‘A solemn holy act not to be classed with amusements.’
Queen Victoria’s idea of a good wedding reception
IN MARRIAGE AS in everything else, Bertie was to find it almost impossible to please Victoria, who, like all interfering mothers worth their salt, sent out a barrage of contradictory messages concerning her son’s wedding. The only consistent thing about the Queen was that everything she did was motivated by her own self-interest.
On the one hand, she campaigned in Bertie’s favour with his future in-laws. She wrote to Princess Alexandra’s mother referring to Bertie’s ‘fall’ as ‘this (one) sad mistake’, and claiming that ‘wicked wretches had led our poor innocent Boy into a scrape’. In all her writings, Victoria was very fond of underlining words (usually represented in a printed text, including this one, as italics), but for her letter to Bertie’s intended mother-in-law she resorted to capital letters to insist that she would look to Bertie’s future wife ‘as being HIS SALVATION’. Victoria even went so far as to assure the Danes that Bertie was ‘very domestic and longed to be at home’, which was either a white lie or a spectacular piece of denial.
Privately, though, Victoria was set firmly against Alexandra – she wanted a German daughter-in-law, not a Dane. Bertie’s elder sister Vicky had married the heir to the Prussian crown, sealing for the foreseeable future (or so Victoria thought) England’s friendship with the Germans. Ideally, Bertie would add a second link to this Anglo-Prussian family chain. The Danes, on the contrary, were in direct conflict with Prussia over the possession of the tiny border states of Schleswig and Holstein, which at the time were like two irritating grains of sand in the salami sandwich of northern European politics.
In Alexandra’s favour, she was part German – her mother was from Hesse-Kassel, a small duchy that had provided Britain with soldiers (at a price) during the American War of Independence. But this pedigree didn’t satisfy Victoria, mainly because the court of Hesse-Kassel was notorious for being too dissolute, too frivolous – too French. Exactly like Bertie, in fact.
Politically, then, Alexandra was a disaster. But even Prussia’s English princess, Vicky, was all for the marriage because she astutely felt that the only hope of forcing Bertie to become anything like a stable husband was to find him a beautiful wife, and the eligible German girls she had met were all a bit too Kaiser-like. Alexandra was not as stunning as some of the French ladies Bertie had encountered, but she had natural poise and a delicate beauty that might, Vicky suggested, keep him interested.
Victoria’s moral mentor, Uncle Leopold, King of the Belgians, was also in favour of Alexandra, but for a much more masculine reason. He thought her a good choice as a wife because, he wrote to Victoria, ‘there is something frank and cheerful in Alex’s character, which will greatly assist her to take things without being too much overpowered or alarmed’. His meaning was clear: Bertie was always going to be a womanizer, and Alexandra seemed to have what it took to survive the humiliation. In this, Leopold was something of an expert – he had an official mistress who was thirty-five years his junior, and who had borne him two illegitimate sons.
As it happened, Alexandra’s mother was not at all reassured by Victoria’s lobbying. Princess Christian of Denmark had heard about the tempestuous relationship between Victoria and Bertie, and was terrified that the bad feeling between them would ruin Alexandra’s chances of a happy marriage.
With so many conflicting opinions surrounding the Anglo-Danish match, it was left to seventeen-year-old Alexandra herself to sort things out. First there was a short introduction to Victoria in Belgium in September 1862, at which the Queen decided that Alexandra seemed ‘dignified’ and ‘distinguished’, even if her parents were not.
Then in November, Victoria summoned Alexandra to a meeting in England to be inspected more closely, without the support of her mother this time, and with her father banished to a nearby hotel. Petrified as she was at the prospect of a solo audience with the gorgon mother-in-law, Alexandra had the good sense to present herself to the mourning Victoria in a plain black dress, without any jewellery, and to put up with hours of lectures about Albert. She was a model of sobriety, piety and healthy melancholy.
The ruse worked. Victoria wrote to Vicky, saying, ‘How beloved Albert would have loved her.’ From beyond the grave, Papa had given his approval. ‘She is so good, so simple, unaffected,’ Victoria went on, unwittingly spelling out that poor Alexandra was the complete opposite of the French beauties that Bertie was so fond of.
He, meanwhile, was trying his best to reassure his mother that he would do his marital duty. After Alexandra had accepted his proposal, which was little more than a formality, Bertie wrote a letter to Victoria in his confusing style – half German, half Yoda from Star Wars – promising that: ‘Love and cherish her you may be sure I will to the end of my life.’
