Not everybody shared the Prince Consort’s enthusiasm for a closer alliance with Prussia, or for his vision of a united and reformed Germany, led by that vast northern kingdom. Richard Monckton Milnes spoke only for an informed minority in England when he used an article about Prussia to ask, in 1846, what remained wanting to ‘the healthy social state of this great people? We answer, and they answer – Political development under Liberal Institutions.’1 A country that followed the democratic lines of British liberalism would be a preserver of peace, Milnes argued, and a valuable Protestant ally for Britain in Europe.
There was another view, represented by The Times and by Lord Palmerston, a politician whose low opinion of Prussia’s value to England was based upon its traditional deference to Vienna and the weak leadership, over a period of twenty-one years (1840–61), of a king, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, whose terror of offending Austria had played a strong part in his decision to resist unification and the imperial crown, back in 1848. For this group, including those whose livelihoods were suddenly threatened by an army of industrious German refugees, Prussia was neither to be favoured above the three Western powers (Russia, Austria and France) with whom Britain had shared the leaders’ table since the Congress of Vienna (1815), nor to be trusted to lead a unified Germany.
Punch, a newish magazine specialising in inoffensive cartoons, spoke for England’s sizeable anti-Prussian party in mid-September 1855, when one of its writers remarked that a Prussian eagle had been seen circling with suspicious intent over the Queen’s dove-cote at Balmoral, ready to pounce and carry off a prize. Punch, clearly, expected Victoria to shoo this bold predator off the turrets of her Scottish home.
Time, together with the spectacle of true, spontaneous love, would end by softening even hardened opponents to an Anglo-Prussian match for the Queen’s first and cleverest child.
Seldom have the desires of a young couple complied so pleasingly with the wishes of their parents as in the case of Vicky, England’s Princess Royal, and Fritz (an abbreviation of Friedrich), the Crown Prince of Prussia.* Fritz was tall, principled, brave and good-looking; daguerrotypes do scant justice either to the intelligence that gleamed from Vicky’s deep-blue eyes, or to her radiant smile and porcelain-pale skin. Visiting Balmoral in 1855, the young Prince was as captivated by Vicky’s appealing manner as he was awed by her fluent German and well-informed interest in his country (Albert had been the chief tutor of a daughter who adored him, and who would never stop trying to live up to her father’s unfeasibly high expectations). Encouraged by an ADC (Aide-de-Camp), Colonel Helmuth von Moltke, who had an English wife of his own, Fritz wasted no time in approaching Vicky’s parents.
Permission was granted, but marriage, since Vicky was not yet fifteen years old, would have to wait. Nevertheless, loitering beside the young Princess on a hill walk around the Balmoral estate, Fritz managed to pluck and offer a sprig of heather, together with the hope, sealed by a first kiss, that Vicky would come to Prussia, not just for a visit, but for ‘always’. The Princess blushed, but did not commit herself. Learning of her parents’ approval, and already enchanted by Fritz’s handsome face and loving looks, Vicky grew bolder, throwing herself into the young man’s arms with what her approving mother described as the ardency of a grown woman.2 An engagement was formally announced the following year.
In Prussia, the news pleased Fritz’s parents more than it did Otto von Bismarck, not yet the all-dominating political figure, but one who was plotting hard, and who wanted Russia, not England, as Prussia’s ally. The Princess Royal sounded to be an intelligent and warm-hearted young woman; the problem foreseen by an exceptionally wily politician was that a dutiful daughter would be more likely to take advice from her commanding mother than to listen to Prussian advisors. ‘If our future Queen . . . remains even only partly English,’ Bismarck wrote to a friend, ‘I can see our Court in danger of being surrounded by English influence.’3
Arrangements, despite Bismarck’s forebodings, rolled smoothly forward. In the winter of 1857–58, with grim news still reaching Britain from besieged Lucknow, the prospect of a royal wedding offered welcome relief to the war-weary English press. Thankfully, The Times turned from stories of bloodshed and starvation in northern India to expressing its distaste for the greed of Queen Victoria’s nastiest uncle, the elderly King Ernest of Hanover, who mysteriously chose the very month of his great-niece’s wedding to lay claim to a royal hoard of jewellery and plate, treasure that the former Duke of Cumberland suspected might otherwise form part of Vicky’s dowry. (King Ernest got his way; Vicky, en route to Berlin, was regaled with a Hanoverian feast presented on a splendid gold dinner service that had been destined for her own new home.) Turning to a more pleasing subject, The Times announced that the Princess would be housed within ‘a splendid suite of apartments in the Royal Schloss’ on the Unter den Linden. Fortunately, the paper’s correspondent was unaware that, since the shabby and thriftily managed royal palace did not yet run to electricity and gas, Vicky’s maid would be dressing her for state occasions by the light of a single candle.
A young German girl was among the excited observers of the elaborate procedures that occupied centre stage in London during the three weeks running up to Vicky’s wedding on 25 January 1858. Countess Wally von Hohenthal (christened Walburga) was the daughter of a widowed Saxon diplomat. Exiled to England for a year after flogging a man who had dared to impugn his sister’s virtue, Wally’s father despatched an English governess, Miss Page, to educate his motherless child, back in Saxony.
