Dearest Vicky, Darling Fritz (24 page)

On the day after their return Fritz was commissioned to take temporary control of the government. The wounded Kaiser had insisted that his son could only represent him and was to rule according to his own principles, not to the Crown Prince’s, and shortly after regaining consciousness he had signed a bill ensuring that affairs of state would continue as before. When Fritz met Bismarck to discuss the form of these representative functions, Bismarck presented him with a document,
Stellvertreter Urkunde
, reflecting these conditions and thus denying him a decisive role in important matters of state, even as his father’s deputy. It was clear that his decisions would be subject to approval of, or either ignored by, the Chancellor, who would take notice of Fritz’s opinions on domestic and foreign policy only if they suited him. Unlike the regency of 1858 to which Wilhelm had been appointed as a result of his brother’s illness, Fritz was empowered to act just as a deputy until his father’s return to health. It placed a new strain on relations between both men during the Emperor’s convalescence, as Fritz knew that Bismarck was taking no chances and ensuring he would have no influence on state affairs.

Vicky saw this in a positive light; because of political unrest after the two assassination attempts, she knew repressive measures would be undertaken to restore order, and as they were bound to be unpopular, she thought it as well that Fritz should not be considered responsible for them. It was better for it to be known that he was powerless to oppose conservative policies enacted during his regency.

When Bismarck dissolved the
Reichstag
, during the ensuing election campaign the government press made much of the responsibility of the Social Democrats and their alleged left liberal allies for both assassination attempts. The conservatives gained seats at the expense of the liberal and progressive parties, which gave Bismarck a comfortable passage for his anti-socialist bill in the autumn. Though rejected by the centre and progressive parties, it was passed comfortably by the conservatives and national liberals. Its provisions included outlawing of the Social Democratic Party, to which Hödel had belonged, its meetings and assemblies forbidden, and socialists found guilty of breaking the law exiled. To Vicky it was part of a growing reactionary trend in German politics which violated liberal principles of equality before the law and freedom of assembly, though to Fritz socialism was an unhealthy movement to be eradicated.

The Congress of Berlin opened on 13 June, to revise the unsatisfactory peace terms imposed by Russia on Turkey at the treaty of San Stefano, and was dissolved a month later. Fritz took no part beyond welcoming foreign representatives to the city and addressing them at the gala dinner on the opening night. Though not consulted about negotiations at the conference table, there was little doubt that he approved of Russia’s aims of territorial expansion being thwarted, chiefly due to Disraeli’s and Andrassy’s protection of their own national interests; England took possession of the island of Cyprus, and Austria was permitted to occupy Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Nobiling was in prison awaiting trial, and died a few weeks later of wounds self-inflicted before his arrest, but Hödel had already been arraigned and sentenced to death. According to Prussian law, executions had to be ratified by the sovereign before being carried out. The Kaiser had always opposed the death penalty and commuted such sentences passed to him for approval to life imprisonment. After the verdict on Hödel, gossips suggested that if the Crown Prince spared him, it would be due to the influence of his consort who wanted to encourage future attempts on her father-inlaw so that she and her husband could come to the throne sooner. Like his father Fritz was reluctant to sanction a death sentence, but the popular view was that it would be foolish to show leniency in such a case, especially as one attempt had so nearly succeeded and it seemed the time for stern measures. After a prolonged period of soul-searching he signed the death warrant on 8 August. General von Albedyll, head of the military cabinet, saw how much Fritz took the matter to heart, and believed he could not sleep on the night of the execution. He was obviously relieved on hearing it was all over, and pleased with a letter from his father thanking him for having spared him the ordeal. Hödel went unrepentantly to the scaffold, crying ‘Bravo for the Commune!’
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before the executioner’s act silenced him.

When the Kaiser attended a military review at Kassel in September it was evident that he was recovering. He still trembled but was looking much fitter, as he appeared on horseback in public for the first time since June, and in a matter of weeks he was restored to full health. On 5 December Fritz relinquished the hollow regency and the Kaiser returned to Berlin, sobered by the thought that ‘this trial’ had been imposed on him in his own capital and by a fellow-Prussian, but apparently none the worse.

