A Most English Princess, page 46
“Oh yes, Lieutenant, good afternoon. I am glad to see you walking without crutches. You are acquainted with Prince Wilhelm? I was not aware.”
“I had the profound honor of meeting the Prince for the first time just now. I sought him out to commend him for his splendid appearance today. The Fatherland is indeed blessed to have such a handsome, noble, and I discover now, brilliant, heir—a worthy son to his magnificent father.”
She felt the barb in the young man’s fawning. William, brilliant? Herbert had probably quickly taken the measure of her smug and silly boy. But she felt too tired to appropriately counter this play-acting. She gave a curt nod and said, “I must return to my husband.”
“Before you go let me offer a future service,” the young Bismarck replied. “Your son tells me he will join us in the First Regiment of Foot Guards in a few years’ time. I would be pleased to act as a guide to the young prince in his first months as an officer. Please call upon me.”
Vicky laughed. “It will be many years before the prince takes up military duties, Lieutenant. We have other, better plans for him.” She summoned up her vision of William at Oxford. “Good afternoon,” she said, and turned on her heel. She hoped the young Bismarck would tell everyone what she had said. How satisfying to thrust back at the son a small measure of the contempt she felt for the father.
Her mood lifted further as she spied ahead of her, between clusters of people, Fritz’s fine fair head and broad shoulders. He was leaning forward slightly talking to a short woman all in black, maybe the widowed Duchess of Mecklenberg-Strelitz. How he stood out in this company for his authentic graciousness and great integrity! She mustn’t be so consumed with anxiety, she thought. Later, they would all look back on today and see it for what it was: an electrifying, intoxicating observance of the nation’s birth when the real work of nation-building was still in front of them. Even the Chancellor had said privately there could be no more wars. In the future, it wouldn’t be people like Bismarck and his son who represented Germany, but Fritz and her and their like-minded allies. She nodded, reassuring herself. William would come to understand this as he got older. There was so much time. Once he had the model of his own father as kaiser—quite soon, she secretly prayed—he would have decades to grow into his responsibilities, become an exemplary man. Still, she would be unstinting in her efforts to improve him. He’d appreciate that she knew best in the long run.
Fritz looked up and caught sight of her moving toward him. He smiled, his face tired, but his spirit true. They were unbreakable, and even in this noisy room she could feel the silent, steady current that linked him and her. She smiled back, confident and in love, ready for all that lay ahead.
Epilogue
Doorn, Occupied Holland, November 21, 1940
He has filled his house with pictures, many of them portraits—life-size painted figures, elegant oils of aristocratic faces, scores of photographs. Yet only three are of his mother, all from her last years. “Here she is forever the widowed matron, dressed in black,” his daughter, also Victoria, commented once. “But she was pretty in her day. You don’t want to remember her like that? As someone to be admired?”
At the time he smiled, not disputing. Perhaps it’s true. Perhaps his ambivalence for the woman who bore him is revealed in how he has chosen and arranged his pictures. His grandfather, the first kaiser, has pride of place in nearly every room.
Today, on what would have been her one hundredth birthday, he plucks from the flock of framed images on the study sideboard one small photograph of his mother. Down in the dining room he props it up next to the crystal water glass as he sits down for luncheon. She’s wearing a black ruffled dress, a small black lace cap, and the large star of the Order of the Black Eagle pinned over her heart. Papa’s last gift. Her clear, frank gaze looks directly into the camera. No smile. Hers is a serious—but not unfriendly—expression. He notes the soft curve of her cheek, the unlined face, the beautiful white hands holding a folded black fan.
“And so, Mama?” he says aloud, in English, after the footman who served him has left the room and he is alone. “What would you make of the world today, eh?”
Then he laughs. He can’t imagine his intense, proper, admonitory mother comprehending the fate of Europe, or his own. Never could she have fathomed such a person as the repellant little Austrian corporal who now rules in Germany. She—a woman who hated obsequiousness, even the proud Prussian version of it—would despise how the noble German people call this scoundrel “der Führer” and lift their arms in automatic salute as he drives by in one of his open cars.
