CHAPTER 9
Prince Louis Departs
By early October, many people in Britain believed that something was wrong with the navy. August had provided the bright moment of victory in the Bight, but also the escape of Goeben. September had produced the loss of the three Bacchantes. The navy’s positive contributions—the passage of the BEF, the establishment of the North Sea blockade, and the throttling of German overseas commerce—were either unglamorous or unrecorded. Even within the navy, officers were disgusted with the defensive strategy of the distant blockade. “We are only playing at war,” groaned Beatty. “We are as nervous as cats, afraid of losing lives, losing ships, and running risks. Until we risk something, we shall never gain anything.”
Someone at the Admiralty must be guilty, the British public decided. Churchill was the obvious target. He was young, brash, flamboyant, famous, hated by some, mistrusted by many. It was said that the First Lord was a brilliant but erratic amateur, whose energy and arrogance had led him to interfere in technical and strategic matters beyond his competence. Even Beatty, who had been the First Lord’s naval secretary and who owed to Churchill his leapfrog promotion to command the Battle Cruiser Squadron, repeatedly criticized Churchill in letters to his wife: “Winston, I hear, does practically everything and some more besides.” “If he would either leave matters entirely alone at the Admiralty which would be the best thing to do, or give it his entire and complete attention, we might get forward, but this flying about and putting his fingers into pies which do not concern him is bound to lead to disaster.” “If we only had a Kitchener at the Admiralty we could have done so much more and the present state of chaos in naval affairs would never have existed. It is inconceivable the mistakes and blunders we have made and are making.”
For those already disparaging Churchill’s performance at the Admiralty, his October adventure in Antwerp provided fresh ammunition. When the German army swept through Belgium and northern France, it left the great port of Antwerp far behind. As a port and a symbol, Antwerp, the last remaining stronghold of the Belgian nation, had great significance. Positioned on the far left flank of the Allied front in the west, it might—if it could be held—become a sally port from which the Allies could thrust into the flank of the German army in France.
British responsibility for helping in the defense of Antwerp lay with the War Office, and Churchill’s involvement came on Kitchener’s initiative. On the night of October 2, the First Lord left London for a weekend visit to Dunkirk, where a squadron of British naval airplanes was based. At 11:00 p.m., with London twenty miles behind, Churchill’s special train to Dover was suddenly halted and returned to the city. A car rushed the First Lord to Kitchener’s house in Carlton Gardens, where he found the war secretary, Sir Edward Grey, and Prince Louis of Battenberg, the First Sea Lord. (Asquith was in Wales making a speech.) Churchill was told that the Belgian government intended to evacuate Antwerp the following day; the fall of the city, which must follow, would pose a threat to the French Channel ports and to cross-Channel communications. Bound for the Continent in any case, the First Lord offered to go to Antwerp to survey the situation. Kitchener accepted. Churchill returned to Victoria Station and arrived in Antwerp the following afternoon. That morning, the British Cabinet had met and approved the dispatch of the Royal Marine Brigade to bolster the city’s Belgian garrison. Encouraged by this evidence of British support, the Belgian government postponed its evacuation and Churchill threw himself into the city’s defense. The Royal Marine Brigade arrived in Antwerp on October 4; the following day, the First Lord summoned as additional reinforcement the raw reservists of the First and Second Naval Brigades; combined, the three British infantry brigades were combined into the new, 10,000-strong Royal Naval Division. Awaiting their arrival, Churchill commandeered an open Rolls-Royce and toured the front lines. The mammoth German siege howitzers that had destroyed the fortress of Liège had now been trundled up before Antwerp and were belching one-ton shells at the Antwerp forts, which were being pulverized one by one. As pieces of shrapnel screamed across the flat, boggy countryside, Churchill, wearing a broad smile, and “waving his stick . . . would walk a few steps and stare towards the enemy’s direction.” By October 5, Churchill had convinced himself that Antwerp’s continued resistance depended on his remaining in the city. That morning, he took the extraordinary step of telegraphing Asquith, suggesting that he resign from the Admiralty and the Cabinet in order to “undertake command of the [British] relieving and defensive forces assigned to Antwerp. . . . I feel it my duty to offer my services.” Churchill’s telegram, read aloud to the Cabinet by the prime minister, brought a roar of incredulous laughter. Kitchener, however, did not think Churchill’s offer risible; he was ready to commission the former lieutenant of hussars as a lieutenant general in the British army and give him command of British troops in Antwerp. Asquith, annoyed, declared that Churchill could not be spared from the Admiralty and telegraphed him to return immediately. The First Lord was back in London on October 7.
