by Jane Ridley
Susan was the wayward daughter of the red-bearded Duke of Newcastle who had taken Bertie to America. The duke had been one of Gladstone’s closest friends, and when, twenty years before, Susan’s scandalous mother had left him and bolted to Italy with her lover, Gladstone had followed in hot pursuit, in a vain attempt to rescue her. Susan had been Vicky’s bridesmaid, but she then disgraced herself by making a runaway marriage to Lord Adolphus Vane-Tempest, a son of Lord Londonderry, who, Queen Victoria told Vicky, “drinks and has twice been shut up for delirium tremens.” The Duke of Newcastle refused to give his consent; there were “no settlements, no trousseau, nothing,” and because he wouldn’t allow her to use his carriage, Susan walked to church with her governess. The Queen joked that there was a bet about which of the two, Susan or Adolphus, would be confined first. Within days, it was Adolphus who had gone mad and been locked up.72 He tried to kill Susan, and according to the Queen, he died in 1864 in a struggle with his four keepers when he burst a vein in his throat.73
Bertie’s relationship with Susan had begun in 1867, and he was a frequent visitor to her house in Chapel Street, Westminster.74 In 1871, she became pregnant. Her baby was conceived in March, shortly before the birth of Alix’s dead son.75
Susan delayed telling Bertie about the pregnancy, she later explained, because “I hoped to the last that my efforts might be successful and that then I need never have told You of the anxiety I had gone through.” She evidently understood that it was her responsibility to prevent pregnancy, and if her precautions failed, it was then her duty to abort the baby. She saw her own doctor, who did “everything he could for me as long as it was possible to do so with safety.” Susan admitted that “Perhaps I was wrong in keeping silence but I did it to save you annoyance—so please forgive me for You little know how sad and unhappy I am.”76
She at last summoned the courage to confess her condition to Bertie in early September, when she was already five or six months pregnant.77 Bertie ordered her to consult his doctor, Oscar Clayton.c Susan delayed, and felt compelled to explain: “Your Royal Highness blames me for not at once going to Dr. C[layton] as You desired me, but You can understand it was most painful to go to an utter stranger under such sad circumstances.”78
She eventually agreed to consult the sinister Dr. Clayton, but Bertie now refused to see her. Instead, she was interviewed by Francis Knollys. Not surprisingly, she found it hard to speak freely to him. “I was so confused today that I hardly knew what I was saying to you,” she told him.79 Knollys arranged for her to see Dr. Clayton the following day. Susan never used the word, but Clayton’s role was plainly to perform an abortion. His verdict, however, as she told Bertie, was that it was “too late and too dangerous.”80
Bertie ordered Susan to leave London and have the baby secretly in the country. She reluctantly concurred. “I am ready to obey Your orders in everything and it grieves me more than I can say to feel that You are annoyed with me,” she wrote, adding pathetically, “Don’t please be angry if I entreat you to come and see me before I go away.… Please don’t let me leave without saying ‘Goodbye.’ ”81 Desperate to avoid a scandal, he still refused to meet her.
Susan needed money, but by now she lacked the courage to ask. Her friend Harriet Whatman wrote a thinly disguised blackmail letter to Bertie, telling him that if “the event” was to be kept a secret, he must pay her at least £250.82 Susan settled into 26 Wellington Crescent, Ramsgate, a large Regency terraced house looking out over the sea, to await the birth of her child, which was due in early December.
After Christmas 1871—presumably after the baby was born—Susan wrote to Dr. Clayton asking for an appointment: “The same symptoms still continue and for the last three weeks I have had a white discharge. My back aches dreadfully and I feel altogether very unwell.”83 A few weeks later she wrote to Knollys asking for more money, as Dr. Clayton had ordered her to return to London. “He has not allowed me to leave my Room since I returned & I may not even put my foot to the ground.… I cannot enter into particulars but Mr. Clayton will explain all to Him when he sees Him.”84 She had an ulcer on her foot—“I am a cripple on two sticks and cannot move about!!!!”85
Nothing is ever said of the baby. No birth was registered in Susan’s name in the Ramsgate (Thanet) area. Nor was any infant death recorded.86 Perhaps the child was handed over to someone else, or perhaps it was stillborn. It is conceivable that the obliging Dr. Clayton performed a dangerously late termination. The distressing symptoms related by Susan seem to hint at a venereal disease. The gumma or leg ulcer is a symptom of tertiary syphilis, and so is spinal pain. But tertiary syphilis develops five years after the initial infection, and it’s unlikely that Susan would have been Bertie’s mistress if she had been suffering throughout their affair from the disease.d87
Four years later Susan Vane-Tempest was dead.
