The Heir Apparent (12 page)

At the Curragh, Bertie lived in general’s quarters. His so-called hut consisted of a sitting room, drawing room, and dining room. The soldier’s life agreed with him, and he wrote to his mother: “I will … do my best now to make the best use of the short time I now have before me for acquiring knowledge & instruction.”
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What sort of instruction he had in mind was left unclear. The day before, Victoria had written to her uncle Leopold in one of her flashes of self-knowledge: “Alas! Sons are like their mothers—at least the eldest are supposed to be—& so I think Bertie has avoided all likeness to his beloved father.”
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Victoria and Albert visited the Curragh at the end of August. Bertie’s hopes of commanding a company in front of his parents were
dashed by Colonel Percy, who told him: “You are too imperfect in your drill, and your word of command is not sufficiently loud and distinct.”
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Bertie had other distractions. His engagement diary contains the following entries:

The discovery of these cryptic notes allows us to pinpoint exactly the date of Bertie’s “fall.” “N.C.” was Nellie Clifden, a lady of easy virtue who had followed the brigade from London. Urged on by his fellow officers, Bertie escaped at night through the windows of his quarters, and made love to her in another officer’s hut. As his diary reveals, this took place not once but on three occasions.
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Four days after the “third time,” Bertie crossed to Coblenz, where he attended the maneuvers of the Prussian army.

From Coblenz, Bertie traveled through the Rhineland with Vicky and Fritz. He journeyed incognito, again using the title of Baron Renfrew. Incognito was not meant to conceal his true identity; it was a convention that excused him from ceremonial duties and meant that he was not expected to be formally received by the rulers through whose lands he traveled.
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Bertie and his party visited Speyer Cathedral, a jewel of Romanesque architecture that had been recently restored. In the Chapel of St. Bernard, above the crypt crammed with the coffins of medieval emperors, he and Vicky happened to encounter Prince Christian of Denmark and his wife, Princess Louise, traveling with their daughter Alexandra.

This meeting, seemingly a chance encounter, had, in fact, been carefully choreographed by Vicky at Bertie’s request. Alexandra, however, knew nothing. When she left the family house party at Rumpenheim Castle on the banks of the Main that morning, she was surprised at her mother telling her to wear her best dress; being a thrifty princess,
she usually wore old clothes for grimy train journeys. Bertie attempted to make conversation with Princess Louise, Alexandra’s mother, but this was difficult as his hushed voice was barely audible to the princess, who was almost completely deaf.

Vicky and Fritz moved away from the Danish group and pretended to admire the new frescoes in the German Nazarene style that artfully obliterated the crude medieval stonework. Vicky tried desperately to overhear the conversation; this meeting was crucial to her marriage diplomacy, the Queen had written obsessively detailed instructions from England, and Vicky was naturally nervous. At first, the encounter between Bertie and Alexandra was stilted. In the flesh, Bertie thought Alexandra a disappointment after the studio photographs, which showed an oval-faced beauty posed against a profile-flattering mirror, her tiny waist exaggerated by the big checks of her full gathered skirt. In reality, her nose was too long and her forehead too low. But after fifteen minutes or so, observers thought that “the reverse of indifference on both sides soon became unmistakeable.” Perhaps because she was unaware how much was at stake, the sixteen-year-old Alexandra was not shy. Vicky noted approvingly her simple and unaffected manner, and thought her forward for her age—“her manners are more like 24.”
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The scene at Speyer Cathedral is intensely visual, almost filmic in its immediacy. Communication was a matter of bows and curtseys, the touch of a gloved hand, an incline of the head; Alexandra could speak English—she had had English nurses since childhood—but she and Bertie barely exchanged words. Alexandra remained silent after the meeting, or at least there is no record of what she thought. Not for six months did her mother tell her of the Prince of Wales’s intentions.

