William was appointed captain of the 6th-rate Pegasus on 10 April 1786 and sailed for the North American station three months later. From Nova Scotia he was sent to the Leeward Islands, where he found himself under command of his old friend Nelson. Despite Nelson’s guidance, William proved a severe disciplinarian. He introduced numerous petty regulations, including a prohibition on using the term “bugger” (at that time a common term of abuse in the fleet) and ordered floggings for the least transgression. He soon became as unpopular with his officers as with his men. The ship’s schoolmaster tried to murder him, but was prevented by an alert Marine sentry. The first lieutenant, an experienced officer, tried to reduce the extent of the punishments ordered by his captain, only to be publicly overruled. William complained that this officer, Lieutenant Isaac Schomberg, constantly challenged his authority. Schomberg, an officer of whom Nelson had a high opinion, asked for a court-martial and was promptly placed under arrest. After being persuaded to apologize, he was transferred to Barfleur and, to the prince’s chagrin, became flag lieutenant to the distinguished admiral, Lord Hood. In another incident, William’s third officer, Lieutenant William Hope, who was generally thought to have been subjected to harsh treatment, also later left the ship. Off-duty, William enjoyed attending official and private balls, banquets and similar events in polite colonial Society. In March 1787 he gave away the widowed Mrs Frances Nesbit at her marriage to Nelson. In less polite circles he frequented houses of ill-repute and was sued by the proprietress of one in Bridgetown, Barbados, for extensive damage caused by him and his companions. He also underwent treatment for a social disease at this time. Pegasus was then sent to Canada, where he had an affaire with Mrs Wentworth, the wife of a senior colonial official. This caused his ship’s sudden recall to England at the end of 1787.
William then applied to go to the East Indies station, but was refused. He had the sympathy of his elder brothers, but this only made his position worse in the eyes of the King, who regarded them as a bad influence. On 1 March 1788 he became captain of the 5th-rate Andromeda, taking the crew of Pegasus with him. During July 1788 he put to sea with the rest of his squadron for exercises in the Channel. At the same time the King learnt of an affaire between William and Sally Winne, daughter of a naval victualling contractor. Andromeda was ordered to sail immediately to Halifax, Nova Scotia, despite William’s protest that his officers and men, who had expected to return home after a short deployment, would be unable to make provision for their families. At Halifax he found that Mrs Wentworth had transferred her affections to another officer. He resumed his round of balls and parties, maintaining his reputation as a hard drinker, and celebrating the King’s birthday with a cannonade that drowned the signal guns of a vessel sinking in full view of his own. He then sailed for Jamaica, where he was already a local favourite from his earlier service there. Dining with the planters, he spoke in defence of slavery (already under attack from abolitionists in British society) and was acclaimed by them as an ideal future Governor.
William was recalled home early in 1789, after George III had become seriously ill with what is now believed to be porphyria. The King had recovered his mind by the time that Andromeda arrived in April 1789, but was then faced with a demand by William for the peerage customarily given to princes on their coming of age, and therefore, in his case, overdue. With some reluctance, the King created him Duke of Clarence (the first since Edward IV’s brother drowned in a butt of Malmsey in the Tower of London in 1478) on 20 May 1789. In 1789 Clarence set up house in Richmond, Surrey, with a noted courtesan, Polly Finch, but she became bored with the rural surroundings, by the lack of company and by his custom of reading Campbell’s The Lives of the Admirals to her. On discovering that there was a second volume, she fled back to London. Between May and November 1790 he commanded the 3rd-rate Valiant in the fleet assembled at the time of a threatened war with Spain over the possession of Nootka Sound (Vancouver, British Columbia).
Clarence was promoted rear-admiral of the Blue on 3 December 1790. In 1793, after the outbreak of the French Revolutionary War, he was appointed to command the 2nd-rate London, then fitting out. The refit was cancelled when Clarence made a speech in the House of Lords calling for peace and criticizing the war policy of the Prime Minister, William Pitt the Younger. He was never again given a seagoing command, though he rose steadily in rank to became rear-admiral of the Red on 1 February 1793, vice-admiral of the Blue on 12 April 1794, vice-admiral of the White on 4 July 1794, vice-admiral of the Red on 1 June 1795, admiral of the Blue on 14 February 1799, admiral of the White on 1 January 1801 and admiral of the Red on 9 November 1805. On the death of Sir Peter Parker [10] he became admiral of the fleet on 24 December 1811, at the age of 46. During this period, from 1791 onwards, he kept house with an actress, Mrs Dorothy Jordan. They had a family of ten children, who took the surname FitzClarence. In 1811 he suddenly ended their relationship, though making financial provision for her and their children. She made an unsuccessful return to the stage and died in misery at St Cloud, France, five years later. Clarence flew his flag as admiral of the fleet in the 2nd-rate Impregnable in 1814, when, after the fall of Napoleon, he conveyed Louis XVIII to France and the Emperor Alexander I of Russia and King Frederick William III of Prussia to England. The Prince Regent, who had designed the baton awarded to field marshals, presented a naval version to Clarence, who continued to figure in Society as “the Royal Tar” or “Old Tarrybreeks”.