Five years of harsh schooling (Caroline Page shared her employer’s belief in the power of the whip) gave young Wally an excellent grounding in English literature, language and history. Aged nineteen in 1858, she was eminently qualified to become chief lady-in-waiting to the future Crown Princess; the post, although unpaid, provided Wally with a personal carriage, a permanent seat in the royal box and, as part of the bridegroom’s wedding train, a free journey to England.
Wally liked Vicky from the start; she was as struck by the Princess’s graceful manner as by her relish for a hearty breakfast of port and oysters. Vicky showed evidence of a strong personality, but this – so Wally decided – was just as well; Fritz, while courteous, kind and good, lacked confidence.
Indulged at court (‘Everybody is delightful to me and I am as spoilt as I have never been before’), Wally considered Windsor Castle to be as romantic as anything she had read about in Walter Scott. The cold, however, was terrible; Wally was baffled – as were all German visitors – by the Queen’s passion for a bracing gust of fresh air in every room. No wonder that the court ladies loved wearing the cosy tartan jackets that were all made, as Wally couldn’t refrain from complacently recording, back in Germany.4
Tartans were to the fore on the wedding day, with Vicky’s brothers smartly arrayed in kilts, sporrans and plaids. Wally, watching from one of the best pews in the Chapel Royal at St James’s Palace, was more interested in observing the heartiness with which Fritz wrung his new father-in-law’s hand, while a crimson-cheeked Vicky curtseyed repeatedly, almost to the ground, before her smiling mother.
The whole affair, to the eyes both of young Wally and an appreciative crowd of reporters, had something of a fairy tale about it. Travelling on to Windsor, the smiling young couple were surrounded by a group of eager schoolboys queuing to pull their carriage uphill, with thirty in the lead and twice as many pushing behind. Fritz, praised again and again in the papers for his honest, manly face, clear blue eyes and splendid height – he towered above his tiny bride – was presented with the Order of the Garter and looked delighted, while a splendid ball held that week at the Prussian Legation enabled Charles de Bunsen’s successor, Albrecht von Bernstorff, to demonstrate how thoroughly this match was approved in Germany. (Prussian press reports naturally declared that the Bernstorff ball had outshone all England’s endeavours.)
One small mishap blotted the arrangements. In Berlin, a new ambassador from England painstakingly wreathed portraits of the young couple with orange blossom, unaware that myrtle was Germany’s wedding symbol. Ambassador Bloomfield’s guests were puzzled and unimpressed.
The Ambassador’s faux pas was reported by The Times. Further embarrassments could not be risked, and Victoria and Albert made swift arrangements for a trusted attaché to be diverted from Vienna to Berlin. Cultivated, intelligent and sympathetic to Albert’s political goals, the imposingly tall Robert Morier was to prove a valuable chess piece in the game of European diplomacy. Well placed to act as a political observer, he was expected to keep a watchful eye on the young couple who – it was reasonable to assume – would soon preside over a country that took England for its model. (For how, back in 1858, could anybody have predicted that Fritz’s father would still be on the throne in thirty years time?)
It was a pity that Vicky’s parents did not delegate a little more of their power to clever Mr Morier. Queen Victoria was a brilliant spymaster, but – most especially where her children were concerned – she lacked tact. A robust faith in British supremacy led to a stream of reminders to Vicky, newly established at the stiff, old-fashioned Prussian court, concerning her duty to maintain English traditions, to retain English servants and to behave – in short – in a way that was guaranteed to offend the family and country to which she now belonged.
Advising was one thing; in despatching an English midwife and nurse to Prussia, together with instructions to give her first grandchild a traditional English christening, Victoria took a step too far.
Wilhelm II, as he later became, was born a year and a day after his parents’ marriage. Willy himself later blamed the English doctors and, by cruel implication, his English-born mother, for the difficult extraction that resulted in the paralysis of his left arm. Vicky, with equal injustice, blamed the German doctor, Eduard Martin, without whom, after he was called in at a late stage, both mother and child would probably have died.
Vicky, while slow to recover her strength, matched Fritz in the affection she lavished on their newborn son. Victoria, while disapproving (baby-worship was not her forte), shared Vicky’s distress about the harsh methods that were vainly employed to rectify Wilhelm’s defective arm: aged four, the child was encased within an iron corset with bars and a fixed helmet that was intended to strengthen his neck. Vicky shed tears; Wilhelm, while stoic, would later react violently, displaying an uncontrollable – and entirely unpredictable – temper, bewildering rages that came and went as swiftly as a shower of rain. This troubling volatility would become a lifelong hallmark of Wilhelm’s complicated personality.
Victoria had shown herself to be an interfering mother; Albert, when it came to keeping his distance from Prussian politics, proved equally tactless.
