LAST DAYS OF AN EMPRESS.

South Canterbury Times, Issue 3145, 20 July 1901, Page 1 (Supplement)

LAST DAYS OF AN EMPRESS.

The Kaiser’s Mother Dying in Oh-

sourity of Cancel’.

Every now and then one sees in the morning papers a telegram, dated Irom Berlin or from Frankfort-on-Mam, announcing the speedily-approaching death of the Dowager-Empress of Germany (writes^ the Paris correspondent of the New York “Sun”). For many months the wife of Frederick the Noble, and the mother of the present Kaiser, has been given up periodically by the doctors. Cancer is slowly destroying her. She is as much under sentence of death as a condemned murderer, but she has one resource that the murderer has not. She can, and does, stave off death by the exercise of her indomitable resolution. An English doctor who recently assisted for a brief period her regular physician, said the other day at a medical congress in Paris : “The Dowager-Empress ought to have died months ago; but even death cannot pierce at one stroke through the defence of her granite will; he has to bore slowly to get at the c'tadel of that life.” The -Empress with the formidable will is one of the most unhappy women in the world. She clings desperately to life, but her heart was broken long ago, and her last days are steeped in bitterness. Her whole career has been a brilliant m.sery. Now that she is dying slowly—a- widow, an abandoned mother and an ex-sovereign detested by the people she tried faithfully to serve—she may well have said, as is reported: “ I mean to live ais long as I can ; but when I die no one will be sorry, least of all myself.” This iron will, which keeps her alive now, has been directly and indirectly the cause of all her misery. No doubt it came to her from her mother, the late Queen of England. Anyhow, it is certain that very early in life the present Empress Frederick of Germany, then Princess Victoria of England, came often into conflict with her mother. When she was only six she

DARED TO OITOSE THE WILL OF HER QUEEN MOTHER.

Queen Victoria, the Prince-Consort Albert, the Princess Royal, and the present King of England were present in state at a review at Aldershot. A brilliant cavalcade of officers galloped by the side of the conch as royal guards. The little Princess dropped her handkerchief to the ground for the pride of seeing Field-Marshals and Generals pulling up their horses and dismounting tc restore the object. The Queen observed the incident and motioned to the officers not to gratify her caprice. Then she stopped the carriage and turned to the Princess :

“Get out, my child, and pick up your handkerchief.” The little girl refused. “ Mamma, I can’t; I’d be ashamed,” she said.

The Queen insisted, the Prince-Consort entreated, but the Princess pouted, blushed and refused this time flatly: “I won’t.”

Her Majesty had to let the carriage drive ahead, leaving the handkerchief on the ground. In 1855 Princess Victoria was married at the age of seventeen to the Crown Prince of Prussia, Frederick, the son and heir of King Wilhelm. It was a brilliant marriage. But happy though it was for the Princess in the unfailing love between herself and her Fritz, it was made bitter by the intense hatred she excited in Bismarck.

From beginning to end the Iron Chancellor sought to thwart “ the English woman,” as he called her. It was a bitter blow to him that the heir of the house of Hohenzollern should have made a martial alliance with a Princess of his enemy’s country. “She has poisoned,” said he, “the Hohenzollern blood at its source.” And through the press he stirred the whole people of Prussia against the Crown Princess. She was represented as a traitor mi the steps of the throne, an interloping foreigner bent on destroying the Prussian nation by insidiously Anglicising it. This was the more readily believed in that Hie Crown Princess was really trying to introduce unto Prussia many liberal ideas prevalent in England. Herself a woman of strong intellect and remarkably educated, she sought to procure for women in Prussia an enlightened system of education and some considerable degree of political influence. She bad set her face against many survivals of feudal privileges still lingering in Prussia, ami IMUmCALLY I'HOCI.AIMFit mmSKI.F A

DHMOCIIAT. “ The English woman,” said Bismarck,

“is not only a rights-of-man woman ; she is also a rignts-of-woman woman, winch is worse. It is red revolution enthroned at Berlin.”

She was hissed in the streets of Berlin, stones were thrown at hen carriage, she could not appear at a public function, even by the side of the Crown Prince whom tlie people adored without risk of -insult. A curious complaint of hers has been recorded. From an early age she had been a diligent student of the woiks of John Stuart Mill, the great English republican philosopher and advocate of woman’s rights. One year in the height of her unpopularity at Berlin she wrote to him and -invited him to pay a visit to herself and the Crown Prince. Mill declined. In a respectful letter he explained that such a meeting would do harm both to him and to her ; people would c’aarge him with selling his republican principles for Royal smiles, and would say of her that she allowed philosophical faddisms to lower -her Royal dignity.

