THE CROWN PRINCE'S REGENCY
In the January of 1874 the Crown Princess went to Russia to be present
at the marriage of her brother, the Duke of Edinburgh, with the Grand
Duchess Marie Alexandrovna. Unlike most Royal personages, many of whom
regard such functions as weddings as duties to be endured, the Crown
Princess thoroughly enjoyed the experience. The Emperor Alexander was
charmed with her cleverness and enthusiasm, and gave her a ruby
bracelet, which she was fond of wearing to the end of her life.
The Princess had the pleasure of entertaining the Prince and Princess of
Wales on their way home from St. Petersburg. It was the first time the
Princess of Wales had appeared at the Prussian Court since the War of
the Duchies, and her wonderful beauty and charm of manner greatly
impressed all those who were brought in contact with her.
The Crown Princess gave a splendid fancy dress ball at the New Palace in
February, 1874. To some who were present it recalled the costume ball
given by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert at Buckingham Palace nearly
thirty years before. The Crown Princess, who was devoted to Italy and
to Italian art, decided that the entertainment should be known as the
Venetian Fête. She herself wore a replica of the dress in which Leonora
Conzaga was painted by Titian. Later there was painted by von Angeli a
portrait of the Crown Princess in this dress.
The Crown Prince and Princess spent the spring of 1875 in Italy,
including a long stay in Venice. There they entertained the painter
Anton von Werner, who has left an enthusiastic account of their visit.
He records that the Princess drew and painted with real industry, now
sketching the unequalled treasures of the past, now studying the effects
of light or shade on the canals or in the square of St. Mark's. The
painter was astonished, not only at the Princess's powers of technique,
but also at her artistic sympathy and feeling. She seemed to know
intuitively what would make a fine sketch. On the evening of her
departure, he says, this artist Princess carried away with her an
unforgettable picture. The Grand Canal was covered with a fleet of
gondolas, each lighted with torches, while the full moon shed her
radiance over the noble palaces and the Rialto Bridge.
Von Werner adds that the Princess, in spite of the many claims on her
time, had since that time persevered in all her artistic studies, and he
particularly mentions von Angeli, Wilberg, Lutteroth and Albert Hertel,
as painters who helped and inspired her. She did life-sized portraits
of her children, Prince William and the Hereditary Princess of
Saxe-Meiningen, in addition to numerous pencil and water-colour sketches
of really remarkable artistic merit.
In the October of that year the Crown Prince, in a long letter to his
old friend, Prince Charles of Roumania, mentions that the Princess is
more industrious and successful than ever in painting and drawing, and
does marvels in the way of portraits. He also describes how his wife led
her Hussar regiment past the King. She did it, he says, magnificently,
and looked extremely well in her simple yet becoming uniform.
The Crown Princess was of great assistance to her husband in his scheme
of adding a Royal Mausoleum to the Berlin Cathedral, which should be a
kind of Pantheon of the House of Hohenzollern. There were to be statues
of all the Electoral Princes and Kings, with inscriptions relating the
history and exploits of each. This involved a great deal of historical
research, of which the Princess took her share, as also in the
composition of the more detailed historical memoirs or character
sketches of his ancestors to which the Crown Prince also devoted
himself.
A visit to Scheveningen in 1876 enabled the Crown Princess to study,
much to her delight, the historical and artistic treasures of the old
cities of Holland.
It will be remembered that the Crown Princess, many years before, had
had scruples about her husband's association with Freemasonry. She was
perhaps reassured by a speech which he delivered in July, 1876, when
Prince Frederick of the Netherlands celebrated his sixtieth anniversary
as Grand Master. Freemasonry, he declared, aimed at love, freedom, and
tolerance, without regard to national divisions, and he hoped it might
be victorious in the struggle for intellect and liberty. This speech is
particularly interesting because, only two years before, the Crown
Prince had resigned his office in Grand Lodge in Berlin owing to the
opposition he encountered in striving to carry out certain reforms in
the craft.
1877 was an eventful year in the Prussian Imperial family. In February,
Prince William received his commission in the Foot Guards; Princess
Charlotte was betrothed to the Hereditary Prince Bernhard of
Saxe-Meiningen; and Prince Henry made his formal entry into the Navy.
In April of this year it became known that Bismarck had made one of his
not infrequent threats to resign, and Bucher wrote to Busch to tell him
the news: "It is not a question of leave of absence," he said, "but a
peremptory demand to be allowed to retire. The reason: Augusta, who
influences her aging consort, and conspires with Victoria (the Crown
Princess)."
