The King is Dead, Long Live the King! Majesty, Mourning and Modernity in Edwardian Britain
Martin Williams
Hodder & Stoughton, £25, 304 pages
It may well seem improper and almost indecent to be reviewing a volume with a title like this while nation and Commonwealth are still basking in the afterglow of the recent Coronation. Nevertheless, Martin Williams’s beautifully written book about royal change and mourning is timely, because by linking it to the public outpouring of sorrow and affection that accompanied the death of Queen Elizabeth II in September 2022, he is able to frame its theme: a similar phenomenon that occurred at the death of King Edward VII in May 1910.
The eldest son of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, Edward escaped from his strict childhood with a penchant for high living, marital infidelity and France. His wife, Queen Alexandra, had the patience of a saint and invited Alice Keppel to say a last goodbye.
Edward VII’s death was nevertheless greeted with a very real national grief, and a tangible sense, as one society lady put it, that “the meaning of everything seems gone for the moment”. Others noted portents: rushing home to attend his dying sovereign, Herbert Asquith received a telegram in the small hours announcing that he was too late. The prime minister raised his eyes to heaven in time to see Halley’s Comet burning across the sky.
A month later, Ascot was swathed in black but still went ahead – Edward would have approved. At Epsom the previous year his horse had won; descending to the paddock he had been mobbed with well-wishers. Someone began to sing the national anthem and soon the enormous crowd had taken up the strain: Williams’s assessment is that “only a monarch as popular as Edward could have elicited such demonstrations of jubilation and sorrow”.
He has a point, for somehow Edward’s personality spoke to the spirit of his age – and yet he ruled for only nine years and at a time when millions of his subjects lived in poverty and squalor. His reign saw some of the most ambitious attempts at change since the Great Reform Act, and a battle between the Liberal-dominated House of Commons and a Tory-dominated House of Lords. Meanwhile, the fight for women’s suffrage became increasingly disruptive – although describing the redoubtable Emmeline Pankhurst as “messianic” seems a bit much.
In all this turmoil Edward VII represented reassuring continuity, much as his mother had done – and for so long. Unlike Victoria, however, he was a monarch with whom his people identified more easily: “in his person, the English saw their aspirations reassuringly – indeed, joyfully – affirmed. His love of sport, rich food, fine wine and beautiful women was proverbial. Neither abstemious nor hypocritical, his easy charm and pleasant vices made him seem infinitely relatable.”
Williams argues that Edward’s loss – earlier than might have been expected, at 68 – came a serious blow to national confidence. He tells the story from the viewpoint of a cast of characters drawn from all strata of contemporary society, from high-society ladies to working men in the street and from cabinet ministers to Dr Crippen. War also looms on the horizon, but with a good deal of pathos for the reader – for we know what is coming, while they all engage from a position of relative insouciance.
This is a book about a changed and changing world trying to cope with even more change: it may not sound entirely unfamiliar. In that light, what it has to say to our own present situation will be as varied as its readers’ insights and sensibilities. Williams emphasises that Edward VII shared with Elizabeth II “their love of Sandringham, their passion for horse racing and their unrivalled prestige on the international stage”. True, but he had quite a bit in common with the present king, too.
Williams is sensibly silent on rumours that Edward was visited by a Catholic priest on his deathbed, who received him into the Church. If a priest appeared at all then is likely to have been Fr Cyril Forster, chaplain to the Irish Guards, who was well-liked by the Catholic-sympathetic king. There is so little evidence, however, that it would have been frivolous of Williams to mention it. Then again, as any historian knows, absence of evidence is not quite the same as evidence of absence.
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