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Updated: May 28, 2025
Benedetti then, as in duty bound, asked permission to inform his Government that the King would undertake that the candidature should not be resumed at any time. The King, of course, refused, and, when Benedetti pressed the request, repeated the refusal with some emphasis, and then, beckoning to his adjutant, who had withdrawn a few paces, broke off the conversation.
Aristotle's dicta were Nature; and when Benedetti, at Venice, opposed in 1585 Aristotle's opinions on violent and natural motion, there were hundreds, perhaps, in the universities of Europe as there certainly were in the days of the immortal "Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum" who were ready, in spite of all Benedetti's professed reverence for Aristotle, to accuse him of outraging not only the father of philosophy, but Nature itself and its palpable and notorious facts.
In private conversation he was more open; to Benedetti he said: "I have at last succeeded in determining a King of Prussia to break the intimate relations of his House with that of Austria, to conclude a treaty of alliance with Italy, to accept arrangements with Imperial France; I am proud of the result."
On the other hand, we must note that the conduct of the German Press at this crisis was certainly provocative of war. The morning on which Bismarck's telegram appeared in the official North German Gazette, saw a host of violent articles against France, and gleeful accounts of imaginary insults inflicted by the King on Benedetti.
Benedetti received instructions to go to the King at Ems and request him to order or advise the Prince to withdraw. At first Grammont wished him also to see the Prince himself; on second thoughts he forbade this, for, as he said, it was of the first importance that the messages should be conveyed by the King; he was determined to use the opportunity for the humiliation of Germany.
Benedetti then suggested that it would probably concern certain strips of territory on the left bank of the Rhine; on this, Bismarck stopped him: "Do not make any official announcements of that kind to me to-day." He went away, the Conference was concluded, the preliminaries were signed and ratified.
Again Gramont pressed Benedetti to urge the matter; but the utmost that the King would do was to state: "He gives his approbation entirely and without reserve to the withdrawal of the Prince of Hohenzollern: he cannot do more." The ambassador thereupon returned to Paris. Meanwhile, however, Bismarck had given the last flick to the restive courses of the Press on both sides of the Rhine.
They did not make the confidence of the French any greater; it was now apparent that the King had been asked, and had given his consent without considering the effect on France; they could not acquiesce in this distinction between his acts as sovereign and his acts as head of the family, for, as Benedetti pointed out, he was only head of the family because he was sovereign.
Not satisfied with this issue of the affair, Napoleon insisted that the Prussian king should engage never to support the candidacy of a Hohenzollern prince for the Spanish crown. William, who was at Ems, told the French ambassador, Benedetti, that he could not give a promise of this sort. When the question was again raised he sent an aide-de-camp, declining to discuss the matter further.
It was with this object that he published the proposal alleged to have been made to him by the French representative, Benedetti, in 1866, that Prussia should help France to acquire Belgium as a solace for Prussian annexations in Northern Germany. Then, as now, England insisted upon the Treaty of 1839. The treaty was most strictly construed.
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