Edward VII: Prince of Pleasure

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 dreading the death of Queen Victoria.

Partly because she was a fixture of everybody's lives,

but also because they were rather worried

about the kind of king her son would make.

You know, 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 Caresser as opposed to Edward the Confessor.

There was a lot of talk that he was a vulgar philistine

and he would be quite incapable of the gravitas and the mastery

that you needed to be king.

King Edward VII, known to the family as Bertie,

couldn't have had a more different 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 he was going to be a good king.

Not even Bertie, actually -

it's widely attested that he was depressed at the time he became king,

because he 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 VII's popular 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.

Albert and Victoria were very aware of this sort of Hanoverian hangover,

this moral legacy from the Regency days.

The irony was, Victoria was a highly sexed individual

and enjoyed her sex life,

and revelled in it and explored it and wrote about it.

But they knew that the symbol of monarchy

had to be a far more moral endeavour.

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 gruelling programme of moral and intellectual enlightenment.

Prince Albert had an idea

that princes had to be kind of super-people.

And 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.

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 parcelled out half hour by half hour into lessons

from early in the morning until six o'clock at night.

And he behaved appallingly.

He behaved like the sort of legendary naughty boy.

He stood in the corner and stamped and screamed,

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.

"The 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 dreaminess,

"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 Coombe.

Phrenology was this sort of mid-19th century pseudo-science

that declared that if you felt the bumps on a person's head,

then you could determine something about their character,

about the way 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.

Bertie desperately wanted friends.

He really wanted to meet 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 of his own age. He never goes anywhere near a school.

And even when he goes to university, Albert is terribly careful to ensure

that he is secluded, so he is brought up very much in isolation.

And this for him was really difficult,

because he was by nature an incredible extrovert.

Despairing of his son's 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 Ireland.

But if Albert hoped boot camp would be the making of his son,

he was to be disappointed.

Soon after Bertie's arrival,

fellow officers smuggled a friendly young actress by the name of Nellie Clifden into his sleeping quarters.

The Prince recorded the momentous event in his personal diary.

"6th September, NC, first time.

"9th September, NC, second time.

"10th September, NC, third time."

Temptation comes, and 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, of course horror strikes him.

Bertie is weak in spirit and flesh

and you have this terrible tension between the ideals of monarchy

and this ideal of this bourgeois, mid-Victorian industrious, dutiful monarchy

and what Bertie likes to get up to in the barracks.

It's both an attack upon on their ideal of family but also crucially, I think,

Albert is very worried that it is 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 weak,

"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.

In the Queen's eyes he was 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 appalling misdemeanour

which led to the death of her beloved Albert.

Albert's death has a profoundly negative affect

on the relationship between Bertie and Victoria.

Victoria was completely, well, shocked,

and blames Bertie for Albert's death.

Victoria, she says, "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 and heir from further trouble,

the Queen now resorted to a desperate remedy - marriage.

The royal houses of Europe were 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 starchy correctness and the infinite tedium

of Victoria's court,

the Danish Royal court was a delight for the Prince of Wales

because they took everything cheerfully.

Their idea of relaxation was romps and 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 sitting room

they'd all run up after you and go, "boo!"

And that was really not all right, they wanted to be galloping around

and playing parlour 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, Marlborough House,

the newlyweds quickly became the centre of London's high society.

Amid a ceaseless round of dances, dinner parties and entertainments,

Bertie's 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 charm, an easy way of dealing with people.

People found him good company.

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,

fell in love with him,

and in a way she remained in love with him for the rest of her life.

She said to one of Bertie'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 the heir to the 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 a man of considerable ability, great energy.

The trouble was that his mother felt that he was irresponsible,

frivolous and incapable a playing a serious role.

Bertie thought what he wanted to do

was to have access to government papers, particularly to Foreign Office dispatches,

because he was always interested in foreign policy and saw that as his special area.

Every time he asked for access to dispatches, 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's 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 present Prince of Wales 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 worst, his least likeable qualities.

It's said that they had to send three telegrams

to get him to come away from the races to come to her sickbed,

and when he did come he didn't want to stay.

Bertie's reaction is not good.

And he goes out night after night,

saying he'd be back and she waits up and waits up

and he says he'll be back at midnight, but he doesn't come back until three,

and she's meanwhile weeping. You know, very dependent on him.

