George Washington's Ghost

Five minutes ago, he had been enjoying a convivial luncheon with his wife and a couple of old Kaiserliche Marine friends and their spouses, confidently expecting to enjoy a few days sightseeing and catching up with a clutch of his godchildren. Everybody had expected the Court of Electors – the twenty-two kings, princes and counts, and two princesses of the German Empire – to sit in deliberation for most of the rest of the week. After the endless, wearying, dispiriting funerary ceremonial of the last three days, it had seemed reasonable to expect the Electors to take their time; not to sit down, shut the doors, cursorily chat amongst themselves for a couple of hours and then come out with a verdict before the crowned heads of Europe, and the world leaders still hanging around in the German capital, had had time to digest their luncheons!

Moreover, despite the nervousness of his advisors, practically everybody had taken it as read, that the Crown Prince, forty-four year-old Wilhelm, the old Kaiser’s eldest surviving son, was the only serious candidate and although the Court of Electors might haggle and privately seek certain assurances – mainly about the status and privileges of individual Electors – that in the end they would surely row in behind him.

This was in no way an unreasonable expectation.

History bore exemplary witness to the fact that the one thing it was safe to take for granted, was that whatever their faults and foibles, the members of the Court of Electors, tended to be a notoriously unimaginative, and very cautious bunch when they sat down to appoint a candidate to safeguard a tradition dating back to the time of Charlemagne the Great.

Which made the transparent eccentricity of what the King had just been told all the more… extraordinary.

Sir George Horace Walpole, the King’s Foreign and Colonial Secretary, was as surprised as anybody. In fact, he was struggling to keep a straight face, undecided whether the whole thing was some huge practical joke or simply, a very, very bad dream.

The sort one might expect to experience after recklessly experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs…

It happened that the King of Bavaria, Ludwig Maximillian VI, was a mild-mannered, God-fearing man in his late fifties who had never really taken much interest in getting involved with his kingdom’s internecine political machinations. By all accounts he was a decent, somewhat indecisive man, rather hen-pecked by his wife, Alexandra, a waspish woman younger by some fifteen years who had thus far born him two teenage daughters, and latterly, begun to meddle around the edges of the turbulent Munich political hothouse.

“They’ve named poor old Ludwig Emperor?” The King demanded, only partially ventilating a positively volcanic excess of sudden existential angst. He turned to his wife, who had followed her husband out of the dining room and heard the raised voices. “They’ve only gone and passed over Willie for that chap down in Munich!”

“Ludwig?” Eleanor murmured, dazed. “Surely not?”

George Walpole coughed respectfully.

“I fear there is no doubt, Ma’am. The Proclamation of Succession has already been promulgated. The Imperial Government has resigned pending the pleasure of the Emperor designate.”

“Marvellous!” The King muttered in exasperation. “What the Devil is going on, Walpole?” He put, testily, to his Foreign and Colonial Secretary.

“If I was to speculate, sir,” his old friend offered, “I’d say that the Electors have had their fill of strong leadership.”

The Queen shared her husband’s anxiety.

“Willie won’t take this very well, Bertie,” she said, voicing what they were all thinking.

The Kronprinz – or rather, the former Kronprinz – was not a man known for his patience, of for his propensity to take a slight, less still a punch to the solar plexus like this, with a smile. Moreover, given that Wilhelm was now King of Prussia, by far the most powerful economically and militarily, and in terms of population and geographic weight three times the size of the next three largest ‘electorates’, the decision of King Wilhelm VI of Prussia’s fellow Electors was nothing short of… dangerously eccentric.

“The Government has resigned, you say?” The King queried.

“Yes,” his Foreign Secretary nodded, “although in theory the ministers will stay in post in the interregnum before the new Kaiser makes his own appointments, sir.”

“Have you spoken to Lothar?”

“Count Bismarck is currently incommunicado,” Walpole explained, trying to conceal how worried he was by his counterpart’s unwillingness to either take his call, or for his staff to agree a time or a venue for a meeting. No matter how fraught things had been in the past the two men had always been able to thrash things out, face to face. “I suspect, Lothar is fully occupied attempting to ascertain from the new Kaiser’s advisors their attitude to the pressing matters of the day.”