BOOKS
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sake, released from any religious significance and no longer a private
ceremonial of the aristocracy. It was the age of the plutocrat, who felt
no shame in displaying his wealth, and who reached his apogee in Eng–
land. Compared to the rest of what Victoria called "the royal mob,"
consisting in large part of her grandchildren, Edward was anti-snobbish–
if a willingness to accept Money as well as Rank can be so called- and
he outraged the anti-Semitic Austrian royalties, whose capital was prob–
ably the most distinguished J ewish center in the world, by his friendship
with Baron Hirsch. No wonder Sir Ernest Cassel came to England, and
there became Edward's closest friend and financial adviser. There was
plenty of anti-Semitism in England, of the nasty gossipy sort, but it did
not significantly interfere with the opportunity for financial and even
social success. Edward enjoyed the world of Jewish finance and the
"faster" aristocracy where all was permitted except to break the eleventh
commandment: "Thou shalt not be found out." Affairs were tolerated
when known only to the intimates of society; when publicized through the
law courts or in other ways, they then became inexcusable, and the
participants were "banished." He did not take seriously his mother's
warning that the life of ostentation would bring about a repetition of the
French Revolution. The Queen, in her comparative seclusion, saw the
upper classes as driving the rest of society to extremes, while Edward–
who knew something about it, from his incognito tour of the slums and
from sitting on Royal Commissions on the Aged Poor, Agricultural De–
pression, and the Housing of the Working Class-saw that the danger
lay not in the misbehavior at the top but in the suffering at the bottom.
A Tory himself (although preserving official impartiality) he was none–
theless sympathetic to the plight of the working classes; neither attitude
had much influence on what his Governments did.
As Sir Philip points out, England combines intense class conscious–
ness with a strong feeling, somewhat mitigated after 1914, that everyone
has the right to exploit the position into which he has either been born
or scrambled. Edward was a fine "upper bourgeois" king. His high living,
his gambling, his sex life, represented the beau ideal of every late
Victorian financier or businessman. What member of the upper bour–
geoisie would not have liked, in his heart of hearts, to be called, as
Edward was by Rudyard Kipling, "a corpulent voluptuary," or, by a
Greek equerry,
"un prince vraiment chic."
Edward's very vulgarity
stirred hope in the smallest businessman or stockbroker: he too could
behave like a king if he believed it of himself and had the cash. Sir
Philip quotes Namier's remark that "a man's status in English society has
always depended primarily upon his self-consciousness; for the Eng–
lish . . .
perceive and accept facts without anxiously inquiring into their
