CHAPTER IV
Where did his sympathies lie? Let us judge him by his actions. He throws his Privy Councillorship in the Sovereign’s face, and his Baronetcy as well; and are we not justified in saying that his sympathies, by that very action, showed themselves to be German and not British?
Lord Wittenham (formerly Registrar to the Privy Council), House of Lords, 26 July 1918
On 23 June 1915, three weeks after Edgar’s arrival in America, Sir George Makgill of the Anti-German Union made a successful preliminary application to the High Court in London. The Court directed that an order be served on Sir Ernest Cassel and Sir Edgar Speyer, under the ancient name of quo warranto, to show by what authority they claimed to be members of the Privy Council. While insisting that his client ‘bore no animus against anyone in particular’, Makgill’s Counsel observed archly that Edgar had left the jurisdiction ‘for his health or something else’.1
Six months later, in December, the full case came before the King’s Bench Division of the High Court, presided over by the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Reading. Makgill’s argument was simple: Cassel and Speyer were ineligible to sit on the Privy Council by virtue of Section 3 of the Act of Settlement, 1701. The section was unequivocal:
No person born out of the kingdoms of England, Scotland, or Ireland or the Dominions thereunto belonging (although he be naturalised... except such as are born of English parents) shall be capable to be of the Privy Council.
The case* was argued by some of the leading advocates at the English bar. Cassel retained the services of Sir Robert Finlay (soon to be Lord Chancellor). Edgar was represented in his absence by John Henry Roskill. The Court had directed that notice of the hearing be served on the Home Secretary as an interested party, but in complying with this direction, Makgill’s solicitors showed him little respect. ‘This is not’ – so ran their covering letter – ‘to be taken as an invitation by us to you to attend and appear at the Argument: indeed we are doubtful if you have any locus standi’*.2 In fact the constitutional importance of the case, known as a ‘relator action’, required the intervention of the Attorney- General, Sir Frederick Smith, who, together with the Solicitor-General, Sir George Cave (both future Lord Chancellors), appeared on behalf of the Home Secretary.
On specific instructions, Roskill made an unusual preliminary statement on behalf of his client. Unlike Cassel, Edgar had filed no evidence. Roskill explained his client’s feeling that, having publicly offered to resign his privy councillorship, and having given his reasons for so doing, it would be paradoxical now to assert his right to it; but that having been directed by the Court to do so, he desired to comply by appearing through Counsel. Nevertheless, said Roskill, his client did not wish it to be thought that he was doing anything inconsistent with what he had offered in his letter to the Prime Minister.
This declaration could hardly be expected to make a favourable impression on the Bench. In effect Edgar was intimating that he did not care much one way or the other about the outcome of the case. The Lord Chief Justice quickly replied that the Court was concerned only to determine the point of law at issue and need not comment on Roskill’s observation. The law was straightforward. Under the Naturalisation Act of 1870 a naturalised alien enjoyed the same rights as a natural-born British subject. The Act repealed by implication all previous legislation to the contrary, including Section 3 of the Act of Settlement. The appointment of Speyer and Cassel to the Privy Council was unimpeachable.
Having found in their favour, however, Lord Reading drew a significant distinction. Costs normally follow the event, but are a matter for the Court. While awarding costs to Cassel, the Lord Chief Justice ordered that Edgar should pay his own. On the face of it, the decision was uncontroversial, since Edgar had chosen not to engage in the action. In fact, it was intended as a deliberate slight. The reason, as Reading told Sir Almeric Fitzroy afterwards, was that while Cassel’s conduct had been entirely correct, through his ‘loyalty letter’ in The Times ‘attesting in earnest language his loyalty to the King and to the country of his adoption’, Edgar’s attitude, through his instructions to Counsel, was anything but. He had shown himself to be ‘studiously disrespectful’. He had ‘in substance told the King and the Privy Council to go hang’.3 This lack, or apparent lack, of respect towards his membership of the Privy Council, would have lasting consequences.
