CHAPTER V
I am thoroughly aware that the point which is likely to excite the attention of my readers to a greater degree than any other in the previous chapter, is the reference contained therein to the tyranny exercised by the monarchs of the Old World upon their relatives. In fact, it is far better in Europe to be a mere subject than a kinsman or kinswoman of the sovereign.
Even the lowliest of the lieges of the anointed of the Lord has certain constitutional rights and prerogatives which may be said to safeguard him from oppression and persecution, but princes and princesses of the blood have no such rights, and are exposed to every caprice and every whim of the head of their family, defiance of whose wishes entails exile, loss of property, even poverty and outlawry, without any redress.
Royal and imperial personages, in addition to being subjected to the ordinary laws of the land, are expected to yield blind and unquestioned obedience to another code, comprising what are officially styled the "Family Statutes" of the dynasty to which they belong. These are administered by the head of the family, who is free to construe them as he sees fit, and while they are binding upon the members of his house, they in no way can be said to constitute any limitation to the exercise of his authority. In fact, the latter is absolutely unrestricted, and extends to every phase of the life of a royal personage. Thus, a prince or princess of the blood is debarred from contracting a marriage without the consent of the sovereign, and if any union has taken place without the sanction of the head of the family, it is regarded, not only at court, but even by the tribunals of the land, as invalid, and children that may be born of the marriage bear the stigma of illegitimacy. If a marriage has received the full authorization of the ruler, and there is any issue, the children cannot be educated without the sovereign's wishes being consulted. The parents, in fact, are regarded much as if they were either minors, outlaws, or demented people, unfitted to be entrusted with the control and bringing up of their offspring, for the sovereign is ex officio the guardian of all children who are under age, belonging to the married members of his family, and his rights over the children are superior to those of the latter's father and mother.
If the boy is to have a tutor, or the girl a governess, the appointment cannot be made by the parents without their previously obtaining the permission of the sovereign, and he has it in his power to reject their nominee, and to assign some candidate of his own, who may possibly be regarded as most objectionable to the unfortunate parents, for the duty of taking charge of the education of the young people in question. The royal or imperial mother, indeed, may esteem herself fortunate if the sovereign does not insist on personally selecting the nurses of her infants: when the present kaiser was born, not merely the late Empress Augusta, but likewise all the other members of the reigning house of Prussia, and of the Court of Berlin, thought it quite right and natural that the old Emperor William should exercise his authority for the purpose of prohibiting the young mother from herself nursing her baby; on the ground that it was contrary to the traditions of the House of Hohenzollern, and a quite undignified proceeding. Fortunately, the late Emperor Frederick, who had spent much of his time at the court of his mother-in-law, Queen Victoria, and who was aware that she had nursed every one of her numerous children herself, without permitting this motherly duty to interfere with the arduous official business of the State, expostulated with his father, and persuaded him to withdraw his prohibition, much to the horror of the courtiers, and greatly to the satisfaction of the royal lady, who is now Empress Frederick.
In Austria one of the principal sources of the domestic unhappiness of the lamented Empress of Austria, was the small voice that she was allowed by the sovereign—her husband—to have in the management and the control of her own children, as long as her mother-in-law, the late Archduchess Sophia, was alive. It was only after the demise of the archduchess that Empress Elizabeth first realized in their full measure the joys of motherhood.
While on the subject of Austria, I may cite the case of the widowed Crown Princess Stephanie as another illustration of the extent to which royal parents are deprived of all authority over their children. Thus when Crown Prince Rudolph died at Mayerling, his little daughter, at that time barely six years of age, was assigned to the guardianship, not of her widowed mother, but of her grandfather. A very general belief prevails that this arrangement about the care of the little Archduchess Elizabeth, was due to a piece of animosity on the part of the ill-fated crown prince against his wife, and I have seen it stated in print that he had left a will confiding his only child to his father, and directing that its mother should be allowed no voice in its education. There is no official authority for any such statement, but no matter whether the crown prince expressed any such testamentary wish or not, the fact remains that at his death his child was bound by the statutes of the House of Hapsburg, to become the ward of the sovereign, who in this case happened to be her grandfather. Gentle and soft-hearted as is Emperor Francis-Joseph, he nevertheless exercised his authority over his grandchild in a way that cannot but have been galling in the extreme to its mother, a way, in fact, which I imagine would be beyond the endurance of any American woman. Thus he insisted upon himself appointing and selecting her governesses and teachers; he nominated her entire household without consulting her mother, and its members, as well as the girl's instructors made their reports not to Crown Princess Stephanie, but to him, from whom, also, they alone took their instructions.
