The Heir Apparent (30 page)
Authors: Jane Ridley
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Nonfiction, #Retail, #Royalty
Alix’s love of nursing brought her close to Bertie; for once, he was dependent on her, and he couldn’t escape. But she wasn’t allowed to have him to herself. Princess Alice, who happened to be staying in the house, bossily tried to take charge. “We are all furious at seeing our Princess [Alix] sat upon and spoken of as if she had not sense enough to act for herself,” wrote Lady Macclesfield.
111
By now the doctors were issuing several bulletins a day, each more
alarming than the last: 26 November 1871, 6:00 p.m.: “The course of the fever today has been rather severe but regular. The Prince’s strength continues good”; 27 November, 9:00 a.m.: “His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales has passed a sleepless night. The course of the fever is marked by increasing intensity, but the strength does not fail.”
112
The doctors’ drafts, preserved in Gull’s papers, are crossed through and reworded; they show a striving for medical accuracy, rather than political spin, but in their artless attempts to state the truth, the doctors were the unwitting agents of a resurgence of loyalty to the monarchy. The nation was gripped. “The alarm in London very great,” noted the Queen. “Immense sympathy all over the country.”
113
Queen Victoria, who was always energized by illness, yearned to be at Bertie’s bedside, but she needed to be asked. She had never visited Sandringham before, and Alice opposed her coming now. For once Alix overruled her domineering sister-in-law, and wrote on her own initiative inviting her mother-in-law. The drama of the widow Queen, who herself had been ill, rushing by special train (the details of the route were printed in the paper) to visit her wayward son on his sickbed, almost exactly ten years after the death of her beloved Albert, transfixed the nation.
The Queen slept badly before her journey to Sandringham on 29 November. Alice and Alix, thin and tearful, met her at the door. Peeping in at Bertie’s darkened room, she saw him lying on his back, breathing loudly as he dozed with one lamp burning, and Albert’s illness came flooding back to her.
114
What they didn’t tell her was that Bertie now thought he had succeeded as king, and raved of reforms in the household that “set all their hair straight on end.”
115
He gave orders that all gentlemen were to wear tights, “because I’m very particular about dress and General Knollys must kneel down and give me a glass of water, it was always done in former days.”
116
The next evening, when Victoria went to Bertie’s dressing room after dinner, a tearful Alice rushed in, saying that his temperature had suddenly fallen (from 105°) and his breathing seemed all wrong. The Queen went into the bedroom. “What I saw reminded me terribly of December ’61!” She followed Alix out into the dressing room, and
“when [Alix] completely broke down I tried to reassure her, although my heart was heavy with fear, and held her dear little slight frame in my arms.” Dr. Jenner told Victoria that Bertie had a threatening of the congestion of the lungs or pneumonia that had killed Albert. “Went sadly to my room, very, very anxious,” she wrote.
117
In fact, Bertie had turned a corner toward recovery. The next morning he was sufficiently robust to ask for an egg, and the Queen returned to Windsor.
118
The doctors’ bulletins on 1 December signaled cautious optimism.
119
But the same day brought news of the death from typhoid of Lord Chesterfield, another guest at Londesborough Lodge. This was apparently proof that the fetid drains of Scarborough had caused the prince’s illness, which had hitherto been hotly denied by Lord Londesborough, but it was a shock that, said Lady Macclesfield, “came like ice upon all our hearts.”
120
On 5 December, Gull wrote in his private notes that the prince’s breathing was easier and all his symptoms had improved, though “there remains the liability to relapse and reduplication of the attack.”
121
Gull was right to fear a double dip. On 7 December, the twenty-sixth day of the illness, the ominous rose spots returned. Soon Bertie’s breathing became rapid, he began to clutch at his sheets (a symptom that particularly worried the doctors), and his mind wandered in a constant state of delirium.
122
Bulletins were issued every four hours.
123
For the first time,
The Times
openly discussed the possibility of the prince’s death.
