by Jane Ridley
The person who remained silent and gave no version of the story was the Queen.
The last authentically recorded words that Bertie spoke were “I am so glad,” when Georgie told him that his horse Witch of the Air had won the four fifteen at Kempton Park.‡78
He then suffered an alarming heart attack. Alix watched as her husband drifted into a coma. At eleven, they lifted him out of his chair into bed, quite unconscious.
Downstairs, people had come and gone throughout the day. Winston Churchill had bustled into the palace, anxious to assert his right as Home Secretary to witness the demise of the Crown. He was kept downstairs and not admitted even to the antechamber.79
The Archbishop of Canterbury had visited twice. He left at about seven without having seen the King. Esher registered concern. “I was so anxious that the Archbishop should be in the Palace, that I ventured to ring up his chaplain at Lambeth and suggest his return. Apart from all reasons, convention to a Monarchy has such powerful meanings.”80
Esher’s worry is understandable, but his words about convention having such powerful meanings are somewhat elliptical. He may have had another motive for recalling the archbishop. There are hints that a Roman Catholic priest was summoned to the palace in Bertie’s last hours. The priest was Father Cyril Forster, chaplain to the Irish Guards, who had often been called to Marlborough House in the past when Catholic guests required his ministrations. Even if Father Forster saw the King, this is not to say that Bertie underwent a dramatic deathbed conversion. Nor is there any reason to believe that “he was given the sacraments or more than the blessing which any priest could give.”81 It is conceivable, however, that if Bertie had been formally received into the Catholic Church while he was abroad—as was, and still is, sometimes suggested in Catholic circles—Father Forster “could have given the absolution over a handshake.”82 If a Catholic priest was indeed prowling the corridors of the palace, this surely explains Esher’s urgent summons to the archbishop. This was the only way to get rid of the priest.83
Archbishop Davidson returned at nine p.m., and waited with Esher and Knollys downstairs, in the secretaries’ room. The Prince of Wales called the archbishop into the King’s bedroom at eleven thirty. Fifteen minutes later, the King was dead. “I have seldom or never seen a quieter passing of the river,” wrote the archbishop.84
At exactly seventeen minutes past midnight, Georgie and May drove out of the palace. The crowd could see that May was weeping uncontrollably. Two minutes later, a low-voiced household official brought the news to the people outside: “The King is dead!”85 At Number 10 Downing Street, Margot Asquith had gone to bed and the messenger knocked on her door with the news: “So the King is dead!” she said out loud, and burst into tears.86 The next morning, the crowd outside the palace had thickened to thousands, many wearing black. Ernest Cassel called on Margot, and the two of them sat crying on her sofa together. “He really loved the King,” she wrote.87
Rumors spread that the King had died of cancer of the throat, a taboo kind of cancer especially because of its link with syphilis. The Times printed a denial, claiming that though the King was attended by leading laryngologists St. Clair Thomson and Felix Semon, he suffered from “smoker’s throat.”88 Perhaps there was more to the rumor than this. Skittles was on friendly terms with Laking, who told her that for the past three or four years the King had had a swelling in his throat that was sprayed twice a day and that “might develop at any time into cancer.”89 Laking also told Skittles that the King really died of “blood poisoning caused by the injection of serum for his throat—it had relieved the throat but resulted in poisoning the blood.”90 “Vaccination treatment” to prevent catarrhal attacks was mentioned in the official doctors’ report on the King’s death.91 It was an “experimental treatment” recommended by Laking; according to Skittles, it “may have done more harm than good.” Reid treated him with these injections in Biarritz. Soveral, who was with the King during his illness in Biarritz, was convinced that he was killed by his doctors.92
Others blamed the politicians. “They have killed him, they have killed him,” wailed the Queen to her friend the Duchess of Abercorn.93 She accused Asquith and Churchill, who had publicly threatened to put pressure on the King in spite of warnings not to drag the Crown into party politics. It suited the Tories to take up the cry, which was “widely prevalent” in “lower middle class circles” in London.94 The ministers’ response was to point to the doctors’ warnings that the King might die suddenly at any time.95
