PART III
10
No one seemed especially pleased that Edward, “the arch-vulgarian,” as Henry James called him, was finally king. The country had lost its all-powerful grandmother; a fifty-nine-year-old playboy did not seem like much of a substitute. It would be fair to say that almost everyone expected him to be a flop as king. Even Edward was ambivalent about his new role. When his mother died he was in the throes of depression—a legacy, like his tempers, of his miserable childhood. His health was bad, he was recovering from pleurisy, his bronchitis was becoming chronic, a broken kneecap made it hard to walk. Along with his mother’s death, there had been that of his brother Affie the year before, and now Vicky was in a last, dark, painful descent into cancer. The Boer War was an ongoing mess, morale in the country was fragile at best, and the rest of the world seemed uniformly hostile.
The reservations were not unjustified. Not only had the queen denied Edward any formal experience of government, but even at fifty-nine, he was still spoilt, self-indulgent, obsessed with clothes and tetchy when he didn’t get his own way. He liked, for example, to travel incognito, but not too incognito—he hated being kept waiting in a restaurant or hotel. He was still terrified of boredom, and needed constant external stimulation to keep it at bay. While he had more or less settled down to a kind of monogamy with his mistress Alice Keppel—thirty years his junior and thankfully discreet—he was accustomed to the life of a super-rich aristocratic hedonist, “a world where pleasure felt like a ripened peach for the outstretching of a hand,” where anything was allowed apart from the sin of exposing one’s circle and class to the scrutiny and opprobrium of the rest of the world. A world that was, in the words of Vita Sackville-West, “immoral, lavish and feudal.”1 There are less than appealing glimpses of the king—or “Kinki” as he was known by some—making horrible single entendres, “insinuendoes,”2 to his mistress’s stoically grinning husband, George; and at dinners at Marlborough House, laughing at the obsequious clowning of the resident fool, Christopher Sykes, who would crawl drunkenly about under the dinner table, splashed with brandy, snuffling “as your Royal3 Highness pleases.” In some respects he wasn’t entirely unlike his nephew Wilhelm—the amusement at someone else’s expense, the impatience, the restlessness, the susceptibility to the rich and the flattering—though it was a comparison he would have hated. Then there was his gargantuan appetite. The new king smoked twenty cigarettes and twelve cigars a day, two of the former and one of the latter before breakfast, and ate five mountainous meals. Dinner might typically be twelve courses, and include oysters, caviar, plovers’ eggs, ortolan, sole poached in cream, pheasant stuffed with truffles, quails stuffed with foie gras, frogs’ legs in jelly. He was said to take a whole roast chicken to bed. Small wonder he could now barely climb a flight of stairs.
But, as the king’s ex-mistress Frances Warwick observed, during his years of enforced idleness Edward had longed “for some intimate4 contact with the affairs of the greater world outside.” He was fascinated by international politics and, though his mother had tried to restrict his access to the government, a number of Liberal politicians had been sending him cabinet papers for years. Now he revelled in his new role, and longed to show he could make a difference. His first forays into government, however, were none too impressive. He quickly found himself at odds with the Conservative government. As far as it was concerned, the monarchy had lost all real constitutional power and there was no winning it back. Besides, in the previous ten years, government business had grown so extraordinarily in complexity and volume that it was impossible for the monarch—especially one who spent three months a year on holiday—to be consulted or even informed about everything. Edward, however, believed that crucial royal prerogatives—the right to be briefed about cabinet discussions before decisions were made, the right to steer official appointments and the right to dissolve or call Parliament—must be reasserted after falling into disuse in his mother’s last years.
Lord Salisbury had little respect for Edward, perhaps because over the years he had been obliged to extricate him from some extremely embarrassing and grubby situations. Salisbury’s successor and nephew, the clever, insouciant Arthur Balfour, who took over from him just after the end of the Boer War in July 1902 in what was effectively an astonishingly undemocratic little coup,* treated the king with barely hidden condescension, which Edward hated. The differences were also tribal: Edward belonged to the ostentatious, wilfully philistine, fashionable aristocratic set. Salisbury (though he liked to pretend otherwise) and Balfour were essentially aristocratic intellectuals who looked down on everybody else.
The conflict came to a head in August 1902 just after Balfour became prime minister. In an effort to counteract Russian influence in Persia—where Britain had its eye on oil reserves—the Foreign Office had lured the shah to England with promises of glamorous court balls, gala dinners and the Order of the Garter. Edward, however, had not been consulted about the Garter, which he alone could present. He retaliated bad-temperedly by saying he couldn’t give a Christian order to an “infidel” (though his mother had given one to the shah’s father and as a rule he was notably religion-blind). The foreign secretary, Lord Lansdowne, sent him drawings for a Garter divested of its Christian motifs. Edward, who was on his yacht at Cowes, hurled them into the sea. He told Lansdowne that he should sort out Persia by coming to an agreement with Russia. The shah, who hadn’t enjoyed the trip nearly as much as he’d expected—the weather was awful, he hated the opera, the trains made him sick—went home in a sulk. Lansdowne threatened to resign. Balfour put his foot down. He wrote to Edward, politely informing him that if Lansdowne went, the entire cabinet would resign too, creating a constitutional crisis. The king grumpily backed down. It’s worth noting that such jostling for influence was not unlike—in a much paler shade—the conflicts his nephews were engaged in with their ministers.
