Alert and ramrod-backed, the small bronze figure perches at one side of a sculpted sofa that has been placed in the middle of a town square. While the fingers of one hand caress the decorative head of a carved lion, offering a hint of her legendary power to enthral and subdue, the wasp-waisted young woman in a décolleté court dress turns with an expressive smile towards the vacancy at her side, towards a space that was occupied, during her heyday, by some of the most influential figures in London and Berlin.
The town is Pszczyna, formerly Pless. The young woman who stares into emptiness with such bold eyes represents Daisy Cornwallis-West, Princess of Pless: hostess, reformer and a tireless urger of cousinly friendship between their two nations to a Francophile Edward VII of England and his volatile nephew, Emperor Wilhelm II.
Born in Wales in 1873, Daisy was eighteen and training to become a singer when an ambitious mother introduced her to a new recruit to the German Embassy in Carlton House Terrace. Hans Heinrich Pless was the thirty-year-old heir to one of the grandest titles and the greatest fortunes in Germany. Naturally, so Patsy Cornwallis-West reasoned, the Prince would wish to ally himself to her very beautiful, very young (and very poor) daughter, just as one of the richest men in England – Bendor, second Duke of Westminster – would wish, ten years later, when bent by Patsy’s terrifying will, to marry Daisy’s intrepid, horse-mad sister. Patsy met her match in 1900, however, when Winston Churchill’s widowed American mother snapped up the handsome young George Cornwallis-West by announcing their engagement in The Times.
Married at St Margaret’s, Westminster, in 1891, and tearfully preparing to set out for her new life in faraway Silesia, Daisy was advised by her mother’s old friend, the Prince of Wales, to be sure to learn German and to show loyalty to her adopted country. Heinrich, meanwhile, studied his bride’s going-away dress and observed that she had put it on the wrong way round. Hans Heinrich, as Daisy later remarked of the husband she never learned to love, always displayed ‘the keenest eye for women’s clothes’.1 The implication, although delicately made, is clear: Hans had an intimate knowledge of women’s clothes because he kept (and would continue to keep) mistresses.
Writing three beguilingly gossip-filled volumes of memoirs during the hardship and illness that befell her during the interwar years, Daisy Pless conjured back a world that now seems as improbable, glamorous and chilling as the Arabian Nights. Pless itself, chiefly inhabited by Hans Heinrich’s affable father until his death in 1907, was a 600-room Silesian fortress that Daisy’s husband later extravagantly converted to resemble the gigantic chateau of an imperious courtesan. Wilhelm II, requisitioning Pless for the eastern HQ of his army, picked the castle for the up-to-date comforts installed by Hans Heinrich, but also, perhaps, from fond memories of Daisy, a merrily outspoken young hostess to the vast parties of European aristocrats who convened at Pless for the purpose, principally, of slaughter. Stags, according to some mysterious local custom, were merely lassoed and released; the boar and bison that inhabited Pless’s mighty woodlands were less fortunate. Daisy’s first-born son, recalling his early days at Pless, would still remember in his old age the baby-like screaming of hares, shot in their hundreds each year upon the empty fields that lay in plain view of his turret bedroom.
