The fourteenth of December 1878 was the seventeenth anniversary of Prince Albert’s death. Bertie and Alix went to Windsor for the customary service in the mausoleum, but this year the melancholy occasion was clouded by impending tragedy. The previous day had been punctuated by alarming telegrams from Darmstadt, where Bertie’s sister Alice lay desperately ill with diphtheria. Sir William Jenner, dispatched by the Queen, wired that the disease had spread to her windpipe; she had great difficulty in breathing, high fever, exhaustion, and restlessness.1 The glands in her throat were so swollen that her neck was as thick as her cheeks. Her tonsils were coated with patches of false membrane, and the danger was that she would die of suffocation, as they obstructed her windpipe. Throttling by membrane had been the cause of the death of her four-year-old daughter, May, four weeks earlier.2 At two thirty a.m., Alice became unconscious, and she died at 7:30 on the morning of the fourteenth. The cause of death of the thirty-five-year-old princess was given as exhaustion and cardiac failure.3
As soon as the Queen received the dreaded telegram, she went to Beatrice, returned to her room and spoke to Leopold, and only then went to Bertie’s sitting room. She wrote in her journal:
He was not ready for a few minutes, but soon came out in his dressing gown, having received the same dreadful news from Sir William [Jenner], looking dreadfully pale and haggard, trying to repress his violent emotion, quite choked with it. His despair was great, and he could hardly speak. As I kissed him he said, “The good are always taken and the bad remain.”4
The words in italics were cut from the 1926 edition of the Queen’s letters, presumably because they showed a lack of manliness; but they give a glimpse of the most sympathetic side of Bertie’s character—unguarded, emotional, and self-deprecatory.5 As for Alix, when the Queen went in to see her while she dressed and took her in her arms, she said simply: “I wish I had died instead of her.”6
The tragedy at Darmstadt had all the makings of a Victorian melodrama—except that it was genuinely heartbreaking. Apart from one daughter, Elizabeth (Ella), Alice’s entire family, including her husband, Louis, had been infected with diphtheria within eight days. When little May died, her body was placed in a coffin covered with white flowers, and Alice was the only member of the family present at the funeral service in the castle. After it was over, she left the room and walked slowly upstairs. “At the top of the stairs she knelt down, and taking hold of the golden balustrade, looked into the mirror opposite to her to watch the little coffin being taken out of the house.”7
Medical reports remarked on the unusual fact that none of the sixty members of the Hesse-Darmstadt household had been infected, and deduced that the infection was spread by kissing.8 Alice herself allegedly caught the disease when she broke the news of May’s death to her ten-year-old son, Ernie, who was so overcome that she embraced him—and thus her own death. Disraeli used his novelist’s skills to paint a pathetic picture of this tragic kiss in his speech in the House of Lords, which “greatly moved” Bertie.9
As Victoria remarked, Alice had expected to die early and had been talking about it for years.10 A family portrait made by Heinrich von Angeli in 1878 shows a paunchy, bearded Louis; Alice, wearing a strange nunlike garb, looks haggard and unhappy. Ever since the trauma of nursing her father, Albert, on his deathbed as an eighteen-year-old, she had suffered from depression.11 For years she complained of failing vision, neuralgia, and “rheumatism,” but her symptoms were so vague as to defy diagnosis. In 1876 she described herself as “absurdly” wanting in strength, dull, tired, and useless. “I have never in my life been like this before. I live on my sofa.”12 Queen Victoria, who saw her in the summer of 1878, thought she looked “very weak and delicate and is up to nothing,” and when she heard of the diphtheria she dreaded that her semi-invalid daughter would be too frail to survive.13
Alice’s son Frittie had inherited the hemophilia gene, and in 1873 the two-year-old had fallen from a window in Alice’s bedroom and died soon after from internal bleeding on the brain. For months—years even—Alice could think of little else but the horror of his sudden death. It brought her exceptionally close to her surviving son, Ernie. “Seldom a mother and child so understood each other,” she wrote. “It requires no words; he reads it in my eyes.”14 Alice was unfulfilled in her marriage to the amiable but bovine Louis. She was estranged from her mother, whose unfair letters made her cry with rage. “I wish I were dead,” she wrote in 1877, “and it will probably not be too long before I give Mama that pleasure.”15 Morbid foreboding was always in the air at Darmstadt. Ernie, too, was profoundly affected by Frittie’s death, and as a mawkish little boy he would say to Alice: “When I die, you must die too, and all the others; why can’t [we] all die together? I don’t like to die alone like Frittie.”16 Five years later, Alice and May did indeed die together.*
At Windsor on 14 December 1878, the dark blinds came down, and a fall of snow blanketed the castle in silent stillness. The Lord Chamberlain ordered the court to wear deep mourning for six weeks: black dresses, white gloves, pearls, and diamonds.17 Victoria’s reaction to Alice’s death was strangely muted; for her, perhaps, nothing could ever be so bad again as Albert’s death. It was Bertie who was overcome. “My Bertie … is so sad,” wrote Alix.18 “She was my favourite sister,” Bertie told Lord Granville, “so good, so kind, so clever; we had gone through much together—my father’s illness, then my own.”19
