The Heir Apparent (88 page)

The last king to lie in state had been George III, whose body lay at Windsor for one day in 1820. No king had ever lain in St. Stephen’s Hall. As Esher, who was opposed to the idea, pointed out, it was hardly appropriate given that it was the scene of the trial of Charles I.
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Gladstone,
who lay in state there in 1898, was honored as a great commoner. But Edward VII’s lying in state achieved precisely what Archbishop Davidson intended: It brought the King’s funeral to the people. The democratic character of the lying in state was assisted by Schomberg McDonnell, who ruled that the doors should open to the public at six a.m., and that press photography should be permitted.
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Messenger boys were forbidden to hold places for others, and no tickets were sold, so the wealthy were obliged to wait in line with the poor, and the queue itself became a symbol of social equality.
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After the royal party left, Westminster Hall was opened to the public. By four o’clock, when the doors opened, a line of people one mile stood along the Embankment, headed by three seamstresses, “very poorly dressed but very reverent.”
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“They’re givin’ ’im to us now,” cried a white-faced work girl as the doors opened. “They’re givin’ ’im to us now!”
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As the queue of working people, many of them women, filed past the catafalque, it seemed that King Edward had at last become the people’s king. Carpets had been laid to muffle the footsteps, and no one spoke. This “mute stream always always passing” were extraordinarily impressive in their silent loyalty.
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Some waited all through the night in eight hours of torrential rain, a forest of black umbrellas, for the doors to open the next morning at six. On Wednesday, the queue was four miles long and six abreast—an orderly, respectful human procession, snaking around the streets of Westminster like the black ink that bordered the nation’s mourning newspapers.

Soveral made a late-night visit on Wednesday with the King of Portugal. Carrington received them as Lord Great Chamberlain and wrote that Soveral was “terribly pale and upset. He held my hand for quite two minutes saying over and over again, ‘This is too awful.’ ”
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On Thursday, the last day, the queues were longer than ever; in spite of deluging rain, a crowd twelve people deep and seven miles long waited patiently. That afternoon Carrington received a message that the hall was to be closed while the German emperor visited. The police were aghast and refused to deny entry to the crowd. The kaiser appeared soon after three p.m., entering the hall through the Star Chamber Court, led in by King George. He placed a great wreath of
white and purple flowers upon the coffin and, after kneeling in prayer, rose and firmly clasped the new King’s hand.
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That evening, Asquith came and stood in Westminster Hall watching the people pass. Schomberg McDonnell thought his attitude offensive: “I fear he had dined well: and he seemed to regard the occasion as a mere show.”
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After the doors closed for the last time at ten p.m., Queen Alexandra paid a final visit. Just as she was expected to arrive, a party in evening dress swooped into the peers’ enclosure. One of them was Alice Keppel. Loulou Harcourt, First Commissioner of Works, persuaded her to return to the Speaker’s House, tactfully avoiding “a very great difficulty.” Alix, noted Carrington, “had her veil up and seemed perfectly calm; she looked beautiful.”
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It was a hot night, and Schomberg McDonnell opened the doors of the hall because he feared that the officers guarding the coffin might faint. To his horror, he saw Lady Desborough hovering at the entrance, with Maurice Baring and Evan Charteris in attendance. The Queen had long since left, the coffin was resting in dignified silence. The socialites nevertheless demanded admittance. Ettie Desborough fixed McDonnell with a grin that (he ungallantly wrote) “had doubtless been effective 20 years ago,” but her “blandishments” were all in vain. Carrington angrily told her he was ashamed of her and begged her to go away, “for the Queen would be hurt and amazed if she heard of their behaviour.”
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Nor was she the last. No sooner had Ettie reluctantly retired than a procession of four motor cars swept into Palace Yard. From these alighted the entire Churchill family, headed by Winston. His mother, Jennie Churchill, was there, and so was the Duke of Marlborough. Led by Winston, they advanced to the door, but McDonnell refused to allow them to enter. Winston blustered that if anyone had a right, he
had, but McDonnell replied that as Keeper of Westminster Hall he declined to let him in. After a heated argument, they departed. It was, wrote McDonnell, “an amazing instance of vulgarity and indecency, of which I should not have thought that even Churchill was capable.”
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No one could have predicted that Churchill himself was to lie in state in the same hall; fifty-five years later, the most unpopular man in England had become the greatest Englishman of all.

