When Bertie attended Royal Ascot and processed up the course in the state carriage, the crowd hissed. His horse won the last race, and a cheering mob collected in front of the royal stand. He turned to Carrington and said, “They are in a better temper than they were this morning.”1 But the truth was that the Mordaunt case had made Bertie deeply unpopular. He was booed at the theater, and a letter appeared in Indépendence Belge, purportedly written by Bertie to Affie, relating how “la mère” had done a deal with Sir Charles Mordaunt before the trial, and complaining that Victoria was always telling him to be good like Albert.2 It turned out to be a clever hoax, denied by Bertie “absolutely and indignantly,” but it was written by someone with inside knowledge.
Fresh scandal threatened when a Sheffield paper carried a report that Lord Sefton, a racing friend of Bertie’s, was bringing an action for divorce citing the prince as corespondent. Bertie signed an affidavit, denying the “slightest impropriety” with Lady Sefton.3 Sefton sued for libel and won, but not before Lord Stanley had noted the rumors in his diary: “Another trial like that of last year would most likely create, which does not exist, an acknowledged Republican party, bent on putting an end to the Monarchy after the Queen’s death. His folly almost amounts to insanity in this one respect: no warning seems to have any effect.”4
The sleaze was symptomatic of a deeper malaise. For the first time since the reign of George IV, the monarchy was facing a crisis of legitimacy. Not just the Prince of Wales but the Queen herself was under attack, drowning in a tide of gossip and innuendo. Even more toxic than the revelations of the Mordaunt case were the rumors concerning Victoria and her relationship with her Highland servant, John Brown.
John Brown, the Highland gillie, had been summoned from Balmoral to Osborne back in 1864. He soon became a privileged favorite. Promoted from leading her pony to personal servant, he enjoyed unique access to the Queen; he came to her room each day after breakfast and after lunch. Rumors soon spread. In 1866, the Lausanne Gazette printed a story that the Queen had secretly married Brown and was expecting his child. This was a fabrication, and a libel. But the rumors refused to die and, as the Queen’s unpopularity grew, the sleaze about “Mrs. Brown” thickened.5 It was whispered that “there was actual sexual intercourse between John Brown and the Queen.”6 The Liberal politician Loulou Harcourt recorded in his diary for 1885 a story about Dr. Norman Macleod, the Scottish Presbyterian minister to whom the Queen looked for spiritual guidance. According to his sister, Macleod confessed on his deathbed in 1872 that “he had married the Queen to John Brown, and added that he had always bitterly regretted it.”*7
For the widow Queen to have a sexual relationship with anyone—let alone a servant—was almost, but not quite, unthinkable, and the stories still persist today. The tales of Victoria’s secret marriage to Brown are hard to credit, unwitnessed as they are. No marriage certificate for Queen Victoria and John Brown has ever been found. Victoria’s attachment to Brown was strongly emotional, nonetheless. Throughout her life she depended upon the support of dominant men, and the rough, plain-speaking Brown, who addressed her as “wumman” at a time when she craved intimacy and no one called her Victoria anymore, went some way to filling the gap in her life left by Albert.
Brown was a drunkard and a bully, and he terrorized the household, who nicknamed him the Queen’s Stallion. Victoria’s children hated him. His cruelty toward the hemophiliac Prince Leopold is documented; he hit Leopold, scolded him from morning till night, and kept him in isolation, banishing his favorite dog.8 The children came to dread holidays at Balmoral, where Brown reigned supreme.9
Among the guests at Balmoral in September 1869 was the Austrian sculptor Edgar Boehm, who had been commissioned by the Queen to model John Brown, as well as to teach sculpture to Victoria’s fourth daughter, the artistically talented Princess Louise. At twenty-one, Louise was pretty, flirtatious, and rebellious. As Bertie diplomatically told his mother: “I must candidly confess that [from] what I know of her character she would not be happy if she remained too long unmarried.”10 She soon became intimate with the blue-eyed, long-legged Boehm.
John Brown complained about Boehm to the Queen, claiming that the sculptor was overfamiliar with Princess Louise. Brown and Victoria burst into Boehm’s studio and found Louise there. “The Queen asked her what she was doing, and the girl got angry and said if she was to be chased about and spied on she would leave home. The Queen ordered her to her room but as she (the Princess) was going out she took John Brown by the shoulders and said, ‘Look here, John Brown, this is your doing. Either you or I leave this house.’ She then shut herself up in her room.”†
The Prince of Wales was summoned, as he “was very fond of his sister and had most influence over her,” and they set about finding a husband for Louise.11 Louise was Bertie’s ally among his sisters, and he sympathized with her over John Brown. “I am sorry to hear that that brute JB made himself disagreeable during your stay at B[almoral]. I wish you would tell me what he did,” he wrote in 1871.12 Bertie also supported Louise in the negotiations over her marriage, asserting his position as eldest brother and challenging Victoria’s control over her daughters. “You know dearest Louise,” he wrote, “how fond I am of you, & would do anything to serve you—& can have but one wish & that is y[ou]r happiness but I trust I shall be informed before it is actually settled what future Mama intends f[o]r you—& not like Lenchen’s marriage, when everything was settled before I had even a suspicion. That is all I ask.”13