Wilhelm the elder (Fritz’s father) had been reluctantly forced into the position of Prussia’s regent in 1858, the year during which his brother, the King, suffered a debilitating stroke. Ready to welcome a new daughter-in-law, the new Regent was less charmed when Albert appointed himself as an informal counsellor, one whose well-intended interference (expressed in the form of copious and rather commanding letters) would simplify Bismarck’s route to power. Wilhelm himself was staunchly conservative in his views; he distrusted the democratic liberalism espoused by Albert and sturdily carried forward by Vicky and by Fritz. To Wilhelm, it seemed clear that all Prussia required was a programme to ensure, in times of crisis, the speedier mobilisation of troops.
The gap between Wilhelm and Albert was made dispiritingly apparent in 1861 when, in advance of his coronation at Königsberg, Wilhelm announced his wish for a feudal ceremony of homage. Albert was appalled, as were the anti-Prussian correspondents for The Times. Vicky, while disapproving, prudently reserved her opinions for the long and regular letters that would pass between her and her mother until the very ends of both their lives.
Three months after the accession of Wilhelm I, Vicky lost the beloved father on whom she still relied for her best counsel. Albert had been her oracle; his death in December 1861 confirmed the Prince Consort’s eldest child in her determination to carry his ideals forward in Prussia, and to press for the liberal constitutions that were so dear to Fritz and herself – and so hateful to the King.
Shrewd, passionate and invincibly stubborn, Vicky’s misfortune was to be ranged, from this time on, against Bismarck: a man who distrusted England and who therefore regarded Vicky herself as an inconvenient menace.
Bismarck’s rise to absolute power was hastened by the feebleness of the new King. In 1862, thwarted in his plans for army reform and only a year into his reign, Wilhelm I threatened to abdicate. Vicky urged her husband to grasp this opportunity – he had strong support – to seize the Prussian throne for himself. Gentle, soldierly Fritz, overcome by the spectacle of his father in tears, backed away from any such calculated act. He could not bring himself to do it.
Here was the moment, in late September 1862, four years after their marriage, which appeared to determine the fate of Vicky and her husband. Acting against the wishes of a wife, Augusta, whom he disliked, and an heir whom he mistrusted, King Wilhelm allowed Bismarck to persuade him that abdication was unnecessary. Prussia, if placed in the proper hands, those of a loyal representative of the King, could be lovingly defended and strengthened. Newly appointed by a grateful Wilhelm as Minister President – Prussia’s nearest equivalent to a prime minister – Bismarck was at last in a position to create the empire of blood and iron that was his proclaimed objective. His plans included no concessions to the gentle progress towards German unification envisaged by Vicky and Fritz.
One comfort was on hand. Vicky had conspired with her mother to arrange a German marriage for Princess Alice, the sister to whom she felt most attached. Victoria herself had been an occasional charmed guest of the Grand Duke of Hessen-Darmstadt when she visited Wolfsgarten, the family’s beloved woodland hunting lodge, lying fifteen miles outside the sleepy little medieval town of Darmstadt. Prince Louis, the Grand Duke’s burly heir, had courted Alice during visits to Scotland, a land for which the young people’s shared fondness helped to obscure the fact that they had little else in common. Alice, like her older sister, was a conscientious girl; she had used her excellent nursing skills to care for Albert through his last difficult days. Grieving for her husband’s loss, Victoria relied upon Alice to become her secretary and comforter. It was not, however patient she might be, the ideal role for a young fiancée.
Alice married Louis at Osborne House in the spring of 1862, in a ceremony so drenched in black crepe that it was described as feeling more like a funeral than a wedding. Soon afterwards, ignoring her mother’s reproaches, Alice travelled out to Darmstadt. Here, having anglicised a stuffy little court where a 4 p.m. dinner in full evening dress was still de rigueur, the Princess turned her energies toward health reform. Hospitals and nurse-training schemes were set up. When the supply of deaconesses from Kaiserswerth began to shrink, Alice was able to provide her own trained nursing teams to London’s German Hospital.
Hessen-Darmstadt was a minor duchy. Nobody there minded that Alice and Louis read to each other in English, or that Louis was always popping off to England to gather information about the railways and factories that were his main interests. For Vicky, spoken of in Berlin as ‘die Engländerin’, life was far more circumscribed. The occasion of Bertie’s marriage to Alexandra of Denmark in March 1863 offered a rare excuse for her to return home and to bring along – it was his first visit to England – Victoria’s eldest grandson.
Willy’s angelic appearance (he was dressed, in the preferred royal style, in Highland tartan) was deceptive. He instantly annoyed his grandmother by addressing her, without permission, as ‘Duck’. Conducted to the ceremonials and placed safely out of the Queen’s sightline (Victoria observed the proceedings from a private seat, closeted high above the nave), the precocious four-year-old scratched his kilted uncles on their bare calves, threw his sporran over his pew, brandished his miniature dagger and finally bit his uncle Alfred in the leg.
Willy already showed signs of turning into a little monster. Bertie’s Alexandra, by contrast, made an excellent impression. Vicky, having originally introduced the couple at Speyer, was charmed all over again by Alex’s unaffected sweetness and slender beauty. The Princess’s sole fault lay in her birth. If only – as Vicky had wistfully told her mother, even as she first praised the match – Alexandra had been anything other than Danish.
