Other influences were also at work, emanating from Queen Victoria and the British Government.  It is well known that Her late Majesty wrote to the Emperor William stating that it would be “easy to prove that her fears [of a Franco-German war] were not exaggerated[246].”  The source of her information is now known to have been unexceptionable.  It reached our Foreign Office through the medium of German ambassadors.  Such is the story imparted by Lord Odo Russell, our Ambassador at Berlin, to his brother, and by him communicated to Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff.  It concerns an interview between Gortchakoff and Bismarck in which the German Chancellor inveighed against the Russian Prince for blurting out, at a State banquet held the day before, the news that he had received a letter from Queen Victoria, begging him to work in the interests of peace.  Bismarck thereafter sharply upbraided Gortchakoff for this amazing indiscretion.  Lord Odo Russell was present at their interview in order to support the Russian Chancellor, who parried Bismarck’s attack by affecting a paternal interest in his health:—­

“Come, come, my dear Bismarck, be calm.  You know that I am very fond of you.  I have known you since your childhood.  But I do not like you when you are hysterical.  Come, you are going to be hysterical.  Pray be calm:  come, come, my dear fellow.”  A short time after this interview Bismarck complained to Odo of “the preposterous folly and ignorance of the English and all other Cabinets, who had mistaken stories got up for speculations on the Bourse for the true policy of the German Government.”  “Then will you,” asked Odo, “censure your four ambassadors who have misled us and the other Powers?” Bismarck made no reply[247].

[Footnote 246:  Bismarck:  his Reflections, etc., vol. ii. pp. 191-193, 249-153 (Eng. ed.); the Bismarck Jahrbuch, vol. iv. p. 35.]

[Footnote 247:  Sir M. Grant Duff, Notes from a Diary, 1886-88, vol. i. p. 129.  See, too, other proofs of the probability of an attack by Germany on France in Professor Geffcken’s Frankreich, Russland, und der Dreibund, pp. 90 et seq.]

It seems, then, that the German Chancellor had no ground for suspicion against the Crown Princess as having informed Queen Victoria of the suggested attack on France; but thenceforth he had an intense dislike of these august ladies, and lost no opportunity of maligning them in diplomatic circles and through the medium of the Press.  Yet, while nursing resentful thoughts against Queen Victoria, her daughter, and the British Ministry, the German Chancellor reserved his wrath mainly for his personal rival at St. Petersburg.  The publication of Gortchakoff’s circular despatch of May 10, 1875, beginning with the words, “Maintenant la paix est assuree,” was in his eyes the crowning offence.