The Heir Apparent (38 page)
Authors: Jane Ridley
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Nonfiction, #Retail, #Royalty
Meanwhile, the prince made careful diary plans, choreographing a triumphant return home. He wrote Alix “a very dear letter,” telling her that on his return to English waters, he wished to see her “
first
and
alone
.”
66
The
Serapis
arrived off Yarmouth, Isle of Wight, at eleven a.m. on 11 May 1876, where Bertie boarded the
Enchantress
and was reunited with Alix and his children.
67
In London, Bertie and Alix visited the Queen at Buckingham Palace, where a large crowd had gathered. Victoria, jealous of her own popularity, noticed that when Bertie and Alix drove away, and she appeared alone at the palace window, the crowd “turned round and cheered”—the enthusiasm for herself was greater than for Bertie, she thought.
68
Arriving at Marlborough House at eight, Bertie and Alix paused briefly to change, and then drove to Covent Garden. They made their carefully planned entry during
Un Ballo in Maschera
, Verdi’s opera about regicide, but the irony was perhaps lost on them. The Queen thought going straight to the opera a “great mistake,” but Bertie insisted
that, though he would have far preferred to dine quietly at Buckingham Palace with his mother, this would be “impolitic” at the present moment, when “the friendly feeling which exists towards him should [not] in any way be damped.”
69
By the time of Verdi’s second act, the opera house was packed. Women glittering with diamonds waited and whispered with anticipation until at last the prince and princess arrived. The whole assembly rose, and it seemed the cheers would never cease. Bertie bowed and bowed repeatedly, and then, in accordance with his instructions, the soloist Mme. Albani sang “God Bless the Prince of Wales,” with such vigor that renewed cheering broke out.
70
The following evening at seven thirty, Lord Hardwicke called on Bertie at Marlborough House. He had just come from seeing Lord Aylesford, and he brought the news that Sporting Joe had decided not to divorce Edith, but to arrange a private legal separation.
71
The scandal had been averted.
There is at Packington Hall a large silver cigar box in the shape of a log cabin, designed for handing round cigars after dinner.
72
The Packington log cabin was a present from Bertie to Sporting Joe.
Bertie had much to be thankful for. Joe had returned from India in a confused and reckless state of mind, determined to fight a duel with Blandford. On discovering that under the rules of dueling “if I call him out … he is not allowed to shoot at me … but I have a cool shot at him,” and considering this unfair, Joe agreed instead to hire a lawyer.
73
He was advised by friends such as Hardwicke to agree to a legal separation, as in a divorce case all his past misdeeds would come out in court.
74
But Joe’s real reason for deciding against divorce was perhaps to protect the Prince of Wales. When someone mentioned that Bertie had written letters to Edith, he threatened to horsewhip the tale-teller for propagating “a scandalous falsehood,” even though he already knew all about the correspondence.
75
Blindly loyal to his prince, Joe was willing to give up all he had—his wife, his fortune, even his home—to serve him.
Joe shut up Packington Hall and rented a house in Bognor, where he lived with a woman named Mrs. Dilke and consorted with “negro minstrels” and ladies who danced around the room in smoking caps. Bertie kept in touch. He visited Joe when he was ill, and he invited him to Sandringham.
76
We catch a glimpse of Joe at New Year 1882, playing “Snapdragon” before dinner: “the P[rince]ss of Wales’ lace tea gown caught fire. L[or]d Aylesford caught her in his arms, and pressed her very tight, and put out the flames and saved a bad accident.”
77
Later he immigrated to Texas—hence the log cabin cigar box. Installing himself and his retinue in the only hotel of a shanty town named Big Spring, he bought twenty-two thousand acres. The cowboys set about separating him from his cash, but it’s good to learn that he won their respect and “they would spill their blood for him as quickly as he would open another bottle for them.”
78
Joe died of drink at age thirty-six. Bertie’s note in his diary signifies that he still considered Joe one of his court: “Receive sad news of death of L[or]d Aylesford in Texas USA.”
79
The curmudgeonly Lord Derby commented: “He had run through his whole fortune by gambling, racing and extravagance generally; and was one of the very worst examples of the English peerage. Naturally he belonged to the Marlborough House Set.”
80
This was a harsh verdict. Joe had inherited debts, and he spent a good deal of his fortune serving the Prince of Wales.
