Edward’s death would have been traumatic for George at any time. Coming as it did in May 1910, it plunged him into the middle of the most serious constitutional crisis in British politics for decades, one that had parallels with the constitutional struggles in Germany and Russia. The House of Commons was attempting to abolish the House of Lords’ veto, the weapon the Conservative aristocracy—who sat in the Lords by virtue of its hereditary titles—had been using to block Liberal legislation and reforms already passed in the Commons. The matter had reached crisis point in late 1909 when the Lords threw out David Lloyd George’s Budget, which, because it extended death duties and land taxes, they saw as an attack on them. The Conservative aristocracy did itself no favours with public opinion by reacting with almost comic hysteria—even though, as both sides suspected, the actual amounts raised would be pretty modest. The Duke of Buccleuch,45 who owned among other things a large collection of Poussins, claimed he couldn’t afford the guinea for the subscription to Dumfries Football Club. The Earl of Onslow put large parts of Surrey up for sale, and the Duke of Rutland, who like many Tories seemed to think that radical Liberals and Labour Party members were the same thing, said that all Labour MPs should be gagged. As Prince of Wales, George’s sympathies had been with the Lords. The much-loathed Lloyd George had drafted his Budget and launched it with speeches which cheerily and baldly pointed out the gap between rich and poor in a way that no British statesman ever had, and with great panache and humour. “A fully equipped46 Duke costs as much to keep as two Dreadnoughts and is more difficult to scrap,” he said. The House of Lords was “five hundred ordinary men chosen at random from among the unemployed.” In the Conservative press he was portrayed as a bomb-throwing anarchist or a highwayman—which he loved.
The House of Lords’ rejection of Lloyd George’s Budget had forced a general election in early 1910. The Liberals, who won only a couple more seats than the Conservatives, kept power in a coalition with the Irish nationalists and the Labour Party, giving them a 113-seat majority. For different reasons each party was raring to destroy the Lords’ veto, and the Commons put forward a bill to do just that. Everyone knew the Lords would reject it. Prime Minister Asquith’s solution was to threaten to flood the Lords with new Liberal peers, created by the king. Edward had hated being placed in such a position. An attack on the Lords, he and his advisers felt, was perilously close to an attack on the monarchy. He’d died furious with both Asquith and the Conservative Lords for having refused to compromise. Some of the more extreme Tories went so far as to claim that the prime minister’s threats had killed the king.
George’s unease and lack of experience were so palpable that Asquith promised him six months’ grace, in which he tried and failed to reach a compromise with the Lords. But in December 1910 he was obliged to call another election, and came to see the king to ask him for a guarantee that he would create the peers if the Liberals won. Their interaction was a comedy of errors which painfully demonstrated how little George understood politics. Asquith, aware that the king hated the idea, asked for his guarantee in such overly delicate, allusive language that George thought he’d been let off the hook, realizing the truth only three days later. When Asquith returned to ask for the guarantee in plainer terms, he brought with him another minister, Lord Crewe. Just as George had misunderstood Asquith’s previous attempts at delicacy and tact, so he now thought Crewe was there because Asquith didn’t trust his word—whereas Asquith meant it as a courtesy to George. Then when the prime minister suggested that the guarantee be kept secret until it was actually needed, George assumed he was being asked to do something underhand. “I have never in my life47 done anything I was ashamed to confess, and I have been accustomed to conceal nothing.” He failed to understand that the prime minister was trying to keep him out of the controversy unless it was entirely necessary. George later claimed Asquith had bullied the assurance out of him by threatening to resign and call a new election on the issue of the king and the peers against the people. He obsessed over it for years, imagining there might have been an alternative. When he found out in 1913 that Arthur Balfour, leader of the Lords’ opposition, had offered at that moment to form a Conservative government and he hadn’t been told, he fumed that he could have invited Balfour to form an administration and saved the Lords’ veto. But this would have been potentially far more partisan and interventionist than what Asquith asked him to do. Balfour would automatically have lost his first Commons vote, which would have triggered yet another election on a subject the country was sick of. That election would have been a vote of confidence on the king’s decision to back the Conservatives—dragging the Crown into politics as it had not been for over a century.
