CHAPTER XVIII

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."