The Heir Apparent (85 page)

The King left London on the evening of 6 March 1910. After dining at Buckingham Palace, he drove in a closed carriage to Victoria station. Crowds of people waited to watch him walk across the crimson-carpeted platform onto the royal train.
¹
He reached Paris the following afternoon, and saw the play
Chantecler,
which he thought “stupid & childish—& more like a Pantomime!” The heat at the theater was “awful,” he told Georgie, and “I contrived to get a chill with a threatening of bronchitis.”
²

In fact it was worse—“acute cardiac distress,” which his doctor Sir James Reid treated throughout the night.
³
The next day he was well enough to exchange visits with President Fallières and attend a large luncheon party with Madame Waddington, the American widow of the French ambassador to London. He laughed until he was red in the face when her grandson greeted him, “How do you do, King Edward?”
⁴
At lunch was the Comtesse de Pourtalès, now a dictatorial grande
dame of seventy-four and one of his oldest friends, and she walked with him in the Jardin des Plantes. He had tea with the sixty-three-year-old Madame Standish, who had once been a mistress, and he confided in the Comtesse de Greffuhle: “I have not long to live. And then my nephew will make war.”
⁵

From Paris, Bertie traveled to Biarritz, and there his health broke.

“Unable to go out owing to a cold in the head,” he wrote laconically in his diary.
⁶
In his rooms in the Hôtel du Palais, Mrs. Keppel nursed him. She scrawled a note to Soveral: “The King’s cold is so bad that he cannot dine out but he wants us all to dine with him at the Palais SO BE THERE. I am quite worried entre nous and have sent for the nurse.”
⁷

The Times
reported on 14 March that, on his doctor’s advice, “King Edward remained in his apartments today as a storm was raging. His Majesty’s health, however, is excellent.”
⁸
This was disinformation. Even the King accepted that he was ill. His diary for 14–18 March reads: “Severe cold and bronchial attack. Unable to leave the house. Dine in sitting room.”
⁹
Reid, who noted that the King was breathing fast and coughing badly with a fever, sat up all night in the next room.
¹⁰
Nurse Fletcher, who had cared for the King previously, arrived from England. “Physical signs in the chest” that threatened a fatal attack of pneumonia, occasioned Reid “no little anxiety.”
¹¹
Alice Keppel was “much alarmed,” and little wonder.
¹²
Watching the King struggle for breath, she knew that he was fighting for his life. That the King of England should die in a hotel room in Biarritz, with only his mistress at his bedside, was a terrifying scenario.

But Bertie turned the corner. By 22 March, he was well enough to write to Georgie: “I have really had a nasty & sharp bronchial attack with a horrible cough, but I am now getting daily better and stronger, still I must be careful for a time.”
¹³
The big cigars lit up again. He read a novel—always a bad sign.
¹⁴

Reid took a risk, and, in order to avoid scenes with the King, concealed the true facts from the Queen, who had always nursed her husband
in the past. Had Alix realized how close Bertie was to death, she would undoubtedly have rushed to his bedside.
¹⁵

The public knew nothing.
¹⁶
The Times
reported on 17 March that the King was “recovering from his slight indisposition,” and on 25 March, “His Majesty is now completely restored to health.”
¹⁷
When Ponsonby traveled to Biarritz to relieve Arthur Davidson as private secretary, he was astonished to discover how ill the King had been. Mr. Grey of the
Daily Mail
had agreed to suppress details of the King’s illness in exchange for being kept fully informed.
¹⁸

Partly because of this conspiracy of silence, a myth grew up about that last spring in Biarritz. It was alleged that the King had indulged in a “hedonistic holiday,” running away from the constitutional crisis at home.
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19
Indeed, after he recovered, the King resumed his Biarritz routine. His diary fills with motor drives and dinner parties: not only Alice Keppel, but also Agnes Keyser and even Jennie Churchill feature in the lists.
²⁰
But as Davidson, his assistant private secretary, later wrote, it was wrong to think that “because the King dined out or had a dinner party that he was indifferent to politics.” The fact was that “the King either dined out or had people to dinner every night of his life—it was his ordinary life.”
²¹

