The Heir Apparent

by Jane Ridley

  Bertie still resented his exclusion from Cabinet secrets. At a dinner with Ferdinand de Rothschild, he complained to Edward Hamilton that he was “kept too much in the dark” by the government.83 Hamilton approached Gladstone, who agreed, but insisted that the Queen must first be consulted. So Hamilton saw Ponsonby, who wrote a note to the Queen: “The Prince of Wales complains that the Govt tell him nothing. Mr. Hamilton thinks Mr. Gladstone would readily tell HRH anything of importance that takes place in the cabinet.… But first he asks would Y[ou]r Majesty sanction this?” Victoria scrawled over Ponsonby’s note in bold mauve pencil: “The Queen thinks he should be told when things are no longer secrets … for he is not discreet.”84 Gladstone asked for clarification, and Ponsonby wrote another note: “Mr. Gladstone is anxious to obtain a direct authorization from Y[ou]r Majesty tomorrow, as to the cabinet reports which he is to furnish to the Prince of Wales.” This time the purple pencil was even more emphatic. “Regular ones w[oul]d be quite irregular and improper. Only some g[rea]t decision or change of policy he might be let known of before it is publicly known.”85 That was the end of the matter. Before the purple pencil of the sixty-six-year-old widow Queen, strong men quailed.

  In his forties, Bertie achieved a new maturity; people began to remark on the soundness of his judgment and his generosity and loyalty to his friends. Observers commented that he was a reformed character and had abandoned womanizing. According to an anonymous French commentator, the Prince of Wales “is very different in 1885 from what he was in 1878. The vie orageuse is over and forgotten, or remembered only and looked at through the mellowing medium of middle age.”86

  Not everyone agreed. Lady Geraldine Somerset, lady-in-waiting to Bertie’s Aunt Cambridge, wrote in her diary (1885) of the “reigning young ladies.” The list included Margot Tennant (twenty-one) and Julie Stonor (twenty-six). How strange, mused Uncle George (Duke of Cambridge), was this new line of the prince’s, “taking to young girls and discarding the married women.”87

  Julie Stonor was the daughter of Alix’s “beloved” lady-in-waiting, Elise Stonor. She and her brothers were orphaned when their father suddenly died in 1881, quickly followed by their mother (“She loved him above everything in the world, she will probably die herself from despair,” predicted Alix).88 Alix brought the Stonor children up as if they were her own. The Stonors were an old Catholic family, and Alix encouraged them in their faith; Julie Stonor’s Roman Catholic missal was a gift from the prince and princess. According to the waspish Lady Geraldine: “Dear papa and both sons are by way of being more or less in love with her.”89 Julie was certainly a close friend of Prince George, who even talked of marrying her, though her Catholicism was an insuperable impediment. But the implication that she was a mistress of Bertie’s is groundless fabrication. Fiercely loyal to “Motherdear,” as she called Alix, Julie Stonor was not the sort of girl to engage in flirtation with HRH, whom she saw as a father figure.d90

  Margot Tennant was different. The daughter of the Glasgow industrialist Sir Charles Tennant, she prided herself on being fearless and outspoken. In her Memoirs, she related how one evening in 1887 her father sent the brougham with a last-minute message asking her to accompany him to dinner with Lady Randolph Churchill. Margot had no time to change, and she arrived wearing a white muslin dress with “transparent chemise sleeves, a fichu and a long skirt with a Nattier blue taffeta sash” (the detail is characteristic: Margot considered herself to be a fashion statement). To her horror, all the other ladies present wore off-the-shoulder ball gowns and tiaras. The prince arrived, came straight up to her (she had met him twice before), and told her that she was to sit next to him at supper. “Oh no, Sir,” said Margot, “I am not dressed at all for the part! I had better slip away, I had no notion that this was to be such a smart party.… I expect some of the ladies here think I have insulted them by coming in my night-gown!” Of course the prince admired her frock, and they ended the best of friends.91

  Margot’s story about her white muslin is strikingly similar to the story about Lillie Langtry and her plain black dress. Both are variants on the Cinderella myth, the young girl’s fantasy that Prince Charming spots her in her homely frock and, ignoring the ugly older sisters of the court, dances with her all night.

