LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
[Letters of the length of one of our leading paragraphs are often more read, and therefore more effective, than those which fill treble the space.] QUEEN VICTORIA, BISMARCK, AND A GERMAN MARRIAGE INTRIGUE.
[To THE EDITOR Or TEl " SPECTLTOR."]
Stu,—In Mr. Lytton Strachey's Queen Victoria the following words will be found on p. 284 in a passage referring to the rumour of a revived marriage project between Princess Victoria of Prussia and Prince Alexander of Battenberg, the ex-Prince of Bulgaria :— " Victoria, as well as the Empress, highly approved of the match. . . . A fierce struggle between the Empress and the Chancellor followed. Victoria, whose hatred of her daughter's enemy was unbounded, came over to Charlottenburg to join in the fray. Bismarck, over his pipe and his lager, snorted out his alarm. The Queen of England's object, he said, was clearly political."
It is evident that in writing this passage Mr. Strachey has been misled by Busch, whose ipsissima verbs are quoted, just as Busch himself was misled by Bismarck when the latter directed him to set the Press machinery in motion against a marriage project which would, he held, compromise good rela- tions between Germany and Russia, the basis of his foreign policy. The campaign was accordingly taken up with great bitterness in the " reptile" Press, and even the Times corre- spondent, no doubt unwittingly, gave it encouragement by tele- graphing to his paper that the Queen was urging the match.
Now, being in a position to know the whole history of this unfortunate episode, I feel that it is right to state that there is no foundation whatever for the statement that Queen Victoria approved or urged the match; in fact, the very opposite is the truth. According to Busch's diary, it was on April 7th, 1888, that he was furnished by the Chancellor with the lines on which he was to attack " the foreign influences working against me—the reigning lady and her mother." Within two days, at any rate, of that date Bismark knew that there had been no justification for dragging in the Queen's name. But the Press campaign had been started, and the malignant attacks con- tinued for some time afterwards.
It is probable that a "Chancellor crisis," which excited con- siderable attention at the time, only existed so far as Bismark chose to make it for his own ends. It arose through a proposal of Prince Alexander, after the accession of the Emperor Frederick, that he should come to offer his respects. This pro- posal at once revived rumours of the projected marriage. The Press campaign was at once initiated by Bismarck without his having even seen the Empress. As soon as he did see her the whole matter was composed. It is even questionable whether the idea that such a match would then have antagonized Russia was not a miscalculation on his part. Reports from Russia at the time tended to show that it was held there that his future interference in Bulgaria might best be discounted by marrying Prince Alexander to a German Princess and giving him a divisional command in Germany. The presumption drawn at the time by some of those best able to judge the real significance of an unpleasant incident was that the Chancellor, who never acted from tamper but always from calculations, designedly sought at the outset of a new reign to show that the throne was not absolute, perhaps less as a lesson to the reign- ing sovereign than to his heir. To have gratuitously dragged in Queen Victoria's name, and to have stirred up popular feeling against the new sovereigns at a moment of such tragedy in their lives, when the whole matter could have been arranged Without publicity, were matters which did not weigh in the scale against the pursuit of his own aims.
On April 24th Queen Victoria on her way home from the South came to Charlottenburg, not "to join in the fray " which was then over, but to visit her daughter and the dying Emperor. Bismarck, who had a very satisfactory interview with Her Majesty, was so full of affability that observers were tempted to wonder whether he was capable of feeling remorse. An article in the Berliner Boersen Zeitung, moreover, stated that the Imperial Chancellor had been indignant at the notorious article in the Greuzboten slandering the Empress Victoria! It is well, however, that historians should not misjudge what
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