Christopher Hibbert - Edward VII - The Last Victorian King

The Prime Minister replied that he was already pledged to the Commission and that he could not overrule the Cabinet; and the King was left to complain gloomily to Knollys about the apparent power of a body which neither the King nor the Prime Minister could gainsay.

The King was no more successful when he attempted to prevent the publication of an Army Journal in which officers were to be free to express their feelings on military subjects. This, the King maintained, was totally opposed to the army’s tradition of silence. He would ‘neither sanction nor support’ the Journal in any way; ‘this should be clearly understood’; he washed his hands ‘of the whole matter’. But the Journal was established all the same.

Nor did the King’s views prevail when he suggested that the age for admittance of subalterns into the Guards might be reduced to eighteen; nor when he proposed that on the fiftieth anniversary of the Indian Mutiny the occasion should be marked ‘by a judicious distribution of honours’; nor when he tried to obtain an earldom for Lord Curzon; nor when he asked that the band of the Coldstream Guards should be sent to play in Germany, a request turned down by the Foreign Office, whose ‘extraordinary conduct’ of the ‘whole transaction’ caused him ‘much annoyance’. Nor did the King succeed in preventing the admission of native members to the Viceroy of India’s Council, which he considered a ‘step fraught with the greatest danger to the maintenance of the Indian Empire under British rule’. When Satyendra Prassano Sinha, a distinguished Hindu lawyer, was suggested as a suitable member of the Council, the King wrote to protest ‘most strongly’. He told Lord Minto, the Viceroy:

To take a very clever native on to your Executive Council must necessarily be a source of much danger to our rule in the Indian Empire. I am afraid it is the ‘thin end of the wedge’, and it will require a most resolute Viceroy to avoid being forced to nominate one if not two native members of the council. I can hardly believe that the present appointment of a Hindoo will not create great and just indignation among the Mahomedans and that the latter will not be contented unless they receive an assurance that one of their creed succeeds to Mr Sinha.

A week later, however, he was obliged to sign ‘the objectionable paper’. ‘Do try and induce Morley not to be so obstinate by appointing another Native,’ he asked Esher on Sinha’s resignation. ‘He knows how strong my views are on the subject, and so does Minto; but they don’t care what I say, nor does any member of my precious (!) Govt.’

One of the most painful of all the King’s disagreements with his government was over his determination, during Balfour’s premiership, not to confer a Knighthood of the Garter upon the Shah of Persia, who had been persuaded by the British Minister in Teheran that if he made the journey to England, which he was reluctant to do, the King would admit him into that most noble order of chivalry. The King contended that it was a Christian order and could not, therefore, be bestowed upon an infidel even though his mother had conferred it upon the Shah’s father as well as upon two Sultans of Turkey. The government, on the other hand, maintained that were the Shah not to receive the Garter which he had been led to expect would be bestowed upon him, he was quite likely out of pique to ally himself with Russia, a consequence as much to be dreaded as it was easy to avoid. The Foreign Secretary, Lord Lansdowne, endeavoured to solve the problem by preparing a memorandum of a proposed revision in the statutes of the Order to enable it to be conferred upon non-Christians. This document, so Lansdowne said, the King had read in his presence and, having done so, had nodded twice as if he approved of it. But this the King denied, though he admitted that he had taken the document from Lansdowne and had put it to one side intending to read it later. Anyway, Lansdowne went ahead with his plan and ordered from the court jewellers special Garter insignia from which the Christian emblems were to be removed. At the same time he sent a letter to the King explaining what he had done, and attached to it coloured illustrations of the proposed new Garter Star from which the Cross of St George was to be omitted.

The King at the time was on board the royal yacht, the Victoria and Albert, at Portsmouth; and Frederick Ponsonby described the dreadful scene when the King opened the harmless-looking Foreign Office box and took out the contents. He was already annoyed with the Shah, who, put out by the delay in conferring the Order upon him, had rejected a gold-framed miniature of the King surrounded by diamonds which had been offered him and had told his suite not to accept the English decorations which it had been proposed to confer upon them. Consequently, as the King picked up Lansdowne’s letter and — in its recipient’s eyes — its scarcely less than blasphemous enclosure, there was an immediate ‘explosion. He was so angry that he flung the design across his cabin’. It went through the porthole and, so Ponsonby thought, into the sea. Furiously, the King dictated ‘some very violent remarks’ to be addressed to Lord Lansdowne. Ponsonby softened the tone of the letter; but, even so, Lansdowne recognized that he would have to resign unless the King gave way. While Knollys urged the King to stand firm, the Duke of Devonshire advised the Prime Minister to support Lansdowne, and the Shah became thoroughly disgruntled.

‘We have a very difficult game to play,’ Balfour wrote to the King, who continued to protest that it was ‘an unheard of proceeding, one sovereign being dictated to by another as to what order he should confer on him’. Balfour persisted:

Russia has most of the cards, yet it would be dangerous to lose the rubber. Our well-known fidelity to our engagements is one of our few trumps. We must not waste it … Lord Lansdowne, erroneously believing himself to be authorized by Your Majesty, has pledged your Majesty to bestow the Garter upon the Shah — has indeed pledged your Majesty repeatedly and explicitly.

If he be prevented from carrying out these pledges, what will be his position?… And, if he resigned, could the matter stop there in these days of governmental solidarity?

Faced once again with the threat of the government’s resignation, the King felt obliged to give way. He was ‘much depressed about it all’, Knollys told Balfour; but his ‘high sense of duty’ and ‘patriotic motives’ overcame his great reluctance. He insisted, however, that no decorations should be given to the Shah’s suite in view of their earlier refusal of them, and that this must be the last time the Garter was conferred upon a person who was not a Christian. But even these conditions were not observed. The King was persuaded in the end to give decorations to the Shah’s grumpy entourage, and though he would not agree to the Order being conferred upon the King of Siam five years later, he agreed to bestow it upon the more important Emperor of Japan.

If King Edward often found his successive governments tiresome and difficult, he was not an easy man to do business with himself. By the end of 1905 he had virtually stopped giving formal audiences to his ministers, preferring to talk to them when he happened to meet them at dinner parties or upon other social occasions, or dealing with them through people he knew well and trusted including Sir Charles Hardinge, Sir Ernest Cassel, Lord Fisher, de Soveral, Knollys and Esher, the last five of whom all worked closely together and met frequently at Brooks’s Club.

Most of his personal staff were devoted to him; some loved him; but none could pretend that working for him was always a pleasure. When a subject interested him he was scrupulous, even pedantic in his attention to its smallest and most insignificant detail. ‘He is … a good listener, if you aren’t too long,’ Asquith, Campbell-Bannerman’s successor, told his wife. ‘He has an excellent head and is most observant about people … He is not at all argumentative and understands everything that is properly put to him.’ Yet with matters that bored him he would not make the slightest effort to comprehend them. Frederick Ponsonby commented: