Dreadnought, Britain, Germany and the Coming of the Great War

by Robert K. Massie

  If the Prince was excluded from politics, society was another matter. At a time when the Queen's seclusion rendered the royal court almost nonexistent, the young Prince and Princess of Wales became the center of society and the arbiters of fashion. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, following Albert's inclinations, had come to regard society as frivolous and decadent, limiting their circle to royal relatives and a sprinkling of the oldest nobility. Society, which had laughed at Prince Albert and pitied Queen Victoria, now threw open its doors for the youthful Prince of Wales and his beautiful Princess. Bertie, especially, rushed to embrace all that was offered. Day after day, he hurried from one social engagement to the next, enjoying banquets, balls, operas, music halls, theater, garden parties, and private suppers. He could get by with little sleep. Sometimes, friends would be summoned to Marlborough House late at night for supper and whist until the early hours. At other times, he would sally forth with a party to explore London nightlife, using hired hansom cabs rather than royal carriages, often ending up at Evans Music Hall in Covent Garden, where he and his friends would sit in a reserved box protected by a screen from the audience's gaze.

  The Prince's circle encompassed aristocrats, politicians, diplomats, financiers, merchants, physicians, explorers, actors, and actresses. This circle acquired a name, "the Marlborough House Set." Members, aware of Bertie's desire never to be alone, arranged to make themselves available at short notice. To institutionalize his friendships and provide a site for meetings, in 1869 the Prince formed the Marlborough Club at 52 Pall Mall, near Marlborough

  House. Four hundred gentlemen, all acquaintances of the Prince of Wales!, made up the original membership, and Bertie became the club's first president. Jewish members were welcomed and smoking was permitted in most rooms. On the lawn behind the club, there was a bowling alley where Bertie and his friends bowled in their shirtsleeves until the neighbors protested the rumbling of the balls. Until the Prince's death, all candidates for membership required his endorsement for election.

  Bertie valued his companions and showed them intense loyalty, but a certain sensitivity was demanded in return. He liked wit, tolerance, and gaiety; he enjoyed a funny story, a good anecdote, or a tidbit of gossip properly presented. Snobs, prudes, prigs, and bores were made unwelcome. Bertie did not mind a measure of gentle chaffing, but there were limits; he expected respect and deference to his rank. The trick for those close to him was knowing where to draw the line between cordial good fun and excessive familiarity. Occasionally, men close to him trespassed, and the Prince reacted swiftly. Behind his back, his friends referred to his increasing girth, calling him "Turn Turn." One night at Sandringham, a visiting baronet was behaving wildly in the billiard room when the Prince put his hand on his friend's shoulder and remarked with a kindly smile, "Freddy, Freddy, you're very drunk." Sir Frederick immediately pointed to his host's waistline and said, "Tum Tum, you're very fat." The Prince turned on his heel and beckoned to an equerry. Before breakfast the next morning, Sir Frederick had left the house.

  The Prince had a voracious appetite. At breakfast, before shooting, he had poached eggs, bacon, haddock, and chicken or woodcock. His dinner seldom consisted of fewer than twelve courses, the richer and more elaborate the better. He delighted in caviar, at any hour, never tired of crayfish cooked in Chablis, and was especially fond of game birds-grouse, pheasant, partridge, snipe, or woodcock-boned, stuffed with truffles or foie gras, and bathed in a rich Madeira sauce. He insisted on roast beef and Yorkshire pudding at Sunday lunch after church and regarded grilled oysters as the ideal dish for an after-theater supper. His wife complained that he ate anything, refused to chew, and bolted his food. Bertie drank moderately, preferring champagne to wines and taking only a single glass of brandy after dinner. He loved to smoke, however. It was unpardonable in the Victorian Age for gentlemen to smoke in the presence of ladies, and considered vulgar even to smell of tobacco. Queen Victoria permitted no smoking in the royal palaces, even in guest bedrooms. Count Paul von Hatzfeldt, the German Ambassador, once was discovered at Windsor Castle, lying in his pajamas on the bedroom floor with his head in the fireplace, blowing smoke up the chimney. There was no smoking in the dining room after dinner, even after the ladies had withdrawn; gentlemen sat and drank port or brandy, avoiding tobacco lest the room be tainted by the smell. Only after the ladies had gone to bed might gentlemen switch into silk smoking jackets and puff away on cigars or cigarettes. The Prince of Wales was not able to change these rules while his mother was on the throne. In his own houses, however, and everywhere else, he smoked prodigiously. Beginning with a small cigar and two cigarettes before breakfast, he consumed an average of twelve large cigars and twenty cigarettes a day.