The illness took a heavy physical toll on the Princess, leaving her lame and increasingly deaf.

It had also opened up deep, underlying tensions in her relationship with the Prince.

I think that he was mixed up, selfish and perhaps a self-obsessed figure.

I think the trouble partly was that Bertie's conflicted

because he was forced to marry her and he resented that.

I mean, 21, forced into an arranged marriage,

no time sow his wild oats, all of that kind of stuff.

But on the other hand, he actually is very fond of her,

so that he treats her badly but at the same time he loves her.

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 liked 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 there were 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...

"Hello Wales, will you pay for my champagne?"

And he did pay for her champagne.

There was this very celebrated brothel called Le Chabanais, 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 wanted to

without breaking into a sweat really.

He was at one point known as Kingky,

which is kind of awful, isn't it?

He would sit in this most incredible bath

that had this sort of swan-necked, mythological figure

and he would sit in this bath with a with a lady of his choice,

not with water in there, but with champagne.

And I guess they would 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 Prince had also 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 obviously rather amusing company.

Everyone seems to have loved her.

She was very popular.

In 1869, the Prince of Wales began a flirtation

with the 21-year-old Lady Harriet Mordaunt,

wife of a prominent Member of Parliament.

He would pay her these afternoon visits.

He would arrive in a hansom cab.

He didn't come in his own carriage, so he 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's 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 cuts short his holiday, arrives back unexpectedly

he sees his wife driving around two white ponies,

which Sir Charles had actually earlier bought from the Prince of Wales.

And watching as they sort of prance around

is the Prince of Wales himself.

Sir Charles 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 watch as they're shot.

GUNSHOTS

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.

Bertie faced disgrace in the witness box of a public divorce trial.

The case was front page news.

But the Prince still had one supporter.

Recently discovered letters reveal Princess Alexandra, at least,

refused to see any ill in her husband.

"My sweet Minny, I have to mention to you a terrible scandal

"which has shocked everybody here more than words can tell.

"It is a man, Charles Mordaunt, 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 was the first time for many centuries

that the heir to the throne had appeared in court.

I mean, this in itself was shocking,

and the nature of the case was shocking, too.

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,

and 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.

"His folly almost amounts to insanity.

"No warning seems to have any effect."

On 23rd February 1870, a packed courtroom heard the Prince deny

any impropriety with Lady Mordaunt.

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 preserve the family honour,

and although you might think that it's a rather odd way to go about it

by establishing you've got a lunatic in the family,

somehow that was considered preferable to the fact

that you had this 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 young woman who steps out of line was very grim indeed,

if that suited society and the men around her.

Bertie's reckless behaviour had contributed to the ruin of a young woman

and tarnished of the monarchy's image at a time of growing Republican sentiment.

The jeers Bertie suffered in public

were as 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, the other side of it

was that the more intelligence she could accumulate of Bertie's bad behaviour,

the more she could say, well, he's absolutely not fit to be 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.

So, she really did her best to try and prevent him from having

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, 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 behaviour.

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 infantilised.

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 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

Edwardian gluttony was simply something to amaze you.

Huge breakfasts, mid-morning meals,

eight-course lunches, tea,

and 12-course dinners, and then sandwiches 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 diverted.

Bertie did have this sort of gargantuan appetite for everything.

I think a lot of it does come out of having this miserable childhood

where he feels that things are constantly denied him.

When he wasn't devouring a favourite midnight feast of cold roast chicken,

Bertie continued to work his way through a series of mistresses,

including model turned actress, Lily Langtree, and Jennie 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 cards, and you could buy them in the 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 Easton Lodge in Essex,

she was famous for hosting lavish entertainments.

Daisy Warwick 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,

and these were the famously racy house parties where Daisy sort of organised adultery really.

There would be flowers on your dressing table,

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 10-year affair would become common knowledge,

documentary evidence of the relationship has been scarce.

Until now.

The affair with Daisy Warwick was incredibly intense,

but until recently nobody actually knew what went on between them.

It was a puzzle because there was absolutely no evidence at all.

But then, looking at the diary that Bertie kept,

I suddenly realised there was a symbol that I didn't understand

which seems 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.

It's possible to see 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.

He'd meet her in the morning, they'd have intimate suppers in the evening.

He called her, "My darling Daisy wife." It was a sort of second marriage.

I think she could fairly be described as the the love of his life.