Late on Monday, 16 December, Bertie, Leopold, and Helena’s husband, Prince Christian, crossed to Flushing and traveled all the next day by train to Frankfurt. After the service in Darmstadt, Alice’s coffin was drawn through thick snow to the mausoleum at Rosenhohe, where Frittie and May already lay. The mourners followed on foot; chief among them was Bertie. Alice’s husband, Louis, though recovering from diphtheria, was not yet strong enough to walk through the snow. At ten thirty that night, an exhausted Bertie wrote to Knollys: “This has been a terribly trying day, and I hardly like to think of it, the interview with the poor G[ran]d Duke and the children was also inexpressibly painful. All was conducted with the greatest respect and quickly as was possible—but it was simply dreadful. I still feel as if I was under the impression of a horrid dream.”20
Back at Windsor, a memorial service was held at the time that Alice’s coffin was taken to the Rosenhohe. Alix, “who has been a real devoted sympathising daughter to me,” gave her arm to the Queen as they walked into the private chapel, which was draped with black. Victoria bore up to the end, when the Dead March from Saul was played; then, in floods of tears, she retreated to Albert’s Blue Room and knelt in prayer.21
After the funeral at Darmstadt, Bertie rejoined his mother at Windsor. Victoria went to see him as he sat writing in his room with Fossy, his little dog, lying beside him.22 They talked of Alice’s younger days, and Bertie was “so dear and nice.”23 “It has brought all so close together,” wrote Victoria.24 Later, he wrote her “a very dear kind [letter], speaking of Alix being ‘much too good for him’ and so delighted at my great praise of her.”25
Alix’s youngest sister, Thyra, was not a beauty like her sisters. At twenty-five she was considered an old maid, and her teeth stuck out. She was taller than Alix, and (according to Queen Victoria’s adviser Howard Elphinstone) “decidedly clever and most sensible and agreeable.”26 Gossips whispered that she had given birth to an illegitimate child in 1871 when, at the age of eighteen, she disappeared abroad for eleven months; the father was supposed to be a Danish hussar named Marcher, who committed suicide shortly afterward. The Danish royal family claimed that the rumor was a smear story started by Bismarck, and that Thyra had, in fact, been ill, first with jaundice, and then with typhoid in Italy. In Rome, visiting Bertie and Alix, she met Ernest, Crown Prince of Hanover.27 Ernest had an abnormally long neck, a nose so flat that it was almost nonexistent, narrow shoulders, and thick pebble spectacles. Alix thought him “the ugliest man there ever was made!!! But I like him so much.”28 Thyra fell in love with him at once.
Ernest’s father, the blind King George V of Hanover, Queen Victoria’s first cousin, had sided with the Austrians in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, with catastrophic results. Prussia dethroned him, annexed Hanover, and sequestrated his immense hereditary fortune, which was known as the Welfenfond. Bismarck paid the income into his “reptile fund,” the slush money he used to bribe the reptiles, as he called the liberal press. George V died in 1878, and Ernest wrote an ill-advised letter to the German emperor, laying claim to his title as King of Hanover. This destroyed any chance he had of getting his fortune back. He became locked into a quarrel with Prussia. Queen Victoria, who was his father’s executrix, tried in vain to persuade him to drop his claim to the throne of Hanover. Dreading Victoria’s wrath if he married a wife of whom she disapproved, Ernest distanced himself from Princess Thyra.
The deadlock was broken by Alix. She wrote to Ernest telling him that Thyra much wished to see him, and suggested a secret meeting in Frankfurt. Fearing a trap, Ernest hesitated, but Alix insisted, and accordingly, one day in September 1878, Queen Louise of Denmark and her daughters Alix and Thyra drove into Frankfurt, pretending that they needed to see an ear doctor. Ernest duly appeared at the appointed rendezvous. First Alix talked to him, and then Queen Louise, while Thyra waited anxiously in the water closet. At last Thyra was allowed to see Ernest alone. She wasted no time. As soon as he had kissed her hand, she proposed to him herself. Waiting outside the door, Queen Louise became agitated and, fearing that the meeting was a mistake and Ernest was indifferent, pushed Alix into the room. Alix saw at once that the radiant Thyra had been accepted and all was settled, but this made Queen Louise even more flustered. “My God, then she has proposed,” she declared, and tried to intervene, but it was too late; the couple were locked in an embrace. When the time came to leave, the Queen had to force them apart. “I stood behind the door,” Alix told Minnie, “and saw their parting kiss!!!”29
By marrying Thyra, Ernest leapfrogged from being a sacked ruler at the bottom of the royal heap, and positioned himself at the center of the anti-Prussian dynastic bloc, becoming brother-in-law to the Prince of Wales, the Russian czarevitch, and the King of Greece.30
At the wedding in Copenhagen, a large party of Hanoverians appeared, which gave Berlin an excuse to denounce the Danish king for harboring conspirators against the German Empire. The German ambassador was conspicuously absent. The deterioration of Denmark’s relations with Berlin worried Bertie, and he worked behind the scenes to help Ernest and protect the Danes from Bismarck’s anger. “I foresee troubles ahead for my excellent brother-in-law,” he told Sir Charles Wyke, the British ambassador in Copenhagen. “If he had only not irritated the German Emperor by that injudicious letter all the bullying which has since taken place would not have occurred and he might now have had his fortune.”31 Bertie appealed to Vicky, who explained that though she sympathized with Ernest and Thyra, private intervention by Victoria or Bertie could do no good unless Ernest formally rescinded his letter to the German emperor. “The question does not only resolve itself into what is ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ I wish it were as simple as that!” she told Bertie, and warned, “I … think it a pity that political questions should step in to disturb the peace and harmony of the family and be treated as personal ones!”32 But of course the personal was political—that is the essence of dynastic diplomacy—and the German emperor’s bullying of Ernest served only to tighten the links of the anti-Berlin dynastic bloc.
