The Heir Apparent (28 page)
Authors: Jane Ridley
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Nonfiction, #Retail, #Royalty
The harsh truth was that there were to be no more babies. Alix was only twenty-six, but repeated pregnancies and premature births had worn her out. She was very ill, spitting blood.
48
Six births in eight years of marriage meant that she had spent forty-eight months, half of her married life, pregnant.
§
With the exception of Louise, whose arrival was precipitated by Alix’s illness, the girls’ births were relatively straightforward. As Bertie explained, “There is always more risk with a boy of its being born before the proper time.”
49
Eddy was born at seven months, Georgie at eight months, and now John, born too early to live. Alix ached for more children, and it was a permanent sadness in her life that she was unable to have the large Victorian family of her fantasies.
For a man as sexually rampant as Bertie, a celibate marriage might seem a cruel mockery. But, as the dean perceived, Bertie was “deeply attached to the Princess, despite all the flattering distractions that beset him in society”; he genuinely wanted to “be more careful about her.”
50
At first, the death of their baby son strengthened the marriage. “What my angelic blessed Bertie was to me all this time no words can describe, a true angel!” wrote Alix. “If anything could have bound us closer together, it is this, our first great sorrow.”
51
The court went into mourning for ten days for the infant Prince John. Ladies were ordered to wear black silk dresses trimmed with crêpe, black shoes and gloves, and black fans, feathers, and ornaments. Gentlemen wore black court dress, with black swords and buckles and plain linen.
52
When Victoria suggested that Bertie and Alix should retire into prolonged mourning, her son snapped back: “Want of feeling I never could show, but I think it’s one’s duty not to nurse one’s sorrow, however much one may feel it.” Alix must resume her social duties, “else she will get into a low and morbid state which I am certain will be very injurious to her. You have … no conception of the quantity of applications we get … to open this place, lay a stone, public dinners, luncheons, fetes without end and sometimes people will not take
no
for an answer … and all these things have increased tenfold since the last 10 years.… It is however gratifying that this wish exists in these Democratic days, as one must show oneself in public however irksome it may be—and sometimes it is indeed so.
53
Out of private tragedy, Bertie endeavored to redefine the monarchy. “Showing oneself in public” was to be central to the survival of the institution in the democratic age. In 1871, however, there was reason to doubt whether even that would be sufficient.
Far from engaging public sympathy, the death of Prince John was greeted with republican catcalls. Ever since the Mordaunt case, the radical
Reynolds’s Newspaper
had voiced a strident republicanism. The paper was the publication of G. W. M. Reynolds, an ex-Chartist dedicated to fighting the class war and exposing royalty as an undeserving burden on the taxpayer. It cruelly recorded the death of the baby Prince John thus:
We have much satisfaction in announcing that the newly born child of the Prince and Princess of Wales died shortly after its birth, thus relieving the working men of England from having to support hereafter another addition to the long roll of State beggars they at present maintain.
Reynolds was equally savage about:
the miserable mockery of interring with royal funereal ceremony a shrivelled piece of skin and bone, grandiloquently entitled “prince,” not 24 hours old … and to augment the folly the Court goes into mourning for the loss of the wretched abortion which … was carried to the grave by four stout men.
54
Grumbling about the extravagance of the publicly funded Prince of Wales swelled into a vicious personal campaign.
Reynolds’s
ridiculed Bertie’s speeches as “tautological twaddle,” “slip-slop stuff” that was evidence of intelligence “of a very low order.”
55
The New York Times
pronounced that the Prince of Wales was totally unable to understand the “questions of the day, the temper of the people or the times in which he lives.”
56
Fired by the example of the socialist Paris Commune, republicanism surged.
The Queen came under attack as well. Her demand for an annuity from Parliament for Louise on her marriage sparked a storm of republican agitation, objecting to semi-royals leeching on the taxpayer.
57
Walter Bagehot, who had penned an apology for the monarchy in his
English Constitution
in 1867, wrote a stern leader in
The Economist
: “The Queen has done almost as much injury to the popularity of the monarchy by her long retirement from public life as the most unworthy of her predecessors did by his profligacy and frivolity.”
58
What Does She Do with It?
demanded a pseudonymous pamphlet that claimed that the tight-fisted Queen was hoarding money from the £385,000 voted by Parliament in the Civil List.
59
The Queen complained vigorously that she was overworked, but her unofficial private secretary General Grey advised Prime Minister Gladstone: “Pray dismiss from your mind any ideas of there being any ‘weight of work’ upon the Queen.” Encouraged by her sycophantic doctor, Jenner, Victoria had become entrenched in a “long unchecked habit of self-indulgence.” Her workload consisted of “very short notes” and a “shorter interview” when she ordered Grey to “ ‘write
fully’ on this or that subject” and subsequently to “approve of the draft which I submit to her.”
60
Gladstone, though a Liberal, was dedicated to preserving the monarchy, and he judged that the moment had come to grasp the “burning issue” that he had been “continually revolving” for the past year: “To speak in rude and general terms, the Queen is invisible and the Prince of Wales is not respected.”
61
A grim-faced Gladstone traveled by train to Balmoral on 25 September. He wrote to Lord Granville: “Send for and read
Reynolds’s Newspaper
of last Sunday on the gambling at Homburg. These things go from bad to worse. I saw ‘What Does She Do With It’ advertised on the walls of the station at Birkenhead.”
