Christopher Hibbert - Edward VII - The Last Victorian King

Asquith made excuses which the King condemned as ‘pitiful’. He acknowledged that Lloyd George had been greatly provoked by some ‘foolish and mean speeches’ by his opponents and was somewhat placated by a letter of explanation from him, yet he viewed the intensifying political crisis with the deepest despondency, telling Asquith that he thought party politics had never been more bitter. Distressed by attempts to ‘inflame the passions of the working and lower orders against people who happen to be owners of property’, he was equally upset by the intransigence of the House of Lords. He brought all the influence he could to bear upon them not to reject Lloyd George’s budget as they were threatening to do in defiance of a rule that had not been broken for two hundred years; and he confided to Knollys that he thought the ‘Peers were mad’.

Taking advice on the propriety of the Lords’ intended action, he was told by some of his counsellors that rejection would be unconstitutional and by others that a budget which provided for revolutionary land taxes, as well as new income taxes and death duties, was a social measure that required the sanction of the electorate. Dreading an election fought on such an issue, the King renewed his efforts to reach a compromise, going so far as to ask Asquith to offer the Lords a dissolution of Parliament and a general election in three months’ time if only they could be persuaded to pass the budget, unpalatable as it was. But despite the King’s appeals, on 30 November 1909, playing into Lloyd George’s hands, the House of Lords rejected the ‘People’s Budget’; and faced with the knowledge that he would now be required to dissolve Parliament so that there could be a general election, he confessed at Sandringham on 2 December that he had never spent a more miserable day in his life.

On New Year’s Eve the customary ceremonies of ‘first footing’ were observed. The house was cleared of guests and servants just before midnight as usual, so that the King and Queen could be the first to open the front door in the New Year. On this occasion, however, they were forestalled by one of their grandchildren who, unaware of the importance that the King attached to such traditions, ran into the house by the back and flung the door open triumphantly as his grandparents approached it. The King looked at the child gravely and observed, ‘We shall have some very bad luck this year.’

While the King was at Sandringham discussions were held in London about the possibility of either allowing the Prime Minister to assume the Sovereign’s prerogative of creating peers or of curbing the power of the Lords by framing a Parliamentary Bill whose passage through the House would be guaranteed by the King’s giving a pledge to create enough new peers favourable towards it. The King, for his part, believed that if he were to create several hundred Liberal peers in order to limit the power of the House of Lords, as the government wanted him to do, he would not only fatally debilitate the Upper House but also abandon the political impartiality of the Crown to the ultimate ruin of its reputation. And as he again spoke gloomily of abdication, Asquith opened the Liberal Party’s election campaign with the pledge that he would not assume office unless he could secure the ‘necessary safeguards’ for ensuring ‘the effective limitation of the legislative powers of the Lords’ as well as the Commons’ ‘absolute control over finance’.

After Christmas the King went down to Brighton with Frederick Ponsonby and Seymour Fortescue to stay with Arthur Sassoon during the forthcoming General Election. People who saw him there were shocked to discover how tired and old and ill he looked. At dinner time he sat silent and morose, while Mrs Sassoon tirelessly kept up the conversation with Fortescue and Ponsonby. Appalled by such electioneering slogans as ‘Peers against People’ and by the condemnation of the House of Lords as wreckers of the Constitution, and as an obsolete assembly of rich backwoodsmen trying to avoid paying taxes, he grew increasingly melancholy, grievously worried that the Crown, by being dragged into controversy, would be diminished in prestige. One day he was driven to Worthing where he fell asleep in his car on the seafront while a huge crowd gathered round, staring through the windows in sympathetic silence.

At Eaton Hall, where he went to shoot with the Duke of Westminster after leaving Brighton, his gloom was temporarily dispelled. He thought he saw a way out of his difficulties, and he asked Knollys to tell Asquith that if the Liberals won the election he would not feel justified in creating the number of peers that would be necessary to get the party’s policies through the House of Lords until the country had been consulted at a second general election. Asquith, who was asked to treat this stipulation as strictly confidential, chivalrously agreed to do so and to undertake the delicate task of managing his party accordingly.

Nothing was said about the King’s intervention in favour of the House of Lords during the election campaign which resulted in the government’s retention of just enough seats to remain in office. According to Lord Esher this result ‘caused great relief’ at Windsor where it was felt that Asquith’s slender majority would make it easier for the King to resist unwelcome demands.

In fact, the Prime Minister was preparing the way for an announcement that, distasteful as it would be to his more reformist supporters, would take a great weight off the King’s mind. He could not accept a proposal, put forward by the King on his own initiative to the Lord Privy Seal, that the right to vote should be limited to a hundred peers of whom half would be nominated by the leaders of each of the two main parties; for this might well lead to the nomination of hacks selected because of their loyalty rather than their worth. But, on 21 February, Asquith made an announcement in the House of Commons virtually repudiating the pledge which he had made to his party before the election. He had neither requested nor received any guarantee about the creation of peers, he said. And he added that it was ‘the duty of responsible politicians to keep the name of the Sovereign and the prerogatives of the Crown outside the domain of party politics’.

Gratified by these remarks, the King left for Biarritz by way of Paris for the holiday which his doctors had been vainly pressing him to take earlier than usual but upon which he had been reluctant to embark until assured that he was no longer needed in England. But although his mind was less ill at ease, he was still depressed and on edge. In Paris, at the Théâtre de la Porte St Martin, he attended a performance of the new play, Chantecler, an allegorical verse drama by Edmond Rostand, author of Cyrano de Bergerac. But he was ‘dreadfully disappointed’: he had never seen anything ‘so stupid and childish’; while the theatre was so hot that he ‘contrived to get a chill with a threatening of bronchitis’. He also suffered from an attack of acute indigestion followed by a shortness of breath and a sharp pain near the heart. Two days later he became so ill at Biarritz that Sir James Reid advised him to stay in bed. This he declined to do, though he agreed to remain in his room at the Hôtel du Palais where the Marquis de Soveral and Mrs Keppel were amongst his few visitors.

At the end of March he felt a little better; but he was still fretting about the political situation at home where Asquith’s difficulties in getting his government’s measures passed by Parliament were once again bringing into discussion the unpleasant topic of the King’s creation of a complaisant majority in the House of Lords. The Queen begged him to join her on a Mediterranean cruise. The weather in Biarritz, as she had no need to tell him, was miserable that spring. There was thick snow in the hotel grounds on 1 April. And four days later, when the King sent home to Hardinge details of the arrangements he wanted made for the entertainment of ex-President Roosevelt in June, he still complained of ‘snow, rain and constant wind’. But he did not want to leave for the Mediterranean while Mrs Keppel was in Biarritz. Besides, he felt he could not go so far away while it might be necessary at any moment for him to return to London.