Matriarch

by Anne Edwards

  No proof was ever presented that Prince Eddy had been with “Podge” at the brothel. However, there was never any official denial to allay public suspicions that the police had concealed evidence (an accusation broadly hinted at in the press).

  The Prince was a natural candidate for public conjecture because of the gossip and rumour that had steadily grown since his youth. Even his devoted mother, Alexandra, Princess of Wales, was aware of her elder son’s shortcomings and did nothing to hide them. In 1883, when he was nineteen, the Princess had written to her son’s childhood tutor, the Reverend John Dalton: “We are neither of us blind to his faults.” And to her mother-in-law, the Queen, she wrote a short time later, “Eddy is a very good boy at heart though perhaps he is a little slow and dawdly which I always attribute to his having grown so fast.”

  Princess May had known Prince Eddy since childhood, and her memory of her cousin was not pleasant. In childhood, he had bullied her, and she had thought him dull-witted and had far preferred the company of his younger brother, Georgie. Boorish though he had been and still might be, Prince Eddy would one day be King, and if her stay at Balmoral proved successful, she would be Queen.

  She had accepted the idea quite easily. The power, glory, and riches that came with the title could have been one reason, but the status such a marriage would bring her family was a great consideration. The Tecks had always been the poor royal relations, and her mother, whom she loved dearly, had been made to feel this all too frequently. Even she had been treated shabbily by her English relations at times. Under such circumstances, it would have been difficult for Princess May to refuse the most brilliant position in the realm; to become successively Duchess of Clarence and Avondale, Princess of Wales, and ultimately Queen Consort of England.

  Her mother stepped down from the carriage with surprising grace and led the way through the harsh wind to the platform where she rendered her last-minute instructions (“Remember, Aunt Queen can’t abide people who sleep late”). Princess Mary Adelaide then kissed her daughter on the cheek and hurried her two children into the carriage bearing the Royal Crest. Once they were situated, she stood implanted upon the platform dwarfing all else about her, one hand holding her boldly feathered hat, the other waving in the sharp wind as her daughter’s train steamed out of the station and into the cold, grey distance.

  At what moment in his childhood Prince Eddy realised that one day he was going to be King is hard to know. Years later his future great grand-nephew, Charles, Prince of Wales, Heir-Apparent to the Throne,* was to say the knowledge was “something that dawns on you in the most ghastly inexorable sense. Slowly you get the idea that you have a certain duty and responsibility.” Prince Eddy, at twenty-six, was aware of his future, but either he could not or did not want to grasp what he had to live up to in order to fulfil it.

  Prince Eddy had been born January 8, 1864, two months premature and without preparations or a nurse in attendance. This had caused a furore, since the duty of the Home Secretary was to be present at the birth of those in direct succession to the Throne. From infancy the Prince had been blighted with poor health. As he matured, his lack of character and his inordinate slowness were causes for greater concern. From birth he bore a hearing deficiency, a problem which accounted for his learning disability. Since his mother was extraordinarily sensitive about it, suffering this same handicap, she was not told, and the condition was never medically treated. Prince Eddy was inclined to dark moods, and though his manners were correct, he was aloof and awkward, suffered a nervous tic, and possessed a piercing, unpleasant, high-pitched voice.

  His younger brother, Prince George, had quite another personality. Though only seventeen months separated them, Prince George was full of high spirits and eminently more attractive and adept at most things. The Princes were to be seen side by side throughout their youth. Their parents apparently believed that with their close association the older brother might eventually take on the younger’s characteristics and hoped that the public would associate Prince Eddy with Prince George’s bright affability.

  The Royal brothers were schooled together until their midteens. Then, in a move that drew strongly adverse comment in Parliament, at fourteen and fifteen respectively, they were sent as cadets on a three-year world cruise aboard both H.M.S. Britannia and H.M.S. Bacchante, chaperoned by the Reverend John Dalton, whose duty was to report their activities to their parents. By the end of the cruise, expectations were that Prince Eddy might have matured into a more personable and knowledgeable young man. Instead, while Prince George learned the sea and navigation, his elder brother absorbed little except (according to Mr. Dalton) things of “a dissolute nature,” referring to the young man’s liking for alcohol and his penchant for escaping Mr. Dalton’s careful guard to frequent seaside dives while in port with young ruffians of poor reputation.

