Dirty Bertie

by Stephen Clarke

  Struggling to gain legitimacy for his Second Empire, Napoléon III looked outside France and tried to strike up personal relations with his fellow European sovereigns. But when he sent out the first feelers towards Victoria in 1854, he received a predictable putdown, despite the fact that since October 1853, the two countries were, for the first time in centuries, fighting on the same side in a war – Crimea.4

  Anglophobes in Paris were quick to say that Victoria’s standoffishness was typical of the Brits – they didn’t mind accepting France’s help to support their interests in the east, but they were too snobbish to invite their new ally to dinner. A close associate of Napoléon III, Horace de Viel-Castel, wrote sniffily in his memoirs that Victoria had refused to issue ‘a personal invitation to the Emperor and Empress of the French’, as if their titles alone should have been enough to win them a ticket across the Channel.

  Canny Napoléon did not give up, though. He intimated that he wanted to come and deliver a personal invitation to Victoria and Albert to attend the 1855 Exposition Universelle that was being planned in Paris. He must have known that Albert was fascinated by all things scientific and industrial, and had been one of the prime movers behind the 1851 Great Exhibition in London, at which, annoyingly for Napoléon, members of the deposed French royal family had been guests of honour.

  The ploy worked, and an invitation to visit London was duly sent.

  In April 1855, the French imperial couple sailed to Dover (into a dense English fog that they may have seen as a bad omen), to be met not by Victoria but her husband. Other sovereigns might have seen this as a snub, but Napoléon and Eugénie were on a charm offensive, and immediately set about seducing the dour Albert. The two men had something in common, because Napoléon spoke with a strong Swiss-German accent, thanks to one of his foreign exiles after the fall of Bonaparte. So conversation was slow and Germanic – rather like England’s rail service at the time – and the train journey to Paddington apparently went very smoothly.

  Waiting at Windsor, and no doubt rehearsing the level of condescension she could show the French upstarts, was Victoria, whose attitude to the French visit was evident in a letter to her Secretary of State, the Earl of Clarendon, in October 1854: ‘His [Napoléon’s] reception here’, she wrote, ‘ought to be a boon to him and not a boon to us.’ She was deigning to meet him as if he were a poor relative begging for a loan.

  But if Victoria was at first somewhat cold towards her French visitors, the ice very soon thawed out. Little Napoléon was not a handsome man in comparison to the grand Albert, and sported a straggly goatee and an absurd moustache that was permanently waxed into two long, needle-sharp points, but he was an innate charmer. As Jacques Debussy, a biographer of Empress Eugénie, noted, Napoléon ‘showed no delay in winning the affection of the Queen [Victoria], as he did with anyone he wished to seduce’.5

  Napoléon may not have been trying to bed Victoria, but reading between the lines of her descriptions of the state visit, we can see that the Frenchman deployed all his Gallic seduction techniques. The Emperor was, Victoria told her friend Sir Theodore Martin, ‘so simple, naïf even, so pleased to be informed about things he does not know’ (we can almost hear Napoléon telling the Queen, ‘Oh, madame, you are fascinetting, please tell me more about ze ideal diet of Corgis’) and ‘so gentle, so full of tact’ (‘do not worray, Your Majesté, your secret detestation of your Prime Ministaire is safe wiz me’) and ‘so full of kind attention towards us, never saying a word or doing a thing, which could put me out’ (‘yes, mah dear Victoria, I absolutely adore boiled pheasant’). This was a French séducteur on his best behaviour, devoting as much care and patience towards his female prey as a fisherman reeling in a prize trout.

  To complete this atmosphere of heady eroticism, Victoria awarded Napoléon Britain’s highest honour: appointment to the Order of the Garter – the order of chivalry founded in the fourteenth century by King Edward III after he had danced so energetically with a lady that her garter slipped off. He picked it up, put it on his own leg, and declared (in French): ‘Shame on anyone who misinterprets what I just did,’ probably implying: ‘If you assume I’m going to be removing the rest of the lady’s clothes afterwards, it’s just your dirty mind.’ This of course became the Order’s motto: ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’. Investing Napoléon as a so-called ‘Stranger Knight of the Garter’ was his due as a visiting head of state, but his highly charged relations with Victoria must have added an extra French frisson to the ceremony.

