The Heir Apparent: A Life of Edward VII, the Playboy Prince

Alix was crushed by Eddy’s death. At Sandringham she preserved his room as a shrine and visited it daily, strewing fresh flowers on the bed. His uniforms and clothes were kept in a glass cabinet, and his soap and hairbrushes were laid out exactly as they had been on the day he died.¹ Never again did Alix stay at Abergeldie. “Last time we were there,” she wrote in 1902, “was with darling Eddy—& since then I c[ou]ld not bear to stay there again!”² Mourning brought her closer to Queen Victoria, who understood grief all too well. She leaned also on Oliver Montagu, whom she found “such a comfort and help”; despite his bluff manner, Montagu could relate to her religious feelings. “We often talked over sacred things together,” Alix wrote; something one can hardly imagine Bertie doing with his wife.³

Mourning emasculated Bertie. The Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz^† thought him “very fat and puffed, not knowing well what to do with himself now, during the mourning, it gave me a painful impression.”⁴ Forbidden social life, theaters, and races, he was condemned to accompany Alix as she wandered restlessly in search of peace, looking “lovelier than ever” in her long black veil.⁵ Escaping Sandringham, with its sad memories, Alix brought Bertie to stay at Compton Place, the Duke of Devonshire’s house in Eastbourne, for the day Eddy was to have married in February. “Hope beautiful fresh air may do us all good though our hearts remain sad wherever we are,” she wired the Queen.⁶ In the spring, the family fled to Cap Martin on the Riviera. For Bertie, incarcerated with a tearful, insomniac wife, the enforced domesticity and inactivity of a year’s mourning was almost unendurable.

The newspapers were filled with respectful eulogies for the dead Eddy—all except Reynolds’s, which declared that his mental faculties were “extremely limited” and he made “the poorest possible appearance” in public.⁷ Eddy was no fool, but he seemed strangely vulnerable to scandal and lacking in common sense—a quality his brother, George, possessed in abundance. Bertie, however, was changed. There is no evidence that he considered Eddy’s death a blessing. He was genuinely saddened.

Bertie’s relations with the Queen reverted to their former coolness. He complained that “he is not of the slightest use to the Queen; that everything he says or suggests is poohed poohed [sic].”⁸ Victoria had been quick to sympathize over Eddy’s death, but she found Bertie’s gambling and adultery hard to forgive. The Tranby Croft scandal was bad enough. Far worse was his affair with Daisy Warwick, which she knew all about thanks to a spiteful letter from Mina Beresford. In the new era of moral politics and intrusive newspapers, Bertie’s infidelity was a liability.

Salisbury’s government fell in August 1892, and when Gladstone took office once again, he told the Queen that the Cabinet had agreed to communicate its proceedings to the Prince of Wales, “as has been in action for several years past.” Victoria was horrified.⁹ She consulted Salisbury, who confirmed that he had never sent a report of Cabinet proceedings to the prince.¹⁰ Victoria scrawled triumphantly in purple pencil to Ponsonby: “The Queen is quite sure what Lord Salisbury says is the fact, for she is certain nothing of the kind was ever done or ought to be done.”¹¹ Algernon West, Gladstone’s private secretary, hastened to reassure her that the intention was merely to let the prince know “generally what was going on,” and not to send him a copy of the prime minister’s letter to the Queen, which was at that time the only formal record of Cabinet proceedings.¹² Gladstone was always more willing than Lord Salisbury to keep the Prince of Wales informed, which was one of the reasons why Bertie liked and respected him. Salisbury’s attitude was strictly correct, but “there was a quality in it that was humiliating to him.”¹³

Lord Rosebery, the foreign secretary in the Gladstone government, agreed to send Bertie the information he really wanted: confidential foreign dispatches. The most secret documents were enclosed in red leather boxes locked with a special key. Only the sovereign, the prime minister, and the head of the Foreign Office possessed copies of this key. Rosebery discovered in the Foreign Office the gold key that had once belonged to Prince Albert, and forwarded it to Bertie.¹⁴ Unfortunately, it seemed not to work. Knollys thought Bertie had been tricked and given a key that “would open nothing,” but the fact was, “that particular Cabinet key has to be pushed in a certain distance and then given a turn before it can go right home.”¹⁵ Even when he got his gold key to work, Bertie complained that the red boxes often contained little of interest. “The game is not to let me see any interesting or important Despatches! This has been going on for years under successive governments and it would be far better if FO sent me no more, which is preferable to the rubbish they send!”¹⁶

Bertie’s diary, seemingly the most impenetrable and impersonal of documents, contains a code. Cracking the code gives the key to his preoccupations—the double life and the secret narrative that made his constant performance bearable. At intervals in the diary Bertie inscribed small symbols or initials in the left-hand margin. He frequently wrote the letters “VR,” “G,” or “Vy.” Checking the dates when these initials occur against his correspondence confirms that “G,” “VR” and “Vy” denote days when he wrote to George, the Queen, or Vicky. The diary for 1891 and 1892 is missing, but in the volume for 1893 the pages are scattered with a small symbol that resembles a capital D in reverse. This is inscribed not in the margin but at the top of the box headed “morning” or “evening.”

