The rift caused by the Schleswig-Holstein war was deepened by a quarrel over the marriage of the Queen’s third daughter, Princess Helena (known as Lenchen). Victoria depended heavily on the support of her unmarried daughters. The first daughter who acted as her unofficial private secretary was Alice. She was succeeded by Helena, and the Queen so despaired at the prospect of losing this daughter to marriage that she determined to find her a husband who would be prepared to live at the English court. This was a tough job description, coupled with the fact that Helena was the plainest of the princesses.1
Eventually, Victoria lighted on Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein. Penniless (by princely standards), thirty-four, prematurely bald, and a chain-smoker, he was “really a very good fellow though not handsome.”2 But Victoria could hardly have chosen a bridegroom who was more objectionable to Bertie. Christian was the younger brother of Victoria’s nephew by marriage the Duke of Augustenburg, the liberal claimant to Schleswig and Holstein who had challenged King Christian of Denmark over the duchies and then been ousted when Bismarck invaded and grabbed them for Prussia and Austria. To Alix the engagement seemed a deliberate snub, especially as Victoria refused to discuss it with her. Alix could hardly bear to meet Christian.3 Bertie, meanwhile, out of loyalty to Alix threatened to boycott Lenchen’s wedding. His ally was Alice. According to Sir Charles Phipps, Alice was “the great agent in exciting dissension in the family.”4 Jealous of Lenchen’s access to her mother, she worried that if Christian succeeded in gaining Victoria’s confidence, she herself would be excluded forever. Outwardly she supported the match, imploring Bertie, as “the Brother who has ever been the friend of my heart and deep love of my soul,” to sacrifice his feelings and act kindly toward Victoria and Lenchen.5 But behind Victoria’s back, she stirred up trouble, warning Christian not to let himself be put upon and made to live in England.6
Alice’s meddling seems relatively harmless, but when Victoria learned about it she was furious. Like the Queen of Hearts in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (which was published the same year), she was prone to bewildering changes of mood.* “Off with her head!” she roared; and Alice, who had been her favorite the year before, was disgraced. “When your parent and Sovereign settles a thing for her good which interferes with none of your rights and comforts, opposition for mere selfish and personal objects—indeed out of jealousy—is monstrous,” stormed the Queen. “I cannot tell you what I have suffered.”7 Bertie swallowed his objections to the marriage, and in the topsy-turvy world of Victoria’s family he now became the favorite. Blowing hot and cold as only she could do, Victoria declared that “Bertie has a loving affectionate heart and could never bear to be in long disagreement with his family. Towards me he is very dear and nice.”8
The following summer, Bismarck engineered war against Austria and, with Vicky’s husband, Fritz, at their head, the Prussian troops smashed Austria and Austria’s German allies at the battle of Königgrätz (3 July 1866). Bismarck was merciless. Alix’s grandfather, the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel, who fought with Austria, was deprived of his sovereignty, and his country was incorporated into Prussia. Victoria’s first cousin George V, the blind King of Hanover, also an ally of Austria, was dethroned, his territory absorbed into Prussia, and his family fortune—the so-called Welfenfond—confiscated by Bismarck. Bismarck annexed Schleswig and Holstein, in defiance of Denmark’s claim to the duchies.†
Alice suffered, too. Her husband, Louis of Hesse-Darmstadt, supported Austria and was punished with the loss of part of his lands. During the war, Darmstadt was overrun by Prussian troops. Alice, who was seven months pregnant, was marooned there and became quite ill, thin and sleepless. Queen Victoria, still angry, commented tartly that “Poor Alice” was “so sharp and bitter” that “no one wishes to have her in their home.”9 In an embarrassing mix-up, the Queen placed a letter to Vicky in which she complained about Alice in an envelope addressed to Alice; though “vexed” and “distressed” by the mistake, she claimed it was good for Alice to learn what her mother thought about her.10
During the Austro-Prussian war, Bertie asked once more for access to government dispatches. His request was refused, as it had been at the time of the Schleswig-Holstein war.11 But this time Bertie and Victoria were in agreement over foreign policy. Had he read the dispatches, Bertie would have seen how indefatigable his mother had been in striving to prevent what she called a German civil war. She even addressed a personal appeal to her “Beloved Brother” the King of Prussia, imploring him to throw over Bismarck and sue for peace, with predictably discouraging results, as the King was no longer in control of Prussian foreign policy.
