By royal I do not mean kings and emperors only, or queens and empresses. I should have very little to tell of them. But royal, as is well known, has a wider meaning. The families of all reigning sovereigns, whether grand dukes, dukes, princes, landgraves, electors, etc., are royalty, nay even certain mediatised families, families that have ceased to be reigning, and which are very numerous on the continent, claim the same status, and may therefore intermarry with royal princes and princesses. Princes and princesses may also marry persons who are not royalty, but in that case the marriage is morganatic—a perfectly good and legal form of marriage both from an ecclesiastical and civil point of view, only that the children of such marriages, though perfectly legitimate, cannot succeed to the throne: in many cases no great loss to them. It has been my good fortune to see a good deal of royalty during the whole of my life. I say good fortune on purpose, for, with all the drawbacks inherent in Court life, royal persons enjoy some great advantages. Their position is assured and well defined. It requires no kind of self-assertion, and wherever they appear, they have no equals, no rivals, and hardly any enviers. They know that their presence always gives pleasure, and that every kind word or look from them is highly appreciated. They seldom have any inducement to try to appear different from what they are, or to disguise what they think or feel. What is the use of being a bishop, Stanley used to say, except that you can speak your own mind! The same applies to crowned heads, and if some of them, and it may be some bishops also, do not avail themselves of this privilege, it is surely their own fault. No doubt, if a bishop wants to become an archbishop, he has to think twice about what he may and what he may not say. But a king or a prince does not generally want to become anything else, and as they want nothing from anybody, they are not likely to scheme, to flatter, or to deceive. Whatever people may say of the atmosphere of courts and the insincerity of courtiers, the sovereign himself, if only left to himself, if only seen in his own private cabinet, is generally above the vitiated atmosphere that pervades his palace, nor does he, as a rule, while speaking with perfect freedom himself, dislike perfect freedom in others.

Of course there are differences among royalty as well as among commonalty. Some sovereigns have become so accustomed to the daily supply of the very cheapest flattery, that the slightest divergence from the tone of their courtiers is apt to startle or to offend them. Still most human beings like fresh air.

And have we not known persons who display their mitres and shake their crosiers before our faces, far more than kings their crowns and their sceptres? There is a whole class of people in ordinary life who have become something, and who seem always to be thanking God that they are not as other men are. They have ceased to be what they were, quite unaware that even in becoming something, there ought always to be or to remain something that becomes or has become. They seem to have been created afresh when they were created peers, temporal or spiritual.

But we must not be unfair to these new creations or creatures. I have known bishops, and archbishops too, in England, who, to their friends, always remained Thirlwalls or Thomsons, and in the second place only Bishops of St. David’s or Archbishops of York. My friend Arthur Stanley never became a dean. He was always Stanley; Dean of Westminster, if necessary. If he had been what he ought to have been, Archbishop of Canterbury, he would never have ceased to be A. P. Stanley, his chuckle would always have been just the same, and if his admirers had presented him with a mitre and crosier, he would probably have put the mitre on his head sideways, and said to his friends what another bishop is reported to have said on a similar occasion: “Thank you, my friends, but a new hat and an alpaca umbrella would have been far more useful than a mitre and a crosier.” With regard to royal personages, they have the great advantage that they are to their business born. They have not become, they were born royal. I was much struck by the extraordinary power of observation of a French friend of mine, who, when in 1855 the Queen and the Empress Eugénie entered the Grand Opera at Paris together, and were received with immense applause, turned to his neighbour, an Englishman, and said: “Look at the difference between your Queen and our Empress.” They had both bowed most graciously, and then sat down. “Did you not observe,” he continued, “how the Empress looked round to see if there was a chair for her before she sat down. But your Queen, a born Queen, sat down without looking. She knew a chair must be there, as surely as she is Queen of England.”

There must be something to hedge a king. While most people have to move in a crowd, and hold their own even in a mob—and it is difficult to move with ease when you are hustled and pushed—royal persons are never in a crowd, and have never to adopt a position of self-defence or self-assertion. Still there is a difference between royal persons also. Some of them with all their dignity manage to hide their crown in everyday life; others seem always conscious that it is there, and that they must not condescend too low, lest it should tumble from their head.

My first acquaintance with royalty was at Dessau, my native town. Much has been written to ridicule the small German princes and their small Courts. And it cannot be denied that the etiquette kept up by the courtiers, and the nobility, in some of the small capitals of Germany is ludicrous in the extreme. But there is in the sovereigns themselves an inherited dignity, a sentiment of noblesse oblige, which demands respect. The reigning Duke of Anhalt-Dessau was to us boys a being by himself, and no wonder. Though the Duchy was so small that on one occasion a troublesome political agitator, who had been expelled from the Duchy, threatened to throw stones and break the Duke’s windows as soon as he had crossed the frontier, to us children Dessau was our world. When I was a child, the town of Dessau, the capital of the Duchy, contained not more than 10,000 or 12,000 inhabitants, but the Duke, Leopold Friedrich (1817–1871), was really the most independent sovereign in Europe. He was perfectly irresponsible, a constitution did not exist, and was never allowed to be mentioned. All appointments were made by the Duke, all salaries and pensions were paid from the Ducal chest, whatever existed in the whole Duchy belonged, or seemed to belong, to him. There was no appeal from him, at least not in practice, whatever it may have been in theory. If more money was wanted, the Dukes, I believe, had only to issue a new tax, and the money was forthcoming. And with all that one never, or hardly ever, heard of any act of injustice. The Duke was rich, nearly the whole of the Duchy belonged to him, and he had large landed property elsewhere also. Taxation was low, and during years of war and distress, taxes were actually remitted by the Dukes. The only public opinion there was, was represented by the Duke’s own permanent civil service, and certainly in it tradition was so strong that even the Duke, independent as he was, would have hesitated before going against it.