The abolition of the veto—and the power of the Lords—was eventually, and with much bitterness, passed in July 1911, and without George having to create the extra peers, but he worried about the process all the way through, relieving his feelings by bombarding Asquith with memos, and daily summoning ministers and Lords to air his worries.
One of Nicholas’s biographers has written that “In England where a sovereign48 needed only to be a good man in order to be a good king, Nicholas II would have made an admirable monarch.” Perhaps it was truer to say that in Russia George might well have been just as disastrous as Nicholas and that in Britain it didn’t matter what the sovereign was like as long as he was sober and followed the rules. The Lords débâcle was an inauspicious beginning to George’s reign; but he would be, as it turned out, a good king. The system would make him effective almost despite himself, compelling him to do things he would never have chosen to do, for example meeting and being polite to the man he loathed, Lloyd George (and forcing the radical chancellor to do likewise). Eventually, Lloyd George would become his prime minister. It wasn’t quite as if Nicholas had been forced to meet, say, Lenin, or Wilhelm had socialized with the German Marxist Rosa Luxemburg, but, in George’s head at least, it wasn’t far off. In September 1911 Lloyd George went to stay at Balmoral for several days. Both sides were obliged to be on their best behaviour. Lloyd George went on picnics with the royal family, and George presented him with one of his father’s walking sticks. After a few days Lloyd George had had enough. “I am not cut49 out for Court life,” he wrote to his wife. “I detest it. The whole atmosphere reeks with Toryism. I can breathe it and it depresses and sickens me. Everybody is very civil to me as they would be to a dangerous wild animal whom they fear and perhaps just a little admire for its suppleness and strength.” He was far from the only one to find the royal way of life—not just the opinions, but the arbitrary rules and rituals, the obligatory changes of clothes (at least four a day) and the hours of shooting—anachronistic and irritating. The next leader of the Conservative Party, Andrew Bonar Law, an austere Scottish businessman with nothing in common with the old aristocratic grandees, would find his obligatory weekends with the royal family at Balmoral “unendurable.”50
It took the country a while to get the hang of George. With his melancholy direct stare and unflinchingly upright deportment, a fresh white gardenia eternally in his buttonhole, a hat (a homburg or a top hat—he would sooner have left his home naked than without one) and his immaculate old-fashioned tailoring, his deliberate, elegant figure communicated respectability, decency, steadiness and old-fashioned values. In a world that seemed to be getting faster, more confusing and more dangerous, there was something very reassuring about that. As king he would be a layer of foundation stones, a visitor of schools, mining towns, railway works and occasionally workers’ cottages, though his diaries reveal nothing of what he made of these places. His was an unflashy, domestic kind of monarchy—one that seemed concerned to operate with the support of its subjects and to want to be in touch with them. Under George the British monarchy really would become, as Walter Bagehot had described it in his book The English Constitution, “dignified” and “symbolic.”
15
CELEBRATIONS AND WARNINGS
1911–14
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nbsp; The reality of European politics was that Anglo-German relations were as stalemated as they’d ever been—as were Russo-German relations. Nevertheless, each country, each emperor, continued to paper over the cracks with cousinly gestures, each increasingly irrelevant. In May 1911 George invited the kaiser to the unveiling of the marble memorial to Queen Victoria outside Buckingham Palace. “You are perfectly right1 in alluding to my devotion and reverence for my beloved grandmother, with whom I was on such excellent terms,” Wilhelm wrote to George. “… Never in my life shall I forget the solemn hours in Osborne near her deathbed when she breathed her last in my arms! Those sacred hours have riveted my heart firmly to your house and family.” It would be Wilhelm’s final visit to England, and in his memoirs his account—pages on guards and Highland regiments, military colours, the family gathered round the monument, the welcome he received—was almost tender and saturated with longing.2 At the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, where George and Wilhelm saw the play of the day, Money, the audience gave them a standing ovation, and a specially designed curtain depicted the two emperors on horseback riding towards each other and saluting. The war minister and Germanophile Sir Richard Haldane gave a lunch for the kaiser and filled it with the most eminent and famous men in England: Lord Kitchener, Lord Curzon, J. A. Spender, the editor of the Manchester Guardian, the Labour MP Ramsay MacDonald, the writer Edmund Gosse, the senior general Sir Henry Wilson, the painter John Singer Sargent and Baden Powell, the hero of Mafeking and author of the recent runaway bestseller Scouting for Boys. Wilhelm was on fizzing form. “I don’t think3 I ever met a man so full of the zest of life, and so eager to show it and share it with other people,” said Sir John Morley.
