Dreadnought

by Robert K. Massie

  Bülow demanded an apology from Chamberlain. Paul Wolff-Metternich, about to replace Hatzfeldt as German ambassador in London, was instructed to make a formal protest at the Foreign Office. Metternich did his best to dissuade Bülow, observing that Chamberlain remained Germany’s best friend in the British Cabinet. Bülow insisted. Metternich called on Lord Lansdowne. The Foreign Secretary saw no prospect of an apology “for a speech16 which in our opinion did not call for one.” Metternich, pressured from Berlin, called again to ask for a lesser expression of regret which Bülow could wave before the Reichstag. Again Lansdowne refused. Chamberlain told the Austrian Ambassador that “there had been no warmer advocate17 than himself of England’s adherence to the Triple Alliance.” Now, he said, he had been “subjected to three weeks of measureless attack and abuse.... Since no insult had been meant, no apology would be given.”

  Bülow refused to leave the matter alone. On January 8, 1902, he rose in the Reichstag: “The German Army18 stands far too high and its shield is far too bright to be touched by unjust attacks. This business recalls Frederick the Great’s remark when told that someone had been attacking him and the Prussian Army. ‘Let the man alone and don’t be excited,’ said the great King. ‘He is biting granite.’” The Reichstag thundered applause, and Chamberlain was alienated forever. Three days later, speaking in Birmingham, he hurled defiantly: “What I have said,19 I have said. I withdraw nothing. I qualify nothing. I defend nothing. I do not want to give lessons to a foreign minister and I will not accept any at his hands. I am responsible only to my sovereign and my countrymen.”

  Chamberlain was cheered in the streets of London as well as of Birmingham. “Mr. Chamberlain,”20 said The Times, “is at this moment the most popular and trusted man in England.” “You would be interested21 to see the effect created in England by the German treatment of us,” a Foreign Office official wrote to a friend a few weeks later. “The change is extraordinary. Everyone in the [Foreign] Office talks as if we had but one enemy in the world, and that is Germany. It is no good trying to assure us unofficially or officially that they are really our friends. No one believes it now.”

  Already, on December 19, 1901, before Bülow’s speech, the British government had moved formally to terminate alliance negotiations. Lansdowne told Metternich that “the temper of the two countries22 was not in a particularly favorable state” and that “while we certainly did not regard the proposal with an unfriendly or critical eye, we did not think that for the moment we could take it up.”

  Chamberlain’s dream of an Anglo-German alliance had ended, but his feeling that Britain could no longer afford to stand alone had not changed. On January 30, 1902, Metternich reported to Berlin, “I hear in the strictest confidence23 that negotiations have been going on for the last ten days between Chamberlain and the French ambassador for the settlement of all colonial differences between the two powers....” More evidence followed quickly. On February 8, King Edward invited ministers of the Crown and all foreign ambassadors to Marlborough House, where he continued to live while Buckingham Palace was being refurbished. Eckardstein represented Germany. After dinner, while the company was having coffee and cigars, Eckardstein saw Chamberlain and Paul Cambon, the French Ambassador, go off together into the billiard room. Eckardstein lurked near the doorway. He strained to listen, but managed to pick up only two words: “Morocco” and “Egypt.” As soon as Cambon departed, Eckardstein approached Chamberlain. The Colonial Secretary complained about the Chancellor’s speech to the Reichstag and the German press. “It is not the first time24 that Count Bülow has thrown me over in the Reichstag. Now I have enough of such treatment and there can be no more question of an association between Great Britain and Germany.” As Eckardstein was leaving Marlborough House, an equerry came up and said that King Edward would like to talk to him after the others had left. Eckardstein went to the King’s private study. Fifteen minutes later, the King, having changed into less formal clothing, came in, shook hands, and offered Eckardstein an 1888 cigar and a whiskey and soda. He spoke frankly about British resentment of the abuse of Chamberlain and England in the German press. “For a long time at least,”25 he said, “there can be no more any question of Great Britain and Germany working together in any conceivable matter. We are being urged more strongly than ever by France to come to an agreement with her in all colonial disputes and it will probably be best in the end to make such a settlement.”