Luckily, Alexandra was quite smitten with her jovial, impeccably mannered English Prince. She told Vicky: ‘You perhaps think that I like marrying your Brother for his position but if he was a cowboy I should love him the same and would marry no-one else.’ It should be noted that, at the time, a cowboy was not someone who rode the prairies in search of buffalo, whisky and good-time girls – he was simply the cattle equivalent of a shepherd boy.
Victoria, though, was terrified that Bertie might have something of the wandering ranch-hand about him, and insisted that, even though the young couple were engaged, they should never be left alone together unless someone was sitting outside the room next to an open door. There would be no pre-marital rodeo-riding on Victoria’s watch.
While arrangements were finalized, Bertie was exiled to the royal yacht Osborne (the renamed Victoria and Albert) for a short cruise in the Med. It was a stormy November, and almost everyone on board was seasick. One of the steamer’s paddle wheels was damaged, and it was forced to moor in the Bay of Naples, where Bertie held a low-key twenty-first birthday party. This coming-of-age in exile looks very much like a deliberate ploy on Victoria’s part, a punishment for Bertie’s premature assertion of his adulthood with Nellie Clifden.
However, Victoria seems to have let her political and emotional manoeuvrings distract her, because she made a grave mistake in planning her son’s short Mediterranean exile. On the way home, Bertie had to make an overnight stop in Paris to change trains.
Since poor General Bruce had died of fever just two weeks after the Orient tour, Bertie now had a new moral guardian – an aged veteran of the Napoleonic Wars called General Sir William Knollys. Nominally he was Bertie’s ‘comptroller and treasurer’, the idea being that preventing the Prince of Wales’s financial excesses would also limit his moral overindulgences. But Knollys was more lenient than Bruce, and would become loyal to the Prince rather than the Queen, so Bertie was able to escape from his base at the British Embassy and visit Eugénie, who was in Paris.
Eugénie was, as usual, surrounded by her charm school, and Bertie was introduced to yet another young married beauty, the dusky Anne-Alexandrine-Jeanne-Marguerite Seillière de Sagan, who immediately set about confiding in him that her husband was cheating on her (quelle surprise). For the moment, Bertie could only console the unhappily married French lady verbally, but it was a heavy hint that he filed away for later use. When he eventually acted on it, it would lead to a paternity scandal.
Bertie’s wedding, like his engagement, was a mixture of youthful geniality and maternal gloom. The date, chosen by Victoria, was 10 March 1863, during Lent, the season of self-denial. When the Archbishop of Canterbury complained about the inappropriate timing, he was rebuked by the Queen, who reminded him that marriage was ‘a solemn holy act not to be classed with amusements’. In short, Bertie was lucky he wasn’t getting married on Good Friday – crucifixion day.
The British public, though, had no such negative thoughts. They were wholeheartedly in favour of a royal wedding, whatever the date. Just as in 1981, when Prince Charles married his own carefully selected virgin bride, the nation erupted in a frenzy of capitalistic monarchism. Streets were decorated with flags and bunting, and shop windows were suddenly overflowing with souvenirs. There were photos, marriage medals, even commemorative Princess Alexandra hair curlers. New celebratory songs were written, and the sheet music was published so that every household with a piano (and in those days there were many) could bash out a patriotic tune in their front room.
One of these songs was called ‘Oh Take Her But Be Faithful Still’, which, judging by the way the royal marriage would turn out, was one tune that Bertie didn’t get to hear.
The official celebrations were set to begin three days before the wedding, when Bertie was to escort Alexandra through London after her arrival in England on the royal yacht. As soon as the route of the procession was announced, strategic windows and balconies were put up for rent at exorbitant prices. An American biographer, Stanley Weintraub, quotes one of the many small ads that appeared in The Times, which was offering a viewpoint for the procession with what must surely have been a deliberate spelling mistake and double entendre:
Royal Procession: First floor, with two large widows, to be let, in the best part of Cockspur Street, with entrance accessible behind.
If Bertie saw the ad – and it became famous – he would probably have laughed. And asked to meet the two widows.
The procession attracted immense crowds – the biggest ever seen in London, it was said – but The Times reported that the royal carriages were ‘old and shabby, and the horses very poor, with no trappings, not even rosettes’. Victoria had put her usual damper on the celebrations. Even so, for four long hours the crowd cheered a tumultuous welcome to Alexandra, who was looking beautiful and composed in an open carriage despite the cold March wind and her first exposure to public hysteria.
