For a considerable time after the return of the princess from the Orient the anonymous letters contained phrases and peculiarities of expression that clearly indicated Princess Charlotte, and to such an extent was this the case that those in pursuit of the sender of the missives would have ascribed their authorship to the princess, had it not been that she herself was referred to in many of the letters in a particularly savage and scurrilous manner. Baron Schrader, the Hohenaus and their friends, being aware of the existence of the quarrel between the Kotzes and the Saxe-Meiningens, naturally became more convinced than ever that it was either Baron Kotze, or his "viper-tongued" wife, as they described her, who were the culprits, and insisted that it was the baroness who had taken advantage of her intimacy with the princess to get possession of her royal highness's diary, the contents of which were now being used in so many of the letters.
What has now become of the diary it is impossible to say, but judging by the excerpts used in the anonymous letters, it must have constituted a particularly piquant volume or series of volumes! Thus there was one remark about the emperor which ridiculed "his intolerable swagger." There were also some comical references to Princess Victoria of Prussia, who was jilted by the late Prince Alexander of Battenberg, on the very eve of the day appointed for the wedding, and that for the sake of a little actress. This princess has since then married Prince Adolph of Schaumburg, who was recently ousted from the regency of the tiny principality of Lippe. "Poor Vicky" was described as being "many-sided" owing to the number of her affaires de coeur, notably those with Baron Hugo von Reischach, at that time a very handsome lieutenant of the "Garde-du-Corps," but who afterward became gentleman-in-waiting to the widowed Empress Frederick, and married one of the princesses of Hohenlohe. This flirtation between Baron Reischach and Princess Victoria formed the theme of quite a number of the anonymous letters, in which the princess was charged with every kind of indelicacy, while the unfortunate baron was ridiculed in connection with the modernity of his nobility. Other love affairs of "poor Vicky" were likewise discussed in no friendly manner, and she was represented as being to such a degree infatuated for Count Andrassy, the eldest son of the famous Austro-Hungarian statesman, that the young fellow, it is declared, was forced to resign his secretaryship to the Austro-Hungarian Embassy, at Berlin, and to flee from the Prussian Court, in order to escape from the demonstrative attentions of the princess: "If it is like this now," said one of the letters, "what in Heaven's name will it be when 'Vicky' marries!"
There were, moreover, all sorts of matters relating to the vie intime of the imperial family discussed in these anonymous communications, such as bickerings between the emperor and his mother, quarrels with his English relatives, flirtations of the younger princesses, etc., which no one could possibly have known about, save members of the imperial family, and which were just the sort of thing that Princess Charlotte would have written in her diary, in her witty and sarcastic manner.
In fact there was so much of the phraseology and style habitual to Princess Charlotte in the letters, that they would inevitably have been, as I remarked above, positively ascribed to her had it not been for the grossly improper and even disgusting twist and construction that was invariably added to her well-known manner of writing. Although a terrible flirt as well as a daring coquette, the princess has never been charged with anything more serious than trivial affaires de coeur, excepting by the writer of the anonymous letters.
Then too, as I have also already stated many of these letters assailed the princess herself, in the most unscrupulous fashion; an abominable and impossible story, picked up from the filthiest of Berlin gutters, impugning the legitimacy of the only child of the princess, being thus circulated far and wide. This vile fabrication alleged that Charlotte had been married off in a hurry to Prince Bernhardt of Saxe-Meiningen, in order to avoid a public scandal. It is only necessary to recall the fact that the sole child of Princess Charlotte, Princess Fedora, now married to Prince Henry of Reuss, was born twelve months after her mother's marriage, in order to show how utterly without foundation was this shameful slander. At least a dozen anonymous letters sent to the emperor and to various other personages dealt with an episode said to have taken place during a trip undertaken by the princess in Norway and Sweden. She was attended on that occasion by a Captain von Berger, and his wife, who were her gentleman and lady-in-waiting, and there was also in her suite a diminutive officer holding the rank of lieutenant, and bearing the old Silesian name of Count Schack, who acted as aid-de-camp.
According to the anonymous letters, Princess Charlotte made a kind of toy of the little officer, and behaved in a most volatile manner. There was evidence of such intense malignity in these letters against Princess Charlotte that they were attributed to a jealous woman, and that if not actually written by one, they had at any rate been inspired by a member of the fair sex.
There can be no doubt that Princess Charlotte and her husband ended by sharing the opinion entertained by the Schrader-Hohenau clique, about the letters being inspired by Baroness Kotze, and written by her husband, and it must be confessed that there was a certain amount of ground for their doing so. The blotting pads used by Baron Kotze, both at the Union Club and elsewhere, were subjected to much the same microscopic examination as those of Duke Ernest-Gunther of Schleswig-Holstein, and when at length a distinct degree of similarity was discovered to exist between the caligraphy of the anonymous letter writer and the impressions which figured on the blotting pads habitually used by Baron Kotze, Baron Schrader drew up a report on the subject, charging Baron Kotze with being the author of the letters, and presented it to the emperor. The latter hesitated a little before taking any action in the matter, and would doubtless have yielded to the advice of the minister of the imperial household, Prince Stolberg-Wernigrode, who urged him to institute a very careful secret investigation of his own before rushing the denouement, cautioning him that Baron Schrader's evidence was inadequate, had it not been for the pressure brought to bear upon his majesty by the Saxe-Meiningens and other members of his family, who were all convinced that Baron Kotze was the guilty party.
It was due entirely to this pressure that the kaiser, incensed beyond measure at the persistency and the malignity of these letters, took the extraordinary step of having Baron von Kotze arrested by the chief of his military household, General von Hahnke merely on the strength of his imperial order, dispensing with any legal warrant. That Count Hahnke should have been selected for this duty, and that a military prison, rather than the ordinary house of detention, should have been chosen for the incarceration of Baron Kotze, must be ascribed to the fact that the latter was at the time a captain of cavalry on the reserve lists, and that in a military prison the authority of the emperor, as head of the army, is supreme and absolute, which cannot be said of the ordinary civil prisons, the officers of which are subject above everything else to the tribunals and to the laws of the land.
Of course, from the very moment when the baron was arrested, the entire scandal, that is to say the existence of a conspiracy for the writing and distribution of anonymous letters, became public, and served to furnish material for articles both in the German and the foreign press on the alleged moral rottenness of the Court of Berlin. At first there is no doubt that society, and even the ordinary public, accepted the guilt of Baron Kotze as assured, and were further led to believe the story about the baroness having been the instigator of many of the letters, by her at once withdrawing to her country-seat at Friedrichsfeld, and refusing to receive anyone.
Doubts as to the baron's guilt, however, commenced to arise when it was found that in spite of his incarceration, the anonymous letters continued to be sent as before, without any interruption, while all efforts to bring home the guilt to the baron completely failed in every sense of the word. Not only did the famous expert in caligraphy, Langenbuch, declare that the handwriting of the letters had nothing whatsoever in common with that of Baron Kotze, but that those written during his incarceration were exactly similar to the others. The emperor himself received anonymous letters, describing him to be a fool for having unjustly imprisoned an altogether innocent man, and recommending him to look after his brother-in-law, Duke Ernest-Gunther of Schleswig-Holstein.