The Crown Prince’s position was particularly difficult because he was appealed to by all parties—by the Liberals, who looked forward to the day when he would be King of Prussia as perhaps not very far distant; and by the Conservatives, who adjured him to support the Government on dynastic grounds.
Of the two parties, the Liberals appeared to have the best of it, for the prolonged absence of the Crown Prince and Crown Princess was naturally interpreted in Germany as indicating, if not their sympathy with the Liberal party, at any rate their dislike of the existing Government.
But events were shaping themselves in such a way that the Dantzig affair, with all that had led up to it and had followed it, was soon to be forgotten in a crisis of much greater moment, and one which brought to the Crown Prince his baptism of fire.
It was during the visit of the Crown Prince and his family to England that King Frederick VII of Denmark, the last of his dynasty, died, and the question of the succession to the Duchies of Schleswig-Holstein immediately became acute.
CHAPTER X
THE WAR OF THE DUCHIES
PALMERSTON is reported to have said on one occasion, that there had been only three men in Europe who really understood the Schleswig-Holstein question. One of them was himself—and he had forgotten it; the second man was dead; and the third was in a mad-house.
But the members of the Royal Houses of England, Prussia, and Denmark considered that, without being either jurists or diplomatists by profession, they understood the question quite well enough to take different sides with ardent enthusiasm. The question came, in fact, like a dividing sword, and not for the first time it brought war in its train between Prussia and Denmark. The British Royal family was placed by its intimate ties with both combatants—the Prince of Wales had married Princess Alexandra of Denmark in March, 1863—in a position of peculiar delicacy, which was not rendered easier by the fact that public opinion in England warmly espoused the cause of Denmark.
If it was not easy for Queen Victoria and her advisers to steer a prudent course, the position of the Crown Princess in Berlin was even more difficult. She met the crisis with her customary courage, and she applied to its solution the teachings of that constitutional liberalism which she had imbibed from her father.
The Princess felt very strongly that the honour as well as the interest of Prussia—or perhaps one should say her interest as well as her honour—required the nation to play an unselfish part, and to seek indemnity in the moral prestige to be derived from the settlement of this ancient racial feud. As future Queen of Prussia, the Princess wished to see the interests of the Crown identified with the constitutional rights of the people; she desired to see the inhabitants of the duchies once more contented, loyal subjects of Duke Frederick of Schleswig-Holstein. It was not her fault, nor was it within her knowledge, that the solution which Bismarck even then contemplated, and which he was ultimately able to carry out, belonged to a wholly different order of ideas.
It is necessary, in a brief retrospect, to show how this question of the duchies had become like an open sore, poisoning the relations between Denmark and Prussia. Perhaps the most fertile cause of trouble lay in the fact that Schleswig and Holstein, though grouped together by historical circumstances, were each very different in the character of its population and their real or supposed rights.