The Heir Apparent

by Jane Ridley

  Bertie spent a few days in Paris on his way home from the Riviera. Here he found Daisy Warwick, holidaying with her sisters. After sitting for the painter Carolus-Duran, Daisy would mount her bicycle and (so she archly told her friend W. T. Stead), “speed away” for “all sorts of adventures.”13 These included five assignations with Bertie, whose new toy was a four-cylinder motor car, supplied by Monsieur Panhard et Levassor’s establishment, in which, like Mr. Toad, he drove to the Hotel Bristol.14 Thanks to Bertie’s patronage, the motor car was soon to become “as much a part of the courtier’s baggage as is the cigarette case.”15

  Daisy’s old enemy Lord Charles Beresford had returned from the Mediterranean, but he was powerless to harm her now. Bertie spotted him at Ascot in 1896, and was enraged when he “purposely passed close to me without bowing but he bowed shortly afterwards to my son and went up to the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire with a ‘hail fellow well met’ kind of manner and said how glad he was to see them again.”16 Eventually Beresford was made naval aide-de-camp, which “allowed the poor beast to get into Society again,” but unfinished business remained.17 In June 1897, the Duke of Portland forwarded a letter from Beresford expressing his regret for the angry letters he had written to Bertie and his wife’s regret for the letter she wrote to the Queen.18 The prince accepted the apology, and Beresford’s letter was forwarded to Daisy, who wrote: “It is a great triumph to have received the apologies, and a great relief that the episode is closed.”19

  At Ascot in 1897, Bertie’s horse Persimmon won the Gold Cup at a canter by eight lengths, and the entire crowd turned “as with one accord to the royal Enclosure, cheering for several minutes.”20 The cup, appropriately enough, was a replica of the famous Warwick Vase. “Lady Warwick was in very high favour,” noted Carrington.21 After Daisy had left, Bertie’s racing manager Lord Marcus Beresford came up and asked him a favor. With tears running down his face, he begged the prince to allow him to bring his brother Charlie to offer his congratulations. “I had no alternative but to say yes,” Bertie told Daisy later that day. “He came up with his hat off, and would not put it on till I told him, and shook hands.… My loved one,” he wrote anxiously, “I hope you won’t be annoyed at what has happened, and exonerate me from blame as that is all I care about!”22

  Daisy by now cared not a jot about Charlie Beresford. All her attentions were taken up with Joe Laycock, who had been her lover for the past two years. Nor was Bertie faithful to Daisy. As well as Jennie Churchill, there was the beautiful Lady Dudley, sister of poor mad Harriett Mordaunt. “Midnight supper with Lady Dudley,” Bertie had noted on the day he won the Derby in 1896.23 But it was to Daisy that he wrote the long, confiding letters—letters that “contained some very candid criticisms of persons and events of the day,” as well as political secrets.24

  The morning of 22 June 1897 was close and dull, but when Queen Victoria was helped into her open state landau—an intricate operation involving her Indian servant and a sloping green baize plank—the sun came out. Bertie, wearing a scarlet field marshal’s uniform, rode beside the Queen—a small figure in black silk embroidered with silver, sitting opposite Alix in mauve—at the end of the royal procession of seventeen carriages that formed up for the Diamond Jubilee.

  The planning of the ceremony had occupied the committee that Bertie chaired at Marlborough House since January. Entertaining the royal families of Europe had cost the Queen exorbitant sums at her Golden Jubilee in 1887, and she threatened to boycott her Diamond Jubilee if she was asked to contribute to the costs.25 The Treasury paid the bill, and the committee planned to economize and please the politicians by celebrating the empire. Bertie has been credited with organizing the event, but in fact his role was to facilitate the innovations of Reginald Brett (later Lord Esher), permanent secretary to the Office of Works.26 The Queen was too lame to dismount from her coach, and Brett proposed to make the focal point an open-air celebration outside the west front of St. Paul’s Cathedral. The support of Bertie as chairman for this controversial innovation was crucial. “Has one ever heard of such a thing! After 60 years Reign, to thank God in the Street!!! Who can have started such an idea, and how could the Queen adopt it?” exclaimed Augusta, Grand Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz.27

