Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter

by Diana Souhami

  His father responded with more demands. Male tutors worked on Bertie with a pressure that made him pathologically enraged. One, Henry Birch, was kind to him and Bertie used to leave presents and affectionate letters on his pillow. Birch, when he left, dared tell Prince Albert that Bertie’s

  peculiarities arise from want of contact with boys of his own age, and from his being continually in the society of older persons, and from his finding himself the centre round which everything seems to move.

  He was replaced in 1852 by Frederick Waymouth Gibbs who aspired to carry out Albert’s wishes in ‘exact obedience and subordination’. At the end of each day Victoria and Albert were given a report on Bertie’s ‘conduct and employment from hour to hour’. They read his essays and the journal he was compelled to keep.

  Bertie passionately hated this tutor. An excerpt from Gibbs’s journal reads:

  A very bad day. The P. of W. has been like a person half silly. I could not gain his attention. He was very rude, particularly in the afternoon, throwing stones in my face. During his lesson in the morning, he was running first in one place, then in another. He made faces and spat.

  When Bertie was sixteen, Albert employed a rota of middle-aged tutors instructed to remember at all times ‘in deportment and dress’ that they were in attendance to the eldest son of the Queen. Their task was to fashion the man to wear the crown – the King, the first person in the land. Practical jokes, card games, billiards and gossip were forbidden. Even Bertie’s meals were prescribed: bread and butter and an egg for breakfast, meat, vegetables and Seltzer water for lunch and dinner. And no pudding.

  Reform did not follow. Far from it. Bertie, sensing his parents and their henchmen had a nasty axe to grind, worked out a simple formula: however they exhorted him to behave he did the opposite, whatever they told him to remember he forgot. In adult life he loved practical jokes, parties, gambling, illicit sex, ten-course meals, fat cigars and claret with his cake at teatime. He liked the company of wayward men and shunned anything bookish. Even his handwriting was scarcely legible. His hedonism and philandering mirrored his parents’ passion to mould and control him. Victorian values led to Edwardian rebellion.

  Victoria put it down to ‘tainted blood’ from her uncles in his veins. She said he was living proof of her ‘unregenerate Hanoverian self’. ‘I am in utter despair’ she wrote to her daughter Vicky in 1858 when Bertie was seventeen:

  The systematic idleness, laziness – disregard of everything – is enough to break one’s heart and fills me with indignation … Handsome I cannot think him, with that painfully small and narrow head, those immense features and total want of chin.

  She said there was nothing innately good in him and she feared for the country if ever he became king. ‘His only safety and the country’s is in his implicit reliance in every thing on dearest Papa that perfection of human beings.’

  Sent to Oxford in 1859 Bertie made friends with the Marquis of Hastings, who breakfasted on claret and mackerel cooked in gin. Two years later he went to Cambridge to learn history. In September, on vacation from the university, he was attached to the Grenadier Guards at Curragh Camp near Dublin. Albert wanted him, in three months, to ‘learn the duties of every grade from ensign upwards’, ‘be competent to command a battalion’ and ‘to manoeuvre a Brigade in the Field’.

  Bertie was hopeless at it, his orders indistinct, his grasp of drill negligible. In line with his genuine preoccupations he started an affair with Nellie Clifden, actress and camp favourite of the guardsmen. The story reached The Times, the Queen and Albert. ‘The agony and misery of this day’ Victoria wrote, ‘… broke my Angel’s heart.’

  On 16 November her Angel wrote to his fallen son ‘in the greatest pain I have yet felt in this life’. Bertie, he said, was the talk of the town and Nellie Clifden already nicknamed the Princess of Wales. Probably she would have a child, and claim Bertie as the father:

  If you were to try to deny it she can drag you into a Court of Law to force you to own it and there, with you in the witness box, she will be able to give before a greedy multitude disgusting details of your profligacy … Oh horrible prospect, which this person has in her power any day to realize! and to break your poor parents’ hearts.

  A week later, on 22 November, Albert got soaked to the skin inspecting new buildings at Sandhurst. He wrote in his diary of feeling ‘thoroughly unwell and full of rheumatic pains’. None the less three days later he went to Cambridge to confront his profligate son. Bertie apologized for all the grief he had caused and told him he had ‘yielded to temptation’ with Nellie. Albert said he forgave him but that God would not.

