Sometimes he despaired of remembering that this man was king ! Prime Minister Austen Chamberlain kneaded his brows and looked up,
"Your Majesty, if I may make an observation." he began.
"Ah yes...yes" King Albert II stammered to a halt and looked open-mouthed at the man who had governed the British Empire these last ten years.
Chamberlain put all personal thoughts out of his mind and sought the language in which to make his point.
"Your Majesty, there are workers councils being formed across France as the civil war against the Empire spreads. Even in Russia Tsar Michael is facing similar problems. I find I must agree with Crown Prince Wilhelm when he says that this is not a time to be removing dynasties. The threat is that we may find them replaced with republics."
"That is monstrous !" the 56 year old king blinked, "What would that mean for my cousin Willi ?"
Chamberlain cringed inwardly but managed to retain his outward composure,
"Your Majesty it would mean that what we are now seeing in France - Bordeaux for example - we would see in Bavaria, in Wurttemburg, in Baden, in Hesse-Darmstadt, in Nassau-Luxembourg..."
"That is....", even a man of the king's intellect was able to realise when he was about to repeat himself, "Do you mean that we must accept these treacherous Wittelsbachs in power ? And the others ?"
"Yes, Your Majesty" Chamberlain was glad to have finally got through to the king, "The so-called middle option favoured by the German National Liberals would not work. If the victorious power attempts to insert its own princes as monarchs it would lead to what I hear is called a puppet regime."
"Puppet ? You mean like Mr Punch ?"
"In a sense, yes" the Prime Minister suppressed a smile, "The apparent value is that the external power exercises control without being directly involved. But the weakness is that the regime lacks an internal powerbase and has to rely on external support for its continuation..."
Chamberlain broke off seeing the look of utter bewilderment on his monarch's face. Hurriedly he searched his memory for an example,
"It would be like Mexico !" he exclaimed, then quickly lowered his voice to a more normal level, "Emperor Maximilian owed his position to France but France did not invade the empire, only aid it. In the end the opposition from inside Mexico became too strong and in 1875 the Emperor and Empress were murdered."
"You think that will happen in Bavaria ?! In Hesse-Darmstadt ?!" the king's tone was one of complete alarm.
"I think the German Crown Prince will prevail over his father." Chamberlain said with much less certainty than he felt, "the current regimes will be accepted into the German Empire on the same basis as Hannover, Saxony, Oldenburg and the Saxon Duchies."
"Ah...then that is good" the 56 year old king frowned, "It is good as it is better than everything else...but I can still not think of the Wittelsbachs in the same way as I do old Ernst August."
Chamberlain smiled,
"Nobody will expect you to Your Majesty, the King of Hannover is after all your cousin."
"Very well, then", satisfied, the King's mind jumped to a subject always close to his heart, "Do you have the names for my Accession Day honours ?"
"Yes Your Majesty" . Chamberlain had personally been against making the anniversary of the king's accession in October 1906 a day of triumphalism and ceremonies but the traditionalists in his party had made a stand over the issue. With both Arthur Balfour and George Curzon weighing in against him he had made the concession for the sake of cabinet unity. Since 1912 Accession Day had been a day of imperial glorification. Even he had had to admit that during the war that had certainly had its uses, especially in the bleakest days of the American submarine menace.
"I assume the First Lord approved all the nominations from the Baltic Squadron ?"
Chamberlain launched into a fit of coughing in the effort to stifle his true feelings. Churchill had been the devil himself to convince ! More than secure in the glory and success of a successful war, Winston had used all his seven years in the job to exact a raft of concessions in return. When he had seen the naval estimates the Chancellor, Lord Derby, had been apoplectic ! Using all his years of political experience Chamberlain had deployed against the powerful aristocrats the very rivals who had made Accession Day such a day of national consequence in the first place. Foreign Secretary George Curzon had agreed that if the king wanted these honours as a personal matter and if the price of them was Winston's 4-4 programme of 16" and 18" super-battleships, then the nation was duty-bound to provide. Lord Derby's agreement had had a price of its own - but that was politics !
"Yes Your Majesty, it is as you wished."
The look of childlike pleasure that spread across the monarch's face was enough to tell Chamberlain that all the negotiating had been to a good end. The king's pleasure and gratitude would go a long way the next time he needed to rely upon it.