The Heir Apparent

by Jane Ridley

  Gull was right to fear a double dip. On 7 December, the twenty-sixth day of the illness, the ominous rose spots returned. Soon Bertie’s breathing became rapid, he began to clutch at his sheets (a symptom that particularly worried the doctors), and his mind wandered in a constant state of delirium.122 Bulletins were issued every four hours.123 For the first time, The Times openly discussed the possibility of the prince’s death.

  The Queen was advised that if she wished to see her son before he died, she should leave immediately, and she set off for Sandringham at once that afternoon.124 She was expected at four, and at two o’clock Gull and Jenner took a few minutes’ walk in the garden. Jenner said: “Well, if he lives until Her Majesty comes I shall be satisfied.” Gull replied: “That will not satisfy me. Now we shall see if Shakespeare’s signa mortis are right, for they are marked enough here”—and he quoted Henry V, on the death of Falstaff: “After I saw him fumble with the sheets and play with flowers and smile upon his fingers’ ends, I knew there was but one way; for his nose was as sharp as a pen and a’ babbled of green fields.”125

  The Queen arrived at seven thirty p.m. in deep snow and was met by Lady Macclesfield, who told her Bertie was “very bad.” She rushed up to his room, where Alix and Alice sat on either side of the bed. Bertie lay breathing rapidly.126 Telegrams were sent summoning Arthur, Leopold, and Beatrice. Both Helena and Vicky were refused, partly because there was no room, even though Vicky begged her mother to be allowed to come.127 The house was so crowded that the princesses Louise and Beatrice were obliged to share a bed.

  Bertie’s illness had called forth a general expression of sympathy, which, said The Graphic, “in its quiet earnestness is a satisfactory proof of the loyalty of the nation.”128 On Sunday, thinking that Bertie had rallied, Alix slipped out from the sickroom to church. She passed a note to the vicar: “My husband being thank God somewhat better, I am coming to Church. I must leave, I fear, before the service is concluded, that I may watch by his bedside. Can you not say a few words in prayer in the early part of the service that I may join with you in prayer before I return to him?” Trembling with emotion, the vicar prayed while Alix stood in the royal pew alone.129 Reported in The Times, this poignant image stirred the public’s heart.

  Bertie passed a tranquil morning, but by Sunday evening the bulletins were grave.130 Gull’s notes describe a “paroxysm” or spasm of coughing, and the short, guttural, suffocative cough baffled and worried him.131

  On Monday, the Queen was woken at five thirty a.m. with a message from Jenner that Bertie had suffered a severe spasm and might at any minute “go off,” so she put on her dressing gown and hurried to the bedroom. She found Alix and Alice sitting in vigil in the dreary light beside Bertie, who was breathing as if he would choke at any moment. He raved continually, talking on and on, whistling and singing. “This has been a terrible day,” wrote Victoria, who went back and forth continually to the sickroom, and took her meals upstairs.132

  Downstairs, the family and household waited for news, talking in whispers in the great hall, pacing the slippery floors, trying not to trip over the skins and enormous protruding heads of the animals that Bertie had shot.133 Bertie’s brothers Affie and Arthur giggled at his ravings, earning stern reproofs from Victoria.134 Alice snubbed the devout Alix for praying, and briskly declared: “Providence, there is no Providence, no nothing, and I can’t think how anyone can talk such rubbish.”135 In London, Gladstone found the suspense painful, and trembled when he opened the telegrams from Sandringham.136

  Wednesday, 13 December 1871, the day before the anniversary of beloved Albert’s death, was, said Victoria, “the worst day of all.” Yet another fit of suffocating coughing nearly killed Bertie. The Queen and Alice said to each other in tears: “There can be no hope.”137 Alix was so desperate to stay by his side that when the doctors told her that it would distress him to know that she was in the sickroom, she crawled in on hands and knees so as to be out of sight.138 She scarcely ate, and the exhaustion of sitting up night after night had made her so deaf that she was not easy to wake when asleep. “How she will bear the final blow when it comes, one cannot imagine,” groaned Lady Macclesfield, who confidently expected the prince to die.139

  On the morning of 14 December, the Queen crept into the sickroom and stood behind the screen. Bertie asked the nurse if the Queen was in the room. Victoria went to the bed, and he kissed her hand and smiled and said, “So kind of you to come; it is the kindest thing you could do.”140

  So, on the anniversary of his father’s death, Bertie’s recovery began.