Bertie had wanted to educate Eddy at a public school, preferably Wellington, of which he was a governor. When Eddy was thirteen, this plan was abruptly abandoned. His tutor Dalton wrote darkly of the young prince’s backwardness, and warned against separating the brothers. “Prince Albert Victor [Eddy] requires the stimulus of Prince George’s company to induce him to work at all. If Prince George left Prince Albert Victor, the education of the latter, even now extremely difficult, would be rendered still more so.”33 He proposed sending Eddy to Dartmouth as a naval cadet, along with Prince George; the unspoken advantage of this arrangement was that it ensured that he remained their tutor.
Dalton had no trouble in convincing Bertie of the wisdom of his plan. But Queen Victoria, who was the ultimate arbiter in matters of her grandsons’ education, objected strongly to Dartmouth, on the somewhat surprising grounds that the navy would “make them think that their own Country is superior to any other,” which was undesirable in a king, who needed to be free from all national prejudices.34 Dalton, who showed more talent for intrigue than he did for teaching, managed to overcome the Queen’s objections, and in October 1877 the two boys were dispatched to the Britannia, the training ship at Dartmouth, accompanied by Dalton. For Alix, the parting from her sons was “a great wrench”: “poor little boys, they cried so bitterly.”35
For Eddy, Dartmouth was a disaster. In December 1878, Lord Ramsay, the commander of the Britannia, nerved himself to write to the Prince of Wales about the boy’s progress: “It is very, very unsatisfactory, indeed so unsatisfactory that I really think Your Royal Highness should reconsider the advisability of his remaining in the Britannia.… Prince Edward is learning nothing.… And this is not the worst. It is still more discouraging that every master and tutor who has had to do with him seems to despair of being able to teach him anything.… The experiment … has failed.”36 Prince George, on the other hand, was making excellent progress, doing better every day.
After this bombshell, it can have come as no surprise when Eddy failed the passing-out examination. Dalton, however, emerged unscathed. He took no responsibility for sending Eddy to Dartmouth. Instead, he blamed the boy’s inadequacy. Eddy’s problem was “that extreme inability … to fix his attention to any given subject for more than a few minutes consecutively.” According to Dalton, “it is to physical causes that one must look for an explanation of the abnormally dormant condition of his mental powers.” The prognosis was hopeful, as the prince would improve with time; meanwhile, competition with boys of his own age must be avoided. Dalton proposed a solution that could hardly have been more extreme: Eddy and George should be launched together on a world cruise for two years. Naturally, their tutor would accompany them.37
Once again, Dalton easily persuaded the royal parents of his bizarre proposal. When Victoria first heard of the idea, she “did not like it all,” but Dalton succeeded in changing her mind.38 The plan was condemned by the Cabinet, which objected that it would “agitate and distress the country.”39 But this intervention backfired, as Bertie and the Queen joined forces in their annoyance at the politicians’ unwarranted interference.†40
Bertie accompanied Eddy and Georgie to Portsmouth and saw them depart for a six-month cruise to the West Indies. On board the Bacchante, the two boys shared a plainly furnished cabin, which was connected with Dalton’s cabin by a door cut through the bulkhead.41 “Felt parting from dear boys dreadfully,” Bertie wired Victoria.42 He told Georgie: “I shall never forget what I felt wishing you goodbye on the 19th.”43 No one could accuse him of being hard-hearted toward his sons.
The shocking thing about the sorry tale of the education of the princes, especially Eddy, is the unquestioning trust that both Bertie and Alix placed in Dalton. “He has my total confidence,” wrote Alix, “he is such an upright man whose aim totally is the good of the boys!”44 Dalton had contrived to make himself indispensable by preying on the parents’ fears. His talk of the “physical causes” of Eddy’s backwardness has given rise to all sorts of speculation. Some say that Eddy had inherited Alix’s deafness, others that his two-month-premature birth caused “neuro-developmental impairments,” which meant that he was educationally subnormal, or that he suffered from petit mal epilepsy.45 Banishing him on a world cruise was not helpful. Anything better calculated to encourage speculation that he was abnormal can hardly be imagined. The truth was that Eddy was lazy and a slow developer, and today he might be diagnosed with attention deficit disorder. But the letters he wrote as a young man show a lively intelligence. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that his problems were made worse by Dalton and his system of shutting him up for years in isolation on a ship.
