Dearest Vicky, Darling Fritz (3 page)

On another occasion Fritz had a trivial argument with his father, and wanted an impartial opinion as to which of them was wrong. Unruh was asked to arbitrate, and after listening carefully to both sides of the dispute said he believed the Prince of Prussia was in the wrong and his son in the right. Everyone, he continued, was liable to err, and the tutor wanted to tell him not to boast about it, but was forestalled when the boy threw himself on the floor, sobbing, ‘Now everything is lost!’ He had desperately hoped that his father would have been judged right, and was not comforted until Wilhelm took him in his arms and told him gently, ‘You are wrong, Fritz, but you are also right, and so you shall carry your point.’
¹²

Another time Fritz complained to Unruh about one of his teachers, who had puzzled him by referring to the fact that one day he would be King. Pressing the teacher for an explanation, the man told him that on the death of His Majesty, the Prince of Prussia would be King, and in due course he too would die. Here Fritz angrily interrupted him; ‘I know nothing about this; I have never thought of it, and I do not wish my father’s death to be referred to.’
¹³
On 18 October 1841, his tenth birthday, in accordance with family tradition he received his commission as Second Lieutenant in the First Infantry Regiment of Guards, and was invested with the Order of the Black Eagle.

While his tutors found him kind and obedient, they thought he was not particularly intelligent. Augusta was disappointed if not surprised to find her son apparently growing up as a typical Prussian prince, with no early evidence of interest in her progressive political views, but instead a typical Hohenzollern sense of devotion to the army and Prussian monarchy inherited from the father whom he admired but feared. Though it was an age when sons were expected to be in awe of their fathers, Augusta once told a friend that she was alarmed to see how much her son was ‘agitated and nervous’ in his father’s presence.
¹⁴

In the spring of 1848 Germany, like much of Europe, was shaken by unrest; street fighting broke out in Berlin, and the temporarily unnerved King promised immediate reforms in consultation with the
Landtag
(Prussian Parliament). Fritz and Louise could see shots being fired between guards and revolutionaries from the palace, and with a sense of shame on behalf of his family the Prince of sixteen also watched the King being forced by demonstrators to salute the bodies of dead revolutionaries in the palace square at Berlin. After a few days Augusta decided that the capital was no place for her children and she took them to Babelsberg, their summer retreat three miles from Potsdam. Here Otto von Bismarck, one of the most reactionary members of the United Diet in Germany, approached Augusta with a plan to persuade the King to abdicate, ask Wilhelm to renounce his right to the succession and place Friedrich, young, innocent, untarnished by any connection with the past, and therefore more acceptable to the rebels than any other Hohenzollern, on the throne. It had been suggested by Karl, the King’s arch-conservative younger brother, who intended that he himself should be the power behind the throne. By coincidence a similar manoeuvre later that year brought the young Habsburg Franz Josef to the imperial Austrian throne in succession to his uncle, the epileptic Emperor Ferdinand. However Augusta’s loyalty to her husband and brother-in-law, or more possibly the desire to see herself as a Queen Consort in waiting, rather than as Queen Mother, overruled her. She refused to contemplate the idea, and never forgave Bismarck.

Meanwhile mobs demanded the blood of Prince Wilhelm, regarded by the Prussian conservatives as their champion at court, after he had summoned troops into the Berlin streets to put down rioting, thus earning himself the epithet of ‘the Grapeshot Prince’. Significantly his was the only royal palace in Berlin to be attacked by revolutionaries, who painted slogans on the walls and smashed the windows. The King sent him a letter advising him ‘to repair to the friendly Court of England’,
¹⁵
and he trimmed his whiskers with a pair of scissors in order to avoid recognition. Making for the safety of the Prussian Embassy at Carlton House Terrace in London, he was invited to Windsor by Prince Albert who lectured him on his schemes for a united liberal Germany, and the lessons that could be learnt from England’s acceptance of parliamentary government without any adverse effect on national loyalty to the crown. Wilhelm listened in silence, more out of good manners than agreement. Interpreting his acquiescence partly as depression and partly agreement, Albert wrote approvingly to King Leopold that Germany could ‘ill spare people like him.’
¹⁶
While he was in exile his name was removed from the church prayers until reinstated by order of the government. In May he left England to return home, and was appointed commander of forces in Prussia and Hesse who were charged with putting down the last remnants of rebellion, ordering summary executions with a vengeance that shocked the other German states and secured the order of
Pour le Mérite
from the King.

