The Heir Apparent (19 page)
Authors: Jane Ridley
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Nonfiction, #Retail, #Royalty
Bertie’s spending was fiercely curbed. When he asked for a checkbook, Sir William Knollys refused. If Bertie wrote checks, claimed Knollys, “I sh[oul]d never know how I stood with regard to the credits & debits in the Bankers Book.”
104
In London, Bertie’s diary charts a routine of mornings spent riding in the public gaze in Rotten Row. He attended the House of Lords, following the advice given him by Lord Granville, who had told him to
drop in as often as possible, not because of the debates (which were often dull), but because it was a very pleasant club.
105
He had few public duties. Victoria ordered that he must on no account be put at the head of societies such as the Royal Literary Fund or asked to make speeches. This was the sort of work that Albert had done, and which he had planned for Bertie after his marriage, but Victoria insisted that he was too young and too inexperienced.
c
106
His diary records playing whist for high stakes. “Played 8 rubbers at whist. I lost £138!!!” “I lost 7 rubbers and £101!!!”
107
But not all his companions were raffish aristocrats such as Lord Hartington or the Duke of Sutherland. George Otto Trevelyan, the Liberal MP and author, was “really intimate” with him around this time. “He used to send for me about 11 at night … to talk and smoke cigarettes with him in his smoking room; a beautiful little marble chamber for an hour or so.… He was wonderfully bright and gracious.”
108
But the haughtier members of the aristocracy disapproved. After observing Bertie on a visit to the Tory grandee Lord Derby at Knowsley, where the prince sat up smoking until three a.m., Derby’s son Lord Stanley wrote that “he talked a great deal, neither very sensibly nor the reverse. He is easy and pleasant in his manners: in face and figure he is growing fat, which gives an air of heaviness.”
109
On 2 June 1865, after going to Epsom races to watch the Oaks, Bertie gave a dinner party at Marlborough House, and Alix, who was eight months pregnant with her second child, “not feeling well did not come down.” The obstetrician Dr. Farre was summoned, and at midnight Alix’s labor pains came on. “At 1:18 she was safely confined of a boy—8 months child, but very quick labour—only Farre, Mrs. Clarke and I were present,” noted Bertie.
110
This baby weighed at least two pounds more at birth than the two-months-premature Eddy. Alix had planned to breast-feed, and confided in Dr. Sieveking, telling him to keep it secret
“because the Queen would not hear of it.” Sieveking forbade it on medical grounds: The princess could only undertake to nurse her baby for six weeks and the child would be hand-fed thereafter.
111
So the new baby was committed to a wet nurse for nine months.
This was the future King George V, but when Victoria learned that Bertie intended to call the new prince George Frederick Ernest, she wrote: “I fear I cannot admire the names you propose for the baby.” She had hoped, she said, for some fine old name, but “George only came over with the Hanoverian family.”
112
When Bertie had objected to his own double name, and asked to be known as Edward when he became king, his mother indignantly refused. As Albert Edward, Victoria explained, he was to begin a new line of kings named in memory of Albert. “I quite understand your wishes about my bearing my two names,” wrote Bertie diplomatically, “although no English Sovereign has ever done so yet.”
113
But he flatly refused to obey Victoria’s wishes over the new baby, writing his mother a letter that Phipps thought “objectionable”: “We are sorry to hear that you don’t like the names that we propose to give our little boy but they are names that we like.”
114
Bertie and Alix stayed at Osborne in July, bringing with them twenty-nine servants, which Victoria thought excessive, as there was nowhere for them all to sleep.
115
“
Personally
we are on the most
agreeable
footing,” Victoria told Alice, “but things are on the
brink
of a
precipice
.” Bertie, she thought, was becoming less and less domestic, diverging from Alix and spending less and less time with her; yet Alix was so “
indolent
” that she seemed not to care. “As they go on their lives must be short,” warned the Queen.
116
*
Expert advice in the 1930s strongly urged that the journals be destroyed on account of their intimate subject matter. Fortunately this was ignored, and the journals were deposited in the library of the Royal College of Physicians, where they have languished ever since. I stumbled upon them in a chance trawl through a card index.
