Paris, 6 March 1908, 10:30 a.m. Between breakfast with Sir Ernest Cassel and lunch with President Fallières, the King squeezed in a visit to the studio of the sculptor Auguste Rodin.1 He asked to see the bust that Rodin had made of Daisy Warwick, but the sculpture was away being cast at the foundry. Rodin wrote about the King to Lady Warwick afterward: “Il a pensé que j’étais devant de grandes difficultés car il a parlé de vos traits si fins, et a décrit votre charmante figure comme s’il corrigeait mon buste absent, et je sens que si je l’avais laissé en terre je l’aurais montré.”*2
Daisy had already given Rodin seven sittings. She was one of the four Englishwomen he agreed to sculpt, all with the wide-cheekboned, square-jawed “handsome” faces that were his ideal of female beauty, inspired by Michelangelo’s statues of young men. By 1908, Daisy was running short of money and she was unable to afford Rodin’s hefty fee of £1,000. Three years later, Rodin sent her the marble bust, but there is no record in his papers of any payment by her or anyone else. The story of Daisy’s portrait is still shrouded in mystery, but it has been suggested that the King’s visit to the studio was followed by a check that settled the fee.3
“What do you think of that charming Lady Warwick mounting a wagon at the corner of the street and addressing her ‘comrades,’ the scum of the labourers, and then taking off her glove to shake and feel their horny hands!” Alix had exclaimed at the time of the 1906 election.4 Daisy Warwick, now forty-six, overweight, and loudly socialist, was intent on “revenge.”5 The Daily Mail announced that she was about to produce her memoirs, and she approached Arthur Pearson, owner of the Daily Express, offering to sell Bertie’s letters for publication and threatening to go to the Hearst press in America if he refused.6 Her sister Blanche Gordon-Lennox acted as go-between. Blanche had a meeting with Knollys, and told him that Daisy was feeling sour and neglected, and the best way to buy her off was to stage a reconciliation. Bertie agreed to appear at dinner with a mutual friend, but it was not until the autumn or winter that a meeting took place.7 Eventually Daisy promised to abstain from public speaking. She also wrote a letter in which she declared that she had decided that writing her memoirs would be unwise, and in consequence all her papers had been destroyed.8 She put it about that it had taken her three hours to burn Bertie’s letters one evening.9
If Bertie was indeed the secret purchaser of the Rodin bust, this was perhaps his way of thanking Daisy. He remained loyal to her, and continued to see her until shortly before his death.10 Daisy had not, in fact, abandoned the idea of publishing, nor had she destroyed all the letters. As for the marble bust, this was sent by Rodin to Daisy’s home, Easton Lodge, in 1912. Less than a year later, it was sold secretly, in defiance of an injunction imposed by Daisy’s creditors that restrained her from selling any of the contents of her estate. It has never reappeared.11
At four thirty on the afternoon of 4 March 1908, the day before he left London for France, the King visited the prime minister at 10 Downing Street.12 He stayed for twenty minutes. Campbell-Bannerman had been critically ill with heart failure, and Bertie wished to say goodbye; he thought he might never see him again. A few days earlier, Bertie had spoken to the man marked out as CB’s successor, H. H. Asquith. Bertie considered CB a “great gentleman,” and liked him best of all the prime ministers of his reign. Asquith, by contrast, he thought “deplorably common not to say vulgar,” but he made no attempt to resist his succession.13 Bertie now told Asquith that if a change of prime minister became necessary, he must come out to Biarritz. Asquith found the King “very agreeable.” “He talked a little all over the place, smoking a cigar, about Roosevelt, Macedonia, Congo etc.”14
At Biarritz, the King occupied rooms on the ground floor of the Hôtel du Palais to save the strain of wheezing as he climbed the stairs to his usual first-floor suite. The drains smelled so bad that he threatened never to return.15 As usual, Alice Keppel was installed with her children in Ernest Cassel’s Villa Eugénie. While the Keppel children’s nanny fussed about ironing and goffering Violet and Sonia’s frilly knickers, the gentleman Sonia called “Kingy” took long drives with Mama in the afternoons. Stamper, who always sat in the front seat, described these drives but, being a loyal member of the household, never mentioned Mrs. Keppel by name.16 The King growled at the news from London, watching angrily as Asquith planned his Cabinet changes while CB was still in Downing Street and fighting for his life. “It reminds one of a dying animal with the vultures hovering about him,” he wrote. The suggestion that he should return to London infuriated him. “I do not see the necessity of going over to England … merely to hold a council and receive and give seals of office.”17
On 2 April, CB dictated a letter to the King asking permission to resign. The King telegraphed the next day that he had no choice but to accept.†18 On 5 April, he wrote to Asquith inviting him to form a government.
Asquith arrived in Biarritz in vile, lashing rain on the night of 7 April. At ten a.m. the next morning, dressed in his frock coat, he went to see the King, who was also wearing a frock coat, and kissed hands.19 Elated by his promotion, Asquith himself made no complaint at having to go all the way to Biarritz, but in London, The Times roundly criticized the King for not returning to his country at such a moment.20 Most observers agreed.
