The Heir Apparent (71 page)

The Garter with cross omitted was commissioned by Lansdowne, who proposed to give it to the shah of Persia. Lansdowne claimed that he had mentioned the design to the King a few days before, but Bertie remembered nothing about it. The proposal to give the Garter to the shah enraged him; he objected that it could not be given to a non-Christian. The shah considered that he was entitled to the Garter as his father had had it before; but since then Queen Victoria had ruled that non-Christians were ineligible. The real point was that Bertie considered the Garter to be in the gift of the monarch, and he refused to be bullied by the Foreign Office into giving it away—in spite of the fact that he heartily approved of the aim, which was to win the friendship of the shah against Russia.

Lansdowne’s clumsy attempt to compromise by removing the cross from the Garter could hardly have been better calculated to annoy Bertie, whose passion for correctness in such matters was notorious. Lansdowne refused to back down. He wrote to Balfour threatening to
resign if the King blocked the shah’s Garter, and asking him to intervene.

Balfour stayed at Balmoral in September, but nothing was said about the Garter. Soon afterward, however, the prime minister went on the attack, writing letters to Knollys that have been described as masterpieces of Balfour’s “fundamentally dishonest” technique of “rewriting history as a means of conducting policy.”
⁶⁶
Balfour claimed that the issue was not whether Lansdowne had the King’s authority to issue the Garter (though, of course, that
was
the issue) but whether Lansdowne was to be “thrown over.” If Lansdowne was forced to go back on his word, he would lose all authority, and would be unable to continue in office: “And if he resigned could the matter stop there in these days of Government solidarity?” asked Balfour.
^d
67

This was round one to Balfour. The shah got his Garter, and Balfour concluded that the new King could easily be outmaneuvered or bullied. He was soon to be proved wrong.

Edward VII’s reputation as king rests largely upon his role in foreign policy. He was Edward the Peacemaker, responsible for making possible the Entente Cordiale with France. His visit to Paris in May 1903 was perhaps the most important political intervention he ever made. It was certainly the most controversial.

Bertie controlled all the arrangements for the Paris trip himself. Fritz Ponsonby, his assistant private secretary, was surprised that his master should insist on organizing his own schedule; but Bertie had learned the advantages of keeping his own diary, and he had very good reasons for doing this now. No one was informed of the whole picture. Neither Alix nor Knollys knew of his intentions. People were told what they needed to know, but information was kept in watertight compartments: “Most of the suite had no idea where they were going.”
¹
Ignoring usual practice, Bertie informed neither the British ambassador in
Paris, Sir Edward Monson, nor Lord Lansdowne, the foreign secretary.
²

The King’s itinerary ostensibly consisted of a visit to the King of Portugal in Lisbon, followed by a Mediterranean trip to Rome. Bertie’s real agenda, of visiting President Loubet in Paris, was kept strictly secret. Not until rumors of the royal visit had reached Ambassador Monson did the King reveal his plans to the foreign secretary. He avoided asking Lansdowne to join him as minister in attendance, as might have been expected. Nor did he choose a senior Foreign Office official to accompany him. Instead, he picked Charles Hardinge, the most junior of the four undersecretaries at the Foreign Office.
^*

The King had good reason for keeping Lansdowne in the dark. The foreign secretary had told him that the British government had no intention of reaching an understanding with France over Morocco, the outstanding colonial dispute that needed to be resolved if relations between the two countries were to improve.
³
By visiting Paris, the King was taking the initiative and making foreign policy himself. This was a dangerous thing for the monarch to do: If the mission failed, it could be seriously damaging.

On 30 March 1903, Alix embarked for Copenhagen, “furious” at having to entertain the kaiser, who was paying a state visit to Denmark.
⁴
William was thus safely out of the way, being lionized by the Danish court. “I could not help being much amused at Apapa [King Christian] having created him an Admiral!” Bertie wrote to Georgie, “as Uncle Sacha and I were only Colonels of regiments! I wonder if Mama and Aunt Minny suggested it!!!”
⁵

Meanwhile Bertie sailed for Portugal on the
Victoria and Albert,
taking with him seventy pieces of luggage. In addition to Charles Hardinge and Fritz Ponsonby, he brought the Marquis de Soveral, the Portuguese minister. These men composed an inner court; but of the three,
only Soveral was privy to Bertie’s plans. Bertie made his entry into Lisbon wearing his uniform as colonel of a Portuguese cavalry regiment, an exceptionally short jacket that “was not becoming to a stout man,” as it revealed a large expanse of breeches.
⁶
Etiquette dictated that only the two kings could sit while all others had to stand, enduring not only a pigeon-shooting competition but also the gala opera that followed. The King was not impressed by the Portuguese nobility, who he thought looked “like waiters at second-rate restaurants.” They all had hopes of receiving the Royal Victorian Order, wrote Ponsonby, “but as the first three are said to be disloyal and it would be difficult to give it to No. 4, none of them were given it.”
⁷

