The Heir Apparent (62 page)

Abdul Karim, the Queen’s Indian servant, had joined the household at the time of the Golden Jubilee. Victoria, like Bertie, was genuinely free of racial prejudice, and her Indian servants symbolized the special connection with her Indian empire. They were also decorative. Abdul Karim, who was clever and manipulative, became Victoria’s favorite. He gave her lessons in Hindustani, and he was promoted to be her teacher (Munshi); next she made him her Indian secretary. The Munshi’s intimacy with the Queen outraged the household, not merely on racial grounds but also because he was revealed to be low class, the barely literate son of an apothecary. When the Queen’s doctor, Sir James Reid, diagnosed him with “gleet” (gonorrhea), and the Queen insisted that he accompany her to Cimiez nonetheless, the household mutinied. Harriet Phipps, the woman of the bedchamber, was deputed to tell the Queen that they refused to go if the Munshi was of the party. The furious monarch responded by sweeping all the clutter off her desk onto the floor. They went.

Sir James Reid had been charged by the Queen with the Munshi’s welfare, and in Cimiez he held endless talks with the household, with the Queen, and with Bertie. The Queen insisted that the Munshi was the victim of the snobbery and racism of the court, and demanded that they associate more with him. Reid countered by telling the Queen that her obsession with the Munshi made her seem insane. The Prince of Wales, said Reid, had “quite made up his mind to come forward if necessary, because quite apart from all consequences to the Queen, it affects
himself
most vitally.… Because it affects the throne.”
¹¹
Victoria broke down and admitted that she had played the fool. But Bertie did not come forward and speak to his mother—he failed to confront her, even on an issue where she was plainly in the wrong. The Queen continued to pander to the Munshi, who bullied her abominably. Perhaps, as some thought, Victoria had succeeded in making her widow’s life so dreary that she needed the emotional excitement of the drama.
¹²
As with John Brown, she had allowed a favorite servant to monopolize access and disrupt the functioning of her court.

Bertie spent a few days in Paris on his way home from the Riviera. Here he found Daisy Warwick, holidaying with her sisters. After sitting for the painter Carolus-Duran, Daisy would mount her bicycle and (so she archly told her friend W. T. Stead), “speed away” for “all sorts of adventures.”
¹³
These included five assignations with Bertie, whose new toy was a four-cylinder motor car, supplied by Monsieur Panhard et Levassor’s establishment, in which, like Mr. Toad, he drove to the Hotel Bristol.
¹⁴
Thanks to Bertie’s patronage, the motor car was soon to become “as much a part of the courtier’s baggage as is the cigarette case.”
¹⁵

Daisy’s old enemy Lord Charles Beresford had returned from the Mediterranean, but he was powerless to harm her now. Bertie spotted him at Ascot in 1896, and was enraged when he “purposely passed close to me without bowing but he bowed shortly afterwards to my son and went up to the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire with a ‘hail fellow well met’ kind of manner and said how glad he was to see them again.”
¹⁶
Eventually Beresford was made naval aide-de-camp, which “allowed the poor beast to get into Society again,” but unfinished business remained.
¹⁷
In June 1897, the Duke of Portland forwarded a letter from Beresford expressing his regret for the angry letters he had written to Bertie and his wife’s regret for the letter she wrote to the Queen.
¹⁸
The prince accepted the apology, and Beresford’s letter was forwarded to Daisy, who wrote: “It is a great triumph to have received the apologies, and a great relief that the episode is closed.”
¹⁹

At Ascot in 1897, Bertie’s horse Persimmon won the Gold Cup at a canter by eight lengths, and the entire crowd turned “as with one accord to the royal Enclosure, cheering for several minutes.”
²⁰
The cup, appropriately enough, was a replica of the famous Warwick Vase. “Lady Warwick was in very high favour,” noted Carrington.
²¹
After Daisy had left, Bertie’s racing manager Lord Marcus Beresford came up and asked him a favor. With tears running down his face, he begged the prince to allow him to bring his brother Charlie to offer his congratulations. “I had no alternative but to say yes,” Bertie told Daisy later that day. “He came up with his hat off, and would not put it on till I told him, and shook hands.… My loved one,” he wrote anxiously, “I
hope you won’t be annoyed at what has happened, and exonerate me from blame as that is all I care about!”
²²