The British force in Antwerp helped to delay the fall of the city, but could not prevent its capitulation on October 10. Churchill later argued that the British effort had given the Allies time to secure the channel ports of Dunkirk and Calais, but many regarded the Antwerp expedition as a fiasco and blamed the First Lord for romantic vainglory. “What we desire chiefly to enforce upon Mr. Churchill,” said the Morning Post, “is that he is not a Napoleon, but a Minister of the Crown with no time to organize or lead armies in the field. . . . To be photographed and cinematographed under fire at Antwerp is an entirely unnecessary addition . . . to his proper duties.” Asquith was furious at the sending of the two naval brigades partly made up of raw recruits, one of whom was his own son, Arthur. “I can’t tell you what I feel of the wicked folly of it all,” he wrote to Venetia Stanley. The navy condemned the First Lord for wasting the untrained men of the Royal Naval Division, 1,500 of whom retreated into the Netherlands and were interned there. Beatty fumed that Churchill had made “such a darned fool of himself over the Antwerp debacle. The man must have been mad to have thought he could relieve . . . [Antwerp] by putting 8,000 half-trained troops into it.”
The Antwerp episode eroded Churchill’s position in the government. Nevertheless, because Asquith could think of no one to replace him at the Admiralty, Churchill survived. But if the mercurial First Lord was not to be held responsible for the navy’s problems, who could be? There was, in fact, another figure at the Admiralty, a man older, more dignified, less visible, who, because of his name and background, was even more vulnerable than Churchill. This was the most senior officer in the Royal Navy, the First Sea Lord, Prince Louis of Battenberg.
The origins of the House of Battenberg, an unkind chronicler once wrote, are lost in the mists of the nineteenth century. It is true that most of Prince Louis’s names and titles were concocted and attached to him during his lifetime. When he was born in Graz, Austria, in 1854, his family name was Hesse. His father, Prince Alexander of Hesse, was one of the legion of younger sons of great European houses who swarmed through aristocratic parlors—splendidly connected but, once of age, forced to cast about for an occupation and an income. Prince Alexander’s nineteen-year-old sister Marie mightily advanced her brother’s fortunes by marrying the future Tsar Alexander II of Russia; soon thereafter, twenty-year-old Prince Alexander was appointed a major general in the Russian army. He lost this rank when he eloped with one of his sister’s ladies-in-waiting, a Polish woman of German, French, and Hungarian blood, at which point an infuriated tsar withdrew both imperial favor and the army commission. Alexander offered himself to the Austrian army, again became a general, and in Graz fathered Louis, the future First Sea Lord. When Prince Alexander retired to Hesse, his older brother, now the Grand Duke of Hesse, found names, titles, and a home-stead for the itinerant general and his family. The marriage was recognized morganatically: Alexander was to remain a royal highness and a prince; his wife would have the lesser title of countess. The children would be princes and princesses, but they were to be serene—not royal—highnesses and would have no right of succession to the Hessian throne. Ten miles south of Darmstadt, the grand duke found his brother a village called Battenberg where a small castle sat on a mountain bluff above the river Eder. Here, the boy Louis, now titled His Serene Highness, Prince Louis of Battenberg, grew up speaking German, French, Italian, Russian, and English.
Another frequent visitor to Hesse was Queen Victoria’s second son, Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, known in the family as Affie. An officer in the Royal Navy catapulted to the rank of captain at the age of twenty-three, Affie liked visiting his sister Alice, now the wife of the grand duke. He also liked wearing his uniform, which young Louis much admired. Gratified, Affie suggested that this young relative by marriage enter the British navy and join him on a cruise around the world. Louis was eager, his parents approved, and, in October 1868, he crossed the Channel, took the oath of allegiance to the queen, and became a British subject. An obstacle arose: all naval cadets were required to pass a physical examination. Louis’s eyesight was mediocre, but ingenuity saw him through. Told that he would be asked to read the time from a clock on the dockyard tower, he set his watch by the clock before going into the exam. When the question was asked, he managed a furtive peek at his watch and answered correctly.
From the start, Louis’s path in the navy diverged from that of an ordinary cadet. A month after his entry, still scarcely knowing port from starboard, he was assigned to accompany the Prince and Princess of Wales on a five-month cruise that took them up the Nile and then through the Dardanelles to Constantinople. Bertie, the twenty-seven-year-old heir to the throne, decided that fourteen-year-old Louis was “a remarkably nice boy.” When, on account of his heavy German-English accent, young Louis was so harassed on ship by other boys that he wanted to quit the navy, the Prince of Wales, whose accent had similar inflections, advised him to “stick it out a bit longer.” Thereafter, when Louis was on leave in England, he stayed with the prince and princess at Sandringham in Norfolk or at Marlborough House in London, where a permanent bedroom was kept for him. In 1875, he accompanied Bertie to India, where he hunted tigers, stuck pigs, and broke his collarbone falling from a horse.
