Oh, Madam, it is a Princess,”1 announced the physician who had presided over the delivery of Queen Victoria’s first child.
“Never mind,” crisply replied the twenty-one-year-old Queen, still energetic after twelve hours of labor. “The next will be a prince.”
Bertie was born eleven months later. But her favorite child, and that of “Dearest Albert,” was this first little girl, Victoria Adelaide Mary Louise, known as “Vicky,” who grew up to become Empress of Germany and the mother of Kaiser William II.
Albert was enchanted with this bright little girl, who spoke German with her parents and English and French almost as well. Her mind was receptive, and the tutors who had such difficulty with the Prince of Wales sent glowing reports of his older sister. Vicky also was willful, obstinate, emotional; once as a child, she attempted to interrupt when her mother was talking to her ministers. When the gentlemen refused to be silent, the Princess stamped her foot and said, “Queen, queen, make them obey me!”2 Queen Victoria did what she could to control this behavior. Vicky, at thirteen, out driving with her mother, dropped her handkerchief out of the carriage so she could watch the equerries dashing to pick it up. Queen Victoria ordered the carriage stopped and its steps put down, and said, “Victoria, go and fetch it yourself.”3 Nevertheless, the Queen compared her daughter’s qualities favorably, not only to Bertie’s, but to her own. “Bertie is my caricature,”4 she wrote to Vicky when her daughter was an adult. “...You are quite your dear, beloved Papa’s child. You are so learned and so fond of deep philosophical books that you are quite beyond me and certainly have not inherited that taste from me.”
Prince Albert planned a special future for this special child. Albert dreamed of a Europe united in liberalism, progress, and peace. The constitutional monarchy of a liberal England would become one of the twin pillars of this noble edifice; a united Germany, gathered under the leadership of a newly liberalized Prussia, would be the other. The King of Prussia, Frederick William IV, and his brother, who would take the throne as King William I, both were rigidly conservative, but both were growing old. The future lay with William’s son, young Prince Frederick. And Frederick, if not dazzlingly intelligent, was handsome, amiable, and dutiful; a man, Albert felt sure, who could be steered by a clear-headed, purposeful wife. Someone like Vicky.
Fritz, as Frederick was known, met Vicky at the Great Exhibition in 1851, when he was twenty and she was ten. Four years later, walking through the heather on a hillside near Balmoral, the tall, blond Prussian Prince proposed to the fourteen-year-old Princess Royal. The wedding, delayed until the bride reached seventeen, was the cause of competitive jostling between the British and Prussian dynasties. The Prussians announced that it was traditional for Hohenzollern princes to be married in Berlin. Queen Victoria commanded her Foreign Secretary to tell the Prussian Minister “not to entertain the possibility5 of such a question.... The Queen could never consent to it, both for public and for private reasons, and the assumption of its being too much for a Prince Royal of Prussia to come over and marry the Princess Royal of Great Britain in England is too absurd to say the least.... Whatever may be the usual practice of Prussian princes, it is not every day that one marries the eldest daughter of the Queen of England. The question must therefore be considered as settled and closed.”
No more was said. On January 25, 1858, the wedding was celebrated in St. James’s Chapel, and the bridal couple left the church to the strains of Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March,” the first time this music had been used for an actual wedding. Vicky tearfully departed for Germany. The Queen wept as she embraced her daughter. “Poor, dear child!”6 she wrote later. “I clasped her in my arms and blessed her and knew not what to say. I kissed good Fritz and pressed his hand again and again. He was unable to speak and tears were in his eyes.” At Gravesend, the bride lamented, “I think it will kill me7 to take leave of dear Papa.” Bertie sobbed as he stood beside his father on the Channel quay, waving at the boat which was carrying his sister to the Continent. Only Albert remained in control; but then he dashed back to Windsor to write to his daughter: “I am not of a demonstrative nature8 and therefore you can hardly know how dear you have always been to me....”
Vicky’s reception in Berlin was cool. Feeling at the Prussian court and in society ran so high against the “English” marriage that the British Minister, Lord Bloomfield, avoided even calling on his sovereign’s daughter. Conservative Prussians, aware of Prince Albert’s hopes for a liberal Germany, suspected his plan of using Vicky’s marriage to advance his design. Otto von Bismarck, then Prussian representative to the Federal Diet in Frankfurt, wrote to a friend, “You ask me... what I think9 of the English marriage.... The ‘English’ in it does not please me; the ‘marriage’ may be quite good, for the Princess has the reputation of a lady of brain and heart. If the Princess can leave the English-woman at home and become a Prussian, then she may be a blessing to our country. If our future Queen on the Prussian throne remains the least bit English, then I see our court surrounded by English influence.” The Prussian royal family seemed uninterested in making the seventeen-year-old bride feel welcome. Despite the long engagement, no home had been prepared for the newlyweds, who spent their first winter in a dark, cold apartment at the Berlin Castle. “Endless dark corridors10 connected huge, mysterious-looking rooms, hung with pictures of long-forgotten royal personages; the wind whistled down through the large chimneys... ,” remembered a lady-in-waiting who suffered with them.
Vicky disliked the boots that Prussians always wore; she condemned the absence of bathrooms, the thinness of Prussian silver plate, and the formality, monotony, and length of Prussian court ceremonies. All these matters, she declared, were better done in England. In 1860, after three years in Berlin, she began to offer her husband political advice. “To govern a country11 is not a business that only a King and a few privileged men are entitled to do,” she wrote to Fritz during a visit to England. “It is on the contrary the right and sacred duty of the individual as well as of the whole nation to participate in it. The usual education which a Prince in Prussia has hitherto received is not capable of satisfying present-day requirements, although yours, thanks to your Mama’s loving care, was far better than that of the others.... You were not, however, sure of, nor versed in, the old liberal and constitutional conceptions and this was still the case when we married. What enormous strides you have made during these years!”
Vicky continued to speak of England as “home.” In 1871, after thirteen years in Prussia, she wrote to a friend, “You cannot think how dull12 and melancholy and queer I feel away from you all and my beloved England! Each time I get there I feel my attachment to that precious bit of earth grow stronger and stronger.” Kaiser William II wrote in his memoirs, “She delivered judgement13 on everything and found everything wrong with us and better in England which she habitually called ‘home.’” William II explained his mother’s behavior: “She came from a country14 which had had little to do with the Continent, which had for centuries led a life of its own... quite different from the traditions and growth of the country which she was to join. The Prussians were not Englishmen... they were Europeans. They had a different concept of monarchy and of class.... [Nevertheless,] my Mother set out with burning zeal to create in her new home everything which, according to her English education, convictions and outlook was necessary for the creation of national happiness.”