Susan’s story is an unsettling reminder of the human cost of Bertie’s pleasure. Like Harriett Mordaunt, she was a victim, cast away once she became an embarrassment to the prince. His ruthlessness is chilling. Susan’s letters were preserved not because Bertie felt sentimental about her, but because they landed on Knollys’s desk—all her communications to HRH were sent under cover to his secretary. Once Bertie sniffed the terrible scandal of a pregnancy, he left Knollys to deal with Susan. His refusal to see her in spite of her very real distress can only be described as cruel. Coldly and efficiently, he saved his princely skin from contamination.
Susan’s letters are the only ones from a mistress that are known to have survived. Other letters from women with whom he became entangled were destroyed, either by Bertie himself or by Knollys. Plenty of Bertie’s letters exist, as most of his female correspondents kept them. Susan’s howls of pain could hardly be further removed from the polite gossip and mildly flirtatious small talk that Bertie usually wrote to his women friends. Perhaps Knollys chose to keep her letters because they were exceptional, or it may have been an accident that they escaped the bonfire; it’s impossible to tell whether other women wrote to him in this way. But her anguished letters give a glimpse of the abyss—of the reality of disgraceful pregnancies and life-threatening abortions that lay behind the carefully crafted world of afternoon visits and discreet notes.
Susan’s is the only illegitimate pregnancy that can be credited with certainty to Bertie—and even so, the child cannot be traced. The destruction of the women’s letters means that there is no way of knowing for certain whether other mistresses bore his children. Had it not been for the fact that her letters happened to be preserved, Susan herself would have vanished from the record; there is no other evidence of her relationship with the prince.
Of course, there were rumors of Bertie’s bastards, and the villages around Sandringham and Balmoral are alleged to be thickly populated with cousins of the Queen. But genealogical research, meticulously establishing birth dates and checking them against Bertie’s movements and social connections, which are exceptionally well documented, has revealed that most of the alleged illegitimate children are mythical.88 This has led to speculation that his “preferred sexual techniques excluded penetrative sex.”89 Susan Vane-Tempest’s letters suggest another explanation: birth control.
Contraception was not unknown in England, but it was far more widespread in France. The French, it seems, practiced birth control without writing about it, while the English talked about it but rarely used it. Contraception was a professional necessity for prostitutes, and the Paris sex industry could hardly have functioned without it. Barrier methods such as the condom and the diaphragm were available, and prostitutes also relied on vaginal sponges and douching.90 Bertie’s visits to Paris courtesans meant that he was far better educated about sex and contraception than his disapproving compatriots. It was part of a courtesan’s job to protect herself against pregnancy and disease, and Bertie expected his mistresses to do the same. Married women could pass off illegitimate children as belonging to their husbands, but this was not possible for a widow
such as Susan Vane-Tempest. If contraception failed, abortion was available as a second line of defense. It was illegal and considered morally abhorrent, but men like the suave and silky Dr. Clayton would always oblige.e
“I fear fresh bothers are brewing—from abroad—in which my brother and myself are concerned,” Bertie admitted to Knollys in July.91 Among the documents preserved by Knollys is a small, fat, brown-stained envelope labeled “Beneni,” stuffed with tightly folded letters written on thick paper. Someone has endorsed the packet: “Re Barucci—treat with care.”92
La Barucci, the courtesan Giulia Beneni, who four years before had entertained Bertie in her Champs-Élysées mansion with its white velvet staircase, died of consumption during the Siege of Paris in a house on the rue de la Baume.f Her brother, a failed Italian tenor named Piro Beneni, moved in to claw her legacy and blackmail her royal clients.
