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A story is told of Oscar Browning, a Cambridge Don (generally regarded as an incurable snob), when he showed the Kaiser round his college. Afterwards he was surrounded by undergraduates who were anxious to know what he thought of “Kaiser Bill.” To whom he made reply: “He is one of the most charming Emperors I have ever met.”

I make no such boast, but as a cat may look at a king, so may a journalist and war correspondent and writer of books. I find it a curious thought that as an impecunious young man with no more than a few shillings in my pocket, I have banqueted with Kings, even with one Emperor who was Kaiser Bill himself (they were unaware of my presence), and on other occasions have had conversations with them at home and abroad. It never did me any good.

It was from Fleet Street that I was told off now and then to attend a royal banquet at Guildhall. Nothing could be more magnificent in colour or pageantry, with the guests in every kind of uniform, naval and military, wearing their orders and decorations, and the Lord Mayor and Aldermen in their robes of office, and old Gog and Magog looking down upon the treasures of gold plate glinting beneath the timbered roof and minstrels’ gallery of this ancient shrine of history. Into the courtyard had clattered a King’s escort of cavalry. Trumpets sounded. Music ushered in the turtle soup. From turtle soup to Waterloo port, the banquet was cheering to the soul and stomach of a young journalist who, as a rule, paid one and twopence for his lunch and a penny for the waiter. And there at the high table sat the German Kaiser, an impressive figure with his upturned moustaches, or Alfonso of Spain, or Manoel of Portugal, the boy king whose reign was brief. I remember that boy whom afterwards I met when he was a king in exile. He was in a merry mood and winked at his gentlemen in attendance and raised his glass to them from time to time, not at all overawed by all this splendour and ceremony.

The first king with whom I had any conversation was a wily one. It was King Ferdinand of Bulgaria. It was a chance meeting during the Balkan wars which were a prelude to the First World War. With some other war correspondents—English, French, and German—I was standing at one end of a little bridge across the river Maritza from which the Turks had retreated. Presently Ferdinand came up in a big car and halted at the bridge. Because of the weather I wore a fur cap and sheepskin coat like a Bulgarian peasant, and I suppose this costume—no disguise for my English look—caught the eye of the King, for he beckoned me to come up and speak to him. He was very civil, smiling down his long nose with little piggy eyes, and a cruel mouth. He asked what paper I represented and made some general remarks about the progress of the war. He spoke perfect English and I seem to remember that he had an English chauffeur. I remember he said, “The Turks are still up to their old tricks.” With one foot on the running-board of his car I felt perfectly at ease—perhaps too much at ease and too easy in my address to a reigning sovereign, whom I failed to call “Your Majesty” or anything of that kind beyond a simple “Sir.” But I felt that this little conversation might be useful to myself and my fellow-correspondents. We had been utterly frustrated and humiliated. Now I thought the censorship might be relaxed. He seemed very friendly and afterwards spoke to some of my friends, walking on to the bridge with us.... Three days later I was arrested by order of the King himself (who had spotted me in an area from which we were barred). Old Fox Ferdinand!

After young Manoel had lost his throne, I was received by the Queen Mother of Portugal, who thanked me for some help I had given to the release of many of her aristocrats who had been put into horrible prisons and treated like convicts. At the request of the Duchess of Bedford, Lord Lytton, and others I had gone out to Portugal, bribed my way into the prisons—it was rather like an adventure in the French Revolution—and afterwards wrote a series of articles in the Daily Chronicle which alarmed the Republican leaders, who wanted to retain England’s friendship. Anyhow, for some weeks came to my little house in Holland Street, Kensington, a number of these released prisoners to kiss my hands. A few weeks later they forgot all about me. But the Queen Mother pinned a little enamel cross to my breast. I have it still in a cabinet, and to this day I don’t know whether or not I was decorated with the third class of the Order of the Holy Ghost or some other minor honour of the former régime. This happened in a country house to which the ex-King arrived with a number of his gentlemen. He was not overwhelmed with grief for the loss of his crown. He was, indeed, in a larking mood, and when he went upstairs he leaned over the banisters and one by one knocked off the top hats of his gentlemen in attendance. Their laughter did not ring quite true.

