Christopher Hibbert - Edward VII - The Last Victorian King

Under the next administration the situation did not much improve. When, in July 1908, the King asked to see ‘a copy of Winston Churchill’s Army Scheme’, the Secretary for War passed the letter on to the Prime Minister, who sent it back with the comment, ‘I return this. I have replied to Knollys in the sense which you suggested. It is, in any case, an impertinent request. These people have no right to interfere in any way in our deliberations.’

Most of the King’s disagreements with his ministers were attributable to his being ‘completely left in the dark’. Since the ruin of Sir Charles Dilke by the scandal of his divorce, and of Lord Randolph Churchill by disease, the King had no close political friends other than the Duke of Devonshire and Lord Rosebery. He did not get on with his Conservative Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour, with whom he had almost nothing in common. Nor did he relish the company of the three ministers, Lord Lansdowne, Lord Selborne and St John Brodrick, with whom, as Foreign Secretary, First Lord of the Admiralty and Secretary for War, he was principally concerned. Arnold-Forster, who succeeded Brodrick in 1903, was even worse, ‘obstinate as a mule’, according to Lord Esher, opposing everything which the King proposed. Nor were Balfour’s opponents any better, in the King’s opinion. Their leader, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, had given particular offence by his criticisms of the conduct of the Boer War, speaking of British ‘methods of barbarism in South Africa’, a phrase that so annoyed the King that he had with difficulty been dissuaded from sending for the Liberal leader and telling him to avoid such remarks in future. Since then Campbell Bannerman’s ‘gratuitous and ungenerous’ attacks on the Prime Minister had continued to exasperate the King, who remarked to Knollys that it was ‘curious’ that he hardly ever opened his mouth ‘without saying something in bad taste’.

When Campbell-Bannerman succeeded Balfour in 1905 and the King got to know him better, he became quite fond of him. But he continued to annoy the King by his speeches on foreign policy, a subject about which — like Lloyd George — he knew ‘nothing’. ‘Between ourselves,’ Knollys confided to Esher in 1907, ‘I don’t think the King ever will like “C.B.” politically.’ As for Campbell-Bannerman’s Under-Secretary for the Colonies, Winston Churchill, the King decided that he was ‘almost more of [a] cad in office than he was in opposition’ when he had ‘showed a great want of taste’ and talked ‘simple nonsense’. He liked Churchill well enough as a man — though Francis Knollys did not — but Churchill’s conduct towards Lord Milner was, in the King’s opinion, ‘simply scandalous’, while his later comments on the ‘richer classes’ were ‘unforgivable’.

There were, indeed, very few politicians whom the King fully trusted. He thought John Morley, Secretary for India, ‘wonderfully agreeable and sensible’. He liked Arnold-Forster’s successor, Haldane, who was ‘always acceptable’, though he described him as a ‘damned radical lawyer and a German professor’ when it fell to Haldane’s lot to reduce the army estimates. He got on well, too, with the ebullient, working-class President of the Local Government Board, John Burns, whose appearance in knee-breeches, Esher said, was ‘a revelation’ and whose summary of his relationship with the King was expressed in the words, ‘Me and ’im get on first-rate together.’ The King was also particularly attached to Lord Fisher, a man of commanding personality, who wholeheartedly returned the King’s affection and remained forever grateful for his support against his enemies. ‘They would have eaten me but for Your Majesty,’ Fisher once told the King, who was delighted that his dear friend had triumphed over that ‘gasbag’ Beresford.

The King did not enjoy many victories himself. He did get his own way with the Order of Merit which he insisted, against all objections, should be open to military and naval officers despite the great number of other honours available to them. He was equally and successfully insistent that the Kaiser should be allowed to decorate all the British officers and men who had been in attendance on him while he was in England at the time of Queen Victoria’s death, although his ministers much regretted the growing practice of British citizens accepting foreign decorations. The King also occasionally managed to wrest a written promise from a minister by declining to sign a paper until the required undertaking had been given. He refused, for example, to sign a Royal Warrant concerning army pay and allowances until Arnold-Forster had assured him in writing that no serving officer would have his pay cut, unless, at the same time, his duties were to be reduced. The King was again victorious when an attempt was made to limit the time an equerry could remain in his service to five years and to stop their army pay for that period. And when the government, which had agreed to pay the expenses he incurred in entertaining foreign sovereigns, asked that a distinction should be made between political and private visits, the King refused to allow that such a distinction could be made. He had his own views, Knollys told the Treasury, ‘respecting the importance, from a political point of view, of visits of foreign sovereigns to this country which might not coincide with those of the Secretary of State’; and there might, therefore, be ‘constant conflicts between the King on one side, and the Treasury and Foreign Office on the other’. This argument proving ineffective, the King said that he would send for the Prime Minister and tell him personally that he would not stand for ‘such an attempted evasion by the Treasury of what was agreed upon’ at the time of his accession. And at this threat, the Treasury gave way.

It was usually, however, the King who had to give way; and he rarely did so without a struggle. Determined to outgrow his reputation for being over-impressionable, in his later years he was often obstinate. And even when he had been convinced that he must yield to pressure he would not do so immediately, saying, ‘I will consider the matter,’ which his staff learned to translate as, ‘I recognize that I will shortly have to surrender.’

In the first year of his reign a young officer who had been cashiered for cowardice by surrendering to the enemy in South Africa appealed to him to exercise his royal prerogative of mercy. The King read the papers, decided that the officer had been harshly treated, and approached the Commander-in-Chief, Lord Roberts. Roberts agreed with the King and asked the Adjutant-General to hold a special court of inquiry. The court recommended that the sentence should be quashed and that the officer should be convicted of an error of judgement and allowed to resign his commission. But the Secretary of State for War, who was concerned by the number of times officers had surrendered unnecessarily in the war and had considered it his unpleasant duty to make an example of this particular officer, threatened to resign if the harsher punishment were not imposed. The King’s apparent willingness to pardon the young man anyway brought from the Prime Minister a warning of the possibility of the entire government’s resignation in order to defend the principle of collective Cabinet responsibility. So the officer had to be sacrificed; and the King had to yield to the government’s pressure.

The King also had to yield when the war was over and it was proposed to appoint a Royal Commission to enquire into its conduct. He wrote to the Prime Minister:

This system of ‘washing our dirty linen in public’ the late Queen had a horror of. The Government is a strong one with a large Parliamentary majority. Why, therefore, should Ministers pledge themselves, or give way to demands from unimportant M.P.’s? The proposed Inquiry will do the Army and also the Country harm in the eyes of the civilised world.