The Heir Apparent (20 page)

Bertie and Alix rarely posed together, but there is one photograph that shows them standing side by side dressed for riding. Alix, slender and sleek in her tailored habit, looks doe-eyed at her prince. Bertie, slouching in his breeches and boots, avoids her gaze, staring moodily out of the photograph as if he wishes she weren’t there. Victoria worried that they were drifting apart, and blamed Alix for neglecting Bertie’s comfort: “She is never ready for breakfast, not being out of her room till 11 often, and poor Bertie breakfasts alone and then she alone.”
¹⁷
Bertie’s easy good humor meant that relations between the couple were always cordial, but he was perhaps already tiring of his sweet-natured wife; he resented her absorption in nursery life and felt suffocated by her clinging affection.

In the autumn of 1866, Alix’s sister Dagmar (Minnie) became engaged to the Russian czarevitch, the future Alexander III. She had previously been engaged to his older brother, a sickly young man with a “worn aged face and pale and lustreless blue eyes,” but when he died of meningitis she dutifully transferred her affections to the new heir, his vast, bearlike brother.
¹⁸
Minnie’s marriage was a dynastic coup for Denmark. The daughters of the Danish Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg family were like princesses in a fairy tale. Brought up privately and with great simplicity, Alix and Minnie had married two of the most eligible princes in Europe.
¹⁹

Alix was pregnant once more, which meant that she was unable to travel to the wedding in St. Petersburg, and Bertie asked permission to go alone. To his surprise, Victoria gave her consent, though grudgingly (“I did not say ‘I approved,’ but only that ‘I
would not object
’ ”); though she was unable to resist a dig, pointing out how unfortunate it was that he remained so little at home and was always “running about.”
²⁰

In Bertie’s absence, Victoria ordered her daughter-in-law to stay with her at Windsor. She took Alix driving alone with her in the afternoons, and the two women became intimate, something that Alix declared she had always wanted, though (Vicky told Victoria) “she says she is not amusing she knows, and she fears she bores you.”
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Victoria agreed that she had long wished to be friends with Alix, reporting to Bertie that “she looks thin and at times pale,” but “I have talked much with her and have the highest opinion of her.”
²²

Alix missed Bertie dreadfully. When he delayed his return, leaving her to celebrate her birthday alone, she consoled herself with the thought that “my angel Bertie” was well and loved by everybody in St. Petersburg.
²³

Bertie was splendidly entertained in St. Petersburg. The government was so pleased with his reception that Disraeli voted £1,000 of public money to pay for the trip. Bertie caused a sensation by dancing in his kilt at a ball, and he joined a hunt where seven wolves were killed. The Russian court was notoriously lax. The czar, Alexander II, lived openly with his mistress, while his wife lay upstairs in the Winter Palace, slowly dying from tuberculosis. Scandalous rumors of Bertie’s flirtations with the pretty women of St. Petersburg reached the ears of his sister Alice.
²⁴
This was his first significant separation from Alix, and he enjoyed himself all too obviously in the company of other women.

In England, politics that winter was deadlocked over parliamentary reform. In February 1867, the Queen reluctantly opened Parliament—a gesture of support for her Conservative ministers that she regretted, as she was hissed and booed by the pro-reform crowds. For Bertie, this was a challenge too good to resist. On 11 February, when a reform demonstration marched through London, he insisted on watching, defying the advice of General Knollys, who feared a scene. Bertie drove in his brougham through the crowds, and was recognized when he reached the United Service Club in Waterloo Place, where he “was most enthusiastically cheered,” being (said Knollys) “at present very popular.” Here he watched the demonstration from an upstairs window, and Knollys
was struck by the irony of “this immense popular assemblage … supposed to entertain democratic principles—certainly anything but monarchical—defiling before the Heir Apparent of the Crown.”
²⁵

