The Heir Apparent (18 page)

The Queen appointed a committee of three doctors, Sieveking, Jenner, and Sir James Clark, to report on the sanitary arrangements of the princess. Alix was to go to bed at eleven o’clock, have eight hours’ sleep and take a daily walk; “at the monthly periods the exercise should be limited to a gentle walk.” In the event of another pregnancy, great care must be taken to prevent a premature birth. Otherwise, the doctors warned, “a habit may be engendered likely to result in a general and permanent delicacy of health.”
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On the Queen’s orders, court balls and drawing rooms were planned so that the dates did not coincide with Alix’s periods.
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Bertie thought the doctors’ report “absurd” and, according to Sieveking, showed “a good deal of temper over it.”
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No doubt Alix was distressingly thin, but most of her ailments could be put down to childbirth. She suffered from “extreme costiveness,” natural enough after giving birth, but refused to accept an enema. She complained of backache, fatigue, and “general lassitude,” a “want of power and disinclination
to do anything,” ailments that surely would be diagnosed today as postpartum depression.
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Some of her symptoms were odd and worrying, however. Shortly after the birth of her son, she seems to have suffered a prolapsed uterus, which she described as a falling of the womb. Her nurse, Mrs. Clarke, told Sieveking that “it had come outside and was without sensation and had best be cut off.”
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Queen Victoria corresponded regularly with Bertie—she wrote to him on average once every ten days—but she often used Sir Charles Phipps, the Keeper of the Privy Purse, to communicate her displeasure. Together with General Grey, Victoria’s private secretary, Phipps had assumed a dominant position at court.
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He had been one of Albert’s close associates, and when Albert died Lord Torrington worried that the court was in for a “King Phipps reign … it makes me quite savage the thought, that we shall be ruled by Phipps.”
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At first, Phipps’s ambitions were frustrated by Albert’s German servants, especially his valet, Carl Ruland. Victoria always inclined to give favorite servants access, bypassing the household, and Ruland’s ascendancy made Phipps “angry and jealous.”
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By the summer of 1863, however, Phipps and Grey together had succeeded in purging the Germans, establishing themselves as the Queen’s advisers.
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Phipps seemed fated to write “injudicious” letters to Bertie.
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Whenever reports reached the Queen of Alix going riding or even boating, or of Bertie accepting invitations without consulting her, he fired off a missive. This enraged Bertie, who complained about “espionage,” and tale-telling.
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“It would be really better for poor Sir Charles never to write on any subject connected with the Queen’s wishes,” wrote Sir William Knollys.
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Victoria, for her part, complained to Alice of Bertie’s want of confidence in her, which meant that “
none can
be given in return, and much as I love Alix I am
not
on an intimate footing
with her
, I am no nearer than I
was
when
she married
, and I
feel
that B’s marriage
with her
has
alienated him
from
our
relations and has made him
quite
a
stranger
and quite
John Bullish
!!”
⁷⁸
“It hurts me and it
shocks
me,” she
wrote, “to see how
stupid and obtuse
he is.”
⁷⁹
Using King Leopold as intermediary, she demanded that Bertie should “
consult me
on
everything
concerning his
own movements
and concerning the
management
of the child, which
last
is my
right
and
duty
;
also
to point out the extreme
necessity
of his
not
making
his house
a
foyez
for
Danes
.”
⁸⁰
As she told Alice: “By
law
I am bound to supervise the management and education of his child or children and could if I chose take them from him—if I thought the education not good!”
⁸¹

