3

‘Every Inch the King of England’

On 23 January 1901 the Privy Council met for the first time in the new reign. Sir Almeric FitzRoy, Clerk of the Council, mumbled the king’s proclamation, and ended with a clattering solecism by crying ‘God Save the Queen’. There was a delay while the Lord Mayor of London urged his preposterous claim that he was ex officio a privy councillor. Then the monarch entered, preceded by the Earl of Pembroke, the Lord Steward, and the Earl of Clarendon, the Lord Chamberlain, and attended by the Duke of Portland, as Master of the Horse, and by his lord-in-waiting Lord Suffield. Raising his right hand, he addressed his Privy Council. Carrington, who was present, said he ‘utterly broke down when he announced the Queen’s death. But he recovered himself with a tremendous effort: & spoke for about 8 minutes without a single note. The speech was absolutely perfect, dignified, simple and sincere. He willed that he should be styled Edward, the name six of his ancestors had borne. Albert was his first name; but there could be but one Albert: his dearly beloved father known all over the world as “Albert the Good”.’ Overall the Privy Council arrangements were deplorable. ‘The members stood in a crowd 10 deep across the room: and they stepped on the Archbishop’s robes, & nearly pulled him backwards,’ continued Carrington. ‘The whole solemn business was very badly managed – people pushing and tumbling over each other; & behaving as if it was a ballot at Brooks’s Club.’¹

The monarch’s designation as Edward VII spawned an immediate nickname, ‘Edward the Caresser’. Henry James dubbed him ‘the arch-vulgarian’ and Rosebery Le Roi Charmeur. He was also called ‘King of the Jews’ and Keppel ‘Mistress without Robes’. To fawning journalists and on memorial statues erected after his death he was ‘Edward the Peacemaker’. Society people used the tag ‘Kinki’. Countess Howe, who trotted after the king like a lapdog and was married to a lord-in-waiting, was called ‘Kinki’s bow-wow’. Two obsequious couples, Lord and Lady Savile, who entertained him at Rufford Abbey, and Ronald and Maggie Greville of Polesden Lacey, were ‘the Civils and the Grovels’. Queen Victoria is often reckoned as the final monarch of the house of Hanover, although she considered her surname to be Guelph-d’Este of the House of Brunswick: Edward VII’s accession inaugurated the new royal dynasty of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. This fit and accurate name endured for only sixteen years, before being jettisoned in an attack of wartime nerves in 1917 for the bogus anglicization of Windsor.²

Edward VII gave his name to the first decade of the twentieth century. ‘If the Victorian era was the era of respectability, the Edwardian will probably be known as the epoch of that frisky futility known as smartness,’ a commentator judged in 1909. Actors and chefs were the two occupations that grew most between the national censuses of 1901 and 1911. The pleasure resorts of Southend and Bournemouth were among the towns with highest population growth. As the novelist Rose Macaulay summarized in 1923:

Those brief ten years we call Edwardian now seem like a short spring day. They were a gay and yet an earnest time. A time of social reform on the one hand, and social brilliance on the other … The onrush of motor-cars and the decline of bicycles and the horse; extravagant country house parties at which royalty consented to be entertained, with royal bonhomie and royal exactions of etiquette … There was nothing dowdy about our King Edward. He set the stakes high, and all who could afford it played. Pageants and processions passed in regal splendour. Money nobly flowed. Ideals changed … Victorian sternness, Victorian prudery and intolerance still prevailed among some of the older aristocracy, among many of the smaller squirearchy, the professional classes and the petty bourgeoisie, but among most of the wealthy, most of the titled, most of the gay and extravagant classes, a wider liberty grew.³

Courtiers are often misrepresented as futile or parasitic. Nevertheless courts – with their focus on the wishes of one individual, and their mixture of splendour with influence – provide paradigms of personal leadership, group behaviour and institutional power. The workings of a royal household are instructive for anyone who would understand the dynamics of informal courts that surround powerful men and women: politicians, millionaires, newspaper editors, philanthropists, military leaders, surgeons in teaching hospitals, sports administrators, university vice-chancellors. ‘A small Court aristocracy has still today a greater part in the English regime than is assumed in Europe,’ the diplomat-connoisseur Count Harry Kessler reflected during a visit to London in 1901. In the new reign, hard and compact within the soft congeries of traditional court families, there were four men whose influences were paramount in the royal household and who epitomized its distinctive features: Francis Knollys, Arthur Ellis, ‘Regy’ Esher and Horace Farquhar constituted the Edwardian camarilla.⁴

Knollys had been a matchless private secretary and groom-in-waiting to the prince since 1870. He had proved his superb discretion during imbroglios from the Mordaunt divorce to the baccarat fiasco. He was clear-headed, tough, devoted, dispassionate and decisive. In the royal household, he was that rare creature, a Liberal in politics. He took especial interest in European diplomacy and ambassadorial appointments, and more than half convinced his monarch that all German leaders from the Kaiser downwards were liars. Knollys despised titles, despite being a knight in three distinct orders and receiving a barony in 1902. He found his royal master – who felt no need to confide in men – impenetrable.

