The Heir Apparent (92 page)

Davidson’s files give a fascinating glimpse of the way history is composed. Balfour, who had never got on with Bertie, had written him out of the historical narrative. Asquith had done the same. Lee revealed that it was Asquith who had “supplied all the material” for the section of the
DNB
article on the Parliament Bill crisis.
⁶⁰
Asquith alleged that King Edward had played a passive part in the crisis, being “content to watch the passage of events without looking beyond the need of the moment.”
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No one reading the article would have realized how important the King’s role had been during the crisis, nor how badly Asquith had needed his support.

History, once written, proved unexpectedly difficult to unpick. Lee refused point blank to revise his article. To do so, he claimed, would “discredit the Dictionary, and would ruin its publication and myself.”
⁶²
The reality, as Lee knew very well, was that a revision of a single article in a volume of more than seven hundred pages would be ruinously uneconomic.

After consulting King George V, Davidson enlisted the support of Lord Morley, Gladstone’s biographer, a minister and Grand Old Man of Letters. Lee was summoned to a meeting in Morley’s office. Davidson listed the passages the King wanted expunged from the article. Morley asked: “You mean to say that if these were left out, it would satisfy you.” Davidson replied: “Certainly not. We want a new work.” Lee was appalled. The last thing he wanted was to write an official life of Edward VII. He became “very sulky” and tried to back out, protesting that he had just been appointed professor of English literature at the East End College of London University—“very hard work.” Morley
was relentless; according to Davidson, he “behaved like a
trump,
too
beautifully.
” He told Lee “it was no good him saying that he had not written depreciatory things, because he had.”
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Lee was too frightened of Morley to say no. “His
only
fear is that if he ignores Lord Morley’s advice (which was the strongest I ever heard given on any subject from a man in his position) that Lord Morley will have done with him for ever.”
⁶⁴

Lee was cornered. He agreed to write the biography, and arranged an advance of £300 from Smith, Elder, the publishers of the
DNB
.
⁶⁵
It soon became apparent that his ideas about biography were very different from the courtiers’. Brandishing a copy of his 1911 lecture
The Principles of Biography
, he demanded access to all the available letters and papers.
⁶⁶
King Edward’s papers were in the hands of Esher and Knollys, and they had both initially refused to have anything to do with Lee and his book. Once the biography was agreed to, however, Esher was all smiles. Collared by the King, he agreed to supply Lee with the papers at Windsor.
⁶⁷

Lee spent a day reading documents at Windsor in June 1914. He arrived with a swollen face from toothache and kept looking at himself in the mirror. At teatime, Esher appeared. “He talked vaguely about the difficulties of Biography and then gave Lee a rough account of the part he had played in Army Reform. It was very good. He praised King Edward and made out he was the
fons et origo
[source and origin] of all army reform. Brodrick, Arnold-Forster, and Haldane were puppets but the person who pulled the strings was himself!” Ponsonby could see that Esher was playing a part, but he had no objection so long as King Edward “got his full share of credit.”
⁶⁸
Once again, history was being written.

Lee was only given access to carefully selected documents. He was allowed to see papers relating to Bertie’s early life, but little thereafter. This was partly because the archive was still in a state of confusion. Ponsonby claimed that “With regard to 1875 to 1900 no papers appear to exist. Knollys burned everything.”
⁶⁹
This was not, in fact, the case, but the story of Knollys’s holocaust proved very useful as a way of fobbing off the biographer. Lee was sent on wild goose chases, to work
through the Granville papers, for instance, or the Foreign Office dispatches (uninformative and “deadly dull”).
⁷⁰
Ponsonby allowed Lee to work only once at Windsor. He worried that Lee would “be tempted to write up early incidents in too full detail.” Worse, if Lee got into Esher’s clutches, “there would be no saying what might happen.” Esher selected papers from the archive at Windsor that Ponsonby vetted before giving them to Lee to work on at Buckingham Palace.
⁷¹

