The Heir Apparent (50 page)

Bertie spent the morning shooting ducks at Sandringham on 30 January 1889, the day he received news of the sudden death of Crown Prince Rudolf.
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He was shocked and “greatly upset.”

“I knew him so well,” he told Jennie Churchill, “and had seen so much of him last year that I cannot bring myself to believe that I shall never see him again.”
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Rudolf was found shot through the head at his hunting lodge at Mayerling. In his bed lay the dead body of his mistress, the eighteen-year-old Marie Vetsera. Official reports claimed that the Mayerling tragedy was a double suicide, the result of a lovers’ pact, but Salisbury was convinced that Rudolf and Marie Vetsera had been assassinated.
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Bertie made it his business to ascertain the true story.
⁵⁷
He told the Queen on 12 February that Rudolf had killed Marie Vetsera and then himself.

According to Bertie’s informant, there was “some unknown reason” why Rudolf committed suicide, and he didn’t do it on account of Marie Vetsera. Bertie hinted at dark secrets: “There are details I could tell you—which I cannot write—which clearly show complete aberration of the mind for some time past—the whole story is like a bad dream and I can think of nothing else.”
⁵⁸

Rudolf had plenty of reasons to blow his brains out. He suffered from syphilis, and he may well have inherited the Wittelsbach depression through his mother, the Empress Elizabeth, whose cousin, the mad King Ludwig II of Bavaria, died in mysterious circumstances in 1886. But what really happened at Mayerling is still a mystery, and the answer is said to lie in a locked archive in the Vatican. With its stories of secret papers that will reveal all and hints at an establishment cover-up, Mayerling mirrors the Eddy/Ripper myth—a tale of a flawed and mentally unbalanced heir to the throne, syphilis, sexual promiscuity, and murder.

Bertie attended the Catholic requiem mass for Rudolf at Farm Street Church of the Immaculate Conception, but he disappointed the Austrian court by staying away from the funeral in Vienna, though he sent a “
beautiful
” wreath—“the words were in black on white satin.” By then tales were spreading of the “awful crime” that Rudolf had committed, and no one in Vienna regretted his death.
⁵⁹
Bertie, however, remained loyal to his friend’s memory. For him, the prince’s death was more than a personal tragedy. Rudolf, who had also been a favorite of Vicky’s, was the last link in Bertie’s project of an Anglophile German bloc. First Fritz’s death had ruled out the prospect of a good Germany. Now Rudolf’s death ended the dream of a liberal Austria.

Bertie did gain one key contact in Austria through Rudolf: Baron Maurice de Hirsch, the Austrian railway magnate, who was descended from a family of Jewish financiers at the Bavarian court. Rudolf had agreed to give him an introduction to the Prince of Wales in exchange
for a loan.
⁶⁰
After Rudolf’s death, Hirsch became Bertie’s financial adviser, helping to fill the growing gap between the prince’s income and his spending.

In February 1889, the kaiser let it be known that he wished to visit England in the summer. Still smoldering from the Vienna incident, Victoria was adamant that “William must
not
come this year,” telling Bertie, “
you
could not meet him, and I could
not
after all he has done and said.”
⁶¹
Bertie agreed, refusing to meet the kaiser unless he received an expression of regret for the incident at Vienna. But Bertie and his mother failed to reckon with Lord Salisbury. He insisted that Britain needed good relations with Germany, and William must be allowed to come. “It is your Majesty’s interest,” he told the Queen, “to make his penitential return as easy to him as possible.”
⁶²

Pushed by Salisbury, Victoria reluctantly consented to invite her nephew, but only to Cowes and not to Windsor. Like a small child, the kaiser was ecstatic, and wired Victoria that he was “overjoyed to be allowed” to come to the “dear old Home.”
⁶³
This was strange language for a German emperor to use, but it hints at his confused sense of identity. For William (as one psycho-historian has suggested), England was identified with his mother, and though he resented the dominance of Vicky/England, at the same time he longed for her approval. Validation by Vicky/England was crucial to his sense of self-worth.
⁶⁴
To Vicky, the news of William’s impending visit came as a “
stab
.”

“The thought that W[illiam] who has
so
trampled upon me, and on his beloved father’s memory, should now be received … in my own dear home,” she found unbearable, betraying by the violence of her language—“stab,” “trampled”—the rawness of her emotions toward her son.
⁶⁵

Bertie’s quarrel with the kaiser was still unresolved. Bertie was by now “sick … of the whole affair,” and, guided perhaps by Knollys, who had thought all along that the Queen was the best person to reach a settlement, he decided in May to “leave the matter entirely in dear Mama’s hands.”
⁶⁶
His relations with Victoria had never been better. At
Easter she granted him his “long looked for wish”: She stayed at Sandringham.
⁶⁷
Only once had she come before, in 1871–72, when she thought Bertie was dying of typhoid. The Easter visit was a success; she was “pleased with her reception” through the triumphal arches escorted by the West Norfolk Hunt, and she enjoyed the theatrical performance that Bertie arranged with Ellen Terry and Henry Irving.
⁶⁸

Salisbury frightened the Queen by threatening that a rupture with Germany caused by a personal quarrel within the royal family would endanger the position of the monarchy at home.
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He then drafted a friendly letter to William for the Queen to sign.
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Bertie considered the letter was “too mild.”

