The Heir Apparent

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I began work on this book in 2003. My original idea was to write a short life of King Edward VII, looking at his relations with women: with his mother, Queen Victoria; with his sisters; with his wife, Queen Alexandra; and, of course, with his mistresses. But then, by gracious permission of Her Majesty the Queen, I was granted unrestricted access to the papers of King Edward VII in the Royal Archives.

This was an extraordinary privilege. I find it hard to convey a sense of the vast riches I encountered in the archives at Windsor Castle. The first documents I saw concerned the Prince of Wales’s childhood and education. Trolley loads of papers, meticulously cataloged and bound, gave a harrowing insight into an ambitious educational project that ended in fiasco. Where else was the upbringing of a recalcitrant boy documented as if it were an affair of state? I was the first biographer to see the papers of Edward VII for almost fifty years—since Philip Magnus,
who published in 1964. Many more papers have been added since. I realized very soon that I would need to write a full biography.

The research at Windsor took me more than five years. I don’t mean that I went there every day—far from it; but whenever I could, I seized a research day. I caught the train from Paddington, changed at Slough, walked from Windsor station up to the castle, passed through security checks at the Henry VIII Gate, and climbed the eighty-nine steps to the top of the Round Tower, where the archives are housed. Windsor is quite unlike any other archive; researchers work in rooms of understated grandeur, the manuscripts are preordered, awaiting your arrival, and when the bell rings for coffee at eleven o’clock the guard changes to the stirring music of a military band in the Lower Ward outside. Arriving pale and haggard (I know this from the police security photographs), I would sink into a chair beside a cart which had been loaded with my ration of papers for the day. Like a caterpillar chewing a giant lettuce leaf, I set to work, reading through the mountain of documents and transcribing them onto my laptop. When I came across gold—as I often did—I would type like a frenzied exam candidate, racing against the time when the bell rang for closing.

I made the decision that I must call my subject Bertie. None of his contemporaries addressed him by the double name of Albert Edward, which he himself disliked. Previous biographers had referred to him respectfully as the Prince of Wales or King Edward, but I wanted to avoid the formality and distancing effect of royal titles. Calling him Bertie—as his family did—brought him closer in some ways, but at the same time gave him reality as a figure from history.

The many thousands of letters that I read from Queen Victoria to Bertie were a revelation. I found it astonishing—admirable, in a way—that Victoria never learned the courtly art of dissembling. Not for her the long pause, the polite request for more information. Whatever was on her mind she poured out in her emphatic, illegible scrawl. Her correspondence with her daughter Vicky reveals her as one of the best letter writers of the nineteenth century—vivid, candid, and intensely human. Her letters to Bertie, by contrast, were often judgmental and
framed in the imperative mood. Her anger leaped from the page, startling in its urgency even today.

Bertie’s replies puzzled me. I have read thousands of his letters, and they are—mostly—prime examples of the masculine epistolary style sometimes known as British phlegm. He filled the page with small talk, padded out with comments on the weather or the health of acquaintances, and peppered his sentences with clichés enclosed in quotes. Little wonder that Victoria berated him for failing to enter into a vigorous and heartfelt exchange of opinions with her. There were times when I wondered whether the effort of deciphering the impenetrable loops of his grotesque calligraphy was worth the bathetic result. But then I realized that I was missing the point. For him, letter writing was a duty, not a means of self-expression; the aim was not to reveal, but to conceal, his true feelings.

So closely did Bertie guard his private life that, in his will, he ordered all his letters to be destroyed. No correspondence survives between him and his wife, Alexandra of Denmark. I wanted to place the marriage at the center of my story, but the hole in the archive seemed to make this impossible. My breakthrough came when I discovered that the National Archives of Denmark possessed three boxes of photocopies of letters written in Danish by Alix to her sister Dagmar. I booked a flight to Copenhagen and hired a translator. It was February, and I sat shivering beside my translator in the permafrost of the archive, typing as she read the fading photocopies and translated roughly out loud. Later, she worked systematically through the boxes, translating the letters that at last allowed me to see things from Alexandra’s point of view.

The first phase of Bertie’s life—up to the age of about thirty—has a strong story line provided by his stormy relationship with Queen Victoria and by his marriage. The second part—the thirty years until his accession aged fifty-nine, which I have called the Expanding Middle—was the hardest bit to write. A great deal is known about what he did—what time he took a train, whom he saw, how many pheasants he shot—but it is hard to find the heart of the genuine man who was
Bertie. Then I hit upon the idea of going back to my original plan of trying to work out his inner life by looking at his relationships with women.

No letters from women are preserved among Bertie’s papers, but many of his letters to women survive outside the Royal Archives.
^*
These are typically polite and discreet; but the bland contents belie their subversive purposes. Consider the situation. Royal invitations were normally formal and formulaic, issued by equerries or private secretaries and composed in the third person. Here, however, the Prince of Wales wrote to a woman in his own hand, informally and in the first person. His purpose was often to make an appointment to see the woman alone, sometimes for tea—the
cinq à sept
—or for luncheon. Though they give so little away, Bertie’s missives can be read as coded messages in a royal dance of courtly love. Some, but not all, of the women became his mistresses. But that did not necessarily mean that he slept with them. The word “mistress” should perhaps be understood in the sense, today archaic, of a woman who is admired, cosseted, and courted by a man, as well as in the modern meaning, which almost invariably implies a sexual relationship.