I am thoroughly aware that the point which is likely to excite the
attention of my readers to a greater degree than any other in the
previous chapter, is the reference contained therein to the tyranny
exercised by the monarchs of the Old World upon their relatives. In
fact, it is far better in Europe to be a mere subject than a kinsman
or kinswoman of the sovereign.
Even the lowliest of the lieges of the anointed of the Lord has
certain constitutional rights and prerogatives which may be said
to safeguard him from oppression and persecution, but princes and
princesses of the blood have no such rights, and are exposed to every
caprice and every whim of the head of their family, defiance of whose
wishes entails exile, loss of property, even poverty and outlawry,
without any redress.
Royal and imperial personages, in addition to being subjected to
the ordinary laws of the land, are expected to yield blind and
unquestioned obedience to another code, comprising what are officially
styled the "Family Statutes" of the dynasty to which they belong.
These are administered by the head of the family, who is free to
construe them as he sees fit, and while they are binding upon the
members of his house, they in no way can be said to constitute any
limitation to the exercise of his authority. In fact, the latter is
absolutely unrestricted, and extends to every phase of the life of a
royal personage. Thus, a prince or princess of the blood is debarred
from contracting a marriage without the consent of the sovereign, and
if any union has taken place without the sanction of the head of the
family, it is regarded, not only at court, but even by the tribunals
of the land, as invalid, and children that may be born of the marriage
bear the stigma of illegitimacy. If a marriage has received the full
authorization of the ruler, and there is any issue, the children
cannot be educated without the sovereign's wishes being consulted.
The parents, in fact, are regarded much as if they were either minors,
outlaws, or demented people, unfitted to be entrusted with the control
and bringing up of their offspring, for the sovereign is _ex officio_
the guardian of all children who are under age, belonging to the
married members of his family, and his rights over the children are
superior to those of the latter's father and mother.
If the boy is to have a tutor, or the girl a governess, the
appointment cannot be made by the parents without their previously
obtaining the permission of the sovereign, and he has it in his power
to reject their nominee, and to assign some candidate of his own,
who may possibly be regarded as most objectionable to the unfortunate
parents, for the duty of taking charge of the education of the young
people in question. The royal or imperial mother, indeed, may esteem
herself fortunate if the sovereign does not insist on personally
selecting the nurses of her infants: when the present kaiser was
born, not merely the late Empress Augusta, but likewise all the other
members of the reigning house of Prussia, and of the Court of Berlin,
thought it quite right and natural that the old Emperor William should
exercise his authority for the purpose of prohibiting the young mother
from herself nursing her baby; on the ground that it was contrary to
the traditions of the House of Hohenzollern, and a quite undignified
proceeding. Fortunately, the late Emperor Frederick, who had spent
much of his time at the court of his mother-in-law, Queen Victoria,
and who was aware that she had nursed every one of her numerous
children herself, without permitting this motherly duty to interfere
with the arduous official business of the State, expostulated with
his father, and persuaded him to withdraw his prohibition, much to the
horror of the courtiers, and greatly to the satisfaction of the royal
lady, who is now Empress Frederick.
In Austria one of the principal sources of the domestic unhappiness
of the lamented Empress of Austria, was the small voice that she was
allowed by the sovereign--her husband--to have in the management and
the control of her own children, as long as her mother-in-law, the
late Archduchess Sophia, was alive. It was only after the demise of
the archduchess that Empress Elizabeth first realized in their full
measure the joys of motherhood.
While on the subject of Austria, I may cite the case of the widowed
Crown Princess Stephanie as another illustration of the extent to
which royal parents are deprived of all authority over their children.
Thus when Crown Prince Rudolph died at Mayerling, his little
daughter, at that time barely six years of age, was assigned to the
guardianship, not of her widowed mother, but of her grandfather. A
very general belief prevails that this arrangement about the care of
the little Archduchess Elizabeth, was due to a piece of animosity on
the part of the ill-fated crown prince against his wife, and I have
seen it stated in print that he had left a will confiding his only
child to his father, and directing that its mother should be allowed
no voice in its education. There is no official authority for any such
statement, but no matter whether the crown prince expressed any such
testamentary wish or not, the fact remains that at his death his child
was bound by the statutes of the House of Hapsburg, to become the ward
of the sovereign, who in this case happened to be her grandfather.
