The Edwardians

by Roy Hattersley

  The degree to which the King depended upon Hardinge was illustrated, during the 1903 tour of European capitals, by letters sent to their wives by both master and servant. The King told Queen Alexandra that Hardinge was ‘invaluable in every respect’20 and Hardinge wrote home with the joyous instruction, ‘read all the King’s speeches as they are all my composition. He is delighted with them and never changes a word.’21 The work of the European tour completed, Hardinge returned to St Petersburg as Ambassador in 1904. To confirm the King’s pleasure he was made a Privy Councillor and Knight Commander of both the Victorian Order and Saint Michael and Saint George. Two years later he became the permanent secretary of the Foreign Office and Head of the Diplomatic Service. Back in London he joined the group of advisers on whom the King was wise enough to rely. Perhaps there was something in the Hardinge genes which particularly equipped them for royal service. His son became principal private secretary to Edward VIII and warned his King that, if his determination to marry Mrs Simpson brought down the government and precipitated a general election, ‘even those who would sympathise with Your Majesty as an individual would deeply resent the damage which would inevitably be done to the Crown’. Plain speaking of that order was a family characteristic. It saved Edward VII, though not his grandson, from innumerable acts of folly.

  The difficulty of the tasks that Hardinge was expected to discharge and the delicacy with which he completed them is illustrated by a démarche which he was instructed to execute on behalf of the King early in his Russian accreditation.

  When you are received by the Emperor, pray express to him my earnest desire that the best and most desirable relations should be established between the two countries and that all important points should be discussed in the most amicable spirit and arranged as soon as possible … You can, at the same time, convey to him my hope that he may find himself able to grant a more liberal form of Government to his country.22

  Not surprisingly, the King’s increasing reliance on Hardinge began to agitate ministers. And Hardinge himself – appointed on merit Head of the Diplomatic Service and happy occasionally to occupy the unusual role of Minister Plenipotentiary – sometimes worried about the role to which the King had elevated him. ‘Although I fully represented the Foreign Office, I had not the responsibility of a Member of the Cabinet.’23 That was not the sort of nicety which worried the King, but, despite his extraordinary dependence on Hardinge, in November 1906 he was prepared – indeed he was anxious – for his favourite to leave his side and become Ambassador to Washington. Edward Grey, Foreign Secretary in the recently elected Liberal government, responded with great tact. The suggestion that Hardinge should represent Britain in America was ‘the very best arrangement – for Washington. But what we shall gain there we shall lose here.’24 The King continued to press his proposal, despite Hardinge’s own preference for remaining in London.

  It was not long before Grey began to regret that he had not accepted the King’s suggestion. The relationship between sovereign and head of the diplomatic service was diminishing the role of the Foreign Secretary. Special difficulties were arising when the King travelled abroad, always in the company – by royal command – of Hardinge. In the conversations which followed, the civil servant convinced the minister that he had no wish to exceed his authority – an act of humility he confirmed by seeing the King secretly rather than by broadcasting his many audiences in a way which would have bolstered his prestige. The idea of surreptitious meetings was proposed in a recklessly frank letter. ‘I send you very privately these suggestions which I trust you will keep suitably to yourself.’25 The plan was unhesitatingly accepted by another royal confidant, Francis Knollys, the King’s principal private secretary.

  Francis Knollys possessed the courtier’s invaluable gift of speaking plainly in language which minimised offence. His father had been appointed treasurer to, and comptroller of, the Prince of Wales’s household in 1862. Young Knollys, an unsettled soldier and reluctant civil servant, met Edward while assisting, more or less unofficially, in the comptroller’s office. In 1870 he became private secretary to the Heir Apparent. Their relationship was cemented during the Tranby Croft ‘baccarat scandal’ and the weeks of embarrassment which surrounded the Mordaunt divorce case. Knollys gave calm and frank advice at a time when most of the Court was virtually incapacitated by a debilitating combination of disapproval and deference. After the election of Campbell-Bannerman in 1905, Knollys’s Liberal inclinations and associations, never hidden from a basically Conservative Court, helped to improve the relations of the sovereign and his Cabinet. But his most important task was persuading Edward VII that he must step out from under the shadow of his mother’s sixty-year reign. The King, so worldly and socially self-assured, could not forget Victoria’s lack of confidence in his ability to take her place. During the public dispute with Benjamin Disraeli about the cost of the Prince of Wales’s visit to India in 1875, Francis Knollys had been the vehicle for Edward’s complaint that, despite his constant efforts to please his mother, he never enjoyed her approval or support. Knollys believed Victoria’s lack of faith to be unjustified. He was rewarded by Edward boasting to him about small achievements in the manner of an uncertain schoolboy describing his successes to a sympathetic master.

