The Heir Apparent (11 page)

Bertie and his retinue landed at the remote fishing village of St. John’s, Newfoundland, on 23 July 1860. He dutifully read aloud the wooden speeches written for him by Newcastle, who had drafted them from Albert’s memoranda; but the journalists found the copy they needed at the dance that evening, when the prince whirled and twirled until two a.m. and was spotted calling the dances, correcting the backwoods folk of this unfashionable spot. A news report appeared in the New York press, which earned Bertie a reproof from Albert: “You always liked to order people about at dances but I trust you will keep that longing in check.” Never forget, he warned his son, “how much and how constantly you are watched, observed and described.”
⁸²
“I am
quite aware that I am closely watched and must be careful in what I do,” responded Bertie, denying that he had ordered the dancers about; but “besides if I did it would have been not to be wondered at, as I never saw so many people who knew so little about dancing.”
⁸³
A few days later, however,
The New York Herald
reported that the prince “whispered sweet nothings” to the ladies as he directed them in the dance. “His Royal Highness looks as if he might have a very susceptible nature and has already yielded to several twinges in the region of his midriff.”
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This was not what Albert wanted to hear.

When he crossed the border from Canada into the United States, Bertie traveled as Baron Renfrew. Some commented on his unimpressive looks and unfashionable clothes, but he was recognized and welcomed everywhere. At Washington he was received at the White House by President James Buchanan, and Harriet Lane, the bachelor president’s thirty-year-old niece, played hostess. “I thought Miss Lane a particularly nice person and very pretty,” Bertie told Victoria.
⁸⁵
The royal tour climaxed with Bertie’s arrival at New York on 11 October. A crowd of three hundred thousand (allegedly) showered him with flowers—which shows, Bertie modestly reported, “that the feeling between the two countries could not be better.” At the Grand Ball next day, three thousand were invited but five thousand squeezed into the Opera House, causing the floor to give way. It took two hours of banging for the carpenters to put it right, and dancing did not begin until midnight.
^†
86

No one had expected such overwhelming enthusiasm. Even Victoria went out of her way to give credit to her son. She insisted, however, that Bertie’s reception by the Americans was due principally to “the (to me incredible) liking they have for my unworthy self.”
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Bertie returned home to Windsor in November looking extremely well. Victoria commented in her journal that he had become “very talkative,” and the courtiers were amused to see him conversing in an independent sort of way with his father.
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After America, Bertie was sent straight back to Oxford. Even the martinet General Bruce questioned the wisdom of resuming the schoolboy discipline, but Albert insisted on the same strict rules as before. Bertie left Oxford in December with good reports. According to the dean of Christ Church, “[He] has expressed himself with increasing freedom and written at greater length than he has ever done before.”
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Next on Albert’s program for his son came a year at Cambridge. In January 1861, Bertie enrolled at Trinity College. As before, he was installed under General Bruce’s supervision in a residence of his own: Madingley Hall, a large, comfortable house about four miles outside Cambridge. Bertie found it old-fashioned and very cold. For his lectures he drove in to Cambridge, where Dr. Whewell, the master of Trinity, lent him rooms in the Lodge. Here Charles Kingsley, the regius professor, came to lecture him on history. Kingsley was nervous as to whether the interpretation that he gave of the Glorious Revolution of 1689 accorded
with the royal parents’ historical views. “The responsibility terrifies me,” he wrote. He needn’t have worried. Bertie thought Kingsley one of the best lecturers he had ever heard—“though of course my experience is not very great”—and had nothing to say about the content.
²
Albert forbade him from taking notes, insisting that he write the lectures out from memory when he returned home to Madingley.
³

