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.
In December 1905, Stamper drove the King to a house party at Crichel, where he was the guest of Lord and Lady Alington. They were second-generation members of the Marlborough House set and great friends of Mrs. Keppel, whose daughter Sonia Keppel remembered Lady Alington’s “pale face and full lips and small alert eyes” as being somehow at variance with her large, lazy body, enveloped in “a billowing ocean of lace and ribbons.”*4 The King stayed at Crichel for five days, but if this disconcerted his hosts, they need not have worried, as Mrs. Keppel was also a guest, and “so long as Mrs. George is here, he is perfectly happy.”5 Over three days the party shot three thousand pheasants. The King’s stand was marked by a red label on a stick (all the other places had white ones) so that the beaters could skillfully direct clouds of pheasants to fly over his head.6
Just before Bertie’s visit to Crichel, a political crisis blew up. On the afternoon of Monday, 4 December, Prime Minister Balfour, had an audience at Buckingham Palace and offered his resignation. Balfour’s government had been in a state of terminal decline for months, but he resigned without waiting to face the electorate. He insisted on going before Christmas 1905, earlier than expected, which, Bertie told Georgie, “I think is unnecessary and a mistake.”7 Pressed by the King to accept an honor, Balfour declined, but he agreed to accept the blue and red Windsor uniform. The following morning, at ten forty-five, Bertie summoned the Liberal leader Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman and invited him to form a government. “Nothing could be nicer or more courteous than he was,” Bertie told Georgie.8 The sixty-nine-year-old CB was a round-faced, white-whiskered Scot. “We are not as young as we were, Sir Henry!” said the King and shook him warmly by the hand. Whereupon (according to Margot Asquith’s diary), “knowing that he ought to kneel and kiss hands, CB advanced and waited, but the King interrupted by some commonplace remark; when he had finished speaking, CB again advanced meaning to kneel, but the King only wrang his hand, at which he felt the interview was over, as to have had another try would have been grotesque.”9 After this, the King boarded the special train for Crichel.
Knollys regretted his master’s absence from London: “Your Majesty would, I am sure, have had more direct control over the negotiations, and Sir H[enry] could then, without any difficulty, have referred to you from time to time the proposals which were made for the filling up of the various offices.”10 From Crichel, Bertie was accommodating. Knollys telephoned declaring: “The King agrees to everything.”11
Bertie was back in London at five thirty on Sunday, 10 December, and an hour later he saw CB with the list of ministers. He wrote to his sister Princess Louise: “The new Gov[ernmen]t promises to be a strong one—and I find Sir H. Campbell-Bannerman charming to do business with.”12 CB was the first prime minister to receive formal constitutional recognition in accordance with the warrant drawn up by Sandars and Balfour at the King’s suggestion. The next day, the outgoing ministers gave up their seals of office, and the new administration was sworn in at a meeting of the Privy Council. London was blanketed with thick black fog; the King’s carriage was preceded by twelve running footmen bearing flaring torches, and the new government began, as Bertie quipped, “by losing their way!”13 Esher noticed that the fog affected the King’s breathing, and he was very unwell at dinner.14
By remaining at Crichel and distancing himself from the change of government, Bertie ensured that no one could accuse him of meddling. This has earned him the approval of some historians, who note that, unlike Queen Victoria, he allowed CB a free hand with appointments.15 In point of fact, Bertie had been playing a cool game behind the scenes. By the time Balfour resigned, the King had done all he needed to do to ensure the outcome he wanted.
