What Bertie was doing, of course, was putting his past life of pleasure and social flittering to good use. He had always chatted with monarchs and leaders about their countries – and incidentally discussed the local racecourses, casinos, theatres and females – and now he was having exactly the same conversations in the explicit service of his nation.
At one point, Bertie’s government requested that he should differentiate between personal and political visits from foreign sovereigns, so that the nation would not have to pay to entertain Kaiser Wilhelm, for example, if he rowed over to Bertie’s yacht for drinks during Cowes Week. But Bertie refused to differentiate and, as the years of his short reign went on, he would be proved increasingly right, because in his case any opportunity to sit down and chew the fat of European politics counted as a state visit. As he had shown in the past, good relations between countries could be maintained just as well – in some cases better – with a cosy dinner as a tightly worded treaty.
The proof of all this is that Bertie was genuinely respected by foreign diplomats. In 1907, the Belgian Chargé d’Affaires in London said that: ‘The English are increasingly getting into the habit of seeing international problems as coming almost exclusively under the remit of King Edward, whose profound political instinct and productive diplomacy they very rightly respect.’
Bertie had even grown detached – some would say mature – enough to make a few key gestures towards the French to remind them that his love affair with them needed mutual respect. As early as 1889, when he was still Prince of Wales, he had declined the official invitation to attend the Paris Exposition Universelle because of its political symbolism. It had been organized to coincide with the centenary of France’s anti-royalist revolution, and it was of course impossible for Bertie to lend his name to the wholesale guillotining of monarchs (even if they were French). Many of the crowned heads of Europe and even their ambassadors refused to attend Paris’s centenary Expo, citing prior engagements or sudden illnesses.
However, Bertie decided that if he couldn’t go as a prince, there was nothing to stop him attending as a private Francophile, so he took Alexandra and the children to Paris to see the new Eiffel Tower. In fact he was given the honour of being the tower’s first official visitor, and got a two-hour private tour from Gustave Eiffel himself, who took the royal family to the summit. According to a report in Le Figaro newspaper of 11 June 1889, Bertie was ‘very interested’ in the English restaurant on the first level, but after that ‘the ascent proceeded to the third floor with no interruptions except the change of lifts’.
It must have been a literally dizzying experience because the tower was the tallest building in the world, and made not of solid stone but a latticework of apparently slim girders. What was more, the lifts had not received their final security clearance. Even so, according to Le Figaro: ‘It was with the most complete peace of mind and perfect confidence that the Prince and Princess of Wales insisted on taking their place in the lift with all their children, the hope and future of the throne of England.’ In short, it was a bit like going on the test flight of a new aeroplane, and was proof yet again that Bertie was game for a thrill whenever he went to Paris.
At the top of the tower, Bertie was delighted with the view. He congratulated Eiffel on his ‘incomparable work’ and ‘shook Eiffel by both hands on several occasions’. Back down on terra firma, Bertie and his family were greeted by the ‘enthusiastic cheers and hurrahs of the crowd’. It was yet another public-relations triumph for Paris’s favourite Englishman. One British newspaper quoted Bertie as quipping that ‘the Eiffel tower is an awful tower’. but this sounds like the writer’s own feeble attempt at a joke.
Bertie’s double standards – boycotting the 1889 Expo as a royal but enjoying it as a man – could be interpreted as proof of his weak character. Which it probably was in some ways. But it was also a sign that, unlike so many politicians, he was capable of taking the long-term view. So the French wanted to celebrate their revolution? Why not? No one could deny that it happened. For now, the most important consideration was for monarchist Britain to get on with republican France.
So, ever the ambassador, even when he was on a supposedly private visit, in 1889 Bertie also paid a courtesy call on President Sadi Carnot – and received one in return. Five years later, when Carnot was stabbed to death by an anarchist, Bertie went in person to the French Embassy in London to offer his condolences, a gesture that was also typical of him. It was these private marks of respect that would later win him the trust of so many European leaders, and not only in France.
However, Bertie’s 1889 trip to the Paris Expo was a temporary high point in Anglo-French relations of the time, mainly because of both countries’ determination to be the world’s most efficient colonizers. As the century came to an end, diplomatic tensions grew steadily worse, and finally flared up in an incident that has been long forgotten by the Brits, but which remains firmly stuck in the French historical gullet.
