On 22 March 1887 Kaiser Wilhelm I celebrated his ninetieth birthday. Seven days earlier Professor Karl Gerhardt had for the first time cauterised a small tumour on the Crown Prince’s left vocal cord; it was eventually to become clear that Friedrich Wilhelm was suffering from cancer of the larynx. Suddenly the prospect loomed of two changes of sovereign in rapid succession, or even of the crown passing directly from Wilhelm I to Wilhelm II. Everything needed to be reconsidered. Not only for Bismarck and Waldersee, but even for loyal supporters of the Crown Prince and Princess such as their candidate for the Chancellorship, the liberal Badenese statesman Franz Freiherr von Roggenbach, the accession of a Kaiser Friedrich who was not only ill with cancer but, as a result, unable to speak and thoroughly demoralised could be contemplated only if his ‘English’ wife could somehow or other be removed from his side, even if it meant conjuring up a major sexual scandal. Their son, Prince Wilhelm of Prussia, whose belligerent and reactionary tendencies the military and conservative forces at court had nurtured with a view to creating a bulwark against what might have been decades of rule by his liberal anglophile parents, now became the focus of everyone’s calculations.

With the support of his grandfather, the court, Waldersee and Bismarck, and driven by the conviction that he had to save the divine monarchical principle in its Prussian, militaristic form from imminent takeover by his English–Coburgian mother with her ‘sentimental humanitarianism’ and her ‘unGerman’ constitutional principles, Wilhelm stepped up his machinations against his parents. After a dolorous odyssey via Bad Ems, the Isle of Wight, the Scottish Highlands, the Tyrolese Alps and Baveno, the Crown Prince and Princess had since early November 1887 been staying in San Remo on the Italian Riviera, where by putting on a show of optimism they tried to fend off demands for Friedrich Wilhelm to renounce the throne in favour of his son.