The Heir Apparent: A Life of Edward VII, the Playboy Prince

“Unable to go out owing to a cold in the head,” he wrote laconically in his diary.⁶ In his rooms in the Hôtel du Palais, Mrs. Keppel nursed him. She scrawled a note to Soveral: “The King’s cold is so bad that he cannot dine out but he wants us all to dine with him at the Palais SO BE THERE. I am quite worried entre nous and have sent for the nurse.”⁷

The Times reported on 14 March that, on his doctor’s advice, “King Edward remained in his apartments today as a storm was raging. His Majesty’s health, however, is excellent.”⁸ This was disinformation. Even the King accepted that he was ill. His diary for 14–18 March reads: “Severe cold and bronchial attack. Unable to leave the house. Dine in sitting room.”⁹ Reid, who noted that the King was breathing fast and coughing badly with a fever, sat up all night in the next room.¹⁰ Nurse Fletcher, who had cared for the King previously, arrived from England. “Physical signs in the chest” that threatened a fatal attack of pneumonia, occasioned Reid “no little anxiety.”¹¹ Alice Keppel was “much alarmed,” and little wonder.¹² Watching the King struggle for breath, she knew that he was fighting for his life. That the King of England should die in a hotel room in Biarritz, with only his mistress at his bedside, was a terrifying scenario.

But Bertie turned the corner. By 22 March, he was well enough to write to Georgie: “I have really had a nasty & sharp bronchial attack with a horrible cough, but I am now getting daily better and stronger, still I must be careful for a time.”¹³ The big cigars lit up again. He read a novel—always a bad sign.¹⁴

The public knew nothing.¹⁶ The Times reported on 17 March that the King was “recovering from his slight indisposition,” and on 25 March, “His Majesty is now completely restored to health.”¹⁷ When Ponsonby traveled to Biarritz to relieve Arthur Davidson as private secretary, he was astonished to discover how ill the King had been. Mr. Grey of the Daily Mail had agreed to suppress details of the King’s illness in exchange for being kept fully informed.¹⁸

Partly because of this conspiracy of silence, a myth grew up about that last spring in Biarritz. It was alleged that the King had indulged in a “hedonistic holiday,” running away from the constitutional crisis at home.^*¹⁹ Indeed, after he recovered, the King resumed his Biarritz routine. His diary fills with motor drives and dinner parties: not only Alice Keppel, but also Agnes Keyser and even Jennie Churchill feature in the lists.²⁰ But as Davidson, his assistant private secretary, later wrote, it was wrong to think that “because the King dined out or had a dinner party that he was indifferent to politics.” The fact was that “the King either dined out or had people to dinner every night of his life—it was his ordinary life.”²¹

No one knew whether the government would succeed in making a deal with the Irish or whether they would be defeated, and as the uncertainty deepened, the King’s temper worsened. In spite of a soothing visit to a convent of religious sisters who passed their days in silence, he fulminated against the socialistic tendencies of his government and Asquith’s inability to “make up his mind or make a clear statement.” He told Knollys: “I do not suppose the P.M. will suggest my making a quantity of peers, but should he do so I should certainly decline, as I would far sooner be unpopular than ridiculous!”²⁴

Alix urged him to leave that “horrid Biarritz,” and join her at Genoa on a Mediterranean cruise, but the King refused.²⁵ “I fear she is much disappointed at my not going with her,” he told Knollys. Bertie claimed that “I could not go so far away fr. Home—as I always feel I might be wanted at any moment and I can be in London fr. here under 24 hours.”²⁶

Without waiting to see the sick King return, Alix and her daughter Victoria departed on a whim for a fortnight’s Mediterranean cruise to Corfu—a curiously irresponsible thing to do.

Asquith wrote on 13 April confirming the King’s worst fears. Bertie had already received advance warning from Esher that the government had struck a deal with the Irish. In exchange for the Irish allowing the budget to pass, the Cabinet proposed to demand guarantees from the Crown to ensure that the Veto Bill passed the Lords.²⁷ Pithily expressed by Esher, the policy was this: “(a) Bribe or blackmail (whichever you like) for the Irish. (b) The price—a menace to the Sovereign.”²⁸

The King’s reply was brief and formal. He informed the PM that he expected to receive a telegram with the results of the critical vote in the Commons on the budget on 19 April, “so that he can make his plans accordingly.”³⁰ In private, he was fuming. “It is simply disgusting,” he wrote. “Thank God I am not in London.”³¹ Asquith had gone back on his word not to ask for guarantees until after a second election, and to keep the Crown out of politics. Now he told the Commons (14 April) that if the Lords rejected the Veto Bill, “we shall find it our duty immediately to tender advice to the Crown as to the steps which will have to be taken if that policy is to receive statutory effect in this Parliament.”³² In plain language, as the King told Knollys, this meant that “he is going to ask me to swamp the H of Lords by a quantity of peers.… I positively decline doing this—besides I have previously been given to understand that I should not be called upon to agree to this preposterous measure. Certainly the P.M. & many of his colleagues assured me so—but now that they are in the hands of [Irish leader] Redmond & Co. they do not seem to be their own master.”³³

