This incident about the glass of water evidently much impressed Bismarck, for he told it to Busch again some months later, when he said of the Crown Princess, “She is in general a very clever person, and really agreeable in her way, but she should not interfere in politics.”
The Empress’s relations with Bismarck after her husband’s accession were more pleasant than they had ever been before. The Emperor naturally leaned upon his wife, and her influence perhaps appeared greater than it was. But, whatever its precise extent, Bismarck, with his intensely practical mind, saw that it was at any rate a factor in the situation, and he made use of it accordingly. It was, indeed, as natural for him to cultivate her good will now, as it was for him a little later to heap contumely and insult on her head. Such conduct was utterly incomprehensible to the Empress, with her upright, loyal nature; she would have suffered less from the Chancellor had she been able to find the key to both his greatness and his littleness.
But, even at this time, when Bismarck had the strongest reasons for conciliating the Empress, there was one question, that of the Battenberg marriage, on which he felt compelled to do battle with her, and in which he vanquished her in fair fight.
The Empress, different as she was in many respects from her mother, was absolutely at one with Queen Victoria in her views of everything which should regulate family life. Thus, she was as firm a believer in the importance of securing happy marriages for her sons and daughters as the Queen had proved herself to be. That the union of two human beings should be guided by State considerations was to her abhorrent. She had welcomed with eager delight her niece, Princess Irene of Hesse, as a daughter-in-law; she knew that the latter’s sister, Princess Victoria, had formed a happy marriage with Prince Louis of Battenberg. Now it was Prince Louis’s brother, Alexander of Bulgaria, who had been from boyhood a favourite with her sister, Princess Alice, whom the Empress desired to see married to her second daughter, Princess Victoria. The alliance had been mooted some four years before, but was then considered, by Bismarck especially, as quite out of the question, if only because the hero of Slivnitza had earned the intense hostility of the Tsar Alexander.
In July, 1885, Bismarck told Hohenlohe that, whereas the Emperor and the Crown Prince were in favour of the marriage of Princess Victoria with the King of Portugal, the Crown Princess and the young Princess herself preferred the Prince of Bulgaria, and that there was “great skirmishing” going on over the business.
More than a year later, in October, 1886, the old Emperor himself spoke to Hohenlohe of the matter, and with some bitterness, declaring that the Crown Princess and Princess Victoria still entertained the idea of this alliance. He said he had questioned the Crown Prince, who had denied it, and he further observed that in politics his son was ruled by his wife.
In 1888 the Empress still desired the marriage because she believed that the affections of her daughter were seriously engaged. But, changed as were all the conditions of her own and the new Emperor’s life, she at once found arrayed against her the same powerful influences as before, with the addition of that of her eldest son, the new Crown Prince. The difference of opinion in the Imperial family became known to the whole of Europe, and was very frankly discussed in the English and Continental Press. Matters seemed at a deadlock. On the one side were ranged the Empress and all those Royal personages who by kinship or marriage were connected with the Battenberg family; on the other were the Crown Prince, Bismarck, and, it was whispered, the Emperor Frederick himself, who had a great dislike to any marriage that savoured of a mésalliance.
This was the position when Queen Victoria arrived at Charlottenburg to visit her stricken son-in-law. Bismarck, with his usual unerring eye for the potentialities of a situation, seized the opportunity. He sought an audience of the Queen, and succeeded in convincing her by his arguments that the Battenberg alliance was really extremely inadvisable. Not until she found her mother ranged among the opponents of the marriage did the Empress yield, and consent, to use her own phrase, “to sacrifice her daughter’s happiness on the altar of the Fatherland.”
We have a slightly different, and probably less accurate, account of the termination of the affair in Hohenlohe’s journal of May 17, 1888:
“The Empress had said that in the end it would be no misfortune if Bismarck did retire. This was at once retailed to him, whereupon the newspaper war. Malet reported to Queen Victoria at Florence that it was very disadvantageous for English interests that the Queen should appear to interest herself in the Battenberg match. It would be well, more particularly in view of her impending visit to Berlin, to prevent people from thinking she favoured the marriage. The English Ministry also concurred in this. Thereupon Queen Victoria wrote a severe letter to her daughter, the Empress; and during her stay also she expounded her views in an energetic fashion, which produced unhappy and tearful scenes. The relations between Queen Victoria and the Imperial Chancellor have shaped very well. They were enchanted with each other.”