The Heir Apparent

by Jane Ridley

  John Brown died of erysipelas in March 1883. Queen Victoria was utterly crushed. The shock left her unable to walk.28 Bertie detested Brown, but the death of the favorite brought him no closer to his mother. Alix wrote sympathizing tactfully with the Queen’s grief: “I can quite understand how every day and hour at Balmoral must remind you of one who was ever near you.”29 It might do some good, she told the grieving Queen, “to put one’s Sorrow into words and confide the almost intolerable loneliness of suffering to a sympathising soul! And that you know dearest Mama you have indeed in poor me!”30

  Bertie was appalled by the Queen’s plan to commemorate Brown by publishing a volume of More Leaves from the Journal of a Life in the Highlands, which she dedicated to “the Memory of my devoted personal attendant and faithful friend,” John Brown. “I have grave doubts,” he told the Queen, “whether your private life, which ought to be considered as sacred as that of your humblest subjects, should be as it were exposed to the world.”31 This was a fundamental clash over the role of monarchy, and Victoria’s response indicates a startlingly modern approach. “I certainly cannot agree,” she wrote. “In these days of Radicalism,” she considered that publications of this sort, sold in cheap editions to the humblest of her subjects, could only strengthen the monarchy. “I know that the publication of my first book did me more good than anything else.”32

  In More Leaves, Victoria described a life at Balmoral of nice breakfasts, pony-riding expeditions, and Highland weather. “It is innocence itself,” commented the prime minister on reading the Queen’s book. But, as the editor of his diaries remarked, the innocence in this case was Gladstone’s, not the Queen’s.33 By reinventing herself as a nonpolitical, out-of-doors person, the Queen effectively disarmed her radical critics, who had previously complained, with good reason, that she was politically partisan and interfering.

  “It might create surprize,” Bertie told the Queen, “that the name of your eldest son never occurred in it.”34 Victoria could not resist telling him that his name was mentioned five times: “I fear you have not read the book if you overlooked this.”35 She inserted into the new edition a lengthy account of Bertie’s leave-taking before his visit to India in 1875. “I can’t deny that your remarks about my book pained me very much,” she told him, “as I was particularly anxious to hurt no one’s feelings, and I thought I had succeeded.”36

  Bertie tried, as he had tried before, to persuade his mother to open Parliament; as before, he failed. Victoria refused to appear to give support to the hated Gladstone, though she had opened Parliament three times during Disraeli’s 1874–80 government.37 The prince claimed to be neutral: “It is … well known that I have always favoured no party side in politics.”38 But he found Gladstone easy to deal with—in fact, Bertie was “the only friend among members of the Royal family whom Mr. Gladstone has got.”39 He understood that Gladstone’s fierceness toward the Queen masked a thin skin. Staying at Sandringham, Gladstone weighed himself at the prince’s request (165 pounds), and he was charmed by Alix, who told him sweetly, “You will have your favourite hymn Rock of Ages.”§40

  Bertie’s contacts kept him well informed about Gladstone’s night walks, when he prowled the London streets for prostitutes, whom he attempted to redeem. Gladstone was fascinated by Lillie Langtry, who wrote so often, enclosing her letters in double envelopes to protect them from prying eyes, that his private secretary Edward Hamilton had to warn the prime minister against seeing her, as her reputation “is in such bad odour that, despite all the endeavours of HRH, nobody will receive her in their houses.”41 Catherine Walters (Skittles) was another of Bertie’s friends who attracted Gladstone. He read to her, gave her gifts of tea, and measured the size of her waist by putting his hands around it. Skittles reported all this back to Bertie, who advised her “not to trouble [Gladstone] about politics at first, but when he has got into the habit of coming then I mean to let him have it.”42

  “Receive news of successful bombardment of Alexandria by Adm[iral Sir Beauchamp Seymour’s squadron!” Bertie wrote in his diary on 11 July 1882.43 Britain’s intervention to suppress the revolt of Arabi Pasha against the pro-Western khedive in Egypt thrilled him, and he implored the Queen and the government to let him join the military expedition. Reasonably enough, Victoria refused permission; the forty-year-old heir to the throne lacked military training, and his sole qualification was the honorary colonelcy of regiments. For once, she found Gladstone in agreement.44

