Christopher Hibbert - Edward VII - The Last Victorian King

The King was also to be given credit for helping to preserve the entente in its delicate infancy. He warmly welcomed President Loubet to England on his return visit in July 1903, making gracious little speeches in praise of Franco–British friendship, and giving orders for the Marseillaise to be played in full, triumphantly, on all occasions. And when twelve French battleships arrived at Portsmouth in August 1905, at the invitation of ‘King Edward and his government’, he ensured that they were given a reception which the French sailors would never forget and which their compatriots would appreciate as a symbol of the King’s firm commitment to the long life of the entente.

Clearing the way for the entente was the King’s greatest achievement. In no other sphere of foreign policy did he achieve a comparable success. The government, nevertheless, often had cause to feel grateful for his taste for foreign travel as well as for his international contacts. He was generally quite willing to interrupt a holiday when occasion demanded, to go to a royal funeral in Spain, for instance, or to distribute a few Victorian Orders in Portugal where he was on excellent terms with King Carlos, though the Portuguese nobles always reminded him of ‘waiters at second-rate restaurants’. Apart from the King of the Belgians, whom he grew to despise and distrust, there were few European sovereigns with whom he could not have a useful and pleasant conversation; while his known liking for America and Americans was by no means a negligible factor in Anglo–American relations. He much enjoyed the company of Whitelaw Reid, the American Ambassador in London. And, when England and the United States had quarrelled so bitterly over a border dispute between Venezuela and British Guiana in 1895 that war had seemed imminent, he had helped to calm the storm by the tone of his reply to a telegram sent to him by Joseph Pulitzer, whom he had met at Homburg. When Pulitzer’s telegram requesting his views on the critical issue had arrived in London, he had shown it to the Prime Minister, who had deprecated his decision to answer it. But the warm and conciliatory reply which had none the less been dispatched, and which Pulitzer had prominently published in his paper, the New York World, had soothed many ruffled tempers on the other side of the Atlantic.

Much as the King normally enjoyed travelling, the experience was not always a pleasurable one. As Prince of Wales, for example, he had been asked to go to Ireland in 1885 when feeling in the south was running harder than usual against the English. Understandably annoyed that the government were neither willing to pay his expenses nor to request him officially to make a journey from which, as he pointed out, he could hardly expect to derive any ‘personal pleasure’, he was reluctant to go. But as soon as the government agreed to authorize the visit officially and to pay for it, he sailed for Dublin with the Princess Alexandra and his elder son. Their reception in Dublin and in the North was welcoming enough; but in Cork, where they were booed and pelted with onions, it was, as the Prince’s equerry reported, ‘a nightmare’. ‘The streets were filled with sullen faces — hideous, dirty, cruel countenances, hissing and grimacing into one’s very face, waving black flags and black kerchiefs… No one who went through this day will ever forget it … It was like a bad dream. The Prince of Wales showed the greatest calmness and courage.’

So, too, he did when, despite the unrest in St Petersburg, he insisted on leaving for Russia to attend the funeral of Tsar Alexander II, who had been killed by a bomb which had been flung at him as he was returning to the Winter Palace from a military review. Grave doubts were expressed for the Prince’s safety. But neither he nor Princess Alexandra, who was the new Tsarina’s sister, had any doubt that they ought to go. And Lord Granville, the Foreign Secretary, considered that there were strong diplomatic advantages to be gained. ‘I have no doubt that your Royal Highness’s visit will be productive of good,’ Granville wrote to him.

‘There can be no question that a good understanding and friendly relations between this country and Russia may be of immense advantage to both.’

So the Prince and Princess sailed for St Petersburg, where they were given the doubtful assurance by the Minister of the Interior that, provided they did not go about in the new Tsar’s company, they were unlikely to suffer the same fate as his father.

Tsar Alexander III himself, who joined the Prince and Princess at the gloomy and heavily guarded Anichkov Palace after the funeral, was virtually a prisoner there, taking exercise in a narrow courtyard, not daring to go out for fear of the bombs of the nihilists. It was ‘a great consolation’ to have the Prince and Princess there with him, he told Queen Victoria; and he was obviously deeply moved when the Prince invested him with the Order of the Garter, which he had sought permission to do before leaving London. The British Ambassador, Lord Dufferin, thought that ‘nothing could have been in better taste, or more gracefully delivered’ than the Prince’s brief speech on that occasion. Indeed, Dufferin, who had been held responsible by Queen Victoria for any unpleasant incident and was naturally greatly relieved when the visit was over, considered that, from a diplomatic point of view, it had been a marked success. Apart from any other consideration, the Prince had ‘shown all Europe how ready he had been to do a kindness to a near relative, in spite of any personal risk to himself ’.

On the death of Alexander III a few years later, the Prince again visited Russia and once more served his country well by his conduct there. The Prime Minister, Lord Rosebery, had urged him to attend the funeral and to take advantage of the opportunity to endear himself to his nephew, the new Tsar, Nicholas II, who was then twenty-six. But the Prince needed no persuasion. He had left London with Princess Alexandra immediately on hearing of Alexander III’s illness, and was in Vienna when he heard of his death. He told Prince George to join him in St Petersburg not only out of respect for ‘poor dear Uncle Sasha’s memory’, but also because ‘the opportunity to see the great capital of Russia’ was ‘not one to be missed’. ‘Poor Mama is terribly upset,’ he added. ‘This is indeed the most trying and sad journey I have ever undertaken.’

Once in St Petersburg the Prince uncomplainingly performed all the duties that were expected of him with the utmost conscientiousness. He attended the daily and appallingly tedious services in the fortress church of St Peter and St Paul; he displayed no sign of fatigue or restlessness during the final four-hour-long funeral service, nor any distaste when he was required to kiss the lips of the evil-smelling corpse, which had not been embalmed until three days after death. He made himself agreeable to everyone, winning ‘golden opinions’, Princess Alexandra’s woman-of-the-bedchamber, Charlotte Knollys, said, ‘by all the kind feeling he [had] shown’, even to the King of Serbia — whom all the Russian high nobility ignored because he was so uncouth — and particularly to the young Tsar, whom he described as ‘shy and timid’ and, despite his autocratic views, ‘weak as water’. All the same, he had grown quite fond of him and, in return, the Tsar was now prepared to inscribe himself to his ‘dearest Uncle Bertie’ as ‘ever your most loving nephew, Nicky’.

Lord Rosebery warmly congratulated him on his arrival home, assuring him that he had never stood so high in national esteem, that he had made the most of his opportunity, justified the highest anticipations and rendered a ‘signal service’ to his country ‘as well as to Russia and the peace of the world’.