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Anglo-American Memories

<h3> CHAPTER XLIV I EDWARD THE SEVENTH AS PRINCE OF WALES—PERSONAL INCIDENTS </h3> Everything, or almost everything, has been said about King Edward the Seventh, every tribute paid him from every quarter of the world; and the mourning of his people is the best tribute of all. I should like to add an estimate from a different point of view and a tribute, but I suppose they would have no proper place in these papers, and I confine myself therefore to memories. I will go back to the period when he was Prince of Wales, and to the place where he put off most of the splendours belonging to his rank, and where most of the man himself was to be seen; not once nor twice, but for years in succession. Homburg was to the Prince of Wales a three weeks' holiday. I do not think he took the medical side of it very seriously. He drank the waters and walked, as the doctors bade him, but with respect to diet he seemed to be his own doctor and his prescriptions were not severe. But then nobody, the local physicians excepted, ever did take Homburg {410} very seriously as a cure. What the Prince liked was the freedom, of which he was himself the author. On occasions of ceremony and in the general course of his life at home, strict etiquette was enforced. At Homburg the Prince used his dispensing power and put aside everything but the essentials. He lived in a hired villa. He wore lounging suits in the daytime—sometimes of a rather flamboyant colour—and a soft grey hat. In the evening a black dining jacket, black tie, black waistcoat, black trousers, and a soft black Homburg hat. The silk hat and the dress coat and white tie or white waistcoat were unknown. Most of the officers of his household were left at home, but General Sir Stanley Clark was always with him. His way of life was as informal as his dress. He was there to amuse himself and it was an art he understood perfectly. Homburg is a village, but it had, or had at that time, many resources. The three or four streets of which the place consisted were so many rendezvous for the visitors. The lawn-tennis grounds were another. The walks in the woods were delightful. There were drives over the hills and far away, in the purest air in Germany. If you tired of the little watering-place or its guests, there was Frankfort, only eight miles distant, with resources of a more varied kind. But in Homburg itself the Kursaal, though there had been no gambling since 1869, and the hotels, were always open and sometimes lively. What the Prince liked was society, in one form or another. The open-air life suited him. It was {411} sufficiently formal but less formal than indoors. He liked strolling about and meeting acquaintances or friends. When you had once seen His Royal Highness leaning against the railings of a villa—the villa stood each in its own ground—and talking to a lady leaning out of the first floor window, and this interview lasting a quarter of an hour, you felt that the conditions of life and the relations of royalty to other ranks in life had taken on a quite new shape in Homburg. But the attitude of respect was maintained. Certain formalities were never forgotten. The Prince was always addressed as "Sir" or as "Your Royal Highness." But these observances were not irksome, nor was conversation restricted or stiffened by the obligations of deference or by the accepted conventionalities which, after all, were more matters of form than of substance. And in his most careless moods the Prince had a dignity which was the more impressive for being apparently unconscious. Nobody ever forgot what was due to him; or ever forgot it twice. It was an offence he did not pardon; or pardoned only in those who could not remember what they had never known. A foreigner, an American, who erred in pure ignorance might count on forgiveness. The Prince gave many luncheons and dinners, almost always at Ritter's or at the Kursaal. I should think there was never a day when he did not play the host. The dinners at the Kursaal were given on the terrace, always crowded with other dinner-parties. At Ritter's they were on the {412} piazza. This open-air hospitality was the pleasanter because it was so seldom possible in England. He had brought the art of entertaining to perfection. He put his guests, even those who stood most in awe of royalty, at their ease. The costume perhaps helped. When a company of people were in dining jackets and the men wearing their soft black hats, even at table, by the Prince's command, etiquette became a less formidable thing. The Prince talked easily, fluently, and well. He might ask a guest whom he liked to sit next him, ignoring distinctions of rank, but during the dinner he would talk, sooner or later, to everybody. There might be a dozen guests, a number seldom exceeded. I will give you one example of the dialogue which went on, and no more. The late Duke of Devonshire, at that time the Marquis of Hartington, was sitting nearly opposite the Prince, but at some distance, and this colloquy took place: "Hartington, you ought not to be drinking all that champagne." "No, sir; I