The first candidate for Louise’s hand was a Prussian prince, whom no one much liked, least of all Louise, so he was dropped. The next suitor found by Victoria was Lord Lorne, eldest son of the Duke of Argyll. Though Louise preferred the blond-haired Highland chief to the Prussian, she told the Queen that she “did not like Lorne enough.”14
Finding a mate for the strong-willed princess was becoming a matter of urgency. In 1870, the Reverend Robinson Duckworth, a handsome, dark-eyed man with a soft voice, was dismissed from his post as governor to Prince Leopold. He was suspected of flirting with Louise, and she had become overfond of him.15 At Balmoral that summer, the matchmaking was resumed in earnest. Two more German princes were summoned and, to the “utter astonishment” of the Queen, Louise also insisted on inviting Lorne, her spurned suitor of the previous summer.16 In October, she became engaged to him. Louise later bitterly regretted her marriage, and she blamed Victoria for forcing her into it, writing in 1884: “It was y[ou]r wish for two years, that I sh[oul]d marry Lorne, & because I saw how much it bothered & worried you, that I said I w[oul]d see him again. You asked me to choose between him & another, all I answered was that I thought Lorne was the best of those two, if you remember.”17
Bertie opposed the marriage. “I always liked Lorne,” he told Louise, “but his position will require tact & discretion, which cleverer men than him would find difficult to maintain.”18 To Victoria he wrote more bluntly. “I decidedly maintain that a marriage with a subject is lowering the position of the Royal Family, & in the instance of Lorne—he is excessively poor, & Louise’s position will naturally be less good.”19 Louise was the first member of Victoria’s family to marry a commoner, and this set a historic precedent. But the real reason why Lorne was a bad choice was that Louise was not in love with him. Alexandra, who was close to Louise, wrote, “She resents him like the devil, the poor man, I am sorry for both of them, and he is going to suffer for that! He is in love with her voilà tout.”20
Relations between Bertie and Victoria were made worse by the war of 1870 between France and Germany. Once again, mother and son were divided. The Queen sympathized with Germany, claiming that this was a war of aggression by France. Bertie shared none of her pro-German feeling. Vicky addressed emotional appeals to the Queen—“Oh that England could help us!”—but Bertie refused to forget the past, commenting tartly, “Nobody could express feelings more touchingly or simply than dear Vicky—I only wish to call to her recollection what the feelings of unfortunate little Denmark must have been when they heard that the Armies of Prussia and Austria were ag[ain]st them. Everybody must confess that that campaign was a war of aggression.”21
When the German armies with Fritz at their head smashed the French at Sedan (1 September 1870) and the Emperor Napoléon III surrendered, Bertie made no attempt to disguise his sympathies. He predicted “fearful carnage” in Paris, with “revolution the final and inevitable result. It is a sad business and so unnecessary. France will not recover from this shock and humiliation for years to come.”22
The Queen’s loyalty to her German relations made her unpopular at home when the victorious Prussian armies laid siege to defenseless Paris. But, on the other hand, Bertie’s French sympathies did him little good. The fall of the French monarchy boosted English republicanism, and Bertie’s identification with the decadent French court exposed him to criticism. When the Empress Eugénie fled to exile in England, Bertie impulsively dispatched a letter offering her the loan of Chiswick, the house he rented from the Duke of Devonshire. But his failure to consult either the Queen or the government beforehand meant that his generous offer was a political embarrassment, and gave yet another example of his lack of judgment.23 Bertie lent a horse to the Prince Imperial, the son of Louis-Napoléon, who had joined his parents in exile. Out hunting, the Prince Imperial had a fall trying to jump some iron railings. As “the hope of Imperial France lay on the ground with all the wind knocked out of him,” all the Prince of Wales could say was, “Oh my poor horse, what has happened to my poor horse!”24
Exiles from the imperial court were royally entertained at Marlborough House. Among them was Blanche, the half-American Duchess of Caracciolo, who scandalized London society that winter, going out shooting in a kilt and smoking cigarettes. Her ailing husband was cruelly teased by a prankster who dressed up as a doctor and told him he was dying, while his valet disguised himself as a priest and heard his last confession.25 Soon the duchess was pregnant, and she gave birth to a daughter named Alberta Olga, in honor of Bertie, who was the baby’s godfather and rumored—probably falsely—to be her father, too.‡26
For three years Bertie and Alix had spent little time at Sandringham while the house was being rebuilt. Alix worked hard to arrange “everything” herself, and the house reflected her idiosyncratic taste.27 There were no ancestral portraits or old masters and no antiques. The furniture came from Maples store on Tottenham Court Road. Visitors walked straight into the hall, where Alix presided at tea over a narrow oblong table. Upstairs was a “truly sinister warren” of small rooms and narrow passages—children’s bedrooms, guest rooms, rooms for ladies-in-waiting and equerries.28
The new house was ready in time for Alix’s twenty-sixth birthday on 1 December 1870. One of the guests was Oliver Montagu, whom Bertie had appointed equerry. Alix described him to Minnie as “my good friend O.”29 She was still endearingly loyal to “my Bertie,” but she had come to depend on Montagu’s companionship. Outwardly loud and bumptious, Montagu had a softer, religious side, and he became Alix’s devoted admirer. To conduct a platonic flirtation with a gallant officer, a cavalier with whom she always danced the first after-dinner waltz, made her feel adored without being threatened.
