by Jane Ridley
Vicky and Fritz moved away from the Danish group and pretended to admire the new frescoes in the German Nazarene style that artfully obliterated the crude medieval stonework. Vicky tried desperately to overhear the conversation; this meeting was crucial to her marriage diplomacy, the Queen had written obsessively detailed instructions from England, and Vicky was naturally nervous. At first, the encounter between Bertie and Alexandra was stilted. In the flesh, Bertie thought Alexandra a disappointment after the studio photographs, which showed an oval-faced beauty posed against a profile-flattering mirror, her tiny waist exaggerated by the big checks of her full gathered skirt. In reality, her nose was too long and her forehead too low. But after fifteen minutes or so, observers thought that “the reverse of indifference on both sides soon became unmistakeable.” Perhaps because she was unaware how much was at stake, the sixteen-year-old Alexandra was not shy. Vicky noted approvingly her simple and unaffected manner, and thought her forward for her age—“her manners are more like 24.”31
The scene at Speyer Cathedral is intensely visual, almost filmic in its immediacy. Communication was a matter of bows and curtseys, the touch of a gloved hand, an incline of the head; Alexandra could speak English—she had had English nurses since childhood—but she and Bertie barely exchanged words. Alexandra remained silent after the meeting, or at least there is no record of what she thought. Not for six months did her mother tell her of the Prince of Wales’s intentions.
Bertie returned home to Balmoral mildly pleased, but in no hurry to wed. To his mother’s dismay, it was evident that he was not smitten. “As for being in love,” she wrote, “I don’t think he can be, or that he is capable of enthusiasm about anything in this world.”32 Vicky, too, was annoyed that, after all her negotiations, Bertie was unmoved—incapable, apparently, of feeling passion for “that sweet lovely flower—young and beautiful—that even makes my heart beat when I look at her—which would make most men fire and flames—not even producing an impression enough to last from Baden to England.”33 All sorts of objections now occurred to Bertie: Alexandra’s family must first visit England, he didn’t want children (“which for so young a man is so strange a fear,” thought Victoria); he was too young—he was after all not yet twenty.34
At this point, Albert’s patience snapped. He gave Bertie an angry lecture and the next day handed him a note of what he had said. If Alexandra and her parents came to Windsor, warned Albert, Bertie would be duty-bound to propose. If he delayed, he risked losing “a positive and present advantage for the hope of future chances which … probably may never occur.”35
Albert could feel the game slipping away. From Coburg, his brother Ernest objected to a Danish match. Albert loftily brushed him aside. “I am not, as you suppose, asking ‘What has it to do with you?’ ” he began, and then wrote a letter saying precisely that.36 More wounding was a letter from old Stockmar, now retired to Coburg, who wrote urging the unsuitability of the match. The purpose of the marriage, he pointed out, was to correct Bertie’s weakness, but so tarnished was Alexandra’s family that matrimony was bound to have the opposite effect. Alexandra’s mother was rumored to be a loose woman who had affairs, while her father was an imbecile. Stockmar’s defection gave Albert a “dreadful shock,” but he was no less determined to press the marriage.37
Bertie, however, had compelling reasons for delaying. Nellie Clifden was back in London. Gossips whispered that she now styled herself the Princess of Wales. It was rumored that when Bertie went to Windsor for his twentieth birthday on 9 November 1861, Nellie followed him and he smuggled her into the castle.
Nellie briefly became Bertie’s mistress. Through her, and her friends among the Guards officers, Bertie made his first forays into a secret London nightlife of theaters, casinos, and women in deep décolletage. The 1860s was a decade of sexual liberation, a brief interlude of eroticism that has been obscured to posterity by Victorian prudishness and respectability. The world in which Nellie was the girlfriend of a number of young officers was not squalid or furtive; it was fashionable and fast.
