When Wilhelmine Encke first opened her eyes on the world one day in the year 1754, he would have been a bold prophet who would have predicted that she would one day be the uncrowned Queen of the Court of Russia, _plus Reine que la Reine_, and that her children would have in their veins the proudest blood in Europe. Such a prophecy might well have been laughed to scorn, for little Wilhelmine had as obscure a cradle as almost any infant in al Prussia. Her father was an army bugler, who wore private's uniform in Frederick the Great's army; and her early years were to be spent playing with other soldiers' children in the sordid environment of Berlin barracks.
When her father turned his back on the army, while Wilhelmine was still nursing her dol s, it was to play the humble role of landlord of a small tavern, from which he was lured by the bait of a place as French-horn player in Frederick's private band; and the goal of his modest ambition was reached when he was appointed trumpeter to the King.
This was Herr Encke's position when the curtain rises on our story at Potsdam, and shows us Wilhelmine, an unattractive maid of ten, the Cinderel a of her family, for whom there seemed no better prospect than a soldier-husband, if indeed she were lucky enough to capture him. She was, in fact, the "ugly duckling" of a good-looking family, removed by a whole world from her beautiful eldest sister Charlotte, who counted among her many admirers no less exalted a wooer than Prince Frederick William, the King's nephew and heir to his throne.
There was, indeed, no more beautiful or haughty damsel in all Potsdam than this trumpeter's daughter who had caught the amorous fancy of the Prince, then, as to his last day, the slave of every pretty face that crossed his path. But Charlotte Encke was much too imperious a young lady to hold her Royal lover long in fetters. He quickly wearied of her caprices, her petulances, and her exhibitions of temper; and the climax came one day when in a fit of anger she struck her little sister, in his presence, and he took up the cudgels for Wilhelmine.
This was the last straw for the disillusioned and disgusted Prince, who sent Charlotte off to Paris, where as the Countess Matushke she played the fine lady at her lover's cost, while the Prince took her Cinderel a sister under his protection. He took her education into his own hands, provided her with masters to teach her a wide range of accomplishments, from languages to dancing and deportment, while he himself gave her lessons in history and geography. Nor did he lack the reward of his benevolent offices; for Wilhelmine, under his ministrations, not only developed rare gifts and graces of mind, like many another Cinderella before her; she blossomed into a rose of girlhood, more beautiful even than her imperious sister, and with a sweetness of character and a winsomeness which Charlotte could never have attained.
On her part, gratitude to her benefactor rapidly grew into love for the handsome and courtly Prince; on his, sympathy for the ill-used Cinderel a, into a passion for the lovely maiden hovering on the verge of a still more beautiful womanhood. It was a mutual passion, strong and deep, which now linked the widely contrasted lives of the King-to-be and the trumpeter's daughter--a passion which, with each, was to last as long as life itself.
Wilhelmine was now formally installed in the place of the deposed Charlotte as favourite of the heir to the throne; and idyllic years fol owed, during which she gave pledges of her love to the man who was her husband in al but name. That her purse was often empty was a matter to smile at; that she had to act as "breadwinner" to her family, and was at times reduced to such straits that she was obliged to pawn some of her smal stock of jewel ery in order to provide her lover with a supper, was a bagatelle. She was the happiest young woman in Prussia.
Even what seemed to be a crowning disaster, fortune turned into a boon for her. When news of this unlicensed love-making came to the King's ears, he was furious. It was intolerable that the destined ruler of a great and powerful nation should be governed and duped by a woman of the people. He gave his nephew a sound rating--alike for his extravagance and his amour; and packed off Wilhelmine to join her sister in Paris.
But, for once, Frederick found that he had made a mistake. The Prince, robbed of the woman he loved, took the bit in his teeth, and plunged so deeply into extravagant dal ying with bal et-dancers and stars of the opera that the King was glad to choose the lesser evil, and to summon Wilhelmine back to her Prince's arms. One stipulation only he made, that she should make her home away from the capital and the dangerous allurements which his nephew found there.
Now at last we find Cinderella happily instal ed, with the King's august approval, in a beautiful home which has since blossomed into the splendours of Charlottenburg. Here she gave birth to a son, whom Frederick dubbed Count de la Marke in his nurse's arms, but who was fated never to leave his cradle. This child of love, the idol of his parents, sleeps in a splendid mausoleum in the great Protestant Church of Berlin.
As a sop to Prussian morality and to make the old King quite easy, a complaisant husband was now found for the Prince's favourite in his chamberlain, Herr Rietz, son of a palace gardener; and Frederick William himself looked on while the woman he loved, the mother of his children, was converted by a few priestly words into a "respectable married woman"--only to leave the altar on his own arm, his wife in the eyes of the world.
The time was now drawing near when Wilhelmine was to reach the zenith of her adventurous life. One August day in 1786 Frederick the Great drew his last breath in the Potsdam Palace, and his nephew awoke to be greeted by his chamberlain as "Your Majesty." The trumpeter's daughter was at last a Queen, in fact, if not in name, more secure in her husband's love than ever, and with long years of splendour and happiness before her. That his fancy, ever wayward, flitted to other women as fair as herself, did not trouble her a whit. Like Madame de Pompadour, she was prepared even to encourage such rivalry, so long as the first place (and this she knew) in her husband's heart was unassailably her own.
