Meanwhile, Russia, France and Germany secretly discussed how they might intervene to impose a Great Power settlement on Britain, or even exploit its vulnerability. In the New Year of 1900 Muraviev suggested79 that, while Britain was indisposed, Russia should get a foothold in Persia with a big loan and some well-applied pressure, and start making trouble on the North-West Frontier. Nicholas approved the plan. The Russians, however, accepted they had to be careful. The costs of running Manchuria had become crippling. The new “border” between Russian-occupied China and the rest and the railway lines required lots of soldiers to patrol them, and the single track of the great Trans-Siberian railway meant that moving men and goods to China was slow and expensive. The Chinese remained deeply unimpressed by dear and poorly made Russian goods, so money wasn’t coming in. The whole colonial project was becoming horribly expensive. Angering the British too much might be an even more costly mistake in the long run. The Russians restricted themselves to a large loan to the Persian government, and moved their troops up and down the Afghan border, which always alarmed the British. Wilhelm, meanwhile, offered to guard the frontier, should the Russians wish to attack Northern India.80 The Russians greeted the offer without enthusiasm; they regarded it as a provocation. Russo-German relations had not recovered since Germany had taken Kiaochow in late 1897, and had lurched uneasily along since, punctuated by the kaiser’s clumsy demands for attention from Nicholas and suggestions that they act together either against France or Britain. Bernhard von Bülow claimed to want to improve relations with Russia, but he had not been very effective in bringing the two emperors together. In 1899 he’d allowed a visit by the tsar to Potsdam—which Bülow had pestered the Russians for for months—to be entirely upstaged by the signing of the deal with Britain over Samoa. And Dona had deliberately insulted Alix by refusing to escort her to the railway station on the imperial couple’s departure.
Then in February 1900 Muraviev suggested that Russia, Germany and France combine to impose a diplomatic solution on the Boer War. Wilhelm now81 said that he must sound out London first—which persuaded the Russians even more emphatically that he was up to something. A few days later the kaiser wrote to Edward warning that “Sundry Peoples82 are quietly preparing to take liberties and foster intrigues and surprises in other parts of the world … Be on the look out! … Humbugs! Ware wolf!! We must both keep our weather eye open!”
Two weeks later he wrote, “My warnings83 have not been too soon. Yesterday evening I received a note from St. Petersburg in which Count Mouraview [sic] formally invites me to take part in a collective action with France and Russia against England for the enforcing of peace and the help of the Boers! I have declined … Sir Frank has been informed by me of this preposterous step in a very confidential manner.” The kaiser told Lascelles that Russia had made a large loan to Persia with an eye to getting an advantage over Britain there, and that if England went to war with France, “he would keep84 his bayonets fixed on the land side.”
At the end of March Wilhelm assured his grandmother that he’d saved England “from a most dangerous85 situation.” “There lingers,”86 the prime minister told the queen, “in Lord Salisbury’s mind a doubt, whether a proposal for a combination against England was ever really made by France and Russia to Germany; but still, it is very satisfactory to receive from the German Emperor such clear expressions of good will.” When Edward was shot at in Belgium by a teenage would-be anarchist in April, Wilhelm rushed to see him—national interest might divide royal families, but everyone in the ruling class hated an anarchist. In Copenhagen, where he went afterwards, however, Edward appears to have been shown papers which87 suggested that it was Germany which had made the preliminary overtures to France and Russia to join a coalition, and that it had encouraged Russia to invade India.
Wilhelm’s account of how he saved England from a Russian plot would become more elaborate with the years. In 1908 he told a British newspaper that he’d prevented a Russian attempt to “humiliate England88 to the dust.” By the time he came to write his memoirs, he had fought off a Franco-Russian conspiracy to attack Britain by threatening to make war on them in return. When he telegraphed the queen with the news, he claimed, she had said she would never forget his help.
