The Queen remarked drily that if Wilhelm refused to come until Salisbury left office he’d have to wait a long time. She nevertheless wrote reminding him that she had invited him to Osborne in August. Salisbury told her, “I cannot help49 fearing that it indicates a consciousness on the part of His Majesty that he cherishes some design which is bound to make me his enemy … It is a great nuisance that one of the main factors in the European calculation should be so ultra human. He is as jealous as a woman because he does not think the Queen pays him enough attention.”
Wilhelm’s rage about Salisbury and the lost birthday could not be assuaged. Two weeks later he wrote the queen a furious nine-page letter, accusing Salisbury of deliberately stalling negotiations with Germany, most recently over disagreements over the Samoan islands.
This way of treating Germany’s feelings and interests has come upon the people like an electric shock and has evoked the impression that Lord Salisbury cares for us no more than for Portugal … if this sort of highhanded treatment of German affairs by Lord Salisbury’s Government is suffered to continue, I am afraid that there will be a permanent source of misunderstandings and recriminations between the two Nations, which may in the end lead to bad blood. I of course have been silent as to what I have personally gone through these last six months, the shame and pain I have suffered and how my heart has bled when to my despair I had to watch how the arduous work of years was destroyed—to make the two Nations understand each other and respect their aspirations and wishes … Lord Salisbury’s Government must learn to respect and treat us as equals, as long as he cannot be brought to do that, People over here will remain distrustful and a sort of coolness will be the unavoidable result … Now you will understand dear Grandmama why I so ardently hoped to be able to go over for your birthday. That visit would have been perfectly understood over here, as the duty of the grandson to his grandmother50.
He added that until now he had maintained a dignified silence hoping that Salisbury might mend his ways, “and therefore gulped everything down and held my tongue.”
It was unprecedented for a monarch to attack another monarch’s chief minister in a private letter, a contravention of what Wilhelm himself described as “the European rules of civility.”500 The queen rallied herself to administer a reproof. She was feeling her age. Almost blind, completely lame, increasingly tired, she had been gradually withdrawing from public affairs, avoiding her ministers and even her private secretaries, because she said she couldn’t bear to argue with them anymore. (She insisted, instead, that her daughter Beatrice read her official missives. This had given rise to some awkward misunderstandings when, for example, Beatrice was called upon to explain major foreign policy issues, or vaccination, to the queen.)
“I doubt,”51 she wrote, frostily, “whether any Sovereign ever wrote in such terms to another Sovereign and that Sovereign his own Grand Mother, about their Prime Minister. I never should do such a thing, and I never personally attacked or complained of Prince Bismarck, though I knew well what a bitter enemy he was to England and all the harm he did.” The truth was, however, that Salisbury was once again stalling on negotiations, this time over who should run Samoa, where Germany and Britain had taken opposite sides in a civil war. And his distant attitude during the negotiations had not just maddened the kaiser, it also had a lastingly disenchanting effect52 on one of the influential pro-British voices in the German Foreign Office, Fritz Holstein.
“Old Victoria’s53 rude letter has hurt Him unutterably deeply!” Eulenburg wrote to Bülow from Wilhelm’s annual Scandinavian yachting trip in July. He was once again worried about Wilhelm, who seemed constantly on the edge of hysteria. Eulenburg watched him bully his entourage, fly into rages and launch into flights of terrifyingly violent rhetoric, demanding the gunning down of the Socialists who had once again done well in the German elections. Wilhelm had indulged in this kind of bloody rhetoric for years; he rarely, if ever, acted on it. What upset Eulenburg was the realization that the kaiser would never grow up. “Psychologically speaking,54 there is not the slightest change,” he wrote miserably to Bülow. “He is the same explosive being, if not even more violent and unaccountable … When so markedly eccentric a nature dominates a realm there cannot but be convulsions.” Like an indulgent parent Eulenburg had tolerated the spoilt child in Wilhelm, while nursing the conviction that if all the obstacles were removed from the kaiser’s way, he would somehow become the monarch and the man Eulenburg sincerely wanted him to be. He wrote sad, disillusioned, disappointed letters to Bülow, describing Wilhelm’s erratic behaviour and his own failed attempts to modify it. No friend to Britain, nor especially to Russia, he worried particularly over Wilhelm’s anger towards the two countries. It was still, he thought, better “to run after55 Russia and England than to anger them both.”
