CHAPTER VII
Suddenly fluttered a wing,
Sounded a voice, the same,
Somebody spoke your name:
Oh, the remembering!
Sounded a voice, the same,
Song of the heart’s green spring,
Oh, the remembering:
Which of us was to blame?
Leonora Speyer, ‘Suddenly’, 1920
When we began this fight, we had clean hands – are they clean now? What’s gentility worth if it can’t stand fire?
John Galsworthy, The Skin Game, 1920
‘I shall never forget nor forgive the treatment I have received. This may not be a fine sentiment but it is the true one at any rate’,1 Edgar wrote to Bernard Shaw in June 1915, shortly after his arrival in America. This feeling of powerful resentment and injustice was fuelled by his treatment by the British authorities across the next six years. It re-emerged when he testified before the Committee, as was noted by Oscar Dowson, assistant legal adviser to the Home Office, who was present during Edgar’s cross-examination: ‘He was evidently suffering from a strong sense of personal grievance at the treatment he had received since the beginning of the war at the hands of his country of adoption.’ Dowson’s overall impression of Edgar was perceptive, and – significantly – it differed from that of Mr Justice Salter. ‘It is evident’, wrote Dowson, ‘that he had no intention to injure the interests of this country during the war... On all essential points Sir E[dgar] Speyer’s conduct was loyal’.2
The Committee’s report was released at the beginning of January 1922. The quality newspapers reproduced it in full, The Times under the heading ‘Speyer Report Revelations’.3 The press as a whole had a field day and revelled in Edgar’s downfall. The Pall Mall Gazette, which before the war had hailed him as a Mr Cheeryble, headed its report ‘The Unmasked Hun’.4 The National Review exulted in the ‘pleasant surprise’ vouchsafed to the public by the detection of ‘this snake in the grass’.5 The Daily Mail referred to ‘acts of flagrant disloyalty during the war’ and ‘deals that helped Germany.6 A Times editorial, headed ‘Sir Edgar Speyer’, observed that Edgar was lucky to have had his naturalisation revoked. Had he remained a British subject, he might have faced the capital charge of treason for ‘aiding and abetting the King’s enemies’7 in time of war. The Daily Express complained: ‘Traitor Still a Baronet.’8
For seven years, from 1914 to 1921, many forces in society had been set in motion against Edgar. Stirred up by the war from the murky depths there emerged on the frothy surface of public life the delusional demagogues, the Beresfords, Bottomleys* and Billings, with their spymania and obsession with the machinations of a ‘hidden hand’. Their vapourings were propelled, like poison-gas, by a powerful and sometimes irresponsible press. At the height of the vendetta in May 1915 a Liberal raged against ‘the foul Northcliffe pogrom of people with German names’.9 ‘The Morning Post took the palm’,10 Edgar told the Committee; but the right-wing press as a whole was baying at his heels, echoing or inciting public and parliamentary opinion, while street processions and the rioting London mob hooted and vented their insensate fury on his head.
Deployed against him at one time or another were the principal organs of state: the Home Office under successive Home Secretaries, Scotland Yard and various branches of the intelligence service at home and overseas, the Board of Trade, the War Office, the Foreign Office and diplomatic services, the Law Officers of the Crown and the judiciary: all intent on bringing him to book.
Behind it all lay what? Envy of Edgar’s wealth and prominence, dislike and suspicion of his political influence, fears and suspicions fired by the visceral resentments of war: justified fear of Germany as a powerful, resourceful and ruthless enemy, suspicion that Germans in England must feel the call of their homeland and would not shrink from obeying it. Edgar did nothing to demonstrate that he was above those suspicions, rather he fed them by his long silence and then confirmed them in the eyes of many with his letter to Asquith. Scapegoats were needed and Edgar fitted the part.
