The Edwardians Read online

  The crush was greatest in Hyde Park, part of the addition to the route which the Commissioner had hoped would avoid dangerous congestion on the pavements of the Mall and Piccadilly. At places the crowd was a hundred deep and, as it swayed forward, the soldiers who were lining the route pushed it back. An occasional coster offered tawdry mementos for sale and a few dozen pickpockets were apprehended by mourners and handed over to the police. But what was most noticeable about the crowd was its silent discipline.

  There was a hushed intake of breath and the incredulous whisper, ‘The Queen’, as the head of the procession appeared. In an age of hats – silk for gentlemen, bowlers for prosperous clerks and respectable shopkeepers and flat caps for the rest – it was followed by a rustle as men lifted their arms to bare their heads. The sound which most of the mourners remembered was the tramp of marching feet. Even the bands – alternating Chopin’s Funeral March and the Dead March from Saul – were subdued. There were, however, signs of life from the soldiers who lined the route. They should have stood to attention with arms reversed and heads bowed, but many of them risked punishment by raising their eyes to watch the coffin as the cortège passed.

  The massed bands of the Household Cavalry at the head of the procession moved out in silence apart from the mournful sound of one drum, draped like the rest in black crěpe, beating out the rhythm of the slow march. Behind the band came four battalions of militia, volunteers and yeomanry, representatives of the colonial levees, officers and men of the Pay, Ordnance and Service Corps, six battalions of Infantry of the Line, four of foot guards, the Royal Regiments of Artillery and the Engineers. Lancers, Dragoons and Hussars and finally the Horse and Life Guards made up the last of the military contingent but not the rearguard of the main parade. That honour properly fell to the Senior Service – the Royal Navy and the Royal Marines. The sailors put the Army, and the weather, to shame by scorning greatcoats and marching into the February wind in shirt-sleeve order.

  Four more bands, Engineers, Artillery, Marines and Foot Guards, preceded the Court and Household. The Earl Marshal, as befitted his age and seniority, rode. The rest were on foot. Victor Cavendish was in the third rank. When, on 1 February, he received a telegram from the Duke of Norfolk telling him that he ‘had to walk in the procession’ he was once more not properly prepared. His diary reveals his anguish. ‘Full dress coat. Had to borrow one. My own not finished. Arthur Hill lent me his.’ No doubt that night when he dined with Lord Lansdowne, his father-in-law and Secretary of State for War, he expressed his relief that the difficulties with clothes were resolved. If so, he spoke too soon. On the day before the funeral procession, although he ‘thought satisfactory arrangements had been made, Arthur Hill came round and asked for his uniform back. Tried to raise another one. He was very nice about it.’ Fortunately, the obliging Arthur Hill found a minister who had chosen to sit on a stand rather than march behind the coffin. So Victor Cavendish embarked, properly dressed, on a ‘long, tiring day. But, on the whole, everything went off very well.’

  Cavendish was mistaken. According to the plan, the gun carriage on which the coffin rested was to be drawn to the private funeral in St George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle by eight bays of the Royal Horse Artillery, but the traces broke. An attendant equerry, Prince Louis of Battenberg (one day to become First Sea Lord), suggested that the job should be done by sailors. The Artillery – well represented at Court – argued, but the King, fearful of a fiasco, ordered the Navy to take over. The communication cord was removed from the royal train and employed as a hawser. As a result the most memorable picture of the whole funeral – jolly tars in straw hats towing their sovereign to her eternal rest – was created.

