The Heir Apparent (66 page)

At fifty-nine, Bertie was a reluctant heir. “I would have liked it 20 years ago,” he said. The story circulated among the courtiers that, the moment Victoria died, Alix knelt before her husband and kissed his hand in homage. “Sire!” she said. Bertie replied, in German, “It has come too late.”
¹

When the news of Queen Victoria’s death reached the journalists waiting at the gates of Osborne, a mad crowd in carriages and on bicycles raced down the hill to the post office, whooping, “Queen dead!”
²
Victoria died at 6:30 p.m. on 22 January 1901, and it was not until 10:30 the next morning that the Prince of Wales, as he still was, left Osborne for London, accompanied by the royal dukes, to hold the Accession Council at 3 p.m. and take the oaths of sovereignty.
³
The prime minister, Salisbury, who saw him before the council, found him “very much upset. We had a long talk alone. He broke down.”
⁴
Speaking in a room crowded ten deep with jostling privy councillors, the new King’s voice
cracked as he announced the death of his “beloved” mother. He declared his wish to be styled Edward, desiring that the name Albert should stand alone for his great and wise father, Albert the Good. Afterward, to the consternation of the clerks, who had neglected to bring a shorthand writer, it was discovered that he had made this definitive eight-minute speech entirely without notes.
⁵
Then the royal dukes kissed his hand on bended knee, followed by Lord Salisbury (who was annoyed when Bertie signaled the old man need not kneel if he did not wish), and the Duke of Devonshire. Though Bertie was now King, Alix refused to be called Queen or allow anyone to kiss her hand until Victoria was buried.

At Osborne the dead Queen’s body was prepared for her coffin. In accordance with the “Instructions” that Victoria had written in 1897 for her dresser to open directly after her death, Sir James Reid arranged Albert’s dressing gown beside her, together with a plaster cast of his hand and a long list of trinkets, photographs, and handkerchiefs. Victoria had lived for forty years in the borderlands between life and death and, like a barbarian queen (or perhaps a child), she desired to surround herself with keepsakes and mementos to take with her to the next world. Reid obeyed her instructions to the letter, keeping secret the orders that he knew would enrage her heir. At the last minute, he placed a favorite photograph of John Brown together with a case containing his hair in her left hand, which he concealed behind Alix’s flowers.
⁶
On her finger was Albert’s wedding ring, and in accordance with her instructions, she also wore the plain gold ring that had belonged to John Brown’s mother, and which she had worn every day since his death.
⁷

No monarch had been buried for sixty-four years, and the precedents had been forgotten. The Duke of Norfolk as Earl Marshal claimed the hereditary right to organize the funeral, but when Fritz Ponsonby, assistant private secretary to Queen Victoria, arrived at the Earl Marshal’s office and spoke to the heralds, he found “absolute chaos.”
⁸
Ponsonby took charge himself.

“The Queen,” as Bertie called his mother’s coffin, left Osborne in the royal yacht
Alberta.
Bertie followed in the
Victoria and Albert.
He noticed that the yacht’s royal standard was at half-mast. The captain told him, “The Queen is dead, Sir.”

“The King of England lives,” replied Bertie, and the standard was hoisted.
⁹
The procession of great warships that glided behind the tiny
Alberta
across the gleaming blue Solent, booming their salutes, was, said Princess Mary, “one of the saddest finest things I have ever seen, a mixture of great splendour and great simplicity.”
¹⁰
The cortège arrived at Victoria station at 8:00 a.m. on 2 February 1901. Wearing plumed helmet and cloak, Bertie rode for the last time beside his mother. The kaiser was by his side in the procession to Paddington. The crowds with their heads uncovered in deepest mourning were a sight “never to be forgotten,” he told Vicky.
¹¹

From Paddington, the funeral procession traveled by train to Windsor. When the Queen’s coffin arrived, the horses drawing the gun carriage bolted, breaking the traces. Ponsonby hastily improvised, and the gun carriage was dragged up the steep hill by the men of the naval guard of honor.
^*
In St. George’s Chapel, the Earl Marshal had forgotten to seat anyone in the choir, and Sir Spencer Ponsonby-Fane, the seventy-seven-year-old blind and bumbling comptroller to the Lord Chamberlain, shuffled about moving royals into the empty stalls. By some oversight, the King’s son-in-law the Duke of Fife had been left off the list of guests. Bertie loudly upbraided Fritz Ponsonby in front of Fife. Afterward he took Ponsonby by the arm and told him he had done wonders. “I had to say something strong, as Fife was so hurt,” he confided.
¹²

The accession of an overweight fifty-nine-year-old philanderer hardly thrilled the imagination. “We grovel before fat Edward—Edward the Caresser as he is privately named,” wrote Henry James, who thought
the new King was “quite particularly
vulgar
!”
¹³
Rudyard Kipling referred to him as a “corpulent voluptuary.” Even
The Times
could not resist a breath of criticism, causing a sensation with a triple negative: “We shall not pretend that there is nothing in his long career which those who respect and admire him could not wish otherwise.”
¹⁴
The most that could be said for him, thought Wilfrid Blunt, was that “he has certain good qualities of amiability and of philistine tolerance of other people’s sins and vulgarities which endear him to rich and poor, to the Stock Exchange Jews, to the Turf Bookmakers and to the Man in the Street.”
^†
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Few kings have come to the throne amid lower expectations. But Albert Edward turned out well. Like Shakespeare’s Prince Hal, the dissipated prince evolved into a model king.

Bertie was a poor talker and worse letter writer. He was not witty and he was very easily bored. Yet he possessed charisma. Instantly recognizable in his curly brimmed top hat and frock coat or double-breasted suit, he combined warmth with dignity and a sense of occasion. People mocked his inability to pronounce his
r
’s, and some accused him of speaking with a guttural German accent. Others claimed that his diction was “perfectly modulated.”
¹⁶
He had a deep, throaty smoker’s voice and he never used notes; he had perfected the art of the impromptu speech.

