Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Dying Emperor

by Thomas A. Turley

  “A race to the grave,” my friend remarked sardonically.

  “A race of grave import to Europe’s future, sir,” snapped Ponsonby. “Behind the scenes, Bismarck has worked for months to undermine the Emperor and Empress. Last November, the doctors’ private report on Frederick’s illness was somehow published in the court gazette. It included the speculation that he might have syphilis![18] The official press depicts the Emperor as a doomed man, dominated by his English wife, whose chosen doctor thwarted the surgery that might have saved his life.”

  “You feel certain that Bismarck inspires these attacks?”

  “Not a word is published in Berlin without the Chancellor’s approval. The Prime Minister has long deplored his vast, corrupt influence on the German press.”

  “Unfortunately,” Jenner added, “he also has a willing tool in Crown Prince William, who supports the position of the German doctors. His conduct towards his parents has been infamous! In November, when Frederick would not agree to the removal of his larynx, the young man travelled to San Remo and made quite a scene, trying to force the operation on his father. Then, with Bismarck’s aid, he persuaded his grandfather to name him - instead of Frederick - regent in case of the old man’s incapacitation. William’s sycophants already treat him as emperor in all but name. The Chancellor has no scruples about flattering his vanity.”

  “Infamous, indeed,” Holmes murmured. “So, whenever Frederick passes from the scene, the prospect of a liberal Germany dies with him, and the Bismarckian principles of ‘Blood and Iron’ will be secure. Is that the essence of Her Majesty’s concern?”

  “Properly speaking, that is her government’s concern,” General Ponsonby replied. “The Queen’s personal interest is in learning how long her son-in-law is likely to survive. Yet, I cannot deny Her Majesty’s hope that time remains to accomplish the reforms that Frederick and her daughter cherish.”

  “Which would greatly diminish Bismarck’s power,” my friend noted. “Obviously, it is in his interest to speed his young disciple’s accession to the throne.”

  “Pardon me, Sir Henry,” I now interposed. “Has not the contest between Emperor and Chancellor already been decided? The papers are full of Bismarck’s intention to resign over the impending Sandro marriage.”

  “Possibly, Doctor,” Ponsonby agreed, “though intentions do not always end in resignations. The marriage crisis is another reason for anxiety over the Queen’s proposed visit to Berlin.”

  “What, pray tell, is a ‘Sandro?’” wondered Holmes.

  “Prince Alexander of Battenberg,” I reminded him, delighted for once to have the advantage of my friend. “You remember: the former ruler of Bulgaria, who defeated our friend King Milan in the war of ’85. His elder brother married Beatrice, the Queen’s youngest daughter. Alexander is called ‘Sandro’ within the royal family.”[19]

  “Thank you, Watson, I had quite forgotten him.” Sherlock Holmes seemed slightly nettled. “How fortunate that your obsession with royalty is there to cover any lapses on my part. So, Sir Henry, whom does ‘Sandro’ intend to marry, and why do his prospects of connubial bliss arouse dismay in diplomatic circles?”

  “The Prince’s engagement to Frederick’s second daughter, Princess Viktoria [“another Victoria!” lamented Holmes], is rumoured to be imminent. The Chancellor has threatened to leave office if a betrothal is announced. He interprets the marriage as a plot by the Empress and her mother to embroil Germany with Russia. As you recall, it was the Tsar who sponsored the Bulgarian coup that overthrew Prince Alexander.”

  “No doubt,” my friend said blandly. “And does the Queen support the match?”

  “Her Majesty has no objection to the Prince, but he is said to be enamoured of an actress. In any case, she has advised her daughter not to proceed without the consent of Crown Prince William, who is supporting Bismarck’s opposition to his parents’ wishes.[20] Whether the Empress is set upon the marriage, and whether the Iron Chancellor would then carry out his threat of resignation, will likewise be subjects for your investigation.”

  “Dear me,” said Holmes, “we are developing quite an agenda!”

  “The crux of the matter is this,” intoned Sir William Jenner. “Is Frederick’s health still good enough for him to serve - at least in the foreseeable future - as a counterweight to Bismarck? If so, how long is that situation likely to continue?”

