Good King Edward

For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground

And tell sad stories of the death of kings

Richard II (III, ii)

His funeral, almost exactly a century ago, was described by the historian Barbara Tuchman as "the greatest assemblage of royalty and rank ever gathered in one place and, of its kind, the last". That funeral, with which Tuchman began her classic work on the Great War, The Guns of August, was certainly the last "event" before the horrors of the Somme and Verdun. The Edwardian Era, stretching from the death of Queen Victoria in January of 1901, to Edward VII's own death in May of 1910, is regarded as a sort of Indian Summer for the British Empire, and indeed for European Civilization. The restraint and propriety that was a hallmark of Victorian Britain loosened under Edward. Among his first royal commands was ending his mother's ban on smoking at Court. With the simple words "Gentlemen, you may smoke" the new King, a keen smoker himself, signalled that his reign was going to be, quite simply, a lot more fun.

Excluded from real power during Victoria's long reign, Edward became the leading playboy of the civilized world. As Prince of Wales he travelled to Canada, America, Germany, Egypt, Palestine and India. His personal style set trends through out the world, making fashionable tweed, Homburg hats and Norfolk jackets and the wearing of black ties with formal dinner jackets. Even his usual Sunday lunch influenced British culinary habits for decades. He once reproached the Prime Minister, the Marquess of Salisbury, for inappropriate dress during an international crisis. The PM explained weakly that "my mind must have been occupied by some subject of less importance."

His many dalliances were the subject of widespread gossip. His wife, the Danish Princess Alexandra, accepted these affairs as the fate of a royal consort. The future king's good nature, easy charm and surprisingly careful attention to public duties - which his mother scorned - made him enormously popular with friends and the Empire at large. In the wake of the Fashoda Crisis, it was Edward who did more than anyone to ease away the old Anglo-French rivalry, and help establish the Entente Cordiale that was to do so much to save the free world in the first half of the twentieth century. He annoyed many by his flouting of the bigotry of the age, openly socializing with Jews and remarking, during his visit to India, that: "Because a man has a black face and a different religion from our own, there is no reason why he should be treated as a brute." Repeatedly he condemned the use of the word "nigger" when it was still in widespread use.

Even his death, most likely from bronchitis, became him. The Prince of Wales, the future George V, informed the dying monarch that his horse had won at Kempton Park that afternoon. "I am very glad," replied Edward. Those were his last words. He lost consciousness soon after and died a few hours later.

The image his name most easily conjures is that of a portly man, on the comfortable side of middle age, dressed in tweed and holding a shotgun. The man of leisure out for a casual hunt, as opposed to the formal scarlet colours of the fox hunt. The Edwardian stepping down of restraint also begat an increasing informality to dress and manners. For much of the rest of the century the process of dressing down would continue, from Edward's casual elegance to the current ubiquity of denim. It is unlikely that the King would have approved of the descent.

The Edwardian Gentleman, like his sovereign, dressed in tweed while in the country. A bowler hat for work days in the City. Generous in disposition, though not to the point of familiarity. Mindful of private and public duties, yet far from zealous. Tolerant of others, yet certain of the moral and intellectual world he inhabited and was sworn to defend. Upon the last years of European pre-eminence he gazed with detachment and subtle irony. Conscious of his solemn upbringing and open to the possibilities which the new century, with its new technology and attitudes, promised to provide. His education had been classical. He knew far more of Horace or Cicero than differential equations or the new discoveries in electro-magnetism, yet strove to understand the modern. The smattering of Latin he still recalled was a hallmark of his social status. His distant ancestors had been violent brutes. A little further forward we find their humble piety slipping into religious fanaticism. His great-grandfather was perhaps a Georgian rake, his father obsessed with respectable conduct. He stood at the end of the line. The last gentleman in an age where the term was used, by all, neither ironically or indifferently.