But the Duke himself was a splendid example of uprightness, fairness, and justice. He belonged to one of the oldest reigning families in Europe. The Hohenzollern, and even the Hohenstaufen, were but of yesterday compared with the glorious ancestors of the Ascanian princes. They did not actually claim descent from Ascanius, the son of Aeneas, nor from Askenas, the grandson of Japhet, though some crazy genealogists may have done so; but there is no flaw in their pedigree from the present Duke to Albrecht the Bear, Markgrave of Brandenburg in 1134. Some people would probably say that he belonged to a totemistic age. The Duke whom I knew, and who died in 1871, was the eighteenth successor of this Albrecht the Bear, and though his possessions had been much reduced in the course of centuries, he knew what was due from him to his name, and to the blood of his ancestors. He never forgot it. He was a tall and very handsome man, very quiet, very self-contained, particularly during the later part of his life, when his increasing deafness made any free intercourse between him and his friends and officials extremely difficult. He worked as hard as any of his ministers, and no wonder, considering that everything, whether important or not, had finally to be decided by him. As he had been much attached to my father, and as my grandfather was his president or prime minister, he took some interest in me when I was a boy at school in Dessau, and I can remember standing before him and looking up to him in his cabinet with fear and trembling, although nothing could be kinder than the handsome tall man with his deep voice and his slowly uttered words; he seemed to move in an atmosphere of his own, far removed from the life of his subjects. The ducal castle at Dessau was a grand old building, a quadrangle open in front, with turrets that held the staircases leading up to the reception rooms. Some of his ancestors had been highly cultivated men, who had travelled in Italy, France, and England, and had collected treasures of art, which were afterwards stored up in the old Palace (Schloss) at Dessau, and in several beautiful parks in the neighbourhood that had been laid out a hundred years ago after the model of English parks. The orange trees (Orangerie) in those parks and gardens were magnificent, and I do not remember having seen such an abundance of them anywhere else; but they suddenly began to wither and die, and even replanting them by their heads and letting the roots grow as new branches does not seem to have saved them.

The Duke and his highly cultivated Duchess were the little gods of Dessau. They seemed to live on their own Olympus. Everything depended on them; everything, such as theatre, concerts, or any public amusements, had to be provided out of their private purse. No wonder that the people looked up to them, and that whatever they did was considered right, whatever they said was repeated as gospel.

Scholars are just now writing learned essays as to whether the idea of the apotheosis of Augustus came to the Romans from Greece or from Egypt, or whether it may be a survival of fetishism. It may have had a much more homely origin, however. To the common people in the villages round Dessau, I feel sure that the Duke was little short of a god, provided always that they knew what was meant by a god. He might not have created the world, even Divus Augustus was not credited with that tour de force; but there was nothing else, I believe, that the peasants would have thought beyond the power of their Duke. To us children also, the Duke, the Duchess, and all the members of the Ducal family, were something quite different from the rest of the world, and some of these impressions of childhood often remain for life. When their carriage passed through the streets, everybody stood still, took off his hat, and remained bareheaded till they had passed. There was nothing servile in all this, as little as there is in a Frenchman signing himself Votre très-obéissant serviteur, for no one ever thought at that time that it could be otherwise. Nor am I at all certain that this outward respect for a sovereign is a mistake, for in honouring their sovereign, people after all but honour themselves. Whether he is supposed to be a sovereign by the grace of God, or by hereditary right, or by the voice of the people, he represents the country and the people; he is their duke, their king, their emperor, and if they wish to see him honoured by others, they must not fail to honour him themselves. When I saw the other day a king passing through the streets of his own capital, and no one touching his hat, I thought, “What a low opinion these people must have of themselves.” Even as boys at school we felt a pride in our Duke, and, though we knew scraps only of the glorious history of his ancestors, we knew how they had borne the brunt of the battle in all the greatest episodes of the history of Germany.

