Christopher Hibbert - Edward VII - The Last Victorian King

Delighted by the compliments that had been paid to him in England, the Kaiser returned to Germany an evidently dedicated Anglophile. ‘We ought to form an Anglo–German alliance,’ he had declared on the last day of his visit at a luncheon at Marlborough House. ‘You would watch over the seas while we would safeguard the land. With such an alliance not a mouse would stir in Europe.’ His recently appointed Chancellor, Count von Bülow, wrote:

I found him completely under the spell of his English impressions. As a rule he could not change his military uniform often enough, but now he wore civilian clothes as he had done in England. He wore a tie-pin with his deceased grandmother’s initials on it. The officers who were summoned … to dine with him … did not seem very pleased by his constant enthusiastic allusions to England and everything English.

It seemed for a time that some sort of agreement might be reached with Germany; and, although the King was sceptical, he agreed to do what he could to help. But he was not enthusiastic, and became even less so as the months went by.

The King and the Kaiser met again in Germany in February 1901 when the King went out to see his sister who was dying of cancer at Friedrichshof. Having expressed the hope that it would be regarded as a purely family visit, the King was disconcerted, on stepping down from the train at Frankfurt, to find his nephew in full-dress uniform waiting to greet him with a military escort.

Six months later, the King had to return to Germany for his sister’s funeral. Expecting that he would have to talk to the Kaiser about the possibility of an Anglo–German alliance which their respective governments had been considering, the King asked Lord Lansdowne to give him a set of notes which he could use as a basis for private discussions. But when the time came, the King was so deeply upset by the loss of his sister; so annoyed by the Kaiser’s recent reference to British ministers as ‘unmitigated noodles’; so exasperated by the Kaiser’s long letters of gratuitous advice about the conduct of the Boer War; and, in any case, so sceptical about the prospect of an Anglo–German alliance, that he impatiently and imprudently handed Lansdowne’s notes to the Kaiser without attempting to discuss any of the points mentioned in them.

Having thus avoided any unpleasant conversation at Homburg, the King went on to Wilhelmshöhe near Cassel, where he was irritated to find 15,000 troops to welcome him to further official talks with the Kaiser which had been arranged to take place in the castle. These conversations got off to a bad start. The Kaiser, in his knowing way, said that he was interested to hear that the British government were thinking of granting independence to Malta, a proposal of which the Colonial Office had not troubled to inform the King, who was naturally at first embarrassed by his ignorance and then furious with the government for having failed to consult or enlighten him. Nothing of importance was thereafter discussed at Wilhelmshöhe, from which the King was thankful to escape to Homburg. He seemed even more relieved when, soon after his return home to England, he was told that the government had decided to break off the negotiations for an alliance with Germany.

The next year, 1902, the Kaiser was again in England; and this time the visit was an utter failure. At Sandringham, to which the Kaiser was asked by his uncle to travel in plain clothes since it was ‘not customary to wear uniform in the country in England’, the most strenuous efforts were made to entertain the Kaiser and his suite. Musicians were brought up from London for him; Horace Goldin displayed his remarkable gifts as a conjurer; Albert Chevalier came to sing his funny songs; Sir Henry Irving arrived with a company of actors to perform Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Story of Waterloo; Arthur Bourchier and Violet Vanbrugh were in excellent form in a short piece entitled Dr. Johnson. There were shooting parties and there were large dinner parties to which distinguished soldiers and various members of the Cabinet were invited so that the Kaiser could talk to them.

But nothing seemed to please him very much. Whenever he attempted to talk to the King’s ministers about Anglo–German relations they were exasperatingly non-committal, while the King himself steadfastly declined to be drawn on the subject at all. If the Kaiser did not find the British congenial, they certainly did not find him so. They did not like the clothes he wore for shooting, which looked like a kind of uniform, though they had to admit that he shot well with the light gun he had to use because of his withered arm. They were appalled when some military members of his suite drew revolvers to shoot at the hares. And they were constantly irritated by his officious display of knowledgeability on every conceivable subject.

‘What petrol do you use?’ he asked on being shown the King’s new car. The King did not know. Potato spirit was the best, the polymath informed him. Had he ever tried that? The King had never even heard of it. The conversation ended there. But a few days later the King was astonished to discover an extraordinary assortment of glass bottles, retorts and jars on his table together with various mineral and vegetable substances: the Kaiser had sent to Germany for them so that he could demonstrate to his uncle the method of manufacture of his favoured motor fuel. No one was surprised when, as the Kaiser boarded the Hohenzollern, the King was heard to murmur, ‘Thank God, he’s gone!’

Thereafter relations between the King and the Kaiser rapidly deteriorated, reaching their nadir in 1905 when, in an attempt to break the entente cordiale, the Kaiser, having spoken at Bremen of a ‘world-wide dominion of the Hohenzollerns’, made a bombastic speech at Tangier, asserting Germany’s ‘great and growing interests in Morocco’. Castigating the Kaiser’s speech, which had been made at the instigation of von Bülow, as ‘the most mischievous and uncalled-for event which the German Emperor has ever been engaged in since he came to the throne’, the King, who was himself cruising in the Mediterranean at the time, landed at Algiers where he took the remarkable step of asking the French Governor-General to send, on his personal behalf, a telegram of encouragement to Théophile Delcassé, who was reported to have resigned when pressed to show a more conciliatory attitude towards Germany. Delcassé had already been persuaded not to resign by Loubet when the King’s message arrived; but as his country and Germany drifted close to war he was forced out of office, and French resistance to German demands for a conference on the future of Morocco collapsed.

The Germans badly mishandled the Morocco Conference, which not only left France the dominant power in the area, but also the prestige of the British, who had stood loyally by their partner, greatly enhanced. And the Kaiser, convinced that his uncle was plotting the destruction of Germany, was consequently more resentful of him than ever. ‘He is a Devil,’ he announced to three hundred guests at a banquet in Berlin.

‘You can hardly believe what a Devil he is.’ The King was no less uncomplimentary about the Kaiser. ‘The King talks and writes about [him] in terms that make one’s flesh creep,’ Lord Lansdowne wrote, ‘and the official papers which go to him, whenever they refer to His Imperial Majesty, come back with all sorts of annotations of a most incendiary character.’ Nor did the King confine himself to comments about the Kaiser: von Bülow was ‘badly informed’; the opinions of Baron von Holstein, head of the political section of the German Foreign Office, were as ‘absurd’ as they were ‘false’; in negotiating with Russia, Germany was ‘certain’ to act behind England’s back. In fact, the King was ‘inclined to agree’ with Francis Knollys that ‘all public men in Germany from the Emperor downwards [were] liars’.