The Heir Apparent: A Life of Edward VII, the Playboy Prince

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

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 sovereign’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

Esher felt justified in extracting from the Rothschild archive four packets of confidential Disraeli letters, including one packet that contained almost all of Bertie’s letters to Disraeli. He showed them to Bertie, who ordered them to be destroyed.²⁷

The same happened when George Profeit, the son of Queen Victoria’s agent at Balmoral, Dr. Profeit, attempted to blackmail Bertie over letters about John Brown. Bertie entrusted Sir James Reid with the job of retrieving the letters. Reid eventually succeeded in persuading Profeit to surrender a tin box containing more than three hundred letters from Queen Victoria concerning Brown, many of which were “most compromising,” which he handed in person to the King.²⁸ These were presumably destroyed.

When the Munshi died in India in 1909, Bertie worried about Victoria’s letters. He wrote to the viceroy: “I am not satisfied in my mind that there may not be still letters in Queen Victoria’s handwriting in their possession—and I should be glad if further discreet investigations could be made, informing the Munshi’s family that … they must at once return them or they will be the sufferers thereby!”²⁹

Bertie had successfully destroyed many of Queen Victoria’s papers, and he made certain that his own documents were similarly censored. In his will, he directed that all letters to him from his mother and from his wife, and all private letters and papers, should be destroyed by his private secretary immediately after his death.³⁰

Not only were the letters in what Esher described as a state of “dire confusion,”³³ but Knollys himself was becoming confused. Since King Edward’s death his colleagues had complained about his “mental apathy.”³⁴ Ponsonby observed that “his memory has completely gone,” and by 1914 he was referring to him as “gaga.”³⁵ Senile or not, Lord Knollys was undoubtedly disaffected as he set about obeying his dead master’s last orders. Baron Hermann von Eckardstein, the German diplomat, found him “greatly aged” and “almost tired of life,” sifting through the King’s papers, deciding which to keep and which to burn. The papers contained much both of a political and a personal nature: “Owing to their political content they should be handed down to posterity,” but “due to their very delicate private character they should be withheld from future generations and should be burned.” Knollys erred on the side of caution and inclined to “destroy too many rather than too few of such papers.”³⁶ It took him only one month to complete this work. He wrote to George V on 17 March 1913: “Sir I have finished the papers and am vacating my room here today.”³⁷ How much he destroyed can never be known, but posterity has accused him of a bonfire.

Meanwhile, a fuse was lit in the unlikely form of the Dictionary of National Biography. The 1912 supplement carried an extended article on King Edward by the editor, Sidney Lee. Lee was a hollow-eyed Shakespeare scholar who had contributed 820 articles to the DNB by dint of working seven days a week and living as a recluse. His DNB article on Queen Victoria, which he expanded and published as a book, had pleased the royal family, so his article on King Edward came as a thunderbolt.³⁸

From Marlborough House, where he now worked for Queen Alexandra, Sir Arthur Davidson, Bertie’s former assistant private secretary, began a campaign to clear his master’s reputation. He consulted Knollys and Esher, but both were oddly opposed to taking action. Esher reluctantly agreed to write an article, but he claimed that it would be said that he was “a sycophant and a courtier” and his views would carry little weight. He did all he could to “wriggle out” of it.⁴⁰ Loftily declining to descend into the gutter of literary quarrels, he suggested that instead he should write an article on some grand theme such as the philosophy of kingship.⁴¹

The real reason for Esher’s prevarication soon became apparent: He himself had supplied Lee with material for the DNB piece.⁴² He was up to his usual tricks, hunting with both the hare and the hounds. “Oh! Esher! Esher!” wailed Davidson. “I am sick of Esher and the way he has behaved over this.”⁴³ “Manly men,” as the royal archivist Owen Morshead recalled, “did not like Lord Esher.” He was like a “medicated tom cat,” and honest men such as George V and Lord Stamfordham “felt their skin prickle when he entered the palace, as some people react to the unseen presence of a cat in the room.”⁴⁴