Summoning Asquith to Biarritz was widely seen as the King’s first constitutional blunder in the seven years of his reign.21 True, the King (influenced, it seems, by Mrs. Keppel)22 returned home in time to hold the Privy Council on 16 April, but by then the damage was done. The episode demonstrated, as Carrington wrote, that “the presence of the King in this country is not a necessity”; but perhaps this was no bad thing. In the same way, Bertie had ostentatiously distanced himself from Campbell-Bannerman’s Cabinet-making back in 1905, when he stayed at Crichel during the crisis. By remaining at Biarritz in 1908, he demonstrated that the paranoid views of the German press about his omnipotence were wildly exaggerated. “It would be a serious danger,” wrote Carrington, “if the King were supposed to be a more important and influential political person than he is. This is all the more necessary as there is a genuine belief abroad that Esher, Fisher, Cassel and others are attempting to form a sort of backstairs influence on HM. If this feeling grows it may be dangerous—the Emperor of Germany’s ‘camarilla’ has done a great deal of harm already everywhere.”23
Carrington’s fears of a backstairs clique were not without foundation. Esher wrote frequently to Knollys (“My dear Francis”) confiding “everything that comes into my head,” while Fisher’s letters to Esher were addressed “My beloved E.”24 The three men formed a habit of dining together. Esher and Knollys resented Ponsonby’s closeness to the King. “Poor dear Fritz,” Esher wrote patronizingly, “is inclined to a certain pomposity.… His most serious fault is an uncertainty of judgement.”25 According to Arthur Bigge, the King’s household “are all at sixes and sevens, and all frantically jealous of each other.”26
Esher’s influence was waning. He had already been cut out of the Foreign Office loop by Charles Hardinge, and as a Tory he was suspected by the Liberal government. In February 1908, a letter written by Esher appeared in The Times defending Fisher’s record on naval reform: “There is not a man in Germany, from the Emperor downwards, who would not welcome the fall of Sir John Fisher.”27 This sentence was picked up by the kaiser, who took the extraordinary step of writing to Lord Tweedmouth, First Lord of the Admiralty, denying Germany’s intention of starting a naval race and dismissing Esher’s claims to authority: “I am at a loss to tell whether the supervision of the foundations and drains of the Royal Palaces is apt to qualify somebody for the judgement of Naval Affairs.”28
It was a shrewd hit. Bertie replied, standing on his dignity, that “Your writing to my [author italics] First Lord of the Admiralty is a ‘new departure.’ ”29 But the spat did not end here. Tweedmouth, who unfortunately turned out to be suffering from a brain tumor that affected his sanity, leaked the kaiser’s letter, and an article appeared in The Times attacking the kaiser for seeking to influence Admiralty policy.
Bertie was furious. He wrote Esher a formal reprimand, and blasted him to Fisher.30 Esher, who was supported throughout by Fisher and Knollys, breezily predicted that the affair would soon blow over, and within days he was kissing the King’s hand. But, in fact, his standing at court was seriously compromised. Bertie no longer trusted him to be discreet.‡ On his return from Biarritz, the King summoned Fisher and told him off for talking too freely in society and boasting that “the King would see me through anything! that it was bad for me and bad for him as being a Constitutional Monarch.” Then the King “smoked a cigar as big as a capstan bar for really a good hour afterwards, talking of everything from China to Peru, not excluding the Times article on himself.”31
On 5 June 1908, the King traveled to Epsom races for the Oaks, dined with the Waleses and the Fifes, and then caught a ten o’clock train to Port Victoria, where he boarded the royal yacht Victoria and Albert.32 The crossing of the North Sea was so rough that he was ill, and the Queen, who was rarely seasick, was thrown off her chair into a corner of the cabin and then lay flat on the deck “like a corpse,” vomiting continually.33 On 9 June, the royal yacht reached Reval (now Tallinn) on the Baltic and anchored there, close to the czar’s yacht Standart.
This yachting meeting with Czar Nicholas was the culmination of much patient diplomacy. Giving affirmation to the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 with a meeting of King and czar was fraught with difficulties.34 Meeting at sea in the policed, neutral space of royal yachts solved the security issue—though the British were amazed by the paranoia of the Russians. No one was allowed on shore, and the police even threatened to strip-search the women members of a local choir who serenaded the royal party.35 Public opinion at home was also a problem. Keir Hardie, the first Labour MP and a veteran republican, attacked the meeting as “condoning the atrocities” perpetrated by the czar.
At Reval at eleven a.m. on 9 June, the King summoned Sir Arthur Nicolson, the ambassador in St. Petersburg, to his cabin on the Victoria and Albert. Bertie was sitting in a chintz-covered chair wearing the uniform of the Kiev Dragoons. It was uncomfortably tight. He fired questions at Nicolson: “whether the Emperor would wear the uniform of the Scots Greys or whether he would appear as a Russian admiral: what decorations he would wear and in what order: what about the Russian railways? Whether M Stolypin [prime minister] spoke French or German, or even English: what exactly were the present relations between the Government and the Duma; was the Duma a thing one should mention? Or not?” And so on.
At eleven thirty, Czar Nicholas II and his family came on board the Victoria and Albert. It was contrary to protocol that the czar should pay the first visit, and it signified the nephew’s respect for the uncle.
