Why I Read This Book
Living in Asia, the selection of English books is limited. So I often find myself reading books that wouldn't particularly have caught my attention back home.
This is one of those books. I was in the mood for a history book, the selection of English books at my local bookstore in Saigon was severely limited, and so I ended up with this.
I had no complaints about the subject nature of the book--the actual subject matter of the book is in my area of interest (I'm interested in Victorian Era History, and also the Paris Commune--both of which figure in this book--and I've always felt that Prince Bertie was an interesting guy). But the book cover didn't quite look like it would scratch my itch for a good history yarn.
(While it's true that I like narrative histories rather than serious academic studies, I still prefer narrative histories that get into some of the juicy details and immerse themselves in the story. This book looked like it was mostly fluff).
And (spoiler alert) my initial reservations about this book turned out to be correct.
But it was short and readable enough, so I breezed through it in a couple of weeks. And here I am with my review.
Background
Before I get into critiquing the merits of this books, I'll give some brief background on the subject.
Before he was King Edward VII of England, the son of Queen Victoria spent most of his life known as Bertie.
Bertie was an interesting figure, partly because he essentially spent his entire life just waiting around to become king. He occupied the position of Prince of Wales for longer than any of his predecessors. Because Queen Victoria refused to die for so many years, Bertie didn't become King until he was 60. (Although, assuming he outlives his mother, the current Prince of Wales will one day beat that record--Prince Charles is 67 now.)
Bertie's parents, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, were famously very puritanical about sex, cigars and alcohol. Bertie infamously went in the exact opposite direction, and was a womanizer, drinker, smoker and playboy his entire life. (Bertie appears to have been one of these rich playboys who have an extended adolescents that lasts into their 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s).
The family drama of Queen Victoria's prudism versus Prince Bertie's libertinism always makes for interesting reading.
Queen Victoria was constantly tearing her hair out trying to control her son. Bertie, for his part, spent most of his adult life trying to resist being controlled by his mother.
Queen Victoria was sure Bertie would be a terrible king, but in the end Bertie handled the responsibilities of kingship very well.
(Sidenote: Apparently Shakespeare's portrayal of the mischievous Prince -Hal is largely fictional--we don't actually have any historical records that King Henry V was irresponsible in his youth. (W) However, Bertie's transformation into King Edward VII is a great example of a real life Prince Hal story.)
The Review
Having explained why any book with Prince Bertie as the subject has the potential to be interesting, let me now get to the merits of this particular book.
Stephen Clarke's background is not as historian, but as a comedy writer (W). Serious students of history should stay well away from this book. (But then, of course you already knew that just by looking at the cover art.)
However if, like me, you enjoy history as a hobby, and want to be entertained and amused by history, then having a comedian as your guide is all the better.
And the good news is that Stephen Clarke can write very readable, witty prose.
I would have been quite content to read Stephen Clarke's version of a comic biography on Prince Bertie. But the problem is that this isn't really a biography. It's trying to make an argument, and in my mind it doesn't make a convincing case, and also spreads itself too thin trying to cover too many things at once.
The central argument of the book is in two parts, and goes like this:
1) Prince Bertie was very attracted to the debauchery going on in Paris during the 19th century, and in fact it was the French culture that shaped Bertie's character.
2). As a result of receiving his education in the night clubs of Paris, Bertie became great at managing social situations. Which in turn made him a great diplomat when he finally became King. Which in turn, made him the one man who was able to handle the unhinged Kaiser Wilhelm II. Stephen Clarke argues that as King, Bertie was able to delay World War I during his lifetime. And further argues that if Bertie had lived 4 years longer, World War I would never have happened.
It's an interesting argument, but the problem is that it means that this slim little book is essentially juggling 3 stories at once. It is at once a biography of Prince Bertie, and at the same time a social history of Paris during the 19th Century, and at the same time a story about the relationship between Kaiser Wilhelm II and Bertie.
All of these are interesting stories in their own right, but as a result of them all being crammed into the same book, none of them are done full justice. For, example, we get a very brief biographical sketch of Prince Bertie, but only the bare-bones details of his life, and not enough to get immersed in the story.
The second problem is that, despite Stephen Clarke's best efforts, it appears the connections between the different narrative threads are tenuous.
The decadence of Paris during the end of the Second Empire is well documented (See: Paris Babylon by Rupert Christiansen, among other books), so Stephen Clarke is on firm footing there. Where he seems to be stretching is when he tries to say that connect all the decadent stories of Paris directly to Bertie's life, and to then claim that Paris molded Bertie into the man he would become.
To my mind, Stephen Clarke never really firmly connects what was happening in Paris to the story of Prince Bertie.
Now, I'm not an expert by any means. I don't know what the historical data actually says. But just as a casual reader, I can tell Stephen Clarke is stretching the evidence just by his use of modal verbs.
