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

by Martin Williams

Danger on the high seas had abated for another reason. More and more ships were now equipped with wireless.

Ocean travel was, then, increasingly free of risk. Aviation was not, but it had a grip on the Edwardian imagination that not even the forthcoming wonders of the Olympic and Titanic could rival. On 17 December 1903, the Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur, made a number of flights at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in history’s first powered, manned and controlled aeroplane. That the ground they covered was minimal was immaterial. The fact that they had flown at all demonstrated that it could be done.

In both countries, the official line was that this great stride forward in aviation would assist the cause of peace. Nevertheless, it was telling that chief among the dignitaries who welcomed Blériot to the Savoy was Richard Haldane, the Secretary of State for War, who assured him his achievement ‘marked the beginning of a new era’.30 A French paper, Le Siècle, could scarcely keep from gloating: ‘Great Britain is no longer the impregnable fortress of which the garrison could intervene without uneasiness in foreign wars. She constituted at will a European or an extra-European Power. Very soon she will no longer have the opportunity of choosing. She will be vulnerable like her allies.’31 H. G. Wells, the prophet of the age, had already written of great cities laid waste by flying machines in his 1908 novel, The War in the Air. Suddenly, that alarming prospect crept closer.

Written by P. H. Ditchfield and illustrated by Fred Roe, Vanishing England was an exercise in pure nostalgia that masqueraded as a guidebook. A lament for a lost idyll of thatched roofs and half-timbering, maypoles and coaching inns, it took aim at ‘a busy, bustling world that knows no rest or peace’. The automobile was characterised as a ‘hideous monster’ roaring through village centres, ‘startling and killing old, slow-footed rustics and scampering children, dogs and hens, and clouds of dust strive in very mercy to hide the view of the terrible rushing demon’. ‘In a few years’ time,’ Ditchfield concluded, ‘the air will be conquered, and aeroplanes, balloons, flying-machines and airships will drop down upon us from the skies and add a new terror to life’.37

The apocalyptic fiction of H. G. Wells notwithstanding, few Edwardians entered into Max Beerbohm’s fears about the over-enthusiastic embrace of technology. On the contrary: buoyed by the rhetoric of empire and dazzled by the wonders of science, they surrendered themselves to the current of ever-accelerating change, confident it would bring them, and the nation, nothing but good. Britain was booming. Since the turn of the century, its population had burgeoned by three million each year. By 1910, it was nearing forty-five million. During the same period, the population of Greater London had increased by nearly seventy thousand each year until it reached, and would soon surpass, seven million. Not only was it the largest city in the country, it was the largest in Europe. Twice the size of Berlin, the number of its inhabitants exceeded those of Paris, Vienna and St Petersburg combined.1

At the heart of this vibrant metropolis was the effulgent figure of the King. Unlike his mother, he believed it was the business of the monarch to be visible. Queen Victoria had come to loathe London, preferring to seclude herself in what Lord Esher described as an atmosphere of ‘hushed reverence . . . deep memories . . . queenly pity . . . of personal sorrows, and of duties simply performed through long years’. In her elderly presence, statesmen were ‘half afraid to speak above a whisper’.5 Quite apart from finding it desperately dull, Edward had judged such remoteness to be politically inexpedient.

With his accession, the Crown returned to the capital. After decades of neglect, the Palace was spectacularly revitalised. Forsaking Marlborough House, his home of nearly forty years, the King wasted little time in purging what he referred to as the ‘sepulchre’.8 In the words of his grandson the Duke of Windsor, it was ‘as if a Viennese hussar had suddenly burst into an English vicarage.’9 Cases of knick-knacks and family mementoes vanished into storage, Prince Albert’s library of valuable first editions was dissolved with almost indecent haste and museum-quality paintings were cleaned and rehung. Under the direction of C. H. Bessant of Bertram & Son, the Grand Staircase and Marble Hall were enveloped in glittering white and gold.

