Theodore Roosevelt Abroad (26 page)

Another speaker scheduled for the Guildhall that month, on a slightly different subject, world peace, was Andrew Carnegie, who had arrived in England a few days before TR. When asked by the press whether Roosevelt’s reelection would further the cause of international peace, he commented that he had “a fine peace record, but we all know there’s a bit of the barbarian in him.” On the other hand, he declared that the Kaiser was a “true peacemaker” and “peace-lover” who would close his career “unstained by the shedding of human blood.”
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Carnegie sent TR a message of greetings on May 13 from his resort hotel in Torqay, “Welcome Colonel Commanding to London.” He warned him to take care of his still ailing throat for which England had a “dangerous climate in May,” and he thought it “very fine” that he was to be America’s representative at Edward’s funeral. He planned to come to London afterwards to try and see Roosevelt’s “cronie” [
sic
] the Kaiser. He went on “If you and he don’t make a team that can drag the cart behind I am a disappointed man.”
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Carnegie did not receive Roosevelt’s report on the failure of his Berlin mission until the next day when he wrote again in light of that, and the indefinite postponement of the Wrest Park summit in England. He told TR that he had not seen the Berlin papers and had not known that all had not “past [
sic
] off well.” However, the eversanguine Carnegie was sure at least that “you and the Emperor now being friends may some day count for much.” He went on that the Wrest Park conference was only a way to give TR “a chance to become known to the leaders here and they to know you. It may make all the difference some day that you are friends.” In his usual over the top style, Carnegie continued, “Your future is, recent events excepted, likely to excel your past since you are a born leader of men with the sublime audacity to perform wonders.”
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Regardless of Roosevelt’s lack of success in Berlin, Whitelaw Reid also hoped to salvage the conference at his Oxfordshire house. About the eminent guest list he had worked so hard to build, he told TR, “I am sure that the presence of three prime ministers at one table, filled out with others of such distinction” as John Morley, the Secretary of State for India, and Lord Lansdowne, a former Conservative foreign secretary, “would constitute an occasion not lightly to be lost.”
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Unfortunately for the hopes of Carnegie and Reid, though Roosevelt did visit Wrest Park, the death of Edward VII scrambled all arrangements and there would be no gathering of eagles. TR instead saw Carnegie in London and many other of the notables on the proposed guest list at other occasions.

The night before Edward’s funeral, Roosevelt attended a formal dinner at Buckingham Palace for the special envoys that surprised him by turning into, in his words, “a veritable wake—I hardly know what else to call it.” TR and Stéphen Pichon, the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, were the only non-royals in the company of seventy. But even Pichon’s clothes were “stiff with gold lace and he wore sashes and orders,” while Roosevelt was the only one present in plain evening dress. After perfunctory words of condolence to the King, it was “on with the revel! It was not possible to keep up an artificial pretense of grief any longer, and nobody tried.”
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At dinner George V sat in the middle of one side of the immense table with his cousin Wilhelm II across from him and everyone else arranged by order of precedence. TR had Prince Heinrich of Prussia, the German Emperor’s younger brother and commander of the High Seas Fleet, on his right hand. On his left, he found a “tall, shambling young man in a light blue uniform,” whose place card proclaimed him Prince Ernest of Cumberland. In reply to TR’s remark that the young man’s title was English, but he seemed German, he answered, “with a melancholy glance at the very vivacious Emperor” opposite them, that he “ought to be Prince of Brunswick and King of Hanover and would be ‘if not for him,’ ” with a nod to Wilhelm. TR considered suggesting that the young man “relieve his feelings by throwing a carafe at the usurper.”
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That evening, Roosevelt found himself engaged in conversation by the Bulgarian ruler, Ferdinand I, who had angered his fellow sovereigns by taking the title Czar, which was thought “bumptious.” He was also involved in a row with the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand over precedence. The Archduke did not like the Czar or Bulgaria and thought that as heir to “a real and big empire” he should have priority. On the express train to London, the Archduke had succeeded in having his car inserted in front of the Czar’s who then refused to let the Austrian walk back through it to the dining car. Instead he was forced to get off and on the train at two stations. All in all, TR considered the royal spat delightfully amusing and as “utterly childish” as similar “nursery quarrels” he had refereed, much to his distaste, in official Washington. Such matters, however, were of import to Europe’s rulers, and the Kaiser sided with his Austrian ally in the affair. While the Colonel and Czar Ferdinand chatted, Wilhelm stalked over to introduce Alfonso XIII, the King of Spain, and with a “ferocious” look over his shoulder at the Czar, said of Alfonso, “he is worth talking to.”
