The Heir Apparent

by Jane Ridley

  Sir Charles appeared in the witness box on day three of the trial (Friday, 18 February), and did his best to involve Bertie. His counsel, Serjeant Ballantine, examined him:

  —Were you also aware that the Prince of Wales was an acquaintance of your wife?—I was.

  —I believe you had not personal acquaintance with his Royal Highness?—I cannot say that I knew him well. I had a slight acquaintance, and had spoken to him, but he was not a friend of mine. I was not intimate with him.

  —You were aware that he was acquainted with your wife’s family, and was on intimate terms with them?—Certainly.

  —Did he ever come to your house upon any invitation of yours?—Never.

  —Did you ever have any conversation with your wife about him? Did you ever express your desire as to her not continuing her acquaintance with his Royal Highness?—I did. I warned her against continuing her acquaintance with him.

  —Lord Penzance: What was it that you said to her about not continuing this acquaintance with his Royal Highness?

  —Sir C. Mordaunt: I said I had heard in various quarters certain circumstances connected with his previous career which caused me to make the remark.93

  Bertie was not actually cited as corespondent, but Sir Charles’s evidence forced him into the witness box. As Bertie told the Queen: “He took care to mention my name so often,—& in order to compromise me in every possible way—that I fear I have now no other alternative but to come forward and clear myself of the imputations wh[ich] he has cast upon me.”94

  The Lord Chancellor, Lord Hatherley, considered that by expressing his willingness to appear in court, Bertie would silence the rumors about him.95 Sir William Knollys agreed, convinced as he was that Bertie was “innocent of anything beyond thoughtlessness.”96 Bertie’s letters to Harriett appeared in The Times on 21 February, a leak that certainly benefited Bertie even if his advisers did not inspire it. As the Lord Chancellor wrote, the publication of the letters “has really been of great service, though probably intended for annoyance, for persons have been surprized [sic] to find them so simple and free from impropriety.”97

  The danger, as Lord Chief Justice Sir Alexander Cockburn warned, was that by going into the witness box, Bertie would expose himself to hostile cross-examination.98 Behind the scenes, Prime Minister Gladstone worked to prevent this.d

  On “Saturday evening” (19 February), Bertie scrawled a note to Francis Knollys from Marlborough House. “I saw Sir Thomas Moncreiffe this evening and had a most satisfactory interview with him. He is coming here tomorrow at 3 to your room.” Also summoned were Bertie’s doctor, Oscar Clayton, and his solicitor, Arnold White. “They had better each be in a separate room.” It sounds like a drawing-room farce, but the purpose of this conference was to prepare for Bertie’s appearance in the witness box. “I am in great hopes that this horrid business will now end very well,” he told Knollys.99

  Bertie was scheduled to give evidence on day five of the case (Wednesday, 23 February). He entered the witness box at around three p.m., coming in from a door at the back of the box, and when he appeared, the court, which was packed, fell silent. Dr. Deane, counsel for the Moncreiffes, examined him:

  —Were you acquainted with Lady Mordaunt before her marriage?

  —I was.

  The prince’s calm, assured manner breathed patrician honesty as Dr. Deane bowled soft questions at him.

  —We have heard in the course of this case that your Royal Highness used hansom cabs occasionally. I do not know whether this is so.—It is so.e

  —I have only one more question to trouble your Royal Highness with. Has there ever been any improper familiarity or criminal act between yourself and Lady Mordaunt?—There has not.100

  Bertie pronounced this answer in a firm, manly tone, and clapping burst out in the court, but it was instantly checked. To Bertie’s relief, Serjeant Ballantine, the formidable counsel for Sir Charles, whose cross-examination Bertie had been dreading, declined to question him. This was presumably Gladstone’s doing.

  The ordeal lasted seven minutes, and Bertie received an ovation as he left the court. Later that day he wrote a relieved letter to the Queen: “I trust that by what I have said today the public at large will be satisfied that the gross imputations wh[ich] have so wantonly been cast upon me are now cleared up.”101 That night Bertie and Alix dined with Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone. “Extremely gracious and kind,” wrote Gladstone in his diary. “It is a critical time.”102 The next day The Times printed a long leading article defending the prince, whose sole error was that he had been too careless of his reputation. As the editor Delane told the palace, “the whole British nation was relieved and rejoiced by the Prince’s evidence.”103 The jury’s verdict, delivered the same day, was that Harriett Mordaunt had never been in a mental state to answer Sir Charles’s suit. Her confession was the raving of a madwoman. Sir Charles did not get his divorce.

