The King is Dead, Long Live the King!: Majesty, Mourning and Modernity in Edwardian Britain

by Martin Williams

If the ceremonies in Westminster elicited an extraordinary response from the general public, it would not be true to claim they affected everybody equally. Inevitably, there were dissenting voices. Beatrice Webb was an activist and social reformer closely involved with the left-wing Fabian Society. Stoked as it was by the popular press, she regarded the wave of emotion that had crashed over Britain with unalloyed contempt. ‘London and the country generally is enjoying itself hugely at the royal wake, slobbering over the lying-in-state and the formal procession,’ she fumed. ‘The ludicrous false sentiment which is being lavished over the somewhat commonplace virtues of our late King would turn the stomachs of the most loyal of Fabians.’28 Bloomsbury, too, remained largely unmoved. The restlessness that had propelled Virginia Stephen towards the suffrage movement in January, then into the Dreadnought hoax the following month, had been the prelude to a bout of mental illness that worried the Bells greatly. They had spirited her away to Dorset in the hope that a change of scene, accompanied by a complete cessation of activity, would do her good. Poised on the brink of temporary insanity, Virginia let Edward’s death pass without mention.