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Bertie and the beast
Robert Blake Edward VII Christopher Hibbert (Allen Lane £5.95)
'Most of his time was spent in the pursuit of Pleasure, and all of it was spent in comfort; Yet even his sternest critics conceded that When there was work to be done, sooner or later he did it.' In these words Mr Christopher Hibbert sums up King Edward VII admirably. Lacking the brain of his father and the application of his mother, a throwback in many respects to his great uncle, George IV, he was nevertheless a monarch Who did more good than harm, insofar as a British King could affect events at all by the beginning of the twentieth century.
One of the many virtues of this excellent biography is that the author does not pitch royal influence too high. Contemporaries grossly exaggerated it. A photograph once appeared in an illustrated paper of the King talking to Campbell Bannerman in the Kurhaus gardens of Marienbad. The King was striking his palm with his clenched fist to emphasise a point. The caption read, 'Is it Peace or war?' When Campbell-BannerMan's secretary showed it to him, his master Paused and said: 'The King wanted to have my opinion whether halibut is better baked than boiled.'
The King Was indeed a great traveller. His constant visits and conversations with Monarchs who really did possess some of the reality as well as the trappings of poweil gave a delusory impression of his own' Position. He often oiled the wheels, as he did over the entente with France, but the machine was driven by others. It was. only very rarely that he acted against the advice of his own Cabinet. One occasion was his v. isit to the Pope in 1903, when he was passing through Rome. Balfour was against it, for fear of a Protestant uproar, but the 1(!rig agreed with the Duke of Norfolk who thought that the omission would offend his Catholic subjects. He forced the Prime Minister to tender advice which allowed him a loophole. Even so the visit bristled With difficulties. The King could not request an audience and the Pope was slow to intimate a desire to see him. Then, where was the visit to be made from? The King Was to lunch with the King df Italy, but to go straight from the Quirinale was impossible; relations between the Papacy and the Monarchy had been glacial for years. Eventually the British Embassy was chosen.
The King decided to arrive at Naples ineognito—which Sir Frederick Ponsonby Considered 'rather absurd', since 'no other human being in the world would come With eight battleships, four cruisers, four destroyers and a dispatch vessel'. At Naples
his unwilling host for lunch was Lord Rosebery who had a villa there. Quantity was satisfactory—twenty courses ending at 4 p.m.—but quality was not, since the exPrime Minister had employed an indifferent firm of caterers. The King was in a bad temper by the time he reached Rome. However, the visit went well, and the Pope, who was ninety-three, tactfully obviated any danger of the royal suite having to obey the King's strict injunction not to kiss his ring by shaking hands all round. These, rather than great affairs of state, were the sort of problems that beset a monarch at the turn of the century.
If the King spent most of his life in the pursuit of pleasure he can scarcely be blamed. He was not a collector or a connoisseur and he never read a book—a fact which became disconcertingly apparent when he imprudently reproached his mother on the absence of his own name from More Leaves "from a Journal of Our Life in the Highlands. The Queen pointed out that it appeared on pages one, five, eight, 331 and 378. She added that he would no doubt have been mentioned more often if he had seen fit to come more often to Balmoral. Lacking all intellectual interests and excluded by his mother from any share in the serious duties of royalty—it was not till he was over fifty that he was given the Prince Consort's golden key which opened Foreign Office boxes—he naturally devoted himself to society, sport, racing, gambling, eating and making love.
It was his first essay in the latter activity which indirectly caused his exclusion. The Prince was oddly immature as a boy and nearly seventeen before one of his tutors, surprised at certain questions which he asked, gave him a discreet lecture on the 'purpose and abuse of the union of the sexes'. But when he was nineteen at the Curragh Camp a group of young officers after a drunken party put a pretty actress in his bed to await his return. His affair with Nellie Clifden, whom he shared with his boon companion Lord Carrington, soon became notorious and reached the ears of his father, for she was highly indiscreet.
The Prince Consort was horrified to what even then seemed an absurd degree. He was ill at the time and died of typhoid soon after.
Queen Victoria to the end of her days attributed his death to his worry about 'Bertie's fall', as she called it. 'I never can or shall look at him without a shudder,' she wrote to her daughter, the Crown Princess of Prussia, 'Pity him t do ... But more you cannot ask.'
And so, although the Prince Consort's friend, Colonel Seymour, assured the Queen that the episode was no more than a 'youthful error that very few young men escape', the unlucky Prince was for forty years entrusted only with the most trivial functions and thus condemned to live almost exactly the sort of life of which his mother most deeply disapproved.
The Prince of Wales's ceaseless pursuit of pleasure is well described by Mr Hibbert, and his character is vividly portrayed—the charm, the courtesy, the sudden outbursts of rage, the endless fuss about clothes, medals and uniforms, the perpetual fear of ennui, the heavy banter, the practical jokes, the recklessness which produced such 'scandals' as the Mordaunt, Aylesford, Beresford and Tranby-Croft affairs, the ceaseless amours not only in England, but Paris and the various spas which he visited for his health. The author evokes this vanished world of conspicuous waste with a cool detachment avoiding nostalgia and censoriousness alike. And he has an eye for the anecdote. Dealing with the famous liaison with Mrs Keppel, he observes that something of the aura of the affair rubbed off on Colonel Keppel. After the King's death, when he was in the Tuscany villa which his wife had bought as a result of the provision made for her, he was pointed out to some inquisitive tourists by a guide as `l'ultitno amante della Regina Victoria', When the Prince quietly reproved an Austrian aristocrat for wearing what looked like a Guard's tie, he was asked how long the Guards had had those colours. To his reply 'three hundred years', the answer came 'They have been my family colours for seven hundred years'.
Mr Hibbert has written a wholly admirable biography which is excellent value for money. The official life by Sir Henry Lee was conscientious and scholarly, but for obvious reasons omitted large slices of the royal private life. Sir Philip Magnus' s life based on the royal archives was much more candid, but he, too, steered clear of some matters, or at any rate did not go into so much detail. Mr Hibbert does not appear to have used the papers at Windsor, but he has searched widely through other collections, including some fascinating material from the dossiers of the Paris police. His book is wonderfully well illustrated, highly readable and in places extremely funny. It is also a work of learningand scholarship. I can imagine no better a present for someone who, unlike its subject, reads books.
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