by Jane Ridley
For Eddy’s twenty-eighth birthday on 8 January 1892, a shooting party was arranged at Sandringham. There was talk of appointing him after his marriage as Viceroy of Ireland—the post that Bertie had rejected with contempt twenty years before—and Bertie, who supported the plan, arranged to discuss it with Salisbury in London the following Monday.101 Meanwhile, out shooting on 6 January, Eddy felt ill and walked back after lunch to the house. Influenza was rampant that winter—The Times carried daily reports detailing the progress of the epidemic—and at Sandringham Francis Knollys was ill and so was one of the equerries. On the eighth, Eddy struggled downstairs to see his presents, but felt too ill to appear at his birthday dinner. Alix cabled Victoria: “Poor Eddy got influenza, cannot dine, so tiresome.”102 The next day, Saturday, Dr. Laking was summoned from London. Bertie cabled Victoria on Sunday: “Eddy’s attack of influenza very sharp now developed some pneumonia in left lung, restless night, strength well maintained, Laking here, Broadbent coming today.”103
On Monday the first announcement appeared in The Times. The medical bulletins were now posted not once but twice daily outside Marlborough House, and Bertie canceled his meeting with the prime minister in order to stay at Sandringham. At 9:30 a.m. on Wednesday, 13 January, a new bulletin was posted that startled the knot of onlookers: “Symptoms of great gravity have supervened, and the condition of his Royal Highness the Duke of Clarence is critical.”104 Bertie sent a heartfelt message to his mother: “Our darling Eddy is in God’s hands, human skill seems unavailable, there could not be a question of your coming here.”105 Snow was falling at Sandringham as the reporters watching the house spotted Bertie emerge and pace briefly up and down. Shortly after, Georgie and May appeared. Some said later that they were holding hands.106
Inside the house, in his small, high-ceilinged bedroom, Eddy lay delirious with fever on his brass bed. As he raved wildly, crying out “Hélène! Hélène!”c his fingernails turned blue and his lips were livid. At eight that morning, Alix, who had spent the night at Eddy’s bedside, had woken Bertie to tell him that she thought their son was dying. All day Alix sat beside the bed as the three doctors and a nurse squeezed noiselessly past her in the narrow room. Bertie paced back and forth from the cramped sitting room next door, where the family waited in shocked horror. At midnight Alix was reluctantly persuaded to take some sleep on a sofa. At two a.m., the doctors woke her. The death agony had begun. For seven hours Eddy lay, a terrible rattle in his throat, with his mother holding his hand. Suddenly he said, quite clearly, “Something too awful has happened—my darling brother George is dead.” And then: “Who is that? Who is that?” He died at nine a.m. on 14 January.107
“Our darling Eddy has been taken from us, We are broken hearted,” Bertie wired Victoria.108 Shortly afterward he put pen to paper: “What we went through for 8 hours watching poor dear Eddy from 2 to 10 this morning I shall never forget,” he wrote to his mother. “Dear Eddy looks so peaceful lying on his bed with his hands crossed … and covered with flowers.… I cannot write more, as I am too upset and my nerves completely unstrung.”109 George echoed his despair: “I shall never forget that awful moment with us all sobbing round his bed where we had been watching for nearly six hours without being able to help him as long as I live.”110
The funeral was at Windsor, and Bertie begged his seventy-two-year-old mother, who was at Osborne, not to attend, because of the cold weather and the risk of illness.111 Victoria, who had wished to be present, replied: “I have rec[eive]d your letter which has distressed me very much. You have stopped my going.… I feel quite ill at not going. Everybody expects me to go.”112
Bertie hastened to heal the breach, protesting that he had stopped her coming not because he didn’t want her, but to protect her health: “Your telegram has deeply pained us as you have misunderstood the motive which urges us to beg you not to undertake a journey for so painful a ceremony on account of incurring considerable risk while this illness is flying about.”113 As a sop to the Queen, he agreed to her request that his sisters Princesses Beatrice and Helena should attend the service at Windsor. Victoria’s reply was hurt: “I am very sorry that my telegram pained you, as my only wish is to save you all the pain I can.”114
Alix wrote consolingly to Victoria: “Your dear words did my poor bleeding and crushed heart good. I feel I cannot stay away. My darling Eddy would have wished me to take him to his last resting place, so I shall hide upon the staircase in a corner, unknown to the world.”115
Eddy’s body was taken from the church at Sandringham to Windsor. Alix and her daughters watched the funeral from Catherine of Aragon’s closet, looking down on the coffin as it lay in the choir. It was a damp, raw day, and Bertie “broke down terribly” and wept throughout the service.d116
Telegrams of condolence poured in, averaging a thousand a day. It was the saddest moment of Bertie’s life.
