Edward VII_The Last Victorian King

by Christopher Hibbert

  The arrangement had been to meet in the courtyard at four o’clock, to motor first to the gardens and then to Virginia Water for tea. And it was now ten minutes past four.

  The distracted gentlemen-in-waiting flew about, but I could see in a moment that Henry was not likely to turn up, so I begged the King to get into his motor [Margot Asquith recorded]. He answered with indignation, ‘Certainly not. I cannot start without the Prime Minister …’ Seeing affairs at a standstill I went up to the Queen and said I feared there had been a scandal at court, and that Henry must have eloped with one of the maids of honour. I begged her to save my blushes by commanding the King to proceed, at which she walked up to him with her amazing grace, and, in her charming way, tapping him firmly on the arm pointed with a sweeping gesture to his motor and invited [Lady Londesborough] and Alice Keppel to accompany him: at which they all drove off … When we returned to the Castle we found that Henry had gone for a long walk with … one of the Queen’s maids of honour, over which the King was jovial and even eloquent.

  The Queen of course was frequently late, and although the King’s usual reaction was to sit drumming his fingers and then to swallow his anger when she at last appeared with an insouciant, ‘Am I late?’, on one occasion at least, according to a royal chef, he took his revenge. It was during a luncheon party at Windsor where thirty guests had been kept waiting for a quarter of an hour by the Queen’s non-appearance. It was the custom at Windsor for the dining-room staff to serve the King and Queen first, then work their way down the table to the other end. When everyone had finished a bell was rung and the plates were cleared away for the next course. At this particular luncheon, however, the King gobbled each course and rang the bell as soon as he had cleared his own plate.

  When the roast was reached the guests were beginning to give up hope of managing more than a few mouthfuls during the whole meal. All of them had hearty appetites, and there were downcast expressions before the dessert stage was reached. As the King had expected, Queen Alexandra was aware of their plight, but she could do nothing to help them, for it was to some extent her fault that the meal had been hurried.

  At Balmoral, after the deer-stalking, grouse-driving and salmon-fishing, there were gillies’ balls as well as card-games and even the occasional cinema show, which was ‘jolly bad’ in the opinion of one frequent guest, Sir Felix Semon, a nose and throat specialist of German descent, but at least it had the charm of novelty and was certainly much to be preferred to the ‘deafening tribe of royal pipers in Highland garb, who, when game was served, solemnly marched three times round the table and made a hellish noise with their bagpipes’.

  The King was much less tolerant of drunkenness among his Highland servants than his mother had been, and summarily dismissed one of them who appeared in front of him one day barely able to stand. But life at Balmoral was otherwise much freer than it had been in his mother’s time, and for most of the guests it was more enjoyable. Winston Churchill, who went there as a twenty-seven-year-old Member of Parliament in 1902, told his mother how ‘pleasant and easy-going’ it was (adding that she must ‘gush’ to the King about his having written to say how much he had enjoyed himself). Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary, gave similar testimony to the pleasures of Balmoral. He ‘always groaned’ when he had to go there; but it was ‘observed with amusement’ how he immediately succumbed to the King’s charm and how, on arriving home — provided with a hamper containing a venison pie, fruit and a bottle of champagne for the journey — he invariably confessed that he had had a most agreeable time. Like every other guest, though, Grey was rather dispirited by Balmoral’s interior decorations and was much relieved when even Queen Alexandra — who had insisted that, as this was Queen Victoria’s favourite home, it must remain exactly as it had been in her time and that none of the dreadful wallpapers must be touched — could not tolerate the tartan carpets and curtains in the drawing-room.