81
Edith, by contrast, was ostracized. Leaving her children at Packington forever (“It is like being dead and yet alive,” she told her mother-in-law), she fled to Paris, where she and Blandford lived together under the names Mr. and Mrs. Spencer.
82
In 1881 she produced a son, named Guy Bertrand.
e
Blandford’s wife divorced him two years later, but though he claimed that Guy Bertrand was the child he loved most, he didn’t marry Edith. After a scandalous affair with Lady Colin Campbell, he married a rich American widow. Edith died in Paris in 1897, two days before the great Devonshire House Ball. Her death condemned
the relatives who had shunned her for more than twenty years to observe mourning, which meant that they were unable to attend the ball and their elaborate outfits were never worn. Her sister-in-law Mrs. Hywfa Williams watched the festivities from an upstairs skylight. “How I longed to be down in the room!” she wrote, “but very sad was Edith’s death for all her sisters.”
83
As for Randolph Churchill, he got his way and stopped the Aylesford divorce, but he had broken all the rules of courtly behavior and for this he had to be punished. Nothing if not stubborn, Randolph refused to grovel. Bertie appealed to Prime Minister Disraeli, Lord Chancellor Lord Cairns, and Hartington to arbitrate. Arrangements were made for the entire Churchill family to go into exile. The Duke of Marlborough reluctantly accepted Disraeli’s offer to become Viceroy of Ireland. The royal connection had already cost him dear—in 1875, shortly after entertaining the Prince of Wales at Blenheim, he had disposed of the Marlborough gem collection for thirty-five thousand guineas. The duke grimly sold off more land, and arranged to take Randolph with him as unpaid private secretary.
Randolph first skipped off to America. As Jennie breezily put it, having had “serious differences of opinion with various influential people,” Randolph felt in need of “a little solace and distraction.”
84
A form of apology drafted by the Lord Chancellor was sent for him to sign, and he succeeded in doing this in what the Lord Chancellor thought was “the most ungracious and undignified way that was possible.”
85
However ungracious, the apology had been extracted, and Bertie had seemingly won his point. The Queen entertained the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough at Windsor in December 1876, and Bertie grudgingly agreed that he would bow to Randolph. However, he let it be known that he would not speak to him and would boycott any house that entertained the Randolph Churchills. This was not mere spite. No one mentioned the fact, but Randolph still had Bertie’s letters to Edith in his possession. Being a social exile was the making of
Randolph as a politician, as he no longer wasted his time partying at Marlborough House.
In July 1885, a mysterious locked box was delivered to Lord Cairns. On opening it, he found a sealed envelope addressed to the Prince of Wales. Cairns forwarded the box to Marlborough House. Inside the sealed box were the three letters that Bertie had written to Edith.
86
*
A retort is a long-necked glass container. HRH once visited Joe in the hospital with a broken leg. He brought two “boy” champagne bottles. “Joe, have a drink,” said Bertie. “Oh, after you, Sir,” replied Joe, whereupon HRH opened a bottle and drank the lot (no mean feat). After more chat the episode was repeated, and the prince quaffed the second bottle, too. (Author interview, Lord Aylesford, November 2006.)
†
Edith gave birth to a daughter the following year, and Alix stood as godmother. At the baptism at the Chapel Royal on 24 July 1875, Alix held the baby over the font, and it was christened Alexandra.
‡
This is corroborated by the photograph of the party posed on the balustrade beside the conservatory. Bertie in the center is flanked by Alix and Edith, who stands next to Joe Aylesford and Louise Manchester. The czarevitch is on Alix’s right. Apart from Hartington, who was Louise Manchester’s acknowledged lover, Bertie is the only bearded man.
§
These brief messages are the only known communications between Bertie and Alix that have survived the bonfires of letters after their deaths.