  From afar, Queen Victoria disapproved of the behavior of what she called the "Marlborough House fast set." Describing Society as "repulsive, vulgar, bad and frivolous in every way," she likened it to the nobility of France on the eve of the French Revolution. The Prince and Princess of Wales, particularly the Prince, seemed to her bent only on pleasure. "Bertie and Alix left… [Windsor] today, both looking as ill as possible," she wrote to Vicky. "We are all seriously alarmed about her. For although Bertie says he is anxious to take care of her, he goes on going out every night till she will become a Skeleton. Oh, how different poor, foolish Bertie is to adored Papa, whose gentle, loving, wise, motherly care of me, when he was not 21, exceeded everything."

  In October 1871, soon after his thirtieth birthday, the Prince contracted typhoid fever while visiting a country house. Two others in the house party, an earl and a groom, also became feverish and ultimately died. Bertie was taken to Sandringham, where he steadily grew worse. By the beginning of December, his condition had worsened sufficiently to bring Queen Victoria hurrying to Sandringham, where she remained for eleven days. The rest of the royal family assembled in the overcrowded house, split into groups, sitting in parlors, waiting anxiously for news. Princess Alexandra sat by her husband's bedside, leaving only to pray in the village church. The Queen also sat in the sickroom watching her son, who was bathed in sweat, start up from a feverish sleep to hurl pillows at his nurse. No one forgot the approaching fatal anniversary-December 14-of the Prince Consort's death ten years before from the same disease. On December 11, Bertie raved incessantly, talking, singing, whistling. At seven p.m., the Queen was told that the end probably would come during the night. "In those heart-rending moments," Victoria wrote in her journal, "I scarcely knew how to pray aright, only asking God, if possible, to spare my beloved Child." In the morning, the Prince was slightly better, and by the fourteenth the fever had vanished entirely.

  Bertie sought diversion in travel. In 1866, the Prince of Wales went to St. Petersburg to represent his mother at the marriage of Alexandra's Danish sister Minny to the Russian Tsarevich Alexander (known as Sasha). Alix, desperate to go, was pregnant and had to remain at home. In 1869, however, she accompanied the Prince on a six-month tour to Paris, Copenhagen, Berlin, Vienna, Cairo, Constantinople, Sebastopol, Yalta, and Athens. In Vienna, he found Hapsburg protocol onerous-it required him to call upon every member of the Emperor Franz Josef's extended family-"and as there are 27 archdukes now at Vienna, it is hard work." In Egypt, six blue and gold river steamers bore the royal party five hundred miles up the Nile, towing barges which carried three thousand bottles of champagne, four thousand bottles of claret, four French chefs, and a white donkey for the Princess to ride. Returning to Cairo, Bertie climbed the Great Pyramid, and Alix visited the Khedive's harem, where the women painted her face and eyes, wrapped her in a robe and veil, and sent her back to surprise her husband.

  The Prince of Wales' favorite foreign country was France; his favorite Continental city, Paris. As a boy of fourteen, riding through the French capital in a carriage with the Emperor Napoleon III, he had announced, "I should like to be your son." In the last decade of the Second Empire (the 1860s), Bertie took every opportunity to visit Paris and bask in the brilliance of the imperial court. He became a
familiar and popular figure in many Parisian circles: with the Bourbon princesses of the House of Orleans, the sons of the House of Rothschild, the dowagers of the Faubourg St.-Germain, and the ladies of the demimonde. After the fall of the Empire in 1870, Bertie remained a welcome figure, not only in the aristocratic French Jockey Club, of which he remained a member until his death, but among Republican politicians, who saw in England a counterweight to the massive power of the new German Empire. In France, the Prince usually traveled incognito and became "Baron Renfrew," or, when Alexandra was with him, "the Duke and Duchess of Lancaster," or even "Mr. and Mrs. Williams." No one was fooled, but the public understood that he wished to enjoy his privacy.

