4

‘… and Every Inch the First Gentleman in Europe’

A new trans-European railway system, steamships and his own questing nature made Edward VII the best-travelled member of the royal family until they began flying in aircraft. In 1862 he became the first English prince to visit the Holy Land since Henry IV in 1392. Within a few years this royal itinerant knew most European capitals, including Athens, Constantinople and St Petersburg. Outside his continent, he visited Canada, the United States, Egypt and India. His journeys were a rejection of his monotonous boyhood detention.

In the prince’s youth, Prussia was the junior of five Great Powers: Austria, Britain, France, Russia and Prussia constituted the Concert of Europe established after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815. In the royal household the allegiances forged at the Battle of Waterloo held until 1888. Bertie had entirely German ancestry, spoke German as a first language, was never the foe of Germans, and recognized confederated Germany as central to continental stability. Yet by his mid twenties he was set on formulating resistance to Hohenzollern Prussia. His efforts in this direction were hindered by the fact that although Queen Victoria devolved ceremonial and social duties to him, she was determined to remain politically paramount. His requests to see government papers, especially diplomatic dispatches, were refused because she fancied that he might be indiscreet. Instead, winnowed specimens of confidential Foreign Office material was supplied to him by her sanction.

The death in 1863 of King Frederick VII of Denmark provoked a succession crisis. The Danish throne devolved through the female line upon Frederick’s cousin, Christian IX, Princess Alexandra’s father; but under Salic law, the duchies of Schleswig, Holstein and Saxe-Lauenburg could only pass by male descent. The duchies therefore became separated from Denmark, just as the kingdom of Hanover had been divided from the United Kingdom when Victoria ascended her throne in 1837, and as the grand duchy of Luxemburg would be separated from the kingdom of the Netherlands in 1890. Christian IX tried to incorporate the duchies into his kingdom on his succession; but the German Confederation, which had replaced the Holy Roman Empire in 1815 and was dominated by Austria, upheld the claim to the duchies of Frederick, Prince of Augustenburg, who was the senior heir under Salic law. After Danes and Germans went to war, Queen Victoria’s son-in-law Crown Prince Frederick of Prussia led his forces to victory in the Battle of Dybbøl (18 April 1864). The three duchies were then annexed by Austria and Prussia: this usurpation by Augustenburg was consolidated by the marriage of his daughter to the future Emperor Wilhelm II of Germany.

Next, on 15 June 1866, Lord Augustus Loftus, the ambassador in Berlin, was sitting in Bismarck’s garden enjoying the evening breeze when the clocks chimed midnight. The Iron Chancellor astounded Loftus by checking his watch and then saying in French, with malicious unexpectedness, ‘At this moment our troops have entered Hanover, Saxony and Hesse-Cassel.’ Prussia was moving to dislodge Austria from leadership of the German Confederation, and to best the German states that were allied to Austria. A fortnight later Crown Prince Frederick led Prussian troops to a crushing victory at the Battle of Königgrätz. The wars of 1863–4 and 1866 settled the Prince of Wales as anti-Prussian as well as pro-Danish.¹

The prince’s French sympathies began earlier. In 1855, aged thirteen, he accompanied his parents on a visit, during the Crimean War, to Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie in Paris. He relished the cannonades, bands and fireworks, and on the station platform before entraining home gave a last avid look at all that he was leaving. During the 1860s he returned to Paris on several occasions. As a highlight of his visit in 1867 Empress Eugénie staged a semi-political revue at the Théâtre des Variétés. In one scene Britannia and France, played by the Marquise de Gallifet and Comtesse Édouard de Pourtalès, agreed on Free Trade between each other. ‘Yes, and no more passports! Let us have a bridge over the Channel!’ cried Britannia. ‘Very well,’ France responded, ‘and we will prolong the Boulevard Haussmann to Piccadilly.’ Such sentiments pleased the prince.²

The prince’s tour of India in 1875–6 was the first of hundreds of visits to colonial possessions undertaken by members of the royal family to consolidate their popularity in the ensuing 140 years. But it was in Europe’s palaces, chancelleries, shooting lodges and resorts that he projected his personality and exerted influence. The prince once confided to Carrington that when he became king, he would act as his own Foreign Secretary. As his mother banned him from seeing state papers until the 1890s, he used his social position in London to converse with foreign diplomats, who kept him au courant with European politics. He gleaned his information and expressed his views through informal meetings and private correspondence rather than from the filleted précis that he was allowed to see. He circulated as a solo plenipotentiary with initiatives of his own. To give one example, he invited his Danish-born brother-in-law King George of Greece to stay in 1876 at Marlborough House, introduced him to Disraeli, and subsequently acted as a conduit of diplomatic warnings from Disraeli to Athens. Operating in these ways, he seemed more susceptible to personalities than focused on policy.