Sarah Bernhardt, the Divine Sarah, took London by storm in the summer of 1879 with her passionate performance in the Comédie-Française’s Phèdre. It left her so shattered that she vomited blood all night as her doctor pressed crushed ice to her lips. The illegitimate child of a Jewish courtesan, Sarah Bernhardt had frizzy red hair, a white face, and an unfashionably waif-like figure. She possessed a very modern genius for publicity. At the house she rented in Chester Square, she posed for photographers wearing the suit of white pantalons and jacket that she used for painting, and she bought a cheetah and a wolfhound to add to the menagerie of a monkey and a parrot that she kept in the garden.46 Naturally, Bertie was captivated. He watched her perform night after night, and he visited her gallery in Piccadilly.47 Sarah was introduced to the prince. “I’ve just come back from the P of W,” she scrawled to director Edmond Got. “It is 1:20 and I cannot rehearse at this hour. The Prince has kept me since 11.… I shall make amends tomorrow by knowing my part.”48 There were rumors, there always were, of an affair, but this was a flirtation, beneficial not only to Bertie, who was addicted to celebrity—a craving he shared with Oscar Wilde, passionate admirer of both Lillie Langtry and Sarah—but also to Bernhardt herself, who gained social validation from his approval. She was lionized, much to the chagrin of Lady Frederick Cavendish, who thought it “outrageous” that an actress, and a “shameless” one at that, should be invited to the houses of respectable people.‡49
Lillie Langtry found herself eclipsed. She was never in love with Bertie; in old age she remarked that she was always a little afraid of him, and “he always smelt so very strongly of cigars.”50 For her, what mattered was her status as royal favorite, and here the warning signs were plain to see. The names of Mr. and Mrs. Langtry first appear in the guest list for a Marlborough House Sunday dinner in Bertie’s diary in April 1879.51 The fact that Bertie invited Lillie to dine with Alix indicates that he no longer considered her to be his mistress. An exchange at a charity bazaar at the Albert Hall in July neatly encapsulates her declining stock. Bertie bought a cup of tea from Mrs. Langtry’s stall. Before handing it to him, she put it to her lips. “I should like a clean one please,” snapped Bertie.52 The public snub is the closest we can get to Bertie’s feelings, which are, as ever, unrecorded. Lillie, for her part, embarked on an affair with a younger man—the teenage Lord Shrewsbury, who was just nineteen. One afternoon Bertie called unexpectedly (Lillie had tried to put him off, but he didn’t receive her note) and found her with Shrewsbury. According to the story Lord Derby heard, the lovers were discovered in flagrante, and a terrible row ensued.53 Lillie even thought of marrying Shrewsbury, but decided against it, as she found him “quite as uneducated and much more jealous than Ned … and he gets worse every day—In fact I should despise him in a month.”54
The new breed of scurrilous gossip papers, which had created Lillie Langtry, now threatened to destroy her, and burn Bertie in the process. Town Talk was a weekly London society paper edited and published by the twenty-seven-year-old Adolphus Rosenberg. Throughout September, it ran a story that Ned Langtry had filed a petition for divorce, and that the Prince of Wales was named as corespondent.
Rosenberg then claimed that Patsy Cornwallis-West used her house at 49 Eaton Place as a photography studio, running from one camera to another in order to mass-produce the cartes de visite that she sold on commission in a Victorian version of Hello! magazine. Patsy’s husband sued for libel at once. When the court case opened, Rosenberg was surprised to find himself further indicted for publishing libels against the Langtrys.55 How the notoriously hard up Ned Langtry paid the lawyer’s fees has never been explained.
Neither Lillie nor Patsy was present in court. Ned Langtry testified: “I have read these articles and there is not one single word of truth in them.… I am now living at home with my wife.”56 Rosenberg was sentenced to eighteen months in prison. But the silencing of Town Talk was achieved at a cost. Day after day throughout October 1879, The Times had printed column inches repeating the paper’s allegations against the Prince of Wales.
Queen Victoria, who was always generous when Bertie was in trouble, blamed his love of country house parties. “It is what has done dear Bertie so much harm,” she told Vicky. “That visiting is … the worst thing I know and such a bore. The gentlemen go out shooting and the ladies spend the whole day idling and gossiping together. Alix hardly ever goes now—she hates it so.”57
The fact was that at thirty-eight, Bertie was a playboy Prince Hal, poised dangerously close to the edge of scandal. The London society press created a discourse of social slights and innuendo, of fashion and tittle-tattle, that reverberated nationally as it was reprinted in the gossip pages of local newspapers. Knollys’s desk filled with letters about petty social disputes, gambling debts, and slanderous chitchat and quarrels with Vanity Fair. Bertie had become the chief of the aristocratic tribe, ruling over the atavistic honor culture of the Victorian nobility, but this was hardly a fit role for a modern prince. The problem—what was the Prince of Wales to do?—remained unsolved.
Or so it seemed. The Marlborough House mailbag for 1879 also includes business letters from Beaconsfield about matters such as Egypt.58 There was correspondence with the Colonial Office about a Colonial Exhibition in New South Wales, with the Foreign Office about the Paris Universal Exhibition, with the Archbishop of Canterbury about the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge and with the governors of Calcutta about the water supply in Dacca. Bertie’s life had a serious side, which is too easily overlooked. He performed twenty public engagements in 1879, visiting schools and hospitals, laying foundation stones, and presiding at dinners; he made nineteen appearances in the House of Lords, and at Buckingham Palace he held four levees, two drawing rooms, and two state concerts.§59 When the Queen retreated to the Italian lakes in March, “Prince Hal” told Beaconsfield that he wished to be in frequent communication with the prime minister. “This is all very well,” commented Beaconsfield, “if it do not take, as threatened, the form of a rather protracted Sandringham visit.”60
Bertie’s diary for 1880 records at least seven visits from Prince Louis of Battenberg.61 The handsome twenty-six-year-old naval officer was on leave and half-pay, and on his frequent visits to London he stayed at Marlborough House.
