by Jane Ridley
Bertie’s travels as Prince of Wales—his familiarity with Paris courtesans and German spas—made him the most cosmopolitan of British monarchs; fluent in German and French, even speaking English with the hint of a German accent, he possessed the best address book in Europe and his own superior sources of intelligence. As King, he acted as his country’s roving ambassador. An amazing number of Victoria’s descendants held power in Europe, and Bertie was head of this immensely influential family. The fact that both Germany and Russia were ruled by his nephews gave a unique opportunity for dynastic diplomacy. The reconfiguration of British foreign policy after 1902 meant that the making of the ententes would have taken place in any event, but Bertie played a key part in enabling the Entente Cordiale through his visit to Paris in 1903. Historians have been slow to recognize his contribution, however, because—as the evidence clearly shows—after his death the politicians attempted to write him out of diplomatic history.
In his relations with the emperor of Germany, his nephew Kaiser William, Bertie’s achievement is more ambiguous. His aim was to triangulate the ententes with Russia and France by maintaining friendly relations with Germany. He promoted the naval race with Germany, but he was dedicated to preventing war—which by the end of his life he considered inevitable. His dynastic diplomacy was compromised, however, by the baggage of family quarrels. He could never forget how the kaiser had snubbed him in Vienna, nor could he forgive William for his treatment of his mother, Bertie’s sister Vicky. The kaiser, for his part, was paranoid about his uncle, whom he called “Satan.” Negotiation with a character such as Kaiser William was doomed. In 1914, he blamed Bertie for the outbreak of war, declaring: “Edward VII is stronger after his death than I am who am still alive.”5
No king since has played the part that Bertie did in foreign policy. George V, who rarely traveled and who spoke poor German and worse French, made no attempt to emulate his father in this respect. Instead, he sought to identify the monarchy with the British Empire—with India and the “British Dominions beyond the Seas,” to which Bertie paid relatively little attention.
Debate still smolders over Bertie’s legacy. On the one hand, his detractors allege that he was “indolent and overfed,” a man whose lack of interest in domestic politics and aversion to paperwork led him to take the line of least resistance and do what his prime ministers wanted.6 The result, it is suggested, was that he was the first truly constitutional monarch in the modern sense of the term—that is, a king who is not openly partisan and plays no part in politics. On the other hand, he has been hailed as the last king to wield the political power of the Crown, pursuing his own policies and fighting constant battles with his ministers.7
Both sides in this controversy assume that being a constitutional monarch is a sign of failure. Edward VII was indeed the first constitutional king. But rather than weakening the monarchy, he modernized it and made it stronger.
The decline in the power of the Crown—the consequence of the rise of democracy, the growth of a robust two-party system, and the triumph of liberal ideas—took place during the second half of Victoria’s reign. Paradoxically, Victoria herself never accepted it, and she continued to behave as though her powers were undiminished. In the last decades of her reign she was virulently pro-Conservative, pursuing a vendetta against the Liberal party in general and Gladstone in particular. Though the Crown lost its power, however, its influence—private and nonpartisan—grew. As the Crown became distanced from politics, its authority increased. At the end of her reign, Queen Victoria was less powerful than she had been at the beginning, but her popularity was far greater and so was respect for the institution of monarchy.8
Edward VII was the first monarch to come to terms with this shift. He did not debate policy with his ministers; he showed no party preferences, nor did he veto ministerial appointments. But this did not mean he was a weak king. He relinquished the powers of the Crown, but he greatly expanded its influence. In foreign policy and defense, which were traditionally seen as the special preserve of the sovereign, he intervened behind the scenes.* Acting as an enabler, he facilitated his ministers’ policies and promoted what he considered to be the national interest. When the Liberal government was formed in 1905, for example, he ensured continuity in foreign policy through his contacts at the Foreign Office and through engineering the appointment as foreign secretary of the pro-French Edward Grey. But he was careful to avoid any appearance of meddling in Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman’s Cabinet making.