* * *
* On other occasions when he went to the opera he was preceded by a chef and six footmen bearing hampers filled with silver and gold plates and food for the twelve-course dinner that was served during the interval in the room at the back of the royal box. (Hibbert, Edward VII, p. 197.)
† The young Winifred Sturt had been shocked to see the royal family play this illegal game every night at Sandringham. “They have a real table, and rakes, and everything like the rooms at Monte Carlo.” (Quoted in Magnus, Edward VII, pp. 222–23.)
‡ Bertie played a version of the game known as baccarat banque. Four packs are combined and shuffled to make 208 cards. The banker deals only to the two players sitting on his left and on his right. All the players sitting on the right of the banker make one tableau, and the ones on the left form another, and their role is simply to put out their stakes. The banker deals two cards facedown to the players on his left and right and to himself, and one card to each faceup. He then looks at his cards and offers one more card to the players on his left and right. The object is to get eight or nine. The player declares, and if the banker’s cards are not equally good, the banker loses the whole of that side of the table.
§ The quotes are taken from the transcripts of the subsequent trial.
‖ The paper was signed by the Prince of Wales, Lord Coventry, Owen Williams, Arthur Wilson, the Hon. Arthur Somerset (not Podge, but a relative who was an equerry), Lord Edward Somerset, Edward Lycett Green, Stanley Wilson, Berkeley Levett, and Reuben Sassoon. The one courtier who avoided signing and kept a low profile throughout was Christopher Sykes. As Carrington wrote: “The only man who has kept his head is the supposed ass Christopher Sykes; though he was present his name has never been mentioned, nor was he called as a witness.” (Bodleian Library, Lincolnshire Papers, MS Film 1120, Carrington Diary, 17 May 1891.) Perhaps Sykes was not such a fool after all.
a Gordon-Cumming had “cuckolded so many husbands; been witty at the expense of so many fools.” (Gordon-Cumming’s daughter Elma, in Havers, Baccarat Scandal, p. 270.) He had attempted to seduce the newly wedded Leonie Leslie, who pushed him away, prompting him to say, “Silly little fool, all the married women try me.” Stories such as this did him no favors. (Leslie, Edwardians in Love, p. 143.)
b Christian de Falbe, the Danish minister, acquired Luton Hoo, near Bedford, when he married the widow of the previous owner, Mrs. John Shaw Leigh. Bertie visited Luton Hoo in 1886; thereafter it became a regular fixture. Bertie described it as “one of the most comfortable houses I know of.” (The Times, 30 November 1886; Lee, Edward VII, vol. 1, p. 573.)
c In his delirium he called for Hélène d’Orléans, and not his fiancée, May of Teck.
d After the service, Princess Beatrice sent a message via Ponsonby, complaining that she had been locked into her pew. Arthur Ellis replied: “The Prince of Wales desires me to say that—the harem of Princesses was not locked into the … pew closet but the door got jambed [sic], and adds that none of them were wanted at all. No ladies were to attend, and the Princess of Wales especially requested privacy—and to avoid meeting her O
sborne relations. So they all came. If Princess Beatrice was annoyed it cannot be helped and she must get over it—as she likes.” (Arthur Ellis to Henry Ponsonby, 22 January 1892, in Arthur Ponsonby, Henry Ponsonby, p. 359.)
