Von Angeli speaks with enthusiasm of the simple and charming home life of the Crown Prince and Princess, who often entertained him. He notes that, while there was much talk of a literary, artistic, and scientific kind, politics and military matters were never referred to. For the Crown Princess the painter had the highest admiration--indeed, he says she was gifted with every adornment of mind and heart. She made such progress in painting that von Angeli declares himself proud to call himself her instructor. The Crown Prince took a keen interest in his wife's success, and was himself encouraged to begin working, both in charcoal and in colour. As regarded the relations between England and Germany, the Crown Princess had an increasingly difficult part to play during the years that immediately succeeded the war. France and Germany--the former with far more reason--both considered that they had been badly treated by Great Britain during the conflict. Prince Bismarck either was, or pretended to be, watchful and apprehensive of the state of feeling in France, and Moltke, following his lead, spoke at a State banquet as if war might again be forced on Germany by France. Urged, as Bismarck and his friends believed, by the Crown Princess, but really by the advice of Lord Granville, Queen Victoria, in 1874, made a personal appeal to the German Emperor. In her letter, after observing that England's sympathies would be with Germany in any difference with France, she added the significant qualification, "unless there was an appearance on the part of Germany of an intention to avail herself of her greatly superior force to crush a beaten foe." In reviewing the life of the Empress Frederick as a whole, it must never be forgotten that the Emperor William was not expected to reach, as in fact he did, an extraordinary old age. After the Franco-Prussian War, everyone of any intelligence, from Bismarck downwards, attached great importance to the Crown Princess's views and feelings; they believed that she had established a commanding influence over her husband, and that the moment he succeeded to the throne she would be the real ruler. Accordingly, the further intervention of Queen Victoria in 1875, when a German attack on France appeared imminent, was the crowning offence of the "British petticoats." Queen Victoria, as is well known, wrote a personal letter to the Tsar, who responded by going himself to Berlin. The "British petticoats," it is true, had resented what appeared to be the act of aggression of France before the falsification of the Ems despatch had been revealed, but they were angered by Bismarck's conspiracy with Russia in denouncing the Black Sea Treaty; and his opposition to a law of Ministerial responsibility, which might have given the new Empire a constitutional basis, showed the impossibility of any real political sympathy between the Minister and the Princess who had been trained in the school of Prince Albert.