The next day (Tuesday 12 February), Alix visited the theater and, driving home with the windows open, felt a slight pain in her shoulder. By Thursday the pains had spread, moving around her limbs, especially acute in her elbows and knee, and when Dr. Sieveking was called at nine thirty p.m. on Friday (the fifteenth), he found the princess, who was eight months pregnant, greatly distressed with severe pain in her right knee.
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Bertie departed for a steeplechase and dinner at Windsor, judging that her malady was not “of sufficient consequence to put off going.” In the evening she became worse, and Knollys sent two telegrams to Bertie, “without requiring him to come up.”
²⁷
The next morning he sent a third wire, begging him to return immediately.
²⁸

The Times
announced that the princess had “acute rheumatism.” Medical bulletins, signed by the royal doctors, Sieveking, Jenner, and Farre, were posted daily outside Marlborough House, detailing the “pain and febrile action” from which she was suffering.
²⁹

Alix’s illness precipitated yet another premature confinement. Bertie, who told his mother he was “nervous & worried by dear Alix’s illness,” was called to her room at six a.m. on 20 February, having been up all night in anticipation of a crisis.
³⁰
The doctors feared that the rheumatism would produce an “obstruction,” but Alix gave birth to a baby girl after only thirty minutes of labor. Dr. Farre, the obstetrician, who arrived just in time for the delivery at six thirty, refused to allow chloroform, though the suffering princess “wished it very much.”
³¹
The four-weeks-premature baby was very small.

In his diary, Knollys commented that the princess

What Knollys meant by “another complaint” is not clear. His wording seems curiously ambivalent, and language such as “pregnant with
evil
” is almost apocalyptic. Dr. Jenner told the Queen: “The heart still not right, the pain in the knee very obstinate and acute. At any moment the condition might become dangerous!”
³³

When Victoria visited for the first time, on 27 February 1867, she found Alix “lying very low, with her poor knee covered over and supported quite high up, so that her leg was greatly above her head!” Alix was worn, thin, and emotional—tears came to her eyes when she saw the Queen. Afterward, Jenner spoke to Victoria “very seriously” about her daughter-in-law’s state.
³⁴

Alix was in such acute pain that she was often unable to sleep, and her restlessness could only be subdued by laudanum. After sitting up all night with her, Lady Macclesfield wrote: “The light way in which the Prince regards the Princess’s illness is perfectly painful (perhaps
disgusting
) to me and to the Queen also.”
³⁵
Bertie stayed out later than ever. “The Princess had another bad night,” raged Lady Macclesfield, “
chiefly
owing to the Prince promising to come in at 1 a.m. and keeping her in a perpetual fret, refusing to take her opiate for fear she should be asleep when he came. And he never came till 3 a.m.!”
³⁶

Jenner feared a crisis, and told the Queen that his patient stood on “the brink of a precipice.”
³⁷
Only then, when his wife was acutely agitated and fevered with a racing pulse, and the doctors injected morphia into her knee and gave her morphine to induce sleep, did Bertie seem to realize that “she is ill” and started to spend more time with her.
³⁸
He moved his desk into her sickroom so that he could write letters beside her. The Queen found Alix “greatly altered” and “wretchedly ill.”
³⁹
Jenner told her on 10 March that there were symptoms he disliked. Bertie wrote to Queen Louise of Denmark asking her to come to England, and this gave rise to wild speculation that Alix was on the verge of death.
The Times
published an official denial, dismissing the rumors as “unfounded as they are extraordinary.”
⁴⁰

Knollys visited, and thought her “looking very pretty” in bed, lying on her back and unable to turn or bend her knee, with a large apparatus over her legs to protect them from the bedclothes. “Her hair was
loose about her shoulders, & the upper part of her figure could have formed a study for a painter.”
⁴¹

Victoria found her “very low and suffering.”

“Will it never get better,” sighed Alix, and laid her head on the Queen’s shoulder.
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The inflammation was made far worse by forcibly bending the knee under anesthetic and binding it in splints to straighten it. The doctors gave her chloroform for an hour and twenty-five minutes while they readjusted the leg.
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“She was sick several times afterwards and suffered a great deal of pain,” Bertie told Victoria, “partly from the alteration of the position of the knee and fr[om] exhaustion.”
⁴⁴
James Paget, the surgeon who was treating Alix, told the Queen that this was “very serious,” though he hoped in time it “would get right.” When the Queen saw Alix’s leg, it “looked pitiable in all its bandages and so wasted.”
⁴⁵

What was wrong with Alix?