  The following Sunday, at Clyro church in Radnorshire, the vicar read out the bulletin from the paper: “The Prince has passed a tranquil day and the symptoms continue to be favourable.” The Reverend Kilvert commented in his diary: “I love that man now, and always will love him. I will never say a word against him.… God bless him and keep him, the Child of England.” A little girl in Sunday school was asked who had died for us on the cross. “Lord Chesterfield,” was the reply.141 This was Bertie’s apotheosis: He had become a holy prince. Among the best things he did was nearly to die.

  * * *

  * In the 1950s, Harold Nicolson claimed that while researching at Balmoral, he came across the “marriage lines” of Queen Victoria and John Brown in a game book. He allegedly replaced the document where he found it, for fear that it would be destroyed. (Christopher Tyerman, letter to The Times, 21 December 2004.) It has never been seen since.

  † Boehm related this story to Catherine Walters, the courtesan also known as Skittles, who told it to the diarist Wilfrid Blunt in 1885.

  ‡ Bertie was rumored to have fathered numerous children, but most of these “bastards” were apocryphal (see this page). Olga Caracciolo was probably not Bertie’s daughter. It was the duke himself who registered her birth in August 1871. The story of her royal paternity was local gossip in Dieppe, however, where she was brought up in the 1880s. The duchess was a dedicated Anglophile, who dressed in the tailored style of Princess Alexandra. Occasionally Bertie would visit her in Dieppe, always arriving in a yacht.

  § Eddy was born on 6 January 1864; Georgie on 3 June 1865. Louise was next, on 20 February 1867, then Victoria (6 June 1868) and Maud (26 November 1869).

  ‖ He was a Liberal in politics, he disliked dressing up in court uniform, and he was devoted to his wife. The letters he wrote from Balmoral give unrivaled glimpses of Victoria’s Highland court.

  a Abergeldie Castle, a tower house on the south bank of the Dee, three miles from Balmoral, was leased by the Queen from its owner and lent to Bertie after he married.

  b Bassano’s glamorous photograph, which shows the prince smoking a cigar, was a study for a painting he commissioned by Alfred Sheldon Williams.

  c Oscar Clayton was described by Ponsonby as “a dreadful little snob and Jenner says not a good doctor. But he is most attentive and that is everything.” (RA VIC/Add A 36/1340, Henry Ponsonby to Mary Ponsonby, 24 October 1877.)

  d Susan’s symptoms may well have been caused by complications or infection after childbirth or a possible termination.

  e Gladstone’s gossipy secretary Edward Hamilton wrote in his diary in 1881: “In deference to the Prince of Wales, Oscar Clayton has been submitted for knighthood. It is to be hoped that no disagreeable stories will come out about him.” (Diary of Sir Edward Hamilton 1880–1885, ed. Dudley Bahlman [Clarendon Press, 1972], vol. 1, p. 355 [2 November 1881].)

  f See this page.

  CHAPTER 10

  Resurrection?

  1871–75

  The day after Bertie’s fever passed the crisis, Francis Knollys and Henry Ponsonby went for a ride at Sandringham. They cantered over some jumps and both fell off their horses. In between, the private secretaries discussed the future. The prince, said Knollys, had reached the turning point in his life. “If after the illness and the great sympathy for him he takes up some line of work it will save him from frivolous idleness and the follies he has been ac
cused of and may make something of him.” The only question was what he should do. Philanthropy or science and art, suggested Ponsonby.1 No, said Knollys; he had “never shown any inclination whatsoever” for social work, and as for the South Kensington Albertopolis, as the Albert Hall and Victoria and Albert Museum were called, he only did the bare minimum.2 Knollys’s solution was foreign affairs. In a memo to Ponsonby, he proposed that the Queen should forward dispatches for the prince.3 But, as Ponsonby objected, “writing empty minutes which will not be read” was a waste of time and could hardly be called employment.4

