The Heir Apparent (22 page)

On 19 September 1867, only two days after her uncle signed away his power, a telegram arrived for Alix from the King of Prussia, who was Vicky’s father-in-law, proposing to pay her a visit at Wiesbaden. Encouraged by her sister Minnie, Alix dictated a reply so uncivil that Knollys refused to send it. When Bertie returned at eleven p.m., he made excuses for his wife, telegraphing the King that Alix was too unwell to receive him.
⁹⁰

Victoria was enraged by her daughter-in-law’s behavior. “I can’t tell you how shocked I am at Alix’s refusal,” she told Vicky.
⁹¹
“If only she understood her duties better.”
⁹²
A very strong letter to Bertie followed, but he refused to dragoon his wife; guilty perhaps at his neglect of her, he defended her right to her own opinions. “I myself should have been glad if she had seen the King,” he told his mother, “but a lady may have feelings wh[ich] she cannot repress, while a man
must
overcome them. If Coburg had been taken away—as Hanover, Hesse (Cassel) and Nassau have been—I don’t think you would much care to see the King either.”
⁹³

Alix’s insult to the King of Prussia made Vicky’s position difficult, and she and Alice both implored Bertie to induce Alix to change her mind. Bertie needed no persuading, but Alix refused to listen. He enlisted Queen Louise, who, he told Knollys, was “so sensible and could make her daughter do what was proper.”
⁹⁴
A few days later, the King of Prussia telegraphed again. Once more Alix declined to see him. Queen Louise, Knollys, and Bertie confronted her and begged her to compromise. But Alix was adamant. Louise gave up and left the room, while Knollys watched as Bertie “used every argument but in vain to persuade the Princess. It was a question of feeling with the Princess and she would not listen to reason of any kind,” he wrote. “After a long discussion the Princess ended it by getting up and walking out of the room by the aid of her stick saying that she would not talk any more
about it.”
⁹⁵
Eventually, on Knollys’s advice, Bertie wrote a telegram inviting the King to visit and showed it to Alix. Shortly afterward, Queen Louise packed her bags and scuttled off to Rumpenheim.

On the morning of the King’s visit, Knollys remarked that Alix looked pale. “Yes, she said, I may be pale but it is from anger at being obliged to see this King of Prussia and not from cold—and what I mind most is that it is [in] consequence of [Bertie’s] two sisters interfering (I am afraid she said these two old women tho not much older than herself) or I should not have been obliged to do so.”
⁹⁶

Surprisingly, the visit was a success. Alix was “very
civil
” to the King, who was satisfied with his reception.
⁹⁷
But the moral victory belonged to Alix; she had defied both her mother and her mother-in-law and made it plain that she was not a passive invalid who could be ignored.

It was one thing for Alix to thumb her nose at the King of Prussia; quite another for her to keep her restless, easily bored husband amused. She worried that Bertie found it “terribly dull” to have an invalid wife who could no longer accompany him everywhere.
⁹⁸
Bertie wrote from Wiesbaden to his friend Carrington: “This place has become frightfully dreary, it rains nearly every day and it is awfully cold.… Our Trente et Quarante table has been suppressed, and the second roulette table moved into another room. I have had two or three lucky coups.… On Saturday we leave here (thank God).”
⁹⁹

By the time they returned home, Alix was once again pregnant. She could now walk upstairs on two sticks, but her knee was still completely stiff. At Windsor for Bertie’s twenty-sixth birthday, she was frail and thin but very pretty, and Victoria commented, “It is a sad sight to see her thus and to those who did not see her so ill as we did, when one really did not dare to hope she would get better, it is sad and touching to see.” Victoria found Bertie full of amiable qualities, which “makes one forget and overlook much that one would wish different.”
¹⁰⁰
This new pregnancy so soon after he and Alix had resumed marital relations imposed yet more strain on their ailing relationship.

Bertie busied himself writing letters. One of his correspondents was a woman named Madame Didier. She seems to have been a French countess; he may have met her in Petersburg, and he certainly saw her that summer in Germany.
^b
“Je vous envoie les boutons Marius que je vous ai promis a Wiesbach
[
sic
],
et j’espère que vous avez l’occasion de les porter bien souvent et bien longtemps.”
^c
101

Letters such as this, enclosing tokens of buttons, were harmless enough, one might think; elaborate exercises in a platonic game of courtly love. When Bertie visited Russia in 1874 for the wedding of his brother Alfred to the sister of the czarevitch, he wrote to Madame Didier from the Anitchkoff Palace, where he was staying. “
J’espère de pouvoir vous rendre une visite entre 4 et 5 heures cet après midi si cela vous conviens
.”
^d
102
A harmless afternoon call, perhaps; but afternoon calls were the prince’s time for flirtation. Ten days later, on the eve of his departure, Bertie wrote again, bidding the countess farewell, regretting that they had not met at the balls of the past week, and enclosing a photograph of himself.
¹⁰³

