The Heir Apparent (86 page)

The memorandum of 3 May in which Esher advised King Edward to refuse his government’s advice to create peers was probably never seen by him. We can only guess at what Bertie would have done, but he would not have been kept in the dark about Esher’s talks with Balfour. Nor would Knollys—or even Asquith—have dared to bully him. It seems likely, that, had he lived, he would not have given Asquith hypothetical guarantees before a second election.

The King held a thirty-minute audience with Asquith at eleven thirty on 28 April. “I do not look forward to it,” he wrote; but Asquith reported to Margot afterward, “I had a good talk with the King this evening [
sic
] and found him most reasonable.”
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On the afternoon of Thursday, 28 April 1910, the King attended the private view at the Royal Academy. He looked “tired and a little pale.”
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That evening, he appeared at Covent Garden and sat through one act of
Siegfried
alone in the royal box, looking “very tired and worn.” Redesdale, who was in a box nearby, saw him give a great sigh as he got up; he opened the door of the box, lingered for a little in the doorway, and “with a very sad expression in his face—so unlike himself—took a last look at the house, as if to bid it farewell, and then went out.”
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Redesdale was writing with hindsight. Esher, who knew the King far better, saw him on the evening of Friday the twenty-ninth and thought him “in excellent spirits—and apparently in excellent health.”
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On Saturday, he traveled to Sandringham, not, as the papers later suggested, to “combat a threatened attack” by a change of air, but because he wanted to oversee the estate as he always did.
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The King and his suite left St. Pancras at nine fifteen on Saturday and ate breakfast on the train. The doctors’ report later said he was “feeling a little unwell,” but he walked about the grounds inspecting new planting, and at dinner Ponsonby thought he was “in his usual
form,” telling stories of “amusing incidents of former years” and playing bridge.
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On Sunday, the King drove the short distance to church in a “clarence,” but later he walked in the garden and inspected the farm and stud. The drawing rooms were shut up, as the Queen was away, and the King insisted on working in Knollys’s room, which was chilly, without a fire.

Monday morning was cold and very wet. Bertie traveled back to London in the afternoon. He was “not in a talkative mood,” but it never occurred to Ponsonby or anyone else that he was beginning a serious illness.
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That evening, he went to 17 Grosvenor Crescent to play bridge with Agnes Keyser. She was concerned by his coughing, and sent a messenger with a penciled note to Sir James Reid: “The King is dining here. He would like to see you tonight at Buckingham Palace at 11:15, if you would kindly go there, as he has a cold, and a little cough and Nurse is not there.”
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Reid found HM sitting in his dressing room in an easy chair, panting very fast and coughing, with a temperature of one hundred degrees and complaining of difficulty in breathing. Reid applied linseed and mustard poultices to the King’s chest and back and prescribed a sleeping draught of chlorodyne and morphine. When he returned home at one a.m., he told his wife: “The King may recover, as he did at Biarritz, but if not he will be dead in three days.”
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The next morning, the King dressed but agreed to remain upstairs, doing business as usual. Ponsonby, who saw him during the day with letters, never thought his condition was alarming, and nor did Esher.
⁵³
Grey requested an audience to discuss the guarantees, but the King refused to see him. At dinner with Ponsonby and two members of the suite, the King complained that he was unable to eat anything and talking made him cough. After dinner they were joined by Alice Keppel and her friend Venetia James, and they played bridge, which, as Bertie explained, meant that he didn’t need to talk. He smoked a huge cigar, which seemed to soothe him.
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On Wednesday, 4 May, after a wretched night, Bertie struggled
into his clothes and forced himself through his program of interviews, but he looked terrible, with large black blotches under his skin.
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At eleven, he saw Newton Moore, the prime minister of Western Australia. His lord-in-waiting wrongly briefed him that Moore was the PM of New Zealand. Sir Francis Hopwood, the civil servant, corrected the error, and the King lost his temper, which set off a frightening fit of violent coughing. When Hopwood suggested that he should go to bed, the King replied, “No, I shall work to the end. Of what use is it to be alive if one cannot work?”
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(Prince Albert would surely have approved.) At one thirty, he saw Georgie. The Prince of Wales was so alarmed that he wrote to warn “darling Motherdear,” who, spurred by a “providential instinct,” was hurrying back from Corfu.
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“Thank God you are coming home to look after him,” wrote Georgie.
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That evening, the King felt so unwell that he noted in his diary: “The King dines alone.”
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It was the last entry he ever wrote. It was also the saddest. The man who had spent his entire life trying to ensure that he did not dine alone was at last forced to confront himself.

Ponsonby had expected to play bridge with the King after dinner that evening. Bertie canceled the game. He looked “wretched.”
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For the first time, Ponsonby was seriously worried.

