by Jane Ridley
The power of the Crown is usually calibrated in terms of the monarch’s power to resist his ministers, but the sovereign can equally play an important part in “putting his influence and authority behind the government, which is exactly what King Edward did.”93 So sorry did the King feel for his stricken prime minister, who, as a commoner, ranked below some members of his own Cabinet, that he wrote (through Knollys): “The King thinks it would be only decent and proper that the Prime Minister should have some precedency formally laid down for him.… After the Sovereign the Prime Minister is certainly the most important man in the Empire and he should therefore have a correspondingly important position.”94 Balfour replied (through his private secretary, J. S. Sandars) that he was “not a little touched by HM’s condescension.”95 Accordingly, in 1905, a warrant was drawn up, based on a memorandum by Sandars, formally recognizing the prime minister as the King’s fourth most important subject, after the Archbishops of Canterbury and York and the Lord Chancellor. This constitutional adjustment is usually credited to Balfour; but, as these documents reveal, the change was made on the initiative of the King.96
The King told Balfour in early 1905 (through Knollys) that “he is very sorry for you and for all that you have to go through, and he only trusts that you will not knock up.”97 Again, in July, after Balfour had received a mauling in the House of Commons, Knollys told him that “the King desires me to … say how much disgusted he feels at the crude and vulgar attacks” made especially by Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George, “and to add that he thinks your answer was an excellent one.”98
One of Balfour’s worst headaches was India, where George Curzon, the viceroy, was locked into a struggle with Lord Kitchener (the commander in chief). At issue was the question of whether the Indian army should remain subject to the dual control of viceroy and C in C, as Curzon insisted, or whether the C in C should take over the military administration, as Kitchener urged. The incompetent Brodrick, appointed Secretary of State for India in the reshuffle of 1903, mishandled the dispute badly and decided in favor of Kitchener. The King took Curzon’s side during this controversy. Bertie and Curzon had little in common. Curzon despised the King, who he thought was not at all what a king should be.c99 But when Curzon resigned, Bertie fired off a telegram to Balfour suggesting that, in order to soothe feelings, Curzon should be made an earl at once.100 Balfour wired back the same day: “There are manifest difficulties in course proposed—GC has resigned because he differed from policy of Government. Under most favourable construction he cannot be said to have behaved well. To reward him would be equivalent to a public intimation that the sure road to honour was disobedience to instructions.”101
The refusal of Curzon’s earldom was urged by Brodrick, but it was Balfour who made the decision.102 Francis Knollys complained to Sandars that “the position Mr. Balfour has taken up is a weak one. Are Curzon’s five years’ brilliant administration to be ignored and unrecognised for differing from the government and making difficulties about instructions, rather than disobeying them?”103 Balfour replied with a twenty-five-page dictated letter splitting hairs but stubbornly justifying his position—a document that even today makes the heart sink.104
As usual, the King gave way. As usual, the King was right. Balfour’s vindictiveness toward his old friend poisoned their relationship for life, and Curzon played a key role in breaking his leadership of the Unionist party in 1911. Self-indulgent philistine though he was, the King understood the art of management far better than Balfour the repressed intellectual.
* * *
* Bertie had noted Hardinge’s talent when the young man was posted at St. Petersburg. Hardinge’s wife, Winifred (Bina) Sturt, was the daughter of Bertie’s old friend Lord Alington of Crichel, and a favorite of Alix’s, who had engineered her marriage and made her a lady-in-waiting.
† Or at least this was what Bertie was reported to have said by the French journalist Arthur Meyer, writing in The Times in 1922. Bertie first met Jeanne Granier in 1889, when the journalist Frank Harris brought her to his room at the Grand Hotel in Monte Carlo. Granier’s racy stories of the French stage kept the prince and Randolph Churchill in fits of laughter until three a.m., and Bertie told Harris it was “one of the most charming evenings” he had ever spent.
‡ “I shall never forget my visit to your charming city, and I can assure you it is with the greatest pleasure that I return each time to Paris, where I am treated exactly as if I were at home.”
§ Old Lord Salisbury died on 22 August 1903. This was his son.