  Knollys was sixty-four when Edward succeeded to the throne, and had spent almost all of his adult life at Court. He had worked for the new King for so long that he understood how the royal mind worked and possessed the inestimable advantage of being able to speak for His Majesty without prior consultation and still represent the King’s view in every detailed particular. Only once did his judgement fail him.

  On 5 November 1909, Lloyd George’s Finance Bill – which raised money to pay both for dreadnoughts and for the pensions that the Liberal government proposed – was rejected by the House of Lords by the substantial majority of 350 votes to 75. The result was a constitutional crisis which was only resolved by an Act of Parliament that curbed the power of the Upper House, and the threat to create enough new Liberal peers to guarantee the passage of whatever legislation Mr Asquith’s government thought right to put to the House of Commons.*

  By then a peer himself, Viscount Knollys (as he had become) had thought of voting with the Liberals. Cabinet ministers in the Commons had told him that they ‘saw no harm in it’ and he had come to the independent conclusion that ‘it would be no bad thing if it were supposed (for it can only be supposition) that the King is opposed to the rejection of the budget’.26 He honestly believed that by appearing in the division lobby he would be doing his ‘best to prevent a disaster happening to the Constitution and, inadvertently, to the Monarchy’. The King took a different view and Knollys changed his mind.

  The catastrophe which Knollys feared was averted by the Lords’ capitulation. But only just. Knollys discovered that the Prime Minister was on the point of asking for guarantees about the creation of enough Liberal peers to carry the government’s business in the House of Lords. Knollys’s contact in the Cabinet, Richard Haldane, the Secretary of State for War who spoke with dubious authority for colleagues of different temperaments and attitudes, claimed to have told ministers that they were asking the sovereign for ‘an abdication of his prerogative, not only on his behalf but on that of his successors’.27 Knollys thought it better not to excite the King by passing on that opinion. ‘He is not over fond of the Cabinet as it is … It would be a mistake to set him further against them.’ The man who had no scruples about heightening the conflict between the two Houses of Parliament was another Liberal, Reginald Brett, Viscount Esher.

  Reginald Brett was a courtier who had served Queen Victoria and who was inherited by her son. He had begun his public life as private secretary to the Duke of Devonshire when (as the Marquis of Hartington) the eventual leader of the Liberal Unionists had been Gladstone’s Secretary of State for War. Had he so wished, Esher could have enjoyed a distinguished parliamentary career of his own. He had been elected to Parliament in 1880 a
s Member for Penryn and Falmouth, but he was defeated at Plymouth in the general election of 1885 and gave up politics for ever. Too interested in public affairs – and too well connected – to abandon public service completely, he allowed Lord Rosebery (an old school friend) to persuade him to become Secretary to the Office of Works. He supervised the Diamond Jubilee celebrations with such success that he was invited to become permanent secretary to the War Office and Colonial Office in turn. He declined both offers.

  Esher’s mother had been a personal friend of Queen Victoria and there is no doubt he was regarded at Buckingham Palace as one of the family. Perhaps it was that special relationship which made him, after he had helped to organise the funeral, despondent about the nation’s future under its new sovereign. It may be that, during the first year of Edward’s reign, he adjusted his opinion about both the King’s character and the country’s prospects. Or he may have thought that Britain was in particular need of his talents. Whatever the reason, in 1902 he agreed – at the suggestion of Balfour, another old school friend – to serve on the Committee of Enquiry into the conduct of the South African war. At the end of each day’s session, he wrote to the King describing the proceedings. Not surprisingly, when he published a minority report, ‘the palace’ was strongly in favour of its implementation. For the rest of his reign, Edward VII took it for granted that the War Office and Imperial Defence in general should be organised according to the prescription set out by Reginald Balliol Brett, Second Viscount Esher.

