When Edward was given an opportunity to behave like a real international statesman, he flunked it. The occasion was a lunch with Wilhelm several weeks after Vicky’s death in August 1901. The foreign secretary, Lord Lansdowne, had taken the unusual step of preparing a memo for him outlining British foreign policy, rehearsing the areas of conflict, and suggesting what he might say about various issues. It was a flattering acknowledgement of Edward’s potential role in foreign affairs. But as lunch ended, instead of using Lansdowne’s paper as an aide-mémoire for a serious talk on foreign policy, Edward fished it out of his pocket and handed the whole thing to Wilhelm. It was a faux pas which would have got any senior diplomat fired. Lansdowne was not amused. For a king who claimed to want a role in government, it demonstrated a lack of staying power, though Edward’s blushes were saved. The German Foreign Office took the paper as a policy document and prepared a formal answer to it.
It may have been that Edward was too lazy, or too upset after his sister’s death, to bother. It seems likely that he simply couldn’t bear the thought of spending a couple of hours arguing the finer points of British foreign policy with his nephew. Through lunch Wilhelm had complained constantly that the British were obstructing the latest round of negotiations with Germany on a potential alliance. He also seemed to know all about things on which Edward hadn’t been briefed—British plans to give Malta self-government, British overtures to Japan. It’s also likely Edward had heard about Wilhelm’s final aggressions against his dead mother. The moment Vicky died he had Friedrichshof surrounded and searched (nothing was found—with the unofficial help of Fritz Ponsonby Vicky had already secretly evacuated her papers during Edward’s previous visit). Then he spread a rumour that she had at the last revealed her true loyalties by demanding that her naked body be wrapped in the Union Jack21 and sent to England for burial. Not only was the story a lie—she’d asked to be buried at Potsdam by her husband—but the detail of the nakedness was cruelly over-intimate. It was, however, eagerly repeated at the German court—the kaiser’s last, damaging blow against his mother.
The two men’s complicated relationship was evident to everyone around them. “King Edward22 never liked him,” Fritz Ponsonby wrote, “and therefore, while conversations in public were ostensibly very amicable, one always felt that it was an effort on both sides to keep them so.” An English cousin observed, “Uncle Bertie23 thought William was bumptious and tiresome and William thought Bertie patronized him.” Bülow said that at moments Wilhelm literally hated his uncle. Edward was, however, far from being the only monarch who found Wilhelm difficult. Apart from Nicky, the kaiser had alienated many of Europe’s crowned heads with his over-familiarity and rudeness. He slapped Ferdinand of Bulgaria on the bottom during a state visit, behind his back called him “Fernando naso” because of his large, beaky nose, and claimed he was a hermaphrodite. He called the admittedly teeny Italian king, Umberto I, “the dwarf”24 in the hearing of Umberto’s entourage. The Greek royal family quietly loathed him, and his cousin Marie of Romania found him unbearably condescending. The paradox was, of course, that being so bad at personal relationships, Wilhelm should believe so deeply in conducting international relations through personal relationships.
Edward’s efforts, however, had no effect on the latest round of Anglo-German negotiations. Bülow had told Wilhelm that if he seemed slightly cool about Joseph Chamberlain’s proposals, Germany would extract better terms, and in due course the talks had collapsed just like the ones before. The Germans demanded more than the British were willing to give: a long list of colonies in Southern Africa and China, plus an insistence that rather than making a one-to-one defensive treaty, Britain must join the Triple Alliance—Germany’s bloc—and commit itself to the defence of Italy and Austria-Hungary as well as Germany. The conditions seemed designed to put the British off, which Bülow may well have hoped they would. Gradually the foreign secretary, Lord Lansdowne, backed away. Fritz Holstein blamed Bülow for clinging “to all the obstacles25 which stood in the way of the alliance,” but he too was abrupt and hostile with the British. By nature someone who couldn’t help but see ulterior motives and conspiracies, he’d come to mistrust the British and believed that Salisbury had deliberately misled him during previous negotiations and had behaved dishonourably over Samoa. As for Wilhelm, he was told by Bülow that the obstruction was all on the part of the British. The kaiser complained noisily about British delays and called the British cabinet “a pack of26 unmitigated noodles”—a phrase he liked so much he used it several times. The British cabinet ignored his words, but Edward minded, and couldn’t stop himself grumbling to Hatzfeldt’s deputy at the German embassy, Hermann von Eckhardstein, that he had “already had to27 put up with many of these jokes of the Kaiser’s and even worse than this one too, and I suppose I shall have to put up with many more.” Even without Bülow’s intriguing, there was, as in the past, a fundamental gap between the two sides’ expectations which made any accommodation very hard. The Germans were sure that the Boer War had forced Britain onto the ropes, that it signalled a genuine decline, and they expected its desperation to allow them to drive a hard bargain for their friendship. The British, still the richest nation in the world, were not that desperate. They were, however, taken aback by the abruptness of the Germans.
