Martin Williams

“One of the most eloquent was written by the Reverend Henry Scott Holland, Canon of St Paul’s Cathedral, and delivered at Evensong on 15 May. A soul-stirring meditation on loss, one part of it in particular has endured. Imagining what the deceased might say to those he or she had left behind, Scott Holland speculated that it might be ‘Death is nothing at all. It does not count. I have only slipped away into the next room.’ Profoundly moving though the lines were, they vanished into obscurity for decades until their rediscovery in the late twentieth century, when they attained enormous popularity as a stand-alone reading at funerals.”
― Martin Williams, The King is Dead, Long Live the King!: Majesty, Mourning and Modernity in Edwardian Britain

“Yet more meetings with statesmen and military personnel took place on Wednesday, 4 May. For the first time, the King admitted the possibility he might be dying. When it was suggested that he should go to bed, he rejected the idea out of hand. ‘No,’ he protested, ‘I shall not give in – I shall work to the end. Of what use is it to be alive if one cannot work?’28”
― Martin Williams, The King is Dead, Long Live the King!: Majesty, Mourning and Modernity in Edwardian Britain