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 be
came 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.”12 George’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.
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