King Edward VII had a horror of reporters but, again, as a cat may look at a king, I was close to him on many occasions and once helped to save his life, though he was unaware of it. It was when his horse, Minoru, won the Derby. The crowd went wild, and when the King went out to lead his horse in, they surged forward in a great mass of shouting and cheering humanity. A crowd on the move is a dangerous monster, and for a few minutes the King was in grave danger as those behind pushed forward those in front who could not stop. Some twenty of us linked arms and made a ring round the King, pressing backwards with all our strength, while the King’s detective—a tall Irishman—struck at the foremost faces with clenched fists. The King stood there panting a little. I saw the rise and fall of his chest. The Prince of Wales, afterwards George V, stood by his side deeply alarmed until his father retreated with dignity to the royal enclosure.

I went over to Ireland when Edward VII attended the races at Punchestown and Leopardstown and other Irish racecourses. Those were the gay days, with the nobility and gentry of Ireland and England crowding the stands and the paddocks. I remember a day when I met General Pole-Carew, who was in command of the arrangements for the King’s visit. I happened to know him and he greeted me cheerily. “Hulloa, young fellow! What are you doing here?” On the spur of the moment I told him a fairy-tale.

“I’m looking for the prettiest girl in Ireland.”

He looked interested and amused.

“Are you, indeed? Well, you’ve come to the right place and the right man. Wait here a minute.”

He led up a number of the most marvellous young beauties in their summer frocks, and having told them of my quest their Irish eyes were full of laughter.

Often I went to Windsor when there were Royal visitors at the Castle, and I think we “special correspondents” had a better time in the Castle inn than the crowned heads at the royal banqueting. There were Falstaffian scenes in our private room. One of us—J. D. Irvine of the Morning Post—had a rich voice and a dramatic gift with which he rendered arias from Pagliacci and other operas in the grand manner after regaling the company with ribald stories. Another—an artist on the Daily Graphic, before photography killed black-and-white drawing—could, with the assistance of his table napkin and an india-rubber face, convert himself into an exact likeness of Queen Victoria in her later years. As a shy young man—it took me many years to get over that shyness in spite of the rough and tumble of Fleet Street—I took no part in these entertainments except that of a laughing and sometimes blushing listener.

During those visits to Windsor I was an eye-witness of the royal shoots when the Kaiser and others went out with the guns. It seemed to me a massacre of birds rather than any form of sport. The best shot, I remember, was the Prince of Wales, afterwards George V. Alfonso of Spain looked bored and chilly in our English climate. The Kaiser, always dramatic, wore a Robin Hood hat with a feather in it. At a respectful distance I breathed the same air as these exalted ones in windy and generally pouring weather at Cowes.

Once I watched the arrival of the Kaiser at Kiel shortly before the First World War, when he was cheered by a group of English people who afterwards hated him. As I have mentioned elsewhere, my Aunt Kate, who was in service with the children of Queen Victoria, once had to chastise this august personage when he was a naughty boy at Windsor (that at least is our family tradition), and when I saw him on State visits I used to think with amusement, “Yes, my fine fellow, an aunt of mine once gave you a spanking.”

Not that I had any hatred of him. History records that at the eleventh hour he tried too late to prevent the war with urgent pleas to Nicholas of Russia not to allow the mobilisation of the Russian Army which would force him to mobilise the German Army, that last request being withheld from the Czar until the fatal decree was issued. After the war I was against the popular clamour of “Hang the Kaiser!” and annoyed some of my friends in Fleet Street by a letter to my paper, the old Daily Chronicle, deploring this outcry for vengeance.

I never had any interview with him, but years afterwards, before the Second World War, I sat at a luncheon-table in Berlin next to his only daughter—the Duchess of Brunswick—who was very charming and gay. She took a fancy to my wife and gave her a photograph of herself and her five handsome young sons. For a time she had been impressed by Hitler and the Nazi spirit of German youth, but then saw the terrible danger to which it was leading and the arrogance and folly of men like Ribbentrop who were abominably rude to her. When Neville Chamberlain flew to Munich she and her husband took hands and danced a few steps of joy like two bourgeois Germans because it seemed to be a promise of peace. So she told my wife. And during the lunch the Duke of Brunswick—a lineal descendant of George III—turned to me and spoke some grim words.