  Every year at the end of the London season, the Prince went yachting at Cowes and then slipped away to a Continental spa to try to lose weight. When this took him to Austria, he called on the Emperor. Protocol aside, he liked Franz Josef. "The weather is still excellent and the riding enjoyable on maneuvers," wrote the Hapsburg emperor in 1888, when he was fifty-eight and Bertie forty-seven. "I tried hard to shake off the Prince of Wales by continued hard trotting and by sustained gallop. But I didn't succeed. This chubby man kept right up with me. He showed incredible endurance and spirit, even after he grew a bit stiff. He wore through his red Hussar's trousers, which was pretty uncomfortable since he had nothing on underneath."

  The Prince disliked Germany. Bernhard von Bulow, the German diplomat who later became Chancellor, knew the Prince well and said that Bertie "could never rid himself of the impression that the word 'German' was identical with the narrow-minded, moral preaching, drilling, and brute force. If he found a man to be dull, clumsy and uncouth, he would say of him: 'He is as tiresome and tedious as a German professor.' If a lady seemed to him to lack all grace and elegance, he compared her with a German Frauchen." Bertie's view of Germany was reinforced by his wife, Princess Alexandra, who hated Germans for wrenching away Schleswig and Holstein from Denmark, and by his sister Vicky, the German Crown Princess and later Empress, who disliked almost everything in Berlin and Germany. Bertie was fond of his sister and her husband, Frederick, and if a visit to Germany involved a visit to them, he grumbled less about going. Later, when his nephew William became Kaiser, he avoided Germany whenever possible. The Prince made his feelings clear during the three short wars fought by Bismarck and Prussia to forge German unity: he described the war with Denmark which resulted in the annexation of Schleswig-Holstein as a "stain forever on German history"; he believed that right and justice were with Austria in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866; and his sympathy for France in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 was so pronounced that the Prime Minister, Mr. Gladstone, and eventually the Queen were obliged to insist on his silence.

  To Queen Victoria, secluded at Windsor, Osborne, or Balmoral, it seemed that her son was always in motion. "The country, and all of us would like to see you a little more stationary," she wrote to him. He replied with as much patience as he could muster: "You remind me, my dearest Mama, that I am 45, a point I have not forgotten, although I am glad to say that I feel younger. You are, I think, rather hard upon me when you talk of the round of gaieties I indulge in at Cannes, London, [Bad] Homburg, and Cowes… I like Cannes, especially for its climate and scenery, just the same as you do Aix [-en-Provence], which you tell me you are going to this year… With regard to London, I think, dear Mama, you know well that the time we spend there is not all amusement, very much the reverse. To Homburg I go only for my health and to Cowes to get the sea breezes and yachting which, after the fatigue of the London Season, are an immense relaxation. Nobody knows better than I do that I am not perfect-still, I try to perform the many and ever-increasmg duties which lie before me to the best of my ability, nor do I shirk many which I confess I would prefer not to have to fulfill. There ijs an old English saying that 'all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy'-and there is a great deal of truth in it…"

  Foreign travel did not calm the restless Prince. Beginning in his middle twenties and continuing for the rest of his life, Bertie was unfaithful to Alexandra. Once she was hampered by deafness, the Prince grew increasingly bored. She tried to keep up, but eventually abandoned the effort. He went out, stayed late, and was everywhere surrounded by appealing society women.

  Gentlemen in Victorian England could amuse themselves as much as they liked with "actresses," the term society applied to women; of the streets and special houses. Approaches to unmarried girls of good family were strictly forbidden. Once married, a young woman in society must not be approached until she had borne her husband several sons to carry on the family name and inherit the estates. The essential rule underlying the entire structure was discretion; everything might be known, nothing must be said. The ultimate disgrace was divorce, when charges and proceedings would get into the newspapers, informing the middle and lower classes that the standards upheld by Queen Victoria and the Church of England were habitually mocked by the nation's aristocracy.