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 any good.

"Don't forget, my darling, to expect me from five on Sunday next.

"I only wish it could be before.

"Goodnight and God keep you, my adored little Daisy."

Bertie's wife, Princess Alexandra

had long since learned to turn a blind eye

to her husband's stable of mistresses.

But in the Countess of Warwick, she had come up against a real rival.

Daisy Warwick

was unlike the professional beauties and slightly marginal society ladies.

Daisy Warwick was right in the middle of the court, a court insider.

She was the mistress with whom Alex couldn't cope

because she threatened Alex's whole world.

Alexandra becomes increasingly distant and she punishes Bertie

by going abroad and by staying abroad.

She goes and stays with her family.

She cables back laconically, "I'm so sorry, have got delayed."

Doesn't show any indication of coming back. This was public humiliation for Bertie.

Bertie had brought his relationship with the Princess to breaking point.

Alexandra needn't have worried.

The Prince's prodigious energies had begun to fail him

in one crucial area.

We know Bertie's health was poor at the time of his relationship

with Daisy Warwick.

And it's also true that in his diary,

Bertie does talk about electrical treatment.

Now what could this be?

One of the things that a male patient might have visited a doctorto be cured for

was impotence problems.

Because it was thought that a shock of electricity

could restore the body's sort of vital energy.

For Daisy, I think the physical side of their relationship

was hugely important.

I think that she loved sex.

She always worrying about it and wanting to meet people.

I found a draft of her letters that said she "mated naturally

"with physical strength or beauty."

Beauty had never been an attribute Bertie could lay claim to.

Now his strength was in question.

In 1898, the still highly-charged Countess

fell pregnant by another man.

To Alexandra's delight,

Daisy wrote to the Prince, ending the 10-year affair.

Her letter is long-since destroyed.

But Bertie's reply is on record.

"My lovely little Daisy, you could not help, my loved one,

"writing to me as you did, though it gave me a pang.

"I gave your letter to the Princess.

"She was moved to tears,

"and said that out of evil, good would come."

The Prince of Wales once again faced an empty existence,

but all that was about to end.

The Queen's health was failing.

In January 1901,

Bertie was summoned to Osborne House on the Isle of Wight.

For the first time in his life, he entered his mother's bedroom.

When she saw Bertie, her eldest son,

in whom for a great deal of her life she had not been best pleased,

I don't think he expected to receive

quite the warmth that some of his siblings got.

But she completely opened her arms to him,

by saying "Bertie" and pulling him forward and hugging him.

And he was reduced to tears.

The reconciliation had come too late.

Minutes later his mother lapsed into unconsciousness and died.

The moment Bertie had been waiting for all his life had arrived.

The accession of an overweight 59-year-old philanderer

hardly thrilled the public imagination.

Few sovereigns have come to the throne with lower expectations.

But from his first command as King,

Bertie was determined to send a signal of intent to his doubters.

He must have recognised that his sense of insecurity

was also reflected by the whole nation's and Empire's view

that he was not quite up to job as she, his mother, had been.

And when he went down to join the yachts that were lined up

to take Queen Victoria's body back from the Isle of Wight to Portsmouth,

he looked up in the rigging

and saw that the Royal Standard was flying at half mast.

And he asked the captain why that was the case,

and the captain, perplexed, said, "Well, the Queen is dead."

And he said "No, the King is alive."

And I think that was a sort of florid way where,

with the spectacular nature of using a symbol,

he was able to show that no, this show goes on.

On January 21st, 1901,

Bertie followed the late Queen's funeral cortege

on its journey towards its final resting place at Windsor.

But even as the King bade farewell to his mother, Bertie was determined

to break with the traditions of her reign and forge his own distinctive brand of monarchy.

After the death of Prince Albert,

Queen Victoria had led an increasingly reclusive existence

behind the walls of Windsor Castle

and her forbidding Highland retreat, Balmoral.

These 20 seconds of film footage,

showing Victoria taking a carriage ride at Balmoral,

are one of the rare glimpses into royal life

the Queen was prepared to allow.

There was great and growing deal of concern about Victoria's withdrawal from public life.

Obviously, her mourning was profound and everyone respected that,

but when it went on, and on, and on

and she didn't open Parliament, she didn't appear,

it fed into a growing Republican move within Britain.

There were these royals taking salaries and not doing the job.

