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grotesque calligraphy was worth the bathetic result. But then I realized that I was missing the point. For him, letter writing was a duty, not a means of self-expression; the aim was not to reveal, but to conceal, his true feelings.
    So closely did Bertie guard his private life that, in his will, he ordered all his letters to be destroyed. No correspondence survives between him and his wife, Alexandra of Denmark. I wanted to place the marriage at the center of my story, but the hole in the archive seemed to make this impossible. My breakthrough came when I discovered that the National Archives of Denmark possessed three boxes of photocopies of letters written in Danish by Alix to her sister Dagmar. I booked a flight to Copenhagen and hired a translator. It was February, and I sat shivering beside my translator in the permafrost of the archive, typing as she read the fading photocopies and translated roughly out loud. Later, she worked systematically through the boxes, translating the letters that at last allowed me to see things from Alexandra’s point of view.
    The first phase of Bertie’s life—up to the age of about thirty—has a strong story line provided by his stormy relationship with Queen Victoria and by his marriage. The second part—the thirty years until his accession aged fifty-nine, which I have called the Expanding Middle—was the hardest bit to write. A great deal is known about what he did—what time he took a train, whom he saw, how many pheasants he shot—but it is hard to find the heart of the genuine man who wasBertie. Then I hit upon the idea of going back to my original plan of trying to work out his inner life by looking at his relationships with women.
    No letters from women are preserved among Bertie’s papers, but many of his letters to women survive outside the Royal Archives. * These are typically polite and discreet; but the bland contents belie their subversive purposes. Consider the situation. Royal invitations were normally formal and formulaic, issued by equerries or private secretaries and composed in the third person. Here, however, the Prince of Wales wrote to a woman in his own hand, informally and in the first person. His purpose was often to make an appointment to see the woman alone, sometimes for tea—the
cinq à sept
—or for luncheon. Though they give so little away, Bertie’s missives can be read as coded messages in a royal dance of courtly love. Some, but not all, of the women became his mistresses. But that did not necessarily mean that he slept with them. The word “mistress” should perhaps be understood in the sense, today archaic, of a woman who is admired, cosseted, and courted by a man, as well as in the modern meaning, which almost invariably implies a sexual relationship.
    Queen Victoria deplored Bertie’s habit of letter writing, and she had good cause to do so. Time after time it got him into trouble. Writing letters implied a degree of intimacy with a woman—usually a married woman—that most Victorians judged to be improper. Today these relationships would be censured for a different reason: because they were unequal and often involved what we would see as an abuse of Bertie’s power as Prince of Wales. Within Bertie’s social set, it was almost impossible for a woman to resist his advances. Some of his early mistresses were destroyed by the experience.
    Historians have written of the “feminization” of the monarchy under Queen Victoria, as domestic virtues and philanthropy replaced martial valor, and rulers were no longer expected to lead armies into battle. Bertie’s womanizing signaled a vigorous protest against thebourgeois respectability of his parents. It made a statement about a certain type of masculinity that was entirely at odds with the gender politics of the Victorian court.
    Bertie’s affairs and flirtations depended upon compliant husbands. When the husbands rebelled—as Sir Charles Mordaunt did in 1870, or Lord Randolph Churchill