A SIREN OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
When Wilhelmine Encke first opened her eyes on the world one day in the
year 1754, he would have been a bold prophet who would have predicted
that she would one day be the uncrowned Queen of the Court of Russia,
_plus Reine que la Reine_, and that her children would have in their
veins the proudest blood in Europe. Such a prophecy might well have been
laughed to scorn, for little Wilhelmine had as obscure a cradle as
almost any infant in all Prussia. Her father was an army bugler, who
wore private's uniform in Frederick the Great's army; and her early
years were to be spent playing with other soldiers' children in the
sordid environment of Berlin barracks.
When her father turned his back on the army, while Wilhelmine was still
nursing her dolls, it was to play the humble rôle of landlord of a small
tavern, from which he was lured by the bait of a place as French-horn
player in Frederick's private band; and the goal of his modest ambition
was reached when he was appointed trumpeter to the King.
This was Herr Encke's position when the curtain rises on our story at
Potsdam, and shows us Wilhelmine, an unattractive maid of ten, the
Cinderella of her family, for whom there seemed no better prospect than
a soldier-husband, if indeed she were lucky enough to capture him. She
was, in fact, the "ugly duckling" of a good-looking family, removed by a
whole world from her beautiful eldest sister Charlotte, who counted
among her many admirers no less exalted a wooer than Prince Frederick
William, the King's nephew and heir to his throne.
There was, indeed, no more beautiful or haughty damsel in all Potsdam
than this trumpeter's daughter who had caught the amorous fancy of the
Prince, then, as to his last day, the slave of every pretty face that
crossed his path. But Charlotte Encke was much too imperious a young
lady to hold her Royal lover long in fetters. He quickly wearied of her
caprices, her petulances, and her exhibitions of temper; and the climax
came one day when in a fit of anger she struck her little sister, in his
presence, and he took up the cudgels for Wilhelmine.
This was the last straw for the disillusioned and disgusted Prince, who
sent Charlotte off to Paris, where as the Countess Matushke she played
the fine lady at her lover's cost, while the Prince took her Cinderella
sister under his protection. He took her education into his own hands,
provided her with masters to teach her a wide range of accomplishments,
from languages to dancing and deportment, while he himself gave her
lessons in history and geography. Nor did he lack the reward of his
benevolent offices; for Wilhelmine, under his ministrations, not only
developed rare gifts and graces of mind, like many another Cinderella
before her; she blossomed into a rose of girlhood, more beautiful even
than her imperious sister, and with a sweetness of character and a
winsomeness which Charlotte could never have attained.
On her part, gratitude to her benefactor rapidly grew into love for the
handsome and courtly Prince; on his, sympathy for the ill-used
Cinderella, into a passion for the lovely maiden hovering on the verge
of a still more beautiful womanhood. It was a mutual passion, strong and
deep, which now linked the widely contrasted lives of the King-to-be and
the trumpeter's daughter--a passion which, with each, was to last as
long as life itself.
Wilhelmine was now formally installed in the place of the deposed
Charlotte as favourite of the heir to the throne; and idyllic years
followed, during which she gave pledges of her love to the man who was
her husband in all but name. That her purse was often empty was a matter
to smile at; that she had to act as "breadwinner" to her family, and was
at times reduced to such straits that she was obliged to pawn some of
her small stock of jewellery in order to provide her lover with a
supper, was a bagatelle. She was the happiest young woman in Prussia.
Even what seemed to be a crowning disaster, fortune turned into a boon
for her. When news of this unlicensed love-making came to the King's
ears, he was furious. It was intolerable that the destined ruler of a
great and powerful nation should be governed and duped by a woman of the
people. He gave his nephew a sound rating--alike for his extravagance
and his amour; and packed off Wilhelmine to join her sister in Paris.
But, for once, Frederick found that he had made a mistake. The Prince,
robbed of the woman he loved, took the bit in his teeth, and plunged so
deeply into extravagant dallying with ballet-dancers and stars of the
opera that the King was glad to choose the lesser evil, and to summon
Wilhelmine back to her Prince's arms. One stipulation only he made, that
she should make her home away from the capital and the dangerous
allurements which his nephew found there.
