But he loved me the best!
—HRH QUEEN ALEXANDRA
Bertie bowed to the inevitable a year later and proposed to Alix at her home in Lakean, in conditions carefully stage-managed by Queen Victoria. Once Alix and Bertie had been safely betrothed, the queen took Alix under her wing, welcoming her into the royal family by inviting her to stay at Osborne, the queen’s home on the Isle of Wight. Alix, meekly and uncomplainingly, submitted to her role, to the queen’s endless anecdotes of the late Prince Albert, and carriage rides in the rain.1 Although this royal wedding could hardly be described as romantic, Queen Victoria’s spin doctors ensured that it appeared to be a genuine love match. And Bertie, eager to please his mother after the debacle of Nellie, played his part like a born actor. “Love and cherish her you may be sure I will to the end of my life,” he told the queen.2
The date was set for March 10, 1863, in St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, by which time Alix would be eighteen and Bertie twenty-one. The royal wedding, the first for many years, was greeted with enthusiasm by a public ready to celebrate after two years of mourning Prince Albert. The poet laureate, Alfred Lord Tennyson, penned “A Welcome,” with which to greet the future princess when she arrived:
Sea-Kings’ daughter from over the sea, Alexandra!
Saxon and Norman and Dane are we,
But all of us Danes in our welcome of thee, Alexandra!3
Princess Alexandra’s arrival in London was greeted with immense pageantry, the sort of event at which the British royal family excels. From the moment she set foot on British soil, Alix proved a hit with the public. She disembarked at Gravesend on March 7 on the royal yacht Victoria and Albert to be greeted with deafening cheers from the crowd on the riverbanks and little boats bobbing about in the water as Bertie, ten minutes late, ran up the gangway to kiss her. “It was her smile of greeting that I shall always remember—the wonderful smile which ravished all in the days when she came a girlbride, and with its undying beauty to the end,” raved the Daily Express.4 The couple then traveled by train to the Bricklayers Arms station in Southwark, a heavy-goods station that had been converted into a “perfect triumph of the decorative art.”5After being greeted by representatives of the railway company and civic dignitaries, they boarded a carriage to London Bridge, with an escort of Life Guards, where the procession was joined by the carriages of the livery companies, the lord mayor of London, and the prime minister, Lord Palmerston.
London Bridge had been lavishly decorated by J. B. Bunning, the city architect, with standards bearing the Danish emblem of the raven and the elephant. One hundred incense burners gave off “the most graceful fragrance.”6 A massive triumphal arch had been mounted on the bridge, decorated with royal portraits, coats of arms, allegorical figures, and a representation of Britannia in a chariot drawn by four horses, welcoming Princess Alexandra to Britain.
From London Bridge, the route passed through dense crowds wearing wedding favors and waving Danish flags to the Mansion House, where the Lady Mayoress, attended by eight young women in white dresses, presented the princess with a bouquet.
The diarist Arthur Munby, watching the procession from King William Street in the city, heard the bands approaching and the sound of deep hurrahs coming nearer and nearer:7
The great crowd surged to and fro with intense expectation. The glowing banners of the City procession reappeared and passed, and the countless carriages full of blue robes and scarlet robes and Lord Lieutenants’ uniforms and the Volunteer bands and the escort of the Blues [a Guards regiment]; and the first three royal carriages whose occupants … were heartily cheered. But when the last carriage came in sight, the populace, who had been rapidly warming to tinder point, caught fire all at once. “Hats off!” shouted the men; “Here she is”, cried the women; and all those thousands of souls rose at her, as it were, in one blaze of triumphant irrepressible enthusiasm, surging round the carriage, waving hats and kerchiefs, leaping up here and there and again to catch sight of her, and crying Hurrah.… She meanwhile, a fair haired graceful girl, in a white bonnet and blush roses, sat by her mother, with “Bertie” and her father opposite, smiling sweetly and bowing on all sides, astounded—as she well might be—but self-possessed; until the crowd parted at length.8
There was enormous excitement and genuine enthusiasm for the royal couple, and the immense crowd was generally good-natured, but the shortage of city policemen led to poor crowd control. The men of the London Volunteer Brigade, who were supposed to take up a position outside Mansion House, arrived too late to get through the crowd, and the procession frequently ground to a halt, with carriages unable to get through to take their place in the procession. At several points, the Life Guards had to clear the way with drawn sabres.9 It later emerged that several people had been crushed to death.10
The procession continued up past St. Paul’s Cathedral, where seating for ten thousand people stretched from Cheapside to Ludgate Hill, and then along Fleet Street as far as Temple Bar, which had been made into another heavily decorated triumphal arch. At this city boundary the procession ended and the lord high steward of Westminster took over, with the royal party traveling via Hyde Park Corner to Paddington Station, where they took a train to Slough, which would be followed by another carriage procession to Windsor. The young princess took it in her stride, smiling and waving to the cheering Eton schoolboys despite her long and tiring journey and the fact that her carriage arrived in darkness and torrential rain.11
Queen Victoria’s response was rather different. When Princess Alexandra finally arrived at Windsor Castle, the queen told her that although the wedding would be “the only ray of happiness” in her life since her husband’s death, she was too “desolate” to join the young couple for dinner.12 This approach set the tone for what was supposed to be a gloriously happy occasion. On the day before the wedding, Queen Victoria conducted Bertie and Alix to Prince Albert’s mausoleum at Frogmore. “I opened the shrine and took them in.… I said, ‘He gives you his blessing!’ and joined Alix’s and Bertie’s hands, taking them both in my arms. It was a very touching moment and we all felt it.”13
There is a photograph, described by one author as “possibly the most repulsive picture in the Royal Archives,”14 that reflects this curious event. The photograph depicts the young couple standing politely before the bust of the late prince consort, with Queen Victoria, in full mourning, eyes fastened on the image of her late husband while Alix looks self-conscious and Bertie appears to be frankly resentful. The “bust” photographs were not unusual: a series appears in the royal family albums. But this particular photograph casts a long shadow over the wedding preparations, like a wicked fairy’s curse in an old folk tale. It was scarcely an auspicious start to Alix and Bertie’s married life.
On the morning of the wedding, Queen Victoria dressed in her customary mourning, with long black streamers and white veil, with the badge of the Order of the Garter that had belonged to Prince Albert and a miniature decorated with his portrait. The queen made her way separately to St. George’s Chapel, under a covered way constructed for the occasion, which took her into the north side of the altar that had been built by Henry VIII to enable Catherine of Aragon to watch the ceremony of the Order of the Garter and had henceforth been known as the “Catherine of Aragon closet.” From this prominent position, Queen Victoria, who was conscious that she was being photographed, stared fixedly not at the ceremony itself, but instead at the marble bust of her late husband.15
As nine hundred guests crammed into St. George’s Chapel, Bertie, with risers in his shoes, stood five foot seven in his size eight boots and general’s uniform. Bertie had been promoted to the rank of general on his twenty-first birthday. From Bertie’s shoulders hung the cloak of the Order of the Garter. As he stood between the Crown Prince of Prussia, his brother-in-law, and the Duke of Coburg, waiting for his bride, Bertie kept casting nervous glances up at his mother in the Catherine of Aragon closet, where she appeared “agitated and restless” and in a state of profound melancholy.16 As Jenny Lind, “the Swedish nightingale,” sang in the chorale that had been composed by Prince Albert, the queen threw back her head and looked “away with a most painful expression on her face.”17 “See,” commented one observer, “she is worshipping him in spirit!”18 By this stage, Crown Princess Vicky, Princess Alice, and her sisters were in tears.
In contrast, Princess Alexandra was completely composed, walking demurely down the aisle on her father’s arm. Pale from crying and saying good-bye to her mother, Alix wore a white dress trimmed with Honiton lace and garlanded with orange blossom with a long silver train, which had to be held by eight bridesmaids.19 By the time she reached the altar, Alix was twenty minutes late, setting the tone for the lifetime of unpunctuality that would drive Bertie to distraction. In other unedifying scenes, wedding guests were shocked to see the Knights of the Garter hurrying down the aisle in a giggling huddle, rather than stepping decorously two by two.20 But the worst behavior came from Vicky’s son, the future Kaiser William II. Young children can often be difficult at weddings, but the four-year-old William, clad in Highland dress, kept throwing the cairngorm from the top of his dirk across the choir.21 William also hurled his aunt’s muff out of the carriage window, addressed Queen Victoria as “duck,” and bit Prince Alfred on the leg.22 Benjamin Disraeli, who had dared to look at the queen, had received a cold stare, but still recalled the wedding as “a fine affair, a thing to remember, a perfect pageant … the beautiful chapel, the glittering dresses, the various processions … the heralds, the announcing trumpets, the suspense before the procession appeared, the magnificent music.…”23
The royal party lunched separately from the other guests. Queen Victoria did not attend, and ate alone. Later, Queen Victoria watched as the newly married couple’s carriage left Windsor Castle for the railway station, en route for their honeymoon at Osborne on the Isle of Wight. The carriage halted briefly under Queen Victoria’s window, and Bertie and his new bride looked up at her. Once Bertie and Alix and their guests had departed, Queen Victoria walked down to the mausoleum to pray beside Prince Albert’s tomb.24
Excited crowds, including many boys from Eton College, flocked to greet the royal carriage as it arrived at Windsor Station. Among these young Etonians was Randolph Churchill, who vividly recalled the scene:
“Nothing stood before us. The policemen charged in a body, but they were knocked down. There was a chain put across the road, but we broke that; several old genteel ladies tried to stop me, but I snapped my fingers in their face and cried, ‘Hurrah!’ and ‘What larks!’ I frightened some of them horribly. There was a wooden palisade put up at the station but we broke it down.… I got right down to the door of the carriage where the Prince of Wales was, wildly shouting, ‘Hurrah!’ He bowed to me, I am perfectly certain; but I shrieked louder.”25 Randolph also observed that Alix had strong nerves, because she did not look frightened, just kept smiling blandly as the frenzy continued around her.
There are no intimate details, but it appears that Bertie and Alix did have a genuine “honeymoon period” during which they were said to look “comfortable and at home together.”26 The wedding night might have come as something of a shock to Alix, as it did to so many well-brought-up young girls. But these early days seem to have been satisfactory: according to Crown Princess Vicky, meeting the couple soon after their wedding, “love has certainly shed its sunshine on these two dear young hearts and lends its unmistakable brightness to both their countenances.… Bertie looks blissful. I never saw such a change, his whole face looks beaming and radiant.”27 To Queen Victoria’s genuine delight, the Alix she encountered on their return to Windsor Castle was “sweet and lovely.” It was not to last.