It was the emperor who decided where his grandchild was to stay, where she was to spend this part of the year, and where another season, and finally he strictly prohibited her from leaving his dominions. The position of the Crown Princess of Austria since the death of her husband has been so extremely unpleasant and painful, that she has spent much of her time—indeed, at least nine months of the year—in foreign travel. The imperial family, the court and the people, hold her responsible for that domestic wretchedness which drove her so universally popular husband to his tragic death at Mayerling. Of a jealous disposition and of a temper that even at its best is difficult, she is generally understood to have driven him by her violence and injustice to seek, away from his home, the pleasures that he could not find by his own fireside.
It had been known that she had been strangely lacking in dignity in her complaints concerning his behavior, and after his death she gave cruel offence both to his parents and to the people of her adopted country by her indifference to his terrible fate, and by the frivolity with which she bore her widowhood, not a little of which was spent at the gaming tables of Monte-Carlo in the gayest mourning costumes possible; a circumstance which horrified Queen Victoria, who was at that time at Nice, and naturally cruelly embittered the bereaved and sorrowing mother, Empress Elizabeth, who, robed in deepest black, was at Cap-Martin, endeavoring to recover her health, which had been absolutely shattered by the tragedy.
All these things led to the crown princess being regarded with deep disfavor in Austria. Difficulties were raised with regard to her rank and precedence at court, and the animosity manifested towards her was such at Vienna, and elsewhere in the dual empire, that she found it preferable to spend the greater part of her time abroad. She was not, however, permitted to take her little daughter with her, and thus the young archduchess may be said to have grown up altogether away from her mother, whom she saw for barely two months of the year, and then more as a visitor and a stranger, than as a relative who had any voice in the ordering of her life.
If, then, this control of the minor princes and princesses of his dynasty is insisted upon to such an extent by the aged Emperor of Austria, the kindliest, most warm-hearted and sympathetic of old men, always prone to patient forbearance and indulgence, it will be readily understood that it is exercised to its fullest extent by Emperor William, in whose character the tendency to autocracy, and the spirit of command, is far more developed than in his brother monarch. Indeed, he not only claims the right to act as the chief guardian of the junior members of the reigning house of Prussia, of which he is the head, but likewise of the children of all those sovereign families of Germany which have acknowledged him as their emperor. Thus he insisted upon having entire control of his young cousin, the only son of the reigning Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, declaring that his own authority must be substituted for that of the lad's father, in spite of the latter being himself a reigning sovereign, and an ally rather than a vassal.
The tragic fate of the young prince will be too fresh in the memory of my readers to need more than passing reference here. The boy, removed from parental care, was transferred by Emperor William to Berlin, with the avowed purpose of being under his own imperial eye. Unfortunately, the duties and occupations of William are so multifarious that he was unable to fulfil his very excellent intentions with regard to Prince Alfred. The latter fell into bad hands, squandered large sums of money at cards, became involved in pecuniary difficulties, and in his endeavors to retrieve them, sunk deeper and deeper into the mire, until finally Emperor William, suddenly alive to the results of his wholly-unintentional neglect of the royal lad, sent him back to his heart-broken parents, discredited, implicated in all sorts of unpleasant gambling transactions, and shattered alike in health and mind. In the midst of their silver-wedding festivities, they were forced to send their only boy off to a sanitarium in Austria, where, in spite of the close restraint under which he was kept, he managed to put an end to his life, only a few days after his arrival, prompted thereto by either physical or mental agony, no one knows which.
