Edward VII_The Last Victorian King

by Christopher Hibbert

  He was often ‘distinctly peppery in his temper’, speaking so sharply to those who asked him what he considered trivial questions that they dared not approach him a second time, sending the servants ‘flying about in all directions’. Once the very able English Consul at Marseilles came aboard the royal yacht to deliver telegrams and letters from a large portfolio which, on being opened, proved to be empty. The King shouted at the man so loudly that he fled from the yacht terrified and, during the hour that it took the Consul to retrieve the missing correspondence, he marched up and down the deck, abusing him as a halfwit. When some order of his had not been fully understood, the King would repeat it very slowly and precisely, word by carefully enunciated word, while the listener stood before him, dreading the possibility that the bottled-up anger might suddenly burst forth before he was allowed to escape from the room.

  If more seriously provoked, the King’s rages were ungovernable. Ponsonby recalled numerous occasions of his master’s ‘boiling with rage’, ‘breaking into a storm of abuse’, ‘shouting and storming’, ‘shaking the roof of Buckingham Palace’, ‘becoming more and more angry and finally exploding with fury’. There was the time when Ponsonby advised him not to give several Victorian Orders on going to Portsmouth as this would lead naval officers to expect decorations whenever he went to any other naval base. Ponsonby said:

  He was furious and shouted at me that I knew nothing about such matters, and that, being a soldier, I was, of course, jealous of the navy. I, however, stuck to it, and said that the Victorian Order would be laughed at if it were given on such occasions. He was still more angry and crushed me with the remark that he didn’t know that the Victorian Order was mine to give. After this explosion I at once retired, but I was interested to see that when he did visit Portsmouth he gave no decorations.

  A similar explosion erupted on board the royal yacht when the King and Queen were cruising in the Mediterranean in May 1909 and it was decided to pay a visit to Malta. The King was looking through the programme arranged for his reception at Valetta when a telegram arrived from the Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean to the effect that all ships in the area had been ordered off to make a demonstration. King Edward was ‘perfectly furious and in his rage became most unreasonable’. Captain Colin Keppel, commander of the royal yacht, could do nothing with him and suggested that Frederick Ponsonby be sent for. Ponsonby recorded:

  When I entered the King’s cabin I at once grasped that there was thunder in the air. ‘What do you think of that?’ the King shouted at me as he tossed me a telegram, and before I had time to answer he stormed away at the disgraceful way he was treated. He ended a very violent peroration by saving he had a good mind to order the Fleet back to Malta.

  Ponsonby succeeded in calming the King’s anger by pointing out that the navy, no doubt, had very good reasons for requiring the Mediterranean Fleet to make a demonstration; but when he went on to say that it was extraordinary that neither the Prime Minister nor the First Lord of the Admiralty had had the courtesy to keep him informed of the situation, the King’s fury burst out afresh, and ‘after breaking into a storm of abuse of the government’, he instructed Ponsonby to send messages in cipher to both ministers which, ‘had they been sent as he directed them, would certainly have startled both recipients and would probably have entailed their resignation’.

  The King was equally angry when, on arriving in Naples, he found that the Queen had ordered donkeys to transport the royal party up to the summit of Vesuvius from the end of the railway. He refused to risk placing his great weight on the back of a small donkey; and, while the Queen and others of the party set off, he went for a short walk. According to her sister, the Empress Marie of Russia, who had been invited to join the party, the Queen did not trust herself to a donkey either but was carried up in a chair while the Empress walked. But Frederick Ponsonby remembered them all as having been on donkeys which were still a long way from the summit when the King returned from his walk to the train. Eager to begin a picnic luncheon, he had the train’s whistle sounded at regular and increasingly frequent intervals to summon the riders back for the return journey. By the time the last rider had returned on his weary donkey, the King was ‘boiling with rage’ and ‘unable to let off steam’ on Queen Alexandra or on Fehr, the courier, who had wisely disappeared, the King poured ‘the vials of his wrath’ on Ponsonby’s innocent head.

