Edward VII

• 1. Introduction

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  Edward VII was barely a month old on the 8th of December 1841 when he was created Prince of Wales. He would carry that title until the 22nd of January 1901, a span of 59 years and 45 days. No heir in British history had waited so long, and the record stood until Charles III passed it. Within the family he was always Bertie.

  For most of those decades, his mother, Queen Victoria, treated him as a problem to be managed rather than a partner to be trained. This documentary asks what a man does with that much unused time. It asks how a prince known for gossip and gambling came to be called the Peacemaker. And it asks why the German emperor, who was his own nephew, blamed him when Europe went to war four years after his death.

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• 2. Heir Under Pressure

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  At the age of seven, Edward began a demanding course of study designed by his father, Prince Albert, and overseen by several tutors. Albert and Victoria wanted a model constitutional monarch. Unlike his elder sister Victoria, Edward was not a diligent student, and his efforts never satisfied his parents. His real gifts were charm, sociability and tact. Benjamin Disraeli described him as informed, intelligent and sweet in manner.

  Freedom arrived in 1859. After an educational trip to Rome early that year, Edward spent the summer at the University of Edinburgh, studying under the chemist Lyon Playfair. In October he entered Christ Church, Oxford. Released from his parents' strictures, he enjoyed learning for the first time and did satisfactorily in his examinations. In 1861 he moved to Trinity College, Cambridge, where Charles Kingsley, Regius Professor of Modern History, tutored him. Kingsley drew out the best academic work of Edward's life, and Edward looked forward to the lectures.

  The army was a harder disappointment. Edward had been gazetted a colonel on the 9th of November 1858, and he resented not having earned a commission by examination. His mother then vetoed any active military career.

  In September 1861 he was sent to Germany, officially to watch military manoeuvres. The real purpose was to arrange a meeting with Princess Alexandra of Denmark, whom his parents had already chosen as his bride. His elder sister Victoria, who had married the Crown Prince of Prussia in 1858, hosted the two at Speyer on the 24th of September. Alexandra and Edward were friendly from the start.

  Then came Ireland. Wanting some genuine army experience, Edward attended manoeuvres there, and fellow officers hid an actress named Nellie Clifden in the camp. He spent three nights with her. Albert, though ill, was appalled and travelled to Cambridge to reprimand his son. Albert died in December 1861, only two weeks after that visit.

  Victoria was inconsolable. She wore mourning clothes for the rest of her life and blamed Edward for her husband's death. She wrote to her eldest daughter, "I never can, or shall, look at him without a shudder." The marriage plans that she and Albert had made, however, did not die with him.

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• 3. Prince on Tour

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  In 1860, Edward made the first tour of North America ever undertaken by a Prince of Wales. His good humour and easy confidence made it a success over four months in Canada and the United States. He opened the Victoria Bridge at Montreal and laid the cornerstone of Parliament Hill in Ottawa. He watched Charles Blondin cross Niagara Falls on a highwire. He stayed three days at the White House with President James Buchanan, who went with him to George Washington's tomb at Mount Vernon.

  Vast crowds greeted him everywhere, and he met Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. In Trinity Church, New York, prayers for the royal family were said for the first time since 1776. The tour lifted Edward's self-esteem and brought Britain real diplomatic benefits.

  Shortly after Albert's death, the widowed Queen withdrew from public life and arranged a long tour of the Middle East for her son. He visited Egypt, Jerusalem, Damascus, Beirut and Istanbul. The British government hoped he would win the friendship of Egypt's ruler, Said Pasha, so that France could not seize the Suez Canal if the Ottoman Empire collapsed. This was the first royal tour to have an official photographer, Francis Bedford.

  At home, Edward invented the royal public appearance as we know it. He opened the Thames Embankment in 1871, the Mersey Railway Tunnel in 1886 and Tower Bridge in 1894. Yet the Queen gave him no active part in governing until 1898. She let him see only summaries of important papers and refused him the originals.

  Others worked around her. Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone sent him papers in secret. From 1886, Foreign Secretary Lord Rosebery passed him Foreign Office despatches, and from 1892 some Cabinet papers were opened to him. Edward also irritated his mother in 1864 by taking Denmark's side over Schleswig-Holstein and by going out of his way to meet the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi.