On the dismissal of his action, Sir George Makgill appealed for donations, evidently with success, to enable him to take the case against Edgar to the Court of Appeal. He did not pursue his action against Cassel, perhaps because Cassel could point, as he had done in his ‘loyalty letter’, to the fact that all his closest relatives had enlisted in the King’s service. The appeal, which was heard in July 1916, was rejected, the Court of Appeal confirming the decision of the High Court. For Makgill and the Anti-German Union, the outcome served to bring home ‘the serious need for drastic reform of our naturalisation laws’.4
William Boosey’s attempt to veto the performance of German music at the Queen’s Hall as the insidious legacy of Sir Edgar Speyer was echoed a year later in the House of Commons by Sir Alfred Markham, who protested at the continuing predominance of German music under the baton of Sir Henry Wood. Both Newman and Wood had maintained a robust attitude from the first. A fortnight after war was declared, Newman riposted boldly to the cancellation, at Boosey’s insistence, of a Wagner programme at the Queen’s Hall. This, Newman made clear, was an unavoidable mishap dictated by ‘outside pressure’ brought to bear ‘at the eleventh hour by the lessees of the Queen’s Hall’. Beethoven, Brahms and Wagner remained staples of the repertoire, the Wagner evenings proving ‘the chief success’5 of the 1914 season. Pressure for a boycott revived with the sinking of the Lusitania, but Newman and Wood devised a clever compromise. They agreed that no music by living German composers would be played, since Germans would profit from the royalties. As for the classics, however, Wood roundly declared: ‘There is no nationality in music’. ‘To exclude a classic because it is German’, he said, ‘would be as unreasonable as to smash your piano because it is German’.6 This was fairly unanswerable, and the 1915 season went ahead with a liberal repertoire of German classics.
But there was no let up in the pressure for official action against Edgar. Behind the scenes Conservative Central Office had encouraged the attacks by Leo Maxse on prominent Liberals of German origin.7 The decision in the Makgill case was followed by questions in the House. At the end of July 1916, Major Newman MP asked the Prime Minister whether the Government would legislate to remove from the Privy Council any member not of British birth and to restore the law to what it was before 1870; and whether there was any reason to deny Sir Edgar Speyer’s wish to be relieved both of his membership of the Privy Council and of his baronetcy. Asquith replied that no such legislation was contemplated. On the second point, he simply referred his questioner to the published correspondence between himself and Edgar, to the effect that the King had not been minded to grant Edgar’s request. Apart from his own distaste for the agitation on the subject, doubtless the Prime Minister did not intend to enter into discussion of the legalities. As far as the baronetcy was concerned, the law appeared to be that the Crown could not accept the surrender of a hereditary dignity.
Four months later, on 6 December 1916, Asquith was ousted from the premiership by a Conservativedominated coalition headed by Lloyd George and backed by the Northcliffe Press. That Edgar, though out of sight in America, was far from out of mind in London and had been neither forgiven nor forgotten, was immediately clear from press reaction. On the day that Asquith’s Government fell, Northcliffe’s Evening News, followed next morning by the Daily Mail, jubilant at the demise of ‘the old gang’, published a cartoon showing the new, combative Prime Minister, Lloyd George, in the cockpit of a fighter-plane, shooting down a zeppelin named ‘Haldaneism’. In the gondola of the falling dirigible were Asquith, Grey and – Sir Edgar Speyer.
The Conservatives were not disposed to see Edgar let off with paper squibs. The ‘Unionist War Committee’ was a Conservative ‘ginger group’ strongly critical of Asquith’s lacklustre leadership and his perceived softness towards ‘the enemy within’. In late 1916, its ‘Enemy Influence subcommittee’ under Sir Edward Carson was busy considering the unsatisfactory outcome of the Makgill case. In January 1917, it formally demanded that legislation be enacted to bring about the disqualification of naturalised Germans from membership of the Privy Council.
The Clerk to the Privy Council, Sir Almeric Fitzroy, who was, as has been seen, an inveterate enemy of Edgar, scuttled busily behind the scenes, malign and venomous, intent on assisting in his downfall. In 1915 he had made a point of attending the Makgill case. The Court had directed that a copy of the quo warranto order be served on him as an interested party and at Lord Reading’s invitation he even sat next to the judges. Three years later, in August 1918, with the approval of Lord Curzon, Lord President of the Council, he passed to the Home Office notes he had made of his conversation with Reading the day after the hearing. Fitzroy had elicited from the Lord Chief Justice opinions critical of Edgar’s loyalty and tending to the conclusion that he should be removed from the Privy Council. His notes, Fitzroy thought, ‘might be useful’8 to the Home Secretary in determining, under the new Aliens Bill now before Parliament, whether to revoke Speyer’s citizenship.
