All in the family
George Gale
The King, the Press and the People Kinley Roby .(Barrie and Jenkins £6.50)
The Hanoverians, the Guelph family, which through a female line providing some trace of Stuart blood and the provisions of the Act of Settlement acceded, in the not comely person of George I, to the throne of Great Britain and Ireland in 1714, were a pretty undistinguished lot. In general, it can be said of this troupe of royals that they hated their fathers and sons and exhibited with regularity a black streak Which issued either as dissolution or as madness or as both. Victoria, however, seemed likely to be different: a young and joyful girl, With a teenager's crush on Lord Melbourne, she became queen in June 1837, to the general Pleasure of the public and to the particular relief of the politicians. Then, unfortunately, three years later she married Albert. The future Edward VII was their second child and first son and he it is who is the subject of a very amusing but misnamed book.
Edward, or Bertie — the diminutive of Albert — by which he was known inside the dreadful family, was only two Years old when an anonymous tract laid down The Prince's life must be exemplary"; and as a Child and youth his life was more cocooned, more corsetted, than ever that of his mother and father had been. Denied the companionship of his contemporaries, he was also cut off from any affection — if such existed — from his Parents. Just before he was sixteen he was given £100 a year from his miserly mother to buy his own clothes, his mother telling him at the time to avoid anything "extravagant or slang," that being "an offence against decency • . an indifference to what is morally wrong." His father and mother dreaded that Bertie, in his puberty, would fall from grace, by which they meant from virginity, and did everything they could to stop the inevitable. With three and a half years to go before Bertie became twenty one, his mother feared that then "he will be of age and we can't hold him except by moral power! I shut my eyes to that terrible moment!"
The terrible' moment arrived before then. Bertie had been packed off to Canada and the United States and had found himself actually liked, was doing stints at Oxford and Cambridge, and had been sent on training with the Grenadier Guards at-the Curragh in Ireland. Then, not at all suddenly, the Queen's mother, the Duchess of Kent, died. Victoria, possibly out of a sense of guilt, or possibly displaying the incipient Havoverian madness, was altogether excessively disturbed at her mother's death, and angered at Bertie's insufficient display of uncontrollable grief. Bertie went back to Ireland, and his fellow subalterns arranged that Young Nellie Clifden taught him, if not the facts of life, at least the pleasures of sex. It rapidly became mess-room knowledge. Nellie followed Bertie from Ireland to Cambridge. Soon enough Albert found out about his son; not much later he contracted typhoid, which was not diagnosed. Next, having told Victoria about Bertie and Nellie, Albert died. Victoria, having been unnaturally stricken at her mother's death, now became very unhinged, coming to believe that her eldest son, through his affair with Nellie Clifden, had been the cause of her husband's ',death. Albert, the Prince Consort, was sent to Frogmore, there to join Victoria's mother; but at Buckingham Palace and at Windsor and elsewhere his rooms were to be left untouched, his clothes and papers also, for the next forty years, until Victoria died and Edward VII (resolutely declining to be called King Albert-and-Edward, as his mother wanted) cleaned out the rubbish.
It is a terrible story; and Mr Roby, when he is not trying to write a thesis, tells it extremely well. But we must dispose of the ridiculous title of his book. For a start, it is not about the King but the Prince: only the last twelve chapters deal with Edward VII's reign, and that very much as an epilogue. Then, it is not about the press, nor even about the Prince of Wales's relations with the press; instead, we get a lot of quotations from the press. And, third, it is not about 'the people' either, although 'they' crop up from time to time. A book could have been written about the prince, the press and the people, perhaps; but this would have been a different and more arduous and probably more tedious endeavour than that which Mr Roby has set out upon. What we are given, instead, is a lively biography of the Prince of Wales, enriched with many good quotations from contemporary press files and other secondary and tertiary sources, together with some occasional and not very helpful observations on 'people' and 'public.' The one question which a genuinely academic study of the subject, as indicated by the title, might have answered is, were the wildly differing responses of 'the public' to the Prince of Wales during his long exclusion from authority the responses of a single, fickle public; or were they the responses of at least two different publics, each drawn from the same mass, but each choosing to come to the surface only at particular times and, as often as not, in response the one to the other? It is a criticism of Roby's book that he seems totally unaware of the question, let alone the answer. This said, the book is great fun. Mr Roby is particularly good on the great scandals which punctuated the Prince's forty years of hanging on, waiting until his mother died.
The Prince of Wales would undoubtedly have made a first-class diplomat, had his mother permitted. As it was, he did pretty well, hobnobbing around the European capitals and being one of the chief architects, in his later life, of the entente cordiale. He always liked France, and never liked Germany; and his Overall influence in this regard may well have been both considerable and misplaced. He also set fashion; won the Derby twice; and, finally, more or less endeared himself to the general public as an English gentleman, which is to say, someone given to the pursuit of foxes and women, enjoying the pleasures of turf and table, and almost but not quite as ignorant as he might appear about anything and everything else. In many respects Edward was what the ordinary man would like to be and do, if he won the pools. The unhappy thing about Edward, or at least about his sixty years as `Bertie, Alas!' was that he didn't win the pools. His mother kept him starved not only of affection but of funds; and it was probably the lack of both which nfade Bertie as he was. Despite his profligacy and despite, too, the Hanoverian vulgarity which he inherited, he was a man of spirit, which survived his terrible upbringing, a man of pleasures, which he enjoyed despite the hypocrisies of his times, and a man with a disposition towards his fellows which was capable, time and again, of disarming the criticism which his behaviour attracted. He might have brought the monarchy down; but instead, he strengthened it.
He was a very flawed man, Bertie, but he is the justified hero of Mr Roby's story — just as his parents, Victoria and Albert, are the villain and the villainess. All in all, a very Victorian — or Albertine — melodrama, highly recommended as a most superior scissors-and-paste job, which turns out not to be, as well, a hatchetjob.
George Gale is a former editor of The Spectator
Previous page