With the approval of the London government, he returned to the Paris of the Third Republic, visited President Thiers and attended the National Assembly as early as 1872. There were further major visits in 1874 and 1878, together with holiday interludes. At the time he was often likened to another ardently Parisian royal heir, King Willem III of the Netherlands’ son Willem, Prince of Orange, known on the boulevards as ‘Prince Citron’, whose debauchery hastened his death there at the age of thirty-eight in 1879. ‘Neither exceedingly arrogant nor exceedingly affable,’ it was said on Prince Citron’s death, ‘he easily made friends and still more easily unmade them.’ The Prince of Wales, too, was arrogant as well as affable, and ruffled feelings as easily as he flattered them. In 1879 Georges, Marquis d’Harcourt, the French ambassador in London, claimed that ‘partly by his needlessly open declaration of Bonapartist sympathies, partly by considering himself above all social rules’, the prince was becoming unpopular with official Paris: ‘he invites himself and his friends everywhere not always with much regard to the convenience of those concerned – plays high, & is not as punctual in payment as the etiquette of gamblers requires.’ One of the prince’s favourite Frenchmen was Henri, Marquis de Breteuil, fundraiser for the Orléans royalist party and perhaps significantly (given the prince’s Semitic sympathies) the grandson of a Jewish banker who had been Minister of Finance under the Second Empire. In 1881 Breteuil organized the first of the prince’s several private meetings with Léon Gambetta, then President of the Chamber of Deputies: the two men found easy agreement about Prussian-led Germany. ‘Behold the first cosmopolitan Prince of Wales produced by the reigning House of England,’ declared a Paris newspaper when Bertie later breakfasted with Gambetta. As king he made Breteuil an honorary Knight Commander of the Victorian Order in 1904.³

The prince approved Disraeli’s foreign policies, but found him unctuous. Conversely, he found Gladstone companionable, invited the radical Joseph Chamberlain to dine at Marlborough House in 1879, and in the following year asked the future Duke of Fife to hold a dinner at which he could meet the quasi-republican Sir Charles Dilke. His belief that antagonism could be mitigated by personal meetings animated his European journeys. ‘By his dignified bearing and ingratiating manners he has acquired popularity in every country and at every Court which he has visited,’ wrote Lord Augustus Loftus in 1894.⁴

Or every court bar one. By the 1880s Germany was more dominant in continental Europe than any power had been since Napoleon I’s apogee. In 1888 Queen Victoria’s grandson inherited the empire as Wilhelm II. Anglo-German relations deteriorated in the ensuing quarter-century. Contention was promoted on both sides by nationalist newspapers, chauvinist politicians and bloodthirsty militarists. A London press agitation shoved Lord Salisbury’s government into resolving in 1889 to maintain enough battleships to equal the combined strength of the two next largest navies in the world, the French and Russian. At Wilhelm’s behest, Germany retaliated after 1897 with a naval building programme to vie with the Royal Navy. Simultaneously, the dynastic quarrel between Wilhelm and his uncle Bertie intensified. Each man riled the other. Masculine vanity was projected from personal to national proportions. Family ill-feeling did not cause the European war of 1914, but it created the habitat for warmongering.

This feud began in the mid 1880s when Crown Prince Frederick and his wife promoted a scheme to marry their daughter to Alexander of Battenberg, the regnant Prince of Bulgaria. They and the Prince of Wales saw this as likely to increase English and reduce Russian influence in the Balkans. Bismarck, however, opposed the match for complicating German-Russian relations, and enlisted the support of young Prince Wilhelm in defeating the plan. ‘May Allah damn him to hell,’ Wilhelm wrote to Tsar Alexander III a few days before his uncle Bertie’s visit in 1885 to Berlin to support this Battenberg-Hohenzollern marriage alliance. ‘With his false character and penchant for intrigue he will no doubt attempt … to politick a bit behind the scenes with the ladies.’ In 1886 Russia ejected Alexander from Bulgaria, and Bismarck intervened to install Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg as reigning prince in 1887.⁵

