With all of Albert’s thoughtful touches, Osborne became a much loved escape for his family. The royal children were each given an individual plot to garden and even had a fully furnished Swiss-style chalet that was built just for them. They learned to cook in the cottage’s miniature kitchen, with its full range of utensils, and kept their collections under glass cases in a minimuseum. “Yesterday there was a grand tea at the Swiss Cottage,” Victoria reported—“and imagine good Affie [her second son, Alfred] by way of amusement exhibiting his air pump and steam engine (puffing and blowing all the time—in the tool house) … and pumping over himself and [third son] Arthur.”
Victoria, too, delighted in Osborne. “Sat out under the trees, where it was really heavenly, and sketched,” she wrote during the summer of 1855. “Every day, every year, this dear sweet spot seems more lovely and with its brilliant sunshine, deep blue sea and dazzling flowers, is a perfect paradise,—and all my beloved one’s creation,—the result of his exquisite taste.”
The queen took her first sea swim off the estate’s private beach, but it could hardly be called a quick, spontaneous dip. First she stepped into a “bathing machine,” a changing room on wheels where she slipped into her swimsuit. The bathing machine was then pulled by a horse to the very edge of the shore, after which Victoria emerged from the other side directly into the water. “I thought it delightful,” she wrote, “till I put my head under water, when I thought I should be stifled.”
Of all the joys Osborne had to offer the queen, nothing came close to simply being with her man—reading books together, taking walks, watching the ships sail by on the Solent, listening to the nightingales in the evening, or playing duets on the piano. “Never do I enjoy myself more or more peacefully than when I can be so much with my beloved Albert,” she wrote—“follow him everywhere.”
The relaxed and relatively carefree atmosphere at Osborne evaporated completely with Prince Albert’s untimely death in 1861.* He was only forty-two, as was Queen Victoria, whose life all but ceased as well. For decades she lived in semi-seclusion, dressed in her widow’s weeds, obsessively tending to her late husband’s memory.
In her maudlin devotion to her mate, the queen ordered Osborne maintained exactly as Albert left it. During a visit in 1862, Lord Clarendon found it “difficult to believe” that the prince would not at any moment walk into his room because “everything was set out on his table and the pen and his blotting-book, his handkerchief on the sofa, his watch going, fresh flowers in the glass.” Amid the gloom, Queen Victoria even dabbled in the occult, desperately trying to contact her prince. Alas, she had to content herself with his jacket, which she took to bed with her every night.
Writing from the estate during her first Christmas without her beloved, Victoria pronounced how she would conduct herself as queen now that Albert was gone. “I am … anxious to repeat one thing,” she wrote, “and that one is my firm resolve, my irrevocable decision … that his 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.… I am also determined that no one person, may he be ever so good, ever so devoted among my servants—is to lead or guide or dictate to me. I know how he would disapprove it. And I live on with him, for him; in fact I am only outwardly separated from him, and only for a time.”
Poor Princess Alice, Victoria and Albert’s second daughter, had the misfortune of marrying Prince Louis of Hesse at Osborne less than seven months after her father’s death. She had lovingly attended her grieving mother—even sleeping with her in her bedroom—and now the queen dreaded the day of Alice’s “wretched marriage.” Victoria described the ceremony as “more like a funeral than a wedding,” which, thanks in large part to her, it was.
There were no joyous preparations before the ceremony. The queen made certain of that. “She [Alice] is dressing in her Beloved Papa’s room, while I am having my widow’s cap adjusted! I think it is a dreadful dream!” At least the bride was allowed to wear white for this special occasion, although her trousseau was the required black.
Only immediate family and a handful of relatives were invited to the service, which took place in the dining room of Osborne House—right under a family portrait dominated by Prince Albert. Victoria sat apart from everyone else, protectively flanked by her four eldest sons. “Fortunately for the bride and groom, who were much less the focus of attention than the huddled figure in black, the Archbishop of York kept the service short,” wrote biographer Stanley Weintraub.