Fritz regarded the popular agitation for constitutional reform with distaste, and was shocked to learn that the King had ridden through the streets of Berlin wearing a revolutionary tricolour armband, the symbol of revolutionaries calling for German unification. He told his cousin Friedrich Karl that he would never fall so low; ‘I intend to keep my Prussian cockade on my cap and will not wear the German one.’ Those weeks of March, April and May 1848, he noted in his diary, were ‘the most tragic spring of my life’, and democratic reformers were ‘the unruly mob’ who had ‘trampled the majesty of the crown under their feet.’
¹⁷

In adolescence Fritz gradually came to see the virtues of his mother’s more liberal political views, as well as noting the lessons of the previous year. At a banquet at Potsdam in May 1849 he was seated next to the conservative Leopold von Gerlach, the King’s Adjutant-General. The latter said he envied the prince his youth, as he would doubtless ‘survive the end of the absurd constitutionalism.’ Fritz shocked him by replying that he believed some form of representation of the people would become a necessity.
¹⁸
There had to be a parliament, he believed, implying that the integrity of such an assembly provided by the monarchy had to be respected.
¹⁹

In the summer of 1849, after Unruh’s retirement, he began fulltime military service with his regiment and was promoted to the rank of First Lieutenant; that autumn he commanded the regiment for the first time during seasonal routine manoeuvres. In October he celebrated his eighteenth birthday in the traditional Hohenzollern manner with a reception attended by family and various officials including Prussian state ministers, military commanders, and deputations from town magistrates, all in full dress. He received their congratulations, the Mayor of Berlin, Herr Naumyn, read out addresses from the town officials, and made several short speeches of thanks in return.

Three weeks later he made a break with tradition by becoming the first Hohenzollern prince to receive a university education. Until then military training had been considered adequate for the heirs to the Prussian throne and their kin, but Augusta had used her influence to have her nephew Friedrich Karl, son of the scheming Prince Karl, enrolled at the University of Bonn. In doing so she set a precedent for sending her son there; and in November 1849 he settled in Bonn, on the first floor of the university building, the former Elector’s castle, to study literature, history and law. In his third term he wrote a long essay on his educational experiences, acknowledging that ‘no true picture of the life and doings of man’ could be gleaned at court; one had to meet and exchange views regularly with people from all social classes. ‘At Court one is surrounded by people who invariably meet royalty with politeness, with the observance of ancient traditional forms, and only too frequently with deceitful flatteries, so that habit gradually leads one to think of life in no other way, and to estimate all men with whom one comes in contact by the same standard.’
²⁰
It met with qualified approval from his mother who remarked with asperity that, while his knowledge of human nature had certainly improved, ‘his intellectual development does not equal that of his peers.’
²¹

Life in the palaces surrounded by fawning courtiers and servants was stifling, and he found it a refreshing change to get together with royal fellow-students and others in his rooms at Bonn for a ‘social round table’. Though he worked hard, studying into the small hours rather than joining in the all-night drinking and singing parties enjoyed by other students, he was never priggish; he mixed freely with his contemporaries and the people of Bonn, and was accepted by them as ‘one of the crowd’. While he kept his distance from political discussions, knowing that in his position it was politic not to take sides, he had a sense of humour and relished a joke as well as anyone. Only those who failed to treat him with respect due to a prince of the blood royal risked incurring his displeasure, for while he had ‘the common touch’, he insisted on the appropriate deference to his rank.

When not at Bonn he was happiest visiting his mother and sister at Koblenz, their rural retreat in West Prussia. Despite the seven years in age between them, the childhood lack of intimacy between Fritz and Louise had lessened by the time of his early manhood. They were a familiar sight together strolling along the banks of the Elbe, shopping in nearby towns, or visiting local fairs, with a small pug dog scampering at their heels.

