Both men were a little downcast when Collingwood reiterated the difficulties inherent in carrier operations in the western area of the Gulf of Spain. His ships would be liable to attack from land-based aircraft based in Nuevo Granada to one side, and Cuba in his rear. Moreover, the navies of the Triple Alliance would hardly be likely to grant a Royal Navy carrier task force free passage into their waters!
War Plan Anson contemplated air strikes on enemy ships at sea and ports, blockade operations, commerce raiding and actively seeking battle with enemy warships. Attempts to conduct full scale war games to establish the practicality of the Royal Navy providing continuous, or in any way meaningful air support to land operations conducted more than a few miles from the sea had, to Cuthbert Collingwood’s chagrin, never been conducted.
The view in both London and Philadelphia was that such exercises would have been construed as provocations by the Spanish!
In any event, with the big carriers only now commissioning, the value of such evolutions employing smaller, or ‘make believe’ carriers would have been nominal.
That was not to say the Collingwood and his staff had not mounted small scale exercises, and extended ‘table wars’ in secret; but that was not the same thing as testing theory against reality at sea with actual ships and men. Moreover, Cuthbert Collingwood was in little doubt that the first time one of the new task forces – built around one of the Ulysses class fleet carriers – went into action, would come to be universally regarded as a seminal moment in naval history.
Sadly, he suspected that moment would not long be delayed.
Chapter 12
Sunday 9th April
St James’s Palace, Pall Mall, London
His Majesty George the Fifth, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of His Other Realms and Territories King, Head of the Commonwealth, and Defender of the Faith, had, as was his custom, risen early that morning and spent much of the last two hours mentally preparing himself for the conversation he was going to have with his cousin, twice removed, the forty-four year old heir presumptive – history taught Teutonic dynasties to never take the votes of the twenty-four Electors, the disorderly mob of kings and princes of the Empire for granted – to the Imperial Crown of the Germanies.
He glanced again at the big clock on the wall over the hearth.
In a few minutes the Prime Minister would be speaking to the Empire.
Later that afternoon, it would be his turn.
At this very moment his advisors were finalising the text of his own address, to be delivered from the studios of the Empire Broadcasting Corporation at Hampstead…
It seemed that Crown Prince Wilhelm’s father was ‘indisposed’ which, unfortunately, unlike the ‘indisposition’ of a supposedly key member of the establishment in London, the seat of a slowly maturing constitutional monarchy since the days of the Glorious Revolution of the latter seventeenth century, meant that there was an almost complete vacuum of power in Berlin, at the very moment that the crisis deepened and potentially, the great powers stumbled ever-closer to the edge of the abyss.
So, whereas, in an ideal World, if such a thing had ever existed, the King would be speaking directly to the grumpy old man he had regarded as an eccentric, bad-tempered uncle in his youth; instead, he was waiting to be put through to the Kaiser’s brilliant, intemperate, charming, meddlesome eldest surviving son. On the plus side the two men had had early careers in common, as the younger sons of families apparently well-stocked with spare male heirs, they had been allowed to pursue naval careers. Unfortunately, that was about all they had in common.
Whereas, George, over ten years the Crown Prince’s senior had enjoyed a long and fulfilling naval career, met and married the love of his life to whom he had been, and would be faithful unto death; Wilhelm had had his career abruptly curtailed in his late twenties, and – even if one was being exceptionally charitable about it – compensated for this disappointment, by setting out to bed every aristocratic, and numerous less well-bred women, in Europe, marrying and divorcing two royal princesses by the time he reached his mid-thirties. In Berlin they gossiped that the man had bastard sons and daughters in every principality of the German Empire!
And as for politics…
King George had treated with Whigs, Conservatives and ‘People’s Christian’ and whichever kind of ‘democrats’ – Liberal, Social, Popular, Syndicalist – his people had cared, as was their right, to place in power in the Palace of Westminster with equal, ineffable aplomb. True, he had offered advice, and what support he might at times of crisis but he had never, ever taken sides. In Germany, such a regal ‘hands-off’ approach was regarded as the signature of crippling weakness, contemptible, in fact.
The door opened and the Queen entered the room overlooking the ancient Friary Court. She smiled tight-lipped and took a seat beside the desk at which her husband sat, trying very hard not to fidget and scowl as the long wait for the phone to ring continued, seemingly indeterminably.
The royal couple had never liked Buckingham Palace, where, for short, painful periods of their marriage George had had to put up with the Old King, his not entirely dearly remember father, who, egged on by his dear and only vaguely lamented mother, had always treated Eleanor like a tradesman’s daughter.
Well, Bertie had put a stop to that nonsense when, unexpectedly, the crown had been placed upon his – at the time – somewhat befuddled head!
Prior to his accession, courtesy of the worst Fenian outrage in modern times some fifteen years ago, which had, at a stroke, murdered all five men – the his father, the King, his elder brother and three nephews – in the royal line above him, he, Eleanor and their brood of then little-known princes and princesses, had ‘camped out’ at St James’s Palace on their rare ‘duty calls’ to London. Until then, other than for royal weddings, funerals and occasionally, to make up the numbers at state banquets and bun fights to celebrate this or that visit by miscellaneous emperors or potentates, they had lived – blissfully – apart, ‘semi-detached’ as the press would have it, from most of the Royal Family, and had had as little as possible to do with ‘the Court’. George had pursued his naval career and in the decade before the assassination of the Old King, they had lived in sublime, relative anonymity in rural Hampshire, with the notable of exception of that happy interlude when Eleanor and the younger children had joined George in New England during HMS Lion’s first commission, attached to the Atlantic Fleet at Norfolk, Virginia.
Originally, Henry VIII had built St James’s Palace as a purposefully modest royal residence, by then, presumably, wearying of the splendour and the oppressive formality of his great palaces at Whitehall, Hampton Court, Richmond and elsewhere.
Eleanor maintained that ‘the old monster must have wanted a quiet love nest where he could have his wicked way with Ann Boleyn!’
Her husband speculated that his infamous predecessor’s motivations might have been a tad subtler, although as in most things, he was loath to gainsay his wife, whose judgement in so many things was infallible. For his part he was fond of telling visitors that the palace was built on the site of a leper hospital!
The palace, constructed in Tudor style in red brick, was arranged around several courtyards: Colour Court, the Ambassador's Court and the Friary Court, with its most memorable external feature being its eighteenth century gatehouse. Not least among St James’s recommendations to the newly crowned King and Queen back in the early 1960s, had been that many of the key members of the Royal Household actually had offices within it; a major consideration given that from the outset both George and Eleanor had been preoccupied with bringing the Monarchy, the Royal Household, Parliament and the People closer together, and somehow, the layout and existing usage of St James’s Palace had seemed ideal.