At this point the British Ambassador in Berlin, Sir Edward Malet, was forced to intervene, for even Queen Victoria was being dragged into the controversy. “Dear Count Bismarck,” he wrote on November 14th, “Will you kindly glance your eye at the passage which I have marked in this evening’s Nordeutsche Allgerneine Zeitung? You will see that to the Queen of England also is to be attributed that the Crown Prince was committed to the care of an English specialist. The context indicates that the word ‘also’ means that the other person was the Crown Princess. Now as a matter of fact, of which I am sure you are aware, the Crown Princess had nothing to do with calling in Sir Morell Mackenzie, still less the Queen. The report that the Crown Princess sent for him originally is doing her great injury, and is devoid of truth.
“Would it be possible, with reference to this paragraph, which gains credence through appearing in the semi-official paper, to state authoritatively in the same paper, or in the Reichs Anzeiger, that Mackenzie was called in by decision of the physicians attending the Crown Prince, and that the Crown Princess was not even consulted and that certainly the Queen of England had nothing to do with it?” Sir Edward ended his letter: “I am sure your chivalry will make you feel as I do about these statements.”[70] But he was wrong, there was no chivalry. Count Bismarck promised to take up the matter with his father, and the attacks continued.
Meanwhile the Crown Prince rapidly grew worse. He had spasms of suffocation and in February 1888 it was necessary to perform an operation which deprived him of his voice but enabled him to breathe through a tube inserted in his throat. A month later the old monarch died with his grandson at his bedside, and the news was telegraphed to Italy. The voiceless Frederick was German Emperor. The scene at San Remo was pitiful. The moment the news was received the household gathered in the drawing-room. The new Emperor wrote out the announcement of his succession as Frederick ÜI. Next he invested his beloved consort with the highest order in his power to give — the ribbon of the Black Eagle. Then he greeted Sir Morell Mackenzie and wrote on a piece of paper: “I thank you for having made me live long enough to reward the valiant courage of my wife.” Finally he sent a telegram to Queen Victoria. “At this moment of deep emotion and sorrow at the news of my father’s death, my feelings of devoted affection to you prompt me, on succeeding to the throne, to repeat to you my sincere and earnest desire for a close and lasting friendship between our two nations. Frederick.”[71] That night the new Empress wrote to her mother: “To think of my poor Fritz succeeding his father as a sick and stricken man is so hard! How much good he might have done! I pray that it may be and that he may be spared to be a blessing to his people and to Europe.”[72]
The Emperor was not fit to travel, yet he had no recourse but to return to Germany. Instead of moving into the Berlin Schloss he took up residence in the Palace of Charlottenburg, a few miles outside the capital, as the doctors felt that the air would be more beneficial. People who saw him were appalled. He could barely stand. He made a painful effort to hold himself erect, but his emaciated frame and the look of agony in his deep, tragic eyes revealed only too clearly that the hand of death was on him. News spread through the Bismarck entourage that his reign was a matter of weeks. This was the signal not merely for indifference but for cruel defiance. Not that the Emperor contemplated any far-reaching changes. There was no longer any question of implementing the plans that he and Vicky had discussed so often. Bismarck would have to reign, and the autocratic regime would continue undisturbed. All he could do was to reward his liberal friends with decorations and promote a few of them to government positions. Nevertheless, even the smallest decisions made by his wife and himself were mocked. When the Empress dismissed the German physician, Professor Bergmann, because she felt he had handled Frederick’s throat too roughly, causing unnecessary pain, William received the doctor to show his respect. When the Emperor demanded the resignation of Herr von Puttkamer, the Minister of the Interior, because of corrupt practices in conducting the recent Reichstag elections, Bismarck ostentatiously gave a dinner in his honour. Colonel Swaine, the British military attache in Berlin, was so shocked by the behaviour of Prussian officialdom that he wrote to the Prince of Wales: “We are living in sad times here in Berlin. Not sad alone because we have an Emperor at death’s door, nor sad only because there are family disagreements, but sad, doubly sad, because almost all officials — perhaps with exceptions, but I know them not — are behaving in a way as if the last spark of honour and faithful duty had gone — they are all trimming their sails. It seems as if a curse had come over this country, leaving but one bright spot and that is where stands a solitary woman doing her duty faithfully and tenderly by her sick husband against all odds. It is one of the most, if not the most tragic episode in a country and life ever recorded in history.”[73]
The unpleasant atmosphere grew venal when rumour swept the capital that the Empress was planning to exploit her brief moment of power by insisting upon the marriage of her daughter to Prince Alexander of Battenberg. The Prince was no longer ruler of Bulgaria. He had been kidnapped by the Russians and forced to sign a paper of abdication at the point of a gun. As he was now a private citizen, there was no real reason why the wedding should not take place. But both Prince Bismarck and Prince William still insisted that Russia would take umbrage, and instructed the press to open a campaign against the proposal.
