The Heir Apparent (34 page)
Authors: Jane Ridley
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Nonfiction, #Retail, #Royalty
Bertie’s parting from Alix on 12 October 1875 was drawn out and emotional. Alix broke down repeatedly; Princess Helena told the Queen, “She looks so worn and tired and pale and so sad. Really it makes one’s heart ache to see them both.”
117
Alix accompanied Bertie on the steamer to Calais, and the final farewell was a passionate embrace on deck. Both of them were weeping, and (Alix told Minnie) “had to tear ourselves away from each other, and I saw him disappear over the dark landing bridge, and there on the ship stood poor Alexandra alone, so totally alone, with her bursting heart.”
118
Alix wired the Queen from Sandringham two days later: “Everything seems sad and dreary without him.”
119
Her devotion to her Bertie, in spite or perhaps because of his philandering, was more intense than ever.
*
Poole’s Archive shows his chest and waist measurements increasing from 33¾ inches and 29½ inches in 1860 to 43 inches and 39½ inches in 1876.
†
Katrine Countess Cowper, wife of the 7th Earl.
‡
On a visit to Coventry in 1874, Bertie told his equerry to arrange for a bowling alley to be included in the itinerary. When the bemused Hartington made no attempt to conceal his boredom, the mayor uttered the line in which he had been coached: “HRH especially asked for its inclusion in tribute to your lordship’s love of Skittles.”
§
Florence Nightingale, a chronic invalid, lived opposite at number 35, also commemorated with a blue plaque. Both women did much of their work in bed.
‖
On a visit to Vienna with Bertie, Knollys slept with “about as low a woman” as he could find, before learning that all the ladies of the town were poxed. He confessed to being “in a horrible fright.” (Rosebery’s diary, April 1873, in Hibbert,
Edward VII,
p. 305.)
a
The second son of the Princesse de Sagan, who was born in Paris on 20 July 1867, was alleged to be Bertie’s bastard, but Bertie’s relationship with the princesse seems to have begun sometime after the child was born. In late October/early November 1866, he was not in France. He left England for St. Petersburg on 1 November 1866, traveling via Brussels and Potsdam, where he stayed with Vicky. (Leslie,
Edwardians in Love,
pp.70–72; Camp,
Royal Mistresses,
pp. 350–51.)
b
Bertie demanded £100,000 from the government, and eventually the Cabinet agreed to ask Parliament for £60,000.
India
1875–76
The tearful parting left Bertie feeling low.
1
To Alix he wrote “the most beautiful, loving letters you can imagine, so like himself.”
2
He told Lord Granville that he felt so depressed that he contemplated turning back.
3
He looked terrible, too. Alexander Bassano, the society photographer who had snapped him as a jaunty man-about-town before his illness, took a photograph that summer that, in spite of studio air-brushing, shows him looking puffy, overweight, and middle-aged: As Victoria wrote, “He is grown so large, and nearly quite bald.”
4
From Paris he traveled overland to Brindisi, where he boarded the HMS
Serapis
. Here he was united with his suite. The eighteen men he had picked to accompany him included the inner circle of the Marlborough House set: His friends “Sporting Joe” Aylesford and Charles Carrington came as personal guests, Lord Suffield and Owen Williams were equerries, and Lord Charles Beresford was an aide-de-camp. The leader was silver-haired Bartle Frere, an old India hand, who was
charged by the Queen with speaking plainly to the prince. A “dear old
patapouf
” (according to Ponsonby), Frere probably lacked the authority to influence the prince. The Queen sent Lord Alfred Paget as her representative, much to Bertie’s annoyance.
5
A member of the family which had monopolized so many posts at Victoria’s early court that it was known as the “Paget clubhouse,” the fifty-nine-year-old Lord Alfred made himself unpopular by bagging the best cabin and by constant grumbling.
6
W. H. Russell of
The Times
was appointed historian and given exclusive reporting rights, provoking complaints from the rest of the press. To keep his rivals happy, it was agreed that Russell should report nothing until they reached Bombay.
