by Jane Ridley
The King and Queen of Sweden stayed at Windsor in November. Esher thought the Queen “a very unbrilliant person, fond of sport and lawn-tennis”; she was under the influence of her doctor, Axel Munthe, “a clever pushing rather pretentious man,” who ordered her to retire to bed at five p.m. and remain there until noon next day.99 The Asquiths stayed at Windsor for the state banquet (22 November), and Margot found that King Edward and Queen Alexandra could talk of little but the kaiser’s folly. The King told her: “It is very serious—he is most unwise and unbalanced and this ought to be a severe lesson to him. My poor sister it would have been a great grief to her in fact it would have killed her I think. He was always so unkind to her too.” The Queen agreed. “I am glad his poor mother is dead. It would have broken her heart,” she told Margot. “Such a man! Such things! The newspapers shocking!” Alix imitated the kaiser out shooting (he was an excellent shot, in spite of the withered arm), “ ‘throwing his guns to his loaders for them to catch on their knees poor things! Like that!’ and she made a most amusing series of gestures.”100 Margot rocked with laughter, and so did Lady Lansdowne and the Queen of Sweden.
Also staying at Windsor was Lord Howard de Walden, super-rich medievalist and Olympic fencer. The castle made him “feel medieval”; the gorgeous pictures and arms made his mouth water, but he was grieved by the portraits of ancestors with “lined faces and mouths like vices which look down from the walls.” A self-styled “philosophic anarchist,” he found court life hard to take seriously. “I feel it is a sort of sad last transformation scene: in a moment the curtain will come down and the harlequinade of pure democracy will begin.”101
Chief among the obstacles to pure democracy was the King himself, but he was a sick man. On the day the Swedes departed, he insisted on standing in the cold and wet, inspecting improvements in the park at Windsor; it was his practice personally to supervise all estate works. He then caught a train to Sandringham, where he fell ill with bronchitis.102 After ten days in bed, he departed for Brighton to convalesce. Here he stayed with Arthur Sassoon and his Italian wife, Louise—a brilliant hostess blessed with “magnolia complexion and chestnut curls, magnificent diamonds and French chef.”103 Their house, number 8, King’s Gardens, is a tall brick villa in the French style on the seafront at Hove.c The house was not big enough to accommodate the King’s suite, who grumbled at having to stay in a hotel nearby.104 The King tried to curb rumors about his health, refusing to hold a Privy Council for the prorogation of Parliament at Brighton, as it would have given the impression that he was too unwell to travel to London. Almeric Fitzroy heard a rumor that originated with the Duke of Fife that in addition to bronchitis, the King was suffering from “an acute pain in the region of the heart.”105 On the first days of the visit, Bertie spoke very little and, during his drives with Stamper, dozed in the car. Soon he was better, “talking all the time, as was his wont, to those who were with him,” among them Alice Keppel.106 Stamper drove him along the coast to Seaford or Worthing, where he was mobbed by jostling crowds, when all he wanted was to stroll slowly along the shore and sit gazing out to sea.
He recovered in time for Christmas at Sandringham, where he was a distant but thrillingly important figure to his grandchildren. The grandson who Stamper thought resembled the King most in character was the eldest, Prince Edward, known to the family as David.d107
Soon the King’s great crocodile-skin dressing case was packed with his papers, his leather-bound foolscap diary, his jewelry, a miniature of Alix, and photographs of his family, and loaded into the backseat of the Daimler, as he embarked on his January round of shooting parties. He was slower to swing after birds than before, and he smoked cigars all the time, one after another.108 At Hall Barn with Lord Burnham of the Telegraph, the King “ate the usual enormous lunch in the usual tent,” feasting on turtle soup, Irish stew, cold truffled turkey, mince pie, and pâté de foie gras. He told Carrington “he had been very unwell and it had taken him a long time to throw the effects off.”109 Little wonder, when the most effective measure to alleviate chronic bronchitis and slow the progression of emphysema is to stop smoking.
In spite of the King’s poor health, arrangements went ahead for the royal visit to Berlin. This was a diplomatic necessity, as Grey explained: “If the visit had not taken place, it would have been a cause of offence and made all politics most difficult. For this reason I am glad it is arranged, but otherwise I do not expect much good from it. To please the Emperor does not carry so much weight in Germany as it did.”110 As before, the King was accompanied by Charles Hardinge, who did the diplomatic work.
