The Queen’s House

by Edna Healey

  There were still tragedies to be faced – the Boer War broke out on 11 October 1899 – but there were two more triumphant progresses to and from Buckingham Palace: after the relief of Ladysmith, and then of Mafeking, when people went ‘quite mad with delight’.

  In 1900 Queen Victoria left Buckingham Palace for the last time. Her stamina was extraordinary, although her sight failed in her last years. She worked almost until the end. She died at Osborne House at 6.30 p.m. on Monday 22 January 1901. The Prince of Wales was at her bedside and so was her grandson, Emperor William II of Germany, who upheld the dying Queen on her pillow for the last two and a half hours.

  But the Queen’s last word was for ‘Bertie’, now Edward VII.

  * This was Princess Feodore of Leiningen, daughter of the Duchess by her first husband Prince Emich Charles of Leiningen.

  * The pavilion was demolished in 1928.

  * Two of these were moved to Kennington, where they can still be seen.

  * Had he been able to look into the future, he would have seen those outbursts repeated in Edward VIII; even the mild King George VI had what the family called his ‘gnashes’.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Edward VII

  The most kingly of them all.’1

  LORD ESHER

  Edwardian Interlude

  When Edward VII succeeded to the throne, he was almost sixty and Queen Alexandra was fifty-six. He had a life of his own, which involved long absences abroad and many affairs with charming ladies; she was still very beautiful but severely deaf and a little lame. They had five children who were now grown up – the last, Princess Maud, was born in 1869. Kingship had come almost too late: they were set in their ways, comfortably established at Marlborough House, and at first had no wish to move to Buckingham Palace.

  The Queen was especially unwilling to move from her home, which she loved. She felt that leaving Marlborough House would ‘finish’ her. ‘All my happiness and sorrow were here,’ she wrote to her son, George; ‘Very nearly all of you were born here, all the reminiscences of my whole life are here and I feel as if by taking me away a cord will be taken out of my heart which can never be mended again.’2 It took the combined efforts of the King and the Grand Duchess Augusta (who kept a house in London) finally to persuade her.

  The Queen had learned to accept Edward VII’s failings and compensated by enfolding her children with an almost suffocating love. The nation adored her, admiring her serene beauty. The King, in turn, gave her affection and consideration and insisted that she was always shown the greatest respect; in fact, he gave her almost everything – except fidelity. This she accepted with a grace and dignity that silenced or at least diminished scandal. But by the time he came to the throne, though he was still the centre of society life in London and the fashionable spas of Europe, and still attracted to the ladies, his wilder gambling and womanizing days were over. In February 1898 he had met the charming and discreet Mrs Keppel, who was to be his mistress for the rest of his life. The liaisons with ladies such as Lady Brooke (later Countess of Warwick) and the actress Lillie Langtry faded. Even the King’s advisers accepted Mrs Keppel, an intelligent liberal, as a useful link with the Liberal Party, especially when it came into power in 1905.

  Edward VII inspired devotion and love, mixed with a certain terrified awe. The Times, while admitting that he had been led astray by temptation in its most seductive forms’, claimed that ‘in public life … he has never failed in his duty to the Throne and the nation’.3

  Queen Alexandra was loved and admired not only by the people, but also by the King’s friends. Her remarkable tolerance may perhaps be explained. After the birth of her sixth baby in 1871 (a boy who lived only twenty-four hours) she may have been content that her husband’s Hanoverian energy should be directed elsewhere. In the end she accepted the wise Mrs Keppel as preferable to the undiscriminating affairs in which the King had previously indulged. In the Palace she reigned supreme, and the King had to accept her total absence of a sense of time with unaccustomed patience.

  Their children grew up with loving, indulgent parents, with a freedom denied to Edward VII in his own constricted childhood. He treated his second son, the Duke of York (later King George V), more like a brother than a son.

  Edward VII took seriously his duties as King and he was determined to bring the Palace into the twentieth century. During the six months’ traditional period of mourning, when he was not expected to make many public appearances, he turned his formidable energy into clearing the royal palaces. Queen Victoria had left a vast accumulation of possessions of every kind. Every room in Buckingham Palace, Windsor, Balmoral and Osborne was cluttered with mementoes, portraits, busts and photographs of the Queen’s enormous family, and above all of Prince Albert, whose rooms had been left sacred and unchanged since the day he died.

