The Empress Frederick: a memoir

by Anonymous

We can best perhaps realise the remarkable qualities which the Empress brought into the House of Hohenzollern by comparing her eldest son with his predecessors on the throne. King Frederick William IV had a mind which appeared incapable of appreciating matters of greater importance than the etiquette of Courts and the prescriptions of mediæval heraldry. As we know, during the last years of his life his intellect was clouded much in the same way as was that of King George III of England. King Frederick’s brother and successor, the old Emperor William, possessed remarkable strength of character combined with little capacity or intellect, as Bismarck very frankly explained, both to his creature, Busch, and in other recorded expressions of opinion. As for the Emperor William’s father, the ill-fated Frederick, it was no doubt from him that the son derived that dash of romantic idealism characteristic of both monarchs.

But undoubtedly William II was always much more the son of his mother than of his father, which seems, indeed, to be the rule in families of less exalted rank. We have seen how the Empress really received from her father the training of a man, and, it may be added, of an extremely versatile man. If fate had compelled her eldest son to earn his own living in a private station, it is extraordinary to think of the number of professions in any one of which he could have attained a competence, if not indeed high distinction. From his mother, rather than from his father, he inherited a great appetite for work and an extraordinary aptitude for detail; and he showed himself at different times to have had in him the making, not only of a soldier and a sailor, but of a musician, a poet, an artist, a preacher, and an orator.

Compare this with his grandfather, the old Emperor, who, if he had not been born in the purple, could only have been a soldier, and not, it must be added, one who could have held very high commands. Compare him again with his father; the Emperor Frederick, if he had not been born in the purple, though he certainly showed greater military capacity than the old Emperor, nevertheless would probably not have been happy or successful in any private station other than that of a great moral teacher.

The Emperor William’s affinity to his mother in character, temperament, and accomplishments becomes the more striking the more it is investigated. He shared with her a certain impulsiveness, a deficiency in what is ordinarily called tact, which really amounts to a constitutional inability to appreciate the effect which a particular word or action will necessarily have on other people. This, which seems a negative quality, is really a positive one, interwoven with a high courage and a contempt for the mean little dictates of conventional prudence, which have always commanded the admiration of generous minds. This remarkable similarity between mother and son assuredly furnishes the key to the somewhat complex question of their relationships at different periods. They were in fact too much alike for their relations to be always harmonious.

The widowed Empress did not owe all her unhappiness to Bismarck alone. In 1889 Gustav Freytag published a volume of Reminiscences of the Emperor Frederick which attracted a great amount of attention, more perhaps than they intrinsically deserved. But Freytag’s position among German writers as novelist, poet, dramatist, and historian, was so great that everything he wrote had its importance, and in addition to that it was known that he had at one time been admitted to the confidence of the then Crown Prince, whose political Liberalism he appeared to share.

Freytag was a Silesian by birth, and this no doubt did him no harm with the Emperor Frederick, who was warmly attached to Silesia, and delighted in the graphic pictures of life in that province which Freytag drew in his novels. The Empress made Freytag’s acquaintance in the early years of her married life—indeed, the first German novel which she read with her husband was Freytag’s Soll und Haben. The novelist had been presented to the Prince Consort by his patron, Duke Ernest of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, and it was natural in all the circumstances that the Crown Princess and her husband should have shown the great writer marked signs of favour.

It is all the more extraordinary, therefore, that in his Reminiscences Freytag should have drawn such a picture of the Emperor Frederick as must have deeply distressed his then newly-made widow. It was a picture which she herself knew to be inaccurate, and which indeed could only gratify the personal hostility of Bismarck and his adherents. There is no need to linger long over this picture, but it demands some notice because it, so to speak, gathers together in a convenient form the principal features of what may be called the Bismarckian view of both the Empress and her husband.

It has been said that Freytag apparently shared the Crown Prince’s Liberalism, but he was also steeped in Prussian particularism, and it was this that brought him to his almost blind admiration of Bismarck, and rendered him incapable of appreciating the political conceptions of the Emperor Frederick. Freytag, indeed, was a bad judge of character, the presentation of which was his weak point as a novelist.

Allusion has already been made to the fact that the Crown Prince invited Freytag to accompany him with the Third Army in the Franco-German War, and the Reminiscences terminate soon after the battle of Sedan. After 1870 the Crown Prince hardly ever saw Freytag, and never with any real intimacy; yet on this slender foundation of knowledge the novelist revived, under the specious cloak of affection, some of the worst charges of the Reptile Press, and of the insulting commentary which Bismarck published on the late Emperor’s diary.

The principal charge for our purposes here is that the Crown Prince was subjected to foreign influence, and was entirely dominated by his wife. In effect Freytag suggests that through the Crown Princess, Princess Alice, and other members of the English Royal family, important secrets of German military movements reached the French commanders. “Both the Empress Frederick and Princess Alice,” he says, “wrote to their august mother and the family in London, and what crossed the North Sea could be sent to France again in letters a few hours later. It is therefore not unnatural that the French learned by way of England a variety of news about our army which with greater propriety would have remained concealed.”