Dreadnought

by Robert K. Massie

  The one person in England to whom Lord Salisbury willingly deferred was the monarch. When Salisbury first became Foreign Secretary, Queen Victoria decided that this vigorous champion of Britain’s greatness deserved her confidence. She gave it unstintingly for the rest of her life. He had been Prime Minister only the briefest time in 1885 when he was forced to step down in favor of Gladstone. “What a dreadful thing53 to lose such a man, for the country, the world, and me!” the Queen lamented. Nevertheless, she gratefully congratulated him on the “triumphant success54 of his conduct of foreign affairs by which he has in seven months raised Great Britain to the position she ought to hold in the world.” On the spot, she offered him a dukedom. Salisbury declined, explaining that his “fortune would not be equal55 to such a dignity.” But, he said, “the kind words in which your Majesty has expressed approval of his conduct are very far more precious to him than any sort of title.” Ten years later, the queen’s gratitude and confidence were undiminished. “Every day, I feel the blessing56 of a strong Government in such safe and strong hands as yours,” she wrote. He had, she declared to a bishop, “if not the highest,57 an equal place with the highest among her ministers,” including Lord Melbourne and Disraeli. As he aged and grew heavy, Salisbury’s legs began to weaken. The Queen invited him to sit in her presence.

  The sovereign, to Salisbury, was the embodiment of the nation and the focus of patriotism, the Crown indispensable to the functioning of Kingdom and Empire, its continued prestige the only guarantee of the nation’s stability. Nevertheless, his feelings for the woman, Queen Victoria, went deeper. He was the first of her prime ministers to be younger than she, and he treated her with chivalry and personal devotion. He could not manage the courtly grace and flowery language which Disraeli had troweled onto his Faerie Queen, but he made up these lacks with an iron determination that she should be protected and obeyed. “I will not have the Queen worried,”58 he would say to colleagues who wished to press this or that decision on the monarch. He most admired Queen Victoria’s loyalty, her unflagging sense of duty, and her honesty. “Always speak the truth to the Queen”59 was his only advice to those approaching her for the first time. Her own candor was complete; the one offense which she could not pardon in others was any attempt to deceive or to conceal things from her. Salisbury’s wife was under the impression that her husband told the Queen “everything.”60

  Their correspondence was formal; each wrote in the third person. Lord Salisbury’s letters always began with the phrase: “Lord Salisbury, with his humble duty to your Majesty,...” In cipher telegrams, this was shortened to a terse “Humble duty.” His deference was impeccable but underneath lay his steely will: “Lord Salisbury offers this suggestion61 with much diffidence and is quite prepared to find that there are objections to it which are not evident to him at the moment.”

  The Queen wrote back formally, although when she was upset, she telegraphed excitedly, often bluntly, in the first person. “I am too horrified62 for words at this monstrous, horrible sentence against this poor martyr Dreyfus,” she telegraphed in September 1899 from Balmoral. “If only Europe would express its horror and indignation! I trust there will be severe retribution!” Retribution was beyond Salisbury’s power, but he could and did agree: “Lord Salisbury entirely shares63 your Majesty’s burning indignation at the gross and monstrous injustice which has been perpetrated in France. It is perfectly horrible....” Sometimes, when the Queen was truly aroused, there was nothing that could be done. After the death of the Emperor Frederick, the Queen wanted her widowed daughter to come to England for a long visit. The Prince of Wales and Lord Salisbury discussed the idea and decided that, for political reasons, the Empress should not come. A telegram from Balmoral to Lord Salisbury annihilated this recommendation:

  Letter received.64 Intention doubtless well meant, but it would be impossible heartless and cruel to stop my poor, broken-hearted daughter from coming to her mother for peace, protection, and comfort. She has nowhere to go; everyone expects her to come and wonders [why] she has not come before. It would be no use [to postpone the visit] and only encourage the Emperor [William II] and the Bismarcks still more against us. You all seem frightened of them, which is not the way to make them better. Tell the Prince of Wales this, and that his persecuted and calumniated sister has been for months looking forward to this time of quietness. Please let no one mention this again. It would be fatal and must not be.