During these years, the demands of a naval career often rubbed against the delights and temptations of high society. The tall young officer with blue eyes, a black beard, and a gentle manner played the piano and the flute; he danced, rode, and shot; he was a prince and he was often in the company of the Marlborough House set surrounding the Prince of Wales. In this society in 1880, Louis met Lillie Langtry, said to be the most alluring woman in England. The Prince of Wales had been Lillie’s admirer, but, now ready to move on, he affably passed her along to Louis. Louis fell in love. He wished Lillie to divorce the hapless, off-stage Mr. Langtry and marry him. Lillie, inconveniently, became pregnant. Louis’s parents, appalled at the prospect of another morganatic stain on the Battenberg credentials, reacted promptly. Louis was assigned to a warship headed around the world while an agent was dispatched to Lillie to arrange a financial settlement. On March 8, 1881, behind a heavy curtain of discretion, Lillie’s daughter, Jeanne-Marie, was born. For twenty years, she did not know the name of her real father.
In 1884, Louis married his cousin Princess Victoria of Hesse, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. Here, the circumstances of Louis’s relationship with Mrs. Langtry were reversed; this time a member of the morganatic, nonroyal branch of the Hessian family was marrying up. Queen Victoria, always partial to the Hessian children of her dead daughter Alice, approved and attended her granddaughter’s wedding. *14 Now Louis knew or was related to everybody. His younger brother Alexander, known as Sandro, became the ruling prince of Bulgaria. Another brother, Henry, called Liko, married Queen Victoria’s youngest daughter, Beatrice. To the future King George V, Louis could write chummily, “My dearest Georgie,” and sign himself, “Goodbye, my dear, old boy, Ever your affectionate shipmate, Louis.” Before long, Prince Louis was connected through his wife’s sister to the Hohenzollern dynasty; then, through another of his wife’s sisters, to the Romanovs. Victoria’s sister Irene of Hesse married Prince Henry of Prussia, the younger brother of Kaiser William II. Then Victoria’s youngest sister, Alix of Hesse, became engaged to Nicholas, the Russian tsarevich. Two years later, Captain Prince Louis of Battenberg, RN, and his wife attended the coronation of the Emperor Nicholas II and his wife, Empress Alexandra.
Louis never quite knew the extent to which this far-reaching network of family relationships helped or hurt his career. He liked to think that he had advanced on his own abilities. “I hate the idea of getting anything, as regards naval work, at the hands of the king, my uncle. [In fact, King Edward VII was his wife’s uncle.] I want to get it on my own merits, if I have any,” he wrote. For the most part, he seems to have succeeded. Year by year, he climbed the ladder, but there was no leaping ahead of others as Affie had done. Yet as much as Louis hated remarks that he was a “German princeling” or a “court favorite,” hard as he tried to adapt himself to the hearty “band of brothers” atmosphere of Victorian navy wardrooms, he was a princeling, born a German, and there was favoritism. He was married to one of Queen Victoria’s favorite granddaughters, and the sovereign was fond of him. “I am sure you must miss dear Ludwig, one of the kindest and best of husbands,” the queen wrote to Princess Victoria in 1887, using the German form of Louis’s name, a practice she often applied within the family. In 1891, the queen intervened directly to boost thirty-seven-year-old Louis up the ladder. Writing to the First Lord of the Admiralty, she declared, “She hopes and expects that Prince Louis of Battenberg, to whose merits everyone who knows the service well can testify, will get his promotion at the end of the year. . . . There is a belief that the Admiralty are afraid of promoting officers who are princes on account of the radical attacks of low newspapers and scurrilous ones, but the Queen cannot credit this. . . . She trusts there will be no further delay in giving him what he deserves.” Three months later, Louis was promoted.
Sometimes, Louis resisted royal wishes. In 1895, both the queen and the Prince of Wales urged him to accept the captaincy of the royal yacht. The queen had asked for this because she wanted to see more of her great-grandchildren, Bertie because he liked Louis’s company. Prince Louis, fearing that the appointment would mean the end of his regular navy career, gently refused.
In the mid-nineties, he became captain of a cruiser and then of two battleships. He was the Director of Naval Intelligence and, in 1904, was promoted to rear admiral and given command of a cruiser squadron.