In the midst of this uproar, Queen Victoria arrived in Berlin to visit her stricken son-in-law. Lord Salisbury had been apprehensive about the trip. He was afraid Bismarck might not show her proper respect, or that William might be rude to her. He need not have worried. Her dumpy figure, swathed in black, was the symbol of majesty. Her immense prestige, coupled with tact and firmness, enabled her to carry off her difficult role perfectly. She charmed Bismarck who had never met her before; she cheered the Emperor; she warned her daughter not to press the marriage with Alexander unless William consented; and she implored William to be more considerate of his mother. While she was present the meanness and maliciousness faded away; but as soon as she departed it rolled back again like a sultry storm.
On May 24th the Emperor attended the wedding of his son Prince Henry to Princess Irene, daughter of Princess Alice. All eyes were upon him. The collar of his uniform was cut high in order to hide the tube in his throat, but those near him could see his breast heaving as he fought for breath. He was a pitiful object, so white, so wasted, so sad; but Count von Waldersee, who sat not far from him, could only exult. “How wonderfully everything is turning out!” he wrote in his diary on May 30th. “What a terrible misfortune it would have been if we now had a healthy Kaiser Frederick over us! Under his wife’s leading he would have put the whole German Empire out of joint… All are looking with high hope to the Crown Prince. Who would have believed it a year ago?”[74] A week after the wedding the Emperor asked to be taken to the New Palace at Potsdam. This was where he had been born and where he had spent the first year of his marriage. He was carried down the river by barge, as it was the least painful way to move him. As soon as he arrived, he wrote on a slip of paper that he rechristened the palace “Friedrichskron.” It was the only immortality he sought.
Ten days later the Empress telegraphed her mother that her husband’s condition had taken a turn for the worse, and on the 14th June the doctors cabled that he was sinking. The Queen immediately wired William: “Am in great distress at these terrible news and so troubled about poor dear Mama. Do all you can, as I asked you, to help her at this terrible time of dreadful trial
and grief. God help us!”[75] On that same day Prince Bismarck was received by the dying man. The Emperor took his wife’s hand and placed it inside the Chancellor’s, imploring the old man, with his eyes, to look after her. His sons and daughters filed in to see him; the Empress kept vigil at the bedside.
That night there were mysterious movements in the palace. Army officers with permits signed by Prince William moved into one of the wings; and the Master of the Household was told
that he was already superseded by a new man — a nominee of the Prince. The next morning the Emperor died. But there was little time to think of this, for the palace was suddenly in a state of siege, surrounded by soldiers. No one could move in or out without permission from the officer in charge. Prince William was determined to lay his hands on his father’s private papers, and for several hours officers went through the rooms ransacking tables and drawers, but nothing was found. While this was going on, a telegram arrived for William from Queen Victoria. “I am broken-hearted. Help and do all you can for your poor dear mother and try to follow in your best, noblest and kindest of father’s footsteps. Grandmama.”[76] One wonders if William had time to read it. He was busy walking up and down the park, fulminating against his mother to Count von Waldersee. “In spite of all assertions,” he said, “she has long been prepared for my father’s death; everything has most deliberately been arranged with this in sight. There is… nothing in writing to be seen, everything has been done away with.”[77] Two days later Queen Victoria wrote in her journal: “Colonel Swaine arrived from Berlin… He had brought some papers which Fritz had desired should be placed in my care.”
When the Prince and Princess of Wales arrived in Berlin for the funeral they found the Empress distraught. She had left the Palace with her two daughters and taken refuge at her little country house at Bornstedt not far away. William, she declared, was doing everything to insult his father’s memory. Despite her pleading he had insisted on holding a post-mortem on the body under the pretext that it was required by law, but in reality only to revive the cancer issue and further embarrass Mr. Mackenzie. She had tried to see Prince Bismarck to ask him to prevent it, but he had replied that he was too busy with his new master to spare the time. William had struck another blow by writing to Prince Alexander declaring that he would never consent to a marriage between him and Victoria. Although the dead Emperor had left a last testament, dated April 12th, saying: “I entirely acquiesce in the betrothal of your second sister with Prince Alexander of Battenberg. I charge you as a filial duty with the accomplishment of my desires…,” he had based his refusal on the “profound conviction held by my grandfather and father.”
The Prince and Princess were appalled by William’s behaviour. They were shocked to learn that he even had taken the funeral arrangements out of his mother’s hands and was ignoring her wishes; in the end she refused to attend the public ceremony and held a private service of her own. The Prince of Wales was doubly affected, for he was genuinely moved by the loss of his brother-in-law. Before leaving London he had written his second son: “Try, my dear Georgy, never to forget Uncle Fritz. He was one of the finest and noblest characters ever known; if he had a fault he was too good for this world.”[78] He longed to talk about Frederick and hear his praises sung, but the Berlin world was cold and derisory. Count Herbert Bismarck referred to the dead man as an “incubus” and said that an Emperor “who could not speak was not fit to reign.” The Prince was so outraged that he told Prince Hohenlohe he would have liked to throw him out of the room.
