This is a biography of Edward VII. Eldest son of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert and not as bright as his elder sister Vicky, Prince Albert Edward, known as Bertie, was bullied unmercifully by his parents and kept on such a short leash during his adolescence that, predictably perhaps, once he lost his virginity (probably quite late) he began a strong of liaisons. He soon grew into a playboy prince, smoking, drinking, and gambling, holidaying abroad and on his yacht, and having affairs, often with married women, even after his marriage. Because of Queen Victoria's longevity, Bertie was 59 before he became King. He still kept at least one mistress and travelled extensively, seemingly under the illusion that because he was the uncle of both the Tsar of Russia and the Kaiser of Germany, and related to most other European monarchs, he could prevent war.
Jane Ridley's autobiography is well written and exhaustively detailed. However, she conforms to the not-quite-inevitable rule that biographers fall in love with their subjects. She repeatedly does her best to show Bertie in the best possible light during the playboy years. For example, she claims that there is only one illegitimate child whose paternity can safely be ascribed to Bertie; we are meant to infer that the numerous other claims are all false; this seems improbable. She uses the fact that Bertie was surprisingly discreet in his letters to women to imply that most of his liaisons were platonic: if he called for tea, he drank tea. But even she must acknowledge that sometimnes his treatment of his discarded mistresses was appalling: "Harriet [Mordaunt] was bundled off to a villa in Worthing, where she was kept under virtual house arrest, an act of dubious legality which was sanctioned by Bertie's doctor William Gull" (Ch 8); the poor woman later went mad.
But it is when Bertie becomes King that the biography becomes a hagiography. According to Ridley, King Edward was an astute political operator whose frequently unauthorised diplomatic overtures left the democratically elected politicians looking foolish and flat-footed. Time and again she denigrates prime ministers. This absurd pretence that this pompous and opinionated man ("His Royal Highness is always ready to forget his rank, as long as everyone else remembers it."; Ch 8) was somehow more important than all the rest of his subjects reaches its absurd apotheosis in chapter 25 when she suggests that Bertie was "trying to keep the peace of Europe almost single-handed" which is a ridiculous statement. Not only was he pompous and obsessed with protocol, going repeatedly into rages if he was presented with someone wearing what he considered to be incorrect clothing, and endeavouring to order the British fleet to Malta to greet his yacht (Ch 26) but also he was extraordinarily meddlesome in politics making the assumption that cabinet ministers were his "confidential servants". He repeatedly attempted to manipulate cabinet appointments and came to the brink of refusing to create the extra peers needed by Asquith's government in order to facilitate the passage of Lloyd George's budget which had been rejected by the overwhelmingly Conservative House of Lords. It is not inconceivable that, had he not died, he would have provoked a constitutional crisis that would have seen the British monarchy swept away at the end of the First World War, which also saw the end of the Russian Tsar, the Austro-Hungarian Emperor and the German Kaiser.
This partiality shown by Ridley, even in the face of the evidence she herself records, spoiled what started out as a promising and readable biography.
Selected quotes:
- "Her later claim that Alix made her a cup of tea seems improbably, to say the least (did Alix know how to make tea?)" (Ch 14)
- "Anything less erotic than sitting in a cold and sticky champagne bath seems hard to imagine." (Ch 19)
September 2021; 495 pages
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