The Heir Apparent (59 page)

Bertie’s new toy was the royal yacht
Britannia
. Commissioned by him in 1892 and built on the Clyde,
Britannia
was both a state-of-the-art racing cutter and a luxury yacht. She won races in 1893, but 1894 was her most exciting season, as she battled race after race with her American rival
Vigilant
. The prince’s coolness gained the admiration of his crew, who watched as
Britannia
heeled from side to side, maneuvering at the start of a race, while Bertie sat on deck reading the newspapers, his deck chair rolling violently. At length he stood up and held on to the rail of the ship, and both chair and papers fell overboard. Asked whether the chair should be retrieved, Bertie merely remarked, “Yes, pick up the papers,” and a dinghy was dispatched to recover the royal
Times
.
⁵⁷

When Bertie went to the South of France in the spring, he stayed on board
Britannia
, cruising from one regatta to another. On 3 March 1894, the day that
Britannia
arrived at Marseille, Bertie noted, “Mr. Gladstone resigns premiership is succeeded by Lord Rosebery.”
⁵⁸
Victoria was delighted; half blind and deaf, the eighty-five-year-old Gladstone noted her “cheerfulness” when he tendered his resignation at Windsor, and he was hurt that she expressed no regret but made small talk, allegedly remarking: “I hear your daughter has been bitten by a mad cat. Is that true?”
⁵⁹
To the prince, however, Gladstone wrote a sad little farewell letter (“the devotion of an old man is [of] little worth”) conveying his “fervent thanks” for his “unbounded kindness” and that of the “beloved Princess.”
⁶⁰
Bertie reciprocated the old man’s affection, and acted as a pallbearer at his funeral three years later.

Rosebery, Gladstone’s successor, was welcomed by both Bertie and Victoria. The Queen liked the forty-six-year-old aristocrat personally and thought she could control him politically (she couldn’t), and Rosebery was a good friend of Bertie’s.

A letter writer with the lightest of touches, unstuffy, civilized, and
sympathetic, the widower Rosebery was sufficiently close to the Waleses to write beguilingly to Alexandra imploring her to put aside her grief for Eddy and appear in public. (“I am half inclined to tear this letter up, but I leave that to Your Royal Highness.”)
⁶¹
Bertie stayed with Rosebery at Dalmeny, where he grumbled about the all-male party, but he enjoyed slipping down to the Durdans, Rosebery’s Epsom retreat (“Rosebery was in great form and chaffed R. Churchill unmercifully”).
⁶²

Perhaps Bertie knew too much about Rosebery. In August 1893, at Homburg, he had helped to rescue him from the mad Marquess of Queensberry. The homophobic marquess, who was the father of Lord Alfred Douglas (Bosie), the lover of Oscar Wilde, was convinced that his eldest son, Lord Drumlanrig, private secretary to Rosebery, was having a homosexual affair with Rosebery. He arrived in Homburg determined to “out” “that boy pimp and boy lover Rosebery.” He was met by the police and interviewed by the Prince of Wales, who told him, “We are quiet people at Homburg and don’t like disturbance.” The scandal took another turn in October 1894, when Drumlanrig was found dead during a shoot. The official verdict was accidental death, but dark rumors circulated of suicide and homosexual cover-up, and Rosebery lived in terror that the vicious marquess would denounce him.
⁶³

When Rosebery offered himself as a suitor for Princess Victoria, he was sharply rebuffed by Alix. Toria, as she was known, was intelligent—not as pretty as Maud, but very “light in hand” according to Carrington.
⁶⁴
Years later, as an old lady, Anita Leslie recalled Toria reflecting that “there had been someone perfect for her but they would not let her marry him—‘And we could have been so happy.’ ” The man, Anita later discovered, was Rosebery.
⁶⁵
At the time, the millionaire widower prime minister seemed far from ideal. Not only did his involvement in politics rule him out,
⁶⁶
but he was nineteen years older than Toria, painfully insomniac, and dogged by damaging rumors of homosexuality. And the fact was that Alix did not want her daughters to marry.

The husbandless state of Princesses Victoria (twenty-five) and Maud (twenty-four), unkindly known as “the Hags,” was beginning to
excite comment. “I cannot understand their not being married,” wrote Vicky, “they would be such charming wives.”
⁶⁷
When the Queen taxed Bertie about it, he told her that “Alix found them such companions that she would not encourage their marrying, and that they themselves had no inclination for it (in which I think he is mistaken as regards Maud). He said that he was ‘powerless,’ which I cannot understand.”
⁶⁸
The reason why Bertie was “powerless” was because of the rift between him and Alix over Daisy Warwick.