  After a week of public and private functions, there was still a hint of English condescension in the air – Victoria wrote to her uncle Leopold that ‘our Imperial guests . . . behave really with the greatest tact’, as if surprised that the French heads of state held their knife and fork correctly and didn’t wipe their mouths on the tablecloth. But the two couples had overcome their differences to become firm friends, and a return visit was arranged.

  IV

  Before thirteen-year-old Bertie was informed, to his delight, that he would be accompanying his parents to France, his childhood had been one long bout of Albertian oppression. In an attempt to mould him into a perfect Anglo-German prince, Bertie’s father had subjected him to a régime of discipline, loneliness and violence.

  A series of adult tutors were instructed by Albert – with Victoria’s approval – to drill the boy for six hours a day, six days a week in German, French, Latin, arithmetic, history, more German and even more (mainly royal) history. To avoid immoral influences, Bertie was kept away from all other children except his closest siblings, and after falling behind his younger brother Alfred, Bertie was declared retarded and banished to educational solitary confinement, relieved only by a few short, stilted visits from Eton boys who were considered worthy company for a prince.

  Young Bertie was ordered to write essays for his father, each one of which provoked a paternal report to the effect that they were below standard and that he needed to study even harder. When the frustrated boy rebelled with foot-stomping, furniture-throwing tantrums, he was given a sound flogging by Albert. In short, Bertie’s young mind and body were being force-fed a diet of failure and humiliation.6

  Even the ten-year-old Prince’s French teacher, a certain Docteur Voisin, said that the boy was being made to do too much intellectual work, which was a bit like a Viking military instructor complaining that the curriculum contained too much pillaging.

  ‘Make him climb trees! Run! Leap! Row! Ride!’ Voisin urged Bertie’s main tutor, a dull 29-year-old barrister called Frederick Waymouth Gibbs. But this and other pleas to grant the boy something approaching a normal childhood were ignored by his parents.

  It wasn’t entirely Victoria and Albert’s fault that they were so rigid. Albert had endured a disturbed childhood himself: when he was five, his mother left home, married her lover and never saw her children again before dying of cancer aged only thirty. Albert’s father, a renowned lech, then married his own niece and turned his back on his offspring. It was perhaps natural that these dysfunctional beginnings should spark a yearning in Albert for stability at all costs.

  Victoria meanwhile was haunted by the fear that her male children might inherit wayward genes from the Hanoverian side of her family. Her grandfather was ‘mad’ King George III, the first royal to talk to trees, and her uncle was the dissolute George IV, of whom The Times newspaper said on his death: ‘There never was an individual less regretted by his fellow-creatures than this deceased king.’ Not the kind of DNA that was going to preserve the British monarchy. And Victoria had been a staunch monarchist since childhood – according to Lytton Strachey’s playful biography, her favourite tune as a young girl was ‘God Save the King’.

  When baby Bertie was only a few days old, Victoria wrote to her uncle, King Leopold of Belgium: ‘I hope and pray he may be like his dearest Papa.’ A month later, she wrote again, repeating herself more emphatically: ‘You will understand how fervent my prayers are . . . to see him resemble his angelic deares
t Father in every, every respect, both in body and mind.’ In short, from the start, Victoria was begging God to make sure Bertie would grow up as a fun-hating German prude who didn’t understand cricket.

  It was, of course, entirely thanks to this tyrannical upbringing that Bertie would later rebel and turn into exactly the kind of gambling, philandering playboy that his parents abhorred. But then a very similar pattern was being repeated for most upper-class British males at the time, so Victoria and Albert were only applying an extreme form of current educational thinking.

