The Heir Apparent (74 page)
Authors: Jane Ridley
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Nonfiction, #Retail, #Royalty
Esher was fifty-one, and his influence was at its height. His appointment as lieutenant and deputy governor of Windsor Castle gave him direct access to the King. He owed his entrée at Windsor to his wife, Nellie, who was a daughter of Queen Victoria’s friend Madame Van de Weyer, the widow of the Belgian minister. Esher inherited his title from his father, a self-made lawyer, the son of a curate who became Master of the Rolls. His real emotional bond was to Eton. He was a protégé of the charismatic homosexual master William Johnson Cory, who encouraged him to have affairs with other boys, and even in adult life he never really grew away from his alma mater. At the time of his rise to favor at court, Esher was besotted with his own son, the unprepossessing Etonian Maurice (Molly), to whom he wrote adoring letters, pouring out all the secrets of the War Office. That Bertie knew of this infatuation is unlikely, but Esher was certainly running risks, living “on a knife edge.” At Windsor Castle, he had a room that Maurice and other Eton boys visited, and which he called the Nest, where he kept blazers and photographs of boys.
82
Esher understood the working of the King’s mind. As he explained to Admiral Fisher, who complained that the King was unable to grasp details: “HM has two receptive plates in his mind. One retains lasting impressions. I have tested this over and over again. The other, only mostly fleeting ones. On the former are stamped his impressions of
people
and their relative value. On the latter, of
things
, and these are
apt to fade or be removed by later ones. But, and this is the essential point, if you can stamp your image on number one … you can always rely on carrying your point.”
83
Esher’s Committee on the War Office reported with impressive speed in January 1904. Esher proposed to establish an Army Council or General Staff. He was very clear that the army was to be run by politicians, not the King. “In Germany it is the emperor who co-ordinates the action of the German Navy and Army. In Britain it can only be the Prime Minister. That is a constitutional axiom.”
84
By scrapping the commander-in-chief, the influence of the Crown was reduced. This was the price that Bertie had to pay to achieve his aim of reforming the army.
85
Not that royal influence was eliminated. The new office of inspector general was given to Bertie’s brother Arthur, Duke of Connaught.
b
The War Office loathed Esher for his meddling with appointments and for his “disgraceful” treatment of Lord Roberts, whom he had forced to resign as commander in chief.
86
The politicians loathed him, too, and with good reason. Esher did his best to undermine the Secretary of State for War, H. O. Arnold-Forster, a tactless but well-intentioned reformer. He interfered with Arnold-Forster’s reforms by going behind his back to the King, and he purported to speak on the King’s behalf. His palace intrigues “left a thread of mischief-making and bitterness woven into the reform movement” that jeopardized its success.
87
The new Lord Salisbury told Balfour that Esher’s relations with the King were “in the highest degree unsatisfactory. He ought either to be a responsible minister and defend his views in parliament or (at the very most) he should confine himself to intensely confidential conversations with yourself.” Salisbury considered that Esher meddled far too much. “A person who is in confidential communication with the military chiefs and with the King and works against the Secretary of
State is a dangerous individual.”
88
If anyone abused the constitutional power of the Crown, it was Esher.
Esher was a liability, and yet Bertie seemed oblivious, such was Esher’s skill in insinuating himself into the King’s confidence. In December 1905, Carrington was in Francis Knollys’s room when the door opened and in walked Esher. “He certainly is an extraordinary man and has a wonderful footing at Buckingham Palace. He seems to be able to run about as he likes—and must be a considerable nuisance to the household.”
89
Early in 1906, the King told Esher (so Esher related), “Although you are not exactly a public servant, yet I always think you are the most valuable servant I have,” and (Esher told his son, Molly) “then I kissed his hand as I sometimes do.”
90
The coda, suppressed from the published version of this letter, is: “But in doing it I only thought how little all this meant including the kiss, compared with a kiss upon another hand, and a few words of affection or appreciation from other lips.”
