Numerous members of the King’s staff recalled similar instances of his kindness, tact and generosity; of his ‘enviable gift’, as Robert Vansittart, a young temporary extra private secretary, described it, ‘of making innocents feel that he really wanted to see them’; of the pleasure they themselves derived from performing some service which made him momentarily happy and brought forth that characteristic murmur of ‘yes, yes, yes’ like the purring of a contented cat; of the enthusiasm he affected upon being offered presents he did not really want, such as the stylographic pen given him by Frederick Ponsonby. It was a ‘wonderful invention’, he declared, ‘treating it like a conjuring trick’. ‘He used it for a short time simply to please me,’ Ponsonby recorded, ‘but really hated it. Then mercifully he lost it and was terrified lest I should give him another, but of course I had seen what a failure it was and never alluded to it again.’
He was always punctiliously courteous to servants, prefacing his requests with ‘please’ and expressing his gratitude with ‘thank you’ and delighting Lady Fildes’s parlourmaid by the way he bowed and smiled at her in the hall when he came to Melbury Road to have his portrait painted.
His own servants had to admit, though, that he was an increasingly difficult man to work for as he grew older. Exacting, temperamental, impatient and irritable, he also had many foibles. One of the most tiresome was his inordinate superstitiousness. He had a horror of crossed knives on a table and kept an ever-watchful eye on the Master of Ceremonies at court levees to make sure that he wore his jewel of office correctly ‘as any displacement was of evil omen’. His valets were expressly forbidden to turn his mattress on a Friday, and he would never allow thirteen people to sit down with him to dinner. Once when he discovered that he had accidentally done so three nights running at Friedrichshof, he was ‘much upset’ until he comforted himself with the thought that perhaps it did not matter as one of the company was pregnant. And Winston Churchill remembered how, as a young subaltern invited to dinner at Deepdene, he had arrived eighteen minutes late in the drawing-room where thirteen people, ‘in the worst of tempers’, were suffering from the King’s steadfast refusal to lead such an unlucky number of people into the dining-room.
Sir Luke Fildes, who was asked to do a drawing of the King on his deathbed, was surprised to see a festoon of charms and keepsakes hanging from the head of the bedstead. He thought that each one must be ‘a memento of some congenial entertainment’. But, as he was at work, Princess Victoria came into the room and enlightened him. ‘I see you keep looking at those mascots of his,’ she said. ‘The old dear used to think they brought him luck.’
Unlike many highly superstitious people, however, the King never lacked courage. Lord Redesdale recalled how, once he had made up his mind to have the operation which necessitated a postponement of his coronation, he made not the least fuss about it, though he knew that he might die. Both in Ireland and in England he had been threatened with death by the Fenians; but this had never deterred him from visiting any part of either country, even though a strong escort of police was often considered necessary to protect him. When a man who had threatened to murder him was sentenced to ten years’ penal servitude, he asked the Home Secretary to mitigate the severe sentence on the grounds that the man was probably mad. And when an anarchist student, who regarded him as responsible for ‘killing the Boers’, fired a pistol at him through the window of his carriage as his train was leaving Brussels in 1900, he behaved with the most perfect composure, never even changing colour, according to Charlotte Knollys, who was in the royal carriage, calling out to the people on the platform, who had grabbed hold of the would-be assassin, not to harm him. ‘The King was the only man I ever met,’ Lord Carrington noted in his journal after his friend’s death, ‘who did not know what moral or physical fear meant.’
Devoted as they were to the King when he was in one of his gratified and gratifying moods, his servants always held him in the greatest awe. For his forceful and formidable personality made him an extremely intimidating figure. ‘Even his most intimate friends were all terrified of him,’ Frederick Ponsonby wrote.
I have seen Cabinet ministers, ambassadors, generals and admirals absolutely curl up in his presence when trying to maintain their point. As regards myself, I varied. If I was quite certain of my facts I never minded standing up to him. In fact, I always noticed that he invariably respected people who stood up to him, and he carried this so far that he was always taken in by dictatorial and cocksure people. At times however I was perfectly terrified of him.
Ponsonby’s daughter recorded that ‘his angry bellow, once heard, could never be forgotten’.
All his staff dreaded these violent outbursts which suddenly erupted when his impatience and irritation could no longer be contained and which became more frequent and more terrifying as the King grew older. No one had more experience of them than Mr Chandler, the Superintendent of his Wardrobe, who would occasionally be summoned to come immediately to the King’s room where his Majesty, pacing furiously up and down, would, as Sir Lionel Cust said, use the poor man ‘as whipping boy or safety valve’ and ‘scold him unmercifully about something’ as soon as the door opened. Yet Chandler, like the rest of the King’s staff, was devoted to him and knew that once the storm was over every effort would be made to make amends for any feelings that had been hurt. As Lord Esher said, ‘If the King assailed you, as he sometimes assailed me, vigorously, remorselessly, it was almost certain that within an hour or two he would send for you, or dispatch a few lines on a slip of paper, on some wholly different subject, in the friendliest manner, with no allusion to what had passed.’ ‘It was a pleasure,’ Lord Fisher thought, ‘to face his furious anger for the sake of the lovely smile you got later on.’
