Dirty Bertie

by Stephen Clarke

  That afternoon, Bertie and Alexandra were driven off to their honeymoon in a carriage, hailed by the crowds and the nation’s bells. They were on their way to the railway station, where they were to catch a train to Southampton, then the royal yacht to the Isle of Wight, where they were to spend a week at Osborne – a house now transformed into yet another shrine to Albert.

  Victoria, having got what she called a ‘sad and dismal ceremony’ out of the way, snuck back to the mausoleum to commune with her dead husband.

  Not exactly an auspicious start to a marriage.

  III

  Princess Alexandra had one good reason to be thankful for Victoria’s interference, however – for a while it drew Bertie closer to her. When in November 1863, the Schleswig-Holstein problem flared up into a short, unequal war between little Denmark and mighty Prussia, Bertie supported his wife in opposition to his mother.

  ‘Oh! If Bertie’s wife was only a good German and not a Dane!’ Victoria moaned, while Bertie defended Alexandra and began to nurture the feeling (which became stronger throughout his life) that the Prussians were nothing more than bullies – yet another view that he would share with the French.

  Victoria also united the young couple by pestering them about every aspect of their social life. She objected to late dinners and parties on moral grounds, and also did her best to discourage Alexandra from horse-riding, one of the Princess’s favourite hobbies, on the grounds that it would hinder childbearing. The Queen even gave orders that parties and receptions should be organized to avoid Alexandra’s periods.

  It seems strange that Victoria was so impatient to see an heir to the throne, because she expressed serious doubts about both Alexandra’s and Bertie’s suitability as breeding stock.

  ‘Are you aware that Alix [as Alexandra came to be called by her family] has the smallest head ever seen?’ she wrote to her daughter Vicky. ‘I dread . . . – with his [Bertie’s] small empty brain – very much for future children.’

  It was largely Victoria’s own fault if Bertie’s brain stayed empty, because she still refused to let him have anything to do with matters of state. She didn’t trust him to read cabinet papers, because she was afraid he would disagree with her or prove too indiscreet – and in both cases, her fears were entirely justified.

  She didn’t want Bertie to represent her at public functions, either, despite his success at doing so in America as a much younger man. She wrote to her Home Secretary, referring to herself in the third person as she usually did when communicating with politicians, that:

  Her Majesty thinks it would be most undesirable to constitute the Heir to the Crown a general representative of Herself, and particularly to bring Him forward too frequently before the people. This would necessarily place the Prince of Wales in a position of competing as it were, for popularity with the Queen.

  What else was there for 21-year-old Bertie and his 18-year-old wife to do than ignore Victoria’s disapproval and enjoy themselves?

  Shortly before their wedding, Bertie had take possession of the two houses that would be the main venues for his English partying for the rest of his life. Marlborough House in Pall Mall, built by Christopher Wren in 1710, belonged to the crown, and £60,0002 of government money was spent on modernizing it as Bertie’s London home. To this, the Prince added £100,000 of his own money (mainly income from the Duchy of Cornwall – land still owned by the Prince of Wales today), which he lavished on furniture and carriages for Marlborough, as well as jewellery for Alexandra and himself.

  Like all other aspects of Bertie’s private life, Marlborough House was modelled on what he had seen in France. It was redecorated in a French style, with plenty of gilding on the woodwork, and remodelled to provide a ballroom and a series of large reception rooms like those in which Napoléon and Eugénie held their Parisian parties. The décor included tapestries from the Gobelins factory in Paris given to Bertie by Napoléon, and paintings by Franz Xaver Winterhalter, the German artist who had painted the French imperial couple and the beauties at their court. Winterhalter now painted portraits of Bertie and Alexandra, making the Prince look a bit like a chubby boy Hussar and Alexandra a vamp with an alarmingly low-cut dress.

  In deliberate defiance of his mother’s wishes, Bertie fitted out a smoking room at Marlborough. Typically, though, he was terrified that Victoria would find out, so when she came to inspect the new home, the smoking den was camouflaged with a chalked message on the door saying ‘Lavatory. Under Repair’. It was the only way to make sure that Victoria would not poke her nose in where it was not wanted.

  The young couple’s other playground was Sandringham in Norfolk, a country house comfortably far away from Bertie’s mother. This he bought out of his own money for £220,000 (though its 7,000 acres of farms yielded a healthy £6,000 a year in rents, so it was a sound investment as well as a hideaway). Aptly, Bertie bought the house from an owner who spent most of his time away from home whooping it up in Paris, and had recently moved abroad permanently after shocking the Norfolk gentry by marrying his mistress.

  Like Marlborough, Sandringham received a Napoléon III-style makeover. Bertie had seen how the Emperor was redesigning Paris, and he now built new roads on the Sandringham estate, laid out a pleasure garden for outdoor amusements, and founded schools and a hospital for his tenants. In the house, Bertie built himself a games annexe that included a billiard room and a skittles alley. Clearly needing to make up for a lost childhood, he would also hold tricycle races in the ballroom and toboggan down the main stairs on a silver tray.

  The sense of fun extended to the choice of décor – alongside the predictable country-house paintings of rural landscapes and livestock was a real stuffed baboon that greeted visitors at the front door, its paws outstretched to receive their calling cards.

  Alexandra was happy at Sandringham – flat Norfolk, she said, reminded her of Denmark, and on the country estate she was able to keep a vast pack of dogs of different breeds. She also enjoyed ice-skating on the ponds and – at first, anyway – joined in with the atmosphere of playfulness. On one occasion, when Mrs Gladstone (the mother of the boy who had informed on Bertie for kissing a German girl) was invited to Sandringham, Alexandra came to tuck her up in bed like a child.

  The couple organized house parties that were as relaxed, if not quite as morally lax, as Napoléon and Eugénie’s get-togethers. The indoor amusements at Sandringham usually took place away from the bedrooms, and consisted of raucous meals, long card games and music evenings, during which unlucky guests were sometimes subjected to the violin-playing of Bertie’s younger brother Alfred, which Victoria’s private secretary Henry Ponsonby once described as ‘an appalling din’. Getting Alfred to perform sounds like one of Bertie’s practical jokes.

  But the aspect of Bertie’s social life that was most obviously inspired by Napoléon III was the mix of people that he entertained, both in London and the country. In the face of the intense snobbery of France’s hereditary aristocrats, the parvenu Napoléon had been obliged to invent a new social model for his court. By necessity, it was as much a meritocracy as it was an aristocracy. Bertie now began to play host not only to lords and ladies, but also to achievers from many different walks of life – his only requirement was that they were witty when describing their achievements.

  The following is a description of Napoléon’s guest lists at Fontainebleau written by a Belgian diplomat, Baron Beyens. It almost exactly matches Bertie’s own taste in company: ‘Official personages – civil and military, men of state and foreign diplomats, aristocrats from every country, artists, scientists, men and women of letters, as well as a selection of private individuals well known only because of their social situation.’ The Baron went on: ‘Sharing with them the pleasures of luxury and tasteful entertainment – was it not proof of a social mood free of pride and haughtiness, a simplicity of tone completely unlike the coldness of those sovereigns whose outdated sense of etiquette cuts them off from mere mortals?’ He could have been
describing Bertie’s own mother.

  These days, we would probably disagree with the Baron about Bertie’s lack of haughtiness, and some of the entertainment as definitely less than tasteful (pouring brandy over defenceless social inferiors’ heads, for example). But compared to Victoria, Bertie really was democratizing his social circle, and because of this he received plenty of ‘advice’ from snobs who wanted him to be haughtier.

  Earl Spencer3 warned the Prince of Wales that he should not attend a ball given by Lionel and Charlotte de Rothschild because ‘they . . . hold their position from wealth and perhaps the accidental beauty of the first daughter they brought out’. But Bertie ignored this kind of thinly disguised English anti-Semitism. He had first met the Rothschilds in Paris, and always enjoyed being invited to the family’s houses in England, where, according to French biographer Philippe Jullian, ‘he could find the abundant luxury of the Second Empire, with its refined cuisine and international atmosphere’. No English snob was going to talk Bertie out of his French pleasures.