On January 27, 1859, Princess Victoria, eighteen years old, gave birth to the son who was to become Kaiser William II. Vicky endured a long and painful breech delivery without anesthetics. The extraction with forceps was difficult and resulted in severe damage to the baby’s left arm. This was not noticed for three days; then it was discovered that the arm was paralyzed and the muscles around it crushed. Examination showed that during delivery the arm had been wrenched almost out of its socket. Despite interminable exercises and constant treatment, neither the arm nor the hand recovered. Throughout William’s life, both were miniaturized, feeble, and almost useless. The left sleeves of William’s jackets and tunics were cut shorter than the right; the little left hand usually carried gloves or slipped into a carefully placed pocket or came out to rest on the hilt of a sword. William could not use an ordinary knife and fork; at dinners a footman or his dinner partner had to cut his meat for him.
When the child was very young, these distressing facts had yet to be learned. He was the first grandchild of the Queen of England (who was only thirty-nine) and, according to her wish, the baby was given the name of Albert. His full name was Frederick William Victor Albert, and he was known in the family as William or Willy. Queen Victoria was delighted. She saw him first at twenty months. “Our... darling grandchild... came walking15... in a little white dress with black bows.... He is a fine fat child with a beautiful white, soft skin, very fine shoulders and limbs, and a very dear face, like Vicky and Fritz.... He has Fritz’s eyes and Vicky’s mouth and very fair, curly hair.” When William was two and a half, Vicky brought him to Osborne; Grandfather Albert wrapped him in a large white damask table napkin and swung him back and forth while the little boy screamed with pleasure and his grandmother clucked her smiling disapproval.
At four, William was taken back to England to be present at the wedding of his Uncle Bertie to Princess Alexandra. William attended the ceremony in a Highland costume given to him by his grandmother; it came with a small toy dirk. During the ceremony, William was restless. His eighteen-year-old Uncle Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, appointed to keep an eye on him, told him to be quiet, but William drew his dirk and threatened Alfred. When Alfred attempted to subdue the rebel by force, William bit him in the leg. The Queen missed seeing this fracas; to her William remained “a clever, dear, good little child,16 the great favorite of my beloved Angel [Vicky].”
Vicky was obsessed by William’s damaged arm. She blamed herself for her child’s handicap, for his appearance of being oddly off balance, for his so little resembling his tall, healthy father. Initially, she tried to conceal the handicap and her feelings; eventually, she spoke freely to her mother. “The poor arm is no better,17 and William begins to feel being behind much smaller boys in every exercise of the body—he cannot run fast because he has no balance, nor ride, nor climb, nor cut his food.... Nothing is neglected that can be done for it, but there is so little to be done,” she wrote to Queen Victoria in May 1870. Seven months later she wrote again, “He... would be a very pretty boy18 were it not for that wretched unhappy arm which shows more and more, spoils his face... his carriage, walk and figure, makes him awkward in all his movements, and gives him a feeling of shyness, as he feels his complete dependence, not being able to do a single thing for himself.... To me it remains an inexpressible source of sorrow....”
William repeatedly tried to correct or overcome the handicap. He did gymnastic exercises, learned to swim, sail, and fire a gun. “My greatest troubles,”19 he said in his memoirs, “were with riding.” His mother insisted that he perfect this skill. “The thought that I, as Heir to the Throne, should not be able to ride, was to her intolerable. But I felt I was not fit for it because of my disability. I was worried and afraid. When there was nobody near, I wept.” Riding lessons, begun when the Prince was eight, became a matter of ruthlessness for the adults and endurance for William. Over and over, in the words of the tutor who supervised these lessons, “the weeping prince”20 was “set on his horse, without stirrups and compelled to go through the paces. He fell off continually; every time, despite his prayers and tears, he was lifted up and set upon its back again. After weeks of torture, the difficult task was accomplished: he had got his balance.” Looking back on his boyhood, Kaiser William II decided that “the result justified... [the] method.21 But the lesson was a cruel one and my brother, Henry, often howled with pain when compelled to witness the martyrdom of my youth.” William had no doubt as to who was ultimately responsible for this coldly rational treatment. “Hinzpeter [the tutor who supervised his lessons] was really a good fellow,”22 he wrote. “Whether he was the right tutor for me, I dare not decide. The torments inflicted on me, especially in this pony riding, must be attributed to my mother.”
Vicky also took responsibility for her son’s general education. “His education will... be an important task,”23 she wrote to Queen Victoria when her son was six. “I shall endeavour to make him feel that pride and devotion for his country and ambition to serve it.... And I may be able to instill our British feeling of independence into him, together with our brand [of] English common sense, so rare on this side of the water.” William and his brother, Henry, three years younger, were turned over to George Hinzpeter, who prescribed Latin, mathematics, history, and geography; English and French under special tutors were added, and William read Shakespeare, Dickens, Sir Walter Scott, Byron, Macaulay, Tennyson, Defoe, and James Fenimore Cooper. Both boys spoke English regularly with their mother and used it as effortlessly as German; later William was said to be unaware which language he was speaking. When William was seven, lessons began at six A.M. and continued until six P.M. with two short breaks for meals and exercises. Hinzpeter’s philosophy was based on “a stern sense of duty24 and the idea of service,” William wrote later. “The character was to be fortified by perpetual renunciation... the ideal being the harsh discipline of the Spartans.... No praise: the categorical imperative of duty demanded its due; there was no room for the encouraging or approving word.... No word of commendation.... The impossible was expected of a pupil in order to force him to the nearest degree of perfection. Naturally, the impossible goal could never be achieved; logically, therefore, the praise which registers approval was also excluded.”
Vicky occasionally wrote proudly about her son. When he was eight, she told her mother, “Willy is a dear,25 interesting, charming boy—clever, amusing, engaging—it is impossible not to spoil him a bit—he is growing so handsome and his large eyes have now and then a pensive, dreamy expression, and then again they sparkle with fun delight.” When William was twelve, Vicky wrote to Queen Victoria, “I am sure you would be pleased26 with William if you were to see him—he has Bertie’s pleasant, amiable ways—and can be very winning. He is not possessed of brilliant abilities, nor of any strength of character or talents, but he is a dear boy, and I hope and trust will grow up a useful man.... There is very little of his Papa or the family of Prussia about him.” Mother and son shared pleasant moments. Vicky painted in oil and watercolors, doing landscapes, portraits, still lifes and flowers, and William remembered “happy hours spent27 in... [her] studio... my mother sitting at her easel, while I read aloud to her from some humorous English tale, and how she every now and then dropped her palette to enjoy a hearty laugh.” The Prince of Wales, visiting his sister, approved of his nephews. “It is impossible to find two nicer boys28 than William and Henry,” he wrote to Queen Victoria.