In the months towards the end of 1900, the eighty-two-year-old queen-empress began to fail. Almost simultaneously, just after the general election of October, which the Conservatives, with a campaign orchestrated by Chamberlain, won, Salisbury gave up the post of foreign secretary, an inescapable sign of his waning energy. The burst of righteous fervour that had got the queen through the first months of the Boer War had gradually evaporated. Then Affie died of throat cancer early in 1900, and the news came that Vicky’s cancer was also entering its final virulent phase. The queen had insisted on keeping up a positive front through the war, but as the months passed, she became, her household observed, “lachrymose about the89 senseless waste of human lives.” She started an album for the dead, but abandoned it because she found it too sad. Her ladies-in-waiting would find her crying over the casualty lists. By December, ensconced at Osborne, the mausoleum, she was almost completely blind and increasingly feeble. By the New Year of 1901 she was dying.
In Berlin, Wilhelm was in the midst of celebrating the 200th anniversary of the Prussian crown. When he heard, he dropped everything and rushed to his grandmother’s deathbed. No one wanted him to go: Bülow and Eulenburg dreaded both the effect of his departure on German public opinion—with news of British successes in South Africa, the German press had become hostile again, running cartoons of the queen decorating a British soldier for raping Boer girls, referring to Chamberlain as the devil and Kitchener, now running the war, as a butcher—and worried that Wilhelm would succumb to the temptations of England. Just the week before, Joseph Chamberlain had made another request for an Anglo-German alliance. “I think of all90 the things he will say!” Eulenburg wrote worriedly. “He will be like a child amidst all these people.” Bülow sent a diplomatic minder to keep an eye on him.
The kaiser’s imminent arrival upset everybody in the English family too. Victoria’s daughters Helena and Louise, who had been supervising her care, sent frantic telegrams trying to fend him off. Wilhelm merely laughed that “the petticoats” were “fencing off poor grandmama from the world.”91 He arrived at Victoria Station, where Edward and George met him. In his memoirs, Wilhelm wrote that as he emerged from the train an “ordinary man” said “Thank you Kaiser!” and Bertie nodded. “‘That’s what they all think, every one of them, and they will never forget this coming of yours.’ Nevertheless, they did forget it,” Wilhelm wrote bitterly years later, “and quickly.”92
They set off for Osborne the next day. To everyone’s surprise, Wilhelm played it exactly right. “He behaved in93 a most dignified and admirable manner. He said to the Princesses, ‘My first wish is not to be in the light, and I will return to London if you wish. I should like to see Grandmama before she died, but if that is impossible I shall quite understand.’” Edward wrote to Vicky, who was now too ill to come herself, “William was94 kindness itself and touching in his devotion.”
As the queen’s condition worsened, each member of the family had a few minutes with her. “She looked just the same, not a bit changed,” George wrote in his diary. “She was almost asleep and had her eyes shut … I kissed her hand, Motherdear was with me.” On the afternoon of 22 January the whole family gathered around her bed. “She was conscious up til 5.0 and called each of us by name and we took leave of her. I shall never forget that scene in her room with all of us sobbing and heartbroken round her bed. It was terribly distressing.”95 As Wilhelm very much liked to say later, the queen “softly passed away96 in my arms” (or arm). In a feat of physical stamina much remarked on by the household, he knelt by her bedside and held her for two and a half hours without moving. He had the queen laid out on the dining table and at his request the Union Jack was laid across her coffin. He would have put her in the coffin all by h
imself if Edward and his brother Arthur hadn’t claimed it.