The Germans, significantly, had always looked upon Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, as their own sacred property. Nevertheless, Denmark was a separate country, linked to Germany only by two tiny Danish provinces of which one, Holstein, containing the valuable Baltic port of Kiel, also belonged to the sizeable group of states comprising the German Confederation.
Bismarck was already looking northwards with an acquisitive eye in 1863 when Denmark’s new King Christian, Alex’s father, put his signature to a pre-arranged treaty that bound Schleswig, Holstein’s northern neighbour, to his own kingdom, so breaking both a 500-year-old pact that the two tiny provinces should enjoy joint independence under ‘personal union’, and a much more recent commitment (given at the 1852 Treaty of London) to let them alone. Uproar followed. Vicky’s husband Fritz, duty-bound to support his friend Fritz Holstein when he, as Duke of Augustenburg, also laid claim to Schleswig, set off for the battle-field. Alex, carrying an uncomfortable Bertie in her wake, backed her father. Victoria (while privately taking the view that both small states should belong to Germany) opted for neutrality.
Bismarck, meanwhile, had reached the same conclusion. Certainly, Prussia should be involved, but only in order to acquire two valuable little states for the North German Confederation. The concerns of Vicky, Fritz and the handsome young Duke of Augustenburg scarcely rippled the surface of Bismarck’s own deep calculations.
The bloody process through which Bismarck achieved the annexation of Schleswig and Holstein left no doubt of the direction in which Prussia was heading under the Minister President’s control. Fritz, having shown exceptional military skill and courage, was forced to watch the outwitting of his friend the Duke (whose wife was Vicky’s cousin) by a man of vastly superior political skill and unstoppable determination. Following a carefully picked squabble with Austria, Prussia’s new national hero proceeded to take over Hessen-Kassel, Nassau and – following its defeat in battle – Hanover.* By 1867, only Bavaria, Baden, Württemberg and Hessen-Darmstadt remained beyond Bismarck’s control.
The position of Alice and Vicky, English princesses who had married into German royalty, remained as delicate as that of two tightrope-walkers. On the one hand, their imperious mother was constantly insisting that they should remain loyal to their home-land; on the other, brought up on their father’s ardent desire for a united Germany, they wanted nothing more than to see Albert’s dream fulfilled.
Alice, always a peacemaker, strove especially hard to strike a perfect balance. In 1865, she told her mother about the excellent English that her children were learning from their governess, Margaret Hardcastle, and stressed the deep affection that she and Louis felt for Scotland and all their kind friends there, on the Balmoral estate (‘Do tell them so always’). A year later, swept up in the war against Denmark, Alice may have pleased Victoria rather less with her vision of German supremacy: ‘God grant this war, which has produced so many heroes, and cost so many gallant lives, may not have been in vain, and that at length Germany may become a mighty, powerful Power. It will then be the first in the world . . .’5 Naturally, Victoria supported her late husband’s dream for German unification, but – foremost in the world?
Four years later, and the mother at last of Ernst (an eagerly awaited male heir to whom both Victoria and King Wilhelm stood as godparents), Alice returned to the defence of Germany. In 1870, no Englishwoman living in Germany could do otherwise.
By 1870, Bismarck had nearly achieved his goal: a unified Germany. He had created a North German Federation with Wilhelm I as its president. All that remained was to provoke a war that would bring the remaining states into line behind Prussia. In 1870, Napoleon III of France strode forward into Bismarck’s open trap.
It was Bismarck who, when the throne of Spain was formally offered to one of King Wilhelm’s relations from Catholic Bavaria in February 1870, urged his uneasy master to support an offer which would – and did – infuriate the French Emperor. Later, Bismarck would claim that Napoleon’s ensuing decision to declare war on Prussia was provoked by his own deliberately brusque revisions to a telegram from King Wilhelm to Count Vincent Benedetti, the French Ambassador. Later evidence suggests, however, that France was already preparing for battle when Benedetti demanded Prussia’s promise to stand aside regarding Spain. On 18 July 1870, France went to war against the combined and formidable military force of three Prussian armies.
The Franco-Prussian War, although bloody, was relatively short. In October 1870, following the surrender of Metz, Paris was besieged by Prussian forces and starved into submission. Thomas Carlyle, writing to The Times on 11 November 1870, invited England’s support for the victor: ‘noble, patient, deep, pious, and solid Germany’. In Berlin, urged on both by Bismarck and by the Crown Prince, Wilhelm agreed to bow to the expectations of his country – but not in order to accommodate Bavaria’s status as a separate kingdom – to be named Emperor of Germany. On 18 January 1871, he was crowned the German Emperor. The ceremony took place – as the French would never forget – in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.
Ten days later, France formally acknowledged her defeat.
Bismarck was not a gracious victor. France was subjected to the loss of territory (all of Alsace and most of Lorraine) and to the continued occupation by German troops until five billion francs (the equivalent of a billion dollars) had been paid in reparations. This, too, was not to be forgotten by the French.
