In 1867, Walter Bagehot, editor of The Economist, published his famous book on the English Constitution, which, like most books, seems to have passed Bertie by. One of the fallacies Bagehot skewered was the idea that it was the function of the Crown to give a moral example to the nation. Queen Victoria’s domestic virtues were admirable, but not an essential part of her role, claimed Bagehot, and it was unfair to criticize her son for not following her example. “All the world, whatever is most attractive, whatever is most seductive, has always been offered to the Prince of Wales of the day, and always will be. It is not rational to expect the best virtue where temptation is applied in the most trying form at the frailest time of human life.”1
Queen Victoria did not agree. She bombarded Bertie with letters, warning about “the frivolity, the love of pleasure, self-indulgence, luxury and idleness” of the aristocracy which, she thought, “resembles the time before the French Revolution.… It is, dear Child, in your power to do much to check this,” she wrote. “It is for this reason that I always urge you so strongly not to frequent Races, for they lead to every species of evil, gambling etc.”2
Victoria envisaged Bertie acting as “social sovereign,” giving a moral example to the nation, as she and Albert had done before. As she told Knollys: “The respectability of the Queen’s and Prince’s Court, without its ever having tended to austerity or exclusion of amusement,—but quite the contrary,—was universally acknowledged to be a great safeguard to the Throne and Country—and it is therefore so absolutely necessary that the P[rince] and P[rince]ss, who are too young themselves to know of the effect of all these things, sh[oul]d be very particular in distinguishing People whose characters are not respected—by wh[ich] she means, not asking them to dinner—not down to Sandringham—and above all, not going to their houses.”3
If Victoria really expected Bertie to provide moral leadership, she was being utterly unrealistic. She knew it, too; as she confided to one of her ladies, she felt it her duty to write to Bertie about the state of society, but “I fear it will be of little use, as he is far too weak and self-indulgent, but still it is a duty wh[ich] I must do,—and I trust some of the advice may still remain dinning in his ears.”4
Many of the members of Bertie’s court of whom Victoria most disapproved had, in fact, defected to Marlborough House from Windsor. One defector especially frowned upon by Victoria was Louise, Duchess of Manchester.
Nine years older than Bertie, Louise von Alten was the daughter of a Hanoverian count. Her husband, the Duke of Manchester, was a B-list duke of little brain, but Louise was a social climber with a nose for power. Her ambition was to command the very pinnacle of society by gaining appointment as Mistress of the Robes. The highest court position open to a woman, this was always held by a duchess, whose role it was to control the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting and organize state ceremonies. The office had been monopolized by Harriet, Duchess of Sutherland, Queen Victoria’s close friend, throughout the long ascendancy of the Whigs;* but in 1858 the Tory prime minister Lord Derby appointed Louise Mistress of the Robes. For the twenty-six-year-old German girl to leapfrog to the peak of London society was an astonishing coup. When the government fell and she resigned in June 1859, Victoria took leave of her with regret, “for she is really a very pleasant, nice, sensible person.”5 By 1863, the Queen had changed her mind. Louise received no invitation to Bertie’s wedding, a slashing snub. Perhaps the Queen had learned that Louise had gained her appointment as Mistress of the Robes as a result of a deal she made with Derby before he became prime minister.6 More likely she was put off by stories about Louise’s wild behavior. Playing a boisterous game of hare and hounds, Louise fell over in a ditch to reveal a shocking pair of scarlet tartan knickerbockers beneath her crinoline.7 Victoria complained that “the D[uche] ss of Manchester is become very fast—flirts, and coquets and is much talked about. I cannot take her again as Mistress of the Robes.”8
Realizing that social leadership had passed from the Queen to Marlborough House, the duchess now threw herself at the Prince of Wales. “No one knows how gloriously beautiful a woman can be who did not see the Duchess of Manchester when she was thirty,” old gentlemen would later recall.9 Photographs of a short, affectedly posed woman turning her profile to the camera make this hard to credit, but being a “beauty” in the 1860s was as much a matter of playing a social role as possessing regular features. Beauty was a cult, and men competed to pay homage. When Bertie made an afternoon call on the Duchess of Manchester, he noted in his diary: “Found her well and looking lovely. I stayed there about 45 minutes.”10
Bertie’s admiration for Louise’s looks was inflated by the gossips into scandal. There was talk that the duchess was trying to seduce the Prince of Wales, and it was rumored that she had been warned off and ordered to leave Bertie alone.11
But Louise was never Bertie’s mistress. On the contrary, she took care to befriend Alix as well, creating a role for herself as social mentor and confidante to Marlborough House.12 This infuriated the Queen, who told Knollys that Louise was “not respected”; people avoided her “in every way,” and it was the duty of the prince and princess to “let her feel that her conduct has obliged them to be distant towards her.”13 What Louise had done to deserve this latest explosion was to conduct an affair with another friend of Bertie’s: Lord Hartington, rising Whig politician and heir to the Duke of Devonshire. The affair was discreetly managed—she always addressed him as Lord Hartington, and he called her Duchess. Louise was heard to let slip her guard only once, when she remarked, “Harty darling, stand me a stamp.”14 But it was an open secret—they were treated like an engaged couple and asked together to dinner parties—and it meant that the doors of Victoria’s court slammed firmly shut on her.
Bertie remained loyal. In February 1868, he stayed a week with Louise at Kimbolton, the Manchesters’ seat in Huntingdonshire. Victoria tried to stop him going, but Bertie insisted, staunchly defending Louise (“I do not like to hear her abused”).15 It was his first visit in six years—he had previously stayed with them when at Cambridge—and it marked Louise’s full endorsement by Marlborough House.
Alix remained behind at Sandringham, unable to face the journey. “I hate when he is away,” she wrote; without “my darling husband” the house seemed “empty and desolate and lonely.”16 At Kimbolton there was hunting all day and dancing all night. Carrington, who was a fellow guest, found it “a very hard week.” “We scarcely got to bed at all.”17 They posed on the steps, dressed for riding to hounds; Louise, imperious in top hat, veil, and wasp-waisted riding habit, stands beside Bertie, looking jaunty in his pink hunting coat. The duchess had “arrived.” Her closeness to the prince underlined her position at the very heart of society. As the “Double Duchess” of Devonshire (she married Hartington in 1892), installed at Chatsworth, heavily rouged and addicted to gambling and bridge, Louise clung on until 1911.
