The Age of Decadence: A History of Britain: 1880-1914

A Rich social history [and] a devestating critique of prewar Britain. Disturbingly relevant to the world in which we live. –The Times (London)

The Age of Decadence

A History of Britain: 1880-1914

Simon Heffer

To Peter Hennessy, in friendship and fellowship

Give them a chance. Give them money. Don’t dole them out poetry-books and railway-tickets like babies. Give them the wherewithal to buy these things. When your Socialism comes it may be different, and we may think in terms of commodities instead of cash. Till it comes give people cash, for it is the warp of civilisation, whatever the woof may be.

E. M. Forster, Howards End (p. 134)

A time there was, as one may guess,

And as, indeed, earth’s testimonies tell,

Before the birth of consciousness

When all went well.

Thomas Hardy, ‘Before Life and After’, from Time’s Laughingstocks

We are weak, and writing is difficult, but for my own sake I do not regret this journey, which has shown that Englishmen can endure hardships, help one another, and meet death with as great a fortitude as ever in the past. We took risks, we knew that we took them; things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint, but bow to the will of Providence, determined still to do our best to the last.

Captain Robert Falcon Scott, Journal, 29 March 1912

This they all with a joyful mind

Bear through life like a torch in flame,

And falling fling to the host behind –

Play up! play up! and play the game!

Sir Henry Newbolt, ‘Vitai Lampada’

Penny buses, gramophones, bamboo furniture, pleasant Sunday afternoons, Glory Songs, modern language teas, golf, tennis, high school education, dubious fiction, shilling’s worth of comic writing, picture postcards, miraculous hair restorers.

T. W. H. Crosland, The Suburbans (p. 80)

In the first place I believe in the British Empire, and in the second place I believe in the British race. I believe that the British race is the greatest of governing races that the world has ever seen… I believe there are no limits accordingly to its future.

Joseph Chamberlain, speech to the Imperial Institute, London, 11 November 1895

‘And yet,’ demanded Councillor Barlow, ‘what’s he done? Has he ever done a day’s work in his life? What great cause is he identified with?’

‘He’s identified,’ said the Speaker, ‘with the great cause of cheering us all up.’

Arnold Bennett, The Card (p. 256)

Our Sovereign Lord the King chargeth and commandeth all persons, being assembled, immediately to disperse themselves, and peaceably to depart to their habitations, or to their lawful business, upon the pains contained in the act made in the first year of King George, for preventing tumults and riotous assemblies. God save the King.

The Form of Proclamation from the Riot Act, 1714

INTRODUCTION

This book is a successor to High Minds: The Victorians and the Birth of Modern Britain, which told the history of Britain and the growth of British power from 1838 to 1880. It starts where that finished, with Gladstone beginning his second administration in April 1880; and it ends in July 1914, with a nation fixated on an Ireland on the brink of civil war over Home Rule. It does not deal with the immensely complex question of why Britain went to war in 1914, which the author hopes to cover in a later volume. Although primarily a social, political and cultural history of Britain in the decades before the Great War, The Age of Decadence also deals at length with two other matters that profoundly shaped and affected Britain at home: the thirty-year wrangle over Irish Home Rule, whose consequences are still apparent in the twenty-first century, and the late-Victorian and Edwardian expansion and consolidation of the British Empire.

I owe great thanks to many individuals and institutions who assisted me or granted me access to archives during the writing of this book, or who simply discussed questions within it with me and pointed me towards hitherto unknown sources. Extracts from the journals of Bishop Hensley Henson are reproduced by kind permission of the Chapter of Durham Cathedral: I owe a particular debt to Dr Julia Stapleton for alerting me to this source, and to Dr Janet Gunning and Lisa di Tommaso for facilitating access. Andrew Riley and Ceri Humphries, of the Churchill College Archives Centre at Cambridge, helped me with the papers of the 2nd Lord Esher. The Marquess of Salisbury generously granted me access to the papers of his great-great grandfather, the 3rd Marquess. Vicki Perry and Sarah Whale helped me greatly in the Hatfield archives. Sonia Gomes and Gemma Read at the London School of Economics Women’s Library helped me with material concerning the campaign for women’s suffrage. I should also like to thank the staff of the British Library for assistance with a number of archives, notably those of W. E. Gladstone and Viscount Northcliffe. The staff of the Cambridge University Library, particularly Peter Meadows, helped me with access to the archives of Lord Randolph Churchill. The staff of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, especially Sonja Kujansuu, assisted me with the papers of Herbert Henry Asquith. Simon Gough, Archives Officer at the Parliamentary Archives, enabled access to the papers of David Lloyd George, and I was greatly helped by Dr Mari Takayanagi, Senior Archivist, Parliamentary Archives. I must also thank the staff of the National Archives, Kew.

I much profited from conversations with Professor Lord Hennessy, Professor Brendan Simms, Dr Karina Urbach, Dr Fred Hohler, Leo McKinstry, Dr Andrew Roberts, Professor Roy Foster, Dr Jean Chothia, Jeff Randall, Jonathan Meades, Dr Shruti Kapila, Angus MacKinnon, Julia Richardson, Dr Matthew Butler, Professor Robert Colls, David Frith and His Honour Judge Martin Edmunds QC. I am grateful to Natascha Nel for her design expertise. Mr and Mrs Tom Ward provided peerless hospitality on my visit to the Bodleian Library, for which I salute them. Sue Brealey very kindly read the book in proof, as did Caroline Pretty, and I am much in their debt. Lynn Curtis, who copy-edited the manuscript, saved me from some errors, and any that remain are mine.

I am particularly fortunate in my agent, Georgina Capel, who has been a constant support throughout the writing of this book; and in my editor at Random House, Nigel Wilcockson, whose enthusiasm for the subject and knowledge of it have been as invaluable to me as his magnificent insight and vision about how a book should actually be constructed. In an age when too many authors complain about the indifference of their editors, I am conscious of my great good fortune. I am also grateful to his assistant, Rowan Borchers, for some heavy lifting at a late stage in the process. But as always my greatest debt is to my wife, Diana, not merely for her advanced proofreading skills but also for unquestioningly providing all the practical and metaphysical infrastructure an author could need during a four-year gestation period from conception to birth, and to my sons Fred and Johnnie for their help, tolerance and encouragement.

