The Heir Apparent (16 page)

Victoria was overcome during the singing of a chorale composed by Albert, but after this she recovered and looked inquisitively at the audience. Disraeli, who was nearsighted, raised his eyeglass to the royal box, and caught her icy glance. He did not venture to use his glass again. When the marriage was over, the Queen recorded, “I gave them an affectionate nod and kissed my hand to sweet Alix.”
⁷⁸

Afterward, Bertie and Alix lunched with thirty-eight royal relations, while five hundred wedding guests caroused elsewhere. Not so the Queen. “I lunched alone with Baby [Princess Beatrice].”
⁷⁹
The wedding guests departed in an undignified crush from Windsor station. Disraeli sat on his wife’s lap on the train, while so many gems were plundered from the jewel-encrusted Maharaja Duleep Singh that he had to be locked up and sent to London by a later train. Meanwhile, Bertie and Alix departed for the honeymoon to Osborne, which, as Fritz remarked, was now a gloomy vault crammed with relics of Prince Albert.
⁸⁰

Neither Bertie nor Alix wrote accounts of the wedding. From the version Victoria gave in her journal, one might think it was she, not her son, who was the star of the occasion. Victoria was superbly skilled at dramatizing her role as queen in mourning. W. P. Frith’s painting of the ceremony in St. George’s Chapel, which Victoria commissioned, encapsulates the drama. The eye is instantly drawn to the lonely figure of the black-clothed Queen standing in her box, her face and widow’s cap bathed in light. The bridesmaids and members of the royal family
stare up at her, and seem almost oblivious of the bridal couple; but her gaze is firmly fixed on her son and his bride—neither of whom returns it, nor indeed do they look at each other, but seem absorbed in inner reflection.
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A few days after the honeymoon, Bertie and Alix were photographed at Windsor with Victoria beside Albert’s marble bust, the “dear, dear protecting head” as Victoria called it.
⁸²
The day before the wedding, the Queen had taken Bertie and Alix to the mausoleum at Frogmore and opened the shrine. “
He
gives you his blessing,” she said, and joined their hands, took them both in her arms, and kissed them. “It was a very touching moment and we all felt it,” she wrote.
⁸³
The wedding photograph was an attempt to convey this. Victoria gazes theatrically up at Albert’s bust, but her face in profile set off against the deep black of her mourning drapery is sharply focused, while Albert’s chiseled marble features dissolve into a blur. The photographer was forced to bathe the Queen’s black dress in an excess of light, which whited out Albert’s head. Victoria had positioned herself deferentially below Albert on his pillar, but he had become a faceless spirit.
⁸⁴
Bertie and Alix were almost irrelevant to the drama of Victoria’s grief. Bertie stands behind his mother, clean-shaven for once, puffy-eyed, plump and slightly seedy, bulging out of his too-tight black coat—he had put on weight during his tours abroad.
⁸⁵
Alix, in white contrasting sharply with the Queen’s black, looks neither at her husband nor his parents but skittishly over her shoulder as the photographers had taught her to do. The dance between Bertie, his wife, and his mother was about to unfold.

After the honeymoon, Bertie and Alix traveled to Sandringham, the new house Bertie had bought in Norfolk. The countryside was bleak and wild, and people in country carts lined the road from the station to greet them.
²
The east wind blowing from the Wash made spring unendurable. “As there was all England wherein to choose, I do wish they had had a finer house in a more picturesque and cheerful situation,” lamented a lady-in-waiting.
³

At Sandringham, however, Bertie and Alix could be alone together—or at least, as alone as much as people can be when attended always by ladies-in-waiting and equerries as well as troops of servants. The flat countryside reminded Alix of Denmark, and she felt at home, she told her sister, because the house was “comfortable and cosy and not too large.”
⁴
The couple spent all day together, walking in the garden and discussing improvements, and went to bed before eleven. “He
seems very kind to her,” reported lady-in-waiting Mrs. Bruce, “and so proud of her appearance, which is certainly most fascinating.”
⁵

The eighteen-year-old princess was young for her age and refreshingly simple. “I am very fond of soldiers,” she once said; “I always think I was intended for a nursery maid.”
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The Danish court where she grew up was neither as rich nor as formal as the English monarchy. The Yellow Palace, where Alix’s family lived, was a modest town house; the front door opened straight on to the street. Blue-uniformed soldiers changed the guard outside each morning, and Alix played four-handed piano in the cream and gold drawing room with its French rococo furniture. Until she married, she shared a bedroom with her sister Dagmar, known as Minnie, three years her junior, to whom she wrote rambling, homesick letters from England. She clung to cozy, cluttered domesticity, summed up in the Danish word
hygge.
Most of all, she clung to Bertie.

No letters survive between Bertie and Alix. But their marriage was closely observed, especially by Victoria. She set up a network of spies and intelligence gatherers, of private secretaries and ladies-in-waiting and doctors, who reported to her almost daily on her son and daughter-in-law. From her inner sanctums at Windsor and Osborne, she spun webs of spiderlike intricacy; the more reclusive she became, the more she needed to know and control.

