The Heir Apparent (45 page)

During the 1880s, the number of Bertie’s openings, dinners, and other such public engagements climbed to a yearly average of forty-two; but his amusements grew in proportion.
¹
Cowes Week swelled to fill a fortnight, or sometimes the entire month of August: to “get the sea breezes and yachting” was “an immense relaxation,” he explained, “after the fatigues of the London season.” From 1883 he escaped to Cannes for three weeks in February and March, which he found “very beneficial … at that somewhat trying time of year.”
²
Keeping the prince amused was “a major social problem,” and stratagems were devised to relieve the tedium of staying year after year with the same parties in the same great houses.
³

The routine of his social season was reconfigured. Bertie stayed most years during the 1880s in mid-July at Waddesdon.
⁴
This brand-new French chateau in the Rothschild county of Buckinghamshire was the creation of Ferdinand de Rothschild. A member of the Austrian
family, he was a widower in his forties. Morose, depressive, and solipsistic, he disliked racing, took no interest in pretty women, and dined on cold toast and water.
⁵
Though his priceless collections seemed to give him little pleasure, he was a perfectionist. Once after a storm devastated the flower garden, an early rising guest noticed an army of gardeners replanting the borders to their former glory in time for breakfast.
⁶
The nervy-fingered “Ferdy” seemed an unlikely friend for Bertie, but the connection suited both men. The novelist Henry James found the “gilded bondage of that gorgeous place” oppressive, but Bertie had always been drawn to Rothschilds, because he “relished their sensible cosmopolitan outlook, public spirit, geniality and panache.”
⁷
Waddesdon became a favorite place for the prince to entertain, effectively an alternative court. Guest lists were sent in advance to Marlborough House for approval, and Bertie noted the names carefully in his diary, as he did whenever he stayed in a country house.
⁸
The Rothschilds appealed all the more in the 1880s as, squeezed by agricultural depression, Bertie’s English friends no longer vied so keenly for the expensive honor of entertaining him.

Alix did not come to Waddesdon. But she accompanied Bertie, at least at first, to another new social fixture: the Duke of Richmond’s house party for Goodwood races, which ended the summer season in late July. The first of the huge royal Goodwood parties took place in 1881.
⁹
Dean Stanley, Queen Victoria’s beloved friend who had accompanied the twenty-year-old prince to the Holy Land, had died a few days before. The funeral was brought forward to suit HRH. Bertie’s diary notes: “Attend Dean of Westminster’s funeral at Westminster Abbey 4. Leave Victoria Station 6 for Chichester drive to Goodwood House and stay there.”
¹⁰
He was truly a railway prince. Victoria grieved that Bertie refused to cancel his end-of-season ball at Marlborough House out of respect for the dean.
¹¹
People were even more shocked when Alix opened the first quadrille dancing with King Kalakaua of Hawaii. Bertie took the king with him everywhere that season, insisting that he should be given precedence. He wanted to persuade Kalakaua to agree to the annexation of his islands by Britain, rather than America. At Lady Spencer’s party, the King of Hawaii marched along
beside Alix, while Fritz, the German Crown Prince, trailed humbly behind. When the Germans objected, Bertie retorted: “Either the brute is a King or else he is an ordinary black nigger, and if he is not a King, why is he here at all?”
¹²

Bertie’s appetite was inexhaustible; after a dinner of many courses, he was said to retire with a cold chicken beside his bed, which, so the story went, was always bare in the morning.
^*
His nickname was Tum Tum—though he was sensitive on the subject. When Sir Frederick Johnstone was behaving obstreperously in the billiard room at Sandringham, Bertie put his hand on his shoulder: “Freddy, Freddy, you’re very drunk.” Johnstone pointed at Bertie’s expanding middle and, imitating his rolling
rrr
’s, replied: “Tum Tum, you’re
verrry
fat!” Bertie walked out of the room, and the friendship was terminated. Johnstone left the house before breakfast the next morning.
¹³
Carrington described a shooting party at Holkham with the Earl of Leicester in December 1881: “We fell at once to luncheon. Woodcock pie, mashed potatoes and champagne, curacao, cigarettes, and then fevered and restless sleep.” Dinner (men only) followed at eight sharp, and by 9:15 they were in the smoking room for an evening of play for high stakes.
¹⁴

When Bertie attended a party with Lord Stamford in Leicestershire, the shooting was ruined by the crowd of thousands of textile workers who crammed into the fields beside the woods and cheered lustily whenever Bertie appeared. They snatched at the dead pheasants as they fell to the ground and tore them to pieces in their enthusiasm, but nevertheless Bertie noted a tally of 8,463 pheasants over four days.
¹⁵

Eating and shooting were not enough to keep boredom at bay. For amusement Bertie turned to the young women from the New World who invaded English society in the 1880s. One name that features often in the lists of guests at royal house parties is that of Lady Mandeville.

