Jane Ridley: Bertie - A Life Of Edward VII (Chatto & Windus)

Saturday 15 September 2012

On December 14, 1871, the Prince of Wales, against all seeming odds, did what his father Albert had failed to do two decades earlier, to the day: 30-year-old Albert Edward recovered from typhoid and – almost as miraculously – became popular.

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Review: Brian Morton

'Bertie' had never been much liked. Even his mother, for whom Albert was nonpareil in life and a very saint in the tomb, said she couldn't look at her second child without a shudder: "a terribly unfit, totally unreflecting successor! ... He does nothing!" The people thought him a waster and wished the rules of succession could be changed to allow his older sister, Vicky (arguably the cleverest royal of modern times) to ascend the throne.

Disraeli is often credited with rebuilding the British monarchy, but it was Gladstone who took charge of the thanksgiving celebrations to mark Bertie's recovery, a Diana-like moment, and to find the Prince of Wales some gainful employment. As Jane Ridley reveals, Edward became the first career royal. He played hard, and often fast and loose with other men's wives, but it has been forgotten that he also worked hard.He visited India, to justify his mother becoming Empress. The visit was a success, although opinion at home was soured by the shooting of an elephant in Ceylon and a pregnant tigress. Shooting was an obsession, and so was the apparel that went with it. Present-day fashion editors devour footage of the Duchess of Cambridge, to see if fascinators are back in or on the way out, but no royal figures have exerted as much influence as Bertie and his beautiful Danish wife Alix. Everything from the Norfolk jacket to "Teddy Boy" drapes date from his reign.His was a life alternately feminised and macho, in uneven proportions. Ridley originally set out to write a life of a Prince of Wales and his women, intuiting that these were the relationships that defined him. Philandering is often a sign of insecurity, and Bertie had all the insecurity of an older son who lacks maternal love and cannot possibly meet the weight of expectation handed down from his father. The exact nature of his amours cannot now be gauged. Much correspondence has been burned. Whether he bedded or merely flirted with some of his mistresses remains speculative, but his loose-box of actresses, professional beauties and courtesans have become legendary figures: Susan Vane-Tempest, Lillie Langtry, Catherine Walters, also known as "Skittles", Jennie Churchill (mother of Winston), and Alice Keppel, the great-grandmother of Camilla Shand, now Duchess of Cornwall.When one thinks of that connection, there is a strong air of plus ça change in royal circles. Prince Charles finds himself in much the same position as Bertie, only likely to ascend the throne in old age. He is also very much Bertie's heir in the sense of being an active Prince of Wales rather than a king-in-waiting. The irony of Victoria is that the more she retreated into widowhood, the more iron-like was her grip on power. Ridley, whose painstaking detail is matched by superb insight, shows that the myth of Edward VII as a do-nothing monarch was the creation of Liberal politicians anxious to demonstrate Britain's political modernity and freedom from atavism. Far from being "totally unreflecting", he was shrewd and proactive. He may have liked the outgoing freedom of American heiresses, but he also wisely recognised that the future lay with America, and it was Bertie who founded the "special relationship". He also loved France and its pleasures, but just two generations after Waterloo his Entente Cordiale reshaped European politics. Bertie may have disliked his cousin William II, but he also took a more deliberate and significant step away from his mother's obsessive pro-Germanism. The reigns of the two 20th-century Georges were dominated by European war. The "Edwardian age" has been presented as an episode of late-Victorianism, a historical lacuna. Ridley shows that it was instead the beginnings of what we are now.BErtie: A Life Of Edward VIIJane RidleyChatto & Windus, £30

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Jane Ridley: Bertie - A Life Of Edward VII (Chatto & Windus)

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