Esher’s treachery seemed the more dishonorable because he owed a debt of gratitude to Bertie.⁴⁵ Meanwhile, Sidney Lee agreed to write a letter of apology to Queen Alexandra. Alix replied (via Esher himself) regretting the damage that Lee had done to her husband’s reputation, but it was never clear how much she understood or how much she wanted to know.⁴⁶ She read the DNB article and it upset her, but she was oddly disengaged, and so dilatory that Davidson despaired of ever being able to persuade her to give her attention to the matter of Bertie’s biography.⁴⁷

Henceforth, it was Davidson, not Alix, who played the part of the wronged widow, while Alix was kept in the dark. As Davidson explained to Probyn, the Queen “would not take it in and would not appreciate it.… The Queen has absolutely no idea of logic, that if you say a thing is wrong, you must prove it so, and also the Queen has no sense of appreciation. I mean it’s a constitutional deficiency, and she will only think—whatever she may say—a great deal of unnecessary fuss—‘much better have told Lee he was mistaken and get him to alter his article.’ All the paraphernalia of the means of getting him to do so will be so much Sanskrit to her.”⁵⁰

Davidson’s next move was to interview some politicians and ask them to write contradictions of Lee’s article. Most were helpful in conversation, but they all seemed “to get very cautious and disappointing on paper.”⁵¹ Asquith wrote a one-page letter which Davidson thought “rather in the style of a master’s character to a servant than that of the Prime Minister to his late Sovereign.”⁵² As for Balfour, “nothing could be more sympathetic” than his manner, but he declared that he had not read the article.⁵³ His dictated letter was typically evasive, avoiding detail but criticizing the article for its failure to convey the King’s personality.⁵⁴

Armed with these letters from Balfour and Asquith, Davidson confronted Sidney Lee, who explained that he had interviewed fifty people for his article. He was “amazed” at the letters Davidson showed him. He “could not understand” Balfour’s letter, as Balfour had clearly told him that “the King’s influence was absurdly overrated.”⁵⁵ He had notes to prove it. Lee’s typed notes of his interview with Balfour still survive in his papers today. Entente Cordiale: “King had nothing to do with it … qualities not great.”⁵⁶ Balfour’s remarks went straight into the DNB article.

The duplicity of Balfour and Asquith made Davidson “feel rather sick.”⁵⁷ Ponsonby agreed. “What [Lee] said about Asquith does not surprise me but Balfour beats me. I now see his reluctance to read the article or commit himself in any way.”⁵⁸ Balfour protested that he had been “ill-used”: He had given Lee an off-the-record interview and kept no notes, and now his remarks were quoted against him.⁵⁹

Davidson’s files give a fascinating glimpse of the way history is composed. Balfour, who had never got on with Bertie, had written him out of the historical narrative. Asquith had done the same. Lee revealed that it was Asquith who had “supplied all the material” for the section of the DNB article on the Parliament Bill crisis.⁶⁰ Asquith alleged that King Edward had played a passive part in the crisis, being “content to watch the passage of events without looking beyond the need of the moment.”⁶¹ No one reading the article would have realized how important the King’s role had been during the crisis, nor how badly Asquith had needed his support.

History, once written, proved unexpectedly difficult to unpick. Lee refused point blank to revise his article. To do so, he claimed, would “discredit the Dictionary, and would ruin its publication and myself.”⁶² The reality, as Lee knew very well, was that a revision of a single article in a volume of more than seven hundred pages would be ruinously uneconomic.

