Undercover agents sent by the Tsar stirred up the Bulgarians against the prince and before the end of the year, after a series of swashbuckling adventures and heroic escapades, he had been ousted from his throne. Eventually, he returned home to Darmstadt so disillusioned and depressed that even when the people begged him to return, he refused, declaring that he would not set foot on Bulgarian soil again.
His fall from power made little difference to lovelorn Moretta, who dramatically claimed that if she could not marry Sandro she would kill herself. Distraught, Vicky pleaded more fervently on her behalf, but her efforts merely strengthened the Prussians’ resolve. Infuriated by her ‘meddling’ Bismarck initiated a whispering campaign to discredit both the Crown Princess and Sandro. The prince, it was said, had contracted syphilis; he was decadent; he was homosexual; the Crown Princess was so eager to promote the match because she wanted the handsome young man for herself. When Vicky continued to put pressure on Fritz, the Kaiser stated that if the wedding ever took place, he would disown both Moretta and her mother. For a further year, the saga dragged on. Moretta languished, Sandro waited, and her mother struggled for a solution, but by spring 1887 Vicky and her daughters faced a more immediate concern.
On Tuesday, 22nd March Fritz’s father, Emperor William I, celebrated his ninetieth birthday with a banquet in Berlin at which Queen Victoria was represented by Bertie and Lenchen. It was decided that the announcement of Henry’s engagement to Cousin Irène of Hesse, would be made during the dinner - an event that the shy Hessian princess anticipated more with trepidation than excitement, as Vicky told the Queen:
“Poor little Irene was looking forward in terror to this ordeal of upwards of ninety Fűrstlichkeiten [aristocrats] to be stared at.”
It was Fritz’s duty to make the announcement and to toast his father but when he came to make the speech, his voice was barely audible. Throughout the winter, he had been troubled by a sore throat and hoarseness, which did not improve as expected with the coming of spring. Assuming that the illness was an after-effect of his recent bout of measles, the Crown Prince initially paid little heed to the symptoms, but as they persisted, he finally accepted his doctors’ advice and agreed to ‘take a cure.’ In April, following the confirmation of his younger daughters, he and Vicky travelled with Moretta, Sophie and Mossy to the fashionable spa town of Ems. Away from the capital, he seemed a little better, but when the family returned to Berlin in May there was no evidence of any great improvement.
Further medical investigations uncovered a series of growths on his larynx, which the doctors attempted to excise in a brutal and painful procedure, carried out without anaesthetic. The Crown Prince patiently bore the ordeal but no sooner were the growths removed than others appeared. At Bismarck’s suggestion, Vicky consulted a renowned British throat specialist, Dr. Morrell Mackenzie, who recommended an immediate biopsy and arranged for a further examination when the Crown Prince visited to England for the Queen’s Golden Jubilee celebrations. arrange
To avoid the smog of London, Vicky and Fritz stayed in the outskirts at Norwood, but even so it was clear to all the guests that Crown Prince was seriously ill. When the jubilee celebrations were over, Mackenzie removed another growth and recommended an extended period of convalescence. Vicky, Fritz and their three younger daughters enjoyed a brief sojourn with the Queen at Balmoral, before travelling to the Austrian Tyrol. As the autumn chill set in, they moved on to the warmer climes of St. Remo in Italy where ‘the gentillezza…of the young princesses…captured all hearts.’
Far from the damp, dust and stresses of Berlin, Fritz appeared to be improving. He was happy in Italy with Vicky and their daughters who, he told a friend, ‘surround us with their loving tenderness, and the Riviera is a delightful climate and does us much good.’ His recuperation seemed so effective that by October Vicky was able to write to the Queen:
“Thank God, our beloved Fritz whom everybody enquires after, is going on so well. I think this will continue.”
Her optimism survived the autumn but in January 1888 larger growths appeared and within a month urgent telegrams from Berlin threatened to put an end to his convalescence. Fritz’s father was desperately ill and it was vital that the heir should return to Germany at once to take up his duties.
It was impossible, Vicky said, for Fritz to go back to the dusty capital before Mackenzie had re-examined him and she immediately summoned the doctor to Italy. This time Mackenzie was forced to admit what Fritz had suspected all along - the tumours were cancerous and nothing could be done.
While Vicky and Fritz struggled to come to terms with the devastating news, rumours ran rife through Berlin. The Crown Prince’s lengthy absence and the reported use of mercury in his treatment led to speculation that he was suffering from syphilis contracted during his visit to Egypt in 1869. The Crown Princess and her ‘English•’ doctors, it was said, were deliberately killing him or alternatively keeping him alive just long enough to secure her position as Empress. Vicky’s determination to maintain a cheerful appearance for Fritz’s sake did nothing to allay the gossip; her smiles merely confirmed to her critics that she cared nothing for her husband and had already taken other lovers.
The German medics, meanwhile, recommended immediate surgery but when Mackenzie warned that Fritz would not survive the operation, the Crown Prince declined further treatment. At the height of the tension, Willy rushed to Italy demanding a full account of the prognosis so that he might report back to the ailing Kaiser. Disgusted by his bombastic manner, Vicky refused him access to his father and he returned to Berlin angry and offended, openly stating that Mackenzie was killing the Crown Prince. To Vicky’s despair, Charlotte and Henry agreed and, likewise, urged their father to ignore the advice of British doctors and opt instead for surgery.
