ABSTRACT
The great popularity William I later enjoyed as an aged Emperor must not blind to the fact that for the first ten years of his reign, or even longer, he was regarded with very great mistrust. In the eighteen-forties and fifties the folk in North and South Germany contemptuously nick-named him “Der Kartatschenprinz’’—“The Grape-shot Prince”— because he it was who in the year of revolution had given his Royal brother the diehard advice to employ cannon and bombs against the people of Berlin. The Prince was the only one of the Hohenzollern family who was forced at that time to leave Berlin and withdraw first to the Fortress of Spandau, then to the Pfaueninsel, and finally to England. The month-long siege and subsequent chastisement of the fortress of Rastatt, where the remnants of the champions of freedom, Karl Schurz among them, had sought refuge, did not redound to the credit of the future William I.
