Holmes and Watson

by June Thomson

  The King of Bohemia refers to Irene Adler as a well-known adventuress, which may be an exaggeration. Given the circumstances, his attitude towards her was probably biased. She was certainly a beautiful and fascinating woman. Watson, always susceptible to feminine charms, was much taken with her. Even Holmes was attracted, although Watson is at pains to point out that his old friend was not in love with her. It was not in Holmes’ nature to feel any romantic passions, but by opening his account of the case with the striking sentence: ‘To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman’, Watson may have been indulging in a little wishful thinking. If only Holmes were capable of love, then Irene Adler could well have been the type of woman he might have married: beautiful, talented, high-spirited with a mind and a will of her own.

  Holmes is undoubtedly on the defensive about her. When he describes her as ‘the daintiest thing under a bonnet on this planet’, he is careful to make it clear that he is expressing the opinion of the ostlers in the mews behind her house, whom he had questioned in the course of his enquiries.

  She was also intelligent, a necessary quality, for Holmes would not have been attracted to her if she had not possessed as fine a mind as his own. Despite his carefully organised plan to secure the photograph and the letters, Irene Adler managed to elude him and escape with her newly-married husband, taking the compromising photograph, and presumably the letters as well, with her. In their place she left a photograph of herself alone. It was this photograph which Holmes claimed as his fee from the King of Bohemia, although he was later to receive a magnificent gold and amethyst snuff box from his client.

  Holmes also kept the sovereign which Irene Adler had given him as payment for acting as a witness to her marriage to Godfrey Norton and which, Holmes informs Watson, he intended wearing on his watch-chain as a memento, the only recorded instance of Holmes showing any sign of sentimentality, although he may have intended it as an ironic reminder of the fact that Irene Adler had outwitted him. It was the first time Holmes had ever been beaten by a woman, a fact which he was still referring to ruefully seven months later, in September 1889 during the case of the Five Orange Pips.

  But if Irene Adler’s identity can be established, what about Holmes’ supposedly royal client?

  Whoever he was, he certainly was not the King of Bohemia.* That country had ceased to be a separate kingdom in 1526 when, after the death of its own monarch, King Ferdinand of Austria contrived to have himself elected to the throne. In 1889 it was ruled over by the Hapsburg emperor, Franz Joseph, as part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Therefore Watson’s account of how Holmes deduced his client’s Bohemian background by examining the watermarks in his writing paper must be discounted. Holmes may indeed have made a similar examination but with entirely different results.

  Nor should too much reliance be placed on Watson’s description of the king as a flamboyantly dressed giant of a man, six feet six inches in height, with the chest and limbs of a Hercules. Watson has obviously disguised the man’s appearance in order that he should not be easily identified. The so-called King of Bohemia would not have given his permission for the account to be published had his real name and status been too obvious. All of these details should therefore be regarded as red herrings, designed to throw the reader off the scent. So, too, is the implication that the King of Bohemia had links with the Austrian Hapsburg family. Nevertheless, Watson has managed to include in his description of the king several clues which could point to his identity.

  He was German; he was a thirty-year-old bachelor; he was hoping to marry a princess; he was of royal blood and possessed the hereditary title to a kingdom; at the time he consulted Holmes he had some connection with a Scandinavian monarch which a scandal might destroy and which was causing him great anxiety. Moreover, although the king was masked when he first arrived; Holmes recognised his voice and was familiar with his features once the mask was removed. In addition, Holmes openly shows his disapproval of him during the interview. Finally, he was in London in March 1889.

  Despite the obvious difficulties of identifying him, various candidates have been suggested, including Emperor Franz Joseph’s son, Crown Prince Rudolph, and even Edward, Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, both well-known womanisers.

  Neither is convincing. In March 1889 Prince Rudolph was already dead. Two months earlier, on 30th January, his body was found at the hunting-lodge at Mayerling, together with that of his seventeen-year-old mistress, Baroness Mary Vetsera. Both had been shot in circumstances which suggested that Prince Rudolph had first killed the Baroness before committing suicide.

