Edward VII_The Last Victorian King

by Christopher Hibbert

  The Crown Prince’s father, the old Kaiser Wilhelm I, had certainly not been persuaded, though. Nor had the Crown Prince’s son, Prince Wilhelm, then aged twenty-five, and strongly opposed to his parents’ liberal outlook. Nor had Prince Bismarck, who had spoken to the Prince of Wales about the insignificance of romantic love in comparison with a country’s destiny. Disregarding both Bismarck’s rebuke and the Kaiser’s ban on any further discussions about the possibility of such an unsuitable match, the Prince of Wales and his sister had arranged for a secret meeting between the two young lovers, who had been encouraged to believe that, although the marriage could not take place while the Kaiser was still alive, the situation would be transformed once the old man was dead.

  Queen Victoria had been entirely on Prince Alexander’s side. At the Darmstadt wedding of her granddaughter, Princess Victoria of Hesse, to Prince Louis of Battenberg, she had fallen under Prince Alexander’s spell herself. She had found him not only ‘very fascinating’ and ‘a person in whose judgment’ she ‘would have great confidence’, but even to be compared with Prince Albert. ‘I think he may stand next to beloved Papa,’ she had written at that time. ‘I think him (as in beloved Papa’s case) so wonderfully handsome.’ So annoyed had she been, indeed, that the marriage between this paragon and her granddaughter, Princess Victoria, had been forbidden in Berlin that when Prince Wilhelm had proposed to visit England, she had let it be known that he would not be welcome at Windsor. Delighted to have an excuse not to have the tiresome young man at Sandringham either, the Prince of Wales had explained to him that he could hardly go to England to stay with his uncle if he could not call on his grandmother: so the visit had better be cancelled. Prince Wilhelm had, therefore, remained in Germany where he had gone about making insulting remarks about his uncle and referring to his grandmother as an ‘old hag’. He had come to England with his father for Queen Victoria’s Jubilee two years later; but his uncle, that ‘old peacock’, had virtually ignored him.

  Within a year of the Jubilee, however, it was impossible to ignore the egregious young man any longer. For in March 1888 his grandfather had died at last; less than four months later his father, Frederick III, had also died; and on 15 June 1888, at the age of twenty-nine, he had become Kaiser himself.

  Impulsive and theatrical, Kaiser Wilhelm II was capable of exercising great charm. He was undoubtedly clever and could be lively and amusing in conversation, although the encouraging laughter of his entourage would often drive him on to excessive hilarity and to that kind of boisterous, bullying banter into which so many of Queen Victoria’s descendants all too easily lapsed. John Morley wrote after meeting him at luncheon:

  He is rather short, pale, but sunburnt; carries himself well; walks into the room with the stiff pride of the Prussian soldier; speaks with a good deal of intense and energetic pleasure, not like a Frenchman, but staccato; his voice strong but pleasant; his eye bright, clear and full; mouth resolute, the cast of face grave or almost stem in repose, but as he sat between two pretty women he lighted up with gaiety and a genial laugh. Energy, rapidity, restlessness in every movement from his short, quick inclinations of the head to the planting of the foot.

  A compulsive exhibitionist, he was insatiably fond of talking, determined in his efforts to bring all those in his company to agree with what he said, and ever on the watch for an opportunity to demonstrate the breadth of his knowledge or the retentiveness of his memory. Frederick Ponsonby recalled one embarrassing occasion when the Kaiser asked him across the dinner table how many members there were of the London County Council and how many years elapsed between elections. Ponsonby, not very certain of his facts, answered as best he could.

  ‘I don’t think you’re right,’ the Kaiser commented and thereupon gave the exact figures. Presumably he had committed them to memory, as he learned by heart the statistics of all the most modern ships in the Royal Navy so as to impress any British Admiral with whom he might find himself in conversation, but his easy and irritating display of detailed information was nevertheless ‘effective’, as Ponsonby said, ‘and everyone present marvelled at his knowledge’.

