The Heir Apparent (44 page)

Alix spent the summer of 1879 in Denmark with her sister Minnie, staying with King Christian at Bernstorff, his summer residence. An unpretentious early-nineteenth-century building with whitewashed walls, Bernstorff stood in a romantic park beside the sea. It had been the childhood holiday retreat of Alix and Minnie, and that summer the two sisters insisted on staying there together, refusing to move to the grander and larger castle of Fredensborg. They even shared the bedroom they had used as girls.
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The house was crammed with Romanovs and Waleses and their suites, and twenty or thirty people sat down to dinner each night at five o’clock, which, complained Charlotte Knollys, made the evenings “dreadfully long.”
⁸⁵
It rained every day, and Charlotte found that “one day here is so exactly like the other that there really is nothing to tell.”
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Minnie’s husband the czarevitch Alexander arrived, bringing with him four yachts. Charlotte Knollys thought him “much improved in manners (he used to be rather rough).”
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Alix reported that he was “most amiable … sensible and by no means violent in politics.”
⁸⁸
When Bertie joined the party, arriving on board his own yacht
Osborne
, Queen Victoria worried that her indiscreet son would cause trouble with England’s archenemy. Bertie replied diplomatically: “I shall of course avoid politics as much as possible but as he married dear Alix’s sister whom I am very fond of, I am most anxious that our relations
should not be strained.”
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The two brothers-in-law competed to entertain on their yachts. In Paris, on the journey home, they spent four days together, Bertie showing the czarevitch round the boulevards. Beaconsfield commented that Bertie had “come back very Russian, they say.”
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Back in England, Alix missed “my own angelic little Minnie.” Usually, she told Minnie, she could survive their separations, but this time, “I have been so miserable that everyone asks what is wrong with me, but it was only
homesickness for you
!!”
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She found herself talking aloud, imagining that she could hear Minnie’s voice speaking to her. “It is always a pleasure to me when somebody says our voices are alike and that we look like each other!”
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It was as if Minnie was the other half of herself, wearing the same clothes, speaking in the same voice. Having a doppelgänger made her feel secure.

At Sandringham, she rode her six horses every day and indulged her passion for hunting. This had to be kept secret from the Queen, who disapproved almost as strongly of princesses riding to hounds as she did of them breast-feeding, but Alix found it more thrilling each time, in spite of bloodcurdling falls. On one occasion, the horse jumped and “I silly animal lost my balance and flew over the wrong side, head down, thinking my last moment had come—but I got my head out of the sand and picked myself half up, then I talked to the horse, and then it stopped, the sweet animal—then one of the gentlemen, [Dighton]
Probyn
, jumped off and pushed me into the saddle and then everything was well and I hurried on!!!” Another time the horse jumped over a wide, deep ditch, “but it jumped too short and put its head through a fence, getting so afraid that it went
on its hind legs
down into the ditch and there we walked up and down and I could not get it out.” Eventually it rolled out, and fortunately both horse and rider were unharmed. She implored Minnie, “
Do not tell
!”
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At Sandringham, Alix was adored. Mrs. Louise Cresswell, the lady farmer and tenant of Appleton House on the estate, worshipped her. Alix would visit for tea, driving herself over in her four-pony carriage. Mrs. Cresswell was an occasional guest at the Big House, but she was terrified of the prince. He was frighteningly unpredictable—a jovial
figure in the ballroom, but a tyrannical Henry VIII on the estate. His black looks spelled disaster.

Mrs. Cresswell fought a running war against the estate office, complaining that the royal pheasants and hares ruined her crops, and the clash sharpened as agricultural depression deepened after the wet summer of 1879. “Every proprietor of land is ‘down in the mouth’ at present,” wrote Bertie, and Mrs. Cresswell complained that he showed her scant charity.
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In 1880, the bank foreclosed on Mrs. Cresswell and called in its loans. She later wrote a book describing her battles, entitled
Eighteen Years on the Sandringham Estate
(1887), in which she failed to mention the fact that she owed more than two years’ rent. As her debts grew, she became convinced that she was being persecuted by HRH. The estate was reluctant to evict her, but their offers to help were met by threats of lawsuits, wild accusations, and unreasonable demands for rent reductions.
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Bertie emerges if anything with credit from the episode, but Mrs. Cresswell was able to write a one-sided account, presenting herself as the innocent victim of HRH’s Germanic lust for shooting—an attack to which he was powerless to reply.

Bertie stayed at Hughenden with Beaconsfield for a night in January 1880. The court-loving prime minister fussed about the visit and the guest list for weeks beforehand. He threw a small dinner party, which was a triumph, and the next morning, while Bertie retired to write to Alix, dashed off an ecstatic report to Lady Bradford. Prince Hal had “praised the house, praised his dinner, praised the pictures; praised everything; was himself most agreeable in conversation, said some good things and told more.” The prince went to bed no later than midnight, and Major Teesdale the equerry told Beaconsfield that “in regard to late hours, eating, drinking, everything, there is a great and hugely beneficial change in his life.”
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Bertie’s feelings toward Beaconsfield were ambivalent. On the whole, he sympathized with his politics, especially in foreign affairs. But he distrusted Beaconsfield’s knowing irony, he bristled at his camp
obsequiousness, and he despised his inability to say what he thought to his face. Above all, Bertie disliked Beaconsfield because he was Victoria’s favorite. He worried that Victoria confided too much, and that, like John Brown, Beaconsfield knew too many family secrets.
^a
With Gladstone, the opposite was the case. Bertie shared his mother’s opposition to Gladstone’s Liberal politics, though his views were less extreme. But he had no sympathy with Victoria’s violent dislike of Gladstone himself. On the contrary, he found Gladstone personally agreeable.

