As regarded the relations between England and Germany, the Crown Princess had an increasingly difficult part to play during the years that immediately succeeded the war. France and Germany—the former with far more reason—both considered that they had been badly treated by Great Britain during the conflict. Prince Bismarck either was, or pretended to be, watchful and apprehensive of the state of feeling in France, and Moltke, following his lead, spoke at a State banquet as if war might again be forced on Germany by France.
Urged, as Bismarck and his friends believed, by the Crown Princess, but really by the advice of Lord Granville, Queen Victoria, in 1874, made a personal appeal to the German Emperor. In her letter, after observing that England’s sympathies would be with Germany in any difference with France, she added the significant qualification, “unless there was an appearance on the part of Germany of an intention to avail herself of her greatly superior force to crush a beaten foe.”
In reviewing the life of the Empress Frederick as a whole, it must never be forgotten that the Emperor William was not expected to reach, as in fact he did, an extraordinary old age. After the Franco-Prussian War, everyone of any intelligence, from Bismarck downwards, attached great importance to the Crown Princess’s views and feelings; they believed that she had established a commanding influence over her husband, and that the moment he succeeded to the throne she would be the real ruler. Accordingly, the further intervention of Queen Victoria in 1875, when a German attack on France appeared imminent, was the crowning offence of the “British petticoats.”
Queen Victoria, as is well known, wrote a personal letter to the Tsar, who responded by going himself to Berlin. The “British petticoats,” it is true, had resented what appeared to be the act of aggression of France before the falsification of the Ems despatch had been revealed, but they were angered by Bismarck’s conspiracy with Russia in denouncing the Black Sea Treaty; and his opposition to a law of Ministerial responsibility, which might have given the new Empire a constitutional basis, showed the impossibility of any real political sympathy between the Minister and the Princess who had been trained in the school of Prince Albert.
The consequence of Queen Victoria’s successful intervention was indeed far-reaching. The ten years which followed were probably the most anxious of Bismarck’s whole life. France, by the prompt payment of the Indemnity and in other ways, had shown a most disquieting power of revival after the war. In addition, the understanding with Russia, which was the pivot of Bismarck’s foreign policy, having been broken in his hands, he was obliged to recast his policy from the foundations; and, though he succeeded in his immediate aims of separating England and France on the one hand, and France and Russia on the other, his resentment against the Crown Princess and her mother as the origin of all his troubles burned all the more fiercely.
After each quarrel—for quarrels there were—between the all-powerful Minister and his future sovereign, a peace, or rather a truce, was generally patched up, and Bismarck would be invited to some kind of festivity at the Crown Prince’s palace. A shrewd observer has recorded that on such occasions his manner to the Crown Princess was always courteous, but to the Crown Prince he was often curt to the verge of insolence.
So intense was the feeling aroused among Bismarck and his followers, that the Crown Prince and Princess found life in Berlin almost intolerable, and they began spending a considerable portion of each year abroad.