In October 1901 Joseph Chamberlain, who—to his chagrin—had become the particular butt of German attacks on the war, made a speech in defence of the government’s policy and the British army’s conduct in South Africa, claiming it was certainly no worse than anything other Great Powers had done, and included among his examples Prussian soldiers in the Franco-Prussian War. Though Chamberlain had equally impugned the Russians and Austrians, it was the German press that went berserk. It’s important to understand that in Germany the army had become almost sacred and inviolate. It was intensely respected, it was seen as the vehicle of German unification, and in the absence of many other national institutions with which the whole country could identify, it seemed to incarnate the nation’s dignity and identity. Bülow demanded an apology. Chamberlain, in no mood to back down—which he in any case never liked to do—said he’d meant no harm and therefore there was no need to apologize. In Germany his effigy was burned in the streets, and in Berlin there was a brisk trade in spittoons with his face on them. In London The Times ran a report on German Anglophobia, illustrating it with some of the more shocking cartoons.
Despite the personal friction between them, Edward and Wilhelm consciously made an effort to remain on good terms. The king sent the kaiser a Christmas message stressing how much he wanted an “entente cordiale” with Germany, and how, despite the Anglophobia of the German press, England wished to be on good terms with Germany, “and walk hand in hand28 together harmoniously for the sake of peace and the welfare of mankind.” Wilhelm’s answer was grandiose but friendly: “The press is awful29 on both sides, but here it has nothing to say, for I am the sole arbiter and master of German Foreign Policy and the Government and Country must follow me, even if I have to face the musik [sic]! May Your Government never forget this, and never place me in the jeopardy to have to choose a course which could be a misfortune to both them and us.”
But in the New Year of 1902, Bülow—contrary to the advice of the German Foreign Office—couldn’t resist making a public riposte to Chamberlain. He said the German army was blameless and Chamberlain’s words were an outrageous attack on Germany’s heroic struggle for independence. It illustrated why Germany must be strong, so “no one can be30 indifferent to our enmity.” Chamberlain’s reply, in a speech in Birmingham, was similarly grandstanding: “I withdraw nothing, I qualify nothing, I defend nothing.” The two governments’ foremost imperialists faced off. It was a sign of an underlying and growing resentment of Germany in Britain, that Chamberlain instantly became—just as Bülow did—the most popular man in his country, and vilified in the other.
The monarchs’ assurances of goodwill faltered. The kaiser denounced Chamberlain’
s speech as a “conglomeration31 of bluff and overbearing and secret insult,” and said the colonial minister should be shot. But he told Ambassador Lascelles that despite British obstruction and calumnies he was still full of goodwill—though London must remember he was not a “quantité négligeable32.” In London, Salisbury counselled that Bülow’s speech should be ignored and they should register their disapproval by cancelling George’s upcoming trip to Wilhelm’s birthday party in Berlin at the end of January—a visit arranged months before to demonstrate the new closeness of the two families. “I think that under33 the circumstances it would be better for him not to go where he is liable to be insulted, or be treated by the Public in a manner which I feel sure no one would regret more than yourself,” Edward wrote to Wilhelm. The kaiser did not reply. “This is most34 disagreeable for me especially if I have to go in the end,” George complained to his secretary Arthur Bigge. “I hate the very idea of going.” When Lascelles gingerly broached the situation to Wilhelm days before George was due, the kaiser claimed he’d never received35 Edward’s missive, and threatened a dire diplomatic crisis—“another Fashoda”—if the visit were cancelled. Fourteen years before, in equally sticky circumstances, Wilhelm had claimed that a crucial letter had gone missing. No one, especially Edward and Lascelles, believed him. The king relented but demanded a polite telegram from Wilhelm guaranteeing that George would be treated with respect. It never arrived.