Now at last we find Cinderella happily installed, with the King's august
approval, in a beautiful home which has since blossomed into the
splendours of Charlottenburg. Here she gave birth to a son, whom
Frederick dubbed Count de la Marke in his nurse's arms, but who was
fated never to leave his cradle. This child of love, the idol of his
parents, sleeps in a splendid mausoleum in the great Protestant Church
of Berlin.
As a sop to Prussian morality and to make the old King quite easy, a
complaisant husband was now found for the Prince's favourite in his
chamberlain, Herr Rietz, son of a palace gardener; and Frederick William
himself looked on while the woman he loved, the mother of his children,
was converted by a few priestly words into a "respectable married
woman"--only to leave the altar on his own arm, his wife in the eyes of
the world.
The time was now drawing near when Wilhelmine was to reach the zenith of
her adventurous life. One August day in 1786 Frederick the Great drew
his last breath in the Potsdam Palace, and his nephew awoke to be
greeted by his chamberlain as "Your Majesty." The trumpeter's daughter
was at last a Queen, in fact, if not in name, more secure in her
husband's love than ever, and with long years of splendour and happiness
before her. That his fancy, ever wayward, flitted to other women as fair
as herself, did not trouble her a whit. Like Madame de Pompadour, she
was prepared even to encourage such rivalry, so long as the first place
(and this she knew) in her husband's heart was unassailably her own.
Picture our Cinderella now in all her new splendours, moving as a Queen
among her courtiers, receiving the homage of princes and ambassadors as
her right, making her voice heard in the Council Chamber, and holding
her _salon_, to which all the great ones of the earth flocked to pay
tribute to her beauty and her gifts of mind. It was a strange
transformation from the barracks-kitchen to the Queendom of one of the
greatest Courts of Europe; but no Queen cradled in a palace ever wore
her honours with greater dignity, grace, and simplicity than this
daughter of an army bandsman.
The days of the empty purse were, of course, at an end. She had now her
ten thousand francs a month for "pin-money," her luxuriously appointed
palace at Charlottenburg, and her Berlin mansion, "Unter den Linden,"
with its private theatre, in which she and her Royal lover, surrounded
by their brilliant Court, applauded the greatest actors from Paris and
Vienna. It is said that many of these stage-plays were of questionable
decency, with more than a suggestion of the garden of Eden in them; but
this is an aspersion which Madame de Rietz indignantly repudiates in her
"Memoirs."
While Wilhelmine was thus happy in her Court magnificence, varied by
days of "delightful repose," at Charlottenburg, France was in the throes
of her Revolution, drenched with the blood of her greatest men and
fairest women; her King had lost his crown and his head with it; and
Europe was in arms against her. When Frederick William joined his army
camped on the Rhine bank, Wilhelmine was by his side to counsel him as
he wavered between war and peace. The fate of the coalition against
France was practically in the hands of the trumpeter's daughter, whose
voice was all for peace. "What matters it," she said, "how France is
governed? Let her manage her own affairs, and let Europe be saved from
the horrors of bloodshed."
In vain did the envoys of Spain and Italy, Austria and England, practise
all their diplomacy to place her influence in the scale of war. When
Lord Henry Spencer offered her a hundred thousand guineas if she would
dissuade her husband from concluding a treaty with France, she turned a
deaf ear to all his pleading and arguments. Such influence as she
possessed should be exercised in the interests of peace, and thus it was
that the vacillating King deserted his allies, and signed the Treaty of
Bâle, in 1795.
