by Jane Ridley
By claiming a right not to create peers to pass the veto bill unless it had been sanctioned by a second election, the King seized the initiative. Some consider that he was “stretching his constitutional role.”‖68 He was certainly taking a great gamble. If the Liberals won an overwhelming majority, he would be unable to resist the demand for the creation of peers.
On the day that Knollys was closeted with Asquith’s private secretary, the King was conspicuously absent from the political scene, staying at yet another house party: with Bendor, the fabulously rich and spoiled Duke of Westminster, at Eaton. Whenever the King stayed anywhere for more than two nights, a private telegraph office was installed in one of the rooms of the house by post office engineers, and throughout his stay at Eaton a stream of cipher telegrams was received and dispatched by operators.69 At dinner, however, Bertie refused to be drawn on the political situation, merely commenting, “Yes! Yes! Disgraceful, disgraceful!”70 He seemed far more interested in accompanying Alice Keppel and Daisy Pless on a surprise visit to Daisy’s grandmother, Lady Olivia Fitzpatrick, who lived nearby. The old lady was not pleased to see him, and the visit started badly when the King sat down in her favorite chair. However, “he made outrageous love” to her and “in a few minutes they were both flirting desperately.”
“Is it true,” asked the King, “that my Mother sent you away from Court for trying to flirt with my father?”71
On New Year’s Day 1910, the King wrote a letter to “My Dear Mrs. George” from Sandringham, one of the very few letters to Mrs. Keppel that has survived. “My first letter of this New Year must be written to you today and wish you again all possible happiness and prosperity,” he wrote. “Oh! The telegrams and letters they surpass all human belief and do not leave one a spare moment. I am so looking forward to Monday—when I shall hope to [sic] our next meeting between 5 and 6. I shall motor over from here.” And he signed himself, “Tout à vous ER.”72
The King’s rendezvous with his mistress was at Elveden, where they were both guests at the annual January shooting party with the Iveaghs. In the cavernous marble hall created by the previous owner, the Maharaja Duleep Singh, the house party assembled for shooting tea. The women shivered in their tea gowns, as—in spite of the Guinness millions—there was only one fire, and that was where the King sat.73 The Iveaghs lived like royalty themselves, with thirty housemaids and fifty servants living in the house. When the King and Queen came, they brought a suite of twenty-two, including a postman and a man in red livery who stood outside Bertie’s door.74 Carrington found the King “anxious about the state of affairs” but “on a very even keel and there will be no political talk in his presence.” He played bridge until twelve thirty every night and went shooting every day, and Carrington thought him “really very well indeed.”75
Lady Fingall, a fey, witty Irishwoman, was given the room next to the King’s.a A double door joined her room to the King’s, concealed on his side by a large bookcase. Through the door, Daisy Fingall could hear the doctor giving oxygen at night, and the King’s voice, with its curious vibration that (she wrote) “I recognise now when I turn on my wireless and the German voices push out the others.”76 When she sat next to the King at dinner, he growled at her for sympathizing with the suffragettes. After dinner, in a corner of the drawing room, he told her: “Your friend, Mrs. Jameson, has hurt me deeply.”
Daisy Fingall was astonished. Mrs. Jameson was the sister of the cavalry officer Douglas Haig, and she possessed psychic powers, transcribing messages from her dead brother George. The King disclosed that she had written to him with a message from Alice, Bertie’s favorite sister, who had died more than thirty years before. It ran: “The time is short. You must prepare.” When Daisy asked if Mrs. Jameson had proof that the message was from Alice, he replied: “She said I was to remember a day when we were on Ben Nevis together and found white heather and divided it.”77
Only that summer Bertie had driven past Ben Nevis and recalled the time he had climbed it; his sister Alice was much in his thoughts.78 Bertie was superstitious. He believed, for example, that odd numbers of asparagus brought bad luck, and if he had an odd number of stalks on his plate, he always asked for another to make the numbers even.79 That New Year’s Eve at Sandringham, as was customary, the house was emptied of guests and servants so that the King and Queen could be the first to open the front door in the New Year. A grandchild ran around from the back and triumphantly flung the door open. “We shall have some very bad luck this year,” said the King.80 Mrs. Jameson’s omens disturbed him deeply.