  On 7 December Albert came out in a rash which his doctor, Sir James Clark, thought was typhoid. William Jenner, Professor of Clinical Medicine at University College, London, who was called in to confirm the diagnosis and to treat him, blamed the drains at Windsor. Victoria blamed Bertie.

  On 13 December Bertie, struggling with examinations at Cambridge, received a telegram summoning him to Windsor. His father, aged forty-two, died the next day. Victoria, unhinged with grief, confirmed to her daughter Vicky that the Curragh affair had killed her Angel,

  for there must be no illusion about that – it was so; he was struck down – and I can never see B. – without a shudder! Oh! that bitterness – oh! that cross!

  Albert, she said, had tried to protect her from ‘the disgusting details’ but she knew all. She referred to Bertie’s ‘fall’ and ‘all Papa foresaw’ in terms of consequences for the country and world of a debauched heir to the throne.

  She was too distraught to go to the funeral. Bertie, representing her, wept with his face in his hands.

  Victoria thereafter looked forward to nothing but ‘future reunion with Him [Albert]’. ‘To work for Him, to honour His memory more and more, to have memorials raised in His name – here is my consolation.’

  She could not set eyes on her murderous, chinless son. He was to tour Egypt and Palestine to spare her ‘a constant contact which is more than ever unbearable to me’. He was told to travel incognito, avoid all society except royalty and people of superior character, listen to a sermon every Sunday, visit ancient monuments, read serious books.

  Away five months, he grew a beard to hide his want of chin, enjoyed shooting crocodiles, quails and vultures and resisted pressure to visit the ruins at Thebes. ‘Why,’ he asked his equerry, ‘should we go and see the tumbledown old Temple? There will be nothing to see when we get there.’

  Back home, his sister set about finding him a wife. As he was ‘too weak to keep from sin for virtue’s sake’, there had to be some practical prompt ‘and surely a wife will be the strongest’. The Queen wanted someone young, pretty, quiet, clever, sensible and of good education, character, intellect and disposition:

  I feel it is the sacred duty he, our darling angel, left us to perform … If Bertie turns obstinate I will withdraw myself altogether and wash my hands of him.

  Princess Alexandra, daughter of Prince Christian Schleswig-Holstein, heir to the Danish throne, was found. A share of intrigue and impecunity was accorded to the Danish royal dynasty but Alexandra herself was beyond stain. Vicky judged her diffident, humble, shy, placatory, tactful, well-educated, not very clever. She was fluent in English and German, pretty and young, ‘her walk, manner and carriage are perfect, she has a lovely figure but very thin, a complexion as beautiful as possible’.

  The Queen gave her the highest accolade: Albert would have approved. Bertie, polite about the prospect of marrying her, vacillated between acceptance and panic. He thought her nose too long, her forehead too low. His mother lamented to Vicky that he was probably not in love: ‘I don’t think he can be or that he is capable of enthusiasm about anything in the world.’ Vicky wrote, ‘If she fails to kindle a flame no one will ever succeed in doing so … I do not envy his future wife.’ The Queen agreed: ‘What you say about Bertie and that lovely princess is so true – so sad, and the prospect a melancholy one.’ But pl
enty of women were to succeed in kindling Bertie’s flame – prostitutes in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, actresses, society beauties, dancers wearing two oyster shells and a five-franc piece, other men’s wives.

  On 8 September 1862 Bertie sought permission from her father Prince Christian to marry Alexandra. The next day he proposed. In all he had seen her for a few hours. ‘I still feel as if I was in a dream,’ he wrote to his mother:

  I frankly avow to you that I did not think it possible to love a person as I do her … If only I can prove to dear Alix that I am not unworthy of her love and make her future a happy one, I think I shall have every reason to be content.

  The marriage took place on 10 March 1863 at St George’s Chapel, Windsor. Alexandra was eighteen, Bertie twenty-two. The nation celebrated with banners, bunting, fireworks. This was the marriage of the heir to the throne, the prospective head of state, church and the royal family. Marriage was the constitutional basis for the monarchy, the context for procreation and the family. No other sexual relationship could be ordained, authenticated or admitted, as the daughter of Bertie’s most favoured mistress would, decades later, find out.

