Matriarch

by Anne Edwards

  As a young bride, Princess Alexandra revelled in the gaiety of the Prince of Wales’s set. Then, no more than five years after their marriage, his affairs had become the subject of scandal. The situation was not helped when she became ill with rheumatic fever, which caused her not only years of pain, but for the rest of her life a stiffness in her hip and leg that produced a noticeable limp. She had suffered a hereditary form of deafness known as ostosclerosis, and after the birth of her first two children, this condition grew worse. Never much of a conversationalist, years would pass before she would be able to lip-read, and she was always to speak English crudely and with a thick Danish accent. She had never understood why her husband was so blatantly unfaithful to her when her beauty far outshone any of his mistresses. Her many problems and her insecurity had turned Princess Alexandra into an overly possessive mother and a willful woman. She was one of those women who won hordes of admirers on first meeting, but who, despite being dazzlingly beautiful, disappointed on further acquaintance.

  In the course of their nearly twenty-nine years together, Princess Alexandra had more or less shut her eyes to the Prince of Wales’s flagrant affairs. He had been fascinated by, among others, an American debutante, a Miss Chamberlayne (whom the Princess renamed “Miss Chamberpots”), by the great actress Sarah Bernhardt (some claimed he was the father of the Divine Sarah’s son, Maurice), by the scintillating Lillie Langtry, the socially prominent Lady Aylesford, and by Lady Brooke (later the Countess of Warwick). Princess Alexandra had been fore-bearing with the beautiful Lillie and had looked at Lady Aylesford with disdain, but she truly loathed Lady Brooke who still had some hold on the Prince of Wales’s affections.

  Shortly after the announcement of their elder son’s engagement, a wide rift became evident between the Prince and Princess of Wales. Whatever its cause, the Princess left for Livadia in the Crimea, very much in a pique, to celebrate the silver wedding of Tsar Alexander III and her sister, the Empress Maria Fyodorovna,* on October 13, just after approving the liaison of Prince Eddy and Princess May. So acrimonious was the Princess of Wales’s relationship with her husband at this time that she preferred to attend her sister’s anniversary than to be present at the festivities planned for his fiftieth birthday on November 9, 1891.

  The great misfortune of the Prince of Wales’s life was that his mother refused to take him into partnership. He claimed that he knew less than the secretaries of the ministers about the contents of the boxes that were piled upon Queen Victoria’s desk. The knowledge within them was out of his reach, and a minister’s occasional confidence only made his predicament all the more frustrating.

  But in 1891, Britain was involved in a political crisis that would grow steadily over the next two years, and the Prince of Wales, perhaps satiated with his useless life, turned his energies toward it. In 1886, Gladstone had surprisingly converted his former stand in favour of Home Rule.* The Liberal faction in Parliament, angry at what it considered a betrayal, broke with its elderly leader. Turning for support to the back streets of Glasgow and Cardiff, Gladstone provided one of the few instances in history of a statesman becoming progressively more radical with the passing years. The Queen called him “a dangerous old fanatic” and was to add, “The idea of a deluded excited man of 82 trying to govern England and her vast Empire with the miserable democrats under him is quite ludicrous. It is like a bad joke!”

  This crisis was to be a turning point in the life of the Prince of Wales. There were to be no more public scandals, but on November 12, 1891, when Prince George fell desperately ill with typhoid and his “Motherdear” (as he always called Princess Alexandra) rushed back to his bedside from the Crimea, Lady Brooke still cast a shapely shadow. In early January 1892, when the Tecks arrived at Sandringham House, the atmosphere between husband and wife was markedly strained.

  The country estate of Sandringham in Norfolk, overlooking the Wash, is a little more than a hundred miles north of London, or close to three hours by train; this was the Prince of Wales’s country home. Bought for him by his father in the hope that it would keep his son away from the gaming tables, the original house burned to the ground in 1867. With his wife’s help, the Prince built, furnished, and landscaped the new rambling orange-brick mansion, and work was completed in 1870. Situated in a park of about two hundred acres, it is approached by a broad drive that sweeps northward to the front entrance and continues on to the stables and to the other houses on the estate. On the east front, a wide lawn separated the house from an immense walled garden and a congeries of buildings which comprised the stud-farm, stables, kennels, and Princess Alexandra’s model dairy.

