Christopher Hibbert - Edward VII - The Last Victorian King

‘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.’