Dirty Bertie

by Stephen Clarke

  The general conclusion after the tour was that Bertie had done a grand job of representing the monarchy abroad, and had even got the Americans singing ‘God Save the Queen’.

  Typically, Victoria and Albert didn’t want to let all this international success go to their son’s head. The Queen noted that after America he was ‘extremely talkative’ and had taken to smoking cigars. She grudgingly gave Bertie permission to smoke in England, ‘but only on condition that he does not do so in public or in the house’.2 And she began looking around frantically for a wife to take the Prince of Wales’s morals in hand.

  Albert, meanwhile, decided that the boy had a ‘growing sense of his own importance’ and needed the fun and public adulation drilling out of him. This was no doubt why he packed Bertie off to Cambridge. And now, after only a couple of months at his second university, faced with yet more evidence that his son was no scholar, Albert concluded that Bertie would benefit from a dose of army discipline with the Grenadier Guards in Ireland. It was a tactic that was to prove fatal, in more ways than one.

  Although this was more than fifty years before the British army would be fighting to retain possession of Ireland, while in uniform Bertie was to be protected as if he were in enemy territory – the enemy in this case being the dissolute British soldiers. Because of warnings from General Bruce about the ‘temptations and unprofitable companionship’ of young officers, Bertie was billeted in private quarters, away from the other men, and his social life was restricted to four or five strictly regimented regimental dinners a week. On other evenings, he was allowed to ‘read and dine quietly in his own rooms’.

  Albert also instructed that his son be forced to learn the duties of every rank in turn, starting as an ensign – the lowliest commissioned officer. In short, the ten weeks spent at the Curragh Camp in County Kildare were designed to be as humiliating as the rest of Bertie’s education.

  Fortunately for him, the other soldiers saw Bertie’s prison-like living conditions as a challenge, and organized a commando raid on his heavily fortified virtue.

  Sources differ as to what happened on the evening of 6 September 1861. The most credible version seems to be that one night, after General Bruce had gone to bed, some of the officers sneaked a woman called Nellie Clifden into Bertie’s quarters. Nellie was a good-time girl from London who had followed the officers, her best customers, to Ireland. So on that night a couple of months before Bertie’s twentieth birthday, when the young Prince got back to his bedroom, there was a warm welcome awaiting him. Probably guessing that this kind of opportunity was not going to fall from the heavens every evening, Bertie took full advantage of the situation. He did so again three days later, and booked a third performance, too, either in his own quarters or by sneaking out to another room.

  Nellie was by all accounts amusing company, both in and out of bed, and Bertie arranged to see her after he got back to England. Soon, she was trading on her famous conquest and styling herself ‘the Princess of Wales’ in London’s dance halls.

  It took a few months but eventually the gossip about Nellie broke through the class barriers and reached the ears of Bertie’s father. On 12 November, Prince Albert heard the catastrophic news that his son had lost his virginity without parental permission. Worse, he had probably smoked a cigarette afterwards – indoors, too.

  Albert had already contracted the illness that would very soon kill him, and was suffering from chronic insomnia and bouts of fever, but he took up his pen to express to Bertie ‘the greatest pain I have yet felt in this life’. He spoke in typical Albertian terms of Bertie letting himself be prematurely ‘initiated in the sacred mysteries of creation, which ought to remain shrouded in holy awe until touched by pure and undefiled hands’, and said that if only Bertie had confided in his father about his ‘sexual passions’ (not a very credible idea), Albert would have explained ‘the special mode in which these desires are to be gratified’. No, not cold showers, hiking up mountains or blasting a shotgun at wildlife, but ‘the holy ties of Matrimony’.3

  Both Albert and Victoria felt certain that this biblical fall from grace with Nellie was the ultimate symptom of their son’s errant Hanoverian genes. Despite all their best efforts, Bertie was turning into the infamous George IV. Soon, they feared, he would be gambling away his money, recruiting a harem of mistresses and bringing the royal name into international disrepute. And they were, of course, completely right.

