In the South African War she took the English official point of view very strongly while deploring the necessity, as she regarded it, of war; and when her nephew, the German Emperor, sent his famous telegram to Krueger, she wrote to him with her own hand, declaring that he had acted unjustifiably; rated him, indeed, as if he had been a peccant schoolboy. And when he pleaded that he thought her Majesty's ministers had directed the Jameson raid, the old lady replied by declaring that none of her ministers knew anything about it and scolded him sharply for the assumption.
"You have weakened the principle of royalty," she wrote.
It says a good deal for the Kaiser that he apologized humbly and promised never to offend again in the same way.
From this it will be seen that towards the end of her life Queen Victoria's personal influence in the courts of Europe was extraordinary. She was the oldest reigning sovereign, save the Emperor of Austria, and the most secure.
Everyone outside of England saw that she had immense power, and yet she was supposed to be a constitutional ruler.
Men of the first capacity as English politicians were astonished at her ability.
No two men could have been more unlike than Lord Randolph Churchill and Sir Charles Dilke; yet both spoke of Victoria as the ablest woman they had ever known. Still, her influence was injurious. She strengthened English conservatism and it was already far too strong; she did more than any other person to block the wheels of progress. All her influence during the last twenty years of her life was thrown against reform; she loved the established order and the traditional rule of conduct.
Her foreign policy was bounded by the idea of working in perfect harmony with Germany. She distrusted and disliked France and despised the French.
After Fashoda she still passed a couple of months on the French Riviera in the winter, but her relations with the French had been so slight and formal that the difference of feeling between the two races made hardly any impression on her. It was the South African war which got the English thoroughly disliked in France. And the high-handed, not to say, rude way the English acted about Fashoda humiliated French pride and brought the two peoples to the verge of war. I have already told how Rochefort, the greatest of French journalists, wrote in the Intransigeant the bitterest attack on Queen Victoria; he even called her "Cette vieille caleche qui s'obstine a s'appeler Victoria," (That old stage coach which persists in calling itself Victoria.) Prince Edward used to say that he never knew his position till his mother died, and at her death-bed Lord Salisbury spoke to him.
"He had always been cold to me," he said, complainingly, "but when the doctors said, 'The Queen is dead,' Lord Salisbury suddenly altered his tone, his manner, everything. He came to me respectfully; stooped to kiss my hand and hoped that I would believe he would serve me as faithfully as he had tried to serve my mother. I was really touched. Then, for the first time, I realized through his deference what it was to be King of England."
When Edward came to the throne, he brought a new policy into power: so long as Victoria lived, England favored Germany and cold-shouldered France, and the outward visible sign of England's good will was the cession of Heligoland to Germany.
Of course, Lord Salisbury knew nothing of the value of that island; never dreamed that it could be an outpost of attack on England by airships and a fortress to protect the German navy. He was blissfully ignorant of geography and gasped with astonishment when told once that Zanzibar was an island.
But he had served Victoria loyally, and up to the very end of her reign it looked as if the understanding between the two Teutonic peoples was certain to endure for at least another century.
In 1889, when I first knew him, Prince Edward was a typical German in appearance, about five feet eight in height, very heavily built, with dark brown hair and full whiskers, beard and moustache. He was already very stout; but instead of trying to get rid of his fat, or to keep it within bounds, he was much more concerned to conceal it. The trait is characteristic. He dressed with extreme care, and always with the idea that he had a figure.
Consequently, his clothes were always a little too tight, and thus drew attention to his rotundity. As is usually the case, his vanity did him harm.
His love of good living and childish self-esteem were his most obvious qualities; they went hand in hand with good humor and a certain bonhomie which everyone noticed in him. When threatened by old age, he tried from time to time to diminish his drinking, believing that too much liquid was the cause of his obesity: but he could never be persuaded to cut down his eating.
Foolish proverbs, enshrining the stupidity of the past, governed him, or were used by him as justification: "Bread is the staff of life… good food never hurt any one," commonplaces appealing to him irresistibly.
The Prince had had every advantage of both German and English training.
He spoke English however, with a strong German accent, and continually used bad English through translating literally from the German. In the same way, his French was fairly fluent so long as he kept to the commonplaces of conversation; but as soon as he had to express some unfamiliar thought he was hopelessly at sea, and then his baragouinage was that of a South German. Curiously enough, his accent in French and in English was rather like a Bavarian, with an indefinable tang of the Jew. I don't put forward the usual scandalous explanation; I merely note the fact.
The Prince's sensualism was as round as his figure, as full-blooded as his body.
He gambled whenever he could because of the pleasure it gave him; he smoked incessantly, though the cigarettes plagued him with smoker's cough; but till Nemesis came with the years-ill health and indigestion from want of exercise or from over-eating, which you will-he was generally good humored and kindly disposed: un ban vivant, as the French say.
Like the average man, he delighted in popularity. He could not help believing that all desired and sought it, and if they failed, it was because of some shortcoming in them. He could not imagine that anyone would hold himself above the arts which lead to popular applause. When he drove through London, bowing and smiling to cheering crowds, he took it all as a triumph of personal achievement, a final and complete apotheosis.
Edward had all the aristocrat's tastes. He loved horse-racing, was gregarious, hated to be alone, preferred a game of cards to any conversation; in fact, he only talked freely when he went to the opera, where, perhaps, he ought to have been silent. He was a gambler, too, as English aristocrats are gamblers, and his love for cards often got him into difficulties. It has been said by a bitter but keen sighted observer: "King Edward was loved by the English because he had all the aristocratic vices, whereas King George is disliked by them because he has all the middle class virtues."
Early in the nineties I was struck by the story of Father Damien. There was an echo of the heroic self-sacrifice of St. Paul and the early Christian martyrs in his self-abnegation.
A simple Belgian monk, he had begged to be sent to the South Sea lepers. He made the choice in the spring of lusty manhood, knowing that he would never see his home and his loved ones again, in the full conviction that he, too, must catch the loathsome malady and die piecemeal, rotting for years, and praying in the end for death as a release.
At luncheon one day I happened to have the Vyners: Mrs. Vyner, an intimate friend of the Prince of Wales, was an extraordinary woman; Bob Vyner, her husband, was simply a very rich Yorkshire squire. Mrs. Vyner, without being good-looking, had an extraordinary charm of manner. I remember once saying to her daughter, Lady Alwynne Compton: "You know, Lady Alwynne, after talking to your mother for some time, one feels a sort of ultimate sympathy with her, almost as though it were love."