Daisy by now cared not a jot about Charlie Beresford. All her attentions were taken up with Joe Laycock, who had been her lover for the past two years. Nor was Bertie faithful to Daisy. As well as Jennie Churchill, there was the beautiful Lady Dudley, sister of poor mad Harriett Mordaunt. “Midnight supper with Lady Dudley,” Bertie had noted on the day he won the Derby in 1896.
²³
But it was to Daisy that he wrote the long, confiding letters—letters that “contained some very candid criticisms of persons and events of the day,” as well as political secrets.
²⁴

The morning of 22 June 1897 was close and dull, but when Queen Victoria was helped into her open state landau—an intricate operation involving her Indian servant and a sloping green baize plank—the sun came out. Bertie, wearing a scarlet field marshal’s uniform, rode beside the Queen—a small figure in black silk embroidered with silver, sitting opposite Alix in mauve—at the end of the royal procession of seventeen carriages that formed up for the Diamond Jubilee.

The planning of the ceremony had occupied the committee that Bertie chaired at Marlborough House since January. Entertaining the royal families of Europe had cost the Queen exorbitant sums at her Golden Jubilee in 1887, and she threatened to boycott her Diamond Jubilee if she was asked to contribute to the costs.
²⁵
The Treasury paid the bill, and the committee planned to economize and please the politicians by celebrating the empire. Bertie has been credited with organizing the event, but in fact his role was to facilitate the innovations of Reginald Brett (later Lord Esher), permanent secretary to the Office of Works.
²⁶
The Queen was too lame to dismount from her coach, and Brett proposed to make the focal point an open-air celebration outside the west front of St. Paul’s Cathedral. The support of Bertie as chairman for this controversial innovation was crucial. “Has one ever heard of such a thing! After 60 years Reign, to thank God in the Street!!! Who
can
have started such an idea, and how could the Queen adopt it?” exclaimed Augusta, Grand Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz.
²⁷

As the royal procession crawled toward St. Paul’s, the cheering was deafening. Women wept, men shouted themselves hoarse. “No one … has ever met with such an ovation as was given to me,” wrote the Queen.
²⁸
When she neared St. Paul’s, where the colonial troops were assembled, the crowd burst out singing “God Save the Queen.” The Archbishop of Canterbury cried, “Three cheers for the Queen,” and a thunderous roar broke out. The small black figure was “much moved.” As the tears streamed down Victoria’s face, Alix gently held her hand.
²⁹
The procession returned via London Bridge and the streets of south London, showing the Queen to the London poor, another innovation proposed by Brett and promoted by Bertie.
³⁰

Bertie played his part to perfection. In spite of all the long years of being put down and rejected, he made no attempt to upstage his mother and showed no trace of envy. How different from Kaiser William, whom the Queen refused to invite, and who wrote bitterly to his grandmother: “To be the first and eldest of your grandchildren and yet to be precluded from taking part in this unique fete, while cousins and far relations will have the privilege of surrounding You … is deeply mortifying.”
³¹

The climax of the Jubilee season was the fancy dress ball given at Devonshire House by Louise, Duchess of Devonshire. The sixty-five-year-old Louise’s features had coarsened with age, not helped by her brown wig and gash of red lipstick; now stout and apparently incapable of showing emotion, she was feared and respected but not loved.
^†

Heading the list of seven hundred guests, Bertie came dressed as Grand Master of the Knights Hospitaller of Malta, wearing a black velvet tunic embroidered with jet. His costume celebrated his charitable
work as Grand Prior of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem; with his fat legs poured into thigh-length boots, and a tall black hat, he resembled a prosperous vole. Alix was dressed in cream satin and cascades of pearls as Marguerite de Valois, the promiscuous and unhappily married French queen who was imprisoned by her husband. She was “horribly bored” on account of the crush, which must have made it impossible for her to hear.
³²
Her friend Gladys de Grey, who came as Cleopatra, wore £6,000 worth of gold and orchids and was attended by an Arab slave; some considered that she was upstaged by a rival Cleopatra, the American beauty Minnie Paget, a favorite of Bertie’s, whose Worth dress was encrusted with emeralds, rubies, and diamonds. (After her death in 1911, the dress fetched a mere £9 at auction.)
³³
It was a good night for Charles Frederick Worth. Jennie Churchill appeared in another of his creations, dressed, appropriately perhaps, as the Byzantine empress Theodora, the sexually voracious barbarian courtesan who married the emperor Justinian. She wore a crown and carried a sovereign’s orb. Daisy Warwick flaunted her quasi-royal status as Marie Antoinette—or perhaps she was economizing for once by wearing the same gown of turquoise velvet embroidered with silver fleur-de-lis that she had worn at her own Warwick ball.

