Philip: The Final Portrait

by Gyles Brandreth

  Victoria adored her husband and it is clear from her journal that, at least when she was young, her approach to the physical aspects of love was anything but ‘Victorian’: ‘I NEVER NEVER spent such an evening!!!15 My DEAREST DEAREST DEAR Albert sat on a footstool by my side, & his excessive love & affection gave me feelings of heavenly love & happiness, I never could have hoped to have felt before! He clasped me in his arms, and we kissed each other again and again! His beauty, his sweetness and gentleness – really how can I ever be thankful enough to have such a Husband!’

  Despite the discomforts and indignities of childbirth (‘I think … of our being like a cow or a dog at such moments,’ she said), she bore nine children. The first was born on 21 November 1840, nine months and eleven days after her wedding. ‘Oh, Madam,’ said her physician, Dr Locock,16 ‘it is a Princess.’ ‘Never mind,’ answered the Queen feebly, ‘the next will be a Prince.’ It was. Eleven and a half months after the birth of Princess Victoria, known first as Pussy, then as Vicky, on 9 November 1841, Bertie, the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII, was born.

  Victoria’s reign was long and, overall, hugely successful. When Albert died, on 14 December 1861, the Queen was only forty-two. Utterly bereft, she closeted herself at Windsor Castle, and her sustained seclusion – at Windsor, at Balmoral, at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight – did not endear her to the press or public. She was temperamental, emotional, volatile: there were times when her family, and her ministers, feared for her sanity. She was also able, intelligent, and perceptive, though susceptible to flattery – ‘Gladstone treats the Queen like a public department,’ said Benjamin Disraeli. ‘I treat her like a woman’; of course, the Queen preferred Disraeli – and wilful to the point of obstinacy. She would not give up her devoted, drunken, Highland servant, John Brown, however much her family wanted her to do so. She would not abandon her Indian secretary, Abdul Karim, ‘the Munshi’, however anxious the Indian Office and others were over his constant presence at her side. Victoria, especially as she grew older, was instinctively conservative, but neither a snob nor, in any way, racially prejudiced.

  As Queen, she had dignity, determination, and unique dynastic skills. She came to be known as ‘the grandmother of Europe’ with good reason. Vicky married a future German emperor. Bertie married the Danish Princess Alexandra, whose brother became King of Greece and whose sister was Empress of Russia. It was her third child Alice who married the Grand Duke of Hesse and launched the line that produced, among others, the last Tsarina and Prince Philip. Her fourth child, Alfred, also married into the Russian royal family and, in time, his daughter became Queen of Romania. After Helena and Louise came two more sons: Arthur, Duke of Connaught, whose daughter became Queen of Sweden, and Leopold, Duke of Albany. Her youngest child, Beatrice, married Henry of Battenberg, and became the mother of the Queen of Spain.

  As a mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, Victoria was interested and involved, concerned and conscientious. There is a lovely photograph of her, taken in April 1886, with her daughter Princess Beatrice, her granddaughter Princess Louis of Battenberg, and her great-granddaughter Princess Alice (Prince Philip’s mother), aged one. They all look contented. The Queen is smiling happily.

  When Victoria was not amused17 it was all too often because of Bertie. Victoria and Albert viewed the young Prince of Wales as a problem child. He was not academic; he was not athletic; he did not inherit his father’s appetite for work. Instead, he seemed to have inherited his assorted, dissolute, great-uncles’ appetites for good food, fine wines, gaming, and loose women. In 1861, when he was still nineteen and a young officer stationed with his regiment in Ireland, a compliant young actress, Nellie Clifton, was slipped between his sheets. Prince Albert heard all about it and was appalled. What if the liaison were to result in a child? In his anguish, the Prince Consort wrote to the Prince of Wales: ‘If you were to try and deny it, she can drag you into a Court of Law to force you to own it & there with you in the witness box, she will be able to give before a greedy Multitude disgusting details of your profligacy for the sake of convincing the Jury, yourself crossexamined by a railing indecent attorney and hooted and yelled at by a Lawless Mob!! Horrible prospect, which this person has in her power, any day to realise! And to break your poor parents’ hearts!’