His powerlessness made Edward lose his temper frequently. It was hard for the British royals to reconcile themselves to this. The habit of deference and courtesy around them meant that the reality of their lack of power was not reflected by the way people felt obliged to treat them. It was most confusing. Edward’s capable private secretary, Sir Francis Knollys, who’d been with him since 1870, along with Fritz Ponsonby, quietly redrafted the brusque if not rude memos he’d dictate when angry. Nor—just like his imperial nephews—did he seem able to differentiate between the important and the trivial. When the famously badly dressed Salisbury turned up to a court event in a pair of old trousers that didn’t match his tail coat, Edward wailed in front of twenty ambassadors, “What will they,5 what can they, think of a premier who can’t put on his clothes?” Salisbury replied, “I am afraid that my mind must have been occupied by something less important.” As so often with Edward, the less appealing side and the attractive quality were peculiarly proximate to each other. “He had the most curious brain,” Fritz Ponsonby wrote, “and at one time one would find him a big, strong far-seeing man, grasping the situation at a glance and taking a broad-minded view of it; at another one would be almost surprised at the smallness of his mind. He would be almost childish in his views, and would obstinately refuse to understand the question at issue.” That said, Ponsonby, whose plain speaking did not always endear him to Queen Victoria or George, liked the king. He was “very businesslike but exacting,” but “far more considerate and human than the Queen … always thinking of small acts of kindness,” whereas she had “rarely considered the feelings of her Household” or wondered whether her needs “might cause inconvenience.”6
Edward had no desire to wrest policy-making from the government—in most respects his views reflected those of the Conservative government. But he wanted respect. His preoccupations were the traditional ones of European monarchy: the army, the navy, foreign affairs. He took his role seriously—as seriously as a man could who took a quarter of the year off and was essentially part of an eighteenth-century amateur tradition of government. He believed that Britain needed to raise its profile in Europe, and needed to be at peace. His instincts were towards agreement and compromise; he liked to think of himself as a smoother-over and he believed that the Crown should be a popular symbol of unity, even—especially—in a society which was undergoing extraordinary social change and profound political reformation. After an encounter with Kier Hardie, the Socialist MP who was an outspoken critic of social privilege, to whom the king was carefully solicitous, his friend Admiral Jackie Fisher was both taken aback and impressed when, in response to his own sniping comment about Hardie, Edward snapped, “You don’t7 understand me! I am King of ALL the people!” The nitty-gritty of domestic politics, however, didn’t interest him much, and he took no role in addressing the condition of the poor and the fact that the Boer War had exposed appalling levels of poverty and deprivation in the richest country in the world. Among the bottom third of the population life expectancy8 was forty-five—thirty-five for dockers, which explained why their union was one of the most militant. One in three died in infancy; another third of those who lived to over seventy-five ended up in the poorhouse; and in the slums of major cities even the air made you sick. As Kier Hardie himself had pointed out in Parliament, the prince owned “some of the vilest9 slums” in the country, and made £60,000 a year from them. But then sympathy for the poor—particularly the politically active poor—was not widespread in the Conservative government and its adherents, which still regarded strikers as lazy troublemakers. In 1901 it upheld the Taff Vale judgement, a law case which made trade unions liable for employers’ strike damages—and in one blow made strikes impossible.*
The lesson was clear: if Edward wanted to exercise influence he would have to find other, more informal, ways of doing it—and he did find them. He’d always been good at being charming, he was a great networker and had an eye for cultivating the right people. As Prince of Wales he had gathered a loose coterie of rising men who kept him abreast of government and foreign policy, while he praised them in the salons of aristocratic England—their talents and his talking up blurred whose reputation was benefiting whom, and suggested that royal patronage still had some pull in British politics. Among these men were Admiral Jackie Fisher, the eccentric but persuasive architect of the reform of the Royal Navy; the fiercely anti-German diplomat Sir Francis Bertie; the future war minister Sir Richard Haldane; and the creepily obsequious, self-styled royal éminence grise, Reginald Brett, Viscount Esher, who had the ear of three prime ministers, but was fascinated by royalty and encouraged Edward to demand his prerogatives.
He also had great confidence and possessed a rare—especially in the British royal family—talent for public performance. The high aristocracy of the late nineteenth century have been dubbed “the great ornamentals”—as their actual power declined, they became ermine-draped symbols of civic pride. Edward was the greatest ornamental of them all. He created for himself a larger-than-life public persona of bonhomie and good humour which would eventually prove, at home and abroad, to be a more than adequate substitute for his mother’s po-faced longevity, creating a glamorous public image for the monarchy. He took pleasure in show, prided himself on always being affable and courteous in public (when he didn’t always feel it) and was determined to be visible—as his mother had rarely been. Perhaps because he had been one of the first public figures to weather the force of press scrutiny and salaciousness, he had an understanding of what the press could do and—unlike both his nephews—some idea of how to work it. He played to the nascent stirrings of celebrity culture. The public might claim to be shocked by his scandalous past, but a lot of them loved the racing, the yachts, the theatregoing, even the stylish women—the papers never quite stated the nature of his relationships with them. He allowed the Daily Mail to take and publish photographs of himself with his grandchildren. To bolster his claims to be a man of substance he cultivated a reputation for speaking off the cuff in public in three languages. Less generous historians have suggested that the speeches were written10 by others and committed to memory—but witnesses at the time denied this. And in Europe, where monarchs with real power demonstrated it through show and ceremonial, Edward’s talent for publicity and public demonstrations would give his actions a whole different dimension.
For George, the new century had brought a few, though hardly momentous, changes. He’d taken up golf, cycling, bridge and the new sine qua non of royal luxury life, cars (Edward had a fleet of them by 1903)—all fashionable new pastimes. As the Prince of Wales, he acquired two further homes, Abergeldie, near Balmoral, and Frogmore, half a mile from Windsor Castle; he was made a trustee of the British Museum, in which he took no interest; and he was found a place on the Committee for Food in Wartime. Edward placed a desk next to his to ensure that his son had the experience of government that his mother had denied him. He was given a private secretary, Arthur Bigge, who had worked briefly for the queen, an effective, literate, organized, Conservative-voting ex-soldier, who told George not to look cross or bored in public. George quickly became as dependent on him as he was on May, and equally rude on occasion too. “I fear sometimes11 I have lost my temper with you and often been very rude, but I am sure you know me well enough by now to know that I did not mean it … I am a bad hand at saying what I feel, but I thank God that I have a friend like you, in whom I have the fullest confidence.”
What George’s new position did open him up to was the empire. After the queen’s death in 1901, he and May were sent to Australia to be present at the inauguration of the country’s first parliament and its transformation from six colonies into one “Commonwealth.” Edward had wanted to cancel the trip, but Balfour argued that he should go. The Boer War, which had exposed such hostility in Europe, had paradoxically turned Britain in on its empire, and made the government all the keener to emphasize the colonies’ bonds with the “Mother Country.” Balfour had come up with a new, more visible role for the monarchy in the empire. “The King is no longer merely King of Great Britain and Ireland and of a few dependencies whose whole value consisted in ministering to the wealth and security of Great Britain and Ireland,” he told Edward. “He is now the great constitutional bond uniting together in a single Empire communities of free men separated by half the circumference of the Globe.” Australia’s citizens knew “little and care little for British Ministries … But they know, and care for, the Empire … and for the Sovereign who rules it.”12George’s visit, Balfour argued, was a great opportunity to make that connection real. But the war, together with the issue of Home Rule in Ireland and the growing independence movement in India, had also raised questions about whether the colonies actually wanted to be part of the empire. And grand though Balfour’s conception sounded, it was really another ornamental role, a job that required being rather than doing. George and May set off for eight months in March 1901—George was so upset at parting from his parents that he could barely speak and had to take refuge in his cabin—with an entourage of twenty-two. They went via Singapore and New Zealand, with stop-offs in South Africa and Canada. In their absence, Edward and Alexandra spoiled their children egregiously. George described the experience purely in terms of numbers in his diary: 45,000 miles travelled, 21 foundation stones laid, 544 addresses received, 4,329 medals presented, 24,855 hands shaken at official receptions. Being on show endlessly he found a trial. He complained to Nicholas in one of the very occasional letters they continued to exchange (in 1902 George managed a record of three to his cousin), about the “tiresome functions”13 he had to attend, but he was also, almost despite himself, excited by the empire. Its breadth, its cheering crowds were suddenly real, and he returned convinced that there was “a strong feeling of14 loyalty to the Crown and deep attachment to the Mother Country in Australia.”
