Edward VII: The Last Victorian King

13 King of the Castle

Emerging from the Reform Club on his way to dinner with the tenants of his De Vere Gardens flat, Henry James was shocked to see a newspaper placard proclaiming ‘Death of the Queen’. The streets seemed ‘strange and indescribable’, the people in them dazed and hushed, almost as though they were frightened. It was ‘a very curious and unforgettable impression’; and James, sensing London’s fear that the Queen’s death would ‘let loose incalculable forces for possible ill’, was himself ‘very pessimistic’.

Writing later to friends in Austria on the black-bordered paper of the Reform Club, he had not expected to feel such grief for the ‘simple running down of an old used-up watch’. But he deeply lamented the passing of ‘little mysterious Victoria’ and the succession of that ‘arch vulgarian’, ‘Edward the Caresser’, who had been ‘carrying on with Mrs Keppel in so undignified a manner’. ‘His succession, in short, [was] ugly and [made] all for vulgarity and frivolity’. At dinner he heard John Morley say that the King had made a ‘good impression’ at his first Privy Council meeting, to which James added the doubtful comment, ‘Speriamo.’

The Times shared Henry James’s gloomy outlook. It admitted that King Edward had ‘never failed in his duty to the throne and the nation’. But there must have been many times when he had prayed, ‘lead us not into temptation’ with ‘a feeling akin to hopelessness’. The Times, in fact, could not pretend that there was nothing in the King’s long career which those who respected him ‘would wish otherwise’.

The new King was fifty-nine. His fair beard was turning grey, and although a lotion was vigorously applied to his scalp twice a day, he was nearly bald. Exceedingly portly, he still walked as if he were late for some appointment, his stout legs full of energy. He entered upon his inheritance with appealing enthusiasm and zest. At Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace he strode about with his hat on his head, his dog trotting after him, a walking stick in his hand, a cigar in his mouth, giving orders; opening cupboards; peering into cabinets; ransacking drawers; clearing rooms formerly used by the Prince Consort and not touched since his death; dispatching case-loads of relics and ornaments to a special room in the Round Tower at Windsor; destroying statues and busts of John Brown; burning the papers of his mother’s pretentious and wily Indian attendant, the Munshi, whose letters from the Queen were eventually retrieved from his widow; throwing out hundreds of ‘rubbishy old coloured photographs’ and useless bric-à-brac; setting inventory clerks to work at listing the cluttered accumulations of half a century; rearranging pictures. His Surveyor of Pictures recorded:

He lost no time in decision. I found it useless to ask the King if I should hang this there or another here and so on. His mind could not take it in … ‘Offer it up,’ he would say and when ‘offered up’ he would come to see and perhaps put his head on one side, all with a twinkle in his eye, and say, ‘That is not amiss,’ or perhaps he would at once say that he did not like it. He enjoyed sitting in a room with the men working about him, and liked giving directions himself as to the actual position of pictures.

‘I do not know much about art,’ he would say, rolling his r’s in that characteristic German way of his, ‘but I think I know something about ar-r-rangement.’ He certainly knew a great deal about the family portraits, ‘and was seldom at fault, even with almost unknown members of various Saxon duchies’.

He gave instructions for new bathrooms and lavatories to be installed; for the telephone system to be extended; for various coach houses to be converted into garages for the motor-cars which now came rattling and sputtering through the gates; for rooms to be redecorated, supervising the work himself, as the Queen ‘had little interest in such matters’, having all the varnish stripped off the oak panelling.

He would brook no opposition to his plans, overcoming any resistance with good-natured firmness, determined not to allow inconvenient sentiment to stand in the way of necessary overhaul. ‘Alas!’ Queen Alexandra lamented to her sister-in-law in Berlin. ‘During my absence [in Copenhagen] Bertie has had all your beloved Mother’s rooms dismantled and all her precious things removed.’ He caused even greater offence to his sisters by disregarding his mother’s will, which had provided for Osborne House to be kept in the family, and by presenting the place to the nation for use as a Royal Naval College and a convalescent home for naval officers.

As well as reorganizing the royal palaces, the King also transformed the court, drastically reforming both the Lord Steward’s and the Lord Chamberlain’s offices. He appointed new grooms-in-waiting and gentlemen ushers, making Sir Dighton Probyn Keeper of the Privy Purse; retaining Sir Francis Knollys as his private secretary; and taking more and more into his confidence Lord Rosebery’s clever, subtle, handsome friend, Lord Esher, who eventually, in the words of the Secretary for War, St John Brodrick, ‘constituted himself the unofficial adviser of the crown’. As a supposedly self-seeking eminence grise, Esher was disliked and distrusted by those who suspected his motives for so sedulously acquiring authority and influence to be less disinterested than they were. Lord Carrington recognized him as an ‘extraordinary’ and ‘clever’ man, but added that he might be dangerous and was certainly unscrupulous.

‘He seems to be able to run about Buckingham Palace as he likes,’ Carrington noted in his journal. ‘He must be a considerable nuisance to the Household … He is not trusted by the general public who look on him as an intriguer.’ Margot Asquith described him as ‘a man of infinite curiosity and discretion, what the servants call “knowing” … He has more intelligence than most of the court pests. Slim with the slim, straight with the straight, the fault I find with him is common to all courtiers, he hardly knows what is important from what is not.’

An exceptionally ceremonious man, Lord Esher was doubtful at first that all the King’s changes in the running of the Household were for the better. The King was ‘kind and debonair and not undignified’, Esher thought, but ‘too human’. The sanctity of the throne was gradually disappearing, and Esher could not help but ‘regret the mystery and awe of the old court’. The ‘quiet impressive entrance’ of the monarch before dinner was ‘as obsolete as Queen Elizabeth’. The King came down unannounced, and dinner itself was ‘like an ordinary party’ with ‘none of the “hush” of the Queen’s dinners’.

Before long, however, Esher was pleased to note that the etiquette ‘stiffened up very much’; ladies were required to wear tiaras and men to appear in court costume with decorations.

Decorations for the King were of transcendent significance, and he took a quite touching delight in awarding them. Lord Carrington remembered how the King, especially dressed in field marshal’s uniform for the occasion, had expressed — and had obviously felt — ‘the greatest pleasure’ in giving him the Order of the Garter, the ‘finest Order in the world’. ‘His Majesty had gone to the trouble’ of doing so in a room filled with reminiscences of their Indian tour, turning the occasion into a memorable little ceremony and breaking with tradition to make a short and apposite speech as he held his friend’s hand. ‘I was so much moved,’ Carrington recorded in his journal, ‘that I left the Garter behind at Buckingham Palace, but Elsom (my old footman) now a “Royal” came running out with it and saved the situation.’

It pained the King beyond measure to see decorations incorrectly worn, particularly those which he had awarded himself. Very occasionally he would be amused by some peculiarly atrocious solecism as, for instance, Henry Ponsonby’s wearing two Jubilee Medals at once at a dinner in Germany. But the normal response was a pained rebuke such as that delivered to Sir Felix Semon, who was informed at Chatsworth that the Star of the Victorian Order was ‘usually worn on the left breast’.

He could not forbear correcting any error his sharp eye detected, though he generally contrived to do so as tactfully as possible. Noticing an English diplomat wearing his G.C.B. incorrectly, he informed him quietly of his mistake in German, employing a Bavarian dialect which no one in the room, other than the diplomat himself, who had a Bavarian mother, would have understood. Similarly, at a ball at Devonshire House, he waited until it was time to wish his host good night and to congratulate him on the ‘magnificent manner in which everything had been done’, before informing the Duke confidentially that there was, however, one thing that had not been quite right. What was that? the Duke asked anxiously, and was told, ‘You have got your Garter on upside down.’

Taking care to be exceptionally tactful with foreign diplomats, the King was seen to draw aside the Swedish Minister, who had appeared at court with his medals in the wrong order, and was heard to whisper in his ear — as though imparting a state secret of the utmost significance — the name of the court jewellers, ‘Hunt and Roskill, 148 Piccadilly’.

The King was equally distressed to see men wearing their uniforms improperly or turning out in civilian clothes which he considered inappropriate to the occasion. On embarking upon a continental tour in 1903 he had his suite paraded on the deck of the Victoria and Albert in full dress uniform. ‘The sea was rough,’ recorded Charles Hardinge, Assistant Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, who was one of the party, ‘and it was somewhat painful staggering about the deck in full uniform, but it seemed to amuse the King to see us. Our clothes were all criticized without exception.’

Scarcely anyone who came into contact with the King escaped such criticism. Even a woodwind player who was seen to be wearing a black tie instead of a white at Covent Garden was sharply reprimanded by an equerry. ‘He could not endure a button being even an inch out of place,’ as the Duke of Manchester said, ‘and thought nothing of calling down any person, no matter who they might be, if the slightest item was wrong.’ The Duke went on to cite one of the King’s extremely rare mistakes when he told an Austrian nobleman at Marienbad that he was doing something he ought not to do. ‘What was that?’ the Austrian enquired, much perturbed. He was wearing, ‘quite inadvertently’, the King was sure, the tie of the English Guards. How long had these been the Guards’ colours? the nobleman asked and, on being told for over three hundred years, was able to reply, ‘Sir, they have been my family’s colours for over seven hundred years.’

The King was intensely annoyed to find himself wrong in such matters. Discovering the French Ambassador wearing an unfamiliar ribbon to his Grand Cordon of Charles III at a reception at the Spanish Embassy, he took him aside to advise him that his valet ought to be more careful. On being told by the Ambassador that the ribbon had lately been changed by the Spanish court, he evinced the deepest shock.

‘Impossible! Impossible!’ he said in so loud and agitated a voice that other guests at the reception imagined some dreadful catastrophe had befallen Europe. ‘Impossible! I should know about it!’ He made it his first duty the next morning to find out whether or not the ribbon had been changed; and, being told it had been, he immediately summoned the Spanish Ambassador to reprimand him gravely for not having informed him.

Ladies were not immune from the King’s rebukes. The Queen was a law unto herself and had been known to wear her Garter star on the wrong side when she felt it clashed with her other jewels. But the Queen’s eccentricities were no excuse for anyone else’s. The Duchess of Marlborough, who appeared at dinner with a diamond crescent instead of the prescribed tiara, was sharply reprimanded for having done so. In the King’s opinion there was a suitable manner of dress for every conceivable occasion, even on board the royal yacht where a minister was scolded for wearing knee-breeches instead of trousers and a race-horse trainer for having a black scarf round his neck rather than a white one. Catching sight of R.B. Haldane, whose German sympathies were wellknown, in an unsuitable hat at a garden party, he exclaimed, ‘See my War Minister approach in a hat he inherited from Goethe!’ And at Coburg in the middle of some instruction to Henry Ponsonby, suddenly noticing the man’s dreadful trousers, he broke off to ask where on earth he had found them: they were quite the ugliest pair he had ever seen in his life. Lord Rosebery, always unpredictable in his choice of attire, was a particular irritant. The King contented himself with eyeing Rosebery angrily ‘all through dinner’ when he had the temerity to present himself aboard the royal yacht wearing a white tie with a Yacht Squadron mess-jacket. But he could not contain himself when Rosebery came to an evening reception at Buckingham Palace in trousers instead of kneebreeches. ‘I presume,’ the King growled at him, ‘that you have come in the suite of the American Ambassador.’

‘My dear fellow,’ he once said, ‘more in sorrow than in anger’, to a groom-in-waiting who was to accompany him to a wedding, ‘where is your white waistcoat? Is it possible you are thinking of going to a wedding in a black waistcoat?’ And to a secretary who had thought it odd to be told to present himself in ‘a sort of Stock Exchange attire’ for a visit to see the pictures at the Salon in Paris and who had thought it prudent to question the instructions, the King replied, ‘I thought everyone must know that a short jacket is always worn with a silk hat at a private view in the morning.’ He himself was infallible. He even knew what the answer was when the Russian Ambassador asked him if it would be proper for him to attend race-meetings while in mourning: ‘To Newmarket, yes, because it means a bowler hat, but not to the Derby because of the top hat.’

He selected his own clothes with the nicest care, and earnestly discussed with his tailor the exact manner in which he thought the cut of the evening dress waistcoat could be improved or the precise reduction that ought to be made in the length of the back of a tail coat. Austen Chamberlain, accompanying the King on a cruise as Minister in Attendance, was ‘very much amused’ to overhear an instruction issued to a Swiss valet as the yacht approached the Scottish coast: ‘Un costume un peu écossais demain.’

The King’s taste in clothes was generally conservative: he attempted to prevent the demise of the frock-coat and to revive the fashion of wearing knee-breeches with evening dress. He refused to wear a Panama hat and derided those who did; he continued to wear a silk hat while riding in Rotten Row long after this was considered old-fashioned. Yet he made several new fashions respectable. His adoption of a short, dark blue jacket with silk facings, worn with a black bow tie and black trousers, on the voyage out to India led to the general acceptance of the dinner jacket. Twenty years later, so Winston Churchill told his mother, ‘everyone wore tweed suits’ at Goodwood Races following the King’s ‘sensible example’; while his appearance at Longchamps Races in an unusually tall, peculiarly shaped top hat started a hunt in London for similar headgear by fashion-conscious Frenchmen who subsequently discovered that the King’s hat was made at a shop in the Place Vendôme and that its shape was attributable to its designer’s anxiety to conceal the baldness at the back of his head. Nevertheless, many other similar hats were soon to be seen on the Paris boulevards. The King’s adoption of the loose, waist-banded Norfolk jacket made this type of jacket popular all over England; while photographs of him wearing a felt hat with a rakishly curved brim brought back from Homburg, or a green, plumed Tyrolean hat from Marienbad, led to thousands of others being sold at home. He found it more comfortable — then decided it looked elegant — to leave the bottom button of his waistcoat undone, and soon no gentleman ever did that button up.

Sometimes he went too far. The sight of the King on a German railway station in a green cap, pink tie, white gloves and brown overcoat induced the Tailor and Cutter to express the fervent hope ‘that his Majesty [had] not brought this outfit home’. Other observers were driven to complain about the tightness of his coats, and the excessive size of his tie-pins, as well as the ungainly figure he cut in those foreign uniforms which he loved to wear even when their short coats, as those of the Portuguese cavalry, ‘showed an immense expanse of breeches’, or when their huge, shaggy greatcoats, as those of the Russian dragoons, made him look ‘like a giant polar bear’. But despite these lapses the King was the acknowledged arbiter of sartorial taste as well as a recognized expert on uniforms, decorations and medals, of which he had an immense collection. When he was at Marienbad, continental tailors came with notebooks and cameras to record any changes in style he might have favoured since the previous season. And in the West End of London, there were often to be seen in the streets short, stout pedestrians who copied not only his clothes but also his beard and way of moving so faithfully that other passers-by respectfully raised their hats to them.

Apart from clothes, sport, food and women, the King had few other interests outside his work. He enjoyed the ritual and regalia of Freemasonry; he liked pottering about in the gardens of his friends, pointing out with his walking stick arrangements and vistas that appealed to him, commenting on alterations that had been made since his last visit. He often went to the theatre and the opera, his arrival at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, being preceded by that of a chef and six footmen and by numerous hampers filled with cloths, silver, gold plate and food for the tenor twelve-course meal which was served in the room at the back of the royal box during the hour-long interval.

The King’s favourite theatrical performances were plays about modern upper-class society, musical comedies and light opera rather than classical tragedies, Shakespeare or anything more intellectually demanding. Queen Alexandra, on the other hand, preferred grand opera, and once at Windsor gave instructions for the band to play Wagner. At the same time the King sent a request for Offenbach to the dismayed bandmaster, who thought it advisable to compromise with a selection from Gilbert and Sullivan operettas and thus got into trouble with them both. According to Lady Warwick, ‘the King’s retort to the attempt [by Sir Walter Parratt, Master of the King’s Musick] to introduce more serious musical compositions at the state concerts was to have a performance by Sousa and his band’.

Because of its connections with the court, he took an interest in the Poet Laureateship, and had urged the claims of Swinburne against those of Alfred Austin, whose eventual appointment as successor to Tennyson was due to his services to the Conservative Party. But the King seems rarely to have even so much as opened a book, and almost never to have finished one, a notable exception being Mrs Henry Wood’s romantic novel, East Lynne, which he had read in Egypt as a young man, had recommended to his travelling companions, and about which he subsequently asked them questions to test their familiarity with the plot. On receiving a book he would say how much he was looking forward to reading it; but Winston Churchill, whose mother sent the King a copy of The Malakand Field Force, seems to have been uniquely fortunate in being assured that the book had actually been read with ‘the greatest possible interest’. When supervising the alterations at Buckingham Palace after his mother’s death, he airily gave instructions to the librarian at Windsor to ‘pack up’ his father’s fine collection of books and to ‘get rid of those which were not required’. And when furnishing the library at Sandringham he summoned a man from Hatchard’s bookshop, instructing him to fill the shelves with whatever volumes might be considered suitable for a country house.

Nor did the King display much interest in the visual arts, particularly not in anything which smacked of the avant-garde. In painting he insisted on the strictest accuracy in representation, and far preferred portraits to landscapes. On being shown Holman Hunt’s picture of the London Docks on the night of his marriage, he looked at it closely for a few seconds and then, by way of comment, asked the single question, ‘Where am I?’

He far preferred to be in the open air, although his outdoor activities were now rather limited. Riding not very well, he had still gone out with the West Norfolk Hounds in the 1880s, but his hunting days were over long before he came to the throne. Still weighing over sixteen stone, he was also both too heavy and too old for fencing, which he had practised as a younger man, or for lawn tennis, which he had begun to play in the early 1880s as an additional means of losing weight. He had never been much of a swimmer, and had never taken to cricket, which he had once played on the Curragh, dropping two easy catches and failing to score a single run. Later, he did occasionally play at Sandringham, where he liked it rather better, as it was the common practice to bowl him a few easy balls so that he could score some runs and thus be kept in a good temper. He did not have the patience for fishing, which was, in any case, too lonely an occupation for him. Nor did he greatly care for golf, though he had courses made at both Windsor and Sandringham on which Queen Alexandra and Princess Victoria enjoyed playing a wild game of the Queen’s own invention; this involved a race from tee to hole to see who could get a ball in first. The game usually ended in a hockey-like scrimmage on the green, where the cut and battered balls were once found by the King, who thought someone was trying to play a trick on him.

Towards the end of his life the King took the greatest pleasure in riding a specially made tricycle up and down the drive at Sandringham. He also much enjoyed motoring, provided he was not accompanied by the Queen, ‘whose one idea was not to run over a dog’ and who tapped the chauffeur on the shoulder whenever she thought his speed excessive. Her husband, on the contrary, liked to be driven extremely fast, and could not bear the sight of a car in front of him on a stretch of country road. Motorists, therefore, became accustomed to being overtaken by a large Daimler or sixty-five-horse-power Mercedes in which a bearded figure sat on the blue morocco back seat, smoking a large cigar, as he urged his chauffeur on, with impatient gestures and gruff commands, to ever greater speeds. After 1907 motorists also became used to the uncouth sound of a special horn in the shape of a four-key bugle which was always carried in the royal cars after their owner had admired a similar device employed by the Kaiser.

The King had been introduced to the pleasures of motoring in 1898 at Warwick Castle, whence he had made a brief excursion in a six-horse-power Daimler. The next year, while staying with Mr and Mrs George Cavendish-Bentinck at Highcliffe Castle in Hampshire, he had been taken out by John Douglas-Scott-Montagu, later second Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, in a twelve-horse-power Daimler which, to the consternation of the ladies sitting in the back, reached a speed of forty miles an hour. At that time very severe restrictions were imposed upon the speed of cars, and it was not until 1903 that the limit was raised to twenty miles an hour on roads deemed suitable for such fast-moving traffic. Yet the King, unaffected by the traffic laws of his realm and driving in cars which bore the Royal Arms on the door-panels but carried no number plates, paid no attention to the regulations. He often congratulated himself on having driven along the Brighton road in 1906 at sixty miles an hour, three times as fast as the law allowed, though he professed himself to be uncompromisingly opposed to motor racing, which he thought ‘would be very dangerous for the occupants of the motors and still more so for the Public’. His motor engineer, C.W. Stamper, who rode in front next to the driver, ready to jump down with his tool-bag if there were any trouble with the engine, recorded that the King’s Mercedes was once rattling up to Newark at ‘a good pace’ when the chauffeur failed to notice a culvert in the road which the car’s wheels struck with a fearful bump. ‘Stop! Stop!’ the King called out. ‘Do you want to kill me?’ But he seemed more disturbed by the dent in his brown bowler, which he showed indignantly to Stamper, than by the threat to his own safety. Generally as he got out of the car he would say to Stamper with satisfaction, ‘A very good run, Stamper; a very good run, indeed!’

At Queen Alexandra’s instigation, so it was said, the King gave up the cruel practice of shooting pigeons released from traps. But to the end of his life he continued to derive the greatest pleasure from most other forms of shooting. He was always seen to be in excellent spirits when, dressed in a rough country suit with heavy boots and an Inverness cape, and accompanied by his favourite retriever, Diver, he left the house with the prospect of a day’s good sport. After tripping over a rabbit hole at Windsor in 1905 he was unable to walk out with the other guns, but he solved the problem by bringing into use a low pony carriage in which he was drawn to his stand, where the pony was taken out of the shafts so that the King could shoot from his seat.

As he grew older the King seemed to enjoy a day’s racing even more than shooting. He relished the company of racing people and what he himself termed the ‘glorious uncertainty of the turf’. Before the middle of the 1890s he had had very few successes as an owner. But his fine horse Persimmon won the Derby in 1896 — prompting Rosebery to remark that everyone would say that all the other horses had been stopped — and four years later, after another splendid royal horse, Ambush II, had won the Grand National, Persimmon’s brother, Diamond Jubilee, also won the Derby. As well as the Derby, Diamond Jubilee won the Newmarket Stakes, the Eclipse Stakes, the St Leger and the Two Thousand Guineas, after which last success its owner appeared to be ‘delirious with joy’.

Admiring success in others, the King revelled in the glow of triumph himself. He seemed never happier than when a victory on the turf was welcomed by the crowd as an opportunity to cheer him and wave their hats at him, shouting ‘Good old Teddy!’ In the last year of his life, Minoru won the Derby for him for the third time, and racing correspondents reported that there had ‘never been such cheering’, that tens of thousands of people sang ‘God Save the King’, and that even the policemen on duty, infected by the almost hysterical atmosphere of the occasion, threw their helmets in the air and joined in the roars of acclaim. That night the King gave his usual Derby Day dinner at Buckingham Palace to the members of the Jockey Club. His chefs had excelled themselves with their turtle soup and whitebait and those sugary concoctions made up in the royal racing colours of purple, scarlet and gold. And the happy host, who had returned from the Continent a fortnight before looking tired and ill, now seemed suddenly to have recovered his health and spirits in the excitement of his success.

Criticisms of the King’s extravagance as a racing man were not altogether just. He was certainly impulsively lavish in his presents to his jockeys and stablemen after a win: when Ambush II won the Grand National he gave £500 to the jockey, £250 to the head stableman and £50 to the lad who looked after the horse. But his prize-money was considerable. In 1896 and 1897, when he earned a total of nearly £44,000, he was second in the list of winning owners; and in the single year of 1900 he earned almost £32,000. Diamond Jubilee, who won the Derby that year, was eventually sold for £31,500. Altogether, between 1886 and 1910, from stud fees and stake money, his stables took well over £400,000. Nor was he, contrary to many reports, an extravagant gambler. It seems that the largest bet he ever placed on a horse to win was £600; and although he could not have afforded to lose such a sum in his youth, by 1894 — when he did lose it by backing the favourite, Baron Hirsch’s Matchbox, to win the Paris Grand Prix — his finances were in a less perilous condition.

As early as 1869 Queen Victoria had noted in her journal her son’s hopes and expectations of being granted a larger income. But Gladstone had contended that it was up to the Queen to make provision ‘in consideration of the extent to which she [allowed] him to discharge her social duties for her’. Twelve years later Francis Knollys told Lady Spencer, so Gladstone’s secretary recorded in his diary,

that the question of the Prince of Wales’s debts could not be postponed much longer. That will be an awkward matter for the government to deal with. It is sure to raise a very strong feeling against the Queen who (it will be thought and not unfairly thought) should have made some allowance to H.R.H. in consideration of the extra expenses which fell upon him by reason of her seclusion.

But it was not until 1889 that the House of Commons increased his income by £36,000 and granted him a capital sum of £60,000 so that he could make provision for his children. And even then, having spent £300,000 on the improvements at Sandringham, he had found it impossible to carry on without recourse to borrowing from friends and even, so it was supposed, from moneylenders whom French detectives reported as being perpetual visitors to his various hotels. He was apparently also reduced from time to time to selling various possessions. Joseph Duveen recalled a man coming into his shop with a piece of jewellery for which he asked £100. Duveen claimed to have told the man it was worth much more than that and to have given him £500. He was ‘pretty sure’ that his customer had been the Prince of Wales.

When the King came to the throne he had no private capital left, nor any to expect under the terms of his mother’s will which provided for her own private fortune to pass to her younger children. Parliament, however, came to his help by granting him the handsome income of £470,000; and in the hands of men, including Sir Ernest Cassel, who were more capable of administering it than he was himself, that income, which was £85,000 more than Queen Victoria had received and to which was added £60,000 from the Duchy of Lancaster, proved adequate to withstand the strain that his way of life placed upon it.

Certainly the King’s guests never had cause to complain about their host’s hospitality. His reforms of the Household had included pensioning off many under-employed servants such as the Indians — whose sole duty it had been to cook the curry for luncheon whether anyone wanted it or not — and several of Queen Victoria’s huge kitchen staff of nineteen chefs and numerous cooks, bakers, confectioners, apprentices and underlings. But the food in the royal palaces, under the supervision of M. Menager, was still as plentiful as it was excellent.

Some of the Queen’s former guests objected to the less formal atmosphere as Lord Esher did. But most of them welcomed the relative informality which even at Windsor permitted impromptu dances to be held in the crimson drawing-room under the energetic supervision of that tireless waltzer, Lord Fisher.

Relaxed as the atmosphere at Windsor was, though, and ‘extraordinarily comfortable’ as Haldane found all the arrangements, no one was allowed to be late for anything if the King were not to be deeply offended, perhaps even enraged. Once when Asquith, as Prime Minister, was late in joining a party in the Castle courtyard, the King ‘looked first at his watch and then at the Castle clock’, so Mrs Asquith said, ‘and fussed crossly about the yard’. Angrily turning to his gentlemen-in-waiting, he asked, ‘What have you done? Where have you looked for him? Did you not give him my command?’

The arrangement had been to meet in the courtyard at four o’clock, to motor first to the gardens and then to Virginia Water for tea. And it was now ten minutes past four.

The distracted gentlemen-in-waiting flew about, but I could see in a moment that Henry was not likely to turn up, so I begged the King to get into his motor [Margot Asquith recorded]. He answered with indignation, ‘Certainly not. I cannot start without the Prime Minister …’ Seeing affairs at a standstill I went up to the Queen and said I feared there had been a scandal at court, and that Henry must have eloped with one of the maids of honour. I begged her to save my blushes by commanding the King to proceed, at which she walked up to him with her amazing grace, and, in her charming way, tapping him firmly on the arm pointed with a sweeping gesture to his motor and invited [Lady Londesborough] and Alice Keppel to accompany him: at which they all drove off … When we returned to the Castle we found that Henry had gone for a long walk with … one of the Queen’s maids of honour, over which the King was jovial and even eloquent.

The Queen of course was frequently late, and although the King’s usual reaction was to sit drumming his fingers and then to swallow his anger when she at last appeared with an insouciant, ‘Am I late?’, on one occasion at least, according to a royal chef, he took his revenge. It was during a luncheon party at Windsor where thirty guests had been kept waiting for a quarter of an hour by the Queen’s non-appearance. It was the custom at Windsor for the dining-room staff to serve the King and Queen first, then work their way down the table to the other end. When everyone had finished a bell was rung and the plates were cleared away for the next course. At this particular luncheon, however, the King gobbled each course and rang the bell as soon as he had cleared his own plate.

When the roast was reached the guests were beginning to give up hope of managing more than a few mouthfuls during the whole meal. All of them had hearty appetites, and there were downcast expressions before the dessert stage was reached. As the King had expected, Queen Alexandra was aware of their plight, but she could do nothing to help them, for it was to some extent her fault that the meal had been hurried.

At Balmoral, after the deer-stalking, grouse-driving and salmon-fishing, there were gillies’ balls as well as card-games and even the occasional cinema show, which was ‘jolly bad’ in the opinion of one frequent guest, Sir Felix Semon, a nose and throat specialist of German descent, but at least it had the charm of novelty and was certainly much to be preferred to the ‘deafening tribe of royal pipers in Highland garb, who, when game was served, solemnly marched three times round the table and made a hellish noise with their bagpipes’.

The King was much less tolerant of drunkenness among his Highland servants than his mother had been, and summarily dismissed one of them who appeared in front of him one day barely able to stand. But life at Balmoral was otherwise much freer than it had been in his mother’s time, and for most of the guests it was more enjoyable. Winston Churchill, who went there as a twenty-seven-year-old Member of Parliament in 1902, told his mother how ‘pleasant and easy-going’ it was (adding that she must ‘gush’ to the King about his having written to say how much he had enjoyed himself). Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary, gave similar testimony to the pleasures of Balmoral. He ‘always groaned’ when he had to go there; but it was ‘observed with amusement’ how he immediately succumbed to the King’s charm and how, on arriving home — provided with a hamper containing a venison pie, fruit and a bottle of champagne for the journey — he invariably confessed that he had had a most agreeable time. Like every other guest, though, Grey was rather dispirited by Balmoral’s interior decorations and was much relieved when even Queen Alexandra — who had insisted that, as this was Queen Victoria’s favourite home, it must remain exactly as it had been in her time and that none of the dreadful wallpapers must be touched — could not tolerate the tartan carpets and curtains in the drawing-room.

Most of the King’s friends preferred Sandringham to any of his other homes. It had not been improved in appearance either by the rebuilding which had been carried out in 1869 or by the new wing which had been added after the fire of 1891 had completely destroyed thirteen bedrooms in the upper part of the house. There was little worth looking at inside, apart from the tapestries designed by Goya which were a present from the King of Spain and were hung in the dining-room. But there was a special Gemütlichkeit at Sandringham not to be found elsewhere. Strangers felt quite as much at ease there as they had done when the King was Prince of Wales. Like Henry Broadhurst, Joseph Arch, the working-class founder of the Agricultural Labourers’ Union and Liberal Member of Parliament for the North West division of Norfolk, was a contented week-end guest. And a deputation of trade union leaders was also made to feel welcome.