  During the week which followed, observers disagreed about the mood that the funeral had created in the country. The Daily Chronicle found ‘everything shrouded in gloom’, while Arnold Bennett – who had failed to find a place on the pavement from which he could see the procession – believed the crowd that obscured his view to be ‘serene and cheerful. The people, on the whole, were not deeply moved, whatever the journalists may say.’2 Henry Labouchere, MP – a republican but in his place in the Parliament stand – hated the ‘furs and feathers’ of the military. Even Field Marshal Lord Roberts, the Commander-in-Chief, had criticisms to make. In order to get the procession through London in the prescribed time, Chopin’s Funeral March was played too quickly. Worse still, seats in the stands were changing hands through the initiative of an early manifestation of ticket touts. But the general judgement was that the grief, however expressed, was genuine. Indeed it was so intense and prolonged that the editors of national newspapers, the men who had described ‘the sorrow of her people as her coffin was carried through their midst’,3 began to fear that the country had, in the words of The Times, ‘turned aside from the stern tasks of everyday life by an excessive indulgence in the luxury of mourning’.4 The Economist warned, ‘We are not so prosperous that we can all succumb like widows in the protracted luxury of tears.’5 The Westminster Gazette compared the interment in the Royal Mausoleum at Frogmore to a burial at sea. ‘The ship is slowed down when the body is committed to the deep, but once that has taken place there can be no waiting … Full steam ahead is today’s order – just because it can be nothing else.’6

  Bernard Shaw sought ‘to interrupt the rapture of mourning in which the nation [was] enjoying its favourite festival – a funeral’. But the editor of the Morning Leader, to whom he wrote his complaint, felt unable to publish a letter which described the funeral as ‘a total suspense of common sense’.7 It was probably the scandalously scientific nature of Shaw’s objections, rather than the absence of respect, that made them unsuitable for publication. ‘To delay a burial for a fortnight, to hermetically seal up the remains in a leaden coffin’ was, he insisted, both ‘insanitary and superstitious … The Queen should have been either cremated or buried at once in a perishable coffin in a very shallow grave.’

  The Queen’s death – long anticipated but unexpected at the end – had left Great Britain insecure and uncertain and, in some extreme cases, incredulous. Some parish clerks refused to nail the notice of her death to their church doors because they could not believe that the terrible news it bore was true. Throughout most of her sixty-four glorious years, the British people had been told, by their politicians, their newspapers and their popular entertainers, that ‘Victorian’ was the adjective which symbolised the nation’s industrial, commercial and military greatness. The Victorians’ belief that they ruled the world had been underlined on 12 May 1876 when the Queen was declared Empress of India, and confirmed on 21 June 1887 when the crowned heads of Europe travelled to London to celebrate her Golden Jubilee. At first ‘it seemed’, wrote the Daily Chronicle, ‘as though we had bidden farewell to an era, the greatness of which we can scarcely judge’.8

  News of the Old Queen’s death was received in wildly different ways in the various corners of the Empire on which the sun never set. The Irish nationalists could not resist using the occasion to repeat historic grievances. ‘As the sovereign of Ireland, she was immensely forgetful of her obligations. No reign was more destructive for our people or more ruinous since the time of the Tudor queen.’9 But the Boer prisoners, at the Greenall detention centre in South Africa, behaved with more decorum. They ‘suspended their amusements for a period of mourning’.10 A pro-Boer paper was less gracious. It used the prisoners’ unexpected tribute to reiterate its opposition to the war. ‘Her Majesty was, to them, the symbol of the country with which they are engaged in a deadly struggle. These prisoners do not know what has become of their farms, their wives or their children. Yet they desire to pay her memory the only mark of respect in their power … It is a signal proof that the Boers are the exact opposite of the barbarous and brutal savages they have been called in our Yellow Press.’11

  Lord Curzon wrote from the governor’s house in Calcutta with the news that the death of the Empress had moved all India. Victoria, in life, had exerted an
‘overpowering effect on the imagination of the Asiatic’.12 In the city itself, sweetmeat vendors closed their stalls on the Maidan during the day of the funeral and joined the vast throng of silent mourners. Curzon reported that messages of condolence had been painted on banners. ‘We poor Musulmans from Sialdah grieving.’13 The personal sorrow was to be matched by an unprecedented display of public respect. As the days passed, those two emotions were combined with visceral apprehension – fuelled by the recognition that the days of Victorian glory, as well as Victoria herself, had passed away for ever. The Times was particularly portentous.

