Books: Corpulent Voluptuary

GAY MONARCH (378 pp.) -Virginia Cowles-Harper ($5).

When Britain’s King Edward VII asked a “pretty young lady” to partner him at bridge, she declined, saying sweetly: “I am afraid, Sir, I can’t even tell a King from a Knave.” Most of Edward’s biographers have had the same trouble: none has satisfactorily explained how and why the monarch whom Rudyard Kipling called “a corpulent voluptuary” was also modern Britain’s most agile royal diplomat and plenipotentiary. Now, Boston-bred Virginia Cowles has shown that an American woman may look at a King with more understanding than many a Briton. Married to former Under Secretary of State for Air Aidan Crawley, Author Cowles has been a newspaper correspondent in Europe since the Spanish civil war. The excellence of her biography lies in her sensuous, feminine appreciation of Edward and his era.

A Problem Child Is Made. Queen Victoria could never understand why parents as admirable as herself and Prince Consort Albert should have had an heir like “Bertie.” Most of the people at court took instinctively to the “fair little lad,” but, according to palace gossip, the Queen thought him “stupid” from the very start, and “in all [her] published letters which range over the Prince’s childhood, there is not one word of praise for his character, not a single endearing anecdote, not a trace of pride or pleasure in his personality.” Bertie detested pedantry and loved people. His parents’ efforts to change this bias read like a horror story.

Bertie was not allowed to mix or play with other boys. His first tutor, Eton’s Henry Birch, was ordered to report in detail on the little boy’s failings. When, instead, Birch became fond of Bertie, he was sacked. Birch’s successor, Frederick Gibbs, had everything that the creation of a problem child demands. He kept “story books of all kinds” out of Bertie’s reach, reported regularly that the frustrated little boy was “excited,” “disobedient,” “very angry,” “rude,” “half silly.” Bertie responded, complained Gibbs, by “throwing stones in my face.”

No Slouch. At 17 Bertie was dubbed Knight of the Garter, and established in his own “household.” His equerries were instructed never to permit “lounging ways, such [as] lolling in armchairs” or “slouching … with hands in the pocket.” All “satirical or bantering expressions” were taboo, and “a practical joke was never to be permitted.” Bertie’s leisure was to be spent “looking over drawings or engravings.” On reading this memorandum, the Knight of the Garter burst into tears.

When he was 18, Bertie was sent off on a royal tour of Canada and the U.S. Astonishingly, the subdued princeling blossomed under the round of levees and balls. When he returned to Britain, Punch gleefully cartooned him puffing a cigar and swigging drinks with an aplomb that amazed and disconcerted his austere father.

Then father Albert died. The withdrawal of the brokenhearted Queen into seclusion proved a godsend to Bertie. Married off at 22 to Denmark’s Alexandra, “the most beautiful Princess in Europe,” he set to work making hay of every item in the old memorandum. Lounging in armchairs was his delight, bantering expressions his favorite form of speech, practical jokes his favorite game. He himself rarely looked again at his drawings and engravings, but legion were the ladies whom he invited upstairs to do so.

Beer & Skittles. In those days before popular photography, Author Cowles points out, even a Prince of Wales could safely indulge in “orgies”-in the improvement of royal morals, one Leica is worth a dozen archbishops. Soon “there was scarcely an important demimondaine who did not claim an acquaintance with the Prince of Wales.” It was a sportive era, and the Prince took delight in “spirited battles with soda syphons, apple-pie beds, leaking hot-water bottles,” and “an inkpot over a door which emptied its contents on [the Duke of Marlborough’s] head.” He liked clapping on a fireman’s helmet and rushing to a good blaze with that celebrated fire buff, the Duke of Sutherland. When Bertie’s pal “Harty-Tarty” (Lord Hartington) was keeping “Skittles,” London’s foremost courtesan, Bertie arranged for a bowling alley to be erected for Harty-Tarty at a civic reception. Explained the mayor: “We were informed by the Prince’s equerry that your lordship was very fond of skittles.”

Amid the indignities he instigated, Bertie remained royal to the core. No syphon ever played upon his head, no rubber bottle leaked upon his feet. At the least sign of disrespect “his blue eyes grew cold, and his lower lip protruded in the famous Guelph pout.”

Bertie’s trouble (like that of many playboys) was that he had no intelligent way of using his talents. Until he was 42 years old his mother allowed him to sit on only two House of Lords committees-one discussing “Plague of Cows,” the other “Scarcity of Horses”-they were not subjects that “riveted his attention.”

Behind Mother’s Back. Author Cowles is at her best in describing how dogged Bertie eventually succeeded in working behind his mother’s back. He was helped by friendly Cabinet ministers who recognized the value of a Prince of Wales who spoke French and German almost as well as English, had met all the rulers (most of them his relations) and all the leading political figures in Europe. “No royalty I have ever met,” said the great Gladstone, “has such charm and tact as the Prince of Wales.” Gradually Bertie’s “unofficial” visits to European capitals became political feelers, all the better for being disguised as mere jaunts of pleasure. Thanks to his drawing-room and boudoir experience, he matured into a unique ambassador who “could assess men’s motives unerringly” and knew “exactly how … to pacify . . . reassure . . . captivate hostile critics [and] give real pleasure.”

For 35 years before he became King, “he had talked about an Entente with France, and for 15 years [about] a rapprochement with Russia.” Both notions were pooh-poohed by his mother and most of her ministers, who worked stubbornly for an entente with Germany. Bertie’s views did not prevail until the heirs of Bismarck made it clear that Germany intended to expand at Britain’s expense. Bertie came to the throne in 1901, and from then until his death (1910) “there was scarcely a diplomatic move … which did not receive his active help.” What Author Cowles suggests is that Bertie, the monarch who preferred women to men and acted by hunch and instinct, ended by very nearly proving “that kingship is more effective when it exerts its personality than when it exerts its brain.”