The Heir Apparent

by Jane Ridley

  Albert was beatified and transmogrified into a cult. At Frogmore, close to the sepulcher that housed the remains of her mother, Victoria supervised the construction of a mausoleum, her own version of the Taj Mahal, a rich and dramatic celebration of the angel of death. It was built on a marsh, and a fire burned constantly to keep off decay. Bertie was heard to remark that he “would take good care not to be buried in such a place.”40

  The anniversary of Albert’s death, 14 December, became a holy day for the Queen and her family, commemorated each year with prayers and weeping at the mausoleum. For the rest of her life Victoria dressed in widow’s cap and weeds. Alice’s wedding, which took place in the dining room at Osborne in July, was more like a funeral. Victoria sat hunched in an armchair. Affie “sobbed all through and afterwards—dreadfully.”41

  General Bruce, Bertie’s governor, who had contracted fever in the Near East, died shortly before Alice’s wedding. On the last day of his life, he spoke of Bertie’s fall.42 For Bertie, Bruce’s exit was sad but timely; Bruce had controlled him with excessive strictness. In place of a governor, Victoria appointed a comptroller and treasurer for her son: General William Knollys, a sixty-five-year-old retired soldier.‡ The Queen ordered Knollys to act as Bertie’s mentor and to report directly to her.43 Much to Bertie’s annoyance, she insisted that Knollys should be informed of his fall. Reluctantly, Bertie agreed, “hoping that this may be the last conversation that I shall have with you on this painful subject.”44

  Victoria, however, was obsessive on the matter; she couldn’t let it go. “Poor Boy,” she wrote, “who alas! cannot, as beloved Papa & good Fritz, bring ‘the white flower of a blameless life’ to the altar, but alas! must feel when that pure innocent girl looks at you with her fine eyes, ashamed at your unworthiness—oh! those wicked ones who ‘robbed you of your virtue’ as beloved Papa said. Oh! That sad stain which grieved your beloved Papa so sorely, so bitterly … let it not be blotted out from your own conscience but let it be your constant admonition to make up, by a future spotless life, for that which alas! can never be undone.”45

  Bertie’s response to this eleven-page outburst was diplomatic. “If you only knew how much I feel for you,” he wrote, “& how I see what a miserable existence you are now forced to lead, & how I often wish I could allay your suffering & sorrow, you would not I think consider me so very selfish.” As for his fall, he was contrite: “I will not touch again on that unhappy subject, which I know grieved you & Papa so much, I only hope that my past conduct has made some amends.”46

  For Bertie, writing to his mother had become like negotiating with a hostile power. His letters are devoid of real feeling. Victoria’s language of sin and redemption made little impression. How insincere his repentance was can be seen from a gossipy letter he wrote that same month to his friend Carrington. “I am sorry to hear that you went to such a disreputable place as the one you mention in your letter, as I hoped that you were conducting yourself better, but I fear that such is not the case … I hope that you have not lost Lydia Thompson’s shoe?”§47

  Freud hypothesized that men seek out prostitutes to revenge themselves on their mothers, by treating women merely as objects of sexual gratification. Bertie’s hunger for the demimonde may have represented a rebellion against his overcontrolling mother. But he always risked being found out, and whenever the Queen learned of his transgressions, she used them as an argument for refusing to allow him responsibility.

  Victoria left nothing about Bertie’s engagement to chance. She insisted on seeing Alexandra for herself, in order to judge “whether she will suit me.”48 She drew up an elaborate schedule for this meeting, choreographing each interview in advance. Bertie was also provided with detailed instructions as to how and where and when to propose to the princess. “It is dreadful to do all this without [Papa],” wailed the Queen, imploring Bertie by his marriage to “cast a few gleams of light on the declining years of my now utterly desolate … life.”49