The guest list at Sandringham was not quite as varied as it had been in the days when Lord Alington’s daughter — surprised to find that she had been invited at the same time as George Lewis, the solicitor — had been shocked that the royal family played baccarat, ‘an illegal game, every night … [with] a real table, and rakes, and everything like the rooms at Monte Carlo’. But although bridge had taken the place of baccarat, Gottlieb’s orchestra played in the hall, and the barrel-organ, previously brought into use for dancing, was now usually silent, Lord Carrington thought it was just like the ‘old days’. He wrote:

I could hardly realize that the Prince of Wales was King. He seemed so entirely himself … his own kind dear self. The Queen walked out alone after dinner, and the King remained in the dining-room and smoked as he used to do … When the Queen retired we all went into the smokingroom, which was the same as ever. The Leech pictures, the same furniture, the table where the Equerry wrote the stable orders for the morning, the bowling alley next door, and the whole thing brought back memories of Blandford, Oliver Montagu, Christopher Sykes … Charlie Beresford, Charlie Dunmore, and old Quin.

14 The King at Work

Immediately on his accession, the King took up his new duties with obvious relish, conscious of the importance of his vocation and enjoying to the full its responsibilities. Lord Redesdale described how he once called at Marlborough House during the early months of the new reign before the King had moved to Buckingham Palace:

I found him in his private sitting-room all alone, and we sat smoking and talking over old times for a couple of hours. Towards midnight he got up and said, ‘Now I must bid you good night, for I must set to work,’ pointing to a huge pile of familiar red boxes. ‘Surely,’ I said, ‘your Majesty is not going to tackle all that work to-night!’ His answer was, ‘Yes, I must! Besides, it is all so interesting,’ and then he gave me one of his happy smiles.

Lord Esher also described the enthusiasm with which the King came to his new work, how he would ask question after question, interrupt the answers with his quick, ‘Yes … yes … yes’, give orders, scribble notes on bits of paper in his scarcely legible handwriting, and then stand in front of the fire with one of his immense cigars between his teeth, ‘looking wonderfully like Henry VIII, only better tempered’. The impression he gave Lord Esher was ‘that of a man, who, after long years of pent-up action, had suddenly been freed from restraint and revelled in his liberty’. He insisted on having all his letters ‘brought to him unopened, about 400 a day’, and sorted them by himself. ‘He tried at first to open them all but found that impossible.’ He also insisted on signing the 6,600 army commissions which had accumulated during the last months of his mother’s reign; and he then embarked on the Royal Navy commissions, which had formerly been signed at the Admiralty as traditionally being the responsibility of the Lord High Admiral, but he found that additional task beyond him.

He was too restless and impatient, however, for prolonged deskwork. Soon he took to summoning secretaries and giving them outlines of what he wanted to say rather than writing long letters himself as his mother had done. He was far more at home in fulfilling those public engagements which he was called upon to carry out in such numbers and which he performed so well. He gave the impression of being really interested in what he was doing and displayed an ability to listen to officials telling him things he knew already, or did not want to know at all, with every sign of absorbed concentration. According to some observers, though, he was not at his best at levees. But then, those who attended levees did not care for them either. They could be tedious, and even on occasion embarrassing. An official was posted at the door leading into the throne room to turn away anyone who was incorrectly dressed. The absent-minded Arthur Hardinge, for instance, once appeared before the horrified King with a buttoned boot on one foot and an evening shoe on the other, a blunder he weakly excused on the grounds that he was very short-sighted. Edward Marsh, then a junior clerk in the Colonial Office, wrote of a levee in St James’s Palace in 1902:

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 about an hour to get round, through the successive pens in which one is shut up with the same little group of people … and when one reached ‘the Presence’ one was rushed through with just time to make one’s bow to the red, bored, stolid sovereign.

If bored at levees at St James’s, the King rarely displayed any lack of interest at equally tedious functions elsewhere. Every year there were reports of his laying foundation stones, opening exhibitions, attending dinners, visiting hospitals and schools, inspecting new libraries and art galleries with the same assiduity he had displayed as Prince of Wales. And even those whose comments were not for publication spoke of his geniality and bonhomie. Osbert Sitwell, as a boy at Eton, was present when he opened the School Library, a memorial to boys killed in the Boer War, and was struck by the ‘very individual and husky warmth’ of his voice: ‘There was, as he spoke in public, a geniality in its sound, as of one who found in life the utmost enjoyment, and in spite of a rather prominent and severely attentive blue eye, and a certain appearance of fatigue, the chief impression was one of good humour.’

Every summer, between Ascot Races and Cowes Regatta, he went to an industrial town, usually in the Midlands or the North, to undertake the duties of an official visit. And every winter he opened Parliament in state, resuming a ceremonial which Queen Victoria had abandoned, and renewing the practice of reading the speech from the throne.

He was an effective speaker. At the first Privy Council meeting of his reign he had, as John Morley said, impressed his audience by his ability to speak fluently and spontaneously without a prepared script. On that occasion, after almost breaking down on referring to the irreparable loss he and the whole nation had suffered by the death of his ‘beloved mother, the Queen’, he spoke with what Lord Carrington described as ‘dignity and pathos’ for eight minutes without reference to a single note. It was a facility which he perfected. He told Lord Fisher that he had once learned a speech off by heart to welcome the French President to England. But when the time came to deliver it, he could not remember the words he had so laboriously memorized and was forced to ‘keep on beginning at the beginning’. So, except when he had to say a few words in Danish or Russian, he had never tried to learn a speech again; and his delivery was all the better for it, whether in English, French or German. It was remembered with pleasure how, on a visit to Germany, he had been quite equal to the occasion when the Kaiser had risen to make an impressive speech at a dinner at which it had been agreed no speeches should be made. On completing his prepared oration, the Kaiser invited the King to reply. Undeterred, the King did so; and, apart from a moment’s embarrassing silence when he tapped the table in an effort to recall a particular German word, which Prince von Bülow supplied for him, he made quite as effective a speech as his host had done. Very rarely did he make a mistake in one of these more or less impromptu speeches; and when, calling in at an Italian port during one of his Mediterranean cruises, he caused brief embarrassment in Rome and London by referring to a non-existent ‘alliance’ between England and Italy when he should have said ‘friendship’, it was admitted that the slip — which was not reported in the Press — was of a kind that the King scarcely ever made.

Admirably as he carried out his ceremonial and social duties, the King soon made it clear that he was not prepared to confine himself to making speeches, signing documents and laying foundation stones. He was not much concerned with domestic policies or with colonial affairs; he was bored to death by talk about free trade and tariff reform; but he evinced a deep interest in the army and the navy; in hospitals and medical research; and, above all, in foreign policy.

He told St John Brodrick, Secretary for War, that he expected to be consulted about the appointment and promotion of senior officers, about every important question of policy, and particularly about the reform of the army medical system which, so Brodrick said, ‘he pressed forward from the first day of his reign’. He was equally insistent that matters of naval policy should be brought to his attention; and, when the time came, gave his unhesitating support to Lord Fisher, whose reforms, as Fisher himself recognized, might well have been scuppered by his opponents had not the King made it so forcibly obvious where his own sympathies lay in the First Sea Lord’s bitter quarrel with the vain and tiresome Lord Charles Beresford.

As it was with the army and navy, so it was with medicine. Numerous hospitals had cause to be grateful for the attention he paid to their welfare. He helped to found the National Association for the Prevention of Consumption; he started King Edward’s Hospital Fund which eventually had an annual income of over £150,000; and he assured one of his several medical friends, Sir Frederick Treves, that it was his ‘greatest ambition not to quit this world until a real cure for cancer’ had been found.

Concerned as he was with all these matters, however, he devoted only a fraction of the time to them that he gave to foreign affairs. Once a week he asked Charles Hardinge to have breakfast with him at Buckingham Palace, and he discussed foreign politics ‘most of the time at these interviews with great breadth and interest’. He read through every dispatch that came from abroad, his secretary observed, ‘often when the subject was very dull. Any inaccuracy annoyed him: even a slip of the pen put him out’. And he paid the same close attention to those private letters which he liked British ambassadors to write to him as supplements to their official dispatches. He studied draft treaties carefully, and occasionally made suggestions for alterations in their wording. He received foreign representatives alone in his room; and, when abroad, with the agreement of the Foreign Office, undertook diplomatic discussions both with other sovereigns and with their ministers.

His usefulness in this respect was widely recognized: as Disraeli had said of him, ‘he really has seen everything and knows everybody’. So, too, was his conscientiousness appreciated. Charles Hardinge wrote:

Often I had to suggest a visit which I knew would be irksome to him, or that he should see somebody that I knew he would not want to see, and he would exclaim, ‘No, no, damned if I will do it!’ But he always did it, however tiresome it might be for him, without my having to argue the point or in fact say another word. He had a very strong sense of the duties which his position entailed and he never shirked them.

Yet he was constantly given cause to complain that the government did not take him into their confidence, that he was consulted only when it suited their convenience, that he was often ignored, and that the excuses which ministers made to him when they failed to keep him informed of their actions were ‘often as “gauche” as their omissions’. Uneasily aware that ministers had been far more punctilious in keeping the monarch informed of their problems and proposed solutions in Queen Victoria’s time than they now were in his, he was deeply offended at what he took to be the least sign of slighting neglect. In the first few months of his reign he had reason to rebuke Lord Halsbury, the Lord Chancellor, for having, without reference to him, published a report about a new form of declaration against the doctrine of transubstantiation which, according to the Bill of Rights of 1689, the monarch was required to make before reading the speech from the throne. Since the King himself had suggested a modification in the wording of the declaration, which he took to be insulting to his Roman Catholic subjects, he was ‘naturally much surprised that he had received no intimation, previous to his having read it in the newspapers, of the report, as it was an important matter concerning the Sovereign regarding which he ought to have been consulted’.

This was the first of numerous rebukes he felt obliged to administer. Throughout his reign he fought to maintain the Crown’s right to be consulted, to prevent the Sovereign’s becoming a ‘mere signing machine’, to retain those few remaining royal prerogatives which he felt were being gradually eroded. Yet he could not prevent their erosion. He was forced to accept not only Parliament’s authority to cede territory, but also the Prime Minister’s power to appoint and dismiss ministers without reference to the Sovereign, as well as the Cabinet’s right to take over the patronage of so-called ‘Crown’ appointments, including the appointment of bishops which, in the last few years of his reign, was left in the hands of Campbell-Bannerman, born of Presbyterian parents in Glasgow, and Asquith, the son of a noncomformist Lancashire wool-spinner.

Although eventually he lost interest in the selection of bishops, he never did so in the case of diplomatic appointments. But his suggestions about these were quite as likely to be disregarded as they had been when he was Prince of Wales. In 1904, for example, his proposal that Arthur Herbert should go to Sweden and Sir Rennell Rodd to Morocco was followed by Rodd’s being retained at Stockholm and Herbert’s being despatched to Norway.

As though intent upon reminding his ministers of his concerned and watchful eye on their affairs, the King was as ready to offer his comments on the papers that were sent to him as he was to call attention to points which the ministers appeared to have overlooked or underestimated. One day complaining about the ‘trash’ which the Poet Laureate, Alfred Austin, sent to him, the next about papers being initialled instead of signed, or addressed to him in an incorrect manner, the King was determined not to be disregarded. Sometimes his interference was fruitful: after his insistence that a grant of £50,000 to Lord Roberts on being created an earl on his return from South Africa was disgracefully mean, the grant was doubled. And although his objection to the appointment of the American Admiral Mahan as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge — on the grounds that the chair ought to be held by an Englishman — did not result in the selection of the King’s nominee, John Morley, it did bring about the appointment of a compromise candidate, the classical scholar John Bagnell Bury. Usually, however, the King’s inconvenient views were, if possible, ignored in the hope that he would — as frequently he did — not continue to press them once they had been stated.

He never, however, ceased to press his right to be informed of government decisions before they were implemented. He appreciated that there might be some constitutional objection to his being allowed to see Cabinet papers while important matters were under discussion; and was evidently not surprised to learn that the Prime Minister considered it ‘impossible … to yield in a matter of this kind’. But he did insist that it was his ‘constitutional right to have all dispatches of any importance, especially those initiating or relating to a change of policy, laid before him prior to their being decided upon’. This right, ‘always observed during Queen Victoria’s reign’, was certainly not always observed during his. In April 1906 he had reason to complain that the Prime Minister never brought anything before him, never consulted him in ‘any way’. The perfunctory reports of Cabinet meetings that were sent to him really made ‘an absolute fool of the King,’ Francis Knollys protested the following year. ‘There is no use in ministers liking the King if he is treated like a puppet.’

Under the next administration the situation did not much improve. When, in July 1908, the King asked to see ‘a copy of Winston Churchill’s Army Scheme’, the Secretary for War passed the letter on to the Prime Minister, who sent it back with the comment, ‘I return this. I have replied to Knollys in the sense which you suggested. It is, in any case, an impertinent request. These people have no right to interfere in any way in our deliberations.’

Most of the King’s disagreements with his ministers were attributable to his being ‘completely left in the dark’. Since the ruin of Sir Charles Dilke by the scandal of his divorce, and of Lord Randolph Churchill by disease, the King had no close political friends other than the Duke of Devonshire and Lord Rosebery. He did not get on with his Conservative Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour, with whom he had almost nothing in common. Nor did he relish the company of the three ministers, Lord Lansdowne, Lord Selborne and St John Brodrick, with whom, as Foreign Secretary, First Lord of the Admiralty and Secretary for War, he was principally concerned. Arnold-Forster, who succeeded Brodrick in 1903, was even worse, ‘obstinate as a mule’, according to Lord Esher, opposing everything which the King proposed. Nor were Balfour’s opponents any better, in the King’s opinion. Their leader, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, had given particular offence by his criticisms of the conduct of the Boer War, speaking of British ‘methods of barbarism in South Africa’, a phrase that so annoyed the King that he had with difficulty been dissuaded from sending for the Liberal leader and telling him to avoid such remarks in future. Since then Campbell Bannerman’s ‘gratuitous and ungenerous’ attacks on the Prime Minister had continued to exasperate the King, who remarked to Knollys that it was ‘curious’ that he hardly ever opened his mouth ‘without saying something in bad taste’.

When Campbell-Bannerman succeeded Balfour in 1905 and the King got to know him better, he became quite fond of him. But he continued to annoy the King by his speeches on foreign policy, a subject about which — like Lloyd George — he knew ‘nothing’. ‘Between ourselves,’ Knollys confided to Esher in 1907, ‘I don’t think the King ever will like “C.B.” politically.’ As for Campbell-Bannerman’s Under-Secretary for the Colonies, Winston Churchill, the King decided that he was ‘almost more of [a] cad in office than he was in opposition’ when he had ‘showed a great want of taste’ and talked ‘simple nonsense’. He liked Churchill well enough as a man — though Francis Knollys did not — but Churchill’s conduct towards Lord Milner was, in the King’s opinion, ‘simply scandalous’, while his later comments on the ‘richer classes’ were ‘unforgivable’.

There were, indeed, very few politicians whom the King fully trusted. He thought John Morley, Secretary for India, ‘wonderfully agreeable and sensible’. He liked Arnold-Forster’s successor, Haldane, who was ‘always acceptable’, though he described him as a ‘damned radical lawyer and a German professor’ when it fell to Haldane’s lot to reduce the army estimates. He got on well, too, with the ebullient, working-class President of the Local Government Board, John Burns, whose appearance in knee-breeches, Esher said, was ‘a revelation’ and whose summary of his relationship with the King was expressed in the words, ‘Me and ’im get on first-rate together.’ The King was also particularly attached to Lord Fisher, a man of commanding personality, who wholeheartedly returned the King’s affection and remained forever grateful for his support against his enemies. ‘They would have eaten me but for Your Majesty,’ Fisher once told the King, who was delighted that his dear friend had triumphed over that ‘gasbag’ Beresford.

The King did not enjoy many victories himself. He did get his own way with the Order of Merit which he insisted, against all objections, should be open to military and naval officers despite the great number of other honours available to them. He was equally and successfully insistent that the Kaiser should be allowed to decorate all the British officers and men who had been in attendance on him while he was in England at the time of Queen Victoria’s death, although his ministers much regretted the growing practice of British citizens accepting foreign decorations. The King also occasionally managed to wrest a written promise from a minister by declining to sign a paper until the required undertaking had been given. He refused, for example, to sign a Royal Warrant concerning army pay and allowances until Arnold-Forster had assured him in writing that no serving officer would have his pay cut, unless, at the same time, his duties were to be reduced. The King was again victorious when an attempt was made to limit the time an equerry could remain in his service to five years and to stop their army pay for that period. And when the government, which had agreed to pay the expenses he incurred in entertaining foreign sovereigns, asked that a distinction should be made between political and private visits, the King refused to allow that such a distinction could be made. He had his own views, Knollys told the Treasury, ‘respecting the importance, from a political point of view, of visits of foreign sovereigns to this country which might not coincide with those of the Secretary of State’; and there might, therefore, be ‘constant conflicts between the King on one side, and the Treasury and Foreign Office on the other’. This argument proving ineffective, the King said that he would send for the Prime Minister and tell him personally that he would not stand for ‘such an attempted evasion by the Treasury of what was agreed upon’ at the time of his accession. And at this threat, the Treasury gave way.

It was usually, however, the King who had to give way; and he rarely did so without a struggle. Determined to outgrow his reputation for being over-impressionable, in his later years he was often obstinate. And even when he had been convinced that he must yield to pressure he would not do so immediately, saying, ‘I will consider the matter,’ which his staff learned to translate as, ‘I recognize that I will shortly have to surrender.’

In the first year of his reign a young officer who had been cashiered for cowardice by surrendering to the enemy in South Africa appealed to him to exercise his royal prerogative of mercy. The King read the papers, decided that the officer had been harshly treated, and approached the Commander-in-Chief, Lord Roberts. Roberts agreed with the King and asked the Adjutant-General to hold a special court of inquiry. The court recommended that the sentence should be quashed and that the officer should be convicted of an error of judgement and allowed to resign his commission. But the Secretary of State for War, who was concerned by the number of times officers had surrendered unnecessarily in the war and had considered it his unpleasant duty to make an example of this particular officer, threatened to resign if the harsher punishment were not imposed. The King’s apparent willingness to pardon the young man anyway brought from the Prime Minister a warning of the possibility of the entire government’s resignation in order to defend the principle of collective Cabinet responsibility. So the officer had to be sacrificed; and the King had to yield to the government’s pressure.

The King also had to yield when the war was over and it was proposed to appoint a Royal Commission to enquire into its conduct. He wrote to the Prime Minister:

This system of ‘washing our dirty linen in public’ the late Queen had a horror of. The Government is a strong one with a large Parliamentary majority. Why, therefore, should Ministers pledge themselves, or give way to demands from unimportant M.P.’s? The proposed Inquiry will do the Army and also the Country harm in the eyes of the civilised world.

The Prime Minister replied that he was already pledged to the Commission and that he could not overrule the Cabinet; and the King was left to complain gloomily to Knollys about the apparent power of a body which neither the King nor the Prime Minister could gainsay.

The King was no more successful when he attempted to prevent the publication of an Army Journal in which officers were to be free to express their feelings on military subjects. This, the King maintained, was totally opposed to the army’s tradition of silence. He would ‘neither sanction nor support’ the Journal in any way; ‘this should be clearly understood’; he washed his hands ‘of the whole matter’. But the Journal was established all the same.

Nor did the King’s views prevail when he suggested that the age for admittance of subalterns into the Guards might be reduced to eighteen; nor when he proposed that on the fiftieth anniversary of the Indian Mutiny the occasion should be marked ‘by a judicious distribution of honours’; nor when he tried to obtain an earldom for Lord Curzon; nor when he asked that the band of the Coldstream Guards should be sent to play in Germany, a request turned down by the Foreign Office, whose ‘extraordinary conduct’ of the ‘whole transaction’ caused him ‘much annoyance’. Nor did the King succeed in preventing the admission of native members to the Viceroy of India’s Council, which he considered a ‘step fraught with the greatest danger to the maintenance of the Indian Empire under British rule’. When Satyendra Prassano Sinha, a distinguished Hindu lawyer, was suggested as a suitable member of the Council, the King wrote to protest ‘most strongly’. He told Lord Minto, the Viceroy:

To take a very clever native on to your Executive Council must necessarily be a source of much danger to our rule in the Indian Empire. I am afraid it is the ‘thin end of the wedge’, and it will require a most resolute Viceroy to avoid being forced to nominate one if not two native members of the council. I can hardly believe that the present appointment of a Hindoo will not create great and just indignation among the Mahomedans and that the latter will not be contented unless they receive an assurance that one of their creed succeeds to Mr Sinha.

A week later, however, he was obliged to sign ‘the objectionable paper’. ‘Do try and induce Morley not to be so obstinate by appointing another Native,’ he asked Esher on Sinha’s resignation. ‘He knows how strong my views are on the subject, and so does Minto; but they don’t care what I say, nor does any member of my precious (!) Govt.’

One of the most painful of all the King’s disagreements with his government was over his determination, during Balfour’s premiership, not to confer a Knighthood of the Garter upon the Shah of Persia, who had been persuaded by the British Minister in Teheran that if he made the journey to England, which he was reluctant to do, the King would admit him into that most noble order of chivalry. The King contended that it was a Christian order and could not, therefore, be bestowed upon an infidel even though his mother had conferred it upon the Shah’s father as well as upon two Sultans of Turkey. The government, on the other hand, maintained that were the Shah not to receive the Garter which he had been led to expect would be bestowed upon him, he was quite likely out of pique to ally himself with Russia, a consequence as much to be dreaded as it was easy to avoid. The Foreign Secretary, Lord Lansdowne, endeavoured to solve the problem by preparing a memorandum of a proposed revision in the statutes of the Order to enable it to be conferred upon non-Christians. This document, so Lansdowne said, the King had read in his presence and, having done so, had nodded twice as if he approved of it. But this the King denied, though he admitted that he had taken the document from Lansdowne and had put it to one side intending to read it later. Anyway, Lansdowne went ahead with his plan and ordered from the court jewellers special Garter insignia from which the Christian emblems were to be removed. At the same time he sent a letter to the King explaining what he had done, and attached to it coloured illustrations of the proposed new Garter Star from which the Cross of St George was to be omitted.

The King at the time was on board the royal yacht, the Victoria and Albert, at Portsmouth; and Frederick Ponsonby described the dreadful scene when the King opened the harmless-looking Foreign Office box and took out the contents. He was already annoyed with the Shah, who, put out by the delay in conferring the Order upon him, had rejected a gold-framed miniature of the King surrounded by diamonds which had been offered him and had told his suite not to accept the English decorations which it had been proposed to confer upon them. Consequently, as the King picked up Lansdowne’s letter and — in its recipient’s eyes — its scarcely less than blasphemous enclosure, there was an immediate ‘explosion. He was so angry that he flung the design across his cabin’. It went through the porthole and, so Ponsonby thought, into the sea. Furiously, the King dictated ‘some very violent remarks’ to be addressed to Lord Lansdowne. Ponsonby softened the tone of the letter; but, even so, Lansdowne recognized that he would have to resign unless the King gave way. While Knollys urged the King to stand firm, the Duke of Devonshire advised the Prime Minister to support Lansdowne, and the Shah became thoroughly disgruntled.

‘We have a very difficult game to play,’ Balfour wrote to the King, who continued to protest that it was ‘an unheard of proceeding, one sovereign being dictated to by another as to what order he should confer on him’. Balfour persisted:

Russia has most of the cards, yet it would be dangerous to lose the rubber. Our well-known fidelity to our engagements is one of our few trumps. We must not waste it … Lord Lansdowne, erroneously believing himself to be authorized by Your Majesty, has pledged your Majesty to bestow the Garter upon the Shah — has indeed pledged your Majesty repeatedly and explicitly.

If he be prevented from carrying out these pledges, what will be his position?… And, if he resigned, could the matter stop there in these days of governmental solidarity?

Faced once again with the threat of the government’s resignation, the King felt obliged to give way. He was ‘much depressed about it all’, Knollys told Balfour; but his ‘high sense of duty’ and ‘patriotic motives’ overcame his great reluctance. He insisted, however, that no decorations should be given to the Shah’s suite in view of their earlier refusal of them, and that this must be the last time the Garter was conferred upon a person who was not a Christian. But even these conditions were not observed. The King was persuaded in the end to give decorations to the Shah’s grumpy entourage, and though he would not agree to the Order being conferred upon the King of Siam five years later, he agreed to bestow it upon the more important Emperor of Japan.

If King Edward often found his successive governments tiresome and difficult, he was not an easy man to do business with himself. By the end of 1905 he had virtually stopped giving formal audiences to his ministers, preferring to talk to them when he happened to meet them at dinner parties or upon other social occasions, or dealing with them through people he knew well and trusted including Sir Charles Hardinge, Sir Ernest Cassel, Lord Fisher, de Soveral, Knollys and Esher, the last five of whom all worked closely together and met frequently at Brooks’s Club.

Most of his personal staff were devoted to him; some loved him; but none could pretend that working for him was always a pleasure. When a subject interested him he was scrupulous, even pedantic in his attention to its smallest and most insignificant detail. ‘He is … a good listener, if you aren’t too long,’ Asquith, Campbell-Bannerman’s successor, told his wife. ‘He has an excellent head and is most observant about people … He is not at all argumentative and understands everything that is properly put to him.’ Yet with matters that bored him he would not make the slightest effort to comprehend them. Frederick Ponsonby commented:

He had a most curious brain, and at one time one would find him a big, strong, far-seeing man, grasping the situation at a glance and taking a broadminded view of it; at another one would be almost surprised at the smallness of his mind. He would be almost childish in his views, and would obstinately refuse to understand the question at issue.

He never troubled to conceal his annoyance at even the most trifling grievances. Ponsonby recalled accompanying him to the Anglican church at Biarritz, where they sat in the front pew. When the time for the collection came, Ponsonby discovered that the only coin he had in his pocket was a gold louis; so he put it in the plate next to the King’s donation, also a gold louis. After the service the King crossly asked Ponsonby if he always gave a louis. ‘I hastily explained that I had nothing else,’ Ponsonby commented, ‘but he seemed to think I had spoilt his donation. He considered it only right to put in a gold piece, but when I did the same people thought nothing of his generosity.’

He was often ‘distinctly peppery in his temper’, speaking so sharply to those who asked him what he considered trivial questions that they dared not approach him a second time, sending the servants ‘flying about in all directions’. Once the very able English Consul at Marseilles came aboard the royal yacht to deliver telegrams and letters from a large portfolio which, on being opened, proved to be empty. The King shouted at the man so loudly that he fled from the yacht terrified and, during the hour that it took the Consul to retrieve the missing correspondence, he marched up and down the deck, abusing him as a halfwit. When some order of his had not been fully understood, the King would repeat it very slowly and precisely, word by carefully enunciated word, while the listener stood before him, dreading the possibility that the bottled-up anger might suddenly burst forth before he was allowed to escape from the room.

If more seriously provoked, the King’s rages were ungovernable. Ponsonby recalled numerous occasions of his master’s ‘boiling with rage’, ‘breaking into a storm of abuse’, ‘shouting and storming’, ‘shaking the roof of Buckingham Palace’, ‘becoming more and more angry and finally exploding with fury’. There was the time when Ponsonby advised him not to give several Victorian Orders on going to Portsmouth as this would lead naval officers to expect decorations whenever he went to any other naval base. Ponsonby said:

He was furious and shouted at me that I knew nothing about such matters, and that, being a soldier, I was, of course, jealous of the navy. I, however, stuck to it, and said that the Victorian Order would be laughed at if it were given on such occasions. He was still more angry and crushed me with the remark that he didn’t know that the Victorian Order was mine to give. After this explosion I at once retired, but I was interested to see that when he did visit Portsmouth he gave no decorations.

A similar explosion erupted on board the royal yacht when the King and Queen were cruising in the Mediterranean in May 1909 and it was decided to pay a visit to Malta. The King was looking through the programme arranged for his reception at Valetta when a telegram arrived from the Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean to the effect that all ships in the area had been ordered off to make a demonstration. King Edward was ‘perfectly furious and in his rage became most unreasonable’. Captain Colin Keppel, commander of the royal yacht, could do nothing with him and suggested that Frederick Ponsonby be sent for. Ponsonby recorded:

When I entered the King’s cabin I at once grasped that there was thunder in the air. ‘What do you think of that?’ the King shouted at me as he tossed me a telegram, and before I had time to answer he stormed away at the disgraceful way he was treated. He ended a very violent peroration by saving he had a good mind to order the Fleet back to Malta.

Ponsonby succeeded in calming the King’s anger by pointing out that the navy, no doubt, had very good reasons for requiring the Mediterranean Fleet to make a demonstration; but when he went on to say that it was extraordinary that neither the Prime Minister nor the First Lord of the Admiralty had had the courtesy to keep him informed of the situation, the King’s fury burst out afresh, and ‘after breaking into a storm of abuse of the government’, he instructed Ponsonby to send messages in cipher to both ministers which, ‘had they been sent as he directed them, would certainly have startled both recipients and would probably have entailed their resignation’.

The King was equally angry when, on arriving in Naples, he found that the Queen had ordered donkeys to transport the royal party up to the summit of Vesuvius from the end of the railway. He refused to risk placing his great weight on the back of a small donkey; and, while the Queen and others of the party set off, he went for a short walk. According to her sister, the Empress Marie of Russia, who had been invited to join the party, the Queen did not trust herself to a donkey either but was carried up in a chair while the Empress walked. But Frederick Ponsonby remembered them all as having been on donkeys which were still a long way from the summit when the King returned from his walk to the train. Eager to begin a picnic luncheon, he had the train’s whistle sounded at regular and increasingly frequent intervals to summon the riders back for the return journey. By the time the last rider had returned on his weary donkey, the King was ‘boiling with rage’ and ‘unable to let off steam’ on Queen Alexandra or on Fehr, the courier, who had wisely disappeared, the King poured ‘the vials of his wrath’ on Ponsonby’s innocent head.

The King was also very demanding. Ponsonby recalled a day at Malta when, summoned to the King’s cabin after breakfast, he was told to prepare a list of names for decorations and given fifteen letters to write as well as two to copy. On being released, Ponsonby rushed off to a review. Then he had to go to a luncheon in an army mess. After that there was a levee to attend, and he did not get back on board the royal yacht until half past five. Ponsonby recorded:

The King sent for copies of letters to show the Queen at tea. Answer, not yet done. Afterwards he sent for me to discuss decorations and asked for a typed list. Answer, not done. Had I written yet to so-and-so; answer, no. Then the King said, ‘My dear man, you must try and get something done.’ So I got a list of decorations typed by a petty officer on board. He spelt two names wrong and left out a third, all of which the King found out …Although I sat up till 1.30 to get straight, the King is left with the impression that nothing is done.

