The Heir Apparent (23 page)

Realizing that social leadership had passed from the Queen to Marlborough House, the duchess now threw herself at the Prince of Wales. “No one knows how gloriously beautiful a woman can be who did not see the Duchess of Manchester when she was thirty,” old gentlemen would later recall.
⁹
Photographs of a short, affectedly posed woman turning her profile to the camera make this hard to credit, but being a “beauty” in the 1860s was as much a matter of playing a social role as possessing regular features. Beauty was a cult, and men competed to pay homage. When Bertie made an afternoon call on the Duchess of Manchester, he noted in his diary: “Found her well and looking
lovely
. I stayed there about 45 minutes.”
¹⁰

Bertie’s admiration for Louise’s looks was inflated by the gossips into scandal. There was talk that the duchess was trying to seduce the Prince of Wales, and it was rumored that she had been warned off and ordered to leave Bertie alone.
¹¹

But Louise was never Bertie’s mistress. On the contrary, she took care to befriend Alix as well, creating a role for herself as social mentor
and confidante to Marlborough House.
¹²
This infuriated the Queen, who told Knollys that Louise was “not respected”; people avoided her “in
every
way,” and it was the duty of the prince and princess to “let her
feel
that her conduct has obliged them to be distant towards her.”
¹³
What Louise had done to deserve this latest explosion was to conduct an affair with another friend of Bertie’s: Lord Hartington, rising Whig politician and heir to the Duke of Devonshire. The affair was discreetly managed—she always addressed him as Lord Hartington, and he called her Duchess. Louise was heard to let slip her guard only once, when she remarked, “Harty darling, stand me a stamp.”
¹⁴
But it was an open secret—they were treated like an engaged couple and asked together to dinner parties—and it meant that the doors of Victoria’s court slammed firmly shut on her.

Bertie remained loyal. In February 1868, he stayed a week with Louise at Kimbolton, the Manchesters’ seat in Huntingdonshire. Victoria tried to stop him going, but Bertie insisted, staunchly defending Louise (“I do not like to hear her abused”).
¹⁵
It was his first visit in six years—he had previously stayed with them when at Cambridge—and it marked Louise’s full endorsement by Marlborough House.

Alix remained behind at Sandringham, unable to face the journey. “I hate when he is away,” she wrote; without “my
darling
husband” the house seemed “empty and desolate and lonely.”
¹⁶
At Kimbolton there was hunting all day and dancing all night. Carrington, who was a fellow guest, found it “a very hard week.” “We scarcely got to bed at all.”
¹⁷
They posed on the steps, dressed for riding to hounds; Louise, imperious in top hat, veil, and wasp-waisted riding habit, stands beside Bertie, looking jaunty in his pink hunting coat. The duchess had “arrived.” Her closeness to the prince underlined her position at the very heart of society. As the “Double Duchess” of Devonshire (she married Hartington in 1892), installed at Chatsworth, heavily rouged and addicted to gambling and bridge, Louise clung on until 1911.

Bertie’s household at the time of his marriage consisted largely of men who had served him before 1863. General Knollys headed the household
as comptroller and treasurer. One of Bertie’s equerries, Major Teesdale, had been picked by Albert to attend him at White Lodge in 1858; another, Captain Charles Grey, had accompanied him as equerry on his trip to Italy. Bertie’s old tutor at Oxford, Herbert Fisher, became his private secretary.
¹⁸
This was a household of which even Albert would have approved, and Bertie set about changing it as soon as he was settled in Marlborough House. By 1867, General Knollys was in a perpetual panic at his inability to control his royal master or persuade him to comply with the Queen’s commands. The Queen implored Bertie to gather around him “really good” people, as Albert had done, but he insisted on surrounding himself with cronies.
¹⁹
His friend Arthur Ellis, whom he made equerry in 1867, belonged to the much-intermarried Ellis/Hardinge dynasty of courtiers, and Victoria raised no objection to his appointment. But she complained about the appointment as equerry of Captain Oliver Montagu, a younger son of the Earl of Sandwich and a “rollicking” officer in the Blues, whom Bertie called a “wicked boy.”
²⁰
Another friend of Bertie’s to whom the Queen objected was Charles Carrington. Bertie wished to make him an equerry, but Carrington declined the offer after consulting his father, who said: “You are his friend now, if you are a member of his household you will be his servant—he may get tired of you: and your position as equerry would not be a pleasant one.”
²¹

