The Life of King Henry the Eight • Paragraph 882
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Meanwhile, in the morning, His Majesty had received on board his yacht the celebrated Boer Generals, Botha, De Wet and De la Rey. Afterwards, in company with Lord Kitchener and Earl Roberts they had returned to London greatly pleased with the cordiality of their reception and especially gratified at the kind manner of Queen Alexandra. Following the official Naval Review, the King on the next day visited the fleet in a stormy sea and watched it go through certain manoeuvres of a practical kind before being dispersed to its different local stations. On his return to London he found the Shah of Persia a guest of the nation and awaiting formal reception at the hands of its Monarch. And thus King Edward took up again his unceasing round of duty and ceremonial and high responsibility. In the past year or two he had gone through every variety of emotional experience and official work and brilliant ceremony--his mother's death and the consequent mourning of a nation and empire; his own assumption of new and heavy duties; the special labours of an expectant period; the time of serious illness and the anxieties of complex responsibility to a world-wide public; the realization of his Coronation hopes; the change from an old to a new period stamped by the change in his national advisers and the presence of his Colonial Premiers. He now entered upon his further lifework, with chastened feelings in a personal sense but, it is safe to say, with high and brilliant hopes for the future of his own home country and its far-flung Empire.