Dirty Bertie

by Stephen Clarke

  It’s not difficult to imagine the kind of things that Napoléon would have told his young protégé, the son he had been longing for, and trying for, ever since he married Eugénie. Napoléon was an opportunistic man who had got to his position in life thanks to his guile and determination as well as his Bonaparte blood, against fierce opposition from both royalists and republicans. Like all self-made men, he relished the pleasures he had earned. So it seems impossible that he wouldn’t have shared a few tricks with the star-struck English Prince who had expressed such rapt admiration for everything he saw and did in Paris.

  ‘One day,’ the Emperor may have told Bertie, ‘you’ll have courtiers of your own. And believe me, petit prince, you’ll be fighting the women off. Haven’t you seen how they all want to talk to you and dance with you? In ten years – five, even – they’ll be falling at your feet. You’ll have your pick of the most beautiful girls in your country – no, in the whole of Europe. Look at me, I’m short, not that good-looking, but I can get any woman I want with a snap of my fingers. Of course, Eugénie isn’t always happy about it, but I made her an Empress, so she’s grateful for that. Your princess will be just as indulgent with you.’

  This man-of-the-world speech would have been punctuated with nonchalant puffs on a cigar, which was also a novelty for Bertie because both his parents abhorred tobacco. Like Napoléon’s womanizing, cigar-smoking was a badge of distinction that Bertie would go on to imitate all his life, until lung disease killed him.

  If Bertie was the son Napoléon had always longed for, then Napoléon was the father Bertie would never have, and the boy apparently told his host: ‘You have a very beautiful country. I would like to be your son.’

  Eugénie also lavished attention and affection on Bertie, probably even more than she had done in London. Now that she was pregnant and absent from most of the public events, Bertie’s contact with her was almost entirely in private, in the intimate setting of one of her boudoirs. A beautiful, broody woman in the company of an impressionable, affection-starved teenage boy – it’s a powerful equation.

  And Eugénie’s attention was multiplied by the number of her ever-present companions, the ravishing dames d’honneur that Bertie had admired in the Exposition’s group portrait. Unlike his mother’s ladies-in-waiting, the Empress’s female courtiers were chosen for their beauty and wit rather than their good blood or fondness for dogs.

  Not, of course, that Eugénie or her erotic entourage would have deliberately set out to over-excite a thirteen-year-old boy. They had plenty of male suitors to keep them occupied. But they were chatty and charming, flirtatiously teasing, more like a group of girlfriends than a sovereign and her servants. And when, resplendent in their ballgowns at Versailles, the aristocratic French femmes fatales clasped Bertie to their chests and let him guide them around the dance floor in a twirling waltz, their bare shoulders and encouraging smiles would have been as intoxicating to the youngster as a magnum of champagne.

  A French biographer of Edward VII, Philippe Jullian, whose other books include a volume of nineteenth-century nude photos, gives a resolutely French view of Bertie’s sudden sexual awakening. In Paris, Jullian says, the young Prince:

  . . . breathed for the first time that odor di femina whose trail he would follow for the rest of his life. The beautiful, perfumed women who kissed him (he was just a child, after all) also curtsied before him, and as they plunged forward, their décolleté revealed delights that were veiled at Windsor.

  Writing in her diary, Victoria herself innocently highlighted this perfumed trail that Bertie had stumbled on during his first trip to Paris: ‘The beauty of the French capital, the liveliness of the French people, the bonhomie of the French Emperor, the elegance of the French Empress, made an indelible impression on his [Bertie’s] pleasure-hungry nature.’

  Of course, at that time the Queen didn’t realize what kind of pleasures her son would be hungry for, or quite how big his appetite would very soon become . . .

  * * *

  1 Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia were Bertie’s nephews, Alfonso XIII of Spain was married to a niece, Frederick IX of Denmark and Gustav Adolf VI of Sweden were married to great-nieces, Alexander of Greece was a great-nephew, Haakon VII of Norway was a son-in-law, and Bertie had family connections almost everywhere else in Europe except Austro-Hungary, which was ruled by his old friend the Emperor Franz Joseph, and France, where he was loved as an adoptive local.