“It’s a dirty world, isn’t it?”

I had to agree with him when the world was plunged into a second World War before the wounds and agony of the first—“the War to end War” as it had been called—had not yet been healed in the bodies and souls of men.

I once caused King Alfonso of Spain to take shelter in a butcher’s shop. It was in the Isle of Wight where my son and I were on holiday. Alfonso was walking at a slow pace with the Empress Eugénie, a very old lady, who was leaning on his arm. We did not like to pass them and walked behind very slowly, also while I was touched by seeing a lady who was once a great beauty and Empress of France before the defeat at Sédan and the tragic years of exile. Lovely she had looked in many paintings and engravings, and now, when I saw her, she was a frail-looking, little old woman, lined and worn by age. King Alfonso did not like those two men walking behind him—he was always in danger of assassination—and suddenly dodged with Eugénie into the butcher’s shop and waited there until we had passed.

I saw him several times in San Sebastian and for the last time after he had lost his crown. That was in the dining-room of a small inn in France. After his lunch, the French innkeeper brought him a visitors’ book and asked him for his autograph, which he gave without a word. He took no notice of me as I stood up out of respect when he left the room. People who knew him as King said he was a gay and high-spirited fellow, passionate and boyish, but some of his own aristocrats were against him and he lost the loyalty of his people. “Well,” he said once, “I may not always be King of Spain but I hope to die a Spanish gentleman.”

I was one of the very first to learn of the death of King Edward when I went at midnight into the equerries’ entrance of Buckingham Palace after I had seen King George and Queen Mary drive out in tears, but that is a story I have told elsewhere. As I have said, Edward VII detested the very sight of a newspaper man, but by the wish of Queen Alexandra a select few of us were allowed into the room where he lay on his deathbed. He lay there more handsome I thought than in life. Death had given him a greater nobility and we few were hushed and awestruck as we stood in silence.

I was in the Abbey for the Coronation of King George V, thrilled by the splendour and solemnity of the scene within that ancient shrine of history where many ghosts walk—the ghosts of lion men and tiger men, of saints and sinners, of kings and princes, queens and princesses, heroes and villains, martyrs and traitors. The old Duke of Norfolk, black-bearded and broadshouldered like a medieval baron, was Garter-King-of-Arms, and at one moment when the King was being unrobed he had trouble with a shoulder knot. As Alexander cut the Gordian knot with his sword, the Duke pulled out a clasp-knife and solved his difficulty. The flash of the knife about the King’s throat looked a trifle alarming.

We had been in the Abbey at 7.30 in the morning, and to ease the pangs of hunger during this long ceremonial—we should not get out until after three in the afternoon—my wife had prepared some sandwiches for me which were neatly packed in a tin box. I laid them on the parapet of the place where I sat and left my seat to watch the entrance of the peeresses. When I came back my sandwiches had gone. But there was a lady who had been sitting next to me. It was Marie Corelli. I thought she had a sleek look, but I had no evidence to bring against her and any dark suspicion I entertained may have maligned her. So I went hungry.

I was one of four journalists who accompanied King George V on his Coronation tour, when all the pageantry of Scotland came out to greet the King. The roads were lined with Scottish territorials, who afterwards fought and fell in Flanders, the fine flower of Scotland’s youth. The people sang the old Jacobite songs. There was the skirl of bagpipes. Outside Edinburgh Castle the King was kept waiting for quite a time while the heralds made question and answer as to the credentials of this man who demanded entrance. In Stirling, in Perth, in other cities there were loyal addresses, and it was as we entered Perth that I had one of the best laughs of my life. I have told about this before, but perhaps one of the Ancients may be permitted to repeat a good story.

There were four Daimlers in the royal progress and we four journalists were in the last one. Curiosity had been aroused all along the way as to whom we might be and there were conflicting theories. Some thought we were foreign representatives. Others suggested that we were detectives. But as we waited while a loyal address was being delivered in Perth, two old Scots standing close to our car consulted with each other.

Said one with very blue eyes and a fringe of reddish hair under his chin:

“Who mun they be, Jock?”

The other gazed at us intently.

“Eh,” he answered solemnly, “they mun be the King’s barstards.”