The D in Bertie’s life was Daisy Warwick. Anecdotal accounts stress the intensity of the affair during the early 1890s. Puzzlingly, however, the name of Lady Warwick occurs less and less frequently in his diary from 1893. He made a habit of staying with Lord and Lady Warwick in October each year at Easton Lodge, and sometimes in March as well. But her name seems to have dropped out of the Marlborough House parties held by Ferdinand Rothschild or Baron Hirsch. There is tantalizingly little evidence, as the letters that do survive from Bertie to Daisy date mainly from 1898 or later, when the affair was burned out. Daisy’s letters were presumably destroyed after Bertie’s death.

Daisy had been the center of his life; more than his mistress, she had become “my little Daisywife.” Whenever they were both in London, he took tea with her at her house at 50 South Audley Street, or they met for late-night suppers in a house placed at his disposal by a member of his household.¹⁹ What took place at these assignations can only be surmised; the important thing was that no one else was present, not even servants. Daisy tells a story of one of these meetings. She arrived in a cab at the appointed house after the opera. Bertie had been given a latch key, and there were no servants in the house, just a supper waiting of lobster and champagne to be eaten in perfect privacy. On reaching the house, “what was my alarm to find my admirer on his knees on the pavement groping for a lost latch key.” She hurriedly dismissed her cab and helped the search. But to no avail. “There was nothing left for us to do but—supperless—to go arm-in-arm for a midnight stroll in the empty, echoing streets before seeking our respective, lawful dwelling-places.”²⁰ More than any of his earlier mistresses, Bertie was emotionally involved with Daisy Warwick. She was Anne Boleyn to his Henry VIII: She was the commoner with whom the middle-aged prince fell in love. By contrast with Tudor England, however, a royal divorce was never considered or even discussed. Bertie remained loyal—in his own way—to Alix. “She is my brood mare,” he used to say. “The others are my hacks.”²¹

Undaunted, Daisy retreated to her Essex estates, where she entertained with louche luxury. “The most coveted invitations in England were those to house parties at Easton Lodge marked: ‘To meet the Prince of Wales.’ ”²³ Her friend the novelist Elinor Glyn fondly recalled arriving on a winter’s evening; the women dressed in velvet sable-trimmed tea gowns, the tea table laden with scones and cream, the footmen all the same height at six feet, the luxurious bedrooms with hot baths and writing tables equipped with pens from Asprey and bouquets of flowers for wearing at dinner. Instead of the usual country-house sport of shooting, which Daisy disliked, weekends at Easton revolved around a game of adultery: a carefully choreographed flirtation that took place between the married women and their admirers—little notes would appear on a lady’s breakfast tray from her admirer, and there were lovers’ walks to the Stone House, an Elizabethan folly in the grounds, all orchestrated with velvety charm by Daisy. Most of the men fell hopelessly in love with her; she possessed what Elinor Glyn, coining a phrase, described as “It,” the supreme personal charm which is “quite indefinable” and “does not depend upon beauty or wit, although she possessed both in the highest degree.”²⁴

But there was another side to Daisy’s character, a social conscience and searching for purpose that sat uneasily with the royal mistress. Looking back on her life, she reflected that though at the beginning she worshipped the same gods as others of her class, she was changed when she met the journalist W. T. Stead in 1892. With his rough northern voice, his strong beard and mesmeric eyes, Stead became her Svengali. Daisy now entered what she called her “middle-class period”—her “Board of Guardians, philanthropic, educational, lady-gardening period.”²⁵ Stead had won fame as editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, forcing the government to raise the age of consent in 1885 through the “Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” revelations, and as editor of the Review of Reviews from 1890 he was the scourge of adulterers such as Charles Dilke and Charles Parnell. But he did not denounce the adulteress Daisy. On the contrary, he became her confidant and adviser.

Daisy was already tiring of Bertie. Not that she disliked him. As she later told the journalist Frank Harris: “He was very considerate, and from a woman’s point of view that’s a great deal.… I grew to like him very much; I think anybody would have been won by him.”²⁶ But she confessed that when guests at Easton house parties left her alone with the prince, she found it “boresome as he sat on a sofa holding my hand and goggling at me.”²⁷ In London, she became resentful of his constant demands, which monopolized her time. When they were apart, he wrote letters twice or thrice a week, which she must answer “or he used to say I had hurt him.”²⁸

Stead suggested that Daisy should use her influence to educate and improve the prince. In August 1893, he advised her that she must be “the priest of the parish” and Bertie the “parishioner.”²⁹ A triangular relationship developed, Daisy regularly reporting on her relations with the “parishioner” to Stead.

Influencing the prince gave Daisy a kind of power. “Being a woman and thus cut off from public life which is open to men—worse luck—one’s power is only in personal influence,” she wrote.³⁰ This sort of power had always been the prerogative of the royal mistress. With the language of parishioner/priest, Daisy and Stead gave it a moral spin. Not only would the priest redeem the parishioner, and thus legitimize her adultery, but also, as priest, she was the dominant partner within the relationship. Supremely self-confident, Daisy could see that the prince was no different from other men. Because he read so little, he learned not from books but, “like a woman,” from meeting people.^‡ It now became Daisy’s mission to show the prince “things as they really were,” to teach him about the lives of the poor. She was well aware that her ability to do this depended upon his “extraordinary appreciation of physical beauty”—that is, her own beauty.³¹ When Bertie stayed at Easton for Easter 1893, the visits to the Stone House and thoroughbred studs were interspersed with tea with the vicar and a tour of the workhouse. After the prince’s visit in October, Daisy reported to Stead: “My ‘parishioner’ was very glad to spend these few quiet days at Easton, but I think he is rather jealous of your influence on my life and thoughts.”³²