Vicky, eager for William’s education to fit him for leading his country along the liberal path laid out by Prince Albert, did what she could to steer him away from the provincialism of the Prussian court. In 1874, William and Henry, fifteen and twelve, accompanied by Hinzpeter, were entered in a high school in Kassel where, for two and a half years, they mixed with other boys of good German families. In January 1877, William finished school and, on his eighteenth birthday, received as a present from his grandmother the Order of the Garter. (Queen Victoria originally had planned to send him the lesser Grand Companionship of the Bath. Vicky urged that the highest order be given. “Willy would be satisfied29 with the Bath, but the nation would not,” she wrote to her mother.) After Kassel, William spent four terms at Bonn University, where he studied law and politics. He joined the exclusive Borussia student society, although he refused its traditional heavy drinking and was not permitted to duel. During his years in Bonn, William, then nineteen, spent many weekends with his aunt, Grand Duchess Alice of Hesse-Darmstadt (Queen Victoria’s second daughter), and her children in Darmstadt, becoming almost a member of the family. His attention centered on his cousin Elizabeth, who was fourteen.fn1 Ella, as she was called, found her Prussian cousin overbearing. He would ask to ride, then demand to shoot, or row, or play tennis. When he was bored, he would climb off his horse, or throw down his racket, and announce that everyone should sit around while he read aloud from the Bible. Whatever he was doing, he always wanted Ella next to him. His infatuation received no encouragement and later, when he was German Emperor and she was the wife of Grand Duke Sergei of Russia, he stubbornly refused to see her. As an old man, he admitted that he had spent much of his time in Bonn writing love poetry to his cousin Elizabeth.
When William finished his studies in Bonn, his mother wanted him to travel widely to broaden his mind and experience. A trip to Paris while still at the university had produced mixed results. William visited the Louvre, Notre Dame, and Sainte-Chapelle, and he went up in a balloon launched from the Tuileries Gardens. But, he said, “the feverish haste and restlessness30 of Parisian life repelled me. I... never wanted to see the French capital again”—and although he lived for sixty-three years after this visit, he never did. William, on leaving Bonn, was “passionately interested... to go to Egypt.”31 But his grandfather, William I, King of Prussia and German Emperor, intervened. Prince William was second in line, after his father, to both those titles. It was time, according to his grandfather, for his Prussian qualities to be emphasized. The years during which Vicky had primary influence over the education and guidance of her son ended.
When Vicky arrived in Berlin in 1858, King Frederick William IV of Prussia was mentally ill; his brother William was Regent and Heir to the Throne. In 1861, Frederick William died and William, sixty-three, became King William I. William’s son and daughter-in-law, Fritz, thirty, and Vicky, twenty, became Crown Prince and Crown Princess, expecting within a decade or so to mount the throne. Nine months later, King William summoned the conservative politician Otto von Bismarck to administer his government. Bismarck began a twenty-eight-year tenure as Minister-President of Prussia and Chancellor of the German Empire. King William I lived past ninety. Bismarck, ruling in the King’s name, united Germany and made his elderly master an emperor, but it was not the liberal Germany desired by Prince Albert or by Fritz and Vicky.
Vicky was shocked and heartbroken by her father’s death. As with her mother, grief gave Prince Albert’s precepts the force of heavenly command and the young Englishwoman obediently set herself to influence the course of Prussian affairs through her tall, good-natured husband, who was devoted to his wife, admitted her intellectual superiority, and was willing to be guided by her vigorous opinions. Frederick, although trained as a soldier, was both a liberal and a nationalist. He longed for the re-creation of the medieval German Empire under a monarch like Charlemagne. His son Prince William remembered as a boy studying with his father a book titled German Treasures of the Holy Roman Empire. “It was so big32 that I had to spread it out on the floor, and I was never tired of looking at the pictures which my father would explain as he squatted beside me on the ground,” said William. Thoroughly sympathetic with the hopes of his father-in-law, Prince Albert, Fritz was quickly estranged from his father’s chief minister, Bismarck.
The breach between the King and Bismarck on the one hand, and Fritz and Vicky on the other, opened wide only nine months after Bismarck took office. Most Prussian newspapers in the 1860s were liberal and their editorial freedom was guaranteed by the constitution. They were critical of Bismarck’s conservative policies. During the spring of 1863, the Crown Prince warned his father that Bismarck’s encroachment on the constitution was opening a gap between the monarchy and the people. On June 1, at a Crown Council from which Frederick was absent on a military inspection tour, Bismarck retaliated by issuing a decree establishing censorship of press articles that might “jeopardize the public welfare.” The Crown Prince, with Vicky’s encouragement, protested publicly on June 5. “I knew nothing33 [about this order beforehand],” he told a political meeting in Danzig. “I was absent. I have had no part in the deliberations which have produced this result.” King William, who in fact had signed the decree reluctantly, was enraged by his son’s open opposition, characterizing it as military insubordination. He wrote to “Fritz a furious letter,”34 Vicky wrote to her mother, “treating him quite like a little child, telling him instantly to retract in the newspapers the words he had spoken at Danzig.” Frederick refused and offered to retire from the Army and politics and live in seclusion with his family. Bismarck, wishing to avoid creating a martyr in the Heir to the Throne, calmed King William and the threat of a court-martial was reduced to a military reprimand. Five months later, when the press decree was rescinded, Frederick wrote to Bismarck declaring his general opposition to the Minister-President’s policies: “A loyal administration35 of the laws and of the constitution, respect and goodwill towards an easily led, intelligent, and capable people—these are the principles which, in my opinion, should guide every government.... I will tell you what results I anticipate from your policy. You will go on quibbling with the constitution until it loses all value in the eyes of the people.... I regard those who lead His Majesty the King, my most gracious father, into such courses as the most dangerous advisers for the Crown and the country.” Vicky was pleased and apprehensive about what had happened. “Fritz... has for the first time in his life36 taken up a position decidedly in opposition to his father,” she wrote her mother. But, she added, “we are dreadfully alone,37 having not a soul from whom to ask advice.... Thank God I was born in England where people are not slaves and [are] too good to allow themselves to be treated as such.”
