Beatrice Webb watched the Prince of Wales presenting prizes to the students of the London County Council in 1897. She thought he “acted like a well-oiled automaton, saying exactly the words he was expected to say, noticing the right persons on the platform, maintaining his own dignity, whilst setting others at ease and otherwise acting with perfectly polished discretion”:
Not an English gentleman, essentially a foreigner and yet an almost perfect constitutional sovereign. From a political point of view, his vices and foibles, his lack of intellectual refinement or moral distinction, are as nothing compared to his complete detachment from all party prejudice and class interests and his genius for political discretion. But one sighs to think that this unutterably commonplace person should set the tone to London Society. There is something comic in the great British nation with its infinite variety of talents, having this undistinguished and limited-minded German bourgeois to be its social sovereign.1
The “unutterably commonplace person” had annoyed Beatrice Webb because of his plan to commemorate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. He proposed to endow the hospitals of London, creating the Prince of Wales’s Hospital Fund. The Fabian socialist Webb sneered at this charitable project as the sort of proposal one would expect from “a committee of village grocers.”
Bertie’s committee, which met at Marlborough House, included the head of Anglo-Jewry, Lord Rothschild; the Chief Rabbi; the Bishop of London; and millionaires such as Julius Wernher and Ernest Cassel. Bertie was no figurehead; minutes show that he was “informed, involved and strong-minded.”2 It was he who drove the project.3 On his insistence, the fund created a sizable endowment: He gave a standing order, and invited his City friends, many of them Jewish financiers, to make generous subscriptions. King Edward’s Hospital Fund, as it became, was at that time the most ambitious hospital fund ever conceived, and it survives today as the King’s Fund, “arguably Edward VII’s most significant permanent memorial.”4
The fund was the brainchild of Sir Henry Burdett, Bertie’s adviser on charitable projects. A hospital administrator and stockbroker, Burdett had come to Bertie’s notice in 1889 when he published a book entitled Prince, Princess and People. In it, he gave an exhaustive account of the Waleses’ philanthropic activities, which until then had gone largely unnoticed. The charitable duties performed by the Prince of Wales, wrote Burdett, “probably exceed those of any other single man in the country.” Burdett listed eighty-four hospitals that Bertie opened or contributed money to.5 He saw that the charitable work of the royals could be put to use more effectively. His book won favor at Marlborough House, and he was quick to ingratiate himself there. The prince’s charitable activities became more focused. In 1896, on Burdett’s advice, Bertie agreed to become president of Guy’s Hospital, and head its fund-raising appeal, culminating in a festival dinner for four thousand guests. This raised £150,000, making it to date allegedly the most profitable dinner ever.6
Alix had a role as a champion of nurses. Her influence was phenomenal, if erratic. Brass plaques can still be seen in London hospitals that commemorate the Waleses laying a stone or opening a wing, bearing witness to their tireless activity: the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children; the Albany Wing of the National Hospital, opened by Alix as a memorial to Leopold (1885); the New Hospital for Women, later renamed the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital (1889); the London Hospital, Whitechapel (1887); Soho Square Hospital for Women; the Brompton Hospital (1879); the Putney Hospital for Incurables; the London Fever Hospital; the Royal Hospital for Women and Children at Waterloo Bridge … the list goes on and on.
Bertie provided the vital link between Burdett’s world of hospitals and charities, and the new plutocracy. Contemporaries deplored the “social sovereignty of wealth over every class” in Bertie’s court, and commentators complained that financiers, self-made millionaires, and South African randlords thronged the drawing rooms of Marlborough House.7 When Thomas Lipton, child of the Glasgow Gorbals turned tea tycoon, raced his yacht Shamrock against Bertie’s Britannia, the kaiser commented sarcastically that his uncle Bertie was “going yachting with his grocer.”8 What he didn’t realize was that Lipton had made a donation of £25,000 to Princess Alexandra’s fund to feed the London poor in 1897, followed by a further £100,000 for a poor people’s restaurant. The social sovereignty of wealth was not unconditional; the plutocrat must be validated by charitable giving before he was rewarded at court. “The millionaire’s quickest and surest route to royal favour is a big cheque for a necessitous hospital.”9
Bertie spent the spring of 1897 in the French Riviera on board Britannia, as was his custom. Queen Victoria was at Cimiez, near Nice, and Bertie visited her there several times.10 A crisis had erupted in the Queen’s household, and her ladies and gentlemen were threatening to resign.
Abdul Karim, the Queen’s Indian servant, had joined the household at the time of the Golden Jubilee. Victoria, like Bertie, was genuinely free of racial prejudice, and her Indian servants symbolized the special connection with her Indian empire. They were also decorative. Abdul Karim, who was clever and manipulative, became Victoria’s favorite. He gave her lessons in Hindustani, and he was promoted to be her teacher (Munshi); next she made him her Indian secretary. The Munshi’s intimacy with the Queen outraged the household, not merely on racial grounds but also because he was revealed to be low class, the barely literate son of an apothecary. When the Queen’s doctor, Sir James Reid, diagnosed him with “gleet” (gonorrhea), and the Queen insisted that he accompany her to Cimiez nonetheless, the household mutinied. Harriet Phipps, the woman of the bedchamber, was deputed to tell the Queen that they refused to go if the Munshi was of the party. The furious monarch responded by sweeping all the clutter off her desk onto the floor. They went.
Sir James Reid had been charged by the Queen with the Munshi’s welfare, and in Cimiez he held endless talks with the household, with the Queen, and with Bertie. The Queen insisted that the Munshi was the victim of the snobbery and racism of the court, and demanded that they associate more with him. Reid countered by telling the Queen that her obsession with the Munshi made her seem insane. The Prince of Wales, said Reid, had “quite made up his mind to come forward if necessary, because quite apart from all consequences to the Queen, it affects himself most vitally.… Because it affects the throne.”11 Victoria broke down and admitted that she had played the fool. But Bertie did not come forward and speak to his mother—he failed to confront her, even on an issue where she was plainly in the wrong. The Queen continued to pander to the Munshi, who bullied her abominably. Perhaps, as some thought, Victoria had succeeded in making her widow’s life so dreary that she needed the emotional excitement of the drama.12 As with John Brown, she had allowed a favorite servant to monopolize access and disrupt the functioning of her court.