Daisy’s philanthropic activities are often dismissed as disorganized and impulsive, but she was right to urge Bertie to do good works. Thanks to Daisy Warwick, “the great womanizer was womanized.”³³ Alix later told Lord Rosebery that at this time she “hated Lady Warwick.”³⁴

The death of Oliver Montagu was another blow to Alix. Eight years earlier Montagu had lost an eye, which had been injured in a shooting accident. Alix described the operation in gruesome detail: In order to stop the blood, sponges were stuck into the cavity where the eye had been; but OM’s sufferings endeared him to her all the more. “I cannot really think of anything else,” she wrote, “and he, poor one, had the loveliest eyes—I have never seen anyone as little vain as him.”³⁵ Now, the forty-nine-year-old Montagu was mortally ill with cancer. He insisted on traveling to Cairo, and, after undergoing two operations, he died there in January 1893.³⁶ Alix was grief stricken. According to Skittles (who loved a good story), the princess went to bed and cried for three days. She confessed her feeling for Montagu to Bertie, but he “found nothing to object in it. He knew all about it.” Skittles once received an anonymous letter complaining about Alix’s relationship with Montagu; she showed it to Bertie, who remarked that he, too, received letters on the subject, usually from the wives of clergymen. When Skittles suggested that he ought to speak to the princess about it, Bertie “said he could not do that, as it would be an insult to her. He knew there was nothing in it.”³⁷

Alix was sentimental. This was the woman who had erected a tombstone in the pets’ graveyard that still survives in the shrubbery at Marlborough House:

Bereft of Montagu, Alix was thrown on to the companionship of her woman of the bedchamber, the devoted Charlotte Knollys. As the princess’s constant attendant and amanuensis, Charlotte gained an unhealthy influence over her mistress.⁴⁰ Isolated by her deafness, Motherdear clung, too, to her unmarried children, Victoria, Maud, and especially George. Her relations with “Georgie boy” had always been possessive, and she is often blamed for infantilizing her son, “holding him back in a mental playground where she could reign supreme.”⁴¹ She held all the tighter after Eddy’s death. “Thank God dear Georgie the only one left is looking well I always feel that pang wherever [sic] I look at him now,” she wired the Queen.⁴²

The Duke of York, as George now became, had Eddy’s allowance from Parliament, a house in St. James’s Palace, and York Cottage at Sandringham. A life of ease was hard to resist. He spent two months improving his German at Heidelberg, and then marriage to May was all that remained to be done. Alix took him on a cruise to Athens to prepare; she told him that she was “worried to death” about his marrying. “Nothing and nobody can or shall ever come between me and my darling Georgie boy,” she wrote.⁴⁵

George returned home ahead of Alix, who remained abroad on purpose. He visited his sister Louise at Sheen Lodge; Princess May was invited over from nearby White Lodge, and the diffident prince was pushed by his sister into the garden, where he proposed to May and was accepted.^§

“Melampus!” he wired to Bertie that evening. Melampus was the name of the ship he had taken in the summer, and the code word they had agreed for an acceptance by May.⁴⁶ There was nothing spontaneous about this proposal, though it happened a day or two earlier than expected. Bertie was delighted. “What a relief it must be to your mind that all is now satisfactorily settled and you can easily understand that I have the same feelings,” he told George.⁴⁷ Alix’s emotions were more complicated. “You know what mixed feelings mine are,” she wired Victoria from Malta.⁴⁸ To May she wrote a congratulatory letter that was affectionate but suffocating: “I hope that my sweet May will always come straight to me for everything,” signing herself, “ever your most loving and devoted old Motherdear.”⁴⁹

The wedding took place in boiling heat on 6 July 1893 at the Chapel Royal. Between the wedding breakfast and a family dinner, Bertie somehow managed to squeeze in a clandestine meeting with Daisy Warwick—a D symbol is written in the diary.⁵⁰ George’s first cousin Nicky, the czarevitch, stayed at Marlborough House and noted a shade reproachfully, “Uncle Bertie is in very good spirits and very friendly, almost too much so.” Alix, lovelier than ever—and much more lovely than the bride—in ethereal white satin and diamonds, looked “rather sad” in church. “One can quite understand the reason why,” wrote Nicky.⁵¹

The couple spent their honeymoon at York Cottage, Sandringham, where it poured with rain. After ten days, the entire Wales family joined them. York Cottage had formerly been the Bachelor’s Cottage; it was unpretentious and cramped and only five minutes’ walk away from Sandringham House. To the growing annoyance of her new daughter-in-law, Alix could never resist dropping in for tea or to rearrange the furniture.⁵²

Many years later, King George V allegedly declared: “My father was frightened of his mother; I was frightened of my father, and I am damned well going to see to it that my children are frightened of me.”⁵³ The remark was probably apocryphal; it was untrue, at least so far as Bertie’s relationship with George is concerned. Of all the Hanoverian/Saxe-Coburg-Gotha monarchs, Bertie was the only one who never quarreled with his heir, an achievement for which he has not received the credit he deserves. Four days after the wedding, he wrote to Prince George: “I hope you will always look upon me as your elder brother and ask my advice always.… You are quite right in saying that we have not lost a son but you have brought us another daughter.”⁵⁴ The relationship between father and son was, however, an unequal one. George’s first cousin, who disliked Bertie, considered that “King Edward’s affection for Prince George was due to the fact that the latter was prepared to be his complete slave.”⁵⁵