†
Under the 1852 London treaty, the prince of Augustenburg had waived his claim to the duchies, which had been assigned to the personal rule of Christian of Denmark when he became king, but only on condition that he did not rule the duchies as part of Denmark.
‡
“The Queen wishes the new court to be as dull and stupid as her own” was the comment of Lord Stanley of Alderley (aka Ben Backbite) on hearing of Lady Macclesfield’s appointment as Alix’s lady-in-waiting. (Fulford,
Dearest Mama,
p. 289.)
§
The temporary wet nurse, whom the Queen thought too old, was replaced by a woman named Mrs. Roe, who nursed the baby for nine months. Her husband was employed as a keeper at Sandringham, but was caught poaching and then left of his own accord. He became a constable in the Metropolitan Police, but was dismissed for drunkenness. Eventually he immigrated to America. (RA VIC/Add C07/1/0650, Francis Knollys’s Memo on Wet-nurses Engaged by Prince of Wales 1864–68, 20 October 1868.)
‖
Queen Louise had more time for Bertie than Victoria did. She told Clarendon that she had studied his character, and “there was more latent ability than he was given credit for or than anyone had tried to develop, but that what she dreaded for him was want of occupation.” It was a shrewd assessment. (Kennedy,
My Dear Duchess,
p. 216.)
a
Bertie paid £225,000 to Charles Spencer Cowper for the Sandringham estate, which wags described as six thousand acres of sand. The place had been found by Albert, and Bertie was supposedly persuaded to buy it by a Cambridge friend, Henry Villebois, whose father owned the local hounds. (Charles Sebag-Montefiore Archive, Philip Magnus Papers, Lord Bradford to Magnus, 1 December 1958.)
b
£10,000 of the parliamentary grant was apportioned as a dress allowance for Alexandra. Bertie also derived an average rental of £6,000 from Sandringham.
c
In spite of Victoria’s doubts, he became president of the Society of Arts in 1863, a post formerly filled by Albert.
Alix’s Knee
1865–67
The rift caused by the Schleswig-Holstein war was deepened by a quarrel over the marriage of the Queen’s third daughter, Princess Helena (known as Lenchen). Victoria depended heavily on the support of her unmarried daughters. The first daughter who acted as her unofficial private secretary was Alice. She was succeeded by Helena, and the Queen so despaired at the prospect of losing this daughter to marriage that she determined to find her a husband who would be prepared to live at the English court. This was a tough job description, coupled with the fact that Helena was the plainest of the princesses.
1
Eventually, Victoria lighted on Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein. Penniless (by princely standards), thirty-four, prematurely bald, and a chain-smoker, he was “really a very good fellow though not handsome.”
2
But Victoria could hardly have chosen a bridegroom who was more objectionable to Bertie. Christian was the younger brother
of Victoria’s nephew by marriage the Duke of Augustenburg, the liberal claimant to Schleswig and Holstein who had challenged King Christian of Denmark over the duchies and then been ousted when Bismarck invaded and grabbed them for Prussia and Austria. To Alix the engagement seemed a deliberate snub, especially as Victoria refused to discuss it with her. Alix could hardly bear to meet Christian.
3
Bertie, meanwhile, out of loyalty to Alix threatened to boycott Lenchen’s wedding. His ally was Alice. According to Sir Charles Phipps, Alice was “the great agent in exciting dissension in the family.”
4
Jealous of Lenchen’s access to her mother, she worried that if Christian succeeded in gaining Victoria’s confidence, she herself would be excluded forever. Outwardly she supported the match, imploring Bertie, as “
the Brother
who has ever been the friend of my heart and deep love of my soul,” to sacrifice his feelings and act kindly toward Victoria and Lenchen.
5
But behind Victoria’s back, she stirred up trouble, warning Christian not to let himself be put upon and made to live in England.
6
Alice’s meddling seems relatively harmless, but when Victoria learned about it she was furious. Like the Queen of Hearts in Lewis Carroll’s
Alice in Wonderland
(which was published the same year), she was prone to bewildering changes of mood.
*
“Off with her head!” she roared; and Alice, who had been her favorite the year before, was disgraced. “When your parent and Sovereign settles a thing for her good which interferes with none of your rights and comforts, opposition for mere selfish and personal objects—indeed out of jealousy—is monstrous,” stormed the Queen. “I cannot tell you what I have suffered.”
