Read Dearest Vicky, Darling Fritz Online
Authors: John Van der Kiste
Meanwhile Bismarck told Vicky that he must continue to give the impression he was opposing the Battenberg marriage, in order to try and keep Crown Prince Wilhelm on his side. Any disagreement between the Chancellor and the heir would result in the latter going over to the far right, and looking to pious, warmongering friends like Waldersee and Stöcker for support. This must be avoided at all costs if possible. As usual the Chancellor was playing a devious game, at the same time telling his confidantes that the Empress was a ‘wild woman’ who was in love with ‘the Battenberger’ herself, and wanted to have him around her, like her mother did with his brothers. On the same day he had an item inserted in the Berlin press that he was about to hand in his resignation over a ‘secret conflict’, and the next editions of the papers narrowed it down to questions of ‘a family nature’. A subsequent article stated that there was some consternation in diplomatic circles over his intention of resigning because of a possibility of the Battenberg marriage taking place; as Queen Victoria and Prince Alexander were due to come to Berlin, the Queen intent on acting as matchmaker and thus taking it upon herself to interfere in the Reich’s foreign policy. Germany had to preserve her disinterest regarding Bulgaria and thus the trust of Russia and Austria, a confidence which would be destroyed at once if the Tsar’s most hated personal enemy was to become the son-inlaw of the German Emperor.
On 12 April Fritz had a severe attack of coughing. Mackenzie was called, and after consulting Krause and Wegner he decided to try a shorter tube. When this failed to bring more than momentary relief, he chose a different canula altogether and out of professional courtesy sent a note inviting Bergmann to come to Charlottenburg as soon as possible, to see him insert it. Bergmann arrived late in the afternoon, wildly excited and thinking from the message that an emergency had arisen. According to Hovell, who was by no means uncritical of Mackenzie, the German doctor’s breath smelt heavily of alcohol, and he was swaying from side to side.
On being led into the Kaiser’s room where he was writing at his desk, his breathing audible but laboured, Bergmann removed the shorter canula from his throat and replaced it with a new one. It went into the patient’s neck, but no breathing came out; instead he had a sudden violent fit of coughing. The doctor tried again, in the same rough and ready manner, and with a similar result. Instead of going into the windpipe as it should have done, the canula was forced in front of it, into the neck tissues, causing heavy coughing and haemorrhage. At this second failure, just as a grim-faced Mackenzie was about to insist on taking over, Bergmann (who had been invited to watch, rather than help) conceded defeat and sent for his more capable assistant Bramann, who had been outside in the carriage waiting to be called if necessary. He replaced the canula properly, but the damage had been done; Fritz continued to cough and bleed for several hours, and Bergmann’s clumsiness left him weaker than before.
That evening he asked Mackenzie to prevent Bergmann from carrying out any further operations on him. Bergmann proceeded to write to Vicky asking her rather unnecessarily to relieve him of the duty of working as Mackenzie’s adviser, to which the latter’s answer was equally to the point; after what he had witnessed, he respectfully warned that he would withdraw from the case altogether if Bergmann was allowed as much as to touch Fritz’s throat again.
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Since the previous autumn Queen Victoria had been determined to visit her stricken son-in-law again. If Kaiser Wilhelm had lived a few weeks longer they might have met at San Remo, for she had arrived at Florence within a fortnight of Fritz’s accession. When she publicly announced her intention of coming to Berlin, the Bismarcks were convinced this could only mean one thing. Sir Edward Malet, British Ambassador in Berlin, anxious to preserve good Anglo-German relations even if it meant appeasing Bismarck and Crown Prince Wilhelm, asked Lord Salisbury, British Prime Minister, to persuade the Queen to postpone her plans for visiting the city. With some indignation she pointed out that her journey was to have no political significance. She had come north with the sole intention of seeing her gravely ill son-in-law, probably for the last time, even before the Battenberg controversy flickered into life again.