  No one claimed that Bertie was the father of Harriett’s child. But few agreed with Alix that he stood “white as snow in the face of the world.”104 Tradition among the family of Sir Charles Mordaunt maintains that Bertie committed adultery with Harriett.105 On the other hand, Harriett’s great-nephew, Iain Moncreiffe, family historian and genealogist, was convinced that Bertie was innocent, and had not “tampered with Aunt Harriett.”106 Queen Victoria shrewdly wrote: “He did not know more of, or admire, the unfortunate, crazy, Lady Mordaunt any more than he does or did other ladies.”107 Even if he was innocent, he was damned. The republican Reynolds’s Newspaper considered that his “childish and ungrammatical letters” revealed the heir to the throne as being a dunderhead, uneducated and unintelligent.108

  Victoria urged Bertie to change his ways. “B feels now,” she told Vicky, “that these visits to ladies and letter writing are a mistake.”109 Prompted by the Queen, Gladstone wrote warning Bertie that his reputation “with respect to whatever touches the sanctity of family relations” was a matter of national importance, crucial to the security of the throne.110 But Bertie saw no reason to act differently. He continued to visit ladies, he still wrote letters, and he still saw his “fast” friends. We shall never know whether or not he had sex with the women he visited in the afternoons. Most probably an abrupt lunge would be followed by a kiss smelling of tobacco and a hasty grope, all over in a few minutes.

  Soon after the trial, Bertie and Alix attended a house party with Louise Manchester at Kimbolton. Victoria begged Alix to avoid Louise: “the Duchess of Manchester is not a fit companion for you. She has done more harm to Society from her tone, her love of admiration & ‘fast’ style than almost anyone, & what will people say if they see you & Bertie going on a visit to her House, just after all that has happened?”111 They went all the same. Carrington described a drunken scene on Sunday night when, after a very merry dinner, the entire party marched off to chapel to hear their host read prayers. “Hartington pushed over the front of the pew a huge prayer book which struck an enormous powdered footman on the head, who was sitting below. He fell on his face with a groan and a loud crash and was dragged away insensible—thus completing the success of the party, which was very great. We hardly went to bed at all.”112

  Meanwhile, in a villa in Seaford, poor crazed Harriett Mordaunt threw a cup of tea at a likeness of the Prince of Wales: “That has been the ruin of me. You have been the curse of my life, damn you.” But perhaps the real villain was Harriett’s proud, unforgiving husband Sir Charles, who had refused to do the gentlemanly thing and accept the child as his own—as Rosa Lewis, the Duchess of Duke Street, expressed it: “No letters, no lawyers and kiss my baby’s bottom.”113

  Harriett was later incarcerated in Dr. Tuke’s asylum in Chiswick, where she grew rapidly worse. For the rest of her life, she was a certified lunatic. She died aged fifty-eight in 1906.

  * * *

  * Harriet, Duchess of Sutherland, was Mistress of the Robes 1837–41, 1846–58, and again in 1859–61.

  † The Marlborough Club was funded, accor
ding to Carrington, by “an old snob called Mackenzie; the son of an Aberdeenshire hatter, who made a fortune in indigo and got a baronetcy.” (Bodleian, Lincolnshire Papers, MS Film 1120, “King Edward as I Knew Him.”) For Mackenzie, see this page. The freehold was bought for £18,000 in May 1868, and the club, which was housed in an undistinguished building (now destroyed) designed by the architect David Brandon, opened the following year.

  ‡ Between 1862 and 1901, 676 photographs of Alexandra were registered, 655 of Bertie, and 428 of Queen Victoria.

  § Alix’s neck was slightly scarred when she married: Vicky mentions a botched childhood operation that left a mark. But marriage photographs show a swan-necked princess. Only after her illness did she invariably appear in high collars or pearl chokers.