Bismarck did not forgive and the extended duel between the Bismarck party and what Bismarck deprecatingly referred to as the “Anglo-Coburg” party, was begun. The Crown Prince and Crown Princess, visiting Prussian towns, were received with ceremonies so minimal as to border on rudeness; Vicky assumed that instructions had come from Berlin. During the war with Denmark, Vicky loyally supported Prussia, and during the wars with Austria and France in which Fritz became a military hero she became enthusiastic. “I feel that I am now every bit as proud38 of being a Prussian as I am of being an Englishwoman and that is saying a very great deal as you know what a ‘John Bull’ I am,” she told her mother. “I must say the Prussians are a superior race as regards intelligence and humanity, education, and kind-heartedness.” But Vicky’s enthusiasm never extended to Bismarck. “To us and to many39 quiet and reflecting Germans, it is very sad and appears very hard to be made an object of universal distrust and suspicion, which we naturally are as long as Prince Bismarck remains the sole and omnipotent ruler of our destinies. His will alone is law here,” she wrote to Queen Victoria in 1875. “I wonder,” she said in 1881, “why Bismarck40 does not say straight out, ‘As long as I live, both the constitution and the crown are suspended’ because that is the exact state of the matter.”
The German Emperor, William I, watched from afar as his grandson Prince William, guided principally by Crown Princess Victoria, grew to manhood. Occasionally, when his parents were not in Berlin, Prince William was invited to dinner alone with his grandfather. The meal was served on a small, shaky, green card table in a drawing room of the royal palace on the Unter den Linden. “A bottle of champagne41 was put on the table,” Prince William remembered, “which the Emperor himself uncorked and with his own hands always filled two glasses, for himself and for me. After the second glass he would hold the bottle up to the light and make a pencil mark on the label at the height of the contents for he was very economical....” The Emperor decided that his grandson should begin the military phase of his preparation for the throne, and William, nearing twenty-one, was assigned as a lieutenant to the First Regiment of Foot Guards, stationed in Potsdam. William embraced regimental life. In the officers’ mess, he was universally praised. In the Guards, William said, “I really found my family,42 my friends, my interests—everything of which I had up to that time had to do without.... Before I entered the regiment, I had lived through such fearful years of unappreciation of my nature, of ridicule of that which was to me highest and most holy: Prussia, the Army, and all of the fulfilling duties that I first encountered in this officer corps and that have provided me with joy and happiness and contentment on earth.” The regimental atmosphere affected William’s personality. As a boy and a student, his manner had been polite and agreeable; as an officer, he began to strut and speak brusquely in the tone he deemed appropriate for a Prussian officer. William’s hardness distressed his parents; Crown Prince Frederick, a successful soldier, ruefully described William in the 1880s as “my son, the complete Guards officer.”43 William made plain that he no longer much cared about his parents’ opinions; he had the Guards and his grandfather. The Emperor, he said, was the only member of his family who appreciated his deep feelings for the army and for Prussia.
During his Potsdam years another formidable influence strengthened William’s growing rejection of his mother. He married. William had met Princess Augusta Victoria of Schleswig-Holstein in 1868, when he was nine. Her father’s principality, sandwiched between Prussia and Denmark at the base of the Jutland peninsula, had been annexed by Denmark, then conquered and annexed by Prussia in the war of 1864. Many Schleswigers and Holsteiners were aggrieved by their absorption by Prussia; Princess Augusta’s father had decided to adjust to circumstances. William’s suit for the Princess’s hand (her family name was Dona) was his own decision; Dona’s family was of minimal distinction, scarcely suitable for an heir to the throne of Prussia. Nevertheless, Vicky, Fritz, and King William I approved and on February 27, 1881, William and Dona were married in the Berlin Castle.
Dona, then twenty-three, a year older than her husband, was a tall, robust young woman with a rosy-pink complexion. Brought up amidst the rural nobility, she shared all its limitations and prejudices. She had been given a meager education and had developed few intellectual abilities or interests. She read neither newspapers nor books and had a simplistic understanding of politics. Her manners were conventional, her morality puritanical. The Prince of Wales once said that her only interests were “Kinder, Kirche, Küche” (children, church, kitchen). An Englishwoman, living in Germany, added “clothes,” and described the future Empress as “nice but silly.”44 “For a woman in that position,45 I have never met anyone so devoid of any individual quality of thought or agility of brain and understanding,” said another. “She is just like a good, quiet, soft cow that has calves and eats grass slowly and ruminates. I looked right into her eyes to see if I could see anything behind them, even pleasure or sadness, but they might have been glass.”
It was suggested that Dona’s purpose was to breed some sturdy stock into the Hohenzollern line. Dona produced seven children—six sons and a daughter—within ten years (1882–1892), but her personality was more significant to William than her good health. William needed sympathy and warm emotional support; Dona supplied him with unquestioning adoration. He was in revolt against his mother, and the woman he chose was entirely unlike his mother. On two subjects, however, Dona had strong views which delighted William: Dona was inflexibly opposed to liberalism in all areas and she hated England. Liberalism, political, cultural, artistic, she equated with license; Englishmen, whom she thought of as liberals, were hypocrites, dangerously given to license. After her marriage, Dona treated her mother-in-law with icy formality; Vicky scornfully referred to her daughter-in-law’s rigidly Protestant ladies-in-waiting as the “Hallelujah Aunts” or “a blessed set of donkeys.”46 William supported his wife and referred to his parents and his three younger sisters, who were close to his parents, as “the English Colony.”47
The division in the royal family was widely known in Berlin, and Bismarck turned it to his purpose. The Chancellor, relying solely for his power on the mandate given him by Kaiser William I, needed a buttress against the liberal forces which looked for leadership to the Crown Prince. Prince William, at odds with his parents, suited admirably. In 1884, Bismarck encouraged the Kaiser to delegate certain diplomatic missions, denied to the Crown Prince, to the younger William. William was sent to St. Petersburg as the Kaiser’s representative at the coming-of-age ceremonies of the sixteen-year-old Tsarevich Nicholas, the future Tsar Nicholas II. While there, William became friendly with Bismarck’s son, Herbert, who was acting as Counselor of the German Embassy in the Russian capital. William enjoyed the attention he received as his grandfather’s envoy; on returning home, he wrote to his host, Tsar Alexander III, that he would always take care to guard Russia’s interests, especially against the wiles of the Prince of Wales, who possessed “a false and intriguing character.”48 Tsar Alexander, who was Bertie’s brother-in-law, considered William’s letter rude and presumptuous. In August 1886, the Kaiser ignored his son and invited his grandson to accompany him to a meeting at Gastein with Emperor Franz Josef of Austria. He then sent William to Russia to report on the meeting to Tsar Alexander.
