But during the Congress the Crown Prince and Princess kept rigidly apart from even its social functions, the only exception being that the Crown Prince gave an official dinner in the King’s name to the plenipotentiaries. The Crown Princess stayed out at Potsdam, while the Empress refused to appear in any official way; she treated her son entirely as if he were already Emperor.
Most serious was the sharp division caused between the father and son by the decisions of the Congress. The Crown Prince, who had a life long dislike and suspicion of Russia and of Russian state-craft, was supposed to have favoured England, and the old Emperor, to the very end of his life, considered that Germany had not done as well at the Congress as she should have done. He ascribed the fact—probably most unfairly—to the Crown Prince instead of to Bismarck.
Meanwhile, all kinds of gossip were rife as to the Crown Princess’s efforts to influence her husband, for by the public at large the Regent was regarded as all-powerful.
To give an example of how the Princess was misunderstood and misjudged; when Hodel attacked the Emperor, the latter declared that he did not wish the full severity of the law to be exercised. But when Nobeling’s far more serious attempt at assassination followed, public opinion demanded that Hodel should be condemned to death. The Crown Prince, as Regent, had to sign the death warrant, and it became known that he had told a personal friend how very painful it was to him to sign it. It was widely believed that this over-scrupulousness, for so the good Berliners considered it, was due to the influence of the Crown Princess; yet as a matter of fact she had been, from the first, of opinion that Hodel, who had certainly meant to kill his Sovereign, should be executed.
In spite, however, of Bismarck’s determination to make him a cypher, the Crown Prince did not allow himself to be put wholly in the background. To the Minister’s great annoyance, he opened a personal correspondence with the new Pope, Leo XIII, in the hope of putting an end to the Kulturkampf. Though at the time it did not seem as though the Prince had succeeded, it laid the foundations for the ultimate solution of the problem.
The Regent also appointed a certain Dr. Friedberg, a distinguished Jewish jurist, who belonged to the Liberal party, to a very high judicial post. Curiously enough, this was the only appointment the Crown Prince made which was not afterwards revoked. The Emperor William I retained Friedberg, but refused to bestow on him the Black Eagle even after he had served for nine years in office. Ten years later, when the Emperor Frederick was on his way home from San Remo after his father’s death, he received a Ministerial delegation at Leipzig, and, on seeing Friedberg, he took the Black Eagle from his own neck and placed it about that of his old friend.
By the end of the year, the Emperor was quite himself again. On a certain memorable evening in December, he appeared at the Opera and was the object of an extraordinary popular demonstration. The next day he wrote an open letter to the Crown Prince, thanking him in the warmest terms for the way in which he had fulfilled his duties as Regent.
It was rumoured at the time—it is difficult to know with what truth—that the Crown Princess would have liked, after the recovery of her father-in-law, that a special post should be created for her husband. But, on his side, the Crown Prince said to an English friend that he had no wish to find himself the fifth wheel of the coach, and that he hated having only a semblance of authority.
During that visit to England which was so suddenly interrupted by Nobeling’s attempt on the Emperor, Mr. Goschen, the statesman whom Lord Randolph Churchill afterwards “forgot” at the time of his dramatic resignation, was asked to arrange a meeting between the Crown Prince and Princess and George Eliot. The novelist thus describes the party in a letter to a friend:
“The Royalties did themselves much credit. The Crown Prince is really a grand-looking man, whose name you would ask for with expectation if you imagined him no royalty. He is like a grand antique bust—cordial and simple in manners withal, shaking hands, and insisting that I should let him know when next we came to Berlin, just as if he had been a Professor Gruppe, living au troisième. She is equally good-natured and unpretending, liking best to talk of nursing soldiers, and of what her father’s estate was in literature. We had a picked party to dinner—the Dean of Westminster, the Bishop of Peterborough, Lord and Lady Ripon, Dr. Lyon Playfair, Kinglake, Froude, Mrs. Ponsonby (Lord Grey’s granddaughter), and two or three more ‘illustrations’; then a small detachment coming in after dinner. It was really an interesting occasion.”