In 1817 Princess Charlotte of Wales, the Prince Regent’s only legitimate offspring, died in childbirth. As the Duke of York had long been estranged from his childless wife, the succession to the throne lay with Clarence and his younger brothers. Clarence himself (like all his brothers, hopelessly in debt) sought the hand of an English heiress, Sophia Wykeham of Thame Park, Oxfordshire. After the Prince Regent forbade this match, Clarence married the twenty-six-year-old Princess Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen on 13 July 1818. Between 1819 and 1822 she suffered two miscarriages and bore two daughters, of whom one died at birth and the other lived for only three months. On 17 April 1827, after the death of the Duke of York made Clarence heir presumptive, the ancient office of Lord High Admiral was revived for his benefit. Nevertheless, it was intended that he should carry out his duties only on the advice of a Council, led by the forceful Admiral Sir George Cockburn [20]. A junior member was Vice-Admiral Sir William Hope, who had been Clarence’s third lieutenant in Pegasus but seemed not to bear his old captain a grudge.
Clarence insisted on taking the duties seriously, touring dockyards and introducing reforms into the promotion system. First Lieutenants of ships of the line became commanders, both in title and in rank. Four admirals and six captains were made naval aides-de-camp to the Lord High Admiral (later to the King), a new appointment devised by Clarence with appropriate embellishments of uniform, a subject that always fascinated him. In a practical measure, he introduced a uniform peaked cap to replace the variety of head-gear previously worn by officers on informal occasions instead of the full dress cocked hat. After the battle of Navarino (20 October 1827), where his old friend Admiral Sir Edward Codrington embarrassed the British Cabinet by destroying a combined Turkish and Egyptian fleet, Clarence sent him personal congratulations and distributed honours on an unprecedented scale. Despite his reputation as a stern captain, he now drastically reduced the number of offences for which men could be flogged. Cockburn repeatedly reminded Clarence that he had no powers to act without the agreement of his Council, but Clarence disregarded him. Finding a small squadron waiting at Portsmouth for the arrival of its appointed admiral, he put to sea with it so that for ten days the Admiralty had no idea where he and the ships had gone.
In 1828 Clarence, who stressed the importance of good gunnery, set up a committee to improve this aspect of the fleet’s training. This involved financial costs about which his Council had not been consulted. The Duke of Wellington, as Prime Minister, was already alarmed at the cost of Clarence’s dockyard visitations. Always a
strict constitutionalist, he informed King George IV that, if his brother did not resign, his ministers would. Clarence accordingly left office on 17 September 1828, though his concern for gunnery was shared by others and played a part in the establishment in 1830 of a gunnery training school at Portsmouth in the hulk Excellent.
Clarence succeeded to the throne on his brother’s death on 26 June 1830. Never one for court etiquette, he entirely agreed with the government’s economies in the costs of his coronation, which he regarded as a waste of money. Many traditional ceremonies were abolished and Queen Adelaide provided the jewels for her own crown. On his accession he gave up his position as admiral of the fleet, and bestowed this rank on the three senior admirals of the Red, Williams Freeman [13], Lord Gambier [14] and Sir Charles Pole [15]. Still interested in uniforms, he changed the Royal Navy’s facings from white to scarlet, as more appropriate to a Royal Service (a decision reversed under his successor). William IV was soon faced by a constitutional crisis over the question of parliamentary reform. Despite a majority in the Commons in favour of the Reform Bill, supported by public opinion in the country as a whole, the measure was repeatedly rejected by the Lords. Reluctantly, he was persuaded by Wellington, who feared a breakdown of public order, to declare that, if necessary, he would create enough new pro-Reform peers to ensure the Bill’s passage. Rather than see the emergence of a permanent Liberal majority in the Lords, the Opposition finally gave way and allowed the measure to be carried. During the rest of William IV’s reign he acted as a constitutional monarch, accepting the advice of his ministers and enjoying a modest degree of popularity among his subjects. He died on 20 June 1837 from pneumonia brought on by heart disease and other factors, and was buried at Windsor. He was succeeded by Victoria, only child of his deceased younger brother, the Duke of Kent.