Prussia’s victories strained Bertie’s relations with Vicky to a breaking point. Vicky was proud of her husband, Fritz, who had commanded the Prussian troops and led his country to victory. “I cannot and will not forget that I am a Prussian,” she wrote. The German states that opposed Prussia had “broken their own necks”; they had overestimated Austria’s strength, knowing full well what the consequences of Austria’s defeat would be, and they deserved their fate.12
But Vicky was conflicted. She had no sympathy with Prussian authoritarianism. She loathed Bismarck and despised her blinkered, reactionary Hohenzollern in-laws. During the war, her two-year-old son, Sigismund, died of meningitis, plunging her into deepest grief, and she was far from triumphalist about Prussia’s victories. To her credit, she did all she could to stop the German wars from tearing her family apart. Struggling to keep politics out of family life, she insisted that “one must separate one’s feelings for one’s relations quite from one’s judgement of political necessities.”13 When Bertie visited her at Potsdam that autumn, she wrote: “About Politics we will not discuss will we? They are not my doing—if they were, much w[oul]d be different.… I dislike Bismarck and disapprove his principles, but I cannot stand having my country abused.” Vicky sympathized with Bertie’s predicament: “I understand quite well what Alix’s feeling must be about the fate of her relations. I feel for her and them.”14 Bertie’s visit was a success. Vicky told the Queen that he was “kind and dear”—his face wore “an expression of quiet and content which is so pleasing to look at.”15
Bertie’s rapprochement with Vicky earned him more approval from Victoria. So pleased was she with her eldest son that she confided in him her anxiety about Affie, her current bête noire, whom she proposed to banish from the wicked flatterers of London society by sending him in command of a ship to Australia. “I know how much I can rely on you,” the Queen told Bertie, “and how steady and well-principled you are—I feel there is no one to whom I cd appeal more properly than to you.”16
Bertie and Alix rarely posed together, but there is one photograph that shows them standing side by side dressed for riding. Alix, slender and sleek in her tailored habit, looks doe-eyed at her prince. Bertie, slouching in his breeches and boots, avoids her gaze, staring moodily out of the photograph as if he wishes she weren’t there. Victoria worried that they were drifting apart, and blamed Alix for neglecting Bertie’s comfort: “She is never ready for breakfast, not being out of her room till 11 often, and poor Bertie breakfasts alone and then she alone.”17 Bertie’s easy good humor meant that relations between the couple were always cordial, but he was perhaps already tiring of his sweet-natured wife; he resented her absorption in nursery life and felt suffocated by her clinging affection.
In the autumn of 1866, Alix’s sister Dagmar (Minnie) became engaged to the Russian czarevitch, the future Alexander III. She had previously been engaged to his older brother, a sickly young man with a “worn aged face and pale and lustreless blue eyes,” but when he died of meningitis she dutifully transferred her affections to the new heir, his vast, bearlike brother.18 Minnie’s marriage was a dynastic coup for Denmark. The daughters of the Danish Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg family were like princesses in a fairy tale. Brought up privately and with great simplicity, Alix and Minnie had married two of the most eligible princes in Europe.19
Alix was pregnant once more, which meant that she was unable to travel to the wedding in St. Petersburg, and Bertie asked permission to go alone. To his surprise, Victoria gave her consent, though grudgingly (“I did not say ‘I approved,’ but only that ‘I would not object’ ”); though she was unable to resist a dig, pointing out how unfortunate it was that he remained so little at home and was always “running about.”20
In Bertie’s absence, Victoria ordered her daughter-in-law to stay with her at Windsor. She took Alix driving alone with her in the afternoons, and the two women became intimate, something that Alix declared she had always wanted, though (Vicky told Victoria) “she says she is not amusing she knows, and she fears she bores you.”21 Victoria agreed that she had long wished to be friends with Alix, reporting to Bertie that “she looks thin and at times pale,” but “I have talked much with her and have the highest opinion of her.”22
Alix missed Bertie dreadfully. When he delayed his return, leaving her to celebrate her birthday alone, she consoled herself with the thought that “my angel Bertie” was well and loved by everybody in St. Petersburg.23
Bertie was splendidly entertained in St. Petersburg. The government was so pleased with his reception that Disraeli voted £1,000 of public money to pay for the trip. Bertie caused a sensation by dancing in his kilt at a ball, and he joined a hunt where seven wolves were killed. The Russian court was notoriously lax. The czar, Alexander II, lived openly with his mistress, while his wife lay upstairs in the Winter Palace, slowly dying from tuberculosis. Scandalous rumors of Bertie’s flirtations with the pretty women of St. Petersburg reached the ears of his sister Alice.24 This was his first significant separation from Alix, and he enjoyed himself all too obviously in the company of other women.