Simon Heffer, Great Leighs, 10 April 2017

PROLOGUE:

SWAGGER

I

The decades before the Great War appeal to the imagination because of the often romantic glimpses we have of them more than a century later. We sense an era when, it seems, all went well. The first moving pictures show jubilees and state funerals, with kings and emperors in richly decorated uniforms and plumed helmets, personifying the pomp of the period: it was a time of unquestioned British imperial power, and its leaders looked the part. We see film of an age of elegance, with men in silk hats and frock coats, and women in astonishing examples of the milliner’s and dressmaker’s art, promenading by rivers and in parks, applauding moustachioed cricketers or rowing eights. London and other cities are captured on film too, the new motor-omnibuses mixing in the streets with horse-drawn traffic, everyone busy and bustling. We hear the music of Sir Edward Elgar and Sir Hubert Parry; we still see hotels and office blocks finished then – great Edwardian baroque palaces, which when built rose higher than any such buildings had before thanks to their innovative steel frames. In museums and antique shops we see the beautifully designed everyday objects of the period: the coins, the stamps, the advertisements, the hot water bottles and boot-jacks.

Swagger was the predominant style of the period, and not merely in painting. The pervasiveness of this mixture of opulence, arrogance and ornament and its ability to seduce explains why our conceptions of the age between 1880 and 1914 are rooted, still, so much more in myth than in reality. Swagger reflected the rise of imperial power, and the effects of that on the British psyche. It was evident at Queen Victoria’s 1887 Golden Jubilee, but far more so at the 1897 celebrations and the Coronation of King Edward VII in 1902. It caught on among the wealthy, for whom tasteful ostentation became de rigueur. It provoked the swagger portrait; shaped the dress of the moneyed classes; influenced the architecture; informed the music of contemporary composers; inspired everyday design; and dominated the personal style of Edward VII and George V. The age developed a love of ceremonial, show and ornament, practised mainly by the rich but lapped up by those who witnessed it, the tens of millions whose lives bore no relation to this elegant Belle Époque fantasy and who existed outside the myth, many of them in a life whose precariousness shamed so wealthy, and advanced, a nation.

Doing things in style was expensive. On 1 January 1905 General Sir Dighton Probyn VC, a hero of the Indian Mutiny but now comptroller of King Edward VII’s household, wrote to Arthur James Balfour, the etiolated and exhausted Tory prime minister, expressing outrage at how starved of funds the King – head of the greatest empire in the world – was. His Majesty felt ‘disappointment’ in paying income tax; and in having to fund State visits out of the civil list.¹

He was used to his friends bankrupting themselves to pay for his private visits to them, but far less sanguine when paying for himself. Visits to Scotland and Ireland in 1903 had cost £12,101 – more than £1 million in early-twenty-first-century prices – and he sought assurances that the Treasury would in future bear such costs, and those of State visits to Britain.

But Probyn’s main gripe on behalf of his master was about the state of Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace: £60,000 had been allowed for work, but Probyn, having consulted the Office of Works, thought the sum needed was nearer twice that. The Ball Room and Supper Room in Buckingham Palace ‘must be restored next autumn’, he said. ‘I doubt if there are two such shabby big State Rooms in any other Court in Europe.’²

Balfour agreed to find the money to keep up appearances, though begged for a delay to avoid ‘a difficult controversy and an inconvenient inquiry’ by small-minded MPs, who had recently voted money to maintain Royal residences.³

In an age before a welfare state, when photographs show ragged children without shoes in the slums of British cities, and when those too worn out to work were consigned to die in workhouses, politicians had to be careful. Beneath the surface, and away from the swagger, the social storm before the international catastrophe was brewing.

II

As the nineteenth century neared its end, so too did the greatest British life of all. Queen Victoria celebrated her Diamond Jubilee in June 1897, just after her seventy-eighth birthday. Few could recall Britain before Victoria, so epic had been her reign. She had emerged from her deep unpopularity of the 1870s and early 1880s to become the sentimental incarnation not just of the British nineteenth century, when it had finally achieved greatness as the world’s leading power, but of the whole British past.

A great pageant was set for 22 June, when the Queen would make a progress to St Paul’s Cathedral. A committee chaired by the Prince of Wales and including Regy Brett, the future Lord Esher – whose instinct for the pompous was as fine as his organisational skills – had been planning the event in meticulous detail since March. Brett was charged with arranging an opera gala (which the Queen would not attend); for her carriage to stop on the procession so a child could be presented to her; for various loyal addresses to be declaimed; and for the Munshi – the Queen’s Indian secretary, adored by her but hated by her household and family – to have three tickets for the best stand.⁴

For weeks beforehand newspapers teemed with advertisements offering to rent out rooms, or rather views, along the route, with the cost of places ranging from two guineas to around £20 each, depending on position and whether or not one was under cover. Entrepreneurs threw in luncheon for those wishing to extend the party. The Princess of Wales launched a £25,000 appeal to provide a substantial meal for each of London’s destitute. Clerkenwell had an astonishing 40,000 of them; Bethnal Green 14,500 and Shoreditch and Hackney 10,000 each, but such unfortunates as these also lived cheek-by-jowl with the well-to-do: Westminster had 4,500 and Kensington 5,000 to 6,000 – figures that show not merely the extent of poverty at that time within the principal city of the British Empire, but also how impossible it was for the ruling class to remain unaware of the fact.⁵

At a shilling a head it would cost £15,000 to feed the estimated 300,000 indigent in the capital alone. Ultimately Thomas Lipton, the tea merchant, covered that part of the cost the Princess of Wales’s fund fell short of.

Large contingents of soldiers and sailors paraded throughout Britain and the Empire, displaying the nation’s new military power; the fleet was reviewed off Spithead, with 167 ships present, all painted black for the occasion. Crowned heads and representatives from around the world headed to London. There were banquets and conferences for visiting imperial prime ministers and potentates, not just in London, but in great provincial cities too; colonial and imperial troops joined the parades. When the Jubilee hymn was sung in St Paul’s Cathedral, an electric signal was sent around the world so at that precise moment people in Australia and elsewhere would know to sing it too. The copes worn by the officiating clergy, it was disclosed, were of a special design, ‘chosen with a view to its harmonising with the architecture of the Cathedral’.⁶

The vestments were ‘of white silk on a gold ground, and have hoods bearing the monogram IHS worked in gold on green velvet and surrounded by rays.’

