by Jane Ridley
Undaunted, Daisy retreated to her Essex estates, where she entertained with louche luxury. “The most coveted invitations in England were those to house parties at Easton Lodge marked: ‘To meet the Prince of Wales.’ ”23 Her friend the novelist Elinor Glyn fondly recalled arriving on a winter’s evening; the women dressed in velvet sable-trimmed tea gowns, the tea table laden with scones and cream, the footmen all the same height at six feet, the luxurious bedrooms with hot baths and writing tables equipped with pens from Asprey and bouquets of flowers for wearing at dinner. Instead of the usual country-house sport of shooting, which Daisy disliked, weekends at Easton revolved around a game of adultery: a carefully choreographed flirtation that took place between the married women and their admirers—little notes would appear on a lady’s breakfast tray from her admirer, and there were lovers’ walks to the Stone House, an Elizabethan folly in the grounds, all orchestrated with velvety charm by Daisy. Most of the men fell hopelessly in love with her; she possessed what Elinor Glyn, coining a phrase, described as “It,” the supreme personal charm which is “quite indefinable” and “does not depend upon beauty or wit, although she possessed both in the highest degree.”24
But there was another side to Daisy’s character, a social conscience and searching for purpose that sat uneasily with the royal mistress. Looking back on her life, she reflected that though at the beginning she worshipped the same gods as others of her class, she was changed when she met the journalist W. T. Stead in 1892. With his rough northern voice, his strong beard and mesmeric eyes, Stead became her Svengali. Daisy now entered what she called her “middle-class period”—her “Board of Guardians, philanthropic, educational, lady-gardening period.”25 Stead had won fame as editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, forcing the government to raise the age of consent in 1885 through the “Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” revelations, and as editor of the Review of Reviews from 1890 he was the scourge of adulterers such as Charles Dilke and Charles Parnell. But he did not denounce the adulteress Daisy. On the contrary, he became her confidant and adviser.
Daisy was already tiring of Bertie. Not that she disliked him. As she later told the journalist Frank Harris: “He was very considerate, and from a woman’s point of view that’s a great deal.… I grew to like him very much; I think anybody would have been won by him.”26 But she confessed that when guests at Easton house parties left her alone with the prince, she found it “boresome as he sat on a sofa holding my hand and goggling at me.”27 In London, she became resentful of his constant demands, which monopolized her time. When they were apart, he wrote letters twice or thrice a week, which she must answer “or he used to say I had hurt him.”28
Stead suggested that Daisy should use her influence to educate and improve the prince. In August 1893, he advised her that she must be “the priest of the parish” and Bertie the “parishioner.”29 A triangular relationship developed, Daisy regularly reporting on her relations with the “parishioner” to Stead.
Influencing the prince gave Daisy a kind of power. “Being a woman and thus cut off from public life which is open to men—worse luck—one’s power is only in personal influence,” she wrote.30 This sort of power had always been the prerogative of the royal mistress. With the language of parishioner/priest, Daisy and Stead gave it a moral spin. Not only would the priest redeem the parishioner, and thus legitimize her adultery, but also, as priest, she was the dominant partner within the relationship. Supremely self-confident, Daisy could see that the prince was no different from other men. Because he read so little, he learned not from books but, “like a woman,” from meeting people.‡ It now became Daisy’s mission to show the prince “things as they really were,” to teach him about the lives of the poor. She was well aware that her ability to do this depended upon his “extraordinary appreciation of physical beauty”—that is, her own beauty.31 When Bertie stayed at Easton for Easter 1893, the visits to the Stone House and thoroughbred studs were interspersed with tea with the vicar and a tour of the workhouse. After the prince’s visit in October, Daisy reported to Stead: “My ‘parishioner’ was very glad to spend these few quiet days at Easton, but I think he is rather jealous of your influence on my life and thoughts.”32
