King Edward
John Grigg
Edward VII: Prince & King Giles St Aubyn (Collins £1 0) In the short preface to his new book Giles St Aubyn says that 'Edward VII has been fortunate in his biographers'. Anyone who has read the lives by Philip Magnus and Christopher Hibbert (to mention only the most recent) will be likely to agree; and it seems that the old boy's luck is holding, because Mr St Aubyn, too, has now written about him brightly and sympathetically. The only question that one has to ask is:Why was it necessary to write about him again so soon?
.Mr St Aubyn anticipates it and tells us that his 'principal excuse' is that he has been 'Privileged to study letters about [the King] Which were thought not to exist'. These are the 'thousands of documents amassed in the course of his duties' by Francis Knollys, who Was Edward's private secretary and confidant from 1863 until his death in 1910. Knollys then destroyed, on the King's Instructions, a very large number of his master's personal papers, but 'contrary to general belief did not, as Mr St Aubyn now informs us, destroy his own. This correspondence is claimed as the chief source for the present book, though it must be said that tangible evidence of it in the text is disappointingly elusive.
Why? One possible reason may be that the Knollys collection may consist largely of letters from Edward to Knollys of a kind that even a great-grand-daughter may not Wish to be published. Though the Queen is thanked in the usual fulsome terms for copyright permission, it may be that the scope of her permission has been rather strictly limited, so far as the Knollys collection is concerned.
No details of the collection are given, so We can only guess at the precise nature of the 'unique material' of which it is said to Consist. But it would hardly be surprising if were to include many letters from the King dealing with aspects of his life which, to a pious descendant, may seem already over-exposed.
It is clear, for instance, that one of Knollys's duties was the handling of blackmailers, and of women whom his master had got into trouble. Mr St Aubyn describes how blackmail was paid to the brother of Madame Giulia Barucci, 'one of the most breath-taking courtesans of the Second Empire', to whom Edward had written 20 indiscreet letters. For a time Knollys toyed with the idea of having the letters seized, but decided on reflection that 'the'days for those sort of things are past'. Through an intermediary he arranged for them to be bought.
Another tricky case was that of Lady Susan Vane-Tempest, whose husband was mad and died of drink, but who was subsequently consoled by the Prince of Wales to such effect that she had a child by him. When he first heard of her pregnancy, it seems that he hinted at an abortion, only to be told that it was too late and too dangerous' He also received a letter from her close friend, Mrs Harriet Whatman, reminding him that Lady Susan's 'private means were very small' and that she was faced by a 'vista of expenses'.
Somehow she was persuaded to disappear to Ramsgate for her confinement, but before long she was back in London and writing to Knollys: 'I am too sorry to be obliged again to have recourse to the kindness of One who has already been so generous to me, but the expenses of two houses and the extra servants have been very great'. Knollys must have been quite relieved when she died 3 years later.
If there were much new material of the Barucci and Vane-Tempest type in Mr St Aubyn's book, it would be easier to understand why he acknowledges such a debt to the Knollys collection. But in fact there is very little. Most of the scandal and tittletattle in the book is far from new, though Mr St Aubyn reproduces it well.
On the political side fresh information is not much more plentiful — which is odd, because Knollys was as much involved with Edward's public as with his private life, and the public should be less compromising. Can it be that here, too, there is stuff that has to be hidden? Was he a less good constitutional monarch than is generally supposed?
The most important issue was that which faced him at the end of his reign, when the Liberal Government had introduced legislation to curb the House of Lords's veto and the Prime Minister, Asquith, was expecting the King to facilitate its passage by giving a pledge that he would, if necessary, create a large number of peers. Edward's line before the election at the beginning of the year 1910 had been that he would not do this unless there were another election fought specifically on the constitutional issue. Asquith had not challenged this royal veto at the time, although he had given his supporters to understand, in a key-note speech in the Albert Hall, that the constitutional issue would be decided by the first election.
At the end of April, 9 days before the King died, Knollys, together with Esher (courtier and eminence grise) and the Archbishop of Canterbury, met Arthur Balfour, leader of the opposition, and ascertained from him that he would be willing to form a government, and then to ask for an immediate dissolution of Parliament, if the King decided not to accept the advice of his Liberal Prime Minister. We shall never know if he would have embarked upon this dangerous course, because his death supervened. But most historians have tended to assume that his strong common sense would have deterred him, when it came to the point.
Mr St Aubyn does provide some new evidence on this question, which slightly militates against the assumption that the King would have acted wisely. In about mid-April (the exact date is not given) he wrote to Knollys: 'Why don't the moderate Liberals state that, if the Government continues their socialism and arbitrary ways, they cannot support them? The Prime Minister . . . says that he and the Cabinet agree "The name of the Crown should be kept out of the arena of party controversy". Yet in his speech in the House of Commons he talks of "We shall feel it our duty to tender advice to the Crown". . . Evidently by that it is supposed he is going to ask me to swamp the House of Lords by a quantity of Peers . . . I postively decline doing this.'
In spite of this letter, the King should probably still be given the benefit of the doubt. Mr St Aubyn's own attitude is not entirely clear. At one point, after admitting that Edward had 'asserted a new constitutional doctrine', he immediately adds that this was 'not an unreasonable thing to do in a novel situation'. Yet a little later he says: 'It can hardly be wrong to advise a constitutional Sovereign to be guided by his Prime Minister'. That, surely, is the more sensible comment.
Mr St Aubyn's book would be well worth reading even if it contained nothing at all that was new, because it is based upon a very thorough knowledge of the printed sources. As for the Knollys collection, there may not be all that much to show for it in the book, but it is very interesting to know that it exists and it will be even more interesting to know what is to become of it.
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