Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 1.djvu/616

 fall from power in June 1905 he continued to exchange friendly visits with him during his later sojourns in the French capital. M. Clemenceau, who became prime minister in October 1906, and held office for nearly three years, was reared in Gam- betta's political school, members of which had always interested the king since his pleasant meetings with their chief. M. Clemenceau was the king's guest at Marien- bad on 15 Aug. 1909. Political principles counted for little in his social intercourse. He was still welcomed with the same cordiality by representatives of the fashion- able royalist noblesse as by republican statesmen. A modest estimate was set on his political acumen when in informal talk he travelled beyond safe generalities. An irresponsible suggestion at a private party in Paris that the entente ought to be con- verted into a military alliance met with no response. Nor was much heed paid to some vague comment which fell from his lips on the intricate problem of the relations of the European powers on the north coast of Africa. But every- one in France appreciated his French sym- pathies and acknowledged his personal fascination.

His cruises to the Mediterranean during these years took him to Algiers in 1905, Mediterranean and to Athens and the Greek cruises, 1905, archipelago in April 1906 ; at 19 ^ 6 '1907, Athens, where he was the guest of his brother-in-law, King George I, he witnessed the Olympic games. In 1907 he landed from his yacht at Cartagena to meet the young king of Spain, who had married his niece the year before. Twice in the course of the same journey he also met the king of Italy, first at Gaeta (18 April), and secondly on the return journey by rail outside Rome (30 April). Two years later (1909) he enjoyed similar experiences, meeting the king of Spain at San Sebastian and Biarritz, and the king of Italy at Baiae ; then he also visited Malta and Sicily, besides Pompeii and other environs of Naples. In April 1908 he cruised in the North Sea, and he visited in state the three northern courts of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, In Denmark he was a familiar figure. To the new kingdom of Norway, where his son-in-law reigned, he went for the first time. At Stockholm he had been the frequent guest of earlier Swedish kings while he was Prince of Wales.

During a single year, 1905, the German emperor and the king failed to exchange In the Baltic. hospitalities. Germany lay outside the ubiquitous route of his pleasure cruises, Temporar and circumstance s deterred the estrangement kin g fr m deliberately seeking from the personal intercourse with his Slw. nephew. For the continued friction between Germany and England the king had no sort of responsibility. But the emperor was for the moment inclined to credit his uncle with want of sympathy, and there followed one of those short seasons of estrangement to which their intimacy was always liable. Reports of unguarded remarks from the royal lips in the course of 1905 which reached the emperor from Paris had for him an unfriendly sound. Meanwhile the German press lost no opportunity of treating the king as a declared enemy of Germany. The king's voyages were held to be shrewd moves in a diplomatic game which sought German humiliation. The meetings of the king with the king of Italy were misconstrued into a personal attempt on the king's part to detach Italy from the triple alliance. The interview at Gaeta in April 1907 was Misappre- especially denounced as part hensionsin o f the king's Machiavellian design of an elaborate coalition from which Germany was to be excluded. Adverse comment was passed on his apparent desire to avoid a meeting with the emperor. He was represented as drawing a cordon round Germany in the wake of his foreign journeys, and there were even German politicians who professed to regard him as a sort of Bismarck who used the velvet glove instead of the iron hand. He was deemed capable of acts of conciliation to suit his dark purposes. It was pretended that, with a view to soothing German irritation for his own objects, he by his own hand excised from the official instructions to the English delegates at the Hague conference (June 1907) his ministers' orders to raise the question of a general reduction of armaments. Serious French publicists well knew the king to be innocent of any such wiles. French caricaturists, who made merry over his * fievre voyageuse,' only echoed the German note in a satiric key. They pictured the king as a * polype Europeen ' which was clutching in its tentacles all the sovereigns of Europe save the German emperor, without prejudice to the international situation.

The German fancies were complete delusions. The king had no conception of any readjustment of the balance of European power. There was no serious quarrel