  As for Bertie, Prince of Wales, he is just as unlikely. Although he had married a Danish princess, Alexandra, which might accord with the King of Bohemia’s engagement to the daughter of the Scandinavian king, the wedding had taken place twenty-six years earlier in 1863. At the time of the events Watson is describing, the prince was forty-nine and so corpulent that he was known behind his back as ‘Tum-Tum’. Besides, however much Holmes might have disapproved of Bertie’s hedonistic lifestyle, he would not have treated the heir to the throne in quite so openly a cold and contemptuous manner.

  Nor is there any obvious candidate among the numerous minor royal princes, grand dukes, dukes and counts scattered about Europe in the late 1880s.

  There is, however, one man whose identity matches the majority of Watson’s clues. He was a German count who, although not of royal descent, was the son of a prince and who could be regarded as heir, if not to a royal throne, then to a position of such power and prestige that it far outweighed any regal claim to some minor princedom. He was also a bachelor who, it was rumoured, was in love with a princess whom he was hoping to marry. She was not Scandinavian but German and a member of that other great European royal dynasty, the Hohenzollern family, to which the count in question had very close ties. There were, however, Scandinavian connections, but of a political rather than a matrimonial nature. In addition, his identity, if correct, would go a long way to explain Holmes’ cold and dismissive attitude towards him.

  For good measure, there was also an opera singer – not Irene Adler it should be stressed – whose secret love affair with a semi-royal prince and a former suitor for the hand of the same Hohenzollern princess whom the count hoped to marry, led to his fall from grace and his retirement from public life shortly before the events of March 1889. His humiliation may well have served as an awful warning to the count of what might happen to him if his own liaison with an opera singer was made public.

  As a final and deciding factor, the count in question was in London in March 1889 on a delicate diplomatic mission which the least breath of scandal could well have ruined. It is quite possible that Mycroft Holmes, who had important Government contacts, had invited his brother to a reception in the count’s honour, which was how Holmes was able to recognise his client by his voice even before he removed the mask.

  He was Count Herbert von Bismarck, German Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and the son of Otto von Bismarck, the all-powerful chancellor to William II, the young German emperor, who had been awarded the title of Prince for services to the Hohenzollern imperial family. As Bismarck’s son, Count Herbert may well have set his sights on succeeding his father as chancellor to the Second Reich. In March 1889 he was forty years old and still a bachelor. Although this makes him ten years older than the age Watson ascribes to the King of Bohemia, this may be another red herring to confuse the scent.

  The princess he was said to have fallen in love with and hoped to marry was Victoria, known in the family as Moretta. She was the second daughter of the late emperor, Kaiser Frederick III, and the former Empress Victoria (Vicky) who was herself the eldest daughter of yet another empress, Victoria, the English queen and matriarch. Moretta was therefore Queen Victoria’s granddaughter and niece to the Prince of Wales as well as being sister to the new young Kaiser, Wilhelm II, who had succeeded to the imperial throne less than a year earlier in June 1888, on the death of his father, Frederick III.r />
  Count Herbert’s mission to London in March 1889 was to make friendly overtures to Great Britain in order to promote an Anglo-German alliance, a difficult task as the relationship between the two countries was far from cordial. There were deep-seated personal as well as political problems.

  Bertie, Prince of Wales, made no secret of his dislike and distrust of the autocratic chancellor and his son, whom he referred to as ‘those wicked Bismarcks’. To make matters worse, Vicky, the former empress, was disliked by the Germans for her too-liberal English views and for the influence Queen Victoria continued to exert over her eldest daughter, an unpopularity which the English royal family blamed largely on the Bismarcks for conducting a personal vendetta against the former princess royal.