Ceremony ensured the dignity of the proceedings. The Times devoted thousands of words and acres of newsprint to cataloguing to the minute every planned movement of every contingent of soldiers and sailors. When, the week before the great pageant, the Queen and her Court travelled from Balmoral to Windsor, a guard of honour saw off her fifteen-coach, double-engined (the ‘Victoria’ and the ‘Jubilee’, specially painted blue and gold) train. It stopped at Aberdeen, where flowers were presented to the Queen, and at Perth, where the public lined the trackside to cheer and wave flags. At Carlisle the London and North Western Railway’s finest engine, the ‘Queen Empress’, painted cream and gold, took over, with the help of another engine, the ‘Prince of Wales’.

When the Queen reached Windsor the next morning she found the station approach ‘lined with Venetian masts and flags, yellow-fringed crimson cloth, red, blue and white bunting, and trophies of flags and shields bearing Her Majesty’s arms and Prince of Wales feathers, while the Royal Standard and Union Jacks have been hoisted above the façade.’⁷

This was but a hint of what would come. Paddington Station, through which the Queen would enter London, was lavishly smothered in heraldic devices, Union flags and bunting: as was much of the capital and, indeed, Britain. Temporary triumphal arches strewn with ornaments marked the route from Paddington to Buckingham Palace: the Queen was pleased to note one bore the motto ‘Our hearts thy Throne’.⁸

The symbolism of royalty, richly wrought, had become the symbolism of power, personal majesty, and the majesty of an entire Empire and the culture of its mother country.

When the Queen reached the Palace her vast European family awaited her, and showered her with diamonds. At dinner for the family, foreign potentates and ambassadors that evening – she sat between the ill-fated Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the Prince of Naples – she wore ‘a dress of which the whole front was embroidered in gold, which had been specially worked in India, diamonds in my cap, and a diamond necklace.’ ⁹

A band played in the ballroom while she was pushed around in her wheelchair – she could not stand for long – to greet her guests. So that the splendour could be taken to the people a force of 2,400 officers and men marched from the City of London on the Saturday before the Jubilee pageant, parading through the East End to Bethnal Green and Victoria Park and back. The event also ensured that the city’s lowest classes would be impressed by the power and glory of their nation, would identify with it, and have their patriotism stirred.

On 22 June, Jubilee Day, the sun shone. The Queen, escorted by Life Guards and officers of Indian regiments, drove from Buckingham Palace to St Paul’s through what The Times called ‘a storm of acclamation’.¹⁰

It was ‘a military and Royal procession of unparalleled grandeur… the pageant as a whole was of wonderful splendour and variety, and not to be matched by any of which history holds the record.’ Sixteen carriages of foreign and native royalties and dignitaries preceded the Queen’s State Carriage, ‘drawn by the cream-colour horses, which were gorgeous in their new harness… ridden by postilions, with red-coated running footmen at their sides’. The Royal dukes, led by the Prince of Wales, accompanied the carriage, uniformed and on horseback, while ‘guns boomed in Hyde Park [and] the bells clanged from St Paul’s… round by Hyde Park Corner into Piccadilly and past the great houses, the stream of gold and scarlet flowed like a sunlit river.’ In the carriage next to the Queen’s was her daughter Vicky, the Dowager Kaiserin. She could not ride with the Queen because ‘her rank of Empress prevented her sitting with her back to the horses’.¹¹

In the sea of colour – the lavishly decorated and flag-draped palaces of St James’s Street and Piccadilly, the vast array of uniforms, the finery of princesses and ambassadresses, what the Queen termed ‘festoons of flowers across the road and many loyal inscriptions’ and a crowd in its finest clothes – the small figure of the Queen stood out, in her customary ‘black silk dress trimmed with white lace and a bonnet to match’, clutching a parasol.¹²

Along the route the dates ‘1837’ and ‘1897’ were picked out in garlands of purple flowers; imperial crowns in red, white and yellow ones. Road, river and railway bridges bore flowers and the Royal cipher. ‘Squadron after squadron of cavalry, battery after battery of artillery’ marched ahead of the Sovereign.¹³

For three hours, from 10.45 to 1.45, the Queen’s procession wound its way around London, with stops outside St Paul’s and at the Mansion House before going over London Bridge and through the Borough and Southwark to Westminster Bridge.

The approach to St Paul’s was lavishly decorated. ‘The obelisks in Ludgate Circus were draped in purple and gold cloth, with embossed shields and palms. In Ludgate Hill the columns were surmounted by relief banners of elephants, through whose trunks the line of garlands passed. These elephants… were decked with purple and gold trappings, and were mounted on a base of Oriental design,’ The Times reported.¹⁴

The exotic beasts indicated it was not merely a nation, but an empire, whose glories were celebrated. The next day the Duke of Argyll wrote to the Queen: ‘No Sovereign since the fall of Rome could muster subjects from so many and so distant countries all over the world.’¹⁵

Her carriage, drawn by eight cream horses in gold-plated and morocco harness, pulled up outside St Paul’s amid a ‘deep, thrilling, prolonged ‘‘hurrah!’’’ and ‘the merry peal of the cathedral’s bells’. The Queen was not equal to walking to the chancel so 500 choristers complemented the remarkable scene and sang a Te Deum on the steps of the building. The Archbishops of Canterbury and York, and several bishops, were at the open-air service ‘in rich copes, with their crosiers, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London each holding a very fine one’; and when the ‘Old Hundredth’ was sung the vast crowd joined in.¹⁶

They then sang ‘God Save the Queen’, after which the Archbishop of Canterbury, ‘departing from the prescriptions of etiquette, called for three cheers for the Queen, and had an enthusiastic response from the entire assembly.’ As the procession moved on to the Mansion House, where the Lady Mayoress presented the Queen with a silver basket of orchids, The Times’s reporter noted that ‘never in the long course of its history did the City look gayer or more picturesque than yesterday.’

Such pomp was next witnessed when the Queen was buried on 2 February 1901; she had died at Osborne on 22 January. A show such as never before seen at a monarch’s obsequies was felt to be obligatory. The Victorian cult of death had full expression as the presiding spirit of the British nineteenth century went to her grave. Lady Battersea, Lord Rothschild’s daughter and wife of a Liberal politician and property developer, described the atmosphere: ‘Black, mourning London, black, mourning England, black, mourning Empire… the emptiness of the great city without the feeling of the Queen’s living presence in her Empire, and the sensation of universal change haunted me more than any other sensations.’¹⁷

The obsequies were marked, as The Times’s correspondent observed, by ‘every circumstance of public ceremonial… in accordance with the wishes of the Queen’.¹⁸

She had been conscious of the importance of her own dignity as monarch being represented to her mourning people, and wanted her funeral to project the grandeur of her realm and empire. ‘From the moment when the gleam of the white pall and the flash of the golden Crown were seen at the doors of Osborne to that in which her late Majesty’s style and titles were proclaimed in St George’s Chapel, Windsor, and the stirring prayer God Save the King was heard for the first time for two generations from the altar steps of St George’s Chapel… it was a ceremony of sorrowful splendour from beginning to end.’