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For the state funeral the next morning, Theodore planned to wear his Rough Rider Colonel’s uniform; however, Edith insisted on plain evening dress, which meant that he stood out all the more, a penguin amongst the glorious uniformed plumage of the assembled international nobility. In the procession through London to Paddington Station, where a royal train for Windsor waited, nine kings riding three abreast followed Edward’s coffin, immediately behind which trotted Edward’s little white terrier, Caesar. The affronted Kaiser commented that he had “done many things in his life, but he had never before been obliged to yield precedence to a dog.”
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This contretemps aside, Wilhelm put aside his previous animosity and proved, for all appearances at any rate, the “most genuine mourner” present of Edward VII, whose disappearance from the scene he believed would allow him to take his proper place at the head of European affairs.
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Further back in the procession, TR shared a coach with the incensed French envoy, Pichon. The night before, he had complained to Roosevelt of the plain black coats of their coachmen, while red was worn for royalty. This he considered “an outrage, a slight upon the two great Republics.” At Buckingham Palace the following morning TR found Pichon, whom he described as “a queer looking creature at best” whose anger “made him look like a gargoyle,” even more agitated than the night before. Now he was infuriated that the two were to ride in what Roosevelt considered a gorgeous coach. Pichon explained that this was another outrage as the royals all had glass coaches. Since TR “had never heard of a glass coach except in connection with Cinderella,” he was “less impressed by the omission.”
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The Frenchman was also angry at their relative position, eighth in line, behind “toutes ces petites royautés” even “le roi du Portugal” and “ces Chenois,” the Chinese ambassador. To make matters worse, “ce Perse,” a Persian prince of royal blood, had been put in with them. Pichon insisted that Roosevelt take the place of honor by riding in the right-hand rear seat. The “unfortunate Persian followed,” TR noted, “looking about as unaggressive as a rabbit in a cage with two boa constrictors.” He was able to mollify Pichon, at least temporarily, by pointing out that the most important thing would be their respective places at the lunch to follow the interment at Windsor Castle. Luckily, Pichon was placed at the Queen’s table, while Roosevelt was at the King’s and another Gallic “explosion” thereby avoided.
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Unaware of the melodrama unfolding inside, in his description of the funeral procession for the
Daily Mail
, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle commented on “the strong profile of the great American, set like granite as he leans back in his carriage.”
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A few days after the funeral, Theodore and Edith had lunch with George V and Queen Mary at Marlborough House. Roosevelt thoroughly liked the King, who asked his advice about accusations brought against him that he had a secret, previous, wife and drank excessively. He responded that it was always a mistake to refute private slander with a public statement and unless the accusations were made in public he would take no notice, but if any public accusation was made it needed to be promptly and effectively met. TR appraised George as a strong man who would keep within the constitutional limitations, but was going to make himself felt, not only in England, but the world. He did not think the King had the tact, from what he had heard, of Edward VII, though that might come. George struck the Colonel as “one who had a thorough hold on himself and thorough knowledge of the people he is to rule.”
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With his official duties at an end, Roosevelt and the family relocated from the marble halls and gold-plated extravagance of Dorchester House to the still substantial London residence of Arthur Lee, TR’s old friend of Rough Rider days, at 10 Chesterfield Street. Lee had married an American heiress and settled into life as a wealthy and wellconnected Conservative MP. The move allowed TR the freedom to see whom he liked although the house remained in a “state of siege” while he was in residence. Having nabbed the “prime lion of the season” the endless stream of people at Chesterfield Street included various big game hunters, the headmaster of Eton, where Edith visited with Spring Rice, and the Japanese ambassador. None of these visitors knew the house’s mistress, Lee’s wife Ruth, and on one occasion an old lady said to her angrily, “if I wasn’t TR’s daughter, who was I?” Another visitor was Seth Bullock, to whom the Colonel had sent an invitation in Deadwood. TR recalled, “by that time I felt I just had to meet my own people, who spoke my neighborhood dialect.”