  ‖ Rock doves imported by train from Scotland were released from cages and shot at twenty-five yards’ range.

  a This seemed baffling, but it later transpired that Harriett had slept with Johnstone after she became pregnant—and that her husband told her that Johnstone suffered from a “disease” that might be conveyed to his children.

  b Harriett’s sister Louisa was married to the Duke of Atholl. Her mother-in-law the duchess was a friend of Queen Victoria and served as Mistress of the Robes in 1852.

  c The bird (a young kittiwake) was afterward stuffed and given an inscription: “To the Gull’s Friend.”

  d As Francis Knollys wrote in 1891, at the time of Bertie’s second court appearance, over the Tranby Croft gambling scandal: “HRH remembers that in 1869 [sic] when he was called upon as a witness in the Mordaunt case, Mr. Gladstone, who was the Prime Minister, took all the indirect means in his power (and successfully) to prevent anything being brought out in the court of the trial that could prove to be injurious to the Prince or the crown.” (Hatfield House, Salisbury Papers, 3M/E, Knollys to Schomberg McDonnell, 11 June 1891: cited in Magnus, Edward VII, p. 229.)

  e That the prince should use a hansom cab was especially shocking to the Victorians. There was something unpleasantly sly and furtive about a prince hiring a public carriage to drive anonymously through gaslit streets. (Roger Fulford, “The King,” in Edwardian England, ed. Simon Nowell-Smith [Oxford University Press, 1964], p. 9.)

  CHAPTER 9

  Annus Horribilis

  1870–71

  When Bertie attended Royal Ascot and processed up the course in the state carriage, the crowd hissed. His horse won the last race, and a cheering mob collected in front of the royal stand. He turned to Carrington and said, “They are in a better temper than they were this morning.”1 But the truth was that the Mordaunt case had made Bertie deeply unpopular. He was booed at the theater, and a letter appeared in Indépendence Belge, purportedly written by Bertie to Affie, relating how “la mère” had done a deal with Sir Charles Mordaunt before the trial, and complaining that Victoria was always telling him to be good like Albert.2 It turned out to be a clever hoax, denied by Bertie “absolutely and indignantly,” but it was written by someone with inside knowledge.

  Fresh scandal threatened when a Sheffield paper carried a report that Lord Sefton, a racing friend of Bertie’s, was bringing an action for divorce citing the prince as corespondent. Bertie signed an affidavit, denying the “slightest impropriety” with Lady Sefton.3 Sefton sued for libel and won, but not before Lord Stanley had noted the rumors in his diary: “Another trial like that of last year would most likely create, which does not exist, an acknowledged Republican party, bent on putting an end to the Monarchy after the Queen’s death. His folly almost amounts to insanity in this one respect: no warning seems to have any effect.”4

  The sleaze was symptomatic of a deeper malaise. For the first time since the reign of George IV, the monarchy was facing a crisis of legitimacy. Not just the Prince of Wales but the Queen herself was under attack, drowning in a tide of gossip and innuendo. Even more toxic than the revelations of the Mordaunt case were the rumors concerning Victoria and her relationship with her Highland servant, John Brown.

  John Brown, the Highland gillie, had been summoned from Balmoral to Osborne back in 1864. He soon became a privileged favorite. Promoted from leading her pony to personal servant, he enjoyed unique access to the Queen; he came to her room each day after breakfast and after lunch. Rumors soon spread. In 1866, the Lausanne Gazette printed a story that the Queen had secretly married Brown and was expecting his child. This was a fabrication, and a libel. But the rumors refused to die and, as the Queen’s unpopularity grew, the sleaze about “Mrs. Brown” thickened.5 It was whispered that “there was actual sexual intercourse between John Brown and the Queen.”6 The Liberal politician Loulou Harcourt recorded in his diary for 1885 a story about Dr. Norman Macleod, the Scottish Presbyterian minister to whom the Queen looked for spiritual guidance. According to his sister, Macleod confessed on his deathbed in 1872 that “he had married the Queen to John Brown, and added that he had always bitterly regretted it.”*7

  For the widow Queen to have a sexual relationship with anyone—let alone a servant—was almost, but not quite, unthinkable, and the stories still persist today. The tales of Victoria’s secret marriage to Brown are hard to credit, unwitnessed as they are. No marriage certificate for Queen Victoria and John Brown has ever been found. Victoria’s attachment to Brown was strongly emotional, nonetheless. Throughout her life she depended upon the support of dominant men, and the rough, plain-speaking Brown, who addressed her as “wumman” at a time when she craved intimacy and no one called her Victoria anymore, went some way to filling the gap in her life left by Albert.