  Albert died only a few weeks later, possibly of typhoid, possibly of cancer. In the extremis of her grief, Victoria attributed her husband’s death to the distress he had been caused by their son. ‘Oh! that boy,’ she said, despairingly, ‘much as I pity him I never can or shall look at him without a shudder …’

  At five foot seven inches, Bertie was a little taller than his mother, and rounder. At his heaviest he weighed more than sixteen stone – 224 pounds. His nickname was ‘Tum-Tum’. He enjoyed five substantial meals a day – breakfast, luncheon, afternoon tea, dinner, supper – and smoked as many as twenty cigarettes and a dozen fat cigars between daybreak and sunset. He coughed and he wheezed, but he safeguarded his own health by requiring others not to smoke while he was doing so. Despite his weight and his wheezing, throughout his adult life he enjoyed a series of mistresses: occasionally actresses, like the young Nellie Clifton and the celebrated Lillie Langtry, more often the willing wives of his complaisant aristocratic and racing friends.

  On 10 March 1863 Bertie, aged twenty-one, married Princess Alexandra of Denmark. She was just nineteen, beautiful, tall, sweet-tempered, good-natured, a little vacant, chronically unpunctual, wonderfully tolerant. She endured her husband’s selfishness, self-indulgence, and promiscuity for almost half a century. When he was dying in the late spring of 1910, she allowed Alice Keppel, his last and most enduring mistress, to come to his bedside. Queen and mistress shook hands and Alix, with extraordinary generosity, said to Alice, ‘I am sure you always had a good influence over him.’

  She probably did. In many ways Bertie was a spoilt child and Mrs Keppel (‘My little Mrs George’18 as he called her) could coax and tease him out of his sulks and ill-humour. The present Prince of Wales (Bertie’s great-great-grandson) is also reported to have had occasional sulking moments and bouts of ill-humour in the past, and his good-humoured mistress-turned-wife, Mrs Camilla Parker Bowles (the great-granddaughter of Mrs Keppel, as chance would have it) is said to have had a similarly useful influence over him.

  Prince Charles’s first wife, Diana Spencer, was, to an extent, consoled by the affection in which she was held by the public at large and by her strong and loving relationship with her own children. The same was true of Princess Alexandra. She was strikingly beautiful, much admired, and genuinely loved by the people. She did good works. With the Alexandra Rose Day, she introduced a new form of charitable fund-raising to Britain. Despite increasing deafness19 and a slight limp, triggered by rheumatic fever when she was just twenty-two, she was easy with strangers and especially comfortable with children.

  Alix’s own children were a special joy to her. She had six, the youngest of whom, a boy, died when only a few hours old. Her daughters called her ‘darling Motherdear’ and were so devoted that Bertie feared they might never leave the nest. In the event, the eldest, Princess Louise, the Princess Royal, married the Duke of Fife, and the youngest, Princess Maud, married Prince Charles of Denmark, later to become King Haakon VII of Norway. Only the middle girl, another Princess Victoria, remained a spinster all her life.

  As seems to be the custom with the British Royal Family, it was the eldest son who proved to be the problem child. Prince Albert Victor, the Duke of Clarence, known in the family as Eddy, was born prematurely at the start of 1864 and died prematurely in the spring of 1892. He was neither bright nor ambitious and devoted most of his short life to the pleasures of the boudoir and the polo field. When the police raided a male brothel in Cleveland Street in central London they discovered a clutch of the Prince of Wales’s friends and associates among the regular clientele and learnt that Bertie’s eldest boy, the young Duke of Clarence, had not long before visited the establis
hment in the (forlorn) hope of seeing a display of naked women. Eddy was notorious and his dissolute behaviour fuelled the rumours that he was ‘Jack the Ripper’, the man who murdered and mutilated a number of prostitutes in the Aldgate and Whitechapel districts of east London in 1888.

