by Jane Ridley
The King’s special train steamed into the Bois de Boulogne station in Paris at 3:00 p.m. on 1 May. As the King rode to the British Embassy in the president’s state carriage, the sullen crowd thronging the Champs-Élysées jeered “Vivent les Boers!,” “Vive Jeanne d’Arc!”
“The French don’t like us,” said one of the suite.
“Why should they?” replied Bertie.16
That afternoon at the embassy the King received a deputation from the British Chamber of Commerce and read a speech, drafted by Hardinge, that declared Britain’s friendship for France. Effectively a press release, it appeared in the French papers next morning. When the King attended the Théâtre-Français to see a new play, L’Autre Danger, the house was full but the audience was icy. To the consternation of the Paris police, the King insisted on mingling with the crowd in the foyer during the interval. Spotting the actress Jeanne Granier, he walked up, kissed her hand, and said, “Oh, Mademoiselle, I remember how I applauded you in London. You personified there all the grace, all the esprit of France.”†17 The effect was electric; he was cheered as he returned to his box. By morning the King’s gesture was on everyone’s lips.
The next day, at a military review at Varennes, the King stood beside the president. Bertie wore a plumed helmet and military overcoat over his scarlet field marshal’s uniform, and he was scrupulous in saluting the French troops. At eleven forty-five he attended a reception at the Hôtel de Ville. Flinging off his gray overcoat, he gave the briefest of impromptu speeches, delivered in faultless French: “Je n’oublierai jamais ma visite à votre charmante ville, et je puis vous assurer que c’est avec le plus grand plaisir que je reviens à Paris, ou je me trouve toujours comme si j’étais chez moi.”‡
“Comme si j’étais chez moi.” No British politician could have said those words. Neither Balfour nor Lansdowne could conceivably have taken Paris by storm as Bertie did. From that moment at the Hôtel de Ville, he was met everywhere by frenzied cheers. All those years of dissipation as Prince de Galles were not in vain. “It was his personal knowledge of French ways, his charming Parisian manner and his Parisian way of living in Paris that won influence for him,” wrote George Saunders, the Times’ Paris correspondent, diplomatically hinting at Bertie’s career as an English milord.18
That afternoon, the King was entertained with a race meeting at Longchamps. He found himself in a box sitting next to Madame Loubet, dowdy wife of the bourgeois French president. The prospect of spending the entire afternoon thus incarcerated was too painful, and after two races Bertie beckoned Ponsonby and whispered, “You must get me out of this. Go to the Jockey Club and ask someone to send me an invitation.”19 The Prince d’Arenberg came to the rescue and Bertie escaped to the Jockey Club. The republican politicians began to murmur, but Bertie watched only one race from the Jockey Club stand, and he did not appear in the paddock where his friends from the vieille noblesse awaited him. He understood that the aristocracy were so deeply estranged from the politicians of the Third Republic that being seen to socialize with his old friends could only damage him and undo the good that his visit had done.
At dinner at the Élysée Palace, President Loubet mumbled a speech that he had written out and pinned to a candlestick. Bertie replied in fluent French without notes. Afterward, Jennie Churchill’s nephew Shane Leslie watched him being driven to the Opéra “in a delirious struggling crowd.… The cry of Vive le Roi was raised, shouted down and raised again till it conquered.”20 Inside the Opéra, Daisy Pless, the glamorous daughter of Patsy Cornwallis-West, who was married to the Prince of Pless, saw the King sitting between the “monkey looking” Loubet and his wife, “who looks like a fat Jewess.”21 In fact, the King and the president were by now good friends. Bertie spotted in the audience the famous courtesan Liane de Pougy, one of the many women with whom he was rumored (falsely) to have had an affair. “Would you like her to be asked to leave?” asked Loubet.
“Not at all,” replied Bertie, explaining that it pained him to think that the Parisians should find it necessary “to ignore the laws of gallantry in order to avoid offending my well-known taste for austerity.”22 In a little over twenty-four hours, the English milord had conquered Paris.