Alix’s sixth pregnancy was different from the others. She was always tired. She suffered irregular bleeding, so she was unsure whether she was pregnant or not.30 At six months she felt depressed and listless, but “still not showing it much, and still dancing.”31 She fell heavily out skating on the ice, crashing down on her bad knee, and her mouth filled with blood.32 At seven months she fell again, tumbling out of her carriage at the wedding of Princess Louise to Lord Lorne.33
Back at Sandringham for Easter 1871, Alix woke early on 6 April with pains. At twenty minutes to seven Bertie knocked on the door of the lady-in-waiting Mrs. Stonor. She realized at once that the princess was going into premature labor, and telegraphed the royal obstetrician, Arthur Farre, and monthly nurse, Mrs. Clarke. Bertie stayed with Alix as the pains grew more severe until the baby was born at half past two. Only the local doctor was present—Dr. Farre arrived from London almost an hour later.34 The six-weeks-premature baby was very small—even smaller than Eddy had been—but beautifully formed, with fingernails. His head was “quite black” and Bertie thought him “very ugly”; Farre assured them that this was because he was born facing downward, and was of no consequence.35 The baby’s hands and feet were cold and his circulation was feeble.36
Mrs. Clarke rubbed the infant with brandy, but by eight p.m. he was sinking fast and the clergyman was hastily summoned to perform the baptism.37 Alix asked for this to take place at her bedside, but when she saw her son for the first time, she broke down and pressed him to her. She was (said Mrs. Stonor) “dreadfully affected and the Prince was so overcome that he cried most bitterly.”38 Bertie held a small Russian cup containing holy water, and as the sick baby was baptized with the names “Alexander John Charles Albert,” it gave such signs of life that “we all hoped there was still a faint hope.”39
The next morning, Good Friday, the baby was a blue-livid color and Dr. Farre said it couldn’t live.40 Alix insisted on having him with her in bed. Prince John died after twenty-four hours, and “so calmly that we never knew the exact moment when it drew its last breath.”41 Alix lay next to the dead child until eight in the evening, sobbing as she held his hand, which was warm though his head was cold and his limbs were stiffening.42
The next day, Bertie placed his baby son, dressed in a frock tied with white satin bows and a cross of bog oak round his neck, in a little wooden shell. While Alix wept in her bedroom next door, the prince and Mrs. Clarke snipped tiny wisps of baby hair and screwed down the wooden lid.43
The day before the funeral, Bertie placed the little shell in a lead and mahogany coffin, which he covered with white satin and arranged with white flowers, camellias, and banksia roses. Mrs. Stonor found him “so much affected, the tears were rolling down his cheeks.”44
On Easter Tuesday (11 April) Bertie walked hand in hand with Eddy and Georgie, both wearing kilts and black gloves, behind the tiny coffin, which was carried by three grooms and the coachman, across the park to the church. From her bedroom upstairs, Alix called to Mrs. Clarke to draw the curtain so she could watch the procession. Sobbing bitterly, she took her prayer book and asked to be left alone.
Inside the church, the Dean of Windsor, Gerald Wellesley, intoned the service inaudibly, croaking with a hoarse voice, and Bertie wept throughout. Afterward, he and the young princes laid white wreaths on the coffin, and when it was lowered into the ground, the children threw primroses and anemones into the grave.45
Infant mortality was a fact of Victorian life, and Bertie’s grief seems perhaps excessive, but he had good reason to weep. The death of Prince John marked a watershed in his marriage. The day before the funeral, Dr. Farre had had a “very long and serious” talk with him about “the Future and perfect rest.” Mrs. Stonor reported to the Queen that Dr. Farre “says the Prince quite agreed with him in all he said,” and it was “a most satisfactory conversation.”46 Farre seems to have warned Bertie to desist from conjugal relations as Alix’s health was in danger. A letter from the Dean of Windsor to Victoria suggests that the doctor had not summoned up the courage to speak as plainly as the Queen had hoped. Wellesley urged her to speak to her son herself, as “many who might speak to him with authority, with respect to the health and moral welfare, both of the Princess and himself, shrink from doing so directly, so that he loses hearing the truth, which might perhaps be a little disagreeable to him.”47
The harsh truth was that there were to be no more babies. Alix was only twenty-six, but repeated pregnancies and premature births had worn her out. She was very ill, spitting blood.48 Six births in eight years of marriage meant that she had spent forty-eight months, half of her married life, pregnant.§ With the exception of Louise, whose arrival was precipitated by Alix’s illness, the girls’ births were relatively straightforward. As Bertie explained, “There is always more risk with a boy of its being born before the proper time.”49 Eddy was born at seven months, Georgie at eight months, and now John, born too early to live. Alix ached for more children, and it was a permanent sadness in her life that she was unable to have the large Victorian family of her fantasies.
For a man as sexually rampant as Bertie, a celibate marriage might seem a cruel mockery. But, as the dean perceived, Bertie was “deeply attached to the Princess, despite all the flattering distractions that beset him in society”; he genuinely wanted to “be more careful about her.”50 At first, the death of their baby son strengthened the marriage. “What my angelic blessed Bertie was to me all this time no words can describe, a true angel!” wrote Alix. “If anything could have bound us closer together, it is this, our first great sorrow.”51
The court went into mourning for ten days for the infant Prince John. Ladies were ordered to wear black silk dresses trimmed with crêpe, black shoes and gloves, and black fans, feathers, and ornaments. Gentlemen wore black court dress, with black swords and buckles and plain linen.52 When Victoria suggested that Bertie and Alix should retire into prolonged mourning, her son snapped back: “Want of feeling I never could show, but I think it’s one’s duty not to nurse one’s sorrow, however much one may feel it.” Alix must resume her social duties, “else she will get into a low and morbid state which I am certain will be very injurious to her. You have … no conception of the quantity of applications we get … to open this place, lay a stone, public dinners, luncheons, fetes without end and sometimes people will not take no for an answer … and all these things have increased tenfold since the last 10 years.… It is however gratifying that this wish exists in these Democratic days, as one must show oneself in public however irksome it may be—and sometimes it is indeed so.53
Out of private tragedy, Bertie endeavored to redefine the monarchy. “Showing oneself in public” was to be central to the survival of the institution in the democratic age. In 1871, however, there was reason to doubt whether even that would be sufficient.
Far from engaging public sympathy, the death of Prince John was greeted with republican catcalls. Ever since the Mordaunt case, the radical Reynolds’s Newspaper had voiced a strident republicanism. The paper was the publication of G. W. M. Reynolds, an ex-Chartist dedicated to fighting the class war and exposing royalty as an undeserving burden on the taxpayer. It cruelly recorded the death of the baby Prince John thus:
We have much satisfaction in announcing that the newly born child of the Prince and Princess of Wales died shortly after its birth, thus relieving the working men of England from having to support hereafter another addition to the long roll of State beggars they at present maintain.
