Edward VII Was England’s Most Debaucherous King

Edward VII’s wife endured his tragic death with dignity and grace; the same cannot be said for his much younger mistress. When Alice Keppel heard that Edward was ill, she rushed to the gate of Buckingham Palace, waving a letter from Edward to gain entrance. The guards finally relented, though it is likely that when they heard what she did inside, they regretted that decision. In public, the Victorians were some of the stuffiest, snobbiest, most repressed people in history. Behind closed doors, it was a different story. In private, Victorian England was rife with drink, debauchery, and scandal, and no one did it better than Queen Victoria’s infamous son, King Edward VII. His bedroom escapades fueled the gossip mill for centuries, and his mother was utterly ashamed of him. But more than anything, “Dirty Bertie” knew how to be a royal with style.

The future King Edward VII was born on November 9, 1841, in the lavish Buckingham Palace. His parents called him Albert Edward but quickly took to calling him Bertie. Bertie was the eldest son and therefore heir to the throne of England. From the moment he was born, Queen Victoria and her husband, Prince Albert, wanted to make sure their son learned how to be a proper king. Edward’s older sister, Victoria, was a brilliant little student; the prince, not so much. He desperately wanted to impress his parents, but he just was not cut out for the studious life. His tutors noted that while his academic abilities were lacking, the boy was nevertheless overflowing with charm, a trait that would serve him for his entire life. Victoria and Prince Albert were not interested in charm. They looked at their son and saw a failure, and it was only a matter of time before Bertie cracked under the pressure.

At 19 years old, he found his true calling in life. He took an official tour of North America as the Prince of Wales, and everywhere he went, massive crowds came to greet him. Years of facing his parents’ disappointment had left him a rather shy boy with low self-esteem. The amazing success of his time in North America worked wonders, and suddenly the young man was bursting with confidence. What is a wealthy, charismatic young royal to do with all that confidence? Women. The answer is women.

In 1861, Edward’s folks sent him to Germany, apparently to watch some military maneuvers. If you think that seems like a pretty dubious reason to travel across the continent, you would be right. Edward’s parents had an ulterior motive. Edward was now nearly 20 years old; it was long past time to find him a wife. He showed up in Germany, and the woman his parents wanted him to marry happened to be there at the exact same time. Edward met Princess Alexandra of Denmark, or Alix as her family called her, and the two of them hit it off. Pretty soon, their families had a marriage agreement in place. There was just one problem: Alexandra was not the only woman that young Bertie was talking to.

Not long before traveling to Germany, Edward had taken another trip, this time to Ireland. There he met actress Nellie Clifden, the first in a long, long line of mistresses. Edward had been sent to Ireland to get some army experience, but his fellow cadets were only too happy to enable the rebellious prince’s dalliance. They allowed Nellie Clifden to hide out in their barracks for three days while she and Edward had their fun. Supposedly, Edward lost his virginity to Clifden during those three days. At 19 years old, Prince Bertie was having the time of his life, but it was all about to come crashing down.

If there is one thing Victorians liked to do, it was gossip, so it did not take long for word of Edward’s affair to reach his parents. Prince Albert was already in ill health when he traveled to Ireland to reprimand his son. The two of them apparently took a long walk in the rain together. Not only did Albert’s stern words do nothing to curb his son’s womanizing, the pouring rain did not do his health any favors. Albert passed away from his illness, thought to be Crohn’s disease, just two short weeks after his talk with his son. Queen Victoria was beside herself with grief, and she wore mourning clothes for the rest of her life. Some of her pain turned to anger. She had never been fond of young Bertie, mostly because she thought he was a screw-up; while she once found him embarrassing, now she despised him.

Between his grief over his father’s passing and his mother’s hatred, you would think maybe this was the time where Edward finally decided to clean up his act, but you would be wrong. He married Alexandra of Denmark at Windsor Castle on March 10, 1863, but there was no wedding ring on Earth that was going to keep Edward VII tied to one woman. By all accounts, Edward and Alexandra’s marriage was a happy one, but that is only because Alexandra put up with Edward’s most scandalous habit. He continued to take mistresses for their entire marriage. No one knows the exact number, but historians have tied at least 55 women to Edward. It was around this time that King Edward VII of England gained his most infamous nickname: Dirty Bertie. Despite his countless affairs, Edward never once acknowledged a single illegitimate child.

In 1864, Lady Susan Vane-Tempest lost her husband, and in her grief, she fell into the arms of none other than our guy, Eddie. A letter to Edward from one of Susan’s confidants in 1871 said that the crisis was due within two or three months, a not-so-well-veiled allusion to Susan’s pregnancy. Whether by choice or coercion, Susan never mentioned the child, and she took the secret to her grave when she died at just 36 years old.

