The Heir Apparent

by Jane Ridley

  “Well, Stamper, what about the new car?” were the King’s first words to his mechanic on his return.13 The motor that had just been delivered was a 65 hp Mercedes in which the monarch sped through his realm. He drove the fifty miles from Newmarket to Sandringham in a record-breaking one hour and twenty minutes, averaging 37½ mph.14 Though he exceeded the speed limit of 20 mph the King’s car was never stopped. Police alerted in advance of his route cleared the roads of slow horse-drawn traffic. Often when the King drove through a village the local brass band played “God Save the King.” Constant repetition of the national anthem must surely be the bane of a musical monarch’s life, and Bertie had strong views on the matter; he ordered military bands to speed up the timing and play at the rate of eighty beats to the minute. However excruciating the village band, he always raised his hat and bowed in acknowledgment, often bursting out laughing as soon as the village was passed.15

  That summer, the King’s horse Minoru won the Derby by a head, and ecstatic crowds surged on to the course as Bertie walked from the royal box to lead in his horse. It was his third Derby win, and a wag shouted from the crowd, “Now King you have won the Derby, go back home and dissolve this bloody Parliament!”16

  Parliament was bogged down in the budget. The Liberal government battled to get the budget through the Commons, the bill didn’t pass until November, and the Lords threatened to throw it out. As class war smoldered into flame between the Liberals and the peers, Bertie busied himself with house parties and visits to old mistresses. He stayed with Minnie Paget and saw Isadora Duncan dance; he called on Lillie Langtry, now Lady de Bathe and “an old tart of a girl with reddish hair and a flamboyant manner,” and inspected her successful racing stables; he spent a weekend with Emma Bourke and her husband, Lord Clarendon.†17 In July, after a royal visit to Manchester, the King and Queen drove back through pouring rain to Knowsley, where they stayed with Lord Derby, and cheering crowds lined the entire route. For mile after mile the King and Queen acknowledged their welcome, sitting in a closed car perched forward on the edge of the seat so that they could be seen, Alix bowing and Bertie perpetually raising his hat.18

  With the cheers of the Lancashire crowd still ringing in his ears, the King brought his motor to stay at Nuneham Park with the Liberal minister Loulou Harcourt. As usual, he played a lot of bridge. “Mrs. George (the Favorita) was in great good humour and very smart, winning over 1000 points at bridge from the King.”19 Bertie was an indifferent player. According to Frank Lascelles, who played often with him, when he had a good hand as well as a good dummy, “he knows how to make the best of it, but he has no knowledge of where the cards are.”20 He was alarmingly short-tempered with his partners, but Alice Keppel could tease him out of it, quipping, “Sir, I am afraid I cannot even tell a King from a Knave.” Once, grumbling that he had no cards, he put her into a high-no-trump contract and laid his own hand down as dummy. “All I can say, Sir, is God save the King and preserve Mrs. Keppel,” observed Alice.21

  Only days after the Nuneham house party, Loulou Harcourt made a speech attacking the “black hand” of the Tory peers for “issuing edicts of assassination” against Liberal measures. He denied using the word “assassins” to describe the peers, but he received a tart reprimand from Bertie in the shape of a letter from Knollys, pointing out that the King would have expressed regret if Harcourt had used such words “immediately after he had been your guest.”22

  Lloyd George continued to needle the House of Lords. He made an inflammatory speech at Limehouse (30 July 1909), in which he attacked the dukes as selfish, pampered parasites. The palace objected strenuously. On the King’s instruction, Knollys wrote to the Liberal minister Lord Crewe, protesting at LG’s speech, “which can only have the effect of setting ‘class’ against ‘class’ and stirring up the worst passions of its audience.” “The King cannot understand how Asquith can tacitly allow certain of his colleagues to make speeches that would not be tolerated by any Prime Minister until within the last few years.” Such speeches, said Knollys, were seen by the King “as being an insult to the Sovereign when delivered by one of his confidential servants.”23

  On 2 August, the czar and his family visited Cowes in the yacht Standart. Radicals attacked the King for entertaining the autocrat. But Bertie was returning Nicholas’s hospitality at Reval; and, as Grey pointed out: “The King’s influence with the Czar and the friendship of the British Government are really a support to Stolypin … and to the Duma and all friends of constitutional progress in Russia.”24