Bertie spent a few days in Paris on his way home from the Riviera. Here he found Daisy Warwick, holidaying with her sisters. After sitting for the painter Carolus-Duran, Daisy would mount her bicycle and (so she archly told her friend W. T. Stead), “speed away” for “all sorts of adventures.”13 These included five assignations with Bertie, whose new toy was a four-cylinder motor car, supplied by Monsieur Panhard et Levassor’s establishment, in which, like Mr. Toad, he drove to the Hotel Bristol.14 Thanks to Bertie’s patronage, the motor car was soon to become “as much a part of the courtier’s baggage as is the cigarette case.”15
Daisy’s old enemy Lord Charles Beresford had returned from the Mediterranean, but he was powerless to harm her now. Bertie spotted him at Ascot in 1896, and was enraged when he “purposely passed close to me without bowing but he bowed shortly afterwards to my son and went up to the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire with a ‘hail fellow well met’ kind of manner and said how glad he was to see them again.”16 Eventually Beresford was made naval aide-de-camp, which “allowed the poor beast to get into Society again,” but unfinished business remained.17 In June 1897, the Duke of Portland forwarded a letter from Beresford expressing his regret for the angry letters he had written to Bertie and his wife’s regret for the letter she wrote to the Queen.18 The prince accepted the apology, and Beresford’s letter was forwarded to Daisy, who wrote: “It is a great triumph to have received the apologies, and a great relief that the episode is closed.”19
At Ascot in 1897, Bertie’s horse Persimmon won the Gold Cup at a canter by eight lengths, and the entire crowd turned “as with one accord to the royal Enclosure, cheering for several minutes.”20 The cup, appropriately enough, was a replica of the famous Warwick Vase. “Lady Warwick was in very high favour,” noted Carrington.21 After Daisy had left, Bertie’s racing manager Lord Marcus Beresford came up and asked him a favor. With tears running down his face, he begged the prince to allow him to bring his brother Charlie to offer his congratulations. “I had no alternative but to say yes,” Bertie told Daisy later that day. “He came up with his hat off, and would not put it on till I told him, and shook hands.… My loved one,” he wrote anxiously, “I hope you won’t be annoyed at what has happened, and exonerate me from blame as that is all I care about!”22
Daisy by now cared not a jot about Charlie Beresford. All her attentions were taken up with Joe Laycock, who had been her lover for the past two years. Nor was Bertie faithful to Daisy. As well as Jennie Churchill, there was the beautiful Lady Dudley, sister of poor mad Harriett Mordaunt. “Midnight supper with Lady Dudley,” Bertie had noted on the day he won the Derby in 1896.23 But it was to Daisy that he wrote the long, confiding letters—letters that “contained some very candid criticisms of persons and events of the day,” as well as political secrets.24
The morning of 22 June 1897 was close and dull, but when Queen Victoria was helped into her open state landau—an intricate operation involving her Indian servant and a sloping green baize plank—the sun came out. Bertie, wearing a scarlet field marshal’s uniform, rode beside the Queen—a small figure in black silk embroidered with silver, sitting opposite Alix in mauve—at the end of the royal procession of seventeen carriages that formed up for the Diamond Jubilee.
The planning of the ceremony had occupied the committee that Bertie chaired at Marlborough House since January. Entertaining the royal families of Europe had cost the Queen exorbitant sums at her Golden Jubilee in 1887, and she threatened to boycott her Diamond Jubilee if she was asked to contribute to the costs.25 The Treasury paid the bill, and the committee planned to economize and please the politicians by celebrating the empire. Bertie has been credited with organizing the event, but in fact his role was to facilitate the innovations of Reginald Brett (later Lord Esher), permanent secretary to the Office of Works.26 The Queen was too lame to dismount from her coach, and Brett proposed to make the focal point an open-air celebration outside the west front of St. Paul’s Cathedral. The support of Bertie as chairman for this controversial innovation was crucial. “Has one ever heard of such a thing! After 60 years Reign, to thank God in the Street!!! Who can have started such an idea, and how could the Queen adopt it?” exclaimed Augusta, Grand Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz.27
As the royal procession crawled toward St. Paul’s, the cheering was deafening. Women wept, men shouted themselves hoarse. “No one … has ever met with such an ovation as was given to me,” wrote the Queen.28 When she neared St. Paul’s, where the colonial troops were assembled, the crowd burst out singing “God Save the Queen.” The Archbishop of Canterbury cried, “Three cheers for the Queen,” and a thunderous roar broke out. The small black figure was “much moved.” As the tears streamed down Victoria’s face, Alix gently held her hand.29 The procession returned via London Bridge and the streets of south London, showing the Queen to the London poor, another innovation proposed by Brett and promoted by Bertie.30
Bertie played his part to perfection. In spite of all the long years of being put down and rejected, he made no attempt to upstage his mother and showed no trace of envy. How different from Kaiser William, whom the Queen refused to invite, and who wrote bitterly to his grandmother: “To be the first and eldest of your grandchildren and yet to be precluded from taking part in this unique fete, while cousins and far relations will have the privilege of surrounding You … is deeply mortifying.”31
The climax of the Jubilee season was the fancy dress ball given at Devonshire House by Louise, Duchess of Devonshire. The sixty-five-year-old Louise’s features had coarsened with age, not helped by her brown wig and gash of red lipstick; now stout and apparently incapable of showing emotion, she was feared and respected but not loved.†
Heading the list of seven hundred guests, Bertie came dressed as Grand Master of the Knights Hospitaller of Malta, wearing a black velvet tunic embroidered with jet. His costume celebrated his charitable work as Grand Prior of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem; with his fat legs poured into thigh-length boots, and a tall black hat, he resembled a prosperous vole. Alix was dressed in cream satin and cascades of pearls as Marguerite de Valois, the promiscuous and unhappily married French queen who was imprisoned by her husband. She was “horribly bored” on account of the crush, which must have made it impossible for her to hear.32 Her friend Gladys de Grey, who came as Cleopatra, wore £6,000 worth of gold and orchids and was attended by an Arab slave; some considered that she was upstaged by a rival Cleopatra, the American beauty Minnie Paget, a favorite of Bertie’s, whose Worth dress was encrusted with emeralds, rubies, and diamonds. (After her death in 1911, the dress fetched a mere £9 at auction.)33 It was a good night for Charles Frederick Worth. Jennie Churchill appeared in another of his creations, dressed, appropriately perhaps, as the Byzantine empress Theodora, the sexually voracious barbarian courtesan who married the emperor Justinian. She wore a crown and carried a sovereign’s orb. Daisy Warwick flaunted her quasi-royal status as Marie Antoinette—or perhaps she was economizing for once by wearing the same gown of turquoise velvet embroidered with silver fleur-de-lis that she had worn at her own Warwick ball.
Walking home through Green Park at dawn, Consuelo, the young American Duchess of Marlborough, was dismayed to find the “dregs of humanity” lying on the grass. “Human beings too dispirited or sunk to find work or favour, they sprawled in sodden stupor, pitiful representatives of the submerged tenth.”34 Like all historic parties, the Devonshire House ball was a tipping point: the beginning of the end of the great London houses—Devonshire House was destroyed in 1924—and the swan song of Louise, the Double Duchess.