  Another innovation imported by Bertie from France, Jullian claims, was a new tolerance towards women of less than spotless reputation. The Prince’s London dinners were apparently the first occasions on which English upper-class ladies regularly agreed to share a table with actresses.

  Duty obliged the Prince to invite some pompous guests who didn’t quite fit in, but they were usually swallowed up in the crowd. And besides, European heads of state quickly came to realize that it was necessary to send two sorts of diplomats to London – crusty old ambassadors to please the Queen, and young, fun-loving aides who would get on with the heir to her throne.

  Victoria knew what was going on, and watched Bertie’s growing independence with a mixture of fear and disgust. She was sure that when she died, England would know ‘nothing but misery’ and that King Bertie would ‘spend his life in one whirl of amusements’.

  Her only consolation was that the young couple were at least providing her with plenty of descendants. Bertie and Alexandra’s first son was born just less than ten months after their wedding, and was diplomatically named Albert Victor in accordance with grandmother’s wishes. Only eighteen months later, a second son was born, the future King George V. In the space of seven years, Alexandra was to bear six children in all, though the last of them, Alexander, lived only twenty-four hours.

  This fertility took its toll on the Princess. Quite simply, she couldn’t provide babies while keeping up with Bertie’s desire for a social life that resembled a perpetual motion machine. Alexandra tried her best – her second son was born at Marlborough House at midnight, after she and Bertie had attended an orchestral concert in town, on an evening when she was also scheduled to host a late supper party. Quite a soirée for a heavily pregnant woman.

  Coupled with her frequent absences from the social calendar because of childbirth and lying-in, in early 1867 Alexandra suffered a serious attack of rheumatic fever that left her with a permanent limp. At only twenty-two, her wild dancing days were over. It was also becoming obvious that she suffered from a hereditary condition that causes progressive deafness – otosclerosis, abnormal bone growth in the inner ear. The problem was aggravated by pregnancy, so Alexandra was doomed to become less and less able to follow the lively banter that was the very raison d’être of Bertie’s social gatherings (the ones at which his wife was present, anyway). Even more than physical beauty, it was wit that attracted Bertie to women, and Alexandra was growing into a silent wallflower, what Oscar Wilde would later compare to dining opposite a lily stuck in a wine glass. Not much of a conversation partner for a chatty young prince.

  At the beginning, Bertie’s sister Vicky had expressed a touching faith in the healing power of marriage over her errant brother: ‘As he is too weak to keep from sin for virtue’s sake, he will only keep out of it from other motives, and surely a wife will be the strongest?’

  This was apparently the case for many Victorian men, even the upper classes who are so often depicted chasing chambermaids and making fools of themselves with actresses. In the mid-nineteenth century it was quite common for rich Englishmen to sow their wild oats with prostitutes and servants (and, more frequently than was admitted, with male friends, too) throughout their twenties and well into their thirties, finally marrying at a relatively late age and settling down to baby-making and approximate monogamy.

  However, Bertie had been forced into marrying young, and now, as Alexandra spent more and more time with her children and her dogs, he looked elsewhere for amusement. Not that he waited until Alexandra was deaf and limping. In 1864, when he had been married less than two years, Victoria apparently knew that Bertie was still living the bachelor life: ‘I often think her [Alexandra’s] lot is not a happy one,’ Victoria wrote. ‘She is very fond of Bertie, though not blind.’ This was presumably not a joke about Alexandra’s deafness.

  Prince Albert had married Victoria when he was twenty and never strayed from the path of saintliness, but Bertie seems to have adopted an entirely different attitude to marital respectability. He quickly turned Alexandra into what one of his biographers, Gordon Brook-Shepherd, describes as ‘the most courteously but most implacably deceived royal lady of her time’. Crucially, though, he was forgetting the Empress Eugénie.

