Dirty Bertie

by Stephen Clarke

  Whenever the 38-year-old Kaiser Wilhelm II, Bertie’s nephew and Victoria’s grandson, came to the Solent to sail one of his racing yachts in the Cowes regatta, he usually brought an escort of two immense new warships to remind his English relatives that Britannia wasn’t the only force to be reckoned with on the seas. In June 1897, however, for such a grand official occasion as the Diamond Jubilee review of the fleet, he sent over a thirty-year-old refurbished frigate, the König Wilhelm, named after his grandfather.

  It was a crude and obvious snub, intended as revenge on the British royal family. Victoria had refused to invite Wilhelm himself to her Jubilee celebrations, ostensibly on the grounds that she didn’t want the nation to bear the expense of entertaining crowned heads of Europe, and he was furious. He wrote to Victoria complaining that ‘to be the first and eldest of your grandchildren and yet to be precluded from taking part in this unique fete, while cousins and far relations will have the privilege of surrounding You . . . is deeply mortifying’.

  It was a massive blow to his ego, and he might well have been tempted to order his most terrifying new dreadnought to steam into the Solent and deafen Bertie with its big-gun salute. Instead, Wilhelm responded with Teutonic disdain and sent over an ancient tub that was due to be demoted to service as a floating barracks almost immediately after its trip to England.

  In the event, the British admirals didn’t need a new German battleship to remind them that their impressive fleet might be going out of date. As Bertie and the assembled dignitaries looked on, a small steamer suddenly appeared amongst the British warships and evaded all naval attempts to intercept it as it sped back and forth in front of the surprised spectators.

  This was the Turbinia, then the fastest ship in the world, capable of 34.5 knots (39 mph), almost double the speed of most warships of the time. Its startling power was achieved thanks to brand-new steam turbine engines, an invention that was about to revolutionize sea warfare. The Turbinia was British, but it was a stark sign that, as the century drew to a close, the world was changing. The exchange of snubs between the fading Victoria and her ambitious German grandson, and the appearance of an uninvited intruder at an occasion as solemn as a naval review, were proof that Europe was losing the cosy stability that had been symbolized by all those winter gatherings of aged royals in Cannes and Nice.

  Bertie was not the poetic type, but even he might have seen the hint of a metaphor in the crashing thunderstorm that broke out over the darkened sea as the Diamond Jubilee naval review came to an end.

  * * *

  1 No doubt a reference to pine trees and lavender rather than illegal smoking materials – those wouldn’t arrive in any quantity until after the film festival started in 1947.

  2 La Belle Otero’s generous chest measurements are said to have inspired the twin domes on the roof of the Hôtel Carlton at Cannes. This seems hard to believe because the domes are very wide apart and alarmingly pointed.

  13

  REACHING AN ANGLO-FRENCH ENTENTE

  ‘He [Bertie] is the most powerful factor in world diplomacy, and, because he is for peace, his overall approach will serve above all to maintain harmony between the nations.’

  Remark made by an Italian politician to Camille Barrère, French Ambassador to Rome 1897–1924

  I

  NOWADAYS IT IS a major media event if a member of the British royal family has to give a speech in French. The Windsor in question will squint at a carefully prepared text and gargle his or her way through several minutes of tortuous vowels and unpronounceable consonants, delighting French listeners with an English accent as strong as a ten-year-old Stilton. Bertie though, both as Prince of Wales and King, was trilingual, and could banter fluently at any social occasion from Biarritz to Berlin and from Marseilles to Moscow (where the aristocrats all spoke French). The only time he felt slightly awkward improvising speeches was in Danish or Russian, but even then he was capable of learning a short text off by heart. He was a true international. And as the sun finally began to set on Victoria’s reign, Bertie was exactly the successor that Britain – and the rest of Europe – needed. The fact that no one realized it, except perhaps a few of his fans in France, was not his fault. In Britain, unlike France, a tempestuous private life has always blinded people to the possibility that someone might be well suited for public service, and most Brits still believed what Bertie’s own mother had said about him when he first started straying across the Channel: he was, she declared in 1863, ‘totally totally unfit . . . for ever becoming King’.