Asquith’s defection made Lord Knollys hysterical. He ranted that the prime minister intended “to commit the greatest outrage on the King which has ever been committed since England became a Constitutional Monarchy; and, if I were the King, I would, should the elections be in favour of the radicals, rather abdicate than agree to it.”³⁵ Fortunately, Lord Knollys was not the King, nor did the King listen to his wild talk. The word “abdication” did not cross Bertie’s lips, but he was angered “by the way in which my Ministers have treated me in mentioning my Prerogative in such a casual way especially the Prime Minister and I wish them to understand that I look upon them with the greatest displeasure and can no more be on friendly terms with them. They are not only ruining the Country but maltreat me personally, and I can neither forgive nor forget it.”³⁶

One of the drives that Stamper arranged took Bertie to Lourdes. He was received by the Bishop of Lourdes, who escorted him to the Church of the Rosary. He then climbed the steps and entered the basilica, which is perched on the terrace above. A company of pilgrims appeared and knelt on the steps as they sought the bishop’s blessing. Stamper watched the bishop raise his hands above the kneeling crowd in the setting afternoon sun. “There above them all, one figure stood out sharply against the background of white. It was the King, standing bare-headed in the sunlight, watching the scene below.”³⁷

Stamper’s image of the King is almost apocalyptic. Perhaps the visit was a political gesture, designed to appeal to his Catholic subjects. Perhaps, conscious of the approach of death, Bertie sought comfort from the Catholic shrine. He visited the Lourdes grotto, but his contemplation must have been sorely tried by the crowd, which was so great that he had to leave through a side door.³⁸

He traveled directly to London, without pausing in Paris. On the journey, Ponsonby had “quite an interesting conversation with him as to how far the Sovereign could rightly go in settling the differences between the two Houses of Parliament.”⁴⁰ In order to signal his displeasure, the King had previously asked Knollys to prevent Asquith, Lloyd George, and Winston Churchill from meeting him at Victoria station, as was customary, but when his train arrived at five forty-five on 27 April, Asquith and Churchill were waiting on the platform to receive him.⁴¹

At three o’clock that afternoon, Knollys and Esher met Balfour with Randall Davidson, Archbishop of Canterbury, at Lambeth Palace. Knollys had summoned the meeting, which Esher pompously called “a Conference at Lambeth,” in order to sound out Balfour. If the government asked the King to dissolve Parliament and give guarantees, and if the King refused this “advice,” would Balfour be prepared to form a government? Balfour replied that he would “come to the King’s assistance” by taking office and immediately asking for a dissolution.⁴² Quoting the precedent of William IV in 1832, Esher argued that Balfour’s willingness to take office meant that the King was not bound to accept the advice of his ministers to create peers.

Later, Esher’s Lambeth Palace meeting became the subject of furious political controversy. Knollys, who had declared that the King should abdicate rather than give conditional guarantees, abruptly changed his mind, and six months later he counseled King George V to agree to Asquith’s demand. Extraordinarily, he concealed Esher’s memorandum from the new King. Believing that he had no choice in the matter, George agreed to give the conditional guarantees to create peers that Asquith demanded before a second election. Had he known that Balfour was prepared to take office, he might have acted differently, and he afterward considered that he had been bullied into acquiescing by Knollys and Asquith. Knollys “seriously misled” the King, according to one constitutional expert, and gave dangerous advice; by agreeing to hypothetical pledges and committing himself in advance, George potentially compromised the political neutrality of the monarchy.⁴³

The memorandum of 3 May in which Esher advised King Edward to refuse his government’s advice to create peers was probably never seen by him. We can only guess at what Bertie would have done, but he would not have been kept in the dark about Esher’s talks with Balfour. Nor would Knollys—or even Asquith—have dared to bully him. It seems likely, that, had he lived, he would not have given Asquith hypothetical guarantees before a second election.

The King held a thirty-minute audience with Asquith at eleven thirty on 28 April. “I do not look forward to it,” he wrote; but Asquith reported to Margot afterward, “I had a good talk with the King this evening [sic] and found him most reasonable.”⁴⁴

On the afternoon of Thursday, 28 April 1910, the King attended the private view at the Royal Academy. He looked “tired and a little pale.”⁴⁵ That evening, he appeared at Covent Garden and sat through one act of Siegfried alone in the royal box, looking “very tired and worn.” Redesdale, who was in a box nearby, saw him give a great sigh as he got up; he opened the door of the box, lingered for a little in the doorway, and “with a very sad expression in his face—so unlike himself—took a last look at the house, as if to bid it farewell, and then went out.”⁴⁶

Redesdale was writing with hindsight. Esher, who knew the King far better, saw him on the evening of Friday the twenty-ninth and thought him “in excellent spirits—and apparently in excellent health.”⁴⁷ On Saturday, he traveled to Sandringham, not, as the papers later suggested, to “combat a threatened attack” by a change of air, but because he wanted to oversee the estate as he always did.⁴⁸

The King and his suite left St. Pancras at nine fifteen on Saturday and ate breakfast on the train. The doctors’ report later said he was “feeling a little unwell,” but he walked about the grounds inspecting new planting, and at dinner Ponsonby thought he was “in his usual form,” telling stories of “amusing incidents of former years” and playing bridge.⁴⁹ On Sunday, the King drove the short distance to church in a “clarence,” but later he walked in the garden and inspected the farm and stud. The drawing rooms were shut up, as the Queen was away, and the King insisted on working in Knollys’s room, which was chilly, without a fire.