The Queen was advised that if she wished to see her son before he died, she should leave immediately, and she set off for Sandringham at once that afternoon.
124
She was expected at four, and at two o’clock Gull and Jenner took a few minutes’ walk in the garden. Jenner said: “Well, if he lives until Her Majesty comes I shall be satisfied.” Gull replied: “That will not satisfy
me
. Now we shall see if Shakespeare’s
signa mortis
are right, for they are marked enough here”—and he quoted
Henry V,
on the death of Falstaff: “After I saw him fumble with the sheets and play with flowers and smile upon his fingers’ ends, I knew there was but one way; for his nose was as sharp as a pen and a’ babbled of green fields.”
125
The Queen arrived at seven thirty p.m. in deep snow and was met by Lady Macclesfield, who told her Bertie was “
very bad
.” She rushed up to his room, where Alix and Alice sat on either side of the bed. Bertie lay breathing rapidly.
126
Telegrams were sent summoning Arthur, Leopold, and Beatrice. Both Helena and Vicky were refused, partly because there was no room, even though Vicky begged her mother to be allowed to come.
127
The house was so crowded that the princesses Louise and Beatrice were obliged to share a bed.
Bertie’s illness had called forth a general expression of sympathy, which, said
The Graphic,
“in its quiet earnestness is a satisfactory proof of the loyalty of the nation.”
128
On Sunday, thinking that Bertie had rallied, Alix slipped out from the sickroom to church. She passed a note to the vicar: “My husband being thank God somewhat better, I am coming to Church. I must leave, I fear, before the service is concluded, that I may watch by his bedside. Can you not say a few words in prayer in the early part of the service that I may join with you in prayer before I return to him?” Trembling with emotion, the vicar prayed while Alix stood in the royal pew alone.
129
Reported in
The Times,
this poignant image stirred the public’s heart.
Bertie passed a tranquil morning, but by Sunday evening the bulletins were grave.
130
Gull’s notes describe a “paroxysm” or spasm of coughing, and the short, guttural, suffocative cough baffled and worried him.
131
On Monday, the Queen was woken at five thirty a.m. with a message from Jenner that Bertie had suffered a severe spasm and might at any minute “go off,” so she put on her dressing gown and hurried to the bedroom. She found Alix and Alice sitting in vigil in the dreary light beside Bertie, who was breathing as if he would choke at any moment. He raved continually, talking on and on, whistling and singing. “This has been a terrible day,” wrote Victoria, who went back and forth continually to the sickroom, and took her meals upstairs.
132
Downstairs, the family and household waited for news, talking in whispers in the great hall, pacing the slippery floors, trying not to trip over the skins and enormous protruding heads of the animals that Bertie
had shot.
133
Bertie’s brothers Affie and Arthur giggled at his ravings, earning stern reproofs from Victoria.
134
Alice snubbed the devout Alix for praying, and briskly declared: “
Providence,
there is no Providence, no nothing, and I can’t think how anyone can talk such rubbish.”
135
In London, Gladstone found the suspense painful, and trembled when he opened the telegrams from Sandringham.
136
Wednesday, 13 December 1871, the day before the anniversary of beloved Albert’s death, was, said Victoria, “the worst day of all.” Yet another fit of suffocating coughing nearly killed Bertie. The Queen and Alice said to each other in tears: “There can be no hope.”
137
Alix was so desperate to stay by his side that when the doctors told her that it would distress him to know that she was in the sickroom, she crawled in on hands and knees so as to be out of sight.
138
She scarcely ate, and the exhaustion of sitting up night after night had made her so deaf that she was not easy to wake when asleep. “
How
she will bear the final blow when it comes, one cannot imagine,” groaned Lady Macclesfield, who confidently expected the prince to die.
139
On the morning of 14 December, the Queen crept into the sickroom and stood behind the screen. Bertie asked the nurse if the Queen was in the room. Victoria went to the bed, and he kissed her hand and smiled and said, “So kind of you to come; it is the kindest thing you could do.”