From Elveden, Bertie retreated once more to Brighton to nurse his health with Arthur and Louise Sassoon. On 14 January, the day the election campaign officially began, he wrote in his diary: “In the morning walk on the beach near Shoreham. In the afternoon motor to Worthing and walk on the Promenade.”81 In these short, slow walks with Alice Keppel by his side, pausing often to catch his breath, Bertie no doubt pondered gloomily the consequences of a Liberal election victory. Whether he could resist if Asquith then demanded guarantees to create peers was by no means certain. Esher was sent on an intelligence-gathering mission to Whittingehame, Arthur Balfour’s country house, to sound out the views of the opposition. He reported that Balfour was “amazed” at the “impudence” of Asquith’s request for guarantees. The veto bill had not been drafted, nor had it passed the Commons. “It would be a breach of the King’s duty, if not of his Coronation oath,” said Balfour, “to pledge himself to create peers to pass a bill which he has never seen.”82
Back at Windsor, Bertie waited anxiously for the election news. As the results trickled through, it emerged that the Liberals had won, but they had lost their overall majority and were now dependent on the Irish.b The atmosphere palpably lightened. As Esher reported, the verdict made the King “less depressed than he was, because undoubtedly the fix in which Ministers find themselves makes it impossible for them to bully him.”83 There was no question of Asquith demanding guarantees at once, as the reduced majority could not be read as a clear mandate for Lords reform. The King discussed the political situation with Esher. “He is quite clear that he will not assent to any request to make peers.”84
Bracing himself for an unpleasant meeting, Bertie invited Asquith to dine and sleep at Windsor. In a breach of etiquette that seemed to confirm Bertie’s view that he had no manners, Asquith rushed off to France without even writing a letter.85 When Margot realized what a blunder her husband had made, she hastened to explain to Knollys that Asquith was exhausted after sitting up for two nights with his daughter Violet, who was devastated by the death of her fiancé Archie Gordon in a car crash.86 Margot demanded to see the King herself: “I would only say how deeply sorry I am and Henry [Asquith] will be when he knows he has vexed him,” she told Knollys. “I would much like to do this in person if only to stop all the insufferable gossip and the joy my political enemies (few I think!) have in repeating that the King is angry with us.”87 This letter was shown to Bertie, and his response was stiffly correct: “I am sure you know that he is always glad to see you,” Knollys told Margot, “but he thinks that in this instance, as the matter in question is an official one, it will perhaps be better, if anything is said to him on the subject, it should come from the Prime Minister himself.”88 In truth, Bertie was fuming with Asquith for going AWOL. “My Prime Minister’s place is in London,” he declared.89
Bertie was scrupulously correct in his dealings with the new Liberal government. Winston Churchill, his bête noire, was promoted to Home Secretary, but he seemed to have changed his spots.c One of Churchill’s new duties was to write the nightly letter to the monarch describing the day in Parliament, and in these communications Churchill reinvented himself as the loyal servant of the King. Margot played bridge with Bertie and “rubbed it in” that Winston had much improved. She teased Bertie, saying he would soon be playing bridge with the Tories, to which he replied “he would be very sorry if we went out of office, and that Henry [Asquith] had served
him well.”90
Asquith worried that the King might refuse to open Parliament, and he was greatly relieved when he agreed to do so, “as I have done on all previous occasions since my accession to the throne.”91 The King read his speech “pretty badly” in the Lords.92 He was ill once more with bronchitis. He took short breathless walks in the garden at Buckingham Palace, and his doctors urged him to go abroad.93 He refused to leave until the political crisis eased, and only made up his mind to travel to Biarritz when Asquith insisted that he must for the sake of his health.94
* * *
* In Minnie’s version, Alexandra was carried in a chair by three men, while she herself walked. (Battiscombe, Queen Alexandra, p. 260.)
† “I am quite ready to go to Church … on Sunday,” he told Emma, “if the Service is only the morning Service (without Litany and Communion Service) & a short Sermon.” (Humphrey Whitbread Archive, B to Lady Clarendon, 26 June [1909].)
‡ The King had precedents on his side. Esher supplied him with a memorandum listing two occasions when Queen Victoria had approached the opposition, in 1869 over the Irish Church Bill and again in 1884 over the Reform and Redistribution Bill. But Victoria never saw the opposition leaders herself, and the negotiations were conducted through intermediaries. (Esher’s memo, 7 October 1909, in Brett, Journals and Letters, vol. 2, p. 413.)