King Edward VII spoke with Peter Stolypin and Alexander Izvolsky, the foreign minister. He discussed the marvelous progress of the Russian railways and the gratifying collaboration with the Duma, and remarked on how well the czar looked in the uniform of the Scots Greys. Afterward Stolypin told Nicolson how amazed he was by the King’s grasp of Russian policy. As Harold Nicolson wrote, the King was a “supreme diplomatist.” Unlike the kaiser, who patronized and bullied the czar, Bertie made him feel a “highly successful nephew,” the more so because he avoided all awkward political questions.36 He made no attempt to meddle in Russia’s affairs, and Nicky seemed for once at ease.
The next night, the Russians dined on board the Victoria and Albert. Bertie’s suite had feared that the notoriously difficult Czarina Alexandra might refuse to attend the dinner if she was forced by protocol to take second place behind her mother-in-law, Minnie, who accompanied the Russian party and, as dowager empress, enjoyed precedence. Bertie solved the protocol issue and prevented a scene by taking Minnie and Alexandra each on one arm. “Tonight I am going to enjoy the unique honour of taking two Empresses in to dinner.”37 He told Alexandra that her daughters spoke English with a Scots accent. She fired their tutor at once.38 To flatter the czar, Bertie made him an Admiral of the Fleet. This honor gave Nicky childlike pleasure. After dinner, Jackie Fisher danced the fashionable Merry Widow waltz with Nicky’s sister, the Grand Duchess Olga, both with their hands folded behind their heads, and watched in a circle by the monarchs and their ministers.§39
Politicians in London carped that the King erred in raising the question of the Jews in his talks with Stolypin, but in retrospect, Bertie’s willingness to respond to concerns about the czarist pogroms shows a moral courage decidedly lacking among his ministers. More doubtful was his mention to Nicky of Cassel’s desire to participate in a new Russian loan. When Kaiser William got to hear of this, he hastened to describe his uncle as “a jobber in stocks in shares,” who counted on making a “colossal” personal profit out of the Russian loan.40 Reval infuriated William, who minuted his ambassador’s report: “[King Edward] aims at war. I am to begin it, so that he does not get the odium.”41 At home, Esher and Balfour grumbled that the King had taken with him Charles Hardinge rather than foreign secretary Edward Grey. But no one could deny that Reval had achieved its diplomatic aim of strengthening the ties between Russia and Britain.42
Asquith complained that the King had acted unconstitutionally in making the czar an honorary admiral without consulting his government beforehand. Bertie instructed Knollys to write a letter of apology, explaining that the King was “totally unaware of the constitutional point,” and “regretted that he had, without knowing it, acted irregularly.” Mindful that the gesture had consolidated the success of the visit, Bertie added a dig: “The King deplores the attitude taken up by Mr. Asquith on the Women’s Suffrage Bill.”43
Bertie seems to have misunderstood the prime minister’s attitude toward women’s suffrage. Like the king, Asquith was implacably opposed to giving women the vote.
Back in England, Bertie refused to bow to criticism. The names of the MPs who spoke out against his visit to Reval—Victor Grayson, Keir Hardie, and Arthur Ponsonby—were removed from the list of guests at the royal garden party that he held at Windsor on 20 June 1908. Arthur Ponsonby, son of Henry and brother of Fritz, should have known better than to vote against the King’s visit, but his exclusion from Windsor provoked a row. Liberal whip Alexander Murray, the Master of Elibank, warned that the story might leak into the press “and he will be held up as a martyr to principle, for these Fleet Street scribblers will gloat over his exclusion.” He feared that “an incorrect impression might thus be given of His Majesty’s character and disposition.”44 Murray managed to stop the Daily News from reporting the incident and prevent an agitation “for socialistic and sensational gutter press purposes.”45 Arthur Ponsonby apologized and the King accepted his explanation.46 The garden party affair was a storm in a royal teacup, but Bertie’s uncharacteristic irritability had needlessly inflamed his critics.47 The incident showed how powerful and intrusive the press had become. As Lord Northcliffe, the owner of the Daily Mail, explained, “The King has become such an immense personality in England that … the space devoted to the movements of royalty has quintupled since His Majesty came to the Throne, and our difficulties have increased in proportion.”‖48
King Edward, meanwhile, played a King Canute–like grumpy old man against the modern world. His efforts to ban from Hyde Park women who had abandoned the side saddle were unsuccessful, but he “let it be known that ladies who ride astride in the Park will not be allowed to go to Court.”49 To the Lord Chamberlain’s request that smoking should be permitted in theaters, the chain-smoking King replied that “he cannot consent to its adoption in London,” as no other country allowed it.50 When Guards officer Colonel Gathorne-Hardy attended a levee wearing the wrong stripes on his trousers, he was mortified to receive a royal reprimand. “I will at once replace the gold stripes on my trousers with red ones,” he hastened to reply.51 Dinner guests at Windsor were expected to wear evening dress with knee breeches. Those who opted for more informality risked being greeted by the King: “I see you have come in the suite of the American Ambassador.”52 Not even the Queen was exempt. When she appeared wearing the Garter star on the wrong side, explaining that it had clashed with her other jewels, Bertie ordered her back.53 The Duke of Marlborough (Sunny), who separated from his wife, Consuelo, in 1906, received a message (through his kinsman Lord Churchill) that “until the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough live together again under the same roof, and are asked out together, neither of them can be invited to ‘Court.’ ”54 Like Randolph Churchill before him, Sunny Marlborough was banished by Bertie for defying the rules.