Little is said of these numerous small principalities in the history of Germany, but without them German history would often be quite unintelligible, and Germany would never have had so intense a vitality, would never have become what it is now. No doubt there was also an element of danger in them, particularly during the first half of this century, when as members of the German Confederation they could band together and support either Austria or Prussia in their fatal rivalry. They were the horses, as Bismarck said, harnessed to the chariot of Germany, some before and some behind, and pulling in different directions, so that it was impossible to advance. But that danger is past, thanks chiefly to Bismarck’s policy, and for the future the smaller principalities that have escaped from his grasp will form the most useful centres of intellectual life, nor are they likely now to be absorbed by Prussia, if well advised. There was a time during the Austro-Prussian war in 1866 when everybody expected that Anhalt, being almost an enclave of Prussia, would share the fate of Hanover, Nassau, and the Electorate of Hessia. The reigning Duke had the strongest sympathies for Austria. But he had a clever minister, who showed him that there were only two ways open to him under the circumstances, either to abdicate of his own free will, and make as advantageous an arrangement with Prussia as possible, or to say yes to whatever demand was made from Berlin. He chose the latter alternative, and it is reported that it was of him that Bismarck said: “I know what to do with my enemies, but what to do with my friends, I don’t.”

I cannot resist the temptation of giving here a short sketch of the really glorious history of the duchy and the Dukes of Anhalt, such as it was known to us as boys. Nor should it be supposed that I exaggerate the importance of my native duchy. I doubt, indeed, whether there is any reigning house now that can produce such a splendid record as Anhalt. If it has remained small and lost much of its former political influence, that is due chiefly to a law of inheritance which prevailed in the ducal family. Instead of making the eldest son the ruler of the whole duchy, it was the custom to divide the land among all the princes. Thus instead of one Duchy of Anhalt there were four duchies, Anhalt-Dessau, Anhalt-Cöthen, Anhalt-Zerbst, and Anhalt-Bernburg, some of them again subdivided. From time to time the duchies were reunited, and so they are at present, the last of the collateral branches having died out in 1863, when they were united once more into one duchy.

If we go slowly back into the past, and that seems to me the real task of the historian, we shall find that there is no critical epoch in the history of Germany, and of the history of the world, where we do not meet with some of the princes of the small Duchy of Anhalt, standing in the very front of the fight. I only wonder that no one has yet attempted to write a popular history of the four principalities of Anhalt, in order to show the share which they took in the historical development of Germany. I have tried to refresh my memory by reading a carefully written manual, “Anhalt’s Geschichte in Wort und Bild,” by Dr. Hermann Lorenz, 1893, but instead of quoting his opinion, or the opinions of any historians, as to the personal merits and the historical achievements of the princes of Anhalt, whether as warriors or as rulers, I shall try to quote, wherever it is possible, the judgments pronounced on them by some of their own contemporaries, whose names will carry greater weight.

The beginning of the nineteenth century was dominated by Napoleon’s invasion and almost annihilation of Germany. Dessau was then ruled by Prince Leopold Friedrich Franz (1740–1806). He had done an immense amount to raise both the material and the intellectual status of his people, and had well earned the name he is still known by, of “Father Franz.” Many of the princes of that time were far in advance of the people, and they met, as he did, with considerable difficulty in overcoming the resistance of those whom they wished to benefit by their reforms. The young prince of Dessau had travelled in Holland, England, and Italy. He avoided France, which he said was dangerous to young princes, and yet he was enlightened enough to erect a monument to Rousseau in his beautiful park at Wörlitz. He loved England. “In England,” he used to say, “one becomes a man.” Nor did he travel for pleasure only. While in England, he studied agriculture, architecture, gardening, brewing, and various other manufactures, in order to introduce as many improvements as possible among his own people. In Italy he studied art, both ancient and modern, under Winckelmann, and this great antiquarian was so delighted with the young prince and his companion that he spoke of their visit as the appearance of two young Greek gods. At that time it was still possible to buy old classical statues and old Italian pictures, and the young prince gladly availed himself of his opportunities as far as his financial resources would allow, and brought home to Dessau many valuable specimens of ancient and modern art. These he arranged in his various palaces and museums, all open to the people, and in the beautiful parks and gardens which he had created after English models in the neighbourhood of his capital. After a hundred years some of these parks, particularly that of Wörlitz, can vie with some of the finest parks in England. Like the neighbouring duchy of Weimar, Dessau soon attracted visitors from all parts of Germany. Goethe himself and his enlightened patron, the Duke Karl August, were often the guests of the Duke of Dessau, and Goethe has in several places spoken in rapturous terms of the beauties of Wörlitz, and the charm of the Duke’s society. Wieland, Lavater, Matthison, and other celebrities often passed happy days at Dessau as guests of the Duke.