Even across the Atlantic, Prince Louis attracted special attention. In 1906, Louis brought his squadron up Chesapeake Bay to Annapolis and was invited by Theodore Roosevelt to dinner at the White House. In New York, he stayed with Colonel John Jacob Astor. But Louis was a professional sailor, and he turned his voyage back across the Atlantic into a feat of seamanship. For seven days, seven hours, and ten minutes, Battenberg’s six coal-burning armored cruisers raced side by side 3,327 miles from Sandy Hook, New Jersey, to Gibraltar. The average speed of the squadron was an unprecedented 181⁄2 knots and Battenberg’s flagship won by 300 yards. He became a vice admiral in 1907 and second in command of the Mediterranean Fleet, then Commander-in-Chief of the Atlantic Fleet. His reputation was bright; his ships and squadrons won cups for gunnery and smartness; his skills as a tactician and fleet commander were widely recognized. Ernle Chatfield, the wartime captain of the battle cruiser Lion and himself a future First Sea Lord, described Battenberg as “perhaps the outstanding officer on the flag list. He had a brilliant career at sea and was a great tactician and fleet handler. He was severe, but just.” A senior navy captain added, “There are literally hundreds of naval officers who would be quite ready to believe black was white if he issued a memo to that effect.” Lord Selbourne, a former First Lord, said simply, “He is the ablest officer the Navy possesses.”
Louis did not conceal his ultimate ambition and when, in December 1912, Churchill made him First Sea Lord, the appointment was widely praised. Fisher called him “more English than the English” and “the most capable administrator on the Admiral’s list, by a long way.” Lord Selbourne declared that “if his name had been Smith he would ere now have filled various high offices to the great advantage of the country, from which he has been excluded owing to what I must characterize as a stupid timidity. He has in fact nearly had his naval career maimed because he is a prince and because of his foreign relationships . . . a better Englishman does not exist or one whom I would more freely trust in any post in any emergency.” Churchill said simply to Asquith, “There is no one else suitable for the post.”
Personally, Winston Churchill and Louis Battenberg possessed similarities of background. Both were blue-blooded sons of younger sons of aristocratic houses: Louis descended from the Grand Dukes of Hesse, Churchill from the Dukes of Marlborough. Both were welcome and comfortable in society; both had risen to the top largely on merit. There the similarities faded. Churchill was only thirty-nine in 1914; Battenberg was sixty. Churchill had taken greater risks, broken rules, challenged the established order, and leaped ahead of his contemporaries. Battenberg had followed the rules in his steady climb up the promotion ladder. Nevertheless, Churchill respected Battenberg’s record and intelligence, while Prince Louis believed that he could advise and guide the mercurial politician, steering him away from trouble within and outside the navy.
For twenty prewar months, Battenberg and Churchill worked together. Prince Louis had an orderly mind and, unlike many British admirals, he understood the meaning of sea power; indeed, he had talked with Mahan. Churchill, on coming to the Admiralty, had—as instructed by Asquith and the Cabinet—created a War Staff, but it was a purely advisory body with no executive authority. As First Sea Lord, Battenberg attempted to nurture and enhance its role, appointing a series of intelligent, talented officers. Prince Louis also worked hard to define the mutually supporting roles of the British and French fleets, even though the two navies were bound merely by an “understanding.” Within the Admiralty, Battenberg never challenged Churchill’s supremacy. A constant flow of initiatives sprang from the fertile mind of the First Lord, and Battenberg settled into the role of adviser, judge, mediator, and facilitator. Rather than opposing Churchill directly, Battenberg tried to channel the First Lord’s thinking into paths of compromise, moderation, and conciliation. There were moments when he had to restrain Churchill from trampling too hard on naval tradition. One such instance involved the naming of new dreadnoughts in 1912. Traditionally, the First Lord proposed names and the king usually agreed. In 1913, Churchill proposed Oliver Cromwell for one of the five new 15-inch-gun superdreadnoughts being laid down that year. The king reacted violently to the suggestion that one of his ships should be named for the man who had cut off the head of his ancestor King Charles I. Churchill pushed hard until Battenberg cautioned the First Lord, “All my experience at the Admiralty and close intercourse with three sovereigns leads me to this: from all times the sovereign’s decisions as to names for H.M. ships [have] been accepted as final by all First Lords.” If Churchill persisted, he concluded, “the service as a whole would go against you.” Churchill backed down, and the new dreadnought became HMS Valiant. *15
Once the war began, however, Churchill cast advice and restraint aside. As the supreme political authority at the Admiralty, he saw himself as solely responsible to the prime minister, the Cabinet, Parliament, and the country for the war at sea; the First Sea Lord, the Admiralty War Staff, and the admirals in the fleet were there to carry out his orders. His imagination was often brilliant and his energy was phenomenal; somehow, his capacity for work actually increased under the pressures of war. Conduct of the war was centralized in a tiny ad hoc Admiralty War Group run by Churchill and including the First Sea Lord, the chief of the War Staff, and the naval secretary. Churchill himself described its working: “We met every day and sometimes twice a day, read the whole position and arrived at a united decision on every matter of consequence. . . . Besides our regular meetings, the First Sea Lord and I consulted together constantly at all hours.” Nevertheless, Churchill admitted, he often acted on his own: “It happened in a large number of cases that, seeing what ought to be done and confident of the agreement of the First Sea Lord, I myself drafted the telegrams and decisions and took them personally to the First Sea Lord for his concurrence before dispatch.” Further, Churchill said, “I accepted full responsibility . . . and exercised a close general supervision over everything that was done or proposed. Further, I claimed and exercised an unlimited power of suggestion and initiative, subject only to the approval and agreement of the First Sea Lord on all operative matters.”
