The sharp-eyed courtiers who scanned the Prince of Wales for signs of grief reported that the bereavement made no deep impression.1 Bertie wrote tight letters that gave little away. To his friend Carrington he said: “I have received a sad blow in the loss of my Father, who was kindness itself to me, though I fear that I have often given him pain by my conduct.”2 He told another Cambridge friend, “I am still quite stunned by the dreadful blow … and can hardly yet realize it.”3
A reporter who caught a glimpse of him off his guard noted that he “appeared very careworn, and suffering severely.”4 But the mask rarely slipped. Bertie was an emotional character and easily moved to tears, but he did not allow himself to grieve for his father’s death.
Albert’s death marked the beginning of a new reign. Effectively, he had been king. He had reformed the monarchy, distancing it from Victoria’s “wicked uncles” and identifying the “royal family” with middle-class domestic virtue. He had reorganized its finances, cut waste, and eliminated corruption. Thanks to the savings he made on the Civil List, the Crown could live within its means without appealing to Parliament for more, significantly strengthening its political position. Osborne and Balmoral were both paid for out of savings.5 On the other hand, he had interfered in politics, attempted to shape foreign policy, and acted almost as an unofficial member of the Cabinet. As Disraeli put it, he planned “to establish court-influence on the ruins of political party … with perseverance equal to that of George the Third and talent infinitely greater.”6 He had taken political business out of the hands of the Queen, who had become de-skilled; she could barely write a letter unless Albert drafted it. At dinner, politicians noticed how Albert would prompt Victoria in German, and then, like a ventriloquist’s doll, she would ask the question he suggested.7 It’s worth asking the counterfactual question: What would have happened if Albert had lived? His spectacular career demonstrates just how much could be achieved by a genuinely able ruler. But his quest for power was arguably destined to set the monarchy on a collision course with Parliament. His inability to delegate and his insistence on keeping control of the court in his own hands are worrying signs. In some ways, his death was opportune. It removed the Crown from the front line of politics at a time when the rise of a robust system of two-party politics meant that retreat was essential to the monarchy’s survival. At the moment of his death, however, Albert seemed indispensable. Now the entire burden of monarchy fell to Victoria, and this hysterical widow, crippled by grief, seemed of all people the least capable of bearing it.
The deeper the Queen retreated into mourning, the greater was Bertie’s opportunity to seize a political role, as his father had done before him. As heir to the throne and a male, Bertie was a figure of national importance. Leaders appeared in The Times urging the Prince of Wales to reject a life of frivolity and follow a career of usefulness, filling the place left by his father. Inspired by court insiders, the editor of The Times implored the Queen not to follow the example of the Hanoverians and quarrel with her heir. Instead, she should take him into her confidence and prepare him for the duties of government.8 Bertie read the Times articles with great attention, and was reportedly “very struck” by them.9 But he seemed fatally lacking in ambition. Instead of grasping power, he allowed himself to be outmaneuvered by his mother into a position of impotence. Breaking with Hanoverian tradition, the Prince of Wales did not become the focus of opposition to the reigning monarch.
Victoria’s grief was all-consuming. “Why may not the earth swallow us up?” she wailed.10 She had leaned on Albert for everything, never donning a gown or a bonnet without his approval. In her private journal of “Remarks Conversations Reflections,” the Queen poured out thousands of words of unedited grief. “Oh no more peaceful blessed nights!… Those w[hich] seemed a foretaste of Heaven—for their peace.”11
It is sometimes suggested that Queen Victoria was going through menopause, but this seems unlikely.12 She was only forty-two and was not physically ill. But she had never experienced any real misfortune in her life before, and she was suffering from an emotional breakdown. In denial about Albert’s death, she slept in the marital bed with his nightshirt in her arms, his photograph and watch lying on the pillow beside her, and a marble cast of his hand within reach. Next door, in his dressing room, his papers and clothes lay as they had when he was alive, and hot water was brought each morning to his room. At Windsor, the Blue Room where Albert died was photographed and kept as a shrine, exactly as it was at the hour of his death, “even to an open pocket handkerchief on the sofa,” but the bed was strewn like a coffin with white flowers.13
In spite of all her weeping and sad mornings, waking day after day at four a.m., Victoria insisted on performing the business of monarchy herself. “I must work and work, and can’t rest,” she told Vicky, “and the amount of work which comes upon me is more than I can bear! I who always hated business have nothing but that!”14 Sitting at her twin writing table next to the beloved’s empty desk, scrawling over page after page of thickly black-edged paper, she felt that she was carrying on Albert’s mission.