May never quite became another daughter to Bertie. The serious-minded princess disliked his “fast set” and disapproved of his habits of racing and gambling. George was not part of the Marlborough House set either. In many ways he seemed the antithesis of his fat, philandering father: devotedly uxorious, and thin, he disliked London society. Perhaps it was because George seemed his ideal alter ego that Bertie found him so congenial, unlike Eddy, who reminded him of his dissipated younger self.^‖ Father and son had much in common, too: an obsession with punctuality, an addiction to smoking, a passion for uniforms, and a devotion to the competitive slaughter of game birds. The happy result was that Prince George as Duke of York and heir presumptive did much less in the way of public work than Bertie had done in his twenties, and his father never pushed him to undertake official duties. “For seventeen years,” as Harold Nicolson wrote, “he did nothing at all but kill animals and stick in stamps.”⁵⁶

Bertie’s new toy was the royal yacht Britannia. Commissioned by him in 1892 and built on the Clyde, Britannia was both a state-of-the-art racing cutter and a luxury yacht. She won races in 1893, but 1894 was her most exciting season, as she battled race after race with her American rival Vigilant. The prince’s coolness gained the admiration of his crew, who watched as Britannia heeled from side to side, maneuvering at the start of a race, while Bertie sat on deck reading the newspapers, his deck chair rolling violently. At length he stood up and held on to the rail of the ship, and both chair and papers fell overboard. Asked whether the chair should be retrieved, Bertie merely remarked, “Yes, pick up the papers,” and a dinghy was dispatched to recover the royal Times.⁵⁷

When Bertie went to the South of France in the spring, he stayed on board Britannia, cruising from one regatta to another. On 3 March 1894, the day that Britannia arrived at Marseille, Bertie noted, “Mr. Gladstone resigns premiership is succeeded by Lord Rosebery.”⁵⁸ Victoria was delighted; half blind and deaf, the eighty-five-year-old Gladstone noted her “cheerfulness” when he tendered his resignation at Windsor, and he was hurt that she expressed no regret but made small talk, allegedly remarking: “I hear your daughter has been bitten by a mad cat. Is that true?”⁵⁹ To the prince, however, Gladstone wrote a sad little farewell letter (“the devotion of an old man is [of] little worth”) conveying his “fervent thanks” for his “unbounded kindness” and that of the “beloved Princess.”⁶⁰ Bertie reciprocated the old man’s affection, and acted as a pallbearer at his funeral three years later.

Rosebery, Gladstone’s successor, was welcomed by both Bertie and Victoria. The Queen liked the forty-six-year-old aristocrat personally and thought she could control him politically (she couldn’t), and Rosebery was a good friend of Bertie’s.

Perhaps Bertie knew too much about Rosebery. In August 1893, at Homburg, he had helped to rescue him from the mad Marquess of Queensberry. The homophobic marquess, who was the father of Lord Alfred Douglas (Bosie), the lover of Oscar Wilde, was convinced that his eldest son, Lord Drumlanrig, private secretary to Rosebery, was having a homosexual affair with Rosebery. He arrived in Homburg determined to “out” “that boy pimp and boy lover Rosebery.” He was met by the police and interviewed by the Prince of Wales, who told him, “We are quiet people at Homburg and don’t like disturbance.” The scandal took another turn in October 1894, when Drumlanrig was found dead during a shoot. The official verdict was accidental death, but dark rumors circulated of suicide and homosexual cover-up, and Rosebery lived in terror that the vicious marquess would denounce him.⁶³

When Rosebery offered himself as a suitor for Princess Victoria, he was sharply rebuffed by Alix. Toria, as she was known, was intelligent—not as pretty as Maud, but very “light in hand” according to Carrington.⁶⁴ Years later, as an old lady, Anita Leslie recalled Toria reflecting that “there had been someone perfect for her but they would not let her marry him—‘And we could have been so happy.’ ” The man, Anita later discovered, was Rosebery.⁶⁵ At the time, the millionaire widower prime minister seemed far from ideal. Not only did his involvement in politics rule him out,⁶⁶ but he was nineteen years older than Toria, painfully insomniac, and dogged by damaging rumors of homosexuality. And the fact was that Alix did not want her daughters to marry.

The husbandless state of Princesses Victoria (twenty-five) and Maud (twenty-four), unkindly known as “the Hags,” was beginning to excite comment. “I cannot understand their not being married,” wrote Vicky, “they would be such charming wives.”⁶⁷ When the Queen taxed Bertie about it, he told her that “Alix found them such companions that she would not encourage their marrying, and that they themselves had no inclination for it (in which I think he is mistaken as regards Maud). He said that he was ‘powerless,’ which I cannot understand.”⁶⁸ The reason why Bertie was “powerless” was because of the rift between him and Alix over Daisy Warwick.