But after Duke Franz had spent all his life in embellishing his land and inspiring his subjects with higher and nobler ideals, the Napoleonic thunder-cloud, which had long threatened Germany, burst over his head, and threatened to destroy everything that he had planted. After the battle of Jena in 1806 Prussia and the whole of Germany were at the mercy of the great French conqueror, and Napoleon, with his army of 100,000 men, who had to be lodged and fed in every town of Germany through which they passed, appeared at Dessau on 21st October, 1806. The old Prince had to receive him bareheaded at the foot of the staircase of his castle. My mother, then a child of six, remembered seeing her own grand and beautiful prince standing erect before the small and pale Corsican. The Prince, however, in his meeting with the Emperor, was not afraid to wear the Prussian order of the Black Eagle on his breast, and when he was asked by Napoleon whether he too had sent a contingent to the Prussian army, he said, “No, sir.” “Why not?” asked the Emperor. “Because I have not been asked,” was the answer. “But if you had been asked?” continued the Emperor. “Then I should certainly have sent my soldiers,” the Prince replied; and he added: “Your Majesty knows the right of the stronger.” This was a not very prudent remark to make, but the Emperor seems to have liked the outspoken old man. He invited him to inspect with him the bridge over the Elbe which had been burnt by the Prussians to cover their retreat. He demanded that it should be rebuilt at once, and on that condition he promised to grant neutrality to the duchy. Nay, before leaving Dessau in the morning he went so far as to ask his host whether he could do anything for him. “For myself,” the Prince replied, “I want nothing. I only ask for mercy for my people, for they are all to me like my children.”

The next critical period in the history of Germany is that of Frederick the Great, marked by the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) and the establishment of Prussia as one of the great Powers of Europe.

Here again we find a prince of Anhalt as one of the principal actors. The instrument with which Frederick the Great won his victories was his well-drilled army, and the drill-master of that army had been Leopold, Fürst zu Anhalt, the Field-Marshal of Frederick’s father. At the head of his grenadiers and by the side of Prince Eugène, Prince Leopold of Dessau had won, or helped to win, the great battles of Höchstadt, Blindheim (corrupted to Blenheim), Turin, and Malplaquet in the War of the Spanish Succession, and had thus helped in establishing against the overweening ambition of Louis XIV. what was then called the political equilibrium of Europe. The Prussian Field-Marshal was known at the time all over Germany as the “Alte Dessauer,” and through Carlyle’s “Life of Frederick the Great” his memory has lately been revived in England also. Having completely reorganised the Prussian army and having led it ever so many times to brilliant victories, he was for Prussia in his time what Bismarck was in our own. But after the death of Frederick I. and Frederick William II., Frederick II., or the Great, disliked the old general’s tutelage and dismissed him: much as Bismarck has been dismissed in our own time. The young King wrote to the old Field-Marshal quite openly: “I shall not be such a fool as to neglect my most experienced officers, but this campaign (in Silesia) I reserve for myself lest the world should think that the Prussian King cannot go to war without his tutor.” His old tutor was very angry, but he did not rebel, and in a State like Prussia, Frederick the Great was probably as right as the present Emperor in saying “Let one be King.” However, after Frederick had once established his own position as a general, he recalled his old tutor, and in the second Silesian War it was the brave warrior who stormed the heights of Kesselsdorf at the head of his old grenadiers, and won one of the most difficult and most decisive victories for his King. The King after the battle took off his hat before his tutor and embraced him in the sight of the whole army. The inscription placed on the Field-Marshal’s monument at Berlin, probably composed by the King himself, is simple and true: “He led the Prussian auxiliary forces victoriously to the Rhine, the Danube, and the Po; he took Stralsund and the island of Rügen. The battle of Kesselsdorf crowned his military career. The Prussian army owes him its strict discipline and the improvement of its infantry.” The successors of Frederick the Great have never forgotten what they owe to the “Alte Dessauer,” and I doubt not they may be counted on in the future also as the stoutest friends and supporters of the illustrious house of Albrecht the Bear, the first Markgrave of Brandenburg.

If stronger testimony to the military genius of the Old Dessauer were wanted from the mouth of his own contemporaries, it might easily be quoted from the despatches of Prince Eugène. That great general freely admits that the Prince’s troops surpassed his own in courage and discipline; nay, he adds, “the Prince of Dessau has done wonders in the battle of Turin.” The Emperor of Austria endorsed this judgment, and added, “that he had earned immortal glory,” and he conferred on him the title of Serene Highness.

So much for the eighteenth century. If now we look back to the seventeenth, the century of the Thirty Years’ War, we find Anhalt the constant trysting-ground of the two parties, the Catholic and the Protestant Powers, and we see the princes of Anhalt again and again at the head of the Northern or Protestant armies. The Elbe often divided the two, and the bridge over the river near Dessau was contested then as it was during the Napoleonic wars. Well do I remember, when as a boy I went to the Schanzenhaus, a coffeehouse on the way to the new bridge over the Elbe, how it was explained to me that these Schanzen or fortifications were what was left of the works erected by Wallenstein: just as I learnt at a later time that my own house at Oxford called Park’s End, was so called not because it stood as it does now at the end of the Park, but because what is now called the Park was originally the Parks, i.e., the parks of artillery erected by Cromwell’s army against the walls of Oxford. The right name of my house should therefore have been not Park’s End, but Parks’ End. A more merciless war than the Thirty Years’ War was seldom waged; villages and whole towns vanished from the ground, and many tracts of cultivated land, particularly along the Elbe, were changed into deserts. Yet during all that time the Anhalt princes never wavered. When the Elector of the Palatinate, Frederick II., had been proclaimed King in Bohemia in 1619, his commander-in-chief was Prince Christian of Anhalt. When after years of slaughter Gustavus Adolphus came to the assistance of the Protestant Powers in Germany and won the decisive battle of Lützen, one of Prince Christian’s sons, Prince Ernest, fought at his side and died of his wounds soon after the battle. The memory of Gustavus Adolphus has been kept alive in Dessau to the present day. He has become the hero of popular romance, and as a schoolboy I heard several stories told by the common people of his adventures during the war. There stands a large red brick house which I often passed on my way from Dessau to Wörlitz, and which is simply called Gustavus Adolphus. The story goes that the Swedish king was in hiding there under a bridge while the enemy’s cavalry passed over it.