  Lord Salisbury knew when the battle was over and wrote calmly to the Prince of Wales:

  Sir:

  In furtherance of the conversation65 I had with your Royal Highness on Monday, I wrote to the Queen that night, giving reasons why I thought it, and your Royal Highness thought it, more prudent that the visit of the Empress Frederick should be deferred.

  I have this afternoon received the enclosed answer from Her Majesty.

  I have the honor to be your Royal Highness’ obedient, humble servant,

  SALISBURY

  Salisbury’s respect for the Queen’s judgment was not based wholly on her rank. As he told the House of Lords after her death: “She had an extraordinary knowledge66 of what her people would think—extraordinary because it could not have come from personal intercourse.... I always felt that when I knew what the Queen thought, I knew pretty certainly what view her subjects would take, and especially the middle class of her subjects.”

  Lord Salisbury, averse to pretense and bombast, had little taste for the Queen’s eldest grandchild. The Prime Minister’s description of William II’s qualities first appeared during the brief reign of Emperor Frederick. Queen Victoria was about to pay her son-in-law a final visit. Officials in Berlin worried that the grandmother might say something to irritate Prince William, her sensitive grandson, who soon would be Emperor. Count Hatzfeldt communicated these worries to Salisbury, who passed them along to the Queen:

  “It appears that his [Prince William’s] head67 is turned by his position and the hope evidently was that your Majesty might be induced to have a special consideration for his position.... Evidently, though Count Hatzfeldt’s language was extremely guarded, they are afraid that, if any thorny subject came up in conversation, the Prince might say something that would not reflect credit on him; and that if he acted so as to draw any reproof from your Majesty, he might take it ill, and a feeling would rankle in his mind which would hinder the good relations between the two nations.... It is nevertheless true—most unhappily—that all Prince William’s impulses, however blameable or unreasonable, will henceforth be political causes of enormous potency; and the two nations are so necessary to each other that everything that is said to him must be very carefully weighed.”

  Salisbury and Hatzfeldt were later involved in the family imbroglio which resulted from William’s behavior towards his uncle in Vienna. The Prince of Wales was furious, and the queen had referred to her grandson as a “hot-headed, conceited,68 and wrong-headed young man, devoid of all feeling.” In his conversations with Hatzfeldt, Salisbury found that the Ambassador had not reported any of these royal opinions to Berlin. “He was simply afraid to do so,”69 the Prime Minister reported to the Queen. “From the hints he let drop, Lord Salisbury gathered that the young Emperor was difficult to manage, that Prince Bismarck was in great perplexity, and his temper had become consequently more than usually unbearable.... If nobody tells Prince Bismarck the truth, there is no knowing what he might do. Lord Salisbury’s impression is that Count Hatzfeldt’s position is very insecure.”

  When Bismarck fell in March 1890, Salisbury pronounced it “an enormous calamity70 of which the effects will be felt in every part of Europe.” The manner of the Chancellor’s dismissal, Salisbury noted to the Queen, had a certain poetic justice: “It is a curious Nemesis71 on Bismarck. The very qualities which he fostered in the Emperor [William II] in order to strengthen himself when the Emperor Frederick should come to the throne have been the qualities by which he has been overthrown.” Nevertheless, the man who had created and con
trolled the carefully balanced interlocking alliance system was gone; Europe would be spared the bullying and secret treaties which doubled back on each other, but Bismarck’s had been a policy of peace. The policies of the young Emperor and his new ministers were unknown.

  The first signs were hopeful. The new German Chancellor, Caprivi, wrote a warm personal note to Lord Salisbury, appealing for friendly relations with England. Salisbury responded. The result in the summer of 1890 was an agreement between Germany and Britain in which the two empires exchanged colonial territories. Curiously, the agreement, which had Salisbury’s support and which delighted the Kaiser, was opposed by most Germans and Englishmen, who each thought that their country had gotten the worse of the bargain.

