King Wilhelm Gottsreich Sigismond von Ormstein was Grand Duke of Cassel-Felstein and hereditary king of Bohemia in 1888. He employed the skills Sherlock Holmes in A Scandal in Bohemia in order to hunt down a picture which could potentially disrupt a rather sensitive marriage. The picture was one of him and Irene Adler, the former Prima Donna at the Imperial Opera in Warsaw whom he had met in five years previously, and with whom he had had a brief affair. Adler was threatening to send it to his bride-to-be, Princess Clotilde Lothman von Saxe-Meningen of Scandinavia, which would destroy the marriage and possibly damage international relations.