The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary Part 2

Kotze being thus frustrated in his efforts to obtain punishment for his foe and persecutor through the courts of law, came to the conclusion that there was no other means left him to vindicate his honor, but a challenge to fight a duel. His demand for satisfaction, however, was declined by Baron Schrader, on the ground that it was too late for Kotze to resort to arms, and that if he had stood in need of satisfaction of this kind, he should not have allowed so long a period to elapse before demanding it. The matter was referred to a so-called court of honor, which sustained the contention of Baron Schrader, and declared that inasmuch as Baron Kotze had by his dilatoriness placed himself beyond the power of exacting satisfaction from Baron Schrader for the indignities to which he had been subjected, he was no longer worthy to wear the uniform of a Prussian officer. This decision of the court of honor was ratified by Prince Frederick of Hohenzollern, the general commanding the division of Guards, to the reserve force of which Baron Kotze belonged, but it was annulled by the emperor, an action on the part of his majesty which led Prince Frederick to resign his command, and to withdraw for the time from the Court of Berlin.

The emperor thereupon entrusted the affair to another jury of honor at Hanover, which rendered a decision, blaming Baron Kotze for his dilatoriness in demanding satisfaction of Baron Schrader, but authorizing him to continue to wear the uniform, and to remain in the service of the emperor as an officer. This verdict was ratified by the emperor himself and on the strength thereof the long delayed duel took place between the two barons. In June, 1896, Baron Schrader was wounded in the abdomen by Baron Kotze, a wound to which he succ.u.mbed on the following day. That seemed to settle, in the minds of all, the innocence of Baron Kotze, for after spending the customary few months in nominal imprisonment for infraction of the civil laws, which prohibit the fighting of those very duels which are prescribed by the military code, he was invited to resume his service as master of the ceremonies at court, was treated once more with the utmost distinction by the emperor, while his wife spent several weeks in the autumn of that year as the guest of Princess Charlotte of Saxe-Meiningen, at the latter's country seat.

But who was the author of the anonymous letters?

That is a question with which I propose to deal in the following chapter, at the same time showing how this most sensational court scandal of the latter half of the nineteenth century led to the exodus from Berlin, and the desertion of its court by numerous royal personages and great n.o.bles.

CHAPTER IV

To this day the ident.i.ty of the writer of the anonymous letters remains a secret to the general public in Germany, as well as abroad, but it is pretty generally known in court circles at Berlin and at Vienna; and if steps have been taken by the authorities to prevent the true facts from getting into print, and the writer was merely expelled from Germany, instead of being brought to justice and sentenced to a long term of imprisonment, it is only because the culprit could not have been tried and convicted without the name of one of the greatest personages in Germany being dragged into the case.

Needless to add that the anonymous letter writer was a woman--a foreign lady of t.i.tle--who for a time was one of the most admired beauties at the Court of Berlin, where, thanks to her inimitable chic, elegance and brilliancy of wit, everybody, men and women alike, were charmed. Old Emperor William, who was always very attentive to the fair s.e.x, up to the very last, and easily smitten by a pretty face, had introduced the lady to his court without taking much trouble to investigate her antecedents or character, and of course, with such a sponsor, everyone took it for granted that she was above reproach, socially, as well as morally. She became very intimate with many of the court people, notably with the Hohenaus, the Kotzes, etc., and was even admitted to the intimacy of Princess Charlotte of Saxe-Meiningen, the emperor's eldest sister. She possibly might have, in spite of all, retained her social eminence, had she not allowed herself to be compromised, first, in the eyes of a few, and subsequently, in a more general fas.h.i.+on, by the only brother of the empress, Duke Ernest-Gunther of Schleswig-Holstein-Augustenburg. The a.s.sociation of their names ultimately became such that the great ladies of the Berlin Court, commenced to cut adrift from the fair foreigner, whose resentment at this treatment naturally became particularly bitter against precisely those with whom she had been most intimate.