Sir Arthur Ellis was a Grenadier Guards officer who was appointed equerry to the Prince of Wales in 1867, became a stalwart of the Marlborough and Turf clubs, and was promoted by royal influence to the rank of major-general in 1885. The new monarch retired an elderly bungler as Comptroller of the Lord Chamberlain’s Department in 1901 and appointed his trusty Ellis instead. Carrington thought Ellis ‘a slippery dog’ for breaking an agreed news embargo in 1902, when the king had to undergo an emergency operation for perityphlitis and thus to defer his coronation, by telephoning the secret to Alfred Rothschild, who spread it through the Stock Exchange where prices dropped. Ellis proved sometimes overweening, and had spells of the monarch’s disfavour before falling dead at the Royal Opera in 1907 while the auditorium was ringing with cheers at the king’s arrival.⁵

For the first half of Edward’s reign, Lord Esher had an undefined but impregnable position, which enabled him to exert serpentine influence unhampered by tangible responsibilities. He had a French mother, a Belgian wife and savoir faire that attracted the king. He was abstinent (barley water being his favourite drink); he smoked aromatic rose-tinted cigarettes; as a middle-aged married man, he could not keep away from Eton, where he was smitten by a succession of adolescent boys; supremely he was infatuated with his younger son. Rosebery, when Prime Minister in 1895, appointed him as Secretary of the Office of Works with the explanation: ‘he’s an old Eton and Oxford friend, and has run through two fortunes already, so I must do something for him, poor fellow.’ The Duke of Abercorn (who had been Edward’s Groom of the Stool until the abolition of this archaic lavatorial post early in the new reign) said in 1904 that the king would have liked Esher as Prime Minister, Reuben Sassoon as Chancellor of the Exchequer and Knollys as Foreign Secretary. Esher proved indispensable in reinventing the amenities and accoutrements of the royal household. He also wanted to be the lever turning the fulcrum of the army. It was a sign of the Conservative government’s weakness that Esher in 1901–5 insinuated his way to high influence in reorganizing the War Office, selecting officers for high commands and establishing the Committee of Imperial Defence. His influence receded after more competent Liberals took power in 1906. Democratic censure discomfited him, and he therefore shrank from public exposure. He declined the viceroyalty of India in 1908 with the remark that the job’s powers were parochial.⁶

Farquhar was the least known but not the least significant of the camarilla. His grandfather had received a baronetcy from George IV for governing Mauritius, but the family had no estates. Born in 1844, he was an obscurely educated fifth son. He began in the 1860s as an impecunious clerk in a government department: ‘good-looking, with plenty of assurance and push’, he then ‘wormed himself’ into a firm of India merchants. Described as ‘the first young man of his class who really managed to combine business and society’, his partnership in Sir Samuel Scott’s private bank in Marylebone, his financial activities in Paris and his speculation in land at Santa Fe brought him money. He was a dandy and playgoer who enjoyed watching every turn of the social whirl. Sexually he probably preferred men to women – but he used everyone.⁷

Farquhar was the Duke of Fife’s best man at his wedding to Princess Louise of Wales in 1889. He persuaded the duke, who feared that north-east Scotland was full of appropriating socialists, to sell most of his Banffshire estates and to invest the proceeds in Scott’s bank. He accompanied the Prince of Wales on a visit to the Hungarian shooting lodge of his fellow financier Hirsch in 1890. His helpfulness to the duke and to the prince helped him to clamber to a higher social altitude: the Smart Set smiled when he bought an estate near Sandringham with the apt name of Castle Rising. Scott’s bank merged with Parr’s in 1894; a few months later Farquhar consolidated his position by marrying the widowed Lady Scott. He was described by Carrington in 1895 as ‘the most unpopular man in London’: when he and Fife proposed Alfred Beit, ‘the Hebrew South African Millionaire’, for membership of the Marlborough Club, Beit was ‘pilled’. Farquhar and Fife were directors of Cecil Rhodes’s Chartered Company of South Africa until the outcry caused by Jameson’s Raid on the Transvaal necessitated their retirement. Ellis said that when Farquhar heard news of the Raid while shooting at Castle Rising, he ‘winked & gave everyone to understand that he knew all about it’, although later it was expedient to pretend ignorance. He was a large shareholder in South African mining shares when (but not after) they were booming. As an investor he was adept at selling at the right time as well as timely buying.⁸

He served twelve years on London County Council, where he was financed in political work by Herbert Stern, whom he helped to become Lord Michelham in 1905. Sardonically nicknamed ‘Kind Horace’, combining lustrous subservience with monetary adroitness, he sidled his way to titles and appointments: a baronetcy in 1892 (after the Prince of Wales had unsuccessfully solicited a peerage for him), a controversial barony in 1898 (for which he bragged that he had paid above the accepted tariff), Master of the Household in 1901, privy councillor in 1907. After 1912 he managed the widowed Duchess of Fife’s finances and misappropriated £80,000. He was an investor in City Equitable Fire Insurance, but sold his holding before the crash caused by the embezzlement of its suave chairman. He was given £200,000 to distribute as sweeteners by the New York millionaire Waldorf Astor, who wanted a peerage, and apparently misused up to £80,000 of this bribe. In 1922 he gave £20,000 which had been subscribed for Conservative Party funds, to Lloyd George, the Liberal leader, who promoted him to an unmerited earldom in consequence. He died an undisclosed bankrupt. One lifelong acquaintance called him ‘all bunkum and self-advertisement’. A friend described him as having a first-rate head and keeping his heart subservient to it. An obituary declared: ‘He was genial to everybody, but his generosity was well under control.’⁹

