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| ISBN-13: | 9781634241748 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Trine Day |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2018 |
| Pages: | 192 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
Bertie
In the fourth year of her reign at the tender age of 22, Queen Victoria gave birth to her second child, the future King of England. Frets and worries about the Queen's "difficult" pregnancy were happily resolved when the birth of a healthy Albert Edward was announced on 9 November 1841 to a relieved nation. For the first time in almost eighty years, England had a suitable male heir. Long live the King!
Bertie, as he was nicknamed by family members, was said to lack the intelligence of his older sister and showed a marked preference for the outdoors to the study of algebra. But he ploughed on doggedly, albeit it without enthusiasm, and mastered his lessons well enough to escape a light corporal punishment sometimes contemplated by his demanding parents. In the summer of 1855, Bertie, now the fourteen year-old Prince of Wales, and his older sister, Vicky, accompanied their parents on a state visit to Napoleon III and his wife Eugenie. The combined effects of Paris and the first welcome cessation of rigorous daily study had a lasting effect on the young Prince. A Frenchman writing more than a century after the event captured the essence of Berties's first trip abroad:
In the Tuileries, he breathed for the first time that odore di femmina whose trail he was to follow for the rest of his life. The scented, alluring women not only kissed him (was he not a child?) but also curtsied to him, and as they bent forward, their décolletage revealed delights that were veiled at Windsor.
In November of 1858, when Prince Edward came of age at seventeen, he was given a £500 yearly allowance and his first taste of independence. During the course of the next few years he attended the universities of Edinburgh, Oxford, and Cambridge, traveled abroad, while developing his taste for cigars, shooting, cards, and women. At age 20 and a boy no longer, he was sent to Ireland to serve with the 2nd Battalion, Grenadier Guards to broaden his experience. No doubt believing that they were only carrying out the spirit of the mission, his young fellow officers smuggled the fetching Dublin actress, Nellie Clifden, into his bed. Of course the delicious gossip soon reached the ears of his father who delivered himself of a stern lecture to his errant son. Unfortunately, the doting but strict Prince Albert was infected with the typhus germ and died some months later on December 14, 1861.
This brought front and center the next milestone: marriage. During the course of some years of mixing and matching political considerations, religious affiliations, and physical characteristics – not necessarily in that order – the final choice fell on the attractive Danish princess Alexandra, the daughter of Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksberg. Things seemed to go well and the two were married in St. George's Chapel at Windsor, on March 10, 1863, with all the grand pomp and circumstance befitting the future King and Queen of England. Alexandra's father, whose private life was a public scandal, duly inherited the throne of Denmark in November of 1863. But as Queen Victoria had feared, the newly-crowned King Christian IX supported unilateral changes in the status of the duchy of Schleswig in violation of the London Protocol of 1852. This brought Denmark into conflict with Prussia and Austria and resulted (after a further brief war between Prussia and Austria in 1866) in the annexation of Schleswig and Holstein by Prussia. Alexandra was livid. Denying that her father had incurred any blame for the loss of the duchies by his unquestionably illegal action, she developed a fanatical hatred for all things German that stayed with her to the end of her days:
For the rest of the nineteenth century and, more important, for the first decade of the twentieth, when Edward was on the throne himself, the anti-Prussian lobby of England found a permanent focusing point around Alexandra. Though she was never a significant figure politically, the intensity and consistency of her feelings acted as a catalyst for many of her English sympathizers. At the most they disliked, distrusted and perhaps feared the Prussians. Alexandra, whether as Princess or Queen, positively hated them. Her husband could not have remained entirely unaffected by this domestic pressure, especially after his own infidelity put him so heavily in his wife's private debt.
After returning from a seven-day honeymoon at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, the bridal pair set up housekeeping in London. There was Marlborough House for frequent and elaborate social functions and hunting parties, and there was Sandringham for private marital bliss. But Prince Edward had always been a hedonist to the core and marital vows could not hope to contain his relentless pursuit of pleasure. It was hardly surprising therefore that Alexandra soon became "the most courteously but most implacably deceived royal lady of her time."
Neither marriage nor children nor royal decorum could divert the future King from pursuing his favorite pastime at the Paris brothel of Le Chabanais. There did come a point when the aging Prince's ever-expanding girth threatened to put an end to such pursuits, but as necessity is the mother of invention, an ingenious French furniture designer came up with the inspired siege d'amour, or "love-chair." Resembling something out of a medieval torture chamber, the contraption allowed the corpulent Prince to indulge in his fantasy of having sex with two ladies while protecting them from being crushed by his weight. We may forgive the petite Mademoiselles of Le Chabanais for possibly having concerns about the sturdiness of the device while the Prince was in the throes of royal passion.
The precise function of the "chair" remains a matter of conjecture but any mental imagery of the rotund Prince/King in action on his love-chair may not be for the faint of heart. History in any case records no untoward incidents and the chair itself, now owned by the Soubrier furniture-making family who originally custom-built the chair for Bertie, has never been on public display.
