Dirty Bertie

by Stephen Clarke

  2 See Chapter 13.

  3 Note the choice of adjective, doubtless an appeal – conscious or not – for Bertie to be friendlier with him than with France.

  15

  C ’EST LA FIN

  ‘[Thanks to Edward VII] the balance of European powers was less unstable, and peace less precarious.’

  Raymond Poincaré, French politician

  I

  DURING THE EARLY years of his reign, Bertie’s health had declined in fits and starts, more or less in synch with the political ups and downs that Europe was suffering. And sadly for Europe, as soon as he had got over his stomach abscess of 1902, he had immediately resumed his unhealthy lifestyle.

  Christopher Hibbert lists Bertie’s favourite dishes as king: at home he would have a glass of warm milk in bed, followed if he was going out shooting with a breakfast of bacon and eggs, haddock, chicken, toast and butter. Lunch depended on whether the occasion was formal or not, and could even be relatively light if he was shooting. Tea would consist of poached eggs and cakes, and was followed by a dinner that often involved twelve courses. His favourites were oysters, which he slurped down several dozen at a time, plovers’ eggs, caviar, sole poached in Chablis, chicken in aspic, and any game birds that were available – pheasant, grouse, partridge, snipe, woodcock, quail; all of them prepared in thick, creamy sauces. Quails he preferred stuffed with foie gras. His favourite style of lunch and dinner was a meal during which he could gobble as much as possible while being amused by gossiping friends or the coy chatter of a pretty woman.

  On top of all this, Bertie was still smoking more than twenty cigarettes and a dozen cigars a day, and would sometimes take a cigar break in the middle of a formal dinner.

  Not surprisingly, his heart and lungs began to battle it out to see which could finish him off first. The lungs presented his most visible weakness. After a particularly bad bout of bronchitis in the winter of 1905, on doctor’s orders Bertie swapped his usual break in Cannes for a trip to Biarritz. He immediately approved: ‘Though this place is quieter than the Riviera it is more bracing and I am sure healthier.’ What he meant was that the cooler, fresher Atlantic air helped to ease his breathing so that he wasn’t so subject to the coughing fits that often cut short his conversations.

  In Biarritz, Bertie subjected himself to a health cure of sorts, cutting down slightly on his food. His French police bodyguard Xavier Paoli described his ‘reduced’ daily intake: after his glass of milk in bed, Bertie would breakfast on bacon, boiled eggs, fried trout or smelt (a small Atlantic fish) and coffee. Lunch was often boiled plovers’ eggs with paprika, grilled fish, and a meat dish (either chicken or lamb). His favourite fruit and vegetables were asparagus and strawberries. He drank very moderately (in the Frenchman’s eyes), taking just a couple of glasses of Chablis or champagne with a meal. It wasn’t a starvation diet, but Bertie was clearly making some effort.

  As his reign went on, he began to make a habit of wintering in Biarritz for longer and longer periods, inviting Alice Keppel with him as maîtresse-en-titre. He would travel down on the royal train, while she followed on separately for appearance’s sake. Bertie would take up residence in a suite of rooms at the Hôtel du Palais, a new luxury establishment on the seafront. It had been built on the site of the Empress Eugénie’s holiday residence, which had been destroyed by fire in 1903. Meanwhile, in a neat piece of symmetry, Alice and her young daughter Sonia would stay at the nearby Villa Eugénie, which had once belonged to the Empress’s son.

  Together, Bertie and Alice would enjoy something resembling a family holiday. In the morning, Bertie would work on his terrace, dealing with the messages sent over from England. Then in the afternoon they would go out in one of Bertie’s claret-coloured cars that had been driven down from England. Speeding through the Pyrenees or along the coast, Bertie would have a bugle sounded so that the drivers of slow carts and carriages would know that his convoy was approaching (an idea suggested to him by Kaiser Wilhelm). He may also have invented the common British practice of stopping right by the roadside for picnics. At a picturesque spot, he would order his loyal driver and mechanic Charles Stamper to pull over, and then his attendants would get out the picnic basket and some chairs for a quick meal on the hard shoulder. These regular outings along unpolluted roads would probably have been good for mind and body if Bertie hadn’t smoked non-stop every mile of the way.

