The Heir Apparent

by Jane Ridley

  Grey worried not only that the visit would panic the French but also that something disastrous would happen, making relations with Germany worse rather than better.124 For the smooth running of the visit he had the King to thank. It was he who laid on the banquets, entertaining twenty-four royals to luncheon, and lining up eight monarchs in a photograph, and he who took the kaiser shooting in the “dear old park I know so well.”125 Grey wrote a briefing document listing the topics the kaiser might raise, but Bertie studiously avoided entering into political discussions. When William mentioned the Berlin–Baghdad Railway, the King merely referred him to Haldane, who was staying at Windsor. Haldane was thrilled to be summoned by the kaiser at one a.m. to his private room to discuss the Baghdad railway, and he dictated an excited memorandum claiming that the emperor had agreed to a settlement that would satisfy Britain, France, and Russia. But Haldane has rightly been dubbed a bear of little brain; the deal turned out to be illusory, as William had spoken (as he did at Björkö) without consulting his chancellor, Bülow. As one historian has observed, “both sides used the state visit as a kind of benign cover under which to pursue essentially hostile policies.”126 The British staged the visit in parallel with negotiations for the Anglo-Russian Convention, while the Germans pressed ahead with an acceleration of their program of battleship building.

  Elderly Campbell-Bannerman was so shattered by being kept standing at Windsor for two and a half hours that he suffered a “seizure.” The sixty-four-year-old King was made of sterner stuff. Esher thought he made a better show than the forty-eight-year-old kaiser. “He has more graciousness and dignity. William is ungraceful, nervous and plain. There is no ‘atmosphere’ about him. He has not impressed Grey.”127 All the same, Grey thought the visit was a success. William was “genuinely pleased” by his reception, especially when he visited the City and cheering crowds lined the route, and he made a speech declaring that blood was thicker than water. In fact, concluded Grey, “The result has been to mollify Anglo-German relations—at any rate for the time.”128 Characteristically, however, Grey gave the King no credit for this result.

  * * *

  * The Alingtons’ London house was 38 Portman Square, opposite Mrs. Keppel at number 30. Both of their parents had played minor parts in the Aylesford scandal. Feo Alington was the daughter of the Earl of Hardwicke, and Lord Alington’s father was Henry Sturt (see this page).

  † An illustrated paper printed a picture of the King talking earnestly to CB at Marienbad beneath the caption, “Is it Peace or War?” “Would you like to know what the King was saying to me?” CB asked his private secretary. “He wanted to have my opinion whether halibut is better baked or boiled.” (Wilson, CB, p. 145.)

  ‡ Nicky was the son of Alix’s sister Minnie; Alexandra was the daughter of Bertie’s sister Alice; William was the son of Bertie’s sister Vicky.

  § Benckendorff was a favorite of Minnie’s—he had been her dancing partner in the 1870s—and it was due to her that he was appointed Russian minister in Copenhagen. This was where Bertie first encountered him, and in 1902, when Baron de Staal, the Russian ambassador in London, retired, Bertie asked Nicholas II to appoint Benckendorff as a token of friendship. On his arrival in London, he gave Benckendorff a private audience and told him that he was touched by Nicholas’s gesture in sending “the diplomat whom he had personally mentioned.” (Marina Soroka, “Debating Russia’s Choice Between Great Britain and Germany: Count Benckendorff versus Count Lamsdorff, 1902–1906,” International History Review, vol. 32 [2010], esp. pp. 3–7.)

  ‖ The jeune fille in question was named Elsie Gill. She was then twenty-two. As an eighty-five-year-old, she told Anita Leslie a story that gives a glimpse into the King’s secret life, now so carefully hidden. Mrs. Sophie Hall Walker was thirty-five, and married to an older man, a wealthy racehorse trainer; she was rich and athletic and often stayed at Marienbad, where she won the ladies’ golf championship. Young Elsie Gill had watched open-eyed as the hotel maids prepared Mrs. Hall Walker’s room for a teatime visit from the King. The room was filled with sweet-smelling flowers and sprayed with scent and the curtains were drawn. It was some years before Elsie realized what the preparations were for; she had innocently imagined that kings were always received in the afternoons in darkened, perfumed rooms. (Leslie, Edwardians in Love, p. 302.)

