Great Britain, Edward VII, Halfcrown 1910, PCGS MS 64

History

On the sixth of May 1910, Edward VII refused to go to bed. He had suffered several heart attacks through the course of that afternoon, his breathing was failing, and every doctor in the palace knew what was coming. But the King sat upright in his chair and said – in words that became immediately famous – No, I shall not give in; I shall go on; I shall work to the end. Between moments of faintness, his son told him that his horse, Witch of the Air, had won that afternoon at Kempton Park. Edward rallied briefly, said he was very glad, and lost consciousness for the last time. He died that evening, sixty-eight years old, still dressed, still in his chair.

The Half Crown of 1910 was struck in the months before that afternoon – in the early part of a year that had begun badly and never recovered. Edward had returned from convalescence in Biarritz in late April, visibly unwell, to find London in the grip of a constitutional crisis over the House of Lords’ rejection of Lloyd George’s People’s Budget. He had spent his final weeks attempting to broker a resolution between a Liberal government he distrusted and a Conservative opposition he could not move, while his lungs failed steadily around him. He died with the crisis unresolved, leaving it to his son and successor George V to navigate the Parliament Act of 1911 that finally stripped the Lords of their absolute veto.

This particular coin, graded MS 64 by PCGS, survived the century in a condition its contemporaries did not. The vast majority of Edwardian halfcrowns went into circulation and stayed there – passing through pockets and tills and counting houses across the empire, accumulating the honest wear of commerce, until the silver shortage of the First World War prompted the wholesale melting of sterling coinage that destroyed an enormous proportion of the surviving stock. A coin that emerged from the twentieth century in mint state, its surfaces still carrying the crisp detail of the Royal Mint’s dies, is a coin that was set aside almost immediately – handled with care, kept from the rough democracy of everyday use, preserved by someone who understood that it was worth preserving.

The obverse carries the right-facing laureate bust of Edward VII, engraved by George William de Saulles – the same portrait that had appeared on British coinage since the coronation issue of 1902. The reverse displays the crowned quartered shield within the Garter band, the legend HONI SOIT QUI MAL Y PENSE encircling it in the manner of medieval chivalry. Two and a half shillings of sterling silver, 92.5% fine, fourteen grams of metal that outlasted the king whose face it bears, the constitutional crisis that consumed his final weeks, the war that melted most of its contemporaries, and a century of general indifference to small silver coins.

Edward VII is often overshadowed – by his mother’s enormity before him, and by the catastrophe that followed him. But the Edwardian age he gave his name to was, for those who lived in it comfortably, the last period of genuine, uncomplicated confidence in the permanence of the world they knew. The halfcrown of 1910 is a small, perfect, mint-state fragment of that confidence.

It survived. Most things from that world did not.