Bertie understood the need to project the authority of the Crown through ceremonial and public display. Hence his impatience with Victoria’s gloomy court, secluded at Windsor and Osborne. In contrast to his mother, he opened Parliament in state every year of his reign. Based in London, the monarchy became glamorous again. Buckingham Palace, which Queen Victoria had barely used after Albert’s death, was restored to splendor. Showering decorations and medals like confetti, Bertie insisted on strict protocol. If sartorial correctness seemed to take the place of personal morality, this was because outward display was essential to the image of authority.
As the power of the Crown declined, the monarch acquired a new role: the head of state became the head of the nation. When Admiral Fisher asked why on earth the King was inquiring after the health of the republican Keir Hardie, Bertie went for him “like a mad bull.” “You don’t understand me!” he roared. “I am King of ALL the People!”†9 How successful he was in gaining acceptance for that role was shown during the constitutional crisis of 1910, when both sides turned to him as mediator. He had become the nation’s head. This was the greatest achievement of his reign.
Standing in front of a fire with a fat cigar between his teeth, King Edward seemed to Esher “wonderfully like King Henry VIII, only better tempered.”10 The fact was that Bertie adored being King. Confounding the naysayers, he was very good at it.
Alix never fully adjusted to widowhood. She made no attempt to create a new role for herself as Dowager, as did Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. By now almost stone deaf, she found it hard to come to terms with change. Each year she joined Minnie in Denmark on their yachts for “the same old life”: sixteen or eighteen people for every meal, but the regal sisters would never decide until half an hour before where they wanted to eat. So the cook prepared vast quantities of food regardless, and the result was a massive bill and a very disgruntled cook, who complained at the Queen’s thoughtlessness, “never receiving any praise at all or being told what the Queen likes, but every dislike is made known to him.”11 Superbly coiffed, straight-backed, and radiantly smiling, the two old queens sat at either end of a long table. Everything was always “fine” or “splendid”—the pain of Bertie’s death was never mentioned.12
Alix stayed on at Sandringham in the big house, while George V and Queen Mary squashed into York Cottage. Some have blamed Alix for refusing to move, but this is unfair—Bertie had left the house to her for her lifetime, and the King and Queen could have found another place to live.13 Alix’s household remained unchanged. Charlotte Knollys, seventy-five in 1910, continued as her companion and private secretary, and the seventy-seven-year-old Dighton Probyn stuck to his post as her comptroller. With his neck bent double, his chin and long white beard nodding on his chest, he fought a losing battle against the compulsive extravagance of the “blessed Lady,” as he called her.
In old age, Alix the ever-youthful high-spirited princess metamorphosed into a monster. The princess who perhaps had never fully grown up reverted to a spoiled and willful child. Lacking inner resources, Motherdear clung unreasonably to her family. “Mama, as I have always said, is one of the most selfish people I know,” wrote George.14 Victoria, her unmarried daughter, suffered the most. She was forced to live with her mother, who treated her like a glorified maid. When Alix rang her bell, Toria was obliged to run, often to discover that her mother had quite forgotten why she wanted her.
The 1914–18 war shattered Alix’s world. She became a
frail old woman, incoherent and confused. George, whom, in deference to Bertie, Alix insisted on calling “King George” rather than “the King,” was very good to her.15 He wrote often, and in church he would sit beside her, finding her place in the prayer book. She found comfort in the company of children, and toddlers would be selected to entertain her.16 T. E. Lawrence, who met her in 1920, saw beneath the black net veil and wrote cruelly of a “mummified thing”: “the red-rimmed eyes, the enamelled face, which the famous smile scissored across all angular and heart-rending.”17 But her mind still went back to Bertie, and how, sixty years before, walking in the gardens at Laeken, “he suddenly proposed to me! My surprise was great & I accepted him with greatest delight!”18
* * *
* The exception to this was the visit to Paris in 1903, which was a political intervention.
† This was what Daisy Warwick meant when she described Bertie as “the most democratic monarch who ever sat on the throne of England.” (Warwick, Life’s Ebb and Flow, p. 154.)