After the season, Bertie and Alix escaped together to Bayreuth. In spite of being so deaf, Alix shared Bertie’s love of opera. Bertie was gripped by Parsifal, which lasted six hours—from four until ten—but it “could be given nowhere but here. The stage is dark the whole time—and not a sound is heard. The orchestra is invisible as it plays under the stage.”35
From Bayreuth, Alix traveled to Denmark, while Bertie headed for Marienbad to take his cure. This was his first visit to the Bohemian spa, two thousand feet above sea level, which was to become his favorite retreat. He stayed at the Hotel Weimar, rose at six, drank the waters, and walked for two hours. It rained incessantly, but, he told Georgie, “I manage to get through the day somehow.”36 His regime as he described it was that of an abstemious monk, but in fact he entertained often three times a day (including teatime). To the strains of a band, he dined on grouse (specially mailed from Britain), aubergines frites (his favorite vegetable), and peaches. His impeccably cut dark blue coat or gray striped suit with trousers precisely creased sometimes down the side, sometimes down the front, turned heads on the promenade. Sigmund Muntz, the contemporary chronicler of Bertie’s days at Marienbad, noted that any study would “lack its most vital element,” if it “prudishly” avoided HRH’s relations with women.37 In the afternoons, the prince took damp drives through the thickly wooded hillsides with a new friend: Mrs. Eddy Bourke.
Emma Bourke was the sister of Mabel Batten, the girl with whom Bertie had had a flirtation many years before in India. Emma, in her early forties, was manipulative, with a history of sending poison-pen letters.‡ Her husband, who was twenty years older than her, was a son of Lord Mayo, the assassinated Viceroy of India; though a stockbroker, he was often short of money. Bertie wrote to Emma shortly after leaving Marienbad, thanking her for her letter, written in French (“I can speak it fluently enough but have not your gift of writing it”), and apologizing for his execrable handwriting (“It comes partly from my writing so much. You imagine I get no end of ‘billets doux’ but I assure I have never had less from the fair sex than since I have been abroad this time. It is a case of ‘out of sight out of mind’ ”).
“Let me at once dispel from your mind an erroneous impression,” he wrote, “about being your best friend if not your lover! Indeed I did not mean to imply that I wished to cease from being the latter. Far from it I can assure you but I meant to imply that the latter depended upon you my dear child but the former I always claimed to be.”38 Bertie’s distinction between friend and lover hints at a physical relationship, but whether this was more than a brief embrace on a wet afternoon carriage drive is impossible to tell. The following spring, Emma received a summons to dine at a restaurant in Nice, and Bertie gave typically precise directions about dress: She and her daughter were ordered to wear a “high dress” and hats, “your husband in evening jacket and black tie as is the custom abroad.”§39 He took a paternalistic interest in Emma’s precarious finances, addressing her as “My dearest little Friend.” In 1899, he wrote, “I have … not forgotten the happy days I spent with you two years ago,” and enclosed a hundred-pound note from his winnings at Ascot and Newmarket. “You are the kindest and best little woman in the world. I only wish there were more like you.”40
By September 1897, Bertie probably knew that Daisy Warwick was three months pregnant. He continued to meet her through the autumn, but Daisy’s pregnancy meant that he could no longer be seen with her in public.41 It also brought Alix into the equation at last.
In January 1898, Alix accompanied Bertie when he attended a house party at Chatsworth.‖ Daisy took this opportunity to write him a “beautiful letter,” which he gave to Alix to read, and she was “moved to tears.” She, too, had received a letter from Daisy. “She begged me to tell you,” Bertie wrote, “that you had no enemies that she was aware of who were friends of hers, and that your name was not mentioned to her—or by her. I know, my darling, that she will now meet you with pleasure so that your position is, thank God! better now than it ever was since we have been such friends.”
She really quite forgives and condones the past, as I have corroborated what you wrote about our friendship having been platonic for some years; you could not help, my loved one, writing to me as you did—though it gave me a pang—after the letters I have received from you for nearly nine years! But I think I could read “between the lines” everything you wished to convey. The end of your beautiful letter touched me more than anything—but how could you, my loved one, for a moment imagine that I should withdraw my friendship from you? On the contrary I mean to befriend you more than ever, and you cannot prevent my giving you the same love as the friendship I have always felt for you. Certainly the Princess has been an angel of goodness throughout all this, but then she is a lady!42
This letter was written for Alix’s eyes, and Alix responded on cue. She wrote no letter to Daisy, but sent her a crucifix wrapped in a piece of paper on which was written the barbed words: “From one who has suffered much and forgives all.”43
Daisy had abdicated as maîtresse en titre. In exchange, she was granted forgiveness by Alix, which meant that she was reinstated at court. Daisy was triumphant, and wrote crowing to her friend W. T. Stead about her “complete reconciliation with the Princess of W[ales], and all estrangement on that score at an end.”44 Many years later, Daisy claimed that she would have remained with Bertie to the end, “but for an appeal made to her by Queen Alexandra to renounce him.”45 She remained friends with Bertie, who still addressed her as “my own adored little Daisywife.”
There are hints that Daisy’s pregnancy prompted Alix to confront Bertie. Of all Bertie’s mistresses, Daisy Warwick posed the greatest threat to Alix and caused her the most unhappiness. Skittles, unreliable but well informed, related that after Bertie’s death in 1910, Alix remarked: “Twelve years ago when I was so angry about Lady Warwick and the King expostulated and said I should get him into the divorce courts, I told him once and for all that he might have any woman he wished and I would not say a word.”46 It had taken Alix many years to come to terms with Bertie’s philandering. As she later remarked: “But I thought I was so-o-o beautiful.”47 With Daisy’s defection, some sort of truce had been reached between the prince and princess.
Daisy’s son was born on 21 March 1898. The child was christened with only one name, Maynard, which was Daisy’s maiden name, and the godfathers were Cecil Rhodes and Lord Rosebery, both sexually ambivalent men rumored to be homosexuals. The child was passed off as Lord Warwick’s, but plenty of clues pointed to another father of this baby born after a gap of thirteen years. Bertie’s name was sometimes mentioned, and the “D” symbol does indeed cluster around the Diamond Jubilee in June 1897, when the baby was presumably conceived.48 Bertie took an interest in the “Diamond Jubilee” baby, as he called it in the letters he wrote to Daisy, but this need not imply paternity.49 Daisy herself was in no doubt that the father was Joe Laycock.50 Having a child by another man was the exit route that Lillie Langtry had chosen from her relationship with the prince, and in Daisy’s case, as with Lillie, Bertie behaved generously, showing no sexual jealousy. Daisy by now had three children by three different men. No wonder that she made a virtue of sexual freedom, telling Lord Rosebery, whom she fruitlessly pursued, that “Far too much fuss, in my opinion, is made by women about personal morality which, after all, is entirely a matter for the individual.”51 Of the damage done to her children or other people’s marriages, Daisy seemed unaware.