“It was very solemn—very affecting, very sad,” the queen wrote after the ceremony. The archbishop, tears streaming down his face, “read the service … beautifully! But when it came to the words till death us do part I could not restrain my tears—tho’ I struggled and I did command myself till all was over. Affie sobbed dreadfully all through.”
Of course there was no reception. Immediately after the service the queen went to her room, where she ate lunch alone with the bride and groom. Alice and Louis were allowed a couple of days for their honeymoon, but Victoria expected her daughter back at Osborne to attend to her. A week later, Alice left for her new home in Hesse.
“I hardly miss her at all, or felt her going,” the queen reported, “so utterly absorbed am I by that one dreadful loss.”
After several decades of deep mourning the shroud lifted a little. Victoria was even bold enough to stray from Albert’s original plan for Osborne and allowed an addition to be built. She enjoyed having her grandchildren and great-grandchildren visit her at the estate, where she provided entertainment for them and—occasionally—reveled in their company. Not all were enamored with Osborne, however.
“Even as a child I was struck by the ugliness of the house, which has been described as ‘a family necropolis,’ ” wrote Victoria’s great-grandson King Edward VIII. “The floors of the corridors and passages were inlaid with mosaic; set into the walls were numerous alcoves each displaying in life size a white marble statue of a dead or living member of ‘Gangan’s’ large family.”
Victoria spent her last Christmas at Osborne in 1900. It was not a joyous occasion for the queen, now eighty-one and in failing health. Looking up at the family Christmas tree (a holiday adornment Prince Albert had popularized in Britain), she could barely see the candles lighting it. “I feel so melancholy,” she wrote, “as I see so very badly.” Adding to her distress on Christmas Day was the news that her dear friend Lady Churchill had died the night before. “The loss to me is not to be told,” she lamented, “and that it should happen here is too sad.”
On January 22, 1901, at half past six in the evening, the long reign of Queen Victoria came to a close when she breathed her last in her bedroom at Osborne. Her coffin, stuffed by her order with mementos of Albert—including his dressing gown and a plaster cast of his hand—was taken down to the dining room. There the queen rested for a week before leaving the Isle of Wight for the last time.
* Typhoid was identified as the cause of Albert’s death, although some historians have speculated that he may have had some other chronic disease, given how ill he was in the years preceding his death.
House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor
EDWARD VII
(reigned 1901–1910)
GEORGE V
(r. 1910–1936)
EDWARD VIII
(r. 1936)
GEORGE VI
(r. 1936–1952)
ELIZABETH II
(r. 1952–present)
29
Edward VII (1901–1910): Sex Ed
And to break your poor parents’ hearts.
—PRINCE ALBERT
Upon the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, her eldest son succeeded her as Edward VII. He was fifty-nine. The name Saxe-Coburg-Gotha had come to the royal family in 1840, when Victoria married Prince Albert, and was thus adopted by the new king upon his accession. Although Edward’s reign was relatively short, only nine years, he did lend his name to that era of ari
stocratic splendor that preceded the horrors of World War I.
They called him Edward the Peacemaker for his valiant attempts to keep Europe out of war at the dawn of the twentieth century. But when it came to the ladies, Edward the Maker might have been a more fitting sobriquet. A seemingly endless succession of mistresses—from actresses to aristocrats—shared the royal bed. “He was stimulated by their company,” wrote Margot Asquith, “intrigued by their entanglements, flattered by their confidence, and valued their counsel.”
Yet given the trauma surrounding his first encounter with the opposite sex, it’s a wonder Edward VII wasn’t celibate. Scarring doesn’t begin to describe the experience.
From earliest childhood poor Edward* received very little approbation from his parents, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. The boy’s very appearance made his mother shudder. “Handsome I cannot think him,” the queen sniffed, “with that painfully small and narrow head, those immense features and total want of a chin.” But it was the prince’s natural gregariousness that repelled his parents most.
