The Heir Apparent

by Jane Ridley

  CHAPTER 14

  Prince Hal

  1878–81

  The fourteenth of December 1878 was the seventeenth anniversary of Prince Albert’s death. Bertie and Alix went to Windsor for the customary service in the mausoleum, but this year the melancholy occasion was clouded by impending tragedy. The previous day had been punctuated by alarming telegrams from Darmstadt, where Bertie’s sister Alice lay desperately ill with diphtheria. Sir William Jenner, dispatched by the Queen, wired that the disease had spread to her windpipe; she had great difficulty in breathing, high fever, exhaustion, and restlessness.1 The glands in her throat were so swollen that her neck was as thick as her cheeks. Her tonsils were coated with patches of false membrane, and the danger was that she would die of suffocation, as they obstructed her windpipe. Throttling by membrane had been the cause of the death of her four-year-old daughter, May, four weeks earlier.2 At two thirty a.m., Alice became unconscious, and she died at 7:30 on the morning of the fourteenth. The cause of death of the thirty-five-year-old princess was given as exhaustion and cardiac failure.3

  As soon as the Queen received the dreaded telegram, she went to Beatrice, returned to her room and spoke to Leopold, and only then went to Bertie’s sitting room. She wrote in her journal:

  He was not ready for a few minutes, but soon came out in his dressing gown, having received the same dreadful news from Sir William [Jenner], looking dreadfully pale and haggard, trying to repress his violent emotion, quite choked with it. His despair was great, and he could hardly speak. As I kissed him he said, “The good are always taken and the bad remain.”4

  The words in italics were cut from the 1926 edition of the Queen’s letters, presumably because they showed a lack of manliness; but they give a glimpse of the most sympathetic side of Bertie’s character—unguarded, emotional, and self-deprecatory.5 As for Alix, when the Queen went in to see her while she dressed and took her in her arms, she said simply: “I wish I had died instead of her.”6

  The tragedy at Darmstadt had all the makings of a Victorian melodrama—except that it was genuinely heartbreaking. Apart from one daughter, Elizabeth (Ella), Alice’s entire family, including her husband, Louis, had been infected with diphtheria within eight days. When little May died, her body was placed in a coffin covered with white flowers, and Alice was the only member of the family present at the funeral service in the castle. After it was over, she left the room and walked slowly upstairs. “At the top of the stairs she knelt down, and taking hold of the golden balustrade, looked into the mirror opposite to her to watch the little coffin being taken out of the house.”7

  Medical reports remarked on the unusual fact that none of the sixty members of the Hesse-Darmstadt household had been infected, and deduced that the infection was spread by kissing.8 Alice herself allegedly caught the disease when she broke the news of May’s death to her ten-year-old son, Ernie, who was so overcome that she embraced him—and thus her own death. Disraeli used his novelist’s skills to paint a pathetic picture of this tragic kiss in his speech in the House of Lords, which “greatly moved” Bertie.9

  As Victoria remarked, Alice had expected to die early and had been talking about it for years.10 A family portrait made by Heinrich von Angeli in 1878 shows a paunchy, bearded Louis; Alice, wearing a strange nunlike garb, looks haggard and unhappy. Ever since the trauma of nursing her father, Albert, on his deathbed as an eighteen-year-old, she had suffered from depression.11 For years she complained of failing vision, neuralgia, and “rheumatism,” but her symptoms were so vague as to defy diagnosis. In 1876 she described herself as “absurdly” wanting in strength, dull, tired, and useless. “I have never in my life been like this before. I live on my sofa.”12 Queen Victoria, who saw her in the summer of 1878, thought she looked “very weak and delicate and is up to nothing,” and when she heard of the diphtheria she dreaded that her semi-invalid daughter would be too frail to survive.13

  Alice’s son Frittie had inherited the hemophilia gene, and in 1873 the two-year-old had fallen from a window in Alice’s bedroom and died soon after from internal bleeding on the brain. For months—years even—Alice could think of little else but the horror of his sudden death. It brought her exceptionally close to her surviving son, Ernie. “Seldom a mother and child so understood each other,” she wrote. “It requires no words; he reads it in my eyes.”14 Alice was unfulfilled in her marriage to the amiable but bovine Louis. She was estranged from her mother, whose unfair letters made her cry with rage. “I wish I were dead,” she wrote in 1877, “and it will probably not be too long before I give Mama that pleasure.”15 Morbid foreboding was always in the air at Darmstadt. Ernie, too, was profoundly affected by Frittie’s death, and as a mawkish little boy he would say to Alice: “When I die, you must die too, and all the others; why can’t [we] all die together? I don’t like to die alone like Frittie.”16 Five years later, Alice and May did indeed die together.*