The turret was the sanctuary and refuge of young Hansel Pless; here, he could safely carry out a quiet mutiny of his own against the massacre being executed beyond a boy’s control. ‘I kept a barn owl, a jackdaw, a fox terrier, two rabbits and a ferret. The smell was appalling, but nobody ever came up there. I was quite safe, and so were they.’2
Daisy, while capable of appearing at dinner in a sack to protest against the required five-times-a-day changes of attire, played her role with grace and style; even the stiffest of visitors found it hard to resist the freshness of a girl who, after taking them off for a midnight toboggan ride, would suggest an hour of cake walks, risqué songs and – although Daisy herself disliked alcohol – Champagne. Lady Susan Townley, recalling encounters with Daisy in Berlin during the early 1900s, remembered her as the greatest social draw in town, exuding an impetuous charm that Willy, who always put Daisy next to him at banquets, found irresistible. Who else, Lady Susan wondered, could have got away with putting on a puppet show that openly mocked the Emperor, along with all his courtiers, except for Daisy Pless?3
The courageous spirit so admired by Lady Susan was put to more valuable use by Daisy than for making fun of the nobility. Dividing her time between Pless and Fürstenstein, the enormous Silesian clifftop castle bestowed upon Hans Heinrich as a wedding gift from his father, Daisy became indignantly conscious of the gap separating her own semi-royal existence from that of the 20,000 miners whose labour upheld it. Down in the valley towns below Fürstenstein, where she became fondly known as unsere Daisy (our Daisy), the young Princess picked her way through streets of mud, where tightly packed houses with roofs made of tar paper backed onto a refuse-choked river. Complaining to her husband and receiving only a reminder of the annual tea provided to a grateful workforce, Daisy lost her temper sufficiently to point out that the miners had to trudge uphill on foot for this honour, before waiting in the courtyard for up to two hours, followed by a long walk home in the dark. Naturally, the miners did not complain. How could they, when no unions yet existed and no other source of income was available?
Hans Heinrich’s father and namesake proved more willing to be enlightened than his son. Working together, the young English-woman and the elderly Prussian Prince initiated a programme of improvements that included two hospitals, improved housing, river-cleaning, free school milk and a pension scheme so advanced for its time that it was later adopted all across Prussia.
Daisy, slowly, came to love Germany with a deep tenderness that shines out of her account of returning to Fürstenstein from Berlin on a warm summer evening, with Hans Heinrich’s English-bred dogs sprawled across the carriage floor and the hum of crickets filling the night-scented air. If she never mastered the language, the fault lay partly with a world that remained almost parodically British. Aside from reading English books and riding the Irish mares of which Prince Heinrich imported at least three a year to join his renowned stud, Daisy conversed daily with an English butler, an English groom, an English head gardener, an English valet and – although his services were hardly needed by a family who spoke English first and German second – an English tutor. If Daisy never learned to speak perfect German, it was perhaps because she never experienced the need.
Visiting England on his own for the first time, as a schoolboy of thirteen, Daisy’s firstborn son, Hansel, entered a world that felt pleasingly familiar. ‘It seemed’, the Prince later declared, ‘as if I had come home.’
And, in a more ambivalent sense than Hansel intended, so he had. Staying in Leicestershire as the guest of his father’s brother, Count Friedrich Hochberg, an ardent huntsman, spiritualist and Anglophile, Hansel was introduced to Uncle Fritz’s neighbours: a perfectly German circle, living a thoroughly English life. Bruno and Emma Schröder were visiting their hunting box at nearby Bicester Hall, while Count Kinsky and Herbert von Bismarck, the Chancellor’s son, were staying down the road at the Garth with Adolph Deichmann and his wife Hilda. Baron Hermann von Eckardstein, a genial giant in the diplomatic world, dropped by, meanwhile, to greet Count Hochberg and to break his journey up to Chatsworth, where the Devonshires had invited him, as they frequently did, to join a party of English sportsmen.
Hansel, who later looked back on his pre-war Leicestershire visits as ‘the happiest, most carefree weeks of all my life’, thought his compatriots looked entirely at home jogging off to a meet through the country lanes of the English Midlands. And so they were: a painting still on display in the royal palace of Wiesbaden shows the Duke of Nassau with his pack of hounds. The Duke and his comrades are nattily dressed in the familiar costume: pink jacket, white breeches and velvet riding cap. At a glance, the viewer might mistake this Hesse hunting scene for a day out with the Quorn or Pytchley.
Daisy arrived at Pless in 1891, the year in which Wilhelm II finally condescended to visit his widowed mother at the house near Frankfurt which Vicky was patiently inhabiting until the Friedrichshof (named in Fritz’s memory) could be completed.