  The territories exchanged were Heligoland and Zanzibar, two small islands five thousand miles apart. Heligoland, a granite boulder less than a mile square, inhabited by fishermen, was set in the North Sea twenty miles north of the mouths of the Elbe and Weser rivers. Britain had seized and annexed the island from Denmark during the Napoleonic Wars. Although it commanded the sea approaches to Hamburg and Bremen, Germany’s most important ports, Bismarck—uninterested in the sea, in colonies, and navies—ignored it. Britain scarcely noticed Heligoland—Lord Derby, as Foreign Secretary, called it “this perfectly useless piece of rock”72—and never sought to fortify it; to do so would needlessly provoke a power which she had no intention of fighting. In 1887, Bismarck reluctantly authorized construction of the Kaiser William I (Kiel) Canal from the Baltic to the North Sea across the base of the Jutland Peninsula. German perception of Heligoland began to change. William II decided that “possession of Heligoland73 is of supreme importance to Germany.” Once acquired, it would become the keystone of Germany’s maritime defense, a shield for her North Sea coast, a launching point for future naval offensives against her potential enemies, France and Russia. Accordingly, the Wilhelmstrasse proposed that Great Britain cede Heligoland to Germany. In return, the German Empire would recognize an exclusive British protectorate over the island of Zanzibar, twenty miles off the eastern coast of southern Africa.

  Salisbury saw no use for Heligoland, but could see value in acquiring Zanzibar, which commanded the north-south trade routes on Africa’s eastern coast. Queen Victoria disagreed, Lord Salisbury pressed, and the Queen gave way: “The conditions you enumerate74 are sound and the alliance with Germany valuable; but that any of my possessions should be thus bartered away causes me great uneasiness, and I can only consent on receiving a positive assurance from you that the present arrangement constitutes no precedent.” The Prime Minister telegraphed his reassurance:

  “Lord Salisbury quite understands75 and so do his colleagues that this case is not and cannot be a precedent. It is absolutely peculiar. The island [Heligoland] is a very recent conquest. It became a British possession by Treaty in 1814. Why it was retained at the general settlement we do not certainly know.... No authority has ever recommended that it be fortified and no House of Commons would pay for its fortification. But if it is not fortified and we quarreled with Germany, it would be seized by Germany the day she declared war.... There is no danger of this case being made a precedent for there is no possible case like it.”

  From Balmoral, the Queen consented: “Your answer respecting Heligoland76 forming no possible precedent I consider satisfactory.... But I must repeat that I think you may find great difficulties in the future. Giving up what one has is always a bad thing.”fn4

  William II was delighted by the exchange. For the remainder of Salisbury’s 1886–1892 term as Prime Minister, relations between the Emperor and England were warm. William was proud of his rank in the Royal Navy and bombarded the Admiralty with advice. In 1891 he sent a detailed paper listing changes he recommended in the administration of the British Navy. Salisbury asked Lord George Hamilton, the First Lord, to prepare a polite reply: “It is wise78 to return a soft answer. Please send me a civil, argumentative reply, showing that in some directions we are adopting his recommendations... and that we will give our best consideration and attention to his valuable suggestions. It rather looks to me as if he was not ‘all there.’” William, in these years, eagerly desired Lord Salisbury’s good opinion. Making a state visit to England in July 1891, he asked to be invited to spend the night at Hatfield and, after his return to Berlin, he sent to Salisbury a full-length portrait of himself in the uniform of a British admiral as a memento of his visit.

  Salisbury was uncomfortable with the Kaiser’s attention and hoped that the advice from Berlin would cease. On April 14, 1892, he wrote to the Queen: “Lord Salisbury respectfully draws79 your Majesty’s attention to the Emperor William’s conversation as reported. He appears to be strangely excited; and it would be a very good thing if your Majesty would see him and calm him.” A week later, Salisbury said again: “Lord Salisbury hopes80 that some opportunity may occur which will enable your Majesty to recommend to the Emperor calmness, both in his policy and in the speeches which he too often makes.”

