The Heir Apparent (56 page)

The lesson of Tranby Croft, however, was, as
The Times
pointed out, that the prince was not entitled to a private life. No matter how hard he worked at his public duties, the people still had a right to know what he did in private and a right to deplore his gambling, because he was “the visible embodiment of the Monarchical principle.”
⁶⁸
The court case, which was reported at length in the newspapers, offered a vivid, intimate snapshot of Bertie’s social life, zooming in on such details
as the gambling counters he brought with him in his luggage, and marked a landmark in the development of a democratic monarchy open to public scrutiny.

Bertie resented his inability to answer his critics, and refused to bow to the pressure.
⁶⁹
The Nonconformist churchmen went unanswered. Victoria urged him to write an open letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury, but he resisted, declining to write anything hypocritical.
⁷⁰
In this affair at least, Bertie knew that he had acted “perfectly straightforwardly and honourably.”
⁷¹
Honor was the key to the whole thing, and for Bertie and his court it counted for far more than middle-class morality. Gordon-Cumming was a “d——d blackguard.”
⁷²
He “has no sense of wrong or right.”
⁷³
By going to the law, he had broken the code of honor and “done his utmost to mix my name up in the matter in endeavouring to cloak his iniquities.”
⁷⁴
Alix, who was always seen as the ultimate arbiter in matters of chivalry, agreed. Gordon-Cumming, she told Georgie, was a “brute” and a “vile snob” who had “behaved too
abominably
to them all.”
⁷⁵

The punishment was social disgrace. Gordon-Cumming and his wife went to live in lonely exile on their barren Scottish estates. The neighbors never called, no invitations ever came. His friends refused to speak to him. But at least he had Flip’s $80,000 a year, and he used her money to renovate his castle at Gordonstoun.

Bertie had at last concluded that Eddy’s army career was “simply a waste of time.”
⁷⁶
Eddy was worryingly lacking in energy and self-esteem. Carrington watched him visit Wycombe and make a speech: “When he sat down he turned round and said to me, ‘I have made a rare ass of myself.’ It is pathetic to see how little confidence he has in himself.”
⁷⁷
Bertie suggested three alternatives.
⁷⁸
Plan number one was to send Eddy on a long sea voyage to the colonies, out of reach of temptation. Queen Victoria put her foot down. Eddy, she said, had been “
dosed
” with the Colonies. She urged Bertie’s option two: a European tour.

Bertie, however, was concerned not with Eddy’s education, or lack of it, but with his dissipated behavior, a subject he dared not mention to his mother, as Knollys explained in a note to Salisbury: “Unfortunately [the Queen’s] views on certain social subjects are so strong that the Prince of Wales does not like to tell her the real reasons for sending Prince Eddy away, which is intended as a punishment and as a means of keeping him out of harm’s way, and I am afraid that neither of these objects will be attained by his simply travelling about Europe.”
⁸⁰

Bertie’s third option was a surprise: to marry Eddy off to Princess May of Teck. Princess May was the daughter of Queen Victoria’s first cousin Mary, the Duchess of Teck, known to many as Fat Mary. The Duke of Teck was the son of Duke Alexander of Württemberg, who made a morganatic marriage to a Hungarian countess. The blight of “commoner’s” blood meant that, instead of succeeding to the throne of Württemberg, the Duke of Teck was reduced to “vegetating inconspicuously in England, pruning roses.”
⁸¹
Incapable of living within their means, the Tecks ran up large debts; they were pursued by their creditors, and, after the humiliation of auctioning their possessions in 1883, spent two years in exile in Florence.
⁸²

Princess May’s nonroyal blood ruled out marriage to a German prince, and even the Wales princesses looked down on “poor May! with her Württemberg hands!”
⁸³
Yet, her father’s lack of funds disqualified her from marrying an English duke. Her marriage prospects seemed dim: “She was too Royal to marry an ordinary English gentleman,
and not Royal enough to marry Royalty.”
⁸⁴
Better educated than the Wales children, Princess May was a studious girl with a phenomenal memory for objects and faces and a passion for lists. Had she not been a princess, she would have made an excellent museum curator.
⁸⁵
In Alix’s eyes, she had the great advantage of not being German. May’s mother, Alix’s friend and cousin the Duchess of Teck, gushing, good-hearted, extravagant, and chronically unpunctual, drove Bertie crazy, while Princess May, who was frightened of him, annoyed him. Only the year before, she had been rejected as a possible wife for Eddy because the “vision of P[rince]ss May haunting Marlborough House makes the Prince of Wales ill.”
⁸⁶