  Not that being monarch actually meant very much in the last years of Victoria’s life – despite her brief showing at the Diamond Jubilee, she spent most of her time shut away at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, either blustering vainly about her government’s policies, or dismissively rubber-stamping them. Britain’s monarchy had become the ghost in the attic. Few people thought that Bertie would be more than another poltergeist.

  II

  On 19 January 1901, Bertie was summoned to Osborne. He was fifty-nine years old. He had been aware that his mother was slowly sinking into dementia and blindness for years, but he had been kept in the dark about the recent deterioration of her condition by optimistic reports from his sister Helena and one of the doctors. Now, though, a more pragmatic royal physician, James Reid, had insisted that Bertie be warned that his mother was dying – after all, preparations for a handover of the throne would have to be made. And Reid, an ambitious man, no doubt hoped that by showing himself as an ally of the Prince, he might become a doctor to the King.

  On receiving the summons, Bertie rushed down from London as fast as the train and boat could carry him. Not that he actually spoke to Victoria when he got to Osborne – he had never seen his mother in bed before, and couldn’t face it now. Perhaps he was in denial about the idea of Victoria’s death, even though it was all that stood between him and the culmination of decades of waiting for a meaningful job. Seeing her lying helpless and defeated would have made his mother’s imminent disappearance too real. So next day Bertie left the Isle of Wight again and headed to London where he was due to meet his nephew, Kaiser Wilhelm.

  Almost no one in England wanted Wilhelm to come to England at this time, including the closest members of his English family, but everyone in the nation knew he was arriving because he had published the fact himself.

  Wilhelm had been informed of Victoria’s final illness by Dr Reid, who was in fact the Kaiser’s man at the palace – his spy. Reid had correctly assumed that Victoria’s deathbed scene was a family occasion that Wilhelm would not want to miss. And so, in typical attention-seeking fashion, the Kaiser had sent a telegram to the royal family that was left uncoded (unlike all other official communications, so this was almost certainly a personal order by Wilhelm), announcing that he would be joining the vigil at his grandmother’s bedside. The message, which passed through the hands of several telegraphists, as he knew it would, was instantly leaked to the press, so that all of Victoria’s subjects suddenly knew that she was at death’s door.

  Returning to Osborne on 20 January with the Kaiser, Bertie finally accepted that it was time to see his mother in her nightdress. When he entered her bedroom, Victoria told him ‘Kiss my face’ and held out her arms to embrace him. Faced with such a rare show of maternal affection, Bertie began sobbing uncontrollably.

  Throughout the evening and the next day, as more family members gathered, Victoria’s daughters Beatrice and Helena repeatedly told her who was in the room with her – but always omitted one name: Wilhelm.

  Dr Reid, Wilhelm’s secret sidekick, questioned Bertie about this, and Bertie replied that he was afraid to tell his mother about the Kaiser’s presence because it would ‘excite her too much’ – in the negative sense of the word, of course. What he probably meant was that Wilhelm was capable of saying something inappropriate that would give her a heart attack: ‘Yes, I am here, Grossmutter. You didn’t think I’d miss your deathbed scene, did you?’

  At
one point, everyone was asked to leave Victoria’s bedroom. Wilhelm took the opportunity to complain to Dr Reid about being left out of the Princesses’ list of names, so Reid asked Bertie if it was possible to take Wilhelm to the bedside alone. No doubt fearing a scene, Bertie agreed, and told Reid to inform Wilhelm that ‘the Prince of Wales wishes it’.

  This private audience did the trick, and from then on, Wilhelm was attentiveness personified – for two and a half hours he sat uncomfortably with his good arm under Victoria’s pillow, holding her head up so that it was easier for her to breathe. He was in his place, at the heart of his family.

