He was a conservative of the extreme type, hated and feared by the liberal and national party no less than Metternich. But no man better than he comprehended the policy of Austria, and all the complicated threads composing the web of German politics.
The choice of this man for minister to the King augured ill for the liberals. The outlook had never been darker than at this hour before the dawn.
But great political storms, like storms of another sort, are full of surprises. The ominous storm clouds we have feared roll away and vanish in calm, and the little ones, not larger than a man's hand, suddenly expand and darken our sky. A fateful storm was gathering for Germany in the duchy of Schleswig-Holstein.
Of the nature of the Schleswig-Holstein entanglement someone (Was it Beaconsfield?) wittily said that there were only two men in Europe who understood it, himself and another; and the other was dead. But that was a mistake. There was a man in Prussia who understood it, and who lived to use it for his own far-reaching designs.
The principal threads in the tangled web were as follows:
The two adjacent dukedoms of Schleswig and Holstein, which constitute a sort of natural bridge about 150 miles long and 50 miles wide, between Denmark and Prussia, are, by the way, the land of nativity for the Anglo-Saxon race, the Angles having inhabited Schleswig, and the Saxons Holstein, at the time they so kindly protected the Britons from the Picts and Scots.
So it is probable that every member of the Anglo-Saxon family has some ancestral root running back to that fertile strip of pasture land.
It had for many years been under the Danish protectorate, the King of Denmark being, by virtue of his position, also Duke of Schleswig-Holstein, just as the German Emperor is now King of Prussia by virtue of his imperial office.
But this little people was by no means merged with the Danish by this arrangement; on the contrary, they preserved very jealously their own traits and ancestral traditions. Among these was the exclusion of women from the royal succession—the Salic law, framed by their Frank ancestors centuries before on the banks of the river Saale, being part of their constitution. Hence, when King Frederick VII. of Denmark died in 1862 without male heir, and King Christian IX. became King, the people of the two dukedoms hotly refused to recognize him as their lawful ruler, but claimed their right of reversion to Duke Frederick VIII., who was in the direct male line of succession.
Had the Salic law prevailed in Denmark, this Duke Frederick (father of the present young Empress of Germany) would now be King of Denmark instead of Christian IX. But it did not exist, so Christian, father of the Dowager Empress of Russia—of the Princess of Wales—and of King George of Greece—became, in 1862, lawful King of Denmark, with rights unimpaired by female descent.