Grandmama of Europe: The Crowned Descendants of Queen Victoria

by Theo Aronson

  In the spring of 1906, having in previous years paid official visits to the sovereigns of Portugal, Italy, Austria and Germany, the King sailed to Greece. In Athens, of course, he would once more be among relations. King George I of the Hellenes was Queen Alexandra's brother and the Crown Princess Sophie was King Edward's niece. The first five days of the visit were spent on the beautiful island of Corfu. 'It is interesting to note the remains of the British occupation more than fifty years before,' observed one chauvinistic member of the King's suite, 'which even the want of care and slovenliness of the Greeks had been unable to destroy.' While on Corfu, King Edward and Queen Alexandra were reunited with their son and daughter-in-law, the Prince and Princess of Wales, who were on their way home from an official tour of India. Together, the royal party sailed on to Athens for the official part of the visit.

  Queen Alexandra enjoyed the Greek visit immensely. She was devoted to her brother, King George, and the recent death of their father, old King Christian IX of Denmark, brought brother and sister closer still. King Edward's stay was somewhat spoiled by the fact that Lord Charles Beresford, commanding the battleship squadron of the British Mediterranean Fleet, neglected to change into full-dress uniform to receive the Greek King. The normally easy-going King George complained to the King about the implied insult and King Edward (who anyway disliked Beresford) lost no time in reporting him to the Board of Admiralty.

  Crown Princess Sophie was delighted to welcome her English relations. Displaying almost as much enthusiasm as her late mother, the Empress Frederick, Sophie took them sightseeing: to the Acropolis, the British School of Archaeology, the Athens Museum, the Theatre of Dionysus, the Theseus Temple and the Olympic Games Stadium. There were dinners, en famille, for eighteen, and a state banquet for a hundred and eighty.

  One day the party drove out to the royal home at Tatoi where they all lunched in the garden. The Greek royal family, says Ponsonby, 'were all delightful', with the Crown Princess Sophie the most delightful of them all. Although, with the years, Sophie had become more assured and dignified, she had none of the conceit of her brother, the Kaiser. Indeed, she was quite ready to laugh with Sir Charles Hardinge, the Minister in attendance on King Edward, about 'the pompous airs of the Kaiser, comparing them with the dignity of King Edward'. She asked Hardinge if he did not find her brother 'absurd'. It was not, says the disconcerted Hardinge, 'an easy question to answer'.

  During his Mediterranean cruise the following year – the spring of 1907 – King Edward met yet another of his relations: King Alfonso XIII of Spain, the husband of his niece Ena. King Alfonso had invited King Edward to pay a state visit to Madrid, but with the memory of his niece's wedding-day fresh in his mind, the British King refused the invitation. They met, instead, at the Spanish port of Cartagena; or rather, off the port, as the King's well-founded fear of anarchists prevented him from setting foot in the town itself. The meeting was a great success. King Edward was fond of the Spanish King: Alfonso XIII was exactly the sort of charming, amusing, animated, daredevil, unintellectual young man with whom King Edward felt at ease. They shared a passion for uniforms. 'Alfonso has created me a Captain-General in his Army and I wore the uniform at dinner last night,' reported the delighted King Edward to his son, Prince George. 'He appeared as a 16th Lancer, which suited him very well.'

  Again the question of a uniform soured the King's visit to Spain no less than it had to Greece. This time the offender was Sir Maurice de Bunsen, the British Ambassador at Madrid. Uncertain as to what he should wear to board the Victoria and Albert on its arrival off Cartagena at ten in the morning, de Bunsen plumped for white knee breeches and stockings. The King was furious. 'Trousers are always worn on board ship!' he spluttered.

  If sartorially the visit had its disasters, politically it was highly satisfactory. After protracted negotiations and by a secret exchange of notes, England, France and Spain agreed to guarantee each other's possessions in the Mediterranean. That accomplished, the King sailed on to Gaeta where he met the King of Italy. On this occasion, there were no political discussions.

  Continuing the royal round, Edward and Alexandra went to Scandinavia in the spring of 1908. Again, the series of visits was very much of a family affair, for the King had relations in Denmark, Norway and Sweden. With the death of old King Christian IX of Denmark in 1906, Queen Alexandra's brother had become King Frederick VIII of Denmark. His second son (Queen Alexandra's nephew) was now King Haakon of Norway and married, of course, to King Edward's daughter Maud. In Sweden, too, there was a family connection: for in 1905, Princess Margaret of Connaught (the daughter of one of King Edward's brothers) had married Gustaf Adolf, the eldest son of the Swedish Crown Prince.

