an investiture on board the royal yacht outside Cowes on 15 August 1902, the day before the fleet review held there to mark the coronation. Wilson took part in the review with the Majestic. He went on to be Commander-in-Chief, Home Fleet in May 1903 (renamed the Channel Fleet in December 1904), hoisting his flag in the battleship and then in the battleship . He was appointed a Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order on 11 August 1903 on the occasion of the King's visit to Ireland, promoted to full admiral on 24 February 1905 and advanced to Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order on 11 August 1905 on the occasion of the visit of the French Fleet. He was advanced to Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath on 9 November 1906. First Sea Lord Wilson was promoted to Admiral of the Fleet on 1 March 1907 and, after three years in retirement, became First Sea Lord in January 1910. In this role he was, according to Hew Strachan, "abrasive, inarticulate, and autocratic" and was really only selected as Admiral Fisher's successor because he was a supporter of Fisher's reforms. He took part in the funeral of King Edward VII in May 1910. Wilson gave a poor account of himself at the Committee of Imperial Defence meeting after the Agadir Crisis, at which he said that in the event of war the Navy planned to land the Army on the Baltic Coast, an old plan of the recently retired Admiral Fisher, apparently derived from the Seven Years' War of the mid eighteenth century. Reginald McKenna (First Lord of the Admiralty) supported Admiral Wilson, but the Committee Secretary Maurice Hankey pointed out that the Army must draw up such plans and that the Army plans had already been approved by the Committee of Imperial Defence. According to the memoirs of Lord Haldane, Field Marshal Nicholson (Chief of the Imperial General Staff), asked Admiral Wilson whether the Admiralty had maps of German strategic railways (to show how the Germans could rush reinforcements to invasion spots), and when Wilson said it was not the Admiralty's business to have such maps, Nicholson openly rebuked him and said that if the Navy "meddled" in military matters they needed not just to have such maps but to have studied them (an exchange not reflected in the official minutes). The meeting