Edward VII: The Last Victorian King

by Christopher Hibbert

  Almost every other evening there was some sort of party in the King’s hotel suite. This was sometimes a gay, relaxed gathering, at others, so one disgruntled guest complained, ‘a trying mixture of court restraint and jollity’, with the ‘dismal mysteries of bridge’ for those who played the game and ‘difficult conversation’ for those who did not. Occasionally the King went to the theatre to attend some light-hearted piece such as Oscar Strauss’s Walzertraum or Lehar’s The Merry Widow, or to listen to Yvette Guilbert, the diseuse whose performances he had much admired since an American friend, Mrs Ogden Goelet, had paid her £600 to break a contract in Paris in order to sing for him at Cannes. And once he went to what was billed as Die Hölle (‘The Underworld’) thinking it was a melodrama. It turned out to be a rather tiresome series of rude songs and recitations performed by a company from a Viennese musichall. When the second act threatened to be no better than the first the King got up and left, as he had left a much coarser performance by a Viennese cabaret singer — who sang a song about a monk who says to a lascivious countess, ‘Were it not for my holy robes’ and receives the reply, ‘Then take off your holy robes’ — which the King had thought disrespectful to the Abbot and monks of Tepl.

  The day after he had walked out in boredom from Die Hölle the papers congratulated his Majesty on having made a stand against immorality by having refused to see an improper performance; and soon afterwards a letter arrived from England from William Boyd Carpenter, Bishop of Ripon, expressing the satisfaction of the whole Church at the protest the King had made against obscene musical comedy. The King’s secretary wanted to know how to reply to this letter. ‘Tell the Bishop the exact truth,’ the King replied. ‘I have no wish to pose as a protector of morals, especially abroad.’

  The King was certainly more used to being criticized for depraving morals at Marienbad than praised for protecting them. He was only too liable to pick up curious people and ask them to luncheon, Frederick Ponsonby admitted.

  Monsieur and Madame de Varrue came one day. She had been a noted beauty in Paris, and had late in life married a young man who suddenly called himself Baron de Varrue … Mrs Dale Lace, with an eye glass, short skirts and a murky past, also came to luncheon and some of the were shocked, although she amused the King … Life at Marienbad was very hard work, as I spent so much time seeing people who were difficult to get rid of. For instance … a beautiful lady from the half-world in Vienna who wanted to have the honour of sleeping with the King. On being told this was out of the question, she said if it came to the worst she would sleep with me, so that she should not waste the money spent on her ticket.

  ‘A cloud of bluebottle flie constantly buzzed round the King,’ one British visitor complained in 1904. He was ‘recklessly abandoned to the society of a few semi-déclassé ladies and men to match’, though he was ‘civil enough to decent people’ and ‘followed the cure loyally’. In 1905 he was deemed to be ‘less evilly surrounded than in other years’ and the ‘doubtful ladies’ were ‘rather out of it’. But it was still well enough known that doubtful ladies continued to seek his company, that he was rarely averse to theirs, and that he found Marienbad a very convenient place in which to meet them. Sophie Hall Walker, whose husband, breeder of the King’s Derby winner, Minoru, became the first Lord Wavertree, was one of his favourite companions. And the daughter of Sir Charles Gill, another Marienbad habitué, remembered how in the afternoons she used to watch fascinated as Mrs Hall Walker’s hotel room was prepared for a teatime visit by the King, how flowers were placed in big vases, the air sprayed with scent and the curtains drawn.

  The American actress, Maxine Elliott, who was not invited to dinner parties in London by those hostesses generally known to entertain the King, confessed that she went to Marienbad, ‘where matters could be more easily arranged’, with the sole purpose of getting to know him. Sailing out to Bohemia with a socially impeccable American woman friend, she took rooms in a hotel near the Weimar and soon learned the King’s routine. Thus it was that one fine morning, the delightful, beautifully dressed figure of Maxine Elliott was to be seen sitting on a bench near the Kurhaus, apparently absorbed in a book. The King approached, attended by Frederick Ponsonby, Sidney Greville and Seymour Fortescue; Miss Elliott raised her eyes from her book; the King glanced into them; the royal party walked past. Then one of the King’s attendants returned to the bench with a message: ‘His Majesty believes you are the Miss Elliott he admired so much in your play. His Majesty would be delighted with your presence tonight for dinner. Mrs Arthur James is giving a dinner in His Majesty’s honour. 7.45 at the Weimar Hotel. Your invitation will, of course, be delivered to your hotel.’ After a further visit to Marienbad in a subsequent year, during which she was seen frequently in the King’s company, Miss Elliott was sufficiently assured of his interest in her to buy a house in England, Hartsbourne Manor at Bushey Heath, where she spent a great deal of money on a suite of rooms above her own which she referred to as ‘the King’s suite’.

