Dearest Vicky, Darling Fritz (41 page)

Two months later the Kaiser noted she was still taking an interest ‘in everything that is going on in the world, politics as well as literature & art’, and in the furnishing of some of her rooms at Friedrichshof. Nevertheless she was in frightful pain for much of the time, except when allowed relief through injections of morphia which were eventually given in larger doses. Sentries on duty outside Friedrichshof asked to be moved further away, so they could not hear her screams of agony. After her last visit, Beatrice sent a harrowing description of her sister’s plight to Lady Mallet; ‘every feature and every limb distorted and that charming countenance quite unrecognizable, her mouth drawn up, her teeth project, her nostrils are dilated by her terrible struggle for breath which makes her nose bleed constantly and the whole face yellow.’
⁴²
It was difficult to understand what she said, but she enjoyed being read aloud to much of the day. She was unable to eat properly, and the doctors expected her to get weaker for lack of food. Despite this the Kaiser reported optimistically to King Edward VII in July that ‘the vital organs’ were not yet attacked by the disease, ‘so that there is nothing to inspire any momentary anxiety; if things go on like this at present the doctors think that it may go on for months even into the winter possibly.’
⁴³

Mercifully for her this verdict was soon proved wrong. On 4 August an official bulletin announced that her strength was ‘fading fast’, and the rest of her children were summoned. The Kaiser had been cruising on his yacht in the North Sea when he was summoned back by telegram. Dona met him at Kiel, and he scolded her in front of his entourage for not having remained at his mother’s bedside, though Vicky had personally not wanted her daughter-in-law to stay. Henry, Ditta, Moretta, Sophie, and Mossy, who had all known for weeks that release from her sufferings could come to their mother at any time, had been there a while, and their eldest brother joined the vigil.

Canon T. Teignmouth-Shore, a long-standing friend of the British royal family, was visiting Germany at the time, and next morning a telegram from the Emperor invited him to Friedrichshof. On arrival he was shown up to her bedroom on the first floor, where the family were gathered around her in reverential silence. He knelt down to join them in prayers for the Visitation of the Sick, and they could see the lips of the semi-conscious Empress moving faintly as she tried to join in the Lord’s Prayer. Withdrawing respectfully afterwards he was shown into the library, to wait until called again. Taking a book from the shelves at random to pass the time, which happened to be Lady Bloomfield’s
Diary
, by coincidence he opened it to find a glowing account of the Princess Royal in early youth just before her marriage, some forty years earlier, speaking of ‘the bright, intelligent face, flushed with the joy of life.’ ‘What a contrast to that face upstairs, so aged with suffering, on which I had looked a few moments before,’ he noted. ‘The expression on that face, so awfully and sadly changed from what it was even in recent years, was sanctified with the sacrament of pain and sorrow.’
⁴⁴

By now she had slipped into unconsciousness. Maybe she was dreaming of happier times, of her first meeting with Fritz just half a century before; of their ride along Deeside that never-to-be-forgotten September day more than forty years earlier, when he had handed her a sprig of heather and asked her to be his wife; of the January morning when they had knelt together at the altar and been united as one. If so, she was happy in the knowledge that soon they would be reunited for ever.

Towards 6 p.m. the Canon was called back to say a few more prayers, as the end was near. Ironically Sophie and Mossy, who had rarely left their mother’s side, had just gone out to the garden for a breath of fresh air. While they were there, a white butterfly – the symbol of the resurrection – flew in through the window, fluttered around over her, and out again, just as she breathed her last.

Earlier that summer she had left instructions with her nearest surviving sister Helena for her wishes after death. There was to be no post mortem, no embalming, no photographs, no lying in state, and her body was to be covered with the Prussian royal standard. Her coffin was to be closed at once, taken to the town church at Kronberg and kept there until the funeral after which she was to be buried in the Friedenskirche mausoleum beside her husband and their two youngest sons. The court chaplain was to say a short prayer at the ceremony but not to make a speech.

Unlike Fritz’s funeral, hers was conducted with dignity, taking place at Potsdam on 13 August. Whether Vicky would have wanted her son to take the opportunity to make a great military display out of her death and burial was debatable, but perhaps he was making amends for his callous behaviour by burying her like an Empress. He and Bertie were united in their grief for the sorely-tried mother and sister, and for once nobody could doubt the depth of his feeling as he arranged the wreath on her coffin at the altar and fell to his knees, placing his face in the folds of the pall as he silently broke down.

History is full of ‘what ifs’. It is impossible to resist asking what might have happened if a fit and well Kaiser Friedrich III had ascended the throne in March 1888? Even Emil Ludwig, one of whose main claims to fame was publishing a biography of ex-Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1926 with a highly damaging portrait of his mother, which led directly to Sir Frederick Ponsonby setting the record straight with
Letters of the Empress Frederick
two years later, allowed himself the luxury of such speculation. A few years later he wrote an essay, ‘If the Emperor Frederick had not had Cancer’, published in
If it Had Happened Otherwise
, edited by J.C. Squire. In it he took as his fantasy the scenario that Frederick had recovered from what proved to be a minor throat ailment in 1887, succeeded his father and reigned until August 1914, having maintained peace with Russia, held a formal reconciliation with France, and introduced parliamentary government into Germany.

