27

TO FACE LIFE WITH COURAGE

What meager joy Vicky experienced during these years centered on family life, as it did with Victoria. Vicky’s relationships with Moretta, Sophie, and Mossy, as well as her role as grandmother, sustained her through these otherwise lonely years, which increasingly took their toll as well on her mother. Vicky never hesitated to keep Sophie, in Athens, informed of what went on with the rapidly aging Queen. “How lame and infirm she is breaks my heart to see,” wrote Vicky in 1894, “but thank God … her mind and intelligence and interest and power of work [are] quite what they were.”¹

In 1897 Vicky’s anxieties reached new levels when hostilities broke out between the Ottoman Empire and Greece. Victoria sent money to Vicky for the Greek refugees, but the queen insisted that her contribution be kept a secret. Vicky also begged Wilhelm II to help Greece, but “his hostility was so blatant that Queen Victoria made a formal protest through her embassy in Berlin.”² Greece lost the Greco-Turkish War of 1897, sending the Greek royal family’s popularity plummeting. Vicky counseled Sophie to bear with it, as she knew firsthand how it felt to be unpopular.

As for Queen Victoria herself, who was as popular as ever, she was grateful for having been granted a long life. Gone were the days when she thought she would not outlive her beloved Albert for long. Though she never stopped grieving for her dead husband, Victoria had come to embrace life, despite the many sadnesses she had lived through. In 1897 she admitted: “My poor old birthday again came round, and it seems sadder each year, though I have such cause for thankfulness, and to be as well as I am, but fresh sorrow and trials still come upon me. My great lameness, etc., makes me feel how age is creeping on. Seventy-eight is a good age, but I pray yet to be spared a little longer for the sake of my country and dear ones.”³ It was an echo of the message she had sent the nation upon Prince Leopold’s death in 1884, in which she said: “Though much shaken and sorely afflicted by the many sorrows and trials which have fallen upon me during these past years, I will not lose courage, and with the help of Him who has never forsaken me, will strive to labour on for the sake of my children, and for the good of the country I love so well.”⁴ These trials and tribulations in life were all part of the “difficult road of life as a believing Christian,”⁵ words the queen had written at the time of Vicky’s confirmation many years before.

With the passage of time, more deaths of friends and family saddened Victoria. It was thus with some trepidation that the queen anticipated her final years, confessing once to Vicky that “as time goes on the love and affection of a mother and her appreciation of one’s sorrows, trials and difficulties becomes a greater comfort. My trials are so great and many—the loss of devoted friends and valued advisers is so keenly felt—that I can only foresee that my declining years will be very trying ones.”⁶ The queen was right. Prince Henry of Battenberg’s death from malaria while serving with the British Forces in the Ashanti War in 1896 had been especially hard on the old queen, who enjoyed her son-in-law’s amusing company. Victoria felt especially compassionate toward Henry’s widow, Beatrice, and her fatherless four young children. These grandchildren, who lived under the same roof as their grandmother all year round, brightened the queen’s final years.^m She delighted in their presence. Though Victoria could be intimidating to many (she could be simultaneously tyrannical and caring when it came to her servants), toward the youngest in her family, the queen was imposing but not so frightening. King Edward VIII recalled that “such was the majesty that surrounded Queen Victoria, that she was regarded almost as a divinity of whom even her own family stood in awe. However, to us children she was ‘Gangan,’ a childish interpretation of ‘great-grandmama.’”⁷ Queen Marie of Romania, daughter of Victoria’s son Alfred, saw the queen in a similar light, referring to her as “dear old Granny.”⁸

The doyenne of sovereigns, Victoria was also the grandmother of Europe. By the end of the nineteenth century, her descendants reigned, or were set to occupy, the thrones of England, Germany, Greece, Romania, and Russia. Dynastic matchmaking preoccupied Victoria and Vicky in the 1890s as it had decades before. The matrimonial prospects of one of Victoria’s favorite granddaughters, Princess Alix of Hesse, were of particular concern. Victoria had great plans for the beautiful but introverted Alix. The queen hoped that Alix would marry the slow-witted Eddy, Bertie’s eldest son and thus second in line to the British throne. Alix, however, declined his proposal and instead married Czar Nicholas II of Russia in 1894. The queen accepted the marriage, but ever the Russo-phobe, who eyed the Russian Empire with suspicion, Victoria always harbored deep reservations about Alix’s future there.