  The bad feeling was not only on the part of the English royal family either. The young Kaiser, Wilhelm II, deeply resented his uncle Bertie’s treatment of him as a mere nephew, which he felt was not in accordance with the dignity of his imperial status.

  There were other long-standing political disagreements between Great Britain and Germany, one of which was the Schleswig-Holstein question, which was so complicated that Lord Palmerston said only three people had ever understood it: the Prince Consort, who was dead; a German professor, who had gone mad; and himself, and he had since forgotten what it was all about. The Schleswig-Holstein situation was one of the reasons for the coolness in the relationship between the two countries, which Count Herbert von Bismarck was hoping to improve during his visit to London. It is in this diplomatic area that the Scandinavian connection can be seen. Although not part of Danish territory, the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein were ruled over by the King of Denmark until 1863 when Austria and Prussia combined to force the Danish king to relinquish them.

  Britain largely supported the Danes and the dispute took on a more personal nature when the Prince of Wales married the Danish princess, Alexandra, in March of that same year. In fact, Princess Alexandra so hated the Germans that for eleven years she refused to visit Berlin and was reluctant even to travel to Germany for the funeral of her late brother-in-law, Kaiser Frederick III. It was only on Queen Victoria’s special pleading that she finally agreed to attend.

  To make matters worse, in January 1889, two months before Count Herbert’s arrival in London, an old scandal involving Sir Robert Morier, the British Ambassador to St Petersburg, had been stirred up again in the Cologne Gazette, largely, it was suspected, at the instigation of the Bismarcks, father and son. This concerned the allegation that in 1870, during the Franco-Prussian war,* Sir Robert had passed on military information to the French marshal, Bazaire, about troop movements of the German army, a charge vigorously denied by Sir Robert. In an attempt to clear his name, Sir Robert had appealed personally to Count Herbert to publish an official denial of the allegation, a request which the Count had refused in a ‘curt and crude reply’.

  Diplomatically, the timing of this renewed attack on Sir Robert could not have been more ill-judged, for it helped neither Anglo-German relations nor Count Herbert’s reputation in England. In a leading article for 4th January 1889 The Times took a strong line, accusing the Bismarcks of inflaming anti-British feeling in Germany and warning them that ‘their barrack-room manners’ were not conducive to a good understanding between the two countries.

  ‘We must beg the German Chancellor,’ the article continued, ‘and those who take their tone from him to treat English public men as English gentlemen.’

  As a further complication, the British Government, anxious to preserve its isolationist policy, regarded with some suspicion Germany’s attempts to form alliances with other European nations, particularly with Great Britain’s traditional enemies, France and Russia, a situation which added to Count Herbert’s problems. In the event, Lord Salisbury, the prime minister, refused to sign the Anglo-German alliance and the count returned home empty-handed.

  In treating his client with such brusqueness, Holmes may have been expressing this official mistrust, or his coldness might have arisen from a more personal antipathy. Count Herbert was a conceited, overbearing man, a heavy drinker with a tendency towards violence when drunk, and with an unfortunate habit for someone in his position as German Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, of issuing orders to his opposite numbers rather than sitting down round the international table to discuss matters diplomatically. Holmes’ attitude towards him may reflect the private opinion of Mycroft and his colleagues in the British Foreign Office, who could well have experienced the Count’s highhanded manner during the negotiations over the Anglo-German alliance.

  With so much depending on a successful mission to London, it is understandable that Count Herbert was anxious that no scandal concerning himself and the former opera singer, Irene Adler, should be made public, especially as a similar liaison between a prince and another professional singer had caused so much gossip only a short time before.

  But who were this prince and his opera singer whose relationship so closely matched that of Count Herbert’s and Irene Adler’s?

  He was the handsome Prince Alexander (Sandro) of Battenburg, second son of Prince Alexander of Hesse. Because of the latter’s morganatic marriage to a commoner, a former lady-in-waiting to his sister, the Empress of Russia, Sandro’s father had been obliged to give up the right to the Hessian title for his three sons.