  Traveling as Countess of Balmoral, Victoria crossed to Laeken, Uncle Leopold’s Brussels palace, on 3 September 1862, and the carefully scripted audiences with Princess Alexandra and her family took place. Victoria was overcome by tears, not at the prospect of losing her son, but because she found it “horrible” to meet Alexandra’s parents without Albert by her side. Alexandra, who had been warned that the Queen wished for virtue in her daughter-in-law, wore a tactful black dress and simple, girlish hair.50 Victoria fell for her at once. Princess Alexandra, she wrote, was “a pearl,” gentle and dignified and altogether more distinguished than her rather common family. “Tho’ quite exhausted & worn out—& in a state of nervousness & exhaustion & sorrow hardly to be described,” Victoria wrote at once giving Bertie full sanction to propose.51

  Bertie was like an actor in a play. All he had to do was learn the lines the Queen had written for him and perform them on cue. “I think,” he wrote, “that I have quite made up my mind about the young Princess, & that I should be happy with her.”52 Two days later, on 9 September, he gave a triumphant report to Victoria: “The all important event has taken place today.” As scripted by his mother, Bertie had proposed to the princess at Laeken, while out walking in the garden. “She immediately said yes; but I told her not to answer too quickly but to consider over it. She said she had long ago, I then asked her if she liked me. She said yes. I then kissed her hand & she kissed me.” Next, he asked Alexandra’s parents for their consent, and “We then went to luncheon.”53

  Bertie was under every sort of pressure to fall in love with his princess. A love match, as his uncle Leopold wrote, “destroys all the arguments of his affair being arranged for him without it being his choice.”54 Victoria shamelessly briefed both The Times and Lord Russell, her minister in Germany, to deny reports of an arranged marriage, insisting that the match was in no sense political.55 Bertie tried hard to oblige, seeming to become more enamored by the hour. Two days later he wrote to his mother: “I frankly avow to you that I did not think it possible to love a person so as I do her.”56

  No sooner was the engagement accomplished than Victoria invited Alexandra to visit her. It was less an invitation than a command. The princess was summoned to Osborne alone, without Bertie. Such was “the fear—I might almost say the horror—the Queen has of the Princess’s mother’s family,” wrote Victoria’s private secretary, General Grey, that the parents were expressly forbidden from staying.57 Prince Christian was allowed to accompany his daughter on the crossing, but Victoria ostentatiously refused to receive him, forcing him to put up at a London hotel. When Princess Louise objected, pointing out that her daughter had never before been away from home, Victoria sent unpleasant messages via her lady-in-waiting. The Queen “has been a little disapp[ointe]d,” wrote Lady Augusta Bruce, “[she] cannot help feeling an alteration in tone.”58 That the Danes must learn their place as poor relations was made painfully clear.

  Alexandra arrived at Osborne by moonlight on 5 November 1862. She later confessed to being terrified, but from the moment she landed and embraced the nine-year-old Prince Leopold, who greeted her on the pier clutching a bunch of flowers, she could do no wrong. She was gentle and unaffected, she went to bed at ten o’clock, and she spent hours sitting alone with Victoria listening to her talk about Albert. So moved was Alexandra, wrote Victoria, that she “laid her dear head on my shoulder & cried”—an act of emotional intelligence that won the Queen’s heart.59 Soon the princess was being affectionately referred to as Alix.

  The affection was mutual. “You cannot imagine how lovable the dear good Queen is,” wrote Alix (in Danish) to her sister in a letter that breathes homesickness. On long drives through the rain with the Queen in an open carriage she consoled herself by reflecting how similar the Isle of Wight was to the coast of Denmark.60

  Victoria warned Alix not to make Bertie a partisan of Denmark, and forbade her to bring a Danish maid. “It would not do for the dear young couple’s happiness if Alix had a maid to whom she could chatter away
in a language her Husband could not understand.”61 She complained that Bertie wrote to Alix in English rather than German, which “grieves and pains me as the German element is the one I wish to be cherished and kept up in our beloved home.”62 But Bertie’s laziness about German was compounded by Alix’s Danish sympathies. She had learned from her parents a horror of German, which was the language of Denmark’s enemies, and she preferred to speak English when she couldn’t use Danish. Victoria’s command was not obeyed.

  Bertie, meanwhile, was packed off on yet another foreign cruise, this time to the Mediterranean with Vicky and Fritz. As Lord Clarendon explained, Victoria wanted to keep him out of the way “till the time for Hymen is completed. Perhaps too the Queen may think that Continental temptations will be less strong than the British.”63 Like a stallion at stud, the Prince of Wales was kept in a sort of sexual quarantine.