“Unhappy woman that I am,” she cried to her secretary ; “ the Chancellor and my future subjects hate me because thev think me a democrat; and the democrats will have nothing to do with me because 1 may one day be a queen !” It is said that she wrote a letter to the English philosopher which he would never show to anyone, and of which he did not like to speak; probably it was not gentle. In all her struggles with the autocratic Chancellor, and with the malevolence of the people, she was morally sustained by Frederick. The Crown Prince, though obliged for Slate reasons to keep on saying nothing, was much more liberal in hi i ideas than either Bismarck or old Wilhelm, and as far us possible he Din-'l-I.VDI'ID his wife’s idf.as. It is a curious fact that it was her energy, determination and astuteness chat made him Emperor for three months Ail the world remembers that when the old Emperor Wilhelm lay on his death-bed, the Crown Prince was already afflicted with the virulent throat disease which was -.o kill him. This was Bismarck’s chance of gratifying his hate of the English woman, and preventing her from mounting the Imperial throne, with power practically to govern the Empire in place of her sick husband. It was the law in Germany that no Prince can become King if afflicted with an incurable -disease. The Chancellor sought to have the Crown Prince declared to be suffering from cancer, so that on the old Emperor’s death the crown might fall to the present Kaiser, instead of his father.

All the Court physicians were Bismarck s tools ; if they could but be got to see the sufferer and utter the word “cancer” the Chancellor would deprive his enemy of her chance of grasping the helm. But the Crown Princess resisted every persuasion, every artifice, every menace; she brought the English ■ physician, Morell Mackenzie, over from England to treat her husband, and rigorously debarred every German doctor from the sick room. It was like an international war, waged in the passage, outside tlie sick chamber, an imperial crown being the stake at issue. She won ; Dr Mackenzie said that the Grown Prince’s malady was not such as to deprive him of his right; and on the old Emperor’s death, the Princess Victoria became Empress of Germany. It must not be thought that she had been fighting merely for that title. Her deep love for her husband was amply proved by her devotion to him all through the time of DEADLY POLITICAL INTRIGUE. And she gave, incidentally at the same time, proof of her remarkable intellectual powers. For during the three months of her husband’s reign she made a profound s.udy of the me.lical- principles involved in his case, for the sole purpose ofdiastening tiie recovery which never came. Sir Morell Mackenzie afterward wrote that the Kmpress became so proficient in tbe matter that a doctor might have talked with her about it for an hour at a time without suspecting that she was a mere outsider. No wonder that King Edward VII., when Hiked who was the cleverest woman he had known amwered without hesitation.;

“My sister, the Dowager Empress of Germany.” When after ninety-nine days of tenure iif the Imperial throne Frederick died, (here the last dismal stage of the Empress’s career. As Crown. Princess and as Empress she had had trouble, unpopularity, the persistent abhorrence of the allpowerful Iron Chancellor, all sorts of intrigues to fight against; but she had had power and high place. Now she was to know the misery of obscurity.

Few mothers have suffered more from their children than this unhappy Empress from the Kaiser. I have neard a German officer relate a favourite device of William’s to humiliate his mother during his grandfather’s reign. The first Emperor Wilhelm though not an unkind old fellow in his way, was an autocratic ruler of his household and even his strong-willed daughter-in-law never dreamed of resisting him. He would sometimes send an order to the Crown Princess by her son, young Wilhelm.

THE BOY WOULD RUDELY ENTER HIS MOTHER’S PRESENCE

and, as if in his own name, bid her do the thing—perhaps to preside at some function, perhaps to leave Berlin- for a brief visit to Potsdam.

Naturally resenting the young man’s insolent manners, the unhappy mother would refuse to do as he desured. He would let her commit herself definitely to the refusal, often before other people, then would ask her with a triumphant sneer whether he was to bring the Emperor word that the Crown Princess despised the command of her sovereign. The brutality cut the mother to the quick; violent scenes constantly took place, and. the haughty woman, who never feared to confront the stormy rage of the Chancellor, would cry and wring her hands in despair over the conduct of her son.

Long after the masterful young man had become Emperor in nis turn and had broken Bismarck, her life-long enemy, be still took a strange pleasure, if report be true, in wounding and slighting his mother in her lonely widowhood. Even now he scarcely ever sees her; when he duos it is only for a formal visit of a few minutes, a concession to the outward decencies. After the death of her mother, Queen Victoria, he paid such a visit in company with his uncle, tire new King, and probably at the hitter’s urgent request. That formal call of condolence will very likely be the last until he is summoned to the death scene that may any day take place. For it is not cheerful at Cronsberg-on-the-Main, where the most miserable of royal ladies is fighting with death. The house, though called a schloss or castle, is a dismal, ugly building in the worst modern German style. The great cheerless rooms are almost bare; there is no sign of the domestic comfort which one would expect to find in the home of an English Princess living in Germany, the land of good housewifely order. Except in the graver crises of Iter incurable malady, the Empress spends most of her time seated at a window in the big, bare salon, gazing listlessly at the chimneys that make her view. They say she is very often found in tears, though she does not like to have it noticed. She reads little, but “The Imitation of Christ” is always within read) of her hand. Twice a week she has a visit from her youngest daughter, the Princess of Hesse, who comes over from Frankfort to pass the afternoon at tlie mournful schloss. Jl is a pitiful evening to a life which dawned so brightly.