Gentle and soft-hearted as is Emperor Francis-Joseph, he nevertheless
exercised his authority over his grandchild in a way that cannot but
have been galling in the extreme to its mother, a way, in fact, which
I imagine would be beyond the endurance of any American woman. Thus
he insisted upon himself appointing and selecting her governesses and
teachers; he nominated her entire household without consulting her
mother, and its members, as well as the girl's instructors made their
reports not to Crown Princess Stephanie, but to him, from whom, also,
they alone took their instructions.
It was the emperor who decided where his grandchild was to stay, where
she was to spend this part of the year, and where another season, and
finally he strictly prohibited her from leaving his dominions. The
position of the Crown Princess of Austria since the death of her
husband has been so extremely unpleasant and painful, that she has
spent much of her time--indeed, at least nine months of the year--in
foreign travel. The imperial family, the court and the people, hold
her responsible for that domestic wretchedness which drove her so
universally popular husband to his tragic death at Mayerling. Of
a jealous disposition and of a temper that even at its best is
difficult, she is generally understood to have driven him by her
violence and injustice to seek, away from his home, the pleasures that
he could not find by his own fireside.
It had been known that she had been strangely lacking in dignity in
her complaints concerning his behavior, and after his death she gave
cruel offence both to his parents and to the people of her adopted
country by her indifference to his terrible fate, and by the frivolity
with which she bore her widowhood, not a little of which was spent
at the gaming tables of Monte-Carlo in the gayest mourning costumes
possible; a circumstance which horrified Queen Victoria, who was at
that time at Nice, and naturally cruelly embittered the bereaved and
sorrowing mother, Empress Elizabeth, who, robed in deepest black,
was at Cap-Martin, endeavoring to recover her health, which had been
absolutely shattered by the tragedy.
All these things led to the crown princess being regarded with deep
disfavor in Austria. Difficulties were raised with regard to her rank
and precedence at court, and the animosity manifested towards her was
such at Vienna, and elsewhere in the dual empire, that she found it
preferable to spend the greater part of her time abroad. She was not,
however, permitted to take her little daughter with her, and thus the
young archduchess may be said to have grown up altogether away from
her mother, whom she saw for barely two months of the year, and then
more as a visitor and a stranger, than as a relative who had any voice
in the ordering of her life.
If, then, this control of the minor princes and princesses of his
dynasty is insisted upon to such an extent by the aged Emperor of
Austria, the kindliest, most warm-hearted and sympathetic of old men,
always prone to patient forbearance and indulgence, it will be readily
understood that it is exercised to its fullest extent by Emperor
William, in whose character the tendency to autocracy, and the spirit
of command, is far more developed than in his brother monarch. Indeed,
he not only claims the right to act as the chief guardian of the
junior members of the reigning house of Prussia, of which he is the
head, but likewise of the children of all those sovereign families of
Germany which have acknowledged him as their emperor. Thus he insisted
upon having entire control of his young cousin, the only son of
the reigning Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, declaring that his own
authority must be substituted for that of the lad's father, in spite
of the latter being himself a reigning sovereign, and an ally rather
than a vassal.
The tragic fate of the young prince will be too fresh in the memory of
my readers to need more than passing reference here. The boy, removed
from parental care, was transferred by Emperor William to Berlin, with
the avowed purpose of being under his own imperial eye. Unfortunately,
the duties and occupations of William are so multifarious that he was
unable to fulfil his very excellent intentions with regard to Prince
Alfred. The latter fell into bad hands, squandered large sums of
money at cards, became involved in pecuniary difficulties, and in
his endeavors to retrieve them, sunk deeper and deeper into the mire,
until finally Emperor William, suddenly alive to the results of his
wholly-unintentional neglect of the royal lad, sent him back to
his heart-broken parents, discredited, implicated in all sorts of
unpleasant gambling transactions, and shattered alike in health and
mind. In the midst of their silver-wedding festivities, they were
forced to send their only boy off to a sanitarium in Austria, where,
in spite of the close restraint under which he was kept, he managed
to put an end to his life, only a few days after his arrival, prompted
thereto by either physical or mental agony, no one knows which.
