Wilhelm and Edward, meanwhile, went on demonstrating their amicability in public. In the autumn of 1902, against the advice of his entourage, Wilhelm invited the British “hero” of the Boer War, Lord Roberts, to army manoeuvres, and declined to meet three Boer War generals who toured the European capitals, an unpopular decision in Germany which irritated Bülow. Edward, whom Saunders considered too pro-German, invited Wilhelm to Sandringham for his birthday in November, and arranged for the kaiser’s British regiment to be briefly stationed near Dover so he could inspect it.
The kaiser was shocked by the new strain of hostility he discovered in the British papers—though they gratifyingly still made a distinction between himself and the German government. His own welcome, as he told Bülow, had been “as hearty and affectionate as ever;” it was the chancellor and the government “they would like to send to the devil.”52 He and George went out and shot 2,201 pheasants53 in one day. “He made himself54 most agreable [sic] when he came here,” George told Nicholas. The interaction between the monarchs was as prickly as ever, though. When the king proudly showed off his new motor car, Wilhelm was keen to show off his own expertise. What did it run on? Edward—hating being made to feel ignorant by his nephew—had to admit he had no idea. Ah, potato spirit was the thing, Wilhelm announced. Far better than petrol. He promised—despite Edward’s protestations—to have his experts whip up a sample by the end of the week. As Wilhelm departed, one German diplomat claimed to have heard Edward grunt, “Thank God he’s55 left.”
The strength of new anti-Germanism was made alarmingly evident at the end of 1902. The British and German governments sent a flotilla of warships to blockade the coast of Venezuela, which—as South American states were wont to do—was threatening to renege on large debts it owed both countries. When members of the British government—Chamberlain, now rabidly anti-German—and the Conservative press led by The Times kicked up a fuss, the British ships were almost immediately withdrawn. In fact the situation was more complicated than it looked: the Conservative administration was also bowing to American pressure to withdraw, and because it was very unpopular in the country, it felt more obliged than it otherwise might have to listen to its more right-wing elements; most Liberals were not opposed to working with the Germans. Then the same thing happened a few months later. The government organized a conference with the German government to arrange for British financiers to invest in the German-backed Baghdad railway, the right-wing press hissed again, and the government withdrew. The new British hostility wasn’t helped when in February 1903 the National Review, the country’s most passionately anti-German publication, published an article claiming that the previous summer, on board a yacht belonging to some rich Americans, the kaiser had launched into a stream of invective against Britain and his uncle, voicing his dislike “with such brutal frankness”56 that his audience was shocked. The kaiser denied it, but even Lascelles, who vainly tried to minimize the damage—“We should remember57 that he always exaggerates and that people who do not know him well are apt to misunderstand him”—believed it was true. There was another splurge of anti-German rhetoric in the British press, and this time the finger pointed at the kaiser and his new navy. “There is a58 menace growing up in the east which cannot be ignored and which means that an adequate squadron must be at some strategical point in home waters,” reported the right-wing Morning Post, a paper which in the past had glowingly praised Wilhelm.
When relations with Britain were going badly it had now become almost a cliché that Germany would find itself getting on better with Russia, and so it proved. In September 1901, after nearly four years of frostiness on Russia’s part, Wilhelm and Nicholas, with Bülow and Lamsdorff, had met in the North German town of Danzig. The Germans knew by now that the tsar found the kaiser difficult, and so Wilhelm’s uncle, the Duke of Baden—to whom he was said occasionally to listen—had sat him down beforehand and carefully suggested that he must simply be friendly and make no obvious demands. It seemed to work. Nicholas wrote with some relief to his mother that Wilhelm was “in good spirits,59 calm and very amiable.” He told Bülow he hoped the two countries would “always fight60 shoulder to shoulder,” and showed some keenness when the Germans proposed a continental league with France. Even better, the Russian press reported favourably on the meeting.
