The Heir Apparent (14 page)

It is sometimes suggested that Queen Victoria was going through menopause, but this seems unlikely.
¹²
She was only forty-two and was not physically ill. But she had never experienced any real misfortune in her life before, and she was suffering from an emotional breakdown. In denial about Albert’s death, she slept in the marital bed with his nightshirt in her arms, his photograph and watch lying on the pillow beside her, and a marble cast of his hand within reach. Next door, in his dressing room, his papers and clothes lay as they had when he was alive, and hot water was brought each morning to his room. At Windsor, the Blue Room where Albert died was photographed and kept as a shrine, exactly as it was at the hour of his death, “even to an open pocket handkerchief on the sofa,” but the bed was strewn like a coffin with white flowers.
¹³

In spite of all her weeping and sad mornings, waking day after day at four a.m., Victoria insisted on performing the business of monarchy herself. “I must work and work, and can’t rest,” she told Vicky, “and the amount of work which comes upon me is more than I can bear! I who always hated business have nothing but that!”
¹⁴
Sitting at her twin writing table next to the beloved’s empty desk, scrawling over page after page of thickly black-edged paper, she felt that she was carrying on Albert’s mission.

Albert had encouraged Victoria in her obsessive mourning when her mother died, and now she clung to her grief. All the anger she felt
for Albert’s death was directed at Bertie. “Oh! that boy … I never can or shall look at him without a shudder,” she wrote.
¹⁵

Early in 1862, Victoria had a conversation at Osborne with her groom-in-waiting Colonel Francis Seymour. She received him standing in Albert’s dressing room, wearing her widow’s cap. A locket containing Albert’s hair and his photograph hung from her neck. “I don’t mind telling you as an old friend … that what killed [Albert], was that dreadful business at the Curragh.” Seymour pleaded that Bertie’s fall was the sort of error that few young men escaped, but the Queen was adamant: She could never forget that he had caused his father’s illness. “She said he had nothing to remind her of him, the others Princess Royal and Alfred in particular had just something of his look, but the Prince of Wales nothing and she could not help being relieved when he was gone from her, tho’ he had behaved as well as he could.”
¹⁶

On 5 January 1862, Victoria penned a memorandum. She was under pressure to keep Bertie beside her, but this, she explained, was out of the question. We always come back, she wrote, to “the one dreadful misfortune,” that is, Bertie’s fall; the vital thing was to prevent it happening again. Meanwhile, Bertie’s character was such that “a
lengthened
stay … 
at Home
will only lead to continued & protracted
idleness
.” The solution was for him to travel. “If the Prince of Wales is well surrounded and is never allowed to go out alone & is moreover constantly kept reminded of
all
that is right & good, the Queen does not see how it is possible for
him
to get into mischief.”
¹⁷

Albert had planned that Bertie should complete his education with a trip to the Near East, and Victoria insisted that this should still take place. Bertie had no wish to travel, but his views were not consulted. King Leopold, who interviewed Bertie and tried to intervene with Victoria on his behalf, told Lord Clarendon that relations between mother and son were worse than ever. “It is entirely her fault as the poor boy asks nothing better than to devote himself to comforting his Mother and with that object would be delighted to give up his foreign expedition but she wouldn’t hear of it and seems only anxious to get rid of him.”
¹⁸
The prime minister, Lord Palmerston, tried to dissuade the Queen from sending Bertie abroad, telling her that “the country was
fearful we were not on good terms, as he was so much away from home.”
¹⁹
But Victoria refused to budge. “Many wish to shake my resolution and to keep him here,” she told Vicky, but that would “force a contact which is more than ever unbearable to me.”
²⁰

Not only had Bertie lost his father, but he was made to feel responsible for his death. At first he tried to please by complying with his mother’s wishes. He made no attempt to resist his banishment. But Victoria’s rejection left deep wounds. Bertie’s pity for his grieving mother soon turned to anger. Rather than confront her, he was outwardly dutiful and obedient, but secretly he deceived her. He was resentful, too, that, in spite of all the pressure from politicians and
The Times,
Victoria excluded him from her confidence. Instead, she shared her innermost thoughts with Vicky, to whom she complained constantly about Bertie.

