ministerial council in the palace which he mentions did not take place.  Prince Anthony was living as the King’s guest in the palace, and had invited him and some of the ministers to dinner.  I scarcely think that the Spanish question was discussed at table.  If the Duke of Gramont[35] labors to adduce proof that I did not stand aloof from and averse to the Spanish proposal, I find no reason to contradict him.  I can no longer recall the text of my letter to Marshal Prim, which the Duke has heard mentioned; if I drew it up myself, about which I am equally uncertain, I should hardly have called the Hohenzollern candidature “une excellente chose”:  the expression is not natural to me.  That I regarded it as “opportune,” not “a un moment donne,” but in principle and in time of peace is correct.  I had not the slightest doubt in the matter that the grandson of the Murats, a favorite at the French Court, would secure the goodwill of France towards his country.

The intervention of France at its beginning concerned Spanish and not Prussian affairs; the garbling of the matter in the Napoleonic policy, by virtue of which the question was to become a Prussian one, was internationally unjustifiable and exasperating, and proved to me that the moment had arrived when France sought a quarrel against us and was ready to seize any pretext that seemed available.  I regarded the French intervention in the first instance as an injury, and consequently as an insult to Spain, and expected that the Spanish sense of honor would resist this encroachment.  Later on, when the turn of affairs showed that, by her encroachment on Spanish independence, France intended to threaten us with war, I waited for some days expecting that the Spanish declaration of war against France would follow that of the French against us.  I was not prepared to see a self-assertive nation like Spain stand quiet behind the Pyrenees with ordered arms, while the Germans were engaged in a deadly struggle against France on behalf of Spain’s independence and freedom to choose her king.  The Spanish sense of honor which proved so sensitive in the Carlist question simply left us in the lurch in 1870.  Probably in both cases the sympathies and international ties of the Republican parties were decisive.

The first demands of France respecting the candidature for the Spanish throne, and they were unjustifiable, had been presented on July 4, and answered by our Foreign Office evasively, though in accordance with truth, that the ministry knew nothing about the matter.  This was correct so far, that the question of Prince Leopold’s acceptance of his election had been treated by his Majesty simply as a family matter, which in no way concerned either Prussia or the North German Confederation, and which affected solely the personal relations between the Commander-in-Chief and a German officer, and those between the head of the family and, not the royal family of Prussia, but the entire family of Hohenzollern, or all the bearers of that name.