Castles of Steel (33 page)

The British force in Antwerp helped to delay the fall of the city, but could not prevent its capitulation on October 10. Churchill later argued that the British effort had given the Allies time to secure the channel ports of Dunkirk and Calais, but many regarded the Antwerp expedition as a fiasco and blamed the First Lord for romantic vainglory. “What we desire chiefly to enforce upon Mr. Churchill,” said the
Morning Post,
“is that he is not a Napoleon, but a Minister of the Crown with no time to organize or lead armies in the field. . . . To be photographed and cinematographed under fire at Antwerp is an entirely unnecessary addition . . . to his proper duties.” Asquith was furious at the sending of the two naval brigades partly made up of raw recruits, one of whom was his own son, Arthur. “I can’t tell you what I feel of the wicked folly of it all,” he wrote to Venetia Stanley. The navy condemned the First Lord for wasting the untrained men of the Royal Naval Division, 1,500 of whom retreated into the Netherlands and were interned there. Beatty fumed that Churchill had made “such a darned fool of himself over the Antwerp debacle. The man must have been mad to have thought he could relieve . . . [Antwerp] by putting 8,000 half-trained troops into it.”

The Antwerp episode eroded Churchill’s position in the government. Nevertheless, because Asquith could think of no one to replace him at the Admiralty, Churchill survived. But if the mercurial First Lord was not to be held responsible for the navy’s problems, who could be? There was, in fact, another figure at the Admiralty, a man older, more dignified, less visible, who, because of his name and background, was even more vulnerable than Churchill. This was the most senior officer in the Royal Navy, the First Sea Lord, Prince Louis of Battenberg.

The origins of the House of Battenberg, an unkind chronicler once wrote, are lost in the mists of the nineteenth century. It is true that most of Prince Louis’s names and titles were concocted and attached to him during his lifetime. When he was born in Graz, Austria, in 1854, his family name was Hesse. His father, Prince Alexander of Hesse, was one of the legion of younger sons of great European houses who swarmed through aristocratic parlors—splendidly connected but, once of age, forced to cast about for an occupation and an income. Prince Alexander’s nineteen-year-old sister Marie mightily advanced her brother’s fortunes by marrying the future Tsar Alexander II of Russia; soon thereafter, twenty-year-old Prince Alexander was appointed a major general in the Russian army. He lost this rank when he eloped with one of his sister’s ladies-in-waiting, a Polish woman of German, French, and Hungarian blood, at which point an infuriated tsar withdrew both imperial favor and the army commission. Alexander offered himself to the Austrian army, again became a general, and in Graz fathered Louis, the future First Sea Lord. When Prince Alexander retired to Hesse, his older brother, now the Grand Duke of Hesse, found names, titles, and a home-stead for the itinerant general and his family. The marriage was recognized morganatically: Alexander was to remain a royal highness and a prince; his wife would have the lesser title of countess. The children would be princes and princesses, but they were to be serene—not royal—highnesses and would have no right of succession to the Hessian throne. Ten miles south of Darmstadt, the grand duke found his brother a village called Battenberg where a small castle sat on a mountain bluff above the river Eder. Here, the boy Louis, now titled His Serene Highness, Prince Louis of Battenberg, grew up speaking German, French, Italian, Russian, and English.

Another frequent visitor to Hesse was Queen Victoria’s second son, Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, known in the family as Affie. An officer in the Royal Navy catapulted to the rank of captain at the age of twenty-three, Affie liked visiting his sister Alice, now the wife of the grand duke. He also liked wearing his uniform, which young Louis much admired. Gratified, Affie suggested that this young relative by marriage enter the British navy and join him on a cruise around the world. Louis was eager, his parents approved, and, in October 1868, he crossed the Channel, took the oath of allegiance to the queen, and became a British subject. An obstacle arose: all naval cadets were required to pass a physical examination. Louis’s eyesight was mediocre, but ingenuity saw him through. Told that he would be asked to read the time from a clock on the dockyard tower, he set his watch by the clock before going into the exam. When the question was asked, he managed a furtive peek at his watch and answered correctly.

From the start, Louis’s path in the navy diverged from that of an ordinary cadet. A month after his entry, still scarcely knowing port from starboard, he was assigned to accompany the Prince and Princess of Wales on a five-month cruise that took them up the Nile and then through the Dardanelles to Constantinople. Bertie, the twenty-seven-year-old heir to the throne, decided that fourteen-year-old Louis was “a remarkably nice boy.” When, on account of his heavy German-English accent, young Louis was so harassed on ship by other boys that he wanted to quit the navy, the Prince of Wales, whose accent had similar inflections, advised him to “stick it out a bit longer.” Thereafter, when Louis was on leave in England, he stayed with the prince and princess at Sandringham in Norfolk or at Marlborough House in London, where a permanent bedroom was kept for him. In 1875, he accompanied Bertie to India, where he hunted tigers, stuck pigs, and broke his collarbone falling from a horse.