  2 Bertie’s first impression of Napoléon III’s appearance wasn’t promising. In his diary he noted drily that ‘the Emperor is a short person. He had very long moustachios but short hair.’

  3 For more details of the British involvement in the 1848 revolution and the unfortunate Louis-Philippe’s fate at the hands of his English hosts, see 1,000 Years of Annoying the French.

  4 Not everyone in Britain felt comfortable with this sudden Anglo-French alliance – Sir James Graham, the First Lord of the Admiralty, called it ‘unnatural’.

  5 This is séduire in the French sense, which can mean win over, as well as charm into bed.

  6 Incidentally, failure and humiliation is a model still used today by the French education system, which is principally designed to prove – unnecessarily one might think – that teachers know more than their pupils.

  7 Now the Gare de l’Est. The Gare du Nord had been built in 1846, but that line went up to Lille and on to the Belgian border.

  8 On the same day, an agreement was signed between the Vatican and the Austrian government, giving the Catholic Church control over marriage laws and education in Austria, but there is no record of a big party afterwards.

  9 The sheik’s gesture might have been a witty, topical allusion to the fact that Victoria had appointed Napoléon to the Order of the Garter when he was in England.

  10 For a list of the biographies I read while researching this book, see the Bibliography, here.

  11 The tomb had been started in 1842 and would not be completed until 1861.

  12 The painting appears to be slightly misnamed, because the Château de la Muette was on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne, not the Bois de Saint-Germain. The château was subsequently demolished and replaced by a more modern mansion, now the Paris HQ of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.

  13 Napoléon, remember, had not done this in Boulogne, but had gone to greet Victoria on her ship.

  14 See 1,000 Years of Annoying the French for all the problems that dual nationality caused Mary (or Marie as she called herself).

  15 The Palais des Tuileries, originally built in the sixteenth century and adopted by Napoléon Bonaparte as his Paris home, was a château that joined the two wings of the Louvre. It was destroyed by Communard revolutionaries shortly after the fall of Napoléon III, in May 1871.

  2

  THE ROYAL CHERRY IS UNROYALLY POPPED

  ‘The women whom he had kissed as a small boy were prepared to give their all to the young man.’

  Philippe Jullian, in his biography Edouard VII

  I

  SO FAR, BERTIE had only seen the champagne fizzing in the glass and witnessed its effect on others. He hadn’t, as it were, popped a cork of his own. And for a long time after the family trip to Paris, there was little chance that Bertie would be returning to France for a second glimpse of the earthly pleasures available there. Apart from one short hop across the Channel with his parents in August 1858 to meet Napoléon and Eugénie in Cherbourg, the delights of the French imperial court were off the menu.

  The problem was politics. Napoléon III had apparently taken a lesson from his warlike uncle and decided that the best way to keep a grip on power was to appeal to French patriots by annoying the neighbours. After the end of the Crimean War in 1856, he began meddling in Italian affairs, helping to ‘liberate’ areas of the country occupied by Austria, and thereby worrying England and Prussia that he would cause a Europe-wide war. And just a couple of years after fighting the Russians in Cr
imea, Napoléon began carefully leaked discussions with the Tsar about an East–West alliance that threatened to sandwich Prussia like a fat sausage, with France poised to slice off the west bank of the Rhine.

  All this saddened and infuriated Victoria. She still sent Napoléon warm letters from his ‘devoted sister’, but to her ministers and her uncle Leopold, the King of Belgium, she poured out her exasperation about the French.

  When Napoléon invaded Naples in May 1860, she wailed to Leopold that:

  No country, no human being would ever dream of disturbing or attacking France;1 every one would be glad to see her prosperous; but she must needs disturb every quarter of the Globe and try to make mischief . . . and, of course, it will end some day in a regular crusade against the universal disturber of the world! It is really monstrous!