For Princess Alice, there was no doubt where her loyalties now lay. ‘Everywhere,’ she had written to her mother at the outbreak of the war, ‘troops and peasants are heard singing “Die Wacht am Rhein” and “Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland” . . . there is a feeling of unity and standing by each other, forgetting all party quarrels, which make one proud of the name of German [sic].’ Spurring her mother on in this same letter, Alice had congratulated the Queen for upholding her own shared loyalty to Albert’s homeland, for ‘all know that every good thing England does for Germany, and every evil she wards off her, is owing to your wisdom and experience, and to your true and just feelings’.6
Victoria had supported her husband’s dream of German unification, but this was a difficult time for an English monarch with daughters living in Germany. Carlyle spoke for the few, not the majority. The English papers were filled with accounts (angrily denied by Alice on 14 January 1871) of Prussian atrocities. Neither Alice nor her royal mamma could force a British empire to welcome the birth of a rival in the heart of Europe. Even the Germanophile Robert Morier admitted to sharing Disraeli’s anxiety about the alteration to a balance of power that had been calibrated with such delicate care in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars half a century before, at the Congress of Vienna.
Vicky and Fritz, while initially delighted at the fruition of Albert’s hopes, were appalled by the rapaciousness of Bismarck’s demands from the vanquished French and dismayed by the increasingly hostile tone of the English press. Secretly, Vicky must have shared her sister’s relief at hearing that Napoleon III and the Empress Eugénie (of whose kindness to her before her marriage Vicky retained fond memories) had found refuge in England. Publicly, she buttoned her lips as, all around her, the German press attacked Victoria for having dared – following Wilhelm’s ascent to imperial status – to praise newly republican France as Germany’s equal.
In 1872, following her engagement to the intensely Anglophile first secretary at London’s first ever German Embassy, Hugo von Krause, Charles de Bunsen’s granddaughter Hilda paid her own first visit to Berlin, accompanied by her fiancé, her father Ernest, and their friend Albrecht Bernstorff, the long-serving ambassador to the Court of St James’s.
The visit was intended to be brief; Wilhelm I, relishing his new role as emperor, decreed otherwise. Ernest, longing to be snugly back in his London study, was commanded to build a new house in Berlin and to join the imperial circle, together with Hilda and Hugo von Krause. These were grim tidings. ‘I am glad to think of the satisfaction of the dear Emperor in considering you to be secured for life to his dominions,’ old Fanny de Bunsen wrote to her despondent granddaughter from Carlsruhe, before comforting her that so ardent an Anglophile as Hugo von Krause (‘so English, so English’) was certain to find a way to escape.7
Possibly, Wilhelm decided that building a vastly expensive house as a contribution to his new project to beautify Berlin was a fair price for the de Bunsen family’s freedom. The house was built, release was granted and Hilda was allowed to marry her handsome Hugo back in England. A year later, von Krause died after a hunting accident and Hilda, the desolate mistress of Bendeleben, a faraway German estate that she had scarcely seen, was left alone.
While the de Bunsen family comforted the young and pregnant widow at Abbey Lodge, the house in Regent’s Park that remained a haven for their far-flung family, Victoria’s government approved plans to rent, as their new British Embassy in Berlin, a vacant palace on the Wilhelmstrasse. The vast edifice had been created for Bethel Henry Strousberg, a railway king of the 1860s, as a showpiece for the height of a career that had spectacularly plunged to destruction.
Strousberg’s meteoric fall was part of a post-war economic crisis that almost shook Bismarck’s new empire from its triumphant perch. Fortunes – including the massive French indemnities – had been lavished on glorifying the new Berlin. Fortunes had also been squandered during speculative trading in a stock market which, when it crashed in 1873, brought down everybody – in Bismarck’s pungent terms – from lords to bootblacks. Strousberg’s own fall did not save him from being publicly tarred, along with the bankers, as one of those Jews who were swiftly blamed for the country’s economic misfortunes. Anti-Semitism had often been noted by English visitors to Germany in the past, but only as a simmering undercurrent; now, for the first time, it revealed a public face.
The country made a swift recovery, but the high-minded National Liberal Party to which Vicky and Fritz were closely attached was brutally thrust aside. For his new allies, Chancellor Bismarck reverted to his earliest supporters, the ultra-conservative Junker landowners of Prussia, whose hostility to Jews was voiced in strident calls for the head of the Chancellor’s own banker, Gerson Bleichröder. Bismarck ignored them; Fritz showed a warmer heart but less wisdom when, noting that Bleichröder’s daughter was being pointedly ignored at a court ball, he ordered one of his ADCs to dance with her. The result was anger from the ADC, embarrassment for the young woman and, despite his good intentions, short shrift for Fritz.
England’s feelings towards Germany, despite Carlyle’s enthusiastic tributes, had been improved neither by reports of Prussian atrocities during the Franco-Prussian War, nor by signs that the thrusting new empire might threaten Britain’s commercial power. Relations were not improved by the discovery that several of Strousberg’s investors had been Englishmen, whose fortunes were now lost. In Germany, meanwhile, the revelation that England had quietly provided arms and supplies to France throughout the recent war was considered tantamount to treachery.