This was Bertie’s defining intervention in foreign policy. The Boer War had left Britain beggared and beleaguered. Isolation was no longer tenable. The potential enemies of the empire included not only France and Russia but also Germany, as the kaiser had rushed to the support of the Boers. That Britain had to make a choice between the Germans and the Franco-Russian camp was widely acknowledged; that the decision should be a rapprochement with France was recognized by most of the Balfour government. But a diplomatic deal was impossible while opinion in France was so strongly anti-British. By his visit to Paris, Bertie defused this opposition. Acting without official support from the government, he upstaged the politicians; but he was not opposing government policy, he was facilitating it—or at least facilitating what he thought government policy ought to be. True, Bertie had his own motives for aligning England against Germany. These went back to William’s quarrel with Vicky at the time of Fritz’s death in 1888, and even further back to the rift within the family when Bertie sided with Alix against Queen Victoria and Vicky over Prussia’s invasion of Schleswig-Holstein in 1864.
Bertie’s Paris triumph was hailed by the English press. The government had no choice but to welcome it. At the time, no one was in any doubt as to the importance of the part played by the King in promoting the French entente. Lansdowne acknowledged his role when the agreement was negotiated the following year.23 Eyre Crowe, the guru of the Edwardian Foreign Office, wrote a classic paper analyzing England’s relations with France and Germany in 1907, in which he stressed the importance of the King’s initiative in removing French suspicion and hostility toward Britain, and doing so almost overnight. “The French nation having come to look upon the King as personally attached to their country, saw in HM’s words and actions a guarantee that the adjustment of political differences might well prepare the way for bringing about a genuine and lasting friendship.”24
After Bertie’s death, however, his role in the formation of the entente was downplayed. The politicians tried to write him out of diplomatic history. In an interview in 1911, Balfour assured the biographer Sidney Lee that the King “had nothing to do” with the entente. His visits to France were helpful, but “In no case did he go at the request of ministers: no political discussion that he held had much effect on policy.”25 Lee incorporated this version of events into the article he wrote about Edward VII in the Dictionary of National Biography, stating that “no direct responsibility” for the “initiation or conclusion” of the agreement belonged to the King. In 1915, Balfour was puzzled to read an account that credited Edward VII with the making of the entente. He wrote to Lansdowne: “During the years which you and I were his ministers, he never made an important suggestion of any sort on the larger questions of policy.”26 This view became orthodoxy, repeated by diplomatic historians, who dismissed the notion that the King had anything to do with the making of foreign policy.27 What Balfour failed to acknowledge was that the King’s visit to Paris was policy in itself.28
Strictly speaking, of course, it is true to say that the Anglo-French entente of 1904 was a settlement of outstanding colonial disputes, most importantly in North Africa. The British agreed to allow France control over Morocco in exchange for French recognition of British influence in Egypt. This barter of Egypt for Morocco was signed by Lord Lansdowne and Paul Cambon in April 1904. No one would claim that the King drew up state papers or negotiated a treaty.
But the orthodox account of the diplomatic revolution of 1903–4 is too narrow. It may have been true, as Times correspondent George Saunders wrote, that the French “greatly exaggerate King Edward’s political part in arranging the Entente Cordiale and in working it”; but this in itself gave him influence.29 French statesmen believed that the King personally directed British foreign policy. For them, h
is visit had the highest diplomatic importance. In his discussions with President Loubet and foreign minister Delcassé, Bertie exceeded his role as a constitutional monarch, warning the latter not to trust the kaiser, who he said was “à la fois fou et méchant,” (both mad and wicked) and stressing his personal desire for an agreement.30 These conversations persuaded Théophile Delcassé to initiate negotiations with the British government.
