by Jane Ridley
Victoria genuinely believed that Bertie was incapable of filling her place. She complained to Vicky that she was overworked and longed to retire to a cottage in the hills, “if only our dear Bertie was fit to replace me! Alas! Alas! I feel very anxious for the future.”35
Gladstone refused to take no for an answer. Insisting that “bitter fruit will be reaped hereafter” and “retrospective judgement” passed upon him for neglecting this “golden” opportunity, he continued to bombard the Queen with lengthy memoranda.36 What he failed to realize was that Bertie himself had no wish to go to Ireland. Gladstone demanded to see Bertie face-to-face. He was disappointed to learn that the prince had, in fact, “implored the Queen to take the matter upon herself,” fearing that a direct refusal would annoy the prime minister and make him angry.37 For once, mother and son were in agreement.
In answer to Gladstone’s third lengthy five-point memo urging the Irish plan, the Queen crisply replied that she thought it “useless” to prolong the discussion.38 When he suggested that Bertie should prepare himself for ruling by a course of reading, Victoria was not encouraging. The prince, she said, “has never been fond of reading and … from his earliest years it was impossible to get him to do so. Newspapers and very rarely, a novel are all he ever reads.”39
When Gladstone stayed at Sandringham in November 1872, he found Alix “most kind and simple as usual,” and “none of the stiffness of a court.”40 But though he had every opportunity, he “did not even mention” the subject of employment to the prince, much to Francis Knollys’s annoyance, and Bertie “said nothing to him.”41
Meanwhile, a truce developed between Windsor and Marlborough House. This was largely the work of Francis Knollys and Henry Ponsonby. Unlike former private secretaries such as Sir Charles Phipps or old Sir William Knollys, neither Ponsonby nor Francis Knollys saw his role as being to tell tales to the Queen about the prince. Rather than divide mother and son, Ponsonby endeavored to strengthen the monarchy by patching up a common front. Writing in bold black ink in a voice of ironic detachment, he smoothed over rows, gently punctured inflated egos, and outwitted the interference of meddling politicians.
Lord Granville, the foreign secretary, began to send the Prince of Wales selected dispatches from the Foreign Office. At first Granville was skeptical, complaining that when he supplied confidential information during the Franco-Prussian War, Bertie handed around his notes at a dinner party.42 To everyone’s surprise, however, Bertie really read the dispatches and took “a deal of interest.”43 Gladstone admired Bertie’s love of movement and excitement, and his genuine good nature and empathy; but complained of his “total want of political judgement, either inherited or acquired.”44 Perhaps for this reason the dispatches dried up.
So the problem of how Bertie was to occupy himself was not solved, and the opportunities were lost to engage him after his illness, to cash in on his new popularity, and to build on his more serious frame of mind. Queen Victoria observed that “if this great warning is not taken, and the wonderful sympathy and devotion of the whole nation does not make a great change in him, it will be worse than before and his utter ruin.”45 After the defeat of Gladstone’s plan, however, “the prince’s life continued in its former rut.”46
Heinrich von Angeli, the Austrian artist, made a portrait of Bertie and Alix with their children Eddy and Maud in 1875. Queen Victoria, who had also been painted by von Angeli, claimed that he was her favorite artist. “What I like is his honesty, total want of flattery and appreciation of character,” she wrote, and his portrait of the Wales family can be read as a psychological commentary.47 Bertie stands behind his family. The iconography of rule—a pillar behind him, his heir, Eddy, in tartan at his side—gives him authority; yet his costume is not that of a royal person but of a masterful mid-Victorian father. He wears a black coat, and his white cuffs seem to escape from his sleeves as though he has dressed rather hastily. These are clothes suitable for the Victorian public sphere, and he seems to have come in from somewhere outside the picture. Alix, seated with the six-year-old Maud on her knee, wears the sideways skittish look for which she was famous. There is no eye contact between husband and wife, and Bertie’s folded arms form a barrier. The focal point of the painting is Alix’s hand, which rests on her daughter’s lap. The emotional bond between mother and daughter seems stronger than that between husband and wife.
