The Heir Apparent (89 page)

Biographical hindsight can be misleading. There was, in fact, nothing inevitable about Bertie’s story, which can be constructed as a narrative that follows the trajectory of Shakespeare’s Prince Hal, the dissolute prince who reformed after his accession to become the model king. It is easy to forget how different things might have been.

Bertie might have predeceased his long-lived mother, dying young like his own son Eddy. He nearly succumbed to typhoid when he was thirty. He almost died before his coronation and only survived thanks to the most recent medical advances. The doctors warned in 1907 that
his health was being seriously undermined by his lifestyle of smoking, overeating, and overwork, and he was lucky to live as long as he did.

This book has revealed the angry feelings—at times murderous—of Victoria toward her eldest son. It sometimes seemed that she could never forgive Bertie for his “Fall,” which, she believed, had caused Albert’s illness and death. Even by the standards of the Hanoverians, who, “like ducks, produce bad parents. They trample on their young,” Victoria was a brutal mother to Bertie.
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Throughout the eighteenth century, Hanoverian Princes of Wales had quarreled with their fathers and formed a rallying point for political opposition. What if Bertie had rebelled openly against Victoria?

Max Beerbohm drew a cartoon of the middle-aged Prince of Wales standing in the corner like a naughty child cowering from the terrifying figure of Queen Victoria. Victoria used Bertie’s scrapes and his reputation for indiscretion as an excuse to deny him access to government secrets. But it was he who enabled her to behave as she wished and to live in seclusion, hiding from her people for forty years. Bertie and Alix together performed the ornamental public role that Victoria declined. Had Bertie refused to do this—had the social functions of monarchy fallen into disuse—Queen Victoria’s position would have been barely tenable.

What if twenty-one-year-old Bertie had not colluded and agreed to his arranged marriage with Alexandra of Denmark? The consequences of his alliance with the Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg princess were surprisingly far-reaching, especially in foreign policy. Without Alix, Bertie would surely not have sided with Denmark against the rest of his family—his sister Vicky and Victoria herself—who supported Prussia over the Schleswig-Holstein war of 1864. What began as a family rift eventually triggered a realignment of dynastic diplomacy that was ultimately to see Britain entering the First World War on the side of Russia and France.

Bertie was not defined by his marriage, in the way that Victoria and Albert were. In spite of his genuine affection for Alix, he neglected her during her illness and pregnancies, and seemed incapable of being faithful to her. He was Edward the Caresser, notorious for his philandering.
Margot Asquith wrote: “Women have been the excitement and the joy, the achievement of his life.”
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As a young man, however, he treated women with a thoughtlessness that bordered on cruelty. His flirtation with Harriett Mordaunt landed him in court, but he showed no remorse for her subsequent descent into insanity. When his pregnant mistress Susan Vane-Tempest—the only woman by whom he is known definitely to have fathered an illegitimate child—implored him to see her, he broke off contact.

In middle age, however, Bertie changed. He grew up. His life splits into two parts, divided by the tragedy of the death of Prince Eddy. Bertie fell in love with Daisy Warwick at the age of forty-eight, and the intensity of that affair is revealed in this book. He enjoyed an on-again, off-again (and most likely physical) relationship with Jennie Churchill over several decades. He rewarded Alice Keppel for her discretion, political advice, and skill at the bridge table with the things that mattered to her—money and acceptance at court. To these women—and many more—Bertie was loyal and generous long after the end of any physical relationship.

Bertie’s survival as serial adulterer depended partly on the silence of the press in an era when, outside the divorce court, sexual gossip was considered off-limits. More important, however, was a compliant wife. What if Alix had refused to tolerate his unfaithfulness? Public confrontation in the style of Queen Caroline, the estranged wife of George IV, was not in her nature, but unofficial separation was certainly an option. The truth can be found in Alix’s newly discovered letters to her sister Minnie. These private and revealing documents give a picture of Alix’s deep affection for Bertie and her devotion to family life; leaving Bertie would have been unthinkable to her. Her loyalty was his most precious asset.

