When England was at its most elegant

Telegraph

29-03-2025

'Here are… people… accustomed to the intimate society of princes, politicians, financiers, wits, beauties, and other makers of history, yet are apparently content with desultory chatter and make-believe occupation throughout the long hours of an idle day.' The passage is from Vita Sackville-West's The Edwardians, a bestseller of post-crash 1930. Set in 1905, the novel drew on the author's aristocratic youth, a procession of diamond-festooned heroines, 'trim waists cutting their hour-glass pattern above the flowing out of the skirt', lost in an array of stupendous dinners and balls, in the wake of which their lovers corridor-creep for assignations in big-house bedrooms.
Next month, The King's Gallery at Buckingham Palace will be playing host to The Edwardians: Age of Elegance, an exhibition of more than 300 items which will plunge visitors into the opulence and pleasure-seeking of the years that immediately preceded the Great War. Around half the exhibits will be on display for the first time, a cornucopia of jewels, clothes, paintings, photographs, books, sculpture and ceramics by this brief era's most illustrious players, including John Singer Sargent, Frederic Leighton, Edward Burne-Jones, Carl Fabergé, Oscar Wilde and Edward Elgar.
At its heart sit two of our history's most modish royal couples: King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, and their successors, King George V and Queen Mary. Father and son were not obviously alike. Where Edward VII was a 48-inch waisted, oft-plastered hedonist with a notorious 'sex chair' (very much not in the Royal Collection), his heir was uxorious, a devout Anglican, who read the Bible daily, and assumed a quasi-priestly role towards his countrymen. Yet, the cultures they commanded over were recognisably the same: a life of luxurious leisure, made thrilling by innovative technology, global travel, and flourishing art and literature.
Among the exhibition's most dazzling portraits, Queen Alexandra painted by François Flameng epitomises the fairy-tale allure of this existence. The Queen, decreed by Vogue to be 'head of fashion throughout the British dominions', sports the riband and star of the Order of the Garter, her Cartier collier résille necklace, and the 105.6 carat Koh-i-nûr diamond as a brooch. Her pearls reach to her lap, the gauze about her shoulders suggesting fairy wings.
Edwardian culture has traditionally been regarded as some golden interlude between the sun never setting on the Victorian empire and the seismic shifts of the First World War. However, under the influence of historians such as Alwyn Turner and his Little Englanders, published last year, it is increasingly seen as a moment of unrest, political anxiety, and social change.
'For an age of glamour, there is so much more beneath the surface,' observes Kathryn Jones, curator of the King's Gallery exhibition. 'This was a period of transition, with Britain poised on the brink of the modern age, and Europe edging towards war. Our royal couples lived lavish, sociable, fast-paced lives, embracing new trends and technologies.'
Glamour is never not in evidence, whether in Alexandra's gobstopper pearl and diamond Dagmar necklace, or Mary's Louis XVI-style 'Love Trophy' collar. Portraits by society darlings Philip de László and Sargent capture sumptuous style, as tottering knick-knackery evokes the modishly cluttered interiors of the couples' private residences of Marlborough House and Sandringham. Charles Baugniet's After the Ball presents the world's most decorous morning-after image: a beauty of the sort who would come to preside over Edwardian society, still in ball gown and dancing slippers, slumbering on a sofa in thin dawn light.
And, yet, the days of this world were numbered. War was brewing, social unrest escalating, whether trade union activism, or suffragettes planting bombs. Meanwhile, the modernisation that saw Alexandra snapping away with her portable Kodak was ushering in social and political change.
It is change we see reflected in E M Forster's novels, whether A Room with a View's lower middle-class romantic George Emerson, or Howards End's townhouses demolished for flats, and culture-obsessed clerk Leonard Bast. And here I must declare an s-shaped interest: having been captured aged 20 swanning about in Merchant Ivory's rendition of Howards End, all high collar and piled-up curls.
For, even if we know that splendour was by no means the Edwardian era's sole story – rights restricted, the corsetry crippling – we will never fail to swoon over such moneyed magnificence. Indeed, we will be enchanted by sophisticates such as Sackville-West's Lady Roehampton 'oyster satin flowing out at her feet, pearls vanishing into the valley between her breasts, pearls looped round her wrists'. If the Palace gift shop fails to include copies of The Edwardians amid ropes of paste pearls, it will have missed a trick.