The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (8 page)

2. By the end of the nineteenth century the European powers had seized much of the world for their empires and at times imperial rivalries had brought them close to war. China, where the declining Manchu dynasty was struggling to keep control, looked like their next prey. As the Europeans perch on the egg called China, Japan, which was now dreaming of building its own empire on the mainland of China, and the United States, which opposed imperialism and tried to insist on an ‘Open Door’ policy in China, look uneasily on.

The greatest spectacle of all, and the most impressive display of British power, was the naval review at Spithead the following Saturday. In the sheltered waters of the Solent, between the south coast of England and the Isle of Wight, 165 ships – among them 21 battleships, 53 cruisers, and 30 destroyers – lay in rows. Public enthusiasm was intense. Spectators had come from all over England, jamming the local towns, lining the shores, and hiring scores of sightseeing boats.
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German steamers brought over crowds of Germans who were fascinated by this display of naval power. Over 200 reporters were present and the Admiralty for the first time laid on an official press boat.
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Japan and the United States, both fledgling naval powers, each sent a warship in greeting. Germany sent an obsolete battleship. ‘I deeply regret that I have no better ship to place at your disposal,’ Kaiser Wilhelm wrote to
his brother, an admiral, ‘while other nations shine with their fine vessels.’
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As the royal yacht carrying Edward, the Prince of Wales, who was representing his mother, entered its waters, the fleet fired a great salute. The
Victoria and Albert
made its way slowly along the fleet, followed by yachts with his guests, the Admiralty yacht,
Enchantress
, and steamers for members of the House of Commons and the Lords.
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The prince, dressed in an admiral’s uniform, took the salute from the thousands of sailors lining the decks above on the naval ships. There was a sudden flurry of excitement when the inventor Charles Parsons cheekily turned up in his new ship, the
Turbinia
. With its special fast steam turbine, it darted up and down at high speed, well out of the reach of the slower navy ship sent to catch it. (The Admiralty were forced to look at his invention and his turbines were later going to power its huge dreadnoughts.) Rudyard Kipling, who was present for the review, said he ‘never dreamed that there was anything like it under Heaven. It was beyond words – beyond any description!’
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When the sun went down, the ships flashed into view again, outlined with the new electric lights while their searchlights played on the fleet and on the spectators still massed on the shores. As the Prime Minister had said when the Diamond Jubilee was being planned, ‘a great naval review would be a most fitting mode of celebration’.
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If Queen Victoria stood for longevity and order and the Royal Navy for British power, her Prime Minister, Robert Cecil, the third marquess of Salisbury, appeared the epitome of calm self-confidence, both that of his country and of the British landowning classes. For centuries ownership of agricultural land had been the chief source of wealth and influence in virtually all European countries. In Britain some 7,000 families, from the minor gentry with estates of 1,000 acres or more to the great aristocrats with estates of more than 30,000 acres, owned most of the agricultural land and often urban land, mines, and industries as well. For all the gradations of wealth among them, collectively they made up the polite society which Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope described so well. With their wealth and status came power. The upper levels of the civil service, the Church, the armed forces, the House of Commons, and of course the House of Lords were all dominated by the landed classes. Even in 1897, after successive reforms had widened the franchise and
brought new sorts of men into politics, 60 per cent of Members of Parliament still came from those classes. Men such as Salisbury felt it was right that they should. ‘Every community has natural leaders’, he wrote in an article in the
Quarterly Review
in 1862, ‘to whom, if they are not misled by the insane passion for equality, they will instinctively defer. Always wealth, in some countries birth, in all intellectual power and culture, mark out the men to whom, in a healthy state of feeling, a community looks to undertake its government.’ And the privileged had an obligation to take on the governing of their less fortunate fellows.
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Salisbury was more prey to doubts than this might indicate. His childhood had been loveless and spartan even by the standards of his class. Sent to his first boarding school at the age of six, he later described it as ‘an existence among devils’. Eton was not much better; he was savagely bullied and his father eventually took him away and had him privately tutored. Perhaps as a result of his early experiences he was deeply pessimistic about human nature and its propensity to do evil. He also suffered throughout his life from ‘nerve storms’, attacks of depression which would lay him low for days on end.
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As compensation, life gave him brains, character and a head start as a member of the ruling class of the most powerful country in the world. When he decided that politics was his métier, his connections ensured him a place in the House of Commons. (He did not have to bother with the effort of electioneering since his seat was not contested.) He also had a long and successful marriage to a woman who was his equal both intellectually and in strength of character. Visitors to Hatfield, his country house, found a happy domestic scene with rambunctious children who, unlike many Victorian children, were encouraged to speak up.