Margot Asquith had been one of Bertie’s “young ladies” twenty years earlier (as Margot Tennant), and now, as the wife of the prime minister, she watched the King with fascination. She considered that his bark was worse than his bite, which was far less lethal than the Queen’s:
If I had to choose between the King and the Queen I should be more afraid ultimately of the Queen. She is the most unsnobby, refined, fascinating lovely creature in the whole world and gives one a thrill from her distinction and sweetness, but au fond she is stupid, childish, obstinate and incapable of making up her mind. She has never grown up and enjoys the most ridiculous trifles. She takes great likes and dislikes and I should think would be unpleasantly unforgiving. The King is much kinder—a better sort altogether—but he is common and vulgar compared to the Queen.55
To his old mistresses Bertie was unfailingly generous. Emma Bourke appealed to him when the 1907 City panic caused financial ruin to her husband’s firm. “Mon Roi,” she wrote, “my husband’s capital has all been swept away and here we are, he at 72 and a very sick man left without anything.” Would you, she implored, “for the sake of a friend in great distress, use all your influence with Sir Ernest Cassel to help us all he can?”56 Bertie forwarded Emma’s letter to Cassel: “It would be more than kind of you if you could be induced to give them a helping hand.”57 Two months later, Eddie Bourke was dead. Within a year, Emma Bourke had become engaged to her old flame Lord Clarendon, and Bertie wrote: “I am sure you have acted wisely in marrying the man who has been devoted to you for so many years.”58 He was loyal, too, to her sister Mabel Batten, with whom he had dallied forty years before in India; she dedicated a song to him in 1902, and he still wrote occasionally to “Ladye”—though he might have been less than overjoyed to learn that in 1908 she became the lover of Radclyffe Hall.59
With Skittles, now sixty-nine and in poor health, the King was helpful, too. When the Duke of Devonshire died in 1908, Skittles’s payments stopped, and she wrote to the King, who sent Knollys to see her. She showed him her correspondence with the duke, who had once proposed to her. Fortunately, the duke’s letter “contained a distinct promise that the allowance should be continued as long as she lived and when the matter was explained to the present Duke by Knollys no difficulty was made about it.”60 Skittles continued to live cozily on South Street in Mayfair; she claimed that the blue satin decoration of her bedroom was a gift of the King, and she was supplied with regular presents of game from Sandringham.61
Nothing was allowed to interrupt the sacred routine of the King’s social and sporting calendar. In August 1908, after racing at Goodwood and yachting at Cowes, came the cure at Marienbad, with a visit en route to Kaiser William at Friedrichshof, near Cronberg, Vicky’s old home.
The meeting with the kaiser was carefully prepared. Edward Grey drafted two memoranda, warning that if Germany continued her shipbuilding program, Britain was bound to keep pace, whereas a slowdown would be met by a friendly response.62 Bertie was annoyed by Grey’s presumption in telling him what to say—“This is I believe the first occasion on which the Sovereign has received instruction from his government”—but he absorbed the message.63 As he minuted: “If Germany ceases her extensive shipbuilding—we shall do the same and not otherwise. It is the only chance of a real peaceful solution of the present feeling existing between England and Germany.”64
As usual, Grey did not accompany the King, who brought with him Hardinge. Grey abandoned the attempt to dictate the agenda, conceding that “this is a personal matter between the King and the Emperor in which the King’s own knowledge and judgement of the Emperor’s disposition is much superior to any of us.”65 On the journey, the King discussed with Hardinge what to do with Grey’s memoranda, but nothing was decided. When he came face-to-face with the kaiser, on the morning of 11 August, the King found him in “very good humour,” but though “we talked freely on international politics, the subject of our respective navies was not broached.”66 According to Hardinge, “the Emperor showed such reluctance to discuss naval matters that the King refrained from pushing the question.”67 He mentioned Grey’s memorandum, but as William showed no desire to see it, he said no more.68 Bertie had judged William’s mood correctly.
After luncheon, as the kaiser smoked his cigar, Hardinge confronted him on the naval issue, and he became extremely angry. “I regret to say,” wrote Bertie, “that he utterly declined to modify his ship building programme in any way! We must now build more than ever, and as quickly as ever. We have no other alternative.”69
Cronberg brought European war a notch closer. It caused a hardening of anti-German feeling in London. “We now know the worst and should be prepared for it,” wrote Hardinge; “our only course now open is a big programme.”70 Bertie’s royal diplomacy had failed to bring Germany and England together. But no one had seriously expected that William would agree to call off the navy race; the most that could be hoped for was to keep open communications.
