But the King felt that he could not go to the Vatican unless he was actually invited to go; and any such invitation, Cardinal Rampolla continued to insist to Monsignor Stonor, could not possibly be issued. Faced with this impasse, the Duke of Norfolk decided to intervene personally. He did not trust Monsignor Stonor, considering him ‘stupid and a bungler’, so Francis Bertie told Sandars, and suspecting that he was playing along with Rampolla in the hope of ‘getting his reward’. Under pressure from Norfolk the more reliable Monsignor Merry del Val, the President of the Accademia, who had been to school in England, went to see the Pope personally and, to Cardinal Rampolla’s anger, returned from the Vatican with an acceptable message: ‘His Holiness has personally expressed his concurrence with what the Duke of Norfolk conveyed to His Majesty as to the pleasure which His Holiness would derive from a visit from His Majesty.’
No sooner had the seemingly intractable problem of the invitation been settled, however, than other problems arose. First of all, the Vatican wanted to know, where would the visit be made from? The Pope could not possibly receive the King if he left from the Quirinale, since relations between the Papacy and the Monarchy had been severely strained by the Pope’s loss of his patrimony as a consequence of the unification of Italy. Sir Francis Bertie went to consult King Victor Emmanuel on this point. The Italian King was agreeable and accommodating. He told Bertie that he thought that a visit to the Pope was ‘quite natural and that though it could not be made direct from the Quirinale, there were ways of satisfying the Pope’s susceptibilities’. He cheerfully suggested that King Edward might start his journey from the house of the Minister whom his nephew, the Kaiser, had accredited to the Pope. Bertie, so he reported, ‘treated this suggestion as intended as a joke’.
Meanwhile it seemed to Mr Balfour, so yet another message from London informed the King, ‘that if the Pope lays down from what palaces he will, and from what palaces he will not receive a direct visit from your Majesty, he has not much real ground of complaint if he is not visited at all’. Ignoring this comment, the King decided to make his visit from the British Embassy, and Hardinge was sent to discuss the final arrangements with Cardinal Rampolla. It was not a comfortable interview.
Cardinal Rampolla received me in a most gushing manner [Hardinge reported to Balfour]. His appearance did not impress me. He has a deceitful eye and does not look one straight in the face. He speaks Italian French. He asked if the King would come and call on him and whether he might return the visit to the King at the English College. I told him quite plainly that much as the King would like to make his personal acquaintance there could be no question of his Majesty paying him a visit since the King only paid visits to sovereigns. He at once quoted the precedent of the German Emperor to which I replied that the King of England could not possibly admit that his actions could in any way be bound by precedents set by the German Emperor. I also added that there was no question of the King going to the English College as if he did so he would have to go to the Scotch and Irish Colleges … He then asked if the King would visit St Peter’s as he would like to receive him there … to which I replied that if H.M. went to St Peter’s it would be ‘en touriste’. He also asked if Monsignor Stonor would accompany the King from the Embassy to which I answered that the King proposed to take me in his carriage and that Stonor had better await the King at the Vatican … I impressed upon him that although the King would come in uniform as an act of courtesy to the Pope the visit was to be considered quite private and informal.
Sailing from Malta on 21 April 1903, the Victoria and Albert set course for Naples whence a telegram was dispatched to say that the King would arrive incognito, which seemed ‘rather absurd’ to Frederick Ponsonby since ‘no other human being in the world would come with eight battleships, four cruisers, four destroyers, and a dispatch vessel’.
On stepping ashore at Naples, the first English monarch to set foot there since Richard Coeur de Lion, the King immediately alarmed the Italian police, who had planned to close to the public the museums which he was to visit and to fill the galleries with detectives. He refused to have any police protection, and when two of his suite were asked to walk closely behind him at all times to guard him from the knives and bullets of assassins, he turned round in irritation and sent them off in different directions. He even insisted on exploring the slums of Naples with Queen Amélie of Portugal and Mrs Cornelius Vanderbilt, afterwards listening complacently to a lecture from Charles Hardinge ‘about exposing himself needlessly’.
