Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 1.djvu/606

 conspicuously relieved the pecuniary strain on the chief London hospitals. VIII Three years and a half were to pass between the celebration of Queen Victoria's sixty years of rule and the end of her prolonged reign. French caricaturists insolently depicted the extreme senility which would distinguish the prince when his time for kingship would arrive. But the prince as yet showed no loss of activity and no narrowing of interest. As soon as the diamond jubilee festivities ended the prince and princess proved their liking for modern music by attending the Wagner festival at Baireuth (Aug. 1897). Thence the prince went on his customary holiday to Homburg, and on his way home visited his Difficulties siste ^ the 'Empress Frederick with the at Cronberg. One of those re- German curring seasons of coolness was dividing his nephew the German emperor and himself. Private and public events alike contributed to the disagreement. There was a renewal of differences between the emperor and his mother, and the emperor had imprudently expressed by telegram his sympathy with President Kruger of the Transvaal Republic, who was resisting the demands of the British government in South Africa. The emperor disclaimed any intention of wounding English susceptibilities. He deemed him- self misunderstood. The prince, however, for the time absented himself from Berlin on his foreign travels, and did not recommend himself to German public favour by an emphatic declaration of un-alterable personal devotion to France, at the moment that a period of estrangement menaced that country and England. In the spring of 1898, when the two governments were about to engage in a sharp diplomatic duel over their relations in north Africa, the prince laid the foundation stone of a new jetty at Cannes and pleaded in public the cause of peace.

Varied anxieties and annoyances were accumulating. The ambiguity of his position at home was brought home to him in April, when he was requested to preside, for the first and only time in his career of heir-apparent, over the privy council. Since 1880, when Queen Victoria had made it her practice to spend the spring in the The prince Riviera, a commission had been and the privy privately drafted empowering the prince and some of the ministers to act, in cases of extreme urgency, on her behalf in her absence from the council. Hitherto the commission had lain dormant, and the prince merely learnt by accident that such a commission existed and that his name was included in it. The concealment caused him annoyance. Now in April 1898, on the outbreak of the Spanish- American war, it was necessary to issue a proclamation of neutrality, and he was called upon to fill the queen's place in the transaction.

In the summer an accidental fall while staying at Waddesdon with his friend Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild caused a fracture of his kneecap (18 July 1898), and disabled him for two months. The death on 6 Feb. 1899 of his next brother, Alfred, now become duke of Saxe-Coburg, was a serioiis grief. His relations with the duke had been close from boyhood, and the wrench with the past was severe. At the end of the year the gloom was lightened by the arrival, after a four years' absence, of the German emperor on a friendly visit to Queen Victoria and the prince. The episode was an eloquent proof that there was no enduring enmity between the emperor and either his uncle or his uncle's country, whatever were the passing ebullitions of irritation. The em- The German P eror arrived just after the emperor's outbreak of the South African Sov' 1899 war ' m *k course of which the prince was to learn that even in France there were limits to the effective exercise of his personal charm.

During 1899 and 1900 misrepresentations of England's aim in the war excited through-out Europe popular rancour which involved the prince, equally with his mother and the English ministers, in scurrilous attack. The war was denounced as a gross oppression on England's part of a weak and innocent people. The emperor's presence in England when the storm was breaking was a welcome disclaimer of approval of the abusive campaign. But in the spring of 1900 the prince suffered practical experience of the danger which lurked in the continental outcry. On his way to Denmark, while he and the princess were seated in their train at the Gare du Nord, Brussels, a youth, Sipido, aged fifteen, fired two shots at them (4 April). Attempt on Th ev were unhurt, and the the prince's prince showed the utmost cool-IQOO* AprU ness ' ^^ e act was an outcome of the attacks on England which were prompted by the Boer war. It was the only occasion on which any nefarious attempt was made on the prince's life. The sequel was not reassuring to British feeling. Sipido and three alleged accomplices were put on their trial at Brussels