MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON ATa dinner-party last week I noticed that, although two foreign Ambassadors were present, the place of honour was accorded to one of His Majesty's Ministers. Having spent much of my youth being bothered by these matters of placement, I was shocked to observe this departure from the ancient rule that foreign Ambassadors yield precedence only to members of the Royal Family who are Royal Highnesses. I was aware that in France the diplomatic body are subordinate, in these matters of seating, to the Presidents of the two Chambers, and that in the United States the Vice-President takes precedence over all Ambassadors ; but it was painful to me to find that we in this country, who had hitherto shown all honour to the representatives of the heads of foreign States, should have relapsed into the ungainly manners which dis- figure the capitals of many of the Latin American countries. I enquired of my neighbour, who seemed more up-to-date in such questions than I am myself, what was the explanation of this breach of long-established practice. He told me that it was due partly to the modern plethora of Ambassadors which had caused inflation, and partly to the fact that the Dominion High Commissioners had, strange to relate, demanded also to be accorded ambassadorial rank. The Foreign Office had realised that if the old system were in these new conditions to be maintained, it would mean that the Prime Minister, the Archbishops and the Lord Chancellor would, at any public dinner attended in force by foreign and overseas representa- tives, be relegated to the obscure position which in my youth was designated under the wounding phrase "Les petits Bens du bout de la table." Anxious as they were to preserve the prestige of our domestic rulers, the Foreign Office had therefore issued an edict under which precedence at private dinner-parties and public functions was to be accorded to the two Archbishops, the Lord Chancellor, the Prime Minister, the Lord President of the Council and, if my informant was telling the truth, the Lord Privy Seal.
* * * * I was horrified by this information, which I still feel must have been mistaken. I could not believe that either the Doyen or the Marshal of the Diplomatic Corps could possibly have agreed to so flagrant a violation of established custom. I thought of what King Edward VII would have said about such an innovation, or Count Mensdorff or Monsieur William Martin. To those unaccustomed to diplomatic conventions it may seem but a trivial thing, unworthy of the stirring times is which we live, that a serious man should be concerned, when there are forty plates upon the table, about the exact plate opposite to which he is asked to sit. Yet in fact these problems of placement are liable if incorrectly handled to provoke much human bitterness and even to lead to acute diplomatic inci- dents. When I was in Constantinople in the early months of 1914 I witnessed one such incident which still leaves a scar upon my memory. I was present at the famous dinner-party given by Mr. Henry Morgenthau, the newly-arrived Ambassador of the United States. Mr. Morgenthau had invited to this, his first function, a larger number of foreign Ambassadors and the leading members of the Turkish Cabinet. He had also invited Marshal Liman von Sanders, who had been appointed, much to our subsequent detri- ment, to organise the Turkish armies. When we sat down to dinner, Liman von Sanders found that he had been accorded the thirteenth place. He sat there scarlet in the face, refusing either to eat or speak. When the dinner was over he rose abruptly and left the house. The tension that ensued has been vividly described in the third chapter of Mr. Morgenthau's delightful book, Secrets of the Bosphorus.
* * * * The Liman von Sanders incident, although it has become a locus classicus in the history of diplomatic misplacement, and although it has convinced students of the art that it is a mistake to invite too many important people to the same dinner, is insignificant in com- parison to the dreadful event which occurred at Lisbon in 1760. on the occasion of the marriage of the Princess of Brazil. The Marquis Sebastiao Pombal, Prime Minister of Portugal, issued an edict to the effect that foreign Ambassadors in Lisbon, with the exception of the Nuncio and the Imperial Ambassador, should henceforth take precedence according to the date of their credentials. Choiseul, the French Minister for Foreign Affairs, replied that his Sovereign could not in this matter surrender the dignity due to his Crown, and that under no pretext could such a thing as the date of credentials be allowed to affect the rights attaching to the honour of France. " No Sovereign," he wrote, " in matters of this kind recognises powers of legislation in the person of other Sovereigns." The Courts of Madrid and Vienna were in full accord with the strong line that Choiseul had taken, and in fact described the edict as " an absurdity which only deserved contempt." The Court of Lisbon were there- fore obliged to withdraw their edict, and it was not until the regiment adopted by the Congress of Vienna introduced some common sense into the problem that the precedence of ambassadors was regulated by the seniority of the Envoy concerned and not by the presumed antiquity of the monarchy which he represented. Yet I cannot resist the impression that the Foreign Office, in their recent ukaze, have behaved rather in the manner of Pombal.
* * * * The diplomatic body in London is composed of sensible, although numerous, men. They have bowed to the edict with wounded resignation. There is today no Holy Roman Emperor to whom they can submit their wounds ; and with admirable restraint they have refrained from appealing to the Pope. Nor is there much danger in present conditions that they will resort to physical violence, either against their colleagues or against those members of the British Cabinet who have now been accorded pride of place. It is unlikely that we shall witness scenes such as that which occurred at Tower Wharf on September 30th, 1661, when the servants of the Spanish Ambassador shot the postilion of the French Ambas- sador and pulled his coachman off the box. This outrage, which was caused by a dispute as to which of the two coaches should precede each other in a procession, led Louis XIV to threaten Spain with a declaration of war. De Watteville, the peccant Spanish Ambassador, was hastily recalled ; but it was not till one hundred years later that the Pacte de Famille healed the wound which had been occasioned by the scuffle on Tower Wharf. So violent a reaction to the edict of the Foreign Office is today improbable ; but had the diplomatists in London wished to be inquisitive or disagreeable, they might have asked whether the Prime Minister, who is now put above them, possesses any constitutional identity at all. In the eighteenth century the title, if used at all, was used in a derogatory sense, and was interchangeable with such derisive expressions as " sole Minister " or " prime Vizier." It occurs in only one Act of Parliament, the Chequers Estate Act of 1917, and does not figure in the records of either House. And the only reference to the official precedence of the Prime Minister is contained in a sign- manual of King Edward VII in which he is expressly relegated to a place below the Ambassadors and immediately after the Arch- bishop of York.
Shocked though I am by this degradation of the status of the representatives of foreign Powers, I must confess that some such drastic rearrangement was necessitated by the present appalling increase in those who can claim ambassadorial rank. Some de- flationary measures, such as were firmly imposed by the Congress of Vienna, are long overdue. I trust also that in this process of readjusting titles of dignity we shall abolish the foolish word "Premier," which is as ridiculous as if the French were to refer to Mr. Attlee as "/e prime." Our present egalitarian mood tends to destroy all sense of proportion, and to render the Ambassador of the United States the equal of . . .
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