know I oughtn't." "Then why do you do it?" "Well, sir, I have made up my mind that I had rather be ill now and then than always taking care of myself." "Oh, you think that now, but when the gout comes what do you think then?" "Sir, if you will ask me then I will tell you. I do not anticipate." The Prince laughed and everybody laughed. And Lord Hartington, for all his gout, lived to be {413} seventy-four, one of the truest Englishmen of his time or of any time. Among the Americans who were presented to the Prince at Homburg were Mr. Depew and Mark Twain. I was not in Homburg when Mr. Depew first came, but I asked one of the Prince's equerries to arrange the presentation for Mr. Depew, and I wrote to Lady Cork begging her to do what she could for him. So the formalities were duly transacted. The Prince took a liking to the American, asked him to dine, put him on his right hand, and listened to his stories with delight. He told me afterward that Depew was a new experience. He asked him again and again, and the next year also; I believe several years, or as long as Depew went to Homburg. The Prince said: "Depew's stories were not all good, but he told the bad ones so well that they were better than the good." My letter to Lady Cork had a fate I did not foresee, though I ought to have foreseen. When she told the Prince that I had written her about Depew she had my manuscript in her hand. "Is that Smalley's letter? May I see it?" asked the Prince; took it and read the whole. It happened that I was staying at the time with one of her married daughters, and there was a deal good of family gossip in the letter. When the Prince handed it back there was in his eyes a gleam of that humour so often seen there, and he said: "Now I know some of the things I have been wanting to know." {414} And Lady Cork answered: "Sir, we have nothing to conceal from Your Royal Highness." There was, of course, an intimacy which put the Prince on his honour. Mark Twain was staying at Nauheim, some twelve miles away. He had driven into Homburg and was wandering about the place when he was pointed out to the Prince, and was presented. Mark Twain had at the time no very great care about his personal appearance, and was very shabbily dressed. He was the "Tramp Abroad." At first I don't think he much interested the Prince. His slowness of speech and his unusual intonations were not altogether prepossessing. However, when he had taken his leave the Prince seemed to think he wished to see him again and said: "I should like to ask him to dinner. Do you think he has a dining jacket?" The risk, whatever it might be, was taken, the invitation was sent, and Mark came to dinner, dining jacket and all. But he did not care to adapt himself to the circumstances; considering, perhaps, that the circumstances ought to adapt themselves to him. The meeting was not a great success, and, so far as I know, was never repeated. Socially speaking, the Mississippi Pilot was an intransigeant at times, and this was one of the times. He could not, I suppose, overcome his drawling manner of speech nor reduce his interminable stories to dinner-table limits. He had the air of usurping more than his share of the conversation and of the time, which {415} he certainly did not mean to. Intentions, unluckily, count for little. Men are judged by what they do, and the general impression was not as favourable to Mark on this occasion as it would have been if he had been better known. Among all Princes and Potentates there was never one more willing to make allowances or less exacting in respect to trivial matters than Mark's host. But, after all, he was Prince of Wales and the future King of England, and if you were not prepared to recognize that, it was open to you to stay away. Mark Twain, at any rate, was not one of the Americans who followed the Prince to Homburg. He met the Prince almost by accident, and returned from Nauheim by the Prince's invitation for this not very successful dinner. His Republicanism was perhaps of a rebellious kind, and possibly, though without desiring to, he gave the Prince to understand as much. Some of Mark's compatriots went far in the opposite direction, especially one or two American women. There was a handsome American girl who had found means to be presented to the Prince; no difficult matter for a pretty woman at any time. Then she sent him a photograph of himself and begged him to sign it. As I was passing the Prince one afternoon in the street he stopped me and pulled a parcel out of his pocket, saying: "This is a photograph Miss X. sent me to sign, and I have signed it, and I was just going to leave it for her at the hotel. But I am afraid to. I {416} don't know what she may not ask me next. Would you mind leaving it for me?" The Prince did not see, but as I went in I saw, on the porch, the girl herself. She must have looked on at what happened and I am not at all sure she did not hear what the Prince said. None the less, she accepted the signed photograph joyfully, and it always had a place of honour in New York. "Wasn't it kind of His Royal Highness to give it to me?" queried this beautiful being, not knowing