Empress Frederick has inherited from her mother, Queen Victoria, a singularly fiery temper.  Her passionate anger when she realized the base treachery to which her sick husband and herself had been subjected in their time of cruel tribulation and trouble can only be imagined by those who have the privilege of knowing her, and the scene that took place between herself and the offending chamberlain was not merely dramatical, but tragical in its fierce intensity.

It was very shortly after this that the old emperor died.  If Prince Bismarck entertained any further hopes of preventing the accession of Crown Prince Frederick to the throne, they were frustrated by Prince William, who declined to be a party to any such conspiracy.  Indeed, in spite of all that has been said to the contrary, I am firmly convinced that William at no time took any part, either directly or indirectly, in the Bismarckian plot to oust his so sadly afflicted father from his rights to the crown.  But, on the other hand, it is certain that he was suspected by his parents and relatives of being privy to the scheme, and that he was treated with still greater hostility and lack of affection by them than previously, which naturally served to embitter him more than ever before.

Emperor Frederick’s reign lasted not quite one hundred days, and throughout that period a conflict may be said to have raged around the bedside of the dying man.  Both he and his wife, aware how brief his tenure of the throne was destined to be, were bent on inaugurating some of those liberal reforms and popular measures which had been the dream of their entire married life, and which they wished to see put in force, as a lasting memorial of that monarch who figures in German history to-day as “Frederick the Noble.”

Prince Bismarck, and all the leading statesmen of Prussia, it must be admitted, ranged themselves against the imperial couple in the matter.  They expressed profound pity for the dying emperor, but they denounced the empress with the utmost virulence for taking advantage, as they described it, of his condition to endow Germany with some of the most pernicious features of English political life, which, while all very well for Britons, were destined to prove disastrous in the extreme if applied to Prussia.  The fiercer the opposition, the more resolute did both the emperor and empress become in their determination to attain their aim, before death once more rendered the throne vacant; and the position of William, who was now crown prince, became even more difficult than it had hitherto been.  His political sympathies were, it is impossible to deny, with Prince Bismarck and his followers, and he could not with his training and with the influences by which he had been surrounded, ever since he had left school, but disapprove of the measures which his father and mother wished to adopt.  This very naturally added to their distrust of him, and while they lavished every token of affection upon their other children, he was treated by them more as a political adversary and a personal foe than as a friend or a son.