But, whatever its creator’s imperial emotions, the post-1914 monarchy had, in a world where European decline was inescapable, to be detachable from empire. George V wanted to be an imperial king replete with imperial ceremony before the war, he had insisted on travelling to Delhi to be crowned Emperor of India. Of course, the Windsor monarchy was still bound to the empire in the Twenties. Instead of continental leadership, George V - who had become heir on the death of his older brother from the Russian flu - offered Britain the idea of a monarchy based on dutiful, quiet service and a largely domestic royal family. By the end of the First Word War, Edward VII’s second son had turned Prince Albert’s House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha into the Windsors, surrendered the use of all German titles, and refused asylum to the Tsar and Tsarina, both his first cousins, to protect the British monarchy from the sins of association. No European monarch could ever have such hope and dread projected onto them again. When the moment of crisis arrived in August 1914, leaving the Kaiser to contemplate the terrible necessity for Germany to wage war against both Russia and France to achieve any of his ambitions, he complained bitterly that “the dead Edward was stronger than the living one”. On the King’s sudden death, the Russian foreign minister Alexander Izvolsky declared: “We have lost the mainstay of our foreign policy.” In France, Edward was mourned in the republican corridors of power in Paris and in provincial towns. A popular song in 1909 proclaimed “as long as there’s a King like good King Edward there’ll be no war”.
More from this author How the EU bungled BrexitĪs the pre-1914 European world approached its dissolution, Edward VII, as elder statesman of a continent-wide royal family dominated by Victoria and Albert’s descendants, appeared a peacemaker. Working his other nephew, Tsar Nicholas II, while influencing the appointments of the British ambassador in St Petersburg and the Russian ambassador at the Court of St James’, he was also instrumental in realising the 1907 Anglo Russian Entente. By visiting Paris in 1903, against the advice of British officials, and transforming in just four days French public opinion of him, he played his part in the Entente Cordiale of 1904. In Europe, he sought to check German power, leaving the Kaiser convinced his uncle was “Satan”, standing between Germany and its world destiny. During the constitutional crisis of 1909-10, Edward VII successfully demanded a general election before the Liberal government could pass its budget after its defeat in the House of Lords, and then another before it could expect to legislate to remove the Lords’ right of veto - although he did not live to see that vote. Although Edward VII did as much for the modern monarchy as his parents, his reign belongs to another world, one in which the British monarch still had real political influence. When it came to his funeral procession, the crowds were much larger than they were for his mother.īut the present Queen is a successful part of a continuous story about duty that began with the monarchy her grandfather George V established. But after Edward VII died in May 1910, throngs of people waited through the night under a deluge of rain outside Westminster Hall to see the coffin of a man who appeared, at least, rather to enjoy being King. Queen Victoria feared her son would bring down the monarchy.
There was nothing austere about Edward VII: he ate excessively, smoked too much, gambled, and had a string of mistresses. Since Victoria’s reign established the idea that the monarchy’s legitimacy had, in part, to rest on public affection, the British have not continuously loved quietude in their monarchs. The joyful festivities for the Silver Jubilee bank holiday in June 1977, for example, felt as much about a country needing to remind itself that one purpose of a monarchy is to create such a national occasion, as a celebration of the Queen herself. The Queen’s being was not always fused in this way with a near ideal form of British monarchy. In that moment, one can sense a shivering fear that the Queen’s death may open the path to a troubling future where the forces stacked against the British monarchy, from outside and in, begin to overwhelm it - without there being any unifying idea about what could come next. There has not been a life of monarchical duty continuously exercised over anything like the same time in British or English history.īut such is the nervousness that hangs over the monarchy’s future, in any rendition of the national anthem there is a palpable charge on the words, “long to reign over us, God save the Queen”. Her Majesty’s stoical endurance through national and personal tribulation has cut deep.
The 70th anniversary of the Queen’s accession to the throne represents a strange juncture in the country’s history.
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