Campbell-Bannerman’s succession as prime minister had not gone unchallenged. In the autumn of 1905, a plot had been hatched to banish CB to the House of Lords, thus making him a figurehead prime minister. This coup was planned by H. H. Asquith, R. B. Haldane, and Edward Grey, meeting at Relugas, a remote Scottish fishing lodge. The Relugas plot is remarkable because it hinged on an attempt to drag the Crown into party politics. Involving the King was the idea of Haldane, Scottish lawyer and German-loving intellectual, who had known Bertie for a couple of years. It was a dangerous game, especially for a Liberal politician. Even more extraordinary was the response of Knollys, whom Haldane approached. Acting with astonishing indiscretion for a man who had spent his life in the service of the court, Knollys wrote to Haldane giving guarded assurances of the King’s support.16
Bertie knew about Haldane’s intrigues, but he refused to be drawn in. In August, while undergoing his cure at Marienbad, he had met Campbell-Bannerman. It turned out that CB had spent his holidays at Marienbad for thirty years, bringing his invalid wife, Charlotte, to whom he was devoted. He disapproved of the King and the tainted ladies who buzzed around him like bluebottles. Bertie, for his part, expected the Scot, the son of a Glasgow merchant who looked like a grocer, to be “prosy and heavy,” and distrusted him on account of the unpatriotic, “pro-Boer” line he had taken during the Boer War.17 He asked CB to lunch, and was surprised to discover that he was a bon viveur with a sense of humor who shared his love of Austrian coffee and French food.† For two weeks, CB was constantly entertained by the King at the Hotel Weimar. Bertie told him that “he must soon be in office and very high office.” CB thought this “most significant and very discreetly done.”18 Nothing was said by the King about CB’s translation to the Lords.
So exhausted was CB by Bertie’s “insatiable” energy and appetite, by the long evenings sitting out after dinner making sticky conversation while HM played bridge, that when the King departed he took to his bed for forty-eight hours. Bertie, on the other hand, considered Marienbad a rest cure.19
After Marienbad, he proceeded to Balmoral, where Haldane was summoned. Bertie told him that he had read his correspondence with Knollys “with much interest.” He also told him that he had met CB, and liked him.20 Haldane formed the impression that the King would cooperate in sidelining CB, but he was mistaken. Bertie’s aim in all of this was to reconcile the Relugas conspirators to the leadership of CB—to smooth the rift in the Liberal party. CB, for his part, knew that he had the King’s backing, and this made it possible for him to crush the Relugas rebels. He persuaded them to take office, and he refused to allow himself to be kicked upstairs to the House of Lords.
Bertie’s chief concern in the change of government was to ensure continuity in foreign policy and uphold the entente with France. In the autumn of 1905, Esher was dispatched to consult Lansdowne as to his successor as foreign secretary. Lansdowne suggested Lord Spencer (who suffered a stroke) and, after him, Edward Grey—though he lacked experience and Lansdowne thought “his reputation has been rather cheaply earned.”21 The forty-three-year-old Grey was one of the Relugas three. He was also the King’s godson; his father, General Grey, had been Bertie’s equerry.
Grey got the job. “I shall do all I can to stem the impetuosity of the new Government but it will not be easy,” Bertie told Georgie. “Fortunately in Sir E. Grey we have a sensible man who wishes as regards our foreign policy to walk in his predecessor’s footsteps.”22
A critical moment had been reached in Anglo-Russian relations. Because Russia was France’s ally, the survival and strength of the Entente Cordiale depended on good relations between England and Russia. According to Charles Hardinge, who served in St. Petersburg between 1897 and 1902 and spoke to Bertie often at this time: “King Edward saw clearly what few others realised, that friendship with Russia was essential for us both in the Near East and Central Asia, and that this could only be obtained through the channel and by the cooperation of France.”23
The friendship with Russia was strained to breaking point by the Russo-Japanese War of 1904. England agreed to stay out of the war, in spite of the fact that the Japanese had been their allies since 1902, but the Russians suspected them of lending secret support. When the Japanese confounded expectations and defeated the Russians, waves of Anglophobia swept through Russia. Urged on by Kaiser William, Czar Nicholas II blamed the English for Russia’s humiliation. In Britain, anti-Russian opinion was inflamed by the Dogger Bank incident of October 1904, when the Russian fleet accidentally shot at British fishing boats, which they mistakenly thought were Japanese submarines.