The shambles at the Privy Council accession ceremony was what the new king was set on stopping. His mother’s household had aped a petty German court in its fusty, insular provincialism. He determined to play the part of leading man in a court at once modern, ornate, cosmopolitan and smart. One of his earliest decisions was that courtiers were to address him as ‘Sir’ instead of the antiquated ‘Sire’ required in his mother’s household. He repudiated his mother by other changes. He discontinued her Order of Victoria and Albert, and conferred her Imperial Order of the Crown of India only once (in 1909, on the Countess of Minto, who had repeatedly besought it as wife of the viceroy). He had long intended to introduce in his kingdom a new decoration emulating Prussia’s order Pour le Mérite instituted by Frederick the Great in 1740. In 1902 he obtained the statutes of the Prussian order and colour sketches of its insignia from Berlin. Months later he created a comparable decoration for civilians distinguished in the arts, sciences and literature, and for eminent officers of his army and navy. The Order of Merit was entirely in the sovereign’s personal gift, and independent of ministerial advice. It was awarded to a maximum of twenty-four individuals (the king in 1906 nominated three Japanese, who had recently led their forces to victory over Russia, as honorary members). The first appointees in 1902 were three scientists, three soldiers, two admirals, two literary-minded politicians, one painter and the Astronomer Royal. Balfour as Prime Minister was chary of the OM going to authors: he advised that picking just one man for the Order from among Hardy, Kipling, Shaw and Swinburne would ‘raise no end of jealousies’.¹⁰

The new monarch determined to transform the material environment of the monarchy as well as the operations of his household. Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle, he said, resembled ‘Scottish funeral parlours’ rather than seats of majesty. The redecoration of the Palace’s great rooms, which looked sepulchral under their coating of London smuts, was undertaken by Esher and Ellis, abetted by Farquhar, under the monarch’s approving eye: he would stroll into a topsy-turvy room where Esher was directing workmen, perch on a table smoking a cigarette and grunt his approval. The apartments on the north side were gutted, and given electricity and bathrooms, for the occupation of the king and queen. Every picture was taken down, and new ones brought from Marlborough House. He hired a theatre designer to create rooms in scarlet, white and gold; although Victorian courtiers complained that the new décor resembled a continental opera house, it instilled a new monarchical grandeur. ‘I do not know much about A-rr-t, but I think I know something about Arr-r-angement,’ the king growled.¹¹

He also oversaw the rearrangement of the adjacent royal parks. In 1901 Buckingham Palace stood awkwardly on its site between St James’s Park and Green Park and unaligned to major thoroughfares. There was a carriageway running from the Palace towards Trafalgar Square, crammed beneath and against Carlton House Terrace, but the Mall was a leafy walkway leading nowhere. There was no public space in front of the Palace (there were apprehensions that this would enable the gathering of hostile mobs). As part of the scheme to erect the Victoria Memorial sculpture there, the architect Sir Aston Webb in 1901 produced a winning design for a ceremonial landscape of colonnades, domed pavilions, gateways, obelisks and fountains which offered an Edwardian version of Bernini’s Piazza San Pietro in Rome. A cheaper version of Webb’s scheme was started in 1903: the old carriageway was turned into a horse-ride, the Mall was widened on a line centralized on Buckingham Palace, Constitution Hill was also widened, Webb’s design for Admiralty Arch was built at the east end of the Mall to complement Wellington Arch at the west end of Constitution Hill, Wellington Arch was surmounted by a sculpted chariot drawn by four horses paid for by the newly ennobled financier Lord Michelham, avenues of trees were planted, imposing gates and railings installed and new connecting roads laid. The outlay of £353,907 was impressive at a time when the proposal to provide London County Council with an hôtel de ville on the riverbank opposite the Palace of Westminster was routed by retrenching taxpayers. Esher (consulting with the king) was the driving force in creating this regal setting, which became the only part of London to match the radiating avenues of Paris, Vienna and St Petersburg. This spacious but not grandiose parkland became the majestic demesne for all the crucial royal events of the twentieth century: state funerals, royal weddings, peace celebrations, jubilees. It entered the national psyche, and despite being vandalized by the traffic roundabout created at Hyde Park Corner under the misnamed Park Lane Improvement Act of 1958, it is the remnant of Edwardian England that remains most material to the nation.¹²

King Edward was a stickler for correct deportment who savoured court pomp and wished to glamorize the monarchy. In 1901 he appointed a committee comprising four earls (Carrington, Clarendon, Pembroke and Mount Edgcumbe) and two courtiers (Ellis and Knollys) to recommend improvements to the dowdy, slipshod afternoon Drawing Rooms, at which ladies were presented to the monarch in the Throne Room at Buckingham Palace. The enlargement of Society since the 1870s, making many more women eligible for presentation, had turned these events into scrimmages during which their trains, lappets and feathers got torn. Following the committee’s report, the king substituted evening ‘courts’ held in the Ballroom, during which he and Queen Alexandra surveyed the assembly enthroned on a dais, with the royal family and household grouped around them in order of precedence. He had as Prince of Wales visited most European courts, and now adapted the best of what he had seen for English usage. He discussed every detail with Ellis, and emulated the practice at German and Russian courts where the sovereign passed with due ceremony through the general company, saluting them and conversing with a favoured few. Leading the royal procession in and out from the Ballroom, the king adopted the gallant innovation of taking Queen Alexandra in formal manner by the hand. On these occasions he resembled an actor-manager who understood costumes, deportment, visual inspiration, entrances and exits. These new ceremonials seemed both stagey and continental: Queen Alexandra told Carrington in 1908 that during the courts in the Ballroom she felt like the Grand Duchess of Gerolstein in Offenbach’s opéra bouffe of that title.

