As a sop to Prussian morality and to make the old King quite easy, a complaisant husband was now found for the Prince's favourite in his chamberlain, Herr Rietz, son of a palace gardener; and Frederick William himself looked on while the woman he loved, the mother of his children, was converted by a few priestly words into a "respectable married woman"—only to leave the altar on his own arm, his wife in the eyes of the world.
The time was now drawing near when Wilhelmine was to reach the zenith of her adventurous life. One August day in 1786 Frederick the Great drew his last breath in the Potsdam Palace, and his nephew awoke to be greeted by his chamberlain as "Your Majesty." The trumpeter's daughter was at last a Queen, in fact, if not in name, more secure in her husband's love than ever, and with long years of splendour and happiness before her. That his fancy, ever wayward, flitted to other women as fair as herself, did not trouble her a whit. Like Madame de Pompadour, she was prepared even to encourage such rivalry, so long as the first place (and this she knew) in her husband's heart was unassailably her own.
Picture our Cinderella now in all her new splendours, moving as a Queen among her courtiers, receiving the homage of princes and ambassadors as her right, making her voice heard in the Council Chamber, and holding her salon, to which all the great ones of the earth flocked to pay tribute to her beauty and her gifts of mind. It was a strange transformation from the barracks-kitchen to the Queendom of one of the greatest Courts of Europe; but no Queen cradled in a palace ever wore her honours with greater dignity, grace, and simplicity than this daughter of an army bandsman.
The days of the empty purse were, of course, at an end. She had now her ten thousand francs a month for "pin-money," her luxuriously appointed palace at Charlottenburg, and her Berlin mansion, "Unter den Linden," with its private theatre, in which she and her Royal lover, surrounded by their brilliant Court, applauded the greatest actors from Paris and Vienna. It is said that many of these stage-plays were of questionable decency, with more than a suggestion of the garden of Eden in them; but this is an aspersion which Madame de Rietz indignantly repudiates in her "Memoirs."
While Wilhelmine was thus happy in her Court magnificence, varied by days of "delightful repose," at Charlottenburg, France was in the throes of her Revolution, drenched with the blood of her greatest men and fairest women; her King had lost his crown and his head with it; and Europe was in arms against her. When Frederick William joined his army camped on the Rhine bank, Wilhelmine was by his side to counsel him as he wavered between war and peace. The fate of the coalition against France was practically in the hands of the trumpeter's daughter, whose voice was all for peace. "What matters it," she said, "how France is governed? Let her manage her own affairs, and let Europe be saved from the horrors of bloodshed."
In vain did the envoys of Spain and Italy, Austria and England, practise all their diplomacy to place her influence in the scale of war. When Lord Henry Spencer offered her a hundred thousand guineas if she would dissuade her husband from concluding a treaty with France, she turned a deaf ear to all his pleading and arguments. Such influence as she possessed should be exercised in the interests of peace, and thus it was that the vacillating King deserted his allies, and signed the Treaty of Bâle, in 1795.
Such was the triumphant issue of Madame Rietz's intervention in the affairs of Europe; such the proof she gave to the world of her conquest of a King. It was thus with a light heart that she turned her back on the Rhine camp; and with her husband's children and a splendid retinue set out on her journey to Italy, to see which was the greatest ambition of her life. At the Austrian Court she was coldly received, it is true, thanks to her part in the Treaty of Bâle; but in Italy she was greeted as a Queen. At Naples Queen Caroline received her as a sister; the trumpeter's daughter was the brilliant centre of fêtes and banquets and receptions such as might have gratified the vanity of an Empress: while at Florence she spent days of ideal happiness under the blue sky of Italy and among her beauties of Nature and Art.
It was at Venice that she wrote to her King lover, "Your Majesty knows well that, for myself, I place no value on the foolish vanities of Court etiquette; but I am placed in an awkward position by my daughter being raised to the rank of Countess, while I am still in the lowly position of a bourgeoise." She had, in fact, always declined the honour of a title, which Frederick William had so often begged her to accept; and it was only for her daughter's sake, when the question of an alliance between the young Countess de la Marke and Lord Bristol's heir arose, that she at last stooped to ask for what she had so long refused.
A few weeks later her brother, the King's equerry, placed in her hands the patent which made her Countess Lichtenau, with the right to bear on her shield of arms the Prussian eagle and the Royal crown.
Wherever the Countess (as we must now call her) went on her Italian tour she drew men to her feet by the magnetism of her beauty, who would have paid no homage to her as chère amie of a King; for she was now in the early thirties, in the full bloom of the loveliness that had its obscure budding in the Potsdam barrack-rooms. Young and old were equally powerless to resist her fascinations. She had, indeed, no more ardent slave and admirer than my Lord Bristol, the octogenarian Bishop of Londonderry, whose passion for the Countess, young enough to be his granddaughter, was that of a lovesick youth.