by Anne Edwards
P A R T T W O
UNCLE WALES BECOMES KING
NINE
On becoming Heir-Apparent, the Duke of York also became the Duke of Cornwall. The title was an irrelevancy; what mattered were its vast estates which produced substantial income. Princess May was now a rich woman. She was also much disgruntled.
Only a few days after Queen Victoria’s death, she wrote her old friend, Mlle. Bricka, “We are to be called D. & Dss of Cornwall & York & I don’t think the King intends to create G[eorge] Pce of Wales.” To her Aunt Augusta on February 3, 1901, she added, “I believe this is the first time that the Heir-Apparent has not been created Prince of Wales!” Such an unprecedented oversight cut Princess May deeply. She felt that her mother-in-law was working against her, but without Prince George’s support, she was helpless. Unfortunately, her husband was forever timid about supporting his wife’s position in any matter in which his mother had taken a stand.
Her thirty-three years rested handsomely on Princess May, and her popularity was as high as ever. Still, at home she had to compete with her husband’s mother for his affections.
Queen Alexandra was most reluctant to have another woman wear the title with which she had been personally identified for nearly forty years, and she convinced the King that much confusion might occur if the new Heir-Apparent and his wife assumed the titles of Prince and Princess of Wales too abruptly. Princess May was never to forgive her mother-in-law for her humiliating action, and though she thoroughly enjoyed her higher position (albeit without the title she coveted), her relations with the new Queen were considerably cooler than they had been with Victoria.
Yet (and perhaps due to her harsh feelings toward Queen Alexandra), Princess May overcame most of her timidity to her father-in-law, who included her in almost all social events during the first months of his reign as King Edward VII. King Edward respected her intelligence and admired her strength of character. He also took it upon himself to “loosen” her up a bit and was fond of telling her slightly risqué stories that, despite her general primness, set her to laughing. And when Princess May laughed, she lost much of her self-control and dissolved into loud guffaws.
Princess May suffered a great loss at Queen Victoria’s death, her devotion to her mother having been transferred to the aging Queen. She now wrote with greater frequency to Aunt Augusta, her correspondence taking on a more confidential tone. Many letters were critical of King Edward’s Court, which in her opinion fell far short of what she expected it should be.
Lord Esher apparently agreed with her, for less than a fortnight after the Queen’s funeral, he complained that, “The sanctity of the Throne has disappeared. The King is kind and debonnair, and not undignified—but too human!” And, in fact, the austerity and rigidity that had characterised Queen Victoria’s Court disappeared as soon as Edward became King. Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace were quietly transformed into light-hearted cosmopolitan courts as beauty, wit, and charm swept out the old, musty regime.
To the despair of his ministers, who liked to have an opportunity alone with him after a palace dinner, the King had abolished at Windsor the time-honoured British custom by which the ladies, dinner over, left the gentlemen to their port. Instead, both sexes would proceed out of the dining room together, in continental fashion. King Edward loved society, especially the society of women.
The Monarchy had taken on a new shape better suited to the twentieth century, and although Princess May was not entirely comfortable with the changes, the King’s naturalness and his panache won her over. Never a hypocrite, and unable to adopt a façade of mock morality, King Edward left to Queen Alexandra the difficult task of easing the transition from the old world to the new. Within a year, a newly gay atmosphere pervaded London’s upper-middle-class homes. Gone were the ottomans and antimacassars, the solid maple furniture and the turkey pile. In their places were little gilt “papier-mâché” chairs, “chaiseslongues” smothered with lace cushions, “Lady Teazle” screens covered with machine-made Beauvais, and masses of “maddeningly midget” tables. Taste had taken a light-hearted feminine turn. The colour mauve (Queen Alexandra’s favourite) dominated most decors. Pink shades shut out the sunlight at an early hour each day. Begonias were replaced by orchids, and petunias by malmaisons. The heavy Teutonic taste of Prince Albert, which Queen Victoria had preserved, disappeared almost entirely, and the deification of the feminine was re-established.
