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On the day following the death of King Edward, I obtained permission to see him lying in his death chamber. The little room had crimson hangings, and bright sunlight streamed through the windows upon the bed where the King lay with a look of dignity and peace. I was profoundly moved by the sight of the dead King who had been so vital, so full of human stuff, so friendly and helpful in all affairs of state, and with all conditions of men who came within his ken.

In spite of the severe discipline of his youth in the austere tradition of Queen Victoria—perhaps because of that—he had broken the gloomy spell of the Victorian Court, with its Puritanical narrowing influence on the social life of the people, and had restored a happier and more liberal spirit. Truly or not, he had had, as a young Prince of Wales, the reputation of being very much of a “rip,” and certain scandals among his private friends, with which his name was connected, had made many tongues wag. But he had long lived all that down when, in advanced middle age, he came to the throne, and no one brought up against him the heady indiscretions of youth.

He had played the game of kingship well and truly, with a desire for his people’s peace and welfare, and had given a new glamour to the Crown which had become rather dulled and cobwebbed during the long widowhood of the old Queen. In popular imagination he was the author of the Entente Cordiale with France, which seemed to be the sole guarantee of the peace of Europe against the growing menace of Germany, though now we know that it had other results. Anyhow, Edward VII, by some quality of character which was not based on exalted idealism but was perhaps woven with the genial wisdom of a man who had seen life in all its comedy and illusion, and had mellowed to it, stood high in the imagination of the world, and in the affection of his people. Now he lay with his scepter at his feet, asleep with all the ghosts of history.

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.

Among other royal events which I had to record was King George’s Coronation Progress through Scotland, which was full of picturesque scenes and romantic memories. The Scottish people were eager to prove their loyalty and for hundreds of miles along the roads of Scotland they gathered in vast cheering crowds, while all the way was guarded by Highland and Lowland troops of the Regular and Territorial Armies. For the first time I saw the fighting men of bonnie Scotland, and little dreamed then that I should see their splendid youth in the ordeal of battle, year after year, and foreign fields strewn with their bodies, as often I did, in Flanders and in France.

There were four or five correspondents, of whom I was one, allowed to travel with the King. We had one of the royal motor cars, and wherever the King drove, we followed next to his equerries and officers. It was an astonishing experience, for we were part of the royal procession and in the full tide of that immense, clamorous enthusiasm of vast and endless crowds which awaited the King’s coming. Our eyes tired of the triumphal arches, floral canopies, flag-covered cities and hamlets, through which we passed, and of those turbulent waves of human faces pressing close to our carriage. Our ears wearied of the unceasing din of cheers, the noise of great multitudes, the skirl of the pipes, the distressing repetition of “God Save the King” played by innumerable brass bands, sung for hundreds of miles by the crowds, by masses of school children, by Scottish maidens of the universities, by old farmers, standing bareheaded as the King passed. We pitied any man who had to pass his life in such a way, smiling, saluting, keeping the agony of weariness out of his eyes by desperate efforts.

I am bound to say that the correspondents’ car brightened up the royal procession considerably. One of our party was an Edinburgh correspondent, who has been made by nature in the image of a celebrated film actor of great fatness, with a cheery, full-moon face of benevolent aspect. The appearance of this figure immediately following the King, and so quick upon the heels of solemnity, had a devastating effect upon the crowds. They positively yelled with laughter, believing that they recognized their “movie” favorite. Highland soldiers, with their rifles at the “present,” stiff and impassive as statues, wilted, and grinned from ear to ear. Scottish lassies from the factories and farms, whose eyes had shone and cheeks flushed at the sight of the King, had a quick reaction, and shrieked with mirth.

They could not place the correspondents at all. Some thought we were “the foreign ambassadors.” Others put us down as private detectives. But the most astonishing theory as to our place and dignity in the procession was uttered by an old Scottish farmer at Perth. The King had halted to receive a loyal address, and the crowd was jammed tight against our carriage. We could hear the comments of the crowd and the usual question about our identity. The old farmer gazed at us with his blue eyes beneath shaggy brows, and plucked his sandy beard.

“Eh, mon,” he said, seriously, “they maun be the King’s barstards.”

I laughed from Perth to Stirling Castle, and back again to Edinburgh.

