EARLY WIDOWHOOD: THE FALL OF BISMARCK
It is said that one of the last acts of the dying Emperor was to place
Bismarck's hand in that of the Empress as a token of reconciliation. But
there was no reconciliation. On the contrary, the Emperor Frederick was
no sooner dead, than Bismarck once more became all-powerful, and
ruthlessly he used his power.
The accession of the young Emperor William was followed by an astounding
outburst of violence against the Empress Frederick on the part of
Bismarck's tools, his agents in the Press and elsewhere--indeed, the
Empress once told an intimate friend that no humiliation and pain which
could be inflicted on her had been spared her.
The first humiliation took a strange and terrible form; a cordon of
soldiers was drawn round the New Palace, when the Emperor Frederick was
known to be dying, in order that no secret documents might be removed
without the knowledge of the new Emperor.
The Empress, aware that this was the work of Bismarck, requested an
interview with him, but Bismarck replied that he had no time, as he was
so fully occupied with his master, the new Emperor. As a matter of
fact, everything at the New Palace which the late Emperor or the Empress
Frederick considered to be important had been placed out of Bismarck's
reach. For a considerable time these private papers were entrusted to
the care of a person in the Empress's confidence, who resided outside
the country, ultimately they were sent back to Germany.
Unfortunately not all the late Emperor's papers had been so carefully
guarded, and, to the anguish of his widow, his memory became involved in
acute, and it may even be said degrading, controversy.
In the well-known review, the _Deutsche Rundschau_, Dr. Geffcken, a
Liberal publicist who had been honoured by the Emperor Frederick's
friendship, published extracts from the diary of the late Sovereign.
They were designed to defend his memory against his traducers, and in
particular to prove that it was he who suggested the united German
Empire. It seems that the diaries were found locked up at the Villa
Zirio, and it was stated that they were given, or at least shown, by the
Emperor Frederick to Baron von Roggenbach, the Baden statesman.
Bismarck at first affected to believe, and apparently he succeeded in
persuading the Emperor William, that the published extracts were
forgeries. The offending number of the review was accordingly
suppressed, and Geffcken was arrested on September 29 on a charge of
high treason. He was acquitted of criminal intention in the following
January, and in the interval the _Cologne Gazette_ charged Sir Robert
Morier, then British Ambassador in St. Petersburg, with having given
information to Marshal Bazaine of the movements of the Prussian forces
in 1870. Fortunately Morier was able to produce convincing documentary
evidence of his innocence, but it was generally felt that this monstrous
attack on the Empress Frederick's old friend was really directed against
the Empress herself.
The Empress behaved with the greatest dignity and self-restraint during
this time of bitter persecution, and in the many diaries and memoirs of
the period we can find but one reference which reveals how she really
felt. This reference is in Sir Horace Rumbold's _Recollections_. He
tells of the deep feeling with which the Empress spoke of the suffering
she had passed through and the wrongs she had endured. "She spoke of
them with an exceeding bitterness, emphasising what she said with
clenched hands and betraying an emotion which suddenly gained me, and
more than explained the Queen's well-known reference to her as her 'dear
persecuted daughter.'"
It may be asked why the young Emperor William did not intervene to
protect his mother from the hostility of his Chancellor. Unfortunately
there is no doubt that at this time there was an estrangement between
mother and son. Years before, Bismarck had taken precautions to prevent
the heir presumptive to the throne from imbibing the liberal principles
of both his parents, and had caused him to spend the impressionable
years of early manhood entirely under the influence of his grandfather,
the old Emperor, and the military glories of the new Empire. Bismarck no
doubt thought that he had obtained a complete ascendancy over his new
master. It was significant that whereas on his accession the Emperor
Frederick had addressed his first message to the nation at large through
the Chancellor, the Emperor William addressed his first messages to the
Army and Navy, the civilians having to wait a day or two for their
recognition. Another indication of the character of the new régime was
afforded by the Emperor William's reversal of his father's decision to
name the New Palace, Friedrichskron.
