by Jane Ridley
The war made Britain acutely unpopular in France. The government wanted Bertie to attend the opening of the 1900 Paris Exhibition, but he refused. For him to go, he said, “would be a positive slight to the Queen, and would be regarded by Frenchmen as a proof that he was indifferent to the vile caricatures and lampooning of his own mother by their Press.”104 Victoria supported him. The war effort brought Bertie and Victoria politically close. There was no more squabbling over secret dispatches: They both had too much to do. In March, when the relief of the Siege of Ladysmith brought a turning point in the war, Victoria drove around London, doing what Bertie had urged her to do all those years ago, and the spontaneous effect was electric—“as if a great wave of devotion and sympathy had passed over the capital.… Your Majesty does not much admire Queen Elizabeth,” wrote Lord Rosebery, “but the visit to London was in the Elizabethan spirit.”105
“I have no plans at present,” wrote Bertie in March. “How can one have any when the war is going on?”106 That Boer War winter, confined to London, Bertie dined out most nights. There were three London houses where he ate dinner so often that in his diary he wrote only the address. One was 30 Portman Square: Mrs. Keppel. The second was 17 Grosvenor Crescent, and the third was 35 Belgrave Square.
Number 17 Grosvenor Crescent was a large, heavy mansion off Hyde Park Corner, just behind St. George’s Hospital, the home of two wealthy unmarried sisters, Agnes and Fanny Keyser. Bertie’s first dinner with the Keyser sisters is always said to have taken place in 1898, but in fact he dined with Agnes Keyser back in 1895.107 Agnes’s money came from stockbroking; her family was linked to the Bischoffsheims, which may have been how Bertie came to know her. She was the least glamorous of his mistresses—if indeed she was one: a middle-aged spinster, controlling and governess-like, who fed him plain food. But in the winter of 1900, Bertie’s regular visits to 17 Grosvenor Crescent had a purpose. Though untrained, Agnes had a vocation for nursing, and at Grosvenor Crescent she and Fanny started a private hospital for officers wounded in South Africa. As well as eating rice pudding, Bertie visited “Sister Agnes” in her starched uniform in the private ward. After the war, he persuaded his rich friends to subscribe, and Agnes Keyser’s ward grew into King Edward VII’s Hospital for Officers.d108
Number 35 Belgrave Square was the home of Mrs. Arthur Paget, the wife of General Paget, a friend of Bertie’s, who was serving in South Africa. Minnie Paget, now in her midforties, was an heiress, the daughter of a New York hotel owner, the self-made millionaire Paran Stevens. Her ambitious mother had driven her up and down Manhattan with a coach waiting outside every venue so that the young girl didn’t miss a single party. One of Edith Wharton’s original Buccaneers—her brother was briefly engaged to Wharton—Minnie had come to London in search of a husband, had stayed at Sandringham, and had knitted Bertie a waistcoat. The Boer War was her finest hour. She raised £7,000 for war widows and orphans with a masque at the Hay-market Theatre, and she funded a hospital ship.
Minnie was not well liked. She was sharp and brittle; some people said that she was incapable of telling the truth.109 When the seventeen-year-old American Consuelo Vanderbilt came to London (she later married the Duke of Marlborough), she was introduced to Minnie, who agreed to bring her out. “She was considered handsome,” wrote Consuelo: “to me, with her quick wit and worldly standards, she was Becky Sharpe incarnate.… I realised with a sense of acute discomfort that I was being appraised by a pair of hard green eyes.”110 During Daisy’s reign, the Americans had fallen out of favor at Marlborough House. Now, with the rise of Mrs. Keppel, they were back. When Minnie entertained the prince with dinner and cards, she could sense the sweet smell of social power. “Let us be either four or eight at dinner,” he wrote, “but they should all be bridge players.”111
Brussels Nord station, 4 April 1900, 5:30 p.m. After strolling about the platform for thirty minutes, Bertie boarded the special train heading for Copenhagen on a visit to the King of Denmark. He sat down beside Alix opposite an open window, and a servant handed him tea. As the train pulled out of the station, a young man mounted the carriage step, put his gloved hand through the window, and fired two shots at a range of two yards. Alix felt a bullet whizz past and bounce off the woodwork just above Bertie’s head. “If he had not been so bad a shot I don’t see how he could possibly have missed me,” wrote Bertie.112
