The Heir Apparent (77 page)

Like a fat old cat playing with an angry mouse, Bertie manipulated William and worked on his emotions. In January 1906, shortly after the
opening of the Algeciras Conference to resolve the dispute between Germany and France over Morocco, Bertie wrote his nephew a birthday letter. “We are—my dear William—such old friends and near relations that I feel sure that the affectionate feelings which have always existed may invariably continue. Most deeply do I deplore the uncalled-for expressions made use of in the Press concerning our two countries and most ardently do I trust that they will cease.”
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To Kaiser William this appeal, however insincere, was impossible to resist. Assuring his uncle that “my life’s endeavour” was to achieve a mutual understanding between their two countries (which at one level was the truth), William begged him to remember the “silent hours when we watched and prayed” at the bedside of dear Grandmama, “when the spirit of that great Sovereign-Lady passed away, as she drew her last breath in my arms. I feel sure that from the home of Eternal Light she is now looking down upon us and will rejoice when she sees our hands clasped in cordial and loyal friendship.”
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At Biarritz in the spring of 1906, Bertie received “concise and most interesting” letters from Hardinge, updating him on the negotiations at Algeciras.
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William’s designs to isolate France collapsed like a house of cards as England and Russia stood by their ally. Germany suffered a humiliating diplomatic defeat. William angrily blamed Bertie, as did his ministers and the German press.
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King Edward, sitting beside the sea at Biarritz, going on motor picnics with Mrs. Keppel, had, in fact, done nothing at Algeciras.
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Mrs. Keppel preserved the menu that the King wrote for dinner on the last evening of his stay at Biarritz: scrambled eggs
aux fines herbes,
fillet of sole, lamb chops, creamed spinach, chicken, roast woodcock, and peach tart.
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After this light meal, Bertie departed without his mistress for a month’s Mediterranean cruise with his wife. Alix was mourning her father King Christian. Looking “very sad & tired after her great sorrow,” “Motherdear” was anxious to see her brother Willie, the King of Greece, but this was no relaxing family holiday.
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The Uncle of Europe was on a mission to sort out another errant nephew: Prince
George of Greece, whose arbitrary rule as High Commissioner of Crete had driven the people to the edge of rebellion.

The royal yacht
Victoria and Albert
was truly a floating court. The King insisted on the strict observance of protocol. At Corfu, Lord Charles Beresford, the Admiral of the Mediterranean Fleet, arrived with his fleet to escort the
Victoria and Albert
to Athens. When the King of Greece boarded his flagship, Beresford failed to change into full dress uniform. When Bertie heard of this solecism he ordered Charles Hardinge to make a formal complaint to the Admiralty. Whether or not it was a calculated insult, the uniform gaffe was badly timed. Charlie Beresford was embroiled in an ugly quarrel with Admiral John (Jackie) Fisher, and Bertie read his flouting of protocol as a challenge.

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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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Kaiser and King embraced cordially on the platform.
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William greeted Fritz Ponsonby with heavy-handed chaff: “See you are getting grey like me. How old are you?”
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There was “a feeling of thunder in the air,” wrote Ponsonby.
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Bertie was careful to avoid controversial subjects, and “very wisely,” in Hardinge’s view, talked only in general terms “of our policy.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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!”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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?”
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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.”
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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 craved the affirmation of crowds.

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

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.
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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
!”
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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.
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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.
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