that the true story had been told me. When I made my report to the Prince I remarked casually that Miss X. had been sitting on the veranda and might have seen what took place. "I hope she heard also," exclaimed the Prince. But he did not quite mean that. At any rate, he relented afterward and was seen to be talking to the girl, whose eyes he could not but admire. II PRINCE OF WALES AND KING OF ENGLAND—THE PERSONAL SIDE I need not say much about the public life of the late King nor about the part he played in the Empire of the world. But there are certain passages in his private life and in his relations with the late Queen which had an effect on his career, and may be related in whole or in part. The greatness of this reign is the more remarkable because experience of public affairs came to the {417} King late in life. He was in his sixtieth year when he came to the Throne, and during the forty years when he might have been acquiring invaluable experience he had been sedulously excluded by the late Queen from all share in the business of State. So much is known, and so much is sometimes stated in the English Press, though stated with caution. It is the truth, but it is not all the truth. I believe it to be also true, that after the death of the Prince Consort, in 1861, the Queen desired the Prince of Wales to take up some portion of the duties of his father, and offered him a place as her private secretary. The Prince, for whatever reason, declined it. He was not much over twenty years of age, and never in any man, perhaps, was the desire of la joie de vivre stronger. Some years later a truer sense of his position and duties and opportunities came to him. He offered to accept, and besought the Queen's permission to accept, the post she had first offered him. Her Majesty made answer that the post had been filled, and never from that time onward did she open to the Prince of Wales the door she then closed. She left him to amuse himself, to choose his own associates and his own occupations. She herself spent six hours a day—never less, and often much more—in reading dispatches and State papers of all kinds. The Prince saw none of them, was present at no interviews with Ministers, knew nothing at first hand of the conduct of affairs. Yet the Prince had, in the face of these {418} discouragements, an appetite for public business. He was well informed about it, but only as an outsider is well informed. Naturally, the opinion had grown up that not much was to be expected of the Prince as King. The death of the late Queen was thought to close an era. It had not occurred to any one, except perhaps to his nearest friends, to think of the new King as well equipped for his Kingship. True, Lord Salisbury, than whom there could be no higher authority, speaking in the House of Lords, had said of the new King upon his accession that he had "a profound knowledge of the working of our constitution and conduct of our affairs." Lord Salisbury had had his exceptional means of knowing, and he expressed his own opinion, a true opinion, but not a general opinion. I suppose Lord Rosebery, long intimate with the Prince, might have said as much. But to most men such expressions came as a surprise. I met Sir Francis Jeune at dinner on the evening after the first Privy Council held by the King, which Sir Francis had gone down to Osborne to attend. He began at once to describe the scene: "The King astonished us all. We had all known him as Prince of Wales. It became clear we had yet to know him as King. His air of authority sat on him as if he had worn it always. He spoke with weight, as a King should speak. It was plain he had come to the Throne to rule." Ask the Ministers and other great personages who stood to him in official relations. Mr. Asquith has answered for them all: {419} "I speak from a privileged and close experience when I say that, wherever he was or whatever may have been his apparent preoccupations, in the transaction of the business of the State there were never any arrears, there was never any trace of confusion, there was never any moment of avoidable delay." In the opinion of the King their time and his belonged to the public, and neither was to be wasted. The whole truth about the late King's mission to Paris has, I think, never been told. It was not expedient that it should be told at the time, nor was it generally known. But until it is known full justice cannot be done to the King's courage and wisdom, or to his direct personal influence on the course of great affairs. For it was the man himself, the King himself, who won this great victory; not by diplomacy, not by statecraft, but because he was the man he was. I tell the story briefly, but the outlines will be enough. When the King went to Paris to lay the foundations of a new friendship between France and England the feeling of the French against the English ran high. They had not forgotten nor forgiven the sympathies of England with Germany in 1870. They had not forgotten their own retreat from Egypt in 1882, and they scored up their own mistake against England. They had not forgotten Fashoda. The King was warned not to go. The French