The Heir Apparent (60 page)

As well as pouring money into her husband’s Warwick Castle, Daisy lavished her fortune on her own property at Easton Lodge. When Bertie came to stay in October 1895, he arrived in his special train at Easton Lodge station, on a private railway that Daisy had paid for out of her own pocket.
⁹³
Within six months, the Countess of Warwick was selling three thousand acres of her Essex estates.
⁹⁴
Such spending seemed only natural to Bertie, and it did not occur to him that Daisy might need financial help. In many ways, Daisy and Bertie were similar characters: socially confident extroverts, used to gratifying every appetite, compulsive spenders, and voracious eaters. Daisy’s granddaughter remembered Daisy in old age taking a bath, huge and devoid of her wig; she still wore Edwardian false hair and feather boas, and she wolfed pats of cheese and butter in the dairy.
⁹⁵

But Daisy claimed descent from Oliver Cromwell as well as Nell Gwyn. She had a puritanical streak, and she disapproved of drunkenness and gambling. She taught the prince to lead a better life; according to Knollys, she “terminated all the late hours and generally fast living that had prevailed before.”
⁹⁶
Perhaps Bertie grew tired of Daisy’s do-gooding—her needlework circles and schools for poor children, her
quixotic attempt to finance a welfare state out of her own personal fortune. The reverse D symbol still marched through his diary—it occurs on forty-odd days in both 1895 and 1896—but there were hints that their relationship was changing.

Daisy combined a social conscience with a commitment to sexual freedom; this very modern moral code was to be her undoing. Among the guests at the Warwick ball was a millionaire Durham coal owner named Joe Laycock. He was known as one of the ugliest men in England but also one of the most attractive—“ugly in that special way with eyes set very far apart, very lithe and very powerfully built and with such
vitality
!”
⁹⁷
At some point in 1894–95 Daisy began an affair with him. That she should fall for such a man was not surprising; what was remarkable was that Bertie seemed prepared to accept her defection.

Bertie and Daisy both claimed in 1898 that their relationship had been “platonic” for “some years.”
^b
98
This may have been a matter of necessity rather than choice. There were rumors that Bertie was impotent, possibly since 1895.
⁹⁹
Often on “D” days the prince noted a morning appointment with his doctor, Laking. In January 1896, he underwent a course of “electrical treatment.” This was the new wonder therapy of the day, and electric shocks were administered for impotence—though electricity was also used for many other ailments. At fifty-five, Bertie was overweight and threatened with heart trouble and possibly diabetes. His daughter Victoria noticed him panting when he walked upstairs.
¹⁰⁰

These were the years when the prince was often seen in Paris. In Montmartre, at the Moulin Rouge (opened in 1889), he was accosted
by the cancan dancer Louise Weber, who jeered,
“Ullo, Wales! Est-ce que tu vas payer mon champagne?” (Will you pay for my champagne?)
¹⁰¹

Le Chabanais, founded in 1878, was a palace of sex decorated lavishly in a variety of styles, including Moorish, Japanese, and Louis XVI. The room Bertie used was known as the Hindu chamber; emblazoned above the bed was his coat of arms. The prostitutes with their frizzed black hair, long drawers, corsets, and bare breasts, seem to twenty-first-century (female) eyes strangely lacking in allure, but Bertie undoubtedly visited. He was watched by the Paris police, who kept files on his movements.
¹⁰²
The copper bath that was filled with champagne while he consorted with prostitutes (anything less erotic than sitting in a cold and sticky champagne bath seems hard to imagine) still exists. Appropriately, it was bought by Salvador Dalí. The prize artifact in Bertie’s room was the seat of love, which he allegedly commissioned in about 1890.
¹⁰³
Exactly what permutations the complicated design of stirrups and supports was designed for is hard to see, but when it was later exhibited to visitors, they were told: “He stepped in there as if he were going to a stall.”
¹⁰⁴

In 1894, Bertie’s friend Randolph Churchill became alarmingly ill. Bertie asked royal physician Sir Richard Quain to seek a report from Randolph’s doctor, Thomas Buzzard. This disregard for professional ethics caused lasting resentment among some of the Churchill family, as Buzzard’s report on Randolph’s “General Paralysis” seemed to confirm that he was suffering from the tertiary stage of syphilis. Buzzard’s diagnosis was later challenged by Randolph’s grandson, Peregrine Churchill, who maintained that Randolph died of a brain tumor; but Bertie now believed his friend was terminally ill with syphilis, and so did Jennie.
¹⁰⁵
Bertie was all the more solicitous. On Christmas Day 1894, Jennie wrote the prince “a kind but dreadfully sad letter.”

