This syndicate of discontent

From Castles of Steel by Robert K. Massie. Page 173.

Jingoistic nationalism in Britain in the early weeks of the Great War resulted in the smashing of windows of shops owned by German immigrants, the stoning of dachshunds, and public insulting of people with foreign names. Hysteria fanned by the popular press left no one immune. Violet Asquith, the prime minister’s daughter, was asked “whether it was true that my father drank the kaiser’s health after dinner.” In this predjudiced context, the holding of the navy’s highest post by a German-born prince at the beginning of a war with Germany became a focus of grievance. Louis was called a Germhun, a term coined by Horatio Bottomley. There were rumors that the First Sea Lord was secretly dealing with the Germans, that he had deliberately engineered the loss of the three armored cruisers, and that he had been imprisoned in the Tower on the orders of the king. Stories about Prince Louis reached the Naval School at Osborne, where his thirteen-year-old son, Louis (known as Dickie), was a cadet. “The latest rumor . . . here,” he wrote to his mother, Princess Victoria, is “that Papa has turned out to be a German spy and has been discreetly marched off to the Tower where he is guarded by Beefeaters. Apparently the rumor started . . . by the fact that an admiral has been recalled from the Mediterranean to find out about the Goeben and Breslau escaping. People apparently think he let the German cruiser escape as he was a spy or an agent. . . . I got rather a rotten time of it for about three days as little fools . . . insisted on calling me a German spy and kept on heckling me.”

Rumors of this kind reverberated not just among the boys at Osborne but in Belgravia drawing rooms and the clubs of St. James, where Louis’s old enemies, a group of elderly retired admirals, gathered. This “syndicate of discontent,” as Fisher called it, had always been envious of Battenberg’s relations with the court and hostile to his advancement to the navy’s highest post. The most bigoted was Beresford, enraged that Fisher, a middle-class nobody, and now Louis, a German prince, had both become First Sea Lord, an office he never had reached. At one point in his vendetta, Beresford wrote an article belittling Louis’s record as a naval officer and demanding that he be expelled from the navy because of his German birth. He sent this to the editor of every London newspaper, asking that it be published anonymously. No one agreed.