The State Visits of Edward VII

Reinventing Royal Diplomacy for the Twentieth Century

Matthew Glencross

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137548993
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This book explores the revival under Edward VII of the ceremonial state visit by British monarchs, showing the impact and importance of active royal diplomacy during his reign. Using the Royal Archives, memoirs and newspapers, it reveals the contribution made by the use of ceremony and public display to popular appreciation of the monarchy.

1

The Modern Revival of Royal Diplomacy

Introduction

It is important to note that state visits overseas were not a modern phenomenon: diplomacy evolved out of visits between royals or their representatives. The modern concept of the summit meeting was, in the historical past, encapsulated in the royal visits exchanged between sovereigns. As the concept of the state emerged, royal visits became merged into something that was more than a personal power-play, and the terminology of the state visit began to emerge. From the start, such royal exchanges were integral to a ruler’s role in safeguarding the lands over which they claimed suzerainty, through the making and sustaining of alliances of offence and defence. Consequently, at times of turmoil such as the Middle Ages, there are many examples of rulers undertaking personal journeys in order to conduct diplomacy face-to-face, as when Richard I of England visited the French King to secure his goodwill so that Richard could securely leave Europe for his Crusade to the Holy Land.¹ Public display of royal might and power was not automatically a core element in these visits, though undoubtedly ritual and ceremonial within the royal courts, by both hosts and visitors, would have been an important aspect of the power negotiations. It was during the early modern period, the supposed golden age of European kingship that succeeded the age of Christendom, that a more public dimension to royal displays became significant. The secular European states that had emerged looked to the creation of a sense of personal loyalty to the monarch amongst the mass of their subjects, especially in post-feudal societies such as that which had developed in England. It is not coincidence that the Tudor monarchs, seizing power at the end of the Wars of the Roses, were particularly conscious of the need to display their royal power, in terms of dazzling displays of wealth presented through rituals of pomp and ceremony, for a wide audience amongst their subjects.² Henry VIII apparently ‘enjoyed touring England and presenting himself to his subjects’,³ because he understood the impact that seeing him in person, appropriately dressed and accompanied with due fanfare, could have on the loyalty of his subjects. It impressed viewers with the extent of his power and resources, and this anticipation of being ‘impressive’ was behind his decision to undertake a display of English royal power in a foreign setting, in order to improve the standing overseas of both his own royal house and his country. Henry consequently sought to cement the treaty with France in 1514 with a grand gesture that would affirm English royal power: Francis responded in kind in order to try to signal the superiority of French power. The meeting became known as the Field of the Cloth of Gold because of the amount of gold thread used by each side to deck out its encampment. The extravagance of the display put on by both the English and the French King was widely reported throughout Europe, as each party sought to outshine the other in the splendour of its costumes and accessories.⁴

It set a new standard for royal visits, where grand public display by either rulers or their representatives was understood as representing the political power of a country. Henry’s daughter, Elizabeth I, also understood the importance of imagery and pomp in diplomacy and politics, as did her successor, James I of England and VI of Scotland.⁵

But the turmoil of the wars of religion within Europe substantially halted royal visits to other states, unless as part of a familial relationship. Instead, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, diplomacy was largely carried out by state representatives – ambassadors and special envoys – and, consequently, the high levels of pomp and ceremony that had characterised the royal visits of the sixteenth century diminished, though the importance of monarchical display within their own courts and for wider home consumption remained. It was not until after the Napoleonic era, with the resettlement of Europe under the Congress of Vienna from 1815 on, that royal state visits overseas resumed as a regular feature of inter-state diplomacy.⁶ The Congress of Vienna had seen a reaffirming of monarchical power as the raison d’être of legitimate states, and this encouraged a more direct interchange between rulers, outside the familial links that existed between so many of the European royal houses. Once again, the direct demonstration of royal power became understood and accepted as a tool of diplomacy that went beyond the arranging of royal marriages that could, as part of a spousal dowry, ensure the support of one nation-state for another.

Royal marriages had always been a tool in the diplomatic armoury. The resultant links between royal houses had always been perceived as having the potential to reinforce the influence of a state by providing an informal but enduring form of alliance. During the troubled years of the European wars of religion and the wars of succession during the eighteenth century, the choice of side during conflicts was often shaped by the consequences of marital choices, as with the marriage of James I and VI’s daughter Elizabeth to Frederick of the Palatinate. Such overseas royal visits as did take place in this period were usually in the guise of family interchanges, often in search of potential brides or for other family events including funerals, rather than as exercises in royal diplomacy of the nature of the Field of the Cloth of Gold. Consequently, such visits were rarely described as being state occasions.