All this was not only feasible, but very likely. By the mid-1880s both Fritz and Vicky were despondent and embittered to some extent by the years of waiting, by the direction of political affairs under Bismarck, and by the constant humiliations inflicted on them with the preferential treatment shown by the military and political establishment, to say nothing of Kaiser Wilhelm I, to their eldest son. Nevertheless it would not have been beyond them and their political allies – the hypothetical ‘Gladstone ministry’ of Richter, Virchow, Bamberger, and Miquel – to oversee a turning of the tide. It is unarguable that their respect for Bismarck and all that he had done for Germany, despite their disapproval of his methods, would have precluded any sudden break. It is equally beyond doubt that in Bismarck they would have had an ally if necessary against their son Wilhelm and the pernicious influence of Waldersee and his ilk. Bismarck himself observed that, had he lived longer, the ‘Extreme Liberals would have been greatly surprised and disillusioned by the energy and indignation with which the Emperor and King would have met their plan of a “truly constitutional government”, i.e. the diminution of his prerogative rights and the conduct of his government under the tutelage of Liberalism.’
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As his writings from the 1860s showed, in his adherence to the power of the crown – a modified variation on the divine right of Kings, perhaps – Fritz was less radical than his wife and father-in-law. Nevertheless a more liberal climate would certainly have prevailed in Germany.

One of Wilhelm II’s more sympathetic modern biographers has suggested that forces at work throughout Germany were strong enough to have frustrated even a healthy Friedrich, and doubts that he had either the inclination or stamina to dominate.
⁴⁶
Fritz was certainly not one of nature’s ‘dominators’, but he did not need to be in order to appoint the men who would have presided over a change in political direction. Kaiser Wilhelm I did not need to dominate Prussia in 1862; all he had to do, as events proved, was appoint one particular man.

Wilhelm certainly did have the inclination and stamina; he was clearly intent on imposing his personality on the German Empire from the moment he ascended the throne. The results, as his mother and uncle had foreseen, were bound to lead to disaster. Vicky’s predictions of doom and gloom to Frau von Stockmar and Donna Laura Minghetti
^*
about Germany’s future and that of her son were realized all too soon. Four or five years after her death King Edward VII, who saw clearly that Kaiser Wilhelm was at the mercy of his hawks and sycophants, noted that it would be ‘not by his will that he will unleash a war, but by his weakness.’
⁴⁷
About two or three weeks before his death in 1910, he remarked to a friend in Paris that he did not have long to live. ‘And then my nephew will make war.’
⁴⁸

When Wilhelm II is taken out of the picture and Friedrich III put in his place, the European scene is transformed. There would almost certainly have been a reconciliation between Germany and France; fragile Russo-German relations, notwithstanding the Battenberg crisis, would have healed and been placed on a firmer footing; and the naval arms race, presided over by Admiral Tirpitz and Wilhelm II with such devastating effect, would surely never have happened.

A few weeks after her husband’s death, Vicky had written to Bamberger of her certainty that one day there would be a reaction among the German people. While they would still praise the national virtues such as the readiness to sacrifice, the capacity for work, and the heroic deeds of their army, they would ‘revolt against the poisonous spirit which is now spreading so widely – against the confusion of ideals and the ignoble sense, against idol worshipping, against blindness and delusion which seems to prevent any unprejudiced local judgment!’ By then, she knew she would be resting in her grave and reunited in the world hereafter with her husband, ‘and they will hardly know what we wanted, and how much we loved our fatherland for which we were permitted to do so little.’
⁴⁹

*
That the general is not named, and that the memoirs in which this story was quoted were based on the diary of a ‘German court official’ who died in 1914 and published anonymously in 1929, suggest that the story lacks authenticity.

*
See above, p. 249.

Notes

Abbreviations used: A – Albert, Prince Consort; E – Prince of Wales/King Edward VII; F – Prince Friedrich Wilhelm/Kaiser Friedrich III; LN – Lord Napier; QV – Queen Victoria; u/d – undated (letter); S – Princess Sophie; V – Princess/Empress Victoria/Empress Frederick; W – Prince/Kaiser Wilhelm II

Chapter One

1.
Wilhelm II,
My Ancestors
, 129.

2.
Bülow, I, 1897–1903, 17.

3.
Tschudi, 63.

4.
Radziwill, 34–5.

5.
Roberts, 14.

6.
Longford,
Victoria R.I
., 153 (all Longford references are to this title unless noted otherwise).

7.
Royal Archives, RA VIC/Y/37/4, Princess Feodora of Hohenlohe-Langenburg to QV, 19.11.1843.

8.
Lyttelton, 310.

9.
Victoria,
Letters 1837–1861
, II, 3,QV to King Leopold, 9.1.1844.

10.
Lyttelton, 344–5.

11.
Poschinger, 16.

12.
ibid, 18.

13.
ibid, 19.

14.
Kollander, 3.

15.
Simon, I, 34.

16.
Albert, 136, A to King Leopold, 28.3.1848.

17.
Kollander, 4.

18.
Poschinger, 21, Gerlach diary, 3.5.1849.

19.
Kollander, 5.

20.
Poschinger, 28.

21.
Kollander, 18.

22.
Rodd, 38. Though the date of this passage is not quoted, most biographers have assumed that the description refers to a period of study prior to F’s first visit to England in 1851.

23.
Kollander, 6.

24.
Radziwill, 46.

25.
Victoria,
Letters 1837–1861
,II, 106, QV to King Leopold, 29.9.1846.

26.
Royal Archives, RA VIC/QVJ/29 April 1851.

27.
Bennett,
King Without a Crown
, 207.

28.
Radziwill, 47.

29.
Royal Archives, RA VIC/QVJ/8 May 1851.

30.
Victoria,
Further Letters
, 25, QV to Princess Augusta, 19.6.1851.

31.
Poschinger, 39–40.

32.
Victoria,
Further Letters
, 39, QV to Princess Augusta, 28.3.1853.