The Heir Apparent

by Jane Ridley

  Relations between Bertie and Victoria were made worse by the war of 1870 between France and Germany. Once again, mother and son were divided. The Queen sympathized with Germany, claiming that this was a war of aggression by France. Bertie shared none of her pro-German feeling. Vicky addressed emotional appeals to the Queen—“Oh that England could help us!”—but Bertie refused to forget the past, commenting tartly, “Nobody could express feelings more touchingly or simply than dear Vicky—I only wish to call to her recollection what the feelings of unfortunate little Denmark must have been when they heard that the Armies of Prussia and Austria were ag[ain]st them. Everybody must confess that that campaign was a war of aggression.”21

  When the German armies with Fritz at their head smashed the French at Sedan (1 September 1870) and the Emperor Napoléon III surrendered, Bertie made no attempt to disguise his sympathies. He predicted “fearful carnage” in Paris, with “revolution the final and inevitable result. It is a sad business and so unnecessary. France will not recover from this shock and humiliation for years to come.”22

  The Queen’s loyalty to her German relations made her unpopular at home when the victorious Prussian armies laid siege to defenseless Paris. But, on the other hand, Bertie’s French sympathies did him little good. The fall of the French monarchy boosted English republicanism, and Bertie’s identification with the decadent French court exposed him to criticism. When the Empress Eugénie fled to exile in England, Bertie impulsively dispatched a letter offering her the loan of Chiswick, the house he rented from the Duke of Devonshire. But his failure to consult either the Queen or the government beforehand meant that his generous offer was a political embarrassment, and gave yet another example of his lack of judgment.23 Bertie lent a horse to the Prince Imperial, the son of Louis-Napoléon, who had joined his parents in exile. Out hunting, the Prince Imperial had a fall trying to jump some iron railings. As “the hope of Imperial France lay on the ground with all the wind knocked out of him,” all the Prince of Wales could say was, “Oh my poor horse, what has happened to my poor horse!”24

  Exiles from the imperial court were royally entertained at Marlborough House. Among them was Blanche, the half-American Duchess of Caracciolo, who scandalized London society that winter, going out shooting in a kilt and smoking cigarettes. Her ailing husband was cruelly teased by a prankster who dressed up as a doctor and told him he was dying, while his valet disguised himself as a priest and heard his last confession.25 Soon the duchess was pregnant, and she gave birth to a daughter named Alberta Olga, in honor of Bertie, who was the baby’s godfather and rumored—probably falsely—to be her father, too.‡26

  For three years Bertie and Alix had spent little time at Sandringham while the house was being rebuilt. Alix worked hard to arrange “everything” herself, and the house reflected her idiosyncratic taste.27 There were no ancestral portraits or old masters and no antiques. The furniture came from Maples store on Tottenham Court Road. Visitors walked straight into the hall, where Alix presided at tea over a narrow oblong table. Upstairs was a “truly sinister warren” of small rooms and narrow passages—children’s bedrooms, guest rooms, rooms for ladies-in-waiting and equerries.28

  The new house was ready in time for Alix’s twenty-sixth birthday on 1 December 1870. One of the guests was Oliver Montagu, whom Bertie had appointed equerry. Alix described him to Minnie as “my good friend O.”29 She was still endearingly loyal to “my Bertie,” but she had come to depend on Montagu’s companionship. Outwardly loud and bumptious, Montagu had a softer, religious side, and he became Alix’s devoted admirer. To conduct a platonic flirtation with a gallant officer, a cavalier with whom she always danced the first after-dinner waltz, made her feel adored without being threatened.