  In her diary for 1885, Margot wrote a single, unpunctuated sentence: “The Prince asked to be introduced to me and was rather taken and excessive and gave me a horseshoe and his photo wanted to meet me when he could but I refused twice to lunch and once at Waddesdon.”92 To the twenty-one-year-old Margot, the prince was a sexual predator, an older man to be kept at a safe distance. In April 1886, Margot’s life was torn apart by the death of her sister Laura, to whom she was exceptionally close, and the prince wrote a sympathetic letter. “It is not many years ago that I lost my favourite and deeply beloved sister. I know what I then suffered, and I therefore know what you suffer!” Bertie could offer no consolation, he wrote, “beyond the privilidge [sic] of being looked upon as a friend and therefore truly sympathising with you.”93

  Margot seems to have taken up the offer of friendship. At Christmas she sent him a tortoiseshell cigar case: “Don’t think me a brute for not having thanked you,” wrote Bertie. “I shall always value it as your gift and still more for y[ou]r kind thoughts of me.”94 Soon he was proposing to call on her, but Margot, as an unmarried woman, in spite of her reputation for being fast, was oddly prudish, and she refused him. Bertie wrote tartly, “Very well—I shall not inflict my presence on you and when we meet … you shall explain the reasons to me.”95 Another time he invited himself to call, and reassured her: “I really do not think it would excite any remark and be considered quite natural.”96 Margot, however, seems to have won, and Bertie was rejected.

  Bertie’s new political friend in place of the disgraced Dilke was the equally disreputable Lord Randolph Churchill, who was now the rising hope of the Tory party. The prince had at last, after eight years of banishment, agreed to meet Jennie and Randolph Churchill at a dinner in March 1884. The formal reconciliation came on 16 May 1886, when Bertie dined with the Churchills at their house at 2 Connaught Place. He “thought it best to be on speaking terms though we can never be the same friends again.”97 In fact, the dinner turned out better than he expected, in spite of an electricity blackout caused by the breakdown of the dynamo that Randolph’s brother Blandford had installed in the cellar. The Randolph Churchills were instantly restored to favor. They stayed at Sandringham for Bertie’s birthday, and their names were included in the lists of Bertie’s guests at Waddesdon.98

  Randolph’s letters often mention Bertie’s kindness; it’s plain that he valued the rekindling of their friendship.99 As Chancellor of the Exchequer in Lord Salisbury’s new Conservative government, the thirty-seven-year-old Randolph was a political star, famed for his modern style of Tory democracy. But his ministerial career turned out to be even briefer than Dilke’s. In December 1886, after five months in office, he sent a resignation letter. The Queen was outraged because he had written his letter while staying as her guest, using Windsor Castle writing paper. Bertie came to the defense of his friend: “Lord Randolph is a poor man and a very ambitious one but he gave up £5000 a year in ceasing to be Ch[ancellor] of the Exchequer.… Should his life be spared (and he has not a good life) he is bound to play sooner or later a prominent part.”100

  “Should his life be spared.” Randolph had been informed by his doctors that he was suffering from syphilis. His mood swings and violent rages, his growing deafness and cardiac weakness were made worse by the poisonous treatment he was prescribed: mercury and potassium iodide. Whether he actually had syphilis is controversial; his symptoms are consistent with a brain tumor or some other neurological condition; but the fact is that he believed he had it, his doctors diagnosed it, and he might as well have had it.101 About this time he broke off physical relations with Jennie but didn’t tell her the reason. Hurt and confused, Jennie needed a confidant, and perhaps she found one in the prince.


  “Now we come to the suspicious events,” wrote Jennie’s great-niece Anita Leslie. “During the rest of that summer season [of 1886] Lady Randolph Churchill several times received the Prince for luncheon and alone. One might take it for granted that a physical affair had started.”102 Anita Leslie could find no evidence, as she readily admitted, to prove that after lunch the prince and Jennie walked upstairs to the drawing room and, after Jennie had ordered the footman to remove the coffee cups, the prince expertly unlaced her complicated clothing as she lay on a chaise longue. Bertie’s letters give nothing away. What is one to make, for example, of a message like this: “Unless you are engaged I wonder if I may propose myself to luncheon on Monday next”?103 Or, marginally more revealing: “Would it be very indiscreet if I proposed myself to luncheon?”104 But this seems to have been the guarded language that Bertie used to conceal the fact that Lady Randolph Churchill had become his mistress.