‖ This much-repeated story seems improbable. George Lyttelton refused to believe it: “I mean, he may have been a fool about many things, but surely not about trousers?” (The Lyttelton–Hart-Davis Letters, vol. 3 [John Murray, 1981], pp.128–29.)
a Mrs. Keppel’s social-climbing friend Mrs. Ronnie Greville was a monster. The illegitimate daughter of Edinburgh brewer William McEwan by his cook, she resembled a Japanese pug dog. She entertained the King at Reigate Priory, and in 1906 she bought Polesden Lacey and decorated it in sumptuous red and gold. Bertie became a regular visitor. “I don’t follow people to their bedrooms. It’s what they do outside them that is important,” she once remarked. “There is no one on earth quite so skilfully malicious as old Maggie,” thought the diarist Chips Channon (Chips: The Diaries of Sir Henry Channon [Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967], pp. 208, 336.)
b Esher saw Arthur at Balmoral in 1904 and was not impressed. The duke was a “very amiable but silly goose” and “very chancy in his kilt—sits in odd positions—and shows everything he has to show, which is not much.” (Lees-Milne, Esher, p. 151.)
c Bertie had annoyed the snobbish Curzon, who was a stickler for correctness, by telling him off for signing himself as plain Curzon, rather than using his formal title Curzon of Kedleston. The King’s friend Earl Howe, whose family name was Curzon, had complained to the King that George Curzon had poached his courtesy title of Viscount Curzon. (Gilmour, Curzon, pp. 127–28.)
CHAPTER 24
Uncle of Europe
1905–7
Charles Stamper was engaged as motor engineer to the King in 1905. On every drive that Bertie made, Stamper sat in the front, next to the chauffeur, with his royal master in the backseat. Nattily dressed, with a waxed mustache, and a touch theatrical (his brother was an actor), the twenty-nine-year-old Stamper had begun his career as a coach builder, like his father before him.1 It was his job to maintain the King’s two 40 hp Mercedes cars, his Daimler and the Renault landaulet he used in London. The King’s claret-colored cars had no license plate, which made them instantly recognizable. Only the Renault was fitted with a number, as the King used it when he wanted not to be seen. Like all HM’s cars, it was emblazoned with the royal arms, so the disguise hardly made him invisible. Stamper arranged every itinerary, and he kept a record of his journeys, which he later published with some help from Dornford Yates.2 Bertie timed his drives to the minute. “Fine run, Stamper. Fine run,” he would say. When the King attended a house party, he traveled on the royal train, which was painted crimson and cream, and designed to resemble the royal yacht inside, with white enamel paint and polished brass.3 At the nearest station, he would be met by Stamper, who had driven ahead, preceded by charabancs bearing the King’s luggage.
In December 1905, Stamper drove the King to a house party at Crichel, where he was the guest of Lord and Lady Alington. They were second-generation members of the Marlborough House set and great friends of Mrs. Keppel, whose daughter Sonia Keppel remembered Lady Alington’s “pale face and full lips and small alert eyes” as being somehow at variance with her large, lazy body, enveloped in “a billowing ocean of lace and ribbons.”*4 The King stayed at Crichel for five days, but if this disconcerted his hosts, they need not have worried, as Mrs. Keppel was also a guest, and “so long as Mrs. George is here, he is perfectly happy.”5 Over three days the party shot three thousand pheasants. The King’s stand was marked by a red label on a stick (all the oth
er places had white ones) so that the beaters could skillfully direct clouds of pheasants to fly over his head.6
Just before Bertie’s visit to Crichel, a political crisis blew up. On the afternoon of Monday, 4 December, Prime Minister Balfour, had an audience at Buckingham Palace and offered his resignation. Balfour’s government had been in a state of terminal decline for months, but he resigned without waiting to face the electorate. He insisted on going before Christmas 1905, earlier than expected, which, Bertie told Georgie, “I think is unnecessary and a mistake.”7 Pressed by the King to accept an honor, Balfour declined, but he agreed to accept the blue and red Windsor uniform. The following morning, at ten forty-five, Bertie summoned the Liberal leader Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman and invited him to form a government. “Nothing could be nicer or more courteous than he was,” Bertie told Georgie.8 The sixty-nine-year-old CB was a round-faced, white-whiskered Scot. “We are not as young as we were, Sir Henry!” said the King and shook him warmly by the hand. Whereupon (according to Margot Asquith’s diary), “knowing that he ought to kneel and kiss hands, CB advanced and waited, but the King interrupted by some commonplace remark; when he had finished speaking, CB again advanced meaning to kneel, but the King only wrang his hand, at which he felt the interview was over, as to have had another try would have been grotesque.”9 After this, the King boarded the special train for Crichel.