Consuelo Mandeville was the daughter of a Cuban landowner named Yznaga; she was born in 1858 on her mother’s cotton plantation in Louisiana. As slave-owning Southerners whose fortunes fluctuated
wildly, the Yznagas were excluded from the magic circle of New York society after the Civil War. At eighteen, Consuelo made a spectacular romantic marriage to the Duke of Manchester’s son (she nursed him back to health after he fell ill from a fever while staying in her family house). The marriage turned out badly. Lord Mandeville was a weak-willed wastrel, and Consuelo’s fabled millions did not materialize. Nevertheless, being Lady Mandeville gave her the kudos she needed to launch herself on the social scene in both London and New York.
¹⁶

Consuelo Mandeville had tiny feet that uneasily supported her plump body; she told funny stories in a slow southern drawl, and she sang Spanish songs as she strummed her banjo. Later, Edith Wharton drew a sympathetic portrait of her in
The Buccaneers
, where she features as Conchita Closson, the dusky-skinned, cigarette-smoking southern beauty who leads the American invasion of England.
¹⁷
Consuelo and her two sisters, Nantica (who married Sir John Lister-Kaye) and Emily Yznaga, were often at Marlborough House. When Bertie and Alix took Consuelo and her two-and-a-half-year-old twin daughters to visit Queen Victoria, the children disobeyed instructions to kiss her hand, and rushed toward her, climbed into her lap, and flung their chubby arms around her neck, covering her with kisses and chanting, “Nice Queen! Nice Queen!” To the relief of all, Victoria was delighted, returned their kisses, and asked them to stay for luncheon.
¹⁸
A favorite of Bertie’s (“He’s crazy about her Spanish songs”), Consuelo was rumored to be his mistress. She was so short of money that when the prince came to dinner, she had to ask her friends to send around the French cuisine.
¹⁹

More than three hundred American women married into peers’ or baronets’ families between 1870 and 1914, and by 1914 as many as 17 percent of such families had American connections. Only a few of these marriages were straight financial transactions, trading American dollars for English titles. It was not so much the Americans’ cash as their style that appealed: their fearlessness, their talkativeness, and their lack of respect for rank.
²⁰
How to know whether an American girl came from a good family was a puzzle for English hostesses; as the
fictional Lady Brightlingsea remarks in
The Buccaneers
, “I don’t see how they can tell each other apart, all herded together, without any titles or distinctions.”
²¹
Consuelo knew exactly which American was which, and she acted as social gatekeeper. When Bertie asked her advice, she would habitually reply: “Oh, Sir, she has no position at home; out there she would be just dirt under our feet.”
²²

From 1882, Bertie retired each year to Homburg, where he spent several weeks taking the cure. Homburg was an island of Englishness in Germany.
^†
Here, each morning at seven, Bertie drank the waters from the Elisabeth-Brunnen, the spring named after his great-aunt, Elizabeth, Princess of Hesse-Homburg: three beakers of the salt-rich and gaseous waters were supposed to relax the bowels within an hour. Between each glass of water, Bertie joined spa visitors in walking as fast as he could up and down the avenue.
²³
He played lawn tennis for weight-reducing exercise, and in the evenings he dined at the Kursaal, the grand conversation house of the spa with its marble columns and ballroom.
²⁴
He pretended to lead the simple life, but Homburg was hardly a quiet retreat; Bertie’s arrival made it instantly fashionable and the English competed to hold grand balls in his honor.
²⁵