  The King was also very demanding. Ponsonby recalled a day at Malta when, summoned to the King’s cabin after breakfast, he was told to prepare a list of names for decorations and given fifteen letters to write as well as two to copy. On being released, Ponsonby rushed off to a review. Then he had to go to a luncheon in an army mess. After that there was a levee to attend, and he did not get back on board the royal yacht until half past five. Ponsonby recorded:

  The King sent for copies of letters to show the Queen at tea. Answer, not yet done. Afterwards he sent for me to discuss decorations and asked for a typed list. Answer, not done. Had I written yet to so-and-so; answer, no. Then the King said, ‘My dear man, you must try and get something done.’ So I got a list of decorations typed by a petty officer on board. He spelt two names wrong and left out a third, all of which the King found out …Although I sat up till 1.30 to get straight, the King is left with the impression that nothing is done.

  With his work the King neither received nor asked for any help from the Queen. Occasionally the Queen’s hatred of Germany or concern for her Danish relations would induce her to make some suggestion or protest. In 1890, for instance, during the government’s negotiations to secure a protectorate over Zanzibar in exchange for Heligoland, she strongly protested about this ‘knuckle-down to Germany’ and prepared a memorandum in which she stressed that, before Britain came into possession of Heligoland during the Napoleonic Wars, the island had ‘belonged from time immemorial’ to Denmark and that ‘in the hands of Germany it would be made the basis of operations against England’. The Queen also offered her services in translating letters from her brother, the King of Greece, and in making his difficulties well known to her husband and the government. But these were rare interpositions. As Charles Dilke said, the Queen never talked politics; and the King would not have had it otherwise.

  He was even unwilling to let the Queen play an important part in the ceremonial duties of the monarchy or to attend official functions without him, insisting that such work was his responsibility and that she ought not to carry it out without his being there as well. Sometimes she complained, but she did not press the point. And while her husband spent more and more time away from her, she was quite content to retreat to Sandringham. She seemed perfectly happy on her own there; and when her husband did join her, she made it clear that whatever freedom or authority he might enjoy outside the home she was the mistress inside it. Lord Esher remembered how when he and the King, then Prince of Wales, had been discussing some important topic, a message had come from his wife asking him to go to her. He had not gone immediately; but a second summons had sent him scurrying from the room, leaving the business unfinished. And the Countess of Airlie recorded the Princess’s cheerfully irreverent comment to Sir Sidney Greville, who, anxious not to keep his Royal Highness waiting any longer for an important engagement, pressed her to join him: ‘Keep him waiting. It will do him good!’

  The contents of official boxes which were never shown to the Queen were, however, readily made available to his son and his daughter-in-law. This was, the King explained, a ‘very different matter’.

  Prince George and his father were — and were always to remain — on excellent terms. ‘We are more like brothers than father and son,’ the King once wrote, a sentiment which his son later echoed in a letter to Lord Dalkeith; and although Prince George held his father in too much awe for this to be really so, there was between them an intimacy which in royal relationships was so rare as to be almost unique. Recognizing his son’s diffidence, his need of reassurance and sympathy, the King gave him the confide
nce that he would otherwise have lacked by a constant affirmation of love and trust, by an obvious pride in his reliability. He made it clear that he trusted him in a way that he himself had never been trusted and that he regarded him with an unreserved affection with which his own parents had never been able to look upon him.