Bertie reported to Sandars on 26 April:
The King has been very civilly and respectfully received in the streets here. Hats off and some clapping but no cheering. On the other hand at the Opera Gala last night he had an enthusiastic reception — vivas and cheers and clapping of hands several times and lasting some time … There was a great display of jewels but not much beauty. The ballet dancers had pink caleçons which gave them an odd appearance. I believe that King Victor Emmanuel [II], of holy memory, said of a ballet of that kind that if it were not for the clothes it would be paradise.
Two days later the King arrived in Rome feeling rather crotchety and out of sorts. A morose and sleepy guest, he had been entertained at luncheon the previous day by Lord Rosebery, an equally quiet as well as an unwilling host, who had a villa outside Naples and who had employed a firm of caterers to provide the seemingly interminable but indifferent meal of twenty courses which lasted until four o’clock. But although the King’s bad mood worsened as he left for the Vatican and found that the private nature of his visit had been rendered suspect by streets lined with troops and cheering crowds, and although Cardinal Rampolla grumpily declined to be present, the interview with the Pope went off very well.
Hardinge reported to Balfour:
On arrival within the precincts of the Vatican, His Majesty was received with great pomp by a motley and picturesque group of ecclesiastics, chamberlains, officers of the Swiss Guard and of the Noble Guard, many of them in sixteenth century costumes. After the presentations to the King, His Majesty was taken to the Pope’s private apartments where the Pope … a perfect marvel for a man of ninety-three … came to meet him in the ante-room, and took him into an inner room where they remained in conversation for about a quarter of an hour or twenty minutes. The King has told me since that the Pope talked to him of every sort of question — Venezuela, Somaliland, Lord Salisbury, some occasion when he had seen the Queen about forty years ago, etc. The King then sent for us and presented each of us in turn to the Pope.
The King had been careful to warn his suite to show the Pope the utmost respect without prejudicial veneration, to bow as often as they liked but on no account to kiss his ring if it were offered to them. But the Pope, ‘a really fine and dignified old gentleman’, saved them any possible embarrassment by getting out of his chair, shaking hands with everyone in turn and then making a short speech assuring them how happy he was to have had the opportunity of seeing their master.
The visit to the Pope was a happy prelude to the King’s far more politically important visit to Paris the next month. He had made his plans to visit Paris, after going to Portugal and Italy, in ‘the utmost secrecy’, as the Marquis de Soveral told King Carlos I. He had told neither the Queen nor the government, nor even his private secretary, ‘extreme discretion’ being necessary in view of the effect which his journey would have on Russia and Germany. Nor had he told the French President. ‘He does not wish to compromise himself,’ Soveral explained, ‘but wants to be in a position where he can abandon his trip should difficulties crop up.’ When they were informed of the King’s intentions, most of the Cabinet were extremely dubious about the wisdom of a visit to France. Lord Lansdowne warned the King that it might be dangerous in view of French feeling about the Boer War and about the incident at Fashoda in the Upper Nile Valley from which a French detachment had been forced to retreat after a protest at their presence there had been handed to them by General Kitchener. But the King was undeterre
d. The French President, Emile Loubet, welcomed the idea warmly, telling the British Ambassador, who also approved of it, that ‘he could not lay too much stress on the influence which the King’s presence in Paris would have on friendly relations between the two peoples … His Majesty, while Prince of Wales, had acquired an exceptional popularity; and he would find when he returned that this feeling was as warm as ever … [and] was general among all classes.’
So the government, without enthusiasm, gave their consent to the visit, trusting that their foreboding would not be justified and that the King’s personal reputation in France would avert any serious unpleasantness, even though he was going — as he insisted on going — with ‘all the honours due to the King of England’.