  On returning from their world travels, and after being away from the family for a painfully long time, the brothers were once again sent abroad—this time to Switzerland for six months to learn French. Such long separations in a family whose mother was almost incestuously close to her sons and to whom partings had invariably brought on the most terrible scenes of despair must have been difficult for the young Princes. An unusually close relationship existed between them. On Prince George’s part, the responsibility for his brother and attendant lack of privacy had a sobering and maturing influence. When they were finally forced to go their independent ways—Prince Eddy to Cambridge to further his education and Prince George to pursue his naval career on H.M.S. Canada in the Royal Navy’s West Indian and North American squadron—the older brother wrote:

  My dear George. So we are at last separated for the first time and I can’t tell you how strange it seems to be without you and how much I miss you in everything all day long.

  While at Cambridge, Prince Eddy’s tutor was James Kenneth Stephen,* a young man (twelve years his student’s senior), who, according to his colleagues, was a scholar “with cultivated taste and a natural bent towards dainty and exquisite language.” The relationship between tutor and pupil was extremely close, hardly surprising given Prince Eddy’s lifelong dependence upon his brother and his position, which disallowed the usual friendships of university life. After two years at Cambridge, he was gazetted to the 10th Hussars, but the relationship with Stephen did not end, and they continued a frequent and intimate correspondence.

  From the time Prince Eddy left Cambridge in 1885, he became the subject of intense family concern and public censure. There were persistent and worried exchanges that touched upon Eddy’s “dissipations.” What these might be was never spelled out. If, indeed, they were homosexual indiscretions, the Prince at least seemed to be attracted to women. To his parents’ displeasure and the Queen’s disapproval, he was reported in and out of love with a series of unsuitable ladies with alarming speed.

  Alix of Hesse,† his first cousin, the daughter of his father’s sister Princess Alice and of her husband, Louis IV, Grand Duke of Hesse, was his first acceptable Royal attachment. The Queen, anxious to see her problem grandson married and settled, was most agreeable to the idea of “Alicky” (her family name), as both a granddaughter and granddaughter-in-law. To her disappointment, Princess Alix refused the proposal.

  “It’s a real sorrow to us,” the Queen wrote to her daughter, the Empress Frederick, in 1880, “she [Princess Alix] says that if she is forced she will do it—but that she would be unhappy & he —too. This shows gt strength of character as all her family & all of us wish it, & she refuses the greatest position there is.”

  Princess Alix had refused Prince Eddy’s proposal on the grounds that she did not love her cousin in the way a woman should love her husband. The Queen, who had adored Prince Albert, could understand this rationale, even though love matches at that time were relatively rare among the Royal families of Europe. In fact, the Princess not only felt no passion for Prince Eddy, she found his lethargy and his immature appearance disagreeable. Even his mother had
been alarmed by the last. “What I do not understand,” she wrote Prince George upon receiving a photograph of her younger son with a full beard, “is why, you little mite, should have so much hair about you, whereas he [Prince Eddy], the biggest, has none yet?”

  Prince Eddy finally had grown a small, blond cavalry moustache which was waxed and turned up at the ends, but his neck and arms were freakishly long and out of proportion to the rest of his body. Self-conscious about his awkward appearance, he wore high starched collars and extraordinarily wide cuffs, making him look more ridiculous and prompting his father to tease him unmercifully. “Don’t call him Uncle Eddy,” the sartorially splendid Prince of Wales would advise younger members of the Royal Family. “Call him ‘Uncle-Eddy-Collars-and-Cuffs.’ ” This curious manner of dress and his father’s often indiscreetly voiced nickname, “Collars-and-Cuffs,” which soon became public knowledge, was to make Prince Eddy a whispered suspect for “Jack the Ripper.”