In 1935 George Dangerfield wrote The Strange Death of Liberal England. It sought nominally to explain the decline of the Liberal Party, yet showed a glimpse of something more profound, the death of the liberal spirit that animated the Edwardian Gentleman. The violence of the suffragettes, the threat of Civil War in Ireland and Asquith and Lloyd George's attacks on the House of Lords, in the years immediately proceeding and following Edward's death, marked the passing of the deferential, and largely peaceful, England that had come into being in the last decades of Victoria's reign. The nineteenth century had begun in violence and social unrest, yet ended in peace and prosperity. The twentieth century began like a lamb and yet its first half witnessed a resurgent barbarism, made all the more horrible by the power of modern technology. The Edwardian Gentleman could not have foreseen the Somme, or fascism, or the Battle of Britain, or nuclear weapons or the slow rot of democratic socialism. It was not merely that these things came as a surprise to him, if he lived long enough to see them, but that they were so alien to his nature and being. Having gotten "far enough ahead of barbarism" a slide back was inconceivable. A century after Good King Edward's death we honour his memory, and provide for ourselves and our posterity, by seeking to revive the sprit he and his age represented. We borrow the old cry, which greeted the accession of his son George V, to new and old purposes:

The Edwardian Gentleman is Dead! Long Live the Edwardian Gentleman!

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A Funeral: When the sun of the Old World set in a dying blaze of splendour never to be seen again

The Funeral 100 years ago of His Imperial Majesty, King Edward the Seventh.



SO GORGEOUS WAS THE SPECTACLE on the May morning of 1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England that the crowd, waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admiration. In scarlet and blue and green and purple, three by three the sovereigns rode through the palace gates, with plumed helmets, gold braid, crimson sashes, and jeweled orders flashing in the sun. After them came five heirs apparent, forty more imperial or royal highnesses, seven queens—four dowager and three regnant—and a scattering of special ambassadors from uncrowned countries. Together they represented seventy nations in the greatest assemblage of royalty and rank ever gathered in one place and, of its kind, the last. The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history’s clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again.

In the center of the front row rode the new king, George V, flanked on his left by the Duke of Connaught, the late king’s only surviving brother, and on his right by a personage to whom, acknowledged The Times, “belongs the first place among all the foreign mourners,” who “even when relations are most strained has never lost his popularity amongst us”—William II, the German Emperor. Mounted on a gray horse, wearing the scarlet uniform of a British Field Marshal, carrying the baton of that rank, the Kaiser had composed his features behind the famous upturned mustache in an expression “grave even to severity.” Of the several emotions churning his susceptible breast, some hints exist in his letters. “I am proud to call this place my home and to be a member of this royal family,” he wrote home after spending the night in Windsor Castle in the former apartments of his mother. Sentiment and nostalgia induced by these melancholy occasions with his English relatives jostled with pride in his supremacy among the assembled potentates and with a fierce relish in the disappearance of his uncle from the European scene. He had come to bury Edward his bane; Edward the arch plotter, as William conceived it, of Germany’s encirclement; Edward his mother’s brother whom he could neither bully nor impress, whose fat figure cast a shadow between Germany and the sun. “He is Satan. You cannot imagine what a Satan he is!”

(Read on....)

This verdict, announced by the Kaiser before a dinner of three hundred guests in Berlin in 1907, was occasioned by one of Edward’s continental tours undertaken with clearly diabolical designs at encirclement. He had spent a provocative week in Paris, visited for no good reason the King of Spain (who had just married his niece), and finished with a visit to the King of Italy with obvious intent to seduce him from his Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria. The Kaiser, possessor of the least inhibited tongue in Europe, had worked himself into a frenzy ending in another of those comments that had periodically over the past twenty years of his reign shattered the nerves of diplomats.

Happily the Encircler was now dead and replaced by George who, the Kaiser told Theodore Roosevelt a few days before the funeral, was “a very nice boy” (of forty-five, six years younger than the Kaiser). “He is a thorough Englishman and hates all foreigners but I do not mind that as long as he does not hate Germans more than other foreigners.” Alongside George, William now rode confidently, saluting as he passed the regimental colors of the 1st Royal Dragoons of which he was honorary colonel. Once he had distributed photographs of himself wearing their uniform with the Delphic inscription written above his signature, “I bide my time.” Today his time had come; he was supreme in Europe.