After consulting King George V, Davidson enlisted the support of Lord Morley, Gladstone’s biographer, a minister and Grand Old Man of Letters. Lee was summoned to a meeting in Morley’s office. Davidson listed the passages the King wanted expunged from the article. Morley asked: “You mean to say that if these were left out, it would satisfy you.” Davidson replied: “Certainly not. We want a new work.” Lee was appalled. The last thing he wanted was to write an official life of Edward VII. He became “very sulky” and tried to back out, protesting that he had just been appointed professor of English literature at the East End College of London University—“very hard work.” Morley was relentless; according to Davidson, he “behaved like a trump, too beautifully.” He told Lee “it was no good him saying that he had not written depreciatory things, because he had.”⁶³ Lee was too frightened of Morley to say no. “His only fear is that if he ignores Lord Morley’s advice (which was the strongest I ever heard given on any subject from a man in his position) that Lord Morley will have done with him for ever.”⁶⁴

Lee was cornered. He agreed to write the biography, and arranged an advance of £300 from Smith, Elder, the publishers of the DNB.⁶⁵ It soon became apparent that his ideas about biography were very different from the courtiers’. Brandishing a copy of his 1911 lecture The Principles of Biography, he demanded access to all the available letters and papers.⁶⁶ King Edward’s papers were in the hands of Esher and Knollys, and they had both initially refused to have anything to do with Lee and his book. Once the biography was agreed to, however, Esher was all smiles. Collared by the King, he agreed to supply Lee with the papers at Windsor.⁶⁷

Lee spent a day reading documents at Windsor in June 1914. He arrived with a swollen face from toothache and kept looking at himself in the mirror. At teatime, Esher appeared. “He talked vaguely about the difficulties of Biography and then gave Lee a rough account of the part he had played in Army Reform. It was very good. He praised King Edward and made out he was the fons et origo [source and origin] of all army reform. Brodrick, Arnold-Forster, and Haldane were puppets but the person who pulled the strings was himself!” Ponsonby could see that Esher was playing a part, but he had no objection so long as King Edward “got his full share of credit.”⁶⁸ Once again, history was being written.

Lee was only given access to carefully selected documents. He was allowed to see papers relating to Bertie’s early life, but little thereafter. This was partly because the archive was still in a state of confusion. Ponsonby claimed that “With regard to 1875 to 1900 no papers appear to exist. Knollys burned everything.”⁶⁹ This was not, in fact, the case, but the story of Knollys’s holocaust proved very useful as a way of fobbing off the biographer. Lee was sent on wild goose chases, to work through the Granville papers, for instance, or the Foreign Office dispatches (uninformative and “deadly dull”).⁷⁰ Ponsonby allowed Lee to work only once at Windsor. He worried that Lee would “be tempted to write up early incidents in too full detail.” Worse, if Lee got into Esher’s clutches, “there would be no saying what might happen.” Esher selected papers from the archive at Windsor that Ponsonby vetted before giving them to Lee to work on at Buckingham Palace.⁷¹

Little wonder that Lee became discouraged and threatened to abandon the project. He was dismayed when Rosebery mischievously told him that he must bring Bertie’s women into the book. A “threatening letter” that he received from Lady Warwick “greatly disturbed him.”⁷² For a confirmed bachelor such as Lee, sexual scandal was toxic, and gossip was a biographical sin. The outbreak of war in August 1914 came as a relief to all concerned. Lee opined that the publication of the biography was not advisable, as the King’s anti-German feeling would doubtless be twisted into showing that he had always intended to go to war against Germany. As for Davidson, he was more than willing to agree to Lee’s request to suspend work on the book until the war was over.⁷³

Meanwhile, a furious tornado burst upon the royal advisers in the shape of Daisy Warwick, whose finances were once again in crisis, ruined by a company promoter who had swindled her out of £50,000. Her last remaining asset was her affair with the Prince of Wales. In the time-honored fashion of the courtesan, she proposed to cash in and reveal all in her memoirs.

Daisy’s sister Blanche Gordon-Lennox considered that Daisy’s mind was deranged; there could be no other explanation for her wicked behavior.⁷⁵ But Daisy did have some justification. She claimed that she had exhausted her inheritance in entertaining the Prince of Wales, and that she had received no reward for her nine years as royal mistress—unlike Alice Keppel, who was known to have made a fortune, largely thanks to Ernest Cassel’s dealings on her behalf. Daisy’s mistake was to imagine that George V could be blackmailed.