As the Queen’s mortal remains sailed from the Isle of Wight to Gosport ‘a thunder of cannon… seemed unending’. A ‘mighty fleet’ lined up to salute her along the eight miles of the crossing, stretching, it seemed, ‘into infinity’, ‘emblems and instruments alike of her Empire and dominion’. Foreign ships lined up too in salute, including some from the Navy of her grandson, the Kaiser, in whose arms she had died. The coffin was borne through London ‘in solemn pomp… followed by a train of mourners, Royal and representative, of unprecedented volume and splendour… significant of the vast extent of the Empire.’ The service was ‘of unexampled dignity and beauty’. At Osborne, in London and at Windsor, the Army and Navy were in massed formations. Military bands played sombre marches by Chopin and Beethoven, and pipe bands played laments. The State Crown and a smaller crown lay on cushions at either end of the coffin, with two orbs and a sceptre.

A train brought the coffin from Gosport to Victoria, whence it processed to Paddington via the Mall, St James’s, Piccadilly and Marble Arch. Around 32,000 soldiers lined the route; those in the procession wore full dress uniform and decorations, led by their commander-in-chief, Earl Roberts. When the coffin reached the funeral train it was placed on an ‘imposing catafalque’ in a carriage ‘draped in purple and ornamented with white satin rosettes… broad purple stripes divided the walls into panels, crowned with a purple garland and held by white rosettes and ribbons.’¹⁹

In Windsor ‘the houses were shrouded in purple hangings. The people were clad in the profoundest black.’ Life Guardsmen in shining helmets and scarlet cloaks massed below the castle, punctuating the sea of black. There were judges in full-bottomed wigs and robes, heralds in playing-card costumes and Garter knights in robes and decorations.

Only once did the ceremony threaten to come unstuck. A horse pulling the gun carriage carrying the Queen’s coffin reared and could not be brought under control. The procession stopped; the King, the Kaiser and the Duke of Connaught, walking behind the gun carriage, waited for calm. In the end all the horses were removed, and bluejackets from the naval guard of honour moved in, picked up the harnesses and used them to pull the carriage. A new tradition was born. As The Times put it: ‘The honour of drawing the carriage bearing the coffin of the Queen who held sway over the greatest Navy the world has ever seen had, by a rare accident, fallen to the representatives of the service which holds so large a part in the affections of all who own the British name.’ ²⁰

The procession was deemed ‘the most memorable spectacle in the lives of all who had beheld it.’

By the time of the Coronation of the new King, postponed from June to August 1902 because of his succumbing to appendicitis, the public were not only used to massive displays of pomp, but expected them, and expected the world to be watching. The King was devoted to pageantry and show, and this essential part of the tone of Edwardian Britain took its lead from him. So aware was he of the value of ceremony that, for the first time since Prince Albert’s death, he revived the State Procession to open parliament. ‘The State coach was exhumed and done up, and the famous cream-coloured horses from Hanover were exercised and drilled to get them into condition,’ wrote Sir Lionel Cust, Surveyor and Keeper of the King’s Pictures, and a Gentleman Usher.²¹

He took part in several such occasions and said that ‘each time I felt the same thrill as we entered the House of Lords with its massed robes and uniforms, and the bevies of ladies in diamonds and Court dresses in the galleries above.’ ²²

The spectacle was awesome, and deliberately so, projecting majesty and imperial power: but Cust found the ride to and from Westminster from Buckingham Palace in an antique coach so boring – the seats were set so far back one could not easily see out of the window – that he and his fellow courtiers played a rubber of bridge en route.

III

A feature of the era was that an idea of beauty and grandeur was often found in the design of everyday objects, especially those issued by the state. It was the good fortune of George William de Saulles – chief engraver to the Royal Mint when Edward VII ascended the Throne – not to have designed the Golden Jubilee silver and gold coinage of Queen Victoria minted in the years immediately after 1887. It was roundly criticised, mainly for Sir Edgar Boehm’s portrait of the Queen on the obverse. Her Majesty had been depicted flatteringly on the coinage of her youth, designed by William Wyon, as a lovely young girl out of Jane Austen. In her middle years she had been depicted on the copper coinage as a stately but handsomely romantic figure – the famous ‘bun’ pennies, halfpennies and farthings, that Wyon’s son Leonard designed in 1860. However, in Boehm’s Jubilee coinage – which The Times, with its usual obsequiousness, had described as ‘modelled from life… lifelike and dignified, the Queen appears crowned and veiled’ – she looked sour, chinless and porcine, her over-sized head made all the more glaring by a crown several sizes too small being perched upon it, above a bizarre flowing head-dress.²³

The Queen was then sixty-eight and not even in the first flush of middle age. Compared with photographs of her at this period the engraving is honest and lifelike, both in physiognomy and demeanour. However, her popularity among her people having recovered considerably by 1887, there was an outcry at this less than idealised representation, and the controversy echoed down the years. Cartoonists seized upon the ridiculous crown about to topple off her head. There had been a long traffic between Boehm, the Mint and Windsor Castle about the effigy, with everyone proclaiming himself unhappy: it recalled the controversy in the 1860s over Marochetti’s statue of Prince Albert on the Albert Memorial, resolved only by Marochetti’s sudden death and the recommissioning of the statue.²⁴

This time fate did not intervene, and the effigy circulated on coins for years.

The coins appeared on the day the Golden Jubilee was publicly marked, 21 June 1887, and The Times published the first salvo against them a month later, in a letter to the editor. ‘The feeblest and most ill-executed specimens of coinage ever sent out from a national mint, except at periods of extreme decadence or distress’, proclaimed the writer, Edward J. Poynter.²⁵

He wanted ‘a more simply-treated portrait of Her Majesty without the accessories’ – the ridiculous crown, and veil. Poynter added – in case anyone had missed the point – that ‘the crying evil is the portrait of the Queen. Here something must be done.’ Historians are denied insight into how Boehm felt, because almost all of his papers were destroyed after his sudden death in December 1890, in his studio in the Fulham Road in the presence of his ‘pupil’ Princess Louise, the Queen’s daughter. Rumours of a sexual relationship between the two have never been proved and, in the light of the destruction of Boehm’s papers, probably never will be.