Behind him rode the widowed Queen Alexandra’s two brothers, King Frederick of Denmark and King George of the Hellenes; her nephew, King Haakon of Norway; and three kings who were to lose their thrones: Alfonso of Spain, Manuel of Portugal and, wearing a silk turban, King Ferdinand of Bulgaria who annoyed his fellow sovereigns by calling himself Czar and kept in a chest a Byzantine Emperor’s full regalia, acquired from a theatrical costumer, against the day when he should reassemble the Byzantine dominions beneath his scepter.

Dazzled by these “splendidly mounted princes,” as The Times called them, few observers had eyes for the ninth king, the only one among them who was to achieve greatness as a man. Despite his great height and perfect horsemanship, Albert, King of the Belgians, who disliked the pomp of royal ceremony, contrived in that company to look both embarrassed and absentminded. He was then thirty-five and had been on the throne barely a year. In later years when his face became known to the world as a symbol of heroism and tragedy, it still always wore that abstracted look, as if his mind were on something else.

The future source of tragedy, tall, corpulent, and corseted, with green plumes waving from his helmet, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir of the old Emperor Franz Josef, rode on Albert’s right, and on his left another scion who would never reach his throne, Prince Yussuf, heir of the Sultan of Turkey. After the kings came the royal highnesses: Prince Fushimi, brother of the Emperor of Japan; Grand Duke Michael, brother of the Czar of Russia; the Duke of Aosta in bright blue with green plumes, brother of the King of Italy; Prince Carl, brother of the King of Sweden; Prince Henry, consort of the Queen of Holland; and the Crown Princes of Serbia, Rumania, and Montenegro. The last named, Prince Danilo, “an amiable, extremely handsome young man of delightful manners,” resembled the Merry Widow’s lover in more than name, for, to the consternation of British functionaries, he had arrived the night before accompanied by a “charming young lady of great personal attractions” whom he introduced as his wife’s lady in waiting with the explanation that she had come to London to do some shopping.

A regiment of minor German royalty followed: rulers of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Waldeck-Pyrmont, Saxe-Coburg Gotha, of Saxony, Hesse, Württemberg, Baden, and Bavaria, of whom the last, Crown Prince Rupprecht, was soon to lead a German army in battle. There were a Prince of Siam, a Prince of Persia, five princes of the former French royal house of Orléans, a brother of the Khedive of Egypt wearing a gold-tasseled fez, Prince Tsia-tao of China in an embroidered light-blue gown whose ancient dynasty had two more years to run, and the Kaiser’s brother, Prince Henry of Prussia, representing the German Navy, of which he was Commander in Chief. Amid all this magnificence were three civilian-coated gentlemen, M. Gaston-Carlin of Switzerland, M. Pichon, Foreign Minister of France, and former President Theodore Roosevelt, special envoy of the United States.

Edward, the object of this unprecedented gathering of nations, was often called the “Uncle of Europe,” a title which, insofar as Europe’s ruling houses were meant, could be taken literally. He was the uncle not only of Kaiser Wilhelm but also, through his wife’s sister, the Dowager Empress Marie of Russia, of Czar Nicolas II. His own niece Alix was the Czarina; his daughter Maud was Queen of Norway; another niece, Ena, was Queen of Spain; a third niece, Marie, was soon to be Queen of Rumania. The Danish family of his wife, besides occupying the throne of Denmark, had mothered the Czar of Russia and supplied kings to Greece and Norway. Other relatives, the progeny at various removes of Queen Victoria’s nine sons and daughters, were scattered in abundance throughout the courts of Europe.