Relations between the Dowager Empress and her eldest son had not been cordial since Fritz’s death in 1888. Willy’s brutal determination to diminish his father’s achievement had shocked and wounded Vicky. She had disliked the way in which, during his first months in power, the young Emperor had cockily insisted that Uncle Bertie should cut short his annual stay in Vienna so that he, Wilhelm II, might have no competition during his own, far more recently planned visit to that city. The Prince of Wales had been understandably annoyed: Alexandra, his wife, went so far as to describe Willy as ‘a conceited ass’.4
Tact was never Wilhelm’s strong point, despite a robust belief in the invincibility of his own charm. In 1889, at a moment when Germany required British support against the possible rise of a right-wing military dictatorship under General Boulanger in France, he was called upon to mend his arrogant ways. The Emperor set about it by visiting his grandmother’s summer residence on the Isle of Wight with a retinue of twelve warships, and putting on a parade, for Victoria’s pleasure, of 1200 goose-stepping Prussian sailors. Invited to become admiral of the British fleet by a shrewd old woman who always had the measure of her eldest grandson’s vanity, Willy accepted with delight; taking the role to heart, he promptly started offering Victoria tips for improvements in the Royal Navy.
The Queen’s well-judged boosts to the young Emperor’s ego offered an example that her eldest daughter found difficult to emulate. Wilhelm himself did not help. He had waited three years to call upon his widowed mother; even then, he tried Vicky’s patience to the limit. A last-minute telegram requested provision to be made in Vicky’s modest home for thirteen servants and an imperial suite of six gentlemen that included one of the Dowager Empress’s fiercest critics. ‘It is really not very civil,’ Vicky complained to Victoria, and added that she already wished the day were over. Wilhelm’s visit was, nevertheless, an olive branch, and Vicky was in no position to reject it.
Relations between mother and son eased in 1894, as Vicky finally moved into the house that would become her beloved home for the last six years of her life. Here, at the Friedrichshof, she set out to create a comfortable feeling of England abroad, a welcoming centre for a family whose links were being loosened both by distance and by the diminishing powers of the wily old spider who still held her place at the centre of the royal web, back in Britain.
Hints of Vicky’s sedate home life gleam out of the memoirs of her (slightly bored) visitors. Georg de Bunsen’s tall, copper-haired daughter, Marie, wrote about the relief of retreating to the Friedrichshof’s ‘club-room’ where she and Frank Lascelles, the British Ambassador, could smoke cigarettes (alcohol was sternly discouraged) and gossip about the nature of the Empress’s relationship with her constant companion, Count Seckendorff. Daisy Pless found the Empress hungry for news of England, the country in which she had regretfully declined to settle, following Fritz’s death. Her duty, Vicky explained, was to the German people, among whom she had lived for the last thirty years, and to whom – whatever her son might say to the contrary – she felt that her loyalty belonged. Daisy, uncertain how best to console a stately and sorrowful widow, but confident of her own singing skills, ventured an emotional rendering of ‘Home Sweet Home’.
Vicky’s real problem was that, unlike her mother, she had lost all power. The Queen, in the decade of her Diamond Jubilee, showed no intention of allowing the Prince of Wales to believe, even for a second, that he could have the final say. Vicky, adrift and functionless, enjoyed no such privilege. In 1896, as the German Empire celebrated its own first quarter-century, the Emperor himself was still a young man: trim, active and – so Willy flattered himself – in tune with the times. While Vicky sighed for an older world of high ideals and noble endeavours of the kind represented by the philanthropic institutions endowed by the Schröders, her son joined the march towards a new and hard-nosed, blustering world of colonial expansionism, aggressive markets and a fleet big enough for Germany to compete against America as the biggest trading power in the world.