  On August 31, 1888, an aging prostitute named Mary Ann Nicholls was strangled to death and then fiendishly disemboweled in London’s East End. Within the next nine weeks, four more women were murdered in the same bizarre, clinical, ritualistic, and horrifying fashion and in the same area—Whitechapel. Terror spread throughout London as the murderer, named by the press “Jack the Ripper,” remained at large. The last victim, Mary Kelly, was pregnant; the final act of butchery the bloodiest. “Ripper” headlines circled the globe. The glare of publicity brought the terrible conditions that flourished in London’s East End to the shocked attention of people all over the world. Sixty brothels were revealed to be operating at the time in Whitechapel. More than two hundred lodging houses were brothels in all but name. Prostitutes were so plentiful, their lives so futile, that they were indifferent to the dangers of dark alleys and deserted yards.

  With the exposure of such squalid and appalling conditions, the incensed public demanded immediate action in the apprehension of the Ripper. The Queen took an active interest in the case; supposedly consulted with a psychic, a man named Lees; and made suggestions to the authorities on how the murderer might be caught. Eyewitness descriptions of the man suspected to be the Ripper and seen leaving the scene of one murder described him as being of medium height, possessing a small, fair moustache, and wearing a deer-stalker’s hat and “collars and cuffs.”

  This last item of information gave rise to the theory espoused behind closed doors, and in the offices of the police station in the precinct of the “Jack the Ripper” atrocities, that Prince Eddy was the fiendish murderer. The accusation was never proved, but the Duke of Clarence’s name remained linked with the horrendous crimes. People spoke of the fact that he hunted deer and had been taught how to dissect venison to remove their vital organs. A published photograph showed him wearing a deer-stalker’s hat such as was described by the witnesses. And the Court Circular, which reported the whereabouts of the members of the Royal Family on a daily basis, had not included Prince Eddy’s name on the dates and at the times of the murders. In effect, he had no alibi.

  Other rumours proliferated, claiming that Prince Eddy was suffering from brain decay caused by syphilis. If true, the actions of his parents and the Queen gave no indication that they had this knowledge. They were concerned with his instability and were agreed that marriage to an attractive and solid young woman would greatly improve his public image.

  After Prince Eddy’s rejection by Princess Alix, he appeared to fall legitimately in love with the beautiful Princess Hélène of Orléans, second daughter of the Comte de Paris, head of the House of Bourbon (who had recently been banished from France and taken refuge in England). For over a year Prince Eddy and Princess Hélène gave every evidence of a young couple very much in love. But Princess Hélène was a Catholic. In order for them to marry, the Pope would have had to grant a dispensation.* The young people, with the Prince of Wales’s prodding, enlisted the Queen’s help. The idea of Prince Eddy forfeiting his rights to succession in order to marry Princess Hélène was discussed. The Pope refused to ordain such a marriage. Even if he had, Parliament would have intervened and the Queen could not have overridden its decision. If this had been a ploy on the part of the Crown to force Prince Eddy out of the line of succession in an honourable fashion, the scheme did not work.

  The end of the relationship came in July 1891.† A month later Prince Eddy’s erratic behaviour and his worsening appearance (waxy skin, sunken eyes, dark circles beneath them, and a careless disregard for his grooming and dress) gave his parents great anxiety. His love for Princess Hélène cannot be held responsible for his condition. Documentary evidence exists in the form of letters that he was simultaneously wooing another beautiful woman, Lady Sybil St. Clair-Erskine.‡

  “I thought it was impossible a short time ago to love more than one person at the same time,” he wrote Lady St. Clair-Erskine on June 21,1891. “I only hope and trust that this charming creature which has so fascinated me is not merely playing with my feelings. I can’t believe she would after what she has already said, and asked me to say.” He closed with: “I am writing in an odd way and have no doubt you will think so but I do it for a particular reason and want you to promise me to cut out the crest and signature ... for ... supposing some one got hold of the letter by any chance? You understand why I say this?”