I was tempted to pass this story up to the King, who I am sure would have roared with laughter, but I dared not take the risk.

When George V came out to France during the First World War he insisted upon going very near to the Front line, somewhat to the alarm of his generals. The young Prince of Wales, then a lieutenant in the Guards and familiar with trenches, dug-outs, shell holes and gunfire, was in attendance. On one morning it seemed as if the enemy had spotted the King and his company—I stood a yard or two away from him—for while he was looking across a ridge at the German lines shells began to fall rather close. He was asked to draw back a hundred yards or so, but the German gunners lengthened their range. This happened three times, but the King himself was quite unperturbed. On this visit His Majesty was good enough to receive us five war correspondents and spoke very friendly words to us, thanking us for our dispatches which he read every day. He shook hands with us and I noticed how small his hand was, like a boy’s, when for a moment I held it in mine.

One morning after the war I was summoned to Buckingham Palace for an investiture. A number of distinguished officers of the Army and Navy and a few others, of whom I was one, were to receive honours and we waited for our turn. The King came out after breakfast wiping his moustache after the morning cup of coffee. When my turn came I knelt down on a velvet cushion while he gave me the accolade and put the ribbon and cross of a Knight Commander of the British Empire round my neck. He spoke a few words:

“I am very glad to give this to you.”

It did me quite a lot of harm, that honour, as a literary man and journalist. Many of my former associates in Fleet Street (from which I had departed not long after the war) could not bear the thought of it. One of them was Hamilton Fyfe who had been my friend and now hated me, and I don’t think H. M. Tomlinson has ever quite forgiven me. But it has not made any difference to my own way of life nor instilled any poison into my pen—any taint of snobbishness. Titles mean very little nowadays when they are handed out in batches.

I spent a day with the Duke of York before he became George VI. It was when he went down to visit his boys’ camp in Suffolk, which was one of his special hobbies, paid for out of his privy purse. It was an experiment in sociology and, as he told me on the way down in his car, none of his friends thought it would work. Boys of all classes, from Eton and Harrow and from elementary schools in the East End of London and elsewhere, were brought together for this period of holiday camping, divided up into teams in which they were all mixed, feeding together, sleeping together, having sports together, without the slightest difference of class.

“It works marvellously,” he told me. “Eton boys chum up with Bermondsey boys, and Harrow boys with those from Hoxton or wherever it may be. There is no snobbishness or class consciousness on either side. The secret is in the team spirit and terrific competition between the teams in sports and games. Whatever class of boy can run fast in a relay race or pull hard in a tug-of-war he is cheered on by his fellows. Before the end of the holiday they are on the best possible terms of friendship.”

During that long day I was able to discover some of the characteristics of the young man who was destined, against his wish, to become King. He was very shy and confessed that he hated being stared at by crowds. He pulled down the blinds of the car when we passed through towns. He had an immense admiration for his brother, then Prince of Wales.

“He’s going to make a speech lasting nearly an hour,” he told me. “I couldn’t do that to save my life.”

He loved a joke and a good laugh, and he was happy and easy in the company of boys, as I saw throughout the day when he bathed with them, letting them throw water at him; lunched with them, leaving his own place to join them at one of the tables; and taking part with gusto in their sing-song round the camp fire.

Later in history, as King George VI, he came out to France at the beginning of the war when, for a time during the “phoney war,” I was a correspondent again, feeling like a man in a dream, or the ghost of myself, because all this was a dreadful repetition. I had seen it all before. Our young soldiers looked exactly like those who had sung “It’s a long, long way to Tipperary” in 1914. They were in the same places—Arras, Amiens, Lille, Monchy and villages around. They were drinking in the same old estaminets. Only one thing was different and that was all the difference between life and death. There was no thunder of artillery, no bursting shells, no swish of machine-gun bullets.

Sir John Gort, Commander-in-Chief, presented me and others to the King. He shook hands with me and laughed and said, “Back to the old job, Gibbs?”

But I saw nothing of the Second World War except the blitz over England, having come back just before Dunkirk. When the great attack was made on D-day I was out of it, being too old perhaps for that adventure, though I didn’t think so. Partial blindness had made it impossible before then.

