by A. N. Wilson
The most significant of the new king’s anti-parental gestures was his decision to close Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, and make it, jointly, a Royal Naval College for young cadets and a convalescent home for retired officers. There is an apocryphal story told at Osborne of a visitor coming down the drive in the 1920s and seeing twenty or thirty elderly gentlemen of military or naval deportment, some in bath chairs and covered with plaid rugs, some strolling on the lawn. The visitor was waggishly told: ‘Those are the Prince Consort’s illegitimate children!’ It would not be funny if, instead of referring to the priggishly monogamous Albert, the joker had claimed the old gentlemen to be children of the notoriously lecherous Edward VII. What the joke points up is the fact that the Prince Consort’s real children were no longer there in the Italian palazzo which he had so lovingly built in the 1840s. It was where the distraught queen had spent the greater part of her long widowhood, and it was where she had died.
As the old queen lay dying in January 1901, Henry James, wisest of commentators, had written from his London club, the Reform, to American friends:
I feel as if her death will have consequences in and for this country that no man can foresee. The Prince of Wales is an arch-vulgarian (don’t repeat this from me); the wretched little ‘Yorks’ are less than nothing; the Queen’s magnificent duration had held things magnificently – beneficently – together and prevented all sorts of accidents. Her death, in short, will let loose incalculable forces for possible ill. I am very pessimistic.6
To another American, when the queen had actually died, he wrote:
We grovel before fat Edward – E. The Caresser, as he is privately named … But I mourn the safe and motherly old middle-class queen, who held the nation warm under the fold of her big, hideous, Scotch-plaid shawl and whose duration had been so extraordinarily convenient and beneficent. I fear her death much more than I should have expected; she was a sustaining symbol – and the wild waters are upon us now.7
James bids his compatriots to mourn Victoria, ‘for she was always nice to us’.8 His novelistic antennae caught, as political commentary might have failed to do, the vulnerability of the most powerful nation upon Earth, at the apogee of its pre-eminence.
From the perspective of over one hundred years, we look back to the early years of the twentieth century and see the Edwardian world through the mayhem of slaughters and revolutions which followed. Knowing what is to come will influence two quite different approaches. Some will look back on the period before the First World War as a Golden Age of peace and prosperity, of long afternoons and country house parties. Others will see in the troubled situation in the Empire, the terrible living conditions of the urban poor, the twin growth of nationalism and military technology, a terrifying howl of ancestral voices prophesying war. Both those opposing polarities will focus some of their thoughts upon the monarchy. After all, it was in the aim of ridding the world of the tyrannies and injustices with which a monarchical system is associated that the revolutions in Russia, Germany, Bulgaria, Italy, Spain, were to be driven forward. Some readers of history will continue to see that upturning of thrones to be, in the Cromwellian phrase, a cruel necessity. Others will note that in the years when other countries of the world had their civil wars, their Gulags, their Dachaus and their Kristallnachts, it was the conservative, monarchical, aristocratic Britain which maintained a political ideal of personal freedom, not merely for its own citizens, but also for foreign refugees to its shores and those in other lands who fought for freedom.
Those who lean towards the latter view, as I do myself, need to be clear in their minds what they are saying. While it might be true that the evolved monarchical system and a liberalized aristocracy in Britain undoubtedly did help to maintain a rule of law, a continuity with stabler days, in a way that revolutionary wars did not, it would be absurd to suggest that the monarchs themselves had very much to do with it. Faced with the military or economic disasters which befell some other European countries, it is unlikely that any of the four British monarchs of the first half of the twentieth century would have been able to withstand the rise of a British Lenin or a British Mussolini. It was often what they did not do, rather than what they did, which strengthened the monarchs’ roles. The notion that beneath a deceptive appearance there lurked profound political acumen in the monarchs who reigned from 1901 to 1952, in Edward, George, Edward or George, is to be resisted. It is to overlook the truth of what Henry James intuited as he witnessed the passing of Victoria, the removal of ‘a sustaining symbol’. This is not to say that Edward VII, who was personally amiable, did not have some aptitude for oiling diplomacy. His chief virtue, politically, however, was that he allowed that side of things, almost exclusively, to be handled by professional politicians.
‘He subscribes to his cripples, rewards his sailors, reviews his soldiers and opens bridges, bazaars, hospitals and railway tunnels with enviable sweetness,’ said Mrs Asquith, the wife of his Liberal prime minister. Lord Fisher said of him: ‘He wasn’t clever, but he always did the right thing, which is better than brains.’9 No one would have said this of the king’s Prussian nephew Willy.