Picture our Cinderella now in al her new splendours, moving as a Queen among her courtiers, receiving the homage of princes and ambassadors as her right, making her voice heard in the Council Chamber, and holding her _salon_, to which al the great ones of the earth flocked to pay tribute to her beauty and her gifts of mind. It was a strange transformation from the barracks-kitchen to the Queendom of one of the greatest Courts of Europe; but no Queen cradled in a palace ever wore her honours with greater dignity, grace, and simplicity than this daughter of an army bandsman.
The days of the empty purse were, of course, at an end. She had now her ten thousand francs a month for "pin-money," her luxuriously appointed palace at Charlottenburg, and her Berlin mansion, "Unter den Linden,"
with its private theatre, in which she and her Royal lover, surrounded by their brilliant Court, applauded the greatest actors from Paris and Vienna. It is said that many of these stage-plays were of questionable decency, with more than a suggestion of the garden of Eden in them; but this is an aspersion which Madame de Rietz indignantly repudiates in her
"Memoirs."
While Wilhelmine was thus happy in her Court magnificence, varied by days of "delightful repose," at Charlottenburg, France was in the throes of her Revolution, drenched with the blood of her greatest men and fairest women; her King had lost his crown and his head with it; and Europe was in arms against her. When Frederick William joined his army camped on the Rhine bank, Wilhelmine was by his side to counsel him as he wavered between war and peace. The fate of the coalition against France was practical y in the hands of the trumpeter's daughter, whose voice was al for peace. "What matters it," she said, "how France is governed? Let her manage her own affairs, and let Europe be saved from the horrors of bloodshed."
In vain did the envoys of Spain and Italy, Austria and England, practise all their diplomacy to place her influence in the scale of war. When Lord Henry Spencer offered her a hundred thousand guineas if she would dissuade her husband from concluding a treaty with France, she turned a deaf ear to al his pleading and arguments. Such influence as she possessed should be exercised in the interests of peace, and thus it was that the vacillating King deserted his al ies, and signed the Treaty of Bale, in 1795.
Such was the triumphant issue of Madame Rietz's intervention in the affairs of Europe; such the proof she gave to the world of her conquest of a King. It was thus with a light heart that she turned her back on the Rhine camp; and with her husband's children and a splendid retinue set out on her journey to Italy, to see which was the greatest ambition of her life. At the Austrian Court she was coldly received, it is true, thanks to her part in the Treaty of Bale; but in Italy she was greeted as a Queen. At Naples Queen Caroline received her as a sister; the trumpeter's daughter was the brilliant centre of fetes and banquets and receptions such as might have gratified the vanity of an Empress: while at Florence she spent days of ideal happiness under the blue sky of Italy and among her beauties of Nature and Art.
It was at Venice that she wrote to her King lover, "Your Majesty knows wel that, for myself, I place no value on the foolish vanities of Court etiquette; but I am placed in an awkward position by my daughter being raised to the rank of Countess, while I am still in the lowly position of a bourgeoise." She had, in fact, always declined the honour of a title, which Frederick William had so often begged her to accept; and it was only for her daughter's sake, when the question of an al iance between the young Countess de la Marke and Lord Bristol's heir arose, that she at last stooped to ask for what she had so long refused.
A few weeks later her brother, the King's equerry, placed in her hands the patent which made her Countess Lichtenau, with the right to bear on her shield of arms the Prussian eagle and the Royal crown.
Wherever the Countess (as we must now cal her) went on her Italian tour she drew men to her feet by the magnetism of her beauty, who would have paid no homage to her as _chere amie_ of a King; for she was now in the early thirties, in the ful bloom of the loveliness that had its obscure budding in the Potsdam barrack-rooms. Young and old were equal y powerless to resist her fascinations. She had, indeed, no more ardent slave and admirer than my Lord Bristol, the octogenarian Bishop of Londonderry, whose passion for the Countess, young enough to be his granddaughter, was that of a lovesick youth.
From "dear Countess and adorable friend," he quickly leaps in his letters to "my dear Wilhelmine." He looks forward with the impatience of a boy to seeing her at "that terrestrial paradise which is called Naples, where we shal enjoy perpetual spring and spend delightful days in listening to the divine _Paesiello_. Do you know," he adds, "I passed two hours of real delight this morning in simply contemplating your elegant bedroom where only the elegant sleeper was missing."
"It is in _Crocelle_," he writes a little later, "that you will make people happy by your presence, and where you will recuperate your health, regain your gaiety, and forget an Irishman; and a holy Bishop, more worthy of your affection, on account of the deep attachment he has for you, will take his place."
In June, 1796, this senile lover writes, "In an hour I depart for Germany; and, as the wind is north, with every step I take I shall say:
'This breeze comes perhaps from her; it has touched her rosy lips and mingled its scent with the perfume of her breath which I shall inhale, the perfume of the breath of my dear Wilhelmine.'"