WILLIAM (WILHELM) II
HM German Emperor and King of Prussia FREDERICK
WILLIAM VICTOR ALBERT, KG, GCVO (1859–1941) [47]
Prince William of Prussia, the future German Emperor William II (Kaiser Wilhelm II), was born in Berlin on 27 January 1859. He was the first child of Frederick, Crown Prince of Prussia, and Princess Victoria, eldest daughter of Queen Victoria. His birth, to a teenage mother, was a difficult one and caused him to be born with a left arm that never developed to its full size, and possibly with brain damage contributing to his violent mood swings in later life. Hopes that Frederick, who succeeded as German Emperor in 1888, would, under the influence of his forceful wife, turn the new Germany into a liberal and pro-British nation ended with his death at the age of 55 from cancer of the throat, after a reign of ninety-nine days. William succeeded his father on 15 June 1888 and began his reign by impressing all whom he met with his personal charm, energy and breadth of new ideas for a new empire. With nobody willing to contradict him, he came to believe himself an expert on every subject. At the opening of the Kiel Canal, he insisted on piloting his yacht, Hohenzollern, as the first vessel through. It was widely believed that the ship’s officers disconnected the controls on the bridge and navigated her from a different position. Hastening to Queen Victoria’s deathbed (he was always proud that she died with his arm supporting her), he first drove the train and then took the helm as his ship crossed the Channel. In foreign policy his capricious character led him to alternate between chauvinism and conciliation, and served only to create tension between Germany and the other Great Powers. William’s attitude towards the British was one of extremes. On the one hand he admired British power and gloried in his descent from Queen Victoria. On the other hand he resented the British reluctance to accept that the new Germany was a World, rather than merely a European, Power. His open sympathy for the Boer republics in their struggle with the British in South Africa, though it reflected the views of many of his subjects, placed a considerable strain on Anglo-German relations.
William’s enthusiasm for the Imperial German Navy, a new service created for the new empire and officered largely by the sons of its rising industrial and commercial middle class, alienated the British still further. As a small boy his first uniform had been a sailor suit and, with his younger brother, Prince Henry [62], he had played in a small-scale replica of a Royal Navy frigate. On 2 August 1889, at the Royal Regatta at Cowes, Isle of Wight, (the first in his series of regular attendances at this event) Queen Victoria appointed him an honorary admiral of the fleet. This honour, one that had never previously been bestowed on any foreign sovereign, delighted William and he immediately began work on a plan to improve the British Navy. Influenced by the United States Admiral Alfred Mahan’s book The Importance of Sea Power, William became convinced that, as a Great Power, Germany must herself have a Navy to match her imperial status. He saw the need for cruisers to protect her large merchant fleet and her new colonial possessions in Africa and the Pacific, and battleships to show the British that Germany’s friendship was worth having. This only triggered a costly naval race between the two nations, as the British insisted on retaining their existing margin of superiority. Intending to usher in an era of international peace, to be kept by British supremacy at sea and German supremacy on land, he only drove the British into the arms of France and Russia, the ancient foes of the British and Germans alike.
When the British ambassador to Berlin pointed out that, if the German fleet maintained its rate of expansion, by 1912 it would have more modern battleships than the British, he replied that, as an admiral of the English fleet, he knew that this was nonsense. He remained well disposed towards the Royal Navy and when he encountered a British fleet while cruising in Hohenzollern, had to be talked out of inviting its admiral to dine with him. Although William was superficially on good terms with his uncle, Edward VII [44], the two monarchs came to dislike each other. William disapproved of his uncle’s womanizing and playboy life-style (though in his own private life he himself had a taste for unconventional sexual practices), while Edward took his sister Victoria’s part in her quarrel with her son. Moreover, Edward’s queen, Alexandra, was a Danish princess who never forgave Prussia for defeating Denmark in the war of 1864. The prospect of warmer relations between William and George V [64], who succeeded Edward VII in 1910, was blighted by the continued naval race. Winston Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, expressed the British point of view in 1912. For Britain, he said, a powerful fleet was a necessity. For Germany, it was a luxury.
The approach of the First World War in 1914 found William cruising in the Baltic. Shocked and surprised by the rapid escalation of the crisis, he first tried to persuade his cousin, the Emperor Nicholas II of Russia [60], not to mobilize, but failed both in this and in his subsequent attempt to persuade his own generals to march against Russia rather than France. When the British declared war on Germany William repudiated his position as a British admiral of the fleet and field marshal. Although he was constitutionally Supreme War Lord, his generals excluded him from any part in framing military strategy. He exercised greater influence over his admirals and was instrumental in May 1916 in calling off the submarine campaign against unarmed merchant shipping. In January 1917 he approved the renewal of the campaign, having been persuaded that, even if it provoked the United States into entering the war, his U-boats would sink the American troopships before they reached France.
Throughout the war William insisted that the High Seas Fleet must be kept as a fleet in being, to inhibit the Royal Navy’s use of its own supremacy, and to remain as a bargaining counter in any post-war negotiations. At the beginning of November 1918 news that his government was seeking an armistice had a shattering effect throughout Germany. Sailors of the very fleet on which he had lavished so much enthusiasm began the slide into revolution. On 9 November 1918, following the declaration of a German republic, William abdicated and fled to the neutral Netherlands. He was given refuge by the Dutch government and lived in exile as a private gentleman. His empress, Augusta Victoria of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg, with whom he had six sons and a daughter, died in 1921. In 192
2 he married Princess Hermine of Reuss, a capable thirty-four-year-old widow with five children. William died at Doorn on 4 June 1941 and was buried in the grounds of his estate there, in an impressive tomb of his own design.
WILLIAMS
WILLIAM PEERE, see FREEMAN, WILLIAM PEERE
WILLIAMS [13]
WILLIS
Sir ALGERNON USBORNE, GCB, KBE, DSO (1889–1976)
British Admirals of the Fleet Page 42