The Heir Apparent (49 page)

William’s treatment of his mother was heartless, but her response made it worse. Her pain and anger rained down in a torrent on Windsor and on Marlborough House. Most of the things she wrote about William were true. He was indeed an atavistic, reactionary autocrat; he was putty in the hands of the devious Bismarck; he was ignorant of everything except military matters; he was nationalistic, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic. Vicky was correct to predict that William would lead Germany to nemesis. But for a woman of such intelligence and humanity, she was extraordinarily lacking in insight. Her grief was displaced into anger against her son, much as Victoria had turned against
Bertie and blamed him for Albert’s death. She seemed unable to perceive that quarreling with William was ultimately self-destructive.

From Windsor, Victoria poured the oil of sympathy onto the flames of Vicky’s anger. From Marlborough House, on the other hand, Bertie urged his sister to mend the quarrel. After he returned from Fritz’s funeral, he wrote: “There will I know be endless difficulties with W[illiam] but you must not be disheartened dearest Vicky and try and surmount them. Above all if possible try and have some influence with him so that he may not be entirely at the mercy of those in whose political opinions you cannot agree.”
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And again: “Let no estrangement exist between you both, and remember he is his father’s eldest son.”
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She must ignore the campaign against her. “If as you say there is a party who wish to get rid of you and drive you away from the country I hope you will not play their game—and show that you have only contempt for the abominable way they behave and let it fall back on them when they wish to crush a defenceless woman.”
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For the rest of her life, Vicky dressed in black. She was becoming more and more like her mother, “not only in her appearance but in the way she ‘moves.’ ”
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In her stubbornness, too, she resembled Victoria. She knew very well that her estrangement from William was no mere family quarrel, but threatened to destabilize Anglo-German relations. But she refused to listen to Bertie’s good advice.

Mourning for Fritz canceled the London season of 1888 for Bertie, and after a party-free summer he retreated to Homburg. Here he lived on
a regime of spa water, tennis, and Wagner, traveling to Frankfurt to hear
Lohengrin, Die Walküre
, and
Tannhäuser
, and he saw Vicky who was staying at the palace.
³¹

On 10 September 1888, Bertie arrived in Vienna on a month’s visit. He drove to the Grand Hotel at 6:45 a.m., and the Austrian emperor Francis Joseph visited him at 11:00, followed by Crown Prince Rudolf at 12:45. Changing into his uniform as colonel of the 12th Austrian Hussars (gold-frogged tunic, red breeches, Hessian boots, and white shako—one of the few smart uniforms still remaining in the Austrian army), Bertie returned the emperor’s call at the Hofburg.
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Francis Joseph mentioned that William planned to arrive in Vienna after Bertie had left, on 3 October. Bertie, who had written twice to William asking the date of his arrival but received no answer, declared that he would change his program to be sure of being in Vienna to welcome his nephew. The next day, he learned from the British ambassador in Vienna, Sir Augustus Paget, that the German ambassador had informed him that the kaiser did not wish to meet his uncle in Vienna and, as Bertie put it, that he “preferred my room to my company!”
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This ostentatious snub became known as the Vienna incident.
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At first, Bertie was angry and upset. He deliberately misunderstood the message to stay away, insisting that by welcoming William in Vienna he would signal friendly relations. This embarrassed Emperor Francis Joseph, who, as the subordinate partner in the Dual Alliance with Germany, felt under pressure to obey the kaiser’s wishes. On 12 September, Bertie dictated a note for Colonel Swaine, the military attaché in Berlin, who was authorized to show it to William. The letter declared that the prince, who had “the greatest affection” for his nephew, had been looking forward to their meeting with pleasure, and the news that William would prefer not to meet had caused him great pain. “I have never seen the Prince of Wales so upset about anything and he is racking his brains in vain to discover the cause.… 
What is the meaning of all this?
”
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Bertie was being disingenuous. It could hardly have escaped his notice that William had made a speech at Frankfurt on 16 August, the day after Bertie’s arrival at Homburg, attacking those who claimed that
Fritz had intended to surrender Alsace-Lorraine. This was a coded broadside against Bertie, and after his speech William was heard to say, “I hope my uncle the Prince of Wales will understand that!”
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Bertie had asked Bismarck’s son Herbert whether it was true that, if Fritz had lived, he would have wished to return Alsace-Lorraine to France.
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He also asked about Alsace in an audience with old Bismarck, but because Alix was present, Bismarck had given a civil answer, and Bertie had taken advantage of this unwonted amiability to draw up a paper recording the conversation. The following day Herbert Bismarck had forced Sir Edward Malet, the British ambassador, to withdraw this document, claiming that it had not been sanctioned by Prime Minister Salisbury, and this apparently had hurt Bertie, as it was the first state paper he had ever written.
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Bertie was vulnerable because he was so closely identified with the hated Empress Vicky. Spies reported his unguarded private conversations to Bismarck. Every mistake that Vicky made was credited to Bertie’s influence: “He was the scapegoat against which all Berlin hurled themselves.”
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Bertie’s friendly relationship with his brother-in-law, Czar Alexander III, also made him a danger. The previous autumn the czar had spent his customary family holiday at Fredensborg, and Alix had used the opportunity to poison him against William, telling stories about his bad behavior toward his parents. The czar, who for all his autocratic politics was a devoted family man, was shocked, and Russia’s commitment to the German alliance was compromised as a result.
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No one could say that Alix lacked influence.