If genial, self-indulgent and in many respects well-adjusted Edward VII would have been a disappointing subject for a psychoanalyst, the same could not be said for his nephew, the German Emperor Wilhelm II. Nor is this simply a matter of interest to doctors or to royal obsessives. It is now generally recognized that the Kaiser, an autocratic ruler with immense power over his 68 million subjects,* was governed in his foreign policy by the profound psychological complexity of his attitude to his mother. There is first the very matter of his birth, in 1858, to Queen Victoria’s eldest child – herself named Victoria – and Prince Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia. Princess Victoria insisted upon English doctors, and only English doctors, being present at the birth, which took place in Berlin. She always blamed herself for the fact that his arm was deformed, apparently as a result of clumsy midwifery. For the first few years of his life she was in denial about the withered arm, and throughout his youth she feared that it would warp his manliness or his independence. When he was eight and a half his tutor, Hinzpeter, was instructed by Princess Victoria to make sure that the disabled little boy could retain his balance on a horse. In Hinzpeter’s words:
The tutor, using a moral authority over his pupil that had now become absolute, set the weeping prince on his horse without stirrups and compelled him to go through the various paces. He fell off continually: every time, despite his prayers and tears, he was lifted up and set upon its back again. After weeks of torture, the difficult feat was accomplished: he had got his balance.10
Princess Victoria’s anxiety for the moral and intellectual development of her son was no less demanding. She hero-worshipped her father Prince Albert, whose liberal politics were greatly at odds with the autocratic militarism of the Prussian Junkers. She abominated Bismarck, who rallied the conservative and militaristic elements of the country, with triumphant effect, to unify the German states under Prussia and with their victory over France in 1870 to create the unified Reich of modern Germany. Wilhelm was just twelve when Germany was born – the existence of the Reich was proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles as a triumphant gesture at the end of the Franco-Prussian war – and just thirty when in June 1888 his father, who had only been Emperor for ninety-nine days, died of throat cancer.
Vicky was quite as savage and violent towards her son the future Kaiser as Queen Victoria had been to Bertie. When the teachers at the horrible gymnasium at Kassel, which the boy was compelled to attend, humiliated and criticized him, Vicky redoubled their attacks by letter. ‘I am so sorry to hear that you are so bad at your mathematics & so behindhand compared with other boys! I fear you fancy yourself far more perfect in many things than you really are, and you will have to find out by experience how little you really do know …’ But it is one thing to find out from experience and another to hear no praise from a parent, no positive response to any effort.<
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Willy responded with heart-rending letters from the gymnasium about his somewhat disturbing dreams:
I dreamt last night that I was walking with you & another lady … you were discussing who had the finest hands, whereupon the lady produced a most ungraceful hand, declaring it was the prettiest and turned us her back. I in my rage broke her parasol; but you put your dear arm round my waist, led me aside, pulled your glove off … & showed me your dear beautiful hand which I instantly covered with kisses.11
Is it too fanciful to see in this fourteen-year-old’s dream an insight into the psyche which commanded the later Kaiser’s political and foreign policy? Unable with a part of himself to confront or accept his mother’s coldness and downright callousness, he divides her into two beings: a beautiful lady who accepts his physical adoration and allows him to make innocent love to her by unpeeling her gloves and kissing her hands, and a harsh, ugly-handed woman who needs to be treated with violence? The lovely lady who responds to his love is the Germany whom his mother married, the cruel lady whose parasol deserves to be broken is the England who gave his hated mother birth.
Willy, as the parents called him, did everything possible to defy his liberal father and his English mother. He befriended the most extreme conservative Junker army officers. He married the fervently anti-English and anti-Danish Princess Augusta Victoria of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg. He was openly and vulgarly anti-Semitic, much to his parents’ distress. His anti-English fanaticism could be so uncontrolled that when he suffered from a nosebleed he would do nothing to stanch the flow, exclaiming that he would be happy if he lost every drop of his English blood.
In other moods, the all but schizophrenic Wilhelm would tell his closest confidant Graf Philip Eulenburg-Hertefeld (1847–1921) that Britain was, for him, a home from home (Es ist mir eine Heimat). ‘It sounds ghastly to a German ear when I say,’ wrote Eulenburg, ‘that the German emperor is not a German at all, but actually an Englishman.’ Opinion differed about the degree of his mother’s success in wanting to make her Hohenzollern son into an English gentleman.12
In England, where the Kaiser delighted in his title as an Admiral of the Fleet, he loved to attend the Cowes Regatta and to be a guest at the great country houses. True, there were snobs who believed that ‘in his checked suit and boater he looked more of an incongruous cad than most Bank Holiday trippers to Margate’.13
It was not because he was badly received in England that the Kaiser had such a profoundly ambivalent attitude towards his mother’s country. There was something deep in his psyche which longed both to love and to destroy her. While Queen Victoria was still alive, he had denounced her as an ‘old hag’. But he rushed to her deathbed at Osborne and behaved like a model mourning grandson. It was he who, in an emblematic gesture, had insisted upon closing the dead queen’s eyes. During the Jameson raid against the Boers he had infuriated English public opinion by sending the Boer leader Kruger a congratulatory telegram at having kept the English predators at bay. Yet he advised his nephew Prince Bertie, later Edward VII, about how to deploy English troops in South Africa. He was in awe of the Royal Navy and rejoiced in its strength. He also wanted to build a German navy which could destroy it. ‘One cannot have enough hatred for England. Caeterum censeo, Britannia esse delendam,’ he could proclaim to Eulenburg, yet he could splutter to the Austro-Hungarian ambassador:
In England one seems to want to treat me as a quantité négligeable. But I will not tolerate this … I will certainly never be an enemy of England, in spite of all the insults which I have continuously been paid on their part. One seems in England not always to understand, in spite of the fact that I have often made it clear, that I and not my ministers make German policy.14
There was some justice in the Kaiser’s impatience. One of the abiding themes in the story of Britain’s relations with Europe in the twentieth century is the assumption, or half-assumption, by British politicians and diplomats that European peoples would have benefited from arranging their internal political affairs on a British model. Their failure to do so has often provoked bafflement. Queen Victoria herself, and her daughter the Kaiser’s mother, dreamed of the liberal Germany towards which ‘dear Papa’ had aspired. If Edward VII had said ‘I and not my ministers make British policy’, he would have found himself being invited to see a doctor, if not to abdicate. Wilhelm II, particularly under the influence of Eulenburg, was tempted to ride roughshod over the delicate alliances and balances which constituted ‘Germany’. Edward VII was a constitutional monarch in a country which (excepting Ireland) was politically united, and confident in its parliamentary evolutions. It had huge social problems, vast injustices: it had not yet extended the franchise to all men, let alone to any women, nor solved any of the problems of urban poverty. But its system of evolved parliamentary representative government, administered by an impartial civil service, rested on a national history stretching back hundreds of years. Germany, when Queen Victoria died, was but thirty years old.