Albert had encouraged Victoria in her obsessive mourning when her mother died, and now she clung to her grief. All the anger she felt for Albert’s death was directed at Bertie. “Oh! that boy … I never can or shall look at him without a shudder,” she wrote.15
Early in 1862, Victoria had a conversation at Osborne with her groom-in-waiting Colonel Francis Seymour. She received him standing in Albert’s dressing room, wearing her widow’s cap. A locket containing Albert’s hair and his photograph hung from her neck. “I don’t mind telling you as an old friend … that what killed [Albert], was that dreadful business at the Curragh.” Seymour pleaded that Bertie’s fall was the sort of error that few young men escaped, but the Queen was adamant: She could never forget that he had caused his father’s illness. “She said he had nothing to remind her of him, the others Princess Royal and Alfred in particular had just something of his look, but the Prince of Wales nothing and she could not help being relieved when he was gone from her, tho’ he had behaved as well as he could.”16
On 5 January 1862, Victoria penned a memorandum. She was under pressure to keep Bertie beside her, but this, she explained, was out of the question. We always come back, she wrote, to “the one dreadful misfortune,” that is, Bertie’s fall; the vital thing was to prevent it happening again. Meanwhile, Bertie’s character was such that “a lengthened stay … at Home will only lead to continued & protracted idleness.” The solution was for him to travel. “If the Prince of Wales is well surrounded and is never allowed to go out alone & is moreover constantly kept reminded of all that is right & good, the Queen does not see how it is possible for him to get into mischief.”17
Albert had planned that Bertie should complete his education with a trip to the Near East, and Victoria insisted that this should still take place. Bertie had no wish to travel, but his views were not consulted. King Leopold, who interviewed Bertie and tried to intervene with Victoria on his behalf, told Lord Clarendon that relations between mother and son were worse than ever. “It is entirely her fault as the poor boy asks nothing better than to devote himself to comforting his Mother and with that object would be delighted to give up his foreign expedition but she wouldn’t hear of it and seems only anxious to get rid of him.”18 The prime minister, Lord Palmerston, tried to dissuade the Queen from sending Bertie abroad, telling her that “the country was fearful we were not on good terms, as he was so much away from home.”19 But Victoria refused to budge. “Many wish to shake my resolution and to keep him here,” she told Vicky, but that would “force a contact which is more than ever unbearable to me.”20
Not only had Bertie lost his father, but he was made to feel responsible for his death. At first he tried to please by complying with his mother’s wishes. He made no attempt to resist his banishment. But Victoria’s rejection left deep wounds. Bertie’s pity for his grieving mother soon turned to anger. Rather than confront her, he was outwardly dutiful and obedient, but secretly he deceived her. He was resentful, too, that, in spite of all the pressure from politicians and The Times, Victoria excluded him from her confidence. Instead, she shared her innermost thoughts with Vicky, to whom she complained constantly about Bertie.
Before departing on his tour of the Near East, Bertie saw his mother (6 February 1862). She thought he seemed nervous at the thought of leaving. “He was low and upset, poor Boy. So was I.”21
The Queen had ordered that the Prince of Wales should travel with his suite in deep mourning, alone and in strict incognito, and accept no invitations. Away from his mother, Bertie’s spirits rose. In Venice (“charming”), the royal yacht Osborne anchored opposite the ducal palace, and he cruised around in gondolas all day (“a charming sensation”) and paid two visits to Elizabeth, Empress of Austria, whom he found “very handsome” as well as (naturally) “charming.”22 Venetian art, however, received no mention.