  Soon after Salisbury returned to office in June 1895, the German Emperor became permanently embittered toward him. Always sensitive to English opinion or behavior, William believed that, during Regatta Week in August 1895, the Prime Minister had given him not one, but two, deliberate snubs.

  The Kaiser was at Cowes, living on board the Hohenzollern. He had come in grand style, bringing along a naval flotilla which included the new German battleships Worth and Weissenburg. The presence of this squadron, which the Kaiser wished to show off to the Prince of Wales, already had frayed many nerves. “His Majesty gave the English81 a special treat by bringing along a fleet of four battleships and a dispatch boat,” Alfred von Kiderlen-Waechter, the Foreign Ministry official assigned to the party, wrote ironically to Holstein. “They block the course of the racing vessels, every few moments they get an attack of salutirium, the sailors are flooding Cowes, the Queen has to invite the commanders, etc.”

  Simultaneously, Lord Salisbury was visiting Osborne House for an audience with the Queen. She suggested he call on her grandson to discuss the question of the future of the Ottoman Empire. Salisbury requested an audience. The interview was to be held on the Hohenzollern. The appointed hour came, but the Prime Minister did not arrive. William had been waiting impatiently for an hour when a steam cutter came alongside and Lord Salisbury hurried up the ladder, apologizing profusely for his tardiness. He explained that the launch bringing him from the landing in East Cowes had broken down and that he had had to wait for another to be brought. The Kaiser, rather than brushing the matter off, remained sullen throughout the interview, and Salisbury’s proposal—that England and Germany combine in an approach to the problem of Turkey—was buried under his resentment. The unintended affront was compounded the following day. That afternoon, the Emperor asked to see Salisbury again, inviting him to come on board the Hohenzollern at four P.M. This time, William waited for two hours and Salisbury never appeared. The explanation was that when the Kaiser’s invitation arrived, the Prime Minister was with the Queen. The telephone message was taken by a footman in the billiard room and delivered only at three forty-five P.M. Deciding that it was too late to call on the Emperor, whose request was doubtless only a courtesy since it had been delivered by telephone, Salisbury returned by boat to Portsmouth and took a train to London. The next day he received a message from the Queen: “William is a little sore82 at your not coming to see him, having waited some hours for you, thinking you would come after seeing me.... [I] think you should write a line to Count Hatzfeldt expressing regret at this.” Salisbury apologized, but the Kaiser continued to speak of the Premier’s “insulting behavior.” Eventually, Lord Salisbury got tired of continued German references to his error and remarked to Eckardstein, “Your Kaiser seems to forget83 that I do not work for the King of Prussia, but for the Queen of England.”

  Returning to Berlin, William brooded over what he considered his rude treatment in England. Five months later, in early January 1896, events in so
uthern Africa provided a flashpoint and William’s anger exploded. Holstein blamed both the Emperor and Lord Salisbury. “Seeking an outlet84 for his resentment, he [the Kaiser] seized on the first available opportunity, which was the Jameson Raid,” he wrote in his Memoirs. Earlier, he had written to Eckardstein: “By his boorish behavior85 in the autumn of 1895, Lord Salisbury succeeded in inducing in the Emperor, England’s best friend in Germany, a temper which contributed to the sending of the Kruger Telegram.”

  fn1 Of Derby, Disraeli, not inferior to Salisbury in flinging gibes, observed, “I do not know23 that there is anything that would excite enthusiasm in him except when he contemplates the surrender of some national possession.”

  fn2 At the end of the Congress, Lady Salisbury was presented by the Sultan with the “Order of Chastity31 Third Class.” Only the wives of crowned monarchs received the Order First Class, Lord Salisbury was informed. Other royal ladies received the Order Second Class; the wives of diplomats were awarded Third Class.