It was then that, in Paris, Le Matin repeated ‘libel’ against Isaacs and added, for good measure, that Samuel had chosen Marconi to build the radio link as a favour to the Attorney General’s brother. It was no longer possible to avoid the publicity of a prosecution. Winston Churchill, who was himself to become briefly and wrongly implicated, persuaded F. E. Smith to represent Samuel.33 In consequence, the case achieved a status at the Bar which encouraged Edward Carson, the leader of the Ulster Unionists, to act for Isaacs. The hope that the involvement of two such prominent members of the Opposition would encourage the integrity of two Liberal ministers to be examined ‘outside party politics’ was not realised. And the proceedings, though unavoidable, did great damage to both plaintiffs’ reputations. Le Matin withdrew its allegation unreservedly, apologised and paid all the costs, but Isaacs was forced to admit that he had bought shares in the Marconi Company of America. Although he had not lied to the House of Commons, he had been less than fully frank. If he was innocent of all impropriety, why had he hidden what he later insisted was an entirely respectable transaction?
Suspicions were heightened by the discovery that the Master of Elibank (recently retired as government chief whip) had acquired some of the shares on behalf of the Liberal Party and then sailed, for an undisclosed purpose and period, for Bogotà. The mood of the House of Commons and, in consequence, the attitude of the Select Committee changed. Anticipating weeks of consideration and determined to concentrate on the questions of ministerial conduct, it delegated discussion on the technical aspect of the contract to an advisory committee, under the chairmanship of Lord Parker of Waddington, a patent judge. He quickly removed all doubt about Samuel’s decision. ‘The Marconi system is at present the only system of which it can be said with any certainty that it is capable of filling the requirements of the Imperial Chain.’
The question of propriety was not resolved so easily.
Select Committees of the House of Commons usually contain one or two Members whose enthusiasm outruns their discretion. So it was with the Marconi Inquiry. Other names were added to the list of possible miscreants. They included Winston Churchill, who was called to give personal testimony.
Am I to understand that every person, Minister or Member of Parliament whose name is mentioned by current rumour … is to be summoned before you and asked to give a categorical denial to charges which, as I have pointed out, have become grossly insulting … I am grieved beyond words that fellow Members of the House of Commons should have thought it right to lend their sanction to putting such a question.34
Having complained so bitterly about the nature of the question, he went on to answer it in terms so categoric that his denial took up six lines of the Official Report. He then, typically, demonstrated his solidarity with the other accused ministers by ordering the Admiralty Board yacht to the Caernarvon coast and taking the Lloyd George family for a sailing holiday. Such things were acceptable in Edwardian Britain. The yacht was treated as private property by all senior ministers with the slightest connection with the Navy or naval policy.
Lloyd George and Isaacs offered their resignations to the Prime Minister in the clear expectation that he would refuse them – as, indeed, he did. But in private he described their conduct as both ‘lamentable’ and ‘difficult to defend’.35 That did not prevent him from defending them in public. Asquith told the House of Commons, ‘Their honour, both their private honour and their public honour, is, at this moment, absolutely unstained.’
The Select Committee was not so sure. Inevitably, it divided on party lines. The Liberal majority concluded that ‘the ministers concerned, when entering into the purchases, were all bona fide convinced that the American company had no interest in the agreement’. The Unionist minority claimed that an interest existed and that it was ‘material, although indirect’. As a result, buying the shares was a grave ‘impropriety’. More important, it aimed to censure both Lloyd George and Isaacs for ‘wanting in frankness and in respect for the House of Commons’ by failing to admit their involvement with the American company during the October debate.
Reports of Select Committees are usually debated in the House of Commons on a simple motion to accept their findings. Two amendments were moved to the Marconi report. One, in the name of a sympathetic Liberal back-bencher, spoke in unequivocal terms of the honour and rectitude of Lloyd George and Isaacs. The other, moved on behalf of the official Opposition by Andrew Bonar Law himself, asked only for the House to express its regret. Had it been carried, both men would have had to go.
