King Edward VII - Part 1

in January 1901 Britain and the Empire mourned the passing of an era for more than six decades Queen Victoria had stamped her presence on the throne with a dignified and sober Authority now few could imagine life without her people were dragging the death of Queen Victoria partly because she was a fixture of everybody's life but also because they were rather worried about the kind of King her son would make in a would this man be a worthy successor there had been very little evidence that he would there was a very strong feeling that he wasn't up to much he was nicknamed Edward the Caressa as opposed to Edward the Confessor um there was a lot of talk that you know he was a vulgar Philistine and that he would be quite incapable of the gravitas and the sort of getting a mastery that you needed to be king King Edward the seventh known to the family as Bertie couldn't have had a modern public image from that of his mother FAT 59 years old and with a reputation for frivolity Bertie had been pursued by scandal and written off as an idle playboy Prince basically nobody thought that Bertie was going to be a good king not even Bertie actually there it's widely attested that he was quite depressed at the time that he became King because I think he really thought nobody would respect him and he wasn't going to manage so it was a very inauspicious start before he'd even been crowned it seemed the new king was on the verge of a nervous breakdown but Edward the seventh spot Hillier touch would turn out to be his secret weapon the man of whom many predicted disaster turned out to be the king who reinvented monarchy for the modern age in the 1840s Queen Victoria and her consort Prince Albert embarked on a mission under the reign of their predecessors the high living Hanoverians the monarchy had become a byword for corruption and immorality Victoria and Albert believed that if it was to survive in an era of revolution the royal family must become a model of public duty and immaculate private morality albertson Victoria were very aware of the sort of the Hanoverian hangover this moral legacy from the particularly for the Regency days the irony was Victoria was a highly sexed individual and enjoyed her sex life and and reveled in it and you know explored it and wrote about and all the rest of it but they knew that the symbol of monarchy had to be a far more moral endeavor central to Victoria and Albert's plans was their first son and heir Bertie Prince of Wales to groom the boy for kingship they subjected him to a grueling program of moral and intellectual enlightenment Prince Albert had an idea that Princess sort of had to be kind of super people and he he developed this educational regime for his children whereby pretty much every waking moment was stuffed with improving educational experiences from the age of about three and constantly impressed on Bertie was the fact that he was going to be king and he had to be good and he had to achieve and everything had to be improving and it was suffocating his whole day was parceled at half are by half are in two lessons um from a bad sort of you know early in the morning until six o'clock at night and he had behaved appallingly he behaved like the sort of legendary at North High boy he stood in the corner and stamped and screamed and he behaved as abominably as he possibly could he refused to work today I had to do some arithmetic with the Prince of Wales immediately the pencil was flung to the end of the room stool was kicked away the prince was very rude throwing stones in my face Bertie's parents were in despair I never in my life met such a thorough and cunning lazybones it does grieve me when it is my own son and that he might be called upon at any moment to take over the reins of a country where the Sun never sets his intellect alas is weak he listens to nothing you tell him but seems in a sort of dream eNOS which alarms us for his brain Victoria and Albert are pretty upset anxious and confused by their son's refusal to respond to this educational plan they bring in a phrenologist a man called George Koon phrenology was this sort of mid 19th century pseudoscience that declared that if you felt the bumps on a person's head then you could determine something about their character about the way that they were put together now Combe felt all over young Bertie's head and declared that his centres of self-esteem were too highly developed the boy is a nervous and excitable child with little power of endurance or sustained action in any direction the brain is feeble and abnormal making him liable to fits of passion and obstinacy despite Bertie's lack of academic promise at the age of 17 he was packed off to university the prince took every opportunity to give his royal minders the slip and applied himself enthusiastically to the study of gambling horses and strong cigars but he desperately wanted friends um he really wanted to meet you know boys of his own age that's what he really wanted he wanted friendship he's not ever allowed to sort of rub shoulders with people as equals you know of his own age he never gives any anywhere near a school and even when he goes to university albert is terribly careful to ensure that he is secluded so he has brought up very much in isolation and this for him was really difficult because he was by nature an incredible extrovert despairing of his sons academic abilities in 1861 Prince Albert decided to knock his son into shape with a taste of military life Bertie was ordered to attend an army camp in iron but if Albert hoped bootcamp would be the making of his son he was to be disappointed soon after Bertie's arrival fellow officers smuggled the friendly young actress by the name of Nellie Clifton into his sleeping quarters the prints recorded the momentous event in his personal diary 6th of September NC first time like the September NC second time 10th of September NC third time temptation comes and you know he's ready for it he is brimming over with the desire to share the delights of this