The Heir Apparent

by Jane Ridley

  Alix was in such acute pain that she was often unable to sleep, and her restlessness could only be subdued by laudanum. After sitting up all night with her, Lady Macclesfield wrote: “The light way in which the Prince regards the Princess’s illness is perfectly painful (perhaps disgusting) to me and to the Queen also.”35 Bertie stayed out later than ever. “The Princess had another bad night,” raged Lady Macclesfield, “chiefly owing to the Prince promising to come in at 1 a.m. and keeping her in a perpetual fret, refusing to take her opiate for fear she should be asleep when he came. And he never came till 3 a.m.!”36

  Jenner feared a crisis, and told the Queen that his patient stood on “the brink of a precipice.”37 Only then, when his wife was acutely agitated and fevered with a racing pulse, and the doctors injected morphia into her knee and gave her morphine to induce sleep, did Bertie seem to realize that “she is ill” and started to spend more time with her.38 He moved his desk into her sickroom so that he could write letters beside her. The Queen found Alix “greatly altered” and “wretchedly ill.”39 Jenner told her on 10 March that there were symptoms he disliked. Bertie wrote to Queen Louise of Denmark asking her to come to England, and this gave rise to wild speculation that Alix was on the verge of death. The Times published an official denial, dismissing the rumors as “unfounded as they are extraordinary.”40

  Knollys visited, and thought her “looking very pretty” in bed, lying on her back and unable to turn or bend her knee, with a large apparatus over her legs to protect them from the bedclothes. “Her hair was loose about her shoulders, & the upper part of her figure could have formed a study for a painter.”41

  Victoria found her “very low and suffering.”

  “Will it never get better,” sighed Alix, and laid her head on the Queen’s shoulder.42 The inflammation was made far worse by forcibly bending the knee under anesthetic and binding it in splints to straighten it. The doctors gave her chloroform for an hour and twenty-five minutes while they readjusted the leg.43 “She was sick several times afterwards and suffered a great deal of pain,” Bertie told Victoria, “partly from the alteration of the position of the knee and fr[om] exhaustion.”44 James Paget, the surgeon who was treating Alix, told the Queen that this was “very serious,” though he hoped in time it “would get right.” When the Queen saw Alix’s leg, it “looked pitiable in all its bandages and so wasted.”45

  What was wrong with Alix?

  Jenner told Queen Victoria that the doctors “had no experience of any case of the kind.”46 The ladies of Alix’s household, sitting up night after night beside her bed, whispered darkly that her illness was all Bertie’s fault.47 Evil rumors began to build. Perhaps he had infected his sweet, pure wife with “Disease.” Phipps was dismissive. “I fear he leads a not very healthy life,” he wrote, “but I do not believe half the ill-natured stories I hear.”48 The previous year, Phipps had reported that Bertie frequented a place named the Midnight Club and complained that he “lowers himself” too much in pursuit of pleasure.49

  “Syphilis” was the word that no one dared to mention. Rumors still persist today that Alix was the innocent victim of Bertie’s lifestyle. Syphilis was epidemic in the brothels of mid-nineteenth-century Europe, and Bertie’s encounters with prostitutes ever since his “fall” meant that he must have been exposed to it. If he was infected with the syphilis organism, Treponema pallidum, at the time of his marriage, he could hardly fail to have passed it on to Alix, as sufferers are infectious for two years. The early stages of the illness are unpleasant enough: a genital sore, then ulcers, rashes, and swollen lymph nodes. An unlucky 40 percent of sufferers experience further stages. The illness may attack the heart and sometimes the spinal cord, producing symptoms that mimic a brain tumor and end in madness. Sometimes it presents as a gumma or ulcerating tumor on the lower leg, causing a deep, gnawing pain that is worse at night and throbs remorselessly. Syphilis can damage hearing, and after her illness, Alix became increasingly deaf.50

  Retrospective diagnosis of syphilis has become a game among biographers of nineteenth-century subjects, working without proper medical records to identify a disease that manifests in a bewildering variety of forms. Alix’s case history, however, is relatively well documented, because she was attended by so many doctors. In his private diary, Sieveking described her symptoms at the start of the illness: “The right knee much swollen and very painful, the face much flushed, the tongue furred, white and creamy, the pulse above 100 … great restlessness and expressed fear of ‘rheumatic fever.’ ”51 Sieveking confirmed the diagnosis of rheumatic fever, the frightening autoimmune disease triggered by a streptococcal infection in the throat, which, in the pre-penicillin era, brought risk of death and permanent heart damage. But the diagnosis seemed not to fit. In rheumatic fever the pain moves from joint to joint, causing a “flitting polyarthritis.” Alix’s pains initially followed this pattern, but after a few days the pain settled in her knee. It was this symptom that baffled the doctors.

