by Jane Ridley
Copyright © 2013 Jane Ridley
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Originally published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus, a member of The Random House Group, London, in 2012, as Bertie: A Life of Edward VII.
Portraits of the Royal Family (this page), Susan Vane-Tempest (this page), John Brown (this page), Jennie Churchill (this page), Queen Victoria (this page) and Queen Victoria’s family (this page): all © National Portrait Gallery, London.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Ridley, Jane.
The heir apparent : a life of Edward VII, the playboy prince / Jane Ridley.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-4000-6255-3
eBook ISBN 978-0-8129-9475-9
1. Edward VII, King of Great Britain, 1841–1910. 2. Great Britain—Kings and rulers—Biography. 3. Edward VII, King of Great Britain, 1841–1910—Relations with women. 4. Great Britain—History—Edward VII, 1901–1910. I. Title.
DA567.R53 2013 941.082′3092—dc23 2013002597
[B]
www.atrandom.com
Title-page and part-title photograph: © iStockphoto.com
Cover design: Anna Bauer
Cover photograph: colorized version of a black-and-white photograph of Edward VII by Alexander Bassano (© National Portrait Gallery, London)
Web asset: Excerpted from The Heir Apparent by Jane Ridley, copyright © 2013 by Jane Ridley. Published by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
v3.1
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
FAMILY TREE OF EDWARD VII
FAMILY TREE OF ALEXANDRA
INTRODUCTION: The Eighty-Nine Steps
PART ONE
Youth
CHAPTER 1 Victoria and Albert 1841
CHAPTER 2 “Our Poor Strange Boy” 1841–56
CHAPTER 3 “Neither Fish nor Flesh” 1856–60
CHAPTER 4 Bertie’s Fall 1861
CHAPTER 5 Marriage 1861–63
CHAPTER 6 “Totally Totally Unfit … for Ever Becoming King” 1863–65
CHAPTER 7 Alix’s Knee 1865–67
CHAPTER 8 Marlborough House and Harriett Mordaunt 1868–70
CHAPTER 9 Annus Horribilis 1870–71
PART TWO
Expanding Middle
CHAPTER 10 Resurrection? 1871–75
CHAPTER 11 India 1875–76
CHAPTER 12 The Aylesford Scandal 1876
CHAPTER 13 Lillie Langtry 1877–78
CHAPTER 14 Prince Hal 1878–81
CHAPTER 15 Prince of Pleasure 1881–87
CHAPTER 16 William 1887–89
CHAPTER 17 Scandal 1889–90
CHAPTER 18 Nemesis 1890–92
CHAPTER 19 Daisy Warwick 1892–96
CHAPTER 20 “We Are All in God’s Hands” 1897–1901
PART THREE
King
CHAPTER 21 King Edward the Caresser 1901–2
CHAPTER 22 “Edward the Confessor Number Two” 1902
CHAPTER 23 King Edward the Peacemaker 1903–5
CHAPTER 24 Uncle of Europe 1905–7
CHAPTER 25 King Canute 1908–9
CHAPTER 26 King of Trumps 1909–10
CHAPTER 27 The People’s King: March–May 1910
CONCLUSION
AFTERWORD: Bertie and the Biographers
Photo Insert
Dedication
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
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INTRODUCTION
The Eighty-Nine Steps
I began work on this book in 2003. My original idea was to write a short life of King Edward VII, looking at his relations with women: with his mother, Queen Victoria; with his sisters; with his wife, Queen Alexandra; and, of course, with his mistresses. But then, by gracious permission of Her Majesty the Queen, I was granted unrestricted access to the papers of King Edward VII in the Royal Archives.
This was an extraordinary privilege. I find it hard to convey a sense of the vast riches I encountered in the archives at Windsor Castle. The first documents I saw concerned the Prince of Wales’s childhood and education. Trolley loads of papers, meticulously cataloged and bound, gave a harrowing insight into an ambitious educational project that ended in fiasco. Where else was the upbringing of a recalcitrant boy documented as if it were an affair of state? I was the first biographer to see the papers of Edward VII for almost fifty years—since Philip Magnus, who published in 1964. Many more papers have been added since. I realized very soon that I would need to write a full biography.
The research at Windsor took me more than five years. I don’t mean that I went there every day—far from it; but whenever I could, I seized a research day. I caught the train from Paddington, changed at Slough, walked from Windsor station up to the castle, passed through security checks at the Henry VIII Gate, and climbed the eighty-nine steps to the top of the Round Tower, where the archives are housed. Windsor is quite unlike any other archive; researchers work in rooms of understated grandeur, the manuscripts are preordered, awaiting your arrival, and when the bell rings for coffee at eleven o’clock the guard changes to the stirring music of a military band in the Lower Ward outside. Arriving pale and haggard (I know this from the police security photographs), I would sink into a chair beside a cart which had been loaded with my ration of papers for the day. Like a caterpillar chewing a giant lettuce leaf, I set to work, reading through the mountain of documents and transcribing them onto my laptop. When I came across gold—as I often did—I would type like a frenzied exam candidate, racing against the time when the bell rang for closing.
