The Heir Apparent (31 page)

William Gladstone, meanwhile, proposed to stage a grand thanksgiving ceremony at St. Paul’s Cathedral. On 21 December 1871 he had a long audience with the Queen at Windsor. Victoria’s journal breezily records: “After discussion it was agreed that I should send [Gladstone] a letter.”
⁵
Gladstone gives a different version. His lengthy memorandum records a furious argument with the Queen, who violently resisted the public thanksgiving. Treating her rather as he did his sister Helen, who was mad, the prime minister laboriously explained that the feeling in the country had been “wrought up to the highest point, and nothing short of a great public act of this kind can form an adequate answer to it.” The prince’s illness had “worked in an extraordinary degree to the effect of putting down that disagreeable movement with which the name of Sir C. Dilke had been connected”: the aim now must be to get rid of it altogether, “for it could never be satisfactory that there should exist even a fraction of the nation republican in its views.” Reluctantly, the Queen agreed to a public thanksgiving, but when Gladstone mentioned giving employment to the Prince of Wales, “this brought out no direct response” but an icy vagueness.
⁶

Bertie’s recovery was distressingly slow. He developed agonizing pain in his left leg, especially in the hip. His fever climbed, his mind wandered, and he fancied himself in an American hotel, unable to realize that the aching leg actually belonged to him. The leg gave him violent spasms that baffled the doctors and prevented him from sleeping.
⁷
He had frightening attacks of breathlessness, too, and the doctors feared a deep-seated inflammation.
⁸
He was tortured by toothache. Later, the leg periodically became swollen, as the circulation was obstructed—the result, said the doctors, of the “narrowing of the veins caused by their inflammation”; his bad left leg troubled him for the rest of his life.
⁹
Having become emaciated during the fever, he now put on weight too quickly.
^*
Victoria thought he was looking “so aged
and shaken and so deathly pale—and very lame.”
¹⁰
Leopold, too, found him “much aged—the top of his head is quite bald.”
¹¹
At thirty, Bertie had become middle-aged.

His enfeebled state brought him closer to Alix. “You can hardly think HOW happy I am,” she told her sister-in-law Louise. “We are never apart, and are now enjoying our
second
‘Honey Moon.’ ”
¹²
Later, she would look back on Bertie’s convalescence as the time “when I could do
everything
for him and be of use and pleasure to him—and never were we so
close
to each other before!!”
¹³
When Bertie came to Osborne to convalesce, even Victoria noticed “something different” about him, “which I can’t exactly express. It is like a new life—all the trees and flowers give him pleasure as they never used to do.… He is constantly with Alix and they seem hardly ever apart.”
¹⁴
Photographs show them standing close together, Alix resting her head on his shoulder or putting her arm through his; they seem touchingly devoted, where before they had avoided any form of contact before the camera.
¹⁵

Alix looked “more
lovely
,” according to Prince Leopold, “and I might say
angelic
, than ever.”
¹⁶
Nursing suited her. She told William Gull, the doctor whom she credited with saving Bertie’s life, how she rubbed him to keep him warm after he took his first bath: “You cannot think how happy and thankful I am to see him so fully restored.”
¹⁷

The national thanksgiving on 27 February 1872 was an extraordinary outpouring of public loyalty and affection. How strange it was, mused Bagehot in
The Economist
, that “a middle-aged lady is about to drive, with a few little-known attendants, through part of London, to return thanks in St. Paul’s for the recovery of her eldest son from fever, and the drive has assumed the proportions of a national event.”
¹⁸

Victoria dreaded the day and bickered furiously with Gladstone beforehand. The prime minister supervised the organization of the ceremony down to the last detail, following the precedent of George III’s thanksgiving at St. Paul’s after his recovery from illness in 1789. Credit for the revival of the late-Victorian monarchy is usually given to Disraeli, but Gladstone’s insistence on making a ceremonial occasion of Bertie’s recovery was crucial.
¹⁹
Indeed, so successful was Gladstone in
burying republicanism and silencing critics of the monarchy that he undercut his second aim: to devise a useful employment for the Prince of Wales.

