Dearest Vicky, Darling Fritz by John Van der Kiste

Author:John Van der Kiste
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780752499260
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2013-07-16T12:00:00+00:00

SEVEN

‘He complains about his wasted life’

Vicky and Fritz were keen to see their eldest son suitably and happily married. During his university days they had encouraged Willy’s visits to his aunt Alice, her husband Louis and their children, hoping the homely atmosphere of Darmstadt would be a good influence on him and counteract the fawning, military ambience of Berlin. By the age of nineteen he had become besotted with their second daughter Elizabeth (‘Ella’), and during the last months of her short life Alice thought the young couple would be well-matched. She made no effort to dispel any impression among the rest of the family that a betrothal might soon follow.

Nevertheless Ella and her sisters did not take to their restless, showy cousin, and she had as good as pledged herself to her distant Romanov kinsman, Grand Duke Serge of Russia. Unlike her sister, Vicky felt such a marriage between first cousins was inadvisable as Alice’s younger son, the haemophiliac ‘Frittie’, had bled to death after what should have only been a minor fall, and the risk that any children of a marriage between the future German Emperor and Ella might suffer from the same condition was too great.* She had hoped for some time that he might instead marry one of the daughters of their old friend Duke Friedrich of Holstein, the nieces of Prince and Princess Christian, and granddaughters of Queen Victoria’s late half-sister Feodora. Once he became aware that a betrothal with Ella could never be, he started paying court to the Duke’s daughter Princess Augusta Victoria of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg, ‘Dona’, a plain, pious but even-tempered young woman three months older than himself.

Dona was not considered particularly aristocratic, rich or pretty, and Kaiser Wilhelm threatened to forbid the match until Bismarck withdrew his objections after her father’s death from cancer in January 1880. On personal grounds the Chancellor approved of this simple, unambitious woman, whose evident lack of cleverness placed her in a different class from the regrettable tradition of intelligent Hohenzollern consorts. When she and Willy were betrothed in February, the news was received coldly in Berlin, partly for reasons of lineage, and partly as the late Duke’s claim to the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, which had been dismissed by Bismarck after the war of 1864, was but a recent memory. Vicky knew the Berliners might not consider her grand enough, but as they made plain their dislike for everything foreign so much, she expected they would be pleased enough with a Princess bred, born and educated in Germany; ‘and more spite, ill-will, backbiting and criticism of the unkindest sort, she never can have to endure – than I have gone through for twenty-two years.’1

Willy’s sister Charlotte thought her brother too cold-hearted and incapable of being in love with anyone except himself. She found Dona silent, uncommunicative, very shy and a poor figure beside her more lively sister Caroline Matilda (‘Calma’), and also thought her brother-in-law Ernest of Saxe-Meiningen was in love with Dona and had hoped to marry her.

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