Government warned him. They could protect him, they said, against violence but not against insult. His own Government thought his visit, {420} in the circumstances, ill-advised. Against all this he set his own conviction that the moment had come to make an effort for a better understanding between the two peoples. Danger did not deter him. For personal danger he cared nothing, and against the danger that any discourtesy to himself might embitter the two nations he set the hope of success. Like the statesman he was, he calculated forces and calculated wisely. He knew that the French, and especially the Parisians, had always liked him personally and he resolved to risk it. Neither his courage nor his sagacity was at fault. At first things went badly. When he reached the railway station he was received in silence. When he drove from the station to the Embassy there was not a cheer. As he went about Paris the next day the attitude of the Parisians was still sullen, if not hostile. But the presence and personality of the King began after a time to soften hardness. Before nightfall a cheer or two had been heard in the streets, and next day all Paris was once more all smiles and applause. The King had conquered. He had won over the people. He had convinced Ministers. He had conciliated public opinion. He had laid a gentle hand upon old and still open wounds. He had shown himself for the first time a great instrument and messenger of peace, and had begun the work to which all the rest of his life was to be devoted. Long before that ever-memorable visit, in France as in England, the Prince knew all sorts of people, {421} and was popular with all, and did not mind being of service now and then to the people whom he did not know at all. Dining one night with the Duc de la Rochefoucauld-Bisaccia in the Faubourg St. Germain, he was asked by his host to go with him to the opening reception at the house of a banker in the Boulevard Haussmann. The banker had made a great fortune and had great social ambitions. The Prince knew very well why he was asked, but good-naturedly went. His going was chronicled and blazoned next day in every one of the seventy daily papers of Paris; and the banker's ambition was satisfied. That was one incident. Another was his presence of course in the Prince of Wales period, at a supper given by the Figaro in its new offices. Celebrities of all sorts were there, and the Prince had to sit still while a too well-known actress from the Bouffes proposed the Queen's health. He raised his glass drank the toast, and said nothing. It was no fault of his. This also found its way into the French papers; not into the English. He had many friendships among artists, men of letters, soldiers, statesmen. Between the Prince and the late Marquis de Galliffet, the Marshal Ney of this last generation, there was a close tie; two chivalrous souls who understood each other from the beginning. He was often to be seen in studios—M. Detaille's, M. Rodin's, and many others. He knew the theatres in Paris as well as he knew the theatres in London; perhaps better. He went to the theatre primarily, I think, to be amused, and the theatres {422} in Paris are more amusing than the theatres in London. The most patriotic Englishman may be content to admit that. If the Prince had any politics abroad they were kept for his private use. To the French Republic, as Republic, and to successive Presidents of the Republic, he showed nothing but good-will. To French statesmen the same; to Gambetta, to Waldeck-Rousseau, and to M. Clemenceau, whose originalities and courage interested him long before that energetic individuality had become Prime Minister. They all liked the Prince, but not one of them ever guessed that from him when King would spring the new impulse of friendship which was to make France and England in all but name allies, and so impose peace upon the restless ambitions of another great sovereign. Gambetta, it is true, foretold a splendid future for the Prince, without explaining how it was to be splendid. I think if you moved about among Englishmen one thing would impress you more than all others in their tributes to their late King. Not their full testimony to his greatness as King. Not their admiration of his capacities. Not their pride in him as a Ruler. Not their sense of the incalculable services he has rendered. Not their gratitude for these services, deep as that is. Not the Imperial spirit and the new value they set upon the Unity of the Empire. Not his virtues of any kind, though to all of them they bear witness. The one thing which would impress you beyond all this is the affection they bore to him in his lifetime {423} and now bear to his memory. He had known how to establish new relations between King and People, relations which had a tenderness and a beauty unknown before. They belonged to an earlier period of history. They were not quite patriarchal, as in really ancient days, but were like the relations which exist in an old family: ties of blood and of long descent. They did not exist in the last reign. There was immense respect for Queen Victoria; not much sentiment. She had withdrawn