by Jane Ridley
Once or twice a week at about four o’clock, Bertie would drive up to the house in Chesham Place in an anonymous hansom cab. In the hall he would hand his hat, gloves, and cane to Bird, the butler. This was a sign that the meeting was prearranged, as etiquette dictated that the gentleman who made an uninvited call should sit with hat, gloves, and cane on the floor beside his chair, signifying the fleeting and casual nature of the visit. The prince would enter the drawing room, where Harriett waited for him alone. Her husband was never at home when Bertie called; he was busy in the House of Commons, or competing in pigeon-shooting matches at the newly established Hurlingham Club in Fulham.‖ Bird received instructions from Lady Mordaunt that “no one else was to be admitted after his Royal Highness came.”58
Afternoons were the accepted time for adultery, rushed and uncomfortable though it must have been in crinoline and stays on a sofa. But what took place in the hour and a half or so when Bertie was alone in the drawing room with Harriett was not witnessed. The servants had their suspicions, but nothing improper was ever reported.
On 15 June 1868, Sir Charles Mordaunt departed on a fishing holiday to Norway, leaving his wife behind. While he was away, Harriett saw a great deal of a friend named Lord Cole. One night Cole dined with her, and stayed on alone after the guests had left until one a.m. Meanwhile, on 6 July, Princess Alexandra gave birth to her fourth child, a daughter, wisely named Victoria. The Queen thought the baby a “mere little red lump,” and joked that her grandchildren were being born at the rate of rabbits in Windsor Park.59
The following week, Sir Charles returned unexpectedly to Walton Hall, his Warwickshire home, having cut short his fishing holiday. It was a blazing hot summer’s day, and in front of the house he saw his wife in her pony carriage. She was showing off the two white driving ponies she had bought a few months before from the Sandringham stables. On the steps of the house, admiring her, stood a man—none other than the Prince of Wales.
Bertie hurriedly departed. Shortly afterward, Sir Charles ordered the groom to bring the two ponies round onto the lawn. Dragging Harriett down the steps, he shot the animals dead in front of her.
The whispered scandal was misery for Alix, who clung obsessively to “my Bertie.” Her leg was still sore—Bertie reported that she had at last been able to “valse” with him—and now her husband decided to take her away to spend the winter abroad, beginning with Denmark.60
By running away from the gossip and pleasing Alix, Bertie annoyed the Queen. There was the usual tug-of-war about taking the children out of the country. Alix wanted the three eldest, Eddy, Georgie, and Louise, to spend Christmas with her parents at Fredensborg, leaving baby Victoria behind at home, but the Queen forbade the one-year-old Louise to travel. She gave a grudging assent for the two boys, but only if the doctors agreed: “They are the Children of the Country and I shall be blamed for allowing any risk to be run.”61
Alix implored Victoria to relent over Louise, who was a sickly child: “I would prefer to give up the trip rather than leave the little darling behind. You will understand this best, my angel mother, and therefore I speak so openly to you.”62 No one, not even Vicky, dared to appeal to Victoria’s feelings in this way, but for once the Queen resisted Alix’s charms and accused her of being “very selfish” and “unreasonable.” This provoked a furious outburst from Bertie. “Alix has made herself nearly quite ill with worry of all this,” he told the Queen, “but what she has felt most are the words you have used regarding her. Ever since she has been your daughter in law, I think she has tried to meet your wishes in every way—and you have never said an unkind word to or of her.” Selfish she most certainly was not, “and her whole life is wrapt up in her Children.” Was it not inconsistent, he demanded, to forbid Alix to travel home to her parents with her children when Vicky and Alice regularly brought their babies with them to England?63
At this Victoria wisely gave way, as she always did in an unwinnable situation. Little Louise accompanied her parents to Fredensborg.