Almost as soon as the happy young couple arrived in Windsor, where the wedding itself was to take place, Victoria took them to Albert’s brand-new mausoleum, finished just the day before. The Queen led Bertie and Alexandra into the shrine and joined their hands before the late Prince Consort’s tomb. ‘He gives you his blessing,’ Victoria declared. Alexandra would have been forgiven for thinking she was marrying into the Dracula family.
Victoria insisted on holding the wedding ceremony in St George’s Chapel at Windsor, which until then had been better known as a venue for royal funerals.1 Within its walls were the tombs of Kings Edward IV, Henry VI, Henry VIII, Charles I, Georges III and IV and William IV, and its East Choir was being rebuilt as a chapel in honour of Bertie’s father. A place of unbridled joy it was not.
Victoria had taken care to fill the church with her own guests, so that there was hardly any room for Alexandra’s family. Even the King of Denmark had not been invited. Victoria herself was not amongst the congregation, either, and remained almost completely hidden from view throughout the ceremony. She watched proceedings from on high in Catherine of Aragon’s Closet. This sounds like a wardrobe but is in fact a private recess on a balcony above the altar, built so that Catherine could observe the ceremonies of the Order of the Garter that were held in St George’s. (After she was estranged from Henry VIII, titillations in Catherine’s life must have been few and far between.)
So, up in her closet, in a black dress with a white veil, wearing a miniature of Albert in a brooch, Victoria gazed down like an avenging angel. The first piece of music to be played, chosen by Victoria of course, was an oratorio written by her husband, and she was seen to sigh and raise her face to heaven as it was sung. It was a relief that she hadn’t asked for Alexandra and Bertie to be brought to the altar in coffins.
The guests and the bridal couple did their best to jolly up the occasion – many of the men sported brightly coloured uniforms; the women were resplendent in their jewels and silks. Alexandra arrived (twenty minutes late) in a white-and-silver satin dress embroidered with orange blossoms that hung in clusters like mistletoe, as if to remind everyone that she was expecting a kiss on this funereal day. Bertie was looking elegant, if a little plump, in a general’s uniform with the velvet cloak of the Order of the Garter wrapped around his shoulders. In a photograph taken just after the ceremony, the cloak’s bulbously tasselled cord hangs down over his crotch like an historic fertility symbol.
When it came to the vows, Bertie showed himself up. He had to have Alexandra’s six first names (Alexandra Caroline Marie Charlotte Louise Julia) read out in groups – he was apparently incapable of reciting them all from memory.
There were moments of lightness, though – Bertie’s nephew, the four-year-old Wilhelm, future Kaiser of Germany, who was wearing Highland dress, pulled the large gemstone from the handle of his dirk and had to be restrained from throwing it across the aisle.
Many members of the congregation were also distracted by the ample cleavage of the 65-year-old Duchess of Cambridge, a great-granddaughter of George II and now Princess of that frivolous court of Hesse-Kassel. And when the Archbishop’s sermon droned on for what the orchestra considered too long, the musicians began loudly tuning their instruments.
After the ceremony, at the wedding lunch (which the Queen did not attend), the future Kaiser misbehaved again, crawling under the table to bite the exposed leg of his uncle Prince Arthur, who was wearing the uniform of a Scottish soldier – tunic and kilt. It was, of course, not Wilhelm’s last attack on the British military.
During the lunch, the happy couple were called away from the celebrations to pose for a family photo that must have confirmed in the bride’s mind that she had just married into some kind of ghost-worshipping sect. There are four characters in the picture. To the left is the white-veiled Alexandra, the only person gazing frankly into the camera. To the rear is Bertie, pouting morosely and looking away. In front of him, sitting rigidly at right angles to the camera, is Victoria, who is swathed in a voluminous black habit that makes her look like a cross between a nun and a hearse. She is ignoring the young couple, and staring up at a life-size head-and-shoulders bust of Albert on a plinth. If the photographer actually did say ‘cheese’, no one heard him.
That afternoon, Bertie and Alexandra were driven off to their honeymoon in a carriage, hailed by the crowds and the nation’s bells. They were on their way to the railway station, where they were to catch a train to Southampton, then the royal yacht to the Isle of Wight, where they were to spend a week at Osborne – a house now transformed into yet another shrine to Albert.
Victoria, having got what she called a ‘sad and dismal ceremony’ out of the way, snuck back to the mausoleum to commune with her dead husband.
