Edward VII (r.1901-1910)
The feeling of awe for the kingly office did not cause all men to stammer in King Edward's presence. But however subtle the technique at his Court, however easy the intercourse between the King and his friends, the one always remained the sovereign, the others his subjects. Even a privileged person like Lord Fisher, combining the functions which centuries before would have been divided between the Lord Admiral and the Court jester, only forgot himself and committed some outrageous solecism in order to heighten the contrast between the reactions of his ruthless and authoritarian temperament towards the King and towards the rest of the world. When the royal anger threatened to blow him sky-high, he could enjoy the rare pleasure of feeling scolded and humble. To Lord Fisher as to Sir Lionel Cust, King Edward, from being his King and Master, came to be his hero.
King Edward was above everything else a constitutional sovereign. The King of England was not as other men. He was not a mere figurehead, a ceremonial chief of state, an hereditary president conveniently saving his countrymen the trouble of choosing some politician, whose chameleon tints had grown neutral with age, to represent them collectively for a period of years. He was an embodiment of the mystery of authority; in the words of the mediaeval English lawyers, he was the Vicar of the Great King. He was the Christian symbol of government in a society which consisted of a partnership between the dead, the living, and the unborn; a protest too, against the mechanical conceptions of politics which had been in the ascendant since the French Revolution and had, it seemed to some, reached their reduction ad absurdum in the antics of Marxian socialism.
Englishmen began to feel disillusion about parliamentary government when King Edward reigned, a disillusion grown deeper with the increasing signs of its futility and corruption. It inspired Mr. Horatio Bottomley, in the days when he was the oracle of the proletariat, to assert that with King Edward on the throne Parliament was "almost a redundancy," and Mr. John Ward, the labor leader, could tell the Trades-Union Congress in 1907 that the King was "almost our only statesman" — both palatable truths. Lord Fisher said much the same thing in more picturesque language when he remarked that King Edward shared Henry VIII's attributes of combining autocracy with a socialistic tie with the masses.
If he had not the mastery of Europe, as one foreign diplomatist averred, he was unquestionably the greatest of its personalities, its Uncle, whose strongly marked features and corpulent form embodied for the cartoonists every mood from amiability and bonhomie to sinister cunning — an Epicurean Uncle who knew everything worth knowing about the art of living, a large-hearted Uncle who loved all the world except his imperial German nephew. It was not easy for even the best of Edwardians to realize how King Edward dominated the life of his time.
Superficially, and among the small class which gave the key and rhythm to social life, the Edwardian era had much in common with its Victorian predecessor. Punctilio still ruled. The restaurant habit, which was later placed within the reach of all sorts and conditions of Londoners, had not deposed the private hostess from her long tenure of power, and the great houses of Mayfair, ill suited for daily life but magnificently set out for entertaining, stood in their gardens little dreaming that they were to give way to blocks of flats where the rich enjoyed bathrooms de luxe and standardized food electrically cooked in communal kitchens. It was an age indebted to the past for the sobriety of its amusements and the exuberance of its fashions. The Edwardian era, indeed, shrinks to almost a remote antiquity when it is remembered that elaborately appareled ladies still drove round the Park of an afternoon, within the gates of which motors were forbidden to blast their noisy way, that young women went out visiting with their mothers, and young men conscientiously left cards upon those who had fed them.
King Edward was little influenced by the Tory respect for rank. To a king all his subjects should appear much of a muchness, and King Edward was in nothing more royal than in this. He chose his friends where he liked and would surely have laughed at the explanation of a courtier that the cold shoulder of the higher aristocracy drove him more and more into the society of wealthy and parvenu financiers.
Queen Victoria's long reign had solidly established the constitutional monarchy; it remained for her son to rehabilitate the idea of English kingship by showing how the sovereign could be no less constitutional but personally more monarchical. While prince of Wales he had had little real training in statecraft, but when he became king his genuine capacity for affairs was shown. Ably advised by such men as Lord Knollys and Lord Esher, he devoted himself to the work of removing the Throne from its former isolation, and bringing it into touch with all sections of the community for the promotion of social happiness and welfare. His own love of pageantry and his interest in the stately ordering of court functions responded, moreover, to a marked inclination on the part of the public and of "society" for such things. It was significant that even Radicals and Socialists began to advocate extensions of the prerogative, and to insist on the active part which the Crown should play in public life. The king won the genuine affection and confidence of the people; and in Queen Alexandra he had an ideal consort, to whom all hearts went out.
This power of communicating with all people, this power of bringing them into sympathy was surely the most king-like of all qualities, the one most valuable in a Sovereign. The duties of kingship were not becoming easier as time went on, while they were becoming, under the conditions of modern Empire, even more necessary to the health and even to existence of the State. Genius keeps its own counsels, and no mere attempt at analyzing character, no weighing of merits, no attempt to catalogue great gifts really touches the root of that great secret which made King Edward one of the most beloved monarchs that ever ruled over this great Empire.
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