  As the royal procession crawled toward St. Paul’s, the cheering was deafening. Women wept, men shouted themselves hoarse. “No one … has ever met with such an ovation as was given to me,” wrote the Queen.28 When she neared St. Paul’s, where the colonial troops were assembled, the crowd burst out singing “God Save the Queen.” The Archbishop of Canterbury cried, “Three cheers for the Queen,” and a thunderous roar broke out. The small black figure was “much moved.” As the tears streamed down Victoria’s face, Alix gently held her hand.29 The procession returned via London Bridge and the streets of south London, showing the Queen to the London poor, another innovation proposed by Brett and promoted by Bertie.30

  Bertie played his part to perfection. In spite of all the long years of being put down and rejected, he made no attempt to upstage his mother and showed no trace of envy. How different from Kaiser William, whom the Queen refused to invite, and who wrote bitterly to his grandmother: “To be the first and eldest of your grandchildren and yet to be precluded from taking part in this unique fete, while cousins and far relations will have the privilege of surrounding You … is deeply mortifying.”31

  The climax of the Jubilee season was the fancy dress ball given at Devonshire House by Louise, Duchess of Devonshire. The sixty-five-year-old Louise’s features had coarsened with age, not helped by her brown wig and gash of red lipstick; now stout and apparently incapable of showing emotion, she was feared and respected but not loved.†

  Heading the list of seven hundred guests, Bertie came dressed as Grand Master of the Knights Hospitaller of Malta, wearing a black velvet tunic embroidered with jet. His costume celebrated his charitable work as Grand Prior of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem; with his fat legs poured into thigh-length boots, and a tall black hat, he resembled a prosperous vole. Alix was dressed in cream satin and cascades of pearls as Marguerite de Valois, the promiscuous and unhappily married French queen who was imprisoned by her husband. She was “horribly bored” on account of the crush, which must have made it impossible for her to hear.32 Her friend Gladys de Grey, who came as Cleopatra, wore £6,000 worth of gold and orchids and was attended by an Arab slave; some considered that she was upstaged by a rival Cleopatra, the American beauty Minnie Paget, a favorite of Bertie’s, whose Worth dress was encrusted with emeralds, rubies, and diamonds. (After her death in 1911, the dress fetched a mere £9 at auction.)33 It was a good night for Charles Frederick Worth. Jennie Churchill appeared in another of his creations, dressed, appropriately perhaps, as the Byzantine empress Theodora, the sexually voracious barbarian courtesan who married the emperor Justinian. She wore a crown and carried a sovereign’s orb. Daisy Warwick flaunted her quasi-royal status as Marie Antoinette—or perhaps she was economizing for once by wearing the same gown of turquoise velvet embroidered with silver fleur-de-lis that she had worn at her own Warwick ball.

  Walking home through Green Park at dawn, Consuelo, the young American Duchess of Marlborough, was dismayed to find the “dregs of humanity” lying on the grass. “Human beings too dispirited or sunk to find work or favour, they sprawled in sodden stupor, pitiful representatives of the submerged tenth.”34 Like all historic parties, the Devonshire House ball was a tipping point: the beginning of the end of the great London houses—Devonshire House was destroyed in 1924—and the swan song of Louise, the Double Duchess.

  After the season, Bertie and Alix escaped together to Bayreuth. In spite of being so deaf, Alix shared Bertie’s love of opera. Bertie was gripped by Parsifal, which lasted six hours—from four until ten—but it “could be given nowhere but here. The stage is dark the whole time—and not a sound is heard. The orchestra is invisible as it plays under the stage.”35

  From Bayreuth, Alix traveled to Denmark, whil
e Bertie headed for Marienbad to take his cure. This was his first visit to the Bohemian spa, two thousand feet above sea level, which was to become his favorite retreat. He stayed at the Hotel Weimar, rose at six, drank the waters, and walked for two hours. It rained incessantly, but, he told Georgie, “I manage to get through the day somehow.”36 His regime as he described it was that of an abstemious monk, but in fact he entertained often three times a day (including teatime). To the strains of a band, he dined on grouse (specially mailed from Britain), aubergines frites (his favorite vegetable), and peaches. His impeccably cut dark blue coat or gray striped suit with trousers precisely creased sometimes down the side, sometimes down the front, turned heads on the promenade. Sigmund Muntz, the contemporary chronicler of Bertie’s days at Marienbad, noted that any study would “lack its most vital element,” if it “prudishly” avoided HRH’s relations with women.37 In the afternoons, the prince took damp drives through the thickly wooded hillsides with a new friend: Mrs. Eddy Bourke.