  Alix’s knee is proof positive that she was not suffering from syphilis, as “for all its protean manifestations in brain, skin, heart etc [syphilis] does not cause acute pain/swelling in a single joint … especially in the absence of symptoms in other systems.”52 Rather, she seems to have been suffering from a “septic” arthritis caused by some bacterium. Today it would respond to antibiotics. Then, there was no alternative but to stick it out.

  Alix’s deafness had been noticeable ever since she arrived in England, though some thought it due to “absence,” inattention, or poor English.53 Lord Stanley noted that she was “so deaf as to be unable to follow a conversation and often to answer at cross-purposes.”54 Victoria was in no doubt about the matter, writing to Vicky: “Alas! she is deaf and everyone observes it, which is a sad misfortune.”55

  According to her biographer, Georgina Battiscombe, who was herself deaf, Alix suffered from a type of deafness called otosclerosis.56 This involves a hardening of the small bone in the middle ear; it is a genetic form of deafness that strikes only women (men are carriers), and is often thought to be brought on by pregnancy. Though Queen Louise of Denmark was deaf, there is no mention of deafness among her siblings, and only one of Alix’s five children—Maud—seems to have been afflicted.

  One new piece of evidence suggests a different diagnosis. Dr. Sieveking noted in his diary that, shortly after the birth of Eddy, at the urgent request of both Bertie and himself, Alix agreed to see Joseph Toynbee, who was the leading ear specialist of the day.57 Toynbee pronounced that her deafness was “essentially nervous,” and the treatment was rest; no operation was needed.‡58

  In his scientific work, Toynbee was one of the first to describe otosclerosis, yet he did not diagnose this condition in Alix. By “nervous” deafness, he meant what is today known as sensorineural hearing loss, due to changes in the acoustic nerves, which act as microphones in the inner ear. “If he diagnosed that Alix had a ‘nervous’ deafness,” one specialist has written, “then it would be difficult to refute his finding, and this, in turn, would seem to rule out otosclerosis as the cause of Alix’s progressive hearing loss.”59 Whatever its cause, deafness was a crippling handicap for a woman like Alix, whose work depended on social contact.

  Alix was photographed that spring, her dark-rimmed eyes and loose hair a vision of Pre-Raphaelite beauty. For Bertie, however, the horrid cage around her leg symbolized her unavailability. Mermaid-like, she could not be a real wife.

  Bertie’s order page in the ledger of Poole the tailor includes the following:

  A grey diagonal Angola Pea Coat, Silk breast facings, Silk sleevings and velvet collar ………………………… £7.3s

  which was delivered personally by the great Mr. Poole himself. Bertie also ordered:

  a pair of black French classic trousers, braid sides ……… £2:14s

  a pair striped doe trousers, braid sides ……………… £2:14s.

  The ledger shows the tailor cleaning and pressing thirty-four white vests (wai
stcoats) and altering a dress coat and fancy trousers to fit the prince’s expanding waistline: by June the tailor’s bill came to £283:8s.6d.60

  Bertie’s destination was Paris, where he visited the International Exhibition staged by Napoléon III, reassuring the Queen that Alix, who had at last managed to sleep through a whole night, “says she don’t mind it at all.”61 Before he left, he attended the baby’s christening. She was named Louise; this annoyed the Queen, who made it plain that she expected a girl to be called after her. Bertie was even angrier than he had been over Victoria’s interference with George’s name: He declared it was a wish she “had no right to indulge or expect to be gratified,” as Alix was anxious to name the baby after her own mother.62 The child was given the second name of Victoria, but the Queen was not present at the christening—very few people were, as it took place in the sitting room at Marlborough House. Alix was wheeled in on her bed, looking “quite lovely” with a “white lace jacket trimmed with pink and a pink bow in her hair, the bed being covered with a blue silk coverlet.”63

