Christopher Hibbert - Edward VII - The Last Victorian King

Yet despite this quarrel, when the Kaiser came to England in the summer of 1889, he showed himself so determined to be pleasant that Knollys was able to assure the Prime Minister that he and the Prince of Wales had succeeded in getting along perfectly well together. The Kaiser had obviously been delighted to be made an honorary Admiral of the Fleet and to be proposed for membership of the Royal Yacht Squadron; while the Prince — though his temper was rather frayed by an attack of phlebitis and he still thought that ‘Willy [was] a bully’ — had decided that his nephew was certainly a good deal less combative than he had been formerly. On the day of the Kaiser’s departure, Joseph Chamberlain declared in a speech at Leicester that ‘no far-seeing English statesman could be content with England’s permanent isolation on the continent of Europe’, and that the ‘natural alliance’ was between England and ‘the great German Empire’. The Prince of Wales would not have put it as strongly as that, but he was now more inclined to assent to an Anglo– German understanding. Accordingly, the Prince’s return visit to Berlin the next year was as successful as the Kaiser’s visit to England. The Prince — who had shown no resentment that his nephew was now an Emperor while he was still a powerless heir — told Queen Victoria that he had been treated ‘quite like a sovereign’ in Germany and that his only regret was that his expenses had ‘in consequence been heavy’.

It was almost the last time that the Prince wrote well of his nephew, about whom nothing annoyed him more than his determination to shine at Cowes as a brilliant yachtsman and as master of an increasingly powerful navy. Until the Kaiser decided to become what the Prince, in the hearing of Baron von Eckardstein, called ‘the boss of Cowes’, it was the Prince himself who was the star of the annual regatta. He was Commodore of the Royal Yacht Squadron as well as of the Royal Thames Yacht Club; he was President of the Yacht Racing Association; and he was extremely proud that his own racing cutter, Britannia, with himself aboard, had won many an important race and was, indeed, in his own estimation, ‘the first racing yacht afloat’. But the Kaiser had spoiled all that. In 1893 he had appeared at Cowes with a new yacht of his own, Meteor I, with which he had the satisfaction of beating the King in the race for the Queen’s Cup. And thereafter he had bombastically set about using Cowes as a showplace for the latest warships of the German navy.

In 1895 he arrived in the imperial yacht, Hohenzollern, escorted by Germany’s two newest warships, Wörth and Weissenburg, both named after German victories during the Franco–Prussian War. And on 6 August, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the victory at Wörth, he chose to address his sailors in a vainglorious speech which the Prince of Wales denounced as an affront to his hosts and which provoked journalistic warfare between the English and German press.

Having already antagonized the regatta committee by ostentatiously withdrawing Meteor I from the race for the Queen’s Cup on the grounds that the handicapping was unfair to him, the Kaiser exasperated his uncle two days later at a dinner party aboard the Osborne. A quarrel had broken out between France and England over a border dispute in the Far East, and there was even talk of war. The Kaiser was in an exceptionally boisterous mood that evening; and, heedless of his uncle’s excessive sensitivity about never having been on active service, slapped him on the back — on the front, one eyewitness told Baron von Eckardstein — and cried out, ‘So, then, you’ll soon be off to India to show what you’re good for as a soldier.’

Before leaving Cowes that year the Kaiser approached George Lennox Watson, the designer of the three-hundred-ton Britannia, and ordered a yacht which would be even bigger than that and even faster than Meteor I. The Prince could not cope with this. He sold Britannia, in which he had taken such pride, to John Lawson-Johnston, who had made a fortune out of Bovril; and, although he bought the yacht back when he became King and attended Cowes with unfailing regularity, he never took part in a race there again. ‘The regatta at Cowes was once a pleasant holiday for me,’ he complained. ‘But now that the Kaiser has taken command it is nothing but a nuisance … [with] that perpetual firing of salutes, cheering and other tiresome disturbances.’

Having won the Queen’s Cup with his unrivalled Meteor II in 1899, the Kaiser added insult to injury not only by repeating his complaint about the ‘perfectly appalling’ system of handicapping but also by insisting on bringing to England with him, as his naval aide-de-camp, Admiral Baron von Senden und Bibran. This overbearing Junker had irritated the Prince by his haughty manner on previous visits to England and, piqued by the Prince’s dismissive attitude towards him, had spread reports in Berlin about the Prince’s anti-German sentiments. As soon as the Prince saw Senden’s name on the Kaiser’s list, he sent for Baron von Eckardstein to tell him that ‘after what had happened, the Kaiser could not possibly be accompanied on his visit to England by this person’ for whom he had ‘a quite peculiar aversion’. He absolutely declined to receive such a cad as the Admiral had shown himself to be. Eckardstein did his best on the Prince’s behalf, but the Kaiser was adamant, flatly declaring that if he went to England at all he would take with him anyone he liked. It seemed, in fact, that the visit would have to be cancelled until the German-born Duchess of Devonshire, ‘one of the cleverest and most capable women’ that Eckardstein had ever met, persuaded the Prince to accept Senden if he apologized for his past conduct and if it was clearly understood that he would be invited to Windsor only to attend the official dinner in honour of the Kaiser and, in no circumstances at all, to Sandringham.

In spite of this ominous beginning, the Kaiser’s visit to England in 1899 was a notable success. It was recognized that his coming at such a time, accompanied by his Foreign Secretary, was proof to the world that, if there were a European coalition in favour of the Boers, Germany would not be party to it. And the Kaiser received much credit in England for this gesture which was made in defiance of public opinion in Germany. The Prince, who supervised the arrangements with his habitual attention to detail in such matters, went out of his way to be agreeable to his guest; while the Princess of Wales, who cordially disliked him and considered that he got ‘more foolish and conceited every day’, succeeded in disguising her distaste for his company at Sandringham, though in private she ridiculed the ‘fool’s’ having thought it necessary to arrive there with three valets and two hairdressers, one of whom was responsible for the upward-sweeping wings of the imperial moustache.

‘The German visit is going off very well,’ Francis Knollys reported to his friend, Lord Rosebery. ‘The German Emperor is much pleased with … England, and he evidently wishes to be very civil to everybody.’

The Kaiser also created a good impression in England by his behaviour when Queen Victoria died. And after her death, in defiance of the wishes of his ministers, he declared that he would stay on in England as a private member of her family until the funeral. The Prince, who had, in fact, been rather put out by the Kaiser’s officious attempt to lift his grandmother’s body into her coffin, told the Empress Frederick that he had been kindness itself

and touching in his devotion without a shade of brusquerie or selfishness … [his] touching and simple demeanour, up to the last, will never be forgotten by me or anyone. It was indeed a sincere pleasure for me to confer upon him the rank of field-marshal in my army, and to invest Willy [the German Crown Prince, aged nineteen] (who is a charming young man) with the Order of the Garter.