  On board the royal yacht Victoria and Albert with the King and Queen was the prime minister, and in the intervals of the complex choreography of boarding the Standart, firing royal salutes, and changing in and out of uniform, Bertie made certain that he squeezed in an interview with Asquith, who found the experience a chastening one. The King was very angry indeed about Lloyd George’s Limehouse speech. It was the last time in English history that the monarch tore strips off the prime minister. “I have never known him more irritated, or more difficult to appease,” Asquith told Lloyd George. He urged LG to apologize, because “the King, of course, lives in an atmosphere which is full of hostility to us and to our proposals; but he is not himself unfriendly, and, so far, he has ‘stood’ the Budget very well—far better than I expected. It is important, therefore, to avoid raising his apprehensions and alienating his goodwill.”25 Lloyd George wrote a disingenuous letter (5 August) explaining about the Limehouse speech, which, he claimed, had been provoked by violent Tory attacks.26

  Bertie departed for his three weeks’ cure at Marienbad, as he always did. Here he was reunited with the ravishing American actress Maxine Elliott. A friend of the Keppels, she had traveled to Marienbad the year before and positioned herself on the bench where she knew the King always passed on his morning walk. Recognizing the forty-year-old beauty demurely reading a book as the actress he had seen in a play, Bertie sent back one of his equerries to invite her to dinner. According to Chips Channon, who knew her in old age, Maxine Elliott was “an immense bulk of a woman with dark eyes, probably the most amazing eyes one has ever seen.” She was “lovable, fat, oh so fat, witty and gracious”—he once saw her consuming pat after pat of butter without any bread (butter was Daisy Warwick’s downfall, too).27 Channon claimed that Edward VII, along with Lord Curzon and many others, had shared her “tempestuous” bed. Rosebery had proposed to her, too. The King had lunch with her at Marienbad four times; who knows what went on in the afternoons behind closed curtains in her scented hotel room.28 Certainly she received encouragement enough to buy Hartsbourne Manor in Bushey Heath in order to entertain Bertie, for whom she expensively decorated what she called the King’s suite.29

  A few days before Bertie left Marienbad, Sigmund Muntz the journalist was drinking coffee at an inn in the pine forests high up above the town, when the “Duke of Lancaster” unexpectedly stepped from his car. Leaning on a stick and muffled in a shawl against the autumn chill, Bertie incognito seemed a lonely figure. Briefly glimpsing the man behind the mask, Muntz pondered whether power and popularity had brought the King happiness.30

  Back in London, Bertie seemed to have thrown off his depression. Esher was summoned to breakfast alone at Buckingham Palace. “I waited in the little room lined with his Indian armour for a few minutes, when he came in, punctually, with his dog. He looked wonderfully well, thinner and younger. We sat down, each with our own small silver coffee pot and boiled egg.”31

  The King’s chief concern that morning was Winston Churchill, who had ridiculed the dukes as ornamental creatures “like goldfish.” “These unfortunate individuals, who ought to lead quiet, delicate, sheltered lives, far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife, have been dragged into the football scrimmage.”32 Winston’s speech, said Bertie, was vulgar and “American,” and Winston was a traitor to his class.33

  Lloyd George caused less annoyance. This was partly due to Mrs. Keppel, “who likes him.”34 Six months later, Esher was predicting th
at Lloyd George will “someday drift over to the Tories.”35 A man of his class, wrote Esher, “is always easier to deal with, when once he is ‘arrivé,’ than a man sprung from the ‘upper’ class. He is less dangerous, in spite of his flaming language. Most of that is mere Celtic gas.”36 Churchill, a protégé of the King who was in the habit of spending his weekends at Blenheim, was a different matter. Both Esher and Knollys disliked him. “Churchill thinks solely of party exigencies,” wrote Esher. “He has his eye fixed on the radical wing, and means to lead it. He is conceited and thinks no one is so clever as himself.”37

  Lord Knollys was so enraged by Churchill’s speech that he wrote a letter to The Times effectively accusing him of lèse-majesté for failing to acknowledge that the creation of peers was a royal prerogative.38 “He and the King must really have gone mad,” was Churchill’s comment. “This looks to me like a rather remarkable Royal intervention and shows the bitterness which is felt in these circles. I shall take no notice.”39 Winston was right about Knollys. Panicked by the threat that class war against the peers posed to the Crown, his judgment deserted him. The King, on the other hand, saw clearly what WC (“whose initials are so well-named!” as he remarked to Esher) was trying to achieve.40 By attacking the peers, Churchill hoped to goad the House of Lords into rejecting the budget, thus provoking the constitutional crisis that the King was anxious to prevent.