Knollys regretted his master’s absence from London: “Your Majesty would, I am sure, have had more direct control over the negotiations, and Sir H[enry] could then, without any difficulty, have referred to you from time to time the proposals which were made for the filling up of the various offices.”10 From Crichel, Bertie was accommodating. Knollys telephoned declaring: “The King agrees to everything.”11
Bertie was back in London at five thirty on Sunday, 10 December, and an hour later he saw CB with the list of ministers. He wrote to his sister Princess Louise: “The new Gov[ernmen]t promises to be a strong one—and I find Sir H. Campbell-Bannerman charming to do business with.”12 CB was the first prime minister to receive formal constitutional recognition in accordance with the warrant drawn up by Sandars and Balfour at the King’s suggestion. The next day, the outgoing ministers gave up their seals of office, and the new administration was sworn in at a meeting of the Privy Council. London was blanketed with thick black fog; the King’s carriage was preceded by twelve running footmen bearing flaring torches, and the new government began, as Bertie quipped, “by losing their way!”13 Esher noticed that the fog affected the King’s breathing, and he was very unwell at dinner.14
By remaining at Crichel and distancing himself from the change of government, Bertie ensured that no one could accuse him of meddling. This has earned him the approval of some historians, who note that, unlike Queen Victoria, he allowed CB a free hand with appointments.15 In point of fact, Bertie had been playing a cool game behind the scenes. By the time Balfour resigned, the King had done all he needed to do to ensure the outcome he wanted.
Campbell-Bannerman’s succession as prime minister had not gone unchallenged. In the autumn of 1905, a plot had been hatched to banish CB to the House of Lords, thus making him a figurehead prime minister. This coup was planned by H. H. Asquith, R. B. Haldane, and Edward Grey, meeting at Relugas, a remote Scottish fishing lodge. The Relugas plot is remarkable because it hinged on an attempt to drag the Crown into party politics. Involving the King was the idea of Haldane, Scottish lawyer and German-loving intellectual, who had known Bertie for a couple of years. It was a dangerous game, especially for a Liberal politician. Even more extraordinary was the response of Knollys, whom Haldane approached. Acting with astonishing indiscretion for a man who had spent his life in the service of the court, Knollys wrote to Haldane giving guarded assurances of the King’s support.16
Bertie knew about Haldane’s intrigues, but he refused to be drawn in. In August, while undergoing his cure at Marienbad, he had met Campbell-Bannerman. It turned out that CB had spent his holidays at Marienbad for thirty years, bringing his invalid wife, Charlotte, to whom he was devoted. He disapproved of the King and the tainted ladies who buzzed around him like bluebottles. Bertie, for his part, expected the Scot, the son of a Glasgow merchant who looked like a grocer, to be “prosy and heavy,” and distrusted him on account of the unpatriotic, “pro-Boer” line he had taken during the Boer War.17 He asked CB to lunch, and was surprised to discover that he was a bon viveur with a sense of humor who shared his love of Austrian coffee and French food.† For two weeks, CB was constantly entertained by the King at the Hotel Weimar. Bertie told him that “he must soon be in office and very high office.” CB thought this “most significant and very discreetly done.”18 Nothing was said by the King about CB’s translation to the Lords.
So exhausted was CB by Bertie’s “insatiable” energy and appetite, by the long evenings sitting out after dinner making sticky conversation while HM played bridge, that when the King departed he took to his bed for forty-eight hours. Bertie, on the other hand, considered Marienbad a rest cure.19
After Marienbad, he proceeded to Balmoral, where Haldane was summoned. Bertie told him that he had read his correspondence with Knollys “with much interest.” He also told him that he had met CB, and liked him.20 Haldane formed the impression that the King would cooperate in sidelining CB, but he was mistaken. Bertie’s aim in all of this was to reconcile the Relugas conspirators to the leadership of CB—to smooth the rift in the Liberal party. CB, for his part, knew that he had the King’s backing, and this made it possible for him to crush the Relugas rebels. He persuaded them to take office, and he refused to allow himself to be kicked upstairs to the House of Lords.