Among Wilhelm’s earliest acts after his accession in 1888 was a definitive veto on the Battenberg-Hohenzollern marriage: relations between uncle and nephew never recovered. As Emperor of Germany, Wilhelm soon proved the most bombastic ruler in Europe, although not the most tyrannous or xenophobic. He insulted his grandmother Queen Victoria, but also showed puerile delight when she gave him the rank of Admiral of the Fleet in the Royal Navy. In 1892–5 he insisted on attending the annual yacht regatta at Cowes, where he created ‘endless friction’, as a German diplomat conceded: ‘The Kaiser interfered in everything, even in the sailing handicaps, and he treated his uncle, who was, after all, twenty years older than himself, sometimes as a quantité negligeable, and sometimes as a subject for schoolboy jokes.’ Similarly ‘fat old Wales’, as German courtiers called him, was ‘inconceivably rude’ to his nephew, both at Cowes and elsewhere. When, in 1895, the prince was invited to the inaugural ceremony of the Kiel Canal, the shortcut between the Baltic and North seas of which the Kaiser was so proud, the prince asked for the opening to be postponed because it clashed with Ascot week. His son the Duke of York, who went instead, caused offence by not wearing German naval uniform at his mother’s insistence. ‘The Heir Apparent,’ the diplomatic expert Sir Valentine Chirol judged in 1898, ‘would sacrifice anything and everything to humiliate his nephew in Berlin.’⁶

Until the 1890s imperialism remained a word associated with military despotism, or populist autocracy, as personified by the discredited Napoleon III. The flop of London’s Imperial Institute – opened in 1893 with the Prince of Wales as one of its chief promoters, but retrenched in 1899 through lack of interest – indicates the indifference to empire-building. Salisbury’s Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, seemed to emulate Napoleonic errors by his policy in South Africa. From 1899 two small pastoral republics, with an Afrikaans population less than London’s, entangled the British Empire for two and a half years in a war that required 400,000 troops to be mustered against them. The military defeats of December 1899 and January 1900 were a national humiliation. The Cabinet and the army were condemned for incompetence, amateurism and fatuity. The governing class lost confidence in itself as administrators, strategists and realists.

‘One can’t help wondering what this new century will bring,’ Sir Edward Hamilton wrote on New Year’s Day 1901. ‘Many think we are about to go downhill. I … believe that we shall … muddle on and retain our supremacy for some time to come. But there is no disguising the fact that there are plenty of breakers ahead.’ There was diminished faith in national institutions, especially when challenged by American and German competition, as the Spectator commented after the coronation in 1902. ‘The most notable social fact of this age … is a universal outcry for efficiency in all the departments of society,’ it averred. ‘From the pulpit, the newspaper, the hustings, in the drawing-room, the smoking-room, the street, the same cry is heard: Give us efficiency, or we die.’ The Spectator attributed national decline to systemic corruption, and especially to mercantile chicanery and swindling financiers: ‘it is dishonesty that kills national efficiency with a slow and horrible poison.’ Rampant imperialists also identified the Crown with national debility. ‘The king is an old gentleman who does nothing and belongs to a dead age,’ Kipling complained two months after the coronation. ‘The things with which he has to deal are raddled and painted frauds.’⁷

The international unpopularity of the Boer War forced the London government to recognize its alarming diplomatic isolation. The first diplomatic initiative of the new century was the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902, directed against Russia, although the chief threat was increasingly seen as Germany. Despite its name, the Committee of Imperial Defence (1902) was overwhelmingly preoccupied with Europe. Moreover, in 1902–3, the expense of the Boer War led to a domestic fiscal crisis, which made Chamberlain’s programme of protective tariffs seem exigent. Protectionists regarded international trade as combat. They wanted supremacy for the British Empire as a world power. Their ideal was domination, not the prosperous co-operation of peaceable communities. They felt as much alarm at another country’s rising wealth as they would at a hostile army massing on their borders. They did not see international trade as giving reciprocal benefits, or realize that if foreigners grew richer they were better able to pay for English products. Some protectionists, it seemed, would accept economic losses for England with equanimity if they could thereby inflict greater losses on industrial rivals.

