And after his daughter had gone back to Berlin, the loving father wrote to her:
“Your dear visit has left upon us the most delightful impression; you were well, full of life and freshness, and withal matured. I may therefore yield to the feeling, sweetest of all to my heart as your father, that you will be lastingly happy. In this feeling I wait without apprehension for what fate may bring.”
On this visit to England the Princess did not fail to see her old friend and ruler, Sarah Lady Lyttelton, who records:
“The dear Princess came in, habited and hatted and cockfeathered from her ride, looking very well though in a very bad cold. She embraced me and received me most kindly, and took me into her magnificent sitting-room, where I spent almost an hour with her, till she had to go and change her dress for luncheon. She talked much of her baby and inquired after everybody belonging to me and seemed as happy as ever.”
CHAPTER VII
ADVICE FROM ENGLAND
THE year 1860 was on the whole a happy one for the Princess Royal. It brought her a long visit from her parents and the birth of her eldest daughter, but on the other side of the account the relations between her two countries, England and Prussia, became perceptibly worse.
For the New Year her father sent her one of his customary letters of sagacious counsel, in which may be detected a certain note of uneasiness as to the development of his daughter’s powers of self-control:
“You enter upon the New Year with hopes, which God will surely graciously suffer to be fulfilled, but you do also with good resolutions, whose fulfilment lies within your own hand and must necessarily contribute to your success, also happiness, in this suffering and difficult world. Hold firmly by these resolutions, and evermore cherish the determination, with which comes also strength, to exercise unlimited control over yourself, that the moral law may govern and the propensity obey,—the end and aim of all education and culture, as we long ago discovered and reasoned out together.”
It is remarkable that early in this year Prince Frederick William appears to have been for a time the centre of the hopes of the reactionary party. The Junkers actually planned to bring about the resignation of the Prince Regent, and to induce Prince Frederick William to assume the supreme power and govern without a constitution, which formed the great obstacle to their military ambitions. This scheme argued an extraordinary misapprehension, not only of Prince Frederick William’s honest, straightforward character, but also of all his political ideals. He was, especially at this period of his life, a pure Constitutionalist, with a profound admiration for the free polity of England, and it would be difficult to imagine any form of government which would have seemed both to him and to his wife more immoral, as well as more certain to entail a counter-revolution, than a military dictatorship. It is perhaps not without significance that in March a British warship was launched at Portsmouth and was named Frederick William by way of compliment to the husband of the Princess Royal.
In June there was a parade at the Königsberg garrison, at which the Prince Regent said to his son, “Fritz, I appoint you to the First Infantry Regiment, the oldest Corps in the service,” and about a month afterwards the young commander was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant-General.