The Heir Apparent (41 page)
Authors: Jane Ridley
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Nonfiction, #Retail, #Royalty
At a reception that summer (Lillie related), the parchment-faced Beaconsfield sat wearing his newly awarded Garter ribbon. He was introduced to Lillie. “What can I do for you?” asked the prime minister. “Four new gowns for Ascot,” came the pert reply, at which he laughed, patted her hand, and said, “You are a sensible young woman. Many a woman would have asked to have been made a duchess in her own right.”
63
Lillie’s own story (which is unsubstantiated) implies that she was now recognized as royal mistress, like Charles II’s Nell Gwyn. As her biographer has observed, however, her career was one of invention. She excelled at self-fashioning, carefully constructing an image of herself as royal mistress to project to the world.
64
Historians will probably never know the intimate truth about Bertie and Lillie, but Bertie certainly pulled strings to advance her family. He asked Lord Lytton, the Indian viceroy, to promote her brother in the Indian Civil Service; Lytton, however, replied that Le Breton had only recently been promoted to chief inspector of post offices in Rajputana, and “to put him over the heads of all his seniors … would I fear be too rapid promotion even for Mrs. Langtree’s [
sic
] brother.”
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The Murrietas were rumored to have created a love nest for Lillie on their estate at Wadhurst, the new house that the two bachelor brothers, Christobel and Adriano de Murrieta, had built with the profits of their Argentinian trade. Here Bertie’s friend Jesusa and her husband José de Murrieta, now ennobled by the King of Spain as the Marquess of Santurce, created fashion history by seating guests at separate tables in the dining room, arranged like a restaurant.
‖
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Members of the Marlborough House set attempted to curry favor by dotting the countryside with cottages
ornées
where the prince could conduct secret assignations. At Gunton, near Sandringham, it is well authenticated that Lord Suffield, who was Lillie’s friend, lent her a shooting box, Elderton Lodge, where she could meet the prince.
67
The
stories about royal love nests always feature Lillie, and never the other mistresses.
68
By keeping Lillie in secret houses, Bertie hoped to live a double life and shield Alix from embarrassment. The tales are revealing, too, about Lillie’s ambivalent social status—in spite of her friendship with the prince, she was not considered a suitable house party guest.
Alix seems to have found some consolation in the support of Oliver Montagu. As Lady Antrim, later Alix’s lady-in-waiting, recalled, the gallant Montagu “shielded her in every way, not least from his own great love, and managed to defeat gossip. Oliver Montagu was looked upon with awe by the young as he sauntered into a ballroom, regardless of anything but his beautiful Princess, who as a matter of course always danced the first after-supper waltz with him. But she remained marvellously circumspect.”
69
An enigmatic letter that Montagu wrote to his father, Lord Sandwich, in October 1878 can be read as evidence of his tortured relationship with the princess:
a
Yes, believe me, that though I says it as shouldn’t, the cock child is not a bad’un at bottom. I know he has faults as others have, and perhaps even more of them, but his heart is in the right place. Outwardly he is a noisy crowing brute, but if everyone knew what his inward feelings are and what he has had to go through, they would not envy him his existence. I know not nor have I read of anyone put in the unfortunate position that I have been and yet, thank God, to have got through the worst without much damage to others.
70
He could be talking about anything. But the words about his feelings and the position into which he has been put suggest that the unspoken subject of this letter is his painfully platonic relationship with his princess. Loyal cavalier that he was, he could hardly mention her by name.
*
She may have used the name in letters to Minnie to distinguish Victoria from her own mother Queen Louise; more likely, it was a disparaging reference to Victoria’s pro-German sympathies.
†
The fitness-obsessed empress ruined the shoes of her ladies-in-waiting by walking each morning twice around Hyde Park (about eight miles). Though a skilled haute école rider, she lacked the hunting woman’s ability to make a horse gallop. “Come on, madam, come on!” her exasperated pilot, Bay Middleton, would yell; her trail across country could be followed like a paper chase from the throwaway squares of Japanese rice paper that she used as handkerchiefs. (Cornwallis-West,
Reminiscences,
pp. 76–78.)
‡
Men dancing with sweaty hands is a trope of royal stories. My father as a young man once danced with Princess Margaret, who was wearing a sequinned dress. He was nervous and hot, and afterward he noticed that his right hand was covered with sequins. To his horror, he saw an imprint of his hand on the princess’s waist.
§
Sidney Lee titled his chapter on Bertie’s life in 1876–78, “Political Estrangement from Russia,” writing as if foreign policy was the prince’s chief occupation. (Lee,
Edward VII.
)
‖
Wadhurst Park was built by E. J. Tarver in 1872–75, and another wing was added to entertain the Prince of Wales in 1881. It is now demolished. The Murrietas, who invested heavily in Argentinian railways, lost their fortune in the Barings crash of 1890, when Argentina defaulted on bond payments.
a
Montagu made frantic attempts to obtain a post in the royal household, but the Queen disliked his free and easy manners. (Richard Davenport-Hines, “A Radical Lord Chamberlain at a Tory Court,”
Court Historian,
vol.16 [2011], p. 224.)
Prince Hal
1878–81
The fourteenth of December 1878 was the seventeenth anniversary of Prince Albert’s death. Bertie and Alix went to Windsor for the customary service in the mausoleum, but this year the melancholy occasion was clouded by impending tragedy. The previous day had been punctuated by alarming telegrams from Darmstadt, where Bertie’s sister Alice lay desperately ill with diphtheria. Sir William Jenner, dispatched by the Queen, wired that the disease had spread to her windpipe; she had great difficulty in breathing, high fever, exhaustion, and restlessness.