Reynolds was equally savage about:
the miserable mockery of interring with royal funereal ceremony a shrivelled piece of skin and bone, grandiloquently entitled “prince,” not 24 hours old … and to augment the folly the Court goes into mourning for the loss of the wretched abortion which … was carried to the grave by four stout men.54
Grumbling about the extravagance of the publicly funded Prince of Wales swelled into a vicious personal campaign. Reynolds’s ridiculed Bertie’s speeches as “tautological twaddle,” “slip-slop stuff” that was evidence of intelligence “of a very low order.”55 The New York Times pronounced that the Prince of Wales was totally unable to understand the “questions of the day, the temper of the people or the times in which he lives.”56 Fired by the example of the socialist Paris Commune, republicanism surged.
The Queen came under attack as well. Her demand for an annuity from Parliament for Louise on her marriage sparked a storm of republican agitation, objecting to semi-royals leeching on the taxpayer.57 Walter Bagehot, who had penned an apology for the monarchy in his English Constitution in 1867, wrote a stern leader in The Economist: “The Queen has done almost as much injury to the popularity of the monarchy by her long retirement from public life as the most unworthy of her predecessors did by his profligacy and frivolity.”58 What Does She Do with It? demanded a pseudonymous pamphlet that claimed that the tight-fisted Queen was hoarding money from the £385,000 voted by Parliament in the Civil List.59
The Queen complained vigorously that she was overworked, but her unofficial private secretary General Grey advised Prime Minister Gladstone: “Pray dismiss from your mind any ideas of there being any ‘weight of work’ upon the Queen.” Encouraged by her sycophantic doctor, Jenner, Victoria had become entrenched in a “long unchecked habit of self-indulgence.” Her workload consisted of “very short notes” and a “shorter interview” when she ordered Grey to “ ‘write fully’ on this or that subject” and subsequently to “approve of the draft which I submit to her.”60
Gladstone, though a Liberal, was dedicated to preserving the monarchy, and he judged that the moment had come to grasp the “burning issue” that he had been “continually revolving” for the past year: “To speak in rude and general terms, the Queen is invisible and the Prince of Wales is not respected.”61
A grim-faced Gladstone traveled by train to Balmoral on 25 September. He wrote to Lord Granville: “Send for and read Reynolds’s Newspaper of last Sunday on the gambling at Homburg. These things go from bad to worse. I saw ‘What Does She Do With It’ advertised on the walls of the station at Birkenhead.”62 The copy of Reynolds’s Newspaper Gladstone carried in his pocket revealed that the Prince of Wales had been spotted in a crowded casino at Homburg gambling away the gold that had been wrung from the toil and sweat of the working man—and this at a time when gambling in England was illegal.63
At Balmoral, Gladstone found the Queen more invisible than ever. She had succumbed to a mysterious illness and stayed in her room for much of the day.64 She communicated by sending written notes. Not until day four of his stay did she see the prime minister, and then only for half an hour, during which she exercised what he called “the repellent power which she knows so well how to use.”65 She would hear no criticism of herself, but Gladstone reported that she was “much vexed” by Bertie’s gambling. “That part of the case, poor soul, she can discern well enough.”66
The Queen’s newly appointed private secretary was in attendance. Shrewd and clearheaded, with a nice sense of irony, the thirty-six-year-old Henry Ponsonby was a surprising choice.‖ Ponsonby went for a walk in the rain with Gladstone, and held conspiratorial conversations with Princess Alice, who was also at Balmoral.67 Alice undertook to speak to Bertie about his gambling, but she dared not approach her mother. “I long to be able to ask her to say she will do something but I really am afraid and have been advised not,” she told Ponsonby, dropping her voice dramatically so that she was barely audible. The Queen saw no one and heard nothing; Ponsonby marked the newspapers for her, but she seemed not to read their criticisms. “Yet,” said Alice, “she knows all that is said against the Prince of Wales she thinks he has become so unpopular that it is useless to expect he will come to the throne. She thinks the monarchy will last her time and that it is no use thinking of what will come after if the principal person himself does not, & so she lets the torrent come on.”68
Après moi le déluge was Victoria’s excuse for doing nothing.
The stories of Bertie’s gambling at Homburg and Baden were exaggerated. Francis Knollys told Ponsonby that the prince had entered the casino and thrown a few gold pieces on the table, and that was all; he lost very little money.69 But Knollys must have been biting his tongue. He knew that Bertie was sitting on one, if not two, explosive sexual scandals, which he was busily trying to defuse.
A letter had arrived at Abergeldie.a The envelope was addressed to Francis Knollys, but there was no doubt who the contents were for:
My dear Sir,
I cannot tell Your Royal Highness how utterly miserable I am that You should have left London without coming to see me. You have shewn me so much kindness for the last four years that I cannot understand Your having twice been in London for two days without coming to see me. What have I done to offend You? I did my best to obey the orders Your Royal Highness gave me the last time I had the happiness of seeing You but the answer was, too late and too dangerous. I was anxious to avoid writing on such a painful subject but You have forced me to it. I cannot describe to you how wretched I am—and Life is so uncertain and I am far from strong and I felt I may perhaps never see You again, therefore You may imagine my feelings when I received your letter yesterday and knew that You were really off to Scotland!!
Forgive this wretched letter and wishing Your Royal Highness every blessing this world can bestow.
I remain as ever
Y[our]r Royal Highness’s obed[ien]t servant
SV-T70
SV-T was Lady Susan Vane-Tempest, a mistress whom Bertie was anxious to discard. Before traveling to Scotland, he had spent a few days in London after attending the maneuvers at Aldershot. He was photographed by the society photographer Alexander Bassano in a Piccadilly studio, dressed in his uniform as colonel commanding the 10th Hussars.b71 But he made no effort to visit Susan, who had begged him to see her before he left London.
