Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy (74 page)

Three years after her triumphant Diamond Jubilee, Victoria, now aged eighty-one, died. Her last word was ‘Bertie’.

Twenty-four hours later, Albert-Edward was making his accession speech at St James’s Palace, London. And it contained a bombshell. He would reign, he announced, as King Edward VII, not Albert I, as his mother had wished. For ‘I desire’, the new king declared, ‘that Albert’s name should stand alone.’ The Albertine monarchy, and its long Victorian aftermath, was over.

And this was only the start. Edward got rid of Osborne, which he detested, by giving it to the nation as a monument to his parents. He purged Windsor and Buckingham Palace, those ‘Scottish funeral parlours’, as he called them, of sixty years’ accumulation of clutter and mementos. He redecorated Buckingham Palace in the smart new white, gold and crimson style of the grand hotels and theatres where he had spent so much of his time as prince. Even the national memorial to Victoria was used to redesign the Mall and Buckingham Palace as the setting for the grand state ceremonies that Victoria, alive, had so much disliked. Edward’s sisters, devoted to Victoria’s memory, were horrified; everyone else rather approved.

Edward was in his sixtieth year. Browbeaten by his father and sidelined by his mother, he had gone his own way. He shot, he sailed, and he was by far the most successful royal breeder of racehorses ever. He loved the theatre, opera and bridge. He ate enormously and smoked heroically. And he remained an inveterate, if reasonably discreet, adulterer. In short, like George IV, that earlier prince of Wales who had had to wait too long for the throne, Edward had made pleasure a profession.

But whereas George’s dissipation had cost him his youthful good looks, Edward, unimpressive as a young man with bulbous eyes and a weak mouth and chin, gained girth and gravitas with age. He now looked every inch a king; he even looked a bit like Henry VIII. Above all, like both Henry VIII and George IV, he loved the pomp and circumstance of being king. Out went Victoria’s republican simplicity; in came stately sovereign splendour.

Edward decided to revive the state opening of Parliament, which Victoria had first truncated and then abandoned, in its full, colourful ritual. So, on 14 February, only three weeks after Victoria’s death, he processed to the gilded House of Lords. In place of his mother’s widow’s weeds, he wore the scarlet tunic of a field marshal under his crimson, gold and ermine robes; he read the speech himself; he even proposed changes to its contents until he was slapped down by the prime minister.

Not that Edward was hidebound by tradition, being, for instance, a pioneer motor-car enthusiast. Given his first spin by Lord Montagu at Beaulieu, Edward soon acquired a fleet of cars of his own, with their characteristic claret-painted bodywork; he converted part of the royal stables into garages; he added ‘Royal’ to the title of the Automobile Club and, looking every inch a Toad of Toad Hall in his loudly checked tweeds, he adored being driven at sixty miles an hour (three times the legal speed limit) on the straight stretches of the London–Brighton Road. He even considered introducing a motor coach into the coronation procession.

Indeed, Edward’s first thought had been that he would have a thoroughly modern coronation, magnificent of course, but free from all old-fashioned ‘tomfoolery’. His advisers, too, split into traditionalists and modernizers. Eventually, the traditionalists won.

It was even decided to reuse St Edward’s Crown as the actual coronation crown. Made for the Restoration of 1660 in imitation of the Tudor Imperial Crown, which the Puritans had smashed, it had last been used for the coronation of William and Mary in 1689. Now, lightened a little by paring away 12 of its 83 ounces of solid gold and restored to its original bulbous shape, it was refurbished to symbolize the historical continuity of the six other Edwards who had ruled before the king.

But, as once before in Edward’s life, his state of health intervened to dramatic effect. The coronation was due to take place on 26 June 1902. But, three days previously, the rehearsal at the Abbey was interrupted to announce that the coronation had been postponed indefinitely because of the king’s illness. He underwent an emergency operation the following day for a burst appendix. His recovery was rapid and the ceremony took place on 9 August. It was impressive enough but it was a shadow of what had been planned. Edward was not strong enough to wear the St Edward’s Crown; the service was curtailed and he had to rest for half an hour before emerging from the Abbey.