CHAPTER 19
Daisy Warwick*
1892–96
Alix was crushed by Eddy’s death. At Sandringham she preserved his room as a shrine and visited it daily, strewing fresh flowers on the bed. His uniforms and clothes were kept in a glass cabinet, and his soap and hairbrushes were laid out exactly as they had been on the day he died.1 Never again did Alix stay at Abergeldie. “Last time we were there,” she wrote in 1902, “was with darling Eddy—& since then I c[ou]ld not bear to stay there again!”2 Mourning brought her closer to Queen Victoria, who understood grief all too well. She leaned also on Oliver Montagu, whom she found “such a comfort and help”; despite his bluff manner, Montagu could relate to her religious feelings. “We often talked over sacred things together,” Alix wrote; something one can hardly imagine Bertie doing with his wife.3
Mourning emasculated Bertie. The Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz† thought him “very fat and puffed, not knowing well what to do with himself now, during the mourning, it gave me a painful impression.”4 Forbidden social life, theaters, and races, he was condemned to accompany Alix as she wandered restlessly in search of peace, looking “lovelier than ever” in her long black veil.5 Escaping Sandringham, with its sad memories, Alix brought Bertie to stay at Compton Place, the Duke of Devonshire’s house in Eastbourne, for the day Eddy was to have married in February. “Hope beautiful fresh air may do us all good though our hearts remain sad wherever we are,” she wired the Queen.6 In the spring, the family fled to Cap Martin on the Riviera. For Bertie, incarcerated with a tearful, insomniac wife, the enforced domesticity and inactivity of a year’s mourning was almost unendurable.
The newspapers were filled with respectful eulogies for the dead Eddy—all except Reynolds’s, which declared that his mental faculties were “extremely limited” and he made “the poorest possible appearance” in public.7 Eddy was no fool, but he seemed strangely vulnerable to scandal and lacking in common sense—a quality his brother, George, possessed in abundance. Bertie, however, was changed. There is no evidence that he considered Eddy’s death a blessing. He was genuinely saddened.
Bertie’s relations with the Queen reverted to their former coolness. He complained that “he is not of the slightest use to the Queen; that everything he says or suggests is poohed poohed [sic].”8 Victoria had been quick to sympathize over Eddy’s death, but she found Bertie’s gambling and adultery hard to forgive. The Tranby Croft scandal was bad enough. Far worse was his affair with Daisy Warwick, which she knew all about thanks to a spiteful letter from Mina Beresford. In the new era of moral politics and intrusive newspapers, Bertie’s infidelity was a liability.
Salisbury’s government fell in August 1892, and when Gladstone took office once again, he told the Queen that the Cabinet had agreed to communicate its proceedings to the Prince of Wales, “as has been in action for several years past.” Victoria was horrified.9 She consulted Salisbury, who confirmed that he had never sent a report of Cabinet proceedings to the prince.10 Victoria scrawled triumphantly in purple pencil to Ponsonby: “The Queen is quite sure what Lord Salisbury says is the fact, for she is certain nothing of the kind was ever done or ought to be done.”11 Algernon West, Gladstone’s private secretary, hastened to reassure her that the intention was merely to let the prince know “generally what was going on,” and not to send him a copy of the prime minister’s letter to the Queen, which was at that time the only formal record of Cabinet proceedings.12 Gladstone was always more willing than Lord Salisbury to keep the Prince of Wales informed, which was one of the reasons why Bertie liked and respected him. Salisbury’s attitude was strictly correct, but “there was a quality in it that was humiliating to him.”13
Lord Rosebery, the foreign secretary in the Gladstone government, agreed to send Bertie the information he really wanted: confidential foreign dispatches. The most secret documents were enclosed in red leather boxes locked with a special key. Only the sovereign, the prime minister, and the head of the Foreign Office possessed copies of this key. Rosebery discovered in the Foreign Office the gold key that had once belonged to Prince Albert, and forwarded it to Bertie.14 Unfortunately, it seemed not to work. Knollys thought Bertie had been tricked and given a key that “would open nothing,” but the fact was, “that particular Cabinet key has to be pushed in a certain distance and then given a turn before it can go right home.”15 Even when he got his gold key to work, Bertie complained that the red boxes often contained little of interest. “The game is not to let me see any interesting or important Despatches! This has been going on for years under successive governments and it would be far better if FO sent me no more, which is preferable to the rubbish they send!”16
The years after Eddy’s death were a strangely meaningless interlude. Not that Bertie was idle. In March 1893, when the year of mourning was at last over, he told George, “I don’t think I have been more busy in my life.”17 In December 1892, he was appointed to the Royal Commission on the Aged Poor, and he conscientiously attended twice-weekly meetings from twelve to four p.m. during the parliamentary session. He was present for thirty-five out of the forty-eight meetings. His diary is crowded with a thicket of names, and each day bristles with appointments—public dinners, charitable events, theatergoing, entertaining royalty.
