With The State Visits of Edward VII: Reinventing Royal Diplomacy for the Twentieth Century, Matthew Glencross has chosen an important and neglected subject: the meetings of modern monarchs. Glencross makes a valuable distinction between the royal visit and the state visit. The latter is a ritualized and formalized event, designed to express the symbolic presence of a monarchical state. Visiting royal males wear uniforms and decorations, and females drip with jewels and compete for media attention with conspicuously expensive gowns. Elaborately planned and choreographed, the events of the state visit—typically a banquet, opera, and exchange of gifts—are governed by the semiotics of protocol and precedence. Because they are so formulaic, and because the public display attracts acres of platitudinous press coverage, state visits tend to be the chapters in royal biographies that one skips. Royal visits, by contrast, project the ruler as an individual rather than an institution. Semiformal events may be involved, but these excursions are far less ritualized than state visits. There is a third type of royal visit, not dealt with in this book: traveling incognito. This was much favored by Queen Victoria, who shunned ceremonial throughout her long widowhood. When she traveled to Germany or later France, as she often did, she preferred to use a title such as Countess of Kent, thus signaling that she was not to be formally received by the rulers through whose lands she travelled.

By contrast with his mother, King Edward VII enjoyed ceremonial and socializing with what Victoria called the “royal mob,” and his reign was punctuated by frequent trips to other sovereigns. Most of these were actually royal visits rather than state visits, though the distinction is sometimes blurred. Undoubtedly, Edward made full state visits to Scandinavia in 1908 and Germany in 1909. But the famous 1903 visit to Paris was planned by the king in secret without the government knowing: this was surely not a modern state visit. Nor was the 1903 meeting with the pope, which the king arranged on his own initiative without clearing it with the cabinet. Edward's meeting with Nicholas II at Reval is classed as a state visit here, but as all the action took place on royal yachts and Edward did not set foot on Russian soil, this seems more like royal visit.

Glencross cites David Cannadine's famous (and cumbersomely titled) 1983 article “The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual: The British Monarch and the ‘Invention of Tradition’ c. 1820–1977” (in the Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawn and Terence Ranger, 101–64) to conceptualize the shift from royal to state visits, which became the norm later in the twentieth century. Cannadine's argument that invented tradition proliferated as real power shrank is problematic for the reign of Edward VII, however. In foreign politics, Edward VII played a far more active and effective role than his mother had done, acting as ambassador for his country. But this spike in real power went hand in hand with an increase in pomp and display orchestrated by a monarch whose knowledge of protocol was encyclopedic. The influence of Edward VII abroad depended in large measure upon the family links forged by the royal marriages arranged by Queen Victoria over several generations, and Edwardian royal diplomacy needs to be set in the context of the pre-1914 dynastic realm, an area that Glencross fails to explore. Nor does he engage with the leading work on this topic, Roderick McLean's Royalty and Diplomacy in Europe 1890–1914 (2001).

There are a few errors. Edward VII was not “steeped in [Walter] Bagehot and [A. V.] Dicey from his earliest days” (3). No evidence exists to show that he read Bagehot (unlike George V, who took careful notes of The English Constitution), and Dicey was a closed book to him. Glencross states that Sidney Lee in his biography of Edward VII claimed, on the basis of interviews with politicians, that the king's interventions in foreign policy were of little worth. Actually, this claim was made by Lee in an article he wrote for the 1911 Dictionary of National Biography. So infuriated were the royal advisers that they forced Lee to recant and virtually ordered him to write the official life. (Volume 2, on the reign, which was mainly written by Lee's secretary S. F. Markham, prints many useful documents and is much cited by Glencross.) Contrary to what Glencross says here, Edward insisted on raising the question of persecution of the Jews at a meeting with Pyotr Stolypin, the Russian prime minister, at Reval.

Glencross is surely right, however, to claim that Edward created a context in which the personality of the monarch counted less than the symbolism of the presence of the sovereign on formal occasions, thus providing a framework in which subsequent monarchs with little interest in diplomacy could operate effectively.