Monday morning was cold and very wet. Bertie traveled back to London in the afternoon. He was “not in a talkative mood,” but it never occurred to Ponsonby or anyone else that he was beginning a serious illness.⁵⁰ That evening, he went to 17 Grosvenor Crescent to play bridge with Agnes Keyser. She was concerned by his coughing, and sent a messenger with a penciled note to Sir James Reid: “The King is dining here. He would like to see you tonight at Buckingham Palace at 11:15, if you would kindly go there, as he has a cold, and a little cough and Nurse is not there.”⁵¹

Reid found HM sitting in his dressing room in an easy chair, panting very fast and coughing, with a temperature of one hundred degrees and complaining of difficulty in breathing. Reid applied linseed and mustard poultices to the King’s chest and back and prescribed a sleeping draught of chlorodyne and morphine. When he returned home at one a.m., he told his wife: “The King may recover, as he did at Biarritz, but if not he will be dead in three days.”⁵²

The next morning, the King dressed but agreed to remain upstairs, doing business as usual. Ponsonby, who saw him during the day with letters, never thought his condition was alarming, and nor did Esher.⁵³ Grey requested an audience to discuss the guarantees, but the King refused to see him. At dinner with Ponsonby and two members of the suite, the King complained that he was unable to eat anything and talking made him cough. After dinner they were joined by Alice Keppel and her friend Venetia James, and they played bridge, which, as Bertie explained, meant that he didn’t need to talk. He smoked a huge cigar, which seemed to soothe him.⁵⁴

On Wednesday, 4 May, after a wretched night, Bertie struggled into his clothes and forced himself through his program of interviews, but he looked terrible, with large black blotches under his skin.⁵⁵ At eleven, he saw Newton Moore, the prime minister of Western Australia. His lord-in-waiting wrongly briefed him that Moore was the PM of New Zealand. Sir Francis Hopwood, the civil servant, corrected the error, and the King lost his temper, which set off a frightening fit of violent coughing. When Hopwood suggested that he should go to bed, the King replied, “No, I shall work to the end. Of what use is it to be alive if one cannot work?”⁵⁶ (Prince Albert would surely have approved.) At one thirty, he saw Georgie. The Prince of Wales was so alarmed that he wrote to warn “darling Motherdear,” who, spurred by a “providential instinct,” was hurrying back from Corfu.⁵⁷ “Thank God you are coming home to look after him,” wrote Georgie.⁵⁸

That evening, the King felt so unwell that he noted in his diary: “The King dines alone.”⁵⁹ It was the last entry he ever wrote. It was also the saddest. The man who had spent his entire life trying to ensure that he did not dine alone was at last forced to confront himself.

Ponsonby had expected to play bridge with the King after dinner that evening. Bertie canceled the game. He looked “wretched.”⁶⁰ For the first time, Ponsonby was seriously worried.

On Thursday, Reid found the King worse after another bad night. He was a bluish color in the face, and Reid told Ponsonby that he worried lest his heart fail.⁶¹ Undaunted, the King refused to cancel his engagements. Lord Islington, newly ennobled governor of New Zealand, commented after his audience: “I think I have been with a dying man today!”⁶²

Alice Keppel stayed with the King throughout the day. The nurse administered oxygen from a huge metal cylinder, but this only relieved his breathing for a short while. Reid gave an injection of strychnine to stimulate his heart. When he returned at noon, he found the King was worse, so he remained there with Laking.⁶³

At six p.m., an announcement was issued that the King was suffering from a severe bronchial attack. This was followed at eight p.m. by a bulletin posted on the palace railings and signed by the doctors that warned that “His Majesty’s condition causes some anxiety.”⁶⁵ The bulletin, which was approved by the King, effectively gave notice that he was on his deathbed.

Bertie met death with courage. At one moment he said, “I am feeling better and intend to fight this, and I shall be about again in a day.”⁶⁶ He refused to go to bed that night, but sat up in a chair, fighting for breath and unable to speak.⁶⁷

In the morning he was worse, but he insisted on dressing. He rejected the informal clothes laid out for him by his valet, and asked for gray trousers.^† He was angry when the doctors forbade him from having a bath. He tried to do business with Davidson and Knollys but his voice was faint and indistinct. He smoked half a cigar and had a violent coughing fit.

Davidson telephoned Ernest Cassel to cancel his appointment. Half an hour later, Knollys rang summoning Cassel to come at once. He arrived at twelve. The King was standing up and looked “as if he had suffered great pain” but seemed in good spirits.⁶⁸ Cassel brought with him an envelope containing £10,000 in banknotes, which he left beside the King.⁶⁹

At one p.m., Bertie walked to his bedroom window to play with his canaries, and fainted. Now the oxygen was given almost continuously and so were the strychnine injections, but to less and less effect; he gradually lost consciousness during the afternoon, slumping forward in his chair.

At Great Cumberland Street, Jennie Churchill and her sister Leonie Leslie sat waiting for news all afternoon, talking in whispers so the servants would not hear. The telephone rang and Leonie came back into the drawing room with tears in her eyes. “They can’t get him out of his armchair. Alice has been sent for.”⁷¹

Mrs. Keppel had been banished from the palace when Alix returned on Thursday, and she spent Friday morning in hysterics. Now, it seems, she presented the Queen with a letter that Bertie had written back in 1901. It read as follows:

To her great credit, Alix obeyed her husband’s wishes, painful though the instruction was, and summoned the mistress to the palace.