In the summer of 1918 the war still raged on unabated and had reached its culminating crisis. Russia was out. Italy and France were exhausted. America had barely entered the conflict. Victory and defeat lay in the balance. They would be decided where the war had begun – on the Western Front. The succession of massive offensives unleashed by Ludendorff in a final bid to reach Paris had smashed through the British Fifth Army, thrown the Allies back to Amiens and the Marne and had not yet been stemmed. None could foretell the outcome, but the stakes were desperately high.
How could these tremendous German advances in the fourth year of the war be explained? In London, Noel Pemberton Billing, MP, had one simple answer. Defending himself in person against a charge of criminal libel, Billing insisted that German agents in England had compiled a ‘Black Book’ containing the names of 47,000 Englishmen and women addicted to sexual perversions, who, under threat of exposure, had divulged valuable information to the enemy. Among those listed in this remarkable inventory, Billing, in open Court and to gasps from a packed public gallery, named Asquith, Margot Asquith, Haldane and even the trial judge! Acquitted by a credulous jury, Billing lost no time before rising in the House of Commons to renew the outcry against the remaining uninterned aliens with a question about ‘the number of damned Germans that are running free about the country’.9 The Speaker ruled the question out of order. Billing refused to desist. He was ‘named’ by the Speaker and forcibly removed from the Chamber by the Sergeant-at-Arms and four attendants.
The frenzied obsession with ‘the enemy within’ and the sinister machinations of a ‘hidden hand’ reached a peak. The Prime Minister himself, Lloyd George, gave voice to it ten days later, complaining in the Commons of anonymous letters he said he received from Germans ‘crowing over’ British setbacks:
They are obviously written by Germans and the writers say they are Germans. Where are they? I feel that that sort of thing has got to be stopped.10
On 8 July, the Evening News announced on its front page: ‘This is Enemy Alien Week’. Three days later, a huge demonstration, said to be the biggest since the war began, filled Trafalgar Square. Two large placards summed up the protesters’ demands: ‘A Clean Sweep’ and ‘Intern Them All’.11 On hearing of this, the King was outraged. ‘“Intern them all,” indeed!’ he exclaimed to Margot Asquith. ‘Then let them take me first! All my blood is German. My relations are German. Let me be interned before Cassel or Speyer’.12
The British Nationality and Status of Aliens Bill, discussion of which preoccupied Parliament in the second half of 1918, was the product of the public agitation that had raged throughout the war. Lord Charles Beresford, now raised to the peerage, was no less vocal a popular tribune in the Lords than in the Commons. ‘What the public really wants’, he declared, ‘is that all naturalised subjects of enemy origin should have their naturalisation papers revoked’.13 Ever alert to the demands of public opinion, Lloyd George, even at this critical juncture of the war, made it his business to put in an appearance when the Commons discussed the Bill. ‘I myself’, he declared, ‘during the last few weeks, in spite of other urgent matters, have given consideration to it, because I regarded it as a matter of great concern affecting the prosecution of the war’.14 How the elimination of naturalised Germans in Britain could affect the outcome of the tremendous struggle on the Western Front, the Prime Minister did not explain. Did he too believe in the influence of the ‘hidden hand’? Or, more plausibly, did he seek, for political advantage, ostensibly to lend it credence?
The fury against Prince Louis of Battenberg and Sir Ernest Cassel, which had blazed a few years earlier, searing both its victims, had largely spent itself. Lord Sandhurst, for the Government, pleaded for Prince Louis, now anglicised as the Marquess of Milford Haven, and Cassel, exonerated by his family’s war record, to be relieved of further obloquy. This left Edgar to face the brunt of the anti-German campaign as the Bill’s most prominent target. In the Commons, Noel Pemberton Billing denounced the ‘German Jew called Edgar Speyer, who is now working out the damnation of this country in America’.15 A month later, on 29 July, Bonar Law, under intense pressure from his backbenchers, brought up the issue of Edgar’s membership of the Privy Council before the War Cabinet. Chaired by Lloyd George, the War Cabinet agreed that once the Aliens Bill became law, Edgar’s case would be referred to the Committee to be set up under it. Bonar Law informed the Commons accordingly the same evening (and Curzon the Lords three days later).
