Philip Eulenburg has been clever enough to foster William’s very pardonable weakness as to his gifts as a musician and a poet, and being a man of the most charming manners, possessed of an unusual supply of tact, and extremely accomplished in many respects, he has acquired an extraordinary degree of influence over his sovereign.  Indeed it may be doubted whether there is any member of the imperial entourage who stands as high in the good graces of the German ruler as does his ambassador to the Court of Vienna.

Each year the emperor makes a point of spending a week at Liebenberg, the country-seat of the count, and it has long been a matter of comment that these visits are invariably signalized by the inauguration of some political or administrative move on the part of the kaiser.  It was, indeed, at Liebenberg that the emperor decided upon the dismissal from the chancellorship of General Count Caprivi, who had been unfortunate enough to incur the enmity of the Eulenburgs.

Count Philip, who possesses a fine voice, and who during the annual yachting trip of the emperor on board the Hohenzollern, is accustomed to sing duets with the monarch, and to play the latter’s accompaniments, is not, as is generally supposed, the brother, but merely the cousin of Botho, Augustus, and the late Count Wend Eulenburg.  His career was almost wrecked at its very outset by an incident which developed into an international question.  While stationed as a young sub-lieutenant of cavalry at Bonn, he was one day inadvertently jostled in the street by a gray-haired and rather portly stranger, whom he at once addressed in the most insulting manner.  Upon the stranger responding in kind, the count drew his sabre and cut the man down, inflicting upon him such a wound that he expired a short time afterwards at the hospital.  There it was discovered that he was one Ott, a Frenchman, and one of the chefs of Queen Victoria, momentarily detached from his duties at Windsor Castle, in order to attend her majesty’s second son, the Duke of Edinburgh,—­now the reigning sovereign of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha,—­during his stay on the continent.  Both the queen and Prince Alfred were indignant at the outrage, which was made the subject of an acrimonious correspondence between the English, French and Prussian Governments, the result being that Count Philip was sentenced to pay heavy damages to the widow and to the orphaned children of his victim, and to undergo a year’s imprisonment in a fortress.

He only joined the diplomatic profession in 1881, when he was appointed as third secretary to the German embassy at Paris, and he occupied very inferior roles in the diplomatic service of his country until the accession to the throne of his friend and patron, Emperor William, who promoted him a few weeks later, at one bound, from the post of second secretary of the legation at Munich to the rank of Prussian minister-plenipotentiary at Aldenberg, whence he was transferred a year later to Stuttgart, then, to The Hague, and then back to Munich, as chief of the legation, which post he retained until his nomination in 1892 to the German ambassadorship at Vienna, that is to say, to the blue ribbon of the diplomatic service of the kaiser.