In Europe

and today I once again go zipping across borders unhindered in the high-speed Eurostar. (Not that the state is unaware of my whereabouts; I am scrutinised and shadowed electronically in dozens of different ways, but that is another story.) Only here in Great Britain do they still do things the old way. My papers are inspected earnestly by conscientious, solid citizens in Her Majesty's service.
    For Britain, the century began with a funeral; the morning after my arrival, therefore, I dive immediately into the newspaper archives of the new British Library, that gigantic red-brick warehouse of thought.
    Queen Victoria's funeral was held on Friday, 1 February, 1901, I read in the special commemorative edition (price: twopence) of the
Yorkshire Post
. Hundreds of thousands looked on as the procession trundled through London, with the bagpipes of the Scots and Irish Guards leading the way. The
Post
's correspondent John Foster Fraser goes to great lengths to reproduce the sound of the muffled drums: ‘Rumble – rattle rumble – rattle.’ The rest of his report deals mainly with the family following after the bier: the new king, Edward – ‘his cheeks ashen, his eyes dull and tired’; his cousin, Wilhelm II, kaiser of Germany – ‘moustaches drooping’; hissecond cousin Leopold II, king of Belgium; his brother-in-law, the Greek king George I; ‘blond and blue-eyed’ nephew Heinrich of Prussia; the ‘manly-built’ Grand Duke of Hesse ‘with his firm chin’; and so the entire House of Hanover and its entourage shuffled through London, with Kaiser Wilhelm out in front.
    This was the European summit of 1901. Foreign affairs was still largely a matter for royal households, and for decades short, resolute Victoria in her perpetual black satin dresses had been almost literally the ‘grandmother of Europe’, or at least of the clan network of European rulers. Those rulers all had their quarrels, large and small. But at the same time there were countless family weddings, parties and funerals, photograph sessions during which they switched uniforms: the future King George V in Prussian pomp, Kaiser Wilhelm in British uniform. Kaiser ‘Willy’ in Russian braid, Czar ‘Nicky’ in Prussian gear. When the queen died on 22 January, 1901, it was as a kind of primal mother (according to an eyewitness report from Lord Reginald Esher):‘The queen occasionally recognised those around her and spoke their names. Reid, the physician, put his arm around her and supported her. The Prince of Wales knelt beside her bed. The German kaiser stood silently at the head, beside the queen. The other children and grandchildren were there as well, all their names were spoken from time to time. She died peacefully. After the king left for London, the German kaiser arranged the rest.’
    In the end it was Kaiser Wilhelm, along with his uncle, King George, who lifted his grandmother Victoria into her coffin. That was how things went among the eternal kin, within the European family.
    And there was yet another bedrock certainty: the British Empire. In Southwark, on Walworth Road, one finds the Cuming Museum. This ‘British Museum in miniature’, as it is sometimes called, is in fact more like an incredible collection of curiosities, piled high in the upper room of a library. Over the span of 120 years, father and son Richard (1777–1870) and Henry Cuming (1807–1902) dragged everything they could lay their hands on back to this plush lair; they were true nineteenth-century gentlemen. Father Richard's passion was born in 1782, when an aunt gave him three fossils and an old Indian coin for his fifth birthday. When Henry Cuming died in 1902, he left behind more than 100,000 objects,plus enough money to run a museum that would preserve the results of their collectors’ frenzy for all eternity. Consequently, we can still today wander about in the dream world of two Victorians.
    The museum's cabinets and showcases contain, among other things: a length of Roman sewer pipe, an apple corer made from a sheep's bone, a phial containing crumbs from the wedding cake of Edward VIII, a stuffed chimpanzee – originally sold as ‘the mummy of a two-hundred-year-old man’ – an orange tooter from the 1864 races at Epsom, a piece of plaster from the room in which Napoleon died, every programme from every play the Cumings ever attended, a pair of Etruscan vases, a cigarette butt thrown away by a member of the royal family, a Roman child's toy, a