With his work the King neither received nor asked for any help from the Queen. Occasionally the Queen’s hatred of Germany or concern for her Danish relations would induce her to make some suggestion or protest. In 1890, for instance, during the government’s negotiations to secure a protectorate over Zanzibar in exchange for Heligoland, she strongly protested about this ‘knuckle-down to Germany’ and prepared a memorandum in which she stressed that, before Britain came into possession of Heligoland during the Napoleonic Wars, the island had ‘belonged from time immemorial’ to Denmark and that ‘in the hands of Germany it would be made the basis of operations against England’. The Queen also offered her services in translating letters from her brother, the King of Greece, and in making his difficulties well known to her husband and the government. But these were rare interpositions. As Charles Dilke said, the Queen never talked politics; and the King would not have had it otherwise.

He was even unwilling to let the Queen play an important part in the ceremonial duties of the monarchy or to attend official functions without him, insisting that such work was his responsibility and that she ought not to carry it out without his being there as well. Sometimes she complained, but she did not press the point. And while her husband spent more and more time away from her, she was quite content to retreat to Sandringham. She seemed perfectly happy on her own there; and when her husband did join her, she made it clear that whatever freedom or authority he might enjoy outside the home she was the mistress inside it. Lord Esher remembered how when he and the King, then Prince of Wales, had been discussing some important topic, a message had come from his wife asking him to go to her. He had not gone immediately; but a second summons had sent him scurrying from the room, leaving the business unfinished. And the Countess of Airlie recorded the Princess’s cheerfully irreverent comment to Sir Sidney Greville, who, anxious not to keep his Royal Highness waiting any longer for an important engagement, pressed her to join him: ‘Keep him waiting. It will do him good!’

The contents of official boxes which were never shown to the Queen were, however, readily made available to his son and his daughter-in-law. This was, the King explained, a ‘very different matter’.

Prince George and his father were — and were always to remain — on excellent terms. ‘We are more like brothers than father and son,’ the King once wrote, a sentiment which his son later echoed in a letter to Lord Dalkeith; and although Prince George held his father in too much awe for this to be really so, there was between them an intimacy which in royal relationships was so rare as to be almost unique. Recognizing his son’s diffidence, his need of reassurance and sympathy, the King gave him the confidence that he would otherwise have lacked by a constant affirmation of love and trust, by an obvious pride in his reliability. He made it clear that he trusted him in a way that he himself had never been trusted and that he regarded him with an unreserved affection with which his own parents had never been able to look upon him.

He hated to be parted from him. Within a week of Queen Victoria’s death he abruptly cancelled a long-standing arrangement for his son to make an official visit to Australia on the grounds that neither he nor Queen Alexandra could spare him so soon for so long. The King was persuaded to change his mind by the Prime Minister, but he parted from his son with sorrow, confessing to Lord Carrington that he ‘quite broke down as he said good-bye’, and he welcomed him home with unconcealed joy. Lord Esher recalled how the father, on the many occasions on which he spoke of his son, ‘always’ did so ‘with that peculiar look which he had — half smile, and half pathos — and that softening of the voice, when he spoke of those he loved. He used to say the words “my son” in quite a different tone from any which were familiar to me in the many tones of his voice.’ For his part the Duke of York, as Prince George became in 1892, was utterly devoted to his father, consulting him about every aspect of his life, ‘even as to whether his footmen ought to wear black or red liveries at dinner’, and ‘complaining terribly’ when his father was not available for consultation that he had ‘no one to go to or advise him’. After the King’s death he could scarcely bring himself to speak of him without tears starting to his eyes. Though he recognized his faults, he admired him intensely and would never allow a word of criticism of him ever to be spoken. The only criticism he himself ever made of him in his voluminous correspondence with his mother was of a decision he had made to convert the bowling alley at Sandringham into a library.

It was the greatest comfort to the King in the last years of his life that his son and his son’s family lived in a small house in the grounds of Sandringham — York Cottage, formerly known as the Bachelor’s Cottage, which had been built as an annexe for male guests at Sandringham and which he had given to Prince George as a wedding present. Although this was not altogether pleasing to the Duchess of York — who was much more aware than her husband of the house’s inconvenience and lack of character and who had to submit to perpetual visits from her mother-in-law — the King delighted in the intimate propinquity, and seemed never more content than when his grandchildren with their parents came up to the big house for tea.

The grandchildren loved to do so, and in later life they remembered their grandfather with unclouded pleasure and affection. They retained memories of being taken to see him in his robes before he left for Westminster Abbey on the day of his coronation. ‘Good morning, children,’ he had said to them. ‘Am I not a funny-looking old man?’ They were too overwhelmed by the sight of him in his strange costume to offer any opinion in reply on that occasion, but they were not usually in the least in awe of him. His eldest grandson, Prince David — later King Edward VIII — recalling the contrast between life at York Cottage and that other world, redolent of cigar smoke and scent, which his grandfather inhabited, described him as being ‘bathed in perpetual sunlight’. Prince David was so little afraid of him, in fact, that he was even capable, on one occasion at least, of interrupting his conversation at table. He was reprimanded, of course, and sat in silence until given permission to speak. ‘It’s too late now, grandpapa,’ Prince David said unconcernedly. ‘It was a caterpillar on your lettuce but you’ve eaten it.’

Both the King and Queen delighted in looking after their grandchildren when their parents were away. They encouraged them to romp about the house, even in the dining-room, and to show off to the guests, who were required to pretend they were elephants and to give the children rides on their backs. And, so as to enjoy them all the more, the King once contrived to leave their governess in London for a fortnight while he spoiled them to his heart’s content at Sandringham.

With the small children of close friends he was equally indulgent, allowing Mrs Keppel’s to call him ‘Kingy’. The younger of the Keppel daughters, Sonia, was rather frightened of him at first. Instructed to curtsy to him whenever she saw him but never daring to ‘look higher than beard-level’, she ‘played safe and curtsied to the cigar and rings’. But Sir Ernest Cassel, too, had a beard, wore rings and smoked cigars;

‘so, more often than not, he came in for the curtsy’.

In time, though, Sonia overcame her nervousness, and when the King came to tea with her mother she was delighted to be allowed down into the drawing-room at six o’clock to see him. Together they devised a ‘fascinating game’ with bits of bread and butter which were sent, butter side downwards, racing along the stripes of his trousers. Bets of a penny each were placed on the contestants, Sonia’s penny being provided by her mother. ‘The excitement was intense while the contest was on … and Kingy’s enthusiasm seemed delightfully unaffected by the quality of his bets.’

On Princess Victoria’s birthday a children’s party was given each year by the King and Queen at Buckingham Palace where balloons were shot up into the sky and, on bursting, discharged presents all over the lawn while excited children raced about to pick them up. They were not in the least intimidated by the presence of their host, as most of their parents were; and when he asked one boy what he would like, he received the brusque command, ‘More jam, King.’

15 The King at Home

Perpetually alarmed by the prospect of boredom, the King was as anxious as ever to ensure that each day held for him the promise of some interesting activity. To make this easier to achieve, his yearly programme followed an almost unchangeable plan, largely regulated by the need to be in London in January or February for the State Opening of Parliament; by the social obligations of the London season, which began after Easter and ended with the races at Ascot in late June; and by those other race-meetings at which his Majesty’s presence was expected as a matter of course. After the yachting at Cowes in early August he liked to be at Bolton Abbey, the Duke of Devonshire’s Yorkshire house, for the opening of the grouse-shooting season on the twelfth. October would normally find him shooting at Balmoral. On 9 November he would invariably be at Sandringham for his birthday.

Although guests at Sandringham were pleased to find that life there was fairly informal, the King’s taste for regularity and punctuality imposed upon it an almost immutable routine. Breakfast began at nine and ended promptly at ten. The Royal Family did not appear, having breakfast in their own rooms; but those who chose to come down for it would find small round tables laid in the dining-room and a menu as ample and varied as that demanded by the King’s own voracious appetite. Indeed, the quantities of food consumed by the King, at breakfast as at every other meal, astonished those who, unapprised of his capacity, observed for the first time his zestful gourmandism.

After drinking a glass of milk in bed, he would often content himself with coffee and toast when he was to spend the morning indoors; but to fortify himself for a morning’s shooting he could devour platefuls of bacon and eggs, haddock and chicken, and toast and butter, in as short a time as it would take a less hungry man to drink two cups of coffee. Soon afterwards, an hour or so in the cold fresh air would sharpen his appetite for hot turtle soup. Yet this would in no way impair his appetite for luncheon at half past two, just as a hearty luncheon would not prevent his appearing for tea in a short black jacket and black tie in the hall where, as his band played appropriate melodies, he helped himself to poached eggs, petits fours and preserved ginger as well as rolls and scones, hot cakes, cold cakes, sweet cakes and that particular species of Scotch shortcake of which he was especially fond.

The dinner which followed at half past eight consisted usually of at least twelve courses; and it was not unknown for the King to take a liberal sample of every one, to the horror of the Queen, who confessed to his doctors that it was just ‘terrible’ the amount of food he got through, that she had ‘never seen anything like it’. He would enjoy several dozen oysters in a matter of minutes, setting the fashion for swallowing them between mouthfuls of brown bread and butter; and would then go on to more solid fare. He had an exceptional relish for caviare, plovers’ eggs and ortolans, for soles poached in Chablis and garnished with oysters and prawns, for chicken and turkey in aspic, quails and pigeon pie, grouse, snipe, partridge, pheasant and woodcock; and the thicker the dressing, the richer the stuffing, the creamier the sauce, the more deeply did he appear to enjoy each mouthful. No dish was too rich for him. He liked his pheasant stuffed with trufles and smothered in oleaginous sauce; he delighted in quails packed with foie gras and garnished with oysters, trufles, mushrooms, prawns, tomatoes and croquettes; he never grew tired of boned snipe, filled with forcemeat as well as foie gras, grilled in a pig’s caul and served with trufles and Madeira sauce. He declared ‘delectable’ a dish of frogs’ thighs served cold in a jelly containing cream and Moselle wine, and flavoured with paprika, which was especially prepared for him at the Savoy by Ritz and Escoffier, who named it Cuisses des Nymphes ? l’Aurore. Yet he appeared to derive almost equal enjoyment from more simple dishes: roast beef and Yorkshire pudding invariably appeared on the menu for Sunday luncheon at Sandringham, though he himself far preferred lamb. At Balmoral a stag-shooting party would be offered Scotch broth, Irish stew and plum pudding. And when once the King was noticed to frown upon a bowl of boiled ham and beans, it was not, he hastened to explain, because he despised such homely fare but because ‘it should have been bacon’. Almost the only dish he did not like was macaroni.

His appetite was not in the least affected by the huge cigars and the Egyptian cigarettes he smoked in such quantities. By the time he sat down to breakfast he had already had two cigarettes and one cigar; and often by dinner time he had smoked twenty more cigarettes — exhaling the smoke slowly and contemplatively through his nose — as well as twelve vast and pungent Coronay Corona, Henry Clay’s ‘Tsar’, or Uppmanns’ cigars. He never learned to smoke a pipe, which he said was something he had always wished to do as it was by far the most convenient form of smoking when out shooting, especially in a high wind. Frederick Ponsonby gave him one as a present, having taken

an enormous amount of trouble to get one with a top fitted … but he was so long putting the metal top on when he had lit the pipe that it always went out. He had three tries and the more he hurried the more clumsy he became. After the third try proved a failure he produced a cigar and said, ‘This is, after all, far simpler’, and explained that it was the fault of the tobacco.

If tobacco did not blunt his appetite, neither did alcohol. In earlier years he had drunk a good deal of champagne, preferably Duminy extra sec, 1883, which he had had decanted into a glass jug from which he helped himself; and he had been fond of making a powerful cocktail to a recipe sent to him from Louisiana and comprising champagne, whisky, maraschino, angostura bitters and crushed ice. But, as King, he rarely had more than two or three glasses of champagne at a time and he drank little other wine. He might enjoy a small cognac by way of a chasse Café but spirits held little appeal for him and he rarely drank port. Once the ladies had retired he was anxious to rejoin them as soon as possible, preferring their company to that of men; and for a short time he instituted the practice of taking the men away as soon as their hostess had ‘collected the eyes’ of the ladies. Indeed, any prolongation of the meal was tiresome for him. He grew impatient with guests who dawdled over their food and did not like the menu to be interrupted by sorbet or iced punch, though when his favourite rum-flavored sorbet was on the menu he could not resist it. Nor did he like his concentration on his food to be distracted by intellectual conversation, which always made him fiddle with the cutlery. Such talk, he considered, should be limited to the intervals between the courses, if tolerated at all. He preferred to listen to a good anecdote retailed by one of his amusing friends or a whisper of gossip from a pretty woman.

He was not a gifted conversationalist himself, rarely speaking more than a dozen words at a time and usually framing these in the form of questions. He was extremely tactful, though, in asking the sort of questions which the guest to whom they were directed would have pleasure in answering. For he made a point of remembering people’s tastes and interests; and it was frequently noticed how, during those Sunday afternoon inspections of his estate at Sandringham, he would find in a cup or plate, or some other trophy he had won at a race meeting or regatta, a reason to talk about horses or yachts to a sportsman who had felt unable to comment sensibly on the fuchsias and tomato plants in the greenhouse. He was also exceedingly adept at bringing a difficult conversation to an end with a murmured, ‘Quite so, quite so’; and then immediately, and in as natural a way as possible, diverting it on to easier lines.

Although everyone agreed with Lord Sandwich that he had ‘a marvellous memory’ and could — as he often did — recite the entire list of guests at house-parties he had attended years before, the King was an indifferent raconteur. He told his stories with too ponderous an emphasis on their introductory scene-setting, choosing to relate those which required a lightness of touch not at his command, and sometimes grasping a button on the coat of the man to whom they were principally addressed as though he sensed a wandering attention. He was also inclined to repeat his favourite stories until they became all too familiar. Whenever the name of the Shah of Persia was mentioned, for instance, he was as likely as not to remind his companions of the time he and the Shah had been fellow-guests of the Duke of Sutherland at Trentham and how the Shah had observed disapprovingly of their rich host, ‘Too grand for a subject. You’ll have to have his head off when you come to the throne!’

Another of his favourite stories concerned an English officer who had been shot through the head during the Boer War and had been sent home to be operated on by Sir Frederick Treves. Finding the damage extensive, Treves had been forced to remove a large part of the brain; and, although the operation had been successfully performed, he felt obliged to reveal to his patient his apprehension as to the young man’s prospects in his career. ‘It’s very kind of you to take so much interest in my welfare, Sir Frederick,’ the officer replied, ‘but thank God my brain is no longer wanted. I have just been transferred to the War Office.’

Such stories were well received since it was the King himself who told them. But a less courtly audience would, no doubt, have been less indulgent. The King’s tendency to jovial banter would also have been found less amusing in other men. Occasionally the King really was amusing, as when a neighbour, Somerville Gurney, inadvertently shot a hen pheasant one day late in the season when instructions had gone out that only cocks were to be killed. ‘Ah, Gurney,’ the King admonished his guest as the hen fell to the ground, ‘what a one you are for the ladies!’ The laughter his Majesty’s sallies aroused, however, encouraged him to continue the chaff to the point where the responses became dutiful rather than spontaneous.

Sir Felix Semon was a common butt for the King’s insistent banter after he had shot a young stag below the minimum admissible weight. Ashamed of his action, Semon had retreated to a corner of the drawingroom where the guests assembled before dinner. But immediately on entering, the King went up to him and in a hoarse stage whisper, clearly heard throughout the room, accused him of being a ‘chicken butcher’. The remark was greeted by prolonged laughter which continued to punctuate the subsequent exchanges:

‘Oh, Sire, that is hard!’

‘Not too hard. It is thoroughly merited! How could you shoot such a miserable staggie? Defend yourself!’

Semon protested that he had not intended to kill so young an animal.

‘That won’t wash. If you were a young lad who had gone out stalking for the first time I might possibly accept such an excuse. But you, you have killed hundreds of stags. Be ashamed of yourself! You will have to hear of this until your life’s end.’

‘I hope your Majesty will not be as good as your word.’

‘Won’t I? Well, you will see!’

For several days the bantering continued with persistent references to ‘Sir Felix’s babies’ until Semon was reported to have caught a 15-pound salmon. The King publicly congratulated him; then, after a long pause, added the question, ‘Did it have horns?’

More loud laughter broke out immediately; and there was further merriment the next day when Semon shot three fully grown stags before luncheon, during which the King told his eldest grandson to go up to Sir Felix and enquire ‘if he had killed a little staggie to-day’. At this there was ‘general laughter’.

‘Who set you on to this?’ Semon asked.

‘Grandpa,’ came the reply, ‘which set the laughter going again, the King shaking with mirth the whole time’.

Tiresome as some guests found what the Duchess of Teck termed the King’s ‘odious chaffing’, everyone who knew him well agreed that he had a kind heart. This was never more obvious than it was at Christmas when he and the Queen spent hours together in the ballroom at Sandringham arranging presents on the trestle tables which were laid out around a big Christmas tree.

He delighted in giving presents, whether chosen with care — like the huge silver-gilt inkstand he gave to the Gladstones on their golden wedding anniversary to make up for the impersonal telegram of congratulations from Queen Victoria — or given impulsively, like the gold cigarette-case he presented to Margot Tennant for having picked him out a winner at Ascot. When staying with friends he would often be driven to a nearby antique shop to choose them something he thought they would like; or, when special services had been rendered, he would order a commemorative present to be specially made. To Sir Walter Campbell, Deputy Ranger of Windsor Park, who had cleared the park of rabbits which had become a pest there, he presented a silver model of a rabbit with the remark that there would at any rate be one rabbit left at Windsor. And to Lord Burnham of Hall Barn, Beaconsfield, he gave a silver pheasant ‘as a recollection of the best day’s shooting’ he had ever had. Friends going abroad were liable to be asked to buy him a selection of suitable gifts, as was a visitor to the Paris Exhibition to whom he sent 5,800 francs to spend ‘on any bibelots or objets d’art’ which took her own fancy and which he would find ‘useful as birthday and Xmas presents’.

At Christmas at Sandringham guests were required to wait in the corridor outside the ballroom before dinner and to come in one by one to receive the gifts which had been wrapped up for them. Frederick Ponsonby thought this was

a rather trying experience as one found the King on one side and the Queen on the other explaining who gave what present and giving particulars about the various articles. One stood gasping one’s thanks to each alternately, and it was always a relief when the next person was called in. It was impossible to make a set speech, and most people, including myself, continued gasping, ‘Thank you so much.’

Ponsonby himself was quite overcome by the number of presents he received: ‘There were prints, water-colours, silver cigarette-cases, a silver inkstand, pins, studs, and several books.’ But it was all ‘beautifully done, and the pleasure of giving seemed never to leave their Majesties, as it so often does with rich people’.

On Christmas Eve it was the turn for the families on the estate to gather near the coach-house door where the King and Queen sat to wish them a Merry Christmas and to give each family a joint of beef. And on New Year’s Eve all the servants collected outside the ballroom where huge piles of presents, about eight hundred in all, and each one numbered, were massed around the Christmas tree. As the servants entered the room they drew two numbers each and were handed the corresponding presents by one of the princesses or a member of the household. It was not a very satisfactory method of distribution, as ‘a housemaid might get a razor and a footman a powder-puff’; but it ‘seemed to give much pleasure. At the conclusion the Christmas tree was stripped and all the toys and sweets were given to the children’.

The ballroom was also the setting for those occasional theatricals and musical performances which were intended to form one of the highlights of the Christmas festivities but which many of the guests found extremely boring. Indeed, a week-end at Sandringham, despite the informality of the atmosphere and the King’s efforts to make his guests feel at home, was sometimes a rather tedious affair, particularly as solitary pursuits and pleasantly lazy idling were discouraged. ‘What are you going to do to-day?’ the King would ask; and if no satisfactory answer were forthcoming, there would follow a recommendation of some activity which the guest might well feel totally disinclined to pursue. So, rather than be sent off to play billiards, to watch a game of golf or to join one of those games which were played after tea, the wary and experienced guest would say that he was on his way to read a book in the library or to have a look at the collection of fire-arms in the gunroom. Any excuse would satisfy the host; but some plan of action had to be given, otherwise the King would immediately propose one or endeavour to entertain the indolent guest himself. And his efforts in this respect were not always successful. Sir Felix Semon cited the example of an antiquated bishop who could not be sent off to play billiards or croquet and who, when his host endeavoured to engage him in conversation, seemed to share not a single interest with him. The King switched in despair from one subject to another without arousing the least response. At length, catching sight of a photograph of himself on a side table, he thought he would try that as a last resort. What did the bishop think of the likeness? The bishop put on his spectacles, peered at the photograph, then shook his head in a melancholy manner before replying, ‘Yes, yes, poor old Buller!’

For those who did not play cards, the evening after dinner often seemed excessively long; while for those who did, it could seem even more so if they happened to be playing with the King. He was very fond of bridge, which he nevertheless did not play very well, soon losing interest when his cards were bad, yet never failing to criticize his partner’s mistakes without the least equivocation or apology. He soon recovered his temper, however, after even the most unsatisfactory game, accepting his winnings with complacent satisfaction and paying out his losses as though he were bestowing upon his opponent a most valuable present. And when he was ready to go to bed, between one o’clock and half past one, he was usually as affable as he had been during the day, making sure that everyone had a good supper, recommending the grilled oysters which were his own favourite refreshment at that time of night, going upstairs, as he had done in his youth, to escort the men guests to their rooms, to make sure that they had all that they could possibly require and to give a token poke to the fire in the grate.

No one, however, was allowed to go to bed before the Queen retired at about midnight. One evening, finding the number of people downstairs to be one short, and imagining that the absentee must be one of the younger guests, he rang for a page and told him to go and fetch back the culprit, who turned out to be General Sir Dighton Probyn, the seventy-five-year-old Keeper of the Privy Purse, who had gone to bed because he was not feeling well. Ponsonby thought that the King was ‘very much amused by this episode; but Sir Dighton was not’.

On leaving Sandringham the King frequently went to stay for a week or so with the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth, or with Lord Iveagh at Elveden, the first of those several country house visits which he liked to make each year. In 1872 the then Duke had written a rather breathless letter from Chatsworth to his son Lord Hartington, who was staying at Sandringham: ‘Glad you are staying at Sandringham, for you will be able to get answers to several things I want to know. How long do they stay? How many servants do they bring? How many maids for the Princess? Do you think they could bring any horses? Am so afraid that our own may not stand the cheering …’

A generation later the answers to these and other similar questions were well known at Chatsworth as they were in many other large country houses in England, the owners of which were put to a good deal of trouble and expense in providing the King with the comfort he had grown accustomed to expect.

In the first place, his hosts were often required to accommodate an entourage of almost Elizabethan proportions. It was not unknown for the King to travel with two valets, a footman and a brusher; with a lordin-waiting, a groom-in-waiting, a private secretary and two equerries, all of whom had their own servants; with two chauffeurs, two loaders for the King’s guns and a loader each for the guns of the gentlemen attendants; with a gentleman-in-waiting and two ladies-in-waiting for the Queen, who also brought a hairdresser and two maids; with two detectives, two police sergeants and three constables; and with an Arab boy whose sole duty it was to prepare the royal coffee, which he served to his master on bended knee. The number of pieces of attendant luggage was likely to be equally prodigious. In the King’s trunks alone there would be as many as forty suits and uniforms and twenty pairs of boots and shoes even for a visit which was to last for no more than a week.

Despite the cost and trouble of entertaining the King and his entourage there were, however, few places where they were not welcome. And hostesses whose houses were never included in the royal progresses were deeply jealous of those his Majesty favoured: the Saviles of Rufford Abbey with whom he often stayed for Doncaster Races and the Grevilles of Reigate Priory became known to the disappointed as the Civils and the Grovels.

The King’s intimation of a proposed visit would be followed by a notification from a member of his Household as to the length of the stay. A list of guests would then be submitted for his approval; and occasionally he would add a name or, more rarely, cross one out. Except in the case of houses which were visited regularly, there would then ensue a lengthy correspondence about the arrangements for the reception of the royal party, the number of attendants and servants to be expected, the sort of accommodation to be provided for the detectives, the provision of a guard of honour, the speeches of welcome to be made at the railway station and the addresses to be handed to the King by various local dignitaries. When, for instance, the King proposed to visit Alnwick Castle to stay with the Duke of Northumberland in 1906, a cascade of letters, orders, questionnaires, invitations and prohibitions issued from the castle to ensure that all the arrangements were conducted in an efficient and seemly manner. Instructions were given for the railway station to be closed to ordinary traffic and to be decorated. The entrance gate to the castle was also to be decorated, while the front of the barbican was to be illuminated at night by gas flood-lighting. Triumphal arches were to be erected in the town, and tickets to be printed so that the Duke’s tenants would have the best view of his Majesty’s progress. Medals were to be issued so that the local schoolchildren would have a suitable memento of the auspicious event. Orders were given that the loyal addresses from the county council and urban authority should be inscribed and handed to the King, not spoken; and that no more than four members of the council were to be presented to him. Arrangements were made for a guard of honour from the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers and for a sovereign’s escort. ‘There is one very important point to bear in mind,’ the Duke warned the councillor in charge of the civic welcome. ‘The Alnwick mob is all right till a procession has passed, but they have no idea of not breaking up and rushing after the carriage … [So] a considerable part of the escort must be placed behind the King’s carriage.’

Arrangements also had to be made for a band to play before dinner; for a singer to perform after dinner; for rooms to be prepared not only for the King and Queen and their servants but for the minister in attendance as well. Accommodation was also required in the castle for an inspector, a sergeant and three constables of the Household Police, as well as an inspector and a sergeant from Scotland Yard. These policemen would wear ordinary clothes and mingle with the indoor servants when the King and Queen were in the castle and with the gardeners, gamekeepers and beaters when they were in the grounds or out shooting.

Alnwick Castle, which had been extensively restored in the previous century, was in good order and no alterations or redecorations had to be carried out in the suite of rooms allocated to the King and Queen. But the owners of other houses which they visited were put to great expense in painting, papering and refurnishing rooms which were considered insufficiently imposing for royal habitation.

‘We came to Mount Stewart at Whitsuntide,’ wrote Lady Londonderry after arrangements had been made for a royal visit there in 1903. ‘And looking over the house … the place looked extraordinarily shabby; and we felt that it must be tidied up for the great occasion.’ So the billiardroom was transformed into an additional drawing-room; twelve other rooms were repapered; the main drawing-room was provided with specially embroidered upholstery and cushions; the suites of upstairs rooms to be given to the King and Queen were redecorated in green and yellow silk and equipped with new furniture, including some ‘nice little bits of Sheraton’ and with ‘masses of flowers both in baskets and on the tables’. Once he had spent a week-end in a country house the King liked to be given the same bedroom, sitting-room, dressing-room and bathroom on each succeeding visit; and he liked to follow the same sort of daily routine. If he were not going out shooting, he would have breakfast in his room and then attend to any correspondence there might be, his letters being opened for him by a servant who stood behind his chair and slit the envelopes with a long paper-knife. Towards midday he would go down to join the other guests and perhaps go for a stroll in the garden, making comments on any alterations his sharp eye noticed as having taken place since his last visit, or play a game of croquet which he and his partner usually won as everyone knew how cross he got if he was beaten. When staying with Sir Ernest Cassel he was often pitted against the Duchess of Sermoneta, who was not only extremely pretty but also a very bad player so that a game with her always put him in a good mood. One day, however, a lucky hit sent her ball flying ‘right across the ground,’ she recorded in her memoirs, ‘and straight through the right hoop (I didn’t even know it was the right one) and, continuing its glorious career, hit the King’s ball straight into the rose bushes … By the icy stillness that prevailed I realized that never, never was such a thing to happen again.’

During his walks in the garden the King was usually accompanied by his dog, a brown and white long-haired fox terrier who bore on his collar the legend, ‘I belong to the King.’ Despite the ministrations of the footman whose duty it was to wash and comb him, Caesar was a peculiarly scruffy animal and was often to be seen with his mouth covered with prickles after an unsuccessful tussle with a hedgehog. The King loved him dearly, took him abroad, and allowed him to sleep in an easy chair by his bed. Once in Bohemia, when the dog fell ill, he was only dissuaded from spending £200 on a visit by his English vet on learning that there was a first-class man in Vienna. Taken to rejoin his master after a brief parting, Caesar would always jump up in excitement at seeing him, and the King would say with gruff affection, ‘Do you like your old master, then?’ He could never bring himself to smack the dog, however reprehensible his behaviour; and ‘it was a picture’, so Stamper, the motor engineer, said, ‘to see the King standing shaking his stick at the dog when he had done wrong. “You naughty dog,” he would say very slowly. “You naughty, naughty dog.” And Caesar would wag his tail and “smile” cheerfully into his master’s eyes, until his Majesty smiled back in spite of himself.’ Devoted as he was to the King, though, Caesar showed not the least interest in the advances of other human beings who bent down to fondle him, disdaining to notice the staff when he accompanied the King on an inspection of the kitchens from which, on less important occasions, he was nevertheless eager to accept any bones.

‘Whenever I went into the King’s cabin,’ recalled Charles Hardinge, who accompanied the King on the royal yacht during his continental excursions in 1903, ‘this dog always went for my trousers and worried them, much to the King’s delight. I used not to take the slightest notice and went on talking all the time to the King which I think amused His Majesty still more.’

As the hour chosen by the King for serving dinner approached, a gentleman-in-waiting informed the host that his Majesty would be ready in fifteen minutes. The guests were then asked to assemble in the drawingroom to await the arrival of the King. They presented themselves in full evening dress, the men in white ties with carnations or gardenias in their button-holes, the ladies in dresses with trains, wearing, perhaps, a spray of orchids on their well-corseted bosoms, and carrying ostrich feather fans.

The King appeared with exact promptitude at the time he had stipulated. Having taken stock of the company to make sure there were no absentees, he walked across the room to his hostess, offered her his arm, and escorted her immediately into the dining-room, where his footman in scarlet livery stood behind his chair. If the Queen were present the men wore frock dress and knee-breeches, and it was she who led the way to the diningroom on the arm of her host.

