before taking any action in the matter, and would doubtless have yielded to the advice of the minister of the imperial household, Prince Stolberg-Wernigrode, who urged him to institute a very careful secret investigation of his own before rushing the denouement, cautioning him that Baron Schrader’s evidence was inadequate, had it not been for the pressure brought to bear upon his majesty by the Saxe-Meiningens and other members of his family, who were all convinced that Baron Kotze was the guilty party.

It was due entirely to this pressure that the kaiser, incensed beyond measure at the persistency and the malignity of these letters, took the extraordinary step of having Baron von Kotze arrested by the chief of his military household, General von Hahnke merely on the strength of his imperial order, dispensing with any legal warrant.  That Count Hahnke should have been selected for this duty, and that a military prison, rather than the ordinary house of detention, should have been chosen for the incarceration of Baron Kotze, must be ascribed to the fact that the latter was at the time a captain of cavalry on the reserve lists, and that in a military prison the authority of the emperor, as head of the army, is supreme and absolute, which cannot be said of the ordinary civil prisons, the officers of which are subject above everything else to the tribunals and to the laws of the land.

Of course, from the very moment when the baron was arrested, the entire scandal, that is to say the existence of a conspiracy for the writing and distribution of anonymous letters, became public, and served to furnish material for articles both in the German and the foreign press on the alleged moral rottenness of the Court of Berlin.  At first there is no doubt that society, and even the ordinary public, accepted the guilt of Baron Kotze as assured, and were further led to believe the story about the baroness having been the instigator of many of the letters, by her at once withdrawing to her country-seat at Friedrichsfeld, and refusing to receive anyone.

Doubts as to the baron’s guilt, however, commenced to arise when it was found that in spite of his incarceration, the anonymous letters continued to be sent as before, without any interruption, while all efforts to bring home the guilt to the baron completely failed in every sense of the word.  Not only did the famous expert in caligraphy, Langenbuch, declare that the handwriting of the letters had nothing whatsoever in common with that of Baron Kotze, but that those written during his incarceration were exactly similar to the others.  The emperor himself received anonymous letters, describing him to be a fool for having unjustly imprisoned an altogether innocent man, and recommending him to look after his brother-in-law, Duke Ernest-Gunther of Schleswig-Holstein.