The role of Albert, Prince Consort, in the marriage of his eldest daughter Victoria to Prince Frederick Wuilliam of Prussia. From European Royal History Journal, July-August 2001

While Victoria, Princess Royal, 'Vicky', the eldest child of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, was still a child, the plans were set in motion that would make her the wife of Prince Frederick William, 'Fritz' of Prussia. Nine years older than her, he was second in line to the throne after his father William and childless uncle King Frederick William IV. King Leopold of the Belgians, who had helped to bring about Victoria and Albert's own marriage and was always keen to extend Coburg influence, for reasons of family ambition, was partly responsible. So was Baron Stockmar, his physician and unofficial family counsellor who supported anything to bring together 'the two great Protestant dynasties in Europe'.

Yet Albert was the main catalyst in the match between his favourite child with her intellectual mind, so like his own, and the Prussian prince, whom he knew, was an intelligent young man with his mother Augusta's liberal leanings more than the narrow-minded military conservatism of his father William. With a progressive Germany under the Hohenzollerns of Prussia, allied to England, under King Frederick and his consort, another Queen Victoria, the royal houses of Britain and Prussia, and both nations, would be united.

In April 1851 William, Augusta, Fritz and his sister Louise were invited to the opening of the Great Exhibition in London so Fritz could be introduced to Vicky. They came face to face for the first time in the Chinese Drawing Room at Buckingham Palace and though she was still only ten, she made a vivid impression on him. Years later he told Catherine Radziwill how taken he had been with her from the start; 'She seemed almost too perfect; so perfect, indeed, that often I caught myself wondering whether she was really a human being.'

When Fritz returned to Berlin he and Vicky began to correspond regularly. Four years later the Queen and Albert decided it was time to take matters further, and invited him to stay with them at Balmoral. He was astonished at the change in her; at fourteen the combination of her childish roundness and unforced charm was irresistible. When they sat next to each other at dinner on the first evening, she could hardly keep her eyes off him. Two days later he told the Queen and Albert that he wanted 'to belong to our Family; that this had long been his wish, that he had the entire concurrence and approval not only of his parents but of the King - and that finding Vicky so allierliebst, he could delay no longer in making this proposal'. Four days later he proposed to her, and after he was back in Berlin, Albert wrote to him that 'From the moment you declared your love and embraced her, the child in her vanished.'

'The description of the rapid development of my dear Vicky's character, in consequence of our mutual declaration, is an extremely joyful piece of news for me', Fritz wrote back to Albert. 'I can vividly imagine how the dear child has suddenly moved closer to her parents, and on both sides this development is a very beneficial, amazing one; but it would not be easy for me to say any more, for because I just feel so drawn towards her and discovered so much depth of mind and feeling in her, I really cannot put into words what it was that so specially attracted me.'

The betrothal was officially announced in April 1856, and Albert took every chance to continue what he saw as his duty to educate them both for their future. He told Fritz that he should spend less time in military duties and more in learning about contemporary government and politics. Vicky, he considered, still had much to learn regarding her role as an effective queen consort, and he devoted two hours each evening to coaching her. She wrote daily essays on history, literature and politics to be read and corrected by him, and to be taken to Prussia as guidance notes for the years ahead.

They were married at St James's Palace, on Monday 25 January 1858, two months after her seventeenth birthday. Later that week she confessed tearfully to the Queen that 'I think it will kill me to take leave of Papa'. When the Prince Consort and the two elder boys saw Fritz and Vicky on their way at Gravesend where they boarded the royal yacht, the Victoria and Albert; she clung to her father in a last embrace prior to the farewell. As he sadly stepped ashore, he waited in vain for a few moments to see if they would reappear on deck. The next day he wrote to his daughter, 'I am not of a demonstrative nature, and therefore you can hardly know how dear you have always been to me.'

Life in Prussia for her was a shock. In England she had been the second lady in the land after her mother and sovereign, and as the eldest of nine children a natural leader in the nursery. Now this conscientious, eager yet immature girl had to take her place as the youngest of several princesses content to accept their role as submissive wives prepared to fill their time with gossip, dinner parties and childbearing - and ask for nothing else.

