Princess Alexandra survived her ordeal. Although at the time a Danish marriage was not politically expedient, after several weeks the Queen reluctantly professed herself satisfied. Prince Edward not only fell in love with Princess Alexandra but saw in the marriage a way out of the gilded cage of his childhood. He proposed to the Princess immediately and was immediately accepted. Because the bereaved Queen Victoria was unable to face the crowds of well-wishers, the nineteen-year-old Princess Alexandra, who had been looking forward to her new status, was denied both a state procession and a London wedding. The marriage ceremony took place on a cold March day in 1863 in a cold St George’s Chapel, Windsor. The chilly atmosphere at the wedding was to be a foretaste of the marriage itself.
During the ceremony Queen Victoria, dressed in black, sat almost completely hidden from view. Her son’s reaction to her behaviour is not recorded. The 22-year-old Prince Edward had to balance the gloomy send-off against the freedom from his mother for which he had wished for so long. Princess Alexandra’s feelings while she was undergoing the weeks of positive vetting that her mother-in-law had insisted on are not recorded either, but her sense of self-worth can hardly have been enhanced. Had she known her husband better she might have wondered whether the ‘great escape’ from his family, in which she had played a part, would be replaced by a happy family life.
Princess Alexandra readily accepted the responsibilities of marriage. She could hardly have been a more attentive mother or a ‘less attentive’ wife. Despite the machinations with which she was surrounded at Court, she saw no evil in anyone and seemed to have made a conscious decision to ignore her husband’s philandering. Like many other Victorian wives, she may indeed have regarded her husband’s sexual indiscretions as proof of his virility. After his marriage, having survived the death of his father and the disapproval of his mother over the Nellie Clifden affair, Prince Edward continued to enjoy life amongst the demi-mondaine in London, Paris, on the French Riviera and in Germany.
Between 1864 and 1870 Princess Alexandra gave birth to six children. the last of whom died immediately after birth. While her husband dedicated himself to a life which sought to rectify the wrongs of his childhood, the popular Princess was never lonely. Prince Edward was not short of company either, but it was company that existed not only outside his home but outside his marriage. The envy of his peers and his rich friends for his sartorial elegance, for his fabulous parties and his success with women fulfilled his need for admiration. Even his vast gambling debts struck awe in his companions at the card table, the race track and the casino. Larger than life in every sense, Prince Edward’s appetites were gargantuan and his need for sex and food insatiable. In the 1870s he insisted that the custom of leisurely eating and of polite conversation at his table should come to an end. He decreed that at the Marlborough House dinner parties no meal should last for more than one hour. Delayed pleasures did not appeal to him. His appetites had to be gratified immediately. The unseemly haste with which he fulfilled his need both for food and for sex pleased neither the chefs who provided him with lavish gastronomy, nor the women who, with equal attention to detail, attempted to satisfy his (possibly equally short-lived) sexual appetite. In indulging his needs in this peremptory manner, Prince Edward was repeating the pattern of his dysfunctional childhood, when moments of pleasure were few and had to be seized upon before they were spirited away.
When Princess Alexandra and Prince Edward returned from their one-week honeymoon to an enthusiastic society welcome, the Princess believed that a glittering life lay ahead of her. She and her husband were attracted to one another and shared a love of ‘fun’. This often took the form of practical jokes. Such jokes were a cover for deep-seated feelings of hostility and were played at the expense of their house guests who were often humiliated by them. While the jokes may in fact have been ‘fun’ for the perpetrators, it was not always so for the victims of them who were forbidden by the social mores of the Court from retaliating in kind.
Prince Edward could hardly have been more pleased with the Princess his mother had chosen for him. He found her beautiful, charming, sympathetic and understanding. With few inner resources of his own he needed a great deal of input from those around him. Since his upbringing had failed to put him in touch with his own assets (it had in fact successfully suppressed them), he needed to draw upon the assets of others. His new wife, however, was able to provide him with neither stimulating conversation nor with wit, and after her first child was born could not rely upon her looks either to maintain her husband’s attention. Prince Edward saw to it that he was always surrounded by beautiful women. His emotional deficits as a child, the vacuum left within him by his parents’ lack of love and understanding, made it impossible for any one person to satisfy him, and as an adult it was only natural that he should turn to married women (other ‘mothers’) whom he often then rejected.
Within a year of her marriage Princess Alexandra had herself become a mother, but for Prince Edward even a live-in and loving mother could not compensate for the wrongs of his past. Although Princess Alexandra was loving towards her overly dependent husband, when he ceased to be her only ‘child’ he became disenchanted with her. He not only began to find fault with, among other things, his wife’s lack of intellect but he envied the attention she was giving to their rapidly increasing family. A downward spiral developed. The more Princess Alexandra was involved with her children, the more Prince Edward felt justified in looking outside the marriage for comfort. The more he did so, the more the Princess relied upon her sons to make up for the love that her husband withheld from her. Their mother’s smothering and their father’s frequent absences began to sow the seeds of the dysfunctional background in which their sons and daughters were to grow up.