Yet not family feeling alone nor even the suddenness and shock of Edward’s death—for to public knowledge he had been ill one day and dead the next—accounted for the unexpected flood of condolences at his passing. It was in fact a tribute to Edward’s great gifts as a sociable king which had proved invaluable to his country. In the nine short years of his reign England’s splendid isolation had given way, under pressure, to a series of “understandings” or attachments, but not quite alliances—for England dislikes the definitive—with two old enemies, France and Russia, and one promising new power, Japan. The resulting shift in balance registered itself around the world and affected every state’s relations with every other. Though Edward neither initiated nor influenced his country’s policy, his personal diplomacy helped to make the change possible.

Taken as a child to visit France, he had said to Napoleon III: “You have a nice country. I would like to be your son.” This preference for things French, in contrast to or perhaps in protest against his mother’s for the Germanic, lasted, and after her death was put to use. When England, growing edgy over the challenge implicit in Germany’s Naval Program of 1900, decided to patch up old quarrels with France, Edward’s talents as Roi Charmeur smoothed the way. In 1903 he went to Paris, disregarding advice that an official state visit would find a cold welcome. On his arrival the crowds were sullen and silent except for a few taunting cries of “Vivent les Boers!” and “Vive Fashoda!” which the King ignored. To a worried aide who muttered, “The French don’t like us,” he replied, “Why should they?” and continued bowing and smiling from his carriage.

For four days he made appearances, reviewed troops at Vincennes, attended the races at Longchamps, a gala at the Opéra, a state banquet at the Elysée, a luncheon at the Quai d’Orsay and, at the theater, transformed a chill into smiles by mingling with the audience in the entr’acte and paying gallant compliments in French to a famous actress in the lobby. Everywhere he made gracious and tactful speeches about his friendship and admiration for the French, their “glorious traditions,” their “beautiful city,” for which he confessed an attachment “fortified by many happy memories,” his “sincere pleasure” in the visit, his belief that old misunderstandings are “happily over and forgotten,” that the mutual prosperity of France and England was interdependent and their friendship his “constant preoccupation.” When he left, the crowds now shouted, “Vive notre roi!” “Seldom has such a complete change of attitude been seen as that which has taken place in this country. He has won the hearts of all the French,” a Belgian diplomat reported. The German ambassador thought the King’s visit was “a most odd affair,” and supposed that an Anglo-French rapprochement was the result of a “general aversion to Germany.” Within a year, after hard work by ministers settling disputes, the rapprochement became the Anglo-French Entente, signed in April, 1904.

Germany might have had an English entente for herself had not her leaders, suspecting English motives, rebuffed the overtures of the Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, in 1899 and again in 1901. Neither the shadowy Holstein who conducted Germany’s foreign affairs from behind the scenes nor the elegant and erudite Chancellor, Prince Bülow, nor the Kaiser himself was quite sure what they suspected England of but they were certain it was something perfidious. The Kaiser always wanted an agreement with England if he could get one without seeming to want it. Once, affected by English surroundings and family sentiment at the funeral of Queen Victoria, he allowed himself to confess the wish to Edward. “Not a mouse could stir in Europe without our permission,” was the way he visualized an Anglo-German alliance. But as soon as the English showed signs of willingness, he and his ministers veered off, suspecting some trick. Fearing to be taken advantage of at the conference table, they preferred to stay away altogether and depend upon an ever-growing navy to frighten the English into coming to terms.

Bismarck had warned Germany to be content with land power, but his successors were neither separately nor col- lectively Bismarcks. He had pursued clearly seen goals unswervingly; they groped for larger horizons with no clear idea of what they wanted. Holstein was a Machiavelli without a policy who operated on only one principle: suspect everyone. Bülow had no principles; he was so slippery, lamented his colleague Admiral Tirpitz, that compared to him an eel was a leech. The flashing, inconstant, always freshly inspired Kaiser had a different goal every hour, and practiced diplomacy as an exercise in perpetual motion.

— Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August

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Putting King Eddy Back Together Again

This 6th of May, it will be 100 years since our patron king and the great Edwardian era passed away.

