The Heir Apparent (70 page)

When Georgie paid homage, Bertie pulled his son back by his robe as he turned, and kissed him twice in a gesture of touching emotion.
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In a gallery above the chancel where the princesses sat were the
King’s lady friends who, not being peeresses, would otherwise have been excluded. Wits quipped that this was the King’s Loose Box. Mrs. Keppel, La Favorita, was conspicuous in the best place; Jennie Churchill was there, and so was her sister Leonie. Sarah Bernhardt wore tactless and conspicuous white, and some observers said that Minnie Paget did, too.
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But the Queen stole the show. Her coronation came after Bertie’s, and was performed by the Archbishop of York. She was crowned kneeling before the altar, beneath a canopy supported by four tall duchesses, among them Consuelo Marlborough and Millicent, Duchess of Sutherland (who was Daisy Warwick’s sister). Alix had requested that the archbishop anoint her forehead rather than her hair, which was a wig; being devout and superstitious, she believed that holy oil must actually touch her body. As Consuelo watched the archbishop anoint the Queen with trembling hands, she saw a trickle of oil run down the royal nose.
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The moment Alix was crowned was the signal for the four hundred peeresses sitting together to put on their coronets. This for Bertie was the most impressive part of the ceremony.
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The peeresses had insisted on wearing their tiaras, contrary to tradition, and in order to add their coronets they had to arch their gloved arms high above their heads in an almost balletic scene.
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As Alix returned from the altar, wearing her newly commissioned crown set with the Koh-i-noor diamond, and carrying her scepter and ivory rod, she dropped a low bow when she passed the King.
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She was fifty-six, heavily made up, allegedly bald, and almost stone deaf, but she seemed like a queen from a fairy tale.
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That night, at the Carlton Hotel, Auguste Escoffier the celebrity chef served a gala dinner. The menu of eighteen courses included
Mousseline de Sole Victoria,
which was followed by
Poularde Edward VII.
Escoffier had prepared his masterpiece,
Poularde Derby,
back in 1881 to
woo the then Prince of Wales when he first stayed at César Ritz’s Grand Hotel in Monte Carlo.
Poularde Derby,
which Bertie declared a “truly royal dish,” consisted of chicken stuffed with foie gras and truffles served on a bed of more truffles cooked in champagne and foie gras.
Poularde Edward VII
was a variation on this dish that Escoffier had devised especially for the Coronation. In recognition of Bertie’s Indian empire, the chicken stuffed with foie gras and truffles was served with curry sauce. Escoffier commemorated the Queen with
Pêches Alexandra,
a variation on his signature dish of
Pêches Melba.
Peaches poached in syrup were laid on a bed of vanilla ice cream and coated with strawberry purée (
Pêches Melba
used raspberry purée), sprinkled with rose petals and veiled with spun sugar.
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“Francis Knollys is the most powerful man in England at this moment,” wrote Carrington in 1901.
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Knollys had served Bertie for forty years, and when he became King, Bertie rewarded his old retainer by keeping him on as his private secretary. (Arthur Bigge, who had been private secretary to Queen Victoria and might reasonably have expected the post, was sidelined.)
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Before 1901, Knollys had dealt with all the Prince of Wales’s business himself, and “made it a one-man job.”
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At first, he tried to do the same in the new reign, writing every letter himself in bold black ink (neither shorthand nor the typewriter had reached Marlborough House). Though he worked all day, however, he was unable to keep pace with the King’s correspondence. To relieve him, Bertie appointed Fritz Ponsonby, who had previously been assistant private secretary to Queen Victoria, as Knollys’s number two. This arrangement was not a success. Marlborough House had for years despised Queen Victoria’s household as fuddy-duddy and inefficient, and Knollys was suspicious of Ponsonby, whom he saw as an emissary from the enemy camp. Ponsonby wrote a full and funny (though not always reliable) account of Bertie’s court in his
Recollections of Three Reigns;
but as a colleague he was stubborn and tactless,
and he lacked the political skills of his father, old Henry Ponsonby.
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Knollys, for his part, found it hard to share power, and suspected Ponsonby of “trying to cut him out and take his place.”
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To marginalize Ponsonby, he made him share his job with a second assistant private secretary, Arthur Davidson, cutting his salary and allowing him to work for only half the year.