  Brown was a drunkard and a bully, and he terrorized the household, who nicknamed him the Queen’s Stallion. Victoria’s children hated him. His cruelty toward the hemophiliac Prince Leopold is documented; he hit Leopold, scolded him from morning till night, and kept him in isolation, banishing his favorite dog.8 The children came to dread holidays at Balmoral, where Brown reigned supreme.9

  Among the guests at Balmoral in September 1869 was the Austrian sculptor Edgar Boehm, who had been commissioned by the Queen to model John Brown, as well as to teach sculpture to Victoria’s fourth daughter, the artistically talented Princess Louise. At twenty-one, Louise was pretty, flirtatious, and rebellious. As Bertie diplomatically told his mother: “I must candidly confess that [from] what I know of her character she would not be happy if she remained too long unmarried.”10 She soon became intimate with the blue-eyed, long-legged Boehm.

  John Brown complained about Boehm to the Queen, claiming that the sculptor was overfamiliar with Princess Louise. Brown and Victoria burst into Boehm’s studio and found Louise there. “The Queen asked her what she was doing, and the girl got angry and said if she was to be chased about and spied on she would leave home. The Queen ordered her to her room but as she (the Princess) was going out she took John Brown by the shoulders and said, ‘Look here, John Brown, this is your doing. Either you or I leave this house.’ She then shut herself up in her room.”†

  The Prince of Wales was summoned, as he “was very fond of his sister and had most influence over her,” and they set about finding a husband for Louise.11 Louise was Bertie’s ally among his sisters, and he sympathized with her over John Brown. “I am sorry to hear that that brute JB made himself disagreeable during your stay at B[almoral]. I wish you would tell me what he did,” he wrote in 1871.12 Bertie also supported Louise in the negotiations over her marriage, asserting his position as eldest brother and challenging Victoria’s control over her daughters. “You know dearest Louise,” he wrote, “how fond I am of you, & would do anything to serve you—& can have but one wish & that is y[ou]r happiness but I trust I shall be informed before it is actually settled what future Mama intends f[o]r you—& not like Lenchen’s marriage, when everything was settled before I had even a suspicion. That is all I ask.”13

  The first candidate for Louise’s hand was a Prussian prince, whom no one much liked, least of all Louise, so he was dropped. The next suitor found by Victoria was Lord Lorne, eldest so
n of the Duke of Argyll. Though Louise preferred the blond-haired Highland chief to the Prussian, she told the Queen that she “did not like Lorne enough.”14

  Finding a mate for the strong-willed princess was becoming a matter of urgency. In 1870, the Reverend Robinson Duckworth, a handsome, dark-eyed man with a soft voice, was dismissed from his post as governor to Prince Leopold. He was suspected of flirting with Louise, and she had become overfond of him.15 At Balmoral that summer, the matchmaking was resumed in earnest. Two more German princes were summoned and, to the “utter astonishment” of the Queen, Louise also insisted on inviting Lorne, her spurned suitor of the previous summer.16 In October, she became engaged to him. Louise later bitterly regretted her marriage, and she blamed Victoria for forcing her into it, writing in 1884: “It was y[ou]r wish for two years, that I sh[oul]d marry Lorne, & because I saw how much it bothered & worried you, that I said I w[oul]d see him again. You asked me to choose between him & another, all I answered was that I thought Lorne was the best of those two, if you remember.”17

  Bertie opposed the marriage. “I always liked Lorne,” he told Louise, “but his position will require tact & discretion, which cleverer men than him would find difficult to maintain.”18 To Victoria he wrote more bluntly. “I decidedly maintain that a marriage with a subject is lowering the position of the Royal Family, & in the instance of Lorne—he is excessively poor, & Louise’s position will naturally be less good.”19 Louise was the first member of Victoria’s family to marry a commoner, and this set a historic precedent. But the real reason why Lorne was a bad choice was that Louise was not in love with him. Alexandra, who was close to Louise, wrote, “She resents him like the devil, the poor man, I am sorry for both of them, and he is going to suffer for that! He is in love with her voilà tout.”20