Dirty Bertie

by Stephen Clarke

  On May Day 1903, the date of Bertie’s arrival in Paris, Le Figaro admitted that people always ‘worry what is hidden in the thoughts of kings’. But, toeing the official presidential line, it reassured its readers that ‘le roi Edouard’ had:

  . . . no other idea, no other desire, than to ensure world peace. He is related to all the sovereigns of Europe, most of them younger than he is, and you can be sure that he will use the authority of his age and the familiarity of his family ties to smooth away any obstacles, if there are any, and live in perfect understanding with everyone. It is a great role, a beautiful role.

  Unfortunately, the Parisians in the street either didn’t read Le Figaro or didn’t agree.

  At 2.55 p.m., Bertie, dressed in a British general’s scarlet tunic, arrived by royal train at the now-defunct Bois de Boulogne station, to be met by President Loubet who was, the papers noted, sunburnt after his recent trip to Africa. The two men shook hands, but – unusually – made no speeches. They were clearly nervous about the reception they might receive. They climbed aboard the President’s state carriage, and five minutes after Bertie’s arrival they were driving into Paris, with crowds lining the route. Le Figaro noted that these spectators had been waiting ‘for two hours’ – in the past the Parisians would have been out at dawn to be sure of catching a glimpse of their favourite monarch.

  Driving along the Champs-Élysées, there were cheers, but also shouts of ‘Vivent les Boers!’, ‘Vive Fachoda!’ and even the old bugbear ‘Vive Jeanne d’Arc!’ When one of Bertie’s staff grumbled that ‘the French don’t like us’, he retorted, ‘Why should they?’

  In general, though, the crowd seemed well disposed. Plenty of buildings along the route had been decorated with British flags and ‘Welcome’ signs in English. So Bertie would not have been put off by a few hecklers. Besides, he must have been glowing in the satisfaction that his covert operation was actually being enacted. And he understood the French character – they were always at their most aggressive just before letting themselves be seduced.

  At 5 p.m., Bertie paid a very short visit to the President at the Élysée Palace, and half an hour later he was at the nearby British Embassy to receive members of the British Chamber of Commerce. There, he gave a carefully worded speech about Anglo-British friendship that had been prepared for him by Charles Hardinge and that was released to the French press to be reprinted next day. It spoke of his wishes that Britain and France could end all hostilities and work together as ‘champions and pioneers of civilization and peaceful progress’.

  After a twelve-course dinner at the Embassy that included a diplomatic mixture of dishes – cream of asparagus soup à la Reine, fillet of beef à l’anglaise, petits pois à la française, peaches à la Montreuil – Bertie went to the Théâtre Français to see an aptly named play, L’Autre Danger. In fact, though, it was not about the danger of world war but a comedy by a writer of witty boulevard farces called Maurice Donnay in which a man meets up with an old flame after she gets married and has an affair with her, only to fall in love with her daughter – the perfect choice of show for Bertie.

  There were few laughs at the start of the evening, though. Unlike past outings to the theatre, when Bertie would be cheered merely for his choice of mistress, there was virtual silence amongst the audience. Le Figaro reported nothing more than a ‘murmur of curiosity’ as he took his seat. This lack of enthusiasm might be explained by the fact that much of the audience that night was made up of French bureaucrats, not the most extrovert of people. In any case, Bertie laughed his way through the first act and then, during the interval, as he had so often done in the past, he strolled out into the corridors with the rest of the audience, followed by his nervous police bodyguards. There, he saw someone he knew (a pretty safe bet in Paris). It was the former star of the Paris stage, and his former lover, Jeanne Granier, now a grande dame in her early fifties. Probably the last time he had seen her was in a Monte Carlo hotel room some fourteen years earlier. Bertie went over and kissed her hand affectionately. According to the police report of the soirée, he told her in loud French that could be heard by everyone in the vicinity, ‘Ah, mademoiselle, I remember how I applauded you in London, where you represented all the grace and all the wit of France.’6

  Next day, everyone who was anyone was repeating this little piece of theatrical dialogue, and all the French newspapers printed Bertie’s speech to the Chamber of Commerce, which was hailed as a ‘great sensation’.

