Christopher Hibbert - Edward VII - The Last Victorian King

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.