The incident at Vienna rapidly escalated into a standoff. Bertie received no reply to his message to the kaiser. Still huffing and puffing, he departed for Hungary on a shooting expedition with Crown Prince Rudolf. Spending time with the lively prince made Bertie even angrier with William. Rudolf was thirty and Bertie forty-six, but their friendship prospered.

Rudolf detested William. Clever and sardonic, he found William’s heel-clicking arrogance intolerable. Politically liberal (in so far as such a thing was possible for a future Habsburg emperor), he bitterly resented Austria’s dependence on Germany. He told Bertie that William
had remarked that “if his uncle wrote him a very kind letter, he
might perhaps answer it
!!”
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Rudolf reported that “Wales” was “in great fettle, wants to see everything and will not allow himself to be left out in the cold. Nothing seems to tire the old boy. I long for a rest.”
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Bertie always dismissed the rumors about Rudolf’s dissolute habits—the visits to lowlife prostitutes and the drinking binges—but surely knew of Rudolf’s quarrel with his father, Emperor Francis Joseph, and the young man’s estrangement from his wife.

At the time that William made his state entry into Vienna on 3 October, Bertie was traveling to Bucharest to stay with the King and Queen of Romania; the queen, as Elizabeth of Wied, had been considered as a possible wife for Bertie twenty-seven years before. He wore his English field marshal’s uniform with the Grand Cordon of the Star of Romania. Back in England, meanwhile, Lord Salisbury tried to patch up the damage. Bertie’s spat with William threatened to upset the prime minister’s carefully crafted European entente, balancing France by cultivating German friendship. Salisbury told Victoria that Bertie’s blunder was that he had treated William “as an uncle treats a nephew, instead of recognising that he was an Emperor who, though young, had still been of age for some time.”
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Victoria agreed that personal quarrels should not be allowed to affect the foreign policy of the two nations, but pointed out that “with such a hot-headed, conceited and wrongheaded young man, devoid of all feeling, this may at ANY moment become
impossible
.”
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Alix told Georgie that William had been “most
frightfully rude
” toward Papa and refused to meet him in Vienna. “Oh he is mad and a conceited ass—who also says that Papa and Grandmama don’t treat him with proper respect as the Emperor of all and mighty Germany! But my hope is that pride will have a fall some day!! Won’t we rejoice then.”
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Bertie returned home on 22 October. Before his departure for the Newmarket races, the prime minister visited him at Marlborough House and explained his policy of appeasing Germany, warning Bertie not to allow a family quarrel to get in the way.
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But Salisbury had failed to appreciate that, though foreign policy in Britain was controlled by politicians, in Germany family quarrels really did dictate foreign
policy. And in Bertie’s case, the quarrel with William had strengthened his position at home by ending his long rift with his mother.