On receiving the Home Secretary’s decision, Edgar was required to surrender his certificate of naturalisation to the Home Office, to be scored through and marked ‘revoked’. Having ceased to be a British subject, he was no longer eligible, under the Act of Settlement 1701, to be of the Privy Council. Sir Almeric Fitzroy did not conceal his glee at the prospect of ‘his expulsion from the Privy Council’. He prepared with long-anticipated relish for the formalities that would remove Edgar’s name from the roll, ‘a step I have long since pressed upon the attention of the authorities’.11
The King, in whose name this was done, took no pleasure in kicking a man when he was down. Now that the unpleasant duty was forced on him, he hoped that it might be done with a minimum of fuss. Fitzroy explained to the King’s Private Secretary, Lord Stamfordham, that following the precedent of George III, notably in the case of Charles James Fox, the King might, depending on his sense of personal outrage, choose to strike out Edgar’s name with his own hand. Stamfordham reported the King’s aversion to ‘anything so personal, and, if I may say so, theatrical’.12 Of the squalid little ceremony at Buckingham Palace in which Edgar’s name was duly expunged, Fitzroy noted unctuously that it was ‘hailed with satisfaction by everyone present’.13 These included the Home Secretary, Edward Shortt, and Sir Robert Horne, who had made the Latin quip at Edgar’s expense. Fitzroy regretted only the apparent impossibility of divesting Edgar of his baronetcy, but took comfort in the thought that he had no male heirs to pass it on to.
Even literature played its part in the vendetta. It has been suggested that in his classic spy-thriller of 1915, The Thirty-Nine Steps, John Buchan may have had Edgar in mind in the character of Appleton, the German agent. Certainly in the persons of Sir Hermann and Lady Gurtner, E F Benson cast Edgar and Leonora as the melodramatic villains of his novel Robin Linnett, set in 1914. Benson portrays Sir Hermann, privy to secret information in July 1914, purchasing shares simultaneously in Vickers and Krupps, and includes such unlikely touches as the young Gurtner children singing Die Wacht am Rhein at bedtime. A dozen years later, Benson evidently thought better of this unkind travesty, for he produced a far more sympathetic account of the true story in As We Are, published in 1932 shortly after Edgar’s death. Yet even Benson assumed that the sentence pronounced on Edgar was just, in the belief that ‘he associated with the pro-German party in New York... and identified himself with them in utterance and in deed’.14
‘Speyer’s affair has made quite a big noise’,15 observed Carswell, secretary to the Committee, when it produced its report. Yet this was no Dreyfus case, such as to divide families, convulse society or put in question the integrity of the state. No body of opinion emerged to question Edgar’s condemnation. Edgar himself, while protesting his innocence, announced his acceptance of the outcome with ‘equanimity’.16 No lessons were drawn from the affair: it had no repercussions. It was, figuratively and perhaps literally, a nine days’ wonder, a postscript to the war.
How, then, should it be seen? As a tale of hubris visited on an overweening Titan – ‘this great Sir Edgar Speyer’,17 as H A Gwynne wrote mockingly at the outbreak of the war, or ‘the notorious German, Sir Edgar Speyer’,18 as William Boosey wrote vindictively at its conclusion? What mischievous sprite had tempted Edgar, on receiving his baronetcy in 1906, to choose for his coat-of-arms a turkey-cock between two trumpeting elephant-trunks, and the ambitious motto: Arduus ad solem?* Did he, like Icarus, invite his fate by flying too near the empyrean heights?
To suggest that Edgar and Leonora were to some degree their own worst enemies or that they brought their fate upon themselves would be an exaggeration. Yet there is a residue of truth in it and there was a touch of folie à deux in their reactions and their departure for America. In their distress they lacked the instinct of prudence. Unmerited, unfair and humiliating though their social ostracism was, philosophical reflection would have reminded them that their ordeal was little compared to those who truly suffered in the agony of the war. Edgar was hardly what the Washington Post described him as on his arrival in America – a ‘war refugee’19 – in the sense applicable, say, to the hordes of wretched civilians who clogged the roads of Belgium in desperate flight from invasion or the reluctant German deportees torn from their English homes into internment camps or, in the case of their English wives and children, into a strange land. And while the Speyers crossed the Atlantic in the comfortable security of a state cabin on a neutral ship, Britons in their thousands were dying in the mud, blood and misery of France and the Dardanelles.