*
7
There were no women on board the
Serapis
. This was perhaps the only time in his adult life that Bertie was surrounded entirely by men. It was also his first experience of political responsibility and a real job that he had worked hard to get. The Indian trip, which had begun as a bachelor spree, had turned into a royal progress, but the men he picked to accompany him were not qualified for the work. Cronies, drinking companions, and practical jokers, they had left behind in England a trail of adultery and scrapes. One of the functions of a court is to promote talent, but Bertie had filled his court with wastrels and socialites, uneducated philistines who could no more rule an empire than write a book.
On board the
Serapis
, Bertie and his floating court of men lived in spartan luxury. The extreme heat and early hours agreed with him; he played energetic lawn tennis on deck and he looked “wonderfully well in the face.”
8
He was provided with duplicate sets of private apartments, one running each side of the vessel, so that he could use whichever was least sunny. His plain metal bedstead was not fixed to the floor but suspended from brass uprights, so that it swung freely to neutralize the rolling of the ship.
9
In HRH’s drawing room, which was
furnished like a gentleman’s club, with heavy leather-upholstered mahogany furniture bolted to the floor, the party was unusually subdued. As Carrington wrote, “We are more like a lot of monks than anything else—no jokes or any approach to it.” Aylesford and Beresford were quietness itself: no rows, no whist, no bear fights.
†
10
Bertie had been shocked to discover that the Indian Civil Service (ICS) had no official uniform to wear in order to receive him, and he was disappointed when his proposal for a brass-buttoned blue coat was rejected. On board the
Serapis
, however, he devised his very own dress uniform of black trousers, short blue jacket with silk facings and gilt buttons, and black tie.
11
Sweating in their uniforms in temperatures of well over 100 degrees, the all-male suite dined each night at seven thirty prompt, serenaded by a band that played throughout the meal as they chaffed the rubicund Lord Alfred Paget, known as Beetroot, who declared he never ate at sea and then devoured more than anyone else. After dinner, Bertie would rise and propose a toast to Her Majesty the Queen, and all stood while the band played the national anthem.
12
Security in India was tight. One of the suite sat up all night outside the prince’s door, while another slept in his room.
13
Lord Suffield, who acted as chief of the household, went everywhere with Bertie, ready to leap in front of him should an attack be made on his life.
14
More effective perhaps was Colonel Edward Bradford, the stern head of the Indian secret police, who had lost an arm after being mauled by a tiger.
‡
Victoria worried about her son’s health and bombarded him with anxious letters and telegrams warning him not to do too much.
15
To please his mother, Bertie wore a white pith helmet.
The
Serapis
reached Bombay on 8 November 1875. The Prince of Wales drove through six miles of streets lined with silent crowds. Lord
Northbrook, the viceroy, hastened to assure the Queen that cheering was not the Indian way.
16
The following day, his birthday, Bertie held his first royal audience. One by one the chiefs and princes were taken firmly by the hand and led, as if in custody, to meet the Prince of Wales, who advanced from his silver chair to an appointed spot on the carpet, took each Indian’s hand, and conducted him back to the chair. Bertie wore a field marshal’s uniform, which contrasted with the bejeweled magnificence of the turbaned rajas, and played his part to perfection, listening to the princes, looking them in the eye, and treating them as royal equals.
17
Instinctively he grasped the essence of the Raj; he himself was the embodiment of the alliance between the Queen and the native princes that had been forged after the Mutiny of 1857. As W. H. Russell wrote in
The Times
, Bertie had grown with the greatness of the occasion and elevated a royal visit into a historic event.
18
This was royalty as theater, and he excelled in his role. His passion for uniforms and dressing up coupled with his addiction to the London stage meant that he knew his lines perfectly and understood instinctively how the role of prince-emperor should be played.
At Baroda, Bertie paid a state visit to the thirteen-year-old ruler, known as the Gaekwar. The boy Gaekwar had recently been adopted heir to Baroda, and the prince’s visit helped legitimize a new regime.