It is sometimes claimed that Bertie loathed paperwork and neglected it, but this was not the case.
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The new King worked through the documents in his red boxes punctually and efficiently. According to Esher, “He
never
leaves over anything until next day. All papers and letters of the day are dealt with within 24 hours.”
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Bertie would pencil a brief scrawl on a government document that Francis Knollys then drafted into a letter. His penciled “Approved ER” or “Seen ER” reveal him as working like a modern minister, rather than a Victorian statesman laboriously covering reams of paper in black-inked screeds. His businesslike methods earned him the gratitude of the Foreign Office, who commented that “the rapidity and regularity with which the King’s boxes are returned is really remarkable”—and a marked contrast with Queen Victoria.
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He corresponded less with ministers than Victoria had done, but living in London he was more accessible than she had been. In foreign policy, he exercised influence and powers that none of his predecessors had dreamed of. At home, he clung tenaciously to his prerogatives and the Crown’s traditional powers.

Salisbury, who was Bertie’s first prime minister, had been a devoted servant of Queen Victoria. Her death stood second only to the death of his wife as one of the great blows that broke his health, “so strong was his personal love and devotion to her.”
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Balfour’s remark, that the King “had nothing in common with Lord Salisbury, and Salisbury had little sympathy with the King,” was an understatement.
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Bertie found Salisbury’s buffoonish absentmindedness intolerable. When Salisbury appeared late for a Buckingham Palace drawing room in 1897 wearing the “tunic of an Elder Brother of Trinity House, the hose of a Privy Councillor, the Garter on the wrong shoulder and a sword,” Bertie was “furious: literally in a passion. ‘Here is our foreign minister dressed like a guy—Europe in a turmoil—twenty ministers and ambassadors
looking on—what will they think,’ he wheezed, ‘what can they think of a premier who can’t put on his clothes?’ ”
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Once Bertie acceded, relations improved. Salisbury reported a grudging respect for the new King, whom he found easy to work with. “I think we shall have to call him Edward the Confessor Number Two,” he wrote.
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Bertie objected to the wording of the declaration he was forced to read at the opening of his first Parliament, repudiating Roman Catholicism as “superstitious and idolatrous.” He read the words in a low voice that was barely audible, and afterward he wrote to Salisbury asking for the “crude language” to be changed as it was “not in accordance with public policy of the present day.”
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Salisbury agreed privately that the oath was “scurrilous” and a stain on the statute book, but he feared a Protestant backlash if the wording was tampered with.
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The most serious disagreement was over honors. Declaring that “the initiative in the matter should rest with himself rather than the Prime Minister!” Bertie proposed to give peerages at the Coronation to Sir Thomas Lipton and Sir Ernest Cassel. “You may laugh if you like,” he told the PM’s secretary, “but no more suitable men could be found.”
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Salisbury was dismayed, especially by the Lipton nomination: “The man has no services, and his name and vocation are moreover ridiculous.”
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Cassel was ruled out as a German and a Jew. Salisbury got his way. Cassel had to be content with a privy councillorship (and even that was contentious), while Lipton became a baronet. Little did Salisbury know how much the two men had given to charity, nor could he have imagined the debt the monarchy owed to Cassel. Once again it is Bertie who seems modern.