Stamper, the motor engineer, recorded:
Sometimes, if his Majesty were annoyed he would show his displeasure by assuming an air of the most complete resignation. Instead perhaps of upbraiding me, if I lost the way, he would question me quietly … gravely deplore the way in which Misfortune singled him out for her victim, and then settle himself gently in his corner, as if resigning himself to his fate. In his countenance there was written a placid acceptance of the situation and a calm expectancy of worse to come.
Sometimes, too, the King’s anger would abruptly dissolve into laughter, as it did when, having decided to build a sanatorium with the £200,000 which Cassel had given him for a charity of his own choosing, the committee appointed to supervise its construction selected a site at Midhurst for which no adequate water supply could be found. The King’s anger ‘knew no bounds’. Refusing to listen to any excuses, he ended his assault upon Sir Felix Semon, the member of the committee with whom he was most often in contact, by declaring, ‘I’ll tell you something: you doctors are nearly as bad as the lawyers. And, God knows, that will say a great deal!’ In the tense silence that followed, Sir Felix felt constrained to laugh; and the King, surprised at first by such a reaction rather than the expression of contrition which would have been more appropriate to his rage, began to laugh too. The row was over.
It was not only his staff and intimate friends who had first-hand experience of the King’s ungovernable, though fortunately brief rages. Prince Christopher of Greece recorded in his memoirs the ‘consternation stamped on the faces of his guests’ at a big dinner party when the King spilled some spinach on his shirt. His face went red with fury as he plunged his hands into the dish and smeared the spinach all over his starched white front. But then ‘he laughed in his infectious way, “Well, I had to change anyway, hadn’t I? I might as well make a complete mess of it.” ’
With his wife rarely — and with the Prince of Wales never — were there any of these angry scenes which from time to time shattered the peace of the Household. The Queen’s unpunctuality continued to exasperate him to the end; but, having completely failed to cure her, he had been obliged to tolerate it. While waiting for her he would sit drumming his fingers on a nearby table in that all t
oo familiar manner, tapping his feet on the floor and gazing out of the window with an expression which Frederick Ponsonby described as being like that of a Christian martyr.
That alarming drumming and tapping could also be observed when he was bored. Usually he contrived to hide his boredom in public and, when duty required, could listen to the most tedious people with apparently rapt attention. But there were occasions when he could not contain himself. Then the agitated movements of his fingers and feet, growing more and more rapid, would be supplemented by an icy, unblinking stare, or by a whispered aside to an attendant to rescue him — as, one day at Longchamps, he had whispered instructions to be saved from the all too oppressive proximity of Mme Loubet sitting on one side of him and the equally unprepossessing and no less stout wife of the Governor of Paris on the other.
This had been done with charm and courtesy, of course, for the King’s reputation for tactful behaviour with ladies was almost legendary. Stories were told of occasional lapses, of his having, for example, discomfited the American heiress, Mrs Moore, a rather absurd, importunate woman of whom the King said there were three things in life one could not escape:
‘L’amour, la Mort et La Moore.’ Mrs Moore, having curtsied before the King ‘almost to her knees’ in a flamboyantly theatrical gesture, was asked in a voice even more penetrating than usual, ‘Have you lost anything?’ Such lapses with men were more frequent. An American, who evidently wanted to be recognized by the King and made a great fuss of bowing very low every time he saw him, eventually got close enough at Homburg to observe, ‘I guess, Sir, you know my face?’ ‘I certainly seem to recognize,’ the King is alleged to have replied, ‘the top of your head.’
There were also occasions when the King’s laughter offended as much as his mocking words. On his return from Germany in 1909, impressed by the military atmosphere of the Kaiser’s court, he decided that meetings of the Privy Council should in future be conducted in a more formal setting. Instructions were given that uniforms should be worn; and it was intimated that full ecclesiastical vestments would, therefore, also be appropriate. Cosmo Gordon Lang, the recently appointed Archbishop of York, a Scotsman with a keen sense of drama and a highly dignified manner, readily conformed to the King’s wishes and attended his first Privy Council meeting in his splendid and commodious archiepiscopal robes. Having kissed the King’s hand, he retired slowly backwards upon the diminutive figure of Lord Northcote, a former Governor-General of Australia, who was also attending his first meeting of the Privy Council. Northcote became entangled in the voluminous vestments from which he struggled unsuccessfully to emerge, while the Archbishop, evidently unaware of the foreign body within the folds of his cope, maintained his usual dignified composure. The King stepped forward to help; but, overcome by Northcote’s ludicrous predicament, suddenly burst into laughter.
That irrepressible, infectious laughter was heard again a month later when the King was being driven in one of his motor-cars from Biarritz to San Sebastian to have luncheon with the King of Spain. The ridiculous sight of the slovenly Spanish soldiers lining the route, many waving and smiling genially rather than saluting, few standing to attention and some actually sitting down and smoking, was too much for him and, beginning to laugh, he could scarcely control himself before San Sebastian was reached.