  CHAPTER 25

  King Canute

  1908–9

  Paris, 6 March 1908, 10:30 a.m. Between breakfast with Sir Ernest Cassel and lunch with President Fallières, the King squeezed in a visit to the studio of the sculptor Auguste Rodin.1 He asked to see the bust that Rodin had made of Daisy Warwick, but the sculpture was away being cast at the foundry. Rodin wrote about the King to Lady Warwick afterward: “Il a pensé que j’étais devant de grandes difficultés car il a parlé de vos traits si fins, et a décrit votre charmante figure comme s’il corrigeait mon buste absent, et je sens que si je l’avais laissé en terre je l’aurais montré.”*2

  Daisy had already given Rodin seven sittings. She was one of the four Englishwomen he agreed to sculpt, all with the wide-cheekboned, square-jawed “handsome” faces that were his ideal of female beauty, inspired by Michelangelo’s statues of young men. By 1908, Daisy was running short of money and she was unable to afford Rodin’s hefty fee of £1,000. Three years later, Rodin sent her the marble bust, but there is no record in his papers of any payment by her or anyone else. The story of Daisy’s portrait is still shrouded in mystery, but it has been suggested that the King’s visit to the studio was followed by a check that settled the fee.3

  “What do you think of that charming Lady Warwick mounting a wagon at the corner of the street and addressing her ‘comrades,’ the scum of the labourers, and then taking off her glove to shake and feel their horny hands!” Alix had exclaimed at the time of the 1906 election.4 Daisy Warwick, now forty-six, overweight, and loudly socialist, was intent on “revenge.”5 The Daily Mail announced that she was about to produce her memoirs, and she approached Arthur Pearson, owner of the Daily Express, offering to sell Bertie’s letters for publication and threatening to go to the Hearst press in America if he refused.6 Her sister Blanche Gordon-Lennox acted as go-between. Blanche had a meeting with Knollys, and told him that Daisy was feeling sour and neglected, and the best way to buy her off was to stage a reconciliation. Bertie agreed to appear at dinner with a mutual friend, but it was not until the autumn or winter that a meeting took place.7 Eventually Daisy promised to abstain from public speaking. She also wrote a letter in which she declared that she had decided that writing her memoirs would be unwise, and in consequence all her papers had been destroyed.8 She put it about that it had taken her three hours to burn Bertie’s letters one evening.9

  If Bertie was indeed the secret purchaser of the Rodin bust, this was perhaps his way of thanking Daisy. He remained loyal to her, and continued to see her until shortly before his death.10 Daisy had not, in fact, abandoned the idea of publishing, nor had she destroyed all the letters. As for the marble bust, this was sent by Rodin to Daisy’s home, Easton Lodge, in 1912. Less than a year later, it was sold secretly, in defiance of an injunction imposed by Daisy’s creditors that restrained her from selling any of the contents of her estate. It has never reappeared.11

  At four thirty on the afternoon of 4 March 1908, the day before he left London for France, the King visited the prime minister at 10 Downing Street.12 He stayed for twenty minutes. Campbell-Bannerman had been critically ill with heart failure, and Bertie wished to say goodbye; he thought he might never see him again. A few days earlier, Bertie had spoken to the man marked out as CB’s successor, H. H. Asquith. Bertie considered CB a “great gentleman,” and liked him best of all the prime ministers of his reign. Asquith, by contrast, he thought “deplorably common not to say vulgar,” but he made no attempt to resist his succession.13 Bertie now told Asquith that if a change of prime minister became necessary, he must come out to Biarritz. Asquith found the King “very agreeable.” “He talked a
little all over the place, smoking a cigar, about Roosevelt, Macedonia, Congo etc.”14

  At Biarritz, the King occupied rooms on the ground floor of the Hôtel du Palais to save the strain of wheezing as he climbed the stairs to his usual first-floor suite. The drains smelled so bad that he threatened never to return.15 As usual, Alice Keppel was installed with her children in Ernest Cassel’s Villa Eugénie. While the Keppel children’s nanny fussed about ironing and goffering Violet and Sonia’s frilly knickers, the gentleman Sonia called “Kingy” took long drives with Mama in the afternoons. Stamper, who always sat in the front seat, described these drives but, being a loyal member of the household, never mentioned Mrs. Keppel by name.16 The King growled at the news from London, watching angrily as Asquith planned his Cabinet changes while CB was still in Downing Street and fighting for his life. “It reminds one of a dying animal with the vultures hovering about him,” he wrote. The suggestion that he should return to London infuriated him. “I do not see the necessity of going over to England … merely to hold a council and receive and give seals of office.”17

  On 2 April, CB dictated a letter to the King asking permission to resign. The King telegraphed the next day that he had no choice but to accept.†18 On 5 April, he wrote to Asquith inviting him to form a government.

