Edward VII: The Last Victorian King

by Christopher Hibbert

  As he sat down he received ‘a tremendous ovation’, according to Frederick Ponsonby, who had described the atmosphere the day before as having been ‘distinctly antagonistic’. ‘He now seemed to have captured Paris by storm. From that moment everything was changed wherever he went. Not only the King but all of the suite were received with loud and repeated cheering. It was a most marvellous transformation.’ As the British Ambassador confirmed a few days later, the visit had proved a success ‘more complete than the most sanguine optimist could have foreseen’. ‘Seldom has such a complete change of attitude been seen,’ the Belgian Minister in Paris thought, ‘as that which has taken place in this country … towards England and her Sovereign.’

  That evening, on his way from a state banquet at the Elysée to the Opéra, the King was made to feel that all restraint had been abandoned and all reservations overcome. He seemed now to have entirely won the people over. Cheering crowds blocked the path of his carriage, shouting ‘Vive Edouard!’ ‘Notre bon Edouard!’ ‘Vive notre roi!’ These shouts were repeated whenever he thereafter appeared; and on 4 May as the King left the Embassy for the Gare des Invalides where the royal train was waiting to take him to Cherbourg, the crowds’ parting ovation was described in Paris newspapers as being ‘délirant’, ‘fer vent’, ‘passionnant’, ‘excitant’.

  He had spoken of strengthening the bonds of friendship between the two countries, and of their mutual desire to ‘march together in the path of civilization and peace’. And certainly most Frenchmen — supposing the King’s powers to be far greater than they were — believed that whither he wished to march, Englishmen would follow and that he himself was wholeheartedly committed to bringing about a lasting friendship with their country.

  In England, however, public opinion still regarded the entente with France suspiciously; and it was to be many years yet before that suspicion, which was never completely to disappear, began at last to dissolve. There could be no doubt, though, that King Edward’s charm and personality helped to hasten its dissolution and to make the entente cordiale a reality.

  His reputation as the sole originator of the entente is undeserved. It ignores the patient work of Lord Lansdowne (who had a French grandmother), Paul Cambon, French Ambassador in London, and Théophile Delcassé, who told a friend on taking office in 1898, ‘I do not wish to leave this desk without having restored the good understanding with England.’ It also ignores England’s need to end her isolation from the continental powers and to overcome her colonial difficulties, particularly in Africa. But as Sir Sidney Lee said, ‘the credit for influencing public opinion not only in France but also in England in favour of the entente, the credit for lulling the French suspicions of perfidy Albion and English suspicions of France, the credit for creating an atmosphere in which agreement could be reached, must go to Edward VII.’

  The King was also to be given credit for helping to preserve the entente in its delicate infancy. He warmly welcomed President Loubet to England on his return visit in July 1903, making gracious little speeches in praise of Franco–British friendship, and giving orders for the Marseillaise to be played in full, triumphantly, on all occasions. And when twelve French battleships arrived at Portsmouth in August 1905, at the invitation of ‘King Edward and his government’, he ensured that they were given a reception which the French sailors would never forget and which their compatriots would appreciate as a symbol of the King’s firm commitment to the long life of the entente.

  Clearing the way for the entente was the King’s greatest achievement. In no other sphere of foreign policy did he achieve a comparable success. The government, nevertheless, often had cause to feel grateful for his taste for foreign travel as well as for his international contacts. He was generally quite willing to interrupt a holiday when occasion demanded, to go to a royal funeral in Spain, for instance, or to distribute a few Victorian Orders in Portugal where he was on excellent terms with King Carlos, though the Portuguese nobles always reminded him of ‘waiters at second-rate restaurants’. Apart from the King of the Belgians, whom he grew to despise and distrust, there were few European sovereigns with whom he could not have a useful and pleasant conversation; while his known liking for America and Americans was by no means a negligible factor in Anglo–American relations. He much enjoyed the company of Whitelaw Reid, the American Ambassador in London. And, when England and the United States had quarrelled so bitterly over a border dispute between Venezuela and British Guiana in 1895 that war had seemed imminent, he had helped to calm the storm by the tone of his reply to a telegram sent to him by Joseph Pulitzer, whom he had met at Homburg. When Pulitzer’s telegram requesting his views on the critical issue had arrived in London, he had shown it to the Prime Minister, who had deprecated his decision to answer it. But the warm and conciliatory reply which had none the less been dispatched, and which Pulitzer had prominently published in his paper, the New York World, had soothed many ruffled tempers on the other side of the Atlantic.