The trouble was that Churchill’s concept of his role, added to his constant demand for haste, eliminated normal staff procedure in presenting alternative views. Often, orders were written and issued quickly, without the advantage of staff analysis, and subordinates were effectively eliminated from any role in decision making. Admiralty messages had flair, but because they were written by an amateur, their language was often ambiguous. The advent of modern wireless communications added to the complication. Now, the Admiralty could communicate directly with the admirals and ships at sea, who began receiving messages straight from the desk and hand of the First Lord. Constitutionally, Churchill was entitled to do this, but it created confusion at the Admiralty and in the fleet. Already, in the episode of the Goeben’s escape, the confusion of orders emanating from Churchill’s pen had befuddled Admiral Milne and confused Admiral Troubridge.
Nowhere was the effect of this erosion of professional authority greater than in the office of the First Sea Lord. Traditionally, the naval officer filling this role was responsible for the worldwide conduct of naval operations; Battenberg, however, had all but ceded this role to the First Lord. Prince Louis was responsible for keeping the fleet mobilized in the week before the war, but as time passed, and the whirlwind activity of the First Lord increased, Prince Louis’s authority and self-confidence deteriorated. During the first three months of war, the First Sea Lord wrote few minutes and memoranda. Churchill wrote the cables to Milne regarding Goeben; it was the First Lord who wrote on September 18, four days before the Bacchantes were sunk: “These cruisers ought not to continue on this beat.” Battenberg’s original response had been “Concur.” Soon, Prince Louis’s nickname around the Admiralty was “Quite Concur.”
It was in this context of losses at sea and restlessness in the fleet that public discussion over Louis’s German birth began. The accusation that he was something less than a full-fledged Englishman, like the charge that he was a “court favorite,” had been heard throughout his career. Most officers in the navy respected and admired Battenberg, but not all. Some were jealous of his court connections. Others knew that he was a Fisher man and they, being Fisher’s enemies, became Battenberg’s, too. At the time Prince Louis was promoted to rear admiral, several senior officers mounted a campaign against him. Prince Louis was aware of their sentiments; on July 24, 1906, he wrote to Fisher, “I heard by chance what the reasons were which [Admirals] Beresford and Lambton and all that tribe gave out urbi et orbi against my becoming Second [Sea] Lord or any other Lord and fleet command; that I was a damned German who had no business in the British Navy and that the Service for that reason did not trust me. I know the latter to be a foul lie. . . . It was however such a blow to me that I seriously contemplated resigning my command there and then.” Complaints were heard again when it became known that he was to be made an acting vice admiral and second in command of the Mediterranean Fleet. King Edward heard about the complaints and asked Fisher about them. Fisher replied, “I have never known more malignant rancour and jealousy as manifested by Lord Charles Beresford and Hedworth Lambton as against Prince Louis and I regret to say Lord Tweedmouth [then First Lord] is frightened of what these two can do in exciting the Service against the avowed intention of making Prince Louis an acting Vice Admiral.” This resentful antagonism never died out; indeed, it spread to the press. In 1911, when Louis was appointed Second Sea Lord, Horatio Bottomley, editor of the weekly John Bull, protested, “Should a German boss our navy? Bulldog breed or Dachshund? It would be a crime against our empire to trust our secrets of national defence to any alien-born official. It is a heavy strain to put upon any German to make him a ruler of our navy and give him the key to our defences.” The Daily Mail wrote: “It is a curious stroke of fortune by which one brother-in-law directs the operations of the British navy . . . and the other in person commands the German fleets at sea.” (Prince Henry of Prussia then commanded the High Seas Fleet.)
Unfortunately and unwittingly, the Battenbergs contributed to popular misperceptions. In an era of a naval armaments race with Germany, they kept their home in Germany and made frequent and widely reported visits to their relatives in Darmstadt. There was an advantage—which Churchill recognized—in having a First Sea Lord who knew the German navy and many of its senior officers and who was related by marriage to Prince Henry of Prussia and the kaiser. But these connections aroused suspicions. No one understood this better than Queen Victoria, who had counseled the Battenbergs “to live more in England” and “embrace English life.” Even in the active navy, officers who admired Battenberg saw an irritating German side to his personality. Prince Louis, said his biographer Richard Hough,
never understood, through all his long service life . . . why his peculiarly German manner of being right, and always right, of not being ashamed of showing he had brains, rubbed his fellow officers the wrong way. “These are the kind of administrative blunders which are never made in Germany,” he once wrote . . . [to a friend]. Louis could no more cure this tendency than he could completely refine and Anglicize his faint German accent which ruffled feelings further when declaiming about the efficiency of German ways.