  For the moment, though, there was a solution. Albert ordered Bertie to make a full confession to General Bruce. Bertie did this (although he refused to give the names of the officers who had smuggled Nellie into his quarters), and sent a letter of sincere repentance to his father, who accepted the apology and offered forgiveness – on condition that Bertie agreed to take the only action that could save him from perdition.

  He had to marry, and fast.

  A potential princess had already been selected – sixteen-year-old Alexandra of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, daughter of the heir to the Danish throne. Bertie had met Alexandra, but not been overwhelmed. His sister Vicky had witnessed the meeting and reported to her parents that ‘he was disappointed about her beauty’ and thought ‘her nose was too long and her forehead too low’. Too bad. Bertie would have to redeem himself by tying the knot. He had committed one youthful indiscretion too many, and now his youth was over.

  So, too, tragically, was Albert’s life. On 25 November 1861, he made an unscheduled visit to Cambridge for a heart-to-heart with his son. There, he received Bertie’s apology during a long, exhausting walk through an East Anglian storm, made worse by the fact that Bertie lost his way. Back at Windsor, Albert collapsed, and on 14 December he died – though not before giving his eldest son one last opportunity to disgrace himself.

  Typically, on receiving a telegram summoning him to Windsor on the thirteenth, Bertie did not grasp the gravity of the situation (in his defence, the telegram was ambiguously worded), and arrived at his father’s death bed at three in the morning, in high spirits after a London dinner.

  Queen Victoria, who had lost her mother only nine months earlier, went almost insane with grief. And she blamed Bertie for this new disaster. She had always seen Albert as a cross between an angel, a prophet, a guru and a saint, and she had no doubt that ‘that dreadful business at the Curragh’ had destroyed her perfect husband. In Victoria’s tearful eyes, Bertie had become the devil incarnate. She wrote to her daughter Vicky that: ‘I never can or shall look at him [Bertie] without a shudder . . . [He] does not know that I know all – Beloved Papa told him that I could not be told all the disgusting details.’

  Prince Albert had decreed that Bertie should marry, so marry he would. The Queen wrote to her uncle Leopold:

  I am . . . anxious to repeat one thing, and that one is my firm resolve, my irrevocable decision, viz. that his [Albert’s] wishes—his plans—about everything, his views about every thing are to be my law! And no human power will make me swerve from what he decided and wished.

  A quick wedding was to be Bertie’s punishment, imposed by his father from beyond the grave.

  Victoria felt morally obliged to inform the Danish royal family that the bridegroom-to-be was not a virgin, and was probably astonished by their very Scandinavian reaction: they knew all about it. Wedding plans were duly set in motion.

  Meanwhile, the Queen had another duty to fulfil in her husband’s name, and one that suited her own purposes, too. Before his death, Albert had planned an educational tour for Bertie, taking in Vienna, Venice, Greece, Egypt and the Middle East. Now the grieving Victoria wanted her son out of her sight and, less than eight weeks after Albert’s death, Bertie was packed off abroad under the close moral guardianship of General Bruce and a chaplain.

  Over the next four months, Bertie would meet the Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria and the Viceroy of Egypt, steam up the Nile, shoot (amongst other things) crocodiles, vultures, owls and lizards, and grow a straggly beard.

  Predictably, the educ
ational aspect of the trip bored Bertie – while the rest of his party explored the pharaohs’ tombs, he stayed back at camp, smoking and reading a racy bestseller called East Lynne, about a married lady who elopes with her lover, bears an illegitimate child, and then returns in disguise to become the governess in her husband’s new household. Much more exciting than old Egyptian stones. When faced with the prospect of visiting the temple at Thebes, Bertie objected, saying: ‘Why should we go and see the tumbledown old temple? There will be nothing to see when we get there.’ But Albert had decreed that the tour should be character-forming, so off to the ruins he had to go.

