Castles of Steel

by Robert K. Massie

  In 1884, Louis married his cousin Princess Victoria of Hesse, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. Here, the circumstances of Louis’s relationship with Mrs. Langtry were reversed; this time a member of the morganatic, nonroyal branch of the Hessian family was marrying up. Queen Victoria, always partial to the Hessian children of her dead daughter Alice, approved and attended her granddaughter’s wedding.

  [Louis and Victoria’s first child, also named Alice, eventually married Prince Andrew of Greece and became the mother of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, consort of Queen Elizabeth II. As a result, when Prince Louis’s great-grandson Prince Charles becomes King of England, a descendant of the morganatic Battenbergs will—at last—occupy a royal throne.]

  Now Louis knew or was related to everybody. His younger brother Alexander, known as Sandro, became the ruling prince of Bulgaria. Another brother, Henry, called Liko, married Queen Victoria’s youngest daughter, Beatrice. To the future King George V, Louis could write chummily, “My dearest Georgie,” and sign himself, “Goodbye, my dear, old boy, Ever your affectionate shipmate, Louis.” Before long, Prince Louis was connected through his wife’s sister to the Hohenzollern dynasty; then, through another of his wife’s sisters, to the Romanovs. Victoria’s sister Irene of Hesse married Prince Henry of Prussia, the younger brother of Kaiser William II. Then Victoria’s youngest sister, Alix of Hesse, became engaged to Nicholas, the Russian tsarevich. Two years later, Captain Prince Louis of Battenberg, RN, and his wife attended the coronation of the Emperor Nicholas II and his wife, Empress Alexandra.

  Louis never quite knew the extent to which this far-reaching network of family relationships helped or hurt his career. He liked to think that he had advanced on his own abilities. “I hate the idea of getting anything, as regards naval work, at the hands of the king, my uncle. [In fact, King Edward VII was his wife’s uncle.] I want to get it on my own merits, if I have any,” he wrote. For the most part, he seems to have succeeded. Year by year, he climbed the ladder, but there was no leaping ahead of others as Affie had done. Yet as much as Louis hated remarks that he was a “German princeling” or a “court favorite,” hard as he tried to adapt himself to the hearty “band of brothers” atmosphere of Victorian navy wardrooms, he was a princeling, born a German, and there was favoritism. He was married to one of Queen Victoria’s favorite granddaughters, and the sovereign was fond of him. “I am sure you must miss dear Ludwig, one of the kindest and best of husbands,” the queen wrote to Princess Victoria in 1887, using the German form of Louis’s name, a practice she often applied within the family. In 1891, the queen intervened directly to boost thirty-seven-year-old Louis up the ladder. Writing to the First Lord of the Admiralty, she declared, “She hopes and expects that Prince Louis of Battenberg, to whose merits everyone who knows the service well can testify, will get his promotion at the end of the year. . . . There is a belief that the Admiralty are afraid of promoting officers who are princes on account of the radical attacks of low newspapers and scurrilous ones, but the Queen cannot credit this. . . . She trusts there will be no further delay in giving him what he deserves.” Three months later, Louis was promoted.

  Sometimes, Louis resisted royal wishes. In 1895, both the queen and the Prince of Wales urged him to accept the captaincy of the royal yacht. The queen had asked for this because she wanted to see more of her great-grandchildren, Bertie because he liked Louis’s company. Prince Louis, fearing that the appointment would mean the end of his regular navy career, gently refused.

  In the mid-nineties, he became captain of a cruiser and then of two battleships. He was the Director of Naval Intelligence and, in 1904, was promoted to rear admiral and given command of a cruiser squadron.