  Most of the King’s friends preferred Sandringham to any of his other homes. It had not been improved in appearance either by the rebuilding which had been carried out in 1869 or by the new wing which had been added after the fire of 1891 had completely destroyed thirteen bedrooms in the upper part of the house. There was little worth looking at inside, apart from the tapestries designed by Goya which were a present from the King of Spain and were hung in the dining-room. But there was a special Gemütlichkeit at Sandringham not to be found elsewhere. Strangers felt quite as much at ease there as they had done when the King was Prince of Wales. Like Henry Broadhurst, Joseph Arch, the working-class founder of the Agricultural Labourers’ Union and Liberal Member of Parliament for the North West division of Norfolk, was a contented week-end guest. And a deputation of trade union leaders was also made to feel welcome.

  The guest list at Sandringham was not quite as varied as it had been in the days when Lord Alington’s daughter — surprised to find that she had been invited at the same time as George Lewis, the solicitor — had been shocked that the royal family played baccarat, ‘an illegal game, every night … [with] a real table, and rakes, and everything like the rooms at Monte Carlo’. But although bridge had taken the place of baccarat, Gottlieb’s orchestra played in the hall, and the barrel-organ, previously brought into use for dancing, was now usually silent, Lord Carrington thought it was just like the ‘old days’. He wrote:

  I could hardly realize that the Prince of Wales was King. He seemed so entirely himself … his own kind dear self. The Queen walked out alone after dinner, and the King remained in the dining-room and smoked as he used to do … When the Queen retired we all went into the smokingroom, which was the same as ever. The Leech pictures, the same furniture, the table where the Equerry wrote the stable orders for the morning, the bowling alley next door, and the whole thing brought back memories of Blandford, Oliver Montagu, Christopher Sykes … Charlie Beresford, Charlie Dunmore, and old Quin.

  14

  The King at Work

  There is no use in ministers liking the King if he is treated like a puppet.

  Immediately on his accession, the King took up his new duties with obvious relish, conscious of the importance of his vocation and enjoying to the full its responsibilities. Lord Redesdale described how he once called at Marlborough House during the early months of the new reign before the King had moved to Buckingham Palace:

  I found him in his private sitting-room all alone, and we sat smoking and talking over old times for a couple of hours. Towards midnight he got up and said, ‘Now I must bid you good night, for I must set to work,’ pointing to a huge pile of familiar red boxes. ‘Surely,’ I said, ‘your Majesty is not going to tackle all that work to-night!’ His answer was, ‘Yes, I must! Besides, it is all so interesting,’ and then he gave me one of his happy smiles.

  Lord Esher also described the enthusiasm with which the King came to his new work, how he would ask question after question, interrupt the answers with his quick, ‘Yes … yes … yes’, give orders, scribble notes on bits of paper in his scarcely legible handwriting, and then stand in front of the fire with one of his immense cigars between his teeth, ‘looking wonderfully like Henry VIII, only better tempered’. The impression he gave Lord Esher was ‘that of a man, who, after long years of pent-up action, had suddenly been freed from restraint and revelled in his liberty’. He insisted on having all his letters ‘brought to him unopened, about 400 a day’, and sorted them by himself. ‘He tried at first to open them all but found that impossible.’ He also insisted on signing the 6,600 army commissions which had accumulated during the last months of his mother’s reign; and he then embarked on the Royal Navy commissions, which had formerly been signed at the Admiralty as traditionally being the responsibility of the Lord High Admiral, but he found that additional task beyond him.

  He was too restless and impatient, however, for prolonged deskwork. Soon he took to summoning secretaries and giving them outlines of what he wanted to say rather than writing long letters himself as his mother had done. He was fa
r more at home in fulfilling those public engagements which he was called upon to carry out in such numbers and which he performed so well. He gave the impression of being really interested in what he was doing and displayed an ability to listen to officials telling him things he knew already, or did not want to know at all, with every sign of absorbed concentration. According to some observers, though, he was not at his best at levees. But then, those who attended levees did not care for them either. They could be tedious, and even on occasion embarrassing. An official was posted at the door leading into the throne room to turn away anyone who was incorrectly dressed. The absent-minded Arthur Hardinge, for instance, once appeared before the horrified King with a buttoned boot on one foot and an evening shoe on the other, a blunder he weakly excused on the grounds that he was very short-sighted. Edward Marsh, then a junior clerk in the Colonial Office, wrote of a levee in St James’s Palace in 1902:

  The levee was a most wearisome performance and I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when I think of the manner in which 1,500 of the educated classes spent their morning. It took about an hour to get round, through the successive pens in which one is shut up with the same little group of people … and when one reached ‘the Presence’ one was rushed through with just time to make one’s bow to the red, bored, stolid sovereign.

