Edward VII_The Last Victorian King

by Christopher Hibbert

  As though intent upon reminding his ministers of his concerned and watchful eye on their affairs, the King was as ready to offer his comments on the papers that were sent to him as he was to call attention to points which the ministers appeared to have overlooked or underestimated. One day complaining about the ‘trash’ which the Poet Laureate, Alfred Austin, sent to him, the next about papers being initialled instead of signed, or addressed to him in an incorrect manner, the King was determined not to be disregarded. Sometimes his interference was fruitful: after his insistence that a grant of £50,000 to Lord Roberts on being created an earl on his return from South Africa was disgracefully mean, the grant was doubled. And although his objection to the appointment of the American Admiral Mahan as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge — on the grounds that the chair ought to be held by an Englishman — did not result in the selection of the King’s nominee, John Morley, it did bring about the appointment of a compromise candidate, the classical scholar John Bagnell Bury. Usually, however, the King’s inconvenient views were, if possible, ignored in the hope that he would — as frequently he did — not continue to press them once they had been stated.

  He never, however, ceased to press his right to be informed of government decisions before they were implemented. He appreciated that there might be some constitutional objection to his being allowed to see Cabinet papers while important matters were under discussion; and was evidently not surprised to learn that the Prime Minister considered it ‘impossible … to yield in a matter of this kind’. But he did insist that it was his ‘constitutional right to have all dispatches of any importance, especially those initiating or relating to a change of policy, laid before him prior to their being decided upon’. This right, ‘always observed during Queen Victoria’s reign’, was certainly not always observed during his. In April 1906 he had reason to complain that the Prime Minister never brought anything before him, never consulted him in ‘any way’. The perfunctory reports of Cabinet meetings that were sent to him really made ‘an absolute fool of the King,’ Francis Knollys protested the following year. ‘There is no use in ministers liking the King if he is treated like a puppet.’

  Under the next administration the situation did not much improve. When, in July 1908, the King asked to see ‘a copy of Winston Churchill’s Army Scheme’, the Secretary for War passed the letter on to the Prime Minister, who sent it back with the comment, ‘I return this. I have replied to Knollys in the sense which you suggested. It is, in any case, an impertinent request. These people have no right to interfere in any way in our deliberations.’

  Most of the King’s disagreements with his ministers were attributable to his being ‘completely left in the dark’. Since the ruin of Sir Charles Dilke by the scandal of his divorce, and of Lord Randolph Churchill by disease, the King had no close political friends other than the Duke of Devonshire and Lord Rosebery. He did not get on with his Conservative Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour, with whom he had almost nothing in common. Nor did he relish the company of the three ministers, Lord Lansdowne, Lord Selborne and St John Brodrick, with whom, as Foreign Secretary, First Lord of the Admiralty and Secretary for War, he was principally concerned. Arnold-Forster, who succeeded Brodrick in 1903, was even worse, ‘obstinate as a mule’, according to Lord Esher, opposing everything which the King proposed. Nor were Balfour’s opponents any better, in the King’s opinion. Their leader, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, had given particular offence by his criticisms of the conduct of the Boer War, speaking of British ‘methods of barbarism in South Africa’, a phrase that so annoyed the King that he had with difficulty been dissuaded from sending for the Liberal leader and telling him to avoid such remarks in future. Since then Campbell Bannerman’s ‘gratuitous and ungenerous’ attacks on the Prime Minister had continued to exasperate the King, who remarked to Knollys that it was ‘curious’ that he hardly ever opened his mouth ‘without saying something in bad taste’.

  When Campbell-Bannerman succeeded Balfour in 1905 and the King got to know him better, he became quite fond of him. But he continued to annoy the King by his speeches on foreign policy, a subject about which — like Lloyd George — he knew ‘nothing’. ‘Between ourselves,’ Knollys confided to Esher in 1907, ‘I don’t think the King ever will like “C.B.” politically.’ As for Campbell-Bannerman’s Under-Secretary for the Colonies, Winston Churchill, the King decided that he was ‘almost more of [a] cad in office than he was in opposition’ when he had ‘showed a great want of taste’ and talked ‘simple nonsense’. He liked Churchill well enough as a man — though Francis Knollys did not — but Churchill’s conduct towards Lord Milner was, in the King’s opinion, ‘simply scandalous’, while his later comments on the ‘richer classes’ were ‘unforgivable’.

