"that the monarch should have no individual thoughts of his own about State and government, but should only think with the heads of his Ministers and only say what they tell him to say, is fundamentally wrong—is inconsistent with State rights and with the wish of the German people";
and he concluded by challenging the House to mention a single case in which the Emperor had acted unconstitutionally. None of these bickerings between Crown and Parliament went to the root of the constitutional relations between them, but they betrayed the existence of popular dissatisfaction with the Emperor, which in a couple of years was to culminate in an outbreak of national anger.
An occurrence calls for mention here, not only as a kind of harbinger of the "storm," but as one of the chief incidents which in the course of recent years have troubled Anglo-German relations. The incident referred to is that of the so-called "Tweedmouth Letter," which was an autograph letter from the Emperor to Lord Tweedmouth, First Lord of the British Admiralty at the time, dated February 17, 1908, and containing among other matters a lengthy disquisition on naval construction, with reference to the excited state of feeling in England caused by Germany's warship-building policy. The letter has never been published, but it is supposed to have been prompted by a statement made publicly by Lord Esher, Warden of Windsor Castle, in the London Observer, to the effect that nothing would more please the German Emperor than the retirement of Sir John Fisher, the originator of the Dreadnought policy, who was at the time First Lord of the Admiralty; and to have contained the remark that "Lord Esher had better attend to the drains at Windsor and leave alone matters which he did not understand." The Emperor was apparently unaware that Lord Esher was one of the foremost military authorities in England.
The sending of the letter became known through the appearance of a communication in the London Times of March 6th, with the caption "Under which King?"—an allusion to Shakespeare's "Under which king, Bezonian, speak or die"—and signed "Your Military Correspondent." The writer announced that it had come to his knowledge that the German Emperor had recently addressed a letter to Lord Tweedmouth on the subject of British and German naval policy, and that it was supposed that the letter amounted to an attempt to influence, in German interests, the Minister's responsibility for the British Naval Estimates. The correspondent concluded by demanding that the letter should be laid before Parliament without delay. The Times, in a leading article, prognosticated the "painful surprise and just indignation" which must be felt by the people of Great Britain on learning of such "secret appeals to the head of a department on which the nation's safety depends," and argued that there could be no question of privacy in a matter of the kind. The article concluded with the assertion that the letter was obviously an attempt to "make it more easy for German preparations to overtake our own." The incident was immediately discussed in all countries, publicly and privately.
Everywhere opinion was divided as to the defensibility of the Emperor's action; in France the division was reported by the Times correspondent to be "bewildering." All the evidence available to prove the Emperor's impulsiveness was recalled—the Kruger telegram, the telegram to Count Goluchowski, the Austrian Minister of Foreign Affairs, after the Morocco Conference, characterizing him as a "brilliant second (to Germany) in the bout at Algeciras," the premature telegram conferring the Order of Merit on General Stoessel after the fall of Port Arthur, and other evidence, relevant and irrelevant. Reuter's agent in Berlin telegraphed on official authority that the Emperor "had written as a naval expert."
On the whole, continental opinion may be said to have leaned in favour of the Emperor. Mr. Asquith, the English Prime Minister, at once made the statement that the letter was a "purely private communication, couched in an entirely friendly spirit," that it had not been laid before the Cabinet, and that the latter had come to a decision about the Estimates before the letter arrived.
All eyes and ears were now turned to Lord Tweedmouth, and on March 10th he briefly referred to the matter in the House of Lords. He received the letter, he said, in the ordinary postal way; it was "very friendly in tone and quite informal"; he showed it to Sir Edward Grey, who agreed with him that it should be treated as a private letter, not as an official one; and he replied to it on February 20th, "also in an informal and friendly manner." A discussion, in which Lord Lansdowne and Lord Rosebery took part, followed, the former—to give the tone, not the words of his speech—handing in a verdict of "Not guilty, but don't do it again," against the Emperor, and laying down the principle that "such a communication as that in question must not be allowed to create a diplomatic situation different from that which has been established through official channels and documents"; and Lord Rosebery, while he recognized the importance of the incident, seeking to minimize its effects by an attitude of banter. The treatment of the incident by the House of Commons as a whole gave considerable satisfaction in Germany, where all efforts were directed to showing malevolent hostility to Germany on the part of the Times.
Prince von Bülow dealt with the letter in a speech on the second reading of the Budget on March 24, 1908. After referring to the Union Internationale Interparlementaire, which was to meet in a few months in Berlin, and to the "very unsatisfactory situation in Morocco," he said:—
"From various remarks which have been dropped in the course of the debate I gather that this honourable House desires me to make a statement as to the letter which his Majesty the Kaiser last month wrote to Lord Tweedmouth. On grounds of discretion, to the observance of which both the sender and receiver of a private letter are equally entitled, I am not in a position to lay the text of the letter before you, and I add that I regret exceedingly that I cannot do so. The letter could be signed by any one of us, by any sincere friend of good relations between Germany and England (hear, hear). The letter, gentlemen, was in form and substance a private one, and at the same time its contents were of a political nature. The one fact does not exclude the other; and the letter of a sovereign, an imperial letter, does not, from the fact that it deals with political questions, become an act of State ('Very true,' on the Right).
"This is not—and deputy Count Kanitz yesterday gave appropriate instances in support—the first political letter a sovereign has written, and our Kaiser is not the first sovereign who has addressed to foreign statesmen letters of a political character which are not subject to control. The matter here concerns a right of action which all sovereigns claim and which, in the case of our Kaiser also, no one has a right to limit. How his Majesty proposes to make use of this right we can confidently leave to the imperial sense of duty. It is a gross, in no way justifiable misrepresentation, to assert that his Majesty's letter to Lord Tweedmouth amounts to an attempt to influence the Minister responsible for the naval budget in the interests of Germany, or that it denotes a secret interference in the internal affairs of the British Empire. Our Kaiser is the last person to believe that the patriotism of an English Minister would suffer him to accept advice from a foreign country as to the drawing up of the English naval budget ('Quite right,' hear, hear). What is true of English statesmen is true also of the leading statesmen of every country which lays claim to respect for its independence ('Very true'). In questions of defence of one's own country every people rejects foreign interference and is guided only by considerations bearing on its own security and its own needs ('Quite right'). Of this right to self-judgment and self-defence Germany also makes use when she builds a fleet to secure the necessary protection for her coasts and her commerce ('Bravo!'). This defensive, this purely defensive character of our naval programme cannot, in view of the incessant attempts to attribute to us aggressive views with regard to England, be too often or too sharply brought forward ('Bravo!'). We desire to live in peace and quietness with England, and therefore it is embittering to find a portion of the English Press ever speaking of the 'German danger,' although the English fleet is many times stronger than our own, although other lands have stronger fleets than us and are working no less zealously at their development. Nevertheless it is Germany, ever Germany, and only Germany, against which public opinion on the other side of the Channel is excited by an utterly valueless polemic ('Quite right').