This was the era in which Bertie reached manhood, and it shaped his sexuality for life. There are hints about his initiation with Nellie—though only hints, as he was already clever at hiding his tracks—in letters to his friend Charles Carrington. Referring to “our friend N,” whom Carrington identified as “Nelly Clifton [sic] a well known ‘London Lady’ much run after by the household brigade,” Bertie wrote:
I hope that you will continue to like Cambridge … and I trust that you will occasionally look at a book, which at present (entre nous) you have not much done. You won’t I’m sure forget those few hints I gave you regarding certain matters, and I have not forgotten those you gave me at the same time. I am glad to hear that our friend is in good health as I had not heard anything about her for some time.… PS: You won’t I hope forget your promise not to show anybody any of my letters. AE38
By “certain matters,” it seems Bertie meant carnal knowledge, horseplay, and a jokey, manly boisterousness.39 Little wonder that he was reluctant to exchange Nellie’s hoydenish charms for prudish monogamy with a flat-chested teenage Danish princess.
On 12 November, Lord Torrington, a courtier and gossip, came into waiting at Windsor and repeated to Albert the rumors about Nellie’s seduction of Bertie at the Curragh. Victoria never forgot Albert’s misery. “Oh!! that face, that heavenly face of woe and sorrow which was so dreadful to witness!”40
Albert penned a long, self-pitying letter to Bertie, writing “with a heavy heart, on a subject which has caused me the deepest pain I have yet felt in this life.” How could Bertie allow himself to have “sexual intercourse” with this woman—he couldn’t bring himself to write “prostitute.” “To thrust yourself into the hands of one of the most abject of the human species, to be by her initiated in the sacred mysteries of creation, which ought to remain shrouded in holy awe until touched by pure & undefiled hands.” The language throbs with repressed sexual tensions. “At your age,” counseled Albert, “the sexual passions begin to move in young men & lead them to seek explanation to relieve a state of vague suspense & desire. Why did you not open yourself to your father?… I would have reminded you [of] … the special mode in which these desires are to be gratified … by … the holy ties of Matrimony.”41 Albert’s pen ran away with him as he painted a lurid picture of Nellie blackmailing Bertie, of illegitimate children and law cases.
Bertie was contrite. Though penitent, however, he refused to give the names of the officers who had led him into sin, and he denied that Nellie had come to Windsor. In fact, it seems there was a prostitute at Windsor on his birthday, but it wasn’t Nellie.42 Possibly it was a woman named Green. In November 1864, Bertie was hounded by a “blackguard” called Green, who was trying to blackmail him for events that took place “above three years ago.” From the letters of the royal advisers, it seems that Green’s wife had ensnared Bertie into “wickedness”: There could be no doubt, they wrote, “who was the tempter and who the tempted.” Green and his wife were paid an annuity of £60 in exchange for keeping silent and leaving the country to live in New Zealand.43
Though Bertie told his father only half the truth, Albert was mollified. But he gave his son a stark warning: “You must not, you dare not be lost; the consequences for this country & for the world at large would be too dreadful! There is no middle course possible … you must either belong to the good, or to the bad in this life.” In the future, he told Bertie, when speeches were made about the virtue of the royal family, people would always stare at him. “The loose women of London (who form a confraternity) will consider you good sport, & look at you with an effrontery—offering their ware.”44
Albert accurately predicted Bertie’s sexual politics, but his inflamed language and fevered emotions demand explanation. Sleeping with prostitutes was not exceptional behavior for young, healthy upper-class males. As Victoria’s half sister, Feodora, wrote: “It is one of the greatest trials parents can have to go
through, yet, Alas! how frequent! not the less distressing though.”45 Bertie’s alleged profligacy, wrote Lord Granville, “as yet consisted in losing that which few men, well fed and with animal spirits long retain.”46 No doubt Bertie’s fall threatened to jeopardize the Danish wedding, which, if it was to be passed off as a love match, depended upon keeping him in a state of pent-up sexual frustration so that he fell madly in love at first sight. But Albert’s overreaction is symptomatic of his own unbalanced state. Nellie Clifden stirred painful memories of his childhood, which had been scarred by the debaucheries of his father and the adultery of his mother. And the Prince Consort was a dying man.