After Alix rejected Eddy of Wales’s proposal, Queen Victoria and the Empress Frederick began to discuss the suitability of Princess May of Teck as his future wife. Victoria told Vicky, “May is a particularly nice girl, so quiet & yet cheerful & so vy carefully brought up & so sensible,” to which Vicky replied, “I wonder whether Eddy—will ever marry May?”⁹ Eddy did propose to May, but he died suddenly of influenza in 1892. Afterward, his younger brother married her, and they became King George V and Queen Mary upon the death of King Edward VII in 1910.

Victoria still gave her eldest son little in the way of meaningful training or tasks to prepare him for kingship. Nevertheless, their relationship did not degenerate into the love-hate relationship that plagued the Empress Frederick and Kaiser Wilhelm II. Isabella of Castile and Maria Theresa of Austria, like Victoria, were disappointed by the fates of their eldest sons. Isabella’s son, Juan, had grown to be a young man with great potential but died before ascending the throne. Maria Theresa’s son Joseph II turned out to be a difficult co-ruler with whom she was always at loggerheads. Victoria’s oldest son, who succeeded her as Edward VII, was a bon vivant who never lived up to her high hopes, forever overshadowed by his brilliant sister Vicky.

Vicky and Edward’s brother Alfred died in 1900, prompting Victoria to cry out in her journal, “Oh, God! my poor darling Affie gone too! My third grown-up child, besides three very dear sons-in-law.ⁿ It is hard at eighty-one!”¹⁰ The deaths of three of her children, three sons-in-law, and several grandchildren, along with tribulations such as those experienced by Vicky, were more than enough to try Victoria’s Christian faith sorely—yet she never lost her faith and continued to rely heavily on Providence for strength. Victoria’s faith had sustained her in her darkest days and continued to do so. “There is so much sadness on this earth,” the queen once wrote but added, “God alone can console and strengthen us.”¹¹

Victoria remained indefatigable until the end. In the autumn of 1865, she had told her uncle King Leopold, “I sometimes wish I could throw everything up and retire into private life.”¹² But the queen soldiered on, determined not to let her personal inclinations stand in the way of her duty. At no time was this indefatigable spirit more in evidence than during the Boer War. In South Africa the Boers again went to war against the British Empire. Vicky wrote to Sophie about the crisis, saying, “It is very hard for dear Grandmama, but she neither loses her nerve nor her confidence and feels that in the end the difficulties will be mastered.”¹³

Despite her poor eyesight and physical weakness, the queen gallantly cheered on her departing troops, telling them: “May God protect you!”¹⁴ She visited convalescing soldiers, personally awarded medals, and wrote to widows. The queen received government ministers and senior officers in audience, giving advice when necessary. She sent 100,000 tins of chocolate to her soldiers and packages of knitting. What Victoria “could do, she did. It was no coincidence that she became the embodiment of the national spirit.”¹⁵ Now, in the twilight of her life, Queen Victoria led by example, buoying the spirits of one and all, especially in times of despair, such as the sieges at Ladysmith, Kimberley, and Mafeking, when the British armies fell into serious trouble. Then, in the course of one week, Black Week as it came to be known, three British generals and their troops were defeated. Upon hearing the news, the aged queen refused to collapse into dejection and surrender. When Arthur Balfour, leader of the House of Commons, went to see the queen at Windsor that week, she greeted him in a defiant and decisive manner, saying, “Please understand that there is no one depressed in this house; we are not interested in the possibilities of defeat; they do not exist.”¹⁶ The queen’s dogged determination was rewarded in May 1900, when Mafeking was relieved. Victoria wrote to Vicky that the “whole country” was in “wild delight” and that “everything is really going on well now everywhere.”¹⁷ The Empress Frederick still had not lost her attachment to her mother and her native land, telling the queen on New Year’s Day 1900, “My motto for this century: ‘God save the Queen.’”¹⁸