beautiful woman that pretty well is put in his bed and when his father hears about this course horror strikes him Bertie is weakened spirit and flesh and you have this terrible tension between the ideals of monarchy and this idea of this bourgeois mid-victorian industrious dutiful monarchy and you know what Bertie likes to get up to in the barracks it's both an attack upon their ideal of a family but also crucially I think Albert is very worried that it is an undermining politically of the monarchy I write to you with heavy heart on a subject that has caused me the deepest pain I knew that you were thoughtless and week but I could not think you depraved Bertie couldn't have chosen a worse time to be caught in the act his father Prince Albert already suffering the early symptoms of typhoid fever was crushed with worry when he died soon afterwards at Windsor Castle it was Bertie who took the blame into Queens eyes use a martyr who had died because of the wickedness of his son he'd sacrificed his life and she never altogether forgave the Prince of Wales for what she saw as this some appalling misdemeanor which led to the death of a beloved Albert Albert's death has a profoundly negative effect on the relationship between Bertie and Victoria Victoria was completely we'll shocked and blames Bertie for Albert's death Victoria she says you know whenever I see Bertie I shudder I can't bear to have him in the room I can't bear to be near him the prince had never enjoyed a warm relationship with his mother for the next 40 years it would be positively frosty to keep her son an heir from further trouble the Queen now resorted to a desperate remedy marriage the royal houses of Europe was scoured for a suitable partner the winning candidate was the beautiful albeit penniless Alexandra of Denmark in the 18 year old princess it seemed the matchmakers had found the perfect bride Alexandra was in fact an ideal wife for the Prince of Wales compared with the starchier correctness and the Infinity diem of Victoria's Court the danish royal court was a delight for the Prince of Wales because they took everything chair flip and the idea of relaxation was a Rob sand practical jokes and jolly songs it was said about the Danish royal family that nobody was ever allowed to read a book and if they saw you reading a book in the you know sitting-room they'd all run up after you and go boom and you know that was really not right they wanted you to be galloping around and playing parlor games and throwing wet towels at each other in 1863 the 21 year old Prince of Wales married his fun-loving Danish bride for the wedding photograph Queen Victoria arranged for Albert to join them to make sure that nobody had too much fun installed in their opulent marital home more breh house the newlyweds quickly became a center of London's high society amid a ceaseless round of dances dinner parties and entertainments virtus true personality could now flourish he knew that he wasn't clever like his father he knew that he wasn't authoritative like his mother what he had was a sort of charm an easy way of dealing with people people found him good company you know he was well behaved he knew what to say he was a good person to be sitting next to at dinner it was an arranged marriage and that was made completely plain but I think that Alex right from the start really fell in love with him and anyway she remained in love with him for the rest of her life she said to one of Berta's sisters you think I'm marrying your brother because of his position but if he was a cowboy I'd marry him just the same the once lonely isolated youth now had what he'd always craved friendship fun and the unquestioning devotion of a beautiful woman but as the Royal Family's most senior male representative he also had unfulfilled ambitions the Prince of Wales felt as he out of a throne he ought to be playing a prominent part in the affairs of state and he was in fact very ready to do so he was about a considerable ability great energy but trouble was that his mother felt that he was irresponsible frivolous incapable of playing a serious role but he thought what he wanted to do um was to UM have access to government papers and particularly to far enough his dispatches because he was always interested in foreign policy and so that was his special area and every time he asked for access to dispatches and what he always asked for was the key there was a particular gold key that opened the box of secret papers from the Foreign Office and that's what he wanted and Queen Victoria whenever he asked Queen Victoria would say no he can't have access he is too indiscreet Edward said late in his mother's life that everyone had an eternal father but he himself was blessed with an eternal mother the sort of remark in fact that the Prince of work the present Prince of Wales might might actually make and of course there is this permanent tension between the Prince of Wales who is heir to the throne and the person who's actually occupying it frustrated in his ambition by his mother relations between Bertie and his wife also began to come under pressure three children in the first four years of marriage had taken the early Sparkle out of married life eight months into her third pregnancy the princess fell gravely ill with rheumatic fever the crisis was a turning point in the marriage it really played I think to his worse to his least likable qualities it said that they had to send three tearin telegrams to get him to come away from the races to come to her sick bed and when he did come he didn't want to stay Bertie's reaction is not good and he goes out night after night I'm saying he'd be back you know when she wakes up and wakes up and he says he'll be back at midnight and he doesn't come back until 3:00 and she's meanwhile sweeping you know very dependent on him the illness took a heavy physical toll on the princess leaving her lame and increasingly death it had also opened up deep underlying tensions in her relationship with the prince I think that he was mixed up