His English tutor Copland Perry gave him three lessons in English language and literature a week, and was struck by his sincere affection for the country, for the Queen and her family, and also for her political and social way of life. As Fritz had not yet been to England or met Queen Victoria, such Anglophile sentiments were presumably inspired by his mother, who was too impatient or transparent by nature to try and hide her dislike of reactionary Berlin and her preference for English ways from him. At the end of each formal study session, tutor and student amused themselves ‘by writing imaginary letters to ministers and leaders of society’.
²²
At that time Bonn had a small English-speaking colony which used to celebrate Divine Service each Sunday according to the rites of the Church of England. Fritz and Perry often attended these services, sharing a pew and a copy of the Book of Common Prayer together. Fritz enjoyed the service so much that his tutor allowed him to keep the book, which he carried about with him for years afterwards.

Although it was not yet taken for granted that Prince Friedrich Wilhelm would eventually marry the Princess Royal, some of the elder generation clearly had this very much in mind. The idea may have originally been proposed by King Leopold, who had been instrumental in encouraging the marriage of Victoria and Albert themselves and was always keen to extend Coburg influence, partly for reasons of family ambition and partly as a means of safeguarding and strengthening the guarantee of Belgian independence. He encouraged the Queen to cultivate her friendship with Princess Augusta, though the latter was equally keen to make the most of the friendship with Queen Victoria herself, hoping to convert her son to liberalism and nationalism through a marriage to the eldest daughter of the new generation of Coburgs at Windsor Castle.
²³
Alternatively the
eminence grise
might have been Baron Stockmar, King Leopold’s physician and unofficial family counsellor who supported anything that would bring together ‘the two great Protestant dynasties in Europe’
²⁴
and who had first spoken of the issue when Vicky was only six. Finally there was Albert himself, who may not have been the architect but was certainly the catalyst in the match between his daughter and the eventual heir to the Prussian throne.

His vision of a progressive Germany, with the Hohenzollerns of Prussia at the helm, living under constitutional law, and allied to England, seemed well within the bounds of possibility. King Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia had begun to suffer from a series of increasingly debilitating strokes, and he was not expected to live for much longer. As his eldest brother and heir Wilhelm was already in his fifties, his reign was unlikely to be long. He would be succeeded by his only son, now a young man of almost twenty, trained in the liberal tradition by his mother, and open to good English influences. With another Queen Victoria as the consort of King Frederick, the royal houses of Britain and Prussia, and therefore both nations, would be united.

According to another theory, Augusta was anxious to bring such a marriage to fruition as she wanted to forestall her husband’s scheme for their son to wed a Russian Grand Duchess. Political and family ties between Romanovs and Hohenzollerns had been cemented by their membership of the Holy Alliance since 1815, and the King of Prussia’s sister Charlotte’s marriage to Tsar Nicholas I. Not wanting yet another autocratic Russian in the family, Augusta was suspected of using her friendship with Victoria to further the marriage of her only son to Victoria’s eldest daughter. Augusta and Wilhelm had first met the Queen and Albert briefly when the latter couple visited Coburg in 1845, and in September the following year Augusta was invited to stay at Windsor for a week. After her departure the Queen wrote to King Leopold that she found her ‘so clever, so amiable, so well informed, and so good . . .
I believe
that she is a friend to us and to our family, and I do believe that
I
have a friend in her, who may be most useful to us.’
²⁵

Impressed with her liberal ideas and belief in constitutional government, as well as her criticisms of backward, autocratic Russia and weak France, Albert began to convince himself that this was the person through whom he could bring some influence to bear by furthering the unification of Germany under Prussia.

In the spring of 1851 Queen Victoria and Prince Albert invited Wilhelm, Augusta and their two children to England for the opening of the Great Exhibition in London in May so they could meet Fritz, and introduce him to Vicky. She was a well-educated, well-read child, familiar with the plays of Shakespeare and the histories of Gibbon and Macaulay. Queen Victoria, who was skilled at drawing and painting in watercolour, encouraged her daughter to work with her and the latter soon revealed even greater gifts as an artist. Prince Albert fostered her interest in music, and she loved sitting beside him on the organ stool and listen to him playing, though with her impatience she had to be persuaded to make an effort with the drudgery of endless scales and five-finger exercises.