The Heir Apparent (84 page)
Authors: Jane Ridley
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Nonfiction, #Retail, #Royalty
The rejection of the budget by the Lords plunged the King into the political firing line. It made an immediate election inevitable. The election was fought on the budget, but the Liberals also wanted a mandate to limit the powers of the House of Lords. Asquith opened his campaign on 10 December with a speech demanding “safeguards” curbing the legislative powers of the upper chamber. The House of Lords, which was overwhelmingly Conservative, had no intention of voting for a bill limiting its powers, and Asquith plainly intended to ask the King for some sort of guarantee to create extra peers if the Lords rejected a veto bill. This placed the King in an acutely difficult position. On the one hand, he wanted to hang on to his power to create peers, but on the other, he was reluctant to create extra peers to further the political demands of one party. Nor did he want to commit in advance.
Esher, who was having an excellent crisis, having been restored to favor after languishing in the backwater of the archives, was sent out to spy on the Liberals. In a memo to Knollys, he reported alarming intelligence. According to Haldane, “The Prime Minister wishes to obtain a promise from the King
before
the General Election.” Ministers were also considering a proposal to transfer the royal prerogative of peer creation to the prime minister.
64
This last, thought Knollys, would “weaken the Monarchy so considerably that it would be better that the King should abdicate than agree to it.”
65
He considered these proposals so “outrageous” that he thought it best to conceal Esher’s letter from the King “for the present,” as it “would be a mistake to set him still more against his ministers.”
66
On the day Parliament was dissolved (15 December 1909), Knollys, acting on behalf of the King, summoned the prime minister’s secretary. He disclosed that “the King had come to the conclusion that he would not be justified in creating new peers (say 300) until after a second general election.” As Knollys explained, “The King regards the
policy of the Government as tantamount to the destruction of the House of Lords,” and in consequence this issue must be put to the electorate at a second election.
67
By claiming a right not to create peers to pass the veto bill unless it had been sanctioned by a second election, the King seized the initiative. Some consider that he was “stretching his constitutional role.”
‖
68
He was certainly taking a great gamble. If the Liberals won an overwhelming majority, he would be unable to resist the demand for the creation of peers.
On the day that Knollys was closeted with Asquith’s private secretary, the King was conspicuously absent from the political scene, staying at yet another house party: with Bendor, the fabulously rich and spoiled Duke of Westminster, at Eaton. Whenever the King stayed anywhere for more than two nights, a private telegraph office was installed in one of the rooms of the house by post office engineers, and throughout his stay at Eaton a stream of cipher telegrams was received and dispatched by operators.
69
At dinner, however, Bertie refused to be drawn on the political situation, merely commenting, “Yes! Yes! Disgraceful, disgraceful!”
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He seemed far more interested in accompanying Alice Keppel and Daisy Pless on a surprise visit to Daisy’s grandmother, Lady Olivia Fitzpatrick, who lived nearby. The old lady was not pleased to see him, and the visit started badly when the King sat down in her favorite chair. However, “he made outrageous love” to her and “in a few minutes they were both flirting desperately.”
“Is it true,” asked the King, “that my Mother sent you away from Court for trying to flirt with my father?”
71
On New Year’s Day 1910, the King wrote a letter to “My Dear Mrs. George” from Sandringham, one of the very few letters to Mrs. Keppel that has survived. “My first letter of this New Year must be written to you today and wish you again all possible happiness and prosperity,” he wrote. “Oh! The telegrams and letters they surpass all human belief and do not leave one a spare moment. I am so looking forward to Monday—when I shall hope to [
sic
] our next meeting between 5 and 6. I shall motor over from here.” And he signed himself, “Tout à vous ER.”
72
The King’s rendezvous with his mistress was at Elveden, where they were both guests at the annual January shooting party with the Iveaghs. In the cavernous marble hall created by the previous owner, the Maharaja Duleep Singh, the house party assembled for shooting tea. The women shivered in their tea gowns, as—in spite of the Guinness millions—there was only one fire, and that was where the King sat.
