royal wedding celebration

At the beginning of July 1897, Vicky returned from the Jubilee celebrations to her beloved Friedrichshof. There, between visits from her daughters and frequent trips to her beloved Italy, she continued to amass her artistic collections with the same enthusiasm she had shown as a child when collecting fossils to add to her collection in the Swiss Cottage. Friedrichshof was so full of antiques and treasures that, according to a regular visitor, Marie Louise, the ‘wonderful’ place became:
“..more of a museum than a house…I remember once…I went upstairs to my room and lay down on my sofa. My aunt came to see that I had everything I needed and seeing me reclining on the couch said: ‘Dear child do you not know that you are lying on a cinquecento coverlet!’ and she placed a newspaper over it although I had already taken the precaution of removing my shoes.”
Vicky’s concern for her antiques, however, did not prevent her from welcoming children into her home, and one of the chief delights of her widowhood was the pleasure she took in her grandchildren. It saddened her deeply that Willy’s wife seemed so intent on alienating her from their six sons and had acerbically pointed out that the choice of the name Victoria for their only daughter was not made out of deference to her grandmother. But while one daughter-in-law exacerbated the antagonism between Vicky and her son, her second daughter-in-law, Irène of Hesse, proved far more accommodating.
Since Irène’s marriage to Henry, in May 1888, the mutual and long-standing affection
between aunt and niece had deepened, not least because Irène had done so much to improve relations between Vicky and Henry. Life with the Kaiser’s volatile brother was not always easy for the Hessian princess:
“[He] was a tall and handsome man, but inclined to be - let us say - temperamental. At times he was overbearing and very satirical, and at others friendly and charming. His wife was a small woman, simple in manner and of a kindly, unselfish nature.”
Notwithstanding her docility, Irène succeeded in calming his fiery temper and by the time of the Diamond Jubilee, Queen Victoria’s lady-in-waiting, Marie Mallet thought him ‘simple friendly and courteous…the nicest male royalty going.’
The couple had settled in the Königliches Schloss in Kiel from where Henry continued his naval duties and indulged his passion for motor cars and engines, and to where, in March 1889, Vicky and Moretta had hurried to assist Irène through the birth of her first child.
Suffering none of Queen Victoria’s revulsion about the ‘unecstatic and animal’ state of pregnancy, Vicky set to work preparing the nursery and layette for the baby. Though the welcome she received was cordial and her efforts were greatly appreciated, she could not help but feel disappointed to find so few books in the house. It seemed incongruous that the well-educated daughter of Princess Alice showed so little interest in world events and was unable to discuss matters of political importance. Vicky may well have agreed, too, with Marie Mallet’s view that Irène’s ladies-in-waiting were ‘very dull and by no means easy to get on with.’
But if Vicky wanted reassuring that this truly was Alice’s daughter, she needed only to recall how easily her sister had shocked the Queen by breast-feeding her baby. Now it was Vicky’s turn to be appalled when Irène made no attempt to hide her pregnancy behind shawls and rugs, but appeared quite openly in public right up to the time of the birth.
“I think it quite embarrassing,” Vicky wrote prudishly to the Queen, “and would never have dreamed of doing so especially before gentlemen and children and strangers.”
Embarrassed or not, she remained at Irène’s side through the ‘quick, easy’ birth of a son, Waldemar, on 20th March 1889. The baby’s healthy appearance belied a terrible truth. It soon became clear that Waldemar was a haemophiliac, which perhaps accounts for the seven-year gap before Irène gave birth to a second child, Sigismund. Four years later the family was completed with the birth of a third son, Henry.
“I wonder that you are pleased at Irène’s having a third boy.” Queen Victoria wrote to Vicky, “There are far too many princes in Prussia.”
There was an unfortunate irony in the remark, for even as Irène was hoping for a daughter, her younger sister, Alix, Tsarina of Russia, was still desperately praying for a son.
Boys or girls, Vicky delighted in her grandchildren and looked forward with pleasure to Sophie’s frequent visits to Friedrichshof with her large family or the arrival of Mossy and Fischy with their twins. Between and during their stays she continued to enjoy the beautiful scenery of Krönberg walking and riding daily as she had done since childhood, until an accident brought her outings to a sad conclusion.