The round-faced young man was hurled to the ground by the station manager and arrested. He was only fifteen, an anarchist named Jean Baptiste Sipido, and he had bought the revolver for three francs in a market and loaded it in a lavatory before making the assassination attempt. He claimed he was avenging the deaths Bertie had caused in South Africa.113 It was Bertie’s first—and only—near-assassination experience at a time when Europe teemed with anarchists, such as the man who had killed Elizabeth, Empress of Austria, eighteen months before, stabbing her with a shoemaker’s awl (“that poor charming inoffensive woman,” wrote Bertie).114 According to Charlotte Knollys, who was in the carriage, Bertie “never even changed colour, and the Princess behaved equally well.”115 As the train steamed out of the station, the crowd on the platform cheered, and the prince and princess bowed from the open window.116
Bertie displayed considerable courage, and he was justifiably miffed when Salisbury refused to move a parliamentary vote of congratulation. Such a vote would have involved calling a special sitting of the House of Lords, wrote Salisbury, who was a master of the crushing putdown: “It was thought better not to take that course, as it was not then known that the pistol contained a bullet, which the extreme youth of the culprit rendered doubtful.”117 Bertie cursed his cousin King Leopold II for failing to make an example of Sipido, who was acquitted by the Belgian courts on account of being underage.118 Afterward, the prince always took with him an Agent de Sûreté, or detective, when he traveled abroad.119 The incident gave him a sharp reminder that “we are all in God’s hands! in no one else’s!”120
In South Africa, the war at last turned to victory. News of the relief of the Siege of Mafeking reached London on 18 May. Bertie and Alix were at Covent Garden for Wagner’s Lohengrin. After the second act, someone shouted the news from the gallery, and everyone rose to their feet cheering wildly. The singer Madame Marchesi, who was in the stalls, started “God Save the Queen,” which was sung by the entire house.121
Later that month, Bertie’s horse Diamond Jubilee won the Derby. That year he also won the Grand National with Ambush II. But God’s hands were never far away, and in July came the “terribly sad news” of the death of his fifty-five-year-old brother Alfred in Coburg.122 Affie had been Prince Albert’s favorite son; so much cleverer than Bertie as a boy, in middle age he was a friendless alcoholic.e In 1898, he collapsed on a visit to Egypt. “I don’t believe Aunt Marie has the faintest idea of the gravity of his case,” wrote Bertie; “every year his health gets worse.”123 Affie’s only son, Alfred, committed suicide in 1899, and Affie himself was diagnosed with cancer of the throat, though he died of heart failure.
Victoria was devastated. “Oh God! My poor darling Affie gone too!”124 Bertie told Vicky that he could “never remember being so upset before,” but he had grown apart from Affie.125 In truth, he was far more upset by Vicky’s condition.
Bertie had known that Vicky was suffering from breast cancer for almost two years. She complained of “lumbago” as the cancer metastasized into her spine. In August 1900, Bertie traveled from Homburg to be close to his sister at Friedrichshof. By now she was in constant pain. Bertie’s “dear kind face” was always a comfort, but there was little he could do to help.126 He consulted Laking, who advised injections of morphine rather than strychnine or arsenic, but the kaiser refused to allow the English doctor to attend his mother. “It would create a most deplorable feeling here,” he told Victoria.127 By October, Vicky reported that the morphine only dulled the pain for ten minutes. “The terrible nights of agony are worse than ever, no rest, no peace. The tears rush down my cheeks when I am
not shouting with pain.”128 The doctors alerted Bertie to be in “constant anxiety” about her.129 Her letters were so harrowing that Helena and Beatrice stopped reading them aloud to the Queen.
“Poor dear Mama was not looking well,” Bertie wrote to Vicky on 19 November 1900.130 He had been summoned to Windsor by the Queen’s doctor, Sir James Reid, who was concerned about her symptoms. Victoria, who had risen so splendidly to the war, was suddenly older and shrunken. For months she had complained of insomnia, lack of appetite, disordered digestion, and depression.