  In the winter of 1871, while staying at Londesborough Lodge near Scarborough, Edward caught typhoid fever, the disease believed to have killed his father. A fellow guest, Lord Chesterfield, died. The nation was gravely anxious, and his recovery was met with almost universal relief. Arthur Sullivan composed his Festival Te Deum to mark it. Republican feeling had been rising in Britain since the fall of Napoleon III the year before, but Edward's brush with death eased it and improved his standing with his mother.

  On the 26th of September 1875, he left for an eight-month tour of India, calling at Malta, Brindisi and Greece on the way. His advisers noted that he treated people the same whatever their rank or colour. In letters home he protested at how British officials treated Indians: "Because a man has a black face and a different religion from our own, there is no reason why he should be treated as a brute." Lord Salisbury, the Secretary of State for India, issued new guidance, and at least one resident was removed from office.

  Edward returned on the 11th of May 1876, after a stop in Portugal. Parliament then gave Queen Victoria the title Empress of India, partly because the tour had gone so well. The imperial title would one day pass to Edward himself.

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• 4. Pleasures and Scandals

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  Edward married Alexandra at St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, on the 10th of March 1863. He was 21 and she was 18. Their engagement had been sealed at Laeken in Belgium on the 9th of September 1862. The couple made Marlborough House their London home and Sandringham House in Norfolk their country retreat, and they entertained lavishly. They had six children.

  Some circles disapproved of the match. Most of the Queen's relations were German, and Denmark was in dispute with Germany over Schleswig and Holstein. When Alexandra's father became King Christian IX in November 1863, the German Confederation invaded and annexed Schleswig-Holstein. Victoria was divided over the match, and after the wedding she fretted about the couple's social life and tried to dictate matters, even the names of their children.

  Edward kept mistresses throughout his marriage. His companions included the actress Lillie Langtry, Lady Randolph Churchill, the actress Sarah Bernhardt, Agnes Keyser and Alice Keppel. At least fifty-five liaisons are conjectured, though how far each one went is often unclear. He tried to be discreet, but gossip and press speculation followed him anyway. Alexandra knew of the affairs and seems to have accepted them.

  One link reaches into the present day. Alice Keppel's great-granddaughter, Camilla Parker Bowles, became the mistress and later the wife of King Charles III, Edward's great-great-grandson. A rumour held that Keppel's daughter Sonia was Edward's child, but she was almost certainly the daughter of George Keppel. Edward never acknowledged any illegitimate children.

  In 1869, Sir Charles Mordaunt, a Member of Parliament, threatened to name Edward as co-respondent in a divorce suit. He did not, but Edward was called as a witness in early 1870. The evidence showed that Edward had visited the Mordaunts' house while Sir Charles sat in the House of Commons. Nothing more was proven and Edward denied adultery, but the hint of impropriety did harm.

  Edward was also the arbiter of men's fashion across the world. He made tweed, Homburg hats and Norfolk jackets stylish. He popularised black ties with dinner jackets in place of white tie and tails. He pioneered trouser creases pressed down the sides rather than front and back, and the stand-up turn-down collar was made for him by Charvet. By tradition, the habit of leaving the bottom waistcoat button undone began with him. His waist measured 48 inches shortly before his coronation.

  His appetites shaped British habits in other ways. He is credited with introducing the Sunday meal of roast beef, potatoes, horseradish sauce and Yorkshire pudding. He smoked heavily all his life, though he was not a heavy drinker. He ordered every clock at Sandringham set half an hour fast to give the shooting parties more daylight. This Sandringham time lasted until Edward VIII abolished it in 1936.

  He was also a patron of the arts and sciences, and he helped found the Royal College of Music. Opening it in 1883, he said, "Class can no longer stand apart from class... I claim for music that it produces that union of feeling which I much desire to promote."

  Horse racing was his great passion. In 1896 his horse Persimmon won both the Derby and the St Leger. In 1900 Persimmon's brother, Diamond Jubilee, took the Triple Crown of the Derby, the St Leger and the 2000 Guineas, as well as the Newmarket Stakes and the Eclipse Stakes. Another of his horses, Ambush II, won the Grand National that same year.

