Twenty-seven years ago an elderly prince of the Schleswig-Holstein family produced a temporary sensation by renouncing his ancestral rank, in order to marry a beautiful young Miss Lee, whom he had met at Paris. He was then just the age of the century—sixty-four—and the bride, who, with true American courage, states the year of her birth in the Almanach de Gotha, was twenty-six. Less than a year later the bridegroom, who had been given the title of Prince de Noër at the Austrian Court, died in Syria. Nine years afterwards—in 1874—his widow married Count Waldersee, and went to Berlin to live.
It happened, in 1881, that young Prince William of Prussia was wedded to a Schleswig-Holstein Princess, to whom the Countess Waldersee, by her first marriage, stood in the relation of great-aunt. Young William and Waldersee were already friends. This connection between their wives led to a closer intimacy, the results of which have been tremendous in Germany.
I have said that the home of the Waldersees now became the centre of the rising opposition to the Bismarcks. Count Waldersee himself represented the ancient Prussian nobles’ traditions of an absolute monarchy and a Hohenzollern’s unlimited kingly power—traditions which were all at war with this Bismarckian usurpation of authority. The Countess Waldersee, with the privilege of an American, was able to gather into association with this aristocratic conservatism many elements in German political life which, under any other roof than hers, would have been antagonistic. Here it was that the women’s conclave was formed—the young Empress Victoria and her widowed mother-in-law, the Empress Frederic, joining hands with the Countess Waldersee—with the blessing of the aged Empress Augusta, who all her life long had hated Bismarck, resting upon their work.
Bismarck had been supreme for so many years, and had put so many of these feminine cabals under his feet in bygone days, that he failed to recognize the deadly peril which confronted him in this newly-unmasked battery. He proceeded to charge upon it with all his old recklessness of confidence, and with his accustomed weapons of newspaper insults, personal browbeatings and threats to resign. To his great bewilderment nothing gave way. He had come at last upon a force greater than himself. He maintained the struggle for over a year—scornfully at first, and later with a despairing tenacity as pitiful as it was undignified, until at last he was fairly cudgeled off the field.
This was the trick of it: Bismarck, in all his extended series of conquests over previous attacks by the women of the Court, had had the King at his back. He was supported by old William in his long campaign against the old Empress and the English Crown Princess. He had had the sanction of young William in his warfare upon the Empress Frederic. It had been with royal consent that he bore himself like the foremost man in Prussia, and he had allowed himself to forget the importance of this fact. The tables were completely turned upon him the instant these adroit and sagacious women whispered in young William’s ear, “Why not be foremost man in Prussia yourself?”
The young Kaiser’s thirtieth birthday came on January 27, 1889. We can put down to about that date his advance to an independent position in front of everybody else in his kingdom—including the Bismarcks. No single striking event marked the change; but the feeling that the change had come spread with strange swiftness throughout the length and breadth of Germany. The half-intuitive sense that Bismarck was done for ran like wildfire over the country. The Iron Chancellor for thirty years had done his best to reduce German manhood to the serf-like condition of the courtier, and it is proverbial that there is no other keenness of scent like that of courtiers for the fall of a favourite.
The open reconciliation between William and his mother belongs to a somewhat later period, but the spirit of it was already in the air. The terrible news of the death of Crown Prince Rudolph of Austria, which came on January 30th, is also to be taken into account as bearing upon this change at Berlin. The Austrian heir-apparent was only six months older than William, and of late years they had not been friends. Rudolph had been peculiarly intimate with the Prince of Wales and with the late Emperor Frederic, and had not concealed his sympathy with the English view of William’s behaviour. His tragic ending now produced the most painful and softening effect upon the emotional young Kaiser. He could only be restrained from going incognito to the funeral at Vienna by the urgent pleas of the stricken Austrian Emperor, and he made obviously sincere expressions of grief to the friends of the Prince of Wales, which went far toward removing the ill-feelings between them.
As it became apparent that the young Kaiser had thrown off his Bismarckian leading-strings, and, after a miserable interlude of small personal persecutions and revenges, was at last coming to comprehend the vastness of his duties and responsibilities, the world began watching him with an interest of another sort.
It was not easy for outsiders to follow with much clearness the details of the fight which Bismarck was now making to retain his position and prestige. No one but a German politician could understand the excitement about the appointment of the National Liberal, von Bennigsen, to the Governorship of Hanover—an act, by the way, which definitely ranged the ultra-Tories against Bismarck—or apprehend the significance of Bismarck’s fruitless attempts to secure the dismissal of Court Chaplain Stocker, who was too much a partisan of Waldersee’s. The general public preferred rather to study the personality of the young Kaiser as revealed by his individual acts and utterances.
William’s fondness for travelling had from the first attracted attention. It is not generally known that in order to gratify this taste he at the beginning of his reign decided to devote to it the money which would be saved by foregoing a coronation ceremony. This decision accorded with historic Prussian precedents. From the year 1701, when Prussia was raised to royal estate, and the first King was crowned with such memorable and costly pomp at Königsberg, no Hohenzollern had a coronation ceremony until William I put the crown upon his own head in October of 1861. Each of the intervening monarchs held instead what is called a Hudligung, or solemn homage from the assembled representatives of the estates of the realm—a curious ceremonial relic from feudal times which survived into the present century in its antique form as a public function in the Schloss Platz. William I’s avowed reason for breaking over the rule was that during his predecessor’s reign a Constitution had been promulgated in Prussia, and that this new-fangled innovation rendered it necessary to remind people anew of the powers and prerogatives of the monarch by visible signs of crown and sceptre.