Awful, he thinks, summoning up the scene, familiar from the newsreels. True, he welcomed the man’s rise when he believed the monarchy might be restored. And, still, that hope dashed, he cheered the magnificent German victories against England and France last spring. Of course, those were the triumphs of his own men, trained as junior officers for the last war and back to take their revenge in the new.
German soldiers guard his home now, not Dutch, and the Lowlands are occupied by the Reich. “Can you imagine England, too, Mama, part of greater Germany? A United States of Europe, controlled from Berlin? It may well happen,” he says, laughing again, shaking his head.
He shouldn’t have let it get around, after she died, that she had requested to be wrapped in the Union Jack and sent back to Windsor for burial. She had wanted nothing of the kind. She was interred, as she had requested, beside her husband and dead sons in the Friedenskirche at Potsdam. Those stories, they were just some fun.
But perhaps it was beneath him to repeat them, he thinks, picking up his fork. Then he rebukes himself. Didn’t justifiable rage long ago replace any guilt he felt over her? The fury that engulfed him when he learned how Fritz Ponsonby, the swine, planned to publish her letters, smuggled out of Friedrichshof a few months before her death. Ponsonby had kept them hidden, only producing them after he himself had written a memoir—it was an outrageous effort to sully and contradict his own account.
For the first and only time in his long years of exile he had made a legal fuss, retaining a lawyer in London to sue Ponsonby for theft. Those letters belonged to him, her eldest son and heir. But his solicitor concluded that a thievery case was impossible to prove, and because his cousin the English king did not stand in Ponsonby’s way, and his mother’s sister Louise, Duchess of Argyll, along with his own two youngest sisters, had approved, Letters of the Empress Frederick couldn’t be stopped.
So, instead, he took the lawyer’s suggestion and purchased the rights to the German edition so he could write his own preface, urging the reader not to believe implicitly what the Empress Friedrich wrote, since she “was very sensitive and everything wounded her . . . and her temperament made her use bitter words about everybody.”
He was correct there, he thinks as he eats. Mama could never accommodate herself to things. So often unreasonable. When Papa fell ill, Mama kept disputing with the doctors, bringing in that disgraceful English one to look down Papa’s throat and declare he saw no cancer there. By the time Grandfather died, aged ninety, and Papa ascended as Kaiser Friedrich III, he could no longer speak, wrote his remarks on a pad of paper, and the ministers had to listen to their monarch’s breathing as it gurgled through the cannula in his neck. Mama should never have allowed it! Better the crown pass directly to him as regent, sparing Papa’s dignity. But his mother hungered for power, desperate to promote her pro-English cabal, and to marry Moretta off to that despicable Battenberg, whom his silly sister claimed to love. Well, it all came to naught, as Papa died after a mere ninety-nine days.
He sighs. A noble man, his father, even in death, but inordinately fond of his wife. Quite unbecoming.
The meal finished, he picks up his mother’s photograph again, and as he’s climbing the stairs he reflects that he’s been married twice, and both times to trivial women. Poor Dona, a small-minded creature obsessed with precedence. Admirably fecund, of course. She’d given him seven children, six sons and the baby Victoria, before dying of a malfunctioning heart. Hermine, livelier than Dona ever was, is a welcome female presence at his table when not away on long visits to her children in Germany. She often extolls the regime, applauding the attacks on the Jews. He agrees that his homeland has been too long in the grip of an evil Semitic influence, but the stories one hears nowadays are distasteful: indiscriminate arrests, even of Jewish officers, those who earned the Iron Cross! In any case, Hermine shouldn’t talk about politics—she can’t carry it off. She’s not an intellectual like his mother, nor an artist.
Doesn’t he have one of Mama’s watercolors somewhere? A seascape she did at Cannes years ago, when they were all there together, before the French war? Maybe in the back passageway, he thinks, turning in that direction to get it. He wonders: who else in this life remembers Mama? Sophie and Mossy, of course. But they long ago gave up discussing her with their older brother. To them she’s a kind of martyr, persecuted by Bismarck, lonely in widowhood, but brave for remaining in Germany when she might have left. His sisters refuse to recognize that so much of what their mother did was for effect. She longed to be seen as a saintly do-gooder, a particularly magnanimous woman, but she was never generous or loving to him—he had to join the Guards to find his true family.
