The Heir Apparent (65 page)

Number 35 Belgrave Square was the home of Mrs. Arthur Paget, the wife of General Paget, a friend of Bertie’s, who was serving in South Africa. Minnie Paget, now in her midforties, was an heiress, the daughter of a New York hotel owner, the self-made millionaire Paran Stevens. Her ambitious mother had driven her up and down Manhattan with a coach waiting outside every venue so that the young girl didn’t miss a single party. One of Edith Wharton’s original Buccaneers—her brother was briefly engaged to Wharton—Minnie had come to London in search of a husband, had stayed at Sandringham, and had knitted Bertie a waistcoat. The Boer War was her finest hour. She raised £7,000 for war widows and orphans with a masque at the Hay-market Theatre, and she funded a hospital ship.

Minnie was not well liked. She was sharp and brittle; some people said that she was incapable of telling the truth.
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When the seventeen-year-old American Consuelo Vanderbilt came to London (she later married the Duke of Marlborough), she was introduced to Minnie, who agreed to bring her out. “She was considered handsome,” wrote Consuelo: “to me, with her quick wit and worldly standards, she was Becky Sharpe incarnate.… I realised with a sense of acute discomfort that I was being appraised by a pair of hard green eyes.”
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During Daisy’s reign, the Americans had fallen out of favor at Marlborough House. Now, with the rise of Mrs. Keppel, they were back. When Minnie entertained the prince with dinner and cards, she could sense the sweet smell of social power. “Let us be either four or eight at dinner,” he wrote, “but they should all be bridge players.”
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Brussels Nord station, 4 April 1900, 5:30 p.m.
After strolling about the platform for thirty minutes, Bertie boarded the special train heading for Copenhagen on a visit to the King of Denmark. He sat down beside Alix opposite an open window, and a servant handed him tea. As the train pulled out of the station, a young man mounted the carriage step, put his gloved hand through the window, and fired two shots at a range of two yards. Alix felt a bullet whizz past and bounce off the woodwork just above Bertie’s head. “If he had not been so bad a shot I don’t see how he could possibly have missed me,” wrote Bertie.
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The round-faced young man was hurled to the ground by the station manager and arrested. He was only fifteen, an anarchist named Jean Baptiste Sipido, and he had bought the revolver for three francs in a market and loaded it in a lavatory before making the assassination attempt. He claimed he was avenging the deaths Bertie had caused in South Africa.
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It was Bertie’s first—and only—near-assassination experience at a time when Europe teemed with anarchists, such as the man who had killed Elizabeth, Empress of Austria, eighteen months before, stabbing her with a shoemaker’s awl (“that poor charming inoffensive woman,” wrote Bertie).
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According to Charlotte Knollys, who was in the carriage, Bertie “never even changed colour, and the Princess behaved equally well.”
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As the train steamed out of the station, the crowd on the platform cheered, and the prince and princess bowed from the open window.
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Bertie displayed considerable courage, and he was justifiably miffed when Salisbury refused to move a parliamentary vote of congratulation. Such a vote would have involved calling a special sitting of the House of Lords, wrote Salisbury, who was a master of the crushing putdown: “It was thought better not to take that course, as it was not then known that the pistol contained a bullet, which the extreme youth of the culprit rendered doubtful.”
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Bertie cursed his cousin King Leopold II for failing to make an example of Sipido, who was acquitted by the Belgian courts on account of being underage.
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Afterward, the prince always took with him an
Agent de Sûreté
, or detective, when he
traveled abroad.
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The incident gave him a sharp reminder that “we are all in God’s hands! in no one else’s!”
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In South Africa, the war at last turned to victory. News of the relief of the Siege of Mafeking reached London on 18 May. Bertie and Alix were at Covent Garden for Wagner’s
Lohengrin
. After the second act, someone shouted the news from the gallery, and everyone rose to their feet cheering wildly. The singer Madame Marchesi, who was in the stalls, started “God Save the Queen,” which was sung by the entire house.
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Later that month, Bertie’s horse Diamond Jubilee won the Derby. That year he also won the Grand National with Ambush II. But God’s hands were never far away, and in July came the “terribly sad news” of the death of his fifty-five-year-old brother Alfred in Coburg.
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Affie had been Prince Albert’s favorite son; so much cleverer than Bertie as a boy, in middle age he was a friendless alcoholic.
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In 1898, he collapsed on a visit to Egypt. “I don’t believe Aunt Marie has the faintest idea of the gravity of his case,” wrote Bertie; “every year his health gets worse.”
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Affie’s only son, Alfred, committed suicide in 1899, and Affie himself was diagnosed with cancer of the throat, though he died of heart failure.

Victoria was devastated. “Oh God! My poor darling Affie gone too!”
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Bertie told Vicky that he could “never remember being so upset before,” but he had grown apart from Affie.
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In truth, he was far more upset by Vicky’s condition.

Bertie had known that Vicky was suffering from breast cancer for almost two years. She complained of “lumbago” as the cancer metastasized into her spine. In August 1900, Bertie traveled from Homburg
to be close to his sister at Friedrichshof. By now she was in constant pain. Bertie’s “dear kind face” was always a comfort, but there was little he could do to help.
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He consulted Laking, who advised injections of morphine rather than strychnine or arsenic, but the kaiser refused to allow the English doctor to attend his mother. “It would create a most deplorable feeling here,” he told Victoria.
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By October, Vicky reported that the morphine only dulled the pain for ten minutes. “The
terrible
nights of agony are worse than ever, no rest, no peace. The tears rush down my cheeks when I am not shouting with pain.”
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The doctors alerted Bertie to be in “
constant
anxiety” about her.
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Her letters were so harrowing that Helena and Beatrice stopped reading them aloud to the Queen.