Between 31 August and 30 September 1888, in the slums of Whitechapel, the sex killer Jack the Ripper strangled four poor prostitutes, then cut their throats, slashed their stomachs, and eviscerated them. His fifth and final victim, Mary Jane Kelly, had her throat slit and face and body horrifically mutilated on 9 November.
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The identity of the Ripper has never been conclusively established. Conspiracy theories continue to proliferate. One of the most far-fetched (published in the 1990s) claimed that Mary Jane Kelly was murdered because she was pregnant by the Prince of Wales. This theory lacks evidence or plausibility: No connection has ever been proved between the prince and the victim. On 9 November, Bertie was at Sandringham, celebrating his forty-seventh birthday with a dinner for three hundred estate laborers and a county ball.
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More enduring are the conspiracy theories linking Prince Eddy with the Ripper murders. The most sensational of these came to light in the 1970s; the source was a man named Joseph Gorman, who claimed that his grandmother, Annie Crook, who worked as a shopgirl on Cleveland Street, had made a clandestine marriage to Eddy, who was studying drawing with the artist Walter Sickert in his studio nearby, and in 1885 had a daughter by him. When Queen Victoria found out, she was horrified at the possibility of blackmail and, so the story goes, appealed to Lord Salisbury to put an end to the liaison. Salisbury ordered a raid on Cleveland Street, and Annie Crook was incarcerated in a madhouse. However, Annie’s friend, the prostitute Mary Kelly, spread the story, so Salisbury enlisted the royal physician Sir William Gull to eliminate all Mary’s friends: the Ripper victims Mary Anne Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride and (mistakenly) Catherine Eddowes, and finally Mary herself. The murders were a cover-up, and once Gull had done his work the killings ceased. This explanation solves one of the puzzles about the Ripper: why the murders
suddenly stopped if they were committed by a sexual psychopath who was never arrested.
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However, it bears no relation to fact. There is not a shred of evidence to connect Eddy either to Annie Crook or to Sickert.
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A still more far-fetched theory proposes that Eddy himself was Jack the Ripper.
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This version turns on the alleged “discovery” of the secret papers of Sir William Gull, which supposedly reveal that Eddy contracted syphilis while on a cruise in the West Indies, causing him to go insane, and committed the murders in a fit of mad rage. Gull then confined him to a private mental home near Sandringham, where he died of softening of the brain. This crackpot theory has been rightly demolished. Gull’s secret papers are nowhere to be found. Eddy didn’t suffer from syphilis. Far from being incarcerated, he was active and living a very public life between 1888 and 1891. Nor was he anywhere near Whitechapel on the date of any of the murders; his alibis can be verified from reading
The Times
Court and Social.
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The Eddy/Ripper theory is interesting, however, because it is a classic royal myth. Like so many such stories, it builds a conspiracy theory, which is by definition almost impossible to prove or refute. Key ingredients in such narratives are syphilis and/or pregnancy, madness, sex, prostitutes, establishment cover-ups, and “missing” papers that seemingly contain the solution to the mystery. Our image today of Jack the Ripper is not that of an impoverished Jewish or Irish immigrant in the East End, but of a toff in a cloak, top hat, and elegant Edwardian evening clothes. In the popular imagination, the Ripper lives on as a figure like Eddy.

At seven o’clock on the evening of 13 December 1888, Bertie walked into the gloom of St. George’s Chapel, Windsor. The choir was shrouded in darkness, and a small group of watchers stood beside the
hole that workmen had carefully made in the floor, revealing the royal vault below. The coffins of Henry VIII and Charles I could be dimly seen by the light of a single coil of magnesium wire. Bertie stooped down and silently lowered a small oak case, which he placed on the coffin of the martyr king Charles I. Inside the case was an ivory casket containing relics taken from Charles’s coffin when the Prince Regent opened it in 1813: a chip of cervical vertebra cut with a sharp instrument, a piece of auburn hair from the king’s head, and a tooth. Bertie withdrew, and the workmen immediately returned to close the vault.
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His feelings are unrecorded, but this grim little ceremony surely gave a chilling reminder of the transience of princes.
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