Bertie’s diary, seemingly the most impenetrable and impersonal of documents, contains a code. Cracking the code gives the key to his preoccupations—the double life and the secret narrative that made his constant performance bearable. At intervals in the diary Bertie inscribed small symbols or initials in the left-hand margin. He frequently wrote the letters “VR,” “G,” or “Vy.” Checking the dates when these initials occur against his correspondence confirms that “G,” “VR” and “Vy” denote days when he wrote to George, the Queen, or Vicky. The diary for 1891 and 1892 is missing, but in the volume for 1893 the pages are scattered with a small symbol that resembles a capital D in reverse. This is inscribed not in the margin but at the top of the box headed “morning” or “evening.”
The D in Bertie’s life was Daisy Warwick. Anecdotal accounts stress the intensity of the affair during the early 1890s. Puzzlingly, however, the name of Lady Warwick occurs less and less frequently in his diary from 1893. He made a habit of staying with Lord and Lady Warwick in October each year at Easton Lodge, and sometimes in March as well. But her name seems to have dropped out of the Marlborough House parties held by Ferdinand Rothschild or Baron Hirsch. There is tantalizingly little evidence, as the letters that do survive from Bertie to Daisy date mainly from 1898 or later, when the affair was burned out. Daisy’s letters were presumably destroyed after Bertie’s death.
Poring over the foolscap volumes of Bertie’s diary, sitting high up in the Round Tower at Windsor, I suddenly realized that the secret was staring me in the face. Whenever Bertie stayed with the Brookes at Easton Lodge, he invariably inscribed D twice, both in the morning and the evening. He surely would not write to Daisy twice a day when he was sleeping under her roof. Unlike the other symbols, which note when Bertie wrote a letter, the D records a meeting, carefully positioned in his diary to show the time it took place. In 1893, “D” is written on an astonishing sixty-nine days, sometimes twice or even three times a day. A year or so later, Daisy complained that “the worst of London is that [the prince] claims so much of my time during the rare visits I pay there now, and I see him so seldom that I feel generally obliged to fall in with his leisure time.”18
Daisy had been the center of his life; more than his mistress, she had become “my little Daisywife.” Whenever they were both in London, he took tea with her at her house at 50 South Audley Street, or they met for late-night suppers in a house placed at his disposal by a member of his household.19 What took place at these assignations can only be surmised; the im
portant thing was that no one else was present, not even servants. Daisy tells a story of one of these meetings. She arrived in a cab at the appointed house after the opera. Bertie had been given a latch key, and there were no servants in the house, just a supper waiting of lobster and champagne to be eaten in perfect privacy. On reaching the house, “what was my alarm to find my admirer on his knees on the pavement groping for a lost latch key.” She hurriedly dismissed her cab and helped the search. But to no avail. “There was nothing left for us to do but—supperless—to go arm-in-arm for a midnight stroll in the empty, echoing streets before seeking our respective, lawful dwelling-places.”20 More than any of his earlier mistresses, Bertie was emotionally involved with Daisy Warwick. She was Anne Boleyn to his Henry VIII: She was the commoner with whom the middle-aged prince fell in love. By contrast with Tudor England, however, a royal divorce was never considered or even discussed. Bertie remained loyal—in his own way—to Alix. “She is my brood mare,” he used to say. “The others are my hacks.”21
Bertie had to meet Daisy in secret partly because she was a scandalous woman. Mina Beresford’s campaign to drum her out of society meant that she could not be paraded as the favorite. As Bertie wrote to her in 1899: “You were persecuted by my family—society—and the press—to an extent that was never known before—and, alas! with my family, matters will I am afraid never come straight.… Society is always jealous of a pretty woman if I have the misfortune to think her so—then there are certain women I don’t like—and do not disguise my feelings towards them—who are sure to attack her and me.”22