George went off to Berlin in January 1902 with understandable trepidation, but he reported that everyone, from princes to the officers in the barracks of the 8th Cuirassiers, of whom Wilhelm made him a colonel, was “most civil,” and his cousin, with whom he dined and breakfasted, was “kindness itself.”36 In his not always reliable memoirs, Bülow claimed that a “frank talk” with the “clear-headed, sensible and manly” (and almost unrecognizably articulate) George smoothed over the disagreements and bitterness of the previous months. “We must forget the past and strive only to be friends in the future,”37 the prince was quoted as saying, and assured Bülow that his father regarded him as a friend—which wasn’t true. George’s letters home were Eeyore-ishly self-pitying. “The amount one is expected and has to do is simply awful,” he grumbled. His Cuirassier helmet “looked somewhat like an extinguisher on a candle,” his uniform didn’t fit, and he had “absolutely walked miles in the Schloss as W’s rooms are at the other end of the Castle and every minute I have to come back and put on another uniform.”38 Worst of all, his new boots “hurt abominably.”39
It was in Bülow’s interest for the visit to go well. Tirpitz and he believed that it was vital to remain on decent terms with Britain while the German navy was in its current critical phase—big enough to attract curiosity from England, but small enough to be easily dispatched. Under the courtesy and smiling, ill will towards Britain lurked everywhere at the German court, according to Anne Topham, the British governess who went to work for Wilhelm in 1902. While the English still thought they were “admired and beloved” in Berlin, they were, she wrote, “nothing of the kind. They were looked upon with suspicion and hatred as possible rivals, often with contempt as belonging to a nation whose glory was in decline, whose day was past.”40 In Germany, George seems to have been regarded as a rather blinkered nationalist—“nothing but an English Jingo,” as a German diplomat described him later that year, against which Wilhelm scribbled, “Exactly.”41 He was known to have made tactless comments about the kaiser in the past, but it was obvious he felt none of his parents’ heat42 about him, and May—half-German and anti-Russian—liked Wilhelm and the attention he showed her, though she also acknowledged that he sometimes made “royalty ridiculous.”43 Wilhelm seems to have looked down slightly on his cousin—but then he looked down on many of his cousins. On the other hand, he didn’t see him as a personal threat, and found it easy to be polite to him. “Georgy” [sic], he wrote to Edward, left “all safe and44 sound and we were very sorry to have to part so soon from such a merry and genial guest.”
Only a few days after George’s visit, however, on 30 January 1902, the British dropped a bombshell on the international community and revealed that they were signing a defensive alliance with Japan. The world—especially Russia and Germany—was extremely surprised. For decades Britain had kept aloof from such deals, and its new ally Japan was regarded as a second-rung power, one of the “yellow races” whom Wilhelm, with classic racist logic, claimed to despise while at the same time regarding the “Yellow Peril”—it is to him that the phrase, so redolent of the turn-of-the-century fear and fascination of the East, is attributed—“as the greatest danger threatening the white race.”45 Not that the British were immune to such views: the languidly sophisticated British prime minister, Arthur Balfour, did not consider the Japanese quite as “civilized”46 as the British—though he would never have said so in public. However, they had a not inconsiderable navy, and their proximity to China made the alliance a cheap way of defending British interests in the Far East against Russia, with whom the Japanese had repeatedly clashed over Manchuria and Korea. They were also sufficiently far away to make this first toe-in-the-water of alignment seem not too dramatic. The effects were gratifying. The Russians were both angry and rattled. Almost immediately Lamsdorff, the Russian foreign minister, promised the British that all Russian troops would be evacuated from Manchuria by 1903, and agreed to an open-door trading policy in China and Korea, which they had blocked for years. The Germans were taken aback that their negotiations with Britain had not been quite as centre stage, nor Britain quite as desperate or without friends, as they had imagined. Edward, as courteously as he could, had made sure that Wilhelm was the first foreign head of state to be informed about the defence treaty with Japan. Willy replied gracefully that his government regarded the new alliance as a “guarantee of47 peace in the East”—though it was almost certainly not what they really thought.