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The tall, sinewy westerner, with his long flowing black mustache, black frock coat, string tie, and broad-brimmed black slouch hat, cut quite a figure strolling through the Zoological Gardens or in Mayfair with Roosevelt, who proudly introduced him to all and sundry, including several royals. The marshal was so happy to see TR, he told Kermit, he felt like hanging his hat on the dome of St Paul’s and shooting it off. An admiring Arthur Lee called Bullock “one of nature’s aristocrats if ever there was one.”
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Lee was able to arrange a delightful weekend at Chequers Court, the red brick Elizabethan house in the Chiltern Hills, an hour from London, that he had only recently acquired. Roosevelt’s visit was meant to be its “house-warming” party. A decade later, Arthur and his wife Ruth gave the residence to the nation to serve as the country home of Britain’s prime ministers. Lee gathered a variety of interesting figures, many of whom Roosevelt had requested to meet. Theodore and Edith were on their own as Kermit and Ethel had “decided to bolt off to Scotland,” telling their mother that they had had “quite enough of father” and that they wished he would not talk so much about himself or sign his name so large in all the guest books.
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At Chequers the Colonel found several of the Conservative Party’s leading lights, Arthur Balfour, Alfred Lyttelton and F. S. Oliver, particularly charming. Balfour, the languid and elegant former Prime Minister, was one of the few who was TR’s intellectual equal and, after Roosevelt remarked that he had “never demanded of knowledge anything except that it should be valueless,” their talk ranged across a wide spectrum.
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Lee recorded that TR’s “conquest” of Balfour was “immediate and complete.” Upon his consciousness the Colonel “burst like a meteorite from another planet.” He was so entirely different from anything Balfour had “either experienced or imagined” that their two minds “fizzled chemically when brought into contact for the first time.” Both men were “at the top of their form” in an “almost ceaseless play of coruscating talk which illumined the weekend like summer lightening.”
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Another who was present, TR’s old friend Cecil Spring Rice, commented, perhaps not without bias, that Roosevelt had “turned us all upside down” while enjoying himself hugely. Springy had to say that, “by the side of our statesman,” TR looked a “little bit taller, bigger and stronger.”
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Lee himself thanked TR for the way he “played up” at Chequers. He told his friend, “Personality is a thing which can only explain itself and I am so glad I no longer have any need to attempt (vainly) to explain yours.”
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Roosevelt in turn later told his friend David Gray that Chequers Court was a “delightful place” and that he was almost as fond of Lee as of Spring Rice, and equally fond of both their wives.
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The only man the Colonel met at Chequers that he, and Edith, did not like was the one destined the next year to follow Sir Eldon Gorst as Consul-General in Egypt, Lord Kitchener of Khartoum, the hero of Omdurman. TR found him a “strong man, but exceedingly bumptious, and everlastingly posing as a strong man.” In contrast, he considered the other military icon on hand, Lord Roberts of Kandahar, whose memoir
Forty-one Years in India
he had read, to be a “particularly gentle, modest and considerate little fellow” whom he treated with a “deference and almost boyish hero-worship” which touched Roberts. At Chequers, Kitchener confronted TR over the Panama Canal, proclaiming loudly that it had been a huge mistake not to make it a sea-level canal. When the Colonel responded reasonably that the engineers on the ground recommended against this on good evidence, Kitchener blustered on that he “never paid heed to protests like that” and would have ordered a sea-level canal be dug nevertheless. In the end Roosevelt told Kitchener that he considered his chief engineer in Panama, Colonel George Goethals, the very best man in the world for the job and took his advice. He added that “Goethals had never seen the Sudan, just as he Kitchener, had never seen Panama,” and that he would trust Goethals’ opinion rather than Kitchener’s as to Goethals’ job, just as he would “trust the opinion of Kitchener rather than Goethals if Goethals should criticize Kitchener’s job in the Sudan.”
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