I made the decision that I must call my subject Bertie. None of his contemporaries addressed him by the double name of Albert Edward, which he himself disliked. Previous biographers had referred to him respectfully as the Prince of Wales or King Edward, but I wanted to avoid the formality and distancing effect of royal titles. Calling him Bertie—as his family did—brought him closer in some ways, but at the same time gave him reality as a figure from history.
The many thousands of letters that I read from Queen Victoria to Bertie were a revelation. I found it astonishing—admirable, in a way—that Victoria never learned the courtly art of dissembling. Not for her the long pause, the polite request for more information. Whatever was on her mind she poured out in her emphatic, illegible scrawl. Her correspondence with her daughter Vicky reveals her as one of the best letter writers of the nineteenth century—vivid, candid, and intensely human. Her letters to Bertie, by contrast, were often judgmental and framed in the imperative mood. Her anger leaped from the page, startling in its urgency even today.
Bertie’s replies puzzled me. I have read thousands of his letters, and they are—mostly—prime examples of the masculine epistolary style sometimes known as British phlegm. He filled the page with small talk, padded out with comments on the weather or the health of acquaintances, and peppered his sentences with clichés enclosed in quotes. Little wonder that Victoria berated him for failing to enter into a vigorous and heartfelt exchange of opinions with her. There were times when I wondered whether the effort of deciphering the impenetrable loops of his grotesque calligraphy was worth the bathetic result. But th
en I realized that I was missing the point. For him, letter writing was a duty, not a means of self-expression; the aim was not to reveal, but to conceal, his true feelings.
So closely did Bertie guard his private life that, in his will, he ordered all his letters to be destroyed. No correspondence survives between him and his wife, Alexandra of Denmark. I wanted to place the marriage at the center of my story, but the hole in the archive seemed to make this impossible. My breakthrough came when I discovered that the National Archives of Denmark possessed three boxes of photocopies of letters written in Danish by Alix to her sister Dagmar. I booked a flight to Copenhagen and hired a translator. It was February, and I sat shivering beside my translator in the permafrost of the archive, typing as she read the fading photocopies and translated roughly out loud. Later, she worked systematically through the boxes, translating the letters that at last allowed me to see things from Alexandra’s point of view.
The first phase of Bertie’s life—up to the age of about thirty—has a strong story line provided by his stormy relationship with Queen Victoria and by his marriage. The second part—the thirty years until his accession aged fifty-nine, which I have called the Expanding Middle—was the hardest bit to write. A great deal is known about what he did—what time he took a train, whom he saw, how many pheasants he shot—but it is hard to find the heart of the genuine man who was Bertie. Then I hit upon the idea of going back to my original plan of trying to work out his inner life by looking at his relationships with women.
No letters from women are preserved among Bertie’s papers, but many of his letters to women survive outside the Royal Archives.* These are typically polite and discreet; but the bland contents belie their subversive purposes. Consider the situation. Royal invitations were normally formal and formulaic, issued by equerries or private secretaries and composed in the third person. Here, however, the Prince of Wales wrote to a woman in his own hand, informally and in the first person. His purpose was often to make an appointment to see the woman alone, sometimes for tea—the cinq à sept—or for luncheon. Though they give so little away, Bertie’s missives can be read as coded messages in a royal dance of courtly love. Some, but not all, of the women became his mistresses. But that did not necessarily mean that he slept with them. The word “mistress” should perhaps be understood in the sense, today archaic, of a woman who is admired, cosseted, and courted by a man, as well as in the modern meaning, which almost invariably implies a sexual relationship.
Queen Victoria deplored Bertie’s habit of letter writing, and she had good cause to do so. Time after time it got him into trouble. Writing letters implied a degree of intimacy with a woman—usually a married woman—that most Victorians judged to be improper. Today these relationships would be censured for a different reason: because they were unequal and often involved what we would see as an abuse of Bertie’s power as Prince of Wales. Within Bertie’s social set, it was almost impossible for a woman to resist his advances. Some of his early mistresses were destroyed by the experience.
Historians have written of the “feminization” of the monarchy under Queen Victoria, as domestic virtues and philanthropy replaced martial valor, and rulers were no longer expected to lead armies into battle. Bertie’s womanizing signaled a vigorous protest against the bourgeois respectability of his parents. It made a statement about a certain type of masculinity that was entirely at odds with the gender politics of the Victorian court.
Bertie’s affairs and flirtations depended upon compliant husbands. When the husbands rebelled—as Sir Charles Mordaunt did in 1870, or Lord Randolph Churchill over the Aylesford affair or, later, Lord Charles Beresford—a scandal ensued. It was the men of Bertie’s circle—the so-called Marlborough House Set—who caused the crises which punctuated his life as Prince of Wales: the Mordaunt divorce, the Aylesford scandal, the Tranby Croft case, and the Beresford scandal. But what drove these men to come out in opposition to the prince was his predatory behavior toward their wives or mistresses. The functioning of Bertie’s court as Prince of Wales can be understood only by exploring his links with women. To a remarkable extent, women—mistresses—are central to the dynamics of Marlborough House.