The first year’s arrangements were nerve-racking for those responsible: Clarendon, the Lord Chamberlain, almost lost his mind in 1902 worrying whether or not ladies should wear trains at the new courts. ‘Not one graceful curtsey did I see,’ noted Lady Hamilton after watching women being presented in 1903. ‘The Queen smiled at some of the women’s get-up; one woman had a sort of muslin curtain with a piece of whalebone at the end to keep it down.’ Jean Hamilton watched the ladies being marshalled in the antechamber in order to process in turn: ‘with their plumes and bouquets they looked like parterres of flowers when seated, and like floating ghosts as they moved along the long rows of seats being emptied one after another.’ As evening courts were held during the summer season, the king sweltered in the hot full-dress uniform of an admiral of the fleet or regimental colonel-in-chief.¹³

Levees, by contrast, were entirely male affairs. The monarch announced that on certain dates he would receive at St James’s Palace those who wished for the honour of entering the presence and paying homage. It was essential for newly appointed officers and officials to attend, and gentlemen could not accompany their ladies at court unless they had first been presented at a levee, but otherwise attendance was voluntary. The Gentleman Usher Percy Armytage idealized levees as congregations of diplomatists, colonial administrators, army and navy officers, Indian princes, dignitaries, politicians, scientists and creative thinkers: ‘men who have grown old in public service elbow beardless boys wearing their first uniforms; men who in their own towns and cities are prominent figures come here to retake their own measure and to realize afresh how much bigger is the Empire than any of its component parts.’ But Edward Marsh, a young civil servant who attended in 1902, thought differently: ‘The levee was a most wearisome performance, and I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when I think of the manner in which 1,500 of the educated classes spent their morning.’ It took Marsh an hour to get through the successive pens in which he was shut with the same group of men: the atmosphere, he said, resembled an underground railway compartment in a fog; and ‘when one reached “The Presence” one was rushed through with just time to make one’s bow to the red, bored, stolid sovereign.’¹⁴

The modernization of Buckingham Palace was replicated at Windsor Castle, where the amenities, especially for royal visitors, seemed medieval, although better than in many continental palaces. The new monarch stamped round the castle moving furniture and rehanging pictures. Much was improved, although Empress Eugénie, visiting the State Bedroom for the first time in forty years, murmured to herself, ‘Toujours ces affreux rideaux!’ King Edward hoped to transfer the royal garden parties from Buckingham Palace to Windsor, partly because he liked the Windsor uniform of blue coat with scarlet cuffs and collar, but the difficulties of transporting hundreds of guests proved insurmountable.¹⁵

The king gave his mother’s beloved Osborne – of which he had unpleasant memories – to be a school of naval officers, but wished to occupy Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh as the sovereign’s residence in Scotland, and to establish his household there. He seems to have envisaged treating Edinburgh as Emperor Franz Joseph treated Budapest, as a secondary capital. The Keeper of Holyrood, the Duke of Hamilton, was asked to relinquish the state apartments and to renounce various paintings, tapestries and pieces of furniture. The monarch was infuriated by his refusal, and by advice that under Scottish law the duke could not be dislodged even by royal command. The royal household therefore never entrenched itself at Holyrood, where indeed the Throne Room was ill-shaped for either court or levee. Hamilton, despite forty-five years as a Scottish duke, never received the Thistle. King Edward also hankered to resume use of Hampton Court Palace, but was deterred by the cost.

The Accession Declaration, introduced in 1678 after the Popish Plot, and extended to cover the sovereign under William III, forced new monarchs at their first meeting with Parliament to disavow belief in the transubstantiation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, and to declare that the adoration of the Virgin Mary and other saints was ‘superstitious and idolatrous’. Edward VII detested this anti-Catholic rudeness and, failing to convince Salisbury’s Cabinet that it should be expunged from the statutes, muttered the objectionable declaration inaudibly on 14 February 1901. He continued to vex the more intolerant of Protestants, and to conciliate some Catholics, by meeting Pope Leo XIII, by wearing a silver medal of the Virgin Mary on his watch chain, by attending a Catholic requiem mass for the murdered King Carlos I of Portugal, and by entering Palma Cathedral in Majorca and the sumptuous chapel of Tepl [Teplá] abbey in Bohemia – both with escorts of processing priests. When in 1905 Gilbert Helmer, Abbot of Tepl, was nominated as a Lord Spiritual to the Herrenhaus (the upper chamber of the Austro-Hungarian Imperial Council), the king sent him the insignia of a Commander of the Victorian Order, and in 1909 he conferred an honorary knighthood on Helmer.

There had not been a coronation in London since 1837. Neither heralds nor courtiers remembered what had to be done. Records had to be searched for precedents, hereditary claims to officiate had to be settled, and some innovations were made – notably invitations to Indian maharajahs. Eight thousand congregants crammed into the coronation at Westminster Abbey on 9 August 1902. The abbey’s richly symbolic Cosmati pavement, installed by Henry III before the high altar in 1268, represented both divine power in the universe and the monarchy’s sacred authority. Seated over these inlaid stones and glass mosaic, and imbued by their complex immensity of meaning, Edward underwent the capital act of his coronation, anointment by the Archbishop of Canterbury of his hands, head and heart with holy oil poured from the beak of a golden eagle. Still on the Cosmati pavement, he was presented with the Spurs of Chivalry, the Sword of State, the Orb and two sceptres before being crowned by the Archbishop. ‘The king’s answers were very finely given,’ noted Arthur Benson, who had written the words accompanying Elgar’s coronation music: ‘he looked sternly and grimly about him, not at all complacently … he is a good actor – if only there were a little more real kingliness about him!’ When his only surviving son came to pay homage, Edward pulled him forward by his robe and kissed him twice with fatherly love.¹⁶