It was here that Bertie’s dynastic links had counted. Acting at the request of foreign secretary Lansdowne, he sought to reassure Nicholas II of England’s friendly intentions.24 “Nicky” was a small, conscientious man with velvety blue eyes who lived in isolation in a Fabergé-encrusted palace made unbearable by the neurosis of his wife, Alexandra. He was not an easy man to approach: “He will hardly ever see an ambassador.” Stead, the journalist, was granted an interview and found the czar “absolutely like a child in the simplicity of his views and in the little knowledge of what is going on in the country”—Russia was at that time in the grip of the 1905 revolution.25 Bertie had little respect for Nicky, whom he thought weak as water and unable to make up his mind to do anything.26 But as uncle to both Nicky, who was uncannily like Prince George in looks, and Alexandra, Bertie enjoyed unequaled access. His role was to drive a wedge between his nephews, Czar Nicky and Kaiser William.‡ The kaiser cultivated the czar in indiscreet letters badmouthing their wicked uncle. The czar, as the kaiser wrote, was “not treacherous but he is weak—weakness is not treachery but it fulfils all its functions.”27 Bertie’s man in St. Petersburg was Donald Mackenzie Wallace, a swarthy, cigar-smoking journalist, described by the kaiser as “very intelligent; a friend of King Edward’s; a Jew naturally.”28 Wallace had better access to the czar than the ambassador, and penned long, confidential reports to the King.
Bertie was fortunate in that both the Russian ambassador in London and the British ambassador in St. Petersburg were on his side. Both were, in a way, Bertie’s appointments. Count Benckendorff, who became Russian ambassador in London in 1902, was a passionate Anglophile. A rich, easygoing aristocrat, he entertained more lavishly at the Russian embassy than any of the ambassadors in London before 1914.29 He took pride in behaving as a “private gentleman”; flouting protocol about diplomatic tight lips, he freely expressed his own opinions.§ Soon Benckendorff was asked to shoot at Windsor and to stay at Balmoral. He was openly critical of Nicholas, whom he compared disparagingly to Bertie, and thought Russia’s only chance of salvation lay in an entente with Britain.
In London, Bertie leaned on Lansdowne to accept his nominations for key diplomatic posts.30 Bertie was instrumental in shoehorning his protégé Charles Hardinge into high office. As a reward for Hardinge’s work on the 1903 visit to France, Bertie pushed strongly for his appointment as ambassador to St. Petersburg in 1904. Lansdowne agreed, though not without reservations—Hardinge was not yet due for this senior promotion.31 Hardinge wrote from St. Petersburg to Knollys: “My appointment has been regarded as due entirely to the King’s initiative, and as a guarantee of peace and of more friendly relations between the two Governments.”32
In the autumn of 1905, Bertie helped secure yet another promotion for Hardinge, who leapfrogged to the very top job of head of the Foreign Office. Hardinge wrote thanking Knollys for the part he had played in engineering the move: “I would be grateful … if you would seize a suitable opportunity to tell the King how thankful I am for His Majesty’s gracious intervention on my behalf.” When Benckendorff expressed a fear that Hardinge’s recall implied a cooling of Britain’s attitude toward Russia, Hardinge reassured him. “I explained to him the object and motives of my appointment to the FO at a moment when a change of government is imminent and I pointed out the advantage to the Russian government of having somebody at the FO who is friendly disposed towards them.”33
Bertie wanted Hardinge in London because he needed someone to act as a handle on the incoming foreign secretary, the inexperienced Edward Grey. Hardinge benefited from the royal patronage, but he and his allies at the Foreign Office had an agenda of their own. With the help of the King’s support, they levered themselves into key positions, purging the old guard that had controlled the FO in Lord Salisbury’s day and creating a strongly anti-German climate.34
At the Foreign Office after 1906, Charles Hardinge dominated the inexperienced Edward Grey in a way that would have been unthinkable in the days of Salisbury or Lansdowne.35 With the King, he made himself indispensable; he was effectively the King’s minister. He corresponded frequently with Bertie and also with Knollys, short-circuiting Grey and giving the King detailed intelligence.