In England, politics that winter was deadlocked over parliamentary reform. In February 1867, the Queen reluctantly opened Parliament—a gesture of support for her Conservative ministers that she regretted, as she was hissed and booed by the pro-reform crowds. For Bertie, this was a challenge too good to resist. On 11 February, when a reform demonstration marched through London, he insisted on watching, defying the advice of General Knollys, who feared a scene. Bertie drove in his brougham through the crowds, and was recognized when he reached the United Service Club in Waterloo Place, where he “was most enthusiastically cheered,” being (said Knollys) “at present very popular.” Here he watched the demonstration from an upstairs window, and Knollys was struck by the irony of “this immense popular assemblage … supposed to entertain democratic principles—certainly anything but monarchical—defiling before the Heir Apparent of the Crown.”25
The next day (Tuesday 12 February), Alix visited the theater and, driving home with the windows open, felt a slight pain in her shoulder. By Thursday the pains had spread, moving around her limbs, especially acute in her elbows and knee, and when Dr. Sieveking was called at nine thirty p.m. on Friday (the fifteenth), he found the princess, who was eight months pregnant, greatly distressed with severe pain in her right knee.26 Bertie departed for a steeplechase and dinner at Windsor, judging that her malady was not “of sufficient consequence to put off going.” In the evening she became worse, and Knollys sent two telegrams to Bertie, “without requiring him to come up.”27 The next morning he sent a third wire, begging him to return immediately.28
The Times announced that the princess had “acute rheumatism.” Medical bulletins, signed by the royal doctors, Sieveking, Jenner, and Farre, were posted daily outside Marlborough House, detailing the “pain and febrile action” from which she was suffering.29
Alix’s illness precipitated yet another premature confinement. Bertie, who told his mother he was “nervous & worried by dear Alix’s illness,” was called to her room at six a.m. on 20 February, having been up all night in anticipation of a crisis.30 The doctors feared that the rheumatism would produce an “obstruction,” but Alix gave birth to a baby girl after only thirty minutes of labor. Dr. Farre, the obstetrician, who arrived just in time for the delivery at six thirty, refused to allow chloroform, though the suffering princess “wished it very much.”31 The four-weeks-premature baby was very small.