The police at the door estimated that people filed through Westminster Hall at the rate of ten thousand per hour. The number who paid their respects to the King was estimated at four hundred thousand or more.
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No one had predicted so many. No one could explain it, either. Observers noticed that people “really are profoundly stricken, do firmly feel a personal as well as a State loss, and look upon the late King as a friend and protector.”
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Never in recorded history, boomed
The Times,
had the death of a sovereign caused such wide and impressive manifestations of sorrow.
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The crowds were bigger than at Queen Victoria’s funeral, and the public sorrow deeper. Bertie, the dissipated, self-indulgent Prince of Wales, had somehow transformed himself into the father of the nation.

In spite of his passion for ceremonial and correctness, Bertie left no instructions for his funeral. The Archbishop of Canterbury suggested burial at Westminster Abbey, a radical proposal intended to commemorate the King’s unique relationship with his people—the fact that he was “the most ‘popular,’ in the true sense, of all England’s sovereigns.”
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George V insisted, however, that his father should be buried with his ancestors at Windsor, not beside his parents at Frogmore but in St. George’s Chapel.

All through the night of Thursday, 19 May, people hurried into London. Crowds waited for twelve hours in torrential rain along the processional route of the King’s cortège on Friday, from Westminster Hall to Paddington station. Soon after nine a.m., the funeral procession began to assemble in New Palace Yard. Margot Asquith watched as the gun carriage, the King’s charger, with boots and stirrups reversed, and
a kilted Highlander leading the wire-haired terrier Caesar waited in the grilling sun.
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Eight kings came to Edward VII’s funeral, and at ten o’clock the glittering procession clattered into the yard, led by George V with the kaiser on his right. As soon as Alix’s carriage drew up, the kaiser leaped from his horse and rushed officiously to the door, opening it before the servants could reach it, and ostentatiously planted a smacking kiss on her cheek.
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Alix stepped out, “a vision of beauty,” dressed from head to foot in black crêpe; Margot and the politicians’ wives curtseyed to the ground with bowed heads as she swished past them and into Westminster Hall in order to pay her final respects to the coffin. The kings
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remained seated on their horses; it was rumored that their poor horsemanship might cause complications if they attempted to dismount.
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Soon afterward, the coffin emerged and the procession formed up. Alix was seen to bend and pat Caesar, the King’s dog.

Eight kings and one emperor rode behind the King’s coffin. Theodore Roosevelt, former president of the United States, traveled in a carriage wearing plain evening dress. But the sight that made everyone choke was small white Caesar, who walked behind his master’s coffin, on the instructions of the Queen Mother.
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In Whitehall, the pavement was black with people wedged so tight they could not move. Between 200,000 and 300,000 people crammed into Hyde Park; the crowd was a hundred yards deep and men climbed the trees, shinning up the barbed wire that had been wound around
the trunks to stop them.
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Many had neither eaten nor slept since the day before, and 1,600 received medical attention.
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An iron wall of soldiers lined the processional route, many of them mounted, so the crowd could see very little of the procession, but there was no pushing or shoving. “The behaviour of the crowd was worthy of a democracy; it governed itself,” wrote
The Times.
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As the funeral procession crawled past, the crowd fell eerily silent. No one smoked. Bare-headed, black-coated, hushed and awed, the people mourned their King.

