The Heir Apparent (24 page)

In 1868, he paid an official visit to Ireland. To appease the Irish nationalist Fenians, Prime Minister Disraeli proposed a royal visit, “as during two centuries, the Sovereign has only passed twenty-one days in Ireland.”
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Victoria agreed, though she grumbled to Bertie that the highlight of the visit was the Punchestown races, which would strengthen the belief, “already far too prevalent, that your chief object is amusement.”
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Everyone assumed that the prince would visit Ireland alone, but Alix had other ideas. Though almost six months pregnant, and still convalescent from her knee, she wrote an appeal to Victoria that was as emotional as it was unpunctuated: “I have a sort of very strong wish and feeling, if I may say so, to go with my Bertie this time to Ireland, and as three medical men don’t see any objection I feel I [would] much rather go (although I must say it won’t be very amusing for me) than be left behind in a state of fever about him the whole time which I don’t think can be very good for me now and as I really feel so well and my leg is so much stronger I feel I can as well go to balls etc there than here and as for the journey I don’t really much mind that.”
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This was an appeal the Queen could not resist; she always found it hard to refuse Alix. Thus began what
The Times
described as “the Danish conquest of Ireland.” Attended by Mrs. Stonor, her closest confidante among her ladies, the pregnant princess charmed the crowds, all the more because they knew (as the papers put it) that “she struggled against temporary indisposition and some influences of no slight weight in order to accompany her husband.”
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Alix the suffering, wronged princess personified the romance of monarchy in a way that Bertie never could—even in London, cheers for the princess were always given with “extraordinary vigour.” A hundred thousand people turned out at the Punchestown races to catch a sight of prince and princess. But the success of the Irish tour was, as Victoria cynically wrote, “of no real use.”
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Victoria fretted about Alix’s “miserable, puny” children. “I can’t tell you how these poor, frail, little fairies distress me,” she told Vicky.
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But when she suggested to Bertie that he and Alix should spend the summer with the children in the country, he was indignant. “It would doubtless be far pleasanter for us to live more in the country,” he replied tartly, “but as you know we have certain duties to fulfil here.… Your absence from London, renders it more necessary that we should do all we can.”
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Bertie urged Victoria to appear in public. He regretted her refusal to open Parliament. No doubt she disapproved of William Gladstone, the incoming prime minister, for introducing a bill disestablishing the Irish Church—as it happened, so did Bertie: but “I fear that the people do not know your reason, and will feel much disappointed and vexed to miss the pageant and the éclat which your opening Parlmt [
sic
] always gives.”
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Victoria protested that the noise of the London traffic gave her headaches, but Bertie insisted: “I feel sure that if you were to drive in the Parks and be seen occasionally there … the people would be overjoyed beyond measure. It is all very well for Alix and me to drive or ride in the Park—it has not the same effect as when you do it, and I say thank God! that such is the case, as we live in radical times, and [the] more the people see the Sovereign, the better it is for the
people
and the
country
.”
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Bertie had touched Victoria’s weak spot. Her stubborn refusal to appear after seven years of widowhood was increasingly criticized. In 1868 she published
Leaves of Our Life in the Highlands,
a collection of extracts from her Balmoral journal in Albert’s time, which was a surprise bestseller: The cheap edition sold eighty thousand copies within weeks, to the delight of the Queen, who thought she had discovered a way of reaching her people without appearing in public.
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But in May 1868 she was savaged in the press for neglecting her duty, leaving Windsor, and traveling six hundred miles to Balmoral just as the Conservative government seemed about to fall. The “cruel” press criticism caused her pain and shattered nerves, which, in turn, dictated rest in order to avoid a breakdown.
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No doubt the forty-nine-year-old Queen’s frequent headaches and swollen feet were signs, as Vicky
wrote, that she was approaching “the most trying and unpleasant” stage in a woman’s life.
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The menopausal monarch was no slouch, as a glance at her voluminous correspondence reveals. Each day she spent many hours at her desk, often writing letters and in her journal until well after midnight. It has been estimated that she wrote 2,500 words every day of her adult life, penning a total of sixty million in the course of her reign.
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But her neurotic unwillingness to come out of widowly seclusion meant that she depended on Bertie to perform public duties, and he seemed strangely lacking in any sense of the limits on a prince’s behavior. Locked into a dysfunctional relationship that made them oblivious to the world outside the palace, mother and son drifted toward catastrophe.

A photograph of Bertie in June 1868 shows him jauntily dressed in a double-breasted coat edged with braid, and soft checked-tweed trousers. Not for the fashion-conscious prince the formal Victorian male uniform of frock coat and sober black. He wears a flower in his buttonhole and patent leather boots. He carries gloves, cane, and top hat: essential kit for the man about town paying calls.

While Alix awaited her confinement at Marlborough House, Bertie was at liberty to make calls on ladies as he pleased. The women of his household must sometimes have felt that he considered them to be his personal harem. Once he asked Alix’s lady-in-waiting Mary Hardinge if he might visit her in her private apartments:

One address that Bertie visited often that summer of 1868 was number 6, Chesham Place, off Belgrave Square. This was the house that Lady Mordaunt had taken for the season. Harriett Mordaunt was the twenty-year-old wife of Sir Charles Mordaunt, a Warwickshire MP. She was the daughter of Sir Thomas Moncreiffe, a well-connected Perthshire baronet, and two of her sisters—Helen, who married Sir Charles Forbes, and Georgie, the wife of the fabulously rich Lord Dudley—were friends of Bertie’s. Harriett had known Bertie since she was seventeen, when he asked her to stay at Sandringham, and an exchange of photographs and letters took place.

