The death of a king (or indeed a queen) can disrupt the most carefully laid plans. After May 6, 1910, when Edward VII suddenly succumbed to pneumonia aged 68 after just nine years on the throne, Britain was engulfed in eight weeks of compulsory black-draped mourning. The distress was felt particularly by an aristocracy not only shaken by the unexpected demise of a much-loved, life-relishing sovereign, but anxious at the prospect that Royal Ascot might be cancelled.
To everyone’s great relief George V, the new King, announced that the race meeting would go ahead — with the proviso that all those in the royal enclosure should be clothed in “unrelieved” black. The socialite Lady Diana Manners had to scrabble for black chiffon to disguise her customary Technicolor frocks. Martin Williams’s account of that black Ascot reminds us that the monochrome race in the 1960s film My Fair Lady (when Eliza Doolittle’s language runs away with her) was inspired by the real-life Edwardian gathering 50 years earlier.
Williams completed this book last year, just as the preparations for Elizabeth II’s state funeral were under way, and his account resonates powerfully with our own recent experience of collective mourning. A social historian and gifted storyteller, Williams is by turns moved and amused as he reflects on the poignancy and rituals of a nation united (pretty much) in grief.
The distress was felt particularly by an aristocracy not only shaken by the unexpected demise of a much-loved, life-relishing sovereign, but anxious at the prospect that Royal Ascot might be canceled.
The swiftness with which one monarch’s role is dispensed with in favor of the next may be necessary for stability, but can feel indecent in its haste. In 1901, when Queen Victoria’s barely cold body was transported by ship to the mainland from the Isle of Wight accompanied by her son and heir, Edward was appalled to see the ship’s flag flying at half-mast. “The King of England lives,” he instructed the Captain firmly and the flag was swiftly raised to the top of the pole.
But The King Is Dead, Long Live the King! is not merely an account of the smoothly oiled mechanism of succession. Williams divides his narrative into three alliterative themes: majesty, mourning and modernity. “Majesty” is devoted to Edward VII’s rambunctious private and public life, including his long apprenticeship for the top job. After a “marathon stint” as monarch-in-waiting, he gave his name not only to an age but to a way of life when hedonism for some seemed, at least on the surface, to have no limits as he “sluiced away the last dregs of puritanism”.
Part of the explanation for Edward VII’s immense popularity was his visibility. Unlike his predecessor, who had kept herself almost entirely hidden from public view for decades, Queen Victoria’s son travelled the world, proving himself to be an outstandingly effective diplomat. He shored up essential French loyalties with the entente cordiale, wooed Russia, expressed his horror at racial abuse in the Belgian Congo and laid the foundations for a special relationship with the United States.
At home he demonstrated a joie de vivre among his people, whose “enjoyment was part of his own,” and who viewed him, according to writer GK Chesterton as “a kind of universal uncle”. The king was affectionately nicknamed “Edward the Caresser”, and his love of women, wine and sport ensured that “consumption had never been so conspicuous”. Most of the population, who had only known the long reign of his mother, embarked with Edward on a new and more open century.
The number of cars on Britain’s recently tarmacked roads increased fourfold from 23,000 in 1904 to 100,000 in 1910. In 1909, Louis Blériot wobbled over the Channel from France in his open-sided airplane. And a new creative energy was beginning to erupt in painting, dance, fashion and literature, laying the foundations for the modernist movement. Britain was on the brink of a revolution in the arts, pioneered by the writers, painters and thinkers of the Bloomsbury Group, the post-impressionist artists attracting attention in France and, just a pirouette away, the dazzling dancers of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.
Edward VII was affectionately nicknamed “Edward the Caresser,” and his love of women, wine, and sport ensured that “consumption had never been so conspicuous.”
The chapters on “mourning” form the heart of this book as Williams describes the King’s gradual demise in evocative detail. Bertie’s devotion to mouthwatering meals of between 8 and 12 courses, involving pigeon pies, deer puddings and luscious lobster salads, contributed to a figure that became “terminally stout” — despite several visits to Biarritz, with its beneficial climate, where he made some short-lived efforts to control his weight.
In 1902 disaster struck when Edward went down with a stomach complaint so severe that his coronation was postponed — the hotelier Monsieur César Ritz had a near-collapse when his elaborate preparations for poularde Edouard VII and pêches Alexandra were put on hold. Although recollections may vary, “swirling gossip” alleged that shortly before the ailing King surrendered to his final illness, Queen Alexandra, “always magnanimous to her husband’s lovers,” watched the distraught mistress-in-chief, Mrs Keppel, “almost shrieking” as she was bundled out of Buckingham Palace by members of the royal household.
Not long afterwards, as blinds shrouded the nation’s windows and the borders of newspapers were inked in black, the just-widowed Queen ushered in a photographer and a pair of artists to capture images of her husband’s dead body. She also invited an ever-lengthening list of bemused friends and courtiers to view his corpse, which appeared to her so beautifully “tranquil”.
“Swirling gossip” alleged that shortly before the ailing King surrendered to his final illness, Queen Alexandra watched the distraught mistress-in-chief, Mrs. Keppel, “almost shrieking” as she was bundled out of Buckingham Palace.
Edward’s subjects were willing to wait to pay their respects as the King lay in state in the magnificent medieval Westminster Hall; the line of mourners snaked for miles along the Embankment. “Clergymen, shop assistants, domestic servants and military veterans” were joined by teachers, school children, the fashionable and the elderly and infirm. People passed the coffin at the rate of ten thousand an hour as the police stood by to reprimand queue jumpers.
Not everyone was moved by this grief-sodden display. Beatrice Webb, the left-wing activist and social reformer, regarded the wave of emotion “with unalloyed contempt”, exasperated by people “slobbering” over the “commonplace virtues of our late King”. It was enough, she thought, to “turn the stomach”.
The harmonious transition from Edward to George was in some ways illusory. Society was fragmenting. There was increasing unrest over inequality, which had been concealed beneath the gauze of Edwardian gaiety. The marginalized and those living in extreme poverty were finding a voice through the growing power of the trade unions and the women’s suffrage movement, and there would be an increasingly fractious relationship between parliament, the Liberal prime minister Herbert Asquith and the new King.
On the night Edward VII died, as Asquith watched Halley’s Comet streak across the sky, the royal family braced themselves for the impending arrival of Edward’s nephew Kaiser Wilhelm, who Williams chillingly describes as a “rampant Anglophobic”. He was soon to represent the greatest disruptive threat of all.
Juliet Nicolson is a British journalist and the author of The Great Silence: 1918–1920—Living in the Shadow of the Great War and The Perfect Summer: Dancing into Shadow in 1911