  Even across the Atlantic, Prince Louis attracted special attention. In 1906, Louis brought his squadron up Chesapeake Bay to Annapolis and was invited by Theodore Roosevelt to dinner at the White House. In New York, he stayed with Colonel John Jacob Astor. But Louis was a professional sailor, and he turned his voyage back across the Atlantic into a feat of seamanship. For seven days, seven hours, and ten minutes, Battenberg’s six coal-burning armored cruisers raced side by side 3,327 miles from Sandy Hook, New Jersey, to Gibraltar. The average speed of the squadron was an unprecedented 18½ knots and Battenberg’s flagship won by 300 yards. He became a vice admiral in 1907 and second in command of the Mediterranean Fleet, then Commander-in-Chief of the Atlantic Fleet. His reputation was bright; his ships and squadrons won cups for gunnery and smartness; his skills as a tactician and fleet commander were widely recognized. Ernle Chatfield, the wartime captain of the battle cruiser Lion and himself a future First Sea Lord, described Battenberg as “perhaps the outstanding officer on the flag list. He had a brilliant career at sea and was a great tactician and fleet handler. He was severe, but just.” A senior navy captain added, “There are literally hundreds of naval officers who would be quite ready to believe black was white if he issued a memo to that effect.” Lord Selbourne, a former First Lord, said simply, “He is the ablest officer the Navy possesses.”

  Louis did not conceal his ultimate ambition and when, in December 1912, Churchill made him First Sea Lord, the appointment was widely praised. Fisher called him “more English than the English” and “the most capable administrator on the Admiral’s list, by a long way.” Lord Selbourne declared that “if his name had been Smith he would ere now have filled various high offices to the great advantage of the country, from which he has been excluded owing to what I must characterize as a stupid timidity. He has in fact nearly had his naval career maimed because he is a prince and because of his foreign relationships . . . a better Englishman does not exist or one whom I would more freely trust in any post in any emergency.” Churchill said simply to Asquith, “There is no one else suitable for the post.”

  Personally, Winston Churchill and Louis Battenberg possessed similarities of background. Both were blue-blooded sons of younger sons of aristocratic houses: Louis descended from the Grand Dukes of Hesse, Churchill from the Dukes of Marlborough. Both were welcome and comfortable in society; both had risen to the top largely on merit. There the similarities faded. Churchill was only thirty-nine in 1914; Battenberg was sixty. Churchill had taken greater risks, broken rules, challenged the established order, and leaped ahead of his contemporaries. Battenberg had followed the rules in his steady climb up the promotion ladder. Nevertheless, Churchill respected Battenberg’s record and intelligence, while Prince Louis believed that he could advise and guide the mercurial politician, steering him away from trouble within and outside the navy.

  For twenty prewar months, Battenberg and Churchill worked together. Prince Louis had an orderly mind and, unlike many British admirals, he understood the meaning of sea power; indeed, he had talked with Mahan. Churchill, on coming to the Admiralty, had—as instructed by Asquith and the Cabinet—created a War Staff, but it was a purely advisory body with no executive authority. As First Sea Lord, Battenberg attempted to nurture and enhance its role, appointing a series of intelligent, talented officers. Prince Louis also worked hard to define the mutually supporting roles of the British and French fleets, even though the two navies were bound merely by an “understanding.” Within the Admiralty, Battenberg never challenged Churchill’s supremacy. A constant flow of initiatives sprang from the fertile mind of the First Lord, and Battenberg settled into the role of adviser, judge, mediator, and facilitator. Rather than opposing Churchill directly, Battenberg tried to channel the First Lord’s thinking into paths of compromise, moderation, and conciliation. There were moments when he had to restrain Churchill from trampling too hard on naval tradition. One such instance involved the naming of new dreadnoughts in 1912. Traditionally, the First Lord proposed names and the king usually agreed. In 1913, Churchill proposed Oliver Cromwell for one of the five new 15-inch-gun superdreadnoughts being laid down that year. The king reacted violently to the suggestion that one of his ships should be named for the man who had cut off the head of his ancestor King Charles
I. Churchill pushed hard until Battenberg cautioned the First Lord, “All my experience at the Admiralty and close intercourse with three sovereigns leads me to this: from all times the sovereign’s decisions as to names for H.M. ships [have] been accepted as final by all First Lords.” If Churchill persisted, he concluded, “the service as a whole would go against you.” Churchill backed down, and the new dreadnought became HMS Valiant.

  [King George V blocked another Churchill battleship name proposal the following year. The First Lord had suggested Pitt, to honor the two great prime ministers, father and son. The king rejected the name on an intuition derived from his own many years as a naval officer. Sailors, he knew, tended to find obscene or scatological nicknames for warships; Pitt was too easy and would have an inevitable result. Churchill bowed, not without grumbling that this thought was “unworthy of the royal mind.”]

