by Roland Perry
A great weight had been lifted from Bertie now he was king. It had been a long wait and he must have wondered, with his own diminishing health, if his mother might outlive him. He loved her and did not wish her gone. But now that she was, he would experience a fresh surge in his existence that he hoped would pay for his patience.
A strange atmosphere enveloped London that night. People scurried through the streets and disappeared into their homes to avoid the bitter cold, which added to the pall of sadness that lowered over the city. American-born novelist Henry James, who had lived in London for the last 39 years, was in the Reform Club on Pall Mall when the news of Victoria’s death reached him. Even though he was a British subject, he held the concept of royalty in contempt, especially in light of the progress of the United States to a successful republic. But when he left the club and pulled up his coat collar against the freezing night, he noticed the reaction of the public. People spoke in hushed tones as if frightened. James was surprised by his own emotional reaction. It was after all, he said, ‘a simple running down of the old used-up watch. Just the death of an old widow who had thrown her good fat weight into the scales of general decency.’
Later, more feelings tumbled surprisingly from James. On reflection he wrote of the demise of the ‘brave old woman’ with her ‘holding-together virtue’. Searching for the source of his own reaction he decided that Victoria had been a ‘sustaining symbol’. He mourned the ‘safe and motherly old middle-class Queen, who held the nation warm under the fold of her big, hideous Scotch-plaid shawl’. Her reign had been ‘so extraordinarily convenient and beneficent’. It had ‘prevented all sorts of accidents’.
James could sense that the Victorian era, with all its faults and virtues, was already fading away. On dredging his own sentiments his reflective words fell into the mood that he noticed had pervaded the streets. There was uncertainty about what the future held with Bertie at the helm. For the moment, ‘hope’ was the only thing to hold on to.
The coffin was transferred across the Solent to Portsmouth on 1 February and the following day it was taken to Victoria Station. People were in black beside the track. In London, the crowd on the pavement strained to see the coffin, which was on a gun-carriage drawn by men of the horse artillery. Once glimpsed, many spectators bowed their heads, only to look up again to see four monarchs following the coffin on horseback: Edward VII, Kaiser Wilhelm, King George I of the Hellenes and King Carlos of Portugal. Crown princes of Germany, Romania. Greece, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Siam (Thailand) were in train. The Emperor of Austria, the Tsar of Russia and the King of Italy were also well represented.
At Paddington the coffin was taken by train to Windsor, where thousands withstood the icy cold winds of early February to take in the moment marking the end of the longest rule by a monarch in British history.
Sailors replaced the artillery men in dragging the carriage through Windsor streets, and up to the castle’s Long Walk towards St George’s Chapel, which was not Victoria’s favourite. A short service took place, while cannon fired a salute of 81 guns, one for each year of her life. On 4 February, the artillery men were back in harness pulling the carriage to her final resting place next to Albert in the mausoleum at Frogmore. After her husband’s death, she had had the mausoleum built with the Latin inscription above the door: ‘Vale desideratissime. Farewell most beloved. Here at length I shall rest, with thee in Christ I shall rise again.’
Victoria had instructed that the two white marble statues of Albert and her created by Turin-born, Paris-raised London resident Carlo Marochetti were to be placed side by side on the sarcophagus of Aberdeen granite. But there had been a problem. Her own statue had been sealed into a cavity in a Windsor Castle wall. One old worker from the 1860s was located and he recalled its location. It was retrieved and placed next to Albert. His effigy stared straight ahead, like a Greek god’s gaze fixed on eternity. But, by direction, Marochetti had portrayed Victoria with a more human look, inclined towards Albert in a white, pristine environment.
The mausoleum’s gas lamps were left burning eerily as the family members filed outside. As if by design, sleet floated down on the grass, soon covering it in white too.Victoria had planned the end so well that even the weather bowed to her wishes.
45
EDWARD VII—PAYBACK TIME
Victoria had gone but the secrets of her life lived on in the Victoria–Vicky correspondence. The revelations in them could damage, even ruin, the monarchy and revive images of decadence, which had been with the institution before Victoria. In the early 1900s, this would not be acceptable and Bertie and the other members of the royal family knew it. But because he was preoccupied with other issues, including attempts to rid the world of evidence of his mother’s relationships with Brown and Karim, Bertie put it down the list of his immediate concerns.
Meanwhile, witnesses to the Victorian era and her secret life began to pass on. Just two weeks after Victoria’s death, Dr Husna De Crepeney died in a Paris hospital with a close friend, Céleste Vernard, in attendance. Husna had been born in 1814, making her 48 when she was finally allowed to graduate as a doctor in Sweden in 1862. After sitting further exams in France, De Crepeny practised for the next four decades. Her interests were varied and she was influenced by Vernard, the long-time companion she had first met at the Paris Hippodrome in the 1840s. Vernard had married an impoverished count—Lionel de Chabrillan, the first French consul to Australia. When he died and was buried in Melbourne in 1858, Vernard returned to Paris and established herself as an outstanding writer and impresario in literature, opera and theatre. She renewed her friendship with Husna, who inherited a fortune when her father died in 1869. Some of the money was used to fund Vernard’s many creative ventures, particularly the Mogador theatre in the working-class area of North Paris. Husna’s last request was to ask Vernard to hang a portrait of Elphinstone in the foyer of the theatre, telling her: ‘You spoke of your many loves, but you always said there was one above the others—your husband, the Count. I had but one, the thirteenth Lord Elphinstone, and because he was so special I did not seek another, apart from the “man” I married, who was someone I could never love . . .Lord E was the only true, true love in my heart.’