Such was the triumphant issue of Madame Rietz's intervention in the
affairs of Europe; such the proof she gave to the world of her conquest
of a King. It was thus with a light heart that she turned her back on
the Rhine camp; and with her husband's children and a splendid retinue
set out on her journey to Italy, to see which was the greatest ambition
of her life. At the Austrian Court she was coldly received, it is true,
thanks to her part in the Treaty of Bâle; but in Italy she was greeted
as a Queen. At Naples Queen Caroline received her as a sister; the
trumpeter's daughter was the brilliant centre of fêtes and banquets and
receptions such as might have gratified the vanity of an Empress: while
at Florence she spent days of ideal happiness under the blue sky of
Italy and among her beauties of Nature and Art.
It was at Venice that she wrote to her King lover, "Your Majesty knows
well that, for myself, I place no value on the foolish vanities of Court
etiquette; but I am placed in an awkward position by my daughter being
raised to the rank of Countess, while I am still in the lowly position
of a bourgeoise." She had, in fact, always declined the honour of a
title, which Frederick William had so often begged her to accept; and it
was only for her daughter's sake, when the question of an alliance
between the young Countess de la Marke and Lord Bristol's heir arose,
that she at last stooped to ask for what she had so long refused.
A few weeks later her brother, the King's equerry, placed in her hands
the patent which made her Countess Lichtenau, with the right to bear on
her shield of arms the Prussian eagle and the Royal crown.
Wherever the Countess (as we must now call her) went on her Italian
tour she drew men to her feet by the magnetism of her beauty, who would
have paid no homage to her as _chère amie_ of a King; for she was now in
the early thirties, in the full bloom of the loveliness that had its
obscure budding in the Potsdam barrack-rooms. Young and old were equally
powerless to resist her fascinations. She had, indeed, no more ardent
slave and admirer than my Lord Bristol, the octogenarian Bishop of
Londonderry, whose passion for the Countess, young enough to be his
granddaughter, was that of a lovesick youth.
From "dear Countess and adorable friend," he quickly leaps in his
letters to "my dear Wilhelmine." He looks forward with the impatience of
a boy to seeing her at "that terrestrial paradise which is called
Naples, where we shall enjoy perpetual spring and spend delightful days
in listening to the divine _Paesiello_. Do you know," he adds, "I passed
two hours of real delight this morning in simply contemplating your
elegant bedroom where only the elegant sleeper was missing."
"It is in _Crocelle_," he writes a little later, "that you will make
people happy by your presence, and where you will recuperate your
health, regain your gaiety, and forget an Irishman; and a holy Bishop,
more worthy of your affection, on account of the deep attachment he has
for you, will take his place."
In June, 1796, this senile lover writes, "In an hour I depart for
Germany; and, as the wind is north, with every step I take I shall say:
'This breeze comes perhaps from her; it has touched her rosy lips and
mingled its scent with the perfume of her breath which I shall inhale,
the perfume of the breath of my dear Wilhelmine.'"
But these days of dallying with her legion of lovers, of regal fêtes and
pleasure-chasing, were brought to an abrupt conclusion when news came to
her at Venice that her "husband," the King, was dying, with the Royal
family by his bedside awaiting the end. Such news, with all its import
of sorrow and tragedy, set the Countess racing across the Continent,
fast as horses could carry her, to the side of her beloved King, whom
she found, if not _in extremis_, "very dangerously ill and pitifully
changed" from the robust man she had left. Her return, however, did more
for him than all the skill of his doctors. It gave him a new lease of
life, in which her presence brought happiness into days which, none knew
better than himself, were numbered.
For more than a year the Countess was his tender nurse and constant
companion, ministering to his comfort and arranging plays and tableaux
for his entertainment. She watched over him as jealously as any mother
over her dying child; but all her devotion could not stay the steps of
death, which every day brought nearer. As the inevitable end approached,
her friends warned her to leave Charlottenburg while the opportunity was
still hers--to escape with her jewels and her money (a fortune of
£150,000)--but to all such urging she was deaf. She would stay by her
lover's side to the last, though she well knew the danger of delay.
