While Wilhelmine was thus happy in her Court magnificence, varied by days of “delightful repose,” at Charlottenburg, France was in the throes of her Revolution, drenched with the blood of her greatest men and fairest women; her King had lost his crown and his head with it; and Europe was in arms against her.  When Frederick William joined his army camped on the Rhine bank, Wilhelmine was by his side to counsel him as he wavered between war and peace.  The fate of the coalition against France was practically in the hands of the trumpeter’s daughter, whose voice was all for peace.  “What matters it,” she said, “how France is governed?  Let her manage her own affairs, and let Europe be saved from the horrors of bloodshed.”

In vain did the envoys of Spain and Italy, Austria and England, practise all their diplomacy to place her influence in the scale of war.  When Lord Henry Spencer offered her a hundred thousand guineas if she would dissuade her husband from concluding a treaty with France, she turned a deaf ear to all his pleading and arguments.  Such influence as she possessed should be exercised in the interests of peace, and thus it was that the vacillating King deserted his allies, and signed the Treaty of Bale, in 1795.

Such was the triumphant issue of Madame Rietz’s intervention in the affairs of Europe; such the proof she gave to the world of her conquest of a King.  It was thus with a light heart that she turned her back on the Rhine camp; and with her husband’s children and a splendid retinue set out on her journey to Italy, to see which was the greatest ambition of her life.  At the Austrian Court she was coldly received, it is true, thanks to her part in the Treaty of Bale; but in Italy she was greeted as a Queen.  At Naples Queen Caroline received her as a sister; the trumpeter’s daughter was the brilliant centre of fetes and banquets and receptions such as might have gratified the vanity of an Empress:  while at Florence she spent days of ideal happiness under the blue sky of Italy and among her beauties of Nature and Art.

It was at Venice that she wrote to her King lover, “Your Majesty knows well that, for myself, I place no value on the foolish vanities of Court etiquette; but I am placed in an awkward position by my daughter being raised to the rank of Countess, while I am still in the lowly position of a bourgeoise.”  She had, in fact, always declined the honour of a title, which Frederick William had so often begged her to accept; and it was only for her daughter’s sake, when the question of an alliance between the young Countess de la Marke and Lord Bristol’s heir arose, that she at last stooped to ask for what she had so long refused.

A few weeks later her brother, the King’s equerry, placed in her hands the patent which made her Countess Lichtenau, with the right to bear on her shield of arms the Prussian eagle and the Royal crown.