The Heir Apparent

by Jane Ridley

  After the Russian celebrations, Affie and Marie arrived at Windsor. Victoria held a grand dinner in St. George’s Hall, the first since Bertie’s wedding, and when she walked around the ladies after dinner, she asked Alix to whisper the names in her ear; the Queen knew no one because she never went out.

  When Marie and Affie and the royal family stood on the balcony at Buckingham Palace to show themselves to the people, none of the dust sheets had been taken off the furniture. “My Bertie was so angry, but that did not help of course,” wrote Alix, so she herself set to tearing off the covers and arranging the sitting room—“my gloves … were as black as coal at the reception!” At the drawing room afterward, Marie, in spite of being a Romanov and the daughter of an emperor, was given a rank below all of Victoria’s daughters, even the unmarried Beatrice—a snub that did lasting damage to her relations with her new family.79 In spite of her grandeur, Marie, like all the Romanovs, was startlingly earthy. At the christening of her first child, she breast-fed the baby, regardless of Queen Victoria finding it “indecent and dégoûtent [disgusting]!!!” When the child puked over her fine dress, Marie was quite unembarrassed: “She stood up and the Empress [of Russia] took the little one and Marie ran about with her big breast hanging down in front of everyone and wiped the dress clean!!!”80

  At Marlborough House that summer, the Fancy Dress Ball (22 July 1874) was the grandest royal ball for decades. The décor and costumes were designed by Sir Frederic Leighton. Bertie led the Van Dyck quadrille dressed, somewhat incongruously, as the slender, chaste King Charles I and wearing a large wig of yellow curls.

  Bertie was widely reported to have debts of £600,000.81 Francis Knollys, who was on good terms with Delane, the editor of The Times, inspired an editorial in the newspaper that authoritatively contradicted the story and explained the “true” state of his finances. If the prince occasionally spent more than his income, said the article, there were very good reasons. His income of £100,000 was less than that of many peers; and yet he was expected to perform the Queen’s work, entertaining foreign royalties, representing the Queen abroad, and leading London society.82

  The Times article enraged Victoria. She denounced the claim that Bertie did her work as an “abominable falsehood.”83 Relations with Marlborough House became frayed once again. Ponsonby wrote to Knollys complaining at the article “firing a broadside at us.”84

  In October 1874, Bertie visited France for the first time since the war with Prussia and the formation of the Third Republic. Victoria deplored the trip. Bertie had accepted an invitation to stay with the Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Bisaccia, who had just been sacked as French ambassador in London for demanding the restoration of the monarchy, and the visit was seen as a signal of English support.

  Victoria appealed to the new prime minister, Disraeli, whom she found infinitely more sympathetic than Gladstone, and Disraeli wrote Bertie a flowery letter of discouragement (“whether a visit to France at all is, at this moment, desirable; [is a question] on which I will not presume to offer an opinion.… No living man is more competent to form a correct judgement … than Your Royal Highness”), and suggested that the prince call upon the president in order to demonstrate his support for the Republic.85 This Bertie agreed to do—in future years he always made a point of calling on the president whenever he visited Paris—and he assured Disraeli that he intended to travel incognito as the Earl of Chester.86

  The Times printed an editorial, inspired again by Francis Knollys, that denied that the visit had any political significance; but the real worry was less about the politics of Bertie’s trip than the fact that he proposed to visit France alone, leaving Alix with her family in Denmark.87 Old Sir William Knollys warned that Paris was “the most dangerous place in Europe, and it would be well if it were never revisited. In fact remaining on the Continent whenever it involves a separation of the Prince and Princess—whether Her Royal Highness is in Denmark or elsewhere”—was “most undesirable” and should be as brief as possible in the interests of both.88 Alix herself was blissfully, some might say naïvely, unaware of the dangers. “Deaf as a post,” she refused to listen to what she didn’t want to hear.89 Each morning at her parents’ house in Denmark she rose at seven to write to “my angelic little husband.” In place of Bertie, she shared her bed with her youngest sister, the twenty-one-year-old Princess Thyra.90

  Bertie stayed first with the Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Bisaccia at Esclimont, his Renaissance chateau on the Loire. Assembled at Esclimont was a party of grandees—indeed this was the very world that Proust romanticized and fictionalized.91 Bertie himself was a character in Proust’s work, haunting In Search of Lost Time as the epitome of grandeur and sophistication.

