The Heir Apparent (64 page)

Bertie raged at his enforced inactivity. “All my plans are upset, and I can make no future ones, nor can I at present form any idea when I shall be on my legs again.”
⁷⁵
For almost three months his diary is a painful blank.

Bertie was moved to Cowes, to recuperate on board the
Osborne
. Queen Victoria visited in her wheelchair, finding the prince lying on a couch under a tent that took up the entire stern of the ship.
⁷⁶
Early in August, Alix was summoned to Denmark, where her mother lay dying. She left her daughter Victoria behind to nurse her father. On board the
Osborne
, Bertie became alarmingly ill with pleurisy, and Victoria was forced to send for Laking to apply a blister. Bertie for the first time in his life grew close to his daughter. Alix summoned her to join the family at the Queen of Denmark’s funeral, but Victoria hated Denmark, and Bertie refused to allow her to travel.
⁷⁷
He made no secret of his irritation with Alix, who dawdled in Denmark after her mother’s death. “Surely,” he told George, “dear Mama might for once in her life settle a definite date for her departure.… It is
most
inconvenient being kept in the dark for so long.” Communication between husband and wife was nonexistent. “I have given up writing to her as she never writes to me now, not even a
line
to give me an indication when she thinks of leaving.”
⁷⁸

Desperate to avoid the boredom of empty days, Bertie summoned old friends to visit. Daisy arrived, and found him ill-tempered: “His liver is bad and the enforced idleness is not making him look out pleasantly on the world.”
⁷⁹
Bertie wired Christopher Sykes, who was in Homburg recovering from a stroke. Unable even in extremis to say no, Sykes obeyed the summons. The journey nearly killed him. For Sykes’s nephew, also Christopher, who wrote a brilliant, angry essay about his uncle and the prince, this was the climax of a long career of royal selfishness and bullying. The “great Xtopher” had almost bankrupted himself in entertaining the prince. But if Sykes was a victim, Bertie was an unwitting oppressor; he had nothing but pity for his old friend, he visited him in London, and he wrote to Sir Tatton Sykes imploring him to provide for his brother.
⁸⁰

At Marlborough House, a new court was taking shape. Francis Knollys, standing at his tall desk writing letters in a bold black hand, had by now served Bertie for almost thirty years. He was never quite comfortable in the twentieth century. There were three people who were to form an inner clique. One was Ernest Cassel. The others were the Marquis de Soveral and Mrs. George Keppel. All three were already in place by 1899.

Soveral, the Portuguese minister in London, was known as the Blue Monkey. His blue-black hair, jet-black imperial beard and heavy eyebrows, and the white flower in his buttonhole make him instantly recognizable among the faces lined up for the innumerable royal photographs. Bertie had known him since he was first posted to London in 1884, but it was after 1897 that Soveral became a central figure at Marlborough House. In August 1899, he accompanied the prince to Marienbad for his cure, and Bertie found him a “charming” traveling companion and “a great resource.”
⁸¹
Soveral’s clowning belied a sharp mind, and he was exceptionally well informed on European politics. He was flirtatious and liked to pose as a lady-killer. Being infinitely discreet, he conducted several flirtations at the same time.
He was Alix’s favorite, filling the place in her affections left by Oliver Montagu; he always danced the first waltz at every ball with her, and he knew how to pitch his voice in a way that made it possible for her to hear.
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Have you seen
The Importance of Being Ernest
? Bertie asked Soveral. “No, Sir,” came the answer, “but I have seen the importance of being Ernest Cassel.”
⁸³

The important Cassel filled the place left by Baron Hirsch, Bertie’s financial adviser, who died suddenly in 1896. Cassel, a forty-five-year-old financial superstar, had been Hirsch’s protégé. Hirsch allegedly left instructions to Cassel, his executor, that all Bertie’s debts to him, which were rumored to amount to well over £300,000, should be written off.
⁸⁴
Cassel took over the management of Bertie’s investments, but on the astonishing understanding that he himself would absorb any losses.

Bertie and Cassel looked so similar—both bearded, cigar-smoking endomorphs dressed in double-breasted suits with rings on their fingers—that they were often mistaken for each other. It was even rumored that they were related—hence the joke about “Windsor Cassel.”
^c
Cassel was born in Cologne in 1852, the son of a Jewish banker, and came to England at seventeen. He was engaged as confidential clerk to the London house of the bankers Bischoffsheim and Goldschmidt, and, backed by Hirsch, whose wife was a Bischoffsheim, he amassed a massive fortune, speculating in railways. After the early death from tuberculosis of his wife, he secretly converted to Catholicism—an emotional act for a proud and humorless Jew who disdained small talk. He was greedy for honors, collected orders, and spent money on racehorses.
Better than anyone, he understood the uses to which money could be put; he made himself indispensable to the prince’s charitable projects.

