Dearest Vicky, Darling Fritz (31 page)

By this time the Scottish weather was too damp and cold. Mackenzie advised them to avoid Berlin over winter, and in September Fritz said farewell to Britain for ever. News arrived from Germany that Kaiser Wilhelm was seriously ill, with a number of official functions being performed by the ageing wheelchair-bound Empress with her grandson Wilhelm’s assistance. Fritz was ready to leave for Berlin if his father was to die suddenly, as he would have to in the event of his accession, after which spending the autumn in a different, more temperate climate would be considered, though whether he would be permitted to go outside the German empire was doubtful. He considered returning to Babelsberg briefly to see his father again, but Vicky and Mackenzie persuaded him that to return to Germany while he was still convalescent would delay his recovery.

They left for Toblach in the Austrian Tyrol, arriving on 7 September, the same day that Mackenzie was knighted. Already exhausted by the journey, Fritz found the air too cold and he was coughing badly, looked pale and suffered from insomnia. After one particularly bad night when he choked so much that Vicky dreaded he was in imminent danger of suffocation, a telegram to London brought Mackenzie and Hovell out at once. They moved south to Venice and later Baveno, on the shores of Lake Maggiore, and Fritz appeared better by the time of his fifty-sixth birthday. All the children except Willy and Ditta joined them, acting a short play and playing the piano, just as they had done in happier days at Potsdam. He was so heartened at this demonstration of affection towards him that Vicky had to force herself to remain cheerful while keeping secret a most unwelcome piece of news. That morning she had received a letter from a friend asking her to bring the Crown Prince back to Germany at once; there was talk of a plot to defy the law, exclude him from the succession, and put Wilhelm in his place.

Undoubtedly part of the concern, sometimes bordering on anger, of the Berliners for their beloved heir, stemmed from the lack of public relations. Catherine Radziwill thought the greatest mistake Vicky ever made was to keep genuine knowledge of his condition from the public; the people would have pitied her and admired her courage if only they could have shared her trials with her instead of being left to guess and listen to idle rumour.
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Unfortunately she had to choose between either being completely open, or else keeping her agonies to herself so that her husband should not suffer unnecessarily from seeing negative reports in the press. Already there were too many of these, and she tried to check the papers before he received them, in order to help him avoid the prophecies of gloom which would depress him and therefore undo weeks of effort on her part. Sooner or later the public would be bound to know what danger he was in, but she was hardly to be blamed for drawing a veil of secrecy over his progress for as long as she did.

Already the papers were arguing between themselves. On Fritz’s birthday the
Reichs-Anzeiger
issued a statement that he was better, though it was necessary for him to spare his voice as much as possible and spend the winter in a warm climate so that, he could avoid catching cold as far as possible. Some of the other papers promptly contradicted the news of his improvement and announced that he was suffering from cancer, amounting to little more than vague confirmation of the widespread rumour, and some rightwing journals promptly revived the fictitious law which forbade an incurably sick man to wear the Prussian crown. Despite Vicky’s vigilant censorship Fritz’s eyes naturally strayed, and he was profoundly depressed at all the misinformed, speculative articles about himself.

Within weeks there was a further setback. He did not improve at Baveno, and Vicky put it down to the humidity. At the beginning of November they moved further south to San Remo, on the Italian coast and close to the French border. The Villa Zirio stood on a mountain slope above the Riviera road, in an idyllic setting of palms and fruit trees, of roses and other flowers which bloomed all winter. Fritz’s apartments were a suite of rooms facing east and west to catch the sun. Above all it belonged to an Italian; the Berlin press had made much of the fact that their house at Baveno was leased by an Englishman.