Of course the Liberal amendment prevailed and the two careers continued uninterrupted apart from the occasional disturbance that promotion brings. Lloyd George became Prime Minister and Rufus Isaacs the Lord Chief Justice of England, in those days a natural progression for the Attorney General. There were rumours that Asquith had known about the American shares before the first debate and failed to insist on their existence being revealed; but his reputation was secure. Lloyd George was known to be devious and his reputation was confirmed. He was part of the new world of the twentieth century. And his progress was not to be halted, or indeed significantly impaired, by such a trivial matter as the concealment of dubious financial dealings.
The world had moved on for Marconi too. He had come a long way since the day in December 1901 when he had waited in Nova Scotia to receive, from Cornwall, the first transatlantic wireless message. Short-wave radio had become international big business and Marconi, with the 1909 Nobel Prize to his credit, was the beneficiary. Two years after the Titanic sank, Sir Oliver Lodge wrote, without rancour, of how the miracle had been achieved. ‘My friend Alexander Muirhead conceived the telegraphic application which ultimately led to the foundation of the Lodge-Muirhead Syndicate now bought up by the Marconi Co … Two years later, Marconi came over with the same thing in a secret box …’36
The Titanic disaster marked a moment in world history when the true potential of wireless telegraphy was recognised. It was one of the wonders which made the Edwardian world shrink at a speed that history has not acknowledged.
*The bodies were built by Barker, a coach-building company, which worked with Rolls-Royce for half a century.
*The Lusitania was torpedoed by German U-boats off the coast of Ireland on 7 May 1915. 1,195 passengers and crew were drowned, 128 of them American. The Germans claimed that the possibility of conversion into a battleship justified their action. America disagreed. The antagonism which the sinking aroused contributed to the United States’ decision to enter the war.
EPILOGUE
The Summer Ends in August
Queen Victoria died in the arms of her grandson, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany. Her son, who became Edward VII at that instant, moved forward and closed her eyes. Then he collapsed in uninhibited grief. The end had been anticipated. The family, led by the Queen’s daughter Princess Louise, had already said their last farewells, and the Bishop of Winchester had completed the Aaronic blessing with the words ‘give thee peace’. The ever faithful Doctor Reid assumed command and supervised the removal of the body in preparation for the complicated procedures – many of them stipulated by the Queen herself – which had to precede the burial.
Looking back, it seems that the Kaiser’s intimate presence at that last moment was an augury of things to come. At the time, the King and Court thought of him as no more than an irritant. He had abandoned Berlin and his imperial duties as soon as he heard that his grandmother’s illness was terminal and, despite telegrams from Osborne which were intended to dissuade him from intruding into British grief, he had travelled by royal train and imperial yacht to his dying grandmother’s bedside.
His presence was particularly unwelcome to his uncle, the new King. The Kaiser had been openly sympathetic to the Boers, but there were also personal reasons for the animosity. Wilhelm was twenty-nine when he succeeded his father in 1888. In the early days of his reign, his policy – in so far as Bismarck allowed him one – had been the product of arr
ogance complicated by insecurity. Immediately on his accession he had imposed martial law on Berlin and confined his mother, King Edward’s sister, to her quarters ‘to prevent state or secret documents being conveyed to England’.1 The gross offence against his mother’s integrity and Britain’s honour had been compounded by his subsequent harsh treatment of the woman who was Queen Victoria’s daughter. What was worse, he was rarely civil to Queen Victoria’s son.
Wilhelm had become Kaiser in 1888 and, during the thirteen years which followed, he regarded his Uncle Edward – no more than an Heir Apparent – as his obvious inferior. At his best, he was deeply conscious of the majesty of his imperial person, and he was rarely at his best in Britain. All sorts of obeisances were expected. Edward found it difficult to oblige and the Kaiser, as a result, believed the Prince of Wales and future king to be ‘a peacock’. Although he despised his uncle, Wilhelm loved and admired his grandmother. Nothing could have kept him from her funeral. Throughout, he behaved in a way which illustrated why the King and Court did not want him there.