La Barucci had accumulated a valuable trove. She possessed twenty or so letters from Bertie. He had been careful not to sign them, but they were evidently genuine and most were of a “delicate” nature.93 La Barucci had also stashed away a hoard of photographs. They included cartes de visite signed “Albert Edward”; a large photograph of his brother Affie, the Duke of Edinburgh, wearing Highland costume in a crimson velvet frame signed “Alfred”; an album of the whole royal family inscribed “Alfred to Giulia 1868”; and several photographs of Alix’s brother Frederick, Crown Prince of Denmark, one of which was signed “de votre ami dévoué, Frederik.”94
In September 1871, Bertie received a blackmail letter from “that scoundrel Beneni,” demanding £1,500.95 He forwarded it to Knollys, and instructed him to consult Kanné, the royal courier and agent. The royal advisers agreed that paying the blackmailer would be a mistake, and they planned instead to seize Bertie’s incriminating letters.
When Beneni wrote again, threatening to put the letters up for sale, Kanné was sent on an undercover mission to La Barucci’s house on the rue de la Baume. On 9 November he found Piro Beneni very ill, conducting an informal auction of his sister’s things from his bed. “The wretch” took a liking to him and showed him Bertie’s letters. Beneni wanted £400, and Kanné offered £240, which was rejected. Kanné then pretended to lose his temper and became very angry. He laid the money on the table and accused Beneni of blackmail, claiming that two policemen were waiting outside to make an arrest if everything was not handed over in ten minutes. The bluff succeeded. Beneni crumpled: “Prenez tout, mais laissez moi l’argent, je suis si pauvre.” (Take everything, but leave me the money, I am so poor.) Kanné went to the cupboard in the drawers of which the letters were kept, took the bundles, counted them, and put them in his pocket. Pretending to go outside and talk to the policemen (who did not exist), he returned five minutes later and demanded everything Beneni possessed belonging to the Prince of Wales and his brother. Beneni, who was by now white and trembling with fear, handed over the key to a black cupboard, which contained the cache of letters and photographs.96
Kanné wired Knollys, who cabled back: “Your prompt action highly approved of.”97 The letters were destroyed. As Kanné warned, the prince “can not be too careful in his writing. Every scrape [sic] of his writing becomes every day of more value and importance.”98 Writing “delicate” letters to a courtesan was political suicide at a time when the tide of republicanism seemed unstoppable. When the Liberal MP Sir Charles Dilke addressed meetings on republicanism, loud groans were given for the Prince of Wales.99
That autumn, Bertie and Alix were guests of Lord Londesborough for a week’s grouse shooting near Scarborough. The house party included Louise Manchester and Lord Chesterfield, and twenty-seven people were crammed into the small, boxlike rooms of Londesborough Lodge, perched high on the clifftop above the town. Bertie’s valet slept in a cubbyhole six feet high. Three maids shared an unventilated attic, and the sewage backed up whenever the tide rose. The house, as The Lancet later reported, was in effect “a vessel inverted over the mouth of a pipe, through which rises continually, sometimes with violence, a deadly vapour.”100 Lady Londesborough “was quite the queen” at Scarborough, holding court in a gilt chair with Bertie sitting at her side, while one by one her guests fell ill with diarrhea, Alix among them.101
Back at Sandringham for his thirtieth birthday. Bertie complained of a chill and a whitlow or blister on his finger, and called for cherry brandy and a hot bath, but still insisted on traveling to Buckinghamshire to shoot with his friend Carrington.102 He arrived by train at Woburn Sands in a howling gale, and Carrington, who drove the coach himself, nearly crashed on the way back from the station; dinner was ruined and the nine royal servants somehow managed to lose Bertie’s luggage. The next morning Bertie tried to shoot, but he felt so ill that he gave up and sent for the doctor, the inevitable Oscar Clayton. Long white whitlows had appeared on the palms of his hands, and Clayton ordered him home at once.103
Bertie developed fever, rose-colored spots, and a severe headache. Alix summoned “nice” Dr. Gull, “whom he likes and in whom we have the greatest confidence” (this was the same Dr. Gull who had confined Harriett Mordaunt to a madhouse).104 She also sent for Sir William Jenner. Bertie’s symptoms now allowed a diagnosis: typhoid fever.105 No attempt was made to cover up his illness or conceal it from the public, and the doctors issued regular daily bulletins. Among William Gull’s papers is a diagram charting the course of HRH’s illness and calibrating the days as the infection progressed through its classic stages. First, headache, vomiting, fever; then the telltale rose spots and diarrhea, high fever, and delirium, followed by a critical stage when the lungs became congested.106 There was no treatment, just minute expert observation by the physicians and skilled nursing.