Edward VII told a member of the German embassy in London that it was ‘perpetual pinpricks from Berlin’ – mainly from his nephew Wilhelm, who called him ‘an old peacock’ and ‘Satan’ – that made him desire rapprochement with France and Russia so as to preserve European peace. The king did not intervene in the daily work of his diplomats, but through his private secretary Knollys he pushed the promotion of men who distrusted German intentions: Charles Hardinge, Cecil Spring Rice and Francis Bertie. During the early years of his reign he strove to be on reasonable terms with Wilhelm, but Tirpitz’s naval armaments programme (launched 1897–8), the Kaiser’s abortive treaty with his cousin Tsar Nicholas signed at Björkö (1905), his maladroit attempts to forestall French influence in Morocco (1905–6), and mutual ill-will over state visits exacerbated Anglo-Prussian tension. It is worth stressing that the imperial government in Berlin seldom informed or consulted the constituent states of the German empire on its diplomatic manoeuvres. Monarchs such as King Albert of Saxony were distraught at the turn of events: ‘God knows what we are steering into,’ he exclaimed.⁸

In 1905, for example, Wilhelm disembarked at Tangiers, where he demanded safeguards for the territorial integrity of Morocco against the French. ‘The clumsy theatrical part’ of the Tangiers incident, commented his uncle, made him seem ‘ridiculous’: ‘I have tried to get on with him & shall nominally do my best to the end – but trust him – never. He is utterly false & the bitterest foe that E[ngland] possesses!’ The Kaiser’s continental policy was directed against the pax Britannica of which his uncle was figurehead. Baron von Holstein of the German Foreign Ministry described Berlin’s efforts to limit London’s influence on the European balance of power as ‘our battle against the European Concert – alias English hegemony, alias encirclement’. Helmuth von Moltke, Chief of German General Staff, who thought the English were ‘stirring up hatred in the most incredible way’ against Berlin, predicted in 1905: ‘The first shot exchanged between England and Germany will certainly be the signal for a general European massacre.’⁹

Some rulers at the start of the twentieth century, such as Franz Joseph of Austria or Victor Emmanuel of Italy, seldom left their domains. Edward VII, though, needed movement and stimulation: hence his incessant country house visits, and European wanderlust. His name – still more his transitory presence – evoked awe: ‘he was by far the biggest and most striking personality in Europe,’ judged Fritz Ponsonby, who accompanied him on many continental journeys. There was nothing brilliant about his diplomacy, but he projected a strong character which took the lead.¹⁰

The most important of the king’s initiatives was the journey of 1903 which proved to be the prelude to Anglo-French Entente Cordiale. He was clandestine about its arrangements: when the royal yacht Victoria and Albert embarked, its passengers believed that they were to visit Lisbon, and then cruise in the Mediterranean; but he always intended to visit Rome, so that he could return by land through Paris. The king consulted his boon companion, the Marquês de Soveral, about his scheme rather than the Foreign Secretary, the Marquess of Lansdowne, and defied precedent by taking a rising young diplomat, Charles Hardinge, as minister-in-attendance instead of Lansdowne or another minister. As well as reflecting his low evaluation of Lansdowne, this showed his determination, long before foreshadowed to Carrington, to act when king as his own tantamount Foreign Secretary. One result of Lansdowne’s omission from the royal entourage was that European opinion decided that the king was the controlling mind behind London’s diplomacy, and mistook him for an autocrat with untrammelled diplomatic powers. This proved unhelpful to Berlin’s assessments of London’s intentions.

Victoria and Albert reached Lisbon on 3 April 1903. A green and gold galley rowed by eighty men bedecked in red carried Carlos I to welcome the yacht anchored in the River Tagus. English and Portuguese monarchs enjoyed the affinity of Saxe-Coburg cousins: Edward VII liked Carlos I, while in the next generation Manuel II became specially favoured at George V’s court. During his Portuguese visit, Edward participated in state processions and court ceremonies, received parliamentary deputations and the corps diplomatique, attended an aristocratic pigeon shoot at which he presented an eponymous cup to the winner, was showered with rose petals in a museum, serenaded by bands in picturesque peasant costumes, cheered to the rafters at the opera house, made country expeditions with a cavalry escort, visited summer palaces and tropical gardens. Lisbon’s largest park was renamed Eduardo VII in his honour. It retains that name, together with a statue of the Peacemaker, who is still upheld among Lisbon’s intelligentsia as a laudably cosmopolitan European.

