The Heir Apparent (69 page)

A proclamation issued in June 1901 announced that the Coronation would take place on 26 June 1902. As the date approached, Bertie was more than ever swamped in work. Hours spent distributing Boer War medals—one day alone he handed out three thousand—or visiting the wounded left him exhausted and irritable. In his sixtieth year, he had a full-time job for the first time in his life. One night he summoned Lord Redesdale to Marlborough House, and sat for two hours talking after dinner. About midnight he got up and said, “Now I must bid you good night, for I must set to work,” pointing to a huge pile of red boxes.

“Surely Your Majesty is not going to tackle all the work tonight!”

“Yes! I must! Besides it is all so interesting,” said the King.
²

Bertie’s private apartments at Buckingham Palace consisted of four adjoining rooms on the first floor, looking out over the garden. The third room was his bedroom. His bed, massive and heavy, stood in the corner. The wall was hung high with paintings of his female relations.
Bertie spent most of his time in his private sitting room. His desk was immaculately neat and ordered, and a portrait of Vicky always stood on the table. His bad-tempered French bulldog lay in its basket ready to snap at any visitor. Two cages of canaries hung above the chair and burst into song whenever the visitor spoke.
³

The King breakfasted alone, wearing a shabby old mess jacket. In his pocket was a silver cigar case, loaded the night before by his valet with his pre-breakfast ration—one small cigar and two cigarettes. Each day he smoked between eleven and thirteen cigars in addition to twenty or so Egyptian cigarettes. Some of the cigars were gargantuan Havanas with names such as Cornia y Corona, Henry Clay’s “Tsar,” or Upmann’s.
⁴

The doctor Frederick Treves visited the King in January 1902 to treat a ruptured Achilles tendon. He found him in a state of despair, lying in bed surrounded by papers and telegrams. A valet came to ask what tune the band outside should play. “Why cannot they leave me alone!” groaned the King; but he insisted on making even the smallest decision himself.
⁵
At Buckingham Palace, Lionel Cust, Surveyor of the King’s Pictures, would be summoned by Bertie whenever he could snatch a few minutes, often in his dressing room. Sometimes Cust witnessed the King send for his servant, Mr. Chandler, the Superintendent of the Wardrobe, and scold him mercilessly. “I learned to understand that this was pent-up anger which had to be let out,” wrote Cust. After such a scene, the King was his normal cheerful self.
⁶

A game of bridge with the King had become a terrifying experience. Previously he had drunk moderately, a glass or two of wine at dinner and a little brandy afterward, but now he relied on alcohol in order to “get on” with the work. Arthur the brusher, the only man in the palace who dared contradict him, incurred even more wrath than usual. “I told you,” said the King, “to have those clothes altered. Why have you not done it?”

“You did not,” said Arthur.

“How dare you speak to me like that, I told you to do it.”

“You did not,” said Arthur, and banged the door behind him.

After he had gone, the King said with a smile, “I expect Arthur is right.”
⁷

Bertie’s figure had ballooned. His abdomen grew alarmingly, and his waist swelled to forty-eight inches, the same as his chest. No longer did he allow himself to be weighed. His uniform tunics became too tight. “He had the hunger of the dyspeptic,” wrote Treves. He “ate anything and everything and bolted his food.” He confessed that “he could not be bothered to masticate what he ate.” Alix complained that his appetite was “appalling, that she had never seen anything like it,” but he paid no attention to her warnings.
⁸
It seems likely that he was suffering from an eating disorder brought on by overwork and stress. Insisting on making every decision himself, he was overwhelmed. He had a deep need for order, but he felt that he had lost control. His illness was as much psychological as it was physical.

Bertie’s diary for 16 June 1902 reads: “The King taken ill with severe chill. Unable to dine.”
⁹
After gorging a large quantity of tough lobster, he had got wet at a military review at Aldershot. He complained of abdominal pain, and sent for Laking in the night.
¹⁰
He retreated to bed at Windsor. Ominously, he made no appearance at Ascot races. His belly was grotesquely extended and acutely painful. Laking suspected appendicitis, but Bertie refused an operation and insisted on returning to London.
¹¹
Canceling the Coronation was unthinkable.

Bertie traveled from Windsor to London on Monday, 23 June. He had a high fever and the pain in his stomach was excruciating, made worse by every jolt of the carriage, but he smiled and bowed to the cheering crowd.

Treves, who was a leader in the new field of stomach surgery, examined him, and found a hard swelling in his abdomen.
¹²
Laking told the King that he had an abdominal abscess that would cause death from blood poisoning unless an immediate operation was performed. Bertie refused. “The Coronation
cannot
be postponed. I won’t hear of it. I cannot and will not disappoint the people.… I will go to the Abbey on Thursday if I die there.” Laking replied: “If Your Majesty did go on Thursday to the Abbey in all human probability you
would
die there.”
¹³

News that the Coronation was indefinitely postponed was announced on Tuesday. Wild rumors spread that the King was dying of cancer.

At 12:25 that morning, the King walked to the operating table that had been erected in his dressing room. He wore an old gray dressing gown and he was bent double with pain. Alix, greatly perturbed, thought it was her duty to remain by his side throughout the operation. She became desperately agitated when his face went black from the anesthetic, and when he began to throw his arms about she tried to pin him down. Treves, who was embarrassed at rolling up his sleeves in order to operate in the presence of the Queen, asked her to leave the room.
¹⁴

Treves cut deep into the fat of the King’s abdomen, and at four and a half inches he reached a hard swelling. When he drove the knife in, a pint of pus escaped with a violent gush.
¹⁵
Not cancer, then, but a large abscess. The King might yet live. Treves drained it with tubes and packed the wound with gauze.