  In March 1907, he arrived in Biarritz suffering from a severe cough, and The Times printed a short piece that included a description of the morose King walking ‘along the shore, where he sat for a long time on one of the benches’: a melancholy image evoking a man desperately calling on the sea air to clear his diseased bronchial tubes.

  A year later, things were even worse. In 1908, Bertie decided to stay on the ground floor of the Hôtel du Palais rather than the first as usual, to spare him the exertion of walking upstairs. He was only sixty-six, but seemed to be giving up on Biarritz’s promise to cure his breathing problems.

  Bertie wasn’t pinning all his hopes on France, however. He had always been a regular at the German spas, and this didn’t change when he became king. Just before his accession to the throne, he elected Marienbad – now in the Czech Republic, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire – as his summer health resort. It was a fashionable meeting place for royal families and European socialites, and was also conveniently situated for a stopover chez Kaiser Wilhelm on the way.

  In Marienbad, Bertie would go for brisk walks, wallow in mud baths, drink copious quantities of the healing waters, avoid champagne and eat very sensibly (for him, anyway), sticking to light meals of trout and grouse accompanied by aubergines and peaches. Over the period of a fortnight he could lose about eight pounds.

  Of course he would enjoy himself, too, with parties, bridge evenings and concerts, including, on one occasion, a show by Yvette Guilbert, the French chanteuse who had been shipped down to perform for him in Cannes a few years earlier. Marienbad had a full theatrical programme, and Bertie was often in attendance. Only once was he disappointed, and walked out of a play called Hell, a succession of not-very-stimulating erotic songs in German. Hardly surprising that he was unimpressed – he had been brought up on French eroticism, which was in a league of its own. Bertie was congratulated on this moral stand by the Bishop of Ripon, but he didn’t feel that congratulations were in order, and replied: ‘I have no wish to pose as a protector of morals, especially abroad.’ Possibly Bertie’s most accurate piece of self-analysis ever, and proof that, even in relatively old age, he never forgot his inner Frenchman.

  II

  Perhaps symbolically, Bertie had one of his first attacks of uncontrollable coughing in Germany, while on his last state visit to see Wilhelm in February 1909.

  Bertie was, as usual, enjoying a smoke, when he suddenly began choking, dropped his cigar, and had to have the tight collar of his German army uniform hastily unbuttoned by his terrified wife and the Foreign Office representative Charles Hardinge to save him from suffocating. Hardinge’s intervention was a neat metaphor – keeping Bertie breathing was synonymous with keeping Britain’s foreign policy alive. And on that occasion in Germany it worked, just about.

  Tragically, it was a trip to his beloved France a year later that seems to have finished Bertie off. Or, to put it more kindly, perhaps his body chose to say its farewells in the country that had taught it virtually everything it knew about life.

  In March 1910 Bertie travelled to Paris. While there, he went to the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin, one of Sarah Bernhardt’s favourites, the stage on which Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac was first performed in 1897. There, Bertie saw Rostand’s new play, Chantecler, although it’s hard to know why it was recommended to him, because it was already a flop. It was a sort of tame, non-political precursor of Orwell’s Animal Farm, a verse fable about farmyard animals in which the eponymous cockerel (whose name means ‘sing clearly’) reveals that he makes the sun rise every morning. Bertie, no fan of
allegories unless they involved scantily clad nymphs, found the play ‘stupid and childish’ (as had most of Paris’s theatre-going public). He also found the theatre so stifling and airless that he began to sweat, and caught a chill, which quickly developed into bronchitis.

  Next day, he confided in a friend, the beautiful socialite Comtesse de Greffuhle, that ‘I have not long to live. And then my nephew will make war.’ Bertie’s self-awareness seems to have covered his mortality as well as his morality.

  He left Paris for Biarritz as planned, but after two days he was feeling so ill that he took to his room. He had a fever, and was breathing very rapidly, coughing all the while. Mrs Keppel wrote a note to a friend saying ‘I am quite worried’, which was no doubt the English stiff-upper-lip version of ‘Oh my God he’s dying, what should I do?’ Later, when Dr Reid found symptoms of pneumonia, Alice went even further and wrote that she was ‘alarmed’.