Her animosity against Countess Fritz Hohenau was especially intensified by the particularly offensive manner in which she was cut by "Charlotte of Prussia," whose bitter and contemptuous remarks concerning her were naturally communicated to the foreign lady by the men who still frequented her salons. Through these n.o.blemen and princes she was kept _au courant_ of everything that went on at court, and there is no doubt that she was able to extract much information concerning the emperor and his family from the duke, who visited her daily, and who was infatuated by her potent and undeniable charms beyond all reason.

Of course, no one dreams to-day of accusing the duke of having knowingly played any part in the fabrication of the anonymous letters; but there is no doubt that, with his utter absence of discretion, his lack of intellectual brilliancy, and the thoroughly royal predilection for gossip and t.i.ttle-tattle, which monopolize to this day his interest, he imparted to her, in the course of his daily visits, a vast amount of news and information which she could not possibly have obtained from any one else. Dissipated, foolish and indiscreet to an incredible extent, the duke is nevertheless an honorable man, and in spite of the suspicions entertained at one time concerning him by the Schraders, the Hohenaus, the Anhalts, and the Reischachs, there is no doubt that he had not the slightest conception of the manner in which the gossip which he retailed day by day to his _inamorata_ was used by her for the fabrication of her anonymous letters.

It was Baron von Kotze's cousin, Captain Dietrich Kotze, mentioned in the preceding chapter as having espoused the cause of his unfortunate relative with particular vigor, to whom belongs the credit of having discovered the culprit. He accomplished this more through a piece of good fortune than by design, for he was put on the right scent by a mere chance remark which he happened to overhear at a dinner party in Paris. The information which he obtained was imparted to the emperor, and the latter without a moment's hesitation gave orders that his palace police should visit the "Grande Dame's" residence during the following night, take possession of all her papers and correspondence, and convey her to a small town, near the Belgian frontier, where she was to be kept by the police under strict surveillance, without being permitted to see any one, until further orders.

It is impossible to say exactly what was discovered among these papers, but it is generally understood that the police recovered possession of the missing diary of Princess Charlotte, and obtained ample proofs of the fact that the fair foreigner was the author of all the anonymous letters.

After a twenty-four hours' detention, she was conducted to the frontier by the police, and warned against returning to Germany. If no severer measures were taken against her, it is because it would have resulted in a more or less public disclosure of the indiscreet role played by the duke in the matter, and likewise because she really knew too much! In fact, there is scarcely a secret pertaining to the reigning family, or to the Court of Prussia, with which she is not acquainted, and the fact that she should have refrained from making any attempt to publish them to the world, gives rise to the presumption that means of a financial character, or else some threats of terrorism, have been used to insure her silence.

At the time of the descent of the police upon her house, Duke Ernest-Gunther was staying at Lowther Castle, in Westmoreland, England, as the guest of Lord Lonsdale, and was to have gone on at the end of the week to Sandringham, to stay with the Prince and Princess of Wales. On receiving telegrams, however, from his beautiful friend, notifying him of her expulsion from Germany, he left Lowther Castle, literally at an hour's notice, and without taking leave of his host, proceeded immediately to Paris for the purpose of meeting her, in order to find out to what extent the situation was compromised. There is every reason to believe that it was not until then that he realized that the writer of the long series of anonymous letters was no other than the lady by whose fascinations he had been so completely captivated. A considerable time elapsed before he returned to Berlin.

In fact, a very serious estrangement between himself and the emperor ensued, William declining to hold any intercourse with a relative whose susceptibility to feminine charms, and whose extraordinary absence of even the most elementary discretion, had contributed to one of the most painful scandals that have overtaken the Prussian Court since the close of the last century.

Not even the Kaiser's fondness for his wife, nor his anxiety to please her, could soften the anger which he felt against his brother-in-law, and when after a prolonged voyage to India and elsewhere, the duke on landing at Trieste, ran over from there to the neighboring seaside resort of Abbazia, for the purpose of visiting the German imperial couple, who were spending the early spring there with their children, the kaiser declined to receive his brother-in-law and went out shooting, so as to avoid an interview with him, the princely prodigal meeting with no one except his sister, the empress, with whom he had an interview of a couple of hours.

