Free Dearest Vicky, Darling Fritz by John Van der Kiste Page A

Daughter’ and her husband, with gifts and public dinners for the needy in cities up and down the country.
    Having made their responses ‘very plainly ’, in Queen Victoria’s words, at the altar in the chapel of St James’s, Vicky and Fritz walked hand in hand to the vestry to join the rest of the family for the signing of the marriage register, full of confidence and beaming at the assembled guests. Before the wedding breakfast they stepped out on to the balcony at Buckingham Palace, to be cheered by the crowds in Pall Mall who had braved the winter cold for a glimpse of the Royal couple. They may have been overwhelmed by this reception, conscious of the fact that they were carrying the hopes of a generation; but they were deliriously happy nonetheless. When bride and groom reached Windsor later that day they were met by yet more fireworks, a guard of honour, and a crowd of boys from Eton College who pulled their carriage from the railway station uphill to the castle. It was a heady start to one of the great love matches of its time.
    Historians and biographers have never doubted that it was, in personal terms, an extremely successful marriage. Thirteen years later, a political union was achieved; but it was neither the united constitutional or liberal power that they and their elders had envisaged. Within less than five years of the wedding, two events occurred which were to shake the destiny of the young couple to its very core: firstly, the unexpected death of their mentor, Vicky’s father, Prince Albert; and secondly, the appointment of Count Otto von Bismarck as Minister-President of Prussia. Ultimately, Vicky and Fritz were to be eclipsed by the ambitions of their eldest son, Wilhelm, and by the eventual failure of the hoped-for alliance which would later disintegrate into the carnage and confusion of the First World War.
    Personal factors apart, the marriage had begun with high hopes. It was a truly grand dynastic alliance between the Hohenzollerns of Prussia and Queen Victoria’s family of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, later the House of Windsor, intended to bring to fruition the vision of Prince Albert and his mentors, King Leopold of the Belgians and Baron Christian von Stockmar, of a united, liberal and constitutional Germany. This was to be led by Prussia, with King Friedrich Wilhelm and his consort, a ‘second’ Queen Victoria, at the helm. At the same time as it was intended to fulfil this high-minded ambition, however, theirs was undeniably a genuine love match. For, in the annals of nineteenth century history, Vicky and Fritz were almost uniquely well-suited. She was a charming, bubbly, naïve child of seventeen; he a handsome, chivalrous, yet somewhat withdrawn and self-effacing young man of twenty-six. They had been besotted with one another since their betrothal a little over two years before, and were to remain passionately in love for thirty more years.
    Most royal matrimonial unions of the age were marriages of convenience for which the parents, usually in consultation with their senior ministers and ambassadors at court, arranged betrothals between more-or-less eligible parties for reasons of state, sometimes when the princes and princesses concerned were little more than children. Certainly, they may never even have met. If such a marriage turned out to be a personal success, as it did in the case of King William IV and the much younger Queen Adelaide of England, all well and good. In many cases, for example that of Fritz’s ill-matched parents, Wilhelm and Augusta, husband and wife were totally incompatible and remained thus for almost sixty years during which they lived more happily apart.
    Sadly, Vicky and Fritz’s eldest son and heir Willy, later Kaiser Wilhelm II, did not personify the peaceful or liberal instincts of his parents, but came under the darker influence of his own ‘mentor’, the nationalist hard-liner, Bismarck. It was one of the tragedies of modern history that this