Meanwhile, Alix, who was not at the time on good terms with Bertie, departed for Fredensborg. Here, outwardly at least, the Glücksburg family party was rumbustious as ever. Oliver Montagu arrived to find himself “in a room with an Emperor, Empress, 3 Kings, 3 Queens and Grand Dukes, Grand Duchesses, princes and princesses to the number of 30 or 40!” Three hundred beds were occupied in the palace, but the royal families saw nothing of their suites, and lived in each other’s rooms, “running in and out like rabbits.” In the hall, Montagu found the czar of all the Russias and persecutor of the Jews, Alexander III, “running around after the children with a huge whip which he was cracking, dogs barking and children howling.” Alix seemed “perfectly happy,” or so thought her parfit knight Montagu; in truth, as news reached her, brought perhaps by Montagu himself, of Bertie’s indiscretions with Daisy Brooke, she felt angry and humiliated.
⁸⁷

Instead of coming home, Alix decamped to the Crimea, accompanying the czar and Minnie on their silver wedding anniversary trip.
⁸⁸
This sudden change of plan meant that she would not return until after Bertie’s fiftieth birthday party on 9 November 1891—the strongest signal of displeasure she could give.

In Alix’s absence, arranging Eddy’s marriage fell to Bertie. Eddy could be dragooned and told “he
must
do it—that it is for the good of the country etc etc,” but Princess May’s acceptance was by no means
certain.
⁸⁹
With staggering tactlessness, Bertie commanded Daisy Brooke to invite May and her parents to a house party at Easton, and here the preliminaries were settled.
⁹⁰
The Duchess of Teck was in seventh heaven; after a life spent on the fringes of royalty, always short of money, she was now transported to within spitting distance of “the greatest position there is.”

It was while he was staying at Easton that news reached Bertie of a fire at Sandringham.
⁹¹
From the pine-clad slopes of Livadia, Alix cabled laconically to Victoria: “Arrived safely beautiful easy journey … lovely place. In despair at dreadful fire at Sandringham cannot conceive cause.”
⁹²

By dint of keeping the gas blazing for a week, Sandringham dried out in time for Bertie’s birthday, and he held his party almost as if nothing had happened.
⁹³
Alix was conspicuous by her absence.

No sooner was the party over than disaster struck again. Georgie succumbed to a bilious chill, which turned out to be typhoid. Frightened of being stuck at Sandringham with a critically ill son, Bertie rushed him up to Marlborough House. Here, as the doctors posted twice-daily bulletins on the gates charting the alarming course of the fever, Bertie was confined with his son. He seldom left the house; he was the only family member allowed to visit the sickroom. He attended the doctors’ consultations and wrote telegrams to the Queen and Alix.
⁹⁴
“I deeply regret Alix’s absence … at this moment,” he told Vicky.
⁹⁵

Alix regretted it even more, and her anger with her husband melted as she hastened home from the Crimea: “terrible [
sic
] anxious about poor darling Georgie such a shock on top of fire. Travelling night and day to get home,” she wired the Queen.
⁹⁶
By the time she reached London on 22 November, Georgie was over the crisis.

Taking everyone by surprise—the engagement had been expected in the New Year—Eddy proposed to May while staying with the de Falbes at Luton Hoo.
^b
“Of course I said yes,” wrote May in her diary.
⁹⁷
At last Eddy had done something right, and Bertie was overjoyed. May,
he told Vicky (who was not thrilled by the news, as she still had hopes that Eddy would choose one of her own daughters), was “very well brought up with a good head on her shoulders.”
⁹⁸
Not everyone was taken in by Bertie’s newly discovered enthusiasm for the charms of the Teck princess. “Considering he has known her intimately since birth, it has taken him some considerable time to find it out, nearly one quarter of a century!!!” wrote Lady Geraldine Somerset in her diary.
⁹⁹
Alix was in no doubt that Eddy had found the right bride: “Thank God we all know and love darling May so many years that she will be one of us at once and the fact of her being English will make all the difference and carry the whole nation with them—particularly as dear May has always been one of the most popular members of the family.”
¹⁰⁰