By the turn of the century, both Queen Victoria and the Empress Frederick faced life with courage—the queen in spite of age and frail health remained a vital force for the empire, rallying her soldiers and subjects in a time of war. Vicky, meanwhile, led a dignified life, not wishing to wreak vengeance on those who had wronged her, Fritz, and Germany. The dowager empress, however, could not help but lament what had happened. In the mid-1890s, Vicky confided to her friend Marie de Bunsen: “Earlier in life, as a young girl, I always thought that Germany was imbued and permeated by all the ideals and talents, and that only relief from government suppression was necessary in order that everything that is lofty and noble might spring into flower. And now?” De Bunsen noted of the empress, “She complained of the lack of political capacity of the Germans.” Vicky added, “They talk of ‘making politics.’ Politics are not ‘made’; political issues are matters affecting the weal and woe of the community; consequently every man and every woman, everyone has not only the right but is under an obligation to be concerned in them.”¹⁹ Then, of course, Vicky added her own opinions on her eldest son, the kaiser, insisting how different they were, conveniently ignoring the fact that both could be stubborn to a large degree: “There’s nothing of me about Wilhelm, but a great deal of Frederick William IV. He himself believes he is most like Frederick the Great.”²⁰ The kaiser, by contrast, when he complained “of the strained relationship with his mother expressed the opinion, ‘We are so much alike, of course, and that makes things more difficult.’”²¹ Wilhelm echoed this observation: “My mother and I have the same characters. I have inherited hers. That good stubborn English blood which will not give way is in both our veins. The consequence is that, if we do not happen to agree, the situation becomes difficult.”²²

The Empress Frederick never stopped lamenting her strained relationship with Wilhelm II, but she also grieved over how it affected her relationship with Wilhelm’s children. “They are kept entirely away from me, though I am so passionately fond of children,” noted a resigned Vicky to Marie de Bunsen. Then she added poignantly, “I loved my father and mother ardently; they were my models; when I came to have children of my own it seemed to me a matter of course that they would return my love in the same spirit. How differently things have turned out.”²³ Vicky’s isolation was complete. Cut off from her eldest son and his children as well as official life, the empress increasingly leaned on her mother and daughter Sophie for support. Only Count Seckendorff, the empress’s court chamberlain, could be truly be counted as her friend in Germany. But she had to suffer the indignity of the false stories, instigated years before by Bismarck, that she and Seckendorff were carrying on a clandestine affair.

In her final years, Vicky’s greatest battle—in a life full of battles—was the one she waged against death. She was already suffering acutely from the cancer that was spreading into her spine. During the Boer War, she sewed and knitted for the British troops but could not complete as many items as she would have liked because of her illness. Increasingly, Vicky’s infirmity kept her from leaving Friedrichshof. She visited Queen Victoria in England in 1899. At the end of the visit, the queen wrote her daughter a moving letter, telling Vicky: “It is my greatest pleasure and happiness to be of any use to you, my darling, and to help and comfort others is the one object in life, when one has gone through so much sorrow as I, and indeed you have too … . Let me repeat, come to us whenever and wherever you like.”²⁴

Mother and child kept up their ardent correspondence. Vicky occasionally told her mother of her sufferings, but not to the same extent as in her letters to Sophie in Athens. To her mother, Vicky wrote of being in bed, “in tortures of pain,”²⁵ but to her daughter, she elaborated, writing of “the terrible nights of agony” and how they “are worse than ever, no rest, no peace. The tears rush down my cheeks when I am not shouting with pain. The injections of morphia dull the pains a little for about a quarter of an hour, sometimes not at all, then they rage again with renewed intensity, and make me wish I were safe in my grave … . It is fearful to endure. My courage is quite exhausted and this morning I cried for an hour without ceasing.” She added, “I bear this martyrdom hoping to live on a few years more, and see you happy, and the children grow older.”²⁶

In her letter, written on Sophie and Constantine’s wedding anniversary, Vicky showed her tender side as a mother and gave her opinion about life: “May God bless you both, and your darling children and send you many long and happy years of usefulness and success. Thank God great happiness has been granted you in a dear husband and sweet children. Life is never easy, it is a struggle at best, but the hours of sunshine, and the blessings vouchsafed, make up for what is pain and sorrow.”²⁷