Bertie’s household at the time of his marriage consisted largely of men who had served him before 1863. General Knollys headed the household as comptroller and treasurer. One of Bertie’s equerries, Major Teesdale, had been picked by Albert to attend him at White Lodge in 1858; another, Captain Charles Grey, had accompanied him as equerry on his trip to Italy. Bertie’s old tutor at Oxford, Herbert Fisher, became his private secretary.18 This was a household of which even Albert would have approved, and Bertie set about changing it as soon as he was settled in Marlborough House. By 1867, General Knollys was in a perpetual panic at his inability to control his royal master or persuade him to comply with the Queen’s commands. The Queen implored Bertie to gather around him “really good” people, as Albert had done, but he insisted on surrounding himself with cronies.19 His friend Arthur Ellis, whom he made equerry in 1867, belonged to the much-intermarried Ellis/Hardinge dynasty of courtiers, and Victoria raised no objection to his appointment. But she complained about the appointment as equerry of Captain Oliver Montagu, a younger son of the Earl of Sandwich and a “rollicking” officer in the Blues, whom Bertie called a “wicked boy.”20 Another friend of Bertie’s to whom the Queen objected was Charles Carrington. Bertie wished to make him an equerry, but Carrington declined the offer after consulting his father, who said: “You are his friend now, if you are a member of his household you will be his servant—he may get tired of you: and your position as equerry would not be a pleasant one.”21
Bertie’s masterstroke was the appointment of General Knollys’s son Francis as his private secretary in 1870. A dapper little man with shiny black hair and a beard cut into a strip down his chin, Francis Knollys resembled an Italian waiter. The Queen thought he was not fit for the post. “You ought to have a clever, able man, capable of being of use to you, and of giving you advice,” she told Bertie. Though “very good natured,” Francis Knollys was “not considered clever by anyone.”22 He was too deeply involved with Bertie’s circle for the Queen’s liking; worse, he was a Liberal in politics. Bertie mollified his mother by keeping on the seventy-three-year-old general, and pretending that Francis was merely sharing the work; the general, said Bertie, was “delighted” and felt that the thirty-three-year-old Francis was now “perfectly qualified” for the post.23 The appointment marked a decisive shift. All important correspondence at Marlborough House crossed the desk of Francis Knollys. Bertie had at last emancipated himself from Victoria’s court.
The rule of the Knollys family over Marlborough House was completed when Francis’s sister, Charlotte, became bedchamber woman to Alexandra in 1872. The Ellis family were almost as deeply entrenched: Arthur Ellis’s sister, Mary, who was married to Sir Arthur Hardinge, an equerry to Queen Victoria, was lady-in-waiting to Alexandra.
Smoking, which the Queen abhorred, was the badge of Bertie’s court. Bertie smoked constantly; photographs from this date invariably show him with a cigar or cigarette in hand. He tried to introduce smoking in the morning room at White’s Club, then the smartest club in London, and when the older members voted against it, the prince and his friends seceded in protest to found the Marlborough Club.†24 At 52 Pall Mall, just across the road from Marlborough House, the club was an annex to the Wales court. Bertie, who visited daily, and personally selected the four hundred members, commissioned Vanity Fair’s Carlo Pellegrini (“Ape”) to draw caricatures of the twenty-two founder members. The satirist Samuel Beeton sketched the club in verse in 1874:
A fragrant odour of the choicest weeds,
A hum of voices, pitched in high-born tones;
A score of fellows, some of our best breeds,
The Heir-apparent to the British throne25
Once Bertie offered Pellegrini a drink in the morning room, and the artist, emboldened by his success, replied, “Ring the bell.” “The Prince of Wales, without a word, rang the bell. To the servant who entered, he said, ‘Please show Mr. Pellegrini out,’ and never spoke to him again.”26 For all his affability, Bertie knew how to pull rank, perhaps the least attractive of royal characteristics. His informality was neatly encapsulated by a courtier who remarked: “Yes, His Royal Highness is always ready to forget his rank, as long as everyone else remembers it.”27
Several Rothschilds were among the original club members. They received the seal of royal approval in 1868, when Bertie went stag hunting at Mentmore. He traveled down on the train with Natty Rothschild, smoking all the way; at Mentmore he devoured a breakfast so enormous that it seemed “as if he did not mean to go out,” and then rode very well all day. Natty noted admiringly that the prince was “marvellously strong,” in spite of the fact that for the past week he had been “sitting up night after night smoking etc and has never had more than 4 hours’ sleep.”28 Natty was a Cambridge friend of Bertie, but even so, the immensely successful Jewish Rothschilds had had to struggle to gain admission to the top set. When Bertie was invited to a Rothschild ball in 1865, Lord Spencer, who was Groom of the Stole to the Prince of Wales, strongly advised him to refuse: The Rothschilds, he said, “are very worthy people but they essentially hold their position from wealth and perhaps the accidental beauty of the first daughter they brought out in the world.”29 The snobbish Spencer failed to see that the Rothschilds were valuable to Bertie precisely because of their wealth. Bertie—to do him justice—invited a number of Jews to join his inner circle, and recognized that their cosmopolitan networks abroad were indispensable when he traveled.30 Lacking the anti-Semitic prejudices of many Victorian Englishmen, he was more than happy to trade social recognition for Rothschild cash and company.
Bertie’s court fool was an elongated dandy named Christopher Sykes. Ten years Bertie’s senior, he was the bachelor second son of Sir Tatton Sykes, a boorish hunting squire who owned vast tracts of northeast England. Bertie first stayed with Sykes at Brantingham Thorpe, his house in Yorkshire, in 1869, and soon “the great Christopher,” as the prince called him, was to be spotted unfolding his giant frame in the inevitable house-party photographs, “the head always at the characteristic tilt, the clothes always a little more beautiful than the imagination would evoke.”31
At the Marlborough Club one night Bertie emptied a glass of brandy over his friend’s head. As the liquor trickled down his face and golden beard, Sykes moved not a muscle. There was an anxious silence, and then he gravely bowed and said: “As your Royal Highness pleases.” Sykes, who was a sycophantic snob, probably saw no humor in his performance. Bertie, like a child, couldn’t repeat the joke too often; every time Sykes dutifully obliged. And always the courtiers guffawed until their sides ached.32 Sykes had been beaten by his brutish father as a boy, and he was complicit in Bertie’s rituals of humiliation. But Bertie’s treatment of him was not simple bullying. The reason he tipped brandy over Sykes was that his friend was drunk. Most of the stories about Christopher Sykes revolve around his alcoholism, and drunkenness was the one vice Bertie abhorred.