  The Paris Exhibition was the sort of junket that Bertie most enjoyed: rubbing shoulders with crowned heads, attending a ball for two thousand guests at the British Embassy and calling on the emperor Napoléon, whom he found “ill and worn but as kind and cordial in manner as he always has been to me.”64 In Paris, Bertie was able to pursue his own version of foreign affairs. The court of Napoléon III was notoriously depraved, and he eagerly devoured publications such as Les Amours de Napoléon III or La Femme de César, which detailed the many mistresses of the emperor.65 The sensation of the season was Jacques Offenbach’s light opera The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein, at the Théâtre des Variétés, which poked fun at the toy armies of the minor German states, and starred the voluptuous prima donna Hortense Schneider.

  Bertie’s visit to the Variétés was dramatized by Émile Zola in Nana, the novel about the demimonde that he wrote twelve years later, in which Bertie is thinly disguised as the Prince of Scots. Zola’s research included a visit to the dressing room backstage at the Variétés, where Hortense Schneider had received the prince dressed in her costume as the Duchess of Gerolstein. Zola described the bearded, pink-complexioned prince as having “the sort of distinction peculiar to a man of pleasure, his square shoulders clearly indicated beneath the impeccably cut frock coat,” and imagined him in the dressing room of the seminaked singer: “The Prince, his eyes half-closed, followed the swelling lines of her bosom with the eyes of a connoisseur.” But for Zola, the prince is neither seedy nor undignified. Far from being tarnished, he transposes the demimonde into a make-believe world of kings and queens. When he drinks a toast in the actors’ cheap champagne, it’s as if they are at court, and the actors start to play new roles:

  The world of the theatre was re-creating the real world in a sort of solemn farce under the hot glare of the gas.… And nobody dreamed of smiling at the strange contrast presented by this real prince, this heir to a throne, drinking a barn-stormer’s champagne, and very much at ease in this masquerade of royalty, surrounded by whores, buskers and pimps.66

  General Knollys noted that the reports of Bertie’s visit were “very unsatisfactory”: “suppers after the Opera with some of the female Paris notorieties etc etc.”67 Bertie’s supposed infatuation with Hortense Schneider—she was known as Le Passage des Princes after the Paris arcade—was widely publicized.68 Another of his Paris ladies was the courtesan Giulia Beneni, nicknamed La Barucci. She owned a luxurious house at 124 Avenue des Champs-Élysées, complete with liveried footmen, a grand white-carpeted staircase with velvet-covered banisters, and a tall cabinet stuffed with jewels. When Bertie met her, she arrived forty-five minutes late, having been strictly instructed by the Duc de Gramont to be punctual. “Your Royal Highness, may I present the most unpunctual woman in France?” said the duke. Whereupon La Barucci lifted her skirts to reveal nothing but “the white rotundities of her callipygian charms.”

  “Did I not tell you to behave properly to HRH?” Gramont rebuked her afterward.

  “I showed him the best I have and it was free,” was the reply.69

  News of Bertie’s adventures reached Vicky, who later blamed wicked Paris for corrupting him. “What mischief that very court and still more that very attractive Paris has done to English society,” she wrote. “What harm to our two eldest brothers!”70 Victoria agreed. “Your two elder brothers unfortunately were carried away by that horrid Paris, beautiful though you may think it, and that frivolous and immoral court did frightful harm to English Society … and was very bad for Bertie and Affie.”71

  Aged twenty-five, Bertie was too young and too spoiled to come to terms with the fact that his beautiful wife was now a deaf cripple. In denial, he threw himself headlong into the frenzied pursuit of pleasure and late nights. Victoria, for her part, was convinced that Alix was an invalid for life. “I fear very much that she will never be what she was.” As for Bertie, she wrote, “Poor Boy, it is very sad to think of his whole existence changed and altered and dérangé by this lamentable illness.”72

  Bertie was blamed for his apparent lack of concern. Lady Macclesfield complained that “the Prince (childish as ever) does not see anything serious about it.”73 Bertie was certainly immature, but perhaps his behavior had deeper roots. In spite of his outward forbearance toward Victoria, he seethed with rage. He had grown to be genuinely fond of his wife, but he resented the way his mother and sister Vicky had conspired together to trap him into an arranged marriage. People commented on his ill looks. He spent much time away from home. He was driven by the impulse to revenge himself against his mother, but the person who suffered most from this behavior was his vulnerable wife, Alix.