Reconciliation with the Queen was the dream of every mistress, from Lillie Langtry to Daisy Warwick, but Mrs. Keppel’s story is hard to credit. Not only was the King barely conscious, but Mrs. Keppel was in a highly emotional state. She was later to become notorious as a woman who “cannot resist lying and inventing and saying anything that comes into her Roman head.”⁷⁴

The official version, as recorded by Esher, goes like this. The Queen shook hands with Mrs. Keppel and said, “I am sure you always had a good influence over him,” then walked away to the window. When the King fell forward in his chair, surrounded by nurses, Mrs. Keppel became hysterical once more. She was bundled out of the room, shrieking, and “before the Pages and the Footmen in the passage kept on repeating, ‘I never did any harm, there was nothing wrong between us,’ and then ‘what is to become of me?’ She fell into a wild fit of hysterics, and had to be carried into [Ponsonby’s] room, where she remained for some hours.” Mrs. Keppel’s insistence that there was “nothing wrong between us” can perhaps be read as an admission that she had never slept with the King after all.⁷⁵ “Altogether it was a painful and rather theatrical exhibition, and ought never to have happened,” wrote Esher.⁷⁶

But Esher was an unreliable witness, too, and he was especially jealous of Alice Keppel.

That Mrs. Keppel was overcome by hysterics seems certain. Laking, who was in the room, recalled the Queen taking him aside and whispering, “Get this woman away.”⁷⁷ The two versions of the story—Esher’s and Mrs. Keppel’s—clearly reveal the conflict between the mistress, emotionally distraught and desperate for closure and validation, and the members of the household, who closed ranks to exclude her as soon as the King lost consciousness.

He then suffered an alarming heart attack. Alix watched as her husband drifted into a coma. At eleven, they lifted him out of his chair into bed, quite unconscious.

Downstairs, people had come and gone throughout the day. Winston Churchill had bustled into the palace, anxious to assert his right as Home Secretary to witness the demise of the Crown. He was kept downstairs and not admitted even to the antechamber.⁷⁹

The Archbishop of Canterbury had visited twice. He left at about seven without having seen the King. Esher registered concern. “I was so anxious that the Archbishop should be in the Palace, that I ventured to ring up his chaplain at Lambeth and suggest his return. Apart from all reasons, convention to a Monarchy has such powerful meanings.”⁸⁰

Esher’s worry is understandable, but his words about convention having such powerful meanings are somewhat elliptical. He may have had another motive for recalling the archbishop. There are hints that a Roman Catholic priest was summoned to the palace in Bertie’s last hours. The priest was Father Cyril Forster, chaplain to the Irish Guards, who had often been called to Marlborough House in the past when Catholic guests required his ministrations. Even if Father Forster saw the King, this is not to say that Bertie underwent a dramatic deathbed conversion. Nor is there any reason to believe that “he was given the sacraments or more than the blessing which any priest could give.”⁸¹ It is conceivable, however, that if Bertie had been formally received into the Catholic Church while he was abroad—as was, and still is, sometimes suggested in Catholic circles—Father Forster “could have given the absolution over a handshake.”⁸² If a Catholic priest was indeed prowling the corridors of the palace, this surely explains Esher’s urgent summons to the archbishop. This was the only way to get rid of the priest.⁸³

Archbishop Davidson returned at nine p.m., and waited with Esher and Knollys downstairs, in the secretaries’ room. The Prince of Wales called the archbishop into the King’s bedroom at eleven thirty. Fifteen minutes later, the King was dead. “I have seldom or never seen a quieter passing of the river,” wrote the archbishop.⁸⁴

At exactly seventeen minutes past midnight, Georgie and May drove out of the palace. The crowd could see that May was weeping uncontrollably. Two minutes later, a low-voiced household official brought the news to the people outside: “The King is dead!”⁸⁵ At Number 10 Downing Street, Margot Asquith had gone to bed and the messenger knocked on her door with the news: “So the King is dead!” she said out loud, and burst into tears.⁸⁶ The next morning, the crowd outside the palace had thickened to thousands, many wearing black. Ernest Cassel called on Margot, and the two of them sat crying on her sofa together. “He really loved the King,” she wrote.⁸⁷

Rumors spread that the King had died of cancer of the throat, a taboo kind of cancer especially because of its link with syphilis. The Times printed a denial, claiming that though the King was attended by leading laryngologists St. Clair Thomson and Felix Semon, he suffered from “smoker’s throat.”⁸⁸ Perhaps there was more to the rumor than this. Skittles was on friendly terms with Laking, who told her that for the past three or four years the King had had a swelling in his throat that was sprayed twice a day and that “might develop at any time into cancer.”⁸⁹ Laking also told Skittles that the King really died of “blood poisoning caused by the injection of serum for his throat—it had relieved the throat but resulted in poisoning the blood.”⁹⁰ “Vaccination treatment” to prevent catarrhal attacks was mentioned in the official doctors’ report on the King’s death.⁹¹ It was an “experimental treatment” recommended by Laking; according to Skittles, it “may have done more harm than good.” Reid treated him with these injections in Biarritz. Soveral, who was with the King during his illness in Biarritz, was convinced that he was killed by his doctors.⁹²