Wilhelm’s difficulty – one that Willy would never resolve – was that he was torn between a love of everything British, an adulation that verged upon the obsessive, and utter scorn for a country that he considered to be marooned in the past. Advising his grandmother upon how to run a fleet that, so the Emperor emotionally declared, he loved as if it were his own, Wilhelm saw himself as an English hero: Nelson’s heir (his writing desk was famously carved from the timbers of Nelson’s famous flagship). Back in Berlin, the Emperor indulged his love of cabaret acts, undemanding music (Gounod’s Ave Maria announced his state entrances) and showy statues. Visiting England, the Emperor was usually on his best behaviour and – since he spoke faultless English and loved dressing up in English uniforms – was well-liked by the crowds. Back home again, Willy would brood upon some imagined insult to his person or his empire. Always eager to challenge his less nautical royal uncle at the Cowes Regatta on his own English-built Meteor yacht, Wilhelm took bitter offence at the fact that Kiel, Germany’s imperial war harbour, remained less fashionable (for the simplest of reasons, sniffed Daisy Pless: the glory of Cowes was not, as Willy appeared to think, ‘something you can buy at a Woolworth store’).5
Bertie, declining the offer of a military honour from his nephew during his first and grudging visit to Kiel, was more deliberately rude. The Prince of Wales, in Daisy’s opinion, took more pleasure in being ‘mean’ to Willy than was either wise or kind. ‘I am’, she added, conceding that there were mistakes on both sides, ‘sincerely sorry for both.’6
Wilhelm II’s first serious – and knowing – misstep in his relations with England took place over the New Year of 1895. The Jameson Raid, supported by Cecil Rhodes and Alfred Beit and backed by the unwritten approval of Joseph Chamberlain, Britain’s colonial minister, had been a botched attempt to provoke retaliatory action from the Boers from whom both Rhodes and Beit were keen to wrest control. German sympathies, as Ethel Smyth observed, remained firmly on the side of a people of Dutch-German origin. The Emperor, hearing of the raid’s failure, despatched a telegram of congratulation to Paul Kruger, the Boer leader.
The Kruger telegram caused fury at Victoria’s court and nearly brought about the resignation of Willy’s embarrassed representative at the Court of St James’s, Count Paul von Hatzfeldt. Willy was banned from making an official visit to England for three years, a decision which was reinforced by the news that he planned to send German troops out to aid the Boer cause. Willy’s high-risk project was forestalled when the Marquis de Soveral, Portugal’s suave ambassador to London, learning that the troops were to be landed at a harbour under Portugese control, promptly dictated a refusal of anchorage.7
In Germany, where public sympathy was already on the side of the beleaguered Boers, the despatch of the Kruger telegram triggered a fresh fusillade of anti-British reportage. Vicky hastily cancelled plans for a visit to her mother: ‘if I were to go home at the moment, it might make mischief . . .’ Writing to the Queen again, some ten months later, she sadly acknowledged that England, in Germany, had become a hated word.8
Just as her mother resisted no opportunity to deflate the portly Prince of Wales, Vicky seized the chance to blame Germany’s new mood on Willy’s behaviour. ‘England is disliked and distrusted, which might well have been avoided . . .’ she told Victoria in another letter. ‘William is foolishly confident and sure of himself . . .’9
The captious views of an ousted mother need to be questioned. Cecil Spring-Rice joined the British Embassy in Berlin at the end of 1895, just at the time that Odo Russell’s nephew-in-law, Sir Edward Malet, was replaced as the Queen’s representative by the widely liked Frank Lascelles.* Thin, dark-eyed, poetic and astute, ‘Springie’ was a shrewd observer of Anglo-German relations during this period; his sense of England’s new role as the enemy country (‘It is curious how detested we are . . . our existence is an offence to everyone . . .’) was that it undoubtedly pre-dated the sending of the fateful telegram.10
To Spring-Rice, it seemed as though the telegram helped to release and dispel the poisonous atmosphere that had greeted him on his arrival in Berlin. Writing to a friend at the Foreign Office on 11 January 1896, he noted that there was, by then, ‘no real hostility’, and again, on 17 January, ‘no rudeness anywhere’. The press were stirring up feelings both in London and Berlin, but the people of England and Germany, especially those in mercantile life, were acutely conscious of ‘what enormous interests we have in common and how fatal a war would be’.