  If bored at levees at St James’s, the King rarely displayed any lack of interest at equally tedious functions elsewhere. Every year there were reports of his laying foundation stones, opening exhibitions, attending dinners, visiting hospitals and schools, inspecting new libraries and art galleries with the same assiduity he had displayed as Prince of Wales. And even those whose comments were not for publication spoke of his geniality and bonhomie. Osbert Sitwell, as a boy at Eton, was present when he opened the School Library, a memorial to boys killed in the Boer War, and was struck by the ‘very individual and husky warmth’ of his voice: ‘There was, as he spoke in public, a geniality in its sound, as of one who found in life the utmost enjoyment, and in spite of a rather prominent and severely attentive blue eye, and a certain appearance of fatigue, the chief impression was one of good humour.’

  Every summer, between Ascot Races and Cowes Regatta, he went to an industrial town, usually in the Midlands or the North, to undertake the duties of an official visit. And every winter he opened Parliament in state, resuming a ceremonial which Queen Victoria had abandoned, and renewing the practice of reading the speech from the throne.

  He was an effective speaker. At the first Privy Council meeting of his reign he had, as John Morley said, impressed his audience by his ability to speak fluently and spontaneously without a prepared script. On that occasion, after almost breaking down on referring to the irreparable loss he and the whole nation had suffered by the death of his ‘beloved mother, the Queen’, he spoke with what Lord Carrington described as ‘dignity and pathos’ for eight minutes without reference to a single note. It was a facility which he perfected. He told Lord Fisher that he had once learned a speech off by heart to welcome the French President to England. But when the time came to deliver it, he could not remember the words he had so laboriously memorized and was forced to ‘keep on beginning at the beginning’. So, except when he had to say a few words in Danish or Russian, he had never tried to learn a speech again; and his delivery was all the better for it, whether in English, French or German. It was remembered with pleasure how, on a visit to Germany, he had been quite equal to the occasion when the Kaiser had risen to make an impressive speech at a dinner at which it had been agreed no speeches should be made. On completing his prepared oration, the Kaiser invited the King to reply. Undeterred, the King did so; and, apart from a moment’s embarrassing silence when he tapped the table in an effort to recall a particular German word, which Prince von Bülow supplied for him, he made quite as effective a speech as his host had done. Very rarely did he make a mistake in one of these more or less impromptu speeches; and when, calling in at an Italian port during one of his Mediterranean cruises, he caused brief embarrassment in Rome and London by referring to a non-existent ‘alliance’ between England and Italy when he should have said ‘friendship’, it was admitted that the slip — which was not reported in the Press — was of a kind that the King scarcely ever made.

  Admirably as he carried out his ceremonial and social duties, the King soon made it clear that he was not prepared to confine himself to making speeches, signing documents and laying foundation stones. He was not much concerned with domestic policies or with colonial affairs; he was bored to death by talk about free trade and tariff reform; but he evinced a deep interest in the army and the navy; in hospitals and medical research; and, above all, in foreign policy.

  He told St John Brodrick, Secretary for War, that he expected to be consulted about the appointment and promotion of senior officers, about every important question of policy, and particularly about the reform of the army medical system which, so Brodrick said, ‘he pressed forward from the first day of his reign’. He was equally insistent that matters of naval policy should be brought to his attention; and, when the time came, gave his unhesitating support to Lord Fisher, whose reforms, as Fisher himself recognized, might well have been scuppered by his opponents had not the King made it so forcibly obvious where his own sympathies lay in the First Sea Lord’s bitter quarrel with the vain and tiresome Lord Charles Beresford.

