A picture very often to be seen in Bavaria is one representing Maximilian II. and his family in the garden at Hohenschwangau. The Queen is sitting with Prince Otto on her lap, and the King, standing beside her, has laid his hand on the Crown Prince’s head. He is in the full prime of his manhood; his wife is radiant with happiness and beauty.

The lapse of a few years had transformed this family life in the Bavarian royal castle. The bright and happy Queen had become a widow, the proud mother a Mater Dolorosa. Prince Otto, the child of her heart, was hopelessly insane. The admiration which Ludwig had excited, the great hopes of which at the beginning of his reign he had been the centre, could not outweigh her fearful anxiety for his future.

Until the middle of the seventies, she and her eldest son had been in the habit of residing at Hohenschwangau at the same time, the Queen-mother using the ground floor of the castle, and the young King the first floor. Though they both loved the place equally well, and though Hohenschwangau was Queen Marie’s dower house, her son’s secluded life caused an alteration in this arrangement also: in later years he went to Linderhof when she came to Hohenschwangau, and upon his return she retired to Elbingen-Alp. When they met he showed his mother great respect; and when, as sometimes happened, disharmonies occurred between them he restrained his annoyance. But the Queen-mother’s bourgeois view of life never found the key to his composite nature. Repulsed time after time, she relinquished the hope of ever winning his confidence, though love still lived in the hearts of both.

Exactly opposite Hohenschwangau stood an enormous pine-tree on a projecting rock; lighted up by the declining sun it reminded the Queen-mother of a Christmas-tree. One winter, when they were both living at their favourite castle, son and mother kept Christmas Eve together. The gifts distributed, Ludwig led his mother to a balcony window. He drew aside the heavy velvet curtains. In the snow-covered landscape without, glittered a magnificent Christmas-tree; it was the spruce fir on the rock, which he had caused to be decorated with lights in order to give her pleasure.

Marie of Bavaria loved the country population; she often and willingly entered into personal relations with them. The customs of the peasantry, but above all their deep, childlike sense of religion, exercised an attraction on her pious mind. By birth a Hohenzollern, she had been brought up in the Lutheran teaching; her own mother had been a strict Protestant. As long as Bavaria had been a kingdom its Queen had belonged to this Church, which the Protestant portion of the population regarded as a support and help. Disappointment was great when it was made known that the Queen-mother intended to enter the Roman Catholic Church. Her relatives in Prussia were also painfully surprised; her sister, the Princess of Hesse-Darmstadt, even journeyed to Hohenschwangau at the last minute for the purpose of endeavouring to dissuade her from her resolution. The German Emperor, whose heart she had ever been very near, made representations of a like nature. But life had brought too many trials for her to be led away by the pressure of others from what she felt to be a matter of conscience. Sad, but not bitter, she retired from the world and from her people, whose respect and sympathy followed her in her loneliness.

In the little chapel at Wallenhofen, in all quietness, she changed her religion.

There is no doubt that many hard struggles had gone before this step. It was thought that King Ludwig did not approve of her action because the Protestants of his country so greatly lamented it. But with his love of free-will, he would not place obstacles in the way of her desire. At a religious festival in Munich, he himself informed the public of his mother’s decision.