5

‘Great Influence but Little Direct Power’

The Eton housemaster’s wife Blanche Warre-Cornish used, whenever she felt troubled, to comfort herself: ‘I am an Englishwoman. I was born in wedlock. I am on dry land.’ But what did it mean to be English? What reassurances came from being a subject of Edward VII? In an epoch when parts of Europe were ruled by imperial autocrats, while in Oslo an elected king wondered if he should seek popularity by travelling on trams, what was the constitutional status of the king-emperor in London?¹

The word ‘English’ is deliberate. Queen Victoria’s successor was designated King Edward VII, not King Edward I, although Edward VI had died fifty years before the English and Scottish crowns were united in 1603 in the person of King James VI of Scotland and I of England. There were productive and populous areas of the United Kingdom in south Wales and industrial Scotland, but England predominated. In 1841 England’s share of the realm’s population had been 56.2 per cent, but by 1881 it was 70.6 per cent and in 1911 it exceeded 75 per cent (Prussia in 1900 accounted for 61.2 per cent of the total population of united Germany). By the 1880s England was second only to Belgium as the world’s most densely industrialized country. People who lived through this epoch always spoke of Edwardian England. Edwardian Britain, Ireland, Wales and Scotland never existed as notions.

‘The United Kingdom’, created by the Act of Union with Ireland of 1800, remained a phrase with limited meaning during Edward’s reign. The regional diversity of his territories – their political, racial, linguistic, cultural, economic and administrative disunity – was entrenched. London’s relations with Edinburgh and Dublin had similarities with Vienna’s to Budapest. Dissident Irish MPs formed their own disruptive party in the House of Commons; but Scottish urban MPs, their Highlands counterparts, Welsh MPs from mining districts and those from farming counties, West of England MPs, Midlands MPs, Tyneside MPs, those elected in the Fens or East Anglia, formed cohesive groups with divergent interests. There were regional languages (English, Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Irish Gaelic, Manx Gaelic, Cornish, the four distinct Channel Islands patois) as well as dialects, idioms, vocabularies and phonetics that made people incomprehensible to one another. Shire counties took pride in their distinctions. Industrial cities emphasized their demarcations and vied with one another. By Edward VII’s accession, regional rivalries had been intensified by competitive sports, especially soccer and cricket: he became patron of the Football Association in 1902 in order to provide a unifying figurehead standing above strong community antagonism. Sales of local newspapers outstripped those of national newspapers printed in London until after the war of 1914–18. Towns, cities and country districts were well supplied with community newspapers holding party allegiances: on the Tory side there were nine covering rural Devon, for example, and thirty-three in industrial Lancashire; the Liberals had nearly as many local press outlets of opinion and influence. Whether dailies or weeklies, Tory or Liberal, this press was parochial, literate, decent and respected. The Irish MP who said, ‘I don’t care what The Times said of me – I’m waiting to see what the Skibbereen Eagle says’ was being pragmatic rather than defiant. There was no BBC radio to foster a national voice, but provincial millionaires built art galleries and concert halls to enrich regional culture. Local department stores and local assizes ensured that commerce and law had regional identities.

The Edwardian polemicist Leo Maxse quipped that England was a country governed by Scots, plundered by Welshmen and kicked by Irishmen. Under the Representation of the People Act of 1884, the English and Welsh electorate was expanded by 150 per cent, the Scottish by 160 per cent and the Irish by 300 per cent. Although the London government and the Westminster parliament had sovereign powers over the United Kingdom’s three constituent parts, Scotland, Ireland and ‘England and Wales’, there were different arrangements for each division. Wales had been incorporated into England by Acts of Union in 1536–42. After the Act of Union between England and Scotland in 1707, there was enduring English resentment at the influence of Scots in English political and cultural life, while Scotland kept its own legal and educational systems. Two of the four prime ministers who served Edward VII were Scottish (Balfour and Campbell-Bannerman). Randall Davidson and Cosmo Lang, appointed Archbishops of Canterbury and York in 1903 and 1909, were Scots. The parliamentary unification with Ireland of 1800 had installed 103 Irish MPs in the Westminster parliament, but politically appointed Englishmen (occasionally Scotsmen) occupied Dublin Castle as Lord Lieutenant, and oversaw an armed police force and system of stipendiary ‘resident’ magistrates that set Ireland apart. Chamberlain in 1885 had proposed a system of devolved powers throughout the three kingdoms, with an elected ‘National Council’ in Ireland, Scotland and perhaps Wales, but this bid was trumped by Gladstone’s declaration for Home Rule in the following year.