In 1869, the prince was embroiled in a much higher-profile scandal when Sir Charles Mordaunt, a Member of Parliament, threatened to name him in his divorce from his wife, Harriet Mordaunt. Sir Charles had found salacious letters from the Prince of Wales in his wife’s writing desk. Not only that, he came home early one day to find his wife and the prince alone together. He did not actually catch them in bed together, but this is the Victorian era we are talking about; finding a man and a woman alone in a house was enough to make people faint. After Mordaunt kicked the prince out, his anger apparently had not subsided, and he had to take his rage out on something. He allegedly shot two ponies and made his wife watch. In the end, the courts did not find Edward legally responsible for anything, but the damage to his reputation was done. As for Lady Mordaunt, her lawyers pleaded insanity as a defense for her adultery. While Edward was free to continue gallivanting across Europe, sleeping with anything that moved, she spent the rest of her life hidden from sight, eventually being placed in a lunatic asylum.

Unfortunately, the women who slept with Edward kept on meeting sad fates, and in 1871, Edward himself nearly died, too. Edward was still a young man, and his scandals were starting to pile up, but still, the people could not help but love him. By all accounts, Edward was wildly charismatic and popular, and after what happened in 1871, they only loved him more. While staying in a hunting lodge, Edward came down with deadly typhoid fever, the same disease that was thought at the time to have claimed his father. Sure, the prince was a bit of a handful, but he was still beloved, and losing him so young would have been a national tragedy. Edward eventually recovered, and all of England rejoiced, and it is little wonder people loved him so much.

Despite his faults, Edward was actually kind of a cool guy. Those around Edward could not help but remark that the prince treated everybody with dignity and respect, no matter their class or color. On a trip to India, his letters home show that the racism he found in the country sickened him. Today that is just baseline human decency, but in the heyday of the British Empire, that kind of talk was pretty much unheard of. At a time when anti-Semitism was rife in proper English society, he drew criticism for fraternizing with the Jewish Rothschild family.

Edward managed to keep his affairs out of the papers for a few years after the Mordaunt scandal, but it was only a matter of time before he started turning heads once again. In 1877, he went to the theater and fell head over heels for one of the actresses. Her name was Lillie Langtry, and after she entranced the prince on stage, he quickly organized a meet-cute. He showed up at a dinner party she was attending and arranged it so that he sat right next to her. The consummate charmer, Edward and Langtry hit it off immediately. They kept up their not-so-secret tryst for about three years until Langtry hit Edward with a jaw-dropping truth: she was pregnant. Though it is impossible to know for sure, most historians believe Edward was not the father of Langtry’s child; apparently, he was not the only one who liked to play the field. While Edward and Lillie’s physical relationship ended when she became pregnant, this was not a dramatic falling out. The prince and the starlet remained on good terms for the rest of their lives.

Throughout the 1880s and 90s, Edward did not spend that much time in England, probably something to do with the fact that his own mother could not even stand to look at him. Edward wanted an escape, and he found it in the Parisian underworld, where he soon became something of a legend. Edward likely patronized every high-class cathouse in Paris, but his favorite by far was the infamous Le Chabanais. He visited so often he actually had his own room, complete with his coat of arms over the bed and an extravagant copper bathtub with a massive half-woman, half-swan figurehead.

Women were Edward’s biggest vice, but he had plenty more to go around. Second on the list was probably food, and by the 1880s, Edward had a huge waistline to match his appetite. His enormous belly started to interfere with his earthly desires, so he had Louis Soubrier, a famous cabinet maker, design the siege d’amour, or love chair. This bizarre-looking thing allowed him to still enjoy the company of the working girls, sometimes several at once, without them being crushed under his weight.

If you frequented the Parisian nightlife in the 1880s and 90s, you were bound to bump into Edward VII sooner or later. He enjoyed the city’s nightclubs, especially the legendary Moulin Rouge, where he would frequently appear with a new French socialite or actress on his arm every week. Compared to the grim and depressing London, where the shadow of his mother and her perpetual mourning hung over him like a storm cloud, it is little wonder Edward spent so much time in Paris.

By all accounts, Princess Alexandra was totally fine with her husband’s womanizing. She even welcomed several of his mistresses into their home and acknowledged them in public. He had mistresses until the day he died. He just slowed down a little and found time for new bad habits, and at the top of the list: gambling.