The King was usually an easy and agreeable guest. Even when he arrived in an exceptionally grumpy mood, he could normally be won over by a dish that pleased him or a remark that amused him. Sir Osbert Sitwell recorded an occasion when the King went to stay with Lord and Lady Brougham ‘in a mood that rendered him difficult to please. Plainly something had gone wrong; and at dinner he was silent’. But Lady Brougham, ‘an old lady of rare beauty and of infinite charm’ renowned for her ‘unfailing shrewdness of judgement and her use of the appropriate but unexpected adjective’, was quite equal to the challenge.

‘“Did you notice, Sir, the soap in your Majesty’s bathroom?”

‘“No!”

‘“I thought you might, Sir … It has such an amorous lather!”

‘After that, the King’s geniality returned.’

On the day of his departure, having sat for the inevitable group photograph and planted the almost equally inevitable tree, the King would sign his name in the visitors’ book, and perhaps bestow a minor decoration, such as the Coronation Medal, on a senior servant. And while a member of his Household presented a suitable sum to be distributed amongst the other servants, he would give a present to his hostess. Often it was a present at least as valuable as that ‘most lovely bracelet’, with the King and Queen’s miniatures ‘set in diamonds with the royal crown and ciphers and green enamel shamrocks at the sides’, which was given to Lady Londonderry after the King’s visit to Mount Stewart. If he had no suitable jewellery with him he would send to London for a selection from Hunt and Roskill. And once, having stayed at a house in the north where his own servant had been taken ill, he called for his host’s servant who had looked after him instead.

‘Which do you think is the handsomest of these rings?’ he asked him as they examined the case which had arrived from Piccadilly.

‘I am sure you are a good judge of these things.’

The servant indicated the one that he preferred. The King picked it up and handed it to him with the words, ‘Keep it.’

16 The King Abroad

When he went abroad the King’s entourage was not usually as large as it was when he travelled in England. Nor did he make his journeys in so grand a style as his mother, who would book an entire hotel which she filled with a hundred of her own servants as well as numerous pieces of her own furniture and favourite pictures. Yet, although he usually contented himself with a doctor, two equerries, two valets and two footmen — one of the footmen, a tall Austrian named Hoepfner, to wait at table and open the door, the other an Englishman, Wellard, whose duties included cleaning the boots and brushing the dog — he had been known to travel abroad with no less than thirty personal servants in addition to his suite and his doctor. He had taken thirty-three with him when he went to Paris in 1868 to visit the Emperor Napoleon III. And in 1901, on going to stay with his sister at Friedrichshof, the royal yacht had thirty-one servants aboard as well as a crew of three hundred. Journeys by rail were undertaken in a special train, the King’s private carriages being equipped with well-upholstered furniture, commodious cupboards, thick carpets and heavily tasselled curtains. There were fully equipped bathrooms and a smoking-room where the King could enjoy a game of cards or read a newspaper in one of the Spanish leather arm-chairs. In later years short journeys on the Continent were made in one or other of the three claret-coloured motor-cars which were driven out in advance by the royal chauffeurs.

The prospect of a trip abroad almost always put the King in a good mood. He would first send for his Swiss-born courier, the well-informed and loud-voiced M. Fehr, who had formerly worked for Thomas Cook, and with him he would discuss all the details of the journey. He would ensure that Chandler, the Superintendent of the Wardrobe, knew what suits and uniforms would be required; that his Austrian first valet, Meidinger, had all the correct accessories; that his favourite crocodile dressing-case contained his diary, jewellery, a miniature of the Queen, photographs of his children and of his mother (seated at a table, signing a document); that his ragged silk dressing-gown, to which he had become so devoted that he refused to have a new one, was not forgotten; that Stamper, the motor engineer, had received proper instructions with regard to the motor-cars; that the luggage contained an ample supply of presents and decorations, particularly of the ribbons and insignia of the Victorian Order, to be bestowed upon attentive officials and obliging friends.

The last item was most important, since the King liked to be able to reward those who had helped him or pleased him wherever he went. Indeed, few acts gave him greater pleasure than making presentations of medals and decorations and of expensive miniatures, snuff-boxes, photographs in silver frames and gold cigarette-cases without regard to their value which, in any case, he never really appreciated. Frederick Ponsonby had scarcely ever known the King so angry as when all that could be found to present to an important member of the French Jockey Club, who had made arrangements for him to be conducted over some model racing stables near Paris, was a relatively inferior plain silver cigarette-case. Ponsonby deemed this inadequate as so many much more expensive presents had been handed out during the visit, and he had the temerity to send a message to the King pointing this out. Soon afterwards the King appeared before Ponsonby in a state of suppressed fury. Having put his hat, glove and stick slowly and deliberately on the table, he asked in a menacingly quiet voice, ‘Did you send a message that the cigarette-case I had chosen was not good enough?’ On Ponsonby’s admission that this was so, the King burst forth in a deafening ‘flood of oratory’ that shook the whole hotel and reduced Ponsonby ‘to a state of speechless terror’. Regaining the use of his tongue, Ponsonby pleaded that as such beautiful presents were usually given to his Majesty’s friends, it seemed ‘a pity that he should give such a cheap thing to du Bois, who would no doubt show it to everyone in Paris’. This raised a fresh storm, and Ponsonby began to think that the King might have a fit. Eventually, however, he picked up his hat, stick and gloves and left the room, slamming the door. Ponsonby commented:

It was usual with the King after he had let himself go and cursed someone to soothe matters by being nice to them afterwards. But in this case he resented my being so outspoken and made no attempt to forgive me. It was not till years later that I understood that he had really agreed with me but had been much annoyed at not being able to give something good. During the visit to Berlin [in 1909] when the King was ill with a chill and quite unable to attend to anything, he said, ‘I must leave the presents entirely to you to do, and I know you will do everything perfectly and not give anything shoddy like I did in Paris.’

As Ponsonby observed, the King’s rages soon cooled, particularly when he was abroad and enjoying himself as — while on the Continent — he usually was. Indeed, he was never at home for long before he began to look forward eagerly to his next foreign visit. In the year before he died he told his son with the deepest satisfaction, ‘I have crossed the Channel six times this year!’

He was particularly fond of France. He paid regular visits to the Riviera where he engaged with relish in the annual battle of the flowers, once dressed as Satan complete with scarlet robes and horns, and where he played roulette ‘comme d’habitude’. He was even more frequently to be seen in Paris, where he sometimes stayed at the Ritz or the Hôtel de l’Ambassade, but usually at the Bristol, being known there as the Earl of Chester or the Duke of Lancaster, a title which Lord James of Hereford, for one, considered him unjustified in using as it properly belonged to the descendants of John of Gaunt and did not go with the Duchy.

As Prince of Wales he had loved to go for walks in the Bois de Boulogne and down the Champs Elysées, to sail up and down the Seine, to stroll along the boulevards, looking into the shop windows in the rue de la Paix, buying shirts at Charvet’s, jewellery at Cartier’s, handkerchiefs at Chaperon’s and hats at Genot’s. He had enjoyed meals at his favourite restaurants — Magny’s, Léon’s and Durand’s, the Voisin, the Bignon, the Café Américain, the Café des Ambassadeurs and the Café de la Paix. He had wandered into one or other of the clubs of which he was a member — the Jockey Club, the Yacht Club de France, the Cercle des Champs Elysées, the Union Club, the Nouveau and the Rue Royale. Almost every evening he had been to the theatre — the Théâtre Français, the Théâtre des Variétés, the Gymnase, the Vaudeville, the Odéon, the Palais Royal, the Nouveautés, the Renaissance or the Porte St Martin. Afterwards he had paid calls backstage with friends from the Jockey Club, or he had gone to the Epatant for a game of baccarat, or to 16 rue de la Pépinière for ‘une soirée intime’, or to the cabaret at the Lion d’Or, the Bouffes-Parisiens or the Moulin Rouge. Once he had played the part of the murdered prince in Sardou’s Fedora while Sarah Bernhardt wept over him. And he had entertained Bernhardt and other actresses in the Café Anglais in the ‘Grand Seize’, an exotic private room hung with red wall paper and gold hieroglyphics, furnished with gilt chairs and a crimson sofa, and softly lit by gasoliers.

He had made elaborate efforts to give the slip to the indefatigable French detectives who, to his extreme annoyance, followed him everywhere, suitably disguised, even to the extent of wearing clothes appropriate to the different parts of the theatres to which they were assigned and taking their wives with them to restaurants. Occasionally the Prince’s carriage had suddenly rattled off at such a pace from the Hôtel Bristol that the police had lost track of him. But generally they managed to keep up with him and were able to submit reports of meetings with celebrated beauties in the Jardin des Plantes, of long afternoons spent with his intimate friends, the Comtesse Edmond de Pourtalès in the rue Tronchet, the Baronne Alphonse de Rothschild in the Faubourg St Honoré, and the Princesse de Sagan on the corner of the Esplanade des Invalides.

The police had watched him on his visits to Mme Kauchine, a Russian beauty who rented a room in the Hôtel du Rhin; to ‘the widow Signoret’, mistress of the Duc de Rohan; to a certain ‘Dame Verneuil’ who had an apartment on the second floor at 39 rue Lafayette; to the Baronne de Pilar at the Hôtel Choiseul; to Miss Chamberlayne (described in 1884 as his ‘maîtresse en titre’) at the Hôtel Balmoral; to unidentified ladies in the Hôtel Scribe and the Hôtel Liverpool in the rue de Castiglione. The police had been particularly concerned by his visits to the Hôtel de Calais, where he often spent most of the night with a mysterious woman known to the chambermaid as Mme Hudrie, ‘a very beautiful woman, aged about thirty, tall, slim, blonde, remarkable for her magnificent colouring and her perfect elegance … usually dressed in white satin, but always in black when she meets ‘the Prince’. This turned out to be the Comtesse de Boutourline, wife of the Prefect of Moscow, sister-in-law of General Boutourline, formerly military attach? at the British Embassy in London, and granddaughter of Princess Bobinska, with whom she claimed to be staying in the rue de Chateaubriand, though the police discovered that she was actually living in a house belonging to the Comte de Guinsonnas.

The Prince had spent other evenings with the delightful English courtesan, Catherine Walters; and had visited his favourite brothel, Le Chabanais, where the chair upon which he sat with his chosen young women was still displayed over a generation later to the brothel’s customers. He had gone to the Maison Dorée with the Duc de Gramont to meet the generous, passionate and consumptive Giulia Beneni, known as La Barucci, who arrived very late and, on being reprimanded by the Duke, turned her back on the royal visitor, lifted her skirts to her waist and said, ‘You told me to show him my best side.’ He had asked also to meet La Barucci’s rival, Cora Pearl, who had appeared before him naked except for a string of pearls and a sprig of parsley.

On one occasion, when Queen Alexandra was feeling depressed and out of sorts, the King asked her if she would like to go with him to Paris. Immediately she accepted the invitation with the excited eagerness of a little girl. They stayed at the British Embassy; and, for the first time in her life, the Queen was able to dine in public in a restaurant. She had been ‘delighted’ with Paris on a previous visit many years before, and she was equally entranced by it now.

Although they were very rarely in Paris together, the King often went with the Queen on her annual visit to her family in Denmark. He did so out of kindness, for he was overcome by boredom and restlessness while he was there, having to dine with his ancient father-in-law at six o’clock or half past six at the latest and then to play boring games of whist for very low stakes. He pretended to enjoy it all for the Queen’s sake. But the enclosed, provincial atmosphere, sometimes enlivened by a huge family party at the castle of Fredensborg where seven different languages were spoken, he found desperately tedious. Once, after visiting every museum, art gallery and house of historical interest which Copenhagen had to offer, he was driven to going over a farm which sold butter to England. He always longed to be back in Paris again and to take on once more the persona of the Duke of Lancaster.

The incognito was scarcely necessary for almost everyone in Paris knew who the Duke was; and he seemed quite content that this should be so. ‘Ullo Wales!’ La Gouloue, the famous dancer, would shout at him on his appearance at the Moulin Rouge, and he would smile indulgently and order champagne for the dancers and the members of the orchestra. Those who did not recognize him were soon made aware of his identity, as was ‘a prosperous-looking American with a large cigar in his mouth’ who stood waiting for the lift in the lobby of the Grand Hotel. The King also stood waiting to be taken up to the floor on which the ex-Empress Eugènie had taken a room. When the doors opened the American moved forward to enter first as he had been waiting the longer. The King, so accustomed to having everyone else wait for him that he took no notice of his neighbour, strode forward at the same time, collided with him, knocked him off his balance with the superior weight of his great bulk and sent the cigar shooting out of the American’s mouth.

Occasionally on his foreign visits the King would be upset by some display of anti-British feeling. At the time of the Boer War he was deeply offended by being forced to listen to renditions of the Boers’ national anthem on his way to Friedrichshof; and he cancelled his usual spring holiday on the Riviera and refused to open an International Exhibition in Paris because of hostilc articles about his country and rude caricatures of himself which had appeared in French newspapers. But normally he was greeted respectfully wherever he went. Sometimes, indeed, he was forced to complain of the all too enthusiastic welcome accorded to him by cheering crowds or inquisitive tourists who pressed about him with clicking cameras, anxious to obtain a snapshot of a man so famous and revered that people collected cigar stubs that had touched his lips, bones that had been left on his plate, and bowed towards the chair upon which he was accustomed to sit in a favoured shop.

In his later years his continental visits began to assume a set pattern. He would leave England at the beginning of March for France, spending a week or so in Paris before going on to Biarritz for three weeks. He then would embark on a month’s cruise, in the royal yacht, usually with the Queen and preferably in the Mediterranean. Although he once told Lord Morley, while they were driving together through the forests near Balmoral, that ‘if he could have chosen his life he would have liked to be a landscape gardener’, he did not usually seem to take much notice of his surroundings and certainly rarely made a comment on the scenery. At Biarritz, however, he was struck by the beauty of the Basque coast-line and wrote to his friend, Lady Londonderry, of the ‘splendid views’ and of the pleasure he derived from listening to the ‘continual roll of the Atlantic’. He wrote one day in the early spring of 1906:

Though this place is quieter than the Riviera it is more bracing and I am sure healthier. I have charming rooms in a very big hotel close to the sea [the Hôtel du Palais] … Golf is the principal pastime, but the roads are excellent and I take continually long motor drives into the country and to Spain. I shall meet the Queen at Marseilles in the yacht. … There are a great many English here.

One of the principal advantages of Biarritz was that the air suited him far better than the more sultry air of the Riviera. Towards the end of his life he was troubled by coughing fits so severe that he found it difficult to get his breath and seemed to be choking. But once installed at the Hôtel du Palais he found his breathing much more easy, and only regretted that Biarritz was so smelly. It was bad enough in 1907, but so much worse in 1908 that he instructed the British Ambassador in Paris to make representations to Clemenceau himself about ‘the effects of defective draining’, otherwise some other resort would ‘have to be thought of’. Assurances were given that something would be done, and so the next year the King returned as usual.

At Biarritz he was called at seven, and after his glass of warm milk and his bath, he would have breakfast at ten, usually in a small tent on the terrace outside his apartments. The Corsican detective, Xavier Paoli, who was assigned to guard him, reported that he had grilled bacon, boiled eggs and fried fish for breakfast with a large cup of coffee, and that, having finished this meal, he would sit at his writing-table till a quarter past twelve when he went out for a walk. Lunch was served in his large private dining-room overlooking the sea at one o’clock and invariably included hard-boiled plovers’ eggs with a touch of paprika, followed by trout, salmon or grilled sole, a meat dish (preferably chicken or lamb with asparagus), and strawberries or stewed fruit. As in England he drank very little either at luncheon or dinner, contenting himself with a glass or two of Chablis or dry champagne or, possibly, claret and Perrier water. Occasionally between meals he would have a whisky and soda.

Paoli complained of the difficulties of maintaining the King’s privacy. He managed to reduce the swarm of beggars that habitually descended upon Biarritz in the season to two blind and ragged mendicants who took up the same position every day and, at the sound of Caesar’s bark, held out their bowls into which the King dropped his daily contribution with the words, ‘A demain!’ But newspapermen were a more serious problem. Paoli found a retired detective who bore such a marked resemblance to the King that he was known as ‘Edouard’. He tried dressing this man up in clothes like the King’s; but although the resemblance was more striking than ever, ‘Edouard’ could not manage a remotely convincing imitation of the King’s smile or his highly characteristic way of walking or bowing, and the experiment had to be abandoned.

Despite his occasional failures, Paoli believed that he earned the King’s respect, even his friendship; and he proudly recorded in his memoirs how one day he had ventured to admire the tiny gold matchbox with the royal crown which the King wore on his watch-chain. ‘Accept it, my dear Paoli, as a souvenir,’ the King immediately replied with his usual impulsive generosity. ‘I should like you to have it.’

Although Paoli complained of the newspapermen, they discreetly omitted to mention in their reports the presence in Biarritz of Mrs Keppel, who was usually there staying, with her two daughters and their governess, at the Villa Eugènie as a guest of Sir Ernest Cassel and his sister. Mrs Keppel’s daughter Sonia has described how exciting these annual journeys to Biarritz were, and how respectfully her mother was always treated: ‘At Victoria a special carriage was reserved for us; and a special cabin on the boat. And at Calais, Mamma was treated like royalty. The chef de gare met her and escorted us all through the customs, and the car attendant on the train hovered over her like a love-sick troubadour.’ Once at Biarritz, Sonia and her sister saw ‘Kingy’ frequently, accompanying him on picnics which, ‘for some unfathomed reason’, he chose to have by the side of the road, where other cars were sure to park nearby and where footmen unpacked chairs and tables, linen tablecloths, plates, glasses and silver, and ‘every variety of cold food’. ‘Much of “Kingy’s” enjoyment of these picnics was based on his supposed anonymity and, delightedly, he would respond to an assumed name in his deep, unmistakable voice, unaware that most of the crowd was playing up to him.’

Every year, after the Regatta at Cowes, the King also went to Germany or Austria to take the waters at a spa. Formerly he had favoured Homburg which, in the season, had been full of foreign visitors ‘most of whom [he knew] more or less’. These included Reuben Sassoon, a ‘curious old gentleman’, in George Cornwallis-West’s opinion, who ‘never opened his mouth except to put food in it’; but who gave the most entertaining picnic parties for as many as seventy guests; Mrs Arthur James, whose humour and high spirits always put the King in a good temper; and the dear old Duke of Cambridge with his son, Colonel FitzGeorge, and the Duke’s friend, Mrs Robert Vyner. The King had stayed at the Ritters Park Hotel and had drunk the waters conscientiously between half past seven and nine o’clock in the morning before breakfast of a cup of coffee and a boiled egg.

In 1899 the King had transferred his favour to Marienbad, a small town in a pleasant valley in Bohemia, two thousand feet above the sea. The springs of healing waters at Marienbad belonged to the nearby abbey of Tepl, whose monks spent alternating periods of two years in seclusion followed by two years in the outside world and — as though in doubt as to which side of the abbey wall their life’s work lay — wore black top hats with white cassocks. The monks had been profiting by the sale of their waters for more than twenty years when the King, as Prince of Wales, had gone there for the first time. And by 1899 it had become extremely fashionable, the chosen spa of numerous members of Europe’s oldest families: of Grand Admiral Tirpitz and Lord Fisher; of Sir Ernest Cassel and the faded Lillie Langtry; of the Gaekwar of Baroda, the Turkish Grand Vizier and the King of Greece; of the dissolute Duke of Orléans and the celebrated French cavalry officer, General Galliffet, whose wounded stomach was covered by a silver plate; of Princess Dolgorouki, who had morganatically married the Tsar of Russia; of Madame Waddington, the attractive American widow of a French Ambassador in London; and of numerous ladies who, as one English visitor disapprovingly noted, ‘either have already been, or are qualifying themselves for being, divorced’. Most of them were extremely fat when they arrived; and many not much less so when they left.

There were several excellent hotels in the town, the most fashionable being the Weimar where from 1903 to 1909 the King took a suite of rooms which were specially furnished for him in a different style for each succeeding visit, all the pieces being sold for much more than their intrinsic value after he left.

Every morning at the Weimar, the King’s valet, Meidinger, himself awakened by a band which began to play under his window at half past six, entered his master’s bedroom to draw the curtains. And, without fail, he would be asked the same question phrased in the same six words: ‘What’s the weather doing to-day, Meidinger?’

Having heard the subsequent report, the King got up and dressed himself. Soon after half past seven, with his secretary on one side and an equerry on the other, he could be seen strolling briskly up and down on the promenade by the spring known as the Kreuzbrunnen, smartly dressed in a hard, curly-brimmed pale grey felt hat worn at a slight angle to the left, a stiff white collar, neat grey pin-striped suit with all three buttons done up, and yellow suede gloves sewn with black stitching. In warmer weather he would wear a lightweight, dark blue coat and white trousers which were always immaculately creased, sometimes in front and at others down the sides. He was invariably closely shadowed by six Austrian detectives and two detectives from London, Patrick Quinn and Quinn’s assistant, Hester. Even at that hour of the morning crowds of sightseers gathered to watch him stride by, his left arm bent as though he were about to put his hand into his pocket, his right hand grasping a goldknobbed malacca cane or an ebony walking stick adorned with an E in brilliants, surmounted by a crown. As in Paris he liked to be known as the Duke of Lancaster, and was infuriated when the courier, Fehr, had his luggage labels printed, ‘Lord Lancaster’, a mistake that led him to expostulate angrily that people would think he was an ennobled gunmaker. Also, as in Paris, the incognito was scarcely worth while since everyone knew who the Duke of Lancaster was, the Burgomaster advertising his arrival by putting up notices asking people to respect his privacy, and photographs of him being on display in every shop window.

Although Frederick Ponsonby asserted that the King’s ‘one idea of happiness was to be in the middle of a crowd with no one taking any notice of him’, others, more discerningly, supposed that he had no objection to being looked at and admired — he was rather annoyed, in fact, if he was not recognized. When dining incognito in restaurants, he became excessively impatient with waiters who failed to accord him the special treatment to which he was accustomed and treated him as an ordinary person who had to take his turn. And, once, paying an unexpected call on friends in Paris, he was exasperated to be asked at the door who he was. ‘You do not know me? Well, you ought to know me,’ the King expostulated, adding as proof of his own remarkable memory for faces, ‘I know you. Last year you were third footman with the Duchess of Manchester.’

What the King did object to was being hampered or inconvenienced by inquisitive people who lacked the good manners to remain at a respectful distance. The crowds at Marienbad became so obtrusive that the King felt obliged to complain to the Emperor, whose officials saw to it that in future he was allowed to stroll about the town in peace, raising his hat in those varying degrees of respect which he had adopted to convey the exactly appropriate measure of esteem to those whom he encountered. The gestures of civility due to the Grand Duchesses of Saxe-Weimar and Mecklenburg-Schwerin were rather more elaborate than those due to Mme Waddington, and considerably more so than those used to indicate recognition of the English actors who visited Marienbad as regularly as he did himself. Servants off duty were also recognized; and staid Austrian aristocrats were astonished to see him raise his hat to them, a condescension strongly criticized as unbecoming in a monarch. Similarly shocking was the friendliness with which he greeted Fräulein Pistl, an exceptionally good-looking young woman who had a shop under the colonnades by the Kreuzbrunnen where she sold those Styrian hats which members of the King’s entourage were urged to buy and which he bought himself, requiring Fräulein Pistl to deliver them to his hotel personally.

The King usually had his first tumbler of mineral water at his hotel, and two others sitting on a bench which was reserved for his use near the Kreuzbrunnen, both glasses being brought to him by the head waiter of the Weimar. After his second glass he went to have a mud bath in the Neubad. Then he would settle down to lunch, conscious of the fact that he was at Marienbad for a cure which ought to involve the loss of a good deal of weight, yet, as an Austrian journalist noticed, evidently without intending ‘to subject himself to any severe regime’. Certainly, he did not eat as much as he did at home, and dispensed with the cold chicken which in England normally stood on his bedside table in case he woke up hungry in the night. He professed himself to be extremely dismayed by other people’s lapses, particularly those of his friend Harry Chaplin, who, having dieted for several days, would suddenly find fattening food and drink irresistible; and he became very cross when something which was strictly forbidden, such as champagne, was handed round in his presence. Nevertheless, he enjoyed the local trout; he did not decline grouse with fried aubergines; and he ate a large number of peaches, his favourite fruit, which the suave and elegant Marienbad doctor, Ernst Ott, advised were better for him than oranges. He never seems to have claimed to have lost more than eight pounds in a fortnight and considered even this highly satisfactory.

Occasionally he would have luncheon at the Rübezahl restaurant on a hillside overlooking the town, and after the meal would go for a walk in the surrounding pine forests or for a drive in a motor-car. He once went for a drive with the English War Minister, Haldane.

He proposed that we should go in plain clothes as though we were Austrians [Haldane recalled]. And the first thing he did was to make me buy an Austrian hat [from Fräulein Pistl, of course] so as to look like a native … As we were passing a little roadside inn, with a wooden table in front of it, the King stopped and said, ‘Here I will stand treat.’ He ordered coffee for two … He said Austrian coffee was always admirable, and you could tell when you had crossed the frontier into Germany, because of the badness of the coffee… ‘Now I am going to pay,’ he said. ‘I shall take care to give only a small tip to the woman … in case she suspects who I am.’ We then drove to a place the King was very fond of — a monastery inhabited by the Abbot of Teppel — where we had a large tea and where the King enjoyed himself with the monks very much, gossiping and making himself agreeable.

Knowing how fond the King was of shooting, the Abbot once invited him to shoot on the monastery lands. Normally while at Marienbad the King went shooting at Bischofteinitz with Prince Trauttmansdorff, who arranged his guns and four hundred beaters to perfection. But the Abbot, inexperienced in such matters, thought that all he had to do was buy a few partridges, put them down in a field and drive them over the guns. So as to prevent their flying away before the guns were ready, two kites, which the partridges were rightly expected to mistake for big, predatory birds, were set up over the field. But the kites were left in position when the beaters began the drive, which meant that the birds would only fly for short distances in front of the beaters before alighting again. This made the shooting both difficult and dangerous; and one old monk, who appeared with an antiquated gun, thought he would be better off behind the beaters. ‘It will all be quite safe,’ he assured the nervous English guests. ‘But of course if anyone shoots at me, I shall shoot back.’ The King, who was used to being given the best position, was for some reason placed right at the end of the line and was scarcely able to get a single shot all day.

On Sundays the King attended morning service at the Anglican church in the Jägerstrasse; and on the Emperor’s birthday, 18 August, wearing a splendid Austrian military uniform, he went to the thanksgiving service in the Roman Catholic church, after which, standing on the Weimar’s wide balcony in his green plumed hat with the ribbon of the Order of St Stephen on his chest, he took the salute of a parade of veterans. On the evening of that day he always gave a dinner, either in the banqueting hall of the Weimar or in the hall of the Kurhaus, for important local dignitaries, distinguished visitors to Marienbad and British residents in Vienna such as Henry Wickham Steed, The Times’s correspondent.

Almost every other evening there was some sort of party in the King’s hotel suite. This was sometimes a gay, relaxed gathering, at others, so one disgruntled guest complained, ‘a trying mixture of court restraint and jollity’, with the ‘dismal mysteries of bridge’ for those who played the game and ‘difficult conversation’ for those who did not. Occasionally the King went to the theatre to attend some light-hearted piece such as Oscar Strauss’s Walzertraum or Lehar’s The Merry Widow, or to listen to Yvette Guilbert, the diseuse whose performances he had much admired since an American friend, Mrs Ogden Goelet, had paid her £600 to break a contract in Paris in order to sing for him at Cannes. And once he went to what was billed as Die Hölle (‘The Underworld’) thinking it was a melodrama. It turned out to be a rather tiresome series of rude songs and recitations performed by a company from a Viennese musichall. When the second act threatened to be no better than the first the King got up and left, as he had left a much coarser performance by a Viennese cabaret singer — who sang a song about a monk who says to a lascivious countess, ‘Were it not for my holy robes’ and receives the reply, ‘Then take off your holy robes’ — which the King had thought disrespectful to the Abbot and monks of Tepl.

The day after he had walked out in boredom from Die Hölle the papers congratulated his Majesty on having made a stand against immorality by having refused to see an improper performance; and soon afterwards a letter arrived from England from William Boyd Carpenter, Bishop of Ripon, expressing the satisfaction of the whole Church at the protest the King had made against obscene musical comedy. The King’s secretary wanted to know how to reply to this letter. ‘Tell the Bishop the exact truth,’ the King replied. ‘I have no wish to pose as a protector of morals, especially abroad.’

The King was certainly more used to being criticized for depraving morals at Marienbad than praised for protecting them. He was only too liable to pick up curious people and ask them to luncheon, Frederick Ponsonby admitted.

Monsieur and Madame de Varrue came one day. She had been a noted beauty in Paris, and had late in life married a young man who suddenly called himself Baron de Varrue … Mrs Dale Lace, with an eye glass, short skirts and a murky past, also came to luncheon and some of the were shocked, although she amused the King … Life at Marienbad was very hard work, as I spent so much time seeing people who were difficult to get rid of. For instance … a beautiful lady from the half-world in Vienna who wanted to have the honour of sleeping with the King. On being told this was out of the question, she said if it came to the worst she would sleep with me, so that she should not waste the money spent on her ticket.

‘A cloud of bluebottle flie constantly buzzed round the King,’ one British visitor complained in 1904. He was ‘recklessly abandoned to the society of a few semi-déclassé ladies and men to match’, though he was ‘civil enough to decent people’ and ‘followed the cure loyally’. In 1905 he was deemed to be ‘less evilly surrounded than in other years’ and the ‘doubtful ladies’ were ‘rather out of it’. But it was still well enough known that doubtful ladies continued to seek his company, that he was rarely averse to theirs, and that he found Marienbad a very convenient place in which to meet them. Sophie Hall Walker, whose husband, breeder of the King’s Derby winner, Minoru, became the first Lord Wavertree, was one of his favourite companions. And the daughter of Sir Charles Gill, another Marienbad habitué, remembered how in the afternoons she used to watch fascinated as Mrs Hall Walker’s hotel room was prepared for a teatime visit by the King, how flowers were placed in big vases, the air sprayed with scent and the curtains drawn.