Until 1867 the death of a monarch had required the dissolution of Parliament within six months. Edward VII’s accession was the first that was not followed by a general election. The post of prime minister remained constitutionally anomalous in 1901. Several Cabinet offices ranked in order of precedence above that of prime minister until, at King Edward’s initiative, a warrant was issued in 1905 placing the prime minister as the fourth most important subject after the Archbishop of Canterbury (as Primate of all England), the Lord Chancellor and the Archbishop of York in that order. The Church of England and the judiciary thus remained ahead of elected politicians. This remains the case in 2016.

The United Kingdom was not in the Edwardian period a constitutional democracy in twenty-first-century terms. Secret ballots had been introduced in 1872 at parliamentary contests, but rowdy electioneering remained common, and bribery survived in cathedral towns or where brewers were candidates. Under the suffrage reforms of 1884, women were excluded from the parliamentary franchise, although a minority of them qualified for votes in borough or county council elections by reason of being property owners. Throughout Edward’s reign, fewer than half of the total adult population could vote. The census of 1901 recorded 32 million people living at 6 million addresses: the electorate in 1900 numbered 6,730,435. The 1884 Act differentiated between voter qualifications for males aged twenty-one or more in county parliamentary constituencies and those in urban boroughs. It did not rest on any statement of innate or democratic rights to vote. Instead there was a hierarchical system based on property ownership and residence, whereby men were granted suffrage as ownership voters (freeholders and holders of life interests in property), as occupation voters (householders, leaseholders, tenants, occupants of homes tied to their jobs), as lodgers, as payers of poor rates and by retaining ancient rights to vote in certain historic boroughs (the last group numbered 26,000 voters in 1901). The electors of the City of London constituency were thus not the caretakers and watchmen who lived there, but the bankers, merchants and tradespeople who had business premises there with homes elsewhere. Towards the end of Edward’s reign, in 1909–10, the Conservative Party asserted that the rights of unelected landowners sitting in the House of Lords should prevail over the decisions of the elected majority in the House of Commons. Universal suffrage was not enacted until 1928.

Seventy-nine parliamentary constituencies – mainly small country towns, some of them latter-day pocket boroughs – had been eliminated by the Redistribution of Seats Act of 1885, which apportioned their electors to larger county seats. But once the factional interests of local dignitaries were eradicated, the irresponsible misuse of moneyed influence by a few ruthless, self-seeking London newspaper proprietors obtruded. ‘Daily Mailiness’, as one commentator called it in 1909, pretending that the profits from commercialized anger, slurs and xenophobia mixed with ‘banal, vulgar … social and Court gossip’ were synonymous with public liberty and national good, was more politically corrupting than the network of pocket boroughs that it superseded. Edward VII got peerages for two of the petty Caesars, Edward Levy-Lawson of the Daily Telegraph and Alfred Harmsworth of the Daily Mail, who became Lord Burnham and Lord Northcliffe respectively. Within a few years the original press lords had been joined as legislators in the Upper House by the proprietors of the Daily Express, News of the World, Sunday Pictorial and others.²

There were different tiers of peerages. Men (but not women) who inherited peerages of England (created before 1707), of Great Britain (created between 1707 and 1800) and of the United Kingdom (created from 1801) could take their seats in the House of Lords with few preliminaries. The upper chamber was also supplied with members by two electoral colleges. All the men holding Scottish peerages (but not the women) chose sixteen ‘representative Scottish peers’ to sit in the Lords for the duration of each parliament. ‘Irish representative peers’, to a possible total of twenty-eight, were elected for life by their peers (there were no Irish peeresses). At the accession of George I in 1714, the House of Lords had 207 members and 390 on William IV’s accession in 1830 (both figures include bishops). On the accession of Edward VII, 553 peers sat in the House of Lords, including the Duke of York. Monarchs preferred to preserve the rare mystique of the peerage by limiting the bestowal of new coronets, so it was considered an Edwardian achievement when in 1904 there were no peerage creations or promotions. By the coronation of George V in 1911, however, there were 591 peers on the roll.