Nearly half a century later, after the Russian Revolution had destroyed the glitzy, over-the-top St. Petersburg court, Madame Didier was an old lady in Monte Carlo, living in one small room in an apartment near the station. She wrote to Lord Stamfordham, private secretary to George V, asking whether the royal family would be interested in buying three letters from Edward VII together with a signed photograph.
¹⁰⁴
The palace dispatched an emissary named Dr. Pryce Mitchell, who reported that Madame Didier was “refined, dignified and must have been a very beautiful woman, poorly dressed but clean and tidy. Her surroundings denote abject poverty, even privation, yet she is treated with marked respect by the woman who owns the apartment.
She attributes her present misfortune to the unhappy state of affairs in Russia.”
¹⁰⁵
She claimed that unless she could produce the sum of 2,600 francs, her few personal belongings would be seized. Pryce Mitchell and the royal advisers worried that Madame Didier was being advised by a third party intent on blackmail, and after protracted negotiations the old lady agreed to part with her precious letters for £20. Pryce Mitchell refused to pay more, pointing out that the letters were of no importance or value.
¹⁰⁶

But in that case why had Madame Didier treasured them for fifty years and smuggled them out of Russia when she fled the revolution? The story of Bertie’s letters to Madame Didier encapsulates the puzzle for historians of knowing what his relations with women really were. He had only to look at a woman for her to be branded his mistress. He wrote a great many letters to women. It was often assumed—as the advisers of George V imagined—that these letters were evidence of passionate affairs that might damage the monarchy. Usually they turn out to be bland, formal, and, frankly, dull. It is hard to infer anything but a social relationship from these missives, but the question remains: Why did he write them? And why did so many of the women keep them? These were private letters, written in his own hand, not invitations dictated to an equerry. They were often to arrange a private meeting—just the two of them, the prince and the lady. The husbands were not present. But was this any more than flirtation? It would be a leap in the dark to imagine that Bertie’s brief, discreet letters were the last remaining souvenirs of the glorious moment when Madame Didier, so impoverished and faded, had been mistress to a prince.

In 1867, Walter Bagehot, editor of
The Economist,
published his famous book on the
English Constitution,
which, like most books, seems to have passed Bertie by. One of the fallacies Bagehot skewered was the idea that it was the function of the Crown to give a moral example to the nation. Queen Victoria’s domestic virtues were admirable, but not an essential part of her role, claimed Bagehot, and it was unfair to criticize her son for not following her example. “All the world, whatever is most attractive, whatever is most seductive, has always been offered to the Prince of Wales of the day, and always will be. It is not rational to expect the best virtue where temptation is applied in the most trying form at the frailest time of human life.”
¹

Queen Victoria did not agree. She bombarded Bertie with letters, warning about “the frivolity, the love of pleasure, self-indulgence, luxury and idleness” of the aristocracy which, she thought, “resembles the time before the French Revolution.… It is, dear Child, in
your
power to do
much
to check this,” she wrote. “It is for this reason that I always
urge you so strongly not
to
frequent Races
, for they
lead
to every species of evil, gambling etc.”
²

Victoria envisaged Bertie acting as “social sovereign,” giving a moral example to the nation, as she and Albert had done before. As she told Knollys: “The respectability of the Queen’s and Prince’s Court, without its ever having tended to austerity or exclusion of amusement,—but quite the contrary,—was universally acknowledged to be a great safeguard to the Throne and Country—and it is therefore so absolutely necessary that the P[rince] and P[rince]ss, who are too young themselves to know of the effect of all these things, sh[oul]d be very
particular
in distinguishing People whose characters are not respected—by wh[ich] she means, not asking them to dinner—not down to Sandringham—and above all, not going to their houses.”
³

If Victoria really expected Bertie to provide moral leadership, she was being utterly unrealistic. She knew it, too; as she confided to one of her ladies, she felt it her duty to write to Bertie about the state of society, but “I fear it will be of little use, as he is far too weak and self-indulgent, but
still
it is a
duty
wh[ich] I must do,—and I trust
some
of the
advice
may
still
remain
dinning
in his ears.”
⁴

Many of the members of Bertie’s court of whom Victoria most disapproved had, in fact, defected to Marlborough House from Windsor. One defector especially frowned upon by Victoria was Louise, Duchess of Manchester.

Nine years older than Bertie, Louise von Alten was the daughter of a Hanoverian count. Her husband, the Duke of Manchester, was a B-list duke of little brain, but Louise was a social climber with a nose for power. Her ambition was to command the very pinnacle of society by gaining appointment as Mistress of the Robes. The highest court position open to a woman, this was always held by a duchess, whose role it was to control the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting and organize state ceremonies. The office had been monopolized by Harriet, Duchess of Sutherland, Queen Victoria’s close friend, throughout the long ascendancy of
the Whigs;
^*
but in 1858 the Tory prime minister Lord Derby appointed Louise Mistress of the Robes. For the twenty-six-year-old German girl to leapfrog to the peak of London society was an astonishing coup. When the government fell and she resigned in June 1859, Victoria took leave of her with regret, “for she is really a very pleasant, nice, sensible person.”
⁵
By 1863, the Queen had changed her mind. Louise received no invitation to Bertie’s wedding, a slashing snub. Perhaps the Queen had learned that Louise had gained her appointment as Mistress of the Robes as a result of a deal she made with Derby before he became prime minister.
⁶
More likely she was put off by stories about Louise’s wild behavior. Playing a boisterous game of hare and hounds, Louise fell over in a ditch to reveal a shocking pair of scarlet tartan knickerbockers beneath her crinoline.
⁷
Victoria complained that “the D[uche] ss of Manchester is become very
fast
—flirts, and coquets and is much talked about. I cannot take her again as Mistress of the Robes.”
⁸