England’s embrace of the continental commitment plunged her into the world of European diplomacy that, as an isolationist, imperial power, she had discounted since the mid-nineteenth century. In the decade before 1914, England drew closer to the continent than she had been since 1815. This presented opportunities that Bertie was uniquely qualified to seize. Victoria’s marriage policy meant that Britain, which had been for centuries on the dynastic periphery of Europe, was now at the center. As uncle of both Kaiser William and Czar Nicholas II, Bertie was head of the family. He spoke fluent French and German, practicing his languages on his Austrian valet, Meidinger, whom he employed for that purpose. As a result of his exclusion from politics as Prince of Wales, he had spent many months each year in Germany and France; he had traveled several times to Russia and to Austria. His network of contacts and cousins meant that, unlike politicians such as Balfour or Lansdowne, he was a truly cosmopolitan figure. These links were important because, as Salisbury pointed out in 1896, Europe’s future had come to depend upon the will of three or four men. “It is very remarkable that in spite of the progress of democratic ideas, the weight of individual personalities, for good or evil is greater than ever. Now every turn in the humours of the Emperor Nicholas or the Emperor William, or the Sultan of Turkey, is watched and interpreted—the fate of many thousands of lives depends on them.”31 After 1901, Bertie became one of those men.
The very success of Bertie’s policy brought a down side. Britain’s rapprochement with France led directly to her involvement in the Great War. If Bertie is to be credited with bringing about the entente, so, the argument goes, he must also be blamed for causing the war. It was summed up neatly with schoolboy humor in the spoof history of England 1066 and All That. King Edward, who “smoked cigars, was addicted to entente cordials, married a Sea King’s daughter and invented appendicitis,” pursued a policy of peace that “was very successful and culminated in the Great War to End War.”32
Bertie’s popularity in France was resented by Kaiser William and added to his fears of the encirclement of Germany. No doubt, “if the king had stayed at home, occasionally inviting his nephew to shoot the pheasants of Sandringham, the rapprochement with France might have gone ahead without the exacerbation of Anglo-German relations.”33 By taking on William at his own game of royal tours abroad and effortlessly outdoing him, Bertie was bound to cause resentment and jealousy. He was well aware of this. In his dealings with William, he endeavored to use his influence to triangulate the French entente and contain German hostility. This was not an easy task.
On the morning of 31 March 1905, after dithering for two hours on board his steamer Hamburg, Kaiser William was bundled into an open boat in the storm-swept Bay of Tangier and rowed, furious and terrified, through the breakers to the shore. On landing at Tangier, he mounted an unfamiliar white horse that nearly threw him, and made a speech at the sultan’s palace, declaring that he had come to recognize Morocco’s independence. Having theatrically demonstrated his rejection of the Anglo-French colonial agreement of 1904—which gave Morocco to France—and thus triggered an international crisis, the kaiser resumed his cruise on board the Hamburg. Steaming off to Gibraltar, he sent an April Fool’s Day telegram to Uncle Bertie: “So happy to be once more at Gibraltar and to send you from British soil expression of my faithful friendship. Everybody so nice to me. Had a delightful dinner and garden party with Sir George and Lady White and many pretty ladies.”34
William had been bullied into landing at Tangier by Bernhard von Bülow, the German chancellor, but once the thing was done, he took the credit and happily boasted about it.35 His Morocco escapade was a tipping point. It caused another rift in William’s relationship with his uncle, and this time it was never fully healed. A week later, at Marseille, Bertie embarked on a Mediterranean cruise on board the Victoria and Albert. From the royal yacht, he fulminated against his nephew. The landing at Tangier was an “uncalled-for event.” The kaiser “is no more or less than a political ‘enfant terrible,’ ” Bertie told foreign secretary Lord Lansdowne. “These annual cruises are deeply to be deplored and mischief is their only object.”36 To Louis Battenberg, the King was even more unguarded. “I have tried to get on with him & shall nominally do my best till the end—but trust him—never. He is utterly false & the bitterest foe that E[ngland] possesses!”37
