The Heir Apparent (29 page)

She eventually agreed to consult the sinister Dr. Clayton, but Bertie now refused to see her. Instead, she was interviewed by Francis Knollys. Not surprisingly, she found it hard to speak freely to him. “I was
so
confused today that I hardly knew what I was saying to you,” she told him.
⁷⁹
Knollys arranged for her to see Dr. Clayton the following day. Susan never used the word, but Clayton’s role was plainly to perform an abortion. His verdict, however, as she told Bertie, was that it was “too late and too dangerous.”
⁸⁰

Bertie ordered Susan to leave London and have the baby secretly in the country. She reluctantly concurred. “I am ready to obey Your orders in everything and it grieves me more than I can say to feel that You
are annoyed with me,” she wrote, adding pathetically, “Don’t please be angry if I
entreat
you to come and see me before I go away.… 
Please
don’t let me leave without saying ‘
Goodbye
.’ ”
⁸¹
Desperate to avoid a scandal, he still refused to meet her.

Susan needed money, but by now she lacked the courage to ask. Her friend Harriet Whatman wrote a thinly disguised blackmail letter to Bertie, telling him that if “the event” was to be kept a secret, he must pay her at least £250.
⁸²
Susan settled into 26 Wellington Crescent, Ramsgate, a large Regency terraced house looking out over the sea, to await the birth of her child, which was due in early December.

After Christmas 1871—presumably after the baby was born—Susan wrote to Dr. Clayton asking for an appointment: “The same symptoms still continue and for the last three weeks I have had a white discharge. My back aches dreadfully and I feel altogether
very
unwell.”
⁸³
A few weeks later she wrote to Knollys asking for more money, as Dr. Clayton had ordered her to return to London. “He has not allowed me to leave my Room since I returned & I may not even put my foot to the ground.… I cannot enter into particulars but Mr. Clayton will explain all to Him when he sees Him.”
⁸⁴
She had an ulcer on her foot—“I am a cripple on two sticks and cannot move about!!!!”
⁸⁵

Nothing is ever said of the baby. No birth was registered in Susan’s name in the Ramsgate (Thanet) area. Nor was any infant death recorded.
⁸⁶
Perhaps the child was handed over to someone else, or perhaps it was stillborn. It is conceivable that the obliging Dr. Clayton performed a dangerously late termination. The distressing symptoms related by Susan seem to hint at a venereal disease. The gumma or leg ulcer is a symptom of tertiary syphilis, and so is spinal pain. But tertiary syphilis develops five years after the initial infection, and it’s unlikely that Susan would have been Bertie’s mistress if she had been suffering throughout their affair from the disease.
^d
87

Four years later Susan Vane-Tempest was dead.

Susan’s story is an unsettling reminder of the human cost of Bertie’s pleasure. Like Harriett Mordaunt, she was a victim, cast away once she became an embarrassment to the prince. His ruthlessness is chilling. Susan’s letters were preserved not because Bertie felt sentimental about her, but because they landed on Knollys’s desk—all her communications to HRH were sent under cover to his secretary. Once Bertie sniffed the terrible scandal of a pregnancy, he left Knollys to deal with Susan. His refusal to see her in spite of her very real distress can only be described as cruel. Coldly and efficiently, he saved his princely skin from contamination.

Susan’s letters are the only ones from a mistress that are known to have survived. Other letters from women with whom he became entangled were destroyed, either by Bertie himself or by Knollys. Plenty of Bertie’s letters exist, as most of his female correspondents kept them. Susan’s howls of pain could hardly be further removed from the polite gossip and mildly flirtatious small talk that Bertie usually wrote to his women friends. Perhaps Knollys chose to keep her letters because they were exceptional, or it may have been an accident that they escaped the bonfire; it’s impossible to tell whether other women wrote to him in this way. But her anguished letters give a glimpse of the abyss—of the reality of disgraceful pregnancies and life-threatening abortions that lay behind the carefully crafted world of afternoon visits and discreet notes.