The truth was that Bertie died of emphysema and heart failure.96 It was not the doctors or Asquith and Churchill that killed him, but his cigars. Three years earlier, Semon and Laking had handed Knollys a report on the King’s health. The King had already suffered three attacks of bronchitis in three years, and they were concerned that his violent coughing might cause blood vessels to burst. Though his health appeared robust to the world at large, it was in reality precarious, and they warned that “an acute complication of any kind may bring about, apparently suddenly, very serious results.”97 For three years the King had lived on borrowed time. His survival depended on spending winters in the sun. The irony was that the political crisis had hastened his death. As Sir Felix Semon wrote: “How I wish the King instead of going home direct from Biarritz had, as usual during the last few years, made a Mediterranean trip and returned much later than he did.”98
For eight days the King’s body lay at Buckingham Palace in the bedroom where he died, on his simple mahogany bed, dressed in a pink silk nightdress. Alix invited a stream of visitors to say goodbye—fifty-eight were listed in The Times, and there were many more.99 Bertie’s face seemed peaceful, even happy, and there was no sign of pain. When Ponsonby visited, Alix told him that “she had been turned into stone, unable to cry, unable to grasp the meaning of it all, and incapable of doing anything.” All she wanted was to hide in the country, but there was a terrible state funeral to be endured.100 When Esher saw her, she moved about the King’s room, speaking quietly but naturally, as if Bertie were a child asleep. At last “she had got him there all to herself,” and in a way, thought Esher, she was happy. “It is the womanly happiness of complete possession of the man who was the love of her youth and—as I fervently believe—of all her life.”101
Mrs. Keppel thought she knew otherwise. She told Rosebery that the King complained that Alix “never addressed a word of endearment to him”; though he was flagrantly unfaithful, he claimed “he had always put the Queen first.”102 On the day the King died, Alice did not return home to Portman Square, but stayed with her friend Venetia James on Grafton Street. People gossiped that she was avoiding her creditors and the press who clustered around her door waiting for news. But Alice Keppel was in a state of nervous collapse. When Venetia James took her frightened children to see her in bed, she looked at them “blankly and without recognition and rather resentfully.”103
The mysterious packet of £10,000 in banknotes was returned to Ernest Cassel. Knollys wrote: “I presume they belong to you and are not the result of any speculation you went into for him.” Cassel sent the money back, saying that “it represented interest I gave to the King in financial matters I am undertaking.”104 But there is no reason to suppose that the £10,000 found its way to Mrs. Keppel, as the King had presumably intended.
When Alice Keppel called at Marlborough House to sign her name after the King’s death, orders had been given by Georgie and May that she should not be allowed to do so.105 The kaiser, who had once sought out her company, refused to see her when she asked for an audience.106 Little wonder that she thought that life had “come to a full stop, at least for me.”107 But Mrs. Keppel was well provided for. That summer she moved into her new house in Mayfair at 16 Grosvenor Street, a Georgian mansion of immense size, “gorgeously furnished” with gifts from the King. Esher spat blood. “It is almost indecent in its splendour,” he wrote. Even more galling, she was rumored to have a fortune of £400,000 made for her by Cassel.108 B
ut she was living in the style that Bertie had intended, and she honored her side of the bargain. In spite of being snubbed at court, she burned almost all of the King’s letters, though she was careful to preserve the letter that Bertie had written in 1901 asking her to his deathbed.109
Behind drawn blinds at Buckingham Palace, Alix clung to her Bertie. “I always knew the Queen was in love with him,” wrote Jackie Fisher after visiting the corpse.110 Unlike the hysterical Alice Keppel, the Queen Mother, as Motherdear was now styled,§ was calm and clearheaded. Esher and Knollys spent hours trying unsuccessfully to compose a message to the nation from the Queen. Then Alix sent down her own word-perfect draft, written on four sides of paper without a crossing-out. They published it unaltered: “From the bottom of my poor broken heart I wish to express to the whole nation and our kind People we love so well my deep-felt thanks for all their touching sympathy in my overwhelming sorrow and unspeakable anguish.” Give me a thought in your prayers, implored the Queen, “which will comfort and sustain me in all I still have to go through.”111 Almost instinctively, she knew how to communicate her emotions to the people and, like a great actor, she readied herself for the last performance of her career.