The King understood his role to be a performative one, and it was as a giant stage that Buckingham Palace was now conceived. ‘Like a highly trained actor,’ Cust recalled, he had ‘studied and learnt the importance of mien and deportment, of entrance and exit, of clear and regulated diction and other details, which he absorbed quite modestly and without any ostentation into his own actions’.12 Edward emitted a ‘curious electric element’13, which galvanised all who came into contact with it. The rental value of houses in Pimlico and Belgravia shot up, owing to their proximity to the rejuvenated Court. Foreign visitors were dazzled by its panache. ‘Everything is so tastefully and artistically arranged, it makes one’s mouth water to see all this magnificence,’ wrote the Dowager Empress of Russia during a visit to Windsor Castle in 1907.14 Outside, Edward involved himself in a comprehensive redesign of The Mall and its environs which would transform the Palace into the locus of a processional route of the utmost grandeur. Stretching from the monumental Admiralty Arch, built from 1908 to a design by Sir Ashton Webb, it terminated in an immense memorial to Queen Victoria.

Hilldrop Crescent in Islington, North London, might have existed on a different plane from intellectual Bloomsbury and the fashionable West End. The clattering traffic of the adjacent Caledonian and Holloway Roads bypassed it as surely as cultural subversion and Society sophistication. Its semi-detached houses – square, solid, entirely unremarkable – sheltered the kind of middle-class residents they had been built for. There, anonymity was not considered a mark of failure so much as a badge of respectability.

The apparent sleepiness of Hilldrop Crescent could be attributed to the fact that, by 1910, more and more Londoners were opting out of inner-city life to set up home in the suburbs. Even as the West End burgeoned in size and splendour, as many as seven hundred thousand people made the move out of the cramped and smoky metropolis in search of wider streets, fresher air and more modern conveniences. The outer ripples of this shift in population spread as far afield as the south coast of England.

messianic figure who kindled rebellion with her firebrand conviction, Mrs Pankhurst was profoundly troubling to the Edwardian patriarchy. Early attempts to dismiss her crumpled in the face of her ‘great revolt’,22 which appropriated the language and trappings of an army. The

The King had no truck with any of it. For all his love of women, he expected them to exercise their influence softly and discreetly. There was no place in his conception of boudoir politics for suffragettes causing trouble in a sphere so clearly not their own.

In 1909, suffragettes who had been sentenced to gaol for acts of civil disobedience went on hunger strike. In response, the authorities resorted to a policy of force-feeding. It was a brutal remedy, and caused widespread revulsion, even among those who deplored militancy.

The WSPU bestowed silver medals on women who had been force-fed. On purple, white and green ribbons, their bars were engraved ‘FOR VALOUR’. Separate bars were awarded for each hunger strike, with some suffragettes collecting several.

The opulence of the Edwardian rich threw the plight of the Edwardian poor into stark relief. The rarefied worlds of Escoffier and Mewès and Davis, of Selfridges and the Savoy, were far removed from the deprivation that abounded in London, and in every other town and city in the British Isles. In 1906 – the same year the Ritz opened its doors – as many as twelve million men, women and children were estimated to be malnourished and on the verge of chronic hunger.

Charity had a discomfiting way of illuminating the gulf between wealth and poverty. Newly installed as the chatelaine of Blenheim Palace, Consuelo Marlborough noticed that the butler left a basket of tins on the sideboard in the dining room. These, she learnt, were intended for leftovers from the ducal table. The scraps would be packed into the tins, then taken, in feudal fashion, to the poorest residents in the surrounding villages. At no stage had it ever been thought necessary to separate savoury dishes from sweet: all were jumbled together. Revolted, Consuelo made a point of sorting through the viands before they were despatched. Although her in-laws found her departure from tradition to be ‘impertinent’, the recipients were, she noted, surprised and delighted that somebody had bothered to take the trouble.7

During its first two years, the Liberal Government pursued a modernising and moderately progressive agenda. Under Campbell-Bannerman, the underground railway network was expanded, wireless telegraphy became more widespread, the electrification of London was completed and the programme of naval shipbuilding inaugurated by the Dreadnought advanced. It also legislated to improve conditions for the lower classes. By 1908, the Trades Dispute Act, the Workmen’s Compensation Act, the Probation of Offenders Act and the Coal Mines Regulation Act had all seen the light of day.

