The Heir Apparent

by Jane Ridley

  Bertie’s feelings toward Beaconsfield were ambivalent. On the whole, he sympathized with his politics, especially in foreign affairs. But he distrusted Beaconsfield’s knowing irony, he bristled at his camp obsequiousness, and he despised his inability to say what he thought to his face. Above all, Bertie disliked Beaconsfield because he was Victoria’s favorite. He worried that Victoria confided too much, and that, like John Brown, Beaconsfield knew too many family secrets.a With Gladstone, the opposite was the case. Bertie shared his mother’s opposition to Gladstone’s Liberal politics, though his views were less extreme. But he had no sympathy with Victoria’s violent dislike of Gladstone himself. On the contrary, he found Gladstone personally agreeable.

  In March 1880, Beaconsfield called a snap election and was unexpectedly and overwhelmingly defeated. Rather than wait to meet defeat in Parliament, as was customary, he made constitutional history by resigning immediately, and Queen Victoria found herself confronted with the inevitability of a hated Liberal government, with Gladstone as it its most likely prime minister. She told Ponsonby she would rather abdicate than appoint “that half-mad firebrand,” and she endeavored to make the Whig Lord Hartington prime minister instead.97

  For the first time in his life, Bertie attempted to play a part behind the scenes. He was a friend of Hartington’s, and he was on good terms with Lord Granville, the third candidate for the premiership. He had several meetings with Hartington, which he reported to Ponsonby: “I think it right to let you know that I had a long conversation again with Hartington yesterday evening—and he is more anxious than ever that the Queen should send for Mr. Gladstone to form a government instead of sending either for Lord Granville or himself.” Personally, Bertie was “strongly of the opinion that the Queen should send for Mr. Gladstone. Far better that she should take the initiative than that it should be forced on her.”98 When Ponsonby showed Bertie’s letter to the Queen, she scrawled furiously across it: “The Prince of Wales … has no right to meddle and never has done so before. Lord Hartington must be told … that the Queen cannot allow any private and intimate communications to go on between them, or all confidence will be impossible.”99

  The Prince of Wales had indeed no constitutional role, nor had the Queen asked him to intervene. But his advice was sensible, well meant, and correct—Gladstone was the inevitable prime minister, and for the Queen to block him would have been a dangerous mistake. By snubbing Bertie so brutally, Victoria could hardly fail to make trouble. Bertie blamed his youngest brother, Prince Leopold, who was a staunch Tory and Beaconsfield’s pet. Leopold enjoyed the Queen’s confidence and acted as her adviser during the ministerial crisis, and Bertie accused him of poisoning the Queen against Gladstone and persuading her that Gladstone was an enemy of the royal family.100

  Soon the prince and his mother were quarreling again. The Queen proposed to make Bertie colonel in chief of the Household Cavalry, but in exchange she demanded that he should give up his colonelcy of the Rifle Brigade, which she desired to transfer to Prince Arthur. Bertie abandoned the Rifles with “extreme reluctance,” and let it be known that he would have preferred to keep both regiments.101 Without telling the Queen, like a small boy he persuaded Arthur to allow him to wear the Rifles’ black buttons whenever he chose. Victoria wrote irritably to Arthur: “I wish Bertie would not meddle so much in everything concerning you brothers as he does now; for you are my children and you owe him no allegiance or obedience, which belongs only to me! Pray do not yield to him, for he has no right to do it.… He was most unkind to poor Leopold the other day, but he won’t stand being treated like a little child.”102 Bertie, for his part, complained that Victoria did not consult him. “I do not think that I am prone to ‘let the cat out of the bag’ as a rule, or betray confidences, but I own that it is often with great regret that I either learn from others or see in the newspapers hints or facts stated with regard to members of our family,” he told the Queen.103

  “Receive sad intelligence of assassination of Emperor of Russia by explosive bomb!” noted Bertie on 13 March 1881.104 The czar Alexander II had lived like a hunted animal in the last months of his life, repeatedly targeted by terrorists, and he was eventually murdered driving in his sleigh in St. Petersburg. In London, the Liberal politician Charles Dilke watched Bertie at the mass in the Russian chapel. The small room was packed and stifled with incense. Bertie wore a heavy uniform and carried a lighted taper, and Dilke saw him go to sleep standing, “his taper gradually turn round and gutter on the floor.”105