Susan was the wayward daughter of the red-bearded Duke of Newcastle who had taken Bertie to America. The duke had been one of Gladstone’s closest friends, and when, twenty years before, Susan’s scandalous mother had left him and bolted to Italy with her lover, Gladstone had followed in hot pursuit, in a vain attempt to rescue her. Susan had been Vicky’s bridesmaid, but she then disgraced herself by making a runaway marriage to Lord Adolphus Vane-Tempest, a son of Lord Londonderry, who, Queen Victoria told Vicky, “drinks and has twice been shut up for delirium tremens.” The Duke of Newcastle refused to give his consent; there were “no settlements, no trousseau, nothing,” and because he wouldn’t allow her to use his carriage, Susan walked to church with her governess. The Queen joked that there was a bet about which of the two, Susan or Adolphus, would be confined first. Within days, it was Adolphus who had gone mad and been locked up.72 He tried to kill Susan, and according to the Queen, he died in 1864 in a struggle with his four keepers when he burst a vein in his throat.73
Bertie’s relationship with Susan had begun in 1867, and he was a frequent visitor to her house in Chapel Street, Westminster.74 In 1871, she became pregnant. Her baby was conceived in March, shortly before the birth of Alix’s dead son.75
Susan delayed telling Bertie about the pregnancy, she later explained, because “I hoped to the last that my efforts might be successful and that then I need never have told You of the anxiety I had gone through.” She evidently understood that it was her responsibility to prevent pregnancy, and if her precautions failed, it was then her duty to abort the baby. She saw her own doctor, who did “everything he could for me as long as it was possible to do so with safety.” Susan admitted that “Perhaps I was wrong in keeping silence but I did it to save you annoyance—so please forgive me for You little know how sad and unhappy I am.”76
She at last summoned the courage to confess her condition to Bertie in early September, when she was already five or six months pregnant.77 Bertie ordered her to consult his doctor, Oscar Clayton.c Susan delayed, and felt compelled to explain: “Your Royal Highness blames me for not at once going to Dr. C[layton] as You desired me, but You can understand it was most painful to go to an utter stranger under such sad circumstances.”78
She eventually agreed to consult the sinister Dr. Clayton, but Bertie now refused to see her. Instead, she was interviewed by Francis Knollys. Not surprisingly, she found it hard to speak freely to him. “I was so confused today that I hardly knew what I was saying to you,” she told him.79 Knollys arranged for her to see Dr. Clayton the following day. Susan never used the word, but Clayton’s role was plainly to perform an abortion. His verdict, however, as she told Bertie, was that it was “too late and too dangerous.”80
Bertie ordered Susan to leave London and have the baby secretly in the country. She reluctantly concurred. “I am ready to obey Your orders in everything and it grieves me more than I can say to feel that You are annoyed with me,” she wrote, adding pathetically, “Don’t please be angry if I entreat you to come and see me before I go away.… Please don’t let me leave without saying ‘Goodbye.’ ”81 Desperate to avoid a scandal, he still refused to meet her.
Susan needed money, but by now she lacked the courage to ask. Her friend Harriet Whatman wrote a thinly disguised blackmail letter to Bertie, telling him that if “the event” was to be kept a secret, he must pay her at least £250.82 Susan settled into 26 Wellington Crescent, Ramsgate, a large Regency terraced house looking out over the sea, to await the birth of her child, which was due in early December.
After Christmas 1871—presumably after the baby was born—Susan wrote to Dr. Clayton asking for an appointment: “The same symptoms still continue and for the last three weeks I have had a white discharge. My back aches dreadfully and I feel altogether very unwell.”83 A few weeks later she wrote to Knollys asking for more money, as Dr. Clayton had ordered her to return to London. “He has not allowed me to leave my Room since I returned & I may not even put my foot to the ground.… I cannot enter into particulars but Mr. Clayton will explain all to Him when he sees Him.”84 She had an ulcer on her foot—“I am a cripple on two sticks and cannot move about!!!!”85
Nothing is ever said of the baby. No birth was registered in Susan’s name in the Ramsgate (Thanet) area. Nor was any infant death recorded.86 Perhaps the child was handed over to someone else, or perhaps it was stillborn. It is conceivable that the obliging Dr. Clayton performed a dangerously late termination. The distressing symptoms related by Susan seem to hint at a venereal disease. The gumma or leg ulcer is a symptom of tertiary syphilis, and so is spinal pain. But tertiary syphilis develops five years after the initial infection, and it’s unlikely that Susan would have been Bertie’s mistress if she had been suffering throughout their affair from the disease.d87
Four years later Susan Vane-Tempest was dead.
Susan’s story is an unsettling reminder of the human cost of Bertie’s pleasure. Like Harriett Mordaunt, she was a victim, cast away once she became an embarrassment to the prince. His ruthlessness is chilling. Susan’s letters were preserved not because Bertie felt sentimental about her, but because they landed on Knollys’s desk—all her communications to HRH were sent under cover to his secretary. Once Bertie sniffed the terrible scandal of a pregnancy, he left Knollys to deal with Susan. His refusal to see her in spite of her very real distress can only be described as cruel. Coldly and efficiently, he saved his princely skin from contamination.
Susan’s letters are the only ones from a mistress that are known to have survived. Other letters from women with whom he became entangled were destroyed, either by Bertie himself or by Knollys. Plenty of Bertie’s letters exist, as most of his female correspondents kept them. Susan’s howls of pain could hardly be further removed from the polite gossip and mildly flirtatious small talk that Bertie usually wrote to his women friends. Perhaps Knollys chose to keep her letters because they were exceptional, or it may have been an accident that they escaped the bonfire; it’s impossible to tell whether other women wrote to him in this way. But her anguished letters give a glimpse of the abyss—of the reality of disgraceful pregnancies and life-threatening abortions that lay behind the carefully crafted world of afternoon visits and discreet notes.
Susan’s is the only illegitimate pregnancy that can be credited with certainty to Bertie—and even so, the child cannot be traced. The destruction of the women’s letters means that there is no way of knowing for certain whether other mistresses bore his children. Had it not been for the fact that her letters happened to be preserved, Susan herself would have vanished from the record; there is no other evidence of her relationship with the prince.