Messages of condolence and grief poured in from across the globe. In St. Petersburg, Alix broke down at her grandmother’s memorial service—a rare public display of emotion that brought her no credit in Russia. She hadn’t seen the queen for four years, but her grandmother’s letters had been a solid connection to Europe and her old life. The rest of the Russian family’s reaction to the queen’s death was a paradigm of their confused attitudes to Britain. The fervently pro-Boer Xenia wrote, “The Queen was everything97 that was best about England; she was so much loved, and exuded such enormous calm!” Nicky wrote to Edward, “She was so remarkably98 kind and touching towards me since the first time I ever saw her … I shall forever cherish her memory. I am quite sure that with your help dear Bertie, the friendly relations between our two countries shall become still closer … notwithstanding the occasional slight frictions in the Far East.” In Manchuria, Russia was using its 170,000-man army to blackmail the Chinese government and gain advantage at Britain’s expense. Witte had demanded that it formally acknowledge Russia’s annexation of the province and make the Russo-Chinese bank the only foreign bank from which it would take loans. He also demanded exclusive rights to railway concessions and raw materials in neighbouring provinces such as Mongolia, and a concession to build a branch line from the north to Peking.* Naturally, when asked by the British, the Russians denied making any such demands. “The lying is unprecedented99 even in the annals of Russian diplomacy,” sniffed the British secretary of state for India.
The British papers lavished Wilhelm with praise. “We may be100 pardoned if we cannot help regarding him a half Englishman,” the Telegraph wrote. “… We have never lost our secret pride in the fact that the most striking and gifted personality born to any European throne since Frederick the Great was largely of our own blood.” Even the Daily Mail, the country’s most nationalistic paper, called him “a friend in need.” (The left-wing press was less impressed: Justice railed at the way the mainstream papers worshipped “This presumptuous101 and half-mad Emperor … because he has shown respect and handsome behaviour.”) It was very tempting to stay. Days turned into a week, one week into two. At the funeral he rode a great white horse next to Edward at the head of the funeral cortège. George, who had come down with measles, was absent. Henry James, watching the final journey of his adoptive homeland’s queen, picked out the kaiser, in his shiny Wagnerian helmet, as its most inspiring figure: “We seem to have102 suddenly acquired a sort of unsuspected cousin in the person of mustachioed William, who looked wonderful and sturdy in the cortege and who has done himself no end of good here by his long visit and visible filiality to the old Queen … May it make for peace!”
Edward indulged his nephew. He arranged for him to drive around London in an open carriage so the public could cheer him—which they obligingly did. He presented him with an Order of the Garter decoration inlaid with diamonds, he made him a field marshal in the British army. Then he introduced him to the new foreign secretary, the irreproachably aristocratic Lord Lansdowne. Wilhelm followed Bülow’s instructions and avoided the implied invitation to closer relations; instead he lectured Lansdowne: “The old English103 strategy of keeping Europe in balance, of trying to play one nation off against the other for the benefit of England, was ‘exploded.’” No one on the continent would fall for that anymore.” He himself, Wilhelm explained, was now “the balance of power in Europe.” He also, however, awarded Lord Roberts, the commander who had led the British army in the Transvaal, the Order of the Black Eagle.
In Germany, there were howls of fury—Bülow described it as “a slap in the104 face” for German public opinion. The press groused about his absence—“Oh! If only the105 Kaiser realized what a wealth of love and trust he loses with his own people by so openly manifesting his affection for a foreign people.” Several key government bills were voted down in the Reichstag as the right-wing Anglophobic agrarian vote, which the chancellor had strenuously cultivated, melted away in anger. No one quite understood the significance of the visit for Wilhelm. His grandmother had been acknowledged as the most senior monarch in Europe. The kaiser believed that just as Germany was the natural heir to Britain’s position, so he—rather than “Fat Edward”—should be his grandmother’s natural successor among the kings and emperors of Europe. He went to England not merely to say goodbye to his grandmother, but also to receive what he saw as the anointing kiss of the dying monarch.
At a special lunch at Marlborough House the day before he left, however, he couldn’t resist making an impassioned speech calling for a union between “the two Teutonic nations” (he had recently met Houston Stewart Chamberlain, English author of The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, a synthesis of nineteenth-century thinking about race, which heavily advanced the primacy of the “Teuton race”). Standing shoulder-to-shoulder, they would help keep “the peace of the world. We ought to form an Anglo-Germanic alliance, you to keep the seas, while we would be responsible for the land; with such an alliance, not a mouse could stir in Europe without our permission.”106 That it had no effect, he blamed on the fact that the British failed to make it public.