Others blamed the politicians. “They have killed him, they have killed him,” wailed the Queen to her friend the Duchess of Abercorn.⁹³ She accused Asquith and Churchill, who had publicly threatened to put pressure on the King in spite of warnings not to drag the Crown into party politics. It suited the Tories to take up the cry, which was “widely prevalent” in “lower middle class circles” in London.⁹⁴ The ministers’ response was to point to the doctors’ warnings that the King might die suddenly at any time.⁹⁵

The truth was that Bertie died of emphysema and heart failure.⁹⁶ It was not the doctors or Asquith and Churchill that killed him, but his cigars. Three years earlier, Semon and Laking had handed Knollys a report on the King’s health. The King had already suffered three attacks of bronchitis in three years, and they were concerned that his violent coughing might cause blood vessels to burst. Though his health appeared robust to the world at large, it was in reality precarious, and they warned that “an acute complication of any kind may bring about, apparently suddenly, very serious results.”⁹⁷ For three years the King had lived on borrowed time. His survival depended on spending winters in the sun. The irony was that the political crisis had hastened his death. As Sir Felix Semon wrote: “How I wish the King instead of going home direct from Biarritz had, as usual during the last few years, made a Mediterranean trip and returned much later than he did.”⁹⁸

For eight days the King’s body lay at Buckingham Palace in the bedroom where he died, on his simple mahogany bed, dressed in a pink silk nightdress. Alix invited a stream of visitors to say goodbye—fifty-eight were listed in The Times, and there were many more.⁹⁹ Bertie’s face seemed peaceful, even happy, and there was no sign of pain. When Ponsonby visited, Alix told him that “she had been turned into stone, unable to cry, unable to grasp the meaning of it all, and incapable of doing anything.” All she wanted was to hide in the country, but there was a terrible state funeral to be endured.¹⁰⁰ When Esher saw her, she moved about the King’s room, speaking quietly but naturally, as if Bertie were a child asleep. At last “she had got him there all to herself,” and in a way, thought Esher, she was happy. “It is the womanly happiness of complete possession of the man who was the love of her youth and—as I fervently believe—of all her life.”¹⁰¹

Mrs. Keppel thought she knew otherwise. She told Rosebery that the King complained that Alix “never addressed a word of endearment to him”; though he was flagrantly unfaithful, he claimed “he had always put the Queen first.”¹⁰² On the day the King died, Alice did not return home to Portman Square, but stayed with her friend Venetia James on Grafton Street. People gossiped that she was avoiding her creditors and the press who clustered around her door waiting for news. But Alice Keppel was in a state of nervous collapse. When Venetia James took her frightened children to see her in bed, she looked at them “blankly and without recognition and rather resentfully.”¹⁰³

The mysterious packet of £10,000 in banknotes was returned to Ernest Cassel. Knollys wrote: “I presume they belong to you and are not the result of any speculation you went into for him.” Cassel sent the money back, saying that “it represented interest I gave to the King in financial matters I am undertaking.”¹⁰⁴ But there is no reason to suppose that the £10,000 found its way to Mrs. Keppel, as the King had presumably intended.

When Alice Keppel called at Marlborough House to sign her name after the King’s death, orders had been given by Georgie and May that she should not be allowed to do so.¹⁰⁵ The kaiser, who had once sought out her company, refused to see her when she asked for an audience.¹⁰⁶ Little wonder that she thought that life had “come to a full stop, at least for me.”¹⁰⁷ But Mrs. Keppel was well provided for. That summer she moved into her new house in Mayfair at 16 Grosvenor Street, a Georgian mansion of immense size, “gorgeously furnished” with gifts from the King. Esher spat blood. “It is almost indecent in its splendour,” he wrote. Even more galling, she was rumored to have a fortune of £400,000 made for her by Cassel.¹⁰⁸ But she was living in the style that Bertie had intended, and she honored her side of the bargain. In spite of being snubbed at court, she burned almost all of the King’s letters, though she was careful to preserve the letter that Bertie had written in 1901 asking her to his deathbed.¹⁰⁹

Behind drawn blinds at Buckingham Palace, Alix clung to her Bertie. “I always knew the Queen was in love with him,” wrote Jackie Fisher after visiting the corpse.¹¹⁰ Unlike the hysterical Alice Keppel, the Queen Mother, as Motherdear was now styled,^§ was calm and clearheaded. Esher and Knollys spent hours trying unsuccessfully to compose a message to the nation from the Queen. Then Alix sent down her own word-perfect draft, written on four sides of paper without a crossing-out. They published it unaltered: “From the bottom of my poor broken heart I wish to express to the whole nation and our kind People we love so well my deep-felt thanks for all their touching sympathy in my overwhelming sorrow and unspeakable anguish.” Give me a thought in your prayers, implored the Queen, “which will comfort and sustain me in all I still have to go through.”¹¹¹ Almost instinctively, she knew how to communicate her emotions to the people and, like a great actor, she readied herself for the last performance of her career.