Ponsonby sat on board the
Victoria and Albert
busily deciphering the telegrams that poured in. Eventually the King told him, “You know we are going to Paris,” and swore him to strict secrecy.
⁸
When they reached Gibraltar, the King heard that President Loubet was at Algiers and sent four cruisers to salute him, and the president replied inviting the King to visit. It was at this point that Bertie finally told the government that he intended to return via Paris. “The government showed great hesitation for various reasons but the King insisted and the visit was arranged.”
⁹

First came the visit to Italy. Bertie insisted on going ashore incognito—though as Ponsonby observed, this was somewhat absurd, as “no other human being in the world could come with eight battleships, four cruisers, four destroyers and a dispatch vessel.”
¹⁰
(Paying for the royal tour out of taxpayers’ money was apparently not an issue.) Lunch with Rosebery at his villa in Posillipo, where caterers provided a revolting meal of twenty courses, was not a success. How could a man amuse himself alone in such a place for weeks on end? wondered the extrovert King. “He is a strange, weird man, Sir,” replied Hardinge.
¹¹

Bertie’s plan to visit the Pope had created alarm lest it enrage English Protestants, and he reluctantly agreed to abandon it.
¹²
But he still intended to stay with the King of Italy at the Quirinal in Rome, and the Duke of Norfolk, a leader among British Catholics, urged that not to visit Leo XIII would be “looked upon as a terrible slight to an old man,”
which would have a “deplorable effect” on Britain’s Catholics.
¹³
The Cabinet, on the other hand, opposed the visit, fearful of the effect it would have on Lancashire’s working-class Tories, who were strongly anti-Catholic. Joseph Chamberlain, speaking for the Nonconformists, breathed fire and brimstone, and Balfour was inclined to agree. Bertie had already made plain his views when he objected to the oath castigating Roman Catholics that he had been obliged to swear in 1901. Now he dictated an angry telegram to Balfour that could only have made matters worse and might have forced the PM to resign. Hardinge was shocked when Ponsonby toned down the royal words and rewrote the telegram. It was Ponsonby who suggested that the King should pay a private visit to the Pope entirely on his own responsibility and without consulting the Cabinet.
¹⁴
This compromise solved the conflict. Bertie got his way and spent fifteen minutes with the ninety-three-year-old Leo XIII, who looked the color of a dead man but talked lucidly of Venezuela and Somaliland.
¹⁵

The King’s special train steamed into the Bois de Boulogne station in Paris at 3:00 p.m. on 1 May. As the King rode to the British Embassy in the president’s state carriage, the sullen crowd thronging the Champs-Élysées jeered
“Vivent les Boers!,” “Vive Jeanne d’Arc!”

“The French don’t like us,” said one of the suite.

“Why should they?” replied Bertie.
¹⁶

That afternoon at the embassy the King received a deputation from the British Chamber of Commerce and read a speech, drafted by Hardinge, that declared Britain’s friendship for France. Effectively a press release, it appeared in the French papers next morning. When the King attended the Théâtre-Français to see a new play,
L’Autre Danger,
the house was full but the audience was icy. To the consternation of the Paris police, the King insisted on mingling with the crowd in the foyer during the interval. Spotting the actress Jeanne Granier, he walked up, kissed her hand, and said, “Oh, Mademoiselle, I remember how I applauded you in London. You personified there all the grace, all the
esprit
of France.”
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The effect was electric; he was cheered as he returned to his box. By morning the King’s gesture was on everyone’s lips.

The next day, at a military review at Varennes, the King stood beside the president. Bertie wore a plumed helmet and military overcoat over his scarlet field marshal’s uniform, and he was scrupulous in saluting the French troops. At eleven forty-five he attended a reception at the Hôtel de Ville. Flinging off his gray overcoat, he gave the briefest of impromptu speeches, delivered in faultless French:
“Je n’oublierai jamais ma visite à votre charmante ville, et je puis vous assurer que c’est avec le plus grand plaisir que je reviens à Paris, ou je me trouve toujours comme si j’étais chez moi.”
^‡

“Comme si j’étais chez moi.”
No British politician could have said those words. Neither Balfour nor Lansdowne could conceivably have taken Paris by storm as Bertie did. From that moment at the Hôtel de Ville, he was met everywhere by frenzied cheers. All those years of dissipation as Prince de Galles were not in vain. “It was his personal knowledge of French ways, his charming Parisian manner and his Parisian way of living in Paris that won influence for him,” wrote George Saunders, the
Times’
Paris correspondent, diplomatically hinting at Bertie’s career as an English milord.
¹⁸

That afternoon, the King was entertained with a race meeting at Longchamps. He found himself in a box sitting next to Madame Loubet, dowdy wife of the bourgeois French president. The prospect of spending the entire afternoon thus incarcerated was too painful, and after two races Bertie beckoned Ponsonby and whispered, “You must get me out of this. Go to the Jockey Club and ask someone to send me an invitation.”
¹⁹
The Prince d’Arenberg came to the rescue and Bertie
escaped to the Jockey Club. The republican politicians began to murmur, but Bertie watched only one race from the Jockey Club stand, and he did not appear in the paddock where his friends from the
vieille noblesse
awaited him. He understood that the aristocracy were so deeply estranged from the politicians of the Third Republic that being seen to socialize with his old friends could only damage him and undo the good that his visit had done.