‘The Heir Apparent: A Life of Edward VII, the Playboy Prince’ by Jane Ridley

[cinrit]

When the dissipated, overweight, scandal-prone Prince of Wales finally got the job he'd been waiting for all his life, he was 59 and tired. "It has come too late," he said, in German, to his wife, Alexandra, as she knelt and kissed his hand beside his mother's deathbed. Jane Ridley's exhaustive new biography presents her subject as a Victorian Prince Hal, an immature philanderer who grows up into a decent, if hardly heroic, king.

Certainly nobody hoped for much from Victoria's eldest son — "few kings have come to the throne amid lower expectations" — but those low expectations were his own doing, as hundreds of pages of biography have already detailed. As an attempt to rescue Edward VII (known as "Bertie") from unfairly harsh historical judgments, the story of his reign — like the reign itself — is too little, too late. The story is also an indictment of the system of hereditary monarchy. And it's hard not to see parallels between Bertie's fate and that of his great-great-grandson Prince Charles, now 65: to spend adult life searching for something to do while waiting for Mother to die.

More: ‘The Heir Apparent: A Life of Edward VII, the Playboy Prince’ by Jane Ridley - The Washington Post

Cindy

[amabel]

Hmm, Charles may have to wait all his life for his role, but his attempts to "find someting to do" have IMO been very successful and admirable.

[sandy]

Charles always seemed very focused and did not "cast about" looking for something to do. 

[Queen Camilla]

Is this just a repackaged/retitled version of Jane Ridley's book, Bertie: A Life of Edward VII?