After the stress of Cronberg, Bertie’s meeting the next day in the Alpine town of Bad Ischl with Emperor Francis Joseph of Austria came as a relief. Hardinge thought the seventy-eight-year-old emperor “the dearest and most courteous gentlemen that lives,” and Bertie had a genuine affection for the old man.71 He had visited Francis Joseph the year before in his (relatively) humble wooden shooting box, its walls bristling with the heads of dead animals, and as before, this was an informal occasion.72 Bertie persuaded Francis Joseph to ride for the first time in a motor car, and on a two-hour drive they discussed the European situation. Hardinge, meanwhile, held “quite a satisfactory” conversation with the foreign minister, Count Aehrenthal.73
Such was the fame of King Edward that his visits to the Austrian emperor excited wild speculation. In Hungary, aristocrats pondered whether the King was pursuing a secret political agenda. At shooting parties in their castles, they conjectured that the great peacemaker was intent on detaching Austria from its Dual Alliance with Germany.74 They were wrong. There was no political substance to the visit. But Bertie was duped. Not one hint was given that Aehrenthal at that very moment was planning the coup that was ultimately to trigger the outbreak of war in 1914: the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
At Balmoral that October, the royal routine was shattered by the arrival of Count Albert von Mensdorff, the Austrian ambassador, bearing a letter from Francis Joseph. It contained news of the proposed coup against Bosnia.75
Bertie received Mensdorff at six thirty on 5 October 1908.76 Mensdorff was his second cousin, a Saxe-Coburg relation and a member of the King’s set who was given privileged rank at court.77 But not on this occasion. With a few curt words, Bertie dismissed him. “Never did I see [the King] so moved,” wrote Lord Redesdale. “No one who was there can forget how terribly he was upset.”78 Bertie complained bitterly about the breach of faith at Ischl. Mensdorff tried to persuade him that no decision had been made at the time of the meeting there, but he was unconvinced. Bertie refused to believe ill of Francis Joseph—in spite of mounting evidence that the devious old emperor had known all about it—and instead blamed the even more treacherous Aehrenthal.79 But the annexation of Bosnia was a turning point. It proved that the elaborate system of royal visits was no more than a façade behind which the powers continued to pursue their real agendas.
European war was now a real danger, and the King made every effort to prevent it. He returned to London from Balmoral on 10 October, and the next day saw Hardinge for breakfast, followed by Grey, then Izvolsky, the Russian foreign minister, and finally Asquith.80 The King supported the Cabinet in demanding an international conference, and in his talks with Izvolsky, he backed Russia’s demands for the opening of the Dardanelles to Russian warships in exchange for an agreement not to intervene against Austria.
Grave though the crisis was, there was no suggestion that it should be allowed to interfere with the King’s social program. On 19 October, he left London for a week’s visit to Mrs. Willie James at West Dean, near Goodwood House.
The Times reports suggested that this was a purely social house party. Guests included Consuelo Manchester, Lady Sarah Wilson,a and, of course, Mrs. George Keppel, and the King spent three days shooting rabbits and partridges.81 In fact, Bertie was working, closeted in his room most of the time, dealing with the Bosnian crisis. Hardinge, who had also been invited, felt obliged to cancel, as he explained to the King: “I am sure Your Majesty will understand that, since Sir E. Grey will be away, it will be impossible for me to absent myself from London while this crisis is still going on.”82 From London, Hardinge fired off bulletins to West Dean. Would it be a good idea for the King to write a letter to Czar Nicholas, asking him to keep Izvolsky in office—though “Your Majesty is better able than I am to express an opinion on this point.”83 The King wanted Izvolsky to stay, in spite of his deceit over Bosnia, on the grounds that he might be succeeded by someone worse.84 He wrote to Nicky, and Izvolsky was retained, holding office until Bertie’s death.85 Would the King use his influence with Sir Ernest Cassel, asked Hardinge—“I see from the papers that he will be one of the guests for the weekend at West Dean.” In order to demonstrate England’s support for Turkey, the Cabinet wanted a bank to make a loan of £500,000: “We hope very much that Your Majesty may be able to encourage Sir E. Cassel to consider favourably this proposal.”86
The King’s hostess at West Dean, Evie James, was a socialite. She reminded the architect Edwin Lutyens of a “roundabout barmaid”: She was very nearsighted with thick pince-nez, “nose tipped and very tilted, lovely hands, gay, thoughtless, extravagant.”87 A talented comic actress—her performance as a little girl in short petticoats at the Chatsworth theatricals had the King in stitches—she was rumored to be a royal mistress.b88
On the last day, the King paid his regular visit to the King Edward VII Sanatorium for Consumption at Midhurst, which had been founded with a £2 million donation from Sir Ernest Cassel. When the King’s car began the long descent on the return journey, Stamper realized to his horror that all the brakes had failed. As the heavy vehicle gathered speed, the King remained quite unaware that anything was wrong, but for Stamper, sitting helpless in the front seat beside the driver, it was a terrible moment. He nerved himself to leap out of the car and grab the brake wire, but eventually he and the driver managed to swing the car off the road. Afterward, Stamper worked all through the night to clean the oil that had leaked into the brakes, and by the morning the car was safe.89
The King never knew how close he had been to a fatal accident that afternoon. He was far more concerned with the race to stop European war. But the stress of trying to keep the peace of Europe almost single-handed was quietly killing him.