  Buckingham Palace, the King complained, was like a mausoleum. He set to with gusto: as the Duke of Windsor later remembered, ‘like a Viennese hussar bursting suddenly in an English vicarage’.4 This was a little unjust. The King employed careful and highly qualified assistants to make detailed reports and showed great tact when dealing with Osborne House, which had been the Queen’s own property. His sisters had houses on the estate and when he decided to give part of the house to the nation as a convalescent home for naval officers and as a training school for naval cadets, he was careful to get their co-operation.

  Although he was no lover of desk work and never allowed it to interfere with his pleasures, he went to it with all the energy of a man starved for so long of real work. At first he insisted on opening all his letters himself, signing by hand the vast backlog of service commissions waiting for his signature: there were 6,000 still to be signed after the death of Queen Victoria. In the end he had to resort to a rubber stamp, but at least made sure that he signed by hand all those dealing with people he had known personally. He took a close interest in everything to do with the armed services and foreign affairs. The royal network, stretching from Russia to Spain and Portugal, from Norway and Denmark to Greece and throughout Germany, gave him a personal knowledge of that world. He loved travel, was fluent in several foreign languages and, when he wished, could charm in all of them. Like Queen Victoria, he would always learn from people rather than official reports, and like her, had good judgement.

  This personal experience of foreign countries hardly compensated for the fact that he came to the throne knowing little of the business of being a monarch. Queen Victoria had allowed him limited access to government papers; and she had not encouraged him to prepare for kingship by direct experience, any more than she would allow him to live with Princess Alexandra in Buckingham Palace. Neither Liberals nor Tories expected Edward VII to make a good King; he was considered frivolous and headstrong. As Edward’s biographer, Sir Philip Magnus, writes, The art of constitutional government had to be learnt by King Edward, who found it increasingly convenient to meet and talk to individual ministers upon purely social occasions.’5 It was reminiscent of the bypassing of government by the great Whig families in the time of Melbourne.

  At the beginning of the new reign the new members of the royal Household were appointed. The Earl of Clarendon became Lord Chamberlain; the Earl of Pembroke, Lord Steward; the Duke of Portland, Master of the Horse; and Sir Arthur Ellis, Comptroller of the Lord Chamberlain’s department. Lord Farquhar became Master of the Household; Sir Francis (later Lord) Knollys, the King’s Private Secretary; and Sir Dighton Probyn, Keeper of the King’s Privy Purse.

  Edward VII had no Lord Melbourne to guide him, no Prince Consort to educate him, no Baron Stockmar at his elbow. Instead, like Charles II, he had his ‘Cabal’, his circle of friends. These were his financial adviser, Sir Ernest Cassel; Sir John (later Lord) Fisher, 2nd Sea Lord from 1902 and 1st Sea Lord from 1904 until 1910; Sir Charles (later Lord) Hardinge of the Foreign Office; and Sir Francis Knollys, who had been Edward’s Private Secretary since 1870 and probably understood the new King’s character more than anyone
and accepted his frailties.

  His most influential adviser was Lord Esher, who not only advised the King on military affairs, but has been called the éminence grise behind Edward VII. He had been Private Secretary to the Duke of Devonshire, had ‘an intimate knowledge of politics’ and had sat as a Liberal MP in the House of Commons. Esher had also been Permanent Secretary at the Office of Works (formerly Woods and Forests), an experience which was most useful to the King in his dealings with the royal palaces. It was he who persuaded the King to open some of the royal palaces to the public. He had organized the Diamond Jubilee of 1897– and could advise the King on precedent and protocol. Sensitive and cultured, he was also a man of great drive and competence. He was the editor of Queen Victoria’s letters and he had an unrivalled knowledge of the past, but he also looked to the future, accepting change. He was to be the man responsible for organizing the memorial to Queen Victoria. The King once said, ‘I always think you are the most valuable public servant I have.’ In reporting this to his son Maurice, Esher added, ‘and then I kissed his hand, as I sometimes do’.6