Shortly after the Queen’s death Evelyn Cecil, a Unionist MP, asked Sir Michael Hicks Beach, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Master of the Mint, whether in view of the ‘widespread condemnation of the portrait of Queen Victoria on the coinage first used in 1887, he has satisfied himself that the designing of the new coinage has been entrusted to the best possible artistic workmanship’.²⁶

Hicks Beach replied that ‘the task of designing the effigy of His Majesty on the new coinage has been entrusted to Mr de Saulles, the engraver to the Mint. I think the coinage of 1887 is a warning against entrusting this work to an artist unaccustomed to coinage and engraving.’ Cecil fretted about the designs for the reverses of the new coinage, declaring himself pleased with those on the copper coinage since 1895, when the ‘bun’ coinage had been superseded, and on the silver coinage since 1893, when the Jubilee designs were ended. Hicks Beach promised that ‘the whole question of the designs for the new coinage is receiving my careful attention. I do not, as at present advised, think that it will be found desirable to introduce many changes in the present designs on the reverses.’

Yet fortunately for de Saulles, and for the coinage, some of those designs did change. It was announced on 11 December 1901 that the gold and bronze coinage would remain unchanged, as would the silver threepenny and sixpenny coins; but the shilling, florin and half-crown were redesigned to project both the fluidity and grace of de Saulles’s expertise, and the peak of imperial, swaggering self-confidence in the Edwardian age: for the prosaic reason, as Hicks Beach had said on 12 March, that the florin and the half-crown needed to look more distinct from each other. They were close in size and in the last Victorian silver coinage had each borne reverses of heraldic shields. There was a campaign for a decimal coinage – Anthony Trollope had made it the obsession of Plantagenet Palliser in his political novels thirty years earlier – but Balfour had ruled: ‘I do not think the country is prepared for any fundamental change such as [that]’.²⁷

The contentious issue resolved, the design of the new coinage could proceed.

There was great public interest in it, not least because of a widespread feeling that the coinage should reflect national pride. A reader wrote to The Times on 28 February to demand that a ship be used on the reverse of some of the coins, following a precedent followed for 300 years from the time of Edward III. ‘It would’, wrote R. L. Kenyon from his club in Pall Mall, ‘represent our connexion with our colonies, the extension of our commerce, the foundation of our strength.’ ²⁸

He added that such a design would ‘beautify our coins and be a recognition of our colonial empire.’

De Saulles had become Engraver to the Mint in 1893, aged just thirty-one, on the death of Leonard Wyon. His grandfather was Swiss-French and his father a Birmingham glass merchant. Despite this there was criticism of his being commissioned to design King Edward’s coinage because he was – the ill-informed critics contended – a foreigner. No less a figure than Alfred Gilbert, Britain’s most fashionable sculptor, rushed to his defence, demanding ‘fair play’ not least because ‘art knows no nationality.’ ²⁹

In his teens de Saulles trained at the Birmingham School of Art, before being apprenticed to a die-sinker. He began his career as a commercial artist designing labels. In 1884 he secured a post with John Pinches, the medallist and die-engraver, in London. Having learned the art of medalling, he returned to Birmingham in 1888 to work for Joseph Moore, another medallist. The Royal Mint engaged him on the advice of Sir Thomas Brock in 1892, and having seen his work appointed him its chief engraver. It was a demanding job, in an era when the Mint made not only the British coinage – usually redesigned only once in a generation – but also that of many colonies. De Saulles designed the copper coinage for British East Africa and for British Honduras, as well as some of the Indian coinage, and designed and engraved medals.

His first big commission was to engrave dies for the new silver coinage of Queen Victoria in 1893, using designs by Brock. De Saulles’s idiom was different from Brock’s, and his own coinage designed eight years later would be radically so; however, de Saulles had his first chance with British coinage in 1895, redesigning the reverse of the copper coinage. Replacing Wyon’s Amazonian Britannia was a slimmer, more elegant and girlish figure in light, flowing robes. The double florin, or four-shilling piece, introduced uniquely into the Jubilee coinage, had been deeply unpopular because of its similarity in size to the crown, causing incautious shopkeepers to give a shilling too much change, and unlucky shoppers frequently to be swindled of a shilling. The decision to alter the designs of the shilling, florin and half-crown, and the pressing need to ensure the denominations of coins were clearly displayed, gave de Saulles his opportunity to create perhaps the most beautiful coinage in British history.³⁰

It was believed that Oscar Roty, the French medallist who designed in the Art Nouveau style and was most noted for the figure of La Semeuse, used on French coins and stamps for decades, had influenced de Saulles; also Roty’s friend and fellow initiator of the Art Nouveau movement, Jules-Clément Chaplain. Whatever influence these medallists had on de Saulles, the idiom of Art Nouveau, with its fluidity and lack of restraint, was an integral part of Edwardian design in everyday objects, and redolent of the self-confidence and opulence of the era. The engraving of St George slaying the dragon, by Benedetto Pistrucci, first used on the gold coinage of George III in 1817, also inspired de Saulles. At the end of Victoria’s reign it was used on the crown as well as on the half-sovereign, sovereign, double-sovereign and five-pound piece.

De Saulles went to Marlborough House on 21 February 1901, a month after the accession, and the King sat for him while the engraver made sketches of the Royal profile. A further sitting took place on 6 June. On 13 January 1902 a Proclamation in the King’s name described de Saulles’s new coinage. His effigy of the King was on all the obverses. On the reverses, the half-crown showed ‘the Ensigns Armorial of the United Kingdom contained in a shield surmounted by the Royal Crown and surrounded by the Garter bearing the motto Honi Soit Qui Mal y Pense ’; the florin ‘the figure of Britannia standing upon the prow of a vessel, her right hand grasping a trident, and her left resting on a shield’; and the shilling ‘Our Royal Crest, with the date of the year placed across the Crest’.³¹

The descriptions do not do justice to the designs de Saulles produced. The coat of arms on the half-crown bursts out of the Garter that surrounds it, and threatens to overflow from the coin itself. The font of the lettering is spare, clear and sharp, shorn of High Victorian ornament. On the florin, the figure of Britannia standing – she had always previously been seated – creates an impression of motion: the figure is at the front of her ship, her robes filled with the wind and billowing around and behind her. She, too, bursts from her frame towards the clear line of the edge of the coin. On the shilling, the Royal lion surmounts the Crown. It is a vigorous, arrogant, powerful living beast, and the Crown is sumptuously bejewelled.

