The fact that the Crown Prince Frederic, despondent and unnerved in the presence of a mortal disease, had voluntarily pledged himself to renounce his rights of succession, was naturally not published to the world. Although it is beyond doubt that such a pledge was given, nothing more definite than a roundabout hint has to this day been printed in Germany upon the subject. There are no means of ascertaining the exact number of personages in high position to whom this intelligence was imparted at the time. As has been said, the Emperor, the Chancellor, and the young heir were parties to Frederic’s original action. Certain indications exist that for a time the secret was kept locked in the breasts of these four men. Then Frederic confessed to his wife what he had done.

The strangest feature of this whole curious business is that Frederic should ever have taken this gravely important step, not only without his wife’s knowledge, but against all her interests. Her influence over him was of such commanding completeness, and his devotion to her so dominated his whole career and character, that the thing can only be explained by laying stress upon his admitted tendency to melancholia and assuming that his shaken nerves collapsed under the emotional strain of meeting his father and son with sympathetic tears in their eyes.

With the moment when the wife first learned of this abdication the active drama begins. She did not for an instant dream of suffering the arrangement to be carried out—at least until every conceivable form of resistance had been exhausted. We can fancy this proud, energetic princess casting about anxiously here, there, everywhere, for means with which to fight the grimly-powerful combination against her husband’s future and her own, and can well believe that in the darkest hour of the struggle which ensued this true daughter of the Fighting Guelphs never lost heart.

For friends it was hopeless to look anywhere in Germany. She had lived in Berlin and Potsdam for nearly thirty years, devoting her large talents and wide sympathies to the encouragement of literature, science, and the arts, to the inculcation of softening and merciful thoughts embodied in new hospitals, asylums, and charitable institutions, and the formation of orders of nurses; most earnestly of all, to the task of lifting the women of Germany up in the domestic and social scale, and making of them something higher than mere mothers of families and household drudges. Nobody thanked her for her pains, least of all the women she had striven to befriend. Her undoubted want of tact and reserve in commenting upon the foibles of her adopted countrymen kept her an alien in the German mind, in spite of everything she did to foster a kindlier attitude. The feelings of the country at large were passively hostile to her. The influential classes hated her vehemently.

That she should link together in her mind this widespread and assiduously-cultivated enmity to her, and this new and alarming conspiracy to keep her husband from the throne, was most natural. She leaped to the conclusion that it was all a plot, planned by her ancient and implacable foe, Bismarck. That her own son was in it made the thing more acutely painful, but only increased her determination to fight.

Instinctively she turned to her English home for help. Although nearly two centuries have passed since George I entered upon his English inheritance, and more than half a century has gone by since the last signs of British dominion were removed from Hanover, the dynastic family politics of Windsor and Balmoral remain almost exclusively German. In all the confused and embittered squabbles which have kept the royal and princely houses of Germany by the ears since the close of the Napoleonic wars, the interference of the British Guelph has been steadily pitted against the influence of the Prussian Hohenzollern. Hardly one of the changes which, taken altogether, have whittled the reigning families of Germany from thirty down to a shadowy score since 1820, has been made without the active meddling of English royalty on one side or the other—most generally on the losing side. Hence, while it was natural that the Crown Princess should remember in her time of sore trial that she was also Princess Royal in England, it was equally to be expected that Germany should prepare itself to resent this fresh case of British intermeddling.

The scheme of battle which the Crown Princess, in counsel with her insular relatives, decided upon was at once ingenious and bold. It could not, unfortunately, be gainsaid that her husband, Frederic, had formally pledged himself to relinquish the crown if he proved to be afflicted with a mortal disease. Very well; the war must be waged upon that “if”.

A good many momentous letters had crossed the North Sea, heavily sealed and borne by trusted messengers, before the system of defence was disclosed by the first overt movement. On the 20th of May, 1887, Dr. Morell Mackenzie, the best known of London specialists in throat diseases, arrived in Berlin, and was immediately introduced to a conference of German physicians, heretofore in charge of the case, as a colleague who was to take henceforth the leading part. They told him that to the best of their belief they had to deal with a cancer, but were awaiting his diagnosis. On the following day, and a fortnight later, he performed operations upon the illustrious patient’s throat to serve as the basis for a microscopical examination. With his forceps he drew out bits of flesh, which were sent to Prof. Virchow for scientific scrutiny. Upon examining these Prof. Virchow reported he discovered nothing to “excite the suspicion of wider and graver disease,” * thus giving the most powerful support imaginable to Dr. Mackenzie’s diagnosis of “a benign growth.”

     * Mackenzie’s “Frederic the Noble,” p. 34.