For the German-hating Alix, who was recovering from an attack of influenza and neuralgia, the visit was a penance. She told Margot Asquith afterward, “I never wanted to go to Berlin. I was made to go—and it has been a complete failure!”111 Outwardly, the visit seemed a success. Bertie melted the unfriendly Berlin crowd when he made an impromptu speech in German at the Rathaus, giving thanks to the little girl who presented him with a golden goblet of Rhine wine. Alix smiled serenely when the horses in her carriage took fright at the crowd and fell and, to the mortification of the German court, she and the Empress Dona had to make a hasty exit into another carriage.112 “Oh! I was charming … of course,” she told Margot; but she “hated” the emperor all the time. She sat next to him at every meal, and noticed that he ate nothing. “You must eat more!” she told him. “I will give you some of my excellent lozenges. Sir Francis Laking gave them to me—they will strengthen your brain!” When Margot interjected, “You didn’t really say that?” the Queen replied, “Of course I did, he wants a little chaff. He just grunted and said, You find me stupid? I said, Certainly I do—making all this commotion about nothing and kidooodle [sic] about your navy.” Then Alix “waved her arms round her head and roared with laughter continuing, ‘The stupid man I believe showed my lozenges to his doctor he thought I was going to poison him and I should like to have!’ ”113
Bertie was far from well. Climbing upstairs left him breathless, and at the first family dinner, he fell asleep. After lunch the next day at the British Embassy, he had a coughing fit while smoking a cigar and talking to Daisy of Pless. Horrified, she watched as he fell against the back of the sofa, “his cigar dropped out of his fingers, his eyes stared, and he became pale and could not breathe. I thought: ‘My God, he is dying; oh! Why not in his own country.’ ”114 Daisy tried to undo the tight collar of his Prussian uniform, Alix rushed up and they both struggled with it, at last Bertie came to and unfastened it himself. He instantly lit another huge cigar.115
Later, the kaiser summoned Bertie’s doctor, Sir James Reid, who acted as secret go-between with the English court (had Bertie known of Reid’s role as William’s spy, he would surely not have approved). He gave Reid a private cipher to use in case the King became seriously ill:
I Radium most interesting in its effect (HM seriously ill)
II Radium cures can be reconed [sic] with (Please come at once).
III Institute of Radium cures great success (HM rapidly sinking).116
As this bizarre instruction shows, having managed to make a star appearance at Queen Victoria’s deathbed, the kaiser was now determined to be in at the death of his uncle, which he evidently thought was imminent.
At the ball that night, the King sat quietly observing the dancers and did not walk about. Very likely he was bored; as Alix remarked, the balls were “awful”: “All the ugly German women dancing so stiff, the ugly minuets.” She asked William, “ ‘When have you time at your balls for flirtations?’ And he just grunted and showed me the only pretty woman.”117 Bertie took no interest in distributing decorations among the German court; Ponsonby, who had to sit up until two a.m. allotting medals, thought this a sign that the King was seriously ill. During the ballet Sardanapalus, which the kaiser produced himself, Bertie fell asleep. He woke with a start in the last scene, when the monarch burns all his treasures, thinking that the opera house really was on fire. Bertie was t
oo unwell to work the crowd during the interval, and Alix did it instead, charming everyone though she was unable to hear a word they said.118
The Berlin visit did little good. It failed to slow the German navy race. The fact that the visit took place at all, and that the two rulers were civil to each other, was perhaps important, but their hatred soon reasserted itself. The Bosnian crisis, which had rumbled on since the autumn, was resolved in Austria’s favor in March 1909, humiliating Russia at a time of military weakness and leaving Serbia hungry for a war of revenge. For this unstable and unfair settlement Bertie blamed Germany, whose backing gave Austria the confidence to threaten a war against Serbia. As he told Hardinge, “Ever since my visit to Berlin the German Government have done nothing but thwart and annoy us in every way.… We may safely look upon Germany as our bitterest foe, as she hardly attempts to conceal it.”119
People noticed that the King, by nature cheerful and ebullient, was increasingly prone to depression, sitting brooding in silence. After eight years of striving for peace, the world could hardly be said to be a safer place. Closing the ring around Germany only made William more paranoid. Even if he could be contained in the west, eastern Europe was increasingly unstable. The Balkan crisis had proved that Francis Joseph, seemingly the greatest gentleman of all, could not be trusted. Britain’s reaction was to draw closer to Russia, but Bertie knew only too well that the weak Nicky was hardly a reliable ally. Bertie’s superb contacts had enabled him to lead and support the process of bringing Britain into closer relations with the continental powers, but tightening the links seemed only to ratchet up the pressure for war.