While he was bored by smart society and frequently forgot names, he was nevertheless courteous in an absent-minded way. At a dinner for party supporters, he made sure to talk to each guest about his particular interests but said to his private secretary with concern at the end, ‘there was someone I have not identified who, you said, made mustard’.
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He did not bother much with the usual pastimes of his peers such as shooting or hunting. Horses to him were merely a means of getting about and an inconvenient one at that. In his later years he took up riding a tricycle for his health. Dressed in a purple velvet poncho, he would cycle near Buckingham Palace or, at Hatfield, along the special paths that
had been made for him. There, a young footman would push him up the hills and then jump on behind for the run down. (His grandchildren were fond of lying in wait for him with jugs of water.)
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He was at once deeply religious and fascinated by science. Hatfield already had a chapel; he now built a laboratory for his experiments. His wife, said their daughter Gwendolen, ‘shared in the painful experiences familiar to relatives of self-educating chemists’. He once fainted at Lady Salisbury’s feet after inhaling the chlorine gas he had just made. On another occasion, there was a loud explosion in the laboratory. Salisbury appeared ‘covered with blood and severely cut about the face and hands to explain to his terrified family – with evident satisfaction at the accurate working out of chemical laws – that he had been experimenting with sodium in an insufficiently dried retort’.
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The family were relieved when he turned to electrical experiments although again the results were not always happy. Hatfield had one of the first private electrical systems in Britain and the first fatal electrocution when an estate worker touched a live cable.
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For a time the family and their guests at Hatfield had to eat dinners in the glare of a pair of early arc lights. Those were followed by a series of the latest innovations. ‘There were evenings’, remembered Gwendolen Cecil, ‘when the household had to grope about in the semi-darkness, illuminated only by a dim red glow such as comes from a half-extinct fire; there were others when a perilous brilliancy culminated in miniature storms of lightning, ending in complete collapse.’ When the first phones appeared, Hatfield’s guests had to step cautiously over the wires lying across the floors. The devices were primitive and could only pick up phrases enunciated clearly and slowly. Salisbury’s voice echoed around the house, said Gwendolen, as he ‘reiterated with varying emphasis and expression, “Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle; the cow jumped over the moon”’.
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With his long beard and imposing bulk, Salisbury looked, some thought, like his contemporary the famous Victorian cricketer, W. G. Grace. Others compared him to ‘one of Michelangelo’s versions of God’.
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Salisbury himself was generally indifferent as to what others thought of him. He refused, when he was Prime Minister, to live in Downing Street. When his father had complained that he was marrying a social inferior and would be shunned by society, Salisbury had merely replied: ‘The persons who will cut me because I marry Miss
Alderson are precisely the persons of whose society I am so anxious to be quit.’
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After all he was a Cecil, from one of England’s great families. One of his most famous ancestors William Cecil, the first Lord Burghley, was the close adviser of the first Queen Elizabeth during most of her reign. And his son, Robert, was Secretary of State both to her and to her successor James I. Over the centuries the family accumulated wealth and titles. James I made Robert the Earl of Salisbury, and gave him the royal palace at Hatfield. Robert promptly tore it down and used the bricks to build the great rambling house which is still there today. King George III made the title even grander in the time of Salisbury’s grandfather, with only one stipulation: ‘Now my lord, I trust you will be an English marquess and not a French marquis.’
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The first marquess’s son married a young and very rich heiress and so assured the family’s continuing fortunes. Although he cared little for comfort and was a notoriously shabby dresser (he was once turned away at the door of the Casino in Monte Carlo),
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Salisbury, with an income of between £50,000 and £60,000 per year, was a very rich man. And Hatfield House, while it was not on the scale of Blenheim Palace or Chatsworth, was a very grand house with its Long Gallery, its Marble Hall, its library, drawing rooms, and dozens of bedrooms. In addition he had a London house with its own ballroom and a Chalet Cecil just outside Dieppe.

Unconventional though he may have been, Lord Salisbury was to both his compatriots and to foreigners a true representative of one of the most admired and envied classes in the world. All over Europe, the upper classes imported English nannies and grooms, wore tartans, and ate marmalade at breakfast. In Miklós Bánffy’s novel
They Were Divided
, set among the Hungarian upper classes before the war, a young nobleman who has loved England from afar finally gets the chance to go to London. He tells his ambassador he wants only one thing, to become a temporary member of the most exclusive men’s club in London, the St James’s. And so, for two weeks, he sits in the window of the club. ‘It was a heavenly feeling.’ No matter that he does not see anything else of London or that he cannot speak to anyone because his English is too poor.
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The prestige of the British aristocracy was also partly a matter of wealth. The great families in Britain were as rich as the richest Germans
or Russians and there were more of them. Moreover, prosperity spread downwards into smaller landowners and sideways to the rising new industrial and commercial classes. As Queen Victoria’s daughter, the mother of the future Wilhelm II, wrote to her mother from Germany in 1877: ‘You know how small fortunes are in Germany and how little people are accustomed to luxury and
train du grande monde
.’ At the same time, though, the upper classes across Europe, particularly those whose income came mainly from their rural estates, were feeling a chill as the world changed around them. Industrialisation and the spread of European power around the world combined to make agriculture in Europe less important and less profitable. Cheap food from the Americas and such parts of the world as Australia was good for the working classes and their employers, not so good for landowners. Incomes from agriculture in Europe fell precipitously in the last two decades and the value of agricultural land dropped correspondingly.

Landowners were sometimes fortunate enough to own urban property, which was going up in value. Salisbury derived only a quarter of his income from agricultural land; the rest came from urban property or investments. The bigger among them also saved themselves by opening businesses or investing in industry or by marrying money outside their own circles as the French Prince de Polignac did with the heiress to the Singer sewing-machine fortune. An increasing number did not survive. Chekhov’s
The Cherry Orchard
or Miklós Bánffy’s Transylvanian trilogy depicting estates mortgaged to the hilt and old families going under reflected the reality.

In the decades before the Great War, the landed aristocracy and the lesser gentry were not only losing ground economically as classes; in many parts of Europe they were also losing in other ways. The rising middle and working classes and the new men of wealth now challenged their privileges and competed with them for power. The old classes were no longer as socially dominant as they had once been. The owners of fortunes made from commerce and industry – think of the friends of King Edward VII with names such as Rothschild, Lipton and Cassels – could match them with beautiful houses and lavish entertainment. In politics and government too the landed interests no longer counted as much as they had once done, even in countries such as Germany. The extension of the franchise – in Britain the number of those voting
doubled from 3 million to nearly 6 million in the reforms of 1884 and 1885 – and the redrawing of voting boundaries broke apart many of the cosy old arrangements where seats in Parliament were in the gift of local magnates.
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