This confrontation was so serious that it would have seemed inconceivable, when Bertie came to the throne in 1901, that he could be only three years away from one of Britain’s greatest diplomatic triumphs of the twentieth century, the Entente Cordiale. In 1901 it looked much more likely that France and Britain would go to war again . . .
V
If you ask any French patriot to list the low points in Anglo-British relations, they will probably begin with recriminations about Joan of Arc and St Helena, before spitting out a strange word: ‘Fashoda’.
This is the name of a diplomatic incident that still rankles with the French, all the more so because hardly any Brits have ever heard of it. Even in Christopher Hibbert’s highly detailed biography of Bertie, Fashoda merits just two-and-a-half lines. From a French perspective, however, this is one of the most serious diplomatic incidents in Franco-British history. It is as if we had come to a dinner party in France’s home, insulted its food, its furniture and the intelligence of its children – while totally sober – and then forgotten all about the incident. In short, to French minds, Fashoda2 represents all that is worst about les Anglais – not just their arrogance, but most of all their failure to take French grievances seriously.
The Fashoda incident (in French it was a ‘crisis’) took place in East Africa in 1898. As a colonial incident it was (sorry, France) a bit of a non-event, a mere showdown at a time when bloody battles were being fought all across the continent, and when the conflict between Britain and the Boers was about to explode into war.
Fashoda was the name of a fort on the Nile in southern Sudan, a strategic point in both French and British plans for Africa. Britain wanted to realize its dream of owning a string of colonies from Cairo to Cape Town, linking Egypt to South Africa via its East African territories, including Sudan. France, meanwhile, wanted to open up an east–west corridor from Senegal to Djibouti, also through Sudan. The French therefore launched three expeditions to occupy the as yet unconquered Fashoda, one from Brazzaville on the Congo River in the west, the other two from the east, across Ethiopia. The Brazzaville party was led by a 24-year-old solder called Jean-Baptiste Marchand, and comprised 120 Senegalese soldiers, a dozen French officers and hundreds of African porters. They sailed upriver in a borrowed Belgian steamer and a small fleet of rowing boats, dragged and floated them across marshland to the Nile, and finally arrived a year and a half later to find out that they were on their own: the other French expeditions had been halted by the Ethiopians. This depleted French force settled into the fort on 10 July 1898 and renamed it Saint-Louis to make it clear who now owned it.
They weren’t alone for long, however, because six weeks later General Horatio Kitchener arrived. He was in the process of establishing a military career that would peak at the Battle of Omdurman in the Sudan that same year, but he did no more than demand (politely) that the French leave the fort. The French (just as politely) refused. Wishing to avoid a battle that might spark a war, the two men agreed to differ and asked their govern
ments for advice.
Back in Europe, the French took one look across the Channel at the jingoistic Brits, who had been riding on a wave of patriotism since the Diamond Jubilee, and decided that a colonial war was a strong likelihood. This idea was confirmed when Royal Navy warships began, rather unsubtly, to perform manoeuvres outside the ports of Brest in Brittany and Bizerte in French-owned Tunisia. And when France’s Foreign Minister Théophile Delcassé asked the British Ambassador to Paris, Sir Edmund Monson, whether Fashoda could be ‘the cause of a break-up between us’,3 he received the blunt answer ‘oui’.
Poor Jean-Baptiste Marchand was duly ordered by his government to quit Fashoda and make for Djibouti, leaving Kitchener’s men to move in. Kitchener himself, meanwhile, had gone north to fight at Omdurman and seal his reputation as a national hero.
La crise de Fachoda poisoned the French psyche. To cover its humiliation, the French government played down the affair. Delcassé said that the ‘patriotic sensitivity’ of the British was ‘overexcited’, and ‘if the English had said one friendly, conciliatory word, the problem could have been solved’. As he said it, he was probably shrugging as if to suggest that it was all a big fuss caused by those crazy Anglais whipping up a storm in their tasse de thé. The French also announced that their withdrawal from Fashoda was caused by ill health: Marchand and his men had been too sick to hold out. But no one really believed all this, and France was hit by a wave of Anglophobia, which grew to a positive tsunami when Britain went to war against the Boers in October 1899.