In a later letter, the empress again brought up her illness: “I am often in very low spirits and shed many tears, but sometimes when I feel a trifle better I am full of hope, and think of a possible future and better days, though I well know that I cannot be cured, and that my life can never again be what it was. This must be accepted, but I do not find it easy.”²⁸

When Marie de Bunsen visited the Empress Frederick in December 1900, she found her “horribly ill, the torture had been unspeakable and still almost unbearable.” When de Bunsen asked why this had happened to her, Vicky replied, “There is no answer to that. It is so, and has to be endured.”²⁹

Queen Victoria was naturally perturbed to read of Vicky’s illness, telling her: “I am in despair to hear of your having been again so suffering. How I wish I could be of any use!”³⁰ But there was little she could do, for back in England, at Osborne, Victoria’s own health continued to worsen; “the emblem of [the] nineteenth century was dying.”³¹ There was little doubt that, in the twilight of their lives, “the greatest agony Victoria had to bear was the thought that she might have to survive her own firstborn daughter’s death. Most tragic of all the burdens for these two great women was the fact that, though they were united in suffering, they would not be able to see each other during their final illnesses.”³²

Victoria’s last letter to Vicky was written on January 6, 1901. In it the queen, wrote touchingly: “I am so grieved to see by your dear letters that your hands trouble you so. It is very troublesome [that they] hurt you so much. I attempt to write myself [instead of dictating]. I don’t suffer from my eyes, only the sight is rather bad since I have been rather poorly but I hope it will soon be much better … . I must, I fear, end for today … . God bless you, darling child.”³³

Sir James Reid, the queen’s physician, informed Kaiser Wilhelm of his grandmother’s deteriorating condition. He left for Osborne, where he had not visited since being banned a few years before. But he would not be denied being present for the most dramatic event in the British Empire: Queen Victoria’s last days.

Toward the end, Victoria was dazed and confused, often asleep, but the queen had her lucid moments too. Her physician was with her, and when Victoria recognized him, she would tell him, “I’m very ill.”³⁴ The queen’s family gathered around her bedside, in disbelief that the matriarch was dying. In the queen’s final moments, she fixed her eyes upon a painting, the Entombment of Christ. At 6:30 P.M. on January 22, 1901, Queen Victoria died in the arms of Sir James Reid and Kaiser Wilhelm, who held her on opposite sides. She was eighty-one years old and had reigned for sixty-three years, the longest in English history.

Queen Victoria’s death was a shock to her subjects. The end of her reign seemed simply inconceivable to many. The future Queen Mary captured the mood of the nation: “The thought of England without the Queen is dreadful even to think of. God help us all.”³⁵

To Vicky, who could not be with her mother at the end, Victoria’s death was a bitter blow. “Words cannot describe my agony of mind at this overwhelming sorrow,” she wrote to Sophie. “Oh, my beloved Mama! Is she really gone? … To have lost her seems so impossible—and I far away could not see her dear face or kiss her dear hand once more. It breaks my heart … . What will life be to me without her, the wretched bit of life left to me, struggling with a cruel disease? Now all that is gone.”³⁶

Queen Victoria’s body was taken ceremoniously from Osborne to Windsor Castle. Huge crowds lined the streets in solemn tribute. Silence reigned; a deep and sincere mourning among the late queen’s subjects was observed. Upon its arrival at Windsor, men of the naval guard of honor pulled the gun carriage with the coffin up a steep hill from the railroad station. On February 4, the coffin was taken to the mausoleum at Frogmore, and there, Victoria’s remains were laid to rest next to Prince Albert’s, to repose side by side in eternity.