Cassel became Bertie’s most intimate male friend. From 1899, Bertie dined regularly with him either at 48 Grosvenor Square or at Moulton Paddocks, Cassel’s opulent home near Newmarket. The prince was witness at the wedding of Cassel’s only daughter, Maud, to the MP Wilfrid Ashley in 1901, and godfather to their daughter, asking for the child to be christened Edwardina (fortunately for her, perhaps, this was contracted to Edwina). Bertie bombarded Cassel with indecipherable notes about his investments.
⁸⁵
The symbol
Ec
, presumably for Ernest Cassel, starts to appear in his diaries in 1899. By 1901,
Ec
is his most frequent correspondent of those noted in the diary, and the initials appear sixty-three times that year. In 1904, the King wrote forty-five letters to
Ec
, the same number in 1905, and fifty in 1906.

Finding his accommodation on Grosvenor Square too cramped, Cassel bought Brook House on Park Lane in 1905. He decorated the vast mansion with the rarest Italian marble. At the head of the staircase hung a portrait of King Edward. This was disconcertingly lifelike, causing guests to straighten themselves, and it proved a hazard, as some slipped and fell. Daisy Warwick considered that it was almost impossible to distinguish whether the portrait was of Bertie or of Cassel himself.
⁸⁶

The third new name that features regularly is the Hon. Mrs. George Keppel.

Bertie didn’t pretend to be in love with Alice Keppel: “It is rather hard that I may not prefer the society of one lady to others without being supposed to be infatuated with her!”
⁸⁷
Given his growing ill health and possible impotence, it’s likely that he rarely if ever slept with her. But he was determined that his new favorite should not be persecuted in the way that Daisy had been. She must be accepted by society, and even by Alix.

That season, the word went out that wherever the prince was invited, the Hon. George and Mrs. Keppel must be asked, too. In September, Bertie paid a visit to the Edmonstone castle of Duntreath. “Mrs. GK was as usual the life and soul of the party,” he told Emma Bourke.
⁸⁸
In 1899, the Keppels moved to the fashionable address of 30 Portman Square (now demolished). This was a square much favored by the Marlborough House set; indeed, it was almost an enclave of Bertie’s court. The Keppels’ neighbors included the Dukes of Fife and Manchester and (after 1901) Mrs. Eddy Bourke. It seems unlikely that George Keppel could have paid the rent out of his earnings. His business dealings were by that point an embarrassment. In 1900, a fraudulent company of which he was director wound up with debts of £4,000 and no assets, having tried to promote three companies, each of which failed.
⁸⁹
George was found a job by Sir Thomas Lipton as wine manager in New York, “so he is provided for and got out of the way.”
⁹⁰
On the night of the 1901 census, Mrs. Keppel was alone at 30 Portman Square with two children, seven female servants, and three manservants—a substantial household. In December 1899, Alice Keppel paid her first visit to a Sandringham house party—unaccompanied by George.
⁹¹
On the day Bertie returned to London, he dined for the first time at 30 Portman Square.
⁹²

The people who invited the prince to house parties changed, too. Waddesdon was no longer an option: Ferdinand de Rothschild died suddenly in 1898. Often, however, when the people changed, the houses remained the same. The de Falbes died, but Bertie continued to stay at their house, Luton Hoo, which was bought by Sir Julius Wernher, the German financier and randlord.
⁹³
Elveden, in Norfolk, was another house that was itself almost a royal subject. When Bertie’s friend the Maharaja Duleep Singh died, it was bought by Lord Iveagh. Bertie once again slotted it into his shooting calendar. Glenmuick, near Balmoral, the estate that had once belonged to Sir James (MacTavish) Mackenzie, was bought by Lord Glenesk, who, as Algernon Borthwick, had founded
The Morning Post
, and Bertie became his guest of honor.