His Imperial Majesty King Edward The Seventh in Coronation Robes
As Barbara Tuchman described in The Guns of August, the funeral of Edward VII marked "the greatest assemblage of royalty and rank ever gathered in one place and, of its kind, the last". The reign of "the Peacemaker" arguably represents the high water mark of civilisation, which came to a crashing and inglorious end all across Christian Europe soon after his death. Old Bertie famously had a girth the size of Humpty Dumpty; alas, all we king's men and all the king's horses haven't (yet) been able to put King Eddy back together again.

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"minority it's totally safe to be racist towards"

A pro-British movie? About Queen Victoria? The historian Andrew Roberts gives us the astonishing news:

For decades Hollywood has treated its audiences like morons, straitjacketing complex historical issues into goodies versus baddies. A classic example is the recent release Valkyrie, in which the German generals' assassination plot against Hitler is presented as having been launched in order to promote human rights and the decent treatment of minorities. The fact that Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, the undeniably brave would-be assassin described Poles as "an unbelievable rabble" of "Jews and mongrels" is conveniently forgotten.

The Young Victoria, released in Britain next month, could not be more different. In it we experience the joy of witnessing the highly political Bedchamber Crisis of 1839 being acted out between the Whig Lord Melbourne and the Tory Sir Robert Peel, something I never thought I would ever see on the silver screen. Like A Man For All Seasons and Oliver Cromwell, two excellent historical movies also based closely on fact, Victoria works because the viewer is not patronised or told what to think.

A movie with a scene about The Bedchamber Crisis? I'm about to faint. Could a movie about the repeal of the Corn Laws be far off? Snap out of it. Snap. Out. Of. It.

It is probably too much to hope that Hollywood has fundamentally altered its view of the English – we are still the minority it's totally safe to be racist towards – but Victoria allows us a glimpse of how good Hollywood history movies could be if they didn't exude such prejudice against us and our past.

I'm not sure if racist is quite the word. The older usage of race roughly corresponds to ethnicity today. In the modern sense the British are not a race, nor are they really an ethnicity. Though Canadian census forms do consider British to be an ethnicity. British is a nationality (unless Mr Salmond has his way). It's a quibble, I know. Roberts' essential point is correct. There are things you get away with saying and implying about Britain and the British that would land you before a court in many countries, if said about anyone else.

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The King in Colour

A rare colour image of King Edward VII taking a breather during a stroll through a Scottish estate in full Highland costume in the autumn of 1909. Recently discovered in the home of the banker Lionel de Rothschild, who took the photo, the image of the King was taken on one of the banker's regular trips to Scotland for the autumn grouse season, at Tulchan in Strathspey, 15 miles from Balmoral. Rothschild was an enthusiastic amateur photographer who experimented in taking colour pictures, called autochromes, and went about perfecting the new process. Eight months after it was taken, Edward died and George V took ascended the throne.

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Georgivs V, Rex Imperator

His reign will be remembered always in history because of the [First] World War and all the agony it caused. During that time the King played his part with a courage and sympathy which were recognised somehow by the whole people. Many crowns fell into the dust, many kings departed, but when peace came King George stood on his balcony and looked down on vast cheering crowds among whom were many of his soldiers, and he knew that he held the loyalty of his folk...

He holds it because of certain qualities of character which we like to think are very English - in simplicity, in honesty, in sense of duty, and, perhaps one may add, in sense of humour.

An excerpt from the book entitled: "The Book of The King's Jubilee", Edited by: Sir Philip Gibbs, KBE. Published by: Hutchison & Co. Ltd. London 1935.

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An Ordinary Sort of Fellow

The Father King at Balmoral with sons Edward, George and Henry. Randolph Churchill claimed that George V was a strict father, to the extent that his children were terrified of him. The King was apparently quoted as saying: "My father was frightened of his mother, I was frightened of my father, and I am damned well going to see to it that my children are frightened of me."