  Chapter 18

  Arthur Balfour

  In the spring of 1902 it seemed to Lord Salisbury that he might at last lay down the burden he had carried, as Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister, for the better part of twenty-four years. He was alone, weary, and aging rapidly. With increasing frequency, Cabinet ministers, hearing a slow, rhythmic breathing at the Cabinet table, would glance at their leader’s chair and note that the Prime Minister had dropped off to sleep.

  Salisbury would have departed sooner had the war been won more quickly. As the struggle on the veldt dragged on, the Prime Minister clung to office. At last, on May 31, 1902, a peace treaty was signed at Pretoria reincorporating the two Boer republics into the British Empire. The new King’s coronation was only six weeks away, and Salisbury decided to stay until the formal transference had been achieved. When King Edward’s sudden appendicitis forced an indefinite postponement of the ceremony, no further reason existed to delay. On July 11, 1902, without consulting or even notifying his colleagues, Lord Salisbury went to Buckingham Palace and resigned. His physician advised him to leave immediately for the Continent. He took the advice, but his health was ruined. When death came at Hatfield on August 22, 1903, he was prepared. “One might as well1 be afraid of going to sleep,” he had noted earlier.

  Four days before Lord Salisbury’s resignation, Joseph Chamberlain had suffered a serious accident. On the morning of July 7, 1902, Chamberlain had stepped into the quadrangle of the Colonial Office and reviewed a battalion of West African troops brought to London for the coronation. After congratulating them on their loyalty, the Colonial Secretary suggested that some of them might be fortunate enough to glimpse “the King’s face2 before you return to your homes.” In the afternoon, Chamberlain had taken a hansom cab from the Colonial Office to his club. The day was hot and the glass front window of the cab, secured by a leather strap, had been folded up against the roof. To settle the dust, the pavements had been sprinkled and the footing was slippery. Near the Canadian Arch on Trafalgar Square, the horse shied, slipped, and fell, tipping the cab violently forward. Chamberlain was hurled out of his seat as the heavy glass pane snapped its restraining thong and crashed down on the Colonial Secretary’s head. His scalp was penetrated to the bone in a three-and-a-half-inch gash running from the middle of his forehead across his right temple. Stunned, with blood pouring into his eyes, he was taken to Charing Cross Hospital. Despite the blow and loss of blood, Chamberlain seemed all right; his wife found her husband wreathed in a cloud of smoke from one of his cigars. He remained in the hospital several days and then went home to Prince’s Gardens to rest. His injury was greater than had first appeared. “Joe Chamberlain was3... very nearly killed,” wrote Lord Esher. “The skull was bruised at a very thin place and he has not been able to read or think since.”

  Chamberlain was at home in bed when Lord Salisbury resigned. That afternoon, July 11, the King sent for Arthur Balfour and asked him to lead the government. Balfour received the King’s messenger at the House of Commons and, before going to the Palace to accept, drove to Prince’s Gardens to consult Chamberlain. The invalid was asleep and his doctor had left orders that he must not be disturbed. Mrs. Chamberlain, however, agreed to awaken her husband, and Chamberlain, lying in bed, promised Balfour his complete support. Then Balfour went to the King.

  King Edward’s choice was expected. Only two other candidates had been imaginable, Devonshire and Chamberlain, and both were disqualified because they came from the smaller Liberal wing of the Unionist coalition. Nevertheless, to many people, Chamb
erlain’s position in the new government seemed awkward; some said bluntly that a Cabinet in which Mr. Chamberlain served under Mr. Balfour was upside down. Chamberlain had spoken for Britain on many of the issues of the day. He had led the party to victory in the Khaki Election. In the countryside, he was England’s most popular politician and although the aristocratic Cecils, uncle and nephew, had ruled in Whitehall and Westminster, no one believed that either could rule without Joseph Chamberlain’s support. Since the Khaki Election, Balfour and Chamberlain had in effect shared power, with Chamberlain managing the war and the Empire, while Balfour managed everything else. Chamberlain recognized that, when it came to confronting the constituencies and facing the rough and tumble of bringing out the vote, he was the one who kept the coalition in power.

