As for the Empire itself, though the original idea of it was his, Frederic suffered the fate of many other inventors in having very little to do with it after it was put into working order. He presented a magnificently heroic figure on horseback in out-of-door spectacles, and his cultured tastes made the task of presiding over museums and learned societies congenial. But there his participation in public affairs ended.
The Empire he had dreamed of was of a wholly different sort from this prosaic, machine-like, departmental structure which Bismarck and Delbruck made. Frederic’s vision had been of some splendid, picturesque, richly-decorated revival of the Holy Roman Empire. There are a number of delightful pages in Freytag’s book giving the Crown Prince’s romantic views on this point. * When the first Reichstag met in 1871, to acclaim the new Emperor in his own capital, Frederic introduced into the ceremony the ancient throne chair of the Saxon Emperors, which may now be seen in Henry’s palace at Goslar, and which, having lain unknown for centuries in a Harz village, was discovered by being offered for sale by a peasant as old metal some seventy years ago.
Among practical Germans this attempt to link their new Empire with the discredited and disreputable old fabric, which had been too rotten for even the Hapsburgs to hold together, was extremely distasteful. Yet Frederic clung to this pseudo-mediævalism to the last. When he came to the throne as Kaiser his first proclamation spoke of “the re-established Empire.” And those who were in Berlin at the time know how a whole day’s delay was caused by the dissension over what title the new ruler should assume--the secret of which was that he desired to call himself Kaiser Friedrich IV, thus going back for imperial continuity to that Friedrich III who died while Martin Luther was a boy, and who is remembered only because he was the father of the great Max and was the original possessor of the Austrian under lip.
Freytag indeed says that to that first proclamation Frederic did affix a signature with an IV--the assumption being that Bismarck altered it.
The reader has been shown this less satisfying aspect of Frederic, as his associates saw him, because without understanding it the attitude of both his father and his son towards him would be flatly unintelligible. They did not believe that he would make a safe Emperor for Germany.