Two days after the King returned from West Dean, on 28 October 1908, Hardinge wrote enclosing a “pernicious production” from The Daily Telegraph: an interview with the German emperor.90 “You English are mad, mad, mad as March hares,” declared the kaiser, complaining with his characteristic blend of bombast, stilted slang, and paranoia that his good and peaceful intentions toward England had been willfully misunderstood. The article was based on the conversations William had held when he stayed with Colonel Stuart-Wortley at Highcliffe near Christchurch in Dorset in the autumn of 1907 (after his visit to Windsor), and as Hardinge reported to the King, “we have received absolutely reliable information from the office of the Daily Telegraph” that the interview “emanates from the German Emperor himself and that the Editor has a letter from His Majesty forwarding the article and mentioning improvements and alterations which he had made.”91 The article did indeed originate with William, and it represented a crass attempt to improve Anglo-German relations by removing misunderstandings.
In Germany, William found himself engulfed in a political crisis that almost destroyed his credibility. His indiscreet remarks and manifest lack of judgment caused howls of outrage and stoked anti-English hatred. Betrayed by his chancellor, Bülow, who lied about his own role in approving the draft of The Daily Telegraph interview, William was savaged in the Reichstag. By mid-November he was ill, suffering from crying fits, confined to bed, and contemplating abdication. When Alix wrote to inquire about his “cold,” he replied, “I am not suffering from cold but from complete collapse.”92
If Bertie was amazed by William’s foolishness and surprised that the owner of the Telegraph, his friend Lord Burnham, who regularly entertained him shooting at Hall Barn, had agreed to publish the interview, he was horrified by a second interview by the kaiser that surfaced in November. It transpired that William had spoken in July to an American journalist named William Hale. Mistaking Hale for a clergyman, the kaiser gave vent to a tirade of anti-English hatred; he announced that King Edward was corrupt and his court was rotten and declared that war with England was inevitable and the sooner the better. The German government suppressed publication of the article in the American Century Magazine, but they were too late to stop it appearing in The New York World. The World issued a denial, but proofs of the ten-thousand-word article had already reached the Daily Mirror in London, and The Observer published a summary of the story.93 At the Foreign Office, Hardinge did all he could to suppress the article. “Were it to appear the indignation against the Emperor would be general everywhere. We have no desire to see him so exasperated and a danger to Europe.”94
Hardinge sent the King early intelligence of the Hale interview. Bertie minuted it with one word: “Curious.”95 He was unconvinced by the denials printed in The New York World, or by Count Metternich, the German ambassador, who assured him that the interview was a fabrication. “I know the German Emperor hates me and never loses an opportunity of saying so (behind my back) while I have always been kind and nice to him.”96 Hardinge urged that the Hale interview made a visit by the King to Berlin imperative. “It is the only possible step that I can see by which it might be possible to rehabilitate [William’s] self-esteem and to show that we have not taken his indiscretions too seriously. So long as the German Emperor is in a sore state of mind, as at present, he is a positive danger to the peace of Europe.”97 Reluctantly, the King agreed. Not only did he consent to visit Berlin in the New Year, he personally intervened to stop publication of the Hale interview in The Morning Post and also the National Review, which was edited by the violently anti-German Leo Maxse. “Maxse must really be spoken to most seriously,” minuted the King.98
The King and Queen of Sweden stayed at Windsor in November. Esher thought the Queen “a very unbrilliant person, fond of sport and lawn-tennis”; she was under the influence of her doctor, Axel Munthe, “a clever pushing rather pretentious man,” who ordered her to retire to bed at five p.m. and remain there until noon next day.99 The Asquiths stayed at Windsor for the state banquet (22 November), and Margot found that King Edward and Queen Alexandra could talk of little but the kaiser’s folly. The King told her: “It is very serious—he is most unwise and unbalanced and this ought to be a severe lesson to him. My poor sister it would have been a great grief to her in fact it would have killed her I think. He was always so unkind to her too.” The Queen agreed. “I am glad his poor mother is dead. It would have broken her heart,” she told Margot. “Such a man! Such things! The newspapers shocking!” Alix imitated the kaiser out shooting (he was an excellent shot, in spite of the withered arm), “ ‘throwing his guns to his loaders for them to catch on their knees poor things! Like that!’ and she made a most amusing series of gestures.”100 Margot rocked with laughter, and so did Lady Lansdowne and the Queen of Sweden.