Yet, although the King’s laughter was often heard in private, the occasions when he was seen laughing in public were extremely rare. His customary public deportment was universally recognized, indeed, as being exemplary, combining, in a way that was considered unique, irreproachable dignity with easy affability, authority with charm. Scores of witnesses have given testimony to this. ‘He was not a lover of the stage to no purpose,’ wrote Sir Lionel Cust, ‘and like a highly trained actor, he studied and learned the importance of mien and deportment, of exit and entrance, of clear and regulated diction and other details, which he absorbed quite modestly and without any ostentation into his own actions.’ Other observers praised his ability to put people at ease with a few well-considered words, to move on from one person to the next with a remark that would draw them both into a conversation which they could enjoy while he went on to talk to someone else, to flatter them all with the help of his excellent memory. At a state banquet in Berlin he happened to catch sight of Mme de Hegermann Lindencrone, the American wife of the Danish Minister, whom he had met once briefly many years before. He went up to her and reminded her of that meeting which had taken place at Sommerberg where the King had gone to play tennis with Paul Hatzfeldt, a former German Ambassador in London.
‘ “Fancy your Majesty remembering all these years.”
‘ “A long time ago. I was staying with the King and Queen of Denmark at Wiesbaden. I remember all so well. Poor Hatzfeldt! I remember what Bismarck said of him, ‘Was he not the best horse in his stable?’ ” And he turned smilingly to greet another guest.’
He would try to talk to everyone and, unlike the Kaiser, to do so without a hint of patronage. A stickler for convention and the rules of precedence, he was so satisfied with the established order of society that he would not allow anyone to make disparaging remarks about any of its institutions. It was rarely suggested, though, that he was pompous. He would far rather sit down to a meal with an entertaining acrobat than a tedious duke. Nor did he have any religious or racial prejudices. Indeed, his tolerant attitude towards the Roman Catholic Church — emphasized by a visit to Lourdes, his insistence that Cardinal Manning as a Prince of the Church should rank after himself and before the Prime Minister on a Royal Commission, and his readiness to attend a Requiem Mass — led to absurd rumors that he was a secret convert, just as his friendship with so many Jews, and his resemblance to Sir Ernest Cassel, gave rise to equally ill-founded stories that he had himself inherited Jewish blood from a court chamberlain with whom his paternal grandmother had been in love.
Above all, as everyone agreed, the King had a strong sense of duty. Most of his time was spent in the pursuit of pleasure, and all of it was spent in comfort; yet even his sternest critics conceded that, when there was work to be done, sooner or later he brought himself to do it. There was, however, one notable dereliction. In April 1908 the King declined to return home from France when Asquith became Prime Minister on Campbell Bannerman’s death. ‘I am sure he ought to return,’ Francis Knollys told Asquith, ‘and I have gone as far, and perhaps further, in what I have said to him than I am entitled to go.’ But Asquith had to go out to Biarritz to kiss hands, and there was troublesome delay in appointments to the new Cabinet as it was impracticable for all the other ministers affected to cross the Channel. There were no embarrassing speeches in the House of Commons, where the King’s failure to come home was nevertheless strongly deprecated. But some newspapers, rarely having occasion to criticize the King on such a score, condemned his selfishness. The Times suggested:
It may perhaps be regarded as a picturesque and graceful tribute to the reality of the ‘Entente’ with our French friends that the King and the Prime Minister should find themselves so much at home in their beautiful country as to be able to transact the most important constitutional business on French soil. Still, the precedent is not one to be followed, and everyone with a sound knowledge of our political system must hope that nothing of the kind will happen again.
It was suggested to the King that he might save himself from such attacks by emphasizing that he came to Biarritz for his health. But at the time the King felt ‘perfectly well’. He would not say that he was not. He was not in the habit of lying. And he would not lie now. So nothing more was said to him about the matter. Soon it was forgotten; and, if the King remembered it with shame, he did not talk about it. It was better to remember the afternoons with Mrs Keppel, the drives into the country to Pau and Roncesvalles, the walks in the woods, the picnics by the road, the games of pelota at Anglet, the races at la Barre.
After dining with Lord and Lady Islington on the night of the King’s death, Mrs Asquith had gone to see the Hardi
nges. Edward Grey was there, and both he and Charles Hardinge looked ‘white with sorrow’. On returning to Downing Street, Mrs Asquith lay in bed with the lights turned on, ‘sleepless, stunned and cold’. At midnight there was a knock at the door. The head messenger walked in and, stopping at the foot of the bed, said, ‘His Majesty passed away at 11.45.’ Mrs Asquith burst into tears. She had written earlier:
Royal persons are necessarily divorced from the true opinions of people that count, and are almost always obliged to take safe and commonplace views. To them clever men are ‘prigs’, clever women ‘too advanced’; Liberals are ‘socialists’; the uninteresting ‘pleasant’; the interesting ‘intriguers’; and the dreamer ‘mad’. But, when all this is said, our King devotes what time he does not spend upon sport and pleasure ungrudgingly to duty. He subscribes to his cripples, rewards his sailors, reviews his soldiers, and opens bridges, bazaars, hospitals and railway tunnels with enviable sweetness. He is loyal to all his … friends … and adds to fine manners, rare prestige, courage and simplicity.
Edward VII_The Last Victorian King Page 43