  There were, indeed, very few politicians whom the King fully trusted. He thought John Morley, Secretary for India, ‘wonderfully agreeable and sensible’. He liked Arnold-Forster’s successor, Haldane, who was ‘always acceptable’, though he described him as a ‘damned radical lawyer and a German professor’ when it fell to Haldane’s lot to reduce the army estimates. He got on well, too, with the ebullient, working-class President of the Local Government Board, John Burns, whose appearance in knee-breeches, Esher said, was ‘a revelation’ and whose summary of his relationship with the King was expressed in the words, ‘Me and ’im get on first-rate together.’ The King was also particularly attached to Lord Fisher, a man of commanding personality, who wholeheartedly returned the King’s affection and remained forever grateful for his support against his enemies. ‘They would have eaten me but for Your Majesty,’ Fisher once told the King, who was delighted that his dear friend had triumphed over that ‘gasbag’ Beresford.

  The King did not enjoy many victories himself. He did get his own way with the Order of Merit which he insisted, against all objections, should be open to military and naval officers despite the great number of other honours available to them. He was equally and successfully insistent that the Kaiser should be allowed to decorate all the British officers and men who had been in attendance on him while he was in England at the time of Queen Victoria’s death, although his ministers much regretted the growing practice of British citizens accepting foreign decorations. The King also occasionally managed to wrest a written promise from a minister by declining to sign a paper until the required undertaking had been given. He refused, for example, to sign a Royal Warrant concerning army pay and allowances until Arnold-Forster had assured him in writing that no serving officer would have his pay cut, unless, at the same time, his duties were to be reduced. The King was again victorious when an attempt was made to limit the time an equerry could remain in his service to five years and to stop their army pay for that period. And when the government, which had agreed to pay the expenses he incurred in entertaining foreign sovereigns, asked that a distinction should be made between political and private visits, the King refused to allow that such a distinction could be made. He had his own views, Knollys told the Treasury, ‘respecting the importance, from a political point of view, of visits of foreign sovereigns to this country which might not coincide with those of the Secretary of State’; and there might, therefore, be ‘constant conflicts between the King on one side, and the Treasury and Foreign Office on the other’. This argument proving ineffective, the King said that he would send for the Prime Minister and tell him personally that he would not stand for ‘such an attempted evasion by the Treasury of what was agreed upon’ at the time of his accession. And at this threat, the Treasury gave way.

  It was usually, however, the King who had to give way; and he rarely did so without a struggle. Determined to outgrow his reputation for being over-impressionable, in his later years he was often obstinate. And even when he had been convinced that he must yield to pressure he would not do so immediately, saying, ‘I will consider the matter,’ which his staff learned to translate as, ‘I recognize that I will shortly have to surrender.’

  In the first year
of his reign a young officer who had been cashiered for cowardice by surrendering to the enemy in South Africa appealed to him to exercise his royal prerogative of mercy. The King read the papers, decided that the officer had been harshly treated, and approached the Commander-in-Chief, Lord Roberts. Roberts agreed with the King and asked the Adjutant-General to hold a special court of inquiry. The court recommended that the sentence should be quashed and that the officer should be convicted of an error of judgement and allowed to resign his commission. But the Secretary of State for War, who was concerned by the number of times officers had surrendered unnecessarily in the war and had considered it his unpleasant duty to make an example of this particular officer, threatened to resign if the harsher punishment were not imposed. The King’s apparent willingness to pardon the young man anyway brought from the Prime Minister a warning of the possibility of the entire government’s resignation in order to defend the principle of collective Cabinet responsibility. So the officer had to be sacrificed; and the King had to yield to the government’s pressure.

