Her sense of dislocation was shared by countless others. The antithesis of all that was remote and inscrutable, Edward had been vibrant, familiar and intensely alive. His sudden demise, after an illness that had lasted, as far as the majority of his subjects were concerned, barely twenty-four hours, tore a gaping hole in the fabric of the nation. To Lionel Cust, the Surveyor of the King’s Pictures, it was not, like the passing of Queen Victoria, ‘the removal of one who to many was more like a permanent institution’. It was the loss of both ‘a personal friend’ and ‘a great personality who
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