The Heir Apparent (81 page)

On the last day, the King paid his regular visit to the King Edward VII Sanatorium for Consumption at Midhurst, which had been founded with a £2 million donation from Sir Ernest Cassel. When the King’s car began the long descent on the return journey, Stamper realized to his horror that all the brakes had failed. As the heavy vehicle gathered speed, the King remained quite unaware that anything was wrong, but for Stamper, sitting helpless in the front seat beside the driver, it was a terrible moment. He nerved himself to leap out of the car and grab the brake wire, but eventually he and the driver managed to swing the car off the road. Afterward, Stamper worked all through the night to clean the oil that had leaked into the brakes, and by the morning the car was safe.
⁸⁹

The King never knew how close he had been to a fatal accident that afternoon. He was far more concerned with the race to stop European war. But the stress of trying to keep the peace of Europe almost single-handed was quietly killing him.

Two days after the King returned from West Dean, on 28 October 1908, Hardinge wrote enclosing a “pernicious production” from
The
Daily Telegraph
: an interview with the German emperor.
⁹⁰
“You English are mad, mad, mad as March hares,” declared the kaiser, complaining with his characteristic blend of bombast, stilted slang, and paranoia that his good and peaceful intentions toward England had been willfully misunderstood. The article was based on the conversations William had held when he stayed with Colonel Stuart-Wortley at Highcliffe near Christchurch in Dorset in the autumn of 1907 (after his visit to Windsor), and as Hardinge reported to the King, “we have received absolutely reliable information from the office of the Daily Telegraph” that the interview “emanates from the German Emperor himself and that the Editor has a letter from His Majesty forwarding the article and mentioning improvements and alterations which he had made.”
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The article did indeed originate with William, and it represented a crass attempt to improve Anglo-German relations by removing misunderstandings.

In Germany, William found himself engulfed in a political crisis that almost destroyed his credibility. His indiscreet remarks and manifest lack of judgment caused howls of outrage and stoked anti-English hatred. Betrayed by his chancellor, Bülow, who lied about his own role in approving the draft of
The Daily Telegraph
interview, William was savaged in the Reichstag. By mid-November he was ill, suffering from crying fits, confined to bed, and contemplating abdication. When Alix wrote to inquire about his “cold,” he replied, “I am not suffering from cold but from complete collapse.”
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If Bertie was amazed by William’s foolishness and surprised that the owner of the
Telegraph,
his friend Lord Burnham, who regularly entertained him shooting at Hall Barn, had agreed to publish the interview, he was horrified by a second interview by the kaiser that surfaced in November. It transpired that William had spoken in July to an American journalist named William Hale. Mistaking Hale for a clergyman, the kaiser gave vent to a tirade of anti-English hatred; he announced that King Edward was corrupt and his court was rotten and declared that war with England was inevitable and the sooner the better. The German government suppressed publication of the article in the American
Century Magazine,
but they were too late to stop it appearing
in
The New York World
. The
World
issued a denial, but proofs of the ten-thousand-word article had already reached the
Daily Mirror
in London, and
The Observer
published a summary of the story.
⁹³
At the Foreign Office, Hardinge did all he could to suppress the article. “Were it to appear the indignation against the Emperor would be general everywhere. We have no desire to see him so exasperated and a danger to Europe.”
⁹⁴

Hardinge sent the King early intelligence of the Hale interview. Bertie minuted it with one word: “Curious.”
⁹⁵
He was unconvinced by the denials printed in
The New York World,
or by Count Metternich, the German ambassador, who assured him that the interview was a fabrication. “I know the German Emperor hates me and never loses an opportunity of saying so (behind my back) while I have always been kind and nice to him.”
⁹⁶
Hardinge urged that the Hale interview made a visit by the King to Berlin imperative. “It is the only possible step that I can see by which it might be possible to rehabilitate [William’s] self-esteem and to show that we have not taken his indiscretions too seriously. So long as the German Emperor is in a sore state of mind, as at present, he is a positive danger to the peace of Europe.”
⁹⁷
Reluctantly, the King agreed. Not only did he consent to visit Berlin in the New Year, he personally intervened to stop publication of the Hale interview in
The Morning Post
and also the
National Review,
which was edited by the violently anti-German Leo Maxse. “Maxse must really be spoken to most seriously,” minuted the King.
⁹⁸