The dread word had been set down, and Cecil Spring-Rice (who later wrote the words of ‘I Vow to Thee, My Country’) would allude to it with increasing anxiety over the years. Back in January 1896, he was convinced that a war could be avoided. Trade remained an arena of fierce conflict; the rapid growth of the German Navy was worrying; the press caused nothing but trouble; still, the Emperor struck Spring-Rice as a decent man who was striving to maintain good relations with his mother country. Wilhelm II had decided not to return his English uniforms (as if Willy would ever have made such a sacrifice). Instead, so Spring-Rice told Francis Villiers, his friend at the Foreign Office, on 22 January, the Emperor was boasting that he would win back all his popularity in England, ‘and beat the Prince of Wales with an English-built yacht’. As for war: ‘I’m sure it’s correct to say of public opinion here that they regard war between us as impossible. That is the very reason for their violent abuse.’ The insults, in other words, were of the kind traded between sparring cousins, too closely knit by blood to risk a fight.
Richard Seymour, a junior English diplomat, arrived in Berlin the following year (1897) for a six-month stay as an honorary attaché at the British Embassy. Less experienced than his friend Springie, Seymour’s initial dismay at being despatched to spend his first night on a sofa in a shabby back dining room at a nearby hotel (a court ball meant that all the Embassy bedrooms were taken) was deepened by the discovery that he was required to attend this event, dressed in the clean white breeches he did not possess, for his formal introduction to the Emperor.11
Breeches were loaned and a solemn face just about preserved, as young Seymour looked on at the stiff-legged caperings that took place at the Neues Palast that night. (‘There is, probably, no person on earth less fitted to dance a minuet than a Prussian officer.’) Three smart taps of a gilt cane announced, to the mandatory strains of Gounod’s Ave Maria, the Emperor’s approach. All smiles during Sir Frank’s introduction of his protégé, Wilhelm asked the newcomer how he was enjoying himself in the finest city in Europe, complimented him upon an eminent grandfather – the ambassador to St Petersburg during the Crimean War – and then passed briskly on.
My grandfather enjoyed the first of his three spells in Berlin. Sir Frank was a kindly chief and life at the Embassy – even back in the days when all deciphering and message transmission had to be done by the inexperienced attachés – was seldom stressful. Seymour’s account of a typical evening at 170 Wilhelmstrasse makes it sound like a gentlemen’s club: large, quiet rooms, shaded lamps, the young attachés lounging over the papers in their chairs, Sir Frank off in a corner of the half-visible billiard room, a bearded courtier writing notes at his buhl desk, while puffing on his habitual Turkish cigarette in its long-stemmed amber holder. My grandfather’s memoirs summon up an age when a young attaché’s time off might be spent playing golf at Spandau, skating at the Tiergarten and paying sedate weekly visits to a lively old lady known to himself and Cecil Spring-Rice as Countess Tiddly-Winks (Tiele-Winckler), whose respect for England remained undimmed.
One image stands out in Richard Seymour’s gentle recollections. In 1897, while still forbidden to visit England, the Emperor decided to celebrate his grandmother’s Diamond Jubilee at Kiel. Travelling up by private train to Schleswig-Holstein for the occasion, Sir Frank Lascelles made what Richard Seymour later realised had been a pre-planned stop. Disembarking at a small, deserted station, well out of view of the royal party, the English diplomat ordered his team to pay their respects to a tall, shuffling-footed old man who – with a shock of excitement – Seymour recognised as the fallen Chancellor. Bismarck’s health was failing, his eyesight almost gone, but he still held himself like a prince – and was saluted as such by the little English party before they continued on their way.
Welcomed to Kiel, and scolded for not having dressed in yachting attire (Willy’s obsession with uniform extended to every area of official life), Sir Frank’s little group were offered a pointed toast. Saluting Victoria as the wisest sovereign in Europe, Wilhelm evidently expected his emollient words to be swiftly transmitted to the ageing Queen as a peace offering. Perhaps the message went astray; certainly, no response was forthcoming.