  At Ascot in June, Bertie received a “flat reception” from the crowd when he appeared at the races without Alix, but he insisted on inviting the “fashionable female celebrities of the day” to luncheon, a party that Knollys thought in questionable taste.74 Some of these were harmless flirtations. He was spotted “spooning with Lady Filmer.”75 She was the wife of his friend Sir Edmund Filmer and a dancing partner of Bertie’s; shooting deer at Invercauld in 1865, he wrote that “I had the good fortune to have Lady Filmer with me (who also had a small Whit-worth rifle) and I enjoyed a very pleasant tête à tête with her.”§76

  In his diary, Lord Stanley reported, “Much talk in society about the P[rince] of Wales and his disreputable ways of going on. He is seen at theatres paying attention to the lowest class of women, visits them at their houses etc.”77 Bertie insisted on going to Paris again in July, in spite of the opposition of General Knollys, who saw the prime minister, Lord Derby, and stated his anxiety about the visit “after the scenes I had been led to believe had taken place at the former one” and with “the Princess in such a state.”78

  For Bertie, the summer of 1867 was a tipping point. He was unfaithful to Alix, not just with the “lowest class” of women, but with women in society. Perhaps to him it seemed the natural thing to do. Among the men of his set, debauchery was seen as a healthy amusement, which Bertie indulged in the same way that he drank and smoked. Alix’s illness seemed to sanction his return to bachelor ways.79 But if he expected that he could use women for sex and then discard them, he was to be disillusioned. Many of the women with whom he began relationships that summer refused to go quietly. Blackmail, pregnancy, even a court case were to return to haunt him. There was no such thing as a relationship without consequences.

  Alix was not prepared to sink gracefully into social death as a sofa-bound invalid. While Bertie was in Paris, she drove out for the first time in the garden at Marlborough House. Accompanied by Princess Louise, her friend among Bertie’s sisters, she had herself carried in a wheeled chair over a platform level with the carriage, and the chair placed where the carriage seat had been removed. Defying doctor’s orders, she was determined to appear at a military review on Bertie’s return; General Knollys was mightily relieved when the review was canceled, believing that if Alix had appeared
alongside Victoria, “the Princess would have received an ovation but it would have been at the expense of the Q[ueen].”80

  By mid-August, Alix was sufficiently recovered to travel with Bertie to Germany, to Wiesbaden, the capital of Dessau, the spa town recommended by the doctors. Accompanied by their three tiny children, twenty-five servants, and a retinue of courtiers and doctors, the Waleses steamed up the Rhine. Alix sat on the hot deck in her wheelchair in a specially constructed cabin and amused herself by drawing all day. The Prussian flag flying on the stern of the boat upset her, and she became agitated when a crowd gathered on shore to see her being carried out of the ship in a sedan chair and into a carriage: Knollys noted her extreme dislike of appearing in public as an invalid.81

  At Wiesbaden, Alix took daily baths under the supervision of Paget, her doctor, and Bertie reported her progress to the Queen: “Every day she walks on crutches and can put her foot to the ground and swing it about.”82 Bertie itched to escape downriver to the fleshpots and gambling tables of Baden, a prospect that filled Knollys with horror, on account of the “disgraceful tone” of society there and especially Bertie’s friend Marie of Baden, the wicked Duchess of Hamilton, and her scandalous son the duke, whose character was so “irretrievably lost” that there could only be “contamination” in associating with him.‖83 This was just the sort of company that Bertie most enjoyed and, ever the rebellious adolescent, he wrote to Victoria: “I know, dear Mama, so well what these German Baths are, and I think I know who to avoid and who not—and not to compromise myself in any way. I know that Vicky has written to you on the subject, but one would imagine that she thought me 10 or 12 years old and not nearly 26.”84