Alexandra’s crowning was the signal for 450 peeresses in crimson robes with white minivers to arch their gloved arms above their tiaras to don their coronets. This synchronized elegance was followed by a radiant burst, like a lightning flash, when they checked small mirrors in their fans to see if their coronets were straight. At the coronation’s end, the congregation pushed and jostled to leave the abbey, ‘as only a well-dressed crowd can’, said Carrington. Benson surveyed the assembly: ‘the business-like peers had gone, but the rest yielded to the irresistible desire to prance and pace and mince.’ He found sitting outside, waiting for carriages, ‘an absurd group of peers and peeresses hobnobbing over sandwiches, like almsmen and almswomen, with Lady Sligo in the midst, all looking rather wrinkled and tired in the daylight.’ Sir Edward Bradford, the Police Commissioner who had received a baronetcy in the Coronation Honours, was nervous about crowd behaviour in the streets, but the monarch had a jubilant reception. In the king’s box in Westminster Abbey were Alice Keppel, the actress Sarah Bernhardt, the American heiress Minnie Paget, Lady Kilmorey (mistress of Prince Francis of Teck, who bequeathed her the Duchess of Cambridge’s emeralds), and Eliza Hartmann, whose husband made his fortune from Turkey red dye and twill. Wags called it the Loose Box.¹⁷

The carryings-on of the Upper Crust were a national obsession. The English were sunk in ‘tittle-tattle’, lamented The Times’s foreign editor Sir Valentine Chirol in 1901. The Boer War, he felt, ‘is looked upon chiefly as a nuisance that has to be endured, but about which it is not good form to talk. The latest cricket score, whether Asquith is or is not going to dine, why the King goes on board Lipton’s yacht, who the lady was who got the necklace and who the one who paid for it, these are the questions which engross the trustees of this great Empire!’ The royal household stood at the apex of national gossip. ‘The palace, its inhabitants, its satellites and their doings are the favourite themes of small-talk and speculation in the very humblest circles in the remotest parts of the provinces,’ wrote a London journalist in 1903. ‘What, at each successive meal, forms the daily courses of the royal table. How much is paid for the tea, coffee, tobacco and snuff at Buckingham Palace. The exact work allotted to each of His Majesty’s dressers … Such are the problems that exercise the speculation of innumerable well-paid writers, or are discussed with a detail that delightfully stimulates the inventive faculty by thousands of firesides, at as many dinner and tea-tables, in as many housekeepers’ rooms, servants’ halls and parlours.’ The copycat mentality was shown when Alice Keppel’s Worth evening dress of oyster satin was imitated by other court ladies, and then by a wider public.¹⁸

One absurd episode shows how closely the royal household was monitored around the world and how the reach of the king’s tastes was global. Early in his reign he commissioned two new royal banners, for himself and Queen Alexandra, to be hung above their stalls as Knights of the Garter in St George’s Chapel at Windsor. The making of these heraldic flags was entrusted to the Royal School of Art Needlework. The quarterings that displayed the arms of England and Scotland were uncontroversial; but the third quadrant, featuring the Irish harp, proved troublesome. Since Charles II’s day the front edge of the harp had been depicted as a winged maiden showing her bare breasts. The virtuous ladies of the Royal School of Art Needlework blinked at this impurity, and stitched conventional-looking harps unburdened by bosoms. The neutered harp was instantly reported by journalists when the needlewomen displayed their handiwork, and Lord Clarendon, as Lord Chamberlain, was deluged with letters, telegrams, telephone calls and personal visits demanding to know if existing heraldic standards flown from public buildings across the world were to be scrapped, and if so who was to pay for the new de-sexed ones. The virtuous ladies were swiftly told to unstitch the harps on their banners, and to embosom them. The king was both amused and vexed by this fidget.

Edwardian London was smarter than ever, a journalist concluded in 1909. Its West End shone as ‘the hub of fashion, the queen of Society, the plutocrat’s pleasure-resort’. Mayfair, Belgravia, Chelsea and Kensington had been transformed: ‘the long rows of drab, humdrum buildings have given place to handsome drapery, millinery, bric-à-brac and high-art-furniture stores’. Shops offering utilitarian commodities had been ousted by ‘jewellers, florists, furriers, massage and beauty-culture establishments, palmists and astrologers’ temples of mystery, tea-houses, restaurants de luxe’. Hotels like the Ritz, Savoy and Carlton resembled the palaces of earlier centuries: huge festive rooms, bevies of servants, luxuries at the command not of a reigning family but of any comer who could afford the bill. The profits of the smart drapers proclaimed the prosperity of a court city. They paid annual dividends to shareholders of from 15 per cent to 22.5 per cent for most of the Edwardian period.¹⁹

What were the traits of this monarch who was likened to Henry V, Charles II and George IV?