To Georgie, the King wrote: “I think I had best keep my views to myself”—discretion that turned out to be unfortunate, as it meant that he never discussed the constitutional crisis with his son, who was to be called upon to make decisions all too soon.
²²
The veto resolutions that the Cabinet introduced into the Commons (21 March), reducing the Lords’ absolute veto to a delaying power of no more than two years, annoyed the King. He was enraged by Winston Churchill and Lloyd George, who made inflammatory speeches dragging the
Crown into party politics. “The way the government is going on is really a perfect scandal, and I am positively ashamed to have any dealings with them,” he told Knollys on 26 March, before embarking on a motor drive to Lac d’Yrieux, where he walked in the woods on the shores of the lake and Stamper served tea.
²³

No one knew whether the government would succeed in making a deal with the Irish or whether they would be defeated, and as the uncertainty deepened, the King’s temper worsened. In spite of a soothing visit to a convent of religious sisters who passed their days in silence, he fulminated against the socialistic tendencies of his government and Asquith’s inability to “make up his mind or make a clear statement.” He told Knollys: “I do not suppose the P.M. will suggest my making a quantity of peers, but should he do so I should
certainly
decline
, as I would far sooner be unpopular than ridiculous!”
²⁴

Alix urged him to leave that “horrid Biarritz,” and join her at Genoa on a Mediterranean cruise, but the King refused.
²⁵
“I fear she is much disappointed at my not going with her,” he told Knollys. Bertie claimed that “I could not go so far away fr. Home—as I always feel I might be wanted at any moment and I can be in London fr. here under 24 hours.”
²⁶

Without waiting to see the sick King return, Alix and her daughter Victoria departed on a whim for a fortnight’s Mediterranean cruise to Corfu—a curiously irresponsible thing to do.

Asquith wrote on 13 April confirming the King’s worst fears. Bertie had already received advance warning from Esher that the government had struck a deal with the Irish. In exchange for the Irish allowing the budget to pass, the Cabinet proposed to demand guarantees from the Crown to ensure that the Veto Bill passed the Lords.
²⁷
Pithily expressed by Esher, the policy was this: “(a) Bribe or blackmail (whichever you like) for the Irish. (b) The
price
—a menace to the Sovereign.”
²⁸

The menace was contained in Asquith’s letter. In cloudy mandarin prose he explained that when the Lords rejected the Veto Bill, the Cabinet proposed “at once to tender advice to the Crown as to the necessary steps—whether by exercising the Royal Prerogative or by a Referendum … to be taken to ensure that their policy, approved by the
House of Commons by large majorities, should be given statutory effect in this parliament.” In other words, the government proposed to ask the King to create peers to pass the bill. However, “if they found that they were not in a position to accomplish that object,” that is, if the King refused, “they would either resign office or advise a dissolution of parliament.” But—and this was the sting—“in no case would they feel able to advise a dissolution except under such conditions as would secure that, in the new Parliament, the judgement of the people as expressed in the elections would be carried into law.” In short, they would demand conditional guarantees from the King before the second election. To sweeten the pill, Asquith added that the Cabinet “were all of the opinion that, as far as possible, the name of the Crown should be kept out of the arena of party politics.”
²⁹

The King’s reply was brief and formal. He informed the PM that he expected to receive a telegram with the results of the critical vote in the Commons on the budget on 19 April, “so that he can make his plans accordingly.”
³⁰
In private, he was fuming. “It is simply disgusting,” he wrote. “Thank God I am not in London.”
³¹
Asquith had gone back on his word not to ask for guarantees until after a second election, and to keep the Crown out of politics. Now he told the Commons (14 April) that if the Lords rejected the Veto Bill, “we shall find it our duty immediately to tender advice to the Crown as to the steps which will have to be taken if that policy is to receive statutory effect in this Parliament.”
³²
In plain language, as the King told Knollys, this meant that “he is going to ask me to swamp the H of Lords by a quantity of peers.… I positively decline doing this—besides I have previously been given to understand that I should
not
be called upon to agree to this preposterous measure. Certainly the P.M. & many of his colleagues assured me so—but now that they are in the hands of [Irish leader] Redmond & Co. they do not seem to be their own master.”
³³