Ever since he had visited Coburg the previous autumn, Albert had thought he was close to death. Out driving one day, his carriage horses bolted. As the runaway horses galloped headlong toward a railway crossing, Albert flung himself out. He was cut and bruised and badly shaken. He became depressed and emotional. Out walking with his brother, Ernest, he broke down; tears streamed down his cheeks as he declared that he would never see Coburg again. When he paid a farewell visit to Stockmar, his old mentor thought that he lacked the will to live.47
Albert returned to England suffering from diarrhea and stomach cramps. Ever since boyhood, he had complained of a “weak stomach,” and his gastric attacks had become progressively worse and more frequent. Stress and overwork made him vulnerable, and to this was added the depression of a lonely man with few friends in England. Retrospective diagnosis is a tricky business, but it seems likely that Albert suffered from some form of chronic, recurring gastric illness.48
Now forty-two and a grandfather, he looked heavy, paunchy, and balding. He was always cold; when he rose early to work on dark winter mornings, he wore a wig to warm his bald pate.
On 25 November 1861, Bertie received a surprise visit at Cambridge from Albert, who had resolved to have it out with him. Carrington accompanied his friend to the station. Bertie seemed nervous, and Carrington stood on the platform and watched as the Prince Consort kissed his son and they drove off in a coach to Madingley.49 It was a wet and stormy day, but Albert insisted on going for a private walk with Bertie. Bertie mistook the way, and by the time they returned, Albert was soaked to the skin, with racking pains in his back and legs. He had been tormented by sleeplessness and “rheumatism” for the past fortnight, but he stayed up talking to Bertie until one a.m.
What passed between them is not known, but the result was that Albert forgave his son.50
Albert returned to Windsor a sick man. “I never saw him so low,” said Victoria.51 She blamed Albert’s depression and sleeplessness on Bertie’s fall, which “broke him quite down.” Albert himself confided in Vicky that his “shattered state” was due to worry, “about which I beg you not to ask questions.”52 Neither Albert nor Victoria could see that his anxiety over Bertie was an emotional overreaction, as much a symptom as the cause of his wretchedness.
Watching the Eton volunteers two days later, Albert shuddered inside his fur-lined coat. The day was warm, but he felt as if water were being poured down his back. Not until 7 December, after he had been miserably ill for more than two weeks, did the doctors make a diagnosis of “fever,” meaning typhoid. Listless and irritable, unable to eat or sleep, Albert wandered restlessly day and night, pacing Windsor’s state bedrooms in his quilted dressing gown.
In Cambridge, Bertie spent his time larking with Natty Rothschild and his hounds. “It is perhaps better to say as little as possible about the festivities here,” a conscience-stricken Natty later wrote.53 When Albert was diagnosed with typhoid, Bertie was warned that he must not return to Windsor, for fear the fever was epidemic.54 But he received little detailed news about his father’s illness, and Victoria wrote no letters to him. Vicky, on the other hand, who was pregnant in Berlin and not permitted to travel, was kept fully informed by Victoria, who wrote almost daily to her daughter.
Victoria found the diagnosis of fever oddly reassuring. Sir William Jenner promised her the prince would recover when the fever had taken its natural course, and she allowed herself to hope. She seemed not to realize that Albert had become dangerously ill. Only the eighteen-year-old Alice, who sat for long hours by her father’s bedside, knew the truth.
On Wednesday, 11 December 1861, Alice wrote to Bertie telling him that Albert was “very ill, but continues to improve.”55 In fact, the doctors that evening noticed an ominous change in Prince Albert’s breathing, and they feared the onset of the dreaded “congestion of the lungs,” or pneumonia.56 Later, as Alice read aloud from the Bible, Albert stopped her and asked: “Is your Mother in the room?”
“No,” said Alice.
“Before you go to bed tonight I want you to write to your sister at Berlin & tell her that she must be prepared for the worst. I feel sure I shall never get over this.” The next day Albert’s fever was worse, he became delirious, and he vomited foul-smelling, bloodied mucus into a bowl held by Alice. Again he asked her: “Is your Mother here?” and finding her alone, he asked if she had done as he wished.
“Yes,” said Alice, “but I also added that we hoped you saw danger where there was none.”
