by Jane Ridley
Some say that William was brain-damaged at birth; others claim that he was a textbook case of narcissistic personality disorder: a grossly inflated sense of self, very quick to take offense, incapable of learning from experience, and ultimately superficial. Because of his withered arm and his intellectual mediocrity, he could never satisfy his powerful mother, Vicky: “She wanted him to be a Prince Albert, and yet used his limitations to keep him dependent and intensely involved with her.”11 Already he exhibited some of the traits of a sociopath. He had no sense of remorse and no empathy for the feelings of others. He seemed incapable of feeling affection.12
To William’s horror, his mother now proposed that his sister Victoria (Moretta) should marry the second Battenberg brother, Alexander (Sandro), the Prince of Bulgaria. Sandro was the star of the Battenberg family: He was parachuted into the newly created country of Bulgaria, becoming prince at age twenty-two in 1879. A romantic figure, tall and bearded, he flashes across the dynastic scene in 1884–85. Reams of coroneted and embossed royal writing paper were consumed by the Battenberg marriage project. To William it was contamination. The more Vicky urged it—and she grew almost hysterical in her support for Sandro—the more estranged mother and son became.
This quarrel caused a major shift in the fault lines of dynastic diplomacy. For almost twenty years, Europe’s royals had been split between the Germans and their supporters, who included Queen Victoria, and the anti-German Danes and their allies, foremost among whom was Bertie. Now the Germans were split themselves. The conflict was not just about the romantic Sandro. At issue was the future of Germany. Vicky and her husband, Crown Prince Fritz, stood for a liberal, pro-English Germany. Against them, Vicky’s son William and his allies, his grandfather the old emperor, and Bismarck, represented authoritarian, militaristic Germany. In this matter, Queen Victoria naturally sided with her daughter. Bertie supported Vicky, too, acting as a sort of unofficial envoy on her behalf in the Battenberg affair. As a result, William’s hatred of him became almost obsessive. When Bertie visited Berlin for the kaiser’s eighty-eighth birthday in March 1885, William wrote to Alexander III: “We shall see the Prince of Wales here in a few days. I am not at all delighted by this unexpected apparition, because—excuse me, he is Your brother-in-law—owing to his false and intriguing nature he will undoubtedly attempt in one way or another to push the Bulgarian business—may Allah send them both to hell, as the Turks would say!”13
Bertie spent several weeks in Austria-Hungary in the autumn of 1885. The Habsburg lands offered an intoxicating mixture of sport, realpolitik, and eroticism that was far more exciting than the stiffness and parochialism of the Danish or German courts. In Vienna, he had the misfortune to be spotted emerging from one of the city’s “most infamous brothels in broad daylight at 12 noon,” and his nephew William, who also happened to be staying in Vienna, wrote gleefully to his grandfather the kaiser about the “stupidity” of his libidinous uncle.†14
From Vienna, Bertie proceeded to Budapest. Here (according to William), “He led such a fast life … that even the Hungarians shook their heads.”15 William’s innuendo hints at more brothels, but the main thing that Bertie did to shock the Hungarians was to challenge their anti-Semitic prejudices. Professor Arminius Vámbéry was a distinguished explorer and traveler whom Bertie had met in London twenty years before. Because he was a Jew of humble background, he was shunned by Hungarian society. So Bertie gave a dinner, and walked with Vámbéry on his arm into a room full of Hungarian grandees, who bowed deeply and were civil to the Jewish professor—for the moment at least.16
When William eventually arrived in Budapest, Bertie told him “in great embarrassment” that he had been forced to cancel his invitation to stay at Sandringham that year, as Queen Victoria did not wish to see him because of his attitude toward the Bulgarian marriage. William pretended to be glad that he had a weapon to use against his mother if she should reproach him for not being sufficiently well-disposed toward Queen Victoria (“the old hag”).17 In fact, this was a crushing snub, and one for which William, who never forgave an insult, was soon to seek revenge.
Bertie and Alix’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary fell on 10 March 1888. Celebrating a silver wedding was a German custom, hitherto unknown in England, and the Waleses were the first to popularize it.18 But the ninety-one-year-old Emperor William I died the day before, and Fritz’s serious illness was now public knowledge. Shops in the West End added black drapes to the silver decorations they had arranged for the Waleses. The family dinner went ahead nonetheless, and the Queen herself broke with habit and attended. The guests wore silver and white, the dining room was decorated with white flowers and gleaming silver plate, and towering above all this stood a wedding cake six feet high and decorated with white roses. Everyone remarked how youthful Alix looked. “We all looked like old ladies,” said one of her bridesmaids, who were invited to the celebrations, “but the Princess was as young and fresh as she was on her wedding day.”19 In a hint at her unpunctuality, Bertie gave her a silver clock engraved with the letters A—L—B—E—R—T—E—D—W—A—R—D in place of numbers.