As her intermediary, Daisy chose Arthur du Cros, millionaire founder of the Dunlop Rubber company and one of her creditors. Calculating that du Cros was ambitious for recognition at court and a title, she confided her plan to him at a meeting in June 1914. Genuinely shocked, du Cros reported back to the palace. The courtiers were aghast. Ponsonby considered that publication of the letters would not only “blast” King Edward’s reputation, but have a “far graver effect on the monarchy.”⁷⁶ He urged paying her off, but George V was determined not to give in to blackmail, nor to allow Lady Warwick to humiliate his mother. Sir Charles Russell, the King’s solicitor, was appointed, and he laid an elaborate trap.

On Russell’s request, du Cros agreed to join Daisy on a trip to Paris (13 July 1914), where she met with Frank Harris to discuss the sale of the letters. Russell sent a detective, Mr. Littlechild, to follow Daisy to Paris and shadow her movements. Peeping through the window of her hotel, Littlechild saw Daisy produce several documents, like letters, one of which she gave to Frank Harris. “The lady did most of the talking, and appeared, by her gestures, to be very much in earnest.”⁷⁷

Daisy was not silenced by the injunction. Quite the contrary. In the autumn of 1914, Frank Harris fled wartime France and sought refuge with her at Easton Lodge. Here he dabbled with her memoirs, composing a chapter or two, and she allowed him to rummage among the letters she kept in her room. In the winter, Harris sailed to America, taking with him some of Bertie’s letters. Daisy claimed that he had stolen them, which may or may not have been true. Daisy was watched by spies and visited by Russell. Sir John Simon, the Attorney General, saw three of the letters and pronounced them to be “very bad,” particularly the references to Queen Alexandra. In February 1915, Prime Minister Asquith wrote, “there is now proof that she has been disobeying the injunction and is again hawking some of [the letters]. So the Impeccable”—Asquith’s name for Simon—“proposes to go to a Judge and ask him to ‘commit’ her—in vulgar language to send her to prison till she amends her ways.”⁷⁹

This was a serious threat. “You will remember,” Russell wrote, “I was going to apply to commit Lady Warwick to Holloway.”⁸⁰ The specter of prison was enough. Daisy promised to surrender all the letters she possessed and appealed for time to recover the letters from America as well as the manuscript of her memoirs. At length in June, and after renewed threats of committal, Daisy secured the material. She demanded to hand it over in person to George V, but the King declined to meet her, so her brother-in-law, the courtier Sidney Greville, delivered a packet of letters to Lord Stamfordham.⁸¹

Daisy salvaged as much credit from her humiliation as she could. Glossing over her attempt to blackmail George V, she wrote in a fury of indignation at the way she had been treated: “I am handing back with splendid generosity the letters King Edward wrote me of his great love, and which belong to me absolutely. I … have never dreamed of publishing … such things.” But (and here was the sting), “My memoirs are my own affair, and every incident of those ten years of close friendship with King Edward are in my own brain and memory.”⁸²

Nightmares about Daisy’s memoirs continued to haunt the royal advisers. Mrs. Keppel heard a rumor in 1921 that “a certain lady” planned to publish an autobiography based on her own diary, “where I believe, she put in everything, however sacred, this may mean that she can get out of actually using letters, by saying, in this beastly diary, what was in them.”⁸³ “Sacred” is an odd word to use for adultery with a prince. The rumors about Daisy’s diary turned out (unfortunately for historians) to be unfounded.

Daisy received no money from George V, but du Cros agreed to pay £64,000 toward her debts. This was what she had wanted all along. For his generosity and public service in paying off Lady Warwick, du Cros received a baronetcy in 1916.⁸⁴ Daisy made copies of Bertie’s letters, and these have recently resurfaced in a private collection; they hardly seem “very bad,” as Sir John Simon considered. Dating from the end of her affair with Bertie in 1898, they are not passionate love letters but the usual mixture of gossip and affectionate banter.