It should have meant something, but actually it meant nothing. No British politician sought to buttonhole Wilhelm or tackle him on the naval race. “His visit4 of course will be an absolutely private one and it has no political significance whatever,” George wrote to Nicholas. “… I wanted to tell you this in case the newspapers should print a lot of rubbish.” On his last day, the kaiser worked himself up into a fury on the subject of Britain’s agreements with France and Russia in a conversation with Louis of Battenberg: “You must be5 brought to understand in England that Germany is the sole arbiter of peace or war on the Continent. If we wish to fight we will do so without your leave.” He seemed particularly miffed by Britain’s closeness to Russia.
It was as if each country’s position had become so entrenched that there was no way to fill those deepening cracks of mistrust and tension. Germany clung to its unsatisfied need for recognition, its navy and its commitment to Austria; Britain was determined to maintain its world position and stay tied to France; Russia remained torn between knowing it couldn’t afford conflict, but desperate to restore its Great Power status through some form of imperial expansion. By contrast, it took only one small, aggressive gesture on the international stage to create a full-blown European crisis. No one wanted it to be like this (except possibly the German army)—not least because by 1911 each country was facing economic depression and considerable social unrest—but no one was willing to give way. The German chancellor, Bethmann-Hollweg, had started talks with Britain when he’d taken office in 1909, but quickly found his room for manoeuvre limited: the German Right—highly critical of the government—liked the navy, and the kaiser made it clear that if he pushed too hard for cuts he might be sacked. To placate his critics the chancellor insisted that, in return for a reduction in German ships, Britain must pledge neutrality in a European war, which the British regarded as evidence that the Germans wanted them out of the way to attack France. Asquith and Grey could see no point in further talks, though they paid lip service to the idea of rapprochement as a sop to their critics on the Liberal and Labour backbenches. Even David Lloyd George, a consistent opposer of naval expansion and critic of Grey, was beginning to question German intentions.* The German Foreign Office, meanwhile, was on the look-out for some diplomatic coup which would bring the government some much missed applause at home.
Then, just two months after Wilhelm returned from England, on 1 July 1911, Germany sent a gunboat, the Panther, to the port of Agadir, in Morocco, where the French had recently and illegally sent troops claiming they were needed to quell a local rebellion. By the terms of the Algeciras conference, Germany was entitled to compensation if the French changed the nature of their presence in Morocco. With the Panther (which, somewhat ironically, was not a beautiful shiny new warship but a squat, dirty old cruiser well overdue for the scrapyard) positioned threateningly on the coast, the German Foreign Office demanded the French hand over the whole of the French Congo, adding that if they did not respond positively Germany might be forced to extreme measures.
That the German Foreign Office was using a warship as leverage seemed to the British Foreign Office and Asquith a dangerous precedent: not merely another swipe at France, but a direct challenge to British naval supremacy and therefore its Great Power status—gunboat diplomacy had always been a particular British speciality. Their response was bluntly aggressive. On 21 July, in a speech at the Mansion House in the City of London, David Lloyd George announced that Britain was determined to keep her “place and prestige” among the Great Powers of the world, even if it led to war. “If a situation were to be forced upon us in which peace could only be preserved by the surrender of the great and beneficent position Britain has won by centuries of heroism and achievement, by allowing Britain to be treated … as if she were of no account in the Cabinet of Nations, then I say emphatically that peace at that price would be a humiliation intolerable for a great country like ours to endure.”6
The German government was astounded by the speech—that it was so direct and that Lloyd George had delivered it—but refused to back down. Within a few days both fleets were placed on alert; a colonial quarrel was transformed into an international crisis. The German press expressed outrage that Britain was dictating to Germany. In London The Times claimed that the German navy had vanished from the North Sea and might be about to attack. (In fact it was on its way to Norway to take part in friendly manoeuvres with the British Atlantic fleet.) Escalation with Britain was not what the Germans had intended at all. Behind the scenes the two sides negotiated a climb-down, and plans were made for Franco-German talks. But the French, emboldened by the English threats, refused the Germans’ demands for compensation. Talks and constant rumours of war dragged on through August and September. By October the German Foreign Office had run out of steam and finally agreed to take 100,000 square miles of all-but-useless equatorial jungle in the French Congo. An agreement was signed on 4 November.