Some little time before the Second World War I was invited to meet young King Leopold of the Belgians at the house of a friend in Brussels. It was at a time when there was a political crisis—there was a frequent political crisis—and in conversation with ordinary citizens in Brussels it seemed that the King himself was unpopular, though I couldn’t think why.

That evening in Brussels about a dozen people, including several ladies, were present when the King arrived—a handsome young man, quiet and unaffected, with a real charm of manner. He spoke English perfectly, and during the evening he beckoned me to come and sit next to him and entered into a conversation which lasted for nearly an hour.

At that time Hitler was becoming aggressive and the possibility of war was in many minds, and undoubtedly his.

“If it comes,” he said, “I think Belgian neutrality will be respected this time. That will be of advantage to France by safeguarding her left flank. Anyhow, I don’t think the Germans will attack through Belgium. They have a different plan of action. But I hope it won’t happen at all.”

After further talk about this he spoke some words which I noted down at the time.

“There won’t be a war anyhow until the late summer of ’39.”

He was right about that. He knew what was being talked about behind the scenes in Germany, but he was wrong—tragically wrong—about the inviolability of Belgium. All his sympathy was with Great Britain and France, and he had a profound admiration for England and, I thought, an exaggerated optimism regarding its future.

It was when he had launched into a philosophical discourse on the subject of world history. Obviously he had read a good deal and had thought over what he had read, with ideas of his own which he put modestly and with a smile.

“There are cycles of civilisation,” he said. “If one follows the story of the old civilisations one sees how each one of them ascended in a curve of power and prosperity until after a thousand years or so they reached the zenith and began to decline down the descending curve. England is beginning the upward climb and has at least a thousand years of progress until they reach their culminating point.”

That seemed to me altogether too hopeful a view and I told him that I thought we were well on the downward curve, but he would not agree to that and assured me with a laugh that England was only just beginning her ascent, according to Destiny.

He spoke always of England, but I think he must have been thinking of the British Empire, as we still called it then, and if one includes Canada and Australia and New Zealand in one’s vision of the future, his optimism does not seem stretched too far. But little old England, without the great Dominions, is visibly declining in power, having given up so many of her possessions, having yielded—perhaps too hastily—to the new ideals of self-determination and fanatical nationalism, having become ashamed, with a guilt complex, of her old Imperialism or what is now used as a reproach by her critics, including the Americans, her “colonialism.”

“Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

Is one with Nineveh and Tyre.

Judge of the nations, spare us yet,

Lest we forget, lest we forget.”

Kipling’s lines of pride and warning come back to my mind as I remember the prophecy made by the King of the Belgians. We are not yet one with Nineveh and Tyre.

Our conversation was interrupted and then ended by a visit from one of Leopold’s ministers, who brought news of some new political trouble. He was always in difficulty, as he told me, owing to the two races in his kingdom—the French-speaking Walloons and the Flemish folk.

“If I try to do something favourable to the Flemish,” he said, “the others hate me for it. And if I am fair to them I get into hot water with their political opponents. It’s all very difficult—and quite impossible to please everybody.”

He was the target of world criticism when he surrendered to the German Army after a brief spell of resistance when his troops were routed and outmanœuvred. He did only what we had to do before Dunkirk, and now no one holds it against his honour and courage. But after the war he had many critics in his own country and was forced to resign in favour of young Baudouin. I should like to have another talk with him. I found him charming and highly intelligent.

Now I come to think of it I did, like Oscar Browning, have the opportunity of meeting an emperor—“the most charming Emperor I have ever met”—being the only one. I had lunch with him, and sat next to his daughter. It was the Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, which we call Abyssinia. One had to speak French to him, and in the third person, which I found difficult.

Sa Majesté se trouve bien, j’espère?

He is a handsome man with his well-trimmed beard and moustache, jet black before it became silver, and the look of a saint and a hero, almost too good to be true. He was very amiable, but I found myself more at ease with his daughter, who spoke very good English. I ventured to tell her that she was remarkably like Princess Nefertiti, and she laughed and said, “I accept that as a compliment.” She was studying to be a nurse in a London hospital.

Since then I have had no encounters with kings or emperors, and have not even had the privilege of a cat except the one who was asked, “Pussy cat, pussy cat, where have you been?” To which she made answer, “I’ve been up to London to see the Queen.”