herself too much from general intercourse, and even from the ceremonial part of her royal duties. But this King, her son, went among the people, lived among them, lived for them, gave them his constant thought, won their hearts. His loss is to them a personal loss. They mourn for him as for a King, and they mourn for him as for a Friend who is gone. That seems to me the finest tribute of all. III AS KING—SOME PERSONAL AND SOCIAL INCIDENTS AND IMPRESSIONS I met at luncheon one of the King's friends, in some ways one among the most intimate of the innumerable friends he had; a man, however, not readily yielding to emotion nor likely to take what is called the sentimental view. We began to talk of the King. Suddenly he broke off: "I cannot say much. I loved him." I don't know that I can tell you anything more {424} characteristic or illuminating than that. It is the kind of tribute the King himself would have liked. And there are millions of Englishmen to-day whose hearts are full of the same feeling. The King—the late King—was a great master of kingly graces. He knew, I suppose, more men and women than any man of his time. He knew the exact degree of consideration to which each one of them was entitled, and exactly how to express it. If you desire to form to yourself a conception of the interval which divides a king, with the inherited traditions of a thousand years, from the elected Chief Magistrate of yesterday, you might do worse than watch the ceremonial customs of personal intercourse. We know what the indiscriminate handshakings by the President are. We know that the custom, aided by the incredible stupidity of the police about him, cost one of them his life. We read the other day that a President, after enduring this exaction for a time, had to stop it. His right hand was all but paralysed. We have all listened to the Presidential, "I am very glad to see you," repeated to all comers. It may be unavoidable but it all detracts something from the dignity of the office and the man. This King who is gone gave his hand more often than any other; but at his own choice and discretion. It was thought abroad he went great lengths, and some of the Continental sovereigns and the courtiers about them criticized him. They also after a time imitated him, and sometimes at once. The present German Emperor was one of those who took the {425} hint from his uncle as soon as it was given. I told long ago how the Emperor and the then Prince of Wales in 1889 came on board the White Star steamship Teutonic lying at Spithead, with a great company of naval guests, there to witness the great naval review which never took place. The First Lord of the Admiralty, Mr. Chamberlain, Lord Charles Beresford, Mr. Ismay, Mr. Depew, and many other persons of distinction were grouped on the main deck. The Emperor came up the steps first, and by way of acknowledging their salutations raised his white cap. The Prince of Wales shook hands with all those I have named and with some others, the Emperor looking on astonished. Then came a prolonged inspection of the Teutonic, the finest passenger ship then afloat, the pioneer of all modern comfort and splendour on the Atlantic, Mr. Ismay's creation. There had been much talk in which Emperor and Prince had both taken part, and by the time they were ready to leave, the great German sovereign had learned his lesson. He shook hands cordially with Mr. Ismay, in whom he had recognized a kindred spirit of greatness, other than his own but not less genuine, and with others. The faces of his staff were the faces of men amazed, perplexed, almost incredulous. At drawing-rooms and Courts and levees; in private houses where he was a guest, whether in town or country, on the turf, in the theatre, at a public ceremonial, at a Marlborough House or Windsor garden-party, the same habit prevailed. Prince of Wales or King of England, he met his {426} friends as a friend, and for acquaintances with any title to recognition he had a pleasant welcome. It added immensely to his popularity among those who knew him, and among the millions who never saw him, but heard. They thought of him as a man among men, which he was in every sense, and as one who thought manhood an honourable thing. Ask, moreover, any of the equerries or others of his household. They will all tell you he was considerate. He expected each officer to do his duty, and it was done. It is often an irksome duty; but he made it needlessly so. The human side of him was never long hidden. It is a remark one is tempted to repeat again and again. It came out in the services he was for ever doing; public in their nature, but from a private impulse. He met to the full the expectation of the public, and discharged to the full the obligation of the Crown in respect of all charities and ceremonials; and always with a kindly grace which made his presence and his gifts doubly welcome. With people whom he knew well and liked he was glad to lay aside etiquette. I could give you, but must not, the names of friends to whom he would often send word in the afternoon that he was coming to dine that evening and to play bridge after. Even a king, and