  Money had been lavished to make Sandringham one of the best shooting estates in the country. The weeks around Christmas were called the Sandringham Season and were a notable social event each year. Platoons of servants would arrive first to prepare the house for its Royal occupants and their guests. Fires would be lit and clocks set forward one half-hour, for the Prince, wishing to make the most of the short winter day for the shooting, was a pioneer in the use of daylight saving time. On December 1, the Princess’s birthday, carriages and fourgons overladen with baggage and shooting equipment would begin to arrive, their passengers cheered in the gloom of the grey December by the bright gaslights that shone from the windows of most of the rooms.

  For a week the shooting party decimated the clouds of pheasants that had been raised the previous summer. Lunch, which was a “veritable feast,” was served in a tent in the field. With the best of the shooting season over, the first group of guests, the sportsmen and their ladies, departed. Then the Prince’s international friends—the actresses and writers and social scions—arrived. “Beauty, wit, wealth, sophistication” were the valid passports to the Prince and Princess of Wales’s close circle.

  The Christmas season cast a different spell over Sandringham as members of the Royal Family gathered. The big pond was the scene of skating parties, “the lake and island illuminated with coloured lamps and torches, the skating chairs with glow-worm lights, and the skaters flitting past and disappearing in the darkness.” The ballroom was in constant use as the Prince and Princess of Wales gave county, farmers’, and servants’ balls.

  The fourth of January, when the Tecks set out for Sandringham, was a bleak day with such thick fog that the house, although brightly lit, could only be seen dimly until the carriage was a stone’s throw from the front door. When they arrived, the men were out shooting and Prince Eddy’s two unmarried sisters, the Princesses Victoria (“Toria”) and Maud, were both in bed with flu.

  Sandringham possessed no grand entrance hall, no circular staircase down which ladies could sweep majestically, no rooms of state. In fact, one walked from the front door into a small drawing room overcrowded with furniture and separated from the open hall by a partial screen painted with country scenes. Elsewhere, a larger drawing room more formally decorated in gold, white, and blue was used mainly for the gathering of guests before dinner and led into a pleasant—but surprisingly compact —dining room; a billiards room hung with Leech cartoons; a newly converted, well-stocked library (which had originally been a large bowling alley); and the ballroom.

  A strong Russian flavour pervaded Princess Alexandra’s sitting room and the main drawing room, with displays of a remarkable collection of Fabergé objects in each. An over-furnished, cluttered appearance prevailed here as it did at Marlborough House, giving both houses a look of long-established domesticity. The reception rooms notwithstanding, Sandringham was vast, containing enough small rooms to accommodate the multitudes of guests and servants. At dinner, the Royal ladies wore their diamonds and tiaras, the men their uniforms and Orders. Still, the portly Prince of Wales, who was responsible for setting the men’s fashions, would often take his nine-course meals (of which he was extremely fond) in his apartments, since he did not like to wear formal attire at dinner —one reason being that he could not eat comfortably restricted by such dress.

  The atmosphere at Sandr
ingham was quite foreign to the Tecks, who were a harmonious and uncomplicated family. The Wales family maintained an appearance of loving devotion, but on closer observation, the acrimony among them surfaced. “Motherdear” was overly possessive of her sons and dominated her daughters. The Prince of Wales teased his sons unmercifully and was fond of playing childish and often mean-tempered practical jokes on them as well as his guests, supervising the making of beds so that the covers did not turn down, stuffing the pockets of a guest’s dinner jacket with sticky sweets, or squirting another with a bicycle pump filled with water. Princess Mary Adelaide had always found her host’s “odious chaffing moods” unsettling and stalwartly disapproved the “fast ladies and gamblers” of his “Marlborough House Set.” Still, they had had in their youth an amiable, cousinly relationship, and he had once sent her feathers from his game-catch to decorate her stylish hats. Princess May was no more at ease with “Uncle Wales” than her mother and stayed out of his way as much as possible.