Hardinge insisted that all communication between the King and the Foreign Office should go through the “proper channels.” This was code for cutting out the King’s friend Esher, who was politically a Tory. When Esher on behalf of the King asked for information about the Baghdad Railway, Hardinge minuted Knollys: “We cannot possibly admit Esher’s interference in our Foreign Office affairs.” If the King wants information, “we look to receiving a request for it through the proper channel,” that is, Knollys himself. “Sir Edward Grey feels very strongly that Esher is not the proper channel between him and the King.”36 Hardinge accompanied the King on all his meetings with the kaiser or other monarchs, filling the place of the foreign secretary as minister in attendance. He used the royal connection to gain access to the kaiser that would otherwise have been impossible for an official. Bertie discussed foreign questions with Hardinge in a way that he did with no one except Knollys. He would talk to ministers or ambassadors without admitting their argument. As his assistant private secretary Arthur Davidson wrote, “The King never allowed himself to go beyond generalities in either writing or speaking.… His mind and his brain took in everything although his lips were silent.” The discussions came later with Knollys or Hardinge, but never with his informant. “That is why the King always scored, and therein his difference from the German Emperor who always answered, always discussed and always failed.” The King’s letters were “banal to a degree,” but this was intentional; the only people to whom he opened up on paper were Hardinge and Knollys.37
The January 1906 election gave the Liberals a landslide victory, reducing the Conservatives to a rump of 157. “What a terribly radical speech the King had to make at the opening of Parliament,” commented the Princess of Wales to her aunt Augusta. “How he must have hated it.”38 King Edward’s correspondence with his prime minister reveals his attempts to apply the brakes. Like Queen Victoria, the King demanded to be kept informed, but in this respect Campbell-Bannerman turned out to be little better than Balfour. His Cabinet reports, penned in crabbed and shaky black ink, were perfunctory, sometimes only half a sheet of notepaper. The King’s irritable comments, penciled on slips of paper, are bound beside them in the archive. “The information as usual is meagre.”39 CB’s jottings were meant to forestall intervention by the King by preventing him from knowing what was going on; it is sobering to reflect that these scrappy notes form the sole official record of the 1906 Liberal Cabinet.
No doubt the seventy-year-old prime minister was feeling his years. As Esher wrote, “The influence of age is upon him.… He cannot bring himself to write. It thoroughly bores him.”40 But Bertie suspected that he was being deliberately kept in the dark. He was especially annoyed by the radical speeches of Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. When Lloyd George blustered about the creation of a minister for Wales, the King expostulated: “I have heard nothing on the subject from the Prime Minister! This proceeding is most unconstitutional, and I cannot pass over it in silence.”41 CB apologized and, smooth as ever, explained: “I ought to have been more on the spot,” but his wife was seriously ill and he nursed her day and night.42 The King was not mollified. “It seems inconceivable that the P. M. has so little control over the members of his Cabinet,” he harrumphed. “The excuse he gives for Mr. L. G. is a very meagre one.”43
Even more of a thorn in the royal flesh was Winston Churchill. Bertie watched with displeasure when the bumptious, self-seeking Churchill defected from the Tories and joined the Liberals in search of promotion, and he was “disgusted” by Churchill’s “crude and vulgar” attacks on Balfour in 1905.44 He was disgusted, too, by his behavior in office after 1905. Churchill behaved like a rebellious son, anxious for the King’s approval and validation as well as his patronage, yet unable to resist pushing the boundaries and provoking a reaction. As colonial undersecretary, Churchill handled the granting of self-government to South Africa, and at the end of 1906 he wrote the King a thirty-five-page letter explaining his reasons for allowing the Boers the vote under the new constitution. Bertie’s reply ended with a sentence drafted by Ponsonby but amended in pencil by Bertie (his words are given in italics): “His Majesty is glad to see that you are becoming a reliable Minister and above all a serious politician which can only be attained by putting country above party.”45
That winter of 1905–6, the King visited Agnew’s Gallery on Bond Street, where he spent half an hour alone with Velázquez’s painting of a nude Venus. Agnew’s had bought the masterpiece from the cash-strapped owner of Rokeby Park in Teesside, and the newly founded National Art Collections Fund launched an appeal to buy it for the National Gallery. In early January 1906, the fund announced that they had failed to raise the £45,000 that Agnew’s asked for, and the press reported that the Velázquez was lost to the nation. A few weeks later came the surprise announcement that, thanks to an anonymous donor, the painting had been saved. In spite of demands for transparency, the committee of the fund refused to reveal the identity of the last-minute savior of the Rokeby Venus. Not until 1996 was the secret uncovered. A letter was found, pasted into the committee’s minute book, written on Buckingham Palace paper by the banker and collector Robert Benson, who was treasurer of the fund. It read as follows: “When you see Mr. Lockett Agnew at 11 a.m. about the Velasquez Venus with the Mirror you are at liberty to tell him that Major Holford mentioned the position to His Majesty who was much interested.”46 Holford was Benson’s brother-in-law, also a collector and an equerry. On behalf of the King, Benson undertook to subscribe £8,000 and guarantee a further £5,000 for twelve months, making the purchase possible. In May 1906, the King became patron of the fund.