The climax of King Edward’s reign, as Lytton Strachey wrote, was “the unresolved drama of its tragic close.”
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Bertie died suddenly and dramatically at the height of a constitutional crisis. At the time he seemed the only man capable of resolving the political conflict. King Edward was somehow above party, the nation’s savior. No one could have foreseen that the spoiled young prince of fifty years before—the
son whose accession Queen Victoria dreaded—would have been universally mourned.

Money and sexual scandal have been the twin demons of monarchy since the twentieth century. Neither troubled Bertie while he was King, and this was largely due to the lessons he had learned as Prince of Wales. Victoria and Albert had projected an image of the “royal family” as the embodiment of bourgeois domestic values. Bertie, by contrast, was King alone. In paintings and photographs he appears by himself, wearing military uniform, Highland dress, or a double-breasted suit—the public face of the sovereign. He made no attempt to “market” his family or lay claim to domestic virtue. How could he, when as Prince of Wales his gambling and adultery had made him notorious, and now as King he was openly accompanied by his acknowledged favorite, Mrs. Keppel? If anything, his outrageous flouting of middle-class morality endeared him to his people. As Logan Pearsall Smith quipped: “A virtuous king is a king who has shirked his proper function: to embody for his subjects an ideal of illustrious misbehaviour absolutely beyond their reach.”
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Refusing to parade the “royal family” was politically wise, however. As Bertie’s successors were to discover, projecting monarchy as the “family firm” placed an unreasonable pressure on its members to lead exemplary lives.

Bertie the debt-ridden prince turned into an unexpectedly wealthy King. This was largely due to Ernest Cassel. By paying off Bertie’s debts as Prince of Wales, Cassel ensured that he seemed solvent on his accession. Like the court Jews who had propelled the absolutism of small German states in the eighteenth century, Cassel made the King stronger in his relations with Parliament. Edward VII’s finances were not an issue during his reign. He had no need to ask the government for extra funds, and this ensured that he avoided the humiliation and annoyance of parliamentary inquiry and debate. The sum of money that Bertie owed to Ernest Cassel has never been fully calibrated, but Cassel’s role in underpinning the Edwardian monarchy was incalculable.

Bertie’s travels as Prince of Wales—his familiarity with Paris courtesans and German spas—made him the most cosmopolitan of British monarchs; fluent in German and French, even speaking English with the hint of a German accent, he possessed the best address book in Europe and his own superior sources of intelligence. As King, he acted as his country’s roving ambassador. An amazing number of Victoria’s descendants held power in Europe, and Bertie was head of this immensely influential family. The fact that both Germany and Russia were ruled by his nephews gave a unique opportunity for dynastic diplomacy. The reconfiguration of British foreign policy after 1902 meant that the making of the ententes would have taken place in any event, but Bertie played a key part in enabling the Entente Cordiale through his visit to Paris in 1903. Historians have been slow to recognize his contribution, however, because—as the evidence clearly shows—after his death the politicians attempted to write him out of diplomatic history.

In his relations with the emperor of Germany, his nephew Kaiser William, Bertie’s achievement is more ambiguous. His aim was to triangulate the ententes with Russia and France by maintaining friendly relations with Germany. He promoted the naval race with Germany, but he was dedicated to preventing war—which by the end of his life he considered inevitable. His dynastic diplomacy was compromised, however, by the baggage of family quarrels. He could never forget how the kaiser had snubbed him in Vienna, nor could he forgive William for his treatment of his mother, Bertie’s sister Vicky. The kaiser, for his part, was paranoid about his uncle, whom he called “Satan.” Negotiation with a character such as Kaiser William was doomed. In 1914, he blamed Bertie for the outbreak of war, declaring: “Edward VII is stronger after his death than I am who am still alive.”
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No king since has played the part that Bertie did in foreign policy. George V, who rarely traveled and who spoke poor German and worse French, made no attempt to emulate his father in this respect. Instead, he sought to identify the monarchy with the British Empire—with India and the “British Dominions beyond the Seas,” to which Bertie paid relatively little attention.