One November day in 1797 Frederick William made his last public
appearance at a banquet, with the Countess at his right hand; and seldom
has festival had such a setting in tragedy. "None of the guests," we are
told, "uttered a word or ate a mouthful of anything; the plates were
cleared at the hasty ringing of a bell. A convulsive movement made by
the sick man showed that he was suffering agonies. Before half-past nine
every guest had left, greatly troubled. The majority of those who had
been present never saw the unfortunate monarch again. They all shared
the same presentiment of disaster, and wept."
From that night the King was dead, even to his own Court. The gates of
his palace were closed against the world, and none were allowed to
approach the chamber in which his life was ebbing away, save the
Countess, his nurse, and his doctors. Even his children were refused
admittance to his presence. As the Marquis de Saint Mexent said, "The
King of Prussia ends his days as though he were a rich benefactor. All
the relations are excluded by the housekeeper."
A few days before the end came the Countess was seen to leave the
palace, carrying a large red portfolio--a suspicious circumstance which
the Crown Prince's spies promptly reported to their master. There could
be only one inference--she had been caught in the act of stealing State
papers, a crime for which she would have to pay a heavy price as soon
as her protector was no more! As a matter of fact the portfolio
contained nothing more secret or valuable than the letters she had
written to the King during the twenty-seven years of their romance,
letters which, after reading, she consigned to the flames in her boudoir
within an hour of the suspected theft of State documents.
A few days later, on the night of the 16th of November (1797), the King
entered on his "death agony," one fit of suffocation succeeding another,
until the Countess, unable to bear any longer the sight of such
suffering, was carried away in violent convulsions. She saw him no more;
for by seven o'clock in the morning Frederick William had found release
from his agony in death, and his son had begun to reign in his stead.
At last the long-delayed hour of revenge had come to Frederick William
III., who had always regarded his father's favourite as an enemy; and
his vengeance was swift to strike. Before the late King's body was cold,
his successor's emissaries appeared at the palace door, Unter den
Linden, with orders to search her papers and to demand the keys of every
desk and cupboard. Even then she scorned to fly before the storm which
she knew was breaking. For three days and nights her carriage stood at
her gates ready to take her away to safety; but she refused to move a
step.
Then one morning, before she had left her bed, a major of the guards,
with a posse of soldiers, appeared at her bedroom door armed with a
warrant for her arrest; and for many weeks she was a closely guarded
prisoner in her own house, subject to daily insults and indignities from
men who, a few weeks earlier, had saluted her as a Queen.
At the trial which followed some very grave indictments were preferred
against her. She was charged with having betrayed State secrets; with
having robbed the Royal Exchequer; stolen the King's portfolio; and
removed the priceless solitaire diamond from his crown, and the very
rings from his fingers as he lay dying. To these and other equally grave
charges the Countess gave a dignified denial, which the evidence she was
able to produce supported. The diamond and the rings were, in fact,
discovered in places indicated by her where they had been put, by the
King's orders, for safe custody.
The trial had a happier ending than, from the malignity of her enemies,
especially of the King, might have been expected. After three months of
durance she was removed to a Silesian fortress. Her houses and lands
were taken from her; but her furniture and jewels were left untouched,
and with them she was allowed to enjoy a pension of four thousand
thalers a year. Such was the judgment of a Court which proved more
merciful than she had perhaps a right to expect. And two months later,
the influence and pleading of her friends set her free from her
fortress-prison to spend her life where and as she would.
The sun of her splendour had indeed set, but many years of peaceful and
not unhappy life remained for our ex-Queen, who was still in the prime
of her womanhood and beauty and with the magnetism that, to her last
day, brought men to her feet. At fifty she was able to inspire such
passion in the breast of a young artist, Francis Holbein, that he asked
and won her hand in marriage. But this romance was short-lived, for
within a year he left her, to spend the remainder of her days in Paris,
Vienna, and her native Prussia. Here her adventurous career closed in
such obscurity, at the age of sixty-eight, that even those who
ministered to her last moments were unaware that the dying woman was the
Countess who had played so dazzling a part a generation earlier, as
favourite of the King of Prussia and Queen of her loveliest women.