Authors: Jane Ridley
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Nonfiction, #Retail, #Royalty
The Heir Apparent (61 page)
In 1896, Victoria was seventy-seven. She had sat longer on the throne than any English monarch, beating her grandfather George III’s record of fifty-nine years.
128
She was very lame, relying on her Indian servant to support her walking, and she was nearly blind from cataracts. She could no longer read, pathetically complaining that the candles gave no light and she could not find glasses to suit.
129
During the course of her long widowhood, the way her staff worked had been organized to ensure that she was seen as little as possible by the household. All communications took place in writing. Reprimands were written out and delivered in special boxes, marked “The Queen.”
130
If a member of the household needed to tell her something, they had to pen a proper letter, beginning, “—— presents humble duty to Your Majesty,” and place it in an envelope addressed to the Queen, which must be sealed but not licked.
131
No one was allowed to go outside until the Queen went. It was frowned on to meet her in the grounds when she was in her carriage, so any courtier who accidentally came across her was obliged to hide behind a bush.
132
She practiced bizarre economies, such as having newspaper cut into squares and used as lavatory paper.
133
Sir Henry Ponsonby, who had served Victoria as private secretary for twenty-five years, saving her from herself and rescuing the monarchy in the process, suffered a stroke in January 1895, dying ten months later. The Ponsonbys and the Greys were an intermarried dynasty of
royal servants—Henry Ponsonby had succeeded his wife’s uncle, General Grey, as private secretary in 1870—and it seemed entirely natural that Henry’s son Fritz, who had been an equerry, should become assistant private secretary. Sir Arthur Bigge was now the private secretary. The Queen relied increasingly on Princess Beatrice, especially after the death of Beatrice’s husband, Prince Henry of Battenberg (January 1896), to read her correspondence and take dictation. Fritz Ponsonby despaired of Beatrice, who was hopelessly unprofessional about her secretarial duties, often neglecting to read important documents if she was in a hurry to develop a photograph or paint a flower for a bazaar.
134
But the old Queen was reluctant as ever to share work with her heir. Only when it suited her did Victoria fall in with Bertie’s suggestions. Nicholas and Alexandra had been invited to pay a private visit to Balmoral in September 1896. When Bertie proposed a ceremonial welcome, the Queen agreed, but only because Salisbury urged the need to cultivate Russian support.
Balmoral, where the Queen’s regime of seclusion, silence, thirty-minute meals, nonsmoking, and open windows was at its strictest, was purgatory to the sybaritic Bertie, but he stayed for a week. Nothing ever changed; the same chairs were in the same places, the same biscuits on the plates—only the dogs were replaced when they died.
135
Bertie traveled to Leith in pouring rain to welcome the czar and czarina on their arrival from Denmark. He wore his Russian uniform with a splendid red and gray greatcoat, “not the least tight,” noted lady-in-waiting Edith Lytton. Bertie was “very nice all day to everyone,” and Edith (whose husband had been a clever diplomat) was struck by the absurdity of expecting the small and very young czar to solve the Eastern Question.
136
The visit was not a success. It rained constantly. Nicky had an abscess on his tooth, but his uncle Bertie took him out shooting all day long. He was put in the best place, but missed everything. On 25 September, Bertie noted the results of a deer drive:
Emperor of Russia …………… 0
Duke of Connaught …………… 4 stags
Duke of York ………………… 5 stags
.…
Prince of Wales ……………… 0 (no shot)
137
Lord Salisbury arrived, having insisted on a bedroom heated to a minimum temperature of sixty degrees, which was the hottest the Queen would allow.
138
Bertie was excluded from the “VERY SECRET” discussions between Salisbury and the czar, and he left Balmoral before the Russians.
139
Nicky breathed a sigh of relief. “After he left I had an easier time, because I could at least do what I wanted to, and was
not
obliged to go out shooting every day in the cold and rain.”
140
Victoria, on the other hand, was annoyed. Bertie had departed to Newmarket, where Persimmon won the Jockey Stakes. The Queen made no secret of her disapproval.
141
As she remarked,
“Il faut payer pour être Prince.” (One has to pay a price to be a prince.)
