The Heir Apparent

by Jane Ridley

  Fisher was a member of the King’s inner group. He bombarded Esher and Knollys with letters written in a large, bold hand, often at four thirty a.m., and signed “Yours till hell freezes.” Hardinge thought him a menace, “backbiting his opponents, full of self praise, avoiding points of criticism and distorting facts.”73 But Fisher was dedicated to building enough dreadnoughts to win the naval race with Germany. In 1905 he offered to resign and was dissuaded by the King, who gave him the Order of Merit. In January 1906, at age sixty-five, he was made an additional admiral, which allowed him to stay on as First Sea Lord—thus blasting Charlie Beresford’s hopes of getting the top job. Bertie’s objections to Beresford and championing of Fisher may well have ensured Britain’s victory in the naval race with Germany. The Corfu incident in April was the first salvo in a quarrel that personalized and politicized the struggle between arms race reform, represented by Fisher, and naval orthodoxy, championed by Beresford.

  Bertie at last agreed to visit the kaiser in August 1906. Grey was skeptical. He had made up his mind that compromise with Germany was impossible, and saw no reason to change this view.74 The King was accompanied by Hardinge. In his memoirs, Hardinge denied that Grey was envious of his close relations with the King, but documents reveal that the opposite was the case.75 Hardinge, as head of the Foreign Office and royal favorite, went behind the back of his boss, foreign secretary Grey, concealing his plan to accompany the King until it was too late for Grey to stop it. “I do not want him to know that I have said anything to anybody or to think that I know more than what he himself told me,” he explained to Knollys.76 He took elaborate precautions to avoid publicly upstaging the foreign secretary. He traveled out to Germany alone, and told Grey that he was accompanying the King privately rather than going as minister in attendance: “I think this is the best way of getting over any objections which Grey may have.”77

  The kaiser met his uncle’s train at Cronberg station wearing the light green full dress uniform and steel helmet of the Posen Chasseurs. Bertie dressed in the suit and panama hat he had made fashionable at Goodwood races, conspicuously laying aside the uniform he usually sported when visiting another sovereign—a gesture intended to reassure the French by signaling the private character of the meeting.78 Kaiser and King embraced cordially on the platform.79 William greeted Fritz Ponsonby with heavy-handed chaff: “See you are getting grey like me. How old are you?”80 There was “a feeling of thunder in the air,” wrote Ponsonby.81 Bertie was careful to avoid controversial subjects, and “very wisely,” in Hardinge’s view, talked only in general terms “of our policy.”82

  The real discussion at Cronberg took place between William and Hardinge. The kaiser was critical of the French (“a bundle of nerves and a female race not a male race like the Anglo-Saxons and the Teutons”). Though he claimed that he had been warmly welcomed at Tangier as the deliverer from French oppression, he expressed himself in favor of better relations with England.83 Gaining access to the kaiser through the King was critical to Hardinge’s diplomacy, and the meeting indicated an easing of the hostility of 1905.

  Bertie’s stay that summer at Marienbad was a dull one. No women were invited to his dinners owing to mourning for the King of Denmark. (Alice Keppel never came to Marienbad.) “What tiresome evenings we shall have,” sighed Bertie.84 Sometimes it seemed as if his closest companion was his dog, the white-haired terrier Caesar, who accompanied him on the long car drives he took with Stamper. The King always sat in the left rear seat, filling the car with smoke from the cigar that was constantly alight in his hand. Bertie never hit Caesar, but he would shake his stick at him: “You naughty dog,” he would say very slowly. “You naughty, naughty dog.” “And Caesar would wag his tail and ‘smile’ cheerfully up into his master’s eyes, until His Majesty smiled back in spite of himself.”85

  Every other morning the King drove to the Rübezahl Hotel, where he remained for about an hour. The press, who followed his every move—when Ponsonby held a press conference, thirty-seven reporters attended—were curious, scenting scandal. In fact, the King was receiving electrical treatment, and he hired a room in the Rübezahl because it was the only place in the town with a sufficiently strong current. The press were told that the King suffered from rheumatism, but Bertie confided in his equerry that he was being treated for a “slight disease of the skin” and he wished this to be kept absolutely private.86

  The truth was that the King had a rodent ulcer beside his nose. The Marienbad treatment with X-rays and Finsen light failed, and the ulcer was becoming distressingly large and difficult to hide. In 1907, it was cured by radium.87 So delighted was the King that he persuaded Cassel to endow a Radium Institute in London, and declared: “My greatest ambition is not to quit this world till a real cure for cancer has been found, and I feel convinced that radium will be the means of doing so!”88 This caused consternation in the household, as it fueled the persistent rumors that the King suffered from cancer, then a taboo disease.