  The King reached Balmoral on 23 September. A day or so later, he learned (through Esher, whose intelligence sources with the opposition were excellent) that the Unionist leaders had almost certainly made up their minds, after months of uncertainty, to throw out the budget in the House of Lords.41 Bertie was “strongly opposed” to rejection, anticipating that if the Lords threw out the budget, the crisis would inevitably escalate.42

  At Balmoral, the Russian ambassador Benckendorff found Bertie in a stimulated mood: “It is the first time I have seen him very excited about politics and … he does not mince words.”43 Watching the King in the smoking room after dinner, surrounded by men such as Haldane, Rosebery, and Reginald McKenna, made Benckendorff feel that the English “fearing for the constitution are truly idiotic”; the contrast with the autocracy of Nicholas II could hardly be more marked. “All the conversation is conducted, encouraged, made natural and amusing by his skill, his tact.… Telegrams are pouring in and he is reading them aloud, with private comments as if alone in the room.”44

  The King summoned Asquith to Balmoral, to ask whether he would be acting constitutionally if he talked to the leaders of the opposition.45 Bertie spoke frankly. “He still wants the Budget to pass (this is most private),” Asquith reported to Margot, “and is making determined efforts to influence the Lords.” In his interview with Balfour and Lansdowne, “He will urge the gravity of the step they are taking and the disastrous consequences which he considers must ensue.… This he is doing wholly on his own initiative.”46 For his part, Asquith undertook to write to Lloyd George, and endeavor to gag him from attacking the peers.47 Asquith’s warning letter was ignored by Lloyd George, who made a rabble-rousing speech at Newcastle (9 October) ridiculing the peerage as “five hundred men, ordinary men chosen accidentally from among the unemployed,” intended to provoke them into voting for rejection. The King was not pleased. The next time he saw Asquith, he “told him how highly I disapproved of L. George’s speech! The former tried to defend it but it was a mild attempt!”48

  Bertie then summoned the opposition—Balfour and Lansdowne—to Buckingham Palace on 12 October. The interview was not a success: As Bertie wrote drily to Georgie, “No results accrued from it.”49 According to Carrington, the two grandees were “very stiff and reserved and HM apparently got nothing out of them.” They told him (untruthfully) that no decision had been taken with regard to the budget. The King’s intervention was “generally supposed to have been a mistake,” wrote Carrington, “the first of any importance he has made.”‡50 Esher nevertheless thought it was “appreciated all over the country. It was a very wise move: even though it bears no direct or immediate fruit.”51

  Asquith, who stayed at Windsor in November, was impressed by the King’s grasp of the situation. “He is a very good listener and quite a clever man: a capital head. Very superior to the Prince of Wales, who is a dunderhead.… The King isn’t educated of course, but he thoroughly understands.” The King told Asquith that he liked Lansdowne but thought him “not a clever man, not a clever man at all.” Balfour he cordially disliked as “the greatest political shuffler of our day” with “no sense of honour or truth: he doesn’t trust his judgement.”52 Discussing his views of opposition leaders with the PM was no doubt indiscreet, but Balfour and Lansdowne had done little to earn the King’s confidence.