By February 1888, the tumours had grown so large that Fritz had no alternative but to undergo a tracheotomy to enable him to breathe. A month later, on 9th March 1888, a telegram arrived at his villa in Italy informing him that his father had died and he was now Emperor. For thirty years, Vicky had been preparing for this moment. The miseries of life in Prussia had been made bearable only through the dream that one day Fritz would accede to the throne and implement numerous reforms - but the time had come too late. While Fritz wept for his dead father, Willy heartlessly declared that it was impossible for a man who could not speak to rule Germany and suggested the new Kaiser should abdicate in his favour. Hearing of his outburst, a disgusted Queen Victoria angrily dispatched a letter telling Vicky - now Empress Frederick - to ‘send William and his odious ungrateful wife, to travel and find his level.’
The long journey to Berlin in appalling weather exacerbated Fritz’s condition and the weight of his new responsibilities quickly took their toll. On 24th May 1888, he struggled to attend Henry and Irène’s wedding - an event described by Vicky as ‘by far the prettiest wedding we ever had,’ - but the service exhausted him and the guests were only too aware of the laboured whistling of his breath through the tracheotomy tube. Within a month his health deteriorated even more alarmingly.
“He is a perfect skeleton now and his fine thick hair is quite thin.” Vicky wrote desperately to her mother. “His poor throat is such a painful and shocking sight, and I can hardly bear to look at it when it is done up etc: I have to rush away to hide my tears often!”
In April, Queen Victoria, deeply saddened by the news, paid a visit to Charlottenberg to offer what comfort she could to Fritz, Vicky and their daughters, but she knew as well as anyone that there was little hope.
“Death was clearly written in his face,” noted one of the ladies-in-waiting, “and it can only be a matter of a few weeks. The Empress wept terribly at parting with the Queen, they say she sees no one and longs for sympathy, which she has no chance of finding in Germany where every hand is against her, her sorrow must be too terrible!”
Unable to implement the reforms of which he and Vicky had dreamed for so long, Fritz at least had the opportunity to grant one of his wife’s dearest wishes by consenting to the marriage of Moretta and Sandro.
After reigning for only three months, the fifty-six-year-old Emperor Frederick III died at the Friedrichskron Palace, his favourite home in Potsdam, on 15th June 1888. As his widow and daughters sat weeping at the bedside, Willy virtually snatched the crown from his dead father’s hands. Even as Fritz lay dying, Willy had ordered a battalion of guards to surround the Friedrichskron and the moment that Fritz breathed his last, he ordered them to prevent anyone from leaving the building. While the new Kaiser Wilhelm II ransacked his father’s desk in search of incriminating documents, soldiers forbad his mother from even going into the garden to pluck flowers for her dead husband.
Willy’s heartless behaviour at his father’s deathbed marked only the beginning of the trials that Vicky and her younger daughters were to suffer at his hands in the early months of their bereavement. Ignoring his father’s wishes, the new Kaiser ordered an autopsy, after which the unceremonious funeral was carried out in such haste that few foreign royalties were able to attend. Willy immediately demanded that his mother should send him Fritz’s uniforms and effects; and for the Empress Frederick and her daughters worse was to come. They were curtly informed that they must leave the Friedrichskron Palace, which had been the girls’ home all their lives, and, in a deliberate attempt to wipe out his father’s memory, Willy announced the palace was to revert to its original unimaginative name the New Palace. Refusing his mother’s requests for various alternative accommodations, he offered her instead the smallest mansion in Potsdam.
Broken-hearted at her loss, and despairing at her son’s unfilial behaviour, Vicky’s sole comfort came from her younger daughters and from an empathetic mother in England.
“Darling beloved Fritz,” Queen Victoria wrote, “I loved him so dearly. He was so kind to me always…I seem him always before me with those beautiful loving blue eyes.”
No one knew the extent of a widow’s grief better than the Queen, and as usual in a family crisis, her kindness came to the fore. While urging Vicky to ‘struggle on bravely’ for the sake of her ‘three dear girls’, she offered to send a small sum of money to help them to purchase a country house, as well as extending her customary invitation to England. Along with their mother, the three young princesses, grieving, ousted from their home and facing the galling prospect of having to show obeisance to their haughty and self-righteous sister-in-law, leaped at the chance of escape from Berlin and gratefully accepted their grandmother’s invitation.
In mid-November 1888 Moretta, Sophie and Mossy arrived with their mother for a tearful reunion with the Queen. The genuine warmth and concern with which the British people welcomed Vicky - their ‘Princess Royal’ - almost tempted her into accepting Queen Victoria’s offer of making England her permanent home. For three months, she and her daughters remained at Osborne and Windsor with the Queen who was ‘kindness itself’ but by the time they moved on to Sandringham in March, Moretta could only wonder at her grandmother’s evident change of attitude towards the possibility of marriage to the Battenberg prince.
The Queen had always championed Sandro’s cause and his unceremonious ousting from his throne had turned him into ‘a martyr as well as a hero.’ Yet now it seemed to Moretta that her grandmother’s enthusiasm had cooled. It was impossible, the Queen explained, for Moretta to go against the will of her new Emperor and since Willy remained obdurate, she must resign herself to life without her prince. Not until she returned to Berlin, did Moretta discover the true reason for her grandmother’s change of heart.
“I know your one wish was to help him,” she had written to Vicky in May 1888, “and therefore I feel if you and [Moretta] really love him, you ought to set him free and spare his honourable name being assailed as it is now being even by his friends.”
It was more than a question of honour. Liko had already told the Queen that his brother’s passion had waned. Waiting in Darmstadt and losing hope of ever being allowed to marry into the Hohenzollern family, Sandro had become involved with an actress in the Darmstadt theatre to whom he would soon propose.
When a heartbroken Moretta eventually discovered the truth, she rushed back to England for comfort.
“Grandmama took me in her arms and kissed me over and over again,” she wrote on the first anniversary of her father’s death, “We could but cry in silence.”
Sandro Battenberg married his actress and Moretta had no option but to reconsider her future.