  Only in the Swedish capital of Stockholm was there some show of pomp. In Denmark, the new King was as unpretentious as the old; and King Haakon of Norway was less pretentious than either. Indeed, King Haakon shocked King Edward's entourage by announcing his intention of travelling about the streets of his capital by tram. Only by moving amongst his subjects with the utmost simplicity would he be able, he reckoned, to win popularity and combat republicanism. Against any such notion, the British argued hotly. 'I told him,' claims Ponsonby, 'that he must get up on a pedestal and remain there.'

  Queen Maud, although overjoyed to welcome her parents to her new home, experienced considerable difficulty in entertaining them adequately. The vast royal palace, still in the process of renovation, was said to be 'very uncomfortable' and lacked enough bathrooms and furniture. The state banquet, complained one of the guests, 'was very indifferently done, as the suite were new to the game and the staff had never done a big dinner'. The visit, never the less, was very enjoyable, assuming, as Sir Charles Hardinge put it, 'the character of a family rather than an official visit'.

  'The Norwegians,' he added blandly, 'are a very simple race, though not without culture. There was little scope for political conversations with them.'

  However, it was as a result of political conversations between Britain and Russia, that King Edward paid his next visit: to Tsar Nicholas II, in the summer of 1908. An Anglo-Russian convention had been signed the year before. This convention, whose existence was rather more significant than its text, was looked upon as 'the triumph of King Edward's policy of which the Anglo-French entente [of 1904] was the first step'. In other words, Britain was now loosely allied to both France and Russia.

  As Russia was regarded as being even more dangerous to crowned heads than Spain, the sovereigns arranged to meet at sea. They would anchor off Reval (now Tallin) in the Gulf of Finland. The passage of the Victoria and Albert through the North Sea was extremely rough. Even Queen Alexandra, who was a very good sailor (she always appeared on deck, it was said, looking as elegant as though she had just emerged from a bandbox) experienced a nasty moment. This was when, at the tea table, a sudden lurch of the ship flung her to the floor and sent everything – tea-urn, teapot, china, cakes, biscuits, bread and sugar – tumbling into her lap. Characteristically, she treated it as a great joke.

  At Reval were waiting the imperial yachts Standart and Polar Star, escorted by such remnants of the Russian Imperial Navy as had survived the naval disaster of Tsushima during the recent Russo-Japanese War. By now the weather had cleared and the two days spent off Reval were delightful. While the Ministers talked, the royalties exchanged visits. The two families were doubly related: Tsar Nicholas II was Queen Alexandra's nephew (her sister, the Dowager Empress Marie, was there as well) and the Tsaritsa Alexandra was, of course, King Edward's niece. 'There was no disguising the fact,' claims Hardinge, 'that the Emperor and Empress were extraordinarily happy in the company of their uncle and aunt, and the visit had largely a family character.'

  The King, almost bursting out of his uniform of the Kiev Dragoons, boarded the Standart and delighted the guard of honour of Russian sailors by saying to them, according to the Russian custom and in Russian, 'Good morning my children'. To this they answered, 'God save the King'. This quaint exchange w
as followed by another Russian tradition: a snack of caviar sandwiches and kirsch; the liquor tasting, thought the British visitors, 'like boot varnish'.

  Somewhat less satisfactory was the King's reception of his Ambassador to St Petersburg, Sir Arthur Nicolson. Again it was a question of dress. Throughout the interview, at which King Edward seemed quite uninterested in Nicolson's answers to his disconnected questions, the King's eyes never left the Ambassador's decorations.

  'What is that bauble?' he finally asked.

  With some pride Nicolson explained that it was the 'badge of Nova Scotia Baronetcy', the only hereditary order in England, conferred on his ancestors in 1637.

  The King was not impressed. 'Never wear that bauble again,' he said.

