Dearest Vicky, Darling Fritz (40 page)

Even after settling at Friedrichshof, Vicky continued to spend part of the winter at Berlin, more out of duty than inclination. She liked to keep an eye on her various charities, notably the Victoria Haus for retired British and American governesses, and children’s hospitals, and at the same time she found it easier to see her professor, politician, writer and artist friends in the capital. However she disliked the city and never felt really well or comfortable there; ‘I shrink so from all that is show and ostentation and which forces one into public when one’s feelings seem so sacred that one cannot bear to be amongst a quantity of people, some most well-meaning and others who have behaved so ill and now make a show of loyalty, the hypocrisy of which makes me sick’.
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As ever she found solace in visits to Britain, and her informality sometimes led to anxious moments for the family and court. At Osborne in 1896 the Queen’s equerry Frederick Ponsonby was awaiting her arrival when told that a German gentleman was anxious to see him. A man was ushered in and explained in broken English that he had to see the Empress immediately on her arrival. As soon as Her Majesty arrived, Ponsonby said, he would give his card to Count Seckendorff, who would arrange an interview. The man insisted he must see the Empress the moment she stepped ashore. Fearing he was either an anarchist or an escaped lunatic, Ponsonby sent a message to the detective at the gate, telling him that a German passing by in a few minutes had to be watched. A plain-clothes policeman who followed him reported that he was staying at the Medina Hotel, and seemed quiet and respectable if eccentric in his habits, but surveillance was maintained. The next day Vicky arrived, and when she got into a carriage with Princess Beatrice and drove off Ponsonby was astonished to see her wave and kiss her hand to the man as she passed. He was an eminent sculptor from Berlin and an intimate friend of hers, she had told him she would see him the instant she set foot in England and he had taken it literally.
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Her literary tastes and passion for books never ceased to amaze the family and court, as well as provoke arguments. On another visit to Osborne, Lady Ponsonby wrote to her husband of the Empress carrying off six books at a time and finishing them off in a couple of days. Both women regularly discussed their reading matter, and both were forthright personalities who might accept each others’ views with some reluctance. When Lady Ponsonby defended a book she had just read, the Empress ‘listened now and then, but puts on a second-century look which rather prevents one going on.’
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A discussion at dinner between Queen Victoria and her eldest daughter at Balmoral on the subject of novelist Marie Corelli proved an even more lively occasion. The Queen thought she was one of the greatest writers of the day, while the Empress called her work ‘trash’. To support her argument she asked Frederick Ponsonby for his opinion. Unaware that his sovereign was such an admirer, he said that notwithstanding the popularity of Corelli’s books, he thought the secret of her success was that her writings appealed to the semi-educated. The Empress clapped her hands and the subject was instantly dropped.
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Count Seckendorff had remained at the head of her household, as devoted as ever. As a gifted draughtsman who shared her love of art, he particularly enjoyed their expeditions abroad when both would sketch or paint side by side in the open air. A belief persisted in certain sections of Berlin society until his death in 1910 that he and the Empress Frederick had shared much more together, that they had been lovers or even secretly married. The liberal journalist Maximilian Harden published a tribute after her death in which he referred to her resting in the Friedenskirche, Potsdam, beside her
first
husband; and ‘a celebrated old general’, who had been a friend of Fritz, once remarked that he was convinced that the widowed Empress had married Seckendorff, as he was ‘a very charming gentleman and their tastes harmonise in everything.’
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Yet Vicky had loved Fritz passionately, and the possibility that she could have secretly taken a second husband cannot be taken seriously. When discussing similar gossip with her maid of honour Marie de Bunsen, regarding a theory that Baron Roggenbach and a princess of Wied were husband and wife, she dismissed it at once. To her it was merely ‘an unusually beautiful friendship, but of course people can’t be induced to believe it.’
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In 1897 Vicky returned to England for her mother’s Diamond Jubilee festivities. She was saddened by the absences of those who had attended the Jubilee celebrations of ten years previously; Fritz, the Duke of Clarence, Grand Duke Louis of Hesse and Henry, Beatrice’s husband, were all sorely missed. Nevertheless she wrote excitedly to Sophie of the celebrations, London streets beautifully decorated, immense crowds and tremendous enthusiasm, and the impressive scene in front of St Paul’s. It was good to be among family once again, though Buckingham Palace was ‘like a beehive, the place is so crammed we do not see very much of one another.’
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In September 1898 she was riding with Mossy when her horse took fright at a threshing machine and threw her off. Her coat caught in the pommel as she fell, and though her head and shoulders were on the ground, she was badly shaken but otherwise only bruised by the horse treading on her hand. She made light of the accident, and the doctors confirmed that her injuries were only superficial. For a few days she was confined to her room with a temperature and a swollen arm, restlessly moving from bed to sofa to keep the aches and pains at bay.