In the summer of 1899, following strong hints from Count von Hatzfeldt and Baron Eckardstein about her nephew’s desire for a rapprochement, Victoria finally relented. The Emperor was requested to visit the Isle of Wight for her birthday celebrations, but the invitation extended only to Osborne, her private home. Willy, who had been sorely missing his summer sailing jaunts to Cowes, took umbrage. Announcing that he could not dream of visiting England while his grandmother’s prime minister, Lord Salisbury, stood in the way of Germany’s plans to colonise the tiny Polynesian islands of Samoa, Willy presented a dollop of his own expert advice upon the handling of prime ministers, before grandly regretting his inability to travel – not to Osborne – but to Cowes.*
Victoria was not easily vexed, but it did not please her to be offered advice about the handling of Lord Salisbury by her obstreperous grandson, and it pleased her even less to be so wilfully misunderstood. The words ‘not to Cowes’ were fiercely underscored in her response. Willy’s provocative answer was to send the English-crewed Meteor over to compete at the Cowes Regatta, lacking only his own imperial presence on the decks. The Meteor won. Graceless in victory and still sulking about Lord Salisbury, Wilhelm informed the Royal Yacht Squadron (of which the Prince of Wales was the proud president) that British racing regulations were flawed (not quite up to the standards maintained in Germany).
Petty though Willy was being, the more serious dispute about Samoa did remain unresolved and Britain, in October 1899, was also at war once again against the Boers. Eager not to provoke a repetition of the Kruger telegram debacle, Victoria accepted Willy’s suggestion of paying a visit to Windsor in November, together with the large suite upon which the Emperor always insisted.
In a controversy strangely reminiscent of Willy’s descent upon his mother’s home at Frankfurt, it was the retinue that nearly undid this second attempt at peacemaking. Bertie, who had not taken kindly to his nephew’s slurs on the integrity of the Royal Yacht Squadron, was dismayed to learn that Willy intended to bring with him a certain Admiral von Senden for whom (as Willy well knew) the Prince of Wales felt a strong dislike. Pleas and warnings proved unavailing; not even the beguiling Baron Eckardstein could persuade Willy to leave the Admiral at home. Worse: the Emperor – forgetting who had requested the invitation in the first place – now threatened to cancel his visit until the issue of Germany’s presence in Samoa was resolved.
Negotiations continued. Bertie grudgingly agreed that von Senden might join the gathering, so long as he kept a decent distance; the Emperor, in turn, allowed the Samoan discussions to be briefly laid aside. On 19 November, Willy and Dona arrived in England for a ten-day visit. A peculiar but carefully planned medley of Wagner overtures and Gilbert and Sullivan songs accompanied their state banquet at Windsor with the Queen. No harsh words were uttered. It seemed, to the relieved diplomats from both countries, that peace was in the air.
Good relations having been shakily restored, Willy maintained them in his own inimitable style. A gratified Daisy Pless received a contribution of £300 to her fund for the graves of British soldiers killed during the Boer War. Richard Seymour, back at the British Embassy in Berlin for a second stint, was as startled as his chief when, unannounced, ‘booted, spurred and in full uniform’, the Emperor bounced into Sir Frank Lascelles’s bedroom, plumped himself down on the bed, unrolled his maps and delivered advice on how the new campaign in South Africa was to be conducted, with a request that his words should instantly be transmitted to London (it was 8 a.m.).12
Victoria, too, may have been anxious to strengthen the connection with Germany when she expressed the wish that one of her own family should preside over Prince Albert’s duchy of Coburg. In the summer of 1900, ‘Charlie’ Albany, an Eton schoolboy without a word of German in his vocabulary, learned of his fate. Wilhelm, stepping into the role of substitute father, oversaw the first five years abroad of a bewildered exile who acutely missed his sister Alice and the happy life that they had shared at Claremont, the family home. Treating the young Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha with a kindness that was not forgotten, Willy took a keen interest in his progress and even – in due course – found him a bride who was both pretty and affectionate. Gradually, with Willy’s help, a very English young man learned to become a devoted German.