'Your place is that of your husband's wife, and of your mother's daughter,' the Prince Consort reminded her rather ambiguously three weeks after her wedding. 'You will desire nothing else, but you will also forego nothing of that which you owe to your husband and to your mother'. Queen Victoria was equally forthright in reminding Vicky of her duty 'as my daughter and Princess Royal', by following English practices in her own personal life, regardless of the consequences, and that she must never forget what she owed her country, in other words, England; 'never forget those duties which you owe to it as well as to your new one!'

Vicky was blamed for being tactless, but constantly lectured from a distance by parents determined not to let go, it was hard for her to do otherwise. She did not have the maturity or self-assurance to see that her parents would do better to let her accept that her loyalties had shifted with marriage. Her father never ceased to try and guide her political attitudes and opinions, while the Queen seemed intent on controlling her daughter's personal life as a married woman as much as possible, demanding frequent, preferably daily, return letters about every detail of her routine and new life, and her daughter's views on her Prussian relatives.

That summer Vicky realized she was carrying her first child, and had a bad pregnancy, culminating in the dangerous birth of William, the future Emperor, whose left arm and shoulder were permanently damaged during her confinement. A few weeks earlier Baron Stockmar's son Ernest, who was her and Fritz's private secretary, warned his father about her problems and the Baron wrote to the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Clarendon, who was in Berlin at the time, asking for his help. The Queen, Clarendon said, 'wishes to exercise the same authority and control over her that she did before her marriage and she writes her constant letters full of anger and reproaches…and of her forgetting what is due to her family and country, till the poor child is made seriously ill, and put in a state dangerous to her in her actual condition.' Admitting that he was perturbed at the Queen's 'aggressive system', the Prince Consort said he had tried to moderate the demands she made on their daughter, but it was necessary to acquiesce to her to a degree, lest she should become too 'excited to an opposition to her will', and the madness of George III might be unleashed in her. However he broached the matter with tact, and her letters became less hectoring in future.

After King Frederick William died in January 1861 the Prince Consort tried again to influence Fritz's father, now King William, with his ideas. A free, united, outspoken Germany alone could win respect abroad, he told him, while 'a reactionary tendency in Berlin would play havoc with everything.' The King threw Albert's letters into the fire without a second thought, scolding Fritz and Vicky bitterly as he did so. Albert was disappointed that King William, first and foremost a military man, seemed only interested in his army, which to him was the source of Prussia's strength. His unwillingness to take a leading role on behalf of Prussia in German affairs irked Fritz and the liberals. Albert maintained that Prussia must first become 'the moral leader of Germany before it can raise itself as a power in Europe and this will not happen by adoption of hasty policies or by making outrageous claims; but by adoption of a bold, confident, truly German and completely liberal policy that corresponds to the needs of our time and the needs of the German nation, which will in turn make it impossible for any of the other German states to adopt any alternative course.'

On her twenty-first birthday in November Vicky received what was probably her father's last letter to her; 'May your life, which has begun beautifully, expand still further for the good of others, and the contentment of your own mind!' It ended with a warning; 'Without the basis of health it is impossible to rear anything stable….Therefore see that you spare yourself now, so that at some future time you may be able to do more.' By that time he was already gravely ill, suffering from typhoid fever, pneumonia and possibly cancer, and he died on 14 December. 'Why has the earth not swallowed me up?' was Vicky's reaction in her next letter to her mother. 'To be separated from you at this moment is a torture which I can not describe.'

The Prince Consort's death deprived her of her foremost mentor, the most stable element in her life, the person who understood her better than anyone else, the only one she deemed capable of guiding her in her role as an English princess in an often hostile land. Still impulsive and inclined to jump to conclusions, she was deprived of his leadership too early, and it took her a long time to come to terms with her loss. In some ways he had been her saviour, for even King William had to take note of his words when he came to her defence, even if he was impatient with his 'interference'. Yet she knew that he and most of her in-laws regarded his death as more of a deliverance than anything else, and that there was no more than empty formality in their expressions of sympathy and regret.

Nevertheless he had done Fritz and Vicky, particularly the latter, an inadvertent disservice by what virtually amounted to his interference in Prussian affairs. As a Coburger by birth and an Englishman by marriage, it was not for him to try and steer Prussia towards the liberal united Germany which he, Baron Stockmar and King Leopold all longed to see; and, as Fritz had once said to Vicky in an angry moment, it was hardly his business to try and rule the land through King William. It was equally injudicious of him to make himself the pillar of support to whom they always looked for advice. He should have seen that the day would come when he was no longer there to help, especially as he was a sick man for the last few months of his life.

