The precipitate haste with which the young Kaiser had rushed off to visit St. Petersburg, almost before the public signs of mourning for his father had been removed in Berlin and Potsdam, had impressed everybody as curious. Nearly a year had now elapsed, and the failure of the Czar to say anything about returning the visit was growing to seem odder still. It was, of course no secret that the Czar did not like William. No two men could present greater points of difference, physically and mentally. The autocrat of all the Russias is a huge, lumbering, slow, and tenacious man, growing somewhat fat with increasing years, hating all forms of regular exercise, and cherishing a veritable horror of noisy, overzealous, and bustling people. Every smart public servant in Russia is governed by the knowledge that his imperial master has a peculiar aversion to all forms of bother, and values his officials precisely in proportion as they make short and infrequent reports, free from all accounts of unpleasant things, and, still more important, from all meddlesome suggestions of reform. When a Russian diplomat was asked, a year ago, what the Czar’s personal attitude toward William was, he answered expressively by shrugging his shoulders and putting his fingers in his ears.
But now the Czar, from passively affronting William by not returning his visit, summoned the energy for a direct provocation. A palace luncheon was given in St. Petersburg, celebrating the betrothal of a Montenegrin Princess to a Russian Grand Duke, and the Czar, standing and in a loud, clear voice, drank to Prince Nikolo of Montenegro as “the only sincere and faithful friend Russia had” among European sovereigns. That there might be no doubt about this, the Czar had the words printed next day in the Official Messenger.
Germany was not slow to comprehend the meaning of this remarkable speech. But to make it still clearer the Czarowitch, three weeks later, paid a formal visit to Stuttgart to attend some Court festivities, and passed through Berlin both going and coming—though the Breslau-Dresden route would have been more direct—apparently for no other purpose than to insult the Kaiser by stopping for an hour each time inside the railway station, as if there were no such people as the Hohenzollerns to so much as leave a card upon. As a capstone to this insolence, the Russian officers of his suite refused to drink the toast to the German Empire at the Stuttgart banquet, and, when a dispute arose, left the room in a body.
The immediate effect of this was to remove the last vestige of reserve existing between William and his English relatives. He at once sent word that, if convenient, he would visit his grandmother, the Queen, at the beginning of August. An assurance of hearty welcome was as promptly returned.
This decision marked another stage in the decline of Bismarck’s power. We have seen how he had been gradually pushed aside in the management of German internal affairs. Now the Kaiser was to break through the dearest traditions of Bismarck’s foreign policy—the cultivation of Russian amiability at whatever cost of dignity, and the contemptuous snubbing of England. With a fatal inability to distinguish between the promptings of passion and the dictates of true policy, the Chancellor had been led into a position where he could maintain himself only if every one of the elements and chances combined to play his game for him, and keep William at daggers-drawn with all things English. The miracle did not happen. As we have seen, even the Czar took it into his head to interfere to the damage of Bismarck’s plans.
So the perplexed and baffled old Chancellor, noting with new rage and mortification how power was slipping from his hands, yet helpless to do other than fight doggedly to hold what yet remained, stopped behind in Berlin, the while Kaiser William steamed at the head of his splendid new squadron into Portsmouth Harbour, and the very sea shook with the thunderous cannon roar of his welcome. The world had never before seen such a show of fighting ships as was gathered before Cowes to greet him. There was one other thing which may be assumed to have been unique in human chronicles. William, in the exuberance of his delight at his really splendid reception, and at being created a British Admiral, issued a solemn imperial order making his grandmother a Colonel of Dragoons.
The English did well to surround the young Kaiser’s visit with all imaginable pomp and display of overwhelming naval force, for it meant very much more both to them and to him than any one is likely to have imagined at the time. The splendour of the material spectacle, and the sentimental interest attaching to the fact that this young man coming to greet his grandmother was the first German Emperor to set foot on English soil since the days of the Crusaders, were much-dwelt upon in the press. To us who have been striving to trace the inner workings of the influences shaping the young man’s character, the event has a nearer significance. It meant that William—having for years been estranged from the liberalizing English impulses and feelings of his boyish education; having since his majority exulted in the false notion that to be truly German involved hatred of all things English—had come to see his mistake.
It is not possible to exaggerate the importance of this visit, and of the causes leading up to it, upon William’s mind. The Hohenzollerns, until within our own times the comparatively needy Princes of a poor country, have always been greatly impressed by the superior wealth and luxurious civilization of the English. The famous Double-Marriage project of Frederic William I’s days was clung to in Berlin through years of British snubs and rebuffs because thrifty Prussian eyes saw these islands through a golden mist. To the imagination of German royalty, English Princesses appear in the guise of fairies, not invariably beautiful, perhaps, but each bearing the purse of Fortunatus. This view of the English colours the thoughts of more lowly-born Germans. When Freytag * seeks to explain the late Kaiser Frederic’s complete and almost worshipping subjection to his wife, he says: “She had come to him from superior surroundings.”
* “The Crown Prince and the German Imperial Crown,” p. 49.
William had tried hard, in his ultra-German days, to despise English wealth along with English political ideas. The theory of a Spartan severity, governing expenditure and all other conditions of daily life, was the keynote of his Teutonic period. But when he became Kaiser he had yielded to the temptation of getting the Reichstag to augment his annual civil list by 3,500,000 marks. That in itself considerably modified his austere hatred of luxury. Now, as the guest of the richest nation in the-world, he was able to feel himself a relative, and wholly at home. The English conquest of William was complete.