Still, a growing section of the population was unsympathetic to the King’s attitude toward life, his open relationship with Alice Keppel, and his nouveau riche friends. The transition from being Prince of Wales to Monarch was not easy. At fifty-nine and after empty years of waiting, he had to learn, and learn quickly, the difficult trade of Kingship. He was not to be a great King, but his immense style and gusto, the force with which he propelled the nation from an old-fashioned stuffy monarchy into the twentieth century, made him a memorable one. And perhaps he could not have achieved this distinction without the woman he had married.
Queen Alexandra possessed an air of dignity and respectability that, combined with her remarkable beauty and good works, endeared her to the people. She had the ability to be stately and human at the same time, and quickly became Great Britain’s ideal of womanhood. Considered to her credit was her mediocre mind, for it made her more typical of the accepted stereotype of her generation of upper-class English women. But there was another side to Queen Alexandra that Princess May knew too well. In private, the Queen was obstinate, overpossessive, domineering, and more than a little spoiled, traits that made her children weak, her husband philander, and her daughter-in-law bristle. And though little has been said of it through the years, she and her own mother-in-law, Queen Victoria, had not been on intimate terms either. Lord Esher, who managed the Royal Household, wrote his son on March 7, 1901, “I was tired to death yesterday after two hours alone with the King and Queen at Buckingham Palace. They were fussing over domestic plans. She had never before been into Queen Victoria’s rooms. Queer was it not? She examined every detail; and made all her own little domestic arrangements.”
According to Lord Esher, “a smart difference of opinion” occurred between husband and wife during this tour of their new residence. The King insisted that they should occupy these private apartments, where he intended to renovate the memorial his father’s room had become so that it was habitable for himself. Queen Alexandra was to take his mother’s bedroom. The Queen, however, at first preferred the grander, airier, and more convenient rooms that had previously been reserved for visiting royalty and state officials. Finally, at the end of the tour, and under duress, she agreed to look at Victoria’s chambers. By March 12, less than a week later, she made up her mind; she had Lord Esher take her through them privately and was “in tearing good spirits.”
King Edward was never to like Buckingham Palace, which he called “the Sepulchre,” but he put his stamp upon it nonetheless. Prince Albert’s former dressing room was soon known as the Indian Room, the floor covered in a richly patterned Indian rug with tiger skins scattered on it. Gifts from Princes and Rajas were lavishly displayed, and the walls held glass cases filled with jewelled scabbards. His bedroom was unconventionally simple. Racks holding his hats (twelve daytime hats and six top hats) and canes (five or six dozen) were openly displayed right beside the doorway. No great canopy stretched over his low-backed, average-width bed. A screen, rather than the usual velvet drapes, gave a measure of privacy to the bed’s occupant. The walls were covered with a severe blue-and-silver brocade stripe and hung with a dazzling collection of portraits of England’s most beautiful Royal ladies. Nearest his bed, however, was a portrait of his father, Prince Albert (the only male portrait in the room), and another of Queen Victoria holding the infant Prince of Wales.
The state rooms were redecorated, but Queen Alexandra’s cluttered hand was everywhere. Few of the many great treasures piled into the rooms could be seen to their best advantage. Abundant electric-light bul
bs were installed instead of the sparse gas-lighting and sparser electricity which Queen Victoria had grudgingly allowed. Bathrooms were provided more generously, and in the zest for modern comfort many of the dressing rooms were fitted with three basins in a row, one for the hands, one for the face, and one for the teeth.
The grounds and the approach to Buckingham Palace breathed a sense of “new life.” The forty-five acres of parkland surrounding the palace received much attention. Summerhouses and cupolas were added. Bronze storks were placed by the private lake, and boatmen in brilliant scarlet livery had been added to the staff to man the dozen new luxurious paddleboats with their elegant throne seats and colourful canopies.
Evening Courts, where elaborately gowned and bejewelled debutantes were presented to the King and Queen, were substituted for the less gala afternoon drawing rooms held for this purpose by Queen Victoria. With the sight of the equipages of the great families and their footmen and coachmen in their cocked hats and rich liveries driving up the Mall to Buckingham Palace, the final fusty Victorian years were banished to the past. The mere fact that the King had chosen to call himself Edward and not Albert promised the people a new epoch.