The Queen was right about Maud. Known as Harry, Maud was the most attractive of Bertie’s daughters; as her collection of designer dresses reveals, she was a size zero with an eighteen-inch waist. She admired Princess May’s brother, Prince Frank of Teck, but her feelings were not reciprocated. In the autumn of 1895, on a Danish family holiday at Bernstorff, she became engaged to her first cousin Prince Charles, the second son of Alix’s brother the King of Denmark and an officer in the Danish navy. Alix had hoped that Maud might marry the older brother. The Duchess of Teck thought Charles charming, but remarked that he looked “fully 3 years younger than Maud and has no money.”⁶⁹ Charlotte Knollys declared that it was a love match: “He has cared for her for three years and she certainly seems extremely fond of him.”⁷⁰ Maud was “very much in love,” but everyone doubted whether she would be prepared to live “in a cottage in Denmark with a lady-in-waiting” while her sailor prince was away at sea.⁷¹ They were right. After her marriage in July 1896, she never ceased to grumble about her Danish exile, and was only happy at Appleton, the house that Bertie gave her on the Sandringham estate (it had previously been the home of the bad-tempered Mrs. Cresswell). Though Maud was supposed to be his favorite daughter, Bertie seemed oddly indifferent.

An hour after his arrival at the white-stuccoed imperial palace in the Crimea, Bertie found himself attending mass in the black-draped chapel, where the putrefying body of Alexander III lay in an open coffin. Twice daily he knelt with the royal families and their suites, wearing full uniform and holding a lighted taper while singers chanted mournful dirges in a language he could not understand.⁷⁴

Alix never left her sister’s side. Livadia was a palace-village of small houses, and Alix stayed in the imperial house with Minnie and her family.⁷⁵ The two sisters even shared a room, and Minnie was in consequence “able to sleep better than she has done for a long time.” Bertie was ensconced in another house “on my comfortable own.”⁷⁶

Bertie was charged by Prime Minister Rosebery to win the sympathy of the new czar, his nephew Nicky. At twenty-six, Nicky had a childlike simplicity that portended disaster in the autocrat of all the Russians. “I know nothing of the business of ruling,” said he. “I have no idea of even how to talk to the ministers.”⁷⁷

Bertie threw himself into the funeral arrangements. He summoned George to St. Petersburg, ordering his reluctant son to arrive in frock coat, cap, and sword. “Aiguil[l]ette^a in thin crape excepting the points … cocked hat and epaulettes covered with crape and white gloves would be the mourning,” he wrote.⁷⁸ He spent hours closeted with Count Vorontzov-Dashkov, the minister of the imperial court, who was too deferential to protest when the young czar’s uncle dictated the arrangements for the journey to Moscow and even the funeral itself. “I wonder what his tiresome old mother would have said,” remarked Nicky’s sister the Grand Duchess Olga many years later, “if she had seen everybody accept uncle Bertie’s authority. In Russia of all places!”⁷⁹ Livadia was overcrowded and chaotic; one thousand people slept in the palaces, and Charlotte Knollys complained that she had to use her dressing table as a desk and keep her washing things in a piano.⁸⁰ Arthur Ellis thought the “confusion, indecision and bustle” was worse even than the “masterly inactivity and fussiness” of Windsor Castle.⁸¹ Bertie impressed everyone: “He is never in the way and is so kind and civil to all the suite and even to the servants whom he recognises,” wrote Charlotte Knollys.⁸²

Bertie spent his fifty-third birthday traveling with the czar’s remains on the imperial train to Moscow. The royal party wore full court dress for the entire five-day journey—“first-class purgatory!” groaned Arthur Ellis.⁸³ After the czar’s body had lain in state for twenty hours in the cathedral in Moscow, the train crawled on to St. Petersburg. From the station, Bertie walked in the four-hour procession that followed the funeral car to the church in the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul, where the coffin was deposited for the lying in state. The funeral took place on 19 November 1894, which was none too soon, as the body, which had been imperfectly embalmed, was rotting, the face looked a “dreadful colour,” and the stench was “awful.”⁸⁴ Leaning heavily on Alix, Minnie advanced to the open coffin and for the last time kissed the shrunken lips of her dead husband.

The wedding of the new czar Nicholas II and Queen Victoria’s granddaughter Alexandra of Hesse (Alicky) took place a week later. Alix, who was suffering from a heavy cold, once again supported her red-eyed sister Minnie. Both sisters were dressed identically in simple white—a sign that their old intimacy had been restored. Bertie wore his Russian dragoon uniform, a birthday gift from Nicky, which was distinctly unflattering. Carrington was shocked to see “a fat man in a huge shaggy great coat looking like a huge Polar bear,” who turned out to be the Prince of Wales.⁸⁵ After the service, the enthusiasm of the crowds was so great that Nicholas for once forgot his fear of assassination, and ordered the soldiers lining the route of the imperial procession to be removed. This spontaneous gesture prompted Bertie to predict a new dawn. “The people,” he told Queen Victoria, “only wish to be trusted by him; and if Nicky is liberal in his views and tolerant to his subjects, a more popular Ruler of this country could not exist.”⁸⁶ He was too optimistic. In May 1896 at the Imperial Coronation, a crowd stampeded, crushing thousands of peasants to death. Nicky refused to cancel or alter the ceremonies, heartlessly dancing while outside carts were piled high with corpses.⁸⁷ Queen Victoria had dreaded Alicky’s marriage to Nicky: “My blood runs cold,” she wrote, “when I think of her … placed on that very unsafe throne.”⁸⁸ Already the signs were ominous.