  From Rome, Vicky gave glowing reports on Bertie. “His is a nature which develops itself slowly,” she told her mother, “and I think you will find that he will go on improving and that his marriage will do a good deal for him in that way.”64 This was the optimistic view. The beast, however, would keep rearing its ugly head. Back home, Bertie foolishly boasted about his adventures in Paris with actresses “with very little dress on” to the gossip Lord Torrington, who reported to Delane, the editor of The Times: “Evidently the young man is very hot and asked me a good many leading questions. I believe the marriage is hurried on with all speed for fear of any accident overtaking him.”65

  The wedding was set for a date in Lent, the season of sackcloth and ashes; the dress code for the court was half-mourning colors of gray, silver, and lilac, and the Queen commanded that it should take place at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, rather than London. She insisted that this had been Albert’s wish, but insiders thought the Queen’s real reason for cheating London’s show-loving crowds of a royal wedding was the fact that in St. George’s Chapel she could watch the ceremony unseen from Catherine of Aragon’s closet.66

  Alexandra arrived at Gravesend three days before the wedding. The Danish ambassador Augustus Paget, who accompanied her from Copenhagen, thought her “rather down in the mouth” during the voyage, and she had a heavy cold.67 Bertie, who was “a good deal agitated,” went to meet her.68 He was more than ten minutes late, “which was rather unfortunate,” and rushed aboard the Victoria and Albert, which had been sent to bring her from Antwerp, delighting the crowd by kissing her in full view.69 The road through London teemed with cheering crowds, and in the City even the imperturbable Alix was frightened when the Life Guards charged the crush brandishing their sabers. The crowds inspired the Poet Laureate Tennyson’s wedding ode:

  Sea-kings’ daughter from over the sea,

  Alexandra!

  Saxon and Norman and Dane are we,

  But all of us Danes in our welcome of thee,

  Alexandra!

  Welcome her, thunders of fort and of fleet!

  Welcome her, thundering cheer of the street!

  Victoria, however, read the celebrations as a tribute to her own popularity and, naturally, as recognition for Albert. The sight of any happy couple, she told Palmerston, “plunges daggers into the Queen’s widowed heart, for she is always alone.”70

  At Windsor, Victoria received Alix at the foot of the great staircase with an embrace, and then retired to her room, “desolate and sad.” Later, Alix knocked at her door and knelt before her “with that sweet loving expression which spoke volumes. I was very much moved and kissed her again and again.”71

  On the morning of the wedding (10 March 1863), Victoria dressed in her widow’s weeds and widow’s cap (“more hideous than any I have yet seen,” thought Clarendon), which she enlivened with the blue ribbon and star of the Order of the Garter, worn for the first time since Albert’s death.72 She walked from the deanery over the roof leads to the royal closet, a Gothic box high up on the wall of St. George’s Chapel.

  Inside, the chapel was packed. The Queen’s insistence on inviting her entire household left few seats for the great and the good, and invitations were highly prized. Bertie himself was allowed only four friends (Carrington was one). The adventurer Disraeli was present (on the insistence of Prime Minister Palmerston, and not, as he liked to think, because of the Queen’s special regard for him), while the Duchess of Manchester, who had once served as Mistress of the Robes, was omitted, a snub that caused a lasting rift.

  When the Queen entered the box, the entire congregation bowed. As Vicky processed up the aisle, magnificent in white satin trimmed with ermine, she caught sight of her mother and (wrote the Queen) “made a very low curtsey, with an inexpressible look of love and respect, which had a most touching effect.”73

  Next Bertie entered, wearing Garter robes and flanked by his supporters, his brother-in-law Fritz and his uncle Ernest of Saxe-Coburg.‖ He seemed pale and nervous but, some said, “more considerable” than usual.74 He bowed to his mother and kept looking up at her, Victoria thought, “with an anxious clinging look.”75 Bertie stood waiting for what seemed an eternity, ten or twenty minutes, until at last Alix appeared. Instead of the magnificent wedding dress of Brussels lace given to her by King Leopold, she wore Honiton lace patterned with roses, shamrocks, and thistles and garlanded with orange blossoms—a last-minute change of plan that signaled her role as ambassador for English fashion, though critics considered her “too sunk in greenery.”76 She was pale and trembling and red-eyed, having cried all morning at leaving her mother. Not that she was doubtful about marrying Bertie; she said to one of his sisters: “You perhaps think that I like marrying your Brother for his position but if he was a cowboy I should love him just the same and would marry no one else.”77