In Alexandria, Arthur (later Dean) Stanley, a protégé of Albert’s, joined the party. As professor of ecclesiastical history at Oxford University, his role was to provide tuition in ancient history. Bertie scrambled very fast up one pyramid and then, to Stanley’s dismay, showed no interest in seeing any more dull ruins. Instead, he sat smoking and reading East Lynne, the bestselling novel about adultery by Mrs. Henry Wood. He insisted on the rest of the party reading East Lynne, too, and as they steamed in luxury down the Nile, the prince quizzed his companions. “With whom did Lady Isobel dine on the fatal night?”23 His chief amusement was shooting crocodiles from the boat. “We are leading quite an Eastern lazy life, and smoke and drink coffee nearly all day,” he told Carrington. “I trust that you have cut the acquaintance of our friend N [Nellie Clifden].”24
Stanley at first despaired of Bertie, who was woefully lacking in intellectual curiosity, but he was disarmed by the prince’s engaging manner, his modesty, and his real efforts to conceal his boredom. He was especially impressed by the way Bertie conducted himself in interviews with high personages, where “he appears to the best advantage.”25
In Jerusalem, Bertie was tattooed with the five crosses forming a Crusader’s Jerusalem cross on his forearm.*26 He grew his first beard. Strictly supervised by Bruce, he avoided the erotic temptations of the East, which for many English travelers formed the secret agenda of the Grand Tour. Nellie Clifden was still on his mind, however. From Constantinople he wrote to Carrington: “I am sorry to see by your letter that you still keep up an acquaintance with NC, as I had hoped by this time that that was over.”27
With Bertie safely out of the country for four months, Queen Victoria busied herself arranging his marriage—a “sacred duty” that Albert, “our darling Angel,” had left her to perform.28 How fortunate it was that sacred duty coincided so exactly with the Queen’s convenience, removing her irksome son from her home while protecting him from the dangers of bachelor life. Bertie was not consulted in the matter. The marriage was arranged entirely by the Queen and Vicky.
From Germany, Vicky reported dark rumors that Princess Alexandra had disgraced herself by having a teenage affair with an army officer.29 This and other tales about Alexandra’s family were fabrications, invented by Denmark’s enemies in Germany, as Vicky’s investigations soon revealed. Alexandra’s mother, Princess Louise, was “lively,” which was code for flirtatious, but not unfaithful to her husband. The harlot of the family was Louise’s sister, the Princess of Dessau, who had an illegitimate child as a result of an affair with a groom; this passion had been encouraged by her mother, Alexandra’s grandmother, the old Landgravine of Hesse, who, Vicky reported, was “wicked and very intriguing—besides not being at all respectable.”30
Ever since she was fourteen, Alexandra had been monitored by the British minister in Copenhagen, Augustus Paget, who assured Baron Stockmar that the young princess had attended only two parties in her life, both heavily chaperoned. Up until sixteen she had lived in seclusion in the nursery. “In short,” wrote Paget, “it appears that the whole object of the parents has been to prevent her name being mixed up with anyone else’s.”31
Princess Louise was an ambitious matchmaker, anxious to marry her two pretty daughters, Alexandra and Dagmar, into the top league of European royalty. Her husband, Prince Christian, was an obscure and impoverished princeling, connected only remotely to the childless King of Denmark, whose heir he had been designated under the London Protocol of 1852.† He owned no estates, and his income had only recently increased from a paltry £800 to £2,000, still a modest sum. The Danish princesses’ sole assets were their beauty and connections, and Princess Louise knew very well that her daughters’ virtue must be strictly and conspicuously guarded if they were to hold their value in the royal marriage market.
Queen Victoria grumbled that the Danish family were “as bad as possible,” but she was being disingenuous, conveniently forgetting her own Albert’s lecherous father and her philandering brother-in-law, Ernest.32 She insisted that Bertie’s fall should be kept secret. Her cover was blown by the Duke of Cambridge, who wrote to Princess Louise (she was his cousin) revealing all, adding that Victoria and her son were on the worst of terms. Wally Paget found Princess Louise in tears with this letter in her hands, saying that Alexandra’s position would be impossible if she married Bertie.33 Victoria leaped to her son’s defense, insisting that “wicked wretches had led our poor innocent boy into a scrape,” that Albert and she had forgiven him “this (one) sad mistake,” that she had never quarreled with him and that “she looked to his wife as being his salvation.”34 But the Duke of Cambridge’s leak had shifted the advantage in this game of moral bargaining away from Victoria, giving the Danes the upper hand—all the more so as the czar of Russia now returned to the attack and announced his intention of swooping off either Alexandra or Dagmar as a bride for his son.35
When Bertie returned home in June 1862, Victoria found him “much improved and … ready to do everything I wish”—that is, he agreed to marry as soon as she desired. She told Vicky “we get on very well. He is much less coarse looking and the expression of the eyes is so much better.”36 Within a few weeks, however, Bertie was irritating his mother as much as ever. She complained that he was idle and listless, he fidgeted terribly, his voice was too loud, and his argumentative manner with the younger children exasperated her.37
The Queen found all talk or excitement intolerable. She always dined alone. She suffered from neuralgia, lost weight, and sometimes could barely walk. Her journal is a dreary litany of sleepless nights, headaches, and lethargy. No doubt today she would be diagnosed as clinically depressed.38 As the months went by, her mourning continued unabated. Like Miss Havisham, her grief had become almost pathological. Prolonged grief can follow an ambiguous relationship where conflict and tensions are unresolved, leaving lingering guilt, and perhaps this was the case with Victoria. Her marriage to Albert had been intensely competitive, a battleground for power, and the Queen’s worship of her Angel was a stratagem for coping with his superiority, which at another level she resented.