Only a nation in its pomp could contemplate a coinage such as this. Its opulence and extravagance were utterly appropriate to the public’s sense of self-worth. With de Saulles’s coinage, the idea of swagger was inculcated into society, through everyone’s pocket or purse. The coinage brought beauty and aesthetics into everyday life. There was nothing token about this currency: the gold coins were gold and the silver ones silver (after the Great War the silver content would be halved; after the Second World War it would be zero). The designs reflected, most fundamentally, the preciousness of the metal they adorned.

De Saulles designed, modelled and engraved his own work, and when he died suddenly in 1903, aged only forty-one, his friends and fellow artists attributed it to overwork undermining an already weak constitution. By then the Edwardian silver coinage was in its second year of minting, and no one wrote to the papers attacking it. De Saulles’s idea that an object such as a coin could be a thing of great beauty caught on quickly: more care was taken over the presentation of everything, from the design of shop-fronts to advertisements, from steam engines to sweet-tins.

The new aesthetics also influenced stamp design, particularly when the philatelist George V took an expert interest in those depicting him. The Australian artist and sculptor Bertram Mackennal, who designed the King’s stamps, suggested larger dimensions for high-value items so he could adorn them with a ravishing design of Britannia driving a chariot through the waves, next to the King’s head in a crowned and draped wreath. The received impression of George V as a boorish oaf is belied by the consultations he had with Mackennal between September 1910 and March 1911, in order to refine the ‘Seahorses’ design. The monarch was determined that his stamps should befit the nation over which he reigned; and in doing so, he brought a little grandeur into the lives of everyone who bought a stamp.

IV

Architects in the imperial capital and elsewhere in Britain around the turn of the century found patrons eager for new buildings worthy of the world’s greatest power. Men such as Sir Aston Webb (perhaps best known for his sub-Gothic design of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London), J. M. Brydon and William Young led the way during the 1890s, creating a vogue for exuberance in architecture that the Great War killed off. Edwardian baroque (or English renaissance) was in part embraced as a reaction against the Gothic, and all it represented about the Victorian age. There was also a perceived link between classicism and opulence at a time of ostentation. Some architects, mainly in provincial practices, but including Edwin Lutyens (who came late to the grand style), carried on building in this way until the 1920s when, like much of the Edwardian legacy, it looked pompous and reactionary. However debased it became as it outstayed its welcome, its first flowering was magnificent, and visually exemplified the Belle Époque and Edwardian style. The Architectural Association’s Notes recorded in 1898 that ‘the possibilities of the style seem infinite… who can say that it will not lead to what must be the desire of us all, namely the formulating of a truly English twentieth-century progressive architecture?’ ³²

In late-Victorian domestic architecture there was a fashion, in grander houses, for a pastiche of the Queen Anne style. The late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries inspired Edwardian public buildings: and so was born Edwardian baroque. Wren, Vanbrugh and the architects of the great French chateaux and public buildings of the eighteenth century were major influences. The new buildings’ grandeur resided not merely in their ornaments and mouldings. The introduction of steel frames meant they could be built higher and, to maintain proportions, wider. The great Edwardian palaces along London’s Millbank, Whitehall, Piccadilly and in the City, are memorials to the wealth of the age. In Whitehall designs such as Young’s War Office (begun in 1898) fit in well with the Banqueting Hall, Inigo Jones’s masterpiece, having the same Italianate features: columns, domes, lavishly cut arches over windows and doors, pediments, rusticated stonework, oeil-de-boeuf windows, richly varied rooftops and chimneys. Brydon’s Treasury building on the corner of Parliament Square, built between 1898 and 1912, complements Scott’s Foreign Office of forty years earlier.³³

They were also adorned with lavish statuary, which made the Edwardian era a golden age for sculptors. Steel-framed buildings also allowed for much larger windows, and encouraged the evolution from ornate stone edifices to plainer, more utilitarian styles.

Edwardian baroque was not confined to London, its greatest showcase. Manchester had several examples, notably Lancaster House, but also great warehouses such as Asia House and India House. Belfast’s City Hall was built in the style; so too the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, the Liver Building at Liverpool, and the Port of Liverpool Building. The Liver Building, by Walter Aubrey Thomas, was started in 1908 and finished in 1911. It was the first building in Britain made of reinforced concrete; it has the grandeur and some of the ornamentation of Edwardian baroque without the finesse. The Cunard Building on Liverpool’s waterfront – the third of the ‘Three Graces’, begun just before the war began in 1914 – is more authentically baroque, also built of reinforced concrete but embellished with Portland stone flourishes as well as with richly detailed sculptures. Smaller provincial towns also embraced the style: one of the grandest and most ornate baroque revival buildings is John Belcher’s Colchester Town Hall, begun in 1897. In Scotland, architects such as Charles Rennie Mackintosh built on a similarly grand scale, though in a more idiosyncratic style that in some ways anticipated modernism.

In London, such buildings and their settings conform with the Edwardians’ idea of an imperial capital, the scale and the style of the new streetscape summoning up ideas of the avenues of Vienna, the Unter den Linden in Berlin and the Champs-Élysées in Paris. The most famous introduction of the Edwardian era was the façade of Buckingham Palace, built by Sir Aston Webb in just three months in the summer of 1913, in what The Buildings of England calls ‘a tasteful but insipid performance in the Louis XVI manner’, thus completing John Nash’s work of a century earlier and turning a house into a palace.³⁴

The newly embellished building was the climax of a ceremonial route that ran from Trafalgar Square through the neo-baroque glory of Admiralty Arch (completed a year earlier), along the Mall (lined with the most ornate lamp-posts in London, decorated with little galleons) to the Queen Victoria Memorial, ending at the Palace itself. The re-fronting was paid for by public subscription, and the money left over built the Victoria Memorial.