Four days after the King’s death, arrangements were made to place him in his coffin, but Alix refused to part with him, and the doctors and undertakers were sent away.112 Bertie’s body, declared Alix, was “so wonderfully preserved”: “it must have been the oxygen they gave him before he died.”113 The Dowager Empress Minnie arrived on 11 May, attended by a giant Cossack, who had exchanged his Russian tunic for black mourning clothes. That evening, Archbishop Davidson read a service as the family knelt round Bertie’s bed and (wrote George) “we kissed him for the last time.”114 The body was dressed in a military greatcoat and encased in a massive oak coffin, but the coffin was not sealed and it lay open on the King’s bed. The plan was to remove it to the throne room in the palace, but Alix could not bear to lose her Bertie. Each day the arrangements were made and announced in The Times, and each day the Queen canceled them.115 Her apartments adjoined the King’s, and she spent her time beside his body, clinging to the marriage that had ended so abruptly and unexpectedly. “They want to take him away,” the tearful Queen told Schomberg McDonnell, the official who was responsible for the arrangements, “but I can’t bear to part with him. Once they hide his face from me, everything is gone for ever.”116
At last, on Saturday morning (14 May), she gave her consent, and the coffin was sealed and removed to the throne room. Here the King lay in state draped in a magnificent embroidered pall; the throne was replaced by an altar, but the room was a blaze of crimson and gold and (noted The Times) “absolutely devoid of funereal trappings.”117 This was not the Victorian way of death. The only sign of mourning was the four guardsmen who stood at each corner of the coffin, heads bowed and hands folded over the butts of their rifles. Each night at ten p.m., Alix asked for a special service in the throne room, inspired perhaps by the Russian masses that had been said for Minnie’s husband, Alexander III. One night the family were so overcome that they were unable to sing the final hymn and left the room in tears.118
Tuesday, 17 May, was a dull, gray morning, and a black-garbed crowd had been packing the Mall since seven a.m. At eleven o’clock precisely, the funeral procession left the palace, preceded by rolling drums and brass intoning Beethoven’s Funeral March. The King’s coffin, placed on a gun carriage and draped in a cream silk pall on which lay the crown, the scepter, and the orb, was drawn by black horses. The new King George V walked behind, heading a procession of the household, and behind them came nine carriages bearing the royal ladies. Alexandra traveled in the first coach with her sister Minnie and her daughters Victoria and Louise. Critics carped that the widowed Queen took precedence over May (now newly Queen Mary), who traveled in the coach behind; but the wonder was that Alexandra was there at all. Queen Victoria had hidden away at Osborne when Albert was buried at Windsor, and there was no script for a royal widow to follow. From the start, Alix made it plain that she would follow the procession.119
She riveted the crowd. Riding in the scarlet and gold of the state coach, she wore deepest black mourning with a long drooping veil, and as she passed the silent people, men doffed their hats and women curtseyed and bent their heads. From her coach, Alix raised her veil, leaned forward, and bowed her head in recognition. “God bless you!” cried the crowd, and the women sobbed. “Moved by that communion with the people” that one writer thought her rarest gift, Alix made the human connection the crowd longed for.120 By the time the procession reached Westminster Hall, heralded by the wailing pipers of the Scots Guards, London was overcome by tears.