Every cabin on the SS Philadelphia was taken when she left Liverpool on 26 May 1915. Why did Edgar not ride out the storm rather than cut and run, fleeing, as it appeared to some, his country of adoption in its time of trouble? Mr Justice Salter conceded that ‘no adverse inference should be drawn from his leaving this country’.20 Yet the reproach of cowardice also formed part of the opprobrium hurled at him. It underlies a mocking caricature by the artist and wit, Sir Philip Burne-Jones. Entitled ‘The Unholy Family’ or ‘“The Flight into Egypt” 1915’, it depicts Edgar as the donkey, ridden into New York by a sprightly, dominant Leonora and led by their young musical protégé, Percy Grainger. Grainger had decamped for America early in the war. Justly rating himself Australia’s first composer of worth, he had, as he admitted, no wish to risk his neck in the trenches.
Yet it was easier to point the finger of reproof or mockery than to say precisely what in the circumstances Edgar should or could have done. The press yelled at him to ‘leave the country’ or ‘retire into seclusion’.21 Where was he to find seclusion in England? In London the mob was howling at his door. As a suspected spy, he was unwelcome at Overstrand. Anxious, above all, for his wife’s feelings and his daughters’ safety, where could he find seclusion other than overseas? ‘I tried’, he explained, ‘to get out of this atmosphere of suspicion which I could not stand any longer, so I applied for a passport to go away’.22
The question of Edgar’s motives in leaving for America persists. Did he propose to take up permanent residence there? So claimed The Sunday Times, which reported him, on what evidence is not known, as having announced on his departure that ‘he never wished to return to this country’.23 The reason Edgar gave was his need for respite. On arriving in New York, he told the press: ‘The anxieties of life in London have worn me out and I require a long rest’.24 He denied any intention to remain overseas for the duration.
His original destination was not the United States. He had applied for a passport on the day he wrote the letter to Asquith. His wish was to go to Norway, Sweden or Italy, then neutral, but the Passport Office refused his application. Was it feared that he might flee to Germany from these neighbouring countries? If that was his intention, there would have been nothing to prevent him taking ship from the United States to Scandinavia, and thence to Germany. As it was, ‘I was informed I could have a passport for the United States, and so I accepted what I could get. I never had any intention of going there’.25 His first choices of country lend weight to the likelihood that he contemplated a period of repose in natural surroundings free from war; and while he took with him to America some works of art, not suggestive of a short stay, winter clothes were not in his baggage. ‘I had no plans’, he said at his trial. ‘I simply was in despair.’26 The great London stage on which he had made his career, to smiles and applause, for a quarter of a century, had collapsed beneath him; and at the age of 52 he was struggling, bruised and dazed amid the wreckage, to recover his balance and his sense of identity.
In America, the Speyers stayed in a succession of hotels and rented accommodation, principally in Boston, with holiday houses in Maine. At the same time, Edgar kept up his houses in Grosvenor Street and at Overstrand. This suggests that he intended no permanent sojourn in the United States. It is true that a letter which he wrote to Eduard in August 1915 suggests otherwise. It reveals his intention, at least at that time, not to return to England except to wind up Speyer Bros. His ‘decision stands’, he told Eduard. His career in England was over, and while he did not ‘lightly give up a position in which he was active for 28 years’, he could do no other, and Leonora felt ‘the same way’.27 This sounds definite enough and is consistent with other evidence of an intention not to return to England and even, as the Committee found, to settle in Germany. It is strange that the Crown did not make more of it.
An MP asked in 1916: ‘Is there a single chance of Sir Edgar Speyer ever coming back to this country?’28 Yet the fact is that in the spring of 1918, when the prospect of German victory was at its height he sought permission to return to England, but was fobbed off by Lord Reading in Washington. At the end of the war he moved from Boston to New York, taking a long lease of 22 Washington Square. Leonora, as he very plausibly explained, was tired of hotels and rented houses. He himself returned to London in 1921 to attend the hearings of the Committee, and again, very briefly, in 1924 in the course of a European holiday.
His London house was not requisitioned because the Government could find no use for it. However, in January 1918 Edgar responded immediately and gladly to a private request that it be turned into a convalescent home for limbless officers. This scheme fell through, but he at once agreed to let it as a club for Canadian and South African officers on leave. Edgar himself paid the running costs.