  Every second day a bag of royal mail arrived from England together with a generous selection of English newspapers which the King read carefully, looking also through various French newspapers and the Vienna Neue Freie Presse so that when one of his ministers joined him at Marienbad he was found to be well informed of what was happening elsewhere.

  Frequently in his company was Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, who, mainly for the sake of his wife, Charlotte, had been a regular visitor to the spa for many years. Campbell-Bannerman had disapproved of the King before he got to know him well, just as the King had supposed that he would have little in common with Sir Henry, whom he had expected to find ‘prosy and heavy’. At first the King had taken little notice of him; but one day he asked him to luncheon and found him, contrary to all his expectations, very good company with a fund of amusing stories, ‘repartees, jokes and gastronomic appreciations’. Thereafter the King sought him out and spent many pleasant hours with him — too many hours, in fact, for the taste of Campbell-Bannerman, who, having been asked to lunch or dinner almost every day in September 1905, complained, ‘I got so mixed up with the King’s incessant gaieties, for which his energy and appetite are alike insatiable, that it was no rest or holiday for me. Thus when at last he was gone … my Dr ordered me to bed and absolute rest for forty-eight hours.’

  Sometimes the King talked politics to him, but more often the conversation was on less weighty subjects. A picture of them both talking earnestly in the gardens of the Kurhaus appeared in an illustrated paper. The King was shown striking his palm with a clenched fist in emphasis of some point to which Campbell-Bannerman was paying close attention. Underneath the picture was the caption, ‘Is it peace or war?’ When Campbell-Bannerman’s private secretary showed him the paper, his master examined it for a few moments before asking the secretary if he would like to know what was being discussed. The secretary said that he would. ‘The King wanted to have my opinion,’ Campbell-Bannerman informed him, ‘whether halibut is better baked or boiled!’

  17

  L’Oncle de l’Europe

  He is, and this one cannot deny, the arbiter of Europe’s destiny.

  ‘The more you know of him,’ Whitelaw Reid, the American Ambassador in London wrote to President Roosevelt about King Edward in 1907, ‘the better I am sure you will like him, and the more you will come to the prevalent English, and, in fact, European belief, that he is the greatest mainstay of peace in Europe.’

  The King’s reputation as a diplomatist of unique influence was prodigious. ‘He is, and this one cannot deny, the arbiter of Europe’s destiny, the most powerful personal factor in world policy,’ the Italian Foreign Minister told the French Ambassador in Rome. ‘And, as he is for peace, his overall approach will serve above all to maintain harmony between the nations.’ The King was widely supposed, in fact, to ‘run the foreign policy of the country’, as Frederick Ponsonby said, a supposition which, Ponsonby thought, may have made Lord Lansdowne ‘a little jealous’ and which, th
erefore, may have accounted for the rather strained relationship between the King and his Foreign Secretary.

  The King’s reputation as an arbiter of foreign policy stood quite as high abroad as it did in England. As the Belgian Chargé d’Affaires in London put it in a report to Brussels in 1907: ‘The English are getting more and more into the habit of regarding international problems as being almost exclusively within the province of King Edward, for whose profound political instinct and fertile diplomacy they, very rightly, feel great respect.’ The King’s views were often considered to be decisive, while his frequent foreign travels — attributed by his detractors as being due to Wanderlust, his determination to emulate the Kaiser, or to a taste for playing an apparently important role in the limelight of the European stage — were followed, watched and reported upon as assiduously as his political opinions were solicited and discussed.