  Disliking the Kaiser, to whom he referred as ‘William the Great’, and dismayed that so sudden an end had been put to his hopes of regulating Anglo–German relations in partnership — as senior partner — with his good-natured, amenable brother-in-law, the Prince of Wales had taken little trouble to disguise his dislike or to guard his tongue when speaking of his nephew. He compared him unfavourably with his father, Frederick III, and maintained that his ‘illustrious nephew’ needed to learn that he was ‘living at the end of the nineteenth century and not in the Middle Ages’. The Prince also disliked the Kaiser’s Foreign Minister, Count Herbert Bismarck, son of the Chancellor, who, in turn, made no secret of the fact that he ‘hated the Prince of Wales’. When Bismarck quarrelled with Sir Robert Morier, British Ambassador in St Petersburg who had been a friend of the Empress Frederick when serving in the British Legation at Darmstadt in the Franco–Prussian War, the Prince intervened in the quarrel so vigorously that the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, was forced to conclude that the Prince had been impulsive and indiscreet and that he persistently offended the Kaiser — as he put it on another occasion — by treating him ‘as an uncle treats a nephew, instead of recognizing that he was an emperor’. Soon afterwards the Kaiser was reported — later, he said, falsely reported — to have made it plain that, on a forthcoming state visit to Vienna, the continued presence of his uncle at the Grand Hotel, where the Prince was then staying on holiday, would not be acceptable to him. And the British Ambassador in Vienna, Sir Augustus Paget, was therefore given the unpleasant duty of informing the Prince that the Austrian Emperor would be grateful if he left the city before the Kaiser arrived. Paget subsequently reported to the Prince:

  I am perfectly certain, from what has been told me, that all the present trouble comes from stories having been repeated to [the Kaiser] of what Your Royal Highness has said. Some of those stories have been repeated to me. I need not say that I do not believe them, but it is necessary to avoid saying anything whatsoever which may be made use of as a foundation for the gossip of the malevolent or idle … [I must emphasize] the all importance of Your Royal Highness being more than guarded in anything you say about the Emperor William.

  The Queen had had a good deal of sympathy for her son in this squabble with the Kaiser and in his insistence that he ought to receive from him a written apology for having said that he did not wish to meet the Prince of Wales in Vienna. She had told Lord Salisbury that it was ‘really too vulgar and too absurd to suggest that the one treated the other as a nephew rather than as an emperor’. It showed ‘a very unhealthy and unnatural state of mind’; and the Kaiser ‘must be made to feel that his grandmother and uncle [would] not stand such insolence’. The Queen would ‘not swallow this affront’, and the ‘Prince of Wales must not submit to such treatment’ by ‘such a hot-headed, conceited, and wrong-headed young man’ who was ‘devoid of all feeling’. Yet she was forced to agree that the political relations of the German and British governments ought ‘not to be affected (if possible) by these miserable and personal quarrels’; and she sent her son-in-law, Prince Christian, to Berlin to see what he could do to bring about a family reconciliation.

  On his arrival in Berlin, Prince Christian was assured by the Kaiser that he had never said he did not want to meet his uncle in Vienna; but since, as he continued to insist, this was ‘not a simple affair between uncle and nephew, but between Emperor and Prince of Wales’, he was not prepared to send a written explanation. Nor did he do so, merely writing in reply to a letter from the Queen — which the Prince deemed ‘rather too mild’ — that the whole Vienna affair was ‘absolutely invented, there not being an atom of a cause to be found’. The whole thing was ‘a fixed idea which originated either in Uncle Bertie’s imagination, or in somebody else’s.’ And with this, the Prince had to be content. ‘What a triumph for the Bismarcks, as well as f
or Willy,’ the Prince commented gloomily to his sister. ‘Lord Salisbury was consulted by [the Queen], and he gave her the worst possible advice, making us virtually to “eat humble pie”!’

  Yet despite this quarrel, when the Kaiser came to England in the summer of 1889, he showed himself so determined to be pleasant that Knollys was able to assure the Prime Minister that he and the Prince of Wales had succeeded in getting along perfectly well together. The Kaiser had obviously been delighted to be made an honorary Admiral of the Fleet and to be proposed for membership of the Royal Yacht Squadron; while the Prince — though his temper was rather frayed by an attack of phlebitis and he still thought that ‘Willy [was] a bully’ — had decided that his nephew was certainly a good deal less combative than he had been formerly. On the day of the Kaiser’s departure, Joseph Chamberlain declared in a speech at Leicester that ‘no far-seeing English statesman could be content with England’s permanent isolation on the continent of Europe’, and that the ‘natural alliance’ was between England and ‘the great German Empire’. The Prince of Wales would not have put it as strongly as that, but he was now more inclined to assent to an Anglo– German understanding. Accordingly, the Prince’s return visit to Berlin the next year was as successful as the Kaiser’s visit to England. The Prince — who had shown no resentment that his nephew was now an Emperor while he was still a powerless heir — told Queen Victoria that he had been treated ‘quite like a sovereign’ in Germany and that his only regret was that his expenses had ‘in consequence been heavy’.