In the late summer of 1899 the British performed a remarkable volte-face which melted Wilhelm’s anger overnight. Salisbury suddenly agreed to give up British claims to Samoa in return for Germany renouncing claims to a few Pacific islands and parts of western Africa and agreeing to be neutral should anything blow up in the Transvaal. The kaiser was delighted. Having sulkily refused to come to England in August, he asked to visit Windsor in November. The likeliest reason for the British change of heart became apparent six weeks after the Samoan agreement, when the Anglo-Boer War broke out on 11 October.
The alleged British casus belli was the Boers’ refusal to grant basic rights to British immigrants who had come to the Transvaal to mine gold. The Boers had refused to do this as they would have instantly been vastly outnumbered. The real motivation for Britain’s entry into the Boer War is still disputed—to absorb the Orange Free State and Transvaal into South Africa, to get at the Boers’ gold, to teach them a lesson. Whatever the reason, it was an ugly, expensive little conflict encouraged by Cecil Rhodes and Joseph Chamberlain, and one which Salisbury in earlier days might have headed off. Unlike Chamberlain, who was excited by imperialism, he’d always considered war a manifestation of failure: “I am an utter unbeliever that anything that is violent will have permanent results.” An economic imperialist, he nevertheless deplored the rising tide of jingoism and strident nationalism which Chamberlain articulated. He said it was like having “a huge lunatic asylum at one’s back.”56 But the times were increasingly against him, his age was beginning to tell, and his wife was ill—she would die six weeks after the war began. Salisbury’s zest for politics was dribbling away, and he had allowed the government to drift into a conflict which he himself called “Joe’s war.”
The campaign quickly inflicted on Britain a series of nasty, intense shocks. Firstly, there was a succession of humiliating defeats: the Boers were the first properly armed force the British had faced in decades, and their effectiveness exposed gaping weaknesses and bungling at the highest levels. Second, there was the horror at the state of the British volunteers: between 40 and 60 percent of them were too malnourished and unfit to join up, exposing levels of abject poverty and ill health in a country which considered itself the best governed and, if you subscribed to those views, the most advanced of all races. These facts had an absolutely devastating effect on Britain’s myth of its own imperial invincibility. After the first burst of enthusiasm for the war, there was the hypocrisy of the Conservative government, which championed the basic rights of British immigrants in the Transvaal, while withholding them from its own subjects in Ireland. (No one, of course, took much interest in the far more numerous and far more ill-treated—by the Boers as much as by the British—indigenous black population, who in the racial assumptions of Europe hardly counted as people.)
Abroad, the war unleashed what Edward called an “incessant storm57 of obloquy and misrepresentation … from every part of the Continent”—part resentment of Britain’s super-power status, part dislike of its bullying. The Boers were hailed as underdog heroes. In France a cartoonist from Le Rire was decorated by the Ministère des Beaux-Arts for his obscene caricatures of British leaders
. In Germany, colonial groups demanded that aid and arms be sent to the Boers, and the mainstream press, which had spent the summer complaining about British behaviour in Samoa, became feverishly denunciatory. Several German officers went to fight with the Boers—a fact which Wilhelm repeatedly denied to his grandmother. In Russia senior members of the government demanded that Russia should exploit Britain’s vulnerability and cause trouble in Afghanistan and on the Indian border. Though Nicholas, like the rest of the Russian elite, thought it an “unequal and unjust58 war,” he repeatedly assured the queen that he would not allow his government to take advantage of Britain’s situation, and had no desire to involve Russia in African affairs. The assurances seemed to owe more to pragmatism and Russia’s overstretchedness in China than any family ties, for he toyed with the thought. “My dear,”59 he wrote to his sister Xenia, who was vigorously pro-Boer, “you know I am not proud, but I do like knowing that it lies solely with me in the last resort to change the course of the war in Africa. The means is very simple—telegraph an order for the whole of the Turkestan army to mobilize and march to the Indian frontier. That’s all.” At Windsor, the queen took to “declaring the60 devotion of the Czar to her and England as genuine only.”
