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 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 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:
“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, 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, 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 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 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.