could you talk a little about the relationship of Vicky and Fritz? what were they like as a couple?
anon you've made me the happiest!! here are some of my favourite tidbits ♥
♡ It was a love match from the beginning till the end. They shared an intellectual and physical bond that was a rarity in royal circles!
♡ Fritz proposed to Vicky while they were taking a stroll near Balmoral Castle. He picked up some white heather, kissed her and asked her if she would consider coming to Prussia. She said she would and he replied that he’d hoped she would stay ‘always’.
♡ They were partners in the true sense of the word and they were particularly vilified for it. In the patriarchal Prussian society, their relationship were an anomaly. Bismark enjoyed spreading rumors about them : Vicky was the domineering wife and Fritz the weak husband. Once, Vicky wrote to Fritz that a woman in Germany was : 'not the partner, friend and helper of her husband... does not have the same educational level as he... If a wife lays claim to this status she is considered dangerous, domineering, ridiculous, peculiar. In England, every woman participates in conversations on politics, reads the newspapers, knows what’s going on, etc.. No Englishwoman would accept and adjust to the lowly and not very dignified status of a German wife.'
♡ To make matters worse, Fritz was constantly undermined by his own family. Vicky wrote 'from his own mother he seldom or rather never hears... words of affection' 'I wish more people knew. He is such a good son, such a good husband & such a good brother! & always thinks his duty before his pleasure.'
♡ Fritz suffered from depression (not surprising when you have his family and you espouse liberal values while being the heir of the very conservative Prussia). Vicky helped him a great deal. He wrote to her : 'You know exactly what it takes to make me happy through good times and bad, and you know exactly what is best for me... you accept me the way that I am; you have taught me how to gain confidence and see the world in a better way than I did before” “if “marriages are made in heaven” then God has obviously done so in our case.'
♡ They were constantly under pressure. Bismark’s propaganda machine against Fritz and Vicky destroyed them in the eye of the Court and of the German people. But damn, they stood their ground.
♡ Vicky and Fritz were against the anti-Semitic movement. And Friedrich made it very clear.
♡ Their home was a space where 'love of art, a real sympathy with the intellectual movement and a wider liberal outlook on life prevailed.'
♡ Fritz helped to promote the development of women and their integration in male bureaucracy. In 1872 he supported a petition sent to the Reichstag which demanded that women were able to work in postal and railway services. *Vicky’s influence*.
♡ 'That you now are everything in the world to me you already know [...] I no longer undertake anything without thinking constantly of you and look upon you as my good angel' Fritz to Vicky.
♡ 'If you only knew how your love moves me, how happy it makes me and how much I return it, I do not deserve so much. Dear, dear Fritz, I think of you day and night.' 'For my precious madly-loved Fritz from is own Vicky.' Vicky to Fritz.
♡ To get away from the oppressive atmosphere of the capital, they bought, in 1863, a farmhouse in the village of Bornstedt, near Postdam. They were popular within the village and they loved this country life. When there, Fritz helped to plant and harvest. They also improved the village: rebuilt the church, created a trade school and a new village school.
♡ Even though Vicky could be very demanding and Fritz often away because of his military duties, they were both attentive and doting parents. Their younger children would come in their room at 7am and sat on their bed to eat their breakfast.
♡ Vicky's first childbirth was a very difficult one and Fritz stayed by her side throughout the ordeal. When she gave birth to her second child, Charlotte, he rubbed her feet during labor.
♡ On the day he became Emperor in 1888 Fritz invested Vicky with the highest honor he could give her: the Order of the Black Eagle. As he was already suffering from cancer and couldn’t speak he wrote to his doctor, Morell Mackenzie : ‘I thank you for having made me live enough to recompense the valiant courage of my wife’. Four months later he would die.
♡ The royal collection kept a bracelet made from plaited hair of Fritz and Vicky, with an FV monogram surrounded by a serpent (x).The Victorians associated the snake motif with eternal love.
♡ He took the picture below in 1887 at Buckingham Palace, in the room he occupied 35 years ago, before his marriage to Vicky. And on the table there is the small portrait that Vicky gave him after their engagement in 1855.
if anyone is wondering, most of these tidbits come from an uncommon woman, the empress frederick by hannah pakula, a really good book on Vicky and Fritz!
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