Leonora, n.e von Stosch, was passionate, susceptible, impulsive and unpredictable. She was a young divorcee when she married Edgar, at a time when divorce was frowned on in England. ‘She had charisma and would dominate any room she entered’, her granddaughter recalls, and ‘was egocentric, difficult, would be either hot or cold, never consistent’.29 She was, wrote Benson, ‘a highly strung woman’,30 with what is called the artistic temperament. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned may be pitching it a little high, as may be the accusation – though it found credence with Margot Asquith among others – that once war broke out ‘she became a blazing, uncompromising pro-German’.31
Sir Henry Wood recalled:
Just before they left this country, I was walking with Lady Speyer in Hyde Park. We watched one of the many units of young men marching and drilling. I remember Lady Speyer turning to me and saying: ‘My dear Henry, how can these young, untrained boys hope to conquer our armies of trained soldiers? It is dreadful.’32
If Leonora really said this – and what better witness than Henry Wood? – it explains much. The observation, though kindly meant, was in the circumstances extraordinarily imprudent, comparable in tactlessness to the Kaiser’s dismissal of Britain’s ‘contemptible little army’. Leonora’s identification with Germany was the height of folly. Stung by the petty humiliations of which overnight she had become the object, Leonora, as Benson says, ‘lost her head a little and spoke bitterly and unwisely about the ingratitude and perfidy of the English, when the only possible course was to be silent’.33
If Leonora was at fault in being too outspoken, no such reproach could be levelled at Edgar. For nine months he kept silent in the face of insult and provocation. Much good it did him. When he did protest, his famous letter made matters worse. Sir Ernest Cassel, when challenged to demonstrate his loyalty, penned a dignified letter to The Times citing his half-century of service to England and his abhorrence of German policy. Contrasting his letter with Edgar’s, The Times, commented that it behoved men in Edgar’s position to ‘dissociate themselves, not from British honours, but from German malpractice’.34 It was true that Cassel could claim, as Edgar could not, that all his male relatives were engaged on Britain’s side. Ostracised and deeply hurt, Edgar remained proud and defiant. Not for him propitiatory protestations of loyalty. Yet he clearly felt impelled to make some public statement. At a time of long pentup emotion, the action was no doubt cathartic. His letter to Asquith was in its way a cri de coeur.
All the same, it was read and remembered as truculent and peevish. Sir John Pedder described it to Asquith as ‘a bad-tempered letter’.35 Austin Harrison, anti-German editor of the English Review, described it as ‘one of the greatest snubs ever offered to a Prime Minister’,36 while John Bull denounced it as ‘the mailed fist shaken in the face of the British people’.37 Three years after the event, Lord Lincolnshire, who had been Lord Privy Seal under Asquith, spoke in the House of Lords of ‘the brutal and insolent German manner’38 in which Edgar had treated his high honour.
Edgar had already decided to leave England when he published the offending letter. Before leaving, he presented Henry Wood with the title deeds to the Queen’s Hall Orchestra. This sounds like a parting gift. His letter to the Prime Minister, predating his departure by only nine days, was surely intended as a parting shot and indeed a Parthian shot, not indeed at Asquith, who had befriended him, but at the enemies who had rounded on him with such malice, and still more, perhaps, the fairweather friends who had abandoned him. All the same, it leaves a disagreeable taste, after Asquith had staunchly defended him with his own letter to The Times, that Edgar requited him by leaving the country four days later.
Nor was it tactful of Edgar, a fortnight after reaching America, to invite his children’s German governess, Fräulein Klock, who had returned home to Kiel on the outbreak of war, to rejoin them in America. Even if it was, in normal circumstances, ‘perfectly natural’, as he told the Committee, ‘that I was anxious to continue the education of my children’,39 circumstances in 1915 were not normal. The Crown did not fail to press home the objection to which Edgar persisted in exposing himself. ‘Was it not an extraordinary thing’, asked Giveen, ‘for a loyal Englishman going to America to import a German governess at that time of the war?’ ‘No, I do not think so at all’,40 replied Edgar, and denied it repeatedly. Mr Justice Salter was curious. How had Edgar managed to contact Fräulein Klock from America? he asked.
‘I sent quite openly a wireless to Miss Klock’, replied Edgar.
Mr Justice Salter was incredulous. ‘You wirelessed straight to Kiel?’