  “The Chancellor, for all his faults, is a known quantity,” Ponsonby concluded. “Since 1871, when Germany united, his sagacious foreign policy has kept the peace in Europe and been invaluable to British interests as a stabilising force. Crown Prince William, I regret to say, allies himself with men who would abandon Bismarck’s prudence and launch preventive wars on those they deem to be the empire’s enemies. For Great Britain, Mr. Holmes, the question now becomes: How soon must we contend with an erratic, untried, and possibly dangerous young ruler whose nation has grown strong enough to challenge us, and will grow stronger still? Under Frederick III, we can still regard the German Empire as a friendly power. Under William II, will it be a friend, a rival, or an enemy?”

  Holmes sighed and came slowly to his feet, dropping his cigar into the coal scuttle. “Well, gentlemen, you have given us much to ponder as we depart for Berlin. I cannot promise answers to all the questions you have posed, but Watson and I will do our best. To whom do we report?”

  “Mackenzie reports by telegram to Dr. Reid, my colleague at the palace,”[21] replied Jenner. “He keeps Her Majesty apprised of the Emperor’s medical condition. However, I expect that much of the information you provide will be political in nature.”

  “Those reports to you may address to me,” said Ponsonby. “Sir Edward Malet is aware of your mission, but do not involve the embassy unless an emergency arises. It is best for this matter to remain entirely unofficial.”

  “Of course. How soon do we begin our journey?”

  “We had hoped that you would leave tomorrow morning, allowing your arrival in Charlottenburg by Tuesday afternoon. I have your itinerary here from-”

  “Thank you, Sir Henry,” Holmes once more interrupted, taking the folded document before Ponsonby could complete his thought. He guided the Queen’s emissaries to our door, ushering them onto the landing with “We shall be touch!” as his only parting word. Not knowing then that my friend was determined to forestall any mention of his brother Mycroft (whom I had yet to meet), I could only marvel at his lack of awe in the presence of great men. Even now, I have not decided whether it is a mark of his own greatness - or rather the reverse.

  1 An obvious reference to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s story “His Last Bow,” which takes place on the night (August 4, 1914) that Great Britain declared war on Germany. Later editors of Watson’s notes have described other incidents of Holmes’ involvement in Anglo-German espionage before the war.

  2 Sir Frederick Ponsonby, ed., Letters of the Empress Frederick (London: Macmillan and Co, Ltd., 1928). Shortly before her death in 1901, the Dowager Empress asked Captain Ponsonby, her godson, “to take charge of my letters and take them with you back to England” without informing her son, William II. Ponsonby was the son of Queen Victoria’s private secretary, Sir Henry Ponsonby, whose wife Mary was an intimate friend and correspondent of the Empress. Captain Ponsonby locked up the letters in his private home, allowing him to assure the German authorities that the late Empress’s letters had not been transferred to the British Archives. Ponsonby finally published them in response to the German historian Emil Ludwig, whose 1927 biography of William II contained (he felt) bitter and unjust criticisms of the Kaiser’s mother, based on one-sided evidence. See Ponsonby’s introduction to the Letters, pp. x-xix.

  3 The procession to Westminster Abbey took place on June 21, 1887. In her biography Queen Victoria: Born to Succeed (New York: Pyramid Books, 1966), p. 500, Elizabeth Longford provide
d a description of Crown Prince Frederick’s appearance that is similar to Watson’s.

  4 Dr. Morell Mackenzie (1837–1892) was the leading British expert on diseases of the throat. He founded a hospital in London for their treatment; wrote three books on laryngology; and was renowned for his skillful use of the laryngoscope, an instrument for viewing the vocal cords indirectly with the aid of mirrors and an external source of light. In September 1887, Mackenzie was knighted for his apparent success in curing the Crown Prince’s throat ailment without invasive surgery, having removed the laryngeal tumor through the mouth. After Frederick’s eventual death from cancer, Sir Morell’s intemperate counter-charges against his German colleagues transgressed the bounds of medical propriety, leading to his censure by the Royal College of Surgeons. His book The Fatal Illness of Frederick the Noble (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1888) is highly polemical; but it contains a moving portrait of the stricken Emperor, whom Mackenzie served loyally - if ineffectually - until the end. He is the subject of a sympathetic, though not uncritical, biography by R. Scott Stevenson, Morell Mackenzie: The Story of a Victorian Tragedy (New York: Henry Schuman, 1947).