In September 1898, while out riding with Mossy, Vicky’s horse ‘took fright at a steam threshing machine…and shied violently.’ Vicky was thrown from the saddle but, though bruised and badly shaken, was able to write the next day to her mother that:
“I got up and walked part of the way home and only felt shaken and stiff towards evening…I am alright today except for a headache.”
In reality, Vicky was far more ill than anyone realised. Throughout her life, she had been troubled by a myriad of rheumatic ailments but following the accident she suffered severe back pain, which intensified with the passing of time. After consulting several doctors who presented conflicting medical opinions, she was eventually diagnosed with breast cancer, which had spread to her spine. Determined to continue living life to the full, she kept the news from her family, referring to her pain simply as lumbago and confiding the truth only to her youngest sister, Beatrice, and their mother.
For several months, she was able to make her regular excursion to Italy and France until, by the end of 1899, the pain left her confined to bed for long periods and she had no alternative but to reveal the truth to her daughters. Charlotte was the last to be told and though she, like the others, promised to keep the news to herself, she immediately announced her mother’s illness to the world.
Mossy, Moretta, and Irène were on hand to offer what comfort they could and Sophie hurried from Greece to be at her mother’s side. Vicky endured her sufferings with fortitude and a touching concern for others, apologising to her nurses for upsetting them by her screams. Yet, hard as she tried to maintain a positive outlook, the pain, relieved only by minimal amounts of morphine, was excruciating and, at its height, she refused to see anyone for fear of causing them distress:
“My legs are shrunken and falling away to nothing, a mere skeleton,” she wrote to Sophie, “The agony is as bad as ever, the nights are a torture…The tears and groans all night long drive me utterly mad. I often think I should put an end to myself if only I could. Oh I cannot bear it any longer!”
So loud were her cries of agony that even the soldiers guarding her palace requested permission to move out of earshot.

For Queen Victoria, her eldest daughter’s illness was but one in a series of heartaches that marred her last years. In the closing years of the century, she mourned not only for Liko, for Young Affie and the Duke of Edinburgh and Coburg, but as the mother of her country, she grieved too for the young officers dying by the dozen in the South African War. Her concern for the soldiers was genuine and she repeatedly sent telegrams assuring them of her gratitude whether in victory or defeat. Though the Queen never doubted the justice of the British cause, the conflict bore an ominous portent of the division that a future war would wreak in the family.
Vicky and her three younger daughters supported the British and shared the Queen’s concern for her troops. From Sophie in Athens, from Vicky in the Friedrichshof and from Mossy in Hesse-Kassel, parcels arrived for the English soldiers, while the princesses studied British newspapers for reports of the cruelty and treachery of the Boers.
Across much of the rest of Europe, however, a different story was told. In Russia, Alix and Ella read reports of the British atrocities and the claim that their grandmother’s soldiers were using Boer women and children as shields.
“We…are right behind the Boers and wish them every success in the war,” wrote the Tsar’s sister. “I think there can be no one (except the English) who isn’t on their side!”
Even Tsar Nicholas, who claimed to discuss the matter every day at dinner, agreed with his sister, leaving Alix torn between loyalty to her grandmother and her husband.
“She is, of course appalled at the loss of English officers,” Nicky wrote, “but what can you do, it has always been like that in their wars!”
From Prussia, too, the Kaiser - while pompously offering his grandmother advice on how best to proceed - praised the Boers’ successes. In Germany ‘the antagonistic feeling…against England was very pronounced,’ making life especially difficult for those English princesses, Marie Louise of Schleswig-Holstein and Alice of Albany, who were living in there. Alice’s brother, as a German officer cadet had no option but to support the Kaiser’s view, while for Marie Louise, who had one brother, Albert, in the German army and another, Christle, serving with the English forces, the situation was still direr.
Christle, a Captain in the King’s Own Rifle Corps, had heroically come
through ‘many hardships’ in the campaign until, like his Uncle Liko before him, he contracted malaria and enteric fever. His sisters, anxiously awaiting news at Balmoral, heard that he was being well treated in the military hospital in Pretoria, but within days pneumonia had set in and he died on 29th October 1900. At his own request his body was buried alongside his fellow officers in Pretoria.
“Dear unselfish Princess Thora [is] just heart broken,” wrote Marie Mallet, “she cared more for her brother than for anything on earth and was justly proud of his valour…[She] is admirable, although she and her mother will miss him every hour of every day…she thinks of everyone but herself.”
It was left to the heart-broken Thora to take the news of the death of yet another grandson to the Queen.
“I cannot write but a few words, as we are in such distress about dear beloved Christle’s loss.” The Queen told Vicky, “…Poor dear Lenchen bears up wonderfully; so too does poor dear Thora…”
Even as she wrote the letter, Queen Victoria was filled with anxiety for the future of its recipient, for by then she knew that Vicky herself was dying.