AFTERWORD
Bertie and the Biographers
Bertie was extraordinarily secretive about archives and resistant to any sort of biography. In this he differed sharply from Queen Victoria. He lived a far more public life than his reclusive mother, but he disliked intensely her habit of releasing publications about her private life such as Leaves from Our Life in the Highlands.
For Victoria, biography was a way of putting the record straight and connecting with her people. When her children complained that Theodore Martin’s biography of Albert revealed too much about their family life, Victoria replied: “endless false and untrue things have been written and said about us, public and private, and … in these days people will write and will know, therefore the only way to counteract this, is to let the real full truth be known, and as much as can be with prudence and discretion, and then no harm but good will be done.”1 Modern biographers could hardly put the case better.
The tidy-minded Albert had used a cross-referenced filing system. This had been continued after his death, but documents were not sorted and filed as assiduously as before. Indeed, by the time Queen Victoria died, her papers were in chaos. Fritz Ponsonby was appalled to discover that forty years of political correspondence had been stuffed into cupboards, filling several rooms at Windsor.2
Victoria left all her private and family papers under the control of Princess Beatrice. These were in a strong room to which Beatrice had the key, “until such time as she is able to go through them in accordance with the Queen’s directions.”3
Beatrice spent thirty years transcribing a bowdlerized version of her mother’s journal into hardcover lined notebooks in her legible blue-black ink, rewriting and destroying the originals as she went.* Her labors filled 111 books and earned her no thanks from posterity. She is routinely berated for mutilating the text of Victoria’s journals and destroying the originals. This is understandable but not entirely fair. Beatrice was a dutiful daughter obeying her mother’s instructions. If the Queen’s journals had been bequeathed to Bertie, the likelihood is that he would have burned the lot.
Beatrice herself burned thirty volumes of letters from Prince Alfred and all of Princess Alice’s letters. As royal archivist Robin Mackworth-Young wrote: “Queen Victoria was perfectly entitled to do what she chose with her most private and intimate writings, and we can count ourselves lucky that they have been left to posterity in any form at all.”4
Victoria bequeathed her political papers to her successors, and Bertie appointed Esher, then Secretary of the Office of Works, to take charge. Victoria had talked about a biography toward the end of her life, but this idea was quickly dropped.5 Instead Esher decided to publish a selection of letters from the early part of her reign. The aim, as he explained, was to let the letters speak for themselves without comment, “thus avoiding the trap into which most biographers notably fall,” while cutting anything which “could give offence or pain.”6 Esher had no experience as archivist or editor, and he appointed a collaborator, Arthur Benson, son of the archbishop and ex-Eton housemaster. The real work of selecting and editing Victoria’s letters was done by Benson. He was installed in the Round Tower and received strict instructions from the King that “not a single paper must on any pretence whatever be taken from the Castle, even for half an hour.”7 He had scant respect for Bertie, whom he described in his diary as looking like a “little dwarf … (What a figure!)”8
Esher’s proposal for a book of Queen Victoria’s letters made Bertie uneasy. “Should it be published?” he asked in 1904. “Anyhow not without my sanction and having looked over it.”9 He was “nervous” and “fussy,” telling Esher there must be “nothing private, nothing scandalous, nothing intime, nothing malicious.”10
All personal matters and references to the Queen’s children were omitted; the letters contain nothing relating to Bertie’s agonizing education, even though Esher knew this material and had discussed it with him.11 Esher forced Benson to shorten the book and cut anything that might annoy Bertie. The success of the enterprise depended, in Esher’s view, on obeying the King’s wishes. “I am all for the King having his way,” he told Knollys. “If he does not, I am sure that there will be trouble hereafter, as all sorts of people will gossip to him and write to him about the deficiencies of the book. If he starts in an attitude of ‘bien veilleur’ all will be well.”12
