EMPRESS FREDERICK.

Otago Witness, Issue 3030, 10 April 1912, Page 83

EMPRESS FREDERICK.

I only saw the late Empress Frederics once. It was at a meeting in the city m connection with education, and Matthew Arnold was one of the distinguished speakers. I can see hear still, a small woman, very simply dressed, with what appeared to me a rosy complexion, a round and full face, and the blue eyes and moderate stoutness and the general air ox the typical and unmistakable English housewife. All the many years she had spent in a foreign country, and amid the potent environment of a German Court, had apparently passed over and left her absolutely untouched. Wherever she appeared she bore the unmistakable imprint of her nationality—she oould not be taken for anything hut an Englishwoman. And what she so palpably appeared physically she was also by intellect, by temperament, and in her career. In mind, m soul, in purpose she remained English, in face, figure, and dress. This was one of the many causes of the intense unpopularity by which she was pursued for many years of her life in her new country. How pi- ; tense and embittered that unpopularity! was those who have no knowledge ot the; intimacies of life in Germany can have no conception. I happened, however, to ; pay frequent visits to Germany during , some of the stormiest moments of her_ .ife, : and in private conversation and in pm ate letters I saw manifestations of this extra- j ordinary feeling which was to me a revel a- : tion and a shock, I remember one letter , in particular which described her passage , through the streets at the funeral of her , husband. She appeared at the. funeral, ' naturally, with a thick black veil, and the comment I saw in a German letter was that she wore a veil in order to conceal , the expression of her triumphant eyes. | Let me try to analyse the causes which led to this to us inexcusable state of feeling. The strong giant of the hand- ; some father, his fair beard, resplendent figure, and the military bearing that might have made him a model from which Wag- i ner drew his pictures of his stately and , chivalrous Lohengrins and I 1 annhausers, ; might have looked the real master by j the side of this small and plain woman; but everybody knew that the reverse was the truth, the small wife was the master, and the tall, robust, and stately husband a slave. Coining to Germany with all the ineradicable instincts of a democratic nation and democratic sovereignty, _ the Empress found herself in fierce collision ■ witn all the German tendencies of her time, and especially with the policy of Bismarck and the Empire. When the Em-. per or and Bismarck resolved to dissolve the Prussian Parliament, when they refused subsidies for the enlargement of the army, Empress Frederick was one of the many, and one of the most powerful forces of the Opposition, and ever and again to her husband made favourable and some- i tiroes wrong protests against this policy, and there were scenes ox anger and alter- i cation between himself and his father, j Bismarck, with his - profound instinct, ! grasped at an early period the real enemy who was opposing his plans; he had a profound contempt for him. How deep that contempt was will be found in the pages of Busch and other biographei-s of Bismarck : “ After the death of the Emperor Frederick,” said Busch, “ I wrote to Bucher a few lines expressing the satisfaction I felt that we were relieved of that incubus, and that his place was now to be taken by a disciple and admirer of the Chief.” Lother Bucher was another of Bismarck’s most intimate friends. Bismarck always knew, however, that the real opponent to his policy was not Frederick, but Frederick’s wife. This was one of the reasons why Bismarck pursued, and even persecuted the Empress Frederick. There was another and strongly conflicting line of political tendency" between the Empress and Bismarck—it was then an unbroken and universal tradition in great and official circles. In England she was an Englishwoman who retained the prejudices ana hatreds of the Crimean war, and she was English enough also to desire to establish friendship between England and Germany rather than between Germany and Russia. Bismarck, on the one hand, never regarded England as a possible and useful ally, nor did lie, on the other hand, ever contemplate a conflict between England and Germany". In one of his famous notes he described a struggle between the two like a battle between a whale and a lion. England was divided from Germany by the seas, while Russia was on the German frontier, and one of tne two great nations which held Germany as m a vice. He therefore all his life fought for an alliance with Russia, and the tremendous justification of his policy lies in the fact that he induced Russia to hold her hands while he was crushing France, and, in spite of the fierce antipathy among the Russian masses, h© succeeded in keeping peace between the Emperor and the Czar to the end of his days.

This enduring conflict took a bitter and even more personal form during those tragical days when the Empress Frederick's husband "was, after all the ■weary years of waiting on the Emperor's throne, dying of cancer. The Empress ■was extremely anxious that her daughter should marry Prince Alexander of Battenberg, then the ruler of Bulgaria, and it •was said that the daughter herself was deeply In love with this very brilliant and handsome member of a brilliant and handsome familv. It seemed to be one of those questions which might well be Bettled according to domestic affections, and ffie Empress herself felt so strongly on it thai she wrote a telegram summoning the Prince of Bulgaria to Potsdam for Eublic betrothal. This, of course, might av© settled the matter, and she herself inus\, have known the tremendous fatality of tiho act. Bismarck, she knew, saw in guch. a domestic alliance the overthrow of

a friendly policy to Russia, -which he had spent the whole of his political life in establishing, and would certainly have re signed if the marriage arrangements had gone on. The Empress determined to Face that and every other consequence, brought the telegram to the bedside of her dying husband, ana compelled or coerced him into sanction. It would have been 'then and there despatched if it had not been for the caution and good sense of the aide de camp, who persuaded the Empress to submit the telegram to Bismarck. He immediately forbade the transmission. That night one can imagine the darkened home with husband and father slowly dying in one room and wife and mother and her daughter weeping in the other tears of humiliated pride and balked love. . Maximilian Harden traces m one ol these picturesque essays the story of the Empress Frederick's life and personality. He traces and analyses the English point of view with which she confronted her new life in Germany:

Whatever went against the English grain annoyed her. Because in England the venerable trumpery of mediaeval ceremonial always was of great importance, she wished to secure the blessing of such habits for the country of her children. Inseparable, the new Germany was to be identified with the old Holy Roman Empire of German nationality. That is why she held with the title of Emperor, with the whole pomp of faded Empire, with a Coronation after the type followed in the days of the Electors; that is why she had the feudal seat of the old Saxon Emperors placed in the Hall of Mirrors, at Versailles. Since in England two parties, representatives of the nobility and gentiy with equal rights, relieved each other in the Government in turns, she could not understand wdiy in Prussian Germany it should not now at last be the Liberals' turn to govern. Well uid she know these German Liberals, merchants, industrials, engineers, dissatisfied politicians, whose business tendency and malcontent favoured development on English lines; among these the Crown Princes, feeling somewhat lonely among the Old Prussians, had found her strongest support; among them only was she really popular, was she still a hope after the great war. These people —a clever woman could not ignore the fact —were not dangerous to the German Crown; it would be easier to govern with them than with the Junkers; they would be content if they were petted, and would never kick over the traces were they once admitted to Court, as officers in the army or as high Government officials. Once freed from the irritating atmosrehere of fruitless oprx>sition —if they experienced the joy of sitting in the King s Council—then would the spell be broken that since the 'forties had lain on Germany's north. Then could young hands commence to reconstruct the new house, widen the hall, let light and air into every corner; and where yesterday Tubbish-heaps raised their melancholy heads, to-morrow there would be meadows as green as at Richmond and as carefully tended as at the widow's residence on the Isle of Wight. The watchword then would be : Every merit its reward, every just claim fulfilment! In place of a senseless and no longer useful hereditary friendship with retrograde Muscovites, a union would b© formed of two kindred nations, with England as the leading head and Germany as the strong-harnessed arm, which no White Czar's power could affect henceforth. Then would Victoria reign by the side of Frederick over a free people, who, by vigorous industry increase the national wealth, worshipped by them as their adored Empress. This desire was to be seen in her household arrangements, and tended to increase her unpopularity aanong what Harden calls " the fanatical inveterate." " Does she speak English?" they cried. It was the final tragedy in this career of misguided effort and obstinate selfwill on the one side and misunderstanding and prejudice on the other that when at last the Empress came to her own, she came too late for herself and for her husband. He was already a dying man, but even then she did not yield to fate. Here, indeed, in this small woman's frame was a will of iron, a will not only more powerful but more self-controlled than even the iron will of Bismarck. When Bismarck, in the white tunic of the Halberstadt Cuirassiers, walked from the castle to the Wildpart Railway Station thick tears were running down his heated face. When Victoria, dressed in English widow's weeds, either alone or with her daughters, or attended by Count Seekendorff and a lackey, mixed again among people her eye was dry, her carriage erect, and in her look the old determination. arrows and slings of a furious fate she had borne; the stones thrown by the multitude who more than ever saw in her the alien, and partly blamed her, the Englishwoman, for the early demise of Frederick, had recoiled ineffectively from the iron ore of her will. Was the little woman in black really stronger than the massive giant in the white horseman's tunic? Even in the agonising hours of her husband's illness she re-asserted her unconquerable and definite love of her native land, for, defying nil the magnificent doctors of Germany, she summoned to her side Sir Morel MacKenzie, one of her own countrymen, and here is a striking ■picture of her at that terrible moment of her life : The daughter of tlie British Queen had never been beautiful. Now, in the days of her deepest sorrow, the head, worn out with worry, yet lit up with a determination to conquer, seemed almost handsome. By the side of her gaunt, livid husband, who no longer could 6peak, but simply looked around with a smile, sat the wife; and from out of her steelj, glittering eyes there grazed

an uncurbed will, ready for any contingency, into the spring-clad world. And the same unmovable determination in the darker glance of the black-clad physician, whose yellow clergyman's face peered lurkingly from among the cushions of the next Court carriage. There was one final chapter in the relations between Bismarck and herself which is in most impressive contrast to all the rest of their lives. When Bismarck had been dismissed by her son in March, 1890, he and has wife came to take leave of her. It is untrue that Bismarck had descended to the depth of suing a woman he had been compelled to so forcibly oppose and even to persecute in what he conceived to be his country's interest. The words she uttered were gracious and friendly, and as Harden says, they touched a chord in the breast of the embittered man. At that moment probably the two strong characters understood, realised, and respected each other more than at any other period in their chequered existence, jueriiaps unknown to both, there was another tie in that the relations of the Empress and her son were not always cordial. Their characters were both too strong and too much alike for a possibility of unbroken concord,- and even to-day one sees in the son the reproduction of many of the things that made the strength and weakness and triumphs of the mother. It may be that she and Bismarck then felt at that moment the sympathy that comes to two people from some stern and inconsistent thing; anyway, the final parting between the strong woman and the strong man was friendly. One more little incident finally. I was struck in reading the accounts by two facts which seemed to me to stand out in bold relief from all other details. One was that among the clergymen who were summoned to say the last prayers over the dead, there was one . who Same from the isles to which the dead woman never ceased to belong in heart and spirit— Canon Teignmouth Shore, a brilliant Irishman, who died but a few weeks ago. The other fact was that on her coffin there were carved English roses. I ascribe tliis fact as a last token of affection to her own people, her last defiance to the other people, who misunderstood and hated her. It was "at once the justification and the indictment of her life.—T.P.'s Weekly.