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over the Aylesford affair or, later, Lord Charles Beresford—a scandal ensued. It was the men of Bertie’s circle—the so-called Marlborough House Set—who caused the crises which punctuated his life as Prince of Wales: the Mordaunt divorce, the Aylesford scandal, the Tranby Croft case, and the Beresford scandal. But what drove these men to come out in opposition to the prince was his predatory behavior toward their wives or mistresses. The functioning of Bertie’s court as Prince of Wales can be understood only by exploring his links with women. To a remarkable extent, women—mistresses—are central to the dynamics of Marlborough House.
    As a young man, Bertie was not always likable. I found it hard to warm to a prince who blatantly cheated on his wife and ruthlessly discarded his mistresses—even though the explanation for his behavior can be found in the unhappiness and loneliness of his loveless childhood. As Bertie reached middle age, however, he did something that is quite difficult for a royal to do, a thing that Alexandra never fully achieved: He grew up. My affection grew for this man condemned to a lifetime of indulgence and political impotence while he waited for his mother to die.
    He continued to be unfaithful, but the pattern of the relationships changed. These late love affairs mattered to him; he cared more. But the evidence is elusive. I knew that Daisy Warwick was central to his life in the 1890s, but all the letters seemed to have been destroyed, leaving a silence that I was unable to penetrate. Fortunately, Daisy possessed a strong sense of her historical importance and—having quarreled with the court—a motive for telling her story. It turned out that she had defied royal commands and kept copies of some of Bertie’s letters. My eureka moment came when I discovered in Bertie’s diary the code he used to record their frequent assignations, enabling me to reconstruct the intensity of the relationship. Alice Keppel, hislast mistress, was both more public and more discreet. She enjoyed a quasi-official status as the King’s
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, but the correspondence that passed between them was almost all destroyed. Unlike Daisy the Babbling Brooke, Alice Keppel stayed silent, and to this day the details of her physical relationship with Bertie—if, indeed, it was physical—remain an enigma.
    By September 2008, I had almost completed my research on Bertie’s years as Prince of Wales, and I had written a draft of his life up to 1901. I planned only a brief concluding chapter on his life as king. I was late for my publisher’s deadline, which had originally been set as 2006. When I think about the story of this book I am humbled by the patience of my long-suffering publishers, Chatto, and especially by the support I have received from my editor, Penelope Hoare. The faith of my American publisher, Susannah Porter of Random House, has also amazed me. I was contracted to write seventy thousand words, but by late 2008 the manuscript had already grown to twice that length: Inside the thin book there was a fat book struggling to get out, and my rich grazing at Windsor had piled on the words. But at least the end seemed in sight.
    Then I received a telephone call from the Royal Archives. Waiting for me, it seemed, were some papers from the reign that I had not yet seen. I arrived at Windsor to find more than 150 bound volumes of documents, as well as several other important files. Any slight hope I might have entertained of publication in 2009 was dashed. I braced myself to ask for yet another extension and cleared my diary to spend a month at Windsor.
    Reading through the bound files of political papers made me realize that I needed to write the history of King Edward’s reign as a story. Previous biographers had treated the reign thematically, organizing their books around the filing system of the King’s papers. There is always a pressure on royal biographers to write the life and times, but I wanted to