The King had insisted on reading everything himself. Or at least that was what Benson and the publisher, John Murray, believed.13 In fact, Bertie probably did not see the first draft. The manuscript was read and censored on his behalf by Esher and Knollys, both of whom were driven by overpowering anxiety about the risk of incurring the King’s displeasure. As Knollys warned Esher: “If when the work appears anything in it strikes the King as inappropriate or in bad taste … the first person he will blame and fall foul of will be you, then Benson while I shall probably make a poor third.”14 Invoking the name of the King (who was actually safely out of reach in Marienbad at the time), Knollys and Esher compiled a list of excisions that ran to nine foolscap pages, cutting every “objectionable and doubtful” passage. By striking out strong language, political bias, and references to living persons, they made the published letters as mild and bland as possible.15 Only after this was the King shown the final proofs; and there is no evidence that he actually read them.16
Arthur Bigge, who also read the proofs, urged caution, not just to protect Queen Victoria’s reputation but also to safeguard the monarchy. “If I were the King,” he wrote, “both from the point of view of son to mother and also for the sake of the monarchical idea and ‘culte’ I would publish nothing which would shake the position of Queen Victoria in the minds of his subjects.”17
The Letters of Queen Victoria were published in three volumes in 1907. So successful were they that Esher considered publishing a further two volumes, covering the twenty years after Albert’s death. He eventually decided that the material was too controversial, especially the letters dealing with German unification. Bertie’s sigh of relief is almost audible. “I entirely agree,” he minuted. “A considerable time must elapse before it would be prudent to publish more of Queen Victoria’s letters.”18
Esher’s work on the Queen’s papers allowed him to carve out a new position for himself as Keeper of the King’s Archives. He posed as a constitutional expert, producing plums from the papers on demand. As an archivist, he inclined toward a policy of burning. In making an “excellent” rearrangement, Ponsonby and Esher between them managed to destroy an estimated 50 percent of Queen Victoria’s political papers.19 In this Bertie was a willing accomplice; in fact, Esher seems to have seen burning as a way of pleasing the King, offering up ritual sacrifices of letters for incineration.† Bertie was especially concerned by the papers relating to his childhood and education, some of which (said Esher) “the King made me burn.”20
Queen Victoria had written numerous frank letters to Disraeli. The copyright in these was, of course, the sov
ereign’s, but the physical letters—the originals—were in the possession of Disraeli. This worried Bertie dreadfully. When Monty Corry, Disraeli’s executor, died in 1903, Disraeli’s papers passed to Lord Rothschild, but Queen Victoria’s letters were referred to the King to vet.
Victoria had written to Disraeli at length and “on every conceivable subject,” both personal and political; her correspondence revealed Prince Leopold as persistently interfering in politics, often causing trouble.21 When the journalist William Monypenny was appointed as Disraeli’s biographer in 1904, Bertie asked Rothschild to allow Esher and Knollys free access to Victoria’s letters at Rothschild’s bank, where they were held, “and they could then tell me if they consider there are any I should object to being published.”22 Three years later (these matters move slowly) Knollys formally requested Rothschild to send all of Queen Victoria’s letters to Windsor for the King to “look over.”23 Rothschild explained that the archive was in a horrible state of confusion, but Victoria’s letters had been arranged by a certain Mr. Scones, who was the head clerk of Disraeli’s solicitor, Sir Philip Rose. Mr. Scones’s brother had been “frequently employed at Windsor by Her Majesty’s permission making copies of letters.”24 When Esher heard this story, he could scarcely contain himself. That the “most confidential documents which can be imagined” should have been read by a lawyer’s clerk was an outrage. “I don’t think any right or reasonable claim can be put forward by the [Beaconsfield] trustees to retain the Sovereign’s letters.” The affair seemed to him to show the necessity for an Act of Parliament giving the Crown power to recall documents. “I am having a short bill drafted,” he told Knollys.25 Esher’s bill was stillborn, but he had convention on his side. Queen Victoria had laid it down that letters written by the sovereign should be returned to the sovereign after the recipient’s death. This was often done during her reign.26
