Christopher Hibbert - Edward VII - The Last Victorian King

There were several excellent hotels in the town, the most fashionable being the Weimar where from 1903 to 1909 the King took a suite of rooms which were specially furnished for him in a different style for each succeeding visit, all the pieces being sold for much more than their intrinsic value after he left.

Every morning at the Weimar, the King’s valet, Meidinger, himself awakened by a band which began to play under his window at half past six, entered his master’s bedroom to draw the curtains. And, without fail, he would be asked the same question phrased in the same six words: ‘What’s the weather doing to-day, Meidinger?’

Having heard the subsequent report, the King got up and dressed himself. Soon after half past seven, with his secretary on one side and an equerry on the other, he could be seen strolling briskly up and down on the promenade by the spring known as the Kreuzbrunnen, smartly dressed in a hard, curly-brimmed pale grey felt hat worn at a slight angle to the left, a stiff white collar, neat grey pin-striped suit with all three buttons done up, and yellow suede gloves sewn with black stitching. In warmer weather he would wear a lightweight, dark blue coat and white trousers which were always immaculately creased, sometimes in front and at others down the sides. He was invariably closely shadowed by six Austrian detectives and two detectives from London, Patrick Quinn and Quinn’s assistant, Hester. Even at that hour of the morning crowds of sightseers gathered to watch him stride by, his left arm bent as though he were about to put his hand into his pocket, his right hand grasping a goldknobbed malacca cane or an ebony walking stick adorned with an E in brilliants, surmounted by a crown. As in Paris he liked to be known as the Duke of Lancaster, and was infuriated when the courier, Fehr, had his luggage labels printed, ‘Lord Lancaster’, a mistake that led him to expostulate angrily that people would think he was an ennobled gunmaker. Also, as in Paris, the incognito was scarcely worth while since everyone knew who the Duke of Lancaster was, the Burgomaster advertising his arrival by putting up notices asking people to respect his privacy, and photographs of him being on display in every shop window.

Although Frederick Ponsonby asserted that the King’s ‘one idea of happiness was to be in the middle of a crowd with no one taking any notice of him’, others, more discerningly, supposed that he had no objection to being looked at and admired — he was rather annoyed, in fact, if he was not recognized. When dining incognito in restaurants, he became excessively impatient with waiters who failed to accord him the special treatment to which he was accustomed and treated him as an ordinary person who had to take his turn. And, once, paying an unexpected call on friends in Paris, he was exasperated to be asked at the door who he was. ‘You do not know me? Well, you ought to know me,’ the King expostulated, adding as proof of his own remarkable memory for faces, ‘I know you. Last year you were third footman with the Duchess of Manchester.’

What the King did object to was being hampered or inconvenienced by inquisitive people who lacked the good manners to remain at a respectful distance. The crowds at Marienbad became so obtrusive that the King felt obliged to complain to the Emperor, whose officials saw to it that in future he was allowed to stroll about the town in peace, raising his hat in those varying degrees of respect which he had adopted to convey the exactly appropriate measure of esteem to those whom he encountered. The gestures of civility due to the Grand Duchesses of Saxe-Weimar and Mecklenburg-Schwerin were rather more elaborate than those due to Mme Waddington, and considerably more so than those used to indicate recognition of the English actors who visited Marienbad as regularly as he did himself. Servants off duty were also recognized; and staid Austrian aristocrats were astonished to see him raise his hat to them, a condescension strongly criticized as unbecoming in a monarch. Similarly shocking was the friendliness with which he greeted Fräulein Pistl, an exceptionally good-looking young woman who had a shop under the colonnades by the Kreuzbrunnen where she sold those Styrian hats which members of the King’s entourage were urged to buy and which he bought himself, requiring Fräulein Pistl to deliver them to his hotel personally.

The King usually had his first tumbler of mineral water at his hotel, and two others sitting on a bench which was reserved for his use near the Kreuzbrunnen, both glasses being brought to him by the head waiter of the Weimar. After his second glass he went to have a mud bath in the Neubad. Then he would settle down to lunch, conscious of the fact that he was at Marienbad for a cure which ought to involve the loss of a good deal of weight, yet, as an Austrian journalist noticed, evidently without intending ‘to subject himself to any severe regime’. Certainly, he did not eat as much as he did at home, and dispensed with the cold chicken which in England normally stood on his bedside table in case he woke up hungry in the night. He professed himself to be extremely dismayed by other people’s lapses, particularly those of his friend Harry Chaplin, who, having dieted for several days, would suddenly find fattening food and drink irresistible; and he became very cross when something which was strictly forbidden, such as champagne, was handed round in his presence. Nevertheless, he enjoyed the local trout; he did not decline grouse with fried aubergines; and he ate a large number of peaches, his favourite fruit, which the suave and elegant Marienbad doctor, Ernst Ott, advised were better for him than oranges. He never seems to have claimed to have lost more than eight pounds in a fortnight and considered even this highly satisfactory.

Occasionally he would have luncheon at the Rübezahl restaurant on a hillside overlooking the town, and after the meal would go for a walk in the surrounding pine forests or for a drive in a motor-car. He once went for a drive with the English War Minister, Haldane.

He proposed that we should go in plain clothes as though we were Austrians [Haldane recalled]. And the first thing he did was to make me buy an Austrian hat [from Fräulein Pistl, of course] so as to look like a native … As we were passing a little roadside inn, with a wooden table in front of it, the King stopped and said, ‘Here I will stand treat.’ He ordered coffee for two … He said Austrian coffee was always admirable, and you could tell when you had crossed the frontier into Germany, because of the badness of the coffee… ‘Now I am going to pay,’ he said. ‘I shall take care to give only a small tip to the woman … in case she suspects who I am.’ We then drove to a place the King was very fond of — a monastery inhabited by the Abbot of Teppel — where we had a large tea and where the King enjoyed himself with the monks very much, gossiping and making himself agreeable.

Knowing how fond the King was of shooting, the Abbot once invited him to shoot on the monastery lands. Normally while at Marienbad the King went shooting at Bischofteinitz with Prince Trauttmansdorff, who arranged his guns and four hundred beaters to perfection. But the Abbot, inexperienced in such matters, thought that all he had to do was buy a few partridges, put them down in a field and drive them over the guns. So as to prevent their flying away before the guns were ready, two kites, which the partridges were rightly expected to mistake for big, predatory birds, were set up over the field. But the kites were left in position when the beaters began the drive, which meant that the birds would only fly for short distances in front of the beaters before alighting again. This made the shooting both difficult and dangerous; and one old monk, who appeared with an antiquated gun, thought he would be better off behind the beaters. ‘It will all be quite safe,’ he assured the nervous English guests. ‘But of course if anyone shoots at me, I shall shoot back.’ The King, who was used to being given the best position, was for some reason placed right at the end of the line and was scarcely able to get a single shot all day.