Abroad, Edward’s ageing playboy reputation meant that his accession had been greeted with little more excitement than it had been at home. And feelings in Europe about the Boer War and Britain’s prosecution of it ran so high that when the king went abroad he was more likely to be booed than anything else. Anti-British cartoons, especially in Germany and France, showed British soldiers bayoneting Boer babies; Edward himself was drawn standing on the mutilated bodies of Boer women and children. As the war entered its second year, the British army, under the leadership of Lord Kitchener, had become utterly ruthless in an attempt to flush out the last Boer guerrilla fighters. It burned farms, shot prisoners, and interned women and children, Boer and black, in concentration camps, an efficient new invention pioneered a few years before by the Spanish during the Spanish-American War. There the internees died in shaming numbers of famine, thirst, cholera and mistreatment. The conditions were so appalling that criticism was beginning to leak into mainstream British politics. The leader of the Liberal Party, Henry Campbell-Bannerman, described the British army’s methods as “barbaric … The vulgar15 and bastard imperialism of irritation and provocation and aggression … of grabbing everything even if we have no use for it ourselves.”
In Russia—where Edward had hoped his bonhomie might make a difference—Britain was resented not just because of the war, but because it had led a coalition of Japan, France and Germany in the spring of 1901 which successfully pressured Russia into halting its attempt to annex Manchuria and bully the Chinese government—though the project’s crippling costs had also played a crucial role. “I fear,” Edward wrote16 to Lord Lansdowne at the end of 1901, “that there is hardly a country that exists concerning which England and Russia hold similar views, and both distrust the other.” When Wilhelm’s brother Heinrich came to St. Petersburg in December that year, Nicholas told him that he mistrusted British policies, “despised” the British army and political system. He liked his uncle personally, he said, but had little respect for him as a monarch: “He has got nothing to say in his own country.” Heinrich, patriotic but also Anglophilic and genuinely fond of his English relatives, was virtually the only person who couldn’t see why the three countries couldn’t simply get on. He was, Bülow observed, “very pro-England, and thus regrets Nicholas’ anti-English attitudes.”17 Heinrich was regarded as very naïve in Berlin. Edward, meanwhile, privately thought Nicholas well disposed to Britain, but as “weak as water”18 and entirely at the mercy of his ministers. “The Russians have19 got quite out of hand in China,” he observed when the British and other European powers sent the Russians an ultimatum to get their soldiers out of Manchuria. “… The Emperor seems to have no power whatever, as I am sure the idea of war between our two countries would fill him with horror.”
Such attitudes made British politicians feel increasingly isolated and vulnerable. Lord Lansdowne, the new foreign secretary, was seriously considering the need for an alliance with a foreign power. One place where there seemed to be possibilities was Germany. Even though public opinion was virulently anti-British, Wilhelm was still glowing from the success of his deathbed visit, and just a week before the queen had died Joseph Chamberlain had once again proposed an alliance to the German government. Talks had begun in the spring of 1901.
Edward did his best to capitalize on the relationship. After Wilhelm returned to Germany, he wrote thanking him for his support and suggested they set up a direct channel of communication to “smooth matters down.”20 He visited Germany twice in that first year—more than once encountering boos and hisses in the streets. Firstly, to see his gravely sick sister, when he tried to persuade her doctors to give her more pain relief (the Germans seemed more puritanical about this than the British, who were enthusiastic tipplers of laudanum), and then again after she died in August 1901. But mastering his irritation with the kaiser was always an effort. Each time he met Wilhelm, he endeavoured not to show he was cross when the kaiser did what he always did and ignored Edward’s requests that the visits be private and informal, turning out instead in full dress uniform, forcing the king to inspect 15,000 soldiers, and delaying lunch by hours.
When Edward was given an opportunity to behave like a real international statesman, he flunked it. The occasion was a lunch with Wilhelm several weeks after Vicky’s death in August 1901. The foreign secretary, Lord Lansdowne, had taken the unusual step of preparing a memo for him outlining British foreign policy, rehearsing the areas of conflict, and suggesting what he might say about various issues. It was a flattering acknowledgement of Edward’s potential role in foreign affairs. But as lunch ended, instead of using Lansdowne’s paper as an aide-mémoire for a serious talk on foreign policy, Edward fished it out of his pocket and handed the whole thing to Wilhelm. It was a faux pas which would have got any senior diplomat fired. Lansdowne was not amused. For a king who claimed to want a role in government, it demonstrated a lack of staying power, though Edward’s blushes were saved. The German Foreign Office took the paper as a policy document and prepared a formal answer to it.
It may have been that Edward was too lazy, or too upset after his sister’s death, to bother. It seems likely that he simply couldn’t bear the thought of spending a couple of hours arguing the finer points of British foreign policy with his nephew. Through lunch Wilhelm had complained constantly that the British were obstructing the latest round of negotiations with Germany on a potential alliance. He also seemed to know all about things on which Edward hadn’t been briefed—British plans to give Malta self-government, British overtures to Japan. It’s also likely Edward had heard about Wilhelm’s final aggressions against his dead mother. The moment Vicky died he had Friedrichshof surrounded and searched (nothing was found—with the unofficial help of Fritz Ponsonby Vicky had already secretly evacuated her papers during Edward’s previous visit). Then he spread a rumour that she had at the last revealed her true loyalties by demanding that her naked body be wrapped in the Union Jack21 and sent to England for burial. Not only was the story a lie—she’d asked to be buried at Potsdam by her husband—but the detail of the nakedness was cruelly over-intimate. It was, however, eagerly repeated at the German court—the kaiser’s last, damaging blow against his mother.
The two men’s complicated relationship was evident to everyone around them. “King Edward22 never liked him,” Fritz Ponsonby wrote, “and therefore, while conversations in public were ostensibly very amicable, one always felt that it was an effort on both sides to keep them so.” An English cousin observed, “Uncle Bertie23 thought William was bumptious and tiresome and William thought Bertie patronized him.” Bülow said that at moments Wilhelm literally hated his uncle. Edward was, however, far from being the only monarch who found Wilhelm difficult. Apart from Nicky, the kaiser had alienated many of Europe’s crowned heads with his over-familiarity and rudeness. He slapped Ferdinand of Bulgaria on the bottom during a state visit, behind his back called him “Fernando naso” because of his large, beaky nose, and claimed he was a hermaphrodite. He called the admittedly teeny Italian king, Umberto I, “the dwarf”24 in the hearing of Umberto’s entourage. The Greek royal family quietly loathed him, and his cousin Marie of Romania found him unbearably condescending. The paradox was, of course, that being so bad at personal relationships, Wilhelm should believe so deeply in conducting international relations through personal relationships.