* * *
* “He thought I was facing the greatest difficulties because he talked of your wonderful features, and described your charming face as if he was correcting the bust that wasn’t there, and I feel that had I the clay model, I would have shown it to him.”
† Bertie considered offering CB a peerage, but decided against; not only was CB likely to refuse, but Bertie judged the measures he had introduced not “worthy of my reward.” (RA VIC/Add C07/2/G, B to Francis Knollys, 3 April 1908.)
‡ After the King died, Alice Keppel told Rosebery that “for the last two years the King did not confide in Knollys for he was afraid that everything he told Knollys went straight to Esher, who was a good man in his way but not the repository of confidences.” (McKinstry, Rosebery, p. 496.)
§ The bumptious Fisher, who enjoyed showing off his dancing, once pushed his luck by asking Queen Alexandra to dance: “She put him in his place, and said, ‘Certainly not.’ ” (Bodleian Library, Lincolnshire Papers, MS Film 1121, Carrington Diary, 31 May 1905.)
‖ What no one could have guessed in 1908 was that within a decade the world would have become such a different place that in 1917, King George V, in order to secure the survival of his own dynasty, would judge it necessary to refuse asylum to his Romanov cousins, who were murdered at Ekaterinburg in July 1918.
a Sometimes known as Mrs. Keppel’s lady-in-waiting, Lady Sarah Wilson was a sister of Randolph Churchill. Her “prominent eyes, harsh voice and sarcastic laugh” made some people shudder. (Balsan, Glitter and Gold, p. 55.)
b Once when the King arrived at West Dean, the butler came down with a very large cardboard box. “Mrs. James is indisposed,” he said, “but she sent you this.” The King was handed a large pair of scissors, and when he cut the ribbon and opened the box, there was Mrs. James disguised as a doll with a wind-up key. (Edward James, Swans Reflecting Elephants, p. 12.) Evie James was the daughter of Helen Forbes, one of Harriett Mordaunt’s sisters. Her son, Edward James, claimed—probably wrongly—that she was Bertie’s illegitimate daughter. Edward James himself was also rumored to be Bertie’s son. Nine months before Edward’s birth (16 August 1907), the King had stayed at West Dean for a house party (19–24 November 1906), and the gossips did their arithmetic. Edward James was probably not his father’s biological son, and he did show a physical likeness to Bertie. However, another of the guests in November 1906 was John Brinton, the man who later became Evie’s second husband, and he seems a more likely candidate for paternity.
c Henry Labouchere described Brighton as “a sea-coast town, three miles long and three yards broad, with a Sassoon at each end and one in the middle.” While Arthur Sassoon lived in King’s Gardens, Albert was in Kemptown, and Reuben in Queen’s Gardens. (Allfrey, Jewish Court, p. 54.)
d Within little more than a decade, David, by now Prince of Wales, would write that York Cottage, Sandringham, was “too dull and boring for words! Christ how any human beings can ever have got into this pompous secluded and monotonous groove I can’t imagine.” (Edward, Prince of Wales, to Mrs. Frida Dudley Ward, 26 December 1919, in Letters from a Prince, ed. Rupert Godfrey [Warner Books, 1999], pp. 286–87.)