These and other incidents show how the Emperor began his reign under the
domination of Bismarck, but it is pleasant to record that the
estrangement from his mother, which the old Chancellor undoubtedly
fostered, was not of long duration.
It is curious how seldom, among the many studies, criticisms, and
estimates of the Emperor William II, we find his extraordinary
versatility attributed to the influence of heredity; and yet it is easy
to see now that the Empress Frederick ought to have enjoyed much greater
popularity in Germany than she did as a matter of fact enjoy at any
time, if only because she was the mother of such a son.
We can best perhaps realise the remarkable qualities which the Empress
brought into the House of Hohenzollern by comparing her eldest son with
his predecessors on the throne. King Frederick William IV had a mind
which appeared incapable of appreciating matters of greater importance
than the etiquette of Courts and the prescriptions of mediæval heraldry.
As we know, during the last years of his life his intellect was clouded
much in the same way as was that of King George III of England. King
Frederick's brother and successor, the old Emperor William, possessed
remarkable strength of character combined with little capacity or
intellect, as Bismarck very frankly explained, both to his creature,
Busch, and in other recorded expressions of opinion. As for the Emperor
William's father, the ill-fated Frederick, it was no doubt from him that
the son derived that dash of romantic idealism characteristic of both
monarchs.
But undoubtedly William II was always much more the son of his mother
than of his father, which seems, indeed, to be the rule in families of
less exalted rank. We have seen how the Empress really received from her
father the training of a man, and, it may be added, of an extremely
versatile man. If fate had compelled her eldest son to earn his own
living in a private station, it is extraordinary to think of the number
of professions in any one of which he could have attained a competence,
if not indeed high distinction. From his mother, rather than from his
father, he inherited a great appetite for work and an extraordinary
aptitude for detail; and he showed himself at different times to have
had in him the making, not only of a soldier and a sailor, but of a
musician, a poet, an artist, a preacher, and an orator.
Compare this with his grandfather, the old Emperor, who, if he had not
been born in the purple, could only have been a soldier, and not, it
must be added, one who could have held very high commands. Compare him
again with his father; the Emperor Frederick, if he had not been born in
the purple, though he certainly showed greater military capacity than
the old Emperor, nevertheless would probably not have been happy or
successful in any private station other than that of a great moral
teacher.
The Emperor William's affinity to his mother in character, temperament,
and accomplishments becomes the more striking the more it is
investigated. He shared with her a certain impulsiveness, a deficiency
in what is ordinarily called tact, which really amounts to a
constitutional inability to appreciate the effect which a particular
word or action will necessarily have on other people. This, which seems
a negative quality, is really a positive one, interwoven with a high
courage and a contempt for the mean little dictates of conventional
prudence, which have always commanded the admiration of generous minds.
This remarkable similarity between mother and son assuredly furnishes
the key to the somewhat complex question of their relationships at
different periods. They were in fact too much alike for their relations
to be always harmonious.
The widowed Empress did not owe all her unhappiness to Bismarck alone.
In 1889 Gustav Freytag published a volume of Reminiscences of the
Emperor Frederick which attracted a great amount of attention, more
perhaps than they intrinsically deserved. But Freytag's position among
German writers as novelist, poet, dramatist, and historian, was so great
that everything he wrote had its importance, and in addition to that it
was known that he had at one time been admitted to the confidence of the
then Crown Prince, whose political Liberalism he appeared to share.
Freytag was a Silesian by birth, and this no doubt did him no harm with
the Emperor Frederick, who was warmly attached to Silesia, and delighted
in the graphic pictures of life in that province which Freytag drew in
his novels. The Empress made Freytag's acquaintance in the early years
of her married life--indeed, the first German novel which she read with
her husband was Freytag's _Soll und Haben_. The novelist had been
presented to the Prince Consort by his patron, Duke Ernest of
Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, and it was natural in all the circumstances that the
Crown Princess and her husband should have shown the great writer marked
signs of favour.