Edward’s efforts, however, had no effect on the latest round of Anglo-German negotiations. Bülow had told Wilhelm that if he seemed slightly cool about Joseph Chamberlain’s proposals, Germany would extract better terms, and in due course the talks had collapsed just like the ones before. The Germans demanded more than the British were willing to give: a long list of colonies in Southern Africa and China, plus an insistence that rather than making a one-to-one defensive treaty, Britain must join the Triple Alliance—Germany’s bloc—and commit itself to the defence of Italy and Austria-Hungary as well as Germany. The conditions seemed designed to put the British off, which Bülow may well have hoped they would. Gradually the foreign secretary, Lord Lansdowne, backed away. Fritz Holstein blamed Bülow for clinging “to all the obstacles25 which stood in the way of the alliance,” but he too was abrupt and hostile with the British. By nature someone who couldn’t help but see ulterior motives and conspiracies, he’d come to mistrust the British and believed that Salisbury had deliberately misled him during previous negotiations and had behaved dishonourably over Samoa. As for Wilhelm, he was told by Bülow that the obstruction was all on the part of the British. The kaiser complained noisily about British delays and called the British cabinet “a pack of26 unmitigated noodles”—a phrase he liked so much he used it several times. The British cabinet ignored his words, but Edward minded, and couldn’t stop himself grumbling to Hatzfeldt’s deputy at the German embassy, Hermann von Eckhardstein, that he had “already had to27 put up with many of these jokes of the Kaiser’s and even worse than this one too, and I suppose I shall have to put up with many more.” Even without Bülow’s intriguing, there was, as in the past, a fundamental gap between the two sides’ expectations which made any accommodation very hard. The Germans were sure that the Boer War had forced Britain onto the ropes, that it signalled a genuine decline, and they expected its desperation to allow them to drive a hard bargain for their friendship. The British, still the richest nation in the world, were not that desperate. They were, however, taken aback by the abruptness of the Germans.
In October 1901 Joseph Chamberlain, who—to his chagrin—had become the particular butt of German attacks on the war, made a speech in defence of the government’s policy and the British army’s conduct in South Africa, claiming it was certainly no worse than anything other Great Powers had done, and included among his examples Prussian soldiers in the Franco-Prussian War. Though Chamberlain had equally impugned the Russians and Austrians, it was the German press that went berserk. It’s important to understand that in Germany the army had become almost sacred and inviolate. It was intensely respected, it was seen as the vehicle of German unification, and in the absence of many other national institutions with which the whole country could identify, it seemed to incarnate the nation’s dignity and identity. Bülow demanded an apology. Chamberlain, in no mood to back down—which he in any case never liked to do—said he’d meant no harm and therefore there was no need to apologize. In Germany his effigy was burned in the streets, and in Berlin there was a brisk trade in spittoons with his face on them. In London The Times ran a report on German Anglophobia, illustrating it with some of the more shocking cartoons.
Despite the personal friction between them, Edward and Wilhelm consciously made an effort to remain on good terms. The king sent the kaiser a Christmas message stressing how much he wanted an “entente cordiale” with Germany, and how, despite the Anglophobia of the German press, England wished to be on good terms with Germany, “and walk hand in hand28 together harmoniously for the sake of peace and the welfare of mankind.” Wilhelm’s answer was grandiose but friendly: “The press is awful29 on both sides, but here it has nothing to say, for I am the sole arbiter and master of German Foreign Policy and the Government and Country must follow me, even if I have to face the musik [sic]! May Your Government never forget this, and never place me in the jeopardy to have to choose a course which could be a misfortune to both them and us.”
But in the New Year of 1902, Bülow—contrary to the advice of the German Foreign Office—couldn’t resist making a public riposte to Chamberlain. He said the German army was blameless and Chamberlain’s words were an outrageous attack on Germany’s heroic struggle for independence. It illustrated why Germany must be strong, so “no one can be30 indifferent to our enmity.” Chamberlain’s reply, in a speech in Birmingham, was similarly grandstanding: “I withdraw nothing, I qualify nothing, I defend nothing.” The two governments’ foremost imperialists faced off. It was a sign of an underlying and growing resentment of Germany in Britain, that Chamberlain instantly became—just as Bülow did—the most popular man in his country, and vilified in the other.
The monarchs’ assurances of goodwill faltered. The kaiser denounced Chamberlain’s speech as a “conglomeration31 of bluff and overbearing and secret insult,” and said the colonial minister should be shot. But he told Ambassador Lascelles that despite British obstruction and calumnies he was still full of goodwill—though London must remember he was not a “quantité négligeable32.” In London, Salisbury counselled that Bülow’s speech should be ignored and they should register their disapproval by cancelling George’s upcoming trip to Wilhelm’s birthday party in Berlin at the end of January—a visit arranged months before to demonstrate the new closeness of the two families. “I think that under33 the circumstances it would be better for him not to go where he is liable to be insulted, or be treated by the Public in a manner which I feel sure no one would regret more than yourself,” Edward wrote to Wilhelm. The kaiser did not reply. “This is most34 disagreeable for me especially if I have to go in the end,” George complained to his secretary Arthur Bigge. “I hate the very idea of going.” When Lascelles gingerly broached the situation to Wilhelm days before George was due, the kaiser claimed he’d never received35 Edward’s missive, and threatened a dire diplomatic crisis—“another Fashoda”—if the visit were cancelled. Fourteen years before, in equally sticky circumstances, Wilhelm had claimed that a crucial letter had gone missing. No one, especially Edward and Lascelles, believed him. The king relented but demanded a polite telegram from Wilhelm guaranteeing that George would be treated with respect. It never arrived.
George went off to Berlin in January 1902 with understandable trepidation, but he reported that everyone, from princes to the officers in the barracks of the 8th Cuirassiers, of whom Wilhelm made him a colonel, was “most civil,” and his cousin, with whom he dined and breakfasted, was “kindness itself.”36 In his not always reliable memoirs, Bülow claimed that a “frank talk” with the “clear-headed, sensible and manly” (and almost unrecognizably articulate) George smoothed over the disagreements and bitterness of the previous months. “We must forget the past and strive only to be friends in the future,”37 the prince was quoted as saying, and assured Bülow that his father regarded him as a friend—which wasn’t true. George’s letters home were Eeyore-ishly self-pitying. “The amount one is expected and has to do is simply awful,” he grumbled. His Cuirassier helmet “looked somewhat like an extinguisher on a candle,” his uniform didn’t fit, and he had “absolutely walked miles in the Schloss as W’s rooms are at the other end of the Castle and every minute I have to come back and put on another uniform.”38 Worst of all, his new boots “hurt abominably.”39
It was in Bülow’s interest for the visit to go well. Tirpitz and he believed that it was vital to remain on decent terms with Britain while the German navy was in its current critical phase—big enough to attract curiosity from England, but small enough to be easily dispatched. Under the courtesy and smiling, ill will towards Britain lurked everywhere at the German court, according to Anne Topham, the British governess who went to work for Wilhelm in 1902. While the English still thought they were “admired and beloved” in Berlin, they were, she wrote, “nothing of the kind. They were looked upon with suspicion and hatred as possible rivals, often with contempt as belonging to a nation whose glory was in decline, whose day was past.”40 In Germany, George seems to have been regarded as a rather blinkered nationalist—“nothing but an English Jingo,” as a German diplomat described him later that year, against which Wilhelm scribbled, “Exactly.”41 He was known to have made tactless comments about the kaiser in the past, but it was obvious he felt none of his parents’ heat42 about him, and May—half-German and anti-Russian—liked Wilhelm and the attention he showed her, though she also acknowledged that he sometimes made “royalty ridiculous.”43 Wilhelm seems to have looked down slightly on his cousin—but then he looked down on many of his cousins. On the other hand, he didn’t see him as a personal threat, and found it easy to be polite to him. “Georgy” [sic], he wrote to Edward, left “all safe and44 sound and we were very sorry to have to part so soon from such a merry and genial guest.”
Only a few days after George’s visit, however, on 30 January 1902, the British dropped a bombshell on the international community and revealed that they were signing a defensive alliance with Japan. The world—especially Russia and Germany—was extremely surprised. For decades Britain had kept aloof from such deals, and its new ally Japan was regarded as a second-rung power, one of the “yellow races” whom Wilhelm, with classic racist logic, claimed to despise while at the same time regarding the “Yellow Peril”—it is to him that the phrase, so redolent of the turn-of-the-century fear and fascination of the East, is attributed—“as the greatest danger threatening the white race.”45 Not that the British were immune to such views: the languidly sophisticated British prime minister, Arthur Balfour, did not consider the Japanese quite as “civilized”46 as the British—though he would never have said so in public. However, they had a not inconsiderable navy, and their proximity to China made the alliance a cheap way of defending British interests in the Far East against Russia, with whom the Japanese had repeatedly clashed over Manchuria and Korea. They were also sufficiently far away to make this first toe-in-the-water of alignment seem not too dramatic. The effects were gratifying. The Russians were both angry and rattled. Almost immediately Lamsdorff, the Russian foreign minister, promised the British that all Russian troops would be evacuated from Manchuria by 1903, and agreed to an open-door trading policy in China and Korea, which they had blocked for years. The Germans were taken aback that their negotiations with Britain had not been quite as centre stage, nor Britain quite as desperate or without friends, as they had imagined. Edward, as courteously as he could, had made sure that Wilhelm was the first foreign head of state to be informed about the defence treaty with Japan. Willy replied gracefully that his government regarded the new alliance as a “guarantee of47 peace in the East”—though it was almost certainly not what they really thought.
As if to confirm that the British were indeed putting their house in order, in May the Boer War finally ground to its grim close. “Thank God48 it is over at last,” George wrote in his diary. Almost immediately the British government handed over £3 million for reparations and the reconstruction of the two Boer states and promised their incumbents self-government within the British empire—a gesture which kick-started the country’s international rehabilitation, but also signalled the pointlessness of the struggle, and prompted questions for the first time about whether the empire was costing Britain rather than enriching it. The cost had been monstrous. A fortune spent, the goodwill of Europe forfeited, the idea of Britain as both invulnerable and as a force for good blown out of the water, an estimated 75,000 dead49—between 22,000 and 28,000 British soldiers, 7,000 Boer soldiers, 20,000 to 28,000 Boer civilians (of which the majority had been children under sixteen), somewhere between 14,000 and 20,000 non-combatant black Africans.
With the end of the war, it was assumed that the reasons for the hostility between Germany and Britain would diminish and calm down. After all, the two nations still had close trading ties, many Germans and British attended the other country’s universities, the British Left had closer relations with the German Social Democrats than any other European left-wing party, and of course there were the blood ties of the royal family. But in one section of the British press the antipathy did not go away. In the right-wing papers a new kind of story about Germany began to appear, suggesting that it had long-term hostile intentions against Britain, and noting with some anxiety that Germany was overtaking Britain: its population was bigger, its shipbuilding outstripping the British for the first time. The stories were true: by 1913, Germany would have a population of 65 million to Britain’s 46 million; and while Britain’s GDP had been 40 percent bigger than Germany’s in 1870, by 1913 it would be 6 percent smaller. More seriously, The Times’sBerlin correspondent, George Saunders, who had lived in Germany for years, was convinced that there was institutionalized ill will towards Britain in the German government. Germany, Saunders told his editor, was “a new, crude,50 ambitious, radically unsound Power,” insidious in its methods: “It is not business, it is dining, shooting, toasts, finance, honours, marriages, dynastic friendships. It is not hard Steel, like Joe Chamberlain … It is not English.” Saunders’s coverage so alarmed Bülow that in mid-1902 the German government tried and failed to get the journalist recalled. The new German ambassador, Count Paul von Wolff Metternich zur Gracht, a rare Anglophile in the German diplomatic service, went to see Edward about it. The king, by way of response, waved a viciously anti-British German article which The Times had reprinted. In truth, he had been dismayed by The Times’s reporting, and had personally approached its editor to ask that coverage of Germany be modified, just as his mother had done five years before. To his quiet humiliation, the editor, Charles Moberly Bell, refused.
Seeds of concern about Germany had also begun to germinate in several government departments. The Admiralty called a conference in 1902 about Germany’s suddenly expanding navy and what it was for. In the Home Office, Special Branch, the Metropolitan Police’s intelligence unit, reported that German army intelligence had recently started to gather information on British coastal defences, when previously the Germans had freely swapped information on the Russians and the French. In the Foreign Office, Salisbury’s former right-hand man, Thomas Sanderson, who had always felt Germany’s posturing was more irritating than effective, observed glumly to his friend Francis Lascelles that he was starting to feel a “settled dislike”51 and mistrust of Germany taking hold among the younger generation.
Wilhelm and Edward, meanwhile, went on demonstrating their amicability in public. In the autumn of 1902, against the advice of his entourage, Wilhelm invited the British “hero” of the Boer War, Lord Roberts, to army manoeuvres, and declined to meet three Boer War generals who toured the European capitals, an unpopular decision in Germany which irritated Bülow. Edward, whom Saunders considered too pro-German, invited Wilhelm to Sandringham for his birthday in November, and arranged for the kaiser’s British regiment to be briefly stationed near Dover so he could inspect it.
The kaiser was shocked by the new strain of hostility he discovered in the British papers—though they gratifyingly still made a distinction between himself and the German government. His own welcome, as he told Bülow, had been “as hearty and affectionate as ever;” it was the chancellor and the government “they would like to send to the devil.”52 He and George went out and shot 2,201 pheasants53 in one day. “He made himself54 most agreable [sic] when he came here,” George told Nicholas. The interaction between the monarchs was as prickly as ever, though. When the king proudly showed off his new motor car, Wilhelm was keen to show off his own expertise. What did it run on? Edward—hating being made to feel ignorant by his nephew—had to admit he had no idea. Ah, potato spirit was the thing, Wilhelm announced. Far better than petrol. He promised—despite Edward’s protestations—to have his experts whip up a sample by the end of the week. As Wilhelm departed, one German diplomat claimed to have heard Edward grunt, “Thank God he’s55 left.”