The stories told about him stress his insistence on correctness and protocol. When the American Consuelo, Duchess of Marlborough, wore a diamond crescent in her hair instead of the regulation tiara at dinner, he remarked: “The Princess has taken the trouble to wear a tiara. Why have you not done so?”
¹⁷
Fortunately, Consuelo possessed a
tiara of her own, but the King could be merciless. To Fritz Ponsonby, who appeared dressed in a tail coat for a picture exhibition before lunch, he said: “I thought everyone must know that a short jacket is always worn with a silk hat at a private view in the morning.”
¹⁸

“My dear fellow,” he remarked to a groom-in-waiting accompanying him to a wedding, “where is your white waistcoat? Is it possible that you are thinking of going to a
wedding
in a black waistcoat?”
¹⁹
He insisted that all the gentlemen of his household stayed up until he went to bed, which was usually between 1 and 1:30. Once he noticed that someone had slipped off, and he ordered the page to fetch him back. It turned out to be the seventy-five-year-old Sir Dighton Probyn, who was feeling unwell. Bertie roared with laughter, but Sir Dighton was not amused.
^‡
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Ladies were expected to kiss the King’s hand. The Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz observed, “He always pokes it out for that, too funny, but never embraces in return! Altogether this is quite a new fashion for ladies, to have to do so.”
²¹
Not just ladies, either. The King ordered that his grandchildren, of whom he was very fond, kiss his hand before being kissed on the cheek, and address him as sir. Even the Prince of Wales kissed hands. These things really mattered to Bertie. Daisy Warwick noticed that he would turn from discussing European politics to consider the buttons and tabs on a regimental uniform “with a gravity that seemed quite out of proportion to the matter in hand.”
²²
Perhaps his obsession with correctness reflected a need to impose order and control on a chaotic world; but it chimed perfectly with
fin de siècle
imperial Britain, a society fixated on hierarchy and rank, which were dramatized through elaborately graded honors and decorations.

“I regret the mystery and awe of the old court,” wrote Lord Esher.
^§
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Bertie was determined to sweep it away. The camarilla of women, headed by his sister Beatrice, who had dominated Victoria’s court, was purged. The royal palaces, shrouded and secret in his mother’s reign,
were restored to their true glory and thrown open. The monarchy was based once more in London. Buckingham Palace, not occupied regularly for forty years, became the seat of the throne. All the old ceremonial was revived, reinvented, and made glamorous again.
²⁴

At Windsor, wearing a pot hat and swinging a walking stick, Bertie clumped around the rooms with his dog at his heels, followed by Sir Arthur Ellis and Lord Esher. Queen Alexandra wished to live in the state apartments, but Bertie insisted on occupying Queen Victoria’s old rooms. “There was quite a smart difference of opinion,” wrote Esher, but the King had his way.
²⁵
Day after day he poked around the castle, installing electric light, moving furniture, rehanging pictures. “I don’t know much about
A-rr-t
but I think I know something about
Arr-r-angement,
” he growled.
²⁶

His iconoclasm was more than a matter of taste. It was a posthumous revenge against his mother. Victoria’s mementos of Brown and Albert were ruthlessly swept aside. “Alas!” Alix told Vicky after a visit to Copenhagen, “during my absence Bertie has had all your Mother’s rooms dismantled and all her precious things removed.”
²⁷
At Windsor, Victoria’s Indian servants wandered like “uneasy spirits,” no longer “immobile and statuesque” as of old.
²⁸
On Bertie’s orders, a bonfire of the Queen’s letters to the Munshi was made at his home, Frogmore Cottage, solemnly watched by Alix, Beatrice, and the Munshi himself.
²⁹
Soon the Munshi took his leave of the King and returned to India on a pension, shadowed by detectives who were worried that he had smuggled out compromising letters written by Victoria.
³⁰
Beatrice, Victoria’s widowed daughter, who had lived both at Buckingham Palace and Windsor, was politely advised to remove her furniture as soon as possible.
³¹

For the opening of his first Parliament on 14 February 1901, Bertie planned every detail. “I wished it to be in as grand State as possible,” he told Vicky.
³²
Victoria had last attended the opening of Parliament fifteen years before, in 1886, and on the seven occasions when she opened it after Albert’s death, she refused to appear in state.
³³
Now, for the first time in forty years, the monarch drove to Parliament in the old state coach. Drawn by eight cream horses, the tall glass coach towered
above the crowd, lumbering and swaying on its leather springs. The House of Lords was packed as Bertie walked in procession, wearing a flowing crimson robe and the Imperial State Crown, unused since 1861. Alix, clasping his left hand, wore a black mourning dress and the Koh-i-noor diamond beneath her scarlet robes, and Queen Victoria’s small diamond crown with a flowing crepe veil.
^‖
34
Both she and Bertie were “very alarmed & shy &
emotionné,
” but her regal appearance created a sensation.
³⁵

With Alix at his side (“I … 
heard
& felt my heart beating loud all the time we were seated on that very conspicuous place,” she wrote), Bertie read the speech himself—unlike Victoria, who had ceased reading it in person after 1861.
³⁶
Most novel of all, the King’s women friends were seated in the Ladies’ Gallery. There was speculation as to whether he would address them. During his speech he looked up twice, but managed to maintain his dignity.
³⁷
As
The Times
commented, the present generation had seen nothing comparable in splendor and solemnity, not even the Jubilees of 1887 or 1897.
³⁸
What they were witnessing was the reinvention of monarchy as spectacle.