The royal advisers panicked again in 1928. The conditions by which Daisy had been saved from imprisonment in Holloway stipulated that if and when she published her memoir, “she undertook to submit it to a literary man.”⁸⁵ She now sent an autobiographical manuscript to Esher, who insisted on cuts.⁸⁶ Daisy’s daughter Lady Marjorie Beckett thought the book so vulgar that she could only describe it as “muck,” which was a somewhat harsh judgment on one of the best-written Edwardian society memoirs, still often cited today.⁸⁷ Harmless extracts from Bertie’s letters were quoted in her book, Life’s Ebb and Flow, in which the narrative of Daisy’s relationship with Bertie is related in a code that only insiders could see through.

Sidney Lee’s reappointment as biographer was confirmed by King George V in July 1920. The courtiers found Lee more insufferable than ever—“more important, more official and perhaps more difficult to deal with,” and “eaten up with self concentration and self conceit.”⁸⁹ Lee needed to find a new publisher, as Smith, Elder had gone out of business. The DNB had been sold to Oxford University Press, but the delegates had dropped Lee as editor and the snub rankled. The dons of the press disliked Lee, whom they described as “an obstinate old pig”: “He will always be the Cad—he cannot help it.”⁹⁰ The feeling against Lee was charged by anti-Semitism. It was widely known that he had changed his name from Solomon Lazarus to Sidney while an undergraduate at Balliol. Davidson thought he looked as though he “ought to be behind a Hokey Pokey wheelbarrow in Petticoat Lane.”⁹¹ Bertie’s friend Admiral Fisher was even blunter and more horrible. “Levi is a liar! … This Jew who is out for money isn’t my horse!”⁹²

Lee eventually signed an agreement with Macmillan, and the game of hide-and-seek-the-letters began again. Ponsonby and Davidson solemnly assured Lee that very little material survived, as Knollys had burned “cartloads of papers and has only kept the official papers.”⁹³ In fact, the courtiers were deliberately concealing material from Lee. Contrary to what they told him, the letters of King Edward had not all been destroyed. Davidson wrote to Ponsonby in 1922: “It is absolutely impossible to let [Lee] run riot amongst this chaos of the late King’s letters. I cannot tell exactly how many there are, and there may or may not be interesting ones amongst them; but in any case the difficulties surrounding these letters—whose very existence has to be kept a dead secret—hedges the whole situation with a bristling fence of difficulties.”⁹⁴ The letters were stored at Marlborough House, and Davidson considered it quite impossible for Lee to see them until he himself had gone through them. He died a few months later, so Lee probably never did see them.

He was steered away from “rummaging about” in the Randolph Churchill papers at Blenheim, for fear he might discover too much about the Aylesford scandal, especially Bertie’s challenging Randolph to a duel. Sir Henry Ponsonby’s often acid letters were withheld; as Davidson wrote, “Lee has no idea of things as we see and know them.”⁹⁷ Charles Hardinge refused to show his letters from King Edward. “They are far too confidential.”⁹⁸ When Lee asked to see Bertie’s diaries, Stamfordham responded with exasperation: “There are no diaries and if there were the King said no one should see them! Surely Sidney Lee has been very well done by us—and I trusted we had seen the last of him in the Round Tower at Windsor. He cannot have the volumes he asks for as they contain heap of letters which he ought not to see and we have not the staff to make any more copies.”⁹⁹

The courtiers did their best to shape Lee’s interpretation. Ponsonby fed him the line that King Edward “always took an intense interest in politics, and that it was simply because he was not allowed by Queen Victoria to do so, that he turned his energies to less important matters.”¹⁰⁰ In Lee’s book, the motif of Bertie’s long years as Prince of Wales became his struggle to obtain the key to the Cabinet boxes—not just the ordinary boxes, but also the special key to the top-secret ones.¹⁰¹