It is all the more extraordinary, therefore, that in his Reminiscences
Freytag should have drawn such a picture of the Emperor Frederick as
must have deeply distressed his then newly-made widow. It was a picture
which she herself knew to be inaccurate, and which indeed could only
gratify the personal hostility of Bismarck and his adherents. There is
no need to linger long over this picture, but it demands some notice
because it, so to speak, gathers together in a convenient form the
principal features of what may be called the Bismarckian view of both
the Empress and her husband.
It has been said that Freytag apparently shared the Crown Prince's
Liberalism, but he was also steeped in Prussian particularism, and it
was this that brought him to his almost blind admiration of Bismarck,
and rendered him incapable of appreciating the political conceptions of
the Emperor Frederick. Freytag, indeed, was a bad judge of character,
the presentation of which was his weak point as a novelist.
Allusion has already been made to the fact that the Crown Prince invited
Freytag to accompany him with the Third Army in the Franco-German War,
and the Reminiscences terminate soon after the battle of Sedan. After
1870 the Crown Prince hardly ever saw Freytag, and never with any real
intimacy; yet on this slender foundation of knowledge the novelist
revived, under the specious cloak of affection, some of the worst
charges of the Reptile Press, and of the insulting commentary which
Bismarck published on the late Emperor's diary.
The principal charge for our purposes here is that the Crown Prince was
subjected to foreign influence, and was entirely dominated by his wife.
In effect Freytag suggests that through the Crown Princess, Princess
Alice, and other members of the English Royal family, important secrets
of German military movements reached the French commanders. "Both the
Empress Frederick and Princess Alice," he says, "wrote to their august
mother and the family in London, and what crossed the North Sea could be
sent to France again in letters a few hours later. It is therefore not
unnatural that the French learned by way of England a variety of news
about our army which with greater propriety would have remained
concealed."
Such a charge is incapable of complete disproof, but at any rate it is
obvious that Freytag could know nothing of the contents, either of the
Crown Prince's letters to his wife, who was at that time working day and
night in the German hospitals, or of the letters of the Crown Princess
and her sister to their relations in England. Yet he describes Princess
Alice as "at heart during the whole of the war a brave German woman,"
which is a plain insinuation that the Crown Princess had not her whole
heart in the success of the German arms. The whole plan of _dénigrement_
is the more subtle, for Freytag professes the most ardent admiration for
the ability of the Crown Princess, her rich natural gifts, and her keen
soaring intellect. At the same time he says:
"The Crown Prince's love for her was the highest and holiest passion of
his life, and filled his whole existence; she was the lady of his youth,
the _confidante_ of all his thoughts, his trusted counsellor whenever
she was so inclined. Arrangements of the garden, decorations of the
house, education of the children, judgments of men and things, were in
every respect regulated by him in accordance with her thoughts and
wishes. It is perfectly intelligible that so complete an ascendancy of
the wife over the husband, who was destined to be the future ruler of
Prussia, threatened to occasion difficulties and conflicts, which,
perhaps, would be greater for the woman than the man--greater for the
wife who led and inspired the husband whose guidance she ought to have
accepted."
Here again we see the limitations of Freytag's undoubtedly great
intellect, as well as his instinctive German middle-class conception of
woman's sphere. To the North-German the idea of woman as a comrade, as
being even approximately on a level with her husband, was then, and is
still to a great extent, inconceivable. In that view of matrimony the
wife is really a chattel, or at best a respected housekeeper.
It may be asked, how could Freytag have supposed that the Emperor
Frederick would have submitted to such domination on the part of his
wife? The answer is that Freytag's conception of the emperor's character
was hopelessly erroneous. He is obliged to confirm his title to be
considered the originator of the idea of a German Empire, but he
attributes it to a mere love of pomp and ceremony, a passion for Court
millinery. The plain truth is that few monarchs have been simpler in
their personal tastes than the Emperor Frederick; the etiquette, the
monotony, and the restraint of Court life bored him, and he was never so
happy as when he could escape to the congenial society of savants,
artists, and writers. It is certainly true that his imaginative and
poetical gifts induced him to try to infuse some elements of dignity and
meaning into the routine of Court ceremonial, but that he cared for such
ceremonial in itself, or attached to it any greater value than that of
symbolism, is frankly absurd.
