THE LITTLE KAISERS
As the king idea seems inseparably connected with war there is no
country in the world where kings and princes have been held in
such great account as in the Central Empires.
I believe there are only two Christian kings in the world--the
kings of Italy and of Montenegro--who are not by blood related to
some German or Austrian royalty.
For remember that while we think of Germany as ruled by the
Kaiser and while it is his will that is certainly imposed upon
the whole of that territory which does not exist politically or
even geographically but which we call Germany, there are houses
of royalty in it almost as numerous as our big corporations.
There are the three kings of Bavaria, Würtemburg and Saxony,
grand dukes and dukes, and princes, all of them taking themselves
very seriously and all of them residing in their own domains;
jealously keeping away from the Emperor's court and jealously
guarding every remnant of rule which the constitution of the
German Empire has bequeathed to them.
Once I asked one of these princelings what his older brother, the
reigning prince, did with his time in the small provincial town
which is the capital of the principality. The brother looked at
me with real surprise in his eyes and answered, "Why he reigns!"
Before the constitution of the German Empire, many of these
poverty-stricken little courts were centres of kindly amusement,
even of intellectual life.
The court of the Grand Duke Charles-Augustus, of
Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach at Weimar where Goethe resided and where he
was entrusted with responsible state duties, was renowned in
Europe as a literary centre.
Many of these princelings, however ridiculous their courts may
have seemed, exercised despotic power. To-day the inhabitants of
the two Mecklenburg duchies are protected by neither constitution
nor bill of rights. The grand duke's power is absolute and he can
behead at will any one of his subjects in the market-place or
torture him to death in the dungeons of the castle and is
responsible to God alone.
Here is an example from history. George Louis, Duke of
Brunswick-Luneburg-Celle, married his mistress, a Huguenot girl
called Eleanore d'Olbreuze. They had one daughter, Sophia
Dorothea, who married the Elector of Hanover, who was also George
I of England. Sophia Dorothea was supposed to have been involved
in a love affair with a Swedish Count, Philip Konigsmarck.
Konigsmarck was murdered by order of George I, and Sophia
Dorothea incarcerated in Ahlden where she died in 1726.
Konigsmarck's sister went to Saxony to beg the aid of the Saxon
King, Augustus the Strong. She failed to get news of her brother,
but became one of the mistresses of Augustus the Strong and the
mother of the celebrated Marshal Saxe. I say one of the
"mistresses" of Augustus the Strong because he boasted that he
was the father of 365 illegitimate children!
The daughter of Sophia Dorothea was the mother of Frederick the
Great and his brothers, and therefore, an ancestor of the present
German Kaiser. Any one writing about her in a disparaging manner
is subject to be imprisoned, under the decisions of the Imperial
Supreme Court, for "lèse-majesté" or injuring the person of the
present monarch in daring to slander his ancestors. And, I
suppose, any one referring to Augustus the Strong may be shut up
in Dresden for insulting a predecessor of the present King.
Every year the nobles of the Central Empires hold a convention at
Frankfort, where the means are discussed by which their
privileges may be preserved. No newspaper prints an account of
this Convention of the highest Caste.
The German peasants, as far as I have seen, are not so much under
the dominion of feudal tradition as are the peasants in Austria
and Hungary.
I was shooting once with a Hungarian Count who stationed me in
one corner of a field to await the partridges, which driven by
the beaters were expected to fly over my head and as I stood
waiting for the beaters to take up their positions two peasant
girls walked past me. One of them, to my surprise, caught hold of
my hand, which she kissed with true feudal devotion. As a guest
of the Count I was presumably of the noble class and therefore
entitled by custom and right to this mark of subjugation. And it
became quite a task in walking through the halls of the castle to
dodge the servants, all of whom seemed anxious to imprint on me
the kiss of homage.
Thackeray in the "Fitzboodle Confessions" gives a most amusing
account of life in one of these small, sleepy, German courts and
relates how he left Pumpernickel hurriedly, by night, after the
court ball where he had discovered not only that his German
fiancée had eaten too much, but that she had a taste for bad
oysters.
All of these small kings and princes are jealous of the King of
Prussia and of his position of German Emperor and show their
jealousy by avoiding Berlin.
In October, 1913, when in London on my way to Germany, I met the
young Grand Duke of Mecklenburg Strelitz in the Ritz Hotel where
he was dining with an English earl and his beautiful wife. As I
happened to have a box for the Gaiety Theatre, we all went there
together and paid a visit to George Grossmith behind the scenes
and talked with Emmy Wehlen, the Austrian actress, who was
appearing in the comic opera then running. But in all the time
that I was in Germany I never once saw or heard of the young
Grand Duke who rules the subjects of his duchy with autocratic
rule without even the semblance of a constitution.
Formerly our minister used to be accredited to some of these
courts and, on inquiring informally through a friend, I learned
that the American Minister is still accredited to Bavaria on the
records of the Bavarian Foreign Office, no letters of recall ever
having been presented. The fact that the American Ambassador is
accredited to none of these courts is a distinct disadvantage
because without letters of credence he does not come into contact
with any of the twenty-four rulers of Germany who control the
Bundesrat in which their representatives sit, voting as they are
told by the kings, grand dukes and princes. A number of these
kings and princelings, combining in the Bundesrat, can outvote
the powerful king of Prussia. But they don't dare!