The series of bereavements, Marie Louise’s divorce, anxieties about Vicky and the stress of the war brought about a rapid deterioration in Queen Victoria’s health.
“She said,” wrote Marie Mallet in the summer of 1900, “that the trials and sorrows of the last few months were almost more than she could bear and, alas, I cannot help feeling that there may be more in store.”
Her sight was failing and, scarcely able to walk any distance, she spent much of her time in the company of her granddaughter, Thora, who patiently sat at her side, listening even as her mind began to fail and she rambled occasionally incoherently of events of the past.
Shortly before Christmas 1900, Queen Victoria left Windsor for the last time, setting sail for her beloved Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. It was a cold, bleak winter and, the frail Queen was visibly fading.
“My sight is rather bad since I have been poorly,” she wrote to Vicky on 6th January, “but I hope it will soon be much better.”
It was not to be. Within a fortnight, telegrams were flying across the continent warning of her decline. Princesses hurried to the island to take their turn in approaching Grandmama’s bed to whisper a last good-bye. Racing, too, across the Solent, much to his aunts’ distress was the Queen’s eldest grandson, Kaiser Wilhelm II, who genuinely wished to see her for one last time. Throughout the 22nd January the Queen lapsed in and out of consciousness and shortly before noon she seemed so close to death that the royalties were summoned to her bedside. As her chaplain, Dr. Davison began his prayers the Queen was able to recognise the members of her family: Victoria Battenberg, who was staying on the Royal Yacht Osborne; the Dowager Duchess of Coburg and her little grandchild, Ducky’s daughter, Elizabeth of Hesse. Daisy and Patsy Connaught arrived with their parents and joined the Prince of Wales and the Queen’s younger daughters, Lenchen, Louise and Beatrice in their vigil. For a few hours she rallied and the family withdrew but by mid-afternoon she had suffered a relapse. At half-past six in the evening of 22nd January 1901, Queen Victoria, died in the Kaiser’s arms.


Ten days later, a long procession of royal mourners followed the coffin towards the yacht Alberta that was to take the Queen’s body back to England. On 4th February, through flurries of snow, the cortege set out from the Albert Memorial Chapel in Windsor to Queen Victoria’s final resting place beside beloved Albert in the Mausoleum at Frogmore. For Marie Louise, standing beside the coffin brought a deep sense of ‘peace and awe’, but, in typical Wales’ fashion, her cousin, Maud, confessed that she found the funeral procession to ‘rather trying & exhausting.’
“I cannot believe that she is really gone, that we shall never see her anymore. It seems impossible,” wept the young Tsarina Alix, whose fourth pregnancy had prevented her from making the journey to England. “How I envy you [she wrote to her sister, Victoria] being able to see beloved Grandmama being taken to her last rest.” A memorial service was held for the Queen in St. Petersburg where, for the first time since her arrival in Russia, the Tsarina wept in public.
While Ducky avoided the funeral, remaining in France with her Russian lover, her elder sister, Missy, was deeply distressed at being prevented from accompanying her husband to the ceremonies. She sensed the implications of the loss of ‘dearest grandmama’ and in a letter to her mother described her longing to return to England:
“To see it all again if only for a day or two…to have a last peep at the old house…with out dear old Granny the last link is cut off!...I tell you it is inconceivable sorrow for me.”
For Alice Albany, who had returned from Germany for the funeral it was an equally devastating experience:
“I had come to regard her as permanent and indestructible - like England and Windsor Castle.”
But it was the future Queen Mary who, perhaps, most accurately expressed the country’s sense of bewilderment:
“The thought of England without the Queen is dreadful even to think of. God help us all.”

Grief-stricken at the death of her grandmother, Mossy of Prussia faced the most difficult task of all. It fell to her to break the news to her mother. Vicky heartbroken and racked with pain, wept “I wish I were dead too!”
For six more months, she struggled on, her agony increasing by the day. In February 1901, she received a final visit from her brother, the new King Edward VII. In spite of the friction between Willy and ‘Uncle Bertie’, the encounter passed off amiably enough, thanks largely to the tact of Sophie and Mossy who ‘were always ready to dash in if the conversation seemed to get into dangerous channels.’ Bertie was horrified by his sister’s rapid deterioration; as she sat ‘propped up with cushions; she looked as if she had just been taken off the rack after undergoing torture.’ Before they left, the king’s physician Sir Francis Laking persuaded her doctors to administer larger doses of morphine to combat her pain.
Through the last few months of her life, Vicky’s daughters and daughter-in-law, Irène, visited regularly, Mossy and Moretta barely leaving her side. To the end she continued to take an interest in current events and in her daughters’ futures; when Sophie arrived from Greece, Vicky urged her to continue to care for the poor of her country. To the last, too, Vicky remained first and foremost an English princess. To her friend Bishop Boyd-Carpenter, she confided that she hoped he would preside at her funeral and read the English Burial Service over her.
In the early evening of August 5th 1901, Vicky, surrounded by her children, died reciting the Lord’s Prayer. The funeral service she had requested was carried out at the English Church Homburg, to be followed some days later by a Lutheran funeral at Krönberg, after which she was interred with Fritz at Potsdam. In her will she left her favourite home at Friedrichshof to her youngest daughter, Mossy.

The death of Queen Victoria severed the tie uniting the royal cousins. Without her as their mainstay, there would be no common bond to keep the family together. With the dawning of the new century, the old world had passed away and the ominous clouds across the Solent portended a future far bleaker for the family that anyone could have predicted.

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.