Walking home through Green Park at dawn, Consuelo, the young American Duchess of Marlborough, was dismayed to find the “dregs of humanity” lying on the grass. “Human beings too dispirited or sunk to find work or favour, they sprawled in sodden stupor, pitiful representatives of the submerged tenth.”
³⁴
Like all historic parties, the Devonshire House ball was a tipping point: the beginning of the end of the great London houses—Devonshire House was destroyed in 1924—and the swan song of Louise, the Double Duchess.

After the season, Bertie and Alix escaped together to Bayreuth. In spite of being so deaf, Alix shared Bertie’s love of opera. Bertie was gripped by
Parsifal
, which lasted six hours—from four until ten—but it “could be given nowhere but here. The stage is dark the whole time—and not a sound is heard. The orchestra is invisible as it plays under the stage.”
³⁵

From Bayreuth, Alix traveled to Denmark, while Bertie headed for Marienbad to take his cure. This was his first visit to the Bohemian spa, two thousand feet above sea level, which was to become his favorite retreat. He stayed at the Hotel Weimar, rose at six, drank the waters, and walked for two hours. It rained incessantly, but, he told Georgie, “I manage to get through the day somehow.”
³⁶
His regime as he described it was that of an abstemious monk, but in fact he entertained often three times a day (including teatime). To the strains of a band, he dined on grouse (specially mailed from Britain),
aubergines frites
(his favorite vegetable), and peaches. His impeccably cut dark blue coat or gray striped suit with trousers precisely creased sometimes down the side, sometimes down the front, turned heads on the promenade. Sigmund Muntz, the contemporary chronicler of Bertie’s days at Marienbad, noted that any study would “lack its most vital element,” if it “prudishly” avoided HRH’s relations with women.
³⁷
In the afternoons, the prince took damp drives through the thickly wooded hillsides with a new friend: Mrs. Eddy Bourke.

Emma Bourke was the sister of Mabel Batten, the girl with whom Bertie had had a flirtation many years before in India. Emma, in her early forties, was manipulative, with a history of sending poison-pen letters.
^‡
Her husband, who was twenty years older than her, was a son of Lord Mayo, the assassinated Viceroy of India; though a stockbroker, he was often short of money. Bertie wrote to Emma shortly after leaving Marienbad, thanking her for her letter, written in French (“I can speak it fluently enough but have not your gift of writing it”), and apologizing for his execrable handwriting (“It comes partly from my writing so much. You imagine I get no end of ‘billets doux’ but I assure I have never had less from the fair sex than since I have been abroad this time. It is a case of ‘out of sight out of mind’ ”).

“Let me at once dispel from your mind an erroneous impression,” he wrote, “about being your best friend if not your lover!
Indeed
I did
not mean to imply that I wished to cease from being the latter. Far from it I can assure you but I meant to imply that the latter depended upon you my dear child but the former I always claimed to be.”
³⁸
Bertie’s distinction between friend and lover hints at a physical relationship, but whether this was more than a brief embrace on a wet afternoon carriage drive is impossible to tell. The following spring, Emma received a summons to dine at a restaurant in Nice, and Bertie gave typically precise directions about dress: She and her daughter were ordered to wear a “high dress” and hats, “your husband in evening jacket and black tie as is the custom abroad.”
^§
39
He took a paternalistic interest in Emma’s precarious finances, addressing her as “My dearest little Friend.” In 1899, he wrote, “I have … not forgotten the happy days I spent with you two years ago,” and enclosed a hundred-pound note from his winnings at Ascot and Newmarket. “You are the kindest and best little woman in the world. I only wish there were more like you.”
⁴⁰