  Much as the King normally enjoyed travelling, the experience was not always a pleasurable one. As Prince of Wales, for example, he had been asked to go to Ireland in 1885 when feeling in the south was running harder than usual against the English. Understandably annoyed that the government were neither willing to pay his expenses nor to request him officially to make a journey from which, as he pointed out, he could hardly expect to derive any ‘personal pleasure’, he was reluctant to go. But as soon as the government agreed to authorize the visit officially and to pay for it, he sailed for Dublin with the Princess Alexandra and his elder son. Their reception in Dublin and in the North was welcoming enough; but in Cork, where they were booed and pelted with onions, it was, as the Prince’s equerry reported, ‘a nightmare’. ‘The streets were filled with sullen faces — hideous, dirty, cruel countenances, hissing and grimacing into one’s very face, waving black flags and black kerchiefs… No one who went through this day will ever forget it … It was like a bad dream. The Prince of Wales showed the greatest calmness and courage.’

  So, too, he did when, despite the unrest in St Petersburg, he insisted on leaving for Russia to attend the funeral of Tsar Alexander II, who had been killed by a bomb which had been flung at him as he was returning to the Winter Palace from a military review. Grave doubts were expressed for the Prince’s safety. But neither he nor Princess Alexandra, who was the new Tsarina’s sister, had any doubt that they ought to go. And Lord Granville, the Foreign Secretary, considered that there were strong diplomatic advantages to be gained. ‘I have no doubt that your Royal Highness’s visit will be productive of good,’ Granville wrote to him.

  ‘There can be no question that a good understanding and friendly relations between this country and Russia may be of immense advantage to both.’

  So the Prince and Princess sailed for St Petersburg, where they were given the doubtful assurance by the Minister of the Interior that, provided they did not go about in the new Tsar’s company, they were unlikely to suffer the same fate as his father.

  Tsar Alexander III himself, who joined the Prince and Princess at the gloomy and heavily guarded Anichkov Palace after the funeral, was virtually a prisoner there, taking exercise in a narrow courtyard, not daring to go out for fear of the bombs of the nihilists. It was ‘a great consolation’ to have the Prince and Princess there with him, he told Queen Victoria; and he was obviously deeply moved when the Prince invested him with the Order of the Garter, which he had sought permission to do before leaving London. The British Ambassador, Lord Dufferin, thought that ‘nothing could have been in better taste, or more gracefully delivered’ than the Prince’s brief speech on that occasion. Indeed, Dufferin, who had been held responsible by Queen Victoria for any unpleasant incident and was naturally greatly relieved when the visit was over, considered that, from a diplomatic point of view, it had been a marked success. Apart from any other consideration, the Prince had ‘shown all Europe how ready he had been to do a kindness to a near relative, in spite of any personal
risk to himself ’.

  On the death of Alexander III a few years later, the Prince again visited Russia and once more served his country well by his conduct there. The Prime Minister, Lord Rosebery, had urged him to attend the funeral and to take advantage of the opportunity to endear himself to his nephew, the new Tsar, Nicholas II, who was then twenty-six. But the Prince needed no persuasion. He had left London with Princess Alexandra immediately on hearing of Alexander III’s illness, and was in Vienna when he heard of his death. He told Prince George to join him in St Petersburg not only out of respect for ‘poor dear Uncle Sasha’s memory’, but also because ‘the opportunity to see the great capital of Russia’ was ‘not one to be missed’. ‘Poor Mama is terribly upset,’ he added. ‘This is indeed the most trying and sad journey I have ever undertaken.’