As if to confirm that the British were indeed putting their house in order, in May the Boer War finally ground to its grim close. “Thank God48 it is over at last,” George wrote in his diary. Almost immediately the British government handed over £3 million for reparations and the reconstruction of the two Boer states and promised their incumbents self-government within the British empire—a gesture which kick-started the country’s international rehabilitation, but also signalled the pointlessness of the struggle, and prompted questions for the first time about whether the empire was costing Britain rather than enriching it. The cost had been monstrous. A fortune spent, the goodwill of Europe forfeited, the idea of Britain as both invulnerable and as a force for good blown out of the water, an estimated 75,000 dead49—between 22,000 and 28,000 British soldiers, 7,000 Boer soldiers, 20,000 to 28,000 Boer civilians (of which the majority had been children under sixteen), somewhere between 14,000 and 20,000 non-combatant black Africans.
With the end of the war, it was assumed that the reasons for the hostility between Germany and Britain would diminish and calm down. After all, the two nations still had close trading ties, many Germans and British attended the other country’s universities, the British Left had closer relations with the German Social Democrats than any other European left-wing party, and of course there were the blood ties of the royal family. But in one section of the British press the antipathy did not go away. In the right-wing papers a new kind of story about Germany began to appear, suggesting that it had long-term hostile intentions against Britain, and noting with some anxiety that Germany was overtaking Britain: its population was bigger, its shipbuilding outstripping the British for the first time. The stories were true: by 1913, Germany would have a population of 65 million to Britain’s 46 million; and while Britain’s GDP had been 40 percent bigger than Germany’s in 1870, by 1913 it would be 6 percent smaller. More seriously, The Times’s Berlin correspondent, George Saunders, who had lived in Germany for years, was convinced that there was institutionalized ill will towards Britain in the German government. Germany, Saunders told his editor, was “a new,
crude,50 ambitious, radically unsound Power,” insidious in its methods: “It is not business, it is dining, shooting, toasts, finance, honours, marriages, dynastic friendships. It is not hard Steel, like Joe Chamberlain … It is not English.” Saunders’s coverage so alarmed Bülow that in mid-1902 the German government tried and failed to get the journalist recalled. The new German ambassador, Count Paul von Wolff Metternich zur Gracht, a rare Anglophile in the German diplomatic service, went to see Edward about it. The king, by way of response, waved a viciously anti-British German article which The Times had reprinted. In truth, he had been dismayed by The Times’s reporting, and had personally approached its editor to ask that coverage of Germany be modified, just as his mother had done five years before. To his quiet humiliation, the editor, Charles Moberly Bell, refused.
Seeds of concern about Germany had also begun to germinate in several government departments. The Admiralty called a conference in 1902 about Germany’s suddenly expanding navy and what it was for. In the Home Office, Special Branch, the Metropolitan Police’s intelligence unit, reported that German army intelligence had recently started to gather information on British coastal defences, when previously the Germans had freely swapped information on the Russians and the French. In the Foreign Office, Salisbury’s former right-hand man, Thomas Sanderson, who had always felt Germany’s posturing was more irritating than effective, observed glumly to his friend Francis Lascelles that he was starting to feel a “settled dislike”51 and mistrust of Germany taking hold among the younger generation.
The Three Emperors Page 34