Six weeks with Alix’s family bored Bertie. The weather on Denmark’s windswept sands made it almost impossible to go out, and there was nothing to shoot except foxes.64 A bear-shooting expedition with the King of Sweden was spoiled by fog, though the King inducted Bertie as a freemason, which annoyed Victoria.65 Alix wept bitterly when the time came to leave her parents and the “children of the nation” were sent home. They were packed off to stay with Queen Victoria, who grumbled about having the house at Osborne “crammed full” of grandchildren and complained that they were spoiled.66 Irked by his mother’s remarks, Bertie wrote a tart letter warning her not to be too strict with the grandchildren lest they should grow to dislike her, “and we should naturally wish them to be very fond of you, as they were in Denmark of Alix’s parents.”67
From Denmark, Bertie and Alix proceeded to Berlin, dreading the meeting with Vicky, who, said Bertie, had become “so elated and proud” since Prussia’s victories.68 Bertie was invested with the order of the Black Eagle, but it was Alix who took Berlin by storm, captivating the King of Prussia, in spite of the spat of the previous summer. The popularity of the Danish Rose with the people of Berlin was such that the Queen of Prussia became quite jealous and picked a quarrel. When Alix said, “I thank your Majesty for all your kindness and friendship,” the Queen, who wanted Alix to call her Aunt Augusta, although she was not, in fact, her aunt, snapped: “It is very impolite of you. By the way, you may call me as you wish, it doesn’t make any difference to me.” Whereupon she turned her back on Alix and stalked off.69
From Berlin, the party traveled to Vienna, and then from Trieste they sailed to Alexandria for a cruise down the Nile. Letters from Victoria pursued Bertie throughout the journey, complaining about the “quantities of extraordinary people” he had invited to meet them in Cairo.70 One of these was the Queen’s bête noire, the Duke of Sutherland, “whose style is not a good one in any way.”71 Even worse was Samuel Baker, the explorer who had discovered the source of the Nile, invited by Bertie to act as a guide, abhorred by Victoria because it was said that he had bought his wife in a slave auction and lived with her before he married her.72
The Nile cruise was one of the happiest times of Alix’s life. A procession of barges towed by five steamers glided in a floating court. Bertie and Alix lived on the Alexandra dahabeah with a lady-in-waiting (Mrs. Grey) and three maids. Bertie’s friend Carrington and Alix’s admirer Oliver Montagu traveled on a luxurious steamer. The Duke of Sutherland and his party, including the naturalist Richard Owen and journalist W. H. Russell, who published an account of the journey, sailed behind in another steamer, as did the Egyptian khedive. “You will doubtless think we have too many ships,” Bertie told Victoria, “but … in the East so much is thought of show that it became almost a necessity.”73
For Alix, having Bertie to herself was paradise. As for Bertie, Samuel Baker, who excelled as a big-game hunter, was the ideal companion. “I cannot say how glad I am to have asked him to accompany us here,” Bertie told Victoria.74 Theirs was a different age. Bertie shot a crocodile with eighty eggs inside it, and Alix adopted a ten-year-old Nubian boy named Ali Achmet, who, in spite of his subsequent baptism at Sandringham, turned out to be a compulsive thief, loathed by all the servants.
From Paris, where they stayed on the journey home, Bertie wrote: “Sad stories have indeed reached our ears from London of ‘scandals in high life’—which is indeed much to be deplored—and still more so, the way in which (to use a common Proverb) they ‘wash their dirty linen in public!’ ”75
The dirty linen belonged to Harriett Mordaunt. At the end of February she had given birth to a premature daughter, probably an eight-months baby. Soon afterward, she started to say strange things. She asked the midwife whether the baby was “diseased.” She said that the baby came from the time when her husband Sir Charles was away in Norway. She was sure the father of the child was Lord Cole. Harriett seemed indifferent toward her baby, but when she noticed a discharge c
oming from her eyes, she became distraught. She told the midwife that Sir Frederick Johnstone, Bertie’s old Oxford friend, was a “fearfully diseased man.”a76
Convinced that the child was infected with venereal disease, Harriett insisted on making a confession to her husband. “Charlie you are not the father of that child,” she declared. “Lord Cole is the father of it and I am the cause of its blindness.” She told him that she had been very wicked. “With who?” asked her startled husband. “With Lord Cole, Sir Frederick Johnstone and the Prince of Wales, and with others, often and in open day.”77 Harriett confidently expected her husband to forgive her, but she had misread him badly. Sir Charles was a proud man, rigid and insecure. The shock and humiliation of being cuckolded was more than he could bear. He determined on revenge. He wanted a divorce, and he wanted to see his wife’s lovers, especially the Prince of Wales, in the witness box.