The year 1878 opened brightly for the Crown Princess, for in February
her eldest daughter, Princess Charlotte, was married to Prince Bernhard
of Saxe-Meiningen. Prince Bismarck, however, excused himself from
appearing at the ceremony on the pretext of ill-health.
It was at this marriage, the first of the Crown Princess's family
weddings, that her brother, the Duke of Connaught, made the acquaintance
of his future wife.
In the month of May came the attempted assassination of the Emperor by a
youth called Hodel. The Emperor then had a marvellous escape, but on
June 2, which happened to be a Sunday, the aged Sovereign was driving
down Unter den Linden when, from an upper window of an inn called "The
Three Ravens," Nobeling, a Socialist, fired two charges of buckshot into
the Emperor's head and shoulders. Violent hæmorrhage set in, and for
some hours it was said, first, that he was dead, and secondly, that if
not dead he could not survive the day.
The Crown Prince and Princess were then in England, and the news reached
them at Hatfield, where they were staying with Lord and Lady Salisbury.
Within a very short time of the receipt of the telegram, they started
for Berlin, finding on their arrival that the Emperor had recovered
sufficiently to sign an order conferring the Regency on the Crown
Prince.
The Regency was hardly more than titular, for the old Emperor stipulated
that his son was only to "represent" him, and that the government was to
be carried on as before in accordance with the Emperor's known views. As
to that, Bismarck had his own ideas, and he succeeded in overcoming the
Crown Prince's natural hesitation at accepting such a position.
Nevertheless, it was an extraordinarily sudden and dramatic change in
the whole position of the Crown Prince and Princess. In the first place
it absolutely put an end to the plan, which had been seriously discussed
and on the whole approved by Bismarck, that the Crown Prince should
become Governor-General or Lieutenant-Governor of Alsace-Lorraine.
Obviously this scheme was no longer practical. The Emperor was old and
his wound was serious; the accession of his son seemed imminent.
It is curious to recall that, so far back as January, 1862, Queen
Augusta, speaking to Prince Hohenlohe, had observed: "The King and I are
old people: we can hardly hope to do more than work for the future. But
I wish we could look forward to a happier state of things for our son."
She was destined to live thirty years longer, and to survive the son to
whom she ever proved herself a loyal and devoted mother, while her
husband, whom even then she described as old, was destined to live more
than another quarter of a century--almost as long, in fact, as the son
who succeeded him for so tragically brief a reign.
But now, in 1878, it seemed as if the Crown Prince, even in the unlikely
event of his father's recovery from his wound, must become virtual ruler
of the German Empire.
A very few days, however, made it clear that Bismarck was determined to
allow the new Regent as little authority as possible beyond that
conferred by the signing of State documents, and that he was to have no
practical influence on foreign politics. But fortune, then as always,
seemed to single out Bismarck for special favour, for in the
all-important matter of Russo-German relations the Crown Prince was far
easier to manage, in so far as any management of him was necessary, than
the old Emperor, who was fondly attached to his nephew, the Tsar
Alexander II.
Those months, during which the Crown Prince exercised in theory a power
which he certainly did not possess in reality, were among the most
trying of all the trying months the Crown Princess ever passed through,
the more so that the Berlin Congress, which she and the Prince had gone
to England to avoid, opened on June 13. Among those who sojourned in
Berlin during those eventful days, and whose presence must have been a
pleasure to the Princess, were Lord and Lady Salisbury.
But during the Congress the Crown Prince and Princess kept rigidly apart
from even its social functions, the only exception being that the Crown
Prince gave an official dinner in the King's name to the
plenipotentiaries. The Crown Princess stayed out at Potsdam, while the
Empress refused to appear in any official way; she treated her son
entirely as if he were already Emperor.
Most serious was the sharp division caused between the father and son by
the decisions of the Congress. The Crown Prince, who had a life long
dislike and suspicion of Russia and of Russian state-craft, was supposed
to have favoured England, and the old Emperor, to the very end of his
life, considered that Germany had not done as well at the Congress as
she should have done. He ascribed the fact--probably most unfairly--to
the Crown Prince instead of to Bismarck.
Meanwhile, all kinds of gossip were rife as to the Crown Princess's
efforts to influence her husband, for by the public at large the Regent
was regarded as all-powerful.
To give an example of how the Princess was misunderstood and misjudged;
when Hodel attacked the Emperor, the latter declared that he did not
wish the full severity of the law to be exercised. But when Nobeling's
far more serious attempt at assassination followed, public opinion
demanded that Hodel should be condemned to death. The Crown Prince, as
Regent, had to sign the death warrant, and it became known that he had
told a personal friend how very painful it was to him to sign it. It
was widely believed that this over-scrupulousness, for so the good
Berliners considered it, was due to the influence of the Crown Princess;
yet as a matter of fact she had been, from the first, of opinion that
Hodel, who had certainly meant to kill his Sovereign, should be
executed.