In September 1864, when the Schleswig-Holstein war was safely over, Bertie and Alix crossed to Copenhagen to stay with Alix’s parents, bringing with them baby Eddy under the supervision of Dr. Sieveking. Victoria insisted that the baby be sent back to her at Balmoral as soon as Alix and Bertie left Copenhagen on a visit to Sweden.
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This upset Alix and put terrible pressure on Sieveking, who expressed doubts to the Queen about sending the baby back, but “because I did not flatly contradict HM I find she has since written to the Prince to the effect that I quite agreed with her, which I certainly did not mean to convey.” Bertie was “a good deal annoyed at being thwarted,” and Sieveking begged him “not to put me in direct opposition to the Queen as I could not contradict her point blank.”
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On his visit to Sweden, Bertie disobeyed Victoria’s command that he and Alix should travel incognito. They stayed in Stockholm with the King, who, Bertie told Victoria, was “immensely gratified by our visit, and what would have been the use of annoying him by not going to the Palace.… You may be certain that I shall always try to meet your wishes as much as possible,” he told her, but “if I am not allowed to use my own discretion, we had better give up travelling altogether.”
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This display of independence was not what Victoria wanted to hear. “It is
absolutely
necessary,” she told Bertie, “when I allow you to go abroad that the plan arranged should be
strictly
adhered to.”
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As a punishment, Victoria vetoed Bertie’s plan to return via Paris. She called upon her ministers Palmerston and Russell to cancel it. When they refused, she was furious. “This is most annoying,” she minuted, “and shows how little support the poor Queen is ever likely to get from her ministers.”
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The visit was stopped all the same. It was “a little hard,”
as General Grey explained, that “the disagreeable task” of controlling the movements of the Prince of Wales should be thrown entirely on the Queen. She was therefore “most anxious” that the cancellation of the trip “should be announced to HRH as coming from the Government” and not from the Queen.
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When Bertie and Alix stayed at Windsor on their return, however, Victoria was all smiles. Bertie, she wrote, was “most amiable” and not at all pro-Dane.
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Alix, whom the Queen found “as dear and good as ever,” complained to her sister that the court was like a nunnery where she was constantly corrected by the abbess and the nuns.
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Victoria scolded that Bertie was childish, and she certainly treated him like a child. On his twenty-third birthday, he and Alix dined quietly with the Queen, and when she withdrew to her private drawing room, they joined the household for a party. At eleven o’clock, when they were in the middle of a round game, Victoria sent one of her pages to order them off to bed. “Down went the cards, and they retired.”
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Meanwhile, Bertie was dogged by a character from his past: the “infernal Green,” who had returned from New Zealand intent on blackmail, threatening to reveal the prince’s sexual adventures with his wife three years earlier. The police inspector at Marlborough House was instructed to refuse admittance, and Green’s demands for money were firmly refused. Bertie was confident that “we have nothing to fear [from] him,” but he must have been on tenterhooks all the same.
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“The
great
danger,” as Phipps wrote, was “the Queen knowing all the worst, but I do not see how this could happen.”
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Phipps’s allusion to “knowing all” hints that Bertie’s sexual adventures before his marriage had been more lurid than the record suggests. Phipps’s knowing about the Green affair gave him a power that Bertie deeply resented. Far more than the scandal becoming public, he dreaded that his mother might hear of it. Whether Alix might have views in the matter was not discussed.

During the year 1865, Bertie kept a diary. The entries are brief and factual. It begins: 1 January, “Sandringham … In the morning we went
to Church.”
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It nevertheless shows him fashioning himself as Prince of Wales. Escaping his mother’s control and fleeing her dull and disapproving court, he embraced the sporting aristocracy—the shooting, hunting, gambling swells whom Prince Albert had so deplored. By nagging and spying on her son, Victoria drove him into the arms of the people whose bad influence she most feared.

In January 1865, Bertie stayed at Holkham, the home of the Earl of Leicester, who was a pioneer of the new and fashionable sport of driven pheasant shooting. Bertie wrote in his diary: “I breakfasted with the gentlemen at 9:30 wh[ich] is by Holkham time 40 minutes faster than London time, and at 10:30 went out shooting.… We killed 2092 head … 1028 pheasants and 948 hares. We killed 1000 pheasants out of the celebrated Scarborough Clump. I killed 166 pheasants to my own gun.”
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Characteristically, Bertie recorded the times and tallies, but the diary also shows that, on a day like this, the Prince of Wales played a leading role among the gentlemen. He was the chief gun, standing in a line of shooters, which was especially nerve-racking because the guests at Holkham were among the best shots in the country. No doubt he was always placed in the best stand and his guns were the finest that London gunsmiths could craft. But the eyes of all were upon him, watching every bird that he missed. Sycophants exaggerated his skill, but Bertie was never more than an average shot, though he had “an extraordinary knack of killing birds behind him at an angle which most people find very difficult.”
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Why he was so devoted to a sport at which he did not excel is not hard to see. Expensive, exclusive, and ritualized, shooting resembled a military operation with none of its discomforts. For Bertie, the would-be army officer, shooting gave access to a man’s world outside his mother’s reach. In this gendered space, his role as dominant male was unchallenged.