For all his championing of new money, Edward never lost his faith in the function of the aristocracy. When, in 1868, Queen Victoria had remonstrated with him over his headlong plunge into high society, he had returned a spirited, if repetitive, response. ‘In every Country a great proportion of the Aristocracy will be idle and fond of amusement, and have always been so,’ he wrote, ‘but I think that in no Country more than ours do the Higher Classes occupy themselves, which is certainly not the case in other Countries. We have always been an Aristocratic Country, and I hope we shall always remain so, as they are the mainstay of this Country.’17

As Prince of Wales, he had facilitated a process of assimilation, drawing parvenus into the patrician fold. By the turn of the century, only mid-Victorian relics like Lady Dorothy Nevill could lament the ‘mob of plebeian wealth which surged into the drawing rooms, the portals of which had up till then been so jealously guarded’. For the most part, the distinctions between old blood and new money had long since melted away. In any case, Lady Dorothy noted, ‘Not a few of that mob have themselves obtained titles, and now quite honestly believe they are the old aristocracy of England.’18

Whether ancient or modern, a peerage conferred privilege.

Simultaneously, the electorate had expanded. Since 1832, successive Reform Acts had enfranchised the middle and working classes. With the passing of the Third Reform Act in 1884, the claim that the House of Lords represented ‘the people’ had become more tenuous than ever – not least because the allegiance of its members so clearly remained with the Conservatives.

Once the full implications of the Government’s proposals had sunk in, there was consternation and fury in the Lords. To finance the ongoing programme of reform, as well as to cover the cost of the eight new dreadnoughts demanded by the public to counter the perceived threat of German aggression, income tax was to be raised and death duties increased. Besides the introduction of a so-called ‘supertax’, there were to be taxes on tobacco, spirits, petrol and motor licences. Most controversial of all would be a parcel of land taxes. A levy of 20 per cent would be introduced on the increase of value of land whenever it changed hands; a duty on the capital of undeveloped land was to be imposed; and all the land in the country was to be surveyed and valued. In other words, it wasn’t just the rich the Liberals intended to squeeze. It was the aristocracy.

The Government claimed it hadn’t set out to goad the Lords to the point it might, in defiance of convention, reject the Budget, thereby sparking an all-out war between the Houses.

Throughout the summer and autumn of 1909, the critical issue was ostensibly the Budget. Trusting in precedent, Lloyd George had incorporated schemes for social reform on the understanding the Lords wouldn’t dare reject a Money Bill.

it not an extraordinary thing that upon the Budget we should be discussing at all the action of the House of Lords?’ enquired Churchill on a platform in July. It was, he maintained, ‘an institution absolutely foreign to the spirit of the age and to the whole movement of society’. Likening the Lords to Punch and Judy shows and other picturesque anachronisms, he claimed it had been roused from its pleasant slumber under Salisbury and Balfour to obstruct the work of democratically elected government. He clearly articulated the outcome if the peers, in a reckless act of class warfare, chose to exercise their veto now. By plunging the nation into fiscal chaos, in the process creating ‘a Constitutional deadlock of novel and unmeasured gravity’, they would hand the Liberals a golden opportunity, ‘clear, brilliant and decisive’, to deal with them once and for all.28

Although personally against the Budget, Edward let it be known that, officially, he had ‘no opinion’ on its provisions. He did, however, deplore the rancour between the Houses, and did what he could to persuade the Lords to pass the Bill.

The most eloquent speeches were delivered by those who, like Lord Rosebery, Lord Cromer and the Archbishop of York, despised the Budget but realised that a far graver question would arise if the Lords exercised the veto now. Lord Balfour of Burleigh (not to be confused with Arthur Balfour) set out the risks in no uncertain terms. ‘My Lords,’ he pleaded, ‘if you win, the victory can be at most a temporary one. If you lose, you have altered and prejudiced the position, the power, the prestige, the usefulness of the House.’32

Anticipation of a rare phenomenon had sparked atavistic fears in other breasts too. Halley’s Comet was due to make its first appearance since 1835. Throughout the winter, scientists wrote articles and delivered lectures for the benefit of the curious, and sometimes apprehensive, public.