selfish and and perhaps a kind of sort of self-obsessed figure I think the trouble perhaps partly was that Bert he's conflicted because he was forced to marry her and he resented that I mean 21 forced into an arranged marriage no time to sow his Wild Oats all that kind of stuff but on the other hand um he actually is very fond of her and um so that he treats her badly but at the same time he loves her it's it's quite complicated I think over the coming years Alexandra would increasingly retreat from society life behind the gates of her Sandringham home while Bertie turned elsewhere to satisfy his emotional and physical needs there's no doubt he did like the company of women and there's no doubt he had lots of mistresses there are all these stories about him going off to Paris and going to brothels where they were you know lovely ladies he would haunt the cafe Anglais where orgies were said to occur he would visit the Moulin Rouge where one of the dancers said although Wales will you pay for my champagne and he did pay for her champagne there was this very celebrated brothel called la Shabana where Bertie visited there is a chair that was in that brothel that was displayed to people as Bertie's chair and it's something that has been designed to allow a man to indulge in the sexual practices that he wants to do you know without breaking into a sweat he was at one point known as kinky which isn't it he would sit in this most incredible bath that had this of swan neck mythological figure and he would sit in this bath with a lady of his choice not with water in there but with champagne in there and I guess they were both sit there and listen to the sound of his father spinning in his grave Bertie's frequent trips to the continent allowed him to indulge his peccadilloes at a safe distance from his wife his mother and the prying eyes of the British press but the principles have begun to play dangerous games closer to home and in 1870 his secret life was exposed in a most shocking public manner my great-great grandmother was rather bubbly and rather frivolous but um obviously sort of rather amusing company everyone seems to have loved her she was she was very popular in 1869 the Prince of Wales began a flirtation with the twenty-one year old lady Harriet mordant wife of a prominent member of parliament he would pay her these afternoon visits he would arrive in a hansom cab I couldn't come in his own armed carriage so obviously wanted to be discreet instructions were given to the servants that no one else was to be admitted if they came to call the visits usually lasted for about an hour and a half there was certainly time to get up to mischief if that's what they wanted to do in the summer of 1869 Harriet's husband a keen sportsman went on a fishing trip to Norway Bertie took the opportunity to enjoy Harriet company at her country residence Walton Hall what they couldn't have known was that 1869 was a miserable year for the Norwegian salmon Sir Charles was back Sir Charles cut short his holiday arrives back unexpectedly and he sees his wife driving around to white pine needs which Sir Charles had actually earlier boot from the Prince of Wales and on watching as they sort of prance around is is is the Prince of Wales himself such as flies into the most appalling rage and instructs his gardener to take off these beautiful white ponies and shoot them and he forces his wife to to watch as they're shot Bertie beat a hasty retreat soon afterwards a tearful Harriet confessed to sinning with the Prince of Wales and other men often and in open day Sir Charles was furious and vowed to divorce her Burtie faced disgrace in the witness box of a public divorce trial the case was front-page news but the prints still had one supporter recently discovered letters revealed Princess Alexandra at least refused to see an eel in her husband my sweet mini I have to mention to you a terrible scandal which has shocked everybody here more than words can tell it is a man Charles mordant a terrible brute who wants to be separated from his wife who accused herself to be unfaithful and mentioned my Bertie as her lover to see one's husband being accused in such a scandalous mean way is nearly more than one can bear this is the first time for many centuries that the heir to the throne um had appeared in court I mean it's in itself was shocking and a nature of the case was shocking - it opened a window it was a revelation to the public of the goings-on in the Prince of Wales's circles I think it was a real crisis to Victorian public opinion it really did threaten the monarchy the Tory politician Lord Stanley noted another trial like that would create a Republican Party bent on putting an end to the monarchy is folly almost amounts to insanity no warning seems to have any effect on the 23rd of February 1870 a courtroom heard the Prince deny any impropriety with lady mordant but the damage to the Prince and the Crown's reputation had been done as for Harriet a worse fate awaited her her family are thrown into a complete panic by the prospect of this sort of very lurid case but her father decides that the thing to do is to say that Harriet's insane they were very keen to sort of preserve the family honor and on although you might think it's a rather odd way to go about it by establishing that you've got a lunatic in the family somehow that was considered preferable to the fact that you had this very very promiscuous young woman lady Harriet was committed to a lunatic asylum she died there 36 years later it's an absolutely appalling story it is like something straight out of Wilkie Collins a true gothic horror story the fate of a sort of young woman who steps out of line was very grim indeed if if that suited society and and the men around her Bertie's reckless behavior had contributed to the ruin of a young woman and tarnished the monarchy's image at a time of growing Republican sentiment the jeers Bertie suffered in public whereas nothing to the roasting he was about to receive from his mother he really is more and