ON THE DEATH OF KING EDWARD VII
Delivered in the British House of Commons, May 12th, 1910
The late King, who has been suddenly taken away from us, had, at the time of his death, not yet completed the tenth year of his reign. Those years were crowded with moving and stirring events, both abroad, in the Empire, and here at home. In our relations with foreign countries they have been years of growing friendships, of new understandings, of stronger and surer safeguards for the peace of mankind. Within the Empire during the same time the sense of interdependence, the consciousness of common interests and common risks, the ever-tightening bonds of corporate unity have been developed and vivified as they had never been before. Here at home, as though it were by way of contrast, controversial issues of the gravest kind—economic, social, and constitutional—have ripened into a rapid maturity.
Sir, in all these multiform manifestations of our national and imperial life, history will assign a part of singular dignity and authority to the great Ruler whom we have lost. In external affairs his powerful personal influence was steadily and zealously directed to the avoidance not only of war, but of the causes and pretexts of war, and he well earned the title by which he will always be remembered, "the Peacemaker of the World."
Within the boundaries of his own Empire, by his intimate knowledge of its component parts, by his broad and elastic sympathy not only with ambitions, and aspirations, but with the sufferings and the hardships of his people, by his response to any and every appeal whether to the sense of justice or the spirit of compassion, he won a degree of loyalty, affection, and confidence which few Sovereigns have ever enjoyed. At home, we all recognize that, above the din and dust of our hard-fought controversies, detached from party and attached only to the common interests, we had in him an arbiter ripe in experience, judicial in temper, at once a reverent worshipper of our traditions and a watchful guardian of our constitutional liberties.
One is tempted, indeed constrained, on such an occasion as this to ask what were the qualities which enabled a man called comparatively late in life to new duties of unexampled complexity—what were the qualities which in practice proved him so admirably fitted to the task, and have given him an enduring and illustrious record among the rulers and governors of the nations? I should be disposed to assign the first place to what sounds a commonplace—but in its persistent and unfailing exercise is one of the rarest of virtues—his strong, abiding, dominating sense of public duty.
King Edward, be it remembered, was a man of many and varied interests. He was a sportsman in the best sense, an ardent and discriminating patron of the Arts, and as well equipped as any man of his time for the give-and-take of social intercourse; wholly free from the prejudices and narrowing rules of caste; at home in all companies; an enfranchised citizen of the world. To such a man, endowed as he was by nature, placed where he was by fortune and by circumstances, there was open, if he had chosen to enter it, an unlimited field for self-indulgence. But, Sir, as every one will acknowledge who was brought into daily contact with him in the sphere of affairs, his duty to the State always came first. In this great business community there was no better man of business, no man by whom the humdrum obligations—punctuality, method, preciseness, and economy of time and speech—were more keenly recognized or more severely practised. I speak with the privilege of close experience when I say that wherever he was, whatever may have been his apparent preoccupations, in the transactions of the business of the State there were never any arrears, there was never any trace of confusion, there was never any moment of avoidable delay.
Next to these, Sir—I am still in the domain of practice and administration—I should put his singular, perhaps an unrivalled, tact in the management of men, and a judgment of intuitive shrewdness as to the best outlet from perplexed and often baffling situations. He had, in its highest and best development, the genius of common sense. These rare gifts of practical efficiency were, during the whole of his Kingship, yoked to the service of a great ideal. He was animated every day of his Sovereignty by the thought that he was at once the head and the chief servant of that vast complex organism which we call the British Empire. He recognized in the fullest degree both the powers and the limitations of a Constitutional Monarch. Here, at home, he was, though no politician, as every one knows, a keen Social Reformer. He loved his people at home and over the seas. Their interests were his interests; their fame was his fame. He had no self apart from them.
I will not touch for more than a moment on more delicate and sacred ground—on his personal charm, the warmth and wealth of his humanity; his unfailing considerateness for all who in any capacity were permitted to work for him. I will only say, in this connection that no man in our time has been more justly beloved by his family and his friends, and no Ruler in our or in any time has been more sincerely true, more unswervingly loyal, more uniformly kind to his advisers and his servants. By the unsearchable counsels of the Disposer of Events he has been called suddenly, and without warning, to his account. We are still dazed under the blow which has befallen us. It is too soon, as yet, even to attempt to realize its full meaning, but this, at least, we may say at once and with full assurance, that he has left to his people a memory and an example which they will never forget, a memory of great opportunities greatly employed, and an example which the humblest of his subjects may treasure and strive to follow, of simplicity, courage, self-denial, tenacious devotion up to the last moment of conscious life to work, to duty, and to service.
—The Right Honourable Herbert Henry Asquith