In the old days, in Germany, at drunken dinners or off on long afternoon sails, he confessed this aloud sometimes. He was a man revered by millions whose own mother didn’t care for him. Listeners would gasp, or murmur that this could not be so, but no less a figure than the famous Viennese psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud concurred. Sometime after the war he gave a speech reproaching Mama for excessive pride and for withdrawing her love from him because of his lame arm.
And yet, Freud never met either one of them.
Back in his study he sits down astride the mounted saddle that has always acted as his desk chair. He puts the photo aside and examines her watercolor for a long minute. It’s surprisingly good. She’s captured the sea’s texture and shafts of sunlight beaming down between clouds. He admires the delicate washes of color and small, precise rendering of the black rocks on the shore. She took great care over it. Typical of her. “Ach,” he says aloud, suddenly grief-stricken. Wasn’t it he who withdrew? She was once to him like the sun—warm, dazzling, vital. But her gravitational pull was so strong. He couldn’t stay close to her and become the man he desired to be. He couldn’t remain her boy.
That’s it! Bigelow remembers Mama, and the rice pudding she used to make. They discussed it when the American visited Doorn last year.
He opens the desk drawer, fishes out one of the blank white postcards he keeps for this sort of missive, and sets down upon it in his large hand the familiar address: Poultney Bigelow, Malden on Hudson, New York, USA. He writes: “Today the 100th birthday of my mother! No notice is taken of it at home. No ‘Memorial Service’ or committee to remember her marvelous work for the welfare of our German people. . . . Nobody of the new generation knows anything about her!”
He signs it William.
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to the novelist Sandra Newman, who gave me both exacting instruction and generous encouragement at every stage of writing this book.
I am grateful to Professor David Kaiser for the excellent course on European diplomatic history he offered at Harvard College in the long-ago spring of 1980. David’s lectures brought Otto von Bismarck alive in my mind—and I find that the wily old Junker has been stomping around up there ever since.
My father, Dr. Paul McHugh, renowned psychiatrist and neurologist, spent hours discussing these characters with me. As so often in the past, I relied upon his humane outlook and keen intellect to improve my own thinking.
Laura Dail, a wonderful friend turned perspicacious agent, matched me with editor Lucia Macro, whose deep knowledge of British royal history and nuanced appreciation of Vicky’s personality made A Most English Princess a better book.
I asked numerous friends to read early versions of the manuscript. Ashleigh Bennett, Wendy Breitner, Joan Goodman, Wendy Greenbaum, George Kimmerling, Beth Lipton, Katherine McNevin, Faith Moore, Tom Schwartz, and Hilary Sterne slogged through the entire novel, providing excellent feedback. Mary Hockaday, sister in spirit, cast her discerning eye over the last draft and pushed me to sharpen it. Two German friends, Corrina da Fonseca-Wollheim and Janine Weitenauer, corrected my German and provided valuable perspective on German history. I thank Natalie Allen, Alissa Dufour, Michael Guarneiri, Alison Gwinn, Jacqueline Lawrence, Peggy Noonan, and Elisabeth Rosenthal for their comments on various chapters.
Charlie Lasswell is ever the affectionate son Vicky could only dream of. And my dear husband, Mark Lasswell, believed in me when I didn’t believe in myself. There aren’t sufficient words to say thank you for that.
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Born in London, CLARE MCHUGH grew up in the United States and graduated from Harvard University with a degree in European history. She worked for many years as a newspaper reporter and later magazine editor. She has also taught high school history and reviewed books for the Wall Street Journal and the Baltimore Sun. The mother of two grown children, she lives with her husband in Washington, DC, and Amagansett, New York. A Most English Princess is her first novel.
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About the Book
Behind the Book
Quite soon after the marriage of Kate Middleton and Prince William in April 2011, a new law was passed by Parliament, having first been endorsed by the heads of the Commonwealth nations. No longer would the order of succession to the British throne favor males over females. Now the eldest child, regardless of sex, would be heir.