  This protracted vigil seems to have helped Bertie come to terms with the prospect of his mother’s demise. He even managed a joke about it. As Victoria was sliding in and out of consciousness, a member of staff asked Bertie whether he thought the Queen would be happy in heaven. He replied: ‘She will have to walk behind the angels. She won’t like that.’

  In the end, the great Queen died peacefully, surrounded by her family and propped up by Kaiser Wilhelm, at 6.30 p.m. on 22 January 1901. As Bertie sailed back from the Isle of Wight to the mainland with her coffin, he saw that the ship’s royal standard was flying at half mast, and asked why.

  ‘The Queen is dead, sir,’ he was told.

  ‘The King of England lives,’ Bertie replied, and the flag was raised.

  The question was: would anyone in Europe salute it?

  III

  To everyone’s surprise, Bertie immediately revealed the strength of character that he had been forced to suppress – in England, at least – for so many years. He announced that he was to be called King Edward, contrary to his mother’s wishes. She had wanted him to succeed as Albert Edward, but Albert was to be remembered as his father’s name, Bertie said. The message was clear – King Edward was going to be his own man.

  At Buckingham Palace, Bertie quickly erased all signs of his mother’s cloistered existence. He fired the Munshi, her Indian servant, threw out her statues of John Brown, and emptied the rooms that had been preserved as shrines for his father. He also modernized the palace, ordering new bathrooms and toilets, and converting old coach houses into garages for his motor cars. The same revolution hit Windsor Castle, where Bertie marched about moving paintings and giving instructions for the immediate installation of all mod cons.

  The domestic changes cut deep. Bertie even asked Princess Beatrice, his widowed sister who had been Victoria’s companion all her life, to vacate her rooms in the royal palaces and move into a cottage at Osborne. Against Victoria’s wishes, Bertie gave the main house there to the nation as a naval college. The only royal residence he left untouched was Balmoral, because he loved its spartan, tartan über-Scottishness.

  At work, too, there was a new régime. From day one, Bertie proved that when, as Prince of Wales, he had begged to be given useful employment, he really meant it. Now he personally dealt with 400 letters a day, and set about clearing a backlog of 6,600 army commissions that had built up during the final months of his mother’s reign, signing each promotion himself.

  He was determined to prove the doubters wrong. Out of respect for the new monarch, the British newspapers didn’t openly talk about his dubious past, but The Times expressed the anxiety that the establishment felt about the playboy Prince coming to the throne: ‘We shall not pretend that there is nothing in his long career which those who respect and admire him could not wish otherwise.’ All of Victorian England’s sexual angst and denial in one triple-negative sentence.

  It was appropriate that Bertie’s first major ceremony, the Opening of Parliament, took place on Valentine’s Day 1901. And he certainly seized the opportunity to show the nation that things had changed. Victoria had attended the Opening only seven times since her husband’s death, and always in her widow’s weeds, never in full royal regalia. Now Bertie was driven to Westminster in the state coach, resplendent in crimson robes and wearing the Imperial State Crown that had not been seen in public since 1861. He was immediately projecting himself as the opposite of his mother – a public sovereign. His subjects had a monarchy, with all its associated palaces, jewels and costumes, and he wanted them to get the most out of it. As always, Bertie was all for sharing the fun.

  In adopting this showiness, he was applying the principle that he had first seen in Paris, when Napoléon III and Eugénie took every opportunity to dress in their finest imperial costumes and stun the crowds with their magnificence. In their logic, and Bertie’s, they weren’t simply showing off – they were doing the nation proud. The people might not get a chance to wear the jewels or ride in the carriages themselves, but they should be able to see them, and bathe in the reflected glory. It’s an idea that lives on to this day, and is the reason why TV companies all over the world are desperate to televise any British royal ceremony going. The Brits do good ceremony. And Bertie was the first modern royal to make it happen.

  A cynic might say that this spirit of official openness allowed Bertie to cover up what was going on in his private life – he was at this time enjoying a long-term affair with Alice Keppel, a witty, big-busted married English lady of thirty-two, the great-grandmother of Camilla Parker Bowles, the present wife and former lover of Bertie’s own great-great-grandson, Charles. But the grand ceremonies weren’t all about camouflage – Bertie genuinely did want to be a public king. He was a people person in all senses of the term.