Jenner told Queen Victoria that the doctors “had no experience of any case of the kind.”
⁴⁶
The ladies of Alix’s household, sitting up night after night beside her bed, whispered darkly that her illness was all Bertie’s fault.
⁴⁷
Evil rumors began to build. Perhaps he had infected his sweet, pure wife with “Disease.” Phipps was dismissive. “I fear he leads a not very healthy life,” he wrote, “but I do not believe half the ill-natured stories I hear.”
⁴⁸
The previous year, Phipps had reported that Bertie frequented a place named the Midnight Club and complained that he “lowers himself” too much in pursuit of pleasure.
⁴⁹

“Syphilis” was the word that no one dared to mention. Rumors still persist today that Alix was the innocent victim of Bertie’s lifestyle. Syphilis was epidemic in the brothels of mid-nineteenth-century Europe, and Bertie’s encounters with prostitutes ever since his “fall” meant that he must have been exposed to it. If he was infected with the syphilis organism,
Treponema pallidum,
at the time of his marriage, he could hardly fail to have passed it on to Alix, as sufferers are infectious for two years. The early stages of the illness are unpleasant enough: a genital sore, then ulcers, rashes, and swollen lymph nodes. An unlucky 40 percent
of sufferers experience further stages. The illness may attack the heart and sometimes the spinal cord, producing symptoms that mimic a brain tumor and end in madness. Sometimes it presents as a gumma or ulcerating tumor on the lower leg, causing a deep, gnawing pain that is worse at night and throbs remorselessly. Syphilis can damage hearing, and after her illness, Alix became increasingly deaf.
⁵⁰

Retrospective diagnosis of syphilis has become a game among biographers of nineteenth-century subjects, working without proper medical records to identify a disease that manifests in a bewildering variety of forms. Alix’s case history, however, is relatively well documented, because she was attended by so many doctors. In his private diary, Sieveking described her symptoms at the start of the illness: “The right knee much swollen and very painful, the face much flushed, the tongue furred, white and creamy, the pulse above 100 … great restlessness and expressed fear of ‘rheumatic fever.’ ”
⁵¹
Sieveking confirmed the diagnosis of rheumatic fever, the frightening autoimmune disease triggered by a streptococcal infection in the throat, which, in the pre-penicillin era, brought risk of death and permanent heart damage. But the diagnosis seemed not to fit. In rheumatic fever the pain moves from joint to joint, causing a “flitting polyarthritis.” Alix’s pains initially followed this pattern, but after a few days the pain settled in her knee. It was this symptom that baffled the doctors.

Alix’s knee is proof positive that she was not suffering from syphilis, as “for all its protean manifestations in brain, skin, heart etc [syphilis] does not cause acute pain/swelling in a single joint … especially in the absence of symptoms in other systems.”
⁵²
Rather, she seems to have been suffering from a “septic” arthritis caused by some bacterium. Today it would respond to antibiotics. Then, there was no alternative but to stick it out.

Alix’s deafness had been noticeable ever since she arrived in England, though some thought it due to “absence,” inattention, or poor English.
⁵³
Lord Stanley noted that she was “so deaf as to be unable to follow a conversation and often to answer at cross-purposes.”
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Victoria was in no doubt about the matter, writing to Vicky: “Alas! she is deaf and everyone observes it, which is a sad misfortune.”
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According to her biographer, Georgina Battiscombe, who was herself deaf, Alix suffered from a type of deafness called otosclerosis.
⁵⁶
This involves a hardening of the small bone in the middle ear; it is a genetic form of deafness that strikes only women (men are carriers), and is often thought to be brought on by pregnancy. Though Queen Louise of Denmark was deaf, there is no mention of deafness among her siblings, and only one of Alix’s five children—Maud—seems to have been afflicted.