‖
It was not true that the solicitor general had seen Edith’s letters, as Randolph claimed. The opinion that Bertie would never sit upon the throne of England if the letters came out in court was based on a hypothetical case. (St. Aubyn,
Edward VII,
p. 183.)
a
Mary, Duchess of Teck, was related to both Bertie and Alix. Her father was the Duke of Cambridge, Bertie’s great-uncle, and her mother, Augusta of Hesse-Cassel, was a first cousin of Alix’s mother, Queen Louise. Alix wrote to her sister when the duchess was pregnant with the future Queen Mary: “Mary of Teck is here—you probably know that she is in a certain condition!!! Can you imagine her so—she is enormously big but we do not really see yet as she is so fat above, and thereby is hiding the lower part of her body!!” (Copenhagen Letters, Box 102, Alix to Minnie, 21 January 1867.)
b
Bertie had strictly forbidden Alix from becoming involved in the Aylesford divorce, and she knew that receiving a woman as tarnished as Edith might damage her reputation. Edith told Louise Manchester on the day of the interview that “the Princess had sent for her to go to Marlborough House at 6.” According to Louise, “It was that busy body Mr. Sturt [Lord Alington] who most improperly went to the Princess and urged an interview, and … her kindness of heart prompted her to see what she could do to save misery to so many people.” (RA VIC/Add C07/1/1090, Duchess of Manchester to B, 27 March 1876; see Henry Ponsonby to Francis Knollys, n.d., in Randolph Churchill,
Churchill: Companion,
vol. 1, part 1, pp. 30–31.)
c
Queen Victoria forbade publication of the letters, as (Ponsonby wrote) “colouring might be easily given & injurious inference deduced from hasty expressions.” (Henry Ponsonby to Francis Knollys, 18 April 1876, in Randolph Churchill,
Churchill: Companion,
vol. 1, part 1, p. 38.) Not publishing gave rise to wild speculation about the lurid contents of the letters (see, for example, Mary S. Lovell,
The Churchills
[Little, Brown, 2011], p. 57). These extracts from the letters that Randolph Churchill used in his attempt to blackmail the Prince of Wales have never before been revealed.
d
In later life his moods were exacerbated, possibly by syphilis; but Lord Derby for one believed that Randolph had inherited mental illness through his mother. (John Vincent, ed.,
Later Derby Diaries,
[Bristol, 1981], pp. 74, 88.) The Duchess of Marlborough was a daughter of the formidable Frances Anne, Lady Londonderry, and a sister of Lord Adolphus Vane-Tempest, mad husband of Bertie’s former mistress, the unhappy Susan Vane-Tempest—odd to think that she was Winston Churchill’s great-aunt.
e
Many years later, at Dunkirk, Michael, the 9th Earl of Aylesford, who was Joe’s nephew, allegedly met a French officer who introduced himself as Guy Bertrand’s son. Michael Aylesford invited the Frenchman into his tank to shelter from the bullets, but both men were killed when it was hit by a shell. (Author email from Lord Aylesford, 3 December 2006.)
Lillie Langtry
1877–78
A photograph taken of Alix in the summer of 1876 shows her wearing a skintight tailored jacket buttoned up to her throat. Her wasp waist is fiercely corseted and belted, making her look abnormally thin. The photo is a fashion plate, and it shows the princess modeling the new style of figure-hugging tailored day clothes that she popularized. These dresses liberated women from the voluminous skirts that restricted physical activity, subjecting their wearers instead to the tyranny of tightly laced corsets.
1
She carries a jaunty umbrella and wears an unflattering round hat, but her eyes are heavy and dark-rimmed, her face is pale, her mouth set, and her glance avoids the camera.
2
That winter she became ill. The official version, as conveyed to the Queen by woman of the bedchamber Charlotte Knollys, was that Alix was “dreadfully pulled down” by a “severe cold.”
3
But her illness was more serious than that. The Queen of Denmark wrote in strictest confidence to Victoria, telling her of Alix’s “indisposition.” Victoria forwarded
a translation of the letter to Dr. Gull, urgently asking for his advice. “She is too dear and precious to us all to let her be sacrificed to others. It is on them or rather on him that we must work and act.… What is to be done?”
4
Evidently the Queen was referring to Bertie, but exactly what she meant by Alix being sacrificed isn’t clear. Perhaps it was the old complaint about the frenetic pace of Bertie’s life wearing Alix out, but this had been said so often before that it’s hard to see why the Queen of Denmark needed to write in strictest confidence. Perhaps conjugal relations had been resumed and Alix had suffered a miscarriage. There are references to neuralgia and fatigue.
5
Three years before she had complained of pain in her eyes, which was so severe that she was unable to write.
6
Whatever it was, Dr. Gull was alarmed and ordered her to stay for six weeks in Athens with her brother Willie, the King of Greece, for a “
complete change
”—something Victoria would never have normally allowed.
7