“Poor dear Mama was not looking well,” Bertie wrote to Vicky on 19 November 1900.
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He had been summoned to Windsor by the Queen’s doctor, Sir James Reid, who was concerned about her symptoms. Victoria, who had risen so splendidly to the war, was suddenly older and shrunken. For months she had complained of insomnia, lack of appetite, disordered digestion, and depression.

Reid found it hard to persuade the prince to take his warnings seriously. Bertie seemed to think his mother was merely out of sorts, and he cheerfully expected that Christmas at Osborne would “take her out of herself.”
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This was wishful thinking. From the day she arrived at Osborne (18 December), Victoria was an invalid, confined to her bedroom. Most of the time she was “childish”—drowsy, incoherent, and confused. She had lost her royal rage, and she apathetically accepted things that had formerly irritated her. Reid suspected “cerebral degeneration,” or dementia, and his diagnosis was confirmed by two other physicians.
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Beatrice shut her eyes to her mother’s descent into childishness. Like an unmarried daughter whose status depended on an aged parent, the widowed youngest child continued to deal with the Queen’s correspondence and write her journal each night as if nothing had changed. Few dared whisper the possibility of a regency, but the fact was, the Queen was now incapable.
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Helena telegraphed Bertie with a cheerful report each day, omitting all the worrying symptoms. She freely admitted that she did not want Bertie and Alix in the house. Bertie, for his part, was only too willing to believe her. He still discounted Reid’s gloomy prognostications, encouraged by Laking, who reported back from Osborne that the Queen was her normal self. In fact, Victoria put on a special effort when she saw Laking. When Reid asked Bertie to approve a bulletin in the Court Circular about the Queen’s poor health, he refused to give consent. The death of his mother was somehow unimaginable. Victoria herself, in spite of her confusion, seemed dimly aware that she was dying. “Is there anyone in the house?” she asked Reid one afternoon. “Is the Prince of Wales here?” Reid asked if she wanted him. “I do not advise it at present,” she replied, lapsing back into drowsy dementia.
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The pretense that the Queen was in normal health continued until 19 January, when Reid happened to walk into the room of private secretary Arthur Bigge as he was shouting down the mouthpiece of the newfangled telephone to Francis Knollys at Marlborough House. Reid told Bigge to advise the Prince of Wales that the Queen might die at any time. He then confronted Helena and persuaded her to write an accurate telegram to Bertie. By five o’clock that afternoon, Bertie had arrived at Osborne.

The first medical bulletin was issued that day: “The Queen is suffering from great physical prostration accompanied by symptoms that cause anxiety.”
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Victoria rallied in the evening, and in a brief moment of lucidity she told Reid: “I think the Prince of Wales should be told I have been very ill, as I am sure he would feel it.” When Reid asked if she would like the prince to come, she replied, “Certainly, but he needn’t stay.”
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But Bertie didn’t see her. He agreed with Reid that it was better not to tell the Queen that he was in the house. He even declined to look into the bedroom while she slept. He had never seen his mother in bed. Victoria was confused, and so ill that she needed oxygen in the night, but Bertie returned to London the next day to receive the kaiser.

None of the royal family wanted the kaiser there. He had, in fact, been summoned by the doctor, Reid, who was in collusion with him.
Without informing any of the family—“I knew the Princesses would disapprove”—Reid had telegrammed William, aware that he wanted to be present at the death.
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From Buckingham Palace, Bertie kept in contact by telephone. The doctors expected the Queen’s death imminently. The next morning at eight a.m., Bertie and William left for Osborne.

That evening, for the first time, Bertie sat by his mother’s bedside. She had been lifted from the grand mahogany marital bed and lay in a small bed in the center of the room, a tiny, huddled figure. After he had left, the semiconscious Queen took Reid’s hand and kissed it repeatedly. Mrs. Tuck, the Queen’s dresser, more alert or more sensitive to Victoria’s needs, asked her if it was the Prince of Wales she wanted. “Yes,” said the Queen.

Bertie returned to her bedside, and she said, “Kiss my face.”
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Then she put out her arms and said, “Bertie,” whereupon “he embraced her and broke down completely.”
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The next morning, the Queen was unconscious and clearly dying. The family was summoned to her bedside. Beatrice, Helena, and Louise told the blind Queen the names of the people in the room. The only name they omitted to mention was that of the kaiser, who was standing at her bedside. Reid asked Bertie why the kaiser was not named. Bertie replied, “It would excite her too much.” Later, when the Queen was alone, Reid went to Bertie and asked if he could take the kaiser to see her. Bertie relented. “Certainly, and tell her that the Prince of Wales wishes it,” he replied.
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In the afternoon, the family was summoned once more. Bertie sat at one side of the bed, behind Reid, who knelt supporting the Queen in a semi-upright position on her pillows. The kaiser knelt opposite supporting her with his good arm.

“At 6:30 she breathes her last,” wrote Bertie in his diary.
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That was all. Not even a hint of the turmoil this intensely emotional man felt at the death of the most powerful woman in his life.