Edward the Rake

John Pearson

dhj 2011 · Bloomsbury Publishing

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Growing up in the supreme moral rigour of Queen Victoria's court, young Bertie was always going to find it hard to live up to his parents' expectation. He was far from a brilliant student, and though charming, his carnal inclinations were widely rumoured to have sped up his Father's decline, with Prince Albert dying a mere two weeks after Bertie spent three nights with an actress who had been smuggled into his military camp. He waited almost sixty years to ascend the throne but was nonetheless able to reconfigure the public image of the monarch, taking the splendour beyond the palace gates and living lavishly in wider society, rapidly becoming one of the most popular monarchs in the history of the crown.

First published in 1975, these chapters in the life of Edward the Rake are dealt with frankly and light-heartedly. It is the story of a man who enjoyed himself and his indelicate advantages to the full, it is a penetrating and yet not unsympathetic portrait of the monarch and of the discreetly swinging social world that he created around him.

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John Pearson was born in 1930, and educated at King's College School, Wimbledon and Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he read history.

He has worked on various newspapers, including the Economist, The Times, and The Sunday Times where for a time he wrote the Atticus column.

After the success of his Life of Ian Fleming, he decamped with wife and family to Rome, where he lived for some years. Mr Pearson returned to England to research and write the life and times of the Kray brothers in The Profession of Violence and has since written many more successful works of both fiction and non-fiction. Biographies remain his specialty with accomplished studies of the Sitwells, Winston Churchill and the Royal Family following his earlier successes.