The King-Emperor was a rather stern, dull and conventional figure who abided by the moral strictures of his time; he did not partake in the wine and womanizing ways of his father, he preferred collecting stamps. He preferred the simple, almost quiet, life in marked contrast to his parents. Even his official biographer despaired, writing: "He may be all right as a young midshipman and a wise old king, but when he was Duke of York ... he did nothing at all but shoot animals and stick in stamps."

During the Great War when H. G. Wells wrote about Britain's "alien and uninspiring court", George famously replied: "I may be uninspiring, but I'll be damned if I'm alien." He would do whatever was required, including changing the family name to Windsor. Dull and dutiful to the end, he had the ideal disposition for a wartime King, which would prove to be the steady hand that guided Britain from the brink, while other European crowns fell into the dust.

Judging by the long success of our current Queen, boring is a blessing for monarchs, for kings there is a kind of virtue in being dull. By the silver jubilee of his reign in 1935, George V had become a well-loved king, saying in response to the crowd's adulation, "I cannot understand it, after all I am only a very ordinary sort of fellow."

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Nine Kings

Pretty near 100 years ago, nine Kings assembled at Buckingham Palace for the funeral of His Imperial Majesty, King Edward VII.

May 1910: From left to right, back row: Haakon VII of Norway, Ferdinand I of Bulgaria, Manuel II of Portugal, Wilhelm II of Germany, George I of Greece and Albert I Of Belgium. Front row: Alphonso XIII of Spain, George V and Frederick VIII of Denmark. The funeral on 20th May was the largest gathering of European royalty – and its last hurrah. Also present at the funeral was Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, whose assassination four years later would spark the Great War – which collapsed many royal dynasties of Europe. Manuel of Portugal would be driven from his throne by revolutionaries within months of this picture. George of Greece would be assassinated. Alphonso, Wilhelm and Ferdinand would lose their thrones.

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Old Bertie

His Imperial Majesty The King-Emperor

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His Imperial Majesty The King-Emperor

King Edward VII (1901-1910) of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions,
Emperor of India and "Uncle of Europe".
Perhaps the most resplendent and radiantly impressive
portrait of any king of any era.
— Glorious —

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ELIZABETH THE GREAT

HER MAJESTY THE QUEEN may not think it worth a mass, worth a toast, or even worth a stamp, but it surely must be considered something of a milestone to have reached the zenith in age of any British monarch since before King Edward the Confessor unified England at the dawn of the second Christian millenium. We may permit ourselves a brief moment of rejoicing at the fact that in the thousand year history of our ancient English Crown, the seed that gave birth to America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand - indeed the shared symbolic patrimony of the English-speaking peoples - never before have we witnessed such longevity.

Yet our Noble Queen has not even reached the youngish age of 82, and could conceivably still go for many more years to come. In five years we will celebrate Her Majesty's diamond jubilee, and watch her surpass George III's almost 60 years on the British throne; in 2015, she will become the longest reigning monarch in "Britain's" history, surpassing that of Queen Victoria, who ascended the throne as a teenager; and if she lives to 99, she will see the sun set on the Sun King, Louis the XIV, also known as Louis the Great, who ruled France for 72 years and currently holds the record for the longest reign of any European monarch. All are entirely within the realm of possibility.*

To the republicans with their fresh, weak-kneed demands that she now retire to make way for their inglorious cause, we say bah humbug!


Long May She Reign Over Us!


God Save The Queen!


Long Live King Edward!


* Not so within the realm of possibility is the nominal reign of 82 years, 9 months by Sobhuza II of Swaziland, which is the longest precisely dated monarchical reign on record and the longest documented reign of any monarch since antiquity. Only Pepi II Neferkare of Ancient Egypt and Taejo of the ancient Korean kingdom of Goguryeo are claimed to have reigned longer.

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"Britain's Real Monarch" and more pulp fiction nonsense...