  It was almost the last time that the Prince wrote well of his nephew, about whom nothing annoyed him more than his determination to shine at Cowes as a brilliant yachtsman and as master of an increasingly powerful navy. Until the Kaiser decided to become what the Prince, in the hearing of Baron von Eckardstein, called ‘the boss of Cowes’, it was the Prince himself who was the star of the annual regatta. He was Commodore of the Royal Yacht Squadron as well as of the Royal Thames Yacht Club; he was President of the Yacht Racing Association; and he was extremely proud that his own racing cutter, Britannia, with himself aboard, had won many an important race and was, indeed, in his own estimation, ‘the first racing yacht afloat’. But the Kaiser had spoiled all that. In 1893 he had appeared at Cowes with a new yacht of his own, Meteor I, with which he had the satisfaction of beating the King in the race for the Queen’s Cup. And thereafter he had bombastically set about using Cowes as a showplace for the latest warships of the German navy.

  In 1895 he arrived in the imperial yacht, Hohenzollern, escorted by Germany’s two newest warships, Wörth and Weissenburg, both named after German victories during the Franco–Prussian War. And on 6 August, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the victory at Wörth, he chose to address his sailors in a vainglorious speech which the Prince of Wales denounced as an affront to his hosts and which provoked journalistic warfare between the English and German press.

  Having already antagonized the regatta committee by ostentatiously withdrawing Meteor I from the race for the Queen’s Cup on the grounds that the handicapping was unfair to him, the Kaiser exasperated his uncle two days later at a dinner party aboard the Osborne. A quarrel had broken out between France and England over a border dispute in the Far East, and there was even talk of war. The Kaiser was in an exceptionally boisterous mood that evening; and, heedless of his uncle’s excessive sensitivity about never having been on active service, slapped him on the back — on the front, one eyewitness told Baron von Eckardstein — and cried out, ‘So, then, you’ll soon be off to India to show what you’re good for as a soldier.’

  Before leaving Cowes that year the Kaiser approached George Lennox Watson, the designer of the three-hundred-ton Britannia, and ordered a yacht which would be even bigger than that and even faster than Meteor I. The Prince could not cope with this. He sold Britannia, in which he had taken such pride, to John Lawson-Johnston, who had made a fortune out of Bovril; and, although he bought the yacht back when he became King and attended Cowes with unfailing regularity, he never took part in a race there again. ‘The regatta at Cowes was once a pleasant holiday for me,’ he complained. ‘But now that the Kaiser has taken command it is nothing but a nuisance … [with] that perpetual firing of salutes, cheering and other tiresome disturbances.’

  Having won the Queen’s Cup with his unrivalled Meteor II in 1899, the Kaiser added insult to injury not only by repeating his complaint about the ‘perfectly appalling’ system of handicapping but also by insisting on bringing to England with him, as his naval aide-de-camp, Admiral Baron von Senden und Bibran. This overbearing Junker had irritated the Prince by his haughty manner on previous visits to England and, piqued by the Prince’s dismissive attitude towards him, had spread reports in Berlin about the Prince’s anti-German sentiments. As soon as the Prince saw Senden’s name on the Kaiser’s list, he sent for Baron von Eckardstein to tell him that ‘after what had happened, the Kaiser could not possibly be accompanied on his visit to England by this person’ for whom he had ‘a quite peculiar aversion’. He absolutely declined to receive such a cad as the Admiral had shown himself to be. Eckardstein did his best on the Prince’s behalf, but the Kaiser was adamant, flatly declaring that if he went to England at all he would take with him anyone he liked. It seemed, in fact, that the visit would have to be cancelled until the German-born Duchess of Devonshire, ‘one of the cleverest and most capable women’ that Eckardstein had ever met, persuaded the Prince to accept Senden if he apologized for his past conduct and if it was clearly understood that he would be invited to Windsor only to attend the official dinner in honour of the Kaiser and, in no circumstances at all, to Sandringham.