But Fritz was no better here either; he lost colour and appetite, and the heat irritated him. Vicky had to have his bed placed in a warm but sheltered area of the terrace and sit by his side fanning him, horrified to see how little interest he suddenly had in anything or anyone, even her. Then one morning, within a week of their arrival, she discovered new swellings on his throat, and he found it a strain to sit up. Panic-stricken, she summoned Mackenzie who examined Fritz the morning after his arrival at the villa, and discovered a new growth on the larynx larger than the previous swellings, with a distinctly malignant appearance. He told Fritz that the disease was more serious than he had thought; half-expecting it, Fritz wrote on his pad – his voice having gone for good – to ask if it was cancer. Mackenzie gravely replied: ‘it looks very much like it, but it is impossible to be certain.’
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Fritz thanked him for being so honest, but when he and Vicky were alone, his self-control went and he broke down. ‘To think that I should have a horrid, disgusting illness! that I shall be an object of disgust to everyone, and a burden of you all!’
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This was the catalyst for the anti-English factions in Germany. For over twenty years aristocratic circles at court and archconservatives alike had waited for the chance to get even with the Crown Princess, for what they considered to be her unwarranted interference in their politics and their country. Now they asserted that she had so set her heart on becoming Empress that she had kept the gravity of her husband’s illness a secret, afraid of their both being passed over in favour of their eldest son. She had refused to listen to German doctors, they said, preferring to summon an Englishman; she and Mackenzie had given him falsely optimistic hopes about his condition and, to satisfy her own whim, she had dragged him to London where he had exhausted himself in her mother’s Jubilee procession. Furthermore she and ‘her’ doctor had conspired to distrust the German physicians, thus preventing an operation on the sick man which might have saved his life.

Almost without exception these allegations were totally without foundation. It was true that the Crown Prince and Princess had eagerly awaited their accession to the throne in order to help inaugurate a more democratic and cultural regime, but she had been assured that they could not be set aside in the succession, no matter what his physical condition. From that point of view, therefore, there was nothing to be gained by shielding the truth. On the other hand it was a deliberate falsehood to suggest that Vicky had called Mackenzie of her own accord; she had not even heard of him before the German doctors mentioned his name, but Bergmann and Gerhardt did not intend to lose face by admitting their responsibility for his appearance in the first place. Unfortunately Mackenzie’s own attitude did nothing to help her; he probably preferred to believe that he had been summoned to Germany by the Crown Princess, not by mere fellow-doctors; far from trying to dispel this impression, he told this to others, including his official biographer H.R. Haweis. As for giving Fritz false hopes, her answer was mere commonsense, as she had told Queen Victoria; ‘you know how sensitive and apprehensive, how suspicious and despondent Fritz is by nature! All the more wrong and positively dangerous (let alone the cruelty of it) to wish him to think the worst! We should not keep him going at all, if this were the case.’
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Finally, the allegation that she had conspired with Mackenzie to the detriment of German medical knowledge was disproved by a letter the doctor published in
Allgemeine Zeitung
on 31 October, affirming that he had never been opposed to entering into consultation with his German colleagues; ‘should any unfavourable symptoms unfortunately develop, I should be the first to ask for the cooperation of one of your countrymen.’
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But the most articulate of Vicky’s enemies slandered her with little restraint and a good deal of imagination. While Bismarck was uncharacteristically silent, Waldersee declared that she ‘scarcely seems a responsible being, so fanatically does she uphold the idea that her husband is not seriously ill’.
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Lucius von Balhausen, Minister of Agriculture, later remarked in his memoirs with spite and total disregard for the truth that she resembled her mother, who had refused almost to the end to believe that the Prince Consort was sinking in 1861, declared he was only malingering, went for a drive and came back to find him dead.
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Herbert Bismarck wrote that the Crown Prince had to remain in Italy because his wife feared she would be pelted with rotten eggs if she returned to Berlin.
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Fritz had always been popular in Prussia. The only circle who hated him as much as they loathed Vicky were the representatives of the Christian Socialist Movement, led by the notoriously anti-Semitic court chaplain Adolf von Stöcker. At a court ball some years earlier Fritz had met a young Jewess who dreaded the prospect of being ignored. He detailed his friend Count Bernstorff to dance with her, while Vicky had shown her lack of prejudice by accepting the honorary chairmanship of a newly-founded orphanage for Jewish girls in Berlin. Willy eagerly identified himself with the anti-Semitic movement, and in December 1887 he attended a meeting of Stöcker’s mission at the Waldersees’ house which planned to extend the movement throughout Germany. There he made a speech declaring that Christian Socialism was needed to bring people back to Christianity who had lost their faith, and to get them to recognize the absolute authority of the monarchy. Bismarck attacked him for this ludicrous address, and was coldly reminded that in Germany the Kaiser, not the Chancellor, was master.