It is generally believed that Princess Charlotte's missing diary is to-day in the possession of the emperor, after having been seized by the police among the correspondence of Duke Ernest-Gunther's fair friend; for the former very warm affection manifested by William for his eldest sister, arising from the belief that she had been subjected to as harsh treatment as he imagined himself to have received at the hands of their mother, the imperious, masterful and immensely clever Empress Frederick, appears since the anonymous letter episode to have given way to feelings of distrust, and even dislike. Princess Charlotte and her husband have been ever since that time virtually banished from the Court of Berlin, at which they are rarely if ever seen. Prince Bernhardt of Saxe-Meiningen, was transferred to the command of the troops at Breslau, although he has but little taste for a military career, and is far more devoted to art, literature, music, and the drama, than to soldiering. At Berlin his duties as a general were more or less t.i.tular, and he had all the leisure which he required for the researches into the affairs of modern and ancient Greece, which have won for him celebrity as one of the most erudite h.e.l.lenists of the present time. He was surrounded by a congenial circle of friends possessed of the same disposition as himself, and had access to some of the finest libraries and museums in the world, while his still charming wife was the most conspicuous figure in a circle composed of all that was most elegant, witty, brilliant and clever in the so-called "_Athens on the Spree_" Indeed, her palace in the Thiergarten was the centre of everything that was eclectic and brilliant, and her salons were the rendezvous of all that was best in Berlin society.

Imagine, therefore, a prince and princess with tastes and dispositions such as these compelled to close up their lovely home, to bid adieu to all their friends, and to take up their residence in the dullest, most uninteresting and provincial of cities, situated in the least picturesque portion of the empire; where the only society consists of bureaucrats of the most starchy description, with no ideas beyond their office, or of impoverished landowners, belonging to the district, whose n.o.biliary pretensions can only be compared with the paucity of their resources, and whose conversation and even intellect is restricted to mangelwurzels, potatoes, and the different grades of fertilizers.

Breslau, to say the whole truth, is a city utterly without any attractions, either social or intellectual; the only other royal personage in the place is an eccentric Wurtemberg princess, a cousin of the now reigning King of Wurtemberg. This lady sacrificed her royal rank and prerogatives in order to marry a physician of the name of Dr. Willim, who had attended her father in his last illness. She could not, however, bring herself to descend to the social level of her husband, who is of plebeian origin, and a mere commoner, but thought that she had done enough in that direction when she contented herself with the name and t.i.tle of Baroness Kirchbach, which she now bears. Of late years she has become a convert to socialism, much to the dismay and distress of her eminently respectable husband, and at the last Socialist Congress held at Breslau, took a very prominent part in the proceedings, arrayed in a blouse of flaming red.

I am very sorry to have to destroy the romance by which the name of this Princess Wilhelmina of Wurtemberg has until now been surrounded, especially that portion thereof which represents her as a lovely and interesting woman. The truth is that she is fearfully homely, both in face and figure, while her eccentricities are such that in America, for instance, she would be described as a "crank." Thus she distinguishes herself through her inordinate fondness for cats, goats and rabbits; escorted by whole herds of which she is wont to wander through the gloomy streets of Breslau. Her costumes are invariably as queer as the one in which she appeared on the platform of the Socialist Congress. Compare this strange figure so utterly unfeminine in its lack of all elegance, with the dainty, spirituelle Princess Charlotte! Yet Baroness von Kirchbach is the only lady of sufficiently lofty birth either in Breslau or in the vicinity to a.s.sociate with Princess Charlotte on terms of any thing like equality!

