Richard Davenport-Hines - Edward VII: The Cosmopolitan King

Richard Davenport-Hines

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EDWARD VII

The Cosmopolitan King

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Allen Lane is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

First published 2016

Copyright Richard Davenport-Hines, 2016

Cover design by Pentagram
Jacket art by Nina van de Vondervoort

The moral right of the author has been asserted

ISBN: 978-0-241-01481-3

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THE HOUSES OF WESSEX AND DENMARK

THE HOUSES OF NORMANDY, BLOIS AND ANJOU

THE HOUSE OF PLANTAGENET

THE HOUSES OF LANCASTER AND YORK

THE HOUSE OF TUDOR

THE HOUSE OF STUART

THE HOUSE OF HANOVER

THE HOUSES OF SAXE-COBURG & GOTHA AND WINDSOR

For Susan Hitch and Philip Mansel

and i. m. C. R. H. A. D. H.

The prince was unwanted. Queen Victoria was infuriated when she fell pregnant in February 1841 less than three months after she had given birth to her eldest child and namesake, Victoria. Child-bearing was to her the resented sequel to sex. It made her feel sick, gross and flushed. It forced her to abstain from enjoyable sexual bouts with her husband Albert (the couple were first cousins in the Saxe-Coburg family, and were aged seventeen and sixteen when first introduced with a view to marriage). Pregnancy, moreover, diminished her sovereign powers by forcing her to devolve some decision-making to her ambitious and overmastering consort. Each of her nine pregnancies strengthened Prince Alberts position. She was under five feet tall, so had a painful delivery of the large baby born at Buckingham Palace on 9 November 1841. This was the queens second child in twenty-two months of marriage: she later likened serial-breeding women to rabbits; and babies, with their jerky limbs, to frogs. She felt depressed for a year after the birth, and found breast-feeding repulsive. The royal heir was wet-nursed by a madwoman who subsequently murdered her own six children.

The baby was christened Albert Edward in St Georges

Fright was basic to Queen Victorias character. She and her husband were only twenty-two years old when their first son was born: both were inexperienced and exposed as they tried to give a strong lead to a rich kingdom. Unsurprisingly she became an anxious, mistrustful, imperceptive, stubborn woman who handled her insecurities, suspicions and fears by insulating herself from threats and by striving to control people and circumstances. She was jealous of her powers and status. Her married life was a constant struggle to stay pre-eminent above her strenuously assertive spouse. Similarly, she wanted her children and grandchildren to be lesser people than she was not only for her lifetime, but in perpetuity. Her imposition of the names Albert and Victoria on her descendants was not only self-aggrandizement, but a debasing label for her progeny. Each of her four sons was given Albert as a forename: so, too, were all of her six grandsons in the male line. Three of her five daughters had Victoria among their forenames. Another was christened Alberta. Her compulsion to lessen everyone who came after her was especially pronounced with her heir, for Victoria upheld the Hanoverian tradition of monarchs disliking and disempowering their Princes of Wales. Her disparagement of her eldest son was vehement and brutal. She made incessant adverse comparisons with his father.