The Heir Apparent

by Jane Ridley

  “Receive very bad accounts of Emperor of Russia’s health,” wrote Bertie on 30 October 1894.72 His forty-nine-year-old brother-in-law, Alexander III, was terminally ill with nephritis (kidney disease) and had gone to Livadia, his palace in the Crimea, to die. The next day, Bertie and Alix, accompanied by Arthur Ellis and Charlotte Knollys, left Charing Cross on a special train. At Vienna they heard that the czar was dead. “Poor Mama is terribly upset,” Bertie told George. Bertie was moved, too; he was genuinely fond of his brother-in-law. This was his fourth visit to Russia, and he found it “the most trying and sad journey I have ever undertaken, and 3 days and 3 nights in the train with a sea voyage to follow is a great undertaking.”73

  An hour after his arrival at the white-stuccoed imperial palace in the Crimea, Bertie found himself attending mass in the black-draped chapel, where the putrefying body of Alexander III lay in an open coffin. Twice daily he knelt with the royal families and their suites, wearing full uniform and holding a lighted taper while singers chanted mournful dirges in a language he could not understand.74

  Alix never left her sister’s side. Livadia was a palace-village of small houses, and Alix stayed in the imperial house with Minnie and her family.75 The two sisters even shared a room, and Minnie was in consequence “able to sleep better than she has done for a long time.” Bertie was ensconced in another house “on my comfortable own.”76

  Bertie was charged by Prime Minister Rosebery to win the sympathy of the new czar, his nephew Nicky. At twenty-six, Nicky had a childlike simplicity that portended disaster in the autocrat of all the Russians. “I know nothing of the business of ruling,” said he. “I have no idea of even how to talk to the ministers.”77

  Bertie threw himself into the funeral arrangements. He summoned George to St. Petersburg, ordering his reluctant son to arrive in frock coat, cap, and sword. “Aiguil[l]ettea in thin crape excepting the points … cocked hat and epaulettes covered with crape and white gloves would be the mourning,” he wrote.78 He spent hours closeted with Count Vorontzov-Dashkov, the minister of the imperial court, who was too deferential to protest when the young czar’s uncle dictated the arrangements for the journey to Moscow and even the funeral itself. “I wonder what his tiresome old mother would have said,” remarked Nicky’s sister the Grand Duchess Olga many years later, “if she had seen everybody accept uncle Bertie’s authority. In Russia of all places!”79 Livadia was overcrowded and chaotic; one thousand people slept in the palaces, and Charlotte Knollys complained that she had to use her dressing table as a desk and keep her washing things in a piano.80 Arthur Ellis thought the “confusion, indecision and bustle” was worse even than the “masterly inactivity and fussiness” of Windsor Castle.81 Bertie impressed everyone: “He is never in the way and is so kind and civil to all the suite and even to the servants whom he recognises,” wrote Charlotte Knollys.82

  Bertie spent his fifty-third birthday traveling with the czar’s remains on the imperial train to Moscow. The royal party wore full court dress for the entire five-day journey—“first-class purgatory!” groaned Arthur Ellis.83 After the czar’s body had lain in state for twenty hours in the cathedral in Moscow, the train crawled on to St. Petersburg. From the station, Bertie walked in the four-hour procession that followed the funeral car to the church in the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul, where the coffin was deposited for the lying in state. The funeral took place on 19 November 1894, which was none too soon, as the body, which had been imperfectly embalmed, was rotting, the face looked a “dreadful colour,” and the stench was “awful.”84 Leaning heavily on Alix, Minnie advanced to the open coffin and for the last time kissed the shrunken lips of her dead husband.