It is probable that Princess Charlotte and her husband will be kept at Breslau, virtually exiled from the Court of Berlin, until the accession of Prince Bernhardt to the throne of Saxe-Meiningen, through the death of his aged father. It is naturally surprising that Prince Bernhardt, as heir to his father's crown, should not take up his residence in the capital of the Duchy of Saxe-Meiningen, instead of being condemned to vegetate at Breslau. The fact of the matter is, however, that the atmosphere of the Saxe-Meiningen capital is even less congenial than that of Breslau to Prince Bernhardt and Princess Charlotte, for the old duke is morganatically married to an actress of the local theatre, upon whom he has conferred the t.i.tle of Baroness Helburg, and the princess finds it difficult to a.s.sociate with this person.

How unrelenting William remains with regard to his sister, may be gathered from the fact that when her only daughter, Princess Fedora, was married the other day at Breslau, he himself, and the empress, pointedly avoided being present at the ceremony, although they were within a couple of hours' distance of Breslau at the time, spending the day in shooting. The slight thus placed upon Princess Charlotte and her husband was all the more marked, as not only were all the other members of the reigning house of Prussia present, but even the aged King of Saxony, the King of Wurtemberg and the Grand Duke of Hesse, had all three taken the trouble to come from long distances in order to attend the wedding, at which Queen Victoria was represented by several members of her family, who had travelled from England for the purpose. The sensation created, not only over all Germany, but even throughout Europe by the absence of the emperor and empress from the wedding of the only child of the hereditary Prince and Princess of Saxe-Meiningen, when they were actually in the neighborhood, was so great that it can only be a.s.sumed that the emperor intended to give a public manifestation of his continued ill-will towards his sister; and that his so kind-hearted and good-natured consort should have thus joined him in this act of public discourtesy, can be explained by a story current at Berlin to the effect that she, too, feels that she can neither forget nor forgive the mingled ridicule, satire and even downright contempt expressed not only about herself, but about the emperor, her sisters, and her mother in the missing diary of Princess Charlotte.

Another reason why Princess Charlotte and her husband are forced to conform themselves to the command, by means of which the sovereign keeps them almost permanently at Breslau, is that Prince Bernhardt has little or no money at all, as long as his father lives, and that the couple are, therefore, almost entirely dependent upon the allowance which the princess receives as a member of the reigning house of Prussia. Now it is the kaiser who, as chief of the family of Hohenzollern, controls all its vast private possessions, and, if at any time, a member of the House of Prussia declines to yield obedience to his orders, he is empowered by the statutes of the Hohenzollern family to suspend the allowances of those guilty of such insubordination. Thus it is greatly because they are so poor that the prince and princess invariably travel incognito when they go abroad, although it has been a.s.serted that the kaiser carries his irritation against his sister to the extent of declining to permit her to leave Germany, save on the understanding that neither she nor her husband will anywhere exact, or receive the honors due to their royal rank.

At the time of the visit of the Emperor and Empress of Germany to Rome, during the silver-wedding festivities of King Humbert and Queen Marguerite of Italy, Prince Bernhardt and Princess Charlotte were in the Eternal City, entirely ignored by the Italian court, as well as by all the foreign royalties present. Indeed, while the emperor, and even the pettiest foreign princelets invited for the occasion, were driving about the streets and parks in royal equipages, the kaiser's sister and brother-in-law had to content themselves with the dingiest of hack cabs, and also with the role of ordinary sight-seers.

Those who imagine that Princess Charlotte prefers an incognito role to that of a royal princess are singularly mistaken. No one is fonder than she is of the prerogatives of rank, and like all clever and pretty women, she is ever eager to be the centre of attraction, and the object of much homage. She cannot, therefore, be said to relish the treatment and neglect to which she is subjected through her brother's displeasure.