The Kaiser sent two battleships and two cruisers to augment the Royal Navy ships which formed a guard of honour across the Solent between Cowes and Portsmouth when the Queen’s mortal remains set out on their last journey from Osborne to Windsor. The coffin was carried on the Alberta, the first of the three royal yachts in the convoy. Then came the Osborne. The Victoria and Albert followed – accompanied by the Hohenzollern, the Kaiser’s own yacht.
Before the coffin was carried from royal ship to royal train, another complicated ceremony had to be performed. The captains of all the escort vessels boarded the Alberta and said their individual farewells. Then they waited while their sovereign arrived to lead the mourners in a short naval service. At the moment when the King paid his homage in front of the coffin, a steam launch set out from the Hohenzollern. The Kaiser was both captain and crew. One admiral muttered, more in hope than anxiety, ‘He doesn’t know the tide or the currents.’ The Schadenfreude was misconceived. The Kaiser brought his boat alongside the Alberta and stepped on board with easy elegance.2 It was the first of his many insensitive intrusions. When, next day, the great funeral procession got under way in London, the King rode immediately behind the royal standard. On his immediate right, the Kaiser was mounted on a milk-white charger – one of six he had brought over to make sure that he respected his grandmother’s wishes. Queen Victoria wanted a white funeral.
For the rest of King Edward’s reign, Wilhelm II was the source of continual embarrassment and anxiety to both the monarch and his ministers. Personal animosity mingled with political ambition to create a smouldering tension which burst into flame every other year. In 1904, anxious to demonstrate that the Entente with France was not a threat to Germany, Edward suggested that he visit Berlin. His nephew suggested Kiel. Although he knew that the alternative venue had been chosen so that the Kaiser could display his increasing naval might, the King agreed. The visit was a great success until the Kaiser suggested that Japan’s victory over Russia would result in the ‘Yellow Peril’ menacing all Europe. Edward laughed out loud. Because of the King’s undisguised amusement at his nephew’s naiveté, the two monarchs were not on speaking terms for more than a year. It is hard to decide who was more foolish, the King or the Kaiser.
On 15 August 190$ the King received a letter from Count Gotz von Seckendorff, an old friend who had been Marshal to Edward’s sister, the Empress Frederick. It begged the King to visit Hamburg to effect a reconciliation with Wilhelm. Inevitably, Edward dismissed the suggestion as impertinent. Knollys was instructed to reply that ‘in no circumstances would he consent to run after the Emperor … it would be undignified for him to play such a part’.3 The letter concluded with a passage which, whether or not it was intended to be emollient, had quite the opposite effect. ‘His Majesty … directs me to tell you that he does not know whether the Emperor retains any affection for him but, from one or two things which he has heard recently, he should say not so that it would do no good were he to pay a dozen visits a year. To show however that he has no animosity against either the Emperor or Germany, the King has invited the Crown Prince of Germany to visit Windsor in November next.’4
The Kaiser was outraged. He had never been invited to Windsor and he told the British Ambassador to convey his wishes to London. He wished to be the King’s guest. Knollys replied to the Berlin foreign office, ‘Perhaps next year unless the Emperor continues to trump up imaginary grievances against the King and intrigues, whenever he has the opportunity, against this country …’5 The intrigue to which he referred was a draft treaty, drawn up at the Czar’s invitation by the Kaiser himself, to commit Russia and Germany to protect each other against ‘English and Japanese arrogance and insolence.’6
President Theodore Roosevelt, with whom Edward VII carried on a stilted correspondence, hoped that he could avert the danger of a Russian-German alliance by brokering a peace treaty between Russia and Japan. But uncle and nephew found new grievances over which to fight. On 7 June 1905, Norway dissolved its union with Sweden. A new king was needed. Wilhelm wanted the throne for one of his younger sons. Edward wanted it for his son-in-law. The King won. Prince Charles of Denmark became King Haakon VII of Norway. He was still on the throne when Germany invaded Norway in 1940.