‘Yes, and signed “Edgar Speyer”.’41
The Speyers did not keep their heads when others around were losing theirs. A sense of proportion, a measure of pluck, a determination to see it through, was missing. Haldane, though he continued to be hissed at in the streets and received more than 2. thousand abusive letters in a single day, endured his fall in stoical silence. He lived to fight another day, and returned to the woolsack in 1924.
The student of this episode, the reader who has followed the thread of these events, confronts throughout the same fundamental question: was Edgar or was he not a loyal British subject? Asked by his Counsel to explain his attitude in August 1914, Edgar replied: ‘My attitude was this: that as soon as Belgium was invaded Great Britain was justified, in fact was obliged to declare war.’42
When he resigned as Chairman of the UERL, his successor, Lord George Hamilton, wrote sympathetically that as an Anglo-German Edgar was ‘in an absolutely impossible position in the event of war’. ‘You have’, he concluded, ‘been the victim’.43
Why, ultimately, had he left England? ‘I felt that my usefulness in this country had gone’, he said. ‘I had not a chance to do anything ... I felt that I was only an embar- rassment to my friends who stood by me’. As for his wartime sympathies, he replied unhesitatingly:
My own feelings were, of course, that I stood by my country, England, where I had lived for upwards of 27 years, where all my attachments were, where I spent a very happy time and had great kindness shown me.
Counsel then asked:
Did the treatment which you received, these accusations of being a spy and a traitor, in any way alter those wishes and attachments that England should win the war?
Edgar replied:
Certainly not, although of course it made me very bitter. But it did not alter my fundamental feelings of my attachment to England.44
How far these sentiments were genuine is for the reader to judge, weighing them against the evidence of this second-hand narrative. Clearly they did not impress Mr Justice Salter, who observed Edgar in the flesh and heard his testimony. It is true that Edgar did not wear his heart on his sleeve or bellow his patriotism from the rooftops, or, as Sir John Simon put it, go around singing ‘God Save the King’.45
Another target of the protracted campaign against Edgar was Asquith and the Asquithians. The Prime Minister’s Downing Street dinner party in the autumn of 1914, at which the position of the fleet was said to have been discussed in the Speyers’ presence, had attained the notoriety of Belshazzar’s feast, and in some Conservative eyes, for Asquith the writing was on the wall. ‘Was he drunk?’ the Earl of Crawford seethed. ‘Is he mad, or does he care so little for our Empire?’46 Crawford’s expostulation echoed expressions of mounting discontent at the character of Asquith’s wartime leadership. In April 1915 Northcliffe confided ‘in violent and contemptuous terms’ his misgivings about Asquith, whom he castigated as ‘indolent, weak and apathetic’. ‘He will never’, said Northcliffe, ‘finish the war’.47
Edgar’s departure from these shores and the fall of the last purely Liberal government were coincidental but symbolic of the decline of liberalism generally. The following year, with continuing military failure and deepening public frustration, John Bull pilloried Asquith as ‘Mr Feeble Hand’, and raged against his refusal to legislate ‘so that never again shall the Hun-born be able to worm his way into the inner councils of the empire... We want no more Sir Edgar Speyers exalted to the highest rank the State can bestow’.48
As late as the summer of 1918, H A Gwynne was still fulminating over ‘Mrs Asquith’s connection with Speyer’,49 and the charge was revived at the General Election, when Lloyd George and the Conservatives joined forces to defeat Asquith and the Liberals and, as Margot noted:
Northcliffe and all who are anti-Henry or me and the Liberal Party said we were pro-German and Pacifists from the first day of the war. I would not drop my old friends for a thousand political ex-enemies. Receiving Cassel and Speyer (specially the latter...) was fatal to me among the silly!50
Edgar was in his way as much a ‘scapegoat for Liberalism’51 as Haldane. In targeting Edgar, Conservatives were paying off old scores, taking vicarious revenge for their deep-seated grievances both against Asquith’s prewar administration and for his wartime failings. In this sense, Edgar was right in seeing the Committee’s Report as ‘neither more nor less than the culmination of years of political persecution’.52 The Report gave satisfaction to Conservatives in its tacit reflection on Asquith and his public defence of Edgar in 1915 – ‘the white-washing letter’, in the words of the Pall Mall Gazette, which castigated ‘those who raised this imposter to his successive dignities’.53 The Morning Post did not fail to remind its readers of ‘Mr Asquith’s testimony to character’.54 The Daily Mail targeted ‘Mr Asquith and Sir Edgar Speyer’ in a single headline, deploring ‘the fact that Speyer should have been allowed to gain admittance to the Privy Council’.55
Asquith’s motives behind his conspicuous, almost excessive support for Edgar have given rise to speculation. ‘At first glance’, writes Professor Brock, ‘his loyalty to Speyer seems wholly admirable’. It was ‘brave to invite him to 10 Downing Street; but given the cloud of enmity and suspicion that hung over him, was it prudent to make Edgar a wartime Prime Minister’s guest?’56 Professor Searle agrees:
Some will admire his stance as showing a loyalty to his friends in their adversity and will applaud his refusal to give way to mob hysteria. Others may doubt the soundness of Asquith’s judgment and see this episode as evidence of a supercilious contempt for public opinion which fatally undermined his wartime premiership.