On 24 August another mass rally took place in Hyde Park. A monster petition, containing 1. million signatures and ‘rolled up like a big drum’,16 was conveyed to 10 Downing Street on a lorry. It demanded the immediate internment of every German in the country. Behind the lorry, waving flags and bearing placards, a long, motley procession wound its tumultuous way through the West End: discharged servicemen, members of the Anti- German Union (now calling itself the British Empire Union), vigilantes still on the hunt for German spies, Trade Unionists, top-hatted City gents in frock-coats, their women-folk and other camp-followers. Lloyd George was not in Downing Street to receive the petition. When this became known to the demonstrators, now in Trafalgar Square, they held another mass meeting to express their disappointment in a resolution deploring the Government’s failure to appreciate ‘the deep national feeling’ about ‘the great peril of the enemy alien at large’. Every Member of Parliament should be asked whether or no he favoured ‘the internment of all enemy aliens’.17
As the tide of war began, at long last, to turn gradually but unmistakably against Germany, so the anti-German temper at home continued to rise. Much of it was understandable. The Germans were in retreat on the Western Front, but they withdrew in good order and British troops paid heavily for every advance. Casualties were as heavy as at any time since 1914. On 10 October, even as the German Government, conscious that the war was lost, was sending out peace-missives to President Wilson, the Kingston to Holyhead mail-boat, the Leinster, was torpedoed in the Irish Sea, with the loss of 400 lives. ‘Brutes they were when they began the war’, the Foreign Secretary, the normally soft-spoken Balfour, said in the Commons, ‘and, as far as we can judge, brutes they remain’.18 Evidence emerged daily of wanton but deliberate destruction by the retreating Germans in France and Belgium and of maltreatment of the 60,000 British prisoners-of-war in German hands. To ‘make Germany pay’, both literally and metaphorically, became the keynote of a vocal public opinion.
The Prime Minister, intent on a general election to renew the Coalition mandate, did not demur from the proposition that his Conservative allies would go to the polls on what C P Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian, described to him as ‘an orgy of anti-Germanism and the aliens hunt.’19 Lloyd George himself was no fanatic. When asked what he would do with the mammoth petition unloaded at Downing Street, his secretary had replied, with a grin: ‘The dustmen will have it’.20 There must be limits to the ‘smelling out’ of aliens, Lloyd George warned the Commons. ‘There are’, he reminded them, ‘few people in this country who are not of Teutonic origin. I’m not sure’, he added, to laughter, ‘that I am not the only survivor on the Treasury Bench who is not of alien origin.’21 While Lloyd George himself might not personally go all the way with the hard men among his Tory allies, however, he was expediently ambivalent and far from unwilling to profit electorally from their zeal.
Within days of the Armistice, the temperature was further raised in Parliament. Lord Beresford observed, with some justice, that the new Aliens Act was passed ‘in deference to public agitation and was not brought forward by the Government itself.’22 Its purpose was to invest the Home Secretary with power to revoke certificates of naturalisation.
Under the Naturalisation Act of 1870 no such power existed: naturalisation, once granted, was permanent. The Act of 1914 allowed for revocation if the certificate had been obtained by fraud, but the Act of 1918 went far beyond this. The new Act authorised the Home Secretary to revoke a certificate of naturalisation on various stated grounds, notably disloyalty to the Crown ‘by overt act or speech’ or communicating or trading with the enemy, or where an individual’s retention of his certificate would not be ‘conducive to the public good’; and these were the heads under which charges would eventually be brought against Edgar. Such charges would be examined by a judicial committee, chaired by a High Court judge appointed by the Home Secretary in consultation with the Lord Chancellor. The Home Secretary, Sir George Cave, confirmed that if his certificate of naturalisation was revoked, ‘Sir Edgar Speyer will cease to be a member of the Privy Council’.23
But suppose Edgar forestalled the Home Office and stole its thunder? For at this juncture Edgar did attempt to defuse the whole overheated issue in the most obvious way: by cable to Downing Street. Just as in his letter to Asquith three years before, so now: ‘I once more, in a message to the then Prime Minister, Mr Lloyd George, tendered my resignation as a member of the Privy Council. To this message I received no reply’.24 The authorities pondered the telegram. Downing Street passed it on to Buckingham Palace. The King was advised that it was a matter for his Ministers. The Home Office – particularly Sir John Pedder, the Permanent Under-Secretary with special responsibility for aliens – had its sights fixed on Edgar, determined that the new law should take its course and that an expectant public should not be baulked of its Roman holiday.