In 1907, it seemed as if a lasting peace was about to break out. The Kaiser was to make a state visit to London, beginning on 11 November. On 31 October, the King – racing at Newmarket – received a message from his ambassador in Berlin. The Kaiser was feeling weak from a recent attack of influenza and felt unable to face the journey. No one in London accepted the explanation – the real reason was either pique or embarrassment. One of Wilhelm’s friends was on the point of standing trial for offences under Germany’s penal code. He was accused of sodomy. Sir Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary, suggested another reason for the sudden change of plans. The Royal Navy had expressed great reluctance to accommodate the accompanying German battleships in Portsmouth and the Kaiser thought that dignity required him to be escorted into harbour by a substantial proportion of his fleet.
Both the German and British foreign offices were terrified by the prospect of the contretemps which cancellation would create. The Emperor was shown details of the arrangements which had been personally made by the King. He was convinced – by the splendour of his proposed reception, rather than by the chaos his absence would cause – that the state visit should go ahead.
According to Lord Esher, the state visit was an unqualified success – at least in the estimation of the guests. ‘The banquet last night was said, by the Germans, to be finer than any spectacular display of the kings they had ever seen.’7 The hosts were not so sure. The King sensibly left the discussion of political matters to his ministers. The Kaiser, on the other hand, conducted his own diplomacy, often without showing complete mastery of his subject. He also made constant attacks on Jews and Jewish influence – not a popular prejudice at the Court of Edward VII. But it seemed that, even though the thaw had not set in, some ice had been melted. Then the Kaiser announced that he proposed to stay on in London for a month’s ‘private visit’.
The Kaiser rented Highcliffe Castle on the Sussex coast and Colonel Edward Montagu Stuart Wortley, its owner, was asked to remain in residence as a guest. On 28 October the Daily Telegraph published what it described as an interview with the Kaiser. There is no doubt that Wilhelm saw it before publication and gave his approval, but the work had been done by Montagu Stuart Wortley. It included a claim that the Kaiser had often made in private company – that he had drawn up the ‘blockhouse and wire’ plan which gradually cleared the veld of Boer commandos, yet had received no thanks or credit from the King, whose military honour he had saved.
London society was more amused than infuriated, but in Germany, where support for the Boers remained strong, the Kaiser’s claim was greeted with fury. Seeking to ingratiate himself with domestic opinion, Wilhelm gave another press interview. He told W. B. Hale of
the New York World that Edward VII was personally corrupt, that his Court was decadent and that war between Britain and Germany was inevitable. The King complained, the newspaper apologised and the Kaiser repudiated all the opinions which he had expressed to Hale. But the damage was done. Wilhelm was never forgiven.
The Foreign Office, on the other hand, saw Anglo-German relations more pragmatically. With great reluctance the King agreed to make a return state visit to Berlin in 1909. He collapsed in the Berlin Rathaus – almost strangled by the tight collar of his Prussian military uniform – but, apart from that, little of note took place. The royal party went on to Biarritz, mirroring the private holiday with which the Kaiser had followed his state visit to London. From there the King wrote, ‘It is sad to see the difficulties we have to contend with … It is strange that, ever since my visit to Berlin, the German Government has done nothing but thwart and annoy us in every way.’8
German conduct appeared all the more sad and strange because of the peculiar place Germany itself occupied in the minds of Edwardian politicians. They were fascinated – indeed, almost hypnotised – by its economic success. German industry was pursuing, overtaking and surging ahead of its British competitors, and thinking ministers attributed this to the social policies of the government in Berlin. When in 1902 A. J. Balfour faced criticism of his Education Bill, he admonished his opponents by reminding them, ‘You tell us we are falling behind the Germans in industrial matters because we do not educate our people.’ He wanted ‘an authority which shall deal with secondary education for all classes of the people’ on the German model. Six years and a change of administration later (when Winston Churchill, at the Board of Trade, wanted to persuade the Prime Minister to move more quickly towards a system of social insurance), he too had no doubt about the strongest argument at his disposal. ‘Germany, with a harder climate and less accumulated wealth, has managed to establish tolerable conditions for her people … the Minister who applies to this country the successful experience of Germans in social organisation may or may not be supported at the polls, but he will at least have a memorial which time will not deface.’ He went on to advocate a ‘big slice of Bismarckianism’.
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