Colonel Roosevelt (14 page)

ROOSEVELT EMERGED FROM
his train at London’s Victoria Station early on Monday, 16 May, with a band of black crape round his silk topper and another band around his left coat sleeve. A solemn and silver-bearded gentleman bade him welcome. It was Whitelaw Reid, whom five years before he had appointed American ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. Another familiar figure pushed forward, lean, long-faced, unmistakably English: his old friend Arthur Lee, M.P. Both men were wealthy, with stately homes in the country, and both were competing to introduce Roosevelt to the
ne plus ultra
of British society.

Reid had won the first round, since protocol demanded that the special ambassador stay in his official residence, Dorchester House. But Roosevelt planned to escape from that gilded prison as soon as the funeral obsequies were over. He preferred the self-effacing Lee to Reid, who, like so many former press barons, was inclined to be pompous.

For the next six or seven days, he had to behave with extreme formality. He was assigned a royal carriage, a military attaché, two British aides-de-camp, six grenadier guards, and even a bugler, to herald his comings and goings. Reid explained that he must make calls at all the noble houses and ranking embassies in London, and be at home when his calls were returned. He should be particularly solicitous toward the monarchs and ministers who had entertained him in Europe. On Thursday, he would take his place among the grandest of these grandees at a pre-funeral banquet in Buckingham Palace, and on Friday, join them in following Edward VII’s cortège to Windsor Castle.

Although his special status would lapse after that, Roosevelt found himself committed to a packed schedule of interviews, reunions, lunches, teas, and dinners that would fill his every waking hour for the next three weeks. In short, he would see little of Edith and even less of his children. In view of Kermit’s apparent resolve to mourn Edward in a panama hat, that was probably just as well.

First of all, homage had to be paid to the new king. Roosevelt breakfasted at the embassy, then proceeded with Reid to Marlborough House, where George V awaited them.

His Majesty turned out to be a fortyish retired naval officer, simple and unaffected in manner. He thanked Roosevelt for making a salutary speech at Cairo University, and wondered if “something of the kind, but stronger,” could be said in London. Roosevelt offered to do so at a reception planned for him in the Guildhall, at the end of the month. But it would be necessary to get the approval of Sir Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary. The King gratefully kept talking for almost an hour, and introduced him to Queen Mary and other members of the royal family.

Roosevelt’s laryngitis was still bad enough that he spoke with occasional gasps. For the first time in his life he obeyed a royal command, and went to
Edward VII’s personal throat doctor for treatment. As a result,
he was hard-pressed to make his appointments with other heads of state before lunch.

His “at home” sojourn that afternoon offered little respite. No sooner had he climbed Reid’s marble stairway to deal with his correspondence than a footman portentously announced, “The King of Norway is below, sir.”

Roosevelt threw down his pen in mock annoyance. “
Confound these kings; will they never let me alone!”

HIS LAST VISITOR
of the day was royalty of another sort. If Alice Roosevelt Longworth was no longer, at twenty-six, the scintillating “Princess Alice” she had been before her marriage, she had matured into a more complex, richly eccentric personality. Always exquisitely dressed, in rembrandt hats and fabrics that complemented her long-lashed, amethyst eyes, she now sported a cigarette holder, and knew just when to wave it, as she smokily discharged one of her patented sarcasms. In contrast to her sedate half sister, Alice was a born socialite, happiest under the chandeliers of the very rich. However, she also had a yen for rough, male political parlors—as her father had, in that never-mentioned period when he was married to the original Alice.

She floated into Dorchester House an hour before midnight, fresh from a transatlantic steamer, bringing a gale of Washington gossip with her. Alice’s chat amounted to primary information, for she was a favorite of President Taft, and the wife of one of his closest associates, Congressman Nicholas
Longworth of Cincinnati. She clearly saw that her father’s return home was going to cause a crisis of leadership in the Republican Party. At all costs he must stay aloof from politics—unless in his heart he wanted to be president again. Alice certainly wanted that in
her
heart. She had buried what she called “
a voodoo” in the White House garden.