The “D” symbol recurs in Bertie’s diary a decent interval after the birth of her son.52 In June 1898, the prince stayed at Warwick Castle once more. Joe Laycock was also in the party, and Daisy took Bertie on a visit to Joseph Arch, the agricultural trade unionist, whose autobiography she had edited. Bertie described the visit as “very interesting”—Arch “remains what he always was—a working man, and does not wish to be considered anything else!”53 Daisy, however, found the occasion excruciatingly embarrassing, as the prince sat beside the open stove, prepared to listen sympathetically, while Arch harangued him about class injustice.54
A flood of letters to “My own lovely little Daisy” continued to pour from Bertie’s pen. These letters only survive because, many years later, Daisy disobeyed the orders of the royal advisers and made transcripts of Bertie’s correspondence before returning the originals. But they give a glimpse of what the relationship was really like.
In spite of the Chatsworth agreement, the prince’s feelings toward Daisy seemed unaltered. “Though we do not see as much of one another as formerly,” he told her, “be assured that the sentiments and attachment I have for you are in no wise diminished though the ‘very warm’ feelings have under force of circumstances and by your own wish, cooled down.”55 When she reproached him for neglecting her, he replied: “Has it been my fault that we have not met so often lately as of yore? Especially in the evenings?! Will you not try and consider me still your best and most devoted friend? Have I deserved to forfeit it all?”
It is just 10 years since we became the great friends which I hoped we were still.… Time and circumstances have doubtless produced changes, but they should be faced, and not change a friendship—may I say a devotion—which should last till “death us do part.” I do not blame you, and you should not blame me, but how can we “kick against the pricks”? If I thought you did not care for me any more even as a true friend, I should indeed be the unhappiest and most miserable of men! My life seems an easy and a happy one, but though I have no right to complain as I receive so many benefits for which I cannot be grateful enough—it is not always “a bed of roses” at home!56
He told her: “You have become more serious, more independent and I have felt for some time that I cannot be of much use to you in your life.… Your continued devotion to me in spite of my many shortcomings has astonished as well as pleased and touched me!”57
Daisy abdicated as mistress in January 1898. Alice Keppel was on the scene in February 1898. She makes her first appearance in Bertie’s diary thus: “27 February 1898. Dine with Hon G. and Mrs. Keppel at 2 Wilton Crescent 8:45.”58 Mrs. Keppel was twenty-nine. She had thick chestnut hair, alabaster Scottish skin, wide shoulders, and a large bust. She was not photogenic. She had a deep throaty voice and she was very funny.
There are several stories about Bertie’s first meeting with Alice. According to one version, related by Anita Leslie, it was at Sandown races where Bertie accosted Anita’s grandfather John Leslie, who had Alice on his arm, demanded an introduction, and then strolled off with the lady.59 Another story claims that they met at dinner with Lady Howe, and the prince spent the whole evening talking with Alice on the top landing “which rather shocked people, especially when they sat for a short time on two steps.”60 Others related that they met through Clarissa Bischoffsheim, society hostess wife of the German Jewish financier.61 It was characteristic of Mrs. Keppel not to circulate her own version. She wrote no memoirs, and very few letters have survived; she was as clamlike as Daisy Warwick was gushingly indiscreet.
That Mrs. George Keppel should have become acquainted with the prince was hardly surprising. Through her marriage in 1891 to a younger son of the Earl of Albemarle, she had joined the outer circle of Marlborough House. Dutch by descent, the Keppels had been a dynasty of generals, admirals, and court officials. George Keppel’s great-uncle, the five-foot-tall Admiral “Harry” Keppel, was a favorite at Marlborough House, and the tiny Princess Maud was nicknamed “Harry” after him. George’s brother Derek was equerry to the Duke of York.a
Alice’s family, the Edmonstones, were old established Scots landowners. Her father was an admiral who inherited the baronetcy in 1871, and she was brought up at Duntreath Castle, fifteen miles from Glasgow. Money from coal and railways had paid for the rebuilding of the ancient castle in the Scots baronial style. Alice’s daughter Violet remembered it smelling of cedar wood, tuberoses, gunpowder, and, oddly, minced meat.
At heart, Alice Keppel was a Scots gentry woman: “Intelligent, downright, devoid of pettiness or prejudice,” as Violet wrote, “she loved a good argument, especially a political one.”62 She spoke clipped English, she was brisk and shrewd, and her feet were planted firmly on the ground. The youngest in a family of nine, as a child she was inseparable from her brother, Archie, the only boy. He was a year older than her and, according to Violet, they were like twins; “they seemed to complete one another.” Archie detested shooting and “winced” through the Glorious Twelfth of August, the opening day of the grouse shooting season, while Alice swung sure-footedly across the moors, adored by all the keepers. “My mother all dynamism, initiative and, yes, virility, my uncle all gentleness, acquiescence, sensibility.”63 Masculinity was a characteristic of all Bertie’s favorites. Lillie Langtry grew mannish in old age, and the hard-riding Daisy Warwick often lamented that she was not born a man.
Alice Keppel was modern. She smoked cigarettes, and she was very interested in money and how to make it, the more so as George Keppel was a third son and had very little. The Albemarles were grander than the Edmonstones but not as rich, and George and Alice started married life with only £20,000 of capital. George left the army and went into business, attempting to capitalize on his name. He did not prosper. In 1898, he was sued by a company promoter named Richard Prior for breach of contract when he resigned as director of the Grand Hotel and Theatre of Varieties in Ipswich. George won the case. The judge ruled it “a monstrous thing” if a gentleman “should be liable to a suit at the hands of the company promoter for all the losses which he said he had made because this gentleman had withdrawn his name.”64
It was George, as Rebecca West once wrote, who was “the real beauty of the two.”65 He was six foot three and almost too immaculately dressed, with a curled mustache. Some said he was sexually cold. Perhaps this was what Violet meant when she said that “he never really grew up.”66
Violet, the Keppels’ first child, was born in June 1894. In adult life she fantasized that the king was her father. She claimed to be “Fitz Edward,” and demanded to be addressed as Highness. But Violet was a mythomane and there is no reason to believe that Bertie knew Alice Keppel in 1893, let alone made love to her. Rumor, however, alleged that George Keppel was not Violet’s father. Her biological father was supposed to be a Yorkshire banker and MP named Ernest Beckett. He was a glamorous widower, his American wife having died in 1891, and he allegedly had an affair with Alice Keppel. Whether Violet was the result, as is sometimes suggested, is impossible to tell.67 Beckett was at the same time involved with another woman, a voluptuous South African divorcée, by whom he had a son who was born eight months after Violet.68 For a married woman to have an affair before the birth of her first child was to defy social convention, and Mrs. Keppel was a conventional woman. Violet in later life never mentioned Ernest Beckett,69 but she spoke of him when she was young; as for Alice Keppel, having committed this one indiscretion, she perhaps became super-discreet as a reaction. We shall probably never know.70
In July 1898, Bertie stayed at Waddesdon with Ferdinand de Rothschild. He wrote in his diary: “Prince of Wales falls downstairs … and fractures kneecap. Leave Waddesdon 3:30.… Dine in sitting room at Marlborough House.”71 Daisy, who was also a guest, related how she was running down a spiral staircase to breakfast when she heard a groan and discovered the heir to the throne lying at the bottom of the stairs unable to move. He had heard a bone crack. Daisy’s husband appeared and tied the leg straight out onto one of the carrying poles of an invalid chair. The local doctor was called; he allowed the prince to eat breakfast with his leg down, which he did in excruciating pain: “He was ghastly white with beads of perspiration running down his forehead.”72 Some thought that the doctor’s failure to splint the leg worsened the injury. Bertie insisted on returning to London, and at Aylesbury station his invalid chair broke and he was dropped humiliatingly and painfully onto the passenger bridge.73
Back at Marlborough House, the leg was placed in splints, and Bertie showed “wonderful pluck” in spite of the doctors’ prognosis that his knee would always be stiff. Alix nursed him, and when Carrington visited, he thought the fifty-three-year-old princess, who was wearing a black-and-white-striped silk gown, looked about thirty-five. “Do you remember dining with us in this very room years ago,” Alix asked Carrington, “when I was so ill and laid up?”74
Bertie raged at his enforced inactivity. “All my plans are upset, and I can make no future ones, nor can I at present form any idea when I shall be on my legs again.”75 For almost three months his diary is a painful blank.