In his diary, Knollys commented that the princess
got through this part of her sorrows well and Dr. Farre does not apprehend any additional mischief from the complications attending another complaint. The other physicians however particularly Dr. Sieveking looked more serious and Lady Macclesfield who is now in waiting … evidently considers it a matter pregnant with evil consequences.32
What Knollys meant by “another complaint” is not clear. His wording seems curiously ambivalent, and language such as “pregnant with evil” is almost apocalyptic. Dr. Jenner told the Queen: “The heart still not right, the pain in the knee very obstinate and acute. At any moment the condition might become dangerous!”33
When Victoria visited for the first time, on 27 February 1867, she found Alix “lying very low, with her poor knee covered over and supported quite high up, so that her leg was greatly above her head!” Alix was worn, thin, and emotional—tears came to her eyes when she saw the Queen. Afterward, Jenner spoke to Victoria “very seriously” about her daughter-in-law’s state.34
Alix was in such acute pain that she was often unable to sleep, and her restlessness could only be subdued by laudanum. After sitting up all night with her, Lady Macclesfield wrote: “The light way in which the Prince regards the Princess’s illness is perfectly painful (perhaps disgusting) to me and to the Queen also.”35 Bertie stayed out later than ever. “The Princess had another bad night,” raged Lady Macclesfield, “chiefly owing to the Prince promising to come in at 1 a.m. and keeping her in a perpetual fret, refusing to take her opiate for fear she should be asleep when he came. And he never came till 3 a.m.!”36
Jenner feared a crisis, and told the Queen that his patient stood on “the brink of a precipice.”37 Only then, when his wife was acutely agitated and fevered with a racing pulse, and the doctors injected morphia into her knee and gave her morphine to induce sleep, did Bertie seem to realize that “she is ill” and started to spend more time with her.38 He moved his desk into her sickroom so that he could write letters beside her. The Queen found Alix “greatly altered” and “wretchedly ill.”39 Jenner told her on 10 March that there were symptoms he disliked. Bertie wrote to Queen Louise of Denmark asking her to come to England, and this gave rise to wild speculation that Alix was on the verge of death. The Times published an official denial, dismissing the rumors as “unfounded as they are extraordinary.”40
Knollys visited, and thought her “looking very pretty” in bed, lying on her back and unable to turn or bend her knee, with a large apparatus over her legs to protect them from the bedclothes. “Her hair was loose about her shoulders, & the upper part of her figure could have formed a study for a painter.”41
Victoria found her “very low and suffering.”
“Will it never get better,” sighed Alix, and laid her head on the Queen’s shoulder.42 The inflammation was made far worse by forcibly bending the knee under anesthetic and binding it in splints to straighten it. The doctors gave her chloroform for an hour and twenty-five minutes while they readjusted the leg.43 “She was sick several times afterwards and suffered a great deal of pain,” Bertie told Victoria, “partly from the alteration of the position of the knee and fr[om] exhaustion.”44 James Paget, the surgeon who was treating Alix, told the Queen that this was “very serious,” though he hoped in time it “would get right.” When the Queen saw Alix’s leg, it “looked pitiable in all its bandages and so wasted.”45
What was wrong with Alix?
Jenner told Queen Victoria that the doctors “had no experience of any case of the kind.”46 The ladies of Alix’s household, sitting up night after night beside her bed, whispered darkly that her illness was all Bertie’s fault.47 Evil rumors began to build. Perhaps he had infected his sweet, pure wife with “Disease.” Phipps was dismissive. “I fear he leads a not very healthy life,” he wrote, “but I do not believe half the ill-natured stories I hear.”48 The previous year, Phipps had reported that Bertie frequented a place named the Midnight Club and complained that he “lowers himself” too much in pursuit of pleasure.49
“Syphilis” was the word that no one dared to mention. Rumors still persist today that Alix was the innocent victim of Bertie’s lifestyle. Syphilis was epidemic in the brothels of mid-nineteenth-century Europe, and Bertie’s encounters with prostitutes ever since his “fall” meant that he must have been exposed to it. If he was infected with the syphilis organism, Treponema pallidum, at the time of his marriage, he could hardly fail to have passed it on to Alix, as sufferers are infectious for two years. The early stages of the illness are unpleasant enough: a genital sore, then ulcers, rashes, and swollen lymph nodes. An unlucky 40 percent of sufferers experience further stages. The illness may attack the heart and sometimes the spinal cord, producing symptoms that mimic a brain tumor and end in madness. Sometimes it presents as a gumma or ulcerating tumor on the lower leg, causing a deep, gnawing pain that is worse at night and throbs remorselessly. Syphilis can damage hearing, and after her illness, Alix became increasingly deaf.50
Retrospective diagnosis of syphilis has become a game among biographers of nineteenth-century subjects, working without proper medical records to identify a disease that manifests in a bewildering variety of forms. Alix’s case history, however, is relatively well documented, because she was attended by so many doctors. In his private diary, Sieveking described her symptoms at the start of the illness: “The right knee much swollen and very painful, the face much flushed, the tongue furred, white and creamy, the pulse above 100 … great restlessness and expressed fear of ‘rheumatic fever.’ ”51 Sieveking confirmed the diagnosis of rheumatic fever, the frightening autoimmune disease triggered by a streptococcal infection in the throat, which, in the pre-penicillin era, brought risk of death and permanent heart damage. But the diagnosis seemed not to fit. In rheumatic fever the pain moves from joint to joint, causing a “flitting polyarthritis.” Alix’s pains initially followed this pattern, but after a few days the pain settled in her knee. It was this symptom that baffled the doctors.