Three days later, Bertie traveled to Berlin to attend the emperor’s funeral. The journey by special train was bitterly cold, and Berlin was covered with deep snow. Fritz, who now became Emperor Frederick III, was too weak to walk in the procession behind his father’s coffin. He watched the black-draped funeral cortège from an upstairs window, a frail figure standing at attention in a general’s uniform. When the hearse passed beneath him, he broke down.
Bertie had feared the worst since November, when he told Georgie: “We are terribly anxious about poor dear Uncle Fritz, as a fresh growth has appeared in his throat, and we are all terribly afraid that it may be cancerous.”20 Vicky was in denial, but Bertie could no longer pretend to himself that Fritz was not a dying man. Arthur Ellis, who accompanied the prince, sent a stark report back to Knollys:
This place is too gloomy for words.
Emp[ero]r dead, the other surely dying.
Even the P[rince] of W[ales] sees it now. It is really a most terrible tragedy.
He [Fritz] received us.
He is quite dumb.
It was one of the saddest things I ever experienced.21
Bertie sent a message via Ellis to Ponsonby: “The Emperor [Fritz] is very very ill. The Queen should realise this. This is what the Prince of Wales bids me to say.”22
Bertie was staying at Sunningdale for Ascot races on 14 June 1888 when he heard at noon that all was over, and returned immediately to London.23 Fritz had ruled for ninety-nine days.
On 16 June, Bertie left once more for Berlin, accompanied by Alix, who had agreed to venture into the German “robber’s den” as a special mark of sympathy for Vicky. “Greatly relieved to hear that dear Alix would go with Bertie to Berlin, as I begged her to,” wrote Victoria.24 Bertie found “darling Vicky” in a state of great distress: “She cried and sobbed like a child.”25 In the days after Fritz’s funeral, he and Alix were with her all the time, and Bertie wrote afterward that “Ever since we parted on that lovely but sad Sunday afternoon my thoughts have continually been with you.”26
Vicky’s position was terrible indeed. Not only had she lost her husband, but she was at war with the entire Prussian court and especially with her son. On the night that Fritz lay dying, William had ordered his hussars to form a cordon around the Charlottenburg Palace to prevent his mother smuggling out her papers. (Vicky had anticipated him by locking them away at Windsor.) Once he became kaiser, William pointedly ignored and humiliated his mother, in spite of—or perhaps because of—a stream of telegrams and letters from Queen Victoria begging him to take care of the grieving widow. Vicky had been very briefly empress, ruling Germany from Fritz’s sickroom. Now her influence was nil. William gave her a tightfisted allowance and evicted her from her palace in Berlin.
William’s treatment of his mother was heartless, but her response made it worse. Her pain and anger rained down
in a torrent on Windsor and on Marlborough House. Most of the things she wrote about William were true. He was indeed an atavistic, reactionary autocrat; he was putty in the hands of the devious Bismarck; he was ignorant of everything except military matters; he was nationalistic, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic. Vicky was correct to predict that William would lead Germany to nemesis. But for a woman of such intelligence and humanity, she was extraordinarily lacking in insight. Her grief was displaced into anger against her son, much as Victoria had turned against Bertie and blamed him for Albert’s death. She seemed unable to perceive that quarreling with William was ultimately self-destructive.
From Windsor, Victoria poured the oil of sympathy onto the flames of Vicky’s anger. From Marlborough House, on the other hand, Bertie urged his sister to mend the quarrel. After he returned from Fritz’s funeral, he wrote: “There will I know be endless difficulties with W[illiam] but you must not be disheartened dearest Vicky and try and surmount them. Above all if possible try and have some influence with him so that he may not be entirely at the mercy of those in whose political opinions you cannot agree.”27 And again: “Let no estrangement exist between you both, and remember he is his father’s eldest son.”28 She must ignore the campaign against her. “If as you say there is a party who wish to get rid of you and drive you away from the country I hope you will not play their game—and show that you have only contempt for the abominable way they behave and let it fall back on them when they wish to crush a defenceless woman.”29
For the rest of her life, Vicky dressed in black. She was becoming more and more like her mother, “not only in her appearance but in the way she ‘moves.’ ”‡30 In her stubbornness, too, she resembled Victoria. She knew very well that her estrangement from William was no mere family quarrel, but threatened to destabilize Anglo-German relations. But she refused to listen to Bertie’s good advice.
