A cool winter wind blew in from the sea as Queen Victoria’s two eldest daughters strolled along the front in Cannes. To all outward appearances, Vicky, the elder and cleverer of the two, had made the better match. Prussia was so much wealthier and more powerful than the impoverished Grand Duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt, and she could not have found a more devoted husband than Fritz, with whom she was still in love after eleven years of marriage. Yet, as she watched the children playing croquet, running on the sand, swishing through rock pools and collecting botanical specimens, the Crown Princess could not help but wonder who had the happier lot.
Short in stature and, by the age of twenty-nine, already developing her mother’s matronly figure, Vicky had always considered her sister far prettier than she was and the sight of Alice’s girls running beside her own clumsy daughter, Charlotte, gave rise to a rueful envy. Although Victoria of Hesse was quite a tomboy with a tendency to talk too much, both she and her younger sister Ella looked so much healthier than their painfully thin Prussian cousin, who suffered continuously from nose and throat complaints and appeared far younger than her nine years.
Only two years previously, Vicky had written hopefully to Queen Victoria that Charlotte ‘is very good looking and much admired’ but seeing her now beside her Hessian cousins, the optimism seemed premature. Confident yet unassuming in their hand-me-down clothes, Alice’s daughters appeared so charming next to the nervous and graceless Charlotte whose hair was so thin it had to be cropped short like a boy’s, and who was such a nail-biter that Vicky had resorted to strapping her hands to her sides and making her wear gloves all day. When Queen Victoria played down the difference remarking that Alice’s third daughter, Irène, was plain, Vicky replied frankly that her own son, Henry, was ‘ugly,’ though conceding that this was not his fault since: ‘he cannot help being so ugly, and he is really not stupid and can be very amusing.’
Still more disappointing for Vicky than her children’s appearance, was their behaviour. With true Hohenzollern pride, her eldest son, ten-year-old Willy, strutted about giving orders and reminding his cousins of the recent Prussian victory over Hesse. Even in his more placid moments he changed his mind so often, abandoning one game to start another, that he soon earned the nickname ‘William the Sudden.’ While his younger sister and brother, Charlotte and Henry, were happy to follow his lead, Alice’s boisterous but impeccably mannered daughters yielded to his whims, perhaps making allowance for his pomposity out of pity for his atrophied left arm. Though every attempt had been made to conceal the deformity - specially designed suits with raised pockets and shortened sleeves - it served as a constant reminder to his mother that she had failed in her first duty to produce a flawless heir.
The trauma of her his birth still haunted the Crown Princess. After thirty-six hours of a tortuous labour, during which the doctors gave up hope of saving either mother or child, the baby was found to be in the breach position and was forcibly removed by forceps. In the process, the nerves in his shoulder were badly damaged and consequently his arm failed to develop. For a boy in Willy’s position as heir to the Prussian throne the deformity was more than a handicap, it was a humiliation. Already Vicky had heard cruel muttering that a ‘one-armed man’ should never be king and she had watched helplessly as he endured various brutal and unsuccessful attempts to correct the abnormality.
“The arm will be a great obstacle to his education,” Vicky had written to her mother, “as what has to be done for it not only takes up so much time but tires him so that he is not fit to learn directly afterwards. He is very backward for his age in consequence; he can neither read nor write nor spell yet…”
Through sheer strength of will he had learned to ride one-handed but even by the age of ten he had difficulty using a knife and fork and the resultant shame left him with a hatred of any sign of weakness and a need to exert his own superiority.
If the trauma of his birth explained Willy’s erratic behaviour, there was no apparent excuse for his equally tempestuous sister. Charlotte’s moods swung from total apathy to sudden tantrums and rages and her sense of her own importance led her to treat her social inferiors with disdain. Queen Victoria, who insisted that all her servants should be treated with respect, had been deeply offended by Charlotte’s refusal to shake hands with her favourite ghillie, John Brown, and wrote a strongly worded letter to Vicky expressing her disapproval. The Crown Princess knew and despaired of her elder children’s arrogance but protested that she was not to blame. Their Hohenzollern grandparents spoiled them terribly and infused them with such Prussian pride that there was little she could do to correct them.
