The Heir Apparent (40 page)

Not until late November was Charlotte well enough to move; still very weak, she was lifted into the train by Alix’s Highland piper and traveled in a special carriage that had been carefully heated to sixty degrees (this was the temperature that Queen Victoria ordained for the rooms of her palaces) by hot-water pans.
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Sometime in 1877, Lillie acquired a plot of land in Bournemouth from Lord Derby and began to build a house. The foundation stone reads: “ELL 1877,” for Emilie Le Breton Langtry, and the house was a redbrick seaside villa, many gabled, half-timbered, and sprawling. Inside it was emblazoned with mottoes. “They say—What say they? Let them say.” “And yours, my friends.” Legend has it that Bertie bought the land for her through an intermediary and paid for the house to be built, and that he stayed there and played at domesticity with Lillie. No evidence has ever been produced to support this.
³⁷

Nonetheless, 1878 was Lillie’s year of triumph. She and her husband, Ned, moved into a house at 17 Norfolk Street, off Park Lane, early in the New Year. Money was tight—when her furniture was sold a few years later, “the only thing at all nice was a low Chippendale
wardrobe”—but Lillie by now was earning a little.
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Cartes de visite
of her photographs filled the shop windows, and the society papers fed their readers with titillating crumbs of gossip about her. Her portraits by Millais and Poynter were the star attractions of the Royal Academy summer exhibition, and Lillie was mobbed by admirers as she walked through the rooms on the night of the opening banquet.
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One of her admirers was Bertie’s friend Rudolf, the eighteen-year-old Austrian Crown Prince. He had come to England to see his mother, the Empress Elizabeth of Austria, who was spending the winter riding to hounds in Northamptonshire, much to the annoyance of Queen Victoria, who thought it “very unbecoming”: “It
lowers
Royalty, and female Royalty above all to have an Empress coming over to hunt.”
^†
40
The callow prince danced with Lillie at a ball given by Ferdinand de Rothschild. Lillie, who was wearing an expensive gown of pale pink crêpe de Chine, suddenly realized that Rudolf had become unpleasantly hot, and his sweaty hands were making marks on her new dress. When she asked him to put his gloves on, he ungallantly replied,
“C’est vous qui suez, madame”
(“It’s you who sweats, madam”).
^‡
Rudolf had misread the signals. He had called often at Lillie’s Norfolk Street house, presumably under the impression that Mrs. Langtry was a royal
poule de luxe
, but he was unwelcome.
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Lillie claimed in her memoirs (and her biographers have repeated it) that she went everywhere with Bertie in the season of 1878. Their friendship has often been described as a domesticated love affair, but there is a hole—a silence—at the center of the narrative. No letters from this time survive. Many of the stories seem to be exaggerated or
wrong. Lillie is alleged to have consummated her relationship with Bertie when Alix refused an invitation to accompany him to a royal house party at Crichel, Dorset, with Lord Alington in January 1878. In fact, Alix
was
there, playing a central role in the ball and festivities, which lasted a week. Louise Manchester reported to Disraeli that Bertie was “very snappish” throughout the whole visit; the Langtrys are not mentioned.
⁴²

Lillie was presented to Queen Victoria in May. Her husband had been presented by Bertie a few weeks earlier, and Lillie’s presentation validated her ambivalent social status.
⁴³
She was low down the list of ladies, but the Queen, who usually left her drawing rooms well before the end, stayed on purpose to see her, or so Lillie believed. Victoria, dressed in black satin with the blue Garter ribbon across her bosom, looked straight in front of her and put out her hand, Lillie thought, in “rather a perfunctory way.” Lillie worried that her headdress, of three ostentatiously large ostrich feathers, cheekily aping the Prince of Wales’s crest, had annoyed the Queen. According to her own account, she went on to curtsey to the waiting row of royalties, beginning with the Prince and Princess of Wales; and later that evening, while dancing at Marlborough House, Bertie chaffed her on her feathers. Most of this anecdote seems to have been make-believe on Lillie’s part. Bertie was not present at Lillie’s drawing room. He was in Paris. So was Alix. Lillie’s presentation had been arranged in order to avoid embarrassment to the Princess of Wales.
⁴⁴