The eighteen or so letters that Bertie wrote to Harriett over the next few years are so innocuous that it is hard to believe that this was anything more than a social friendship. For example, he wrote on 7 May 1867:

A lady’s umbrella could perhaps be construed as a metaphor for male impotence, and Bertie’s letter could be read as a coded reference
to Harriett’s husband, but Bertie could equally well have meant exactly what he said without intending any double meaning.
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There was gossip, nonetheless. When Harriett became engaged to Sir Charles Mordaunt, Lord Dudley took his future brother-in-law aside and warned him of the dangerous intimacy that Harriett’s parents had allowed to exist between her and the prince. And Harriett, who was a bubbly girl, prone to hysterics, sometimes behaved in a strange manner. Young men were startled (or charmed) to find her giving them passionate embraces. Soon after she was married, sharp-eyed servants started to keep diaries recording the behavior of Lady Mordaunt.

Once or twice a week at about four o’clock, Bertie would drive up to the house in Chesham Place in an anonymous hansom cab. In the hall he would hand his hat, gloves, and cane to Bird, the butler. This was a sign that the meeting was prearranged, as etiquette dictated that the gentleman who made an uninvited call should sit with hat, gloves, and cane on the floor beside his chair, signifying the fleeting and casual nature of the visit. The prince would enter the drawing room, where Harriett waited for him alone. Her husband was never at home when Bertie called; he was busy in the House of Commons, or competing in pigeon-shooting matches at the newly established Hurlingham Club in Fulham.
^‖
Bird received instructions from Lady Mordaunt that “no one else was to be admitted after his Royal Highness came.”
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Afternoons were the accepted time for adultery, rushed and uncomfortable though it must have been in crinoline and stays on a sofa. But what took place in the hour and a half or so when Bertie was alone in the drawing room with Harriett was not witnessed. The servants had their suspicions, but nothing improper was ever reported.

On 15 June 1868, Sir Charles Mordaunt departed on a fishing holiday to Norway, leaving his wife behind. While he was away, Harriett saw a great deal of a friend named Lord Cole. One night Cole dined with her, and stayed on alone after the guests had left until one a.m. Meanwhile, on 6 July, Princess Alexandra gave birth to her fourth child,
a daughter, wisely named Victoria. The Queen thought the baby a “mere little red lump,” and joked that her grandchildren were being born at the rate of rabbits in Windsor Park.
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The following week, Sir Charles returned unexpectedly to Walton Hall, his Warwickshire home, having cut short his fishing holiday. It was a blazing hot summer’s day, and in front of the house he saw his wife in her pony carriage. She was showing off the two white driving ponies she had bought a few months before from the Sandringham stables. On the steps of the house, admiring her, stood a man—none other than the Prince of Wales.

Bertie hurriedly departed. Shortly afterward, Sir Charles ordered the groom to bring the two ponies round onto the lawn. Dragging Harriett down the steps, he shot the animals dead in front of her.

The whispered scandal was misery for Alix, who clung obsessively to “my Bertie.” Her leg was still sore—Bertie reported that she had at last been able to “valse” with him—and now her husband decided to take her away to spend the winter abroad, beginning with Denmark.
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By running away from the gossip and pleasing Alix, Bertie annoyed the Queen. There was the usual tug-of-war about taking the children out of the country. Alix wanted the three eldest, Eddy, Georgie, and Louise, to spend Christmas with her parents at Fredensborg, leaving baby Victoria behind at home, but the Queen forbade the one-year-old Louise to travel. She gave a grudging assent for the two boys, but only if the doctors agreed: “They are the Children of the Country and
I
shall be blamed for allowing any
risk
to be run.”
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Alix implored Victoria to relent over Louise, who was a sickly child: “I would prefer to
give up
the trip rather than leave the little darling behind.
You
will understand this best, my angel mother, and therefore I speak so openly to you.”
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No one, not even Vicky, dared to appeal to Victoria’s feelings in this way, but for once the Queen resisted Alix’s charms and accused her of being “very
selfish
” and “unreasonable.” This provoked a furious outburst from Bertie. “Alix has made herself nearly quite ill with worry of all this,” he told the Queen, “but what
she has felt most are the words you have used regarding her. Ever since she has been your daughter in law, I think she has tried to meet your wishes in every way—and you have never said an unkind word to or of her.” Selfish she most certainly was not, “and her whole life is wrapt up in her Children.” Was it not inconsistent, he demanded, to forbid Alix to travel home to her parents with her children when Vicky and Alice regularly brought their babies with them to England?
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At this Victoria wisely gave way, as she always did in an unwinnable situation. Little Louise accompanied her parents to Fredensborg.

Six weeks with Alix’s family bored Bertie. The weather on Denmark’s windswept sands made it almost impossible to go out, and there was nothing to shoot except foxes.
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A bear-shooting expedition with the King of Sweden was spoiled by fog, though the King inducted Bertie as a freemason, which annoyed Victoria.
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Alix wept bitterly when the time came to leave her parents and the “children of the nation” were sent home. They were packed off to stay with Queen Victoria, who grumbled about having the house at Osborne “crammed full” of grandchildren and complained that they were spoiled.
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Irked by his mother’s remarks, Bertie wrote a tart letter warning her not to be too strict with the grandchildren lest they should grow to dislike her, “and we should naturally wish them to be very fond of you, as they were in Denmark of Alix’s parents.”
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