Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [38]
Not until almost two o’clock did the coffin descend into the crypt. The mourners filed by to take a last look at it—Wilhelm II visibly distraught—then adjourned for lunch in the castle. Roosevelt sat at the King’s table. M. Pichon sat at Queen Mary’s, and seemed satisfied that the honor of France had been restored.
THAT EVENING ROOSEVELT and his best English friend, Sir Cecil Spring Rice, were entertained to dinner at Brooks’s Club by Lord Haldane, the Liberal minister of war.
“Dear old Springy” was now fifty-one, and a senior ambassador in the British diplomatic corps. He was deeply versed in the affairs of Germany, Belgium, Russia, and the United States, as well as those of Turkey, Persia, and Japan. From his current posting in Stockholm, he was able to keep a close watch on German naval aggrandizement in the Baltic, and quailed at it even more than Lord Londonderry.
Roosevelt enjoyed discussing grand strategy with Spring Rice, but the presence of another guest at Haldane’s table diverted his attention. David Lloyd George, the merry-faced chancellor of the exchequer, was the most revolutionary force to erupt in Parliament since the days of Reform, eighty years before. His “People’s Budget,” enacted just one week before King Edward’s death, had plunged Britain into a governmental crisis so acute that Conservatives—Arthur Lee agitatedly among them—were predicting the collapse of its historic class system into socialism, or worse. Lloyd George was no socialist, but for years, as the Liberal Party’s radical evangelist, he had looked for a means of destroying the power of the House of Lords. He had found his weapon in a budget that proposed a supertax on all unearned income and inherited estates. Prime Minister Asquith’s government was now threatening a general election, in order to force through a Parliament Bill that would abolish the notion of an unelected upper house. If that happened, nearly a thousand years of landed privilege were to be swept away by the little Welshman who now sat breaking bread at Brooks’s.
Fond as Roosevelt was of Tories like Lee, he found himself more drawn to Lloyd George, Haldane, and other Liberals who had come to power during his own, increasingly progressive, second term as president. (One exception was Winston Churchill, whom he considered to be a boor and a turncoat, and refused to see.) He admired the laws they had passed to benefit workers, pensioners, aspiring homeowners, and small traders. They seemed to be irresolute in formulating foreign policy, but he suspected that Sir Edward Grey supported the new king’s desire for a stronger imperial presence overseas.
Five days after the funeral, he breakfasted with Sir Edward and showed him a draft of his proposed Guildhall speech. It was as provocative toward “Little Englanders” as his Cairo address had been toward Egyptian Nationalists. The foreign secretary approved every word, unconcerned that many members of the British establishment were bound to find it presumptuous.
BY THEN, ROOSEVELT had forsaken Whitelaw Reid’s luxurious hospitality (“Not exactly what I am used to at home”) and was staying with Edith and Alice in Arthur Lee’s town house on Chesterfield Street. Kermit and Ethel were off on a tour of Scotland. He could not escape so easily. Determined visitors kept ringing Lee’s doorbell: Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, the hunter Frederick Courtney Selous, Kogoro Takahira, the former Japanese ambassador in Washington, even Seth Bullock, the sheriff of Deadwood County, South Dakota. They were more congenial to him than the royals he had endured for the past seven weeks. “I felt if I met another king I should bite him!”
On 26 May he went to Cambridge University to accept an honorary LL.D. and found, to his pleasure, that undergraduates seemed to be in control there. A Teddy bear greeted him, sitting with outstretched paws on the ancient cobbles. At the end of the ceremony in the Senate House, a second, monstrous Teddy was winched down from the gallery to hang over his