"Together with the Italian problem, the matter shall have my closest attention," said the Chancellor.
"And don’t forget that they are a crazy lot at best, and hand and glove with Franz Ferdinand’s black masters."
"Matters can’t be hurried, though," ruminated Bülow, "and I am afraid there is little store to be set by Luitpold."
"His ambition is to go thundering down the ages as the man who refused a crown," sneered Phili.
"Thank Heaven he is eighty-four," said the War Lord piously.
"And Ludwig tickled to death with the idea of becoming king," added Eulenburg.
The War Lord was making his adieux, when he suddenly turned upon Bülow. "What are you going to do with Ruprecht?"
"Promise him a field marshal’s baton in our war."
"The right bait," assented Wilhelm, "but I pity the country under his supreme command. Do you know," he added, "that the lowest of his subjects would not permit him to cross his threshold?"
What Edward VII. Thought—No Room for Art—A Vision of Threadneedle Street
Bülow, who loved being Chancellor, hated Phili Eulenburg.
However, the Imperial ex-Ambassador at the Hofburg was then in the zenith of his ill-gotten empire over Majesty, and to incur his displeasure spelt disgrace or enforced resignation.
At the moment the grand old man’s thunderbolts were under lock and key in Harden’s Grunewald villa, and the exalted personages marked for lightning carried things with a high hand, using the German Empire like an entailed estate.
Pretty evenly parcelled out this _fidei commissum_ favoured by the Prussian Constitution, which makes suffrage a mockery. Phili, of late enriched by Hertefeld, the Rhenish domain that guarantees him an independent income of £5,000 sterling a year and by a couple of millions cash, which Baron Nathan Rothschild, of Vienna, left him. Phili was practically the overseer of the Government personnel, and of the diplomatic corps in particular. His card index of prominent men and women, reinforced by reams and reams of correspondence, characterised each person—diplomats, deputies, ministers, councillors, governors, politicians, commanding generals and aspirants for high honours in the army or navy—according to his own viewpoint, the avowed object being to people the highest offices within the gift of the Crown with people like-minded with himself.