Christopher Hibbert - Edward VII - The Last Victorian King

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.

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.