The introduction of filial affection into the relation between Hohenzollern parents and children dates from this Queen Louise, and belongs to our own century. Before that it was the rule for the heirs of Prussia to detest their immediate progenitors. From the time of the Great Elector, every rising generation of this royal house sulked, cursed under its breath, went into opposition as far as it dared, and every fading generation disliked and distrusted those who were coming after it. Nor were these harsh relations confined to sovereign and heir. Wilhelmine, Margravine of Baireuth, records in her memoirs how, at the age of six, she was so much surprised at being fondled and caressed by her mother, on the latter’s return from a prolonged journey, that she broke a blood vessel. * It seems safe to say that down to the family of Frederic William III and Louise, no other reigning race in Europe had ever managed to engender so much bitterness and bad blood between elders and juniors within its domestic fold. The change then was abrupt. The two older boys of this family, Frederic William IV and William I, lived lives as young men which were poems of filial reverence and tenderness. The cruel misfortunes of the Napoleonic wars made the mutual affection within this hunted and homeless royal family very sweet and touching. Perhaps the most interesting of all the reminiscences called forth by the death of the old Kaiser was furnished by the publication of the letters he wrote as a young man to his father--that strange correspondence which reveals him resolutely breaking his own heart and tearing from it the image of the Princess Radziwill, in loving obedience to his father’s wish.
* “Memoirs of Wilhelmine, Margravine of Baireuth,” translated by H.R.H. Princess Chri of Wilhelmine, Margravine of Baireuth, translated by H.R.H. Princess Christian, London, 1887
This trait of filial piety did not loom so largely in William’s son, the late Frederic III, as one or two random allusions in his diary show. And in his son, in turn, its pulse beats with such varying and intermittent fervour that sometimes one misses it altogether.
Young William, as has been said, was the first of his race to be sent to a public school, the big gymnasium at Cassel being selected for the purpose. The innovation was credited at the time to the eccentric liberalizing notions of his mother, the English Crown Princess. The old Kaiser did not like the idea, and Bismarck vehemently opposed it, but the parents had their way, and at the age of fifteen the lad went, along with his twelve-year-old brother Henry, and their tutor, Dr. Hinzpeter. They were lodged in an old schloss, which had been one of the Electoral residences, and out of school hours maintained a considerable seclusion. But in the school itself William was treated quite like any ordinary citizen’s son.