Bertie was moved to Cowes, to recuperate on board the Osborne. Queen Victoria visited in her wheelchair, finding the prince lying on a couch under a tent that took up the entire stern of the ship.76 Early in August, Alix was summoned to Denmark, where her mother lay dying. She left her daughter Victoria behind to nurse her father. On board the Osborne, Bertie became alarmingly ill with pleurisy, and Victoria was forced to send for Laking to apply a blister. Bertie for the first time in his life grew close to his daughter. Alix summoned her to join the family at the Queen of Denmark’s funeral, but Victoria hated Denmark, and Bertie refused to allow her to travel.77 He made no secret of his irritation with Alix, who dawdled in Denmark after her mother’s death. “Surely,” he told George, “dear Mama might for once in her life settle a definite date for her departure.… It is most inconvenient being kept in the dark for so long.” Communication between husband and wife was nonexistent. “I have given up writing to her as she never writes to me now, not even a line to give me an indication when she thinks of leaving.”78
Desperate to avoid the boredom of empty days, Bertie summoned old friends to visit. Daisy arrived, and found him ill-tempered: “His liver is bad and the enforced idleness is not making him look out pleasantly on the world.”79 Bertie wired Christopher Sykes, who was in Homburg recovering from a stroke. Unable even in extremis to say no, Sykes obeyed the summons. The journey nearly killed him. For Sykes’s nephew, also Christopher, who wrote a brilliant, angry essay about his uncle and the prince, this was the climax of a long career of royal selfishness and bullying. The “great Xtopher” had almost bankrupted himself in entertaining the prince. But if Sykes was a victim, Bertie was an unwitting oppressor; he had nothing but pity for his old friend, he visited him in London, and he wrote to Sir Tatton Sykes imploring him to provide for his brother.80
At Marlborough House, a new court was taking shape. Francis Knollys, standing at his tall desk writing letters in a bold black hand, had by now served Bertie for almost thirty years. He was never quite comfortable in the twentieth century. There were three people who were to form an inner clique. One was Ernest Cassel. The others were the Marquis de Soveral and Mrs. George Keppel. All three were already in place by 1899.
Soveral, the Portuguese minister in London, was known as the Blue Monkey. His blue-black hair, jet-black imperial beard and heavy eyebrows, and the white flower in his buttonhole make him instantly recognizable among the faces lined up for the innumerable royal photographs. Bertie had known him since he was first posted to London in 1884, but it was after 1897 that Soveral became a central figure at Marlborough House. In August 1899, he accompanied the prince to Marienbad for his cure, and Bertie found him a “charming” traveling companion and “a great resource.”81 Soveral’s clowning belied a sharp mind, and he was exceptionally well informed on European politics. He was flirtatious and liked to pose as a lady-killer. Being infinitely discreet, he conducted several flirtations at the same time. He was Alix’s favorite, filling the place in her affections left by Oliver Montagu; he always danced the first waltz at every ball with her, and he knew how to pitch his voice in a way that made it possible for her to hear.b82
Have you seen The Importance of Being Ernest? Bertie asked Soveral. “No, Sir,” came the answer, “but I have seen the importance of being Ernest Cassel.”83
The important Cassel filled the place left by Baron Hirsch, Bertie’s financial adviser, who died suddenly in 1896. Cassel, a forty-five-year-old financial superstar, had been Hirsch’s protégé. Hirsch allegedly left instructions to Cassel, his executor, that all Bertie’s debts to him, which were rumored to amount to well over £300,000, should be written off.84 Cassel took over the management of Bertie’s investments, but on the astonishing understanding that he himself would absorb any losses.
Bertie and Cassel looked so similar—both bearded, cigar-smoking endomorphs dressed in double-breasted suits with rings on their fingers—that they were often mistaken for each other. It was even rumored that they were related—hence the joke about “Windsor Cassel.”c Cassel was born in Cologne in 1852, the son of a Jewish banker, and came to England at seventeen. He was engaged as confidential clerk to the London house of the bankers Bischoffsheim and Goldschmidt, and, backed by Hirsch, whose wife was a Bischoffsheim, he amassed a massive fortune, speculating in railways. After the early death from tuberculosis of his wife, he secretly converted to Catholicism—an emotional act for a proud and humorless Jew who disdained small talk. He was greedy for honors, collected orders, and spent money on racehorses. Better than anyone, he understood the uses to which money could be put; he made himself indispensable to the prince’s charitable projects.
Cassel became Bertie’s most intimate male friend. From 1899, Bertie dined regularly with him either at 48 Grosvenor Square or at Moulton Paddocks, Cassel’s opulent home near Newmarket. The prince was witness at the wedding of Cassel’s only daughter, Maud, to the MP Wilfrid Ashley in 1901, and godfather to their daughter, asking for the child to be christened Edwardina (fortunately for her, perhaps, this was contracted to Edwina). Bertie bombarded Cassel with indecipherable notes about his investments.85 The symbol Ec, presumably for Ernest Cassel, starts to appear in his diaries in 1899. By 1901, Ec is his most frequent correspondent of those noted in the diary, and the initials appear sixty-three times that year. In 1904, the King wrote forty-five letters to Ec, the same number in 1905, and fifty in 1906.
Finding his accommodation on Grosvenor Square too cramped, Cassel bought Brook House on Park Lane in 1905. He decorated the vast mansion with the rarest Italian marble. At the head of the staircase hung a portrait of King Edward. This was disconcertingly lifelike, causing guests to straighten themselves, and it proved a hazard, as some slipped and fell. Daisy Warwick considered that it was almost impossible to distinguish whether the portrait was of Bertie or of Cassel himself.86
The third new name that features regularly is the Hon. Mrs. George Keppel.
Bertie didn’t pretend to be in love with Alice Keppel: “It is rather hard that I may not prefer the society of one lady to others without being supposed to be infatuated with her!”87 Given his growing ill health and possible impotence, it’s likely that he rarely if ever slept with her. But he was determined that his new favorite should not be persecuted in the way that Daisy had been. She must be accepted by society, and even by Alix.
