by Theo Aronson
The Kaiser enjoyed it all immensely. In fact, he considered his three-day visit to London to have been a great success. The crowds were enthusiastic; the state occasions, including a ball at the palace, were superbly organised. Even the rumour of the engagement of his only daughter to the King's eldest son, although unfounded, would have given him some satisfaction. Never, Wilhelm was able to assure his chancellor, had he felt the atmosphere at Buckingham Palace to be so free, so open, or so friendly.
Yet it was on the occasion of this visit that Wilhelm II's tendency to take matters into his own hands led to one of his diplomatic gaffes.
Just before leaving for the railway station, the Kaiser brought up the question of Morocco with the King. To quell an insurrection in Fez, France, who was responsible for keeping the Moroccan peace, had very properly sent troops to restore order. The French move was hotly resented by a jealous Germany. She saw no reason why she, too, should not have a slice of the African cake. And so, in a casual conversation with the King before catching his train, the Kaiser told him that although Germany would never go to war for the sake of Morocco, she might claim compensation elsewhere in Africa.
To this suggestion, runs the German chancellor's subsequent report, the British King made no reply.
Notwithstanding the Kaiser's assurance that Germany would not interfere in the Moroccan business, she later despatched the cruiser Panther to lie off the Moroccan coast, at Agadir. This show of force was designed as a warning, not only to France, but to France's ally, Britain.
The incident caused a major crisis. For several weeks during the summer of 1911, until a diplomatic solution was reached, a European war seemed inevitable. And it was when the Agadir crisis was at its height that the Kaiser, in self-justification, blandly announced that he had warned the British King, during that talk at Buckingham Palace, that Germany intended sending a warship to Morocco. This George V denied.
The episode illustrates, not only Wilhelm II's unreliability, but how little he appreciated the limits of George V's constitutional powers. The days when a British monarch could agree important matters of foreign policy had long since gone.
But the question causing the greatest friction between Britain and Germany at this time was the expansion of the German navy. Jealous of British sea power, Wilhelm II was determined that Germany should have as magnificent a battle-fleet. In an atmosphere of almost hysterical chauvinism, two vast navy bills were passed in the Reichstag and the Kaiser's great shipbuilding programme put in hand. In a rousing speech in Hamburg in 1911, Wilhelm spoke of the need 'to strengthen our fleet further so as to make sure that nobody will dispute the place in the sun to which we are entitled.'
All this Britain, as Mistress of the Seas, resented. As a result, a frantic and expensive naval race had developed between the two great nations.
Yet the Kaiser's motives were not necessarily belligerent. Chancellor von Bülow was not far wrong when he claimed that, 'What Wilhelm II most desired 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.'
But even the vainglorious Wilhelm II wanted something more tangible than this from his navy. A powerful German battle-fleet would deter any would-be aggressor. It would be a symbol of national greatness, ridding the upstart Reich of its inferiority complex and establishing it as a great maritime power. It might even induce Britain to forsake France and Russia and join the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria and Italy.
So the shipbuilding continued. And so did the mutual distrust between these two great Teutonic nations.
If George V held what Queen Victoria had called 'the greatest position there is', he was, paradoxically, one of the world's least powerful monarchs. Compared with Europe's other leading sovereigns, the British King had very little personal control of national affairs.
The 'greatness' of his position was of prestige rather than power. He might have been the latest in a line of sovereigns stretching back almost a thousand years, he might have reigned over the world's greatest empire, but, politically, George V was all but impotent. For, in Britain, the theory of constitutional monarchy was to be seen in its most fully developed form. The ideal of George V's grandfather – Queen Victoria's husband, Prince Albert – that the monarchy should be some sort of supra-national institution, standing high above party and faction, had by now been realised.
In Britain, real political power was vested in parliament. 'A Republic', as Bagehot put it, 'has insinuated itself beneath the folds of a Monarchy.' To the disapproval of sovereigns such as Wilhelm II, George V dared not act in defiance of his government. To do so would be to force its resignation, with the subsequent general election being fought on the emotive issue of Crown versus People. This the monarchy could not risk. The King's role was purely advisory, limited to the right to be consulted, the right to encourage and the right to warn.
And in George V, Prince Albert's other dictum – that the monarch should be the symbol of all that was best in national life, the exemplar of the domestic virtues of morality, hard work and dignity – was also being realised.
It was these two characteristics – a lack of personal power and an abundance of personal prestige – that were to keep the British monarch afloat in the turbulent waters that lay just ahead.
4
Heir to the Caesars
IN THE SAME SPRING of 1911 in which George V unveiled the monument to his grandmother, Queen Victoria, Victor Emmanuel III of Italy unveiled an infinitely more ambitious monument to his grandfather Victor Emmanuel II – the monarch under whom Italy had been united a mere fifty years before.
No nineteenth-century king could have hoped for a more grandiose memorial. Dominating Rome's Capitoline Hill and designed with all the self-confident bravura of the age, it was a blindingly white confection of soaring columns, stepped terraces, winged angels, rearing horses, elaborate bas reliefs and, rising triumphantly at its centre, a forty-foot-high bronze statue of Victor Emmanuel II. Nothing could have spoken more grandiloquently of the achievements of nationalism or the glory of kings.