Even a relatively restrained French newspaper like Le Figaro quoted speeches by ‘Uncle Paul’ Kruger, the Boer president of the Transvaal, and reported that: ‘The Boer soldiers march away, gravely singing their psalms as they pursue, across the mountains they know so well, their sublime epic voyage.’ One Boer soldier was quoted in the same newspaper as saying that Kitchener, was ‘good against savages but not against us’. French sympathies couldn’t have been clearer.
It could be said that France’s support for these Dutch colonizers was only a mark of anti-British jealousy. After all, if France could have occupied South Africa, it would have done so, and kicked the Boers off the Cape of Good Hope. At the time, just about every western European country except Luxembourg, Liechtenstein and Switzerland were scrabbling for any scrap of African land they could get.
This ill feeling over Fashoda and the Boer War troubled Bertie, not least because for once the French seemed to have forgotten how much they loved him, and had become openly insulting.4 The anti-British articles in the French press were not only aimed at the politicians and soldiers. Some were directed at him. A leftist journal called L’Assiette au Beurre (the Butter Dish) printed a cartoon of Britannia mooning to reveal that her buttocks were tattooed with a portrait of Bertie. A bit of a change from the fan articles in the Courrier de Cannes.
Bertie had spent so many years living in loving sin with France, and now it was all going wrong, not least because there was a new generation of Parisian thinkers who had not been raised on Anglomania. As Bertie’s biographer Philippe Jullian describes it, they had ‘learnt their manners in the brasseries of the Quartier Latin’. For them, Bertie was fair game. On one of his trips to Paris in the 1890s, he planned to go and see a theatre group’s revue of the year, only to be told that if he did so, they were going to have to edit out several sketches about his gambling debts and his mother’s infatuation with her male servants.
Because of all this, Bertie refused outright to visit Paris’s Exposition of 1900, the first he had missed since 1855. And when he came to the throne in 1901, he knew that he had lost the automatic respect that the city’s people and politicians had always had for him. He was still popular down in Cannes, where his presence was good for the economy, but his beloved Paris had turned decidedly frosty.
What was worse from Bertie’s perspective was that Britain had turned its back on the French, so a reconciliation was going to be difficult. In 1899 the newspaper baron Lord Northcliffe, founder of the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror, wrote that: ‘England hesitated for a long time between France and Germany, but she always respected the German character whereas she has come to regard France with contempt. An Entente Cordiale cannot exist between England and her nearest neighbour. Enough of France, which has neither courage nor political sense.’
Poor Bertie. At the precise moment he became king, he saw his life’s work as a prince sink like a holed Channel steamer. As he sat in Buckingham Palace with his Foreign Office papers, any entente between Britain and France, let alone a cordial one, must have seemed like mission impossible.
VI
As we have seen, Bertie had never been afraid of going on solo missions to France. And his mother and her various governments had spent decades keeping secrets from him. Now it was his turn.
By 1903, arguments about Fashoda and the Boers had lost their vicious edge, even if ‘patriotic sensitivities’, as the French called them, were still running high. Bertie knew that Lord Lansdowne, his Foreign Secretary, felt that the main obstacle to peace between Britain and France (apart from the fact that they had been enemies for the best part of a millennium) was a lasting dispute over Morocco, which sat opposite Gibraltar at the gateway to the Med and was therefore one of the keys to naval mastery of the region. Many people in Britain wanted to get their hands on this southern gatepost and dominate the entrance to the Mediterranean.
Lansdowne didn’t think that the time was right for any compromise with the French. But Bertie, who had spent his whole adult life getting himself compromised in France, had other ideas. So without telling anyone, he planned a trip to visit France’s President Émile Loubet in May 1903. Difficult, one might think, for a king to slip across the Channel unnoticed – even though French monarchs like Louis XVIII, Louis-Philippe and Napoléon III had done exactly that in the other direction. But Bertie had a cunning plan – he was due to sail down to Lisbon to see King Carlos of Portugal, and then steam through the Med to Rome to say buon giorno to King Victor Emmanuel of Italy. This much was public knowledge. But what Bertie didn’t tell everyone was that, as he had so often done in his younger days, he was planning a quick stopover in Paris.