  Blocked by his mother from seeing the telegrams about the British expedition to Egypt, Bertie appealed to his friend in the Liberal government, the Foreign Office minister Sir Charles Dilke. Dilke owed him a favor. It was thanks to Bertie that Victoria had consented to his appointment to government office. Victoria had wished to exclude him as a republican, but Bertie preempted her by asking to meet Dilke at dinner with Lord Fife in 1880. The meeting was a success. As Ponsonby wrote: “The Republican had drunk in the honeyed words of Royalty, had written his name down at Marlborough House and had enquired when the next Levee was to take place.”45

  It was largely due to Dilke, now promoted to president of the Local Government Board, that Bertie was appointed in 1884 to the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Class. Accompanied by Carrington (who was also a member of the commission), and trailed by a Scotland Yard detective, Bertie disguised himself in rough clothes to explore the worst and poorest courts in St. Pancras and Holborn. In one room a half-starved woman lived with three children lying naked in a heap of rags. The landlord asked her where her fourth child was. “I don’t know,” replied the woman, “it went down into the court some days ago and I haven’t seen it since.” When the landlord commented, “What can I do with her, she can’t pay any rent and she won’t go?” the prince was so horrified that he had to be restrained from giving her a five-pound note.46 Bertie’s concern was genuine, but this did not stop him returning to Marlborough House in time for luncheon at two o’clock.47

  A few days later, the prince spoke in the House of Lords—the only full speech he gave there—in which he described his visit: “I can assure your Lordships that the condition of the poor, or rather of their dwellings, was perfectly disgraceful.”48 He attended sixteen of the commission’s thirty-eight meetings; as Dilke wrote, he showed “a devotion to the work of my Commission which was quite unusual with him.”49

  Dilke was the rising star of the Liberal government, but his career was dramatically destroyed by a sex scandal in the summer of 1885. Twenty-two-year-old Mrs. Virginia Crawford, the wife of a Liberal MP, publicly accused him of seducing her. Her husband sued for divorce, naming Dilke as corespondent. Shortly after the scandal broke, Bertie proposed a vote of thanks at the commission in “an extremely cordial speech” (20 July 1885). Dilke wrote thanking him for his support: “This foul charge, with which I have long been threatened in unsigned letters, was first made known to me on this day last week, and I was completely prostrated by it on the day on which I saw Your Royal Highness.… I write thus freely to Your Royal Highness because I can never cease to feel that Your Royal Highness is … one of my truest friends.”50 Bertie gossiped to Skittles that Dilke’s method of seduction was “by bawdy books and tea parties in which the tea service has represented the various parts of generation.”51 Dilke’s disgrace had one plus point, as Bertie explained: “It will at any rate show to the public in general and the radicals in particular that the latter are not more moral than the ‘bloated aristocrats’!”52

  On 28 March 1884, Bertie was at Aintree Racecourse for the Liverpool spring meeting. His horse, The Scot, was favorite to win the Grand National, but fell at Becher’s Brook. “After the race heard terrible news of the Duke of Albany’s [Leopold] sudden death at Cannes,” noted Bertie.53 He returned immediately to London. The hemophiliac Leopold, only thirty years old, had fallen in Cannes and hurt his knee, causing bleeding. He died from sudden convulsions and “breaking of a blood-vessel in the head” the same night.54 Bertie wrote at once to the Qu
een, asking permission to bring his brother’s body back to England.55 The following evening he left London by special train, traveling through the night to reach Cannes thirty hours later. A short service was held at the Villa Nervada, the house where Leopold had died. Bertie stood at the head of the coffin. “He was painfully affected,” reported The Times, “his face bearing only too evident signs of his grief, and more than once during the ceremony he could not restrain his tears.”56 Bare-headed crowds lined the streets of Cannes to watch the funeral procession to the station, and Bertie broke down again when Leopold’s coffin was placed in a black-draped railway carriage. His relationship with Leopold had not been easy, but he was genuinely moved, especially by the suddenness of his brother’s death. “The more I think of our loss,” he told his son Georgie, “the less can I bring myself to believe that it is true!”57