THE THEORY ABOUT the illegitimacy of Britain's monarchs since Edward IV has been around since..., well, Edward IV. It is amazing how succeeding generations of quack historians - most recently, that diminutive manservant from Black Adder who is pushing a treatment of the matter on the History Channel - "discover" it and attempt to flog it to the (increasingly indifferent) masses. The whole idea of five centuries of illegitimate monarchs is, in actual fact, bunk of the first rank, for reasons which I shall explain here.

The conjecture that Edward IV was a bastard was active in his lifetime, and there is, in fact, reason to believe that the conjecture may have been well-founded. Some recent scholarship suggests strongly that Richard, duke of York, was on campaign in France and nowhere near his wife, Cicely Neville, at any time when Edward could plausibly have been conceived. The record indicates that this possibility was widely whispered in Edward's lifetime, and that Edward's supporters (and ironically, the Tudor monarchs) fought actively to disprove the rumours.

All this matters, in principle, because Edward's claim to the throne derived from the descendency of his father, Richard of York, from Edward III (through his grandfather Edmund, duke of York, third son of Edward III; and his father Richard, earl of Cambridge, who was attainted of high treason by Henry V and executed in 1415). In many respects, Edward's claim to the throne was on the same order of strength as that of Henry VI, who descended from the second son of Edward III, John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster. As we all know, the fact of this strong claim, which provoked Richard's persecution at the hands of Henry VI's wife, Margaret of Anjou, touched off the Wars of the Roses. But I digress...

If Edward had, in fact, been born of a father other than Richard, he would not have been of the royal blood, and would therefore have been entirely without a legitimate claim to the throne. More to the point, however - given that Edward's brother, Richard III, who undoubtedly was legitimate and therefore definitely of the royal blood, was killed on Bosworth Field by Henry (VII) Tudor in 1485 - are the implications with respect to the Tudor dynasty. Henry VIII's royal blood derived in part from that of his mother, Elizabeth, who was the daughter of Edward IV. The theorists point out that the loss of this link would upset the rightful order of precedence to the succession.

Henry VIII was, however, also of the royal blood in his father’s right – his father was great-great-grandson of John of Gaunt. The bastardy of Edward, even if fact, would therefore not sever the blood continuity of Britain's monarchs from Henry VI to his Tudor successors on the throne. Let me now come to the point of my argument, which is three-fold: first, that the potential bastardy of Edward cannot now be lawfully established; second, that Edward’s bastardy, even if proved, would not substantially affect the legitimacy of Tudor and subsequent claims to the throne; and third, that even if Edward had been a bastard, and even if that bastardy had in fact severed the blood continuity of the Crown, it would not finally matter in the slightest.

It is self-evident that the information available to us today is insufficient to rule on a point of fact that is 563 years in the past, especially on an issue of such vast consequence. The evidence was insufficient at the time, and has been so considered ever since.

Second: the Tudor dynasty’s blood links to the Plantagenets derived from both sides of Henry VIII's parentage. So issues of precedence aside, continuity of the royal blood would not have been fully interrupted by Edward’s supposed bastardy. And what significance can we meaningfully attach to such second-order issues of precedence, in a century that saw the Wars of the Roses - the storm sown by the usurpation of the Crown of Richard II by Henry (IV) Bolingbroke – pass the Crown three times between competing branches of the same family?

Which brings me to my final point. The right of kings, within the span and scope of British history and law, does not derive exclusively from birth, but from the fact of rule which may, under exceptional circumstances, be established by means other than rightful precedence or even of blood inheritance. Such circumstances obtained, for example, in the cases of Henry Bolingbroke, Henry Tudor, and William the Conqueror. In the latter case, the right to the throne was established and recognized by outright force of conquest, irrespective of any (in fact extant) blood ties to a prior king.

These arguments are irrefutably and completely vindicated and upheld by over five centuries of British history - those centuries establishing fact and precedent that by themselves are absolutely unassailable under British constitutional law.

So much for the dime-novel bunk. God save the Queen.

Walsingham (originally posted here)

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