  The new czar, Alexander III, was Bertie’s brother-in-law, and in spite of the security risks and hostility toward Russia, Bertie persuaded a reluctant Victoria to allow him and Alix to attend the funeral. This was his third visit to Russia. “There is very general surprise expressed at them being allowed to go there at all,” commented Loulou Harcourt in his diary.106

  On the day of the funeral, St. Petersburg was blotted out by thick snow raked by a bitter, swirling wind. The city buzzed with rumors of mines that had been timed to detonate during the service. Inside the heavily guarded Peter and Paul Cathedral, the atmosphere was overpoweringly hot and perfumed with flowers and incense. Bertie and Alix arrived after the interminable funeral mass had already begun, and watched as Minnie—now styled the Empress Marie Feodorovna—along with the rest of the czar’s family, filed past and one by one kissed the mutilated hands of the blackened and putrefying corpse of Alexander II, which lay in its open coffin.107 At least Alix was spared the kissing.

  The next day Bertie invested his brother-in-law Alexander III with the Order of the Garter at the Anitchkoff Palace, where he and Alix were staying. The new czar had moved there from the Winter Palace, but even here he was a virtual prisoner, in constant danger of assassination, and confined for exercise to the palace backyard, which, Bertie declared, was an area unworthy of a London slum.108 The Garter ceremony was performed privately. As Bertie marched into the throne room at the head of five members of his staff, carrying the insignia on narrow velvet cushions, Alix could be heard crying out to Minnie: “Oh! My dear! Do look at them! They look exactly like a row of wet-nurses carrying babies!”109

  * * *

  * Nor was this the last of the Hesses’ tragedies. Alice’s daughter, the czarina Alexandra, was murdered with all her family at Ekaterinburg in 1918. Ernie’s eldest son, the Grand Duke George, was killed in 1937 along with his wife, Cecile, who was Prince Philip’s sister, and their two young sons, in an air crash. Earl Mountbatten, who was the son of Alice’s daughter Victoria, was assassinated in 1979 by a bomb planted by the Irish Republican Army that also killed his grandson. (see David Duff, Hessian Tapestry [Muller, 1967].)

  † When Dalton heard that the Bacchante, a new ironclad corvette, had been chosen, he objected that it was not safe and demanded that the two princes should be separated. Bertie was “very much put out” by Dalton’s change of mind, and after much toing and froing Dalton eventually agreed to the Bacchante. (RA VIC/Add C07/1, Francis Knollys to Henry Ponsonby, n.d. See Ponsonby’s Memo, n.d., in Arthur Ponsonby, Henry Ponsonby, p. 105.)

  ‡ When Bernhardt came to London in 1881, Bertie asked some English ladies to be invited to a supper that he directed to be given for her at the wish of the Duc d’Aumale. The party was not a success. “It was one thing to get [the English women] to go, and another thing to get them to talk when they were there; and the result was that, as they would not talk to Sarah Bernhardt and she would not talk to them, and as the Duc d’Aumale was deaf and not inclined to make conversation on his own account, nobody talked at all, and an absolute reign of the most dismal silence ensued.” (Stephen Gwynn and Gertrude Tuckwell, Life of Sir Charles Dilke [John Murray, 1917], vol. 1, p. 414.)

  § In the same year, he attended the theater, opera, or concerts on eighty occasions.

  ‖ Society, on the other hand, believed that the child was Louis Battenberg’s. Jeanne married the Conservative politician Ian Malcolm in 1902. Margot Asquith, crashingly tactless, told t
he unsuspecting bride on her wedding day that her real father was not Ned Langtry but Louis Battenberg, causing a lifelong rift between Lillie and her daughter. When Lillie’s granddaughter Mary Malcolm died in 2010, her obituaries claimed that her grandfather was Edward VII.

  a See this page.