One more century back brings us to the time of the Reformation, and once more among the most prominent champions of the Protestant cause we see the princes of Anhalt. The very cradle of the Reformation, Wittenberg, was not far from Dessau, and the reigning family of Anhalt was closely connected by marriage with the Saxon princes of the house of Wettin, the chief protectors of the reforming movement in Germany. Prince Wolfgang of Anhalt was present at the Diet of Worms, in 1521, and again in 1529, at the Diet of Speier. He openly declared in favour of ecclesiastical reform, and he extended his patronage to Luther when he came to preach at Zerbst. This was at that time a most dangerous step to take, but the young prince was not to be frightened by Pope or Emperor, and at the Diet of Augsburg he was again one of the first princes to sign the Augsburg Confession. During the momentous years that followed, the Anhalt princes were willing, as they declared, to risk life and wealth, land and throne, for the Gospel. Nor was this a mere phrase, for Prince Wolfgang, when he found himself surrounded at Bernburg by the Imperial army, chiefly Spanish, had in good earnest to fly for his life and remain in hiding for some time. When he was able to return to his duchy, he devoted his remaining years to repairing, as much as possible, the ravages of the war, and he then retired into private life of his own free will, leaving the government to his three cousins, and ending his days as a simple citizen in the small town of Zerbst. Let me quote once more the judgment passed on him by the most eminent of his own contemporaries. Luther and Philip Melanchthon have spoken in no uncertain tone of the merits of the Anhalt princes during the most critical period of the Reformation. Of Prince Wolfgang Melanchthon said: “No one will come again, equal to him in authority among princes, in love towards churches and schools, in zeal to maintain peace and concord, and in readiness to give up his life for his faith.” Of Prince George, called the Gottselige, Luther is reported to have declared: “He is more pious than I am, and if he does not get into heaven, I too shall certainly have to remain outside.” Nay, even his antagonist, the Emperor Charles V., confessed that he knew no other person in the whole of his empire who could be compared in piety or ability to Prince George of Anhalt. Who knows of him now outside the limits of the Duchy of Dessau? but it is all the more the duty of his descendants to keep his memory fresh as one of that small band of men who have done their duty.

So much for the princes of the house of Anhalt during the period of the Reformation. No other reigning family could produce a brighter escutcheon during the troubles of the sixteenth century, and we saw how that escutcheon was preserved bright and brilliant during the centuries that followed, the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth. If the title of Grand Duke does not depend on the number of square miles, surely no family has deserved that title so well as the ducal family of Anhalt.

Beyond the sixteenth century, the history of Germany tells us little of the private character of the Anhalt princes, but we may look forward to new information which the Ducal Archives will yield if examined, as they have been of late by competent historians. Much useful work has been done during the last twenty-two years by a historical society established at Dessau. A Codex Anhaltinus has been published and much light has been thrown on transactions in which some princes of Anhalt had taken a prominent part. If during the time of the Crusades the names of the Ascanians are but seldom mentioned, there was a good reason for it. Bernhard of Clairvaux himself, wise man as he was with all his fanaticism, had persuaded them to turn their arms against the heathen on the eastern borders of Germany, rather than against the heathen who had conquered the Holy Land. Slavonic tribes, particularly the Wends and Sorbs, who were still heathen, were constantly threatening the eastern parts of the German Empire, the very ramparts of civilisation and Christianity, and it was felt to be absolutely necessary to drive them back, or to induce them to adopt a civilised and Christian mode of life. In 1134 Albrecht, commonly called Albrecht the Bear, had been invested by the Emperor Lothar with the Northern Mark, or the Mark Brandenburg, as his fief, in order to defend it as best he could against these Slavonic inroads. This Albrecht the Bear is the ancestor of the reigning Dukes of Anhalt, the present duke being his nineteenth successor. It was the same Mark Brandenburg which was afterwards to become the cradle of Prussia and indirectly of the German Empire. Albrecht’s influence was so great at the time that, after the death of the Emperor Lothar, he succeeded in carrying the election of the Emperor Konrad III., the Hohenstaufen, against the Welfic party, who wished to raise the Duke of Bavaria, Henry the Proud, to the Imperial throne of Germany. The Emperor rewarded Albrecht’s services by taking the Duchy of Saxony away from the Welfic Duke of Bavaria, and bestowing it on him. This led to a bloody war between the two claimants, and ended in the defeat of Albrecht. But though deprived again of his Saxon fief, Albrecht proved so successful in his own mark against the Sorbs and Wends that he received the title of Markgrave of Brandenburg, and as such became one of the Electors of the German Empire. All those fierce fights against the Slavonic races on the western frontier of Germany are now well-nigh forgotten, and only the names of towns and rivers remain to remind us how much of what is now German soil, between the Elbe and Oder, had for a long time been occupied by Slavonic tribes, uncivilised and pagan. Albrecht had really inherited this task of subduing and expelling these enemies from German soil from his father, Count Otto, who was the grandson of Count Esiko of Ballenstädt (1050). All these princes and their knights had to spend their lives in settling and defending the frontiers or marks of Germany, or of what had been German soil before the southward migrations of the German tribes began. They held their fiefs from the German Emperors, but were left free to do whatever they deemed necessary in the defence of their strongholds (burgs) and settlements. The first of the Saxon Emperors, Henry I. (919–936), was called the Burgenbauer, because he encouraged all over Germany the building of strongholds which afterwards grew into villages and towns, and thus led gradually to a more civilised life in the German Empire. Wherever it was possible churches were built, bishoprics were founded, monasteries and schools established and supported by liberal grants of land. A great share in this Eastern conquest fell to the Counts of Anhalt, and their achievements were richly rewarded by the great Saxon Emperors, Henry I. and Otto the Great. There can be no doubt that these bloody crusades of the German Markgraves against their pagan enemies in the East of Europe, though less famous, left more lasting and more substantial benefits to Germany than all the crusades against the Saracens.