In the Berlin great world the princess has always been popular, not merely by reason of her devotion to society, but because a certain amount of sympathy was felt for her in connection with the treatment which she had received at the hands of her mother. For some strange reason or other, Princess Charlotte was never appreciated by her mother, who showed her preference for her younger daughters in a very marked manner. Charlotte was always treated with a far greater degree of strictness than any of the other girls, in spite of her being vastly superior to them in intellect and in looks. Princess Charlotte is still a very charming woman, and was in her younger days a singularly attractive girl, one of the fairest indeed of all Queen Victoria's numerous descendants, but her sisters are inclined to be homely, absolutely deficient in feminine elegance or chic, and, while accomplished, are extremely dull, and not a bit sparkling or witty.

Empress Frederick always declared that her daughter Charlotte was frivolous, and as much inclined to be forward and rebellious to discipline and control as her eldest son, the present emperor.

Therefore, as I have already stated, Charlotte and William were treated by their mother with exceptional severity, were snubbed on every occasion, often in the most humiliating manner, and were made to feel that Prince Henry and their younger sisters held a higher place in the maternal heart than they.

Sad is it to add that the youth of neither William nor Charlotte was a particularly happy one, and thus it is not astonis.h.i.+ng that one as well as the other should have felt inclined to run a bit wild, like young colts, when first emanc.i.p.ated from the school-room. It was during the very few years that intervened between his leaving the university at Bonn and his marriage, that William obtained his reputation for dissipation. His shortcomings, due to the exuberance of youth, were exaggerated until they were transformed from very venial offences into the most mortal of sins, while in the same way the delight manifested by Princess Charlotte at the admiration and homage to which her comeliness gave rise--a very natural feeling when one recalls the snubbings and humiliations to which she had been subjected until then--were construed into frivolity and deep-dyed coquetry, altogether unworthy of a royal princess. She was taxed, too, with an absence of that simpering modesty, more or less affected, which is _de mise_ with so many young girls in Germany and in France, when they make their debut in society, and even her most harmless flirtations were condemned by her mother as grave indiscretions.

Empress Frederick became very soon imbued with the idea that it was necessary to marry off Charlotte without delay, in order to avert the danger, as she conceived it, of one or another of these girlish flirtations developing into something calculated to compromise both her dignity and her fair name. Had the princess been less hurried in this matter, it is probable that she would have found a more suitable husband, and above all one calculated to capture the fancy of a young girl, reared at a court which can boast of some of the finest specimens of manhood in the world. But she was married to the first princelet who happened to catch the eye of Empress Frederick, namely Prince Bernhardt of Saxe-Meiningen--aye, and she was hustled into matrimony in such a hurry, too, as to give a sort of foundation for some shameful and base slanders, cruelly unmerited, but which one hears even Germans who profess loyalty to the crown repeating to this day. Prince Bernhardt, though an excellent man in his way, was very far from meeting the requirements of the "Prince Charmant" fit to be mated to a princess so gay and so brilliant as Charlotte of Hohenzollern. His appearance is effeminate, his manner finicky and old-maidish to a degree. He is neither stalwart nor good-looking; he excels neither as a dancer nor as a rider, nor yet as an athlete, and he gives one at first sight the impression of being an artist or a composer, rather than a son of that grand looking old fellow, the reigning Duke of Saxe-Meiningen.

Indeed, there was at the time of the marriage but one voice in Berlin society, condemning it as having been forced upon Princess Charlotte against her inclinations by her mother. And after the marriage the poverty of the prince rendered him to such an extent dependent upon the financial a.s.sistance of his mother-in-law, that he, as well as his wife, was compelled to remain subservient in every respect to her wishes. Nor was it until William came to the throne and availed himself of his position as head of the family to grant Princess Charlotte an allowance suitable to her rank, that the princess and her husband were emanc.i.p.ated from the strict control of her mother, Empress Frederick.