Eulenburg persuaded Kaiser Wilhelm II to aspire after personal rule, total autocracy. Though Eulenburg retired as a result of scandal in 1902, his political influence remained as an aftertaste from which Wilhelm could not cleanse his palate. He was appallingly shocked when he learned the things of which Eulenburg stood accused – a passion for a Munich boatman a quarter of a century before. It would seem that Eulenburg, and all his Altedel entourage, were decidedly Grecian in their erotic preferences, and no doubt Dr Freud would have noted that the same men who excited the newspapers with their homosexual antics were also urging the Kaiser to build larger and bigger guns, and to expand the German navy. Most of the evidence against Eulenburg in his trial was perjury. The Kaiser only knew real emotional intimacy with men, and undoubtedly fell in love with them, but without knowing he had done so. No one in his position who understood the impression he was conveying would, on a visit to Eton, ask if he could watch ‘a boy being swished’. He needed his son to explain what ‘such men’ did – when he did so, he was incredulous. His reaction was comparable to that of his cousin, the future King George V, who said: ‘I thought men like that shot themselves.’ There could hardly be a greater contrast between two human characters than between uncle and nephew, a difference manifested in their courts – Wilhelm’s stiffly Protestant, highly aristocratic, steaming with only half-articulated homosexuality, violent and militaristic; Edward’s boozy, jolly, nouveau riche in atmosphere, the monarch’s taste for horses, women and rich food being reflected in his raffish friends, and his political ambitions veering in the direction of Entente with France and peace in Europe.
The Kaiser’s schizophrenia about Britain provided just the sort of technicolor tragicomedy which newspapers love. The British public, fed by the ambivalence of journalists, loved, hated, love-hated and laughed at the Kaiser.
‘The German Emperor is … addicted to saying startling things to his own people and others, and our Government may safely be left to clear away any misconception on his part of the facts of this particular case [the Kruger telegram] unless, of course, he really wishes to force at once a quarrel with this country,’ the Liberal Manchester Guardian had written when Willy sent his tactless telegram congratulating Kruger for repulsing the Jameson raid in 1897. But the newspaper editors could have echoed the mood of the band in Portsmouth Harbour on 22 November 1899, when the Kaiser made one of his frequent visits: they played the old melody ‘Oh, Willie, We Have Missed You’.15
He was such good copy. ‘We welcome the Kaiser as one of the most remarkable personalities of the day,’ gushed the Daily Chronicle – ‘as a War Lord who has never created or invited a war, and as a Divine Right autocrat in an age when scarcely one man in a thousand believes in monarchy by divine right.’16
At the time of Queen Victoria’s funeral, Willy made a deep impression. ‘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 o
wn blood.’17 Even if the newspaper really believed Willy was more gifted than Napoleon, Metternich or Bismarck, it is difficult to see how with three wholly German grandparents and one who was half German, he could have been ‘largely of our own blood’.
The Daily Telegraph was the most pro-German of the British newspapers, and in 1908 it was rewarded with one of the most prodigious scoops in the history of journalism. Its correspondent Colonel Stuart-Wortley managed to secure an interview with the Kaiser. It occurred at the height of fears of German aggression and the most delicate negotiations in which the English king was being used by the diplomats and politicians to try to get an agreement by both nations to a joint reduction in naval expenditure.
‘You English are mad, mad as March hares,’ said the Kaiser. ‘What has come over you that you are so completely given over to suspicions quite unworthy of a great nation? What more can I do than I have done? Have I ever been false to my word? Falsehood and prevarication are alien to my nature.’18