Daisy’s philanthropic activities are often dismissed as disorganized and impulsive, but she was right to urge Bertie to do good works. Thanks to Daisy Warwick, “the great womanizer was womanized.”33 Alix later told Lord Rosebery that at this time she “hated Lady Warwick.”34
The death of Oliver Montagu was another blow to Alix. Eight years earlier Montagu had lost an eye, which had been injured in a shooting accident. Alix described the operation in gruesome detail: In order to stop the blood, sponges were stuck into the cavity where the eye had been; but OM’s sufferings endeared him to her all the more. “I cannot really think of anything else,” she wrote, “and he, poor one, had the loveliest eyes—I have never seen anyone as little vain as him.”35 Now, the forty-nine-year-old Montagu was mortally ill with cancer. He insisted on traveling to Cairo, and, after undergoing two operations, he died there in January 1893.36 Alix was grief stricken. According to Skittles (who loved a good story), the princess went to bed and cried for three days. She confessed her feeling for Montagu to Bertie, but he “found nothing to object in it. He knew all about it.” Skittles once received an anonymous letter complaining about Alix’s relationship with Montagu; she showed it to Bertie, who remarked that he, too, received letters on the subject, usually from the wives of clergymen. When Skittles suggested that he ought to speak to the princess about it, Bertie “said he could not do that, as it would be an insult to her. He knew there was nothing in it.”37
Alix depended upon Montagu emotionally and in religious matters, too. “I was so touched by your saying that you thought I have had some good influence on your dear nephew’s spiritual life,” she told his aunt Lady Sydney.38 Montagu’s body was embalmed and shipped back from Cairo in a sealed lead coffin. Bertie was chief mourner, but Alix did not attend the funeral at Hinchingbrooke. She and the young princesses visited the coffin the day before. “Please keep it strictly private as we settled,” she told Lord Sandwich, Montagu’s brother, “and might we quite quietly go in without anybody seeing us. I have sent a tiny cross to you begging you to be so kind as to let it rest over him tonight! and that I might take it away again with me tomorrow as a sad remembrance of my faithful friend.”39 Every year on the anniversary of Montagu’s death she sent a wreath or a flower.
Alix was sentimental. This was the woman who had erected a tombstone in the pets’ graveyard that still survives in the shrubbery at Marlborough House:
Bonny
Favourite Rabbit
Of HRH the
Princess of Wales
Died 8 June 1881
Bereft of Montagu, Alix was thrown on to the companionship of her woman of the bedchamber, the devoted Charlotte Knollys. As the princess’s constant attendant and amanuensis, Charlotte gained an unhealthy influence over her mistress.40 Isolated by her deafness, Motherdear clung, too, to her unmarried children, Victoria, Maud, and especially George. Her relations with “Georgie boy” had always been possessive, and she is often blamed for infantilizing her son, “holding him back in a mental playground where she could reign supreme.”41 She held all the tighter after Eddy’s death. “Thank God dear Georgie the only one left is looking well I always feel that pang wherever [sic] I look at him now,” she wired the Queen.42
Eddy’s death meant that George’s marriage had become a matter of urgency. As the heir presumptive, his life was all that stood between Bertie and the succession of his eldest daughter Louise, with the Duke of Fife as consort. The press clamored for Prince George to marry May of Teck, the tragic princess. So, too, to May’s embarrassment, did her pushy parents. As Eddy lay dying, the stroke-disabled Duke of Teck had been heard to mutter, “It must be a tsarevich, it must be a tsarevich,” referring to the marriage of Alix’s sister Minnie to the czarevitch Alexander after the death of his older
brother Nicholas, to whom she had been engaged.43 (No one mentioned the less happy example of Henry VIII marrying his dead brother’s widow, Catherine of Aragon.) Queen Victoria urged George to choose May, and was (Bertie told George) “in a terrible fuss about your marrying.”44 George himself had other ideas; he wished to marry his seventeen-year-old first cousin Marie, known as Missy, the daughter of the Duke of Edinburgh. Only after the headstrong Missy had turned him down in favor of the adopted heir of the King of Romania did George consider May of Teck.