In the autumn of 1886, Bismarck appointed Herbert State Secretary for Foreign Affairs, the senior post in the German Foreign Ministry. Herbert suggested to his father that the connection with William be strengthened by bringing the Prince into the Foreign Ministry for training. The Kaiser, as pleased by the deferential attention of his grandson as he was dismayed by the disapproving manner of his son, agreed. William came twice a week to the Foreign Ministry building in the Wilhelmstrasse, where he was equipped with an office of his own and given lectures which explained the workings of the department, Germany’s obligations under the Triple Alliance, and the nature of the Empire’s overseas commercial and colonial policies. William also was informed, he said, of “our state of dependence on England49 which was principally due to the fact that we had no navy.” Crown Prince Frederick objected to his son’s indoctrination at the Wilhelmstrasse. “Considering the unripeness50 and inexperience of my eldest son, together with his leaning towards vanity and presumption, and his overweening estimate of himself, I must frankly express my opinion that it is dangerous as yet to bring him into touch with foreign affairs,” he wrote to Bismarck. The protests did no good; the Chancellor had the support of the Kaiser; he ignored the Crown Prince. William, in his memoirs, suggests the flavor of his early relationship with the Chancellor: “My service in the Foreign Office51 brought me... into closer contact with the great statesman, so ardently revered, who moved through the days of my youth almost like some warrior figure out of heroic legend.... I was frequently invited to breakfast with the Prince [Bismarck]... the Princess, [and] Count Herbert Bismarck.... After the meal... [Bismarck] used to lie down on a couch and smoke his long pipe which I have often been allowed to light for him.”
Against this coalition—the Kaiser, the Chancellor, and Prince William—Crown Prince Frederick could make no headway. Frederick, who had commanded armies in the wars against Austria and France, had wished to prove to Prussia, Germany, and Europe that a Hohenzollern prince who had played a major role in unifying Germany by victory in battle also could be a liberal and constitutional sovereign. In 1886, Crown Princess Victoria declared that many things would change when her husband succeeded his father. “Now Bismarck governs52 not only the German Reich but also the eighty-eight-year-old Kaiser,” she said. “But how will it be when Bismarck is faced with a real Kaiser?”
The imminence of Frederick’s reign drew increasing criticism of his character and abilities from those who would have most to lose from his succession. He was devoted to his wife and greatly respected her intellectual talents. “Have you asked the Crown Princess?”53 “We must see what the Crown Princess says about this,” Frederick said frequently. His enemies underscored this deference and painted a picture of a weak, uncertain man, overshadowed by, dependent on, even dominated by his strong-willed, English wife. “Everyone agrees54 that the Crown Prince’s character grows weaker year by year,” Friederich von Holstein, a Foreign Ministry protégé of Bismarck, wrote in his diary in 1884. “His wife’s influence is increasing every year.” Even Frederick’s private secretary scorned his master’s apparent submissiveness to his wife. “You have only to look55 at what she’s made of him,” he declared. “But for her, he’d be the average man, very arrogant, good-tempered, of mediocre gifts and with a good deal of common sense. But now he’s not a man at all; he has no ideas of his own, unless she allows him. He’s a mere cipher.” Vicky, the supposed cause of Fritz’s emasculation, was unpopular. In a nation where wives remained in the background, her tactless and sometimes strident advocacy of political causes, as well as her indiscreet trumpeting of Britain’s superior virtues, had alienated powerful sections of German society. No story denigrating the Crown Princess was too petty. Holstein, accusing her of prodigality, carped in his diary that her chef, “knowing her liking for stewed peaches,56 cooks a dozen peaches a day at three marks apiece throughout the summer and autumn on the chance she would ask for one.”
William, secure in the bosom of his regiment, the esteem of his wife, and the approbation of the Bismarcks, was almost completely estranged from his parents. He opposed the liberal opinions of his father and believed that the strong English sympathies of his mother were anti-Prussian and unpatriotic. He was bitter and contemptuous of what he saw as his father’s dependence. “My father... has a soft heart57 and is so unable to stand on his own two feet that one might say he is even helpless in domestic affairs,” William said to Herbert von Bismarck in 1886. “Now I cannot talk to my father58 at any time in an open and relaxed manner because the Crown Princess [William at this time always referred to his mother as “the Crown Princess”] never leaves us alone for even five minutes for fear that my father—having at last recognized how honest my intentions towards him are—would come under my influence.”
One formidable figure, beyond the reach of Kaiser William I and the Bismarcks, always supported the beleaguered Crown Prince and Crown Princess: Queen Victoria. The Queen could not intervene in German political affairs, but she knew how to make her opinions known and her weight felt on matters affecting the family. In 1885, when William’s sister Victoria wanted to marry Prince Alexander of Battenberg—a match endorsed by the Crown Prince and Crown Princess—the Kaiser, the Bismarcks, William, and Dona opposed it on the ground that the Battenbergs were a family of little significance. Queen Victoria found William’s opposition especially insufferable as he had himself taken a wife of minor royal distinction. “The extraordinary impertinence59 and insolence and, I must add, unkindness of Willy and the foolish Dona force me to say I shall not write to either,” the Queen wrote to her daughter. “As for Dona, poor little insignificant princess, raised entirely by your kindness to the position she is in—I have no words.... As for Willy, that very foolish, undutiful and, I must add, unfeeling boy, I have no patience with him and I wish he could get a good ‘skelping’ as the Scotch say.” The Queen added that William would not be welcome at Windsor, and an invitation to him was withdrawn. William’s first reaction was vehement—he called his grandmother “the old hag”60—then apologetic; he asked his mother to try to have the invitation reinstated. Vicky wrote to the Queen, attempting to explain her son’s behavior. “William is always much surprised61 when he is thought unkind or rude... fancies that his opinions are quite infallible and that his conduct is always perfect—and cannot stand the smallest remark, though he criticizes and abuses his elders and his relations.... This only finds encouragement from Dona and all around him. I trust the faults which make him so difficult to get on with will wear off as he gets older and wiser and associates more with people who are superior to him and can laugh at many of his foolish ideas.”
The relationship between mother and son did not improve. In 1886, Vicky wearily complained to her mother, “He did not condescend62 to remember that he had not seen me for two months, or that I had been to England... or that his sisters had the measles. He never asked after them or you, or any of my relations in England, so that I felt hurt and disappointed.... He is a curious creature. A little civility and kindness go a long way, but I never get them from him....” A year later, in 1887, Vicky seemed resigned: “The dream of my life63 was to have a son who should be something of what our beloved Papa was, a real grandson of his in soul and intellect, a grandson of yours.... But one must guard against the fault of being annoyed with one’s children for not being what one wished and hoped.”