‘Why’, asks Professor Searle, ‘had Asquith taken such risks with his reputation?’ There was, he concludes, ‘another possible explanation for Asquith’s conduct, namely that he was under a personal or a party obligation to the unpopular financier’.57 The Earl of Crawford, in his fulminations against Asquith’s supposed indiscretion, had concluded: ‘No sane man and no patriot would dream of talking on such a matter to a German-born and German-speaking financier, even if under obligations to him.’ [my emphasis – AL]58
Edgar had contributed to Liberal Party funds. He was also generous with his stock market tips. Had he befriended Asquith at a personal level? Leo Maxse, indeed, asked whether Edgar, ‘the spoilt darling of Downing Street’, had bestowed ‘Stock Exchange tips . la Marconi’.59 It is certainly true that, while not embarrassed for money in the conventional sense, the Asquiths always felt the pinch of an income insufficient to their extravagant style of life. The known evidence adds up to very little. In 1910, while his Grosvenor Street house was undergoing redecoration, Edgar had taken a sixmonth lease on the Asquiths’ mansion in Cavendish Square. Whether he paid rent at more than the market rate is not known. The point is that the Asquiths were rumoured to be in hock to their German friends. An anonymous letter to Margot in May 1915 read: ‘(1) People think you have sold England to the Germans to pay your debts (2) That is why you daren’t intern the big Germans.’60
Viewed in this light, Speyer’s letter to The Times might on one reading be understood not merely as a defiant snap of the fingers in the face of public opinion, but as a calling-in of favours from a Prime Minister beholden to him. If there is substance in this hypothesis – for which, it must be emphasised, there is no shred of evidence – to Asquith’s instant letter of support may be added the evidence of a cable sent by Edgar from America in August 1915 direct to Asquith in the following terms:
It seems that many of my cables to London continue to be arbitrarily held up by censor. I strongly protest against such unwarranted action and resent the implied distrust. Moreover my inability of freely communicating with London works to the detriment of British investors.61
Was this the language in which to address a Prime Minister – unless the sender felt confident of his standing with him?
But perhaps the most likely explanation of Asquith’s response to Edgar’s letter is to be found in the contrast it formed with his simultaneous treatment of Haldane, whom he dropped from his Cabinet, with regret, no doubt, but without ceremony, hesitation or apology, in order to save his own prime-ministerial skin. The day before he wrote to Edgar, he had a tête-à-tête with Haldane, which left him, Margot noted at the time, ‘more shattered... than by anything else’62 in the political crisis of May 1915. Asquith’s public letter of support for Edgar, with its fine disdain for press clamour, may have helped assuage the pangs of conscience and the need to reinforce his own self-respect which he certainly felt in throwing Haldane to the wolves. In standing by Edgar at least, he would not be found wanting in the duties of friendship. In a sense, of course, he had no choice. His hand was forced. Edgar’s publication of his own letter compelled Asquith to follow suit.
The Privy Councillorship was Edgar’s poisoned chalice. No doubt Edgar rued the day he was ever made a Privy Councillor and no doubt he was utterly sincere when in 1915 he asked Asquith – and again in 1918 Lloyd George – to let that cup pass from him. Membership of ‘His Majesty’s Most Honourable Privy Council’ was – and is – a signal distinction and involves an oath of allegiance to the sovereign; but it was not as if Edgar belonged to the narrow circle of those who were actually required to advise the monarch. In the case of men like Edgar, membership was purely honorary and ceremonial. Of the five others who were sworn of the Privy Council on the same day as he and who included, typically, a retired colonial governor, an admiral and a university vice-chancellor, none would have performed other than titular duties.