Bertie returned home to Balmoral mildly pleased, but in no hurry to wed. To his mother’s dismay, it was evident that he was not smitten. “As for being in love,” she wrote, “I don’t think he can be, or that he is capable of enthusiasm about anything in this world.”
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Vicky, too, was annoyed that, after all her negotiations, Bertie was unmoved—incapable, apparently, of feeling passion for “that sweet lovely flower—young and beautiful—that even makes my heart beat when I look at
her—which would make most men fire and flames—not even producing an impression enough to last from Baden to England.”
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All sorts of objections now occurred to Bertie: Alexandra’s family must first visit England, he didn’t want children (“which for so young a man is so strange a fear,” thought Victoria); he was too young—he was after all not yet twenty.
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At this point, Albert’s patience snapped. He gave Bertie an angry lecture and the next day handed him a note of what he had said. If Alexandra and her parents came to Windsor, warned Albert, Bertie would be duty-bound to propose. If he delayed, he risked losing “a positive and present advantage for the hope of future chances which … probably may never occur.”
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Albert could feel the game slipping away. From Coburg, his brother Ernest objected to a Danish match. Albert loftily brushed him aside. “I am not, as you suppose, asking ‘What has it to do with you?’ ” he began, and then wrote a letter saying precisely that.
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More wounding was a letter from old Stockmar, now retired to Coburg, who wrote urging the unsuitability of the match. The purpose of the marriage, he pointed out, was to correct Bertie’s weakness, but so tarnished was Alexandra’s family that matrimony was bound to have the opposite effect. Alexandra’s mother was rumored to be a loose woman who had affairs, while her father was an imbecile. Stockmar’s defection gave Albert a “dreadful shock,” but he was no less determined to press the marriage.
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Bertie, however, had compelling reasons for delaying. Nellie Clifden was back in London. Gossips whispered that she now styled herself the Princess of Wales. It was rumored that when Bertie went to Windsor for his twentieth birthday on 9 November 1861, Nellie followed him and he smuggled her into the castle.

Nellie briefly became Bertie’s mistress. Through her, and her friends among the Guards officers, Bertie made his first forays into a secret London nightlife of theaters, casinos, and women in deep décolletage. The 1860s was a decade of sexual liberation, a brief interlude of eroticism that has been obscured to posterity by Victorian prudishness and respectability. The world in which Nellie was the girlfriend of a number
of young officers was not squalid or furtive; it was fashionable and fast.

This was the era in which Bertie reached manhood, and it shaped his sexuality for life. There are hints about his initiation with Nellie—though only hints, as he was already clever at hiding his tracks—in letters to his friend Charles Carrington. Referring to “our friend N,” whom Carrington identified as “Nelly Clifton [
sic
] a well known ‘London Lady’ much run after by the household brigade,” Bertie wrote:

By “certain matters,” it seems Bertie meant carnal knowledge, horseplay, and a jokey, manly boisterousness.
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Little wonder that he was reluctant to exchange Nellie’s hoydenish charms for prudish monogamy with a flat-chested teenage Danish princess.

On 12 November, Lord Torrington, a courtier and gossip, came into waiting at Windsor and repeated to Albert the rumors about Nellie’s seduction of Bertie at the Curragh. Victoria never forgot Albert’s misery. “Oh!! that face, that heavenly face of woe and sorrow which was so dreadful to witness!”
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Albert penned a long, self-pitying letter to Bertie, writing “with a heavy heart, on a subject which has caused me the deepest pain I have yet felt in this life.” How could Bertie allow himself to have “sexual intercourse” with this woman—he couldn’t bring himself to write “prostitute.” “To thrust yourself into the hands of one of the most abject of the human species, to be by her initiated in the sacred mysteries
of creation, which ought to remain shrouded in holy awe until touched by pure & undefiled hands.” The language throbs with repressed sexual tensions. “At your age,” counseled Albert, “the sexual passions begin to move in young men & lead them to seek explanation to relieve a state of vague suspense & desire. Why did you not open yourself to your father?… I would have reminded you [of] … the special mode in which these desires are to be gratified … by … the holy ties of Matrimony.”
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Albert’s pen ran away with him as he painted a lurid picture of Nellie blackmailing Bertie, of illegitimate children and law cases.

