The Heir Apparent (90 page)

Debate still smolders over Bertie’s legacy. On the one hand, his detractors allege that he was “indolent and overfed,” a man whose lack of interest in domestic politics and aversion to paperwork led him to take the line of least resistance and do what his prime ministers wanted.
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The result, it is suggested, was that he was the first truly constitutional monarch in the modern sense of the term—that is, a king who is not openly partisan and plays no part in politics. On the other hand, he has been hailed as the last king to wield the political power of the Crown, pursuing his own policies and fighting constant battles with his ministers.
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Both sides in this controversy assume that being a constitutional monarch is a sign of failure. Edward VII was indeed the first constitutional king. But rather than weakening the monarchy, he modernized it and made it stronger.

The decline in the power of the Crown—the consequence of the rise of democracy, the growth of a robust two-party system, and the triumph of liberal ideas—took place during the second half of Victoria’s reign. Paradoxically, Victoria herself never accepted it, and she continued to behave as though her powers were undiminished. In the last decades of her reign she was virulently pro-Conservative, pursuing a vendetta against the Liberal party in general and Gladstone in particular. Though the Crown lost its power, however, its influence—private and nonpartisan—grew. As the Crown became distanced from politics, its authority increased. At the end of her reign, Queen Victoria was less powerful than she had been at the beginning, but her popularity was far greater and so was respect for the institution of monarchy.
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Edward VII was the first monarch to come to terms with this shift. He did not debate policy with his ministers; he showed no party preferences, nor did he veto ministerial appointments. But this did not mean he was a weak king. He relinquished the powers of the Crown, but he greatly expanded its influence. In foreign policy and defense, which were traditionally seen as the special preserve of the sovereign, he intervened
behind the scenes.
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Acting as an enabler, he facilitated his ministers’ policies and promoted what he considered to be the national interest. When the Liberal government was formed in 1905, for example, he ensured continuity in foreign policy through his contacts at the Foreign Office and through engineering the appointment as foreign secretary of the pro-French Edward Grey. But he was careful to avoid any appearance of meddling in Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman’s Cabinet making.

Bertie understood the need to project the authority of the Crown through ceremonial and public display. Hence his impatience with Victoria’s gloomy court, secluded at Windsor and Osborne. In contrast to his mother, he opened Parliament in state every year of his reign. Based in London, the monarchy became glamorous again. Buckingham Palace, which Queen Victoria had barely used after Albert’s death, was restored to splendor. Showering decorations and medals like confetti, Bertie insisted on strict protocol. If sartorial correctness seemed to take the place of personal morality, this was because outward display was essential to the image of authority.

As the power of the Crown declined, the monarch acquired a new role: the head of state became the head of the nation. When Admiral Fisher asked why on earth the King was inquiring after the health of the republican Keir Hardie, Bertie went for him “like a mad bull.” “You don’t understand me!” he roared. “I am King of ALL the People!”
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How successful he was in gaining acceptance for that role was shown during the constitutional crisis of 1910, when both sides turned to him as mediator. He had become the nation’s head. This was the greatest achievement of his reign.

Standing in front of a fire with a fat cigar between his teeth, King Edward seemed to Esher “wonderfully like King Henry VIII, only better tempered.”
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The fact was that Bertie adored being King. Confounding the naysayers, he was very good at it.

Alix never fully adjusted to widowhood. She made no attempt to create a new role for herself as Dowager, as did Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. By now almost stone deaf, she found it hard to come to terms with change. Each year she joined Minnie in Denmark on their yachts for “the same old life”: sixteen or eighteen people for every meal, but the regal sisters would never decide until half an hour before where they wanted to eat. So the cook prepared vast quantities of food regardless, and the result was a massive bill and a very disgruntled cook, who complained at the Queen’s thoughtlessness, “never receiving any praise at all or being told what the Queen likes, but every dislike is made known to him.”
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Superbly coiffed, straight-backed, and radiantly smiling, the two old queens sat at either end of a long table. Everything was always “fine” or “splendid”—the pain of Bertie’s death was never mentioned.
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Alix stayed on at Sandringham in the big house, while George V and Queen Mary squashed into York Cottage. Some have blamed Alix for refusing to move, but this is unfair—Bertie had left the house to her for her lifetime, and the King and Queen could have found another place to live.
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Alix’s household remained unchanged. Charlotte Knollys, seventy-five in 1910, continued as her companion and private secretary, and the seventy-seven-year-old Dighton Probyn stuck to his post as her comptroller. With his neck bent double, his chin and long white beard nodding on his chest, he fought a losing battle against the compulsive extravagance of the “blessed Lady,” as he called her.

