The King is Dead, Long Live the King!

The rich and fascinating story of the events surrounding the year 1910 when King Edward VII died, sending shockwaves through Britain and changing the country forever.

Unforgettable as it was, the public response to the death of Queen Elizabeth II in September 2022 was not without precedent. When her great-grandfather King Edward VII – glamorous, cosmopolitan and extraordinarily popular – died in May 1910, the political, social and cultural anxieties of a nation in turmoil were temporarily set aside during a summer of intense and ritualised mourning.

In The King Is Dead, Long Live the King! Martin Williams charts a period of tension and transition as one era slipped away and another took shape. Witnessed by a diverse but interconnected cast of characters – crowned heads and Cabinet ministers, debutantes and suffragettes, artists and murderers – here is the swansong of Edwardian Britain. Set against a backdrop of bereavement and parliamentary crisis overshadowed by the gathering clouds of war, we see a people caught between past and future, tradition and modernity, as they unite to bid farewell to a much-loved monarch who had personified his age.