Not exactly an auspicious start to a marriage.
Princess Alexandra had one good reason to be thankful for Victoria’s interference, however – for a while it drew Bertie closer to her. When in November 1863, the Schleswig-Holstein problem flared up into a short, unequal war between little Denmark and mighty Prussia, Bertie supported his wife in opposition to his mother.
‘Oh! If Bertie’s wife was only a good German and not a Dane!’ Victoria moaned, while Bertie defended Alexandra and began to nurture the feeling (which became stronger throughout his life) that the Prussians were nothing more than bullies – yet another view that he would share with the French.
Victoria also united the young couple by pestering them about every aspect of their social life. She objected to late dinners and parties on moral grounds, and also did her best to discourage Alexandra from horse-riding, one of the Princess’s favourite hobbies, on the grounds that it would hinder childbearing. The Queen even gave orders that parties and receptions should be organized to avoid Alexandra’s periods.
It seems strange that Victoria was so impatient to see an heir to the throne, because she expressed serious doubts about both Alexandra’s and Bertie’s suitability as breeding stock.
‘Are you aware that Alix [as Alexandra came to be called by her family] has the smallest head ever seen?’ she wrote to her daughter Vicky. ‘I dread . . . – with his [Bertie’s] small empty brain – very much for future children.’
It was largely Victoria’s own fault if Bertie’s brain stayed empty, because she still refused to let him have anything to do with matters of state. She didn’t trust him to read cabinet papers, because she was afraid he would disagree with her or prove too indiscreet – and in both cases, her fears were entirely justified.
She didn’t want Bertie to represent her at public functions, either, despite his success at doing so in America as a much younger man. She wrote to her Home Secretary, referring to herself in the third person as she usually did when communicating with politicians, that:
Her Majesty thinks it would be most undesirable to constitute the Heir to the Crown a general representative of Herself, and particularly to bring Him forward too frequently before the people. This would necessarily place the Prince of Wales in a position of competing as it were, for popularity with the Queen.
What else was there for 21-year-old Bertie and his 18-year-old wife to do than ignore Victoria’s disapproval and enjoy themselves?
Shortly before their wedding, Bertie had take possession of the two houses that would be the main venues for his English partying for the rest of his life. Marlborough House in Pall Mall, built by Christopher Wren in 1710, belonged to the crown, and £60,0002 of government money was spent on modernizing it as Bertie’s London home. To this, the Prince added £100,000 of his own money (mainly income from the Duchy of Cornwall – land still owned by the Prince of Wales today), which he lavished on furniture and carriages for Marlborough, as well as jewellery for Alexandra and himself.
Like all other aspects of Bertie’s private life, Marlborough House was modelled on what he had seen in France. It was redecorated in a French style, with plenty of gilding on the woodwork, and remodelled to provide a ballroom and a series of large reception rooms like those in which Napoléon and Eugénie held their Parisian parties. The décor included tapestries from the Gobelins factory in Paris given to Bertie by Napoléon, and paintings by Franz Xaver Winterhalter, the German artist who had painted the French imperial couple and the beauties at their court. Winterhalter now painted portraits of Bertie and Alexandra, making the Prince look a bit like a chubby boy Hussar and Alexandra a vamp with an alarmingly low-cut dress.
In deliberate defiance of his mother’s wishes, Bertie fitted out a smoking room at Marlborough. Typically, though, he was terrified that Victoria would find out, so when she came to inspect the new home, the smoking den was camouflaged with a chalked message on the door saying ‘Lavatory. Under Repair’. It was the only way to make sure that Victoria would not poke her nose in where it was not wanted.
The young couple’s other playground was Sandringham in Norfolk, a country house comfortably far away from Bertie’s mother. This he bought out of his own money for £220,000 (though its 7,000 acres of farms yielded a healthy £6,000 a year in rents, so it was a sound investment as well as a hideaway). Aptly, Bertie bought the house from an owner who spent most of his time away from home whooping it up in Paris, and had recently moved abroad permanently after shocking the Norfolk gentry by marrying his mistress.
Like Marlborough, Sandringham received a Napoléon III-style makeover. Bertie had seen how the Emperor was redesigning Paris, and he now built new roads on the Sandringham estate, laid out a pleasure garden for outdoor amusements, and founded schools and a hospital for his tenants. In the house, Bertie built himself a games annexe that included a billiard room and a skittles alley. Clearly needing to make up for a lost childhood, he would also hold tricycle races in the ballroom and toboggan down the main stairs on a silver tray.