In the 1870s, Britain came closer to becoming a Republic than at any time

in the 18th, 19th or 20th centuries.

The Queen had become extremely unpopular.

She was viewed as being a kind of selfish, extravagant figure,

just sulking in her castle, doing nothing for the country.

In stark contrast to his mother, the Prince of Wales couldn't have been more visible.

Bertie's response to this criticism was basically to say that the monarch needs to be seen in public.

To go and open hospitals, lay foundation stones, to cut tapes,

to launch ships - all of the things that members of the Royal Family do today.

By doing these things, I think Bertie was conscious that he was fighting back.

That this was a new role that the monarchy must perform.

Installed in Buckingham Palace,

and free from his mother's apron strings,

the new King threw himself into preparations

for a dazzling coronation

that would put the Royal Family back at heart of national life.

But Bertie's lack of experience in dealing with affairs of state

soon began to tell.

He was completely overwhelmed with all the things, all his projects, all the things that he wanted to do.

The work itself was something completely new.

All these boxes full of documents that he had no training of going through.

He read everything. He hadn't learnt how to delegate at all.

All the sort of detail, even down to what tune the soldiers played

outside his window at Windsor Castle, he had to decide everything.

He is overwhelmed by all this responsibility.

Dangerously overweight, and chain smoking cigars,

the King appeared to be sinking beneath the burden of responsibility.

Doctors began to fear for his health.

"I saw the King every morning in his bedroom at nine.

"I found him surrounded by letters, telegrams and papers

"which covered the whole bed.

"He was evidently greatly perturbed

"and drew attention to the litter around him with a gesture of despair."

He begins to do things like eating far too much.

I mean, he'd always eaten far too much, but to eat in a sort of bulimic way, sort of stuff.

Alexandra complained that at meals he just stuffed.

He never sort of chewed, he just stuffed himself with food.

So he does seem at the beginning to be going through a kind of mental crisis.

The King's mental crisis was about to trigger a national drama.

A few days before the coronation ceremony,

the King collapsed with abdominal pains.

Doctors diagnosed acute appendicitis,

a potentially fatal condition at the turn of the 20th century.

The top doctors are called in to deal with it.

It's a guy called Frederick Treves,

the man who looked after the Elephant Man at the hospital in Whitechapel.

Here, called in to deal with another sort of 19th century monster,

Bertie, who is lumbering around in pain, in this sort of dyspeptic agony.

You know, this organ is swelling inside him and demanding attention

and causing him the most exquisite pain.

The royal surgeon insisted that the coronation be delayed.

The King raged.

"The coronation cannot be postponed.

"I cannot and will not disappoint the people.

"I will go the Abbey at any cost.

"I will go to the Abbey if I die there."

Being crowned, having the holy oil poured on him,

this was an enormously important event for him.

The thing that he had been waiting for all his life,

much as Prince Charles has been waiting for his mother to depart this life so that he can become King.

This was the purpose in life, and so when he got ill and the coronation,

all the plans had been made, all the invitations had been sent,

all the china had been produced,

the dishcloths, everything had been ready, and he got ill.

And so he was determined to try and keep it up.

The assumption of power,

after having waited for so long, is incredibly important to him.

But Treves presents him with an ultimatum.

He says, if you don't postpone the coronation

you will be going to Westminster Abbey in a box.

Finally the King gave way.

At noon on 24th June,

he climbed onto an operating table in Buckingham Palace

and submitted to the surgeon's knife.

The flags are all up, it's all been paid for

and everybody is made to wait while the King undergoes

this very difficult and dangerous operation.

You know, a lot of people died of appendicitis in this period.

This is a new procedure, and it doesn't go well.

The King stops breathing. The King turns blue in the face.

And you can imagine the whole Empire holding its breath at this moment,

because this man has been waiting for decades to be the king of this country

and it looks as if he's not going to get his chance

to prove what he's capable of doing.

The doctors did their job.

Bertie WOULD go to the Abbey,

not in a box,

but the golden state coach of his ancestor, King George III.

On 9th August 1902,

the one-time prodigal prince was crowned King Edward VII

in a dazzling display of pomp and pageantry.

Edward VII expected the ceremony to be delivered absolutely perfectly.

He watched every detail of it with care and concern.

He wanted to send a message to the whole Empire

that they had a new emperor with all the panoply he could muster.