A striking increase in the number of visits paid to London’s German Hospital by various members of the German Emperor’s family during the 1870s suggests an active desire to maintain the old relationship, and to build towards a new attachment upon sound philanthropic foundations. No hard evidence exists to prove it, but the regularity of their visits suggests that this enterprise was led by Vicky and Alice.
The German Hospital provided a perfect means for the two Anglo-German Princesses to offer help to their countrymen (both English and German) while visiting London during the relatively peaceful birth years of the German Empire. Vicky initiated this new involvement in July 1871, touring the hospital’s wards before presenting as a gift from herself and her mother-in-law, the Empress Augusta, four splendid royal portraits to be hung in the entrance hall to the hospital. Alice, a far more frequent visitor, saved the hospital from collapse when – during the time that Kaiserswerth stopped supplying nurses – she sent her own over from Hesse.
Alice’s connection to the many nursing foundations to which she offered unstinting support, both in Germany and England, was brought to a tragic close in the winter of 1878, when the Princess’s children and husband caught diptheria. Tirelessly nursing her family back to health, Alice lost one daughter, May, and feared intensely for the survival of delicate Ernst Ludwig, their beloved boy.
Prince Ernst, who later transformed Darmstadt into a centre for art and became chief patron of the Jugendstil movement (Germany’s Art Nouveau), never got over his mother’s death. It was while nursing her son that Alice caught the disease and died. And, although a heartbroken Louis did his best to maintain the loving links between Darmstadt and Alice’s English family, her beloved German Hospital now stood in urgent need of a new benefactor.
The Schröder family had been involved with Charles de Bunsen’s great project since its beginnings. From 1878, the year of Alice’s death, the Anglo-German banking family became the hospital’s chief patrons. In the same year, they attended the wedding of Hilda de Bunsen to their friend and fellow banker, the Cologne-born Adolph Deichmann. Plain-faced, warm-hearted and as besotted with hunting as the Schröders themselves (they owned neighbouring hunting boxes in Leicestershire), Deichmann had also been a close friend of Hugo von Krause’s. Family connections were strengthened again when his niece, Emma, married Bruno, the Schröders’ nephew and heir.
Here, in a discreet little world of philanthropic bankers who loved England but retained close links to the Fatherland, Anglo-German relations continued to flourish and to prosper.
Unlike the Schröders and the de Bunsens, Emperor Wilhelm I had never got on especially well with his family. He disliked his wife; he despised his son Fritz and he mistrusted Vicky. Perhaps it was the mere giving of his name to young Wilhelm that caught a grandfather’s fancy, allowing him a vain vision of a Wilhelmine future. Perhaps he wanted to counteract the influence of a daughter-in-law who never hid her pride in Britain’s naval supremacy (Willy and his young friends were given a miniature British man-of-war ship to play on in the garden of the Neues Palais at Potsdam), and who wholeheartedly supported British colonialism.
Mischievous accounts of Vicky may well have leaked back to the old King from a grandson with a flair for troublemaking. Possibly, dismissive of Fritz and Vicky’s idealism, the old gentleman chose to undermine it by flattering a little boy’s sense of importance. For whatever reason, he forged a close bond with the child. Willy was only twelve years old when he was permitted to join the new Emperor’s first triumphant entry into Berlin; from then on,the ageing Kaiser missed no opportunity to encourage his oldest grandson to see himself as a reincarnation of Frederick the Great: a figure of mythical grandeur and power, destined to lead his country towards greatness.
Bonding with young Willy, and licensed by Bismarck’s unspoken approval, the Emperor continued to edge Vicky and Fritz off towards the sidelines. Possibly, he spoke of them to the boy in dismissive terms; certainly, he helped to deepen any existing rift between the parents and their son. Willy’s devotion was to his grandfather. The attachment even survived Willy’s unwelcome alliance, in 1880, to Dona, the virulently anti-Semitic daughter of his parents’ friend, the Duke of Augustenburg.
Dona’s unpleasant views caused her no harm. By 1880, anti-Semitism in Germany was beginning to spread. A card carrying the crude message ‘Hurray Get Out’ was on sale in Berlin. When Disraeli, a Christianised Jew, had visited the city in 1878, Bismarck’s homage – ‘That is the man!’ – was interpreted as evidence of Germany’s tolerance; in fact, it was a startling exception to the general rule.
Bismarck allowed the anti-Semitic movement to grow; its chief architect was Heinrich von Treitschke, a right-wing historian. In 1878, a wave of anti-Semitic attacks expressed anger at the growing numbers of Russian Polish Jews who were entering the country; Treitschke supported these attackers by declaring that the new, pure Germany deserved to be protected from a people generally regarded as (the dreadful phrase was not original to him) ‘breeders of misfortune’.
Odious though Treitschke’s opinions were, they found an eager audience. Fritz and Vicky’s valiant attempts at a protest – the Crown Princess made herself the patron of a German orphanage for Jewish girls, while Fritz, dressed in full uniform, attended synagogue – won no support from Bismarck, the viscerally anti-Semitic Junkers, or even their son. If Vicky, during the 1880s, became increasingly outspoken about her admiration for England, it was because she could not bear to identify herself with the new and xenophobic Germany being forged by the Emperor’s chancellor and endorsed by his government.