At the Mordaunts’ Warwickshire home, an appalling tragedy was now enacted. Harriett found herself deserted by her husband, bullied by his family, surrounded by spying servants, and repeatedly examined by doctors. Sir Charles interrogated the servants and ransacked her desk, finding the eighteen letters from the Prince of Wales. Soon the lawyers became involved, as he prepared to sue for divorce.
Harriett’s family were hardly more sympathetic, being determined above all to protect the family honor and save themselves from disgrace. The Moncreiffes had a great deal to lose. Their tentacles extended deep into the aristocracy surrounding the court.b When her sister Helen Forbes heard of Harriett’s confession, she immediately responded: “Tell me is there one name mentioned? I mean the Prince?” She added, “He has ruined the happiness of many families.” Helen was rumored to be a mistress of Bertie’s herself, and it was whispered (probably wrongly) that her daughter Evelyn, born in March 1868, was a royal love child.
“Our great object,” wrote Helen Forbes, “is to prevent anything being brought before the public.”78 The Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 made divorce easier, but Parliament’s decision against allowing cases to be heard in secret meant that proceedings could be freely reported in the newspapers.79 Advised by his lawyers, Sir Thomas Moncreiffe knew that the only hope of keeping the scandal out of the press was for Harriett to plead insanity. It was vital to show that she had not been in her right mind when she made her “confession” to Sir Charles, and that she had been mad ever since.
Harriett’s behavior was increasingly strange. She rarely spoke, but sat silent and dumbly unresponsive. She stood motionless with a fixed stare, as though playing “statues.” Sometimes she burst out into a fit of mad laughter. The Mordaunt family and the servants at Walton were convinced that she was shamming, faking madness on the instructions of her father. Sir Charles’s doctors examined her and reported that she was sane. But the doctors sent to inspect Harriett on the instructions of the Moncreiffe lawyers diagnosed puerperal mania.80
Bertie and Alix, meanwhile, seemed a devoted couple. Egypt had been a second honeymoon, and Alix returned pregnant with her fifth child. But she looked ill and thin, while Bertie was overweight and balding. The baby—another girl, named Maud—was born in November. Alix told Minnie that she had telegraphed for “my Bertie,” who was away when her pains began, and he arrived just in time to be with her in the bad hours, “for without him the angel I would certainly not have been able to stand them—they gave me a little chloroform, but only so little that I felt everything and went off into fits of laughter into the bargain.”81
Building work made Sandringham uninhabitable that winter, and the Waleses rented Gunton, Lord Suffield’s house nearby. They spent six weeks there after Christmas, entertaining relays of rowdy shooting parties. In one period of just four days, 3,207 head of game were shot. The bill of fare gives a glimpse of the menus composed by French chefs for the royal nursery, the little princesses, the stewards’ room, the servants’ hall, and the royal kitchen, climaxing in the Royal Dinner. Shooting breakfast typically consisted of Poulet sauté aux champignons, rump steaks pommes, saucisson de dore (browned) and oeufs brouillés aux truffes (scrambled eggs with truffles). Shooting lunch was Don Pedro sherry, curry of rabbits, ronde de boeuf, partridges, roast beef, galantine foie gras, wild boar, apple pudding, and rum baba. Dinner reads like a restaurant menu:
Tortue Claire. Purée de gibier.
Turbot sauce homard. Eperlans frits sauces anchois.
Foies gras à la Financière.
Filets de phaisant à la Maréchel. Doits asperges.
Roastbeef. Dindes braisés purée de céleris.
Jambon Braisé.
Wild ducks. Asperges.
Macédoines de fruits. D’artois crème.
Pailles au fromage.
Abricots ice.82
At least the Prince of Wales had not lost his appetite from worry.
One night Christopher Sykes, who had just introduced a bill for the preservation of seagulls, his sole achievement in a parliamentary career of twenty-seven years, had a dead seagull put in his bed for a joke.c Sykes was “so tipsy that leaning against the wall of the ballroom his feet slipped from under him; and he fell and lay flat on his back—so we carried him to bed, and he lay on the seagull all night.”83 Little wonder Alix found it exhausting, though she liked some of Bertie’s friends, “now that I know them all so well, though only being intime with very few.”84 As for Lord Suffield, when a fire destroyed Gunton ten years later, it was rumored that he had taken desperate measures, as he could no longer afford to entertain the prince.