Bertie traveled home with George, leaving Alix behind with Minnie in the Anitchkoff Palace. In the deep cold of the Russian winter, Minnie clung pathetically to her sister. Alexander III had been a double-dyed reactionary, but he was a devoted husband, and his death left Minnie alone and dependent on her son. “I am all right and darling Minnie too we lead a very quiet life together now,” Alix wired the Queen.⁸⁹ She had little reason to return home; the “only magnet,” wrote Arthur Ellis, “is the girls at Sandringham alone.”⁹⁰

Daisy had by now become Countess of Warwick, her husband having succeeded as Earl of Warwick and inherited Warwick Castle. In February 1895, she gave a spectacular white and gold bal poudre (powdered wig ball). Bertie was tactfully absent, at Sandringham. Daisy ordered her guests to dress in the fashion of the court of Versailles under Louis XVI: She herself appeared as Marie Antoinette. Two weeks later, an article in a socialist paper, The Clarion, contrasted the lavish luxury and glitter of the Warwick ball with the shivering poor crowded in their hovels, and concluded: “I deeply pity the poor rich Countess of Warwick.” Stung by this personal attack, the philanthropic Daisy rushed up to London by the first train, sought out the dingy offices of The Clarion, and explained to the shabbily dressed editor Robert Blatchford that her ball had given work to half the county. Blatchford dismissed this as unproductive labor, and proceeded to give Daisy a lecture on socialist economics. Daisy left the office stunned; later, in her autobiography, she described this in quasi-religious terms as her conversion experience to socialism.⁹¹ At the time, it hardly seemed so. True, she was elected to the Warwick Board of Guardians; but her chief concern seemed to be to spend her fortune as speedily as she could.

As well as pouring money into her husband’s Warwick Castle, Daisy lavished her fortune on her own property at Easton Lodge. When Bertie came to stay in October 1895, he arrived in his special train at Easton Lodge station, on a private railway that Daisy had paid for out of her own pocket.⁹³ Within six months, the Countess of Warwick was selling three thousand acres of her Essex estates.⁹⁴ Such spending seemed only natural to Bertie, and it did not occur to him that Daisy might need financial help. In many ways, Daisy and Bertie were similar characters: socially confident extroverts, used to gratifying every appetite, compulsive spenders, and voracious eaters. Daisy’s granddaughter remembered Daisy in old age taking a bath, huge and devoid of her wig; she still wore Edwardian false hair and feather boas, and she wolfed pats of cheese and butter in the dairy.⁹⁵

Bertie and Daisy both claimed in 1898 that their relationship had been “platonic” for “some years.”^b ⁹⁸ This may have been a matter of necessity rather than choice. There were rumors that Bertie was impotent, possibly since 1895.⁹⁹ Often on “D” days the prince noted a morning appointment with his doctor, Laking. In January 1896, he underwent a course of “electrical treatment.” This was the new wonder therapy of the day, and electric shocks were administered for impotence—though electricity was also used for many other ailments. At fifty-five, Bertie was overweight and threatened with heart trouble and possibly diabetes. His daughter Victoria noticed him panting when he walked upstairs.¹⁰⁰

Le Chabanais, founded in 1878, was a palace of sex decorated lavishly in a variety of styles, including Moorish, Japanese, and Louis XVI. The room Bertie used was known as the Hindu chamber; emblazoned above the bed was his coat of arms. The prostitutes with their frizzed black hair, long drawers, corsets, and bare breasts, seem to twenty-first-century (female) eyes strangely lacking in allure, but Bertie undoubtedly visited. He was watched by the Paris police, who kept files on his movements.¹⁰² The copper bath that was filled with champagne while he consorted with prostitutes (anything less erotic than sitting in a cold and sticky champagne bath seems hard to imagine) still exists. Appropriately, it was bought by Salvador Dalí. The prize artifact in Bertie’s room was the seat of love, which he allegedly commissioned in about 1890.¹⁰³ Exactly what permutations the complicated design of stirrups and supports was designed for is hard to see, but when it was later exhibited to visitors, they were told: “He stepped in there as if he were going to a stall.”¹⁰⁴

In 1894, Bertie’s friend Randolph Churchill became alarmingly ill. Bertie asked royal physician Sir Richard Quain to seek a report from Randolph’s doctor, Thomas Buzzard. This disregard for professional ethics caused lasting resentment among some of the Churchill family, as Buzzard’s report on Randolph’s “General Paralysis” seemed to confirm that he was suffering from the tertiary stage of syphilis. Buzzard’s diagnosis was later challenged by Randolph’s grandson, Peregrine Churchill, who maintained that Randolph died of a brain tumor; but Bertie now believed his friend was terminally ill with syphilis, and so did Jennie.¹⁰⁵ Bertie was all the more solicitous. On Christmas Day 1894, Jennie wrote the prince “a kind but dreadfully sad letter.”