  William Gladstone, meanwhile, proposed to stage a grand thanksgiving ceremony at St. Paul’s Cathedral. On 21 December 1871 he had a long audience with the Queen at Windsor. Victoria’s journal breezily records: “After discussion it was agreed that I should send [Gladstone] a letter.”5 Gladstone gives a different version. His lengthy memorandum records a furious argument with the Queen, who violently resisted the public thanksgiving. Treating her rather as he did his sister Helen, who was mad, the prime minister laboriously explained that the feeling in the country had been “wrought up to the highest point, and nothing short of a great public act of this kind can form an adequate answer to it.” The prince’s illness had “worked in an extraordinary degree to the effect of putting down that disagreeable movement with which the name of Sir C. Dilke had been connected”: the aim now must be to get rid of it altogether, “for it could never be satisfactory that there should exist even a fraction of the nation republican in its views.” Reluctantly, the Queen agreed to a public thanksgiving, but when Gladstone mentioned giving employment to the Prince of Wales, “this brought out no direct response” but an icy vagueness.6

  Bertie’s recovery was distressingly slow. He developed agonizing pain in his left leg, especially in the hip. His fever climbed, his mind wandered, and he fancied himself in an American hotel, unable to realize that the aching leg actually belonged to him. The leg gave him violent spasms that baffled the doctors and prevented him from sleeping.7 He had frightening attacks of breathlessness, too, and the doctors feared a deep-seated inflammation.8 He was tortured by toothache. Later, the leg periodically became swollen, as the circulation was obstructed—the result, said the doctors, of the “narrowing of the veins caused by their inflammation”; his bad left leg troubled him for the rest of his life.9 Having become emaciated during the fever, he now put on weight too quickly.* Victoria thought he was looking “so aged and shaken and so deathly pale—and very lame.”10 Leopold, too, found him “much aged—the top of his head is quite bald.”11 At thirty, Bertie had become middle-aged.

  His enfeebled state brought him closer to Alix. “You can hardly think HOW happy I am,” she told her sister-in-law Louise. “We are never apart, and are now enjoying our second ‘Honey Moon.’ ”12 Later, she would look back on Bertie’s convalescence as the time “when I could do everything for him and be of use and pleasure to him—and never were we so close to each other before!!”13 When Bertie came to Osborne to convalesce, even Victoria noticed “something different” about him, “which I can’t exactly express. It is like a new life—all the trees and flowers give him pleasure as they never used to do.… He is constantly with Alix and they seem hardly ever apart.”14 Photographs show them standing close together, Alix resting her head on his shoulder or putting her arm through his; they seem touchingly devoted, where before they had avoided any form of contact before the camera.15

  Alix looked “more lovely,” according to Prince Leopold, “and I might say angelic, than ever.”16 Nursing suited her. She told William Gull, the doctor whom she credited with saving Bertie’s life, how she rubbed him to keep him warm after he took his first bath: “You cannot think how happy and thankful I am to see him so fully restored.”17

  The national thanksgiving on 27 February 1872 was an extraordinary outpouring of public loyalty and affection. How strange it was, mused Bagehot in The Economist, that “a middle-aged lady is about to drive, with a few little-known attendants, through part of London, to return thanks in St. Paul’s for the recovery of her eldest son from fever, and the drive has assumed the proportions of a national event.”18

  Victoria dreaded the day and bickered furiously with Gladstone beforehand. The prime minister supervised the organization of the ceremony down to the last detail, following the precedent of George III’s thanksgiving at St. Paul’s after his recovery from illness in 1789. Credit for the revival of the late-Victorian monarchy is usually given to Disraeli, but Gladstone’s insistence on making a ceremonial occasion of Bertie’s recovery was crucial.19 Indeed, so successful was Gladstone in burying republicanism and silencing critics of the monarchy that he undercut his second aim: to devise a useful employment for the Prince of Wales.

  Gladstone wanted the Queen to process in formal robes and state coaches, but Victoria insisted on semi-state and open coaches, in order that the people should see her.20 The family squabbled for weeks beforehand about who was to travel in which coach. Bertie and Alix annoyed the Queen by requesting a separate carriage, a request she refused.21 Whether Bertie would, in fact, be well enough to go was uncertain until the day before.