“My only fear,” he told Vicky, “is that W[illiam] will consider the matter as over and will not allude to it again.”
⁷¹
He needn’t have worried. William’s reply to this innocuous document was as insulting as it was postmodern. The whole Vienna incident, he now declared, “is purely a fixed idea which originated either in Uncle Bertie’s own imagination or in somebody else’s, who put it into his head.”
⁷²

The kaiser’s mendacious reply “made matters worse than ever,” wrote Ponsonby.
⁷³
At Windsor and Marlborough House the Queen and prince and their advisers feverishly wrote and rewrote angrier or less angry letters to William deploring the insult and outrage to the prince.
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But it was no use. Salisbury insisted that their letters would only worsen the quarrel, and none was sent. Knollys lamented that “the Prince of Wales is sacrificed by Lord Salisbury to political expediency.”
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Bertie deplored what he saw as Salisbury’s weakness and willingness to appease the bullying Bismarcks. Salisbury had given “the worst possible advice, making us virtually ‘eat humble pie’!”
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In fact, the episode was a triumph for Salisbury, who had skillfully finessed both the Queen and the Prince of Wales into dropping their family quarrels where these conflicted with the foreign policy of constitutionally elected ministers.

Salisbury was equally shrewd in dealing with the kaiser. On learning that William cared even more about uniforms than his uncle Bertie, he persuaded Victoria to offer William the rank of a British admiral. The effect was electric. William was childishly grateful. “Fancy wearing
the same uniform as St. Vincent and Nelson,” he gushed; “it is enough to make one quite giddy.”
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Soon he was writing gaily to “Dearest Grandmama” to say how glad he was that the Vienna incident was concluded, “and I shall be happy to meet Uncle Bertie in Osborne.”
⁷⁸

The visit to Osborne in August was a triumph. Bertie was on board the royal yacht
Osborne
to welcome William, who arrived on the
Hohenzollern
wearing his new admiral’s uniform, and William kissed the Queen affectionately on both cheeks. Bertie was constantly in attendance, and even Alix was present.
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William was gratified when Victoria invited him to breakfast in her tent, “a rare honour.”
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He told the Queen afterward how delighted he was “to feel and take an interest in your fleet as if it were my own.”
⁸¹

William’s honeymoon with England enabled Germany to adopt the liberal foreign policy urged by Vicky and Fritz. Soon the Bismarcks were sacked and their pro-Russian policies abandoned. Vicky watched with divided feelings. She approved of William’s pro-English views, but she found his triumphalism and boasting about the way he had been feted by the English court a toxic pill to swallow. She deliberately refrained from interfering. “Wronged and persecuted as I have been, I could have appealed to you,” she told her mother, “and all my brothers and sisters to seek redress for me.… But this I could
not
do in my position. England
must
appear to ignore what are affairs of the German court and see that relations between the two great countries be not disturbed or affected by family affairs.”
⁸²
Lord Salisbury could not have put it better himself.

But Salisbury’s insistence on elected governments controlling foreign policy failed to allow for the dynastic marriages of Queen Victoria’s extended family. Never before had the English royal family been so closely related to the rulers of the great powers. As the generation of Victoria’s grandchildren succeeded to the thrones of Europe, the scope for the dynastic diplomacy at which Bertie excelled was to expand. But not yet: not while Salisbury and Victoria were in control.

One day in February 1889, Bertie received a surprise visit from a member of the Marlborough House set: Lady Brooke. Daisy Brooke at twenty-eight had china-blue eyes, a tiny waist, a curvaceous figure of the type that delighted the prince, and the irresistible charm of manner that comes from always getting one’s own way. Bertie found himself unable to decline an appeal for help from “Beauty in Distress.”
¹
Years later, Daisy recalled her conquest: “He was more than kind … and suddenly I saw him looking at me in a way all women understand. I knew I had won, so I asked him to come to tea. For ten years afterwards he came to tea with me every day when we were both in London.”
²
This was Daisy’s way of saying that she had become the prince’s mistress.

Daisy’s enemies alleged that she had barely met the prince at the time of her Beauty in Distress interview, but this was far from the case. Bertie had known her since she was a child. She was an heiress, inheriting
a fortune and Easton Lodge, an estate in Essex, from her grandfather Viscount Maynard at the age of three; this gave her a confidence and sense of entitlement that was unusual among women of her class. She was a court insider, as her stepfather, Lord Rosslyn, a friend of Disraeli, was a favorite of Queen Victoria. The Queen chose Daisy as a suitable bride for Prince Leopold, but this project suited neither party. Determined to take possession of her inheritance at Easton Lodge, the nineteen-year-old Daisy infuriated her parents by marrying her childhood sweetheart, Lord Brooke, heir to the Earl of Warwick.
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Bertie attended the wedding and signed the register at Westminster Abbey in 1881.
³
Daisy came into Bertie’s life again in 1886, two children later, when she and “Brookey” stayed at Sandringham in January, and in June the prince paid his first visit to the Brookes at Easton Lodge. The names at that first royal house party are listed in Bertie’s diary. The guests included the nucleus of the Marlborough House set: Lady Randolph Churchill, Lady Mandeville, and Lord and Lady Charles Beresford.
⁴
Together with Daisy herself, these people were to form the dramatis personae of the scandals that almost derailed Bertie’s life in the years 1889–91.