  CHAPTER 15

  Prince of Pleasure

  1881–87

  During the 1880s, the number of Bertie’s openings, dinners, and other such public engagements climbed to a yearly average of forty-two; but his amusements grew in proportion.1 Cowes Week swelled to fill a fortnight, or sometimes the entire month of August: to “get the sea breezes and yachting” was “an immense relaxation,” he explained, “after the fatigues of the London season.” From 1883 he escaped to Cannes for three weeks in February and March, which he found “very beneficial … at that somewhat trying time of year.”2 Keeping the prince amused was “a major social problem,” and stratagems were devised to relieve the tedium of staying year after year with the same parties in the same great houses.3

  The routine of his social season was reconfigured. Bertie stayed most years during the 1880s in mid-July at Waddesdon.4 This brand-new French chateau in the Rothschild county of Buckinghamshire was the creation of Ferdinand de Rothschild. A member of the Austrian family, he was a widower in his forties. Morose, depressive, and solipsistic, he disliked racing, took no interest in pretty women, and dined on cold toast and water.5 Though his priceless collections seemed to give him little pleasure, he was a perfectionist. Once after a storm devastated the flower garden, an early rising guest noticed an army of gardeners replanting the borders to their former glory in time for breakfast.6 The nervy-fingered “Ferdy” seemed an unlikely friend for Bertie, but the connection suited both men. The novelist Henry James found the “gilded bondage of that gorgeous place” oppressive, but Bertie had always been drawn to Rothschilds, because he “relished their sensible cosmopolitan outlook, public spirit, geniality and panache.”7 Waddesdon became a favorite place for the prince to entertain, effectively an alternative court. Guest lists were sent in advance to Marlborough House for approval, and Bertie noted the names carefully in his diary, as he did whenever he stayed in a country house.8 The Rothschilds appealed all the more in the 1880s as, squeezed by agricultural depression, Bertie’s English friends no longer vied so keenly for the expensive honor of entertaining him.

  Alix did not come to Waddesdon. But she accompanied Bertie, at least at first, to another new social fixture: the Duke of Richmond’s house party for Goodwood races, which ended the summer season in late July. The first of the huge royal Goodwood parties took place in 1881.9 Dean Stanley, Queen Victoria’s beloved friend who had accompanied the twenty-year-old prince to the Holy Land, had died a few days before. The funeral was brought forward to suit HRH. Bertie’s diary notes: “Attend Dean of Westminster’s funeral at Westminster Abbey 4. Leave Victoria Station 6 for Chichester drive to Goodwood House and stay there.”10 He was truly a railway prince. Victoria grieved that Bertie refused to cancel his end-of-season ball at Marlborough House out of respect for the dean.11 People were even more shocked when Alix opened the first quadrille dancing with King Kalakaua of Hawaii. Bertie took the king with him everywhere that season, insisting that he should be given precedence. He wanted to persuade Kalakaua to agree to the annexation of his islands by Britain, rather than America. At Lady Spencer’s party, the King of Hawaii marched along beside Alix, while Fritz, the German Crown Prince, trailed humbly behind. When the Germans objected, Bertie retorted: “Either the brute is a King or else he is an ordinary black nigger, and if he is not a King, why is he here at all?”12

  Bertie’s appetite was inexhaustible; after a dinner of many courses, he was said to retire with a cold chicken beside his bed, which, so the story went, was always bare in the morning.* His nickname was Tum Tum—though he was sensitive on the subject. When Sir Frederick Johnstone was behaving obstreperously in the billiard room at Sandringham, Bertie put his hand on his shoulder: “Freddy, Freddy, you’re very drunk.” Johnstone pointed at Bertie’s expanding middle and, imitating his rolling rrr’s, replied: “Tum Tum, you’re verrry fat!” Bertie walked out of the room, and the friendship was terminated. Johnstone left the house before breakfast the next morning.13 Carrington described a shooting party at Holkham with the Earl of Leicester in December 1881: “We fell at once to luncheon. Woodcock pie, mashed potatoes and champagne, curacao, cigarettes, and then fevered and restless sleep.” Dinner (men only) followed at eight sharp, and by 9:15 they were in the smoking room for an evening of play for high stakes.14

  When Bertie attended a party with Lord Stamford in Leicestershire, the shooting was ruined by the crowd of thousands of textile workers who crammed into the fields beside the woods and cheered lustily whenever Bertie appeared. They snatched at the dead pheasants as they fell to the ground and tore them to pieces in their enthusiasm, but nevertheless Bertie noted a tally of 8,463 pheasants over four days.15

  Eating and shooting were not enough to keep boredom at bay. For amusement Bertie turned to the young women from the New World who invaded English society in the 1880s. One name that features often in the lists of guests at royal house parties is that of Lady Mandeville.