The King took a more lively interest in revitalising Windsor Castle than in the renovation of Buckingham Palace. He had almost everything rearranged and repainted, but he felt compelled to leave the heavy carpets and curtains untouched, for they were, although quite ugly, as good as new.* All the art works were rehung. “I do not know much about Arrt,” he told Frederick Gibbs,* rolling his r’s, “but I think I know something about Arr-r-angement.”
By April 1, King Edward and Queen Alexandra were installed in the castle, and Esher describes the new atmosphere. “The King plays bridge after dinner, and keeps people up till nearly one, which is very tiring. He insists on having all his letters brought to him unopened, almost 400 a day, and sorts them by the envelopes. He tried at first to open them all, but found that impossible.” A week later the King and Queen gave their first large dinner. The atmosphere of the castle had changed drastically. Victoria’s Indian servants wandered about “like uneasy spirits, no longer immobile and statuesque,” their places now filled by footmen vividly attired.
“The oak dining room,” Esher noted, “is no longer used, and the quiet impressive entrance of the Queen into the corridor is as obsolete as Queen Elizabeth. We assembled in the Green drawing-room, and the King came in unannounced with his daughters and his sister. He took the Duchess of Fife in to dinner.† We dined in the White dining room, which looked very well. He retains the Indian servants.‡ The dinner was like an ordinary party. None of the ‘hush’ of the Queen’s dinners. Afterwards we left ‘arm-in-arm’ as we entered.
“Then the party remained in the Green room, and he took me into the White drawing-room. It had been furnished with the famous Couttière Cabinet that belonged to the Compte d’ Artois and with tapestry chairs, and other fine French things. The King began with the Queen’s memorial, going back upon his approval of the scheme [to place it at the top of the Mall] persuaded by X [Alexandra], who was angry because she had not been consulted, that there was danger ‘of mobs in front of the Palace’—a tissue of rubbish.* I said what I thought, but I would not argue ... Later he sat down to bridge; the Princesses slipped away, and I made my bow.
“I regret the mystery and awe of the old Court. However, the change was inevitable.”†
Certainly the Court was a good deal more glittering, as the King insisted that his women guests should wear tiaras at dinner every night at Windsor (a command that greatly pleased Princess May) and that the men should wear Court costume and their decorations.
The King would take long walks with Lord Esher through the gardens at Windsor and Buckingham, and across the fields at Balmoral. Esher was younger by eleven years, but the King thought of him much like the tutors with whom the King had lived at White Lodge when he was a young man. Whatever the reasons, he felt relaxed with Esher and enjoyed their long tête-à-têtes. One day the King, with his dog Caesar at their heels, and Lord Esher wandered around Windsor Castle for over two hours, presumably ransacking bookcases and picture cupboards while he reminisced with Esher about his youth. Lord Esher had greatly admired Queen Victoria, and he was not yet used to the familiarity with the Throne that had so quickly been thrust upon him following her death.
The new Queen’s obdurate nature had surprised Lord Esher, but he quickly learned to take her at her word. “I sent a list of queries to the King tonight about the throne of the Queen,” he wrote in his Journal during the planning of the Coronation.* “She objects to being called Queen Consort. She means to be Queen.” For thirty-eight years as Princess of Wales, Alexandra had been obliged to defer to Victoria’s tastes, wishes, and prejudices. Now she was steadfast in her resolve to have other people give way to her. This willfulness surfaced in her very first ceremonies as Queen. On February 16, she was expected to appear with the King for the opening of Parliament, and the correct dress for a Queen Consort and her Ladies at this ceremonial, and later at the Coronation (planned for a year from that June), became a major issue of the Court. The last Queen Consort had been the wife of William IV, Queen Adelaide, and no one remained who had a clear memory of what she wore on these occasions. Historians were consulted, but Queen Alexandra dismissed their findings. “I know better than all the milliners & antiquaries,” she wrote to her husband’s equerry, Sir Arthur Ellis. “I shall wear exactly what I like and so will all my ladies—Basta!”