But at least, on Saturday, 21 June 1902, Dame Clara Butt had premiered a new work by Edward Elgar at the Royal Albert Hall:

Land of Hope and Glory, Mother of the Free,
How shall we extol thee, who are born of thee?
Wider still and wider shall thy bounds be set;
God who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet.

Make thee mightier yet! ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ caught the mood not only of celebration at the coronation but also of relief at the Treaty of Vereeniging, signed in May 1902, by which the Boer War was brought to a triumphant conclusion with the incorporation of the rebellious Afrikaner provinces into the self-governing Dominion of South Africa.

A year or two later, the huge Cullinan Diamond was found and the South African government decided to make a peace offering of it to Edward. The cheese-paring British government was reluctant to accept it because of its concerns about the cost of cutting and setting the stone. But Edward, with his characteristic love of splendour, insisted and the diamond, cut into two major stones, has become the brightest ornament of both the sceptre and the Imperial Crown. Edward, however, never used them.

But the war, with the near-universal sympathy for the Afrikaners in other countries, had also highlighted Britain’s isolation – now perceived to be dangerous rather than glorious – in Europe. It also gave Edward his opportunity in foreign policy. Edward, with visits as prince of Wales to India, Canada and the Middle East, had been the first monarch to know the empire at first hand. But, unlike his mother, his real interest lay in Europe. He had been brought up to speak French and German as fluently as English, and he spent two months of each year on an early summer holiday in France, followed by a month in autumn taking the waters at a German spa.

Now he capitalized on his familiarity with France to undertake, on his own initiative, a state visit to Paris in May 1903. At first, with widespread pro-Boer sentiment, his reception was cool, even hostile. But during the interval at the Théâtre Français he gallantly saluted – in French – a French actress he’d known in London as representing ‘all the grace and all the spirit of France’.

The remark spread like wildfire and the visit turned into a triumph. The following year, the French president paid a return visit to London and the
Entente Cordiale
was signed. For better or for worse, Britain was involved in the alliances of Continental Europe once more.

On 6 May 1910, Edward’s bull-like constitution finally broke. After smoking his last cigar and taking a light luncheon, he collapsed and was helped to a chair. At five o’clock, he was told that his horse had won at Kempton Park. ‘I am very glad,’ he replied. They were his last coherent words and he died at about quarter to midnight.

Edward’s last words were characteristic, for he had enjoyed being king. He and his advisers understood, of course, that royal ceremony had needed to be polished and made more appealing to the men (though not yet the women) who formed the new, mass electorate and increasingly wielded political power. But Edward preened and paraded because he wanted to and not just to make the monarchy more ‘democratic’. Historians who present his reign as a turning point in the history of the monarchy also forget that he reigned scarcely nine years and left most of his projects unfinished.

If he had been succeeded by his eldest son, the doe-eyed but dim, unstable and apparently perverted Eddie, it is more than likely that the usual Hanoverian pattern would have reasserted itself. The son would have rejected his father’s legacy and Edward’s ceremonious revolution would have died with him. But his eldest son had predeceased him in 1892 and he was succeeded instead by his second son, George.

Soon after his father’s death, the new king, George V, wrote in his diary: ‘I have lost my best friend and the best of fathers. I never had a word with him in his life. I am heartbroken and overwhelmed with grief.’ For the first time in the two centuries of the House of Hanover a father had been succeeded by a son who loved and respected him.

But, despite his fondness for his father, George, who had spent his early career as a well-regarded naval officer, was his opposite in almost everything. He was slim, abstemious and rather shy. He wore the same elegant clothes to the same events and detested changes of fashion. He mistrusted the telephone, except for family gossip; was never driven at more than thirty miles an hour and loathed aeroplanes, submarines and all modern weaponry. He was a crack shot and a notable stamp collector. He was devoted to his wife, his weather gauge and the unchanging daily routines of his life as a country gentleman. Above all, he was driven by a strong sense of duty. The result was that, though George set himself to preserve and complete his father’s programme, he also took it in a very different direction.

His first steps were devoted to his parents. His widowed mother, the beautiful, deaf and rather daffy Queen Alexandra, he decided, was to be known by a new title: ‘queen mother’, rather than the traditional, coldly formal ‘queen dowager’.

