In the centuries since the Protestant German princeling George of
Hannover substituted his descendents for the Catholic Stuart dynasty,
most people in the United Kingdom of Great Britain had grown accustomed
to the royal family that produced George the Fifth. That monarch was
accurately and adequately summarized by the historian AJP Taylor:
"George V (1865-1936) second son of Edward VII; married Princess Mary of
Teck, 1893; king, 1910-36; changed name of royal family from Saxe-Coburg
to Windsor, 1917; his trousers were creased at the sides, not front and
back." (1)
At best of middling intelligence, frequently displaying bad humor and
melancholy, King George had been on friendly terms with his cousin,
Kaiser William of Germany, but their relations stopped immediately when
their countries joined the Great War on opposite sides. Smart enough to
realize that his meal ticket required absolute compliance with the
"advice" of his ministers, George and his wife Mary were content with
mean-spirited gossip about others, and did not spare their children
cruel comments.
On Monday the 11th of November 1918, Germany had agreed to armistice
terms and promptly collapsed in nervous exhaustion. Their army groups
dwindled to divisions, regiments shrank to companies, and artillery and
****ps and airplanes went to victorious Allied soldiers, who were also in
a hurry to demobilize.
Outside from the Rhineland, no foreign soldiers could be seen in
Germany, and even on the Rhine, the foreigners were not omnipresent.
The soldiers seen on German streets were usually jobless, still
dependnent on barracks for meals and cots, often marching to clear away
some amateur "governments" started in imitation of the Russian
Communists. Still the Chancellor and a needed liason between the Army's
commanders and the parliamentarians in his Cabinet, Prince Max kept
disorder to a miminum in Germany. By January 1919, the most serious
Communists in Germany, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, were in jail
and the Reichstag elections sent a centrist majority to the Reichstag
(SDP 105, USP 20, D 75, Z 112, BVP 24, DNVP 65).
The Catholic Center Party was the largest party delegation, with the
Socialists close behind it. The Socialist-Center-Democrat coalition was
flanked by the Independent Socialists to the Left and the Bavarian
People's Party and German Nationalists to the Right. On Monday the 20th
of January 1919, Prince Max acknowledged Friedrich Ebert as his
successor as Chancellor of the Reich.
Ex-Kaiser William had complained of the food and drink available to him
at his hotel/prison. The Ex-Empress, Dona, had joined him, provoking
naught but long discussions on how bad everything had become and how
Germany had let its monarchs down. Thinking he was playing a stronger
hand than he possessed in actuality, William had demanded reinstatement
on the throne, decreasing the chances of such an outcome by deliberate
insults of the leaders of the new Government.
Ebert's Socialists had wanted a Pro****tional Representation electoral
system but Prince Max and his sup****ters had held out for single member
districts won by the biggest plurality. The SMD had brought about
numerous interest groups to submerge doctrinal subtleties in favor of
large parties of broad, and often nondetailed, co-operation.
On Wednesday the 22nd, the Times ran an article on the confused state of
the German monarchy, which had not been abolished in spite of
considerable agitation for a German republic. "There is no noticeable
enthusiasm for a Kaiser drawn from one of the petty kingdoms or
duchies," the newspaper re****ted, "but the mass of Germans see little
admirable in the Hohenzollern House and even the German Nationalists do
not place on their program a Hohenzollern restoration" (2).
The Allies, victorious despite an onslaught of surprising shortcomings,
intended to settle the shape of the peace for the coming century, much
as the Congress of Vienna had done. But already there was an obvious
difference between what happened at Vienna and what was going on in
Paris about a century later. Namely, the victors had no interest in
discussing anything with the loser, Germany. Chancellor Ebert was not
getting letters from Lloyd George, Clemanceau or Wilson asking him to
send a German Talleyrand to their deliberations. Philip Scheideman, the
Foreign Minister, commented: "They do not seem to wish to know our
opinions on any issue" (3).
Prince Max of Baden is usually given credit for finding the Windsor
solution to the German question. Did he first mention the possibility
in conversation with Lord Landsdowne before Christmas 1918? Or did he
speak of the matter to Foreign Secretary Balfour two months later?
The key meme was that a scion of the Windsor dynasty would replace his
Hohenzollern cousins as monarch of a now constitutional Germany.