  Suddenly the atmosphere cleared. It was the good old days in Paris again. Bertie, the world’s greatest and most sociable Francophile, was back. On the morning of Saturday, 2 May 1903, the British royal standard was cheered as it was raised above the Hôtel de Ville, a building more renowned as the scene of anti-monarchist insurrections in 1789 and 1870. Bertie arrived just before noon, dressed in his red uniform and feathered hat, and was cheered by a large crowd. He was welcomed as ‘an old friend’ by the President of the Municipal Council (the city mayor) in a reception room decorated from floor to ceiling in flowers, and in reply he stood up and gave one of his trademark spontaneous speeches. Bertie told the assembled councillors in his fluent French:

  It would have been vexatious not to have been able to stop at the Hôtel de Ville for a moment while I was in your beautiful city. I thank you sincerely for the welcome you have afforded me today. I will never forget my visit to your charming city, and I can assure you that it is always with the greatest pleasure that I return to Paris, where I am always treated as if I were chez moi.

  In short, it was almost fifty years of pleasurable returns to Paris summed up in two or three elegantly constructed sentences. And as the culmination of Bertie’s private plan to salvage Anglo-French relations, it was the moment when the apparently frivolous Prince turned into a true monarch on the world stage.

  Le Figaro said that this was ‘not only a visit from the most Parisian of Princes . . . The royal words that we have just heard rang in our ears as the promise of a new era in relations between our two peoples.’ Even London’s sceptical Times recognized that this was no flash in the pan, conceding for once that it had been Bertie’s ‘Parisian way of living in Paris that won influence for him’.

  On his third day in the city, Bertie was cheered wherever he went. At dinner with the President, he gave a speech of thanks reminding everyone that ‘I have known Paris since I was a child. I have returned many times and I have always admired the beauty of this unique city and the spirit of its inhabitants.’ At the end of his short address, he diplomatically proposed a toast to ‘the prosperity and the greatness of France’.

  As he sat in his carriage to the Opéra that evening, crowds of Parisians jostled to get a view of Bertie and were heard to shout ‘Vive Edouard!’ and even ‘Vive notre roi!’ When he left for England on 4 May, dressed for his Channel crossing in a black admiral’s uniform, he was given an au revoir as loud and affectionate as anything he’d known in 1855, 1878 or any other of the high points in his French love affair. The crowds were ‘enormous’ and ‘joyous’, and hawkers were selling miniatures of the King, calling out: ‘Who hasn’t got his little Edward?’

  At the station, Bertie and Loubet said farewells like old friends, and as Bertie’s train pulled away, it was to a public send-off that, according to the French newspapers, was ‘fervent’, ‘passionate’ and even ‘delirious’. Loubet was looking tired, said Le Figaro, but ‘with the happy smile of a man who has just performed a great duty, and performed it well’. He was cheered all the way back to the Élysée, a rare occurrence for any French leader who hasn’t just won a war (and there haven’t been many of those).

  The British Ambassador Sir Edmund Monson later reported that the success of Bertie’s state visit was ‘more complete than the most sanguine optimist could have foreseen’. In the space of a few hours, by making sure that he was in the right place at the right time, by improvising a few key words, and most of all by reminding the French that Britain’s ruler was the same well-int
entioned man they had known for half a century, Bertie had transformed the French from anti-British republicans to relapsed Bertie lovers.

  Within days, the politicians got to work and hammered out the text of the Entente Cordiale which, when you look at it closely, is not such a friendly document after all. Rather than promising eternal amour and mutual solidarity, it is a slightly sordid exchange of colonialist guarantees – Britain would let France hold on to Morocco if the French stopped trying to grab Egypt. It wasn’t a real alliance; it wasn’t friendly; it was just a polite agreement by each party not to steal what the others had got their eyes on. But at the time, just after Fashoda and the Boer War, even that was a minor miracle, and its importance is still trumpeted more than a century after it was signed in April 1904 – now that everyone has forgotten what it actually said.