‘He was the complete negation of a certain kind of pedantry that we English dislike,’ wrote Lord Willoughby de Broke, ‘and withal he was every inch The King of England and every inch The First Gentleman in Europe.’ The monarch liked the velocity of modern life. Railway companies printed a guide, when he travelled by trains about his kingdom, listing not only the stations through which they would pass but the gradients which they climbed or descended, so as to avoid slopping water during royal ablutions. Contrary to the belief that monarchs never carry money, he kept in his pocket a roll of banknotes with which he paid his losses at bridge. He resented anyone putting as much money as him in the collection plate during church services. He sat enraptured through all six hours of Parsifal. He enjoyed Puccini. In private he liked risqué jokes, especially involving the phallic symbolism of umbrellas, but he disliked broad humour in public. He admired adulterers who were discreet. Novels seemed pointless to his literal mind, and he never touched them unless he was ill. He was a bad loser at croquet and golf. He was a scrappy letter-writer, but a persevering writer of marginal expostulations on official papers. Hanging in his sitting room at Buckingham Palace were two cages of canaries, which burst into song whenever a visitor spoke. At his feet, in a basket, lay his vicious black French bulldog which nipped intruders’ calves. The monarch was superstitious about having a table of thirteen dining together, since he was the one who entered last and rose first. He ordained that twelve must never sit with him, and was upset when by oversight they did. Once he calmed his agitation with the consoling thought that his niece Princess Frederick Charles of Hesse was pregnant, so there had really been fourteen at table. He took it as an ill omen if Lord Ormathwaite wore his jewel of office as Master of Ceremonies, which featured the head of Janus, Roman god of peace and war, upside down.²⁰

Gossip with women pleased the monarch to his marrow. When he went to Leicestershire for a shooting party given by Earl Howe, his hostess put Gladys Ripon next to him four nights running at dinner. She appealed on the fourth night to ‘Fritz’ Ponsonby, his assistant private secretary, for fresh topics of conversation. ‘Give away your relations and friends, and repeat any secrets about them,’ he enjoined. She laughed: ‘But I did that the first night!’ The king preferred the company of pretty women at mixed parties to men’s dinners, which he found dull. In the Ascot week after his father-in-law’s death, it was decided that as the queen was in mourning there would be only a men’s party at Windsor. Looking at the guest list he said disconsolately, ‘What tiresome evenings we shall have!’ His partiality for the Marquês de Soveral and for Count Albert von Mensdorff-Pouilly-Dietrichstein, respectively the Portuguese envoy and Austrian ambassador in London, was attributable to their fluency in the newest gossip from the smarter European capitals. Soveral and Mensdorff were often bidden to Windsor and Sandringham – unlike the German ambassador, Count Paul Wolff-Metternich, who was neither amusing nor conversable.²¹

The king’s meals were as gargantuan as his cigars: he swallowed food in bites, without masticating, and gorged himself. For tea at Sandringham he would have poached eggs, petits fours, preserved ginger, Scottish shortcake, scones. Dinners with many courses, creamy sauces and rich stuffing would follow within hours. He relished caviar, plover’s eggs, soles poached in Chablis and garnished with oysters and prawns, turkey in aspic, pigeon pie, quails, grouse, partridge, pheasant, woodcock and ortolans (the French gastronomic name for the little bird called the bunting). He never tired of boned snipe, filled with forcemeat and foie gras, grilled in a pig’s caul (the web of fat that constitutes the intestinal membrane) and served with truffles and Madeira sauce. In 1908 the chefs Ritz and Escoffier devised a dish for him of frogs’ thighs served cold in a jelly containing cream and Moselle wine, and flavoured with paprika. They named it Cuisses des Nymphes à l’Aurore (thighs of the dawn nymph). He insisted on even numbers of asparagus stalks on his plate, believing that odd numbers brought bad luck. His favourite vegetable was aubergines frites. Peaches he preferred beyond other fruit. Ginger biscuits from Biarritz were required when he went to stay in country houses. The king’s dislike of drunkenness (perhaps exacerbated by the alcoholism of his brother Alfred) reduced the quantities swilled in his presence. Edwardians ceased to offer sherry with soup, and the fashion for pouring innumerable wines declined.²²

Despite his impatience and quick boredom, the monarch gave the impression of listening to his subjects with full attention. When they told him information that he already knew, he heard them with appreciative looks, and even posed civil questions to which he knew the answers. After 1901, he feigned ignorance of subjects as a way of protecting himself from lapses of discretion, and pretended to misunderstand obvious points, when he knew at least as much about the subject as his informants. ‘I do not think there has ever lived anyone so capable of saying and doing the right thing at the right moment,’ said Lord Rossmore. At receptions for the diplomatic corps, where he had to talk to all the ambassadors and envoys in the room within earshot of the others, he spoke to one man, drew a second into the conversation, moved on while apparently listening to the second, and drew a third into talk until he had gratified everyone with some attention.²³

As Prince of Wales he had been since the 1860s a sartorial arbiter for Europe. His clothes were studied by smart tailors across the continent for signs of imminent changes of fashion. The Homburg hat, the Norfolk coat, side creases in trousers, the Prince of Wales check pattern and the fashion for never buttoning the lowest button of waistcoats were all popularized by him. Gladstone amiably recommended the prince ‘to read Beau Brummell’s Life as amusing and instructive’. His crotchets about clothes were giddying. Hours before the funeral of his sister, the Dowager Empress of Prussia, in 1901, he ordained that all the gold lace, sword belts, shoulder cords and aiguillettes on the uniforms of the officers and courtiers attending him must be covered by black crepe. During his coronation in 1902, he noticed that a Lord Justice of Appeal who was sitting in the second row of Westminster Abbey was not wearing his collar as a Knight Grand Cross of the Bath, and sent the President of the Probate, Divorce and Admiralty Division to enquire why. He sulked for a whole evening when Rosebery came to dinner on the royal yacht anchored at Naples wearing a Royal Yacht Squadron mess jacket and white tie. A courtier who had just attended a state banquet in full dress, and was then summoned to make a fourth at bridge with the king, had first to change into a blue serge coat. The monarch insisted that his entourage must, like him, always visit art galleries wearing a short black London coat and top hat, although they felt these clothes made them look like stockbrokers. A frock coat was as unsuitable as country clothes when looking at pictures, insisted the king. Lord Grenfell, who accompanied him to Berlin in 1909, was ordered to disregard War Office regulations for his Field Marshal’s uniform, to order a special greatcoat and other useless garments, and to visit Buckingham Palace for sartorial pointers from the king’s valet. Another characteristic touch was the instruction to Grenfell ‘to be sure and take plenty of cards’.²⁴