  5 William I (1797–1888) had reigned as German Emperor since the nation’s unification in 1871. Previously, he had been Prince Regent of Prussia since 1857, and king since 1861. Although liberal ideals were still current in Prussia at the time of his accession, two assassination attempts, followed by the advent of Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898) as chancellor, turned William toward reaction. This change led to the political isolation of his son and daughter-in-law, Frederick and Victoria. Despite his chancellor’s aggressive foreign policy and successful wars, King William accepted the crown of a united Germany with great reluctance. Even as his own health failed in 1887, he followed his son’s case closely, in November summoning the German doctors to Berlin to explain why the operation they proposed had not been undertaken sooner. Not unreasonably, von Bergmann placed the blame upon Mackenzie. William I died on March 9, 1888, and Frederick III left San Remo for Berlin to begin his 99-day reign. (See Ponsonby, pp. 254–255, 261–263; Mackenzie, pp. 71–73, 123–125). The old Emperor’s political attitudes, and relations with his son and grandson, are well covered in John C. G. Röhl’s Young Wilhelm: The Kaiser’s Early Life, 1859–1888 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998 [1993]), it is the first of three volumes of Röhl’s monumental biography of William II.

  6 Dr. Watson’s time in San Francisco, and his brief, tragic marriage to Constance Adams, are mentioned in W.S. Baring-Gould’s biography Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street (Avenel, NJ: Wings Books, 1995 [1962]), pp. 67–70. David Marcum’s Sherlock Holmes and a Quantity of Debt (London: MX Publishing, 2013), pp. 19–21, offers a similar account. Several months before his death in 1929, the doctor told the story fully in “A Ghost from Christmas Past,” which appears in The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories, Part VII: Eliminate the Impossible, edited by David Marcum (London: MX Publishing, 2017), pp. 130–152).

  7 Recounted in “The Yellow Face,” which Baring-Gould (p. 303) dates as occurring on April 7, 1888. This was one of Holmes’ few unsuccessful cases, which may account for his tetchiness the next morning.

  8 Sir Henry Ponsonby (1825–1895) was the son of a British general and became one himself. Joining the army in 1842, he served in the Crimea and later in Canada, after an interim as Prince Albert’s equerry. From 1870 until shortly before his death, he served as Queen Victoria’s private secretary. Known as an inveterate doodler, Ponsonby and his wife Mary (a close friend of the Empress Frederick) contributed pseudonymously to the journals and newspapers of the day (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ponsonby).

  9 As a young doctor at the London Fever Hospital, Sir William Jenner (1815–1898) made his reputation by first distinguishing typhus from typhoid fever. From the 1860’s until his retirement in 1890, he served as physician-in-ordinary to both Queen Victoria and the Prince of Wales (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_William_Jenner,_1st_Baronet). As noted by Christopher Redmond, William Jenner “was not a descendent of the more famous physician Edward Jenner, the inventor of smallpox inoculation.” See Lives Beyond Baker Street: A Biographical Dictionary of Sherlock Holmes’s Contemporaries (London: MX Publishing, 2016), p. 35.

  10 Dr. Watson’s military rank is established in the fan fiction novels of Marcia Wilson. Thus far, three of them - You Buy Bones, A Test of the Professionals I: The Adventure of the Flying Blue Pidgeon, and A Test of the Professionals II: The Peaceful Night Poisonings-have become available in print from MX Publishing. Others, including A Sword for the Defense and A Fanged and Bitter Thing, cover Watson’s military service in India and Afghanistan, as well as his life during the Great Hiatus.

  11 December 12, 1887. Quoted in Frederick the Noble, pp. 76–77.

  12 A remark that Sir Henry Ponsonby must have passed down to his son, for it is repeated in Letters of the Empress Frederick, p. 236.

  13 The opinions of Sir Morell Mackenzie expressed in this conversation are recorded in the Letters of the Empress Frederick. Jenner’s and Sir Henry Ponsonby’s remarks are partly paraphrased there by Sir Frederick Ponsonby (p. 227). Sir Henry’s statements also reference a letter from his wife (December 3, 1887), found on p. 265 of the Letters. Holmes’ summation is remarkably similar to Queen Victoria’s letter to the Crown Princess on November 18, 1887 (pp. 258–259).

