Christopher Hibbert - Edward VII - The Last Victorian King

Occasionally on his foreign visits the King would be upset by some display of anti-British feeling. At the time of the Boer War he was deeply offended by being forced to listen to renditions of the Boers’ national anthem on his way to Friedrichshof; and he cancelled his usual spring holiday on the Riviera and refused to open an International Exhibition in Paris because of hostilc articles about his country and rude caricatures of himself which had appeared in French newspapers. But normally he was greeted respectfully wherever he went. Sometimes, indeed, he was forced to complain of the all too enthusiastic welcome accorded to him by cheering crowds or inquisitive tourists who pressed about him with clicking cameras, anxious to obtain a snapshot of a man so famous and revered that people collected cigar stubs that had touched his lips, bones that had been left on his plate, and bowed towards the chair upon which he was accustomed to sit in a favoured shop.

In his later years his continental visits began to assume a set pattern. He would leave England at the beginning of March for France, spending a week or so in Paris before going on to Biarritz for three weeks. He then would embark on a month’s cruise, in the royal yacht, usually with the Queen and preferably in the Mediterranean. Although he once told Lord Morley, while they were driving together through the forests near Balmoral, that ‘if he could have chosen his life he would have liked to be a landscape gardener’, he did not usually seem to take much notice of his surroundings and certainly rarely made a comment on the scenery. At Biarritz, however, he was struck by the beauty of the Basque coast-line and wrote to his friend, Lady Londonderry, of the ‘splendid views’ and of the pleasure he derived from listening to the ‘continual roll of the Atlantic’. He wrote one day in the early spring of 1906:

Though this place is quieter than the Riviera it is more bracing and I am sure healthier. I have charming rooms in a very big hotel close to the sea [the Hôtel du Palais] … Golf is the principal pastime, but the roads are excellent and I take continually long motor drives into the country and to Spain. I shall meet the Queen at Marseilles in the yacht. … There are a great many English here.

One of the principal advantages of Biarritz was that the air suited him far better than the more sultry air of the Riviera. Towards the end of his life he was troubled by coughing fits so severe that he found it difficult to get his breath and seemed to be choking. But once installed at the Hôtel du Palais he found his breathing much more easy, and only regretted that Biarritz was so smelly. It was bad enough in 1907, but so much worse in 1908 that he instructed the British Ambassador in Paris to make representations to Clemenceau himself about ‘the effects of defective draining’, otherwise some other resort would ‘have to be thought of’. Assurances were given that something would be done, and so the next year the King returned as usual.

At Biarritz he was called at seven, and after his glass of warm milk and his bath, he would have breakfast at ten, usually in a small tent on the terrace outside his apartments. The Corsican detective, Xavier Paoli, who was assigned to guard him, reported that he had grilled bacon, boiled eggs and fried fish for breakfast with a large cup of coffee, and that, having finished this meal, he would sit at his writing-table till a quarter past twelve when he went out for a walk. Lunch was served in his large private dining-room overlooking the sea at one o’clock and invariably included hard-boiled plovers’ eggs with a touch of paprika, followed by trout, salmon or grilled sole, a meat dish (preferably chicken or lamb with asparagus), and strawberries or stewed fruit. As in England he drank very little either at luncheon or dinner, contenting himself with a glass or two of Chablis or dry champagne or, possibly, claret and Perrier water. Occasionally between meals he would have a whisky and soda.

Paoli complained of the difficulties of maintaining the King’s privacy. He managed to reduce the swarm of beggars that habitually descended upon Biarritz in the season to two blind and ragged mendicants who took up the same position every day and, at the sound of Caesar’s bark, held out their bowls into which the King dropped his daily contribution with the words, ‘A demain!’ But newspapermen were a more serious problem. Paoli found a retired detective who bore such a marked resemblance to the King that he was known as ‘Edouard’. He tried dressing this man up in clothes like the King’s; but although the resemblance was more striking than ever, ‘Edouard’ could not manage a remotely convincing imitation of the King’s smile or his highly characteristic way of walking or bowing, and the experiment had to be abandoned.

Despite his occasional failures, Paoli believed that he earned the King’s respect, even his friendship; and he proudly recorded in his memoirs how one day he had ventured to admire the tiny gold matchbox with the royal crown which the King wore on his watch-chain. ‘Accept it, my dear Paoli, as a souvenir,’ the King immediately replied with his usual impulsive generosity. ‘I should like you to have it.’

Although Paoli complained of the newspapermen, they discreetly omitted to mention in their reports the presence in Biarritz of Mrs Keppel, who was usually there staying, with her two daughters and their governess, at the Villa Eugènie as a guest of Sir Ernest Cassel and his sister. Mrs Keppel’s daughter Sonia has described how exciting these annual journeys to Biarritz were, and how respectfully her mother was always treated: ‘At Victoria a special carriage was reserved for us; and a special cabin on the boat. And at Calais, Mamma was treated like royalty. The chef de gare met her and escorted us all through the customs, and the car attendant on the train hovered over her like a love-sick troubadour.’ Once at Biarritz, Sonia and her sister saw ‘Kingy’ frequently, accompanying him on picnics which, ‘for some unfathomed reason’, he chose to have by the side of the road, where other cars were sure to park nearby and where footmen unpacked chairs and tables, linen tablecloths, plates, glasses and silver, and ‘every variety of cold food’. ‘Much of “Kingy’s” enjoyment of these picnics was based on his supposed anonymity and, delightedly, he would respond to an assumed name in his deep, unmistakable voice, unaware that most of the crowd was playing up to him.’

Every year, after the Regatta at Cowes, the King also went to Germany or Austria to take the waters at a spa. Formerly he had favoured Homburg which, in the season, had been full of foreign visitors ‘most of whom [he knew] more or less’. These included Reuben Sassoon, a ‘curious old gentleman’, in George Cornwallis-West’s opinion, who ‘never opened his mouth except to put food in it’; but who gave the most entertaining picnic parties for as many as seventy guests; Mrs Arthur James, whose humour and high spirits always put the King in a good temper; and the dear old Duke of Cambridge with his son, Colonel FitzGeorge, and the Duke’s friend, Mrs Robert Vyner. The King had stayed at the Ritters Park Hotel and had drunk the waters conscientiously between half past seven and nine o’clock in the morning before breakfast of a cup of coffee and a boiled egg.

In 1899 the King had transferred his favour to Marienbad, a small town in a pleasant valley in Bohemia, two thousand feet above the sea. The springs of healing waters at Marienbad belonged to the nearby abbey of Tepl, whose monks spent alternating periods of two years in seclusion followed by two years in the outside world and — as though in doubt as to which side of the abbey wall their life’s work lay — wore black top hats with white cassocks. The monks had been profiting by the sale of their waters for more than twenty years when the King, as Prince of Wales, had gone there for the first time. And by 1899 it had become extremely fashionable, the chosen spa of numerous members of Europe’s oldest families: of Grand Admiral Tirpitz and Lord Fisher; of Sir Ernest Cassel and the faded Lillie Langtry; of the Gaekwar of Baroda, the Turkish Grand Vizier and the King of Greece; of the dissolute Duke of Orléans and the celebrated French cavalry officer, General Galliffet, whose wounded stomach was covered by a silver plate; of Princess Dolgorouki, who had morganatically married the Tsar of Russia; of Madame Waddington, the attractive American widow of a French Ambassador in London; and of numerous ladies who, as one English visitor disapprovingly noted, ‘either have already been, or are qualifying themselves for being, divorced’. Most of them were extremely fat when they arrived; and many not much less so when they left.