Bertie knew that managing these psychological flaws with infinite tact was even more important than any political negotiations if a European war was to be avoided.
Wilhelm and Bertie had some things in common. They could both be very charming company, particularly if beautiful women were around, and they shared an obsession with details, especially where clothes were concerned. But unlike his uncle, Wilhelm had a petty streak, and felt obliged, for example, to force his superior knowledge on people. Christopher Hibbert cites a case when, à propos of nothing, Wilhelm asked Bertie’s private secretary Frederick Ponsonby how many councillors served on the London County Council, and how often there were elections. Ponsonby confessed his ignorance, only for Wilhelm to recite the exact figures across the dinner table to impress the guests. He had obviously learnt them by heart just to be able to show off. He was Mr Right, but in the wrong way – a man who hated to be caught out or proved wrong, and who would make sure he retaliated if he was offended.
As soon as Wilhelm had succeeded to his throne in June 1888, Bertie had begun to bear the brunt of these attacks. Once, for example, Bertie – who was still Prince of Wales at the time – intervened in a heated argument between the German Foreign Minister and the British Ambassador about the Franco-Prussian War, and made offensive personal remarks about Wilhelm. When these were reported back to him, Wilhelm immediately began plotting his revenge.
Shortly afterwards, in September 1888, Bertie was in Vienna visiting the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph, and was told that Kaiser Wilhelm planned to arrive in the city just after he had left. In a spirit of family togetherness, Bertie wrote to Wilhelm telling him that he would wait and be sure to see him. However, Wilhelm replied that he did not wish to see his uncle, and furthermore, he had booked Bertie’s rooms, the best suite in the best hotel in town, so Bertie – who was a mere prince while he was an emperor – had better vacate them. With admirable calm, Uncle Bertie penned a pained letter, saying that he felt ‘the greatest affection’ for Wilhelm and was hurt by his behaviour. When this appeal went unheeded, Bertie packed up and left. He knew that there was no point prolonging the confrontation when his nephew was in this kind of mood.
But Wilhelm’s tempers were usually assuaged by a petty victory, and when he visited England the following year, everything was sweetness and light. The Brits put on a big show of hospitality, and gave Wilhelm’s ego the dose of love it needed to keep it functioning smoothly. Bertie made him an admiral of the fleet (fortunately it didn’t mean that Wilhelm could sail off in a British battleship), the Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain gave a speech saying that Britain’s ‘natural alliance’ was with ‘the great German Empire’, and Bertie got an invitation for a return visit the following year during which Wilhelm was careful to treat his uncle ‘quite like a sovereign’, as Bertie expressed it in a letter to his mother.
But, just like Bertie’s inflammation of the knee and his chesty colds, Wilhelm’s pettiness flared up several times throughout the 1890s. Uncle and nephew had a running battle at Cowes, for example. When Wilhelm bought a racing yacht in 1891, Bertie commissioned his own, Britannia, with which he enjoyed frequent success at Cannes Regatta and during Cowes Week. Wilhelm reacted by ordering his own new boat, bigger and faster than Britannia, from the same builder, prompting a saddened Bertie to sell his pride and joy and conclude that ‘Cowes was once a pleasant holiday for me, but now the Kaiser has taken command it is nothing but . . . [a] perpetual firing of salutes, cheering and other tiresome disturbances’.
Wilhelm had won again, which probably explains why his state visit to Britain in 1899 was marked by yet another show of family friendship. He declared his neutrality about South Africa while other Europeans were plotting a pro-Boer coalition, and bathed in the British affection at the time for anyone not French. The only moment of Anglo-German disharmony came when Bertie had to intervene to stop Alexandra making fun of Wilhelm for bringing a hairdresser whose only job was to curl the imperial moustache.
Good relations were maintained in 1901 when Wilhelm chose to stay on in England as a private citizen between Victoria’s death and her funeral2 ten days later, despite the protests of his government back in Berlin. As a guest of honour at the huge funeral procession through London, he finally undid the snub of not being invited to the Diamond Jubilee, and returned home talking enthusiastically about an Anglo-German alliance (though he called it Deutsch–Englisch – a different order of priorities).