“A
BORN SOCIALITE, HAPPIEST UNDER THE CHANDELIERS OF THE VERY RICH
.”
Alice Roosevelt Longworth, ca. 1910
.
(photo credit i3.1)

FOR THE REST OF THE WEEK
Roosevelt went about his business, while hundreds of other envoys fulfilled similar obligations. Name after titled name crowded his calendar: the Princess Royal, the Duke and Duchess of Connaught, King George of Greece, Prince and Princess Christian, the Duke of Norfolk, Princess Henry of Battenberg, the Marquess of Londonderry, the
Duchess of Argyll, Lords Lansdowne, Clarendon, and Cromer. More to his taste was an interview with Sir Edward Grey—“
one of the finest fellows I ever met.”

Emerging one morning from Buckingham Palace with Henry White, he was pounced on by Wilhelm II. “My dear friend, I am so glad to have arrived in time to see you.… I have an hour to spare, and we can have a good talk.” Roosevelt glanced at his watch and said that, unfortunately, he was not quite as free. “I’ll give you twenty minutes.”

His bluntness was so unlike the reverence Wilhelm was used to that it beguiled rather than offended. The Kaiser settled for as long as he would stop, and was rewarded with
inside information on what members of the House of Lords felt about Germany’s naval program. Roosevelt was uninhibited in saying what he thought of scaremongers like Lord Londonderry: “No more brains than those of a guinea-pig.” Wilhelm quoted this remark in a cable to Bethmann-Hollweg.
It did not seem to cross his mind that the Colonel might be just as frank in talking about
him
to British leaders.

By late Thursday afternoon, as Roosevelt sat at tea in Dorchester House with a large company of English and American guests, he was beginning to show symptoms of explosive effervescence, as always in periods of intense activity. “
I’m going to a Wake this evening,” he wheezed, chortling. Heads turned in shock as he repeated, “I’m going to a Wake at Buckingham Palace!”

“
I HARDLY KNOW
what else to call it,” he wrote afterward, in a private account of his service as a diplomat. At one protocol level, the “wake,” hosted by George V, was a gathering of some seventy special ambassadors, many of them royal; at another, it amounted to a dinner in honor of Wilhelm II, the senior monarch present.

In contrast to the star-studded uniforms on display, Roosevelt wore what the State Department considered appropriate for a representative of the New World: a swallow-tailed black suit with black studs in his boiled shirt-front. Minus the studs and plus a top hat, it would do him as well at the funeral. For all the severity of his appearance and carefully solemn expression, the satirist in him saw that the next twenty-four hours were going to be rich in comedy.

He was buttonholed at once by the self-styled “Tsar” of Bulgaria, who was a pariah at the party for having recently declared his country an empire. The bearded former prince was triumphant after
denying Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary transit rights through his
wagon-lit
on the train they had shared from Vienna to Calais. As a result, the archduke had been forced to alight at station stops whenever he got hungry, and march furiously down the platform to the dining car.

Wilhelm II did not find this as funny as Roosevelt did. Seeing him in conversation
with the Tsar, he walked up and thrust himself between them. “Roosevelt, my friend, I want to introduce you to the King of Spain.
He
is worth talking to.”

That proved to be the case, although there was a chilly moment when Alfonso XIII said, “I have admired your career, and I have also admired your military career, though I am sorry that your honors should have been won at the expense of my countrymen.” Evidently, memories of the Spanish-American War still rankled south of the Pyrenees. The King went on to express gratification over the Vatican incident, saying that Catholicism in Spain had begun to encroach intolerably upon civilian life, and was causing an anarchist backlash, not unlike that in the Balkans. “I assure you that much though I object to the anarchists, I do not regard them as more dangerous to my country than are the ultraclericals. Of the two, I mind the extreme right even more than I mind the extreme left.”

Roosevelt had been saying the same thing, in almost identical words, for at least ten years, and was proportionately impressed.

His solemnity was further strained when Stéphen Pichon, the French minister of foreign affairs, approached him for a republican
tête-à-tête
.