The Heir Apparent By Jane Ridpley

In The Heir Apparent: A Life of Edward VII, the Playboy Prince accomplished British historian Jane Ridley sets about to improve the reputation of a man who had the misfortunate of waiting 60 years to actualize the function for which he was born. Therefore, it is no surprise the book’s subject, as the title suggests, is more famous for his personal antics than for the time he spent ruling. To his credit, this makes for more breezy reading than one focused a man thoroughly steeped in matters of government.

The future king’s childhood proves that vast wealth and dynastic influence may prove no balm to discontent. By far his biggest social challenge was isolation. Personally, Bertie, the familiar by which he was known to his friends and family, undoubtably suffered from the irrefutable fact his mother often disliked him intensely.  In a letter to her daughter Vicky, Queen Victoria unleashed a litany of his shortcomings, including aesthetic – “Handsome I cannot think him, with that painfully small and narrow head, those immense features and total want of chin.” It is difficult, to say the least, to throw off your grumbling, overbearing mother’s influence when she is, arguably, the most powerful person in your country, never mind the world.

Ridley goes deep, so to speak, on the intricate dynamics of Marlborough House bed-hopping, such that one may occasionally lose the plot about who was doing what with whom. The problem then, as now (see Wikipedia entries Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex) is that there remains little other purpose for heirs and spares in waiting other than frivolity or atrophy if the reigning monarch allows them no role in government. Such was the case with Bertie. The result was a man who filled his time with parties, flirtations and the shooting on a mind-boggling number of pheasants.

Ripley has a talent for making an extensive historical profile highly readable. Her knowledge of the era is undeniably vast. Flecks of humor soften the serious as when she recounts, “He read novels, a sure sign he was ill.” Her ability to incisively summarize the numerous personalities which make an appearance throughout the nearly seven decades of Bertie’s life are most enjoyable:

Lord Randolph Churchill – “He wore a bristling waxed mustache and had inherited the gooseberry eyes of the Churchill family, along with their bad temper. Thin, with an electric, restless sort of energy, he looked younger than he was, and people often remarked on his schoolboy charm. He suffered from mood swings, when he became depressed and paranoid, and he could be brutally rude.”

Minnie Paget – “Minnie was not well liked. She was sharp and brittle: some people said she was incapable of telling the truth.”

Alfred Balfour – “Balfour was quick-witted and charming, but he combined a streak of Scots puritanism with an intellectual arrogance and a talent of casuistry.”

Kaiser Willhelm II – “Touchy and volatile, lurching from grandiose swagger to hypersensitive paranoia, the kaiser baffled his contemporaries and remains an enigma today.”

To a certain extent, Bertie was also an enigma. Most of his correspondences were burned and unlike his mother, who wrote plainly of her emotional state in her journal, Bertie’s offers posterity plain facts and itineraries, not feelings. Per her goal, Ridley’s prodigiously researched biography forms a fairly revealing record of the ambitions and motivations of a lesser known and resolutely secretive British monarch.