In her absence negotiations for Prince Eddy’s marriage progressed smoothly. Amenable as always, he complaisantly accepted Princess May, proposed to her at a house-party at Luton Hoo and was accepted. The wedding was fixed for 27 February 1892, a few weeks after the bridegroom’s twenty-eighth birthday.
His father expressed the greatest satisfaction and relief. He had spent a most unhappy winter. At the beginning of November Prince George had fallen seriously ill with typhoid fever, which he had contracted while staying at Lord Crewe’s; and the Prince of Wales, worried about his elder son’s behaviour and by his wife’s disapproval of Lady Brooke, had feared for a time that he might be called upon to bear the loss of his beloved younger son. But then the heavy gloom had suddenly lifted. Princess Alexandra had hurried home; and in their shared anxiety for Prince George — who was announced to be out of danger on 3 December — his parents had forgotten their differences.
The Prince’s contentment did not, however, last long. Soon after Christmas Prince Eddy, pale and shivering, returned early from a day’s shooting with his father at Sandringham and went to bed with a bad headache that presaged the onset of influenza. He came downstairs on his birthday to look at his presents but felt too ill to stay long and went back to bed. His mother watched him climb the stairs and never afterwards forgot the way he turned to give her ‘his friendly nod’. Soon afterwards, seriously ill with pneumonia, he became delirious; and on 13 January his mother, who had sat by his bedside all night, woke her husband to tell him that she believed their son was dying.
The Prince would not at first believe it. Taking comfort from the specialist who felt that there was still some hope, he constantly appeared at the door of the small sick-room, looking anxiously in upon his son, who never stopped talking, but ‘with great difficulty and effort,’ as his mother said, ‘and with that terrible rattle in his throat’. From time to time it seemed that the Prince’s hope might be justified; subcutaneous injections of ether and strychnine brought the patient momentarily round; but then he relapsed again. Princess Alexandra wiped the sweat from his face and neck, and the nurses placed packs of ice on his forehead. At last he cried out, ‘Something too awful has happened. My darling brother George is dead.’ He then asked, ‘Who is that? Who is that? Who is that?’ murmuring the question repeatedly until he died.
The Prince was grief-stricken, quite ‘broken down’, as his mother said. He burst into tears when the Princess’s devoted friend Oliver Montagu came down to Sandringham to comfort her. Until the day of the funeral he kept returning to gaze upon the body. At the funeral he ‘broke down terribly’, sobbing uncontrollably. In a printed copy of the sermon preached at Sandringham the next Sunday he wrote, ‘to my dearest Wife, in remembrance of our beloved Eddy, who was taken from us. “He is not dead but sleepeth.” From her devoted but broken-hearted husband, Bertie.’
For years the hat which Prince Eddy had been wearing when he went out shooting for the last time, and which he had waved to his mother as, glancing back, he had caught sight of her at a window, was kept hanging on a hook in her bedroom. And for years, too, his own room was kept exactly as it had been when he was alive to use it, his tube of toothpaste being preserved as he had left it, the soap in the washbasin being replaced when it mouldered, a Union Jack draped over the bed, and his uniforms displayed behind the glass door of a wardrobe.
‘Gladly would I have given my life for his,’ the Prince told his mother, ‘as I put no value on mine … Such a tragedy has never before occurred in the annals of our family.’ Yet he knew in his heart that Prince Eddy had been hopelessly ill-qualified for the position for which his birth had destined him. And it was of inestimable comfort to his father that his new heir, Prince George, who was quite content to marry Princess May, seemed, on the contrary, suited in every way to kingship.
When Prince Eddy died, Queen Victoria was seventy-two and had already celebrated her Golden Jubilee. In 1897, on the occasion of her Diamond Jubilee, she was driven through six miles of London’s streets and accorded such an ovation, so she recorded in mingled pride, surprise and delight, as no one had ever received before: ‘The crowds were quite indescribable, and their enthusiasm truly marvellous and deeply touching. The cheering was quite deafening, and every face seemed to be filled with real joy.’ Tears of gratitude had fallen from her eyes, and the Princess of Wales had leaned forward in the carriage to touch her hand.