Bismarck, the ministers, and the Emperor’s household did not realize that Queen Victoria was resolutely opposed to the match. Her main objection was her grandson’s attitude; Sir Henry Ponsonby reported to his wife that the Queen would only accept the marriage if the new Crown Prince would welcome Sandro as a brother-in-law. Wilhelm’s recent letter to the unhappy suitor, telling him that if he married Moretta then he would consider him the enemy of his family and country,
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made it clear that he would accord him no such welcome. The Queen was aware of Sandro’s feelings about this, for on 12 March he had made it clear to Vicky that only if he succeeded in winning Crown Prince Wilhelm’s approval could he foresee a happy solution.
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His brother Henry recognised that Sandro could not possibly afford to keep a wife comfortably in his present state, let alone an imperial princess; if he tried, he would surely be expelled from Germany and ruined.
On the morning of 24 April, with Beatrice and Henry, the Queen arrived at Berlin and went straight to Charlottenburg and the sickbed. Vicky ruefully observed that it was the first time she and Fritz had had her under their own roof as a guest. Though he was rather the worse for recent sleepless nights, the sight of his beloved mother-in-law cheered him as he sat up in bed, propped up on his pillows, his weary eyes lighting up with joy as his trembling hands held out a bouquet of forget-me-nots and French fern from their garden. She sat beside the bed, holding his hand and talking about the family, while he wrote at intervals on his pad and passed it to her. Not until she was able to speak to Vicky alone did she tell her about Sandro and Johanna Loisinger, and Vicky was bitterly upset at having given her daughter false hopes. With his will, Fritz left a letter to Wilhelm dated 12 April, stating that in the event of his death, he gave his consent to Moretta’s marriage and charged him as Emperor to see that it took place. In order to ‘obviate any political difficulties’, he renounced his wish to give Sandro an army commission or decoration.
Despite Lord Salisbury’s fears that his sovereign would be exposed to fierce anti-English demonstrations in the street, Victoria was enthusiastically received every time she was seen in public. The crowds cheered her and showered the carriage with bouquets, and whenever Vicky took the seat beside her mother, shouts of ‘Long live the Empress!’ were evident too. The Queen’s greatest success in Berlin, however, was her meeting with Bismarck, which took place at his request the day after her arrival. Malet had advised that the Chancellor would be ‘greatly pleased at such attention from the Queen.’
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While waiting for her, the mere thought of coming face to face with her made him quite ill at ease, as he fussed over little details of etiquette. Where exactly would she be in the audience chamber, and would she be sitting or standing? He was quite relieved when Ponsonby finally led him to Vicky, who escorted him to her mother a little after midday.
No reference to the Battenbergs is to be found in the published extracts from her journal.
*
Apart from a brief discussion of international affairs and the possibility of war with a Franco-Russian alliance if Austria should be attacked with Germany being bound by treaty to defend her, the time they spent in conversation, a little over half an hour, was kept to relatively uncontroversial matters. Bismarck alluded to their only other meeting, at Versailles in 1855. Queen Victoria mentioned her grandson Wilhelm’s inexperience, to which he replied that the Crown Prince knew nothing about civil affairs, but ‘should he be thrown into the water, he would be able to swim’. She asked him to stand by her daughter and he promised he would, agreeing that ‘hers was a hard fate.’ Most important of all he assured her that he was not contemplating any form of Regency, as he knew it would upset the Emperor.
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At the end the ‘Iron Chancellor’ walked out of the room, smiling with admiration and mopping his brow: ‘What a woman! One could do business with her!’
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On the last day of her visit the Queen saw Fritz again as she told him that he must repay the visit as soon as he felt better. With a ready smile and a wave of her hand, she took her leave for the last time of the son-in-law on whom such a bright future had depended. She also warned her daughter that she had to reconcile herself to the fact that ‘this unfortunate project’, the Moretta-Sandro marriage, would never come to pass. That the Queen returned to England unsure of whether her warning had been taken to heart was evident from one of her letters four weeks later. ‘I only hope you will see your way to put an end to a state of things which is quite ruinous’, she advised Vicky, adding that the betrothal scheme had ‘been the indirect cause of all his misfortunes’, and that if Vicky and Moretta really loved him, ‘you ought to set him free and spare his honourable name being assailed as it is now being’.