  Alix’s sixth pregnancy was different from the others. She was always tired. She suffered irregular bleeding, so she was unsure whether she was pregnant or not.30 At six months she felt depressed and listless, but “still not showing it much, and still dancing.”31 She fell heavily out skating on the ice, crashing down on her bad knee, and her mouth filled with blood.32 At seven months she fell again, tumbling out of her carriage at the wedding of Princess Louise to Lord Lorne.33

  Back at Sandringham for Easter 1871, Alix woke early on 6 April with pains. At twenty minutes to seven Bertie knocked on the door of the lady-in-waiting Mrs. Stonor. She realized at once that the princess was going into premature labor, and telegraphed the royal obstetrician, Arthur Farre, and monthly nurse, Mrs. Clarke. Bertie stayed with Alix as the pains grew more severe until the baby was born at half past two. Only the local doctor was present—Dr. Farre arrived from London almost an hour later.34 The six-weeks-premature baby was very small—even smaller than Eddy had been—but beautifully formed, with fingernails. His head was “quite black” and Bertie thought him “very ugly”; Farre assured them that this was because he was born facing downward, and was of no consequence.35 The baby’s hands and feet were cold and his circulation was feeble.36

  Mrs. Clarke rubbed the infant with brandy, but by eight p.m. he was sinking fast and the clergyman was hastily summoned to perform the baptism.37 Alix asked for this to take place at her bedside, but when she saw her son for the first time, she broke down and pressed him to her. She was (said Mrs. Stonor) “dreadfully affected and the Prince was so overcome that he cried most bitterly.”38 Bertie held a small Russian cup containing holy water, and as the sick baby was baptized with the names “Alexander John Charles Albert,” it gave such signs of life that “we all hoped there was still a faint hope.”39

  The next morning, Good Friday, the baby was a blue-livid color and Dr. Farre said it couldn’t live.40 Alix insisted on having him with her in bed. Prince John died after twenty-four hours, and “so calmly that we never knew the exact moment when it drew its last breath.”41 Alix lay next to the dead child until eight in the evening, sobbing as she held his hand, which was warm though his head was cold and his limbs were stiffening.42

  The next day, Bertie placed his baby son, dressed in a frock tied with white satin bows and a cross of bog oak round his neck, in a little wooden shell. While Alix wept in her bedroom next door, the prince and Mrs. Clarke snipped tiny wisps of baby hair and screwed down the wooden lid.43

  The day before the funeral, Bertie placed the little shell in a lead and mahogany coffin, which he covered with white satin and arranged with white flowers, camellias, and banksia roses. Mrs. Stonor found him “so much affected, the tears were rolling down his cheeks.”44

  On Easter Tuesday (11 April) Bertie walked hand in hand with Eddy and Georgie, both wearing kilts and black gloves, behind the tiny coffin, which was carried by three grooms and the coachman, across the park to the church. From her bedroom upstairs, Alix called to Mrs. Clarke to draw the curtain so she could watch the procession. Sobbing bitterly, she took her prayer book and asked to be left alone.

  Inside the church, the Dean of Windsor, Gerald Wellesley, intoned the service inaudibly, croaking with a hoarse voice, and Bertie wept throughout. Afterward, he and the young princes laid white wreaths on the coffin, and when it was lowered into the ground, the children threw primroses and anemones into the grave.45

  Infant mortality was a fact of Victorian life, and Bertie’s grief seems perhaps excessive, but he had good reason to weep. The death of Prince John marked a watershed in his marriage. The day before the funeral, Dr. Farre had had a “very long and serious” talk with him about “the Future and perfect rest.” Mrs. Stonor reported to the Queen that Dr. Farre “says the Prince quite agreed with him in all he said,” and it was “a most satisfactory conversation.”46 Farre seems to have warned Bertie to desist from conjugal relations as Alix’s health was in danger. A letter from the Dean of Windsor to Victoria suggests that the doctor had not summoned up the courage to speak as plainly as the Queen had hoped. Wellesley urged her to speak to her son herself, as “many who might speak to him with authority, with respect to the health and moral welfare, both of the Princess and himself, shrin
k from doing so directly, so that he loses hearing the truth, which might perhaps be a little disagreeable to him.”47

  The harsh truth was that there were to be no more babies. Alix was only twenty-six, but repeated pregnancies and premature births had worn her out. She was very ill, spitting blood.48 Six births in eight years of marriage meant that she had spent forty-eight months, half of her married life, pregnant.§ With the exception of Louise, whose arrival was precipitated by Alix’s illness, the girls’ births were relatively straightforward. As Bertie explained, “There is always more risk with a boy of its being born before the proper time.”49 Eddy was born at seven months, Georgie at eight months, and now John, born too early to live. Alix ached for more children, and it was a permanent sadness in her life that she was unable to have the large Victorian family of her fantasies.