  For that matter, she was only a bit more comfortable with the Princess of Wales. To Princess May, who was inclined to be snobbish in her disdain of ignorance, Princess Alexandra’s mediocre mind, always flitting butterflylike from superficial subject to inconsequential chatter, made friendship difficult.

  Coal fires burned in every room, yet Sandringham was damp and cold. Within twenty-fours hours May and her mother were suffering from heavy colds, and Toria and Maud’s influenza had spread to other members of the household. The dismal weather did not deter the Prince of Wales and Prince Eddy (who shared his father’s enthusiasm for the sport) from joining the shooting party each morning.

  Lunch on January 7 was served at the Sandringham cottage of Sir Dighton Probyn, since 1877 the Prince of Wales’s equerry, and formerly a dashing young officer and recipient during the Indian Mutiny of the Victoria Cross. Probyn was a talented raconteur, and the ladies braved the inclement weather to be his guest. Prince George, still recuperating from his bout with typhoid, had not gone shooting but did escort his future sister-in-law to lunch, where his brother later joined them.

  Directly after lunch, Prince Eddy was taken suddenly ill with abdominal pains and dizziness, and was driven back to the house and put to bed. During the afternoon, Princess May sat in his small, cramped bedroom by the side of his narrow bed reading to him, while Prince George answered his brother’s congratulatory birthday telegrams in the adjoining study. By evening the pain had lessened, and Prince Eddy’s fever dropped. The next morning, a Friday, his birthday, he felt well enough to insist on going downstairs to open his presents. Freezing snow had fallen during the night, and Sandringham’s corridors were mostly unheated. By the time he returned to his room, his breathing had become laboured, his fever up. Quinine, the standard treatment for influenza, which had plagued the Court that winter, was administered to family and guests as well, as a precautionary measure.

  Though unable that night to join in his birthday celebration, Prince Eddy sat up in his bed and bantered with the relay of friends and family who came to congratulate him. Downstairs, a gala dinner was served in his honour, followed by the entertainments of a banjo player and a ventriloquist. There were high spirits among the celebrants. No one had any suspicion of impending tragedy. Even the protective Princess Alexandra telegraphed the Queen that evening after dinner with some annoyance, “Poor Eddy got influenza, cannot dine, so tiresome.”

  The next morning, January 9, Prince Eddy’s fever soared, and he had a rattling cough. The Prince of Wales’s physician, Dr. Francis Laking,* was sent for. He diagnosed incipient pneumonia and telegraphed Dr. W. H. Broadbent,† who had treated Prince George for typhoid fever a few weeks earlier. Dr. Broadbent arrived the next day to find the patient coherent and in good spirits. No one at Sandringham thought his condition was of a serious nature, although precautions were taken to protect the other guests. A screen surrounded his bed, and only close family members and Princess May were permitted in the room. She would peer at him on tiptoes over the top of the barrier separating them, but even then the nurse or doctor obscured her view. The morning after Dr. Broadbent’s arrival, Prince Eddy’s condition worsened. His mind shifted in and out of consciousness, his cough was worse, and his breathing short and painful enough to elicit cries and moans from him. That night he grew delirious, and by the early hours of January 14, the weather bitter-cold and the sun not yet risen, he was heard shouting in fury at Lord Randolph Churchill and Lord Salisbury (neither of whom was present). Suddenly the invective dissolved into sobs as he cried out for his grandmother, the Queen.

  Princess Alexandra sat by his bed, her delicate profile etched into the greyness of the room as she leaned over her dying son, tenderly stroking his damp hair back from his feverish forehead, while the Prince of Wales—a look of hopeless distraction on his heavy-jowled face—wandered restlessly in and out. Prince Eddy called out wildly “with great difficulty and effort and with [a] terrible rattle in his throat ... ‘Hélène! Hélène!’ ”* Pain overcame him and he lapsed into unconsciousness, only to return to consciousness moments later to cry out again.