The Prince of Wales had never been the German Emperor’s fondest fan. Nevertheless, Bertie recognised that genuine endeavours were being made. On 7 March 1900, less than a year after ridiculing Willy for his pompous habits and crass announcements, Bertie went out of his way to express gratitude to his nephew for ‘the loyal friendship which you manifest towards us on every possible occasion’.
Knowing how proud the Emperor was of being an admiral of the British fleet, Bertie even added a tactful tribute to his naval rank, telling him that England would ever count upon Germany as her best friend ‘as long as you are at the helm’.13
Further evidence of Wilhelm’s desire for reconciliation emerged during this time. President Kruger’s request to rally support by undertaking a personal tour of Germany was turned down. Instead, the Emperor attended a conciliatory meeting at the British Embassy with Cecil Rhodes.
Initially hostile to Germany, Cecil Rhodes had revised his views for reasons that were largely pragmatic. He had come to Berlin in March 1899 to discuss the possibility of taking his planned Cape to Cairo railway line through German territories: during the course of a half-hour of private discussion with the Emperor in the Embassy’s billiard room, a second and more altruistic plan was discussed and, so it seems, agreed.
Opened three years later, in 1902, Rhodes’s will included handsome funding for the Oxford scholarships that still bear his name and that offered politically minded young Americans the chance to study alongside English students at Rhodes’s own alma mater. A codicil added Germany to the scheme and stressed that Wilhelm II would take personal responsibility for picking out the students he considered eligible for the scholarships.
Why did Rhodes add Germany? It seems likely that the suggestion emerged from an encounter so amicable that Willy (according to an attentive Richard Seymour) had expressed a wish that Rhodes could join his own government. Certainly, Wilhelm approved the scheme and concientiously selected students for Oxford from 1902 until the German Rhodes Scholarships were cancelled in 1914. (Opened again for the ten years between 1929–39, they have resumed operation without interruption since 1971.)
In the first year of the new century, the press continued to play England and Germany off against each other in a way that heightened nationalism and paranoia in both countries to fever pitch. Bertie’s image of his nephew at the helm of a ship remained apt; the difficulty was that neither the German nor the British craft seemed willing to deviate from a course that had grown increasingly antagonistic and defensive.
England’s war in Africa exposed weakness in her own defences and channels of information. Fears grew that the mother country was herself vulnerable to attack from the navy to which Wilhelm II had allocated an eye-watering 408 million marks in 1898, and over which, in 1899, he awarded himself complete control. The Emperor spoke of friendship – but could he be trusted?
The death of Victoria at the beginning of 1901 offered Wilhelm a rare opportunity to reassure England of Germany’s friendship; it was a challenge to which he brought all of the considerable theatrical talent at his disposal.
The drama was all the more moving for being genuine. Wilhelm admired Victoria greatly; he relished his role as her eldest grandson. He was at Kiel when news arrived that she was failing; the Krupp-armed Hohenzollern reached harbour at Cowes on 21 January, just in time for the Emperor to join the cluster of relations who had gathered in the gloom of Osborne, waiting for the end. As Victoria faded into unconsciousness during the following afternoon, Willy took his place opposite the doctor at the royal bedside. The German Emperor’s strong right arm – as muscular as his left was withered – provided a firm, unwavering support for the last two and a half hours of the Queen’s life.
For once, there were no tantrums, no demands. Having measured up the corpse and placed a Union Jack on show (Victoria had rejected the use of undertakers for her funeral), Willy appeared to feel that his role as principal mourner was complete.
Tactfully, the new King Edward VII thanked his nephew by making him a field marshal as a birthday gift, three days before the funeral. Less tactfully, Willy requested (and was refused) the right to place his grandmother’s body in the coffin.