The King and Queen of Sweden stayed at Windsor in November. Esher thought the Queen “a very unbrilliant person, fond of sport and lawn-tennis”; she was under the influence of her doctor, Axel Munthe, “a clever pushing rather pretentious man,” who ordered her to retire to bed at five p.m. and remain there until noon next day.
⁹⁹
The Asquiths stayed at Windsor for the state banquet (22 November), and Margot found that King Edward and Queen Alexandra could talk of little but the kaiser’s folly. The King told her: “It is very serious—he is most unwise and unbalanced and this ought to be a severe lesson to him. My poor sister it would have been a great grief to her in fact it would have killed her I think. He was always so unkind to her too.”
The Queen agreed. “I am glad his poor mother is dead. It would have broken her heart,” she told Margot. “
Such
a man!
Such
things! The newspapers shocking!” Alix imitated the kaiser out shooting (he was an excellent shot, in spite of the withered arm), “ ‘throwing his guns to his loaders for them to catch on their
knees
poor things! Like that!’ and she made a most amusing series of gestures.”
¹⁰⁰
Margot rocked with laughter, and so did Lady Lansdowne and the Queen of Sweden.

Also staying at Windsor was Lord Howard de Walden, super-rich medievalist and Olympic fencer. The castle made him “feel medieval”; the gorgeous pictures and arms made his mouth water, but he was grieved by the portraits of ancestors with “lined faces and mouths like vices which look down from the walls.” A self-styled “philosophic anarchist,” he found court life hard to take seriously. “I feel it is a sort of sad last transformation scene: in a moment the curtain will come down and the harlequinade of pure democracy will begin.”
¹⁰¹

Chief among the obstacles to pure democracy was the King himself, but he was a sick man. On the day the Swedes departed, he insisted on standing in the cold and wet, inspecting improvements in the park at Windsor; it was his practice personally to supervise all estate works. He then caught a train to Sandringham, where he fell ill with bronchitis.
¹⁰²
After ten days in bed, he departed for Brighton to convalesce. Here he stayed with Arthur Sassoon and his Italian wife, Louise—a brilliant hostess blessed with “magnolia complexion and chestnut curls, magnificent diamonds and French chef.”
¹⁰³
Their house, number 8, King’s Gardens, is a tall brick villa in the French style on the seafront at Hove.
^c
The house was not big enough to accommodate the King’s suite, who grumbled at having to stay in a hotel nearby.
¹⁰⁴
The King tried to curb rumors about his health, refusing to hold a Privy Council for the prorogation of Parliament at Brighton, as it would have given the impression that he was too unwell to travel to London. Almeric Fitzroy heard a rumor that originated with the Duke of Fife
that in addition to bronchitis, the King was suffering from “an acute pain in the region of the heart.”
¹⁰⁵
On the first days of the visit, Bertie spoke very little and, during his drives with Stamper, dozed in the car. Soon he was better, “talking all the time, as was his wont, to those who were with him,” among them Alice Keppel.
¹⁰⁶
Stamper drove him along the coast to Seaford or Worthing, where he was mobbed by jostling crowds, when all he wanted was to stroll slowly along the shore and sit gazing out to sea.

He recovered in time for Christmas at Sandringham, where he was a distant but thrillingly important figure to his grandchildren. The grandson who Stamper thought resembled the King most in character was the eldest, Prince Edward, known to the family as David.
^d
107

Soon the King’s great crocodile-skin dressing case was packed with his papers, his leather-bound foolscap diary, his jewelry, a miniature of Alix, and photographs of his family, and loaded into the backseat of the Daimler, as he embarked on his January round of shooting parties. He was slower to swing after birds than before, and he smoked cigars all the time, one after another.
¹⁰⁸
At Hall Barn with Lord Burnham of the
Telegraph,
the King “ate the usual enormous lunch in the usual tent,” feasting on turtle soup, Irish stew, cold truffled turkey, mince pie, and pâté de foie gras. He told Carrington “he had been very unwell and it had taken him a long time to throw the effects off.”
¹⁰⁹
Little wonder, when the most effective measure to alleviate chronic bronchitis and slow the progression of emphysema is to stop smoking.

