The Edwardians

by Roy Hattersley

  The upper classes naturally followed his extravagant lead. Harold Nicolson claimed that ‘no Edwardian meal was complete without ptarmigan,* hot or cold’.15 The Edwardians’ uninhibited enjoyment of physical pleasure was an attitude to life which the King, at least, felt no obligation to disguise. When Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman warned that deteriorating health would soon make it necessary for him to resign his office, the King replied that the announcement should be postponed until a date which would not require an early end to the royal holiday in Biarritz.

  It would be wrong to suggest that Edward, Prince of Wales, had longed to spend his entire time studying state papers and performing official duties. But he did, throughout the long years of waiting, make periodic forays into public policy. Sometimes he thought it his duty to advise his mother. In 1885, when Gladstone resigned and a general election could not be held because of imminent constituency boundary redistribution, the Queen refused to travel south from Balmoral in order to discuss with ministers how an interim administration could be formed. Edward’s telegram urging her speedy return to Windsor and duty was a model of both tact and responsibility. ‘In present grave ministerial crisis your presence near London earnestly desired … Fear your position as sovereign might be weakened by your absence. Forgive me for saying this, but universal feeling is so strong I could not help telegraphing.’16

  The Prince’s participation in the procedures of the House of Lords was less judicious but generally benign. On three occasions – 1879, 1882 and 1885 – he intervened in debates to support a change in the law which would allow a man to marry his deceased wife’s sister. The espousal of such a cause is normally the result of friendship with someone who is affected by the proscription. But it seems that Edward simply regarded the law to be misconceived on that particular point. On the first occasion that he advocated the change, he presented a petition in its support drawn up by Norfolk farmers. On the third he endorsed a petition from London cabmen. The Lords rejected the proposal on all three occasions.

  He spoke again in the House of Lords when, after much lobbying, he obtained a place on the Royal Commission on Housing the Working Classes, but he avoided controversy by confining his remarks to evidence of his good intentions. ‘I have been much occupied in building houses for the poor and the working classes in and about the Sandringham Estate.’ He attended eighteen of the Commission’s thirty-eight meetings – remaining silent in most of them because of the dangers of becoming embroiled in controversy. The same fear prompted the Cabinet to decline the Prince’s offer to serve on the Royal Commission on Labour Disputes. He did, however, become a member of the equally contentious Royal Commission on the Aged Poor. His main interest, he said, was to ‘ascertain the grounds of the strong prejudices harboured by the aged poor against entering the workhouse’. It could be argued that his bewilderment at the objection to indoor relief confirmed the importance of his using membership of the Commission to remedy his ignorance. His unwillingness to sign either the majority report or the note of dissent confirmed that he recognised the need for the Heir Apparent to avoid becoming involved, even vicariously, in politics. When he became King, he ignored the golden rule. Time after time, his intrusions into his real political interest – foreign affairs – jeopardised the interests of the nation.

  Although he attended only thirty-five of the forty-eight meetings held by the Royal Commission on the Aged Poor, in general he was moderately assiduous in the discharge of his royal duties. In the year before his accession, he made eighty-six public appearances. He also attended thirty-seven race meetings (no doubt encouraged by almost continuous success),* joined forty-five shooting parties and visited the theatre and opera on forty-eight occasions.17 On other nights he dined with his friends, The Marlborough House set. Edward was essentially gregarious, an attribute which romantics believe represented the spirit of the age. He could not bear to be alone. So parties would be arranged at twenty-four hours’ notice and at weekends he would descend on country houses where, although he was a welcome visitor, host and hostess trembled in fear that they would not meet his needs. Neither age nor elevation changed him. ‘All Edwardian houses kept stores of things like ginger biscuits and aubergines and French patisseries and bath salts in case the King came. And come he did. He came over and over again. And on Monday morning other people would read of it in the Morning Post.’18

