Adventures in Journalism

by Philip Gibbs

His death chamber was disturbed by what seemed to me an outrageous invasion of vulgarity. In life King Edward had resented the click of the camera wherever he walked, but in death the cameramen had their will of him. A dozen or more of them surrounded his bed, snapping him at all angles, arranging the curtains for new effects of lights, fixing their lenses close to his dead face. There was something ghoulish in this photographic orgy about his deathbed.

The body of King Edward was removed to Westminster Hall, whose timbered roof has weathered seven centuries of English history, and there he lay in state, with four guardsmen, motionless, with reversed arms and heads bent, day and night, for nearly a week. That week was a revelation of the strange depths of emotion stirred among the people by his personality and passing. They were permitted to see him for the last time, and, without exaggeration, millions of people must have fallen into line for this glimpse of the dead King, to pay their last homage. From early morning until late night, unceasingly, there were queues of men and women of all ranks and classes, stretching away from Westminster Hall across the bridges, moving slowly forward. There was no preference for rank. Peers of the realm and ladies of quality fell into line with laboring men and women, slum folk, city folk, sporting touts, actors, women of Suburbia, ragamuffin boys, coster girls, and all manner of men who make up English life. History does not record any such demonstration of popular homage, except one other, afterward, when the English people passed in hundreds of thousands before the grave of the Unknown Soldier in Westminster Abbey.

I saw George V proclaimed King by Garter King-at-Arms and his heralds in their emblazoned tabards, from the wall of St. James’s Palace. Looking over the wall opposite, which enclosed the garden of Marlborough House, was the young Prince of Wales with his brothers and sister. That boy little guessed then that this was the beginning of a new chapter of history which would make him a captain in the greatest war of the world, where he would walk in the midst of death and see the flower of English youth cut down at his side.

At Windsor, in St. George’s Chapel, I saw the burial of King Edward. His body was drawn to the Castle on a gun carriage by bluejackets, and the music of Chopin’s Funeral March, that ecstasy of the spirit triumphing over death, preceded him up the castle hill. Against the gray old walls floral tributes were laid in masses from all the people, and their scent was rich and strong in the air. On the castle slopes where sunlight lay, spring flowers were blooming, as though to welcome this home-coming of the King. Kings and princes from all nations, in brilliant uniforms, crowded into St. George’s Chapel, and it was a foreign King and Emperor who sorted them out, put them into their right places, acted as Master of the Ceremony, and led forward Queen Alexandra, as though he were the chief mourner, and not King George. It was the German Kaiser. The Kings of Spain and Portugal wept unaffectedly, like two schoolboys who had lost their father, and indeed, this burial of King Edward in the lovely chapel where so many of his family lie sleeping was strangely affecting, because it seemed like the passing of some historic era, and was so, though we did not know it then, certainly.

The task fell to me of describing the coronation of the new King in Westminster Abbey, and of all the great scenes of which I have been an eyewitness, this remains in my memory as the most splendid and impressive. As a lover of history, that old Abbey, which has stood as the symbol of English faith and rule since Norman days, is to me always a haunted place, filled with a myriad ghosts of the old vital past. And the coronation of an English king, in its ancient ritual, blots out modernity, and takes one back to the root sentiment of the race which is our blood and heritage. One may, in philosophical moments, think kingship an outworn institution, and jeer at all its pomp and pageantry. One’s democratic soul may thrust all its ritual into the lumber room of antique furniture, but something of the old romance of its meaning, something of its warmth and color in the tapestry of English history, something of that code of chivalry and knighthood by which the King was dedicated to the service of his peoples, stirs in the most prosaic mind alive when a king is crowned again in the Abbey Church of Westminster.

The ceremony is, indeed, the old ritual of knighthood, ending with the crowning act. The arms and emblems of kingship are laid upon the altar, as when a knight kept vigil. He is stripped of his outer garments, and stands before the people, bare of all the apparel which hides his simplicity, as a common man.

There was a dramatic moment when this unclothing happened to King George. The Lord Chamberlain could not untie the bows and knots of his cloak and surcoat, and the ceremony was held up by an awkward pause. But he was a man of action, and pulling out a clasp knife from his pocket, slashed at the ribbons till they were cut....

Looking down the great nave from a gallery above, I saw the long purple robes of the peers and peeresses, the rows of coronets, the little pages, like fairy-tale princes, on the steps of the sanctuary, the Prince of Wales himself like a Childe Harold, in silk doublet and breeches, the Archbishop and Bishops, Kings-at-Arms, and officers of state, busy about the person of the King who was helpless in their hands as a victim of sacrifice, clothing him, anointing him, crowning him, before the act of homage in which all the Lords of England moved forward in their turn to swear fealty to their liege, who, in his turn, had sworn to uphold the laws and liberties of England. A cynic might scoff. But no man with an artist’s eye, and no man with Chaucer and Shakespeare in his heart, could fail to see the beauty of this mediæval picture, nor fail to feel the old thrill in that heritage of ancient customs which belong to the poetry and the heart of England.

I, at least, was moved by this sentiment, being, in those days, an incurable romantic, though the war killed some of my romanticism. But even romance is not proof against the material needs of human flesh, and as the ceremony went on, hour after hour, I felt the sharp bite of hunger. We had to be in our places in the Abbey by half-past seven that morning, and keep them until three in the afternoon. I had come provided with half a dozen sandwiches, but, with a foolish trust in hungry human nature, left them for a few minutes while I walked to the end of the gallery to see another aspect of the picture below. When I came back, my sandwiches had disappeared. I strongly suspected, without positive proof, a famous lady novelist who was in the next seat to mine. It was a deplorable tragedy to me, as after the ceremony I had to write a whole page for my paper, and there was no time for food.