Certainly in earlier years, as President Loubet had said, the King had been very popular in France, where his influence was such that, as the Goncourt brothers noted, ‘the style of handshake with the elbow pressed close to the body’ which became fashionable in about 1895 ‘arose from his having an attack of rheumatism in the shoulder’. Both Queen Victoria and the British Foreign Office had been much concerned by his intimate friendship with the French nobility after the fall of the Second Empire. The Queen had thought it most imprudent of him to offer the house which he had borrowed from the Duke of Devonshire — and to which he referred as ‘notre maison de campagne, “Chiswick”’ — as a refuge to the exiled Empress Eugènie. The government had also been concerned about his equally chivalrous insistence that the highest funeral honours should be paid to the Prince Imperial, who had been killed while serving with the British army in the war against the Zulus in 1879. Arranging for a man-of-war to bring the coffin back to England and acting as pallbearer at the funeral, his generous display of sympathy had been deeply gratifying to the dead man’s mother, the Empress Eugènie; but Disraeli had felt compelled to express the hope that the republican government of France would feel as obliged to him as she was.
Yet the Prince of Wales’s friendship with imperialists and royalists had not in the end hampered his ability to get on well with republicans. A report prepared by the French police in 1874 indicated that there was no political significance in his private friendships with either Orleanists or Bonapartists. This report ran:
Il est très sympathique. C’est le type du gentilhomme anglais; il a les instincts toriés; mais tout le monde s’accorde à dire qu’il fera un excellent roi. Quant à ses opinions relativement à la France, on peut citer la réponse qu’il fit au Général Fleury, lors du voyage du Czar à Londres, ‘Monseigneur,’ disait le Général, ‘on prétend que vous êtes orléaniste.’ ‘Bah! Mon cher Général, rien qu’un petit peu.’
In 1878 the republican government had expressed the wish that the Prince would be appointed President of the British section of the Paris International Exhibition. He had accepted the offer, and had delighted the Parisians by the good-humoured way in which he laughingly acknowledged the cries of ‘Vive la République!’ which were directed at him as he walked by in the procession at the opening ceremony. He also created a favourable impression two days later at a banquet in the Hôtel du Louvre where, in a speech delivered half in English and half in French and without recourse to notes, he gave moving testimony of his love of France and of his conviction that there would now be a period of lasting friendship between that great country and his own. ‘England is very popular here at this moment,’ the British Ambassador had told the Foreign Secretary contentedly the following week. ‘And the Prince of Wales’s visit has been the principal cause of this.’
The Prince had increased that popularity as time went on. He had developed an unlikely but mutually respectful relationship with the ugly, ill-dressed Léon Gambetta, who found it ‘no waste of time to talk with him even over a merry supper’ at the Café Anglais. The Prince had convinced Frenchmen that he sincerely loved France ‘at once gaîment et sérieusement’, as Gambetta put it, despite the colonial rivalry between their country and his which sometimes led to his being cruelly lampooned in the French press and execrated by the Parisian mob. And he had allayed disappointment at his refusal in 1889 to bestow his official favour on an International Exhibition in Paris on the anniversary of the outbreak of the French Revolution — on the grounds that its inspiration was anti-monarchical — by visiting the Exhibition privately with his wife and children, making another family excursion to the new iron tower whose marvels were explained to them by its designer, Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, and going to the Elysée to repay a visit made to him by the President, Sadi Carnot. When Carnot was assassinated he went out of his way to display his sympathy by calling in person at the French Embassy to offer his condolences to the Ambassador and attending the requiem Mass in the French chapel in Leicester Square. He had always been equally punctilious in his attentions to Carnot’s successors, particularly to Loubet, who became President in 1899.
Since then, however, the former happy relationship between the King and the French Republic — clouded first by the Fashoda crisis and then by the vociferous pro-Boer sympathies of the French people and press — had been further overcast by his decision not to make his annual visit to France in 1900 as a protest against the savage ridicule of the royal family by Anglophobic journalists and caricaturists. He had also declined to attend the opening of the International Exhibition in Paris that year; and when Lord Salisbury pressed him to do so in the interests of Anglo– French relations, he had produced an exceptionally scurrilous article in La Patrie and had reiterated his determination to make his displeasure known by his absence. The following year he had been even more exasperated by caricatures in Le Rire.