“I cannot describe,” replied Bertie, “how much I feel for you.… You have indeed had a fearful time of it, but you have done your duty by him most nobly.”
¹⁰⁶
Randolph died at age forty-five on 24 January 1895, and Bertie wrote at once to Jennie: “There was a cloud in our
friendship,” but that was long forgotten: “Be assured that I shall always deeply regard him.”
¹⁰⁷

After Randolph’s death, Bertie saw a lot of Jennie. Her name appears often in his diary.
¹⁰⁸
But even if their friendship now developed into a physical affair, renewing their relationship of a few years back, this was not an exclusive romance.
^c
Also, Jennie invited Alix to dinner and consulted her about the guest list, something that would never have happened if Jennie had posed a threat to the Wales marriage.
¹⁰⁹
Equally, Jennie was on friendly terms with Daisy, and often stayed at Easton. Indeed, Daisy later wrote that “one never thought of giving a party without her”—something she surely would not have said if Jennie had been a rival for the prince’s affections.
¹¹⁰

“Dearest Daisy,” wrote Jennie, “I hear you look lovely and about 16!” “Will you be an angel,” she asked, “and send me the recipe for Cumberland Sauce for the ‘Wench’ in my kitchen?”
¹¹¹
Jennie’s cuisine was notoriously good; she was one of the first hostesses to employ Rosa Lewis, expertly trained in French cooking in the kitchen of the Comtesse de Paris at Sheen. Rosa was a favorite of the gourmet Bertie, who enjoyed her cockney wit almost as much as her quails stuffed with foie gras. Hiring the freelance Rosa soon became essential for hostesses entertaining the greedy prince, who let it be known that she was his favorite cook.
^d
112

“May I have a ‘geisha’ tea with you on Wednesday at 5?” Bertie wrote to Jennie Churchill.
¹¹³
And again: “You once said you would give me tea in your Japanese dress—I wonder if you could appear in it at 5:30 this evening? A bientot.”
^e
114
He now addressed her as
ma chère amie
, signing off, “
Tout à vous
, AE.” Between February 1896 and 1897,
he sent a flood of notes proposing himself to tea or lunch. It seems that he visited her in her new, tall house at 35a Great Cumberland Street almost once a week.
¹¹⁵
He included her name on the lists he sent in advance of house parties: She was at Chatsworth, at Waddesdon, at Welbeck, at Cowes. He teased her about her love life, which was lurid. When she broke up with Major Caryl Ramsden, fourteen years younger than her, after a spectacular row in Egypt, Bertie wrote: “You had better have stuck to your old friends than gone on your expedition of the Nile! Old friends are best!”
¹¹⁶

An undated pencil-written card from Bertie, sent from the Ritz in Paris in the spring of 1899 (the Ritz opened in June 1898), is ambiguous but suggestive:

But the letters to
ma chère amie
come abruptly to a halt in 1900 when the forty-six-year-old Jennie announced her intention to marry George Cornwallis-West. Not only was he twenty years younger than her, but he was also rumored to be Bertie’s son by Patsy Cornwallis-West.
^f
The gossip was scurrilous and unfounded, but it made Lady Randolph look ridiculous, and Bertie told her so. Jennie was not amused. Bertie replied: “It has been my privilege to enjoy your friendship for upwards of quarter of a century, therefore why do you think it necessary to write me a rude letter simply because I have expressed strongly my regret at the marriage you are about to make?”
¹¹⁸

So much is known about the detail of Bertie’s daily life—what time he caught a train, whom he saw and when, all recorded in his diary and often published in the Court and Social. But what went on behind the mask—his thoughts, his talk, his laugh—is carefully concealed. One glimpse of the real Bertie exists. It is a record of an interview by Daisy’s mentor, W. T. Stead. In spite of his hurtful gibe at “the fat little bald man in red,” Stead managed to persuade Daisy to arrange a lunch for him to meet the prince. This was in December 1896, and it took place in her sister’s house on South Audley Street.