Louis was the eldest of four Battenberg sons, and like his brothers, Alexander (Sandro) and Henry (Liko), he shamelessly exploited his charm and royal family connections to promote his career. Since joining the Royal Navy at age fifteen, he had benefited greatly from the patronage and generosity of “Uncle Bertie.” Louis’s son, Lord Mountbatten, was later to devote much effort to elaborating a romantic version of his antecedents, insisting that the Battenbergs were equal members of the German royal family. Louis was the son of a cousin of Princess Alice’s husband, the Grand Duke of Hesse, by a morganatic marriage—that is, a marriage to a woman who was not of royal rank.62 Provincial German courts were obsessed with the blood royal, the magic elixir that empowered toy-town princesses to marry kings, and in the snobbish world of the Almanac de Gotha the Battenbergs were looked down upon as “half-castes.” As Vicky’s husband, Fritz, remarked, they were “not … of the blood—a little like … animals”—a comment that perhaps says as much about Fritz as it does about them.63
In 1880, Louis Battenberg began an affair with Lillie Langtry. Whether Bertie knew about this and was complicit, as some have suggested, or whether he was irked by his good-looking young cousin stealing Lillie away from him can only be surmised; we have no real evidence either way.64 At a ball in May or June 1880, so the story goes, Lillie is supposed to have angered the prince by drinking too much champagne and slipping a spoonful of strawberry ice down the back of his neck. This was lèse-majesté indeed; Bertie could never bear to be teased.65 Lillie denied the incident, claiming that it was actually Patsy Cornwallis-West who was responsible; true or not, the story can be read as a measure of her falling stock with Bertie.66 There is no doubt that the prince wanted to distance himself from the scandal of the court case involving Lillie and Patsy Cornwallis-West.
At a Sunday dinner at Marlborough House (so Lillie related in her memoirs), she became suddenly ill with stomach pains, and Alix implored her to leave early. The royal physician Francis Laking followed her home to Norfolk Street. The next day, to Lillie’s everlasting delight, Alix called at Norfolk Street, accompanied by Charlotte Knollys, and made tea for her.67 Neither Bertie nor Alix mentions these events in their diaries, and this episode could easily be dismissed as yet another of Lillie’s apocryphal stories. Being forgiven by Alix was the fantasy of every ex-mistress. It validated the mistress socially and gave closure to the affair. In this instance, however, there seems to be some truth in Lillie’s story. She wrote a letter shortly afterward to her friend Lord Wharncliffe:
I have been so seedy again lately.… I felt so unwell after dinner that Sunday at Marlborough House that I had to leave an hour before the rest. I tell you this because no doubt you will hear as I did that I fainted at dinner because the Prince wasn’t civil enough!!!
The Princess and Miss Knollys came to see me before they left town and had tea and stayed for an hour. I was so puffed up about it … more especially as she kissed me when she left.68
Lillie’s letters to Lord Wharncliffe give edited highlights of her social career, but she would hardly have invented a dinner at Marlborough House, nor Alix’s visit—though her later claim that Alix made her a cup of tea seems improbable, to say the least. (Did Alix know how to make tea?)
What Lillie chose not to reveal in her letter to Wharncliffe was the reason why she felt unwell. She was pregnant. Which of her many lovers was the father of the child was a puzzle, most likely even to Lillie herself. The one man who was not in the frame was her husband, Ned, as he had walked out after the Town Talk libel case. The obvious candidate was Louis Battenberg.69 Lillie told him that he was the father, and he believed her. He confessed to his parents, who put paid to any foolish notions he might have had of marrying Lillie and arranged a financial settlement.70 Bertie may have worried that the child was his—there is a story that he tossed for paternity with Battenberg and lost—but it’s unlikely that he would have introduced Lillie to Alix and allowed his wife to become involved if he was sleeping with Lillie at the time.71 Whoever the father was, hushing up the scandal was imperative. Lillie was lent £2,000 to pay her debts, and her husband, Ned, who often visited her unannounced, was prevented from seeing her, constantly occupied with invitations to shoot or fish. Keeping him in ignorance of the pregnancy was vital; he was angry and resentful, and the worry was that if he discovered that Lillie was pregnant by another man, he might sue for divorce, dragging Bertie into the law courts. Lillie spent the summer holiday in Jersey. One Friday in October, by now four months pregnant, she visited London briefly and saw Bertie.72 On 17 October 1880, Bertie held a meeting with his doctor, Oscar Clayton, and saw Louis Battenberg.73 The same day, Louis departed on a two-year voyage around the world on the aptly named Inconstant. Lillie herself was spirited away to France. Her baby was born on 18 March 1881—a girl named Jeanne Marie.