  The gambling brought trouble in 1891, in the royal baccarat scandal. It emerged that Edward had played an illegal card game for money the year before. When a fellow player unsuccessfully sued others for slander after being accused of cheating, Edward had to appear in court as a witness for the second time. In the same year, Lord Charles Beresford threatened to reveal details of Edward's private life to the press. He was protesting Edward's interference in his affair with Daisy Greville, Countess of Warwick. The friendship between the two men never recovered. Edward's tempers were usually brief, and afterwards he would smooth things over by being especially kind.

  Private grief ran alongside the scandals. In 1871, his youngest son, Alexander John, died a day after his birth, and Edward insisted on placing the baby in the coffin himself, with tears rolling down his face. In late 1891, his eldest son, Albert Victor, became engaged to Princess Victoria Mary of Teck. Early in 1892 he died of pneumonia. "To lose our eldest son," Edward wrote, "is one of those calamities one can never really get over." He told his mother he would have given his life for the young man, since he put no value on his own.

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• 5. Crown and Coronation

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  On the 22nd of January 1901, Queen Victoria died and Edward became king. In an innovation, he was also King of the British Dominions. His mother had intended him to reign as Albert Edward. He chose Edward VII instead, saying he did not want to undervalue the name of Albert, which should stand alone for his father.

  In Scotland the numeral VII was sometimes left out, even by the national church, because earlier Edwards had been English kings excluded from Scotland by battle. J. B. Priestley recalled, "I was only a child when he succeeded Victoria in 1901, but I can testify to his extraordinary popularity. He was in fact the most popular king England had known since the earlier 1660s."

  Edward gave his parents' house, Osborne on the Isle of Wight, to the state and kept living at Sandringham. He could afford the gesture. His private secretary, Sir Francis Knollys, claimed that he was the first heir to inherit the throne in credit. Sir Dighton Probyn, Comptroller of the Household, had managed his money well, aided by financier friends such as Ernest Cassel, Maurice de Hirsch and the Rothschild family. Because some of these friends were Jewish, Edward drew criticism for openly socialising with them in an age of widespread antisemitism.

  The coronation was first fixed for the 26th of June 1902. Two days before, doctors diagnosed appendicitis. The disease usually went untreated by surgery and often killed, but advances in anaesthesia and antisepsis had made an operation possible. Sir Frederick Treves, supported by Lord Lister, performed a radical procedure, draining a pint of pus from an abscess through an incision in the King's abdomen. The next day Edward was sitting up in bed smoking a cigar.

  Two weeks later he was declared out of danger. Treves received a baronetcy that the King had arranged before the operation, and surgery for the appendix entered mainstream medicine. Edward was crowned at Westminster Abbey on the 9th of August 1902 by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Frederick Temple.

  The new king refurbished the royal palaces and revived ceremonies his mother had dropped, such as the State Opening of Parliament. He founded new honours, including the Order of Merit for achievement in the arts and sciences. He also defended his prerogatives. In 1902, the Shah of Persia, Mozzafar-al-Din, visited England expecting the Order of the Garter. Foreign Secretary Lord Lansdowne had promised it without the King's consent, and Edward saw the Garter as his personal gift. He also objected to admitting a Muslim to a Christian order of chivalry. Eventually he relented, and the following year Britain sent a special embassy to the Shah bearing a full Order of the Garter.

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• 6. Uncle of Europe

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  In May 1903, Edward made an official visit to France as the guest of President Émile Loubet, after first calling on Pope Leo XIII in Rome. The trip helped create the atmosphere for the Entente Cordiale of 1904. In that agreement, the French foreign minister Théophile Delcassé and the British foreign secretary Lord Lansdowne settled the two countries' colonial claims in North Africa and ruled out war between them. It ended centuries of Anglo-French rivalry and ended Britain's splendid isolation from Continental affairs. It was also meant as a counterweight to the growing dominance of the German Empire and its ally Austria-Hungary.

  Edward spoke fluent French and German and reinvented royal diplomacy through numerous state visits across Europe. He took annual holidays at Biarritz and Marienbad. He was related to nearly every other European monarch, which earned him the name "uncle of Europe". German Emperor Wilhelm II and Emperor Nicholas II of Russia were his nephews. King Haakon VII of Norway was both his nephew and his son-in-law. Frederick VIII of Denmark and George I of Greece were his brothers-in-law.