Alix’s knee is proof positive that she was not suffering from syphilis, as “for all its protean manifestations in brain, skin, heart etc [syphilis] does not cause acute pain/swelling in a single joint … especially in the absence of symptoms in other systems.”52 Rather, she seems to have been suffering from a “septic” arthritis caused by some bacterium. Today it would respond to antibiotics. Then, there was no alternative but to stick it out.
Alix’s deafness had been noticeable ever since she arrived in England, though some thought it due to “absence,” inattention, or poor English.53 Lord Stanley noted that she was “so deaf as to be unable to follow a conversation and often to answer at cross-purposes.”54 Victoria was in no doubt about the matter, writing to Vicky: “Alas! she is deaf and everyone observes it, which is a sad misfortune.”55
According to her biographer, Georgina Battiscombe, who was herself deaf, Alix suffered from a type of deafness called otosclerosis.56 This involves a hardening of the small bone in the middle ear; it is a genetic form of deafness that strikes only women (men are carriers), and is often thought to be brought on by pregnancy. Though Queen Louise of Denmark was deaf, there is no mention of deafness among her siblings, and only one of Alix’s five children—Maud—seems to have been afflicted.
One new piece of evidence suggests a different diagnosis. Dr. Sieveking noted in his diary that, shortly after the birth of Eddy, at the urgent request of both Bertie and himself, Alix agreed to see Joseph Toynbee, who was the leading ear specialist of the day.57 Toynbee pronounced that her deafness was “essentially nervous,” and the treatment was rest; no operation was needed.‡58
In his scientific work, Toynbee was one of the first to describe otosclerosis, yet he did not diagnose this condition in Alix. By “nervous” deafness, he meant what is today known as sensorineural hearing loss, due to changes in the acoustic nerves, which act as microphones in the inner ear. “If he diagnosed that Alix had a ‘nervous’ deafness,” one specialist has written, “then it would be difficult to refute his finding, and this, in turn, would seem to rule out otosclerosis as the cause of Alix’s progressive hearing loss.”59 Whatever its cause, deafness was a crippling handicap for a woman like Alix, whose work depended on social contact.
Alix was photographed that spring, her dark-rimmed eyes and loose hair a vision of Pre-Raphaelite beauty. For Bertie, however, the horrid cage around her leg symbolized her unavailability. Mermaid-like, she could not be a real wife.
Bertie’s order page in the ledger of Poole the tailor includes the following:
A grey diagonal Angola Pea Coat, Silk breast facings, Silk sleevings and velvet collar ………………………… £7.3s
which was delivered personally by the great Mr. Poole himself. Bertie also ordered:
a pair of black French classic trousers, braid sides ……… £2:14s
a pair striped doe trousers, braid sides ……………… £2:14s.