  Victoria thought Leopold was the cleverest of her sons, but his Tory partisanship made him a liability and he gave advice that was often wrong. His insistence (contrary to constitutional practice) that the Speech from the Throne was the Queen’s and not her ministers’ caused a damaging row with the Gladstone government in January 1881.58 Victoria was saddened by Leopold’s death, but “not ill at all”; for him, perhaps, she thought it was best, as he had suffered so much and “there was such a restless longing for what he could not have.”59

  Eddy and Georgie had returned from their voyage on the Bacchante in May 1880. Georgie had flourished on board ship, but for Eddy the experiment was an utter failure; today we would say that he was depressed. The decision was made to separate them. George would train for a naval career; Eddy was to follow Bertie’s example and study at Cambridge. J. K. (Jem) Stephen, son of James Fitzjames Stephen and a first cousin of Virginia Woolf, was engaged as his tutor.

  Stephen was a tall, muscular twenty-three-year-old, a star athlete and top scholar from Eton and King’s College, Cambridge.60 He reported that Eddy “hardly knows the meaning of the word to read.” This was not because he was stupid, but his “one great difficulty is in keeping his attention fixed.… Sometimes he attends pretty well for a time, and then suddenly, for no apparent reason, his mind relapses almost into a state of torpor.” Stephen was reasonably optimistic. If Eddy could only learn to concentrate, “I see no reason why he should not become a tolerable scholar of English history. The subject interests him: and he has a very fair memory for the more picturesque parts.”‖61

  Bertie took Eddy up to Trinity, Cambridge, in October 1883. Determined to ensure that his son was not subjected to the solitary confinement that he had endured at Madingley, he arranged for him to live in college, chaperoned by Dalton, who, limpet-tike, acted as governor, and Stephen, who directed his reading. Eddy attended lectures with Sir John Seeley, the Regius Professor of Modern History, and was excused from examinations.62 It is sometimes claimed that at Cambridge Eddy lived a “dissipated and unstable life,” but the truth was more prosaic: He enjoyed the freedom of a normal undergraduate.63 He made his first public speech in support of the movement for a Cambridge settlement in the East End of London, declaring that “nothing is more necessary for building up a healthy commonwealth than that all classes and parties whether religious or political should unite together in the attempt to better, not only each other but the community.”64 Whether he wrote them himself or not, these were not the words of a fool. Austen Chamberlain, son of radical politician Joseph Chamberlain, seconded Eddy, and many years later he told Bertie, “I was struck by the fine simplicity of his character and by the strong sense of public duty which he showed even in those early days.”a65

  In the summer, Eddy attended the University of Heidelberg, where he studied German for five hours a day. No correspondence survives between father and son, but one letter that Bertie wrote to Dalton in July 1884 gives a sense of his irritation.

  What you tell me about [Prince Eddy’s] dawdling when he dresses in the morning is really too bad, as the most valuable time in the morning is lost.… Now I am determined that a stop must be put to this childishness. I take a quarter of an hour dressing but will let him have half an hour but not a minute more.…

  If he does not feel that he is 20 and half but more like 14 or 15 he must be treated as a boy and not as a man.… I had hoped that his younger brother’s diligence and success in his recent exam would have stimulated him to work hard, but I fear this is not the case.

  It is really most annoying and makes one think very seriously of the future.66

  Alix was unperturbed, believing Eddy to be “a very good boy at heart, though perhaps he is a little slow and dawdly, which I always attribute to his having grown so fast.”67 Georgie, on the other hand, was hardworking, bright, and affectionate. Bertie wrote him gruff, manly letters that barely mask his affection. “It gives me gr[ea]t satisfaction to hear that [you] are working so hard for your exam; remember it is of the greatest importance that you should pass with credit to yourself. Your whole future career in the service depends upon it.”68 Georgie, said Alix, was a “sweet clever boy and the life and soul of the house, always merry and so happy and so funny.”69