Marlborough House was not just about such manly things as smoking and practical jokes. Alix made the new court the leader of fashion. Whatever she wore, other women rushed to follow. Her image was endlessly replicated in cartes de visite—the photographs pasted onto cards that started to appear in the 1860s. A study of photographs registered for copyright shows that royalty tops the list, and Alexandra was the most frequently photographed, with more images than either Bertie or Victoria.‡33
Madame Elise, the Regent Street dressmaker and one of the pioneers of haute couture, became royal warrant holder to the princess in 1867, and Alix’s patronage assured the house’s success.34 Alix had a dress allowance of £10,000, but she also had to contend with the disapproval of her mother-in-law. When Alix visited Paris, the Queen implored her not to spend too much on clothes. “There is … a very strong feeling in the country against the luxuriousness, extravagance and frivolity of society and everyone points to my simplicity,” wrote Victoria. Rather than vie with the fine London ladies, Alix should be “as different as possible by great simplicity which is more elegant.”35 Bertie bought Alix only two frocks in Paris, “simple ones, as they make them far better here than in London, but if there is anything I dislike it is extravagance on outré dresses—at any rate in my wife,” he told Victoria.36 The Empress Eugénie wore crinolines and enormous dresses designed by Charles Frederick Worth that were heavily satirized in Punch, but by 1869 the imperial court was sinking into decadence, and Worth’s work was perhaps too strongly identified with the regime for Alix to buy his clothes.37 Not until 1878 did Alix visit the shop of the great couturier Worth.
Alix developed her own distinctive style—not cutting-edge, but always right for every occasion. Conscious of her beauty—how could she not be?—she thrived on the admiring glances she attracted in glittering ballrooms. She walked with a limp, carried an elegant cane, and perfected a technique on the dance floor known as the “Alexandra glide.” She learned to ride sidesaddle again, crooking her left leg rather than the customary right one, and keeping her stiff right leg straight—she thought it “[looked] ugly!!!”38 She concealed the scar on her neck with high collars of lace or velvet, and many-rowed collars of pearls.§
On an average of twenty-seven days a year in the late 1860s, Bertie cut ribbons, ate luncheons and dinners, adorned fetes, opened bazaars, planted trees, and laid foundation stones.39 His good works attracted little attention at the time, partly because charity was seen as belonging to the female sphere; it wasn’t real work of the sort Prince Albert had done; but, in fact, Bertie pioneered the role of “welfare monarch.”40 He took his role as president or patron of charities seriously, chairing meetings and speaking at dinners. As president of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, for instance, he made a point of visiting the victims of the Irish Fenians’ Clerkenwell bombing (13 December 1867), telling the Queen: “I am so glad now to have an excuse of going as often as I can.… A kind word or cheerful look, I think, helps and cheers them in their sufferings.”41
In 1868, he paid an official visit to Ireland. To appease the Irish nationalist Fenians, Prime Minister Disraeli proposed a royal visit, “as during two centuries, the Sovereign has only passed twenty-one days in Ireland.”42 Victoria agreed, though she grumbled to Bertie that the highlight of the visit was the Punchestown races, which would strengthen the belief, “already far too prevalent, that your chief object is amusement.”43
Everyone assumed that the prince would visit Ireland alone, but Alix had other ideas. Though almost six months pregnant, and still convalescent from her knee, she wrote an appeal to Victoria that was as emotional as it was unpunctuated: “I have a sort of very strong wish and feeling, if I may say so, to go with my Bertie this time to Ireland, and as three medical men don’t see any objection I feel I [would] much rather go (although I must say it won’t be very amusing for me) than be left behind in a state of fever about him the whole time which I don’t think can be very good for me now and as I really feel so well and my leg is so much stronger I feel I can as well go to balls etc there than here and as for the journey I don’t really much mind that.”44
This was an appeal the Queen could not resist; she always found it hard to refuse Alix. Thus began what The Times described as “the Danish conquest of Ireland.” Attended by Mrs. Stonor, her closest confidante among her ladies, the pregnant princess charmed the crowds, all the more because they knew (as the papers put it) that “she struggled against temporary indisposition and some influences of no slight weight in order to accompany her husband.”45 Alix the suffering, wronged princess personified the romance of monarchy in a way that Bertie never could—even in London, cheers for the princess were always given with “extraordinary vigour.” A hundred thousand people turned out at the Punchestown races to catch a sight of prince and princess. But the success of the Irish tour was, as Victoria cynically wrote, “of no real use.”46
Victoria fretted about Alix’s “miserable, puny” children. “I can’t tell you how these poor, frail, little fairies distress me,” she told Vicky.47 But when she suggested to Bertie that he and Alix should spend the summer with the children in the country, he was indignant. “It would doubtless be far pleasanter for us to live more in the country,” he replied tartly, “but as you know we have certain duties to fulfil here.… Your absence from London, renders it more necessary that we should do all we can.”48
Bertie urged Victoria to appear in public. He regretted her refusal to open Parliament. No doubt she disapproved of William Gladstone, the incoming prime minister, for introducing a bill disestablishing the Irish Church—as it happened, so did Bertie: but “I fear that the people do not know your reason, and will feel much disappointed and vexed to miss the pageant and the éclat which your opening Parlmt [sic] always gives.”49 Victoria protested that the noise of the London traffic gave her headaches, but Bertie insisted: “I feel sure that if you were to drive in the Parks and be seen occasionally there … the people would be overjoyed beyond measure. It is all very well for Alix and me to drive or ride in the Park—it has not the same effect as when you do it, and I say thank God! that such is the case, as we live in radical times, and [the] more the people see the Sovereign, the better it is for the people and the country.”50
Bertie had touched Victoria’s weak spot. Her stubborn refusal to appear after seven years of widowhood was increasingly criticized. In 1868 she published Leaves of Our Life in the Highlands, a collection of extracts from her Balmoral journal in Albert’s time, which was a surprise bestseller: The cheap edition sold eighty thousand copies within weeks, to the delight of the Queen, who thought she had discovered a way of reaching her people without appearing in public.51 But in May 1868 she was savaged in the press for neglecting her duty, leaving Windsor, and traveling six hundred miles to Balmoral just as the Conservative government seemed about to fall. The “cruel” press criticism caused her pain and shattered nerves, which, in turn, dictated rest in order to avoid a breakdown.52 No doubt the forty-nine-year-old Queen’s frequent headaches and swollen feet were signs, as Vicky wrote, that she was approaching “the most trying and unpleasant” stage in a woman’s life.53 The menopausal monarch was no slouch, as a glance at her voluminous correspondence reveals. Each day she spent many hours at her desk, often writing letters and in her journal until well after midnight. It has been estimated that she wrote 2,500 words every day of her adult life, penning a total of sixty million in the course of her reign.54 But her neurotic unwillingness to come out of widowly seclusion meant that she depended on Bertie to perform public duties, and he seemed strangely lacking in any sense of the limits on a prince’s behavior. Locked into a dysfunctional relationship that made them oblivious to the world outside the palace, mother and son drifted toward catastrophe.
