Tales of Turn-Turn
By JAMES POPE-HENNESSY
V1VID and successful biography depends upon three factors—the skill of the biographer, the intrinsic interest of his subject, and the quality and quantity of the source material upon which the book is based. In selecting King Edward VII,* whom he aptly describes as a 'tense and moody King,' Sir Philip Magnus has set himself a task of no ordinary difficulty.
Save for a childhood of especial unhappiness and strain, nine-tenths of King Edward's life was, by force of circumstances backed up by the very strongest inclination, devoted to the pursuit of pleasure. Like his brother-in-law the Emperor Frederick III, the King had to wait inordinately long for his inheritance; and, although he reigned nine years rather than the Emperor's ninety-nine days, his activities as monarch were harassed and harassing rather than influential and important.
To make such a character and career sympa- thetic and convincing is not easy. Yet if Sir Philip has not always succeeded in keeping the drama going, it is because there was singularly little drama about. But his chief handicap has been the paucity of available material. This is due to what Sir Philip nicely terms 'a period of incendiary activity' amongst the Royal Archives initiated after Queen Victoria's death by her youngest daughter and literary executor, Princess Beatrice.
Evening after evening from 1901 onwards, Princess Beatrice would sit over the fire in her Kensington Palace drawing-room transcribing her mother's intimate, detailed and highly vivacious Journals in a garbled and anodyne form, diligently burning the original pages as she went. King Edward himself ordered the destruction of the correspondence between Queen Victoria and Lord Granville, and, next, of Queen Victoria's correspondence with Disraeli on family matters. After his own death, all the King's private and persona] correspondence with his mother and with his wife was burned in accordance with a directive in his will. When Queen Alexandra died -typically intestate—at Sandringham in 1925, the whole of her private papers were destroyed by her old friend and confidante, Miss Charlotte Knollys. Sir Philip thus found no goldMine in the Windsor Archives beyond King Edward's own laconic and colour- less diary, oddly kept in the third person: 'The King rather ill with severe chill,' he wrote of himself, for instance, in •June, 1902: 'Unable to dine.' So Sir Philip, whose scrupulous scholar- ship is once again as evident as in his great Life of Gladstone, has had to rely on State papers, on a few private hoards like the Lin- colnshire archives, on published memoirs, and —it seems almost at times—on newspaper reports of State visits and functions.
These functions were never very taxing. In 1879, the then Prince of Wales performed twenty public engagements; during the Eighties this modest programme crept up to an annual average of forty-two. Within the Royal Family the theory still prevailed that it was awfully good of its members to do anything public at all— Queen Alexandra's hatred of 'that tiresome Alexandra Day' drive being but a survival from this climate of family opinion. Even Queen Mary, with her lofty sense of duty, felt public * KING EDWARD THE SEVENTH. By Philip Magnus. (John Murray, 50s.)
demands inconsiderate: 'After all, there are limits to one's endurance.'
Sir Philip Magnus emphasises Queen Vic- toria's opposition to allowing her eldest son a thorough training in public affairs, or more than glimpses of secret Cabinet papers. Yet even his biographer, who is winningly partial to his sub- ject, allows that King Edward could be excep- tionally voluble and indiscreet about any con- fidential information which came his way. The Queen's original conviction that her eldest son had been the direct cause of the Prince Consort's death waned slowly; but even without that early prejudice, she watched the social round of the Prince and Princess of Wales with an apprehen- sive eye. She was never really unfair to him, however. Writing to his sister, the Crown Princess Frederick, about his youthful dislike of books and of professors, she candidly admitted : 'Bertie is my caricature. That is the misfortune, and, in a man, this is so much worse.'
Sir Philip shows us the development of the Prince of Wales's character with loving care, and his chapter on the truly hair-raising educational programme dreamed up for him by the Prince Consort gives us the origins of much that later went wrong. Isolated from other boys, taught in three languages simultaneously, worked far too long hours for six days a week, the Prince of Wales became moody, nervous, inattentive and given to fits of screaming. Indeed, the long life of total self-indulgence on which he swiftly em- barked when given his freedom was perhaps nothing but a noisy and voluptuous compensa- tion for so vile a childhood. He, could never bear to be thwarted, and his attitude to his subsequent responsibilities seems well summed up in an axiom about yachting which he Coined when Ministers protested at his going off into the blue aboard the Victoria and Albert at a moment of grave national crisis. Asked to! leave a few addresses behind him, he explained :1 'The whole point of yachting is to go where you like and when you like.'
Gladstone, and many others, vainly strdve to persuade the Queen to give her son employ- ment. She may have been right to resist the 'Irish Plan,' which was to send the WaleSes as Viceroy and Vicereine to Dublin--for during a short good-will tour of Ireland in April, 1885, the Royalties and their suite were booed and pelted with onions by what one member of their party termed 'the lazzaroni' of Cork City, who likewise brandished 'black flags and black ker- chiefs—a nightmare!' Whatever the reasons, and his new biographer adduces many, King Edward VII, when he ascended the British throne in 1901, was one of the worst-informed sovereigns of this century.
Piloting us through the main events of the reign--War Office and Admiralty reforms, Public Education Act, House of Lords crisisSir Philip is far more fascinating about the tempestuous relationship between the King and his nephew, the Kaiser Wilhelm, as well as about the calmer connection with the King's mild nephew, the Czar Nicolas. He also lifts the cur:ain on certain social scandals of the day and treats the King's amorous proclivities with sensible frankness. If at times he seems a trifle pontifical—it has never, as he avers, been absolutely disproved (nor absolutely proved) that the Prince Consort had Jewish blood— this is because he loves his sub- ject. He very nearly persuades us to do the same.
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