Now her sight was failing, and her limbs were stiffened by rheumatism. But on her eightieth birthday in 1899 her cheeks were still rosy and friends commented on her good spirits. The Boer War broke out, however, a few months later; and her next birthday was her last. She felt ‘tired and upset’ by all the ‘trials and anxieties’ she had had to endure.
On 18 June 1901, the Prince of Wales and her other surviving children were summoned to Osborne. The Prince arrived on 19 June, but his mother had rallied by then and he did not stay the night. Three days later he was back again and as he entered her room she looked up for a moment and held out her arms. She whispered ‘Bertie’, then lapsed into the unconsciousness from which she never emerged. The Prince put his head into his hands and wept.
Later that day his mother died. He was King at last. The Edwardian Age had begun. And, as though to herald its beginning, the Kaiser, the King of the Belgians and the King of Portugal, waiting for the funeral of the Queen to start, stood by a fireplace in a corridor in Windsor Castle, where smoking had always been strictly forbidden, puffing at cigars.
PART TWO
KING
1901–1910
13
King of the Castle
During my absence Bertie has had all your beloved Mother’s rooms dismantled and all her precious things removed.
Emerging from the Reform Club on his way to dinner with the tenants of his De Vere Gardens flat, Henry James was shocked to see a newspaper placard proclaiming ‘Death of the Queen’. The streets seemed ‘strange and indescribable’, the people in them dazed and hushed, almost as though they were frightened. It was ‘a very curious and unforgettable impression’; and James, sensing London’s fear that the Queen’s death would ‘let loose incalculable forces for possible ill’, was himself ‘very pessimistic’.
Writing later to friends in Austria on the black-bordered paper of the Reform Club, he had not expected to feel such grief for the ‘simple running down of an old used-up watch’. But he deeply lamented the passing of ‘little mysterious Victoria’ and the succession of that ‘arch vulgarian’, ‘Edward the Caresser’, who had been ‘carrying on with Mrs Keppel in so undignified a manner’. ‘His succession, in short, [was] ugly and [made] all for vulgarity and frivolity’. At dinner he heard John Morley say that the King had made a ‘good impression’ at his first Privy Council meeting, to which James added the doubtful comment, ‘Speriamo.’
The Times shared Henry James’s gloomy outlook. It admitted that King Edward had ‘never failed in his duty to the throne and the nation’. But there must have been many times when he had prayed, ‘lead us not into temptation’ with ‘a feeling akin to hopelessness’. The Times, in fact, could not pretend that there was nothing in the King’s long career which those who respected him ‘would wish otherwise’.
The new King was fifty-nine. His fair beard was turning grey, and although a lotion was vigorously applied to his scalp twice a day, he was nearly bald. Exceedingly portly, he still walked as if he were late for some appointment, his stout legs full of energy. He entered upon his inheritance with appealing enthusiasm and zest. At Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace he strode about with his hat on his head, his dog trotting after him, a walking stick in his hand, a cigar in his mouth, giving orders; opening cupboards; peering into cabinets; ransacking drawers; clearing rooms formerly used by the Prince Consort and not touched since his death; dispatching case-loads of relics and ornaments to a special room in the Round Tower at Windsor; destroying statues and busts of John Brown; burning the papers of his mother’s pretentious and w
ily Indian attendant, the Munshi, whose letters from the Queen were eventually retrieved from his widow; throwing out hundreds of ‘rubbishy old coloured photographs’ and useless bric-à-brac; setting inventory clerks to work at listing the cluttered accumulations of half a century; rearranging pictures. His Surveyor of Pictures recorded:
He lost no time in decision. I found it useless to ask the King if I should hang this there or another here and so on. His mind could not take it in … ‘Offer it up,’ he would say and when ‘offered up’ he would come to see and perhaps put his head on one side, all with a twinkle in his eye, and say, ‘That is not amiss,’ or perhaps he would at once say that he did not like it. He enjoyed sitting in a room with the men working about him, and liked giving directions himself as to the actual position of pictures.
‘I do not know much about art,’ he would say, rolling his r’s in that characteristic German way of his, ‘but I think I know something about ar-r-rangement.’ He certainly knew a great deal about the family portraits, ‘and was seldom at fault, even with almost unknown members of various Saxon duchies’.