A photograph of Bertie in June 1868 shows him jauntily dressed in a double-breasted coat edged with braid, and soft checked-tweed trousers. Not for the fashion-conscious prince the formal Victorian male uniform of frock coat and sober black. He wears a flower in his buttonhole and patent leather boots. He carries gloves, cane, and top hat: essential kit for the man about town paying calls.
While Alix awaited her confinement at Marlborough House, Bertie was at liberty to make calls on ladies as he pleased. The women of his household must sometimes have felt that he considered them to be his personal harem. Once he asked Alix’s lady-in-waiting Mary Hardinge if he might visit her in her private apartments:
Without coyness or embarrassment … [she] looked at him calmly and agreed, saying she would await him. Later, she went into her rooms, changed into her very grandest dress and put on her finest jewels as though she were to attend a great state occasion. In due course the Prince came to her apartment, knocked and she called for him to come in. He saw how magnificently she was dressed and was surprised and taken aback; for a moment or two he didn’t speak—and he then asked her if it was necessary to dress so splendidly for a private conversation? To which [she] replied “If your Royal Highness does me the honour of paying me a visit, I wear the clothes that are suitable for such an occasion.” With that he bade her “goodnight” and departed—and she breathed a sigh of relief.55
One address that Bertie visited often that summer of 1868 was number 6, Chesham Place, off Belgrave Square. This was the house that Lady Mordaunt had taken for the season. Harriett Mordaunt was the twenty-year-old wife of Sir Charles Mordaunt, a Warwickshire MP. She was the daughter of Sir Thomas Moncreiffe, a well-connected Perthshire baronet, and two of her sisters—Helen, who married Sir Charles Forbes, and Georgie, the wife of the fabulously rich Lord Dudley—were friends of Bertie’s. Harriett had known Bertie since she was seventeen, when he asked her to stay at Sandringham, and an exchange of photographs and letters took place.
The eighteen or so letters that Bertie wrote to Harriett over the next few years are so innocuous that it is hard to believe that this was anything more than a social friendship. For example, he wrote on 7 May 1867:
My dear Lady Mordaunt,
Many thanks for your letter, and I am very sorry that I should have given you so much trouble looking for the ladies’ umbrella for me at Paris. I am very glad to hear that you enjoyed your stay there. I shall be going on Friday next and as the Princess is so much better, shall hope to remain a week there. If there is any commission I can do for you there it will give me the greatest pleasure to carry it out. I regret very much not to have been able to call upon you since your return, but hope to do so when I come back from Paris, and have an opportunity of making the acquaintance of your husband.56
Believe me yours very sincerely,
Albert Edward
A lady’s umbrella could perhaps be construed as a metaphor for male impotence, and Bertie’s letter could be read as a coded reference to Harriett’s husband, but Bertie could equally well have meant exactly what he said without intending any double meaning.57 There was gossip, nonetheless. When Harriett became engaged to Sir Charles Mordaunt, Lord Dudley took his future brother-in-law aside and warned him of the dangerous intimacy that Harriett’s parents had allowed to exist between her and the prince. And Harriett, who was a bubbly girl, prone to hysterics, sometimes behaved in a strange manner. Young men were startled (or charmed) to find her giving them passionate embraces. Soon after she was married, sharp-eyed servants started to keep diaries recording the behavior of Lady Mordaunt.
Once or twice a week at about four o’clock, Bertie would drive up to the house in Chesham Place in an anonymous hansom cab. In the hall he would hand his hat, gloves, and cane to Bird, the butler. This was a sign that the meeting was prearranged, as etiquette dictated that the gentleman who made an uninvited call should sit with hat, gloves, and cane on the floor beside his chair, signifying the fleeting and casual nature of the visit. The prince would enter the drawing room, where Harriett waited for him alone. Her husband was never at home when Bertie called; he was busy in the House of Commons, or competing in pigeon-shooting matches at the newly established Hurlingham Club in Fulham.‖ Bird received instructions from Lady Mordaunt that “no one else was to be admitted after his Royal Highness came.”58
Afternoons were the accepted time for adultery, rushed and uncomfortable though it must have been in crinoline and stays on a sofa. But what took place in the hour and a half or so when Bertie was alone in the drawing room with Harriett was not witnessed. The servants had their suspicions, but nothing improper was ever reported.
On 15 June 1868, Sir Charles Mordaunt departed on a fishing holiday to Norway, leaving his wife behind. While he was away, Harriett saw a great deal of a friend named Lord Cole. One night Cole dined with her, and stayed on alone after the guests had left until one a.m. Meanwhile, on 6 July, Princess Alexandra gave birth to her fourth child, a daughter, wisely named Victoria. The Queen thought the baby a “mere little red lump,” and joked that her grandchildren were being born at the rate of rabbits in Windsor Park.59
The following week, Sir Charles returned unexpectedly to Walton Hall, his Warwickshire home, having cut short his fishing holiday. It was a blazing hot summer’s day, and in front of the house he saw his wife in her pony carriage. She was showing off the two white driving ponies she had bought a few months before from the Sandringham stables. On the steps of the house, admiring her, stood a man—none other than the Prince of Wales.