In January 1887, the Crown Prince became hoarse and had trouble clearing his throat. At first, this was blamed on his frequent colds, but at the beginning of March, when the symptoms persisted, Dr. Gerhardt, a professor of medicine at Berlin University, was summoned. Gerhardt found on the Prince’s left vocal cord a small growth, which he attempted to remove, first with tweezers, then by burning with a hot wire. By May, the growth had reappeared and the wound caused by the treatment had not healed. Dr. Gerhardt called in another specialist, an eminent surgeon, Dr. Ernst von Bergmann. The two doctors considered the possibility of cancer; whether the growth was malignant or not, they proposed surgical removal of the diseased area. King William I and Bismarck were consulted, although Frederick himself had not been told. “The doctors,” Bismarck wrote, “determined64 to make the Crown Prince unconscious and to carry out the removal of the larynx without having informed him of their intentions. I raised objections and required that they should not proceed without the consent of the Crown Prince.” The Kaiser agreed and “forbade them to carry out the operation without the consent of his son.” Three additional doctors who were summoned diagnosed cancer; they suggested removal, not of the entire larynx, but of the affected area of the vocal cords. If successful, the operation would leave the Crown Prince permanently hoarse but with a voice. Bergmann predicted good prospects: the disease had been caught early; the patient was in good health; the operation should be “not more dangerous65 than an ordinary tracheotomy.” He promised, according to Prince William, the “recovery of my father’s voice66 ‘so that he would be able to command an army corps at a review.’” To this course, the Crown Prince and Crown Princess agreed, although Vicky trembled at “the idea of a knife touching his dear throat.”67 The operation was scheduled for the morning of May 21.
Before proceeding, however, the German doctors unanimously recommended that one more laryngologist be consulted. The preeminent laryngologist in Europe, described as “the greatest living authority68 on diseases of the throat,” was Dr. Morell Mackenzie, an Englishman. Dr. Mackenzie, urgently summoned to Berlin, arrived on the evening of May 20 and examined the patient. He insisted that unless it were proved that the growth was cancerous, the operation should be cancelled. In his opinion, the swelling was not cancerous; rather it was a “fibromatous swelling which could be removed without any operation in from six to eight weeks of treatment.” The Crown Prince, “like any other mortal,69 must come to his clinic for treatment.” The surgery scheduled for the following morning was cancelled. Dr. Mackenzie asked that a fragment of the larynx be removed and examined by Dr. Rudolf Virchow, the foremost pathologist in Germany, Director of the Pathological Institute of Berlin University and the creator of cellular pathology. Virchow examined the tissue and pronounced the growth benign. A second, larger fragment was taken a day later. Virchow again declared that he could find no evidence of malignancy. Dr. Gerhardt and Dr. Bergmann, protesting that pathology remained an unproved science, insisted that their original diagnosis was correct. They warned that the tumor was spreading to the other side of the throat and that if Dr. Mackenzie was wrong, valuable time was being lost. Mackenzie, relying in part on Virchow, remained emphatic. The final decision was left to the Crown Prince and Princess. The patient and his wife selected the hopeful English diagnosis over the gloomy German one.
Mackenzie examined Frederick in London early in June and recommended that his patient go to the Isle of Wight, whose mild climate, he said, would promote a cure of the throat infection. The German doctors, declaring that climate had no effect on swellings of the larynx, malignant or not, opposed this treatment but were overruled. The Crown Prince’s presence in England permitted him to ride on June 21 in Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee parade through London. None in the crowd cheering the tall, bearded figure in white uniform, silver breastplate, and eagle-crested helmet suspected that he could speak only in a tiny whisper. Fritz dutifully spent three months in Britain, dividing his time between the Isle of Wight and the Scottish Highlands. For a while, he seemed to be better. Queen Victoria acceded to her daughter’s request and at Balmoral, in the present of Fritz and Vicky, knighted Morell Mackenzie for saving her son-in-law’s life. In September the Crown Prince and his wife moved on to Venice and Lake Maggiore, where, at the end of October, his voice disappeared completely. Early in November, Vicky established him in a villa set in a grove of olive trees overlooking the Mediterranean at San Remo.
The growths steadily increased. The Crown Princess and Crown Prince still believed in Mackenzie’s diagnosis but, in Berlin, Kaiser William I, Prince Bismarck, and the sick man’s son, Prince William, did not. William asked his grandfather’s permission to go to San Remo to verify his father’s condition. The Kaiser agreed and assigned three new doctors, two Germans and an Austrian, to accompany him. William’s sudden arrival at San Remo precipitated a clash. “My arrival gave little pleasure70 to my mother,” Kaiser William II later recalled. “Standing at the foot of the stairs, I had to allow the flood of her reproaches to pass over me and to hear her decided refusal to allow me to see my father.... My father’s condition, in my mother’s opinion, gave no cause whatever for alarm, but the stony expression of her face... gave the lie to what her lips uttered.... Then I heard a rustling at the top of the stairs, looked up, and saw my father smiling a welcome to me. I rushed up the stairs and with infinite emotion we held each other embraced.”
Vicky described the same scene to her mother: “You ask how Willy was71 when he was here. He was as rude, disagreeable and as impertinent to me as possible when he arrived, but I pitched into him with, I am afraid, considerable violence.... He began with saying... [that] he had to speak to the doctors. I said the doctors had to report to me and not to him, upon which he said that he had the ‘Emperor’s orders’... to report... about his Papa. I said it was not necessary, as we always reported to the Emperor ourselves.... I said I would go and tell his father how he behaved and ask that he should be forbidden the house.... Willy is of course much too young and inexperienced to understand this. He was merely put up to it at Berlin. He thought he was to save his Papa from my mismanagement. When he has not his head stuffed with rubbish from Berlin, he is quite nice and traitable and then we are pleased to have him; but I will not have him dictate to me—the head on my shoulders is every bit as good as his.”
Vicky did agree to have Fritz examined again. Mackenzie, who was present, dramatically reversed his diagnosis: the Crown Prince was suffering from cancer, and would be dead within eighteen months. The other doctors agreed, adding that now even a complete removal of the larynx would do no good. “My father took his sentence72 of death—for such it was—like a hero, standing upright and looking the doctors firmly in the face,” William said. Alone together after the doctors had left, Fritz and Vicky wept and clung to each other. “To think that I have such a horrid, disgusting illness!”73 shuddered Fritz. “That I shall be an object of disgust to everyone and a burden to you all!” To her mother, Vicky wrote, “My darling has got such a fate74 before him which I hardly dare to think of.”
Through most of the winter the couple remained at San Remo while as many as fifty reporters, crowded into the Hotel Victoria, kept a macabre watch. There were demands from Berlin that the Crown Prince return; Kaiser William I, approaching ninety-one, was ill and could not survive much longer. Vicky refused. The only thing that mattered was her husband’s health: Berlin was freezing and damp; if Fritz was to have any chance, it would be in the warm Mediterranean sun. Queen Victoria supported her daughter: “The more failing75 the Emperor becomes, the more Fritz must make sure of getting well.”