  Just as Albert and Victoria had hoped that marriage would magically transform their eldest son (‘marry or burn’ was the phrase they used), so Bertie and Alix hoped that matrimony would make a man of the wretched Eddy. Finding a bride for this particular prince was not easy. First, he rejected an anyway reluctant Princess Margaret of Germany; next, he was turned down by Alix of Hesse (the one who went on to become the luckless last Tsarina of Russia); then, he fell passionately in love with Princess Hélène d’Orléans, who was a Catholic as well as French, and consequently (despite her readiness to become a Protestant) wholly hors de concours.

  In due course he was persuaded to propose to Princess Victoria Mary of Teck, known to all as May, who was three years his junior and not nearly so ‘royal’, but was willing, able, available, and sound. Queen Victoria invited her to Balmoral and gave a grandmotherly seal of approval, judging May to be ‘a superior girl – quiet and reserved till you know her well – … & so sensible and unfrivolous.’20

  Princess May agreed to marry Prince Eddy, but she was spared what would certainly have been an ordeal. In the run-up to the wedding, while shooting at Sandringham in the winter of 1891, Eddy was taken ill. He died of pneumonia on 14 January 1892. In his final fever, as May and his mother took turns to keep watch, repeatedly he called out, ‘Hélène, Hélène.’ His fiancée was understandably disconcerted. His mother was understandably bereft. For years, in her bedroom, Alix kept the hat her hapless son had been wearing on his final shoot, and she preserved his quarters as they been on the day he died: his toothpaste tube as he had left it, a fresh cake of soap ready by the washbasin. Her second son, George, wrote to her: ‘Gladly would I have given my life for his, as I put no value on mine … Such a tragedy has never before occurred in the annals of our family.’

  In truth, tragedy (or, at least, melodrama tinged with bathetic comedy) was probably averted by Eddy’s death. He was not good-husband or good-monarch material. Prince George turned out to be both. Princess May, having received the old Queen’s seal of approval, was too good a catch to let slip, and, within eighteen months, May, having been engaged to one heir apparent, had married the next. It was a fortunate match. George later wrote to his wife: ‘People only said I married you out of pity and sympathy; that shows how little the world knows what it is talking about.’

  Queen Victoria and Edward VII were the last two monarchs whose names alone would conjure up the flavour of the eras in which they reigned. Since 1952 we have not been living in a new Elizabethan age. Elizabeth II is an impressive woman, with special gifts that have been much to the benefit of Crown and country, but she has not set the tone or temper (or tempo) of the time in which she has lived. Far from it. At moments during her long reign she has struggled to keep pace with the swirling changes taking place around her. In part, this is a reflection of the gradually diminishing power and position of the monarchy, but it also has something to do with the personalities – and the perception of the personalities – involved. A statue of Queen Victoria immediately evokes the Victorian age. A photograph of Edward VII – especially one taken at the races, or at a country house party – at once triggers a wider picture of Edwardian England. There is no image of Elizabeth II that conveys the spirit of Britain in the second half of the twentieth century.

  Bertie was in his sixtieth year when Victoria died and he succeeded her as the first king to be called Edward since the middle of the sixteenth century. He had been waiting in the wings a long time. ‘I don’t mind praying to the eternal Father,’ he once said, ‘but I must be the only man in the country afflicted with an eternal mother.’ Despite the lengthy and chequered apprenticeship, to the surprise of many he managed the transition from playboy Prince of Wales to king-of-some-substance without difficulty. As King, he eased up a touch on the womanising (well, we all get older), but his other appetites remained undiminished and his generous girth was seen as evidence of his humanity and endeared him to his subjects. ‘Good old Teddy,’ they said, and they meant it. You could argue that the last time Great Britain could be described as ‘a nation at ease with itself’ was in the Edwardian era, when toffs were toffs, the middle classes were comfortable, and the workers – rather like the King – accepted their lot in life and took their pleasures where they could.

