VICTORIA (PRINCESS ROYAL, EMPRESS FREDERICK)
Group of over sixty autograph letters signed variously ('Victoria Crown Princess and Princess Royal', 'V. Empress Frederick', 'Vicky') to her friend Mary Ponsonby ('Dearest Mary'), including three to Mary's husband Henry Ponsonby, a wide correspondence spanning over thirty years, speaking in the fondest terms and touching on many subjects with much on English and European politics, including Anglo-German relations ('...the Germans are always reproaching the English for having prejudices against Germany... they have many more and much more deeply-seated ones about other countries, especially England!... [it is] a useful handle for elections and for securing the measure of the foundation of a line of German steam packets which the Chancellor wants to carry...'); the possibility of war with Russia in 1885 ('...are we to surrender in the long run to Russia?... If she does succeed in getting her will it will be bad for the rest of the world... [England] has no right to be indifferent and wavering and weak...The 'European Concert' seems all out of tune to me when England does not play the first fiddle...'); English domestic politics and her admiration for Gladstone ('...a wonderful man for whom I have the greatest respect and admiration... Whether he has the keen sight, the eagle eye of the statesman, I do not know. I fear not...'); expressing strong views on Ireland ('...A strong personal rule must be come to if civil war and a sort of revolution in England are not to be the inevitable consequence of giving way to the Parnellites... Fenians... will work ruin and destruction on the country... and will let loose the corresponding party of evil in England... nothing else to be done than to conquer them and liberate Ireland from their yoke... All temporising with anarchy is criminal weakness...'); the vetoing of her daughter's engagement ('...When you see the Prince of Bulgaria, think of me and my poor child, who is breaking her heart about him it is so cruel - & he such a charming & excellent creature... Pray never mention this subject at Osbourne to any one...'); one on her health marked 'Please Burn' ('...I hate the thought of this detestable operation...') and on the German-Russian Treaty of Alliance ('...If England and Italy would only join and make Turkey join, Roumania [sic] and Serbia would follow, and I do not see how Russia could possibly think of making war... a safe and common-sense policy...'); the Boer War ('...The three garrisons of Mafeking, Kimberley and Ladysmith must have had a terrible time of it...'); her loneliness on the the marriage of her daughters ('...I feel more lonely than I can describe...') and revealing her homesickness ('...My British heart aches sadly sometimes...'); requesting English gifts ('...one or two little things I am anxious to get to complete Vicky's dressing-table set... one of those oval pin cushions that are in a silver frame like this [drawing]... for a reasonable price... the monogram ought to be a nice 'V' & the German crown...'); touching on the relationship with her son ('...rarely, if ever, comes to see me...'); her husband's illness ('...that odious bleeding goes on...') and battles with doctors ('...no way represent German science, as we have many far better... I miss so cruelly having nothing more to do for him... I feel like a miserable rag of my former self...'); her continuing sorrow after her husband's death in June 1888 ('...All this I must bear in silence and solitude...') and her loneliness ('...My own personal friends have dropped into the background, are dead, or silent, or have gone away...'); her last days in the South of France ('...I can try and cure my infirmities unmolested and unnoticed by the odious newspaper reporters... I am longing to paint and draw again...'), and much else; the sequence ending with a letter from Count Seckendorff suggesting Ponsonby make a last visit to her friend, 16 October 1900, c.400 pages, letters after June 1888 on mourning paper, mostly 8vo (200 x 125mm.), Berlin, Potsdam, Osborne, Balmoral, Naples and elsewhere, 12 September 1865 to 19 January 1900 (quantity)
Footnotes:
'THE 'EUROPEAN CONCERT' SEEMS ALL OUT OF TUNE TO ME WHEN ENGLAND DOES NOT PLAY THE FIRST FIDDLE': CORRESPONDENCE FROM QUEEN VICTORIA'S DAUGHTER AT THE HEART OF THE PRUSSIAN COURT.

Victoria, Princess Royal (1840-1901), eldest child of Queen Victoria and favourite of her father Prince Albert was married at a young age to Prince Frederick of Prussia and immediately moved to Berlin where she received a less than favourable welcome. The couple shared the hope that Prussia and the later German Empire should become a constitutional monarchy based on the English model, but these political views, and indeed her very Englishness, caused her to be ostracised by the family and the Berlin Court (a 'subterranean war' as she puts it). Our letters to her friend Mary Ponsonby (née Bulteel), the wife of Queen Victoria's Private Secretary Henry Ponsonby, speak candidly of her isolation, particularly after the death of her husband in June 1888 and the marriages of her daughters ('...I feel so wretchedly unhappy... I would give anything to be allowed to lay down the burden of this life... I have so many mercies but my existence is wretched...').

Throughout this long correspondence, her letters, each many pages long, reveal a highly educated, enquiring mind, a woman at the centre of European politics deeply interested in world affairs and particularly those of England, a country she left when only 17 years old. They give a detailed account of life in the Prussian Court from the inside, with much on England's position in Europe ('...I cannot forget all the duties which our position in the world imposes upon us... We want influence and we must have power to use it in the interest of all that is good and we are losing it at every turn...'), her anger at the Court's anti-English stance ('...The continual abuse of everything English every day makes me so savage that it scatters all my tolerance...'), demonstrate an interest in current affairs such as the Dreyfus Case, and shows a clear understanding of the machinations of European politics right up until her death ('...The world is still full of interest and the fate and well-being of those we love are intensely absorbing to us...'). In her final letter of 19 January 1900 she tells her friend '...I work all day long – at knitting... & sewing for the sick & wounded... the Sultan is wicked... - worse than Nero! Turkey should go further south... it is more than high time she were out of Europe... Egypt must be English...' and right up until the end continues to speak of Prussia's '...ambition & greed... in spite of the jealousy of France & Germany we are the foundation of Liberty - & the Champion of civilisation...'.

As well as politics she also speaks of family matters including her worries about her daughters ('...My darling little Sophie looks so terribly thin & pale...') and the strained relationship with her son, the future Kaiser Wilhelm II. Perhaps prompted by the illness and death of her beloved husband from laryngeal cancer in June 1888 just months after his accession as Emperor, she shows a keen interest in the latest medical discoveries such as Professor Koch's work on tuberculosis, but accuses doctors Bergmann and Gerhardt of being in collusion with Bismark for their inability to help her husband. She is reticent about speaking of her mother but, following a visit by Queen Victoria and Henry Ponsonby in April 1888, she comments '...I think she was pleased – in spite of the gloom and sadness which pervades everything, to see what pleasure her visit gave...'. As Mary Ponsonby's daughter Magdalena concludes, '...It was a constant strain on the Empress particularly in the latter years of her life, to feel that a certain amount of espionage was going on round her... I cannot say that she had the same charm as the Queen: in her great seriousness there was too much of the professor about her; all the same she was an extremely clever woman and wonderfully loyal to her friends...' (Mary Ponsonby, A Memoir, Some Letters and a Journal, p.243).

These letters complement the enormous correspondence of some 7,500 letters between the Empress and Queen Victoria that survive. Of our collection, only fifteen were published in full or quoted from in Magdalen Ponsonby's biography of 1927, a copy of which is included in the lot, and a mere handful mentioned in Letters of Empress Frederick edited by Sir Frederick Ponsonby, 1928.
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