Edward had somehow managed to go a few years without a major public scandal, but all of that was about to change. In 1890, he joined a bunch of other upper-crust types at the home of one Arthur Wilson for some friendly high-stakes baccarat. This might seem innocuous compared to the prince’s usual activities, but this soon unraveled into one of the biggest scandals to rock the royal family in years. First of all, the game was completely against the law to begin with. Second, one of Edward’s friends, Sir William Gordon-Cumming, was caught cheating. Tempers flared, and the whole mess ended up going to court. The court actually called Edward to testify, the first time any English court had called an heir to the throne to the stand in over 400 years. In the end, the courts found Gordon-Cumming guilty of cheating. Victorians took things like that extremely seriously, so they kicked him out of the army and completely ostracized him from polite society. Meanwhile, the prince’s reputation took a serious hit, and the public’s opinion of him hit rock bottom.

Edward never really grew out of his roots as a problem child, so what happened when he had a problem child of his own? His eldest son, Prince Albert Victor, was next in line to the throne, and it seems like the young prince took after his dad because as he grew into a young man, rumors started swirling around him too. From wild affairs to male prostitution scandals to rumors that he was secretly Jack the Ripper, Prince Albert Victor managed to be nearly as scandalous as his old man, until tragedy struck. Prince Albert Victor was only 27 years old and in the prime of his life when the influenza pandemic of 1889 ravaged England, and the strapping young prince fell victim to the disease. He died from pneumonia on January 14, 1892, and Edward’s heartbreaking letters revealed just how devastated he was. He wrote to his mother, “To lose our eldest son is one of those calamities one can never really get over. I would have given my life for him, as I put no value on mine.”

Between the loss of his son and the royal baccarat scandal, Edward seemingly put his womanizing aside for a time, but a few years later, he met Alice Keppel, a woman 26 years his junior. Keppel had at least one thing going for her in Edward’s eyes: she was married, and clearly the prince was into that kind of thing. Edward tended to treat the women who shared his bed extremely well, often long after their affairs ended. He could not just flat out give Alice Keppel money from the royal purse, but instead he gave her shares in a rubber company. She earned a cool £50,000 out of that deal, about £7.5 million today. Even her poor husband got something out of the arrangement: Edward found him a new job with a way better salary.

Lady Randolph Churchill, AKA Winston Churchill’s mom, was no stranger to scandal. The same gossips who dished on Edward’s many affairs had nearly as many stories about her. It was only a matter of time before the two of them crossed paths. The gentleman husband comes home only to find his wife alone in the company of Edward.

Dirty Bertie was the Prince of Wales for a long, long time, but even Victoria could not live forever, and on January 22, 1901, she died at the age of 81. Now, at the ripe old age of 60, he finally became King Edward VII. Victoria’s worst fear had come true; she spent her life assuming he would make a terrible king. Edward was full of surprises. His coronation went about exactly as you would expect; he invited several of his mistresses to attend and even made sure the event organizers set aside a specific pew for the king’s special ladies. Scandals or not, Edward was one of the most popular men in England. The nation rejoiced when he became king.

In the end, Victoria was wrong about her screw-up of a son. He was a breath of fresh air after so many years of Victoria’s stern and stuffy rule, but sadly it did not last long. Remember all those ten-course meals? Victoria reigned for 63 years; Edward did not even make it to ten. By 1909, his health began to fail. He fainted during a state visit to Berlin, and a year after that, he collapsed during a visit to France. Edward’s health troubles could not have come at a worse time. England was in the midst of a constitutional crisis. They had elected a liberal government, but the staunchly conservative House of Lords refused to pass their budget. It was the kind of thing that needed Edward’s complete attention, but the king was too sick to travel back to England. To make matters worse, his attendants kept news of his illness a secret, so everyone in England assumed he was just off gallivanting in France like the old days.

His health continued to get worse, but contrary to what his mother expected, Edward took his role as king extremely seriously. On May 6, 1910, he suffered several heart attacks. His doctors tried to urge him to his bed, but he refused, insisting on working to the end. Before long, he was too weak to stand, and he passed away that night. Dirty Bertie, Edward the Caresser, King Edward VII was gone.

When his funeral ended, attendants opened the hall to the public, and mourning crowds arrived in droves to pay their respects before Edward’s burial. Over 400,000 people filed past his coffin in just two days. The incorrigible prince turned beloved king was gone, and the people wanted to say goodbye, as did many of his mistresses. Most of them did it with a lot more tact than Alice Keppel. When she heard that Edward was on his deathbed, she dropped everything and ran to Buckingham Palace. When she arrived, she demanded entry, allegedly waving a letter from the king himself. The guards relented and allowed her inside, though no doubt they soon regretted that decision. Completely unable to control herself, Keppel made such a scene that even the infinitely patient Alexandra had had enough. The queen had her guards escort Keppel outside, and that was the end of Alice Keppel’s time in the upper echelon of English society. Her legacy does live on in today’s royal family; the current King Charles is married to Keppel’s great-granddaughter, Camilla Parker Bowles.