Dimming of the Day

Chapter Three The Picture of Britain The funeral of Edward VII in May 1910 was probably the grandest imperial spectacle that Britain had ever seen. Among the mourners were nine kings, five heirs apparent, forty imperial or royal highnesses, seven queens (four dowagers and three regnant) 16 and a host of royal hangers-on. Edward had been known as “the uncle of Europe” and as far as crowned heads were concerned this was an entirely literal description as Victoria’s progeny spread across the continent. Surely so grand a spectacle, so much bling, must indicate a country and a world at peace with itself. But security had to be high. The police would have worried about anarchists, suffragettes, militant workers and various Irish groups, all of whom had their grievances. So what might be called the Julian Fellowes view of the Edwardian age as a time of peace and prosperity, of untroubled games of cricket watched by large crowds who had come to see the great amateur batsmen of the age, is not quite how it was. Neither the nation nor the cricket field was quite so serene. The nation was certainly not undivided. George Sherston’s aunt in Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man 17 worked by a social code which divided the world into people on whom one could call and people who were socially impossible. Those who were socially impossible have become to a great extent historically invisible. Harold Laski said it more strongly, The Edwardian poor have attracted little attention in imaginative literature and play almost no part in commonly held images of Edwardian England. But to look at the domestic lives of the poor, both urban and rural, is to shadow our picture of upper- and middle-class life with horror and dismay. A sign of the tension was the constitutional crisis that had developed over Lloyd George’s 1909 Budget. The permanent Tory majority in the House of Lords rejected the Finance Bill (with breath-taking arrogance for a party reduced to a rump in the House of Commons). It was passed – reluctantly – but the consequence was the 1911 Parliament Act which constrained the powers of the House of Lords who could now delay legislation passed in the Commons but could not ultimately prevent its passage and could not stop money bills at all. That defeat had come about only after the new king 16 Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August , 1963 17 Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of a Fox-hunting man 23