Once again a German provocation had ended in defeat. “Out of this7 mountain of a German-made crisis came a mouse of colonial territory,” wrote Grey. The German nationalist press and the nationalist German leagues, whose hopes of colonies had been raised so high and had been so constantly dashed, howled with disappointment and anger. Wilhelm was accused of cowardice: one German paper called him “Guillaume le timide, le valeureux poltron!” The German Centre and Left parties poured scorn on the government’s ineptitude and pointless aggression. Senior German army officers sighed that the All Highest was so pusillanimous about taking extreme measures—Moltke had privately hoped for a “reckoning with the8 English.” The German colonial minister resigned.
The kaiser himself had been extremely reluctant to send the Panther and anxious about the British reaction. Predictably, when it had initially proved popular, he had rushed to identify himself as its author. Throughout the subsequent months, however, he had seesawed queasily between anxiety and martial posturing. One moment the German foreign minister, Alfred von Kiderlen-Wächter, had to threaten resignation to keep him on-side, the next Wilhelm was publicly announcing he was prepared to use his sword9 if the French didn’t acquiesce to German demands.
He also claimed that during his May visit to London he had told George of his intention to send a warship to France and that George had agreed—and th
us that the British government’s response was pure hypocrisy. This was familiar territory for Wilhelm—claiming an arrangement had been agreed with another monarch, then accusing them of betrayal. But it was new to George, who scrutinized his memory carefully. He said that Wilhelm had raised the subject of Morocco as he was leaving London; he might even have said something about a ship—but George had no recollection of it. “I absolutely did not express to him my own, or my Government’s consent.” For his own part he thought Wilhelm was “a man of peace,” under pressure from “his own militarists.” “No man likes to be called a coward.”10
It was a depressing sign of the deadlock between the two countries that it was two international business magnates, not politicians, who initiated a final attempt to reach agreement. Albert Ballin was the director of the biggest shipping company in the world, the Hamburg-America Line, and one of Wilhelm’s few Jewish friends; Ernest Cassel was one of Edward’s coterie of Jewish financiers; his dealings and loans had kept several countries afloat, and he was a friend of Churchill and Asquith. Both felt that the German naval programme had gone too far and created pointless hostility. In January 1912 Ballin persuaded Wilhelm to invite a member of the British cabinet to Berlin to discuss the naval race, while Cassel encouraged the British to respond. Grey and Asquith sent Sir Richard Haldane to Berlin in the second week of February, but gave him no authority to make a deal. Everyone fell over themselves to express their hopes that agreement might be reached, but unsurprisingly the talks failed amidst recrimination and arguments over who had offered what. Once again Bethmann-Hollweg insisted on British neutrality before he would even discuss ships, and he couldn’t promise any defence cuts, just a temporary slowdown.
Haldane was astonished by the apparent chaos in the upper echelons of the German government. The kaiser, the chancellor and Tirpitz disagreed on almost everything about foreign policy, naval expansion and what they wanted from the talks. He reckoned Bethmann-Hollweg wished to negotiate, but Tirpitz was opposed to any compromise. He was far from the first British visitor to remark on such confusion. As for Wilhelm, he seemed one minute utterly enthused, and the next cowed by Tirpitz. Haldane didn’t know that on the day of his arrival, Wilhelm had published the new navy bill, and had told Metternich that he would mobilize the German navy if the British carried out their plan of concentrating their fleet in the North Sea (where they’d be on Germany’s doorstep). Haldane left after three days with a bust of the kaiser, from the kaiser, tucked under his arm and a copy of the new German navy bill. The next day Wilhelm told the German industrialist Walter Rathenau that in the summer he would go to Cowes, “and then he would11 settle everything. The King trusted him. His plan was: the United States of Europe against America. The English are not unsympathetic to this.”
The Three Emperors Page 46