more careless being dragged into the dirt and mixed up in one of the most disgusting and scandalous trials on record Victoria was appalled to learn that the Prince of Wales was behaving badly but on the other hand um the other side of it was that the more intelligence she could accumulate of Bertie's bad behavior the more she could say well he is absolutely not fit to the King you know he's a wastrel he's completely no good I must stay with all the power he cannot be trusted Queen Victoria wasn't very good at sharing responsibility she didn't even like doing it with Albert very much who she absolutely adored and so she really did her best to try and prevent him from having for anything any kind of serious duty and some of the heads of the administrations that she dealt with agreed Disraeli didn't want a sensitive document of any sort to be put into Bertie's hands and he was probably right because when he was given things you know he had the tendency to kind of pass them around at dinner parties and ask the guests what they thought you know this wasn't really very useful behavior Bertie grew increasingly disgruntled at his mother's refusal to share power he poured out his anger in a letter to his private secretary the game is not to let me see any interesting or important dispatches this has been going on for years under successive governments and it would be far better if the Foreign Office sent me no more which is preferable to the rubbish they do send because he's not trusted with this kind of material he is more or less infantilized cartoons of the period will depict him as a baby in a pram he's not going to be allowed to involve himself much in the serious business of state so he turns pleasure into a serious business and commits himself to that so that the complexities of his social diary and what parties he's going to actually in a way take the place of sitting there with a red box going through the documents and it's almost as if his his his energies are diverted into that as youth gave way to an increasingly corpulent middle age the prince threw himself body and soul into a life of leisure he lived an extraordinary raffish existence first of all there was the food and he had I mean by modern standards the Edwardian gluttony was simply something to amaze you huge breakfasts mid-morning meals of eight course lunches tea and twelve course dinners and then sandwiches you know before you go to bed but in the meantime he would go out and he would attend the Music Hall he would go to cockpits he would go to billiard rooms that were showing pornographic photographs he would go to brothels a moment would not go by when he was not diverting but he did have this sort of gargantuan appetite for everything and I think a lot of it does come out of out of having this miserable childhood where he feels that things are constantly denied him when he wasn't devouring a favorite midnight feast of cold roast chicken Bertie continued to work his way through a series of mistresses including model turned actress Lily Langtry and one Jenny Churchill mother of a pushy young lad named Winston then at the age of 48 something odd happened perhaps for the first time in his life Bertie fell in love Daisy Warwick was the original it girl a combination of beauty and charm all rolled into one she was one of those society beauties that had their likeness put onto these little cars and you could buy them in shops Daisy Countess of Warwick was 20 years younger than the Prince of Wales fabulously rich and thoroughly scandalous at her grand homes Warwick Castle and Eastern Lodge in Essex she was famous for hosting lavish entertainment Daisy War II it was incredibly extravagant she spent money like there was no tomorrow she had her own railway branch built to bring guests to her house luxury everywhere um and these were the sort of famously um racy house parties where Daisy sort of organised adultery really there would be flowers on your dressing table and there were buttonholes for the men there were printed lists of who was there for dinner and who you were to take in to dinner you didn't touch each other but there were ways of little notes being left by the candles saying come and see me I'm in room whatever it was at one such house party in 1886 that Bertie was introduced to the countess although their ten-year affair would become common knowledge documentary evidence of the relationship has been scarce until now the affair with Daisy Warrick was incredibly intense but the thing about it is that until very recently nobody actually knew what went on between them it was a sort of puzzle because there was absolutely no evidence at all but then looking at the dairy that Bertie kept I suddenly realized um that there was a symbol that I didn't understand um that he seemed to be putting in which seemed to be occurring increasingly frequently sometimes twice a day Bertie's Diaries reveal the philandering Prince was using code to cover his tracks a letter d written backwards signifying his increasingly frequent liaisons with Daisy um it's possible from this to see very clearly that this was an incredibly intense relationship he would meet Daisy twice a day he'd have tea with her every day when she was in London and he'd meet her in the morning they'd have intimate suppers in the evening um he called her my darling Daisy wife it was a sort of second marriage I think she could fairly be described as the love he wrote to her several times a day he saw her all the time and went to stay with her I think he was strongly strongly devoted to her my own lovely little Daisy tomorrow I go to the races I have two horses running but I fear they are not only good don't forget my darling to expect me from five on Sunday next I only wish you could be before good night and God keep you my adored little Daisy

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Keywords: king edward VII

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Length: 30min 55sec (1855 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 01 2011