  At Windsor on 14 December 1878, the dark blinds came down, and a fall of snow blanketed the castle in silent stillness. The Lord Chamberlain ordered the court to wear deep mourning for six weeks: black dresses, white gloves, pearls, and diamonds.17 Victoria’s reaction to Alice’s death was strangely muted; for her, perhaps, nothing could ever be so bad again as Albert’s death. It was Bertie who was overcome. “My Bertie … is so sad,” wrote Alix.18 “She was my favourite sister,” Bertie told Lord Granville, “so good, so kind, so clever; we had gone through much together—my father’s illness, then my own.”19

  Late on Monday, 16 December, Bertie, Leopold, and Helena’s husband, Prince Christian, crossed to Flushing and traveled all the next day by train to Frankfurt. After the service in Darmstadt, Alice’s coffin was drawn through thick snow to the mausoleum at Rosenhohe, where Frittie and May already lay. The mourners followed on foot; chief among them was Bertie. Alice’s husband, Louis, though recovering from diphtheria, was not yet strong enough to walk through the snow. At ten thirty that night, an exhausted Bertie wrote to Knollys: “This has been a terribly trying day, and I hardly like to think of it, the interview with the poor G[ran]d Duke and the children was also inexpressibly painful. All was conducted with the greatest respect and quickly as was possible—but it was simply dreadful. I still feel as if I was under the impression of a horrid dream.”20

  Back at Windsor, a memorial service was held at the time that Alice’s coffin was taken to the Rosenhohe. Alix, “who has been a real devoted sympathising daughter to me,” gave her arm to the Queen as they walked into the private chapel, which was draped with black. Victoria bore up to the end, when the Dead March from Saul was played; then, in floods of tears, she retreated to Albert’s Blue Room and knelt in prayer.21

  After the funeral at Darmstadt, Bertie rejoined his mother at Windsor. Victoria went to see him as he sat writing in his room with Fossy, his little dog, lying beside him.22 They talked of Alice’s younger days, and Bertie was “so dear and nice.”23 “It has brought all so close together,” wrote Victoria.24 Later, he wrote her “a very dear kind [letter], speaking of Alix being ‘much too good for him’ and so delighted at my great praise of her.”25

  Alix’s youngest sister, Thyra, was not a beauty like her sisters. At twenty-five she was considered an old maid, and her teeth stuck out. She was taller than Alix, and (according to Queen Victoria’s adviser Howard Elphinstone) “decidedly clever and most sensible and agreeable.”26 Gossips whispered that she had given birth to an illegitimate child in 1871 when, at the age of eighteen, she disappeared abroad for eleven months; the father was supposed to be a Danish hussar named Marcher, who committed suicide shortly afterward. The Danish royal family claimed that the rumor was a smear story started by Bismarck, and that Thyra had, in fact, been ill, first with jaundice, and then with typhoid in Italy. In Rome, visiting Bertie and Alix, she met Ernest, Crown Prince of Hanover.27 Ernest had an abnormally long neck, a nose so flat that it was almost nonexistent, narrow shoulders, and thick pebble spectacles. Alix thought him “the ugliest man ther
e ever was made!!! But I like him so much.”28 Thyra fell in love with him at once.

  Ernest’s father, the blind King George V of Hanover, Queen Victoria’s first cousin, had sided with the Austrians in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, with catastrophic results. Prussia dethroned him, annexed Hanover, and sequestrated his immense hereditary fortune, which was known as the Welfenfond. Bismarck paid the income into his “reptile fund,” the slush money he used to bribe the reptiles, as he called the liberal press. George V died in 1878, and Ernest wrote an ill-advised letter to the German emperor, laying claim to his title as King of Hanover. This destroyed any chance he had of getting his fortune back. He became locked into a quarrel with Prussia. Queen Victoria, who was his father’s executrix, tried in vain to persuade him to drop his claim to the throne of Hanover. Dreading Victoria’s wrath if he married a wife of whom she disapproved, Ernest distanced himself from Princess Thyra.