On Thursday, Reid found the King worse after another bad night. He was a bluish color in the face, and Reid told Ponsonby that he worried lest his heart fail.
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Undaunted, the King refused to cancel his engagements. Lord Islington, newly ennobled governor of New Zealand, commented after his audience: “
I
think I have been with a dying man today!”
⁶²

Alice Keppel stayed with the King throughout the day. The nurse administered oxygen from a huge metal cylinder, but this only relieved his breathing for a short while. Reid gave an injection of strychnine to stimulate his heart. When he returned at noon, he found the King was worse, so he remained there with Laking.
⁶³

Alix had failed to grasp how ill Bertie was until she received George’s letter at Calais. The first really ominous sign was that he was not present to meet her at Victoria station. When she and Princess Victoria
reached Buckingham Palace at five p.m., they found Bertie gray and sunken and unable to sit upright in his chair. “It was a great shock to them,” wrote the understated Prince of Wales, “to see Papa in this state.”
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Bertie insisted, nonetheless, on signing the documents that Ponsonby gave him from the red boxes.

At six p.m., an announcement was issued that the King was suffering from a severe bronchial attack. This was followed at eight p.m. by a bulletin posted on the palace railings and signed by the doctors that warned that “His Majesty’s condition causes some anxiety.”
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The bulletin, which was approved by the King, effectively gave notice that he was on his deathbed.

Bertie met death with courage. At one moment he said, “I am feeling better and intend to fight this, and I shall be about again in a day.”
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He refused to go to bed that night, but sat up in a chair, fighting for breath and unable to speak.
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In the morning he was worse, but he insisted on dressing. He rejected the informal clothes laid out for him by his valet, and asked for gray trousers.
^†
He was angry when the doctors forbade him from having a bath. He tried to do business with Davidson and Knollys but his voice was faint and indistinct. He smoked half a cigar and had a violent coughing fit.

Davidson telephoned Ernest Cassel to cancel his appointment. Half an hour later, Knollys rang summoning Cassel to come at once. He arrived at twelve. The King was standing up and looked “as if he had suffered great pain” but seemed in good spirits.
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Cassel brought with him an envelope containing £10,000 in banknotes, which he left beside the King.
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Outside Buckingham Palace, a crowd gathered waiting for news. Margot Asquith was one of the first to go to the palace to sign her
name. Feeling tearful, she returned home to find Charles Hardinge “looking very sad, he had seen poor Knollys in tears.” She ordered a black dress and wired Asquith to return immediately from his Mediterranean cruise. “It is like a dream and all London is standing still with anxiety,” she wrote.
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At one p.m., Bertie walked to his bedroom window to play with his canaries, and fainted. Now the oxygen was given almost continuously and so were the strychnine injections, but to less and less effect; he gradually lost consciousness during the afternoon, slumping forward in his chair.

At Great Cumberland Street, Jennie Churchill and her sister Leonie Leslie sat waiting for news all afternoon, talking in whispers so the servants would not hear. The telephone rang and Leonie came back into the drawing room with tears in her eyes. “They can’t get him out of his armchair. Alice has been sent for.”
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Mrs. Keppel had been banished from the palace when Alix returned on Thursday, and she spent Friday morning in hysterics. Now, it seems, she presented the Queen with a letter that Bertie had written back in 1901. It read as follows:

To her great credit, Alix obeyed her husband’s wishes, painful though the instruction was, and summoned the mistress to the palace.

When Mrs. Keppel arrived at five, Bertie was slipping out of consciousness and barely recognized her. The Queen and Princess Victoria were both in the room. According to the story Mrs. Keppel later related
to her friends, the King told the Queen to kiss her. The Queen obeyed, and told Mrs. Keppel that the royal family would “look after her.”
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Reconciliation with the Queen was the dream of every mistress, from Lillie Langtry to Daisy Warwick, but Mrs. Keppel’s story is hard to credit. Not only was the King barely conscious, but Mrs. Keppel was in a highly emotional state. She was later to become notorious as a woman who “cannot resist lying and inventing and saying anything that comes into her Roman head.”
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The official version, as recorded by Esher, goes like this. The Queen shook hands with Mrs. Keppel and said, “I am sure you always had a good influence over him,” then walked away to the window. When the King fell forward in his chair, surrounded by nurses, Mrs. Keppel became hysterical once more. She was bundled out of the room, shrieking, and “before the Pages and the Footmen in the passage kept on repeating, ‘I never did any harm, there was nothing wrong between us,’ and then ‘what is to become of
me
?’ She fell into a wild fit of hysterics, and had to be carried into [Ponsonby’s] room, where she remained for some hours.” Mrs. Keppel’s insistence that there was “nothing wrong between us” can perhaps be read as an admission that she had never slept with the King after all.
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“Altogether it was a painful and rather theatrical exhibition, and ought never to have happened,” wrote Esher.
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But Esher was an unreliable witness, too, and he was especially jealous of Alice Keppel.

That Mrs. Keppel was overcome by hysterics seems certain. Laking, who was in the room, recalled the Queen taking him aside and whispering, “Get this woman away.”
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The two versions of the story—Esher’s and Mrs. Keppel’s—clearly reveal the conflict between the mistress, emotionally distraught and desperate for closure and validation, and the members of the household, who closed ranks to exclude her as soon as the King lost consciousness.

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.
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