7
Bertie swallowed his objections to the marriage, and in the topsy-turvy world of Victoria’s family he now became the favorite. Blowing hot
and cold as only she could do, Victoria declared that “Bertie has a loving affectionate heart and could never bear to be in long disagreement with his family. Towards me he is very dear and nice.”
8
The following summer, Bismarck engineered war against Austria and, with Vicky’s husband, Fritz, at their head, the Prussian troops smashed Austria and Austria’s German allies at the battle of Königgrätz (3 July 1866). Bismarck was merciless. Alix’s grandfather, the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel, who fought with Austria, was deprived of his sovereignty, and his country was incorporated into Prussia. Victoria’s first cousin George V, the blind King of Hanover, also an ally of Austria, was dethroned, his territory absorbed into Prussia, and his family fortune—the so-called
Welfenfond
—confiscated by Bismarck. Bismarck annexed Schleswig and Holstein, in defiance of Denmark’s claim to the duchies.
†
Alice suffered, too. Her husband, Louis of Hesse-Darmstadt, supported Austria and was punished with the loss of part of his lands. During the war, Darmstadt was overrun by Prussian troops. Alice, who was seven months pregnant, was marooned there and became quite ill, thin and sleepless. Queen Victoria, still angry, commented tartly that “Poor Alice” was “so sharp and bitter” that “no one wishes to have her in their home.”
9
In an embarrassing mix-up, the Queen placed a letter to Vicky in which she complained about Alice in an envelope addressed to Alice; though “vexed” and “distressed” by the mistake, she claimed it was good for Alice to learn what her mother thought about her.
10
During the Austro-Prussian war, Bertie asked once more for access to government dispatches. His request was refused, as it had been at the time of the Schleswig-Holstein war.
11
But this time Bertie and Victoria were in agreement over foreign policy. Had he read the dispatches,
Bertie would have seen how indefatigable his mother had been in striving to prevent what she called a German civil war. She even addressed a personal appeal to her “Beloved Brother” the King of Prussia, imploring him to throw over Bismarck and sue for peace, with predictably discouraging results, as the King was no longer in control of Prussian foreign policy.
Prussia’s victories strained Bertie’s relations with Vicky to a breaking point. Vicky was proud of her husband, Fritz, who had commanded the Prussian troops and led his country to victory. “I cannot and will not forget that I am a Prussian,” she wrote. The German states that opposed Prussia had “broken their own necks”; they had overestimated Austria’s strength, knowing full well what the consequences of Austria’s defeat would be, and they deserved their fate.
12
But Vicky was conflicted. She had no sympathy with Prussian authoritarianism. She loathed Bismarck and despised her blinkered, reactionary Hohenzollern in-laws. During the war, her two-year-old son, Sigismund, died of meningitis, plunging her into deepest grief, and she was far from triumphalist about Prussia’s victories. To her credit, she did all she could to stop the German wars from tearing her family apart. Struggling to keep politics out of family life, she insisted that “one
must separate
one’s
feelings
for one’s relations quite from one’s
judgement
of
political necessities
.”
13
When Bertie visited her at Potsdam that autumn, she wrote: “About Politics we will not discuss will we? They are
not my
doing—if they were, much w[oul]d be different.… I dislike Bismarck and disapprove his principles, but I
cannot stand
having my country abused.” Vicky sympathized with Bertie’s predicament: “I
understand quite
well what Alix’s feeling must be about the fate of her relations. I feel for her and them.”
14
Bertie’s visit was a success. Vicky told the Queen that he was “kind and dear”—his face wore “an expression of quiet and content which is so pleasing to look at.”
15
Bertie’s rapprochement with Vicky earned him more approval from Victoria. So pleased was she with her eldest son that she confided in him her anxiety about Affie, her current bête noire, whom she proposed to banish from the wicked flatterers of London society by sending
him in command of a ship to Australia. “I know
how
much I can rely on
you
,” the Queen told Bertie, “and how steady and well-principled you are—I feel there is no one to whom I cd appeal more properly than to you.”
16