In fact, there was little affection between the Hohenzollerns, who were disdainful of the impoverished, morganatic Battenbergs, and the Rhineland Hessian Battenbergs, who shuddered at the behavior of the Prussian Hohenzollerns. Prince Louis once tartly rebuffed a German admiral who had reproached him as a man born in Germany for serving in the British navy. “Sir,” said Prince Louis, “when I joined the Royal Navy in the year 1868, the German empire did not exist.” By 1914, he had been a British subject for forty-six years and most of his male relatives had served or were serving the British crown. Louis’s brother Henry had married Queen Victoria’s daughter, then gone to Africa with the British army for the Ashanti campaign, where he caught fever and died. Henry’s son, and Louis’s nephew, Prince Maurice of Battenberg, was an infantry lieutenant with the King’s Royal Rifles in France. Prince Louis’s two sons, George and Louis, were in the Royal Navy. That he might have to fight against Germany was a source of anguish for Prince Louis, but he had seen the possibility for years and had no doubts about his own loyalty to Great Britain and the Royal Navy. The problem was that once the Royal Navy began to suffer unexpected wartime reverses, the First Sea Lord became an easy target for blame.
Jingoistic nationalism in Britain in the early weeks of the Great War resulted in the smashing of windows of shops owned by German immigrants, the stoning of dachshunds, and public insulting of people with foreign names. Hysteria fanned by the popular press left no one immune. Violet Asquith, the prime minister’s daughter, was asked “whether it was true that my father drank the kaiser’s health after dinner.” In this predjudiced context, the holding of the navy’s highest post by a German-born prince at the beginning of a war with Germany became a focus of grievance. Louis was called a Germhun, a term coined by Horatio Bottomley. There were rumors that the First Sea Lord was secretly dealing with the Germans, that he had deliberately engineered the loss of the three armored cruisers, and that he had been imprisoned in the Tower on the orders of the king. Stories about Prince Louis reached the Naval School at Osborne, where his thirteen-year-old son, Louis (known as Dickie), was a cadet. “The latest rumor . . . here,” he wrote to his mother, Princess Victoria, is “that Papa has turned out to be a German spy and has been discreetly marched off to the Tower where he is guarded by Beefeaters. Apparently the rumor started . . . by the fact that an admiral has been recalled from the Mediterranean to find out about the Goeben and Breslau escaping. People apparently think he let the German cruiser escape as he was a spy or an agent. . . . I got rather a rotten time of it for about three days as little fools . . . insisted on calling me a German spy and kept on heckling me.”
Rumors of this kind reverberated not just among the boys at Osborne but in Belgravia drawing rooms and the clubs of St. James, where Louis’s old enemies, a group of elderly retired admirals, gathered. This “syndicate of discontent,” as Fisher called it, had always been envious of Battenberg’s relations with the court and hostile to his advancement to the navy’s highest post. The most bigoted was Beresford, enraged that Fisher, a middle-class nobody, and now Louis, a German prince, had both become First Sea Lord, an office he never had reached. At one point in his vendetta, Beresford wrote an article belittling Louis’s record as a naval officer and demanding that he be expelled from the navy because of his German birth. He sent this to the editor of every London newspaper, asking that it be published anonymously. No one agreed.
Before the war, this cabal had limited itself to spasmodic attacks, expecting that Batttenberg would resign from the Admiralty if war were declared. When Prince Louis did not do so, his enemies became choleric. On the evening of August 28, a group of members of the Carlton Club, among them Beresford and Arthur Lee, a onetime Civil Lord of the Admiralty and a future First Lord, was standing in a hallway. According to Lee, “the conversation having turned upon German spies, Lord Charles Beresford expressed the opinion that all Germans, including highly placed ones, ought to leave the country as they were in touch with Germans abroad. Louis’ name was not mentioned, but soon after . . . Beresford said that ‘good taste’ should lead Louis to voluntarily resign his position. However good an officer he might be, ‘nothing could alter the fact that he is a German, and as such should not be occupying his present position. He keeps German servants and has property in Germany.’ ”
Lee protested and praised Louis. “I admit all that,” said Beresford, “but none the less he is a German and he entered the Navy for his own advantage, not ours. Feeling is very strong in the service about his being First Sea Lord—it is strongly resented.” When Lee expressed surprise at this statement, Beresford continued, “I am entitled to speak for the service. I know the opinion of my brother officers on the subject. It is very strong.” Lee referred the matter to Churchill, who immediately took it up with Beresford: “In time of war, spreading of reports likely to cause mistrust or despondency is certainly a military offence.” Beresford at first denied Lee’s story and then told Churchill that what went on in London clubs was private and that Lee had no right to draw attention to the conversation. Whereupon Churchill replied:
Dear Lord Charles Beresford:
I am clearly of the opinion that the safety of the state overrides all questions of club etiquette and that personal ties must give way to public requirements at a time like this. Free expressions of opinion which are legitimate in time of peace, cannot be permitted now. Everyone has to uphold confidence or be silent. . . . We have an absolute right to your aid and influence in this and I hope it is on this footing that I may continue to address you. Yours sincerely.