What Bertie did not know was that throughout her pregnancy Lillie clung passionately to another man. His name was Arthur Jones; a rakish Jersey sportsman, he was the illegitimate son of Lord Ranelagh. His sister Alice, another illegitimate child of Lord Ranelagh, had married Lillie’s brother Clement Le Breton. Lillie’s letters to Jones, discovered in 1978, make it clear that she preferred plain Mr. Jones to both the Prince of Wales and the glamorous Prince Louis Battenberg. She told Jones that he was the father of her child, and he bought the potions from the chemist that she took in fruitless efforts to precipitate an abortion. The love letters she wrote during her pregnancy suggest that she at least was convinced that the baby was his, and he was with her in Paris when the child was born.‖74
Oscar Wilde wrote Lady Windermere’s Fan in 1891. He offered Lillie the part of Mrs. Erlynne, which she refused. “Why he ever supposed it would have been … a suitable play for me I cannot imagine,” she wrote, disingenuously.75 In the play, Mrs. Erlynne is a professional beauty with a heart of gold. She is hated by the society ladies, one of whom quips, “Many a woman has a past, but I am told she had at least eleven, and they all fit.”
“You whose whole life is a lie, could you speak the truth about anything?” asks another. But Wilde’s play turns on the idea that it is London society that is morally corrupt, not Mrs. Erlynne, who has been redeemed through her suffering and disgrace. “You don’t know,” she says, “what it is to fall into the pit, to be despised, mocked, abandoned, sneered at—to be an outcast! To find the door shut against one, to have to creep in by hideous byways, afraid every moment lest the mask should be stripped from one’s face.”76
Bertie helped to pull Lillie out of the pit. After her baby was born, he did all he could to support her career as an actor, making a conspicuous appearance at her debut performance of She Stoops to Conquer.77 Lillie was a moderate success on the stage; as the diarist Loulou Harcourt wrote, after seeing her in School for Scandal in 1885: “She is fairly good when she is simply acting the lady of fashion moving about in society but the moment she tries to show any passion or force of feeling she is a miserable failure and proves herself to be no actress but people will continue to go and see her because she is Mrs. Langtry and is dressed by Worth.”78 Thanks to Bertie’s patronage, Lillie received a semi-royal welcome when she toured the United States, and she became a successful racehorse owner—she was the first woman owner to win the Cesarewitch.
Lillie’s long-estranged husband, Ned, died of drink in Chester Asylum in 1897. Francis Knollys was kept closely informed by the solicitor George Lewis when Ned Langtry’s landlord threatened blackmail, claiming to possess compromising letters Bertie had written to Lillie. “I was upon friendly terms with Mr. Langtry up to the last,” wrote Lewis. “I am sure he would sooner have sent me any letters than have given them to his landlord.”79 It seems that Ned Langtry used George Lewis as a broker, trading silence and cash in exchange for Bertie’s love letters. Bertie, meanwhile, maintained a lifelong friendship with Lillie. “How I wish you were on board sailing with me now,” he wrote from Cowes in 1885.80 He attended her opening nights—“I count upon you to reserve the Box for me.”81 He helped arrange for her daughter, Jeanne, to be presented to the Queen.82 He even gave Lillie a dog that had belonged to his current mistress, Lady Warwick: “Perhaps you would write Lady W[arwick] a line to W[arwick] Castle and tell her you like the dog and ask her the name.”83
Alix spent the summer of 1879 in Denmark with her sister Minnie, staying with King Christian at Bernstorff, his summer residence. An unpretentious early-nineteenth-century building with whitewashed walls, Bernstorff stood in a romantic park beside the sea. It had been the childhood holiday retreat of Alix and Minnie, and that summer the two sisters insisted on staying there together, refusing to move to the grander and larger castle of Fredensborg. They even shared the bedroom they had used as girls.84 The house was crammed with Romanovs and Waleses and their suites, and twenty or thirty people sat down to dinner each night at five o’clock, which, complained Charlotte Knollys, made the evenings “dreadfully long.”85 It rained every day, and Charlotte found that “one day here is so exactly like the other that there really is nothing to tell.”86
Minnie’s husband the czarevitch Alexander arrived, bringing with him four yachts. Charlotte Knollys thought him “much improved in manners (he used to be rather rough).”87 Alix reported that he was “most amiable … sensible and by no means violent in politics.”88 When Bertie joined the party, arriving on board his own yacht Osborne, Queen Victoria worried that her indiscreet son would cause trouble with England’s archenemy. Bertie replied diplomatically: “I shall of course avoid politics as much as possible but as he married dear Alix’s sister whom I am very fond of, I am most anxious that our relations should not be strained.”89 The two brothers-in-law competed to entertain on their yachts. In Paris, on the journey home, they spent four days together, Bertie showing the czarevitch round the boulevards. Beaconsfield commented that Bertie had “come back very Russian, they say.”90
Back in England, Alix missed “my own angelic little Minnie.” Usually, she told Minnie, she could survive their separations, but this time, “I have been so miserable that everyone asks what is wrong with me, but it was only homesickness for you!!”91 She found herself talking aloud, imagining that she could hear Minnie’s voice speaking to her. “It is always a pleasure to me when somebody says our voices are alike and that we look like each other!”92 It was as if Minnie was the other half of herself, wearing the same clothes, speaking in the same voice. Having a doppelgänger made her feel secure.