The story has gone down in history that Bertie’s appendix was removed as he lay on a billiard table at Buckingham Palace. This is not correct. The problem was indeed an abscess, and contrary to what has often been said, Treves did not remove the King’s appendix.
^*

When Bertie regained consciousness, his first words were: “Where’s George?” Bertie called for his son from his sickbed, much as his own mother, Queen Victoria, had called for him on her deathbed.

After an interval, Bertie asked Treves, “What noise is that?” referring to the sound of distant hammering. Treves replied: “It is the carpenters putting up stands [for the Coronation] in Constitution Hill.”

“Poor people! Poor people!” said the King. That night, as Bertie lay
awake, restless and in pain, Treves kept watch. Outside the palace, as the sentry paced to and fro, he could see the “ghoulish crowd huddled about the shadows at the gate.” They were waiting. Waiting for the news that the King was dead.
¹⁶

The next day, Bertie was well enough to pencil a note to Alice Keppel, asking her to visit him at five that afternoon: “Sleep was not good owing to oppression on chest—and I was so restless but got some sleep later on in a chair—as lying down was so unpleasant,” he told her.
¹⁷
He wrote again the following day: “Not much sleep complete loss of appetite. Feel wretched but make the best of it.”
¹⁸

He read novels, a sure sign that he was ill. He thought them all very poor, especially Arthur Conan Doyle’s
Hound of the Baskervilles.
Alix visited often. A secret door in Bertie’s dressing room led to her apartments, and when she left she would say, “Good bye. I am the lady who lives in a cupboard.” Her deafness meant that he had to shout to be heard, which was an effort for him, so he pretended to be asleep. His favorite visitor was his daughter Victoria, to whom, said Treves, “he was devoted.”
¹⁹

Treves noticed that Bertie, “being a most orderly and methodical man … was very particular as to the exact position of everything around him.” He never forgot his dignity or his royal rank. He had an extreme dislike of being seen by anyone—even a valet—in a position of helplessness, so screens were placed around him. Above his bed hung a portrait of his dead son Eddy. When the bed was wheeled back into place, he always asked, “Is it exactly under the portrait?”
²⁰

When César Ritz, the proprietor of the new and fashionable Carlton Hotel, heard the news of the postponement of the Coronation, he collapsed with a seizure. Strategically located on the Coronation route at the corner of Pall Mall, the Carlton was one of Bertie’s favorite restaurants, and Ritz had planned a gala dinner for five hundred.
²¹

Bitterly disappointed, too, was Arthur Benson, an Eton housemaster who had written the words to the Coronation ode composed by
Edward Elgar. It all seemed so much wasted work, as he was convinced that it would never be played.
²²
It included the chorus:

The song seemed an unconscious mockery of the fat king:

Most of the visiting ambassadors and royals who had come for the Coronation returned home, and only the colonials remained. When the Coronation eventually took place, six weeks later, it was an imperial celebration, featuring native soldiers from every part of the empire. This was the unintended consequence of Bertie’s operation and the postponement of the ceremony. Royal propagandists such as John Bodley, author of the official history of the Coronation, made a virtue of it and solemnly eulogized the ceremony as the “consecration of the Imperial idea.”
^†
23

Meanwhile, Bertie recuperated on board the
Victoria and Albert,
lying in a bed on deck, wearing a blue flannel suit and puffing a cigar.

The King and Queen drove in the state coach from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abbey at eleven a.m. on 9 August 1902. Alix for once was punctual.

When Alix crossed the abbey threshold, the Westminster schoolboys shouted
“Vivat Regina Alexandra! Vivat, vivat, vivat!”
No matter that their
vivats
were out of time with the anthem. The congregation
of eight thousand
^‡
had been in their seats for more than three hours already, but the Queen, dressed in golden Indian gauze with a purple train, was worth waiting for. The six weeks’ breathing space had given the Earl Marshal, the Duke of Norfolk, time to drill his courtiers and pages, and the processions, which would have been a shambles in June, were perfectly choreographed in August.
²⁴
The King’s procession followed, bearing royal regalia, the scepter, orb and crown, and at last the King.
“Vivat Rex Edwardus!”
shouted the boys, too early, so that they had to shout it twice. As Bertie walked briskly up the nave—so fast that he had to be told several times to slow down—people noticed a strange hush and extraordinary stillness come over the abbey.
²⁵
Consuelo, Duchess of Marlborough, felt a lump in her throat and “realised I was more British than I knew.”
²⁶
When Bertie took the oath, a deep silence descended, and “many ladies began to cry.”
²⁷

Archbishop Temple was eighty-one, doddery, and nearly blind, so his words had been written out in large letters on scrolls, which Bishop Davidson held up before him to read. The effect was ridiculous. Bertie was too weak to wear the traditional St. Edward’s Crown he had wished for, and the lighter Imperial State Crown was used instead.
²⁸
Temple blundered and placed the crown on Bertie’s head back to front, and Bertie himself had to help him put it right. At that moment, with this most precarious of coronations safely consecrated at last, a wild thunderous cheer burst out of “God Save the King!”

The first to pay homage was Temple, who by now was so exhausted that his legs gave way as he tried to rise from his knees. Bertie put out his hands, and three bishops came to the rescue of the selfish old man, who had refused to delegate any part of the service. When Davidson asked in a whisper how he felt, Temple rasped, “Go away!” in a voice that was clearly audible to the congregation.