Mourning for Fritz canceled the London season of 1888 for Bertie, and after a party-free summer he retreated to Homburg. Here he lived on a regime of spa water, tennis, and Wagner, traveling to Frankfurt to hear Lohengrin, Die Walküre, and Tannhäuser, and he saw Vicky who was staying at the palace.31
On 10 September 1888, Bertie arrived in Vienna on a month’s visit. He drove to the Grand Hotel at 6:45 a.m., and the Austrian emperor Francis Joseph visited him at 11:00, followed by Crown Prince Rudolf at 12:45. Changing into his uniform as colonel of the 12th Austrian Hussars (gold-frogged tunic, red breeches, Hessian boots, and white shako—one of the few smart uniforms still remaining in the Austrian army), Bertie returned the emperor’s call at the Hofburg.32 Francis Joseph mentioned that William planned to arrive in Vienna after Bertie had left, on 3 October. Bertie, who had written twice to William asking the date of his arrival but received no answer, declared that he would change his program to be sure of being in Vienna to welcome his nephew. The next day, he learned from the British ambassador in Vienna, Sir Augustus Paget, that the German ambassador had informed him that the kaiser did not wish to meet his uncle in Vienna and, as Bertie put it, that he “preferred my room to my company!”33 This ostentatious snub became known as the Vienna incident.34
At first, Bertie was angry and upset. He deliberately misunderstood the message to stay away, insisting that by welcoming William in Vienna he would signal friendly relations. This embarrassed Emperor Francis Joseph, who, as the subordinate partner in the Dual Alliance with Germany, felt under pressure to obey the kaiser’s wishes. On 12 September, Bertie dictated a note for Colonel Swaine, the military attaché in Berlin, who was authorized to show it to William. The letter declared that the prince, who had “the greatest affection” for his nephew, had been looking forward to their meeting with pleasure, and the news that William would prefer not to meet had caused him great pain. “I have never seen the Prince of Wales so upset about anything and he is racking his brains in vain to discover the cause.… What is the meaning of all this?”35
Bertie was being disingenuous. It could hardly have escaped his notice that William had made a speech at Frankfurt on 16 August, the day after Bertie’s arrival at Homburg, attacking those who claimed that Fritz had intended to surrender Alsace-Lorraine. This was a coded broadside against Bertie, and after his speech William was heard to say, “I hope my uncle the Prince of Wales will understand that!”36
Bertie had asked Bismarck’s son Herbert whether it was true that, if Fritz had lived, he would have wished to return Alsace-Lorraine to France.37 He also asked about Alsace in an audience with old Bismarck, but because Alix was present, Bismarck had given a civil answer, and Bertie had taken advantage of this unwonted amiability to draw up a paper recording the conversation. The following day Herbert Bismarck had forced Sir Edward Malet, the British ambassador, to withdraw this document, claiming that it had not been sanctioned by Prime Minister Salisbury, and this apparently had hurt Bertie, as it was the first state paper he had ever written.38
Bertie was vulnerable because he was so closely identified with the hated Empress Vicky. Spies reported his unguarded private conversations to Bismarck. Every mistake that Vicky made was credited to Bertie’s influence: “He was the scapegoat against which all Berlin hurled themselves.”39 Bertie’s friendly relationship with his brother-in-law, Czar Alexander III, also made him a danger. The previous autumn the czar had spent his customary family holiday at Fredensborg, and Alix had used the opportunity to poison him against William, telling stories about his bad behavior toward his parents. The czar, who for all his autocratic politics was a devoted family man, was shocked, and Russia’s commitment to the German alliance was compromised as a result.40 No one could say that Alix lacked influence.
The incident at Vienna rapidly escalated into a standoff. Bertie received no reply to his message to the kaiser. Still huffing and puffing, he departed for Hungary on a shooting expedition with Crown Prince Rudolf. Spending time with the lively prince made Bertie even angrier with William. Rudolf was thirty and Bertie forty-six, but their friendship prospered.