Small wonder, when it became necessary to find a likely successor to
the present reigning Duke of Saxe-Coburg, and his younger brother,
Prince Arthur of Great Britain, Duke of Connaught, was proclaimed
heir, that the prince decided that it would be preferable to sacrifice
his rights to this throne, rather than his rights over his only son.
On being given to understand that if he accepted the position of heir
apparent, his sixteen-year-old boy would become the ward of Emperor
William, and that the authority of the kaiser would be superior to his
own over the lad, Prince Arthur declined to have anything to do with
the Saxe-Coburg succession, and abandoned both his own claims thereto
and those of his son, in favor of his young nephew, the fatherless
Duke of Albany. It was precisely on the same ground that the Duke of
Cumberland declined to complete the agreement whereby a reconciliation
was to be effected between himself and the kaiser. Born crown prince
of the now defunct Kingdom of Hanover, he should have succeeded to the
throne of the Duchy of Brunswick on the death of his kinsman, the late
Duke of Brunswick, in 1884. The German Emperor, however, decided that
he could not be permitted to take possession of the sovereignty of the
duchy, nor to assume the status of one of the federal rulers of the
confederation known as the German Empire, unless he recognized the
latter, as now constituted, that is to say with his father's Kingdom
of Hanover incorporated with Prussia. For a long time he refused to
do this, but was ultimately persuaded by his brother-in-law, the late
czar, and the Prince of Wales, to consent to a reconciliation
with Prussia, and to accept the present condition of affairs. The
arrangements were on the eve of being completed when a conflict arose
between the duke and the kaiser, as to the education of the former's
eldest son, Prince George. The duke wished to send him to the Vizhum
College, at Dresden, where so many members of the sovereign families,
and of the great houses of the nobility, have received their
instruction, while the kaiser objected to this particular school on
the ground that its teachings were calculated to increase instead
of to diminish particularist and anti-Prussian sentiments. The duke
thereupon declared that he alone was competent to judge and determine
how his boy should be educated, whereupon the kaiser put forth his
pretension to the guardianship of all the junior members of the
sovereign houses comprised in the German Empire. Rather than consent
to this, the Duke of Cumberland, who has inherited much of the
obstinacy for which his great-grandfather, King George III. of Great
Britain, was so celebrated, broke off all negotiations with Emperor
William, and refused to have anything more to do with him, for, like
his cousin, the Duke of Connaught, he would rather sacrifice his
rights to a German throne than his parental rights over a much-loved
boy.
But the despotism of the monarchs of the Old World is by no means
restricted to this question of the control and custody of the junior
members of their respective families. Every prince and princess of
the latter, no matter what his or her age, or superiority in point of
years to the sovereign may be, is subjected to the will of the head
of the house. For instance, no Russian grand duke or grand duchess can
leave the Muscovite empire without previously asking and obtaining the
permission of the czar, and in the same way, the Austrian
archdukes and archduchesses have to crave the sanction of Emperor
Francis-Joseph, and the Prussian princes and princesses, that of the
kaiser, before they can leave their respective countries for a foreign
trip. Even Empress Frederick is compelled to obtain the permission
of her son, the emperor, before taking her departure from Germany for
England or Italy, and a few years ago when quietly enjoying herself in
Paris, she was forced by a peremptory command from her son to suddenly
cut short her stay in the French capital, and to betake herself to
England.
To such an extent is this despotism carried that when Prince Henry
of Prussia was stationed at Kiel, he had to ask his elder brother's
permission before he could run up to Berlin, although Kiel is only
a few hours' trip from the capital; and, as stated in the previous
chapter, Princess Charlotte of Saxe-Meiningen and her husband,
are kept at Breslau, except when their brother William graciously
condescends to permit them to leave their home. Two years ago the
emperor, for reasons which can only be surmised, and which were of
a personal rather than of a political character--of which more
anon--suddenly ordered his only brother Henry off to China, and a
little later, possibly with the object of showing to the world that
his authority extended to the ladies of his house, as well as to the
men, he directed Princess Henry to join her husband at Hong Kong. As
the two little boys of the princess are exceedingly delicate, owing
possibly to the fact that their parents are first cousins, the poor
mother was very reluctant to undertake the trip, but she was forced
by the emperor to go, and had scarcely reached Hong Kong before
she learnt by cable that both her little ones were prostrated by a
terrible attack of diphtheria. She was not, however, permitted to
return, but was kept out in China away from her children until late
in the spring, and reached home well on towards autumn, to find her
little ones--the youngest was but two years old--more delicate than
ever, but fortunately alive.
