The liveliest, shrewdest and best full-length biography of this monarch is Jane Ridley’s Bertie (London: Chatto & Windus, 2012). Giles St Aubyn’s Edward VII : Prince and King (London: Collins, 1979) is a work of unflurried urbanity, wit and insight. Excellent research and keen provocations underlie Simon Heffer’s Power and Place: The Political Consequences of Edward VII (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998), although he over-eggs his pudding and is unfair to a few individuals (the Duke of Clarence, for example). Sir Philip Magnus’s King Edward the Seventh (London: John Murray, 1964) is authoritative but inhibited. Edouard VII, le prince charmeur (Paris: Payot, 1999) by Jean-Pierre Navailles and Roger Buss is a volume in the Collection Portraits intimes. Sir Sidney Lee’s official two-decker biography, King Edward VII (London: Macmillan, 1925, 1927), remains informative to historians, but is skewed in some judgements and makes slow reading. Among other sources, Sir Lionel Cust’s King Edward VII and his Court (London: E. P. Dutton, 1930), Sigmund Münz’s King Edward VII at Marienbad: Political and Social Life at the Bohemian Spas (London: Hutchinson, 1934) and Lord Sysonby’s Recollections of Three Reigns (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1951) have been indispensable to the temper of this book.
On the royal family, Elizabeth Longford’s Victoria R. I. (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1964) and A. N. Wilson’s sprightly Victoria (London: Atlantic, 2014) are the best sources on Edward VII’s mother. Wilson’s demonstration of the queen’s German frame of mind is admirable, although my interpretations vary from his on some other points. Queen Victoria’s correspondence with her daughter and namesake, who was briefly Empress of Germany in 1888, reveal the royal mentality in which Edward VII was reared: under the editorship of Sir Roger Fulford, these letters were published in five volumes by Evans Brothers between 1964 and 1981. There is a suggestive section on Prince Albert and his family’s Schloss at Rosenau in Norman Davies, Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe (London: Allen Lane, 2011), an enthralling account of petty European realms, which illumines the Saxe-Coburg and Gotha antecedents of Edward VII. The Saxe-Coburg cousinhood (too often neglected by English speakers) is also explored in Karina Urbach (editor), Royal Kinship: Anglo-German Family Networks 1815–1918 (Munich: Prince Albert Society, 2008) and in Olivier Defrance and Joseph van Loon, La Fortune de Dora: une petite-fille de Léopold II chez les Nazis (Brussels: Editions Racine, 2013).
Georgina Battiscombe’s Queen Alexandra (London: Constable, 1969) is useful. John van der Kiste’s Edward VII’s Children (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1989) contains interesting material. The king’s elder son is the subject of Andrew Cook’s Prince Eddy: The King Britain Never Had (Stroud: Tempus, 2006). On his younger son, John Gore’s King George V (London: John Murray, 1941) deserves attention for its attractive authenticity. Kenneth Rose’s George V (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1983) is an exemplary royal biography. So, too, although in a different manner, are the peerless three biographical volumes by John Röhl on Edward VII’s nephew the German Kaiser. The final volume, Wilhelm II : Into the Abyss of War and Exile 1900–1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), together with Röhl’s thematic The Kaiser and his Court: Wilhelm II and the Government of Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), contain rich material on the European powers and on the English and German monarchical systems. Miranda Carter’s The Three Emperors: Three Cousins, Three Empires and the Road to World War One (London: Fig Tree, 2009) is a compelling study of George V, Wilhelm II and Nicholas II and casts helpful sidelights on the Edwardian period.
As to Edwardian prime ministers, CB : A Life of Campbell-Bannerman (London: Constable, 1973) by John Wilson (Lord Moran) combines political nous with sensitive social antennae, and gives an admirably evocative introduction to the period before 1909. Salisbury: Victorian Titan (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999) by Andrew Roberts richly deserved its Wolfson Prize for History and Biography, but sensibly halts with its subject’s death in 1902. Max Egremont’s Balfour (London: HarperCollins, 1980) provides contextual illumination. The acclaimed Asquith of Roy Jenkins (London: Collins, 1964) is not an essential source on Edward VII, although its political coverage of 1908–10 is helpful.
Three works by Geoffrey Searle have informed this opusculum: A New England? Peace and War, 1886–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005); The Quest for National Efficiency: A Study in British Politics and British Political Thought 1899–1914 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1971); and Corruption in British Politics, 1895–1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). Background material comes from the following excellent sources: Andrew Adonis, Making Aristocracy Work: The Peerage and the Political System in Britain 1884–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); Vernon Bogdanor, The Monarchy and the Constitution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); Jamie Camplin, The Rise of the Plutocrats: Wealth and Power in Edwardian England (London: Constable, 1978); J. Mordaunt Crook, The Rise of the Nouveaux Riches: Style and Status in Victorian and Edwardian Architecture (London: John Murray, 1999); Roderick McLean, Royalty and Diplomacy in Europe 1890–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); A. J. A. Morris, The Scaremongers: The Advocacy of War and Rearmament 1896–1914 (London: Routledge, Kegan Paul, 1984); and Gregory Phillips, The Die-Hards: Aristocratic Society and Politics in Edwardian England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979). There is a spreading and sometimes tendentious literature on nationhood. Linda Colley’s Acts of Union, Acts of Disunion: What has held the UK together – and what is dividing it? (London: Profile, 2014) can be recommended together with Robert Tombs, The English and their History (London: Allen Lane, 2014).
The meetings of the Society for Court Studies, the contents of its journal Court Historian and the superintendence of both society and journal by that doyen among scholars of European courts and cities, Philip Mansel, are invaluable to anyone wishing to study the English monarchy or its European counterparts. Courtiers’ memoirs, notably Percy Armytage (ghosted by Desmond Chapman-Huston), By the Clock of St James’s (London: John Murray, 1927), Lord Ormathwaite, When I was at Court (London: Hutchinson, 1937), and Lord Suffield, My Memories 1830–1913 (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1913), provide Edwardian courtly minutiae.