The ledger shows the tailor cleaning and pressing thirty-four white vests (waistcoats) and altering a dress coat and fancy trousers to fit the prince’s expanding waistline: by June the tailor’s bill came to £283:8s.6d.60
Bertie’s destination was Paris, where he visited the International Exhibition staged by Napoléon III, reassuring the Queen that Alix, who had at last managed to sleep through a whole night, “says she don’t mind it at all.”61 Before he left, he attended the baby’s christening. She was named Louise; this annoyed the Queen, who made it plain that she expected a girl to be called after her. Bertie was even angrier than he had been over Victoria’s interference with George’s name: He declared it was a wish she “had no right to indulge or expect to be gratified,” as Alix was anxious to name the baby after her own mother.62 The child was given the second name of Victoria, but the Queen was not present at the christening—very few people were, as it took place in the sitting room at Marlborough House. Alix was wheeled in on her bed, looking “quite lovely” with a “white lace jacket trimmed with pink and a pink bow in her hair, the bed being covered with a blue silk coverlet.”63
The Paris Exhibition was the sort of junket that Bertie most enjoyed: rubbing shoulders with crowned heads, attending a ball for two thousand guests at the British Embassy and calling on the emperor Napoléon, whom he found “ill and worn but as kind and cordial in manner as he always has been to me.”64 In Paris, Bertie was able to pursue his own version of foreign affairs. The court of Napoléon III was notoriously depraved, and he eagerly devoured publications such as Les Amours de Napoléon III or La Femme de César, which detailed the many mistresses of the emperor.65 The sensation of the season was Jacques Offenbach’s light opera The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein, at the Théâtre des Variétés, which poked fun at the toy armies of the minor German states, and starred the voluptuous prima donna Hortense Schneider.
Bertie’s visit to the Variétés was dramatized by Émile Zola in Nana, the novel about the demimonde that he wrote twelve years later, in which Bertie is thinly disguised as the Prince of Scots. Zola’s research included a visit to the dressing room backstage at the Variétés, where Hortense Schneider had received the prince dressed in her costume as the Duchess of Gerolstein. Zola described the bearded, pink-complexioned prince as having “the sort of distinction peculiar to a man of pleasure, his square shoulders clearly indicated beneath the impeccably cut frock coat,” and imagined him in the dressing room of the seminaked singer: “The Prince, his eyes half-closed, followed the swelling lines of her bosom with the eyes of a connoisseur.” But for Zola, the prince is neither seedy nor undignified. Far from being tarnished, he transposes the demimonde into a make-believe world of kings and queens. When he drinks a toast in the actors’ cheap champagne, it’s as if they are at court, and the actors start to play new roles:
The world of the theatre was re-creating the real world in a sort of solemn farce under the hot glare of the gas.… And nobody dreamed of smiling at the strange contrast presented by this real prince, this heir to a throne, drinking a barn-stormer’s champagne, and very much at ease in this masquerade of royalty, surrounded by whores, buskers and pimps.66
General Knollys noted that the reports of Bertie’s visit were “very unsatisfactory”: “suppers after the Opera with some of the female Paris notorieties etc etc.”67 Bertie’s supposed infatuation with Hortense Schneider—she was known as Le Passage des Princes after the Paris arcade—was widely publicized.68 Another of his Paris ladies was the courtesan Giulia Beneni, nicknamed La Barucci. She owned a luxurious house at 124 Avenue des Champs-Élysées, complete with liveried footmen, a grand white-carpeted staircase with velvet-covered banisters, and a tall cabinet stuffed with jewels. When Bertie met her, she arrived forty-five minutes late, having been strictly instructed by the Duc de Gramont to be punctual. “Your Royal Highness, may I present the most unpunctual woman in France?” said the duke. Whereupon La Barucci lifted her skirts to reveal nothing but “the white rotundities of her callipygian charms.”
“Did I not tell you to behave properly to HRH?” Gramont rebuked her afterward.
