Edward VII_The Last Victorian King

by Christopher Hibbert

  ‘My dear fellow,’ he once said, ‘more in sorrow than in anger’, to a groom-in-waiting who was to accompany him to a wedding, ‘where is your white waistcoat? Is it possible you are thinking of going to a wedding in a black waistcoat?’ And to a secretary who had thought it odd to be told to present himself in ‘a sort of Stock Exchange attire’ for a visit to see the pictures at the Salon in Paris and who had thought it prudent to question the instructions, the King replied, ‘I thought everyone must know that a short jacket is always worn with a silk hat at a private view in the morning.’ He himself was infallible. He even knew what the answer was when the Russian Ambassador asked him if it would be proper for him to attend race-meetings while in mourning: ‘To Newmarket, yes, because it means a bowler hat, but not to the Derby because of the top hat.’

  He selected his own clothes with the nicest care, and earnestly discussed with his tailor the exact manner in which he thought the cut of the evening dress waistcoat could be improved or the precise reduction that ought to be made in the length of the back of a tail coat. Austen Chamberlain, accompanying the King on a cruise as Minister in Attendance, was ‘very much amused’ to overhear an instruction issued to a Swiss valet as the yacht approached the Scottish coast: ‘Un costume un peu écossais demain.’

  The King’s taste in clothes was generally conservative: he attempted to prevent the demise of the frock-coat and to revive the fashion of wearing knee-breeches with evening dress. He refused to wear a Panama hat and derided those who did; he continued to wear a silk hat while riding in Rotten Row long after this was considered old-fashioned. Yet he made several new fashions respectable. His adoption of a short, dark blue jacket with silk facings, worn with a black bow tie and black trousers, on the voyage out to India led to the general acceptance of the dinner jacket. Twenty years later, so Winston Churchill told his mother, ‘everyone wore tweed suits’ at Goodwood Races following the King’s ‘sensible example’; while his appearance at Longchamps Races in an unusually tall, peculiarly shaped top hat started a hunt in London for similar headgear by fashion-conscious Frenchmen who subsequently discovered that the King’s hat was made at a shop in the Place Vendôme and that its shape was attributable to its designer’s anxiety to conceal the baldness at the back of his head. Nevertheless, many other similar hats were soon to be seen on the Paris boulevards. The King’s adoption of the loose, waist-banded Norfolk jacket made this type of jacket popular all over England; while photographs of him wearing a felt hat with a rakishly curved brim brought back from Homburg, or a green, plumed Tyrolean hat from Marienbad, led to thousands of others being sold at home. He found it more comfortable — then decided it looked elegant — to leave the bottom button of his waistcoat undone, and soon no gentleman ever did that button up.

  Sometimes he went too far. The sight of the King on a German railway station in a green cap, pink tie, white gloves and brown overcoat induced the Tailor and Cutter to express the fervent hope ‘that his Majesty [had] not brought this outfit home’. Other observers were driven to complain about the tightness of his coats, and the excessive size of his tie-pins, as well as the ungainly figure he cut in those foreign uniforms which he loved to wear even when their short coats, as those of the Portuguese cavalry, ‘showed an immense expanse of breeches’, or when their huge, shaggy greatcoats, as those of the Russian dragoons, made him look ‘like a giant polar bear’. But despite these lapses the King was the acknowledged arbiter of sartorial taste as well as a recognized expert on uniforms, decorations and medals, of which he had an immense collection. When he was at Marienbad, continental tailors came with notebooks and cameras to record any changes in style he might have favoured since the previous season. And in the West End of London, there were often to be seen in the streets short, stout pedestrians who copied not only his clothes but also his beard and way of moving so faithfully that other passers-by respectfully raised their hats to them.

  Apart from clothes, sport, food and women, the King had few other interests outside his work. He enjoyed the ritual and regalia of Freemasonry; he liked pottering about in the gardens of his friends, pointing out with his walking stick arrangements and vistas that appealed to him, commenting on alterations that had been made since his last visit. He often went to the theatre and the opera, his arrival at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, being preceded by that of a chef and six footmen and by numerous hampers filled with cloths, silver, gold plate and food for the tenor twelve-course meal which was served in the room at the back of the royal box during the hour-long interval.