Preparing for the Resumption of Active Royal Diplomacy

The background to the resumption of royal diplomacy in the shape of overseas state visits by sovereigns relates to the aftermath of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic period. The challenge of both of these to monarchical power had had the effect of bringing together European royal families, across the old divisions provided by religion and competing claimants to different thrones, by demonstrating that royals had more in common than they had differences.⁷ There was a new consciousness of the concept of a legitimate right to rule deriving from hereditary royalty, the beginnings of what Edward VII was later to describe as the Trade Union of Kings. It provided an atmosphere which encouraged the resumption of royal visits overseas as a modern phenomenon intended to remind audiences in their own nation-states, as well those being visited, of the power and authority of sovereigns to accompany the more traditional royal diplomacy of suitable marriages between royal houses.⁸

What distinguished a state visit by a sovereign to another country from the informal familial exchanges of the previous centuries? The answer lies not merely in the elaborate ceremonials described in the Introduction, but also in how states were conceptualised by the nineteenth century within Europe. At this point, the state visit was, practically speaking, substantially confined to Europe or to the colonial possessions of European powers. In Western thinking, as a result of the Enlightenment debates over the nature of rule as well as events like the American and French Revolutions, the modern state was a relatively new concept. In practice, it had come to mean a totality that was beginning to include the idea of a country as representing a nation or, as Benedict Anderson puts it, an ‘imagined community’ where people expected their government to represent the shared culture and consequent values of that country’s inhabitants, and not merely to support the interests of a ruling dynasty.⁹ The modern state was a reinterpretation of the older forms of monarchical state. There was an increasing expectation, thanks to the rising power of the concept of shared national identities as playing a part in legitimising a state’s existence, that a state would possess political powers which would act to limit as well as to support monarchical initiatives in domestic and foreign policy.

In the era when absolute monarchies dominated, all power was conceptualised as deriving from the ruler, via the royal court, where the heads of the main institutions of state (military as well as political) would all hold senior court positions, which made them directly answerable to the sovereign for their actions. In theory, and to a considerable extent in practice, up to the modern era, the ultimate and real authority in a state’s government rested with the ruler, who alone had the power to make a final pronouncement on policy and its implementation. This is why diplomacy was essentially, in its origins, derived from and representative of royal power, because only a ruler or a directly appointed representative had the power to represent a state’s interests abroad. However, despite the attempts of the Congress of Vienna to turn the clock back, the realities of early nineteenth-century Europe were that most modern rulers had to take into account the will of their subjects when evolving policy, domestic and foreign. The attempt of Charles X of France to emulate his absolutist predecessors and rely on his own authority (which he saw as divinely instituted) had resulted in his deposition in favour of his cousin, Louis-Philippe I, the so-called Citizen King, who was prepared to work with his subjects, hearing their voices through a variety of political structures.¹⁰ This was the context in which Paulmann has explored the revival of state visits by rulers within nineteenth-century Europe: one in which the significance of ceremonial and symbolism was an important aspect of how monarchs affirmed their place in the political structures of their states.¹¹

The British state had, however, developed differently from its European counterparts up to the beginnings of the nineteenth century. Consequently, while there are echoes and parallels to be drawn between the contexts in which British monarchs and their continental counterparts found themselves, the comparative approach to understanding the role and impact of ritual and symbolism as practised by British sovereigns cannot be pushed too far. As Cannadine, amongst others, has shown, during the nineteenth century the pressures of modernity did indeed mean that the ‘invention of traditions’, including royal traditions, was an important grounding exercise for the nation. Yet the potential for looming threats to the continuance of monarchy was not as consciously felt by British sovereigns, despite the reality of a republican movement. For one thing, despite the personal unpopularity of figures like George IV, rulers were no longer so closely and personally associated with political policies.¹² The rise of constitutional monarchy in Britain, which had come as a consequence of a series of episodes during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, had seen the establishment of the office of Prime Minister at the head of an executive which also comprised elected representatives.

From the time of the Civil Wars of the 1640s, the later deposition of James II and the accompanying events of the Glorious Revolution with the Bill of Rights 1689, and the arrival of a German-speaking royal dynasty in 1714, monarchs had gradually (and at times reluctantly) accepted increasing constraints on their ability to develop and implement an independent political policy. Instead, a series of compromises between monarch and parliament had promoted the emergence of political institutions which carried on government in the name of the monarch – while practically limiting the ability of a ruler to exercise sovereign rule. This meant that the British monarchs were more accustomed to the realities that faced monarchical power across Europe: that (with the exception of Russia), throughout the post-1815 period, it had, in practice, to be exercised in a way that made rulers very conscious of the expectations of their subjects. This included how these rulers demonstrated their power, and how they used their royal status to enhance the power and status of their own state on the European and global stage. Increasingly, a royal court was no longer the centre of governance; instead, it was one pillar amongst many in modern governance, and, with the development of the modern print media, was also subject to public scrutiny and criticism via increasingly effective tools of mass communication. The older understanding of the concept of the king (or queen) in state was thus now differently understood.

When Napoleon had sought to legitimise his own assumption of sovereign power in France, he had felt it important to assume not only a royal title but also the trappings that went with it, as underlined in his coronation portrait by David.¹³ Given this, it is not surprising that one thing which the Congress of Vienna felt it essential to re-establish was the concept that it was hereditary rulers that legitimised the existence of an independent state. This is underlined by the creation of the new unitary states of Belgium and Greece in 1830. These states were not permitted to become republics, but had to accept th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  The Modern Revival of Royal Diplomacy
• 2  The First Royal Visits
• 3  A Difficult Host: Edward VIIs Visit to Italy
• 4  Edward VIIs Gift to Diplomacy? 1903 Visit to Paris
• 5  A Virtual Royal Occasion: Edward VIIs 1907 Visit to Spain
• 6  The Diplomatic Margins: State Visits to Scandinavia
• 7  Dealing with the Great Bear: Edward VIIs Visit to Russia
• 8  The Most Powerful and Influential Diplomat of His Day: Edward VIIs Final State Visits
• Epilogue: After Edward
• Bibliography
• Index