  In spite of this ominous beginning, the Kaiser’s visit to England in 1899 was a notable success. It was recognized that his coming at such a time, accompanied by his Foreign Secretary, was proof to the world that, if there were a European coalition in favour of the Boers, Germany would not be party to it. And the Kaiser received much credit in England for this gesture which was made in defiance of public opinion in Germany. The Prince, who supervised the arrangements with his habitual attention to detail in such matters, went out of his way to be agreeable to his guest; while the Princess of Wales, who cordially disliked him and considered that he got ‘more foolish and conceited every day’, succeeded in disguising her distaste for his company at Sandringham, though in private she ridiculed the ‘fool’s’ having thought it necessary to arrive there with three valets and two hairdressers, one of whom was responsible for the upward-sweeping wings of the imperial moustache.

  ‘The German visit is going off very well,’ Francis Knollys reported to his friend, Lord Rosebery. ‘The German Emperor is much pleased with … England, and he evidently wishes to be very civil to everybody.’

  The Kaiser also created a good impression in England by his behaviour when Queen Victoria died. And after her death, in defiance of the wishes of his ministers, he declared that he would stay on in England as a private member of her family until the funeral. The Prince, who had, in fact, been rather put out by the Kaiser’s officious attempt to lift his grandmother’s body into her coffin, told the Empress Frederick that he had been kindness itself

  and touching in his devotion without a shade of brusquerie or selfishness … [his] touching and simple demeanour, up to the last, will never be forgotten by me or anyone. It was indeed a sincere pleasure for me to confer upon him the rank of field-marshal in my army, and to invest Willy [the German Crown Prince, aged nineteen] (who is a charming young man) with the Order of the Garter.

  Delighted by the compliments that had been paid to him in England, the Kaiser returned to Germany an evidently dedicated Anglophile. ‘We ought to form an Anglo–German alliance,’ he had declared on the last day of his visit at a luncheon at Marlborough House. ‘You would watch over the seas while we would safeguard the land. With such an alliance not a mouse would stir in Europe.’ His recently appointed Chancellor, Count von Bülow, wrote:

  I found him
completely under the spell of his English impressions. As a rule he could not change his military uniform often enough, but now he wore civilian clothes as he had done in England. He wore a tie-pin with his deceased grandmother’s initials on it. The officers who were summoned … to dine with him … did not seem very pleased by his constant enthusiastic allusions to England and everything English.

  It seemed for a time that some sort of agreement might be reached with Germany; and, although the King was sceptical, he agreed to do what he could to help. But he was not enthusiastic, and became even less so as the months went by.

  The King and the Kaiser met again in Germany in February 1901 when the King went out to see his sister who was dying of cancer at Friedrichshof. Having expressed the hope that it would be regarded as a purely family visit, the King was disconcerted, on stepping down from the train at Frankfurt, to find his nephew in full-dress uniform waiting to greet him with a military escort.

  Six months later, the King had to return to Germany for his sister’s funeral. Expecting that he would have to talk to the Kaiser about the possibility of an Anglo–German alliance which their respective governments had been considering, the King asked Lord Lansdowne to give him a set of notes which he could use as a basis for private discussions. But when the time came, the King was so deeply upset by the loss of his sister; so annoyed by the Kaiser’s recent reference to British ministers as ‘unmitigated noodles’; so exasperated by the Kaiser’s long letters of gratuitous advice about the conduct of the Boer War; and, in any case, so sceptical about the prospect of an Anglo–German alliance, that he impatiently and imprudently handed Lansdowne’s notes to the Kaiser without attempting to discuss any of the points mentioned in them.

  Having thus avoided any unpleasant conversation at Homburg, the King went on to Wilhelmshöhe near Cassel, where he was irritated to find 15,000 troops to welcome him to further official talks with the Kaiser which had been arranged to take place in the castle. These conversations got off to a bad start. The Kaiser, in his knowing way, said that he was interested to hear that the British government were thinking of granting independence to Malta, a proposal of which the Colonial Office had not troubled to inform the King, who was naturally at first embarrassed by his ignorance and then furious with the government for having failed to consult or enlighten him. Nothing of importance was thereafter discussed at Wilhelmshöhe, from which the King was thankful to escape to Homburg. He seemed even more relieved when, soon after his return home to England, he was told that the government had decided to break off the negotiations for an alliance with Germany.