Young married folks in America can form no conception of the extent of such tyranny, and when, some time after the wedding, Prince Bernhardt and Princess Charlotte secured permission from Empress Frederick--then only crown princess--to visit Paris, and to make a stay there of three weeks, she only gave her consent on the condition that they should be accompanied by one of her chamberlains, and one of her ladies-in-waiting who had known the princess from childhood, and whose behests the prince and princess were obliged to obey throughout their sojourn in the French capital, just as if they had been a little boy and girl, instead of grown-up and married people. Probably the happiest time of Princess Charlotte's life was the period which elapsed between the death of her lamented father and her exile to Breslau. She amused herself to her heart's content, fluttered about in Berlin like a b.u.t.terfly, took a leading part in every social movement, was admired, feted and petted by everyone, but gave her worthy husband no cause whatsoever for uneasiness, and avoided all scandals, save those contained in the anonymous letters, for which she cannot really be held responsible.

To-day she must feel that she has exchanged the unbearable tyranny of Empress Frederick for the yet infinitely more oppressive despotism of her eldest brother, Emperor William,--a despotism so harsh that it has won for her, somewhat late it is true, the kindly sympathy of her own mother,--a severity which may be said to have its source in that most dangerous of all the intimate friends and confidants of the princess, namely, that diary of hers which was stolen from her, and which is believed to be now in the possession of the kaiser.

CHAPTER V

I am thoroughly aware that the point which is likely to excite the attention of my readers to a greater degree than any other in the previous chapter, is the reference contained therein to the tyranny exercised by the monarchs of the Old World upon their relatives. In fact, it is far better in Europe to be a mere subject than a kinsman or kinswoman of the sovereign.

Even the lowliest of the lieges of the anointed of the Lord has certain const.i.tutional rights and prerogatives which may be said to safeguard him from oppression and persecution, but princes and princesses of the blood have no such rights, and are exposed to every caprice and every whim of the head of their family, defiance of whose wishes entails exile, loss of property, even poverty and outlawry, without any redress.

Royal and imperial personages, in addition to being subjected to the ordinary laws of the land, are expected to yield blind and unquestioned obedience to another code, comprising what are officially styled the "Family Statutes" of the dynasty to which they belong.

These are administered by the head of the family, who is free to construe them as he sees fit, and while they are binding upon the members of his house, they in no way can be said to const.i.tute any limitation to the exercise of his authority. In fact, the latter is absolutely unrestricted, and extends to every phase of the life of a royal personage. Thus, a prince or princess of the blood is debarred from contracting a marriage without the consent of the sovereign, and if any union has taken place without the sanction of the head of the family, it is regarded, not only at court, but even by the tribunals of the land, as invalid, and children that may be born of the marriage bear the stigma of illegitimacy. If a marriage has received the full authorization of the ruler, and there is any issue, the children cannot be educated without the sovereign's wishes being consulted.

The parents, in fact, are regarded much as if they were either minors, outlaws, or demented people, unfitted to be entrusted with the control and bringing up of their offspring, for the sovereign is _ex officio_ the guardian of all children who are under age, belonging to the married members of his family, and his rights over the children are superior to those of the latter's father and mother.

If the boy is to have a tutor, or the girl a governess, the appointment cannot be made by the parents without their previously obtaining the permission of the sovereign, and he has it in his power to reject their nominee, and to a.s.sign some candidate of his own, who may possibly be regarded as most objectionable to the unfortunate parents, for the duty of taking charge of the education of the young people in question. The royal or imperial mother, indeed, may esteem herself fortunate if the sovereign does not insist on personally selecting the nurses of her infants: when the present kaiser was born, not merely the late Empress Augusta, but likewise all the other members of the reigning house of Prussia, and of the Court of Berlin, thought it quite right and natural that the old Emperor William should exercise his authority for the purpose of prohibiting the young mother from herself nursing her baby; on the ground that it was contrary to the traditions of the House of Hohenzollern, and a quite undignified proceeding. Fortunately, the late Emperor Frederick, who had spent much of his time at the court of his mother-in-law, Queen Victoria, and who was aware that she had nursed every one of her numerous children herself, without permitting this motherly duty to interfere with the arduous official business of the State, expostulated with his father, and persuaded him to withdraw his prohibition, much to the horror of the courtiers, and greatly to the satisfaction of the royal lady, who is now Empress Frederick.