Before departing on his tour of the Near East, Bertie saw his mother (6 February 1862). She thought he seemed nervous at the thought of leaving. “He was low and upset, poor Boy. So was I.”
²¹

The Queen had ordered that the Prince of Wales should travel with his suite in deep mourning, alone and in strict incognito, and accept no invitations. Away from his mother, Bertie’s spirits rose. In Venice (“charming”), the royal yacht
Osborne
anchored opposite the ducal palace, and he cruised around in gondolas all day (“a charming sensation”) and paid two visits to Elizabeth, Empress of Austria, whom he found “very handsome” as well as (naturally) “charming.”
²²
Venetian art, however, received no mention.

In Alexandria, Arthur (later Dean) Stanley, a protégé of Albert’s, joined the party. As professor of ecclesiastical history at Oxford University, his role was to provide tuition in ancient history. Bertie scrambled very fast up one pyramid and then, to Stanley’s dismay, showed no interest in seeing any more dull ruins. Instead, he sat smoking and reading
East Lynne,
the bestselling novel about adultery by Mrs. Henry Wood. He insisted on the rest of the party reading
East Lynne,
too, and as they steamed in luxury down the Nile, the prince quizzed his companions.
“With whom did Lady Isobel dine on the fatal night?”
²³
His chief amusement was shooting crocodiles from the boat. “We are leading quite an Eastern lazy life, and smoke and drink coffee nearly all day,” he told Carrington. “I trust that you have cut the acquaintance of our friend
N
[Nellie Clifden].”
²⁴

Stanley at first despaired of Bertie, who was woefully lacking in intellectual curiosity, but he was disarmed by the prince’s engaging manner, his modesty, and his real efforts to conceal his boredom. He was especially impressed by the way Bertie conducted himself in interviews with high personages, where “he appears to the best advantage.”
²⁵

In Jerusalem, Bertie was tattooed with the five crosses forming a Crusader’s Jerusalem cross on his forearm.
^*
26
He grew his first beard. Strictly supervised by Bruce, he avoided the erotic temptations of the East, which for many English travelers formed the secret agenda of the Grand Tour. Nellie Clifden was still on his mind, however. From Constantinople he wrote to Carrington: “I am sorry to see by your letter that you still keep up an acquaintance with NC, as I had hoped by this time that
that
was over.”
²⁷

With Bertie safely out of the country for four months, Queen Victoria busied herself arranging his marriage—a “sacred duty” that Albert, “our darling Angel,” had left her to perform.
²⁸
How fortunate it was that sacred duty coincided so exactly with the Queen’s convenience, removing her irksome son from her home while protecting him from the dangers of bachelor life. Bertie was not consulted in the matter. The marriage was arranged entirely by the Queen and Vicky.

From Germany, Vicky reported dark rumors that Princess Alexandra had disgraced herself by having a teenage affair with an army officer.
²⁹
This and other tales about Alexandra’s family were fabrications,
invented by Denmark’s enemies in Germany, as Vicky’s investigations soon revealed. Alexandra’s mother, Princess Louise, was “lively,” which was code for flirtatious, but not unfaithful to her husband. The harlot of the family was Louise’s sister, the Princess of Dessau, who had an illegitimate child as a result of an affair with a groom; this passion had been encouraged by her mother, Alexandra’s grandmother, the old Landgravine of Hesse, who, Vicky reported, was “wicked and very intriguing—besides not being at all respectable.”
³⁰

Ever since she was fourteen, Alexandra had been monitored by the British minister in Copenhagen, Augustus Paget, who assured Baron Stockmar that the young princess had attended only two parties in her life, both heavily chaperoned. Up until sixteen she had lived in seclusion in the nursery. “In short,” wrote Paget, “it appears that the whole object of the parents has been to prevent her name being mixed up with anyone else’s.”
³¹

Princess Louise was an ambitious matchmaker, anxious to marry her two pretty daughters, Alexandra and Dagmar, into the top league of European royalty. Her husband, Prince Christian, was an obscure and impoverished princeling, connected only remotely to the childless King of Denmark, whose heir he had been designated under the London Protocol of 1852.
^†
He owned no estates, and his income had only recently increased from a paltry £800 to £2,000, still a modest sum. The Danish princesses’ sole assets were their beauty and connections, and Princess Louise knew very well that her daughters’ virtue must be strictly and conspicuously guarded if they were to hold their value in the royal marriage market.