  At the close of the reign we find ourselves somewhat less secure of our position than we could desire and somewhat less abreast of the problems of the age than we ought to be considering the initial advantages we secured. Others have learned our lessons and bettered our instructions while we have been too easily content to rely upon the methods which were effective a generation or two ago. In this way the Victorian age is defined at its end as well as at its beginning. The command of natural forces which made us great and rich has been superseded by new discoveries and methods and we have to open what might be called a new chapter.14

  There was much hard evidence to reinforce The Times’s warning. Agriculture was in decline. Between 1890 and 1900 the total acreage under wheat diminished by half a million acres. Britain’s industries had continued to grow during the last decade of Queen Victoria’s life but at nothing like the speed at which they had expanded during her first fifty years on the throne. It was the old staple industries – textiles, coal, steel and shipbuilding – which had fared the worst, not suffering an absolute decline but falling behind Germany.

  By the turn of the century, Germany had begun to challenge more than Britain’s European supremacy. It seemed that the Kaiser (Queen Victoria’s grandson) and Admiral Tirpitz (his Navy minister) were not prepared to leave uncontested the worldwide maritime supremacy which Britain had enjoyed since 1805. In April 1898 the Reichstag passed the Navy Law which authorised the construction of twelve new battleships, ten new large cruisers and twenty-three small cruisers. Despite the ostentatious presence of the Kaiser at his grandmother’s deathbed, and his conspicuous participation in the funeral, London did not think of Berlin as a friend.

  Apprehensions about Germany had been increased by that nation’s sympathetic attitude to the Boers. And the Boers’ victories were undermining the self-confidence which came from an absolute belief in the invincibility of the British Army. The notion that the ‘Soldiers of the Queen’ had ‘always won’ was a myth. But the nineteenth-century defeats had all been converted, in popular imagination, into preludes to victory. The death of General Gordon had been avenged at Omdurman. The slaughter at Isandhlwana had been redeemed by the heroic defence of Rorke’s Drift. Even the catastrophe of the Crimea had resulted, admittedly ten years later, in the Cardwell Army reforms. Popular opinion had taken it for granted that the might of empire would soon deal with an insurrection by Boer farmers, but the Boers had proved remarkably difficult to suppress. Lord Salisbury had no doubt that it was events in South Africa – the Boers’ ingratitude and the generals’ incompetence – which had been the eventual cause of Queen Victoria’s death. On 22 January 1901, Britain had begun to worry about its place in the world.

  Henry James, who did not always speak for England, articulated fears which were felt far beyond the boundaries of his fastidious circle. Suddenly Victoria, once the epitome of philistine materialism, became the symbol of a lost civilisation. He greeted the news of her terminal illness with what can only be called reluctant regret.

  The poor dear stricken Queen is rapidly dying … Blind, used up, utterly sickened and humiliated by the war … She is a very pathetic old monarchical figure … I fear that her death will have consequences for this country that no man can foresee. The Prince of Wales is a vulgarian … The wretched little ‘Yorks’ are less than nothing … The Queen’s magnificent duration has held things beneficially together and prevented all sorts of accidents.

  When it came, he found ‘the old Queen’s death … a real emotion’ because England* had ‘dropped to Edward … fat Edward … Edward the Caresser’. James’s letter to Clare Benedict reflected an anxiety which encompassed far more of the country than the aesthetic elite. ‘I mourn the safe, motherly old middle class queen who held the nation warm under the folds of her big, hideous Scotch-plaid shawl … I felt her death far more than I should have expected. She was a sustaining symbol and the wild waters are upon us now.’15

  The anxiety which Henry James felt was shared by most of the nation; but Lord Esher was both surprised and impressed by the dignity with which the new King balanced the glorious news of his accession with the mournful fact of his mother’s death. Queen Alexandra had won the admiration of the Court by refusing permission for her regal title to be used until the funeral was over. The King himself had won high praise for an impromptu address to the first meeting of his Privy Council. Victor Cavendish, who did not formally attend but ‘heard and saw everything’ from just outside the audience chamber, judged that it was ‘a wonderfully fine speech indeed’.16 But, although Esher, rather to his surprise, began to grow impressed by Edward as a man, he was still dubious about him as a monarch. ‘It may be my imagination but the sanctity of the throne has disappeared. The King is kind and debonair and not undignified – but too human.’