  Capable and intelligent, as well as exceedingly good-looking, Sandro had been elected in 1879 to rule Bulgaria, a newly-created state formed from the eastern part of Armenia after the Russians had defeated the Turks and driven them out of the territory. By supporting Sandro’s nomination to the Bulgarian throne, the Russians assumed he would rule as a puppet prince, willing to carry out the Tsar’s policies.

  Sandro’s charm and dark, good looks so enchanted Queen Victoria that she compared him to her beloved Albert, the late Prince Consort. He also captivated the heart of the nineteen-year-old Princess Victoria (Moretta), daughter of Vicky, the former German empress, and the same princess whom Count Herbert later hoped to marry. But some of the stuffier and more conservative members of the Hohenzollern family, supported by Bismarck, considered the match between Sandro and Moretta unsuitable because of the morganatic marriage of Sandro’s parents. Consequently, the young Prince of Bulgaria was ordered to give up all claim to Moretta’s hand.

  Matters came to a head in 1886 when Sandro, who had angered the Tsar by his independent attitude, was kidnapped by Russian agents and forced to abdicate at gunpoint, much to Bismarck’s delight and to the distress of Queen Victoria, who had set her heart on a wedding between the charming prince and her granddaughter, Moretta.

  In spite of these setbacks and the disapproval of some members of her family, Moretta still clung to the hope that one day she would be permitted to marry her handsome Sandro. It was at this time that the rumours began to circulate of Count Herbert von Bismarck’s interest in Moretta. The match was approved of by his father, the German chancellor, who could see the advantages of a marriage between his son and the Hohenzollern princess, which would have made Count Herbert a member of the imperial family and strengthened his own ties with the young Kaiser.

  But Sandro proved less constant in love than the faithful Moretta. In the interval, he transferred his affections to Joanna Loisinger, an opera singer, whom he secretly married in February 1889, a mere month before Count Herbert’s arrival in London. Because of this liaison, Sandro forfeited his title of Prince and, taking the name of Count Hartenau, retired from public life. His fate must have served as a warning light to Count Herbert of the likely consequences should his own entanglement with an opera singer become common knowledge.

  What happened to them all afterwards?

  Sandro died of peritonitis at the tragically early age of thirty-six and was buried in Sofia, the capital of what had once been his Bulgarian princedom. The year following his death, all hope finally abandoned, Moretta became engaged to Prince Adolf zu Schaumburg-Lippe, whom she later married. Ten years after his death, at
the age of sixty-one, she married Alexander Zubkov, a Russian half her age who, after squandering her fortune, deserted her, leaving her penniless. She died two years later in 1929, disowned by her family.

  Irene Adler also died tragically young, although the date and cause of death are not known. Writing an account of the events of March 1889, published just over two years later in July 1891 under the title ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, Watson refers to her as ‘the late Irene Adler’ but gives no further details. Perhaps the full facts were unknown to him.

  Like Prince Alexander, Count Herbert von Bismarck also retired from public life, but not through any scandal involving an opera singer. On 10th March 1890, a mere year after his meeting with Sherlock Holmes, his father, Prince Otto von Bismarck, was forced to resign by the arrogant young German emperor, Wilhelm II, who had grown tired, as he himself expressed it, of being treated like a schoolboy by his elderly chancellor. Both he and his son went into retirement, Prince Otto dying in 1898, Count Herbert in 1904.

  As for Wilhelm II, perhaps better known as Kaiser Bill, his fate closely mirrored that of his chancellor. After the defeat of the German armies by the Allies in 1918 at the end of the First World War, he was obliged to abdicate and went into exile in Holland, where he spent the next twenty-two years of his life, dying in 1941 at the age of eighty-two, in time to witness the rise of Hitler and the outbreak of the Second World War but not the fall of the Third Reich and the second defeat of Germany in twenty-seven years.