  Family members and guests crowded into the small, over-heated sickroom, after being informed the end might be near. No one spoke. The eyes of those present were riveted to the terrifying spectacle of the young man struggling against an agonising death, his body writhing, his head rising stiffly from his pillows and falling back with piercing, unintelligible cries that were not usually symptomatic of pneumonia. Princess Alexandra, muffling her own sobs, sat in the straight wooden chair beside the bed. Standing beside her was Princess Victoria and next to her—sharing a chair—Princess Maud and Princess May, the latter dazed by the horror of what was happening in the room. Positioned behind them were Princess Louise and the Duke of Fife. On the other side of the bed, Dr. Laking kneeled while he continually took Prince Eddy’s pulse, Prince George on his knees beside him. Dr. Broadbent, a nurse, and the Duke and Duchess of Teck were lined up at the foot of the bed, while the Rector of Sand ring ham, Reverend Frederick Hervey, stood next to the bay window reading the prayers for the dying in the dim grey light. The Prince of Wales kept demanding the latest medical report from the doctors, peering down at the glassy eyes of his dying son and then stalking from the overheated and increasingly foul-smelling room in a state of great distraction.

  The vigil lasted for six hours. Princess Alexandra was wiping the sweat from Prince Eddy’s face when—with a sudden and unexpected strength—he called out, “Something too awful has happened! My darling brother George is dead!” His mother leaned in close across the bed. “Can you do anything to save him?” she asked Dr. Laking. He shook his head, and the Princess of Wales placed her hand over her mouth to suppress a cry. A few moments later Prince Eddy muttered, “Who is that?” As he repeated the question, his voice grew weaker and then was silenced. At 9:35 on the leaden morning of January 14, 1892, Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale—second in line to the Throne of England, newly engaged, and just twenty-eight years of age—was dead.

  His fiancée rose slowly from her chair, came around the side of the Princess of Wales, leaned over and kissed Prince Eddy’s brow, and then left the death room with her parents.

  Many unanswered questions surrounded Prince Eddy’s death. Was it just coincidence that the young man took a dramatic turn for the worse directly after the arrival of the Queen’s physician? Why was he in such agonising pain? Was pneumonia the true cause of his death? To this day, there are those who are convinced that poison was administered to Prince Eddy under the very eyes of his family and without their knowledge. There can be no doubt that Prince Eddy would never have been capable of reigning, and those at Court knew this. Could he have been deposed on the grounds of insanity when the Crown was finally placed on his head? Was there another way to remove him from the succession other than his death? And would not public knowledge of his instability reflect dangerously upon the Royal Family’s ability to reign?

  The Queen remained clois
tered at Windsor. Princess May was the immediate recipient of everyone’s sympathy. No one thought of offering condolences to the mother of “the poor young Bride,” but Princess Mary Adelaide was also in a state of shock. Her life-long dream had come so close to being realised. Now her daughter was once again without prospects and the Tecks’ future more precarious than ever, for Princess Mary Adelaide had spent lavishly and had been extended credit on the strength that Princess May would soon be the Duchess of Clarence and Avondale. How were they to pay these bills? In compensation, Princess May had received only two rings without nearly enough value to satisfy the creditors, who were certain to waste no time with Prince Eddy dead in trying to collect their money.

  “I clung to hope even through the terrible watch of that awful never to be forgotten night of agony,” Princess Mary Adelaide wrote the Queen. “It wrung one’s heart to hear Him, & to see Alix’s wretched, imploring face, Bertie’s bowed head, & May’s dazed misery. It seemed too much, too hard to bear! ... All today telegrams have been pouring in & I have been much with darling Alix & the dearest girls angelic George who is the tower of strength to us all! in His room (where he lies amid flowers, chiefly Maiblumen—Her flower now being woven for the wedding train!) ... his adoring Mother & poor May could not tear themselves away—they have just 11 o’clock borne him to the church ... Bertie & Alix kindly wished to keep us on, united as we all are in common sorrow—Our presence seems a comfort to them!—Of their kindness to our May, I cannot say enough. They have quite adopted her as their daughter and she called Alix ‘Motherdear’—& hopes you will allow her to call you ‘Grandmama’? These privileges & two rings are all that remain to her, poor child! of her bright dream of happiness.”*