Edward VII reigned over a kingdom with slack constitutional arrangements, during an epoch characterized by vitality, aggression and swift adjustment. He curbed his temperament to suit this situation. ‘He is more constitutionally minded than was the Queen,’ noted Sir Edward Hamilton of the Treasury after his accession, adding the hope ‘that he will be less apt to show his likes and dislikes towards political persons’. The new monarch had spent forty frustrated years while his mother restrained his reach. After becoming head of state, he found himself still bridled in policy matters. ‘The position of a British monarch is one of great influence but little direct power, at any rate in matters of importance,’ Sir Almeric FitzRoy of the Privy Council reflected in 1904. ‘Without imputing to King Edward any conscious desire to strain the privileges of his position, it is apparent, both beneath the surface of Court life, and in his more intimate relations with ministers, that he … chafes under the circumstances in which he is placed, and that the energy of which he is denied the exercise in the realm of politics, displays itself in forms of unnecessary interference in matters of detail, and is sometimes exhibited in outbursts of fractiousness that are neither dignified nor reasonable.’ In sum, the king was still limited – as he had been as Prince of Wales – to frets and niceties. He sublimated his autocratic temper in punctilio. His position was as equivocal as the Parliament, the constituent territories, the administration and the identity of his kingdom.³

Wanting to inaugurate his reign with welcome reforms, Edward proposed inserting passages promising old-age pensions and housing for the poor into his first king’s speech in 1901, but did not press his suggestion after being warned that his popularity would suffer if he showed political partisanship. Balfour repulsed his claim in 1904 to receive confidential Cabinet working papers about policy decisions that were under discussion. Other prerogatives were more successfully exerted. He required the Home Secretary to furnish him with a daily report on House of Commons sittings. Appointments in the diplomatic service, the Royal Navy and the army bore his stamp. He prevented the London government from granting diplomatic recognition to the regicide regime in Belgrade. At the suggestion of Jewish friends, despite the opposition of his ministers, he remonstrated with Russian ministers about pogroms. He grumbled at his prime ministers, upbraided individual ministers, discounted ministerial advice but never fought à l’outrance against government policies.

Palace officials felt that they were better attuned than contending parliamentarians to the ultimate needs of the kingdom. ‘I do not know anything of the House of Commons,’ Knollys told the Prime Minister’s private secretary in 1905, ‘but there is the Public (the nation) which is even more important than the House of Commons.’ Esher, too, believed in ‘the immense value to the State of this great function of dispassionate criticism by the Sovereign’. There were four Edwardian prime ministers, two Conservatives (Salisbury and Balfour) followed by two Liberals (Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith). Salisbury and Balfour headed coalition governments in which the Conservative majorities in their Cabinets were compromised by four resolute Liberals who had broken with the official party over the proposed dilution of the United Kingdom by Irish Home Rule (Chamberlain, Devonshire, Lansdowne, Lord James of Hereford). Asquith’s second ministry, in the last five months of Edward’s reign, was sustained by a coalition of Irish nationalist and Labour support.⁴

For thirty years Salisbury had been sardonic in private remarks about the prince, and showed little consideration to his face. He had been cajoled into joining the Marlborough Club in 1899, but seldom went inside. His slapdash air offended the sartorially immaculate prince. When rebuked for appearing in the trousers of an Elder Brother of Trinity House with a diplomatic jacket, the Prime Minister replied, ‘It was a dark morning, and I am afraid that my mind must have been occupied by some subject of less importance.’ The royal family and Salisbury’s family, the Cecils, had a grievance between them. Queen Victoria’s wish for her youngest daughter Beatrice to marry the Grand Duke of Hesse, widower of her second daughter Alice, led the Prince of Wales to muster support in the House of Lords for repeal of the statute (dating from 1835) forbidding men to marry the sisters of their dead wives. Canvassing by the prince finally won a Lords majority for the Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Marriage Bill in 1896 to the irritation of the Cecils, who thought the measure an inducement to incest and unchristian because it enshrined differences between civil law and religious law. For some years Salisbury’s government avoided Commons debates on the bill, and when these could no longer be evaded, his maladjusted son Lord Hugh Cecil made virulent attacks on the proposal, which his fellow Conservative MPs rejected. Campbell-Bannerman’s Liberal administration was less concerned with the imposition of scriptural teaching than with enabling quiet domesticity, and eased the passage through both Houses of Parliament of the bill, which received royal assent in 1907. The country had to wait another fourteen years before the Deceased Brother’s Widow’s Marriage Act of 1921.⁵

