VII. The Agadir Crisis, the Mansion House Speech, and the Double-Edgedness of Agreements

The question of the direction of the speech which Lloyd George made at the height of the Agadir crisis of 1911 has recently been raised again by Dr Cosgrove. His article, however, is in some respects not entirely satisfactory. Most of the material that he uses to revive the traditional version of the Mansion House speech – namely that it was directed against the Germans – is derived from letters which deal with reactions to it, most of them Foreign Office reactions, and some of them at a considerable remove from the event itself. Admittedly one can build a prima facie case on ‘the entirely different impressions’ which the speech was observed to produce in Paris and in Berlin. There was the placing of it by Paul Cambon, the French Ambassador to London, at the end of a line of mounting irritation in England against the attitude of Germany, as the sort of thing the Spectator might have quoted in support of its thesis of the necessity of the union ‘intime évidente, affirmée’ of England and France; and his suggestion that French papers be encouraged ‘à publier quelques appréciations flatteuses de ce discours et de son auteur’

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