From his home in Cavendish Square, a Mr Crawford pointed out that, in earlier generations, a comet was believed to portend some terrible event. The residents of all ‘civilised countries’ knew better, but might it not be a good idea, he suggested, to publish a simple explanation in the local vernacular for the benefit of those ‘peoples and nations whose education has not advanced as rapidly as with us’, lest ancient superstitions ‘make opportunity for the agitator’?14

Notwithstanding his credentials as a historian, he was increasingly drawn to modern painters who were barely known in a Britain belatedly coming to terms with Impressionism.

In early 1910, the world seemed alive with possibilities. Anything, even a miracle, might happen. Still, the British public was notoriously conservative. Was it ready for exposure to the bold, and potentially shocking, canvases of Matisse, Cézanne and Gauguin?

Lucile Ltd was the most prestigious member of the elite band of ‘Court dressmakers’ versed in the complicated etiquette that underpinned the sumptuous ensembles worn by women upon presentation to the sovereign. It was fortunate for Lady Duff Gordon that, under Edward VII, life at Court was a great deal more glamorous than it had been under Queen Victoria. In an attempt to recreate something of the theatrical splendour of the Tuileries which had so impressed him as a boy, Edward pushed the timing of the presentation ceremonies way back, from mid-afternoon to 10 p.m. and beyond. Beneath the blaze of the newly electrified chandeliers, debutantes made their way along crimson carpets into the white and gold ballroom banked with palms and hothouse flowers.

Ever since the Lords’ rejection of the Budget in late November, there had been discussions about the ways in which the deadlock between the Houses might be broken. As early as 2 December, Edward’s Private Secretary, Francis Knollys, had learnt that the Cabinet was mulling two courses of action. The first was to advise the King to make a permanent transfer of his power to create peers to the Prime Minister of the day. The second was to devise a Bill that would abolish the veto of the Lords, and would be accompanied by a pledge from the King that he would, if necessary, create a sufficient number of peers to see it through a House that would otherwise reject it.

When they came in February, the results of the election were inconclusive. The massive majority the Liberals had achieved in 1906 was catastrophically reduced to the point that Asquith was compelled to parley with Labour and the Irish Nationalists to face down the Conservatives. The number of seats held by Labour had increased to forty, but it was the Irish, with nearly double, who had the whip hand. Committed to Home Rule for Ireland – for decades, one of the most insoluble issues in British politics – they threatened to vote with the Conservatives unless a Bill was introduced that would limit the power of the Lords and, in the process, abet their own agenda. It was not an appealing prospect for Asquith who wished to focus, first and foremost, on the Budget.

As he attempted to manoeuvre between the competing factions – including those within his own party, where Lloyd George hoped to smash the veto right away, while Churchill, who had been promoted to Home Secretary, was mooting the total abolition of the Lords – Asquith delayed the reintroduction of the Budget.

Unlike many members of the aristocracy, Edward was not snobbish about the medical profession, treating his doctor as a personal friend as much as an employee. It was Reid who accompanied the King on his holidays to Biarritz, where they were often photographed strolling together along the promenade. The privilege of intimacy was some recompense for a meagre retainer of five pounds a day.

That March, every penny was earned. Edward’s cold turned, yet again, into bronchitis, accompanied by an accelerated pulse, rapid breathing and ‘physical signs in the chest’33 that caused Reid considerable anxiety. Fearful of a sudden emergency, he took to sitting up all night in case he was needed. Soveral and Mrs Keppel were constantly in and out of the royal suite, but otherwise the crisis was kept firmly under wraps. The British public was given no reason to suppose the King suffered from anything worse than a passing indisposition.