Velázquez’s painting of the luscious back view of a fleshy nude lying on her side and holding a mirror excited a storm of controversy. Moralists attacked it as indecent; Lord Ronald Gower, art critic and homosexual, revolted perhaps by the female bottom, thundered against the folly of buying such a painting for a public gallery. Bertie, on the other hand, surely agreed with Lady Colin Campbell, who praised the “radiant warmth of the dimpled flesh.”47 Nowadays, perhaps, he preferred power to sex, but his secret gift of the Venus shows that he was indifferent neither to art nor to female beauty.
The Rokeby Venus had a life of its own. It became an icon of Edwardian sexuality, polarizing attitudes toward women. In May 1914, a suffragette named Mary Richardson slashed the canvas with a butcher’s cleaver. She claimed she was protesting against the government’s harsh treatment of the suffragette Mrs. Pankhurst, but as an old woman she admitted: “I didn’t like the way men visitors gawped at it all day long.”48
Bertie was vehemently opposed to women’s suffrage. He ticked off the prime minister, Campbell-Bannerman, for supporting the Women’s Franchise Bill in 1907, which he thought “undignified.”49 As for the suffragettes, their campaign was “outrageous and does their cause (for which I have no sympathy) much harm.”50 Yet this was the son of one of the most powerful women in British history, and the brother of an intellectual woman who was a key player in German politics. A man who despised his beautiful wife as bird-brained, respected his daughter-in-law Princess Mary for her intelligence, and relied heavily on the political advice of his shrewd mistress, Alice Keppel, could hardly be described as contemptuous of women’s ability or education. But he had no time for the New Woman and remained firmly attached to the Victorian idea of separate spheres. When Daisy Warwick made speeches, he wrote: “Why on earth do you want women to be like men and copy their pursuits? God put you into the world to be different from us but you don’t seem to see it!”51
In November 1905, Bertie fell down a rabbit hole while out shooting at Windsor and tore his Achilles tendon. Dr. Treves gave him an iron splint, and he hobbled painfully wearing this contraption. This did not stop him shooting. A specially constructed pony carriage conveyed him to his stand, where the pony was unharnessed, and the King shot sitting in the carriage.52 He managed to kill 120 pheasants at Hall Barn in this way.53 The royal physician Sir Felix Semon became concerned in February when an attack of bronchitis “threatened to involve the circulatory system,” and on Semon’s advice, the King traveled to Biarritz.54
The Hôtel du Palais at Biarritz was a brand-new French chateau poised on the very edge of the Atlantic coast. It was built on the site of the Empress Eugénie’s palace, which had burned down in 1903. From his ground-floor rooms the King found the continual roll of the Atlantic “not unpleasant”; he worked on his government boxes in the sea air, beneath a striped canopy erected on the terrace.55 Mrs. Keppel and her children stayed nearby as the guests of Ernest Cassel in the Villa Eugénie. Once the property of the Prince Imperial, the villa reminded Sonia Keppel of “a large, uninhabited conservatory, with carpetless floors and glass doors, and with its inmates potted about in it like plants.”56 Assorted duchesses gathered nearby, providing bridge and entertainment; among them was Consuelo, Duchess of Manchester, who had been newly restored to favor. Her son had gone down on bended knee in the street to beg Bertie’s forgiveness for his mother, who had been banished ever since Daisy Warwick had got rid of the Americans.57
Biarritz was perfectly positioned for Bertie’s dynastic diplomacy. Princess Beatrice’s daughter, Ena, had become engaged to King Alfonso of Spain, and Bertie did what he could to help place his niece on the Spanish throne. When Alfonso insisted that Ena should convert to Catholicism, Bertie ignored Protestant demands that he should withhold his consent, and appealed to the Lord Chancellor, Lord Loreburn, who ruled that the 1772 Royal Marriages Act, which required that marriages of descendants of George III receive the consent of the ruling monarch, did not apply to Princess Ena because she was a Battenberg.58 Stamper, who had driven the royal cars out from England, accompanied the King on a visit to Alfonso at San Sebastián. The King laughed at the soldiers guarding the route, who lolled casually in the sun, smoking cigarettes. His car was mobbed by a hysterical crowd; at one point twenty people clung to the back, and Bertie had to be rescued by Sergeant Quin of the Criminal Investigation Department, who drove his car within a few inches of the King’s.59 The incompetence of Spanish security was shockingly revealed at Ena’s wedding in Madrid in May, when a terrorist threw a bomb that missed the royal couple but killed people in the crowd, spattering the bride’s dress with blood.