The strength of new anti-Germanism was made alarmingly evident at the end of 1902. The British and German governments sent a flotilla of warships to blockade the coast of Venezuela, which—as South American states were wont to do—was threatening to renege on large debts it owed both countries. When members of the British government—Chamberlain, now rabidly anti-German—and the Conservative press led by The Times kicked up a fuss, the British ships were almost immediately withdrawn. In fact the situation was more complicated than it looked: the Conservative administration was also bowing to American pressure to withdraw, and because it was very unpopular in the country, it felt more obliged than it otherwise might have to listen to its more right-wing elements; most Liberals were not opposed to working with the Germans. Then the same thing happened a few months later. The government organized a conference with the German government to arrange for British financiers to invest in the German-backed Baghdad railway, the right-wing press hissed again, and the government withdrew. The new British hostility wasn’t helped when in February 1903 the National Review, the country’s most passionately anti-German publication, published an article claiming that the previous summer, on board a yacht belonging to some rich Americans, the kaiser had launched into a stream of invective against Britain and his uncle, voicing his dislike “with such brutal frankness”56 that his audience was shocked. The kaiser denied it, but even Lascelles, who vainly tried to minimize the damage—“We should remember57 that he always exaggerates and that people who do not know him well are apt to misunderstand him”—believed it was true. There was another splurge of anti-German rhetoric in the British press, and this time the finger pointed at the kaiser and his new navy. “There is a58 menace growing up in the east which cannot be ignored and which means that an adequate squadron must be at some strategical point in home waters,” reported the right-wing Morning Post, a paper which in the past had glowingly praised Wilhelm.
When relations with Britain were going badly it had now become almost a cliché that Germany would find itself getting on better with Russia, and so it proved. In September 1901, after nearly four years of frostiness on Russia’s part, Wilhelm and Nicholas, with Bülow and Lamsdorff, had met in the North German town of Danzig. The Germans knew by now that the tsar found the kaiser difficult, and so Wilhelm’s uncle, the Duke of Baden—to whom he was said occasionally to listen—had sat him down beforehand and carefully suggested that he must simply be friendly and make no obvious demands. It seemed to work. Nicholas wrote with some relief to his mother that Wilhelm was “in good spirits,59 calm and very amiable.” He told Bülow he hoped the two countries would “always fight60 shoulder to shoulder,” and showed some keenness when the Germans proposed a continental league with France. Even better, the Russian press reported favourably on the meeting.
In fact, the original impetus for the Russian thaw had come not from Anglophobia but from a pragmatic financial calculation made by the new foreign minister, Count Vladimir Lamsdorff, who had taken over in June 1900, when Muraviev, aged fifty-five, had dropped dead. (Some said it was too much champagne, though it might as easily have been exhaustion; both his predecessors had keeled over in the job.) Lamsdorff, a short, shy man (he wore stacked heels), famous for his beautiful manners—one British diplomat called him “the politest man61 in the world”—had spent his career as a backroom boy among the files of the Russian Foreign Ministry and had been deputy to the more showy but less knowledgeable Muraviev. He was also regarded within the Russian government as Sergei Witte’s man.62 Like Witte, he believed that good relations with Germany were common sense, since Russia’s defence of their mutual border now took a big bite out of its defence budget. In 1900 Russia had spent ten times more on the army than on education, and more on the navy than on the ministries of agriculture and justice put together. Before the lapse of the Russo-German Reinsurance Treaty in 1890 those sums had been almost negligible. It was obvious that better relations ought to have a tangible effect on Russia’s defence budget.
Bülow was delighted. He’d been angling for the tsar and the kaiser to make up for years, though having shut Russian grain out of Germany with exceptionally high tariffs in order to please the Junker land-owning lobby in the Reichstag, he was as responsible as anyone for the deeper reasons for the rift between Russia and Germany.* As Russia’s biggest-selling newspaper, Novoe vremia, observed, closer relations could hardly come about “between peoples with63 tense economic relations.”
Wilhelm instantly took against Lamsdorff—as he had every Russian foreign minister since Lobanov—and made him the butt of his “jokes” all through the meeting. It seemed the kaiser had envisaged himself and Nicholas putting the world to rights all by themselves, and resented the foreign minister’s presence. Lamsdorff’s discomfort—and it was considerable—was shared by the entire imperial entourage, who found meetings with the kaiser “a thorough martyrdom.” He would lecture them on Russian ballet, ask them abrupt personal questions, or deliberately get their names wrong and laugh uproariously. Worse, he would play humiliating practical jokes on his own entourage in front of them—smacking his chief of staff on the bottom, or snipping someone’s braces—so the Russians didn’t know where to look. The minister of the court, Fredericks, said that every encounter with the kaiser left him “a complete wreck.”64
A few weeks later, to demonstrate his goodwill, Wilhelm rode across the Russian border to a small village called Wyshctyten, which had recently experienced a devastating fire. There, in the town square, he distributed several purses of money to the mostly Jewish inhabitants, and made a speech in German which none of the villagers understood. It was meant as a kindly gesture—though it’s hard not to see it as an unconscious attempt to invade and usurp his fellow monarch’s space—and Nicholas took it as such, though he apparently65 thought it rather odd.
From then on the relationship seemed to improve by leaps. In the spring of 1902, when the argument between Bülow and Chamberlain had caused such bitterness between Britain and Germany, Bülow sweetened the latest harsh rise in German tariffs on Russian grain with a large state loan to Russia of 2 million roubles. In August, when the Germans complained about the hostility of the British press, the two emperors again met on their yachts at the Estonian port city of Reval (present-day Tallinn) in the Russian Baltic states. Privately, it was not an encounter Nicholas was looking forward to. “Be friendly and66 severe so that he realizes he dare not joke with you,” Alix told him before the meeting, “and that he learns to respect you and be afraid of you—that is the Chief thing. How I wish I were with you.” On the day, Wilhelm referred to himself constantly as “the Admiral of67 the Atlantic,” and to Nicholas as “the Admiral of the Pacific,” which intensely irritated the tsar. As he departed on his yacht, Wilhelm signalled, “The Admiral of the Atlantic bids farewell to the Admiral of the Pacific.” Nicholas muttered to his entourage, “He’s raving68mad!” Once again the kaiser didn’t help things by insulting Lamsdorff, refusing to award him a decoration, the German Order of the Black Eagle, that he’d been promised. He claimed that Lamsdorff was intriguing against Germany.* which made no sense as he had initiated the thaw between the two countries, and told Bülow that Nicholas disliked his foreign minister and he’d soon be sacked. “I will arrange everything69 directly with the Tsar.”
