One hundred years ago, on 1 May 1903, King Edward VII arrived in Paris on the last stop of a European tour. It had already sparked some controversy: His Majesty’s Protestant subjects were not happy that he had dropped in at the Vatican to see the 93-year-old Pope, Leo XIII. What came next, however, was to be far more radical, and would have unimaginably deep consequences.
Not even the King’s most senior ministers had more than an inkling at the time of what he was up to. Irritated by his nephew the Kaiser, and depressed at the surge of German power in Europe, the King had come to Paris to bury the idea that France was Britain’s traditional enemy. He was determined to sow the seeds of an alliance between the two nations; what would come to be known as the Entente Cordiale was conceived during his visit.
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