Page:The life and times of King Edward VII by Whates, Harry Richard 1.djvu/20

2 down, almost without warning, at the height of a political crisis in which the personal intervention of the Crown had become imminent. As a ruler compelled to work within the mysterious but yet elastic restrictions of a limited monarchy, the circumstances, as will hereafter be shown, were of a most delicate character, and called for the highest sagacity and prudence. But King Edward was deprived by Fate of the singular honour of directing and shaping a settlement. Death overtook him with startling suddenness, while the nation had reason to expect that he would live to a patriarchal age. He passed hence before he could give crowning proof of his political wisdom as the unifying arbiter and final authority in our system of government. It is one of the ironies of national life that he should thus have been robbed of a distinction which would have given an added and untarnishable lustre to his name, and would have placed him beyond dispute in the category of Great Kings.

He and none other was the man upon whom the People depended for finding a safe and honourable way out of the deadlock in the Constitution. Though the triumph has been reserved for his successor, the story of King Edward's life is nevertheless rich in interest, and worthy to be told on an ample scale. These volumes are an attempt to unfold it in such fashion as will depict the Man and the Sovereign, and will narrate the public affairs of the years of his life especially in so far as his personal influence is traceable in them.

He was born in the heart of the Empire, at Buckingham Palace, in the ancient City of Westminster, on Lord Mayor's Day, in the fifth year of the reign of Queen Victoria, and the second year of that illustrious Sovereign's marriage to Prince Albert, the younger son of Ernest Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. The firstborn was a girl—the Princess Royal, who became the wife of the German Emperor Frederick. There was some disappointment, alike at the Court as among the public, that a son had not been born to the Queen; and eager was the expectation when it became known that Her Majesty was likely to provide a companion to the baby Princess. "Is it a boy?" inquired the Duke of Wellington, who had hurried to the Palace on the morning of the ninth. "It's a Prince, your Grace," was the answer of Mrs. Lily, the nurse; and when the town learned, as it did by the firing of the guns in Hyde Park and at the Tower of London, that an Heir to the Throne had arrived, the festivities at the inauguration of the Chief Magistrate of the City of London were diverted into a demonstration of loyal rejoicing which spread from town to town and assumed a national character. Very soon after the event became known, an endless procession of nobles and magnates besieged the Palace gates to make loyal inquiries as to the health of mother and child. The Lord Mayor and the Sheriffs after the swearing-in ceremony before the Lord Chief Justice at Westminster Hall, proceeded in their coaches to the Palace to offer their congratulations to the Queen and the Prince Consort; and to judge from contemporary records, the populace of London gave unrestrained expression to their delight. Punch, then in the frolicsome vigour of youth, caught the mood of the moment and expressed it in lines which, if they