Christopher Hibbert - Edward VII - The Last Victorian King

Queen Victoria had been entirely on Prince Alexander’s side. At the Darmstadt wedding of her granddaughter, Princess Victoria of Hesse, to Prince Louis of Battenberg, she had fallen under Prince Alexander’s spell herself. She had found him not only ‘very fascinating’ and ‘a person in whose judgment’ she ‘would have great confidence’, but even to be compared with Prince Albert. ‘I think he may stand next to beloved Papa,’ she had written at that time. ‘I think him (as in beloved Papa’s case) so wonderfully handsome.’ So annoyed had she been, indeed, that the marriage between this paragon and her granddaughter, Princess Victoria, had been forbidden in Berlin that when Prince Wilhelm had proposed to visit England, she had let it be known that he would not be welcome at Windsor. Delighted to have an excuse not to have the tiresome young man at Sandringham either, the Prince of Wales had explained to him that he could hardly go to England to stay with his uncle if he could not call on his grandmother: so the visit had better be cancelled. Prince Wilhelm had, therefore, remained in Germany where he had gone about making insulting remarks about his uncle and referring to his grandmother as an ‘old hag’. He had come to England with his father for Queen Victoria’s Jubilee two years later; but his uncle, that ‘old peacock’, had virtually ignored him.

Within a year of the Jubilee, however, it was impossible to ignore the egregious young man any longer. For in March 1888 his grandfather had died at last; less than four months later his father, Frederick III, had also died; and on 15 June 1888, at the age of twenty-nine, he had become Kaiser himself.

Impulsive and theatrical, Kaiser Wilhelm II was capable of exercising great charm. He was undoubtedly clever and could be lively and amusing in conversation, although the encouraging laughter of his entourage would often drive him on to excessive hilarity and to that kind of boisterous, bullying banter into which so many of Queen Victoria’s descendants all too easily lapsed. John Morley wrote after meeting him at luncheon:

He is rather short, pale, but sunburnt; carries himself well; walks into the room with the stiff pride of the Prussian soldier; speaks with a good deal of intense and energetic pleasure, not like a Frenchman, but staccato; his voice strong but pleasant; his eye bright, clear and full; mouth resolute, the cast of face grave or almost stem in repose, but as he sat between two pretty women he lighted up with gaiety and a genial laugh. Energy, rapidity, restlessness in every movement from his short, quick inclinations of the head to the planting of the foot.

A compulsive exhibitionist, he was insatiably fond of talking, determined in his efforts to bring all those in his company to agree with what he said, and ever on the watch for an opportunity to demonstrate the breadth of his knowledge or the retentiveness of his memory. Frederick Ponsonby recalled one embarrassing occasion when the Kaiser asked him across the dinner table how many members there were of the London County Council and how many years elapsed between elections. Ponsonby, not very certain of his facts, answered as best he could.

‘I don’t think you’re right,’ the Kaiser commented and thereupon gave the exact figures. Presumably he had committed them to memory, as he learned by heart the statistics of all the most modern ships in the Royal Navy so as to impress any British Admiral with whom he might find himself in conversation, but his easy and irritating display of detailed information was nevertheless ‘effective’, as Ponsonby said, ‘and everyone present marvelled at his knowledge’.

Disliking the Kaiser, to whom he referred as ‘William the Great’, and dismayed that so sudden an end had been put to his hopes of regulating Anglo–German relations in partnership — as senior partner — with his good-natured, amenable brother-in-law, the Prince of Wales had taken little trouble to disguise his dislike or to guard his tongue when speaking of his nephew. He compared him unfavourably with his father, Frederick III, and maintained that his ‘illustrious nephew’ needed to learn that he was ‘living at the end of the nineteenth century and not in the Middle Ages’. The Prince also disliked the Kaiser’s Foreign Minister, Count Herbert Bismarck, son of the Chancellor, who, in turn, made no secret of the fact that he ‘hated the Prince of Wales’. When Bismarck quarrelled with Sir Robert Morier, British Ambassador in St Petersburg who had been a friend of the Empress Frederick when serving in the British Legation at Darmstadt in the Franco–Prussian War, the Prince intervened in the quarrel so vigorously that the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, was forced to conclude that the Prince had been impulsive and indiscreet and that he persistently offended the Kaiser — as he put it on another occasion — by treating him ‘as an uncle treats a nephew, instead of recognizing that he was an emperor’. Soon afterwards the Kaiser was reported — later, he said, falsely reported — to have made it plain that, on a forthcoming state visit to Vienna, the continued presence of his uncle at the Grand Hotel, where the Prince was then staying on holiday, would not be acceptable to him. And the British Ambassador in Vienna, Sir Augustus Paget, was therefore given the unpleasant duty of informing the Prince that the Austrian Emperor would be grateful if he left the city before the Kaiser arrived. Paget subsequently reported to the Prince:

I am perfectly certain, from what has been told me, that all the present trouble comes from stories having been repeated to [the Kaiser] of what Your Royal Highness has said. Some of those stories have been repeated to me. I need not say that I do not believe them, but it is necessary to avoid saying anything whatsoever which may be made use of as a foundation for the gossip of the malevolent or idle … [I must emphasize] the all importance of Your Royal Highness being more than guarded in anything you say about the Emperor William.

The Queen had had a good deal of sympathy for her son in this squabble with the Kaiser and in his insistence that he ought to receive from him a written apology for having said that he did not wish to meet the Prince of Wales in Vienna. She had told Lord Salisbury that it was ‘really too vulgar and too absurd to suggest that the one treated the other as a nephew rather than as an emperor’. It showed ‘a very unhealthy and unnatural state of mind’; and the Kaiser ‘must be made to feel that his grandmother and uncle [would] not stand such insolence’. The Queen would ‘not swallow this affront’, and the ‘Prince of Wales must not submit to such treatment’ by ‘such a hot-headed, conceited, and wrong-headed young man’ who was ‘devoid of all feeling’. Yet she was forced to agree that the political relations of the German and British governments ought ‘not to be affected (if possible) by these miserable and personal quarrels’; and she sent her son-in-law, Prince Christian, to Berlin to see what he could do to bring about a family reconciliation.

On his arrival in Berlin, Prince Christian was assured by the Kaiser that he had never said he did not want to meet his uncle in Vienna; but since, as he continued to insist, this was ‘not a simple affair between uncle and nephew, but between Emperor and Prince of Wales’, he was not prepared to send a written explanation. Nor did he do so, merely writing in reply to a letter from the Queen — which the Prince deemed ‘rather too mild’ — that the whole Vienna affair was ‘absolutely invented, there not being an atom of a cause to be found’. The whole thing was ‘a fixed idea which originated either in Uncle Bertie’s imagination, or in somebody else’s.’ And with this, the Prince had to be content. ‘What a triumph for the Bismarcks, as well as for Willy,’ the Prince commented gloomily to his sister. ‘Lord Salisbury was consulted by [the Queen], and he gave her the worst possible advice, making us virtually to “eat humble pie”!’