Abstract
As an island nation, Great Britain relied on commanding the sea for much of its development and protection. While continental Europeans continually invaded and occupied each other over the centuries, the last fully successful invasion of England dates back to the Norman conquest of 1066. Hence, the English population gained a measure of security behind the Channel ‘moat’, protected by a strong Royal Navy.2 During the latter half of the nineteenth century, however, English self-confidence was severely shaken as accelerated domestic change and the emergence of a new global balance of power profoundly transformed Great Britain and her place in the world.
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Notes
William Tufnell Le Queux, Spies of the Kaiser: Plotting the Downfall of England with a Preface by Nicholas Hiley (1909; London: Frank Cass, 1996), pp. xxxiii, 219.
N.A.M. Rodger, The Safeguard of the Sea: A Naval History of Britain (London: HarperCollins, 1997), 1, p. 429.
David Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 136.
Harold Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880 (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 41.
Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War: Explaining World War I (London: Allen Lane, 1998), p. 29. Even semi-autocratic Austria allowed 21 per cent of its subjects to cast a vote in lower-chamber elections.
Gerard J. De Groot, Blighty: British Society in the Era of the Great War (London: Longman, 1996), p. 110.
Bernard Porter, The Refugee Question in Mid-Victorian Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 124.
During the First World War, Germanophobia and anti-Semitism merged on the extreme right-wing fringe of British society and politics, see Arnd Bauerkämper, Die ‘radikale Rechte’ in Großbritannien: nationalistische, antisemitische und faschistische Bewegungen vom späten 19. Jahrhundert bis 1945 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Rupprecht, 1991), Chapter 1.
See also the contemporary polemics of John H. Clarke, England under The Heel of the few (London: C.F. Roworth, 1918), p. 58: ‘It is easy to understand that the Ashkenazim generally should have desired and worked for a German victory, which would have been, after all, an Ashkenazim victory. For whilst an “English” Jew is by no means an English man; or a “Polish” Jew, a Pole; or a “Russian” Jew, a Russian; all these Jews are Ashkenazim, “German Jews”, and Germany is their home-land.’
Gregory D. Phillips, The Diehards: Aristocratic Society and Politics in Edwardian England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979).
J. Lee Thompson, Northcliffe: Press Baron in Politics, 1865–1922 (London: John Murray, 2000), p. 133.
J.A. Thompson, ‘George Wyndham: Toryism and Imperialism’, in Arthur Mejia and J.A. Thompson, Edwardian Conservatism: Five Studies in Adaption (London: Croom Helm, 1988), pp. 105–28.
George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England (1935; London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1965), p. 320. While Dangerfield’s is an exaggerated view of British society on the eve of the First World War, he does capture the existing tensions within that society.
Cf. Ernest H. Phelps Brown, The Growth of British Industrial Relations (London: Macmillan, 1959), pp. 330f.
Bernard Porter, The Lion’s Share: A Short History of British Imperialism 1850–1970 (London: Longman, 1975), p. 119.
Aaron L. Friedberg, The Weary Titan: Britain and the Experience of Relative Decline, 1895–1905 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), especially pp. 152–203.
For an account of the conflict see Thomas Pakenham, The Boer War (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1979).
R.Q.J. Adams, ‘Field-Marshal Earl Roberts: Army and Empire’, in Arthur Mejia and J.A. Thompson, Edwardian Conservatism: Five Studies in Adaption (London: Croom Helm, 1988), p. 56. The vast majority died through disease.
Bernard Porter, The Edwardians and Their Empire’, in Donald Read (ed.), Edwardian England (London: Harrap, 1982), p. 129, referring to contemporary British notions about the Boers. An anonymous English writer referred to the Boer in 1902 as ‘a preposterously little fellow’, whose defeat ‘was not in itself an essentially pleasant or heroic thing to carry through’, ibid.
See the seminal study of Ignatius F. Clarke, Voices Prophesying War; 1763–1984 (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), and the expanded edition by idem, Voices Prophesying War: Future Wars, 1763–3749 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
John C.G. Röhl, The Kaiser and his Court: Wilhelm II and the Government of Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 83.
The term was coined by Foreign Secretary Bernhard von Bülow, in his maiden speech to the Reichstag on 26 December 1897, see Gerd Fesser, Der Traum vom Platz an der Sonne: Deutsche ‘Weltpolitik’ 1897–1914 (Bremen: Donat, 1996), p. 25.