The German physicians allege that Dr. Mackenzie drew out pieces of the comparatively healthful right vocal cord. The London specialist denies this. Nothing could be further from the purpose of this work than to take sides upon any phase of the unhappy and undignified controversy which ensued. It is enough here to note the charge, as indicating the view which Prof. Gerhardt and his German colleagues took from the first of Mackenzie’s mission in Berlin.

This double declaration against the theory of cancer having been obtained, the next step was to secure the removal of Frederic. The celebration of the Queen’s jubilee afforded a most valuable occasion. He came to England on June 14th—and he never again stepped foot in Berlin until he returned as Kaiser the following year. Nearly three months were spent at Norwood, and in Scotland and the Isle of Wight. A brief stop in the Austrian Tyrol followed, and then the Crown Prince settled in his winter home at San Remo. On the day of his arrival there Mackenzie was telegraphed for, as very dangerous symptoms had presented themselves. He reached San Remo on November 5, 1887, and discovered so grave a situation that Prince William was immediately summoned from Berlin.

That the young Prince had been placed in a most trying position by the quarrel which now raged about his father’s sick-room, need not be pointed out. The physicians who stood highest in Berlin, and who were backed by the liking and confidence of William’s friends, were deeply indignant at having been superseded by two Englishmen like Mackenzie and Hovell. This national prejudice became easily confounded with partisan antagonisms. The Germans are not celebrated for calm, or for skill in conducting controversies with delicacy, and in this instance the worst side of everybody concerned was exhibited.

One recalls now with astonishment the boundless rancour and recklessness of accusation which characterized that bitter wrangle. Many good people of one party seriously believed that the German physicians wanted to gain access to Frederic in order to kill him. On the other hand, a great number insisted that Mackenzie was deceiving the public, and had subjected Frederic to the most terrible maimings and tortures in order to conceal from Germany the fact of the cancer. The basest motives were ascribed by either side to the other. The Court circle asked what they were doing, then, to the Crown Prince that they hid him away in Italy; the answering insinuation was that very good reasons existed for not allowing him to fall into the hands of the Berlin doctors, who were so openly devoted to his heir.

In a state of public mind where hints of assassination grow familiar to the ear, the mere charge of a lack of filial affection sounds very tame indeed.

That William deserved during this painful period the reproaches heaped upon him by the whole English-speaking world is by no means clear. Such fault as may be with fairness imputed to him, seems to have grown quite naturally out of the circumstances. He was on the side of the German physicians as against Mackenzie; but after all that has happened that can scarcely be regarded as a crime. He could not but range himself with those who resented the tone Dr. Mackenzie and his friends assumed toward what they called “the Court circles of Berlin.”

When he reached San Remo in November, it was to note the death mark clearly stamped on his father’s face; yet he heard the English entourage still talking about the possibility of the disease not being cancer. The German doctors had grievous stories to tell him about how they had been crowded out and put under the heel of the foreigner. Whether he would or not, he was made a party to the whole wretched wrangle which henceforth vexed the atmosphere of the Villa Zirio.

The outside world was subjecting this villa and its inhabitants to the most tirelessly inquisitive scrutiny. Newspaper correspondents engirdled San Remo with a cordon of espionage, through which filtered the gossip of servants and the stray babbling of tradespeople. Dr. Mackenzie—now become Sir Morell—confided his views of the case to journalists who desired them. The German physicians furtively promulgated stories of quite a different hue, through the medium of the German press. Thus it came about that, while Germany as a whole disliked deeply the manner in which Frederic’s case was managed, the English-speaking peoples espoused the opposite view and condemned as cruel and unnatural the position occupied by the Germans, with young William at their head.

As the winter of 1887-8 went forward, it became apparent that the Kaiser’s prolonged life had run its span. The question which would die first, old William or middle-aged Frederic, hung in a fluttering balance. Germany watched the uncertain development of this dual tragedy with bated breath, and all Christendom bent its attention upon Germany and her two dying Hohenzollerns.

March came, with its black skies and drifting snow wreaths and bitter winds blown a thousand miles across the Sclavonic sand plains, and laid the aged Kaiser upon his deathbed. Prince William, having alternated through the winter between Berlin and San Remo, was at the last in attendance upon his grandfather. The dying old man spoke to him as if he were the immediate heir. Upon him all the injunctions of state and family policy which the departing monarch wished to utter were directly laid. The story of those conferences will doubtless never be revealed in its entirety. But it is known that, if any notion had up to that time existed of keeping Frederic from the throne, it was now abandoned. William was counselled to loving patience and submission during the little reign which his father at best could have. Bismarck was pledged to remain in office upon any and all terms short of peremptory dismissal through this same brief period.