  This belief in the King’s virtual omnipotence was particularly strong in less powerful states such as Italy; and even more so in those smaller countries, like Greece, Belgium and Portugal, whose thrones were occupied by monarchs to whom the King felt sympathetically drawn not only by their membership of his own profession but also by family ties. He naturally enjoyed this reputation. The Controller of the Kaiser’s Household, who, in the year before the King’s death, came to the view that his influence was far less than the Germans had always imagined, pictured ‘a sly and amiable smile’ stealing over his face when he thought how the world looked upon him ‘as the guiding spirit of … British diplomacy’. Under no illusions about the limits of his power, the King was nevertheless most insistent that he must be kept fully informed about the course and problems of the government’s foreign policy, either by the Prime Minister, or by the Foreign Secretary if the Prime Minister left the effective control of policy in his Foreign Secretary’s hands. He took particular pleasure in letting fellow-sovereigns know how well-informed he was. One day at Marienbad in 1905, according to Henry Wickham Steed, ‘he chaffed the life out of Ferdinand of Bulgaria, who … always [prided] himself upon being more rapidly informed than anyone else’, because Prince Ferdinand knew nothing about the Japanese Admiral Kaimamura’s destruction of the Russian Vladivostok squadron, of which the King had received advance notice from the Counsellor of the British Embassy in Vienna.

  The King’s obvious satisfaction in being entrusted with important confidences, his numerous contacts with ruling dynasties and with important foreign ministers, his charm and tactful good manners, his gift for drawing men out in conversation, and his willingness to listen to them in attentive silence, all stood him in good stead as a roving diplomatist and added to his reputation as an eminent mediator. But after his death it began to be realized that his influence on the conduct of European affairs had, in reality, been far from as effective as had been supposed, and that his views on foreign policy were never consistent and always liable to be influenced by personal considerations and prejudice. The goodwill that he inspired in most European countries, except Germany, together with the dignity of his manner and the forcefulness of his personality when he represented his own country, were fully recognized; yet, as Balfour asked Lord Lansdowne to confirm after the outbreak of the First World War, ‘he never made an important suggestion of any sort on large questions of policy’ during the years when they were both his ministers. Nor did the King ever add the sort of detailed, considered minute which his mother’s ministers had grown to expect from Prince Albert on the Foreign Office dispatches which were sent to him, usually contenting himself with a mere indication of approval or commendation.

  When he disagreed with ministerial advice he did not hesitate to put forward his own views, much to the annoyance of the young Eyre Crowe, who was one day to be Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. Crowe was highly critical of the King’s insistence on maintaining his royal authority, and went about maintaining that he ‘must be taught that he is a pawn in the game’. But the King’s obedience to constitutional propriety was far too strong for him to argue with an important Cabinet decision once it had been taken. And far more often than not he had to give way to his government, as when, for example, he endeavoured to prevent the appointment as French Ambassador in London of M. Challemel-Lacour, a supposed Communist, against whom the King had been prejudiced by his aristocratic French friends and by biased reports in Figaro.

  Although he allowed himself to be persuaded to accept the appointment of Challemel-Lacour (whom he found on personal acquaintance to be entirely unobjectionable), the King did not always give way without a more determined struggle. This was well exemplified in 1903 when, having visited Portugal — where his presence was interpreted in Berlin as a setback for German ambitions in Africa — the King went on to Italy and decided that, on passing through Rome in April, he ought to pay a visit to the Pope as the Kaiser had twice done.

  Influenced by Knollys, who was ‘dead against it’, he had, before leaving England, reluctantly accepted the Cabinet’s advice not to pay the visit. And on 23 March, Knollys had assured Balfour that the King would go only for the day to Rome, where he was to have lunch with King Victor Emmanuel III, and ‘by this arrangement he [would] get out of seeing the Pope’. ‘He hopes the Pope will not be offended by his not calling [on] him,’ Knollys added in a letter to Balfour’s secretary, J.S. Sandars, a few days later. ‘But if he is H.M. cannot help it.’