Insulated from the world by her growing deafness, Alix became unknowable, and few people penetrated behind the mask. As Victoria perceived, in spite of her disability, Alix was incapable of leading a domestic life or staying quiet at home for long. Neither she nor Bertie could live without excitement. Alix never read a book, telling Victoria that “she had been promised that she should have no more lessons after she married!”48
The Waleses stayed at Chatsworth in December 1872. The serious-minded Lady Frederick Cavendish, who kept a diary, was not impressed by the fat prince; he was kind and amiable but only got on with “chaffy, fast people.” She was captivated, however, by Alix’s “perfect charm.” After dinner, Alix was a sight never to be forgotten, “as she whisked around the billiard-table like any dragon-fly, playing at ‘pockets’; punishing the table when she missed, and finally breaking her mace across Lady Cowper’s† back with a sudden little whack. Likewise at bed-time, high-jinks with all the ladies in the corridors; and yet through all one has a sense of perfect womanly dignity, and a certainty that no one could ever go an inch too far with her.”49
Her ladies-in-waiting would have cheerfully laid down their lives for Alix. Francis Knollys’s sister, Charlotte, followed her with a doglike devotion for more than fifty years. Alix was perfectly attuned to the “feminization” of monarchy that occurred during Victoria’s reign. A decorative monarchy was essentially a female one—a matter of appearance, rather than power, of philanthropy rather than foreign affairs, and here the radiant Alix could shine. Bertie, on the other hand, was marginalized and emasculated.
Bertie had no desire to play the part that his father, Albert, had played at the center of domestic family life. Styles of parenting had changed. Mid-Victorian fathers were often absent, and no longer expected to provide the moral authority within the family. Bertie’s parenting conformed not to the “bourgeois” model of Albert, but to the pattern of his aristocratic contemporaries. To his children he was a benevolent figure, often absent, but affectionate. He belonged to the male spaces of the billiard room and the shooting party; he ran Sandringham as an aristocratic estate. He was no domestic tyrant. Nor is there any evidence that he beat his sons as Albert had beaten him.50
Over in Berlin, Vicky agonized about the education of her boys, and fought a losing battle to control the schooling of William, her eldest son.51 She told Victoria how much she envied Bertie, who could bring up his children as he pleased.52 But Bertie did not bother to involve himself. Like many aristocratic fathers, he delegated this role to tutors. Perhaps because his own education had failed so dismally, he was oddly indifferent to the schooling of his sons.
Alix insisted that the children were brought up simply, as she had been in Denmark. They were conscious, of course, of being a race apart, but they had battered toys and rickety old dolls. Queen Victoria approved of the “absence of all pride.”53 But she also complained that Alix spoiled them terribly.54 “They are such ill-bred, ill-trained children. I can’t fancy them at all.”55 The Wales children were not brought up as Bertie had been, paraded before the nation as the “royal family,” and expected to behave as little paragons. At Sandringham, they were liberated from the formality of court life. Alix encouraged boisterous practical jokes and the noisy, knockabout games beloved by her own Danish royal family. When Disraeli stayed at Sandringham, the little princesses appeared at lunch. “What do you think,” he wrote, “of these young ladies, in their glittering costumes being sent on their hands and feet under the table, at which there were 30 guests, to pinch Mr. Sykes’s legs? They had to count the guests on each side to secure the right m
an; but made the mistake of one and as Mr. Sykes was sitting next to me they began to pinch me instead. I thought it was a dog and gave a kick.”56
Alix was especially protective of Eddy, who was a delicate child, quiet, apathetic, and a slow developer. Georgie, who was brighter, was strictly forbidden to quarrel with his brother. Bertie, however, had no patience with Eddy, and he was rumored to snub him “uncommonly”—as Ponsonby wrote, “his jealousy (or whatever it is all the family have always had) of his eldest son is showing itself already.”57 In 1871, when Eddy was seven, a tutor was engaged for him and Georgie: the Reverend John Dalton, a thirty-two-year-old curate from Whippingham, near Osborne, who had been spotted by Queen Victoria. Dalton was more concerned with imposing a strict schoolroom routine and correcting the princes’ moral character than encouraging learning.58 Like most little princes, Eddy and Georgie were shielded from competition or comparison with other children, but when Canon Duckworth, Leopold’s tutor, took charge of them one holiday, he found they knew nothing: At the ages of eight and nine the boys could neither speak nor understand French, “which is a serious drawback for a Prince.”59
It suited Dalton to blame Alexandra as a frivolous flibbertigibbet who disrupted the schoolroom routine. But the letters she wrote to Dalton show a perceptive understanding of her sons’ education. Even after they were removed from their mother’s influence, the princes continued to underperform. Word got out that they were stupid, especially Eddy, who was often described as half-witted. This was a myth. The chief reason the princes were so poorly educated was because Dalton, a rotten teacher but a feline intriguer, managed to insinuate himself into the confidence of the Queen and prey on the insecurity of Bertie and Alix, making everyone believe that he was indispensable and the only hope for the survival of poor dull Eddy and his brother.