  The deadlock was broken by Alix. She wrote to Ernest telling him that Thyra much wished to see him, and suggested a secret meeting in Frankfurt. Fearing a trap, Ernest hesitated, but Alix insisted, and accordingly, one day in September 1878, Queen Louise of Denmark and her daughters Alix and Thyra drove into Frankfurt, pretending that they needed to see an ear doctor. Ernest duly appeared at the appointed rendezvous. First Alix talked to him, and then Queen Louise, while Thyra waited anxiously in the water closet. At last Thyra was allowed to see Ernest alone. She wasted no time. As soon as he had kissed her hand, she proposed to him herself. Waiting outside the door, Queen Louise became agitated and, fearing that the meeting was a mistake and Ernest was indifferent, pushed Alix into the room. Alix saw at once that the radiant Thyra had been accepted and all was settled, but this made Queen Louise even more flustered. “My God, then she has proposed,” she declared, and tried to intervene, but it was too late; the couple were locked in an embrace. When the time came to leave, the Queen had to force them apart. “I stood behind the door,” Alix told Minnie, “and saw their parting kiss!!!”29

  By marrying Thyra, Ernest leapfrogged from being a sacked ruler at the bottom of the royal heap, and positioned himself at the center of the anti-Prussian dynastic bloc, becoming brother-in-law to the Prince of Wales, the Russian czarevitch, and the King of Greece.30

  At the wedding in Copenhagen, a large party of Hanoverians appeared, which gave Berlin an excuse to denounce the Danish king for harboring conspirators against the German Empire. The German ambassador was conspicuously absent. The deterioration of Denmark’s relations with Berlin worried Bertie, and he worked behind the scenes to help Ernest and protect the Danes from Bismarck’s anger. “I foresee troubles ahead for my excellent brother-in-law,” he told Sir Charles Wyke, the British ambassador in Copenhagen. “If he had only not irritated the German Emperor by that injudicious letter all the bullying which has since taken place would not have occurred and he might now have had his fortune.”31 Bertie appealed to Vicky, who explained that though she sympathized with Ernest and Thyra, private intervention by Victoria or Bertie could do no good unless Ernest formally rescinded his letter to the German emperor. “The question does not only resolve itself into what is ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ I wish it were as simple as that!” she told Bertie, and warned, “I … think it a pity that political questions should step in to disturb the peace and harmony of the family and be treated as personal ones!”32 But of course the personal was political—that is the essence of dynastic diplomacy—and the German emperor’s bullying of Ernest served only to tighten the links of the anti-Berlin dynastic bloc.

  Bertie had wanted to educate Eddy at a public school, preferably Wellington, of which he was a governor. When Eddy was thirteen, this plan was abruptly abandoned. His tutor Dalton wrote darkly of the young prince’s backwardness, and warned against separating the brothers. “Prince Albert Victor [Eddy] requires the stimulus of Prince George’s company to induce him to work at all. If Prince George left Prince Albert Victor, the education of the latter, even now extremely difficult, would be rendered still more so.”33 He proposed sending Eddy to Dartmouth as a naval cadet, along with Prince George; the unspoken advantage of this arrangement was that it ensured that he remained their tutor.

  Dalton had no trouble in convincing Bertie of the wisdom of his plan. But Queen Victoria, who was the ultimate arbiter in matters of her grandsons’ education, objected strongly to Dartmouth, on the somewhat surprising grounds that the navy would “make them think that their own Country is superior to any other,” which was undesirable in a king, who needed to be free from all national prejudices.34 Dalton, who showed more talent for intrigue than he did for teaching, managed to overcome the Queen’s objections, and in October 1877 the two boys were dispatched to the Britannia, the training ship at Dartmouth, accompanied by Dalton. For Alix, the parting from her sons was “a great wrench”: “poor little boys, they cried so bitterly.”35

  For Eddy, Dartmouth was a disaster. In December 1878, Lord Ramsay, the commander of the Britannia, nerved himself to write to the Prince of Wales about the boy’s progress: “It is very, very unsatisfactory, indeed so unsatisfactory that I really think Your Royal Highness should reconsider the advisability of his remaining in the Britannia.… Prince Edward is learning nothing.… And this is not the worst. It is still more discouraging that every master and tutor who has had to do with him seems to despair of being able to teach him anything.… The experiment … has failed.”36 Prince George, on the other hand, was making excellent progress, doing better every day.