While Salisbury seemed to fade, the war revived the queen. She summoned up for it a last burst of splendid certainty. She was in no doubt that it was just, having been assured by the Governor-General of South Africa, Viscount Milner, that the English “Uitlanders” were just like the “downtrodden serfs61 of ancient Sparta.” (This was an extraordinary analogy by Milner—one of the instigators of the war—given that he was at that moment encouraging the use of real serfs, indentured Chinese labourers, in the South African mines.) She furthermore claimed that it was good for all those “idle young men62 to miss a Season and rough it with the troops.” When, in mid-December, the British suffered three defeats in “Black week,” she told a minister who dared to offer his commiseration, “Please understand63 there is no one depressed in this house.”
In Germany, the kaiser’s first visit to Britain for five years was deeply unpopular. Dona—usually the acme of submissive obedience—was so against it she claimed she was too ill to travel and it would have to be cancelled. She told Bülow that British “mammonism” was strangling “the brave and godly Boers.” Deciding it was too late to cancel the visit, Bülow accompanied Wilhelm to keep an eye on him, and Holstein was drafted in to persuade the kaiser to keep his Anglophilic tendencies under control. He wrote a flattering memo assuring Wilhelm that he was “more gifted” than his relations, but too honest and open with them. It suggested that he play hard to get, and urged him to “avoid all political conversations,” especially with Salisbury. “The impression made on him [Salisbury] will be all the greater if Your Majesty does not express a desire to receive him … but … merely disposes of him fairly quickly and with immaculate politeness.”64 As it turned out, Salisbury’s wife died the day Wilhelm arrived in England, so he was absent, a cause of relief on both sides.
Wilhelm viewed the visit in a haze of conflicting daydreams. He fancied himself as Britain’s lone white knight in Europe. He simultaneously decided to exploit hostility to Britain in the Reichstag, ordering Tirpitz to bring forward the next stage of naval expansion by a year—though this was not to be announced until after the visit. He also insisted on bringing with him two members of his entourage whom Edward loathed: Kessel, a confirmed Anglophobe, who had persecuted Vicky after Fritz’s death, and Senden Bibran, who had the previous year accused the prince of deliberately slighting him.
He arrived in England67 on 20 November 1899, along with his reluctant wife and two of his sons. England began to work its magic at once. There were troops of strapping horse guards, cheering crowds. There was no hint of condescension. A pleasing cluster of cousins and uncles all professed their gratitude that he had come at such a time. Edward made gracious speeches. The papers, which had always been susceptible to the kaiser’s talent for public show, and were only too aware of the rest of Europe’s condemnation of the Boer War, showered him with an embarrassment of praise—the Kruger telegram seemed entirely forgotten. “His tenacity65 of will, his power of political adaptation, his genuine gift of eloquence, his extraordinary versatility, his clear insight into some of the tendencies of the time, cannot fail to impress,” gushed the Daily News. “A man whose66 remarkable personal qualities are hardly less fully appreciated in England than in Germany itself,” enthused The Times. The only shadow for Wilhelm was discovering the counsellor of the German legation, a small, short-sighted man called Count Karl Puckler, wearing blue evening dress with gold buttons, a painful faux pas for someone who, as Bülow noted, “In England … felt himself, at all events in externals, entirely an Englishman.” The kaiser winced. Bülow quietly advised Puckler to cover himself with a coat. But Puckler, who was also very nervous, had lost his overcoat on the journey, and managed to startle the kaiser twice more before he arrived at Windsor.
At a grand banquet in St. George’s Hall—to which the queen was brought on a litter carried by four bejewelled “Hindus”—they dined off gold. (Bülow beadily remarked that the queen looked like a “mushroom”—presumably pale and bulging—and that the way she prodded her potatoes to see if they were soft reminded him of “some good old soul” in Hanover.) “This is the finest reception and the most inspiring impression of my life,” Wilhelm told Bülow. “Here, where as a child I went along holding my mother’s hand and marvelling, modestly and timidly at the splendour, I am now staying as Emperor-King.” His suite felt differently. “Every morning,” Bülow wrote, “Wilhelm II annoyed the gentlemen of his military entourage by pointing to Windsor Tower and saying to them, ‘From this tower the world is ruled.’” His mood was jolted by the sight of the unfortunate Puckler, still in his blue tail coat with gold buttons, “trying to worm his way through the riders, disturbing some of the horses.” The counsellor, definitively damned in Wilhelm’s eyes, was quietly transferred to the Vienna embassy.
The war was hardly mentioned, though everyone, from the queen down, buttonholed Wilhelm and Bülow about the “spiteful utterances”68 and “shocking tone” of the German press. Wilhelm said it was all the doing of Bismarck, who in retirement still ran a series of papers. Bülow noted that the British were much less anti-German than the Germans were anti-British.