  For the Empress Alexandra, the visit of her 'dear Uncle Bertie' was a blessed break from both the public and the private trials of her life. The King and Queen were so kind; they brought, to Alicky's tortured mind, a breath of another, more light-hearted, more honest-to-goodness world. If life aboard the imperial yacht was safer and more relaxed than life ashore, then how much more so was it aboard the Victoria and Albert. To the British visitors, the security measures aboard the Russian yachts seemed extraordinary. Even the women members of a choral society, singing from a boat anchored near the Polar Star, were stripped and searched before their concert. 'What,' wondered Ponsonby, 'would be said if, when the Russian Emperor came to England, and some ladies' choral society asked leave to serenade him, our police insisted on stripping and searching them?'

  But even now, in the comforting atmosphere of King Edward's visit to Reval, the Tsaritsa's latent hysteria was never far from the surface. On the last night of the King's visit, the British party dined on board the superbly appointed Standart. Both King and Emperor made reassuring speeches and, after dinner, there was a dance on deck. As the sun, so far north, did not set until almost half-past eleven at night, the sky above the gently heaving yacht was a weird and beautiful red. In this strange half-light, Sir Charles Hardinge left the company dancing under the paper lanterns and wandered around to the other, deserted, side of the deck. Suddenly, he heard sobbing. Following the sound, he discovered the Tsaritsa, sitting alone and in floods of tears. He asked if there was anything that he could do to help. No, she answered, nothing. She merely wished to be left alone.

  Could it have been that this contact with her English relations had brought back to Alicky, all too poignantly, memories of the tranquil, trouble-free days of her English-style girlhood?

  The following morning, the Victoria and Albert sailed back to England.

  Because of his state visits to France, Russia, Germany, Austria, Spain, Italy, Greece, Portugal, Denmark, Norway and Sweden, King Edward VII earned his reputation as a supreme royal diplomat: the 'Peacemaker of Europe'. And all the while, as he spread what many considered to be his propitiatory influence, the stage was being set for the great conflict of 1914-1918.

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  By not every sovereign in Europe was King Edward VII looked upon as an angel of peace. To his nephew, Kaiser Wilhelm II, King Edward appeared in a very different guise. He was 'the Encircler': a satanic schemer intent on ringing Germany with enemies. King Edward's main purpose, imagined his nephew, was the isolating of the Second Reich in a hostile Europe.

  There had never, of course, been much love lost between uncle and nephew. They met, officially and unofficially, several times during the King's reign, and the occasions were anything but harmonious. 'There was always a feeling of thunder in the air whenever the King and the Emperor were together,' noted Ponsonby. To the King, the Kaiser was a vulgar, unpredictable, mischief-making megalomaniac; to the Kaiser, the King was a corrupt and double-dealing old roue. King Edward always tried to keep their meetings as short as possible and to avoid all contentious subjects.

  One of the most contentious was the expansion of the German navy. Germany, anxious to become a world power and jealous of British naval might, was determined to build up her own fleet. This Britain, as Mistress of the Seas, hotly resented. As a result, a frantic and expensive naval race had developed between the two nations. It was a race in which the emotions of both King and Kaiser were deeply involved.

  Yet the Kaiser dismissed his uncle's assumption that Germany was planning a naval invasion of Britain as 'sheer nonsense'. In this, he was probably quite sincere. Wilhelm's motives in building up the German fleet were not necessarily belligerent. A powerful navy would deter any would-be aggressor and would establish the Reich as a great maritime power. It would be a symbol of national greatness. It might even, the Kaiser had once imagined, encourage Britain to turn her back on France and Russia and join the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria and Italy.

  His Chancellor, Bernhard von Bülow, was not far wrong when he claimed that the Kaiser's aims were not really aggressive. 'What Wilhelm II most desired . . .' he wrote, 'was to see himself, at the head of a glorious German fleet, starting out on a peaceful visit to England. The English sovereign, with his fleet, would meet the German Kaiser in Portsmouth. The two fleets would file past each other, the two monarchs, each wearing the naval uniform of the other's country . . . would then stand on the bridge of their flagships. Then, after they had embraced in the prescribed manner, a gala dinner with lovely speeches would be held in Cowes.'

  Be that as it may, the shipbuilding continued. And so did Wilhelm's conviction that Uncle Bertie was pursuing a nefarious anti-German policy. To each of King Edward's Continental visits, the German Press was quick to attribute some sinister, Machiavellian motive. It was a conviction which not even the King's state visit to Berlin, in February 1909, was able to refute.