Queen Victoria blamed her eldest son (wrongly) for the premature death of her beloved Albert, the Prince Consort, and complained bitterly to family relations about the Prince's pleasure forays in London and Paris, sexual and otherwise, and grew increasingly disillusioned. The Prince's philandering and his fixation on trivial pursuits such as horse-racing and baccarat confirmed the image of an irresponsible playboy in his mother's eyes. Of course, it was not uncommon for crowned heads to have doubts and fears about the ability of their offspring to carry out their weighty responsibilities, but a decadent lifestyle alone does not explain the extreme strictures imposed on the Prince by his mother and we must look elsewhere for an explanation.
The deep political divide between mother and son was first revealed in January of 1864 when Prussian and Austrian armies invaded Denmark. Aside from the relative merits of the opposing sides, the Prince joined his Danish wife in passionate condemnation of Prussia, while Queen Victoria was just as adamant in support. The Prince, increasingly frustrated by his mother's steadfast refusal to allow his participation in the affairs of State, now demanded that he be accorded access to Foreign Office despatches. The Queen refused, citing his lack of discretion. When informed of the refusal, the Prince wrote a letter of protest to which the Queen replied that "you could not well have a Government key which only Ministers, and those immediately connected with them, or with me, have." While the Prussian-Danish war was causing his wife sleepless nights, the Prince again defied his mother's explicit wishes and triggered another exchange of letters when he met (on April 22, 1864) with the Italian revolutionary leader, Giuseppe Garibaldi.
In June of 1866, when a dispute about the status of Holstein led to war between Prussia and Austria, anti-Prussian sentiment of the Prince and Princess of Wales rose to a fever-pitch. In fact, "the Prince of Wales's abuse of Prussia was robust and indiscreet, while the hatred for everything Prussian felt thereafter by the Princess of Wales became personal and, for that reason, embarrassing." Already on 6 June, ten days before the war had broken out, Bertie told the French Ambassador in London, Prince de la Tour d'Auvergne, that he was praying for an Austrian victory and that the best way to contain Prussian militarism was for France and England to join hands in an alliance. A seven-week campaign resulted in the annexation of Schleswig-Holstein by Prussia to the undisguised consternation of the Prince and Princess, but much worse was to come. On July 19, 1870, the French Emperor, Napoleon III, declared war on Prussia. The much-disputed cause was accurately summarized by the Oxford historian, Michael Howard:
There can be no doubt that France was the immediate aggressor, and none that the immediate provocation to her aggression was contrived by Bismarck; but the explanation that the conflict was planned by Bismarck as the necessary climax to a long-matured scheme for the unification of Germany – an explanation to which Bismarck's own boasting in old age was to give wide currency – is one which does not today command general assent. The truth is more complex. War between France and Prussia was widely foreseen when, after Austria's defeat in 1866, the North German Federation was formed. The resulting change in the European balance of power could be made acceptable to France only if her own position was guaranteed by those compensations on the left bank of the Rhine and in Belgium which Napoleon instantly demanded and which Bismarck point-blank refused. After 1866 the French were in that most dangerous of all moods; that of a great power which sees itself declining to the second rank. In all ranks of French society war with Prussia was considered inevitable."
World sympathy was almost unanimous in favor of Prussia, Queen Victoria wrote "We must be neutral as long as we can, but no one here conceals their opinion as to the extreme iniquity of the war and the unjustifiable conduct of the French!" Poincaré, Clemenceau, and even Napoleon III himself admitted culpability, but Princess Alexandra had a different opinion. She hoped from the bottom of her heart that Prussia would be annihilated and the Prince of Wales shared that opinion. Having expressed to the Austrian Ambassador, Count Apponyi, his fervent hope that Prussia would be taught a lesson at last, the Prince was vexed and dismayed to learn of the calamitous French defeat at Sedan on 2 September and the astonishing surrender of the French Emperor and the proclamation of a Republic in Paris. This bad news was crowned by the official proclamation of the 2nd German Reich on 18 December at France's venerable Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. To reassure his mother, the Prince was obliged to concede that "Of course I consider the French quite in the wrong, and, as all our relations are in Germany, it is not likely that I should go against them ... I am afraid that Alix's feelings are strongly against Prussia. They have always been so since that unfortunate Danish war."
In 1894, France broke out of the diplomatic ring which had been constructed by Bismarck with the purpose of isolating a resolutely hostile France when Russia, after four years of intensive negotiations, agreed to affix the royal Russian signature to the Franco-Russian Alliance. On that momentous occasion, the following conversation took place between Czar Alexander III and his Foreign Minister, N. K. Giers, which revealed the purpose of the new alliance:
"We really do have to come to an agreement with the French," he said. "We must be prepared to attack the Germans at once, in order not to give them time to defeat France first and then to turn upon us ... We must correct the mistakes of the past and destroy Germany at the first possible moment."