Bertie lay behind a screen in a darkened room, breathing very rapidly and loudly. Alix watched him devotedly, refusing to leave his bedside. “No words of mine can EVER fully express to you how fearful and MISERABLE these days of AGONY have been to me,” she told her sister-in-law Louise.107 Gull’s doctor’s notes read: “mind wanders constantly. State to cause great anxiety but not at present alarm.”108 At one point Bertie was too ill to recognize Alix; when she told him she was his wife, he replied, “That was once but is no more, you have broken your vows!”109 His raving became so candid—“all sorts of revelations and names of people mentioned”—that the doctors ordered Alix to leave the room.110
Alix’s love of nursing brought her close to Bertie; for once, he was dependent on her, and he couldn’t escape. But she wasn’t allowed to have him to herself. Princess Alice, who happened to be staying in the house, bossily tried to take charge. “We are all furious at seeing our Princess [Alix] sat upon and spoken of as if she had not sense enough to act for herself,” wrote Lady Macclesfield.111
By now the doctors were issuing several bulletins a day, each more alarming than the last: 26 November 1871, 6:00 p.m.: “The course of the fever today has been rather severe but regular. The Prince’s strength continues good”; 27 November, 9:00 a.m.: “His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales has passed a sleepless night. The course of the fever is marked by increasing intensity, but the strength does not fail.”112 The doctors’ drafts, preserved in Gull’s papers, are crossed through and reworded; they show a striving for medical accuracy, rather than political spin, but in their artless attempts to state the truth, the doctors were the unwitting agents of a resurgence of loyalty to the monarchy. The nation was gripped. “The alarm in London very great,” noted the Queen. “Immense sympathy all over the country.”113
Queen Victoria, who was always energized by illness, yearned to be at Bertie’s bedside, but she needed to be asked. She had never visited Sandringham before, and Alice opposed her coming now. For once Alix overruled her domineering sister-in-law, and wrote on her own initiative inviting her mother-in-law. The drama of the widow Queen, who herself had been ill, rushing by special train (the details of the route were printed in the paper) to visit her wayward son on his sickbed, almost exactly ten years after the death of
her beloved Albert, transfixed the nation.
The Queen slept badly before her journey to Sandringham on 29 November. Alice and Alix, thin and tearful, met her at the door. Peeping in at Bertie’s darkened room, she saw him lying on his back, breathing loudly as he dozed with one lamp burning, and Albert’s illness came flooding back to her.114 What they didn’t tell her was that Bertie now thought he had succeeded as king, and raved of reforms in the household that “set all their hair straight on end.”115 He gave orders that all gentlemen were to wear tights, “because I’m very particular about dress and General Knollys must kneel down and give me a glass of water, it was always done in former days.”116
The next evening, when Victoria went to Bertie’s dressing room after dinner, a tearful Alice rushed in, saying that his temperature had suddenly fallen (from 105°) and his breathing seemed all wrong. The Queen went into the bedroom. “What I saw reminded me terribly of December ’61!” She followed Alix out into the dressing room, and “when [Alix] completely broke down I tried to reassure her, although my heart was heavy with fear, and held her dear little slight frame in my arms.” Dr. Jenner told Victoria that Bertie had a threatening of the congestion of the lungs or pneumonia that had killed Albert. “Went sadly to my room, very, very anxious,” she wrote.117
In fact, Bertie had turned a corner toward recovery. The next morning he was sufficiently robust to ask for an egg, and the Queen returned to Windsor.118 The doctors’ bulletins on 1 December signaled cautious optimism.119 But the same day brought news of the death from typhoid of Lord Chesterfield, another guest at Londesborough Lodge. This was apparently proof that the fetid drains of Scarborough had caused the prince’s illness, which had hitherto been hotly denied by Lord Londesborough, but it was a shock that, said Lady Macclesfield, “came like ice upon all our hearts.”120 On 5 December, Gull wrote in his private notes that the prince’s breathing was easier and all his symptoms had improved, though “there remains the liability to relapse and reduplication of the attack.”121