142
*
Daisy was known by her husband’s courtesy title as Lady Brooke until he succeeded his father as Earl of Warwick in 1893, when she became Countess of Warwick. To avoid confusion, I have called her Daisy Warwick throughout this chapter.
†
Augusta, Grand Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, was the sister of George, Duke of Cambridge, and great-aunt of Princess May of Teck.
‡
What she meant was that women, lacking formal education, had to learn from their own observation.
§
More percipient than it could have known at the time,
Reynolds’s
asked: “Is she in love with the Crown, irrespective of whose head wears it?” (Williams,
Contentious Crown,
p. 68.)
‖
Not that George was untouched by scandal. In May 1893, the
Star
printed a rumor that he had secretly married the daughter of a British naval officer at Malta. Ponsonby annotated the cutting: “The power of imagination among newspapers is extraordinary.” (RA VIC/Z476/28, 29 Cutting from the Star.) In the autumn of 1893, W. T. Stead wrote to Ponsonby informing him of an anonymous correspondent who alleged that George had two children by this marriage. (RA VIC/Add A12/2106a, Henry Ponsonby to Francis Knollys [1893].) Bertie was at first inclined to issue a contradiction. He consulted Gladstone, who advised taking no notice of the rumors, “which are equally scandalous and ridiculous.” (RA VIC/Add C07/1, Algernon West to Knollys, 26 October 1893.) So no denial was published, though the Queen thought this was a mistake, arguing as follows: “No one cares about it today. But in fifty years time when some young prince ascends the throne there will be a cry that he is illegitimate or his father committed bigamy.… Now—a simple denial will clear the clouds away.” (RA VIC/Add C07/1, Ponsonby to Knollys, 27 October 1893.) This was prophetic. In 1911, E. F. Mylius printed a story that George V had married a daughter of Sir Michael Culme-Seymour in Malta and had two children. He was prosecuted for criminal libel and found guilty.
a
The tagged point hanging from the shoulder to the breast of a uniform.
b
Carrington noted that Daisy was due to be presented on Tuesday, 5 March 1895, by Lady Salisbury at a drawing room. “This fact has been privately notified to the Princess and there is a good deal of conversation in London on a paragraph in the Central News telegrams that ‘the Princess of Wales’ arrangements will not permit her to be present.’ Spencer Ponsonby let Francis Knollys know that Lady Warwick was going to the Drawing Room by the
Princess’s special orders.
” (Bodleian Library, Carrington Diary, MS Film 1120, 3 March 1895.) In the end, the presentation didn’t take place, allegedly because Daisy had the flu; but if it was true that Alix approved, it is a sign that Bertie’s relationship with Daisy was no longer physical. (
The Times,
5 March 1895.)
d
The story goes that Bertie spotted Rosa standing in the dining room at a shooting party and, seeing they were alone, snatched a kiss. At lunch, he asked his hostess what had become of the guest with the white dress and wonderful complexion. “Sir, you mean Rosa the cook?” After that her career was assured. (Leslie,
Edwardians in Love,
p. 319.)
e
“Geisha” was not a word the prince used lightly. He saw the West End play
The Geisha
on the day he wrote to Jennie. (RA EVIID/1897: 2 February.) Though a geisha might flirt, nineteenth-century geisha culture often banned sex.
f
At a house party where a band was playing, Bertie met George Cornwallis-West on the landing on the way down to dinner. “What are you going to play tonight?” asked Bertie. “Bridge, I suppose, sir,” replied George. Bertie looked around and burst out laughing: “I took you for the man who conducts the band.” (Ruffer,
Big Shots,
pp. 96–97.) This hardly suggests that he recognized Cornwallis-West as his son.
“We Are All in God’s Hands”
*
1897–1901
Beatrice Webb watched the Prince of Wales presenting prizes to the students of the London County Council in 1897. She thought he “acted like a well-oiled automaton, saying exactly the words he was expected to say, noticing the right persons on the platform, maintaining his own dignity, whilst setting others at ease and otherwise acting with perfectly polished discretion”:
Not an English gentleman, essentially a foreigner and yet an almost perfect constitutional sovereign. From a political point of view, his vices and foibles, his lack of intellectual refinement or moral distinction, are as nothing compared to his complete detachment from all party prejudice and class interests and his genius for political
discretion
. But one sighs to think that this
unutterably commonplace person should set the tone to London Society. There is something comic in the great British nation with its infinite variety of talents, having this undistinguished and limited-minded German bourgeois to be its social sovereign.