In old age, Alix the ever-youthful high-spirited princess metamorphosed into a monster. The princess who perhaps had never fully grown up reverted to a spoiled and willful child. Lacking inner resources, Motherdear clung unreasonably to her family. “Mama, as I have always said, is one of the most selfish people I know,” wrote George.
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Victoria, her unmarried daughter, suffered the most. She was forced to live with her mother, who treated her like a glorified maid. When Alix rang her bell, Toria was obliged to run, often to discover that her mother had quite forgotten why she wanted her.

The 1914–18 war shattered Alix’s world. She became a frail old woman, incoherent and confused. George, whom, in deference to Bertie, Alix insisted on calling “King George” rather than “the King,” was very good to her.
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He wrote often, and in church he would sit beside her, finding her place in the prayer book. She found comfort in the company of children, and toddlers would be selected to entertain her.
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T. E. Lawrence, who met her in 1920, saw beneath the black net veil and wrote cruelly of a “mummified thing”: “the red-rimmed eyes, the enamelled face, which the famous smile scissored across all angular and heart-rending.”
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But her mind still went back to Bertie, and how, sixty years before, walking in the gardens at Laeken, “he suddenly proposed to me! My surprise was great & I accepted him with greatest delight!”
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Bertie was extraordinarily secretive about archives and resistant to any sort of biography. In this he differed sharply from Queen Victoria. He lived a far more public life than his reclusive mother, but he disliked intensely her habit of releasing publications about her private life such as
Leaves from Our Life in the Highlands
.

For Victoria, biography was a way of putting the record straight and connecting with her people. When her children complained that Theodore Martin’s biography of Albert revealed too much about their family life, Victoria replied: “
endless false
and
untrue
things have been written and said about us, public and private, and … in these days people
will write
and
will
know, therefore the only way to counteract this, is to let the
real full
truth be
known
, and as much as
can be
with prudence and discretion, and then
no harm
but
good
will be done.”
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Modern biographers could hardly put the case better.

The tidy-minded Albert had used a cross-referenced filing system. This had been continued after his death, but documents were not sorted and filed as assiduously as before. Indeed, by the time Queen Victoria died, her papers were in chaos. Fritz Ponsonby was appalled to discover that forty years of political correspondence had been stuffed into cupboards, filling several rooms at Windsor.
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Victoria left all her private and family papers under the control of Princess Beatrice. These were in a strong room to which Beatrice had the key, “until such time as she is able to go through them in accordance with the Queen’s directions.”
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Beatrice spent thirty years transcribing a bowdlerized version of her mother’s journal into hardcover lined notebooks in her legible blue-black ink, rewriting and destroying the originals as she went.
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Her labors filled 111 books and earned her no thanks from posterity. She is routinely berated for mutilating the text of Victoria’s journals and destroying the originals. This is understandable but not entirely fair. Beatrice was a dutiful daughter obeying her mother’s instructions. If the Queen’s journals had been bequeathed to Bertie, the likelihood is that he would have burned the lot.

Beatrice herself burned thirty volumes of letters from Prince Alfred and all of Princess Alice’s letters. As royal archivist Robin Mackworth-Young wrote: “Queen Victoria was perfectly entitled to do what she chose with her most private and intimate writings, and we can count ourselves lucky that they have been left to posterity in any form at all.”
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Victoria bequeathed her political papers to her successors, and Bertie appointed Esher, then Secretary of the Office of Works, to take
charge. Victoria had talked about a biography toward the end of her life, but this idea was quickly dropped.
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Instead Esher decided to publish a selection of letters from the early part of her reign. The aim, as he explained, was to let the letters speak for themselves without comment, “thus avoiding the trap into which most biographers notably fall,” while cutting anything which “could give offence or pain.”
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Esher had no experience as archivist or editor, and he appointed a collaborator, Arthur Benson, son of the archbishop and ex-Eton housemaster. The real work of selecting and editing Victoria’s letters was done by Benson. He was installed in the Round Tower and received strict instructions from the King that “not a single paper must on any pretence whatever be taken from the Castle, even for half an hour.”
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He had scant respect for Bertie, whom he described in his diary as looking like a “little dwarf … (What a figure!)”
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Esher’s proposal for a book of Queen Victoria’s letters made Bertie uneasy. “Should it be published?” he asked in 1904. “Anyhow not without my sanction and having looked over it.”
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He was “nervous” and “fussy,” telling Esher there must be “nothing private, nothing scandalous, nothing
intime
, nothing malicious.”
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All personal matters and references to the Queen’s children were omitted; the letters contain nothing relating to Bertie’s agonizing education, even though Esher knew this material and had discussed it with him.
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Esher forced Benson to shorten the book and cut anything that might annoy Bertie. The success of the enterprise depended, in Esher’s view, on obeying the King’s wishes. “I am all for the King having his way,” he told Knollys. “If he does not, I am sure that there will be trouble hereafter, as all sorts of people will gossip to him and write to him about the deficiencies of the book. If he starts in an attitude of
‘bien veilleur’
all will be well.”
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