Vicky was in the early stages of another pregnancy, and had been seriously ill herself, so she was unable to attend her father's funeral at St. George's Chapel, Windsor, on 23 December. Fritz went instead, and he and the Prince of Wales were chief mourners. When she next went to Windsor in February 1862 she was struck by the difference in her old home; Papa's empty room, empty bed, how her mother slept with Papa's coat over her, the red dressing gown beside her and some of his clothes in the bed. She herself desperately missed her father's ready good morning and good night, and it almost seemed to her 'as if the sun had stopped shining'.

Husband and wife always differed somewhat in their political outlook. Vicky had inherited her father's conviction that Prussia needed to adopt a more liberal constitution before aspiring to German leadership, and shared the policy of more left-wing members of the Prussian parliament, the Landtag, who wanted Prussia to adopt parliamentary democracy along British lines. This was too radical for Fritz, a supporter of German unification first and liberalization second. He took issue with the liberals who aimed to increase parliamentary power at the crown's expense; instead preferring to support free expression, free trade and popular education without altering the constitution or subordinating the monarchy's powers to parliament. In his view, the assembly's role was to defend existing laws and institute progressive reforms as long as they could be achieved through mutual cooperation between crown and parliament.

Fritz was more cautious than his wife, more introspective, reluctant to embrace conflict and controversy; she was impulsive, impatient, and as she admitted, loved a good fight. A few more years of guidance and restraint from her father might have taught her the wisdom of proceeding more slowly and surely. In many ways she remained her father's daughter in outlook. A couple of years later, when Fritz was away on active service with the army and she was pregnant, she assured him that there would be 'other calls on her time that summer' as they had 'many important books' to study. 'If you are pressed for time, I will summarize any books you won't have time to read. I'm ashamed to think how much I have yet to learn!' Albert would have been proud of her, never one to let slip any opportunity for self-improvement or to better her husband as well.

In September 1862 the unscrupulous Otto von Bismarck, whom the Prince Consort had once briefly met in France and never trusted, was appointed Minister-President of Prussia, Vicky and Fritz were despondent at the likely consequences. Eight years later, after the Franco-Prussian war had brought the issue of German unity to the fore, Fritz continually thought of the Prince Consort, King Leopold and Baron Stockmar, and their plans for a free German imperial state under a monarchical head to 'march at the forefront of civilisation and be in a position to develop and bring to bear all noble ideals of the modern world.' When the German empire was declared at Versailles in January 1871, he noted ruefully that his father-in-law would have been impressed by such changes, but not by the methods - conquest of Denmark, then Austria, and finally France - whereby unification was achieved.

Though Vicky was disappointed not to find any similarities between her father and her eldest son Wilhelm, at least the youngest bore some resemblance. She had particularly high hopes for Waldemar, born in February 1868, in whom she saw something of the Prince Consort with his love of animals and interest in science and geology. Of all Queen Victoria's grandchildren, he was the one who most enjoyed hunting for minerals and fossils on the Isle of Wight, all of which Vicky carefully labelled and had deposited in the museum at the Swiss Cottage where she had played as a child. He distinguished himself by giving Queen Victoria a nasty fright one evening when he let his pet crocodile loose; her screams brought the household running, and order was not restored until he picked it up again. Tragically Waldemar died of diphtheria six weeks after his eleventh birthday, a loss the grieving parents never got over. Eight years later Vicky wrote to her mother that 'the dream of my life was to have a son who should be something of what our beloved Papa was, a real grandson of his, in soul and intellect, a grandson of yours. Waldie gave me hopes of this - his nature was full of promise from the first…'

To the end of her days, Vicky idolized her father. Eight years after Fritz's death from cancer of the larynx in June 1888, following a reign as Emperor of only three months, she wrote to Queen Victoria of the example of 'good and great men' who had left their mark on the world 'and their deeds do live after them. So it was with beloved Papa whose career on earth was so short and I think with my beloved Fritz it is so also, in another way. I have a feeling that no life is lived in vain.'