Who were they, these poorly dressed people with pale, pinched faces, known only collectively as the crowd? Their lives had never touched Bertie’s, but his death awoke powerful emotions of mute loyalty. What made the Tory diarist Lord Balcarres gulp was not the kings and the military bands, nor the death marches, but a wreath from “some embroideresses of Bethnal Green” or a handful of lilies of the valley in an old cardboard box.
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Thousands of plain laurel wreaths had been brought to decorate the funeral route. Six thousand policemen patrolled the streets, but not a single incident occurred. The presence of so many kings was an invitation to any anarchist, and Scotland Yard posted plainclothes detectives every twenty-two yards (the length of a cricket pitch) along the route. The crowd on the streets was wedged too tight for any man to raise his arm to throw a bomb; the commissioner of police Sir Edward Henry worried that an explosive might be dropped from a window above, but his fears proved needless.
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All political lives, Enoch Powell once observed, end in failure, unless they are cut off in midstream. The life of Edward VII ended at the height of his political influence, but in death he achieved apotheosis.

Bertie’s funeral procession reached Paddington station at eleven o’clock. At precisely the same time, a memorial service for the King was held in Paris in the English church on the rue d’Aguesseau. In the body of the church there assembled the politicians of the Republic, led by President Fallières, the first president to attend an English service in France, and including Georges Clemenceau and Théophile Delcassé, the architects of the Entente Cordiale. The galleries upstairs were reserved for members of society “personally known” to the late King, and
the contrast in dress and manners between the republican bourgeoisie downstairs and the faded aristocratic beauties of Bertie’s Proustian Paris seated above was “very striking,” noted George Saunders of
The Times.
Among those in the gallery was Madame de Pourtalès, “once beautiful and still charming,” with whom the prince had once spent long afternoons on the rue Tronchet.
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“So ridiculous to think that everyone considered I had an affair with him,” she wrote in her diary after the service.
“On ne prête qu’aux riches.”
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Meanwhile, at Windsor, the royal train bearing the King’s coffin and the members of the funeral procession glided into the station at twelve thirty. For the previous two hours, St. George’s Chapel had filled with politicians, ambassadors, and generals. Organization of the service was in the hands of the Duke of Norfolk, the Earl Marshal; charming, but hopelessly “fogged,” he was expected by all to “make a hash of it,” and he did not disappoint.
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He had deliberately avoided making a seating plan in order to prevent difficulties over precedence. The result was that the pew openers changed people’s places again and again, shoving them about when someone grander appeared, and the seating was a “mosaic of indecision and confusion.”
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When the procession appeared at the west door, the minor canons assembled to receive them craned their necks to see what was happening, the choir formed a huddled mob, and the Dean of Windsor, instead of keeping order, sat down among the spectators and became absorbed in conversation with a lady.
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Mrs. Keppel and Agnes Keyser both attended on the invitation of the new King. Alice, wearing full widow’s mourning, was ushered in by Schomberg McDonnell, who met her at the cloister door.
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As the ragged procession of splendidly robed clergy and heralds moved up the aisle, followed by the coffin, a whisper of surprise rippled through the congregation. The Queen Mother was walking behind the King’s body. Alix had been expected to watch the service unseen from the King’s Closet high above the north end of the altar. Yet here she was, deeply veiled, the blue of her Garter ribbon shining
against her black dress, her right hand leaning on a stick, her left clasping the hand of her son George.
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Pedants hissed that she claimed a precedence that was not hers by right; Queen Mary’s sharp-tongued Aunt Augusta blamed the “pernicious influence” of the Empress Minnie, who had persuaded the widow Queen to push herself in front of her daughter-in-law, following Russian custom, which gave the widowed czarina precedence.
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But protocol was no match for human sympathy. A wave of compassion swept through the church, heads bowed, and knees bent. “She has the finest carriage and walks better than anyone of our time,” wrote Margot, “and not only has she grace, charm and real beauty but all the atmosphere of a fascinating female queen for whom men and women die.”
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A prie-dieu was placed behind the coffin, and Alix took her place next to it. George fell back, and Alix was left standing, erect and alone. When the coffin was lowered into the vault, she knelt down and covered her face with both her hands, and everyone wept. Margot watched from her seat in the choir nearby: “That single mourning figure, kneeling under the faded banners and coloured light, will always remain among the most beautiful memories of my life.”
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