  One relative he did not like was Wilhelm II, and their strained relationship worsened tensions between Germany and Britain. At an Anglo-German summit at Kiel in 1904, Wilhelm raged about a "Yellow Peril" and accused the British of "race treason" for backing Japan against Russia. Edward answered that he could not see it. He called the Japanese an intelligent, brave and chivalrous nation, as civilised as Europeans and different only in the pigmentation of their skin.

  Not every journey went smoothly. On the 4th of April 1900, while passing through Belgium on the way to Denmark, Edward was shot at by 15-year-old Jean-Baptiste Sipido, who was protesting the Second Boer War. A Belgian court acquitted the boy because of his age. Together with British disgust at Belgian atrocities in the Congo, the perceived leniency worsened relations between Britain and the Continent.

  In April 1908, during his stay at Biarritz, Edward accepted the resignation of Prime Minister Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. Breaking precedent, he summoned the successor, H. H. Asquith, to travel to Biarritz to kiss hands. The press criticised the King for appointing a prime minister on foreign soil. In June 1908, Edward became the first reigning British monarch to visit the Russian Empire, and the month before he was the first to visit Sweden.

  At home, he threw himself into military and naval questions. After the failings of the Second Boer War, he backed a redesign of army command, the creation of the Territorial Force, and an Expeditionary Force to support France if war with Germany came. In the navy, a feud split the service. Admiral Lord Charles Beresford wanted greater spending and wide deployment. First Sea Lord Admiral Sir John Fisher wanted efficiency savings, the scrapping of obsolete ships, and a reliance on torpedo craft backed by the new dreadnoughts.

  Edward sided with Fisher, partly because he disliked Beresford, and Beresford was dismissed. Fisher announced his own resignation in late 1909. The only qualified figure outside both camps was Sir Arthur Wilson, who had retired in 1907. He was reluctant, but Edward persuaded him to return, and Wilson became First Sea Lord on the 25th of January 1910.

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• 7. Constitutional Crisis

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  As Prince of Wales, Edward had to be talked out of openly voting in the House of Lords for Gladstone's Representation of the People Bill of 1884. His politics were otherwise conservative. He did not favour votes for women, although he suggested the social reformer Octavia Hill for the Commission for Working Class Housing. He opposed Irish Home Rule and preferred a form of dual monarchy.

  In his final year, the Conservative majority in the House of Lords refused to pass the "People's Budget" proposed by Asquith's Liberal government. The King disliked the Liberal attacks on the peers, including a polemical speech by David Lloyd George at Limehouse. When Winston Churchill publicly demanded a general election, Asquith apologised to the King's adviser, Lord Knollys, and rebuked Churchill in Cabinet.

  Edward grew so dispirited by the class-warfare tone that he introduced his son to the Secretary of State for War, Richard Haldane, as "the last King of England". On the 26th of July 1909, his horse Minoru won the Derby. When he went back to the racecourse the next day, a man shouted at him to go home and dissolve this bloody Parliament, and the King laughed.

  The Finance Bill passed the Commons on the 5th of November 1909 and was rejected by the Lords on the 30th of November. The Lords passed a resolution of Lord Lansdowne's claiming the right to oppose it because it lacked an electoral mandate. Edward urged the Conservative leaders Arthur Balfour and Lord Lansdowne to pass the budget, but on Asquith's advice he did not offer them an election as a reward. He was annoyed when his efforts became public, and he forbade Knollys, an active Liberal peer, to vote for the budget. In December 1909 Knollys called a proposal to create new peers "outrageous" and thought the King should abdicate rather than agree to it.

  The January 1910 election produced a hung parliament, leaving the Liberals dependent on the nationalist Irish Parliamentary Party. Edward proposed a compromise in which only 50 peers from each side could vote. Lord Crewe, the Liberal leader in the Lords, advised against it, because only loyal party supporters would be picked. The Irish nationalists wanted the Lords' veto gone so it could not block Home Rule, and they threatened to vote against the budget. Asquith then revealed that he had no guarantees about creating peers, and the Cabinet considered resigning.