Lord Leicester and Holkham, more than Windsor or Balmoral, inspired the regime at nearby Sandringham. Bertie had bought the house and estate in 1862.
^a
No one could understand why he had picked it.
The house, said Sir Charles Phipps, was externally “very ugly—a white washed house with redbrick chimnies [
sic
] and a fanciful brown porch.”
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The first of the Sandringham parties was held at Christmas 1864. Bertie’s Cambridge friend Carrington was a guest, and he found the house “very small and inconvenient,” but Bertie had already embarked on the large-scale pheasant rearing and competitive shooting that was to become such a feature of his court. They shot 809 head—a modest total by comparison with Holkham.
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At Sandringham, too, the clocks ran fast to allow more winter daylight for shooting: Sandringham time was thirty minutes ahead of London time.

The dress code at Sandringham reflected the smartness and informality of the prince’s court. The ledger of Henry Poole, the tailor of Savile Row, contains an entry in HRH’s page for 1865: “blue silk smoking jacket, lined silk, silk collar and cuffs, Sandringham £13:8s.”
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This evening coat without tails was the forerunner of the dinner jacket, the first of Bertie’s sartorial inventions. (He is also credited with making fashionable the turned-up trouser, after rolling up his trouser bottoms to walk through fields and, as his girth grew, undoing the bottom button of his waistcoat.)

Sandringham house parties often involved a compulsory photograph. “After luncheon,” writes Bertie, “we and the whole party were photographed (in a group) … the result was satisfactory.”
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The group photograph, lined up on the steps of a country house with the prince seated or standing in the center, was to become his signature, an image replicated at countless house parties; Bertie, staring straight at the camera, is flanked by his hostess and the prettiest women. By contrast with Victoria and Albert, who were invariably photographed as a family, either as a couple or surrounded by their children, Bertie constructed an iconography of himself as leader of his peers.

At Sandringham, he projected lavish improvements, laying out
princely kitchen gardens and pheasantries.
¹⁰⁰
The original house was undeniably too small, but Bertie’s plans panicked his advisers, who did all they could to prevent him from building an entirely new palace.
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Bertie noted in his diary a meeting to discuss “either a site for a new house or additions to the present one. The latter course was decided on.”
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A. J. Humbert, the architect of the royal mausoleum, was engaged, and the house was enlarged piecemeal, until in 1870 a new one was at last built.

Attempting to restrain Bertie’s building plans, rather than engaging a better country-house architect than Humbert, who specialized in churches, was perhaps shortsighted. But Phipps and Knollys were acutely conscious of the danger of Bertie overspending. The prince’s income totaled more than £115,000. This amounted to about one-third of the Queen’s income of £300,000, but she was among the very top wealth holders in the country, exceeded only by the Duke of Westminster. Bertie was in the top thirty of the rich list, in the same bracket as poorer dukes and below his friends the Duke of Sutherland (rental of £141,000) and the Duke of Devonshire (£181,000 rent). His chief source of income was the Duchy of Cornwall, with rents yielding more than £50,000, and Parliament topped this up on his marriage with an annuity of £50,000.
^b
But this was not enough for Bertie to outshine every subject, as he was expected to do, let alone to build a house, and his expenditure regularly exceeded his income by about £20,000 a year. Rather than risk conflict with Parliament by asking for more, his advisers met the debt by drawing on his capital.
¹⁰³