In March 1880, Beaconsfield called a snap election and was unexpectedly and overwhelmingly defeated. Rather than wait to meet defeat in Parliament, as was customary, he made constitutional history by resigning immediately, and Queen Victoria found herself confronted with the inevitability of a hated Liberal government, with Gladstone as it its most likely prime minister. She told Ponsonby she would rather abdicate than appoint “
that half-mad firebrand
,” and she endeavored to make the Whig Lord Hartington prime minister instead.
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For the first time in his life, Bertie attempted to play a part behind the scenes. He was a friend of Hartington’s, and he was on good terms with Lord Granville, the third candidate for the premiership. He had several meetings with Hartington, which he reported to Ponsonby: “I think it right to let you know that I had a long conversation again with Hartington yesterday evening—and he is
more
anxious than ever that the Queen should send for Mr. Gladstone to form a government instead of sending either for Lord Granville or himself.” Personally, Bertie was “strongly of the opinion that the Queen should send for Mr. Gladstone. Far better that she should take the initiative than that it should be forced on her.”
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When Ponsonby showed Bertie’s letter to the Queen, she scrawled furiously across it: “The Prince of Wales … has no right to meddle and
never
has done so
before
. Lord Hartington must be told … that the Queen cannot allow any private and intimate communications to go on between
them
, or all confidence will be
impossible
.”
⁹⁹

The Prince of Wales had indeed no constitutional role, nor had the Queen asked him to intervene. But his advice was sensible, well meant, and correct—Gladstone was the inevitable prime minister, and for the Queen to block him would have been a dangerous mistake. By snubbing Bertie so brutally, Victoria could hardly fail to make trouble. Bertie blamed his youngest brother, Prince Leopold, who was a staunch Tory and Beaconsfield’s pet. Leopold enjoyed the Queen’s confidence and acted as her adviser during the ministerial crisis, and Bertie accused him of poisoning the Queen against Gladstone and persuading her that Gladstone was an enemy of the royal family.
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Soon the prince and his mother were quarreling again. The Queen proposed to make Bertie colonel in chief of the Household Cavalry, but in exchange she demanded that he should give up his colonelcy of the Rifle Brigade, which she desired to transfer to Prince Arthur. Bertie abandoned the Rifles with “extreme reluctance,” and let it be known that he would have preferred to keep both regiments.
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Without telling the Queen, like a small boy he persuaded Arthur to allow him to wear the Rifles’ black buttons whenever he chose. Victoria wrote irritably to Arthur: “I wish Bertie would not meddle so much in everything concerning you brothers as he does now; for you are
my
children and you owe
him no allegiance
or
obedience
, which belongs
only
to
me
! Pray do not yield to him, for he has no right to do it.… He was most unkind to poor Leopold the other day, but he won’t stand being treated like a little child.”
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Bertie, for his part, complained that Victoria did not consult him. “I do not think that I am prone to ‘let the cat out of the bag’ as a rule, or betray confidences, but I own that it is often with great regret that I either learn from others or see in the newspapers hints or facts stated with regard to members of our family,” he told the Queen.
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“Receive sad intelligence of assassination of Emperor of Russia by explosive bomb!” noted Bertie on 13 March 1881.
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The czar Alexander II had lived like a hunted animal in the last months of his life, repeatedly
targeted by terrorists, and he was eventually murdered driving in his sleigh in St. Petersburg. In London, the Liberal politician Charles Dilke watched Bertie at the mass in the Russian chapel. The small room was packed and stifled with incense. Bertie wore a heavy uniform and carried a lighted taper, and Dilke saw him go to sleep standing, “his taper gradually turn round and gutter on the floor.”
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The new czar, Alexander III, was Bertie’s brother-in-law, and in spite of the security risks and hostility toward Russia, Bertie persuaded a reluctant Victoria to allow him and Alix to attend the funeral. This was his third visit to Russia. “There is very general surprise expressed at them being allowed to go there at all,” commented Loulou Harcourt in his diary.
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On the day of the funeral, St. Petersburg was blotted out by thick snow raked by a bitter, swirling wind. The city buzzed with rumors of mines that had been timed to detonate during the service. Inside the heavily guarded Peter and Paul Cathedral, the atmosphere was overpoweringly hot and perfumed with flowers and incense. Bertie and Alix arrived after the interminable funeral mass had already begun, and watched as Minnie—now styled the Empress Marie Feodorovna—along with the rest of the czar’s family, filed past and one by one kissed the mutilated hands of the blackened and putrefying corpse of Alexander II, which lay in its open coffin.
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At least Alix was spared the kissing.

The next day Bertie invested his brother-in-law Alexander III with the Order of the Garter at the Anitchkoff Palace, where he and Alix were staying. The new czar had moved there from the Winter Palace, but even here he was a virtual prisoner, in constant danger of assassination, and confined for exercise to the palace backyard, which, Bertie declared, was an area unworthy of a London slum.
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The Garter ceremony was performed privately. As Bertie marched into the throne room at the head of five members of his staff, carrying the insignia on narrow velvet cushions, Alix could be heard crying out to Minnie: “Oh! My dear! Do look at them! They look exactly like a row of wet-nurses carrying babies!”
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