"Bertie probably thought..."
"Bertie must have seen..."
"Bertie could not have failed to..."
"Bertie undoubtedly..."
"It is probable that Bertie also..."
The entire book is just speculation. Stephen Clarke essentially spends 364 pages saying, "Look, we know that Prince Bertie was a very naughty boy. And we know that some very naughty things were going on in Paris at the time. So....You do the math!"
To be fair, Stephen Clarke does have a handful of actual real stories about Bertie getting up to mischief in Paris. But not enough to pad out his whole book. So he just fills the rest of the book with speculation.
An example of how extremely thin Stephen Clarke's evidence appears to be is his over-reliance on Nola by Emile Zola (a fictional novel) as proof of the mischief that Prince Bertie got up to in Paris. Initially Stephen Clark introduces Nola as what it is--a fictional story that may or may not have been loosely based on some real life incidents--but then as he gets carried away with his arguments, a few pages later, he drops the caveats completely, and starts quoting from Nola as if it were real life.
The evidence is stretched just as thin on the other argument as well--arguing that Bertie (King Edward VII) single-handedly kept World War I at bay.
Again, I'm no expert. But the story Stephen Clarke shows is stretched so thin, you can just see the holes even without doing any research. Stephen Clarke presents Edwardian diplomacy as if it was just based on the whims of the monarchs, ignoring that both Edward VII and Kaiser Wilhelm II had limited power in their respective constitutional monarchy systems.
Although Stephen Clarke does show that, at times, Bertie was able to calm Kaiser Wilhelm II down, he omits the fact that just as often Bertie's high-handed attitude towards his nephews would inflame Kaiser Wilhelm's anger (at least, according to Wikipedia (W).)
The book reaches its most desperate point on pages 354-357, when Stephen Clarke attempts to demonstrate that Bertie would have prevented World War I by imagining a fictional conversation between Bertie and the rest of the heads of state of Europe following the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. The description of this fictional scene contains narrative such as this:
"...By now his audience of royal males would have been stroking their decorative facial hair. At least half won over, they would have been ripe for Bertie's clinching argument..." (p.355)I suppose this kind of unhistorical imagining is excusable in a comedy-history book that was never really meant to be a serious study. But then a few pages later, Stephen Clarke has the chutzpah to say
"Nowadays Bertie's role in keeping the First World War at bay is generally underestimated or even ignored. Most people seem to see the conflict as a machine that was gaining momentum throughout the first decade of the twentieth century, and would have broken loose whatever anyone did. I hope that this book has shown that things could have been different. Bertie really could have cooled the hotheads, and convinced the world not to go to war over so trifling a matter as the shooting of an Austrian Archduke who was unpopular with his own emperor." (p.361)Excuse me? This book has shown nothing! An imagined conversation that Bertie might have had at an imagined meeting between Europe's monarchs?! It's interesting speculation, but that's as much as I'm willing to grant it.
So that's complaint number one. Too little story in this book, and too much speculation.
Complaint number two is more of a personal bias--I tend to prefer narrative history to social history. I like to hear history as a story, not as a description.
Stephen Clarke ends up spending a lot of time describing the social scene in Paris during the 1860s and 1890s, and so these sections caused me to lose interest. But that's just me. If you like social history, you'll enjoy this book more than I did.
**************************
As I read through this book, I began to re-evaluate my opinion on how interesting a figure Prince Bertie really was. Perhaps, as it turned out, he wasn't interesting enough to base a whole book around.
There's a certain romanticism associated with the teenage rebel, and so we can all cheer on the youthful Prince Bertie as he rebels from his parents and breaks free of his restrictive upbringing.
But the same characteristics are less attractive in a man of 40 or 50. When Bertie was a young man and horrified his parents with his drinking and womanizing, it was interesting family drama. But when Bertie is in his 40s and 50s, and still his only major life accomplishments are sleeping around a lot, and smoking and drinking, his story is beginning to look less interesting.
On the Plus Side
Despite all my complaints about this book, I will admit to learning a lot of interesting things along the way.
Flawed though the book is, there are lots of interesting little tidbits of information scattered throughout it. I suppose that might be enough to give this a cautious recommendation to other history geeks.
The thing that made the biggest impression on me is how completely crazy Kaiser Wilhelm II was. I thought maybe Stephen Clarke might have been exaggerating his character, so I looked Kaiser Wilhelm up on Wikipedia to double check it, and, yeah, he appears to just have been out of his mind. Check out the Wikipedia bio here (W).
The Daily Telegraph Affair (which is infamous enough to have it's own Wikipedia entry--here) is another little interesting bit I learned from this book.