Both Victoria and Albert were terrified of the genetic specter of her wicked Hanoverian uncles like George IV and Ernest, Duke of Cumberland (see previous chapters), and they were determined that the future king would be raised as a model of probity. What resulted was a rigidly proscribed education and deportment program that kept the boy in a cocoon, utterly deprived of joy or youthful companionship. The stringent rules and regulations that governed every aspect of the prince’s life, Lord Redesdale wryly noted, might have been composed “for the use and guidance of a seminary for young ladies.”
Queen Victoria essentially wanted her heir to be a clone of her beloved husband. “You will understand how fervent my prayers and I am sure everybody’s must be, to see him resemble his angelic dearest Father in every, every respect, both in body and mind,” she wrote to her uncle King Leopold I of Belgium.
Alas, the prince was nothing like his rigid and repressed father—a defect that irked his parents no end. He “takes no interest in anything but clothes and again clothes,” Prince Albert wrote despairingly of his son. “Even when out shooting he is more occupied with his trousers than with the game!” Soon enough, the young man’s sartorial interests would be the least of his father’s worries.
Although Victoria and Albert were adamant that their son be isolated from the pernicious influences of his contemporaries, they did allow him a ten-week stint training with a battalion of the Grenadier Guards in Ireland. The prince received quite an education there, courtesy of an actress named Nellie Clifden.
Prince Albert was horrified when he heard about the affair. Ever the prude, he could not have reacted more vehemently had his son “butchered his brothers and sisters and scattered their remains in the lake at Buckingham Palace,” wrote historian Giles St. Aubyn.
In a frenzied letter Albert informed his son that the affair had caused him “the greatest pain I have yet felt in this life,” and warned him of the potentially devastating consequences. Nellie was already being called “the Princess of Wales,” Albert wrote, and, if she became pregnant, she would claim the child was the prince’s. “If you were to try to deny it, she can drag you into a Court of Law to force you to own it & there, with you in the witness box, she will be able to give before a greedy multitude disgusting details of your profligacy.… Oh horrible prospect, which this person has in her power, and any day to realize! and to break your poor parents’ hearts.”
Two months after composing this agonized screed, Prince Albert was dead. Queen Victoria blamed her son, refusing to acknowledge that typhoid had carried her adored husband away. The affair, she wrote to her daughter Vicky, was what made “beloved Papa so ill—for there must be no illusion about that—it was so; he was struck down—and I never can see [the prince]—without a shudder! Oh! that bitterness—oh! that cross!”
For the next forty years, until her own death in 1901, Victoria exacted her revenge. She was singularly determined to control every aspect of her heir’s life, while at the same time depriving him of any real responsibility or training for his future role. Sir Lionel Cust, a servant of Edward’s after he became king, wrote that “the great misfortune” of his life “was that his mother had lived too long … for the welfare of her son and successor.”
The years immediately following Prince Albert’s death were the worst. The very presence of the Prince of Wales seemed to revolt his mother, even as he tried to be solicitous toward her feelings. King Leopold of Belgium, Victoria’s uncle and confidant, told the Earl of Clarendon “that the relations between the Queen and the Prince of Wales are as bad as ever, if not worse, and that his efforts to improve them had been fruitless—it seems to be an antipathy that is incurable but quite unjustifiable—it is entirely her fault as the poor boy asks nothing better than to devote himself to comforting his Mother and with that object would be delighted to give up his foreign expedition [planned before Prince Albert’s death] but she would not hear of it and seems only to wish to get rid of him.”
Despite the fact that his presence greatly disturbed her, the queen was nevertheless keen to interfere with his life—even after his marriage to Alexandra of Denmark in 1863, when the prince was twenty-one. Lord Stanley noted that year how all London was gossiping about the “extraordinary way” in which the queen insisted on directing “the Prince and Princess of Wales in every detail of their lives. They may not dine out, except with previous approval.… In addition, a daily and minute report of what passes at Marlborough House [their London residence] has to be sent to Windsor.”