“Oh,” said he, “you could not say that now. I see the doctors think me in great danger.”57
Albert never asked for Bertie nor mentioned his name. Victoria had no intention of summoning him. So it was Alice who sent a telegram to her brother in Cambridge, asking him to return to Windsor.58 It was “cautiously worded” and gave no indication that Albert was critically ill.59 Bertie spent Friday hunting, “rejoicing over the good news from Windsor,” which he had received in Alice’s earlier letter.60 Not until he returned in the afternoon did he see the telegram, and he thought so little of it that he decided to stay for a dinner engagement with some dons, and left by the eleven o’clock train. He arrived at Windsor at three a.m., talking cheerfully. He was “appalled” to learn how ill his father really was.61
When Bertie saw his father at ten a.m. the next day (Saturday, 14 December 1861), Albert briefly recognized him, but his breathing was alarmingly rapid, his tongue was blackened and swollen, he could barely speak, and his face was changed. He rambled incoherently, repeating Bertie’s name. The doctors still gave slight grounds for hope, and Bertie wrote to Louis, Alice’s fiancé: Their father was “fighting for his life. In 24 hours we will know for sure—almighty God hear our prayers.”62
By late afternoon, it was plain that Albert was sinking. The doctors prepared for the end. At five thirty p.m., the bed was wheeled to the center of the room, and Victoria sat on one side. “Gutes Frauchen” (good little wife) were Albert’s last coherent words to her. He agreed to see the Prince of Wales, but when Bertie took his hand, followed by Helena, Louise, and Arthur, Albert was dozing and showed no signs of recognition. He asked for Sir Charles Phipps, and his three private secretaries trooped in one after another and kissed his hand, weeping as they did so.
As the evening wore on, Albert’s breathing grew more painful and he was bathed in sweat. Victoria knelt beside him, holding his left hand, which was already cold. Alice knelt opposite her. At the foot of the bed knelt Bertie with Helena. This ghastly tableau continued for some time until the Queen could bear it no longer and rushed from the room. At ten forty-five p.m., Alice heard the struggle for breath that she knew was the death rattle, and called her back. After a few gentle breaths it was all over.
Victoria flung herself passionately upon the bed and embraced her dead husband, uttering every endearment she knew. She was removed from the room in hysterics.
Bertie followed her, threw his arms round her neck, and cried: “Indeed Mama I will be all I can to you.” He promised to do his utmost to take his father’s place. He told her he would “hold his life to hers.” Victoria kissed him, and said, “I’m sure my dear boy you will.”63
In the first few days after Albert died, Bertie stayed very close to Victoria. He barely left her room; he wrote letters for her and took meals to her, waiting on her like a devoted serv
ant. The Queen was sedated with opiates, but she couldn’t bear Bertie or Alice to be away from her. To observers it seemed as if the Queen and her heir were reconciled.64 But the stark fact was that if Alice had not summoned him, Bertie would not have been present at Albert’s deathbed. As it was, the death came as a profound shock, for which he was utterly unprepared.
Albert’s funeral took place in wintry gloom at St. George’s Chapel on 23 December 1861. Sobbing uncontrollably at being forced to tear herself away from Albert’s deathbed, the Queen had already left Windsor for Osborne with Alice, Louise, and Helena; it was customary for widows not to attend their husbands’ funerals, and Victoria was in no state to appear in public. Bertie was chief mourner and walked at the head of the procession behind the coffin, wearing a kilt and accompanied by the weeping eleven-year-old Arthur. (Affie was away at sea, and the hemophiliac Leopold was recuperating in the South of France.) On entering the chapel, Bertie was “very much distressed.”65 Albert’s body, dressed in the uniform of a field marshal—even in death he was on duty—was lowered into a temporary resting place in the crypt below the altar, a space more like a coal hole that contained the remains of the kings of England.66
Naturally the doctors were blamed for the prince’s death. “They are not fit to attend a sick cat,” said Lord Clarendon. The diagnosis of fever was made very late, but this may have been deliberate. Sir James Clark knew his patients’ psychology well enough to predict that the very word “fever,” which to the Victorians spelled the killer typhoid, would cause the Queen to have hysterics and Albert to resign himself to death. But the consequence of Clark’s efforts to protect Albert’s peace of mind was that the Prince Consort received no professional nursing. He was attended only by Alice and his valet; he was not confined to bed but allowed to wander about from room to room.67