Gladstone wanted the Queen to process in formal robes and state coaches, but Victoria insisted on semi-state and open coaches, in order that the people should see her.
²⁰
The family squabbled for weeks beforehand about who was to travel in which coach. Bertie and Alix annoyed the Queen by requesting a separate carriage, a request she refused.
²¹
Whether Bertie would, in fact, be well enough to go was uncertain until the day before.

Early in the morning of 27 February, surging crowds massed outside Buckingham Palace and blocked the Mall. Bertie was so lame that Victoria took his arm as they walked slowly down the Grand Entrance and entered an open state landau, in which they rode together with Alix, Beatrice, and Prince Eddy. The Queen’s landau was preceded by a sovereign’s escort of seven open carriages, and in front of them came the Lord Chancellor. At the head of the procession the Speaker set the pace in his quaint old carriage that could only advance at a walk. This was Gladstone’s idea, to stop the Queen dashing through the crowds at a brisk trot. “Dear Alix,” in blue and sable, “was not looking well,” thought Victoria, and Bertie seemed even iller; but John Brown, who sat behind, was splendid “in his very fullest and very handsome full dress.”
²²

“We seemed to be passing through a sea of people as we went along the Mall,” wrote Victoria.
²³
At Temple Bar, the Lord Mayor presented the Queen with the sword of the City, and when she “took dear Bertie’s hand and pressed it—people cried.” This was the gesture the crowd was waiting for, a demonstration of affection; in spite of her dread of public appearances, Victoria was a great actor when she needed to be. Bertie’s hat was constantly off his head and, wrote Victoria, “I often felt a lump in my throat.”
²⁴
St. Paul’s was packed. Bertie walked slowly and painfully up the aisle on his mother’s arm, holding the eight-year-old Eddy by the hand. The Queen, who had complained vigorously about mixing monarchy up with religion, grumbled that St.
Paul’s was a dreary, dingy place and the service was “cold and too long.”
²⁵

Lying on a sofa that evening at Marlborough House, in great pain from his leg, Bertie scrawled a hurried note to his mother: “I cannot tell you how gratified and touched I was by the feeling that was displayed in those crowded streets today towards you and also to myself.”
²⁶
He had made the intoxicating discovery that he was the most popular man in the country.

Monarchy was projected as a narrative shared by the nation, a story in which all could participate. As Alix explained to Victoria: “The whole nation has taken such a public share in our sorrow, it has been so entirely one with us in our grief, that it may perhaps feel it has a kind of claim to join with us now in a public and universal thanksgiving.”
²⁷

The question was what role Bertie should play in this royal narrative: prodigal son or playboy prince.

For Gladstone, the thanksgiving was only a beginning, the first phase of his mission to reform the monarchy. He had a bigger plan. Convinced that this was an opportunity not to be missed, he thought the prince should be given “a central aim and purpose” that would shape his entire life.
²⁸

In July 1872, the prime minister sat down to pen a thirty-four-page letter to the Queen. “Began the formidable letter to H.M.,” he wrote in his diary, “by which I am willing to live or die.”
²⁹
He proposed to send Bertie to Ireland, where he would act as the Queen’s representative during the winter months. In the summer, the Waleses should return to London, where they would deputize for the Queen on occasions of court and public ceremonial.
³⁰

The Queen read Gladstone’s paper with “a good deal of irritation.” She minuted to Ponsonby: “Whoever knows the Prince of Wales’ character well must know that he will always lean to a Party—and in Ireland he would be unable to withstand this and would be beset by
people who would force him into one extreme or the other.” As for the training business, “any preparation of this kind is
quite useless
; and the P. of Wales
will not
do it and unless you are
absolutely
forced
to do it
you never
will
try.” Not that she blamed him for this: She confessed that she herself “
never
could
before
her accession take the slightest interest in Public affairs,” but the moment she had to, she worked hard “tho she
hates it all
as much
now
as she did as a girl.”
³¹

