HUMOUR OF KING EDWARD

Greymouth Evening Star, 5 January 1934, Page 10

HUMOUR OF KING EDWARD

REPLIES TO WILLIAM 11. “Queen Victoria would have been surprised and startled had she been told that her son resembled her as much in body as in mind. But it was so.” Upon this paradox the genial and candid Anglophil, M. Andre Maurois, bases his entertaining “King Edward and His Times” - (writes H. E. Wortham in the London “Daily Telegraph”). Was King Edward like Queen Victoria? True, he had “her sound sense, her natural goodness towards others, her smile.” But what of his sense of humour which made Prince von Bulow liken the King talking to.the Kaiser to an old and mischievous tom-cat playing with a mouse? M. Maurois quotes King Edward’S perfect remark to the Emperor William when his nephew staged a magnificent review of the German fleet at Kiel. As they steamed down the imposing lines the King said: “Yes, yes, I know, . . . You’ve always been very fond of yachting.” His light touch was a trait that endeared him to the Parisians. When King Edward madq, his famous State visit to Paris the Comedie Francaise proposed to play “Le Misanthrope.” “Oh, no,” replied the King. “I’ve seen 'Le Misanthrope’ there a dozen times. They really must not treat me like the Shah of Persia . . . Let them give me a new play.” On his arrive! at the theatre some of the parliamentary deputies hissed. The Anglophobe sentiment King Edward was out to conquer still ran high. It was with some nervousness the next morning that M. Crozier, the chief of the protocol (as the translator, Mr. Hamish Miles, perforce renders the French Lord Chamberlain’s title), asked him about his impressions. “I thought I heard a few hisses,” the King replied. “Put no, I heard nothing . . . . I heard nothing”—a tactful an-

swer. M. Maurois instances many of the Prince’s royal qualities and gives an example of the Prince’s professionally good memory for faces that, will he new to most Englishmen. “Calling on friends in Paris once, without warning, he was stopped at the door by a servant, and asked the man, with some annoyance if he did not recognise him. ‘No, Sir.’ ‘Well, you ought to know me,” said the Prince. ‘I know you. Last year you were third footman with the Duchess of Manchester.’ ” A ‘“SALOME” REBUKED How King Edwrad loved a joke! His gruff laughter continually echoes in M. Maurois’s pages. He was specially delighted with Haldane’s answer to the generals of the Army Council when, at the first meeting after his taking over the War Office, they asked him to give some idea of the army he wished to create. Haldane replied that he was “as a young and blushing virgin just united to a bronze warrior, and that it was not expected by the public that any result of the union should appear until at least nine months had passed.” King Edward supported Haldane against all military cabals, though he deplored his untidiness in dress, and when his shabby Minister once appeared at Marienbad said he must have inherited his hat from

Goethe. M. Maurois does not forget to add that those who joked with the King had to be careful. To the lady who danced before him and then came over to curtsey he said laughingly, “Have you come to claim half of my kingdom?”—“No, Sir Herod,” she replied. “But let me have Sir Ernest Cassel’s head on a platter!” Whereupon the King rose in displeasure and turned his back. He suffered no kind of criticism of his friends.

Out of the fulness of his knowledge M. Maurois gives us some glimpses of King Edward in Paris we have not seen before. A Prince of Fashion in the ’sixties, at the play leading his friends from the Jockey Club. The Varietes was their favourite. There ‘“with wavy whiskers and curling hair, square monocles set in the eye, enormous shirt front, towering stove-pipe hats on their heads, the fast young men of the day drifted along the passages to knock at the little iron door which gave access to the stage. The Prince was at their head.” ON STAGE WITH BERNHARDT He actually appeared once on the stage with Sarah Bernhardt, playing the part of the murdered prince in Sardou’s Fedora, beside whose bier Sarah used tb tear to pieces the emotions of her audience. In many things the Prince set modes —from hats to handshakes. M. Maurois quotes the Goncourts as attributing- the style of handshake about 1895, given with the elbow close to the body, to the Prince of Wales having an attack of rheumatism in the shoulder. | Once in Paris his virtuosity in the ( matter of dress saved a theatue party.] Just before they started news came i of the death of a princely relative. “His companions exchanged glances of disappointment; their evening appeared wasted. One of them ventured to ask, ‘What shall we do,’ The Prince thought for a moment and found the correct solution. ‘Put on black studs and go to the play.’ ”

When the Russian Ambassador, his friend Benckendorff. asked whether lie could go to the races as he was in mourning, the King replied gravely: “To Newmarket, yes, because it means a bowler hat! but not to the Derby, be. cause of the top hat.” These preoccupations, M. Maurois observes wil seem futile only to those who have not deeply considered the arts of governance. “By boldness and ambition a family conquers power; by ceremonies and foresight a dynasty keeps it.” For all its vivacity this book is essentially a serious one. And at the end M. Maurois returns to his point on the resemblance between its central figure and Queen Victoria: “When Edward VII. succeeded his mother the Crown’s prestige stood high. He left it higher. Could monarchy and democracy live hand-in-hand? England had solved that problem, as she always does, not by abstract reasoning, but by living experiment. The King, as arbiter of parties, as symbod of the nation in the eyes of the Empire and of foreign peoples, had played his part to perfection.”