It was believed that Fritz would be given some special position in the government in recognition of his recent duties, but this proved to be unfounded. The day after stepping down, he received a formal letter of thanks from his ‘affectionate father’, which was impersonal enough to be published in the papers. Wilhelm was certainly grateful to his son for having deputised for him, and had it been in his power perhaps he would have tried to give him something more substantial in return. Yet the shock of his attack had weakened what little resistance to Bismarck the infirmity of old age had left him, and he no longer had the stamina to argue privately with his Chancellor. Far from attempting to disagree with him, as he frequently had before, he was more than ever in the statesman’s clutches. Soon after the end of the regency he became convinced that Germany had been unfairly treated at the Congress, and that Fritz was responsible. He did not realize that his son had played no part, and when a guest at one of the Empress’s parties pointed out that Bismarck alone was to blame for what had taken place, he retorted that his Chancellor was only human. ‘It was but natural that he should try and make himself pleasant to the Crown Prince.’
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After the Emperor resumed his duties, Bismarck revived a plan which had been mentioned the previous year, to make Fritz
Statthalter
or governor of Alsace-Lorraine. His motives for doing so were questionable. Some thought it an honest effort by the Chancellor to provide him with some official government duty, though others, including Fritz and Vicky themselves, saw it as a gesture to remove him from Berlin to prevent him from interfering with the conservative programme. Since 1871 the provinces had been governed by a dictatorship from Berlin, but after a few years the conservatives in the
Reichstag
felt that they should be granted some independence in the hope of uniting them more firmly to the empire. The question of appointing an officer to govern them, answerable only to the Emperor, was raised, and the Crown Prince was the obvious choice. When advised by more sympathetic sources that most of his decisions as
Statthalter
would be subject to Bismarck’s approval, and he would not have a free hand in filling the posts in his administration of the province, Fritz refused the post.

In November 1878 diphtheria struck the Grand Ducal family of Hesse, claiming the life of Alice’s youngest daughter May. Just as the rest were recovering, Alice herself died four weeks later, on 14 December, the anniversary of the Prince Consort’s death. Vicky and Fritz were both forbidden by the Kaiser to attend the funeral for fear of infection. Maliciously the Empress commented at a tea-party a week later that it was just as well for Alice’s children that she had died because ‘like all English Princesses, she was a complete atheist’
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– a spiteful judgment on her friendship with the controversial theologian David Strauss.

In March 1879 Fritz and Vicky went to England to attend the wedding of Louise, daughter of Friedrich Karl, to the Duke of Connaught. The bride’s father distinguished himself by his bad behaviour to his son-in-law’s family, complained that his daughter’s house did not have enough rooms, and told everyone that he had confidently expected his previous visit to England to be his last.

Within a day or two of returning to Berlin, Fritz and Vicky were watching the younger children rehearsing a pantomime one afternoon when Waldie complained of a sore throat. He was the most appealing of their three sons, and gave promise of being everything the others were not. Although the Prince, Friedrich Karl, never cared much for his nephew and niece, even he admitted that Waldie was ‘the most delightful boy’
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he had ever seen. Yet for all his love of practical jokes and often unruly behaviour, he was a thin, undersized child who had inherited his father’s delicate health. A cold broke down his resistance to the dreaded diphtheria which had killed his aunt and cousin, ominous white patches appeared on his throat, and he could hardly swallow or close his mouth as his tonsils were so swollen. Vicky washed him with hot vinegar and water, changed his linen and clothes and put them all into a pail of carbolic water, wearing a mackintosh over her own clothes and spraying herself with carbolic acid before returning to the others to prevent the spread of infection. Tragically it was all to no avail and on 27 March he died.