Back in Germany, Vicky’s disease continued to rage. When Wilhelm II returned from the queen’s funeral, he found his mother in terrible shape and told his uncle Bertie, now King Edward VII, of Vicky being “weak” and feeling “absolutely miserable … . We are all fearfully pained by what we see & hear … . Poor mother’s simply in a horrible state of suffering & discomfort.”³⁷ Edward VII visited the dying Vicky. Though he had been always unfavorably compared with his eldest sister by their parents, Edward and Vicky had remained close as siblings, and seeing her in such a miserable state greatly moved the king. Accompanying Edward VII on this visit was his private secretary, Sir Frederick Ponsonby, a godson of the empress. After Ponsonby met the empress, he recalled that “she looked as if she had been taken off the rack after undergoing torture.”³⁸ Vicky, though, was lucid enough to ask Ponsonby to fulfill an important task: to spirit her letters away to England for safekeeping. “I don’t want a soul to know that they have been taken away,” she told him “and certainly Willie [sic] must not have them, nor must he ever know you have got them.”³⁹ Ponsonby agreed. When he received the letters in the middle of the night, he was shocked to find that they were contained in two huge boxes. Ponsonby was at his wit’s end about how to smuggle the letters out since Friedrichshof was surrounded by secret police. He finally labeled one box as books, the other as china, pretending that they were items he had purchased in Germany. When the time came to leave Friedrichshof, soldiers were ordered to take everyone’s luggage out to be loaded. Ponsonby nervously watched as the two precious boxes were taken away while he talked with Kaiser Wilhelm. Fortunately for Ponsonby and Vicky, the clandestine operation went smoothly.

Vicky’s life was nearing its end; the empress was well aware that she had failed in the task she and her parents had set out for her so long ago. The Empress Frederick herself had described her hopes and aspirations for Germany soon after her husband’s death: “Why were we then in opposition? Because our patriotism wanted to see the greatness of the fatherland linked with the noble feeling of right, moral behaviour, of freedom and culture, of independence of the individual,—uplifting of the person as a human being and as a German, European and citizen of the world … ‘Improvement,’ ‘progress,’ ‘ennoblement’ was our motto!”⁴⁰

Ambition was always a driving force for Vicky, “yet her ambition had never been motivated by selfishness,” for “her ambition was to educate Germany … towards freedom and culture … and for her persistence in these ideals she had been maligned and persecuted. Tact had not been her strong point, but she was always so transparently sincere that it is well nigh impossible to understand the reasons for the persistent hatred which had surrounded her.”⁴¹ Vicky had once noted of her life that if all were “made clear in a biography … it would be a long plea for the liberal cause—with which the life of a noble and faithful man, the life of a prince and that of a misunderstood princess were intertwined. And yet our tragic fate belongs to German history.”⁴²

The Empress Frederick’s last letter to her beloved daughter Sophie echoed somewhat Queen Victoria’s to her written only six months before: “My own Sophie darling, … I have been terribly bad these past few days. The attacks of pain so violent, the struggle for breath so dreadful, when in bed or lying down, most distressing … . I manage to struggle through the day, I know not how, and am much out of doors, lying down, my arm hung up in a cushion, my head too … . What joy it will be to see you and Tino [Constantine] and the sweet children … . Goodbye my own darling, God bless you. Ever your devoted, fond and doting, suffering ‘Mother, V.’”⁴³

In early August 1901, the Empress Frederick lay dying at Friedrichshof. The gardens that she had lovingly designed were in fine form. Vicky liked to gaze upon them from outdoors during her final days, but on August 3, she was taken into her house. During this time, her three devoted daughters Moretta, Sophie, and Mossy were with their mother, taking turns nursing her. Wilhelm and Dona arrived as well. On the morning of August 5, Vicky breathed her last. Mossy and Sophie had just stepped out for some fresh air. Upon returning a minute or two later, they found their mother dead. With her at the end, as he had been with Queen Victoria, was Kaiser Wilhelm II, the son and grandson whom both women loved but who had caused them much anxiety. In a repetition of his actions after Frederick III’s death, Wilhelm II ordered that Friedrichshof be searched immediately after Vicky’s death for her papers. Soldiers ransacked the place but found nothing. Vicky had ensured that Wilhelm and his soldiers would come out empty-handed.

Even after the end, “calumnies pursued her beyond her death,” for the “most scurrilous stories about her dying wishes circulated in Berlin. The empress insisted, they whispered, that she be buried not as a German sovereign, but as an English princess … . She was to be laid naked, wrapped in a Union Jack, in a coffin brought over from England and the body sent back to England for burial at Windsor.”⁴⁴

In the end, the Empress Frederick’s coffin was taken to the church at the nearby village at Kronberg by torchlight, covered by the Prussian royal standard. Her body was then taken to Potsdam, where it was buried next to her beloved Fritz. Peace had at last come to Vicky, a peace that had largely been denied her in her lifetime.