  To entertain the Prince de Galles, La Rochefoucauld arranged an English chasse. The French reporters, who were bemused by this Anglo-Saxon activity, noted that 500 shots were fired, and 400 missed; the prince, however, “fires with rare precision; at least 80 of his shots were well aimed.”92 Fortunately, the duke had taken precautions, having placed an order for five hundred pheasants with the London poulterer Mr. Bayly—presumably the birds were already safely dead, ensuring a respectable bag in spite of the wildly inaccurate marksmanship of the blue-blooded French dukes.93

  Among the guests at Esclimont were Monsieur and Madame Standish. Henry Standish, in spite of his English name, was a grandson of the Duc de Mouchy. As for his wife, Hélène, wrote Proust, “It would take a whole lecture to explain to certain foolish young men why Madame Standish is at least as great a lady as Duchesse de Doudeauville.”94 She had made a sensation in London the year before and was said to have captivated Bertie; Robert Lytton, the Paris attaché, was surprised to find her “instead of fast and flippant very quiet, well bred and womanly.”95 In Paris, the prying police followed Bertie wherever he went, and tracked him to the house of Madame Standish, where he spent many hours.96 The liaison between “Missis,” as the Parisians called her, and the Prince of Wales was soon common knowledge. Proust noted that Madame Standish dressed with tailor-made austerity, and wore gowns that “moulded her figure with a precision that was positively British.”97 In fact, she dressed like Alix, with a wasp waist, curled false fringe, and high dog collar—this was her way of advertising the fact that she was a mistress of the prince.

  Next came a visit to Chantilly, where Bertie hunted stags with the Duc d’Aumale. Among the ladies who followed the hounds on horseback was the Princesse de Sagan.98 The daughter of a rich banker, with a nose too large to be beautiful, the princess was estranged from her much older husband, Boson de Talleyrand-Périgord, Prince de Sagan, a frightening, monocled dandy, who was also the original of a character in Proust. She soon became one of Bertie’s regular Paris dates. Bertie later visited de Sagan’s lavishly luxurious Château de Mello. Robert Lytton, who accompanied him, thought Mello “furnished with a mixture of splendour and comfort I have never seen equalled in any English country-house.” Madame Standish was among the guests. A band played throughout dinner “the most animating not to say amative strains,” making the company (thought Lytton) “so ‘jolly’ that I really know not what might have happened in the course of the evening” had Bertie not been obliged to return to Paris at midnight by special train.99 It was allegedly on this visit that the princess’s fifteen-year-old son, looking into his mother’s boudoir and spotting Bertie’s clothes, was seized by a fit of rage and threw the clothes into the water fountains. For this, he was apparently banished to a monastic reformatory.a100

  Bertie’s next project was truly ambitious: a visit to India. In March 1875 he asked the Queen for her permission, and to his and everyone else’s surprise, she agreed. An editorial appeared at once in The Times, proclaiming the prince’s forthcoming visit as a great historical pageant that would visibly link East and West.101

  Victoria instantly regretted giving her consent. She claimed that Bertie had tricked her into agreeing by telling her that the trip had been approved by Disraeli and the Cabinet when, accor
ding to Disraeli, the prince had merely mentioned it casually “at table after dinner.”102 Disraeli blamed Bertie for taking his name in vain; but Disraeli was more economical than most with the truth, and Bertie grumbled that he was “beginning to think him a humbug.”103 He far preferred dealing with Gladstone.

  Victoria protested that Bertie’s health would not stand the trip. Not only did she worry that he would get into some scrape, but, Ponsonby suspected, she was envious of the prestige he would gain if the visit succeeded.104 Soon open war broke out between mother and son, and Disraeli found himself in the middle of it. Victoria objected to some of the people Bertie proposed to take with him, especially her bête noire Carrington and the rollicking naval officer Lord Charles Beresford, who she complained was half-cracked and addicted to practical jokes. She appealed to Disraeli to intervene, and wrote a furious letter for him to read to the Cabinet that made ministers snigger; it was written, said foreign secretary Derby, “with so much violence and so little dignity that to hear it read with gravity was impossible.”105 Bertie stormed off to Downing Street and demanded an interview with Disraeli, at which he “manifested extraordinary excitement.”106 He was thirty-three, objected the prince, and the Queen had no right to exercise a sort of guardianship over him.107 Disraeli counseled the Queen to drop the matter and, on Ponsonby’s advice, she agreed.108

