Stevenson, as Cleveland became the first former president to recapture the office. In 1897, he was appointed a special envoy representing the United States at Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. In 1898, Reid was given a spot on the peace commission, along with former Secretary of State William R. Day, and Senators William P. Frye, Cushman Kellogg Davis, and George Gray, following the Spanish–American War. In June 1902, he was again appointed a special envoy representing the United States at the Coronation of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, along with J. Pierpont Morgan, Jr., Edmund Lincoln Baylies, and William Wetmore, and brought his wife and daughter to London. The coronation was postponed, however, as the King fell ill, and the rescheduled ceremony in August took place after Reid (and most of the other international representatives) had returned home. While in London, he received the degree LL.D. honoris causa from the University of Cambridge in June 1902. In 1904, he was made Chancellor of the University of the State of New York. He also received honorary degrees from Dartmouth, Princeton, Yale, Oxford, St. Andrews, Victoria, and Manchester. Reid’s role as one of the leading Americans in London in 1898 allowed him to promote American interests in a way that ran parallel to the efforts of America’s ambassador John Hay, with whom Reid had been lifelong friends (Reid had even served as best man at Hay’s wedding.) In April of 1898 the United States and Spain went to war. While some public figures from continental Europe such as Édouard Drumont, Gaston Méry, Max Régis, Auguste Mercier and Bernhard von Bülow had been making high profile public statements condemning the United States and praising Spain, Reid was part of an effort to counter this. Reid organized public speaking events where British politicians who he knew were of a pro-American perspective on the war, such as Joseph Chamberlain would make the American case for war to the British public. He was aided in this effort by British publisher W. T. Stead. When a widely-printed article co-written and co-signed by Édouard Drumont, Gaston Méry, and Max Régis that was translated into many languages was making the rounds in various European newspapers in the summer of 1898, Reid got many British celebrities including Arthur Henry Neumann, Percy Powell-Cotton, Harald George Carlos Swayne and Arthur Jephson to write a counter-letter advocating support for the American point of