  The Establishment both feared and resented Esher’s elevation into the role of most trusted and most assiduous adviser. Even Charles Carrington, perhaps the King’s closest friend, expressed surprise at the extent of Esher’s influence. ‘He is an extraordinary man and has a wonderful footing in Buckingham Palace. He seems to be able to run about as he likes and must be a considerable nuisance to the household. He is a clever, unscrupulous man who might be dangerous and he is not trusted by the general public who look upon him as an intriguer.’28 St John Brodrick – Secretary of State for War and the man who suffered most from Esher’s role in the Boer War Enquiry – thought that ‘it would be tedious to record the endless contretemps to which this usurpation of power by an outsider gave rise.’29 Esher’s power depended on the King’s refusal to accept a diminished role – the gradual reduction of the Crown to the position of constitutional cipher. Edward possessed neither the sustained energy nor the incisive intellect necessary to impress his will on governments. Esher – usually supported, though sometimes frustrated, by Knollys and Hardinge – helped the King postpone the reduction in stature which his son was later to accept with bad grace.

  Esher was also the crucial ally of the King’s most controversial adviser, Admiral Sir John Arbuthnot Fisher, an outspoken sailor who persisted in expressing the view that Germany, not France, was the potential enemy that Britain should fear. It was an opinion which he held with such certainty that he told the King, not altogether humorously, that the Kaiser’s Grand Fleet should be ‘Copenhagened’. By that he meant that it should be taken by surprise and sunk without warning, just as his hero Nelson had destroyed the Danes in the Baltic. The King replied, ‘My God, Fisher, you must be mad.’30 But usually the two men saw eye to eye. Both, though for different reasons, were instinctively critical of the War Office. And Fisher possessed an attribute which confirmed the King’s admiration. He was in constant conflict with Lord Charles Beresford, Commander-in-Chief of the Fleet (when Fisher was First Sea Lord) and more successful rival in love to Edward VII.

  Fisher became First Sea Lord in May 1904. He immediately wrote to Esher with the news, to which he added that Lord Selborne (the First Lord of the Admiralty) was afraid of him.31 Such silliness was typical of a fundamentally serious sailor. Winston Churchill (who brought him out of retirement in 1914 and, despite his misgivings, persuaded the Cabinet to support the disastrous Gallipoli expedition) summed up Fisher’s strengths and weaknesses. ‘His genius was mainly that of a constructor, organiser and energiser. He cared little for the army and its fortunes. That was the affair of the War Office. He delighted to trample on the Treasury whenever spending money was concerned. To build warships of every kind, as many as possible and as fast as possible, was the message (and in my judgement the only message) which he carried to the Admiralty.’32 Protocol was brushed aside and the First Sea Lord was asked to advise on the reorganisation of the War Office. As a result, an Army Board – on the model of the Board of Admiralty – replaced the Commander-in-Chief as the supreme military authority, and the Commander-in-Chief of the Army was relegated to a position subservient to Chief of the General Staff, a comparable appointment to First Sea Lord.

  Fisher’s memorial – for which he might not have qualified without royal patronage – was the reorganisation of the fleet.* But he also had moments of calm statesmanship to his credit. Seven months after his appointment as First Sea Lord, Russian battleships, mistaking it for the Japanese enemy, sank the Hull trawler fleet in the North Sea. There was an immediate outbreak of war fever, to which Fisher remained mercifully immune. The crucial ministerial meeting was called while he was in bed with influenza. When he heard that it was taking place, he rose, dressed, travelled to Downing Street and burst into the half-finished meeting. The First Sea Lord argued for patience, so it was difficult for ministers to disagree. The Russians apologised, offered compensation and war was averted. It was another ten years before the crowned heads of Europe were engaged, family to family, in bitter warfare, which only the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (recently renamed Windsor) survived.