But she found that mourning suited her. It allowed her to withdraw from all public appearances and court functions that she found boring or disagreeable. Under cover of mourning she could do exactly as she wished. She retreated into a small inner circle, seeing only her younger children, servants, and favored ladies-in-waiting. Her favorite, Lady Augusta Bruce, the sister of Bertie’s governor, always answered “Yes, ma’am” to everything she said and was promoted to a privileged permanent position at her side.39
Albert was beatified and transmogrified into a cult. At Frogmore, close to the sepulcher that housed the remains of her mother, Victoria supervised the construction of a mausoleum, her own version of the Taj Mahal, a rich and dramatic celebration of the angel of death. It was built on a marsh, and a fire burned constantly to keep off decay. Bertie was heard to remark that he “would take good care not to be buried in such a place.”40
The anniversary of Albert’s death, 14 December, became a holy day for the Queen and her family, commemorated each year with prayers and weeping at the mausoleum. For the rest of her life Victoria dressed in widow’s cap and weeds. Alice’s wedding, which took place in the dining room at Osborne in July, was more like a funeral. Victoria sat hunched in an armchair. Affie “sobbed all through and afterwards—dreadfully.”41
General Bruce, Bertie’s governor, who had contracted fever in the Near East, died shortly before Alice’s wedding. On the last day of his life, he spoke of Bertie’s fall.42 For Bertie, Bruce’s exit was sad but timely; Bruce had controlled him with excessive strictness. In place of a governor, Victoria appointed a comptroller and treasurer for her son: General William Knollys, a sixty-five-year-old retired soldier.‡ The Queen ordered Knollys to act as Bertie’s mentor and to report directly to her.43 Much to Bertie’s annoyance, she insisted that Knollys should be informed of his fall. Reluctantly, Bertie agreed, “hoping that this may be the last conversation that I shall have with you on this painful subject.”44
Victoria, however, was obsessive on the matter; she couldn’t let it go. “Poor Boy,” she wrote, “who alas! cannot, as beloved Papa & good Fritz, bring ‘the white flower of a blameless life’ to the altar, but alas! must feel when that pure innocent girl looks at you with her fine eyes, ashamed at your unworthiness—oh! those wicked ones who ‘robbed you of your virtue’ as beloved Papa said. Oh! That sad stain which grieved your beloved Papa so sorely, so bitterly … let it not be blotted out from your own conscience but let it be your constant admonition to make up, by a future spotless life, for that which alas! can never be undone.”45
Bertie’s response to this eleven-page outburst was diplomatic. “If you only knew how much I feel for you,” he wrote, “& how I see what a miserable existence you are now forced to lead, & how I often wish I could allay your suffering & sorrow, you would not I think consider me so very selfish.” As for his fall, he was contrite: “I will not touch again on that unhappy subject, which I know grieved you & Papa so much, I only hope that my past conduct has made some amends.”46
For Bertie, writing to his mother had become like negotiating with a hostile power. His letters are devoid of real feeling. Victoria’s language of sin and redemption made little impression. How insincere his repentance was can be seen from a gossipy letter he wrote that same month to his friend Carrington. “I am sorry to hear that you went to such a disreputable place as the one you mention in your letter, as I hoped that you were conducting yourself better, but I fear that such is not the case … I hope that you have not lost Lydia Thompson’s shoe?”§47
Freud hypothesized that men seek out prostitutes to revenge themselves on their mothers, by treating women merely as objects of sexual gratification. Bertie’s hunger for the demimonde may have represented a rebellion against his overcontrolling mother. But he always risked being found out, and whenever the Queen learned of his transgressions, she used them as an argument for refusing to allow him responsibility.