  Consuelo Mandeville was the daughter of a Cuban landowner named Yznaga; she was born in 1858 on her mother’s cotton plantation in Louisiana. As slave-owning Southerners whose fortunes fluctuated wildly, the Yznagas were excluded from the magic circle of New York society after the Civil War. At eighteen, Consuelo made a spectacular romantic marriage to the Duke of Manchester’s son (she nursed him back to health after he fell ill from a fever while staying in her family house). The marriage turned out badly. Lord Mandeville was a weak-willed wastrel, and Consuelo’s fabled millions did not materialize. Nevertheless, being Lady Mandeville gave her the kudos she needed to launch herself on the social scene in both London and New York.16

  Consuelo Mandeville had tiny feet that uneasily supported her plump body; she told funny stories in a slow southern drawl, and she sang Spanish songs as she strummed her banjo. Later, Edith Wharton drew a sympathetic portrait of her in The Buccaneers, where she features as Conchita Closson, the dusky-skinned, cigarette-smoking southern beauty who leads the American invasion of England.17 Consuelo and her two sisters, Nantica (who married Sir John Lister-Kaye) and Emily Yznaga, were often at Marlborough House. When Bertie and Alix took Consuelo and her two-and-a-half-year-old twin daughters to visit Queen Victoria, the children disobeyed instructions to kiss her hand, and rushed toward her, climbed into her lap, and flung their chubby arms around her neck, covering her with kisses and chanting, “Nice Queen! Nice Queen!” To the relief of all, Victoria was delighted, returned their kisses, and asked them to stay for luncheon.18 A favorite of Bertie’s (“He’s crazy about her Spanish songs”), Consuelo was rumored to be his mistress. She was so short of money that when the prince came to dinner, she had to ask her friends to send around the French cuisine.19

  More than three hundred American women married into peers’ or baronets’ families between 1870 and 1914, and by 1914 as many as 17 percent of such families had American connections. Only a few of these marriages were straight financial transactions, trading American dollars for English titles. It was not so much the Americans’ cash as their style that appealed: their fearlessness, their talkativeness, and their lack of respect for rank.20 How to know whether an American girl came from a good family was a puzzle for English hostesses; as the fictional Lady Brightlingsea remarks in The Buccaneers, “I don’t see how they can tell each other apart, all herded together, without any titles or distinctions.”21 Consuelo knew exactly which American was which, and she acted as social gatekeeper. When Bertie asked her advice, she would habitually reply: “Oh, Sir, she has no position at home; out there she would be just dirt under our feet.”22

  From 1882, Bertie retired each year to Homburg, where he spent several weeks taking the cure. Homburg was an island of Englishness in Germany.† Here,
each morning at seven, Bertie drank the waters from the Elisabeth-Brunnen, the spring named after his great-aunt, Elizabeth, Princess of Hesse-Homburg: three beakers of the salt-rich and gaseous waters were supposed to relax the bowels within an hour. Between each glass of water, Bertie joined spa visitors in walking as fast as he could up and down the avenue.23 He played lawn tennis for weight-reducing exercise, and in the evenings he dined at the Kursaal, the grand conversation house of the spa with its marble columns and ballroom.24 He pretended to lead the simple life, but Homburg was hardly a quiet retreat; Bertie’s arrival made it instantly fashionable and the English competed to hold grand balls in his honor.25

  At Homburg in 1882, Bertie’s list of dinner guests included an American family: Mr., Mrs., and Miss Chamberlain. Nineteen-year-old Jane (Jeannie) Chamberlain, whom Bertie admired, was the daughter of William Selah Chamberlain, millionaire heir to a Cleveland railroad fortune. A shrewd American debutante, she refused to see Bertie without her parents being present. Chamberpots, as Alix called her, remained in favor for a couple of years. Whether she was really as innocent and virtuous as she pretended is debatable. In 1884, the Paris police watched Bertie paying visits to Jane Chamberlain (among many other women) at the Hotel Balmoral, and according to them, she was his maîtresse en titre.26 In July that year, Edward Hamilton, Gladstone’s secretary, saw Bertie at a dinner party and noted that “as usual, he occupied himself entirely with Miss Chamberlain,” and in August, Bertie asked for the de Falbes, the Danish minister and his wife, to invite the Chamberlains to their ball.‡27