  He hated to be parted from him. Within a week of Queen Victoria’s death he abruptly cancelled a long-standing arrangement for his son to make an official visit to Australia on the grounds that neither he nor Queen Alexandra could spare him so soon for so long. The King was persuaded to change his mind by the Prime Minister, but he parted from his son with sorrow, confessing to Lord Carrington that he ‘quite broke down as he said good-bye’, and he welcomed him home with unconcealed joy. Lord Esher recalled how the father, on the many occasions on which he spoke of his son, ‘always’ did so ‘with that peculiar look which he had — half smile, and half pathos — and that softening of the voice, when he spoke of those he loved. He used to say the words “my son” in quite a different tone from any which were familiar to me in the many tones of his voice.’ For his part the Duke of York, as Prince George became in 1892, was utterly devoted to his father, consulting him about every aspect of his life, ‘even as to whether his footmen ought to wear black or red liveries at dinner’, and ‘complaining terribly’ when his father was not available for consultation that he had ‘no one to go to or advise him’. After the King’s death he could scarcely bring himself to speak of him without tears starting to his eyes. Though he recognized his faults, he admired him intensely and would never allow a word of criticism of him ever to be spoken. The only criticism he himself ever made of him in his voluminous correspondence with his mother was of a decision he had made to convert the bowling alley at Sandringham into a library.

  It was the greatest comfort to the King in the last years of his life that his son and his son’s family lived in a small house in the grounds of Sandringham — York Cottage, formerly known as the Bachelor’s Cottage, which had been built as an annexe for male guests at Sandringham and which he had given to Prince George as a wedding present. Although this was not altogether pleasing to the Duchess of York — who was much more aware than her husband of the house’s inconvenience and lack of character and who had to submit to perpetual visits from her mother-in-law — the King delighted in the intimate propinquity, and seemed never more content than when his grandchildren with their parents came up to the big house for tea.

  The grandchildren loved to do so, and in later life they remembered their grandfather with unclouded pleasure and affection. They retained memories of being taken to see him in his robes before he left for Westminster Abbey on the day of his coronation. ‘Good morning, children,’ he had said to them. ‘Am I not a funny-looking old man?’ They were too overwhelmed by the sight of him in his strange costume to offer any opinion in reply on that occasion, but they were not usually in the least in awe of him. His eldest grandson, Prince David — later King Edward VIII — recalling the contrast between life at York Cottage and that other world, redolent of cigar smoke and scent, which his grandfather inhabited, described him as being ‘bathed in perpetual sunlight’. Prince David was so little afraid of him, in fact, that he was even capable, on one occasion at least, of interrupting his conversation at table. He was reprimanded, of course, and sat in silence until given permission to speak. ‘It’s too late now, grandpapa,’ Prince David said unconcernedly. ‘It was a caterpillar on your lettuce but you’ve eaten it.’

  Both the King and Queen delighted in looking after their grandchildren when their parents were away. They encouraged them to romp about the house, even in the dining-room, and to show off to the guests, who were required to pretend they were elephants and to give the children rides on their backs. And, so as to enjoy them all the more, the King once contrived to leave their governess in London for a fortnight while he spoiled them to his heart’s content at Sandringham.

  With the small children of close friends he was equally indulgent, allowing Mrs Keppel’s to call him ‘Kingy’. The younger of the Keppel daughters, Sonia, was rather frightened of him at first. Instructed to curtsy to him whenever she saw him but never daring to ‘look higher than beard-level’, she ‘played safe and curtsied to the cigar and rings’. But Sir Ernest Cassel, too, had a beard, wore rings and smoked cigars;

  ‘so, more often than not, he came in for the curtsy’.

  In time, though, Sonia overcame her nervousness, and when the King came to tea with her mother she was delighted to be allowed down into the drawing-room at six o’clock to see him. Together they devised a ‘fascinating game’ with bits of bread and butter which were sent, butter side downwards, racing along the stripes of his trousers. Bets of a penny each were placed on the contestants, Sonia’s penny being provided by her mother. ‘The excitement was intense while the contest was on … and Kingy’s enthusiasm seemed delightfully unaffected by the quality of his bets.’

  On Princess Victoria’s birthday a children’s party was given each year by the King and Queen at Buckingham Palace where balloons were shot up into the sky and, on bursting, discharged presents all over the lawn while excited children raced about to pick them up. They were not in the least intimidated by the presence of their host, as most of their parents were; and when he asked one boy what he would like, he received the brusque command, ‘More jam, King.’

  15

  The King at Home

  The pleasure of giving seemed never to leave their Majesties, as it so often does with rich people.