  Asquith arrived in Biarritz in vile, lashing rain on the night of 7 April. At ten a.m. the next morning, dressed in his frock coat, he went to see the King, who was also wearing a frock coat, and kissed hands.19 Elated by his promotion, Asquith himself made no complaint at having to go all the way to Biarritz, but in London, The Times roundly criticized the King for not returning to his country at such a moment.20 Most observers agreed.

  Summoning Asquith to Biarritz was widely seen as the King’s first constitutional blunder in the seven years of his reign.21 True, the King (influenced, it seems, by Mrs. Keppel)22 returned home in time to hold the Privy Council on 16 April, but by then the damage was done. The episode demonstrated, as Carrington wrote, that “the presence of the King in this country is not a necessity”; but perhaps this was no bad thing. In the same way, Bertie had ostentatiously distanced himself from Campbell-Bannerman’s Cabinet-making back in 1905, when he stayed at Crichel during the crisis. By remaining at Biarritz in 1908, he demonstrated that the paranoid views of the German press about his omnipotence were wildly exaggerated. “It would be a serious danger,” wrote Carrington, “if the King were supposed to be a more important and influential political person than he is. This is all the more necessary as there is a genuine belief abroad that Esher, Fisher, Cassel and others are attempting to form a sort of backstairs influence on HM. If this feeling grows it may be dangerous—the Emperor of Germany’s ‘camarilla’ has done a great deal of harm already everywhere.”23

  Carrington’s fears of a backstairs clique were not without foundation. Esher wrote frequently to Knollys (“My dear Francis”) confiding “everything that comes into my head,” while Fisher’s letters to Esher were addressed “My beloved E.”24 The three men formed a habit of dining together. Esher and Knollys resented Ponsonby’s closeness to the King. “Poor dear Fritz,” Esher wrote patronizingly, “is inclined to a certain pomposity.… His most serious fault is an uncertainty of judgement.”25 According to Arthur Bigge, the King’s household “are all at sixes and sevens, and all frantically jealous of each other.”26

  Esher’s influence was waning. He had already been cut out of the Foreign Office loop by Charles Hardinge, and as a Tory he was suspected by the Liberal government. In February 1908, a letter written by Esher appeared in The Times defending Fisher’s record on naval reform: “There is not a man in Germany, from the Emperor downwards, who would not welcome the fall of Sir John Fisher.”27 This sentence was picked up by the kaiser, who took the extraordinary step of writing to Lord Tweedmouth, First Lord of the Admiralty, denying Germany’s intention of starting a naval race and dismissing Esher’s claims to authority: “I am at a loss to tell whether the supervision of the foundations and drains of the Royal Palaces is apt to qualify somebody for the judgement of Naval Affairs.”28

  It was a shrewd hit. Bertie replied, standing on his dignity, that “Your writing to my [author italics] First Lord of the Admiralty is a ‘new departure.’ ”29 But the spat did not end here. Tweedmouth, who unfortunately turned out to be suffering from a brain tumor that affected his sanity, leaked the kaiser’s letter, and an article appeared in The Times attacking the kaiser for seeking to influence Admiralty policy.

  Bertie was furious. He wrote Esher a formal reprimand, and blasted him to Fisher.30 Esher, who was supported throughout by Fisher and Knollys, breezily predicted that the affair would soon blow over, and within days he was kissing the King’s hand. But, in fact, his standing at court was seriously compromised. Bertie no longer trusted him to be discreet.‡ On his return from Biarritz, the King summoned Fisher and told him off for talking too freely in society and boasting that “the King would see me through anything! that it was bad for me and bad for him as being a Constitutional Monarch.” Then the King “smoked a cigar as big as a capstan bar for really a good hour afterwards, talking of everything from China to Peru, not excluding the Times article on himself.”31

  On 5 June 1908, the King traveled to Epsom races for the Oaks, dined with the Waleses and the Fifes, and then caught a ten o’clock train to Port Victoria, where he boarded the royal yacht Victoria and Albert.32 The crossing of the North Sea was so rough that he was ill, and the Queen, who was rarely seasick, was thrown off her chair into a corner of the cabin and then lay flat on the deck “like a corpse,” vomiting continually.33 On 9 June, the royal yacht reached Reval (now Tallinn) on the Baltic and anchored there, close to the czar’s yacht Standart.