During these years, the demands of a naval career often rubbed against the delights and temptations of high society. The tall young officer with blue eyes, a black beard, and a gentle manner played the piano and the flute; he danced, rode, and shot; he was a prince and he was often in the company of the Marlborough House set surrounding the Prince of Wales. In this society in 1880, Louis met Lillie Langtry, said to be the most alluring woman in England. The Prince of Wales had been Lillie’s admirer, but, now ready to move on, he affably passed her along to Louis. Louis fell in love. He wished Lillie to divorce the hapless, off-stage Mr. Langtry and marry him. Lillie, inconveniently, became pregnant. Louis’s parents, appalled at the prospect of another morganatic stain on the Battenberg credentials, reacted promptly. Louis was assigned to a warship headed around the world while an agent was dispatched to Lillie to arrange a financial settlement. On March 8, 1881, behind a heavy curtain of discretion, Lillie’s daughter, Jeanne-Marie, was born. For twenty years, she did not know the name of her real father.

In 1884, Louis married his cousin Princess Victoria of Hesse, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. Here, the circumstances of Louis’s relationship with Mrs. Langtry were reversed; this time a member of the morganatic, nonroyal branch of the Hessian family was marrying up. Queen Victoria, always partial to the Hessian children of her dead daughter Alice, approved and attended her granddaughter’s wedding.

[Louis and Victoria’s first child, also named Alice, eventually married Prince Andrew of Greece and became the mother of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, consort of Queen Elizabeth II. As a result, when Prince Louis’s great-grandson Prince Charles becomes King of England, a descendant of the morganatic Battenbergs will—at last—occupy a royal throne.]

Now Louis knew or was related to everybody. His younger brother Alexander, known as Sandro, became the ruling prince of Bulgaria. Another brother, Henry, called Liko, married Queen Victoria’s youngest daughter, Beatrice. To the future King George V, Louis could write chummily, “My dearest Georgie,” and sign himself, “Goodbye, my dear, old boy, Ever your affectionate shipmate, Louis.” Before long, Prince Louis was connected through his wife’s sister to the Hohenzollern dynasty; then, through another of his wife’s sisters, to the Romanovs. Victoria’s sister Irene of Hesse married Prince Henry of Prussia, the younger brother of Kaiser William II. Then Victoria’s youngest sister, Alix of Hesse, became engaged to Nicholas, the Russian tsarevich. Two years later, Captain Prince Louis of Battenberg, RN, and his wife attended the coronation of the Emperor Nicholas II and his wife, Empress Alexandra.

Louis never quite knew the extent to which this far-reaching network of family relationships helped or hurt his career. He liked to think that he had advanced on his own abilities. “I hate the idea of getting anything, as regards naval work, at the hands of the king, my uncle. [In fact, King Edward VII was his wife’s uncle.] I want to get it on my own merits, if I have any,” he wrote. For the most part, he seems to have succeeded. Year by year, he climbed the ladder, but there was no leaping ahead of others as Affie had done. Yet as much as Louis hated remarks that he was a “German princeling” or a “court favorite,” hard as he tried to adapt himself to the hearty “band of brothers” atmosphere of Victorian navy wardrooms, he
was
a princeling, born a German, and there
was
favoritism. He was married to one of Queen Victoria’s favorite granddaughters, and the sovereign was fond of him. “I am sure you must miss dear Ludwig, one of the kindest and best of husbands,” the queen wrote to Princess Victoria in 1887, using the German form of Louis’s name, a practice she often applied within the family. In 1891, the queen intervened directly to boost thirty-seven-year-old Louis up the ladder. Writing to the First Lord of the Admiralty, she declared, “She hopes and expects that Prince Louis of Battenberg, to whose merits everyone who knows the service well can testify, will get his promotion at the end of the year. . . . There is a belief that the Admiralty are afraid of promoting officers who are princes on account of the radical attacks of low newspapers and scurrilous ones, but the Queen cannot credit this. . . . She trusts there will be no further delay in giving him what he deserves.” Three months later, Louis was promoted.

Sometimes, Louis resisted royal wishes. In 1895, both the queen and the Prince of Wales urged him to accept the captaincy of the royal yacht. The queen had asked for this because she wanted to see more of her great-grandchildren, Bertie because he liked Louis’s company. Prince Louis, fearing that the appointment would mean the end of his regular navy career, gently refused.