91
Bertie cannot be blamed for not knowing of Esher’s secret life—he would surely have been horrified if he had known what was in Esher’s mind at that moment; but his failure to see how dangerous Esher was must count as an error of judgment.
The tariff reform split of 1903 left the Balfour government mortally wounded. Balfour was in the unenviable position of John Major or Anthony Eden, the heir to a charismatic prime minister who inherits a government that is already sinking. Like Major or Eden, the qualities which made him a successful number two—administrative skill and a reputation for cleverness—did not equip him for leadership. Balfour’s weakness made the King stronger. Bertie had grown into his job, while Balfour had failed in his. Balfour had begun the new reign by lecturing the King on the constitution, but the roles were soon reversed, and Bertie came to view his prime minister with a mixture of pity and exasperation. As part of the Entente Cordiale colonial barter with France, Britain relinquished fourteen thousand square miles in West Africa. Balfour invited Parliament to assent, heedless of the fact that the power to cede territory was a royal prerogative. Bertie considered that Balfour had treated him with “scant courtesy”: “He is always so vague that probably he is wrong, but I must insist, if he is, and as a matter of
principle, that he
admits
it.”
92
The King was right, but he gave way, and the royal prerogative to cede territory passed to Parliament.
The power of the Crown is usually calibrated in terms of the monarch’s power to resist his ministers, but the sovereign can equally play an important part in “putting his influence and authority behind the government, which is exactly what King Edward did.”
93
So sorry did the King feel for his stricken prime minister, who, as a commoner, ranked below some members of his own Cabinet, that he wrote (through Knollys): “The King thinks it would be only decent and proper that the Prime Minister should have some precedency formally laid down for him.… After the Sovereign the Prime Minister is certainly the most important man in the Empire and he should therefore have a correspondingly important position.”
94
Balfour replied (through his private secretary, J. S. Sandars) that he was “not a little touched by HM’s condescension.”
95
Accordingly, in 1905, a warrant was drawn up, based on a memorandum by Sandars, formally recognizing the prime minister as the King’s fourth most important subject, after the Archbishops of Canterbury and York and the Lord Chancellor. This constitutional adjustment is usually credited to Balfour; but, as these documents reveal, the change was made on the initiative of the King.
96
The King told Balfour in early 1905 (through Knollys) that “he is very sorry for you and for all that you have to go through, and he only trusts that you will not knock up.”
97
Again, in July, after Balfour had received a mauling in the House of Commons, Knollys told him that “the King desires me to … say how much disgusted he feels at the crude and vulgar attacks” made especially by Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George, “and to add that he thinks your answer was an excellent one.”
98
One of Balfour’s worst headaches was India, where George Curzon, the viceroy, was locked into a struggle with Lord Kitchener (the commander in chief). At issue was the question of whether the Indian army should remain subject to the dual control of viceroy and C in C, as Curzon insisted, or whether the C in C should take over the military administration, as Kitchener urged. The incompetent Brodrick, appointed Secretary of State for India in the reshuffle of 1903, mishandled
the dispute badly and decided in favor of Kitchener. The King took Curzon’s side during this controversy. Bertie and Curzon had little in common. Curzon despised the King, who he thought was not at all what a king should be.
c
99
But when Curzon resigned, Bertie fired off a telegram to Balfour suggesting that, in order to soothe feelings, Curzon should be made an earl at once.
100
Balfour wired back the same day: “There are manifest difficulties in course proposed—GC has resigned because he differed from policy of Government. Under most favourable construction he cannot be said to have behaved well. To reward him would be equivalent to a public intimation that the sure road to honour was disobedience to instructions.”
101
The refusal of Curzon’s earldom was urged by Brodrick, but it was Balfour who made the decision.
102
Francis Knollys complained to Sandars that “the position Mr. Balfour has taken up is a weak one. Are Curzon’s five years’ brilliant administration to be ignored and unrecognised for differing from the government and making difficulties about instructions, rather than disobeying them?”
103
Balfour replied with a twenty-five-page dictated letter splitting hairs but stubbornly justifying his position—a document that even today makes the heart sink.