  There was, however, one major compensation. Luckily for Bertie, his mother was so intent on following ‘dear Papa’s original plan’ to the letter that, against her own better instincts, she rubber-stamped the final stop on the tour – a brief courtesy visit to the court of Napoléon III. Bertie was to spend a night at the British Embassy in Paris, then visit the French Emperor and Empress at one of their summer residences, the Château de Fontainebleau. The Queen’s only condition was that she didn’t want to hear anything about the stopover in Paris, or ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’ as she called it. She wrote to General Bruce warning him that the Prince should not return with any ‘worldly, frivolous, gossipy kind of conversation’ because she at least was still in mourning. Not that Bertie would want to tell his mother the kind of things a young prince could get up to at Napoléon’s court.

  So, after landing at Marseilles on 10 June 1862, Bertie rushed northwards to Paris, knowing that at last, after all the emotional trials of the previous months, it was time for some unadulterated enjoyment. He was also going to get the chance to delve deeper into the tantalizing world that he had discovered with Nellie Clifden.

  As with Bertie’s childhood visit to France, most of his biographers accord only a few lines to this return trip as an adult, referring euphemistically to the more sophisticated pleasures he enjoyed there the second time around. This is probably because there is so little documentation surrounding his brief stay – it was not an officially sanctioned royal visit, so there were no group portraits, no troop inspections, no homage to an imperial tomb.

  But Bertie’s time in Paris in 1862 was so important to his development as a man that to ignore it is an inexplicable omission. The few days that he was now allowed to spend with Napoléon III and Eugénie must have been the realization of a fantasy, the achievement of an ambition kept locked away behind the façade of good behaviour that Bertie had been forced to maintain throughout his repressed teenage years, and even more so since his father’s death.

  Sitting on the French train as it rattled northwards from Marseilles, Bertie must have been reminded of his first journey from Boulogne seven years earlier, and smiled at his boyish crush on motherly Eugénie. Now he was looking forward to some altogether less innocent feminine company.

  * * *

  1 The Queen had obviously forgotten at least the previous five centuries of Anglo-French history.

  2 Victoria was so violently opposed to smoking that one foreign ambassador, when invited to stay with the Queen, took the precaution of smoking his cigars lying in a fireplace and blowing the smoke up a chimney.

  3 Luckily, Albert was unaware that three days earlier, on 9 November, Bertie had almost certainly smuggled a prostitute into Windsor Castle for a private birthday party.

  3

  BERTIE AND THE ‘PALACE DAMES’

  ‘This futile court, so seductive on the surface . . . that thinks only of pleasures and enjoyments.’

  Marquise Irène de Taisey-Chantenoy, in her memoir À la Cour de Napoléon III

  I

  BERTIE HAD THE good fortune to visit the Château de Fontainebleau, seventy kilometres south of Paris, during its heyday, the decade or so that it spent as one of Napoléon III’s résidences secondaires.

  By the nineteenth century, Fontainebleau had been a royal and imperial residence for around 700 years. The first castle was built there in the twelfth century, and was visited by Thomas Becket while he was in exile in France, just before he returned to England to have his brains hacked out in Canterbury Cathedral. The future King Charles II spent some time there in 1646 while his father and Oliver Cromwell were fighting over England’s mode of government. Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette used Fontainebleau as a venue for plays and concerts, and had only just finished redecorating Marie-Antoinette’s sumptuous boudoir when the French Revolution put an end to the party.

  Only the first Napoléon – Bonaparte – used Fontainebleau as more than a forest hideaway, and spent his short but busy stays there conducting politics, including the finalization of several European treaties as he redrew the continent’s borders. It was there that he signed his abdication papers in 1814,1 and in the courtyard that he bade an official farewell to his closest supporters before his exile to Elba.

  Bonaparte’s nephew Napoléon III had more frivolous plans for Fontainebleau, and even today the château’s official website can barely disguise its disapproval. The Histoire section declares that the new imperial couple were only attracted to Fontainebleau ‘when the idea of tourism began to develop’. Their holidays there ‘became regular and increasingly lengthy’, it states, and ‘their entourage was much more relaxed than that of previous sovereigns’, as though Napoléon and Eugénie were a pair of idle squatters.

