KING EDWARD’S COURT

Hokitika Guardian, 25 July 1930, Page 1

KING EDWARD’S COURT

SIR LIONEL GUST’S MEMORIES. LONDON, June 12, The late Sir Lionel Gust was in charge of the National Portrait Gallery before being appointed to the care of the art collections and pictures of the Royal Palaces, and it was in connection with the latter duties that he was brought into close and frequent contact with the late King Edward and had many opportunities of judging him as a man rather than a monarch. As Sir Lionel relates in the newlypublished book “King Edward VII and His Court,” the King knew little about art, but he had a real pride in the proper keeping and effective exhibition of his possessions, which had been rather neglected during the last 20 years of Victoria’s reign. Sometimes various details brought before him were of intimate personal of family concern. Nothing had been changed at Windsor in tire 40 years between the deaths of the Prince Consort and Queen Victoria; even the medicine glass used in the Prince’s last illness was still on the table at his bedside. Relics of this kind were respectively placed in appropriate museums or disposed of. Another odd instance shows the King’s memory of past family history. In a corridor at Windsor was a recumbent marble effigy of a. baby. Queen Alexandra asked who it was. The King replied: “Don’t you know 1 ? If that child had lived, you and I whonld not have been here.” The child was Princess Elizabeth, daughter of King A\illiam IV and Queen Adelaide, who for a few months in 1821 was heir to the Crown of England. It is strange to think that if that forgotten infant had survived, we should now have been talking familiarly of the second Elizabethan age instead of the Victorian age, as the glory of the nineteenth century. Such are the .chances of historv.