Victoria’s death left Britain feeling intensely vulnerable. “Who can think of the nation and the race without her?” the Daily Mail asked. The nation, Henry James wrote, had felt “safe and mothered”107 by the “old middleclass queen who held the nation warm under the fold of her big, hideous, Scotch-plaid shawl.” “Her death in108 short, will let loose incalculable forces for possible ill. I’m very pessimistic.” In Europe there was no such sympathy; ugly and even obscene caricatures of her continued to appear. In Germany, the satirical magazine Simplicissimus published a cartoon of the dead queen109 struggling through a sea of blood to reach the shore where St. Peter and the Boer president, Kruger, stood by the gates of heaven.
* The two commanders, Marchand and Kitchener, took tea together.
* The conference did, however, against all the odds, agree to a series of rules of warfare and to set up a permanent court of arbitration.
* Prince Alfred shot himself on the day of his parents’ twenty-fifth wedding anniversary celebrations in January 1899 and died two weeks later. Various rumours suggested that he was in the last stage of tertiary syphilis, and that he had been ordered to separate from his mistress.
* In fact, the Russian plan to annex Manchuria would simply crumble the following spring, defeated by the collective opposition of Britain, Japan, France and Germany, and—rather more pressingly—Russia’s own massive economic problems and the expense of the project.
PART III
A BRIGHT NEW CENTURY
10
THE FOURTH EMPEROR
1901–4
No one seemed especially pleased that Edward, “the arch-vulgarian,” as Henry James called him, was finally king. The country had lost its all-powerful grandmother; a fifty-nine-year-old playboy did not seem like much of a substitute. It would be fair to say that almost everyone expected him to be a flop as king. Even Edward was ambivalent about his new role. When his mother died he was in the throes of depression—a legacy, like his tempers, of his miserable childhood. His health was bad, he was recovering from pleurisy, his bronchitis was becoming chronic, a broken kneecap made it hard to walk. Along with his mother’s death, there had been that of his brother Affie the year before, and now Vicky was in a last, dark, painful descent into cancer. The Boer War was an ongoing mess, morale in the country was fragile at best, and the rest of the world seemed uniformly hostile.
The reservations were not unjustified. Not only had the queen denied Edward any formal experience of government, but even at fifty-nine, he was still spoilt, self-indulgent, obsessed with clothes and tetchy when he didn’t get his own way. He liked, for example, to travel incognito, but not too incognito—he hated being kept waiting in a restaurant or hotel. He was still terrified of boredom, and needed constant external stimulation to keep it at bay. While he had
more or less settled down to a kind of monogamy with his mistress Alice Keppel—thirty years his junior and thankfully discreet—he was accustomed to the life of a super-rich aristocratic hedonist, “a world where pleasure felt like a ripened peach for the outstretching of a hand,” where anything was allowed apart from the sin of exposing one’s circle and class to the scrutiny and opprobrium of the rest of the world. A world that was, in the words of Vita Sackville-West, “immoral, lavish and feudal.”1 There are less than appealing glimpses of the king—or “Kinki” as he was known by some—making horrible single entendres, “insinuendoes,”2 to his mistress’s stoically grinning husband, George; and at dinners at Marlborough House, laughing at the obsequious clowning of the resident fool, Christopher Sykes, who would crawl drunkenly about under the dinner table, splashed with brandy, snuffling “as your Royal3 Highness pleases.” In some respects he wasn’t entirely unlike his nephew Wilhelm—the amusement at someone else’s expense, the impatience, the restlessness, the susceptibility to the rich and the flattering—though it was a comparison he would have hated. Then there was his gargantuan appetite. The new king smoked twenty cigarettes and twelve cigars a day, two of the former and one of the latter before breakfast, and ate five mountainous meals. Dinner might typically be twelve courses, and include oysters, caviar, plovers’ eggs, ortolan, sole poached in cream, pheasant stuffed with truffles, quails stuffed with foie gras, frogs’ legs in jelly. He was said to take a whole roast chicken to bed. Small wonder he could now barely climb a flight of stairs.
The Three Emperors Page 32