Bertie hurriedly departed. Shortly afterward, Sir Charles ordered the groom to bring the two ponies round onto the lawn. Dragging Harriett down the steps, he shot the animals dead in front of her.
The whispered scandal was misery for Alix, who clung obsessively to “my Bertie.” Her leg was still sore—Bertie reported that she had at last been able to “valse” with him—and now her husband decided to take her away to spend the winter abroad, beginning with Denmark.60
By running away from the gossip and pleasing Alix, Bertie annoyed the Queen. There was the usual tug-of-war about taking the children out of the country. Alix wanted the three eldest, Eddy, Georgie, and Louise, to spend Christmas with her parents at Fredensborg, leaving baby Victoria behind at home, but the Queen forbade the one-year-old Louise to travel. She gave a grudging assent for the two boys, but only if the doctors agreed: “They are the Children of the Country and I shall be blamed for allowing any risk to be run.”61
Alix implored Victoria to relent over Louise, who was a sickly child: “I would prefer to give up the trip rather than leave the little darling behind. You will understand this best, my angel mother, and therefore I speak so openly to you.”62 No one, not even Vicky, dared to appeal to Victoria’s feelings in this way, but for once the Queen resisted Alix’s charms and accused her of being “very selfish” and “unreasonable.” This provoked a furious outburst from Bertie. “Alix has made herself nearly quite ill with worry of all this,” he told the Queen, “but what she has felt most are the words you have used regarding her. Ever since she has been your daughter in law, I think she has tried to meet your wishes in every way—and you have never said an unkind word to or of her.” Selfish she most certainly was not, “and her whole life is wrapt up in her Children.” Was it not inconsistent, he demanded, to forbid Alix to travel home to her parents with her children when Vicky and Alice regularly brought their babies with them to England?63
At this Victoria wisely gave way, as she always did in an unwinnable situation. Little Louise accompanied her parents to Fredensborg.
Six weeks with Alix’s family bored Bertie. The weather on Denmark’s windswept sands made it almost impossible to go out, and there was nothing to shoot except foxes.64 A bear-shooting expedition with the King of Sweden was spoiled by fog, though the King inducted Bertie as a freemason, which annoyed Victoria.65 Alix wept bitterly when the time came to leave her parents and the “children of the nation” were sent home. They were packed off to stay with Queen Victoria, who grumbled about having the house at Osborne “crammed full” of grandchildren and complained that they were spoiled.66 Irked by his mother’s remarks, Bertie wrote a tart letter warning her not to be too strict with the grandchildren lest they should grow to dislike her, “and we should naturally wish them to be very fond of you, as they were in Denmark of Alix’s parents.”67
From Denmark, Bertie and Alix proceeded to Berlin, dreading the meeting with Vicky, who, said Bertie, had become “so elated and proud” since Prussia’s victories.68 Bertie was invested with the order of the Black Eagle, but it was Alix who took Berlin by storm, captivating the King of Prussia, in spite of the spat of the previous summer. The popularity of the Danish Rose with the people of Berlin was such that the Queen of Prussia became quite jealous and picked a quarrel. When Alix said, “I thank your Majesty for all your kindness and friendship,” the Queen, who wanted Alix to call her Aunt Augusta, although she was not, in fact, her aunt, snapped: “It is very impolite of you. By the way, you may call me as you wish, it doesn’t make any difference to me.” Whereupon she turned her back on Alix and stalked off.69
From Berlin, the party traveled to Vienna, and then from Trieste they sailed to Alexandria for a cruise down the Nile. Letters from Victoria pursued Bertie throughout the journey, complaining about the “quantities of extraordinary people” he had invited to meet them in Cairo.70 One of these was the Queen’s bête noire, the Duke of Sutherland, “whose style is not a good one in any way.”71 Even worse was Samuel Baker, the explorer who had discovered the source of the Nile, invited by Bertie to act as a guide, abhorred by Victoria because it was said that he had bought his wife in a slave auction and lived with her before he married her.72
The Nile cruise was one of the happiest times of Alix’s life. A procession of barges towed by five steamers glided in a floating court. Bertie and Alix lived on the Alexandra dahabeah with a lady-in-waiting (Mrs. Grey) and three maids. Bertie’s friend Carrington and Alix’s admirer Oliver Montagu traveled on a luxurious steamer. The Duke of Sutherland and his party, including the naturalist Richard Owen and journalist W. H. Russell, who published an account of the journey, sailed behind in another steamer, as did the Egyptian khedive. “You will doubtless think we have too many ships,” Bertie told Victoria, “but … in the East so much is thought of show that it became almost a necessity.”73
For Alix, having Bertie to herself was paradise. As for Bertie, Samuel Baker, who excelled as a big-game hunter, was the ideal companion. “I cannot say how glad I am to have asked him to accompany us here,” Bertie told Victoria.74 Theirs was a different age. Bertie shot a crocodile with eighty eggs inside it, and Alix adopted a ten-year-old Nubian boy named Ali Achmet, who, in spite of his subsequent baptism at Sandringham, turned out to be a compulsive thief, loathed by all the servants.
From Paris, where they stayed on the journey home, Bertie wrote: “Sad stories have indeed reached our ears from London of ‘scandals in high life’—which is indeed much to be deplored—and still more so, the way in which (to use a common Proverb) they ‘wash their dirty linen in public!’ ”75
The dirty linen belonged to Harriett Mordaunt. At the end of February she had given birth to a premature daughter, probably an eight-months baby. Soon afterward, she started to say strange things. She asked the midwife whether the baby was “diseased.” She said that the baby came from the time when her husband Sir Charles was away in Norway. She was sure the father of the child was Lord Cole. Harriett seemed indifferent toward her baby, but when she noticed a discharge coming from her eyes, she became distraught. She told the midwife that Sir Frederick Johnstone, Bertie’s old Oxford friend, was a “fearfully diseased man.”a76
Convinced that the child was infected with venereal disease, Harriett insisted on making a confession to her husband. “Charlie you are not the father of that child,” she declared. “Lord Cole is the father of it and I am the cause of its blindness.” She told him that she had been very wicked. “With who?” asked her startled husband. “With Lord Cole, Sir Frederick Johnstone and the Prince of Wales, and with others, often and in open day.”77 Harriett confidently expected her husband to forgive her, but she had misread him badly. Sir Charles was a proud man, rigid and insecure. The shock and humiliation of being cuckolded was more than he could bear. He determined on revenge. He wanted a divorce, and he wanted to see his wife’s lovers, especially the Prince of Wales, in the witness box.