In fact, the original impetus for the Russian thaw had come not from Anglophobia but from a pragmatic financial calculation made by the new foreign minister, Count Vladimir Lamsdorff, who had taken over in June 1900, when Muraviev, aged fifty-five, had dropped dead. (Some said it was too much champagne, though it might as easily have been exhaustion; both his predecessors had keeled over in the job.) Lamsdorff, a short, shy man (he wore stacked heels), famous for his beautiful manners—one British diplomat called him “the politest man61 in the world”—had spent his career as a backroom boy among the files of the Russian Foreign Ministry and had been deputy to the more showy but less knowledgeable Muraviev. He was also regarded within the Russian government as Sergei Witte’s man.62 Like Witte, he believed that good relations with Germany were common sense, since Russia’s defence of their mutual border now took a big bite out of its defence budget. In 1900 Russia had spent ten times more on the army than on education, and more on the navy than on the ministries of agriculture and justice put together. Before the lapse of the Russo-German Reinsurance Treaty in 1890 those sums had been almost negligible. It was obvious that better relations ought to have a tangible effect on Russia’s defence budget.
Bülow was delighted. He’d been angling for the tsar and the kaiser to make up for years, though having shut Russian grain out of Germany with exceptionally high tariffs in order to please the Junker land-owning lobby in the Reichstag, he was as responsible as anyone for the deeper reasons for the rift between Russia and Germany.* As Russia’s biggest-selling newspaper, Novoe vremia, observed, closer relations could hardly come about “between peoples with63 tense economic relations.”
Wilhelm instantly took against Lamsdorff—as he had every Russian foreign minister since Lobanov—and made him the butt of his “jokes” all through the meeting. It seemed the kaiser had envisaged himself and Nicholas putting the world to rights all by themselves, and resented the foreign minister’s presence. Lamsdorff’s discomfort—and it was considerable—was shared by the entire imperial entourage, who found meetings with the kaiser “a thorough martyrdom.” He would lecture them on Russian ballet, ask them abrupt personal questions, or deliberately get their names wrong and laugh uproariously. Worse, he would play humiliating practical jokes on his own entourage in front of them—smacking his chief of staff on the bottom, or snipping someone’s braces—so the Russians didn’t know where to look. The minister of the court, Fredericks, said that every encounter with the kaiser left him “a complete wreck.”64
A few weeks later, to demonstrate his goodwill, Wilhelm rode across the Russian border to a small village called Wyshctyten, which had recently experienced a devastating fire. There, in the town square, he distributed several purses of money to the mostly Jewish inhabitants, and made a speech in German which none of the villagers understood. It was meant as a kindly gesture—though it’s hard not to see it as an unconscious attempt to invade and usurp his fellow monarch’s space—and Nicholas took it as such, though he apparently65 thought it rather odd.
From then on the relationship seemed to improve by leaps. In the spring of 1902, when the argument between Bülow and Chamberlain had caused such bitterness between Britain and Germany, Bülow sweetened the latest harsh rise in German tariffs on Russian grain with a large state loan to Russia of 2 million roubles. In August, when the Germans complained about the hostility of the British press, the two emperors again met on their yachts at the Estonian port city of Reval (present-day Tallinn) in the Russian Baltic states. Privately, it was not an encounter Nicholas was looking forward to. “Be friendly and66 severe so that he realizes he dare not joke with you,” Alix told him before the meeting, “and
that he learns to respect you and be afraid of you—that is the Chief thing. How I wish I were with you.” On the day, Wilhelm referred to himself constantly as “the Admiral of67 the Atlantic,” and to Nicholas as “the Admiral of the Pacific,” which intensely irritated the tsar. As he departed on his yacht, Wilhelm signalled, “The Admiral of the Atlantic bids farewell to the Admiral of the Pacific.” Nicholas muttered to his entourage, “He’s raving68 mad!” Once again the kaiser didn’t help things by insulting Lamsdorff, refusing to award him a decoration, the German Order of the Black Eagle, that he’d been promised. He claimed that Lamsdorff was intriguing against Germany.* which made no sense as he had initiated the thaw between the two countries, and told Bülow that Nicholas disliked his foreign minister and he’d soon be sacked. “I will arrange everything69 directly with the Tsar.”
