The Heir Apparent (2 page)

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 myself 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.

“Not feeling very well again and had rather a restless night,” wrote Queen Victoria in her journal on 17 October 1841.
¹
She was heavily pregnant with her second child.

Next day, the royal obstetrician, Dr. Locock, examined the Queen and pronounced the birth to be imminent. Much against her will, she traveled from Windsor, where she was comfortable, to Buckingham Palace, which she disliked. Fat as a barrel and wearing no stays, the twenty-two-year-old Queen expected her confinement daily. She felt “wretched” and too tired to walk.
²
Prince Albert watched his wife anxiously. He wrote in bold black ink in his large childish hand to the prime minister, warning him to be ready to appear at the palace at the shortest notice, “as we have reason to believe a certain event is approaching.”
³
It was a false alarm, the first of many.
⁴

Victoria had not wanted this baby, and she was furious to discover herself pregnant again only months after the birth of her first child.
She had a “vein of iron,” but though she was Queen of England, she could not rule her own biology.
⁵
Feeling nauseous, flushed, and stupid, she was powerless to stop the control of affairs slipping from her fingers. Still more did she resent her enforced abstinence from nights of married bliss with her “Angel,” Albert.

On the morning of 9 November 1841, the Queen’s pains began. Only Albert, four doctors, and a midwife, Mrs. Lilly, attended the labor. At the prince’s request, the prime minister, his colleagues, and the Archbishop of Canterbury did not witness the birth but, contrary to custom, waited in another room. Albert, always conscious of appearances, had insisted that the Queen “was most anxious from a feeling of delicacy that it should appear in the Gazette that at her confinement only the Prince, Dr Locock and the nurse were
present
in the room.”
⁶
His own attendance at the birth, which was widely reported, gave an example to English manhood of how a modern father should behave.
⁷

Delivering the royal baby was nervous work for Dr. Locock. Although this was the Queen’s second confinement, her first child had been a girl, and the possibility of a male heir to the throne meant that this birth was an important political event. The job of royal obstetrician was so risky that Locock was paid danger money—an exorbitant fee of £1,000.
^*
8

At twelve minutes to eleven, a boy was born. The baby was exceptionally large, the mother was only four feet eleven inches tall, and it had been a difficult birth. “My sufferings were really very severe,” wrote Victoria, “and I do not know what I should have done but for the great comfort and support my beloved Albert was to me during the whole time.”
⁹
Albert, who (according to his private secretary) was
“very happy but too anxious and nervous to bear his happiness with much calmness,” showed the baby to the ministers waiting next door.
¹⁰
The healthy boy was the first Prince of Wales to be born since 1762, but for his mother this was not a cause for rejoicing.

The fate of Princess Charlotte, Victoria’s first cousin, could never have been far from the mind of Dr. Locock. Charlotte died in November 1817 after an agonizing fifty-hour labor, having given birth to a stillborn son. Her accoucheur—the fancy French title for what was little more than an unqualified male midwife—shot himself three months later.

If Charlotte had not succumbed to postpartum hemorrhage, Queen Victoria would not have been born. Charlotte’s death detonated a crisis of succession for the Hanoverian dynasty. Not only was she the sole legitimate child of the Prince Regent, later George IV, but, incredibly, she was the only legitimate grandchild of George III—in spite of the fact that he had fathered a brood of six princesses and seven princes. Not that the Hanoverians were an infertile lot. Three of the daughters of George III remained spinsters and the three princesses who married were childless; but the seven sons managed to sire an estimated twenty children between them.
¹¹
All except Charlotte were illegitimate. The sons of George III had failed in their fundamental dynastic purpose: to ensure the succession.

When Charlotte died, Lord Byron threw open the windows of his Venice apartment and emitted a piercing scream over the Grand Canal. She was the only member of the royal family whom the people loved, and with her death the credibility of the monarchy slumped. The Prince Regent, who reigned in place of his old, mad father, George III, was lecherous, gluttonous, and grossly self-indulgent. How he had managed to father Princess Charlotte was a mystery. On his wedding night he was so drunk that he slept in the fireplace. He banished his wife and treated her with ostentatious cruelty, which made him deeply disliked. He and his brothers were the so-called wicked uncles of
Queen Victoria, and even by the rakehell standards of the day, they were dissolute.

Charlotte’s death forced these middle-aged roués, with their dyed whiskers, their wigs, and their paunches, to enter into an undignified race to beget an heir. One by one they dumped their mistresses and hastened to the altar. Their choice of brides was limited by the Royal Marriages Act, introduced by George III in 1772, which made it illegal for the King’s children to marry without his consent. The royal family disapproved of princes marrying into the English aristocracy, as this involved the monarchy in party politics. Under the Act of Settlement of 1701, Roman Catholics were excluded from the succession. So the royal marriage market was effectively confined to the small Protestant German courts, which acted as stud farms for the Hanoverian monarchy.