King Edward was repressed from sending signals in the Coronation Honours list of 1902 as he had been in his first King’s Speech of 1901. His great idea was to bestow baronies as rewards for their philanthropy on Ernest Cassel, who had recently given £200,000 to be spent on a charitable initiative of the king’s choice (the King Edward VII tuberculosis sanatorium), and Thomas Lipton, who had given £25,000 to Princess Alexandra’s fund to feed impoverished Londoners and funded working-class banquets to celebrate the coronation. It is notable that neither Cassel nor Lipton had a son to inherit the peerage: there was no danger of the House of Lords being filled with a second generation of nondescript-looking parvenus. Salisbury baulked, partly because the two plutocrats’ financial support of Alice Keppel was surmised in Society, and partly because one was a German Jew and the other a working-class Irish Glaswegian. He thought it absurd to give a peerage to a grocer (Lipton had democratized tea-drinking by cutting production costs, introducing brand packaging and making tea affordable to the poor). Even though the king requested these two baronies as personal gifts, Salisbury refused him: Lipton was confined to a baronetcy; Cassel to a privy councillorship.

The Coronation Honours were otherwise notable. The king’s friend Earl Cadogan wanted a dukedom, which as the second richest London landlord after the Duke of Westminster he could have maintained with style; but this duchy was withheld by Salisbury, so as not to offend the Marquess of Londonderry, a member of his Cabinet who also wanted a dukedom, but was felt to deserve it less. Cadogan instead was offered a marquessate, which he declined. Lord Colville of Culross, the retiring chairman of the Marlborough Club, was raised from a barony to a viscountcy. Three of the eight new baronies were marks of royal favour: those to Francis Knollys, Francis Grenfell (Colonel Commandant of the King’s Royal Rifles, of which the king was Colonel-in-Chief) and Algernon (‘Bertie’) Mitford (who under his new title of Redesdale succeeded Colville as chairman of the Marlborough Club). Edward Levy-Lawson, proprietor of the Daily Telegraph and sedulous host of royal shoots, was mortified at not receiving a barony: it was withheld by Salisbury because Lawson’s son had just lost a by-election for the Conservatives, but was conceded a year later. The king bestowed a Knighthood of St Patrick on a co-respondent in the Mordaunt divorce, now the Earl of Enniskillen. Cassel and Lord Rothschild were among the new privy councillors nominated in the Coronation Honours list. The seventeen baronets included Lipton and the ruthless solicitor, George Lewis, repository of Society secrets, and not above blackmail in the interests of his clients.

There were widespread but false rumours that Salisbury’s retirement as prime minister in 1902 was hastened by disagreements over the titles granted to Cassel, Lipton and Lewis. Salisbury was succeeded by his nephew Balfour, whom the king found pessimistic, equivocal, vacillating and vague. An adroit parliamentary debater and social charmer, replete with self-love, posing in drawing rooms as a philosopher, Balfour’s political conduct was shallow, cynical and full of improvised feints. Lacking force or direction in many matters, his administration seemed essentially a Society affair. Too often its ministers looked indifferent and listless, the political equivalent of drawing-room loungers. Balfour was condescending to the king, whom he treated, said a courtier, as ‘one of those irritating factors in general politics, which you cannot ignore, and which you must treat with dismal and fictitious solemnity’.⁶