  Before his first visit to France, Bertie’s sole relief from tedium came when Albert took him shooting at Windsor and Balmoral, a form of release that Bertie would embrace for the rest of his life. And he also enjoyed a temporary feeling of self-worth when he was allowed to accompany one or both of his parents to official functions such as the sombre funeral of the Duke of Wellington in 1852, the Naval Review of 1853, and long ceremonies at which his mother pinned the newly created Victoria Cross on the chests of soldiers returning from the Crimea. His childhood was never exactly electrifying.

  So when Bertie was told that he would be going with Victoria, Albert and his sister Vicky to Paris, he must have been as thrilled as any schoolboy who is told that there’s a class outing coming up – no lessons for ten whole days! Even the news that he would have to wear his uniform – the kilt – probably wouldn’t have bothered him, because he had no classmates to warn him that the French might laugh at a teenage boy in a skirt.

  But probably the most exciting prospect of all about the trip to Paris was that he would be seeing the Empress Eugénie again.

  Like Napoléon III, the Empress had climbed to the summit of French society by exploiting all her natural attributes. Whereas most of Napoléon’s female targets gave in immediately to his charms and status, she had forced him to court her for over two years, and eventually marry her. The writer Prosper Mérimée, author of the original story of Carmen and an old friend of Eugénie’s from her pre-Empress days, wrote a none-too-subtle couplet about the imperial couple:

  The Emperor is there because of an election,

  Eugénie because of an erection.

  She was not a classic beauty, but everyone seems to agree that she emanated a powerful sexual charm.

  Bertie had spent some time with her during the French couple’s visit to England, and had written in his diary that she was ‘very pretty’ – a daring entry given that the diary was one of the writing assignments inflicted on Bertie by his father, and was far from private. During her brief stay at Windsor Castle, Eugénie, who longed for children and had suffered several miscarriages, had lavished her attention on the boy in a way that Victoria and Albert had never done, and it is easy to imagine the effect that the voluptuous French lady would have had on the loveless teenage prince.

  In short, if the Channel steamer had broken down during the British royals’ crossing on 18 August 1855, the feverish heat of Bertie’s anticipation would probably have powered the engine right up the Seine to Paris.

  V

  Victoria and Albert’s state visit to France was one of the most successful family holidays in history.

  According to all accounts, including those of Queen Victoria herself, mother and children were in permanent throes of ecstasy, and, to use the French idiom, even the staid Albert temporarily removed the broomstick from his derrière. Those ten glorious summer days in France were packed with more thrills than young Bertie had known in his entire life.

  Even though he had been out in public with his parents before, the welcome they received in Boulogne-sur-Mer must have been an eye-opener. A contemporary painting of the occasion by Louis Armand, which now hangs in the Château de Compiègne near Paris, gives an idea of what it all must have looked and felt like for a teenage boy.

  The harbour is teeming with boats that have taken to the water to greet the royals. Out in the bay, a fleet of warships is letting off cannons in salute (either that, or the French and English captains are holding a small fiftieth anniversary re-enactment of Trafalgar).

  The new royal yacht, Victoria and Albert, a majestic gold-prowed steamer, has docked, and its deck is packed with French dignitaries doffing their top hats to the arriving guests. Eugénie, pregnant again and fearful of another miscarriage, has stayed at home, so Napoléon III has come to Boulogne alone, and he is proudly leading Victoria down a wide, red-carpeted gangplank towards a line of horse-drawn carriages waiting to take the guests to the railway station.

  Meanwhile, as far as the eye can see, hordes of spectators are jostling to get a glimpse of Bertie and his family. Many of these onlookers are chic women in silks and crinolines, holding parasols to protect their fashionably pale skin. A veritable army of bayonet-touting imperial guards and mounted cavalry has been mobilized to keep the ladies at bay.

  There is nothing half-hearted or condescending about this reception. If Napoléon had wanted to pull rank, it would have been customary for him to wait for Victoria to step on to his soil. On the dockside, there is a small marquee with a pair of thrones suggesting that the original plan might have been to hold the welcoming ceremony on land. But Napoléon has gone on board to take Victoria’s hand and invite her personally to come ashore. It was a friendly, and apparently spontaneous, gesture.

