There is no harm in reminding Prince Buelow that the letter V—­which may be a very important link in the chain of events—­comes between U and W. It is clear also that the Chancellor must have forgotten his English history for the moment, for though Cromwell’s rule may be called Caesarism of a kind, the reign of William III, of “glorious, pious, and immortal memory,” which followed the revolution of 1688, could not fairly be so named.

Three years later, in 1906, Prince Buelow found it necessary to defend the Emperor on the score of the “personal regiment.”  “The view,” Prince Buelow said,

“that the monarch should have no individual thoughts of his own about State and government, but should only think with the heads of his Ministers and only say what they tell him to say, is fundamentally wrong—­is inconsistent with State rights and with the wish of the German people”;

and he concluded by challenging the House to mention a single case in which the Emperor had acted unconstitutionally.  None of these bickerings between Crown and Parliament went to the root of the constitutional relations between them, but they betrayed the existence of popular dissatisfaction with the Emperor, which in a couple of years was to culminate in an outbreak of national anger.

An occurrence calls for mention here, not only as a kind of harbinger of the “storm,” but as one of the chief incidents which in the course of recent years have troubled Anglo-German relations.  The incident referred to is that of the so-called “Tweedmouth Letter,” which was an autograph letter from the Emperor to Lord Tweedmouth, First Lord of the British Admiralty at the time, dated February 17, 1908, and containing among other matters a lengthy disquisition on naval construction, with reference to the excited state of feeling in England caused by Germany’s warship-building policy.  The letter has never been published, but it is supposed to have been prompted by a statement made publicly by Lord Esher, Warden of Windsor Castle, in the London Observer, to the effect that nothing would more please the German Emperor than the retirement of Sir John Fisher, the originator of the Dreadnought policy, who was at the time First Lord of the Admiralty; and to have contained the remark that “Lord Esher had better attend to the drains at Windsor and leave alone matters which he did not understand.”  The Emperor was apparently unaware that Lord Esher was one of the foremost military authorities in England.

The sending of the letter became known through the appearance of a communication in the London Times of March 6th, with the caption “Under which King?”—­an allusion to Shakespeare’s “Under which king, Bezonian, speak or die”—­and signed “Your Military Correspondent.”  The writer announced that it had come to his knowledge that the German Emperor had recently addressed a letter