But by 1903 the King had decided that the time had come to make the quarrel up. Feeling against England was still quite strong, as he knew only too well. A special number of the weekly paper L’Assiette au Beurre — devoted to British concentration camps in South Africa and concluding with a rude drawing of Britannia, ‘L’Impudique Albion’, lifting her skirts to reveal buttocks imprinted with the unmistakable features of King Edward VII — sold more than a quarter of a million copies. And several nationalist journals, notably Libre Parole, La Patrie and L’Autorité, maintained an uncompromisingly anti-British tone in every issue. Yet he believed that he must now make an official visit in an effort to bring about the détente which both governments desired, hoping that his personal popularity amongst most people in Paris would help them to regard his country in a more friendly way.
His reception, as he drove from the Porte Dauphine railway station in the Bois de Boulogne down the Champs Elysées, was not altogether encouraging. Most of the crowd watched in silence. A few hats were raised. There was a little scattered cheering — more, however, for the President than the King. But the loudest shouts — fortunately directed at the King’s suite, particularly at Frederick Ponsonby, who was wearing a red military coat, rather than at the King himself — were ‘Vive Fashoda!’
‘Vivent les Boers!’ and ‘Vive Jeanne d’Arc!’ Once or twice a voice shouted quite a long sentence which the English visitors could not catch but which was greeted by loud laughter from the crowd.
‘The French don’t like us,’ one of the King’s suite remarked; and the King curtly observed, ‘Why should they?’ He seemed in excellent spirits, though, glancing to right and left, acknowledging the infrequent acclamations with a smile and polite nod of the head, sitting straight-backed as the carriage rolled by.
After paying a state visit to the President at the Elysée, he drove to the British Embassy where, in reply to an address presented to him by the British Chamber of Commerce, he made a highly effective speech which had been prepared for him by Hardinge. Dinner at the Embassy was followed by a performance of Maurice Donnay’s L’Autre Danger at the Théâtre Français where the audience seemed rather nervous and reserved. Displaying not the least affront at his unenthusiastic reception, he left the loge during the entr’acte, to the evident consternation of the police, and walked about with the rest of the audience as though he felt a
s much at home as he would have done at Drury Lane, proudly wearing the Grand Cordon of the Légion d’Honneur on his starched shirt front. Noticing the actress Jeanne Granier, he walked up to greet her, kissing her hand and carefully enunciating in French, in a voice loud enough for others to hear, the so often quoted words, ‘Ah, Mademoiselle, I remember how I applauded you in London where you represented all the grace, all the esprit of France.’
The next morning that remark was repeated everywhere in Paris as the people read reports in the newspapers of the King’s speech at the British Embassy in which he had referred to his great pleasure at being once more ‘in this beautiful city’ and to the friendship and admiration which he and his countrymen felt ‘for the French nation and their glorious traditions’.
Willing to respond to these sincere overtures, the Parisians greeted him more warmly as he drove out that morning to a military review held in his honour at Vincennes, where, to the crowd’s obvious delight, he simulated the greatest relief and surprise when six cavalry regiments, charging headlong towards his stand with sabres and lances flashing in the air, came to a sudden halt beneath him. He turned round to the President to give him a hearty handshake.
The more extreme nationalists still shouted patriotic slogans and rude remarks; but, as the British Ambassador said, it was easy to perceive that there was in general ‘a marked increase in cordiality’. Although there was little obvious enthusiasm on the road to Vincennes, which took the King through the poorer quarters of Paris, there were far fewer catcalls than there had been the day before. And it gave the people evident satisfaction to see how gravely and conscientiously the King raised his hand in salute to the flags that lined the route of the procession. At the Hôtel de Ville — where the crowds cheered as the royal standard was unfurled on the flag-staff — the King once more assured his hosts in his clear and confident French that it was always with the greatest pleasure that he returned to Paris — ‘o? je me trouve toujours comme si j’étais chez moi’.
Edward VII: The Last Victorian King Page 37