In spite of the King’s poor health, arrangements went ahead for the royal visit to Berlin. This was a diplomatic necessity, as Grey explained: “If the visit had not taken place, it would have been a cause of offence
and made all politics most difficult. For this reason I am glad it is arranged, but otherwise I do not expect much good from it. To please the Emperor does not carry so much weight in Germany as it did.”
¹¹⁰
As before, the King was accompanied by Charles Hardinge, who did the diplomatic work.

For the German-hating Alix, who was recovering from an attack of influenza and neuralgia, the visit was a penance. She told Margot Asquith afterward, “I never wanted to go to Berlin. I was made to go—and it has been a complete failure!”
¹¹¹
Outwardly, the visit seemed a success. Bertie melted the unfriendly Berlin crowd when he made an impromptu speech in German at the Rathaus, giving thanks to the little girl who presented him with a golden goblet of Rhine wine. Alix smiled serenely when the horses in her carriage took fright at the crowd and fell and, to the mortification of the German court, she and the Empress Dona had to make a hasty exit into another carriage.
¹¹²
“Oh! I was charming … of course,” she told Margot; but she “
hated
” the emperor all the time. She sat next to him at every meal, and noticed that he ate nothing. “You must eat more!” she told him. “I will give you some of my excellent lozenges. Sir Francis Laking gave them to me—they will strengthen your brain!” When Margot interjected, “You didn’t really say that?” the Queen replied, “Of course I did, he wants a little chaff. He just grunted and said, You find me stupid? I said, Certainly I do—making all this commotion about nothing and kidooodle [
sic
] about your navy.” Then Alix “waved her arms round her head and roared with laughter continuing, ‘The stupid man I believe showed my lozenges to his doctor he thought I was going to poison him and I should
like
to have!’ ”
¹¹³

Bertie was far from well. Climbing upstairs left him breathless, and at the first family dinner, he fell asleep. After lunch the next day at the British Embassy, he had a coughing fit while smoking a cigar and talking to Daisy of Pless. Horrified, she watched as he fell against the back of the sofa, “his cigar dropped out of his fingers, his eyes stared, and he became pale and could not breathe. I thought: ‘My God, he is dying; oh! Why not in his own country.’ ”
¹¹⁴
Daisy tried to undo the tight collar
of his Prussian uniform, Alix rushed up and they both struggled with it, at last Bertie came to and unfastened it himself. He instantly lit another huge cigar.
¹¹⁵

Later, the kaiser summoned Bertie’s doctor, Sir James Reid, who acted as secret go-between with the English court (had Bertie known of Reid’s role as William’s spy, he would surely not have approved). He gave Reid a private cipher to use in case the King became seriously ill:

As this bizarre instruction shows, having managed to make a star appearance at Queen Victoria’s deathbed, the kaiser was now determined to be in at the death of his uncle, which he evidently thought was imminent.

At the ball that night, the King sat quietly observing the dancers and did not walk about. Very likely he was bored; as Alix remarked, the balls were “awful”: “All the ugly German women dancing so stiff, the ugly minuets.” She asked William, “ ‘When have you time at your balls for flirtations?’ And he just grunted and showed me the only pretty woman.”
¹¹⁷
Bertie took no interest in distributing decorations among the German court; Ponsonby, who had to sit up until two a.m. allotting medals, thought this a sign that the King was seriously ill. During the ballet
Sardanapalus,
which the kaiser produced himself, Bertie fell asleep. He woke with a start in the last scene, when the monarch burns all his treasures, thinking that the opera house really was on fire. Bertie was too unwell to work the crowd during the interval, and Alix did it instead, charming everyone though she was unable to hear a word they said.
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