In Austria one of the princ.i.p.al sources of the domestic unhappiness of the lamented Empress of Austria, was the small voice that she was allowed by the sovereign--her husband--to have in the management and the control of her own children, as long as her mother-in-law, the late Archd.u.c.h.ess Sophia, was alive. It was only after the demise of the archd.u.c.h.ess that Empress Elizabeth first realized in their full measure the joys of motherhood.

While on the subject of Austria, I may cite the case of the widowed Crown Princess Stephanie as another ill.u.s.tration of the extent to which royal parents are deprived of all authority over their children.

Thus when Crown Prince Rudolph died at Mayerling, his little daughter, at that time barely six years of age, was a.s.signed to the guardians.h.i.+p, not of her widowed mother, but of her grandfather. A very general belief prevails that this arrangement about the care of the little Archd.u.c.h.ess Elizabeth, was due to a piece of animosity on the part of the ill-fated crown prince against his wife, and I have seen it stated in print that he had left a will confiding his only child to his father, and directing that its mother should be allowed no voice in its education. There is no official authority for any such statement, but no matter whether the crown prince expressed any such testamentary wish or not, the fact remains that at his death his child was bound by the statutes of the House of Hapsburg, to become the ward of the sovereign, who in this case happened to be her grandfather.

Gentle and soft-hearted as is Emperor Francis-Joseph, he nevertheless exercised his authority over his grandchild in a way that cannot but have been galling in the extreme to its mother, a way, in fact, which I imagine would be beyond the endurance of any American woman. Thus he insisted upon himself appointing and selecting her governesses and teachers; he nominated her entire household without consulting her mother, and its members, as well as the girl's instructors made their reports not to Crown Princess Stephanie, but to him, from whom, also, they alone took their instructions.

It was the emperor who decided where his grandchild was to stay, where she was to spend this part of the year, and where another season, and finally he strictly prohibited her from leaving his dominions. The position of the Crown Princess of Austria since the death of her husband has been so extremely unpleasant and painful, that she has spent much of her time--indeed, at least nine months of the year--in foreign travel. The imperial family, the court and the people, hold her responsible for that domestic wretchedness which drove her so universally popular husband to his tragic death at Mayerling. Of a jealous disposition and of a temper that even at its best is difficult, she is generally understood to have driven him by her violence and injustice to seek, away from his home, the pleasures that he could not find by his own fireside.

It had been known that she had been strangely lacking in dignity in her complaints concerning his behavior, and after his death she gave cruel offence both to his parents and to the people of her adopted country by her indifference to his terrible fate, and by the frivolity with which she bore her widowhood, not a little of which was spent at the gaming tables of Monte-Carlo in the gayest mourning costumes possible; a circ.u.mstance which horrified Queen Victoria, who was at that time at Nice, and naturally cruelly embittered the bereaved and sorrowing mother, Empress Elizabeth, who, robed in deepest black, was at Cap-Martin, endeavoring to recover her health, which had been absolutely shattered by the tragedy.

All these things led to the crown princess being regarded with deep disfavor in Austria. Difficulties were raised with regard to her rank and precedence at court, and the animosity manifested towards her was such at Vienna, and elsewhere in the dual empire, that she found it preferable to spend the greater part of her time abroad. She was not, however, permitted to take her little daughter with her, and thus the young archd.u.c.h.ess may be said to have grown up altogether away from her mother, whom she saw for barely two months of the year, and then more as a visitor and a stranger, than as a relative who had any voice in the ordering of her life.

