Edward the Rake

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.

John Pearson is the author of All the Money in the World (previously titled Painfully Rich), now a major motion picture directed by Ridley Scott film and starring Michelle Williams, Mark Wahlberg and Christopher Plumber (nominated for the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor). He is also the author of The Profession of Violence, on which the Tom Hardy film Legend is based, and the follow-up, The Cult of Violence.

Born in Surrey, England in 1930, Pearson worked for Economist, The Times, and The Sunday Times, where he was the assistant of Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond. Pearson published the definitive biography of Fleming, The Life of Ian Fleming in 1966.

Pearson 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.