It was to William, too, that that last exhortation to be “considerate” with Russia was muttered by the dying man—that strange domestic legacy of the Hohenzollerns which hints at the murder of Charles XII, recalls the partition of Poland, the despair of Jena, and the triumph of Waterloo, and has yet in store we know not what still stranger things.

William I died on March 9, 1888. On the morning of the following day Frederic and his wife and daughters left San Remo in a special train and arrived at Berlin on the night of the 11th, having made the swiftest long journey known in the records of continental railways. The new Kaiser’s proclamation—“To my People”—bears the date of March 12th, but it was really not issued until the next day.

During that period of delay, the Schloss at Charlottenburg, which had been hastily fitted up for the reception of the invalid, was the scene of protracted conferences between Frederic, his son William, and Bismarck. Hints are not lacking that these interviews had their stormy and unpleasant side, for Frederic had up to this time fairly maintained his general health, and could to a limited extent make use of his voice. But all that is visible to us of this is the fact that some sort of understanding was arrived at, by which Bismarck could remain in office and accept responsibility for the acts of the reign.

The story of those melancholy ninety-nine days need not detain us long. Young William himself, though standing now in the strong light of public scrutiny, on the steps of the throne, remained silent, and for the most part motionless. The world gossiped busily about his heartless conduct toward his mother, his callous behaviour in the presence of his father’s terrible affliction, his sympathy with those who most fiercely abused the good Sir Morell Mackenzie. As there had been tales of his unfilial actions at San Remo, so now there were stories of his shameless haste to snatch the reins of power from his father’s hands. So late as August, 1889, an anonymous writer alleged in “The New Review” that “the watchers by the sick bed in Charlottenburg were always in dread when ‘Willie’ visited his father lest he might brusquely demand the establishment of a Regency.”

Next to no proof of these assertions can be discovered in Berlin. If there was talk of a Regency—as well there might be among those who knew of the existence of Frederic’s offer to abdicate—it did not in any way come before the public. I know of no one qualified to speak who says that it ever came before even Frederic.

That a feeling of bitterness existed between William and his parents is not to be denied. All the events of the past year had contributed to intensify this feeling and to put them wider and wider apart. Even if the young man had been able to divest himself of the last emotion of self-sensitiveness, there would still have remained the dislike for the whole England-Mackenzie-San Remo episode which rankled in every conservative German mind. But neither the blood nor the training of princes helps them to put thoughts of self aside—and in William’s case a long chain of circumstances bound him to a position which, though we may find it extremely unpleasant to the eye, seemed to him a simple matter of duty and of justice to himself and to Prussia.

The world gladly preserves and cherishes an idealized picture of the knightly Kaiser Frederic, facing certain death with intrepid calm, and labouring devotedly to turn what fleeting days might be left him to the advantage of liberalism in Germany. It is a beautiful and elevating picture, and we are all of us the richer for its possession.

But, in truth, Frederic practically accomplished but one reform during his reign, and that came in the very last week of his life and was bought at a heavy price. To the end he gave a surprisingly regular attention to the tasks of a ruler. Both at Charlottenburg and, later, at Potsdam, he forced himself, dying though he was, to daily devote two hours or more to audiences with ministers and officials, and an even greater space of time in his library to signing State papers and writing up his diary. But this labour was almost wholly upon routine matters.

Two incidents of the brief reign are remembered—the frustrated attempt to marry one of the Prussian Princesses to a Battenberg and the successful expulsion of Puttkamer from the Prussian Ministry of the Interior.

The Battenberg episode attracted much the greater share of public attention at the time, not only from the element of romance inherent in the subject, but because it seemed to be an obvious continuation of the Anglo-German feud which had been flashing its lightnings about Frederic’s devoted head for a twelvemonth. Of the four Battenberg Princes—cousins of the Grand Duke of Hesse by a morganatic marriage, and hence, according to Prussian notions, not “born” at all—one had married a daughter, another a granddaughter of the Queen of England. This seemed to the German aristocracy a most remarkable thing, and excited a good deal of class feeling, but was not important so long as these upstart protégés of English eccentricity kept out of reach of German snubs.

A third Battenberg, Alexander, had made for himself a considerable name as Prince of Bulgaria: in fact, had done so well that the Germans felt like liking him in spite of his brothers. The way in which he had completely thrashed the Servians, moreover, reflected credit upon the training he had had in the German Army. In his sensational quarrel with the Czar, too, German opinion leaned to his side, and altogether there was a kindly feeling toward him. Perhaps if there had been no antecedent quarrel about English interference, even his matrimonial adoption into the Hohenzollern family might have been tolerated with good grace.

