Edward VII

Biography

Edward VII was born in 1841, the eldest son of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, and was known in the family as Bertie. He studied briefly at the University of Edinburgh in 1859, then at Christ Church, Oxford, and from 1861 at Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1863 he married Princess Alexandra of Denmark, with whom he had six children.

As Prince of Wales for almost sixty years he was kept away from political influence by his mother and became a symbol of the leisured upper class. He carried out ceremonial duties at home and represented Britain abroad, with popular tours of North America in 1860 and India in 1875. His reputation for pleasure-seeking strained his relations with the queen; he was threatened with being named in the Mordaunt divorce case in 1869, and in 1891 he was drawn into the royal baccarat scandal over an illegal card game at Tranby Croft.

He succeeded his mother in January 1901 and proved an effective constitutional monarch who restored royal ceremony and widened the monarchy's social circle. He supported the modernisation of the Home Fleet and the reorganisation of the army after the Second Boer War. His friendly diplomacy, especially an official visit to France in May 1903 that helped prepare the Entente Cordiale of 1904, earned him the nickname Peacemaker, though his relations with his nephew Kaiser Wilhelm II were poor. He died in May 1910 during the constitutional crisis over the House of Lords and was succeeded by his son George V.