And yet his feelings toward the British nation were just as contradictory as his feelings toward his English mother, rejecting her and yet longing for her approval. At the age of four the future emperor made his first bad impression in England. At the wedding of his uncle Edward in St. George's Chapel at Windsor, bored by the ceremony William detached a large gem from the hilt of his Scottish dagger – part of his traditional Scottish dress – and threw it right across the church. When his uncles, Prince Leopold and Prince Arthur, tried to intervene, he flew into a temper tantrum, pulled out the dagger and waved it about wildly. Then as Prince Arthur tried to take the weapon away from him, the little boy bit him in the leg. By the time William became emperor in 1888, Queen Victoria had already celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of her rule and was undisputedly the highest ranking sovereign in Europe. William was dreadfully impressed by the pomp and circumstance that had been staged by clever choreographers propagating the concept of the empire ever since the 1870s (when Victoria was declared Empress of India) and that reached its zenith during her golden and diamond jubilee celebrations.