From Lisbon the king proceeded in his yacht, via Gibraltar and Malta, to Naples, where he arrived with an escort of Royal Navy battleships while protesting that he was travelling incognito. In Rome he met both King Victor Emmanuel and Pope Leo XIII. Thence he returned to his old haunts in Paris, where a sullen early reception was overborne by his charm offensive. ‘He was a Francophile who liked talking about France or people in France,’ recalled the young diplomat Robert Vansittart. ‘They liked talking about him too, respected him as a hedonist without overrating his performances.’ He was said to be witty, continued Vansittart, ‘but much is attributed to those who stand high. I had never seen anyone so flattered and, like most people who have had everything their own way, he was not a good advertisement of his kind.’ Both in private talk and in public addresses the king extolled Parisians and the French, and aroused the mood that facilitated rapprochement. French leaders made a return visit to London. The Anglo-French Agreement of April 1904, which followed, would not have been reached without this first regal initiative, for Balfour’s Conservative ministry was too cautious, negative and spiritless for diplomatic breakthroughs. The king created possibilities of which his politicians were incapable.¹¹

Although there were other state visits, conferences with European monarchs and diplomatic initiatives, one royal locality was second only to Paris in its significance: Marienbad. Edward forsook recuperative visits to the spa town of Homburg after ascending the throne, partly to avoid political complications in Germany, and partly because Homburg, lacking scandals and Professional Beauties, had become boring. He knew that as king his continental headquarters were bound to become a sort of political observatory, and decided that he was best watched in Biarritz and Marienbad. He doubtless recalled that half a century earlier Napoleon III had paid regular visits to Biarritz, where other European leaders resorted for ostensible holidays and discreet unofficial soundings of opinion. The Habsburg Foreign Minister Count Gyula Andrássy, Bismarck and other European leaders had similarly holidayed in spa towns where they could confer privately.

The history of the world became linked to the king’s visits to Marienbad. The spa lay in a district that had been occupied by the Prussians in their war against Austria of 1866, and retained an anomalous frontier tone. Many of its smarter hotels (including the Weimar, where he stayed) were Jewish-owned. There was a resplendent cosmopolitanism which made differences of nationality seem vestigial. All this was congenial to the king, whose imagination dwelt in Europe, not merely in his own domains. Every August for seven summers, from 1903 until 1909, he pitched a continental version of the Marlborough Club in Bohemia. He became the cynosure of every eye in Marienbad, whose meetings, conversations and objects were tracked or surmised. There he held his continental court, made it the European showcase of Edwardian England and evinced his empathy with the Habsburg frame of mind. His annual meetings with the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph, his rendezvous with other European leaders and his avoidance of his nephew Wilhelm excited curiosity across the continent. He always contrived to be in Marienbad on Franz Joseph’s birthday (18 August) and to attend the thanksgiving service held by Gilbert Helmer, the Abbot of Tepl, in the Catholic church opposite the Hotel Weimar. Flanked by his courtiers and by his ambassador in Vienna, Edward wore the uniform of the Austro-Hungarian hussar regiment of which he was Colonel-in-Chief. On the imperial birthday he also held an annual dinner which was attended by his entourage, by English notables visiting the spa and by eminent personages of the district. At the dinner he toasted His Apostolic Majesty. It fell just after the start of the Scottish grouse season, and freshly shot birds were hurried to Bohemia to be served at the imperial birthday repast.

Until 1908 Edward’s meetings with Franz Joseph were reckoned successful: neither man, so it seemed, had ulterior plans. In August that year, however, the two monarchs met at Ischl, and, flanked by their advisers Count Alois von Aehrenthal and Hardinge, discussed Balkan prospects with ‘the utmost apparent intimacy’. Then in October came the greatest single shock to the king’s diplomacy: a letter in French from Franz Joseph announcing that Austria was annexing Bosnia and Herzegovina. ‘The King was indignant, for nobody knew better than he did the danger of tampering with the provisions of the treaty of Berlin,’ recorded the diplomat Lord Redesdale, who was with the king at Balmoral when the letter arrived. ‘He saw that to make any changes in the Turkish provinces was to light a fuse which, sooner or later, was bound to fire a powder magazine. Personally, the King felt that he had been treacherously deceived.’ The king’s final visit to Marienbad, in the next year of 1909, was in mistrustful mood.¹²