This was familiar wishful thinking from Wilhelm, but he had touched on something true about Nicholas. After eight years as tsar, he was beginning to feel more confident, and since the beginning of 1902 had shown a marked disinclination to listen to his senior ministers. Having agreed to evacuate troops from Manchuria, and despite the increasingly perilous state of Russian finances, he stopped the evacuation, closed Russian-controlled ports to foreign trade, and took the control of Manchuria’s civil and diplomatic administration out of the hands of Witte and Lamsdorff, giving it to the ambitious but remarkably incompetent General Alekseev. This was an extraordinarily bad idea: the entire Manchurian plan had become an imperial vanity project which ate money. Between 1897 and 1903 Russia spent 1,141 million roubles on China—only slightly less than the entire state budget for 1903. It would make only one-tenth of that back in Chinese customs tariffs, and only a little more in selling Russian goods. It seems unlikely Nicholas had any notion of what a financial catastrophe Manchuria was, however. He had a very sketchy grasp of economics. He told Mossolov, who ran the tsar’s chancellery, that he had no idea which was worth more, 25 roubles or a gold watch. (The watch was worth hundreds of roubles.) “It is one of70 the big gaps in my education,” he said blithely. “… I don’t know the price of things; I have never had reason to pay for anything myself.”
The Manchurian plan made Nicholas and his cohorts feel that Russia was still a Great Power—and made the British and every other Power with interests in China furious. The timing, however, could hardly have been worse. There had been peasant risings and general strikes across Russia since the spring. Even the most fertile regions were in the grip of an agricultural crisis the government had no idea how to handle. In the towns, food prices were rising and living conditions were among the worst in the world. Assassinations of government officials had become endemic, the universities were in uproar. (“I am so sorry71 to see the Students have again been kicking up a row in the different universities,” George wrote to Nicholas in early 1902, “as I know it must be a great worry to you.”) At Easter a police-condoned pogrom in Kishinev in Bessarabia, in which a large number of Jews (estimates range from between forty-seven and 120) were murdered, caused such an international uproar that the Russian government felt obliged to publish an official condemnation. There were whispers—unfounded—that the tsar had been personally involved. Things had got so bad that Russia’s great secular saint, Leo Tolstoy, wrote an open letter to the tsar, begging him to hear the suffering of his people and reconsider the whole basis of autocracy. Unsurprisingly, the missive merely irritated Nicholas; Tolstoy found himself excommunicated—which in turn made the government look vindictive and on the wrong side. In September Nicholas effectively sacked Sergei Witte, sidelining him to a powerless position on the Council of Ministers. Witte opposed the Far Eastern policy, and his economic policy had by no means been an unadulterated success, but he was also the only minister with any ideas on how to deal with the agricultural crisis. Witte’s demotion left his rival Vyacheslav Plehve, the deeply repressive minister of the interior, as Nicholas’s most senior and influential minister. The tsar was not just being inconsistent, he was actively playing one minister off against another in order to keep the upper hand.
Donald Mackenzie Wallace, the Russian-speaking former foreign editor of The Times, who had begun to send regular reports to Edward via his private secretary, Sir Francis Knollys, felt the Russian government was becoming “more and more72 conservative,” and lurching towards an atavistic anti-Westernism. The new line at the Russian court was, “Russia ought not to adopt certain peculiarities of European Civilization which are generally supposed in western Europe to be a symptom of national progress.” He thought the government was in “chaos,” however, and reported that his Russian friends predicted “a great political change.”73
By early 1903 Edward’s public bonhomie had begun to win over the British public, and in the spring he finally made his great splash on the European stage. In March he set off on a five-week cruise to the Mediterranean, making stop-offs in Lisbon, Gibraltar, Malta, Sicily, Naples and Rome and, at his own instigation, a last-minute state visit to Paris. He refused to take a government minister with him, as was the custom, instead picking Sir Charles Hardinge, an ambitious young diplomat with good connections at court through his wife. In European terms it was as if Edward had got himself a diplomatic aide-de-camp such as the kaiser might have, an act of self-assertion which the foreign secretary, Lansdowne, didn’t much like. Hardinge was clever, confident, had a talent for pleasing the right people and, some said, “an unbecoming74 degree of self regard.” He was part of a new generation in the Foreign Office which argued that Britain needed to rebuild its bridges with France and Russia, and ought to be wary of Germany. Edward’s patronage would have a profound effect on his career: within three years, he would become successively ambassador to Russia and the senior civil servant at the Foreign Office.
The King set out on the Victoria and Albert with a small all-male party that included Fritz Ponsonby. The yacht was accompanied by eight battleships, four cruisers, four destroyers and a dispatch vessel, which slightly spoilt the effect when he insisted on drawing into Naples “incognito.” Right from the start, however, it was clear that Edward had a flair and enthusiasm for this kind of project. Fritz Ponsonby was surprised to discover that he had “made all the75 arrangements and supervised every detail.” In public Edward showed endless good humour, stood for hours, remembered names. He walked into the crowds and refused police protection. Everywhere he went, the public went wild, the press enthused. The Italians loved it—it was the first time a British monarch had visited since the Middle Ages. Little gestures brought the house down: in Rome, he stopped and bared his head as he went through the Porta Pia, and met the Pope—despite Balfour’s suggestion that it would play badly back home.
Paris was the greatest success of all. It was actually the French foreign minister, Théophile Delcassé, who had proposed it. For two or three years he had been of the opinion that it was time to resolve the two countries’ wearyingly long-standing quarrels. Germany was France’s most dangerous European enemy, and antagonism with Britain, which had reached such a hysterical pitch over Fashoda, was a distraction France could do without. Lord Lansdowne, the British foreign secretary, could see the advantages of an accord with France. It would save Britain a great deal of money and end the quarrels about Egypt, but he was cautious. Public opinion in both countries was still very hostile to the other, to such an extent that the French approaches had been top secret, and the British cabinet needed to be won over. Delcassé believed a visit from Edward, Britain’s most famous Francophile, might help the mood. Lansdowne was reluctant. He worried that Edward would be booed (he had no desire to travel himself); Balfour thought state visits accomplished nothing. The king, however,76 seems to have supported the idea of rapprochement from the first, and in March 1903 he decided he wanted to go to Paris. Bypassing both Lansdowne and the British ambassador in Paris—which neither man liked—Edward made the arrangements direct with the French president, Emile Loubet, via the British military attaché. The visit was kept secret until the last minute. “Most of the suite,” Fritz Ponsonby recalled, “had no idea where they were going.”
It was like a fairy tale. The king arrived to boos and jeers. Crowds in the Champs-Élysées shouted, “Vive Fashoda” and even “Vive Jeanne d’ Arc,” which as Ponsonby nervously noted, “seemed to be going back a long way in history.”77 The nationalist paper L’Autorité ran an open letter which began: “Your presence in78 Paris shocks, offends and revolts us patriots …;” La Patrie enumerated every Anglo-French quarrel since the Middle Ages. By the time Edward left, three days later, the Paris crowds were cheering him frenziedly. He turned in a pitch-perfect performance—aided by the fact that the French government had made the second day of his visit a public holiday. The whole city turned out to see him, and the Paris papers covered his every move in minute, breathless detail. In a perfect volte-face, they seemed simply to forget Fashoda and the Boers. Edward walked into the crowds, spoke in fluent French about how much he loved the city and how at home he felt there, looked constantly delighted. Parisians, who like so many in Europe felt a curious combination of fascination and dislike for Britain, had long harboured a soft spot for an English “milord,” and though he hadn’t been back since the mid-1890s, Edward had had the equivalent of film-star glamour ever since he had pursued actresses there in the 1860s.
