Christopher Hibbert - Edward VII - The Last Victorian King

The political discussions which appeared to cloud the horizon on every side made the King deeply despondent about the future. He was worried by the prospect of war; by the fear that Germany was getting ahead of England in the race for naval armaments; by the policies of social reform to which the Liberal government were committed and which he felt endangered the whole basis of society; by the quarrel between the two Houses of Parliament and the insistent demands for reform of the House of Lords.

He was, and had always been, as Charles Dilke said, ‘a strong Conservative, and a still stronger Jingo’. Criticisms of the imperialistic policies of his mother’s governments had never failed to infuriate him. At the time of the Afghan War in 1878–9 he had fiercely resented the attacks of the Liberal opposition on the conduct of the campaign and he told Sir Bartle Frere, ‘If I had my way I should not be content until we had taken the whole of Afghanistan, and kept it.’ He was equally insistent that England ‘must for ever keep a strong hold over Egypt’. And after the death of General Gordon and the fall of Khartoum he had urged the annihilation of the Mahdi and the conquest of the whole of the Sudan. His open support of Dr Jameson’s raiders was followed by his declared support of Cecil Rhodes, whom he invited to dinner, chiding the Prime Minister for refusing to receive him; by his sustained rejection of any suggestion that the Boer War was dishonourable, and his contention that it would be ‘terrible indeed’ if South Africa were ‘handed over to the Boers’. He associated criticism of the British army with treason, and, while accepting that conscription would have to come and generally supporting Haldane, he viewed many suggestions for reform with scepticism: the proposal that the traditional uniforms of the army should be replaced by ‘the hideous khaki’ had at first dismayed him.

His firm objection to admitting natives to a share in the government of India was matched by his opposition to allowing women to have a say in the government of England. Having ‘no sympathy at all’ with female suffrage, he condemned the conduct of those ‘dreadful women’, the ‘so-called “suffragettes”’, as ‘outrageous’. He sternly admonished Campbell-Bannerman for having spoken in their favour, and told Campbell-Bannerman’s successor that he deplored ‘the attitude taken up by Mr Asquith on the Woman’s Suffrage question’. Although he had agreed with Charles Dilke that Octavia Hill should have been appointed to the Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes, he ‘hung fire’, so Knollys told Sandars, when it was proposed that the aged Florence Nightingale should be awarded the O.M., being ‘reluctant to give it to women’. And he was very cross indeed when the Home Secretary put forward the names of two women to serve on the Royal Commission for Divorce — on which, despite the King’s protests, they did serve — since divorce was a subject which could not be discussed ‘openly and in all its aspects with any delicacy or even decency before ladies’. ‘He is quite unconvinced by the arguments brought forward in support of their retention,’ his assistant private secretary, Arthur Davidson, told Asquith. ‘The King considers it the thin edge of suffragettism and feels sure that its supporters will get stronger and more persistent in their demands when they see the principle, on which they base their claims, as partially recognised.’

He disapproved quite as strongly of ladies shooting. And as for the young: ‘Refinement of feeling in the younger generation does not exist in the nineteenth century … the age of chivalry has passed.’

He had not been blindly opposed to all change. He had been persuaded, for instance, by Lord Rosebery of the justice of the Third Reform Bill of 1884 which proposed to increase the size of the electorate by extending household suffrage to the country constituencies. And when the Bill had been rejected by the House of Lords and a demonstration organized by its supporters, he had gone to watch the procession from the Whitehall house of Charles Carrington, one of its principal advocates. Carrington had arranged for the demonstrators to turn their eyes to the right and take off their caps when they reached the Horse Guards, for the Prince and Princess of Wales would be standing on the balcony of the middle window opposite. As the huge procession approached, the Prince had begun to think that he had made a bad mistake in allowing himself to become involved with it. After all, as he had suggested to Rosebery at luncheon, attacks on a hereditary House of Lords were bound to harm a hereditary monarchy; and he had not appeared to be altogether reassured by Rosebery’s contention that the Crown was above controversy and did not presume to resist the people’s will as the Lords resisted the will of the Commons. The Prince’s apprehensions had been immeasurably increased when the procession appeared at the bottom of Whitehall with red flags waving and bands playing the Marseillaise. ‘Hey, Charlie!’ he had said to Carrington. ‘This don’t look much like being a pleasant afternoon.’

Carrington had been right. As the procession had reached his house, all but three of the bands had changed their tune to ‘God Save the Queen’; loud cheers had greeted the appearance of the Prince and Princess on the balcony; caps had been waved; and voices had been raised in singing ‘God Bless the Prince of Wales’. After standing in the hot sun for an hour and a half the Princess had felt faint and had gone indoors to lie down on a sofa; but the vociferous protests from the crowd had brought her back and, propped up by a pile of cushions, she and the Prince had continued to receive an ovation which, as Carrington had commented, ‘did one’s heart good … The reception was something tremendous … In fact the day was a regular triumph for the royal family.’

Although the Prince had brushed off Conservative protests at his having been made use of by irresponsible radicals, any suggestion that he had ambitions to become a citizen-king in the style of Louis-Philippe would have horrified him. He had made friends with some republicans, but he had hoped by so doing to take the sting out of republicanism. He had shown himself in Birmingham, but he had intended by appearing there to do something to counteract the influence of Joseph Chamberlain and had been deeply gratified to hear the mayor declare that in England the Throne was ‘recognized and respected as the symbol of all constitutional authority and settled government’. He had always done his best to show his sympathy with social reform by identifying the monarchy with the conscience of his people. He had always shown a sincere concern for their welfare, particularly for their housing; and he had not hesitated to condemn the ‘perfectly disgraceful’ conditions in which so many of the poor were forced to live. But he had no time for Socialists, never attempted to understand their ideals, and looked upon them in his last years as a dangerous threat to all that he held most dear.

It seemed to him in the summer of 1909 that some of Asquith’s ministers, notably Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Winston Churchill, President of the Board of Trade, were behaving in the most irresponsibly inflammatory manner. On 19 July Knollys told Asquith that it was really painful for the King ‘to be continually obliged to complain of certain of [his] colleagues’. And when, later on that month, Lloyd George, in one of his attacks on the House of Lords, made a speech in which he complained that a fully equipped duke was as costly to maintain as two dreadnoughts and less easy to scrap, the King, so Knollys said, felt constrained ‘to protest in the most vigorous terms against one of his ministers making such a speech … full of false statements, of socialism in its most insidious form and full of virulent abuses of one particular class’. The King could not understand how the Prime Minister could allow his colleagues to make speeches which ‘would not have been tolerated by any Prime Minister until within the last few years’, which his Majesty regarded as being ‘in the highest degree improper’, and which he looked upon ‘as being an insult to the Sovereign’.