It’s easy to imagine Bertie’s glee as he plotted this single-handed intervention in his country’s foreign policy. In the past, his stopovers had been fun but frivolous affairs, frowned on by his mother and her ministers. Now he was going to use the same tactic, but in the cause of world peace. If the term had been invented in 1903, he would have been murmuring, ‘Payback time.’
Of course his secret mission wasn’t without its dangers. If it went wrong – if for example the French decided to use his attempt at diplomacy to score political points against the Germans by leaking the information – he would look an interfering fool, and might get sidelined from active politics again, as he had been when he was Prince of Wales. But Bertie was a gambler who got bored if the stakes were too low. What’s more, he knew that he was the only man whom the French trusted enough to play this dangerous game. And if it worked, if it worked . . . Victory would be as sweet as any he had enjoyed in the casinos of Cannes or Monte Carlo.
So Bertie informed neither Lansdowne, nor Alexandra (though she had rarely been completely au fait with her husband’s trips to France anyway), nor even his private secretary Francis Knollys. He also left the reliable Sir Edmund Monson, the British Ambassador to Paris, in the dark. The only man Bertie trusted with the truth was a junior undersecretary at the Foreign Office called Charles Hardinge, who was married to the daughter of an old friend of his. Again, when it was necessary, Bertie could always call in help from his private connections.
The problem was that the French have never been experts at keeping secrets, and in Paris rumours were soon rife that le roi d’Angleterre was on his way. Bertie got wind of this – no doubt friends of his were asking him which belle Parisienne he would like on the list of dinner guests – and he felt obliged to let Sir Edmund Monson in on the secret. Monson t
ook up Bertie’s cause, went to see President Loubet, and reported back that Loubet:
. . . could not lay too much stress on the influence which the King’s presence in Paris would have on friendly relations between the two peoples . . . His Majesty, while Prince of Wales, had acquired an exceptional popularity; and he would find when he returned that this feeling was as warm as ever.
Again, if it hadn’t been a hundred years too early, Bertie would have smiled to himself and murmured, ‘Game on.’
Then came Bertie’s real master stroke. He went on his cruise to visit the Kings of Portugal and Italy and, as the Victoria and Albert entered the Mediterranean, it was announced that President Loubet was in Algiers. As a mark of respect, Bertie sent a small flotilla of gunboats to salute him,5 and in reply the courteous Frenchman quite naturally invited the King to visit him in Paris – pourquoi pas a quick stopover en route from Rome to London? Quelle bonne idée, Bertie answered, and informed his government that he had accepted. After all, given the tensions about the Mediterranean, this exchange of courtesies was a sign that the French wanted to negotiate. So the King couldn’t very well refuse, could he? Lansdowne tried to argue, but Bertie put his foot down and the Foreign Secretary had to give in. The politician didn’t know it, but he had been outflanked by the new King of European diplomacy. Bertie the meddling Prince had been replaced by Edward Double-O VII.
As it turned out, Loubet had exaggerated Bertie’s ‘exceptional popularity’ in France. Just before he arrived, an anti-British paper called La Patrie (Homeland) published two special issues commemorating every Anglo-French conflict since Joan of Arc, ending of course with Fashoda. A similarly inclined publication called L’Autorité (Authority) declared that Bertie’s visit ‘shocks, offends and revolts us patriots’. Postcards went on sale showing Bonaparte shaking his fist at Bertie and President Loubet, and growling, ‘Oh, if only I were still alive.’ Even the cabaret singers turned against their old star client. One of them had a big hit with a ditty that went ‘Edouard sept, gros et gras’: literally ‘Edward VII, fat and fat’ – gros is a word describing the shape of an overweight person and gras the actual fat content of their flesh. Another wrote a song with an obscene pun in the title: literally, ‘Les Anglais Débarquent’ means ‘the English disembark’ but it is also a vulgar euphemism for the start of a woman’s period (because of English soldiers’ scarlet uniforms).