In his Christmas Annual for 1872, Samuel Beeton published a long poem entitled “The Coming K” that lampoons the court of the Prince of Wales alias Guelpho (Guelph was the family name of the Hanoverian kings). Three copies were said to be at Sandringham.60
The satire shows how the Prince of Wales’s debauched court is the very mirror image of Arthurian chivalry. At Guelpho’s court, the modern knight is described thus:
Marriage he must eschew; but still maintain
Expensive villas in the Fulham Road …
Smoke like a furnace; gamble, if needs be;
Know all the dyed-haired, painted queans who leer
Upon the stage or from the window-pane;
… Moreover, he must make inane remarks;
Be bored at everything; affect a lisp;
Profess he’s steeped with silly cynicism;
And ever try to hide what brain he has.
And never once pronounce the letter “R.”61
Alix doesn’t feature in the poem, and there is no queen at Guelpho’s court. This is a man’s world, and Guelpho’s women friends are courtesans, such as Gettarre, a loud-voiced whore with a painted face who drives her ponies in the park. This was Catherine Walters, also known as Skittles, a quick-witted Liverpudlian horsebreaker, who Bertie first met in the early 1860s when she caused a sensation riding in a skintight habit on Rotten Row as the poule de luxe of Lord Hartington, the Devonshire heir. She made the prince laugh with her sharp repartee. There’s a smutty story, which Bertie never tired of telling, about her umbrella (many of Bertie’s risqué jokes involved umbrellas). It happened to be shabby. Prince of Wales: “It wants re-covering.” Skittles: “I have had it covered twice, but there has been no produce.”‡62
Hartington threw Skittles over (he left her for Louise Manchester), and Skittles retreated to Paris. After the Commune, she returned to London and, bankrolled by the genial Hartington, who gave her a generous allowance for life, set up house on South Street in Mayfair. A blue plaque commemorates the home of “the last Victorian courtesan” at number 15.§ It was in the early seventies, probably in 1872, but Skittles was always vague about dates, that she recalled encountering Bertie, who said: “ ‘You always promised we should be friends some day.’ And so it began.”63 Exactly what “it” consisted of can never be fully established. Skittles claimed that she possessed a drawer full of letters from Bertie, which were in her house at the time of his death, but these have long since vanished.64
Perhaps the real story about Bertie’s relationship with Skittles can be glimpsed from the marble statuette he kept in his library at Marlborough House. “On a kind of shrine at the angle of a bookcase” there stood a half-sized classical nude posed as the Venus de Milo, with her arms flung back behind her head. Bertie had commissioned this nude from Boehm; it is a superb piece of English erotic sculpture, unrivaled for its date. He showed the statuette to the aesthete Lord Ronald Gower in 1878. “And who do you think sat for this figure?” he asked. “Of course I could not guess,” wrote Gower in his diary. “ ‘Skittles,’ said HRH with delight.”65 A courtesan such as Skittles, who understood the rules and knew the boundaries, posed no threat to Alix. On the contrary, Alix was happy to ask her to find suitable horses for her to ride.66
Bertie was beginning to be gossiped about again. The future Liberal prime minister Lord Rosebery was asked by Knollys to lend his London house as a place for Bertie and Affie to meet their “actress friends” in 1873. Rosebery refused.‖67 Different from actresses were married women, such as the Canadian Mrs. Sloane-Stanley. Would Lord Granville be so good as to ask her to his ball? asked Francis Knollys; the prince would like it very much. To which the cynical Granville replied: “I am much obliged for your hint and shall be still more obliged if you will not tell the Prince of Wales you have given it to me.”68 When Captain Haig, an equerry, innocently asked Mrs. Sloane-Stanley to go in with him to supper at a ball, Bertie rushed after her and tried to stop her; Mrs. Stanley at length went off for supper with the captain, and Bertie called out after her, “I hope you will like your new man.”69