Freytag even accuses the Crown Prince of having been ready to risk civil
war in order that he might secure the creation of the Imperial dignity
after the Franco-German War. This is based on a misapprehension of the
Prince's discussions with Bismarck at Versailles. The Crown Prince
believed that force would be unnecessary, and that the South German
States would accept the Constitution proclaimed by the majority of the
Princes assembled at Versailles. It is possible that he would have
advocated compulsion if Bavaria and Würtemberg had thrown themselves
into the arms of Austria, but he well knew that that contingency was in
the last degree improbable.
Early in 1889 the Empress Frederick suffered another bereavement which,
though not of course to be compared with many which she had endured,
nevertheless added perceptibly to her state of melancholy and
depression. This was the death of the venerable Empress Augusta, which
broke a much valued link with the happy past. From those days in the
early fifties when that highly-bred and highly-cultivated Princess had
become "Aunt Prussia" to the Royal children at Windsor, and even more
after the marriage of the Princess Royal, she had remained a loyal and
most kindly and affectionate friend to her daughter-in-law. The two
Royal ladies looked upon life from widely different angles, and the
elder must often have disapproved of the way in which the younger
interpreted her duty. But the Empress Augusta never faltered in her
admiration and affection for one who was so entirely unlike herself, and
in these latter days the death of the Emperor Frederick had brought
them, if possible, even more closely together.
The dramatic fall of Bismarck--the "Dropping the Pilot" of Sir John
Tenniel's memorable cartoon in _Punch_--occurred in March, 1890. It
could hardly have been regretted by the Empress Frederick, but she was
far too magnanimous, and we may add too well aware of Bismarck's
incomparable services to the Empire, to regard the event as in any sense
a personal triumph for herself.
What is truly astonishing, in view of all that had passed, is that the
fallen Minister should have turned to her for sympathy, and should even,
according to some authorities, have begged her to exert on his behalf
her now growing influence with her son. It is said that she then
reminded him that his past treatment of her had deprived her of any
power of helping him now, but such an answer does not accord with what
we know of the Empress's whole character. She was surely incapable at
such a moment of adding anything to the humiliation of her old enemy.
Besides, Professor Nippold speaks of Bismarck's having himself written:
"Her influence over her husband was very great at any time, and became
greater with the years, to culminate at the time when he was Emperor.
But also in her was the conviction that my position close to the throne
was in the interest of the dynasty."
There are, indeed, different versions of what took place in the now
famous interview between Bismarck and the Empress Frederick. It is quite
possible that she regarded the Minister's dismissal from office as an
imprudent and even dangerous step. However that may be, Prince Hohenlohe
declares that Bismarck did not entreat the Empress to intercede for him
with the Emperor; he merely said, when the Empress asked if she could do
anything for him, "I ask only for sympathy." But he certainly did ask to
be received by her in audience, although he must have vividly remembered
the insolent message which he had sent her immediately after the Emperor
Frederick's death, when she had requested him to come to her.
A year later, at Homburg, Prince Hohenlohe and the Empress Frederick had
a long conversation over the Bismarck affair. She said she was not at
all surprised at his dismissal, that "Bismarck was of a combative nature
and would never cease to fight. He could do nothing else." She talked of
previous incidents, of Bismarck's groundless distrust of her, and of the
Empress Augusta, and expressed the opinion "that we had only to thank
the old Emperor's quiet gentleness for any success of Bismarck's. He was
a very dangerous opponent, but not a Republican. He was too Prussian for
that. But the Brandenburg-Prussian noble was determined to rule, though
it were with the King."