a great king, must sometimes relax. He cannot always appear in armour. His hostess would meet him at the door with a curtsey, and then welcome him as a friend; and the talk all through dinner was intimate and free. Those were delightful hours. So were the days in country {427} houses where the King was a guest. Always, no doubt, a certain hush in the atmosphere, a certain constraint if the party was large, but so far as the King was concerned, if people were not at their ease it was their own fault. Everybody knew where the line was drawn. Nobody in his senses over-passed it. One flagrant instance there was, not in the country, but at a house in London, at supper—a large party. The hour grew late and the Prince still sat at his table. A guest who had found the champagne to his liking staggered across the room, steadied himself by a chair and stuttered out: "I don't know whether Your Royal Highness knows how late it is, but it's past two o'clock, and I am going home. Good-night, sir!" The Prince sat still and answered not. He saw the man's condition. Nobody knew better the rule that such a company did not break up till the Prince gave the signal. He was a man with a great social position, and not social only. When he had departed the Prince finished his interrupted sentence and the talk went on as before. Not an allusion to the offence or the offender. His sense of social responsibility showed itself in an unexpected form during the Boer War. There grew up among the aristocracy a passionate patriotism which sent heads of great families and elder and younger sons into the field. The King thought this feeling threatened to have grave consequences. He approved it, of course, and encouraged it, but he thought limits ought to be set to a fervour which {428} seemed not unlikely to extinguish an important part of the nobility. He sent for a number of men in great position who had resolved to go and advised them to wait, saying, with his usual good sense: "Enough men of your class have gone already to show your devotion; more than are really needed for the purposes of war. Wait a little. If matters go badly it will be time enough then for you to depart." One secret of the extraordinary social power of both Prince and King lay in his knowledge of social matters. Nobody was so well informed. He had about him numbers of men, and of women, who took pains to send him, or bring him, the earliest account of any social incident or gossip. It was known that he had these sources of information, and that whatever was known to any one was known to him. Such knowledge as that was a weapon. It was not one of which he made use, or needed to use. The fact that he had it was enough. He liked news also, and took pains to get it. If there were a political or Ministerial crisis, you might be sure that Marlborough House knew all about it. He had a certain number of men in his suite or of his acquaintance from whom he expected, and generally got, early intelligence. There was a sort of competition in supplying him. If you were first you were thanked. If you had been anticipated, he remarked dryly and with a good-humoured twinkle in his very expressive eyes: "Oh, yes, very interesting but I heard it an hour ago." {429} When I was leaving England in 1895 for America the Prince gave me his cipher address and asked me to cable him as often as there was news I thought might interest him. That may serve to show us Americans how much he cared for American matters, and how completely he returned the good-will we have always borne him since his visit to the United States in 1860. I told the Prince my first duty was to The Times, since I was going home as their correspondent. Subject to that, I should be glad to send him what I could. The difference of time was such that he might well enough get a dispatch before midnight at Marlborough House, which could not appear in print till next morning. "But you know that's just what I should like," said the Prince. From beginning to end the late King has lived his life, ever a full life, possibly not always a wise life. Who can be wise always? Who likes a man who is always wise? His faults in youth were of a kind which were recognized as belonging to men. The blood which flowed in his veins came down to him through centuries of ancestors to whom the restrictions and pudencies, often hypocritical, of modern days were unknown. And if we look at the result, at the crown of all, at the matured character which made him one of the greatest servants of the State, of any State, ever known in history, need there be any criticism or any regret? Not perhaps the white flower of a blameless life, but was there ever one? But a great human life, compact of good and ill, and so flowering into the {430} greatness of a great King. Perhaps the best summary is Pascal's: "Qu'une vie est heureuse quand elle commence par l'amour et qu'elle finit par l'ambition." For the King's ambition was never for himself; he had no need to wish to be other than he was. It was an ambition for the good of his people. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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