Rudolf detested William. Clever and sardonic, he found William’s heel-clicking arrogance intolerable. Politically liberal (in so far as such a thing was possible for a future Habsburg emperor), he bitterly resented Austria’s dependence on Germany. He told Bertie that William had remarked that “if his uncle wrote him a very kind letter, he might perhaps answer it!!”41 Rudolf reported that “Wales” was “in great fettle, wants to see everything and will not allow himself to be left out in the cold. Nothing seems to tire the old boy. I long for a rest.”42 Bertie always dismissed the rumors about Rudolf’s dissolute habits—the visits to lowlife prostitutes and the drinking binges—but surely knew of Rudolf’s quarrel with his father, Emperor Francis Joseph, and the young man’s estrangement from his wife.
At the time that William made his state entry into Vienna on 3 October, Bertie was traveling to Bucharest to stay with the King and Queen of Romania; the queen, as Elizabeth of Wied, had been considered as a possible wife for Bertie twenty-seven years before. He wore his English field marshal’s uniform with the Grand Cordon of the Star of Romania. Back in England, meanwhile, Lord Salisbury tried to patch up the damage. Bertie’s spat with William threatened to upset the prime minister’s carefully crafted European entente, balancing France by cultivating German friendship. Salisbury told Victoria that Bertie’s blunder was that he had treated William “as an uncle treats a nephew, instead of recognising that he was an Emperor who, though young, had still been of age for some time.”43 Victoria agreed that personal quarrels should not be allowed to affect the foreign policy of the two nations, but pointed out that “with such a hot-headed, conceited and wrongheaded young man, devoid of all feeling, this may at ANY moment become impossible.”44 Alix told Georgie that William had been “most frightfully rude” toward Papa and refused to meet him in Vienna. “Oh he is mad and a conceited ass—who also says that Papa and Grandmama don’t treat him with proper respect as the Emperor of all and mighty Germany! But my hope is that pride will have a fall some d
ay!! Won’t we rejoice then.”45
Bertie returned home on 22 October. Before his departure for the Newmarket races, the prime minister visited him at Marlborough House and explained his policy of appeasing Germany, warning Bertie not to allow a family quarrel to get in the way.46 But Salisbury had failed to appreciate that, though foreign policy in Britain was controlled by politicians, in Germany family quarrels really did dictate foreign policy. And in Bertie’s case, the quarrel with William had strengthened his position at home by ending his long rift with his mother.
Between 31 August and 30 September 1888, in the slums of Whitechapel, the sex killer Jack the Ripper strangled four poor prostitutes, then cut their throats, slashed their stomachs, and eviscerated them. His fifth and final victim, Mary Jane Kelly, had her throat slit and face and body horrifically mutilated on 9 November.47
The identity of the Ripper has never been conclusively established. Conspiracy theories continue to proliferate. One of the most far-fetched (published in the 1990s) claimed that Mary Jane Kelly was murdered because she was pregnant by the Prince of Wales. This theory lacks evidence or plausibility: No connection has ever been proved between the prince and the victim. On 9 November, Bertie was at Sandringham, celebrating his forty-seventh birthday with a dinner for three hundred estate laborers and a county ball.48
More enduring are the conspiracy theories linking Prince Eddy with the Ripper murders. The most sensational of these came to light in the 1970s; the source was a man named Joseph Gorman, who claimed that his grandmother, Annie Crook, who worked as a shopgirl on Cleveland Street, had made a clandestine marriage to Eddy, who was studying drawing with the artist Walter Sickert in his studio nearby, and in 1885 had a daughter by him. When Queen Victoria found out, she was horrified at the possibility of blackmail and, so the story goes, appealed to Lord Salisbury to put an end to the liaison. Salisbury ordered a raid on Cleveland Street, and Annie Crook was incarcerated in a madhouse. However, Annie’s friend, the prostitute Mary Kelly, spread the story, so Salisbury enlisted the royal physician Sir William Gull to eliminate all Mary’s friends: the Ripper victims Mary Anne Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride and (mistakenly) Catherine Eddowes, and finally Mary herself. The murders were a cover-up, and once Gull had done his work the killings ceased. This explanation solves one of the puzzles about the Ripper: why the murders suddenly stopped if they were committed by a sexual psychopath who was never arrested.49 However, it bears no relation to fact. There is not a shred of evidence to connect Eddy either to Annie Crook or to Sickert.50