The American actress, Maxine Elliott, who was not invited to dinner parties in London by those hostesses generally known to entertain the King, confessed that she went to Marienbad, ‘where matters could be more easily arranged’, with the sole purpose of getting to know him. Sailing out to Bohemia with a socially impeccable American woman friend, she took rooms in a hotel near the Weimar and soon learned the King’s routine. Thus it was that one fine morning, the delightful, beautifully dressed figure of Maxine Elliott was to be seen sitting on a bench near the Kurhaus, apparently absorbed in a book. The King approached, attended by Frederick Ponsonby, Sidney Greville and Seymour Fortescue; Miss Elliott raised her eyes from her book; the King glanced into them; the royal party walked past. Then one of the King’s attendants returned to the bench with a message: ‘His Majesty believes you are the Miss Elliott he admired so much in your play. His Majesty would be delighted with your presence tonight for dinner. Mrs Arthur James is giving a dinner in His Majesty’s honour. 7.45 at the Weimar Hotel. Your invitation will, of course, be delivered to your hotel.’ After a further visit to Marienbad in a subsequent year, during which she was seen frequently in the King’s company, Miss Elliott was sufficiently assured of his interest in her to buy a house in England, Hartsbourne Manor at Bushey Heath, where she spent a great deal of money on a suite of rooms above her own which she referred to as ‘the King’s suite’.

Every second day a bag of royal mail arrived from England together with a generous selection of English newspapers which the King read carefully, looking also through various French newspapers and the Vienna Neue Freie Presse so that when one of his ministers joined him at Marienbad he was found to be well informed of what was happening elsewhere.

Frequently in his company was Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, who, mainly for the sake of his wife, Charlotte, had been a regular visitor to the spa for many years. Campbell-Bannerman had disapproved of the King before he got to know him well, just as the King had supposed that he would have little in common with Sir Henry, whom he had expected to find ‘prosy and heavy’. At first the King had taken little notice of him; but one day he asked him to luncheon and found him, contrary to all his expectations, very good company with a fund of amusing stories, ‘repartees, jokes and gastronomic appreciations’. Thereafter the King sought him out and spent many pleasant hours with him — too many hours, in fact, for the taste of Campbell-Bannerman, who, having been asked to lunch or dinner almost every day in September 1905, complained, ‘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. Thus when at last he was gone … my Dr ordered me to bed and absolute rest for forty-eight hours.’

Sometimes the King talked politics to him, but more often the conversation was on less weighty subjects. A picture of them both talking earnestly in the gardens of the Kurhaus appeared in an illustrated paper. The King was shown striking his palm with a clenched fist in emphasis of some point to which Campbell-Bannerman was paying close attention. Underneath the picture was the caption, ‘Is it peace or war?’ When Campbell-Bannerman’s private secretary showed him the paper, his master examined it for a few moments before asking the secretary if he would like to know what was being discussed. The secretary said that he would. ‘The King wanted to have my opinion,’ Campbell-Bannerman informed him, ‘whether halibut is better baked or boiled!’

17 L’Oncle de l’Europe

‘The more you know of him,’ Whitelaw Reid, the American Ambassador in London wrote to President Roosevelt about King Edward in 1907, ‘the better I am sure you will like him, and the more you will come to the prevalent English, and, in fact, European belief, that he is the greatest mainstay of peace in Europe.’

The King’s reputation as a diplomatist of unique influence was prodigious. ‘He is, and this one cannot deny, the arbiter of Europe’s destiny, the most powerful personal factor in world policy,’ the Italian Foreign Minister told the French Ambassador in Rome. ‘And, as he is for peace, his overall approach will serve above all to maintain harmony between the nations.’ The King was widely supposed, in fact, to ‘run the foreign policy of the country’, as Frederick Ponsonby said, a supposition which, Ponsonby thought, may have made Lord Lansdowne ‘a little jealous’ and which, therefore, may have accounted for the rather strained relationship between the King and his Foreign Secretary.

The King’s reputation as an arbiter of foreign policy stood quite as high abroad as it did in England. As the Belgian Chargé d’Affaires in London put it in a report to Brussels in 1907: ‘The English are getting more and more into the habit of regarding international problems as being almost exclusively within the province of King Edward, for whose profound political instinct and fertile diplomacy they, very rightly, feel great respect.’ The King’s views were often considered to be decisive, while his frequent foreign travels — attributed by his detractors as being due to Wanderlust, his determination to emulate the Kaiser, or to a taste for playing an apparently important role in the limelight of the European stage — were followed, watched and reported upon as assiduously as his political opinions were solicited and discussed.

This belief in the King’s virtual omnipotence was particularly strong in less powerful states such as Italy; and even more so in those smaller countries, like Greece, Belgium and Portugal, whose thrones were occupied by monarchs to whom the King felt sympathetically drawn not only by their membership of his own profession but also by family ties. He naturally enjoyed this reputation. The Controller of the Kaiser’s Household, who, in the year before the King’s death, came to the view that his influence was far less than the Germans had always imagined, pictured ‘a sly and amiable smile’ stealing over his face when he thought how the world looked upon him ‘as the guiding spirit of … British diplomacy’. Under no illusions about the limits of his power, the King was nevertheless most insistent that he must be kept fully informed about the course and problems of the government’s foreign policy, either by the Prime Minister, or by the Foreign Secretary if the Prime Minister left the effective control of policy in his Foreign Secretary’s hands. He took particular pleasure in letting fellow-sovereigns know how well-informed he was. One day at Marienbad in 1905, according to Henry Wickham Steed, ‘he chaffed the life out of Ferdinand of Bulgaria, who … always [prided] himself upon being more rapidly informed than anyone else’, because Prince Ferdinand knew nothing about the Japanese Admiral Kaimamura’s destruction of the Russian Vladivostok squadron, of which the King had received advance notice from the Counsellor of the British Embassy in Vienna.

The King’s obvious satisfaction in being entrusted with important confidences, his numerous contacts with ruling dynasties and with important foreign ministers, his charm and tactful good manners, his gift for drawing men out in conversation, and his willingness to listen to them in attentive silence, all stood him in good stead as a roving diplomatist and added to his reputation as an eminent mediator. But after his death it began to be realized that his influence on the conduct of European affairs had, in reality, been far from as effective as had been supposed, and that his views on foreign policy were never consistent and always liable to be influenced by personal considerations and prejudice. The goodwill that he inspired in most European countries, except Germany, together with the dignity of his manner and the forcefulness of his personality when he represented his own country, were fully recognized; yet, as Balfour asked Lord Lansdowne to confirm after the outbreak of the First World War, ‘he never made an important suggestion of any sort on large questions of policy’ during the years when they were both his ministers. Nor did the King ever add the sort of detailed, considered minute which his mother’s ministers had grown to expect from Prince Albert on the Foreign Office dispatches which were sent to him, usually contenting himself with a mere indication of approval or commendation.

When he disagreed with ministerial advice he did not hesitate to put forward his own views, much to the annoyance of the young Eyre Crowe, who was one day to be Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. Crowe was highly critical of the King’s insistence on maintaining his royal authority, and went about maintaining that he ‘must be taught that he is a pawn in the game’. But the King’s obedience to constitutional propriety was far too strong for him to argue with an important Cabinet decision once it had been taken. And far more often than not he had to give way to his government, as when, for example, he endeavoured to prevent the appointment as French Ambassador in London of M. Challemel-Lacour, a supposed Communist, against whom the King had been prejudiced by his aristocratic French friends and by biased reports in Figaro.

Although he allowed himself to be persuaded to accept the appointment of Challemel-Lacour (whom he found on personal acquaintance to be entirely unobjectionable), the King did not always give way without a more determined struggle. This was well exemplified in 1903 when, having visited Portugal — where his presence was interpreted in Berlin as a setback for German ambitions in Africa — the King went on to Italy and decided that, on passing through Rome in April, he ought to pay a visit to the Pope as the Kaiser had twice done.

Influenced by Knollys, who was ‘dead against it’, he had, before leaving England, reluctantly accepted the Cabinet’s advice not to pay the visit. And on 23 March, Knollys had assured Balfour that the King would go only for the day to Rome, where he was to have lunch with King Victor Emmanuel III, and ‘by this arrangement he [would] get out of seeing the Pope’. ‘He hopes the Pope will not be offended by his not calling [on] him,’ Knollys added in a letter to Balfour’s secretary, J.S. Sandars, a few days later. ‘But if he is H.M. cannot help it.’

So it was that on arrival at Malta a telegram had been sent from the royal yacht to Sir Francis Bertie, British Ambassador in Rome, to the effect that owing to the short time that the King was to stay in Rome it was ‘impossible for his Majesty to visit the Pope for whom he [entertained] the highest reverence and respect’. On the very day that this telegram was dispatched from the royal yacht, however, the Foreign Minister’s secretary, Sir Eric Barrington, sent a message, in cipher and marked ‘very confidential’, from London: ‘The King will receive telegram from Prime Minister about Pope. My conviction is that it is intended as a loophole in case King thinks informal visit desirable.’

The next day the Prime Minister’s telegram was deciphered aboard the Victoria and Albert:

Mr Balfour has the honour to report that yesterday the Duke of Norfolk and Lord Edmund Talbot [two leaders of the Roman Catholic community in England] came to see him on the subject of your Majesty’s visit to Rome. They expressed with deep emotion their views on what they declared would be regarded by the Roman Catholic world as a deliberate slight put upon an old and venerable man [aged ninety-three] by your Majesty’s abstaining from visiting the Vatican. They also maintain that while this course would deeply hurt the sentiments of Roman Catholics, the opposite course would raise no widespread ill-feeling among Protestants. Mr Balfour said he deeply regretted that anything should be done to hurt the feelings of the Pope but that he still adhered to the view that there was really great danger of irritating Protestant sentiment if the King of England paid a formal visit to the Roman pontiff … Mr Balfour could not therefore alter the tenor of the advice already given with the concurrence of the Cabinet.

Lord Edmund Talbot was bitterly disappointed when shown a copy of this telegram which, in his opinion, did not give the King ‘any lead’ at all. ‘The whole thing has been deplorably bungled,’ he told Sandars. ‘I have still faith in the King’s good taste to extricate himself from this extremely painful position … [But] I wish the Prime Minister had found it possible to give His Majesty a helping hand.’

Entirely convinced by the arguments put forward by the Duke of Norfolk and Lord Edmund Talbot, and annoyed by the government’s equivocation, the King gave orders for another telegram to be sent requesting less ambiguous advice. Both Balfour and Lansdowne were accordingly informed that the King felt ‘very strongly on the subject’, that he attached ‘great importance to the question’, that on his three previous visits to Rome as Prince of Wales he had invariably visited the Pope, and that not to do so ‘on this occasion would not only be a slight to a venerable Pontiff but would alienate all the King’s Catholic subjects throughout the world. The King deeply [regretted this divergence of his opinion with the Cabinet], but would like to hear from [the Prime Minister] again on the subject.’

This elicited a reply from Balfour again expressing fears that ‘Protestant prejudice might fasten on the visit’ and make trouble in England; and a complementary message from Barrington to Hardinge confirming that Lansdowne nevertheless wanted the visit to be made. ‘The Cabinet dare not recommend the King to go,’ Barrington explained.

‘But evidently A.J.B[alfour] wished the King in such a matter to passer outre of his advisers.’

The King now lost his temper. Demanding straightforward advice he dictated an enraged telegram to Hardinge, who passed it on to Frederick Ponsonby for coding and dispatch. Ponsonby read it with consternation, feeling ‘instinctively that if this message was sent there would be no alternative for Arthur Balfour but to send in his resignation’. Ponsonby, therefore, rewrote the message ‘in conciliatory language’; and at last the King received the sort of reply from the Prime Minister for which he had been hoping:

If the proposed visit could really be made private and unofficial, Mr Balfour would think it an impertinence to offer any observations on it … The whole stress could be laid on the fact that … the Pope was very aged and in course of nature could live but a short time, that he had expressed a personal desire to see your Majesty and that as a matter of courtesy (so to speak) between gentlemen, you could not pass his door without acceding to his wishes.

The King readily accepted this advice, but great difficulty was experienced in persuading the Vatican to intimate that the Pope would like to see him. Cardinal Rampolla, the Papal Secretary of State, intent upon making it appear that the King had requested an audience, assured Monsignor Edmund Stonor, titular Archbishop of Trebizond and a resident English prelate in Rome, that ‘the Holy Father, in consequence of his well-known present position in Rome, could not take the initiative in inviting a sovereign to pay him a visit, but should the King of England wish to do him the courteous attention of calling upon him, this would be acceptable and duly appreciated.’

But the King felt that he could not go to the Vatican unless he was actually invited to go; and any such invitation, Cardinal Rampolla continued to insist to Monsignor Stonor, could not possibly be issued. Faced with this impasse, the Duke of Norfolk decided to intervene personally. He did not trust Monsignor Stonor, considering him ‘stupid and a bungler’, so Francis Bertie told Sandars, and suspecting that he was playing along with Rampolla in the hope of ‘getting his reward’. Under pressure from Norfolk the more reliable Monsignor Merry del Val, the President of the Accademia, who had been to school in England, went to see the Pope personally and, to Cardinal Rampolla’s anger, returned from the Vatican with an acceptable message: ‘His Holiness has personally expressed his concurrence with what the Duke of Norfolk conveyed to His Majesty as to the pleasure which His Holiness would derive from a visit from His Majesty.’

No sooner had the seemingly intractable problem of the invitation been settled, however, than other problems arose. First of all, the Vatican wanted to know, where would the visit be made from? The Pope could not possibly receive the King if he left from the Quirinale, since relations between the Papacy and the Monarchy had been severely strained by the Pope’s loss of his patrimony as a consequence of the unification of Italy. Sir Francis Bertie went to consult King Victor Emmanuel on this point. The Italian King was agreeable and accommodating. He told Bertie that he thought that a visit to the Pope was ‘quite natural and that though it could not be made direct from the Quirinale, there were ways of satisfying the Pope’s susceptibilities’. He cheerfully suggested that King Edward might start his journey from the house of the Minister whom his nephew, the Kaiser, had accredited to the Pope. Bertie, so he reported, ‘treated this suggestion as intended as a joke’.

Meanwhile it seemed to Mr Balfour, so yet another message from London informed the King, ‘that if the Pope lays down from what palaces he will, and from what palaces he will not receive a direct visit from your Majesty, he has not much real ground of complaint if he is not visited at all’. Ignoring this comment, the King decided to make his visit from the British Embassy, and Hardinge was sent to discuss the final arrangements with Cardinal Rampolla. It was not a comfortable interview.

Cardinal Rampolla received me in a most gushing manner [Hardinge reported to Balfour]. His appearance did not impress me. He has a deceitful eye and does not look one straight in the face. He speaks Italian French. He asked if the King would come and call on him and whether he might return the visit to the King at the English College. I told him quite plainly that much as the King would like to make his personal acquaintance there could be no question of his Majesty paying him a visit since the King only paid visits to sovereigns. He at once quoted the precedent of the German Emperor to which I replied that the King of England could not possibly admit that his actions could in any way be bound by precedents set by the German Emperor. I also added that there was no question of the King going to the English College as if he did so he would have to go to the Scotch and Irish Colleges … He then asked if the King would visit St Peter’s as he would like to receive him there … to which I replied that if H.M. went to St Peter’s it would be ‘en touriste’. He also asked if Monsignor Stonor would accompany the King from the Embassy to which I answered that the King proposed to take me in his carriage and that Stonor had better await the King at the Vatican … I impressed upon him that although the King would come in uniform as an act of courtesy to the Pope the visit was to be considered quite private and informal.

Sailing from Malta on 21 April 1903, the Victoria and Albert set course for Naples whence a telegram was dispatched to say that the King would arrive incognito, which seemed ‘rather absurd’ to Frederick Ponsonby since ‘no other human being in the world would come with eight battleships, four cruisers, four destroyers, and a dispatch vessel’.

On stepping ashore at Naples, the first English monarch to set foot there since Richard Coeur de Lion, the King immediately alarmed the Italian police, who had planned to close to the public the museums which he was to visit and to fill the galleries with detectives. He refused to have any police protection, and when two of his suite were asked to walk closely behind him at all times to guard him from the knives and bullets of assassins, he turned round in irritation and sent them off in different directions. He even insisted on exploring the slums of Naples with Queen Amélie of Portugal and Mrs Cornelius Vanderbilt, afterwards listening complacently to a lecture from Charles Hardinge ‘about exposing himself needlessly’.

Bertie reported to Sandars on 26 April:

The King has been very civilly and respectfully received in the streets here. Hats off and some clapping but no cheering. On the other hand at the Opera Gala last night he had an enthusiastic reception — vivas and cheers and clapping of hands several times and lasting some time … There was a great display of jewels but not much beauty. The ballet dancers had pink caleçons which gave them an odd appearance. I believe that King Victor Emmanuel [II], of holy memory, said of a ballet of that kind that if it were not for the clothes it would be paradise.

Two days later the King arrived in Rome feeling rather crotchety and out of sorts. A morose and sleepy guest, he had been entertained at luncheon the previous day by Lord Rosebery, an equally quiet as well as an unwilling host, who had a villa outside Naples and who had employed a firm of caterers to provide the seemingly interminable but indifferent meal of twenty courses which lasted until four o’clock. But although the King’s bad mood worsened as he left for the Vatican and found that the private nature of his visit had been rendered suspect by streets lined with troops and cheering crowds, and although Cardinal Rampolla grumpily declined to be present, the interview with the Pope went off very well.

Hardinge reported to Balfour:

On arrival within the precincts of the Vatican, His Majesty was received with great pomp by a motley and picturesque group of ecclesiastics, chamberlains, officers of the Swiss Guard and of the Noble Guard, many of them in sixteenth century costumes. After the presentations to the King, His Majesty was taken to the Pope’s private apartments where the Pope … a perfect marvel for a man of ninety-three … came to meet him in the ante-room, and took him into an inner room where they remained in conversation for about a quarter of an hour or twenty minutes. The King has told me since that the Pope talked to him of every sort of question — Venezuela, Somaliland, Lord Salisbury, some occasion when he had seen the Queen about forty years ago, etc. The King then sent for us and presented each of us in turn to the Pope.

The King had been careful to warn his suite to show the Pope the utmost respect without prejudicial veneration, to bow as often as they liked but on no account to kiss his ring if it were offered to them. But the Pope, ‘a really fine and dignified old gentleman’, saved them any possible embarrassment by getting out of his chair, shaking hands with everyone in turn and then making a short speech assuring them how happy he was to have had the opportunity of seeing their master.

The visit to the Pope was a happy prelude to the King’s far more politically important visit to Paris the next month. He had made his plans to visit Paris, after going to Portugal and Italy, in ‘the utmost secrecy’, as the Marquis de Soveral told King Carlos I. He had told neither the Queen nor the government, nor even his private secretary, ‘extreme discretion’ being necessary in view of the effect which his journey would have on Russia and Germany. Nor had he told the French President. ‘He does not wish to compromise himself,’ Soveral explained, ‘but wants to be in a position where he can abandon his trip should difficulties crop up.’ When they were informed of the King’s intentions, most of the Cabinet were extremely dubious about the wisdom of a visit to France. Lord Lansdowne warned the King that it might be dangerous in view of French feeling about the Boer War and about the incident at Fashoda in the Upper Nile Valley from which a French detachment had been forced to retreat after a protest at their presence there had been handed to them by General Kitchener. But the King was undeterred. The French President, Emile Loubet, welcomed the idea warmly, telling the British Ambassador, who also approved of it, that ‘he could not lay too much stress on the influence which the King’s presence in Paris would have on friendly relations between the two peoples … His Majesty, while Prince of Wales, had acquired an exceptional popularity; and he would find when he returned that this feeling was as warm as ever … [and] was general among all classes.’

So the government, without enthusiasm, gave their consent to the visit, trusting that their foreboding would not be justified and that the King’s personal reputation in France would avert any serious unpleasantness, even though he was going — as he insisted on going — with ‘all the honours due to the King of England’.

Certainly in earlier years, as President Loubet had said, the King had been very popular in France, where his influence was such that, as the Goncourt brothers noted, ‘the style of handshake with the elbow pressed close to the body’ which became fashionable in about 1895 ‘arose from his having an attack of rheumatism in the shoulder’. Both Queen Victoria and the British Foreign Office had been much concerned by his intimate friendship with the French nobility after the fall of the Second Empire. The Queen had thought it most imprudent of him to offer the house which he had borrowed from the Duke of Devonshire — and to which he referred as ‘notre maison de campagne, “Chiswick”’ — as a refuge to the exiled Empress Eugènie. The government had also been concerned about his equally chivalrous insistence that the highest funeral honours should be paid to the Prince Imperial, who had been killed while serving with the British army in the war against the Zulus in 1879. Arranging for a man-of-war to bring the coffin back to England and acting as pallbearer at the funeral, his generous display of sympathy had been deeply gratifying to the dead man’s mother, the Empress Eugènie; but Disraeli had felt compelled to express the hope that the republican government of France would feel as obliged to him as she was.

Yet the Prince of Wales’s friendship with imperialists and royalists had not in the end hampered his ability to get on well with republicans. A report prepared by the French police in 1874 indicated that there was no political significance in his private friendships with either Orleanists or Bonapartists. This report ran:

Il est très sympathique. C’est le type du gentilhomme anglais; il a les instincts toriés; mais tout le monde s’accorde à dire qu’il fera un excellent roi. Quant à ses opinions relativement à la France, on peut citer la réponse qu’il fit au Général Fleury, lors du voyage du Czar à Londres, ‘Monseigneur,’ disait le Général, ‘on prétend que vous êtes orléaniste.’ ‘Bah! Mon cher Général, rien qu’un petit peu.’

In 1878 the republican government had expressed the wish that the Prince would be appointed President of the British section of the Paris International Exhibition. He had accepted the offer, and had delighted the Parisians by the good-humoured way in which he laughingly acknowledged the cries of ‘Vive la République!’ which were directed at him as he walked by in the procession at the opening ceremony. He also created a favourable impression two days later at a banquet in the Hôtel du Louvre where, in a speech delivered half in English and half in French and without recourse to notes, he gave moving testimony of his love of France and of his conviction that there would now be a period of lasting friendship between that great country and his own. ‘England is very popular here at this moment,’ the British Ambassador had told the Foreign Secretary contentedly the following week. ‘And the Prince of Wales’s visit has been the principal cause of this.’

The Prince had increased that popularity as time went on. He had developed an unlikely but mutually respectful relationship with the ugly, ill-dressed Léon Gambetta, who found it ‘no waste of time to talk with him even over a merry supper’ at the Café Anglais. The Prince had convinced Frenchmen that he sincerely loved France ‘at once gaîment et sérieusement’, as Gambetta put it, despite the colonial rivalry between their country and his which sometimes led to his being cruelly lampooned in the French press and execrated by the Parisian mob. And he had allayed disappointment at his refusal in 1889 to bestow his official favour on an International Exhibition in Paris on the anniversary of the outbreak of the French Revolution — on the grounds that its inspiration was anti-monarchical — by visiting the Exhibition privately with his wife and children, making another family excursion to the new iron tower whose marvels were explained to them by its designer, Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, and going to the Elysée to repay a visit made to him by the President, Sadi Carnot. When Carnot was assassinated he went out of his way to display his sympathy by calling in person at the French Embassy to offer his condolences to the Ambassador and attending the requiem Mass in the French chapel in Leicester Square. He had always been equally punctilious in his attentions to Carnot’s successors, particularly to Loubet, who became President in 1899.

Since then, however, the former happy relationship between the King and the French Republic — clouded first by the Fashoda crisis and then by the vociferous pro-Boer sympathies of the French people and press — had been further overcast by his decision not to make his annual visit to France in 1900 as a protest against the savage ridicule of the royal family by Anglophobic journalists and caricaturists. He had also declined to attend the opening of the International Exhibition in Paris that year; and when Lord Salisbury pressed him to do so in the interests of Anglo– French relations, he had produced an exceptionally scurrilous article in La Patrie and had reiterated his determination to make his displeasure known by his absence. The following year he had been even more exasperated by caricatures in Le Rire.

But by 1903 the King had decided that the time had come to make the quarrel up. Feeling against England was still quite strong, as he knew only too well. A special number of the weekly paper L’Assiette au Beurre — devoted to British concentration camps in South Africa and concluding with a rude drawing of Britannia, ‘L’Impudique Albion’, lifting her skirts to reveal buttocks imprinted with the unmistakable features of King Edward VII — sold more than a quarter of a million copies. And several nationalist journals, notably Libre Parole, La Patrie and L’Autorité, maintained an uncompromisingly anti-British tone in every issue. Yet he believed that he must now make an official visit in an effort to bring about the détente which both governments desired, hoping that his personal popularity amongst most people in Paris would help them to regard his country in a more friendly way.

His reception, as he drove from the Porte Dauphine railway station in the Bois de Boulogne down the Champs Elysées, was not altogether encouraging. Most of the crowd watched in silence. A few hats were raised. There was a little scattered cheering — more, however, for the President than the King. But the loudest shouts — fortunately directed at the King’s suite, particularly at Frederick Ponsonby, who was wearing a red military coat, rather than at the King himself — were ‘Vive Fashoda!’

‘Vivent les Boers!’ and ‘Vive Jeanne d’Arc!’ Once or twice a voice shouted quite a long sentence which the English visitors could not catch but which was greeted by loud laughter from the crowd.

‘The French don’t like us,’ one of the King’s suite remarked; and the King curtly observed, ‘Why should they?’ He seemed in excellent spirits, though, glancing to right and left, acknowledging the infrequent acclamations with a smile and polite nod of the head, sitting straight-backed as the carriage rolled by.

After paying a state visit to the President at the Elysée, he drove to the British Embassy where, in reply to an address presented to him by the British Chamber of Commerce, he made a highly effective speech which had been prepared for him by Hardinge. Dinner at the Embassy was followed by a performance of Maurice Donnay’s L’Autre Danger at the Théâtre Français where the audience seemed rather nervous and reserved. Displaying not the least affront at his unenthusiastic reception, he left the loge during the entr’acte, to the evident consternation of the police, and walked about with the rest of the audience as though he felt as much at home as he would have done at Drury Lane, proudly wearing the Grand Cordon of the Légion d’Honneur on his starched shirt front. Noticing the actress Jeanne Granier, he walked up to greet her, kissing her hand and carefully enunciating in French, in a voice loud enough for others to hear, the so often quoted words, ‘Ah, Mademoiselle, I remember how I applauded you in London where you represented all the grace, all the esprit of France.’

The next morning that remark was repeated everywhere in Paris as the people read reports in the newspapers of the King’s speech at the British Embassy in which he had referred to his great pleasure at being once more ‘in this beautiful city’ and to the friendship and admiration which he and his countrymen felt ‘for the French nation and their glorious traditions’.

Willing to respond to these sincere overtures, the Parisians greeted him more warmly as he drove out that morning to a military review held in his honour at Vincennes, where, to the crowd’s obvious delight, he simulated the greatest relief and surprise when six cavalry regiments, charging headlong towards his stand with sabres and lances flashing in the air, came to a sudden halt beneath him. He turned round to the President to give him a hearty handshake.

The more extreme nationalists still shouted patriotic slogans and rude remarks; but, as the British Ambassador said, it was easy to perceive that there was in general ‘a marked increase in cordiality’. Although there was little obvious enthusiasm on the road to Vincennes, which took the King through the poorer quarters of Paris, there were far fewer catcalls than there had been the day before. And it gave the people evident satisfaction to see how gravely and conscientiously the King raised his hand in salute to the flags that lined the route of the procession. At the Hôtel de Ville — where the crowds cheered as the royal standard was unfurled on the flag-staff — the King once more assured his hosts in his clear and confident French that it was always with the greatest pleasure that he returned to Paris — ‘o? je me trouve toujours comme si j’étais chez moi’.

As he sat down he received ‘a tremendous ovation’, according to Frederick Ponsonby, who had described the atmosphere the day before as having been ‘distinctly antagonistic’. ‘He now seemed to have captured Paris by storm. From that moment everything was changed wherever he went. Not only the King but all of the suite were received with loud and repeated cheering. It was a most marvellous transformation.’ As the British Ambassador confirmed a few days later, the visit had proved a success ‘more complete than the most sanguine optimist could have foreseen’. ‘Seldom has such a complete change of attitude been seen,’ the Belgian Minister in Paris thought, ‘as that which has taken place in this country … towards England and her Sovereign.’

That evening, on his way from a state banquet at the Elysée to the Opéra, the King was made to feel that all restraint had been abandoned and all reservations overcome. He seemed now to have entirely won the people over. Cheering crowds blocked the path of his carriage, shouting ‘Vive Edouard!’ ‘Notre bon Edouard!’ ‘Vive notre roi!’ These shouts were repeated whenever he thereafter appeared; and on 4 May as the King left the Embassy for the Gare des Invalides where the royal train was waiting to take him to Cherbourg, the crowds’ parting ovation was described in Paris newspapers as being ‘délirant’, ‘fer vent’, ‘passionnant’, ‘excitant’.

He had spoken of strengthening the bonds of friendship between the two countries, and of their mutual desire to ‘march together in the path of civilization and peace’. And certainly most Frenchmen — supposing the King’s powers to be far greater than they were — believed that whither he wished to march, Englishmen would follow and that he himself was wholeheartedly committed to bringing about a lasting friendship with their country.

In England, however, public opinion still regarded the entente with France suspiciously; and it was to be many years yet before that suspicion, which was never completely to disappear, began at last to dissolve. There could be no doubt, though, that King Edward’s charm and personality helped to hasten its dissolution and to make the entente cordiale a reality.

His reputation as the sole originator of the entente is undeserved. It ignores the patient work of Lord Lansdowne (who had a French grandmother), Paul Cambon, French Ambassador in London, and Théophile Delcassé, who told a friend on taking office in 1898, ‘I do not wish to leave this desk without having restored the good understanding with England.’ It also ignores England’s need to end her isolation from the continental powers and to overcome her colonial difficulties, particularly in Africa. But as Sir Sidney Lee said, ‘the credit for influencing public opinion not only in France but also in England in favour of the entente, the credit for lulling the French suspicions of perfidy Albion and English suspicions of France, the credit for creating an atmosphere in which agreement could be reached, must go to Edward VII.’

The King was also to be given credit for helping to preserve the entente in its delicate infancy. He warmly welcomed President Loubet to England on his return visit in July 1903, making gracious little speeches in praise of Franco–British friendship, and giving orders for the Marseillaise to be played in full, triumphantly, on all occasions. And when twelve French battleships arrived at Portsmouth in August 1905, at the invitation of ‘King Edward and his government’, he ensured that they were given a reception which the French sailors would never forget and which their compatriots would appreciate as a symbol of the King’s firm commitment to the long life of the entente.