After Hirsch’s fatal coronary in Vienna in 1896, his role as the prince’s financial protector was taken by another man who sought royal favour as compensation for prevalent anti-Semitism, Ernest Cassel. Born into a Cologne banking family, Cassel began as a confidential clerk in the London office of Hirsch’s banking firm Bischoffsheim & Goldschmidt. He was naturalized as a subject of Queen Victoria in 1878, amassed millions by exploiting Swedish phosphorus iron ore deposits, financing American railways, raising loans in London for Latin American, Chinese and Egyptian governments, profiting from the South African mining boom, funding the construction of the underground railway from Bank to Shepherd’s Bush and of the Aswan dam, and founding the National Bank of Egypt. Cassel was a proud, taciturn, unyielding man, devoid of humour or charm, but with crushing self-assurance. No man had more of the monarch’s trust during his reign. The two men’s faces looked so alike that they could have acted as one another’s doubles: like Reuben Sassoon, Cassel had his beard and moustache trimmed to resemble the monarch’s. His telegraphic address was ‘Ploughboy’.

‘People are wondering whether He will materially alter his mode of living – whether he will “hob nob” with this person, dine with that and stay with a third nobody,’ the Whitehall mandarin Sir Edward Hamilton noted on the king’s accession. Hamilton’s hope that he would only dine in embassies or the ultra-dignified London houses of great territorial magnates was soon dispelled. In May 1901 the monarch and Alice Keppel attended a dinner given by Cassel. ‘After dining with Cassel of course he can dine anywhere,’ noted Hamilton, who was one of the other guests. ‘I regret it much … However, I suppose it is very difficult even for a King to change his ways at 60 years of age.’ Two nights later, at the Marlborough Club, Knollys criticized ‘the King making himself common by dining about here there & everywhere. But nothing can be done. There is nobody who could speak so as to influence him.’ Cassel’s acceptance at the Marlborough Club was grudging, as shown during a financial crisis after the king’s death when his offer to pay for its survival was rejected because he was German. Nevertheless, ‘the Smart Set’ took power in Edwardian London ‘despite all the aristocratic nose-rumpling’, noted Count Kessler after a Savoy Hotel banquet at which Alice Keppel sat at Cassel’s table in a dress with a low-cut back and a boa around her neck.²⁵

The king’s tactics in 1901 negotiating with the government over the Civil List were masterminded by Cassel. He did not ask taxpayers to pay any of his personal debts. He presented himself as solvent, unencumbered by even a penny of debt, although in fact it was not until 1907 that, with Cassel’s help, he was finally rid of old obligations. He had no capital, for Victoria bequeathed her private fortune to her younger children. The annual running cost of Sandringham was £40,000 and Balmoral £20,000. Figures were put to an advisory commission consisting of Balfour for the Conservatives, Sir William Harcourt for the Liberals and a moneyed Edwardian called Sir Blundell Maple, owner of the Tottenham Court Road furniture emporium. The outcome was a parliamentary grant increased to £470,000 a year in return for paying income tax on the £60,000 a year that he received from his estates.

Edward VII hoped that his court would be more efficient, glamorous and spectacular than its predecessors. What in fact made it distinctive was its venality. Arthur Ponsonby, scion of a court family who ended his days as a Labour peer, wrote in 1909 that Edwardian England was defined by its ‘unqualified belief in money as a means, money as an end, aim, object, ideal; money as representing the method of securing a greater deal of physical well-being, money as power, money as pleasure, money, therefore, as happiness’. If this assessment is fair, the country took its cue from the royal household. The corruption of the governing class by the new millionaires was certainly pervasive. Cassel paid for the furnishing of Winston Churchill’s drawing room; the New York financier Pierpont Morgan bought a country house for the Asquiths; George Riddell of the News of the World supplied Lloyd George with his house at Walton Heath (and was later recommended for a barony by him); Lloyd George took holidays on the French Riviera provided by the newspaper tycoon Harold Harmsworth. It was truly Edwardian that Cassel employed Esher in 1902–4 at a salary of £5,000 a year and 10 per cent of profits. Such arrangements would have been unthinkable in the households of Victoria or George V.²⁶

Lord Clarendon, the first Edwardian Lord Chamberlain, cherished the court traditions that antedated the camarilla. ‘A thing was either right or wrong,’ a friend said of him. ‘He set his horse straight and squarely at the fences just as they came; he never stopped to ask what was on the other side, and he never went round by the gate.’ The financial expediency of some of the royal household startled Victorians like Clarendon. Suffield, for example, as a lord-in-waiting, approached the Daimler Motor Company in 1901 to buy a car ostensibly on the monarch’s behalf. As the Daimler chairman described, after its delivery Suffield ‘told him that His Majesty was so short of money that he would be unable to pay for it at once’, but that as soon as one of the King’s horses won a race, Daimler would have ‘first call on the money’. This was at a time when the monarch’s income exceeded £500,000 a year. Suffield, who was an ex-bankrupt, was either wrangling a car for himself or, after a lifetime of prevarication with his creditors, treated all businessmen as if they were moneylenders deserving to be bilked.²⁷

