Victoria, Princess Royal
Victoria, Princess Royal was German Empress and Queen of Prussia as the wife of Frederick III, German Emperor. She was the eldest child of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom and Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha and was created Princess Royal in 1841. As the eldest child of the British monarch, she was briefly heir presumptive until the birth of her younger brother, the future Edward VII. She was the mother of Wilhelm II, the last German Emperor.
Educated by her father in a politically liberal environment, Victoria was married at the age of 17 to Prince Frederick of Prussia, with whom she had eight children. Victoria shared with Frederick her liberal views and hopes that Prussia and the later German Empire should become a constitutional monarchy, based on the British model. Criticised for this attitude and for her English origins, Victoria suffered ostracism by the Hohenzollerns and the Berlin court. This isolation increased after the rise to power of Otto von Bismarck, one of her staunchest political opponents, in 1862.
Victoria was empress for only a few months, during which she had opportunity to influence the policy of the German Empire. Frederick III died in 1888 – 99 days after his accession – from laryngeal cancer and was succeeded by their son Wilhelm II, who had much more conservative views than his parents. After her husband's death, she became widely known as Empress Frederick. The empress dowager then settled in Kronberg im Taunus, where she built Friedrichshof, a castle, named in honour of her late husband. Increasingly isolated after the weddings of her younger daughters, she died of breast cancer in August 1901, less than seven months after the death of her mother, Queen Victoria, in January 1901.
The correspondence between Victoria and her parents has been preserved almost completely: 3,777 letters from Queen Victoria to her eldest daughter and about 4,000 letters from the empress to her mother are preserved and catalogued. These give a detailed insight into life at the Prussian court between 1858 and 1900.
Early life and education
Victoria was born at 1:50 pm on 21 November 1840 at Buckingham Palace, London. She was the first child of Queen Victoria and her husband, Prince Albert. When she was born, the doctor exclaimed sadly: "Oh Madame, it's a girl!" The queen replied: "Never mind, next time it will be a prince!" As a daughter of the sovereign, Victoria was born a British princess. In addition, she was heir presumptive to the British throne from her birth until the birth of her younger brother Prince Albert Edward on 9 November 1841. On 19 January 1841, she was made Princess Royal, a title sometimes conferred on the eldest daughter of the sovereign. To her family, she was known simply as Vicky.She was baptised in the Throne Room at Buckingham Palace on 10 February 1841 by the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Howley. The Lily font was commissioned especially for the occasion of her christening.
The royal couple decided to give their children as complete an education as possible. Queen Victoria, who had succeeded her uncle King William IV at the age of 18, believed that she herself had not been sufficiently prepared for government affairs. For his part Prince Albert, born in the small Duchy of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, had received a more careful education thanks to his uncle King Leopold I of Belgium.
Shortly after the birth of Victoria, Prince Albert wrote a memoir detailing the tasks and duties of all those involved with the royal children. Another 48-page document, written a year-and-a-half later by the Baron Stockmar, an intimate of the royal couple, details the educational principles to be used with the little princess. The royal couple, however, had only a very vague idea of the proper educational development of a child. Queen Victoria, for example, believed that the fact that her baby sucked on bracelets was a sign of deficient education. According to Hannah Pakula, biographer of the future German empress, the first two governesses of the princess were therefore particularly well chosen. Experienced in dealing with children, Lady Lyttelton directed the nursery through which passed all royal children after Victoria's second year and diplomatically managed to soften the unrealistic demands of the royal couple. Sarah Anne Hildyard, the children's second governess, was a competent teacher who quickly developed a close relationship with her pupils.
Precocious and intelligent, Victoria began to learn French at the age of 18 months, and to study German when aged four. She also learned Greek and Latin. From the age of six her curriculum included arithmetic, geography and history, and her father tutored her in politics and philosophy. She also studied science and literature. Her school days, interrupted by three hours of recreation, began at 8:20 and finished at 18:00. Unlike her brother, whose curriculum was even more severe, Victoria was an excellent pupil who was always hungry for knowledge. However, she showed an obstinate character.
