Christopher Hibbert - Edward VII - The Last Victorian King

Bertie reported to Sandars on 26 April:

The King has been very civilly and respectfully received in the streets here. Hats off and some clapping but no cheering. On the other hand at the Opera Gala last night he had an enthusiastic reception — vivas and cheers and clapping of hands several times and lasting some time … There was a great display of jewels but not much beauty. The ballet dancers had pink caleçons which gave them an odd appearance. I believe that King Victor Emmanuel [II], of holy memory, said of a ballet of that kind that if it were not for the clothes it would be paradise.

Two days later the King arrived in Rome feeling rather crotchety and out of sorts. A morose and sleepy guest, he had been entertained at luncheon the previous day by Lord Rosebery, an equally quiet as well as an unwilling host, who had a villa outside Naples and who had employed a firm of caterers to provide the seemingly interminable but indifferent meal of twenty courses which lasted until four o’clock. But although the King’s bad mood worsened as he left for the Vatican and found that the private nature of his visit had been rendered suspect by streets lined with troops and cheering crowds, and although Cardinal Rampolla grumpily declined to be present, the interview with the Pope went off very well.

Hardinge reported to Balfour:

On arrival within the precincts of the Vatican, His Majesty was received with great pomp by a motley and picturesque group of ecclesiastics, chamberlains, officers of the Swiss Guard and of the Noble Guard, many of them in sixteenth century costumes. After the presentations to the King, His Majesty was taken to the Pope’s private apartments where the Pope … a perfect marvel for a man of ninety-three … came to meet him in the ante-room, and took him into an inner room where they remained in conversation for about a quarter of an hour or twenty minutes. The King has told me since that the Pope talked to him of every sort of question — Venezuela, Somaliland, Lord Salisbury, some occasion when he had seen the Queen about forty years ago, etc. The King then sent for us and presented each of us in turn to the Pope.

The King had been careful to warn his suite to show the Pope the utmost respect without prejudicial veneration, to bow as often as they liked but on no account to kiss his ring if it were offered to them. But the Pope, ‘a really fine and dignified old gentleman’, saved them any possible embarrassment by getting out of his chair, shaking hands with everyone in turn and then making a short speech assuring them how happy he was to have had the opportunity of seeing their master.

The visit to the Pope was a happy prelude to the King’s far more politically important visit to Paris the next month. He had made his plans to visit Paris, after going to Portugal and Italy, in ‘the utmost secrecy’, as the Marquis de Soveral told King Carlos I. He had told neither the Queen nor the government, nor even his private secretary, ‘extreme discretion’ being necessary in view of the effect which his journey would have on Russia and Germany. Nor had he told the French President. ‘He does not wish to compromise himself,’ Soveral explained, ‘but wants to be in a position where he can abandon his trip should difficulties crop up.’ When they were informed of the King’s intentions, most of the Cabinet were extremely dubious about the wisdom of a visit to France. Lord Lansdowne warned the King that it might be dangerous in view of French feeling about the Boer War and about the incident at Fashoda in the Upper Nile Valley from which a French detachment had been forced to retreat after a protest at their presence there had been handed to them by General Kitchener. But the King was undeterred. The French President, Emile Loubet, welcomed the idea warmly, telling the British Ambassador, who also approved of it, that ‘he could not lay too much stress on the influence which the King’s presence in Paris would have on friendly relations between the two peoples … His Majesty, while Prince of Wales, had acquired an exceptional popularity; and he would find when he returned that this feeling was as warm as ever … [and] was general among all classes.’

So the government, without enthusiasm, gave their consent to the visit, trusting that their foreboding would not be justified and that the King’s personal reputation in France would avert any serious unpleasantness, even though he was going — as he insisted on going — with ‘all the honours due to the King of England’.

Certainly in earlier years, as President Loubet had said, the King had been very popular in France, where his influence was such that, as the Goncourt brothers noted, ‘the style of handshake with the elbow pressed close to the body’ which became fashionable in about 1895 ‘arose from his having an attack of rheumatism in the shoulder’. Both Queen Victoria and the British Foreign Office had been much concerned by his intimate friendship with the French nobility after the fall of the Second Empire. The Queen had thought it most imprudent of him to offer the house which he had borrowed from the Duke of Devonshire — and to which he referred as ‘notre maison de campagne, “Chiswick”’ — as a refuge to the exiled Empress Eugènie. The government had also been concerned about his equally chivalrous insistence that the highest funeral honours should be paid to the Prince Imperial, who had been killed while serving with the British army in the war against the Zulus in 1879. Arranging for a man-of-war to bring the coffin back to England and acting as pallbearer at the funeral, his generous display of sympathy had been deeply gratifying to the dead man’s mother, the Empress Eugènie; but Disraeli had felt compelled to express the hope that the republican government of France would feel as obliged to him as she was.

Yet the Prince of Wales’s friendship with imperialists and royalists had not in the end hampered his ability to get on well with republicans. A report prepared by the French police in 1874 indicated that there was no political significance in his private friendships with either Orleanists or Bonapartists. This report ran:

Il est très sympathique. C’est le type du gentilhomme anglais; il a les instincts toriés; mais tout le monde s’accorde à dire qu’il fera un excellent roi. Quant à ses opinions relativement à la France, on peut citer la réponse qu’il fit au Général Fleury, lors du voyage du Czar à Londres, ‘Monseigneur,’ disait le Général, ‘on prétend que vous êtes orléaniste.’ ‘Bah! Mon cher Général, rien qu’un petit peu.’

In 1878 the republican government had expressed the wish that the Prince would be appointed President of the British section of the Paris International Exhibition. He had accepted the offer, and had delighted the Parisians by the good-humoured way in which he laughingly acknowledged the cries of ‘Vive la République!’ which were directed at him as he walked by in the procession at the opening ceremony. He also created a favourable impression two days later at a banquet in the Hôtel du Louvre where, in a speech delivered half in English and half in French and without recourse to notes, he gave moving testimony of his love of France and of his conviction that there would now be a period of lasting friendship between that great country and his own. ‘England is very popular here at this moment,’ the British Ambassador had told the Foreign Secretary contentedly the following week. ‘And the Prince of Wales’s visit has been the principal cause of this.’

The Prince had increased that popularity as time went on. He had developed an unlikely but mutually respectful relationship with the ugly, ill-dressed Léon Gambetta, who found it ‘no waste of time to talk with him even over a merry supper’ at the Café Anglais. The Prince had convinced Frenchmen that he sincerely loved France ‘at once gaîment et sérieusement’, as Gambetta put it, despite the colonial rivalry between their country and his which sometimes led to his being cruelly lampooned in the French press and execrated by the Parisian mob. And he had allayed disappointment at his refusal in 1889 to bestow his official favour on an International Exhibition in Paris on the anniversary of the outbreak of the French Revolution — on the grounds that its inspiration was anti-monarchical — by visiting the Exhibition privately with his wife and children, making another family excursion to the new iron tower whose marvels were explained to them by its designer, Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, and going to the Elysée to repay a visit made to him by the President, Sadi Carnot. When Carnot was assassinated he went out of his way to display his sympathy by calling in person at the French Embassy to offer his condolences to the Ambassador and attending the requiem Mass in the French chapel in Leicester Square. He had always been equally punctilious in his attentions to Carnot’s successors, particularly to Loubet, who became President in 1899.