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A few days after the Queen’s departure from Berlin, Bismarck publicly denounced the ‘notorious’ article which had attacked Queen Victoria’s ‘interference’
vis-à-vis
her support of the Battenberg marriage. It had been written by Moritz von Busch on Bismarck’s orders, and when both men discussed this denunciation, the Chancellor smiled cynically. The article, he said, ‘was really quite first rate.’
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During her husband’s reign Vicky’s own health was far from good. Under constant stress, rheumatism and headaches gave her constant trouble, and while friends were sympathetic, her enemies thought or professed to think that she was on the edge of hysteria if not madness. By April she could only sleep fitfully when exhaustion overtook her, and every morning at 6.30 she was by Fritz’s side before he awoke. On stirring he mouthed the words ‘tell me’, and she told him ‘every tiny little thing I had done, seen and heard the day before, what I had thought, hoped and imagined’.
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At times he would feel slightly better and his temperature would subside; if the weather was warm enough, they would have a tent erected in the garden and a seat on the lawn screened by shrubs and trees, so he could lie outside and enjoy the fresh air.
Occasionally the Dowager Empress would be brought along in her wheelchair to sit by her son and talk to him in her shaking voice. Neither of them now had much in common, Augusta’s interests extending little beyond court functions and the gossip which she had always loved, but Fritz was grateful for her company.
When he felt strong enough to drive into Berlin with Vicky and the girls, he had only to show himself at the railings of the palace for the crowds, anxiously awaiting each bulletin on his health, to cheer; when he ventured through the streets, his subjects would wave their handkerchiefs and raise their hats in the air in their enthusiasm for the Emperor whose life was hanging by a thread. Women threw flowers into the carriage, and mothers lifted babies or small children to catch a glimpse of his face. In recognition he raised his cap as often as his energy would permit, until a sudden coughing fit necessitated them turning off briefly into one of the city palaces for the bandage to be renewed. The widespread sympathy and admiration were testified to by the bouquets delivered daily to Charlottenburg, from expensive blooms from Berlin’s most exclusive florists, to humble bunches of primroses and violets from less wealthy but equally devoted well-wishers. One morning a lady bought up the entire contents of a basket of fresh violets from a street vendor and sent them to her sovereign, and a footman came out to give her his thanks.
His mind remained clear, and he always studied the newspapers and state documents passed to him with the keen interest of a ruler determined to do his duty. He was distressed by the news of floods in East Prussia after a period of torrential rain, and though he had to send Vicky to represent him on a visit to the affected areas – the only occasion during his reign on which she left him for any length of time – he made a personal gift of 50,000 marks to help the victims. One of his plans was to alleviate slum areas in the cities by more state expenditure on housing for the poor; ‘in this way part of the so-called social question would be solved’.
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Bismarck had not neglected the lower classes either, but his own tentative steps towards socialism were motivated by absolutist principles; he rejected the idea of factory inspection and statutory limitation of working hours, preferring to establish employee insurance against accidents, sickness, redundancy and old age. This philosophy was too revolutionary for some of his contemporaries, though some of it anticipated the twentieth century welfare state, yet it was too transparent for the more discerning liberals. They saw that the Chancellor’s real aim was to make workers feel more dependent on the state, and therefore on him. Fritz’s honest intentions of improving social conditions had no such motives. Since his first years as Crown Prince he had discussed the socialist movement with his mother and wife, and they agreed that self-help was the best means of combating distress; one would have less to fear from the fanaticism of early socialists if one made good some of the grievances of these would-be revolutionaries. With a more liberal ministry such ideas would have been put into practice.
It grieved him to think that so much would be left undone at his death. When asked about rebuilding the Berlin cathedral, a scheme with which he and Vicky had been concerned during a previous visit to Italy, he wrote sadly on his pad that it was ‘all over and done with’. At a ministerial meeting he asked the Finance Minister Adolf Scholz how long it would take the mint to produce new coins bearing his likeness. When told that they would not be ready for two or three months, he raised his hands and the look of despair on his face revealed that he knew he would not live to see them.
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Nevertheless a few of his ideas still bore fruit. He appointed an army commission to devise new rules for drill and training regulations, part of the military reforms he had planned, in time for him to give his assent, and he entrusted Henry with responsibility for choosing designs submitted for a new uniform for the imperial navy.