With Germany broken up, he argued, Austria would not dare move. Giers, gathering his courage in the face of this unexpected statement, put the obvious question to his sovereign:
"But what would we gain by helping the French to destroy Germany?" "Why, what indeed?" replied the Czar. "What we would gain would be that Germany as such would disappear. It would break up into a number of small, weak states, the way it used to be."
Franco-Russian plans were put on hold indefinitely by the untimely death of Alexander III at forty-nine years of age on November 2, 1894. Meanwhile, the Prince of Wales had not been idle. His offer to deliver letters of friendly advice from the British Government to the Emperor Napoleon III and to King William of Prussia were ignored, while his views about methods of effecting a settlement between Prussia and France were dismissed as "royal twaddle." On November 18, Lord Granville reported to Gladstone that the Prince had been "more than usually unwise in his talk." After the war, the Prince again angered his mother when he offered the beautiful Empress Eugenie (and later the Emperor Napoleon III) the Chadwick House in which to live in comfortable exile without consulting her or the Cabinet.
A truly alarming sign of the Prince's evolving anti-German political predilections came with his first meeting with Léon Gambetta. If there was one man in France who symbolized the eventual return of Alsace-Lorraine after a successful war with Germany, it was the squat, disheveled firebrand Léon Gambetta – the French war hero who in 1870 inspired the nation with his spectacular escape from besieged Paris in a hot-air balloon and combined the Interior and War Departments to organize the Government of National Defence. With his fiery oratory, he roused the nation to an all-out guerre à outrance with these stirring words:
We must set all our resources to work – and they are immense. We must shake the countryside from its torpor, guard against stupid panic, increase partisan warfare and, against an enemy so skilled in ambush and surprise, ourselves employ ruses, harass his flanks, surprise his rear – in short inaugurate a national war. ... Tied down and contained by the capital, the Prussians, far from home, anxious, harassed, hunted down by our awakened people, will gradually be decimated by our arms, by hunger, by natural causes.
In the post-war years Gambetta had kept the flame of the lost provinces burning in French hearts with his famous slogan: "Speak of it never! Think of it always!" This oddest of odd couples, "Two men, whom birth and social context could hardly have been set further apart, the one destined to a crown, the other the apostle of republicanism," were in fact well matched by a common goal. Gambetta himself put it this way: "It is no waste of time to talk with him even over a merry supper at the Café Anglais. He loves France both in a gay and a serious sense, and his dream of the future is an entente with us."
Many of the top-secret meetings between the Prince and Gambetta were arranged by the Marquis Henri-Charles Breteuil, who described Gambetta at one such meeting (12 March, 1881), in his memoirs: "One had to admit that this short, fat man, with his red shining face, his Cyclops eye, his long hair and his heavy, vulgar walk, seemed to spread himself across the elegant floor of our drawing-room like an oil-stain on a piece of silk."
When Gambetta died unexpectedly (on 31 December, 1882) the Prince resumed his quest for an entente with a one-time journalist and life-long French patriot, Théophile Delcassé, who was even more impassioned about Alsace-Lorraine and who would become Foreign Minister in 1898. As with Gambetta, and for the same reason – Le Prussianisme, voilà l'ennemi – the political marriage of minds with Delcassé was instantaneous. For the rest of his long apprenticeship, these were the influences that shaped and strengthened the political aims that the Prince of Wales would later pursue as King:
The empathy which grew up over the years between the Prince of Wales and France was a total one, enveloping his body, mind and spirit. It was to have a strong influence on his political thinking as, in the opposite sense, did all that gradually accumulated distaste for the Prussia of his German relatives, with its puritanical, military pipe-clay capital. ... The country to which he was most devoted and where he felt most at home happened to be the mortal enemy of Prussia, the country he came most to dislike and where, despite all the blood links, he felt least at ease. The equation had lethal balance about it."
Lethal indeed! These were the attitudes that later hardened and coalesced into the font of King Edward's anti-German weltanschauung and later found expression in the radical diplomacy which exploited Franco-Russian ambitions for Alsace-Lorraine and the Straits, respectively. These were the attitudes that hitched the British horse to the Franco-Russian cart, thereby creating the Triple Entente. It could well be said that King Edward VII discovered the moribund spear of the Franco-Russian Alliance. Sir Edward Grey felt its heft, polished and sharpened it, and used the Sarajevo crisis to hurl it at Germany.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Two Edwards"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Peter Hof.
Excerpted by permission of Trine Day LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Prologue 1
1 Bertie 11
2 The Entente Cordiale the 1st Moroccan Crisis 19
3 The 1907 Anglo-Russian Entente and the Annexation Crisis 37
4 The King is Dead Long Live the Triple Entente 47
5 Agadir 63
6 The Triple Entente Prepares for War 71
7 Lord Grey and the World War 87
8 Sir Edward Grey and the July Crisis 111
Epilogue 147
Bibliography 161
Appendices
1 Foreign Office hoarding 1m historic files in secret archive 167
2 Revealed: how King George V demanded Britain enter the First World War 171
Index 177