Was it a case of much ado about nothing? Not to those members of the establishment, notably Sir Almeric Fitzroy, who had expressed sneering disapproval of Speyer’s appointment from the first. Already in 1916 and again in July 1918, Conservative MPs rose at Prime Minister’s question time to remind the House that Edgar had requested to be relieved of his membership of the Privy Council and to ask whether his wish could not be granted.
The question resurfaced in October 1918, when Edgar unexpectedly renewed his offer of resignation in a telegram to Lloyd George. As has been seen, it landed in Downing Street like the proverbial hot potato. Lloyd George wanted nothing to do with it and lobbed it to the King’s Private Secretary. He in turn sought advice from the Lord Chancellor’s Department, which ‘advised him in effect that he had better ask His Majesty’s Ministers, and particularly the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary’.63 The Home Office debated ‘whether he can or should be allowed to take this step’.64 Opinion oscillated between accepting Edgar’s resignation – ‘from the point of view of the satisfaction of the public’ it would be ‘a good thing’65 – and continuing to trawl for information that would lead to his condemnation by the Committee of enquiry. It was another three years before the desired result was reached. Edgar’s real offence lay in treating the honour so lightly by asking to be relieved of it. He could not be permitted to relinquish it on his own terms. He must be deprived of it by due process, and that process would be activated by the revocation of his citizenship. The shining new statutory machinery devised for the purpose must be set in motion. The formalities must be duly gone through. The grim, protracted game must be played out to the end.
Why was Edgar’s trial held behind closed doors? It might be supposed that this was another malicious touch by the authorities. The supposition would be wrong. It was true that hearings in camera had been the practice of the Committee hitherto; but no other case had aroused the same public interest as this, and both the Home Office and the Crown favoured open proceedings. The Committee had the discretion to authorise either: it was Edgar who requested privacy.
It was a cardinal error. Not only did it give the Committee the obvious impression that he had something to hide, but it deprived him of the vital oxygen of publicity. The press, including the Liberal press, would have attended in force. An open hearing would have enabled those whom the Manchester Guardian referred to as his ‘many friends here who will entirely refuse to believe’ in his guilt and who ‘think that Sir Edgar Speyer has been dealt with severely’66 to hear the evidence and test for themselves both the strength of the allegations and the fairness of the proceedings. As it was, the only source of information was the Committee’s Report, leaving the last word with Mr Justice Salter. The findings were damning ‘if’, as The Times said, ‘we are to believe that the Report is justified – and we must do so, as a Judge of the High Court presided at the meetings of the Committee’.67
There is tragedy in the fall of a great benefactor of English musical and artistic life, who had basked in the approval of Edwardian society; but that individual tragedy reflects the wider tragedy of a war in which few in the land were untouched. Among the hardest hit were those most closely involved in Edgar’s condemnation. The Attorney-General lost his elder son. The Solicitor- General, Mr Justice Salter and the Home Secretary, Edward Shortt, each lost his only son. Edgar’s nephew, Karl Schwabach, son of his sister in Berlin, died of wounds in 1916.
Mention has been made of another of Edgar’s nephews, Erwin Beit von Speyer, the elder son of Eduard and Lucie. In 1912, having matriculated from the Goethe Gymnasium in Frankfurt, Erwin spent an undergraduate year at New College, Oxford, like his German father and his American uncle. In August 1914 he was called to the colours as a non-commissioned officer in the Seventh Dragoon Regiment of the German army. After the advance into France, he found himself near Arras. On 24 September, three days after his 21st birthday, he was one of a small detachment of cavalrymen who volunteered for a particularly dangerous reconnaissance. He became separated from his comrades. It was thought that he had been wounded and taken prisoner. In the agony of uncertainty, Eduard cabled James in New York for help in finding him. At the request of the State Department, the American Embassy in Paris organised a search-party. Erwin had been killed in action. His name is one of three young German war-dead commemorated on a tablet in New College Chapel.