At the Mordaunts’ Warwickshire home, an appalling tragedy was now enacted. Harriett found herself deserted by her husband, bullied by his family, surrounded by spying servants, and repeatedly examined by doctors. Sir Charles interrogated the servants and ransacked her desk, finding the eighteen letters from the Prince of Wales. Soon the lawyers became involved, as he prepared to sue for divorce.
Harriett’s family were hardly more sympathetic, being determined above all to protect the family honor and save themselves from disgrace. The Moncreiffes had a great deal to lose. Their tentacles extended deep into the aristocracy surrounding the court.b When her sister Helen Forbes heard of Harriett’s confession, she immediately responded: “Tell me is there one name mentioned? I mean the Prince?” She added, “He has ruined the happiness of many families.” Helen was rumored to be a mistress of Bertie’s herself, and it was whispered (probably wrongly) that her daughter Evelyn, born in March 1868, was a royal love child.
“Our great object,” wrote Helen Forbes, “is to prevent anything being brought before the public.”78 The Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 made divorce easier, but Parliament’s decision against allowing cases to be heard in secret meant that proceedings could be freely reported in the newspapers.79 Advised by his lawyers, Sir Thomas Moncreiffe knew that the only hope of keeping the scandal out of the press was for Harriett to plead insanity. It was vital to show that she had not been in her right mind when she made her “confession” to Sir Charles, and that she had been mad ever since.
Harriett’s behavior was increasingly strange. She rarely spoke, but sat silent and dumbly unresponsive. She stood motionless with a fixed stare, as though playing “statues.” Sometimes she burst out into a fit of mad laughter. The Mordaunt family and the servants at Walton were convinced that she was shamming, faking madness on the instructions of her father. Sir Charles’s doctors examined her and reported that she was sane. But the doctors sent to inspect Harriett on the instructions of the Moncreiffe lawyers diagnosed puerperal mania.80
Bertie and Alix, meanwhile, seemed a devoted couple. Egypt had been a second honeymoon, and Alix returned pregnant with her fifth child. But she looked ill and thin, while Bertie was overweight and balding. The baby—another girl, named Maud—was born in November. Alix told Minnie that she had telegraphed for “my Bertie,” who was away when her pains began, and he arrived just in time to be with her in the bad hours, “for without him the angel I would certainly not have been able to stand them—they gave me a little chloroform, but only so little that I felt everything and went off into fits of laughter into the bargain.”81
Building work made Sandringham uninhabitable that winter, and the Waleses rented Gunton, Lord Suffield’s house nearby. They spent six weeks there after Christmas, entertaining relays of rowdy shooting parties. In one period of just four days, 3,207 head of game were shot. The bill of fare gives a glimpse of the menus composed by French chefs for the royal nursery, the little princesses, the stewards’ room, the servants’ hall, and the royal kitchen, climaxing in the Royal Dinner. Shooting breakfast typically consisted of Poulet sauté aux champignons, rump steaks pommes, saucisson de dore (browned) and oeufs brouillés aux truffes (scrambled eggs with truffles). Shooting lunch was Don Pedro sherry, curry of rabbits, ronde de boeuf, partridges, roast beef, galantine foie gras, wild boar, apple pudding, and rum baba. Dinner reads like a restaurant menu:
Tortue Claire. Purée de gibier.
Turbot sauce homard. Eperlans frits sauces anchois.
Foies gras à la Financière.
Filets de phaisant à la Maréchel. Doits asperges.
Roastbeef. Dindes braisés purée de céleris.
Jambon Braisé.
Wild ducks. Asperges.
Macédoines de fruits. D’artois crème.
Pailles au fromage.
Abricots ice.82
At least the Prince of Wales had not lost his appetite from worry.
One night Christopher Sykes, who had just introduced a bill for the preservation of seagulls, his sole achievement in a parliamentary career of twenty-seven years, had a dead seagull put in his bed for a joke.c Sykes was “so tipsy that leaning against the wall of the ballroom his feet slipped from under him; and he fell and lay flat on his back—so we carried him to bed, and he lay on the seagull all night.”83 Little wonder Alix found it exhausting, though she liked some of Bertie’s friends, “now that I know them all so well, though only being intime with very few.”84 As for Lord Suffield, when a fire destroyed Gunton ten years later, it was rumored that he had taken desperate measures, as he could no longer afford to entertain the prince.
Sir Charles Mordaunt petitioned for divorce on 27 April 1869, accusing Lord Cole, Sir Frederick Johnstone, and “some other person” of committing adultery with his wife. Bertie was not named, but behind the scenes he tried to hush the scandal up. Harriett was bundled off to a villa in Worthing, where she was kept under virtual house arrest, an act of dubious legality which was sanctioned by Bertie’s doctor William Gull.
If Harriett had been feigning insanity at first, the keepers who watched her in Worthing thought that she really did go mad. She was unable to carry on a conversation. She was apathetic and restless by turns, with a strange, vacant look.85 Doctors visited often, but rather than attempt to help the poor demented woman, they filed reports for the lawyers.
“My dearest Mama,” wrote Bertie on 10 February 1870: “It is my painful duty (I call it painful, because it must be so to you to know that y[ou]r eldest son is obliged to appear as a witness in a court of justice) to inform you that I have been subpoened [sic] by Sir C. Mordaunt’s Counsel to appear as a Witness on Saturday next at Lord Penzance’s Court.”