  Taxing though the royal visits undoubtedly were, their cancellation caused even greater trauma. In the early weeks of 1903, Victor Cavendish braced himself for the King’s arrival at Chatsworth. On 26 January he had his hair cut and tried on his Lord Lieutenants uniform. ‘Odd sort of clothes to have to put on in the middle of the day.’ On 27 January he learned, with a mixture of pleasure and apprehension, that, as a yeomanry officer, he was ‘to take command of the escort’. On Saturday 31 January he ‘arrived at Chatsworth about 11.30. Great preparations going on’. The blow fell on 1 February. The King was too unwell to travel. ‘A very large party, but it was a great blow that the King was unable to come and caused great consternation, not only in Chatsworth but all round the county [where] great preparations had been made.’

  In some of the houses which the Prince of Wales visited, the preparations were of dubious respectability. The society within which the Prince of Wales moved took serial promiscuity for granted. In her novel The Edwardians, Vita Sackville-West, who grew up in that milieu, describes the good hostess’s obligation to arrange house-party bedrooms in a way which accommodated irregular liaisons.

  The name of each guest would be written on a card slipped into a tiny brass frame on the bedroom door. The question of the disposition of bedrooms always gave the duchess and her fellow hostesses cause for anxious thought. It was necessary to be tactful and, at the same time, discreet. The professional Lothario would be furious if he found himself by ladies who were all accompanied by their husbands.

  Edward accepted the mores of his friends and cronies and shared their lifestyle, and took unscrupulous advantage of the hospitality which they thought it their loyal duty to provide.

  By the time of his accession to the throne, Edward VII had more or less given up the capricious liaisons of his youth and middle age and settled down, in a manner of speaking, with Alice Keppel. Mrs Keppel, the daughter of an admiral and sister-in-law of a peer, was sufficiently well connected to justify her appearance at country houses which entertained royalty.* So after 27 February 1898 – the date of their first meeting and virtually instant mutual infatuation – hostesses who welcomed Edward to their houses had a clear view of how the bedrooms should be allocated. Proud as they were to entertain him, the demands imposed by his visits were colossal. When, two years after his coronation, he stayed with Lady Saville at Rofford Abbey, his entourage included a valet, a sergeant footman and a ‘brusher’, two equerries (who brought their own valets), two telephonists, two chauffeurs and an Arab boy to prepare his coffee. Had the Queen (rather than Mrs Keppel) accompanied him, space would have been needed below stairs for at least another six servants. Yet the King’s demands were regarded as relatively modest. On his annual visit to Marienbad – where he spent a month taking the waters – he was satisfied with a suite of rooms in the Hotel Weimar. His mother – on her rare travels abroad – always rented the entire hotel and furnished it with favourite items of furniture from Balmoral and Osborne House which she sent on in advance of her arrival.

  Sir Phillip Magnus, in his almost entirely uncritical biography of Edward VII, charted the course of a typical peripatetic year.19 The pattern was preserved, in almost exactly the same form, throughout Edward’s reign. Christmas and New Year were spent at Sandringham. The King then moved on to one of England’s great houses for a week’s shooting, after which brief pleasure duty called him back to London for the State Opening of Parliament held, in those days, at the beginning of the calendar year. At the beginning of March he left England for Paris and Biarritz and a cruise in the royal yacht, Albert and Victoria. He presided over the London s
eason in May, moved to Windsor for Ascot in the middle of June and to Goodwood (where he usually stayed with the Duke of Richmond) at the end of the month. In August he again joined the royal yacht at Cowes for the Regatta. Then – when Queen Alexandra left for Denmark, to make her annual visit to her sister, the Dowager Empress of Russia – he visited Bohemia for his Marienbad cure. Back in England, he paused for a few days in London before travelling north, first for the Doncaster race week and then for shooting and stalking at Balmoral. During November and early December he moved, depending on how the fancy took him, between Buckingham Palace, Sandringham and Windsor.