Clearing the way for the entente was the King’s greatest achievement. In no other sphere of foreign policy did he achieve a comparable success. The government, nevertheless, often had cause to feel grateful for his taste for foreign travel as well as for his international contacts. He was generally quite willing to interrupt a holiday when occasion demanded, to go to a royal funeral in Spain, for instance, or to distribute a few Victorian Orders in Portugal where he was on excellent terms with King Carlos, though the Portuguese nobles always reminded him of ‘waiters at second-rate restaurants’. Apart from the King of the Belgians, whom he grew to despise and distrust, there were few European sovereigns with whom he could not have a useful and pleasant conversation; while his known liking for America and Americans was by no means a negligible factor in Anglo–American relations. He much enjoyed the company of Whitelaw Reid, the American Ambassador in London. And, when England and the United States had quarrelled so bitterly over a border dispute between Venezuela and British Guiana in 1895 that war had seemed imminent, he had helped to calm the storm by the tone of his reply to a telegram sent to him by Joseph Pulitzer, whom he had met at Homburg. When Pulitzer’s telegram requesting his views on the critical issue had arrived in London, he had shown it to the Prime Minister, who had deprecated his decision to answer it. But the warm and conciliatory reply which had none the less been dispatched, and which Pulitzer had prominently published in his paper, the New York World, had soothed many ruffled tempers on the other side of the Atlantic.

Much as the King normally enjoyed travelling, the experience was not always a pleasurable one. As Prince of Wales, for example, he had been asked to go to Ireland in 1885 when feeling in the south was running harder than usual against the English. Understandably annoyed that the government were neither willing to pay his expenses nor to request him officially to make a journey from which, as he pointed out, he could hardly expect to derive any ‘personal pleasure’, he was reluctant to go. But as soon as the government agreed to authorize the visit officially and to pay for it, he sailed for Dublin with the Princess Alexandra and his elder son. Their reception in Dublin and in the North was welcoming enough; but in Cork, where they were booed and pelted with onions, it was, as the Prince’s equerry reported, ‘a nightmare’. ‘The streets were filled with sullen faces — hideous, dirty, cruel countenances, hissing and grimacing into one’s very face, waving black flags and black kerchiefs… No one who went through this day will ever forget it … It was like a bad dream. The Prince of Wales showed the greatest calmness and courage.’

So, too, he did when, despite the unrest in St Petersburg, he insisted on leaving for Russia to attend the funeral of Tsar Alexander II, who had been killed by a bomb which had been flung at him as he was returning to the Winter Palace from a military review. Grave doubts were expressed for the Prince’s safety. But neither he nor Princess Alexandra, who was the new Tsarina’s sister, had any doubt that they ought to go. And Lord Granville, the Foreign Secretary, considered that there were strong diplomatic advantages to be gained. ‘I have no doubt that your Royal Highness’s visit will be productive of good,’ Granville wrote to him.

‘There can be no question that a good understanding and friendly relations between this country and Russia may be of immense advantage to both.’

So the Prince and Princess sailed for St Petersburg, where they were given the doubtful assurance by the Minister of the Interior that, provided they did not go about in the new Tsar’s company, they were unlikely to suffer the same fate as his father.

Tsar Alexander III himself, who joined the Prince and Princess at the gloomy and heavily guarded Anichkov Palace after the funeral, was virtually a prisoner there, taking exercise in a narrow courtyard, not daring to go out for fear of the bombs of the nihilists. It was ‘a great consolation’ to have the Prince and Princess there with him, he told Queen Victoria; and he was obviously deeply moved when the Prince invested him with the Order of the Garter, which he had sought permission to do before leaving London. The British Ambassador, Lord Dufferin, thought that ‘nothing could have been in better taste, or more gracefully delivered’ than the Prince’s brief speech on that occasion. Indeed, Dufferin, who had been held responsible by Queen Victoria for any unpleasant incident and was naturally greatly relieved when the visit was over, considered that, from a diplomatic point of view, it had been a marked success. Apart from any other consideration, the Prince had ‘shown all Europe how ready he had been to do a kindness to a near relative, in spite of any personal risk to himself ’.

On the death of Alexander III a few years later, the Prince again visited Russia and once more served his country well by his conduct there. The Prime Minister, Lord Rosebery, had urged him to attend the funeral and to take advantage of the opportunity to endear himself to his nephew, the new Tsar, Nicholas II, who was then twenty-six. But the Prince needed no persuasion. He had left London with Princess Alexandra immediately on hearing of Alexander III’s illness, and was in Vienna when he heard of his death. He told Prince George to join him in St Petersburg not only out of respect for ‘poor dear Uncle Sasha’s memory’, but also because ‘the opportunity to see the great capital of Russia’ was ‘not one to be missed’. ‘Poor Mama is terribly upset,’ he added. ‘This is indeed the most trying and sad journey I have ever undertaken.’

Once in St Petersburg the Prince uncomplainingly performed all the duties that were expected of him with the utmost conscientiousness. He attended the daily and appallingly tedious services in the fortress church of St Peter and St Paul; he displayed no sign of fatigue or restlessness during the final four-hour-long funeral service, nor any distaste when he was required to kiss the lips of the evil-smelling corpse, which had not been embalmed until three days after death. He made himself agreeable to everyone, winning ‘golden opinions’, Princess Alexandra’s woman-of-the-bedchamber, Charlotte Knollys, said, ‘by all the kind feeling he [had] shown’, even to the King of Serbia — whom all the Russian high nobility ignored because he was so uncouth — and particularly to the young Tsar, whom he described as ‘shy and timid’ and, despite his autocratic views, ‘weak as water’. All the same, he had grown quite fond of him and, in return, the Tsar was now prepared to inscribe himself to his ‘dearest Uncle Bertie’ as ‘ever your most loving nephew, Nicky’.

Lord Rosebery warmly congratulated him on his arrival home, assuring him that he had never stood so high in national esteem, that he had made the most of his opportunity, justified the highest anticipations and rendered a ‘signal service’ to his country ‘as well as to Russia and the peace of the world’.

Thereafter, although he disapproved of the Tsar’s autocratic outlook and was frequently suspicious of Russia’s ‘promises and protestations’, he strove as King towards détente with Russia, stressing in his correspondence with the Tsar his desire to come to a ‘satisfactory settlement… similar to the one … concluded with France’. Hearing, in Scotland in 1906, that Baron Isvolsky, the Russian Foreign Minister, was in Paris, the King returned to London at once in the hope that a meeting might be arranged. Responding to the King’s overture, Isvolsky came to London for discussions which, as Hardinge said, ‘were entirely due to King Edward’s initiative [and] helped materially to smooth the path of the negotiations then in progress for an agreement with Russia’. This, Hardinge added, ‘was just one of those many instances when King Edward’s “flair” for what was right was so good and beneficial to our foreign relations’.

The King’s diplomatic skills were again appreciated in 1908 when he met the Tsar at Tallinn, then known as Revel, a meeting arranged — after the signing of the convention with Russia — in the hope that better relations might be established between the King and the Tsar, who, uneasy about England’s ties with Japan, had not long before condemned the King as ‘the greatest mischief-maker and the most deceitful and dangerous intriguer in the world’. Hardinge was worried on this occasion by the King’s intention both to raise the delicate question of the persecution of Russian Jews, about which he had received a memorandum from Lord Rothschild, and to mention Sir Ernest Cassel’s interest in the flotation of a Russian loan. To raise the question of the Jews was considered not to be ‘constitutionally right or proper’, while to become involved at the same time in a business transaction on behalf of a Jewish financier was held ‘to be unwise to say the least’. His concern for the welfare of the Jews, however, and his desire to oblige an old friend overrode considerations of prudence. So both the pogroms and the loan were mentioned. But although the King clearly questioned Sir Arthur Nicolson, British Ambassador in St Petersburg, on all sorts of subjects which he thought might crop up in discussions with the Tsar, little else of political importance was discussed. And neither were the pogroms halted, nor did the loan materialize. Yet, as Nicolson acknowledged, the meeting was a notable success. The Russian Prime Minister, Stolypin, was greatly impressed by the King’s unexpected knowledge of Russian affairs which, thanks to Nicolson, he had been able to parade. ‘Ah,’ Stolypin commented, ‘on voit bien que c’est un homme d’état!’ At the same time, the Tsar ‘repeatedly expressed his great satisfaction at the visit of the King and Queen’. It had, he said, ‘sealed and confirmed the intention and spirit of the Anglo–Russian agreement’, so Hardinge reported to Edward Grey; and the Tsar was convinced ‘that the friendly sentiments which now prevailed between the two governments could only mature and grow stronger … A glance at the Russian press of all shades and opinions shows conclusively how extremely popular throughout Russia the King’s visit had become, and how it was welcomed as the visible sign of a new era in Anglo–Russian relations.’

The King was criticized for declining to take a Cabinet minister with him on the grounds that to have done so ‘would have made him feel like a prisoner handcuffed to a warder while conversing with his relatives through a grille’. And he was also censured for having made the Tsar an Admiral of the Fleet without consulting Reginald McKenna, the First Lord of the Admiralty. He accepted the criticism in good part. As Knollys explained to the Prime Minister, Asquith:

He had never thought of proposing that the Emperor of Russia should be appointed an Admiral of the Fleet until the idea suddenly struck him at Revel. [He explained] that he was totally unaware of the constitutional point or else he certainly would not have said anything to the Emperor without first consulting you and Mr McKenna and that he regretted he had, without knowing it, acted irregularly … He was always anxious to keep on the best of terms with his ministers … Nothing could have been ‘nicer’ or more friendly than he was.

The King’s errors, in fact, such as they were, were minor in comparison with the rapport established at Tallinn with the Tsar, who openly admitted to having got on much better with the King than he had done the year before with the Kaiser at Björkö. But reading reports of the King of England’s friendly conversations with the Tsar, the Germans, alarmed by the possible consequences of the meeting, spoke again of ‘encirclement’ and ‘English machinations’.

18 The King and the Kaiser

The King’s relations with Germany had never been easy. Persistent trouble in the past had been caused by his frequent displays of sympathy for the family of the last King of Hanover, whose son, the Duke of Cumberland, had married Queen Alexandra’s youngest sister, Thyra. Hanover had found itself on the losing side in the Austro–Prussian War of 1866, and had subsequently been incorporated in the German Empire. The King, as Prince of Wales, had constantly supported the Hanoverians in their attempts to regain their confiscated fortune and territories. Nor had he hesitated to raise the awkward question of their restitution whenever opportunity offered or, when the old King of Hanover died in exile in Paris, to walk at the head of a long procession of mourners at the funeral. This occasion, attended by numerous of the Prince’s Royalist and Bonapartist friends, had assumed the nature of an anti-Prussian demonstration.

There had also been trouble over the Prince of Wales’s known sympathy for France during the Franco–Prussian War. He had been reported as having actually expressed his hopes of a Prussian defeat at a dinner at the French Embassy soon after the War began; and although Francis Knollys had assured Count von Bernstorff, the Prussian Ambassador in London, that the close family connection which the Prince ‘enjoyed with Prussia’ made it impossible for him ‘to entertain the opinion which he was alleged to have expressed’, Bernstorff had not been convinced. Nor had Prince Bismarck, the Imperial Chancellor, who had gone so far as to complain in public that their country had an enemy in the heir to the British throne.

The Prince of Wales had given further offence to Bismarck a few years later when the Prince’s nineteen-year-old niece, Princess Victoria, daughter of the Crown Princess of Prussia, had fallen in love with Prince Alexander of Battenberg, who had been chosen to rule Bulgaria, after its liberation from the Turks, as a Russian nominee. He was a most charming young man, handsome and gifted; but there had not only been strong political objections to the marriage, there had also been the dynastic objection that Prince Alexander was the child of a morganatic marriage between Prince Alexander of Hesse and a Polish countess. Princess Victoria’s mother, however, had dismissed these obstacles as of little importance. And so had her brother, the Prince of Wales. He had considered that Prince Alexander was just the husband for his young niece; and, after long and pleasant conversations with him at Darmstadt, where they had both attended the wedding of Prince Alexander’s brother, Prince Louis of Battenberg, the Prince of Wales had taken Prince Alexander on to Berlin where the Crown Prince had been persuaded by his wife and brother-in-law that Prince Alexander was, indeed, a worthy suitor.

The Crown Prince’s father, the old Kaiser Wilhelm I, had certainly not been persuaded, though. Nor had the Crown Prince’s son, Prince Wilhelm, then aged twenty-five, and strongly opposed to his parents’ liberal outlook. Nor had Prince Bismarck, who had spoken to the Prince of Wales about the insignificance of romantic love in comparison with a country’s destiny. Disregarding both Bismarck’s rebuke and the Kaiser’s ban on any further discussions about the possibility of such an unsuitable match, the Prince of Wales and his sister had arranged for a secret meeting between the two young lovers, who had been encouraged to believe that, although the marriage could not take place while the Kaiser was still alive, the situation would be transformed once the old man was dead.

Queen Victoria had been entirely on Prince Alexander’s side. At the Darmstadt wedding of her granddaughter, Princess Victoria of Hesse, to Prince Louis of Battenberg, she had fallen under Prince Alexander’s spell herself. She had found him not only ‘very fascinating’ and ‘a person in whose judgment’ she ‘would have great confidence’, but even to be compared with Prince Albert. ‘I think he may stand next to beloved Papa,’ she had written at that time. ‘I think him (as in beloved Papa’s case) so wonderfully handsome.’ So annoyed had she been, indeed, that the marriage between this paragon and her granddaughter, Princess Victoria, had been forbidden in Berlin that when Prince Wilhelm had proposed to visit England, she had let it be known that he would not be welcome at Windsor. Delighted to have an excuse not to have the tiresome young man at Sandringham either, the Prince of Wales had explained to him that he could hardly go to England to stay with his uncle if he could not call on his grandmother: so the visit had better be cancelled. Prince Wilhelm had, therefore, remained in Germany where he had gone about making insulting remarks about his uncle and referring to his grandmother as an ‘old hag’. He had come to England with his father for Queen Victoria’s Jubilee two years later; but his uncle, that ‘old peacock’, had virtually ignored him.

Within a year of the Jubilee, however, it was impossible to ignore the egregious young man any longer. For in March 1888 his grandfather had died at last; less than four months later his father, Frederick III, had also died; and on 15 June 1888, at the age of twenty-nine, he had become Kaiser himself.

Impulsive and theatrical, Kaiser Wilhelm II was capable of exercising great charm. He was undoubtedly clever and could be lively and amusing in conversation, although the encouraging laughter of his entourage would often drive him on to excessive hilarity and to that kind of boisterous, bullying banter into which so many of Queen Victoria’s descendants all too easily lapsed. John Morley wrote after meeting him at luncheon:

He is rather short, pale, but sunburnt; carries himself well; walks into the room with the stiff pride of the Prussian soldier; speaks with a good deal of intense and energetic pleasure, not like a Frenchman, but staccato; his voice strong but pleasant; his eye bright, clear and full; mouth resolute, the cast of face grave or almost stem in repose, but as he sat between two pretty women he lighted up with gaiety and a genial laugh. Energy, rapidity, restlessness in every movement from his short, quick inclinations of the head to the planting of the foot.

A compulsive exhibitionist, he was insatiably fond of talking, determined in his efforts to bring all those in his company to agree with what he said, and ever on the watch for an opportunity to demonstrate the breadth of his knowledge or the retentiveness of his memory. Frederick Ponsonby recalled one embarrassing occasion when the Kaiser asked him across the dinner table how many members there were of the London County Council and how many years elapsed between elections. Ponsonby, not very certain of his facts, answered as best he could.

‘I don’t think you’re right,’ the Kaiser commented and thereupon gave the exact figures. Presumably he had committed them to memory, as he learned by heart the statistics of all the most modern ships in the Royal Navy so as to impress any British Admiral with whom he might find himself in conversation, but his easy and irritating display of detailed information was nevertheless ‘effective’, as Ponsonby said, ‘and everyone present marvelled at his knowledge’.

Disliking the Kaiser, to whom he referred as ‘William the Great’, and dismayed that so sudden an end had been put to his hopes of regulating Anglo–German relations in partnership — as senior partner — with his good-natured, amenable brother-in-law, the Prince of Wales had taken little trouble to disguise his dislike or to guard his tongue when speaking of his nephew. He compared him unfavourably with his father, Frederick III, and maintained that his ‘illustrious nephew’ needed to learn that he was ‘living at the end of the nineteenth century and not in the Middle Ages’. The Prince also disliked the Kaiser’s Foreign Minister, Count Herbert Bismarck, son of the Chancellor, who, in turn, made no secret of the fact that he ‘hated the Prince of Wales’. When Bismarck quarrelled with Sir Robert Morier, British Ambassador in St Petersburg who had been a friend of the Empress Frederick when serving in the British Legation at Darmstadt in the Franco–Prussian War, the Prince intervened in the quarrel so vigorously that the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, was forced to conclude that the Prince had been impulsive and indiscreet and that he persistently offended the Kaiser — as he put it on another occasion — by treating him ‘as an uncle treats a nephew, instead of recognizing that he was an emperor’. Soon afterwards the Kaiser was reported — later, he said, falsely reported — to have made it plain that, on a forthcoming state visit to Vienna, the continued presence of his uncle at the Grand Hotel, where the Prince was then staying on holiday, would not be acceptable to him. And the British Ambassador in Vienna, Sir Augustus Paget, was therefore given the unpleasant duty of informing the Prince that the Austrian Emperor would be grateful if he left the city before the Kaiser arrived. Paget subsequently reported to the Prince:

I am perfectly certain, from what has been told me, that all the present trouble comes from stories having been repeated to [the Kaiser] of what Your Royal Highness has said. Some of those stories have been repeated to me. I need not say that I do not believe them, but it is necessary to avoid saying anything whatsoever which may be made use of as a foundation for the gossip of the malevolent or idle … [I must emphasize] the all importance of Your Royal Highness being more than guarded in anything you say about the Emperor William.

The Queen had had a good deal of sympathy for her son in this squabble with the Kaiser and in his insistence that he ought to receive from him a written apology for having said that he did not wish to meet the Prince of Wales in Vienna. She had told Lord Salisbury that it was ‘really too vulgar and too absurd to suggest that the one treated the other as a nephew rather than as an emperor’. It showed ‘a very unhealthy and unnatural state of mind’; and the Kaiser ‘must be made to feel that his grandmother and uncle [would] not stand such insolence’. The Queen would ‘not swallow this affront’, and the ‘Prince of Wales must not submit to such treatment’ by ‘such a hot-headed, conceited, and wrong-headed young man’ who was ‘devoid of all feeling’. Yet she was forced to agree that the political relations of the German and British governments ought ‘not to be affected (if possible) by these miserable and personal quarrels’; and she sent her son-in-law, Prince Christian, to Berlin to see what he could do to bring about a family reconciliation.

On his arrival in Berlin, Prince Christian was assured by the Kaiser that he had never said he did not want to meet his uncle in Vienna; but since, as he continued to insist, this was ‘not a simple affair between uncle and nephew, but between Emperor and Prince of Wales’, he was not prepared to send a written explanation. Nor did he do so, merely writing in reply to a letter from the Queen — which the Prince deemed ‘rather too mild’ — that the whole Vienna affair was ‘absolutely invented, there not being an atom of a cause to be found’. The whole thing was ‘a fixed idea which originated either in Uncle Bertie’s imagination, or in somebody else’s.’ And with this, the Prince had to be content. ‘What a triumph for the Bismarcks, as well as for Willy,’ the Prince commented gloomily to his sister. ‘Lord Salisbury was consulted by [the Queen], and he gave her the worst possible advice, making us virtually to “eat humble pie”!’

Yet despite this quarrel, when the Kaiser came to England in the summer of 1889, he showed himself so determined to be pleasant that Knollys was able to assure the Prime Minister that he and the Prince of Wales had succeeded in getting along perfectly well together. The Kaiser had obviously been delighted to be made an honorary Admiral of the Fleet and to be proposed for membership of the Royal Yacht Squadron; while the Prince — though his temper was rather frayed by an attack of phlebitis and he still thought that ‘Willy [was] a bully’ — had decided that his nephew was certainly a good deal less combative than he had been formerly. On the day of the Kaiser’s departure, Joseph Chamberlain declared in a speech at Leicester that ‘no far-seeing English statesman could be content with England’s permanent isolation on the continent of Europe’, and that the ‘natural alliance’ was between England and ‘the great German Empire’. The Prince of Wales would not have put it as strongly as that, but he was now more inclined to assent to an Anglo– German understanding. Accordingly, the Prince’s return visit to Berlin the next year was as successful as the Kaiser’s visit to England. The Prince — who had shown no resentment that his nephew was now an Emperor while he was still a powerless heir — told Queen Victoria that he had been treated ‘quite like a sovereign’ in Germany and that his only regret was that his expenses had ‘in consequence been heavy’.

It was almost the last time that the Prince wrote well of his nephew, about whom nothing annoyed him more than his determination to shine at Cowes as a brilliant yachtsman and as master of an increasingly powerful navy. Until the Kaiser decided to become what the Prince, in the hearing of Baron von Eckardstein, called ‘the boss of Cowes’, it was the Prince himself who was the star of the annual regatta. He was Commodore of the Royal Yacht Squadron as well as of the Royal Thames Yacht Club; he was President of the Yacht Racing Association; and he was extremely proud that his own racing cutter, Britannia, with himself aboard, had won many an important race and was, indeed, in his own estimation, ‘the first racing yacht afloat’. But the Kaiser had spoiled all that. In 1893 he had appeared at Cowes with a new yacht of his own, Meteor I, with which he had the satisfaction of beating the King in the race for the Queen’s Cup. And thereafter he had bombastically set about using Cowes as a showplace for the latest warships of the German navy.

In 1895 he arrived in the imperial yacht, Hohenzollern, escorted by Germany’s two newest warships, Wörth and Weissenburg, both named after German victories during the Franco–Prussian War. And on 6 August, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the victory at Wörth, he chose to address his sailors in a vainglorious speech which the Prince of Wales denounced as an affront to his hosts and which provoked journalistic warfare between the English and German press.

Having already antagonized the regatta committee by ostentatiously withdrawing Meteor I from the race for the Queen’s Cup on the grounds that the handicapping was unfair to him, the Kaiser exasperated his uncle two days later at a dinner party aboard the Osborne. A quarrel had broken out between France and England over a border dispute in the Far East, and there was even talk of war. The Kaiser was in an exceptionally boisterous mood that evening; and, heedless of his uncle’s excessive sensitivity about never having been on active service, slapped him on the back — on the front, one eyewitness told Baron von Eckardstein — and cried out, ‘So, then, you’ll soon be off to India to show what you’re good for as a soldier.’

Before leaving Cowes that year the Kaiser approached George Lennox Watson, the designer of the three-hundred-ton Britannia, and ordered a yacht which would be even bigger than that and even faster than Meteor I. The Prince could not cope with this. He sold Britannia, in which he had taken such pride, to John Lawson-Johnston, who had made a fortune out of Bovril; and, although he bought the yacht back when he became King and attended Cowes with unfailing regularity, he never took part in a race there again. ‘The regatta at Cowes was once a pleasant holiday for me,’ he complained. ‘But now that the Kaiser has taken command it is nothing but a nuisance … [with] that perpetual firing of salutes, cheering and other tiresome disturbances.’

Having won the Queen’s Cup with his unrivalled Meteor II in 1899, the Kaiser added insult to injury not only by repeating his complaint about the ‘perfectly appalling’ system of handicapping but also by insisting on bringing to England with him, as his naval aide-de-camp, Admiral Baron von Senden und Bibran. This overbearing Junker had irritated the Prince by his haughty manner on previous visits to England and, piqued by the Prince’s dismissive attitude towards him, had spread reports in Berlin about the Prince’s anti-German sentiments. As soon as the Prince saw Senden’s name on the Kaiser’s list, he sent for Baron von Eckardstein to tell him that ‘after what had happened, the Kaiser could not possibly be accompanied on his visit to England by this person’ for whom he had ‘a quite peculiar aversion’. He absolutely declined to receive such a cad as the Admiral had shown himself to be. Eckardstein did his best on the Prince’s behalf, but the Kaiser was adamant, flatly declaring that if he went to England at all he would take with him anyone he liked. It seemed, in fact, that the visit would have to be cancelled until the German-born Duchess of Devonshire, ‘one of the cleverest and most capable women’ that Eckardstein had ever met, persuaded the Prince to accept Senden if he apologized for his past conduct and if it was clearly understood that he would be invited to Windsor only to attend the official dinner in honour of the Kaiser and, in no circumstances at all, to Sandringham.

In spite of this ominous beginning, the Kaiser’s visit to England in 1899 was a notable success. It was recognized that his coming at such a time, accompanied by his Foreign Secretary, was proof to the world that, if there were a European coalition in favour of the Boers, Germany would not be party to it. And the Kaiser received much credit in England for this gesture which was made in defiance of public opinion in Germany. The Prince, who supervised the arrangements with his habitual attention to detail in such matters, went out of his way to be agreeable to his guest; while the Princess of Wales, who cordially disliked him and considered that he got ‘more foolish and conceited every day’, succeeded in disguising her distaste for his company at Sandringham, though in private she ridiculed the ‘fool’s’ having thought it necessary to arrive there with three valets and two hairdressers, one of whom was responsible for the upward-sweeping wings of the imperial moustache.

‘The German visit is going off very well,’ Francis Knollys reported to his friend, Lord Rosebery. ‘The German Emperor is much pleased with … England, and he evidently wishes to be very civil to everybody.’

The Kaiser also created a good impression in England by his behaviour when Queen Victoria died. And after her death, in defiance of the wishes of his ministers, he declared that he would stay on in England as a private member of her family until the funeral. The Prince, who had, in fact, been rather put out by the Kaiser’s officious attempt to lift his grandmother’s body into her coffin, told the Empress Frederick that he had been kindness itself

and touching in his devotion without a shade of brusquerie or selfishness … [his] touching and simple demeanour, up to the last, will never be forgotten by me or anyone. It was indeed a sincere pleasure for me to confer upon him the rank of field-marshal in my army, and to invest Willy [the German Crown Prince, aged nineteen] (who is a charming young man) with the Order of the Garter.

Delighted by the compliments that had been paid to him in England, the Kaiser returned to Germany an evidently dedicated Anglophile. ‘We ought to form an Anglo–German alliance,’ he had declared on the last day of his visit at a luncheon at Marlborough House. ‘You would watch over the seas while we would safeguard the land. With such an alliance not a mouse would stir in Europe.’ His recently appointed Chancellor, Count von Bülow, wrote:

I found him completely under the spell of his English impressions. As a rule he could not change his military uniform often enough, but now he wore civilian clothes as he had done in England. He wore a tie-pin with his deceased grandmother’s initials on it. The officers who were summoned … to dine with him … did not seem very pleased by his constant enthusiastic allusions to England and everything English.

It seemed for a time that some sort of agreement might be reached with Germany; and, although the King was sceptical, he agreed to do what he could to help. But he was not enthusiastic, and became even less so as the months went by.

The King and the Kaiser met again in Germany in February 1901 when the King went out to see his sister who was dying of cancer at Friedrichshof. Having expressed the hope that it would be regarded as a purely family visit, the King was disconcerted, on stepping down from the train at Frankfurt, to find his nephew in full-dress uniform waiting to greet him with a military escort.

Six months later, the King had to return to Germany for his sister’s funeral. Expecting that he would have to talk to the Kaiser about the possibility of an Anglo–German alliance which their respective governments had been considering, the King asked Lord Lansdowne to give him a set of notes which he could use as a basis for private discussions. But when the time came, the King was so deeply upset by the loss of his sister; so annoyed by the Kaiser’s recent reference to British ministers as ‘unmitigated noodles’; so exasperated by the Kaiser’s long letters of gratuitous advice about the conduct of the Boer War; and, in any case, so sceptical about the prospect of an Anglo–German alliance, that he impatiently and imprudently handed Lansdowne’s notes to the Kaiser without attempting to discuss any of the points mentioned in them.

Having thus avoided any unpleasant conversation at Homburg, the King went on to Wilhelmshöhe near Cassel, where he was irritated to find 15,000 troops to welcome him to further official talks with the Kaiser which had been arranged to take place in the castle. These conversations got off to a bad start. The Kaiser, in his knowing way, said that he was interested to hear that the British government were thinking of granting independence to Malta, a proposal of which the Colonial Office had not troubled to inform the King, who was naturally at first embarrassed by his ignorance and then furious with the government for having failed to consult or enlighten him. Nothing of importance was thereafter discussed at Wilhelmshöhe, from which the King was thankful to escape to Homburg. He seemed even more relieved when, soon after his return home to England, he was told that the government had decided to break off the negotiations for an alliance with Germany.

The next year, 1902, the Kaiser was again in England; and this time the visit was an utter failure. At Sandringham, to which the Kaiser was asked by his uncle to travel in plain clothes since it was ‘not customary to wear uniform in the country in England’, the most strenuous efforts were made to entertain the Kaiser and his suite. Musicians were brought up from London for him; Horace Goldin displayed his remarkable gifts as a conjurer; Albert Chevalier came to sing his funny songs; Sir Henry Irving arrived with a company of actors to perform Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Story of Waterloo; Arthur Bourchier and Violet Vanbrugh were in excellent form in a short piece entitled Dr. Johnson. There were shooting parties and there were large dinner parties to which distinguished soldiers and various members of the Cabinet were invited so that the Kaiser could talk to them.

But nothing seemed to please him very much. Whenever he attempted to talk to the King’s ministers about Anglo–German relations they were exasperatingly non-committal, while the King himself steadfastly declined to be drawn on the subject at all. If the Kaiser did not find the British congenial, they certainly did not find him so. They did not like the clothes he wore for shooting, which looked like a kind of uniform, though they had to admit that he shot well with the light gun he had to use because of his withered arm. They were appalled when some military members of his suite drew revolvers to shoot at the hares. And they were constantly irritated by his officious display of knowledgeability on every conceivable subject.

‘What petrol do you use?’ he asked on being shown the King’s new car. The King did not know. Potato spirit was the best, the polymath informed him. Had he ever tried that? The King had never even heard of it. The conversation ended there. But a few days later the King was astonished to discover an extraordinary assortment of glass bottles, retorts and jars on his table together with various mineral and vegetable substances: the Kaiser had sent to Germany for them so that he could demonstrate to his uncle the method of manufacture of his favoured motor fuel. No one was surprised when, as the Kaiser boarded the Hohenzollern, the King was heard to murmur, ‘Thank God, he’s gone!’