  The King’s favourite theatrical performances were plays about modern upper-class society, musical comedies and light opera rather than classical tragedies, Shakespeare or anything more intellectually demanding. Queen Alexandra, on the other hand, preferred grand opera, and once at Windsor gave instructions for the band to play Wagner. At the same time the King sent a request for Offenbach to the dismayed bandmaster, who thought it advisable to compromise with a selection from Gilbert and Sullivan operettas and thus got into trouble with them both. According to Lady Warwick, ‘the King’s retort to the attempt [by Sir Walter Parratt, Master of the King’s Musick] to introduce more serious musical compositions at the state concerts was to have a performance by Sousa and his band’.

  Because of its connections with the court, he took an interest in the Poet Laureateship, and had urged the claims of Swinburne against those of Alfred Austin, whose eventual appointment as successor to Tennyson was due to his services to the Conservative Party. But the King seems rarely to have even so much as opened a book, and almost never to have finished one, a notable exception being Mrs Henry Wood’s romantic novel, East Lynne, which he had read in Egypt as a young man, had recommended to his travelling companions, and about which he subsequently asked them questions to test their familiarity with the plot. On receiving a book he would say how much he was looking forward to reading it; but Winston Churchill, whose mother sent the King a copy of The Malakand Field Force, seems to have been uniquely fortunate in being assured that the book had actually been read with ‘the greatest possible interest’. When supervising the alterations at Buckingham Palace after his mother’s death, he airily gave instructions to the librarian at Windsor to ‘pack up’ his father’s fine collection of books and to ‘get rid of those which were not required’. And when furnishing the library at Sandringham he summoned a man from Hatchard’s bookshop, instructing him to fill the shelves with whatever volumes might be considered suitable for a country house.

  Nor did the King display much interest in the visual arts, particularly not in anything which smacked of the avant-garde. In painting he insisted on the strictest accuracy in representation, and far preferred portraits to landscapes. On being shown Holman Hunt’s picture of the London Docks on the night of his marriage, he looked at it closely for a few seconds and then, by way of comment, asked the single question, ‘Where am I?’

  He far preferred to be in the open air, although his outdoor activities were now rather limited. Riding not very well, he had still gone out with the West Norfolk Hounds in the 1880s, but his hunting days were over long before he came to the throne. Still weighing over sixteen stone, he was also both too heavy and too old for fencing, which he had practised as a younger man, or for lawn tennis, which he had begun to play in the early 1880s as an additional means of losing weight. He had never been much of a swimmer, and had never taken to cricket, which he had once played on the Curragh, dropping two easy catches and failing to score a single run. Later, he did occasionally play at Sandringham, where he liked it rather better, as it was the common practice to bowl him a few easy balls so that he could score some runs and thus be kept in a good temper. He did not have the patience for fishing, which was, in any case, too lonely an occupation for him. Nor did he greatly care for golf, though he had courses made at both Windsor and Sandringham on which Queen Alexandra and Princess Victoria enjoyed playing a wild game of the Queen’s own invention; this involved a race from t
ee to hole to see who could get a ball in first. The game usually ended in a hockey-like scrimmage on the green, where the cut and battered balls were once found by the King, who thought someone was trying to play a trick on him.

  Towards the end of his life the King took the greatest pleasure in riding a specially made tricycle up and down the drive at Sandringham. He also much enjoyed motoring, provided he was not accompanied by the Queen, ‘whose one idea was not to run over a dog’ and who tapped the chauffeur on the shoulder whenever she thought his speed excessive. Her husband, on the contrary, liked to be driven extremely fast, and could not bear the sight of a car in front of him on a stretch of country road. Motorists, therefore, became accustomed to being overtaken by a large Daimler or sixty-five-horse-power Mercedes in which a bearded figure sat on the blue morocco back seat, smoking a large cigar, as he urged his chauffeur on, with impatient gestures and gruff commands, to ever greater speeds. After 1907 motorists also became used to the uncouth sound of a special horn in the shape of a four-key bugle which was always carried in the royal cars after their owner had admired a similar device employed by the Kaiser.