Victoria left nothing about Bertie’s engagement to chance. She insisted on seeing Alexandra for herself, in order to judge “whether she will suit me.”48 She drew up an elaborate schedule for this meeting, choreographing each interview in advance. Bertie was also provided with detailed instructions as to how and where and when to propose to the princess. “It is dreadful to do all this without [Papa],” wailed the Queen, imploring Bertie by his marriage to “cast a few gleams of light on the declining years of my now utterly desolate … life.”49
Traveling as Countess of Balmoral, Victoria crossed to Laeken, Uncle Leopold’s Brussels palace, on 3 September 1862, and the carefully scripted audiences with Princess Alexandra and her family took place. Victoria was overcome by tears, not at the prospect of losing her son, but because she found it “horrible” to meet Alexandra’s parents without Albert by her side. Alexandra, who had been warned that the Queen wished for virtue in her daughter-in-law, wore a tactful black dress and simple, girlish hair.50 Victoria fell for her at once. Princess Alexandra, she wrote, was “a pearl,” gentle and dignified and altogether more distinguished than her rather common family. “Tho’ quite exhausted & worn out—& in a state of nervousness & exhaustion & sorrow hardly to be described,” Victoria wrote at once giving Bertie full sanction to propose.51
Bertie was like an actor in a play. All he had to do was learn the lines the Queen had written for him and perform them on cue. “I think,” he wrote, “that I have quite made up my mind about the young Princess, & that I should be happy with her.”52 Two days later, on 9 September, he gave a triumphant report to Victoria: “The all important event has taken place today.” As scripted by his mother, Bertie had proposed to the princess at Laeken, while out walking in the garden. “She immediately said yes; but I told her not to answer too quickly but to consider over it. She said she had long ago, I then asked her if she liked me. She said yes. I then kissed her hand & she kissed me.” Next, he asked Alexandra’s parents for their consent, and “We then went to luncheon.”53
Bertie was under every sort of pressure to fall in love with his princess. A love match, as his uncle Leopold wrote, “destroys all the arguments of his affair being arranged for him without it being his choice.”54 Victoria shamelessly briefed both The Times and Lord Russell, her minister in Germany, to deny reports of an arranged marriage, insisting that the match was in no sense political.55 Bertie tried hard to oblige, seeming to become more enamored by the hour. Two days later he wrote to his mother: “I frankly avow to you that I did not think it possible to love a person so as I do her.”56
No sooner was the engagement accomplished than Victoria invited Alexandra to visit her. It was less an invitation than a command. The princess was summoned to Osborne alone, without Bertie. Such was “the fear—I might almost say the horror—the Queen has of the Princess’s mother’s family,” wrote Victoria’s private secretary, General Grey, that the parents were expressly forbidden from staying.57 Prince Christian was allowed to accompany his daughter on the crossing, but Victoria ostentatiously refused to receive him, forcing him to put up at a London hotel. When Princess Louise objected, pointing out that her daughter had never before been away from home, Victoria sent unpleasant messages via her lady-in-waiting. The Queen “has been a little disapp[ointe]d,” wrote Lady Augusta Bruce, “[she] cannot help feeling an alteration in tone.”58 That the Danes must learn their place as poor relations was made painfully clear.
Alexandra arrived at Osborne by moonlight on 5 November 1862. She later confessed to being terrified, but from the moment she landed and embraced the nine-year-old Prince Leopold, who greeted her on the pier clutching a bunch of flowers, she could do no wrong. She was gentle and unaffected, she went to bed at ten o’clock, and she spent hours sitting alone with Victoria listening to her talk about Albert. So moved was Alexandra, wrote Victoria, that she “laid her dear head on my shoulder & cried”—an act of emotional intelligence that won the Queen’s heart.59 Soon the princess was being affectionately referred to as Alix.
The affection was mutual. “You cannot imagine how lovable the dear good Queen is,” wrote Alix (in Danish) to her sister in a letter that breathes homesickness. On long drives through the rain with the Queen in an open carriage she consoled herself by reflecting how similar the Isle of Wight was to the coast of Denmark.60
Victoria warned Alix not to make Bertie a partisan of Denmark, and forbade her to bring a Danish maid. “It would not do for the dear young couple’s happiness if Alix had a maid to whom she could chatter away in a language her Husband could not understand.”61 She complained that Bertie wrote to Alix in English rather than German, which “grieves and pains me as the German element is the one I wish to be cherished and kept up in our beloved home.”62 But Bertie’s laziness about German was compounded by Alix’s Danish sympathies. She had learned from her parents a horror of German, which was the language of Denmark’s enemies, and she preferred to speak English when she couldn’t use Danish. Victoria’s command was not obeyed.