That season, the word went out that wherever the prince was invited, the Hon. George and Mrs. Keppel must be asked, too. In September, Bertie paid a visit to the Edmonstone castle of Duntreath. “Mrs. GK was as usual the life and soul of the party,” he told Emma Bourke.88 In 1899, the Keppels moved to the fashionable address of 30 Portman Square (now demolished). This was a square much favored by the Marlborough House set; indeed, it was almost an enclave of Bertie’s court. The Keppels’ neighbors included the Dukes of Fife and Manchester and (after 1901) Mrs. Eddy Bourke. It seems unlikely that George Keppel could have paid the rent out of his earnings. His business dealings were by that point an embarrassment. In 1900, a fraudulent company of which he was director wound up with debts of £4,000 and no assets, having tried to promote three companies, each of which failed.89 George was found a job by Sir Thomas Lipton as wine manager in New York, “so he is provided for and got out of the way.”90 On the night of the 1901 census, Mrs. Keppel was alone at 30 Portman Square with two children, seven female servants, and three manservants—a substantial household. In December 1899, Alice Keppel paid her first visit to a Sandringham house party—unaccompanied by George.91 On the day Bertie returned to London, he dined for the first time at 30 Portman Square.92
The people who invited the prince to house parties changed, too. Waddesdon was no longer an option: Ferdinand de Rothschild died suddenly in 1898. Often, however, when the people changed, the houses remained the same. The de Falbes died, but Bertie continued to stay at their house, Luton Hoo, which was bought by Sir Julius Wernher, the German financier and randlord.93 Elveden, in Norfolk, was another house that was itself almost a royal subject. When Bertie’s friend the Maharaja Duleep Singh died, it was bought by Lord Iveagh. Bertie once again slotted it into his shooting calendar. Glenmuick, near Balmoral, the estate that had once belonged to Sir James (MacTavish) Mackenzie, was bought by Lord Glenesk, who, as Algernon Borthwick, had founded The Morning Post, and Bertie became his guest of honor.
War was declared against the Boer republics in South Africa in October 1899. At first it barely impinged on Bertie’s stately autumn progress of house parties and shooting. But the defeats of December 1899, known as Black Week, jolted the monarchy into action. The Queen was stirred to an unwonted display of leadership. “Please understand that there is no one depressed in this house,” she told Balfour. “We are not interested in the possibilities of defeat; they do not exist.”94 She canceled her plan of spending Christmas at Osborne and remained at Windsor, where she entertained the wives and children of soldiers at tea. “The Queen is so right,” wrote Bertie.95
“I am very despondent and can think of nothing else,” wrote the prince in January.96 The war gave him a new purpose. Day after day, as the government poured more and more men into South Africa, Bertie inspected detachments of troops before they sailed.97 Tirelessly, he visited military hospitals and barracks, and he chaired the Prince of Wales’s Committee to coordinate the volunteer agencies that proliferated to help the war effort.98 With Alix, he traveled to Southampton to receive a hospital ship returning full of wounded soldiers. “Oh! this terrible war!” Alix kept saying as she made the round of each man’s bed. A burly six-foot Highlander was addressed as “Poor little fellow.”99
The British reverses delighted the kaiser. He visited Sandringham in November 1899 for the first time since 1880, restoring relations with Bertie after the Vienna incident—though the German foreign minister Bernhard von Bülow likened uncle and nephew to “a fat malicious tom-cat, playing with a shrew-mouse,” and Alix giggled at the special barber William brought to curl his mustache.100 But the kaiser was unable to resist rubbing salt in the wounds of Britain’s humiliations in South Africa. To Bertie he wrote after Black Week: “Instead of the Angels’ song ‘Peace on earth and Goodwill to Men’ the new century will be greeted by shrieks of dying men killed and maimed by lyddite shells.… Truly fin de siècle!”101 He appended his own military observations and plan of campaign. On 4 February he wrote again, observing that the British were good losers, which was just as well. “Last year in the great cricket match of England v Australia, the former took the latter’s victory quietly, with chivalrous acknowledgement of her opponent.”102 This was too much. Bertie exploded that the war was nothing like a cricket match. “The British Empire is now fighting for its very existence, as you know full well.”103 When Lord Roberts’s strategy in South Africa succeeded, William claimed the credit. Little did Bertie know that his nephew was, meanwhile, intriguing with the Russians to invade India.
The war made Britain acutely unpopular in France. The government wanted Bertie to attend the opening of the 1900 Paris Exhibition, but he refused. For him to go, he said, “would be a positive slight to the Queen, and would be regarded by Frenchmen as a proof that he was indifferent to the vile caricatures and lampooning of his own mother by their Press.”104 Victoria supported him. The war effort brought Bertie and Victoria politically close. There was no more squabbling over secret dispatches: They both had too much to do. In March, when the relief of the Siege of Ladysmith brought a turning point in the war, Victoria drove around London, doing what Bertie had urged her to do all those years ago, and the spontaneous effect was electric—“as if a great wave of devotion and sympathy had passed over the capital.… Your Majesty does not much admire Queen Elizabeth,” wrote Lord Rosebery, “but the visit to London was in the Elizabethan spirit.”105
“I have no plans at present,” wrote Bertie in March. “How can one have any when the war is going on?”106 That Boer War winter, confined to London, Bertie dined out most nights. There were three London houses where he ate dinner so often that in his diary he wrote only the address. One was 30 Portman Square: Mrs. Keppel. The second was 17 Grosvenor Crescent, and the third was 35 Belgrave Square.
Number 17 Grosvenor Crescent was a large, heavy mansion off Hyde Park Corner, just behind St. George’s Hospital, the home of two wealthy unmarried sisters, Agnes and Fanny Keyser. Bertie’s first dinner with the Keyser sisters is always said to have taken place in 1898, but in fact he dined with Agnes Keyser back in 1895.107 Agnes’s money came from stockbroking; her family was linked to the Bischoffsheims, which may have been how Bertie came to know her. She was the least glamorous of his mistresses—if indeed she was one: a middle-aged spinster, controlling and governess-like, who fed him plain food. But in the winter of 1900, Bertie’s regular visits to 17 Grosvenor Crescent had a purpose. Though untrained, Agnes had a vocation for nursing, and at Grosvenor Crescent she and Fanny started a private hospital for officers wounded in South Africa. As well as eating rice pudding, Bertie visited “Sister Agnes” in her starched uniform in the private ward. After the war, he persuaded his rich friends to subscribe, and Agnes Keyser’s ward grew into King Edward VII’s Hospital for Officers.d108
Number 35 Belgrave Square was the home of Mrs. Arthur Paget, the wife of General Paget, a friend of Bertie’s, who was serving in South Africa. Minnie Paget, now in her midforties, was an heiress, the daughter of a New York hotel owner, the self-made millionaire Paran Stevens. Her ambitious mother had driven her up and down Manhattan with a coach waiting outside every venue so that the young girl didn’t miss a single party. One of Edith Wharton’s original Buccaneers—her brother was briefly engaged to Wharton—Minnie had come to London in search of a husband, had stayed at Sandringham, and had knitted Bertie a waistcoat. The Boer War was her finest hour. She raised £7,000 for war widows and orphans with a masque at the Hay-market Theatre, and she funded a hospital ship.