  Once in St Petersburg the Prince uncomplainingly performed all the duties that were expected of him with the utmost conscientiousness. He attended the daily and appallingly tedious services in the fortress church of St Peter and St Paul; he displayed no sign of fatigue or restlessness during the final four-hour-long funeral service, nor any distaste when he was required to kiss the lips of the evil-smelling corpse, which had not been embalmed until three days after death. He made himself agreeable to everyone, winning ‘golden opinions’, Princess Alexandra’s woman-of-the-bedchamber, Charlotte Knollys, said, ‘by all the kind feeling he [had] shown’, even to the King of Serbia — whom all the Russian high nobility ignored because he was so uncouth — and particularly to the young Tsar, whom he described as ‘shy and timid’ and, despite his autocratic views, ‘weak as water’. All the same, he had grown quite fond of him and, in return, the Tsar was now prepared to inscribe himself to his ‘dearest Uncle Bertie’ as ‘ever your most loving nephew, Nicky’.

  Lord Rosebery warmly congratulated him on his arrival home, assuring him that he had never stood so high in national esteem, that he had made the most of his opportunity, justified the highest anticipations and rendered a ‘signal service’ to his country ‘as well as to Russia and the peace of the world’.

  Thereafter, although he disapproved of the Tsar’s autocratic outlook and was frequently suspicious of Russia’s ‘promises and protestations’, he strove as King towards détente with Russia, stressing in his correspondence with the Tsar his desire to come to a ‘satisfactory settlement… similar to the one … concluded with France’. Hearing, in Scotland in 1906, that Baron Isvolsky, the Russian Foreign Minister, was in Paris, the King returned to London at once in the hope that a meeting might be arranged. Responding to the King’s overture, Isvolsky came to London for discussions which, as Hardinge said, ‘were entirely due to King Edward’s initiative [and] helped materially to smooth the path of the negotiations then in progress for an agreement with Russia’. This, Hardinge added, ‘was just one of those many instances when King Edward’s “flair” for what was right was so good and beneficial to our foreign relations’.

  The King’s diplomatic skills were again appreciated in 1908 when he met the Tsar at Tallinn, then known as Revel, a meeting arranged — after the signing of the convention with Russia — in the hope that better relations might be established between the King and the Tsar, who, uneasy about England’s ties with Japan, had not long before condemned the King as ‘the greatest mischief-maker and the most deceitful and dangerous intriguer in the world’. Hardinge was worried on this occasion by the King’s intention both to raise the delicate question of the persecution of Russian Jews, about which he had received a memorandum from Lord Rothschild, and to mention Sir Ernest Cassel’s interest in the flotation of a Russian loan. To raise the question of the Jews was considered not to be ‘constitutionally right or proper’, while to become involved at the same time in a business transaction on behalf of a Jewish financier was held ‘to be unwise to say the least’. His concern for the welfare of the Jews, however, and his desire to oblige an old friend overrode considerations of prudence. So both the pogroms and the loan were mentioned. But although the King clearly questioned Sir Arthur Nicolson, British Ambassador in St Petersburg, on all sorts of subjects which he thought might crop up in discussions with the Tsar, little else of political importance was discussed. And neither were the pogroms halted, nor did the loan materialize. Yet, as Nicolson acknowledged, the meeting was a notable success. The Russian Prime Minister, Stolypin, was greatly impressed by the King’s unexpected knowledge of Russian affairs which, thanks to Nicolson, he had been able to parade. ‘Ah,’ Stolypin commented, ‘on voit bien que c’est un homme d’état!’ At the same time, the Tsar ‘repeatedly expressed his great satisfaction at the visit of the King and Queen’. It had, he said, ‘sealed and confirmed the intention and spirit of the Anglo–Russian agreement’, so Hardinge reported to Edward Grey; and the Tsar was convinced ‘that the friendly sentiments which now prevailed between the two governments could only mature and grow stronger … A glance at the Russian press of all shades and opinions shows conclusively how extremely popular throughout Russia the King’s visit had become, and how it was welcomed as the visible sign of a new era in Anglo–Russian relations.’

