Balfour

Credentials presented by Queen Victoria to acting Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour, empowering him to negotiate on behalf of the U.K. govt. on 26 Aug. 1898. He managed to conclude a secret agreement with Germany regarding the eventual fate of the declining Portuguese Empire. These talks were part of an effort to explore the feasibility of an Anglo-German alliance, which was eventually wrecked by German blunders; Germany's failure to seize this golden opportunity is wistfully regarded by German scholars as Das Grosse Nein, the Great No which, had it been a Yes, might have turned German history away from WWI, Hitler, and the Holocaust.

Balfour was later Prime Minister from 1902 to 1906, and in 1917 as Foreign Minister issued the famous Balfour Declaration granting the Jews a national home in Palestine. Incl. are full length bigraphies of Balfour, and books about pre-WWI Anglo-German relations, e.g. Holsteins Grosses Nein , the very influential 1925 book by Eugen Fischer. (Friedrich von Holstein was the German statesman most closely associated with this Great No.)

The Great Seal of the Realm or Great Seal of the United Kingdom is a seal that is used to symbolise the monarch's approval of important state documents. Wax is melted in a metal mould or matrix and impressed into a wax figure that is attached by cord or ribbon to documents that the monarch wishes to make official.

Inscriptions on the Great Seal, Victorian era:

VICTORIA DEI GRATIA BRITANNIARUM REGINA FIDEI DEFENSOR, Latin for
Victoria, by the grace of God, Queen of the Britains, Defender of the Faith.