WHEN Queen Elizabeth was traversing the plains of Kildare on her way to the National Stud earlier this year, I doubt if anyone took the trouble to point out to her the place where her great-grandfather, the Earl of Dublin, got into a spot of romantic bother. The Earl, better known as the Prince of Wales and, later, King Edward VII, was the feisty eldest son of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.
From his teens, scandal, mostly self-created, followed him at almost every step. He had an enormous appetite for women, food and booze and became so corpulent that the last button of his waistcoat had always to be left undone. This inspired a fashion fad that persists to this day.
Edward’s personal ambition was to follow a career in the British army but his parents felt that, as heir to the throne, it would be better if he received a sound education. He was sent to Edinburgh University then to Christ Church, Oxford, and from there to Trinity College, Cambridge.
Through it all he remained a self-indulgent playboy. His military ranks were honorary but they did afford him the opportunity to occasionally get away from his studies to take part in military manoeuvres.
One of the military trips was to Ireland. He camped on the Curragh and one night some of his fellow officers smuggled a young actress called Nellie Clifden into his tent. Edward did not eject her. His parents got to hear about the incident and when Edward got back to Cambridge his angry father got up from his sick bed to visit him to deliver a reprimand. Prince Albert died a couple of weeks later in December 1861.
The inconsolable Queen Victoria blamed Edward for hastening his father’s death. She had always regarded him as frivolous and reckless and in a letter to her eldest daughter, Princess Victoria of Prussia, she wrote: “. . . much as I pity him I never can or shall look at him without a shudder, as you can imagine”. As far as Edward was concerned, Nellie Clifden was only an appetiser. He began a succession of affairs. His marriage at the age of 22 to Princess Alexandra of Denmark did little to halt his licentiousness in spite of the fact that the union was a reasonably happy one, producing six children. While his mother despaired of him, his wife seem to tolerate his legion of mistresses. Extra-marital activities were far from uncommon among the aristocracy at the time. Edward’s liaisons included the actresses Sarah Bernhardt and Lillie Langtry, the Moulin Rouge dancer La Goulue and a string of married society women, such as Lady Warwick and Lady Mordaunt.
His enduring relationship was with Mrs Alice Keppel, a minor socialite who, claimed historian Victoria Glendinning, had “the sexual morals of an alley cat”. She was almost 30 years younger than the prince.
He was not her first lover but after meeting him in 1898 she became his “official” mistress within a matter of weeks. Princess Alexandra is said to have preferred Mrs Keppel to Edward’s other mistresses because of her discretion, although she became irritated at her annual public appearance at the Cowes regatta.
Mrs Keppel seems to have been able to make the prince happy and contented while keeping her own marriage intact. (The Duchess of Sutherland was heard to remark at a court occasion that Edward was “a much pleasanter child since he changed mistresses”.) Sonia, the second daughter of Alice and the Hon George, who was born in 1900, became the grandmother of Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, the wife of Charles, the present Prince of Wales.
Alongside his gallivanting, Edward tried seriously to prepare himself for kingship. He was a patron the arts and sciences and one of the founders of the Royal College of Music. At the age of 34 he set out on an eight-month tour of India. He insisted on treating all the people he met the same, regardless of social class or colour. He was appalled at the way resident British officials dealt with the natives. “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,” he complained in a letter to Buckingham Palace. He supported reform of the army after the Boer War and, fearing war with Germany, the expansion of the Royal Navy.
After a long, long wait he succeeded to the throne on the death of Victoria in 1901 at the age of 59. Although he lived a life of luxury far removed from the common people, he was popular with the masses.
The writer JB Priestley commented: “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.” After such a long wait there was another delay. His coronation was postponed in 1902 when he had to have an emergency operation for appendicitis. The relationship with Mrs Keppel continued to his death in 1910; she survived until 1947.
Another coronation which nearly had to be postponed was that of one of Edward’s early predecessors, Eadwig (955-959). After being crowned he disappeared before the ceremony was over. A search party was organised by Dunstan, the abbot of Glastonbury. Eadwig was found, crownless, in bed with two women, a mother and daughter, and was dragged back to the church. The newly anointed king soon had his revenge. He married the daughter and banished the abbot.
One feels Edward would have approved.