CHAPTER 26
King of Trumps
1909–10
The Cabinet was bitterly divided over the Admiralty’s program of dreadnought building to rival Germany. For Bertie, who took his naval policy from Fisher, the position was simple: “As long as Germany persists in her present programme of ship building we have no alternative but to build double.”1 The chief opponents of this two-to-one naval race were Churchill and Lloyd George, who claimed (rightly as it turned out) that Fisher and the Admiralty exaggerated Germany’s shipbuilding. As far as the King was concerned, these two ministers could do no right. As prime minister, Asquith seemed unwilling or unable to check them, and Knollys wrote to complain at “the uncompromising attitude Mr. Asquith generally takes when Your Majesty finds fault with any of his colleagues.”2
Asquith was a self-made, raw-boned lawyer; an immensely able man whose mind “opened and shut smoothly and exactly, like the breech of a gun.”3 Bertie found him “deficient in manners but in nothing else.”4 He was certainly preferable to Arthur Balfour, the leader of the Unionist opposition, whom Bertie disliked as “an effeminate creature mixed up with the Souls.” As he confided in Margot Asquith: “It is a great drawback to a man not to be able to love a woman”—to which Margot felt inclined to respond, “How many, Sir?”5 No one could accuse Asquith of being effeminate. But the King now began to suspect that the prime minister’s unshakable imperturbability masked a worrying lack of principle.
Asquith’s was the last Cabinet to use neither agenda nor minutes, and the letter that he penned in his elegant handwriting to the King after each meeting formed the sole official record. To interest the King, he emphasized foreign and military policy rather than domestic politics; and to prevent royal interference, he played down Cabinet divisions and disagreements.6 In the winter of 1908–9, Bertie suspected that he was being “kept in the dark” by Asquith, who was less than frank about the split in the Cabinet over the naval estimates.7 Asquith adroitly steered Winston Churchill and Lloyd George to agree to the principle of eight dreadnoughts at a key Cabinet meeting (24 February), but even so, the King was critical. When the naval estimates were introduced in Parliament, and the attacks from the Tories sparked a naval scare in the press, the King blamed Asquith.
In April 1909, Bertie joined Alix on a three-week Mediterranean cruise. He was in a furious mood. He had expected to be received by the Mediterranean fleet on arriving at Malta, but the ships were ordered elsewhere. Ponsonby was summoned to the King’s cabin. “I at once grasped that there was thunder in the air. ‘What do you think of that?’ the King shouted at me as he tossed me a telegram, and before I had time to answer he stormed away at the disgraceful way he had been treated.”8 It took all Ponsonby’s skill to dissuade the irate monarch from ordering the entire fleet back to Malta at once.
At Naples, the King’s temper was no better. Ponsonby (who was inclined to exaggerate) told a story of Alix and her sister the empress Minnie, who mounted donkeys and disappeared toward the top of Mount Vesuvius.* The King stayed behind in the hired train, fuming at the wait and furiously ordering the whistle to be blown to summon them to turn back. When at length they appeared, the King was “boiling with
rage” but unable to let off steam at the empress or the Queen, so the unfortunate Ponsonby once again incurred the full blast of his wrath.9
In spite of these volcanic explosions, the King dictated a letter to Asquith on the same day (1 May), giving the prime minister his comments on the so-called People’s Budget that Lloyd George had introduced, which proposed to pay for increased naval costs and old age pensions by raising income tax and new land taxes: “His Majesty wishes me to ask you whether in framing the Budget the Cabinet took into account the possible (but the King hopes improbable) event of a European war. The income tax, which has always been regarded as a war tax, now stands so high for unearned incomes over a certain amount that any great increase would have a most disastrous effect on land generally more especially if the war lasted for a considerable time.”10
It was a farsighted comment. Bertie possessed the vision to see domestic politics in a wider European context; what he did not foresee was the political storm that the budget would provoke in Britain.
The King returned on 8 May after two months abroad to face complaints in the press that he spent too much time out of the country. W. E. Grey of the Daily Mail wrote an article pointing out that on his cruise the King had been “far from idle.” He assured Ponsonby that “in future nothing will appear in the paper which is not pleasing to His Majesty, and that you can make what use of its columns you will.”11 Ponsonby agreed in exchange to provide the Mail with information. The King’s popularity that summer was such that he had little need of Mr. Grey and the Daily Mail. As Daisy Pless told the kaiser, “The whole country adores him; indeed the feeling of loyalty in England is extraordinary.”12 This made the kaiser feel rather sick.