The widow Queen held tight to her family. Her letters to her married daughters, Vicky and Alice, are intimate and frank, but also judgmental and contradictory, sometimes startlingly so. To them she poured out her anxieties about Bertie and his marriage. Her letters to Alice are especially outspoken; Victoria had become very close to Alice as a result of Albert’s death, and she told her: “I
can say every
thing to
you
, as I can to
no one else
.”
⁷

At first, Victoria found Bertie improved by marriage. He was, she told Alice, “so amiable and ready to do anything.”
⁸
The reports from Sandringham were “very satisfactory,” and the Queen confessed herself “astonished” by the change in Bertie.
⁹
But the Queen’s hopes that marriage had redeemed her son were soon dashed. Within weeks she was complaining that Bertie had “let himself down” to his old bad
manners.
¹⁰
Victoria considered that Alix’s education had been neglected and she did nothing but write letters all day.
¹¹
As for Bertie, he did not do one useful thing. He never read a book. He was hopelessly frivolous and unreflecting. She shuddered to think of “the poor country with such a
terribly
unfit,
totally unreflecting
successor! Oh! that is awful! He does
nothing
!”
¹²
Bertie (she told Alice) “shows
more
and
more
how
totally totally
unfit he is for ever becoming King.”
¹³

In London, the Prince and Princess of Wales were installed at Marlborough House, which the government modernized at a cost of £60,000. The original house, designed by Christopher Wren for Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, was enlarged by the government architect Sir James Pennethorne. Louis Laguerre’s spectacular saloon, decorated with scenes from Marlborough’s victories, was preserved, and so were his painted staircases. To allow the prince to accommodate the whole of London society at a single ball, the house was remodeled with a lavish enfilade of Frenchified gilded state drawing rooms and dining rooms. The interior was furnished and fitted up by the fashionable London firm of Holland.
¹⁴
Bertie took an interest, and he was allowed to decide such details as the lighting (candles in the princess’s reception room, gas in the passage between the reception room and visitors’ rooms). But the readying and running of the house was the responsibility of Sir William Knollys and his son Francis, and they resented attempts by the prince to interfere with such details as writing paper or servants’ livery, the more so as he constantly found fault.
¹⁵

No sooner had Bertie and Alix unpacked than the London Season began. Night after night the prince and princess hosted great dinner parties, attended banquets, appeared at the opera, and received deputations congratulating them on their marriage. Alix represented the Queen at a drawing room at St. James’s Palace. Victoria usually held three afternoon drawing rooms each season, at which women were presented (men were presented at levees). Mourning for Albert had canceled court functions in 1862, and so in 1863, two thousand guests attended, all agog to see the new princess, the girls wearing bare-shouldered
dresses with long trains and ostrich feathers.
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From two till six p.m., Alix curtseyed continuously as six hundred unknown ladies were presented to her. She seemed pathetic and exhausted—“a white gown and a white face, two curls and a tiara,” sniffed the diarist Louisa Bowater.
¹⁷
Even worse was her ordeal three days later, at a state reception at St. James’s Palace, when she was obliged to walk in front of the royal party, “
totally alone
” behind the Lord Chamberlain, through three crowded halls. “In every room I had to make a deep curtsey and then walk on greeting to right and left! It was terrible!”
¹⁸

At twenty-one, Bertie had been plunged into exacting responsibilities. He had no experience of London society, and his only qualification for this role was his rank. From Osborne and Balmoral, Victoria watched Bertie and Alix’s every move, controlling their lives in an “extraordinary” way.
¹⁹
Where they dined out, whom they invited to Marlborough House—every name was approved by her. When Alix rode in the park, she received a sharp telling-off. Each day a detailed report was sent from Marlborough House to the Queen.
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Victoria complained that Bertie took no care of Alix, but for Alix’s exhaustion Victoria had only herself to blame. By making Bertie act as “social sovereign” in order to shield her own seclusion, she imposed a punishing schedule on her daughter-in-law.

Victoria anxiously scrutinized Alix for signs of pregnancy. Here, too, she despaired. With a twenty-two-inch waist and a thirty-two-inch chest, Alix hardly seemed built for childbearing.
²¹
“Are you aware,” Victoria asked Vicky, “that Alix has the smallest head ever seen? I dread that—with [Bertie’s] small empty brain—very much for future children.”
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Bertie insisted on going out most nights and staying up until four a.m. Alix, said the Queen, “will become a skeleton, and hopes [of pregnancy] there cannot be!!”
²³

The physician-in-ordinary to the Prince of Wales was named Dr. Sieveking. He kept a private diary of his attendance on the prince and princess:
two locked black leather volumes that, by a minor miracle, have survived in a little-known archive.
^*

Sieveking, who was born in England to German parents and had trained in Bonn, was briefed by Victoria. Speaking German, she informed him of “the want of resistance to morbid influences” in Albert’s family, and instructed him to look carefully after “those children,” the prince and princess. “I thought her behaviour most gracious, her voice as clear as a bell and her smile more winning than that of any woman,” wrote the doctor after his first audience with the Queen.
²⁴
Unwittingly, he had been enlisted as one of her informers, charged to spy on Marlborough House.

Sieveking visited Marlborough House every Friday, alternating with Dr. Jenner, who visited on Tuesdays. He rarely saw Alix, but usually spoke to Bertie, who was always sensible and affable. Bertie enjoyed robust health, though he occasionally complained of a hangover. General Knollys told the doctor that the prince had “strong animal passions and is fond of good living … keeps late hours to his great disadvantage … is very good at heart, well meaning and well pleased with truthfulness among those about him—rather hot-tempered but forgiving.” Sieveking also noticed that Bertie was very curious about medical subjects, cross-questioning him on topics such as hermaphroditism. Alix, thought Sieveking, had no influence over her husband, though she was “very fond” of him.
²⁵
She was always more communicative when he was away.

Bertie knew every detail of his wife’s menstrual cycle, and he freely discussed her intimate gynecological details with the doctor. When, three months after the marriage, her period (“catamenia” was the doctor’s word) was two days late, Sieveking promptly forbade her from riding a horse and banned late nights and walking.
²⁶
In spite of these precautions, her period appeared a few days later. Alix confided her
woes to the Queen, who reported to Alice that “
all
came on on Sunday, to [Alix’s] great disappointment.”
²⁷