  The King also had to yield when the war was over and it was proposed to appoint a Royal Commission to enquire into its conduct. He wrote to the Prime Minister:

  This system of ‘washing our dirty linen in public’ the late Queen had a horror of. The Government is a strong one with a large Parliamentary majority. Why, therefore, should Ministers pledge themselves, or give way to demands from unimportant M.P.’s? The proposed Inquiry will do the Army and also the Country harm in the eyes of the civilised world.

  The Prime Minister replied that he was already pledged to the Commission and that he could not overrule the Cabinet; and the King was left to complain gloomily to Knollys about the apparent power of a body which neither the King nor the Prime Minister could gainsay.

  The King was no more successful when he attempted to prevent the publication of an Army Journal in which officers were to be free to express their feelings on military subjects. This, the King maintained, was totally opposed to the army’s tradition of silence. He would ‘neither sanction nor support’ the Journal in any way; ‘this should be clearly understood’; he washed his hands ‘of the whole matter’. But the Journal was established all the same.

  Nor did the King’s views prevail when he suggested that the age for admittance of subalterns into the Guards might be reduced to eighteen; nor when he proposed that on the fiftieth anniversary of the Indian Mutiny the occasion should be marked ‘by a judicious distribution of honours’; nor when he tried to obtain an earldom for Lord Curzon; nor when he asked that the band of the Coldstream Guards should be sent to play in Germany, a request turned down by the Foreign Office, whose ‘extraordinary conduct’ of the ‘whole transaction’ caused him ‘much annoyance’. Nor did the King succeed in preventing the admission of native members to the Viceroy of India’s Council, which he considered a ‘step fraught with the greatest danger to the maintenance of the Indian Empire under British rule’. When Satyendra Prassano Sinha, a distinguished Hindu lawyer, was suggested as a suitable member of the Council, the King wrote to protest ‘most strongly’. He told Lord Minto, the Viceroy:

  To take a very clever native on to your Executive Council must necessarily be a source of much danger to our rule in the Indian Empire. I am afraid it is the ‘thin end of the wedge’, and it will require a most resolute Viceroy to avoid being forced to nominate one if not two native members of the council. I can hardly believe that the present appointment of a Hindoo will not create great and just indignation among the Mahomedans and that the latter will not be contented unless they receive an assurance that one of their creed succeeds to Mr Sinha.

  A week later, however, he was obliged to sign ‘the objectionable paper’. ‘Do try and induce Morley not to be so obstinate by appointing another Native,’ he asked Esher on Sinha’s resignation. ‘He knows how strong my views are on the subject, and so does Minto; but they don’t care what I say, nor does any member of my precious (!) Govt.’

  One of the most painful of all the King’s disagreements with his government was over his determination, during Balfour’s premiership, not to confer a Knighthood of the Garter upon the Shah of Persia, who had been persuaded by the British Minister in Teheran that if he made the journey to England, which he was reluctant to do, the King would admit him into that most noble order of chivalry. The King contended that it was a Christian order and could not, therefore, be bestowed upon an infidel even though his mother had conferred it upon the Shah’s father as well as upon two Sultans of Turkey. The government, on the other hand, maintained that were the Shah not to receive the Garter which he had been led to expect would be bestowed upon him, he was quite likely out of pique to ally himself with Russia, a consequence as much to be dreaded as it was easy to avoid. The Foreign Secretary, Lord Lansdowne, endeavoured to solve the problem by preparing a memorandum of a proposed revision in the statutes of the Order to enable it to be conferred upon non-Christians. This document, so Lansdowne said, the King had read in his presence and, having done so, had nodded twice as if he approved of it. But this the King denied, though he admitted that he had taken the document from Lansdowne and had put it to one side intending to read it later. Anyway, Lansdowne went ahead with his plan and ordered from the court jewellers special Garter insignia from which the Christian emblems were to be removed. At the same time he sent a letter to the King explaining what he had done, and attached to it coloured illustrations of the proposed new Garter Star from which the Cross of St George was to be omitted.