I shall carry my historical retrospect no farther, but it may easily be imagined how this long and glorious history of the princes of the house of Anhalt made a deep impression on the minds of the young generation, and how even as boys we felt proud of our Duke. Though the belief in heredity was not then so strong as it is now—and I must confess that even now my own belief in acquired excellencies being inherited is very small—yet standing before our Ascanian^[15] Duke, the descendant and representative of so many glorious ancestors, one felt something like the awe which one feels when looking at an oak that has weathered many a storm, and still sends forth every year its rich green foliage. It was a just pride that made even the schoolboys lift their caps before their stately Duke and his noble Duchess, and I must confess that something of that feeling has remained with me for life, and the title of Serene Highness, which has since been changed to Royal Highness (Hoheit), has always sounded to my ears not as an empty title or as inferior to Royal Highness or even Majesty, but as the highest that could be bestowed on any sovereign, if he had deserved it by high ideals, and by true serenity of mind in the storms and battles of life.

As to myself, if as a boy I was not quite so much overawed by the inhabitants of the old stately palace at Dessau as my friends and schoolfellows, it was due perhaps to their personal kindness to our family, and likewise to a strange event that happened while I was still very young. The reigning Duke had three brothers and only one son, and in the absence of male heirs it was supposed that the duchy would have gone to Prussia. One of his brothers had married a Countess von Reina, and their children therefore could not succeed. The other brother was married to a Hessian princess, and they had no sons. But for that, they would possibly have succeeded to the throne of Denmark, as it was only due to the resignation of the elder in favour of her younger sister that this younger sister, the mother of the Princess of Wales, became Queen of Denmark, and her husband King. Both the ducal family and the whole country were anxious, therefore, that the only remaining brother of the Duke should marry and have children, when suddenly he announced to the world that he had fallen in love with a young lady at Dessau, a cousin of mine, and that no power on earth should prevent him from marrying her. There was a considerable flutter in the dovecotes of the Dessau nobility; there was also a very just feeling of regret among the people, who disliked the idea of a possible amalgamation with Prussia. Everything that could be thought of was done to prevent the marriage, but after waiting for several years the marriage was celebrated, and my cousin, as Baronne von Stolzenberg, became the Prince’s (morganatic) wife, and sister-in-law of the reigning Duke. The Prince was a handsome man, and extremely good-natured and kind, there was not an atom of pride in him. They lived very happily together, and after a few years they were received most cordially even by the old Duke and his relations. In this way the doings and sayings of the Duke and the ducal court became less hidden behind the mysterious veil that formerly shrouded Olympus, and one began to see that its inhabitants were not so very different after all from other human beings, but that they acted up to their sense of duty, did a great deal of good work unknown to the world at large, and were certainly in many respects far more cultivated and far more attractive than those who were inclined to sneer at the small German courts, and to agitate for their suppression.