  Victoria was overcome during the singing of a chorale composed by Albert, but after this she recovered and looked inquisitively at the audience. Disraeli, who was nearsighted, raised his eyeglass to the royal box, and caught her icy glance. He did not venture to use his glass again. When the marriage was over, the Queen recorded, “I gave them an affectionate nod and kissed my hand to sweet Alix.”78

  Afterward, Bertie and Alix lunched with thirty-eight royal relations, while five hundred wedding guests caroused elsewhere. Not so the Queen. “I lunched alone with Baby [Princess Beatrice].”79 The wedding guests departed in an undignified crush from Windsor station. Disraeli sat on his wife’s lap on the train, while so many gems were plundered from the jewel-encrusted Maharaja Duleep Singh that he had to be locked up and sent to London by a later train. Meanwhile, Bertie and Alix departed for the honeymoon to Osborne, which, as Fritz remarked, was now a gloomy vault crammed with relics of Prince Albert.80

  Neither Bertie nor Alix wrote accounts of the wedding. From the version Victoria gave in her journal, one might think it was she, not her son, who was the star of the occasion. Victoria was superbly skilled at dramatizing her role as queen in mourning. W. P. Frith’s painting of the ceremony in St. George’s Chapel, which Victoria commissioned, encapsulates the drama. The eye is instantly drawn to the lonely figure of the black-clothed Queen standing in her box, her face and widow’s cap bathed in light. The bridesmaids and members of the royal family stare up at her, and seem almost oblivious of the bridal couple; but her gaze is firmly fixed on her son and his bride—neither of whom returns it, nor indeed do they look at each other, but seem absorbed in inner reflection.81

  A few days after the honeymoon, Bertie and Alix were photographed at Windsor with Victoria beside Albert’s marble bust, the “dear, dear protecting head” as Victoria called it.82 The day before the wedding, the Queen had taken Bertie and Alix to the mausoleum at Frogmore and opened the shrine. “He gives you his blessing,” she said, and joined their hands, took them both in her arms, and kissed them. “It was a very touching moment and we all felt it,” she wrote.83 The wedding photograph was an attempt to convey this. Victoria gazes theatrically up at Albert’s bust, but her face in profile set off against the deep black of her mourning drapery is sharply fo
cused, while Albert’s chiseled marble features dissolve into a blur. The photographer was forced to bathe the Queen’s black dress in an excess of light, which whited out Albert’s head. Victoria had positioned herself deferentially below Albert on his pillar, but he had become a faceless spirit.84 Bertie and Alix were almost irrelevant to the drama of Victoria’s grief. Bertie stands behind his mother, clean-shaven for once, puffy-eyed, plump and slightly seedy, bulging out of his too-tight black coat—he had put on weight during his tours abroad.85 Alix, in white contrasting sharply with the Queen’s black, looks neither at her husband nor his parents but skittishly over her shoulder as the photographers had taught her to do. The dance between Bertie, his wife, and his mother was about to unfold.

  * * *

  * In 1882, the future George V was tattooed “by the same old man that tattooed Papa, and the same thing too, the 5 crosses, you ask Papa to show his arm.” (RA GV/PRIV/AA36, Prince George to Princess of Wales, April 1882.)

  † This was the protocol that assigned the succession of the two duchies of Schleswig and Holstein to Denmark. Princess Louise herself was, in fact, more closely related to the King of Denmark than her husband, but as a woman she was excluded from the succession by Salic law.

  ‡ His father, another General Knollys, had been a friend of Queen Victoria’s father, the Duke of Kent, and the man to whose care the duke had commended his cast-off mistress, Julie de St. Laurent.

  § Lydia Thompson was an actress who sold her old dancing shoes to her admirers at the Crystal Palace.