Little wonder that Lee became discouraged and threatened to abandon the project. He was dismayed when Rosebery mischievously told him that he must bring Bertie’s women into the book. A “threatening letter” that he received from Lady Warwick “greatly disturbed him.”
⁷²
For a confirmed bachelor such as Lee, sexual scandal was toxic, and gossip was a biographical sin. The outbreak of war in August 1914 came as a relief to all concerned. Lee opined that the publication of the biography was not advisable, as the King’s anti-German feeling would doubtless be twisted into showing that he had always intended to go to war against Germany. As for Davidson, he was more than willing to agree to Lee’s request to suspend work on the book until the war was over.
⁷³

Meanwhile, a furious tornado burst upon the royal advisers in the shape of Daisy Warwick, whose finances were once again in crisis, ruined by a company promoter who had swindled her out of £50,000. Her last remaining asset was her affair with the Prince of Wales. In the time-honored fashion of the courtesan, she proposed to cash in and reveal all in her memoirs.

In March 1914, she met the unsavory charlatan Frank Harris in France, and together they concocted a plot. Harris would help Daisy write her kiss-and-tell autobiography and publish it in the United States, where he assured her she stood to make the £100,000 she needed to pay off her debts.
^‡
But Daisy was playing a double game.
Her plan was to use the threat of publishing her memoirs to blackmail King George V. Back in 1908, she had promised Bertie that she had destroyed all his letters. Now it turned out that she still possessed a bundle of thirty, which she claimed had turned up when the bailiffs were ransacking her possessions. This was probably fiction; but by now the distinction between true and false was blurred. Daisy planned to offer the letters to George V for a price of £80,000; in return she would call off publication of her memoirs.
⁷⁴

Daisy’s sister Blanche Gordon-Lennox considered that Daisy’s mind was deranged; there could be no other explanation for her wicked behavior.
⁷⁵
But Daisy did have some justification. She claimed that she had exhausted her inheritance in entertaining the Prince of Wales, and that she had received no reward for her nine years as royal mistress—unlike Alice Keppel, who was known to have made a fortune, largely thanks to Ernest Cassel’s dealings on her behalf. Daisy’s mistake was to imagine that George V could be blackmailed.

As her intermediary, Daisy chose Arthur du Cros, millionaire founder of the Dunlop Rubber company and one of her creditors. Calculating that du Cros was ambitious for recognition at court and a title, she confided her plan to him at a meeting in June 1914. Genuinely shocked, du Cros reported back to the palace. The courtiers were aghast. Ponsonby considered that publication of the letters would not only “blast” King Edward’s reputation, but have a “far graver effect on the monarchy.”
⁷⁶
He urged paying her off, but George V was determined not to give in to blackmail, nor to allow Lady Warwick to humiliate his mother. Sir Charles Russell, the King’s solicitor, was appointed, and he laid an elaborate trap.

On Russell’s request, du Cros agreed to join Daisy on a trip to Paris (13 July 1914), where she met with Frank Harris to discuss the sale of the letters. Russell sent a detective, Mr. Littlechild, to follow Daisy to Paris and shadow her movements. Peeping through the window of her hotel, Littlechild saw Daisy produce several documents, like letters, one of which she gave to Frank Harris. “The lady did most of the talking, and appeared, by her gestures, to be very much in earnest.”
⁷⁷

Instead of the six-figure check from the King that she was expecting,
Daisy returned to London to find an injunction served upon her, forbidding her from publishing, circulating, or divulging letters received from Edward VII. “She was all smiles and politeness,” wrote Russell, “but of rather an artificial kind.” She declared that she would tell her story in court.
⁷⁸

Daisy was not silenced by the injunction. Quite the contrary. In the autumn of 1914, Frank Harris fled wartime France and sought refuge with her at Easton Lodge. Here he dabbled with her memoirs, composing a chapter or two, and she allowed him to rummage among the letters she kept in her room. In the winter, Harris sailed to America, taking with him some of Bertie’s letters. Daisy claimed that he had stolen them, which may or may not have been true. Daisy was watched by spies and visited by Russell. Sir John Simon, the Attorney General, saw three of the letters and pronounced them to be “very bad,” particularly the references to Queen Alexandra. In February 1915, Prime Minister Asquith wrote, “there is now proof that she has been disobeying the injunction and is again hawking some of [the letters]. So the Impeccable”—Asquith’s name for Simon—“proposes to go to a Judge and ask him to ‘commit’ her—in vulgar language to send her to prison till she amends her ways.”
⁷⁹