(The painting remained there another forty years until World War II, when it disappeared during the German occupation of Paris, 1940 to 1944.)
Winston Churchill, 26 years old and a cocky young celebrated war correspondent, was in Canada lecturing on the Boer War when he heard about Victoria’s death. He was intrigued to see how Bertie, whom he had advised by private communiqués about the South African conflict, would perform as king.
‘Will it entirely revolutionise his way of life?’ Churchill later asked his Brooklyn-born mother, Lady Randolph Churchill. It was a question on many lips.‘Will he sell his horses and scatter his Jews or will Reuben Sassoon be enshrined among the crown jewels and other regalia?’
‘No,’ she replied, ‘he will remain true to all of them, including his horses and mistresses.’
‘Including you?’
‘I was speaking generally.’
‘Will the Keppel be made Lady of the Bedchamber?’
‘I would think so.’
‘I am glad he has got his innings at last, and am most interested to watch how he plays it.’
Bertie’s turn at the wicket got off to a bright start. After the closed-off nature of Victoria’s court for 40 years, Bertie came across as accessible, friendly and frank. He seemed decisive without being imperious, dignified without being stubborn. Bertie was free from constraint after a lifetime of being conscious of parental ‘control’, even though he had rebelled with his licentious ways. Mother’s disapproving look was not there to hound or haunt him anymore. His first act was to be known as King Edward VII, not the King Albert Edward that his mother had wished. He would say that he could not match his father in name or performance but in reality he did not wish to be in his shadow. There would be no confusion in the annals of hi
story about who was who.
Personal matters concerning Victoria were attended to first. Abdul Karim, his family and other Indians were told to leave the royal court, the palaces and the country. Letters and diaries became the new king’s chief concern. Bertie sent Princess Beatrice, his wife (now Queen Alexandra), and some guards to Frogmore Cottage where they demanded all the letters written by Victoria to the Munshi. While the Munshi and his wife wept inside, the correspondence of the heartfelt union and photographs warmly signed by Victoria were put in a pile outside the cottage and set alight. Bertie was attempting to wipe the memory of what he saw as his mother’s indiscretions.
Shrabani Basu wrote in her book Victoria and Abdul:‘The new King did not want to see any more turbans or smell the curries from the royal kitchens.’
Memorabilia of John Brown, including statues, was also discarded, either destroyed or dumped somewhere.This was posthumous revenge for his mother’s perceived ‘infidelities’. Bertie wanted no reminder of these philanderings, which he believed had retarded his own progress with Victoria. He hated Osborne House and wanted to sell it. He ordered Windsor to be ‘uncluttered’, which meant he wanted most of his mother’s things to be taken away or at least stored out of his sight. He did away with paintings, statues and heirlooms that she held dear.
Three weeks after his mother’s funeral, Bertie visited Paris and made an unscheduled detour into Germany to see Vicky in the last week of February 1901. He took with him Ponsonby and an armed bodyguard for a secret mission. Vicky had reminded him several times to take possession of all her letters to Victoria, which had been so damning of Willy. Bertie’s mission was a tricky one. Ponsonby, with three soldiers, would take the boxed letters from the Friedrichshof attic, load them in a truck and head for the border with France. Once over the border the boxes would be put on a train with the armed guard and taken to England and stored at Windsor. But it had to be done quickly. Once Wilhelm II knew that his uncle was visiting his mother, he was expected to make the journey himself. Willy was a perennial paranoid. He suspected the English and the French were always conspiring against him. In this case, he was correct, at least about the English.
Ponsonby and his guard arrived on 23 February 1901 and left the next day with all Vicky’s letters. Bertie stayed on for four days, knowing this would most likely be the last time he saw his beloved sister alive. He had always regarded her as more a surrogate mother than an elder sister, for Vicky had always given him sound advocacy and had his interests at heart.
As the others predicted, Willy came to the castle with a full entourage. He had always been afraid of his imperious, strong-willed uncle. Despite Willy’s differences with Vicky, he always sought her approval and part of his bombast, she always suspected, was an effort to impress her. He had his staff ask questions of his mother’s courtiers and discovered Ponsonby’s mission. Willy was furious. He tried to arrange a private audience with his mother but she would only see him with Bertie present. The three discussed the letter issue at the long dinner table on 25 February after a six-course meal attended to by twenty staff.
‘Those letters belong to me, the kaiser, your son!’
‘She has left them to the British crown,Willy,’ Bertie said, chomping on a cigar.
‘They are letters from my mother to my grandmother.’
‘And my sister to my mother,’ Bertie said, keeping calm.
Willy asked his mother,‘Why do you betray me so?’
‘It is not betrayal,’ Bertie interjected,‘It is what your mother wants. The argument should end there.’