  The King was at Sandringham on 30 November, the day the House of Lords voted to reject the budget. Among the guests assembled for the Queen’s birthday was Sydney Holland, the hospital reformer. The King came up to him and talked about the London Hospital, of which Holland was chairman. He sat down, “cross-legged, on a sort of saddle-shaped stool, and made one feel at ease at once.”53 Out shooting that day, Sydney Holland fired almost seven hundred cartridges and had to send away for more. The pheasants at Sandringham were plentiful—the place crawled with them; they were also notoriously low and easy to shoot.54 The King joined the shoot late. He wore a thick brown suit, a Tyrolean hat, and boldly striped stockings. At lunch, which was eaten in a tent flying the royal standard, the Queen lit a cigarette and asked the King if he approved of ladies stalking or smoking. “They might smoke, but not shoot,” said the King.55 He left the shoot early. Some of the peers who were staying caught the train to London to vote, but by the King’s wish none of the household voted. Lord Knollys, who was anxious to prevent what he called “a disaster happening to the constitution and, incidentally, to the Monarchy,” had to be restrained by the King from voting in favor of the budget.56

  Parliament was prorogued on 2 December, and Almeric Fitzroy, the clerk to the Privy Council, traveled down to Sandringham, where the King held the Prorogation Council. After lunch Lord Knollys told him “very gravely and emphatically” that he thought the Lords were mad.57 Bertie complained that he had never had such a miserable day. Not only did the council stop him from joining the shoot, but he suffered from toothache all night and had to send for the dentist, who performed an extraction. Holland asked if he had gas. “Oh, no, I just had some cocaine. I can bear pain,” said the King.58

  The Queen spent the day writing eight hundred telegrams of thanks for her birthday greetings of the day before.59 One of these was to Daisy Pless: “I thank you and your dear Hans for kind wire for my old birthday.” Daisy Pless was amazed to discover that Alix was sixty-five. She looked no older than fifty. Daisy observed that, contrary to gossip, the Queen’s lips were not painted, “as they are always moist,” nor was her face enameled, as was often rumored: “I have seen her at Cowes in the pouring rain.”§60 She noticed that Alix always sat side by side with Soveral; “he speaks distinctly and she always hears him.”61 Like Alix, Soveral was fanatically anti-German.

  The King came out shooting on the last day of the house party (4 December). Being a good host, he put himself in the worst place, at the end of the line. Sydney Holland, who was standing in the place next to him, nervously praying that he would not miss, counted seven people in the King’s butt: a body servant, a loader, a man with a dog, a boy carrying cartridges, another with coats, the agent from Balmoral, and the agent from Sandringham. It was a bitterly cold day, driving snow, and the King, who was wearing two coats, put on a third. He went home after one drive and changed into a pink flannel shirt, Guards tie, and colored flannel waistcoat.62 Standing behind the King out shooting was his racehorse trainer, Richard Marsh. Some instinct impelled him to pick up and put in his pocket the last two cartridges that Bertie fired. They were the last he ever discharged at Sandringham.63

  The rejection of the budget by the Lords plunged the King into the political firing line. It mad
e an immediate election inevitable. The election was fought on the budget, but the Liberals also wanted a mandate to limit the powers of the House of Lords. Asquith opened his campaign on 10 December with a speech demanding “safeguards” curbing the legislative powers of the upper chamber. The House of Lords, which was overwhelmingly Conservative, had no intention of voting for a bill limiting its powers, and Asquith plainly intended to ask the King for some sort of guarantee to create extra peers if the Lords rejected a veto bill. This placed the King in an acutely difficult position. On the one hand, he wanted to hang on to his power to create peers, but on the other, he was reluctant to create extra peers to further the political demands of one party. Nor did he want to commit in advance.

  Esher, who was having an excellent crisis, having been restored to favor after languishing in the backwater of the archives, was sent out to spy on the Liberals. In a memo to Knollys, he reported alarming intelligence. According to Haldane, “The Prime Minister wishes to obtain a promise from the King before the General Election.” Ministers were also considering a proposal to transfer the royal prerogative of peer creation to the prime minister.64 This last, thought Knollys, would “weaken the Monarchy so considerably that it would be better that the King should abdicate than agree to it.”65 He considered these proposals so “outrageous” that he thought it best to conceal Esher’s letter from the King “for the present,” as it “would be a mistake to set him still more against his ministers.”66

  On the day Parliament was dissolved (15 December 1909), Knollys, acting on behalf of the King, summoned the prime minister’s secretary. He disclosed that “the King had come to the conclusion that he would not be justified in creating new peers (say 300) until after a second general election.” As Knollys explained, “The King regards the policy of the Government as tantamount to the destruction of the House of Lords,” and in consequence this issue must be put to the electorate at a second election.67