We can glimpse Bertie’s relationship with Lillie in a gossipy letter written by Disraeli, newly ennobled as Earl of Beaconsfield. One night his private secretary, Monty Corry, dined with Prince Hal, as Beaconsfield called Bertie. Afterward, Bertie took Monty to supper with a friend, and there he found “Mr. Standish and Mrs. [Sloane-] Stanley and the Jersey beauty whose name begins with an L; and what with oysters and champagne and so on it was getting very late and very late it was when they broke up. And then Prince Hal said, ‘I shall go to the Turf now and play whist!’ Even Monty could not stand that and escaped, having had a real day with Prince Hal!”
⁴⁵
Perhaps, like Shakespeare’s Hal, Bertie was a prince who roistered and drank until the
small hours, and Lillie was his wench. Perhaps their relationship was not a grand passion, but a matter of companionship, of low life and late nights.

Bertie was taking risks, nevertheless. He had become the first modern gossip-column prince, keenly spied on by the new society papers such as
Truth
,
Vanity Fair
, and
The World
that mushroomed in the 1870s, competing for royal scoops and syndicating their columns to the provincial press. Everything he said or did was commented upon and often distorted.
The World
hinted at adultery, and warned Prince Hal, as it also called him, of the “gathering disfavour with which his widely conspicuous life is beginning to be watched.”
⁴⁶
The Queen’s private secretary Henry Ponsonby reported “an undefined feeling” against Bertie, as he “does not treat the Princess fairly.” Because Alix was more popular, any suspicion of unfaithfulness created indignation against him. He was accused of leading a frivolous life, but this, thought Ponsonby, was “hard on him for what is he to do.”
⁴⁷

The week before Lillie was presented at court, Bertie made a speech in Paris at the opening of the great Exposition. He chaired the British section, and in his speech he declared, “I am convinced that the
entente cordiale
which exists between this country and our own is one which is not likely to change.”
⁴⁸
His words were welcomed by the French as signaling a thaw in relations with England, which had frozen into a cold war ever since the birth of the Third Republic. On 6 May 1878, Bertie met Léon Gambetta, the architect of the Republic, and the two men agreed in their distrust of Germany and Chancellor Bismarck. The visit had turned into a state event, and Bertie was followed by reporters wherever he went. When
“Vive la République!”
was cried and Bertie was seen to put his hat on his head, a gesture of sympathy that he didn’t intend, he remarked, “I thought they were going to say
‘Vive la France!’
 ” The
Times
reporter insisted that Bertie had put his hat on simply because it was raining.
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Never before had Bertie been taken so seriously as a diplomatic figure. The experience went to his head. He confided in Carrington that
when he became king, he intended to act as his own foreign secretary. Carrington repeated this to Gladstone, who was horrified, and growled that in that case, the prince would “probably find his Foreign Office in foreign parts.”
⁵⁰
In England, anyone who disagreed with Bertie’s politics instantly declared that he was exceeding his constitutional powers. Abroad it was different. When he spoke to the Russians or the French, he was taken seriously; foreigners assumed that the British heir apparent carried the same weight at home as his counterparts abroad. This was the secret of his lifelong involvement in foreign politics. He had discovered that, in a Europe of monarchical great powers, his position gave him far more freedom and power to influence events abroad than those at home.

Bertie’s biographers, trying to give shape and purpose to the life of the future king, picture him taking an active interest in the Balkan Crisis of 1876–78.
^§
His views on the 1876 revolt of Serbs and Bulgarians against Turkish rule were certainly forthright. He staunchly supported the Ottoman Empire and blamed Russia for encouraging and promoting the Slavs. This brought him into line with Queen Victoria, who was fiercely anti-Russian, but caused a split with Affie, whose wife, Marie, was the daughter of the czar Alexander II. Alix’s loyalties were also pro-Russian. Not only was her sister Minnie the wife of the czarevitch, but her brother Willie, King George I of Greece, depended on Russian support for his throne. But though the Balkan Crisis made fault lines in British politics, its impact on the royal family was far less seismic and divisive than the wars of German unification had been.