Sir Charles Mordaunt petitioned for divorce on 27 April 1869, accusing Lord Cole, Sir Frederick Johnstone, and “some other person” of committing adultery with his wife. Bertie was not named, but behind the scenes he tried to hush the scandal up. Harriett was bundled off to a villa in Worthing, where she was kept under virtual house arrest, an act of dubious legality which was sanctioned by Bertie’s doctor William Gull.
If Harriett had been feigning insanity at first, the keepers who watched her in Worthing thought that she really did go mad. She was unable to carry on a conversation. She was apathetic and restless by turns, with a strange, vacant look.85 Doctors visited often, but rather than attempt to help the poor demented woman, they filed reports for the lawyers.
“My dearest Mama,” wrote Bertie on 10 February 1870: “It is my painful duty (I call it painful, because it must be so to you to know that y[ou]r eldest son is obliged to appear as a witness in a court of justice) to inform you that I have been subpoened [sic] by Sir C. Mordaunt’s Counsel to appear as a Witness on Saturday next at Lord Penzance’s Court.”
Sir Charles Mordaunt, who “has shown such a spirit of vindictiveness ag[ain]st me—& such a bad spirit,” was determined to make him appear in court. Bertie added: “Alix has been informed by me of everything concerning this unfortunate case.”86
The Queen’s response was instinctive and definitive. Though deeply regretting his involvement, she never for one moment doubted his innocence. “I cannot sufficiently thank you,” wrote Bertie, “for the dear and kind words.”87 Her support was crucial, both for its own sake, and because it meant that the government backed him. Both the prime minister, Gladstone, and the Lord Chancellor were on his side.
As for Alix, she was in no doubt that her angel had been wronged. Her newly discovered letters to her sister reveal that she remained fiercely loyal. “Imagine only my feelings my Minny! To see one’s husband being accused in such a scandalous mean way was nearly more than I could bear, and we were both of us nearly ill at it … imagine that he, my angelic Bertie, in his high position, was trumped [sic], that is to say those brutes accused him in the face of the whole world in such a mean way that everybody naturally believed the worst.”88
Bertie and his lawyers had done everything possible to prevent the case from coming to court. They were careful to operate in a clandestine way, which has made it difficult for historians to learn the truth, but it seems that Harriett Mordaunt’s father, Sir Thomas Moncreiffe, was in league wit
h Marlborough House to ensure that Harriett was declared insane and not fit to appear in court. In November 1869, the royal doctor William Gull visited her and declared her mentally incapable. Harriett’s condition had, in fact, been improving, but after her father paid a visit she became madder by the day. She laughed uncontrollably, she spat, she finger-painted excrement, she ate fluff off the carpet. Did Moncreiffe put her up to this, as the Mordaunts suspected? And how come Sir Thomas, who was notoriously short of money, was willing to risk crippling legal expenses unless he had a guarantee of finance from “somebody” if the case went against him?89
The case came on in Westminster Hall on Wednesday, 16 February 1870. The courtroom was packed, and the verbatim report of the proceedings filled a whole page of the newspapers. The nation was agog. “Reading the Mordaunt Warwickshire Scandal case,” wrote Reverend Kilvert in his remote vicarage on the Welsh marches. “Horrible disclosures of the depravity of the best London society.”90 Queen Victoria ordered the newspapers to be hidden from her younger children, as the details were “such as hardly to be readable for any one and make everyone shudder that the world sh[oul]d be fed with such scandal!”91
Harriett was declared unfit to appear. The Moncreiffes claimed that she had been mad ever since her baby was born. Sir Charles Mordaunt, on the other hand, insisted that she was feigning and, in order to establish her motive for this, the judge, Lord Penzance, allowed the facts of her past life to be put before the jury. This was a turning point in the trial, and it came as a blow for Bertie and the Moncreiffes. As Carrington wrote, Sir Charles seemed “determined to make everybody he possibly can share the disgrace with him and on his wife’s confession drags in the Prince of Wales.” It was a “terrible thing,” thought Carrington, and “will do an awful lot of harm.”92
