Tweedmouth Affair
The Tweedmouth Affair was a political incident in the United Kingdom in March 1908, triggered by the conservative newspaper The Times . The Tweedmouth Affair is named after Edward Marjoribanks, 2nd Baron Tweedmouth , who was one of its central figures as the British Naval Minister was, and achieved relative fame above all as a symbolic milestone for the progressive deterioration of German-British bilateral relations in the last years before the First World War .
The Tweedmouth Affair exerted a direct influence on the British - and thus indirectly also on the German - naval policy of the following years in favor of a further increase in the already started arms spiral in the sense that it was the expansion of the British fleet and in particular the initiation of the dreadnought - Program, an armaments program that included the construction of new, uniformly armed capital ships . The matter also contributed to the deterioration of bilateral relations between the United Kingdom and the German Empire and, in particular, the public image of the German Kaiser, Wilhelm II , who was indirectly involved in the affair. In the latter context, the affair is often seen as a kind of prelude to the so-called Daily Telegraph affair that followed in the autumn of the same year , which once again made the Kaiser the focus of British criticism.
Occasion of Tweedmouth affair was as Tweedmouth letter (letter Tweedmouth) has become famous political document, one of the German Emperor Wilhelm II. Authored personal letter to the then British Minister of Marine Baron Tweedmouth, in which the German monarch tried on British naval policy To influence.
The history of the affair
The occasion of the Tweedmouth letter was the discussion of the naval budget in the British House of Commons from January to March 1908. Large parts of the ruling Liberal Party gathered around the ministers David Lloyd George and Lewis Vernon Harcourt, 1st Viscount Harcourt , in the debate Called for a reduction in the fleet budget in order to be able to use the funds thus freed up in favor of economic investments and an expansion of social legislation. Against this demand, the right-wing press and the conservative MPs used the new German naval law, which had been passed shortly before, in November 1907, into the rhetorical field. The German Kaiser, who followed the British debate attentively as an avid naval enthusiast, felt this development, and in particular Viscount Esher's comment in The Times , that the Germans, and in particular he (the Kaiser), of the dismissal of Admiral John Arbuthnot Fisher , the reorganizer of the British fleet in the years after the turn of the century, would be delighted to take action and intervene in the discussion themselves.
The course of the affair
Wilhelm's letter to Tweedmouth
The public debate in Great Britain led William II to take a rash step. At the end of February 1908 (the exact day can no longer be determined) he wrote a nine-page handwritten letter to Lord Tweedmouth, who at that time held the office of First Lord of the Admiralty . The emperor believed that by means of a personal letter he would have to convince the English naval minister once again of his love for peace and the purely defensive intentions of the German naval armaments and thus be able to influence Tweedmouth in favor of a "slimmed-down" fleet budget. With this in mind, he expressly denied in his letter that Germany was pursuing the goal of challenging British maritime superiority through its naval construction.
Tweedmouth - flattered by the rare honor of having received such attention as minister from a foreign sovereign - responded promptly and, with the consent of Sir Edward Gray , then Secretary of State, enclosed the new Naval Estimates , the even Parliament had not yet seen it at the time. In addition, Tweedmouth, enraptured by the honor of the imperial letter and put into a kind of “childish excitement”, peddled it in his circle of friends and in his London clubs. The result was that the press soon found out about the matter. In view of the emperor's disparaging remarks about Lord Esher, a close friend of the English king, and especially out of consideration for Foreign Minister Gray, whose foreign policy was also very well received by the conservatives and who, through his approval, to send the emperor the naval estimates , had become vulnerable, most newspapers, in agreement with the government and the opposition, agreed to treat the matter discreetly.
The Tweedmouth letter was the result of a tactic that Wilhelm II and Bernhard von Bülow had been pursuing for several years. They used every opportunity to convince the British, privately or publicly, that the German naval program contained no hostile intentions towards Britain, although the German embassy in London repeatedly pointed out that it was precisely these constant denials that only increased suspicions and mistrust.
“Under Which King?” - The Times gets the Tweedmouth affair rolling
The right-wing newspaper Times eventually decided to use the matter in support of the British naval armaments it had championed and as a warning against the policies of the German Empire. On March 6th, she published a letter from her correspondent Colonel Repington, under the headline "Under Which King?" Stated that the Kaiser had written to Tweedmouth and wanted to influence it in the interests of Germany. The Times publisher Buckle and its editor Chirol also supported Repington's attack in an accompanying editorial.
