The Heir Apparent (48 page)

In Westminster Abbey, which was packed with nine thousand people squeezed into specially constructed wooden galleries, the Queen sat alone in the Coronation Chair. She wore her usual black dress and bonnet trimmed with white point d’Alençon lace and the Garter ribbon strapped across her breast. The widow Queen’s mourning was no doubt iconic, almost as much so as the Virgin Queen Elizabeth’s pearl-embroidered white, but it made her family groan. She had resisted suggestions that she should wear her crown and robes of state; when Alix, as favorite daughter-in-law, was sent to persuade her, she had had her head bitten off—“I was never so snubbed in all my life.”
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During the service, the Queen seemed “deeply affected” and the Prince of Wales, who stood near, “gazed tenderly and anxiously at her from time to time.”
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After it ended, Bertie was the first of the family to advance, bow, and kiss her hand. Defying protocol, the Queen leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek. Then, carried away by the impulse of the moment, she embraced all the princes and princesses with “manifest emotion.” Calling back Fritz, she embraced him, too, with special affection.
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“How long will it last?” asked the radical journalist W. T. Stead in the
Pall Mall Gazette
: Will the Prince of Wales, “the fat little bald man in red,” who looked so unimpressive beside his splendid German brother-in-law in white, ever reign over us? he wondered.
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Seated in the Abbey among the Queen’s grandsons, seething with rage against his English relations, was Fritz’s son William. William had asked his grandfather, the ninety-year-old Emperor William I, to appoint him as his representative at the Jubilee instead of Fritz. William’s
pushiness and disloyalty infuriated Victoria, and she pointedly ignored him throughout the event. In the procession he was denied the starring role that he considered his due as eldest grandson, and his wife complained that at court functions she was snubbed by being placed behind the “black” Queen of Hawaii.
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A week after the Jubilee ceremony, in a small, dark room at number 19, Harley Street, Fritz was operated on for a growth on his larynx. Whether he would outlive old William I and succeed as emperor was in doubt, and William plotted ruthlessly to oust his father from the succession.

William’s quarrel with his English relations had begun three years earlier, in April 1884, at the wedding at Darmstadt of Louis Battenberg to Victoria of Hesse, Princess Alice’s eldest daughter. Alice’s four daughters were the most glamorous princesses in the dynastic marriage market. Cousins of the czar, cousins of the kaiser, and granddaughters of Queen Victoria, they were superbly well connected; though not rich, they were blondly pretty Valkyries with long thin noses and long fair hair. What no one knew was that some of them had inherited from their mother a genetic time bomb in the recessive gene for hemophilia.

For Louis Battenberg, the match was a brilliant coup. The letter he wrote to Prince George on his engagement reads less like a man in love than a cat who has got the cream. “I am nearly off my chump altogether with feeling so jolly. I hope you will be pleased to have me as a cousin. It makes me ten times happier to think I shall be the nephew of your dear parents and cousin to you all.”
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Being related to the English royal family perhaps mattered more to Louis than the happiness of his bride.

The Battenbergs were a family of dynastic social climbers, good-looking minor royals who contrived to marry the heirs to the great powers or get themselves adopted as kings of new countries such as Bulgaria. The rise of these outsider families was hotly resented, especially by the blood-obsessed German royalty, who claimed that the Battenbergs’ great-grandfather had been a valet. In the same way, they had gossiped in the past that Prince Albert was the illegitimate son of
a Jewish court chamberlain and that Alix’s mother had conducted outrageous affairs.

The twenty-five-year-old William objected furiously to the Battenberg marriage. Outwardly a shy, fair-haired Guards officer with puffy eyes and a wispy moustache, married to a dull, dutiful minor Protestant princess, William was angry and ambitious. He disapproved of his cousin Victoria of Hesse’s alliance with Louis, who was not “of the blood.” He was consumed with rage against the English relations who marginalized him, and especially against his grandmother, Queen Victoria.
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William’s hostility took Bertie completely unawares.
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The Prince of Wales was on more cordial terms with William’s mother, Vicky, than he had been for years. Alice’s death had brought Bertie and Vicky together, and he saw her when he took his annual cure at Homburg. He attended every family event in Berlin. He was present at William’s wedding in 1881 to Princess Augusta Victoria of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg, whose nickname was Dona.
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He gave William a Highland costume in Royal Stuart tartan, knowing that his nephew shared his own passion for dressing up.

Some say that William was brain-damaged at birth; others claim that he was a textbook case of narcissistic personality disorder: a grossly inflated sense of self, very quick to take offense, incapable of learning from experience, and ultimately superficial. Because of his withered arm and his intellectual mediocrity, he could never satisfy his powerful mother, Vicky: “She wanted him to be a Prince Albert, and yet used his limitations to keep him dependent and intensely involved with her.”
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Already he exhibited some of the traits of a sociopath. He had no sense of remorse and no empathy for the feelings of others. He seemed incapable of feeling affection.
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To William’s horror, his mother now proposed that his sister Victoria (Moretta) should marry the second Battenberg brother, Alexander
(Sandro), the Prince of Bulgaria. Sandro was the star of the Battenberg family: He was parachuted into the newly created country of Bulgaria, becoming prince at age twenty-two in 1879. A romantic figure, tall and bearded, he flashes across the dynastic scene in 1884–85. Reams of coroneted and embossed royal writing paper were consumed by the Battenberg marriage project. To William it was contamination. The more Vicky urged it—and she grew almost hysterical in her support for Sandro—the more estranged mother and son became.

This quarrel caused a major shift in the fault lines of dynastic diplomacy. For almost twenty years, Europe’s royals had been split between the Germans and their supporters, who included Queen Victoria, and the anti-German Danes and their allies, foremost among whom was Bertie. Now the Germans were split themselves. The conflict was not just about the romantic Sandro. At issue was the future of Germany. Vicky and her husband, Crown Prince Fritz, stood for a liberal, pro-English Germany. Against them, Vicky’s son William and his allies, his grandfather the old emperor, and Bismarck, represented authoritarian, militaristic Germany. In this matter, Queen Victoria naturally sided with her daughter. Bertie supported Vicky, too, acting as a sort of unofficial envoy on her behalf in the Battenberg affair. As a result, William’s hatred of him became almost obsessive. When Bertie visited Berlin for the kaiser’s eighty-eighth birthday in March 1885, William wrote to Alexander III: “We shall see the Prince of Wales here in a few days. I am not at all delighted by this unexpected apparition, because—excuse me, he is Your brother-in-law—owing to his false and intriguing nature he will undoubtedly attempt in one way or another to push the Bulgarian business—may Allah send them both to hell, as the Turks would say!”
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Bertie spent several weeks in Austria-Hungary in the autumn of 1885. The Habsburg lands offered an intoxicating mixture of sport, realpolitik, and eroticism that was far more exciting than the stiffness and parochialism of the Danish or German courts. In Vienna, he had the misfortune to be spotted emerging from one of the city’s “most infamous brothels in broad daylight at 12 noon,” and his nephew William,
who also happened to be staying in Vienna, wrote gleefully to his grandfather the kaiser about the “stupidity” of his libidinous uncle.
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From Vienna, Bertie proceeded to Budapest. Here (according to William), “He led such a fast life … that even the Hungarians shook their heads.”
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William’s innuendo hints at more brothels, but the main thing that Bertie did to shock the Hungarians was to challenge their anti-Semitic prejudices. Professor Arminius Vámbéry was a distinguished explorer and traveler whom Bertie had met in London twenty years before. Because he was a Jew of humble background, he was shunned by Hungarian society. So Bertie gave a dinner, and walked with Vámbéry on his arm into a room full of Hungarian grandees, who bowed deeply and were civil to the Jewish professor—for the moment at least.
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When William eventually arrived in Budapest, Bertie told him “in great embarrassment” that he had been forced to cancel his invitation to stay at Sandringham that year, as Queen Victoria did not wish to see him because of his attitude toward the Bulgarian marriage. William pretended to be glad that he had a weapon to use against his mother if she should reproach him for not being sufficiently well-disposed toward Queen Victoria (“the old hag”).
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In fact, this was a crushing snub, and one for which William, who never forgave an insult, was soon to seek revenge.

Bertie and Alix’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary fell on 10 March 1888. Celebrating a silver wedding was a German custom, hitherto unknown in England, and the Waleses were the first to popularize it.
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But the ninety-one-year-old Emperor William I died the day before, and Fritz’s serious illness was now public knowledge. Shops in the West End added black drapes to the silver decorations they had arranged for the Waleses. The family dinner went ahead nonetheless, and the Queen herself broke with habit and attended. The guests wore silver and white, the dining room was decorated with white flowers
and gleaming silver plate, and towering above all this stood a wedding cake six feet high and decorated with white roses. Everyone remarked how youthful Alix looked. “We all looked like old ladies,” said one of her bridesmaids, who were invited to the celebrations, “but the Princess was as young and fresh as she was on her wedding day.”
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In a hint at her unpunctuality, Bertie gave her a silver clock engraved with the letters A—L—B—E—R—T—E—D—W—A—R—D in place of numbers.

Three days later, Bertie traveled to Berlin to attend the emperor’s funeral. The journey by special train was bitterly cold, and Berlin was covered with deep snow. Fritz, who now became Emperor Frederick III, was too weak to walk in the procession behind his father’s coffin. He watched the black-draped funeral cortège from an upstairs window, a frail figure standing at attention in a general’s uniform. When the hearse passed beneath him, he broke down.

Bertie had feared the worst since November, when he told Georgie: “We are terribly anxious about poor dear Uncle Fritz, as a fresh growth has appeared in his throat, and we are all terribly afraid that it may be cancerous.”
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Vicky was in denial, but Bertie could no longer pretend to himself that Fritz was not a dying man. Arthur Ellis, who accompanied the prince, sent a stark report back to Knollys:

Bertie sent a message via Ellis to Ponsonby: “The Emperor [Fritz] is
very very
ill. The Queen should realise this. This is what the Prince of Wales bids me to say.”
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Bertie was staying at Sunningdale for Ascot races on 14 June 1888 when he heard at noon that all was over, and returned immediately to London.
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Fritz had ruled for ninety-nine days.

On 16 June, Bertie left once more for Berlin, accompanied by Alix, who had agreed to venture into the German “robber’s den” as a special mark of sympathy for Vicky. “Greatly relieved to hear that dear Alix would go with Bertie to Berlin, as I begged her to,” wrote Victoria.
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Bertie found “darling Vicky” in a state of great distress: “She cried and sobbed like a child.”
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In the days after Fritz’s funeral, he and Alix were with her all the time, and Bertie wrote afterward that “Ever since we parted on that lovely but sad Sunday afternoon my thoughts have continually been with you.”
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Vicky’s position was terrible indeed. Not only had she lost her husband, but she was at war with the entire Prussian court and especially with her son. On the night that Fritz lay dying, William had ordered his hussars to form a cordon around the Charlottenburg Palace to prevent his mother smuggling out her papers. (Vicky had anticipated him by locking them away at Windsor.) Once he became kaiser, William pointedly ignored and humiliated his mother, in spite of—or perhaps because of—a stream of telegrams and letters from Queen Victoria begging him to take care of the grieving widow. Vicky had been very briefly empress, ruling Germany from Fritz’s sickroom. Now her influence was nil. William gave her a tightfisted allowance and evicted her from her palace in Berlin.