  King Edward’s life of ostentatious pleasure was, to most of his subjects, in happy contrast to the near invisibility of his mother during the last years of her reign. After the pomp and pageantry of 1876 which celebrated her becoming Empress of India she was no longer a total recluse. But age combined with instinct to prevent a constant round of public engagements. Her son, on the other hand, became a consistently visible monarch. Newspaper pictures showed him at race meetings and picnicking with shooting parties. Pleasure was the fashion of the time and the idea of holidays was just beginning to catch the public imagination. The British people, from the intellectual middle classes who spent their springs with Baedeker in Florence and Rome to the cockney costermongers who hoped for a day in Margate with shrimps and whelks, were not in a mood to deny their King his own measure of happiness. Whether the newspapers reported that Edward VII had read the Speech from the Throne at the State Opening of Parliament – a tradition he revived after Queen Victoria had abandoned the greatest spectacle of the Westminster year – or described his elation at the victory of a horse in the Derby, a basically imperialistic people felt that they were, once again, ruled by a sovereign whose uninhibited extravagance reflected the glory of the Empire they had helped to build. It was not the general public who were worried about the King’s social life. It was the Court and the political establishment. And they were not concerned by either the extent or the extravagance of the King’s regular pleasures. Nor were they unduly alarmed by his amorous exploits. They were worried about the male company he kept.

  During his scandalous middle age, Edward VII had seemed to seek the company of men with dubious reputations. As he grew older, he chose his companions with greater discretion. Many of the men with whom he shared his pleasures – racing, shooting and bridge – were in trade. Lord Iveagh was a brewer. Sir Blundell Maple made furniture. Baron Hirsch and Sir Ernest Cassel were bankers and, worse still in an openly anti-Semitic society, Jewish. The Kaiser, on hearing that the King and Sir Thomas Lipton were together at the Cowes Regatta, amused his family by announcing that the King of England had ‘gone boating with his grocer’. Shortly after Edward’s accession, young Winston Churchill, cousin to the Duke of Marlborough and born in Blenheim Palace, spoke for the aristocracy. He was clearly much amused by his pun about Mrs Alice Keppel, who was more Edward’s wife than his mistress. ‘I am curious to know about the King … Will he sell his houses and scatter his Jews or will Reuben Sassoon be enshrined amid the crown jewels and other regalia? Will he become desperately serious … Will Mrs Keppel be appointed First Lady of the Bedchamber?’20

  Winston Churchill regarded the King as rather vulgar. And the era to which he gave his name was, according to the old aristocracy, very much the same. The release from the conspicuous solemnity of Victorian England would have resulted in an explosion of hedonism whether or not it had been encouraged by the behaviour of the sovereign. Edward was the embodiment of a new age in which the old standards were despised and abandoned.

  ‘The lavish expenditure and feverish pursuit of pleasure do not appeal to me any more than the restaurant life which did not exist in my day,’ wrote the Countess of Cardigan and Lancaster. ‘Money shouts while birth and breeding whisper.’21 Lady Dorothy Neville was even more categoric in her condemnation. ‘Society today and society as I knew it are two entirely different things. Indeed it may be questioned whether society, as the word used to be understood, exists at all … Society as it used to be – a somewhat exclusive body of people, all of them distinguished for their rank, their intelligence or their wit – is no more.’

  The new society, which the ancien régime deplored, held the view that it was possible to maintain a tenuous relationship with respectability by the adoption of the most blatant double standards. The King’s definition of acceptable conduct provided a perfect illustration of that moral ambivalence. He was not a hypocrite. He never sought to hide, at least from members of his own circle, his weaknesses for women and gambling. But, like the country over which he reigned, he believed that it was possible to apply moral standards selectively. Affection for rich parvenus was matched by an obsession for Court protocol. His concern that the Countess of Torby – the morganatic wife of Grand Duke Michael of Russia – should not sit on the Duchesses’ bench at Buckingham Palace balls was no worse than ridiculous. But that a man with Edward’s amorous history should tell the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough that, were they to separate, ‘they should not come to any dinner or evening party or private entertainment at which either of Their Majesties was expected to be present’ illustrates the fascination with propriety which hid much that was squalid in Edwardian Britain.