  The wedding of the new czar Nicholas II and Queen Victoria’s granddaughter Alexandra of Hesse (Alicky) took place a week later. Alix, who was suffering from a heavy cold, once again supported her red-eyed sister Minnie. Both sisters were dressed identically in simple white—a sign that their old intimacy had been restored. Bertie wore his Russian dragoon uniform, a birthday gift from Nicky, which was distinctly unflattering. Carrington was shocked to see “a fat man in a huge shaggy great coat looking like a huge Polar bear,” who turned out to be the Prince of Wales.85 After the service, the enthusiasm of the crowds was so great that Nicholas for once forgot his fear of assassination, and ordered the soldiers lining the route of the imperial procession to be removed. This spontaneous gesture prompted Bertie to predict a new dawn. “The people,” he told Queen Victoria, “only wish to be trusted by him; and if Nicky is liberal in his views and tolerant to his subjects, a more popular Ruler of this country could not exist.”86 He was too optimistic. In May 1896 at the Imperial Coronation, a crowd stampeded, crushing thousands of peasants to death. Nicky refused to cancel or alter the ceremonies, heartlessly dancing while outside carts were piled high with corpses.87 Queen Victoria had dreaded Alicky’s marriage to Nicky: “My blood runs cold,” she wrote, “when I think of her … placed on that very unsafe throne.”88 Already the signs were ominous.

  Bertie traveled home with George, leaving Alix behind with Minnie in the Anitchkoff Palace. In the deep cold of the Russian winter, Minnie clung pathetically to her sister. Alexander III had been a double-dyed reactionary, but he was a devoted husband, and his death left Minnie alone and dependent on her son. “I am all right and darling Minnie too we lead a very quiet life together now,” Alix wired the Queen.89 She had little reason to return home; the “only magnet,” wrote Arthur Ellis, “is the girls at Sandringham alone.”90

  Daisy had by now become Countess of Warwick, her husband having succeeded as Earl of Warwick and inherited Warwick Castle. In February 1895, she gave a spectacular white and gold bal poudre (powdered wig ball). Bertie was tactfully absent, at Sandringham. Daisy ordered her guests to dress in the fashion of the court of Versailles under Louis XVI: She herself appeared as Marie Antoinette. Two weeks later, an article in a socialist paper, The Clarion, contrasted the lavish luxury and glitter of the Warwick ball with the shivering poor crowded in their hovels, and concluded: “I deeply pity the poor rich Countess of Warwick.” Stung by this personal attack, the philanthropic Daisy rushed up to London by the first train, sought out the dingy offices of The Clarion, and explained to the shabbily dressed editor Robert Blatchford that her ball had given work to half the county. Blatchford dismissed this as unproductive labor, and proceeded to give Daisy a lecture on socialist economics. Daisy left the office stunned; later, in her autobiography, she described this in quasi-religious terms as her conversion experience to socialism.91 At the time, it hardly seemed so. True, she was elected to the Warwick Board of Guardians; but her chief concern seemed to be to spend her fortune as speedily as she could.

  In May 1895, Bertie stayed at Warwick Castle. This was his first visit, and he must have noticed the reckless spending that struck Margot Asquith so forcefully when she stayed there in 1897. By contrast with Waddesdon, where every picture or objet d’art represented an investment, at Warwick, wrote Margot, all was waste: “Some rare book or picture goes up to Christies annually, and the proceeds of this and Daisy’s private fortune goes to pay the florists, fruits, table linen, towels, hot water pipes, coiffeur etc—breakfasts like ball suppers, hot and renewed from 9:30 till 11:30, small scented notes with button holes on the table of the men at dressing time telling them the lady they are to take in to dinner.” As Margot cruelly noted, there was “something of the kindness and all the impulses of the cocotte” about Daisy.92 She would have been an easy victim for the French Revolutionists. Truly she seemed a latter-day Marie Antoinette.

  As well as pouring money into her husband’s Warwick Castle, Daisy lavished her fortune on her own property at Easton Lodge. When Bertie came to stay in October 1895, he arrived in his special train at Easton Lodge station, on a private railway that Daisy had paid for out of her own pocket.93 Within six months, the Countess of Warwick was selling three thousand acres of her Essex estates.94 Such spending seemed only natural to Bertie, and it did n
ot occur to him that Daisy might need financial help. In many ways, Daisy and Bertie were similar characters: socially confident extroverts, used to gratifying every appetite, compulsive spenders, and voracious eaters. Daisy’s granddaughter remembered Daisy in old age taking a bath, huge and devoid of her wig; she still wore Edwardian false hair and feather boas, and she wolfed pats of cheese and butter in the dairy.95

