The unfortunate Stockmar, in any case, knew nothing of the matter; he would have given much to find out who was responsible. Indeed, this new complication to an already painful and suspicious affair so distressed Stockmar that he fell ill, and had to resign his position as secretary to the Crown Princess. This was for her a real misfortune, as even the most spiteful and prejudiced of her critics could not accuse the old Baron’s son and pupil of being anything but a sound and patriotic German.
Bismarck was good enough to accept the Crown Prince’s assertion that the statement was inserted in the Times entirely without his cognizance, and he thought it was inspired by Geffcken; in fact, he attributed it to the same quarter to which, as he believed, the Crown Prince owed the bent of his political views, namely, the school of writers who extolled the English constitution as a model to be imitated by other nations, without thoroughly comprehending it.
What wonder, then, observed Bismarck, that the Crown Princess and her mother overlooked that peculiar character of the Prussian State which renders its administration by means of shifting Parliamentary groups a sheer impossibility? The party of progress were then daily anticipating victory in their struggle with prerogative, and naturally took every opportunity to place the situation “in the light best calculated to influence female minds.”
In the following August, Bismarck says, the Crown Prince visited him at Gastein, and there, “less under the sway of English influences,” “used the unreserved language of one who sees that he has done wrong and seeks to excuse himself on the score of the influences under which he had lain.”
This attitude, however, if it was ever really adopted, was certainly short-lived. A fresh difference broke out between the Crown Prince and the King on the subject of the former’s attendance at Cabinet Councils, and on this point the Crown Prince undoubtedly held firm. Bismarck prints his marginal notes on a memorandum sent by the Crown Prince to his father. In these notes the whole constitutional position of the Crown Prince is discussed, but we are here only concerned with the following references to the Crown Princess:
“Especially necessary is it that the intermediary advisers, with whose aid alone his Royal Highness can be authorised to busy himself with the consideration of pending affairs of State, should be adherents, not of the Opposition, but of the Government, or at least impartial critics without intimate relations with the Opposition in the Diet or the Press. The question of discretion is that which presents most difficulty, especially in regard to our foreign relations, and must continue to do so until his Royal Highness, and her Royal Highness the Crown Princess, have fully realised that in ruling Houses the nearest of kin may yet be aliens, and of necessity, and as in duty bound, represent other interests than the Prussian. It is hard that a frontier line should also be the line of demarcation between the interests of mother and daughter, of brother and sister; but to forget the fact is always perilous to the State.”
In the autumn of 1863 Queen Victoria was staying at Coburg. She sent for Morier and had a long talk with him on the growing difficulties which seemed to encompass the Crown Prince and Princess. The fact that Morier ventured to hint that any appearance of interference on the part of England would be very prejudicial to the interests of their Royal Highnesses, and that a suspicion that the Crown Prince was being prompted from over the water would materially diminish in the eyes of the Liberal party the value of his opposition, shows that there was something, even then, to be said for the feeling which Bismarck so sedulously fostered.
During the summer of 1863, the Crown Princess accompanied her husband on a long tour of military inspections in the provinces of Prussia and Pomerania, and her Royal Highness performed the ceremony of naming a warship, the Vineta, at Dantzig.
This tour caused a good deal of discomfort to the Crown Prince and Princess, for in most of the towns they visited the municipal authorities ostentatiously refrained from celebrating the occasion; on the other hand, the populace as a rule received the Royal pair with abundant loyalty.
We have a curious glimpse of the sort of impression made in East Prussia by the Crown Princess in a private letter written by a member of the Progressive party, who afterwards became a confidential friend of the Crown Prince. This gentleman says that everyone was pleased with the Crown Princess, for she showed that she had a mind of her own. She informed a certain official that she read the Volkszeitung, the National-zeitung, and the Times every day, and that she agreed entirely with those newspapers—in the circumstances an amazingly imprudent statement. It was, indeed, such a shock to the official that it reduced him to blank silence.