  In any case, the weather was so bracing outdoors that it would have killed Bertie outright. Biarritz is on the same latitude as the Riviera, but the climate is incomparable. The Atlantic breezes that can feel refreshing when they are gentle often turn into gales, and the spring of 1910 was marked by snow, rain and constant wind. Queen Alexandra invited Bertie to come on a Mediterranean cruise, but even in his reduced condition, Bertie didn’t want to shorten his holiday with Mrs Keppel. Despite the bronchitis, France was having its romantic effect.

  After a few days he actually began to improve, so that the risk of suffering a typical French statesman’s death – in a hotel room, alone with his mistress – was at least postponed for a while. He even felt well enough to start chain-smoking cigars again. A bulletin was issued to the British press announcing that ‘His Majesty is now completely restored to health’. Though strictly speaking, that hadn’t been true since about 1890.

  Bertie knew that his days were numbered, which might explain one of the outings he made when he felt well enough to go for drives again.

  Perhaps as a means of denying his own responsibility for his chronic illness, he was highly superstitious. Attached to his bed at home was a bouquet of herbs that he hoped would help to heal him or at least bring him luck. He hated going into dinner if there were thirteen people present, and once when he did so, he was heard to console himself with the thought that one of the women was pregnant, which added another guest. He also counted the sticks of asparagus on his plate, and was alarmed if there was an odd number.

  During Bertie’s last stay at Biarritz, perhaps in an attempt to seek metaphysical help for his health problems, he drove to the shrine at Lourdes, the Pyrenean town where pilgrims had been flocking ever since 1858, when a fourteen-year-old girl called Bernadette had had visions of the Virgin Mary and dug a hole that yielded holy waters.

  On 20 April, Bertie, Alice and a small party of friends covered the first stage of the journey – a hard, 120-kilometre drive from Biarritz to Pau that would have taken at least three hours, given the conditions of the road. Next day, they drove thirty or so kilometres up into the mountains, slowed by several burst tyres, and didn’t arrive in Lourdes until the afternoon. Bertie, an ill man, must have been very determined to get there.

  He was greeted by the Bishop of Lourdes and taken into the grotto to see the pool where pilgrims in search of a miraculous cure for their ills dunk their afflicted body parts or have themselves completely immersed. Sadly for Bertie, he couldn’t undress and dive in to bathe his chest – not only because a huge crowd had gathered to see him, but also because it would have been an overtly Catholic thing for an Anglican monarch to do. Besides, the water is so cold that it would probably have brought on a fatal bout of pneumonia.

  Bertie stayed on in Biarritz until the last week of April 1910 while Alexandra cruised to Corfu, and on the night before his departure, there was a parade of local sailors and the fire brigade, a band playing and fireworks lighting up the stormy sky. It was the town’s biggest-ever au revoir. Bertie, though, was afraid it was a definitive adieu – next day, when everything was packed, he looked out over the bay and said that he was ‘sorry to leave Biarritz. Perhaps it will be for ever.’

  And for once in his life, he didn’t stop over in Paris on his way home through France – an ominous omen.

  Back in London, it was clear to everyone that Bertie’s French holiday hadn’t done him any good. He was quiet, exhausted, coughing incessantly, and had no appetite – except for cigars. He worked on as diligently as ever signing documents, but barely talking as he did so. When he did speak it was to confess to his secretary Frederick Ponsonby that: ‘I feel wretchedly ill. I can’t sleep, I can’t eat.’ The enjoyments of life were deserting him one by one.

  On Monday 2 May, after a quiet evening of bridge (a game that required little or no conversation), Dr Reid found Bertie in his dressing room at Buckingham Palace, breathing very quickly and coughing painfully. He had a temperature of 100 degrees. The doctor applied hot poultices to Bertie’s chest and back, gave him a shot of morphine and put him to bed. The next evening Bertie still couldn’t eat, and found it impossible to talk without coughing.