  The Archbishop of Canterbury conducted the service assisted by four bishops and the Dean of Windsor. Bertie wore a general’s uniform and Garter robes: symbols of rank, power and glory. He vowed to God that he would love, comfort, honour and keep her, in sickness and health, and that he would forsake all others for as long as they both lived. Alexandra wore white and silver satin garlanded with orange blossom. The Queen sat ‘very low and depressed’ throughout the ceremony, dressed in black in a closeted gallery of the chapel, conjuring images of Albert. She began crying when the choir sang a Handel chorale and then she could not stop.

  She found it all ‘far worse than a funeral to witness’ and chastised her daughter for enjoying herself:

  I wonder even how you can rejoice so much at witnessing what must I should think be to you, who loved Papa so dearly, so terribly sad a wedding!… Will you be able to rejoice when at every step you will miss that blessed guardian angel, that one calm great being that led all.

  She avoided all celebrations, the cheering crowds, plumed horses, gilded carriages and choirs singing the Hallelujah Chorus. She took meals alone and commanded no ‘noise and joyousness’ in her presence. Three days before the wedding she took Bertie and Alexandra to what was left of Albert in the mausoleum at Frogmore: ‘I opened the shrine and took them in … I said “He gives you his blessing!”’ She then joined their hands.

  * * *

  Married, Bertie’s life changed. Freed from his mother’s oppressive scrutiny, he indulged in regal style. He had £600,000 capital and an annual income of £50,000 from rents in the Duchy of Cornwall. He spent all this and more. By 1874 he was £600,000 in debt. From the start his spending exceeded his income by over £40,000 a year. £100,000 went on furniture, carriages and jewellery. He bought Sandringham and its 7000 acres for £220,000 then rebuilt it with a billiard room, a bowling alley, a smoking room modelled on one he had seen in Turkey, gunroom, vast gamesroom, wine cellars, kennels, stables. Parliament voted him an additional £40,000 a year with £10,000 a year ‘pin money’ for Alexandra and £60,000 to refurbish Marlborough House in Pall Mall as his London home.

  There were festivities every day for his first London season: fêtes, receptions, processions, balls, parties. Marlborough House, designed by Wren in 1710, became the lavish showpiece for ‘the Prince of Wales’s set’. Eighty-five servants worked there – uniformed and powdered footmen, pages, porters. The reception rooms were large enough to entertain the whole of smart London society at a single ball. Dapper and jaunty, Bertie constantly bought new clothes. Two valets and a brusher cared for them. He innovated side-creases in trousers because mother had criticized his bandy legs.

  Tireless for fun he played bowls, billiards, baccarat, indulged practical jokes of the forbidden sort – like putting a dead seagull in the bed of a drunk friend, went to Evans’s Music Hall in Covent Garden, on trips to Paris, horse-racing at Epsom, Doncaster, Ascot, Newmarket and Goodwood, yachting at Cowes, grouse-shooting and deerstalking in Scotland.

  At Sandringham his shooting parties were elaborate affairs of pomp and pageant. His game larder was said to be the biggest in the world. Three thousand birds were shot in a single day. Parades of gamekeepers and beaters wore velveteen suits and satin smocks. Bertie held elaborate picnics in the shooting fields. Animals introduced to the area for the doubtful privilege of his shoot caused great damage to crops. Mrs Louise Cresswell left her 900-acre farm after the Prince arrived because, she wrote in The Lady Farmer: Eighteen Years on the Sandringham Estate:

  I could not remain unless I killed down the Prince’s game from Monday morning till Saturday night and reserved Sunday for lecturing the agent.

  At first, to the Queen’s disdain, Alexandra partnered her husband in the social whirl. ‘She never reads and I fear Bertie and she will soon be nothing but two puppets running about for show all day and night.’ The Princess was not on show for long. Ten months after her marriage her first child was born, two months prematurely. The Queen chose the name – Albert Victor – without consulting Bertie or Alexandra. She felt ‘thoroughly shaken’ at the christening. ‘Alix looked very ill,’ she wrote to Vicky on 12 March 1864, ‘thin and unhappy. She is sadly gone off; the fraicheur is gone.’

