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

by Martin Williams

In any case, British painting was a distinctly parochial affair. The departure from the policy of ‘Splendid Isolation’ in the field of diplomacy had not, as yet, been mirrored in the world of art. Although they had been established in Paris for decades, the Impressionists received a lukewarm reception in London, where painters continued to labour under what Vanessa Bell described as a ‘Victorian cloud’, either tinkering with the effects of light or harking back to the Pre-Raphaelites.

‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’ tore off the blinkers with a violence even those who were favourably disposed found quite bewildering. Hitherto, ‘modern’ pictures had been displayed piecemeal, or else had been glimpsed as inadequate reproductions in the pages of books with limited circulations. Now, on the walls of a prestigious gallery in the most fashionable part of the capital, hung a galaxy of works by artists whose names and techniques had, until then, been known to only the cosmopolitan few. London reeled.

Yet he sincerely believed in the value of the paintings he had selected. With their vibrant colours, vigorous brushstrokes and apparent freedom from the teaching of hidebound academies, the Post-Impressionists seemed to him to be compatible with his earlier interest in Renaissance art. The Impressionists had, he maintained, been weak on ‘structural design’. In Cézanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh, it had begun to reassert itself. The history of art was, to Fry’s way of thinking, an unbroken continuum. Picasso might seem alien to the uninitiated but, in reality, he was only pushing things ‘a little further’ than preceding generations.

It was not a message London was primed to hear. Judging the works to be juvenile in execution and adolescent in their determination to shock, conservative critics fell over themselves to record their mystification and disgust.

Once the initial chorus of outrage and incomprehension had subsided, the British began to realise the significance of what they were seeing. It was observed the exhibition was just as crowded when it closed in January as it had been when it opened two months earlier. Somewhere along the way, derision was replaced by avid attention. ‘Public taste in pictures is advancing faster than the critics’,’ noted the Graphic. ‘The general attitude was one of admiration.’17 Like it or loathe it, modern art seeped into the consciousness of even the best-insulated.

That autumn, the tectonic plates of Edwardian England were shifting in every direction. The explosive impact of the show at the Grafton Galleries sprang from and fed back into the pent-up appetite for reform which had been suppressed during the summer of mourning for the King. Frank Rutter, the art critic of The Sunday Times, cast the Post-Impressionists as front-line warriors in a universal struggle in which painting and politics were indivisibly linked. Provocatively entitled Revolution in Art, his little book on Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh ‘and Other Modern Painters’ was dedicated, in bold capitals, ‘TO THE REBELS OF EITHER SEX ALL THE WORLD OVER WHO IN ANY WAY ARE FIGHTING FOR FREEDOM OF ANY KIND’.23

The crisis that had caused Edward such anxiety in his final months was now thrust onto the shoulders of his successor. The Prime Minister, who was determined it must be brought to a decisive conclusion, demanded that the King provide a guarantee that he would, if necessary, create a sufficient number of peers to flood the Lords and so see the Bill through. To Edward, the very idea had been repugnant. It sat no more comfortably with George but, after an extremely tense meeting with Asquith and Lord Crewe on 16 November, he gave his begrudging consent. Almost as distasteful to the straight-dealing sovereign as the guarantee itself was the injunction that it should be kept secret.

‘Black Friday’, 18 November 1910, became infamous in the annals of the WSPU. With hindsight, it was viewed as a watershed in the ongoing fight for the vote. On the one hand, the violence so indiscriminately meted out to peaceful campaigners frightened away those members reluctant to submit themselves to such treatment in future. On the other, conviction hardened that the time for conciliation had passed. The suffragettes would continue to stage rallies and choreographed marches, but from now on they were shadowed by a guerrilla programme of direct action that lurched ever further into the realm of extremism. If Black Ascot – dignified, decorous, well-ordered – had been the elegant epilogue to an era that had drawn to its close with the death of Edward VII, Black Friday presaged the discord and division of the one that was opening. The values, assumptions and hierarchies of the Edwardian age would not vanish overnight, but they found themselves increasingly at odds with the forces that were to define the century now hitting its stride.

Foremost among them was the Kaiser. During his visit to London for Edward’s funeral, Wilhelm had mounted the scaffolding to inspect the work at close quarters. A year on, he reaffirmed his commitment to the cause of Anglo-German solidarity. In accordance with his uncle’s wishes, his presence was sure, he said, to produce ‘the happiest results in the relations between the two countries and the two sovereigns’.1 Expatriate Germans turned out in force to enjoy the spectacle of the King and the Kaiser united in friendship as well as blood. The weather was perfect. Only later in the day did clouds gather ahead of what promised to be a terrific storm.