  The King had been introduced to the pleasures of motoring in 1898 at Warwick Castle, whence he had made a brief excursion in a six-horse-power Daimler. The next year, while staying with Mr and Mrs George Cavendish-Bentinck at Highcliffe Castle in Hampshire, he had been taken out by John Douglas-Scott-Montagu, later second Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, in a twelve-horse-power Daimler which, to the consternation of the ladies sitting in the back, reached a speed of forty miles an hour. At that time very severe restrictions were imposed upon the speed of cars, and it was not until 1903 that the limit was raised to twenty miles an hour on roads deemed suitable for such fast-moving traffic. Yet the King, unaffected by the traffic laws of his realm and driving in cars which bore the Royal Arms on the door-panels but carried no number plates, paid no attention to the regulations. He often congratulated himself on having driven along the Brighton road in 1906 at sixty miles an hour, three times as fast as the law allowed, though he professed himself to be uncompromisingly opposed to motor racing, which he thought ‘would be very dangerous for the occupants of the motors and still more so for the Public’. His motor engineer, C.W. Stamper, who rode in front next to the driver, ready to jump down with his tool-bag if there were any trouble with the engine, recorded that the King’s Mercedes was once rattling up to Newark at ‘a good pace’ when the chauffeur failed to notice a culvert in the road which the car’s wheels struck with a fearful bump. ‘Stop! Stop!’ the King called out. ‘Do you want to kill me?’ But he seemed more disturbed by the dent in his brown bowler, which he showed indignantly to Stamper, than by the threat to his own safety. Generally as he got out of the car he would say to Stamper with satisfaction, ‘A very good run, Stamper; a very good run, indeed!’

  At Queen Alexandra’s instigation, so it was said, the King gave up the cruel practice of shooting pigeons released from traps. But to the end of his life he continued to derive the greatest pleasure from most other forms of shooting. He was always seen to be in excellent spirits when, dressed in a rough country suit with heavy boots and an Inverness cape, and accompanied by his favourite retriever, Diver, he left the house with the prospect of a day’s good sport. After tripping over a rabbit hole at Windsor in 1905 he was unable to walk out with the other guns, but he solved the problem by bringing into use a low pony carriage in which he was drawn to his stand, where the pony was taken out of the shafts so that the King could shoot from his seat.

  As he grew older the King seemed to enjoy a day’s racing even more than shooting. He relished the company of racing people and what he himself termed the ‘glorious uncertainty of the turf’. Before the middle of the 1890s he had had very few successes as an owner. But his fine horse Persimmon won the Derby in 1896 — prompting Rosebery to remark that everyone would say that all the other horses had been stopped — and four years later, after another splendid royal horse, Ambush II, had won the Grand National, Persimmon’s brother, Diamond Jubilee, also won the Derby. As well as the Derby, Diamond Jubilee won the Newmarket Stakes, the Eclipse Stakes, the St Leger and the Two Thousand Guineas, after which last success its owner appeared to be ‘delirious with joy’.

  Admiring success in others, the King revelled in the glow of triumph himself. He seemed never happier than when a victory on the turf was welcomed by the crowd as an opportunity to cheer him and wave their hats at him, shouting ‘Good old Teddy!’ In the last year of his life, Minoru won the Derby for him for the third time, and racing correspondents reported that there had ‘never been such cheering’, that tens of thousands of people sang ‘God Save the King’, and that even the policemen on duty, infected by the almost hysterical atmosphere of the occasion, threw their helmets in the air and joined in the roars of acclaim. That night the King gave his usual Derby Day dinner at Buckingham Palace to the members of the Jockey Club. His chefs had excelled themselves with their turtle soup and whitebait and those sugary concoctions made up in the royal racing colours of purple, scarlet and gold. And the happy host, who had returned from the Continent a fortnight before looking tired and ill, now seemed suddenly to have recovered his health and spirits in the excitement of his success.

