The Heir Apparent (35 page)

At Benares, Sir John Strachey, governor of the North-West Provinces, received Bertie in a camp that resembled a dream city in canvas, luxuriously fitted out with double-lined tents furnished with fire-places.
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Bertie and his suite drank almost eighty dozen bottles of Strachey’s champagne in a fortnight and fourteen dozen bottles of soda a day.
³²
After visiting Delhi, Bertie was entertained again by Strachey at Agra. Watched by a crowd of seven thousand people, and serenaded by a band playing music from
Don Giovanni
, he paid a visit by moonlight to the Taj Mahal, which had been recently restored by the energetic Strachey. As Bertie left, he observed a European official, wearing a white hat and morning dress, rudely push an Indian raja to clear the way. He at once dispatched Knollys to express his displeasure, and when the European failed to get the point, sent the Duke of Sutherland, who made it still more forcefully.
³³

Reported in the English press, the incident dramatized Bertie’s disapproval of the bullying racism of the British rulers. “Because a man has a black face and a different religion from our own, there is no reason why he should be treated as a brute,” he told Lord Granville.
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To Salisbury he grumbled about British officers speaking of Indians, “many of them sprung from the great races,” as “niggers.”
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When he complained to Queen Victoria about the brutality and contempt with which English political officers treated the native chiefs, she entirely agreed with him. “I believe it is dreadful how they treat these poor creatures,” she wrote, and forwarded his letter to Salisbury.
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Mr. Saunders, the resident in Hyderabad, was dismissed in consequence.
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Among the Stracheys’ party at Agra was the nineteen-year-old Mabel Batten. She had auburn hair and a mezzo-soprano voice, and she was used to being admired. Her father was the judge advocate general of North-West India, George Hatch. A few months before, she had married George Batten, a forty-three-year-old Indian officer, who was the brother of Lady Strachey.

Lady Strachey was not impressed by Bertie. “The Prince’s tastes are
low and childish,” she wrote. “He has a perfect mania on the subject of dress … fresh orders come nearly every hour about what the suite are to wear and if a button is wrong it is noticed at once and remarked upon. His other tastes are for eating and drinking. He is at times thoroughly selfish and inconsiderate.… As for his moral character, it is as bad as possible and the respectable part of his suite are always in agony lest he misbehave.”
³⁸

On closer acquaintance, Lady Strachey changed her mind. “He is so goodnatured and polite and likeable that one can’t help liking him,” she wrote.
³⁹
She could hardly have guessed that the person with whom Bertie would misbehave would be her own sister-in-law. In the camp at Agra, Bertie saw a great deal of Mabel Batten. He arranged to meet her a few weeks later, when he reached Allahabad, but Mabel did not appear. Bertie wrote her a letter, enclosing photographs that had been taken at Agra: “I was very much disappointed not to meet you last Tuesday [7 March] as I had hoped,
‘mais l’homme propose et la femme dispose.’
 ” He ended: “Hoping that you may soon come to England and will let me know of your arrival.”
⁴⁰

What happened at Agra can never be known, but it was probably no more than a flirtation. Bertie remained loyal to Mabel, however. Two decades later, when she returned to England, she resumed contact. Illegible letters from “AE,” written on tiny cards and stuffed into even smaller envelopes, proposing himself for a cup of tea at five o’clock or a chat between twelve and one, began to plop fatly through the letter box of her Chelsea home.
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Back in London, on 8 February 1876, in bleak, wintry sleet and snow, a truculent Alix sat with the Queen in the semi-state carriage as they processed in slow time from Buckingham Palace to Westminster for the state opening of Parliament. Alix had been furious when Victoria insisted that she should cut short her visit to her family to attend the ceremony, provoking the “biggest and the best” of the rows over the princess’s trips to Denmark.
⁴²
“
Her
not
returning and being with me on
these
occasions when
you
were absent,” the Queen told Bertie,
“would have been misunderstood and have done her harm.”
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The coach windows were closed, but the crowd outside hissed until they reached Westminster, where the schoolboys raised a loud cheer.
⁴⁴
The House of Lords was packed with scarlet-robed peers sitting in deep gloom, until promptly at two p.m. the gaslights flared, a low hum of voices broke out, and the whole house rose as the Queen entered. She took her place on the throne with Alix sitting opposite on the woolsack, and her speech was read by the Lord Chamberlain.
⁴⁵

This was only the fourth time the Queen had opened Parliament in person since Albert’s death fourteen years before. She stubbornly refused to go through with this part of her duty unless she wanted something out of her ministers. Usually it was money for her children: She attended in 1866 in order to persuade Parliament to grant annuities for Alfred’s coming of age and Helena’s marriage, and her appearance in 1871 was prompted by the need for a dowry for Louise and an annuity for the twenty-one-year-old Arthur.
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Now she needed Parliament’s support for something different: the Royal Titles Bill, creating her new title of Empress of India.