  Bertie’s attitude to marriage, like his attitude to so many other things in life, was Napoleonic. He once wrote to a friend, Sir Edward Filmer, referring to himself in French as an ‘homme marié’ who was perfectly justified in going off ‘on a tack by himself’.4 At the time, it was almost expected of a chic Parisian husband that he would live a life of barely concealed adultery. As we have seen, the Emperor’s court was organized to make illicit couplings with single ladies or other men’s wives almost unavoidable.

  Of course, there was no gender equality in this arrangement, and the wives of the alpha males were required to be beyond reproach. The Empress Eugénie was known to be a model of virtue, and Bertie no doubt assumed his own wife would be the same. But being married to a model of virtue only made adultery easier.

  When rumours of his frequent nocturnal outings to London theatres, gentlemen’s clubs (which were basically smoking and drinking dens with comfortable armchairs) and racy parties began to circulate, while poor Alexandra was left to fret about when her husband would get home, one of Bertie’s friends, John Wodehouse, became seriously worried about the Prince’s lifestyle. ‘He is ruining his health as fast as he can – eats enormously . . . smokes incessantly, drinks continually “nips” of brandy; he has only to add, as I fear he will, gambling and whoring to become the rival of the “first gentleman in Europe”.’

  This ‘gentleman’ was, of course, a monsieur – Napoléon III.

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  1 Edward VII himself would later be interred in the church where he was married.

  2 To give an idea of how much this represented, the average wage of a household cook would have been about £35 a year, that of an experienced bank clerk about £150 a year.

  3 This was the 5th Earl Spencer, a friend of the moralist William Gladstone. The current Earl, brother of the late Princess Diana, is the 9th.

  4 Bertie might well have been writing the letter out of guilt at having been seen ‘spooning with Lady Filmer’ (Sir Edward’s wife, Mary) at Ascot Races in June 1867. In the nineteenth century, this verb meant behaving flirtatiously rather than lying down and snuggling up before or after sex.

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  SEX AND THE CITY OF LIGHT

  ‘All he asked of the Parisians was that they should introduce him to Parisiennes.’

  Philippe Jullian, in his biography Edouard VII

  I

  IT SEEMS TO have been Victoria herself who set Bertie off on the next stage of his French voyage of sexual discovery.

  In the autumn of 1864, when Bertie and Alexandra were in Stockholm as part of a Scandinavian trip, Victoria fired off a letter berating her son for staying at King Charles XV of Sweden’s castle. She was worried that Bertie would set
a precedent and that from now on, any minor royal visiting England on holiday would expect free B & B at Windsor. She wrote:

  I was much surprised and annoyed at your accepting an invitation at Stockholm in the Palace after it had been agreed upon and settled . . . that your visit should be a perfectly private one, and that you should live at the Legation [the British Embassy] or in an Hotel, the King being no relation of yours or Alix’s.

  Before leaving for Scandinavia, Bertie had made one of his frequent requests to squeeze in a quick stopover in France, but now Victoria seized the chance to frustrate him:

  I am rather doubtful about your visit to Paris. If it does take place it must be on the complete understanding that it is in real incognito, which your other visits have not been, and that you stop at an Hotel, and do not lodge with the Emperor and Empress and do not accept an invitation to Compiègne and Fontainebleau, which all the Ministers strongly object to, as much as I do. The style of going on there being quite unfit for a young respectable Prince and Princess, like yourselves. Of course, you might accept a day’s shooting at Compiègne and visit and drive with the Emperor and Empress, but nothing more.

  In the end, Victoria went the whole hog and insisted that Bertie return home from Scandinavia via relatives in Germany and Belgium, but the seeds of a mighty oak were sown. Merci for you excellent idea, Mama, Bertie might well have said. Even without the excuse of a change of train when returning from an official visit abroad, it was perfectly possible – as Victoria herself had suggested, n’est-ce pas? – to slip across the Channel as a private citizen, check into a hotel using his old alias of Baron Renfrew, and enjoy Paris incognito. And if his mother objected to the ‘style of going on’ at the imperial palaces, there was a whole city to explore.