The Crown Prince, sucking all day on ice cubes and with a bag of crushed ice tied around his throat day and night, began to suffocate. On February 9, 1888, a tracheotomy was performed and a permanent silver tube was inserted through his throat into his windpipe. On March 2, Prince William returned to San Remo. “[My father’s] figure showed in its emaciation and the yellow color76 of the face unmistakeable signs of the rapid progress of the disease. He was perpetually tormented by a tearing cough, and no word passed his lips for his mouth was already forever dumb. Notes rapidly scribbled on bits of paper had to take the place of speech when gesture and mimicry failed.”
A week later, Kaiser William I died in Berlin. In San Remo, the new Emperor, Frederick III, gathered his household in the drawing room. He invested his wife with the highest Prussian decoration, the Order of the Black Eagle, which only the sovereign could bestow. He wrote a note on a piece of paper and handed it to Sir Morell Mackenzie: “I thank you77 for having made me live long enough to reward the valiant courage of my wife.” Finally, he sent a telegram to Queen Victoria: “At this moment of deep emotion78 and sorrow at the news of my father’s death, my feelings of devoted affection to you prompt me, on succeeding to the throne, to repeat to you my sincere and earnest desire for a close and lasting friendship between our two nations. Frederick.”
On March 11, the new German Emperor returned to his capital. He was too weak to attend his father’s funeral and stood weeping at a window as the funeral procession passed on its way to the Charlottenburg mausoleum. At his first Crown Council meeting, he asked questions and issued instructions by writing slips of paper. He made it clear that Bismarck would remain as Chancellor and that he would make no attempt to alter the Chancellor’s policies. “In my entire ministerial career,”79 Bismarck wrote in his memoirs, “the conduct of business was never so pleasant or lacking in friction as it was during the ninety-nine days of the Emperor Frederick.”
When the long reign of Kaiser William I had come to an end, the Queen had written a congratulatory note to Vicky: “My own dear Empress Victoria,80 it does seem an impossible dream, may God bless her! You know how little I care for rank or titles—but I cannot deny that after all that has been done and said, I am thankful and proud that dear Fritz and you should have come to the throne.” At the end of April, Queen Victoria decided to visit her dying son-in-law. She went straight from her train to the Charlottenburg Palace and walked into the Crown Prince’s bedroom. Wordlessly, he raised up both hands in a gesture of pleasure, then turned and handed her a nosegay. During the Queen’s visit, Vicky brought Bismarck to see her. The Chancellor awaited his audience ill at ease; repeatedly, he asked the Queen’s equerry where in the room the Queen would be and whether she would be standing or seated. To their mutual surprise, Victoria and Bismarck charmed each other. She asked him to stand by her daughter; “he assured me he would.”82 “What a woman!”81 the Chancellor said afterwards. “One could do business with her.” Later, he described her to his family as “a jolly little body.”83 After the audience, the Queen said to the British Ambassador, “I don’t understand84 why my daughter could not get on with Prince Bismarck. I think him a very amiable man and we had a most charming conversation.” The grim purpose of the Queen’s visit was never forgotten, however. During the three-day visit, Vicky often broke down. When it was time for the Queen to leave and she already had entered her railway carriage, Vicky followed and clung to her mother. “It was terrible,”85 the Queen wrote in her journal, “to see her standing there in tears while the train moved slowly off.”
On May 24, the dying Emperor appeared in the chapel of the Charlottenburg Palace at the wedding of his second son, Prince Henry, to Princess Irene of Hesse. He wore a uniform whose collar was cut high enough to cover the tube in his throat. Despite his feebleness and emaciation, he insisted on rising and standing during the exchange of rings. It was apparent to everyone that Frederick’s reign would be short and that within a matter of weeks William would become Emperor. This tormented Vicky, not only because her husband was dying, but because, with Frederick’s death, Prince Albert’s dream of a liberalized Germany in partnership with England also would die. The Crown Princess tried to keep Frederick—and, it seemed to William, the Imperial crown—to herself for as long as possible. “I soon noticed86 that difficulties were being put in the way of my visits to my father,” William wrote. “...Then I learned that spies were posted who gave timely notice of my arrival at the palace, whereupon I was either received by my mother or greeted at the house door with the information that the Emperor was asleep.... When at last I succeeded, with the help of the valet... in slipping by the backstairs unnoticed into my father’s bedroom, he showed himself greatly pleased to see me.... When he gave me to understand that I ought to visit him more often... and I answered that I had already called several times but had never been admitted, he was greatly astonished... he said that my presence was welcome to him at any time.” Colonel Swaine, the British Military Attaché in Berlin, wrote to the Prince of Wales: “We are living in sad times87 here in Berlin.... Not sad alone because we have an Emperor at death’s door... but... because almost all officials... are behaving in a way as if the last spark of honor and faithful duty had gone—they are all trimming their sails. It seems as if a curse had come over this country, leaving but one bright spot and that is where stands a solitary woman doing her duty faithfully and tenderly by her sick husband against all odds.”
Frederick’s illness and approaching death summoned up poisons from the vast reservoir of Prussian antagonism to England. Already in September 1887, when the Crown Prince was leaving England to recuperate in Italy, Friederich von Holstein, First Counselor of the German Foreign Ministry, was spewing venom at the sick man’s wife: “The Crown Princess’s behavior is typical.88 Gay and carefree, with but one idea—never to return to Prussia. I persist in my view, which is now shared by others, namely that from the very beginning she accepted the idea that the worst would happen. Judging by all I have heard of her in recent months, I am tempted to call her a degenerate or corrupt character. Nature and pressure have combined to produce this effect. She came here thirty years ago, her father’s spoiled darling, convinced she was a political prodigy. Far from acquiring influence here, she saw herself obliged to renounce any kind of open political activity and to conform to the restraint of the Prussian court which she hated. She has always despised her husband. She will greet his death as the moment of deliverance.”
