The Heir Apparent (42 page)

Back at Windsor, a memorial service was held at the time that Alice’s coffin was taken to the Rosenhohe. Alix, “who has been a real devoted sympathising daughter to me,” gave her arm to the Queen as they walked into the private chapel, which was draped with black. Victoria bore up to the end, when the Dead March from
Saul
was played; then, in floods of tears, she retreated to Albert’s Blue Room and knelt in prayer.
²¹

After the funeral at Darmstadt, Bertie rejoined his mother at Windsor. Victoria went to see him as he sat writing in his room with Fossy, his little dog, lying beside him.
²²
They talked of Alice’s younger days, and Bertie was “so dear and nice.”
²³
“It has brought all so close together,” wrote Victoria.
²⁴
Later, he wrote her “a very dear kind [letter], speaking of Alix being ‘much too good for him’ and so delighted at my great praise of her.”
²⁵

Alix’s youngest sister, Thyra, was not a beauty like her sisters. At twenty-five she was considered an old maid, and her teeth stuck out. She was taller than Alix, and (according to Queen Victoria’s adviser Howard Elphinstone) “decidedly clever and most sensible and agreeable.”
²⁶
Gossips whispered that she had given birth to an illegitimate child in 1871 when, at the age of eighteen, she disappeared abroad for eleven months; the father was supposed to be a Danish hussar named Marcher, who committed suicide shortly afterward. The Danish royal family claimed that the rumor was a smear story started by Bismarck, and that Thyra had, in fact, been ill, first with jaundice, and then with typhoid in Italy. In Rome, visiting Bertie and Alix, she met Ernest, Crown Prince of Hanover.
²⁷
Ernest had an abnormally long neck, a nose so flat that it was almost nonexistent, narrow shoulders, and thick pebble spectacles. Alix thought him “the
ugliest
man there ever was made!!! But I like him
so
much.”
²⁸
Thyra fell in love with him at once.

Ernest’s father, the blind King George V of Hanover, Queen Victoria’s first cousin, had sided with the Austrians in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, with catastrophic results. Prussia dethroned him, annexed Hanover, and sequestrated his immense hereditary fortune, which was known as the
Welfenfond
. Bismarck paid the income into his “reptile fund,” the slush money he used to bribe the reptiles, as he called the liberal press. George V died in 1878, and Ernest wrote an ill-advised letter to the German emperor, laying claim to his title as King of Hanover. This destroyed any chance he had of getting his fortune back. He became locked into a quarrel with Prussia. Queen Victoria, who was his father’s executrix, tried in vain to persuade him to drop
his claim to the throne of Hanover. Dreading Victoria’s wrath if he married a wife of whom she disapproved, Ernest distanced himself from Princess Thyra.

The deadlock was broken by Alix. She wrote to Ernest telling him that Thyra much wished to see him, and suggested a secret meeting in Frankfurt. Fearing a trap, Ernest hesitated, but Alix insisted, and accordingly, one day in September 1878, Queen Louise of Denmark and her daughters Alix and Thyra drove into Frankfurt, pretending that they needed to see an ear doctor. Ernest duly appeared at the appointed rendezvous. First Alix talked to him, and then Queen Louise, while Thyra waited anxiously in the water closet. At last Thyra was allowed to see Ernest alone. She wasted no time. As soon as he had kissed her hand, she proposed to him herself. Waiting outside the door, Queen Louise became agitated and, fearing that the meeting was a mistake and Ernest was indifferent, pushed Alix into the room. Alix saw at once that the radiant Thyra had been accepted and all was settled, but this made Queen Louise even more flustered. “My God, then
she
has proposed,”
she declared, and tried to intervene, but it was too late; the couple were locked in an embrace. When the time came to leave, the Queen had to force them apart. “I stood behind the door,” Alix told Minnie, “and saw their parting kiss!!!”
²⁹

By marrying Thyra, Ernest leapfrogged from being a sacked ruler at the bottom of the royal heap, and positioned himself at the center of the anti-Prussian dynastic bloc, becoming brother-in-law to the Prince of Wales, the Russian czarevitch,
and
the King of Greece.
³⁰