And he looked into the great dressing-up box of British history

and he opened all the files and papers going back in time

to conjure a coronation of fabulous splendour

in order to deliver utter impact.

Bertie was very much ahead of his time as monarch because he was one of the first to understand

that if the monarchy was to survive in the 20th century,

it must be ornamental.

It must be something that people could identify with, that they could see.

He is becoming the kind of monarch

that England needed in the 20th century.

Almost overnight,

Edward VII transformed the public face of the monarchy.

Now he set about sweeping away the physical evidence

of Queen Victoria's reign.

Determined to bring light into his mother's fusty apartments,

he hired technicians to install electric lights

and theatre designers to transform Buckingham Palace

into a sea of white and gold.

Bertie embarks on a full scale clear-out.

He marches around,

pictures of Albert, pictures of her dogs, all of it is swept aside.

All the old clutter that Victoria had accumulated is swept aside

and the place is made into a palace.

This was a statement about what he thought the monarchy should be.

That it must be grandly, some people would say slightly vulgarly,

but it must be grand, and it must give a sense of theatre.

Edward VII realised that, on its own,

the restoration of traditional ceremonial

wasn't enough to preserve the monarchy.

In an era of rapid social change,

Bertie believed the Crown should move with the times.

Edward VII was very much aware

that the monarchy needed to reach out beyond the aristocracy to other classes.

In a way, he is the first democratic king.

He didn't judge people on the basis of your position in Burke's Peerage.

He was somebody who invited Americans, Jews, people like that

who might not have been welcomed in the most blue blooded circles.

With trades unions and the Labour movement on the march,

the People's King even extended the hand of friendship to sworn enemies of the Crown.

He wants to be a symbol of unity.

For example, there's a story about him meeting Keir Hardie, the Labour MP,

who at the time was the absolute bete noire of all royalty

and all the aristocracy and the Tory Party,

because he was highly critical of privilege and very vociferous about saying so.

And Edward VII meets Keir Hardie

and he is extraordinarily charming and polite to this class enemy.

And one of his friends looks at him and says rather sarcastically,

"Well, you were very nice to him."

And Edward turns to him very quickly and very sharply says,

"No, you don't understand. I mean to be King of all the people."

To the surprise of many of his contemporaries,

Edward VII was proving himself a more than capable monarch.

But much as he relished his new public responsibilities,

the King saw no reason to change the private habits of a lifetime.

Even at the sacred moment of his coronation,

the King signalled his intent with his unconventional choice of guests.

Pride of place in the Abbey was given to a special box

for his lady friends past and present, including new mistress Alice Keppel.

He made sure that all the women who were important to him,

some of whom he slept with,

were close at hand at this prime moment of his life.

He made sure that those women,

without trying put out his wife in any way,

were accorded a position around him whenever he could provide that.

And no less so than at the coronation.

Edward VII was made like that. He loved his Queen,

he adored his children, but he just needed a little bit of extra.

Edward VII worked out for himself a new style of monarchy

which involved a lot of public appearances, doing the ceremonial job perfectly.

And yet at the same time, he drew a very, very strict line between that and his private life.

I think he had this very realistic idea,

in a way much more realistic than putting the whole Royal Family on show,

of saying, "I'm King, I will do my job as King,

"but the deal is that I'm allowed a private life."

For the rest of his life, the King continued to enjoy

all the luxuries of his position, with Mrs Keppel never far from his side.

Queen Alexandra had little choice but to put up with her husband's behaviour.

But nobody else seemed to mind much,

and in 1903 the King's passion for beautiful women

would even prove the key to his greatest political triumph.

In the early years of the 20th century, one issue dominated British foreign policy over all others.

Germany under the King's troublesome nephew, Kaiser Wilhelm,

was building up its armed forces at terrifying speed.

As Prince of Wales, Bertie had been blocked in his ambition to influence foreign and military affairs.

Now he was determined to put his inside family knowledge to good use.

The Kaiser is a very difficult man and very paranoid.

Bertie understood that in a kind of intuitive way.

Bertie understood very clearly it was not going to be possible for him

to restrain Germany, or anybody to restrain Germany.

And he also understood

that the Kaiser was never going to be a reliable friend,

so he saw,

and saw incredibly clearly that war was a real danger.

He didn't want war.

But he felt if war was going to come, Britain must be prepared.

Britain needed allies.