  In 1906 and 1907, the King spent fourteen or fifteen weeks abroad. Perhaps it was just as well. The cost of entertaining him—estimated at anything from £5,000 to £10,000 per house party—was becoming prohibitive. The “ordinary peer” who thirty or forty years before had played host to royalty was now too impoverished by agricultural depression to afford the expense.89

  In July 1906, the King and Queen visited Newcastle to open Armstrong College at the university there. They stayed for two nights at Alnwick with the Duke of Northumberland. Lists, instructions, and questionnaires issued from the household for months before the visit took place. The railway station must be closed, the entrance to the castle decorated, the guests’ names approved. Guards of honor saluted, schoolchildren cheered at the castle gates, bands played before dinner. The King brought two valets, a footman, a dresser, a lord-in-waiting, a groom-in-waiting, a private secretary, two equerries and their servants, as well as a minister in attendance. The Queen brought two ladies-in-waiting, a gentleman-in-waiting, a hairdresser, and two maids. In addition, there was an inspector, a sergeant and three constables from the household police, and an inspector and a sergeant from the Metropolitan Police, all mingling with the indoor servants and wearing ordinary clothes.90 The Percy family were reported to be “very stiff,” but Carrington noted, “We smoked after dinner, an unheard of thing, and everything was splendidly done.”91

  The King was more high-profile when he was abroad. Journalists and detectives swarmed around him. Whatever the effect of his tours on foreign policy, they certainly impacted on his position at home, as column inches of newsprint detailed the enthusiasm with which King Edward the international superstar was received.

  In February 1907, Bertie visited Paris, bringing Alix. Traveling as the Duke of Lancaster, he took over the entire British Embassy (the ambassador moved out). When the King and Queen arrived at the Gare du Nord in two feet of snow, they were loudly cheered by a crowd of two thousand. Eyebrows were raised when Alix accompanied the King to dinner with his old mistress Madame Standish (“This is all thought a little odd,” wrote Carrington) but the real love affair was between Le Roi and the people of Paris.92 Anarcho-syndicalist strikers crippled the city that winter, and the officious Paris police were more than ever vigilant. Bertie shrugged them off. “Who will hurt me in Paris?”93 King and Queen mixed happily with the crowd outside the theater; what they did not know was that most of the people standing near them were detectives. But the cheers that met the King wherever he drove in his claret-colored motor were real, and Stamper found it hard to control his emotions as he sat in the front. “The knowledge that all the vast outburst of affection was focussed upon the one gentleman who was sitting behind me, was almost overpowering, and time and again I have found myself half way between laughter and tears.”94

  Living in the lonely bubble of a political leader, cocooned by his staff and detectives, with a mistress who was more political companion than lover and a deaf wife who shut herself away in Sandringham, Bertie crave
d the affirmation of crowds.

  After his return from Paris, the King contracted a bronchial cough. The attack was more severe than previous ones.95 When he reached Biarritz in March, he was still coughing. The Times printed two short paragraphs:

  King Edward did not return to the Hotel du Palais for dinner yesterday evening, as had been arranged, but stayed at the Villa Bellefontaine and dined with Sir Ernest Cassel, only returning to the Hotel at 11 o’clock.

  Bright sunny weather succeeded yesterday’s rain, and his Majesty walked along the shore, where he sat for a long time on one of the benches.… After another short turn in the motorcar, the King got back to the Hotel about 6 o’clock. He will dine in the town this evening, probably with Sir Ernest Cassel.96

  This apparently innocuous report caused grave offense. The King’s private secretary complained to Baron de Reuter, who gave instructions that Reuter’s Agency was to publish no movements of the King except those of public interest.97 The courtiers fussed because the report was unauthorized, and it implied that the King’s cure was, in fact, a hedonistic holiday. But the image of the sick King sitting alone on a bench gazing sadly out to sea is infinitely more revealing than the dinners with Sir Ernest Cassel.