  Of course Bertie doesn’t deserve all the credit for the Entente Cordiale – diplomats like Lord Lansdowne, Paul Cambon (the French Ambassador in London) and France’s Foreign Minister Théophile Delcassé did much of the political preparation for the agreement. But the true spadework – the laying of the foundations – was all Bertie’s. For all its faults, the treaty between Europe’s greatest historical enemies would never have been signed, or even drafted, if Bertie had not secretly engineered his visit to Paris and convinced everyone in France that entente with the Anglais was a good idea. The French government needed the approval of its suspicious electorate, and, using the tactics taught to him by the Parisians themselves, Bertie seduced the French people into trusting Britain.

  Whether they were wise to do this is a different matter.

  * * *

  1 Ironically, Treves himself died of peritonitis – a ruptured appendix – in 1923, shortly after publishing his memoirs, which included the famous story of his friendship with the Elephant Man.

  2 Even more annoyingly to the French, the Brits can’t even spell its name right. In French, it’s ‘Fachoda’. But then the Brits can’t spell ‘Azincourt’ or pronounce ‘Waterloo’, either.

  3 No doubt thanks to Bertie’s influence, Delcassé used the language of lovers, and referred to ‘une rupture’, the common word for a lovers’ split.

  4 It has been suggested that the original version of a certain proverb was: ‘Hell hath no fury like a Frenchman scorned.’

  5 Given that it was just coming up to the centenary of Nelson’s death at nearby Trafalgar, the British guns probably had to be double-checked for ‘accidental’ live rounds.

  6 Note the brilliant piece of discretion about their frequent meetings in Paris and the Riviera.

  14

  DON’T MENTION THE WAR

  ‘I have not long to live, and then my nephew will make war.’

  Bertie to his friend Elisabeth, Comtesse de Greffulhe, 1910

  I

  WITH THE FRACTIOUS mood prevailing in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century, it wasn’t enough to be friends with France. All over the continent, alliances were being forged and broken, attempted and abandoned, because everyone knew that it was dangerous to be caught standing alone in the playground.

  Bertie was fully aware of all this, and played a vital role in keeping the peace between Britain and a country that both France and Germany desperately wanted as an ally – Russia.

  In letters, young Tsar Nicholas called himself Bertie’s ‘most loving nephew, Nicky’ and addressed the English King as ‘dearest Uncle Bertie’, but in life he was an unstable, isolated character, and relations between the two men were often difficult. Bertie disapproved – often openly – of Nicky’s dictatorial attitude to his people (which would later provoke the Russian Revolution), and criticized him for the anti-Semitic pogroms, but always expressed his hope for an official entente between Britain and Russia ‘similar to the one . . . concluded with France’.

  At the time, France already had more than an entente with Russia – the two were in an anti-German alliance, and Bertie knew that Britain also had to nurture good relations with Russia if the powerful triangle was to be sealed. However, this fragile stability was rocked when Russia went to war with one of Britain’s official allies – Japan – in 1904. Britain declared that it would stay neutral, but the Russians suspected that this was just a ploy and that the Brits were giving the Japanese secret aid. The suspicion ran so deep (especially when Kaiser Wilhelm chipped in, telling the Russians that they should never trust an Englishman) that Tsar Nicholas reacted with Wilhelm-like petulance, calling his uncle ‘the most dangerous intriguer in the world’.

  Bertie’s response was typical. He asked a friend of his in St Petersburg, a hard-living, smooth-talking Scotsman after his own heart called Mackenzie Wallace, to go and reassure Nicholas about Britain’s intentions. Wallace was a journalist rather than a diplomat, but this was an advantage, because Nicholas distrusted ambassadors. So Wallace was able to talk his way into Nicholas’s confidence and defuse the situation. Yet again, it was Bertie’s lifelong sociability and endless chain of faithful friends that saved the day.

