Read "His most Gracious Majesty King Edward VII" by Marie Belloc Lowndes online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
The King has on several occasions, notably in his Message to his People, published on his accession, expressed his resolve to follow in the footsteps of his late deeply-lamented mother in fulfilling the great and sacred responsibilities which at her death he was summoned to undertake. The chief of these responsibilities is that which relates to high State policy, and especially to the intricate and delicate problems arising out of our relations with foreign Powers.
Now, not the least service which Queen Victoria rendered to her people, as Lord Salisbury said in the eloquent tribute which he paid to her memory in the House of Lords, was her constant and rigorous supervision over public affairs. The people saw only the result, the finished policy, associated in their minds with the personality of some popular Minister. What they did not know was how far that policy had been modified, perhaps even completely recast, by the sagacious counsels of their Sovereign, or what pitfalls had been avoided by her warnings, frankly offered, yet never obstinately pressed upon the chosen representatives of her beloved subjects. "Let us have the Queen's opinion," said Lord Clarendon, one of the shrewdest of her Foreign Ministers. "It is always worth hearing, even if you do not agree with it. " And Lord Kimberley confessed that when he was at the Foreign Office he had a difference of opinion with Queen Victoria in regard to an important matter. After discussion Her Majesty, though unconvinced, yielded to her Minister; but the event proved that she was right and the Minister wrong.