After Randolph’s death, Bertie saw a lot of Jennie. Her name appears often in his diary.¹⁰⁸ But even if their friendship now developed into a physical affair, renewing their relationship of a few years back, this was not an exclusive romance.^c Also, Jennie invited Alix to dinner and consulted her about the guest list, something that would never have happened if Jennie had posed a threat to the Wales marriage.¹⁰⁹ Equally, Jennie was on friendly terms with Daisy, and often stayed at Easton. Indeed, Daisy later wrote that “one never thought of giving a party without her”—something she surely would not have said if Jennie had been a rival for the prince’s affections.¹¹⁰

“Dearest Daisy,” wrote Jennie, “I hear you look lovely and about 16!” “Will you be an angel,” she asked, “and send me the recipe for Cumberland Sauce for the ‘Wench’ in my kitchen?”¹¹¹ Jennie’s cuisine was notoriously good; she was one of the first hostesses to employ Rosa Lewis, expertly trained in French cooking in the kitchen of the Comtesse de Paris at Sheen. Rosa was a favorite of the gourmet Bertie, who enjoyed her cockney wit almost as much as her quails stuffed with foie gras. Hiring the freelance Rosa soon became essential for hostesses entertaining the greedy prince, who let it be known that she was his favorite cook.^d ¹¹²

“May I have a ‘geisha’ tea with you on Wednesday at 5?” Bertie wrote to Jennie Churchill.¹¹³ And again: “You once said you would give me tea in your Japanese dress—I wonder if you could appear in it at 5:30 this evening? A bientot.”^e ¹¹⁴ He now addressed her as ma chère amie, signing off, “Tout à vous, AE.” Between February 1896 and 1897, he sent a flood of notes proposing himself to tea or lunch. It seems that he visited her in her new, tall house at 35a Great Cumberland Street almost once a week.¹¹⁵ He included her name on the lists he sent in advance of house parties: She was at Chatsworth, at Waddesdon, at Welbeck, at Cowes. He teased her about her love life, which was lurid. When she broke up with Major Caryl Ramsden, fourteen years younger than her, after a spectacular row in Egypt, Bertie wrote: “You had better have stuck to your old friends than gone on your expedition of the Nile! Old friends are best!”¹¹⁶

An undated pencil-written card from Bertie, sent from the Ritz in Paris in the spring of 1899 (the Ritz opened in June 1898), is ambiguous but suggestive:

But the letters to ma chère amie come abruptly to a halt in 1900 when the forty-six-year-old Jennie announced her intention to marry George Cornwallis-West. Not only was he twenty years younger than her, but he was also rumored to be Bertie’s son by Patsy Cornwallis-West.^f The gossip was scurrilous and unfounded, but it made Lady Randolph look ridiculous, and Bertie told her so. Jennie was not amused. Bertie replied: “It has been my privilege to enjoy your friendship for upwards of quarter of a century, therefore why do you think it necessary to write me a rude letter simply because I have expressed strongly my regret at the marriage you are about to make?”¹¹⁸

He ate everything very rapidly. When Daisy was in the room his conversation was society small talk, reminding Stead of a hostess who gives the impression of being interested but forgets all about it five minutes later. But after she had left the table, Bertie smoked two cigars and they talked about Russia, and Bertie revealed that he disliked its system of government and thought the persecution of the Jews “deplorable.” Whenever Stead tried to draw him out, Bertie good-naturedly refused to engage. When Stead asked him about his relations with the Queen, or his own position, he would only say that it was “very difficult.” “I cannot take any part in politics.”¹²⁰

One doesn’t need to be a Freudian to see the link between Bertie’s powerlessness in politics, his impotence in the bedroom, and his new passion: horse racing. He had kept horses in training since 1885 (before then he raced his horses under other people’s names, as the Queen objected to him using the royal colors).¹²⁴ In eight years he had won very little: His total prize money amounted to £5,904, an annual average of only £250 if one freak good year of 1891 is excluded.¹²⁵ In 1893, he moved his horses from stables at Kingsclere in Hampshire to Newmarket, and confounding all expectations, he bred a really good horse: Persimmon.

In 1896, Victoria was seventy-seven. She had sat longer on the throne than any English monarch, beating her grandfather George III’s record of fifty-nine years.¹²⁸ She was very lame, relying on her Indian servant to support her walking, and she was nearly blind from cataracts. She could no longer read, pathetically complaining that the candles gave no light and she could not find glasses to suit.¹²⁹ During the course of her long widowhood, the way her staff worked had been organized to ensure that she was seen as little as possible by the household. All communications took place in writing. Reprimands were written out and delivered in special boxes, marked “The Queen.”¹³⁰ If a member of the household needed to tell her something, they had to pen a proper letter, beginning, “—— presents humble duty to Your Majesty,” and place it in an envelope addressed to the Queen, which must be sealed but not licked.¹³¹ No one was allowed to go outside until the Queen went. It was frowned on to meet her in the grounds when she was in her carriage, so any courtier who accidentally came across her was obliged to hide behind a bush.¹³² She practiced bizarre economies, such as having newspaper cut into squares and used as lavatory paper.¹³³

But the old Queen was reluctant as ever to share work with her heir. Only when it suited her did Victoria fall in with Bertie’s suggestions. Nicholas and Alexandra had been invited to pay a private visit to Balmoral in September 1896. When Bertie proposed a ceremonial welcome, the Queen agreed, but only because Salisbury urged the need to cultivate Russian support.