Minnie was not well liked. She was sharp and brittle; some people said that she was incapable of telling the truth.109 When the seventeen-year-old American Consuelo Vanderbilt came to London (she later married the Duke of Marlborough), she was introduced to Minnie, who agreed to bring her out. “She was considered handsome,” wrote Consuelo: “to me, with her quick wit and worldly standards, she was Becky Sharpe incarnate.… I realised with a sense of acute discomfort that I was being appraised by a pair of hard green eyes.”110 During Daisy’s reign, the Americans had fallen out of favor at Marlborough House. Now, with the rise of Mrs. Keppel, they were back. When Minnie entertained the prince with dinner and cards, she could sense the sweet smell of social power. “Let us be either four or eight at dinner,” he wrote, “but they should all be bridge players.”111
Brussels Nord station, 4 April 1900, 5:30 p.m. After strolling about the platform for thirty minutes, Bertie boarded the special train heading for Copenhagen on a visit to the King of Denmark. He sat down beside Alix opposite an open window, and a servant handed him tea. As the train pulled out of the station, a young man mounted the carriage step, put his gloved hand through the window, and fired two shots at a range of two yards. Alix felt a bullet whizz past and bounce off the woodwork just above Bertie’s head. “If he had not been so bad a shot I don’t see how he could possibly have missed me,” wrote Bertie.112
The round-faced young man was hurled to the ground by the station manager and arrested. He was only fifteen, an anarchist named Jean Baptiste Sipido, and he had bought the revolver for three francs in a market and loaded it in a lavatory before making the assassination attempt. He claimed he was avenging the deaths Bertie had caused in South Africa.113 It was Bertie’s first—and only—near-assassination experience at a time when Europe teemed with anarchists, such as the man who had killed Elizabeth, Empress of Austria, eighteen months before, stabbing her with a shoemaker’s awl (“that poor charming inoffensive woman,” wrote Bertie).114 According to Charlotte Knollys, who was in the carriage, Bertie “never even changed colour, and the Princess behaved equally well.”115 As the train steamed out of the station, the crowd on the platform cheered, and the prince and princess bowed from the open window.116
Bertie displayed considerable courage, and he was justifiably miffed when Salisbury refused to move a parliamentary vote of congratulation. Such a vote would have involved calling a special sitting of the House of Lords, wrote Salisbury, who was a master of the crushing putdown: “It was thought better not to take that course, as it was not then known that the pistol contained a bullet, which the extreme youth of the culprit rendered doubtful.”117 Bertie cursed his cousin King Leopold II for failing to make an example of Sipido, who was acquitted by the Belgian courts on account of being underage.118 Afterward, the prince always took with him an Agent de Sûreté, or detective, when he traveled abroad.119 The incident gave him a sharp reminder that “we are all in God’s hands! in no one else’s!”120
In South Africa, the war at last turned to victory. News of the relief of the Siege of Mafeking reached London on 18 May. Bertie and Alix were at Covent Garden for Wagner’s Lohengrin. After the second act, someone shouted the news from the gallery, and everyone rose to their feet cheering wildly. The singer Madame Marchesi, who was in the stalls, started “God Save the Queen,” which was sung by the entire house.121
Later that month, Bertie’s horse Diamond Jubilee won the Derby. That year he also won the Grand National with Ambush II. But God’s hands were never far away, and in July came the “terribly sad news” of the death of his fifty-five-year-old brother Alfred in Coburg.122 Affie had been Prince Albert’s favorite son; so much cleverer than Bertie as a boy, in middle age he was a friendless alcoholic.e In 1898, he collapsed on a visit to Egypt. “I don’t believe Aunt Marie has the faintest idea of the gravity of his case,” wrote Bertie; “every year his health gets worse.”123 Affie’s only son, Alfred, committed suicide in 1899, and Affie himself was diagnosed with cancer of the throat, though he died of heart failure.
Victoria was devastated. “Oh God! My poor darling Affie gone too!”124 Bertie told Vicky that he could “never remember being so upset before,” but he had grown apart from Affie.125 In truth, he was far more upset by Vicky’s condition.
Bertie had known that Vicky was suffering from breast cancer for almost two years. She complained of “lumbago” as the cancer metastasized into her spine. In August 1900, Bertie traveled from Homburg to be close to his sister at Friedrichshof. By now she was in constant pain. Bertie’s “dear kind face” was always a comfort, but there was little he could do to help.126 He consulted Laking, who advised injections of morphine rather than strychnine or arsenic, but the kaiser refused to allow the English doctor to attend his mother. “It would create a most deplorable feeling here,” he told Victoria.127 By October, Vicky reported that the morphine only dulled the pain for ten minutes. “The terrible nights of agony are worse than ever, no rest, no peace. The tears rush down my cheeks when I am not shouting with pain.”128 The doctors alerted Bertie to be in “constant anxiety” about her.129 Her letters were so harrowing that Helena and Beatrice stopped reading them aloud to the Queen.
“Poor dear Mama was not looking well,” Bertie wrote to Vicky on 19 November 1900.130 He had been summoned to Windsor by the Queen’s doctor, Sir James Reid, who was concerned about her symptoms. Victoria, who had risen so splendidly to the war, was suddenly older and shrunken. For months she had complained of insomnia, lack of appetite, disordered digestion, and depression.
Reid found it hard to persuade the prince to take his warnings seriously. Bertie seemed to think his mother was merely out of sorts, and he cheerfully expected that Christmas at Osborne would “take her out of herself.”131 This was wishful thinking. From the day she arrived at Osborne (18 December), Victoria was an invalid, confined to her bedroom. Most of the time she was “childish”—drowsy, incoherent, and confused. She had lost her royal rage, and she apathetically accepted things that had formerly irritated her. Reid suspected “cerebral degeneration,” or dementia, and his diagnosis was confirmed by two other physicians.132
Beatrice shut her eyes to her mother’s descent into childishness. Like an unmarried daughter whose status depended on an aged parent, the widowed youngest child continued to deal with the Queen’s correspondence and write her journal each night as if nothing had changed. Few dared whisper the possibility of a regency, but the fact was, the Queen was now incapable.133
Helena telegraphed Bertie with a cheerful report each day, omitting all the worrying symptoms. She freely admitted that she did not want Bertie and Alix in the house. Bertie, for his part, was only too willing to believe her. He still discounted Reid’s gloomy prognostications, encouraged by Laking, who reported back from Osborne that the Queen was her normal self. In fact, Victoria put on a special effort when she saw Laking. When Reid asked Bertie to approve a bulletin in the Court Circular about the Queen’s poor health, he refused to give consent. The death of his mother was somehow unimaginable. Victoria herself, in spite of her confusion, seemed dimly aware that she was dying. “Is there anyone in the house?” she asked Reid one afternoon. “Is the Prince of Wales here?” Reid asked if she wanted him. “I do not advise it at present,” she replied, lapsing back into drowsy dementia.134
The pretense that the Queen was in normal health continued until 19 January, when Reid happened to walk into the room of private secretary Arthur Bigge as he was shouting down the mouthpiece of the newfangled telephone to Francis Knollys at Marlborough House. Reid told Bigge to advise the Prince of Wales that the Queen might die at any time. He then confronted Helena and persuaded her to write an accurate telegram to Bertie. By five o’clock that afternoon, Bertie had arrived at Osborne.
