The Heir Apparent (93 page)

Lee eventually signed an agreement with Macmillan, and the game of hide-and-seek-the-letters began again. Ponsonby and Davidson solemnly assured Lee that very little material survived, as Knollys had burned “cartloads of papers and has only kept the official papers.”
⁹³
In fact, the courtiers were deliberately concealing material from Lee. Contrary to what they told him, the letters of King Edward had not all been destroyed. Davidson wrote to Ponsonby in 1922: “It is absolutely impossible to let [Lee] run riot amongst this chaos of the late King’s letters. I cannot tell exactly how many there are, and there may or may not be interesting ones amongst them; but in any case the difficulties surrounding these letters—whose very existence has to be kept a dead secret—hedges the whole situation with a bristling fence of difficulties.”
⁹⁴
The letters were stored at Marlborough House, and Davidson considered it quite impossible for Lee to see them until he himself had gone through them. He died a few months later, so Lee probably never did see them.

When Lee visited the archives at Windsor, he went “fawning up” to
Sir John Fortescue, the Keeper of the Archives, who “cut him short” and did his best to be unhelpful, refusing to let him see the private and family papers. “I have always treated Queen V’s papers,” wrote Fortescue, “at any rate during her later years—as sacred and not to be pried into.”
⁹⁵
Lee was given carefully vetted selections of letters relating to Bertie’s early life. The tempestuous correspondence between mother and son was deliberately withheld. Lee was assured that the letters contained little of interest, merely remarks about the weather and references to “trivial” family squabbles that blew over in a few days, and “ought to have been destroyed at the time.”
⁹⁶
Bertie’s relationship with his mother gives the main narrative to his early life as Prince of Wales, but this was closed to Lee.

He was steered away from “rummaging about” in the Randolph Churchill papers at Blenheim, for fear he might discover too much about the Aylesford scandal, especially Bertie’s challenging Randolph to a duel. Sir Henry Ponsonby’s often acid letters were withheld; as Davidson wrote, “Lee has no idea of things as we see and know them.”
⁹⁷
Charles Hardinge refused to show his letters from King Edward. “They are far too confidential.”
⁹⁸
When Lee asked to see Bertie’s diaries, Stamfordham responded with exasperation: “There are no diaries and if there were the King said no one should see them! Surely Sidney Lee has been very well done by us—and I trusted we had seen the last of him in the Round Tower at Windsor. He cannot have the volumes he asks for as they contain heap of letters which he ought not to see and we have not the staff to make any more copies.”
⁹⁹

The courtiers did their best to shape Lee’s interpretation. Ponsonby fed him the line that King Edward “always took an intense interest in politics, and that it was simply because he was not allowed by Queen Victoria to do so, that he turned his energies to less important matters.”
¹⁰⁰
In Lee’s book, the motif of Bertie’s long years as Prince of Wales became his struggle to obtain the key to the Cabinet boxes—not just the ordinary boxes, but also the special key to the top-secret ones.
¹⁰¹

The portrait of Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, that Lee painted in his first volume, published in 1925, was almost unrecognizable. Gone
was the playboy prince of the
DNB
. The picture of Bertie as a boy, complained Ponsonby, was “a mere effigy”: “stilted phrases from letters probably written by his tutor or by the Prince Consort give one no idea of what manner of youth he was.”
¹⁰²

The young prince was constructed as a prodigy of statesmanship, playing a central role in European politics and earnestly advising ministers on his frequent visits abroad. George V read the book and remarked that any reader would imagine that his father as Prince of Wales interfered with almost every department of state.
¹⁰³

Lee had sent Lytton Strachey a copy of his article on biography in 1918, and Strachey had replied that biography, like portrait painting, depended on “the curious and indefinable combination of truth and aesthetic arrangement. Perhaps, too, an
advocatus diaboli
might put in a word for the caricaturist.”
¹⁰⁴
There was little aesthetic arrangement and even less caricature in Lee’s leaden prose. The courtiers, however, still complained that he had been too critical of Queen Victoria, and for that reason he was dissuaded from making a personal presentation of his book to George V.
¹⁰⁵
But Ponsonby and Stamfordham had achieved their aim in turning Lee around and making him write a hagiography. They had only themselves to blame if the book was dull, because it was they who had supplied the materials and censored the documents that Lee was allowed to see. Lee, who was probably a suppressed homosexual, felt uneasy writing about the prince’s relations with women; “it worried him very much” that “he had not found time to satisfy himself upon this aspect of his biography.”
¹⁰⁶

Violating his own
Principles of Biography
, which called for brevity, Lee felt compelled to write not one but two fat volumes. His health broke down from overwork while he was writing the first. He developed heart strain, which prevented him from walking up the eighty-nine steps of the Round Tower at Windsor to the archives, and documents had to be brought down to him.
¹⁰⁷
Writing the second volume, on the reign of King Edward, killed Sidney Lee. The publisher Frederick Macmillan assured Ponsonby that the book was “practically written,” but this was not, in fact, the case.
¹⁰⁸
When Lee died, he left only five chapters completed, together with drafts and outlines for others.
The task of completing the book was given to his secretary, S. F. Markham, with whom his relationship had been strained.
¹⁰⁹

Volume two, published in 1927, is actually a much better book than volume one. The story of the reign presented far fewer problems for the authorized biographer than the scandalous life of the Prince of Wales, and Markham published an important selection of political documents. This volume contains the understatement for which Lee (or is it Markham?) is famous: The King “never toyed with his food.”
¹¹⁰
But the unreal portrait of Bertie that Lee constructed in volume one sabotaged the project. Volume two did not receive the credit it deserved. Though it sold fifteen thousand copies, Lee’s biography failed to deconstruct the picture of King Edward that he himself had drawn in the
DNB
.

