The Heir Apparent (78 page)
Authors: Jane Ridley
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Nonfiction, #Retail, #Royalty
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.
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.)
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