Predictably, family relations were strained to the limit when the Entente Cordiale was signed. Wilhelm’s reaction was his usual mix of political menace and petty absurdity. Cruising around the Med in March 1905, he ordered his ship to stop just offshore of the Moroccan port of Tangier, and had himself rowed to shore through a dangerous swell, almost capsizing in the surf, an experience which apparently terrified him. He then rode to the Sultan’s palace on a horse that objected to being ridden by a German and bucked so much that he was almost sent sprawling. There, Wilhelm made a speech announcing that he had come to support Morocco’s right to independence from France. This must have confused the Sultan, who knew that this madman on a white horse had not brought enough firepower to stand up to the large number of heavily armed Frenchmen who were keen to have a say in Morocco’s future. Nevertheless, Wilhelm was so pleased with his troublemaking that he got back on his yacht and sent Bertie an April Fool’s joke. In her biography of Bertie, Jane Ridley quotes the telegram: ‘So happy to be once more at Gibraltar and to send you from British soil expression of my faithful friendship. Everybody so nice to me. Had a delightful dinner and garden party with Sir George and Lady White and many pretty ladies.’ It sounds banal, but this was at a time when an unscheduled stop at Gibraltar, the heart of British naval power in the Mediterranean, by Kaiser Wilhelm and his escort of German gunboats would have had the telegraph wires to London glowing red hot.
It seems almost impossible to imagine the leader of such a powerful nation as Germany mounting a small colonial invasion that threatened European peace, and then blithely having a joke with one of his potential opponents in the resulting war. It was as if Hitler had invaded the Sudetenland and then sent Churchill a photo of a potato shaped like de Gaulle’s head. And the sheer insanity of Wilhelm’s behaviour shows how vital Bertie was to keeping the peace. Although the Kaiser was a head of state playing on a world stage, most of his provocation, both earnest and petty, was directed at his uncle, and only his uncle’s reaction really mattered. In the early twentieth century, Bertie really was the key to world peace.
III
As it was, Bertie was obliged to take the mad Tangier landing seriously and send a message of support to France’s President Loubet, prompting Wilhelm to call his uncle a ‘devil’ and even make a public pronouncement about Bertie’s immorality and his adulterous affair with Alice Keppel. Bertie was furious, but confined himself to private fuming – except for an impromptu speech while visiting President Loubet, during which he unwisely announced that he would like to send 150,000 troops to Schleswig-Holstein. It was as close as Bertie ever came to descending to Wilhelm’s level.
An international confrontation over Morocco was only averted by a hurried conference at which Britain affirmed its support for France, as promised by the Entente Cordiale. In the face of such solidarity, Germany could only step down, leaving Wilhelm’s nose bloodied yet again, and putting him in an even more dangerous mood.
Luckily, as always, Bertie was able to play the family card and keep the peace. On Wilhelm’s birthday in 1906, Bertie wrote to him reminding him that they were ‘old friends and near relations’, and expressing the hope that ‘the affectionate feelings that have always existed may invariably continue’. Wilhelm fell for the family sweet talk, reminding Bertie in his reply that they had been together at Victoria’s deathbed – ‘that great Sovereign-Lady’ – and that ‘she drew her last breath in my arms’. Wilhelm felt sure, he said, that ‘from the home of Eternal Light she is now looking down upon us a
nd will rejoice when she sees our hands clasped in cordial3 and loyal friendship’. Wilhelm even concluded that his uncle’s letter was his ‘most cherished [birthday] gift’, though this may be a slight exaggeration given that everyone around him in Germany knew that his egomania would not have been satisfied with anything less than a new racehorse, a sword that was longer than Bertie’s, or a new battleship to play with.
And the biggest problem with Kaiser Wilhelm was his battleships. Despite constant inquiries from Britain as to why Germany needed such a huge navy, and coded warnings that the British saw this naval arms race as provocation, the German shipyards kept on turning out new gunboats. Finally, in August 1908, with political discussions getting nowhere, Bertie was sent to visit Wilhelm for a chat – one sailor recommending to another that he might like to tone down his boatbuilding habit.