  For a man as sexually rampant as Bertie, a celibate marriage might seem a cruel mockery. But, as the dean perceived, Bertie was “deeply attached to the Princess, despite all the flattering distractions that beset him in society”; he genuinely wanted to “be more careful about her.”50 At first, the death of their baby son strengthened the marriage. “What my angelic blessed Bertie was to me all this time no words can describe, a true angel!” wrote Alix. “If anything could have bound us closer together, it is this, our first great sorrow.”51

  The court went into mourning for ten days for the infant Prince John. Ladies were ordered to wear black silk dresses trimmed with crêpe, black shoes and gloves, and black fans, feathers, and ornaments. Gentlemen wore black court dress, with black swords and buckles and plain linen.52 When Victoria suggested that Bertie and Alix should retire into prolonged mourning, her son snapped back: “Want of feeling I never could show, but I think it’s one’s duty not to nurse one’s sorrow, however much one may feel it.” Alix must resume her social duties, “else she will get into a low and morbid state which I am certain will be very injurious to her. You have … no conception of the quantity of applications we get … to open this place, lay a stone, public dinners, luncheons, fetes without end and sometimes people will not take no for an answer … and all these things have increased tenfold since the last 10 years.… It is however gratifying that this wish exists in these Democratic days, as one must show oneself in public however irksome it may be—and sometimes it is indeed so.53

  Out of private tragedy, Bertie endeavored to redefine the monarchy. “Showing oneself in public” was to be central to the survival of the institution in the democratic age. In 1871, however, there was reason to doubt whether even that would be sufficient.

  Far from engaging public sympathy, the death of Prince John was greeted with republican catcalls. Ever since the Mordaunt case, the radical Reynolds’s Newspaper had voiced a strident republicanism. The paper was the publication of G. W. M. Reynolds, an ex-Chartist dedicated to fighting the class war and exposing royalty as an undeserving burden on the taxpayer. It cruelly recorded the death of the baby Prince John thus:

  We have much satisfaction in announcing that the newly born child of the Prince and Princess of Wales died shortly after its birth, thus relieving the working men of England from having to support hereafter another addition to the long roll of State beggars they at present maintain.

  Reynolds was equally savage about:

  the miserable mockery of interring with royal funereal ceremony a shrivelled piece of skin and bone, grandiloquently entitled “prince,” not 24 hours old … and to augment the folly the Court goes into mourning for the loss of the wretched abortion which … was carried to the grave by four stout men.54

  Grumbling about the extravagance of the publicly funded Prince of Wales swelled into a vicious personal campaign. Reynolds’s ridiculed Bertie’s speeches as “tautological twaddle,” “slip-slop stuff” that was evidence of intelligence “of a very low order.”55 The New York Times pronounced that the Prince of Wales was totally unable to understand the “questions of the day, the temper of the people or the times in which he lives.”56 Fired by the example of the socialist Paris Commune, republicanism surged.

  The Queen came under attack as well. Her demand for an annuity from Parliament for Louise on her marriage sparked a storm of republican agitation, objecting to semi-royals leeching on the taxpayer.57 Walter Bagehot, who had penned an apology for the monarchy in his English Constitution in 1867, wrote a stern leader in The Economist: “The Queen has done almost as much injury to the popularity of the monarchy by her long retirement from public life as the most unworthy of her predecessors did by his profligacy and frivolity.”58 What Does She Do with It? demanded a pseudonymous pamphlet that claimed that the tight-fisted Queen was hoarding money from the £385,000 voted by Parliament in the Civil List.59

  The Queen complained vigorously that she was overworked, but her unofficial private secretary General Grey advised Prime Minister Gladstone: “Pray dismiss from your mind any ideas of there being any ‘weight of work’ upon the Queen.” Encouraged by her sycophantic doctor, Jenner, Victoria had become entrenched in a “long unchecked habit of self-indulgence.” Her workload consisted of “very short notes” and a “shorter interview” when she ordered Grey to “ ‘write fully’ on this or that subject” and subsequently to “approve of the draft which I submit to her.”60