  Edward fought a valiant rearguard action against the irresistible forces of increasing democracy. When, in the early summer of 1904, Balfour’s Unionist government, so recently re-elected on a tide of jingoism, divided and collapsed, Edward VII agreed with weary resignation that constitutional propriety required him to kiss hands with a self-confessed radical. ‘I presume I shall have to send for Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman.’33 The acceptance of the inevitable was swiftly followed by the realisation that a government of personalities whom he disliked was probably to be preferred to a government with policies of which he disapproved. He was properly impressed by an administration which, with some justification, thought of itself as a ministry of all the talents. ‘It is certainly a strong government with considerable brain power. Let us only hope that they will work for the good of the country and indeed the Empire. Sir E Grey will, I hope, follow in the footsteps of Lord Lansdowne in every respect.’34

  Lansdowne’s popularity increased after he left office. Change disturbed the King, so he would have been reluctant to accept new ministers of any sort, but the advent of Liberals caused him special problems. He had not abdicated what he believed to be his right to influence the choice of ministers and, in so doing, preserve the policies with which he agreed. R. B. Haldane would, he thought, ‘make an excellent war minister’, far better than St John Brodrick, his predecessor, who ‘was hopeless’. Lord Carrington, a personal friend, became President of the Board of Agriculture. But one appointment, rumoured rather than proposed, caused consternation at the Court. There was a suggestion that John Burns – the first working man to hold Cabinet office and a figure of unimpeachably unimaginative attitudes and opinions – might become First Commissioner for Works, a ministry which gave him responsibility for the upkeep of the royal palaces. Francis Knollys, the principal private secretary, recorded His Majesty’s opinion. ‘It would almost be an insult to the King to propose Burns for the post – though, of course, he would not make any objection to his occupying some other office … if he is not actually a Republican, he is very nearly one.’35

  Republican or not, John Burns had shown himself to be antipathetic to royal interests by voting in July 1901 against the Report of the Select Committee on Royal Incomes in the very bad company of James Keir Hardie, Henry Labouchere and the Irish Nationalists. The Civil List which the committee proposed had been highly generous. The basic vote of £470,000 a year was �
�85,000 more than Queen Victoria had received and additional sums had been set aside for pensions, repairs to the royal estate and the upkeep of the royal yacht. There was to be a £70,000 annual allowance for the Prince of Wales, £18,000 for each of the princesses and the promise of a generous pension for Queen Alexandra in the event of her being widowed. The Report had been carried in the House of Commons by three hundred and seventy votes to sixty.

  There was no instinctive antagonism between Edward VII and the Liberals. He had many Liberal friends. When the hugely proper radical Henry Campbell-Bannerman was replaced in Downing Street by the less progressive but more worldly Herbert Asquith, Mrs Keppel, who was an enthusiastic supporter of the party, was always a welcome guest at No. 10. After the Kings death, Hardinge recorded her service to the nation in his private file.

  I would like to pay a tribute to her wonderful discretion and to the wonderful influence she always exercised upon the King. She never utilized her knowledge to her advantage or to that of her friends and I never heard her repeat an unkind word of anybody. There were one or two occasions when the King was in disagreement with the Foreign Office and I was able, through her, to advise the King with a view to the policy of the Foreign Office being accepted.36

  Mrs Keppel certainly numbered among the King’s advisers.

  Despite that benign influence, the Liberal government persisted in pursuing policies which the King thought wild and extravagant. In foreign affairs and matters of defence he thought them neither better nor worse than their Tory predecessors. They too, in the royal opinion, underestimated what might have been achieved by personal diplomacy between the relations in the several courts of Europe, and the Cabinet (like all Cabinets) contained men who sought to impose limits on military and naval spending. Haldane disappointed earlier hopes by introducing military reforms which reduced the size of the standing army. European monarchs, including the Kaiser, the King’s nephew, spoke of ‘England in her present unprepared state’.37 Edward was mortally afraid of being patronised. Haldane fell so far from grace that he was described by his sovereign as ‘a damned radical lawyer and a German professor’.