Of course, there were rumors of Bertie’s bastards, and the villages around Sandringham and Balmoral are alleged to be thickly populated with cousins of the Queen. But genealogical research, meticulously establishing birth dates and checking them against Bertie’s movements and social connections, which are exceptionally well documented, has revealed that most of the alleged illegitimate children are mythical.88 This has led to speculation that his “preferred sexual techniques excluded penetrative sex.”89 Susan Vane-Tempest’s letters suggest another explanation: birth control.
Contraception was not unknown in England, but it was far more widespread in France. The French, it seems, practiced birth control without writing about it, while the English talked about it but rarely used it. Contraception was a professional necessity for prostitutes, and the Paris sex industry could hardly have functioned without it. Barrier methods such as the condom and the diaphragm were available, and prostitutes also relied on vaginal sponges and douching.90 Bertie’s visits to Paris courtesans meant that he was far better educated about sex and contraception than his disapproving compatriots. It was part of a courtesan’s job to protect herself against pregnancy and disease, and Bertie expected his mistresses to do the same. Married women could pass off illegitimate children as belonging to their husbands, but this was not possible for a widow such as Susan Vane-Tempest. If contraception failed, abortion was available as a second line of defense. It was illegal and considered morally abhorrent, but men like the suave and silky Dr. Clayton would always oblige.e
“I fear fresh bothers are brewing—from abroad—in which my brother and myself are concerned,” Bertie admitted to Knollys in July.91 Among the documents preserved by Knollys is a small, fat, brown-stained envelope labeled “Beneni,” stuffed with tightly folded letters written on thick paper. Someone has endorsed the packet: “Re Barucci—treat with care.”92
La Barucci, the courtesan Giulia Beneni, who four years before had entertained Bertie in her Champs-Élysées mansion with its white velvet staircase, died of consumption during the Siege of Paris in a house on the rue de la Baume.f Her brother, a failed Italian tenor named Piro Beneni, moved in to claw her legacy and blackmail her royal clients.
La Barucci had accumulated a valuable trove. She possessed twenty or so letters from Bertie. He had been careful not to sign them, but they were evidently genuine and most were of a “delicate” nature.93 La Barucci had also stashed away a hoard of photographs. They included cartes de visite signed “Albert Edward”; a large photograph of his brother Affie, the Duke of Edinburgh, wearing Highland costume in a crimson velvet frame signed “Alfred”; an album of the whole royal family inscribed “Alfred to Giulia 1868”; and several photographs of Alix’s brother Frederick, Crown Prince of Denmark, one of which was signed “de votre ami dévoué, Frederik.”94
In September 1871, Bertie received a blackmail letter from “that scoundrel Beneni,” demanding £1,500.95 He forwarded it to Knollys, and instructed him to consult Kanné, the royal courier and agent. The royal advisers agreed that paying the blackmailer would be a mistake, and they planned instead to seize Bertie’s incriminating letters.
When Beneni wrote again, threatening to put the letters up for sale, Kanné was sent on an undercover mission to La Barucci’s house on the rue de la Baume. On 9 November he found Piro Beneni very ill, conducting an informal auction of his sister’s things from his bed. “The wretch” took a liking to him and showed him Bertie’s letters. Beneni wanted £400, and Kanné offered £240, which was rejected. Kanné then pretended to lose his temper and became very angry. He laid the money on the table and accused Beneni of blackmail, claiming that two policemen were waiting outside to make an arrest if everything was not handed over in ten minutes. The bluff succeeded. Beneni crumpled: “Prenez tout, mais laissez moi l’argent, je suis si pauvre.” (Take everything, but leave me the money, I am so poor.) Kanné went to the cupboard in the drawers of which the letters were kept, took the bundles, counted them, and put them in his pocket. Pretending to go outside and talk to the policemen (who did not exist), he returned five minutes later and demanded everything Beneni possessed belonging to the Prince of Wales and his brother. Beneni, who was by now white and trembling with fear, handed over the key to a black cupboard, which contained the cache of letters and photographs.96
Kanné wired Knollys, who cabled back: “Your prompt action highly approved of.”97 The letters were destroyed. As Kanné warned, the prince “can not be too careful in his writing. Every scrape [sic] of his writing becomes every day of more value and importance.”98 Writing “delicate” letters to a courtesan was political suicide at a time when the tide of republicanism seemed unstoppable. When the Liberal MP Sir Charles Dilke addressed meetings on republicanism, loud groans were given for the Prince of Wales.99
That autumn, Bertie and Alix were guests of Lord Londesborough for a week’s grouse shooting near Scarborough. The house party included Louise Manchester and Lord Chesterfield, and twenty-seven people were crammed into the small, boxlike rooms of Londesborough Lodge, perched high on the clifftop above the town. Bertie’s valet slept in a cubbyhole six feet high. Three maids shared an unventilated attic, and the sewage backed up whenever the tide rose. The house, as The Lancet later reported, was in effect “a vessel inverted over the mouth of a pipe, through which rises continually, sometimes with violence, a deadly vapour.”100 Lady Londesborough “was quite the queen” at Scarborough, holding court in a gilt chair with Bertie sitting at her side, while one by one her guests fell ill with diarrhea, Alix among them.101
Back at Sandringham for his thirtieth birthday. Bertie complained of a chill and a whitlow or blister on his finger, and called for cherry brandy and a hot bath, but still insisted on traveling to Buckinghamshire to shoot with his friend Carrington.102 He arrived by train at Woburn Sands in a howling gale, and Carrington, who drove the coach himself, nearly crashed on the way back from the station; dinner was ruined and the nine royal servants somehow managed to lose Bertie’s luggage. The next morning Bertie tried to shoot, but he felt so ill that he gave up and sent for the doctor, the inevitable Oscar Clayton. Long white whitlows had appeared on the palms of his hands, and Clayton ordered him home at once.103
Bertie developed fever, rose-colored spots, and a severe headache. Alix summoned “nice” Dr. Gull, “whom he likes and in whom we have the greatest confidence” (this was the same Dr. Gull who had confined Harriett Mordaunt to a madhouse).104 She also sent for Sir William Jenner. Bertie’s symptoms now allowed a diagnosis: typhoid fever.105 No attempt was made to cover up his illness or conceal it from the public, and the doctors issued regular daily bulletins. Among William Gull’s papers is a diagram charting the course of HRH’s illness and calibrating the days as the infection progressed through its classic stages. First, headache, vomiting, fever; then the telltale rose spots and diarrhea, high fever, and delirium, followed by a critical stage when the lungs became congested.106 There was no treatment, just minute expert observation by the physicians and skilled nursing.