62
The copy of
Reynolds’s Newspaper
Gladstone carried in his pocket revealed that the Prince of Wales had been spotted in a crowded casino at Homburg gambling away the gold that had been wrung from the toil and sweat of the working man—and this at a time when gambling in England was illegal.
63
At Balmoral, Gladstone found the Queen more invisible than ever. She had succumbed to a mysterious illness and stayed in her room for much of the day.
64
She communicated by sending written notes. Not until day four of his stay did she see the prime minister, and then only for half an hour, during which she exercised what he called “the repellent power which she knows so well how to use.”
65
She would hear no criticism of herself, but Gladstone reported that she was “much vexed” by Bertie’s gambling. “
That
part of the case, poor soul, she can discern well enough.”
66
The Queen’s newly appointed private secretary was in attendance. Shrewd and clearheaded, with a nice sense of irony, the thirty-six-year-old Henry Ponsonby was a surprising choice.
‖
Ponsonby went for a walk in the rain with Gladstone, and held conspiratorial conversations with Princess Alice, who was also at Balmoral.
67
Alice undertook to speak to Bertie about his gambling, but she dared not approach her mother. “I long to be able to ask her to say she will do something but I
really am afraid and have been advised not,” she told Ponsonby, dropping her voice dramatically so that she was barely audible. The Queen saw no one and heard nothing; Ponsonby marked the newspapers for her, but she seemed not to read their criticisms. “Yet,” said Alice, “she knows all that is said against the Prince of Wales she thinks he has become so unpopular that it is useless to expect he will come to the throne. She thinks the monarchy will last her time and that it is no use thinking of what will come after if the principal person himself does not, & so she lets the torrent come on.”
68
Après moi le déluge
was Victoria’s excuse for doing nothing.
The stories of Bertie’s gambling at Homburg and Baden were exaggerated. Francis Knollys told Ponsonby that the prince had entered the casino and thrown a few gold pieces on the table, and that was all; he lost very little money.
69
But Knollys must have been biting his tongue. He knew that Bertie was sitting on one, if not two, explosive sexual scandals, which he was busily trying to defuse.
A letter had arrived at Abergeldie.
a
The envelope was addressed to Francis Knollys, but there was no doubt who the contents were for:
My dear Sir,
I cannot tell Your Royal Highness how
utterly miserable
I am that You should have left London without coming to see me. You have shewn me
so much
kindness for the last four years that I cannot understand Your having twice been in London for two days without coming to see me. What have I done to offend You? I did my best to obey the orders Your Royal Highness gave me the last time I had the happiness of seeing You but the answer was,
too late
and
too dangerous
. I was anxious to avoid
writing
on such a painful subject but You have forced me to it. I cannot describe to you
how
wretched I am—and Life is so uncertain and
I am far from strong and I felt I may perhaps never see You again, therefore You may imagine my feelings when I received your letter yesterday and knew that You were really off to Scotland!!
Forgive this wretched letter and wishing Your Royal Highness every blessing this world can bestow.
I remain as ever
Y[our]r Royal Highness’s obed[ien]t servant
SV-T
70
SV-T was Lady Susan Vane-Tempest, a mistress whom Bertie was anxious to discard. Before traveling to Scotland, he had spent a few days in London after attending the maneuvers at Aldershot. He was photographed by the society photographer Alexander Bassano in a Piccadilly studio, dressed in his uniform as colonel commanding the 10th Hussars.
b
71
But he made no effort to visit Susan, who had begged him to see her before he left London.
Susan was the wayward daughter of the red-bearded Duke of Newcastle who had taken Bertie to America. The duke had been one of Gladstone’s closest friends, and when, twenty years before, Susan’s scandalous mother had left him and bolted to Italy with her lover, Gladstone had followed in hot pursuit, in a vain attempt to rescue her. Susan had been Vicky’s bridesmaid, but she then disgraced herself by making a runaway marriage to Lord Adolphus Vane-Tempest, a son of Lord Londonderry, who, Queen Victoria told Vicky, “drinks and has twice been shut up for delirium tremens.” The Duke of Newcastle refused to give his consent; there were “no settlements, no trousseau, nothing,” and because he wouldn’t allow her to use his carriage, Susan walked to church with her governess. The Queen joked that there was a bet about which of the two, Susan or Adolphus, would be confined first. Within days, it was Adolphus who had gone mad and been locked up.
72
He tried to kill Susan, and according to the Queen, he died in 1864 in a struggle with his four keepers when he burst a vein in his throat.
73
Bertie’s relationship with Susan had begun in 1867, and he was a frequent visitor to her house in Chapel Street, Westminster.
74
In 1871, she became pregnant. Her baby was conceived in March, shortly before the birth of Alix’s dead son.
75
Susan delayed telling Bertie about the pregnancy, she later explained, because “I hoped to the last that my efforts might be successful and that then I need never have told You of the anxiety I had gone through.” She evidently understood that it was her responsibility to prevent pregnancy, and if her precautions failed, it was then her duty to abort the baby. She saw her own doctor, who did “everything he could for me as long as it was possible to do so with safety.” Susan admitted that “Perhaps I was wrong in keeping silence but I did it to save
you
annoyance—so
please
forgive me for You little know
how
sad and unhappy I am.”
76
She at last summoned the courage to confess her condition to Bertie in early September, when she was already five or six months pregnant.
77
Bertie ordered her to consult his doctor, Oscar Clayton.
c
Susan delayed, and felt compelled to explain: “Your Royal Highness blames me for not at once going to Dr. C[layton] as You desired me, but You can understand it was
most
painful to go to an
utter stranger
under such sad circumstances.”
78