This second untimely death was the worst tragedy that Fritz and Vicky had yet to suffer. When they lost Sigi, Vicky had told Catherine Radziwill that to lose a child was not just a dreadful sorrow, but an unnatural one too – ‘we don’t bring our babies into the world in order to survive them!’
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Waldie’s birth had filled the gap left by his dead brother. Now they were distraught with grief. Not generally given to extravagant displays of emotion, Fritz threw himself on the small coffin at the funeral before Waldie was laid to rest beside the brother he had never known. Even the birth of a first grandchild, Charlotte’s and Bernhard’s daughter Feodora, born on 12 May, brought them no solace. Though he appeared outwardly indifferent, Willy was moved by the effect on his parents. The ‘distress and silent desperation’, he wrote to Georg II, Duke of Saxe-Meiningen, were hard to describe; ‘my poor father has grown old overnight and is so unhappy that he is almost apathetic to everything that happens around him. Mama has shown superhuman strength of character outwardly, but all too often she breaks down in her infinite sorrow.’
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‘Ours is indeed a grief which must last a lifetime,’ Vicky wrote to Lord Napier. ‘We can hardly realise yet that we have the lost the darling boy who was our pride and delight, who seemed to grow daily in health and strength, in intelligence and vigour of character. We had fondly hoped he would grow up to be of use to his country, and his family – we had planned and dreamt of a bright and useful future for him – of all that we dare not think now and will not repine, but the wrench is too terrible and Life can never be the same again. He is missed every hour of the day, and the House has lost half its life.’
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To Carol of Roumania, Fritz wrote that with Waldie’s death life had ‘lost what remaining joy it still had to offer us, and we can only gather satisfaction from the execution of our tasks and duties.’
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A combination of grief at the death of his youngest son, and the effect of years of frustration and the experience of a hollow regency, had given him little encouragement for the future. In a bleak mood of despair in May, he told Vicky that he considered himself henceforth ‘retired from political life’.
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Depression with having ‘been unable to take the reins during the best years of my manhood’ had disheartened him, and the death of Waldie had been what he called the final blow.
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Vicky writhed with agonised fury when she read that an Orthodox Protestant minister, on hearing of their bereavement, remarked that he hoped it was a trial sent by God to humiliate her.
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She struggled through the next few weeks in shock, with hormonal upsets followed by giddiness, rheumatism and neuralgia. Dr Wegner recommended that she should spend the winter in a warmer climate, though Vicky feared that the Empress would never consent as it coincided with the social season. Soon there were more disquieting symptoms – noises in her head, uncontrollable shaking in her hands, and fear of imminent suffocation. In July she and Fritz agreed that it was essential for her to go away for the winter, to Styria and Italy. The Kaiser and Empress were strongly against the idea, and demanded she present her father-in-law with a medical certificate before he would approve what he scathingly called a ‘bathing trip’.

Physically and mentally Vicky was at a low ebb. Years of spending winters in unhealthy overheated palaces, attempts on the Kaiser’s life and rumours of threats on her and her husband, and above all her two recent bereavements, had brought her to the verge of a complete nervous breakdown, and she insisted she would probably not survive another winter in the city. As for wanting to get away for a few months, she told Fritz bitterly, his parents, particularly the Empress, treated her ‘as if I were committing a
crime
!!!’
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Yet she and Fritz stood firm, and on 1 September she and her court marshal Count Seckendorff travelled to Styria in Southern Austria. The local physicians diagnosed anaemia, debilitating rheumatism and severe depression. She did not return to Germany for nearly nine months.

For the first few days she was in the grip of deep depression at years of cumulative tragedies. When Queen Victoria suggested that so long an absence from all her ‘associations’ would be painful, she assured her mother that this would not be the case. The whole social and political atmosphere at Berlin had become intolerable for her. ‘Liberty, independence exist not and we have simply to obey, and have every sort of galling interference in our own home. The spirit of espionage, malevolence, and jealousy and malice is rampant and there are many wicked people whose harmful influence cripple and hinder one at every step one takes. . . . All this has worn away gradually a deal of my courage and a deal of my strength’.
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