Back in 1898, the great Victorian prime minister William Ewart Gladstone had lain in state in Westminster Hall. Now George, who had acted as one of Gladstone’s pall-bearers, decided that his father should follow in the steps of the Great Commoner and lie in Westminster Hall before his burial in the royal vault at Windsor. The result was the grandest and most moving ceremony of a ceremonious reign, in which half a million people filed past Edward’s coffin in what the
Illustrated London News
called ‘The People’s Lying-in-State’.

George, however, who had nothing of the celebrity in his temperament and loathed the very concept, was far less relaxed about the ceremonies in which, of necessity, he was the star. And, since he had never acquired his father’s ease at public speaking, he was particularly anxious if they involved a talking role. ‘The most terrible ordeal I have ever gone through,’ George confided to his diary of his first state opening of Parliament. But his sense of duty meant that he persevered nonetheless. It even made him go beyond his father, with his natural appetite for ceremony. Edward, because of his illness, had not been crowned with the massive St Edward’s Crown; his son was. Edward had no separate inauguration as emperor of India; George travelled to the subcontinent in 1911 to wear yet another specially made crown and receive the homage of his Indian subjects in the huge, spectacular Delhi Durbar. Finally, Edward had worn only a field marshal’s cocked hat at the annual state opening of Parliament. But, from 1913, George decided that ‘people wanted him’ to wear the Imperial State Crown, now augmented with the massive South African Cullinan II diamond.

The crown, as the jewellers’ labels inside it show, was subject to repeated alterations. But it was never successfully fitted to George’s narrow skull, and, as he got older, it gave him dreadful headaches. All the same, he continued with his self-imposed burden of wearing it at the annual state opening.

This is the measure of the difference between George V and Edward VII. Edward revived ceremonies because he enjoyed pomp and circumstance and was a natural at it. His son kept them going and even augmented them, not because he liked them, but because he thought it was the right thing to do. This is ceremony as a monarch’s hair-shirt, undertaken, not through inclination, but as a solemn duty. It is this devotion to duty which would transform the monarchy once again as it faced the challenge of ever more rapid and more radical social change.

III

George V had come to the throne in the midst of the worst political crisis in generations. In 1906 the Liberals won a crushing general election victory on a platform of social reform and state welfare benefits. The proposals and the consequent need for heavy taxation were more bitterly divisive than anything since the First Reform Act of 1832, and, like the Reform Act, they pitted the Liberal House of Commons against the Tory House of Lords. Also, as in 1832, the monarchy risked finding itself pig-in-the-middle.

The death of the old king and the inauguration of the new reign had imposed a truce on political strife. But not for long. In November 1910 the Liberal government decided to go to the country on a proposal known as the Parliament Act to curb permanently the power of the Lords. But first, they would get George’s prior agreement to a mass creation of peers if the Lords continued to resist.

The confrontation took place at Buckingham Palace. The Liberal prime minister, Herbert Asquith, browbeat the inexperienced king mercilessly. He was also double-crossed by his private secretary, who concealed from him the Tories’ willingness to form an alternative government. George never forgave those who’d taken advantage of him. But, probably, it was for the best. The powers of the Lords were indefensible; the important thing from the king’s point of view was to stop the monarchy going down with the peerage.

Six weeks after the coronation, the Parliament Act passed the Lords by a whisker, because the bishops decided to vote with the government to save the monarchy from embarrassment and the Lords from themselves.

Soon the crown confronted a far more dangerous threat, when the system of Continental alliances, which Britain had rejoined under Edward VII, sucked Britain and the empire into the slaughter of the First World War. The royal family did its bit. The king visited the troops in the field; Queen Mary cheered up the wounded in hospital and the prince of Wales joined up though fear of his capture meant that, to his intense frustration, he was never allowed near the front.

But, by 1917, the strain was beginning to tell. Abroad, the February Revolution overthrew the Russian autocracy and Tsar Nicholas II, George’s first cousin and spitting image. At home, there were strikes, mutinies and political radicalization. Confronting this double threat, George and his advisers embarked on a series of bold measures to shed old baggage and make new friends.