At Sandringham, she rode her six horses every day and indulged her passion for hunting. This had to be kept secret from the Queen, who disapproved almost as strongly of princesses riding to hounds as she did of them breast-feeding, but Alix found it more thrilling each time, in spite of bloodcurdling falls. On one occasion, the horse jumped and “I silly animal lost my balance and flew over the wrong side, head down, thinking my last moment had come—but I got my head out of the sand and picked myself half up, then I talked to the horse, and then it stopped, the sweet animal—then one of the gentlemen, [Dighton] Probyn, jumped off and pushed me into the saddle and then everything was well and I hurried on!!!” Another time the horse jumped over a wide, deep ditch, “but it jumped too short and put its head through a fence, getting so afraid that it went on its hind legs down into the ditch and there we walked up and down and I could not get it out.” Eventually it rolled out, and fortunately both horse and rider were unharmed. She implored Minnie, “Do not tell!”93
At Sandringham, Alix was adored. Mrs. Louise Cresswell, the lady farmer and tenant of Appleton House on the estate, worshipped her. Alix would visit for tea, driving herself over in her four-pony carriage. Mrs. Cresswell was an occasional guest at the Big House, but she was terrified of the prince. He was frighteningly unpredictable—a jovial figure in the ballroom, but a tyrannical Henry VIII on the estate. His black looks spelled disaster.
Mrs. Cresswell fought a running war against the estate office, complaining that the royal pheasants and hares ruined her crops, and the clash sharpened as agricultural depression deepened after the wet summer of 1879. “Every proprietor of land is ‘down in the mouth’ at present,” wrote Bertie, and Mrs. Cresswell complained that he showed her scant charity.94 In 1880, the bank foreclosed on Mrs. Cresswell and called in its loans. She later wrote a book describing her battles, entitled Eighteen Years on the Sandringham Estate (1887), in which she failed to mention the fact that she owed more than two years’ rent. As her debts grew, she became convinced that she was being persecuted by HRH. The estate was reluctant to evict her, but their offers to help were met by threats of lawsuits, wild accusations, and unreasonable demands for rent reductions.95 Bertie emerges if anything with credit from the episode, but Mrs. Cresswell was able to write a one-sided account, presenting herself as the innocent victim of HRH’s Germanic lust for shooting—an attack to which he was powerless to reply.
Bertie stayed at Hughenden with Beaconsfield for a night in January 1880. The court-loving prime minister fussed about the visit and the guest list for weeks beforehand. He threw a small dinner party, which was a triumph, and the next morning, while Bertie retired to write to Alix, dashed off an ecstatic report to Lady Bradford. Prince Hal had “praised the house, praised his dinner, praised the pictures; praised everything; was himself most agreeable in conversation, said some good things and told more.” The prince went to bed no later than midnight, and Major Teesdale the equerry told Beaconsfield that “in regard to late hours, eating, drinking, everything, there is a great and hugely beneficial change in his life.”96
Bertie’s feelings toward Beaconsfield were ambivalent. On the whole, he sympathized with his politics, especially in foreign affairs. But he distrusted Beaconsfield’s knowing irony, he bristled at his camp obsequiousness, and he despised his inability to say what he thought to his face. Above all, Bertie disliked Beaconsfield because he was Victoria’s favorite. He worried that Victoria confided too much, and that, like John Brown, Beaconsfield knew too many family secrets.a With Gladstone, the opposite was the case. Bertie shared his mother’s opposition to Gladstone’s Liberal politics, though his views were less extreme. But he had no sympathy with Victoria’s violent dislike of Gladstone himself. On the contrary, he found Gladstone personally agreeable.
In March 1880, Beaconsfield called a snap election and was unexpectedly and overwhelmingly defeated. Rather than wait to meet defeat in Parliament, as was customary, he made constitutional history by resigning immediately, and Queen Victoria found herself confronted with the inevitability of a hated Liberal government, with Gladstone as it its most likely prime minister. She told Ponsonby she would rather abdicate than appoint “that half-mad firebrand,” and she endeavored to make the Whig Lord Hartington prime minister instead.97
For the first time in his life, Bertie attempted to play a part behind the scenes. He was a friend of Hartington’s, and he was on good terms with Lord Granville, the third candidate for the premiership. He had several meetings with Hartington, which he reported to Ponsonby: “I think it right to let you know that I had a long conversation again with Hartington yesterday evening—and he is more anxious than ever that the Queen should send for Mr. Gladstone to form a government instead of sending either for Lord Granville or himself.” Personally, Bertie was “strongly of the opinion that the Queen should send for Mr. Gladstone. Far better that she should take the initiative than that it should be forced on her.”98 When Ponsonby showed Bertie’s letter to the Queen, she scrawled furiously across it: “The Prince of Wales … has no right to meddle and never has done so before. Lord Hartington must be told … that the Queen cannot allow any private and intimate communications to go on between them, or all confidence will be impossible.”99
The Prince of Wales had indeed no constitutional role, nor had the Queen asked him to intervene. But his advice was sensible, well meant, and correct—Gladstone was the inevitable prime minister, and for the Queen to block him would have been a dangerous mistake. By snubbing Bertie so brutally, Victoria could hardly fail to make trouble. Bertie blamed his youngest brother, Prince Leopold, who was a staunch Tory and Beaconsfield’s pet. Leopold enjoyed the Queen’s confidence and acted as her adviser during the ministerial crisis, and Bertie accused him of poisoning the Queen against Gladstone and persuading her that Gladstone was an enemy of the royal family.100