Grey clouds gathered over the sea and the princesses assembled their children to return to the Grand Hotel. Archdeacon Dealtry of Madras had arrived to speak English with the elder Prussian boys and, as Willy and Henry prepared for their lesson, Vicky set up her easel to paint a portrait of the Archdeacon’s daughter, carried in the arms of an Indian servant.
Art was virtually the only one of Vicky’s many talents that had not been stifled since her marriage. Eleven years earlier, she had arrived in Berlin filled with high hopes for the future. Germany at the time comprised a number of independent kingdoms and grand duchies of which Prussia was the most dominant. For years, ideas had been mooted about a confederation of the various states and when Vicky married the liberal-minded Fritz, she believed that together they could realise her father’s vision of a peaceful and unified Germany governed along the lines of the British constitution. It did not take long to discover that few members of the Prussian Court shared her dream.
Fritz’s father, first Regent then King, believed more in an absolute monarchy than a British-style constitution and when he appointed the formidable Otto Von Bismarck as Chancellor, all hopes of a democratic society were dispelled. From the start, it was Bismarck’s intention to create a powerful empire rivalling its European neighbours in military supremacy and prestige. Within five years of Vicky’s wedding, he had annexed the disputed Danish duchies of Schleswig and Holstein before embarking upon a war with Austria, dragging other states - including Alice’s Hesse-Darmstadt - into the conflict.
In spite of the Prussian victory, the war had been even more disastrous for Vicky than it had been for Alice. In her anxiety about Fritz’s impending departure for the front, she gave birth to a premature baby, whom, to her mother’s satisfaction, she named Victoria Moretta.
While Moretta flourished Vicky scarcely had time to recover from the birth when tragedy struck the family. No sooner had Fritz left for battle when his son, two-year-old son, Sigismund, developed a fever. The same age as his cousin, Ella, little ‘Sigi’ had a special place in his mother’s heart as the first of her children to be breast-fed. He seemed such a healthy child, so ‘pretty’ so ‘merry’ and ‘so wonderfully strong, with such a fine colour, always laughing and so lively,’ that his illness was all the more shocking. To make matters worse, most of the Court doctors had left with the army and by the time that meningitis was diagnosed, the child was beyond hope. His death in mid-June plunged the Crown Princess into the depths of despair:
“What I suffer none can know,” she wrote to Queen Victoria, “– few know how I loved! It was my own happy secret – the long cry of agony which rises from the inmost depths of my soul reaches heaven alone.”
With Fritz far away and no one on hand to comfort her, Vicky’s grief took a rather macabre turn. Sealing the room in which Sigi had died, she placed an effigy of a baby in his cot and visited it regularly to the horror and disgust of the Court.
The decisive Prussian triumph at Könnigratz did little to raise Vicky’s spirits. Though she half-heartedly rejoiced in the honours that victory accorded her husband, military success brought no solace when she considered the plight of her sister in Darmstadt. Moreover, she could only watch in despair as Bismarck, claiming much of the credit for the Prussian triumph, urged the king to continue his belligerent ambitions further afield.
In such a militaristic climate, there was little room for a liberal-minded and very English princess, whose insistence on clinging to her native customs and tactless comparisons of Britain and Germany did nothing to endear her to the Court. Like Alice, she had shown initiative and imagination in her philanthropic activities. She had established homes and training schools for the unemployed, and organised schemes to provide them with temporary work. She had sponsored evening classes, arranged educational programmes in health and hygiene, founded schools of nursing, and an institute to train young women in a variety of trades; but her efforts were largely unnoticed. The Press drew attention only to her Englishness and her outspoken opposition to Bismarck until she became so unpopular that many Berliners were happy to believe that outlandish stories that the Chancellor fabricated about her. If she hoped for support from her in-laws, she was quickly disillusioned. As far as Fritz’s father was concerned, women had no business meddling in politics, and a Crown Princess’s sole purpose was to provide the country with heirs.
Unfortunately Vicky did little help her own cause. Like Alice, she was prone to bouts of depression and illness, exacerbated by frequent pregnancies and the stifling of her many talents. Moreover, according to one of her English nieces, there was:
“…a curious trait in her character - she was never really satisfied with the moment itself. When she was in Berlin, everything in England was perfect: when she was in England, everything German was equally perfect.”