This was familiar wishful thinking from Wilhelm, but he had touched on something true about Nicholas. After eight years as tsar, he was beginning to feel more confident, and since the beginning of 1902 had shown a marked disinclination to listen to his senior ministers. Having agreed to evacuate troops from Manchuria, and despite the increasingly perilous state of Russian finances, he stopped the evacuation, closed Russian-controlled ports to foreign trade, and took the control of Manchuria’s civil and diplomatic administration out of the hands of Witte and Lamsdorff, giving it to the ambitious but remarkably incompetent General Alekseev. This was an extraordinarily bad idea: the entire Manchurian plan had become an imperial vanity project which ate money. Between 1897 and 1903 Russia spent 1,141 million roubles on China—only slightly less than the entire state budget for 1903. It would make only one-tenth of that back in Chinese customs tariffs, and only a little more in selling Russian goods. It seems unlikely Nicholas had any notion of what a financial catastrophe Manchuria was, however. He had a very sketchy grasp of economics. He told Mossolov, who ran the tsar’s chancellery, that he had no idea which was worth more, 25 roubles or a gold watch. (The watch was worth hundreds of roubles.) “It is one of70 the big gaps in my education,” he said blithely. “… I don’t know the price of things; I have never had reason to pay for anything myself.”
The Manchurian plan made Nicholas and his cohorts feel that Russia was still a Great Power—and made the British and every other Power with interests in China furious. The timing, however, could hardly have been worse. There had been peasant risings and general strikes across Russia since the spring. Even the most fertile regions were in the grip of an agricultural crisis the government had no idea how to handle. In the towns, food prices were rising and living conditions were among the worst in the world. Assassinations of government officials had become endemic, the universities were in uproar. (“I am so sorry71 to see the Students have again been kicking up a row in the different universities,” George wrote to Nicholas in early 1902, “as I know it must be a great worry to you.”) At Easter a police-condoned pogrom in Kishinev in Bessarabia, in which a large number of Jews (estimates range from between forty-seven and 120) were murdered, caused such an international uproar that the Russian government felt obliged to publish an official condemnation. There were whispers—unfounded—that the tsar had been personally involved. Things had got so bad that Russia’s great secular saint, Leo Tolstoy, wrote an open letter to the tsar, begging him to hear the suffering of his people and reconsider the whole basis of autocracy. Unsurprisingly, the missive merely irritated Nicholas; Tolstoy found himself excommunicated—which in turn made the government look vindictive and on the wrong side. In September Nicholas effectively sacked Sergei Witte, sidelining him to a powerless position on the Council of Ministers. Witte opposed the Far Eastern policy, and his economic policy had by no means been an unadulterated success, but he was also the only minister with any ideas on how to deal with the agricultural crisis. Witte’s demotion left his rival Vyacheslav Plehve, the deeply repressive minister of the interior, as Nicholas’s most senior and influential minister. The tsar was not just being inconsistent, he was actively playing one minister off against another in order to keep the upper hand.
Donald Mackenzie Wallace, the Russian-speaking former foreign editor of The Times, who had begun to send regular reports to Edward via his private secretary, Sir Francis Knollys, felt the Russian government was becoming “more and more72 conservative,” and lurching towards an atavistic anti-Westernism. The new line at the Russian court was, “Russia ought not to adopt certain peculiarities of European Civilization which are generally supposed in western Europe to be a symptom of national progress.” He thought the government was in “chaos,” however, and reported that his Russian friends predicted “a great political change.”73
By early 1903 Edward’s public bonhomie had begun to win over the British public, and in the spring he finally made his great splash on the European stage. In March he set off on a five-week cruise to the Mediterranean, making stop-offs in Lisbon, Gibraltar, Malta, Sicily, Naples and Rome and, at his own instigation, a last-minute state visit to Paris. He refused to take a government minister with him, as was the custom, instead picking Sir Charles Hardinge, an ambitious young diplomat with good connections at court through his wife. In European terms it was as if Edward had got himself a diplomatic aide-de-camp such as the kaiser might have, an act of self-assertion which the foreign secretary, Lansdowne, didn’t much like. Hardinge was clever, confident, had a talent for pleasing the right people and, some said, “an unbecoming74 degree of self regard.” He was part of a new generation in the Foreign Office which argued that Britain needed to rebuild its bridges with France and Russia, and ought to be wary of Germany. Edward’s patronage would have a profound effect on his career: within three years, he would become successively ambassador to Russia and the senior civil servant at the Foreign Office.