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The Iveaghs lived like royalty themselves, with thirty housemaids and fifty servants living in the house. When the King and Queen came, they brought a suite of twenty-two, including a postman and a man in red livery who stood outside Bertie’s door.
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Carrington found the King “anxious about the state of affairs” but “on a very even keel and there will be no political talk in his presence.” He played bridge until twelve thirty every night and went shooting every day, and Carrington thought him “really very well indeed.”
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Lady Fingall, a fey, witty Irishwoman, was given the room next to the King’s.
a
A double door joined her room to the King’s, concealed on his side by a large bookcase. Through the door, Daisy Fingall could hear the doctor giving oxygen at night, and the King’s voice, with its curious vibration that (she wrote) “I recognise now when I turn on my wireless and the German voices push out the others.”
76
When she sat next to the King at dinner, he growled at her for sympathizing with the suffragettes. After dinner, in a corner of the drawing room, he told her: “Your friend, Mrs. Jameson, has hurt me deeply.”
Daisy Fingall was astonished. Mrs. Jameson was the sister of the cavalry officer Douglas Haig, and she possessed psychic powers, transcribing messages from her dead brother George. The King disclosed that she had written to him with a message from Alice, Bertie’s favorite sister, who had died more than thirty years before. It ran: “The time is short. You must prepare.” When Daisy asked if Mrs. Jameson had proof that the message was from Alice, he replied: “She said I was to remember a day when we were on Ben Nevis together and found white heather and divided it.”
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Only that summer Bertie had driven past Ben Nevis and recalled the time he had climbed it; his sister Alice was much in his thoughts.
78
Bertie was superstitious. He believed, for example, that odd numbers of asparagus brought bad luck, and if he had an odd number of stalks on his plate, he always asked for another to make the numbers even.
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That New Year’s Eve at Sandringham, as was customary, the house was emptied of guests and servants so that the King and Queen could be the first to open the front door in the New Year. A grandchild ran around from the back and triumphantly flung the door open. “We shall have some very bad luck this year,” said the King.
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Mrs. Jameson’s omens disturbed him deeply.
From Elveden, Bertie retreated once more to Brighton to nurse his health with Arthur and Louise Sassoon. On 14 January, the day the election campaign officially began, he wrote in his diary: “In the morning walk on the beach near Shoreham. In the afternoon motor to Worthing and walk on the Promenade.”
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In these short, slow walks with Alice Keppel by his side, pausing often to catch his breath, Bertie no doubt pondered gloomily the consequences of a Liberal election victory. Whether he could resist if Asquith then demanded guarantees to create peers was by no means certain. Esher was sent on an intelligence-gathering mission to Whittingehame, Arthur Balfour’s country house, to sound out the views of the opposition. He reported that Balfour was “amazed” at the “impudence” of Asquith’s request for guarantees. The veto bill had not been drafted, nor had it passed
the Commons. “It would be a breach of the King’s duty, if not of his Coronation oath,” said Balfour, “to pledge himself to create peers to pass a bill which he has never seen.”
82
Back at Windsor, Bertie waited anxiously for the election news. As the results trickled through, it emerged that the Liberals had won, but they had lost their overall majority and were now dependent on the Irish.
b
The atmosphere palpably lightened. As Esher reported, the verdict made the King “less depressed than he was, because undoubtedly the fix in which Ministers find themselves makes it impossible for them to bully him.”
83
There was no question of Asquith demanding guarantees at once, as the reduced majority could not be read as a clear mandate for Lords reform. The King discussed the political situation with Esher. “He is quite clear that he will not assent to any request to make peers.”
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Bracing himself for an unpleasant meeting, Bertie invited Asquith to dine and sleep at Windsor. In a breach of etiquette that seemed to confirm Bertie’s view that he had no manners, Asquith rushed off to France without even writing a letter.
85
When Margot realized what a blunder her husband had made, she hastened to explain to Knollys that Asquith was exhausted after sitting up for two nights with his daughter Violet, who was devastated by the death of her fiancé Archie Gordon in a car crash.