Susan’s is the only illegitimate pregnancy that can be credited with certainty to Bertie—and even so, the child cannot be traced. The destruction of the women’s letters means that there is no way of knowing for certain whether other mistresses bore his children. Had it not been for the fact that her letters happened to be preserved, Susan herself would have vanished from the record; there is no other evidence of her relationship with the prince.

Of course, there were rumors of Bertie’s bastards, and the villages around Sandringham and Balmoral are alleged to be thickly populated with cousins of the Queen. But genealogical research, meticulously
establishing birth dates and checking them against Bertie’s movements and social connections, which are exceptionally well documented, has revealed that most of the alleged illegitimate children are mythical.
⁸⁸
This has led to speculation that his “preferred sexual techniques excluded penetrative sex.”
⁸⁹
Susan Vane-Tempest’s letters suggest another explanation: birth control.

Contraception was not unknown in England, but it was far more widespread in France. The French, it seems, practiced birth control without writing about it, while the English talked about it but rarely used it. Contraception was a professional necessity for prostitutes, and the Paris sex industry could hardly have functioned without it. Barrier methods such as the condom and the diaphragm were available, and prostitutes also relied on vaginal sponges and douching.
⁹⁰
Bertie’s visits to Paris courtesans meant that he was far better educated about sex and contraception than his disapproving compatriots. It was part of a courtesan’s job to protect herself against pregnancy and disease, and Bertie expected his mistresses to do the same. Married women could pass off illegitimate children as belonging to their husbands, but this was not possible for a widow such as Susan Vane-Tempest. If contraception failed, abortion was available as a second line of defense. It was illegal and considered morally abhorrent, but men like the suave and silky Dr. Clayton would always oblige.
^e

“I fear fresh bothers are brewing—from abroad—in which my brother and myself are concerned,” Bertie admitted to Knollys in July.
⁹¹
Among the documents preserved by Knollys is a small, fat, brown-stained envelope labeled “Beneni,” stuffed with tightly folded letters written on thick paper. Someone has endorsed the packet: “Re Barucci—treat with care.”
⁹²

La Barucci, the courtesan Giulia Beneni, who four years before had
entertained Bertie in her Champs-Élysées mansion with its white velvet staircase, died of consumption during the Siege of Paris in a house on the rue de la Baume.
^f
Her brother, a failed Italian tenor named Piro Beneni, moved in to claw her legacy and blackmail her royal clients.

La Barucci had accumulated a valuable trove. She possessed twenty or so letters from Bertie. He had been careful not to sign them, but they were evidently genuine and most were of a “delicate” nature.
⁹³
La Barucci had also stashed away a hoard of photographs. They included
cartes de visite
signed “Albert Edward”; a large photograph of his brother Affie, the Duke of Edinburgh, wearing Highland costume in a crimson velvet frame signed “Alfred”; an album of the whole royal family inscribed “Alfred to Giulia 1868”; and several photographs of Alix’s brother Frederick, Crown Prince of Denmark, one of which was signed “
de votre ami dévoué,
Frederik.”
⁹⁴

In September 1871, Bertie received a blackmail letter from “that scoundrel Beneni,” demanding £1,500.
⁹⁵
He forwarded it to Knollys, and instructed him to consult Kanné, the royal courier and agent. The royal advisers agreed that paying the blackmailer would be a mistake, and they planned instead to seize Bertie’s incriminating letters.

When Beneni wrote again, threatening to put the letters up for sale, Kanné was sent on an undercover mission to La Barucci’s house on the rue de la Baume. On 9 November he found Piro Beneni very ill, conducting an informal auction of his sister’s things from his bed. “The wretch” took a liking to him and showed him Bertie’s letters. Beneni wanted £400, and Kanné offered £240, which was rejected. Kanné then pretended to lose his temper and became very angry. He laid the money on the table and accused Beneni of blackmail, claiming that two policemen were waiting outside to make an arrest if everything was not handed over in ten minutes. The bluff succeeded. Beneni crumpled:
“Prenez tout, mais laissez moi l’argent, je suis si pauvre.”
(Take everything, but leave me the money, I am so poor.) Kanné went to the cupboard in the drawers of which the letters were kept, took the bundles, counted them, and put them in his pocket. Pretending to go outside
and talk to the policemen (who did not exist), he returned five minutes later and demanded everything Beneni possessed belonging to the Prince of Wales and his brother. Beneni, who was by now white and trembling with fear, handed over the key to a black cupboard, which contained the cache of letters and photographs.
⁹⁶