Bertie, meanwhile, was packed off on yet another foreign cruise, this time to the Mediterranean with Vicky and Fritz. As Lord Clarendon explained, Victoria wanted to keep him out of the way “till the time for Hymen is completed. Perhaps too the Queen may think that Continental temptations will be less strong than the British.”63 Like a stallion at stud, the Prince of Wales was kept in a sort of sexual quarantine.
From Rome, Vicky gave glowing reports on Bertie. “His is a nature which develops itself slowly,” she told her mother, “and I think you will find that he will go on improving and that his marriage will do a good deal for him in that way.”64 This was the optimistic view. The beast, however, would keep rearing its ugly head. Back home, Bertie foolishly boasted about his adventures in Paris with actresses “with very little dress on” to the gossip Lord Torrington, who reported to Delane, the editor of The Times: “Evidently the young man is very hot and asked me a good many leading questions. I believe the marriage is hurried on with all speed for fear of any accident overtaking him.”65
The wedding was set for a date in Lent, the season of sackcloth and ashes; the dress code for the court was half-mourning colors of gray, silver, and lilac, and the Queen commanded that it should take place at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, rather than London. She insisted that this had been Albert’s wish, but insiders thought the Queen’s real reason for cheating London’s show-loving crowds of a royal wedding was the fact that in St. George’s Chapel she could watch the ceremony unseen from Catherine of Aragon’s closet.66
Alexandra arrived at Gravesend three days before the wedding. The Danish ambassador Augustus Paget, who accompanied her from Copenhagen, thought her “rather down in the mouth” during the voyage, and she had a heavy cold.67 Bertie, who was “a good deal agitated,” went to meet her.68 He was more than ten minutes late, “which was rather unfortunate,” and rushed aboard the Victoria and Albert, which had been sent to bring her from Antwerp, delighting the crowd by kissing her in full view.69 The road through London teemed with cheering crowds, and in the City even the imperturbable Alix was frightened when the Life Guards charged the crush brandishing their sabers. The crowds inspired the Poet Laureate Tennyson’s wedding ode:
Sea-kings’ daughter from over the sea,
Alexandra!
Saxon and Norman and Dane are we,
But all of us Danes in our welcome of thee,
Alexandra!
Welcome her, thunders of fort and of fleet!
Welcome her, thundering cheer of the street!
Victoria, however, read the celebrations as a tribute to her own popularity and, naturally, as recognition for Albert. The sight of any happy couple, she told Palmerston, “plunges daggers into the Queen’s widowed heart, for she is always alone.”70
At Windsor, Victoria received Alix at the foot of the great staircase with an embrace, and then retired to her room, “desolate and sad.” Later, Alix knocked at her door and knelt before her “with that sweet loving expression which spoke volumes. I was very much moved and kissed her again and again.”71
On the morning of the wedding (10 March 1863), Victoria dressed in her widow’s weeds and widow’s cap (“more hideous than any I have yet seen,” thought Clarendon), which she enlivened with the blue ribbon and star of the Order of the Garter, worn for the first time since Albert’s death.72 She walked from the deanery over the roof leads to the royal closet, a Gothic box high up on the wall of St. George’s Chapel.
Inside, the chapel was packed. The Queen’s insistence on inviting her entire household left few seats for the great and the good, and invitations were highly prized. Bertie himself was allowed only four friends (Carrington was one). The adventurer Disraeli was present (on the insistence of Prime Minister Palmerston, and not, as he liked to think, because of the Queen’s special regard for him), while the Duchess of Manchester, who had once served as Mistress of the Robes, was omitted, a snub that caused a lasting rift.