Also staying at Windsor was Lord Howard de Walden, super-rich medievalist and Olympic fencer. The castle made him “feel medieval”; the gorgeous pictures and arms made his mouth water, but he was grieved by the portraits of ancestors with “lined faces and mouths like vices which look down from the walls.” A self-styled “philosophic anarchist,” he found court life hard to take seriously. “I feel it is a sort of sad last transformation scene: in a moment the curtain will come down and the harlequinade of pure democracy will begin.”101
Chief among the obstacles to pure democracy was the King himself, but he was a sick man. On the day the Swedes departed, he insisted on standing in the cold and wet, inspecting improvements in the park at Windsor; it was his practice personally to supervise all estate works. He then caught a train to Sandringham, where he fell ill with bronchitis.102 After ten days in bed, he departed for Brighton to convalesce. Here he stayed with Arthur Sassoon and his Italian wife, Louise—a brilliant hostess blessed with “magnolia complexion and chestnut curls, magnificent diamonds and French chef.”103 Their house, number 8, King’s Gardens, is a tall brick villa in the French style on the seafront at Hove.c The house was not big enough to accommodate the King’s suite, who grumbled at having to stay in a hotel nearby.104 The King tried to curb rumors about his health, refusing to hold a Privy Council for the prorogation of Parliament at Brighton, as it would have given the impression that he was too unwell to travel to London. Almeric Fitzroy heard a rumor that originated with the Duke of Fife that in addition to bronchitis, the King was suffering from “an acute pain in the region of the heart.”105 On the first days of the visit, Bertie spoke very little and, during his drives with Stamper, dozed in the car. Soon he was better, “talking all the time, as was his wont, to those who were with him,” among them Alice Keppel.106 Stamper drove him along the coast to Seaford or Worthing, where he was mobbed by jostling crowds, when all he wanted was to stroll slowly along the shore and sit gazing out to sea.
He recovered in time for Christmas at Sandringham, where he was a distant but thrillingly important figure to his grandchildren. The grandson who Stamper thought resembled the King most in character was the eldest, Prince Edward, known to the family as David.d107
Soon the King’s great crocodile-skin dressing case was packed with his papers, his leather-bound foolscap diary, his jewelry, a miniature of Alix, and photographs of his family, and loaded into the backseat of the Daimler, as he embarked on his January round of shooting parties. He was slower to swing after birds than before, and he smoked cigars all the time, one after another.108 At Hall Barn with Lord Burnham of the Telegraph, the King “ate the usual enormous lunch in the usual tent,” feasting on turtle soup, Irish stew, cold truffled turkey, mince pie, and pâté de foie gras. He told Carrington “he had been very unwell and it had taken him a long time to throw the effects off.”109 Little wonder, when the most effective measure to alleviate chronic bronchitis and slow the progression of emphysema is to stop smoking.
In spite of the King’s poor health, arrangements went ahead for the royal visit to Berlin. This was a diplomatic necessity, as Grey explained: “If the visit had not taken place, it would have been a cause of offence and made all politics most difficult. For this reason I am glad it is arranged, but otherwise I do not expect much good from it. To please the Emperor does not carry so much weight in Germany as it did.”110 As before, the King was accompanied by Charles Hardinge, who did the diplomatic work.
For the German-hating Alix, who was recovering from an attack of influenza and neuralgia, the visit was a penance. She told Margot Asquith afterward, “I never wanted to go to Berlin. I was made to go—and it has been a complete failure!”111 Outwardly, the visit seemed a success. Bertie melted the unfriendly Berlin crowd when he made an impromptu speech in German at the Rathaus, giving thanks to the little girl who presented him with a golden goblet of Rhine wine. Alix smiled serenely when the horses in her carriage took fright at the crowd and fell and, to the mortification of the German court, she and the Empress Dona had to make a hasty exit into another carriage.112 “Oh! I was charming … of course,” she told Margot; but she “hated” the emperor all the time. She sat next to him at every meal, and noticed that he ate nothing. “You must eat more!” she told him. “I will give you some of my excellent lozenges. Sir Francis Laking gave them to me—they will strengthen your brain!” When Margot interjected, “You didn’t really say that?” the Queen replied, “Of course I did, he wants a little chaff. He just grunted and said, You find me stupid? I said, Certainly I do—making all this commotion about nothing and kidooodle [sic] about your navy.” Then Alix “waved her arms round her head and roared with laughter continuing, ‘The stupid man I believe showed my lozenges to his doctor he thought I was going to poison him and I should like to have!’ ”113
Bertie was far from well. Climbing upstairs left him breathless, and at the first family dinner, he fell asleep. After lunch the next day at the British Embassy, he had a coughing fit while smoking a cigar and talking to Daisy of Pless. Horrified, she watched as he fell against the back of the sofa, “his cigar dropped out of his fingers, his eyes stared, and he became pale and could not breathe. I thought: ‘My God, he is dying; oh! Why not in his own country.’ ”114 Daisy tried to undo the tight collar of his Prussian uniform, Alix rushed up and they both struggled with it, at last Bertie came to and unfastened it himself. He instantly lit another huge cigar.115
Later, the kaiser summoned Bertie’s doctor, Sir James Reid, who acted as secret go-between with the English court (had Bertie known of Reid’s role as William’s spy, he would surely not have approved). He gave Reid a private cipher to use in case the King became seriously ill:
I Radium most interesting in its effect (HM seriously ill)
II Radium cures can be reconed [sic] with (Please come at once).
III Institute of Radium cures great success (HM rapidly sinking).116
As this bizarre instruction shows, having managed to make a star appearance at Queen Victoria’s deathbed, the kaiser was now determined to be in at the death of his uncle, which he evidently thought was imminent.
