Christopher Hibbert - Edward VII - The Last Victorian King

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: