‘If there had been a medical examination for kings, as there is for soldiers, he would have been declared unfit for duty.’
Émile Flourens, French Minister of Foreign Affairs, writing about Bertie
FAT CIGARS AND fatty meals were beginning to take their toll on Bertie’s body. As the French politician Émile Flourens wrote while Bertie was still alive, the closer he came to inheriting the throne, the more ‘obesity deformed his body . . . and seemed, beneath the weight of bloated flesh, to paralyse all physical activity and intellectual strength’. Apparently not all French politicians of the time were fans of the English Prince.
Bertie had long been a regular at German spas like Homburg and Baden. At the time, people believed that the body could be cleansed and recharged with a brief cure of mineral water, light meals and brisk walks – it was fashionable to stride as fast as one could along the avenues, giving quick bows and tips of the hat to important fellow curists, but stopping to talk to no one. The only problem with this treatment was that for Bertie, ‘light meals’ meant not requesting his usual cold chicken by the bedside in case he got hungry in the night. And a spot of over-indulgence in the evenings was not thought too damaging.
Bertie and his doctors soon began to notice that mineral water and power-walking wasn’t enough. Although he had barely entered his forties, his breath was getting shorter and his veins were starting to clog. Hardly surprising, really, when he was virtually chain-smoking cigars, with cigarettes in between as light relief. He would usually light up one cigar and two cigarettes before breakfast, then fill his cigar and cigarette cases for the day, and get through twenty cigarettes and twelve cigars before dinner. In the evenings he was rarely to be seen without a cloud of smoke hovering around his head, and his less discreet mistresses complained that he stank of stale tobacco.
Seeking an additional, albeit pleasurable, remedy for his ills, from 1883 Bertie opted to spend as much time as possible during the damp English months of February and March on the French Riviera. This was the new English name for the section of France’s south coast east of Cannes, rubbing French noses in the fact that until 1860 the area had belonged to Italy. The French had no collective name of their own for the Riviera until 1887, when the writer Stéphen Liégeard said that ‘this shore bathed in sunbeams deserves to be baptized the Azure Coast’. The term Côte d’Azur was immediately adopted by the patriotic French in opposition to the British name.
Bertie was by no means the first royal to winter in the south of France. Leaving aside kings like Richard the Lionheart, who didn’t really go in for rest cures, Bertie’s great-great uncle, the Duke of York, brother of George III, first escaped to Nice in the winter of 1764. The town had since become so popular with Brits that at the beginning of the nineteenth century it gained its Promenade des Anglais, the English prom financed by a certain Reverend Lewis Way so that the expats would be able to walk along the beach without stumbling on its large round pebbles. After all, it didn’t look good if people came to the town for their health and ended up with broken ankles.
Similarly, ever since the mid-1860s, Monaco had been offering a healthy mix of seawater bathing and gambling, and in 1878 the resort felt rich enough to commission a new casino from Charles Garnier, the man who had designed Paris’s opera house. This was the start of the principality’s reputation as a place to lose one’s excess pounds, in both senses of the term.
Menton, just along the coast towards Italy, was another resort being developed by the Brits. A Manchester doctor called James Henry Bennett arrived there in 1859, looking for nothing more than a pleasant place in which to die of his chronic lung disease, and found to his surprise that he got better. He opened a surgery there and wrote a book called Mentone [sic] and the Riviera as a Winter Climate. In this, he rejected towns further south – Turin was foggy, Rome full of malaria and Naples a cholera trap – and praised both Menton’s clement weather and its cleanliness, which he ascribed to the locals collecting their own excrement for use as fertilizer: ‘They husband their manure with jealous care, and let none escape into the sea.’ Dr Bennett also had a piece of advice that Bertie might well have been wise to follow: ‘It is’, he warned, ‘impossible to effectually pursue health and pleasure at the same time.’
The clean-living doctor quickly began to attract English patients, amongst them Robert Louis Stevenson, and in only ten years or so, Menton grew into one of the most fashionable winter resorts on the Mediterranean coast.
Cannes, meanwhile, had been transformed from a fishing village into a bustling resort by a succession of British immigrants. It had first been discovered in 1834 when a certain Henry, Lord Brougham and Vaux (pronounced ‘broom and vokes’, rather like some nineteenth-century house-cleaning implement) was taking his daughter to Italy for the winter to ease her lung condition. However, they found the border closed at Nice because of a cholera outbreak, so they stopped for the night at an inn in Cannes, where they apparently enjoyed an excellent bouillabaisse. Next morning, Lord H. B. & V. took one look at the bay and decided that he didn’t need to go to Italy after all. He bought a piece of land, built a villa, and was soon inviting high-society friends to join him there. More villas sprang up on the wooded hillsides, and Brougham, a skilled orator (or rather, a determined one – he once spoke in the House of Commons for six straight hours), persuaded the French state to pay for a decent jetty. This attracted the yachting crowd, who began to flock south in search of somewhere less bracing than Cowes.
In 1837 a certain John Taylor, estate agent, arrived in Cannes, and from then on the town became a collection of ‘prime seafront locations’, ‘dream homes in the sun’ and ‘stunning vistas’. The health benefits of the climate were also being touted, and before the 1830s were done, over-indulgers from all across Europe were coming for the sea air, year-round sunshine and what one French history of the town calls its ‘vegetable smells’.1 Thermal spas began to open in Cannes, offering cures for lung diseases, indigestion, gout and kidney trouble – in fact, almost every ill that afflicted the hard-drinking, chain-smoking, over-eating upper classes, including Bertie.
He frequented all these resorts and, according to his future French police bodyguard Xavier Paoli, was well known on the coast by the mid-1870s. In 1878, when Paoli, then an ordinary policeman, first saw Bertie getting off a train in Nice, the station master pointed him out and said: ‘He knows everyone in Nice and we adore him.’
As of 1883, Bertie elected Cannes as his favourite winter hideaway, probably because he had been singing the praises of the Riviera back home, and his mother got into the habit of coming down to Nice and Menton. It was best to base himself a few kilometres away. There wasn’t much fun to be had if the black-clad Queen was hovering in the background.
Bertie and Victoria were by no means the only royal personages to spend time on the coast – every winter, the local papers listed visiting monarchs from as far away as Russia and Brazil, as well as the touring hordes of European aristocrats – but Paoli gives Bertie the credit for the fashionability of the whole Riviera.
‘Cannes was his headquarters . . . but his realm of elegance and pleasure spread as far as Menton and Nice,’ Paoli says. ‘Each of these resorts competed for the honour of a visit, and he increased their prosperity by attracting a vast British colony.’ Even before becoming a monarch in name, Bertie was, says Paoli, ‘the King of the Côte d’Azur, and where pleasures were concerned, nothing was decided there without his assent’.
Bertie’s pleasures while he was down south were (in no particular order) gambling, dining, going to the theatre, womanizing and yachting. When he started visiting Cannes more or less annually, the town was already a glittering society capital, with banquets, costume balls, gala evenings at the theatre, a regatta, and sporting events such as horse-racing and pigeon-shooting, as well as less formal get-togethers – what the French called ‘le five o’clock’ (a tea party) with games of ‘croket’. Though in fact, as of the 1880s, the biggest pleasure of all for Bertie must have been the considerable relief of breathing warm French sea air instead of London’s smog particles and Sandringham’s damp vapours.
The local newspapers would always announce Bertie’s arrival, sometimes months in advance. In October 1885, for example, the weekly Courrier de Cannes reported that Bertie would be coming the following January and that his stay would last ‘at least a month and maybe two. Let’s hope the last figure prevails.’ The locals knew that Bertie’s presence would ensure full hotels and a crowded social calendar. In July 1888, the same paper went so far as to repeat a rumour heard by a Monaco journalist that Bertie had been telling friends in London that he intended to spend more time than usual there the following winter. The Cannes journalist deduced, with much rubbing together of hands, that ‘English high society will follow him, as usual’.
And this it did. Bertie’s arrival always coincided with a long ‘Liste des Étrangers Arrivés’ (List of Arriving Foreigners) column in the society section, detailing who had just settled in at which villa or hotel. Many of these chic tourists would reside at the Hôtel Prince de Galles – not that Bertie stayed in the hotel named in his honour. According to the papers, the Prince of Wales favoured other addresses like the Hôtel de Provence, the Réunion de Cannes, a selection of private villas and, as of 1893, his own racing yacht Britannia.
There were always a few lines in the Cannes papers when Bertie left England or Paris bound for the south, and when he arrived in town, usually on the train that pulled into Cannes around 1 p.m., there were speeches on the platform. However, the accounts of his various arrivals seem to imply that Bertie was in a hurry to get on with the fun – on 14 February 1888, for example, the Courrier de Cannes reports that Bertie arrived by ‘luxury train’ at 1.12 p.m., to be greeted by an official welcoming committee of twenty people and a speech from the deputy mayor.
‘With a few courteous words,’ the article reveals, ‘the Prince thanked Monsieur Millet [the deputy mayor] for the enthusiastic and friendly welcome that the town gave him every year’, and then hurried off to settle into his apartments. On that occasion, it was no wonder that he was keen – printed on the same page was the guest list of a dinner at the Cercle Nautique (yacht club) that same night, that included his lover the Princesse de Sagan.
Not that she is labelled as such, of course, and there is not a whiff of overt scandal in any article about Bertie, as there would have been back in prurient, puritanical England. The Cannes papers afforded the Prince all the discretion necessary to keep him coming to the town. For example, in 1895, we are told that Bertie paid a visit to the Grand Duke and Grand Duchess of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, but not that the Grand Duchess was a beautiful young Russian called Anastasia, unhappily married to a husband who was known for his weak heart and asthma – and who often left his wife alone in Cannes. The closest we get to gossip is after one visit to the Grand Duchess (who is named on her own this time), when we learn that ‘cette entrevue a été assez longue’.
We know from the newspapers that there were often famous women of dubious reputation performing at the theatres during the winter season – in February 1889, Bertie was in Cannes at the same time as Sarah Bernhardt, who was putting on her famous production of Fedora, the tragic story of a princess who is in love with a womanizing count (and that is not a misprint). There is no record in the newspaper of Bertie and Sarah meeting up on this occasion, but it’s hard to imagine the two avoiding each other.
Bertie was also reunited with another former lover, the actress Jeanne Granier, in Monte Carlo, where the two apparently had a fond get-together in a hotel room in 1889. It was said that Jeanne kept the Prince amused for a whole evening with hilarious anecdotes about the Paris theatre scene. But of course she may well have amused him in other ways, as well.
Similarly, another actress-cocotte, Caroline Otero, nicknamed la Belle Otero,2 was often on the coast in winter, under contract to attract clients to the Monte Carlo casino. Again, she is known to have entertained Bertie as a client/lover, but the local newspapers keep mum about it.
If there were no scandalous actresses due to perform, Bertie had them shipped down specially from Paris. Once, after dropping heavy hints to an American friend that he would like to see the shocking chanteuse Yvette Guilbert, she was brought to Cannes at enormous expense to sing at a private dinner. When she toned down her act for the refined company, Bertie begged her for her ‘most delightfully Parisian items’. Guilbert’s repertoire included ditties like ‘L’Hôtel du Numéro Trois’ which talks about a squalid hotel where ‘the maid isn’t very beautiful, but everyone makes love with her’, and ‘Belleville-Ménilmontant’ (named after two poor areas in Paris), in which she reveals that ‘my brother-in-law makes a fortune pimping my sister Thérèse’. Bertie was so delighted with Yvette’s show in Cannes that he invited her to London to perform in front of the ladies and gentlemen of the court. Fortunately, very few of them would have understood her Parisian accent as well as he did.
Although Bertie’s stays in Cannes were very public affairs, with his daily engagements published in the papers, it is possible to read between the lines and find hints of the illicit fun he might also have been enjoying. For example, on 8 February 1883, he was at a soirée given by a certain Lady Camden at her villa, and amongst the guests were ‘Mistress et Miss Chamberlain’. This Miss was Jane, the daughter of an American millionaire, who was one of Bertie’s favourites at the time, and who was seen with him in Paris the following year, when the police recorded her as the Prince’s maîtresse-en-titre (his ‘officially appointed mistress’ – the Parisians, of course, have different grades of lovers).
A more tantalizing reference comes on 15 February 1887, when the Prince attended a seventeenth-century-themed ball chez Lady Murray. Bertie’s costume isn’t mentioned, but one of the guests, a certain Miss Townley, went as Diane de Poitiers, the notorious mistress of France’s King Henri II. Diane de Poitiers was so sexy that Henri’s wife, Catherine de’ Medici, used to watch her husband’s adulterous couplings through a hole in the ceiling in the hope of picking up bedroom tips. Was this Miss Townley sending out a message to Bertie? Did he pick it up? If so, was his chat-up line based on the fact that her costume was a century too early for the evening’s theme, because Diane de Poitiers lived from either 1499 or 1500 to 1566? The newspapers don’t tell us. The last thing they wanted to do was gossip and scare off their biggest tourist attraction.
Bertie was the nineteenth-century equivalent of a superstar. Just as the arrival of a world-famous football player can guarantee a club’s fortunes for a season from the sale of tickets and replica shirts, so Bertie’s regular residencies in Cannes helped the town, and the whole coast, to prosper.
But it wasn’t all about economics. Bertie was also completing his seduction of the French people. As a younger man he had become a welcome fixture on the Parisian scene. Now, in middle age, he was winning the undying affection of the Mediterraneans, all of it thanks to his warm personality. Although he was a prince, he was also a team player, and joined in with any fun that was on offer. He regularly took part in the Nice bataille des fleurs, part of the carnival, during which everyone would throw locally grown daisies, mimosa and fleurs de lys at each other as they drove along the Promenade des Anglais in their carriages. Visitors dressed up in carnival costumes, and Bertie once went disguised as Satan, with a red cape and horns. Quite daring for a future head of the Anglican Church.
After watching Bertie at the carnival one year, the French police noted that: ‘He enjoys himself like a young man, laughs at all the grotesque scenes and afterwards takes great pleasure in describing the day’s events.’ They sound almost surprised that he should be so human.
But Bertie’s greatest strength was that he was always so personable. In March 1896, he paid a short visit – just forty minutes – to the Cannes flower show. A very brief stop, with little opportunity to admire the displays or talk to anyone. Even so, he made excellent use of his time. According to the Courrier de Cannes, as Bertie was leaving the showground, he caught sight of an old man wearing a medal that he recognized (Bertie was an obsessive connoisseur of medals). ‘Ah,’ he exclaimed, ‘I see that you were among the brave men who fought in the Crimea campaign. I am happy to shake your hand.’ The old man was so touched by this gesture that he was left speechless – and Bertie had won yet another friend and admirer, as well as earning himself a glowing write-up in the press.
The concrete proof of the affection he earned came in 1912, two years after his death, when a statue was erected in Cannes in his honour. He was not depicted in the usual monarch’s stately uniform, but as a sailor with a yachting cap set on his head at a racy tilt, and a telescope tucked under one arm. This marble Bertie, who was torn down by Nazi sympathizers in 1943, was gazing fondly out towards the horizon – which was a pity because sprawled at his feet was a naked girl, her modesty barely covered by a sheaf of flowers. She was designed to symbolize the town of Cannes, which – like so many French females – reacted to his presence by getting undressed and prostrating herself in front of him.
In the early 1890s, Bertie’s health took a turn for the worse. He was diagnosed with what his doctors called ‘gouty muscular rheumatism’, and had to give up dancing. He still went to the south of France most winters, but a sense of melancholy pervades some of the newspaper reports of his visits. He stayed on his yacht Britannia more often than on land, and attended far fewer functions, though the Courrier de Cannes managed to put a positive spin on the Prince’s reduced socializing, saying: ‘[He] wants to live peacefully, rest and enjoy the region’s delicious climate.’
The melancholy was understandable, because Bertie suffered some serious blows to his morale at this time. In 1891 his leg was so gouty that he had to cancel his trip to the Côte d’Azur altogether. In January 1892, his eldest son Eddy died of flu just after his twenty-eighth birthday. Even though the young Prince had been a dissolute throwback to the family’s Hanoverian genes, the loss was a crushing blow to Bertie and Alexandra, who descended into months of gloom. During the year of official mourning, all fun was forbidden, and this inactivity, according to one of Victoria’s cousins, the Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, turned Bertie ‘very fat and puffed’. In March of 1892, he made a trip to Cap Martin, between Monaco and Nice, but it was a mournful exile with Princess Alexandra, as well as an attempt to avoid the rampant influenza virus that had killed their son.
After Bertie’s new yacht was delivered in 1893, he enjoyed the regattas at Nice and Cannes, and even won a few prizes, but he must have got the increasing feeling that he was losing the most important race in his life – the one to outlast his mother. She was looking immortal, especially because she was using the same health-preserving tactic as he was, and coming to the Riviera.
What was more, surprisingly for such a resolute widow, Victoria was also giving Bertie headaches because of her infatuations with male servants. First there had been the Scotsman John Brown, the kilted valet who had been by her side for more than ten years, helping her in and out of carriages, talking back to her with coarse common sense, sitting for her sketches, and sleeping at night in a neighbouring chamber.
To Bertie’s relief, Brown died in 1883 of a streptococcal infection at the early age of fifty-six, but a few years later he was replaced by an Indian called Abdul Karim. Also known as the Munshi (teacher) because he taught the Queen Hindi and Urdu, Karim quickly rose from waiting at table to the role of a surrogate John Brown. The closeness between a servant and a queen had been almost tolerable when it was a Scot, but the ladies-in-waiting and male attendants were aghast when they were ordered to treat a colonial as their equal.
From 1892, the Munshi was included in the small party that accompanied Victoria to the Riviera each spring. It sometimes came as a surprise to her visitors when the turbanned Karim was introduced to them. According to a report in the less-than-respectful Birmingham Post in 1893, King Umberto of Italy apparently thought that the Indian was a captive prince, kept by Victoria as proof of her power over her colonies.
In March 1897, Karim’s presence on the south coast of France caused a scandal in the royal household. He had been diagnosed with gonorrhoea (a disease most commonly caught from prostitutes), and the other servants threatened to resign if he came on the Queen’s annual trip to Cimiez, a hilltop suburb of Nice. Victoria threw a fit, accusing her servants of racial prejudice, and the Munshi came along, but the holiday mood was spoilt by constant tensions at the villa. Bertie, who was wintering on his yacht Britannia at Cannes, was called in as a peacemaker by Victoria’s doctor, but he didn’t have the courage to confront his mother.
She, meanwhile, seems to have enjoyed the rumpus, admitting to her doctor that the arguments about Karim were a source of excitement in her old age. The Munshi inspired an almost girlish sense of mischief in Victoria: in 1899, when snobbish members of her household again demanded that Karim stay away from Nice, she left him behind, only to telegraph him as soon as she arrived, telling him to follow on.
These holidays in the sun seem to have brought Victoria out of herself. She could see foreign friends and relatives like the Emperor of Austria and the Prince of Denmark without crossing half of Europe. She even showed signs of spontaneity and energy. During that tempestuous season of 1897 Victoria organized an impromptu jaunt along the coast to Cannes to have tea with her daughter Louise, who was another fan of the Riviera, mainly because of the gambling. According to the society column in the Courrier de Cannes, ‘the news [of Victoria’s arrival in town] was immediately passed on to His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales’. It is easy to imagine Bertie grumbling into his beard at having to come ashore and make small talk with his mother – and the omnipresent Karim.
But this was Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee year, and Bertie set aside any impatience he might have about inheriting the throne to play a key role in organizing the festivities. Driven by his social conscience, he suggested using the grand state occasion to raise money for hospitals. He was also determined to make sure that the poorer citizens of London would get a good view of the proceedings.
There was pressure to hold a ceremony in St Paul’s, but Bertie supported an idea that would allow Victoria to sit peacefully in her carriage rather than have to climb painfully down in full view of the public. The main event was therefore a parade through London on the morning of Tuesday, 22 June 1897. First, Victoria, who had dressed up in what was for her a wild party gown – black silk with silver embroidery – was driven from Buckingham Palace to St Paul’s, where her carriage stopped and she remained seated while a service of thanksgiving was held. The procession then continued through six miles of streets festooned with flowers and bunting, with onlookers leaning out of every window, and filling all the seats on specially erected grandstands.
Thanks to Bertie’s influence, his mother’s rare tour of her capital city also took in the poor neighbourhoods south of the river, and everywhere she went, Victoria received deafening cheers and renditions of ‘God Save the Queen’ as congratulations for her longevity. ‘A never to be forgotten day,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘No one ever, I believe, has met with such an ovation as was given to me.’ If anyone thought she was tired of reigning, they were wrong.