Only a week after Ena’s wedding, Bertie’s daughter Maud was crowned Queen of Norway, marking yet another success for Bertie’s dynasty building. When the union of Norway and Sweden was peacefully dissolved in 1905, Bertie had pushed Maud’s husband, Prince Charles of Denmark, to grasp the Norwegian throne, though the British government was strictly neutral. The Danish claim was opposed by Kaiser William, who wanted a pro-German Norway. Charles was a reluctant candidate, and Bertie had to bully him. “The moment has now come for you to act or lose the Crown of Norway,” he wired. “I urge you to go at once to Norway, with or without the consent of the Danish government.”60 In November 1905, Prince Charles was elected King Haakon VII of Norway.
The kaiser, meanwhile, had held a secret meeting with the czar. In July, the two emperors arranged a yachting rendezvous at Björkö, in the Gulf of Finland. Giving their ministers the slip, Willy and Nicky were reunited like gleeful schoolboys. They grumbled about Uncle Bertie, who they agreed was the “arch-intriguer” and “mischief maker.” Willy complained about Bertie’s “absolute passion for making ‘a little agreement’ with every country, everywhere.” Nicky replied, banging the table: “Well, I can only say, he shall not get one from me, and never in my life against Germany—my word of honour on it.”61 Whereupon Willy produced a paper from his pocket, and invited Nicky to sign a treaty with Germany.
Dismissed by the foreign ministers of both Russia and Germany, the treaty was never ratified, and Björkö has been described by one historian as a “fantasy of autocratic effectiveness.”62 Whether or not Bertie knew about it, he made no attempt to conceal his irritation with William. The Foreign Office quaked. Foreign secretary Lansdowne blamed the King for a worsening of relations with the kaiser: “He talks and writes about his Royal Brother in terms which makes one’s flesh creep, and the official papers which go to him whenever they refer to H. I. M., come back with all sorts of accusations of a most incendiary character.”63
Charles Hardinge, however, considered that King Edward “thoroughly understood” the emperor. “He knew his weaknesses, his vanity and his duplicity. He realised the Kaiser’s jealousy of his own position and influence in Europe and the danger to be apprehended from the Kaiser’s megalomania.”64 Touchy and volatile, lurching from grandiose swagger to kitsch homeliness and mawkish sentimentality, from bullying aggression to hypersensitive paranoia, the kaiser baffled his contemporaries and remains an enigma today.65
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.”66 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.”67
At Biarritz in the spring of 1906, Bertie received “concise and most interesting” letters from Hardinge, updating him on the negotiations at Algeciras.68 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.69 King Edward, sitting beside the sea at Biarritz, going on motor picnics with Mrs. Keppel, had, in fact, done nothing at Algeciras.70
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.71 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.72 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.”73 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.74 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.75 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.76 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.”77
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.78 Kaiser and King embraced cordially on the platform.79 William greeted Fritz Ponsonby with heavy-handed chaff: “See you are getting grey like me. How old are you?”80 There was “a feeling of thunder in the air,” wrote Ponsonby.81 Bertie was careful to avoid controversial subjects, and “very wisely,” in Hardinge’s view, talked only in general terms “of our policy.”82
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.83 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.84 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.”85
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.86
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.87 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!”88 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.89
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.90 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.”91
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.92 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?”93 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.”94
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.95 When he reached Biarritz in March, he was still coughing. The Times printed two short paragraphs:
King Edward did not return to the Hotel du Palais for dinner yesterday evening, as had been arranged, but stayed at the Villa Bellefontaine and dined with Sir Ernest Cassel, only returning to the Hotel at 11 o’clock.
Bright sunny weather succeeded yesterday’s rain, and his Majesty walked along the shore, where he sat for a long time on one of the benches.… After another short turn in the motorcar, the King got back to the Hotel about 6 o’clock. He will dine in the town this evening, probably with Sir Ernest Cassel.96
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.97 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!”98 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.99
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.100
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.)