  The Prince of Wales rigorously observed these rules. His affair with Lillie Langtry, the professional beauty whom he subsequently helped to become a successful stage actress, was conducted with the public acquiescence of Edward Langtry, her husband. Nor was there any public unpleasantness from the husbands of Lady Brooke (later Counters of Warwick) or Mrs. George Keppel. Princess Alexandra also played her role to perfection in these royal bedroom dramas. It was the; Princess's view that other women did not threaten-indeed had very little to do with-her own relationship with "my Bertie." As long as no public scandal was permitted, she remained gracious and forbearing, even tolerantly amused. An example of her attitude is presented by Georgina Battiscomb: "One day, she [Alexandra] chanced to look out of the window at Sandringham just as her husband arid his mistress were returning from a drive in an open carriage. The Princess herself never lost her graceful slimness but Alice Keppel, her junior by twenty-five years, had already grown very stout, whilst the Prince of Wales had long merited his disrespectful nickname of Tum-Tum.' The sight of these two plump persons sitting solemnly side by side was too much for her equanimity; calling her lady-in-waiting to come and view the joke with her, she dissolved into fits of laughter."

  Queen Victoria complained that her son wasted his days with the Marlborough House "fast set," but whenever a prime minister attempted to break the pattern by finding real employment for the Prince, his mother balked. Gladstone, especially, tried. After visiting the Prince at Sandringham, the Prime Minister wrote to the Queen suggesting that the Prince be persuaded to adopt the habit of reading. The Queen replied, "She has only to say that the P. of W. has never been fond of reading, and that from his earliest years it was impossible to get him to do so. Newspapers and, very rarely, a novel, are all he ever reads."

  Queen Victoria's reign stretched on and still the Prince had nothing serious to do. "The Prince of Wales writes to me that there is not much use his remaining at Cowes (though he is willing to do so) as he is not of the slightest use to the Queen," one of Bertie's aides wrote to another in 1892. "Everything he says or suggests is pooh-poohed." Bertie endured. He spent an extraordinarily long time-almost four decades from his coming-of-age and marriage- waiting for a human and political event he must simultaneously have wished for and dreaded.

  Queen Victoria's family spread across Europe as first cousins routinely married each other and kings and emperors, privately known as Bertie and Georgie, Sasha and Nicky, Fritz and Willy, all referred to the little old woman in Windsor Castle as "Granny." All nine of her children and most of her grandchildren married, and there were thirty-seven living great-grandchildren at the time of her death. On family matters, there was no appeal from her dicta, and the smallest concerns of the youngest roused her passionate interest while she still treated the oldest almost as toddlers. On one occasion, aboard the royal yacht Victoria and Albert, four of her children, the Duke of Edinburgh, the Duke of Connaught, Prince Leopold, and Princess Beatrice, came up the gangplank to join their mother, who had come on board earl
ier and gone to her staterooms. The Duke of Edinburgh, a full admiral in the navy and Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet, informed the captain that the yacht could cast off. The captain apologized profusely and explained that he had no orders from the Queen. The children, all adults, looked at each other and said, "Did you not ask Mother?" "No, I did not. I thought you did." The Duke of Connaught was sent to ask permission for the yacht to leave. Victoria, who had anticipated the sequence and been waiting to see what would happen, nodded assent.

  With the passage of time, the Queen's sense of humor, suppressed first by the rigid decorum imposed by Prince Albert, and then by the burden of grief imposed by Albert's death, resurfaced. Though Albert was never forgotten, and every day the Queen was at Windsor she visited the Frogmore mausoleum, she did begin to smile, then to laugh, then to roar with laughter, over pomposity undone, pretense revealed, or language ludicrously misused. At dinner one night at Osborne House, the Queen entertained a famous admiral whose hearing was impaired. Politely, Victoria had asked about his fleet and its activities; then, shifting the subject, she asked about the admiral's sister, an elderly dowager of awesome dignity. The admiral thought she was inquiring about his flagship, which was in need of overhaul. "Well, ma'am," he said, "as soon as I get back I'm going to have her hauled out, roll her on her side and have the barnacles scraped off her bottom." Victoria stared at him for a second and then, for minutes afterward, the dining room shook with her unstoppable peals of laughter. There was, of course, an opposite extreme. Rudeness, vulgarity, indecorum, anything hinting even slightly of lese-majeste, called forth crushing disapprobation. The Queen's face would glaze, her eyes turn stony, and in a voice which often annihilated the social future of the transgressor, Her Majesty would say, "We are not amused."