  Emma Bourke was the sister of Mabel Batten, the girl with whom Bertie had had a flirtation many years before in India. Emma, in her early forties, was manipulative, with a history of sending poison-pen letters.‡ Her husband, who was twenty years older than her, was a son of Lord Mayo, the assassinated Viceroy of India; though a stockbroker, he was often short of money. Bertie wrote to Emma shortly after leaving Marienbad, thanking her for her letter, written in French (“I can speak it fluently enough but have not your gift of writing it”), and apologizing for his execrable handwriting (“It comes partly from my writing so much. You imagine I get no end of ‘billets doux’ but I assure I have never had less from the fair sex than since I have been abroad this time. It is a case of ‘out of sight out of mind’ ”).

  “Let me at once dispel from your mind an erroneous impression,” he wrote, “about being your best friend if not your lover! Indeed I did not mean to imply that I wished to cease from being the latter. Far from it I can assure you but I meant to imply that the latter depended upon you my dear child but the former I always claimed to be.”38 Bertie’s distinction between friend and lover hints at a physical relationship, but whether this was more than a brief embrace on a wet afternoon carriage drive is impossible to tell. The following spring, Emma received a summons to dine at a restaurant in Nice, and Bertie gave typically precise directions about dress: She and her daughter were ordered to wear a “high dress” and hats, “your husband in evening jacket and black tie as is the custom abroad.”§39 He took a paternalistic interest in Emma’s precarious finances, addressing her as “My dearest little Friend.” In 1899, he wrote, “I have … not forgotten the happy days I spent with you two years ago,” and enclosed a hundred-pound note from his winnings at Ascot and Newmarket. “You are the kindest and best little woman in the world. I only wish there were more like you.”40

  By September 1897, Bertie probably knew that Daisy Warwick was three months pregnant. He continued to meet her through the autumn, but Daisy’s pregnancy meant that he could no longer be seen with her in public.41 It also brought Alix into the equation at last.

  In January 1898, Alix accompanied Bertie when he attended a house party at Chatsworth.‖ Daisy took this opportunity to write him a “beautiful letter,” which he gave to Alix to read, and she was “moved to tears.” She, too, had received a letter from Daisy. “She begged me to tell you,” Bertie wrote, “that you had no enemies that she was aware of who were friends of hers, and that your name was not mentioned to her—or by her. I know, my darling, that she will now meet you with pleasure so that your position is, thank God! better now than it ever was since we have been such friends.”

  She really quite forgives and condones the past, as I have corroborated what you wrote about our friendship having been platonic for some years; you could not help, my loved one, writing to me as you did—though it gave me a pang—after the letters I have received from you for nearly nine years! But I think I could read “between the lines” everything you wished to convey. The end of your beautiful letter touched me more than anything—but how could you, my loved one, for a moment imagine that I should withdraw my friendship from you? On the contrary I mean to befriend you more than ever, and you cannot prevent my giving you the same love as the friendship I have always felt for you. Certainly the Princess has been an angel of goodness throughout all this, but then she is a lady!42

  This letter was written for Alix’s eyes, and Alix responded on cue. She wrote no letter to Daisy, but sent her a crucifix wrapped in a piece of paper on which was written the barbed words: “From one who has suffered much and forgives all.”43

  Daisy had abdicated as maîtresse en titre. In exchange, she was granted forgiveness by Alix, which meant that she was reinstated at court. Daisy was triumphant, and wrote crowing to her friend W. T. Stead about her “complete reconciliation with the Princess of W[ales], and all estrangement on that score at an end.”44 Many years later, Daisy claimed that she would have remained with Bertie to the end, “but for an appeal made to her by Queen Alexandra to renounce him.”45 She remained friends with Bertie, who still addressed her as “my own adored little Daisywife.”