  Urged on by “the toadies who hang about him,” such as the Duke of Sutherland and Carrington, Bertie’s Indian plans became increasingly ambitious.109 As the tour built momentum in the press, he gained popularity by attacking the parsimony of the Cabinet.b110

  To Alix’s fury, Bertie refused to take her with him to India. She had dreamed of repeating the success of her Egyptian tour, and being left behind rankled for the rest of her life. She appealed to the Queen, who forbade her to go, and then she approached Disraeli. “You believe in sympathy,” she told him. “I want to go. I trust to you to manage it for me!”111 Even this was unavailing, which, thought Lord Derby, was just as well, as “whether she goes or not, the prince is sure to run after women, and the scandal will be less if he does so in his wife’s absence than if she were there.” Derby picked up gossip that Bertie had skipped off to Menton on the Mediterranean for Easter with the notorious Mrs. Murrieta, the wife of a wealthy Spanish merchant. “The thing is so openly done that it cannot fail to make a scandal,” he wrote hopefully.112 Alix, however, was unaware, and believed that Bertie had fled to Menton for the sun, which relieved the pain in his leg.113

  Shortly before Bertie was due to depart, Victoria wrote forbidding Alix from traveling to Copenhagen with the children for Christmas while he was away. Bertie, who was finding the parting from Alix trying enough as it was, appealed in desperation to Disraeli. “I have not had the heart to tell [Alix],” he wrote, “as I know it would pain her, and I am naturally anxious that the few days left for me to be with her should be happy ones.”114

  Disraeli obliged with a letter to the Queen, pointing out that forcing the princess to “live in seclusion” for six months while Bertie was away seemed somewhat “harsh.”115 Victoria relented, and Disraeli was rewarded with an invitation to Sandringham. Royalty to Disraeli was irresistible. Now he was flattered to be admitted to the confidence of Prince Hal, as he called Bertie. Bertie talked alone with him at midnight for over an hour, and at one a.m. “tried to seduce me to the bowling room and its attendant fumes, but I was firm and retired, and he went to begin his day.” Disraeli sat next to Alix at dinner. Conversation, never easy with the deaf princess, was made harder by her misery at the impending separation, and (wrote Disraeli) “while with strained attention I devoured her words instead of my dinner, there was always an entrée or a sauce interposed or offered at the critical moment.” She began by saying: “When you were here two years ago, you said you would write a book for me about sympathy—now I want sympathy indeed.” That, wrote Disraeli, “was not a bad beginning—but … she is no fool.”116

  Bertie’s parting from Alix on 12 October 1875 was drawn out and emotional. Alix broke down repeatedly; Princess Helena told the Queen, “She looks so worn and tired and pale and so sad. Really it makes one’s heart ache to see them both.”117 Alix accompanied Bertie on the steamer to Calais, and the final farewell was a passionate embrace on deck. Both of them were weeping, and (Alix told Minnie) “had to tear ourselves away from each other, and I saw him disappear over the dark landing bridge, and there on the ship stood poor Alexandra alone, so totally alone, with her bursting heart.”118

  Alix wired the Queen from Sandringham two days later: “Everything seems sad and dreary without him.”119 Her devotion to her Bertie, in spite or perhaps because of his philandering, was more intense than ever.

  * * *

  * Poole’s Archive shows his chest and waist measurements increasing from 33¾ inches and 29½ inches in 1860 to 43 inches and 39½ inches in 1876.

  † Katrine Countess Cowper, wife of the 7th Earl.

  ‡ On a visit to Coventry in 1874, Bertie told his equerry to arrange for a bowling alley to be included in the itinerary. When the bemused Hartington made no attempt to conceal his boredom, the mayor uttered the line in which he had been coached: “HRH especially asked for its inclusion in tribute to your lordship’s love of Skittles.”

  § Florence Nightingale, a chronic invalid, lived opposite at number 35, also commemorated with a blue plaque. Both women did much of their work in bed.

