But it was the mantle of these last two that he felt he was destined to wear, the glittering pinnacles of the great Roman Empire being ever before his romantic ambition. Hence, when the longed-for son was born he called him King of Rome. And why should he not? Was not his mother daughter of a line of emperors leading back to Charlemagne, first emperor of the Holy Roman Empire?
But with the first reverse, this artificially created empire trembled upon its foundations, and upon his defeat at Waterloo, 1815, one thousand years from the death of Charlemagne, the whole fabric fell apart into fragments. The crowns rolled off the heads of Joseph, Jerome, Louis, and the rest of them. The magical creation passed away like a vision of the night.
Europe rallied from the spell which this Corsican magician had thrown over her, and while he lay chained to the rock at St. Helena, the vulture of regret eating his heart away, Metternich, prime minister of Austria, was restoring order to Germany.
A confederation of states was formed, with Austria as its chief, each to be represented at a general Diet, held at Frankfort; and for fifty years such was the condition of Germany. Prussia, fallen from her high position under Frederick the Great, sinking lower and lower in the scale of nations, dominated by Austria, powerless to resent insult, her people helpless and hopeless, looking only to final disintegration and absorption into the powerful states about her.
We have now reached a period with which readers of to-day have more or less personal familiarity. This hour of deep depression in Germany was the one which comes before the dawn.
The Schleswig-Holstein episode was a complicated, tiresome tangle, even while it was enacting, and now is to most people only another name for a rusty German key with which Pandora's box was opened for Europe just twenty-five years ago. But it was a pivotal incident, and must be understood in order to make clear the rapid succession of events following, of which it was the first link in the chain.
The two adjacent dukedoms of Schleswig and Holstein, which constitute a sort of natural bridge about one hundred and fifty miles long and fifty miles wide, between Denmark and Prussia, are, by the way, the land of nativity for the Anglo-Saxon race, the Angles having inhabited Schleswig, and the Saxons Holstein, at the time they so kindly protected the Britons from the Picts and Scots!