The Ship of Dreams. Gareth Russell

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      After the funeral: the monarchs who gathered to mourn Edward VII, standing from left to right King Haakon VII of Norway, Tsar Ferdinand of Bulgaria, King Manuel II of Portugal, Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II, Greece’s King George I and King Albert I of the Belgians. Sitting from left to right are kings Alfonso XIII of Spain, George V of the United Kingdom and Frederick VIII of Denmark.

       Sovereign funeral (The Protected Art Archive/Alamy Stock Photo)

      With the benefit of hindsight, Edward VII’s funeral took on the appearance of an entire world gathering to bury itself alongside the man whose name had been given to their era, but at the time it appeared instead as the appropriate grief of an immutable order. When a peer who had taken his little daughter to watch the royal funeral asked her to say her prayers before bedtime, she replied, ‘It won’t be any use. God will be too busy unpacking King Edward.’[25]

      Nonetheless, Edward VII’s death heightened the general sense of unease in his country. The King’s passing could not have come at a more politically delicate moment for Britain, one that Edward’s subtle influence and considerable experience had, rightly or wrongly, been trusted by many to ameliorate. Seven months before bronchitis took Edward VII, the United Kingdom had collided with a constitutional crisis through the deployment of their veto by the House of Lords, the upper chamber of Parliament consisting of the Lords Spiritual, the bishops of the devolved branches of the Anglican churches in England, Scotland, and Wales, and the Lords Temporal, the hereditary peers. The Lords’ use of the veto was well within their constitutional rights, but their decision to wield it against the Liberal government’s Budget was vibrant testament to the difference between the permissible and the sensible. The House of Lords had not vetoed any financial Bill sent to them by the elected House of Commons since the seventeenth century and so their decision to do so in the winter of 1909 focused attention on whether the veto should have survived into the twentieth.

      The new Budget raised taxes substantially on the wealthiest of King Edward’s subjects, ostensibly in furtherance of the aim of providing funds for old age pensions and to meet the cost of naval rearmament. The surtax of 2.5 per cent on the amount by which all incomes of £5,000 or more exceeded £3,000 might seem laughably low today, but the four new kinds of tax levied on land struck the peers as a deliberate piece of class warfare, with the majority of the shrapnel aimed squarely at those whose ancient privileges were tied to their positions as landowners. That taxes were not being raised as significantly on those made rich by the factories of the Industrial Revolution did not go unnoticed; likewise invoked were dark mutterings that the Budget represented a grossly untenable expansion of the state’s powers. The upper chamber’s rejection of the Budget forced the King to call another election at which, incredibly, the Lords seemed to receive some limited form of popular approval when the Conservatives, who dominated the hereditary Lords but had lost their majority in the elected Commons, won back 100 of the seats they had lost in the 1906 election. The Liberals had, however, still won enough to be returned to office and they immediately allied themselves with two smaller parties, Labour and the Irish Parliamentary Party, to outnumber the Tories decisively in the House of Commons. In a victorious mood, the Liberal coalition tabled three resolutions to prevent a repeat of 1909 – firstly, the Lords would lose the right to amend or reject a financial Bill; secondly, the lifespan of a Parliament was decreased from seven years to five, thus enabling more frequent elections; and, finally, the Lords’ veto was to vanish, to be replaced by the right to delay by a maximum of twenty-five months any piece of legislation passed in the Commons.

      It was as this dilemma over the greatest change to the British Constitution in centuries accelerated that Edward VII died. Expectations that his reactionary son would lend royal support to the nobility were crushed when George V made it clear that he saw his job as brokering a peaceful settlement rather than favouring one side against the other, whatever his personal opinions might be. Lord Haldane, the Liberal government’s Secretary of State for War, who had initially expected subtle Tory politicking from the new monarch, was touched and impressed by how George V walked the tightrope of his first few steps as monarch: ‘I have in these days come to greatly admire the King. He has shown himself to have far more of his father’s qualities of tact and judgement than I supposed. He is being bombarded by Tory extremists with all sorts of suggestions.’[26] The proposal that George V should withhold the Royal Assent, something which had not been done since the reign of his distant predecessor Queen Anne, was shot down by the King, who rightly predicted it would divide the nation even further.[27]

      Noëlle’s husband Norman threw himself into working with the bloc in the Lords who opposed the impending Parliament Bill, or the ‘Lords Act’ as it was more generally known.[28] At first, cold logic dictated that the House of Lords had one immeasurable advantage in their favour: to pass this Bill neutering them, Prime Minister Asquith needed the victims’ acquiescence. They, fairly obviously, were expected to veto the Parliament Bill with savage alacrity, piously arguing that not to do so would ensure that their legacies ‘would be degraded by our failure to be faithful to our trust’.[29] Asquith and his allies threatened to pull the monarchy into the maelstrom by pressuring the King who was, after all, the hereditary guardian of the elected government; they wanted him to flood the House of Lords with an unprecedented number of newly created peerages, all awarded to prominent Liberal sympathisers. Privately, George V regarded Asquith’s plan as ‘a dirty, low-down trick’, but practically he had no intention of seeing the Crown dragged into the mire of an ugly political quarrel, particularly after one fraught prime ministerial audience at the Palace, during which Asquith reiterated that, if his demands were not met, ‘I should immediately resign and at the next election should make the cry, “The King and the Peers against the people.”’[30] This threat to the monarchy reawakened feelings of chivalric loyalty in a sufficient number of peers, including Noëlle’s husband and her friend’s husband, the Duke of Sutherland, who fell on their swords for their king by agreeing either to abstain or vote for the Bill that would castrate them. A less charitable interpretation of their actions might be that they chose to surrender decorously only once they realised they could not win at anything but the most pyrrhic of costs.

      The Lords Act was a critical moment in the decline of the British aristocracy, indeed arguably its most significant single event. Their power had been waning since 1832, thanks to a series of prerogative-clipping Reform Acts, while a sustained period of agricultural recession, beginning in the 1870s, had caused irreparable damage to a caste that still generally drew most of its income from the rural economies. There was also a sense of malaise and victimhood within the aristocracy that accelerated, and perhaps secured, their decline, while the rise of capitalism had left many of them confused and, for the first time, familiar with the uncomfortable sensation of not being the chief beneficiaries of the passing of the ages. Noëlle Rothes had a political mind which, like her husband’s, leaned strongly towards Toryism. СКАЧАТЬ