In the memoirs of Bismarck published by Dr. Busch, there is reproduced
one of Emperor William's letters, written prior to his accession
to the throne, in the course of which he asks the great chancellor
whether he approves of his "commanding" (the German word is
"_befehlen_") his brother Prince Henry to make certain inquiries of
the late Prince Alexander of Battenberg. William in this letter does
not talk of "requesting" his brother, but of ordering him to do this.
If then William, as crown prince, already took upon himself the right
of ordering his brother and his sisters to do this and to do that, it
may be readily imagined that he is not less peremptory in his dealings
with them now that he is their emperor and king.
If they disobey him, he has various means of punishment at his
command. He can banish them from court for a long term; he can
deprive them temporarily, or for all time, of the prerogatives, the
privileges, and the honors due to their rank; he can suspend their
allowances from the national treasury, or from the family property,
or can stop it altogether; he can take from them the control of any
estates which they may have inherited, and confide the administration
thereof to curators appointed for the purpose; finally, he can subject
them to various forms of arrest, as he once did in the case of his
brother-in-law, Prince Frederick-Leopold; while in very extreme cases
he can place the offending relative under restraint in an asylum for
the insane on the pretext of dementia, as has been done in the case
of Princess Louise of Coburg, daughter of King Leopold of Belgium,
and mother of Princess "Dolly" of Coburg, who is now the wife of Duke
Ernest-Gunther of Schleswig-Holstein.
"_Aux arrêts_," or confinement to one's quarters, is the most common
form of punishment inflicted by Old World monarchs upon those of their
kith and kin who have failed to comply with their behests, and there
is scarcely a single sovereign or prince of the blood, who has not
been subjected to this species of discipline at one time or another of
his career. Thus the late Emperor Frederick, prior to his accession
to the throne, but long after his marriage, was sentenced to several
weeks' detention in his palace under strict arrest, as a punishment
for a little joke which he had played during the course of a military
inspection.
He had been protesting for a long time against the tightness of the
uniforms, and of the belts of the rank and file of the infantry,
declaring that it impeded the movements and play of the muscles of the
men, to such an extent as to deprive them of more than fifty per cent,
of their usefulness. One day, during an inspection of the division of
guards at Potsdam, while the troops happened to be standing at ease,
he walked along the front rank of the first regiment, accompanied by
a number of officers, with whom he had just been discussing this very
question of equipment; suddenly, he stopped short in his walk, and
extracting a piece of gold from his pocket, dropped it on the ground,
and told the men nearest him to pick it up, adding that whoever got
hold of it first, might keep it! Several of them made frantic attempts
to bend down in order to get the money, but so tight were their
uniforms and belts that they found it absolutely impossible to reach,
the coin, which Emperor Frederick ultimately picked up himself, and
handed to them.
"And how do you expect to win battles with soldiers hampered to such
an extent as that in their movements?" he exclaimed contemptuously
to the officers around him. "What greater demonstration than this is
needed to prove the justice of my argument?"
The incident was reported to the then Minister of War, who immediately
lodged a complaint with Frederick's father, the result being that
"Unser Fritz," at that time Crown Prince of Prussia, was placed by old
Emperor William for several weeks under arrest in his palace!
Prince Rupert of Bavaria, the heir apparent to the ancient throne of
the Wittelsbachs, was sentenced by his grandfather, the prince regent,
to no less than three months' close arrest in his quarters at Munich,
for having left the kingdom without permission, in order to spend
three days at Paris, in fair but frail company; while the widowed
Duchess of Aosta on one occasion was placed under arrest in her palace
of Turin by her brother-in-law, King Humbert, because she had ventured
to appear in public on her wheel wearing a pair of bloomers!
Prince and Princess Frederick-Leopold, the latter a younger sister of
the Empress of Germany, have both been condemned on several occasions
by the kaiser to close confinement in their palace under the most
stringent kind of arrest, for having disobeyed his majesty's commands
with regard to the management of their household. Duke Ernest-Gunther
of Schleswig-Holstein, the brother of the empress, has been subjected
to more numerous orders of arrest by his imperial kinsman than any
prince of the blood now living.