Kanné wired Knollys, who cabled back: “Your prompt action highly approved of.”
⁹⁷
The letters were destroyed. As Kanné warned, the prince “
can not
be
too careful
in his writing. Every
scrape
[
sic
]
of
his writing
becomes every day of more value and importance.”
⁹⁸
Writing “delicate” letters to a courtesan was political suicide at a time when the tide of republicanism seemed unstoppable. When the Liberal MP Sir Charles Dilke addressed meetings on republicanism, loud groans were given for the Prince of Wales.
⁹⁹

That autumn, Bertie and Alix were guests of Lord Londesborough for a week’s grouse shooting near Scarborough. The house party included Louise Manchester and Lord Chesterfield, and twenty-seven people were crammed into the small, boxlike rooms of Londesborough Lodge, perched high on the clifftop above the town. Bertie’s valet slept in a cubbyhole six feet high. Three maids shared an unventilated attic, and the sewage backed up whenever the tide rose. The house, as
The Lancet
later reported, was in effect “a vessel inverted over the mouth of a pipe, through which rises continually, sometimes with violence, a deadly vapour.”
¹⁰⁰
Lady Londesborough “was quite the queen” at Scarborough, holding court in a gilt chair with Bertie sitting at her side, while one by one her guests fell ill with diarrhea, Alix among them.
¹⁰¹

Back at Sandringham for his thirtieth birthday. Bertie complained of a chill and a whitlow or blister on his finger, and called for cherry brandy and a hot bath, but still insisted on traveling to Buckinghamshire to shoot with his friend Carrington.
¹⁰²
He arrived by train at Woburn Sands in a howling gale, and Carrington, who drove the coach himself, nearly crashed on the way back from the station; dinner was ruined and the nine royal servants somehow managed to lose Bertie’s
luggage. The next morning Bertie tried to shoot, but he felt so ill that he gave up and sent for the doctor, the inevitable Oscar Clayton. Long white whitlows had appeared on the palms of his hands, and Clayton ordered him home at once.
¹⁰³

Bertie developed fever, rose-colored spots, and a severe headache. Alix summoned “nice” Dr. Gull, “whom he likes and in whom we have the greatest confidence” (this was the same Dr. Gull who had confined Harriett Mordaunt to a madhouse).
¹⁰⁴
She also sent for Sir William Jenner. Bertie’s symptoms now allowed a diagnosis: typhoid fever.
¹⁰⁵
No attempt was made to cover up his illness or conceal it from the public, and the doctors issued regular daily bulletins. Among William Gull’s papers is a diagram charting the course of HRH’s illness and calibrating the days as the infection progressed through its classic stages. First, headache, vomiting, fever; then the telltale rose spots and diarrhea, high fever, and delirium, followed by a critical stage when the lungs became congested.
¹⁰⁶
There was no treatment, just minute expert observation by the physicians and skilled nursing.

Bertie lay behind a screen in a darkened room, breathing very rapidly and loudly. Alix watched him devotedly, refusing to leave his bedside. “No words of mine can EVER fully express to you how fearful and MISERABLE these days of AGONY have been to me,” she told her sister-in-law Louise.
¹⁰⁷
Gull’s doctor’s notes read: “mind wanders constantly. State to cause great anxiety but not at present alarm.”
¹⁰⁸
At one point Bertie was too ill to recognize Alix; when she told him she was his wife, he replied, “That
was
once but is
no more
, you have broken your vows!”
¹⁰⁹
His raving became so candid—“all sorts of revelations and names of people mentioned”—that the doctors ordered Alix to leave the room.
¹¹⁰