Thereafter relations between the King and the Kaiser rapidly deteriorated, reaching their nadir in 1905 when, in an attempt to break the entente cordiale, the Kaiser, having spoken at Bremen of a ‘world-wide dominion of the Hohenzollerns’, made a bombastic speech at Tangier, asserting Germany’s ‘great and growing interests in Morocco’. Castigating the Kaiser’s speech, which had been made at the instigation of von Bülow, as ‘the most mischievous and uncalled-for event which the German Emperor has ever been engaged in since he came to the throne’, the King, who was himself cruising in the Mediterranean at the time, landed at Algiers where he took the remarkable step of asking the French Governor-General to send, on his personal behalf, a telegram of encouragement to Théophile Delcassé, who was reported to have resigned when pressed to show a more conciliatory attitude towards Germany. Delcassé had already been persuaded not to resign by Loubet when the King’s message arrived; but as his country and Germany drifted close to war he was forced out of office, and French resistance to German demands for a conference on the future of Morocco collapsed.

The Germans badly mishandled the Morocco Conference, which not only left France the dominant power in the area, but also the prestige of the British, who had stood loyally by their partner, greatly enhanced. And the Kaiser, convinced that his uncle was plotting the destruction of Germany, was consequently more resentful of him than ever. ‘He is a Devil,’ he announced to three hundred guests at a banquet in Berlin.

‘You can hardly believe what a Devil he is.’ The King was no less uncomplimentary about the Kaiser. ‘The King talks and writes about [him] in terms that make one’s flesh creep,’ Lord Lansdowne wrote, ‘and the official papers which go to him, whenever they refer to His Imperial Majesty, come back with all sorts of annotations of a most incendiary character.’ Nor did the King confine himself to comments about the Kaiser: von Bülow was ‘badly informed’; the opinions of Baron von Holstein, head of the political section of the German Foreign Office, were as ‘absurd’ as they were ‘false’; in negotiating with Russia, Germany was ‘certain’ to act behind England’s back. In fact, the King was ‘inclined to agree’ with Francis Knollys that ‘all public men in Germany from the Emperor downwards [were] liars’.

The King’s displeasure with the Kaiser could be attributed to more than politics, the German Ambassador in London, Count Metternich, told von Bülow. ‘It is said that the Kaiser talked freely in yachting circles about the loose morals of English Society, and in particular about King Edward’s relationship with Mrs Keppel. King Edward is very touchy on this subject and this seems to have annoyed him especially.’

Nevertheless, in an effort to allay German suspicions about the entente cordiale and the Anglo–Russian détente, both of which the Wilhelmstrasse was endeavouring to break, the King wrote to the Kaiser on his fortyseventh birthday in 1906 to assure him that England ‘never had any aggressive feelings towards Germany’ and — less convincingly — that, since the sovereigns of the two countries were ‘such old friends and near relations’, the King felt sure that ‘the affectionate feelings’ which had ‘always existed’ would continue. The Kaiser replied in the same vein, reminding the King of the silent hours when they had both watched beside the deathbed of ‘that great sovereign lady’, Queen Victoria, ‘as she drew her last breath’ in her grandson’s arms; and affirming that the King’s letter, which ‘breathed such an atmosphere of kindness and warm sympathy’, constituted ‘the most cherished gift’ among his birthday presents.

When King and Kaiser met again the next year at Wilhelmshöhe both made an attempt to live up to these protestations of affection, the King — as Charles Hardinge told the Foreign Secretary, Edward Grey — ‘studiously avoiding all reference to political questions in which Great Britain and Germany [were] interested’. Afterwards the King wrote to tell Prince George how pleased with the Kaiser he had been. But ‘although the King was outwardly on the best of terms with the German Emperor, and laughed and joked with him’, Hardinge ‘could not help noticing that there was no [such] real intimacy between them’ as there was between the King and the old Emperor of Austria, whom the King described to Sir Lionel Cust as ‘a dear old man’. As Frederick Ponsonby observed, ‘there was always a feeling of thunder in the air whenever the King and the [Kaiser] were together … There were always forced jokes and the whole atmosphere seemed charged with electricity … Both were such big personalities that they each tended to dominate the conversation.’ Ponsonby was thankful ‘when the talk kept’ — as the King always endeavoured to keep it — ‘on family topics and things that did not matter’. The atmosphere during the return visit, which the Kaiser made to England the following year, was no less uneasy. At the last moment, either because he was offended by the reluctance of the English to accept an escort of German battleships at Portsmouth or because he feared that he might be embarrassed by remarks about the impending trial of his friend, Count Philipp Eulenburg, who was accused of homosexual offences, the Kaiser sent a telegram to say that ‘bronchitis’ and an ‘acute cough’ prevented him from coming. Persuaded to change his mind, the Kaiser arrived as planned on 11 November 1907, looking, as the King archly observed when proposing a toast to his guests at a banquet the next evening at Windsor, ‘in splendid health’.

As usual, the King tried to avoid all political discussion with his nephew; but the Kaiser found audiences elsewhere and profoundly affronted many of them.

There were reports of savagely anti-Semitic tirades. There were even more alarming accounts of long monologues at the Hampshire house which had been rented for him, Highcliffe Castle, where he propounded the eccentric view that it was by adopting his strategic plan that the British army had saved itself from ultimate disgrace in the Boer War. The Kaiser also maintained that, out of family loyalty, he had vetoed proposals at the beginning of the war for an anti-British coalition; that he had stood almost alone in holding back the anti-British feelings in Germany; that he was England’s best friend; and that the English were ‘mad as March hares’ not to recognize it. When the gist of these remarks appeared in the Daily Telegraph of 28 October 1908, the King expressed the opinion that ‘of all the political gaffes’ which the Kaiser had made this was ‘the greatest’. Yet there was a worse one to come. A fortnight later the New York World provided a censored synopsis of an interview with the Kaiser which the New York Times had decided was ‘so strong’ that it could not be printed. And although he later repudiated the remarks attributed to him by the interviewer, W.B. Hale, the Kaiser was now on record as having said that war between England and Germany was inevitable, that the sooner it came, the better, that Great Britain was degenerate and her King corrupt. The King wrote in a profoundly aggrieved tone to Francis Knollys:

I know the E[mperor] hates me, and never loses an opportunity of saying so (behind my back) whilst I have always been civil and nice to him … I have, I presume, nothing more to do than to accept [his emphatic denial]. I am, however, convinced in my mind that the words attributed to the G[erman] E[mperor] by Hale are perfectly correct … As regards my visit to Berlin, there is no hurry to settle anything at present. The Foreign Office, to gain their own object, will not care a pin what humiliation I have to put up with …

Had he been able to please himself, the King, who knew very well that the Kaiser, in Eckardstein’s words, treated him ‘as a subject for schoolboy jokes’, would never have spoken to him again. But approached once more to meet him in an endeavour to smooth the path towards a better understanding between their two countries — and to halt competition in building up naval armaments — the King agreed to see the Kaiser on his way to Marienbad in 1908 and, on this occasion, to talk about important political matters rather than trivial family affairs. They met accordingly at Friedrichshof Castle one morning in August. The King had in his pocket a memorandum about naval expenditure which had been prepared for him by the Foreign Secretary. And as the morning wore on and the two sovereigns remained alone together, it began to be hoped that the basis for agreement was being prepared. Two hours passed, then three; and it was not until the early afternoon that the door was opened and the King and Kaiser emerged. All sorts of matters had been discussed, the King confided to Hardinge before luncheon, ‘with the exception of naval armaments’. He had ‘touched on the question and mentioned the document in his pocket’; but the Kaiser had ‘neither asked to see the paper nor to know its contents’, and the King had ‘therefore considered that it would be more tactful on his part not to force upon [him] a discussion which he seemed anxious to avoid’.

Thankful, as always, to have an excuse not to risk a scene with his nephew, who would certainly in the course of it have shown off his detailed knowledge of British and German naval construction, the King then left it to Hardinge to have further talks with the Kaiser during the afternoon and evening. In the course of these talks the Kaiser ‘made several satirical allusions to England’s policy and her new friends’, Hardinge reported to Edward Grey, ‘and endeavoured to show what a good friend he had been to England in the past.’ He again alleged that he had declined to enter a coalition against England, proposed by the Russian and French governments, during the Boer War and that he had, on the contrary, ‘threatened to make war on any Power that dared to make an unprovoked attack on England’. He referred once more to the plan of campaign which his general staff had drawn up for the guidance of the British army after its early reverses in that war, a plan which ‘had been followed by Lord Roberts in all its details’. And he complained that, whereas he was constantly sending his statesmen to London, no English statesman, with the exception of Lord Rosebery ‘many years ago and Mr Haldane quite recently’, was ever sent to Berlin.

Towards the end of the interview an aide-de-camp came to the Emperor and announced that the King was ready to leave for the railway station [Hardinge’s report concluded]. As I somewhat hurriedly rose and asked permission to go to fetch my coat and hat, the Emperor stopped me and said in a very emphatic manner: ‘Remember … the future of the world is in the hands of the Anglo– Teuton race. England, without a powerful army, cannot stand alone in Europe, but must lean on a continental Power, and that Power should be Germany.’ There was no time nor opportunity to continue what might have been an interesting discussion.

So the British diplomats left Cronenberg with the subject of German naval armaments still in unresolved dispute.

The following year, in Berlin, the King apparently did bring himself to broach the embarrassing subject with the Kaiser when they were alone together. But he did so just before his departure and in an extremely diffident way. ‘We are in a different position from other countries,’ he explained. ‘Being an island, we must have a fleet larger than all the other ones. But we don’t dream of attacking anybody.’

The Kaiser agreed that it was ‘perfectly natural that England should have a navy according to its interests and be able to safeguard them’. It was just the same with Germany, which also had no aggressive intentions. According to the Kaiser’s account of this conversation, the King immediately agreed with him:

He: Oh quite so, quite so, I perfectly understand it is your absolute right; I don’t for one moment believe you are designing anything against us.

I: This bill was published eleven years ago; it will be adhered to and exactly carried out, without any restriction.

He: Of course that is quite right, as it is a bill voted by the people and their parliament, I know that cannot be changed.

I: It is a mistake on the part of some Jingos in England that we are making a building race with you. That is nonsense. We only follow the bill.

He: Oh, I know that is quite an absurd notion, the situation is quite clear to me and I am in no way alarmed; that is all talk and will pass over.

This conversation took place in the ‘last minute before the King’s departure’; and it was with evident relief that he brought the unpleasant discussion to an end and boarded his train. It had not been an enjoyable visit from the beginning. Two days previously, the King, unaccompanied by the Kaiser, had attended a reception at the Rathaus where he had delighted the city’s businessmen and dignitaries by making a charming speech to the burgomaster’s little daughter, who had offered him a gold goblet of Rhenish wine, and had consequently been given a warmly gratifying reception. But otherwise this visit to Berlin in February 1909 was characterized by a succession of minor disasters.

The Kaiser had done his best to make it a success; and had gone so far as to have Danish books and pictures of Copenhagen placed in the Queen’s suite, as well as a concert piano, and, in the King’s suite, a portrait of Queen Victoria and a large print of ‘British Naval Victories’. But all his efforts were unavailing. On the outward journey the driver of the royal train had applied the brakes so suddenly that a footman serving dinner had lost his balance and upset a dish of quails over the Queen, leaving one bird suspended in her hair. She had made light of the accident and had kept Frederick Ponsonby and the rest of the suite ‘in roars of laughter describing how she would arrive in Berlin coiffée de cailles’. But she had been able to do nothing to lessen the tension when the train arrived at the frontier town of Rathenow before the King was dressed. The bandmaster had been told to strike up ‘God Save the King’ as the train drew to a halt and to continue playing until the King appeared on the platform. ‘For ten solid minutes’ the band kept up the British National Anthem until the King’s suite, standing to attention in full uniform, ‘all nearly screamed’. At last the King appeared, looking flustered and cross in the uniform of a German field marshal. In order to make up for lost time, he walked at an unusually brisk pace as he inspected the guard of honour and a regiment of hussars and became in consequence very much out of breath, succumbing to a fit of violent coughing on re-entering the train.

At the Lehrter Bahnhof in Berlin it was the Kaiser’s suite who were out of breath as they came ‘running down the platform in a most undignified way’ to greet the King, who appeared unexpectedly at the door of the Queen’s carriage which was a hundred yards further down the platform from his own. There were even more undignified scenes when the visitors left the station for the coaches waiting to transport them to the palace. Frightened by the booming cannon, the cheering crowds and waving flags, some of the horses jibbed and refused to move, while others threw their riders and galloped away loose. The Queen and the Empress were obliged to change carriages, which entailed everyone else behind them doing the same and the occupants of the last carriage having to walk.

Neither the state banquet held that evening nor the court ball on Wednesday was any more successful. At the banquet the King, coughing constantly, found great difficulty in getting through a short speech which, breaking with his usual practice, he read from a prepared text; while the Queen, an unwilling guest at the Kaiser’s table, did not endear herself to her host, who was picking at his food, by saying to him, ‘You ride, you work, you take a lot of trouble. Why don’t you eat? Eating is good for the brain.’ At the subsequent ball, so Ponsonby reported, there was ‘a proper row’ when two of the Kaiser’s sons and various princesses asked the band to play a two-step in defiance of the orders of the Kaiser, who, in accordance with his insistence that court balls were not held for amusement but to provide lessons in deportment, refused to allow any modern tunes to be played.

Throughout the ball, the King, in the uncomfortable uniform of the Stolp Hussars, looked tired and ill. Hearing his fearful cough and looking at his lined, drawn face, more than one of his fellow-guests feared that he might not have long to live.

19 The Final Months

‘The King of England is so stout that he completely loses his breath when he has to climb upstairs,’ the Controller of the Kaiser’s Household noted during this visit to Germany in 1909. ‘The Emperor told us that at the first family dinner he fell asleep … He has an amiable, pleasant manner and looks very shrewd … but he eats … and smokes enormously.’

After luncheon at the British Embassy on 10 February, the day of his visit to the Rathaus, he had been smoking one of his huge cigars and talking to the Princess of Pless when he had suddenly been seized with one of those choking fits which made Lady Cust think he was going to ‘break in two’. As he fought for breath his face turned that alarming puce colour which his bouts of violent, bronchitic coughing had so often lately induced; the cigar fell out of his hand; and he fainted. ‘My God he is dying,’ the Princess of Pless thought. ‘Oh, why not in his own country!’ She tried to unfasten the stiff collar of his tight Prussian uniform, and as she struggled with it Queen Alexandra and Charles Hardinge hurried to help her. His doctor, Sir James Reid, was sent for, and the room was cleared. When the other luncheon guests returned, both the King and the doctor assured them that it was an attack of no consequence, Sir James Reid treating the incident ‘in a very casual manner’, according to Hardinge, ‘and stating that it was simply a form of bronchial attack and in no sense dangerous’. But those who knew the King well could not disguise their concern.

The night before this attack he had gone to sleep at the opera where, at the Kaiser’s command, a spectacularly realistic performance of the last act of Sardanapalus had filled the stage with fire and smoke. The King had woken up with a start. Thinking the whole theatre was in flames, he had demanded to know where the firemen were; and, much to his nephew’s amusement, had with difficulty been reassured by the Empress Augusta.

For months now he had been looking tired and worn. Some days he coughed almost incessantly; he often complained of a sore throat; and he suffered from increasingly severe attacks of bronchitis which left him weak, lethargic and depressed. Yet he could not be persuaded to stop smoking those cigars which, when not in his mouth, were gripped between fat fingers resting on an ample thigh, and seemed almost as essential a part of his physical presence as his hooded eyes and whitening beard. His doctors warned him of their effect on his lungs; but, while he listened grumpily to their advice when he was ill, he did not always take it and refused to obey their orders when he felt well again. ‘I really never can please you!’ he once protested to Sir Felix Semon, who had advised him not to climb up hills at such a speed when deer-stalking in Scotland. ‘First you torment me with your eternal warnings that I ought to take exercise, and now, when I do it, you scold me because I am overdoing it.’

As a younger man neither his excessive smoking nor his gargantuan appetite seemed to have affected his health unduly. His energy and zest for life had always been legendary. Rarely had he seemed tired. Once, after a particularly demanding week, he had been noticed by Charles Dilke at a requiem Mass for the Tsar Alexander II falling asleep standing up, his taper gradually tipping over and guttering on the floor. But normally he could stand a succession of late nights without showing the least exhaustion or abandoning his lifelong habit of early rising.

He had only once been seriously ill since contracting typhoid fever in 1871. A painful attack of phlebitis in 1889 had subsided without complications; a fall downstairs at Waddesdon Manor in 1898 had resulted in nothing worse than a fractured knee-cap and a few weeks spent impatiently in bed. He had never been much troubled by his teeth: his dentist, called to Sandringham, had pulled one out after luncheon one afternoon in 1909, but the King had come down to dinner as usual and, on being asked if he had had gas, had replied, ‘Oh dear no! I can bear pain.’

In the summer of 1902 however, shortly before the day fixed for his coronation, his doctors had been gravely concerned by a sudden deterioration in his condition. A severe chill had been followed by loss of appetite, then by eating even more food than usual and, for the first time in his life, drinking rather too much. He had become excessively irritable and edgy; and despite the extra work and activity which had been imposed upon him on succeeding to the throne and by the imminence of his coronation, he had put on so much weight that his waist measurement was found to be no less than forty-eight inches. He began to fall asleep in the evenings and even during meals. A violent pain developed in his lower abdomen.

Sir Francis Laking diagnosed appendicitis; but, rather than risk the major operation that this then entailed, he advised the King to stay in bed on a milk diet. In any case, the King, unaware of the gravity of his illness, was determined that the coronation must in no circumstances be postponed. He declared that he would be in Westminster Abbey with the Queen on 26 June even if he were to drop dead during the service: the hotels were already full of guests; crown princes and grand dukes had arrived from all over the world. It was given out that his Majesty was suffering from lumbago.

Even after the development of peritonitis, the King would not give way, continuing to work as hard as ever, insisting on attending to the most trivial details, worrying and fretting about every difficulty, even consulting a gypsy woman who much alarmed him by telling him that he would never be crowned and that her own imminent death — which, indeed, took place within a week — would very soon be followed by his own. Sir Francis Laking and Sir Thomas Barlow both warned him that an operation was essential; otherwise he might well die. The surgeon, Sir Frederick Treves, was ready to operate, they told him, and a room had been prepared at Buckingham Palace. Disregarding their urgent warnings, the King continued to insist that he could not disappoint everyone at the last moment like this: the coronation must proceed as planned. ‘Laking, I will stand no more of this,’ he burst out finally. ‘I am suffering the most awful mental agony that any man can endure. Leave the room at once.’

Laking signalled to Barlow to leave; but he himself remained, begging the King to understand that obedience to his commands was out of the question. An operation must be performed immediately. The coronation could not possibly take place. Laking would not leave the room until the King agreed to see Treves. So the King at last gave way. At noon the next day he walked in his ancient dressing-gown to the operating table where he was given an anaesthetic. Queen Alexandra helped to hold him down as he struggled and threw his arms about, growing black in the face. When he was unconscious Treves waited for the Queen to leave the room, not liking, as he subsequently admitted, to take off his coat, tuck up his sleeves ‘and put on an apron while the Queen was present’. Finally she had to be asked to leave, and the operation for perityphlitis began.

It was completed forty minutes later. As the effects of the chloroform wore off, the King opened his eyes and asked, ‘Where’s George?’

The Prince of Wales saw his father the following morning when the doctors and nurses announced that they had never seen ‘such a wonderful man’. He was sitting up in bed, smoking a cigar. And he greeted his son cheerfully and with great affection. The frequent visits of the Queen were not so agreeable to him, as he had to talk so loudly to make her hear. Eventually he took to pretending to be asleep when he heard her coming. He made a rapid recovery, though, for which he warmly thanked Laking and Treves, both of whom he created baronets. In July, on boarding the Victoria and Albert at Portsmouth, Prince George found him eager to embark on a convalescent cruise, ‘lying on deck and looking so well and delighted with the change’.

The King had returned invigorated from that cruise. But now that he was in his late sixties, he was increasingly prone to listlessness and to periods of the utmost depression when his problems and worries seemed insupportable. He talked even of abdication. He began to dread old age and loneliness; his bronchial trouble was chronic; his voice more gruff than ever; his digestion no longer so reliable; his bouts of lassitude alternated with spells of agitated restlessness; while his sudden violent rages were more frequent and alarming and less quickly overcome. When, for example, his visit to Russia was criticized in the House of Commons, and James Keir Hardie, the leader of the Labour Party, said that the visit was tantamount to condoning Tsarist atrocities, the King was furious. He refused to allow Keir Hardie, and another socialist who had attacked the Russian visit, to be invited to attend a garden party given at Windsor Castle for all Members of Parliament. And although he let it be known that they would be invited to future garden parties, he refused to have on any list of guests the name of Frederick Ponsonby’s brother, Arthur — Liberal Member for Stirling and one of fifty-nine Members who had voted against the government’s authorization of the visit — on the grounds that a son of a man who had been secretary to Queen Victoria ought to have known better.

The political discussions which appeared to cloud the horizon on every side made the King deeply despondent about the future. He was worried by the prospect of war; by the fear that Germany was getting ahead of England in the race for naval armaments; by the policies of social reform to which the Liberal government were committed and which he felt endangered the whole basis of society; by the quarrel between the two Houses of Parliament and the insistent demands for reform of the House of Lords.

He was, and had always been, as Charles Dilke said, ‘a strong Conservative, and a still stronger Jingo’. Criticisms of the imperialistic policies of his mother’s governments had never failed to infuriate him. At the time of the Afghan War in 1878–9 he had fiercely resented the attacks of the Liberal opposition on the conduct of the campaign and he told Sir Bartle Frere, ‘If I had my way I should not be content until we had taken the whole of Afghanistan, and kept it.’ He was equally insistent that England ‘must for ever keep a strong hold over Egypt’. And after the death of General Gordon and the fall of Khartoum he had urged the annihilation of the Mahdi and the conquest of the whole of the Sudan. His open support of Dr Jameson’s raiders was followed by his declared support of Cecil Rhodes, whom he invited to dinner, chiding the Prime Minister for refusing to receive him; by his sustained rejection of any suggestion that the Boer War was dishonourable, and his contention that it would be ‘terrible indeed’ if South Africa were ‘handed over to the Boers’. He associated criticism of the British army with treason, and, while accepting that conscription would have to come and generally supporting Haldane, he viewed many suggestions for reform with scepticism: the proposal that the traditional uniforms of the army should be replaced by ‘the hideous khaki’ had at first dismayed him.

His firm objection to admitting natives to a share in the government of India was matched by his opposition to allowing women to have a say in the government of England. Having ‘no sympathy at all’ with female suffrage, he condemned the conduct of those ‘dreadful women’, the ‘so-called “suffragettes”’, as ‘outrageous’. He sternly admonished Campbell-Bannerman for having spoken in their favour, and told Campbell-Bannerman’s successor that he deplored ‘the attitude taken up by Mr Asquith on the Woman’s Suffrage question’. Although he had agreed with Charles Dilke that Octavia Hill should have been appointed to the Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes, he ‘hung fire’, so Knollys told Sandars, when it was proposed that the aged Florence Nightingale should be awarded the O.M., being ‘reluctant to give it to women’. And he was very cross indeed when the Home Secretary put forward the names of two women to serve on the Royal Commission for Divorce — on which, despite the King’s protests, they did serve — since divorce was a subject which could not be discussed ‘openly and in all its aspects with any delicacy or even decency before ladies’. ‘He is quite unconvinced by the arguments brought forward in support of their retention,’ his assistant private secretary, Arthur Davidson, told Asquith. ‘The King considers it the thin edge of suffragettism and feels sure that its supporters will get stronger and more persistent in their demands when they see the principle, on which they base their claims, as partially recognised.’

He disapproved quite as strongly of ladies shooting. And as for the young: ‘Refinement of feeling in the younger generation does not exist in the nineteenth century … the age of chivalry has passed.’

He had not been blindly opposed to all change. He had been persuaded, for instance, by Lord Rosebery of the justice of the Third Reform Bill of 1884 which proposed to increase the size of the electorate by extending household suffrage to the country constituencies. And when the Bill had been rejected by the House of Lords and a demonstration organized by its supporters, he had gone to watch the procession from the Whitehall house of Charles Carrington, one of its principal advocates. Carrington had arranged for the demonstrators to turn their eyes to the right and take off their caps when they reached the Horse Guards, for the Prince and Princess of Wales would be standing on the balcony of the middle window opposite. As the huge procession approached, the Prince had begun to think that he had made a bad mistake in allowing himself to become involved with it. After all, as he had suggested to Rosebery at luncheon, attacks on a hereditary House of Lords were bound to harm a hereditary monarchy; and he had not appeared to be altogether reassured by Rosebery’s contention that the Crown was above controversy and did not presume to resist the people’s will as the Lords resisted the will of the Commons. The Prince’s apprehensions had been immeasurably increased when the procession appeared at the bottom of Whitehall with red flags waving and bands playing the Marseillaise. ‘Hey, Charlie!’ he had said to Carrington. ‘This don’t look much like being a pleasant afternoon.’

Carrington had been right. As the procession had reached his house, all but three of the bands had changed their tune to ‘God Save the Queen’; loud cheers had greeted the appearance of the Prince and Princess on the balcony; caps had been waved; and voices had been raised in singing ‘God Bless the Prince of Wales’. After standing in the hot sun for an hour and a half the Princess had felt faint and had gone indoors to lie down on a sofa; but the vociferous protests from the crowd had brought her back and, propped up by a pile of cushions, she and the Prince had continued to receive an ovation which, as Carrington had commented, ‘did one’s heart good … The reception was something tremendous … In fact the day was a regular triumph for the royal family.’

Although the Prince had brushed off Conservative protests at his having been made use of by irresponsible radicals, any suggestion that he had ambitions to become a citizen-king in the style of Louis-Philippe would have horrified him. He had made friends with some republicans, but he had hoped by so doing to take the sting out of republicanism. He had shown himself in Birmingham, but he had intended by appearing there to do something to counteract the influence of Joseph Chamberlain and had been deeply gratified to hear the mayor declare that in England the Throne was ‘recognized and respected as the symbol of all constitutional authority and settled government’. He had always done his best to show his sympathy with social reform by identifying the monarchy with the conscience of his people. He had always shown a sincere concern for their welfare, particularly for their housing; and he had not hesitated to condemn the ‘perfectly disgraceful’ conditions in which so many of the poor were forced to live. But he had no time for Socialists, never attempted to understand their ideals, and looked upon them in his last years as a dangerous threat to all that he held most dear.

It seemed to him in the summer of 1909 that some of Asquith’s ministers, notably Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Winston Churchill, President of the Board of Trade, were behaving in the most irresponsibly inflammatory manner. On 19 July Knollys told Asquith that it was really painful for the King ‘to be continually obliged to complain of certain of [his] colleagues’. And when, later on that month, Lloyd George, in one of his attacks on the House of Lords, made a speech in which he complained that a fully equipped duke was as costly to maintain as two dreadnoughts and less easy to scrap, the King, so Knollys said, felt constrained ‘to protest in the most vigorous terms against one of his ministers making such a speech … full of false statements, of socialism in its most insidious form and full of virulent abuses of one particular class’. The King could not understand how the Prime Minister could allow his colleagues to make speeches which ‘would not have been tolerated by any Prime Minister until within the last few years’, which his Majesty regarded as being ‘in the highest degree improper’, and which he looked upon ‘as being an insult to the Sovereign’.

Asquith made excuses which the King condemned as ‘pitiful’. He acknowledged that Lloyd George had been greatly provoked by some ‘foolish and mean speeches’ by his opponents and was somewhat placated by a letter of explanation from him, yet he viewed the intensifying political crisis with the deepest despondency, telling Asquith that he thought party politics had never been more bitter. Distressed by attempts to ‘inflame the passions of the working and lower orders against people who happen to be owners of property’, he was equally upset by the intransigence of the House of Lords. He brought all the influence he could to bear upon them not to reject Lloyd George’s budget as they were threatening to do in defiance of a rule that had not been broken for two hundred years; and he confided to Knollys that he thought the ‘Peers were mad’.

Taking advice on the propriety of the Lords’ intended action, he was told by some of his counsellors that rejection would be unconstitutional and by others that a budget which provided for revolutionary land taxes, as well as new income taxes and death duties, was a social measure that required the sanction of the electorate. Dreading an election fought on such an issue, the King renewed his efforts to reach a compromise, going so far as to ask Asquith to offer the Lords a dissolution of Parliament and a general election in three months’ time if only they could be persuaded to pass the budget, unpalatable as it was. But despite the King’s appeals, on 30 November 1909, playing into Lloyd George’s hands, the House of Lords rejected the ‘People’s Budget’; and faced with the knowledge that he would now be required to dissolve Parliament so that there could be a general election, he confessed at Sandringham on 2 December that he had never spent a more miserable day in his life.

On New Year’s Eve the customary ceremonies of ‘first footing’ were observed. The house was cleared of guests and servants just before midnight as usual, so that the King and Queen could be the first to open the front door in the New Year. On this occasion, however, they were forestalled by one of their grandchildren who, unaware of the importance that the King attached to such traditions, ran into the house by the back and flung the door open triumphantly as his grandparents approached it. The King looked at the child gravely and observed, ‘We shall have some very bad luck this year.’

While the King was at Sandringham discussions were held in London about the possibility of either allowing the Prime Minister to assume the Sovereign’s prerogative of creating peers or of curbing the power of the Lords by framing a Parliamentary Bill whose passage through the House would be guaranteed by the King’s giving a pledge to create enough new peers favourable towards it. The King, for his part, believed that if he were to create several hundred Liberal peers in order to limit the power of the House of Lords, as the government wanted him to do, he would not only fatally debilitate the Upper House but also abandon the political impartiality of the Crown to the ultimate ruin of its reputation. And as he again spoke gloomily of abdication, Asquith opened the Liberal Party’s election campaign with the pledge that he would not assume office unless he could secure the ‘necessary safeguards’ for ensuring ‘the effective limitation of the legislative powers of the Lords’ as well as the Commons’ ‘absolute control over finance’.

After Christmas the King went down to Brighton with Frederick Ponsonby and Seymour Fortescue to stay with Arthur Sassoon during the forthcoming General Election. People who saw him there were shocked to discover how tired and old and ill he looked. At dinner time he sat silent and morose, while Mrs Sassoon tirelessly kept up the conversation with Fortescue and Ponsonby. Appalled by such electioneering slogans as ‘Peers against People’ and by the condemnation of the House of Lords as wreckers of the Constitution, and as an obsolete assembly of rich backwoodsmen trying to avoid paying taxes, he grew increasingly melancholy, grievously worried that the Crown, by being dragged into controversy, would be diminished in prestige. One day he was driven to Worthing where he fell asleep in his car on the seafront while a huge crowd gathered round, staring through the windows in sympathetic silence.

