THURSDAY, March 28, 2024
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FROM ENGLISH GLOOM INTO THE CITY OF LIGHT

FROM ENGLISH GLOOM INTO THE CITY OF LIGHT

Queen Victoria tried but failed to suppress her son and heir. Before he became Edward VII, young Bertie cast the mould for every playboy prince who followed

THOSE OF US who aged (considerably) amid tales of licentious behaviour by men of the British royalty - first Prince Andrew and later his nephew Prince Harry - can take heart, if that's the right term, in the knowledge that it was always thus. Stephen Clarke's amusing biography of King Edward VII isn't the least bit concerned about his modernisation of the navy.
 
Prince Albert Edward (Bertie to family and chums) endured a witheringly Prussian childhood at the hands of his stern and oppressive parents, Queen Victoria and her consort, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. So perhaps he is to be forgiven for getting crazy as a March hare once loosed in the meadow.
At least that is Clarke’s forgiving premise, and the author is in a very forgiving mood as he tracks Bertie, pre-coronation, on his frequent tours of Paris in the last half of the 19th century.
Clarke is a long-time denizen of Paris and his previous book (which he plugs relentlessly here) was “1000 Years of Annoying the French”. In researching that one, he came across a wealth of material about another Englishman who fell in love with the City of Light.
Victoria and Albert inadvertently opened a can of worms when they took the teenage Prince of Wales along on a visit to the court of Napoleon III. Bigoted toward the French as Britain’s traditional adversary, Victoria was nevertheless charmed by its self-appointed emperor, and young Bertie couldn’t take his eyes off Empress Eugenie.
The French, he discovered, had a much more relaxed attitude about life, and particularly about the act by which life is reproduced. He couldn’t wait to return, on his own, and sample all that Paris had to offer now that Napoleon had ushered it into a spacious, bright, hi-tech future. And, when Bertie did arrive without the parental ball-and-chain, the lecherous Napoleon was happy to show him what the future held.
Bertie became an utter francophone, lapping up French high society with a fluent French tongue (to the chagrin of his pro-German mother), and then digging deeper, ferreting out the city’s cheesiest, low-class entertainments – and becoming beloved everywhere. “During his several visits in the late 1860s,” Clarke writes, “he became a semi-permanent fixture around the place, building up a catalogue of regular haunts, many of which were fashionable simply because he went there.”
Clarke’s own catalogue of iniquity lists by name the series of lovers Bertie meandered through and, once “safely” married to a Danish princess, the mistresses that followed. Among them were the biggest names in nightclubs, capped by Sarah Bernhardt, queen of the musical stage. There’s a scene in the upstairs room of a nightspot where Bertie wallows in a bathtub of champagne in the company of two damsels, but Clarke generally avoids the lurid details of his affairs – and he doubts this tale’s veracity anyway.
On the contrary, the author steadies out the book’s nudge-nudge-wink-wink jauntiness with quite a lot of British and French history, much of it fascinating. This is hardly a work of scholarship – he’s too devoted to humour and mockery for that – but Clarke has certainly tunnelled into the background and often wanders far from the subject of his biography.
It’s startling to learn, for example, the consequences of Georges-Eugene Haussmann’s decades-long effort, at Napoleon’s behest, to rip up half of Paris and install broad boulevards. This not only opened up the city and got rid of its medieval pestilence – and created all those identical seven-storey facades – it completely reshaped the nightlife, shifting vast segments of clubs and cafes around. Bertie had to dig even deeper to find his more sordid amusements.
Historians, however, surely have a hard time buying into Clarke’s ultimate premise about Bertie, offered later in the story as if a sop to all the inglorious stuff that’s preceded it. First as crown prince and then as king, the author asserts, Edward was the one man in Europe able to keep the peace among increasingly tense, ambitious and well-armed nations.
His death in 1910 at age 68, just nine years after ascending the throne, meant that world war was inevitable, Clarke insists.
It’s a compelling argument, given that Bertie was related by blood or marriage to almost all the crowned heads of Europe and, despite his reputation for decadence, was much admired among statesmen for his tactful and genial approach to divisive issues. But no other biographer has dared suggest as much.
Clarke can’t resist observing that Bertie wanted peace so that he could pursue his personal pleasures uninterrupted, which certainly undercuts his serious contention, but he’s adamant that World War I would have been avoided, or at least postponed, had the king survived longer.
“Without Bertie to soothe [his nephew German Kaiser] Wilhelm’s savage inner beast, or with a British monarch who was less fascinated by international relations, less willing to stand up to jingoistic politicians ... there might have been a First World War much earlier.”
Clarke ends his pacifist musings by revisiting the true nature of gluttonous, cigar-chomping Dirty Bertie.
“If only Bertie had toned down his playboy exploits just a little; if he had gobbled his food with less gargantuan determination; even if he had only applied the same moderation to smoking as he did to alcohol, he might well have lived longer and preserved European peace beyond 1914.”
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