The Heir Apparent (75 page)

In December 1905, Stamper drove the King to a house party at Crichel, where he was the guest of Lord and Lady Alington. They were second-generation members of the Marlborough House set and great friends of Mrs. Keppel, whose daughter Sonia Keppel remembered Lady Alington’s “pale face and full lips and small alert eyes” as being somehow at variance with her large, lazy body, enveloped in “a billowing ocean of lace and ribbons.”
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The King stayed at Crichel for five days, but if this disconcerted his hosts, they need not have worried, as Mrs. Keppel was also a guest, and “so long as Mrs. George is here, he is perfectly happy.”
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Over three days the party shot three thousand pheasants. The King’s stand was marked by a red label on a stick (all the other places had white ones) so that the beaters could skillfully direct clouds of pheasants to fly over his head.
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Just before Bertie’s visit to Crichel, a political crisis blew up. On the afternoon of Monday, 4 December, Prime Minister Balfour, had an audience at Buckingham Palace and offered his resignation. Balfour’s government had been in a state of terminal decline for months, but he resigned without waiting to face the electorate. He insisted on going before Christmas 1905, earlier than expected, which, Bertie told Georgie, “I think is unnecessary and a mistake.”
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Pressed by the King to accept an honor, Balfour declined, but he agreed to accept the blue and red Windsor uniform. The following morning, at ten forty-five, Bertie summoned the Liberal leader Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman and invited him to form a government. “Nothing could be nicer or more courteous than he was,” Bertie told Georgie.
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The sixty-nine-year-old CB was a round-faced, white-whiskered Scot. “We are not as young as
we were, Sir Henry!” said the King and shook him warmly by the hand. Whereupon (according to Margot Asquith’s diary), “knowing that he ought to kneel and kiss hands, CB advanced and waited, but the King interrupted by some commonplace remark; when he had finished speaking, CB again advanced meaning to kneel, but the King only wrang his hand, at which he felt the interview was over, as to have had another try would have been grotesque.”
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After this, the King boarded the special train for Crichel.

Knollys regretted his master’s absence from London: “Your Majesty would, I am sure, have had more direct control over the negotiations, and Sir H[enry] could then, without any difficulty, have referred to you from time to time the proposals which were made for the filling up of the various offices.”
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From Crichel, Bertie was accommodating. Knollys telephoned declaring: “The King agrees to everything.”
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Bertie was back in London at five thirty on Sunday, 10 December, and an hour later he saw CB with the list of ministers. He wrote to his sister Princess Louise: “The new Gov[ernmen]t promises to be a strong one—and I find Sir H. Campbell-Bannerman charming to do business with.”
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CB was the first prime minister to receive formal constitutional recognition in accordance with the warrant drawn up by Sandars and Balfour at the King’s suggestion. The next day, the outgoing ministers gave up their seals of office, and the new administration was sworn in at a meeting of the Privy Council. London was blanketed with thick black fog; the King’s carriage was preceded by twelve running footmen bearing flaring torches, and the new government began, as Bertie quipped, “by losing their way!”
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Esher noticed that the fog affected the King’s breathing, and he was very unwell at dinner.
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By remaining at Crichel and distancing himself from the change of government, Bertie ensured that no one could accuse him of meddling. This has earned him the approval of some historians, who note that, unlike Queen Victoria, he allowed CB a free hand with appointments.
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In point of fact, Bertie had been playing a cool game behind the scenes. By the time Balfour resigned, the King had done all he needed to do to ensure the outcome he wanted.