Balfour’s Liberal successor Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman was the most congenial prime minister to the king. They began to meet at Marienbad when Campbell-Bannerman was still in opposition, clinking their spa-water glasses together, discussing diets, politics and personalities, and reaching a sympathetic understanding. Campbell-Bannerman read French novels, enjoyed Paris, was equable, straightforward, broad-minded, jocular and kindly. He held no doctrinaire antipathy towards the marriage of deceased wives’ sisters. For a fortnight at Marienbad in August 1905, only months before replacing Balfour in Downing Street, Campbell-Bannerman lunched or dined with the king almost daily: ‘I got so mixed up with the King’s incessant gaieties, for which his energy and appetite are alike insatiable, that it was no rest or holiday for me.’ But it was the king’s way to sound out an opposition politician who was soon to assume power. ‘No-one guessed what a wise and excellent ruler he would make,’ Campbell-Bannerman told a Viennese journalist in 1906: ‘The King has confounded in a most amazing way all those who doubted his … capacities.’⁷

In 1908, when the king was recuperating his respiratory strength in Biarritz, Campbell-Bannerman’s failing health necessitated his resignation. Asquith had to journey to Biarritz to complete the formalities of becoming Prime Minister, and to receive the monarch’s approval of Cabinet changes. Asquith’s manner was too lawyerly to attract the king, who thought him common, weak in restraining the oratorical outbursts of his radical supporters, and too conciliatory to suffragettes (whom the king’s circle dubbed ‘the unenjoyed’).⁸

Edward VII kept his desk in immaculate order. He put papers aside that bored him (mainly on domestic politics and colonial affairs), but scrutinized even the dullest diplomatic dispatches and monitored files pertaining to his armed forces. He neither liked nor respected Lansdowne, the Conservative coalition’s Foreign Secretary during 1900–5, and clashed with him. The Liberals’ Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, who was his godson, seldom ventured abroad, and struggled to read French or to speak European languages. Similarly, Grey’s deputy Lord Fitzmaurice seemed indifferent to social life abroad. This insularity might have disheartened the king if it had not justified him in travelling abroad without attendant ministers.⁹

The monarch was the fountain of military honour: some of his worst clashes with the Salisbury and Balfour governments turned on army promotion, awards, pay and discipline. The Conservative Services ministers, St John Brodrick and Oakeley Arnold-Forster at the War Office, and Lord Selborne at the Admiralty, felt his wrath, especially when their departmental submissions were insufficiently deferential. If he seemed troublesome in the matter of Service uniforms, it must be conceded that the slovenly appearances of late-Victorian soldiers were superseded by the martinet smartness of the Edwardians. Overall, the Edwardian army, with its reliance on yeomanry and militia, resembled a peasant levy led by the gentry. Feudal traces overlay its territorially based organization. ‘The army is not a national army, it is the king’s army,’ Rudyard Kipling complained in 1902. ‘The army is looked upon as the perquisite of the aristocracy, who do not take the trouble to learn their job [as officers].’ The royal household’s fear of the populace, Kipling believed, counted for as much as pacifism in the resistance to conscription: ‘at the back of the heads of … the Court lies the old German idea that it is unsafe to “arm the people”.’¹⁰

Richard Haldane, who was Secretary of State for War under Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith in 1905–12, was together with Carrington the king’s favourite Liberal minister. He spoke German, smoked mammoth cigars and enlivened royal motoring expeditions from Marienbad. Best of all, he submitted memoranda which pandered to the monarch’s appetite for technical niceties and gossip. Haldane further won royal favour by adopting Esher’s recommendations for reforms at the War Office (which the Conservatives had stymied), forming the Imperial General Staff in 1907 and later that year enacting the Territorial and Reserve Forces Act. The king regretted that the new Model Army, which Haldane established, was a small expeditionary force rather than a continental standing army, but gave a rousing speech to his lords lieutenant of counties, who were charged with superintending the army’s county Territorial Associations, and thus gentrified the Territorial Force. Although compulsory service by young men in the armed forces was unacceptable to Edwardian Liberalism, the king insisted after 1907 that all future deputy lieutenants in the counties must have military experience.