‘But why, Mother?’ Willy implored her.
‘I felt that all my correspondence with Mama should be in England. I own them, remember, and can do what I wish with them.With respect, Willy, they are more for my dear mama’s memory. They have nothing to do with you.’
‘But when you . . .’
‘Pass over? It changes nothing.They reside in England.The letters are owned by your uncle now.’
‘But the copyright surely is with your estate?’
‘And I am willing them to England.’
‘Your brother over your son!’
‘No, you are avoiding the point. I believe that because the correspondence between me and Mama is connected to the British throne, not the German, then they should be in England.’
Willy fiddled with the glove to his withered arm. He looked like he might cry.
‘Why the sudden interest in your mother’s correspondence?’ Bertie asked. ‘Have you ever asked to see or have it before?’
Willy blinked, got up and left the table in a huff, saying nothing.
One of his staff followed him up the long, winding staircase as he headed to his room.Willy stopped beneath a portrait of Victoria.
‘Your majesty,’ the courtier said, ‘I could not help overhearing the discussion.’
‘Yes?’ Willy said impatiently.
‘I just wished to tell you, majesty, that I have been to the attic with our informant. He showed me a huge cache of letters.They were written by Victoria to your mother.’
‘Have you read them? How many are there?’
‘No, we would not presume to read them, your majesty. There are several thousand of them.’
Willy thought for a moment and shook his head.
‘If they were left by my uncle they must be of no interest, no value,’ he said dismissively and continued on his way to his bedroom miffed and preoccupied by his relatives’ actions behind his back.
Vicky did not have long to live when she wrote again to Bertie mid-summer in 1901 to tell him that the cache of letters from Victoria to her was still in the attic. She suggested that they should also be taken back to England.
‘I thought they had gone with my letters until recently I was told that mama’s were still there in a separate part of the attic. Remember that they contain information about the Elphinstone affair, Papa, Brown and Karim, among many others.They should reside at Windsor, or even be destroyed.’
Bertie wrote back reassuring her that he would arrange for Victoria’s letters to be returned, but with all the other issues of kingship on his plate, it slipped his mind. He had business and pleasure of higher concern to concentrate on.Then on 5 August 1901,Vicky died. Bertie and Alix attended the funeral but did not visit Friedrichshof.Victoria’s voluminous correspondence remained in two large boxes under sheets gathering dust in the castle’s attic.
46
THE EDWARDIAN ERA
In 1904 Bertie achieved his much-desired Entente Cordiale with the French, after a decade of frosty relations, in which he had even seen scurrilous, near-obscene articles and cartoons about him in French magazines. The agreement delineated British and French colonies in North Africa, and ruled out future wars between the two countries. It marked the end of centuries of Anglo-French rivalry and Britain’s isolation from Continental affairs.Although nothing was said publically, the agreement was also an attempt to counterbalance the growing dominance of the German Empire and its ally, Austria-Hungry.
Bertie’s demeanour, proficiency in the French language and genuine love of most things across the Channel caused him again to become as popular there as at home. It also gave him renewed access to his beloved Paris brothels. He had become an icon for madams wishing to encourage business, and prostitutes desiring generous payment for services. The latter had to be more inventive than ever, given his majesty’s limited capacities as he wandered riskily, but happily into his sixties. Despite doctors’ exhortations, his wife’s concern and his mistresses’ warnings, Bertie did not curtail his daily consumption of twelve fat cigars, and twenty cigarettes, champagne and whisky, and copious amounts of rich food. His kingly position provided the opportunity for more of everything. He did not hold back. Bertie’s constitution was amazing, but obesity, heart disease and now worsening asthma began to trouble him.
But by 1906 there was little evidence he was slowing down apart from with his sexual indulgences. Even then he would not giv
e up visiting high-class bordellos, especially his favourite, La Chabanais. In early June 1906 he decided to take his son George, next in line for the throne, to Paris to celebrate George’s forty-first birthday. They stayed at Le Meurice Hotel, met briefly with the French president and prime minister at the Élysée, and visited the Louvre. At 6 p.m. the king told George he had a ‘private meeting’ and that he would be back at 9 p.m. to dine with his son at Les Innocents, an exclusive club restaurant.
Bertie’s undisclosed rendezvous place was La Chabanais where he and three royal bodyguards were met by the brothel manager, who had shut the establishment for three hours for the king’s visit.The courtiers were offered drinks at a dimly lit bar while the king waddled off to his private Hindu Room with his former coat-of-arms above the ornate, four-poster canopied bed. He sat on his love-chair, and loosened his shoes while the manager paraded six young women for his selection. There were three French, two from Africa and one from Siam (Thailand). Bertie chose three.The rejected three fussed about, filling the bath with champagne and lighting Bertie’s cigar, while the ‘selections’, all scantily clad, removed some outer garments and helped Bertie undress. They were soon drinking with him, kissing and caressing everywhere. After about 30 minutes of contortions and cavorting on the love chair, he was so out of breath that he signalled he had had enough. He was helped from the chair by the women, soaped down, and taken to his copper bath. He invited the three other girls to join him in the bath.