  The King, though shrewd, was essentially superficial. To him appearance was all. His concern about how things looked was illustrated by his obsession with the correct choice of dress and display of decorations. He made an official complaint, through his principal private secretary, to the First Lord of the Admiralty that Lord Charles Beresford had failed to change into full dress uniform before welcoming the King of Greece aboard his flagship at Corfu. Beresford had been a competitor for the favours of ‘Daisy’ Warwick and was a public critic of naval policy as devised by Sir John Fisher, the First Sea Lord and a royal crony. The King was not a man to forget old grudges or overlook new offences against his friends. But his rebuke to Frederic Ponsonby, his assistant private secretary, could be attributed only to an almost deranged attachment to the rules (real or imaginary) of formal etiquette. Ponsonby was forbidden to accompany his master to an art exhibition because he was wearing a tailcoat. ‘I thought,’ said the King by way of reproach, ‘everyone must know that a short jacket is always worn with a silk hat at a private view in the morning.’

  Appearances were what counted when Edward VII considered the conduct of greater affairs. Morality was simply a matter of social form and constitutional expediency. The solemnity of the Coronation would not be compromised by the presence of a group of ladies – Sarah Bernhardt, Mrs Hartman, Lady Kilmorey, Mrs Arthur Paget and Mrs George Keppel – sitting in what wags, with an interest in the turf, called ‘The King’s Loose Box’. Their association with the King, although well understood within society, was kept out of the newspapers. So, at the moment of his anointment, there was no risk of a recurrence of the debilitating public scandal which had disfigured his early manhood.

  The King, no less than his mother before him, regarded the Coronation as an event of mystical significance. He had no doubt about the imperial destiny of the country which he had been called by God to serve and lead. Edward Elgar disliked the words which A. C. Benson had set to his Pomp and Circumstance March to make part of the Coronation Ode. But the King himself was sure that Britain was the ‘land of hope and glory’ and that the whole world would benefit when its boundaries wider still were set. God who had made Britain mighty was not going to disturb the proper order of things because of an occasional adultery – though He would be righteously angry if the ceremony in which the Defender of the Faith pledged his fealty to the Established Church was not suitably organised. Fortunately, what appeared to be divine intervention averted a fiasco.

  A couple of weeks before Coronation Day, the Duke of Rutland, the Master of Horse, had what he reasonably described as a ‘remarkable dream’. In it, the State Coach, bearing King Edward to the Abbey, got stuck as it passed under the arch between Horse Guards Parade and
Whitehall. It was only released when a Life Guard drew his sword and hacked the crown from the coach’s roof. The Crown Equerry was, at first, unimpressed by the Duke’s premonition. Eventually he was persuaded to compare the height of the coach and the clearance of the arch. Constant road repairs – tarmacadam heaped on tarmacadam – had so heightened the level of the ground that the coach was two feet too high to pass through in safety. The level of the road was reduced.

  The King then, rightly or wrongly, decided that the Coronation itself was not being properly organised and ordered that the preparations must, henceforth, be under the command of the Guards. The first officer to take charge of a rehearsal, the splendidly named ‘Polly’ Carew,* insisted on the participants ‘numbering off’ in proper military style. In respect for his age and rank, Lord Salisbury, the Prime Minister, was designated number one.22

  The Coronation, at least to the Court and King, was accepted as confirmation that nothing had changed the natural order of society. As long as the monarchy, and the state from which it was indivisible, was not put at risk, the King could do what he liked. So the Countess of Athlone happily explained to her family, ‘Aunt Alex was renowned for her beauty, very lovely with a gracious presence and a disposition which endeared her to a public which worshipped her. But being stone deaf and not mentally very bright she was not much of a companion for an intelligent man like Uncle Bertie.’23 Had it ever become public knowledge – or even a private certainty within the Court – that Aunt Alex was having an affair with the Honourable Oliver Montague, her niece would not have been so understanding.