Illustrations

1. Thirteen-year-old Albert Edward, Prince of Wales rests his hand on the shoulder of his closest brother, Alfred, afterwards Duke of Edinburgh and third regnant Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.

2. Deaf and lame Princess Alexandra with her pug and five surviving children. She expected admiration and dependence from them all.

3. Lady Warwick as maîtresse en titre to Edward the Caresser

4. Lady Colebrooke’s family was financially ruined by court life

5. Lady Michelham looked the picture of an Edwardian parvenue

6. Alice Keppel quelled the monarch’s boredom by purveying Society gossip

7. Queen Victoria undermined, devalued and frustrated her eldest son and heir, ‘Bertie’. They are pictured here together at Coburg a few years before her death.

8. The Prince and Princess of Wales, in their role as England’s leading medical fundraisers, visit the Evelina Hospital for Sick Children at Southwark in 1890.

9. Europe watched as Edward the Peacemaker strolled the spa colonnade and pleasure gardens at Marienbad during the Augusts of his reign. ‘Journalists loved him; he did not mind being snap-shotted.’

10. The Prince of Wales in red field marshal’s uniform, flanked by his soldier brother, Arthur, Duke of Connaught, joins the frail teenage King Alfonso XII in a review of troops at Madrid in 1877.

11. Edward VII kissed Emperor Franz Joseph on both cheeks, and showed ‘spontaneous élan eloquent of their long-standing friendship’ before they paraded through the streets of Habsburg Vienna in 1903.

12. Watched by his household and by various Schleswig-Holstein and Saxe-Coburg cousins, the monarch invests his son-in-law, King Haakon VII of Norway, as a Knight of the Garter at Windsor Castle in 1906.

13. King Manuel II of Portugal, a favourite Saxe-Coburg cousin of the English royal family, riding with the king-emperor on a shoot in Windsor Great Park in 1909.

14. The obligatory expressionless group photograph commemorating Lord Alington’s Whitsuntide house party in 1909 shows Edward VII seated beside his consort with Alice Keppel in the back row (fourth from left). The host was a Marlborough Club stalwart.

15. Max Beerbohm’s cartoon of 1910, entitled ‘Are we as welcome as ever?’, depicts five anxious millionaires, from left to right: Ernest Cassel, Alfred and Leopold de Rothschild, Edward Levy-Lawson and Arthur Sassoon, sidling along a Buckingham Palace corridor early in the new reign. George V’s answer to them was ‘No’.