German conservatives would get the Kaiser they wanted and Britons could
hope for more influence in Germany.
At the beginning, King George was not enthused of the prospect. "Those
Germans are a rum lot. If they had an English King, they would not
appreciate him. They would probably revolt in the night" (4). When
Lloyd George revisited the subject later, George would advocate trying
Greece or Spain or even Italy for an effort to reconstitute a German
monarchy. "It is as if he doesn't want the honor to go to his own
family" (5), commented Lloyd George of King George's attitude.
"My father felt he had to make a public display of anti-German sentiment
in order to keep the affections of his own people," said Edward VIII,
his son, then Prince of Wales. "My father was very conscious of the
hatred so many people had for his German roots and feared that he could
be discarded along with Battenberg for no reason but Prussian relatives.
Rather than confront the prejudice, it was his way to concede to it,
allow it to go unchecked, and pretend as if he fully shared in the
anger" (6).
Arriving in March 1919, in France for the Peace Conference, American
President Woodrow Wilson became one of the Big Three, together with
Clemanceau of France and Lloyd George of Britain. Wilson accepted the
notion that a Britainized Germany would be a great improvement on the
original Bismarckian model. The French premier, Clemanceau, objected
that an English monarch would not be enough to counterbalance the
influence of the General Staff and other militarists.
A diplomat and economist present at the Conference remarked in
retrospect:
"Germany's greatest stroke of luck was the prospect it had of hosting
one of King George's sons as its next Emperor. The British and the
Americans love a King, at least one born and bred in England, and their
goodwill to the hypotheical next German monarch soothed their tempers
and brought them to imagine the necessity of concessions enabling the
new Germany to trade to prosperity. Gone was a nasty sentence that
Germans had caused the Great War --- gone were prohibitions against free
trade with Austria --- stricken were gigantic indemnities that the
defeated Germans were expected to pay in the coming decades" (7).
On Monday the 23rd of June 1919, the Reichstag in Berlin approved the
Treaty of Versailles. There was much lamentation about the Danzig
Corridor to give the new Poland access to the Baltic, and seemingly
little recognition that the alternative to that corridor would have been
the seizure of East Prussia by Poland. Germans claimed their pride was
humbled by the demilitarization of the Rhineland, the scrapping of
German arsenals, the German loss of Alsace Lorraine, and the eva****ation
of the German colonial territories in Africa, Asia and the Pacific. At
the end of debate, sixty five percent of the Reichstag member****p voted
"aye" with ten percent abstaining and twenty-five percent in the
negative.
Unknowing and unappreciative of British, American and German decisions
to forego any war crime trials (which would certainly have involved
him), the ex- Kaiser and ex-Kaiserin took up residence at a castle in
Prussia. "Only the Jews and Bolsheviks challenge my right to my family
throne," William declared publically.
"My cousin's children will be as isolated and as pitiful as the Latin
Emperors of Constantinople were following the terror of the Fourth
Crusade"
(8),
"Bertie was the hesitant one, the man who would be loathe to live places
where he had never been before. Bertie felt the attraction of the old,
bland and accustomed far more strongly than I ever did," said the Prince
of Wales, older brother to the Duke of York, Albert, called Bertie.
"But I was the Crown Prince, and he was not, and so he was the one who
had to take up a new appointment for the sake of Crown and Country"
(9).
So it came to pass that Albert of the Windsor Dynasty came to be German
Emperor in 1919.
Notes:
(1) AJP Taylor, English History 1914-1945 (London, 1965), page 2, note
2.
(2) The Times (22 January 1919).
(3) Scheideman quoted p. 24 in Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six
Months That Changed The World (New York 2001).
(4) George V quoted p. 16 in Jane Gascoyne, Albert The English Kaiser
(New York, 1994).
(5) Lloyd George quoted p.37 in Gascoyne, Albert.
(6) Edward VIII quoted 75-76 in Philip Zeigler, King Edward VIII (New
York, 1995).
(7) John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Foundations Of The Peace (New
York, 1945) pp. 165-66.
(8) William quoted p. 1 New York Times ( 27 June 1919).
(9) Edward VIII quoted p. 124 in Ziegler, Edward.
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