Among the retinue at Windsor was Joseph Chamberlain, who was impressed, as people often were on their first meeting, by Wilhelm’s directness and ability to range knowledgeably across a huge variety of subjects. Chamberlain had been directly attacked by the German press, but despite this he was more certain than ever that Britain needed Germany as an ally, and he had the support of most of the cabinet. With Salisbury absent, he told Wilhelm how much he wanted a “comprehensive understanding” between Germany and Britain. The kaiser had been warned by Holstein to avoid the seductions of Chamberlain, who was fantastically unpopular in Germany because of the Boer War. To Bülow’s relief, the kaiser observed that Britain didn’t traditionally conclude formal alliances, and that Germany was too close to Russia to consider such a move (which wasn’t true). But he allowed that they perhaps might agree on various outstanding matters case by case. The British, he added, must bear in mind that “the German” was touchy, must avoid “trying his patience” and must “show him goodwill even in small things.”69 The next day Chamberlain met Bülow and proposed a union of the United States, Germany and Britain against France and Russia. Bülow suggested Chamberlain might speak positively of Anglo-German relations in public to create a favourable atmosphere in which talks might begin.
The visit concluded with three days of pampering and shooting at Sandringham. It was Wilhelm’s first visit to his uncle’s home since 1880. Edward was faultlessly solicitous. For some time he had let it be known at the German embassy that he was prepared to “do everything that70 lay in his powers to remove all misunderstandings, both of a personal and political nature.” Like his mother, he very much wanted
to see an improvement in Anglo-German relations. He and Bülow, however, did not take to each other. Edward called Bülow a “humbug”71—a trickster and deceiver. Bülow described watching Edward with Wilhelm as like “a fat malicious72 tom-cat playing with a shrewmouse.” George, drafted in to take Wilhelm shooting, wrote approvingly that he “shot remarkably73 well considering he has only got one arm.” The following year he and May invited Wilhelm to be godfather to their third son, Henry, and attended the coming-of-age of the kaiser’s eldest son, “Little Willy.”
On the day of Wilhelm’s departure, Joseph Chamberlain made a grand public overture to Germany in a speech at Leicester, in which he said that no “far-seeing English74 statesman could be content with England’s permanent isolation on the continent of Europe … The natural alliance is between ourselves and the great German Empire.” Barely two weeks later, introducing the new navy bill in the Reichstag, which in one go doubled the size of the German navy, Bülow described, to cheers, Britain’s arrogant jealousy and growing hatred of Germany and its shameful conduct in the Boer War. Not unsurprisingly, Chamberlain felt profoundly insulted.
But Wilhelm, who had personally arranged for the navy bill to be brought forward, was now in the grip of another Anglo-passion, informed as ever by the familiar combination of enthusiasm, tactlessness and ill will which his exasperated entourage struggled to hide. When the British defeats reached their climax in “Black week,” two weeks after his departure, he wrote cheerfully to his uncle, “Instead of the75 Angel’s song ‘Peace on Earth and Goodwill amongst men,’ the new century will be greeted by the shrieks of dying men killed and maimed by sydditte [sic] shells and balls from Quickfirers!” Never mind, he concluded; at least the “British aristocracy” were showing “the world that they know how to die doing their duty.” And he enclosed a series of what he called “aphorisms,” advising Bertie on how Britain could do better. He sent another set two months later, in February 1900, and with it a letter likening the latest British humiliation to a defeat by Australia at cricket. Bertie and the queen were privately infuriated by his presumption, but Bertie took care to thank the kaiser,76 though he complained about his nephew’s inappropriate sporting metaphor. A possibly apocryphal story claims that at this time the kaiser bounced into Sir Francis Lascelles’s bedroom one morning while he was still in bed to present him with his strategy for beating the Boers. The ambassador, horribly embarrassed, tried to get up: “he pushed me77 back on the pillows and advanced nearer, unfurling and placing before me a roll of documents and maps.” Lascelles struggled to recover his dignity and his dressing-gown as the kaiser demanded his plan be sent to London. In his next letter to Edward, he told him how pleased he was that Lord Roberts, the new commander in South Africa, had followed his advice: “This clearly shows78 the correctness in my calculations in my last Gedankensplitter [aphorisms].”
The Three Emperors Page 31