Snubbing Gladstone with a three-line scrawl (“The Queen has so much to write and to do”), she instructed Ponsonby to compose a memo, coolly rejecting the proposal.
³²

Buried in Gladstone’s long-winded obfuscation was an unpleasant threat. The Queen’s recent illness had shown, he wrote, “that it is neither just nor possible to expect from Your Majesty what was once so freely and beneficially rendered; so that he will be very careful to guide his own future conduct by this consideration.”
³³
This was Gladstone’s way of telling the Queen that she was no longer up to the job. By promoting the Waleses, he planned to make the Queen redundant and ease her into premature retirement—a plot he referred to euphemistically as “the kindred matter” or the “comprehensive” solution.
³⁴
Little wonder that the Queen disliked Mr. Gladstone. True, he was a devoted monarchist, determined to save the monarchy by reforming it, and he did more than Disraeli to reinvent the crown as a visible, decorative symbol. But the principal reform he proposed was virtually to force the Queen to abdicate.

Victoria genuinely believed that Bertie was incapable of filling her place. She complained to Vicky that she was overworked and longed to retire to a cottage in the hills, “if only our dear Bertie was fit to replace me! Alas! Alas! I feel very anxious for the future.”
³⁵

Gladstone refused to take no for an answer. Insisting that “bitter fruit will be reaped hereafter” and “retrospective judgement” passed upon him for neglecting this “golden” opportunity, he continued to bombard the Queen with lengthy memoranda.
³⁶
What he failed to realize was that Bertie himself had no wish to go to Ireland. Gladstone demanded to see Bertie face-to-face. He was disappointed to learn that the prince had, in fact, “implored the Queen to take the matter upon
herself,” fearing that a direct refusal would annoy the prime minister and make him angry.
³⁷
For once, mother and son were in agreement.

In answer to Gladstone’s third lengthy five-point memo urging the Irish plan, the Queen crisply replied that she thought it “useless” to prolong the discussion.
³⁸
When he suggested that Bertie should prepare himself for ruling by a course of reading, Victoria was not encouraging. The prince, she said, “has
never
been fond of reading and … from his earliest years it was
impossible
to get him to do so. Newspapers and
very rarely
, a novel are all he ever reads.”
³⁹

When Gladstone stayed at Sandringham in November 1872, he found Alix “most kind and simple as usual,” and “none of the stiffness of a court.”
⁴⁰
But though he had every opportunity, he “did not even mention” the subject of employment to the prince, much to Francis Knollys’s annoyance, and Bertie “said nothing to him.”
⁴¹

Meanwhile, a truce developed between Windsor and Marlborough House. This was largely the work of Francis Knollys and Henry Ponsonby. Unlike former private secretaries such as Sir Charles Phipps or old Sir William Knollys, neither Ponsonby nor Francis Knollys saw his role as being to tell tales to the Queen about the prince. Rather than divide mother and son, Ponsonby endeavored to strengthen the monarchy by patching up a common front. Writing in bold black ink in a voice of ironic detachment, he smoothed over rows, gently punctured inflated egos, and outwitted the interference of meddling politicians.

Lord Granville, the foreign secretary, began to send the Prince of Wales selected dispatches from the Foreign Office. At first Granville was skeptical, complaining that when he supplied confidential information during the Franco-Prussian War, Bertie handed around his notes at a dinner party.
⁴²
To everyone’s surprise, however, Bertie really read the dispatches and took “a deal of interest.”
⁴³
Gladstone admired Bertie’s love of movement and excitement, and his genuine good nature and empathy; but complained of his “total want of political judgement, either inherited or acquired.”
⁴⁴
Perhaps for this reason the dispatches dried up.

So the problem of how Bertie was to occupy himself was not solved, and the opportunities were lost to engage him after his illness, to cash in on his new popularity, and to build on his more serious frame
of mind. Queen Victoria observed that “if this great warning is not taken, and the wonderful sympathy and devotion of the whole nation does not make a great change in him, it will be worse than before and his utter ruin.”
⁴⁵
After the defeat of Gladstone’s plan, however, “the prince’s life continued in its former rut.”
⁴⁶