  The King inspired this ‘dog-like devotion’, as his biographer Sir Philip Magnus calls it, in other members of the Cabal – men who knew all his faults, his irrational outbursts, his gambling, his excessive eating and drinking, his love of women, and loved him just the same. Esher’s eulogy after the death of the King was typical. After writing that the King ‘had one supreme gift, and this was his unerring judgement of men – and women’, Esher wrote: ‘I can only write of him as a master and friend – and the kindest and most considerate a man could have. If he gave his confidence, it was given absolutely … I have known all the great men of my time in this land of ours, and many beyond it. He was the most kingly of them all.’7

  Outside this group, but equally trusted by the King, was Sir Lionel Cust, the man responsible in the early days for the survey and reorganization of the Palace, which had been so long neglected in the last years of Queen Victoria’s life. His memoirs give an invaluable insight into the King’s character and his work for Buckingham Palace, as Fanny Burney’s did in the reign of George III.

  Lionel Cust belonged to a family with long associations with the Crown. One ancestor had fought at the Battle of the Boyne with the Duke of Grafton. Because his grandfather, the Reverend the Honourable Henry Cust, was for thirty years Canon of Windsor, Cust was baptized at St George’s Chapel, Windsor. Lionel Cust’s wife, Sybil, was the great-niece of Lady Lyttelton, Queen Victoria’s wise Lady-in-Waiting, whom the King remembered as ‘Laddles’, his governess when he was a boy.

  But it was not because of these connections that the King was persuaded by Esher to appoint Lionel Cust as Surveyor of the King’s Pictures. In 1897, when Prince of Wales, he had been impressed by Cust, who was then Director of the National Portrait Gallery, and who had shown him round, explaining the pictures simply and sensitively. He was at ease with him and when he became King took him into his confidence and trusted him completely. Edward VII, Cust wrote, ‘supervised all the arrangements in the private apartments himself, and placed the actual work in my hands. For this reason I was admitted to a peculiar intimacy, which few, if any, of his Household were privileged to enjoy.’

  The King was always in a rush when at the Palace but would send for Cust ‘while he was changing his coat before going out … and give me instructions in his bedroom or dressing room, never wasting time’. This gave Cust the chance to see the King ‘divested of regal splendour, just a human being like myself’. As far as Cust was concerned, the saying ‘no man is a hero to his valet’ was reversed. Not that the King ever treated him like a valet: ‘he never failed to apologise to me if I had been kept waiting … From being my King and my master, King Edward came to be my hero.’ Cust was not blind to the King’s faults, such as his explosions of temper, but he, like Esher, grew to love ‘a great personality who radiated something special and indescribable from the Throne’.8

  The King’s aim was to modernize the Palace, which had scarcely been touched for thirty years, and to bring some glamour to the throne. Although he was reluctant to move from Marlborough House, which he and the Queen loved and considered home, he was determined to take possession of the Palace as soon as possible.

  Cust took up his new position as Surveyor of the King’s Pictures on 5 March 1901, keeping his directorship of the National Portrait Gallery. Then he began to make a careful survey of all the royal palaces. Together with Sir Arthur Ellis, Lord Farquhar and Lord Esher as Secretary of the Office of Works, he accompanied the King and Queen on an exhausting tour of each Palace ‘from end to end’. Like George III, the new King liked to be personally involved in the work. Queen Alexandra confined her attention to the private rooms, but gamely limped after the ebullient King for most of the tours. Strangely, she had never been in Queen Victoria’s private rooms in Buckingham Palace, although the old Queen had been very fond of her lovely daughter-in-law.

  At the start of their tour of Buckingham Palace the great entrance hall struck chill and gloomy. The scagliola was peeling, the painted walls were shabby and the lighting dim with dirt. Cust wrote, The great entrance Hall had originally been decorated with painted imitations of marble which had darkened with age and the atmosphere of London so that Edward VII spoke of it as the “sepulchre”.’