This closed the incident but did not end the malevolent gossip. Horatio Bottomley, scenting the kill, stepped up his campaign. Scurrilous letters to Louis began to appear in the Admiralty mail. Others came to newspaper offices. The First Sea Lord was pinioned and increasingly helpless. He knew about the calumnies uttered at the Carlton Club and about the vicious letters arriving at the Admiralty; he saw the constant erosion of his role at the Admiralty; he knew that he was losing the confidence of the First Lord, the Cabinet, and his fellow officers. Gout, from which he had suffered for years, chose this moment to strike him down. *16 To Churchill, it became obvious that Battenberg often was trying to hide his pain. Demoralized, realizing that his health and capacity for work were failing, Prince Louis sank into depression. Decisions became difficult. Officers entering his room at the Admiralty were shocked to see the First Sea Lord sitting alone, quietly reading The Times.
Meanwhile, Churchill knew that if the clamoring public was to be given a head from the Admiralty, that head would be his or Battenberg’s. The Lord Chancellor and former war minister Richard Burdon Haldane, eventually to be forced out of office himself because he had been to a German university and admired German culture, wrote to Churchill on October 19, 1914, that, whatever else happened, “you must not ever consider leaving the Admiralty at this period of crisis. You are unique and invaluable to the nation. . . . Do not pay the least attention to the fools who write and talk in the press.” Haldane suggested another remedy: “I should like to see Fisher and Wilson brought in, and Prince Louis kept with them as Second Sea Lord.” Churchill grasped this suggestion and, on October 20, first spoke to Fisher about returning to the Admiralty. The next day he discussed the idea with the prime minister. “Winston has been pouring out his woes in my ear,” Asquith wrote to Venetia Stanley. “I think Battenberg will have soon to make as graceful a bow as he can to the British public.”
The press campaign against the Admiralty intensified. On October 21, the Morning Post assaulted Churchill, declaring that “grave doubt is expressed on every hand . . . there is a First Lord who is a civilian and cannot be expected to have any grasp of the principles and practice of naval warfare . . . [but who] now seeks to guide the operations of war.” Unless Churchill departed, the paper said, “further mistakes and further disasters” could lead to “the destruction of the empire.” Bottomley resumed his cannonade against Battenberg: “Blood is said to be thicker than water; and we doubt whether all the water in the North Sea could obliterate the blood ties between the Battenbergs and the Hohenzollerns when it comes to a question of a life and death struggle between Germany and ourselves. We shall further repeat our demand that Prince Louis of Battenberg be relieved.”
On October 27, the navy suffered its heaviest material loss of the war to that point, the sinking of the dreadnought Audacious. The tension at the Admiralty was extreme. Churchill walked to 10 Downing Street and, later in the day, Asquith wrote to Venetia Stanley, “Winston came here before lunch in a rather sombre mood. He has quite made up his mind that the time has comefor a drastic change in his [Admiralty] Board; our poor blue-eyed German will have to go and (as W. says) he will be reinforced by two ‘well-plucked chickens.’ ” The reference was to the retired former First Sea Lords Fisher and Wilson. From Downing Street, Churchill went to the palace and informed the king that he and the prime minister wished to replace Prince Louis. Reluctantly, the king consented and informed his uncle, the Duke of Connaught, of “poor Louis B’s resignation.” The last of Churchill’s interviews was with Prince Louis himself; it was made the more painful because that morning Louis had learned that his twenty-three-year-old nephew, Prince Maurice of Battenberg, had died of his wounds in France. Churchill told Louis that he and the prime minister requested the First Sea Lord’s resignation. “Louis behaved with great dignity & public spirit and will resign at once,” Asquith told Venetia.
Prince Louis resigned on October 28. “Dear Mr Churchill,” he wrote, “I have lately been driven to the painful conclusion that at this juncture my birth and parentage have the effect of impairing in some respects my usefulness on the Board of Admiralty. In these circumstances, I feel it to be my duty, as a loyal subject of His Majesty, to resign the office of First Sea Lord, hoping thereby to facilitate the task of the administration of the great service to which I have devoted my life, and to ease the burden on H.M. Ministers.” Privately, Louis wrote to Churchill: “I beg you to release me. I am on the verge of breaking down and cannot use my brain for anything.” The following day Prince Louis went to the palace to say good-bye to the king. “There is no more loyal man in the country,” George V wrote that night in his diary. Leaving the king, Louis returned to the Admiralty and did a remarkable thing: he sent a personal message asking his daughter to come to see him. In his last hour at the Admiralty, Prince Louis of Battenberg met his daughter Jeanne-Marie Langtry for the first time.