They argued that William II would never have bothered to write a letter to Tweedmouth if he had had anything other than exclusively German interests in mind. If William II had anything to say to Great Britain, they argued, that amounted to a fair arms deal, official channels would be available to him for communication with the British government. They also taught readers that no personal relationship could excuse deviating from regular methods and resorting to private influence. The lesson that Great Britain has to learn from this incident is clear: “If there was any doubt before about the meaning of German naval expansion, none can remain after an attempt of this kind to influence the Minister responsible for our Navy in a discretion favorable to German interests, an attempt, in other word, to make it more easy for German preparations to overtake our own. "
It was assumed that the imperial letter intended to lull Great Britain into safety so that the German deep - sea fleet could catch up more quickly, catch up with the British navy or even overtake it, and then attack the weakened enemy. It was the intention of the emperor to create a favorable starting position for this plan by lulling the British into safety through treacherous appeasements such as the Tweedmouth letter and thus enticing them not to arm themselves for the German attack planned for the future in order to make them easier victims later.
England was now - according to the conclusion of the Times - obliged to ensure adequate rearmament and entitled to demand the publication of the correspondence. For the week that followed, the Times kept the discussion going, primarily by printing letters to the editor sharing its point of view.
The press coverage of the Times campaign
The Times attack drew some sensational headlines, but no anti-German campaign emerged in its wake. On the contrary, almost all newspapers accused the Times of stirring up a new panic by violating private correspondence and thus wanting to unnecessarily cloud the bilateral relationship. Of the fifteen metropolitan and provincial newspapers that intervened in the Times-kicked off debate, only two conservative papers - the Evening Standard and the Newcastle Chronicle - supported the Times' request for the correspondence to be published. The Chronicle called Wilhelm "so dangerous a personality in Europe", but he and the Standard emphasized in their criticism rather the impulsive character of the emperor and, unlike the Times, did not assume any malicious manipulative intentions of the monarch.
The rest of the newspapers, most notably the radical liberal press, initially focused on harsh and unreserved condemnation of the Times. Although most newspapers conceded that Wilhelm had again committed one of his typical indiscretions and that it would have been wiser to tread the traditional diplomatic channels, no one doubted that he was acting with good intentions and in the interests of improving German-British relations would have. In the liberal press the hope for an arms limitation agreement was quite emphatic. The picture, however, which was also drawn up here by conservative organs of the emperor, was that of an albeit unconventional, yet capable statesman who would never use such a cheap trick as manipulating a British minister.
The liberal newspapers
Liberal newspapers interpret Wilhelm's action as an act of recklessness, which is unfortunately exploited by malevolent contemporaries to propagate their own goals. For the Daily News , their allegations simply belonged in the gutter, the place for “all such gutter publications”. She accused the Times of cannibalizing information improperly obtained and of completely unsubstantiated speculation. The attempt to accuse a cabinet member of high treason and the monarch of a friendly state with an infamous bribery attempt was fortunately a rarity in the history of British journalism. The radical liberal weekly Nation particularly accused the Times of fraudulent machinations in the elimination of political opponents: “There is a special cruelty and meanness in characterizing a communication which was never intended to see the light ... The Times is no longer an organ of first-rate importance in this country, but in Germany it has a character for influence far beyond its true status here. "
The Daily Chronicle called the emperor an "unconventional sovereign" whose temperament should be restrained, but which should not be accused of malicious intent. With regard to the attempted influence assumed by Wilhelm II, the naval correspondent of the Chronicle said "The Times in its vehement Teutophobia has magnified a slight incident an distorted it out of all resemblance to the acute facts."
The Westminster Gazette also agreed that it was inappropriate for any sovereign to correspond with the minister of another power. The German Kaiser was often unconventional in his methods and, if he broke with tradition, one could in no way assume that he was guilty of any Machiavellian attack on the innocence and independence of his neighbors: the nature of the Kaiser, so the nation is well known. He may be an open and impulsive speaker and writer, but it is obvious that he has been trying for many months to improve political relations between Germany and Great Britain. The Daily Telegraph was convinced that the Kaiser was trying to establish a friendly and lasting arrangement with the United Kingdom and saw how much a naval agreement would serve that end. "We do not believe that the German Emperor could be guilty of so treacherous a machination against his country, apart from the bucolic simplicity and gaucherie of the methods employed ... it is not improbable, indeed, that the use, which is being made of the letter does the German Emperor a very grave injustice. "
The conservative newspapers
Even conservative papers could not follow the explanations of the Times and took the emperor under protection. The Morning Post took the view that the imperial letter could only have been written "in consequence of a misapprehension, natural enough, of the peculiar position occupied by a British Minister". It should be left with the diplomatic channels to familiarize the German monarch with the nature of ministerial responsibility in Great Britain. The Yorkshire Post and Morning Leader expressed themselves similarly : They criticized William's tactlessness and imprudence, but at the same time weakened this rebuke by supplementing the rebuke with praise (for example by calling William a "capable statesman") in order to make it sound more conciliatory to let.