104
As usual, the King gave way. As usual, the King was right. Balfour’s vindictiveness toward his old friend poisoned their relationship for life, and Curzon played a key role in breaking his leadership of the Unionist party in 1911. Self-indulgent philistine though he was, the King understood the art of management far better than Balfour the repressed intellectual.
*
Bertie had noted Hardinge’s talent when the young man was posted at St. Petersburg. Hardinge’s wife, Winifred (Bina) Sturt, was the daughter of Bertie’s old friend Lord Alington of Crichel, and a favorite of Alix’s, who had engineered her marriage and made her a lady-in-waiting.
†
Or at least this was what Bertie was reported to have said by the French journalist Arthur Meyer, writing in
The Times
in 1922. Bertie first met Jeanne Granier in 1889, when the journalist Frank Harris brought her to his room at the Grand Hotel in Monte Carlo. Granier’s racy stories of the French stage kept the prince and Randolph Churchill in fits of laughter until three a.m., and Bertie told Harris it was “one of the most charming evenings” he had ever spent.
‡
“I shall never forget my visit to your charming city, and I can assure you it is with the greatest pleasure that I return each time to Paris, where I am treated exactly as if I were at home.”
§
Old Lord Salisbury died on 22 August 1903. This was his son.
‖
This much-repeated story seems improbable. George Lyttelton refused to believe it: “I mean, he may have been a fool about many things, but surely not about trousers?” (
The Lyttelton–Hart-Davis Letters,
vol. 3 [John Murray, 1981], pp.128–29.)
a
Mrs. Keppel’s social-climbing friend Mrs. Ronnie Greville was a monster. The illegitimate daughter of Edinburgh brewer William McEwan by his cook, she resembled a Japanese pug dog. She entertained the King at Reigate Priory, and in 1906 she bought Polesden Lacey and decorated it in sumptuous red and gold. Bertie became a regular visitor. “I don’t follow people to their bedrooms. It’s what they do outside them that is important,” she once remarked. “There is no one on earth quite so skilfully malicious as old Maggie,” thought the diarist Chips Channon (
Chips: The Diaries of Sir Henry Channon
[Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967], pp. 208, 336.)
b
Esher saw Arthur at Balmoral in 1904 and was not impressed. The duke was a “very amiable but silly goose” and “very chancy in his kilt—sits in odd positions—and shows everything he has to show, which is not much.” (Lees-Milne,
Esher,
p. 151.)
c
Bertie had annoyed the snobbish Curzon, who was a stickler for correctness, by telling him off for signing himself as plain Curzon, rather than using his formal title Curzon of Kedleston. The King’s friend Earl Howe, whose family name was Curzon, had complained to the King that George Curzon had poached his courtesy title of Viscount Curzon. (Gilmour,
Curzon,
pp. 127–28.)
Uncle of Europe
1905–7
Charles Stamper was engaged as motor engineer to the King in 1905. On every drive that Bertie made, Stamper sat in the front, next to the chauffeur, with his royal master in the backseat. Nattily dressed, with a waxed mustache, and a touch theatrical (his brother was an actor), the twenty-nine-year-old Stamper had begun his career as a coach builder, like his father before him.
1
It was his job to maintain the King’s two 40 hp Mercedes cars, his Daimler and the Renault landaulet he used in London. The King’s claret-colored cars had no license plate, which made them instantly recognizable. Only the Renault was fitted with a number, as the King used it when he wanted not to be seen. Like all HM’s cars, it was emblazoned with the royal arms, so the disguise hardly made him invisible. Stamper arranged every itinerary, and he kept a record of his journeys, which he later published with some help from Dornford Yates.
2
Bertie timed his drives to the minute. “Fine run, Stamper. Fine run,” he would say. When the King attended a
house party, he traveled on the royal train, which was painted crimson and cream, and designed to resemble the royal yacht inside, with white enamel paint and polished brass.
3
At the nearest station, he would be met by Stamper, who had driven ahead, preceded by charabancs bearing the King’s luggage.