Ostensibly a commemoration of the reign of Queen Victoria, the Memorial inevitably called to mind thoughts of her successor.

In fact, a schism was developing in the second chamber. On the one hand were the ‘Hedgers’: peers who, however begrudgingly, recognised that it would be better to accede to the proposed reform, lest they be swamped by new creations who would pass the Bill anyway. On the other were the ‘Ditchers’: diehards who were prepared to hold out against any infraction of their hereditary rights until ‘the last ditch’. During the summer of 1911, the conflicts – not just between the Commons and the Lords, but between the rival factions within the Lords – witnessed the almost complete collapse of working relations between the main political parties.

It had been a summer of extraordinary political drama and equally extraordinary social splendour. Even as it contemplated the destruction of its privileges in Parliament, the aristocracy had massed in velvet and ermine at the Coronation on 22 June. Weeks of balls, dinners and garden parties had ensued as the thermometer nudged 100°F in the shade. At the Savoy, guests were sprayed with cooling ozone as they tapped their toes to the raucous strains of the ragtime that had just swept in from America.9

To compensate for the ubiquitous black of the previous year, the palette of that Season ran rainbow-riot. The Post-Impressionists had been partly responsible for awakening London to the potential of flamboyant colour contrasts. The refined vernacular of the eighteenth century suddenly seemed insipid, if not downright precious.

From 1911, the Orientalism of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, Stravinsky’s Firebird and Strauss’s Joseph carried all before it. Lady Duff Gordon’s French rival, Paul Poiret, challenged the sweet-pea shades of the Edwardian era with strident scarlets, jades, purples and oranges. Not to be outdone, Lucile Ltd responded with têtes de couleurs: wigs of blue or pink to be worn while dancing the tango, which was all the rage from 1912. The fashionable silhouette remained narrow, but skirts were slit, draped and tiered, overlaid with wired ‘lampshade’ tunics, and surmounted by lamé turbans crowned with bristling aigrettes. In June 1914, ‘Eve’, writing in the Tatler, could describe the ‘absolute screams in the way of frocks being got ready for Ascot’. The more bizarre the ensembles, the more ‘fearfully right’ they were likely to be.12

an essay on literature published in 1924, Virginia Stephen – since her marriage in 1912, Virginia Woolf – looked back over the preceding quarter-century to pinpoint December 1910 as its point of departure. It was then, she maintained, that ‘human character’ had changed, and with it very much else.13

In making such a bold assertion, she took pains to protect herself. She admitted that her choice of date was somewhat arbitrary, and so open to dispute. She also explained that the transformation, although profound, had been neither so sudden nor so definite as a hen laying an egg or a rose bursting into bloom. Still, having traced the developments of that tumultuous year, it is hard not to believe she had a point.

1910 had opened with a minor sensation (the Dreadnought hoax) and concluded with a major one (the Post-Impressionist exhibition). Between had come the summer of mourning for the King. Although her essay made no reference to any of those events, Virginia surely recognised that each had, to some degree, marked a further step away from the Victorian era and its all-too-brief Edwardian coda. That journey, which continued unchecked until 1914, and accelerated dramatically with the outbreak of the First World War, fostered the social, cultural and political conditions that were to define the rest of the century.

Hailed in his lifetime as ‘the Peacemaker’, Edward VII was spared the destruction of the European order of courts and crowned cousins in ...

passed the remainder of his days in comfortable but ignominious exile in the Netherlands, never ceasing to rage against the legacy of his hated uncle, whose machinations had, he insisted, contributed to his downfall. ‘It is he who is the corpse and I who live on, but it is he who is the victor,’ Wilhelm snarled shortly before his death in 1941.14

The strides in technology that had defined Edward’s reign continued at a dizzying pace. Less than eighteen years after he had crossed the Channel, Louis Blériot was on hand to greet Charles Lindburgh when he landed in France after his flight across the Atlantic. Just as H. G. Wells had predicted, aeroplanes had by then been deployed as lethal weapons. The primitive air raids of the First World War would be reprised on an infinitely more devastating scale across Europe and Japan between 1939 and 1945.

In April 1912, the optimism engendered by the apparently unstoppable march of technology was shattered in the most dramatic circumstances. Vaunted as unsinkable, the super-liner Titanic, which had been under construction in Belfast since 1909, sank after collision with an iceberg while on her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York. In spite of her glittering luxury, she carried lifeboats for only a fraction of her passengers and crew. More than fifteen hundred souls were lost in the worst-ever disaster at sea. Britain and the United States were rocked to their foundations by the most shocking event in living memory.