Small wonder, when it became necessary to find a likely successor to the present reigning Duke of Saxe-Coburg, and his younger brother, Prince Arthur of Great Britain, Duke of Connaught, was proclaimed heir, that the prince decided that it would be preferable to sacrifice his rights to this throne, rather than his rights over his only son. On being given to understand that if he accepted the position of heir apparent, his sixteen-year-old boy would become the ward of Emperor William, and that the authority of the kaiser would be superior to his own over the lad, Prince Arthur declined to have anything to do with the Saxe-Coburg succession, and abandoned both his own claims thereto and those of his son, in favor of his young nephew, the fatherless Duke of Albany. It was precisely on the same ground that the Duke of Cumberland declined to complete the agreement whereby a reconciliation was to be effected between himself and the kaiser. Born crown prince of the now defunct Kingdom of Hanover, he should have succeeded to the throne of the Duchy of Brunswick on the death of his kinsman, the late Duke of Brunswick, in 1884. The German Emperor, however, decided that he could not be permitted to take possession of the sovereignty of the duchy, nor to assume the status of one of the federal rulers of the confederation known as the German Empire, unless he recognized the latter, as now constituted, that is to say with his father's Kingdom of Hanover incorporated with Prussia. For a long time he refused to do this, but was ultimately persuaded by his brother-in-law, the late czar, and the Prince of Wales, to consent to a reconciliation with Prussia, and to accept the present condition of affairs. The arrangements were on the eve of being completed when a conflict arose between the duke and the kaiser, as to the education of the former's eldest son, Prince George. The duke wished to send him to the Vizhum College, at Dresden, where so many members of the sovereign families, and of the great houses of the nobility, have received their instruction, while the kaiser objected to this particular school on the ground that its teachings were calculated to increase instead of to diminish particularist and anti-Prussian sentiments. The duke thereupon declared that he alone was competent to judge and determine how his boy should be educated, whereupon the kaiser put forth his pretension to the guardianship of all the junior members of the sovereign houses comprised in the German Empire. Rather than consent to this, the Duke of Cumberland, who has inherited much of the obstinacy for which his great-grandfather, King George III. of Great Britain, was so celebrated, broke off all negotiations with Emperor William, and refused to have anything more to do with him, for, like his cousin, the Duke of Connaught, he would rather sacrifice his rights to a German throne than his parental rights over a much-loved boy.
But the despotism of the monarchs of the Old World is by no means restricted to this question of the control and custody of the junior members of their respective families. Every prince and princess of the latter, no matter what his or her age, or superiority in point of years to the sovereign may be, is subjected to the will of the head of the house. For instance, no Russian grand duke or grand duchess can leave the Muscovite empire without previously asking and obtaining the permission of the czar, and in the same way, the Austrian archdukes and archduchesses have to crave the sanction of Emperor Francis-Joseph, and the Prussian princes and princesses, that of the kaiser, before they can leave their respective countries for a foreign trip. Even Empress Frederick is compelled to obtain the permission of her son, the emperor, before taking her departure from Germany for England or Italy, and a few years ago when quietly enjoying herself in Paris, she was forced by a peremptory command from her son to suddenly cut short her stay in the French capital, and to betake herself to England.
To such an extent is this despotism carried that when Prince Henry of Prussia was stationed at Kiel, he had to ask his elder brother's permission before he could run up to Berlin, although Kiel is only a few hours' trip from the capital; and, as stated in the previous chapter, Princess Charlotte of Saxe-Meiningen and her husband, are kept at Breslau, except when their brother William graciously condescends to permit them to leave their home. Two years ago the emperor, for reasons which can only be surmised, and which were of a personal rather than of a political character—of which more anon—suddenly ordered his only brother Henry off to China, and a little later, possibly with the object of showing to the world that his authority extended to the ladies of his house, as well as to the men, he directed Princess Henry to join her husband at Hong Kong. As the two little boys of the princess are exceedingly delicate, owing possibly to the fact that their parents are first cousins, the poor mother was very reluctant to undertake the trip, but she was forced by the emperor to go, and had scarcely reached Hong Kong before she learnt by cable that both her little ones were prostrated by a terrible attack of diphtheria. She was not, however, permitted to return, but was kept out in China away from her children until late in the spring, and reached home well on towards autumn, to find her little ones—the youngest was but two years old—more delicate than ever, but fortunately alive.