  Nevertheless, when Balfour was summoned, Chamberlain made no complaint. During Salisbury’s decline, the succession had been decided. In February 1902, four months before Salisbury’s actual retirement, Chamberlain had sought out Balfour’s private secretary and emphasized—the private secretary reported—“that I was to understand4 that he was ‘not a candidate for that office. I have my own work to do and it is not done yet and I am quite content to stay where I am.... I shall be quite willing to serve under Balfour.’”

  The future of the Unionist government and the party depended on close cooperation between the new Prime Minister and his more famous subordinate. In temperament as well as ideology, the two men had little in common. Chamberlain was an innovator; Balfour, like his uncle, was a conserver. “The country is full5 of a vague desire for change, for great change,” declared a fortnightly journal, “but Mr. Balfour is made Prime Minister precisely because it is desired by the ruling families that the minimum of change should be made.” Chamberlain once described their differences: “Arthur hates difficulties.6 I love ’em.” Balfour did not disagree. “The difference between Joe and me,”7 he explained, “is the difference between youth and age. I am age.” (In 1902, Balfour was fifty-four, Chamberlain sixty-five.) Nevertheless, at the beginning, each man, aware of the other’s strengths and his own weaknesses, entered the partnership determined to make it work.

  The new. Prime Minister seemed to many of his contemporaries an embodiment of the Aristotelian philosopher-king. Blue blood, wealth, and charm, guided by what Austen Chamberlain called “the finest brain8 that has been applied to politics in our time,” made up Arthur Balfour. Observers, struggling to describe Balfour’s qualities, came up with words usually applied to aesthetic objects: “brilliant,” “dazzling,” “radiant,” “resplendent.” Indeed, John Maynard Keynes characterized Arthur Balfour as “the most extraordinary objet d’art9 our century has produced.”

  Arthur Balfour was born July 25, 1848, at Whittingehame House, a white Greek Revival mansion in the center of a ten-thousand-acre estate in the East Lothian region of the Scottish Lowlands. His paternal grandfather had gone to India in the eighteenth century, prospered with the East India Company, and returned to marry an earl’s daughter. Balfour’s father married the daughter of a marquess, Lady Blanche Cecil, one of Lord Salisbury’s older sisters. At eighteen, Lady Blanche began producing children, giving birth to nine in eleven years before her husband died of tuberculosis at thirty-five. The eldest of her sons, named Arthur after his godfather, the Duke of Wellington, was seven when his father died.

  Left to raise her children alone, Lady Blanche placed dust covers over the French furniture in Whittingehame House’s yellow-damask drawing rooms and shifted her attention to the nurseries. She taught her children to read and write, heard their nightly prayers, and nursed them through diphtheria, typhoid, and whooping cough. Even before her husband’s death, a friend described Lady Blanche’s unusual character: “To know her slightly10 you would think she was a healthy-minded, happy wife, a mother of children, doing all the good she could.... You never could suspect the intense... feeling, dashing and flashing, and bursting and melting and tearing her at times to pieces. And she looks so quiet and pure and almost cold, aye cold.” Nevertheless, her son Arthur always seemed to know how to handle her. As a little boy, he would climb into his mother’s lap, put his arms around her neck, and ask, “Can you tell me11 why I love you so much?”

  At eleven Arthur went off to school, where he was remembered by his masters as a fragile child with “a beautiful purity of mind.”12 He had no stamina and, on doctor’s orders, was required to lie down in the afternoons. He liked to rest in a room above the chapel where he could listen to the organ played in the hall below. At Eton, where he fagged for the future Marquess of Lansdowne,fn1 he was solitary. Spectacles were not permitted at Eton, and Balfour, who was shortsighted, could not play cricket or other games with balls. Boys made fun of him, but, “if he was laughed at,13 he would join in the laugh, often shutting up his assailant by some witty repartee,” recalled a schoolmaster.