  Once the war began, however, Churchill cast advice and restraint aside. As the supreme political authority at the Admiralty, he saw himself as solely responsible to the prime minister, the Cabinet, Parliament, and the country for the war at sea; the First Sea Lord, the Admiralty War Staff, and the admirals in the fleet were there to carry out his orders. His imagination was often brilliant and his energy was phenomenal; somehow, his capacity for work actually increased under the pressures of war. Conduct of the war was centralized in a tiny ad hoc Admiralty War Group run by Churchill and including the First Sea Lord, the chief of the War Staff, and the naval secretary. Churchill himself described its working: “We met every day and sometimes twice a day, read the whole position and arrived at a united decision on every matter of consequence. . . . Besides our regular meetings, the First Sea Lord and I consulted together constantly at all hours.” Nevertheless, Churchill admitted, he often acted on his own: “It happened in a large number of cases that, seeing what ought to be done and confident of the agreement of the First Sea Lord, I myself drafted the telegrams and decisions and took them personally to the First Sea Lord for his concurrence before dispatch.” Further, Churchill said, “I accepted full responsibility . . . and exercised a close general supervision over everything that was done or proposed. Further, I claimed and exercised an unlimited power of suggestion and initiative, subject only to the approval and agreement of the First Sea Lord on all operative matters.”

  The trouble was that Churchill’s concept of his role, added to his constant demand for haste, eliminated normal staff procedure in presenting alternative views. Often, orders were written and issued quickly, without the advantage of staff analysis, and subordinates were effectively eliminated from any role in decision making. Admiralty messages had flair, but because they were written by an amateur, their language was often ambiguous. The advent of modern wireless communications added to the complication. Now, the Admiralty could communicate directly with the admirals and ships at sea, who began receiving messages straight from the desk and hand of the First Lord. Constitutionally, Churchill was entitled to do this, but it created confusion at the Admiralty and in the fleet. Already, in the episode of the Goeben’s escape, the confusion of orders emanating from Churchill’s pen had befuddled Admiral Milne and confused Admiral Troubridge.

  Nowhere was the effect of this erosion of professional authority greater than in the office of the First Sea Lord. Traditionally, the naval officer filling this role was responsible for the worldwide conduct of naval operations; Battenberg, however, had all but ceded this role to the First Lord. Prince Louis was responsible for keeping the fleet mobilized in the week before the war, but as time passed, and the whirlwind activity of the First Lord increased, Prince Louis’s authority and self-confidence deteriorated. During the first three months of war, the First Sea Lord wrote few minutes and memoranda. Churchill wrote the cables to Milne regarding Goeben; it was the First Lord who wrote on September 18, four days before the Bacchantes were sunk: “These cruisers ought not to continue on this beat.” Battenberg’s original response had been “Concur.” Soon, Prince Louis’s nickname around the Admiralty was “Quite Concur.”

  It was in this context of losses at sea and restlessness in the fleet that public discussion over Louis’s German birth began. The accusation that he was something less than a full-fledged Englishman, like the charge that he was a “court favorite,” had been heard throughout his career. Most officers in the navy respected and admired Battenberg, but not all. Some were jealous of his court connections. Others knew that he was a Fisher man and they, being Fisher’s enemies, became Battenberg’s, too. At the time Prince Louis was promoted to rear admiral, several senior officers mounted a campaign against him. Prince Louis was aware of their sentiments; on July 24, 1906, he wrote to Fisher, “I heard by chance what the reasons were which [Admirals] Beresford and Lambton and all that tribe gave out urbi et orbi against my becoming Second [Sea] Lord or any other Lord and fleet command; that I was a damned German who had no business in the British Navy and that the Service for that reason did not trust me. I know the latter to be a foul lie. . . . It was however such a blow to me that I seriously contemplated resigning my command there and then.” Complaints were heard again when it became known that he was to be made an acting vice admiral and second in command of the Mediterranean Fleet. King Edward heard about the complaints and asked Fisher about them. Fisher replied, “I have never known more malignant rancour and jealousy as manifested by Lord Charles Beresford and Hedworth Lambton as against Prince Louis and I regret to say Lord Tweedmouth [then First Lord] is frightened of what these two can do in exciting the Service against the avowed intention of making Prince Louis an acting Vice Admiral.” This resentful antagonism never died out; indeed, it spread to the press. In 1911, when Louis was appointed Second Sea Lord, Horatio Bottomley, editor of the weekly John Bull, protested, “Should a German boss our navy? Bulldog breed or Dachshund? It would be a crime against our empire to trust our secrets of national defence to any alien-born official. It is a heavy strain to put upon any German to make him a ruler of our navy and give him the key to our defences.” The Daily Mail wrote: “It is a curious stroke of fortune by which one brother-in-law directs the operations of the British navy . . . and the other in person commands the German fleets at sea.” (Prince Henry of Prussia then commanded the High Seas Fleet.)