It was a pity, then, that this latest representative of the House of Savoy should have been so insignificant-looking a figure. Born on 11 November 1869, Victor Emmanuel III had become king on the assassination of his father, King Umberto I, in 1900. As an only, and worryingly puny, child, he was generally regarded as a regrettable result of inbreeding (his parents had been first cousins) and of a genetically exhausted family tree. The House of Savoy, having established itself as a powerful family in the foothills of the Alps in about the year 1000, could claim to be the oldest ruling house in Europe. So perhaps it was only to be expected that this successful dynasty, moving up from counts to dukes to princes to kings of Piedmont-Sardinia and finally, in 1861, to kings of a newly independent and united Italy, should appear to be dwindling away in the person of Victor Emmanuel III.
He was tiny. The most generous assessment of his height was five foot and not quite a quarter of an inch. There was nothing – not plumed helmets, clever tailoring, sweeping cloaks nor high-heeled boots – that could possibly compensate for so regrettable a lack of height. Kings must look, if nothing else, majestic: Victor Emmanuel merely looked ridiculous. When he sat on his specially low thrones, his feet did not quite touch the floor. When he appeared in the midst of his equerries and officers, he looked like the least important person present. On becoming commander-in-chief of the army, the standard had to be lowered to five feet. Standing beside his statuesque wife, Queen Elena, in her outsize belle époque hats, he seemed more like her son than her husband. He was the butt of numberless jokes; he was the object of considerable derision. It was said t
hat he had all the characteristics of little creatures such as weasels or foxes; that he was cunning, selfish, not to be trusted.
Of that braggadocio so dear to the Italian heart, he had almost nothing. His manner could be chilling, his frugality was legendary, he was invariably to be seen in a shabby, even threadbare uniform. Court life, which under the late King Umberto and his forceful consort, Queen Margherita, had attained a certain splendour, had been simplified to the point of austerity. In the Quirinal Palace in Rome, the King and his family were content with a relatively small, sparsely furnished apartment. There was much less ceremonial, there were fewer liveried servants, state entertaining was cut down to a minimum.
'If I hadn't known we were going to the palace', complained one diplomat's wife, 'I should have thought we had made a mistake in the house. The square of the Quirinal was so quiet, almost deserted – no troops nor music, no crowd of people looking on and peering into carriages to see the dresses and jewels – no soldiers nor officials of any kind on the grand staircase . . . nothing like the glittering crowd of gold lace and uniforms one usually sees in the anteroom of a palace.'1
But much of the criticism of Victor Emmanuel III was unfair. There was a great deal more to him than was generally imagined. Although now remembered chiefly for the fact that he became Mussolini's cat's-paw, King Victor Emmanuel had many admirable qualities. In another country, at another time, he might have developed into an accomplished and popular monarch.
What he lacked in inches, he made up for in energy. He held himself erect, he moved briskly, his talk was rapid and to the point. His fellow sovereigns were often surprised by the breadth of his knowledge and the depth of his reading; he has been described as 'the single really learned monarch in Europe'. A visiting Hellenist was astonished at being able to talk to him about some abstruse point in Homer. A member of British Naval Intelligence was impressed by his intimate knowledge of the Royal Navy. Ambassadors found themselves disconcerted by his quick-fire, penetrating questions. More than one came away from an audience feeling drained and bemused.
He had a disarming naturalness. Although prepared to play his kingly role among the splendours of the Quirinal, he much preferred the rustic simplicity and cramped conditions of the Villa Savoia outside the city. Before long, he quit the palace altogether for permanent residence in the country: from there he would drive each morning to what he called his office in the Quirinal. His spare time was devoted to hunting and to the cataloguing and labelling of his famous coin collection. Like so many early twentieth-century monarchs, Victor Emmanuel was happiest in the almost bourgeois atmosphere of his domestic circle.
His marriage was very successful. Queen Elena was a daughter of that most picturesque of Balkan rulers, Prince Nicholas of Montenegro who, in 1910, proclaimed himself king of his mountainous little country. A tall, dark-skinned beauty (critics would refer to her as 'the shepherdess from Montenegro'; admirers as 'the black pearl') Princess Elena had been given a certain gloss at the Russian court. Since her marriage to Crown Prince Victor Emmanuel in 1896 and, more particularly, since becoming Queen of Italy four years later, Elena had developed into an impressive-looking woman. Yet she always retained something of the atmosphere of her native Montenegro.
As Theodore Roosevelt once wrote, 'She was a real peasant-queen, the Saga queen, the queen of the folk stories and fairy talcs – the kind of queen whom the hero meets when he starts out with his wallet and staff and travels "far and far and farther than far", and finally comes to a palace up to which he strolls, and sees the King sitting in front of the door looking at the sheep or the chickens . . . '
The couple had five children: four girls and a boy who, for thirty-four days in 1946, would become Umberto II, the last King of Italy. Whereas Victor Emmanuel had been raised on somewhat Prussian lines (in his youth imitation of the new, Prussian-dominated German empire had been considered de rigeur) the children were being brought up in what was referred to as the Montenegrin fashion: that is, informally and with great freedom.