Severe as are European monarchs nowadays in punishing the disobedience
of the members of their families, they do not, however, venture any
longer to proceed to such extremities as the father of Frederick the
Great, who when the latter was still crown prince, cast his son into
prison, and ordered him to be shot, merely because he discovered
that he was about to leave the kingdom without his permission for the
purpose of undertaking a trip to England; and there is no doubt that
the crown prince would have been put to death, and thus shared the
fate of his two aids-de-camp, who were beheaded before his very
eyes, in the fortress prison of Küstrin, had it not been for the
intervention of the ambassadors of Austria, Great Britain, Russia and
France in behalf of his royal highness.
Yet another phase of this despotism, which the two kaisers,--namely
their majesties of Germany and of Austria,--exercise over the members
of their respective families, is the right which they claim to select
and appoint the officers and ladies-in-waiting of every prince and
princess of the blood. In order to appreciate what this means it
must be explained that it is not merely contrary to etiquette, but
absolutely forbidden by the rules and regulations instituted by
Emperor William and his brother sovereigns, that any such princes or
princesses should venture to appear anywhere in public without being
escorted either by a gentleman or a lady-in-waiting. These attendants,
who are, it is needless to state, of noble birth, may be said to
constitute the very shadow of the personage to whose household they
are attached. In fact a royal or imperial prince or princess cannot
even cross the street, far less leave home for a ride, a drive, a
walk, or for the purpose of paying a visit, or of doing some shopping
without being escorted, if a prince, by a gentleman-in-waiting, and
if a princess, by a lady-in-waiting, and possibly by a chamberlain as
well.
Nor are the duties of the ladies and gentlemen-in-waiting confined to
attendance upon their royal charges in public, for they form part and
parcel of the royal or imperial household to which they are attached,
and if they do not occupy quarters in the palace, at any rate they
take all their meals there, since their duties commence in the early
morning, and only cease late at night.
Now, human shadows of this kind are all very well when one is at
liberty to choose them one's self; but it is very different when
one has no voice whatsoever in the matter, and when one is forced to
submit to close and intimate attendance of this kind by ladies and
gentlemen whom one neither likes nor trusts. In such cases as these,
the gentlemen or ladies-in-waiting are apt to be regarded in the
light of spies by their royal charges, and as people appointed by the
sovereign to keep watch upon their actions. It is probable that no
one has suffered so cruelly in this connection as the widowed
Empress Frederick of Germany. Possessed of extremely liberal views in
political matters--ideas which she imparted to her consort, she found
herself, within a few years after her marriage, in complete opposition
to Prince Bismarck. The latter regarded her as a very dangerous
opponent, and responded to her openly avowed disapproval of his
political methods by using his influence with her father-in-law, old
Emperor William, urging him to interfere with her management of
her children; and above all, to appoint as members of her household
personages with whom she could have no possible sympathy, political
or otherwise, and who were, in every sense of the word, devoted to
the Iron Chancellor. In fact, Prince Bismarck acknowledges in his
reminiscences, as published by his Boswell, Dr. Busch, that he caused
the crown princess--as Empress Frederick was then--to shed many a
bitter tear, by his interference, through her father-in-law, in her
domestic affairs.
Bismarck made no secret of his enmity towards Empress Frederick and
her husband before the latter ascended the throne, and it is on record
that he even officially insisted that secrets of state should not be
confided to "Unser Fritz," for fear that the latter's consort might
communicate them to her English relatives. He even went so far as to
accuse her of having, during the war of 1870, betrayed to non-German
relatives Prussian military secrets, which were used by the French
against her adopted country, and served to prolong the conflict. These
odious charges, "_which have been abundantly disproved_" and for which
"_there was not even the shadow of a foundation_," are merely referred
to here in order to show the intense bitterness of the personal
animosity entertained by the chancellor towards Empress Frederick. Yet
it was he, Bismarck, who, through the old emperor, had the right of
selecting and nominating, not merely the instructors and attendants of
her boys, but her own gentlemen and ladies-in-waiting--nay, even the
physicians and surgeons to be called in cases of illness.