There were even bitter accusations from the jingoist camp. The Daily Mail described the Times allegations as "neither more or less than a mare's nest" and described the entire episode as a comedy. The star accused the Times of a "warmaking conspiracy" with the intention of stirring up hatred between Germany and England.
The political echo of the Times article
The British House of Commons also criticized the malicious and sensational tone of the Times article. The matter of the Tweedmouth letter was treated with great tact by the parliamentarians. Even the opposition did not try to make party political capital out of it. If or insofar as the Times coup represented an attempt to create bad blood between the two nations, it failed completely. The question as to why the British press reacted so calmly and even negatively to Wilhelm's attempt at manipulation in March 1908 can be explained by the political framework conditions. The assurances of peace during his state visit to England in 1907 and the hopes of the British for a disarmament agreement in the summer were still too firmly rooted, as the cautious British reactions to the newer German naval amendment in November 1907 had already shown, to be addressed by an incident played up by the Times to destroy. By October 1908 - with the failure of the arms talks in Kronberg and the Daily Telegraph affair - there was great disillusionment.
Consequences of the Tweedmouth Affair
The immediate consequence of the Tweedmouth Affair was that the German-British maritime arms race, which was supposed to be ended, continued in an even stronger form from spring 1908. The Tweedmouth Affair was partly responsible for this development inasmuch as the Liberal government found it increasingly difficult to oppose the conservative demands for further armament after the Tweedmouth Affair and the public echo. Chancellor of the Exchequer Asquith accordingly promised opposition leader Balfour in March 1908 that the government would initiate a program to build dreadnought capital ships to ensure British superiority in this class of ship.
Esher emphasized the direct connection between the emperor's interference and the implementation of further rearmament in parliament: "The event of the past few days has been a success. Which never would have been obtained but for the Kaiser's letter. So good has come out of evil , if evil it was. " Repington also stated in his memoirs that the Times wanted to achieve this through their approach (Repington, Vestigia, p. 291) and in an article of March 12th he called Wilhelm's interference a "tonkium" which the Edward VII ministers . cured from the wrong track of pacifism and led to a sensible policy of strength.
In the British political establishment, Wilhelm’s interference in domestic affairs also intensified general unease towards the Kaiser and Germany.
The Tweedmouth Affair in the Judgment of Historians
The historian Rhodri Williams claimed in his book "Defending the Empire" that the Tweedmouth letter "agitated public opinion against Germany and fueled suspicion of German policy". The historian Paul Kennedy expressed himself in a similar way in his standard work The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism . In his study on the genesis of the English "Wilhelm image", Reinermann attaches a rather subcutaneous importance to the Tweedmouth affair: Despite the affair in Great Britain in 1908, Wilhelm initially remained an extremely popular figure. Only in retrospect, under the impression of the First World War and the associated drastic negation of the image of Wilhelm, was the matter retrospectively put into a dark light: Only years later were broad sections of the English public who were still open to the Kaiser despite the 1908 affair , under the impression of the following, came to a gloomy interpretation of the matter.
Documents
The original of the Imperial Tweedmouth letter is kept under the identifier "MS Eng hist c264" in the archives of the Bodleian Library (Department: Special Collections and Western Manuscripts) at Oxford University .
See also
literature
- RJ Marjoribanks: The Marjoribanks Journal # 4, p. l. 1996.
- AJA Morris: The Scaremongers: The Advocacy of War and Rearmament 1896-1914 . Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1984.
- Reinermann, Lothar: Der Kaiser in England , Cologne 2001 (pp. 325–332). (Dissertation)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Morris scaremongers, p 141 ff.
- ^ The Marjoribanks Journal # 4, 1996
- ↑ Bülow Memoirs, Vol. 2, p. 353 ff.
- ^ Morris, Radicalism, p. 134
- ^ Daily News March 7th
- ^ Morning Post, March 7, 1908
- ^ Daily Mail, March 7th
- ↑ Manchester Guardian March 7, 1908
- ^ Esher, Journals Vol. 2, p. 295
- ↑ Morris: Racidalism, p 135; Marder: Dreadnought Vol. 1., p. 142, Fisher: Fear God, Vol. 2, p. 163
- ↑ Defending, pp. 92, 160 f.
- ↑ p. 443f.