“I showed him the best I have and it was free,” was the reply.69
News of Bertie’s adventures reached Vicky, who later blamed wicked Paris for corrupting him. “What mischief that very court and still more that very attractive Paris has done to English society,” she wrote. “What harm to our two eldest brothers!”70 Victoria agreed. “Your two elder brothers unfortunately were carried away by that horrid Paris, beautiful though you may think it, and that frivolous and immoral court did frightful harm to English Society … and was very bad for Bertie and Affie.”71
Aged twenty-five, Bertie was too young and too spoiled to come to terms with the fact that his beautiful wife was now a deaf cripple. In denial, he threw himself headlong into the frenzied pursuit of pleasure and late nights. Victoria, for her part, was convinced that Alix was an invalid for life. “I fear very much that she will never be what she was.” As for Bertie, she wrote, “Poor Boy, it is very sad to think of his whole existence changed and altered and dérangé by this lamentable illness.”72
Bertie was blamed for his apparent lack of concern. Lady Macclesfield complained that “the Prince (childish as ever) does not see anything serious about it.”73 Bertie was certainly immature, but perhaps his behavior had deeper roots. In spite of his outward forbearance toward Victoria, he seethed with rage. He had grown to be genuinely fond of his wife, but he resented the way his mother and sister Vicky had conspired together to trap him into an arranged marriage. People commented on his ill looks. He spent much time away from home. He was driven by the impulse to revenge himself against his mother, but the person who suffered most from this behavior was his vulnerable wife, Alix.
At Ascot in June, Bertie received a “flat reception” from the crowd when he appeared at the races without Alix, but he insisted on inviting the “fashionable female celebrities of the day” to luncheon, a party that Knollys thought in questionable taste.74 Some of these were harmless flirtations. He was spotted “spooning with Lady Filmer.”75 She was the wife of his friend Sir Edmund Filmer and a dancing partner of Bertie’s; shooting deer at Invercauld in 1865, he wrote that “I had the good fortune to have Lady Filmer with me (who also had a small Whit-worth rifle) and I enjoyed a very pleasant tête à tête with her.”§76
In his diary, Lord Stanley reported, “Much talk in society about the P[rince] of Wales and his disreputable ways of going on. He is seen at theatres paying attention to the lowest class of women, visits them at their houses etc.”77 Bertie insisted on going to Paris again in July, in spite of the opposition of General Knollys, who saw the prime minister, Lord Derby, and stated his anxiety about the visit “after the scenes I had been led to believe had taken place at the former one” and with “the Princess in such a state.”78
For Bertie, the summer of 1867 was a tipping point. He was unfaithful to Alix, not just with the “lowest class” of women, but with women in society. Perhaps to him it seemed the natural thing to do. Among the men of his set, debauchery was seen as a healthy amusement, which Bertie indulged in the same way that he drank and smoked. Alix’s illness seemed to sanction his return to bachelor ways.79 But if he expected that he could use women for sex and then discard them, he was to be disillusioned. Many of the women with whom he began relationships that summer refused to go quietly. Blackmail, pregnancy, even a court case were to return to haunt him. There was no such thing as a relationship without consequences.
Alix was not prepared to sink gracefully into social death as a sofa-bound invalid. While Bertie was in Paris, she drove out for the first time in the garden at Marlborough House. Accompanied by Princess Louise, her friend among Bertie’s sisters, she had herself carried in a wheeled chair over a platform level with the carriage, and the chair placed where the carriage seat had been removed. Defying doctor’s orders, she was determined to appear at a military review on Bertie’s return; General Knollys was mightily relieved when the review was canceled, believing that if Alix had appeared alongside Victoria, “the Princess would have received an ovation but it would have been at the expense of the Q[ueen].”80
By mid-August, Alix was sufficiently recovered to travel with Bertie to Germany, to Wiesbaden, the capital of Dessau, the spa town recommended by the doctors. Accompanied by their three tiny children, twenty-five servants, and a retinue of courtiers and doctors, the Waleses steamed up the Rhine. Alix sat on the hot deck in her wheelchair in a specially constructed cabin and amused herself by drawing all day. The Prussian flag flying on the stern of the boat upset her, and she became agitated when a crowd gathered on shore to see her being carried out of the ship in a sedan chair and into a carriage: Knollys noted her extreme dislike of appearing in public as an invalid.81