War was declared against the Boer republics in South Africa in October 1899. At first it barely impinged on Bertie’s stately autumn progress of house parties and shooting. But the defeats of December 1899, known
as Black Week, jolted the monarchy into action. The Queen was stirred to an unwonted display of leadership. “Please understand that there is no one depressed in
this
house,” she told Balfour. “We are not interested in the possibilities of defeat; they do not exist.”
⁹⁴
She canceled her plan of spending Christmas at Osborne and remained at Windsor, where she entertained the wives and children of soldiers at tea. “The Queen is so right,” wrote Bertie.
⁹⁵

“I am very despondent and can think of nothing else,” wrote the prince in January.
⁹⁶
The war gave him a new purpose. Day after day, as the government poured more and more men into South Africa, Bertie inspected detachments of troops before they sailed.
⁹⁷
Tirelessly, he visited military hospitals and barracks, and he chaired the Prince of Wales’s Committee to coordinate the volunteer agencies that proliferated to help the war effort.
⁹⁸
With Alix, he traveled to Southampton to receive a hospital ship returning full of wounded soldiers. “Oh! this terrible war!” Alix kept saying as she made the round of each man’s bed. A burly six-foot Highlander was addressed as “Poor little fellow.”
⁹⁹

The British reverses delighted the kaiser. He visited Sandringham in November 1899 for the first time since 1880, restoring relations with Bertie after the Vienna incident—though the German foreign minister Bernhard von Bülow likened uncle and nephew to “a fat malicious tom-cat, playing with a shrew-mouse,” and Alix giggled at the special barber William brought to curl his mustache.
¹⁰⁰
But the kaiser was unable to resist rubbing salt in the wounds of Britain’s humiliations in South Africa. To Bertie he wrote after Black Week: “Instead of the Angels’ song ‘Peace on earth and Goodwill to Men’ the new century will be greeted by shrieks of dying men killed and maimed by lyddite shells.… Truly fin de siècle!”
¹⁰¹
He appended his own military observations and plan of campaign. On 4 February he wrote again, observing that the British were good losers, which was just as well. “Last year in the great cricket match of England v Australia, the former took the latter’s victory quietly, with chivalrous acknowledgement of her opponent.”
¹⁰²
This was too much. Bertie exploded that the war was nothing like a cricket match. “The British Empire is now fighting for its
very existence, as you know full well.”
¹⁰³
When Lord Roberts’s strategy in South Africa succeeded, William claimed the credit. Little did Bertie know that his nephew was, meanwhile, intriguing with the Russians to invade India.

The war made Britain acutely unpopular in France. The government wanted Bertie to attend the opening of the 1900 Paris Exhibition, but he refused. For him to go, he said, “would be a positive slight to the Queen, and would be regarded by Frenchmen as a proof that he was indifferent to the vile caricatures and lampooning of his own mother by their Press.”
¹⁰⁴
Victoria supported him. The war effort brought Bertie and Victoria politically close. There was no more squabbling over secret dispatches: They both had too much to do. In March, when the relief of the Siege of Ladysmith brought a turning point in the war, Victoria drove around London, doing what Bertie had urged her to do all those years ago, and the spontaneous effect was electric—“as if a great wave of devotion and sympathy had passed over the capital.… Your Majesty does not much admire Queen Elizabeth,” wrote Lord Rosebery, “but the visit to London was in the Elizabethan spirit.”
¹⁰⁵

“I have no plans at present,” wrote Bertie in March. “How can one have any when the war is going on?”
¹⁰⁶
That Boer War winter, confined to London, Bertie dined out most nights. There were three London houses where he ate dinner so often that in his diary he wrote only the address. One was 30 Portman Square: Mrs. Keppel. The second was 17 Grosvenor Crescent, and the third was 35 Belgrave Square.

Number 17 Grosvenor Crescent was a large, heavy mansion off Hyde Park Corner, just behind St. George’s Hospital, the home of two wealthy unmarried sisters, Agnes and Fanny Keyser. Bertie’s first dinner with the Keyser sisters is always said to have taken place in 1898, but in fact he dined with Agnes Keyser back in 1895.
¹⁰⁷
Agnes’s money came from stockbroking; her family was linked to the Bischoffsheims, which may have been how Bertie came to know her. She was the least glamorous of his mistresses—if indeed she was one: a middle-aged spinster, controlling and governess-like, who fed him plain food. But in the winter of 1900, Bertie’s regular visits to 17 Grosvenor Crescent had
a purpose. Though untrained, Agnes had a vocation for nursing, and at Grosvenor Crescent she and Fanny started a private hospital for officers wounded in South Africa. As well as eating rice pudding, Bertie visited “Sister Agnes” in her starched uniform in the private ward. After the war, he persuaded his rich friends to subscribe, and Agnes Keyser’s ward grew into King Edward VII’s Hospital for Officers.
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