  It was not only the King’s character which concerned him. When the funeral was over, he stood outside the Frogmore Mausoleum in the falling snow and meditated on the historic moment he had witnessed. ‘So ends the reign of the Queen. And I now feel for the first time that the new regime, so full of anxieties for England, has begun.’17

  *It is worth noting that, throughout the period, writers of undoubted intellectual quality often wrote ‘England’ when they meant Britain or the United Kingdom. They included A. J. Balfour, who was a Scotsman.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Spirit of the Age

  Edward VII was born heir to the throne. But he was sixty before he succeeded his mother and became both King and Emperor. The long years of waiting had not been occupied in preparation. His father, the Prince Consort, had certainly tried to make the Prince of Wales a better man. However no one, least of all his mother, had thought of helping him to become a better king. No matter how much Queen Victoria talked of wanting to join her beloved Albert, the Court could not bring itself to contemplate her death. Indeed, they could barely believe that it would ever happen. In consequence, the education of her son and successor was badly neglected. Despite Victoria’s retreat into near invisibility – the Widow of Windsor spent much of her time at Balmoral and Osborne House – the Prince of Wales did not preside at a Privy Council until 1898 when he was fifty-seven.

  Admirers of the Prince of Wales, in his own lifetime and more recently, have argued that he would have willingly, indeed enthusiastically, served a proper apprenticeship. It is certainly true that attempts, notably by Gladstone, to find him appropriate employment were constantly frustrated by Queen Victoria herself. Disraeli had been the first prime minister to suggest that Edward live for a time in Ireland – a notion largely designed to demonstrate the Crown’s affection for the Province. Her Majesty dismissed the suggestion in categoric language. ‘Not to be thought of … Quite out of the question … Never to be considered’.1 Gladstone revived the idea as a way of keeping a man whom he regarded as a middle-aged roué out of trouble. He invested the idea with a more exalted purpose and told the Cabinet that he felt a ‘duty [to] make a resolute endeavour at improving the relations between the Monarchy and the Nation by framing a worthy mode of life (good public duties) for the Prince of Wales’.2 No doubt the Grand Old Man also had in mind what he regarded as the Prince’s obligation to earn some of the £100,000 a year he received from public funds. Whatever the reason, Ireland was proposed again. Before the Queen had an opportunity to veto the idea, Edward himself dismissed it. The Cabinet’s preparation of a ‘cut and drie
d plan’ for his future was, he said, ‘distasteful’ to him and inappropriate to his status.

  It was strong feelings about dignity – at least as much as a desire to understand the complications of statecraft – which kept the Prince of Wales in constant conflict with both his mother and a succession of prime ministers about his right to see Cabinet papers. The extent of his exclusion, and the deep offence it caused, was confirmed by a letter he wrote to Disraeli from Seville following the announcement that the Queen was to assume the title of Empress of India. ‘As the Queen’s eldest son, I think I have some right to feel annoyed that … the announcement of the addition to the Queen’s titles should have been read by me in the newspapers instead of having received some information from the Prime Minister.’3

  By the time of the Royal Titles Bill, Queen Victoria had agreed that her son could see a selection of official papers. But Disraeli had warned the Foreign Office that the Prince of Wales was indiscreet and urged caution in its decisions about which documents he should see. Victoria, as usual, endorsed Disraeli’s judgement and, more unusually, copied his cunning. ‘It would be best not to refuse to send any despatches to the Prince of Wales but to send such as were not very confidential …’4 It was the papers that he was denied which he hoped to see as he prepared himself for what he believed to be the monarch’s proper role in world affairs. His mother was not willing for him to anticipate her demise.