The first medical bulletin was issued that day: “The Queen is suffering from great physical prostration accompanied by symptoms that cause anxiety.”135 Victoria rallied in the evening, and in a brief moment of lucidity she told Reid: “I think the Prince of Wales should be told I have been very ill, as I am sure he would feel it.” When Reid asked if she would like the prince to come, she replied, “Certainly, but he needn’t stay.”136 But Bertie didn’t see her. He agreed with Reid that it was better not to tell the Queen that he was in the house. He even declined to look into the bedroom while she slept. He had never seen his mother in bed. Victoria was confused, and so ill that she needed oxygen in the night, but Bertie returned to London the next day to receive the kaiser.
None of the royal family wanted the kaiser there. He had, in fact, been summoned by the doctor, Reid, who was in collusion with him. Without informing any of the family—“I knew the Princesses would disapprove”—Reid had telegrammed William, aware that he wanted to be present at the death.137
From Buckingham Palace, Bertie kept in contact by telephone. The doctors expected the Queen’s death imminently. The next morning at eight a.m., Bertie and William left for Osborne.
That evening, for the first time, Bertie sat by his mother’s bedside. She had been lifted from the grand mahogany marital bed and lay in a small bed in the center of the room, a tiny, huddled figure. After he had left, the semiconscious Queen took Reid’s hand and kissed it repeatedly. Mrs. Tuck, the Queen’s dresser, more alert or more sensitive to Victoria’s needs, asked her if it was the Prince of Wales she wanted. “Yes,” said the Queen.
Bertie returned to her bedside, and she said, “Kiss my face.”138 Then she put out her arms and said, “Bertie,” whereupon “he embraced her and broke down completely.”139
The next morning, the Queen was unconscious and clearly dying. The family was summoned to her bedside. Beatrice, Helena, and Louise told the blind Queen the names of the people in the room. The only name they omitted to mention was that of the kaiser, who was standing at her bedside. Reid asked Bertie why the kaiser was not named. Bertie replied, “It would excite her too much.” Later, when the Queen was alone, Reid went to Bertie and asked if he could take the kaiser to see her. Bertie relented. “Certainly, and tell her that the Prince of Wales wishes it,” he replied.140
In the afternoon, the family was summoned once more. Bertie sat at one side of the bed, behind Reid, who knelt supporting the Queen in a semi-upright position on her pillows. The kaiser knelt opposite supporting her with his good arm.
“At 6:30 she breathes her last,” wrote Bertie in his diary.141 That was all. Not even a hint of the turmoil this intensely emotional man felt at the death of the most powerful woman in his life.
* RA VIC/Add A4/172, Bertie to Vicky, 5 August 1900.
† Louise’s weakness was gambling, which Bertie found unacceptable in a woman: He encountered her at Monte Carlo, squired by a Mr. Holden, “an awful little snob who looks like a stud groom—whilst her husband is making important political speeches at home—I can’t understand at her age that she should come out to Monte Carlo to gamble! and go about with third rate men!” (RA VIC/Add C07/1, B to Knollys, 10 March 1894.)
‡ She allegedly sent anonymous letters about her ex-lover George Binning to his fiancée, accusing him of being a libertine. The case against her was never proved, but there seems little doubt that she “behaved in a contemptible manner.” (Lees-Milne, Esher, pp. 89–90.)
§ Bertie’s fussiness about dress extended to his mistresses. Skittles told a story about a lady who agreed, after some time, to gratify his wishes: “As soon as she had signified her willingness, he drew up a programme of her reception, the principal feature of which was that as the interview was to take place in the drawing room of a private house … ‘we shall not,’ he explained, ‘be quite secure against interruption. But I will have screens put up. You must be sure to come in a small round hat and without a veil.’ ” (Fitzwilliam Museum, Wilfrid Blunt Papers, MS 10, Diary, 5 October 1910.)
‖ “Everybody seems gone mad about acting here,” he told Daisy. “It is however a welcome change from the gambling.” (Caroline Spurrier Archive, B to Daisy Warwick, 7 January 1898, Daisy’s transcript.)
a Another member of the York household was Daisy Warwick’s sister-in-law Lady Eva (“Little Bird”) Greville, who was lady-in-waiting to Princess Mary. Daisy’s brother-in-law Sidney Greville was an equerry to Bertie. Mistresses came and went, but the courtiers kept their jobs.
b According to Jim Lees-Milne (almost as unreliable as Skittles), the historian Gordon Brook-Shepherd came across some passionate letters at Windsor from Soveral to Queen Alexandra, “with whom he had an affair.” (James Lees-Milne, Holy Dread [John Murray, 2001], p. 205 [1 December 1984].)
c Cassel was said to be the son of an illegitimate daughter of Prince Albert’s brother, Duke Ernest of Saxe-Coburg, by an actress who married a Frankfurt Jew named Cassel. This story, sadly, lacks any foundation in fact. (Fitzwilliam Museum, Wilfrid Blunt Papers, MS 9, Diary, 27 June 1909; Camp, Royal Mistresses, pp. 355–56.)
d The 1901 census reveals six young officers described as “visitors” at 17 Grosvenor Crescent. The two sisters each deducted ten years from their age.
e Succeeding his uncle Ernest as Duke of Coburg in 1893 had not made things easier for him. His wealthy wife, Marie, the sister of Czar Alexander III, paid off Duke Ernest’s debts, in addition to lavishing money on Clarence House, and by 1899 the Edinburghs were almost bankrupt. Affie appealed to Victoria for financial help, and she paid £95,000 toward his debts. Bertie was kept informed. (RA VIC/Add C07/1, Arthur Bigge to Francis Knollys, 3 April 1899. RA VIC/Add C07/1, Alfred to QV. 14 August 1899 [copy]. RA VIC/Add C07/1, Arthur Ellis to Alfred, 15 August 1899. RA VIC/Add C07/1, Fleetwood Edwards to Francis Knollys, 23 August 1899. RA VIC/Add C07/1, Fleetwood Edwards to B, 26 August 1899. RA VIC/Add C07/1, Lord Monson to Bigge, 23 August 1899.)