The noisiest royal household money scandal involved a company named Siberian Proprietary Mines, which was formed in 1905 by speculators, including Farquhar’s crony Herbert Stern, the financier with branches in Brussels, Paris and London who received a baronetcy in July of that year and, astonishingly, a barony only five months later. The 17th Earl of Derby succeeded a Johannesburg journalist as company chairman. Knollys was recruited as another noble-sounding director: he impressed the investing public, lured other courtiers, attended shareholders’ meetings, seconded the chairman’s speech, but was too guileless in business to trammel the shifty promoters of the company. Siberian Mines shares were never properly distributed, being mostly allotted to a few men who offloaded them in Society and under aliases on the Stock Exchange, without explaining that the company had only weak titles to mine gold. One Friday in 1907 there was a Stock Exchange panic over Siberian Mines, which suffered a collapse in share value. Farquhar was alleged to have been behind the slump, and to have made £70,000 by timely buying and selling; he went abroad, ostensibly for his health. Other members of the royal household tut-tutted about ‘the financial scandals at the Court, so many being implicated in the “Siberians” and other ticklish ventures’, as Carrington reported. The king supposedly heard nothing.²⁸

It is unthinkable that the monarch was involved in such business, but it was sometimes suspected that he was – to the injury of the royal household’s reputation. Another Marlborough Club courtier, Sir John Lister-Kaye, went hunting for monopoly mining concessions in China, where his wife appeared before the Empress Dowager wearing a diamond tiara, which she whipped off and presented when, as expected, the empress admired it. This ostentatious bribe may have made other Chinese authorities avid for baksheesh, for thereafter obstacles were raised before every move of Lister-Kaye’s syndicate. It was suspected in Peking, wrote The Times correspondent there, ‘that our most gracious sovereign and Mrs George Keppel are both interested in it, for nothing else can explain the pertinacity with which the claims of the syndicate are brought before the Commons and the wire-pulling … to support its pretensions’. This impression was increased by Lister-Kaye having ‘Groom-in-Waiting to the King’ printed on the visiting cards that he circulated in China.²⁹

Another courtier’s misfortune showed the penalties of court life. In 1906 the incoming Liberal government promoted a Marlborough Club baronet called Sir Edward Colebrooke to a barony, and appointed him as a lord-in-waiting. ‘Tommy’ Colebrooke had inherited 27,000 acres extending twelve miles on either side of the main road from Carlisle to Edinburgh (poor land yielding an annual rent of about £10,000). In 1903 he had taken Stratford House, an imposing mansion designed by Robert Adam, with its own two sentry boxes standing on the north side of Oxford Street. The new Lord and Lady Colebrooke launched themselves conspicuously. They added a royal wing, with bedrooms, bathrooms and valet’s accommodation, to their seat Glengonnar in Lanarkshire: the king stayed there for three days in October 1906, and enjoyed their chef’s exertions. Colebrooke became a subscriber at the Royal Opera, listed with Farquhar as a benefactor alongside such plutocrats as Pierpont Morgan, Rothschilds, Cassel, Julius Wernher and the Duke of Roxburghe. Lady Colebrooke and Alice Keppel joined forces during the 1907 Season and gave a cotillion at the Ritz Hotel to which they invited young wives – with Cassel’s daughter foremost. Colebrooke tried to fund this outlay by Stock Exchange tips. ‘The ruin of the Colebrookes brought about by rank speculations entered upon in order to have the means for living on a more lavish scale has been attended by a very discreditable incident,’ FitzRoy recorded just twenty-three months after the court appointment. Lady Colebrooke sent some pearls to Cassel asking him to sell them on her behalf. Cassel replied that he had had them valued at £12,000, sent a cheque for that amount and, once it was cashed, returned the pearls to her. ‘Even the sordid conscience of the City revolts against the ignominy of the transaction,’ said FitzRoy. Lord Colebrooke’s finances never recovered from his plunges: Stratford House was leased to the Duke of Roxburghe for the 1907 Season, and sold to the Earl of Derby (ex-chairman of Siberian Mines) in 1908; the Scottish estates were put on the market in 1910, but took years to sell. The impoverished lord salved his pride with minor court posts into the reign of Edward VIII.³⁰

How did these shenanigans look in more hierarchical European countries? The militarist Prince von Faffenheim-Munsterburg-Weiningen, Proust’s character in Le Côté de Guermantes, declared that if the King of England ‘had been an ordinary person there isn’t a club that wouldn’t have blackballed him, and nobody would have been willing to shake hands with him. The Queen is delightful, but limited. There’s something shocking about a royal couple who are literally kept by their subjects, who get the big Jewish financiers to foot all the bills they ought to pay themselves, and make them Baronets in exchange.’ Proust’s character thought Edward VII as corrupt as his Saxe-Coburg cousin Ferdinand of Bulgaria. Although shifty improvisers such as Farquhar, Suffield and Lister-Kaye were gentiles, the opprobrium was heaped on Jewish foreigners. Certainly not since the South Sea Bubble in 1720, or perhaps under James I in 1611–25, had the court had such a mercenary reputation.³¹