Balmoral, where the Queen’s regime of seclusion, silence, thirty-minute meals, nonsmoking, and open windows was at its strictest, was purgatory to the sybaritic Bertie, but he stayed for a week. Nothing ever changed; the same chairs were in the same places, the same biscuits on the plates—only the dogs were replaced when they died.¹³⁵ Bertie traveled to Leith in pouring rain to welcome the czar and czarina on their arrival from Denmark. He wore his Russian uniform with a splendid red and gray greatcoat, “not the least tight,” noted lady-in-waiting Edith Lytton. Bertie was “very nice all day to everyone,” and Edith (whose husband had been a clever diplomat) was struck by the absurdity of expecting the small and very young czar to solve the Eastern Question.¹³⁶ The visit was not a success. It rained constantly. Nicky had an abscess on his tooth, but his uncle Bertie took him out shooting all day long. He was put in the best place, but missed everything. On 25 September, Bertie noted the results of a deer drive:

Lord Salisbury arrived, having insisted on a bedroom heated to a minimum temperature of sixty degrees, which was the hottest the Queen would allow.¹³⁸ Bertie was excluded from the “VERY SECRET” discussions between Salisbury and the czar, and he left Balmoral before the Russians.¹³⁹ Nicky breathed a sigh of relief. “After he left I had an easier time, because I could at least do what I wanted to, and was not obliged to go out shooting every day in the cold and rain.”¹⁴⁰ Victoria, on the other hand, was annoyed. Bertie had departed to Newmarket, where Persimmon won the Jockey Stakes. The Queen made no secret of her disapproval.¹⁴¹ As she remarked, “Il faut payer pour être Prince.” (One has to pay a price to be a prince.)¹⁴²

* Daisy was known by her husband’s courtesy title as Lady Brooke until he succeeded his father as Earl of Warwick in 1893, when she became Countess of Warwick. To avoid confusion, I have called her Daisy Warwick throughout this chapter.

† Augusta, Grand Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, was the sister of George, Duke of Cambridge, and great-aunt of Princess May of Teck.

‡ What she meant was that women, lacking formal education, had to learn from their own observation.

§ More percipient than it could have known at the time, Reynolds’s asked: “Is she in love with the Crown, irrespective of whose head wears it?” (Williams, Contentious Crown, p. 68.)

‖ Not that George was untouched by scandal. In May 1893, the Star printed a rumor that he had secretly married the daughter of a British naval officer at Malta. Ponsonby annotated the cutting: “The power of imagination among newspapers is extraordinary.” (RA VIC/Z476/28, 29 Cutting from the Star.) In the autumn of 1893, W. T. Stead wrote to Ponsonby informing him of an anonymous correspondent who alleged that George had two children by this marriage. (RA VIC/Add A12/2106a, Henry Ponsonby to Francis Knollys [1893].) Bertie was at first inclined to issue a contradiction. He consulted Gladstone, who advised taking no notice of the rumors, “which are equally scandalous and ridiculous.” (RA VIC/Add C07/1, Algernon West to Knollys, 26 October 1893.) So no denial was published, though the Queen thought this was a mistake, arguing as follows: “No one cares about it today. But in fifty years time when some young prince ascends the throne there will be a cry that he is illegitimate or his father committed bigamy.… Now—a simple denial will clear the clouds away.” (RA VIC/Add C07/1, Ponsonby to Knollys, 27 October 1893.) This was prophetic. In 1911, E. F. Mylius printed a story that George V had married a daughter of Sir Michael Culme-Seymour in Malta and had two children. He was prosecuted for criminal libel and found guilty.

a The tagged point hanging from the shoulder to the breast of a uniform.

b Carrington noted that Daisy was due to be presented on Tuesday, 5 March 1895, by Lady Salisbury at a drawing room. “This fact has been privately notified to the Princess and there is a good deal of conversation in London on a paragraph in the Central News telegrams that ‘the Princess of Wales’ arrangements will not permit her to be present.’ Spencer Ponsonby let Francis Knollys know that Lady Warwick was going to the Drawing Room by the Princess’s special orders.” (Bodleian Library, Carrington Diary, MS Film 1120, 3 March 1895.) In the end, the presentation didn’t take place, allegedly because Daisy had the flu; but if it was true that Alix approved, it is a sign that Bertie’s relationship with Daisy was no longer physical. (The Times, 5 March 1895.)

c See this page.

d The story goes that Bertie spotted Rosa standing in the dining room at a shooting party and, seeing they were alone, snatched a kiss. At lunch, he asked his hostess what had become of the guest with the white dress and wonderful complexion. “Sir, you mean Rosa the cook?” After that her career was assured. (Leslie, Edwardians in Love, p. 319.)

e “Geisha” was not a word the prince used lightly. He saw the West End play The Geisha on the day he wrote to Jennie. (RA EVIID/1897: 2 February.) Though a geisha might flirt, nineteenth-century geisha culture often banned sex.

f At a house party where a band was playing, Bertie met George Cornwallis-West on the landing on the way down to dinner. “What are you going to play tonight?” asked Bertie. “Bridge, I suppose, sir,” replied George. Bertie looked around and burst out laughing: “I took you for the man who conducts the band.” (Ruffer, Big Shots, pp. 96–97.) This hardly suggests that he recognized Cornwallis-West as his son.

CHAPTER 19

Daisy Warwick ^*

1892–96

CHAPTER 19

Daisy Warwick*

1892–96

Daisy Warwick ^*