“The English could not help feeling proud of the way the Princess Royal was spoken of, and the high esteem she is held in. For one so young it is a most flattering position, and certainly, as the Princess’s charm of manner and her kind unaffected words had in that short time won her the hearts of all the officers and strangers present, one was not astonished at the praise the Prussians themselves bestow on her Royal Highness. The Prussian Royal Family is so large, and their opinions politically and socially sometimes so different, that it must have been very difficult indeed at first for the Princess Royal, and people therefore cannot praise enough the high principles, great discretion, sound judgment, and cleverness her Royal Highness has invariably displayed.”
And the Duchess adds, on the authority of Field Marshal Wrangel, that the soldiers were particularly delighted to see the Princess on horseback and without a veil.
The Royal visit to Babelsberg came to an end all too soon, and the leave-taking was tearful and emotional in the extreme. Queen Victoria wrote with natural feeling, “All would be comparatively easy, were it not for the one thought that I cannot be with her at the very critical moment when every other mother goes to her child!”
In October of that first year of the Princess Royal’s married life, her father-in-law became permanent Regent, owing to the continued mental incapacity of King Frederick William IV. This filled the young Princess with intense satisfaction, which was increased when the new Prince Regent declared it to be his intention strictly to adhere to the letter and the spirit of the Constitution of 1850. The great bulk of the nation rallied instantly round him, and it seemed as if the gulf between the House of Hohenzollern and the people of Prussia had been suddenly bridged. The Manteuffel Ministry fell in the following month, a general election produced an enormous Liberal majority, and the hopes of the Constitutionalists ran high. The Manteuffel Ministry was succeeded by one of which Prince Charles Anthony of Hohenzollern was the President. From this time forward Prince Frederick William regularly attended the meetings of the Ministry, and Privy Councillor Brunnemann was assigned to him as a kind of secretary and channel of communication on State affairs.
The Princess Royal imprudently expressed to a gentleman of the Court her satisfaction at the change in the political situation, and her words, being repeated and exaggerated, gave great offence to the Conservative party, which was also the party of the King. The Princess’s satisfaction was of course shared by her father, who wrote to the sympathetic Stockmar a letter showing no prevision of that great rock of Army administration on which these high hopes were destined to be wrecked:
“The Regency seems now to have been secured for the Prince. We have only news of this at present by telegrams from our children, but are greatly delighted at this first step towards the reduction to order of a miserable chaos. Will the Prince have the courage to surround himself with honourable and patriotic men? That is the question, and what shape will the new Chamber take, and what will its influence on him be?”
On November 20, 1858, Prince and Princess Frederick William moved into the palace in Unter den Linden which was henceforth to be their residence in Berlin; and on the following day, the Princess’s eighteenth birthday, there was a kind of dedicatory service in the palace chapel, which was attended by all the members of the Royal House.