Bertie was contrite. Though penitent, however, he refused to give the names of the officers who had led him into sin, and he denied that Nellie had come to Windsor. In fact, it seems there
was
a prostitute at Windsor on his birthday, but it wasn’t Nellie.
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Possibly it was a woman named Green. In November 1864, Bertie was hounded by a “blackguard” called Green, who was trying to blackmail him for events that took place “above three years ago.” From the letters of the royal advisers, it seems that Green’s wife had ensnared Bertie into “wickedness”: There could be no doubt, they wrote, “who was the tempter and who the tempted.” Green and his wife were paid an annuity of £60 in exchange for keeping silent and leaving the country to live in New Zealand.
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Though Bertie told his father only half the truth, Albert was mollified. But he gave his son a stark warning: “You
must
not, you
dare
not be lost; the consequences for this country & for the world at large would be too dreadful! There is no middle course possible … you must either belong to the good, or to the bad in this life.” In the future, he told Bertie, when speeches were made about the virtue of the royal family, people would always stare at him. “The loose women of London (who form a confraternity) will consider you good sport, & look at you with an effrontery—offering their ware.”
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Albert accurately predicted Bertie’s sexual politics, but his inflamed language and fevered emotions demand explanation. Sleeping with prostitutes was not exceptional behavior for young, healthy upper-class males. As Victoria’s half sister, Feodora, wrote: “It is one of the
greatest
trials parents
can
have to go through, yet, Alas! how frequent! not the less distressing though.”
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Bertie’s alleged profligacy, wrote Lord Granville, “as yet consisted in losing that which few men, well fed and with animal spirits long retain.”
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No doubt Bertie’s fall threatened to jeopardize the Danish wedding, which, if it was to be passed off as a love match, depended upon keeping him in a state of pent-up sexual frustration so that he fell madly in love at first sight. But Albert’s overreaction is symptomatic of his own unbalanced state. Nellie Clifden stirred painful memories of his childhood, which had been scarred by the debaucheries of his father and the adultery of his mother. And the Prince Consort was a dying man.

Ever since he had visited Coburg the previous autumn, Albert had thought he was close to death. Out driving one day, his carriage horses bolted. As the runaway horses galloped headlong toward a railway crossing, Albert flung himself out. He was cut and bruised and badly shaken. He became depressed and emotional. Out walking with his brother, Ernest, he broke down; tears streamed down his cheeks as he declared that he would never see Coburg again. When he paid a farewell visit to Stockmar, his old mentor thought that he lacked the will to live.
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Albert returned to England suffering from diarrhea and stomach cramps. Ever since boyhood, he had complained of a “weak stomach,” and his gastric attacks had become progressively worse and more frequent. Stress and overwork made him vulnerable, and to this was added the depression of a lonely man with few friends in England. Retrospective diagnosis is a tricky business, but it seems likely that Albert suffered from some form of chronic, recurring gastric illness.
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Now forty-two and a grandfather, he looked heavy, paunchy, and balding. He was always cold; when he rose early to work on dark winter mornings, he wore a wig to warm his bald pate.

On 25 November 1861, Bertie received a surprise visit at Cambridge from Albert, who had resolved to have it out with him. Carrington accompanied his friend to the station. Bertie seemed nervous, and Carrington
stood on the platform and watched as the Prince Consort kissed his son and they drove off in a coach to Madingley.
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It was a wet and stormy day, but Albert insisted on going for a private walk with Bertie. Bertie mistook the way, and by the time they returned, Albert was soaked to the skin, with racking pains in his back and legs. He had been tormented by sleeplessness and “rheumatism” for the past fortnight, but he stayed up talking to Bertie until one a.m.