On his nineteenth birthday, Bertie was given leave by Albert to smoke. Victoria told him that she hoped he would give it up, as smoking set a bad example in society and encouraged idleness, a particular danger in his case: “Your natural difficulty in applying and exerting your mind would be greatly increased & you would often think you were occupied … when you are puffing away in a state of dreamy idleness.” Bertie’s reply was diplomatic: “I should not like to make you [a] promise that I will
entirely
give it up, because I don’t think I
could
keep it; at the same time I will do it as little [as] I can & I dare say that before long I shall give it up altogether.”
⁴
These were the words of a lifelong smoker. Victoria, who detested the habit, banned him from smoking in her houses or in public, and when Bertie was at Buckingham Palace, she ordered the conservatory to be locked to prevent him sneaking out for a cigar.
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At Cambridge, Bertie sucked strong cigars and hunted with the drag hounds.
^*
Bruce forbade him from asking anyone back to Madingley, but he was uneasily aware that Bertie’s “love of excitement and constitutional disinclination to all serious pursuits” tended to carry him “almost unconsciously into the company of the idle and the frivolous.”
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For the first time in his life, Bertie made real friends—Charles Carrington, the boy he had played with at Buckingham Palace, and Nathaniel (Natty) Rothschild and his brother Alfred. For the Rothschilds, this was a social breakthrough, bringing access to court; for Bertie it was the beginning of a lifelong friendship that was to define his style of royalty.
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The drag hunt was paid for largely by the Rothschilds, and Natty noted that Bertie was not allowed expensive horses, owing to his parents’
disapproval of hunting. “No wonder that he gets so many falls,” commented Natty. “I fancy the little spirit he has is quite broken, as his remarks are commonplace and very slow. He will I suppose eventually settle down into a well-disciplined German prince with all the narrow views of his father’s family.”
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In March, Bertie was summoned home unexpectedly to Windsor to the deathbed of his grandmother, the Duchess of Kent. Victoria abandoned herself to an orgy of grief and self-pity. She had never liked her mother, but now she felt (as Albert wrote) “her whole childhood rush back once more upon her memory.”
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No doubt Victoria was overcome by guilt and remorse at reading her mother’s papers, which made her realize how much her despised parent had loved her. But even in a culture that institutionalized mourning, as the court did, the Queen’s reaction seems excessive. Her mother was seventy-five, which was old by the standards of the day, and though the two women had quarreled when Victoria became queen, they had been reconciled for many years. Albert worried that the duchess’s death had unhinged Victoria, and that her obsessive grief signaled a descent into madness.

“She remains almost entirely alone,” he noted. “It is no easy task for me to comfort and support her and to keep others at a distance, and yet at the same time not to throw away the opportunity, which a time like the present affords, of binding the family together in a closer bond of unity.”
¹⁰
The grief-stricken Queen refused to see anyone except Albert, and Albert encouraged her to give herself up to mourning, even though he knew that her seclusion was causing gossip about her mental state. He now did all her work to save her trouble, laboring at the papers on his desk like a donkey on a treadmill.
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Victoria refused to see her children. Bertie annoyed her the most. She made terrible scenes when he shed no tears at his grandmother’s funeral at Frogmore, accusing him of lacking feelings.
^†
As Clarendon
remarked, Bertie could do no right; if he had cried, he would no doubt have been rebuked for increasing her grief.
¹²
Vicky wrote to her mother begging her to avoid an estrangement. Victoria’s reply was stubbornly unforgiving. “I quite agree with you, dear child—that he must be a little more tender and affectionate in his manner—if he is to expect it from me.” Bertie irritated her with silly remarks. “His voice makes me so nervous I could hardly bear it.”
¹³
To Bertie himself, however, Victoria was less angry than hurt. “Open your heart freely to your Mother,” she implored him, “for she too, yearns to
show
you the love she
feels
but she must
meet
with warmth
&
tenderness! I alas! in gone by
&
days, was not as tender and affectionate to dearest Grandmama as I ought to have been (much as I loved her)
&
bitterly
do I lament it
now
.”
¹⁴

“I can assure you,” replied Bertie, “that I did not try to check my feelings”; he was “stunned” by the suddenness of his grandmother’s death, and unable to realize it until some time later. “I did not like to intrude myself upon you, when dear Vicky & Alice were sympathizing with you so warmly & affectionately not because I had not the same feelings as they had, but because I thought I should be in your way.”
¹⁵
As a token of his grief, he ordered writing paper with even thicker black edges.