  At thirty-five, she looked the part: Margot, who met her at Punchestown races, couldn’t take her eyes off her. Wearing a Black Watch tartan skirt, braided coat, and astrakhan hussar’s cap, Jennie had “a forehead like a panther’s and great wild eyes that looked through you.”

  “Had Lady Randolph Churchill been like her face she would have governed the world,” was Margot’s acid verdict.105 None of Jennie’s letters to Bertie survive. The scores of cards and notes he sent to her, and which she preserved, are mostly undated, and usually not postmarked either, as they were often hand-delivered by an orderly, but it’s clear that Jennie had become an integral part of his life. In London she entertained for him. She joined him on his February visit to Cannes. She went sailing with him on the Riviera—“Will you dine with me afterwards?… Perhaps you would order a room at an hotel at Nice, where your maid could meet you and bring a change of dress, as we cannot tell when the race will be over.”106 Jennie Churchill was rumored—at the time—to have slept with two hundred men. It seems unlikely that she failed to consummate her relationship with the morally lax heir to the throne.

  * * *

  * I have not been able to verify this story.

  † Elizabeth (d. 1840), the third daughter of George III, had married the hereditary Prince of Hesse-Homburg, and spent her fortune paying off the debts of this miniature principality and laying out English gardens. The spa was frequented largely by English visitors. (Flora Fraser, Princesses: The Six Daughters of George III [John Murray, 2004], pp. 305–8, 351–55, 367.)

  ‡ Jane Chamberlain married Captain Herbert Naylor-Leyland in September 1889. Their son, born 6 December 1890, was named Albert Edward.

  § Lady Geraldine Somerset, Tory lady-in-waiting to the Duchess of Cambridge, wrote that Gladstone’s invitation to Sandringham made her “blood boil”: If Gladstone died, she wrote, Bertie would no doubt run at once “with ten special trains and twenty extra engines, and enveloped in yards and folds of crepe, to do honour to his funeral!” (Lady Geraldine Somerset’s diary, in Giles St. Aubyn, The Royal George [Constable, 1963], p. 268.)

  ‖ Stephen’s life ended tragically. After a head injury, he developed manic depression. While he was incarcerated in an asylum, he learned of Eddy’s death, and allegedly the news so upset him that he refused to eat and died of starvation thirty days later.

  a Bertie annotated this: “A charming letter.”

  b As the Duke of Windsor said of his aunts, “You might say that they could just read and write, period. That was all.” (Quennell, Lonely Business, p. 214.)

  c He had opposed reform in 1866.

  d In 1891 she married Bernard, Marquis d’Hautpoul, but continued to live in England and became a great friend of Queen Mary. Her brother Harry Stonor was a lifelong courtier and one of the best shots in England.

  CHAPTER 16

  William

  1887–89

  At eleven thirty on the morning of 21 June 1887, wearing a field marshal’s uniform and mounted on a magnificent pale chestnut charger named Vivian, the Prince of Wales rode out of Buckingham Palace in the procession for the Queen’s Jubilee. He was met by a roar from the crowd. An even louder cheer greeted the Queen, in an open landau drawn by six cream horses, with Alix and Vicky, the two most senior princesses, seated in the back. The guards’ bands played as the carriages bearing Victoria’s daughters and granddaughters followed by her sons and sons-in-law on horseback formed up behind the coaches of the Indian princes, the royal household, and various European royalties. The complex choreography had been revised the day before by Bertie, and the maneuver proceeded with machinelike precision as the glittering procession snaked along Piccadilly and Pall Mall through cheering crowds to Westminster Abbey.1 Bertie rode in line with his brothers Affie and Arthur at the back of the cavalcade; just in front of him rode Bertie’s brother-in-law Fritz, the German Crown Prince and husband of his sister Vicky, a towering figure in the magnificent white uniform of the Pomeranian Cuirassiers, with a silver breastplate and eagle-winged helmet. Cheered loudly by the crowd, Fritz was compared to Lohengrin, the legendary hero of Richard Wagner’s opera—a sharp contrast with Lord Lorne, Bertie’s other brother-in-law, husband of his sister Louise, who humiliatingly fell off his horse.2

