Christopher Hibbert - Edward VII - The Last Victorian King

Devoted as they were to the King when he was in one of his gratified and gratifying moods, his servants always held him in the greatest awe. For his forceful and formidable personality made him an extremely intimidating figure. ‘Even his most intimate friends were all terrified of him,’ Frederick Ponsonby wrote.

I have seen Cabinet ministers, ambassadors, generals and admirals absolutely curl up in his presence when trying to maintain their point. As regards myself, I varied. If I was quite certain of my facts I never minded standing up to him. In fact, I always noticed that he invariably respected people who stood up to him, and he carried this so far that he was always taken in by dictatorial and cocksure people. At times however I was perfectly terrified of him.

Ponsonby’s daughter recorded that ‘his angry bellow, once heard, could never be forgotten’.

All his staff dreaded these violent outbursts which suddenly erupted when his impatience and irritation could no longer be contained and which became more frequent and more terrifying as the King grew older. No one had more experience of them than Mr Chandler, the Superintendent of his Wardrobe, who would occasionally be summoned to come immediately to the King’s room where his Majesty, pacing furiously up and down, would, as Sir Lionel Cust said, use the poor man ‘as whipping boy or safety valve’ and ‘scold him unmercifully about something’ as soon as the door opened. Yet Chandler, like the rest of the King’s staff, was devoted to him and knew that once the storm was over every effort would be made to make amends for any feelings that had been hurt. As Lord Esher said, ‘If the King assailed you, as he sometimes assailed me, vigorously, remorselessly, it was almost certain that within an hour or two he would send for you, or dispatch a few lines on a slip of paper, on some wholly different subject, in the friendliest manner, with no allusion to what had passed.’ ‘It was a pleasure,’ Lord Fisher thought, ‘to face his furious anger for the sake of the lovely smile you got later on.’

Stamper, the motor engineer, recorded:

Sometimes, if his Majesty were annoyed he would show his displeasure by assuming an air of the most complete resignation. Instead perhaps of upbraiding me, if I lost the way, he would question me quietly … gravely deplore the way in which Misfortune singled him out for her victim, and then settle himself gently in his corner, as if resigning himself to his fate. In his countenance there was written a placid acceptance of the situation and a calm expectancy of worse to come.

Sometimes, too, the King’s anger would abruptly dissolve into laughter, as it did when, having decided to build a sanatorium with the £200,000 which Cassel had given him for a charity of his own choosing, the committee appointed to supervise its construction selected a site at Midhurst for which no adequate water supply could be found. The King’s anger ‘knew no bounds’. Refusing to listen to any excuses, he ended his assault upon Sir Felix Semon, the member of the committee with whom he was most often in contact, by declaring, ‘I’ll tell you something: you doctors are nearly as bad as the lawyers. And, God knows, that will say a great deal!’ In the tense silence that followed, Sir Felix felt constrained to laugh; and the King, surprised at first by such a reaction rather than the expression of contrition which would have been more appropriate to his rage, began to laugh too. The row was over.

It was not only his staff and intimate friends who had first-hand experience of the King’s ungovernable, though fortunately brief rages. Prince Christopher of Greece recorded in his memoirs the ‘consternation stamped on the faces of his guests’ at a big dinner party when the King spilled some spinach on his shirt. His face went red with fury as he plunged his hands into the dish and smeared the spinach all over his starched white front. But then ‘he laughed in his infectious way, “Well, I had to change anyway, hadn’t I? I might as well make a complete mess of it.” ’

With his wife rarely — and with the Prince of Wales never — were there any of these angry scenes which from time to time shattered the peace of the Household. The Queen’s unpunctuality continued to exasperate him to the end; but, having completely failed to cure her, he had been obliged to tolerate it. While waiting for her he would sit drumming his fingers on a nearby table in that all too familiar manner, tapping his feet on the floor and gazing out of the window with an expression which Frederick Ponsonby described as being like that of a Christian martyr.

That alarming drumming and tapping could also be observed when he was bored. Usually he contrived to hide his boredom in public and, when duty required, could listen to the most tedious people with apparently rapt attention. But there were occasions when he could not contain himself. Then the agitated movements of his fingers and feet, growing more and more rapid, would be supplemented by an icy, unblinking stare, or by a whispered aside to an attendant to rescue him — as, one day at Longchamps, he had whispered instructions to be saved from the all too oppressive proximity of Mme Loubet sitting on one side of him and the equally unprepossessing and no less stout wife of the Governor of Paris on the other.

This had been done with charm and courtesy, of course, for the King’s reputation for tactful behaviour with ladies was almost legendary. Stories were told of occasional lapses, of his having, for example, discomfited the American heiress, Mrs Moore, a rather absurd, importunate woman of whom the King said there were three things in life one could not escape:

‘L’amour, la Mort et La Moore.’ Mrs Moore, having curtsied before the King ‘almost to her knees’ in a flamboyantly theatrical gesture, was asked in a voice even more penetrating than usual, ‘Have you lost anything?’ Such lapses with men were more frequent. An American, who evidently wanted to be recognized by the King and made a great fuss of bowing very low every time he saw him, eventually got close enough at Homburg to observe, ‘I guess, Sir, you know my face?’ ‘I certainly seem to recognize,’ the King is alleged to have replied, ‘the top of your head.’

There were also occasions when the King’s laughter offended as much as his mocking words. On his return from Germany in 1909, impressed by the military atmosphere of the Kaiser’s court, he decided that meetings of the Privy Council should in future be conducted in a more formal setting. Instructions were given that uniforms should be worn; and it was intimated that full ecclesiastical vestments would, therefore, also be appropriate. Cosmo Gordon Lang, the recently appointed Archbishop of York, a Scotsman with a keen sense of drama and a highly dignified manner, readily conformed to the King’s wishes and attended his first Privy Council meeting in his splendid and commodious archiepiscopal robes. Having kissed the King’s hand, he retired slowly backwards upon the diminutive figure of Lord Northcote, a former Governor-General of Australia, who was also attending his first meeting of the Privy Council. Northcote became entangled in the voluminous vestments from which he struggled unsuccessfully to emerge, while the Archbishop, evidently unaware of the foreign body within the folds of his cope, maintained his usual dignified composure. The King stepped forward to help; but, overcome by Northcote’s ludicrous predicament, suddenly burst into laughter.

That irrepressible, infectious laughter was heard again a month later when the King was being driven in one of his motor-cars from Biarritz to San Sebastian to have luncheon with the King of Spain. The ridiculous sight of the slovenly Spanish soldiers lining the route, many waving and smiling genially rather than saluting, few standing to attention and some actually sitting down and smoking, was too much for him and, beginning to laugh, he could scarcely control himself before San Sebastian was reached.