Marienbad was a spa town in Bohemia, 800 miles from London, surrounded on three sides by hills covered with pine forests. It had springs of healing, sparkling, bitter-tasting waters: one surrounded by a colonnade, another covered by a Greek temple set in a grove of alder trees, and a third with a constant hissing of vented gas. The springs were owned by the nearby abbey of Tepl, the monks of which alternated between two years in seclusion and two in the world, as symbolized by their costume of white cassock and black top hat. In Marienbad the king dieted, took the water cure, promenaded in the town, strolled in the woods, had massages and made afternoon expeditions. Tailors came across Europe to espy his clothes, take surreptitious Kodak photographs, make sketches in notebooks and adapt them for shoppers. He expected a band to play at teatime and during dinner, for he thought music increased conviviality: Viennese tunes were favourites.

A King’s Messenger came every second day to keep the monarch informed of the world’s doings. Better than that, Wickham Steed, The Times’s correspondent in Vienna, realized the opportunities for influence if he visited Marienbad during the king’s holidays. He received royal summonses to discuss world affairs, and was asked to report breaking news directly. During the Russo-Japanese War, the king told his private secretary to ‘short circuit’ the ambassador in Vienna and get immediate updates from Steed. The latter telephoned the royal entourage at the Hotel Weimar every evening with the latest news, which reached the king thirty-six hours before Foreign Office messages. The king discussed with Steed his intention to recognize Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s morganatic wife Princess Hohenberg as Empress of Austria after Franz Joseph’s death, the health of Sultan Abdul Hamid II of Turkey, Kaiser Wilhelm and much else. Their exchanges were candid. ‘Never mind contradicting me if you think I am wrong,’ the king told Steed.¹³

It was at Marienbad that the king reached a sympathetic concord with the leader of the Liberal opposition, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, whose previous speeches against the Boer War he had found objectionable. ‘In this small Society of English people, quite half of the ladies either have already been, or are qualifying themselves for being, divorced: and a considerable number of the men are helping,’ Campbell-Bannerman wrote from Marienbad. The monarch’s presence increased the velocity of the fast set: ‘We have the great man here with a cloud of bluebottle flies buzzing round him. It is worse than ever – he is recklessly abandoned to the society of a few semi-déclassé ladies and men to match. He is however decent enough to decent people: and follows the cure loyally.’ The accumulated dynastic experience of monarchs often makes them readier than politicians to accept that trouble is coming. Campbell-Bannerman summarized a discussion with his king at Marienbad in 1905: ‘He has great apprehensions of war between France and Germany, and in that event what should we do? He discussed the personal relations of the Royal families and also the sentiments of the peoples.’ When the king warned that Anglo-German naval rivalry meant that war between the two powers ‘might be inevitable’, Campbell-Bannerman deplored even contemplating the possibility: ‘the two nations, apart from military and ruling class and press, have no desire to quarrel,’ he replied.¹⁴

The king would sit on the balcony of the Hotel Weimar consulting the opinions of well-placed visitors: ‘more often listening than speaking himself, agreeing, doubting, encouraging and consoling, awakening hopes or dissuading’. His visitors over the years included such cronies as Ernest Cassel, Slatin Pasha (a Viennese who had been the Mahdi’s prisoner for twelve years and converted to Islam) and General Gaston de Gallifet, who led charges in the chevauchée de la mort, the last cavalry battle fought in Europe in 1870, had a silver plate over part of his stomach to cover his wounds, and as Minister of War in 1899–1900 had trounced the anti-Semitic conspirators who had unjustly incarcerated Dreyfus. The king brought together at Marienbad Count Alexander Izvolsky, who became Russian Foreign Minister in 1906, and Georges Clemenceau, who became Prime Minister of France in the same year (Clemenceau’s summers in Bohemia made him favour the Czechs against German-speakers at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919). Other royal visitors included the Hungarian secessionist leader Ferenc (Franz) Kossuth, Grand Admiral Tirpitz, Turkish Grand Vizier Hakki Pasha, and morganatic royalty. German princes found it easier to meet King Edward than they did Kaiser Wilhelm. Attendant Habsburg nobility included Mensdorff (Austrian ambassador in London), his elder brother Prince Hugo von Dietrichstein-Nikolsburg (ADC to Emperor Franz Joseph) and a previous ambassador in London, Prince Karl Kinsky. The king went shooting from Marienbad on the preserves of Prince Karl Trauttmansdorff-Weinsberg, whom he made a Knight Commander of the Victorian Order in 1904, and on the sporting estate of Prince Otto von Schönburg-Waldenburg, whose sister was briefly Princess of Albania in 1914. Everywhere he cut a familiar figure to the Austrians, and hoped to sway them towards English sympathies. Other visitors at Marienbad included his wife’s relations in the Russian imperial and Greek royal families.¹⁵