The chief domestic issue involving the monarch was the tension between his two Houses of Parliament. In 1906 the vast Conservative majority in the Lords, led by Lansdowne, amended beyond recognition the provisions on religious instruction in the Liberal government’s Education Bill. Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1908, retaliated by denouncing unelected peers for mutilating the measures of a recently elected government. ‘I admire your cleverness in many ways,’ the king told Lloyd George over a meal in Marienbad, ‘but are you not afraid that you may be going ahead a little too fast, and the result may be the toppling over of the entire edifice?’ Radical oratory elicited complaints to Campbell-Bannerman from the king who, standing at the apex of all inherited status and influence, disliked any attack on hereditary privileges. The Lords passed with angry reluctance Liberal measures such as the Trades Disputes Bill of 1906, the Evicted Tenants Bill of 1907 and the Old Age Pensions Bill of 1908. Lord Rothschild in 1908 organized the rejection of a Licensing Bill, which he regarded as an act of socialist expropriation.¹¹

Then, in 1909, Lloyd George introduced his so-called ‘People’s Budget’. In order to meet the government’s need of an extra £8 million for old age pensions and £3 million for naval armaments, the chancellor imposed a higher rate of income tax on incomes above £2,000, a super-tax on incomes above £5,000, a comprehensive system of land valuation and new land taxes which, although modest in their scope, seemed radical in their implications. These comprised a halfpenny in the pound duty on the capital value of undeveloped land and of undeveloped minerals; a 10 per cent reversion duty on the increased value of leases whenever they were sold; and 20 per cent tax on increased values when land was sold. Although these burdens fell most on urban landlords (agricultural land was exempted), they were received by landowners in the House of Lords as a vindictive economic attack by the party in power on its opposition. They saw the Budget as plundering Conservative resources in order to bribe Liberal voters. It seemed to them the first thrust in an ambush of landlords and rents. The Liberals retorted that the House of Commons had sole responsibility for taxation, that only Commons votes should topple governments, and that as finance bills were enacted annually, unelected peers were asserting their power to remove elected governments annually. The action of Lansdowne’s coroneted followers would, if not resisted, bring the Lords preponderance over the Crown and Commons alike.

The king resented Liberal ministers decrying the Lords on public platforms, which by challenging hereditary principles was tantamount to disputing the continuance of the monarchy. Knollys and Esher feared that their sovereign’s influence, prestige and authority would be diminished if he accepted Liberal demands for the creation of 300 new peers to improve their voting numbers in the Lords. They faulted Balfour and Lansdowne for exposing the Crown’s vulnerability by provoking a slanging match about inherited political privileges. Indeed, neither Balfour nor Lansdowne, whose leadership was weak and devious, were well disposed towards the king. On 30 November the Lords rejected the Finance Bill by 350 votes to 75. On 15 December the king dissolved Parliament, and a general election was called.

For several years the king had blown like a grampus when mounting staircases. He erupted into racking coughs and choking fits that sounded as if they would split him asunder. Heroin had been developed a few years earlier as a sovereign remedy for such coughs (it was administered as a spray on ticklish throats), but his physician felt that his heart was too weak for strong opiates: ‘It is very sad, as in the [1860s] his strength was prodigious & we thought he would live to be a hundred,’ Carrington mused in 1908. The king seemed cheerful at Lord Iveagh’s shooting party at Elveden early in 1910, but needed oxygen tanks to help his breathing, and was upset there by a woman who dabbled in spiritualism giving him a message from his sister Alice, who had died in 1878: ‘Time is short. You must prepare.’¹²

On 20 January 1910 he attended a birthday dinner for his brother Arthur, Duke of Connaught. Throughout the evening he received telegrams with election results from the constituencies. He tried to affect neutrality, yet his comment ‘All the peers’ eldest sons are being returned’ seemed to show relief that voters did not share the Liberal government’s exasperation with the peerage’s parliamentary powers. To the end he believed in the legitimacy of hereditary influence and the preservation of ancestral privilege. In this general election, the Liberal majority over the Conservatives fell from 220 to two. Although the peers finally accepted the Budget, the problem of the Lords veto remained, for the furiously contentious Irish Home Rule vote was looming. The king warned Asquith that he would require a second general election before creating 300 new peers to provide a Liberal majority in the House of Lords. Recognizing that such an expansion would devalue the nobility, he had the Leader of the House of Lords, the Marquess of Crewe, to dinner on 30 January, and suggested a reform whereby all members of the House of Lords could attend and speak in the chamber, but only 100 peers – chosen by an electoral college as representative of both parties for the term of a parliament – could vote. This emulated the existing scheme for electing ‘representative’ Irish and Scottish peers, and foreshadowed the scheme introduced in 1999 for hereditary peers to elect ninety of their number to sit and vote among the life peers in the House of Lords.¹³