“Words fail me to give a description of the solemnity and dignity of the sight in that beautiful old hall,” wrote Queen Mary, “with the coffin in the centre, the guards, all too upsetting.”121 St. Stephen’s Hall was filled with members of the Lords and Commons when the royal procession entered. The King’s coffin was followed by King George, walking with his mother and the Empress Minnie. Minnie wept and Princess Victoria looked “hopelessly miserable.” Bertie’s sisters Louise, Helena and Beatrice were there, “all old women now.” Alexandra, by contrast, in simple black, “scarcely looked forty, so slim and upright and trim.”122 She was pale but composed. At the end of the short service, there was a strange silence. Alix rose from her chair and knelt beside Bertie’s coffin and, with uplifted hands, prayed. All eyes turned to her. For a moment, it seemed she would be overcome. But she got to her feet, and “with queenly dignity signalled her son to escort her to the door.”123
The last king to lie in state had been George III, whose body lay at Windsor for one day in 1820. No king had ever lain in St. Stephen’s Hall. As Esher, who was opposed to the idea, pointed out, it was hardly appropriate given that it was the scene of the trial of Charles I.124 Gladstone, who lay in state there in 1898, was honored as a great commoner. But Edward VII’s lying in state achieved precisely what Archbishop Davidson intended: It brought the King’s funeral to the people. The democratic character of the lying in state was assisted by Schomberg McDonnell, who ruled that the doors should open to the public at six a.m., and that press photography should be permitted.125 Messenger boys were forbidden to hold places for others, and no tickets were sold, so the wealthy were obliged to wait in line with the poor, and the queue itself became a symbol of social equality.126
After the royal party left, Westminster Hall was opened to the public. By four o’clock, when the doors opened, a line of people one mile stood along the Embankment, headed by three seamstresses, “very poorly dressed but very reverent.”127 “They’re givin’ ’im to us now,” cried a white-faced work girl as the doors opened. “They’re givin’ ’im to us now!”128 As the queue of working people, many of them women, filed past the catafalque, it seemed that King Edward had at last become the people’s king. Carpets had been laid to muffle the footsteps, and no one spoke. This “mute stream always always passing” were extraordinarily impressive in their silent loyalty.129 Some waited all through the night in eight hours of torrential rain, a forest of black umbrellas, for the doors to open the next morning at six. On Wednesday, the queue was four miles long and six abreast—an orderly, respectful human procession, snaking around the streets of Westminster like the black ink that bordered the nation’s mourning newspapers.
Soveral made a late-night visit on Wednesday with the King of Portugal. Carrington received them as Lord Great Chamberlain and wrote that Soveral was “terribly pale and upset. He held my hand for quite two minutes saying over and over again, ‘This is too awful.’ ”130
On Thursday, the last day, the queues were longer than ever; in spite of deluging rain, a crowd twelve people deep and seven miles long waited patiently. That afternoon Carrington received a message that the hall was to be closed while the German emperor visited. The police were aghast and refused to deny entry to the crowd. The kaiser appeared soon after three p.m., entering the ha
ll through the Star Chamber Court, led in by King George. He placed a great wreath of white and purple flowers upon the coffin and, after kneeling in prayer, rose and firmly clasped the new King’s hand.‖131
That evening, Asquith came and stood in Westminster Hall watching the people pass. Schomberg McDonnell thought his attitude offensive: “I fear he had dined well: and he seemed to regard the occasion as a mere show.”132 After the doors closed for the last time at ten p.m., Queen Alexandra paid a final visit. Just as she was expected to arrive, a party in evening dress swooped into the peers’ enclosure. One of them was Alice Keppel. Loulou Harcourt, First Commissioner of Works, persuaded her to return to the Speaker’s House, tactfully avoiding “a very great difficulty.” Alix, noted Carrington, “had her veil up and seemed perfectly calm; she looked beautiful.”133
It was a hot night, and Schomberg McDonnell opened the doors of the hall because he feared that the officers guarding the coffin might faint. To his horror, he saw Lady Desborough hovering at the entrance, with Maurice Baring and Evan Charteris in attendance. The Queen had long since left, the coffin was resting in dignified silence. The socialites nevertheless demanded admittance. Ettie Desborough fixed McDonnell with a grin that (he ungallantly wrote) “had doubtless been effective 20 years ago,” but her “blandishments” were all in vain. Carrington angrily told her he was ashamed of her and begged her to go away, “for the Queen would be hurt and amazed if she heard of their behaviour.”134
Nor was she the last. No sooner had Ettie reluctantly retired than a procession of four motor cars swept into Palace Yard. From these alighted the entire Churchill family, headed by Winston. His mother, Jennie Churchill, was there, and so was the Duke of Marlborough. Led by Winston, they advanced to the door, but McDonnell refused to allow them to enter. Winston blustered that if anyone had a right, he had, but McDonnell replied that as Keeper of Westminster Hall he declined to let him in. After a heated argument, they departed. It was, wrote McDonnell, “an amazing instance of vulgarity and indecency, of which I should not have thought that even Churchill was capable.”135 No one could have predicted that Churchill himself was to lie in state in the same hall; fifty-five years later, the most unpopular man in England had become the greatest Englishman of all.