He gave instructions for new bathrooms and lavatories to be installed; for the telephone system to be extended; for various coach houses to be converted into garages for the motor-cars which now came rattling and sputtering through the gates; for rooms to be redecorated, supervising the work himself, as the Queen ‘had little interest in such matters’, having all the varnish stripped off the oak panelling.
He would brook no opposition to his plans, overcoming any resistance with good-natured firmness, determined not to allow inconvenient sentiment to stand in the way of necessary overhaul. ‘Alas!’ Queen Alexandra lamented to her sister-in-law in Berlin. ‘During my absence [in Copenhagen] Bertie has had all your beloved Mother’s rooms dismantled and all her precious things removed.’ He caused even greater offence to his sisters by disregarding his mother’s will, which had provided for Osborne House to be kept in the family, and by presenting the place to the nation for use as a Royal Naval College and a convalescent home for naval officers.
As well as reorganizing the royal palaces, the King also transformed the court, drastically reforming both the Lord Steward’s and the Lord Chamberlain’s offices. He appointed new grooms-in-waiting and gentlemen ushers, making Sir Dighton Probyn Keeper of the Privy Purse; retaining Sir Francis Knollys as his private secretary; and taking more and more into his confidence Lord Rosebery’s clever, subtle, handsome friend, Lord Esher, who eventually, in the words of the Secretary for War, St John Brodrick, ‘constituted himself the unofficial adviser of the crown’. As a supposedly self-seeking eminence grise, Esher was disliked and distrusted by those who suspected his motives for so sedulously acquiring authority and influence to be less disinterested than they were. Lord Carrington recognized him as an ‘extraordinary’ and ‘clever’ man, but added that he might be dangerous and was certainly unscrupulous.
‘He seems to be able to run about Buckingham Palace as he likes,’ Carrington noted in his journal. ‘He must be a considerable nuisance to the Household … He is not trusted by the general public who look on him as an intriguer.’ Margot Asquith described him as ‘a man of infinite curiosity and discretion, what the servants call “knowing” … He has more intelligence than most of the court pests. Slim with the slim, straight with the straight, the fault I find with him is common to all courtiers, he hardly knows what is important from what is not.’
An exceptionally ceremonious man, Lord Esher was doubtful at first that all the King’s changes in the running of the Household were for the better. The King was ‘kind and debonair and not undignified’, Esher thought, but ‘too human’. The sanctity of the throne was gradually disappearing, and Esher could not help but ‘regret the mystery and awe of the old court’. The ‘quiet impressive entrance’ of the monarch before dinner was ‘as obsolete as Queen Elizabeth’. The King came down unannounced, and dinner itself was ‘like an ordinary party’ with ‘none of the “hush” of the Queen’s dinners’.
Before long, however, Esher was pleased to note that the etiquette ‘stiffened up very much’; ladies were required to wear tiaras and men to appear in court costume with decorations.
Decorations for the King were of transcendent significance, and he took a quite touching delight in awarding them. Lord Carrington remembered how the King, especially dressed in field marshal’s uniform for the occasion, had expressed — and had obviously felt — ‘the greatest pleasure’ in giving him the Order of the Garter, the ‘finest Order in the world’. ‘His Majesty had gone to the trouble’ of doing so in a room filled with reminiscences of their Indian tour, turning the occasion into a memorable little ceremony and breaking with tradition to make a short and apposite speech as he held his friend’s hand. ‘I was so much moved,’ Carrington recorded in his journal, ‘that I left the Garter behind at Buckingham Palace, but Elsom (my old footman) now a “Royal” came running out with it and saved the situation.’
It pained the King beyond measure to see decorations incorrectly worn, particularly those which he had awarded himself. Very occasionally he would be amused by some peculiarly atrocious solecism as, for instance, Henry Ponsonby’s wearing two Jubilee Medals at once at a dinner in Germany. But the normal response was a pained rebuke such as that delivered to Sir Felix Semon, who was informed at Chatsworth that the Star of the Victorian Order was ‘usually worn on the left breast’.