  So it was that on arrival at Malta a telegram had been sent from the royal yacht to Sir Francis Bertie, British Ambassador in Rome, to the effect that owing to the short time that the King was to stay in Rome it was ‘impossible for his Majesty to visit the Pope for whom he [entertained] the highest reverence and respect’. On the very day that this telegram was dispatched from the royal yacht, however, the Foreign Minister’s secretary, Sir Eric Barrington, sent a message, in cipher and marked ‘very confidential’, from London: ‘The King will receive telegram from Prime Minister about Pope. My conviction is that it is intended as a loophole in case King thinks informal visit desirable.’

  The next day the Prime Minister’s telegram was deciphered aboard the Victoria and Albert:

  Mr Balfour has the honour to report that yesterday the Duke of Norfolk and Lord Edmund Talbot [two leaders of the Roman Catholic community in England] came to see him on the subject of your Majesty’s visit to Rome. They expressed with deep emotion their views on what they declared would be regarded by the Roman Catholic world as a deliberate slight put upon an old and venerable man [aged ninety-three] by your Majesty’s abstaining from visiting the Vatican. They also maintain that while this course would deeply hurt the sentiments of Roman Catholics, the opposite course would raise no widespread ill-feeling among Protestants. Mr Balfour said he deeply regretted that anything should be done to hurt the feelings of the Pope but that he still adhered to the view that there was really great danger of irritating Protestant sentiment if the King of England paid a formal visit to the Roman pontiff … Mr Balfour could not therefore alter the tenor of the advice already given with the concurrence of the Cabinet.

  Lord Edmund Talbot was bitterly disappointed when shown a copy of this telegram which, in his opinion, did not give the King ‘any lead’ at all. ‘The whole thing has been deplorably bungled,’ he told Sandars. ‘I have still faith in the King’s good taste to extricate himself from this extremely painful position … [But] I wish the Prime Minister had found it possible to give His Majesty a helping hand.’

  Entirely convinced by the arguments put forward by the Duke of Norfolk and Lord Edmund Talbot, and annoyed by the government’s equivocation, the King gave orders for another telegram to be sent requesting less ambiguous advice. Both Balfour and Lansdowne were accordingly informed that the King felt ‘very strongly on the subject’, that he attached ‘great importance to the question’, that on his three previous visits to Rome as Prince of Wales he had invariably visited the Pope, and that not to do so ‘on this occasion would not only be a slight to a venerable Pontiff but would alienate
all the King’s Catholic subjects throughout the world. The King deeply [regretted this divergence of his opinion with the Cabinet], but would like to hear from [the Prime Minister] again on the subject.’

  This elicited a reply from Balfour again expressing fears that ‘Protestant prejudice might fasten on the visit’ and make trouble in England; and a complementary message from Barrington to Hardinge confirming that Lansdowne nevertheless wanted the visit to be made. ‘The Cabinet dare not recommend the King to go,’ Barrington explained.

  ‘But evidently A.J.B[alfour] wished the King in such a matter to passer outre of his advisers.’

  The King now lost his temper. Demanding straightforward advice he dictated an enraged telegram to Hardinge, who passed it on to Frederick Ponsonby for coding and dispatch. Ponsonby read it with consternation, feeling ‘instinctively that if this message was sent there would be no alternative for Arthur Balfour but to send in his resignation’. Ponsonby, therefore, rewrote the message ‘in conciliatory language’; and at last the King received the sort of reply from the Prime Minister for which he had been hoping:

  If the proposed visit could really be made private and unofficial, Mr Balfour would think it an impertinence to offer any observations on it … The whole stress could be laid on the fact that … the Pope was very aged and in course of nature could live but a short time, that he had expressed a personal desire to see your Majesty and that as a matter of courtesy (so to speak) between gentlemen, you could not pass his door without acceding to his wishes.

  The King readily accepted this advice, but great difficulty was experienced in persuading the Vatican to intimate that the Pope would like to see him. Cardinal Rampolla, the Papal Secretary of State, intent upon making it appear that the King had requested an audience, assured Monsignor Edmund Stonor, titular Archbishop of Trebizond and a resident English prelate in Rome, that ‘the Holy Father, in consequence of his well-known present position in Rome, could not take the initiative in inviting a sovereign to pay him a visit, but should the King of England wish to do him the courteous attention of calling upon him, this would be acceptable and duly appreciated.’