More lasting was Bertie’s relationship with the nineteen-year-old Mary (Patsy) Cornwallis-West. The daughter of Lady Olivia Fitzpatrick, who had (allegedly) been expelled from court for flirting with Prince Albert, Patsy married at sixteen and had produced three children by the time she was twenty-one. “The loveliest woman I have ever set eyes on,” according to Lord Rossmore (who had a conflict of interest, being one of her lovers), Patsy was known as the Irish Savage, combining professional beauty with startling feistiness.70 Her son, George Cornwallis-West (born 14 November 1874), was widely believed to have been fathered by Bertie; indeed, his alleged royal descent shaped his life. It is possible that Patsy and Bertie had a love affair, and the story gives an indication of the dates, but there are no known letters, and at the time of the conception, which must have been around mid-February 1874, Bertie was safely out of the country in Russia. It is a biological impossibility that George Cornwallis-West was his son.
Alix’s sister Minnie and her husband the czarevitch visited London in the summer of 1873. Alix pretended that the “unbearable dress nonsense” was “boring me beyond description,” but she and Minnie had planned their wardrobe meticulously beforehand. “I will order the 9 dresses you want,” Alix told her sister, “but I think that it will be better to wait with the décolleté toilettes until you come they sew so quickly and some dresses at least we must have exactly alike.”71 These identical frocks led the fashion for double dressing: Minnie and Alix wore the same costumes on at least thirteen occasions that summer—a caprice that may have been meant to signal the closeness of relations between the Russian and English royal families.72 One of their outfits was a dress of plain white tulle, decorated with gold, loaded with diamonds, and incongruously crowned with wreaths of straw and ivy. In spite of her unconventional dresses, Alix’s “marvellous feminine tact” and “wondrous talent at conciliating adverse tempers and binding family affection” meant (according to one columnist) that having been first seen as a “mere adjunct to the Royal Family,” she had grown to be the “gentle guide and ruler of them all.”73
; The letters that Alix wrote to her sister, dashed off in her indecipherable loopy handwriting that has been likened to crochet work or loose knitting, and written in Danish, were impenetrable to anyone but Minnie. “We must be twins,” she wrote, “only you forgot to come to the world until three years after me!”74 Each parting brought dreadful weeping—days and days of it—so much so that Queen Victoria urged Alix to pull herself together—“I had to think of her who had lost all her relations and her husband!!!”75 Alix understood very well that the close bonds between the sisters made them stronger as a force in dynastic politics. “We all of us know each other too well and are too intimate to let others come between us with intrigues.”76 Clinging to Minnie was perhaps a sign of Alix’s emotional neediness. She still shared a bed with Bertie—she thought at one point that she was pregnant again—but even she could no longer pretend to herself that “my angelic Bertie” was always faithful.77
Bertie and Alix traveled to Russia in January 1874 for the grand state wedding of Bertie’s brother Affie to Marie, the only daughter of the czar, Alexander II. Bertie was disappointed because Victoria would not allow him to accept the colonelcy of the Russian regiment that he had been offered by the czar. “He had set his heart upon it,” wrote Knollys.78 The new Russian uniform, which had already been stitched by Poole the tailor, was never worn.