  But Daisy claimed descent from Oliver Cromwell as well as Nell Gwyn. She had a puritanical streak, and she disapproved of drunkenness and gambling. She taught the prince to lead a better life; according to Knollys, she “terminated all the late hours and generally fast living that had prevailed before.”96 Perhaps Bertie grew tired of Daisy’s do-gooding—her needlework circles and schools for poor children, her quixotic attempt to finance a welfare state out of her own personal fortune. The reverse D symbol still marched through his diary—it occurs on forty-odd days in both 1895 and 1896—but there were hints that their relationship was changing.

  Daisy combined a social conscience with a commitment to sexual freedom; this very modern moral code was to be her undoing. Among the guests at the Warwick ball was a millionaire Durham coal owner named Joe Laycock. He was known as one of the ugliest men in England but also one of the most attractive—“ugly in that special way with eyes set very far apart, very lithe and very powerfully built and with such vitality!”97 At some point in 1894–95 Daisy began an affair with him. That she should fall for such a man was not surprising; what was remarkable was that Bertie seemed prepared to accept her defection.

  Bertie and Daisy both claimed in 1898 that their relationship had been “platonic” for “some years.”b98 This may have been a matter of necessity rather than choice. There were rumors that Bertie was impotent, possibly since 1895.99 Often on “D” days the prince noted a morning appointment with his doctor, Laking. In January 1896, he underwent a course of “electrical treatment.” This was the new wonder therapy of the day, and electric shocks were administered for impotence—though electricity was also used for many other ailments. At fifty-five, Bertie was overweight and threatened with heart trouble and possibly diabetes. His daughter Victoria noticed him panting when he walked upstairs.100

  These were the years when the prince was often seen in Paris. In Montmartre, at the Moulin Rouge (opened in 1889), he was accosted by the cancan dancer Louise Weber, who jeered, “Ullo, Wales! Est-ce que tu vas payer mon champagne?” (Will you pay for my champagne?)101

  Le Chabanais, founded in 1878, was a palace of sex decorated lavishly in a variety of styles, including Moorish, Japanese, and Louis XVI. The room Bertie used was known as the Hindu chamber; emblazoned above the bed was his coat of arms. The prostitutes with their frizzed black hair, long drawers, corsets, and bare breasts, seem to twenty-first-century (female) eyes strangely lacking in allure, but Bertie undoubtedly visited. He was watched by the Paris police, who kept files on his movements.102 The copper bath that was filled with champagne while he consorted with prostitutes (anything less erotic than sitting in a cold and sticky champagne bath seems hard to imagine) still exists. Appropriately, it was bought by Salvador Dalí. The prize artifact in Bertie’s room was the seat of love, which he allegedly commissioned in about 1890.103 Exactly what permutations the complicated design of stirrups and supports was designed for is hard to see, but when it was later exhibited to visitors, they were told: “He stepped in there as if he were going to a stall.”104

  In 1894, Bertie’s friend Randolph Churchill became alarmingly ill. Bertie asked royal physician Sir Richard Quain to seek a report from Randolph’s doctor, Thomas Buzzard. This disregard for professional ethics caused lasting resentment among some of the Churchill family, as Buzzard’s report on Randolph’s “General Paralysis” seemed to confirm that he was suffering from the tertiary stage of syphilis. Buzzard’s diagnosis was later challenged by Randolph’s grandson, Peregrine Churchill, who maintained that Randolph died of a brain tumor; but Bertie now believed his friend was terminally ill with syphilis, and so did Jennie.105 Bertie was all the more solicitous. On Christmas Day 1894, Jennie wrote the prince “a kind but dreadfully sad letter.”