In the mid-nineties, he became captain of a cruiser and then of two battleships. He was the Director of Naval Intelligence and, in 1904, was promoted to rear admiral and given command of a cruiser squadron.

Even across the Atlantic, Prince Louis attracted special attention. In 1906, Louis brought his squadron up Chesapeake Bay to Annapolis and was invited by Theodore Roosevelt to dinner at the White House. In New York, he stayed with Colonel John Jacob Astor. But Louis was a professional sailor, and he turned his voyage back across the Atlantic into a feat of seamanship. For seven days, seven hours, and ten minutes, Battenberg’s six coal-burning armored cruisers raced side by side 3,327 miles from Sandy Hook, New Jersey, to Gibraltar. The average speed of the squadron was an unprecedented 18½ knots and Battenberg’s flagship won by 300 yards. He became a vice admiral in 1907 and second in command of the Mediterranean Fleet, then Commander-in-Chief of the Atlantic Fleet. His reputation was bright; his ships and squadrons won cups for gunnery and smartness; his skills as a tactician and fleet commander were widely recognized. Ernle Chatfield, the wartime captain of the battle cruiser
Lion
and himself a future First Sea Lord, described Battenberg as “perhaps the outstanding officer on the flag list. He had a brilliant career at sea and was a great tactician and fleet handler. He was severe, but just.” A senior navy captain added, “There are literally hundreds of naval officers who would be quite ready to believe black was white if he issued a memo to that effect.” Lord Selbourne, a former First Lord, said simply, “He is the ablest officer the Navy possesses.”

Louis did not conceal his ultimate ambition and when, in December 1912, Churchill made him First Sea Lord, the appointment was widely praised. Fisher called him “more English than the English” and “the most capable administrator on the Admiral’s list,
by a long way.
” Lord Selbourne declared that “if his name had been Smith he would ere now have filled various high offices to the great advantage of the country, from which he has been excluded owing to what I must characterize as a stupid timidity. He has in fact nearly had his naval career maimed because he is a prince and because of his foreign relationships . . . a better Englishman does not exist or one whom I would more freely trust in any post in any emergency.” Churchill said simply to Asquith, “There is no one else suitable for the post.”

Personally, Winston Churchill and Louis Battenberg possessed similarities of background. Both were blue-blooded sons of younger sons of aristocratic houses: Louis descended from the Grand Dukes of Hesse, Churchill from the Dukes of Marlborough. Both were welcome and comfortable in society; both had risen to the top largely on merit. There the similarities faded. Churchill was only thirty-nine in 1914; Battenberg was sixty. Churchill had taken greater risks, broken rules, challenged the established order, and leaped ahead of his contemporaries. Battenberg had followed the rules in his steady climb up the promotion ladder. Nevertheless, Churchill respected Battenberg’s record and intelligence, while Prince Louis believed that he could advise and guide the mercurial politician, steering him away from trouble within and outside the navy.

For twenty prewar months, Battenberg and Churchill worked together. Prince Louis had an orderly mind and, unlike many British admirals, he understood the meaning of sea power; indeed, he had talked with Mahan. Churchill, on coming to the Admiralty, had—as instructed by Asquith and the Cabinet—created a War Staff, but it was a purely advisory body with no executive authority. As First Sea Lord, Battenberg attempted to nurture and enhance its role, appointing a series of intelligent, talented officers. Prince Louis also worked hard to define the mutually supporting roles of the British and French fleets, even though the two navies were bound merely by an “understanding.” Within the Admiralty, Battenberg never challenged Churchill’s supremacy. A constant flow of initiatives sprang from the fertile mind of the First Lord, and Battenberg settled into the role of adviser, judge, mediator, and facilitator. Rather than opposing Churchill directly, Battenberg tried to channel the First Lord’s thinking into paths of compromise, moderation, and conciliation. There were moments when he had to restrain Churchill from trampling too hard on naval tradition. One such instance involved the naming of new dreadnoughts in 1912. Traditionally, the First Lord proposed names and the king usually agreed. In 1913, Churchill proposed
Oliver Cromwell
for one of the five new 15-inch-gun superdreadnoughts being laid down that year. The king reacted violently to the suggestion that one of his ships should be named for the man who had cut off the head of his ancestor King Charles I. Churchill pushed hard until Battenberg cautioned the First Lord, “All my experience at the Admiralty and close intercourse with three sovereigns leads me to this: from all times the sovereign’s decisions as to names for H.M. ships [have] been accepted as final by all First Lords.” If Churchill persisted, he concluded, “the service as a whole would go against you.” Churchill backed down, and the new dreadnought became HMS
Valiant.