Each night after dinner on the Victoria and Albert, the King forced Lord Salisbury,§ the minister in attendance, to partner him at bridge. How the unfortunate Salisbury must have regretted admitting that he played. Whenever he made a mistake, which was often, the King roared with rage. Eventually the scenes became so painful that Fritz Ponsonby and the equerry attempted to divert the royal wrath by pretending to quarrel furiously about each other’s play.38
After a three-weeks’ cruise, the Victoria and Albert returned to Marseille, and Alix and her daughters sailed on to Greece, while the King returned by special train via Paris. This was a private visit, but that did not stop him from doing all he could to repair the damage done by the kaiser. He dined with President Loubet, and he held two meetings with the pro-English foreign minister, Delcassé. Bertie could hardly have made a more ostentatious demonstration of his sympathy for France. Delcassé was the architect of the Entente Cordiale, and Bertie knew from the British ambassador that the kaiser was plotting to get him sacked.39
Bertie insisted that this visit should be incognito. Traveling as the Duke of Lancaster, he stayed at the Hotel Bristol rather than the British Embassy, and he declared his wish “to go about Paris … as he did when he was Prince of Wales.”40 Invitations flooded in, the Hotel Bristol was besieged by visitors signing their names, and Bertie packed his diary with engagements with old friends from the Faubourg Saint-Germain, such as the Standishes and the de Breteuils. At the table of the beautiful Madame de Pourtalès, he scandalized the party by threatening to land 150,000 men in Schleswig-Holstein.41 Ponsonby endeavored to inform the police about the King’s movements while ensuring that he was unconscious of their protection. When Bertie made a secret assignation with a noted beauty in the Jardin des Plantes, he was enraged to recognize the detective who was shadowing him. After that he tried to dodge the police by slipping out unnoticed in his car.42 Throughout the visit, Mrs. Keppel was there, staying in Ernest Cassel’s rooms at 2 rue de Cirque.43 In his discreetly anecdotal memoir, Ponsonby gives a glimpse of her worrying for the King’s safety in a restaurant when she noticed that the man sitting at the next table had a villainous face; he turned out to be yet another detective.44
The previous year, Bertie had delighted the kaiser by attending the annual regatta of the German navy at Kiel in June. This year he pointedly stayed away. William responded by publicly condemning Bertie’s relationship with Mrs. Keppel. When this got back to London, Bertie was much annoyed.45 Relations between uncle and nephew were deteriorating fast.
The King and Queen made a state visit to Ireland in July 1903. On his previous visit to Ireland in 1885, on the eve of Home Rule, Bertie had been greeted by sullen, hostile crowds, and this one began inauspiciously. After an overnight journey, he woke to pouring rain and the news that the Pope had died. No one was at ease, least of all the Irish chief secretary George Wyndham, who was minister in attendance. The King appeared dressed in uniform and consumed a substantial breakfast.46 He told Wyndham to draft a speech for him, and soon they were smoking cigarettes together as the young man altered the address according to royal instructions. “The King vastly improved the draft and said exactly the right thing, so that Protestants and Catholics alike were pleased,” Wyndham recalled
.47 In his speech, Bertie declared that the Pope’s death had brought “a sadness which I share, remembering as I do the kindness with which his Holiness recently received me in Rome.”48 Wyndham noticed the King’s relaxed professionalism, the “fat easy whisper” that put nervous Irishmen at ease. As the “Friend of Our Pope,” Bertie received a rapturous welcome, especially in the Dublin slums.49 “The King paced on and lit a cigarette, bowing and smiling and waving his hand to the ragamuffins in the branches. That finished me and now I love him,” wrote Wyndham. As for Alix, she was “very naughty” and made Wyndham laugh as he gave his speech, but “did this in such a way as to make everyone, including the culprit, feel comfortable and witty.” Standing beside her as she wore the Garter ribbon—which matched the blue of her eyes—ropes of pearls, and a breastplate of diamonds, Wyndham was in ecstasy: “She is an Angel.”50