A few days later she went to Breslau for the wedding of her granddaughter Feodora to Prince Henry XXX of Reuss. Horrified by the recent assassination of her friend Elizabeth, Empress of Austria, stabbed by an anarchist in Geneva, she was already in low spirits. On the way she was unwell with severe lumbago, and the ceremony was further overshadowed by the absence of the Kaiser. His presence at manoeuvres nearby did nothing to dispel the impression that a rift between himself and Ditta had never healed, following a scandal at court some six years previously in which an indiscreet diary of hers containing ‘secrets’ about her brother and the Empress had been lost or stolen and fallen into his hands.

Later that month she went to Balmoral for what proved to be her last visit to Britain, but she was in such pain that she could only find relief in long walks which exhausted her ladies-in-waiting. While there she received confirmation from the doctor that she had cancer, which was too advanced to be operable. As Fritz had done eleven years earlier, she received the verdict with courage. She had survived a desperately unhappy period of widowhood, calumniated and ostracized beyond measure; she had built her own home in Germany, and found some peace of mind with family and friends; she had had the time to enjoy her collections of books and arts, to look after her charities, to see all her surviving children married, and welcome several grandchildren into the world. Yet the Germany of the day was not, and never would be, the empire that it might have been had it not been for her husband’s untimely death. At first she told nobody of her illness but her mother, Bertie, and Beatrice. An attack of dizziness alarmed her while she was visiting friends near Edinburgh, but otherwise she had no premonition of anything being seriously wrong with her. From England she went to Bordighera, on the Italian Riviera, and after staying at Florence and Venice she returned to Friedrichshof in May 1899.

Soon afterwards she told her Lord Chamberlain, the faithful Baron Reischach, in confidence. He could not believe her at first as she still looked so healthy, ‘sunburned and robust’,
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and when he realized she was telling the truth he broke down and wept. She assured him that she felt she would be able to resist the illness for another ten years, and that by the time she was seventy she would be ready to enter eternal rest.

From this time onwards her health began to deteriorate, and she was too ill to go to England for Queen Victoria’s eightieth birthday celebrations on 24 May. As her sufferings steadily increased, the doctors advised her to go abroad to a warmer climate. She chose her beloved Italy, but by the time she reached Trento the pain was so severe that she could get up and down the hotel stairs only with difficulty. It hurt her to lie down at night, and when she tried to sit up in a chair; walking was easier. Professor Renvers wanted her to be out of doors and have as much sun and fresh air as possible. By December her doctors realized that the persistent denial that she was suffering from anything worse than lumbago was beginning to sound hollow, and they thought it was essential that her family should be warned that the problem was more serious. She was also experiencing acute discomfort, it was announced, from neuralgia in the region of the spine and hips.

Returning to Germany in spring 1900 and temporarily improving, she celebrated her mother’s eighty-first birthday by inviting all her children, their spouses and several of their small children to Friedrichshof for luncheon. A few group photographs were taken to mark the occasion and to be sent to England. Vicky appeared in the centre of them all, a small white-haired figure clad in black, dwarfed by the imposing figures of her eldest son and Moretta, the tallest of her daughters.

