he had never been more favourably impressed by anyone than by the Crown Princess of Prussia. Vicky may have been similarly impressed by the Pope, but she was very scathing about what she called the ‘dumb foolery’ of High Mass – priests dressing and undressing, bobbing up and down, and mumbling Latin so fast as to be unintelligible, a ceremony which almost made her laugh.

While they were away Bismarck had sought a compromise with parliament, as he hoped that the strife could be settled if minor concessions were made to the liberal opposition. Like Fritz, Bismarck was not opposed to the two-year service term, and he arranged a plan whereby conscripts could purchase their release from military service after two years, any funds thus raised to be used to attract volunteers; those who could not pay would serve a third year. This scheme was anathema to the King, who claimed that anything less than the three-year term would be fatal to the army. Bismarck then suggested a further concession to the opposition by offering cabinet posts to three senior liberal deputies, but they insisted on the twoyear term as a condition of acceptance. Though Bismarck told the liberals in private that he would secure the King’s consent to the twoyear term, the liberals, well aware of their sovereign’s stubbornness on the issue, refused to enter the government.

Having failed to effect a compromise between crown and parliamentary opposition, Bismarck had to find an alternative solution. On the King’s orders he withdrew the budget for 1863, which had been submitted to parliament with that for the previous year, thus preventing the opposition from voting down funds for the 1862 army reorganization. In a speech before the budget committee, he declared that if parliament refused further funds for the new year he would rule without a budget, a measure justified by the fact that parliament had no exclusive power over military estimates. It was therefore imperative that an agreement with the crown should be reached. Rejection of the budget by either power constituted an emergency, which empowered the government to govern without a budget, as the crown retained all rights not expressly allocated to parliament by the constitution. When progressive party member Rudolf Virchow declared that it was unconstitutional for the government to rule without a budget, Bismarck answered that the constitution made no provision for what was to happen if it was rejected by parliament. As the constitution was deficient in this aspect, the government was obliged to prevent a standstill of all business, and must continue even if that implied expenditure without lawful parliamentary enactment. This failed to persuade the liberals, who accepted the financial estimates for 1863 but rejected the figures for military expenditure. Bismarck dissolved parliament on 13 October, proclaiming a state of emergency and announcing that the government would rule without a budget approved by parliament, submitting a bill of indemnity only when normal conditions were resumed.

After the dissolution he assured Fritz that, while his ministry would continue to do everything possible to resolve the conflict in a manner satisfactory to all, parliament’s uncooperative attitude could result in measures incompatible with the letter of the constitution. As minister-president he was frustrated by the perpetuation of the conflict and felt that the situation was becoming untenable, but even so he said he was committed to removing all barriers to compromise between crown and parliament. While professing a desire to work amicably with the Crown Prince, insisting that he was no reactionary and had no allegiance to any political party, nor any objection to the liberals, he had to take care not to adopt a liberal policy lest parliament interpret this as submission of the government to the will of parliament.

The Prince and Princess of Wales were married on 10 March 1863 at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, with Vicky and Fritz among those present, Fritz as the groom’s best man. Highland-clad Willy took advantage of the occasion to give a foretaste of his future behaviour towards the family in England. Bored during the long service, he threw the dirk from his stocking on the chapel floor; when his uncles, twelve-year-old Arthur and nine-year-old Leopold, scolded him, he retaliated by biting them in the legs. Vicky and Fritz were pleased to hear that the King had kept a promise which he had verbally given them and attended a dinner given by the British Ambassador at the embassy in Berlin that same evening to celebrate the wedding. Bismarck had warned him that in view of Prussia’s attitude towards Denmark it would not be prudent, but to no avail.