Bertie’s masterstroke was the appointment of General Knollys’s son Francis as his private secretary in 1870. A dapper little man with shiny black hair and a beard cut into a strip down his chin, Francis Knollys resembled an Italian waiter. The Queen thought he was not fit for the post. “You ought to have a clever, able man, capable of being of use to you, and of giving you advice,” she told Bertie. Though “very good natured,” Francis Knollys was “not considered clever by anyone.”
²²
He was too deeply involved with Bertie’s circle for the Queen’s liking; worse, he was a Liberal in politics. Bertie mollified his mother by keeping on the seventy-three-year-old general, and pretending that Francis was merely sharing the work; the general, said Bertie, was “delighted” and felt that the thirty-three-year-old Francis was now “perfectly qualified” for the post.
²³
The appointment marked a decisive
shift. All important correspondence at Marlborough House crossed the desk of Francis Knollys. Bertie had at last emancipated himself from Victoria’s court.

The rule of the Knollys family over Marlborough House was completed when Francis’s sister, Charlotte, became bedchamber woman to Alexandra in 1872. The Ellis family were almost as deeply entrenched: Arthur Ellis’s sister, Mary, who was married to Sir Arthur Hardinge, an equerry to Queen Victoria, was lady-in-waiting to Alexandra.

Smoking, which the Queen abhorred, was the badge of Bertie’s court. Bertie smoked constantly; photographs from this date invariably show him with a cigar or cigarette in hand. He tried to introduce smoking in the morning room at White’s Club, then the smartest club in London, and when the older members voted against it, the prince and his friends seceded in protest to found the Marlborough Club.
^†
24
At 52 Pall Mall, just across the road from Marlborough House, the club was an annex to the Wales court. Bertie, who visited daily, and personally selected the four hundred members, commissioned
Vanity Fair
’s Carlo Pellegrini (“Ape”) to draw caricatures of the twenty-two founder members. The satirist Samuel Beeton sketched the club in verse in 1874:

Once Bertie offered Pellegrini a drink in the morning room, and the artist, emboldened by his success, replied, “Ring the bell.” “The Prince
of Wales, without a word, rang the bell. To the servant who entered, he said, ‘Please show Mr. Pellegrini out,’ and never spoke to him again.”
²⁶
For all his affability, Bertie knew how to pull rank, perhaps the least attractive of royal characteristics. His informality was neatly encapsulated by a courtier who remarked: “Yes, His Royal Highness is always ready to forget his rank, as long as everyone else remembers it.”
²⁷

Several Rothschilds were among the original club members. They received the seal of royal approval in 1868, when Bertie went stag hunting at Mentmore. He traveled down on the train with Natty Rothschild, smoking all the way; at Mentmore he devoured a breakfast so enormous that it seemed “as if he did not mean to go out,” and then rode very well all day. Natty noted admiringly that the prince was “marvellously strong,” in spite of the fact that for the past week he had been “sitting up night after night smoking etc and has never had more than 4 hours’ sleep.”
²⁸
Natty was a Cambridge friend of Bertie, but even so, the immensely successful Jewish Rothschilds had had to struggle to gain admission to the top set. When Bertie was invited to a Rothschild ball in 1865, Lord Spencer, who was Groom of the Stole to the Prince of Wales, strongly advised him to refuse: The Rothschilds, he said, “are very worthy people but they essentially hold their position from wealth and perhaps the accidental beauty of the first daughter they brought out in the world.”
²⁹
The snobbish Spencer failed to see that the Rothschilds were valuable to Bertie precisely because of their wealth. Bertie—to do him justice—invited a number of Jews to join his inner circle, and recognized that their cosmopolitan networks abroad were indispensable when he traveled.
³⁰
Lacking the anti-Semitic prejudices of many Victorian Englishmen, he was more than happy to trade social recognition for Rothschild cash and company.