‘Uncle Edward seems to be trying very hard to inaugurate an era of perpetual peace by taking trips,’ the German diplomatist Alfred von Kiderlen-Waechter wrote from Bucharest in 1907. The diplomatic strategy of seeking ententes with France and Russia locked London’s initiatives too tightly to those of Paris and St Petersburg. Berlin blamed the king for having, as they felt, isolated Germany in European councils. All the while distances were shrinking and frontiers being rendered nugatory. In July 1909, months after the Daily Mail campaigned to stop foreigners (‘aliens’) owning land in England, Blériot’s aircraft flew from Sangatte, across the English Channel, and landed on a meadow above the Dover cliffs. In 1913, during the last full year of peace, over 660,000 passengers left England through the Channel ports for Europe. Those 90,000 of them who went as tourists to Italy benefited from the operations of the Latin Monetary Union (formed in the 1860s), whereby Italian lire, together with Belgian, French and Swiss francs, Spanish pesetas, Greek drachmae, Bulgarian lev, Romanian leu and Serbian dinars were pegged and exchangeable in gold and silver coins across most of non-German-speaking Europe. The co-operative possibilities of this were inaudible among the patriotic shouting in London. ‘The industrial Goths are at our gates in the form of German and American competition,’ ran a typical warning of 1909. ‘The battle we are now engaged in is for survival rather than pre-eminence in trade; our very existence as a nation is at stake.’ Alongside a vocal but marginalized peace movement, an assertive and loud group harangued for the causes of tariff protection, compulsory military service and higher armaments spending. One of these was F. S. Oliver, partner in Debenham’s drapery and pamphleteer. ‘Nothing will save us,’ he told Lord Milner, ‘except the sight of red blood running pretty freely; but whether British and German blood, or only British, I don’t know – nor do I think it much matters. “Blood” is the necessity.’¹⁶

The phrase First World War was coined as the title of the best-selling diaries of a military correspondent published in 1920. But it is wrong to think of the events of 1914–18 as a world war. The causes of the fighting and the fields of conflict alike show it as an internecine European struggle. Contending power systems, rather than global concerns, moved the nations into combat in conformity with their treaty obligations. The disunity of neighbouring states, and the belief that European history must comprise recurrent prize-fighting bouts for territory, achieved the catastrophe which destroyed three empires and created new Communist and Nazi tyrannies in Europe.

If Edward VII had survived until 1914, it is possible that this continental dégringolade might have been limited. Already shaken by the Austrian annexation of Bosnia in 1908, he would not in June 1914 have been indifferent to the shooting in the Bosnian capital of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, for whose accession he had laid plans. No one in London would have been more alert than he to the perils raised by the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia in July 1914; no one better attuned to existing alliances and dynastic frailties; no one swifter or more emphatic in adjuring his ministers to cork the crisis in time. Although politicians in London (notably Balfour and Lansdowne) minimized the monarch’s influence on their diplomatic achievements, in Berlin his reach was overstated. Wickham Steed, who became foreign editor of The Times in 1914, gave a just measure of his significance. ‘Undoubtedly, the death of King Edward hastened the catastrophe of 1914,’ Steed judged. Although he could never have averted European conflict, his acumen might have localized or postponed its outbreak:

Stay-at-home Englishmen hardly knew what King Edward’s name and personality had meant to Continental peoples. Under him, British policy had been calculable and tangible. ‘Splendid Isolation’ had ceased. Isolation on the part of one country is apt to induce in others the same feelings of estrangement or positive dislike that men cherish towards individuals who keep them at arm’s length and live in lofty seclusion. Those who are not known cannot be loved; and, in the later decades of Queen Victoria’s reign, England was not known abroad. King Edward translated her to the Continent and gained for her respect and, in some quarters, affection. He was a concrete and likeable embodiment of England. Whether he talked in English, French or German, he always spoke ‘European’, whereas British statesmen spoke an island tongue.¹⁷