Bertie put on a glorious scarlet field marshal’s uniform for the occasion, but took a back seat – literally. A short piece of newsreel film of the procession shows Victoria beneath a parasol accompanied in her carriage by her daughter Helena and Princess Alexandra. Bertie, in a plumed hat, was on horseback behind them. As he rode around London playing the guard of honour, he must have been wondering when, if ever, it would be his turn. Two of his young nephews, Kaiser Wilhelm and Tsar Nicholas, had already inherited their crowns, while he was still waiting. His mother was frail, but winters in the south of France were keeping her going. And he was no spring chicken himself, even though he was trussed up like one and broiling in the sun beneath his feathery helmet.
The celebrations were a great success. Encouraged by Bertie to come out of her shell, the normally reclusive Queen managed to be more sociable than ever, attending receptions for – to name but a few – MPs, lords, schoolchildren and the country’s mayors. She reviewed troops, attended a torchlight procession at Eton and paraded with firemen.
The only major event at which Bertie had to deputize for his absent mother was a review of the fleet at Spithead, near Portsmouth. As he stood on the deck of the royal yacht Victoria and Albert, the full might of Britain’s navy – more than 150 ships manned by over 50,000 sailors – rode at anchor in the Solent, firing cannon salutes and generally showing off their capacity to rule the waves. It was the greatest assembly of naval strength the world had ever seen, and the lines of warships were said to have totalled thirty miles in length. As was the custom in these cases, there was little or no sense of military secrecy, and the fleet was observed by crowds of foreign visitors – there were journalists, visiting admirals and guest vessels from, amongst others, France, the USA, Russia, Japan and Germany. For once, though, Germany’s contribution to the display was a huge disappointment.
Whenever the 38-year-old Kaiser Wilhelm II, Bertie’s nephew and Victoria’s grandson, came to the Solent to sail one of his racing yachts in the Cowes regatta, he usually brought an escort of two immense new warships to remind his English relatives that Britannia wasn’t the only force to be reckoned with on the seas. In June 1897, however, for such a grand official occasion as the Diamond Jubilee review of the fleet, he sent over a thirty-year-old refurbished frigate, the König Wilhelm, named after his grandfather.
It was a crude and obvious snub, intended as revenge on the British royal family. Victoria had refused to invite Wilhelm himself to her Jubilee celebrations, ostensibly on the grounds that she didn’t want the nation to bear the expense of entertaining crowned heads of Europe, and he was furious. He wrote to Victoria complaining that ‘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’.
It was a massive blow to his ego, and he might well have been tempted to order his most terrifying new dreadnought to steam into the Solent and deafen Bertie with its big-gun salute. Instead, Wilhelm responded with Teutonic disdain and sent over an ancient tub that was due to be demoted to service as a floating barracks almost immediately after its trip to England.
In the event, the British admirals didn’t need a new German battleship to remind them that their impressive fleet might be going out of date. As Bertie and the assembled dignitaries looked on, a small steamer suddenly appeared amongst the British warships and evaded all naval attempts to intercept it as it sped back and forth in front of the surprised spectators.
This was the Turbinia, then the fastest ship in the world, capable of 34.5 knots (39 mph), almost double the speed of most warships of the time. Its startling power was achieved thanks to brand-new steam turbine engines, an invention that was about to revolutionize sea warfare. The Turbinia was British, but it was a stark sign that, as the century drew to a close, the world was changing. The exchange of snubs between the fading Victoria and her ambitious German grandson, and the appearance of an uninvited intruder at an occasion as solemn as a naval review, were proof that Europe was losing the cosy stability that had been symbolized by all those winter gatherings of aged royals in Cannes and Nice.
Bertie was not the poetic type, but even he might have seen the hint of a metaphor in the crashing thunderstorm that broke out over the darkened sea as the Diamond Jubilee naval review came to an end.
1 No doubt a reference to pine trees and lavender rather than illegal smoking materials – those wouldn’t arrive in any quantity until after the film festival started in 1947.
2 La Belle Otero’s generous chest measurements are said to have inspired the twin domes on the roof of the Hôtel Carlton at Cannes. This seems hard to believe because the domes are very wide apart and alarmingly pointed.