We dined in old castles, lunched with Scottish regiments, saw the old-time splendor of Holyrood at night, with old coaches filled with the beauty of Scottish ladies passing down the High Street where once, in these old wynds and courtyards, the nobility of Scotland lived and quarreled and fought, and where now barefoot bairns and ragged women dwell in paneled rooms in direst poverty. Again and again they sang old Jacobite songs as the King passed, forgetting his Hanoverian ancestry, and one sweet song to Bonnie Charlie—“Will ye no come back again?”—haunts me now, as I write.

With the King, we saw the great shipbuilding works on the Clyde, where thousands of riveters gathered round the King, cheering like demons, and looking rather like demons with their black faces and working overalls. The King was admirable in his manner to all of them, and, though his fatigue must have been great, his good nature enabled him to hide it. His laughter rang out loudest when he passed under the hulk of a ship on the stocks and saw scrawled hugely in chalk upon its plates: “Good old George! We want more Beer!”

Another great scene of which I was an eyewitness was the King’s Coronation Review of the British fleet at Spithead. It was a marvelous pageant of the grim and silent power of the British navy as the royal yacht passed down the long avenues of battleships and cruisers, in perfect line, enormous above the water line, terrible in the potentiality of their great guns. Every navy in the world had sent a battleship to salute the King-Admiral of the British navy. The Stars and Stripes, the Rising Sun of Japan, the long coils of the Chinese Dragon, the tricolor of France, the imperial colors of Germany, were among the flags, which included those of little nations, with a few destroyers and light cruisers as their naval strength.

All the ships were “dressed” and “manned,” with sailors standing on the yard arms and along the decks, and as the King’s yacht passed each ship, the royal salute was fired, and the crew cheered lustily in the echo of the guns. All but one ship, which was the Von der Thann of Germany. No sound of cheering came from that battleship, but the German crew maintained absolute silence. Few noticed it at the time, but I remarked it with uneasy foreboding.

I also contrasted it later with the greeting given to the Kaiser by a group of English people at Hamburg, not a year before the war, in which England and Germany devoted all their strength to each other’s destruction. I was on a voyage in one of the Castle Line boats, and we put off at Hamburg to be entertained by the Mayor in his palace of the Town Hall. The Kaiser was expected, and we lined up to await his arrival. It was heralded by the three familiar notes of his motor horn, and when he appeared there was a loud “Hip, hip, horrah!” from the English party. The Emperor acknowledged the greeting with a grim salute. He had no love for England then in his heart, and believed, I think, in that “unvermeidlicher Krieg”—that “unavoidable war”—which was already the text of German newspapers, though in England the warnings of a few men like Lord Roberts seemed to be the foolishness of old age, and popular imagination refused to believe in a world gone mad and tearing itself in pieces for no apparent cause.

When that war happened, I caught a glimpse, now and again, in lulls between its monstrous battles, of the man I had seen when he went weeping from the bedside of King Edward; whom I had seen bowing his head under the burden of the crown which came to him; whom I had followed in triumphant processions through his peaceful kingdom—peace seemed so lasting and secure, then—and who had come to visit his youth of the Empire, dying in heaps in defense of their race and power and tradition, as they truly believed, and as, indeed, was so, whatever the wickedness and folly that led to that massacre, on the part of statesmen of all countries who did not foresee and prevent the world conflict.

On his first visit the King was not allowed to get anywhere near the firing line, but was restricted to base areas and hospitals and convalescent camps, and distant views of the battlefields. On his second visit, he insisted upon going far forward, and would not be deterred by the generals, who, naturally, were intensely anxious for his safety.

With another war correspondent—Percival Phillips, I think—I went with the King over the Vimy Ridge where there was always, at that time, the chance of meeting a German shell, and to the top of “Whitesheet Hill,” which was a very warm place indeed a few days after the battle which captured it. The Prince of Wales was with his father, and by that time well hardened to the noise of guns and shell bursts. To the King it was all new, but he was perfectly at ease and lingered, far too long, as the generals thought, among the ruins of a convent, reduced to the size of a slag-heap, on the top of the hill looking over the German lines. As though they were aware of his visit, the Germans put down a very stiff dose of five-point-nines on the very spot where the King had been standing, but a few minutes too late, because he had just descended the slope of the hill and was examining one of the monster mine craters which we had blown at the beginning of the battle. He was there for ten minutes or so, and had hardly moved away before the Germans lengthened their range and laid down harassing fire around the crater. The King adjusted his steel hat, and laughed, while the Prince of Wales strolled about, looking rather bored.