  14 Emil Ludwig repeated contemporary press charges about the British-born Crown Princess’s “distrust of German therapeutics” in his 1927 biography of William II (see Ponsonby, pp. 227, 282–283). In fact, the Empress Frederick did blame her German doctor for her son’s birth injury in a letter to her mother (April 27, 1889), quoted in Röhl’s Young Wilhelm, p. 12. Regarding Mackenzie, the German doctors’ reports make clear that Frederick’s physician-in-ordinary, Dr. August Wegner, first proposed the British laryngologist, to whom his colleagues willingly agreed. See the accounts of Drs. E. Gerhardt (p. 6) and Ernst von Bergmann (p. 17) in Case of Emperor Frederick III: Full Official Reports by the German Physicians and by Sir Morell Mackenzie (New York; Edgar S. Werner, 1888). It is available online from Google Books at: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=G2DTAAAAMAAJ. As Sir Henry notes, it was on May 19, 1887 - the day after this decision - that the Crown Princess wrote asking her mother to send Mackenzie. See Ponsonby, pp. 229, 231–232; and Longford, p. 499.

  15 In late May and early June, 1887, Dr. Mackenzie had successfully excised two portions of the tumor afflicting the Crown Prince’s vocal cord. They were examined by the eminent German pathologist Rudolf Virchow (1821–1902), who found abnormal tissue but no sign of cancer. Mackenzie extracted the rest of the tumor, using his laryngoscope and forceps, while his august patient was in London. Dr. Virchow was again unable to identify cancer in the samples he received. Early in November, a new tumor appeared that Sir Morell admitted had “a distinctly malignant look” (Frederick the Noble, p. 65). Yet, the Crown Prince improved during December; and, even by late January 1888, Virchow’s evaluation of a necrotic slough from Frederick’s larynx showed no clear evidence of cancer. Virchow’s well-documented biography in Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Virchow) absolves him of blame for the Emperor’s death, concluding that Frederick III suffered from a very rare form of carcinoma that was correctly identified only in 1948. Virchow’s scientific contributions include the discovery of leukemia; the development of systematic autopsies; and advances in pathology, parasitology, and forensic medicine. Although anti-Darwinian, he was a noted anthropologist. As “an impassioned advocate for social and political reform,” he led Prussia’s Progressive party and sat as a member of the Reichstag. Near the end of his brief reign, Frederick III attempted to honor Virchow with an order, but Bismarck successfully opposed him (Röhl, p. 822). Although the pathologist directed the Emperor’s autopsy, his report was not published
with those of the other German doctors.

  16 In Frederick the Noble (pp. 234–244), Mackenzie presented statistical evidence that the Crown Prince would have been unlikely to survive either of the operations urged upon him by the German doctors. The procedure Mackenzie forestalled in May (variously called thyrotomy, laryngotomy, or laryngofissure) involved splitting the larynx along its median to remove the small tumor from Frederick’s left vocal cord. Dr. Ernst von Bergmann, a renowned surgeon but not a laryngologist, claimed to have performed seven laryngotomies “without any complications” (see Case of Emperor Frederick III, pp. 17–19). However, none of his patients had had cancer. Of 22 cases cited by the British laryngologist, the death rate - either from the operation’s direct effects or recurrence of malignancy - was 91%. Frederick’s odds would have been even worse in November, when the German doctors advised the total excision of his larynx. Mackenzie’s table showed that only 8 of 138 patients undergoing the procedure had lived longer than two years. His description later in this story of the operation’s horrors was repeated in Frederick the Noble, p. 244. Stevenson (pp. 153–154) admitted that Mackenzie had accidentally doubled some of his case totals. Nevertheless, laryngeal fissure or excision was nearly always fatal in 1887, and the German doctors greatly understated the operations’ risks in recommending them.

  17 Frederick’s accession manifesto and letter to Prince Bismarck were both written in 1885, when it appeared the old Emperor was sinking. At that time, the Crown Prince - although already in his fifties - had not yet become ill and could expect a relatively long reign to carry out the liberal reforms he and Victoria envisioned. Röhl discusses their plans, aspirations, and supporters during this period on pp. 548–551. Ponsonby includes Frederick’s letter to the Chancellor (sent March 12, 1888), pp. 289–291.