At the wedding in Copenhagen, a large party of Hanoverians appeared, which gave Berlin an excuse to denounce the Danish king for harboring conspirators against the German Empire. The German ambassador was conspicuously absent. The deterioration of Denmark’s relations with Berlin worried Bertie, and he worked behind the scenes to help Ernest and protect the Danes from Bismarck’s anger. “I foresee troubles ahead for my excellent brother-in-law,” he told Sir Charles Wyke, the British ambassador in Copenhagen. “If he had only not irritated the German Emperor by that injudicious letter all the bullying which has since taken place would not have occurred and he might
now have had his fortune.”
³¹
Bertie appealed to Vicky, who explained that though she sympathized with Ernest and Thyra, private intervention by Victoria or Bertie could do no good unless Ernest formally rescinded his letter to the German emperor. “The question does not only resolve itself into what is ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ I wish it were as simple as that!” she told Bertie, and warned, “I … think it a pity that
political
questions should step in to disturb the peace and harmony of the family and be treated as
personal
ones!”
³²
But of course the personal
was
political—that is the essence of dynastic diplomacy—and the German emperor’s bullying of Ernest served only to tighten the links of the anti-Berlin dynastic bloc.

Bertie had wanted to educate Eddy at a public school, preferably Wellington, of which he was a governor. When Eddy was thirteen, this plan was abruptly abandoned. His tutor Dalton wrote darkly of the young prince’s backwardness, and warned against separating the brothers. “Prince Albert Victor [Eddy] requires the stimulus of Prince George’s company to induce him to work at all. If Prince George left Prince Albert Victor, the education of the latter, even now extremely difficult, would be rendered still more so.”
³³
He proposed sending Eddy to Dartmouth as a naval cadet, along with Prince George; the unspoken advantage of this arrangement was that it ensured that he remained their tutor.

Dalton had no trouble in convincing Bertie of the wisdom of his plan. But Queen Victoria, who was the ultimate arbiter in matters of her grandsons’ education, objected strongly to Dartmouth, on the somewhat surprising grounds that the navy would “make them think that their own Country is superior to any other,” which was undesirable in a king, who needed to be free from all national prejudices.
³⁴
Dalton, who showed more talent for intrigue than he did for teaching, managed to overcome the Queen’s objections, and in October 1877 the two boys were dispatched to the
Britannia
, the training ship at Dartmouth, accompanied by Dalton. For Alix, the parting from her sons was “a
great
wrench”: “poor little boys, they cried so bitterly.”
³⁵

For Eddy, Dartmouth was a disaster. In December 1878, Lord Ramsay, the commander of the
Britannia
, nerved himself to write to the Prince of Wales about the boy’s progress: “It is
very
,
very
unsatisfactory, indeed so unsatisfactory that I really think Your Royal Highness should reconsider the advisability of his remaining in the
Britannia
.… Prince Edward is learning nothing.… And this is not the worst. It is still more discouraging that every master and tutor who has had to do with him seems to despair of being able to teach him anything.… The experiment … has failed.”
³⁶
Prince George, on the other hand, was making excellent progress, doing better every day.

After this bombshell, it can have come as no surprise when Eddy failed the passing-out examination. Dalton, however, emerged unscathed. He took no responsibility for sending Eddy to Dartmouth. Instead, he blamed the boy’s inadequacy. Eddy’s problem was “that extreme inability … to fix his attention to any given subject for more than a few minutes consecutively.” According to Dalton, “it is to physical causes that one must look for an explanation of the abnormally dormant condition of his mental powers.” The prognosis was hopeful, as the prince would improve with time; meanwhile, competition with boys of his own age must be avoided. Dalton proposed a solution that could hardly have been more extreme: Eddy and George should be launched together on a world cruise for two years. Naturally, their tutor would accompany them.
³⁷

Once again, Dalton easily persuaded the royal parents of his bizarre proposal. When Victoria first heard of the idea, she “did not like it all,” but Dalton succeeded in changing her mind.
³⁸
The plan was condemned by the Cabinet, which objected that it would “agitate and distress the country.”
³⁹
But this intervention backfired, as Bertie and the Queen joined forces in their annoyance at the politicians’ unwarranted interference.
^†
40

Bertie accompanied Eddy and Georgie to Portsmouth and saw them depart for a six-month cruise to the West Indies. On board the
Bacchante
, the two boys shared a plainly furnished cabin, which was connected with Dalton’s cabin by a door cut through the bulkhead.
⁴¹
“Felt parting from dear boys dreadfully,” Bertie wired Victoria.
⁴²
He told Georgie: “I shall never forget what I felt wishing you goodbye on the 19th.”
⁴³
No one could accuse him of being hard-hearted toward his sons.