Even in Cannes, as Alice wrote to Queen Victoria of the ‘heavenly blue sea,’ and the beauty of the sunsets and countryside, Vicky only complained of the expense of the place and the poverty of its architecture:
“If it were not that dear Alice and I were so happy together…I do not think we either of us would be enthusiastic about this place…the absence of nice buildings makes monotonous.”
Frustrated in her aspirations and increasingly isolated from Berlin society, Vicky had no option but to confine her many talents to the decoration of her home and the upbringing of her family. ‘Every moment she could spare…she spent with us,’ Moretta recalled yet even in the schoolroom her hopes were thwarted. It was frustrating for a woman of Vicky’s intellect to discover that her children were not great scholars. Impulsive Willy was hindered by his arm, Henry was ‘lazy’ and Charlotte was, in her mother’s eyes, ‘backward’ and ‘dull.’
‘Stupidity is not a sin,’ she wrote in exasperation to Queen Victoria, ‘but it renders education a hard and difficult task.’
Brilliant herself, the standards she set for her children were way beyond their ability until Queen Victoria herself felt it necessary to intervene:
“Don’t press poor dear Henry too much; it will not do any good and he will learn none the better for it…more harm than good is done by forcing delicate and backward children.”
If at times the perfectionist Vicky despaired of her elder children, she could be equally effusive in their praise. Henry - in spite of his ‘ugliness’ - was ‘a great darling’; Willy, ‘very intelligent and good-looking’ and yet within the same paragraph she was ever ready to point out their faults with the result that the children were never quite sure where they stood and, beneath much of their bluster, all were intrinsically shy and lacking in self-esteem. Unable to impress their mother, Willy, Charlotte and Henry ran to their grandparents for praise. The Prussian Queen Augusta made no secret of her contempt for the Crown Princess and actively encouraged Willy’s rising hostility towards her. The king, meanwhile, regaled his grandson with tales of past Prussian victories, filling his head with dreams of ruling a mighty Empire surpassing that of his British grandmother. The giant Bismarck, ever willing to flatter the impressionable boy to his face while privately viewing him with scorn, appeared to personify that dream and beside the ‘Iron Chancellor’ the Crown Prince and Princess seemed weak, unpatriotic and unworthy of respect or imitation. Proud of his Hohenzollern ancestry, Willy grew to despise his English blood and Vicky could only take refuge in Fritz’s abiding love and the determination to keep her younger children free from the ‘Prussian influence.’
By the time of Moretta’s birth, Vicky was determined to play a more direct role in her children’s upbringing and the effects were almost immediately apparent. Lacking the precociousness of her elder siblings, Moretta, even in early childhood, appeared more English than Prussian:
“She is the only one of our children who does not speak German;” Vicky explained to Queen Victoria, “she will not say any German words.”
Her cheerfulness endeared her to Vicky, but even so her extreme shyness, particularly among strangers, caused her mother a great deal of concern. Within eighteen months of Moretta’s birth, a fourth son, Waldemar was born and he too, under Vicky’s care was so ‘dear’ and ‘honest’ that he soon became her favourite child.
The holiday in Cannes brought a brief respite to both Vicky and Alice. ‘Living quietly together,’ they had the rare opportunity of sharing memories of their idyllic childhood and confiding in one another their present troubles.
“It does me good…to have Vicky’s stimulating company,” Alice wrote to Louis from Cannes, “and to get right away from the narrow, stifling atmosphere of Darmstadt…Vicky learns and hears so much, and she makes really good progress every year, which I cannot say for myself.”
Vicky, too, began to appreciate that, though Alice’s life seemed so much less complicated than her own, she too had her share of difficulties:
“[Alice’s] life in Germany, though she enjoys more liberty than I, and has her husband more to herself, has its disadvantages and I have always admired the way she has taken them.”
The winter moved on and the arrival of Louis and Fritz on the 19th December brought a happy reunion of both families in time for Christmas. Yet, while the children listened intrigued to their fathers’ accounts of adventures in distant lands, both Alice and Vicky had reason to anticipate their return to Germany with some trepidation. With a heavy heart, Alice set out with her children to the ‘stifling’ atmosphere of Darmstadt, while for Vicky there came a brief respite as she and Fritz broke their journey in Paris. Entertained by the charismatic Emperor Napoleon III, and delighting in the Parisian culture, neither Vicky nor Fritz could have realized that within seven months the Prussian Crown Prince would be leading his troops towards the French capital in the midst of a bitter war.