Quoted from James Joll, The Origins of the First World War, 2nd edition (London: Longman, 1992), p. 182.
Holger Herwig, ‘Luxury Fleet’: The Imperial German Navy; 1888–1918 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1980), p. 91.
See, for instance, the memoirs of Walter Nicolai, director of IIIb during the First World War: Nachrichtendienst, Presse und Volksstimmung im Weltkrieg (Berlin: Mittler, 1920), and the English translation: ibid., The German Secret Service (London: S. Paul, 1924). There exists, however, no critical history of Sektion IIIb.
Albrecht Charisius and Julius Mader, Nicht länger geheim: Entwicklung; System und Arbeitsweise des imperialistischen deutschen Geheimdienstes, 3rd edition (Berlin: Deutscher Militärverlag, 1978).
Reinhard R. Doerries, Imperial Challenge: Ambassador Count Bernstorff and German — American Relations, 1908–1917 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), pp. 141–90. Imperial Challenge is a revised edition of the author’s doctoral thesis of 1975.
Friedhelm Koopmann, Diplomatie und Reichsinteresse: Das Geheimdienstkalkül in der deutschen Amerikapolitik 1914–1917 (Frankfurt/M. and New York: Peter Lang, 1990).
Albert Pethö, Agenten für den Doppeladler: Österreich-Ungams Geheimer Dienst im Weltkrieg (Graz: Stocker, 1998).
David Kahn, Hitler’s Spies: German Military Intelligence in World War II (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1978).
See the autobiography of Stella Rimington, Director-General of MI5 from 1992 until 1996, drawing a continuous line from the early until the late twentieth century: Stella Rimington, Open Secret: The Autobiography of the Former Director-General of MIS (London: Hutchinson, 2001).
Sidney Theodore Felstead, German Spies at Bay: Being an Actual Record of the German Espionage in Great Britain during the Years 1914–1918, Compiled from Official Sources (London: Hutchinson, 1920).
See, for instance, Nicholas Everitt, The British Secret Service during the Great War (London: Hutchinson, 1920).
Sir George Aston, Secret Service (London: Faber & Faber, 1930).
Mildred G. Richings, Espionage: The Secret Service of the British Crown (London: Hutchinson, 1934).
John Bulloch, M.I.5: The Origin and History of the British Counter Espionage Service (London: A. Barker, 1963), p. 6, Bulloch thanking Vernon Kell’s wife for her support.
Alan Judd [Petty’s pseudonym], The Quest for C: Sir Mansfield Cumming and the Founding of the Secret Service (London: HarperCollins, 1999), p. 69.
Beginning with the publication of Frederick William Winterbotham’s The Ultra Secret (New York: Harper & Row, 1974). I am grateful to Nicholas Hiley for information on the evolution of intelligence studies in British academe.
David French, ‘Spy Fever in Great Britain 1900–15’, Historical Journal, 21 (1978), pp. 355–70.
Christopher M. Andrew, Her Majesty’s Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence Community (London: Heinemann, 1985).
Nicholas Hiley, ‘The Failure of British Espionage against Germany, 1907–1914’, The Historical Journal, 26, 4 (1983), pp. 867–89.
idem, ‘The Failure of British Counter-Espionage against Germany, 1907–1914,’ The Historical Journal, 28, 4 (1985), pp. 835–62.
Nicholas Hiley, ‘Counter-Espionage and Security in Great Britain during the First World War’, English Historical Review, 101 (1986), pp. 635–70.
Bernard Porter, The Origins of the Vigilant State: The London Metropolitan Police Branch before the First World War (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987), p. 120, referring to the emergence of the’secret state’ in 1909–1911.
Phillip Knightley, The Second Oldest Profession: The Spy as Bureaucrat, Patriot, Fantasist and Whore (London: André Deutsch, 1986), p. 52.
Richard Wilmer Rowan, The Story of the Secret Service (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1938), p. 590.
See Public Record Office (ed.), M.I.5: The First Ten Years, 1909–1919… with an Introduction by Christopher Andrew (Kew: PRO Publications, 1997), pp. 12–15.
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© 2004 Thomas Boghardt
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Boghardt, T. (2004). Introduction. In: Spies of the Kaiser. St Antony’s Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230508422_1
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