Victoria had persuaded Disraeli to capitalize on the goodwill sparked by Bertie’s visit and rebrand her Queen Empress as she had long wished to do. On 18 February she told Bertie: “The title of Empress of India is now to be really and legally adopted, which I am sure you will be pleased with.”
⁴⁷
She was annoyed by the Liberals’ opposition to the bill. “Considering that I was always called [Empress] in India and by many people here, it seems very extraordinary that they should have got up a cry as though I was going to change my
English name
.”
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Bertie had not been consulted, and the English mail took a month to reach him, but when he heard about the Royal Titles Bill, he was furious. He wrote a stinging letter to Disraeli, complaining that he had only learned of the Queen’s plan from the newspapers, having received
no intimation from the prime minister.
⁴⁹
He was right to object that he hadn’t been formally consulted, and he worried that his own title was to be changed to a foreign-sounding “Imperial Highness.”

“I must frankly tell you,” he informed Disraeli, “that I could never consent to the word ‘Imperial’ being added to my name.”
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The open criticism of the bill in Parliament was bound to damage British authority in India, he thought, and if the news leaked out that he opposed the change of title, it would “through increasing his popularity, damage that of the Queen.”
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Disraeli had indeed handled the bill badly by failing to bargain for opposition support beforehand, and Bertie had good reason to feel ill-used by the Queen. Victoria had strenuously opposed his plan to travel to India, but when the trip succeeded, she executed a spectacular U-turn and, without consulting him, stole his glory by upstaging him with this coup de théâtre. The Queen, who took a close interest in India, which she saw as her special fief, had no intention of leaving all the kudos to her son.

By now, Bertie and his party had reached the foothills of the Himalayas. The uniforms, the gold lace, and the cocked hats were packed away, and Bertie enjoyed an orgy of sport, organized by the cheroot-smoking Sir Henry Ramsay, the King of Kumaon. Never had tiger shooting been more luxurious. Bertie’s camp consisted of 2,500 men, 119 elephants, and 500 camels. Lunch was cooked by French chefs, brought out on elephants, and served by German waiters. In the evenings, as they sat around campfires burning logs as big as tree trunks, Gurkha military bands played Mozart and Offenbach. The prince notched up a total of twenty-eight tigers. His sporting exploits were reported not only by Russell in
The Times
but also by Mr. Simpson of
The Illustrated London News
and Mr. Johnson of
The Graphic
, who shared an elephant, lurching and bumping along behind the shooters.
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The Queen was not amused. “I am compelled to mention to you that there is a very strong feeling amongst
all
classes.… The minute description of the unavoidable
sport
in India has not made a good impression.”
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Reynolds’s
deplored the “sickening and disgusting, nay, barbarous and sanguinary account of the special correspondents.”
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Bertie’s diary for 20 February 1876 contains the cryptic entry: “Letters!!!”
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Next day, he went out and shot six tigers—and, he told the nine-year-old Georgie, “some were very savage—two were ‘man eaters.’ ”
⁵⁶

One of the letters that reached the prince’s camp in Nepal on 20 February 1876 was from Edith Aylesford to her husband Sporting Joe, Earl of Aylesford, Bertie’s friend who had accompanied him to India. She announced that she had been unfaithful with Lord Blandford. Would Joe prefer her to leave home at once, she asked, or should she wait until he returned, as “she was willing to live as his wife before the world but no more”?
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In Bertie’s circle, adultery was a sport that had to be played according to strict rules. The first of these was Never Divorce. Not only did divorce bring social disgrace, but court cases risked public exposure, which could be horribly damaging, as Bertie had discovered during the Mordaunt case.

Edith Aylesford’s defection did more than humiliate her husband. She triggered a social scandal that tore apart the Marlborough House
set. Coming as it did when Bertie had at last justified his existence by touring India, the timing could hardly have been more unfortunate.

Edith Aylesford was a sister of Bertie’s equerry Owen Williams. Photographs show a plump woman with a long face and heavy chin accentuated by the fashionable bonnets that she wore perched on the front of her head. She was evidently amusing; certainly Queen Victoria thought it must be Edith whom Bertie admired rather than Sporting Joe, as “Lord A. was too great a fool to be really agreeable to the P. of W.”
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To understand the explosive impact of Edith’s letter, we need to track back to November 1874, when Joe and Edith Aylesford entertained Bertie and Alix at Packington Hall, their Warwickshire home near Birmingham. This was one of those defining house parties that shaped Bertie’s life as Prince of Wales. He and Alix stayed for five nights at Packington. Sporting Joe could ill afford it, but he spared no expense. A lake was created in the center of the vast dining room table (this unfortunately leaked, spoiling the dresses of ladies sitting at dinner), and a temporary wooden ballroom was constructed on the terrace. Fireworks rocketed money into the air, and adorning every room were wreaths of flowers and exotic plants, grown in the luxurious new conservatories that were specially admired by Alix. The chief entertainment was shooting in the Capability Brown park. After every second drive, each gun would shout “Boy!” and there would appear a bottle of champagne, curiously shaped like a “retort,” which must be drained instantly.
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Luncheon, which the ladies attended, was held in a tent, and throughout the meal the party was serenaded by the band of the Warwickshire Yeomanry Cavalry. Afterward, Edith and Alix sat together in the pony carriage for an elaborately posed photograph, and
then went driving together. Edith had four ponies, known as “rats,” which she drove at speed around the estate.
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