1
The glands in her throat were so swollen that her neck was as thick as her cheeks. Her tonsils were coated with patches of false membrane, and the danger was that she would die of suffocation, as they obstructed her windpipe. Throttling by membrane had been the cause of the death of her four-year-old daughter, May, four weeks earlier.
2
At two thirty a.m., Alice became unconscious, and she died at 7:30 on the morning of the fourteenth. The cause of death of the
thirty-five-year-old princess was given as exhaustion and cardiac failure.
3
As soon as the Queen received the dreaded telegram, she went to Beatrice, returned to her room and spoke to Leopold, and only then went to Bertie’s sitting room. She wrote in her journal:
He was not ready for a few minutes, but soon came out in his dressing gown, having received the same dreadful news from Sir William [Jenner], looking dreadfully pale and haggard, trying to repress his violent emotion, quite choked with it
. His despair was great,
and he could hardly speak
. As I kissed him he said, “The good are always taken
and the bad remain
.”
4
The words in italics were cut from the 1926 edition of the Queen’s letters, presumably because they showed a lack of manliness; but they give a glimpse of the most sympathetic side of Bertie’s character—unguarded, emotional, and self-deprecatory.
5
As for Alix, when the Queen went in to see her while she dressed and took her in her arms, she said simply: “I wish I had died instead of her.”
6
The tragedy at Darmstadt had all the makings of a Victorian melodrama—except that it was genuinely heartbreaking. Apart from one daughter, Elizabeth (Ella), Alice’s entire family, including her husband, Louis, had been infected with diphtheria within eight days. When little May died, her body was placed in a coffin covered with white flowers, and Alice was the only member of the family present at the funeral service in the castle. After it was over, she left the room and walked slowly upstairs. “At the top of the stairs she knelt down, and taking hold of the golden balustrade, looked into the mirror opposite to her to watch the little coffin being taken out of the house.”
7
Medical reports remarked on the unusual fact that none of the sixty members of the Hesse-Darmstadt household had been infected, and deduced that the infection was spread by kissing.
8
Alice herself allegedly caught the disease when she broke the news of May’s death to her ten-year-old son, Ernie, who was so overcome that she embraced him—and thus her own death. Disraeli used his novelist’s skills to paint
a pathetic picture of this tragic kiss in his speech in the House of Lords, which “greatly moved” Bertie.
9
As Victoria remarked, Alice had expected to die early and had been talking about it for years.
10
A family portrait made by Heinrich von Angeli in 1878 shows a paunchy, bearded Louis; Alice, wearing a strange nunlike garb, looks haggard and unhappy. Ever since the trauma of nursing her father, Albert, on his deathbed as an eighteen-year-old, she had suffered from depression.
11
For years she complained of failing vision, neuralgia, and “rheumatism,” but her symptoms were so vague as to defy diagnosis. In 1876 she described herself as “absurdly” wanting in strength, dull, tired, and useless. “I have never in my life been like this before. I live on my sofa.”
12
Queen Victoria, who saw her in the summer of 1878, thought she looked “very weak and delicate and is up to nothing,” and when she heard of the diphtheria she dreaded that her semi-invalid daughter would be too frail to survive.
13
Alice’s son Frittie had inherited the hemophilia gene, and in 1873 the two-year-old had fallen from a window in Alice’s bedroom and died soon after from internal bleeding on the brain. For months—years even—Alice could think of little else but the horror of his sudden death. It brought her exceptionally close to her surviving son, Ernie. “Seldom a mother and child so understood each other,” she wrote. “It requires no words; he reads it in my eyes.”
14
Alice was unfulfilled in her marriage to the amiable but bovine Louis. She was estranged from her mother, whose unfair letters made her cry with rage. “I wish I were dead,” she wrote in 1877, “and it will probably not be too long before I give Mama that pleasure.”
15
Morbid foreboding was always in the air at Darmstadt. Ernie, too, was profoundly affected by Frittie’s death, and as a mawkish little boy he would say to Alice: “When I die, you must die too, and all the others; why can’t [we] all die together? I don’t like to die alone like Frittie.”
16
Five years later, Alice and May did indeed die together.
*
At Windsor on 14 December 1878, the dark blinds came down, and a fall of snow blanketed the castle in silent stillness. The Lord Chamberlain ordered the court to wear deep mourning for six weeks: black dresses, white gloves, pearls, and diamonds.
17
Victoria’s reaction to Alice’s death was strangely muted; for her, perhaps, nothing could ever be so bad again as Albert’s death. It was Bertie who was overcome. “My Bertie … is
so
sad,” wrote Alix.
18
“She was my favourite sister,” Bertie told Lord Granville, “so good, so kind, so clever; we had gone through much together—my father’s illness, then my own.”
19
Late on Monday, 16 December, Bertie, Leopold, and Helena’s husband, Prince Christian, crossed to Flushing and traveled all the next day by train to Frankfurt. After the service in Darmstadt, Alice’s coffin was drawn through thick snow to the mausoleum at Rosenhohe, where Frittie and May already lay. The mourners followed on foot; chief among them was Bertie. Alice’s husband, Louis, though recovering from diphtheria, was not yet strong enough to walk through the snow. At ten thirty that night, an exhausted Bertie wrote to Knollys: “This has been a terribly trying day, and I hardly like to think of it, the interview with the poor G[ran]d Duke and the children was also inexpressibly painful. All was conducted with the greatest respect and quickly as was possible—but it was simply dreadful. I still feel as if I was under the impression of a horrid dream.”
20