Some took the view that Willy accepted too unquestioningly the verdict of his flatterers that his father was being mishandled by Mackenzie and, excited by the prospect of premature power, tried to exert some influence out of a sense of duty.
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Nevertheless his next intervention at San Remo was thoroughly ill-timed. After the public criticism of Mackenzie two more doctors, Professor von Schrotter from Vienna and Dr Krause from Berlin, were sent to replace Gerhardt and Bergmann, to whom it was made clear that their services were not required any longer. They examined Fritz, and after all doctors present – Mackenzie included – had held a consultation agreeing that the disease was cancer, they declared that two alternatives were possible: either tracheotomy, an incision in the windpipe, which would avoid danger of suffocation, or total removal of the larynx, which would result in permanent loss of voice at the very least. Whatever course was taken, it would only prolong the patient’s life for months rather than years.

As they were ushered into the sitting-room to break the news to the Crown Prince he stood with composed dignity, giving a nod and a gentle smile that betrayed no emotion. Vicky was beside him, white as a sheet but determined for his sake not to give way. Schrotter, acting as the doctors’ spokesman, told him of their conclusion, without mentioning the word cancer but leaving them in no doubt as to what was inferred, and then gave him a choice of tracheotomy or removal. Calmly he wrote on his pad that he and Vicky wished to be alone for a while to decide. Together they selected tracheotomy, should it become necessary; Fritz felt that an Emperor mutilated by the removal of his larynx would be incapable of carrying out his duties. His resigned attitude made it clear that he knew he was doomed, but only if threatened with suffocation would he submit to a splitting of the larynx. Now that he knew the truth, he seemed a little less depressed than before. Later in front of the servants and doctors, he apologized for feeling so well under the circumstances.

At this stage Willy reappeared with yet another doctor, Schmidt, who was to examine Fritz and take a report back to Berlin with him. Whoever sent them is purely speculative; whether one, encouraged by public opinion and spurred on privately by the other, decided to take matters into his own hands, or whether the Bismarcks sent them, is not known. Whatever the circumstances, Willy was too full of his own importance when he arrived to make allowance for his mother’s frantic state of mind, telling her to get his father up and dressed so that he could take him back to Berlin for an operation. She would not hear of it, and struggling to restrain her temper she suggested that they should go for a walk together. He retorted that he had no time, as he would be too busy speaking to the doctors. When she answered that they had instructions to report to her and not to him, he insisted he was acting on the orders of his grandfather, and to see that the doctors were not interfered with in any way.

The sight of her son impudently standing with his back half turned to her, as good as telling her what to do in the presence of her household, was more than she could stand. In her own words she ‘pitched into him with considerable violence’, declaring that she would report his behaviour to his father and see that he was forbidden the villa in future;
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with that she swept regally out of the room. Rather taken aback, he sent Radolinski after her to tell her that he had not meant to be so rude, but he had come as the Emperor’s representative, and was only doing his duty. The air cleared, she answered that she bore him no grudge, but would not put up with any interference; the head on her shoulders was just as good as his. However it was obviously only a truce, and on his return to Berlin he complained that his mother had treated him like a dog. Forty years later, chastened by abdication and a decade of exile, he recalled benignly that ‘she saw everything in shadows, everything hostile, saw want of sympathy and coolness where there was only a helpless silence.’
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After Fritz was told the doctors’ diagnosis at San Remo, correspondents were asked by Dr Schrader and Radolinski not to divulge the news. They intended to prepare the German public gradually by a series of cautiously-worded bulletins which would make the patient’s state generally known without shocking his own feelings. This plan, however, was frustrated by the immediate publication of a private bulletin to the Emperor in the
Reichs-Anzeiger
which Fritz saw, much to his distress.
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