In fact, behind the scenes, the Palace and the press had entered into a gentlemen’s agreement. Fritz Ponsonby recalled that the editor of the Daily Mail had decided that it would ‘not be right’35 to frighten his readers with the full details of the King’s illness until such a time when suppression became unfeasible. The other papers followed his lead. Ponsonby continued to feed what he believed to be unvarnished updates to the Mail, but when he arrived in Biarritz in early April to relieve Sir Arthur Davidson, he was astonished to discover just how grave the situation on the ground had been. The conspiracy of silence had been so scrupulously maintained that even the staff and guests at the Hôtel du Palais had been none the wiser.

On Alexandra’s part, there was perhaps a willingness to be deceived. For almost half a century, she had been required to display unusual forbearance in the face of Edward’s serial infidelities. Frequently dismissed as a featherbrain, she was sufficiently astute to realise the surest way to alienate his affection would be to cause a scene. ‘Jealousy,’ she had once written, ‘is the bottom of all mischief and misfortune in this world.’1 Well-practised in the art of turning a blind eye, she was alternately cordial and cool to her husband’s mistresses, tolerating liaisons she had every reason to resent.

With his instinctive understanding of image and performance, Edward appreciated that Alexandra’s preternatural glamour was an important factor in his own popularity.

Alexandra’s worst fault was a failure of imagination. Unwilling or unable to comprehend the effects of her often infuriating behaviour, she exacted complete devotion from servants, courtiers and family members. Nobody suffered more under her velvet-gloved rule than her three daughters.

The artistic standard was deemed to be decent, if unexceptional. Since the mid-1880s, the field of portraiture had been dominated by the American painter, John Singer Sargent.

Conferring grandeur on the very rich and glamour on the very grand, he was celebrated for his fearless brushwork and bravura handling of colour and chiaroscuro. Even Roger Fry conceded that he was ‘a brilliant ambassador between [his sitters] and posterity’.18

‘The general public think him in perfect health; but I am impressed with the notion that in the inner circles there is more anxiety about him lately than I have ever observed at any time before.’26

Yet more meetings with statesmen and military personnel took place on Wednesday, 4 May. For the first time, the King admitted the possibility he might be dying. When it was suggested that he should go to bed, he rejected the idea out of hand. ‘No,’ he protested, ‘I shall not give in – I shall work to the end. Of what use is it to be alive if one cannot work?’28

In the meantime, Edward battled on. His nights were restless, and Reid judged his condition to be deteriorating. Oxygen and amyl nitrate provided only temporary relief. The doctors resorted to injections of strychnine to stimulate his heart, which they feared might fail at any moment. There was still no cessation in official business.

At 6 p.m., the first bulletin was issued. It announced that Edward was suffering from ‘a severe bronchial attack’ and had been confined to his room for the last two days. Around 8 p.m., a second bulletin, signed by Laking and Reid, as well as a third Physician-in-Ordinary, Sir Richard Douglas Powell, concluded with the ominous statement that ‘His Majesty’s condition causes some anxiety.’ The press, which until then had continued to observe its self-imposed moratorium, had no choice but to come clean. Over the next twenty-four hours, the headlines became ever more portentous as a stunned nation scrambled for updates.

At the time of his accession, Edward had remarked that the Crown had come to him two decades too late. George, who was just shy of his forty-fifth birthday, believed his own elevation to be premature. He had been devoted to, if somewhat frightened of, his ebullient father. Unusual in the annals of royal history, their bond was remarkable given the diversity of their characters and outlooks. Edward was charismatic and cosmopolitan. George was dependable and dull. Since his marriage to Princess May of Teck in 1893, he had displayed not the slightest interest in other women. Temperamentally averse to the very idea of ‘Abroad’, his grasp of European languages was limited. Slim and abstemious where his father was stout and self-indulgent, his favourite hobbies were shooting and stamp-collecting. Edward could enter into the former easily enough. The latter was incomprehensible to him.

Against those considerable odds, they had co-existed in surprising harmony. A waspish cousin might declare that the King’s affection for the Prince of Wales stemmed from the latter’s willingness to be his ‘complete slave’,1 but that was to do both men an injustice. George never challenged his father politically, and he had neither the aptitude nor the inclination to rival him socially.

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 radiated something special and indescribable from his throne’.5