  “I cannot describe,” replied Bertie, “how much I feel for you.… You have indeed had a fearful time of it, but you have done your duty by him most nobly.”106 Randolph died at age forty-five on 24 January 1895, and Bertie wrote at once to Jennie: “There was a cloud in our friendship,” but that was long forgotten: “Be assured that I shall always deeply regard him.”107

  After Randolph’s death, Bertie saw a lot of Jennie. Her name appears often in his diary.108 But even if their friendship now developed into a physical affair, renewing their relationship of a few years back, this was not an exclusive romance.c Also, Jennie invited Alix to dinner and consulted her about the guest list, something that would never have happened if Jennie had posed a threat to the Wales marriage.109 Equally, Jennie was on friendly terms with Daisy, and often stayed at Easton. Indeed, Daisy later wrote that “one never thought of giving a party without her”—something she surely would not have said if Jennie had been a rival for the prince’s affections.110

  “Dearest Daisy,” wrote Jennie, “I hear you look lovely and about 16!” “Will you be an angel,” she asked, “and send me the recipe for Cumberland Sauce for the ‘Wench’ in my kitchen?”111 Jennie’s cuisine was notoriously good; she was one of the first hostesses to employ Rosa Lewis, expertly trained in French cooking in the kitchen of the Comtesse de Paris at Sheen. Rosa was a favorite of the gourmet Bertie, who enjoyed her cockney wit almost as much as her quails stuffed with foie gras. Hiring the freelance Rosa soon became essential for hostesses entertaining the greedy prince, who let it be known that she was his favorite cook.d112

  “May I have a ‘geisha’ tea with you on Wednesday at 5?” Bertie wrote to Jennie Churchill.113 And again: “You once said you would give me tea in your Japanese dress—I wonder if you could appear in it at 5:30 this evening? A bientot.”e114 He now addressed her as ma chère amie, signing off, “Tout à vous, AE.” Between February 1896 and 1897, he sent a flood of notes proposing himself to tea or lunch. It seems that he visited her in her new, tall house at 35a Great Cumberland Street almost once a week.115 He included her name on the lists he sent in advance of house parties: She was at Chatsworth, at Waddesdon, at Welbeck, at Cowes. He teased her about her love life, which was lurid. When she broke up with Major Caryl Ramsden, fourteen years younger than her, after a spectacular row in Egypt, Bertie wrote: “You had better have stuck to your old friends than gone on your expedition of the Nile! Old friends are best!”116

  An undated pencil-written card from Bertie, sent from the Ritz in Paris in the spring of 1899 (the Ritz opened in June 1898), is ambiguous but suggestive:

  Delighted to call on you at 3:45

  AE

  And you shall have your enjoyments

  Our dinner should be at 7.117

  But the letters to ma chère amie come abruptly to a halt in 1900 when the forty-six-year-old Jennie announced her intention to marry George Cornwallis-West. Not only was he twenty years younger than her, but he was also rumored to be Bertie’s son by Patsy Cornwallis-West.f The gossip was scurrilous and unfounded, but it made Lady Randolph look ridiculous, and Bertie told her so. Jennie was not amused. Bertie replied: “It has been my privilege to enjoy your friendship for upwards of quarter of a century, therefore why do you think it necessary to write me a rude letter simply because I have expressed strongly my regret at the marriage you are about to make?”118

  So much is known about the detail of Bertie’s daily life—what time he caught a train, whom he saw and when, all recorded in his diary and often published in the Court and Social. But what went on behind the mask—his thoughts, his talk, his laugh—is carefully concealed. One glimpse of the real Bertie exists. It is a record of an interview by Daisy’s mentor, W. T. Stead. In spite of his hurtful gibe at “the fat little bald man in red,” Stead managed to persuade Daisy to arrange a lunch for him to m
eet the prince. This was in December 1896, and it took place in her sister’s house on South Audley Street.

  Stead noticed that when Bertie arrived, Daisy made him a graceful curtsey, “prettier than any I had seen before.” (Did she curtsey to him when they were alone?) The prince “does not shake hands nicely, only about half his hand he puts in and there is no grip in it.” Daisy led the way into the dining room, Bertie followed, and Stead came last. Bertie sat at the head of the table, with Stead and Daisy on either side. The prince was slightly under the middle height (he was, in fact, five foot nine)119 and not as fat as Stead expected, but “he had at first a look—I don’t know whether it was his moustache or in his eyes—which made you have a half impression that he had either a slight squint, or that one of his front teeth was awry.”