Lloyd Griscom, the United States ambassador of the time, was always impressed by the easy-going attitudes of the royal family. The same could not be said for their entourage. 'Afterwards', he once wrote of a hunting trip with the King on the royal estate at Castel Porziano, 'we drove to a pavilion over-looking the beach, where the Queen and the ladies-in-waiting joined us for lunch, a very stiff affair. The Court expected royalty to remain exclusive and live up to the accepted principle that they were in a class above and by themselves. In consequence the King and Queen could never relax, and always had to regulate their conduct to avoid shocking their own staff. It was hard on them, since by nature they hated formality and constraint . . .
'Directly the meal was over, we three sauntered towards the beach while the entourage disappeared in the other direction. Once they were out of sight, the most remarkable transformation came over the King and Queen. They began romping up and down on the sand, throwing shells, laughing and shouting, paying no attention to me. They both had cameras and now and then stopped long enough to snap pictures of each other.'
The royal couple carried out their many public duties – the state visits, the audiences, the tours of inspection, the launching of ships, the laying of foundation stones – conscientiously and uncomplainingly. Any national disaster, such as the terrible earthquake at Messina in 1908, revealed them at their best. Hurrying to the scene of devastation, they spent several days among the distressed and dying. The Queen worked on a hospital ship, tending to the injured. She was enough of a queen to appreciate that her presence brought immense comfort to the suffering. 'I am the Queen of Italy,' she said quietly to one severely crushed, bitterly sobbing old woman, 'and I tell you that you need have no fear.' Such is the potency of the royal mystique that the sobbing stopped immediately.
'There is no Italian worthy of the name, be he republican, socialist, or even anarchist who, however much he may be opposed to royalty as a system,' noted one contemporary, 'does not recognise their devotion and their personal courage in the face of national danger and distress.'2
But there was a more important way by which Victor Emmanuel III hoped to retain the loyalty of the various political groupings within his country. By keeping the monarchy free of controversy, by lifting it out of the political sphere, he intended to ensure the survival of his dynasty. For the crown to endure, it had to be the symbol of all Italians, and not only those natural monarchists, the conservatives. Over half a century before, Camillo Cavour, one of the architects of Italian unity, had preached that 'reforms carried out in time, instead of weakening authority, reinforce it: instead of precipitating revolution, they prevent it'.
This was a lesson which Victor Emmanuel had taken to heart. At the very start of his reign, in 1900, he had set a new tone by assuring the senate – the upper of the two chambers of the Italian parliament – that he not only supported the existing institution of constitutional monarchy, but that he favoured a 'liberal monarchy'.
Within months he had put his words into action. He replaced his late father's conservative prime minister with an undeniably liberal one who was, in turn, succeeded by the no less liberal Giovanni Giolitti. With Giolitti's appointment, the decade of the 'socialist monarchy' – the ten years leading up to the First World War – was under way.
As Giolitti's political reforms, including an extension of the franchise, coincided with an unprecedented economic boom (but always in the industrial north, at the expense of the impoverished south) the forces of revolutionary socialism were considerably weakened. Italian politics became less polarised; Marx, as Giolitti put it, was stored away in the attic. And however questionable his theories and methods might have been, Giolitti proved to be of considerable value to the House of Savoy: Victor Emmanuel III could not have hoped for a more loyal prime minister. These were to be the golden years of his reign. 'Liberal Italy' they called the country during this period and in few did this liberalism seem more strikingly personified than in the K
ing.
The King's distaste for pompous ceremonial and lavish entertaining was well known; less appreciated was his strict adherence to the constitutional limits of his position. In spite of much wider personal powers, he aimed to be a monarch in the mould of Britain's George V or Belgium's Albert I; to distance himself from the everyday business of government. 'Does parliament make trouble for you?' asked one foreign ambassador. 'Oh, no, they don't make any for me,' he took pains to point out, 'but they do for the government.' And it was noticed that he seldom referred to himself as 'king' but rather to 'the position which I hold'.3
Yet this is not to claim that Victor Emmanuel was not fully conscious of the majesty of that position. Like all monarchs, he was very concerned with the importance of his kingly status and with the illustriousness of his dynasty. Modest in many things, he was never modest about the splendours and achievements of his house.
And it was in order to add still more lustre to his dynasty that Victor Emmanuel was so anxious to continue the task undertaken by his grandfather, Victor Emmanuel II. The Risorgimento – the unification of all Italians, under the House of Savoy – had still to be completed. It would be up to him to complete it.
In its determination to be taken seriously as a great power, Italy was fulfilling at least two of the classic qualifications: she was founding an empire and she was a member of one of the great European power blocs. The Libyan War of 1911–12 won her a vast tract of North African territory from the decaying Ottoman empire. And an alliance, concluded in 1882 by Victor Emmanuel's father, Umberto I, had linked her to the Central Powers, Germany and Austria–Hungary.