§ Enameling was a method of face painting used by aging Edwardian beauties: a thick white zinc-based paste was applied to conceal wrinkles, and then painted with rouge. Alexandra is reputed to have used this on occasion. Her sister Minnie was also rumored to enamel her face.
‖ The precedent for the use of the royal prerogative to create—or threaten to create—peers was the crisis over the Reform Bill in 1831–32, but this was not exact. The Reform Bill was rejected by the Commons, and an election was called that the Whigs won. The Lords then threw out the bill, and Grey’s government asked the King to create peers. The King refused, but after the Tories had failed to form a government, he capitulated and agreed to the Whigs’ demand that he should create peers if necessary to pass the bill. He did not demand a second election. King Edward could argue, however, that Lords reform was not the issue at the January 1910 election, and a second election was therefore justified.
a Fifteen years later, Chips Channon stayed in the King’s Bed, and in the small hours had a humiliating accident—“I somehow smashed the royal Chamber pot.” (Rhodes James, Chips, p. 21.)
b The final figure was 275 Liberals, 273 Unionists, 82 Irish Nationalists, and 40 Labour. The parties opposing the budget—Unionists and Irish—were stronger than its supporters, the Liberals and Labour.
c Bertie liked Winston’s wife, Clementine Hozier. According to Esher: “The King spoke very appreciatively of Mrs. Winston, and told me what I had never heard, that she was dear old Redesdale’s daughter. (Niece as well as daughter!)” (Churchill Archives Centre, Esher Papers, 2/11, 26 September 1908.)
CHAPTER 27
The People’s King
March–May 1910
The King left London on the evening of 6 March 1910. After dining at Buckingham Palace, he drove in a closed carriage to Victoria station. Crowds of people waited to watch him walk across the crimson-carpeted platform onto the royal train.1 He reached Paris the following afternoon, and saw the play Chantecler, which he thought “stupid & childish—& more like a Pantomime!” The heat at the theater was “awful,” he told Georgie, and “I contrived to get a chill with a threatening of bronchitis.”2
In fact it was worse—“acute cardiac distress,” which his doctor Sir James Reid treated throughout the night.3 The next day he was well enough to exchange visits with President Fallières and attend a large luncheon party with Madame Waddington, the American widow of the French ambassador to London. He laughed until he was red in the face when her grandson greeted him, “How do you do, King Edward?”4 At lunch was the Comtesse de Pourtalès, now a dictatorial grande dame of seventy-four and one of his oldest friends, and she walked with him in the Jardin des Plantes. He had tea with the sixty-three-year-old Madame Standish, who had once been a mistress, and he confided in the Comtesse de Greffuhle: “I have not long to live. And then my nephew will make war.”5
From Paris, Bertie traveled to Biarritz, and there his health broke.
“Unable to go out owing to a cold in the head,” he wrote laconically in his diary.6 In his rooms in the Hôtel du Palais, Mrs. Keppel nursed him. She scrawled a note to Soveral: “The King’s cold is so bad that he cannot dine out but he wants us all to dine with him at the Palais SO BE THERE. I am quite worried entre nous and have sent for the nurse.”7
The Times reported on 14 March that, on his doctor’s advice, “King Edward remained in his apartments today as a storm was raging. His Majesty’s health, however, is excellent.”8 This was disinformation. Even the King accepted that he was ill. His diary for 14–18 March reads: “Severe cold and bronchial attack. Unable to leave the house. Dine in sitting room.”9 Reid, who noted that the King was breathing fast and coughing badly with a fever, sat up all night in the next room.10 Nurse Fletcher, who had cared for the King previously, arrived from England. “Physical signs in the chest” that threatened a fatal attack of pneumonia, occasioned Reid “no little anxiety.”11 Alice Keppel was “much alarmed,” and little wonder.12 Watching the King struggle for breath, she knew that he was fighting for his life. That the King of England should die in a hotel room in Biarritz, with only his mistress at his bedside, was a terrifying scenario.