But these days of dallying with her legion of lovers, of regal fetes and pleasure-chasing, were brought to an abrupt conclusion when news came to her at Venice that her "husband," the King, was dying, with the Royal family by his bedside awaiting the end. Such news, with all its import of sorrow and tragedy, set the Countess racing across the Continent, fast as horses could carry her, to the side of her beloved King, whom she found, if not _in extremis_, "very dangerously ill and pitiful y changed" from the robust man she had left. Her return, however, did more for him than al the skill of his doctors. It gave him a new lease of life, in which her presence brought happiness into days which, none knew better than himself, were numbered.
For more than a year the Countess was his tender nurse and constant companion, ministering to his comfort and arranging plays and tableaux for his entertainment. She watched over him as jealously as any mother over her dying child; but all her devotion could not stay the steps of death, which every day brought nearer. As the inevitable end approached, her friends warned her to leave Charlottenburg while the opportunity was still hers--to escape with her jewels and her money (a fortune of L150,000)--but to al such urging she was deaf. She would stay by her lover's side to the last, though she wel knew the danger of delay.
One November day in 1797 Frederick William made his last public appearance at a banquet, with the Countess at his right hand; and seldom has festival had such a setting in tragedy. "None of the guests," we are told, "uttered a word or ate a mouthful of anything; the plates were cleared at the hasty ringing of a bel . A convulsive movement made by the sick man showed that he was suffering agonies. Before half-past nine every guest had left, greatly troubled. The majority of those who had been present never saw the unfortunate monarch again. They al shared the same presentiment of disaster, and wept."
From that night the King was dead, even to his own Court. The gates of his palace were closed against the world, and none were allowed to approach the chamber in which his life was ebbing away, save the Countess, his nurse, and his doctors. Even his children were refused admittance to his presence. As the Marquis de Saint Mexent said, "The King of Prussia ends his days as though he were a rich benefactor. All the relations are excluded by the housekeeper."
A few days before the end came the Countess was seen to leave the palace, carrying a large red portfolio--a suspicious circumstance which the Crown Prince's spies promptly reported to their master. There could be only one inference--she had been caught in the act of stealing State papers, a crime for which she would have to pay a heavy price as soon as her protector was no more! As a matter of fact the portfolio contained nothing more secret or valuable than the letters she had written to the King during the twenty-seven years of their romance, letters which, after reading, she consigned to the flames in her boudoir within an hour of the suspected theft of State documents.
A few days later, on the night of the 16th of November (1797), the King entered on his "death agony," one fit of suffocation succeeding another, until the Countess, unable to bear any longer the sight of such suffering, was carried away in violent convulsions. She saw him no more; for by seven o'clock in the morning Frederick William had found release from his agony in death, and his son had begun to reign in his stead.
At last the long-delayed hour of revenge had come to Frederick William III., who had always regarded his father's favourite as an enemy; and his vengeance was swift to strike. Before the late King's body was cold, his successor's emissaries appeared at the palace door, Unter den Linden, with orders to search her papers and to demand the keys of every desk and cupboard. Even then she scorned to fly before the storm which she knew was breaking. For three days and nights her carriage stood at her gates ready to take her away to safety; but she refused to move a step.
Then one morning, before she had left her bed, a major of the guards, with a posse of soldiers, appeared at her bedroom door armed with a warrant for her arrest; and for many weeks she was a closely guarded prisoner in her own house, subject to daily insults and indignities from men who, a few weeks earlier, had saluted her as a Queen.
At the trial which fol owed some very grave indictments were preferred against her. She was charged with having betrayed State secrets; with having robbed the Royal Exchequer; stolen the King's portfolio; and removed the priceless solitaire diamond from his crown, and the very rings from his fingers as he lay dying. To these and other equally grave charges the Countess gave a dignified denial, which the evidence she was able to produce supported. The diamond and the rings were, in fact, discovered in places indicated by her where they had been put, by the King's orders, for safe custody.
The trial had a happier ending than, from the malignity of her enemies, especially of the King, might have been expected. After three months of durance she was removed to a Silesian fortress. Her houses and lands were taken from her; but her furniture and jewels were left untouched, and with them she was allowed to enjoy a pension of four thousand thalers a year. Such was the judgment of a Court which proved more merciful than she had perhaps a right to expect. And two months later, the influence and pleading of her friends set her free from her fortress-prison to spend her life where and as she would.
The sun of her splendour had indeed set, but many years of peaceful and not unhappy life remained for our ex-Queen, who was still in the prime of her womanhood and beauty and with the magnetism that, to her last day, brought men to her feet. At fifty she was able to inspire such passion in the breast of a young artist, Francis Holbein, that he asked and won her hand in marriage. But this romance was short-lived, for within a year he left her, to spend the remainder of her days in Paris, Vienna, and her native Prussia. Here her adventurous career closed in such obscurity, at the age of sixty-eight, that even those who ministered to her last moments were unaware that the dying woman was the Countess who had played so dazzling a part a generation earlier, as favourite of the King of Prussia and Queen of her loveliest women.