Prince Sigismund of Prussia

by Susan Flantzer  © Unofficial Royalty 2015

Prince Sigismund of Prussia; Credit – Wikipedia

The first grandchild of Queen Victoria to die, Prince Sigismund of Prussia (Franz Friedrich Sigismund) was born on September 15, 1864, at the Neues Palais in Potsdam, Kingdom of Prussia, now in Brandenburg, Germany. He was the fourth of the eight children of Friedrich III, German Emperor and King of Prussia and Victoria, Princess Royal.

Sigismund had seven siblings:

Sigismund’s mother, known in the family as Vicky, felt a special closeness to her fourth child. Vicky’s first three children had difficulties, and she had always felt more intimate with her five younger children. The first three children were not allowed to be breastfed by their mother. On orders from their paternal grandmother Queen Augusta, they were fed by wet nurses. By the time Vicky had her fourth child, she had enough self-confidence to defy her mother-in-law and breastfeed Sigismund. Perhaps it was the experience of breastfeeding Sigismund that fostered that special closeness.

Two months after Sigismund’s birth, Vicky wrote to one of her mother’s ladies-in-waiting, “My little darling has grown so fat! He has not had a single ache or pain…and sleeps like a top. I cannot say how happy I am with him and what a delight nursing is. I really think that I have never been so happy, and I certainly never loved one of the others so much…” As Sigismund became a toddler, Vicky thought him much cleverer and more intelligent than his three elder siblings and believed he would have great potential in the future.

On June 4, 1866, Vicky’s husband Fritz was on his way to the front of the Austro-Prussian War.  Even before his father left, Sigismund had been fretful, thought to be caused by teething. However, the day after Fritz left, Sigismund was unable to eat or sleep. Twenty-four hours later, he could no longer stand. Because all the doctors normally used by the family had left with the army, Vicky was forced to consult doctors unknown to her who gave her the terrible news that her son had meningitis. At that time, there was no successful treatment for meningitis, and death usually occurred. Sigismund’s convulsions grew increasingly worse until he died in agony on June 18, 1866, only 21 months old. Vicky wrote to her mother Queen Victoria, “Oh to see it suffer so cruelly, to see it die and hear its last piteous cry was an agony I cannot describe, it haunts me night and day!”

Vicky was without her husband to comfort her, and her mother-in-law Queen Augusta personally went to the front to tell Fritz. Fritz’s father gave him permission to come home for the funeral, but Fritz declined. He said, “I am in the service of the fatherland. I would never forgive myself if we were attacked when I was absent from my post.” Understandably, Vicky did not comprehend this and wrote to her husband, “In you, of course, the soldier is uppermost.”

Vicky prepared a small room in the Friedenskirche in Potsdam, Kingdom of Prussia, now in Brandenburg, Germany, with carpets, cushions, pictures, and flowers to receive the tiny coffin. In great shock, Vicky was the only one who attended Sigismund’s funeral who did not cry.

After Sigismund’s father died in 1888, the Kaiser Friedrich Mausoleum was added to the Friedenskirche, and Sigismund and his brother Waldemar, who died of diphtheria when he was eleven years old, were re-interred there. German sculptor Reinhold Begas was commissioned to make their marble tombs.

Tomb of Prince Sigismund; Credit – Wikipedia

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