  As it was with the army and navy, so it was with medicine. Numerous hospitals had cause to be grateful for the attention he paid to their welfare. He helped to found the National Association for the Prevention of Consumption; he started King Edward’s Hospital Fund which eventually had an annual income of over £150,000; and he assured one of his several medical friends, Sir Frederick Treves, that it was his ‘greatest ambition not to quit this world until a real cure for cancer’ had been found.

  Concerned as he was with all these matters, however, he devoted only a fraction of the time to them that he gave to foreign affairs. Once a week he asked Charles Hardinge to have breakfast with him at Buckingham Palace, and he discussed foreign politics ‘most of the time at these interviews with great breadth and interest’. He read through every dispatch that came from abroad, his secretary observed, ‘often when the subject was very dull. Any inaccuracy annoyed him: even a slip of the pen put him out’. And he paid the same close attention to those private letters which he liked British ambassadors to write to him as supplements to their official dispatches. He studied draft treaties carefully, and occasionally made suggestions for alterations in their wording. He received foreign representatives alone in his room; and, when abroad, with the agreement of the Foreign Office, undertook diplomatic discussions both with other sovereigns and with their ministers.

  His usefulness in this respect was widely recognized: as Disraeli had said of him, ‘he really has seen everything and knows everybody’. So, too, was his conscientiousness appreciated. Charles Hardinge wrote:

  Often I had to suggest a visit which I knew would be irksome to him, or that he should see somebody that I knew he would not want to see, and he would exclaim, ‘No, no, damned if I will do it!’ But he always did it, however tiresome it might be for him, without my having to argue the point or in fact say another word. He had a very strong sense of the duties which his position entailed and he never shirked them.

  Yet he was constantly given cause to complain that the government did not take him into their confidence, that he was consulted only when it suited their convenience, that he was often ignored, and that the excuses which ministers made to him when they failed to keep him informed of their actions were ‘often as “gauche” as their omissions’. Uneasily aware that ministers had been far more punctilious in keeping the monarch informed of their problems and proposed solutions in Queen Victoria’s time than they now were in his, he was deeply offended at what he took to be the least sign of slighting neglect. In the first few months of his reign he had reason to rebuke Lord Halsbury, the Lord Chancellor, for having, without reference
to him, published a report about a new form of declaration against the doctrine of transubstantiation which, according to the Bill of Rights of 1689, the monarch was required to make before reading the speech from the throne. Since the King himself had suggested a modification in the wording of the declaration, which he took to be insulting to his Roman Catholic subjects, he was ‘naturally much surprised that he had received no intimation, previous to his having read it in the newspapers, of the report, as it was an important matter concerning the Sovereign regarding which he ought to have been consulted’.

  This was the first of numerous rebukes he felt obliged to administer. Throughout his reign he fought to maintain the Crown’s right to be consulted, to prevent the Sovereign’s becoming a ‘mere signing machine’, to retain those few remaining royal prerogatives which he felt were being gradually eroded. Yet he could not prevent their erosion. He was forced to accept not only Parliament’s authority to cede territory, but also the Prime Minister’s power to appoint and dismiss ministers without reference to the Sovereign, as well as the Cabinet’s right to take over the patronage of so-called ‘Crown’ appointments, including the appointment of bishops which, in the last few years of his reign, was left in the hands of Campbell-Bannerman, born of Presbyterian parents in Glasgow, and Asquith, the son of a noncomformist Lancashire wool-spinner.

  Although eventually he lost interest in the selection of bishops, he never did so in the case of diplomatic appointments. But his suggestions about these were quite as likely to be disregarded as they had been when he was Prince of Wales. In 1904, for example, his proposal that Arthur Herbert should go to Sweden and Sir Rennell Rodd to Morocco was followed by Rodd’s being retained at Stockholm and Herbert’s being despatched to Norway.