  This three-day stay in the German capital was to be the last of King Edward's state visits. The occasion, which the Kaiser was determined should be one of unparalleled magnificence, opened with several farcical incidents. A sudden lurch of the train carrying the royal party to Berlin scattered a trayful of quails over the accident-prone Queen Alexandra, leaving one perched on her toupet. She would arrive in Berlin, she assured her amused companions, coiffée de cailles.

  On reaching the Brandenburg frontier the following morning, the King (having mistaken the time) was not yet dressed in his German Field-Marshal's uniform for the inspection of the guard of honour. While he scrambled into his clothes, the entire company stood to attention on the platform for ten minutes while the band thumped out 'God save the King' over and over again.

  At Berlin it was worse. On the red-carpeted platform of the Lehrter Bahnhof, the German imperial family was solemnly waiting opposite the spot where the King's carriage was destined to draw up. However, the King, having moved into the Queen's carriage, suddenly alighted a good hundred yards farther down the platform. With an undignified clanking of swords, clinking of medals, fluttering of plumes, clutching of feather boas and hitching up of skirts, the German royalties came dashing down the platform to receive him.

  And finally, as the procession moved pompously through the acclaiming streets, the second carriage – carrying the Queen and the German Empress – stopped dead. The horses refused to move. This meant that the entire procession was held up while the royal ladies and several others were obliged to change carriages, in full view of the public. Quite unaware that his was the only carriage moving forward, the Kaiser, with the King by his side, drove on to the Royal Schloss. On hearing about the fracas, Wilhelm was furious. That it should happen in front of the horse-conscious British was doubly infuriating.

  The rest of the visit was suitably impressive. The imperial court might have been showy but it was not without a certain brilliance. The luncheons, the gala dinners, the receptions and the balls were all superbly done. The Kaiser was on his best behaviour. In the ordinary way, King Edward would have enjoyed the pageantry, but he was feeling far from well. He felt puffed and fretful; he tired easily. One day, after a luncheon at the British Embassy, he suddenly collapsed. His doctor, Dr James Reid, was summoned immediately, but once the tight collar of his Prussian unif
orm was unfastened, the King recovered. According to his doctor, King Edward had suffered a bronchial attack.

  As a result, some of the King's less important duties were taken over by Queen Alexandra. As always, she looked lovely. Although Alexandra was old enough to have been the German Empress's mother, she was said to be looking more like her daughter. During the entr'acte at the opera, Alexandra moved amongst the audience, saying a few words here and there. Despite the fact that she could not hear a word that was being said in reply, she charmed everyone by her grace and beauty. 'I have never seen anything better done,' says Ponsonby.

  The visit ended, as it had begun, on a note of farce. One of the stars at the Kaiser's court was the English-born Princess Daisy of Pless. Seeing in her own, decidedly attractive, person, the embodiment of a rapprochement between Britain and Germany, the Princess was determined to play her part to the full during the English King's visit. Surely the King, with his well-known weakness for beautiful young women, would not fail to be impressed by her? He was not impressed; and he very soon tired of her efforts to monopolize him.

  However, it was while chatting to her after the British Embassy luncheon that the King had his bronchial attack. Here was her opportunity. She would win his confidence by recommending a German throat specialist. That very afternoon she dropped a line to Frederick Ponsonby, suggesting that her specialist visit the King immediately. Ponsonby referred the matter to the King's doctor, Sir James Reid; Reid referred it to the Kaiser's physician; the Kaiser's physician referred it to the Kaiser; the Kaiser threatened to have the man flung out of the palace if ever he dared set foot in it. Ponsonby thus wrote to the Princess, declining her offer.

  But she was not to be put off. If the Kaiser would not allow her man into the palace, she must arrange for him to meet the King elsewhere. She wrote again to Ponsonby, outlining a new plan: on leaving Berlin at the end of the state visit, the King was to order his train to halt at the nearby station of Spandau, where it would be boarded by Princess Daisy and her throat specialist. Unbeknown to Ponsonby, the Princess wrote to Sir Charles Hardinge as well. Again she suggested that the royal train stop at Spandau. This time, however, she made no mention of the throat specialist; suspecting, by now, that the King was simply not interested in having her protege forced, so to speak, down his throat, she merely indicated that she wished to take leave of the King. When Hardinge consulted King Edward about it, the King refused to have anything more to do with Princess Daisy.