  Perpetually alarmed by the prospect of boredom, the King was as anxious as ever to ensure that each day held for him the promise of some interesting activity. To make this easier to achieve, his yearly programme followed an almost unchangeable plan, largely regulated by the need to be in London in January or February for the State Opening of Parliament; by the social obligations of the London season, which began after Easter and ended with the races at Ascot in late June; and by those other race-meetings at which his Majesty’s presence was expected as a matter of course. After the yachting at Cowes in early August he liked to be at Bolton Abbey, the Duke of Devonshire’s Yorkshire house, for the opening of the grouse-shooting season on the twelfth. October would normally find him shooting at Balmoral. On 9 November he would invariably be at Sandringham for his birthday.

  Although guests at Sandringham were pleased to find that life there was fairly informal, the King’s taste for regularity and punctuality imposed upon it an almost immutable routine. Breakfast began at nine and ended promptly at ten. The Royal Family did not appear, having breakfast in their own rooms; but those who chose to come down for it would find small round tables laid in the dining-room and a menu as ample and varied as that demanded by the King’s own voracious appetite. Indeed, the quantities of food consumed by the King, at breakfast as at every other meal, astonished those who, unapprised of his capacity, observed for the first time his zestful gourmandism.

  After drinking a glass of milk in bed, he would often content himself with coffee and toast when he was to spend the morning indoors; but to fortify himself for a morning’s shooting he could devour platefuls of bacon and eggs, haddock and chicken, and toast and butter, in as short a time as it would take a less hungry man to drink two cups of coffee. Soon afterwards, an hour or so in the cold fresh air would sharpen his appetite for hot turtle soup. Yet this would in no way impair his appetite for luncheon at half past two, just as a hearty luncheon would not prevent his appearing for tea in a short black jacket and black tie in the hall where, as his band played appropriate melodies, he helped himself to poached eggs, petits fours and preserved ginger as well as rolls and scones, hot cakes, cold cakes, sweet cakes and that particular species of Scotch shortcake of which he was especially fond.

  The dinner which followed at half past eight consisted usually of at least twelve courses; and it was not unknown for the King to take a liberal sample of every one, to the horror of the Queen, who confessed to his d
octors that it was just ‘terrible’ the amount of food he got through, that she had ‘never seen anything like it’. He would enjoy several dozen oysters in a matter of minutes, setting the fashion for swallowing them between mouthfuls of brown bread and butter; and would then go on to more solid fare. He had an exceptional relish for caviare, plovers’ eggs and ortolans, for soles poached in Chablis and garnished with oysters and prawns, for chicken and turkey in aspic, quails and pigeon pie, grouse, snipe, partridge, pheasant and woodcock; and the thicker the dressing, the richer the stuffing, the creamier the sauce, the more deeply did he appear to enjoy each mouthful. No dish was too rich for him. He liked his pheasant stuffed with trufles and smothered in oleaginous sauce; he delighted in quails packed with foie gras and garnished with oysters, trufles, mushrooms, prawns, tomatoes and croquettes; he never grew tired of boned snipe, filled with forcemeat as well as foie gras, grilled in a pig’s caul and served with trufles and Madeira sauce. He declared ‘delectable’ a dish of frogs’ thighs served cold in a jelly containing cream and Moselle wine, and flavoured with paprika, which was especially prepared for him at the Savoy by Ritz and Escoffier, who named it Cuisses des Nymphes ? l’Aurore. Yet he appeared to derive almost equal enjoyment from more simple dishes: roast beef and Yorkshire pudding invariably appeared on the menu for Sunday luncheon at Sandringham, though he himself far preferred lamb. At Balmoral a stag-shooting party would be offered Scotch broth, Irish stew and plum pudding. And when once the King was noticed to frown upon a bowl of boiled ham and beans, it was not, he hastened to explain, because he despised such homely fare but because ‘it should have been bacon’. Almost the only dish he did not like was macaroni.