It was at this juncture that one of the most dramatic scenes which can be imagined took place in the antechamber of the illustrious patient. The crown princess received letters which informed her that Prince Bismarck had submitted to the old emperor, then himself near death, a decree for signature, transferring the succession of the throne from Crown Prince Frederick to the latter's son, Prince William, a decree which, by the by, the old emperor could not bring himself to sign. Furthermore, she learnt through the same sources that one of the principal members of her household at San Remo, in fact, one of the chamberlains in attendance, was sending daily reports of the most venomous character to Berlin, and to Prince Bismarck particularly, about everything that went on around the unhappy crown prince. Not a thing was said, not a thing done, not a change for the worse or the better in the condition of the hapless crown prince, that was not instantly reported to the chancellor, in a sense most detrimental and inimical to the imperial couple at San Remo. This traitor in the camp owed his appointment to the imperial household to Prince Bismarck, but by his charming manners, his professions of loyalty and of devotion, and his denunciations of Prince Bismarck, and of the latter's policy and ways, had completely captured the confidence of both the crown prince and crown princess.
Empress Frederick has inherited from her mother, Queen Victoria, a singularly fiery temper. Her passionate anger when she realized the base treachery to which her sick husband and herself had been subjected in their time of cruel tribulation and trouble can only be imagined by those who have the privilege of knowing her, and the scene that took place between herself and the offending chamberlain was not merely dramatical, but tragical in its fierce intensity.
It was very shortly after this that the old emperor died. If Prince Bismarck entertained any further hopes of preventing the accession of Crown Prince Frederick to the throne, they were frustrated by Prince William, who declined to be a party to any such conspiracy. Indeed, in spite of all that has been said to the contrary, I am firmly convinced that William at no time took any part, either directly or indirectly, in the Bismarckian plot to oust his so sadly afflicted father from his rights to the crown. But, on the other hand, it is certain that he was suspected by his parents and relatives of being privy to the scheme, and that he was treated with still greater hostility and lack of affection by them than previously, which naturally served to embitter him more than ever before.
Emperor Frederick's reign lasted not quite one hundred days, and throughout that period a conflict may be said to have raged around the bedside of the dying man. Both he and his wife, aware how brief his tenure of the throne was destined to be, were bent on inaugurating some of those liberal reforms and popular measures which had been the dream of their entire married life, and which they wished to see put in force, as a lasting memorial of that monarch who figures in German history to-day as "Frederick the Noble."
Prince Bismarck, and all the leading statesmen of Prussia, it must be admitted, ranged themselves against the imperial couple in the matter. They expressed profound pity for the dying emperor, but they denounced the empress with the utmost virulence for taking advantage, as they described it, of his condition to endow Germany with some of the most pernicious features of English political life, which, while all very well for Britons, were destined to prove disastrous in the extreme if applied to Prussia. The fiercer the opposition, the more resolute did both the emperor and empress become in their determination to attain their aim, before death once more rendered the throne vacant; and the position of William, who was now crown prince, became even more difficult than it had hitherto been. His political sympathies were, it is impossible to deny, with Prince Bismarck and his followers, and he could not with his training and with the influences by which he had been surrounded, ever since he had left school, but disapprove of the measures which his father and mother wished to adopt. This very naturally added to their distrust of him, and while they lavished every token of affection upon their other children, he was treated by them more as a political adversary and a personal foe than as a friend or a son.
At length the end came. The pitiful sufferings of "Unser Fritz," uncomplainingly and patiently borne, were brought to a close by a death which in his case must have been a longed-for release; and within an hour afterwards, William, the present emperor, had startled his subjects and the entire civilized world, by taking an extraordinary step, which for a long time afterwards served as a theme for the denunciation of unfilial character hurled against him both in Germany and abroad; this step being the giving of an order to the effect that the guards placed at all the entrances of the Palace of Potsdam, in which his father had breathed his last, should be doubled, that a cordon of troops should be drawn around the park walls, and that no one should be allowed to enter or leave the palace without his permission.
While there is every reason to believe that this measure was suggested to him by Prince Bismarck, yet it must be admitted that it was to a certain extent justified by the circumstances. Emperor Frederick was known to have kept a most exhaustive diary throughout his entire married life, dealing day by day with all the political questions of the hour, the secrets of the Prussian State, the incidents of court life, etc., just as they occurred. From a German point of view it was a matter of the most extreme importance that this collection of diaries should not be permitted to leave Prussia, or to reach a foreign country, for it would practically have meant the placing at the mercy of a foreign land all the state secrets of Prussia during the previous thirty years. Emperor William and Prince Bismarck had both been led to believe that Empress Frederick had made arrangements to have these books conveyed to England by Sir Morel MacKenzie, whom they both disliked as much as they distrusted him. The idea that these volumes should be in the care of MacKenzie, even during the twenty-four hours journey separating Berlin from London, was to them quite intolerable.
Before many hours had elapsed, however, the measures were relaxed. It was discovered that the diaries were no longer in the palace, and that they had been taken over to England either knowingly or unknowingly by Queen Victoria on the occasion of her visit to Potsdam, when she came to bid adieu to her dying son-in-law.
Let me add that some time later, after a considerable amount of explanation and negotiation, Queen Victoria, of her own accord, returned the cases containing Emperor Frederick's diaries to her grandson at Berlin, with the seals unbroken, taking the very sensible ground that inasmuch as there were many Prussian state secrets therein contained, their place was in the archives of the House of Hohenzollern, rather than in England.
Emperor William has never forgotten the course adopted by his grandmother in the matter, and by his manner towards her has repeatedly shown since then that he feels how greatly he can rely upon having his actions appreciated with perfect impartiality and all absence of prejudice at Windsor.