In 1907, twelve-year-old Edward was dispatched, in tears, to the Royal Naval College at Osborne on the Isle of Wight with the bizarre assurance from his father that: ‘I am your best friend.’ Edward quickly settled in as a cadet. His letters home were full of boyish excitement: he wrote to his parents of meeting the explorers Sir Ernest Shackleton and Captain Robert Falcon Scott and he performed in a pantomime. Instead of inheriting his father’s unassailable sense of duty, a duty that was ‘drilled into’ him, Edward, burdened by his regal inheritance, longed to break free. Even as a young boy he said that he ‘never had the sense that the days belonged to me alone’. Edward progressed to officer training at Dartmouth Royal Naval College, where he struggled academically – he came bottom of his year – but proudly reported to his parents that he was ‘top in German’. Perhaps the only thing he excelled in as a boy was German, learning first from his German nursemaid and then Professor Eugene Oswald, an elderly master who had previously taught his father the language. ‘I liked German and studied diligently,’ he said, ‘and profited from the hours I spent with the professor.’
The death of King Edward VII on 6 May 1910, after a reign of nine years, interrupted Edward’s summer term at Dartmouth for three weeks. Now heir apparent, he was called home to Windsor for his sixteenth birthday. His father informed him that he was going to make him Prince of Wales (the king’s eldest son does not automatically become Prince of Wales; he is anointed by the monarch when deemed appropriate). Edward returned to Dartmouth with a new title, the Duke of Cornwall, and considerable wealth from the Duchy of Cornwall estate. For the first time he had an independent income. ‘I do not recall that this new wealth gave rise to any particular satisfaction at the time,’ he said.
In his last term at Dartmouth, both Edward and Bertie (who had followed his brother’s trajectory from Osborne to Dartmouth, where Edward had ‘assumed an older brother’s responsibility for him’) caught a severe case of mumps, followed by measles. Two-thirds of cadets were hospitalised in this epidemic. It is believed that Edward then developed orchitis, a complication of mumps that left him sterile. The knowledge that Edward would not be able to produce an heir may have been significant later, in the establishment’s push to have brother Bertie (George VI) as king.
The coronation of George V in June 1911 thwarted Edward’s ‘first serious ambition’. He was forced to forgo the goal of his officer-cadet life and miss a training cruise in North American waters. After completing his naval training, Edward underwent a ‘finishing’ programme in preparation for his future full-time role as Prince of Wales. Assumed to be studying for Oxford, while his parents travelled to India for the coronation durbar, Edward instead opted to play cards with his grandmother, Queen Alexandra, and helped her with jigsaw puzzles. Nevertheless, Edward went up to Magdalen College, Oxford, in October 1912. Befitting the future king, he had a special suite of rooms installed for him, including his own bath in the first private undergraduate bathroom.
Missing the camaraderie of his Royal Navy friends, he was ‘acutely lonely’ and ‘under the added disadvantage of being something of a celebrity’. He soon realised that the skills he had acquired in the navy, which included an ability to ‘box a compass, read naval signals, run a picket boat, and make cocoa for the officer of the watch’, held little sway with learned Oxford dons. The Prince was tutored by the most eminent scholars, including Magdalen’s esteemed president, Sir Herbert Warren, but Oxford did nothing academically for him. Personally, he seemed uncertain of himself; encouraging familiarity from fellow undergraduates, then swiftly acting with regal hauteur. He found himself happiest on the playing fields, discovering at Oxford a love of sport; he played football, cricket and squash. He beagled with the New College, Magdalen and Trinity packs, took riding lessons – progressing to become a fearless horseman. He punted, gambled, smoked, drank to excess and even smashed glasses and furniture as part of the high jinks of the Bullingdon Club – a club which, the New York Times explained to its readers, represented ‘the acme of exclusiveness at Oxford; it is the club of the sons of nobility, the sons of great wealth; its membership represents the “young bloods” of the university’.
Like Wallis, Edward displayed a strong early interest in fashion, developing his own flamboyant style. Rather than starchy formal garb, he preferred an eccentric mix of sports coats, loud ‘Prince of Wales checks’ (named after his grandfather, but popularised by Edward), bright tartans, baggy golfing plus fours and boyish Fair Isle sweaters. This was to become a source of conflict with his sartorial stickler of a father. When Edward entered the breakfast room at Buckingham Palace one morning, proudly sporting a suit with the new style of trouser turn-ups, the king bellowed: ‘Is it raining in here?’
‘Edward was completely different to any of the rest of the family,’ recalled John Julius Norwich, who, as a young man, knew both Edward and Wallis. ‘George V was very stiff and regal yet here was his son, a boy in a peaked cap, smoking and winking.’ The young prince ‘was dandyish and out to shock’, said David Maude-Roxby-Montalto di Fragnito. ‘He wanted to break tradition. He wore his signet ring in the continental way, just to be different. The British wear it facing inwards, to use on seals, whereas the Europeans wear it facing out. It was very arriviste of the prince to wear his continental style as no British gentleman would ever have done this.’
During his Easter and summer vacations in 1913, Edward went to visit his German relatives. ‘The purpose of these trips was to improve my German and to teach me something about these vigorous people whose blood flows so strongly in my veins. For I was related in one way or another to most of the many Royal houses that reigned in Germany in those days,’ Edward wrote. Later in life, ‘the duke loved to sit with my wife and speak perfect German (with a slight English accent) for hours with her’, recalled Count Rudolf von Schönburg, husband of Princess Marie Louise of Prussia, who was related to Edward through Queen Victoria. ‘Nothing made him happier than speaking at length about his German relations, to whom he was very close. He was very pro-German and would have liked to avoid a war between the two countries.’
‘Later in his life, the prince lived in France for over fifteen years, yet he never spoke a word of French,’ said John Julius Norwich. ‘He would start a conversation with a Frenchman in German. As you can imagine, his fluent German did not go down well in 1946 in France. To him, there was English and there was “foreign” and his “foreign” was German. The prince really was incredibly stupid.’
Edward left Oxford before taking his finals and seemingly without the slightest intellectual curiosity, claiming: ‘I have always preferred outdoor exercise to reading.’ He was now fully confirmed as the playboy bachelor prince. Painfully thin, he subjected himself to punishing physical regimes throughout his twenties and thirties. He liked to sweat a lot – he wore five layers to exercise – then party into the early hours, existing on minimal sleep and even less food. According to Lord Claud Hamilton, the Prince of Wales’s equerry from 1919–22, Edward took after his mother who, ‘frightened of becoming fat, ate almost nothing at all’. Her ladies-in-waiting regularly went hungry as meals consisted of tiny slivers of roast chicken, no potatoes, a morsel of vegetables, followed by a wafer.
Edward loathed Buckingham Palace so much, with its ‘curious musty odour’, that he refused to take meals there and only ate an orange for lunch. This became his daily routine. ‘His amazing energy makes him indulge frantically in exercise or stay up all night,’ observed Chips Channon. Boyish and hyper-energetic, Edward never had to shave and preferred nightclubs to formal society. Like a more sophisticated Bertie Wooster, he even took up the banjulele. His favourite question to courtiers was the decidedly un-royal, rebellious teenage riposte: ‘Can I get away with it?’
‘The late king and queen are not without blame,’ Chips Channon wrote at the time of Edward’s abdication in 1936. ‘For the twenty-six years of their reign, they practically saw no one except their old courtiers, and they made no social background whatever for any of their children. Naturally, their children had to find outlets and fun elsewhere, and the two most high-spirited, the late king (Edward) and the fascinating Duke of Kent (George) drank deeply from life.’ Edward partied his way through