  After his successful trip to England, Napoléon III was clearly out to prove two things: first, that he was a true European sovereign and understood the historic importance of this trip. There had not been a state visit to France by a reigning English monarch since Henry VI in 1431, and that had not been a particularly happy occasion for the French because Henry came to Paris to be crowned King of France. Now was Napoléon’s chance to erase the memory.

  Secondly, he was determined to show that he was the kind of man who returns hospitality. Napoléon wanted everyone, both in England and France, to see that he really knew how to throw a party.

  As Bertie was driven through the admiring summer crowds to the railway station, he must have begun to suspect that this was not going to be like one of the formal state occasions that his mother and father organized. Back in England, onlookers had usually been showing due respect for his (or more precisely his mother’s) royal status. By cheering the monarch, the people were almost cheering themselves as a nation. Here in France it was different: these people owed the British royals nothing but they were saying, ‘Welcome chez nous, we’re going to show you a seriously good time.’

  Like the harbour, the railway station had been decorated, and a contemporary engraving shows the procession passing under an enormous archway draped with flags and flowers and inscribed with giant Vs. In the station itself, people are waving their handkerchiefs and hats in welcome. All along the route, the crowds had been so dense that the royal party were a couple of hours late boarding the imperial train, which didn’t pull into Paris’s Gare de Strasbourg7 until dusk, at precisely 7.12 p.m.

  In Paris, the excitement started all over again, not least because of the 101-cannon salute that marked the royal guests’ departure from the railway station. The city’s new boulevards (of which much more in a later chapter) were lined with thousands of spectators, watching the procession from behind an unbroken rank of soldiers standing to attention, or as close to attention as French soldiers get.

  British history books usually describe the rapturous reception that the royal party received, with Parisians shouting ‘Vive la Reine!’; however, less gushing French accounts, notably that of the historian André Castelot, ring slightly truer. To mark their arrival on the Paris fashion scene, Queen Victoria had put on a blue dress and grey silk jacket, and Albert had donned his field marshal’s uniform, but, according to Castelot, their costume change went almost completely unnoticed. The light was fading fast, and the Parisians who had turned out to witness the procession could hardly see a thing. Many had given up waiting, and others had grown impatient. Consequently, according to French commentators, the crowds were not hugely enthusiastic – more curious than ra
pturous.

  Even so, in Bertie’s mind, a horse-drawn carriage ride through Paris by night, along wide new streets that had been specially cleared of traffic, would surely have made up for any lack of enthusiasm amongst the city’s disgruntled citizens. The Champs-Élysées was in the final throes of its transformation from a rough track across marshland to a fully urban avenue, and it was now lined with the brand-new venues for the 1855 Exposition Universelle. All of these buildings have since been demolished, but on the site of the current Grand Palais and Petit Palais stood the immense Palais de l’Industrie, a 200-metre-long, 35-metre-high stone edifice with a gigantic domed glass-and-iron roof. In the centre of its façade was a triumphal arch topped by a sculpture modestly entitled France Crowning Commerce and Industry. On this summer evening, as Bertie was driven past it, with its transparent roof and 400 windows ablaze with gas lights, it would have been one of the most brilliant sights on the planet – second only to London’s Crystal Palace.

  Next, the royal party drove past the Arc de Triomphe, which was standing in the middle of the new place de l’Étoile, a hub for some of the city’s swankiest new avenues, and into the darkness of the Bois de Boulogne, which was undergoing a spectacular makeover. The old royal hunting forest on the western edge of Paris, once so thickly wooded that aristocrats had hidden there during the Revolution, had been ravaged by occupying British and Russian troops after the Napoleonic wars, and had needed extensive replanting.

  However, after seeing London’s Hyde Park, Napoléon III had decided that a plain forest was too rudimentary for his showcase Paris, and had ordered the remodelling of the woodland into an urban park with wide avenues for promenading carriages, and even an artificial river, a facsimile of the Serpentine. Here, he would surely have been keen to flatter his English guests by telling them how their capital city had inspired him to refurbish his own.