Reid found it hard to persuade the prince to take his warnings seriously. Bertie seemed to think his mother was merely out of sorts, and he cheerfully expected that Christmas at Osborne would “take her out of herself.”131 This was wishful thinking. From the day she arrived at Osborne (18 December), Victoria was an invalid, confined to her bedroom. Most of the time she was “childish”—drowsy, incoherent, and confused. She had lost her royal rage, and she apathetically accepted things that had formerly irritated her. Reid suspected “cerebral degeneration,” or dementia, and his diagnosis was confirmed by two other physicians.132
Beatrice shut her eyes to her mother’s descent into childishness. Like an unmarried daughter whose status depended on an aged parent, the widowed youngest child continued to deal with the Queen’s correspondence and write her journal each night as if nothing had changed. Few dared whisper the possibility of a regency, but the fact was, the Queen was now incapable.133
Helena telegraphed Bertie with a cheerful report each day, omitting all the worrying symptoms. She freely admitted that she did not want Bertie and Alix in the house. Bertie, for his part, was only too willing to believe her. He still discounted Reid’s gloomy prognostications, encouraged by Laking, who reported back from Osborne that the Queen was her normal self. In fact, Victoria put on a special effort when she saw Laking. When Reid asked Bertie to approve a bulletin in the Court Circular about the Queen’s poor health, he refused to give consent. The death of his mother was somehow unimaginable. Victoria herself, in spite of her confusion, seemed dimly aware that she was dying. “Is there anyone in the house?” she asked Reid one afternoon. “Is the Prince of Wales here?” Reid asked if she wanted him. “I do not advise it at present,” she replied, lapsing back into drowsy dementia.134
The pretense that the Queen was in normal health continued until 19 January, when Reid happened to walk into the room of private secretary Arthur Bigge as he was shouting down the mouthpiece of the newfangled telephone to Francis Knollys at Marlborough House. Reid told Bigge to advise the Prince of Wales that the Queen might die at any time. He then confronted Helena and persuaded her to write an accurate telegram to Bertie. By five o’clock that afternoon, Bertie had arrived at Osborne.
The first medical bulletin was issued that day: “The Queen is suffering from great physical prostration accompanied by symptoms that cause anxiety.”135 Victoria rallied in the evening, and in a brief moment of lucidity she told Reid: “I think the Prince of Wales should be told I have been very ill, as I am sure he would feel it.” When Reid asked if she would like the prince to come, she replied, “Certainly, but he needn’t stay.”136 But Bertie didn’t see her. He agreed with Reid that it was better not to tell the Queen that he was in the house. He even declined to look into the bedroom while she slept. He had never seen his mother in bed. Victoria was confused, and so ill that she needed oxygen in the night, but Bertie returned to London the next day to receive the kaiser.
None of the royal family wanted the kaiser there. He had, in fact, been summoned by the doctor, Reid, who was in collusion with him. Without informing any of the family—“I knew the Princesses would disapprove”—Reid had telegrammed William, aware that he wanted to be present at the death.137
From Buckingham Palace, Bertie kept in contact by telephone. The doctors expected the Queen’s death imminently. The next morning at eight a.m., Bertie and William left for Osborne.
That evening, for the first time, Bertie sat by his mother’s bedside. She had been lifted from the grand mahogany marital bed and lay in a small bed in the center of the room, a tiny, huddled figure. After he had left, the semiconscious Queen took Reid’s hand and kissed it repeatedly. Mrs. Tuck, the Queen’s dresser, more alert or more sensitive to Victoria’s needs, asked her if it was the Prince of Wales she wanted. “Yes,” said the Queen.
Bertie returned to her bedside, and she said, “Kiss my face.”138 Then she put out her arms and said, “Bertie,” whereupon “he embraced her and broke down completely.”139
The next morning, the Queen was unconscious and clearly dying. The family was summoned to her bedside. Beatrice, Helena, and Louise told the blind Queen the names of the people in the room. The only name they omitted to mention was that of the kaiser, who was standing at her bedside. Reid asked Bertie why the kaiser was not named. Bertie replied, “It would excite her too much.” Later, when the Queen was alone, Reid went to Bertie and asked if he could take the kaiser to see her. Bertie relented. “Certainly, and tell her that the Prince of Wales wishes it,” he replied.140
In the afternoon, the family was summoned once more. Bertie sat at one side of the bed, behind Reid, who knelt supporting the Queen in a semi-upright position on her pillows. The kaiser knelt opposite supporting her with his good arm.
“At 6:30 she breathes her last,” wrote Bertie in his diary.141 That was all. Not even a hint of the turmoil this intensely emotional man felt at the death of the most powerful woman in his life.
* * *
* RA VIC/Add A4/172, Bertie to Vicky, 5 August 1900.
† Louise’s weakness was gambling, which Bertie found unacceptable in a woman: He encountered her at Monte Carlo, squired by a Mr. Holden, “an awful little snob who looks like a stud groom—whilst her husband is making important political speeches at home—I can’t understand at her age that she should come out to Monte Carlo to gamble! and go about with third rate men!” (RA VIC/Add C07/1, B to Knollys, 10 March 1894.)
‡ She allegedly sent anonymous letters about her ex-lover George Binning to his fiancée, accusing him of being a libertine. The case against her was never proved, but there seems little doubt that she “behaved in a contemptible manner.” (Lees-Milne, Esher, pp. 89–90.)