However, Herbert also took exception to the conversation; the Prince was indiscreet enough, or perhaps angry enough, to suggest that the Emperor Frederick might have wished to return Alsace and Lorraine to the French. Herbert repeated this remark to William who was so indignant that when he made a public speech a month later he said: “There are those people who have the audacity to maintain that my father was willing to part with what he gained on the battlefield. We, who knew him so well, cannot quietly tolerate, even for a single minute moment, such an insult to his memory…” At the end of his oration he turned to the British attache, General Blumenthal, and said: “I hope the Prince of Wales will understand that.”
The Prince understood only too clearly, and the Princess as well.
Alexandra had never liked the Germans anyway and now every time she thought of William’s treatment of his mother she boiled with rage. “Instead of William being a comfort and a support to her,” she wrote in August 1888, “he has quite gone over to Bismarck and Co. who entirely overlook and crush her. It is too infamous.”
Even Queen Victoria was caught up in the storm. Very haughtily did she receive her grandson’s emissary, who had been sent to announce formally the accession of a new sovereign. Soon the British Military Attache in Berlin was writing to the Queen’s secretary: “The young Emperor spoke to me this morning of the cold reception his Envoy, General von Winterfeldt, had received at Windsor…” Victoria wrote on the margin: “The Queen intended it should be cold. She last saw him as her son-in-law’s A.D.C. He came to her and never uttered one word of sorrow for his death, and rejoiced in the accession of his new master.”[79]
The Queen recovered her composure and made a final attempt to induce William to behave “decently.” “Let me… ask you to bear with poor Mama if she is sometimes irritated and excited. She does not mean it; think what months of agony and suspense and watching with broken and sleepless nights she had gone through and don't mind it. I am so anxious that all should go smoothly, that I write thus openly in the interests of both.
“There are many rumours of your going and paying visits to Sovereigns. I hope that at least you will let some months pass before anything of this kind takes place, as it is not three weeks yet since dear beloved Papa was taken, and we are all still in such deep mourning for him…”
William’s reply was firm. He was leaving for the Baltic, “where I hope to meet the Emperor of Russia, which will be of good effect for the peace of Europe, and for the rest and quiet of my Allies. I would have gone later if possible, but State interest goes before personal feelings, and the fate which hangs over nations does not wait till the etiquette of Court mournings has been fulfilled… I deem it necessary that monarchs should meet often and confer together to look out for dangers which threaten the monarchical principle from democratical and republican parties in all parts of the world…”
William’s jibe about democracies was not wasted on Victoria. She promptly telegraphed her Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury. “Trust that we shall be very cool, though civil, in our communications with my grandson and Prince Bismarck, who are bent on a return to the oldest times of government.”
Chapter 4: Dropping the Pilot
“So we are bound together — I and the army — so we are born for one another, and so we shall hold together indissolubly, whether, as God wills, we are to have peace or storm.” These were the twenty-nine-year-old Kaiser’s first public words, delivered in a proclamation to the army. Europe stirred uneasily and the French paper Figaro commented morosely that “a prince who is an enthusiast for the army is also an enthusiast for war.” Three days later William II struck a different note in a speech to the people, declaring that he had vowed to God “to be a righteous and gentle prince, to foster piety and to maintain peace;” but the London Times remarked caustically that his first pronouncement seemed “more spontaneous.”
What sort of a man was this new Emperor? A religious fanatic? A war lord? An exhibitionist? The chancelleries of Europe busied themselves with painstaking assessments of his character but no two opinions seemed to tally. It was known that he possessed a mercurial temperament which could plunge him from exuberance to depression, from jocular friendliness to stiff censoriousness in a matter of minutes. He was difficult to fathom; indeed, the only facet of his character, clear to all, was his changeability. “He is rather short,” wrote the British politician, Mr. John Morley, “pale, but sunburnt; carries himself well; walks into the room with the stiff stride of the Prussian soldier; speaks with a good deal of intense and energetic gesture, not like a Frenchman but staccato; his voice strong but pleasant; his eye bright, clear and full; mouth resolute; the cast of face grave or stern in repose, but as he sat between two pretty women he lighted up with gaiety, and a genial laugh. Energy, rapidity, restlessness in every movement from his short, quick inclinations of the head to the planting of the foot.” The author seems to have paused at this point
and reread his pen portrait. Was something wrong with it?
“I should be disposed strongly to doubt,” he suddenly added, “whether it is all sound, steady, and the result of — what Herbert Spencer could call — a rightly co-ordinated organisation.”[80]
The German people, on the other hand, had no such misgivings. They were thrilled by the style and dash of their twenty-nine-year-old Kaiser. Above all they liked his constant references to the Deity, his presentation of himself as the instrument of the Divine Will. This gave them confidence, and confidence was all they needed for their army of four million men was the strongest in the world. While William’s flamboyant utterances disturbed the complacency of Europe his own people were brought cheering to their feet. “Dazzling” was the word most frequently used to describe the Sovereign. Even a cynical Foreign Office official was soon writing in his diary: “His liveliness is invaluable to us…”
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