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Margot demanded to see the King herself: “I would only say how deeply sorry I am and Henry [Asquith] will be when he knows he has vexed him,” she told Knollys. “I would
much
like to do this in person if only to stop all the insufferable gossip and the joy my political enemies (few I think!) have in repeating that the King is angry with us.”
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This letter was shown to Bertie, and his response was stiffly correct: “I am sure you know that he is always glad to see you,” Knollys told Margot, “but he thinks that in this instance, as the matter in question is an official one, it will perhaps be better, if anything is said to him on the subject, it should come from the Prime Minister himself.”
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In
truth, Bertie was fuming with Asquith for going AWOL. “My Prime Minister’s place is in London,” he declared.
89
Bertie was scrupulously correct in his dealings with the new Liberal government. Winston Churchill, his bête noire, was promoted to Home Secretary, but he seemed to have changed his spots.
c
One of Churchill’s new duties was to write the nightly letter to the monarch describing the day in Parliament, and in these communications Churchill reinvented himself as the loyal servant of the King. Margot played bridge with Bertie and “rubbed it in” that Winston had much improved. She teased Bertie, saying he would soon be playing bridge with the Tories, to which he replied “he would be very sorry if we went out of office, and that Henry [Asquith] had served him well.”
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Asquith worried that the King might refuse to open Parliament, and he was greatly relieved when he agreed to do so, “as I have done on all previous occasions since my accession to the throne.”
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The King read his speech “pretty badly” in the Lords.
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He was ill once more with bronchitis. He took short breathless walks in the garden at Buckingham Palace, and his doctors urged him to go abroad.
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He refused to leave until the political crisis eased, and only made up his mind to travel to Biarritz when Asquith insisted that he must for the sake of his health.
94
*
In Minnie’s version, Alexandra was carried in a chair by three men, while she herself walked. (Battiscombe,
Queen Alexandra,
p. 260.)
†
“I am quite ready to go to Church … on Sunday,” he told Emma, “if the Service is only the morning Service (without Litany and Communion Service) & a short Sermon.” (Humphrey Whitbread Archive, B to Lady Clarendon, 26 June [1909].)
‡
The King had precedents on his side. Esher supplied him with a memorandum listing two occasions when Queen Victoria had approached the opposition, in 1869 over the Irish Church Bill and again in 1884 over the Reform and Redistribution Bill. But Victoria never saw the opposition leaders herself, and the negotiations were conducted through intermediaries. (Esher’s memo, 7 October 1909, in Brett,
Journals and Letters,
vol. 2, p. 413.)
§
Enameling was a method of face painting used by aging Edwardian beauties: a thick white zinc-based paste was applied to conceal wrinkles, and then painted with rouge. Alexandra is reputed to have used this on occasion. Her sister Minnie was also rumored to enamel her face.
‖
The precedent for the use of the royal prerogative to create—or threaten to create—peers was the crisis over the Reform Bill in 1831–32, but this was not exact. The Reform Bill was rejected by the Commons, and an election was called that the Whigs won. The Lords then threw out the bill, and Grey’s government asked the King to create peers. The King refused, but after the Tories had failed to form a government, he capitulated and agreed to the Whigs’ demand that he should create peers if necessary to pass the bill. He did not demand a second election. King Edward could argue, however, that Lords reform was not the issue at the January 1910 election, and a second election was therefore justified.
a
Fifteen years later, Chips Channon stayed in the King’s Bed, and in the small hours had a humiliating accident—“I somehow smashed the royal Chamber pot.” (Rhodes James,
Chips,
p. 21.)
b
The final figure was 275 Liberals, 273 Unionists, 82 Irish Nationalists, and 40 Labour. The parties opposing the budget—Unionists and Irish—were stronger than its supporters, the Liberals and Labour.
c
Bertie liked Winston’s wife, Clementine Hozier. According to Esher: “The King spoke very appreciatively of Mrs. Winston, and told me what I had never heard, that she was dear old Redesdale’s daughter. (Niece as well as daughter!)” (Churchill Archives Centre, Esher Papers, 2/11, 26 September 1908.)