  The King at the time was on board the royal yacht, the Victoria and Albert, at Portsmouth; and Frederick Ponsonby described the dreadful scene when the King opened the harmless-looking Foreign Office box and took out the contents. He was already annoyed with the Shah, who, put out by the delay in conferring the Order upon him, had rejected a gold-framed miniature of the King surrounded by diamonds which had been offered him and had told his suite not to accept the English decorations which it had been proposed to confer upon them. Consequently, as the King picked up Lansdowne’s letter and — in its recipient’s eyes — its scarcely less than blasphemous enclosure, there was an immediate ‘explosion. He was so angry that he flung the design across his cabin’. It went through the porthole and, so Ponsonby thought, into the sea. Furiously, the King dictated ‘some very violent remarks’ to be addressed to Lord Lansdowne. Ponsonby softened the tone of the letter; but, even so, Lansdowne recognized that he would have to resign unless the King gave way. While Knollys urged the King to stand firm, the Duke of Devonshire advised the Prime Minister to support Lansdowne, and the Shah became thoroughly disgruntled.

  ‘We have a very difficult game to play,’ Balfour wrote to the King, who continued to protest that it was ‘an unheard of proceeding, one sovereign being dictated to by another as to what order he should confer on him’. Balfour persisted:

  Russia has most of the cards, yet it would be dangerous to lose the rubber. Our well-known fidelity to our engagements is one of our few trumps. We must not waste it … Lord Lansdowne, erroneously believing himself to be authorized by Your Majesty, has pledged your Majesty to bestow the Garter upon the Shah — has indeed pledged your Majesty repeatedly and explicitly.

  If he be prevented from carrying out these pledges, what will be his position?… And, if he resigned, could the matter stop there in these days of governmental solidarity?

  Faced once again with the threat of the government’s resignation, the King felt obliged to give way. He was ‘much depressed about it all’, Knollys told Balfour; but his ‘high sense of duty’ and ‘patriotic motives’ overcame his great reluctance. He insisted, however, that no decorations should be given to the Shah’s suite in view of their earlier refusal of them, and that this must be the last time the Garter was conferred upon a person who was not a Christian. But even these conditions were not observed. The King was persuaded in the end to give decorations to the Shah’s grumpy entourage, and though he would not agree to the Order being confer
red upon the King of Siam five years later, he agreed to bestow it upon the more important Emperor of Japan.

  If King Edward often found his successive governments tiresome and difficult, he was not an easy man to do business with himself. By the end of 1905 he had virtually stopped giving formal audiences to his ministers, preferring to talk to them when he happened to meet them at dinner parties or upon other social occasions, or dealing with them through people he knew well and trusted including Sir Charles Hardinge, Sir Ernest Cassel, Lord Fisher, de Soveral, Knollys and Esher, the last five of whom all worked closely together and met frequently at Brooks’s Club.

  Most of his personal staff were devoted to him; some loved him; but none could pretend that working for him was always a pleasure. When a subject interested him he was scrupulous, even pedantic in his attention to its smallest and most insignificant detail. ‘He is … a good listener, if you aren’t too long,’ Asquith, Campbell-Bannerman’s successor, told his wife. ‘He has an excellent head and is most observant about people … He is not at all argumentative and understands everything that is properly put to him.’ Yet with matters that bored him he would not make the slightest effort to comprehend them. Frederick Ponsonby commented:

  He had a most curious brain, and at one time one would find him a big, strong, far-seeing man, grasping the situation at a glance and taking a broadminded view of it; at another one would be almost surprised at the smallness of his mind. He would be almost childish in his views, and would obstinately refuse to understand the question at issue.

  He never troubled to conceal his annoyance at even the most trifling grievances. Ponsonby recalled accompanying him to the Anglican church at Biarritz, where they sat in the front pew. When the time for the collection came, Ponsonby discovered that the only coin he had in his pocket was a gold louis; so he put it in the plate next to the King’s donation, also a gold louis. After the service the King crossly asked Ponsonby if he always gave a louis. ‘I hastily explained that I had nothing else,’ Ponsonby commented, ‘but he seemed to think I had spoilt his donation. He considered it only right to put in a gold piece, but when I did the same people thought nothing of his generosity.’