King Edward VII ruled the United Kingdom for the first decade of the 20th Century. He was known as an amiable peacemaker of a king who nonetheless prepared his realm for war.

He was born Albert Edward on Nov. 9, 1841, at Buckingham Palace. His mother was the reigning monarch, Queen Victoria; his father was her husband, Prince Albert.

As the first born son of the regnant, Albert was soon named Prince of Wales and heir apparent. He did have an older sister, Victoria, but Albert was the heir apparent because he was male.

Young Albert, who preferred to be called "Bertie," did not exhibit great skill at learning, and his father designed a rigorous curriculum for him to plow through. The prince chafed under the restrictions. He served in the army for a time.

In 1860, he became the first Prince of Wales to tour North America and paid then-President James Buchanan a state visit that lasted three days. The tour itself lasted four months. He also went on an eight-month tour of India, in 1875; the next year, his mother declared herself Empress of India.

Albert was in an army camp in December 1861 when his father, then gravely ill, arrived to give him an official dressing-down for bad behavior. Prince Albert died just two weeks after making the trip, and Queen Victoria blamed her oldest son for her husband's death. Mother and son had a rocky relationship for the rest of her life. He did not play an active role in running the country until 1898.

Albert married on March 10, 1863, at St. George's Chapel at Windsor Castle. His wife was Alexandra of Denmark, whose father was Denmark's King Christian IX. Albert and Alexandra eventually had six children.

Albert seemed larger than life to some people. He enjoyed horse racing and going to the theater. He also really enjoyed eating fine foods and smoking cigars and cigarettes.

Because his mother was on the throne so long, Albert was king-in-waiting for a very long time. It turned out to be nearly 60 years that he was known as the next monarch of the United Kingdom. He finally got his chance in 1901, after his mother died.

He was a larger-than-life figure as Prince of Wales. He and his wife entertained lavishly, and he attended many parties populated by prominent aristocrats. He enjoyed the arts and helped found the Royal College of Music. A great fan of hunting, he had all of the clocks at his residence at Sandringham set half an hour ahead so he could have more time for hunting. (This practice of keeping Sandringham Time was in place until 1936.)

Edward's oldest son, Albert, known as "Eddy," was engaged to Princess Victoria May of Teck and was just 28 when he died of influenza in 1892. Edward and Alexandra were devastated by their son's death, as they had been in 1871, when their youngest son, Alexander, had died just a day after being born. Also in that same year, Albert himself had had a brush with death, surviving the typhoid fever that many think killed his father.

Edward had another brush with death in 1900. A Belgian teenager, saying he was protesting the Second Boer War, tried to kill the prince while he was traveling through Belgium. Edward was unharmed.

When ascending to the throne, Albert chose not to become King Albert I, so as to head off any comparisons to his much-beloved father; rather, he was King Edward VII (using his middle name). He was crowned on Aug. 9, 1902, after the coronation was delayed because the king underwent treatment for appendicitis.

Edward proved a popular king and a skilled diplomat. He also prepared his kingdom well for war. He was instrumental in setting up the Entente Cordiale, an official alliance with France, and the Triple Entente, an extension of the French alliance that included Russia. He was the first British or U.K. monarch to visit Sweden and Russia, both in 1908. He was involved in reforming the armed forces after the Second Boer War, championing the building of the Dreadnought warships that were pressed into service during World War I while also insisting on the implementation of an army medical service.

Edward also played peacemaker by virtue of his family, in the same way that his mother did. His daughter Maud was the wife of King Haakon of Norway. He counted as his brothers-in-law King George I of Greece and Frederick VIII of Denmark. Among his nieces were Crown Princess Margaret of Sweden, Crown Princess Marie of Romania, Crown Princess Sophia of Greece, and Empress Alexandra of Russia. Among his nephews were Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and Kaiser Wilhelm. (Wilhelm was the only relative with whom Edward had a rocky relationship.) He also had links to the kings of Belgium, Bulgaria, and Portugal.

The Industrial Revolution had brought change to the U.K., creating many opportunities for employment and advancement. Electoral reform had created more and more voters and had brought more attention to the plight of poor people; at the same time, universal suffrage had not achieved for men, and women could not vote at all. Edward did not embrace the growing women's suffrage movement or have much time for discussions of redistribution of wealth. He thus refused to sanction an increase in the number of Members of Parliament in order to pass the 1909 "People's Budget," which called for a suite of taxes on the rich in order to finance a spate of social welfare programs. Prime Minister David Lloyd George had urged Edward to swell the Liberal members of the House of Lords such that that body would then have a majority who were in favor of the new budget. Edward refused, saying that such an issue should be decided by the people directly, by way of a general election. The issue continued because the ensuing election didn't provide enough change in parliamentary membership to make a difference. Finally breaking the deadlock was a bill that changed the power of the House of Lords to outright veto a bill that the Commons had passed and instead gave the Lords the right to delay passage of such a bill for a maximum of two years.

Edward's years of smoking eventually caught up with him. In early 1910, he suffered yet another case of bronchitis, this one quite severe. On May 6, he suffered a number of heart attacks. He died that day, at age 71.

He was known as an amiable person and a fashion trend-setter–in clothing, in entertainment preferences, and in food consumption. (For example, he is thought to have popularized the Sunday Roast, a meal of roast beef, potatoes, and yorkshire pudding that many in the U.K. and other Commonwealth countries eat to this day.) He also founded the Order of Merit, to honor those who excelled in science and the arts. Despite his brief time on the throne, he was Prince of Wales for the better part of six decades. His mother's reign was known as the Victorian Era, but his was known as the Edwardian Era, a brief yet event-filled decade at the turn of a new century.