The sense of fun extended to the choice of décor – alongside the predictable country-house paintings of rural landscapes and livestock was a real stuffed baboon that greeted visitors at the front door, its paws outstretched to receive their calling cards.
Alexandra was happy at Sandringham – flat Norfolk, she said, reminded her of Denmark, and on the country estate she was able to keep a vast pack of dogs of different breeds. She also enjoyed ice-skating on the ponds and – at first, anyway – joined in with the atmosphere of playfulness. On one occasion, when Mrs Gladstone (the mother of the boy who had informed on Bertie for kissing a German girl) was invited to Sandringham, Alexandra came to tuck her up in bed like a child.
The couple organized house parties that were as relaxed, if not quite as morally lax, as Napoléon and Eugénie’s get-togethers. The indoor amusements at Sandringham usually took place away from the bedrooms, and consisted of raucous meals, long card games and music evenings, during which unlucky guests were sometimes subjected to the violin-playing of Bertie’s younger brother Alfred, which Victoria’s private secretary Henry Ponsonby once described as ‘an appalling din’. Getting Alfred to perform sounds like one of Bertie’s practical jokes.
But the aspect of Bertie’s social life that was most obviously inspired by Napoléon III was the mix of people that he entertained, both in London and the country. In the face of the intense snobbery of France’s hereditary aristocrats, the parvenu Napoléon had been obliged to invent a new social model for his court. By necessity, it was as much a meritocracy as it was an aristocracy. Bertie now began to play host not only to lords and ladies, but also to achievers from many different walks of life – his only requirement was that they were witty when describing their achievements.
The following is a description of Napoléon’s guest lists at Fontainebleau written by a Belgian diplomat, Baron Beyens. It almost exactly matches Bertie’s own taste in company: ‘Official personages – civil and military, men of state and foreign diplomats, aristocrats from every country, artists, scientists, men and women of letters, as well as a selection of private individuals well known only because of their social situation.’ The Baron went on: ‘Sharing with them the pleasures of luxury and tasteful entertainment – was it not proof of a social mood free of pride and haughtiness, a simplicity of tone completely unlike the coldness of those sovereigns whose outdated sense of etiquette cuts them off from mere mortals?’ He could have been describing Bertie’s own mother.
These days, we would probably disagree with the Baron about Bertie’s lack of haughtiness, and some of the entertainment as definitely less than tasteful (pouring brandy over defenceless social inferiors’ heads, for example). But compared to Victoria, Bertie really was democratizing his social circle, and because of this he received plenty of ‘advice’ from snobs who wanted him to be haughtier.
Earl Spencer3 warned the Prince of Wales that he should not attend a ball given by Lionel and Charlotte de Rothschild because ‘they . . . hold their position from wealth and perhaps the accidental beauty of the first daughter they brought out’. But Bertie ignored this kind of thinly disguised English anti-Semitism. He had first met the Rothschilds in Paris, and always enjoyed being invited to the family’s houses in England, where, according to French biographer Philippe Jullian, ‘he could find the abundant luxury of the Second Empire, with its refined cuisine and international atmosphere’. No English snob was going to talk Bertie out of his French pleasures.
Another innovation imported by Bertie from France, Jullian claims, was a new tolerance towards women of less than spotless reputation. The Prince’s London dinners were apparently the first occasions on which English upper-class ladies regularly agreed to share a table with actresses.
Duty obliged the Prince to invite some pompous guests who didn’t quite fit in, but they were usually swallowed up in the crowd. And besides, European heads of state quickly came to realize that it was necessary to send two sorts of diplomats to London – crusty old ambassadors to please the Queen, and young, fun-loving aides who would get on with the heir to her throne.
Victoria knew what was going on, and watched Bertie’s growing independence with a mixture of fear and disgust. She was sure that when she died, England would know ‘nothing but misery’ and that King Bertie would ‘spend his life in one whirl of amusements’.
Her only consolation was that the young couple were at least providing her with plenty of descendants. Bertie and Alexandra’s first son was born just less than ten months after their wedding, and was diplomatically named Albert Victor in accordance with grandmother’s wishes. Only eighteen months later, a second son was born, the future King George V. In the space of seven years, Alexandra was to bear six children in all, though the last of them, Alexander, lived only twenty-four hours.