What would Germany have been without her small courts? Without a Duke Charles Augustus of Weimar, there would probably have been no Wieland, no Herder, no Goethe, and no Schiller. It is not only plants that want sunshine, genius also requires light and warmth to bring it out, and the refining influence of a small court was nowhere so necessary as during the period of storm and stress in Germany. It cannot be denied that some of these small courts were hotbeds of corruption of every kind. I remember how in my younger days the small Duchy of Anhalt-Cöthen, for instance, suffered extremely from maladministration during the reign of the last Duke, who died without heirs, and had no scruples in impoverishing the country, and suppressing all opposition, however legitimate. He was a sovereign by divine rights, as much as the King of Prussia, and with the assistance of his ministers he could alienate and sell whatever he liked. He actually established a public gambling house on the railway station at Cöthen. In the third Duchy of Anhalt, that of Anhalt-Bernburg, the reigning Duke was for a time almost out of his mind, but no one had the power to restrain or to remove him. The ministers did all they could to prevent any public scandal, but it was not easy to prevent, if not a revolution—that would have been difficult on so small a scale—at least a complaint to the German Diet, and that might have become serious. Many were the stories told of the poor Duke and believed by the people. Like all court stories they went on growing and growing, and they were repeated “on the highest authority.” One day, it was said, the Duke of Bernburg had been reading the history of Napoleon, how he had decorated a sentinel, and made him an officer on the field of battle. The Duke, so we are told, carried away by his enthusiasm, rushed out of his room, embraced the sentinel, fastened some medal on his breast and said: “Thou art a captain.” The soldier, not losing his presence of mind, said to the Duke: “I thank your Serene Highness, but would you please give it me in writing?” The Duke did, and nothing remained for his ministers but to grant to the private the title and the pension of a captain, and to let him wear the small medal which the Duke had given him. I confess I could never come face to face with the fortunate captain or find out his whereabouts. Still to doubt the truth of the story would have been considered the extreme of historical scepticism. Another time the Duke’s enthusiasm was fired by reading an account of a wild-boar hunt in the neighbouring duchy of Anhalt-Dessau, which had been attended by a number of princes from all parts of Germany. He summoned his Prime Minister and told him, “I must have wild boars in my forests. Turn out a herd of pigs, they will do quite as well.” This command too had to be obeyed, and the extraordinary part of it was that in a few years these tame pigs had completely reverted to their wild state, probably not without some intermarriages with neighbouring wild boars, and the Duke of Bernburg could invite the Duke of Dessau and other princes to hunt wild boars in the Hartz mountains, as well as in the forest of Dessau. Again I cannot vouch for the truth of the story, but I have been assured by competent authorities that such a return from the tame to the savage state is by no means incredible. Very soon after this exploit, however, the ducal race of Bernburg became extinct, and the three duchies now form a happy union under the old name of Duchy of Anhalt.

The year 1848 came at last, and everything was changed. There were émeutes in the streets of Dessau, and when one of my uncles, the General commanding the ducal army, was telling his men that they would have to fire on the people, he received a message from some of them to say that they would willingly fire on anybody outside the town in the open, but not in the streets, because they might smash their own fathers’ windows. This respect for window-glass served, however, another good purpose. When my uncle, in default of a large enough prison, had to confine a number of people in the Duke’s hothouses, they were as quiet as lambs, because here too they were afraid of breaking the glass. In spite of this innate respect for glass and established authority, much mischief was done at Dessau in 1848. Splendid old oaks in the ducal forests were cut down, the game was killed by hundreds, and a new constitution was proclaimed. There was a chamber, I believe there was even a desire for a House of Peers, if Peers could be found; there were two responsible ministers, and the Duke had to be satisfied with a Civil List.

The Duke bore all this with wonderful serenity, but the Duchess died, I believe, from anxiety and nervous prostration. In 1848 even Dukes and Duchesses were hustled, and this was more than she could bear. She had done all that was in her power to make herself useful in her exalted position, and she deeply felt the ingratitude of those whom she had helped and befriended in former years, and who had joined the opposition. She told me herself that she had once to walk out on foot from her palace with an umbrella, because every one of her four carriages had been ordered by the Prime Minister, the Second Minister, the wife of the Prime, and some friend of the Second Minister. This Second Minister was a young man who had left the University not many years before, and was practising at Dessau as a lawyer. Of course, there was great joy among his former University friends; many were invited to Dessau, and as there was an abundance of old wine in the castle, the gates of the ducal cellar, so I was informed, were thrown open, and the thirsty young students soon reduced the store of wine to what they thought more reasonable dimensions. Some of the Rhenish wines in that cellar were more than a hundred years old, so old that but a few bottles were fit for drinking. A thick crust had formed inside the bottles, and only one or two glasses of wine were left. But what was left was considered so useful as medicine in certain illnesses that any doctor was allowed to prescribe and order bottles of it from the ducal cellars. My uncle, the Commander-in-chief of the small Anhalt army, had been through all the Napoleonic wars, had marched twice into Paris, and was such a Franzosenfresser, that, fond as he was of wine, he would never touch French wine, least of all French champagne. He lived to a very considerable age, he celebrated his silver, his golden, his diamond, and his iron (sixty-five years) wedding, and danced at his diamond wedding with his wife and one of the bridesmaids. He was my godfather, and as he had made the acquaintance of his wife at my christening, he never called me by any other name but “mein Wohlthäter,” my benefactor. As he had been at the battle of Jena (1806) with the Emperor William, then a mere cadet in the Prussian army, and afterwards through many campaigns, the Emperor treated him to the very end of his life as his personal friend. Once every year he had to go to Berlin to stay with the Emperor, and talk over old times. He was about five years older than the Emperor, and almost the last time he saw him the Emperor said to him: “Well, Stockmarr, we are both getting old, but as long as you march ahead, I shall follow.” “Yes, your Majesty,” Stockmarr replied, “and as long as you are behind to support me, I hope we shall get on and bring our shares up to par.” “Oh, Stockmarr,” the Emperor replied, “you are not a courtier. If you knew what the courtiers say to me, you would have said, ‘Oh, your Majesty, your Majesty, your shares will rise to at least 15 per cent. premium.’” General Stockmarr told me the story himself, and it gave me a new idea of the old Emperor’s humour, and his insight into the character of his surroundings.