The King set out on the Victoria and Albert with a small all-male party that included Fritz Ponsonby. The yacht was accompanied by eight battleships, four cruisers, four destroyers and a dispatch vessel, which slightly spoilt the effect when he insisted on drawing into Naples “incognito.” Right from the start, however, it was clear that Edward had a flair and enthusiasm for this kind of project. Fritz Ponsonby was surprised to discover that he had “made all the75 arrangements and supervised every detail.” In public Edward showed endless good humour, stood for hours, remembered names. He walked into the crowds and refused police protection. Everywhere he went, the public went wild, the press enthused. The Italians loved it—it was the first time a British monarch had visited since the Middle Ages. Little gestures brought the house down: in Rome, he stopped and bared his head as he went through the Porta Pia, and met the Pope—despite Balfour’s suggestion that it would play badly back home.
Paris was the greatest success of all. It was actually the French foreign minister, Théophile Delcassé, who had proposed it. For two or three years he had been of the opinion that it was time to resolve the two countries’ wearyingly long-standing quarrels. Germany was France’s most dangerous European enemy, and antagonism with Britain, which had reached such a hysterical pitch over Fashoda, was a distraction France could do without. Lord Lansdowne, the British foreign secretary, could see the advantages of an accord with France. It would save Britain a great deal of money and end the quarrels about Egypt, but he was cautious. Public opinion in both countries was still very hostile to the other, to such an extent that the French approaches had been top secret, and the British cabinet needed to be won over. Delcassé believed a visit from Edward, Britain’s most famous Francophile, might help the mood. Lansdowne was reluctant. He worried that Edward would be booed (he had no desire to travel himself); Balfour thought state visits accomplished nothing. The king, however,76 seems to have supported the idea of rapprochement from the first, and in March 1903 he decided he wanted to go to Paris. Bypassing both Lansdowne and the British ambassador in Paris—which neither man liked—Edward made the arrangements direct with the French president, Emile Loubet, via the British military attaché. The visit was kept secret until th
e last minute. “Most of the suite,” Fritz Ponsonby recalled, “had no idea where they were going.”
It was like a fairy tale. The king arrived to boos and jeers. Crowds in the Champs-Élysées shouted, “Vive Fashoda” and even “Vive Jeanne d’ Arc,” which as Ponsonby nervously noted, “seemed to be going back a long way in history.”77 The nationalist paper L’Autorité ran an open letter which began: “Your presence in78 Paris shocks, offends and revolts us patriots …;” La Patrie enumerated every Anglo-French quarrel since the Middle Ages. By the time Edward left, three days later, the Paris crowds were cheering him frenziedly. He turned in a pitch-perfect performance—aided by the fact that the French government had made the second day of his visit a public holiday. The whole city turned out to see him, and the Paris papers covered his every move in minute, breathless detail. In a perfect volte-face, they seemed simply to forget Fashoda and the Boers. Edward walked into the crowds, spoke in fluent French about how much he loved the city and how at home he felt there, looked constantly delighted. Parisians, who like so many in Europe felt a curious combination of fascination and dislike for Britain, had long harboured a soft spot for an English “milord,” and though he hadn’t been back since the mid-1890s, Edward had had the equivalent of film-star glamour ever since he had pursued actresses there in the 1860s.
After Paris, Edward went to Dublin and then to Vienna, to meet Emperor Franz Joseph. Though they had almost nothing in common—Franz Joseph was well known for rising at 4 a.m., eating his lunch at twelve and his dinner at five and being in bed by seven; Edward had barely drunk his first cup of coffee by ten—Edward admired the Hapsburg emperor. Franz Joseph had chosen to place himself above the general mêlée of politics, embracing the role of a ceremonial and dutiful leader, and was almost universally respected. His famous inscrutability probably made Edward want to charm him all the more.
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