  However, Napoléon III gave the château an impressive makeover, in what the website snootily describes as his ‘characteristically eclectic style’. He ordered new furniture for many of the private and public rooms, commissioned a new set of imperial apartments overlooking the gardens and a spectacular 450-seat theatre inspired by the auditorium at Versailles. This was a veritable baroque temple to the arts, with a painted ceiling depicting an azure sky inhabited by angels and a semicircular sweep of columns and arches encrusted in gold leaf. The château may have been a country retreat, but under Napoléon III, its entertainment facilities were worthy of central Paris.

  Every year, usually for four to six weeks in May and June, the imperial couple, along with 200 or so staff and their closest friends and family members, would move out to Fontainebleau for the ritual of the so-called séries. These were weekly house parties attended by fifty or sixty relatives, friends, courtiers, ambassadors, foreign dignitaries and leading lights of literature, science or high society. Every week, a new set of guests would arrive, replacing the previous group who had been graced with an imperial invitation.

  To get there, the guests would usually take the train from Paris and be picked up by a fleet of imperial carriages that would drive them through the town and alongside the château’s 1.2-kilometre-long ‘Grand Canal’ like a group of trippers on an upper-class package holiday. On arriving in the immense central courtyard, the visitors would be met at the foot of the sixteenth-century ‘horseshoe’ staircase and escorted to their rooms – or rather their apartments.

  Each guest, including Bertie in June 1862, would be installed in one of more than 200 private suites, assigned according to the occupant’s rank. The more intimate or important the visitors were to the imperial couple, the closer their apartment would be to the social hub of the château. It was a set-up in which, as the château’s website puts it, domestic arrangements were ‘very supple’ – an obvious euphemism for sexual comings and goings.

  Unless you were a particularly honoured invité, the accommodation was not luxurious. Typically each suite consisted of a trois-pièces – a three-roomed apartment with a salon, bedroom and cabinet de toilette (bathroom and dressing room). Eugénie, who oversaw the decoration of the guest rooms, was aiming for cosiness rather than grandeur, and to achieve this she placed a bulk order for tasteful, simple furniture almost entirely free of the gold leaf that her husband favoured for his decoration. A typical guest apartment is open to the public today, and the poshest thing about it is its view over the family’s private garden. The sitting room contains a round walnut table, four small armchairs covered in luminous blue-and-wh
ite flowered material that matches the wallpaper, a plain desk and a padded sofa. It was designed to be ‘in the English fashion’ – Chesterfield-style padding had just been invented and was very much in vogue, as was the English country-house look.

  The bedroom featured twin beds that could be pushed together if required and a tall mirror fitted with candlesticks to ensure that the guests would be impeccably turned out when they left their rooms for one of the many parties for which they would receive an invitation card. It was also essential that they be on time, so a clock stood on every bedroom mantelpiece. Lateness would be punished with a small fine.

  All in all, it looks less like a palace apartment and more like a suite that you might find in a chic country hotel today (assuming you could do without a widescreen TV), except perhaps for the cabinet de toilette, which testified to the lack of plumbing. On the marble-topped table de toilette stood a jug and bowl. Beside these, there was a china bidet on a wooden stand and a portable commode, and in one corner a low, round metal bathtub like the ones depicted by Degas in his nude bathing scenes.

  The sanitary arrangements were similar in the more luxurious suites on a lower floor, where young Bertie would have stayed, but this wouldn’t have bothered him, because his recent travels had got him used to desert camps and army bunks.

  The most convenient thing about the carefully organized set-up at the Fontainebleau séries was that all the rooms were numbered, as in a hotel, and that the names of the occupants were displayed on each door, on a card handwritten by the Empress. Eugénie took it upon herself to allocate rooms, putting people who might be well suited close to each other. It was an arrangement perfectly conducive to making assignations and flitting from door to door.