With the passage of time, the Queen’s sense of humor, suppressed first by the rigid decorum imposed by Prince Albert, and then by the burden of grief imposed by Albert’s death, resurfaced. Though Albert was never forgotten, and every day the Queen was at Windsor she visited the Frogmore mausoleum, she did begin to smile, then to laugh, then to roar with laughter, over pomposity undone, pretense revealed, or language ludicrously misused. At dinner one night at Osborne House, the Queen entertained a famous admiral whose hearing was impaired. Politely, Victoria had asked about his fleet and its activities; then, shifting the subject, she asked about the admiral’s sister, an elderly dowager of awesome dignity. The admiral thought she was inquiring about his flagship, which was in need of overhaul. “Well, ma’am,” he said, “as soon as I get back68 I’m going to have her hauled out, roll her on her side and have the barnacles scraped off her bottom.” Victoria stared at him for a second and then, for minutes afterward, the dining room shook with her unstoppable peals of laughter. There was, of course, an opposite extreme. Rudeness, vulgarity, indecorum, anything hinting even slightly of lèse-majesté, called forth crushing disapprobation. The Queen’s face would glaze, her eyes turn stony, and in a voice which often annihilated the social future of the transgressor, Her Majesty would say, “We are not amused.”69
Victoria in her later years as a queen and a woman required special handling. Benjamin Disraeli, Lord Beaconsfield, twice Conservative Prime Minister, explained at the end of his life to Matthew Arnold: “Everyone likes flattery70 and when it comes to royalty, you should lay it on with a trowel.” Disraeli flattered profusely. He made Victoria Empress of India and then, on her birthday, produced this tribute: “Today, Lord Beaconsfield71 ought fitly, perhaps, to congratulate a powerful Sovereign on her imperial sway, the vastness of her Empire, and the success and strength of her fleets and armies. But he cannot; his mind is in another mood. He can only think of the strangeness of his destiny that it has come to pass that he should be the servant of one so great, and whose infinite kindness, the brightness of whose intelligence and the firmness of whose will, have enabled him to undertake labors to which he otherwise would be quite unequal, and supported him in all things by a condescending sympathy, which in the hour of difficulty, alike charms and inspires.”
William E. Gladstone, four-time Liberal Prime Minister, lacked Disraeli’s touch. Queen Victoria disapproved of some of Gladstone’s policies—her tendencies were conservative rather than liberal—but during her long rule she had many Liberal ministers with whom she was congenial. When Gladstone replaced Disraeli as Prime Minister in 1880, the Queen informed her Private Secretary that she would “sooner abdicate” than send for Gladstone, “that half-mad firebrand72 who would soon ruin everything and be a Dictator.” Twelve years later, Gladstone was back a fourth time as Prime Minister. The Queen bewailed “the danger to the country,73 to Europe, to her vast Empire, which is involved in having all these great interests entrusted to the shaking hand of an old, wild, and incomprehensible man of eighty-two and a half.... It is a terrible trial, but thank God the country is sound.” Mr. Gladstone’s problem was that he did not know how to please. It is impossible to imagine Gladstone, however polite, writing or speaking in Disraeli’s language. Gladstone was respectful, even reverent, in his conversation and correspondence with the sovereign. But the Queen wanted to be treated as a woman, and “he speaks to me as if I were a public meeting,”74 she said.
For the British people, Victoria was more than an individual, more even than the queen; she was—and had been as long as most of them could remember—a part of the fabric of their lives. She embodied history, tradition, government, and the structure and morality of their society. They trusted her to remain there, always to do her duty, always to give order to their lives. She did not disappoint them. In return, they gave her their allegiance, their devotion—and their esteem. One Victorian matron expressed it by turning to a friend as the curtain fell on Sarah Bernhardt’s flamboyant performance as Cleopatra, and saying, “How different, how very different,75 from the home life of our own dear Queen.”
Chapter 2
Vicky and Willy
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 la
mented, “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 martyrd
om 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.”