The Duke of York, as George now became, had Eddy’s allowance from Parliament, a house in St. James’s Palace, and York Cottage at Sandringham. A life of ease was hard to resist. He spent two months improving his German at Heidelberg, and then marriage to May was all that remained to be done. Alix took him on a cruise to Athens to prepare; she told him that she was “worried to death” about his marrying. “Nothing and nobody can or shall ever come between me and my darling Georgie boy,” she wrote.45
George returned home ahead of Alix, who remained abroad on purpose. He visited his sister Louise at Sheen Lodge; Princess May was invited over from nearby White Lodge, and the diffident prince was pushed by his sister into the garden, where he proposed to May and was accepted.§
“Melampus!” he wired to Bertie that evening. Melampus was the name of the ship he had taken in the summer, and the code word they had agreed for an acceptance by May.46 There was nothing spontaneous about this proposal, though it happened a day or two earlier than expected. Bertie was delighted. “What a relief it must be to your mind that all is now satisfactorily settled and you can easily understand that I have the same feelings,” he told George.47 Alix’s emotions were more complicated. “You know what mixed feelings mine are,” she wired Victoria from Malta.48 To May she wrote a congratulatory letter that was affectionate but suffocating: “I hope that my sweet May will always come straight to me for everything,” signing herself, “ever your most loving and devoted old Motherdear.”49
The wedding took place in boiling heat on 6 July 1893 at the Chapel Royal. Between the wedding breakfast and a family dinner, Bertie somehow managed to squeeze in a clandestine meeting with Daisy Warwick—a D symbol is written in the diary.50 George’s first cousin Nicky, the czarevitch, stayed at Marlborough House and noted a shade reproachfully, “Uncle Bertie is in very good spirits and very friendly, almost too much so.” Alix, lovelier than ever—and much more lovely than the bride—in ethereal white satin and diamonds, looked “rather sad” in church. “One can quite understand the reason why,” wrote Nicky.51
The couple spent their honeymoon at York Cottage, Sandringham, where it poured with rain. After ten days, the entire Wales family joined them. York Cottage had formerly been the Bachelor’s Cottage; it was unpretentious and cramped and only five minutes’ walk away from Sandringham House. To the growing annoyance of her new daughter-in-law, Alix could never resist dropping in for tea or to rearrange the furniture.52
Many years later, King George V allegedly declared: “My father was frightened of his mother; I was frightened of my father, and I am damned well going to see to it that my children are frightened of me.”53 The remark was probably apocryphal; it was untrue, at least so far as Bertie’s relationship with George is concerned. Of all the Hanoverian/Saxe-Coburg-Gotha monarchs, Bertie was the only one who never quarreled with his heir, an achievement for which he has not received the credit he deserves. Four days after the wedding, he wrote to Prince George: “I hope you will always look upon me as your elder brother and ask my advice always.… You are quite right in saying that we have not lost a son but you have brought us another daughter.”54 The relationship between father and son was, however, an unequal one. George’s first cousin, who disliked Bertie, considered that “King Edward’s affection for Prince George was due to the fact that the latter was prepared to be his complete slave.”55
May never quite became another daughter to Bertie. The serious-minded princess disliked his “fast set” and disapproved of his habits of racing and gambling. George was not part of the Marlborough House set either. In many ways he seemed the antithesis of his fat, philandering father: devotedly uxorious, and thin, he disliked London society. Perhaps it was because George seemed his ideal alter ego that Bertie found him so congenial, unlike Eddy, who reminded him of his dissipated younger self.‖ Father and son had much in common, too: an obsession with punctuality, an addiction to smoking, a passion for uniforms, and a devotion to the competitive slaughter of game birds. The happy result was that Prince George as Duke of York and heir presumptive did much less in the way of public work than Bertie had done in his twenties, and his father never pushed him to undertake official duties. “For seventeen years,” as Harold Nicolson wrote, “he did nothing at all but kill animals and stick in stamps.”56
Bertie’s new toy was the royal yacht Britannia. Commissioned by him in 1892 and built on the Clyde, Britannia was both a state-of-the-art racing cutter and a luxury yacht. She won races in 1893, but 1894 was her most exciting season, as she battled race after race with her American rival Vigilant. The prince’s coolness gained the admiration of his crew, who watched as Britannia heeled from side to side, maneuvering at the start of a race, while Bertie sat on deck reading the newspapers, his deck chair rolling violently. At length he stood up and held on to the rail of the ship, and both chair and papers fell overboard. Asked whether the chair should be retrieved, Bertie merely remarked, “Yes, pick up the papers,” and a dinghy was dispatched to recover the royal Times.57
When Bertie went to the South of France in the spring, he stayed on board Britannia, cruising from one regatta to another. On 3 March 1894, the day that Britannia arrived at Marseille, Bertie noted, “Mr. Gladstone resigns premiership is succeeded by Lord Rosebery.”58 Victoria was delighted; half blind and deaf, the eighty-five-year-old Gladstone noted her “cheerfulness” when he tendered his resignation at Windsor, and he was hurt that she expressed no regret but made small talk, allegedly remarking: “I hear your daughter has been bitten by a mad cat. Is that true?”59 To the prince, however, Gladstone wrote a sad little farewell letter (“the devotion of an old man is [of] little worth”) conveying his “fervent thanks” for his “unbounded kindness” and that of the “beloved Princess.”60 Bertie reciprocated the old man’s affection, and acted as a pallbearer at his funeral three years later.