For Eddy’s twenty-eighth birthday on 8 January 1892, a shooting party was arranged at Sandringham. There was talk of appointing him after his marriage as Viceroy of Ireland—the post that Bertie had rejected with contempt twenty years before—and Bertie, who supported the plan, arranged to discuss it with Salisbury in London the following Monday.
¹⁰¹
Meanwhile, out shooting on 6 January, Eddy felt ill and walked back after lunch to the house. Influenza was rampant that winter—
The Times
carried daily reports detailing the progress of the epidemic—and at Sandringham Francis Knollys was ill and so was one of the equerries. On the eighth, Eddy struggled downstairs to see his presents, but felt too ill to appear at his birthday dinner. Alix cabled Victoria: “Poor Eddy got influenza, cannot dine, so tiresome.”
¹⁰²
The next day, Saturday, Dr. Laking was summoned from London. Bertie cabled Victoria on Sunday: “Eddy’s attack of influenza very sharp now developed some pneumonia in left lung, restless night, strength well maintained, Laking here, Broadbent coming today.”
¹⁰³

On Monday the first announcement appeared in
The Times
. The medical bulletins were now posted not once but twice daily outside Marlborough House, and Bertie canceled his meeting with the prime minister in order to stay at Sandringham. At 9:30 a.m. on Wednesday, 13 January, a new bulletin was posted that startled the knot of onlookers:
“Symptoms of great gravity have supervened, and the condition of his Royal Highness the Duke of Clarence is critical.”
¹⁰⁴
Bertie sent a heartfelt message to his mother: “Our darling Eddy is in God’s hands, human skill seems unavailable, there could not be a question of your coming here.”
¹⁰⁵
Snow was falling at Sandringham as the reporters watching the house spotted Bertie emerge and pace briefly up and down. Shortly after, Georgie and May appeared. Some said later that they were holding hands.
¹⁰⁶

Inside the house, in his small, high-ceilinged bedroom, Eddy lay delirious with fever on his brass bed. As he raved wildly, crying out “Hélène! Hélène!”
^c
his fingernails turned blue and his lips were livid. At eight that morning, Alix, who had spent the night at Eddy’s bedside, had woken Bertie to tell him that she thought their son was dying. All day Alix sat beside the bed as the three doctors and a nurse squeezed noiselessly past her in the narrow room. Bertie paced back and forth from the cramped sitting room next door, where the family waited in shocked horror. At midnight Alix was reluctantly persuaded to take some sleep on a sofa. At two a.m., the doctors woke her. The death agony had begun. For seven hours Eddy lay, a terrible rattle in his throat, with his mother holding his hand. Suddenly he said, quite clearly, “Something too awful has happened—my darling brother George is dead.” And then: “Who is that? Who is that?” He died at nine a.m. on 14 January.
¹⁰⁷

“Our darling Eddy has been taken from us, We are broken hearted,” Bertie wired Victoria.
¹⁰⁸
Shortly afterward he put pen to paper: “What we went through for 8 hours watching poor dear Eddy from 2 to 10 this morning I shall
never
forget,” he wrote to his mother. “Dear Eddy looks so peaceful lying on his bed with his hands crossed … and covered with flowers.… I cannot write more, as I am too upset and my nerves completely unstrung.”
¹⁰⁹
George echoed his despair: “I shall never forget that awful moment with us all sobbing round his bed where we had been watching for nearly six hours without being able to help him as long as I live.”
¹¹⁰

The funeral was at Windsor, and Bertie begged his seventy-two-year-old mother, who was at Osborne, not to attend, because of the cold weather and the risk of illness.
¹¹¹
Victoria, who had wished to be present, replied: “I have rec[eive]d your letter which has distressed me very much. You have stopped my going.… I feel quite ill at not going. Everybody expects me to go.”
¹¹²