To those who had reached adulthood since the turn of the century, Edward had embodied the hedonistic spirit of the age. Violet Asquith, who was staying with the Viceroy in Dublin, was brought the news of his death in the middle of the night. ‘The King dead – dead,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘I can’t realise it.’ He had been ‘a splendidly characteristic figurehead – full of personality’.12 The brilliant young scholar Patrick Shaw-Stewart mourned Edward as ‘my favourite institution. There will be no more fun now of any sort.’13 From Balliol College in Oxford, the Honourable Billy Grenfell
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