  Unfortunately and unwittingly, the Battenbergs contributed to popular misperceptions. In an era of a naval armaments race with Germany, they kept their home in Germany and made frequent and widely reported visits to their relatives in Darmstadt. There was an advantage—which Churchill recognized—in having a First Sea Lord who knew the German navy and many of its senior officers and who was related by marriage to Prince Henry of Prussia and the kaiser. But these connections aroused suspicions. No one understood this better than Queen Victoria, who had counseled the Battenbergs “to live more in England” and “embrace English life.” Even in the active navy, officers who admired Battenberg saw an irritating German side to his personality. Prince Louis, said his biographer Richard Hough,

  never understood, through all his long service life . . . why his peculiarly German manner of being right, and always right, of not being ashamed of showing he had brains, rubbed his fellow officers the wrong way. “These are the kind of administrative blunders which are never made in Germany,” he once wrote . . . [to a friend]. Louis could no more cure this tendency than he could completely refine and Anglicize his faint German accent which ruffled feelings further when declaiming about the efficiency of German ways.

  In fact, there was little affection between the Hohenzollerns, who were disdainful of the impoverished, morganatic Battenbergs, and the Rhineland Hessian Battenbergs, who shuddered at the behavior of the Prussian Hohenzollerns. Prince Louis once tartly rebuffed a German admiral who had reproached him as a man born in Germany for serving in the British navy. “Sir,” said Prince Louis, “when I joined the Royal Navy in the year 1868, the German empire did not exist.” By 1914, he had been a British subject for forty-six years and most of his male relatives had served o
r were serving the British crown. Louis’s brother Henry had married Queen Victoria’s daughter, then gone to Africa with the British army for the Ashanti campaign, where he caught fever and died. Henry’s son, and Louis’s nephew, Prince Maurice of Battenberg, was an infantry lieutenant with the King’s Royal Rifles in France. Prince Louis’s two sons, George and Louis, were in the Royal Navy. That he might have to fight against Germany was a source of anguish for Prince Louis, but he had seen the possibility for years and had no doubts about his own loyalty to Great Britain and the Royal Navy. The problem was that once the Royal Navy began to suffer unexpected wartime reverses, the First Sea Lord became an easy target for blame.

  Jingoistic nationalism in Britain in the early weeks of the Great War resulted in the smashing of windows of shops owned by German immigrants, the stoning of dachshunds, and public insulting of people with foreign names. Hysteria fanned by the popular press left no one immune. Violet Asquith, the prime minister’s daughter, was asked “whether it was true that my father drank the kaiser’s health after dinner.” In this predjudiced context, the holding of the navy’s highest post by a German-born prince at the beginning of a war with Germany became a focus of grievance. Louis was called a Germhun, a term coined by Horatio Bottomley. There were rumors that the First Sea Lord was secretly dealing with the Germans, that he had deliberately engineered the loss of the three armored cruisers, and that he had been imprisoned in the Tower on the orders of the king. Stories about Prince Louis reached the Naval School at Osborne, where his thirteen-year-old son, Louis (known as Dickie), was a cadet. “The latest rumor . . . here,” he wrote to his mother, Princess Victoria, is “that Papa has turned out to be a German spy and has been discreetly marched off to the Tower where he is guarded by Beefeaters. Apparently the rumor started . . . by the fact that an admiral has been recalled from the Mediterranean to find out about the Goeben and Breslau escaping. People apparently think he let the German cruiser escape as he was a spy or an agent. . . . I got rather a rotten time of it for about three days as little fools . . . insisted on calling me a German spy and kept on heckling me.”