In the memoirs of Bismarck published by Dr. Busch, there is reproduced one of Emperor William's letters, written prior to his accession to the throne, in the course of which he asks the great chancellor whether he approves of his "commanding" (the German word is "befehlen") his brother Prince Henry to make certain inquiries of the late Prince Alexander of Battenberg. William in this letter does not talk of "requesting" his brother, but of ordering him to do this. If then William, as crown prince, already took upon himself the right of ordering his brother and his sisters to do this and to do that, it may be readily imagined that he is not less peremptory in his dealings with them now that he is their emperor and king.
If they disobey him, he has various means of punishment at his command. He can banish them from court for a long term; he can deprive them temporarily, or for all time, of the prerogatives, the privileges, and the honors due to their rank; he can suspend their allowances from the national treasury, or from the family property, or can stop it altogether; he can take from them the control of any estates which they may have inherited, and confide the administration thereof to curators appointed for the purpose; finally, he can subject them to various forms of arrest, as he once did in the case of his brother-in-law, Prince Frederick-Leopold; while in very extreme cases he can place the offending relative under restraint in an asylum for the insane on the pretext of dementia, as has been done in the case of Princess Louise of Coburg, daughter of King Leopold of Belgium, and mother of Princess "Dolly" of Coburg, who is now the wife of Duke Ernest-Gunther of Schleswig-Holstein.
"Aux arrêts," or confinement to one's quarters, is the most common form of punishment inflicted by Old World monarchs upon those of their kith and kin who have failed to comply with their behests, and there is scarcely a single sovereign or prince of the blood, who has not been subjected to this species of discipline at one time or another of his career. Thus the late Emperor Frederick, prior to his accession to the throne, but long after his marriage, was sentenced to several weeks' detention in his palace under strict arrest, as a punishment for a little joke which he had played during the course of a military inspection.
He had been protesting for a long time against the tightness of the uniforms, and of the belts of the rank and file of the infantry, declaring that it impeded the movements and play of the muscles of the men, to such an extent as to deprive them of more than fifty per cent, of their usefulness. One day, during an inspection of the division of guards at Potsdam, while the troops happened to be standing at ease, he walked along the front rank of the first regiment, accompanied by a number of officers, with whom he had just been discussing this very question of equipment; suddenly, he stopped short in his walk, and extracting a piece of gold from his pocket, dropped it on the ground, and told the men nearest him to pick it up, adding that whoever got hold of it first, might keep it! Several of them made frantic attempts to bend down in order to get the money, but so tight were their uniforms and belts that they found it absolutely impossible to reach, the coin, which Emperor Frederick ultimately picked up himself, and handed to them.
"And how do you expect to win battles with soldiers hampered to such an extent as that in their movements?" he exclaimed contemptuously to the officers around him. "What greater demonstration than this is needed to prove the justice of my argument?"
The incident was reported to the then Minister of War, who immediately
lodged a complaint with Frederick's father, the result being that
"Unser Fritz," at that time Crown Prince of Prussia, was placed by old
Emperor William for several weeks under arrest in his palace!
Prince Rupert of Bavaria, the heir apparent to the ancient throne of the Wittelsbachs, was sentenced by his grandfather, the prince regent, to no less than three months' close arrest in his quarters at Munich, for having left the kingdom without permission, in order to spend three days at Paris, in fair but frail company; while the widowed Duchess of Aosta on one occasion was placed under arrest in her palace of Turin by her brother-in-law, King Humbert, because she had ventured to appear in public on her wheel wearing a pair of bloomers!
Prince and Princess Frederick-Leopold, the latter a younger sister of the Empress of Germany, have both been condemned on several occasions by the kaiser to close confinement in their palace under the most stringent kind of arrest, for having disobeyed his majesty's commands with regard to the management of their household. Duke Ernest-Gunther of Schleswig-Holstein, the brother of the empress, has been subjected to more numerous orders of arrest by his imperial kinsman than any prince of the blood now living.