Queen Victoria grumbled that the Danish family were “as bad as possible,” but she was being disingenuous, conveniently forgetting her own Albert’s lecherous father and her philandering brother-in-law, Ernest.
³²
She insisted that Bertie’s fall should be kept secret. Her cover was blown by the Duke of Cambridge, who wrote to Princess Louise
(she was his cousin) revealing all, adding that Victoria and her son were on the worst of terms. Wally Paget found Princess Louise in tears with this letter in her hands, saying that Alexandra’s position would be impossible if she married Bertie.
³³
Victoria leaped to her son’s defense, insisting that “wicked wretches had led our poor innocent boy into a scrape,” that Albert and she had forgiven him “this (one) sad mistake,” that she had never quarreled with him and that “she looked to his wife as being his salvation.”
³⁴
But the Duke of Cambridge’s leak had shifted the advantage in this game of moral bargaining away from Victoria, giving the Danes the upper hand—all the more so as the czar of Russia now returned to the attack and announced his intention of swooping off either Alexandra or Dagmar as a bride for his son.
³⁵

When Bertie returned home in June 1862, Victoria found him “much improved and … ready to do everything I wish”—that is, he agreed to marry as soon as she desired. She told Vicky “we get on very well. He is much less coarse looking and the expression of the eyes is so much better.”
³⁶
Within a few weeks, however, Bertie was irritating his mother as much as ever. She complained that he was idle and listless, he fidgeted terribly, his voice was too loud, and his argumentative manner with the younger children exasperated her.
³⁷

The Queen found all talk or excitement intolerable. She always dined alone. She suffered from neuralgia, lost weight, and sometimes could barely walk. Her journal is a dreary litany of sleepless nights, headaches, and lethargy. No doubt today she would be diagnosed as clinically depressed.
³⁸
As the months went by, her mourning continued unabated. Like Miss Havisham, her grief had become almost pathological. Prolonged grief can follow an ambiguous relationship where conflict and tensions are unresolved, leaving lingering guilt, and perhaps this was the case with Victoria. Her marriage to Albert had been intensely competitive, a battleground for power, and the Queen’s worship of her Angel was a stratagem for coping with his superiority, which at another level she resented.

But she found that mourning suited her. It allowed her to withdraw
from all public appearances and court functions that she found boring or disagreeable. Under cover of mourning she could do exactly as she wished. She retreated into a small inner circle, seeing only her younger children, servants, and favored ladies-in-waiting. Her favorite, Lady Augusta Bruce, the sister of Bertie’s governor, always answered “Yes, ma’am” to everything she said and was promoted to a privileged permanent position at her side.
³⁹

Albert was beatified and transmogrified into a cult. At Frogmore, close to the sepulcher that housed the remains of her mother, Victoria supervised the construction of a mausoleum, her own version of the Taj Mahal, a rich and dramatic celebration of the angel of death. It was built on a marsh, and a fire burned constantly to keep off decay. Bertie was heard to remark that he “would take good care not to be buried in such a place.”
⁴⁰

The anniversary of Albert’s death, 14 December, became a holy day for the Queen and her family, commemorated each year with prayers and weeping at the mausoleum. For the rest of her life Victoria dressed in widow’s cap and weeds. Alice’s wedding, which took place in the dining room at Osborne in July, was more like a funeral. Victoria sat hunched in an armchair. Affie “sobbed all through and afterwards—dreadfully.”
⁴¹

General Bruce, Bertie’s governor, who had contracted fever in the Near East, died shortly before Alice’s wedding. On the last day of his life, he spoke of Bertie’s fall.
⁴²
For Bertie, Bruce’s exit was sad but timely; Bruce had controlled him with excessive strictness. In place of a governor, Victoria appointed a comptroller and treasurer for her son: General William Knollys, a sixty-five-year-old retired soldier.
^‡
The Queen ordered Knollys to act as Bertie’s mentor and to report directly to her.
⁴³
Much to Bertie’s annoyance, she insisted that Knollys should
be informed of his fall. Reluctantly, Bertie agreed, “hoping that this may be the last conversation that I shall have with you on this painful subject.”
⁴⁴