Bertie agreed with the pro-Turk Beaconsfield, who stubbornly refused to declare his sympathy for the Bulgarian Christians massacred by the Turks in the summer of 1876. When Gladstone launched a moral crusade against the Bulgarian atrocities and published a bestselling pamphlet,
The Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East
, Bertie wrote to prime minister Beaconsfield giving his support. “I deeply deplore the present agitation over the so-called Bulgarian atrocities.… It
must, I fear, weaken the hands of the government, who are so anxious to do all in their power to obtain peace.”
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But the Foreign Office no longer sent Bertie dispatches. Beaconsfield grumbled that Bertie talked indiscreetly to his friends about government secrets, and Victoria ordered that dispatches should not be sent.
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Her refusal to confide in Bertie contrasted starkly with her confidence in Leopold, twelve years Bertie’s junior, who acted as her private secretary on Beaconsfield’s recommendation (this was a move to block the influence of the Liberal Ponsonby, as Leopold was a staunch Tory). For his twenty-fourth birthday in April 1877, Leopold received a Cabinet key to the government red boxes, the coveted symbol of admission to the Queen’s confidence, which had always been denied to Bertie. To avoid trouble with Leopold’s “Royal Brothers,” Beaconsfield advised the Queen to ask for a second Cabinet key for her own convenience, rather than mentioning Leopold by name.
⁵³
Such matters were not discussed between Bertie and Victoria.

As Ponsonby wrote: “It is true that the Queen does communicate all unpleasant matters with the Prince of Wales through third persons—but so does he. They dread personal meetings on these controversies. Whenever they take place the Queen has always the best of it and he gives way on all points and throws any blame off himself quickly. But they write a great deal to each other—but even then avoid controversial subjects.”
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Bertie’s judgment on foreign affairs was worryingly naïve. His chief source of information on the military position in Turkey was his friend Colonel Valentine Baker, who had been dismissed from the 10th Hussars, of which Bertie was colonel in chief. Baker had been accused of attacking a girl in a railway carriage, and though he was acquitted of rape (but convicted of indecent assault), Victoria, who considered that he was a disgrace to the British Army, insisted on cashiering him. Bertie stood loyally by his friend, helping to get him appointed as a military adviser to the Turks, and as Pasha Baker, he became a military hero.
⁵⁵
Bertie pestered Beaconsfield to see Baker, but the prime minister, who was no doubt fearful of annoying the Queen, declined to take his advice.
⁵⁶
Ponsonby despaired at Bertie’s inability to concentrate.
“Nothing can be more genial and pleasant than he is for a few minutes. But he does not endure. He can’t keep up the interest for any length of time. And I don’t think he ever will settle down to business.”
⁵⁷
To the suggestion that he should follow up his Indian tour by becoming a member of the Indian Council, Bertie was indifferent. (He did, however, lend his collection of Indian animals to London Zoo, which probably did more good, as visitor numbers soared, increasing the zoo’s takings by over £6,000.)
⁵⁸
Knollys complained of the difficulty of getting him to enter into any subject and decide on it. “They have to catch snap answers from him as he goes shooting etc.”
⁵⁹

Just how much of a loose cannon the prince could be became evident in the winter of 1877–78, when Russia invaded Turkey and advanced toward Constantinople. Bertie now spoke openly about war with Russia; Lord Derby, the foreign secretary, who was a dove, complained that the hawk prince “talks loudly and foolishly in all companies.”
⁶⁰
English politicians dismissed Bertie’s violent language as out of order, but, as Derby discovered, in Russia his explosions were taken seriously and created the impression that England was bent on war. Count Schouvaloff, the Russian ambassador in London, who knew better, “in vain tried to explain the position of the Prince of Wales, and the little importance that attaches to his words: but that is not easily understood in Petersburgh.”
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Russia was eventually brought to book at the Congress of Berlin (13 June–13 July 1878). This was a personal triumph for Beaconsfield; Turkey regained its independence, and Britain gained Cyprus. The Congress alarmed the French, who feared a threat to their influence in Egypt, and made Britain so unpopular that the ambassador in Paris advised Bertie to postpone the visit he was due to make in July. Bertie did the opposite. He went to Paris; and he held mediation talks with Gambetta, which helped win around the French. Salisbury, newly appointed foreign secretary, wrote to thank him “very earnestly.”
⁶²
When Bertie did what his foreign ministers wanted, they were all smiles, but his position at home was always vulnerable.