This fertility took its toll on the Princess. Quite simply, she couldn’t provide babies while keeping up with Bertie’s desire for a social life that resembled a perpetual motion machine. Alexandra tried her best – her second son was born at Marlborough House at midnight, after she and Bertie had attended an orchestral concert in town, on an evening when she was also scheduled to host a late supper party. Quite a soirée for a heavily pregnant woman.
Coupled with her frequent absences from the social calendar because of childbirth and lying-in, in early 1867 Alexandra suffered a serious attack of rheumatic fever that left her with a permanent limp. At only twenty-two, her wild dancing days were over. It was also becoming obvious that she suffered from a hereditary condition that causes progressive deafness – otosclerosis, abnormal bone growth in the inner ear. The problem was aggravated by pregnancy, so Alexandra was doomed to become less and less able to follow the lively banter that was the very raison d’être of Bertie’s social gatherings (the ones at which his wife was present, anyway). Even more than physical beauty, it was wit that attracted Bertie to women, and Alexandra was growing into a silent wallflower, what Oscar Wilde would later compare to dining opposite a lily stuck in a wine glass. Not much of a conversation partner for a chatty young prince.
At the beginning, Bertie’s sister Vicky had expressed a touching faith in the healing power of marriage over her errant brother: ‘As he is too weak to keep from sin for virtue’s sake, he will only keep out of it from other motives, and surely a wife will be the strongest?’
This was apparently the case for many Victorian men, even the upper classes who are so often depicted chasing chambermaids and making fools of themselves with actresses. In the mid-nineteenth century it was quite common for rich Englishmen to sow their wild oats with prostitutes and servants (and, more frequently than was admitted, with male friends, too) throughout their twenties and well into their thirties, finally marrying at a relatively late age and settling down to baby-making and approximate monogamy.
However, Bertie had been forced into marrying young, and now, as Alexandra spent more and more time with her children and her dogs, he looked elsewhere for amusement. Not that he waited until Alexandra was deaf and limping. In 1864, when he had been married less than two years, Victoria apparently knew that Bertie was still living the bachelor life: ‘I often think her [Alexandra’s] lot is not a happy one,’ Victoria wrote. ‘She is very fond of Bertie, though not blind.’ This was presumably not a joke about Alexandra’s deafness.
Prince Albert had married Victoria when he was twenty and never strayed from the path of saintliness, but Bertie seems to have adopted an entirely different attitude to marital respectability. He quickly turned Alexandra into what one of his biographers, Gordon Brook-Shepherd, describes as ‘the most courteously but most implacably deceived royal lady of her time’. Crucially, though, he was forgetting the Empress Eugénie.
Bertie’s attitude to marriage, like his attitude to so many other things in life, was Napoleonic. He once wrote to a friend, Sir Edward Filmer, referring to himself in French as an ‘homme marié’ who was perfectly justified in going off ‘on a tack by himself’.4 At the time, it was almost expected of a chic Parisian husband that he would live a life of barely concealed adultery. As we have seen, the Emperor’s court was organized to make illicit couplings with single ladies or other men’s wives almost unavoidable.
Of course, there was no gender equality in this arrangement, and the wives of the alpha males were required to be beyond reproach. The Empress Eugénie was known to be a model of virtue, and Bertie no doubt assumed his own wife would be the same. But being married to a model of virtue only made adultery easier.
When rumours of his frequent nocturnal outings to London theatres, gentlemen’s clubs (which were basically smoking and drinking dens with comfortable armchairs) and racy parties began to circulate, while poor Alexandra was left to fret about when her husband would get home, one of Bertie’s friends, John Wodehouse, became seriously worried about the Prince’s lifestyle. ‘He is ruining his health as fast as he can – eats enormously . . . smokes incessantly, drinks continually “nips” of brandy; he has only to add, as I fear he will, gambling and whoring to become the rival of the “first gentleman in Europe”.’
This ‘gentleman’ was, of course, a monsieur – Napoléon III.
1 Edward VII himself would later be interred in the church where he was married.
2 To give an idea of how much this represented, the average wage of a household cook would have been about £35 a year, that of an experienced bank clerk about £150 a year.
3 This was the 5th Earl Spencer, a friend of the moralist William Gladstone. The current Earl, brother of the late Princess Diana, is the 9th.
4 Bertie might well have been writing the letter out of guilt at having been seen ‘spooning with Lady Filmer’ (Sir Edward’s wife, Mary) at Ascot Races in June 1867. In the nineteenth century, this verb meant behaving flirtatiously rather than lying down and snuggling up before or after sex.