  Winston Churchill, who stayed with Cassel at the Villa Bellefontaine, reported, “The King dines or lunches here daily!”98 To those in the know, it was understood that Cassel’s guest was Mrs. Keppel, so the newspaper paragraph was a coded reference to the King’s dining each night with his mistress. Cassel’s daughter Maudie, who was also at the Villa Eugénie, found the royal routine unbearably tedious. “We are his servants quite as much as the housemaid or the butler,” she wrote.99

  As Bertie’s cough improved, he took longer drives in the afternoons, heading a procession of motors and announcing his arrival with a bugle, a practice he copied from the kaiser. Occasionally the claret-colored motor car with its overflowing ashtray would stop by the roadside for the King to drink coffee out of a giant Thermos.100

  In Berlin, William grew paranoid about the plots he imagined his uncle was hatching. At a dinner he announced: “He is a Satan; you can hardly believe what a Satan he is.”101 Satan, meanwhile, steamed off on yet another Mediterranean cruise. This time the destination was Cartagena, near Cadiz, where he had a yachting rendezvous with King Alfonso of Spain, now married to his niece Ena. As usual, he was accompanied by Hardinge. Grey made himself “disagreeable” to the King about Hardinge going to Spain, though Hardinge in the end “brought him round entirely to the King’s views” as to the usefulness of the arrangement.102 The meeting at Cartagena was the result of lengthy negotiations. King Alfonso was anxious for Uncle Bertie to pay a state visit to Madrid, but poor Spanish security meant that this was judged too dangerous. Grey, however, wished for closer relations with Spain. The meeting on board ship was a compromise proposed by Bertie, avoiding the danger and expense of a state visit while giving Alfonso the validation that he needed.

  The two royal yachts met at sea on 8 April, fired salutes, and, escorted by twelve vessels, steamed to Cartagena. Here King Alfonso came on board the Victoria and Albert dressed in a British general’s uniform, and King Edward donned a Spanish admiral’s uniform to return the call.103 Between banquets and the firing of salutes, Hardinge negotiated an agreement with Spain over Morocco. Even Grey now accepted that the King’s last two cruises in the Mediterranean had been “distinctly profitable from the Foreign Office point of view.”104 They had also been distinctly profitable in boosting the popularity of the monarchy at home.

  The King’s next assignation was with King Victor Emmanuel of Italy at Gaeta, near Naples. This yacht visit was purely social, but the press noted the cordial meeting between the two monarchs, who “embraced and kissed each other repeatedly.”105 Looking well and suntanned, Bertie was received enthusiastically by crowds on the shore, who cried “Evviva Il Re Eduardo!” as the Italian squadron boomed a twenty-one-gun salute.

  Italy was Germany’s ally, and Berlin went “stark staring raving mad” over Bertie’s Gaeta meeting with Victor Emmanuel. The stock market fell six points.106 Bertie asked Hardinge to make a formal protest against the German press, which had “imputed to His Majesty the most sinister motives and accused him of deep-laid plots” against Germany.107

  The Germans had good reason to feel paranoid. The Anglo-Russian Convention was concluded in August 1907 and published the following month. Weakened by defeat in the war with Japan and then by revolution, Russia was unable to resist pressure to make terms with England—especially as their allies, the French, insisted on such an agreement as the price of a badly needed loan. The convention caused panic in Germany, where it was blamed on the Wicked King Edward.108 In fact, his role, as at Algeciras, was very limited. He wrote letters to Nicky, but that was about all.

  The family member who really could claim credit for the agreement with Russia was Alix’s sister, the old dowager, the Empress Minnie. She visited London for the first time in more than thirty years in 1907, and her closeness with Alix was widely reported.