At Eaton Hall, where he went to shoot with the Duke of Westminster after leaving Brighton, his gloom was temporarily dispelled. He thought he saw a way out of his difficulties, and he asked Knollys to tell Asquith that if the Liberals won the election he would not feel justified in creating the number of peers that would be necessary to get the party’s policies through the House of Lords until the country had been consulted at a second general election. Asquith, who was asked to treat this stipulation as strictly confidential, chivalrously agreed to do so and to undertake the delicate task of managing his party accordingly.

Nothing was said about the King’s intervention in favour of the House of Lords during the election campaign which resulted in the government’s retention of just enough seats to remain in office. According to Lord Esher this result ‘caused great relief’ at Windsor where it was felt that Asquith’s slender majority would make it easier for the King to resist unwelcome demands.

In fact, the Prime Minister was preparing the way for an announcement that, distasteful as it would be to his more reformist supporters, would take a great weight off the King’s mind. He could not accept a proposal, put forward by the King on his own initiative to the Lord Privy Seal, that the right to vote should be limited to a hundred peers of whom half would be nominated by the leaders of each of the two main parties; for this might well lead to the nomination of hacks selected because of their loyalty rather than their worth. But, on 21 February, Asquith made an announcement in the House of Commons virtually repudiating the pledge which he had made to his party before the election. He had neither requested nor received any guarantee about the creation of peers, he said. And he added that it was ‘the duty of responsible politicians to keep the name of the Sovereign and the prerogatives of the Crown outside the domain of party politics’.

Gratified by these remarks, the King left for Biarritz by way of Paris for the holiday which his doctors had been vainly pressing him to take earlier than usual but upon which he had been reluctant to embark until assured that he was no longer needed in England. But although his mind was less ill at ease, he was still depressed and on edge. In Paris, at the Théâtre de la Porte St Martin, he attended a performance of the new play, Chantecler, an allegorical verse drama by Edmond Rostand, author of Cyrano de Bergerac. But he was ‘dreadfully disappointed’: he had never seen anything ‘so stupid and childish’; while the theatre was so hot that he ‘contrived to get a chill with a threatening of bronchitis’. He also suffered from an attack of acute indigestion followed by a shortness of breath and a sharp pain near the heart. Two days later he became so ill at Biarritz that Sir James Reid advised him to stay in bed. This he declined to do, though he agreed to remain in his room at the Hôtel du Palais where the Marquis de Soveral and Mrs Keppel were amongst his few visitors.

At the end of March he felt a little better; but he was still fretting about the political situation at home where Asquith’s difficulties in getting his government’s measures passed by Parliament were once again bringing into discussion the unpleasant topic of the King’s creation of a complaisant majority in the House of Lords. The Queen begged him to join her on a Mediterranean cruise. The weather in Biarritz, as she had no need to tell him, was miserable that spring. There was thick snow in the hotel grounds on 1 April. And four days later, when the King sent home to Hardinge details of the arrangements he wanted made for the entertainment of ex-President Roosevelt in June, he still complained of ‘snow, rain and constant wind’. But he did not want to leave for the Mediterranean while Mrs Keppel was in Biarritz. Besides, he felt he could not go so far away while it might be necessary at any moment for him to return to London.

So, excessively agitated by fear of being compelled to preside over the destruction of the House of Lords, by talk of a referendum, and by the possibility of the government’s resignation, the King announced that he would remain at Biarritz until the end of the month.

On the evening before his departure, the town’s authorities arranged a noisy and affectionate farewell, with sailors and soldiers, as well as the fire brigade, marching about below his balcony while fireworks exploded in the sky and bands played appropriate tunes in the courtyard. ‘I shall be sorry to leave Biarritz,’ he said the next morning, sadly gazing out to sea; ‘perhaps it will be for ever.’

He returned to Buckingham Palace in the early evening of 27 April 1910, looking almost as exhausted as he had done before leaving for France. Yet he went to the opera that evening; received Asquith the next day; gave several other audiences on Friday before going to Covent Garden; and early on Saturday morning he left for Sandringham, having breakfast on the train. He arrived at Sandringham in time to walk round the garden with the agent and the head gardener before luncheon, looking at the alterations and the plantings which had been carried out in his absence. He was quieter than usual but seemed content; and in the evening, so Frederick Ponsonby said, ‘he told stories of amusing incidents of former years’. The next morning he went to church as usual, though he did not walk across the park with the others but drove in a cab. And in the afternoon, despite rain and a biting wind, he again walked round the garden before settling down to some routine work with Ponsonby in the room that Francis Knollys used as an office.

On Monday afternoon he returned to London. It had been pouring with rain in the morning and the fields were sodden. The King looked out of the window, talking little. That evening he went to have a quiet dinner with Agnes Keyser, and on his return to Buckingham Palace it was obvious that he was about to have another serious attack of bronchitis. Yet when Ponsonby saw him the next morning, ‘he seemed quite himself’, apart from the cough and lack of appetite. After failing to eat any dinner, ‘he smoked a huge cigar’, Ponsonby recorded. ‘Anything worse for a man with a cough I could not imagine, but curiously enough it seemed to soothe him … [Then] the King and I went into the Japanese Room where we remained silent. Presently in came Alice Keppel and Venetia James. We talked for a short time and then we played bridge, as he explained this prevented his talking.’

He had had ‘a wretched night’, he confessed the following morning, and could not eat any breakfast. Yet he insisted that he must carry on with all the audiences that had been arranged for him; and so he did, receiving his numerous visitors in his frock coat, which was de rigueur for such occasions, occasionally being seized, as he was when the American Ambassador called, with spasms of uncontrollable coughing.

On Thursday Ponsonby found him in his bedroom sitting at a writing table with a rug round his legs.

His face was grey and he appeared to be unable to sit upright and to be sunken. At first … he was like a man out of breath, but this gradually got better. He said he would sign what there was in the boxes, and I proceeded to open them and handed him documents for his signature … He seemed to like the work. Even the Foreign Office telegrams he read, but I kept back some documents that would have necessitated a discussion.

Ponsonby tried to leave more than once, but the King did not want to part with him:

I tried again to go, but he said in a gasping voice, ‘You managed so well at Biarritz. I hope everyone was thanked.’ I told him I had thanked them all. I said in as cheerful a voice as I could command that I hoped he would soon be better. He replied, ‘I feel wretchedly ill. I can’t sleep, I can’t eat. They really must do something for me.’ I was to be relieved next day by Arthur Davidson, and the extraordinary thing was that, ill as he was, he remembered this. He turned to me and said, ‘In case I don’t see you again, goodbye.’ I shook him by the hand, but I do not think he meant anything more than what he usually said when I went out of waiting.

The King insisted on giving audiences as usual that day; and, as the well-informed Edward Marsh told Lady Gladstone, ‘he was to receive Jack P [John Dickson-Poynder] as Governor of New Zealand, and somebody else [Major T.B. Robinson] as Agent General for West Australia [actually Queensland]. Lord Sheffield’s mind set to work on these names and produced, “the Agent General for Newfoundland”.’ So when the Australian arrived the King made some comment about having been to his ‘interesting colony’.

The Agent General, who knew he had never been anywhere near Australia, looked bewildered. Hopwood [Permanent Under Secretary of State for the Colonies] saw what had happened and told the King who he really was. The poor King was so terribly upset at having made such a gaffe that he had a violent fit of coughing and turned quite black in the face — and this was really the beginning of the end. Jack P. said that when he got home he was sure he was a dying man.

The Queen had been sent for and, having left Corfu by way of Venice, she had arrived home that day. At Calais she had been handed a note from the Prince of Wales: ‘His cough troubles him very much and he has slept badly the last nights. I cannot disguise the fact that I am anxious about him … I know Laking is writing to you and I will say no more but thank God you are coming home tomorrow to look after him. God bless you, darling Motherdear.’

The Prince and Princess and their two eldest sons were waiting to meet her at Victoria Station. Concerned that he could not meet her himself, as he had always done in the past, the King made all the arrangements for her reception at Buckingham Palace, ordering that all the Household should be ready to meet the Queen in the Grand Entrance Hall. The Prince of Wales, however, had decided that it would be better if his mother arrived without any fuss and gave instructions for her to be driven round to the garden entrance. She was profoundly shocked to see the King looking so ill. Up till then she had comforted herself with the belief that this was just another bronchial attack from which he would soon recover. He tried to reassure her, telling her that he had reserved a box for her that evening at Covent Garden.

At eleven o’clock the next morning Sir Ernest Cassel came to see him, but he was told that the King was too ill to be disturbed. Half an hour later, however, at the King’s insistence, Cassel was summoned back to the Palace. He told his daughter:

I found the King dressed as usual, in his sitting room, rising from his chair to shake hands with me. He looked as if he had suffered great pain, and spoke indistinctly. His kindly smile came out as he congratulated me on having you brought home so much improved in health. He said, ‘I am very seedy, but I wanted to see you. Tell your daughter how glad I am that she has safely got home’ … He then talked about other matters.

He tried to smoke a cigar but could not enjoy it. A light luncheon was brought to his bedroom; and having tried to eat it, he got up and walked towards the window to look at his canaries, whose cage stood by the curtains. While playing with them he collapsed and fell to the floor. Nurses ran towards him and helped him to a chair while Princess Victoria sent for the Queen.

It was clear now that he was dying, suffering from a series of heart attacks. The doctors examined him and could do nothing for him but allay his pain with morphia. Without much success, they had already given him oxygen to inhale and hypodermic injections of strychnine, tyramine and ether. He still sat in his chair, refusing to be helped into bed, protesting weakly, ‘No, I shall not give in; I shall go on; I shall work to the end.’

Charles Hardinge went to 10 Downing Street and told Mrs Asquith that he had left Lord Knollys in tears. He suggested that a telegram should be sent summoning the Prime Minister home from the Mediterranean. Various friends called at the Palace to enquire after him, and some of the closest were allowed into his room to see him. The Archbishop of Canterbury was summoned; and the Queen herself, told that Mrs Keppel had seen the King the day before and was due to call again at five o’clock, said, ‘It will be too late’, and sent for her to return immediately. The Prince of Wales told his father that his horse, Witch of the Air, had won the 4.15 race at Kempton Park. ‘Yes,’ said the King, to whom the news had already been telegraphed. ‘I have heard of it. I am very glad.’

These were the last coherent words he spoke. Twice he fainted, and soon lapsed into a coma. He was undressed and put to bed. The Archbishop was called in from the next room, and at a quarter to midnight on 6 May 1910 the King died without a struggle.

20 Drawn Blinds

‘I have lost my best friend and the best of fathers,’ the new King wrote in his diary, in an untidy hand bearing testimony of his distress, on the evening of the first day of his reign. ‘I never had a [cross] word with him in my life. I am heartbroken and overwhelmed with grief.’

Queen Alexandra also confessed herself grief-stricken. She felt as if she had been turned into stone, she told Frederick Ponsonby, ‘unable to cry, unable to grasp the meaning of it all, and incapable of doing anything’. It was not the biting cold of that wet afternoon at Sandringham that had killed him, she added as she took Ponsonby into the room where the King’s body lay, but ‘that horrid Biarritz’.

‘She was most brave and touching, calm but breaking down now and again,’ said Lord Halifax, who had accompanied the King on that walking tour in the Lake District over fifty years before and had asked if, as an old servant and friend, he might see him in death.

I was much touched by her taking up a prayer-book on a table by the side of the bed and saying, ‘That is the prayer-book you gave him; he always had it with him.’ … She took me again into the room and looked for a time, uncovering his face and said, ‘Does he not look beautiful?’ … He was lying on a little bed screened off from the rest of the room, just under a picture of Prince Eddie and his mother. He was not in the least altered and had that look on his face that death so often brings.

Lord Carrington was also shown into the darkened room; and as he looked down at the King’s ‘beloved’ face which appeared ‘quite happy and composed’ above the collar of a pink shirt, he felt that he had lost the ‘truest friend’ that he had ever had. Charles Hardinge was taken in to see the King, too, and the Queen gave him the jade bell which he had so often seen on the King’s writing-table and which Hardinge thereafter regarded as one of his ‘greatest treasures’. ‘I was deeply moved at seeing there, lying on a simple bed, the dead man who had been so good to me and whom I really loved,’ Hardinge wrote. ‘To me he was always the kindest of masters … I have always missed him since.’

Ponsonby felt the same. He remembered what a ‘lovable, wayward and human’ master the King had been. He recalled numerous acts of kindness: how, for instance — unlike Queen Victoria, ‘who rarely considered the feelings of her Household’ — he would often, without being asked, suggest to ‘some married man that he should go away and spend the week with his family’. Ponsonby called to mind one particular example of ‘that kindness of heart which characterized all his actions’. It was a small incident but it remained in his memory. It occurred during the King’s continental tour in 1903. Aboard the royal yacht was Eduardo de Martino, a Neapolitan artist who had been Marine Painter-in-Ordinary to Queen Victoria and had settled in England in 1875. Ponsonby could not imagine ‘anybody more inappropriate in the suite of an English King’ than this Martino, who had taken the place of Christopher Sykes as an ideal butt for the King’s bantering jokes. Yet Martino appeared so disappointed when he was given to understand that he ought to remain on the yacht when the royal party went ashore, that the King not only gave him permission to form part of the suite but took pains to discuss with other less sensitive members of the party a rearrangement of the order of precedence which would spare Martino’s feelings by ensuring that he did not rank last.

Numerous members of the King’s staff recalled similar instances of his kindness, tact and generosity; of his ‘enviable gift’, as Robert Vansittart, a young temporary extra private secretary, described it, ‘of making innocents feel that he really wanted to see them’; of the pleasure they themselves derived from performing some service which made him momentarily happy and brought forth that characteristic murmur of ‘yes, yes, yes’ like the purring of a contented cat; of the enthusiasm he affected upon being offered presents he did not really want, such as the stylographic pen given him by Frederick Ponsonby. It was a ‘wonderful invention’, he declared, ‘treating it like a conjuring trick’. ‘He used it for a short time simply to please me,’ Ponsonby recorded, ‘but really hated it. Then mercifully he lost it and was terrified lest I should give him another, but of course I had seen what a failure it was and never alluded to it again.’

He was always punctiliously courteous to servants, prefacing his requests with ‘please’ and expressing his gratitude with ‘thank you’ and delighting Lady Fildes’s parlourmaid by the way he bowed and smiled at her in the hall when he came to Melbury Road to have his portrait painted.

His own servants had to admit, though, that he was an increasingly difficult man to work for as he grew older. Exacting, temperamental, impatient and irritable, he also had many foibles. One of the most tiresome was his inordinate superstitiousness. He had a horror of crossed knives on a table and kept an ever-watchful eye on the Master of Ceremonies at court levees to make sure that he wore his jewel of office correctly ‘as any displacement was of evil omen’. His valets were expressly forbidden to turn his mattress on a Friday, and he would never allow thirteen people to sit down with him to dinner. Once when he discovered that he had accidentally done so three nights running at Friedrichshof, he was ‘much upset’ until he comforted himself with the thought that perhaps it did not matter as one of the company was pregnant. And Winston Churchill remembered how, as a young subaltern invited to dinner at Deepdene, he had arrived eighteen minutes late in the drawing-room where thirteen people, ‘in the worst of tempers’, were suffering from the King’s steadfast refusal to lead such an unlucky number of people into the dining-room.

Sir Luke Fildes, who was asked to do a drawing of the King on his deathbed, was surprised to see a festoon of charms and keepsakes hanging from the head of the bedstead. He thought that each one must be ‘a memento of some congenial entertainment’. But, as he was at work, Princess Victoria came into the room and enlightened him. ‘I see you keep looking at those mascots of his,’ she said. ‘The old dear used to think they brought him luck.’

Unlike many highly superstitious people, however, the King never lacked courage. Lord Redesdale recalled how, once he had made up his mind to have the operation which necessitated a postponement of his coronation, he made not the least fuss about it, though he knew that he might die. Both in Ireland and in England he had been threatened with death by the Fenians; but this had never deterred him from visiting any part of either country, even though a strong escort of police was often considered necessary to protect him. When a man who had threatened to murder him was sentenced to ten years’ penal servitude, he asked the Home Secretary to mitigate the severe sentence on the grounds that the man was probably mad. And when an anarchist student, who regarded him as responsible for ‘killing the Boers’, fired a pistol at him through the window of his carriage as his train was leaving Brussels in 1900, he behaved with the most perfect composure, never even changing colour, according to Charlotte Knollys, who was in the royal carriage, calling out to the people on the platform, who had grabbed hold of the would-be assassin, not to harm him. ‘The King was the only man I ever met,’ Lord Carrington noted in his journal after his friend’s death, ‘who did not know what moral or physical fear meant.’

Devoted as they were to the King when he was in one of his gratified and gratifying moods, his servants always held him in the greatest awe. For his forceful and formidable personality made him an extremely intimidating figure. ‘Even his most intimate friends were all terrified of him,’ Frederick Ponsonby wrote.

I have seen Cabinet ministers, ambassadors, generals and admirals absolutely curl up in his presence when trying to maintain their point. As regards myself, I varied. If I was quite certain of my facts I never minded standing up to him. In fact, I always noticed that he invariably respected people who stood up to him, and he carried this so far that he was always taken in by dictatorial and cocksure people. At times however I was perfectly terrified of him.

Ponsonby’s daughter recorded that ‘his angry bellow, once heard, could never be forgotten’.

All his staff dreaded these violent outbursts which suddenly erupted when his impatience and irritation could no longer be contained and which became more frequent and more terrifying as the King grew older. No one had more experience of them than Mr Chandler, the Superintendent of his Wardrobe, who would occasionally be summoned to come immediately to the King’s room where his Majesty, pacing furiously up and down, would, as Sir Lionel Cust said, use the poor man ‘as whipping boy or safety valve’ and ‘scold him unmercifully about something’ as soon as the door opened. Yet Chandler, like the rest of the King’s staff, was devoted to him and knew that once the storm was over every effort would be made to make amends for any feelings that had been hurt. As Lord Esher said, ‘If the King assailed you, as he sometimes assailed me, vigorously, remorselessly, it was almost certain that within an hour or two he would send for you, or dispatch a few lines on a slip of paper, on some wholly different subject, in the friendliest manner, with no allusion to what had passed.’ ‘It was a pleasure,’ Lord Fisher thought, ‘to face his furious anger for the sake of the lovely smile you got later on.’

Stamper, the motor engineer, recorded:

Sometimes, if his Majesty were annoyed he would show his displeasure by assuming an air of the most complete resignation. Instead perhaps of upbraiding me, if I lost the way, he would question me quietly … gravely deplore the way in which Misfortune singled him out for her victim, and then settle himself gently in his corner, as if resigning himself to his fate. In his countenance there was written a placid acceptance of the situation and a calm expectancy of worse to come.

Sometimes, too, the King’s anger would abruptly dissolve into laughter, as it did when, having decided to build a sanatorium with the £200,000 which Cassel had given him for a charity of his own choosing, the committee appointed to supervise its construction selected a site at Midhurst for which no adequate water supply could be found. The King’s anger ‘knew no bounds’. Refusing to listen to any excuses, he ended his assault upon Sir Felix Semon, the member of the committee with whom he was most often in contact, by declaring, ‘I’ll tell you something: you doctors are nearly as bad as the lawyers. And, God knows, that will say a great deal!’ In the tense silence that followed, Sir Felix felt constrained to laugh; and the King, surprised at first by such a reaction rather than the expression of contrition which would have been more appropriate to his rage, began to laugh too. The row was over.

It was not only his staff and intimate friends who had first-hand experience of the King’s ungovernable, though fortunately brief rages. Prince Christopher of Greece recorded in his memoirs the ‘consternation stamped on the faces of his guests’ at a big dinner party when the King spilled some spinach on his shirt. His face went red with fury as he plunged his hands into the dish and smeared the spinach all over his starched white front. But then ‘he laughed in his infectious way, “Well, I had to change anyway, hadn’t I? I might as well make a complete mess of it.” ’

With his wife rarely — and with the Prince of Wales never — were there any of these angry scenes which from time to time shattered the peace of the Household. The Queen’s unpunctuality continued to exasperate him to the end; but, having completely failed to cure her, he had been obliged to tolerate it. While waiting for her he would sit drumming his fingers on a nearby table in that all too familiar manner, tapping his feet on the floor and gazing out of the window with an expression which Frederick Ponsonby described as being like that of a Christian martyr.

That alarming drumming and tapping could also be observed when he was bored. Usually he contrived to hide his boredom in public and, when duty required, could listen to the most tedious people with apparently rapt attention. But there were occasions when he could not contain himself. Then the agitated movements of his fingers and feet, growing more and more rapid, would be supplemented by an icy, unblinking stare, or by a whispered aside to an attendant to rescue him — as, one day at Longchamps, he had whispered instructions to be saved from the all too oppressive proximity of Mme Loubet sitting on one side of him and the equally unprepossessing and no less stout wife of the Governor of Paris on the other.

This had been done with charm and courtesy, of course, for the King’s reputation for tactful behaviour with ladies was almost legendary. Stories were told of occasional lapses, of his having, for example, discomfited the American heiress, Mrs Moore, a rather absurd, importunate woman of whom the King said there were three things in life one could not escape:

‘L’amour, la Mort et La Moore.’ Mrs Moore, having curtsied before the King ‘almost to her knees’ in a flamboyantly theatrical gesture, was asked in a voice even more penetrating than usual, ‘Have you lost anything?’ Such lapses with men were more frequent. An American, who evidently wanted to be recognized by the King and made a great fuss of bowing very low every time he saw him, eventually got close enough at Homburg to observe, ‘I guess, Sir, you know my face?’ ‘I certainly seem to recognize,’ the King is alleged to have replied, ‘the top of your head.’

There were also occasions when the King’s laughter offended as much as his mocking words. On his return from Germany in 1909, impressed by the military atmosphere of the Kaiser’s court, he decided that meetings of the Privy Council should in future be conducted in a more formal setting. Instructions were given that uniforms should be worn; and it was intimated that full ecclesiastical vestments would, therefore, also be appropriate. Cosmo Gordon Lang, the recently appointed Archbishop of York, a Scotsman with a keen sense of drama and a highly dignified manner, readily conformed to the King’s wishes and attended his first Privy Council meeting in his splendid and commodious archiepiscopal robes. Having kissed the King’s hand, he retired slowly backwards upon the diminutive figure of Lord Northcote, a former Governor-General of Australia, who was also attending his first meeting of the Privy Council. Northcote became entangled in the voluminous vestments from which he struggled unsuccessfully to emerge, while the Archbishop, evidently unaware of the foreign body within the folds of his cope, maintained his usual dignified composure. The King stepped forward to help; but, overcome by Northcote’s ludicrous predicament, suddenly burst into laughter.

That irrepressible, infectious laughter was heard again a month later when the King was being driven in one of his motor-cars from Biarritz to San Sebastian to have luncheon with the King of Spain. The ridiculous sight of the slovenly Spanish soldiers lining the route, many waving and smiling genially rather than saluting, few standing to attention and some actually sitting down and smoking, was too much for him and, beginning to laugh, he could scarcely control himself before San Sebastian was reached.

Yet, although the King’s laughter was often heard in private, the occasions when he was seen laughing in public were extremely rare. His customary public deportment was universally recognized, indeed, as being exemplary, combining, in a way that was considered unique, irreproachable dignity with easy affability, authority with charm. Scores of witnesses have given testimony to this. ‘He was not a lover of the stage to no purpose,’ wrote Sir Lionel Cust, ‘and like a highly trained actor, he studied and learned the importance of mien and deportment, of exit and entrance, of clear and regulated diction and other details, which he absorbed quite modestly and without any ostentation into his own actions.’ Other observers praised his ability to put people at ease with a few well-considered words, to move on from one person to the next with a remark that would draw them both into a conversation which they could enjoy while he went on to talk to someone else, to flatter them all with the help of his excellent memory. At a state banquet in Berlin he happened to catch sight of Mme de Hegermann Lindencrone, the American wife of the Danish Minister, whom he had met once briefly many years before. He went up to her and reminded her of that meeting which had taken place at Sommerberg where the King had gone to play tennis with Paul Hatzfeldt, a former German Ambassador in London.

‘ “Fancy your Majesty remembering all these years.”

‘ “A long time ago. I was staying with the King and Queen of Denmark at Wiesbaden. I remember all so well. Poor Hatzfeldt! I remember what Bismarck said of him, ‘Was he not the best horse in his stable?’ ” And he turned smilingly to greet another guest.’

He would try to talk to everyone and, unlike the Kaiser, to do so without a hint of patronage. A stickler for convention and the rules of precedence, he was so satisfied with the established order of society that he would not allow anyone to make disparaging remarks about any of its institutions. It was rarely suggested, though, that he was pompous. He would far rather sit down to a meal with an entertaining acrobat than a tedious duke. Nor did he have any religious or racial prejudices. Indeed, his tolerant attitude towards the Roman Catholic Church — emphasized by a visit to Lourdes, his insistence that Cardinal Manning as a Prince of the Church should rank after himself and before the Prime Minister on a Royal Commission, and his readiness to attend a Requiem Mass — led to absurd rumors that he was a secret convert, just as his friendship with so many Jews, and his resemblance to Sir Ernest Cassel, gave rise to equally ill-founded stories that he had himself inherited Jewish blood from a court chamberlain with whom his paternal grandmother had been in love.

Above all, as everyone agreed, the King had a strong sense of duty. Most of his time was spent in the pursuit of pleasure, and all of it was spent in comfort; yet even his sternest critics conceded that, when there was work to be done, sooner or later he brought himself to do it. There was, however, one notable dereliction. In April 1908 the King declined to return home from France when Asquith became Prime Minister on Campbell Bannerman’s death. ‘I am sure he ought to return,’ Francis Knollys told Asquith, ‘and I have gone as far, and perhaps further, in what I have said to him than I am entitled to go.’ But Asquith had to go out to Biarritz to kiss hands, and there was troublesome delay in appointments to the new Cabinet as it was impracticable for all the other ministers affected to cross the Channel. There were no embarrassing speeches in the House of Commons, where the King’s failure to come home was nevertheless strongly deprecated. But some newspapers, rarely having occasion to criticize the King on such a score, condemned his selfishness. The Times suggested:

It may perhaps be regarded as a picturesque and graceful tribute to the reality of the ‘Entente’ with our French friends that the King and the Prime Minister should find themselves so much at home in their beautiful country as to be able to transact the most important constitutional business on French soil. Still, the precedent is not one to be followed, and everyone with a sound knowledge of our political system must hope that nothing of the kind will happen again.

It was suggested to the King that he might save himself from such attacks by emphasizing that he came to Biarritz for his health. But at the time the King felt ‘perfectly well’. He would not say that he was not. He was not in the habit of lying. And he would not lie now. So nothing more was said to him about the matter. Soon it was forgotten; and, if the King remembered it with shame, he did not talk about it. It was better to remember the afternoons with Mrs Keppel, the drives into the country to Pau and Roncesvalles, the walks in the woods, the picnics by the road, the games of pelota at Anglet, the races at la Barre.

After dining with Lord and Lady Islington on the night of the King’s death, Mrs Asquith had gone to see the Hardinges. Edward Grey was there, and both he and Charles Hardinge looked ‘white with sorrow’. On returning to Downing Street, Mrs Asquith lay in bed with the lights turned on, ‘sleepless, stunned and cold’. At midnight there was a knock at the door. The head messenger walked in and, stopping at the foot of the bed, said, ‘His Majesty passed away at 11.45.’ Mrs Asquith burst into tears. She had written earlier:

Royal persons are necessarily divorced from the true opinions of people that count, and are almost always obliged to take safe and commonplace views. To them clever men are ‘prigs’, clever women ‘too advanced’; Liberals are ‘socialists’; the uninteresting ‘pleasant’; the interesting ‘intriguers’; and the dreamer ‘mad’. But, when all this is said, our King devotes what time he does not spend upon sport and pleasure ungrudgingly to duty. He subscribes to his cripples, rewards his sailors, reviews his soldiers, and opens bridges, bazaars, hospitals and railway tunnels with enviable sweetness. He is loyal to all his … friends … and adds to fine manners, rare prestige, courage and simplicity.

Lord Fisher would have agreed with her. He wrote:

The eulogies in the newspapers did not mention the sins, which struck Wilfrid Scawen Blunt as ‘very absurd, considering what the poor King was’. ‘He might have been a Solon and a Francis of Assisi combined if the characters drawn of him were true. In no print has there been the smallest allusion to any of his pleasant little wickednesses.’ Yet it was these venial sins that had helped to make him the well-liked figure that he undoubtedly was and which largely accounted for the nation’s ‘sense of personal loss’, a loss, so Lord Morley thought, that was ‘in a way deeper and keener than when Queen Victoria died’.

King Edward was, in fact, a popular monarch because he was so obviously a human one. Lord Granville said that he had ‘all the faults of which the Englishman is accused’. But it would have been more accurate to say that he had all the faults of which Englishmen would like to be accused. Also, he had many virtues which they are traditionally supposed to lack. He was not in the least hypocritical; he never attempted to disguise an unashamed zest for luxury and sensual pleasure. Yet, as Edward Grey put it, his ‘capacity for enjoying life’ was ‘combined with a positive and strong desire that everyone else should enjoy life too’.

Mrs Keppel said much the same thing. She was prostrated by the King’s death. Her daughter Sonia described how, ‘at a few minutes’ notice’, the family moved from Portman Square to the Arthur Jameses’ in Grafton Street where the blinds were drawn, the lights were dimmed and black clothes appeared, even for the little girl, with black ribbons threaded through her underclothes. Sonia could not understand why all this had to be so. She went to the room where her mother lay in bed. But Mrs James barred her way; and her mother looked at her blankly, ‘without recognition, almost resentfully’. Sonia ran, frightened, to her father and burst into tears. ‘Why does it matter so much, Kingy dying?’ she asked him, sobbing on his shirtfront.

‘Poor little girl,’ he said. ‘It must have been very frightening for you. And for all of us for that matter. Nothing will ever be quite the same again. Because Kingy was such a wonderful man.’

Colonel Keppel, like all those others who had grown fond of the King, felt conscious of the loss of a remarkable and irreplaceable character. It was difficult to become accustomed to his absence, to enter rooms where he had formerly been seen or to smell the pungent smoke of a Henry Clay cigar, to catch sight of a rakishly tilted Tyrolean hat, or a perky fox terrier, without remembering him.

Writing from Rufford Abbey where he was staying for Doncaster Races after the King’s death, Lord Crewe remarked upon ‘the sense of strangeness’ that had come over all those places where his deep though penetrating voice and his gruff laugh were heard no longer in the corridors, where his ‘intense and commanding personality’ was felt no more.