The young prince was constructed as a prodigy of statesmanship, playing a central role in European politics and earnestly advising ministers on his frequent visits abroad. George V read the book and remarked that any reader would imagine that his father as Prince of Wales interfered with almost every department of state.¹⁰³

Lee had sent Lytton Strachey a copy of his article on biography in 1918, and Strachey had replied that biography, like portrait painting, depended on “the curious and indefinable combination of truth and aesthetic arrangement. Perhaps, too, an advocatus diaboli might put in a word for the caricaturist.”¹⁰⁴ There was little aesthetic arrangement and even less caricature in Lee’s leaden prose. The courtiers, however, still complained that he had been too critical of Queen Victoria, and for that reason he was dissuaded from making a personal presentation of his book to George V.¹⁰⁵ But Ponsonby and Stamfordham had achieved their aim in turning Lee around and making him write a hagiography. They had only themselves to blame if the book was dull, because it was they who had supplied the materials and censored the documents that Lee was allowed to see. Lee, who was probably a suppressed homosexual, felt uneasy writing about the prince’s relations with women; “it worried him very much” that “he had not found time to satisfy himself upon this aspect of his biography.”¹⁰⁶

Violating his own Principles of Biography, which called for brevity, Lee felt compelled to write not one but two fat volumes. His health broke down from overwork while he was writing the first. He developed heart strain, which prevented him from walking up the eighty-nine steps of the Round Tower at Windsor to the archives, and documents had to be brought down to him.¹⁰⁷ Writing the second volume, on the reign of King Edward, killed Sidney Lee. The publisher Frederick Macmillan assured Ponsonby that the book was “practically written,” but this was not, in fact, the case.¹⁰⁸ When Lee died, he left only five chapters completed, together with drafts and outlines for others. The task of completing the book was given to his secretary, S. F. Markham, with whom his relationship had been strained.¹⁰⁹

Volume two, published in 1927, is actually a much better book than volume one. The story of the reign presented far fewer problems for the authorized biographer than the scandalous life of the Prince of Wales, and Markham published an important selection of political documents. This volume contains the understatement for which Lee (or is it Markham?) is famous: The King “never toyed with his food.”¹¹⁰ But the unreal portrait of Bertie that Lee constructed in volume one sabotaged the project. Volume two did not receive the credit it deserved. Though it sold fifteen thousand copies, Lee’s biography failed to deconstruct the picture of King Edward that he himself had drawn in the DNB.

After the publication of Lee’s two volumes, official royal biography was effectively embargoed until after the Second World War.¹¹¹ Sir Alan (Tommy) Lascelles, private secretary to George V, had a conversation with Queen Mary in 1942 about the publication of Henry Ponsonby’s letters to his wife. Queen Mary took the line that the letters ought never to have been written, let alone published, and that a private secretary had no business to mention his work in his letters to his wife. Tommy Lascelles disagreed. “That attitude is typical of the ostrich technique which this family so often adopts.”¹¹² Unconsciously echoing Queen Victoria, he argued that the publication of a biography revealing ordinary human shortcomings actually enhanced the reputation of the monarch. As Keeper of the Royal Archives (1943–53), Lascelles sanctioned official biographies of George V by Harold Nicolson, Queen Mary by James Pope-Hennessy, and George VI by John Wheeler-Bennett. These authors were allowed considerable freedom but were instructed to write nothing embarrassing to the institution of monarchy. As Wheeler-Bennett quipped, royal biography was like matrimony; an enterprise “not to be entered into inadvisedly or lightly; but reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly and in the fear of God.”¹¹³

For the author of a bestselling biography of Gladstone, Magnus was oddly lacking in confidence about the historical context of his book, and he worried about what academic historians might say. He sought reassurance and validation by consulting the leading historians of the day, such as Lewis Namier and A. J. P. Taylor. Robert Blake, who was then contemplating writing a life of Queen Victoria (which never happened), acted as historical adviser and read the typescript.¹¹⁶ While he was working on the book, Magnus was invited to deliver the prestigious Ford Lectures in English history at Oxford, on the theme “Biography and History—George III to George V.” He accepted but withdrew shortly before the titles were published, frightened by A. L. Rowse, who warned him that he would be “torn to pieces by 3rd-rate dons.”¹¹⁷