  He even risked his life to be crowned. His coronation was set for 26 June 1902, but a few days earlier, he began to suffer from a searing pain in his lower abdomen. His doctor Sir Francis Laking prescribed bed rest and warm milk, even though he recognized the symptoms of appendicitis. Perhaps the doctor thought that the problem would go away of its own accord, and that Nature would not dare to interrupt the coronation of a British monarch. He was certainly afraid of seeing the new uncrowned King dying on the operating table on the eve of his succession – the other European powers might take it as a divine sign of England’s weakness. In any case, Bertie was not informed of the seriousness of his condition, and insisted that the coronation go ahead.

  He probably hoped that a milk-only diet would do him some good. His appetite had been misbehaving badly of late. First he had gone off his food, and then he had started craving it. He had even been overdoing the alcohol, which was very rare for him, and had been falling asleep during meals, which never happened, mainly because he spent them gobbling every dish in sight.

  The press was told that the King was in bed with lumbago, but his doctors finally summoned the courage to tell Bertie the truth: he would die without an operation. Even so, the people’s monarch was insistent that his hundreds of guests and millions of expectant subjects should not be disappointed, and he refused to postpone the coronation. Finally, one of Britain’s top surgeons, Sir Frederick Treves, was called in to convince him that an appendectomy was both vital and survivable. Treves had performed the first-ever operation of its kind in England in 1888.1

  Bertie submitted to medical pressure, and the next afternoon, on a table in his dressing room, he was given chloroform and opened up. Apparently Treves had to cut through about four inches of royal flesh before finding the cause of Bertie’s pain – not an inflamed appendix but an enormous abscess around it. Good, if somewhat repulsive, news. Treves drained the pus – a full pint of it – and closed the incision, hoping for the best. Not everyone in Bertie’s physical condition woke up from the primitive anaesthetic, or survived post-op infection, especially when the operation had been performed in an ordinary dressing room by a surgeon in shirtsleeves and an apron. But by next morning the King was sitting up, chatting to the nurses, writing a note to his mistress Alice Keppel, and – of course – smoking a cigar.

  Only six weeks later, on 9 August, his coronation finally went ahead. It was a glittering occasion, with all the pomp and ceremony that one would expect of Bertie, as well as a few moments of comedy. The actual crowning was performed by the ancient, half-blind Archbishop of Canterbury,
Frederick Temple, who placed the crown on backwards. Bertie had to reach up and swivel it himself. And some members of the congregation noticed that the King could not help occasionally letting his eyes stray upwards to a gallery above the altar, where, like a string of pearls, sat a row of his mistresses, past and present, none of whom should really have been invited. Alice Keppel was there, of course, along with Winston Churchill’s mother Jennie, and – to add the French touch that coloured every aspect of Bertie’s life – Sarah Bernhardt, who was dressed as unconventionally as ever, all in white.

  IV

  Bertie’s determination to take an active part in the daily business of monarchy did not flag after his coronation. He quickly gained a reputation amongst all his ministers for his swift and efficient replies to all of their requests. He prided himself on dealing with every note and despatch the day he received it.

  Characteristically, one aspect of the country’s affairs interested Bertie much more than all the rest – foreign affairs. Not only did he make sure that he read every communication from his ambassadors (and being a friend or relative of practically every sovereign in Europe, he regarded them as his ambassadors), Bertie also asked them to give him private briefings, too. These could be notes passing on inside information about the mood in a country or its royal palace, or, when he was travelling, short briefing sessions about the political situation, the economy or even the state of the local railways. Then, suitably informed, Bertie would hold private meetings with foreign leaders to gauge the temperature of Britain’s relations with the country. Bertie regarded Britain’s international relations as his personal mission. As Benjamin Disraeli put it: ‘He really has seen everything and knows everybody.’