The two men locked themselves away in a room in Friedrichshof Castle, near Frankfurt, and talked for more than three hours without any disagreements. In fact, Bertie got the feeling that it was pointless broaching the subject of naval policy with Wilhelm, and kept things light. After this, suitably buttered up, the Kaiser was left to pursue more serious political matters with Charles Hardinge for the rest of the day. Discussions were friendly and as Hardinge stood up to leave, Wilhelm told him ‘in a very emphatic manner’ that ‘the future of the world is in the hands of the Anglo-Teuton race’, and that Britain needed to ‘lean on a continental power, and that power should be Germany’. He sounded exactly like someone who had been brought back into the family fold. Bertie had done his job perfectly.
The need for Bertie’s personal touch became even more urgent on 6 October 1908 when Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria–Hungary – one of Bertie’s oldest European colleagues, and until then a reliable friend – announced that he was annexing Bosnia–Herzegovina.
That is one of those sentences that usually scares people off reading anything about early twentieth-century history, and with good cause. Suffice it to say that the annexation of this small Balkan territory set off a chain reaction in European politics, starting with grumbling in nearby Serbia, and continuing with insurgency in Bulgaria, annoyance in Italy, fury in Russia, calls for calm from everyone else except the Germans, and ultimately the First World War. For the moment, though, the key point was that Britain, France and Russia demanded negotiations over the Bosnia–Herzegovina question, which Wilhelm did everything he could to stall, quibbling about the date, location and conditions of the talks. It wasn’t until April the following year that everyone agreed to accept the annexation, by which time most European leaders were aggrieved at almost all the others. The whiff of war was in the air, and Wilhelm’s curly moustache was twitching with anticipation.
At the end of that same chaotic month, October 1908, tensions were heightened still further when an interview with Wilhelm was published in England, in the Daily Telegraph. In it he swore – in startlingly non-imperial language – his friendship for Britain, saying that the English were ‘mad, mad, mad as March hares’ not to believe him. ‘Have I ever been false to my word?’ he asked, knowing full well that he had on many occasions. He went on:
Falsehood and prevarication are alien to my nature. My actions ought to speak for themselves, but you [British] listen not to them but to those who misinterpret and distort them. That is a personal insult which I feel and resent. To be forever misjudged, to have my repeated offers of friendship weighed and scrutinized with jealous, mistrustful eyes, taxes my patience severely.
He continued with threats that were as thinly veiled as a belly dancer in a Tangier sailors’ bar:
Germany is a young and growing empire. She has a worldwide commerce which is rapidly expanding, and to which the legitimate ambition of patriotic Germans refuses to assign any bounds. Germany must have a powerful fleet to protect that commerce and her manifold interests in even the most distant seas. She expects those interests to go on growing, and she must be able to champion them manfully in any quarter of the globe. Her horizons stretch far away.
Very similar dreams of world domination – and insincere promises of peace – would be expressed by another German thirty years later.
Fortunately for Britain, the pro-British parts of Wilhelm’s interview so incensed patriotic Germans that he was crucified in his own press and called to order by his government. This proof that nobody loved him apparently sent Wilhelm into fits of childlike weeping.
Shortly afterwards, things got even worse, both for Kaiser Wilhelm and his uncle. It was announced that an American magazine called The Century was about to publish another interview with the talkative Kaiser. A journalist called W. B. Hale had spoken to him on board the imperial yacht and subsequently had his interview approved by the German Foreign Office. However, because of the Telegraph scandal, the Germans withdrew their permission to publish. Unfortunately, there were leaks, and a synopsis was printed in the British press, all of it politically inflammatory and some parts downright warlike. ‘If the pan-European war, so much talked about, is inevitable, the sooner it came the better,’ the Observer quoted Wilhelm as saying. It reported that:
Germany was ready and tired of the suspense . . . King Edward [had] been humiliating His Imperial Majesty for more than two years, and he [Wilhelm] was exasperated . . . The effect of the Zeppelin dirigible balloon would give Germany a powerful advantage in war and she was ready to make use of it to the fullest extent.