§ Bertie’s fussiness about dress extended to his mistresses. Skittles told a story about a lady who agreed, after some time, to gratify his wishes: “As soon as she had signified her willingness, he drew up a programme of her reception, the principal feature of which was that as the interview was to take place in the drawing room of a private house … ‘we shall not,’ he explained, ‘be quite secure against interruption. But I will have screens put up. You must be sure to come in a small round hat and without a veil.’ ” (Fitzwilliam Museum, Wilfrid Blunt Papers, MS 10, Diary, 5 October 1910.)
‖ “Everybody seems gone mad about acting here,” he told Daisy. “It is however a welcome change from the gambling.” (Caroline Spurrier Archive, B to Daisy Warwick, 7 January 1898, Daisy’s transcript.)
a Another member of the York household was Daisy Warwick’s sister-in-law Lady Eva (“Little Bird”) Greville, who was lady-in-waiting to Princess Mary. Daisy’s brother-in-law Sidney Greville was an equerry to Bertie. Mistresses came and went, but the courtiers kept their jobs.
b According to Jim Lees-Milne (almost as unreliable as Skittles), the historian Gordon Brook-Shepherd came across some passionate letters at Windsor from Soveral to Queen Alexandra, “with whom he had an affair.” (James Lees-Milne, Holy Dread [John Murray, 2001], p. 205 [1 December 1984].)
c Cassel was said to be the son of an illegitimate daughter of Prince Albert’s brother, Duke Ernest of Saxe-Coburg, by an actress who married a Frankfurt Jew named Cassel. This story, sadly, lacks any foundation in fact. (Fitzwilliam Museum, Wilfrid Blunt Papers, MS 9, Diary, 27 June 1909; Camp, Royal Mistresses, pp. 355–56.)
d The 1901 census reveals six young officers described as “visitors” at 17 Grosvenor Crescent. The two siste
rs each deducted ten years from their age.
e Succeeding his uncle Ernest as Duke of Coburg in 1893 had not made things easier for him. His wealthy wife, Marie, the sister of Czar Alexander III, paid off Duke Ernest’s debts, in addition to lavishing money on Clarence House, and by 1899 the Edinburghs were almost bankrupt. Affie appealed to Victoria for financial help, and she paid £95,000 toward his debts. Bertie was kept informed. (RA VIC/Add C07/1, Arthur Bigge to Francis Knollys, 3 April 1899. RA VIC/Add C07/1, Alfred to QV. 14 August 1899 [copy]. RA VIC/Add C07/1, Arthur Ellis to Alfred, 15 August 1899. RA VIC/Add C07/1, Fleetwood Edwards to Francis Knollys, 23 August 1899. RA VIC/Add C07/1, Fleetwood Edwards to B, 26 August 1899. RA VIC/Add C07/1, Lord Monson to Bigge, 23 August 1899.)
CHAPTER 21
King Edward the Caresser
1901–2
At fifty-nine, Bertie was a reluctant heir. “I would have liked it 20 years ago,” he said. The story circulated among the courtiers that, the moment Victoria died, Alix knelt before her husband and kissed his hand in homage. “Sire!” she said. Bertie replied, in German, “It has come too late.”1
When the news of Queen Victoria’s death reached the journalists waiting at the gates of Osborne, a mad crowd in carriages and on bicycles raced down the hill to the post office, whooping, “Queen dead!”2 Victoria died at 6:30 p.m. on 22 January 1901, and it was not until 10:30 the next morning that the Prince of Wales, as he still was, left Osborne for London, accompanied by the royal dukes, to hold the Accession Council at 3 p.m. and take the oaths of sovereignty.3 The prime minister, Salisbury, who saw him before the council, found him “very much upset. We had a long talk alone. He broke down.”4 Speaking in a room crowded ten deep with jostling privy councillors, the new King’s voice cracked as he announced the death of his “beloved” mother. He declared his wish to be styled Edward, desiring that the name Albert should stand alone for his great and wise father, Albert the Good. Afterward, to the consternation of the clerks, who had neglected to bring a shorthand writer, it was discovered that he had made this definitive eight-minute speech entirely without notes.5 Then the royal dukes kissed his hand on bended knee, followed by Lord Salisbury (who was annoyed when Bertie signaled the old man need not kneel if he did not wish), and the Duke of Devonshire. Though Bertie was now King, Alix refused to be called Queen or allow anyone to kiss her hand until Victoria was buried.
