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Surfeited with material comforts, our society is once again riven by dissent and disaffection. The gaps between rich and poor, conservative and progressive yawn wider by the year. In thrall to hitherto unimaginable forms of technology, we have no inkling of their long-term consequences. We are the beneficiaries of an unprecedented period of peace yet are increasingly beset by fears of war.
By the standards of the age, he was remarkably free of racial prejudice. He deplored as ‘disgraceful’ the callous disdain shown towards the native population by the British in India, expressing his belief that just ‘because a man has a black face and a different religion from our own, there is no reason why he should be treated as a brute’.
Early in his reign, he severed all but the most formal ties with his cousin King Leopold II of the Belgians, because of atrocities in the Belgian Congo. Through his complicity in the barbarous acts committed in his name, Leopold had, Edward considered, ‘neglected his duty towards Humanity’.11
Between 1870 and 1914, dozens of American women married into the British aristocracy: a cohort so numerous that, in time, 17 per cent of the peerage and 12 per cent of the baronetage could claim transatlantic connections. ‘At the present day, so close has the union between ourselves and the United States become that Americans are hardly looked upon as foreigners at all, so many people having American relatives,’ marvelled the octogenarian Lady Dorothy Nevill in 1907.19
‘We resented the introduction of the Jews into the social set of the Prince of Wales,’ wrote Lady Warwick. It wasn’t because they were dislikeable, she explained, ‘but because they had brains and understood finance’25
Rabbi Schewzik delivered an oration in which he described a three-fold sense of grief. First, there was loyalty to the country in which the Jews had ‘found a place of rest’ in a hostile world. Second, as a commercial people, Jews required peace for ‘enterprise and prosperity’, and no man had worked more assiduously to preserve it than Edward. Last, and most significant, the Jews had, with the death of the King, lost ‘their best friend, their protector and their father. He had set an example which might well be followed by other European monarchs in associating with Jews and staying at their
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One of the most eloquent was written by the Reverend Henry Scott Holland, Canon of St Paul’s Cathedral, and delivered at Evensong on 15 May. A soul-stirring meditation on loss, one part of it in particular has endured. Imagining what the deceased might say to those he or she had left behind, Scott Holland speculated that it might be ‘Death is nothing at all. It does not count. I have only slipped away into the next room.’
Mrs Pankhurst had warned the WSPU that the vacillating Liberals would likely sink the Bill. ‘We shall know how to respond to such a declaration of war,’ she wrote menacingly. ‘Our power as women is invincible, if we are united and determined.’