“I am working very hard on Edward VII,” Magnus told his mother in 1959, “but have not yet completed the first chapter which I have actually rewritten at least a dozen times.”¹¹⁸ As each chapter was typed, he sent it for his mother to read. She had strong views. “My darling Boy,” she advised (Magnus was then in his midfifties), do not “prolong the scandalous part” more than necessary: “After all it is not a woman’s magazine darling, but a book by a splendid author!”¹¹⁹ Magnus was pressed by his American publisher, Elliott B. Macrae of E. P. Dutton, to tell the full story of Edward VII and put in “all of the salt, pepper and spice.”¹²⁰ Old Mrs. Magnus did all she could to keep it bland and cut out the pepper and spice. “Substitute another word for murky past,” she wrote. “ ‘For attempting to rape a governess in a railway carriage’ don’t name offence.”^§¹²¹ Again: “ ‘Mrs. Langtry’s lover’—Surely other ways of expressing this.… Steer clear darling as much as you can of hurtful words.”¹²²

Magnus completed his book in August 1962.¹²³ Mackworth-Young vetted the typescript, suggesting only minor changes and selecting controversial passages for Queen Elizabeth to see. The biography sold more than twenty thousand copies and received good reviews, though most followed A. J. P. Taylor’s lead in The Observer and wrote more about the subject, and especially his appetite for food, rather than the book.¹²⁴

Bertie had done all he could to frustrate and block his biographers. By ordering his papers to be burned and by writing letters that were as discreet as they were dull, he sought to guard his private life from posterity. The result was not what he had intended. Destroying the historical record does not prevent the history being written. The official biographer, Sidney Lee, constructed an unreal image of the prince as anodyne political prodigy. Yet outside the control of the royal archives, there flourished an unofficial version of Bertie as libertine and playboy. Anita Leslie’s excellent Edwardians in Love was based on family tradition preserved by her father, Shane Leslie. But there proliferated a genre of royal books about Bertie that recycled and repackaged tired old anecdotes, half-truths, and choice quotations in the manner of subprime debt. No one attempted to reconcile the two versions. Philip Magnus, writing in 1964, was unable to address the prince’s private life, even if he had wished to do so. Not only were the papers missing; the stories were still too sensitive. Only recently has this changed.

As King Edward subsides into history, the scandals of his early life are no longer seen as potential threats to the monarchy. At last it is possible to make connections between the public and the private, to show how it was that debauched Prince Hal evolved into the people’s King Edward the Peacemaker.

* A transcript of the original of the journal, covering the years between Victoria’s accession and her marriage, has survived, and from this it can be seen that Beatrice discarded about two-thirds of the text, including material that “could cause nothing but interest and delight.” (Robin Mackworth-Young, “The Royal Archives, Windsor Castle,” Archives, vol. 13 (1978), p. 123.)

† Esher destroyed documents relating to the Lady Flora Hastings scandal of 1839, Victoria’s letters to Lord Granville, and letters to George IV from Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire and Mrs. Fitzherbert.

‡ One hundred thousand pounds was a wildly inflated sum to ask for Daisy’s memoirs. Prime Minister Lloyd George received an offer of £90,000 for his war memoirs in 1922, which was dubbed “the biggest deal in the history of publishing.” (David Reynolds, In Command of History [Penguin, 2005], p. 24.)

§ She was referring to the scandal caused by Bertie’s friend Valentine Baker, who was convicted of indecent assault on a young woman in a railway carriage.

‖ The Knollys Papers were first used by Giles St. Aubyn, in his excellent Edward VII (1979), and then deposited in the Royal Archives, where they are today.

AFTERWORD

Bertie and the Biographers