Stead noticed that when Bertie arrived, Daisy made him a graceful curtsey, “prettier than any I had seen before.” (Did she curtsey to him when they were alone?) The prince “does not shake hands nicely, only about half his hand he puts in and there is no grip in it.” Daisy led the way into the dining room, Bertie followed, and Stead came last. Bertie sat at the head of the table, with Stead and Daisy on either side. The prince was slightly under the middle height (he was, in fact, five foot nine)
¹¹⁹
and not as fat as Stead expected, but “he had at first a look—I don’t know whether it was his moustache or in his eyes—which made you have a half impression that he had either a slight squint, or that one of his front teeth was awry.”

He ate everything very rapidly. When Daisy was in the room his conversation was society small talk, reminding Stead of a hostess who gives the impression of being interested but forgets all about it five minutes later. But after she had left the table, Bertie smoked two cigars and they talked about Russia, and Bertie revealed that he disliked its system of government and thought the persecution of the Jews “deplorable.” Whenever Stead tried to draw him out, Bertie good-naturedly refused to engage. When Stead asked him about his relations with the Queen, or his own position, he would only say that it was “very difficult.” “I cannot take any part in politics.”
¹²⁰

After lunch, the two men walked upstairs to the drawing room. Daisy, who had concussed herself out hunting, was lying on a sofa with a quilt over her head. Few women did that in front of the Prince
of Wales. The charm of Daisy was that she was so self-confident that she could always be herself. She was still “my little Daisywife.”

Bertie lost his greatest political ally when Rosebery resigned from the premiership in June 1895. Salisbury, who returned to office with a Unionist majority, had little time for the Prince of Wales. Schomberg McDonnell, the prime minister’s private secretary, promised to send Bertie when abroad a résumé of anything interesting going on at home. “Need I say I have never had a line from him!” complained Bertie.
¹²¹
In dynastic politics, too, the prince was marginalized. The uncle of the two most powerful men in the world, the czar of Russia and the kaiser of Germany, seemed condemned to a life of frivolity. When the kaiser invited him to the opening of the Kiel Canal in 1895, Bertie replied asking him to postpone the ceremony as the date clashed with the Ascot races.
¹²²
The kaiser visited Cowes in August 1895 and the German diplomat Alfred von Kiderlen-Wächter complained that “Fat old Wales” had been “inconceivably rude” by keeping him waiting for three-quarters of an hour and butting into his conversation with Lord Salisbury.
¹²³

One doesn’t need to be a Freudian to see the link between Bertie’s powerlessness in politics, his impotence in the bedroom, and his new passion: horse racing. He had kept horses in training since 1885 (before then he raced his horses under other people’s names, as the Queen objected to him using the royal colors).
¹²⁴
In eight years he had won very little: His total prize money amounted to £5,904, an annual average of only £250 if one freak good year of 1891 is excluded.
¹²⁵
In 1893, he moved his horses from stables at Kingsclere in Hampshire to Newmarket, and confounding all expectations, he bred a really good horse: Persimmon.

On Derby Day, 3 June 1896, Bertie arrived at Epsom with customary punctuality in time for the first race. Few people expected him to win. The odds on Persimmon were 5 to 1 against, and the favorite was Leo de Rothschild’s St. Frusquin at 13 to 8. Persimmon was behind for most of the race, but drew level in the last hundred yards, striding
ahead of St. Frusquin (whose jockey broke a stirrup leather) to win by a neck. The effect was extraordinary. A hurricane of spontaneous cheering was prolonged for a quarter of an hour. Crowds flooded onto the course as the prince led his horse into the winners’ enclosure. “The scene of enthusiasm after the Derby was a most remarkable and satisfying sight,” Bertie wired the Queen, with characteristic dryness: racing was the football of the age, and the win had restored him to a sense of connectedness with the public that he had lost since Tranby Croft.
¹²⁶
Victoria remained stonily unimpressed. “Bertie has won the Derby,” she told Princess Beatrice. “I cannot rejoice as I know what dear Papa felt & as it sets an example to so many who get ruined and break their Parents’ hearts. Of course I congratulated him.”
¹²⁷