1
The “unutterably commonplace person” had annoyed Beatrice Webb because of his plan to commemorate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. He proposed to endow the hospitals of London, creating the Prince of Wales’s Hospital Fund. The Fabian socialist Webb sneered at this charitable project as the sort of proposal one would expect from “a committee of village grocers.”
Bertie’s committee, which met at Marlborough House, included the head of Anglo-Jewry, Lord Rothschild; the Chief Rabbi; the Bishop of London; and millionaires such as Julius Wernher and Ernest Cassel. Bertie was no figurehead; minutes show that he was “informed, involved and strong-minded.”
2
It was he who drove the project.
3
On his insistence, the fund created a sizable endowment: He gave a standing order, and invited his City friends, many of them Jewish financiers, to make generous subscriptions. King Edward’s Hospital Fund, as it became, was at that time the most ambitious hospital fund ever conceived, and it survives today as the King’s Fund, “arguably Edward VII’s most significant permanent memorial.”
4
The fund was the brainchild of Sir Henry Burdett, Bertie’s adviser on charitable projects. A hospital administrator and stockbroker, Burdett had come to Bertie’s notice in 1889 when he published a book entitled
Prince, Princess and People
. In it, he gave an exhaustive account of the Waleses’ philanthropic activities, which until then had gone largely unnoticed. The charitable duties performed by the Prince of Wales, wrote Burdett, “probably exceed those of any other single man in the country.” Burdett listed eighty-four hospitals that Bertie opened or contributed money to.
5
He saw that the charitable work of the royals could be put to use more effectively. His book won favor at Marlborough House, and he was quick to ingratiate himself there. The prince’s charitable activities became more focused. In 1896, on Burdett’s
advice, Bertie agreed to become president of Guy’s Hospital, and head its fund-raising appeal, culminating in a festival dinner for four thousand guests. This raised £150,000, making it to date allegedly the most profitable dinner ever.
6
Alix had a role as a champion of nurses. Her influence was phenomenal, if erratic. Brass plaques can still be seen in London hospitals that commemorate the Waleses laying a stone or opening a wing, bearing witness to their tireless activity: the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children; the Albany Wing of the National Hospital, opened by Alix as a memorial to Leopold (1885); the New Hospital for Women, later renamed the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital (1889); the London Hospital, Whitechapel (1887); Soho Square Hospital for Women; the Brompton Hospital (1879); the Putney Hospital for Incurables; the London Fever Hospital; the Royal Hospital for Women and Children at Waterloo Bridge … the list goes on and on.
Bertie provided the vital link between Burdett’s world of hospitals and charities, and the new plutocracy. Contemporaries deplored the “social sovereignty of wealth over every class” in Bertie’s court, and commentators complained that financiers, self-made millionaires, and South African randlords thronged the drawing rooms of Marlborough House.
7
When Thomas Lipton, child of the Glasgow Gorbals turned tea tycoon, raced his yacht
Shamrock
against Bertie’s
Britannia
, the kaiser commented sarcastically that his uncle Bertie was “going yachting with his grocer.”
8
What he didn’t realize was that Lipton had made a donation of £25,000 to Princess Alexandra’s fund to feed the London poor in 1897, followed by a further £100,000 for a poor people’s restaurant. The social sovereignty of wealth was not unconditional; the plutocrat must be validated by charitable giving before he was rewarded at court. “The millionaire’s quickest and surest route to royal favour is a big cheque for a necessitous hospital.”
9
Bertie spent the spring of 1897 in the French Riviera on board
Britannia
, as was his custom. Queen Victoria was at Cimiez, near Nice, and Bertie visited her there several times.
10
A crisis had erupted in the
Queen’s household, and her ladies and gentlemen were threatening to resign.