He could not forbear correcting any error his sharp eye detected, though he generally contrived to do so as tactfully as possible. Noticing an English diplomat wearing his G.C.B. incorrectly, he informed him quietly of his mistake in German, employing a Bavarian dialect which no one in the room, other than the diplomat himself, who had a Bavarian mother, would have understood. Similarly, at a ball at Devonshire House, he waited until it was time to wish his host good night and to congratulate him on the ‘magnificent manner in which everything had been done’, before informing the Duke confidentially that there was, however, one thing that had not been quite right. What was that? the Duke asked anxiously, and was told, ‘You have got your Garter on upside down.’
Taking care to be exceptionally tactful with foreign diplomats, the King was seen to draw aside the Swedish Minister, who had appeared at court with his medals in the wrong order, and was heard to whisper in his ear — as though imparting a state secret of the utmost significance — the name of the court jewellers, ‘Hunt and Roskill, 148 Piccadilly’.
The King was equally distressed to see men wearing their uniforms improperly or turning out in civilian clothes which he considered inappropriate to the occasion. On embarking upon a continental tour in 1903 he had his suite paraded on the deck of the Victoria and Albert in full dress uniform. ‘The sea was rough,’ recorded Charles Hardinge, Assistant Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, who was one of the party, ‘and it was somewhat painful staggering about the deck in full uniform, but it seemed to amuse the King to see us. Our clothes were all criticized without exception.’
Scarcely anyone who came into contact with the King escaped such criticism. Even a woodwind player who was seen to be wearing a black tie instead of a white at Covent Garden was sharply reprimanded by an equerry. ‘He could not endure a button being even an inch out of place,’ as the Duke of Manchester said, ‘and thought nothing of calling down any person, no matter who they might be, if the slightest item was wrong.’ The Duke went on to cite one of the King’s extremely rare mistakes when he told an Austrian nobleman at Marienbad that he was doing something he ought not to do. ‘What was that?’ the Austrian enquired, much perturbed. He was wearing, ‘quite inadvertently’, the King was sure, the tie of the English Guards. How long had these been the Guards’ colours? the nobleman asked and, on being told for over three hundred years, was able to reply, ‘Sir, they have been my family’s colours for over seven hundred years.’
The King was intensely annoyed to find himself wrong in such matters. Discovering the French Ambassador wea
ring an unfamiliar ribbon to his Grand Cordon of Charles III at a reception at the Spanish Embassy, he took him aside to advise him that his valet ought to be more careful. On being told by the Ambassador that the ribbon had lately been changed by the Spanish court, he evinced the deepest shock.
‘Impossible! Impossible!’ he said in so loud and agitated a voice that other guests at the reception imagined some dreadful catastrophe had befallen Europe. ‘Impossible! I should know about it!’ He made it his first duty the next morning to find out whether or not the ribbon had been changed; and, being told it had been, he immediately summoned the Spanish Ambassador to reprimand him gravely for not having informed him.
Ladies were not immune from the King’s rebukes. The Queen was a law unto herself and had been known to wear her Garter star on the wrong side when she felt it clashed with her other jewels. But the Queen’s eccentricities were no excuse for anyone else’s. The Duchess of Marlborough, who appeared at dinner with a diamond crescent instead of the prescribed tiara, was sharply reprimanded for having done so. In the King’s opinion there was a suitable manner of dress for every conceivable occasion, even on board the royal yacht where a minister was scolded for wearing knee-breeches instead of trousers and a race-horse trainer for having a black scarf round his neck rather than a white one. Catching sight of R.B. Haldane, whose German sympathies were wellknown, in an unsuitable hat at a garden party, he exclaimed, ‘See my War Minister approach in a hat he inherited from Goethe!’ And at Coburg in the middle of some instruction to Henry Ponsonby, suddenly noticing the man’s dreadful trousers, he broke off to ask where on earth he had found them: they were quite the ugliest pair he had ever seen in his life. Lord Rosebery, always unpredictable in his choice of attire, was a particular irritant. The King contented himself with eyeing Rosebery angrily ‘all through dinner’ when he had the temerity to present himself aboard the royal yacht wearing a white tie with a Yacht Squadron mess-jacket. But he could not contain himself when Rosebery came to an evening reception at Buckingham Palace in trousers instead of kneebreeches. ‘I presume,’ the King growled at him, ‘that you have come in the suite of the American Ambassador.’
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