In England, Victoria continued to provide prudent advice and a listening ear; at a time when the mood in England was isolationist and deeply suspicious of the future plans of Europe’s new dominant power, the Queen could do no more. Among the very few people in Berlin to whom Vicky and Fritz could turn to for sympathy with their own views during this period of bitter disillusionment was Lord Odo Russell, the English Ambassador who was uncomfortably occupying the ruined Strousberg’s former palace on the Wilhelmstrasse, at a royal cost of 20,000 thalers a year. It was just as well for Russell that his older and adoring brother was a duke, and a rich one.
Odo Russell was one of three delightful and polyglot sons of a soldier’s daughter, a forceful lady whose legendary beauty had won praise from Byron and who, while living an independent life from her husband, famously announced during the Franco-Prussian War that she herself was ‘GERMANICA to the pineal gland: discipline against disorder, sobriety against drunkenness, education against IGNORANCE.’8 Determined to give her sons an enlightened upbringing, Lady William Russell helped that project along by familiarising them with the works of Schiller, Goethe, Eliot and Carlyle. European by upbringing, the Russell boys spoke flawless English, but with a German accent.
Lord Odo came to Berlin in 1871 via Vienna, Paris, Constantinople, Washington and Florence. An acute understanding of German politics and (almost as importantly) of German etiquette made him a perfect envoy to the new imperial court.
An experienced diplomat, Russell needed all of his skill to remain on good terms with what had now become the sharply divided camps of the Emperor Wilhelm and the Crown Prince. To Vicky (for whom Odo sometimes discreetly arranged transfers of funds from her devoted brother Bertie), the kindly and clever Ambassador was a loyal friend, one whose understanding provided welcome consolation in lonely times.
For Vicky and Fritz, high-minded representatives of the old-fashioned Victorian liberalism espoused by Albert, the showy new world of imperial Berlin was a bewildering place. Willy, their son, impatient for his own moment in the limelight (‘I Bide my Time’ ran the ominous inscription on a widely circulated photograph of Willy posing in a Scots kilt and plaid), thrived on the clamour and incessant parades by which Germany trumpeted her imperial role. To Vicky and to Fritz, all that side of life was anathema. Wistfully, the couple grieved for the passing of a world of high ideals, in which liberty and unity walked hand in hand, and in which voluntary public service fulfilled the role that was increasingly being diminished and usurped, under Bismarck, by the state.
Odo Russell, while respectful of Fritz’s ideals, could not blame the old Emperor for favouring boisterous, modern-minded Willy. Afforded a brief chance to rule, for a passing moment, in 1875 (following an attempt upon the Emperor’s life), the Crown Prince had inspired no confidence in his skills as a leader. Fritz was a brave man in battle, but he did not thrive on power; on the contrary, as Russell noted with concern, a short spell of ruling had left the Crown Prince looking tired, defeated, worried and ill.9
Russell himself died in 1884. The Emperor wept; the Empress Augusta told Queen Victoria that Lord Odo would never be forgotten, ‘by us or by Germany’. Even Bismarck, who had occasionally taken Russell’s advice, observed that the British diplomat was irreplaceable. Fritz bore his grief in silence; Vicky was visibly devastated.
During that same year, the Crown Princess lost another precious source of private consolation. Hilda Deichmann’s gentle, shortsighted and scholarly uncle Georg von Bunsen, a Berlin-based diplomat who shared Vicky’s own liberal beliefs, incurred the wrath of Bismarck by proclaiming those views in a form that the Chancellor perceived as a challenge. Nobody challenged Bismarck. When Georg and Emma, his English wife, next held a party at their Berlin home, they faced an empty room; the guests had been ordered to stay away. In public, Bismarck cut Georg and Emma dead; others were encouraged to follow his example. Poultney Bigelow, a half-American who had grown up as the playmate of young Willy and the Bunsen boys, Georg’s sons, was horrified by the implacable thoroughness of the Chancellor’s revenge on what he described as an exemplary family, hospitable to all, endearingly un-Prussianised in their ‘idyllic’ English home. ‘No family furnished a more beautiful example of domestic happiness,’ Bigelow wrote in his memoirs.10 By the end of the year, the Bunsens had sadly decided to return to England. Willy, who had known them almost as an extension of his own family, made no attempt to change their minds.
Fritz and Vicky had waited thirty years to realise Albert’s dream of a single nation presided over by a German ruler and an English princess. Fate would not be kind to them. When Wilhelm I died, aged ninety, in March 1888, Fritz was already a marked man.
A year earlier, the Crown Prince had been examined for a persistent throat infection that neither an agonising regime of cauterisation nor spa treatment could cure. In April 1887, the decision was taken to treat the condition as cancerous and perform an immediate and high-risk operation on the larynx. Fritz himself was not consulted.