  The King was criticized for declining to take a Cabinet minister with him on the grounds that to have done so ‘would have made him feel like a prisoner handcuffed to a warder while conversing with his relatives through a grille’. And he was also censured for having made the Tsar an Admiral of the Fleet without consulting Reginald McKenna, the First Lord of the Admiralty. He accepted the criticism in good part. As Knollys explained to the Prime Minister, Asquith:

  He had never thought of proposing that the Emperor of Russia should be appointed an Admiral of the Fleet until the idea suddenly struck him at Revel. [He explained] that he was totally unaware of the constitutional point or else he certainly would not have said anything to the Emperor without first consulting you and Mr McKenna and that he regretted he had, without knowing it, acted irregularly … He was always anxious to keep on the best of terms with his ministers … Nothing could have been ‘nicer’ or more friendly than he was.

  The King’s errors, in fact, such as they were, were minor in comparison with the rapport established at Tallinn with the Tsar, who openly admitted to having got on much better with the King than he had done the year before with the Kaiser at Björkö. But reading reports of the King of England’s friendly conversations with the Tsar, the Germans, alarmed by the possible consequences of the meeting, spoke again of ‘encirclement’ and ‘English machinations’.

  18

  The King and the Kaiser

  Thank God, he’s gone.

  The King’s relations with Germany had never been easy. Persistent trouble in the past had been caused by his frequent displays of sympathy for the family of the last King of Hanover, whose son, the Duke of Cumberland, had married Queen Alexandra’s youngest sister, Thyra. Hanover had found itself on the losing side in the Austro–Prussian War of 1866, and had subsequently been incorporated in the German Empire. The King, as Prince of Wales, had constantly supported the Hanoverians in their attempts to regain their confiscated fortune and territories. Nor had he hesitated to raise the awkward question of their restitution whenever opportunity offered or, when the old King of Hanover died in exile in Paris, to walk at the head of a long procession of mourners at the funeral. This occasion, attended by numerous of the Prince’s Royalist and Bonapartist friends, had assumed the nature of an anti-Prussian demonstration.

  There had also been trouble over the Prince of Wales’s known sympathy for France during the Franco–Prussian War. He had been reported as having actually expressed his hopes of a Prussian defeat at a dinner at the French Embassy soon after the War began; and although Francis Knollys had assured Count von Bernstorff, the Prussian Ambassador in London, that the close family connection which the Prince ‘enjoyed with Prussia’ made it impossible for him ‘to entertain the opinion which he was alleged to have expressed’, Bernstorff had not been convinced. Nor had Prince Bismarck, the Imperial Chancellor,
who had gone so far as to complain in public that their country had an enemy in the heir to the British throne.

  The Prince of Wales had given further offence to Bismarck a few years later when the Prince’s nineteen-year-old niece, Princess Victoria, daughter of the Crown Princess of Prussia, had fallen in love with Prince Alexander of Battenberg, who had been chosen to rule Bulgaria, after its liberation from the Turks, as a Russian nominee. He was a most charming young man, handsome and gifted; but there had not only been strong political objections to the marriage, there had also been the dynastic objection that Prince Alexander was the child of a morganatic marriage between Prince Alexander of Hesse and a Polish countess. Princess Victoria’s mother, however, had dismissed these obstacles as of little importance. And so had her brother, the Prince of Wales. He had considered that Prince Alexander was just the husband for his young niece; and, after long and pleasant conversations with him at Darmstadt, where they had both attended the wedding of Prince Alexander’s brother, Prince Louis of Battenberg, the Prince of Wales had taken Prince Alexander on to Berlin where the Crown Prince had been persuaded by his wife and brother-in-law that Prince Alexander was, indeed, a worthy suitor.