At Wiesbaden, Alix took daily baths under the supervision of Paget, her doctor, and Bertie reported her progress to the Queen: “Every day she walks on crutches and can put her foot to the ground and swing it about.”82 Bertie itched to escape downriver to the fleshpots and gambling tables of Baden, a prospect that filled Knollys with horror, on account of the “disgraceful tone” of society there and especially Bertie’s friend Marie of Baden, the wicked Duchess of Hamilton, and her scandalous son the duke, whose character was so “irretrievably lost” that there could only be “contamination” in associating with him.‖83 This was just the sort of company that Bertie most enjoyed and, ever the rebellious adolescent, he wrote to Victoria: “I know, dear Mama, so well what these German Baths are, and I think I know who to avoid and who not—and not to compromise myself in any way. I know that Vicky has written to you on the subject, but one would imagine that she thought me 10 or 12 years old and not nearly 26.”84
Wiesbaden was within driving distance of Rumpenheim, the white-fronted, green-shuttered schloss set in dull, flat countryside on the banks of the River Main near Frankfurt where Alix’s family spent their summer holidays. Here the relations greeted one another with affectionate kisses a dozen times over, astounding the prim, buttoned-up English; they spent long days out of doors, dined at five in an overcrowded dining room, and played rumbustious evening games.85 This noisy, boisterous family life was oxygen to Alix, the sort of world she herself tried to re-create at Sandringham. Victoria thought the family party there “the very worst society for Bertie possible which my Angel … said he must be kept out of”; but she needn’t have worried, as Bertie found the early dinners and healthy games deadly dull.86
The German royalty gathered at Rumpenheim inhabited a doomed world that was relentlessly hemorrhaging power to Prussia. Charles Carrington, who accompanied Bertie on a visit, found it a melancholy experience—“a huge building inhabited by Grand Dukes and Grand Duchesses who are in short street.”87 Alix’s grandfather, the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel, had grievously miscalculated by supporting Austria in the 1866 war against Prussia, and Bismarck now took his revenge. That September, the electora was forced to sign an agreement whereby he surrendered political power over Hesse in exchange for keeping his personal fortune.88 Little wonder that when Alix and Bertie visited, the anti-Prussian feeling was “most rabid.”
“They all seemed to have been bit by some Prussian mad dog,” wrote Knollys, “the slightest allusion set the whole party[—]and we were 36 at dinner[—]into agitation, at which my friends the Russians seemed highly amused.”89 Nor was it surprising that Alix shared their feelings.
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.”c101
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.”d102 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.
* The Reverend Robinson Duckworth, who was appointed tutor to Prince Leopold in 1866, was a friend of Charles Dodgson—better known by his pseudonym of Lewis Carroll—and he was on the boating trip on the Thames with Alice Liddell and her two sisters on 4 July 1862, when Dodgson told the story that became Alice in Wonderland. Duckworth features in the book as the Duck in the Pool of Tears, but he had no links with the court at the time the story was written, and there is no evidence that the Queen of Hearts was a portrait of Victoria.
† As a concession to Denmark, the Treaty of Prague after the war provided that Schleswig should be ceded to Prussia only on condition that the Danish-speaking districts were allowed a free vote to join Denmark. In spite of strenuous efforts by Bertie, Bismarck never allowed this plebiscite to take place.
‡ Toynbee died two years later experimenting on himself, trying to prove that tinnitus could be relieved by inhaling a lethal cocktail of hydrogen cyanide and chloroform, and then holding his nose.
§ Bertie wrote to Sir Edmund Filmer, enclosing photos for Lady Filmer, “for which I must apologise—as she will be quite bored possessing so many of me—but the waste paper basket is always useful.” (Hibbert, Edward VII, p. 92.) This hardly suggests that Bertie was having a passionate affair with the wife.
‖ The Duchess of Hamilton was a daughter of the Grand Duke of Baden; her mother, Stephanie Beauharnais, was an adopted daughter of Napoléon I.
a Alix’s grandfather died in September 1867 and was succeeded as Landgrave by his brother.
b Madame Didier is a mystery woman who has eluded genealogical research. She always wrote in French, and she was probably Herminie Julian de Rascas, the wife of one Marie François Calixte Emmanuel Pina de St. Didier (1814–87), officier armée russe, but we cannot be sure.
c “I am sending you the Marius buttons which I promised you at Wiesbach, and I hope that you will have occasion to wear them often.”
d “I hope to be able to pay you a visit between 4 and 5 this afternoon if that is convenient for you.”