In February, recuperating from winter colds at Arthur Sassoon’s Brighton house, the monarch was listless, even with Alice Keppel’s companionship, and made meals awkward by his silence. Travelling to Biarritz in March, he stopped in Paris to see Henri Bataille’s risqué new play, La Vierge Folle (The Mad Virgin). He enjoyed the stir caused by his visibility in the royal box (rather as he had recently relished a production at Buckingham Palace of Léo Delibes’ ballet Le Roi s’amuse [The King has Fun], which had startled some of his entourage by its bold allusions to royalty). His insistence, as he was motored back from the theatre to his hotel, on having the car windows open to the night precipitated bronchitis. He returned to England on 27 April, caught another chill at Sandringham, and back in London had minor heart attacks and difficulty in breathing. On Friday, 6 May newspapers published the first health bulletins. Cassel visited him in the morning (apparently leaving £10,000 in banknotes – perhaps a solace for Alice Keppel). Thereafter his vital spirits petered out. He died fifteen minutes before midnight.

The ensuing weekend’s press made, wrote George Ives in London, ‘a national plunge into the inkpot – very silly & indeed likely to spread a feeling of artificial gloom’. Arthur Benson in Cambridge took a similar view: ‘The papers are full of the King. Everyone loses all sense of humour & proportion. He was a jolly, gallant, kindly old viveur, who enjoyed life & wished everyone else to enjoy it too – & he had a British sense of coming up to the scratch & doing his duty. That was all!’ From Paris, Henry Adams gave a foreigner’s perspective: the death of le roi qui s’amuse brought a spell of factitious unity to a disunited kingdom; the recent parliamentary crisis had revealed to the English ‘a big unsuspected mass of socialism and bitterness against Kings and Lords and everyone else who owns anything, and so they all pretended to care for the king. It’s a bit of humbug.’¹⁴

In 1903 the young King and Queen of Serbia had been murdered in a palace revolution. Thereafter Edward VII refused to meet the usurper King Peter I or the country’s regicide politicians, and until 1906 he prevented London from granting diplomatic recognition to the Belgrade regime. ‘The assassination of King Alexander and Queen Draga was so terrible that it made a deep impression on public opinion in England,’ he told the Russian ambassador. ‘Mon métier à moi est d’être Roi. King Alexander was also by his métier “un Roi”. As you see, we belonged to the same guild, like labourers or professional men. I cannot be indifferent to the assassination of … a member of my guild. We should be obliged to shut up our businesses if we, as kings, were to consider the assassination as of no consequence.’ Monarchs, like craftsmen, prospered if they had sound judgement of people, and trusted their instincts in taking decisions. Monarchies endured best if successive generations did not clash: Edward VII and his grandson George VI were the only rulers of their kingdom since 1727 who did not quarrel with their heirs. He fostered continuities, worked at kingship, and fitted in wherever there was a stir of activity. Recognizing that he was a man of ordinary capacities in an exceptional position, Edward VII trained himself in public performance. As someone who found solitude unbearable even for a few minutes, and inanition almost as bad, social leadership and journeying were his best resources.¹⁵

Edward VII was fortunate in dying before the impending war erased his style of life. Four years of bloodletting, culminating in European republican revolutions, aroused enduring nostalgia for the man and for his epoch. Memories of a time when England seemed endowed with ease, and its king made a paradise for ‘The Smarts’, were his abiding influence. More than a century after his death delectable connotations survived, for the middle and upper classes, in the phrase ‘Edwardian England’. It meant, wrote Vita Sackville-West in The Edwardians, ‘a world where pleasure fell like a ripened peach for the outstretching of a hand’.¹⁶