The Queen was right about Maud. Known as Harry, Maud was the most attractive of Bertie’s daughters; as her collection of designer dresses reveals, she was a size zero with an eighteen-inch waist. She admired Princess May’s brother, Prince Frank of Teck, but her feelings were not reciprocated. In the autumn of 1895, on a Danish family holiday at Bernstorff, she became engaged to her first cousin Prince Charles, the second son of Alix’s brother the King of Denmark and an officer in the Danish navy. Alix had hoped that Maud might marry the older brother. The Duchess of Teck thought Charles charming, but remarked that he looked “
fully 3 years younger
than Maud and has
no
money.”
⁶⁹
Charlotte Knollys declared that it was a love match: “He has cared for her for three years and she certainly seems extremely fond of him.”
⁷⁰
Maud was “very much in love,” but everyone doubted whether she would be prepared to live “in a cottage in Denmark with a lady-in-waiting” while her sailor prince was away at sea.
⁷¹
They were right. After her marriage in July 1896, she never ceased to grumble about her Danish exile, and was only happy at Appleton, the house that Bertie gave her on the Sandringham estate (it had previously been the home of the bad-tempered Mrs. Cresswell). Though Maud was supposed to be his favorite daughter, Bertie seemed oddly indifferent.

“Receive very bad accounts of Emperor of Russia’s health,” wrote Bertie on 30 October 1894.
⁷²
His forty-nine-year-old brother-in-law, Alexander III, was terminally ill with nephritis (kidney disease) and had gone to Livadia, his palace in the Crimea, to die. The next day, Bertie and Alix, accompanied by Arthur Ellis and Charlotte Knollys, left Charing
Cross on a special train. At Vienna they heard that the czar was dead. “Poor Mama is terribly upset,” Bertie told George. Bertie was moved, too; he was genuinely fond of his brother-in-law. This was his fourth visit to Russia, and he found it “the most trying and sad journey I have ever undertaken, and 3 days and 3 nights in the train with a sea voyage to follow is a great undertaking.”
⁷³

An hour after his arrival at the white-stuccoed imperial palace in the Crimea, Bertie found himself attending mass in the black-draped chapel, where the putrefying body of Alexander III lay in an open coffin. Twice daily he knelt with the royal families and their suites, wearing full uniform and holding a lighted taper while singers chanted mournful dirges in a language he could not understand.
⁷⁴

Alix never left her sister’s side. Livadia was a palace-village of small houses, and Alix stayed in the imperial house with Minnie and her family.
⁷⁵
The two sisters even shared a room, and Minnie was in consequence “able to sleep better than she has done for a long time.” Bertie was ensconced in another house “on my comfortable own.”
⁷⁶

Bertie was charged by Prime Minister Rosebery to win the sympathy of the new czar, his nephew Nicky. At twenty-six, Nicky had a childlike simplicity that portended disaster in the autocrat of all the Russians. “I know nothing of the business of ruling,” said he. “I have no idea of even how to talk to the ministers.”
⁷⁷

Bertie threw himself into the funeral arrangements. He summoned George to St. Petersburg, ordering his reluctant son to arrive in frock coat, cap, and sword. “Aiguil[l]ette
^a
in
thin
crape excepting the points … cocked hat and epaulettes covered with crape and white gloves would be the mourning,” he wrote.
⁷⁸
He spent hours closeted with Count Vorontzov-Dashkov, the minister of the imperial court, who was too deferential to protest when the young czar’s uncle dictated the arrangements for the journey to Moscow and even the funeral itself. “I wonder what his tiresome old mother would have said,” remarked Nicky’s sister the Grand Duchess Olga many years later, “if she had seen everybody accept uncle Bertie’s authority. In Russia of all
places!”
⁷⁹
Livadia was overcrowded and chaotic; one thousand people slept in the palaces, and Charlotte Knollys complained that she had to use her dressing table as a desk and keep her washing things in a piano.
⁸⁰
Arthur Ellis thought the “confusion, indecision and bustle” was worse even than the “masterly inactivity and fussiness” of Windsor Castle.
⁸¹
Bertie impressed everyone: “He is never in the way and is so kind and civil to all the suite and even to the servants whom he recognises,” wrote Charlotte Knollys.
⁸²

Bertie spent his fifty-third birthday traveling with the czar’s remains on the imperial train to Moscow. The royal party wore full court dress for the entire five-day journey—“first-class purgatory!” groaned Arthur Ellis.
⁸³
After the czar’s body had lain in state for twenty hours in the cathedral in Moscow, the train crawled on to St. Petersburg. From the station, Bertie walked in the four-hour procession that followed the funeral car to the church in the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul, where the coffin was deposited for the lying in state. The funeral took place on 19 November 1894, which was none too soon, as the body, which had been imperfectly embalmed, was rotting, the face looked a “dreadful colour,” and the stench was “awful.”
⁸⁴
Leaning heavily on Alix, Minnie advanced to the open coffin and for the last time kissed the shrunken lips of her dead husband.