Around this time, Prince Albert began a new file of papers, which he labeled “Bertie’s Marriage Prospects.” He collected letters from Vicky and from old Baron Stockmar, which he annotated in red ink. Victoria entered a note later: “Up to this place all the papers in this book were arranged by the beloved Prince Himself.”
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Bertie was not yet twenty, but already Albert was plotting a dynastic alliance. He must marry before he was old enough to choose for himself, or, which was more likely, before he disgraced himself. That the next English queen should be a German princess was unquestioned, essential both to Albert’s plans for shaping Germany’s future and to his own control over the English throne. The royal family of England must continue to be German.

Albert’s agent in picking a bride was Vicky. Albert had complete
confidence in the judgment of his twenty-year-old daughter. For months now, Vicky had been scouring the pages of the
Almanac de Gotha,
the stud book of European royalty, and sending back reports on the available princesses. It was she who had found Louis of Hesse for Alice, and that had succeeded delightfully; but suitable princesses were in short supply.
¹⁷
Two possible candidates were Elizabeth of Wied and Anna of Hesse, the sister of Alice’s fiancé Louis. Elizabeth, according to Vicky, was good-tempered and clever but boisterous and talked too much.
^‡
Anna spoke in a deep, gruff voice, her eyes twitched incessantly, and her teeth were bad.
¹⁸
The only princess who seemed at all possible was the least eligible on political grounds: Princess Alexandra of Denmark. Denmark was on unfriendly terms with Prussia, locked into a quarrel over the disputed territories of Schleswig and Holstein. Alexandra’s mother’s family was reputed to be bad, her father’s foolish. But Vicky received glowing reports from Wally Hohenthal, now married to Augustus Paget, the English minister in Copenhagen.

At length, in June 1861, Vicky arranged to meet Alexandra. To the relief of Wally Paget, who was by now feeling somewhat responsible, she was captivated. Never had she set eyes on a sweeter creature. Alexandra was everything that Vicky was not—beautiful, tall (taller at least than the five-foot-two Vicky), slender, and gentle. She spoke English and German, but whether she was clever or not, Vicky could not tell—“though I could not perceive the slightest thing to make me think the contrary.” “She has been very strictly kept for she has not read a novel of any kind.”
¹⁹

When Albert saw a photograph of Alexandra, he declared, “From that photograph I would marry her at once.”
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She was evidently “a pearl not to be lost,” and the royal parents now became desperate to bag this treasure for their son. “May he only be worthy of such a jewel!” exclaimed the Queen. A Russian prince was also in the market, and Victoria worried that her “sallow, dull, blasé” son would lose the Danish pearl.
²¹

Bertie himself was the last to hear of these negotiations. Not until the end of May did Albert forward Alexandra’s photograph: “It would be a thousand pities if you were to lose her!” he wrote.
²²
Victoria thought Bertie was “evidently much pleased and interested,” but Bertie wrote guardedly to Albert: “The accounts of the P[rince]ss are so very good, that it leaves me really nothing to say; but of course how to find a way of securing her, is a very difficult matter.” He refused to be rushed: “You must excuse my giving you now my opinions on the subject, as I should like some time to think it over.”
²³

Bertie’s role in Albert’s matchmaking was simple: He must fall in love with the Danish pearl. But the fact was that it was Vicky, not Bertie, who had fallen in love with Alexandra. Bertie’s romantic feelings were altogether more problematic.

As a special concession, Albert agreed to General Bruce’s request that Bertie should be allowed to attend a military camp at the Curragh in the summer of 1861. Bruce permitted him to mix with other officers, but only in public. “Private intercourse” with his companions was strictly policed. Two stern Grenadier officers acted as his mentors: General Ridley, “an excellent soldier and high-minded gentleman,” and Colonel Henry Percy, a Crimean War hero awarded the Victoria Cross and a favorite of the Queen, who made no concessions to the prince’s rank.
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