  This yachting meeting with Czar Nicholas was the culmination of much patient diplomacy. Giving affirmation to the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 with a meeting of King and czar was fraught with difficulties.34 Meeting at sea in the policed, neutral space of royal yachts solved the security issue—though the British were amazed by the paranoia of the Russians. No one was allowed on shore, and the police even threatened to strip-search the women members of a local choir who serenaded the royal party.35 Public opinion at home was also a problem. Keir Hardie, the first Labour MP and a veteran republican, attacked the meeting as “condoning the atrocities” perpetrated by the czar.

  At Reval at eleven a.m. on 9 June, the King summoned Sir Arthur Nicolson, the ambassador in St. Petersburg, to his cabin on the Victoria and Albert. Bertie was sitting in a chintz-covered chair wearing the uniform of the Kiev Dragoons. It was uncomfortably tight. He fired questions at Nicolson: “whether the Emperor would wear the uniform of the Scots Greys or whether he would appear as a Russian admiral: what decorations he would wear and in what order: what about the Russian railways? Whether M Stolypin [prime minister] spoke French or German, or even English: what exactly were the present relations between the Government and the Duma; was the Duma a thing one should mention? Or not?” And so on.

  At eleven thirty, Czar Nicholas II and his family came on board the Victoria and Albert. It was contrary to protocol that the czar should pay the first visit, and it signified the nephew’s respect for the uncle.

  King Edward VII spoke with Peter Stolypin and Alexander Izvolsky, the foreign minister. He discussed the marvelous progress of the Russian railways and the gratifying collaboration with the Duma, and remarked on how well the czar looked in the uniform of the Scots Greys. Afterward Stolypin told Nicolson how amazed he was by the King’s grasp of Russian policy. As Harold Nicolson wrote, the King was a “supreme diplomatist.” Unlike the kaiser, who patronized and bullied the czar, Bertie made him feel a “highly successful nephew,” the more so because he avoided all awkward political questions.36 He made no attempt to meddle in Russia’s affairs, and Nicky seemed for once at ease.

  The next night, the Russians dined on board the Victoria and Albert. Bertie’s suite had feared that the notoriously difficult Czarina Alexandra m
ight refuse to attend the dinner if she was forced by protocol to take second place behind her mother-in-law, Minnie, who accompanied the Russian party and, as dowager empress, enjoyed precedence. Bertie solved the protocol issue and prevented a scene by taking Minnie and Alexandra each on one arm. “Tonight I am going to enjoy the unique honour of taking two Empresses in to dinner.”37 He told Alexandra that her daughters spoke English with a Scots accent. She fired their tutor at once.38 To flatter the czar, Bertie made him an Admiral of the Fleet. This honor gave Nicky childlike pleasure. After dinner, Jackie Fisher danced the fashionable Merry Widow waltz with Nicky’s sister, the Grand Duchess Olga, both with their hands folded behind their heads, and watched in a circle by the monarchs and their ministers.§39

  Politicians in London carped that the King erred in raising the question of the Jews in his talks with Stolypin, but in retrospect, Bertie’s willingness to respond to concerns about the czarist pogroms shows a moral courage decidedly lacking among his ministers. More doubtful was his mention to Nicky of Cassel’s desire to participate in a new Russian loan. When Kaiser William got to hear of this, he hastened to describe his uncle as “a jobber in stocks in shares,” who counted on making a “colossal” personal profit out of the Russian loan.40 Reval infuriated William, who minuted his ambassador’s report: “[King Edward] aims at war. I am to begin it, so that he does not get the odium.”41 At home, Esher and Balfour grumbled that the King had taken with him Charles Hardinge rather than foreign secretary Edward Grey. But no one could deny that Reval had achieved its diplomatic aim of strengthening the ties between Russia and Britain.42