The massive monument to the late Queen outside the Palace proclaimed national pride even more than Webb’s great façade. Sir Thomas Brock, who conceived the decorated lamp-posts in the Mall, designed it. It took eighteen years – from 1906 to 1924 – to finish. Even in that era of bombast it took a friend at Court to argue for a memorial on so lavish a scale, and that friend was Esher, Secretary to the Office of Works, who had the ear of the King on all matters. Esher’s regard for the image of Britain was almost as great as his regard for himself. He had little difficulty in persuading the Sovereign that to honour his late mother in this magnificent way would not merely appeal to the masses who had cheered her at her last jubilee, but would boost Britain’s standing.

Brock had proved his credentials when, aged just twenty-seven, he had been commissioned to complete the great statue of Prince Albert on the Albert Memorial after the death of the sculptor J. H. Foley, whose pupil he had been.³⁵

Having come to the attention of the Royal family he had been asked to make statues of the Queen at both her jubilees; but his work was known to all because, as previously noted, he had designed the veiled head of the Queen on her last coinage. The Victoria Memorial is almost as elaborate as that to her Consort, with Webb filling in the architectural details as Sir George Gilbert Scott had done in Kensington. It was made from 2,300 tons of white Carrara marble (the statues) and Pentelic marble (the plinth). The Queen, enthroned, sits looking down the Mall: above her, 80 feet up, is a gilded winged Victory with Courage and Constancy by her feet, and below, around the Queen, are Charity, Truth and Justice. As at the Albert Memorial, there are classical friezes and bronze groups representing abstracts such as peace, progress, the arts and manufacture. All this was set in a circus, or public space, adorned by much statuary. Through this baroque revival Britain had found its trumpet, and was blowing it.

At the other end of the ceremonial route, Admiralty Arch proclaimed something fundamental to Edwardian amour propre: British naval power. Webb had designed this, too, between 1905 and 1907, and it was built at Edward VII’s request in stone in 1908–11 as part of the national commemoration of Queen Victoria. The iron gates in the three arches were the largest in Britain; and Brock provided suitable statuary to represent Navigation and Gunnery. The arch’s rusticated stone, lavish pediments and pavilioned roofs exemplified the neo-baroque, and the building is, if anything, a finer and more original expression of its grandeur than even Webb’s façade at the Palace or the Memorial before it.

Edwardian baroque buildings went up all over prime sites in the capital, transforming its aspects. Parliament Square, for instance, was newly adorned by Methodist Central Hall, an example of the most uncompromising baroque revival, built by Edwin Rickards between 1905 and 1911. In partnership with Henry Vaughan Lanchester he had just built City Hall in Cardiff, a lavishly baroque extravaganza, and the more modest but still Italianate Cardiff Law Courts. What they put in Parliament Square – described by The Buildings of England as being ‘in a surprisingly worldly Viennese style’ and looking as though ‘it might almost be a very substantially built kursaal ’ (a public recreation room in a European spa) – was radical in size, ornament and style for a location confronting Westminster Abbey and the Neo-Gothic of the Parliament buildings.³⁶

It transformed the architectural nature of a vital part of London.

A series of palaces posing as office blocks went up on Millbank, on the south side of the Abbey. From 1903 to 1906 William Caroe, who specialised in Gothic Revival churches, built the almost incomprehensible headquarters for the Church Commissioners, its roofs and windows baroque, its material red brick dressed with stone, its rampant asymmetricality making it resemble a half-finished Loire chateau. Next to it, in stone, more regularly baroque with an ornate cupola among the pavilions on the roof and bedecked with ornament, is the office block built for the Crown Agents, begun in 1912; adjoining it a tobacco company headquarters, begun in 1913, is even mightier because of its steel frame, and even more decorated. The private sector adopted the majestic idea of the architecture of grandeur just as much as the state did, and thus made its contribution to the transformation of the face and scale of London.

This was just as apparent in two other localities: in the City of London, where bankers and merchants displayed their wealth, and in the West End, where richly-wrought theatres and palatial hotels served an increasingly affluent middle- and upper-middle-class clientele, in keeping with the tone of the grand imperial city London had become. In the City, a programme began in the late 1890s of building larger and more palatial premises for financial institutions. The first exercise in this was in Finsbury Circus, by the Great Eastern Railway’s terminus at Liverpool Street, where the expiry of numerous residential leases in the 1890s allowed a large area of land to be bought up and developed. Salisbury House, completed in 1901, was the first City building to include lifts. There was no sense of restraint among either clients or architects. Electra House in Moorgate, completed in 1903, deploys what The Buildings of England calls ‘the full artillery of domes and decorative sculpture… to bombastic effect.’³⁷

More restrained was the new Central Criminal Court – the Old Bailey – built between 1900 and 1907 on the site of Newgate prison. Edward William Mountford, who had specialised hitherto in town halls and other small institutions, won a competition to design it. The cupola and small dome that crown the building echo the authentic baroque of St Paul’s, just up Ludgate Hill, but owe more to the Royal Naval Hospital at Greenwich; the Court’s ornamentation and sculpture reach their climax with the gilded figure of Justice holding aloft her scales, projecting the idea of British justice to the world. Pediments, friezes, rustication and pilasters all suggest the majesty of the law: not a uniquely Edwardian concept, but one that this building helpfully institutionalises.

A great international city needed up-to-date amenities for visitors, and ones whose grandeur created the right impression. John James Burnet was knighted in 1914 on completing his Edward VII Galleries at the British Museum, an imposing and monumental stone building with a frontage of high windows amid towering Ionic columns. Edwardian baroque also lent itself to hotels, department stores and theatres. The impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte, the great patron of Gilbert and Sullivan, built the Savoy Theatre in 1881, and less than a decade later decided to complement it with a hotel to rival any in the world: it was the first entirely lit by electricity and contained seventy bathrooms.

The Savoy impressed by its size, but in 1906, after three years of building, the Ritz opened on Piccadilly and impressed by its design as well – it was the largest modern building yet seen in London. Pevsner calls it ‘frankly Parisian’, and its version of the baroque – an importation of the Beaux Arts style – evokes the Rue de Rivoli or the Place des Vosges, not least in the way César Ritz was allowed to build over the pavement, creating an arcade under his hotel.³⁸

Its architects, Charles Mewès (a Parisian) and Arthur Davis, thus introduced Beaux Arts architecture to London: two years later they would start building the less French, but outstandingly baroque, Royal Automobile Club on Pall Mall. Waring and Gillow were hired for the Ritz’s interior design, which was pure Louis XVI. And further east along Piccadilly, built from 1905 to 1908, is the Piccadilly Hotel, designed by Richard Norman Shaw in his Late Baroque style, heavily gabled and rusticated.