In July she was horrified to hear that her brother Affie, who had succeeded their uncle Ernest as Duke of Saxe-Coburg Gotha in 1893, had cancer of the throat, and a few days later she was told of his death. It was a severe shock to mother and daughter, especially as by this time Queen Victoria’s former remarkably good health was beginning to give cause for concern. By the autumn Vicky was rarely free from pain, which frequent morphia injections, sometimes as frequently as every two hours throughout the night, did not always alleviate. ‘Never have the spasms been so frightfully violent as these last days,’ she wrote to Sophie. ‘If somebody had put me out of my misery I should have felt intensely thankful.’ Sleep was almost impossible, with frequent pain, ‘too violent, like ever so many razors driven into my back.’ By the time of her sixtieth birthday in November, it was clear that this would be her last. Her hands were so swollen that she had to dictate most of her letters to her daughters, who took turns to come to Friedrichshof and help look after her, while her legs were ‘shrunken and fallen away to nothing, a mere skeleton.’
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Her brothers and sisters felt she might not outlive her mother, but it was not to be the case. On 22 January 1901 Queen Victoria died at Osborne. Overwhelmed with grief when Mossy broke the news to her, Vicky was too helpless to leave Friedrichshof, let alone travel to England for the funeral. Kaiser Wilhelm had joined the family at his grandmother’s deathbed, helped to support her with his good right arm as she passed away, and stayed in England for the funeral. On returning to Germany he came to see his mother for the first time in three months, and the family felt his solicitude for his ‘unparalleled grandmama’ contrasted with the less than eager devotion he showed his dying mother. But he was deeply moved by her sufferings, reporting to his uncle Bertie, now King Edward VII, that she was in such a terrible state of suffering ‘that one really sometimes is at a loss as to think whether she could not be spared the worst.’
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A week later she had the consolation of seeing Bertie again. The court was still in mourning, and the King was anxious to emphasize that he was paying a private visit to see his favourite sister for what he knew would surely be the last time. Among the entourage was his physician-in-ordinary, Sir Francis Laking, whom the King hoped might be able to ease Vicky’s sufferings by persuading the German doctors to give her larger doses of morphia, but they viewed his presence with hostility. The previous autumn, Queen Victoria had begged the Kaiser to receive Laking, but he refused, on the grounds that he was not going to ‘have a repetition of the confounded Mackenzie business, as public feeling would be seriously affected here.’
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Cheered by his visit, Vicky ventured into the fresh air for the first time for several weeks, as her attendants wrapped her in shawls and rugs and wheeled her in her bath-chair along sheltered paths in the castle park while she and her daughters talked to him.

One evening Sir Frederick Ponsonby was asked to go and see Vicky in her sitting room, and she asked him to take her letters back to England; nobody, least of all the Emperor, must know where they were. She would have them sent to his room at 1 a.m. that night. When the appointed hour came, Ponsonby was aghast to find that she had not meant a small packet of letters which could easily be slipped into a case, but instead two enormous trunks wrapped in oilcloth and firmly fastened with cord, brought by four stablemen who were evidently unaware of their cargo’s contents. Marking them ‘China with care’ and ‘Books with care’, he had them placed in the passage with his luggage later that morning, and they were safely returned to Windsor.

Numerous relations and friends came to see her during the last few months. Henry, Irene and their three children came in the spring, though the baby screamed and cried loudly every time he saw his invalid grandmother. Queen Alexandra she found ‘so kind and dear and gentle and quite touching in her goodness to me, and admirable in the way she fills her new position, with such true tact and good sense.’
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Special family occasions were always remembered, and on her sister Louise’s birthday in March Vicky pencilled a short letter in her own hand expressing ‘every manner of
good wish
. . . . What
I
wish for you most ardently is that you may ever be spared sufferings such as mine – the untold misery of a long lingering illness, bearing only the name of Life – but cutting one off from all and everything!’
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She lingered throughout the spring and early summer months. In May her old friends the Bishop of Ripon and his wife came to visit her, and found her lying on a couch in the garden. They were impressed by her resemblance to her mother, and by the practical interest she still took in everything concerning her home. The face of the clock tower needed repainting, and she asked for slips of paper with different shades of blue to be held up against it so she could choose the one she liked best. She pointed out the beauty of the trees most recently planted, telling them sadly that she felt like Moses on Pisgah, ‘looking at the land of promise which I must not enter.’
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