Bertie lay behind a screen in a darkened room, breathing very rapidly and loudly. Alix watched him devotedly, refusing to leave his bedside. “No words of mine can EVER fully express to you how fearful and MISERABLE these days of AGONY have been to me,” she told her sister-in-law Louise.107 Gull’s doctor’s notes read: “mind wanders constantly. State to cause great anxiety but not at present alarm.”108 At one point Bertie was too ill to recognize Alix; when she told him she was his wife, he replied, “That was once but is no more, you have broken your vows!”109 His raving became so candid—“all sorts of revelations and names of people mentioned”—that the doctors ordered Alix to leave the room.110
Alix’s love of nursing brought her close to Bertie; for once, he was dependent on her, and he couldn’t escape. But she wasn’t allowed to have him to herself. Princess Alice, who happened to be staying in the house, bossily tried to take charge. “We are all furious at seeing our Princess [Alix] sat upon and spoken of as if she had not sense enough to act for herself,” wrote Lady Macclesfield.111
By now the doctors were issuing several bulletins a day, each more alarming than the last: 26 November 1871, 6:00 p.m.: “The course of the fever today has been rather severe but regular. The Prince’s strength continues good”; 27 November, 9:00 a.m.: “His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales has passed a sleepless night. The course of the fever is marked by increasing intensity, but the strength does not fail.”112 The doctors’ drafts, preserved in Gull’s papers, are crossed through and reworded; they show a striving for medical accuracy, rather than political spin, but in their artless attempts to state the truth, the doctors were the unwitting agents of a resurgence of loyalty to the monarchy. The nation was gripped. “The alarm in London very great,” noted the Queen. “Immense sympathy all over the country.”113
Queen Victoria, who was always energized by illness, yearned to be at Bertie’s bedside, but she needed to be asked. She had never visited Sandringham before, and Alice opposed her coming now. For once Alix overruled her domineering sister-in-law, and wrote on her own initiative inviting her mother-in-law. The drama of the widow Queen, who herself had been ill, rushing by special train (the details of the route were printed in the paper) to visit her wayward son on his sickbed, almost exactly ten years after the death of her beloved Albert, transfixed the nation.
The Queen slept badly before her journey to Sandringham on 29 November. Alice and Alix, thin and tearful, met her at the door. Peeping in at Bertie’s darkened room, she saw him lying on his back, breathing loudly as he dozed with one lamp burning, and Albert’s illness came flooding back to her.114 What they didn’t tell her was that Bertie now thought he had succeeded as king, and raved of reforms in the household that “set all their hair straight on end.”115 He gave orders that all gentlemen were to wear tights, “because I’m very particular about dress and General Knollys must kneel down and give me a glass of water, it was always done in former days.”116
The next evening, when Victoria went to Bertie’s dressing room after dinner, a tearful Alice rushed in, saying that his temperature had suddenly fallen (from 105°) and his breathing seemed all wrong. The Queen went into the bedroom. “What I saw reminded me terribly of December ’61!” She followed Alix out into the dressing room, and “when [Alix] completely broke down I tried to reassure her, although my heart was heavy with fear, and held her dear little slight frame in my arms.” Dr. Jenner told Victoria that Bertie had a threatening of the congestion of the lungs or pneumonia that had killed Albert. “Went sadly to my room, very, very anxious,” she wrote.117
In fact, Bertie had turned a corner toward recovery. The next morning he was sufficiently robust to ask for an egg, and the Queen returned to Windsor.118 The doctors’ bulletins on 1 December signaled cautious optimism.119 But the same day brought news of the death from typhoid of Lord Chesterfield, another guest at Londesborough Lodge. This was apparently proof that the fetid drains of Scarborough had caused the prince’s illness, which had hitherto been hotly denied by Lord Londesborough, but it was a shock that, said Lady Macclesfield, “came like ice upon all our hearts.”120 On 5 December, Gull wrote in his private notes that the prince’s breathing was easier and all his symptoms had improved, though “there remains the liability to relapse and reduplication of the attack.”121
Gull was right to fear a double dip. On 7 December, the twenty-sixth day of the illness, the ominous rose spots returned. Soon Bertie’s breathing became rapid, he began to clutch at his sheets (a symptom that particularly worried the doctors), and his mind wandered in a constant state of delirium.122 Bulletins were issued every four hours.123 For the first time, The Times openly discussed the possibility of the prince’s death.
The Queen was advised that if she wished to see her son before he died, she should leave immediately, and she set off for Sandringham at once that afternoon.124 She was expected at four, and at two o’clock Gull and Jenner took a few minutes’ walk in the garden. Jenner said: “Well, if he lives until Her Majesty comes I shall be satisfied.” Gull replied: “That will not satisfy me. Now we shall see if Shakespeare’s signa mortis are right, for they are marked enough here”—and he quoted Henry V, on the death of Falstaff: “After I saw him fumble with the sheets and play with flowers and smile upon his fingers’ ends, I knew there was but one way; for his nose was as sharp as a pen and a’ babbled of green fields.”125
The Queen arrived at seven thirty p.m. in deep snow and was met by Lady Macclesfield, who told her Bertie was “very bad.” She rushed up to his room, where Alix and Alice sat on either side of the bed. Bertie lay breathing rapidly.126 Telegrams were sent summoning Arthur, Leopold, and Beatrice. Both Helena and Vicky were refused, partly because there was no room, even though Vicky begged her mother to be allowed to come.127 The house was so crowded that the princesses Louise and Beatrice were obliged to share a bed.
