Christopher Hibbert - Edward VII - The Last Victorian King

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.’