On the thorny question of how best to secure German unity the Prince eventually came round to the opinion that Austria should be excluded from a United Germany, and remain a separate realm, but in cordial friendship and alliance. Prussia, in his view, as the only Great Power in Germany, ought to lead the movement, but it was essential that Prussia should act in a German and not in a If the Public Had Known Prussian spirit.
The Prince himself, in a letter to Stockmar, written in 1854, deals very frankly with the unpleasant experiences through which he had passed:
The English nation, slow of thought trouble to consider what really is the ud uñedutated, never gave itself the ition of the husband of a Queen nant. When I first came over here I was met by this want of knowledge and unwillingness to give a thought to the position of this luckless personage Peel cut down my income. Wellington refused me my rank. The Royal family cried out against the foreign interloper: the Whigs in office were only inclined to concede to me just as much space I could stand upon.
The Constitution is silent as to the Consort pf the Queen: yet there he wa: and not to be done without. quiet and caused no scandal, Went well no one has troubled about me and my doings.
Nów that it has been brought to light that I have for years taken an active interest in all political matters, the public fancied itself betrayed because it felt it had been self-deceived. It also rushed all at once into a belief in secret correspondence with foreign Courts, intrigues, ete.
"Prussia's position, he wrote on One occasion, "is a weak one and will continue to be so, so long as she does not morally dominate Germany, and to be herself German is the way to bring this about." What the Prince did not foresee was that Prussia would so soon adopt Bismarckian ideas and policies—the very antithesis of his own—under the rule of the King whom he had sought to indoctrinate with his own Liberal tendencies.
As one of his dearest objects was to establish cordial relations between England and Germany, he heartily welcomed the suggestion of a matrix monial alliance between the Princess Royal and Prince William's eldest son. She was his favourite daughter; and no son-in-law could have been more amiable—and amenable to the Prince Consort's ideas—than the future Emperor Frederic.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.