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.