  Upstairs in the Picture Gallery the gas-lit chandeliers had to be taken down and cleaned. Not only were they thick with dust, but ‘the pictures which had been hanging for years on a level with, or even above, the chandeliers … were found in parts to be coated with a thin dark film of dirt, in some places amounting to opaque black’. Fortunately Cust knew a restorer, F. H. Baines, who was now commissioned to clean the pictures.

  Cust found Buckingham Palace the most neglected of all the royal palaces. The State Rooms were ‘in fair working order’, but had been untouched since Prince Albert’s death in 1861. The Queen’s suite needed modernizing; Cust noted that ‘the apartments on the North Side, destined for the occupation of their Majesties, had to be gutted, in some places altered in actual structure, provided with new bathrooms, electric light, and all the innovations for modern comfort’.

  Since he was responsible for the care of all the ‘Pictures, China, Sculptures, Bronzes, Tapestry, and ornamental furniture’, and since the workmen were already creating havoc, he began with the greatest urgency.

  The King trusted Cust’s discretion completely, knowing that he would handle his responsibilities with infinite care and sensibility. But otherwise, as Cust remembered,

  King Edward liked to supervise everything himself, enjoying nothing so much in the intervals of leisure as sitting in a roomful of workmen and giving directions in person. ‘Offer it up,’ he would say, ‘and I will come to see,’ and when he came he said Yes or No at once. It was no use asking him to suggest this or that, as he had little imagination, though a quick trained eye and instinct for what was right and what pleased him.

  The efforts of Prince Albert and Stockmar had not been in vain: he had absorbed much of the cultural heritage which they had considered so important. ‘I do not know much about Art,’ he would say with a character-istic rolling of his r’s, ‘but I think I know something about Arrangement.’9

  It took all Cust’s tact and sensitivity to deal not only with the King but also with his sisters, to whom the break-up of the familiar scenes at Buckingham Palace must have been painful at times in view of the almost sacred memory of Queen Victoria. His task was eased by their ‘uniform courtesy’.

  Cust’s most delicate task was to collect carefully all the ‘personal objects’ belonging to Queen Victoria which were not specifically mentioned in her will. There were rows of marble busts and statues, including a collection of statuettes of John Brown. At Windsor, Cust heard the King’s booming reply to his deaf wife when she asked the identity of a marble baby: ‘If that child had lived, you and I would not have been here.’ It was Princess Elizabeth, the baby daughter of William IV and Queen Adelaide wh
o, in 1820, had lived only a few months. There were hundreds of gifts from foreign visitors and jubilees, stored away at Windsor – elephant tusks and oriental boxes: even, unidentified, in a box of assorted relics, a codpiece from the armour of Henry VII.

  But Cust’s most moving experience at Buckingham Palace was to find himself ‘alone in the rooms once occupied by Prince Albert, still apparently much the same as when he last used them, one of them containing his private library, another, the organ, on which he had played himself and on which Mendelssohn had performed’.10 There were family letters in a desk, which he handed over to Princess Beatrice as her mother’s executrix. To Esher’s profound irritation, Princess Beatrice rewrote and expurgated her mother’s journal, and then had the original burnt, in accordance with the old Queen’s instructions. Biographers and historians have gnashed their teeth at this piece of literary vandalism ever since.

  Cust remembered that ‘it was a long business to get Buckingham Palace into working order so much being needed in the way of structural alterations, bathrooms and general decoration …’ There was

  a constant and vigilant warfare with the myrmidons of H.M. Office of Works, especially electricians who all too frequently when a nice spot was available … for hanging pictures in a good light, selected that spot for an electric light fitting which could quite as well be placed elsewhere.11

  Unfortunately he never quite defeated them; nor could he always prevent radiators being placed next to priceless furniture. Cust does not mention the decorators who, in 1902, were busy covering Prince Albert’s polychrome walls of the Grand Hall with gallons of white paint, but they must have been disturbing.

  The King had commissioned the interior decorator C. H. Bessant of the firm of Bertram & Son to transform the entrance to the Palace. So the Grand Hall, the walls of the Grand Staircase and the Marble Hall now gleamed – an expanse of white and gold.