Sir Charles Mordaunt, who “has shown such a spirit of vindictiveness ag[ain]st me—& such a bad spirit,” was determined to make him appear in court. Bertie added: “Alix has been informed by me of everything concerning this unfortunate case.”86
The Queen’s response was instinctive and definitive. Though deeply regretting his involvement, she never for one moment doubted his innocence. “I cannot sufficiently thank you,” wrote Bertie, “for the dear and kind words.”87 Her support was crucial, both for its own sake, and because it meant that the government backed him. Both the prime minister, Gladstone, and the Lord Chancellor were on his side.
As for Alix, she was in no doubt that her angel had been wronged. Her newly discovered letters to her sister reveal that she remained fiercely loyal. “Imagine only my feelings my Minny! To see one’s husband being accused in such a scandalous mean way was nearly more than I could bear, and we were both of us nearly ill at it … imagine that he, my angelic Bertie, in his high position, was trumped [sic], that is to say those brutes accused him in the face of the whole world in such a mean way that everybody naturally believed the worst.”88
Bertie and his lawyers had done everything possible to prevent the case from coming to court. They were careful to operate in a clandestine way, which has made it difficult for historians to learn the truth, but it seems that Harriett Mordaunt’s father, Sir Thomas Moncreiffe, was in league with Marlborough House to ensure that Harriett was declared insane and not fit to appear in court. In November 1869, the royal doctor William Gull visited her and declared her mentally incapable. Harriett’s condition had, in fact, been improving, but after her father paid a visit she became madder by the day. She laughed uncontrollably, she spat, she finger-painted excrement, she ate fluff off the carpet. Did Moncreiffe put her up to this, as the Mordaunts suspected? And how come Sir Thomas, who was notoriously short of money, was willing to risk crippling legal expenses unless he had a guarantee of finance from “somebody” if the case went against him?89
The case came on in Westminster Hall on Wednesday, 16 February 1870. The courtroom was packed, and the verbatim report of the proceedings filled a whole page of the newspapers. The nation was agog. “Reading the Mordaunt Warwickshire Scandal case,” wrote Reverend Kilvert in his remote vicarage on the Welsh marches. “Horrible disclosures of the depravity of the best London society.”90 Queen Victoria ordered the newspapers to be hidden from her younger children, as the details were “such as hardly to be readable for any one and make everyone shudder that the world sh[oul]d be fed with such scandal!”91
Harriett was declared unfit to appear. The Moncreiffes claimed that she had been mad ever since her baby was born. Sir Charles Mordaunt, on the other hand, insisted that she was feigning and, in order to establish her motive for this, the judge, Lord Penzance, allowed the facts of her past life to be put before the jury. This was a turning point in the trial, and it came as a blow for Bertie and the Moncreiffes. As Carrington wrote, Sir Charles seemed “determined to make everybody he possibly can share the disgrace with him and on his wife’s confession drags in the Prince of Wales.” It was a “terrible thing,” thought Carrington, and “will do an awful lot of harm.”92
Sir Charles appeared in the witness box on day three of the trial (Friday, 18 February), and did his best to involve Bertie. His counsel, Serjeant Ballantine, examined him:
—Were you also aware that the Prince of Wales was an acquaintance of your wife?—I was.
—I believe you had not personal acquaintance with his Royal Highness?—I cannot say that I knew him well. I had a slight acquaintance, and had spoken to him, but he was not a friend of mine. I was not intimate with him.
—You were aware that he was acquainted with your wife’s family, and was on intimate terms with them?—Certainly.
—Did he ever come to your house upon any invitation of yours?—Never.
—Did you ever have any conversation with your wife about him? Did you ever express your desire as to her not continuing her acquaintance with his Royal Highness?—I did. I warned her against continuing her acquaintance with him.
—Lord Penzance: What was it that you said to her about not continuing this acquaintance with his Royal Highness?
—Sir C. Mordaunt: I said I had heard in various quarters certain circumstances connected with his previous career which caused me to make the remark.93
Bertie was not actually cited as corespondent, but Sir Charles’s evidence forced him into the witness box. As Bertie told the Queen: “He took care to mention my name so often,—& in order to compromise me in every possible way—that I fear I have now no other alternative but to come forward and clear myself of the imputations wh[ich] he has cast upon me.”94
The Lord Chancellor, Lord Hatherley, considered that by expressing his willingness to appear in court, Bertie would silence the rumors about him.95 Sir William Knollys agreed, convinced as he was that Bertie was “innocent of anything beyond thoughtlessness.”96 Bertie’s letters to Harriett appeared in The Times on 21 February, a leak that certainly benefited Bertie even if his advisers did not inspire it. As the Lord Chancellor wrote, the publication of the letters “has really been of great service, though probably intended for annoyance, for persons have been surprized [sic] to find them so simple and free from impropriety.”97
The danger, as Lord Chief Justice Sir Alexander Cockburn warned, was that by going into the witness box, Bertie would expose himself to hostile cross-examination.98 Behind the scenes, Prime Minister Gladstone worked to prevent this.d
On “Saturday evening” (19 February), Bertie scrawled a note to Francis Knollys from Marlborough House. “I saw Sir Thomas Moncreiffe this evening and had a most satisfactory interview with him. He is coming here tomorrow at 3 to your room.” Also summoned were Bertie’s doctor, Oscar Clayton, and his solicitor, Arnold White. “They had better each be in a separate room.” It sounds like a drawing-room farce, but the purpose of this conference was to prepare for Bertie’s appearance in the witness box. “I am in great hopes that this horrid business will now end very well,” he told Knollys.99
Bertie was scheduled to give evidence on day five of the case (Wednesday, 23 February). He entered the witness box at around three p.m., coming in from a door at the back of the box, and when he appeared, the court, which was packed, fell silent. Dr. Deane, counsel for the Moncreiffes, examined him:
—Were you acquainted with Lady Mordaunt before her marriage?
—I was.
The prince’s calm, assured manner breathed patrician honesty as Dr. Deane bowled soft questions at him.
—We have heard in the course of this case that your Royal Highness used hansom cabs occasionally. I do not know whether this is so.—It is so.e
—I have only one more question to trouble your Royal Highness with. Has there ever been any improper familiarity or criminal act between yourself and Lady Mordaunt?—There has not.100
Bertie pronounced this answer in a firm, manly tone, and clapping burst out in the court, but it was instantly checked. To Bertie’s relief, Serjeant Ballantine, the formidable counsel for Sir Charles, whose cross-examination Bertie had been dreading, declined to question him. This was presumably Gladstone’s doing.