As a young man, Bertie was not always likable. I found it hard to warm to a prince who blatantly cheated on his wife and ruthlessly discarded his mistresses—even though the explanation for his behavior can be found in the unhappiness and loneliness of his loveless childhood. As Bertie reached middle age, however, he did something that is quite difficult for a royal to do, a thing that Alexandra never fully achieved: He grew up. My affection grew for this man condemned to a lifetime of indulgence and political impotence while he waited for his mother to die.
He continued to be unfaithful, but the pattern of the relationships changed. These late love affairs mattered to him; he cared more. But the evidence is elusive. I knew that Daisy Warwick was central to his life in the 1890s, but all the letters seemed to have been destroyed, leaving a silence that I was unable to penetrate. Fortunately, Daisy possessed a strong sense of her historical importance and—having quarreled with the court—a motive for telling her story. It turned out that she had defied royal commands and kept copies of some of Bertie’s letters. My eureka moment came when I discovered in Bertie’s diary the code he used to record their frequent assignations, enabling me to reconstruct the intensity of the relationship. Alice Keppel, his last mistress, was both more public and more discreet. She enjoyed a quasi-official status as the King’s favorita, but the correspondence that passed between them was almost all destroyed. Unlike Daisy the Babbling Brooke, Alice Keppel stayed silent, and to this day the details of her physical relationship with Bertie—if, indeed, it was physical—remain an enigma.
By September 2008, I had almost completed my research on Bertie’s years as Prince of Wales, and I had written a draft of his life up to 1901. I planned only a brief concluding chapter on his life as king. I was late for my publisher’s deadline, which had originally been set as 2006. When I think about the story of this book I am humbled by the patience of my long-suffering publishers, Chatto, and especially by the support I have received from my editor, Penelope Hoare. The faith of my American publisher, Susannah Porter of Random House, has also amazed me. I was contracted to write seventy thousand words, but by late 2008 the manuscript had already grown to twice that length: Inside the thin book there was a fat book struggling to get out, and my rich grazing at Windsor had piled on the words. But at least the end seemed in sight.
Then I received a telephone call from the Royal Archives. Waiting for me, it seemed, were some papers from the reign that I had not yet seen. I arrived at Windsor to find more than 150 bound volumes of documents, as well as several other important files. Any slight hope I might have entertained of publication in 2009 was dashed. I braced myself to ask for yet another extension and cleared my diary to spend a month at Windsor.
Reading through the bound files of political papers made me realize that I needed to write the history of King Edward’s reign as a story. Previous biographers had treated the reign thematically, organizing their books around the filing system of the King’s papers. There is always a pressure on royal biographers to write the life and times, but I wanted to convey a sense of the King’s preoccupations and achievements, and I reckoned a narrative was the best way to do this. I was struck by the abrupt shift from the party-going Prince of Wales to the conscientious, even workaholic, King. The womanizing comes to a stop—well, almost. The third and final part of Bertie’s life—King—was very different from the long years of waiting, yet he seemed instinctively to adapt to the role.
Having written a DPhil thesis on the Edwardian Tory party, I had absorbed the conventional view that Edward VII played a marginal part in the turbulent politics of his reign. These files told a very different story. He was effective and politically astute, he excelled as a diplomat, and (unlike Queen Victoria) he understood and adapted to the changing role of monarchy. Rather to my surprise, I found mys
elf writing a revisionist account of the reign. I came to respect and admire Bertie: The philandering Prince of Wales turned out to be a wise, reforming king, but his intelligence and achievements had been consistently underestimated.
Why historians had got Edward VII so wrong baffled me. But then I came across a collection of nearly 1,200 letters among the papers of George V that documented the writing of the official biography of Edward VII by Sidney Lee. The dossier told a gripping tale of history in the making. These letters revealed the extraordinary efforts made by politicians such as Balfour, Asquith, and Lansdowne to write Edward VII out of history and to suppress his achievements by giving deliberately misleading accounts of his reign.
In this book I have tried to show a Bertie who was both more able and more complex than the figure we know as Edward VII. The real Bertie was obscured by authorized biographers who, in their concern to protect the reputation of the monarchy, concentrated on the politics and said little about the scandals. Equally misleading and one-sided was the alternative narrative that flourished of Bertie as prince of pleasure—a frivolous, self-indulgent lothario. His bed-hopping exploits were wildly exaggerated. His name was linked with more than fifty women, and at least ten illegitimate children were chalked up to him. The true figures are, alas, considerably more modest. I have tried to combine both sides of his life, the public and the private. To do this I have had to chip away at the patina of old anecdotes and peel back layers of hearsay that has been repeated so often that it has almost hardened into fact. It has been a lengthy business. But, like so many women in the past, I have greatly enjoyed the years I have spent in the company of HRH.
* * *
* Letters between Bertie and women that have found their way into the Royal Archives are later accessions, and do not form part of Bertie’s papers.
CHAPTER 1