Severe as are European monarchs nowadays in punishing the disobedience of the members of their families, they do not, however, venture any longer to proceed to such extremities as the father of Frederick the Great, who when the latter was still crown prince, cast his son into prison, and ordered him to be shot, merely because he discovered that he was about to leave the kingdom without his permission for the purpose of undertaking a trip to England; and there is no doubt that the crown prince would have been put to death, and thus shared the fate of his two aids-de-camp, who were beheaded before his very eyes, in the fortress prison of Küstrin, had it not been for the intervention of the ambassadors of Austria, Great Britain, Russia and France in behalf of his royal highness.
Yet another phase of this despotism, which the two kaisers,—namely their majesties of Germany and of Austria,—exercise over the members of their respective families, is the right which they claim to select and appoint the officers and ladies-in-waiting of every prince and princess of the blood. In order to appreciate what this means it must be explained that it is not merely contrary to etiquette, but absolutely forbidden by the rules and regulations instituted by Emperor William and his brother sovereigns, that any such princes or princesses should venture to appear anywhere in public without being escorted either by a gentleman or a lady-in-waiting. These attendants, who are, it is needless to state, of noble birth, may be said to constitute the very shadow of the personage to whose household they are attached. In fact a royal or imperial prince or princess cannot even cross the street, far less leave home for a ride, a drive, a walk, or for the purpose of paying a visit, or of doing some shopping without being escorted, if a prince, by a gentleman-in-waiting, and if a princess, by a lady-in-waiting, and possibly by a chamberlain as well.
Nor are the duties of the ladies and gentlemen-in-waiting confined to attendance upon their royal charges in public, for they form part and parcel of the royal or imperial household to which they are attached, and if they do not occupy quarters in the palace, at any rate they take all their meals there, since their duties commence in the early morning, and only cease late at night.
Now, human shadows of this kind are all very well when one is at liberty to choose them one's self; but it is very different when one has no voice whatsoever in the matter, and when one is forced to submit to close and intimate attendance of this kind by ladies and gentlemen whom one neither likes nor trusts. In such cases as these, the gentlemen or ladies-in-waiting are apt to be regarded in the light of spies by their royal charges, and as people appointed by the sovereign to keep watch upon their actions. It is probable that no one has suffered so cruelly in this connection as the widowed Empress Frederick of Germany. Possessed of extremely liberal views in political matters—ideas which she imparted to her consort, she found herself, within a few years after her marriage, in complete opposition to Prince Bismarck. The latter regarded her as a very dangerous opponent, and responded to her openly avowed disapproval of his political methods by using his influence with her father-in-law, old Emperor William, urging him to interfere with her management of her children; and above all, to appoint as members of her household personages with whom she could have no possible sympathy, political or otherwise, and who were, in every sense of the word, devoted to the Iron Chancellor. In fact, Prince Bismarck acknowledges in his reminiscences, as published by his Boswell, Dr. Busch, that he caused the crown princess—as Empress Frederick was then—to shed many a bitter tear, by his interference, through her father-in-law, in her domestic affairs.
Bismarck made no secret of his enmity towards Empress Frederick and her husband before the latter ascended the throne, and it is on record that he even officially insisted that secrets of state should not be confided to "Unser Fritz," for fear that the latter's consort might communicate them to her English relatives. He even went so far as to accuse her of having, during the war of 1870, betrayed to non-German relatives Prussian military secrets, which were used by the French against her adopted country, and served to prolong the conflict. These odious charges, "which have been abundantly disproved" and for which "there was not even the shadow of a foundation," are merely referred to here in order to show the intense bitterness of the personal animosity entertained by the chancellor towards Empress Frederick. Yet it was he, Bismarck, who, through the old emperor, had the right of selecting and nominating, not merely the instructors and attendants of her boys, but her own gentlemen and ladies-in-waiting—nay, even the physicians and surgeons to be called in cases of illness.