  There are hints that Daisy’s pregnancy prompted Alix to confront Bertie. Of all Bertie’s mistresses, Daisy Warwick posed the greatest threat to Alix and caused her the most unhappiness. Skittles, unreliable but well informed, related that after Bertie’s death in 1910, Alix remarked: “Twelve years ago when I was so angry about Lady Warwick and the King expostulated and said I should get him into the divorce courts, I told him once and for all that he might have any woman he wished and I would not say a word.”46 It had taken Alix many years to come to terms with Bertie’s philandering. As she later remarked: “But I thought I was so-o-o beautiful.”47 With Daisy’s defection, some sort of truce had been reached between the prince and princess.

  Daisy’s son was born on 21 March 1898. The child was christened with only one name, Maynard, which was Daisy’s maiden name, and the godfathers were Cecil Rhodes and Lord Rosebery, both sexually ambivalent men rumored to be homosexuals. The child was passed off as Lord Warwick’s, but plenty of clues pointed to another father of this baby born after a gap of thirteen years. Bertie’s name was sometimes mentioned, and the “D” symbol does indeed cluster around the Diamond Jubilee in June 1897, when the baby was presumably conceived.48 Bertie took an interest in the “Diamond Jubilee” baby, as he called it in the letters he wrote to Daisy, but this need not imply paternity.49 Daisy herself was in no doubt that the father was Joe Laycock.50 Having a child by another man was the exit route that Lillie Langtry had chosen from her relationship with the prince, and in Daisy’s case, as with Lillie, Bertie behaved generously, showing no sexual jealousy. Daisy by now had three children by three different men. No wonder that she made a virtue of sexual freedom, telling Lord Rosebery, whom she fruitlessly pursued, that “Far too much fuss, in my opinion, is made by women about personal morality which, after all, is entirely a matter for the individual.”51 Of the damage done to her children or other people’s marriages, Daisy seemed unaware.

  The “D” symbol recurs in Bertie’s diary a decent interval after the birth of her son.52 In June 1898, the prince stayed at Warwick Castle once more. Joe Laycock was also in the party, and Daisy took Bertie on a visit to Joseph Arch, the agricultural trade unionist, whose autobiography she had edited. Bertie described the visit as “very interesting”—Arch “remains what he always was—a working man, and does not wish to be considered anything else!”53 Daisy, however, found the occasion excruciatingly embarrassing, as the prince sat beside the open stove, prepared to listen sympathetically, while Arch harangued him about class injustice.54

  A flood of letters to “My own lovely little Daisy” continued to pour from Bertie’s pen. These letters only survive because, many years later, Daisy disobeyed the orders of the royal advisers and made transcripts of Bertie’s correspondence before returning the originals. But they give a glimpse of what the relationship was rea
lly like.

  In spite of the Chatsworth agreement, the prince’s feelings toward Daisy seemed unaltered. “Though we do not see as much of one another as formerly,” he told her, “be assured that the sentiments and attachment I have for you are in no wise diminished though the ‘very warm’ feelings have under force of circumstances and by your own wish, cooled down.”55 When she reproached him for neglecting her, he replied: “Has it been my fault that we have not met so often lately as of yore? Especially in the evenings?! Will you not try and consider me still your best and most devoted friend? Have I deserved to forfeit it all?”

  It is just 10 years since we became the great friends which I hoped we were still.… Time and circumstances have doubtless produced changes, but they should be faced, and not change a friendship—may I say a devotion—which should last till “death us do part.” I do not blame you, and you should not blame me, but how can we “kick against the pricks”? If I thought you did not care for me any more even as a true friend, I should indeed be the unhappiest and most miserable of men! My life seems an easy and a happy one, but though I have no right to complain as I receive so many benefits for which I cannot be grateful enough—it is not always “a bed of roses” at home!56