Connections With Other Books I've Read
Prince Bertie/King Edward VII made several appearances in the Flashman series. In Flashman and the Redskins, Flashman describes their relationship thusly:
King Teddy's company is something I'd sooner avoid than not, anyway, for he's no better than an upper-class hooligan. Of course, he's been pretty leery of me for forty-odd years (ever since I misguided his youthful footsteps into an actress's bed, in fact, and brought Papa Albert's divine wrath down on his fat head) and when he finally wheezed his way on to the throne I gather he thought of dropping me altogether - said something about my being Falstaff to his Prince Hal.In Flashman and the Tiger, one of the three stories revolves around Prince Bertie and the Royal Baccarat Scandal (W).
And King Edward VII is also a supporting character in Mr American.
Prince Bertie also popped up in the mini-biography I read about Queen Victoria, and in Monarchy by David Starkey.
Prince Bertie's 1860 tour of America (something mentioned briefly by Stephen Clarke) was also mentioned briefly by Amanda Foreman in A World on Fire.
Several times, Stephen Clarke mentions the Schleswig-Holstein problem as a sticking point in British-Prussian relations in the 19th century, and George MacDonald Fraser devotes a whole Flashman book on this point--Royal Flash.
Many of the diplomatic tensions in Europe around this period resulted from the Scramble for Africa, my knowledge of which comes primarily from Thomas Pakenham's excellent book on the subject.
For example, Stephen Clarke devotes pages 301-306 to describing the Fashoda crisis (W) and Bertie's role in it.
I had already known about Fashoda from Thomas Pakenham, but Stephen Clarke adds a little extra tidbit that I did not know--apparently this incident is still a sore point in France even today.
If you ask any French patriot to list the low points in Anglo-British relations, they will probably begin with recriminations about Joan of Arc and St Helena, before spitting out a strange word: "Fashoda". This is the name of a diplomatic incident that still rankles with the French, all the more so because hardly any Brits have ever heard of it. (Clarke, p.301)As an Englishman who spends most of his time living in France, I guess Clarke would know.
The other big event that occurred during this time period was, of course, the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune. And so this book also fits in with my Paris Commune reading list.
The Paris Commune wasn't the central focus of this book by any means, but it does take the focus from pages 169-176.
The most interesting detail I learned from this section was that General Marquis de Gallifet, who pops up in most histories of the Paris Commune as a savage butcher of the Paris proletariat, was actually a good friend of Prince Bertie.
Nitpicks
I think I've spotted a couple mistakes in this book.
On pages 176-177. (I'll quote the whole paragraph to set the scene, but my issue is only with the last sentence):
Despite his friendship with Napoleon and Eugenie, Bertie was for obvious reasons a royalist at heart, as were many of his Parisian friends. And in 1871 the Comte had a real chance of stepping in to take power, because, unlike Louis-Philippe, he was a man of action. In the early 1860s, he had got bored in exile and gone to fight in the American Civil War--not, as we might imagine of a French conservative, on the Confederate side, but with the anti-slavery Union. He had even seen action in battle, at Gaine's Mill in June 1862, although it is surely a coincidence that the presence of a French aristocrat in the Union army led to one of its only defeats of the whole war.Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the Union army suffer a lot of defeats and set-backs before eventually winning the Civil War?
And one more nitpick from page 195:
Bertie was emboldened by the fact that the moralist Gladstone had lost a general election and been replaced by the worldlier Benjamin Disraeli, so that it looked as if his mother had been deprived of an ally in her war against her son's French indiscretions.While there's no technical falsehoods in that sentence, it's leaving a false impression, so I'm going to go ahead and nitpick it.
The implication is that Queen Victoria would have been upset about Gladstone losing the general election to Disraeli, but in fact Queen Victoria was overjoyed. She hated Gladstone and loved Disraeli.
Child Psychology
While reading this book, I began thinking about how the life of Prince Bertie indicates that so many of the proverbs about child-rearing are complete nonsense.
"Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it." says the Bible (Proverbs 22:6)
Or
"He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes." (Proverbs 13:24).
Bertie spent his entire childhood not being spared the rod, and also having the moralistic values of his parents shoved down his throat, and yet he still rebelled against everything he had been brought up with.
In fact, as Stephen Clarke argues, he rebelled against it precisely because it had been so oppressive in his childhood. As Clarke writes on pages 13
"Young Bertie was ordered to write essays for his father, each one of which provoked a paternal report to the effect that they were below standard and that he needed to study even harder. When the frustrated boy rebelled with foot-stomping, furniture-throwing tantrums, he was given a sound flogging by Albert."
and later 14-15
"It was, of course, entirely thanks to this tyrannical upbringing that Bertie would rebel and turn into exactly the kind of gambling, philandering playboy that his parents abhorred. But then a very similar pattern was being repeated for most upper-class British males at the time, so Victoria and Albert were only applying an extreme form of current educational thinking."Stephen Clarke seems to be arguing, "if you try to force good values on a child, they will grow up to do the exact opposite."
Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky: The Crimes of U.S. Presidents
No comments:
Post a Comment