  At eighteen, Balfour entered Trinity College, Cambridge. He showed no interest in politics and avoided the Cambridge Union; instead, he attended concerts and recitals and developed a passion for Handel. He decorated his rooms with a collection of blue china, and here on Sunday evenings he served and presided over talk of books and philosophy. Some of his fellows considered him affected and nicknamed him “Pretty Fanny.”14 Balfour did not mind; nor was he bothered that he took only a Second in Moral Science. He was being educated in another way outside Cambridge at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire, where Lord Salisbury was trying to assist his widowed sister to bring up her children. Balfour, only eighteen years younger than his uncle, was close enough in age to understand the ingredients of the older man’s success without being overcome by awe. Salisbury fostered this understanding by always speaking to his nephew man-to-man rather than man-to-boy. A friendship, based on mutual respect as well as family affections, developed.

  In 1872, Lady Blanche, debilitated by progressive heart disease, died at forty-seven. A few years earlier, Arthur had come of age and inherited his father’s estate, estimated at four million pounds. In 1874, Salisbury proposed that Balfour enter Parliament and found him a safe seat in Hertfordshire. Balfour, still not much interested in politics, did not open his mouth during his first two and a half years in the House; when finally he did speak it was during the dinner hour, on the subject of Indian silver currency. “In these conditions,”15 Balfour recalled, “I enjoyed to the fullest extent the advantages of speaking in a silent and friendly solitude.” Two years later, he tried his hand at drafting legislation; his subject was a proposed reform of the Burial Law. “A very good bill,”16 his uncle wrote to him, “but, if you bring it in, you will probably find yourself pretty well protected from the curse that attaches to those of whom all men speak well.” In 1878, Salisbury, who had just become Foreign Secretary, took Balfour with him to the Congress of Berlin as his Parliamentary Private Secretary. The young man’s principal memories were of banquets, balls, and parties, but he observed Bismarck, Disraeli, Salisbury, and Andrássy as they pressured Prince Gorchakov into giving up most of what Russia had won from Turkey. Bismarck, on learning Balfour’s name, asked if he was related to a character named Balfour in one of Sir Walter Scott’s novels. Balfour admitted that he was not and expressed surprise that the Chancellor knew Scott’s novels. “Ah,” said Bismarck, “when we were young17, we all had to read Sir Walter.”

  A young man, handsome, charming, rich, and unmarried, had little difficulty making his way in London society. There was little he wanted that he could not have. Loving Handel, he paid for a performance of the full oratorio Belshazzar at the Albert Hall. Savoring philosophy, he wrote a book, A Defence of Philosophic Doubt, and published one thousand copies at his own expense. Balfour bloomed slowly in Parliament. In 1880, when he was thirty-two, an observer wrote: “The member for Hertford18 is one of the most interesting young men in the House... a pleasing specimen of the highest form of culture and good breeding which stands to the credit of Cambridge University. He is not without desire to say hard things of the adversary opposite, an
d sometimes yields to the temptation. But it is ever done with such sweet and gentle grace, and is smoothed over by such earnest protestations of innocent intention, that the adversary rather likes it than otherwise.”

  Balfour, a junior Conservative M.P., was a close friend of Mr. Gladstone, the Liberal leader. Balfour’s London house, at No. 4 Carlton Gardens, was only a few doors from the house occupied by Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone when the Liberals were not in power. The new M.P. often met the older couple for dinner. Mrs. Gladstone referred to him as “that very pretty, quaint boy,19 tall and funny”; the Grand Old Man confessed to his wife, “I really delight in him,20 no more and no less.” Balfour’s inheritance, besides Whittingehame, included a Highland estate called Strathconan with a deer forest and a salmon stream. Balfour himself neither hunted nor fished, but in the autumn he kept the lodge filled with guests. Once, when Gladstone was Prime Minister, Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone came with their daughter Mary, who some thought was in love with Balfour. Gladstone enjoyed the visit and kept putting off his departure for a Cabinet meeting in London. Finally, with little time to spare, host and guest set off to walk the five miles of moor and heather between house and station. The station was some distance away when the train—“with ill-timed punctuality,”21 Balfour wrote—appeared. Balfour charged ahead, splashing through pools, waving frantically to catch the eye of the engineer. He succeeded, and a few minutes later the Prime Minister arrived and clambered aboard. As the train left the station, Balfour reported, “I saw with intense thankfulness22 a pair of wet socks hanging out of the carriage window to dry. I had at least not inflicted on my distinguished guest the added horrors of a head cold.”