After Paris, Edward went to Dublin and then to Vienna, to meet Emperor Franz Joseph. Though they had almost nothing in common—Franz Joseph was well known for rising at 4 a.m., eating his lunch at twelve and his dinner at five and being in bed by seven; Edward had barely drunk his first cup of coffee by ten—Edward admired the Hapsburg emperor. Franz Joseph had chosen to place himself above the general mêlée of politics, embracing the role of a ceremonial and dutiful leader, and was almost universally respected. His famous inscrutability probably made Edward want to charm him all the more.
From Vienna, the king progressed to Marienbad, the most fashionable spa in Europe, a diplomatic bazaar of princes, aristocrats, statesmen and dieters, made more so by Edward’s subsequent annual visits. There he networked, cut a figure and was followed everywhere by thrilled crowds. Few other royals had Edward’s appetite for being in public—Wilhelm was almost the only one. “I can still79 remember Uncle Bertie sitting unperturbed in front of his hotel,” Nicholas’s sister Olga later wrote, “puffing a cigar while hordes of Germans stood staring at him with awe and curiosity. ‘How can you stand it, Uncle Bertie?’ I asked him one day. ‘Why, it’s as much entertainment for me to stare at them as it is for them to stare at me,’ the King replied.”
Wilhelm watched Edward’s success with growing jealousy and irritation. Within days of the king’s departure from Rome in April 1903, he arrived, announcing that he too had come to see the Pope—Bülow putting it about, a little too insistently perhaps, that the trip had been planned for months. When Edward left Vienna, there once again was Wilhelm on his way to see his old friend Franz Joseph. The one place Edward failed to visit was Berlin—he said he was too busy. The truth was that when it came to Wilhelm, his bonhomie failed him. Wilhelm made a scene to the latest British military attaché, who gloried in the name of Colonel Wallscourt Hely-Hutchinson Waters, listing his myriad acts of sacrifice for Britain, and said how wounded he was that Germany had been excluded from the king’s favour.
In October, seething with resentment of Edward, Wilhelm waylaid Nicholas on his annual visit to Hesse. Revealing a pleasing anxiety about the direction of Anglo-French relations, Nicholas told Wilhelm that “he had to80 keep up relations with France and prevent them from joining the English.” Afterwards, Wilhelm wrote to Nicholas. The world was polarizing, he said, the “democratic countries81 governed by Parliamentary majorities, against the Imperial monarchies.” In April the following year, when Britain and France signed the Entente Cordiale, his words rang only too true.
Although it was essentially an agreement about colonial disputes, particularly in Egypt, where France acknowledged Britain’s dominant influence, and in Morocco, where Britain reciprocated, the Entente Cordiale couldn’t but seem a great sea change in Anglo-French relations. It promised a new era of cooperation between the two major democratic powers in Europe, it appeared to set42 aside a thousand years of hostility, and it was hard not to feel that it owed more than a little to each country’s suspicions of Germany. Though he had taken no role at all in the negotiations nor had invented the policy, Edward was given much of the credit for the Entente, and he showed no inclination to disabuse anyone of the notion. The miraculous turnaround his visit to Paris had caused was certainly an amazing public relations coup and a catalyst for serious negotiations. It helped to convince the doubters in the British cabinet. But if Delcassé and Lansdowne hadn’t been ready to get down to serious talks, the effect of the visit, like so many royal visits such as the king’s subsequent trip to Dublin that year, would have been negligible. To illustrate Edward’s new status, Count Osten Sacken, the Russian ambassador in Berlin, sent to the Russian Foreign Office a summary of an article in the German magazine Der Tag published just after the Entente was made public in April 1904. It said that Edward, once “regarded with82 scepticism,” was now held up “as one of the wisest state figures of our time. Having made a clever use of circumstances, King Edward has managed to restore England’s prestige as the master of Europe’s fate.” It was painful irony, the piece added, that Bülow’s failed attempts to promote German interests “had greatly contributed” to this. “Germany has failed to secure its interests in either the Persian Gulf, the Far East, or the Northern Coast of Africa.”
In little over a year Edward established himself as the face of British foreign policy, as well as the most glamorous monarch in Europe. He at last looked effective and successful. He enjoyed his newfound reputation, and it had its uses for Britain. The country needed a front man in Europe, and Edward fitted the role perfectly. With the exception of Chamberlain—who would resign from the government in 1903 to campaign and waste the rest of his career on the excitingly named tariff reform—the British government was notably lacking in charismatic public figures or statesmen who took talking to the public seriously. Lansdowne didn’t travel and his only foreign language was French. His successor, Sir Edward Grey, was even less inclined to travel. Both would be increasingly swamped with the sheer volume of Foreign Office paperwork. Frederick Ponsonby believed that the foreign secretary resented83 the credit the king was given for work that Lansdowne had actually done; on the other hand, he was happy to exploit the access and influence the king’s new reputation offered. When, in late 1903, Lansdowne decided that there was nothing to be lost by suggesting a similar Entente to Russia, Edward was brought in to make sure the proposals got through to Nicholas personally. Everyone knew the tsar was hard to get at. The king also charmed the new Russian ambassador, Count Alexander Benckendorff, whom he invited to Windsor, spoke to of his enthusiasm for the proposal, and asked back to play bridge. After the Entente Cordiale was announced, it was Edward who went round Europe reassuring the various monarchs and presidents that it had only peaceful implications.
Historians still argue over Edward’s contributions to foreign policy. Sentimental monarchists invariably overestimate his importance. Brisk political historians dismiss him as a genial sybarite who was surrounded by an efficient circle of aides, such as Knollys and Hardinge, who managed him. Arthur Balfour’s words to Lord Lansdowne after Edward died are often quoted: “So far as I84 can remember, during the years which you and I were Ministers, he never made an important suggestion of any sort on large questions of policy.” Policy was never what Edward was about. Sir Edward Grey was nearer to the mark when he wrote that while Edward was not one for “long sustained discussion85 about large aspects of policy,” he had a remarkable ability for “projecting his personality over a crowd,” and a real talent for personal relationships. His effect was almost Reaganite. There is also a whiff of jealousy about Balfour’s words—his time as prime minister, as it happened, had had less-than-glowing reviews. The truth was that Edward could be selfish, lazy, indulgent, trivial. He was a conventional thinker and an amateur. But within his own limitations and because of the needs of the time, he made a significant contribution to the furtherance of British foreign policy, the consequences of which would be by no means all benevolent.
* Salisbury was in failing health and depressed by the death of his wife and would die just over a year later.
* Taff Vale would be reversed in 1906 by the incoming Liberal government.
* While keeping the Reichstag Right happy, this policy, incidentally, had simultaneously alienated the German urban poor, who were voting in ever-bigger numbers for the Socialists.
* An ambitious Russian military attaché had been whispering against Lamsdorff to the Germans—but there was endemic intriguing at both the Russian and German courts, and Bülow considered the stories nonsense.