If, then, this control of the minor princes and princesses of his dynasty is insisted upon to such an extent by the aged Emperor of Austria, the kindliest, most warm-hearted and sympathetic of old men, always p.r.o.ne to patient forbearance and indulgence, it will be readily understood that it is exercised to its fullest extent by Emperor William, in whose character the tendency to autocracy, and the spirit of command, is far more developed than in his brother monarch. Indeed, he not only claims the right to act as the chief guardian of the junior members of the reigning house of Prussia, of which he is the head, but likewise of the children of all those sovereign families of Germany which have acknowledged him as their emperor. Thus he insisted upon having entire control of his young cousin, the only son of the reigning Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, declaring that his own authority must be subst.i.tuted for that of the lad's father, in spite of the latter being himself a reigning sovereign, and an ally rather than a va.s.sal.

The tragic fate of the young prince will be too fresh in the memory of my readers to need more than pa.s.sing reference here. The boy, removed from parental care, was transferred by Emperor William to Berlin, with the avowed purpose of being under his own imperial eye. Unfortunately, the duties and occupations of William are so multifarious that he was unable to fulfil his very excellent intentions with regard to Prince Alfred. The latter fell into bad hands, squandered large sums of money at cards, became involved in pecuniary difficulties, and in his endeavors to retrieve them, sunk deeper and deeper into the mire, until finally Emperor William, suddenly alive to the results of his wholly-unintentional neglect of the royal lad, sent him back to his heart-broken parents, discredited, implicated in all sorts of unpleasant gambling transactions, and shattered alike in health and mind. In the midst of their silver-wedding festivities, they were forced to send their only boy off to a sanitarium in Austria, where, in spite of the close restraint under which he was kept, he managed to put an end to his life, only a few days after his arrival, prompted thereto by either physical or mental agony, no one knows which.

Small wonder, when it became necessary to find a likely successor to the present reigning Duke of Saxe-Coburg, and his younger brother, Prince Arthur of Great Britain, Duke of Connaught, was proclaimed heir, that the prince decided that it would be preferable to sacrifice his rights to this throne, rather than his rights over his only son.

On being given to understand that if he accepted the position of heir apparent, his sixteen-year-old boy would become the ward of Emperor William, and that the authority of the kaiser would be superior to his own over the lad, Prince Arthur declined to have anything to do with the Saxe-Coburg succession, and abandoned both his own claims thereto and those of his son, in favor of his young nephew, the fatherless Duke of Albany. It was precisely on the same ground that the Duke of c.u.mberland declined to complete the agreement whereby a reconciliation was to be effected between himself and the kaiser. Born crown prince of the now defunct Kingdom of Hanover, he should have succeeded to the throne of the Duchy of Brunswick on the death of his kinsman, the late Duke of Brunswick, in 1884. The German Emperor, however, decided that he could not be permitted to take possession of the sovereignty of the duchy, nor to a.s.sume the status of one of the federal rulers of the confederation known as the German Empire, unless he recognized the latter, as now const.i.tuted, that is to say with his father's Kingdom of Hanover incorporated with Prussia. For a long time he refused to do this, but was ultimately persuaded by his brother-in-law, the late czar, and the Prince of Wales, to consent to a reconciliation with Prussia, and to accept the present condition of affairs. The arrangements were on the eve of being completed when a conflict arose between the duke and the kaiser, as to the education of the former's eldest son, Prince George. The duke wished to send him to the Vizhum College, at Dresden, where so many members of the sovereign families, and of the great houses of the n.o.bility, have received their instruction, while the kaiser objected to this particular school on the ground that its teachings were calculated to increase instead of to diminish particularist and anti-Prussian sentiments. The duke thereupon declared that he alone was competent to judge and determine how his boy should be educated, whereupon the kaiser put forth his pretension to the guardians.h.i.+p of all the junior members of the sovereign houses comprised in the German Empire. Rather than consent to this, the Duke of c.u.mberland, who has inherited much of the obstinacy for which his great-grandfather, King George III. of Great Britain, was so celebrated, broke off all negotiations with Emperor William, and refused to have anything more to do with him, for, like his cousin, the Duke of Connaught, he would rather sacrifice his rights to a German throne than his parental rights over a much-loved boy.