The shocking thing about the sorry tale of the education of the princes, especially Eddy, is the unquestioning trust that both Bertie and Alix placed in Dalton. “He has my total confidence,” wrote Alix, “he is such an upright man whose aim
totally
is the good of the boys!”
⁴⁴
Dalton had contrived to make himself indispensable by preying on the parents’ fears. His talk of the “physical causes” of Eddy’s backwardness has given rise to all sorts of speculation. Some say that Eddy had inherited Alix’s deafness, others that his two-month-premature birth caused “neuro-developmental impairments,” which meant that he was educationally subnormal, or that he suffered from petit mal epilepsy.
⁴⁵
Banishing him on a world cruise was not helpful. Anything better calculated to encourage speculation that he was abnormal can hardly be imagined. The truth was that Eddy was lazy and a slow developer, and today he might be diagnosed with attention deficit disorder. But the letters he wrote as a young man show a lively intelligence. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that his problems were made worse by Dalton and his system of shutting him up for years in isolation on a ship.

Sarah Bernhardt, the Divine Sarah, took London by storm in the summer of 1879 with her passionate performance in the Comédie-Française’s
Phèdre
. It left her so shattered that she vomited blood all night as her doctor pressed crushed ice to her lips. The illegitimate child of a Jewish courtesan, Sarah Bernhardt had frizzy red hair, a white face, and an unfashionably waif-like figure. She possessed a very modern genius for publicity. At the house she rented in Chester Square, she posed for photographers wearing the suit of white
pantalons
and
jacket that she used for painting, and she bought a cheetah and a wolfhound to add to the menagerie of a monkey and a parrot that she kept in the garden.
⁴⁶
Naturally, Bertie was captivated. He watched her perform night after night, and he visited her gallery in Piccadilly.
⁴⁷
Sarah was introduced to the prince. “I’ve just come back from the P of W,” she scrawled to director Edmond Got. “It is 1:20 and I cannot rehearse at this hour. The Prince has kept me since 11.… I shall make amends tomorrow by knowing my part.”
⁴⁸
There were rumors, there always were, of an affair, but this was a flirtation, beneficial not only to Bertie, who was addicted to celebrity—a craving he shared with Oscar Wilde, passionate admirer of both Lillie Langtry and Sarah—but also to Bernhardt herself, who gained social validation from his approval. She was lionized, much to the chagrin of Lady Frederick Cavendish, who thought it “outrageous” that an actress, and a “shameless” one at that, should be invited to the houses of respectable people.
^‡
49

Lillie Langtry found herself eclipsed. She was never in love with Bertie; in old age she remarked that she was always a little afraid of him, and “he always smelt so
very
strongly
of cigars.”
⁵⁰
For her, what mattered was her status as royal favorite, and here the warning signs were plain to see. The names of Mr. and Mrs. Langtry first appear in the guest list for a Marlborough House Sunday dinner in Bertie’s diary in April 1879.
⁵¹
The fact that Bertie invited Lillie to dine with Alix indicates that he no longer considered her to be his mistress. An exchange at a charity bazaar at the Albert Hall in July neatly encapsulates her declining stock. Bertie bought a cup of tea from Mrs. Langtry’s stall. Before handing it to him, she put it to her lips. “I should like a clean one please,” snapped Bertie.
⁵²
The public snub is the closest we can get to Bertie’s feelings, which are, as ever, unrecorded. Lillie, for her part,
embarked on an affair with a younger man—the teenage Lord Shrewsbury, who was just nineteen. One afternoon Bertie called unexpectedly (Lillie had tried to put him off, but he didn’t receive her note) and found her with Shrewsbury. According to the story Lord Derby heard, the lovers were discovered in flagrante, and a terrible row ensued.
⁵³
Lillie even thought of marrying Shrewsbury, but decided against it, as she found him “quite as uneducated and much more jealous than Ned … and he gets worse every day—In fact I should despise him in a month.”
⁵⁴