  Gladstone, though a Liberal, was dedicated to preserving the monarchy, and he judged that the moment had come to grasp the “burning issue” that he had been “continually revolving” for the past year: “To speak in rude and general terms, the Queen is invisible and the Prince of Wales is not respected.”61

  A grim-faced Gladstone traveled by train to Balmoral on 25 September. He wrote to Lord Granville: “Send for and read Reynolds’s Newspaper of last Sunday on the gambling at Homburg. These things go from bad to worse. I saw ‘What Does She Do With It’ advertised on the walls of the station at Birkenhead.”62 The copy of Reynolds’s Newspaper Gladstone carried in his pocket revealed that the Prince of Wales had been spotted in a crowded casino at Homburg gambling away the gold that had been wrung from the toil and sweat of the working man—and this at a time when gambling in England was illegal.63

  At Balmoral, Gladstone found the Queen more invisible than ever. She had succumbed to a mysterious illness and stayed in her room for much of the day.64 She communicated by sending written notes. Not until day four of his stay did she see the prime minister, and then only for half an hour, during which she exercised what he called “the repellent power which she knows so well how to use.”65 She would hear no criticism of herself, but Gladstone reported that she was “much vexed” by Bertie’s gambling. “That part of the case, poor soul, she can discern well enough.”66

  The Queen’s newly appointed private secretary was in attendance. Shrewd and clearheaded, with a nice sense of irony, the thirty-six-year-old Henry Ponsonby was a surprising choice.‖ Ponsonby went for a walk in the rain with Gladstone, and held conspiratorial conversations with Princess Alice, who was also at Balmoral.67 Alice undertook to speak to Bertie about his gambling, but she dared not approach her mother. “I long to be able to ask her to say she will do something but I really am afraid and have been advised not,” she told Ponsonby, dropping her voice dramatically so that she was barely audible. The Queen saw no one and heard nothing; Ponsonby marked the newspapers for her, but she seemed not to read their criticisms. “Yet,” said Alice, “she knows all that is said against the Prince of Wales she thinks he has become so unpopular that it is useless to expect he will come to the throne. She thinks the monarchy will last her time and that it is no use thinking of what will come after if the principal person himself does not, & so she lets the torrent come on.”68

  Après moi le déluge was Victoria’s excuse for doing nothing.

  The stories of Bertie’s gambling at Homburg and Baden were exaggerated. Francis Knollys told Ponsonby that the prince had entered the casino and thrown a few gold pieces on the table, and that was all; he lost very little money.69 But Knollys must have been biting his tongue.
He knew that Bertie was sitting on one, if not two, explosive sexual scandals, which he was busily trying to defuse.

  A letter had arrived at Abergeldie.a The envelope was addressed to Francis Knollys, but there was no doubt who the contents were for:

  My dear Sir,

  I cannot tell Your Royal Highness how utterly miserable I am that You should have left London without coming to see me. You have shewn me so much kindness for the last four years that I cannot understand Your having twice been in London for two days without coming to see me. What have I done to offend You? I did my best to obey the orders Your Royal Highness gave me the last time I had the happiness of seeing You but the answer was, too late and too dangerous. I was anxious to avoid writing on such a painful subject but You have forced me to it. I cannot describe to you how wretched I am—and Life is so uncertain and I am far from strong and I felt I may perhaps never see You again, therefore You may imagine my feelings when I received your letter yesterday and knew that You were really off to Scotland!!

  Forgive this wretched letter and wishing Your Royal Highness every blessing this world can bestow.

  I remain as ever

  Y[our]r Royal Highness’s obed[ien]t servant

  SV-T70

  SV-T was Lady Susan Vane-Tempest, a mistress whom Bertie was anxious to discard. Before traveling to Scotland, he had spent a few days in London after attending the maneuvers at Aldershot. He was photographed by the society photographer Alexander Bassano in a Piccadilly studio, dressed in his uniform as colonel commanding the 10th Hussars.b71 But he made no effort to visit Susan, who had begged him to see her before he left London.