As it was, the announcement at the end of March that he was to be betrothed to the Princess Victoria, the second daughter of Frederic, provoked on the instant a furious uproar. The Junker class all over Germany protested indignantly. The “reptile” press promptly raised the cry that this was more of the alien work of the English Empress, who had been prompted by her English mother to put this fresh affront upon all true Germans. Prince Bismarck himself hastened to Berlin and sternly insisted upon the abandonment of the obnoxious idea. There was a fierce struggle before a result was reached, with hot feminine words and tears of rage on one side, with square-jawed, gruff-voiced obstinacy and much plain talk on the other. At last Bismarck overbore opposition and had his way. Prince William manifested almost effusive gratitude to the Chancellor for having dispelled this nightmare of a Battenberg brother-in-law.

The solicitude about this project seems to have been largely maternal. Sir Morell Mackenzie says of the popular excitement over the subject: “I cannot say that it produced much effect on the Emperor.” As for the Princess Victoria, she has now for some time been the wife of Prince Adolph of Schaumburg-Lippe.

Although it did not attract a tithe of the attention given the Battenberg marriage sensation, the dismissal of Puttkamer was really an important act, the effects of which were lasting in Germany. This official had been Minister of the Interior since 1881—a thoroughgoing Bismarckian administrator, whose use of the great machinery of his office to coerce voters, intimidate opposition, and generally grease the wheels of despotic government, had become the terror and despair of Prussian Liberalism; To have thrown him out of office it was worth while to reign only ninety-nine days.

Ostensibly his retirement was a condition imposed by Frederic before he would sign the Reichstag’s bill lengthening the Parliamentary term to five years. The Radicals had hoped he would veto it, and the overthrow of Puttkamer was offered as a solace to these wounded hopes. But in reality Puttkamer had been doomed from the outset of the new reign. He was conspicuous among those who spoke with contempt of Frederic, and in his ministerial announcement of the old Kaiser’s death to the public, insolently neglected to say a word about his successor. Questioned about this later, he had the impertinence to say that he could not find out what title the new Kaiser would choose to assume.

Puttkamer’s resignation was gazetted on June 11th, and that very evening Prince Bismarck gave a great dinner, at which the fallen Minister was the guest of honour. In one sense the insult was wasted, for out at Potsdam the invalid at whom it was levelled could no longer eat, and was obviously close to death. Indirectly, however, the affront made a mark upon the world’s memory. We shall hear of Puttkamer again.

On the 1st day of June Frederic had been conveyed by boat to Potsdam, where he wished to spend his remaining weeks in the most familiar of his former homes, the New Palace, the name of which he changed to Friedrichskron. He was already a dying man. Two clever observers, who were on the little pier at Gleinicke, described to me the appearance of the Emperor when he was carried up out of the cabin to land. Said one: “He was crouched down, wretched, scared, and pallid, like a man going to execution.” The other added: “Say rather like an enfeebled maniac in charge of his keepers.”

Yet, broken and crushed as he was, he was Kaiser to the last. The announcement of Putt-kamer’s downfall came on June 11th. Frederic died on June 15th.

It was in the late forenoon of that rainy, gray summer day that the black and white royal standard above the palace fell—signifying that the eighth King of Prussia was no more. A moment later orderlies were running hither and thither outside; the troops within the palace park hastily threw themselves into line, and detachments were at once marched to each of the gates to draw a cordon between Friedrichskron and all the world besides.

In an inner room in the great palace the elder son of the dead Kaiser, all at once become William II, German Emperor, King in Prussia, eighteen times a Duke, twice a Grand Duke, ten times a Count, fifteen times a Seigneur, and three times a Margrave—this young man, with fifty-four titles thus suddenly plumped down upon him, * seated himself to write proclamations to his Army and his Navy.

     * With the possible exception of the Emperor of Austria,
     William is the most betitled man in Europe. Beside being
     German Emperor and King of Prussia, he is Margrave of
     Brandenburg, and the two Lausitzes; Grand Duke of Lower
     Rhineland and Posen; Duke of Silesia, Glatz, Saxony,
     Westphalia, Engern, Pomerania, Luneburg, Holstein-Schleswig,
     Magdeburg, Bremen, Geldern, Cleve, Juliers and Berg,
     Crossen, Lauenburg, Mecklenburg, of the Wends and of the
     Cassubes; Landgrave of Hesse and Thuringia; Prince of
     Orange; Count-Prince of Henneburg; Count of the Mark, of
     Ravensberg, of Hohenstein, of Lingen and Tecklenburg, of
     Mansfeld, Sigmaringen, Veringen, and of Hohenzollern;
     Burgrave of Nuremberg; Seigneur of Frankfurt, Rügen, East
     Friesland, Paderborn, Pyrmont, Halber-stadt, Münster,
     Minden, Osnabrück, Hildesheim, Verden, Kammin, Fulda, Nassau
     and Moers.