Four days after the King’s death, arrangements were made to place him in his coffin, but Alix refused to part with him, and the doctors and undertakers were sent away.¹¹² Bertie’s body, declared Alix, was “so wonderfully preserved”: “it must have been the oxygen they gave him before he died.”¹¹³ The Dowager Empress Minnie arrived on 11 May, attended by a giant Cossack, who had exchanged his Russian tunic for black mourning clothes. That evening, Archbishop Davidson read a service as the family knelt round Bertie’s bed and (wrote George) “we kissed him for the last time.”¹¹⁴ The body was dressed in a military greatcoat and encased in a massive oak coffin, but the coffin was not sealed and it lay open on the King’s bed. The plan was to remove it to the throne room in the palace, but Alix could not bear to lose her Bertie. Each day the arrangements were made and announced in The Times, and each day the Queen canceled them.¹¹⁵ Her apartments adjoined the King’s, and she spent her time beside his body, clinging to the marriage that had ended so abruptly and unexpectedly. “They want to take him away,” the tearful Queen told Schomberg McDonnell, the official who was responsible for the arrangements, “but I can’t bear to part with him. Once they hide his face from me, everything is gone for ever.”¹¹⁶

At last, on Saturday morning (14 May), she gave her consent, and the coffin was sealed and removed to the throne room. Here the King lay in state draped in a magnificent embroidered pall; the throne was replaced by an altar, but the room was a blaze of crimson and gold and (noted The Times) “absolutely devoid of funereal trappings.”¹¹⁷ This was not the Victorian way of death. The only sign of mourning was the four guardsmen who stood at each corner of the coffin, heads bowed and hands folded over the butts of their rifles. Each night at ten p.m., Alix asked for a special service in the throne room, inspired perhaps by the Russian masses that had been said for Minnie’s husband, Alexander III. One night the family were so overcome that they were unable to sing the final hymn and left the room in tears.¹¹⁸

She riveted the crowd. Riding in the scarlet and gold of the state coach, she wore deepest black mourning with a long drooping veil, and as she passed the silent people, men doffed their hats and women curtseyed and bent their heads. From her coach, Alix raised her veil, leaned forward, and bowed her head in recognition. “God bless you!” cried the crowd, and the women sobbed. “Moved by that communion with the people” that one writer thought her rarest gift, Alix made the human connection the crowd longed for.¹²⁰ By the time the procession reached Westminster Hall, heralded by the wailing pipers of the Scots Guards, London was overcome by tears.

“Words fail me to give a description of the solemnity and dignity of the sight in that beautiful old hall,” wrote Queen Mary, “with the coffin in the centre, the guards, all too upsetting.”¹²¹ St. Stephen’s Hall was filled with members of the Lords and Commons when the royal procession entered. The King’s coffin was followed by King George, walking with his mother and the Empress Minnie. Minnie wept and Princess Victoria looked “hopelessly miserable.” Bertie’s sisters Louise, Helena and Beatrice were there, “all old women now.” Alexandra, by contrast, in simple black, “scarcely looked forty, so slim and upright and trim.”¹²² She was pale but composed. At the end of the short service, there was a strange silence. Alix rose from her chair and knelt beside Bertie’s coffin and, with uplifted hands, prayed. All eyes turned to her. For a moment, it seemed she would be overcome. But she got to her feet, and “with queenly dignity signalled her son to escort her to the door.”¹²³

After the royal party left, Westminster Hall was opened to the public. By four o’clock, when the doors opened, a line of people one mile stood along the Embankment, headed by three seamstresses, “very poorly dressed but very reverent.”¹²⁷ “They’re givin’ ’im to us now,” cried a white-faced work girl as the doors opened. “They’re givin’ ’im to us now!”¹²⁸ As the queue of working people, many of them women, filed past the catafalque, it seemed that King Edward had at last become the people’s king. Carpets had been laid to muffle the footsteps, and no one spoke. This “mute stream always always passing” were extraordinarily impressive in their silent loyalty.¹²⁹ Some waited all through the night in eight hours of torrential rain, a forest of black umbrellas, for the doors to open the next morning at six. On Wednesday, the queue was four miles long and six abreast—an orderly, respectful human procession, snaking around the streets of Westminster like the black ink that bordered the nation’s mourning newspapers.

Soveral made a late-night visit on Wednesday with the King of Portugal. Carrington received them as Lord Great Chamberlain and wrote that Soveral was “terribly pale and upset. He held my hand for quite two minutes saying over and over again, ‘This is too awful.’ ”¹³⁰

On Thursday, the last day, the queues were longer than ever; in spite of deluging rain, a crowd twelve people deep and seven miles long waited patiently. That afternoon Carrington received a message that the hall was to be closed while the German emperor visited. The police were aghast and refused to deny entry to the crowd. The kaiser appeared soon after three p.m., entering the hall through the Star Chamber Court, led in by King George. He placed a great wreath of white and purple flowers upon the coffin and, after kneeling in prayer, rose and firmly clasped the new King’s hand.^‖¹³¹

That evening, Asquith came and stood in Westminster Hall watching the people pass. Schomberg McDonnell thought his attitude offensive: “I fear he had dined well: and he seemed to regard the occasion as a mere show.”¹³² After the doors closed for the last time at ten p.m., Queen Alexandra paid a final visit. Just as she was expected to arrive, a party in evening dress swooped into the peers’ enclosure. One of them was Alice Keppel. Loulou Harcourt, First Commissioner of Works, persuaded her to return to the Speaker’s House, tactfully avoiding “a very great difficulty.” Alix, noted Carrington, “had her veil up and seemed perfectly calm; she looked beautiful.”¹³³