What evidence did the Home Office have against Edgar? A file on him was opened, but at this stage its contents were meagre. On 17 September 1918, Sir John Pedder had written to Sir Eric Drummond, private secretary to the Foreign Secretary, Balfour:
My dear Drummond,
Under the British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act which was recently passed, the question of the revocation of Sir Edgar Speyer’s certificate of naturalisation will be raised. As you probably know, a Committee of a judicial character has been appointed to consider such cases, and they are just beginning their operations. It is desirable in Sir Edgar’s case to obtain all the available evidence for the guidance of the Committee. The enclosed memorandum contains a summary of the information at present in our possession. It is particularly desirable to obtain further evidence from America as to the relations between Sir Edgar Speyer and the New York House when he went to New York. Sir George Cave would be much obliged if Mr Balfour could obtain from America any further evidence bearing on the case, especially on the particular point mentioned.
The information which we have hitherto obtained from the other side up to the present is perhaps hardly adequate, as you will see from a private note which I also enclose. This is intended for your use only and not to be sent to New York.
We should like to have the further information as soon as possible. Mr Fisher Williams has been dealing with the case in the Home Office, and he would be able to give the Foreign Office any further particulars they require. Perhaps you would care to let him see any dispatch in draft so that he can say whether it covers the points on which information is desired.
Yours sincerely25
The ‘private note’ enclosed with the letter, a statement of everything known about Edgar’s activities in America, confirms that while the Home Office might have reason to suspect him, it had no evidence whatever on which to lay charges against him.
The decision to charge Edgar was thus taken long before there was anything to charge him with. The Home Office kept prodding and prying. It set enquiries afoot on several fronts. It asked Scotland Yard about Edgar’s activities before his departure for America. Sir Basil Thomson, head of CID and an assiduous wartime spycatcher, whose persistence had helped to bring Sir Roger Casement to the scaffold, was asked whether the police had any evidence of ‘disloyal or disaffected act or speech’ or ‘unlawful communication with the enemy’ or association with any business which he knew would assist the enemy. Special Branch had kept a file on Edgar since 1914. During the first year of the war it had received numerous hostile reports, but having looked into them at the time, it could find ‘no evidence that Sir E Speyer was doing anything to assist the enemy or against the law of this country’.26
It was not a promising start for the authorities. A minute of 29 October 1918 from Sir John Pedder, advising the Home Secretary on his reply to a Commons question on the progress of proceedings against Edgar, confirmed that his case, when heard, would be ‘on counts still to be settled’. Pedder observed:
The case is a very difficult and important one, likely, I suppose, to be fought hard: and at present the evidence is by no means complete. It will take some time to work it up. Enquiries are being made in [the] USA.27
What, then, of Edgar’s activities in America? In September 1918, a senior official had advised that ‘before launching the case’, the British Embassy at Washington ‘should be pressed for any further evidence which they have’.28 What evidence did they have? How had Edgar spent his time in the United States? In the summer of 1915, a few months after his arrival in New York, he had moved to Boston. He found it congenial, the nearest equivalent to an English town. Opinion there was pro- English. It was a literary and above all a musical centre. He spent most of his time there, going to Bar Harbor on the Maine coast for the summer months, and this became the pattern of his life.
He joined the St Botolph Club, meeting-place of the Boston literati, though he noticed that ‘a great many members did not seem very keen to know me’;29 and he moved largely among musical friends and acquaintances, including the Dean of the Boston Conservatory. He attended concerts by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and he got to know its celebrated German conductor, Dr Karl Muck. The Crown was to make much of this, and of his association with John Koren, treasurer of the St Botolph Club, a man with a strong interest in music and the arts. Edgar’s name appeared occasionally in the social columns of the newspapers, but he shunned publicity, gave no interviews and issued no statements. He was anxious to avoid controversy and he was annoyed when a report of the Makgill case appeared in the Boston Journal. Ostensibly his life was one of quiet retirement, centred upon music.
The British authorities thought otherwise. Since early in 1918, the Home Office had pressed the War Trade Intelligence Department and, through the Foreign Office, the British Embassy in Washington and the British Military Mission in New York, to expedite enquiries and produce results. The Home Office pursued several lines of enquiry. In particular it sought information on Edgar’s ‘attitude towards the pro-German activities’ of Speyer & Co in New York, and ‘how far knowledge of those activities can be brought home to him’30 since his arrival in America. It was known that on his arrival in New York Edgar had used the firm’s address as his own and that he had sent his own business cables from the offices of Speyer & Co. These, however, proved to be temporary arrangements and there was nothing unlawful in them. Had matters gone further?
