When he reached San Remo in November, it was to note the death mark clearly stamped on his father’s face; yet he heard the English entourage still talking about the possibility of the disease not being cancer. The German doctors had grievous stories to tell him about how they had been crowded out and put under the heel of the foreigner. Whether he would or not, he was made a party to the whole wretched wrangle which henceforth vexed the atmosphere of the Villa Zirio.
The outside world was subjecting this villa and its inhabitants to the most tirelessly inquisitive scrutiny. Newspaper correspondents engirdled San Remo with a cordon of espionage, through which filtered the gossip of servants and the stray babbling of tradespeople. Dr. Mackenzie—now become Sir Morell—confided his views of the case to journalists who desired them. The German physicians furtively promulgated stories of quite a different hue, through the medium of the German press. Thus it came about that, while Germany as a whole disliked deeply the manner in which Frederic’s case was managed, the English-speaking peoples espoused the opposite view and condemned as cruel and unnatural the position occupied by the Germans, with young William at their head.
As the winter of 1887-8 went forward, it became apparent that the Kaiser’s prolonged life had run its span. The question which would die first, old William or middle-aged Frederic, hung in a fluttering balance. Germany watched the uncertain development of this dual tragedy with bated breath, and all Christendom bent its attention upon Germany and her two dying Hohenzollerns.
March came, with its black skies and drifting snow wreaths and bitter winds blown a thousand miles across the Sclavonic sand plains, and laid the aged Kaiser upon his deathbed. Prince William, having alternated through the winter between Berlin and San Remo, was at the last in attendance upon his grandfather. The dying old man spoke to him as if he were the immediate heir. Upon him all the injunctions of state and family policy which the departing monarch wished to utter were directly laid. The story of those conferences will doubtless never be revealed in its entirety. But it is known that, if any notion had up to that time existed of keeping Frederic from the throne, it was now abandoned. William was counselled to loving patience and submission during the little reign which his father at best could have. Bismarck was pledged to remain in office upon any and all terms short of peremptory dismissal through this same brief period.
It was to William, too, that that last exhortation to be “considerate” with Russia was muttered by the dying man—that strange domestic legacy of the Hohenzollerns which hints at the murder of Charles XII, recalls the partition of Poland, the despair of Jena, and the triumph of Waterloo, and has yet in store we know not what still stranger things.
William I died on March 9, 1888. On the morning of the following day Frederic and his wife and daughters left San Remo in a special train and arrived at Berlin on the night of the 11th, having made the swiftest long journey known in the records of continental railways. The new Kaiser’s proclamation—“To my People”—bears the date of March 12th, but it was really not issued until the next day.
During that period of delay, the Schloss at Charlottenburg, which had been hastily fitted up for the reception of the invalid, was the scene of protracted conferences between Frederic, his son William, and Bismarck. Hints are not lacking that these interviews had their stormy and unpleasant side, for Frederic had up to this time fairly maintained his general health, and could to a limited extent make use of his voice. But all that is visible to us of this is the fact that some sort of understanding was arrived at, by which Bismarck could remain in office and accept responsibility for the acts of the reign.
The story of those melancholy ninety-nine days need not detain us long. Young William himself, though standing now in the strong light of public scrutiny, on the steps of the throne, remained silent, and for the most part motionless. The world gossiped busily about his heartless conduct toward his mother, his callous behaviour in the presence of his father’s terrible affliction, his sympathy with those who most fiercely abused the good Sir Morell Mackenzie. As there had been tales of his unfilial actions at San Remo, so now there were stories of his shameless haste to snatch the reins of power from his father’s hands. So late as August, 1889, an anonymous writer alleged in “The New Review” that “the watchers by the sick bed in Charlottenburg were always in dread when ‘Willie’ visited his father lest he might brusquely demand the establishment of a Regency.”
Next to no proof of these assertions can be discovered in Berlin. If there was talk of a Regency—as well there might be among those who knew of the existence of Frederic’s offer to abdicate—it did not in any way come before the public. I know of no one qualified to speak who says that it ever came before even Frederic.
That a feeling of bitterness existed between William and his parents is not to be denied. All the events of the past year had contributed to intensify this feeling and to put them wider and wider apart. Even if the young man had been able to divest himself of the last emotion of self-sensitiveness, there would still have remained the dislike for the whole England-Mackenzie-San Remo episode which rankled in every conservative German mind. But neither the blood nor the training of princes helps them to put thoughts of self aside—and in William’s case a long chain of circumstances bound him to a position which, though we may find it extremely unpleasant to the eye, seemed to him a simple matter of duty and of justice to himself and to Prussia.