  However, having found a breach in Anglo-Russian relations, Wilhelm did his best to foment more trouble. In the summer of 1905, he arranged to meet Tsar Nicholas during a yachting holiday in the Gulf of Finland, and the two cousins enjoyed a healthy bitch about Bertie. Wilhelm told Nicholas that their uncle had ‘a passion for making “a little agreement” with every country, everywhere’1 – not just Japan. The already sensitive Nicholas was easily convinced, and promised Wilhelm that ‘he [Bertie] shall never get one from me, and never in my life against Germany’. At which point, according to the legend, Wilhelm whipped out a pre-prepared Russo-German treaty and got Nicholas to sign it.

  The two cousins’ improvised treaty was ignored by both the Russian and German governments, but in any case, Britain outflanked Germany by signing an Anglo-Russian Convention in 1907. This agreement was forced on Nicholas by France, which offered a loan to Russia on condition that it entered into an alliance with Britain. To prevent any resentment on Nicholas’s part, Bertie’s personal back-up was needed. Knowing that it was best if he was on hand to consolidate the formal agreement, he paid a state visit to Russia in June 1908, sailing to the Estonian port of Reval (nowadays called Tallinn) on the Victoria and Albert and holding a series of meetings on board ship.

  Again, Bertie showed what a skilled diplomat he was, alternating businesslike discussions with cosy family dinners. He impressed Alexander Izvolsky, the Russian Foreign Minister, with his grasp of Russian and European affairs, and took care to massage Nicholas’s sensitive ego. He made the Tsar an admiral of the fleet, an honour dished out frequently to foreign dignitaries, but which flattered Nicholas enormously. Bertie also congratulated the Tsar on his marvellous new railways, told him he looked excellent in the uniform of the Scots Greys – a scarlet tunic with gold braid and an enormous fur busby – that he had donned for the first meeting, and generally avoided all discussion of thorny subjects like Germany. After just a couple of days, the Russian papers were all hailing ‘a new era in Anglo-Russian relations’.

  This was gratifying and was now becoming something of a habit – wherever Bertie went, the press seemed to end up hailing a new era in Anglo-local friendship. Yet again, peace had been maintained thanks to Bertie’s presence. Even in the prevailing climate of intense international distrust, and despite all Kaiser Wilhelm’s meddling, it was hard to imagine ‘loving’ Nicholas ever going to war with his ‘dearest Uncle Bertie’.

  II

  The problem was that maintaining good relations with the willing French and the suspicious but easily influenced Nicholas was the easy part. Like everyone else in Europe, Bertie knew that the main threat to peace came from a much more dangerous, volatile source. He was going to need all the human-relations skills he had learnt in France to deal with someone more demanding and diva-like than the most temperamental Parisian cocotte – his other nephew, Kaiser Wilhelm.

  The trouble wasn’t all one-sided. The Brits were becoming rabidly anti-German, partly b
ecause of the increasing strength of Germany’s industry and merchant marine, but mainly because of the fear, whipped up by the popular press, of Wilhelm’s expanding fleet of warships. Bertie feared them too, and knew that the only way to keep the German gunboats away from Britain’s colonial outposts was to maintain a strong grip on the Kaiser himself.

  It would need a psychiatrist to diagnose the exact reasons for Wilhelm’s ever-changing emotions towards his British family, but there seem to be three key reasons for his mood swings, the first of which was an inferiority complex caused by his withered left arm, which had been paralysed during childbirth. Because of this, he always felt the need to prove that he was stronger and louder than anyone else. The second was a childish craving for attention: Bismarck used to say that Wilhelm wanted every day to be his birthday. The third, and perhaps the one that he felt most keenly, was a desire to be recognized as Bertie’s equal or – when he succeeded to his throne while Bertie was still a prince – his superior. Wilhelm wanted more than anything else to be accepted as a core member of Victoria’s immediate family, which he saw – rightly – as the trunk in the European family tree.