  The King's speech from the throne on the 21st of February 1910 promised to limit the Lords' veto to a power of delay. Asquith inserted the phrase "in the opinion of my advisers" so the King could be seen to distance himself. On the 14th of April, the Commons passed the resolutions that would become the Parliament Act 1911. They removed the Lords' power to veto money bills, replaced their veto on other bills with delay, and cut the term of Parliament from seven years to five. Edward would have preferred four. The budget passed both Houses that April.

  Behind the scenes, the Palace held secret talks with Balfour and with Randall Davidson, Archbishop of Canterbury. Both advised that the Liberals lacked the mandate to demand new peers. The King thought the proposal "simply disgusting" and said the government was "in the hands of Redmond & Co". Lord Crewe declared publicly that the wish to create peers should be treated as formal ministerial advice, which by convention a monarch must accept. Lord Esher argued that a monarch could dismiss the government in extremis. The crisis would not be settled until after Edward's death.

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• 8. Death and Legacy

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  Edward habitually smoked twenty cigarettes and twelve cigars a day. In 1907, a rodent ulcer, a type of skin cancer beside his nose, was cured with radium. Bronchitis troubled him more and more. He briefly lost consciousness during a state visit to Berlin in February 1909, and in March 1910 he collapsed at Biarritz. He stayed there to recover while Asquith struggled to pass the Finance Bill in London. His poor health went unreported, and he was criticised for remaining in France during such tense politics.

  He returned to Buckingham Palace on the 27th of April, still severely ill with bronchitis. Alexandra came back from visiting her brother, George I of Greece, in Corfu on the 5th of May. The next day Edward suffered several heart attacks but refused to go to bed. "No, I shall not give in; I shall go on; I shall work to the end," he said.

  Between spells of faintness, his son, the Prince of Wales, told him that his horse Witch of the Air had won that afternoon at Kempton Park. The King replied, "Yes, I have heard of it. I am very glad." Those were his last words. At 11:30 pm he lost consciousness for the final time, and he died fifteen minutes later, aged 68.

  Alexandra would not let his body be moved for eight days, though she admitted small groups of visitors. She noted that he remained "wonderfully preserved". On the 11th of May he was dressed in uniform and placed in a massive oak coffin. On the 14th of May the coffin was moved to the throne room, where it was sealed and lay in state with a guardsman at each corner.

  On the morning of the 17th of May, black horses drew the coffin on a gun carriage to Westminster Hall. The new king and his family walked behind, along with Edward's favourite dog, Caesar. Over 400,000 people filed past the coffin in the next two days. The funeral on the 20th of May 1910 was, in Barbara W. Tuchman's words in The Guns of August, "the greatest assemblage of royalty and rank ever gathered in one place and, of its kind, the last". A royal train carried the coffin to Windsor Castle, where he was buried at St George's Chapel.

  His second son, George V, succeeded him. In his reign Edward had prepared George for the role, and contemporaries said they seemed more like affectionate brothers than father and son. In his diary George wrote that he had lost his "best friend and the best of fathers", adding, "I never had a cross word with him in my life."

  Historians have called Edward the first truly constitutional British sovereign and the last to wield effective political power. Though praised as the Peacemaker, he feared that Wilhelm II would tip Europe into war. When war came in 1914, the naval reforms he supported, his part in the Triple Entente of Britain, France and Russia, and his web of family ties fed the German emperor's paranoia. Wilhelm blamed his uncle for the war.

  The first official biography was held back until 1927 by its author, Sidney Lee. He feared German propagandists would pick out material to paint Edward as an anti-German warmonger. Lee was also hampered because Edward had ordered all his letters burned after his death. Later biographers have drawn on sources Lee never saw.

  The historian R. C. K. Ensor, writing in 1936, praised his tact, his memory and his knowledge gathered by talking to eminent men. Ensor doubted the King had much real influence on foreign policy, judging his views crude and his reading slight. He noted too that Edward, though fluent in French and German, never lost a German accent in English. Edward's grandson Edward VIII wrote that the King's lighter side hid real insight and influence. J. B. Priestley judged that he had "a tremendous zest for pleasure but he also had a real sense of duty". Lord Esher called him kind, debonair and not undignified, but "too human".

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