Victoria seemed convinced that her son was unworthy to succeed her. “What would happen if I were to die next winter!” she wrote to her daughter. “One shudders to think of it: it is too awful a contemplation.… The greatest improvement I fear will never make him fit for his position.” On another occasion she declared, “I often pray he will never survive me, for I know not what would happen.”
Even as she withdrew from many of her public duties as sovereign after Albert’s death, the perpetually black-clad queen refused Edward the opportunity to fill the void she left. He was kept completely idle, which led Victoria to sharply criticize his lifestyle and, in a cruel twist, convinced her that he was too irresponsible to ably serve her.
“I am not of the slightest use to the Queen,” the prince lamented. “Everything I say or suggest is pooh-poohed and my brothers and sisters are more listened to than I am.”
Indeed, the queen put infinitely more faith in her son Leopold, twelve years the future king’s junior. On one occasion Prince Leopold pulled a key from his pocket and told his companion: “It is the Queen’s Cabinet key, which opens all the secret dispatch boxes. Dizzy [Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli] gave it to me, but my brother the Prince of Wales is not allowed to have one.”
Leopold’s daughter Alice wrote in her memoirs of the impressive forbearance her uncle showed in the face of the queen’s gross unfairness: “[He] was, of course, aware of the assistance which my father [Leopold] was giving to the Queen and knew that his younger brother had access to State papers which he, though Prince of Wales, was not allowed to see. He was understandably indignant at such treatment, and I cannot help being filled with admiration for his magnanimity, for he bore no grudge against my father and was always kindness itself to my mother and me.… I consider he showed real greatness of spirit in his attitude towards my family.”
King Edward VII showed that same greatness of spirit toward Queen Victoria, despite all the indignities she heaped upon him. “It was evident from all he did and said that he greatly admired his mother,” wrote Giles St. Aubyn, “and with that discriminating forgetfulness which is the measure of a generous mind he held her memory sacred.”
* He was christened Albert Edward.
30
George V (1910–1936): Georgie and Nicky: A Fatal Friendship
Ever your devoted cousin and friend, Georgie
—KING GEORGE V
George V succee
ded his father, Edward VII, in 1910. Four years later Britain was drawn into the bloody conflagration that became known as World War I. Unlike many other European monarchs in the aftermath of that war, King George managed to keep his crown—even in the midst of great social upheaval at home. He remained a well-regarded king, and was genuinely surprised and moved by the outpouring of affection he and his wife, Queen Mary, received during the celebration of his Silver Jubilee, which took place the year before his death in 1936. The king’s cousin and friend, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, on the other hand, never got to celebrate his Silver Jubilee—thanks in part to a momentous decision made by George V in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution.
They were first cousins who looked more like twin brothers, bonded since childhood in an enduring friendship. To their family, and each other, they were Georgie and Nicky. To the rest of the world they were King George V of Great Britain and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. Though they saw each other only occasionally, the two monarchs were in constant correspondence, strengthening their ties through mutual support and encouragement—particularly as they faced their unstable and bellicose cousin Willy, better known as Kaiser Wilhelm II, in World War I. In the end, though, when Nicky needed Georgie most, friendship and family ties were not enough.
George V and Nicholas II were part of a vast network of interrelated European royals. Their mothers were Danish princesses: Alexandra, the elder sister, married the future king of England, Edward VII; the younger sister, Dagmar, married Russia’s future emperor, Alexander III. The family gatherings that sometimes brought the two young princes together cemented their friendship. “Nicky has been kindness itself to me,” George wrote to his grandmother Queen Victoria from Russia, where he attended Nicholas’s wedding to another of Victoria’s grandchildren, Alexandra of Hesse.* “He is the same dear boy he has always been and talks to me quite openly on every subject.… He does everything so quietly and naturally; everyone is struck by it and he is very popular already.”
Behind the Palace Doors Page 25