  The following day, Bertie forced himself to conduct audiences, but was coughing too much to utter more than a few sentences. When it was suggested that he might like to rest, he famously replied: ‘I shall not give in. I shall go on. I shall work to the end. Of what use is it to be alive if one cannot work?’1

  On the last morning of his life, 6 May 1910, Bertie lit a cigar but found that even that was no pleasure any more, and he finally gave up smoking – too late.

  He insisted on sitting up in a chair, where it was easier to breathe, and sucked in lungfuls of oxygen from a large bottle, but still looked distinctly blue in the face. Lunch was brought in, but he didn’t feel like eating, and stood up to go and play with his canaries, which were kept in a cage by the window. The effort was too much for him and he collapsed. Refusing to go to bed, he was propped up again in his chair and continued his laboured efforts to breathe, while his doctors injected strychnine to stimulate his heart – a risky last resort, because an overdose would have caused asphyxia and death.

  By this time, all of Bertie’s close family was with him – minus Kaiser Wilhelm. Alexandra had returned early from her cruise, and, in a spirit of generosity and resignation that was typical of her despite spending so many years as the betrayed spouse, she called for Alice Keppel. The maîtresse-en-titre had visited Bertie the day before and was due to return at 5 p.m., but Alexandra thought that it would be too late to see her lover conscious, and sent news that she should return as soon as possible.

  When Mrs Keppel arrived, Alexandra shook hands coldly, but told her sportingly, ‘I am sure you have always had a good influence on him,’ and walked over to the window to give the maîtresse a few moments of privacy. Bertie, though, had fallen into a coma and did not recognize Alice, which sent her into hysterics, so that she had to be removed from the room.

  Bertie was finally put to bed at 11 p.m. and died there just three-quarters of an hour later, suffocating from the effects of emphysema. His last words before losing consciousness were to express his pleasure at hearing that one of his horses, a two-year-old called Witch of the Air, had won the 4.15 at Kempton Park. Bertie gasped that he was ‘very glad’. History has not recorded whether the dying King had put a bet on his horse.

  III

  The day before the funeral, with the departed sovereign lying in state in Westminster Hall, Kaiser Wilhelm almost caused a riot. He had decided that he would lay his wreath at 2.45 p.m. precisely, and gave just an hour’s notice that the tens of thousands of mourners who were filing past to pay their respects should be kept away.

  Bertie’s old friend, Charles Wynn-Carrington, was Lord Great Chamberlain, in charge of the lying-in-state. He was afraid that Wilhelm’s stunt would cause serious public unrest. When the public mourning had begun, there had been a queue one mile long snaking along the Embankment. By the next day, it had stretched to four miles, with people waiting
six abreast, and on the final day, when Wilhelm intended to visit, the line was an unbelievable seven miles long.

  Wynn-Carrington described the crowds in his diary: ‘People waiting patiently for hours. Hundreds passed the night in the rain. They all went by from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. quietly and reverently without intermission.’ But tell them that the German Emperor was going to halt proceedings for an hour, and the mood might well turn ugly.

  So he went to find Wilhelm, who was calmly having lunch, and told him that he would have to enter the hall via a side door so that the long flow of public mourners would not be interrupted. A side door? The tradesman’s entrance? Wilhelm was not pleased. Even from beyond the grave, Bertie was making his nephew feel inferior. It may not be much of an exaggeration to say that Kaiser Wilhelm’s (delayed) reaction to this final humiliation was, as Bertie had predicted, world war.

  The day of the funeral, 20 May, was fine, though it had rained all night and drenched the mourners who had flooded in from all over the country. Amongst the VIP guests were the Kings of Belgium, Denmark, Greece, Bulgaria, Norway, Portugal and Spain, the Archduke of Austria, the Prince of the Ottoman Empire, the Empress of Russia and dozens of princes and princesses from small European nations like Hesse, Hanover and Schleswig-Holstein. Most of these were Bertie’s relatives or personal friends. France was represented by members of its two opposing clans – the republicans and royalists – with Stéphen Pichon, the Foreign Minister who would go on to be one of signatories of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, and Pierre d’Orléans, the nephew of Bertie’s old friend Henri and grandson of deposed King Louis-Philippe.