In the latter stages of her third pregnancy Princess Alexandra became seriously ill. She complained of severe joint pains and, after she had been diagnosed as having rheumatic fever, took to her bed. Prince Edward who had only just returned from St Petersburg, where he had attended the marriage of his sister-in law Princess Dagmar to Tsar Alexander III, had difficulty in putting aside thoughts of the Russian women he had left behind. Despite his wife’s suffering, and the fact that her pregnancy was virtually at full term, he insisted on leaving London to attend a steeplechase in the country. Three telegrams later he returned anxious and irritated and acting like a dependent child whose mother is ill. Unreasonably, he resented the fact that his sick wife was unable to fulfil his needs and night after night left the marital home to seek comfort in the arms of others who were able, and sometimes paid, to do so. While protesting his love for Princess Alexandra, the Prince was none the less becoming increasingly addicted to the more immediate gratifications of illicit sex, lavish banquets and the excitement generated by gambling, all of which were allowed to take precedence over his family responsibilities.
After her illness Princess Alexandra was left with a swollen, stiff and painful knee. While still beautiful, she was temporarily unable to dance either with her husband or to his tune. Gradually she became aware of a second disorder, a form of deafness such as had afflicted her mother, Princess Louise. Increasingly isolated by her inability to hear what was going on, particularly at state and on other social occasions, the Princess withdrew into herself and devoted more and more time to her children and the simple pleasures of the country.
The effect on Princess Alexandra’s and Prince Edward’s children of their parents’ behaviour towards them cannot be over-emphasized. As a child King George V was indoctrinated with the belief that his mother was in love with him. This later prevented him, out of misplaced loyalty, from making an absolute commitment to any other woman, including his wife.
Had Prince Edward and Princess Alexandra been able to look into the future, they might have realized that they had introduced into the Royal Family a pattern of behaviour which, four generations later, was to change its image for ever.
• 2 •
Darling Georgie
The future King George V made his appearance on 3 June 1865 at Marlborough House, London, only two hours after his mother Alexandra, Princess of Wales had bade goodbye to the last of her dinner guests. Within a few moments of birth Prince George experienced a second separation from his mother. As was the custom, the midwife showed the young Prince briefly to his mother then handed him over to one of the attendants who was responsible for his physical (and, albeit unknowingly, for his emotional) well-being. This parting sowed the first seeds of the clinging dependency, first on his mother and later on his wife, Princess May of Teck, which would persist throughout King George V’s life.
Four weeks after Prince George’s birth a fire broke out in the Marlborough House nursery. Although the infant Prince was quickly removed by his father to another part of the building, Prince Edward at once returned to help the fire brigade cope with the fire. The noise and disruption could hardly have been beneficial to a baby barely four weeks old. Throughout his life Prince George’s father derived almost as much pleasure from ‘big blazes’ as he did from the smaller conflagrations of his extra-marital affairs.
Princess Alexandra was aware of her husband’s distant treatment as a child at the hands of Queen Victoria, and she was anxious not to expose her own children to a similar experience. For this reason she was reluctant to allow their grandmother anything other than minimal involvement in their lives. Because of Princess Alexandra’s desire to bring up her children according to her maternal intuition rather than according to royal protocol, Queen Victoria found it difficult to show unconditional approval of her daughter-in-law. In occasional letters of complaint to her daughter, Crown Princess Victoria, which were similar in tone to those she had written almost twenty-five years earlier about the behaviour of Prince Edward, she accused Princess Alexandra of being ‘haughty and frivolous’ and complained that ‘Alix shows me no confidence whatsoever especially about the children.’
While the honeymoon period between Princess Alexandra and Queen Victoria seemed to be over, the honeymoon between the Queen’s recalcitrant son and his wife had barely begun. The gradual onset of coldness which reflected Prince Edward’s need to scapegoat Princess Alexandra after she had become a mother for his own mother’s coldness had yet to show itself. Both of them, however, provoked angry reactions in Queen Victoria. Her hostility to her son and heir was never far from the surface and it was exacerbated by his flamboyant life-style of which she may have been jealous. Princess Alexandra appeared to have everything she herself might have had, had she not married the pathologically obsessional and moralistic Prince Albert.
Despite Queen Victoria’s misgivings about Prince Edward and Princess Alexandra, both the general public and fashionable society had had enough of the austerity and the gloom cast by Queen Victoria’s years of mourning, and they welcomed on the scene the arrival of the glamorous and charismatic young couple.