140
So, on the anniversary of his father’s death, Bertie’s recovery began.
The following Sunday, at Clyro church in Radnorshire, the vicar read out the bulletin from the paper: “The Prince has passed a tranquil day and the symptoms continue to be favourable.” The Reverend Kilvert commented in his diary: “I love that man now, and always will love him. I will never say a word against him.… God bless him and keep him, the Child of England.” A little girl in Sunday school was asked who had died for us on the cross. “Lord Chesterfield,” was the reply.
141
This was Bertie’s apotheosis: He had become a holy prince. Among the best things he did was nearly to die.
*
In the 1950s, Harold Nicolson claimed that while researching at Balmoral, he came across the “marriage lines” of Queen Victoria and John Brown in a game book. He allegedly replaced the document where he found it, for fear that it would be destroyed. (Christopher Tyerman, letter to
The Times,
21 December 2004.) It has never been seen since.
†
Boehm related this story to Catherine Walters, the courtesan also known as Skittles, who told it to the diarist Wilfrid Blunt in 1885.
‡
Bertie was rumored to have fathered numerous children, but most of these “bastards” were apocryphal (see
this page
). Olga Caracciolo was probably not Bertie’s daughter. It was the duke himself who registered her birth in August 1871. The story of her royal paternity was local gossip in Dieppe, however, where she was brought up in the 1880s. The duchess was a dedicated Anglophile, who dressed in the tailored style of Princess Alexandra. Occasionally Bertie would visit her in Dieppe, always arriving in a yacht.
§
Eddy was born on 6 January 1864; Georgie on 3 June 1865. Louise was next, on 20 February 1867, then Victoria (6 June 1868) and Maud (26 November 1869).
‖
He was a Liberal in politics, he disliked dressing up in court uniform, and he was devoted to his wife. The letters he wrote from Balmoral give unrivaled glimpses of Victoria’s Highland court.
a
Abergeldie Castle, a tower house on the south bank of the Dee, three miles from Balmoral, was leased by the Queen from its owner and lent to Bertie after he married.
b
Bassano’s glamorous photograph, which shows the prince smoking a cigar, was a study for a painting he commissioned by Alfred Sheldon Williams.
c
Oscar Clayton was described by Ponsonby as “a dreadful little snob and Jenner says not a good doctor. But he is most attentive and that is everything.” (RA VIC/Add A 36/1340, Henry Ponsonby to Mary Ponsonby, 24 October 1877.)
d
Susan’s symptoms may well have been caused by complications or infection after childbirth or a possible termination.
e
Gladstone’s gossipy secretary Edward Hamilton wrote in his diary in 1881: “In deference to the Prince of Wales, Oscar Clayton has been submitted for knighthood. It is to be hoped that no disagreeable stories will come out about him.” (
Diary of Sir Edward Hamilton 1880–1885,
ed. Dudley Bahlman [Clarendon Press, 1972], vol. 1, p. 355 [2 November 1881].)
Resurrection?
1871–75
The day after Bertie’s fever passed the crisis, Francis Knollys and Henry Ponsonby went for a ride at Sandringham. They cantered over some jumps and both fell off their horses. In between, the private secretaries discussed the future. The prince, said Knollys, had reached the turning point in his life. “If after the illness and the great sympathy for him he takes up some line of work it will save him from frivolous idleness and the follies he has been accused of and may make something of him.” The only question was what he should do. Philanthropy or science and art, suggested Ponsonby.
1
No, said Knollys; he had “never shown any inclination whatsoever” for social work, and as for the South Kensington Albertopolis, as the Albert Hall and Victoria and Albert Museum were called, he only did the bare minimum.
2
Knollys’s solution was foreign affairs. In a memo to Ponsonby, he proposed that the Queen should forward dispatches for the prince.
3
But, as Ponsonby objected,
“writing empty minutes which will not be read” was a waste of time and could hardly be called employment.
4