At Homburg in 1882, Bertie’s list of dinner guests included an American family: Mr., Mrs., and Miss Chamberlain. Nineteen-year-old Jane (Jeannie) Chamberlain, whom Bertie admired, was the daughter of William Selah Chamberlain, millionaire heir to a Cleveland railroad fortune. A shrewd American debutante, she refused to see Bertie without her parents being present. Chamberpots, as Alix called her, remained in favor for a couple of years. Whether she was really as innocent and virtuous as she pretended is debatable. In 1884, the Paris police watched Bertie paying visits to Jane Chamberlain (among many other women) at the Hotel Balmoral, and according to them, she was his
maîtresse en titre
.
²⁶
In July that year, Edward Hamilton, Gladstone’s secretary, saw Bertie at a dinner party and noted that “as usual, he occupied
himself entirely with Miss Chamberlain,” and in August, Bertie asked for the de Falbes, the Danish minister and his wife, to invite the Chamberlains to their ball.
^‡
27

John Brown died of erysipelas in March 1883. Queen Victoria was utterly crushed. The shock left her unable to walk.
²⁸
Bertie detested Brown, but the death of the favorite brought him no closer to his mother. Alix wrote sympathizing tactfully with the Queen’s grief: “I can quite understand how every day and hour at Balmoral must remind you of one who was ever near you.”
²⁹
It might do some good, she told the grieving Queen, “to put one’s Sorrow into words and confide the almost intolerable
loneliness of suffering
to a sympathising soul! And that you know dearest Mama you have indeed in poor me!”
³⁰

Bertie was appalled by the Queen’s plan to commemorate Brown by publishing a volume of
More Leaves from the Journal of a Life in the Highlands
, which she dedicated to “the Memory of my devoted personal attendant and faithful friend,” John Brown. “I have grave doubts,” he told the Queen, “whether your private life, which ought to be considered as sacred as that of your humblest subjects, should be as it were exposed to the world.”
³¹
This was a fundamental clash over the role of monarchy, and Victoria’s response indicates a startlingly modern approach. “I certainly
cannot
agree,” she wrote. “In these days of Radicalism,” she considered that publications of this sort, sold in cheap editions to the humblest of her subjects, could only strengthen the monarchy. “I
know
that the publication of my first book did me more good than anything else.”
³²

In
More Leaves
, Victoria described a life at Balmoral of nice breakfasts, pony-riding expeditions, and Highland weather. “It is innocence itself,” commented the prime minister on reading the Queen’s book. But, as the editor of his diaries remarked, the innocence in this case was Gladstone’s, not the Queen’s.
³³
By reinventing herself as a nonpolitical,
out-of-doors person, the Queen effectively disarmed her radical critics, who had previously complained, with good reason, that she was politically partisan and interfering.

“It might create surprize,” Bertie told the Queen, “that the name of your eldest son never occurred in it.”
³⁴
Victoria could not resist telling him that his name was mentioned five times: “I fear you have not read the book if you overlooked this.”
³⁵
She inserted into the new edition a lengthy account of Bertie’s leave-taking before his visit to India in 1875. “I can’t deny that your remarks about my book
pained
me very much,” she told him, “as I was particularly anxious to hurt
no one’s
feelings, and I thought I had succeeded.”
³⁶

Bertie tried, as he had tried before, to persuade his mother to open Parliament; as before, he failed. Victoria refused to appear to give support to the hated Gladstone, though she had opened Parliament three times during Disraeli’s 1874–80 government.
³⁷
The prince claimed to be neutral: “It is … well known that I have always favoured no party side in politics.”
³⁸
But he found Gladstone easy to deal with—in fact, Bertie was “the only friend among members of the Royal family whom Mr. Gladstone has got.”
³⁹
He understood that Gladstone’s fierceness toward the Queen masked a thin skin. Staying at Sandringham, Gladstone weighed himself at the prince’s request (165 pounds), and he was charmed by Alix, who told him sweetly, “You will have your favourite hymn Rock of Ages.”
^§
40

Bertie’s contacts kept him well informed about Gladstone’s night walks, when he prowled the London streets for prostitutes, whom he attempted to redeem. Gladstone was fascinated by Lillie Langtry, who wrote so often, enclosing her letters in double envelopes to protect them from prying eyes, that his private secretary Edward Hamilton had to warn the prime minister against seeing her, as her reputation “is in such bad odour that, despite all the endeavours of HRH, nobody
will receive her in their houses.”
⁴¹
Catherine Walters (Skittles) was another of Bertie’s friends who attracted Gladstone. He read to her, gave her gifts of tea, and measured the size of her waist by putting his hands around it. Skittles reported all this back to Bertie, who advised her “not to trouble [Gladstone] about politics at first, but when he has got into the habit of coming then I mean to let him have it.”
⁴²