Princess Alexandra, ‘the people’s Princess’, was encouraged by them in her giddy round of balls and banquets, in her obsession with lavish ball-gowns and jewellery and in her vivacious sense of fun. They were yet to appreciate her love for the country and her pleasure in making homes for her family at Sandringham and Marlborough House, two cold and concrete symbols of her husband’s inheritance. Prince Edward’s insatiable appetites, his gambling and flamboyant extravagances also fascinated the ‘royal watchers’.
A little over a year after her return from honeymoon Princess Alexandra became pregnant. The social whirl continued, however, much to the annoyance of Queen Victoria. Reticent perhaps about discussing the pregnancy, either with her daughter-in-law or her son, she found an alternative way to voice her dissatisfaction with the Princess. She complained to the Waleses about the continuing presence in Marlborough House of her youngest son Prince Alfred, who had become one of his sister-in-law’s most ardent admirers. Sensitive to any hint of impropriety, the Queen focused her disapproval on the nineteen-year-old, although Prince Edward welcomed his brother’s innocuous company.
When Princess Alexandra went into labour prematurely with her firstborn son, Prince Albert Victor Christian Edward (subsequently known as Eddy), to her amusement (but to their mortification) all six of her medical consultants arrived too late for the birth. Eddy caused anxiety from the beginning. Small and delicate, his parents were concerned about him, not only because he was their first-born but because he was the heir apparent. His grandmother was always on the look-out for an opportunity to blame her son and daughter-in-law for perceived or imagined wrong-doing. She attributed the child’s fragile health to the boisterous social life led by his mother during her pregnancy, although Prince Eddy’s fragility was more likely due to his premature birth and – in the absence of the accoucheurs – to his precipitate delivery. In a letter to her daughter, Vicky, Queen Victoria described Eddy as ‘fairy-like, placid and melancholy’. She also told Vicky that unlike her own children ‘all with your fine chests’, he is ‘rather pigeon-breasted which is like Alix’s build’.
Princess Alexandra’s possessive style of mothering was probably exacerbated by the fact that Eddy closely resembled her. She felt a sense of familiarity which made her even more attached to him. Because of Eddy’s prematurity, she was obliged to breast-feed him until a suitable wet nurse could be found. Since the close bond between an infant and his mother centres on his relationship to the breast, Eddy’s later difficulties in committing himself to any one woman would have replicated his early struggle to bond with two women (one a wet nurse) rather than with just one, his mother.
When, eighteen month’s later, Eddy’s brother, Prince George was born he also attracted his grandmother’s concern. Queen Victoria referred to the two boys as ‘poor frail little fairies’ and to one of them as being ‘puny and pale’. If both were to survive their tenuous start in life they were going to need a considerable amount of maternal input which in fact they later received, if only intermittently. The birth of Prince George in no way reduced his mother’s involvement with Prince Eddy. She made herself equally available to them both. Queen Victoria, however, made herself even more unpopular by insisting that she wanted a major say in the upbringing of her grandchildren. She had written to her Uncle Leopold that her son ‘should understand what a strong right I have to interfere in the management of the child or children’. She complained, not to her daughter-in-law but to her son, that she had not been informed early enough to have been present at their birth. ‘It seems that it is not to be that I am to be present at the birth of your children, which I am very sorry for.’ It was some time before the Queen would acknowledge that her lack of intimacy with Princess Alexandra, to which the Princess could not help but react, was more political than personal. In view of the ongoing hostility between Denmark and Germany, she would have preferred her son to have married a nice German girl.
Princess Alexandra, unlike her mother-in-law, who had a hands-off relationship with her children, was totally involved with the day-to-day welfare of her two sons, although such involvement as there was must be understood in the context of mid-nineteenth-century nursery life as it applied to upper-class families. Whenever Princess Alexandra could be spared from the onerous duties incumbent upon a Royal Princess, the two boys had their mother’s company. They took breakfast each morning with their parents, after which their ‘training’ was discussed with their attendant
s. This training emphasized the common courtesies, but attention was also paid to familiarizing the children with the French and German languages. Bi-lingual governesses were employed, virtually on a daily basis, solely for this purpose. Queen Victoria was in fact far less concerned with her grandchildren’s education than were their parents. She had never forgotten Lord Melbourne’s comment about her eldest son, that she should not be ‘over solicitous about education as it may mould and direct the character but it rarely alters it’.
Prince Edward was not indifferent to his children. Like their mother, he also adored them and in the absence of more pressing engagements played boisterous games with them. While Prince George was in awe of Prince Edward whom, according to his father’s mood, he either respected or feared, he remained passionately in love with his mother until the end of her life in 1925. He always addressed her in his many letters, both as a small child and as an adult, as ‘Darling Motherdear’.
Darling Georgie Page 3