To the north, Oxford Street was by the Great War dotted with great baroque emporia, much of it grand if ordinary, but with occasional great statements of Edwardian wealth and grandeur: an imposing Doric-columned building of 1906–8 for Mappin and Webb, for instance, and the former Waring and Gillow building of 1901–6 in what Pevsner calls ‘riotous Hampton Court Baroque’, in which Shaw also had a hand.³⁹

Oxford Street’s baroque jewel was, however, Selfridge’s, begun in 1908 for the Chicago retailer, Gordon Selfridge. Taking up a whole block of the West End, his mighty store – without precedent in London – combined Ionic classicism with vast areas of plate glass, the better to display the goods. Cast-iron panels to conceal the steel framing, by the engineer who had built the Ritz, punctuate the walls. Daniel Burnham, an American architect, was largely responsible, his Parisian training obvious in the style of the decorations. The building was not finished until after the war, but it began, and was completed, as a statement of Belle Époque ambition.

As drama increased in popularity, so new theatres appeared all over London’s West End. Many theatres of ancient lineage – dating back to the golden age of comedy after the Restoration and in the eighteenth century – were drastically improved to comply with modern regulations after some disastrous fires in theatres around the world in the 1890s. Several fine examples were built in St Martin’s Lane – the Coliseum in 1902–4, the Duke of York’s in 1891–2 and the Albery in 1902–3. Most had sumptuous French baroque interior decoration, Waring and Gillow undertaking the Albery as they would later do the Ritz. With other theatres opening in the Charing Cross Road in the 1890s and 1900, the approaches to Trafalgar Square were at last elevated to a grandeur echoing the triumphal mood of the times: the Mall, Pall Mall and Whitehall had come first, with Northumberland Avenue filled by stone-faced buildings during the 1870s and 1880s by order of the then Metropolitan Board of Works. That Northumberland House, the grandest Jacobean palace left in London, had been flattened to provide this expression of late-Victorian vanity reminds one that beneath the façade of swagger there was often a philistinism and arrogance that had yet to work themselves out. They would eventually do so in near-apocalyptic circumstances.

V

The calculated ostentation of commercial and public buildings in this period complemented a similar quality in the personal appearance of those wishing to make an impression on society. Dress in late-Victorian and Edwardian England signified rank and, among the middle and lower classes in particular, was a barometer of respectability. No office boy would go out without a hat. Poor dress was seen as a mark of degeneracy and destitution. The rich, however, took the question of clothing to a sometimes absurd extreme. They often changed clothes several times a day, especially when in London. Unlike their inferiors, they had no need to use clothes to advertise their propriety, but rather dressed according to the minutely calibrated rules of their caste. Women’s finery was never finer; but stealing the show were the dandies, who used clothes as a personal advertisement and in a spirit of competition.

The rules of how the ruling class dressed were strictly enforced, and the ultimate arbiter from the time when he set up his Court at Marlborough House in the 1860s until his death in 1910 was Edward VII. His otherwise unpretentious son, George V, whose happiest moments were spent shooting game or mounting stamps in his albums, was if anything even harder in his strictures about dress. Nor did this fetish die with the Great War: when in the 1920s an emergency cabinet meeting was called for a bank holiday, the King was horrified to see a picture in the paper of Lord Birkenhead sauntering into Downing Street in a tweed suit and a soft hat, and told the offender so.

What Edward VII, as King and Prince of Wales, said about dress had the force of iron law: his son agreed and never wavered from that law until he died in 1936. That men to this day leave the bottom button undone on a waistcoat was one of Edward VII’s initiatives, designed to assist his ever-expanding stomach. He also popularised the dinner jacket, when on his trip to India in 1876 he dined in one on board HMS Serapis, but this was only used en famille on informal occasions. When a junior Guards officer arrived at the Marlborough Club wearing one and not a tailcoat, the Prince, after staring at him with disgust, said: ‘I suppose, my young friend, you are going to a costume ball.’⁴⁰

He supposedly invented the turned-up trouser ‘after rolling up his trouser bottoms to walk through fields’.⁴¹

He, like his son after him, was swift to rebuke anyone who forgot any of the multiplicity of rules, most of which were arbitrary. When a private secretary, Fritz Ponsonby, visited an exhibition in a morning coat, the King said: ‘I thought everyone must know that a short jacket is always worn with a silk hat at a private view in the morning?’⁴²

That may have been an example of his sense of humour, which relied on humiliating those who could not answer back. When he saw Lord Rossmore wearing an unsatisfactory hat at Epsom, he asked: ‘Well, Rossmore, have you come ratting?’⁴³

Noting a picture of the Kaiser, in full dress uniform, greeting Queen Victoria, whose private secretaries General Ponsonby and Colonel Bigge were in frock coats and silk hats, the Prince telegraphed her to say: ‘I see you were attended by Bishop Ponsonby and Dean Bigge.’⁴⁴

In his obsession with clothing Edward VII lacked a sense of proportion in a way that now seems ridiculous, but which terrified his posse of sycophants who lived, it seemed, mainly to win his approval. Conscious of his status, he dressed to reflect it, and expected those who aspired to his society to follow his rules and thus convey an impression of dignity and grandeur to those outside the charmed circle. Austen Chamberlain once overheard him, while in Scotland, say to his valet ‘un costume un peu plus écossais demain’, as if there were gradations of Englishness or Scottishness the monarch had to reflect in his dress.⁴⁵

The Earl of Rosebery once dared to attend one of the King’s evening parties in trousers rather than knee-breeches, which caused the King to ask whether he was part of the suite of the American Ambassador. Such remarks betray an idea of dress as tribal, and as a means not merely of differentiation from other tribes, but of reflecting an imagined superiority over them. At this height of British power, appearances were very much everything.

Even the King, however, could not override public opinion. His notion that knee-breeches should be worn with evening dress did not catch on. Nor did his fad of having his trousers creased at the sides: even for him, that fashion passed. Having invented the smoking jacket, Edward VII (and his circle) permitted this ensemble only at the most informal evenings in. Most dinners required the uniform of evening tailcoat, white waistcoat, white tie and white gloves, particularly when there were ladies present. If a gentleman dined out, or attended the theatre or opera, a