  After the death of their father, King Christian of Denmark, the two sisters bought themselves a house. Hvidore is a villa in wedding-cake stucco perched above a main road in the suburbs of Copenhagen, staring out over the gray sound, lashed by freezing Baltic winds. An inscription in Danish above the fireplace in the billiard room reads Ost Vest Hiemme Bedst (“East West Home’s Best”). “Queen Alexandra,” wrote Bertie, “is so happy in her new little Danish house which she occupies with the Empress Marie Feodorovna.”109 Hvidore was not appreciated by all. “Her suite dread it,” wrote Carrington.110

  England’s rapprochement with Russia meant that good relations with Germany were imperative, and Bertie’s role was to make friendly noises to William. On Hardinge’s suggestion, he invited the kaiser to pay a state visit. “I have already sown the good seed,” wrote Hardinge on 6 April 1907, “and the King is quite ready to ask the German E[mperor] to Windsor in the autumn.”111

  Meanwhile, the kaiser invited his uncle to pay another visit on the journey to Marienbad in August. As at Cronberg the year before, the King brought with him Hardinge. Grey, who spoke no French, said “he preferred this arrangement to going himself, and that from a Foreign Office point of view it is very convenient as it is of distinct advantage to hear what Sovereigns and Foreign Ministers say at first hand.”112 Bertie signaled that the visit was a social one, and he was annoyed when he arrived at Cassel and William staged a military review, especially as it meant he got no luncheon until two thirty. Even worse, after dinner the kaiser made a formal speech to which Bertie felt bound to reply, speaking in fluent German—though there was an awkward silence when he stopped abruptly for want of a word and rapped his finger on the table. Hardinge commented: “I could not help seeing that there was no ‘empressement’ for each other’s society and that there was no real intimacy between them.”113

  Edward VII was seen as the most powerful man in Europe. From Marienbad he fingered the pulse of the world’s diplomacy. He watched the Hague Conference pass empty resolutions on world peace. Soveral, who was a delegate, sent him bulletins, which he found “not pleasant reading.… I wish you would write to Grey or Hardinge or to both telling them the real state of affairs.”114 His own visits to William “will I am led to believe be more conducive to the maintenance of peace than all the subjects being put forward at the Hague Conference.”115

  Stamper noticed that summer that the King’s temper was worse than ever. In the car, he exploded with wrath when they got lost and were late for lunch. “I have never seen His Majesty so moved as he was that day,” wrote Stamper.116 Any slip could excite the royal rage. Emerald Cunard tried to amuse the table-drumming monarch by discussing the novels of Elinor Glyn, with their racy tales of Daisy Warwick’s corridor-creeping house parties. The King glared and turned away; Emerald Cunard had forgotten that a jeune fille was present.‖117

  On 31 October 1907, ten days before the kaiser was due to visit England,
he telegrammed to say that he was suffering from bronchitis and wished to cancel. Bertie suspected that the real reason was that Kaiser William feared a hostile welcome: “He dare not ‘face the music’ and has practically been told he will get a bad reception in England.”118 Bertie insisted that the visit should go ahead. It could hardly have come at a worse time for William. His court had been rocked by scandal when Count Eulenburg, his close friend, was exposed as the man at the center of a homosexual circle. There were hints that William’s relations with Eulenburg were homoerotic—he was known as “sweetie” or Liebchen—but when William was informed of the allegations, his reaction seems to have been one of genuine astonishment.119

  Bertie knew of these scandals but he remained tight-lipped. He was now on excellent terms with Edward Grey. Grey had incurred his anger by attending a reception at Buckingham Palace wearing plain clothes not uniform.120 But at Balmoral in the autumn of 1907, he was “very much touched” by the King and the “kind way” in which he recalled memories of the days when Colonel Grey, the foreign secretary’s father, had been with Bertie as equerry.121 Grey needed the kaiser’s visit to take place, as he wished to avoid accusations from the left of the Liberal party that William had canceled in protest at the agreement with Russia. He telegrammed Sir Frank Lascelles, the ambassador in Berlin, and told him to warn the kaiser that postponement “would be attributed to the recent scandals in Berlin and nothing we could do or say would alter the impression.”122 The hint of blackmail coupled with the promise of a favorable reception owing to the “sympathy” the public felt at “the pain which recent revelations have given him” worked.123 William’s bronchitis took a sudden turn for the better.