  Criticisms of the King’s extravagance as a racing man were not altogether just. He was certainly impulsively lavish in his presents to his jockeys and stablemen after a win: when Ambush II won the Grand National he gave £500 to the jockey, £250 to the head stableman and £50 to the lad who looked after the horse. But his prize-money was considerable. In 1896 and 1897, when he earned a total of nearly £44,000, he was second in the list of winning owners; and in the single year of 1900 he earned almost £32,000. Diamond Jubilee, who won the Derby that year, was eventually sold for £31,500. Altogether, between 1886 and 1910, from stud fees and stake money, his stables took well over £400,000. Nor was he, contrary to many reports, an extravagant gambler. It seems that the largest bet he ever placed on a horse to win was £600; and although he could not have afforded to lose such a sum in his youth, by 1894 — when he did lose it by backing the favourite, Baron Hirsch’s Matchbox, to win the Paris Grand Prix — his finances were in a less perilous condition.

  As early as 1869 Queen Victoria had noted in her journal her son’s hopes and expectations of being granted a larger income. But Gladstone had contended that it was up to the Queen to make provision ‘in consideration of the extent to which she [allowed] him to discharge her social duties for her’. Twelve years later Francis Knollys told Lady Spencer, so Gladstone’s secretary recorded in his diary,

  that the question of the Prince of Wales’s debts could not be postponed much longer. That will be an awkward matter for the government to deal with. It is sure to raise a very strong feeling against the Queen who (it will be thought and not unfairly thought) should have made some allowance to H.R.H. in consideration of the extra expenses which fell upon him by reason of her seclusion.

  But it was not until 1889 that the House of Commons increased his income by £36,000 and granted him a capital sum of £60,000 so that he could make provision for his children. And even then, having spent £300,000 on the improvements at Sandringham, he had found it impossible to carry on without recourse to borrowing from friends and even, so it was supposed, from moneylenders whom French detectives reported as being perpetual visitors to his various hotels. He was apparently also reduced from time to time to selling various possessions. Joseph Duveen recalled a man coming into his shop with a piece of jewellery for which he asked £100. Duveen claimed to have told the man it was worth much more than that and to have given him £500. He was ‘pretty sure’ that his customer had been the Prince of Wales.

  When the King came to the throne he had no private capital left, nor any to expect under the terms of his mother’s will which provided for her own private fortune to pass to her younger children. Parliament, however, came to his help by granting him the handsome income of £470,000; and in the hands o
f men, including Sir Ernest Cassel, who were more capable of administering it than he was himself, that income, which was £85,000 more than Queen Victoria had received and to which was added £60,000 from the Duchy of Lancaster, proved adequate to withstand the strain that his way of life placed upon it.

  Certainly the King’s guests never had cause to complain about their host’s hospitality. His reforms of the Household had included pensioning off many under-employed servants such as the Indians — whose sole duty it had been to cook the curry for luncheon whether anyone wanted it or not — and several of Queen Victoria’s huge kitchen staff of nineteen chefs and numerous cooks, bakers, confectioners, apprentices and underlings. But the food in the royal palaces, under the supervision of M. Menager, was still as plentiful as it was excellent.

  Some of the Queen’s former guests objected to the less formal atmosphere as Lord Esher did. But most of them welcomed the relative informality which even at Windsor permitted impromptu dances to be held in the crimson drawing-room under the energetic supervision of that tireless waltzer, Lord Fisher.

  Relaxed as the atmosphere at Windsor was, though, and ‘extraordinarily comfortable’ as Haldane found all the arrangements, no one was allowed to be late for anything if the King were not to be deeply offended, perhaps even enraged. Once when Asquith, as Prime Minister, was late in joining a party in the Castle courtyard, the King ‘looked first at his watch and then at the Castle clock’, so Mrs Asquith said, ‘and fussed crossly about the yard’. Angrily turning to his gentlemen-in-waiting, he asked, ‘What have you done? Where have you looked for him? Did you not give him my command?’