It was a hot night, and Schomberg McDonnell opened the doors of the hall because he feared that the officers guarding the coffin might faint. To his horror, he saw Lady Desborough hovering at the entrance, with Maurice Baring and Evan Charteris in attendance. The Queen had long since left, the coffin was resting in dignified silence. The socialites nevertheless demanded admittance. Ettie Desborough fixed McDonnell with a grin that (he ungallantly wrote) “had doubtless been effective 20 years ago,” but her “blandishments” were all in vain. Carrington angrily told her he was ashamed of her and begged her to go away, “for the Queen would be hurt and amazed if she heard of their behaviour.”¹³⁴

The police at the door estimated that people filed through Westminster Hall at the rate of ten thousand per hour. The number who paid their respects to the King was estimated at four hundred thousand or more.¹³⁶ No one had predicted so many. No one could explain it, either. Observers noticed that people “really are profoundly stricken, do firmly feel a personal as well as a State loss, and look upon the late King as a friend and protector.”¹³⁷ Never in recorded history, boomed The Times, had the death of a sovereign caused such wide and impressive manifestations of sorrow.¹³⁸ The crowds were bigger than at Queen Victoria’s funeral, and the public sorrow deeper. Bertie, the dissipated, self-indulgent Prince of Wales, had somehow transformed himself into the father of the nation.

In spite of his passion for ceremonial and correctness, Bertie left no instructions for his funeral. The Archbishop of Canterbury suggested burial at Westminster Abbey, a radical proposal intended to commemorate the King’s unique relationship with his people—the fact that he was “the most ‘popular,’ in the true sense, of all England’s sovereigns.”¹³⁹ George V insisted, however, that his father should be buried with his ancestors at Windsor, not beside his parents at Frogmore but in St. George’s Chapel.

All through the night of Thursday, 19 May, people hurried into London. Crowds waited for twelve hours in torrential rain along the processional route of the King’s cortège on Friday, from Westminster Hall to Paddington station. Soon after nine a.m., the funeral procession began to assemble in New Palace Yard. Margot Asquith watched as the gun carriage, the King’s charger, with boots and stirrups reversed, and a kilted Highlander leading the wire-haired terrier Caesar waited in the grilling sun.¹⁴⁰ Eight kings came to Edward VII’s funeral, and at ten o’clock the glittering procession clattered into the yard, led by George V with the kaiser on his right. As soon as Alix’s carriage drew up, the kaiser leaped from his horse and rushed officiously to the door, opening it before the servants could reach it, and ostentatiously planted a smacking kiss on her cheek.¹⁴¹ Alix stepped out, “a vision of beauty,” dressed from head to foot in black crêpe; Margot and the politicians’ wives curtseyed to the ground with bowed heads as she swished past them and into Westminster Hall in order to pay her final respects to the coffin. The kings^a remained seated on their horses; it was rumored that their poor horsemanship might cause complications if they attempted to dismount.¹⁴² Soon afterward, the coffin emerged and the procession formed up. Alix was seen to bend and pat Caesar, the King’s dog.

Eight kings and one emperor rode behind the King’s coffin. Theodore Roosevelt, former president of the United States, traveled in a carriage wearing plain evening dress. But the sight that made everyone choke was small white Caesar, who walked behind his master’s coffin, on the instructions of the Queen Mother.^b ¹⁴³

In Whitehall, the pavement was black with people wedged so tight they could not move. Between 200,000 and 300,000 people crammed into Hyde Park; the crowd was a hundred yards deep and men climbed the trees, shinning up the barbed wire that had been wound around the trunks to stop them.¹⁴⁴ Many had neither eaten nor slept since the day before, and 1,600 received medical attention.¹⁴⁵ An iron wall of soldiers lined the processional route, many of them mounted, so the crowd could see very little of the procession, but there was no pushing or shoving. “The behaviour of the crowd was worthy of a democracy; it governed itself,” wrote The Times.¹⁴⁶ As the funeral procession crawled past, the crowd fell eerily silent. No one smoked. Bare-headed, black-coated, hushed and awed, the people mourned their King.

Who were they, these poorly dressed people with pale, pinched faces, known only collectively as the crowd? Their lives had never touched Bertie’s, but his death awoke powerful emotions of mute loyalty. What made the Tory diarist Lord Balcarres gulp was not the kings and the military bands, nor the death marches, but a wreath from “some embroideresses of Bethnal Green” or a handful of lilies of the valley in an old cardboard box.¹⁴⁷ Thousands of plain laurel wreaths had been brought to decorate the funeral route. Six thousand policemen patrolled the streets, but not a single incident occurred. The presence of so many kings was an invitation to any anarchist, and Scotland Yard posted plainclothes detectives every twenty-two yards (the length of a cricket pitch) along the route. The crowd on the streets was wedged too tight for any man to raise his arm to throw a bomb; the commissioner of police Sir Edward Henry worried that an explosive might be dropped from a window above, but his fears proved needless.¹⁴⁸

All political lives, Enoch Powell once observed, end in failure, unless they are cut off in midstream. The life of Edward VII ended at the height of his political influence, but in death he achieved apotheosis.