In spite, however, of Bismarck's determination to make him a cypher, the
Crown Prince did not allow himself to be put wholly in the background.
To the Minister's great annoyance, he opened a personal correspondence
with the new Pope, Leo XIII, in the hope of putting an end to the
Kulturkampf. Though at the time it did not seem as though the Prince had
succeeded, it laid the foundations for the ultimate solution of the
problem.
The Regent also appointed a certain Dr. Friedberg, a distinguished
Jewish jurist, who belonged to the Liberal party, to a very high
judicial post. Curiously enough, this was the only appointment the Crown
Prince made which was not afterwards revoked. The Emperor William I
retained Friedberg, but refused to bestow on him the Black Eagle even
after he had served for nine years in office. Ten years later, when the
Emperor Frederick was on his way home from San Remo after his father's
death, he received a Ministerial delegation at Leipzig, and, on seeing
Friedberg, he took the Black Eagle from his own neck and placed it about
that of his old friend.
By the end of the year, the Emperor was quite himself again. On a
certain memorable evening in December, he appeared at the Opera and was
the object of an extraordinary popular demonstration. The next day he
wrote an open letter to the Crown Prince, thanking him in the warmest
terms for the way in which he had fulfilled his duties as Regent.
It was rumoured at the time--it is difficult to know with what
truth--that the Crown Princess would have liked, after the recovery of
her father-in-law, that a special post should be created for her
husband. But, on his side, the Crown Prince said to an English friend
that he had no wish to find himself the fifth wheel of the coach, and
that he hated having only a semblance of authority.
During that visit to England which was so suddenly interrupted by
Nobeling's attempt on the Emperor, Mr. Goschen, the statesman whom Lord
Randolph Churchill afterwards "forgot" at the time of his dramatic
resignation, was asked to arrange a meeting between the Crown Prince and
Princess and George Eliot. The novelist thus describes the party in a
letter to a friend:
"The Royalties did themselves much credit. The Crown Prince is really a
grand-looking man, whose name you would ask for with expectation if you
imagined him no royalty. He is like a grand antique bust--cordial and
simple in manners withal, shaking hands, and insisting that I should let
him know when next we came to Berlin, just as if he had been a
Professor Gruppe, living _au troisième_. _She_ is equally good-natured
and unpretending, liking best to talk of nursing soldiers, and of what
her father's estate was in literature. We had a picked party to
dinner--the Dean of Westminster, the Bishop of Peterborough, Lord and
Lady Ripon, Dr. Lyon Playfair, Kinglake, Froude, Mrs. Ponsonby (Lord
Grey's granddaughter), and two or three more 'illustrations'; then a
small detachment coming in after dinner. It was really an interesting
occasion."
This was the kind of party which the Crown Princess thoroughly enjoyed,
though even then her shyness always struck those who met her for the
first time. On this occasion she opened her conversation with George
Eliot by saying, "You know my sister Louise?"--and George Eliot's
comment is "just as any other slightly embarrassed mortal might have
done."
On December 14, the anniversary of the Prince Consort's death, the Crown
Princess suffered another, and a hardly less terrible bereavement.
Her beloved sister, Princess Alice, Grand Duchess of Hesse, after losing
one child from diphtheria and devotedly nursing her husband and her
other children, herself fell a victim to the malady, the treatment of
which was not then so well understood as it is now. The sisters had been
fondly attached to one another from childhood, and after Princess
Alice's marriage the tie was drawn even closer. They had been
inseparable during the Franco-Prussian War, and for many years the
happiest days spent each year by the Crown Princess were those when she
was able to pay a flying visit to the Grand Duchess, or when the Grand
Duchess was able to spend a few days at Berlin or Potsdam.
But there was yet another and an even more bitter sorrow in store for
the Crown Princess. In March, 1879, her third son, Prince Waldemar, died
in his eleventh year. He was a clever, affectionate, merry-hearted boy,
and would have been his mother's favourite child, if she had allowed
herself to make differences between her children. Like the Princess
herself, he had been intellectually far in advance of his years, and he
had had as tutor a distinguished professor, Herr Delbrück, who succeeded
Treitschke in the Chair of History at the Berlin University, and
afterwards played a considerable part in German thought and even in
German politics.