Kind-hearted as the Duke of Dessau was, there were certain things that he could not stand. As his deafness grew upon him his chief amusement was shooting and driving about in his open carriage through the beautiful oak-forests that surround Dessau. There are long avenues through the old oak-forests like bowers formed by the lower branches of the trees, so that one can see the deer a mile off. Here the old Duke was to be seen almost every day. The common people had many endearing names for him, and when they saw his carriage from a distance they shouted Hä Kimmet, and the whole village was soon gathered to see their kind old Duke passing. He knew every tree, every stone, every road. In a wood not far from Dessau there was a large boulder, dropped there by a passing iceberg long before the time even of Albrecht the Bear and Count Esiko. One day, as he was passing by, the Duke missed the stone and drove straight to the next village to find out who had dared to move it. The Schulze of the village stood trembling before the Duke, and had to confess that as the road had had to be mended, the village commune had decided to blast the old useless stone and to break it up for that purpose. The Duke declared that it was his stone, that they had no right to touch it, and that they must replace it. That was, of course, an impossibility, without going back as far as the Glacial period. But the peasants had to go on searching all over the neighbourhood till at last they found two similar boulders, not quite so large as the original stone of offence, still, large enough to cause them much trouble and expense in transporting them to their village. This was their punishment, and from it there was no appeal. The two new stones may now be seen in a public park near Dessau, dedicated to the memory, one of Bismarck, the other of Moltke.

The sound of the Duke’s carriage was well known, not only in the town, but, as the people said, even by the deer in the forest. Other carriages might pass and the deer would not budge, but as soon as the Duke’s carriage was heard approaching they would all scamper away. The fact was that no one was allowed to shoot in the large ducal preserves except the Duke himself. It was a very great favour if he allowed even his brothers or his best friends to accompany him now and then.

Some of his forests were stocked with wild boars. These animals were quite tame while they were being fed in winter, but in summer they would attack the horses of a carriage and become really dangerous. If they could break out by night, which happened not unfrequently, the peasants would find next morning whole fields of corn ploughed up, trampled down, and destroyed. Large damages had to be paid by the Duke, but he never demurred as long as he was unshackled by his two responsible ministers. After 1848, however, not only was the amount to be paid for damages considerably reduced by his ministers, but the Duke was told that this pig-preserving was a very expensive amusement, and that it might make him very unpopular. The Duke knew better. He knew the peasants liked his boars, and still more the ample damages which he paid, but he did not like the advice of his ministers. So whenever any mischief had been done by the boars, the peasants ran after his carriage in the forest and told him how much they had lost. In his good-nature he used to say: “I will pay it all, let me know how much it is; only do not tell my ministers.”

After a time things settled down again at Dessau, still the old state of things could never come back. The three duchies of Anhalt-Dessau, Cöthen, and Bernburg with its beautiful Hartz mountains, when united, formed a more considerable principality, and it was thought necessary to have a regular parliament to control its finances, and watch over its legislation. Everything assumed a grander air; the Duke, who since the days of the Old Dessauer had been Serene Highness (Durchlaucht), now became Highness (Hoheit), which is supposed to be a step higher than Serene Highness (Durchlaucht), though I cannot see how language could ever produce a finer title than Serene Highness. The railway, which as the Berlin jokers said, had led to the discovery of Dessau, brought it at all events close to Berlin, Leipzig, Magdeburg, and the great Continental net of railways. People from all parts of Germany came to settle in the quiet, beautiful town on the Mulde; the Elbe had been made navigable nearly as far as Dessau, and the port near the Walwitzberg became an important commercial centre for export and import.

Whenever I pay a visit to Dessau I find the town more and more enlarged and much improved. The old lamps that swung across the streets are gone, the gurgoyles frown no longer on large red and green umbrellas; there are gas lamps, and there are waterworks, and cabs, and tramways. The grass is no longer allowed to grow in the chinks of the pavement. The old Duke is gone, and the old people whom I knew as a boy are gone too. The wild boars are still there, but they are no longer allowed to break out of bounds. Old men and women are still seen sawing wood and cutting it up in the street, but I do not know their faces, nor the faces of the old women from whom I bought my apples. I look at every man and woman that passes me, there is not one whose face or name I know. It is only when I go to the old cemetery outside the town that old names greet me again, some very dear to me, others almost forgotten during my Wanderjahre. No doubt the present is better, and the future, let us trust, will be better still; but the past had its own charms; our grandfathers were as wise as their sons and grandsons, and possibly they were happier.