The ordeal lasted seven minutes, and Bertie received an ovation as he left the court. Later that day he wrote a relieved letter to the Queen: “I trust that by what I have said today the public at large will be satisfied that the gross imputations wh[ich] have so wantonly been cast upon me are now cleared up.”101 That night Bertie and Alix dined with Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone. “Extremely gracious and kind,” wrote Gladstone in his diary. “It is a critical time.”102 The next day The Times printed a long leading article defending the prince, whose sole error was that he had been too careless of his reputation. As the editor Delane told the palace, “the whole British nation was relieved and rejoiced by the Prince’s evidence.”103 The jury’s verdict, delivered the same day, was that Harriett Mordaunt had never been in a mental state to answer Sir Charles’s suit. Her confession was the raving of a madwoman. Sir Charles did not get his divorce.
No one claimed that Bertie was the father of Harriett’s child. But few agreed with Alix that he stood “white as snow in the face of the world.”104 Tradition among the family of Sir Charles Mordaunt maintains that Bertie committed adultery with Harriett.105 On the other hand, Harriett’s great-nephew, Iain Moncreiffe, family historian and genealogist, was convinced that Bertie was innocent, and had not “tampered with Aunt Harriett.”106 Queen Victoria shrewdly wrote: “He did not know more of, or admire, the unfortunate, crazy, Lady Mordaunt any more than he does or did other ladies.”107 Even if he was innocent, he was damned. The republican Reynolds’s Newspaper considered that his “childish and ungrammatical letters” revealed the heir to the throne as being a dunderhead, uneducated and unintelligent.108
Victoria urged Bertie to change his ways. “B feels now,” she told Vicky, “that these visits to ladies and letter writing are a mistake.”109 Prompted by the Queen, Gladstone wrote warning Bertie that his reputation “with respect to whatever touches the sanctity of family relations” was a matter of national importance, crucial to the security of the throne.110 But Bertie saw no reason to act differently. He continued to visit ladies, he still wrote letters, and he still saw his “fast” friends. We shall never know whether or not he had sex with the women he visited in the afternoons. Most probably an abrupt lunge would be followed by a kiss smelling of tobacco and a hasty grope, all over in a few minutes.
Soon after the trial, Bertie and Alix attended a house party with Louise Manchester at Kimbolton. Victoria begged Alix to avoid Louise: “the Duchess of Manchester is not a fit companion for you. She has done more harm to Society from her tone, her love of admiration & ‘fast’ style than almost anyone, & what will people say if they see you & Bertie going on a visit to her House, just after all that has happened?”111 They went all the same. Carrington described a drunken scene on Sunday night when, after a very merry dinner, the entire party marched off to chapel to hear their host read prayers. “Hartington pushed over the front of the pew a huge prayer book which struck an enormous powdered footman on the head, who was sitting below. He fell on his face with a groan and a loud crash and was dragged away insensible—thus completing the success of the party, which was very great. We hardly went to bed at all.”112
Meanwhile, in a villa in Seaford, poor crazed Harriett Mordaunt threw a cup of tea at a likeness of the Prince of Wales: “That has been the ruin of me. You have been the curse of my life, damn you.” But perhaps the real villain was Harriett’s proud, unforgiving husband Sir Charles, who had refused to do the gentlemanly thing and accept the child as his own—as Rosa Lewis, the Duchess of Duke Street, expressed it: “No letters, no lawyers and kiss my baby’s bottom.”113
Harriett was later incarcerated in Dr. Tuke’s asylum in Chiswick, where she grew rapidly worse. For the rest of her life, she was a certified lunatic. She died aged fifty-eight in 1906.
* Harriet, Duchess of Sutherland, was Mistress of the Robes 1837–41, 1846–58, and again in 1859–61.
† The Marlborough Club was funded, according to Carrington, by “an old snob called Mackenzie; the son of an Aberdeenshire hatter, who made a fortune in indigo and got a baronetcy.” (Bodleian, Lincolnshire Papers, MS Film 1120, “King Edward as I Knew Him.”) For Mackenzie, see this page. The freehold was bought for £18,000 in May 1868, and the club, which was housed in an undistinguished building (now destroyed) designed by the architect David Brandon, opened the following year.
‡ Between 1862 and 1901, 676 photographs of Alexandra were registered, 655 of Bertie, and 428 of Queen Victoria.
§ Alix’s neck was slightly scarred when she married: Vicky mentions a botched childhood operation that left a mark. But marriage photographs show a swan-necked princess. Only after her illness did she invariably appear in high collars or pearl chokers.
‖ Rock doves imported by train from Scotland were released from cages and shot at twenty-five yards’ range.
a This seemed baffling, but it later transpired that Harriett had slept with Johnstone after she became pregnant—and that her husband told her that Johnstone suffered from a “disease” that might be conveyed to his children.
b Harriett’s sister Louisa was married to the Duke of Atholl. Her mother-in-law the duchess was a friend of Queen Victoria and served as Mistress of the Robes in 1852.
c The bird (a young kittiwake) was afterward stuffed and given an inscription: “To the Gull’s Friend.”
d As Francis Knollys wrote in 1891, at the time of Bertie’s second court appearance, over the Tranby Croft gambling scandal: “HRH remembers that in 1869 [sic] when he was called upon as a witness in the Mordaunt case, Mr. Gladstone, who was the Prime Minister, took all the indirect means in his power (and successfully) to prevent anything being brought out in the court of the trial that could prove to be injurious to the Prince or the crown.” (Hatfield House, Salisbury Papers, 3M/E, Knollys to Schomberg McDonnell, 11 June 1891: cited in Magnus, Edward VII, p. 229.)
e That the prince should use a hansom cab was especially shocking to the Victorians. There was something unpleasantly sly and furtive about a prince hiring a public carriage to drive anonymously through gaslit streets. (Roger Fulford, “The King,” in Edwardian England, ed. Simon Nowell-Smith [Oxford University Press, 1964], p. 9.)