Some months later the Empress spoke of the matter to English friends with deep regret, but still with a curious lack of understanding. She even mentioned the subject to the then French Ambassador in London, M. Waddington, eagerly telling him that she had experienced nothing but respect and even sympathy during the first part of her visit, and expressing her astonishment and distress at the feeling her visit to Versailles and the battlefields round Paris had provoked. She had brought herself by then to share Queen Victoria’s view, namely, that the whole thing had been a more or less histrionic demonstration against the French Government.
It showed, however, the Empress’s largeness of mind that during this same visit to England which followed her hasty departure from France she spoke with the warmest admiration of the verse of Paul Déroulède, the great chauvinist leader of the Revanche party.
This was the last intervention of the Empress Frederick in public affairs.
In the following year the Empress had the grief of losing a very old friend in the person of Lord Arthur Russell. Of these three gifted brothers, who were at once so alike and so different, she said pathetically: “The chief charm of the two others to me used to be that they were Lord Odo’s brothers, until I came to know them well and to appreciate each other for his own sake.”
There burst forth, late in the year 1892, a most extraordinary scandal, in which the Empress Frederick, although the affair was almost ostentatiously unconnected with her, could not but be deeply interested.
Various members of the Imperial family, as well as members of their Households, began to be assailed with scurrilous anonymous letters, which not only contained shrewd and well-aimed abuse of each individual, but which also revealed all sorts of shameful secrets to those from whom they had been sedulously hidden. Long-buried family skeletons were dragged out into the light of day, and no one was spared. Indeed, the greatest sufferers were those most closely clustered round about the throne. There was, however, one exception. The widowed Empress was neither attacked nor even mentioned, and the attempt was evidently made, by the writer or writers of these extraordinary communications, to respect, as far as was possible, the feelings and prejudices of the Emperor’s mother.
Nothing was left undone to discover the perpetrators of this most evil and incomprehensible practical joke, if practical joke it was. At first it was supposed that the letters emanated from two people, presumed to be husband and wife, but soon it became clear to thoughtful investigators, and these comprised all the more intelligent members of the Berlin Court world, that many more than two or even three persons must be implicated in the conspiracy. Indeed, the Empress Frederick is said to have observed to a friend that she felt sure that many of those who had at first been victims had now become aggressors, and that practically everybody was taking the opportunity of slinging mud by way of revenge for real or fancied injuries.
This is not the place to deal with the long and complicated story of what came to be known as the anonymous letter scandal. No really satisfactory conclusion was ever attained. Even now German opinion, notably among those chiefly concerned with the exhaustive investigation which took place by the Emperor’s command, is hopelessly divided. The affair ended in the imprisonment—unjust as it turned out—of a high Court official, in a fatal duel, and in many tragi-comedies.
CHAPTER XX
LIFE AT FRIEDRICHSHOF
FOR many interesting details and anecdotes in the following chapter, we are indebted to a valuable pamphlet entitled, “Reminiscences of Victoria Empress Frederick,” by Professor G. A. Leinhaas, her honorary librarian.