“The Opening of Parliament went off without a hitch,” Lord Esher reported. “The Queen looked beautiful, with all her jewels and the Koh-i-noor upon a black dress.† The contrast between the red robes of the peers, and the black dresses of the women, was very effective.” Her decision had been to establish her own personality, while at the same time displaying her respect for the dead Queen. Yet for the Queen to have worn a stone as vulgar in its opulence as the Koh-i-noor diamond at a time of national mourning not only was daring but would have been conceived as a major breach of etiquette by anyone other than Alexandra. For in 1901, the wearing of mourning had progressed to such utter severity that propriety obliged a second wife to don heavy black upon the death of her husband’s first wife’s mother or father. When the old Queen had died, most women in the nation wore mourning, and even small girls had black ribbons threaded in their petticoats. (Queen Victoria’s death had come on the eve of the annual January white sales, and in the department stores of London and the provincial cities, hundreds of assistants worked throughout the night to pack away every white item on display and to drape their interiors and windows in black.) For months any woman who considered herself a lady wrote notes on black-edged paper, stuffed them inside black-edged envelopes, and sealed them with black wax. Thousands upon thousands of black-edged handkerchiefs —coarse cambric for daily use, finer cambric for formal occasions—were sold in the many stores specialising in general mourning that had been flourishing for years.
For the first time in over six decades the people had a King. “Saw the King again after lunch—sitting in his room upstairs with his after-luncheon cigar. Looking wonderfully like Henry VIII, only better-tempered,” Lord Esher wrote.
The comparison was not untoward, for King Edward, always of ample frame, was now quite portly—a fact that did not at all diminish the fame he had as the “uncontested arbiter elegantiarum” in the matter of style. His considerable size had influenced him to adopt the fashion of open, or cutaway, singlebreasted jackets fastened usually with a jeweled link. He introduced the crease into men’s trousers and the low-cut white waist-coat for wear with a dress coat, exposing for the first time a substantial expanse of shirt-front. “Stiff as a breast-plate across the manly chest,” his grandson David was to recall many years later, “this shirt-front was nevertheless vulnerable. My grandmother found it so one evening when my mother and father were dining with him and my grandmother at Buckingham Palace before going on to the opera. The menu included a puré
e of spinach, and the King was unfortunate enough to spill a goblet of this vegetable on his wide and spotless shirt.
“Queen Alexandra took a knife and tried to scrape it off. My mother also did her best to repair the damage. But the tell-tale mark remained ... He laughed boisterously, dipped his napkin in the spinach, and drew a picture with it all over his shirt-front —an abstract painting in spinach, in the style which on the Left Bank in Paris today [1951] is, I believe, called Tachiste. Then he went to change and this royal work of art was lost forever.”
King Edward did indeed cut as memorable a figure with his top hat and formal attire as King Henry ever had with his massive scarlet robes. He wore a top hat for almost all occasions in London and for church on Sundays in the country. Hats were, in fact, the King’s passion, and he championed the bowler and introduced the homburg to England.
None of this did Queen Alexandra approve, for she preferred men to wear uniforms. She could do little about persuading the King, but butlers, footmen, coachmen, and members of the Palace staff soon sported handsome new uniforms resplendent with gold braid and shiny brass buttons. She was also not too keen about Princess May, younger and extremely popular, having a share in her long-awaited glory.
One is therefore able to understand the easy approval she gave to a plan suggested by the King’s ministers less than a month after the old Queen’s death for the Duke and Duchess of York to embark on an ambitious colonial tour to include Gibraltar, Melbourne, Malta, Egypt, Ceylon, Singapore, Australia, then New Zealand and South Africa (with the hope that the war might then be over) and Canada. The trip would mean that Princess May and Prince George would be away from England and their four young children for eight months. No members of the Royal Family had ever undertaken such an extended tour of the Empire. But the death of Queen Victoria and the prolongation of the Boer War made personal contact with the colonies by members of the Royal Family a politic move. The King was not in favour of the tour because it left him with no one except for his brother Arthur, the Duke of Connaught, with whom he might share his greatly increased ceremonial burdens. Still, the ministers and the Queen convinced him of its rightness.