Bertie’s chief concern in the change of government was to ensure continuity in foreign policy and uphold the entente with France. In the autumn of 1905, Esher was dispatched to consult Lansdowne as to his successor as foreign secretary. Lansdowne suggested Lord Spencer (who suffered a stroke) and, after him, Edward Grey—though he lacked experience and Lansdowne thought “his reputation has been rather cheaply earned.”21 The forty-three-year-old Grey was one of the Relugas three. He was also the King’s godson; his father, General Grey, had been Bertie’s equerry.
Grey got the job. “I shall do all I can to stem the impetuosity of the new Government but it will not be easy,” Bertie told Georgie. “Fortunately in Sir E. Grey we have a sensible man who wishes as regards our foreign policy to walk in his predecessor’s footsteps.”22
A critical moment had been reached in Anglo-Russian relations. Because Russia was France’s ally, the survival and strength of the Entente Cordiale depended on good relations between England and Russia. According to Charles Hardinge, who served in St. Petersburg between 1897 and 1902 and spoke to Bertie often at this time: “King Edward saw clearly what few others realised, that friendship with Russia was essential for us both in the Near East and Central Asia, and that this could only be obtained through the channel and by the cooperation of France.”23
The friendship with Russia was strained to breaking point by the Russo-Japanese War of 1904. England agreed to stay out of the war, in spite of the fact that the Japanese had been their allies since 1902, but the Russians suspected them of lending secret support. When the Japanese confounded expectations and defeated the Russians, waves of Anglophobia swept through Russia. Urged on by Kaiser William, Czar Nicholas II blamed the English for Russia’s humiliation. In Britain, anti-Russian opinion was inflamed by the Dogger Bank incident of October 1904, when the Russian fleet accidentally shot at British fishing boats, which they mistakenly thought were Japanese submarines.
It was here that Bertie’s dynastic links had counted. Acting at the request of foreign secretary Lansdowne, he sought to reassure Nicholas II of England’s friendly intentions.24 “Nicky” was a small, conscientious man with velvety blue eyes who lived in isolation in a Fabergé-encrusted palace made unbearable by the neurosis of his wife, Alexandra. He was not an easy man to approach: “He will hardly ever see a
n ambassador.” Stead, the journalist, was granted an interview and found the czar “absolutely like a child in the simplicity of his views and in the little knowledge of what is going on in the country”—Russia was at that time in the grip of the 1905 revolution.25 Bertie had little respect for Nicky, whom he thought weak as water and unable to make up his mind to do anything.26 But as uncle to both Nicky, who was uncannily like Prince George in looks, and Alexandra, Bertie enjoyed unequaled access. His role was to drive a wedge between his nephews, Czar Nicky and Kaiser William.‡ The kaiser cultivated the czar in indiscreet letters badmouthing their wicked uncle. The czar, as the kaiser wrote, was “not treacherous but he is weak—weakness is not treachery but it fulfils all its functions.”27 Bertie’s man in St. Petersburg was Donald Mackenzie Wallace, a swarthy, cigar-smoking journalist, described by the kaiser as “very intelligent; a friend of King Edward’s; a Jew naturally.”28 Wallace had better access to the czar than the ambassador, and penned long, confidential reports to the King.
Bertie was fortunate in that both the Russian ambassador in London and the British ambassador in St. Petersburg were on his side. Both were, in a way, Bertie’s appointments. Count Benckendorff, who became Russian ambassador in London in 1902, was a passionate Anglophile. A rich, easygoing aristocrat, he entertained more lavishly at the Russian embassy than any of the ambassadors in London before 1914.29 He took pride in behaving as a “private gentleman”; flouting protocol about diplomatic tight lips, he freely expressed his own opinions.§ Soon Benckendorff was asked to shoot at Windsor and to stay at Balmoral. He was openly critical of Nicholas, whom he compared disparagingly to Bertie, and thought Russia’s only chance of salvation lay in an entente with Britain.