Queen Victoria and her husband wanted to remove their children from court life as much as possible, so they acquired Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. Near the main building, Albert built for his children a Swiss-inspired cottage with a small kitchen and a carpentry workshop. In this building the royal children learned manual work and practical life. Prince Albert was very involved in the education of their offspring. He closely followed the progress of his children and gave some of their lessons himself as well as spending time playing with them. Victoria is described as having "idolised" her father and having inherited his liberal political views.
First meeting with Frederick
In the German Confederation, Prince William of Prussia and his wife, Princess Augusta of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, were among the personalities with whom Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were allies. The British sovereign also had regular epistolary contact with her cousin Augusta after 1846. The revolution that broke out in Berlin in 1848 further strengthened the links between the two royal couples by requiring the heir presumptive to the Prussian throne to find shelter for three months in the British court.In 1851, William returned to London with his wife and two children on the occasion of the Great Exhibition. For the first time Victoria met her future husband, and despite the age difference they got along very well. To promote the contact between the two, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert asked their daughter to guide Frederick through the exhibition, and during the visit the princess was able to converse in perfect German whereas the prince was able to say only a few words in English. The meeting was therefore a success, and years later Prince Frederick recalled the positive impression that Victoria made on him during this visit, with her mixture of innocence, intellectual curiosity and simplicity.
It was not only his encounter with little Victoria, however, that positively impressed Frederick during the four weeks of his English stay. The young Prussian prince shared his liberal ideas with the Prince Consort. Frederick was fascinated by the relationships among the members of the British royal family. In London, court life was not as rigid and conservative as in Berlin, and Queen Victoria and Prince Albert's relationship with their children was very different from William and Augusta's relationship with theirs.
After Frederick returned to Germany, he began a close correspondence with Victoria. Behind this nascent friendship was the desire of Queen Victoria and her husband to forge closer ties with Prussia. In a letter to her uncle King Leopold I of Belgium the British sovereign conveyed the desire that the meeting between her daughter and the Prussian prince would lead to a closer relationship between the two young people.
Engagement and marriage
Engagement
Frederick had received a comprehensive education and in particular was formed by personalities such as the writer Ernst Moritz Arndt and historian Friedrich Christoph Dahlmann. According to the tradition of the House of Hohenzollern, he also received rigorous military training.In 1855 Prince Frederick made another trip to Great Britain and visited Victoria and her family in Scotland at Balmoral Castle. The purpose of his trip was to see the Princess Royal again, to ensure that she would be a suitable consort for him. In Berlin the response to this journey to Britain was far from positive. In fact many members of the Prussian court wanted to see the heir presumptive's son marry a Russian grand duchess. King Frederick William IV, who had allowed his nephew to marry a British princess, even had to keep his approval a secret because his own wife showed strong Anglophobia.
At the time of Frederick's second visit Victoria was 14 years old. A little shorter than her mother, the princess was tall and far from the ideal of beauty of the time. Queen Victoria was concerned that the Prussian prince would not find her daughter sufficiently attractive. Nevertheless, from the first dinner with the prince it was clear to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert that the mutual liking of the two young people that had begun in 1851 was still vivid. In fact after only three days with the royal family Frederick asked Victoria's parents permission to marry their daughter. They were thrilled by the news but gave their approval on condition that the marriage should not take place before Victoria's 17th birthday.
Once this condition was accepted the engagement of Victoria and Frederick was publicly announced on 17 May 1856. The immediate reaction in Great Britain was disapproval. The English public complained about the Kingdom of Prussia's neutrality during the Crimean War of 1853–1856. The Times characterised the Hohenzollern as a "miserable dynasty" that pursued an inconsistent and unreliable foreign policy, with the maintenance of the throne depending solely on Russia. The newspaper also criticised the failure of King Frederick William IV to respect the political guarantees given to the population during the revolution of 1848. In the German Confederation the reactions to the announcement of the engagement were mixed: several members of the Hohenzollern family and conservatives opposed it and liberal circles welcomed the proposed union with the British crown.