Bertie’s court fool was an elongated dandy named Christopher Sykes. Ten years Bertie’s senior, he was the bachelor second son of Sir Tatton Sykes, a boorish hunting squire who owned vast tracts of northeast England. Bertie first stayed with Sykes at Brantingham Thorpe, his house in Yorkshire, in 1869, and soon “the great Christopher,” as the prince called him, was to be spotted unfolding his giant
frame in the inevitable house-party photographs, “the head always at the characteristic tilt, the clothes always a little more beautiful than the imagination would evoke.”
³¹

At the Marlborough Club one night Bertie emptied a glass of brandy over his friend’s head. As the liquor trickled down his face and golden beard, Sykes moved not a muscle. There was an anxious silence, and then he gravely bowed and said: “As your Royal Highness pleases.” Sykes, who was a sycophantic snob, probably saw no humor in his performance. Bertie, like a child, couldn’t repeat the joke too often; every time Sykes dutifully obliged. And always the courtiers guffawed until their sides ached.
³²
Sykes had been beaten by his brutish father as a boy, and he was complicit in Bertie’s rituals of humiliation. But Bertie’s treatment of him was not simple bullying. The reason he tipped brandy over Sykes was that his friend was drunk. Most of the stories about Christopher Sykes revolve around his alcoholism, and drunkenness was the one vice Bertie abhorred.

Marlborough House was not just about such manly things as smoking and practical jokes. Alix made the new court the leader of fashion. Whatever she wore, other women rushed to follow. Her image was endlessly replicated in
cartes de visite
—the photographs pasted onto cards that started to appear in the 1860s. A study of photographs registered for copyright shows that royalty tops the list, and Alexandra was the most frequently photographed, with more images than either Bertie or Victoria.
^‡
33

Madame Elise, the Regent Street dressmaker and one of the pioneers of haute couture, became royal warrant holder to the princess in 1867, and Alix’s patronage assured the house’s success.
³⁴
Alix had a dress allowance of £10,000, but she also had to contend with the disapproval of her mother-in-law. When Alix visited Paris, the Queen implored her not to spend too much on clothes. “There is … a very strong feeling in the country against the luxuriousness, extravagance and frivolity of society and everyone points to my simplicity,” wrote
Victoria. Rather than vie with the fine London ladies, Alix should be “as
different
as
possible
by
great
simplicity
which is more
elegant
.”
³⁵
Bertie bought Alix only two frocks in Paris, “simple ones, as they make them far better here than in London, but if there is anything I dislike it is extravagance on outré dresses—at any rate in my wife,” he told Victoria.
³⁶
The Empress Eugénie wore crinolines and enormous dresses designed by Charles Frederick Worth that were heavily satirized in
Punch,
but by 1869 the imperial court was sinking into decadence, and Worth’s work was perhaps too strongly identified with the regime for Alix to buy his clothes.
³⁷
Not until 1878 did Alix visit the shop of the great couturier Worth.

Alix developed her own distinctive style—not cutting-edge, but always right for every occasion. Conscious of her beauty—how could she not be?—she thrived on the admiring glances she attracted in glittering ballrooms. She walked with a limp, carried an elegant cane, and perfected a technique on the dance floor known as the “Alexandra glide.” She learned to ride sidesaddle again, crooking her left leg rather than the customary right one, and keeping her stiff right leg straight—she thought it “[looked] ugly!!!”
³⁸
She concealed the scar on her neck with high collars of lace or velvet, and many-rowed collars of pearls.
^§

On an average of twenty-seven days a year in the late 1860s, Bertie cut ribbons, ate luncheons and dinners, adorned fetes, opened bazaars, planted trees, and laid foundation stones.
³⁹
His good works attracted little attention at the time, partly because charity was seen as belonging to the female sphere; it wasn’t real work of the sort Prince Albert had done; but, in fact, Bertie pioneered the role of “welfare monarch.”
⁴⁰
He took his role as president or patron of charities seriously, chairing meetings and speaking at dinners. As president of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, for instance, he made a point of visiting the victims
of the Irish Fenians’ Clerkenwell bombing (13 December 1867), telling the Queen: “I am so glad now to have an excuse of going as often as I can.… A kind word or cheerful look, I think, helps and cheers them in their sufferings.”
⁴¹