Soon the prince and his mother were quarreling again. The Queen proposed to make Bertie colonel in chief of the Household Cavalry, but in exchange she demanded that he should give up his colonelcy of the Rifle Brigade, which she desired to transfer to Prince Arthur. Bertie abandoned the Rifles with “extreme reluctance,” and let it be known that he would have preferred to keep both regiments.101 Without telling the Queen, like a small boy he persuaded Arthur to allow him to wear the Rifles’ black buttons whenever he chose. Victoria wrote irritably to Arthur: “I wish Bertie would not meddle so much in everything concerning you brothers as he does now; for you are my children and you owe him no allegiance or obedience, which belongs only to me! Pray do not yield to him, for he has no right to do it.… He was most unkind to poor Leopold the other day, but he won’t stand being treated like a little child.”102 Bertie, for his part, complained that Victoria did not consult him. “I do not think that I am prone to ‘let the cat out of the bag’ as a rule, or betray confidences, but I own that it is often with great regret that I either learn from others or see in the newspapers hints or facts stated with regard to members of our family,” he told the Queen.103
“Receive sad intelligence of assassination of Emperor of Russia by explosive bomb!” noted Bertie on 13 March 1881.104 The czar Alexander II had lived like a hunted animal in the last months of his life, repeatedly targeted by terrorists, and he was eventually murdered driving in his sleigh in St. Petersburg. In London, the Liberal politician Charles Dilke watched Bertie at the mass in the Russian chapel. The small room was packed and stifled with incense. Bertie wore a heavy uniform and carried a lighted taper, and Dilke saw him go to sleep standing, “his taper gradually turn round and gutter on the floor.”105
The new czar, Alexander III, was Bertie’s brother-in-law, and in spite of the security risks and hostility toward Russia, Bertie persuaded a reluctant Victoria to allow him and Alix to attend the funeral. This was his third visit to Russia. “There is very general surprise expressed at them being allowed to go there at all,” commented Loulou Harcourt in his diary.106
On the day of the funeral, St. Petersburg was blotted out by thick snow raked by a bitter, swirling wind. The city buzzed with rumors of mines that had been timed to detonate during the service. Inside the heavily guarded Peter and Paul Cathedral, the atmosphere was overpoweringly hot and perfumed with flowers and incense. Bertie and Alix arrived after the interminable funeral mass had already begun, and watched as Minnie—now styled the Empress Marie Feodorovna—along with the rest of the czar’s family, filed past and one by one kissed the mutilated hands of the blackened and putrefying corpse of Alexander II, which lay in its open coffin.107 At least Alix was spared the kissing.
The next day Bertie invested his brother-in-law Alexander III with the Order of the Garter at the Anitchkoff Palace, where he and Alix were staying. The new czar had moved there from the Winter Palace, but even here he was a virtual prisoner, in constant danger of assassination, and confined for exercise to the palace backyard, which, Bertie declared, was an area unworthy of a London slum.108 The Garter ceremony was performed privately. As Bertie marched into the throne room at the head of five members of his staff, carrying the insignia on narrow velvet cushions, Alix could be heard crying out to Minnie: “Oh! My dear! Do look at them! They look exactly like a row of wet-nurses carrying babies!”109
* Nor was this the last of the Hesses’ tragedies. Alice’s daughter, the czarina Alexandra, was murdered with all her family at Ekaterinburg in 1918. Ernie’s eldest son, the Grand Duke George, was killed in 1937 along with his wife, Cecile, who was Prince Philip’s sister, and their two young sons, in an air crash. Earl Mountbatten, who was the son of Alice’s daughter Victoria, was assassinated in 1979 by a bomb planted by the Irish Republican Army that also killed his grandson. (see David Duff, Hessian Tapestry [Muller, 1967].)
† When Dalton heard that the Bacchante, a new ironclad corvette, had been chosen, he objected that it was not safe and demanded that the two princes should be separated. Bertie was “very much put out” by Dalton’s change of mind, and after much toing and froing Dalton eventually agreed to the Bacchante. (RA VIC/Add C07/1, Francis Knollys to Henry Ponsonby, n.d. See Ponsonby’s Memo, n.d., in Arthur Ponsonby, Henry Ponsonby, p. 105.)
‡ When Bernhardt came to London in 1881, Bertie asked some English ladies to be invited to a supper that he directed to be given for her at the wish of the Duc d’Aumale. The party was not a success. “It was one thing to get [the English women] to go, and another thing to get them to talk when they were there; and the result was that, as they would not talk to Sarah Bernhardt and she would not talk to them, and as the Duc d’Aumale was deaf and not inclined to make conversation on his own account, nobody talked at all, and an absolute reign of the most dismal silence ensued.” (Stephen Gwynn and Gertrude Tuckwell, Life of Sir Charles Dilke [John Murray, 1917], vol. 1, p. 414.)
§ In the same year, he attended the theater, opera, or concerts on eighty occasions.
‖ Society, on the other hand, believed that the child was Louis Battenberg’s. Jeanne married the Conservative politician Ian Malcolm in 1902. Margot Asquith, crashingly tactless, told the unsuspecting bride on her wedding day that her real father was not Ned Langtry but Louis Battenberg, causing a lifelong rift between Lillie and her daughter. When Lillie’s granddaughter Mary Malcolm died in 2010, her obituaries claimed that her grandfather was Edward VII.