  After this bombshell, it can have come as no surprise when Eddy failed the passing-out examination. Dalton, however, emerged unscathed. He took no responsibility for sending Eddy to Dartmouth. Instead, he blamed the boy’s inadequacy. Eddy’s problem was “that extreme inability … to fix his attention to any given subject for more than a few minutes consecutively.” According to Dalton, “it is to physical causes that one must look for an explanation of the abnormally dormant condition of his mental powers.” The prognosis was hopeful, as the prince would improve with time; meanwhile, competition with boys of his own age must be avoided. Dalton proposed a solution that could hardly have been more extreme: Eddy and George should be launched together on a world cruise for two years. Naturally, their tutor would accompany them.37

  Once again, Dalton easily persuaded the royal parents of his bizarre proposal. When Victoria first heard of the idea, she “did not like it all,” but Dalton succeeded in changing her mind.38 The plan was condemned by the Cabinet, which objected that it would “agitate and distress the country.”39 But this intervention backfired, as Bertie and the Queen joined forces in their annoyance at the politicians’ unwarranted interference.†40

  Bertie accompanied Eddy and Georgie to Portsmouth and saw them depart for a six-month cruise to the West Indies. On board the Bacchante, the two boys shared a plainly furnished cabin, which was connected with Dalton’s cabin by a door cut through the bulkhead.41 “Felt parting from dear boys dreadfully,” Bertie wired Victoria.42 He told Georgie: “I shall never forget what I felt wishing you goodbye on the 19th.”43 No one could accuse him of being hard-hearted toward his sons.

  The shocking thing about the sorry tale of the education of the princes, especially Eddy, is the unquestioning trust that both Bertie and Alix placed in Dalton. “He has my total confidence,” wrote Alix, “he is such an upright man whose aim totally is the good of the boys!”44 Dalton had contrived to make himself indispensable by preying on the parents’ fears. His talk of the “physical causes” of Eddy’s backwardness has given rise to all sorts of speculation. Some say that Eddy had inherited Alix’s deafness, others that his two-month-premature birth caused “neuro-developmental impairments,” which meant that he was educationally subnormal, or that he suffered from petit mal epilepsy.45 Banishing him on a world cruise was not helpful. Anything better calculated to encourage speculation that he was abnormal can hardly be imagined. The truth was that Eddy was lazy and a slow developer, and today he might be diagnosed w
ith attention deficit disorder. But the letters he wrote as a young man show a lively intelligence. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that his problems were made worse by Dalton and his system of shutting him up for years in isolation on a ship.

  Sarah Bernhardt, the Divine Sarah, took London by storm in the summer of 1879 with her passionate performance in the Comédie-Française’s Phèdre. It left her so shattered that she vomited blood all night as her doctor pressed crushed ice to her lips. The illegitimate child of a Jewish courtesan, Sarah Bernhardt had frizzy red hair, a white face, and an unfashionably waif-like figure. She possessed a very modern genius for publicity. At the house she rented in Chester Square, she posed for photographers wearing the suit of white pantalons and jacket that she used for painting, and she bought a cheetah and a wolfhound to add to the menagerie of a monkey and a parrot that she kept in the garden.46 Naturally, Bertie was captivated. He watched her perform night after night, and he visited her gallery in Piccadilly.47 Sarah was introduced to the prince. “I’ve just come back from the P of W,” she scrawled to director Edmond Got. “It is 1:20 and I cannot rehearse at this hour. The Prince has kept me since 11.… I shall make amends tomorrow by knowing my part.”48 There were rumors, there always were, of an affair, but this was a flirtation, beneficial not only to Bertie, who was addicted to celebrity—a craving he shared with Oscar Wilde, passionate admirer of both Lillie Langtry and Sarah—but also to Bernhardt herself, who gained social validation from his approval. She was lionized, much to the chagrin of Lady Frederick Cavendish, who thought it “outrageous” that an actress, and a “shameless” one at that, should be invited to the houses of respectable people.‡49