Bertie’s illness had called forth a general expression of sympathy, which, said The Graphic, “in its quiet earnestness is a satisfactory proof of the loyalty of the nation.”128 On Sunday, thinking that Bertie had rallied, Alix slipped out from the sickroom to church. She passed a note to the vicar: “My husband being thank God somewhat better, I am coming to Church. I must leave, I fear, before the service is concluded, that I may watch by his bedside. Can you not say a few words in prayer in the early part of the service that I may join with you in prayer before I return to him?” Trembling with emotion, the vicar prayed while Alix stood in the royal pew alone.129 Reported in The Times, this poignant image stirred the public’s heart.
Bertie passed a tranquil morning, but by Sunday evening the bulletins were grave.130 Gull’s notes describe a “paroxysm” or spasm of coughing, and the short, guttural, suffocative cough baffled and worried him.131
On Monday, the Queen was woken at five thirty a.m. with a message from Jenner that Bertie had suffered a severe spasm and might at any minute “go off,” so she put on her dressing gown and hurried to the bedroom. She found Alix and Alice sitting in vigil in the dreary light beside Bertie, who was breathing as if he would choke at any moment. He raved continually, talking on and on, whistling and singing. “This has been a terrible day,” wrote Victoria, who went back and forth continually to the sickroom, and took her meals upstairs.132
Downstairs, the family and household waited for news, talking in whispers in the great hall, pacing the slippery floors, trying not to trip over the skins and enormous protruding heads of the animals that Bertie had shot.133 Bertie’s brothers Affie and Arthur giggled at his ravings, earning stern reproofs from Victoria.134 Alice snubbed the devout Alix for praying, and briskly declared: “Providence, there is no Providence, no nothing, and I can’t think how anyone can talk such rubbish.”135 In London, Gladstone found the suspense painful, and trembled when he opened the telegrams from Sandringham.136
Wednesday, 13 December 1871, the day before the anniversary of beloved Albert’s death, was, said Victoria, “the worst day of all.” Yet another fit of suffocating coughing nearly killed Bertie. The Queen and Alice said to each other in tears: “There can be no hope.”137 Alix was so desperate to stay by his side that when the doctors told her that it would distress him to know that she was in the sickroom, she crawled in on hands and knees so as to be out of sight.138 She scarcely ate, and the exhaustion of sitting up night after night had made her so deaf that she was not easy to wake when asleep. “How she will bear the final blow when it comes, one cannot imagine,” groaned Lady Macclesfield, who confidently expected the prince to die.139
On the morning of 14 December, the Queen crept into the sickroom and stood behind the screen. Bertie asked the nurse if the Queen was in the room. Victoria went to the bed, and he kissed her hand and smiled and said, “So kind of you to come; it is the kindest thing you could do.”140
So, on the anniversary of his father’s death, Bertie’s recovery began.
The following Sunday, at Clyro church in Radnorshire, the vicar read out the bulletin from the paper: “The Prince has passed a tranquil day and the symptoms continue to be favourable.” The Reverend Kilvert commented in his diary: “I love that man now, and always will love him. I will never say a word against him.… God bless him and keep him, the Child of England.” A little girl in Sunday school was asked who had died for us on the cross. “Lord Chesterfield,” was the reply.141 This was Bertie’s apotheosis: He had become a holy prince. Among the best things he did was nearly to die.
* In the 1950s, Harold Nicolson claimed that while researching at Balmoral, he came across the “marriage lines” of Queen Victoria and John Brown in a game book. He allegedly replaced the document where he found it, for fear that it would be destroyed. (Christopher Tyerman, letter to The Times, 21 December 2004.) It has never been seen since.
† Boehm related this story to Catherine Walters, the courtesan also known as Skittles, who told it to the diarist Wilfrid Blunt in 1885.
‡ Bertie was rumored to have fathered numerous children, but most of these “bastards” were apocryphal (see this page). Olga Caracciolo was probably not Bertie’s daughter. It was the duke himself who registered her birth in August 1871. The story of her royal paternity was local gossip in Dieppe, however, where she was brought up in the 1880s. The duchess was a dedicated Anglophile, who dressed in the tailored style of Princess Alexandra. Occasionally Bertie would visit her in Dieppe, always arriving in a yacht.
§ Eddy was born on 6 January 1864; Georgie on 3 June 1865. Louise was next, on 20 February 1867, then Victoria (6 June 1868) and Maud (26 November 1869).
‖ He was a Liberal in politics, he disliked dressing up in court uniform, and he was devoted to his wife. The letters he wrote from Balmoral give unrivaled glimpses of Victoria’s Highland court.
a Abergeldie Castle, a tower house on the south bank of the Dee, three miles from Balmoral, was leased by the Queen from its owner and lent to Bertie after he married.
b Bassano’s glamorous photograph, which shows the prince smoking a cigar, was a study for a painting he commissioned by Alfred Sheldon Williams.
c Oscar Clayton was described by Ponsonby as “a dreadful little snob and Jenner says not a good doctor. But he is most attentive and that is everything.” (RA VIC/Add A 36/1340, Henry Ponsonby to Mary Ponsonby, 24 October 1877.)
d Susan’s symptoms may well have been caused by complications or infection after childbirth or a possible termination.
e Gladstone’s gossipy secretary Edward Hamilton wrote in his diary in 1881: “In deference to the Prince of Wales, Oscar Clayton has been submitted for knighthood. It is to be hoped that no disagreeable stories will come out about him.” (Diary of Sir Edward Hamilton 1880–1885, ed. Dudley Bahlman [Clarendon Press, 1972], vol. 1, p. 355 [2 November 1881].)