  ‖ On a visit to Vienna with Bertie, Knollys slept with “about as low a woman” as he could find, before learning that all the ladies of the town were poxed. He confessed to being “in a horrible fright.” (Rosebery’s diary, April 1873, in Hibbert, Edward VII, p. 305.)

  a The second son of the Princesse de Sagan, who was born in Paris on 20 July 1867, was alleged to be Bertie’s bastard, but Bertie’s relationship with the princesse seems to have begun sometime after the child was born. In late October/early November 1866, he was not in France. He left England for St. Petersburg on 1 November 1866, traveling via Brussels and Potsdam, where he stayed with Vicky. (Leslie, Edwardians in Love, pp.70–72; Camp, Royal Mistresses, pp. 350–51.)

  b Bertie demanded £100,000 from the government, and eventually the Cabinet agreed to ask Parliament for £60,000.

  CHAPTER 11

  India

  1875–76

  The tearful parting left Bertie feeling low.1 To Alix he wrote “the most beautiful, loving letters you can imagine, so like himself.”2 He told Lord Granville that he felt so depressed that he contemplated turning back.3 He looked terrible, too. Alexander Bassano, the society photographer who had snapped him as a jaunty man-about-town before his illness, took a photograph that summer that, in spite of studio air-brushing, shows him looking puffy, overweight, and middle-aged: As Victoria wrote, “He is grown so large, and nearly quite bald.”4

  From Paris he traveled overland to Brindisi, where he boarded the HMS Serapis. Here he was united with his suite. The eighteen men he had picked to accompany him included the inner circle of the Marlborough House set: His friends “Sporting Joe” Aylesford and Charles Carrington came as personal guests, Lord Suffield and Owen Williams were equerries, and Lord Charles Beresford was an aide-de-camp. The leader was silver-haired Bartle Frere, an old India hand, who was charged by the Queen with speaking plainly to the prince. A “dear old patapouf” (according to Ponsonby), Frere probably lacked the authority to influence the prince. The Queen sent Lord Alfred Paget as her representative, much to Bertie’s annoyance.5 A member of the family which had monopolized so many posts at Victoria’s early court that it was known as the “Paget clubhouse,” the fifty-nine-year-old Lord Alfred made himself unpopular by bagging the best cabin and by constant grumbling.6 W. H. Russell of The Times was appointed historian and given exclusive reporting rights, provoking complaints from the rest of the press. To keep his rivals happy, it was agreed that Russell should report nothing until they reached Bombay.*7

  There were no women on board the Serapis. This was pe
rhaps the only time in his adult life that Bertie was surrounded entirely by men. It was also his first experience of political responsibility and a real job that he had worked hard to get. The Indian trip, which had begun as a bachelor spree, had turned into a royal progress, but the men he picked to accompany him were not qualified for the work. Cronies, drinking companions, and practical jokers, they had left behind in England a trail of adultery and scrapes. One of the functions of a court is to promote talent, but Bertie had filled his court with wastrels and socialites, uneducated philistines who could no more rule an empire than write a book.

  On board the Serapis, Bertie and his floating court of men lived in spartan luxury. The extreme heat and early hours agreed with him; he played energetic lawn tennis on deck and he looked “wonderfully well in the face.”8 He was provided with duplicate sets of private apartments, one running each side of the vessel, so that he could use whichever was least sunny. His plain metal bedstead was not fixed to the floor but suspended from brass uprights, so that it swung freely to neutralize the rolling of the ship.9 In HRH’s drawing room, which was furnished like a gentleman’s club, with heavy leather-upholstered mahogany furniture bolted to the floor, the party was unusually subdued. As Carrington wrote, “We are more like a lot of monks than anything else—no jokes or any approach to it.” Aylesford and Beresford were quietness itself: no rows, no whist, no bear fights.†10

  Bertie had been shocked to discover that the Indian Civil Service (ICS) had no official uniform to wear in order to receive him, and he was disappointed when his proposal for a brass-buttoned blue coat was rejected. On board the Serapis, however, he devised his very own dress uniform of black trousers, short blue jacket with silk facings and gilt buttons, and black tie.11 Sweating in their uniforms in temperatures of well over 100 degrees, the all-male suite dined each night at seven thirty prompt, serenaded by a band that played throughout the meal as they chaffed the rubicund Lord Alfred Paget, known as Beetroot, who declared he never ate at sea and then devoured more than anyone else. After dinner, Bertie would rise and propose a toast to Her Majesty the Queen, and all stood while the band played the national anthem.12