Rosebery, Gladstone’s successor, was welcomed by both Bertie and Victoria. The Queen liked the forty-six-year-old aristocrat personally and thought she could control him politically (she couldn’t), and Rosebery was a good friend of Bertie’s.
A letter writer with the lightest of touches, unstuffy, civilized, and sympathetic, the widower Rosebery was sufficiently close to the Waleses to write beguilingly to Alexandra imploring her to put aside her grief for Eddy and appear in public. (“I am half inclined to tear this letter up, but I leave that to Your Royal Highness.”)61 Bertie stayed with Rosebery at Dalmeny, where he grumbled about the all-male party, but he enjoyed slipping down to the Durdans, Rosebery’s Epsom retreat (“Rosebery was in great form and chaffed R. Churchill unmercifully”).62
Perhaps Bertie knew too much about Rosebery. In August 1893, at Homburg, he had helped to rescue him from the mad Marquess of Queensberry. The homophobic marquess, who was the father of Lord Alfred Douglas (Bosie), the lover of Oscar Wilde, was convinced that his eldest son, Lord Drumlanrig, private secretary to Rosebery, was having a homosexual affair with Rosebery. He arrived in Homburg determined to “out” “that boy pimp and boy lover Rosebery.” He was met by the police and interviewed by the Prince of Wales, who told him, “We are quiet people at Homburg and don’t like disturbance.” The scandal took another turn in October 1894, when Drumlanrig was found dead during a shoot. The official verdict was accidental death, but dark rumors circulated of suicide and homosexual cover-up, and Rosebery lived in terror that the vicious marquess would denounce him.63
When Rosebery offered himself as a suitor for Princess Vic
toria, he was sharply rebuffed by Alix. Toria, as she was known, was intelligent—not as pretty as Maud, but very “light in hand” according to Carrington.64 Years later, as an old lady, Anita Leslie recalled Toria reflecting that “there had been someone perfect for her but they would not let her marry him—‘And we could have been so happy.’ ” The man, Anita later discovered, was Rosebery.65 At the time, the millionaire widower prime minister seemed far from ideal. Not only did his involvement in politics rule him out,66 but he was nineteen years older than Toria, painfully insomniac, and dogged by damaging rumors of homosexuality. And the fact was that Alix did not want her daughters to marry.
The husbandless state of Princesses Victoria (twenty-five) and Maud (twenty-four), unkindly known as “the Hags,” was beginning to excite comment. “I cannot understand their not being married,” wrote Vicky, “they would be such charming wives.”67 When the Queen taxed Bertie about it, he told her that “Alix found them such companions that she would not encourage their marrying, and that they themselves had no inclination for it (in which I think he is mistaken as regards Maud). He said that he was ‘powerless,’ which I cannot understand.”68 The reason why Bertie was “powerless” was because of the rift between him and Alix over Daisy Warwick.
The Queen was right about Maud. Known as Harry, Maud was the most attractive of Bertie’s daughters; as her collection of designer dresses reveals, she was a size zero with an eighteen-inch waist. She admired Princess May’s brother, Prince Frank of Teck, but her feelings were not reciprocated. In the autumn of 1895, on a Danish family holiday at Bernstorff, she became engaged to her first cousin Prince Charles, the second son of Alix’s brother the King of Denmark and an officer in the Danish navy. Alix had hoped that Maud might marry the older brother. The Duchess of Teck thought Charles charming, but remarked that he looked “fully 3 years younger than Maud and has no money.”69 Charlotte Knollys declared that it was a love match: “He has cared for her for three years and she certainly seems extremely fond of him.”70 Maud was “very much in love,” but everyone doubted whether she would be prepared to live “in a cottage in Denmark with a lady-in-waiting” while her sailor prince was away at sea.71 They were right. After her marriage in July 1896, she never ceased to grumble about her Danish exile, and was only happy at Appleton, the house that Bertie gave her on the Sandringham estate (it had previously been the home of the bad-tempered Mrs. Cresswell). Though Maud was supposed to be his favorite daughter, Bertie seemed oddly indifferent.