  In Westminster Abbey, which was packed with nine thousand people squeezed into specially constructed wooden galleries, the Queen sat alone in the Coronation Chair. She wore her usual black dress and bonnet trimmed with white point d’Alençon lace and the Garter ribbon strapped across her breast. The widow Queen’s mourning was no doubt iconic, almost as much so as the Virgin Queen Elizabeth’s pearl-embroidered white, but it made her family groan. She had resisted suggestions that she should wear her crown and robes of state; when Alix, as favorite daughter-in-law, was sent to persuade her, she had had her head bitten off—“I was never so snubbed in all my life.”3

  During the service, the Queen seemed “deeply affected” and the Prince of Wales, who stood near, “gazed tenderly and anxiously at her from time to time.”4 After it ended, Bertie was the first of the family to advance, bow, and kiss her hand. Defying protocol, the Queen leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek. Then, carried away by the impulse of the moment, she embraced all the princes and princesses with “manifest emotion.” Calling back Fritz, she embraced him, too, with special affection.5

  “How long will it last?” asked the radical journalist W. T. Stead in the Pall Mall Gazette: Will the Prince of Wales, “the fat little bald man in red,” who looked so unimpressive beside his splendid German brother-in-law in white, ever reign over us? he wondered.6

  Seated in the Abbey among the Queen’s grandsons, seething with rage against his English relations, was Fritz’s son William. William had asked his grandfather, the ninety-year-old Emperor William I, to appoint him as his representative at the Jubilee instead of Fritz. William’s pushiness and disloyalty infuriated Victoria, and she pointedly ignored him throughout the event. In the procession he was denied the starring role that he considered his due as eldest grandson, and his wife complained that at court functions she was snubbed by being placed behind the “black” Queen of Hawaii.7

  A week after the Jubilee ceremony, in a small, dark room at number 19, Harley Street, Fritz was operated on for a growth on his larynx. Whether he would outlive old William I and succeed as emperor was in doubt, and William plotted ruthlessly to oust his father from the succession.

  William’s quarrel with his English relations had begun three years earlier, in April 1884, at the wedding at Darmstadt of Louis Battenberg to Victoria of Hesse, Princess Alice’s eldest daughter. Alice’s four daughters were the most glamorous princesses in the dynastic marriage market. Cousins of the czar, cousins of the kaiser, and granddaughters of Queen Victoria, they were superbly well connected; though not rich, they were blondly pretty Valkyries with long thin noses and long fair hair. What no one knew was that some of them had inherited from their mother a genetic time bomb in the recessive gene for hemophilia.

  For Louis Battenberg, the match was a brilliant coup. The letter
he wrote to Prince George on his engagement reads less like a man in love than a cat who has got the cream. “I am nearly off my chump altogether with feeling so jolly. I hope you will be pleased to have me as a cousin. It makes me ten times happier to think I shall be the nephew of your dear parents and cousin to you all.”8 Being related to the English royal family perhaps mattered more to Louis than the happiness of his bride.

  The Battenbergs were a family of dynastic social climbers, good-looking minor royals who contrived to marry the heirs to the great powers or get themselves adopted as kings of new countries such as Bulgaria. The rise of these outsider families was hotly resented, especially by the blood-obsessed German royalty, who claimed that the Battenbergs’ great-grandfather had been a valet. In the same way, they had gossiped in the past that Prince Albert was the illegitimate son of a Jewish court chamberlain and that Alix’s mother had conducted outrageous affairs.

  The twenty-five-year-old William objected furiously to the Battenberg marriage. Outwardly a shy, fair-haired Guards officer with puffy eyes and a wispy moustache, married to a dull, dutiful minor Protestant princess, William was angry and ambitious. He disapproved of his cousin Victoria of Hesse’s alliance with Louis, who was not “of the blood.” He was consumed with rage against the English relations who marginalized him, and especially against his grandmother, Queen Victoria.9

  William’s hostility took Bertie completely unawares.10 The Prince of Wales was on more cordial terms with William’s mother, Vicky, than he had been for years. Alice’s death had brought Bertie and Vicky together, and he saw her when he took his annual cure at Homburg. He attended every family event in Berlin. He was present at William’s wedding in 1881 to Princess Augusta Victoria of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg, whose nickname was Dona.* He gave William a Highland costume in Royal Stuart tartan, knowing that his nephew shared his own passion for dressing up.