While it remains unclear just how much Vicky herself had been told, it was Bismarck, surprisingly, who intervened at this point and informed the horrified Emperor of what was being planned. Wilhelm ordered a halt to the process; sullenly, the German doctors agreed to listen to an outside specialist. Nevertheless, when Morell Mackenzie, an Englishman of Scots descent, suggested less radical steps, they begged to differ.
In June 1887, Fritz was thankfully released from the care of his squabbling doctors to attend the London celebrations for Queen Victoria’s half-century on the throne. Willy, also in attendance, drew less applause than his father, whose plumed helmet, great height and magnificent beard inspired comparisons to a Wagner hero. Seething at the fact that Dona had been given an inferior seat to that of the black Queen of Hawaii, Willy would have been angrier still had he known that his parents had carried three large boxes of private papers away from Berlin. These, at Vicky’s discreet request, were lodged safely in an ‘iron room’ at Buckingham Palace.
By November, the Crown Prince’s condition had worsened. Mackenzie, newly knighted and awarded the Order of the Hohenzollern, now agreed with the German doctors, while declaring that Fritz’s cancer was of very recent development.
Annointed Emperor four months later, in March 1888, Fritz’s first and moving action was to take the Order of the Black Eagle off his uniform and to pin it to the dress of the wife, whom he tenderly addressed as his guardian angel. Too ill, by then, even to attend Wilhelm’s state funeral, Fritz permitted his son to lead the great procession of a hundred princes down the snow-mantled Unter den Linden. Willy, meanwhile, began spreading scandalous tales of his mother’s affair with her court chamberlain, Count Seckendorff, and of her impatience for Fritz to die. The truth was rather different: only one person was eagerly awaiting the death of the new Emperor, and that person was Willy, his heir.
Queen Victoria, always fond of her Prussian son-in-law, had been careful to lavish affection on Fritz at her Jubilee celebrations. With sad prudence, she recognised the need to look forward and indicate support for Vicky, an isolated figure in an increasingly hostile land. In April 1888, Victoria personally travelled to Berlin and charmed a susceptible Bismarck into wearing a candy heart emblazoned with her image. The Chancellor reassured the British Queen; naturally, he would do his utmost to defend and care for her daughter. What Victoria did not know was how active a role Bismarck himself was already playing in the campaign to blacken the Empress’s name.
The naïvety of the Emperor himself remained intact. On 12 June, Fritz called Bismarck to his sickroom and motioned him to clasp, across the bed, Vicky’s hand. After covering both their hands with his own, the voiceless Emperor, making an indication of his trust, gently patted the Chancellor upon the shoulder.
Fritz died three days later and Willy, with indecent speed, seized control. Forbidden even to cut the traditional roses to place upon her dead husband’s breast, Vicky was hustled aside while Willy’s servants ransacked his parents’ rooms in a hunt for the papers that might incriminate her. Nothing, to Willy’s considerable disappointment, came to light; all the documents that mattered had been safely locked away in England, beyond his reach.
Matters grew worse. Willy, having refused to give his own father a state funeral, ordered his mother out of her old home, while withholding the funds for her to build a new one. (Friedrichshof, the house that Vicky would name in memory of her husband, owed its eventual existence to the generosity of a private individual, the Duchesse de Galleria.) While Bismarck spread rumours that Vicky had stolen state papers for publication abroad, Willy encouraged the publication at home of a fierce attack by two of the German team of doctors on the diagnosis made by Mackenzie, the doctor with whom Vicky, by virtue of her British background, was most easily linked. Vicky, by this route, could be implicated as a fellow conspirator in hastening her beloved husband’s death. Within four months of Fritz’s modest funeral, thanks to the vicious industry of Bismarck and her own son, Vicky’s reputation in Germany had reached its nadir.
In February 1890, circumstances offered a scrap of grim consolation. Bismarck had announced – it was a familiar gambit – his resignation. Willy, however, seemed ready to accept it. Frantic for support, Bismarck turned to Vicky and learned, without surprise, that no help was to be had from this quarter. A month later, the defeated Chancellor paid the Dowager Empress a more dignified visit, to offer his official farewell. Determined not to gloat, Vicky wrote to her mother that there had been no harsh words: ‘I should have been sorry – having suffered so much all these long years under the system – that it should appear as if I had any spirit of revenge, which I really have not.’11
Germany’s great chancellor left Berlin with as little fanfare as had been accorded to Fritz’s funeral. A young cousin of Willy’s, Max von Baden, arrived to offer a salute; the new Emperor himself stayed at home. Writing to his grandmother in England in his finest sanctimonious style, Willy assured her that the decision to retire Bismarck had been a difficult one, but taken with the old gentleman’s own best interests at heart. ‘It was a very hard trial, but the Lord’s will be done . . .’12
Footnotes
* The term ‘crown prince’ is used here for convenience; Fritz did not officially become the royal heir until his father was crowned King of Prussia in 1861.
* Victoria provided covert support to George V of Hanover (one of the two little German Georges who had once been seen as good consort material by her uncle William IV). Funds were conveyed via Vicky to the deposed King’s second home in Austria; an implicit condition seems to have been that George would make no trouble between England and Prussia.