The Tories accused Asquith of bullying the King, but this was not his intention. On the contrary, Asquith liked and respected the King far more than Balfour did. He was a clever strategist driving through a constitutional revolution, steering a course between the radicals of his own party on the one side and the King on the other. The last thing he
wanted was to force the pace and drive the king into the arms of the aristocracy. “Wait and see” was his tactic; he judged that the moment was right to ask for guarantees, and the King knew that if he refused, he risked identifying the Crown with opposition to democracy.
³⁴

Asquith’s defection made Lord Knollys hysterical. He ranted that the prime minister intended “to commit the greatest outrage on the King which has ever been committed since England became a Constitutional Monarchy; and, if I were the King, I would, should the elections be in favour of the radicals, rather abdicate than agree to it.”
³⁵
Fortunately, Lord Knollys was not the King, nor did the King listen to his wild talk. The word “abdication” did not cross Bertie’s lips, but he was angered “by the way in which my Ministers have treated me in mentioning my Prerogative in such a casual way especially the Prime Minister and I wish them to understand that I look upon them with the greatest displeasure and can no more be on friendly terms with them. They are not only ruining the Country but maltreat me personally, and I can neither forgive nor forget it.”
³⁶

One of the drives that Stamper arranged took Bertie to Lourdes. He was received by the Bishop of Lourdes, who escorted him to the Church of the Rosary. He then climbed the steps and entered the basilica, which is perched on the terrace above. A company of pilgrims appeared and knelt on the steps as they sought the bishop’s blessing. Stamper watched the bishop raise his hands above the kneeling crowd in the setting afternoon sun. “There above them all, one figure stood out sharply against the background of white. It was the King, standing bare-headed in the sunlight, watching the scene below.”
³⁷

Stamper’s image of the King is almost apocalyptic. Perhaps the visit was a political gesture, designed to appeal to his Catholic subjects. Perhaps, conscious of the approach of death, Bertie sought comfort from the Catholic shrine. He visited the Lourdes grotto, but his contemplation must have been sorely tried by the crowd, which was so great that he had to leave through a side door.
³⁸

The King returned home on 26 April. “I shall be sorry to leave Biarritz,”
he said, as he looked out from his veranda, adding, after a pause, “perhaps for good.”
³⁹

He traveled directly to London, without pausing in Paris. On the journey, Ponsonby had “quite an interesting conversation with him as to how far the Sovereign could rightly go in settling the differences between the two Houses of Parliament.”
⁴⁰
In order to signal his displeasure, the King had previously asked Knollys to prevent Asquith, Lloyd George, and Winston Churchill from meeting him at Victoria station, as was customary, but when his train arrived at five forty-five on 27 April, Asquith and Churchill were waiting on the platform to receive him.
⁴¹

At three o’clock that afternoon, Knollys and Esher met Balfour with Randall Davidson, Archbishop of Canterbury, at Lambeth Palace. Knollys had summoned the meeting, which Esher pompously called “a Conference at Lambeth,” in order to sound out Balfour. If the government asked the King to dissolve Parliament and give guarantees, and if the King refused this “advice,” would Balfour be prepared to form a government? Balfour replied that he would “come to the King’s assistance” by taking office and immediately asking for a dissolution.
⁴²
Quoting the precedent of William IV in 1832, Esher argued that Balfour’s willingness to take office meant that the King was not bound to accept the advice of his ministers to create peers.

Later, Esher’s Lambeth Palace meeting became the subject of furious political controversy. Knollys, who had declared that the King should abdicate rather than give conditional guarantees, abruptly changed his mind, and six months later he counseled King George V to agree to Asquith’s demand. Extraordinarily, he concealed Esher’s memorandum from the new King. Believing that he had no choice in the matter, George agreed to give the conditional guarantees to create peers that Asquith demanded before a second election. Had he known that Balfour was prepared to take office, he might have acted differently, and he afterward considered that he had been bullied into acquiescing by Knollys and Asquith. Knollys “seriously misled” the King,
according to one constitutional expert, and gave dangerous advice; by agreeing to hypothetical pledges and committing himself in advance, George potentially compromised the political neutrality of the monarchy.
⁴³