Finding them wasn't going to be easy.

The recent war in South Africa against the Boers had made Britain highly unpopular in Europe.

But the King had a plan.

In May 1903, he set out on a mission of diplomacy to one of the favourite haunts of his youth, Paris.

Bertie didn't tell them his plans.

He makes this a completely secret agenda.

He didn't even tell his secretaries.

And when the Royal train arrives and Bertie gets out at the station,

he's met with incredibly hostile French crowds.

Bertie turns up in Paris, a place where the British

are incredibly unpopular at the time, and when he arrives he's booed.

There are newspaper editorials saying "Go back to England"

and basically listing every English insult since the burning of Joan of Arc.

Faced with a French mob, the English King's love of Parisian culture and women was about to pay dividends.

He goes to the theatre, and the audience in the theatre is incredibly unfriendly and sullen.

And to the dismay of the French police, the King insists during the interval on going into the foyer

and he spots an actress, and he goes up to her.

And kisses her hand and says,

"Mademoiselle, when I last saw you in London you were superb."

Edward really does have a magic touch.

Immediately the rumour mill in Paris puts this about,

he'd been incredibly charming to this famous actress.

The next day he walks out into the crowds, he shakes hands,

he says how he loves Paris, he looks happy,

and he charms the pants off the French.

The mood changes like this, you know, it just flips.

Suddenly, there's outbursts of cheering wherever he goes.

There's a real sense that he is one of them.

You need to remember,

no English politician spoke French like that.

none of them knew Paris like that and that is critically important

in causing a huge change in French opinion.

The King's weakness for French wine, women and song

had helped him pave the way for a crucial strategic alliance with the old enemy.

There's a sort of French love of an English Milord,

I mean, Milord is what they called English, upper class aristocrats who came to Paris to have a good time.

And as Prince of Wales, Edward VII had come a lot in the '80s and '60s and '70s

and was famous for his great enjoyment of the theatre,

and also his use of French brothels.

And I'm sure that Milord reputation

didn't do him any harm when he came back in 1903 as King.

Next, Bertie threw his support behind admirals arguing

for a new generation of warships, the Dreadnoughts, to keep pace with the German naval threat.

The King was, if anything, ahead of his ministers

in realising how vitally important it was that the British Navy must, at all costs, be built up.

And I think that the King made a very serious contribution

in pressing his ministers to build new, better ships,

to look to the future.

It was a future the 69-year-old King would not live to see.

The 12-course dinners and the trademark cigars were catching up with him.

Already seriously ill with chronic emphysema,

in 1910 the King suffered a series of heart attacks.

As he slipped in and out of consciousness at Buckingham Palace,

he was joined by two women -

his long-suffering wife, Queen Alexandra,

and his mistress, Alice Keppel.

Alexandra remained devoted to Bertie, very close to him throughout his life.

After Bertie's death,

the undertakers were always making appointments

to come and put the body into a coffin

and it was always announced in The Times that this was going to happen.

And day after day, Alexandra would say, "No, I can't bear to part with him."

People who came said that for the first time she had Bertie to herself.

For eight days the Queen clung to her husband.

But even in death, Bertie was a People's King.

In recognition of his unique popularity,

it was decided that his body would lie in state at Westminster

for the public to pay its respects.

The first British Monarch ever to do so.

I think only when King Edward VII died

did the British people realise how much they liked having him around.

He'd been around for so long,

and then suddenly he'd gone,

and so they surged out in their hundreds of thousands

to show they mourned his passing.

Queues of people, humble people, poor people,

they snaked round Westminster, something like seven mile queues.

This really does show to a much greater extent than when Queen Victoria died,

just how successful he had been in making this connection

between the monarchy and the people.

He is this sort of libertine figure. He does seem like a fragment of an earlier age.

You can imagine him careering about 18th century London

with a big wig on and a beauty spot.

And I think in a way, although he seems to be the absolute opposite of his father,

he also seems like the right man for the job in the early part of the 20th century.

Edward VII's creation of a modern public monarchy, together with his fast-living lifestyle,

earned him the affection of his people, and raised the Royal Family to new levels of popularity.

His vision of monarchy as a showy theatre of pageantry

continues to this day.

But the example the King set in his personal life would be rejected.

Bertie's descendants would attempt, with mixed results,

to return to the family values of his mother, Queen Victoria.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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