The Times had mentioned the Emperor’s arrival, but not his presence at the Queen’s bedside. Compensation was to hand in the stately, exhaustive columns of prose that detailed every aspect of the funeral ceremonies. Readers learned that the Emperor had marched at the side of the new King, directly behind the hearse; that Willy had worn his new field marshal’s uniform and had been honoured by a rendering of ‘Heil dir im Siegerkranz’ (‘the air being the same as that of the British National Anthem’, as The Times was anxious to explain). King Edward, courteously acknowledging his own new role as chief of the 1st Dragoon Regiment of the Prussian Guard, had paraded in the traditional blue-grey cloak and black and gold pickelhaube helmet; a uniform which, as The Times reassured its readers, ‘did not for a moment prevent His [Majesty’s] recognition by every bystander’. Such assurances were necessary; the truth was that King Edward, when attired in Prussian uniform, looked – as Bertie had always sounded – unnervingly Germanic.
Just for once, Willy failed to put a foot wrong. He talked to the crowds, delighting them with his clear and idiomatic English; he asked after the welfare of the regiment in South Africa of which he was, officially, commander-in-chief; he spoke with respectful veneration about his deceased grandmother; he wore an expression of becoming sadness when acknowledging the weakening health of his own mother.
Willy, as even the constantly apprehensive inhabitants of the German Embassy agreed, had behaved well. There was, on this occasion, no sign of the Emperor’s terrifying impetuousness; no hint of that unpredictable flicker with which Willy could change from friend to foe. Mourning the end of an era, fearing the aggressive purpose for which Germany’s mighty and swiftly growing fleet might be intended, the English correspondents tumbled over themselves in their eagerness to make Wilhelm feel at home and among friends. The Emperor (The Times pleaded with uncharacteristic humility) must have been deeply gratified by ‘the cordiality of the people and their sincere desire to do him honour’. Wilhelm II, the Telegraph grovelled, had shown himself to be ‘the true heir to Frederick the Great’, while being ‘largely of our own blood’. Surely, the journalistic under-current seemed to murmur, there was no need to rock the boat? Surely, as Joseph Chamberlain had urged to a gathering at Leicester back on 30 November 1899, England, Germany and America could now unite to preserve peace in the world? Surely, the German Emperor’s deference to his royal grandmother signalled the wish for peace with a country that was so nearly his own?14
Willy’s mother died just seven months after Victoria, following a long, painful and gallantly discreet battle with cancer. Vicky, even from the seclusion of the Friedrichshof, had always held the pin that could prick the balloon of her son’s easily inflated ego. With Vicky gone, and Victoria’s voice reduced to a whisper from the grave, Willy’s confidence could only increase.
The women of power were dead: only his compliant Dona remained, an empress who was always ready to soothe her husband’s vanity, ever willing to bolster Wilhelm’s faith in himself as the imperial leader of a young, ambitious and increasingly powerful nation. In the summer of 1901, with ‘IF’ pinned high above his desk, Willy was ready to demonstrate that he, Emperor Wilhelm II, not the exalted gentleman whose large behind now rested on the English throne, was the man who Kipling had in mind.15 ‘If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you . . .’
The fault, for Willy, would always lie in others, never in himself. Nobly, in his own turbulent and increasingly unhinged mind, he intended to gain for the great Fatherland the role that she deserved. The Emperor Wilhelm II would reduce England to picture-book dependency: a charming island, no larger in consequence than the pretty, impoverished duchies of pre-imperial Germany. Little Albion belonged to the past. Germania held the keys to the future.
Footnotes
* Lascelles’s opposite number in London was the wise and tactful Count Paul von Hatzfeldt (1885–1901), increasingly assisted, as his health began to fail in 1898, by Baron Hermann von Eckardstein.
* America and England were in fierce dispute with Germany over the division of land rights in Samoa. The islands were coveted by all three countries for their strategic location.