  Leopold warned Victoria about French hypocrisy, saying that she should ‘make every reasonable exertion to remain on personal good terms with the Emperor’ but that ‘the French dislike the English as a nation, though they may be kind to you personally’.

  In short, in the five or so years after Bertie’s holiday of a lifetime in Paris, any subtle hints to his parents that he fancied a return visit must have been met with outraged splutterings about his failure to grasp the basics of world politics. This might also explain why Bertie later became such an accomplished diplomat – once he reached adulthood, he would steadfastly refuse to let politics come between him and a pleasure jaunt to Paris.

  For the time being, though, he had to obey Mama and Papa, and his frustrated tantrums grew steadily worse until finally he was exiled to Richmond Park with a chaplain, his Latin tutor and three young men in their twenties (two majors and a lord) whose collective mission was to form his character. Prince Albert wrote out a detailed programme, requiring Bertie’s new life coaches to ensure that the boy refrained from ‘careless self-indulgent lounging ways, such as lolling in armchairs on or sofas, slouching in his chair, or placing himself in unbecoming attitudes with his hands in his pockets’. It was also essential that the young Prince of Wales should avoid ‘the frivolity and foolish vanity of dandyism’. Albert might as well have said, ‘Make sure Bertie doesn’t turn out French.’

  II

  Unable to call on Napoléon and the Parisiennes, Bertie began to look elsewhere for his éducation sentimentale. In July 1857, aged fifteen, he was sent on an educational tour of the continent, accompanied by four carefully vetted boys of his own age – three young aristocrats and William Gladstone, eldest son of the Chancellor of the Exchequer of the same name. The plan was for Bertie to be based in Germany, at Königswinter on the Rhine, for three months, during which he would make small sorties across the border into Switzerland and France for healthy pursuits such as hiking and breathing fresh air. Paris was definitely out of bounds.

  However, on the first night at Königswinter, Bertie let the freedom and the local wine go to his head, and kissed a girl. The event was considered so serious that Bertie’s adult minders decided to omit it from their reports back to Prince Albert, no doubt because they feared that the whole trip would be instantly called off and their summer ruined.

  In fact, it was very apt that Albert’s son had surrendered to temptation where he did. After all, according to popular legend, just upstream from Königswinter the most famous Rhine Maiden of them all, the mermaid Lorelei, was perched on a rock overlooking the river, luring innocent men to their doom. At the time, she was the heroine of a well-known song, a setting of Heinrich Heine’s poem ‘Lied von der Loreley’, which describes how ‘the most beautiful maiden sits aloft . . . combing her golden hair and singing a wondrous, overpowering melody’. A boatman ‘is enraptured and does not see the jagged rocks’. At the end of the poem, the poor man’s boat sinks and he is swallowed up by the raging current.

  Of course it wasn’t quite so tragic in Bertie’s case, but from the reactions to his first snog, you might have thought that he had just dived headfirst into a torrent of debauchery. The young Gladstone wrote home to his mother with the shocking news that Bertie had engaged in pre-marital oral contact with a member of the opposite gender. Mrs Gladstone naturally passed on the information to her husband, who reacted with moral outrage, declaring that ‘the Prince of Wales has not been educated up to his position’. He called the public kiss an ‘unworthy little indulgence’ which showed that Bertie was becoming ‘wanton’.

  All this, by the way, from the politician who famously took it upon himself to scour the streets of London for prostitutes, whom he would then ask to describe their wicked ways, before going home and whipping himself. Wantonness was a subject Gladstone knew a lot about.

  On Bertie’s seventeenth birthday in 1858, he may have thought that freedom was at last approaching. He received a letter from his parents announcing that they were giving him a personal allowance of £500 a year – a small fortune at the time. He was also being allowed to join the army as a lieutenant colonel, something that he had long wished to do.