The wedding of the new czar Nicholas II and Queen Victoria’s granddaughter Alexandra of Hesse (Alicky) took place a week later. Alix, who was suffering from a heavy cold, once again supported her red-eyed sister Minnie. Both sisters were dressed identically in simple white—a sign that their old intimacy had been restored. Bertie wore his Russian dragoon uniform, a birthday gift from Nicky, which was distinctly unflattering. Carrington was shocked to see “a fat man in a huge shaggy great coat looking like a huge Polar bear,” who turned out to be the Prince of Wales.
⁸⁵
After the service, the enthusiasm of the crowds was so great that Nicholas for once forgot his fear of assassination, and ordered the soldiers lining the route of the imperial procession to be removed. This spontaneous gesture prompted Bertie to predict a new dawn. “The people,” he told Queen Victoria, “only wish to be trusted by him; and if Nicky is liberal in his views and tolerant to
his subjects, a more popular Ruler of this country could not exist.”
⁸⁶
He was too optimistic. In May 1896 at the Imperial Coronation, a crowd stampeded, crushing thousands of peasants to death. Nicky refused to cancel or alter the ceremonies, heartlessly dancing while outside carts were piled high with corpses.
⁸⁷
Queen Victoria had dreaded Alicky’s marriage to Nicky: “My blood runs cold,” she wrote, “when I think of her … placed on that very unsafe throne.”
⁸⁸
Already the signs were ominous.

Bertie traveled home with George, leaving Alix behind with Minnie in the Anitchkoff Palace. In the deep cold of the Russian winter, Minnie clung pathetically to her sister. Alexander III had been a double-dyed reactionary, but he was a devoted husband, and his death left Minnie alone and dependent on her son. “I am all right and darling Minnie too we lead a very quiet life together now,” Alix wired the Queen.
⁸⁹
She had little reason to return home; the “only magnet,” wrote Arthur Ellis, “is the girls at Sandringham alone.”
⁹⁰

Daisy had by now become Countess of Warwick, her husband having succeeded as Earl of Warwick and inherited Warwick Castle. In February 1895, she gave a spectacular white and gold
bal poudre
(powdered wig ball). Bertie was tactfully absent, at Sandringham. Daisy ordered her guests to dress in the fashion of the court of Versailles under Louis XVI: She herself appeared as Marie Antoinette. Two weeks later, an article in a socialist paper,
The Clarion
, contrasted the lavish luxury and glitter of the Warwick ball with the shivering poor crowded in their hovels, and concluded: “I deeply pity the poor rich Countess of Warwick.” Stung by this personal attack, the philanthropic Daisy rushed up to London by the first train, sought out the dingy offices of
The Clarion
, and explained to the shabbily dressed editor Robert Blatchford that her ball had given work to half the county. Blatchford dismissed this as unproductive labor, and proceeded to give Daisy a lecture on socialist economics. Daisy left the office stunned; later, in her autobiography, she described this in quasi-religious terms as her conversion experience to socialism.
⁹¹
At the time, it hardly seemed so. True, she
was elected to the Warwick Board of Guardians; but her chief concern seemed to be to spend her fortune as speedily as she could.

In May 1895, Bertie stayed at Warwick Castle. This was his first visit, and he must have noticed the reckless spending that struck Margot Asquith so forcefully when she stayed there in 1897. By contrast with Waddesdon, where every picture or objet d’art represented an investment, at Warwick, wrote Margot, all was waste: “Some rare book or picture goes up to Christies annually, and the proceeds of this and Daisy’s private fortune goes to pay the florists, fruits, table linen, towels, hot water pipes, coiffeur etc—breakfasts like ball suppers, hot and renewed from 9:30 till 11:30, small scented notes with button holes on the table of the men at dressing time telling them the lady they are to take in to dinner.” As Margot cruelly noted, there was “something of the kindness and all the impulses of the cocotte” about Daisy.
⁹²
She would have been an easy victim for the French Revolutionists. Truly she seemed a latter-day Marie Antoinette.