  Lady St. Clair-Erskine did not cut out the crest and signature. Indeed, she preserved, intact, this and several other letters from her Royal admirer.

  “I wonder if you really love me?” he wrote a week later. And, when he learned of Lady St. Clair-Erskine’s engagement: “Don’t be surprised if you hear before long that I am engaged also [a reference to Princess May], for I expect it will come off soon. But it will be a very different thing to what it might have once been [perhaps a reference to Princess Hélène] but it can’t be helped.”

  This last letter was written just a few days after he had been given an ultimatum that if Princess May agreed, they were to be married. For Prince Eddy’s drinking and carousing had become so public and his health so frail that the Prince of Wales had had his Private Secretary, Sir Francis Knollys, speak to the Princess of Wales to convince her that some drastic action must be taken. Sir Francis met with the Princess in her private sitting room at Marlborough House. “I told her,” Knollys reported later to Sir Henry Ponsonby, the Queen’s Private Secretary, “that the Prince [of Wales] would agree to:

  “1. The Colonial Expedition [a plan the Prince of Wales endorsed and which would ensure Prince Eddy’s absence from the public eye for a reasonably long time].

  “2. The European cum Colonial Plan [to keep him away even longer].

  “3. To be married to the Princess May in the Spring.

  “She [the Princess of Wales],” Knollys continues, “came to the conclusion that she would prefer No. 3 and that he should marry Princess May in the Spring. I think the preliminaries are now pretty well settled, but do you suppose Princess May will make any resistance?”

  The die was cast, and yet no one could be sure that the young woman who was even now en route to a rendezvous with the Queen would sacrifice her own future happiness for her “duty.” Queen Victoria could not command her to marry Prince Eddy, and if the Queen’s influence should fail, then what was to be done with the awkward problem of the Prince?

  The choice of Princess May had been a careful, cautious process of elimination. Prince Eddy’s wife not only had to be of Blood Royal; to compensate for his failings she must be totally trustworthy and absolute in her sense of duty. Not many young women would have cared to fill the position. Queen Victoria was well aware of Princess May’s bleak future and of her mother’s ambitious nature. No other Princess of the Realm was as indebted to the Crown as was Princess Mary Adelaide’s daughter. Princess Mary Adelaide would know how to apply the proper pressure to win over the young woman’s cooperation, of that the Queen could be certain.

  Footnotes

  *Mabell, Countess of Airlie (1866–1956), Queen Mary’s Lady-i
n-Waiting for over fifty years.

  †238 pounds.

  ‡Princess Mary Adelaide replied to Queen Victoria’s summons: “Only a line not to keep the messenger too long waiting to thank you for your very kind letter and to say with what joy my Children will obey your gracious and more than kind summons. Though I must add that I feel inclined to be rather envious! and not a little jealous at being left out in the cold & not invited to accompany them! albeit very much gratified at your most kind wish to have them with you for a little while.”

  *The Duke of Teck’s father had been heir-apparent to the throne of Württemberg, a state in Southwest Germany with Stuttgart as its capital. His rights to the succession were forfeited in 1835 when he married the Hungarian Countess Rhedey; the marriage, because of the Countess’s lower rank, was unconstitutional in Württemberg. Prince Franz thus had no claim in the succession. Countess Rhedey was trampled to death by a squadron of cavalry led by her husband, her mount having bolted while she watched manoeuvres, when Prince Franz was four years old.

  *Charles, Prince of Wales (1948–), Queen Mary’s great-grandson.

  *James Kenneth Stephen (1852–1892), a cousin of Virginia Woolf (1882–1941).

  †Alix of Hesse (1872–1918), later Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna of Russia. See Relationships.

  *It would have also required an Act of Parliament to enable Prince Eddy to retain his rights of succession in order to circumvent the English Constitution, where a King may neither be Catholic nor be married to a Catholic.