When I read about this change, I had a wistful thought: Might the measure be dubbed “Vicky’s law” to honor Queen Victoria’s eldest child, a girl of intelligence, energy, and commitment, who was the last person passed over for the crown because she was female? All the sovereigns since Queen Victoria either had boys first, or, in the case of the current queen’s father—George VI—only girls.
The poignancy of Vicky’s story has long fascinated me—perhaps because I’m the eldest in my family and have a brother only a year younger, as she did. It was easy to imagine how painful it would be: relegated to second best when you were firstborn just because you were a “lesser”—a girl.
I also had a particular interest in the Royal Family and the late Victorian era from what my mother told me of her own mother’s childhood. My grandmother, born in 1889, grew up in Gosport, near Portsmouth, where boats departed regularly for the Isle of Wight. Her parents worked in the household of General Robert Montgomery, General Officer Commanding South Coast Defense—her mother as a housekeeper and her father as a coachman, later chauffeur. Royal persons could frequently be spotted passing through Gosport en route to stay at Osborne House, and we have a much-cherished photo of my great-grandfather driving King Edward VII, Vicky’s brother Bertie, and his nephew, the kaiser, Vicky’s son. In the photo below, which dates to 1905, the King is far left, with the kaiser beside him, and Henry George Lampard, my great-grandfather, holds the reins.
Courtesy of the author’s family
My interest in Vicky deepened in college, when I studied the rise of Germany as a nation-state, the outbreak of the First World War, the country’s tragic turn to fascism, and the horrific Nazi regime. The reasons for the German descent into barbarism and genocidal madness are still debated by historians. But the seeds of later tragedy were planted in the late summer of 1862 when King Wilhelm of Prussia contemplated abdication in favor of his son, Fritz, Vicky’s husband, and instead chose another path. Historian John C. G. Röhl writes: “We know that the King finally decided to appoint Bismarck . . . [but] right to the end, the struggle might easily have ended differently. We are dealing here with one of those eerie moments where history holds its breath before revealing the fate that lies in store for future generations.”
Vicky was a close witness to this hinge moment, and while I relied on imagination to conjure up the discussions between her and Fritz, her letters to Queen Victoria detail her deep distress at Bismarck’s ascendency and the choices he made for Germany in subsequent years. Going from young bride to Crown Princess, and eventually to Empress of Germany for a scant ninety-nine days, the Vicky I discovered in these letters is an affectionate daughter and a surprisingly modern thinker, who is determined to be the best wife, mother, and public servant she can be, who rages at events outside her control, who discusses her excitement with new ideas—political, scientific, psychological. Vicky read Marx’s Das Kapital and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species with great interest. She worked tirelessly for educational opportunities for young women, and for the better care of the sick. When in the late 1870s Bismarck fanned the flames of anti-Semitism in the German Empire, she and Fritz defied their advisors to express openly their abhorrence of this invidious prejudice. Vicky accepted the honorary chairmanship of an orphanage for Jewish girls, and during the height of the anti-Semitic riots in Germany in January 1881, she accompanied Fritz, wearing his full-dress uniform as a Prussian field marshal, to services at a Berlin synagogue.
Her progressive attitudes earned Vicky the enmity of many in her adoptive country, to whom she would always be “die Englanderin,” an anti-Prussian agent of a foreign power. Bismarck’s allies encouraged rumors that she dominated her husband. For many years, Vicky stood strong against these calumnies, but the double blow of her eldest son, Willy, turning his back on his parents and joining the reactionary camp, and the illness and premature death of Fritz at age fifty-seven, just as he inherited the throne, threw her into a depression for several years. The building of a new home outside Frankfurt, called Friedrichshof in Fritz’s memory (now the glamourous Schlosshotel Kronberg), revived her, as did her relationship with three of her daughters. (Charlotte and she were not close.) Her youngest son, Prince Waldemar, tragically followed Siggy to an early grave, dying of diphtheria in March 1879, at age eleven, just four months after Vicky’s beloved sister Alice died of the same disease at her home in Darmstadt.