After the publication of Lee’s two volumes, official royal biography was effectively embargoed until after the Second World War.
¹¹¹
Sir Alan (Tommy) Lascelles, private secretary to George V, had a conversation with Queen Mary in 1942 about the publication of Henry Ponsonby’s letters to his wife. Queen Mary took the line that the letters ought never to have been written, let alone published, and that a private secretary had no business to mention his work in his letters to his wife. Tommy Lascelles disagreed. “That attitude is typical of the ostrich technique which this family so often adopts.”
¹¹²
Unconsciously echoing Queen Victoria, he argued that the publication of a biography revealing ordinary human shortcomings actually enhanced the reputation of the monarch. As Keeper of the Royal Archives (1943–53), Lascelles sanctioned official biographies of George V by Harold Nicolson, Queen Mary by James Pope-Hennessy, and George VI by John Wheeler-Bennett. These authors were allowed considerable freedom but were instructed to write nothing embarrassing to the institution of monarchy. As Wheeler-Bennett quipped, royal biography was like matrimony; an enterprise “not to be entered into inadvisedly or lightly; but reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly and in the fear of God.”
¹¹³

The Royal Archives were not opened to another biographer of Edward VII until 1958, when Sir Philip Magnus began work on a new life. Magnus, who had already published lives of Kitchener and Gladstone, was a professional biographer and private scholar. He enjoyed friendly relations with Robin Mackworth-Young, the Assistant Keeper of the Royal Archives and a deft promoter of royal biographies. Magnus asked Mackworth-Young to lunch, and soon Mackworth-Young had dropped the “Sir Philip” and was addressing Magnus as “My dear Philip.”
¹¹⁴
Magnus was given special privileges, such as a photocopy of Bertie’s diary (admittedly, he was charged the substantial sum of £60, and asked to return it afterward). He was allowed to bring a typist to speed his transcribing, and Mackworth-Young even gave him permission to eat apples in the Round Tower, “since no one else will be working in the archives at the time, so that no one need know of the precedent.”
¹¹⁵

For the author of a bestselling biography of Gladstone, Magnus was oddly lacking in confidence about the historical context of his book, and he worried about what academic historians might say. He sought reassurance and validation by consulting the leading historians of the day, such as Lewis Namier and A. J. P. Taylor. Robert Blake, who was then contemplating writing a life of Queen Victoria (which never happened), acted as historical adviser and read the typescript.
¹¹⁶
While he was working on the book, Magnus was invited to deliver the prestigious Ford Lectures in English history at Oxford, on the theme “Biography and History—George III to George V.” He accepted but withdrew shortly before the titles were published, frightened by A. L. Rowse, who warned him that he would be “torn to pieces by 3rd-rate dons.”
¹¹⁷

“I am working very hard on Edward VII,” Magnus told his mother in 1959, “but have not yet completed the first chapter which I have actually rewritten at least a dozen times.”
¹¹⁸
As each chapter was typed, he sent it for his mother to read. She had strong views. “My darling Boy,” she advised (Magnus was then in his midfifties), do not “prolong the scandalous part” more than necessary: “After all it is not a woman’s magazine darling, but a book by a splendid author!”
¹¹⁹
Magnus was
pressed by his American publisher, Elliott B. Macrae of E. P. Dutton, to tell the full story of Edward VII and put in “all of the salt, pepper and spice.”
¹²⁰
Old Mrs. Magnus did all she could to keep it bland and cut out the pepper and spice. “Substitute another word for
murky
past,” she wrote. “ ‘For attempting to rape a governess in a railway carriage’ don’t
name
offence.”
^§
121
Again: “ ‘Mrs. Langtry’s lover’—Surely other ways of expressing this.… Steer clear darling as much as you can of hurtful words.”
¹²²

Magnus completed his book in August 1962.
¹²³
Mackworth-Young vetted the typescript, suggesting only minor changes and selecting controversial passages for Queen Elizabeth to see. The biography sold more than twenty thousand copies and received good reviews, though most followed A. J. P. Taylor’s lead in
The Observer
and wrote more about the subject, and especially his appetite for food, rather than the book.
¹²⁴

Bertie had done all he could to frustrate and block his biographers. By ordering his papers to be burned and by writing letters that were as discreet as they were dull, he sought to guard his private life from posterity. The result was not what he had intended. Destroying the historical record does not prevent the history being written. The official biographer, Sidney Lee, constructed an unreal image of the prince as anodyne political prodigy. Yet outside the control of the royal archives, there flourished an unofficial version of Bertie as libertine and playboy. Anita Leslie’s excellent
Edwardians in Love
was based on family tradition preserved by her father, Shane Leslie. But there proliferated a genre of royal books about Bertie that recycled and repackaged tired old anecdotes, half-truths, and choice quotations in the manner of subprime debt. No one attempted to reconcile the two versions. Philip Magnus, writing in 1964, was unable to address the prince’s private life, even if he had wished to do so. Not only were the papers
missing; the stories were still too sensitive. Only recently has this changed.

We now know that Lord Knollys did not burn everything. He seems to have squirreled away compromising papers salvaged from the King’s archive and kept them among his own papers. Packets tantalizingly labeled “The Aylesford Affair” or the letters of poor pathetic Susan Vane-Tempest or blackmail letters from the Paris courtesan La Barucci he kept, along with a mass of other correspondence.
^‖

As King Edward subsides into history, the scandals of his early life are no longer seen as potential threats to the monarchy. At last it is possible to make connections between the public and the private, to show how it was that debauched Prince Hal evolved into the people’s King Edward the Peacemaker.