This was a serious threat. “You will remember,” Russell wrote, “I was going to apply to commit Lady Warwick to Holloway.”
⁸⁰
The specter of prison was enough. Daisy promised to surrender all the letters she possessed and appealed for time to recover the letters from America as well as the manuscript of her memoirs. At length in June, and after renewed threats of committal, Daisy secured the material. She demanded to hand it over in person to George V, but the King declined to meet her, so her brother-in-law, the courtier Sidney Greville, delivered a packet of letters to Lord Stamfordham.
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Daisy salvaged as much credit from her humiliation as she could. Glossing over her attempt to blackmail George V, she wrote in a fury of indignation at the way she had been treated: “I am handing back with splendid generosity the letters King Edward wrote me of his great love, and which belong to me absolutely. I … have never dreamed of publishing … such things.” But (and here was the sting), “My memoirs
are my own affair, and every incident of those ten years of close friendship with King Edward are in my own brain and memory.”
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Nightmares about Daisy’s memoirs continued to haunt the royal advisers. Mrs. Keppel heard a rumor in 1921 that “a certain lady” planned to publish an autobiography based on her own diary, “where I believe, she put in
everything
, however sacred, this may mean that she can get out of actually using
letters
, by saying, in this beastly diary, what was in them.”
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“Sacred” is an odd word to use for adultery with a prince. The rumors about Daisy’s diary turned out (unfortunately for historians) to be unfounded.

Daisy received no money from George V, but du Cros agreed to pay £64,000 toward her debts. This was what she had wanted all along. For his generosity and public service in paying off Lady Warwick, du Cros received a baronetcy in 1916.
⁸⁴
Daisy made copies of Bertie’s letters, and these have recently resurfaced in a private collection; they hardly seem “very bad,” as Sir John Simon considered. Dating from the end of her affair with Bertie in 1898, they are not passionate love letters but the usual mixture of gossip and affectionate banter.

The royal advisers panicked again in 1928. The conditions by which Daisy had been saved from imprisonment in Holloway stipulated that if and when she published her memoir, “she undertook to submit it to a literary man.”
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She now sent an autobiographical manuscript to Esher, who insisted on cuts.
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Daisy’s daughter Lady Marjorie Beckett thought the book so vulgar that she could only describe it as “muck,” which was a somewhat harsh judgment on one of the best-written Edwardian society memoirs, still often cited today.
⁸⁷
Harmless extracts from Bertie’s letters were quoted in her book,
Life’s Ebb and Flow
, in which the narrative of Daisy’s relationship with Bertie is related in a code that only insiders could see through.

“Don’t you think that the time has now come when we might once more consider the question of Sidney Lee and King Edward’s Life,” wrote Davidson to Ponsonby in 1920. To contradict the view that King Edward was responsible for causing the war and to vindicate him in
the war-origins controversy, Davidson wanted the book to show that he had foreseen the conflict and done what he could to prevent it—“hence the Entente.”
⁸⁸

Sidney Lee’s reappointment as biographer was confirmed by King George V in July 1920. The courtiers found Lee more insufferable than ever—“more important, more official and perhaps more difficult to deal with,” and “eaten up with self concentration and self conceit.”
⁸⁹
Lee needed to find a new publisher, as Smith, Elder had gone out of business. The
DNB
had been sold to Oxford University Press, but the delegates had dropped Lee as editor and the snub rankled. The dons of the press disliked Lee, whom they described as “an obstinate old pig”: “He will always be the Cad—he cannot help it.”
⁹⁰
The feeling against Lee was charged by anti-Semitism. It was widely known that he had changed his name from Solomon Lazarus to Sidney while an undergraduate at Balliol. Davidson thought he looked as though he “ought to be behind a Hokey Pokey wheelbarrow in Petticoat Lane.”
⁹¹
Bertie’s friend Admiral Fisher was even blunter and more horrible. “Levi is a liar! … This Jew who is out for money isn’t my horse!”
⁹²