Campbell-Bannerman’s succession as prime minister had not gone unchallenged. In the autumn of 1905, a plot had been hatched to banish CB to the House of Lords, thus making him a figurehead prime minister. This coup was planned by H. H. Asquith, R. B. Haldane, and Edward Grey, meeting at Relugas, a remote Scottish fishing lodge. The Relugas plot is remarkable because it hinged on an attempt to drag the Crown into party politics. Involving the King was the idea of Haldane, Scottish lawyer and German-loving intellectual, who had known Bertie for a couple of years. It was a dangerous game, especially for a Liberal politician. Even more extraordinary was the response of Knollys, whom Haldane approached. Acting with astonishing indiscretion for a man who had spent his life in the service of the court, Knollys wrote to Haldane giving guarded assurances of the King’s support.
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Bertie knew about Haldane’s intrigues, but he refused to be drawn in. In August, while undergoing his cure at Marienbad, he had met Campbell-Bannerman. It turned out that CB had spent his holidays at Marienbad for thirty years, bringing his invalid wife, Charlotte, to whom he was devoted. He disapproved of the King and the tainted ladies who buzzed around him like bluebottles. Bertie, for his part, expected the Scot, the son of a Glasgow merchant who looked like a grocer, to be “prosy and heavy,” and distrusted him on account of the unpatriotic, “pro-Boer” line he had taken during the Boer War.
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He asked CB to lunch, and was surprised to discover that he was a
bon viveur
with a sense of humor who shared his love of Austrian coffee and French food.
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For two weeks, CB was constantly entertained by the King at the Hotel Weimar. Bertie told him that “he must soon be in office and very high office.” CB thought this “most significant and very
discreetly done.”
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Nothing was said by the King about CB’s translation to the Lords.

So exhausted was CB by Bertie’s “insatiable” energy and appetite, by the long evenings sitting out after dinner making sticky conversation while HM played bridge, that when the King departed he took to his bed for forty-eight hours. Bertie, on the other hand, considered Marienbad a rest cure.
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After Marienbad, he proceeded to Balmoral, where Haldane was summoned. Bertie told him that he had read his correspondence with Knollys “with much interest.” He also told him that he had met CB, and liked him.
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Haldane formed the impression that the King would cooperate in sidelining CB, but he was mistaken. Bertie’s aim in all of this was to reconcile the Relugas conspirators to the leadership of CB—to smooth the rift in the Liberal party. CB, for his part, knew that he had the King’s backing, and this made it possible for him to crush the Relugas rebels. He persuaded them to take office, and he refused to allow himself to be kicked upstairs to the House of Lords.

Bertie’s chief concern in the change of government was to ensure continuity in foreign policy and uphold the entente with France. In the autumn of 1905, Esher was dispatched to consult Lansdowne as to his successor as foreign secretary. Lansdowne suggested Lord Spencer (who suffered a stroke) and, after him, Edward Grey—though he lacked experience and Lansdowne thought “his reputation has been rather cheaply earned.”
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The forty-three-year-old Grey was one of the Relugas three. He was also the King’s godson; his father, General Grey, had been Bertie’s equerry.

Grey got the job. “I shall do all I can to stem the impetuosity of the new Government but it will not be easy,” Bertie told Georgie. “Fortunately in Sir E. Grey we have a sensible man who wishes as regards our foreign policy to walk in his predecessor’s footsteps.”
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A critical moment had been reached in Anglo-Russian relations. Because Russia was France’s ally, the survival and strength of the Entente Cordiale depended on good relations between England and Russia. According
to Charles Hardinge, who served in St. Petersburg between 1897 and 1902 and spoke to Bertie often at this time: “King Edward saw clearly what few others realised, that friendship with Russia was essential for us both in the Near East and Central Asia, and that this could only be obtained through the channel and by the cooperation of France.”
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The friendship with Russia was strained to breaking point by the Russo-Japanese War of 1904. England agreed to stay out of the war, in spite of the fact that the Japanese had been their allies since 1902, but the Russians suspected them of lending secret support. When the Japanese confounded expectations and defeated the Russians, waves of Anglophobia swept through Russia. Urged on by Kaiser William, Czar Nicholas II blamed the English for Russia’s humiliation. In Britain, anti-Russian opinion was inflamed by the Dogger Bank incident of October 1904, when the Russian fleet accidentally shot at British fishing boats, which they mistakenly thought were Japanese submarines.