Meanwhile, at Windsor, the royal train bearing the King’s coffin and the members of the funeral procession glided into the station at twelve thirty. For the previous two hours, St. George’s Chapel had filled with politicians, ambassadors, and generals. Organization of the service was in the hands of the Duke of Norfolk, the Earl Marshal; charming, but hopelessly “fogged,” he was expected by all to “make a hash of it,” and he did not disappoint.¹⁵¹ He had deliberately avoided making a seating plan in order to prevent difficulties over precedence. The result was that the pew openers changed people’s places again and again, shoving them about when someone grander appeared, and the seating was a “mosaic of indecision and confusion.”¹⁵² When the procession appeared at the west door, the minor canons assembled to receive them craned their necks to see what was happening, the choir formed a huddled mob, and the Dean of Windsor, instead of keeping order, sat down among the spectators and became absorbed in conversation with a lady.¹⁵³

Mrs. Keppel and Agnes Keyser both attended on the invitation of the new King. Alice, wearing full widow’s mourning, was ushered in by Schomberg McDonnell, who met her at the cloister door.¹⁵⁴

As the ragged procession of splendidly robed clergy and heralds moved up the aisle, followed by the coffin, a whisper of surprise rippled through the congregation. The Queen Mother was walking behind the King’s body. Alix had been expected to watch the service unseen from the King’s Closet high above the north end of the altar. Yet here she was, deeply veiled, the blue of her Garter ribbon shining against her black dress, her right hand leaning on a stick, her left clasping the hand of her son George.¹⁵⁵ Pedants hissed that she claimed a precedence that was not hers by right; Queen Mary’s sharp-tongued Aunt Augusta blamed the “pernicious influence” of the Empress Minnie, who had persuaded the widow Queen to push herself in front of her daughter-in-law, following Russian custom, which gave the widowed czarina precedence.¹⁵⁶

But protocol was no match for human sympathy. A wave of compassion swept through the church, heads bowed, and knees bent. “She has the finest carriage and walks better than anyone of our time,” wrote Margot, “and not only has she grace, charm and real beauty but all the atmosphere of a fascinating female queen for whom men and women die.”¹⁵⁷ A prie-dieu was placed behind the coffin, and Alix took her place next to it. George fell back, and Alix was left standing, erect and alone. When the coffin was lowered into the vault, she knelt down and covered her face with both her hands, and everyone wept. Margot watched from her seat in the choir nearby: “That single mourning figure, kneeling under the faded banners and coloured light, will always remain among the most beautiful memories of my life.”¹⁵⁸

* Sidney Lee said as much in his Dictionary of National Biography article, and Davidson felt obliged to summon him and tell him how painful the visit had been: The sick King was oppressed by “the weight of anxiety on the political situation which never left him.” At this, Lee became “very much disturbed—moved about, asked how I knew etc, and when I told him I was there, said, This is one of those things that is really important, it is eyewitness evidence which cannot be ignored. I am bound to tell you though that this is not what I have been told.” (RA GV/GG9/189, Arthur Davidson to Dighton Probyn, 5 December 1912.)

† The Oxford gray suit and flannel shirt he wore that day was auctioned in New York in 1937, slit in the back where it was cut away from his body. It was sold for $20. (Catalog of Royal Robes and State Gowns, American-Art Anderson Galleries, 5 May 1937, http://www.victoriana.com/library/queen.html.)

‡ This seems more believable than the version give by one biographer, who recorded that the King’s last words were: “I have done my duty.” (Holmes, Edward VII, vol. 2, p. 598.) Laking told Skittles that as Bertie’s mind began to wander, he cried out, “I want to p—.” “What is it he said?” asked the Queen. “He is asking Ma’am for a pencil,” said Laking. (Fitzwilliam, Wilfrid Blunt Papers, MS 11–1975, Diary, 14 December 1910.)

§ The idea of styling Queen Alexandra “Queen Mother” rather than “Queen Dowager” originated with Archbishop Davidson. The only precedent for this was Henrietta Maria, who was known as Queen Mother after 1660. (Kuhn, Democratic Royalism, pp.101–2; Bell, Davidson, p. 609.)

‖ Even in death, however, his uncle haunted William. In 1941, an old man living in exile, William declared of Edward VII: “It is he who is the corpse and I who live on, but it is he who is the victor.” (Lamar Cecil, “History as Family Chronicle,” in Rohl and Sombart, Wilhelm II, p. 111.)

a As well as George V, there were present the kings of Norway, Greece, Spain, Bulgaria, Denmark, Portugal, and Belgium. Of these the worst horseman was King Ferdinand of Bulgaria, “who sat his horse like a sack, holding tight to the pommel.” (PRO Northern Ireland, D/4091/A/6/1, Schomberg McDonnell’s journal, “Edward VII,” May 1910, pp. 42–43.)

b Not that Alix was especially fond of the dog. When Margot Asquith visited her afterward and remarked on its touching devotion, Alix replied: “Horrid little dog! He never went near my poor husband when he was ill!” On Margot remarking that Asquith had seen the dog lying at the dead King’s feet, Alix responded, “For warmth, my dear.” (St. Aubyn, Edward VII, p. 477.) However, the inscription she wrote on the dog’s grave at Marlborough House suggests a change of heart: “Caesar. The King’s Faithful and Constant Companion until Death and My Greatest Comforter in My Loneliness and Sorrow for Four Years after. Died April 18th 1914.”

c “He had such a reputation!”

CHAPTER 27

The People’s King

March–May 1910