But Bertie turned the corner. By 22 March, he was well enough to write to Georgie: “I have really had a nasty & sharp bronchial attack with a horrible cough, but I am now getting daily better and stronger, still I must be careful for a time.”13 The big cigars lit up again. He read a novel—always a bad sign.14
Reid took a risk, and, in order to avoid scenes with the King, concealed the true facts from the Queen, who had always nursed her husband in the past. Had Alix realized how close Bertie was to death, she would undoubtedly have rushed to his bedside.15
The public knew nothing.16 The Times reported on 17 March that the King was “recovering from his slight indisposition,” and on 25 March, “His Majesty is now completely restored to health.”17 When Ponsonby traveled to Biarritz to relieve Arthur Davidson as private secretary, he was astonished to discover how ill the King had been. Mr. Grey of the Daily Mail had agreed to suppress details of the King’s illness in exchange for being kept fully informed.18
Partly because of this conspiracy of silence, a myth grew up about that last spring in Biarritz. It was alleged that the King had indulged in a “hedonistic holiday,” running away from the constitutional crisis at home.*19 Indeed, after he recovered, the King resumed his Biarritz routine. His diary fills with motor drives and dinner parties: not only Alice Keppel, but also Agnes Keyser and even Jennie Churchill feature in the lists.20 But as Davidson, his assistant private secretary, later wrote, it was wrong to think that “because the King dined out or had a dinner party that he was indifferent to politics.” The fact was that “the King either dined out or had people to dinner every night of his life—it was his ordinary life.”21
To Georgie, the King wrote: “I think I had best keep my views to myself”—discretion that turned out to be unfortunate, as it meant that he never discussed the constitutional crisis with his son, who was to be called upon to make decisions all too soon.22 The veto resolutions that the Cabinet introduced into the Commons (21 March), reducing the Lords’ absolute veto to a delaying power of no more than two years, annoyed the King. He was enraged by Winston Churchill and Lloyd George, who made inflammatory speeches dragging the Crown into party politics. “The way the government is going on is really a perfect scandal, and I am positively ashamed to have any dealings with them,” he told Knollys on 26 March, before embarking on a motor drive to Lac d’Yrieux, where he walked in the woods on the shores of the lake and Stamper served tea.23
No one knew whether the government wo
uld succeed in making a deal with the Irish or whether they would be defeated, and as the uncertainty deepened, the King’s temper worsened. In spite of a soothing visit to a convent of religious sisters who passed their days in silence, he fulminated against the socialistic tendencies of his government and Asquith’s inability to “make up his mind or make a clear statement.” He told Knollys: “I do not suppose the P.M. will suggest my making a quantity of peers, but should he do so I should certainly decline, as I would far sooner be unpopular than ridiculous!”24
Alix urged him to leave that “horrid Biarritz,” and join her at Genoa on a Mediterranean cruise, but the King refused.25 “I fear she is much disappointed at my not going with her,” he told Knollys. Bertie claimed that “I could not go so far away fr. Home—as I always feel I might be wanted at any moment and I can be in London fr. here under 24 hours.”26
Without waiting to see the sick King return, Alix and her daughter Victoria departed on a whim for a fortnight’s Mediterranean cruise to Corfu—a curiously irresponsible thing to do.
Asquith wrote on 13 April confirming the King’s worst fears. Bertie had already received advance warning from Esher that the government had struck a deal with the Irish. In exchange for the Irish allowing the budget to pass, the Cabinet proposed to demand guarantees from the Crown to ensure that the Veto Bill passed the Lords.27 Pithily expressed by Esher, the policy was this: “(a) Bribe or blackmail (whichever you like) for the Irish. (b) The price—a menace to the Sovereign.”28
The menace was contained in Asquith’s letter. In cloudy mandarin prose he explained that when the Lords rejected the Veto Bill, the Cabinet proposed “at once to tender advice to the Crown as to the necessary steps—whether by exercising the Royal Prerogative or by a Referendum … to be taken to ensure that their policy, approved by the House of Commons by large majorities, should be given statutory effect in this parliament.” In other words, the government proposed to ask the King to create peers to pass the bill. However, “if they found that they were not in a position to accomplish that object,” that is, if the King refused, “they would either resign office or advise a dissolution of parliament.” But—and this was the sting—“in no case would they feel able to advise a dissolution except under such conditions as would secure that, in the new Parliament, the judgement of the people as expressed in the elections would be carried into law.” In short, they would demand conditional guarantees from the King before the second election. To sweeten the pill, Asquith added that the Cabinet “were all of the opinion that, as far as possible, the name of the Crown should be kept out of the arena of party politics.”29