Wilhelm was even suggesting an anti-British alliance between Germany and the USA. Britain was, he said, a ‘decadent’ and ‘faithless’ nation and, in a section of the interview not quoted in the British press, he made more scathing remarks about Bertie’s private morals.
Wilhelm later denied that he had ever said a word of it, but it all rang very true, and if Bertie had been a lesser diplomat and statesman he would probably have decided that his crazed nephew was beyond even his redemption. However, at this crucial time in Europe’s affairs, Bertie was able to prove yet again that he was the ideal person to have at the helm, a man who (unlike Wilhelm) had lived enough to gain a balanced sense of priorities. Admittedly, they were slightly French priorities, with the emphasis on pleasure, but they enabled him to weather storms like this and keep Europe on course.
Bertie therefore swallowed his pride in the national interest and went to meet Wilhelm in February 1909, his main mission to impress upon his hot-headed nephew that he needed to stop threatening global war.
Wilhelm’s welcome was cordial. He had even arranged for Bertie’s suite to be decorated with a portrait of Queen Victoria and a picture celebrating British naval victories. This was clearly someone wanting approval from his dear old uncle. However, by now Bertie was too ill to make the most of his authority over his nephew. Uncharacteristically, during the official dinners and a ball given in his honour, he sat almost silent and immobile. He couldn’t stop coughing. At one banquet, he had prepared a written speech, but he was too breathless and wheezing to deliver it. He even declined the honour that he usually enjoyed so much – distributing gifts of British medals to local dignitaries. And at a performance of a ballet, Sardanapalus, the story of an Assyrian king fabled for his orgies and the huge number of his concubines, Bertie fell asleep – a sure sign that he was not a well man.
It was left to Alexandra to broach the important subject, in her own innocent way. She told Wilhelm that he was ‘stupid’ to be ‘making all this commotion about . . . [his] navy’. The kindest thing one could say was that hers was a tactic lacking somewhat in Bertie’s subtle touch.
Wilhelm’s only reaction to this sorry show was to have a word with his stool pigeon at Buckingham Palace, James Reid, who was now Bertie’s principal doctor, and agree on a code in case Bertie fell dangerously ill. Wilhelm was afraid that his uncle would refuse to send for him, just as Victoria had done in her final days. It seemed that Wilhelm was already planning his starring role at Bertie’s deathbed. Perhaps he would be able to prop him up, as he had done for Victoria, and share his final mom
ents. Maybe he could even turn the tables and exert some authority on Bertie’s successor – his young, inexperienced son George. In any case, Wilhelm clearly sensed that the time was rapidly approaching when he would be free of the last vestiges of family authority. Bertie’s sudden signs of weakness brought war a big step closer.
It sounds simplistic, but when Wilhelm was feeling like a beloved grandson and nephew, he really seems to have been at peace with himself, and with Britain. And while he was at peace with Britain, he wasn’t going to attack France. It was precarious, but it wasn’t war, and it was a state of affairs that had existed pretty well ever since Wilhelm’s accession to the German throne in 1888. Bertie had been vital to that twenty-year European peace, and he had been the most stable, reliable and determined person involved. Without Bertie to soothe Wilhelm’s savage inner beast, or with a British monarch who was less fascinated by international relations, less willing to stand up to jingoistic politicians, or simply less fluent in the various foreign languages necessary to keep on good terms with the French, Germans and the Russians, there might have been a First World War much earlier. It would have been a very different one, too – an Anglo-German annihilation of France, for example, which, knowing Wilhelm, might well have been followed by an Anglo-German war for European domination, resulting in the destruction of both.
We will never know, but one thing seems certain: if only Bertie had toned down his playboy exploits just a little; if he had gobbled his food with less gargantuan determination; even if he had only applied the same moderation to smoking as he did to alcohol, he might well have lived longer and preserved European peace beyond 1914.
* * *
1 Ironically, for once Wilhelm was not wrong to be paranoid. Bertie was at that very moment overseeing the marriage of Victoria Eugenie, the daughter of his sister Beatrice, to King Alfonso of Spain. He was also urging Prince Charles of Denmark, husband of his daughter Maud, to claim the vacant Norwegian throne – which Charles did in November 1905, creating a pro-British, anti-German Norway.
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