“She was not the wife for a German Emperor, she so English and insisted so strongly on her English ways.  The result was that she was very unpopular in Germany, and the Germans said many wicked things of her.  She hated Berlin, and if her son, the present Emperor, had not required that she should come to the capital every winter, she would have lived altogether at Cronberg in the villa an Italian friend bequeathed to her.

“She was extremely musical, had extensively cultivated her talents in this respect, and was an accomplished linguist.  Like her mother, Queen Victoria, she was unusually strong-minded, and was always believed to rule over her amiable and gentle husband.  Her interest in the English community was great, another reason for the dislike with which the Germans regarded her.  To her the community owes the pretty little English church in the Mon Bijou Platz (Berlin), which she used to attend regularly, and where a funeral service, at which the Emperor was present, was held in memory of her.

“German feeling was further embittered against her by the Morell Mackenzie incident, and to this day controversy rages round the famous English surgeon’s name.  The controversy is as to whether or not Morell Mackenzie honestly believed what he said when he diagnosed the Emperor’s illness as non-cancerous in opposition to the opinion of distinguished German doctors like Professor Bergmann.  Under German law no one can mount the throne of Prussia who is afflicted with a mortal sickness.  For long it had been suspected that the Emperor’s throat was fatally affected, and, therefore, when King William was dying, it became of dynastic and national importance to establish the fact one way or other.  Queen Victoria was ardently desirous of seeing her daughter an Empress, and sent Sir Morrell Mackenzie to Germany to examine the royal patient.  On the verdict being given that the disease was not cancer, the Crown Prince mounted the throne, and Queen Victoria’s ambition for her daughter was realized.

“The Empress also put the aristocracy against her by introducing several relaxations into Court etiquette which had up to her time been stiff and formal.  Her relations with Bismarck, as is well known, were for many years strained, and on one occasion she made the remark that the tears he had caused her to shed ‘would fill tumblers.’  On the whole she was an excellent wife and mother.  She was no doubt in some degree responsible for the admiration of England as a country and of the English as a people which is a marked feature of the Emperor’s character.”

This account is fairly correct in its estimation of the Empress Frederick’s character and abilities, but it repeats a popular error in saying that German law lays down that no one can mount the Prussian throne if he is afflicted with a mortal sickness.  There is no “German law” on the subject, and the law intended to be referred to is the so-called