It is shocking to have to record an example of the prejudice which was
even then still felt in certain circles in Germany against the bereaved
Crown Princess. A minister of the sect who called themselves the
Orthodox Protestants, when he heard of the death of the young Prince,
observed that he hoped it was a trial sent by God to humiliate her hard
heart. This monstrous utterance must have found its way into print, or
to the ears of some singularly ill-advised human being, for the
Princess came to know of it, and in her then state of anguish it gave
her more pain than perhaps even the minister himself would have wished
to inflict.
It was natural that the mother's heart should at this moment turn with
keen anxiety to her son, Prince Henry, who was then serving abroad in a
German warship. She imagined him in the midst of all sorts of perils,
and she begged the Emperor to allow him to return home at once. But the
Sovereign, though expressing kindly sympathy, was obliged, in view of
the rigid rules of the service, to refuse her petition, and the Princess
had to bear as best she could this addition to her burden.
At this time the Crown Princess's relations with Bismarck had undergone
some improvement. On February 23, 1879, Bismarck gave to Busch a most
unflattering picture of the old Emperor, but he described the Crown
Princess as unaffected and sincere, like her husband, "which her
mother-in-law is not." He observed that it was only family
considerations (the Coburger and the Augustenburger more than the uncle
in Hanover) that made the Crown Princess troublesome, formerly more so
than at present. "But she is honourable and has no pretensions."
It was thought that the Crown Princess was sadly in need of mental
change and refreshment after the two terrible blows which had deprived
her of her child and of her sister. She, therefore, went to stay in
Rome _incognito_ during the April of 1880, being only attended by a
lady-in-waiting and her "chambellan." To those of her English friends
whom she happened to meet she spoke constantly of her dead son, saying
that he had been the most promising of her children, and that she felt
as if she could never be resigned to her loss. In answer to a kindly
suggestion that she had so many duties to perform that she would soon be
taken out of herself, she said: "Ah, yes, there is much to do and one
cannot sit down with one's sorrow, but the mother who has lost her child
carries a heavy heart all her life."
During her stay in Rome, the Princess spent almost the whole of each day
in the picture galleries, and in the evening she generally dined with
some of her English friends and members of the diplomatic corps. As was
always her wont, she managed to see all the more interesting strangers
who were just then in Rome, many being asked to meet her at the British
Embassy. One night, when Lady Paget asked her whom she would like to
meet, she answered instantly: "Cardinal Howard and Mr. Story" (the
American sculptor). The Princess, however, could not stay as long in
Rome as she would have liked, for she had to hurry back to be present at
the Emperor's golden wedding festivities.
Fortunately for the Crown Princess, there came other thoughts to
distract her from her grief. She welcomed her first grandchild, the
Hereditary Princess of Saxe-Meiningen giving birth to a daughter, and in
April, 1880, her eldest son Prince William was betrothed to Princess
Victoria of the House of Schleswig-Holstein-Augustenburg, an alliance
entirely approved by his parents. The Crown Prince, in a letter to
Prince Charles of Roumania, said that it was really a love-match, and
that the young Princess possessed remarkable gifts of heart, mind, and
character, as well as a certain gracious dignity. It was also felt that
the marriage would be a sort of compensation to the Augustenburg family
for the loss of the Elbe Duchies.
In September, 1880, the Crown Princess had the joy of welcoming back
Prince Henry from his voyage round the world, and the marriage of Prince
William took place in February, 1881, amid universal rejoicings.
The Crown Princess's influence on the artistic life of Germany was shown
by a little incident connected with her eldest son's marriage. On the
occasion of the wedding the town of Berlin decorated the streets in a
particularly original and beautiful way, and other Prussian towns gave
the young people as a wedding present a really artistic table service.
The Crown Prince exclaimed: "And whom have we to thank that such things
can be done by us in Germany to-day? Not least my wife!"
In the following March, when the Crown Prince was in Russia attending
the funeral of Alexander II, who had been assassinated by Nihilists, the
Princess received an anonymous threatening letter, informing her that
her husband would also fall a victim to the Nihilists in the next few
hours. She was in a dreadful state of agitation until reassuring
telegrams arrived.
A son was born to Prince and Princess William on May 6, 1882, and the
old Emperor William telegraphed to the Crown Prince: "Praise and thanks
to God! Four generations of Kings living! What a rare event! May God
shield the mother and child!"
In November of the same year, the Crown Princess had a curious
conversation with Prince Hohenlohe, who thus records it:
"It may be that Christian consolation does not suffice one, but it is
better to keep this to oneself and think it over. Plato's dialogues and
the ancient tragedies she finds very consolatory. Much that she said was
true. But she is too incautious and hasty in her verdicts upon things
which are, after all, worthy of reverence."