Christopher Hibbert - Edward VII - The Last Victorian King

‘The more you know of him,’ Whitelaw Reid, the American Ambassador in London wrote to President Roosevelt about King Edward in 1907, ‘the better I am sure you will like him, and the more you will come to the prevalent English, and, in fact, European belief, that he is the greatest mainstay of peace in Europe.’

The King’s reputation as a diplomatist of unique influence was prodigious. ‘He is, and this one cannot deny, the arbiter of Europe’s destiny, the most powerful personal factor in world policy,’ the Italian Foreign Minister told the French Ambassador in Rome. ‘And, as he is for peace, his overall approach will serve above all to maintain harmony between the nations.’ The King was widely supposed, in fact, to ‘run the foreign policy of the country’, as Frederick Ponsonby said, a supposition which, Ponsonby thought, may have made Lord Lansdowne ‘a little jealous’ and which, therefore, may have accounted for the rather strained relationship between the King and his Foreign Secretary.

The King’s reputation as an arbiter of foreign policy stood quite as high abroad as it did in England. As the Belgian Chargé d’Affaires in London put it in a report to Brussels in 1907: ‘The English are getting more and more into the habit of regarding international problems as being almost exclusively within the province of King Edward, for whose profound political instinct and fertile diplomacy they, very rightly, feel great respect.’ The King’s views were often considered to be decisive, while his frequent foreign travels — attributed by his detractors as being due to Wanderlust, his determination to emulate the Kaiser, or to a taste for playing an apparently important role in the limelight of the European stage — were followed, watched and reported upon as assiduously as his political opinions were solicited and discussed.

This belief in the King’s virtual omnipotence was particularly strong in less powerful states such as Italy; and even more so in those smaller countries, like Greece, Belgium and Portugal, whose thrones were occupied by monarchs to whom the King felt sympathetically drawn not only by their membership of his own profession but also by family ties. He naturally enjoyed this reputation. The Controller of the Kaiser’s Household, who, in the year before the King’s death, came to the view that his influence was far less than the Germans had always imagined, pictured ‘a sly and amiable smile’ stealing over his face when he thought how the world looked upon him ‘as the guiding spirit of … British diplomacy’. Under no illusions about the limits of his power, the King was nevertheless most insistent that he must be kept fully informed about the course and problems of the government’s foreign policy, either by the Prime Minister, or by the Foreign Secretary if the Prime Minister left the effective control of policy in his Foreign Secretary’s hands. He took particular pleasure in letting fellow-sovereigns know how well-informed he was. One day at Marienbad in 1905, according to Henry Wickham Steed, ‘he chaffed the life out of Ferdinand of Bulgaria, who … always [prided] himself upon being more rapidly informed than anyone else’, because Prince Ferdinand knew nothing about the Japanese Admiral Kaimamura’s destruction of the Russian Vladivostok squadron, of which the King had received advance notice from the Counsellor of the British Embassy in Vienna.

The King’s obvious satisfaction in being entrusted with important confidences, his numerous contacts with ruling dynasties and with important foreign ministers, his charm and tactful good manners, his gift for drawing men out in conversation, and his willingness to listen to them in attentive silence, all stood him in good stead as a roving diplomatist and added to his reputation as an eminent mediator. But after his death it began to be realized that his influence on the conduct of European affairs had, in reality, been far from as effective as had been supposed, and that his views on foreign policy were never consistent and always liable to be influenced by personal considerations and prejudice. The goodwill that he inspired in most European countries, except Germany, together with the dignity of his manner and the forcefulness of his personality when he represented his own country, were fully recognized; yet, as Balfour asked Lord Lansdowne to confirm after the outbreak of the First World War, ‘he never made an important suggestion of any sort on large questions of policy’ during the years when they were both his ministers. Nor did the King ever add the sort of detailed, considered minute which his mother’s ministers had grown to expect from Prince Albert on the Foreign Office dispatches which were sent to him, usually contenting himself with a mere indication of approval or commendation.

When he disagreed with ministerial advice he did not hesitate to put forward his own views, much to the annoyance of the young Eyre Crowe, who was one day to be Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. Crowe was highly critical of the King’s insistence on maintaining his royal authority, and went about maintaining that he ‘must be taught that he is a pawn in the game’. But the King’s obedience to constitutional propriety was far too strong for him to argue with an important Cabinet decision once it had been taken. And far more often than not he had to give way to his government, as when, for example, he endeavoured to prevent the appointment as French Ambassador in London of M. Challemel-Lacour, a supposed Communist, against whom the King had been prejudiced by his aristocratic French friends and by biased reports in Figaro.

Although he allowed himself to be persuaded to accept the appointment of Challemel-Lacour (whom he found on personal acquaintance to be entirely unobjectionable), the King did not always give way without a more determined struggle. This was well exemplified in 1903 when, having visited Portugal — where his presence was interpreted in Berlin as a setback for German ambitions in Africa — the King went on to Italy and decided that, on passing through Rome in April, he ought to pay a visit to the Pope as the Kaiser had twice done.

Influenced by Knollys, who was ‘dead against it’, he had, before leaving England, reluctantly accepted the Cabinet’s advice not to pay the visit. And on 23 March, Knollys had assured Balfour that the King would go only for the day to Rome, where he was to have lunch with King Victor Emmanuel III, and ‘by this arrangement he [would] get out of seeing the Pope’. ‘He hopes the Pope will not be offended by his not calling [on] him,’ Knollys added in a letter to Balfour’s secretary, J.S. Sandars, a few days later. ‘But if he is H.M. cannot help it.’

So it was that on arrival at Malta a telegram had been sent from the royal yacht to Sir Francis Bertie, British Ambassador in Rome, to the effect that owing to the short time that the King was to stay in Rome it was ‘impossible for his Majesty to visit the Pope for whom he [entertained] the highest reverence and respect’. On the very day that this telegram was dispatched from the royal yacht, however, the Foreign Minister’s secretary, Sir Eric Barrington, sent a message, in cipher and marked ‘very confidential’, from London: ‘The King will receive telegram from Prime Minister about Pope. My conviction is that it is intended as a loophole in case King thinks informal visit desirable.’

The next day the Prime Minister’s telegram was deciphered aboard the Victoria and Albert:

Mr Balfour has the honour to report that yesterday the Duke of Norfolk and Lord Edmund Talbot [two leaders of the Roman Catholic community in England] came to see him on the subject of your Majesty’s visit to Rome. They expressed with deep emotion their views on what they declared would be regarded by the Roman Catholic world as a deliberate slight put upon an old and venerable man [aged ninety-three] by your Majesty’s abstaining from visiting the Vatican. They also maintain that while this course would deeply hurt the sentiments of Roman Catholics, the opposite course would raise no widespread ill-feeling among Protestants. Mr Balfour said he deeply regretted that anything should be done to hurt the feelings of the Pope but that he still adhered to the view that there was really great danger of irritating Protestant sentiment if the King of England paid a formal visit to the Roman pontiff … Mr Balfour could not therefore alter the tenor of the advice already given with the concurrence of the Cabinet.