One loyal servant who received an uncontentious peerage was Francis Knollys. Bertie showered honors like confetti at the Coronation. The number of peerages, baronetcies, privy councillorships,
knighthoods, and decorations totaled 1,540. (In 1911, George V handed out a mere 515.)
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The new King resisted giving peerages to party hacks, and there were two orders that he insisted on controlling: the Royal Victorian Order, founded in 1896, and the Royal Victorian Chain, which he inaugurated in 1902. By far the most distinguished royal order was the Order of Merit. This was Bertie’s idea, acting on a suggestion made by Esher in 1900 and inspired by the Prussian Order Pour le Mérite.
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Bertie’s aim was to honor both “officers of the Army and Navy and Civilians distinguished in the Arts, Sciences and Literature.” Numbers were strictly limited to twenty-four. Partly because the order was nonpolitical, it was to be “a decoration entirely vested in the Sovereign’s hand.”
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Salisbury opposed the creation of yet another bauble, but history has proved the old cynic wrong. The OM was, and remains, the most distinguished order in British public life.
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Following in the procession at the Coronation behind the Knights of the Garter with their gorgeous purple cloaks and wearing a plain diplomatic uniform was the new Conservative prime minister, Arthur Balfour. The most powerful man in the country seemed “strangely un-dressed.”
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He had written asking for permission for privy councillors and MPs to wear trousers, but the King insisted on court dress, and the prime minister’s legs seemed sadly spindly in breeches and stockings.
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Because the office of prime minister was unknown to the constitution, Balfour walked in the procession in his capacity as Lord Privy Seal.

Balfour had seamlessly succeeded his uncle Lord Salisbury in July 1902. Salisbury was too unwell to attend the Coronation.
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But the truth was he disliked “flummery,” and so did his nephew Balfour.

Arthur Balfour had been one of Queen Victoria’s favorites. He was the leader of the Souls, the clique of cultured aristocrats who defined themselves in antithesis to the Marlborough House set, despising Bertie and his friends as ignorant philistines.
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Balfour was quick-witted and charming, but he combined a streak of Scots puritanism with intellectual arrogance and a talent for casuistry. Philosophy was his hobby, and no one was cleverer than he at arguing that black was white—a quality that did not endear him to the blunt-speaking King.

“The King will take up a good deal more of his ministers’ time than did the Queen,” sighed Balfour in 1901.
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Bertie’s first King’s Speech, submitted to him by Balfour as Leader of the House in February 1901, was returned covered in significant alterations. Bertie wanted to include legislation on the housing of the poor and on old age pensions. Balfour replied (as he later related) that if the King “took to writing his own speech, he’d have to take all the blame of the measures and enter into party politics.”
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He was obliged to give Bertie a lecture on the constitution: “If … the legislative programme is supposed to be in any way due to the personal initiative of the Sovereign, I fear that a novel constitutional precedent will have been set up which may have a disastrous effect upon the comfort, and even the popularity of the King.”
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Balfour’s argument was unanswerable, and Bertie at once withdrew. As the clerk to the Privy Council Almeric Fitzroy observed, the clash revealed that “the idea of inaugurating his reign with a list of popular measures” had “taken very firm possession of the royal mind.”
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Bertie learned his lesson. “Never did it again,” was Balfour’s comment.
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As prime minister, Balfour at first treated the King with barely disguised contempt, not bothering to write to him with a Cabinet report. This was a mistake. Shortly after his first Cabinet, Balfour received a sharp rebuke from the King. “As you know the Prime Minister from time immemorial has always communicated to the Sovereign a report of what has taken place at every Cabinet Council immediately after
each meeting. Otherwise the King or Queen would be left in the dark as to what was going on in connection with public affairs.”
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Queen Victoria had always insisted on being kept informed by her prime minister of Cabinet discussions. If Balfour assumed that the new King would allow this to lapse, he was badly mistaken.

There were lines that the government crossed at its peril. One of these concerned the Garter.

The first real clash between Bertie and the Balfour government took place only days after the Coronation. To complete his recovery, Bertie embarked on a cruise on board the
Victoria and Albert.
While the King was going through the Foreign Office box, Fritz Ponsonby heard an explosion of rage. Bertie had opened a letter from the foreign secretary Lord Lansdowne, enclosing a design for the Garter Star that omitted the Christian cross in the center. Fritz was astonished (he later claimed) to see the furious monarch hurl the document across the cabin and out of a porthole apparently into the sea, where it happened to land on a passing steam pinnace.
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(The story seems to have grown with the telling: In an earlier account, Fritz merely stated that the King flung the design to the other side of his cabin.)
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