  Of course, with parents like his, the good news was too good to be true. Bertie was still to be under the constant surveillance of a moral guardian, one Colonel Robert Bruce, a forbidding figure who looked a lot like Albert, sharing his combination of bald pate, bushy whiskers and morbid seriousness. Bruce was instructed by Albert to ‘regulate all the Prince’s movements, the distribution of his time and the occupation and details of his daily life’. Most of all, the new surrogate father was told, Bertie needed to practise ‘reflection and self-denial’.

  His parents still seemed to consider him a lost cause. Prince Albert wrote to his eldest daughter Vicky, who had recently married the Crown Prince of Prussia, Friedrich (father of the future Kaiser Wilhelm II who would go to war with Britain in 1914), and made a rare Teutonic joke about Bertie’s intellect, saying that it was ‘of no more use than a pistol packed in the bottom of a trunk if one were attacked in the robber-infested Apennines’.

  If the Italian Apennines were on Albert’s mind, it was because, before letting Bertie go away to the army, he planned to send him to Rome to study the ancients at first hand, all attempts to teach the boy Latin from books having failed miserably. While there, in early 1859, Bertie was allowed to pay a visit to the Pope, though only under the watchful eye of Colonel Bruce for fear that the young Prince, if left alone with the Pontiff, might promise the dissolution of the Church of England. And in the event, Colonel Bruce hastily escorted Bertie out of the Vatican as soon as the subject of English Catholicism was raised.

  Bertie did use his time in Rome to study art, though it wasn’t all ancient. He visited the studio of the well-known English painter Frederic Leighton, where he admired a portrait of a sultry Italian model called Nanna Risi. The erotically charged painting had already been sold, but Leighton convinced the buyer to step down and let his illustrious English visitor have it. Perhaps for the first time, Bertie saw that his rank really could get him any woman he wanted.

  While in Italy, Bertie met Edward Lear, the artist and limerick writer, who said of the Prince that ‘nobody could have had nicer and better manners’. He also met the poet Robert Browning, who thought him a ‘gentle, refined boy’. Just as he had done in Paris, Bertie was proving that he could fit in socially wherever he went.

  Despite the fact that Bertie had resisted physical temptations while in Italy, Victoria was still in a panic about his morals. She wrote to her daughter Vicky saying that she trembled at the thought that the boy would soon come of age ‘and we can’t hold him’.

  In October 1859, Bertie was sent to study at Oxford, but even this brought no loosening of the reins. Instead of joining his fellow toffs to celebrate their escape from the straitjacket of public school, Bertie was made to live out of college and attend private lectures. His only opportunities to sink into moral decline came when he managed to sneak away from the ever-present Colonel Bruce to smoke a forbidden cigarette.

  In January 1861, Bertie went up to Cambridge, but was subjected to the same rigid régime. The Fr
ench biographer Philippe Jullian casts doubt on this idea, asserting that while in Cambridge, Bertie was ‘already tasting the pleasures that ought to have been the reward for a wise marriage’. Jullian mentions a rumour that a Cambridge girl found herself ‘in a delicate situation’. But we can’t be sure whether this is true. After all, Jullian is French, and therefore unable to imagine that a young man might be prevented from having sex at will.

  It probably wasn’t until later that year in Ireland, at the age of nineteen, that Bertie would finally succeed in doing the deed and convincing his mother that further attempts at improving his character were useless. The only thing to do was to marry him off.

  III

  By 1861, Victoria had cause to feel more optimistic about her eldest son. At the end of the previous year, Bertie had returned from a triumphant tour of Canada and the USA, during which he had experienced again the thrills of an adoring crowd. Even the supposedly anti-monarchistic Americans had turned out en masse to cheer him and by implication his absent mother. In New York, a crowd of 300,000 took to the streets and paved the route of the royal procession with flowers. Wherever he went, Bertie delighted everyone, both his hosts and his newly promoted moral guardian, now General Bruce, with his innate sense of diplomacy, his tireless charm and his dancing. The Prince complained of having to waltz with the ageing wives of local dignitaries, but stuck obediently to the names on his dancing card and committed no public faux pas, not even when a good-looking girl polka’d into view, propelled by her ambitious parents.