The new Crown Prince, William, torn between grief for his father and the prospect of becoming German Emperor, had little sympathy for “the English princess who is my mother,”89 as he described her at the time. She had taken control of his father’s medical treatment; now, as a result, his father was dying, and she was attempting to prevent father and son from meeting. At that time—and even more strongly as the years went by—William placed heavy blame on the English Dr. Mackenzie. “The decisive interference90 of the Englishman Mackenzie... had the most disastrous consequences,” William wrote. He questioned “whether the Englishman really pronounced his diagnosis in good faith. I am convinced that this was not the case.... He was out, not only after money, but also after the English aristocracy [referring to Mackenzie’s knighthood]fn2.... When one considers that, if the English doctor had not intervened, my father would in all probability have been saved, one will understand how it was that I took every opportunity of opposing... this ostrich policy. That my mother could not free herself from the Englishman’s authority, even when the facts had become clear to everyone else, had the worst possible effect upon my relations with her.” William absolved his mother of the decision to summon an English doctor and of the specific choice of Mackenzie; he admitted that this was the “unanimous” decision of the Berlin doctors. But few in Germany knew this. Before long, it was a general belief in Germany that the English Crown Princess had insisted on summoning an English doctor, had insisted on following his incompetent advice against the recommendation of a phalanx of German physicians, and thus—even if she was not guilty of Holstein’s vicious charge—was responsible for the needless death of a German emperor.
Early in June, Frederick, suffering from an abscess in the tracheotomy site and intermittent high fevers, was moved from the Charlottenburg Palace to the New Palace at Potsdam, where he had been born. In splendid weather he sat on a terrace and looked out at the gardens of Sans Souci, blazing with spring colors. On the morning of June 13, his friend King Oscar of Sweden visited him. The following day, Bismarck came to say farewell. Frederick reached for the Chancellor’s hand and gave it to his wife. That evening, Frederick could not swallow even liquid food. Queen Victoria, receiving almost hourly telegrams at Balmoral, telegraphed William, “Am in greatest distress92 at this terrible news and so troubled about poor dear Mama. Do all you can, as I asked you, to help her at this terrible time of dreadful trial and grief. God help us!” Frederick III died early in the morning of June 15.
“I am broken-hearted,”93 Queen Victoria telegraphed her grandson. “Help and do all you can for your poor dear mother.... Grandmama.” To Vicky, she wrote: “Darling, darling, unhappy child,94 you are far more sorely tried than me. I had not the agony of seeing another fill the place of my Angel husband, which I always felt I never could have borne!” In her journal that night, the Queen wrote, “None of my own sons95 could be a greater loss. He was so good, so wise, and so fond of me!” The Prince of Wales wrote to his son, Prince George (later King George V): “Try, my dear Georgy,96 never to forget Uncle Fritz. He was one of the finest and noblest characters ever known. If he had a fault he was too good for this world.”
Kaiser William II’s first act was to throw a cordon of soldiers around the New Palace, where his father lay dead. No one could enter or leave the palace without permission; when Vicky, now Dowager Empress, went to the windows, she saw the red uniforms of the hussars patrolling the grounds. William was convinced that his mother would try to smuggle away to England his father’s private papers. Officers went through the private rooms, opening drawers and searching in closets. Nothing was found. Two days later, Queen Victoria wrote in her journal: “Colonel Swaine arrived from Berlin.97... He had brought some papers which Fritz had desired should be placed in my care.”
The Prince of Wales hurried to Berlin for the funeral and found his sister bitterly angry. At William’s command, despite her pleading, a postmortem was being performed on Frederick’s body to verify the cancer and embarrass the English doctor—and the English Princess. When Vicky had attempted to see Prince Bismarck to persuade him to stop the postmortem, the Chancellor had sent word that he was too busy. William was making all the plans for his father’s funeral, ignoring his mother’s wishes; ultimately, she refused to attend the state funeral and held her own private service. The name Friedrichskron, which Frederick had given to the New Palace in his final days, was summarily changed back, on William’s instructions, to New Palace.
Queen Victoria felt the chill emanating from the new regime and repaid it in kind. On June 27, General Winterfeldt arrived from Berlin, bringing a formal letter to the Queen announcing William’s accession. Soon, the new Kaiser was complaining about the cold manner in which his envoy had been received at Windsor Castle. The Queen wrote to her Private Secretary: “The Queen is extremely glad98 to hear that General Winterfeldt says he was received coldly... for such was her intention. He was a traitor to his beloved master, and never mentioned his name even, or a word of regret and spoke of the pleasure... at being chosen to announce his new master’s accession. Could the Queen, devoted as she is to the dear memory of the beloved and noble Emperor Frederick, to whom, and [to] her daughter, General Winterfeldt has behaved so treacherously, receive him otherwise?” Five days later, the Queen tried a warmer approach with her grandson: “Let me ask you to bear with poor Mama99 if she is sometimes irritated and excited. She does not mean it so; think what months of agony and suspense and watching with broken and sleepless nights she has gone through, and don’t mind it. I am so anxious that all should go smoothly, that I write thus openly in the interests of both.” The Queen then turned to another troubling matter. “There are many rumors100 of your going and paying visits to Sovereigns. I hope that at least you will let some months pass before anything of this kind takes place, as it is not three weeks yet since dear beloved Papa was taken, and we are still in such deep mourning for him.” William rebuffed his grandmother. He would soon be taking his fleet up the Baltic, “where I hope to meet101 the Emperor of Russia which will be of good effect for the peace of Europe.... I would have gone later if possible, but State interest goes before personal feelings and the fate which hangs over nations does not wait till the etiquette of Court mournings has been fulfilled.... I deem it necessary that monarchs should meet often and confer together to look out for dangers which threaten the monarchical principle from democratical and republican parties in all parts of the world. It is far better that we Emperors keep firm together.” Queen Victoria was not amused. To Lord Salisbury, her Prime Minister, she telegraphed: “Trust that we shall be very cool,102 though civil, in our communications with my grandson and Prince Bismarck, who are bent on a return to the oldest times of government.”
fn1 Elizabeth’s younger sister Irene, twelve in 1878, would marry William’s brother, Henry. Another sister, Alix, who was six in 1878, was to marry Tsar Nicholas II and become the Empress Alexandra of Russia.
fn2 William’s charge was exaggerated, but Mackenzie, confronted by growing evidence that his diagnosis had been wrong, behaved evasively. In November 1887, after the Crown Prince had been told he had cancer, Mackenzie insisted to Queen Victoria’s doctor that, the previous June when he had prevented an operation, there had been no malignancy. In January 1888, when Fritz was struggling to breathe and shortly before his tracheotomy, Mackenzie told the Queen at Osborne that “though he fully believed91 that there was nothing malignant, he could not say so positively for another six months.” For the rest of his life, Mackenzie struggled to rebut the charge of misdiagnosis in this, his most famous case. His charge that the clumsiness of German physicians caused Fritz unnecessary suffering resulted in his expulsion from the Royal College of Surgeons for violating confidentiality and for unethical conduct. Mackenzie remained in private practice, but bitterness and controversy destroyed his health. In 1892, four years after his royal patient, Mackenzie died.