  Within three years the Princess had two more children which made her fraicheur go off even more. Pregnant with the third, Louise, in February 1867, she had rheumatic fever, was ill for months and racked with pain. Bertie found fraicheur elsewhere and seldom returned before the small hours. ‘The princess had another bad night,’ her lady-in-waiting wrote,

  chiefly owing to the Prince promising to come in at 1 a.m.… refusing to take her opiate for fear she should be asleep when he came! And he never came till 3 a.m.! The Duke of Cambridge is quite furious at his indifference to her and his devotion to his own amusements.

  In August one of Alexandra’s doctors spoke out ‘very forcibly’ to Sir William Knollys, Bertie’s Private Secretary, ‘on the tone people in his own class of society now used with respect to the Prince, and on his neglect of the Princess and how one exaggeration led to another.’

  Bertie was seen ‘spooning with Lady Filmer’ to whom he sent, via her husband, lots of photographs of himself, ‘she will be quite bored possessing so many of me – but the waste paper basket is always useful … I hope she won’t forget to send me one in her riding habit – as she promised.’ At Ascot he lunched with ‘fashionable female celebrities’. At night he met up with actresses. In Paris he kept a private suite at the Hotel Bristol. Knollys heard ‘very unsatisfactory’ accounts of ‘supper after opera with some of the female Paris notorieties etc., etc.’

  On 2 July 1867 the Queen visited Princess Alexandra at Marlborough House. She found her ‘very lovely but altered.’ Alexandra was in a wheelchair. Thereafter she walked with a limp. She had also partially lost her hearing. Photographs of her and Bertie show him bulging in his clothes and her like a wraith. None the less she had a fourth child, Victoria, a year later; a fifth, Maud, in November 1869; a sixth, John, who lived a day, in April 1871. ‘Then the torrent of royal fertility stopped,’ Rebecca West wrote in her memoir 1900. Alexandra was twenty-six:

  She was the loveliest creature … But I do not think that anyone amongst the people around me in 1900, including those who must have seen her at her most moving, said, ‘A terrible thing happened to that woman. She was raped of her youth.’

  Alexandra did not speak of this rape. If she felt marginalized, dispirited and used, she could not say. Her role declined to that of royal dignitary, present at formal functions, excluded from the life her husband lived.

  Bertie’s power was hereditary. He was born to be King and to secure the royal succession. He proved his virility, lived in splendour and exacted ceremonial respect. And though his philandering became public knowledge and his rakishness a way of life, trappings we
re what mattered, not the inner man.

  FOUR

  The pursuit of sex preoccupied Bertie, whatever his marriage vows. To avoid public scrutiny he called himself Baron Renfrew or the Duke of Lancaster and used public carriages when visiting unkingly parts of town. But before he settled in late middle age for staid infidelity with Mrs Keppel, his and his friends’ behaviour provoked comment in the papers and led to brushes with the law.

  Soon after the royal marriage his Oxford friend the Marquis of Hastings eloped with Lady Florence Paget who was engaged to marry Henry Chaplin. Colonel Valentine Baker was sent to prison for a year for assaulting a woman in a railway carriage. ‘If ever you become king’ the Queen told Bertie in 1868, ‘you will find all these friends most inconvenient and you will have to break with them all.’ They were, she said, pleasure-seeking and immoral, the women fast and imprudent. One of his set, Lord Carrington, told her that not only was Bertie leading ‘a very dissolute life, but far from concealing it his wish seems to be to earn himself the reputation of a roué’.

  This dissolute life brought scandal and questions about fidelity and what being kingly meant. In February 1869 Harriet Mordaunt, wife of Sir Charles Mordaunt, Conservative MP for Warwickshire, gave birth to a son. The date of conception precluded Sir Charles as the father – he was fishing in Norway at the time. Harriet, aged twenty, eleven years younger than her husband, confessed that she had had sex ‘often and in open day’ with the Prince of Wales and two of his philandering friends, Lord Cole and Sir Frederick Johnstone. Sir Charles broke the lock on his wife’s writing desk, found her diary and incriminating letters and sued for divorce.

  The Times published Bertie’s letters to Lady Harriet before the case came to court. The tone and content of these was light:

  I am sorry I shall not be able to pay you a visit today, to which I had been looking forward with so much pleasure … but if you are still in town, may I come to see you about five on Sunday afternoon?