A memorandum of August 1918 to the Home Secretary from John Fisher Williams, the Home Office official in charge of Edgar’s file, went straight to the point. Did Edgar’s activities fall within the ambit of the new legislation? ‘The crucial question’, wrote Fisher Williams
is whether or not after his arrival in America Sir Edgar Speyer so far took part in the pro-German activities of the New York house ... as to bring himself within the terms of Section 7 of the B[ritish] N[ationality] & S[tatus] of A[liens] Act as now amended as having either ‘shown himself by act or speech to be disaffected or disloyal’ or by having ‘unlawfully traded or communicated with the enemy or with the subject of an enemy state or ... have been engaged in or associated with any business which is to his knowledge carried on in such manner as to assist the enemy’ in the war.31
When the United States entered the war in April 1917, James Speyer and Eduard Beit von Speyer had severed the connection with each other’s House. Until then, Speyer & Co had continued as before to conduct the large-scale business with Germany for which they had been on the British blacklist since December 1915. Business had been carried on either through banks in neutral states or directly with German banks, including Speyer- Elissen, by means of coded messages designed to evade British monitoring of telegraphic and wireless communications. However hostile to British interests, this was something Speyer & Co were free to do as long as the United States remained neutral.
America once a belligerent, however, the American authorities, as well as the British, now turned their attention to Speyer & Co and James was called in for questioning. He complained vociferously about the blacklisting. ‘The British are down on everything connected with me’, he said, adding incautiously: ‘I wish we were at war with some other people than the Germans’. Realising that he had gone too far, he tried to make out that he had in mind the Japanese, but the inference was ‘unmistakable’, his interlocutor noted. ‘He referred to Great Britain’, which he criticised repeatedly and with ‘strong antagonism’.32
As for Edgar, Lord Chief Justice Reading, as has been seen, while ruling in his favour on the point of law in the Privy Council case in 1915, had ruled against him in the matter of costs. The day after giving judgment, Reading had encountered Sir Almeric Fitzroy, who asked whether now that Edgar appeared to be transacting business through the New York House, he ought to be removed from the Privy Council. Reading ‘replied without hesitation: “Yes”’. He also assented to Fitzroy’s suggestion that he, Reading, should press the point ‘as strongly as possible’33 on Prime Minister Asquith.
It so happened that from late 1915, by a wholly unforeseeable chain of events, the fortunes of war found both Edgar and Lord Reading on American soil. While Edgar’s star was in free fall, however, Reading’s had taken spectacular upward flight, the more remarkable in contrast to his situation not long before the war, when his reputation was still overshadowed by his prominent exposure in the Marconi scandal. Disgruntled Conservatives might continue to rake up the affair, but once the war began, Reading’s unrivalled financial expertise and persuasive advocacy made him indispensable both to Asquith and to Lloyd George. In the autumn of 1915 Reading spent six weeks in the United States, not as Lord Chief Justice, but as head of an Anglo-French mission to negotiate American credits. In the course of meetings with American bankers, he told Fitzroy, James Speyer ‘had moved heaven and earth to obtain an interview with him’; but the dexterous, diplomatic and now far more cautious Reading had taken care to avoid him. ‘He knew him to be the tool, if not the spy, of Bernstorff, and that was enough for him’.34
Nor did Reading have anything to do with Edgar. Much had changed in the year since 1914, when the two fellow Liberals were on friendly terms and Edgar, then at the outset of his troubles, had written to thank Reading for ‘your more than kind letter’, for which Edgar expressed himself as ‘touched’ and ‘very grateful’.35 Having burned his fingers over Marconi, Reading was at pains to keep out of trouble; and if anyone spelled trouble now, that man was Edgar.
Three years later, Lloyd George was Prime Minister, and his faithful emissary Reading, now Earl of Reading, was Ambassador Extraordinary in Washington, where he first eclipsed and then replaced the actual ambassador. In the spring of 1918, at the supreme crisis of the war, Reading stood at the height of his authority with both the American and British Governments. It was then that, acting on instructions originating from the Home Office, he found himself looking into Edgar’s activities in America. Then, on 6 April 1918, he dispatched in cipher the following cable to the Foreign Secretary, Balfour:
Personal
Confidential. I have received a letter from Sir Edgar Speyer, informing me that he wishes to return to England on business matters, and asking to see me for the purpose of obtaining my advice. Please inform me whether you have any views on the subject of his proposed visit to me and his return to England. My inclination is against permitting visit to me: it might easily be misinterpreted.36
Reading’s meaning was that if Edgar were known to have been received by the Ambassador it would go down badly in England. It was scarcely of less concern to Reading that such a meeting might reflect badly on himself.
