Afew steps away from and within sight of my windows at both Trinity College, Toronto and the Chapter House of Christ Church Cathedral in Montréal there were statues of King Edward VII. One was in Queen’s Park, the other in Phillips Square. After the 1901 death of Queen Victoria, he reigned for nine years and died at the age of 68. He was buried at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, 100 years ago, 20th May, 1910.

His demise from cancer of the throat (long a closely guarded secret) was the end of an era which had lasted since the defeat of Napoleon and the 1815 power equilibrium established by the Concert of Europe. It had been a time of aristocratic privilege challenged only slowly by educational, democratic and economic reforms. People had come to fancy

progress’ to be inevitable, consequent upon industrial and scientific advances. The Edwardian years were the gilded Belle Epoque. Few paused to consider Rudyard Kipling’s phrase “ all valiant dust that builds on dust” in his poem Requiem or its warning “Lest we forget”.

Some may still remember coins, especially the big one-cent ‘coppers’, with his image and superscription: “Ed. VII Rex et Ind. Imp.”. The Prince of Wales Road which formerly included part of the present Highway 10 was named to commemorate his visit here in 1860. During that time he laid the corner stone of the new Parliament Buildings in Ottawa.

Victoria, who had dressed in widow’s weeds since her husband, Prince Albert, had died when their eldest son had just turned 21, thought the young prince to be partly responsible for his father’s last illness. The attitude persisted. A caricature by Max Beerbohm depicts H.R.H. on a visit to Windsor Castle at about age 50. He stands, facing into a corner like a naughty schoolboy, while his mother evinces a definite lack of amusement. It was said that he never lost his fear of her. His private life, however, was a contradiction of most things understood by the adjective ‘Victorian”.

“Bertie”, as she called him, was denied a significant role in public life while Victoria lived. A bon vivant who frequented the cafés and salons of Paris with British, French and American socialites, he was a charming if aging and much overweight gambler and womaniser. He drank little except Dom Pérignon. Alexandra of Denmark, his wife, was a forbearing spouse, regal in her upholstered apparel and jewelled chokers. Rumour had it that she graciously invited his perennial but not sole paramour, Alice (Mrs George) Keppel, greatgrandmother of Prince Charles’s consort, Camilla, to join her at his death bed.

Actually, that invitation was extended reluctantly at the king’s request. Alice left sobbing defensively “I never did anything wrong”. She had, clearly, a personal standard of judgment. Her patent but polite promiscuity persisted.

Edwardian society predated the universally chronicled amorality of the Hollywood film stars who have entertained, intrigued and sometimes scandalised the world since the 1920s. J.H. Plumb, the Cambridge historian, said that inthe know outsiders regarded its leaders as outrageous hypocrites who lived in egregious self-deception. Edward himself, a peacemaker and architect of the Entente Cordiale with France, existed in a pre-paparazzi protective cocoon.

Harold Nicolson, the diplomat and diarist, married to Vita Sackville-West who was not afraid of Virginia Woolf, wrote that the Edwardian years were a time of fevered luxury for the few, most of whom were characterised by a peculiar ineptitude. The ‘beautiful people’, when not disporting themselves abroad, spent Thursday to Tuesday weekends at country houses where, said Nicolson, titles and pounds sterling trumped intelligence.

Harold Macmilllan, 1957-63 prime minister of Britain, wrote, “For those of us who remember it, the brief Edwardian summer was an Indian summer before the First World War engulfed us and almost destroyed our generation. Historians, seeing in retrospect what we could not see at the time, say it was an age of illusions. It is true that our fond belief that our world, with the expected changes for the better, would last for ever, was the greatest of illusions”.

The denizens of the haute monde, especially those of the king’s entourage, were identified either as ‘The Bodies’ or ‘The Souls’ as distinct from other members of the privileged classes. The difference between the two was not so much in their morals as in their social concerns.

The fashionable ‘Bodies’ turned up seasonally at Nice, Biarritz, Baden Baden and other resorts. When - or if – they got around to it they married at St George’s, Hanover Square or St Margaret’s, Westminster. The ‘Souls’ frequented London’s literary Bloomsbury district and attended meetings of the democratic socialist Fabian Society. Inherited and intellectual barriers were criss-crossed at the London Hippodrome where acrobatic acts played to packed houses in the grandest of music halls which was a circus and a theatre combined.

The 1899-1902 Boer War had challenged the Empire’s might just as Iraq and Afghanistan have resisted modern arms. An epoch ended with the first decade of the 20th Century. Few realised it. The Edwardians (as we do now?) thought they were simply living with temporary problems.

The rising imperialisms of Germany, Russia and ‘America’, the increased global reach of communications, finance and technocracy should all have signalled during 1901-10 a sea change in the old order of things. The next generation would include years of worldwide war, revolution, economic depression and widespread disillusion.

In her novel The Guns of August Barbara Tuchman said that Edward’s funeral was “the greatest assemblage of royalty and rank ever gathered in one place and, of its kind, the last”. The statues seen from my windows are witness to the fact that as king Edward VII was a greater success than either his friends or his critics had expected.

His successor, George V, claimed that he owed much to his father who had been more like an elder brother. There had never been, he said, a cross word between them. But ‘Bertie’ had had a very different relationship with his cousin ‘Willi’ who was King of Prussia and ‘Kaiser’ of Germany from 1888 to 1918.