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Chapters (54)
  1. Cover
  2. The Summer Queen
  3. Dedication Page
  4. Family Tree of King George III
  5. Family Tree of Queen Victoria
  6. PART ONE
  7. Chapter One
  8. Chapter Two
  9. Chapter Three
  10. Chapter Four
  11. Chapter Five
  12. Chapter Six
  13. Chapter Seven
  14. Chapter Eight
  15. Chapter Nine
  16. Chapter Ten
  17. Chapter Eleven
  18. Chapter Twelve
  19. Chapter Thirteen
  20. PART TWO
  21. Chapter Fourteen
  22. Chapter Fifteen
  23. Chapter Sixteen
  24. Chapter Seventeen
  25. Chapter Eighteen
  26. Chapter Nineteen
  27. Chapter Twenty
  28. Chapter Twenty-One
  29. Chapter Twenty-Two
  30. Chapter Twenty-Three
  31. Chapter Twenty-Four
  32. PART THREE
  33. Chapter Twenty-Five
  34. Chapter Twenty-Six
  35. Chapter Twenty-Seven
  36. Chapter Twenty-Eight
  37. Chapter Twenty-Nine
  38. Chapter Thirty
  39. Chapter Thirty-One
  40. Chapter Thirty-Two
  41. PART FOUR
  42. Chapter Thirty-Three
  43. Chapter Thirty-Four
  44. Chapter Thirty-Five
  45. Chapter Thirty-Six
  46. Chapter Thirty-Seven
  47. Chapter Thirty-Eight
  48. Chapter Thirty-Nine
  49. Chapter Forty
  50. Chapter Forty-One
  51. Acknowledgements
  52. Select Bibliography
  53. The Summer Queen
  54. By Margaret Pemberton

Looking at her father-in-law, May wondered what kind of a king he was going to make. When she had been a child, his habit of ‘chaffing’ had ensured that she’d always gone to great lengths to avoid him. Over the last few years – and as her father-in-law – his ‘chaffing’, where she was concerned, had become a thing of the past, although he did like to shatter her natural primness by telling her risqué jokes and convulsing her in laughter.

But a king who told risqué jokes in mixed company? A king who, for nearly all the years of his married life, had been openly unfaithful to his wife? A king who, as king-in-waiting, had never been instructed in the use of political power and whose entire existence had been a life of fashionable leisure?

Alicky often referred to Bertie slightingly as being an ageing playboy, and now the ageing playboy was King and Emperor, and not only would things never be the same for the family, but they most certainly would never be the same for the country and the empire.

May’s last thought that night, before falling into an exhausted sleep, was that the Victorian age was over. A new, unknown age was about to begin under Bertie, and all anyone could do was to pray for the best.

PART FOUR

THE DARKEST NIGHT AND THE GLORIOUS DAWN

Chapter Thirty-Three

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JULY 1904, PETERHOF, GULF OF FINLAND

It was the last day of July and the heat was suffocating. By her doctor’s calculations, Alicky was due to give birth any day, and she was resting on a sun-lounger in the shade of one of the palace’s many verandas. It would be her fifth child and so far she had only given birth to girls. With each failure to give birth to a son, her panicked anxiety had grown, for Russia’s Salic law meant that none of her and Nicky’s daughters could inherit the crown. Only a son could inherit and, unless she produced a male heir, the crown would pass to Nicky’s younger brother.

Their four girls were their joy and deepest happiness, and Nicky had never blamed her when, time after time, the gun salute that announced the birth of a child to a tsar – firing out over St Petersburg one hundred times for a girl, three hundred times for a boy – only ever fired one hundred times.

As she waited for her pains to begin, fear ate away at her, crippling her with anxiety. This time it had to be a boy. It had to be! She loved Nicky with every fibre of her being, and not to be able to give him the one thing so essential to him as Tsar was such a monstrous cruelty there were times when she could scarcely breathe, her sense of failure weighed so heavily upon her.