When the Queen entered the box, the entire congregation bowed. As Vicky processed up the aisle, magnificent in white satin trimmed with ermine, she caught sight of her mother and (wrote the Queen) “made a very low curtsey, with an inexpressible look of love and respect, which had a most touching effect.”73
Next Bertie entered, wearing Garter robes and flanked by his supporters, his brother-in-law Fritz and his uncle Ernest of Saxe-Coburg.‖ He seemed pale and nervous but, some said, “more considerable” than usual.74 He bowed to his mother and kept looking up at her, Victoria thought, “with an anxious clinging look.”75 Bertie stood waiting for what seemed an eternity, ten or twenty minutes, until at last Alix appeared. Instead of the magnificent wedding dress of Brussels lace given to her by King Leopold, she wore Honiton lace patterned with roses, shamrocks, and thistles and garlanded with orange blossoms—a last-minute change of plan that signaled her role as ambassador for English fashion, though critics considered her “too sunk in greenery.”76 She was pale and trembling and red-eyed, having cried all morning at leaving her mother. Not that she was doubtful about marrying Bertie; she said to one of his sisters: “You perhaps think that I like marrying your Brother for his position but if he was a cowboy I should love him just the same and would marry no one else.”77
Victoria was overcome during the singing of a chorale composed by Albert, but after this she recovered and looked inquisitively at the audience. Disraeli, who was nearsighted, raised his eyeglass to the royal box, and caught her icy glance. He did not venture to use his glass again. When the marriage was over, the Queen recorded, “I gave them an affectionate nod and kissed my hand to sweet Alix.”78
Afterward, Bertie and Alix lunched with thirty-eight royal relations, while five hundred wedding guests caroused elsewhere. Not so the Queen. “I lunched alone with Baby [Princess Beatrice].”79 The wedding guests departed in an undignified crush from Windsor station. Disraeli sat on his wife’s lap on the train, while so many gems were plundered from the jewel-encrusted Maharaja Duleep Singh that he had to be locked up and sent to London by a later train. Meanwhile, Bertie and Alix departed for the honeymoon to Osborne, which, as Fritz remarked, was now a gloomy vault crammed with relics of Prince Albert.80
Neither Bertie nor Alix wrote accounts of the wedding. From the version Victoria gave in her journal, one might think it was she, not her son, who was the star of the occasion. Victoria was superbly skilled at dramatizing her role as queen in mourning. W. P. Frith’s painting of the ceremony in St. George’s Chapel, which Victoria commissioned, encapsulates the drama. The eye is instantly drawn to the lonely figure of the black-clothed Queen standing in her box, her face and widow’s cap bathed in light. The bridesmaids and members of the royal family stare up at her, and seem almost oblivious of the bridal couple; but her gaze is firmly fixed on her son and his bride—neither of whom returns it, nor indeed do they look at each other, but seem absorbed in inner reflection.81
A few days after the honeymoon, Bertie and Alix were photographed at Windsor with Victoria beside Albert’s marble bust, the “dear, dear protecting head” as Victoria called it.82 The day before the wedding, the Queen had taken Bertie and Alix to the mausoleum at Frogmore and opened the shrine. “He gives you his blessing,” she said, and joined their hands, took them both in her arms, and kissed them. “It was a very touching moment and we all felt it,” she wrote.83 The wedding photograph was an attempt to convey this. Victoria gazes theatrically up at Albert’s bust, but her face in profile set off against the deep black of her mourning drapery is sharply focused, while Albert’s chiseled marble features dissolve into a blur. The photographer was forced to bathe the Queen’s black dress in an excess of light, which whited out Albert’s head. Victoria had positioned herself deferentially below Albert on his pillar, but he had become a faceless spirit.84 Bertie and Alix were almost irrelevant to the drama of Victoria’s grief. Bertie stands behind his mother, clean-shaven for once, puffy-eyed, plump and slightly seedy, bulging out of his too-tight black coat—he had put on weight during his tours abroad.85 Alix, in white contrasting sharply with the Queen’s black, looks neither at her husband nor his parents but skittishly over her shoulder as the photographers had taught her to do. The dance between Bertie, his wife, and his mother was about to unfold.
* In 1882, the future George V was tattooed “by the same old man that tattooed Papa, and the same thing too, the 5 crosses, you ask Papa to show his arm.” (RA GV/PRIV/AA36, Prince George to Princess of Wales, April 1882.)
† This was the protocol that assigned the succession of the two duchies of Schleswig and Holstein to Denmark. Princess Louise herself was, in fact, more closely related to the King of Denmark than her husband, but as a woman she was excluded from the succession by Salic law.
‡ His father, another General Knollys, had been a friend of Queen Victoria’s father, the Duke of Kent, and the man to whose care the duke had commended his cast-off mistress, Julie de St. Laurent.
§ Lydia Thompson was an actress who sold her old dancing shoes to her admirers at the Crystal Palace.
‖ Ernest no longer opposed the marriage. A few months before, Bertie had renounced the succession to his uncle, who was childless, in favor of his brother Alfred. At least Alix would never sit upon the throne of Coburg.