In any event, the answer was no. Balfour replied four days later:
I share your view as to the undesirability of receiving a visit from the gentleman in question, and all idea of his return to this country should be discouraged.37
Reading put off successive requests by Edgar to see him, and Edgar gave up trying. Reading then took up the question of Edgar’s legal standing in America. He learned from the State Department that, under a presidential proclamation, any person of German birth finding himself within the jurisdiction of the United States, even though a naturalised British subject, became under American law an enemy alien, liable to internment. The question, as Reading informed the Foreign Office in a ‘personal telegram’38, was whether Edgar was born in Germany. ‘If this suits our views’, he cabled slyly, ‘would you let me know his birthplace’.39 The Foreign Office, while mildly objecting on principle to any British citizen’s being classified as an alien, commented: ‘as to calling him an alien, we have no desire to protect Speyer’.40 The lucky chance of Edgar’s birth in New York spared him the humiliation of arrest and internment in the United States.
Even before America entered the war, the American intelligence services had extended their surveillance to Edgar. Enquiries began in 1916, during his summer sojourn in Maine. His friend, Karl Muck, noted contemptuously:
A secret service fellow is loitering about here just now. He divides his attention between Sir Edgar Speyer (in Bar Harbor) and myself. Idiots.41
The reports of the secret service agents were of the cloak-and-dagger variety. The Home Office described them as ‘rather melodramatic’. Detectives had burgled the New York apartment where Edgar’s ‘confidential secretary’ lived. The secretary, they were told, had on occasion displayed symptoms of extreme nervousness. He had had to be sedated with bromo-seltzer, and had slept in his clothes ‘with a revolver under his pillow’. They were not clear why. They thought he might have been attempting to blackmail Edgar. They had found a code, which, however, might have been a banking code. They heard tell of late-night conversations between Edgar and the secretary. They raided the Speyers’ own apartment. They interviewed domestics. One domestic spoke of a scrapbook containing newspaper reports of U-boat sinkings. A housemaid told of ‘a mysterious meeting’ in ‘Lady Speyer’s boudoir’, of conversations in German between the Speyers and miscellaneous visitors, said to include a German naval captain, a member of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and a man with the unlikely name of Guggengiggle. The same housemaid mentioned a piece of paper containing Chinese characters, whose disappearance appeared to alarm Leonora, of a ‘black bag’ belonging to Edgar and of Edgar’s frequently burning papers. The agents hoped with the housemaid’s assistance to secrete from the apartment several volumes of Edgar’s poems, one of which was thought to glorify the Germans. The Americans concluded that from this ‘muddled story it seems possible that some mysterious and curious things are going on’. The Home Office commented that ‘very little so far seems to have come’42 of it, and so worthless was this farrago of hearsay that no use was made of it at Edgar’s trial.
Back in England, political considerations after the Armistice gave added impetus to the campaign to bring Edgar to account and brought his name back to public attention. The ‘coupon’ election of December 1918 returned the Lloyd George Coalition to power with a landslide majority, but still left the Prime Minister heading a mainly Conservative ministry, with an enlarged host of unruly Conservative backbenchers. ‘George thinks he won the election’, a Tory minister commented. ‘Well, he didn’t. It was the Tories that won the election, and he will soon begin to find that out’.43 Asquith and his followers were routed at the polls. In his own constituency, which he had held for over 30 years, the former Prime Minister confronted a placard reading: ‘Asquith nearly lost you the War. Are you going to let him spoil the Peace?’44
At the hustings Lloyd George did what he could to whip up public expectations of a peace of reparation and retribution. In his notes for a key speech on 29 November he wrote: ‘Deal at this meeting with all controversial matters’. ‘War indemnity’ headed his list of priorities, followed, as he promised his enthusiastic audience, by the ‘exclusion from amongst us of a people who abused our hospitality to spy on us and plot against us’.45 Prominent among his electoral slogans, together with the well-known promises to ‘Make Germany Pay’ and to ‘Hang the Kaiser’, was a pledge for the ‘Expulsion of the Enemy Alien’.46