It was here that Bertie’s dynastic links had counted. Acting at the request of foreign secretary Lansdowne, he sought to reassure Nicholas II of England’s friendly intentions.
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“Nicky” was a small, conscientious man with velvety blue eyes who lived in isolation in a Fabergé-encrusted palace made unbearable by the neurosis of his wife, Alexandra. He was not an easy man to approach: “He will hardly ever see an ambassador.” Stead, the journalist, was granted an interview and found the czar “absolutely like a child in the simplicity of his views and in the little knowledge of what is going on in the country”—Russia was at that time in the grip of the 1905 revolution.
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Bertie had little respect for Nicky, whom he thought weak as water and unable to make up his mind to do anything.
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But as uncle to both Nicky, who was uncannily like Prince George in looks, and Alexandra, Bertie enjoyed unequaled access. His role was to drive a wedge between his nephews, Czar Nicky and Kaiser William.
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The kaiser cultivated the czar in indiscreet letters badmouthing their wicked uncle. The czar, as the kaiser
wrote, was “not treacherous but he is weak—weakness is not treachery but it fulfils all its functions.”
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Bertie’s man in St. Petersburg was Donald Mackenzie Wallace, a swarthy, cigar-smoking journalist, described by the kaiser as “very intelligent; a friend of King Edward’s; a Jew naturally.”
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Wallace had better access to the czar than the ambassador, and penned long, confidential reports to the King.

Bertie was fortunate in that both the Russian ambassador in London and the British ambassador in St. Petersburg were on his side. Both were, in a way, Bertie’s appointments. Count Benckendorff, who became Russian ambassador in London in 1902, was a passionate Anglophile. A rich, easygoing aristocrat, he entertained more lavishly at the Russian embassy than any of the ambassadors in London before 1914.
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He took pride in behaving as a “private gentleman”; flouting protocol about diplomatic tight lips, he freely expressed his own opinions.
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Soon Benckendorff was asked to shoot at Windsor and to stay at Balmoral. He was openly critical of Nicholas, whom he compared disparagingly to Bertie, and thought Russia’s only chance of salvation lay in an entente with Britain.

In London, Bertie leaned on Lansdowne to accept his nominations for key diplomatic posts.
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Bertie was instrumental in shoehorning his protégé Charles Hardinge into high office. As a reward for Hardinge’s work on the 1903 visit to France, Bertie pushed strongly for his appointment as ambassador to St. Petersburg in 1904. Lansdowne agreed, though not without reservations—Hardinge was not yet due for this senior promotion.
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Hardinge wrote from St. Petersburg to Knollys: “My appointment has been regarded as due entirely to the King’s initiative,
and as a guarantee of peace and of more friendly relations between the two Governments.”
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In the autumn of 1905, Bertie helped secure yet another promotion for Hardinge, who leapfrogged to the very top job of head of the Foreign Office. Hardinge wrote thanking Knollys for the part he had played in engineering the move: “I would be grateful … if you would seize a suitable opportunity to tell the King how thankful I am for His Majesty’s gracious intervention on my behalf.” When Benckendorff expressed a fear that Hardinge’s recall implied a cooling of Britain’s attitude toward Russia, Hardinge reassured him. “I explained to him the object and motives of my appointment to the FO at a moment when a change of government is imminent and I pointed out the advantage to the Russian government of having somebody at the FO who is friendly disposed towards them.”
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Bertie wanted Hardinge in London because he needed someone to act as a handle on the incoming foreign secretary, the inexperienced Edward Grey. Hardinge benefited from the royal patronage, but he and his allies at the Foreign Office had an agenda of their own. With the help of the King’s support, they levered themselves into key positions, purging the old guard that had controlled the FO in Lord Salisbury’s day and creating a strongly anti-German climate.
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