19
Russell’s account in
The Times
reads like an Eastern fable:
There was an elephant of extraordinary size, on which there was a howdah which shone like burnished gold.… It was covered with a golden canopy, and it was shining in the morning sun with surpassing splendour. This exquisitely burnished carriage was placed on cushions covered with cloth of gold and velvet, which were fastened upon the embroidered tissue which almost concealed the outline of the beast which stood swaying his painted proboscis to and fro as if he kept time to the music of the bands outside.…
The golden ladder was placed against the howdah step, the Guikwar [
sic
] stepped up, helped carefully, and the Prince followed and sat by his side.… Then as the elephant made its first
stride on-wards, the clamour of voices and of sound deepened and grew and spread.
20
Queen Victoria (according to the Indian secretary Lord Salisbury) had visions of Bertie escalading “zenanas [harems] on ladders of ropes,” and to avoid scandal Salisbury arranged for the party to be kept constantly on the move.
21
Bertie was indefatigable. Carrington thought the viceroy’s staff asked far too much of him, especially as he was more than willing to oblige.
22
His reward was an elephant shoot in Ceylon.
The elephant shoot was organized like a military campaign. Fifteen hundred men labored for two weeks in the Ceylonese jungle to prepare a stockade and nets for the royal party. Wearing his solar topee and special gaiters to protect his legs from bloodsucking leeches, Bertie set off in torrential rain at six a.m. for his high stand, where he waited for five hours without firing a shot. Eventually the beaters lit a forest fire, and the terrified elephants came crashing out of the jungle. Bertie wounded one and shot another, which fell as if it were dead, but when his artist Sidney Hall tried to sketch it, the beast struggled to its feet and lumbered off. Crawling through the jungle, streaming with sweat and tearing his clothes, Bertie eventually crept close enough to kill an elephant, which toppled over and dammed a stream. Surrounded by a cheering crowd of natives, he jumped on top of the mountain of inert flesh and cut off the tail, as was the custom. Sidney Hall sketched the primitive scene, as the elephant’s blood oozed into the swamp.
23
The image of the prince standing victorious on the dead beast seemed to radicals and republicans back home morally repulsive; it epitomized in a disgusting way the rule of the white conqueror over the subject Indians. Shooting an elephant was an affirmation of man’s dominance over the animal kingdom, which to radicals was as offensive as the British subjugation of the Indian peasant.
24
Elephant hunting, however, was part of the feudal, traditional India, and it legitimized the prince’s status as greatest prince of all. Shooting an elephant was a
public act, a performance where the prince was the principal actor: He must be seen to kill the great beast.
§
From Ceylon, Bertie steamed in the
Serapis
north to Calcutta, where he began a ceremonial progress to Delhi. Sport was an essential part of the program. Radicals back home dubbed him the pigsticking prince, and complained that he was wasting public money making brutal war against animals.
25
“It were best had the Prince of Wales stopped at home,” wrote
Reynolds’s Newspaper
.
26
Pigsticking, which involved galloping after ferocious wild boar with a spear, Bertie, in fact, declined, perhaps sensibly, as four members of his suite were injured.
‖
Tiger shooting, however, was mandatory. Staying with the Maharaja of Jaipur, Bertie shot his first tiger—a pregnant female with three cubs. It took four shots to kill her.
The Queen confessed herself bored with Bertie’s progresses, which she dismissed as a wearying repetition of “elephants—trappings—jewels—illuminations and fireworks,” but Bertie was in his element.
27
As Bartle Frere told Victoria, he outworked everyone on his staff, and “showed less susceptibility to heat and exposure to the sun than any of us.”
28
He could remember every name, every firework display and every banquet; as Russell put it, his memory “holds every fact in a vice.”
29
He knew more chiefs than all the viceroys and governors put together. His ability to connect with the rulers of the princely states helped to legitimize the Raj as a neo-feudal alliance between the Indian princes and the English Queen. Indian Civil Service officer Sir
Henry Daly commented, “The effect of the Prince on the Chiefs is miraculous. There is a sentiment in their feudalism which has been touched.… His manner and air to them is perfect.”
30