The resignation provoked another storm, this time in support of Prince Louis. Jellicoe telegraphed his “profound sorrow” and “deepest possible regret.” J. H. Thomas, a prominent Labour MP, wrote to The Times that the campaign against the First Sea Lord was “the most mean and contemptible slander I have ever known.” Lord Selbourne declared “that anyone should have been found to insinuate suspicions against . . . [Prince Louis] is nothing less than a national humiliation.” Louis himself, assessing the event, blamed the government’s weakness. To a friend, Battenberg admitted, “It was an awful wrench, but I had no choice from the moment it was made clear to me that the Government did not feel themselves strong enough to support me by some public pronouncement.” To Jellicoe, he wrote that Churchill “up to the end stood by me and, at first, the prime minister too, but the pressure from without became at last too strong—at least the Cabinet did not feel themselves to be strong enough to protect one of their principal servants. The moment this was made clear to me I walked out of the building and gave those in charge to understand that they would neither see nor hear from me until Peace was signed.”
Battenberg’s departure did not snuff out anti-German feeling in Great Britain or put an end to its toll of prominent men. Of these, Haldane was the most significant. His famous 1912 mission to Berlin, attempting to negotiate an end to the dreadnought-building competition, was characterized in the press as treason; he was accused of being in secret correspondence with the German government; he was charged with having delayed mobilization of the army and the dispatch of the BEF; he was said to have a German wife and to be the illegitimate brother of the kaiser. “On one day,” Haldane wrote, “in response to an appeal in the Daily Express, there arrived at the House of Lords 2,600 letters of protest against my supposed disloyalty to the interests of the nation. These letters were sent over to my house in sacks, and I entrusted the opening and disposal of the contents to the kitchen maid.” Haldane resigned from the government in May 1915 and “before the war ended was threatened with assault in the street and was on some occasions in some danger of being shot at.” Nor did the rising xenophobia threaten only admirals and Cabinet ministers. In June 1917, when King George V heard that people were saying he was pro-German because his family had German names, “he started and grew pale.” Hurriedly, English names were proposed: Plantagenet, York, Lancaster, and England. Eventually, by royal proclamation, the new family name of the dynasty became Windsor. Soon after, Prince Louis wrote to his daughter Louise, who became Queen of Sweden: “George Rex . . . wished to see me. . . . I was closeted with him a long time. . . . [He was] being attacked as being Half-German and surrounding himself by relatives with German names. . . . [His conclusion] was that he must ask us Holsteins, Tecks, and Battenbergs to give up using in England our German titles and to assume English surnames. . . . [He] suggested we turn our name into English: viz Battenhill or Mountbatten.” Prince Louis of Battenberg’s metamorphosis into Louis Mountbatten, Marquis of Milford Haven, was finalized while he was visiting a country house. He noted the change by writing in the guest book, “Arrived Prince Hyde. Departed Lord Jekyll.”
Two weeks after the armistice, a gratuitous act of official cruelty was inflicted on the new Marquis. The First Sea Lord, Rosslyn Wester Wemyss, a protégé of Beresford, sent Louis a letter telling him that he would not be employed again and suggesting that he might wish to retire from the service to make room for younger men. Louis retired at once, writing Wemyss that he had remained on the active list when he left the Admiralty only because Churchill and the government had promised him another active assignment once the war was over. In 1921, this hostile attitude was reversed when First Lord Arthur Lee proposed that “to right a great wrong,” the Marquis of Milford Haven be promoted to Admiral of the Fleet, only the second time in history this had been done for a retired officer. King George agreed at once and Louis was promoted. Five weeks later, he died.
Louis’s son, who with the change of name became Lord Louis Mountbatten, never forgot what had happened to his father. He made the navy his career, resolving to reach the same office from which his father had been forced to resign. Along the way, Mountbatten served in the Second World War as Supreme Allied Commander in Southeast Asia, as the last British Viceroy of India, and as the first Governor General of independent India. Known as Earl Mountbatten of Burma, he became an Admiral of the Fleet and First Sea Lord and then rose higher to serve for six years as Britain’s first interservice Chief of the Defence Staff.
Prince Louis’s resignation as First Sea Lord on October 28, 1914, spared him from having to deal with what would have been still another cause of accusation. On November 1, 1914, three days after Louis left the Admiralty, Vice Admiral Maximilian von Spee inflicted on the Royal Navy its worst defeat in over a century.