  At Sandringham, Alix filled the house with children, and the noise of laughter, piano playing, and horseplay made it almost impossible even to write a letter.70 Her deafness made the noise worse, as people had to shout in order to be heard. A Russian grand duke recalled of this time that “a stranger walking into the dining room … would have thought he was witnessing a family quarrel.”71 Alix spent as much time as she could at Sandringham. A letter Bertie wrote to Knollys in May 1888 reveals his exasperation at her willfulness. “After having written twice to the P[rince]ss urging her to come to Town at latest today to go to the R[oyal] Academy this afternoon I got her telegram yesterday evening—‘Thanks for letters am not going till Friday—children are anxious to stay one day longer!’ ” In spite of Bertie’s urging that attending the Academy was almost a public duty, Alix refused to budge. “If the P[rince]ss will not even in a small matter like this sacrifice the pleasure it gives her to remain at Sandringham 24 hours longer I am powerless to do anything,” he wrote ruefully.72

  Unable to have the large family that she craved, Alix kept her children young, as did all the mothers of the Marlborough House set, “for the younger generation, we knew, would date us.”73 The princesses received almost no education at all.b Affie’s daughter Marie (later Queen of Romania) remembered their habit of adding “dear little” or “poor little” to everyone they talked about. It gave the impression that “life would have been very wonderful … if it had not been so sad.”74

  In 1885, Princess Louise wrote to Knollys, enclosing drawings of the three sisters as animals. “Dear old Thingy,” she wrote. “We hope that the pictures will put you in mind of your little friends, Toots [Louise], Gawks [Victoria] and Snipey [Maud]. You must notice that Toots is practising her steps for the tiresome Court ball, that Gawks is going to bed instead like Cinderella, and that Snipey is trying to console herself with a song instead of singing hymns in Church as she ought to do.… Now goodbye old thingy and hoping you will appreciate the works of art we send you. Your affectionate little friends: Toots, Gawks and Snipey.”75 Louise was then eighteen.

  Bertie welcomed the Third Reform Bill, which gave the vote to two-thirds of the male population, and had to be dissuaded from voting for it in the Lords.c76 On 21 July 1884, a demonstration in support of the bill marched through London, and Bertie invited himself and Alix to watch the procession with his friend Carrington, who lived on Whitehall. As the crowd approached, singing “La Marseillaise,” HRH said, “I don’t think this looks like a pleasant afternoon!”

  “Wait a bit,” said Carrington, who had tipped off the organizers of the demonstration. “I think you are going to get the reception of your life.” The prince’s reception was “stupendous,” equaled only by that given to the radical John Bright. After one and a half hours of standing at the window, Alix grew faint, but when she retired, the crowd shouted for her, and Carrington propp
ed her up with a heap of cushions. When Bertie came and stood at the window, “A roar of applause went up that could have been heard at Windsor Castle.”77

  Encouraged by his popularity at home, Bertie agreed to visit Ireland in the spring of 1885. With the country on the brink of nationalist rebellion, the timing could hardly have been more risky. Accompanied by Eddy and Alix, the prince received an enthusiastic welcome in Dublin, but as the three traveled south, the crowds lining the roads grew ominously quiet, and sinister black flags appeared.78 At Cork, they met a bitterly hostile crowd, though Bertie made light of it, explaining that the demonstration had been stirred up by the nationalist T. P. O’Connor, “who was so furious at the good reception we received in Dublin that he wished to counteract it.”79 Arthur Ellis sent the Queen a vivid account. “No one who went thro[ugh] this day will ever forget it,” he wrote: The procession of seven carriages was assaulted by a storm of hisses and hoots, shouts of “No Prince but Parnell,” an “angry, unwashed” crowd of 2,000 to 3,000 shaking fists and sticks and waving black flags. “The Prince and Princess showed the greatest calmness and courage,” but “it was like a bad dream.”80

  “They ought really not to have gone there,” was Victoria’s verdict.81 Bertie preserved a diplomatic silence, but Gladstone was impressed by his handling of the visit. He told his secretary Edward Hamilton that he admired the prince’s quickness of perception and happy knack of always saying the right thing. “He would make an excellent sovereign. He is far more fitted for that high place than her present Majesty now is. He would see both sides. He would always be open to argument. He would never domineer or dictate.”82