  Early in the morning of 27 February, surging crowds massed outside Buckingham Palace and blocked the Mall. Bertie was so lame that Victoria took his arm as they walked slowly down the Grand Entrance and entered an open state landau, in which they rode together with Alix, Beatrice, and Prince Eddy. The Queen’s landau was preceded by a sovereign’s escort of seven open carriages, and in front of them came the Lord Chancellor. At the head of the procession the Speaker set the pace in his quaint old carriage that could only advance at a walk. This was Gladstone’s idea, to stop the Queen dashing through the crowds at a brisk trot. “Dear Alix,” in blue and sable, “was not looking well,” thought Victoria, and Bertie seemed even iller; but John Brown, who sat behind, was splendid “in his very fullest and very handsome full dress.”22

  “We seemed to be passing through a sea of people as we went along the Mall,” wrote Victoria.23 At Temple Bar, the Lord Mayor presented the Queen with the sword of the City, and when she “took dear Bertie’s hand and pressed it—people cried.” This was the gesture the crowd was waiting for, a demonstration of affection; in spite of her dread of public appearances, Victoria was a great actor when she needed to be. Bertie’s hat was constantly off his head and, wrote Victoria, “I often felt a lump in my throat.”24 St. Paul’s was packed. Bertie walked slowly and painfully up the aisle on his mother’s arm, holding the eight-year-old Eddy by the hand. The Queen, who had complained vigorously about mixing monarchy up with religion, grumbled that St. Paul’s was a dreary, dingy place and the service was “cold and too long.”25

  Lying on a sofa that evening at Marlborough House, in great pain from his leg, Bertie scrawled a hurried note to his mother: “I cannot tell you how gratified and touched I was by the feeling that was displayed in those crowded streets today towards you and also to myself.”26 He had made the intoxicating discovery that he was the most popular man in the country.

  Monarchy was projected as a narrative shared by the nation, a story in which all could participate. As Alix explained to Victoria: “The whole nation has taken such a public share in our sorrow, it has been so entirely one with us in our grief, that it may perhaps feel it has a kind of claim to join with us now in a public and universal thanksgiving.”27

  The question was what role Bertie should play in this royal narrative: prodigal son or playboy prince.

  For Gladstone, the thanksgiving was only a beginning, the first phase of his mission to reform the monarchy. He had a bigger plan. Convinced that this was an opportunity not to be missed, he thought the prince should be given “a central aim and purpose” that would shape his entire life.28

  In July 1872, the prime minister sat down to pen a thirty-four-page letter to the Queen. “Began the formidable letter to H.M.,” he wrote in his diary, “by which I am willing to live or die.”29 He proposed to send Bertie to
Ireland, where he would act as the Queen’s representative during the winter months. In the summer, the Waleses should return to London, where they would deputize for the Queen on occasions of court and public ceremonial.30

  The Queen read Gladstone’s paper with “a good deal of irritation.” She minuted to Ponsonby: “Whoever knows the Prince of Wales’ character well must know that he will always lean to a Party—and in Ireland he would be unable to withstand this and would be beset by people who would force him into one extreme or the other.” As for the training business, “any preparation of this kind is quite useless; and the P. of Wales will not do it and unless you are absolutely forced to do it you never will try.” Not that she blamed him for this: She confessed that she herself “never could before her accession take the slightest interest in Public affairs,” but the moment she had to, she worked hard “tho she hates it all as much now as she did as a girl.”31

  Snubbing Gladstone with a three-line scrawl (“The Queen has so much to write and to do”), she instructed Ponsonby to compose a memo, coolly rejecting the proposal.32

  Buried in Gladstone’s long-winded obfuscation was an unpleasant threat. The Queen’s recent illness had shown, he wrote, “that it is neither just nor possible to expect from Your Majesty what was once so freely and beneficially rendered; so that he will be very careful to guide his own future conduct by this consideration.”33 This was Gladstone’s way of telling the Queen that she was no longer up to the job. By promoting the Waleses, he planned to make the Queen redundant and ease her into premature retirement—a plot he referred to euphemistically as “the kindred matter” or the “comprehensive” solution.34 Little wonder that the Queen disliked Mr. Gladstone. True, he was a devoted monarchist, determined to save the monarchy by reforming it, and he did more than Disraeli to reinvent the crown as a visible, decorative symbol. But the principal reform he proposed was virtually to force the Queen to abdicate.