At the ball that night, the King sat quietly observing the dancers and did not walk about. Very likely he was bored; as Alix remarked, the balls were “awful”: “All the ugly German women dancing so stiff, the ugly minuets.” She asked William, “ ‘When have you time at your balls for flirtations?’ And he just grunted and showed me the only pretty woman.”117 Bertie took no interest in distributing decorations among the German court; Ponsonby, who had to sit up until two a.m. allotting medals, thought this a sign that the King was seriously ill. During the ballet Sardanapalus, which the kaiser produced himself, Bertie fell asleep. He woke with a start in the last scene, when the monarch burns all his treasures, thinking that the opera house really was on fire. Bertie was too unwell to work the crowd during the interval, and Alix did it instead, charming everyone though she was unable to hear a word they said.118
The Berlin visit did little good. It failed to slow the German navy race. The fact that the visit took place at all, and that the two rulers were civil to each other, was perhaps important, but their hatred soon reasserted itself. The Bosnian crisis, which had rumbled on since the autumn, was resolved in Austria’s favor in March 1909, humiliating Russia at a time of military weakness and leaving Serbia hungry for a war of revenge. For this unstable and unfair settlement Bertie blamed Germany, whose backing gave Austria the confidence to threaten a war against Serbia. As he told Hardinge, “Ever since my visit to Berlin the German Government have done nothing but thwart and annoy us in every way.… We may safely look upon Germany as our bitterest foe, as she hardly attempts to conceal it.”119
People noticed that the King, by nature cheerful and ebullient, was increasingly prone to depression, sitting brooding in silence. After eight years of striving for peace, the world could hardly be said to be a safer place. Closing the ring around Germany only made William more paranoid. Even if he could be contained in the west, eastern Europe was increasingly unstable. The Balkan crisis had proved that Francis Joseph, seemingly the greatest gentleman of all, could not be trusted. Britain’s reaction was to draw closer to Russia, but Bertie knew only too well that the weak Nicky was hardly a reliable ally. Bertie’s superb contacts had enabled him to lead and support the process of bringing Britain into closer relations with the continental powers, but tightening the links seemed only to ratchet up the pressure for war.
* “He thought I was facing the greatest difficulties because he talked of your wonderful features, and described your charming face as if he was correcting the bust that wasn’t there, and I feel that had I the clay model, I would have shown it to him.”
† Bertie considered offering CB a peerage, but decided against; not only was CB likely to refuse, but Bertie judged the measures he had introduced not “worthy of my reward.” (RA VIC/Add C07/2/G, B to Francis Knollys, 3 April 1908.)
‡ After the King died, Alice Keppel told Rosebery that “for the last two years the King did not confide in Knollys for he was afraid that everything he told Knollys went straight to Esher, who was a good man in his way but not the repository of confidences.” (McKinstry, Rosebery, p. 496.)
§ The bumptious Fisher, who enjoyed showing off his dancing, once pushed his luck by asking Queen Alexandra to dance: “She put him in his place, and said, ‘Certainly not.’ ” (Bodleian Library, Lincolnshire Papers, MS Film 1121, Carrington Diary, 31 May 1905.)
‖ What no one could have guessed in 1908 was that within a decade the world would have become such a different place that in 1917, King George V, in order to secure the survival of his own dynasty, would judge it necessary to refuse asylum to his Romanov cousins, who were murdered at Ekaterinburg in July 1918.
a Sometimes known as Mrs. Keppel’s lady-in-waiting, Lady Sarah Wilson was a sister of Randolph Churchill. Her “prominent eyes, harsh voice and sarcastic laugh” made some people shudder. (Balsan, Glitter and Gold, p. 55.)
b Once when the King arrived at West Dean, the butler came down with a very large cardboard box. “Mrs. James is indisposed,” he said, “but she sent you this.” The King was handed a large pair of scissors, and when he cut the ribbon and opened the box, there was Mrs. James disguised as a doll with a wind-up key. (Edward James, Swans Reflecting Elephants, p. 12.) Evie James was the daughter of Helen Forbes, one of Harriett Mordaunt’s sisters. Her son, Edward James, claimed—probably wrongly—that she was Bertie’s illegitimate daughter. Edward James himself was also rumored to be Bertie’s son. Nine months before Edward’s birth (16 August 1907), the King had stayed at West Dean for a house party (19–24 November 1906), and the gossips did their arithmetic. Edward James was probably not his father’s biological son, and he did show a physical likeness to Bertie. However, another of the guests in November 1906 was John Brinton, the man who later became Evie’s second husband, and he seems a more likely candidate for paternity.
c Henry Labouchere described Brighton as “a sea-coast town, three miles long and three yards broad, with a Sassoon at each end and one in the middle.” While Arthur Sassoon lived in King’s Gardens, Albert was in Kemptown, and Reuben in Queen’s Gardens. (Allfrey, Jewish Court, p. 54.)
d Within little more than a decade, David, by now Prince of Wales, would write that York Cottage, Sandringham, was “too dull and boring for words! Christ how any human beings can ever have got into this pompous secluded and monotonous groove I can’t imagine.” (Edward, Prince of Wales, to Mrs. Frida Dudley Ward, 26 December 1919, in Letters from a Prince, ed. Rupert Godfrey [Warner Books, 1999], pp. 286–87.)