  Edward VII took his role seriously. He had the presence of a leader and the skills of a diplomat. His achievement in encouraging a loosening of the national bias towards Germany and the signing of the 1904 Entente Cordiale with France was real. He also took himself seriously. When Bertie was a guest at the Comédie Française and a stranger enquired what His Royal Highness thought of the play, the Prince rebuked him: ‘I don’t think I spoke to you.’ He would tease his friends and indulge in his fondness for practical jokes at their expense,21 but his intimates were not permitted to respond in kind. If you overstepped the mark, if you answered back, if, in your cups, momentarily, you forgot who you were, and, more to the point, forgot who he was, your bags would be packed and your carriage summoned. The word lese-majesty comes from the French lèse-majesté, which comes from the Latin laesa majestas, meaning ‘hurting’ or ‘injuring’ majesty.

  In his memoirs, A King’s Story, the Duke of Windsor, briefly Edward VIII, grandson of Edward VII, recalled a conversation he had had, when, as Prince of Wales, he had asked a senior courtier, Sir Frederick ‘Fritz’ Ponsonby, to give him a candid opinion of how he was faring in his role:

  ‘“If I may say so, Sir, I think there is a risk in making yourself too accessible,” he answered unhesitatingly.

  ‘“What do you mean?” I asked.

  ‘“The Monarchy must always retain an element of mystery. A Prince should not show himself too much. The Monarchy must remain on a pedestal.”

  ‘I maintained otherwise, arguing that because of the social changes brought about by the [1914–18] war, one of the most important tasks of the Prince of Wales was to help bring the institution nearer the people.

  ‘“If you bring it down to the people,” Fritz Ponsonby said coldly, “it will lose its mystery and influence.”

  ‘“I do not agree,” I said. “Times are changing.”

  ‘He replied severely, “I am older than you are, Sir; I have been with your father, your grandfather, and your great-grandmother. They all understood. You are quite mistaken.”’

  Victoria, Edward VII, and George V understood the requirements of monarchy and, in their different ways, delivered in full measure. Edward VIII did not.

  One Saturday morning in May 1910, the future Edward VIII and his younger brother, the future George VI, aged sixteen and fifteen, learnt of the death of their grandfather, Edward VII, when they woke up and looked out of the window of Marlborough House and saw the Royal Standard flying over Buckingham Palace at half-mast. Moments later they were called downstairs. The Duke of Windsor later recalled: ‘My father’s face was grey with fatigue, and he cried as he told us that Grandpapa was dead. I answered sadly that we had already seen the Royal Standard at half-mast. My father seemed not to hear as he went on to describe in exact detail the scene around the deathbed. Then he asked sharply, “What did you say about the Standard?” “It is flying at half-mast over the Palace,” I answered. My father frowned and muttered, “But that’s all wrong,” and repeating as if to himself the old but pregnant saying, “The King is dead. Long live the King!” he sent for his equerry and in a peremptory naval manner ordered that a mast be rigged at once on the roof of Marlborough House.’

  This is an interesting story and makes an important point about the Royal Standard. When Diana, Princess of Wales, died in 1997, there was an outcry in the press about the Royal Standard at Balmoral not being flown at half-mast. The Queen was hurt and angered by the criticism
. She felt it showed a lack of understanding of history and tradition. The Royal Standard never flies at half-mast. The flagpole at Buckingham Palace was bare because flags are only flown over a royal residence when the sovereign is in residence. The Queen could see no reason to break with precedence. After several days, against her better judgement, she was persuaded to change her mind and allow a compromise: the Union flag – not the Royal Standard – was flown over Buckingham Palace at half-mast.

  George V, the Queen’s grandfather, was a stickler for the established order of things. As a boy he had been a naval cadet. He spent twenty years in the service and, according to his eldest son, throughout his life ‘retained a gruff, blue-water approach to all situations, a loud voice, and also that affliction common to Navy men, a damaged ear-drum’. Apparently, ‘Damn fool!’ was his favourite expression. He had an explosive temper, a simple sailor’s sense of humour, and a horror of change for change’s sake. He liked things to be ‘ship-shape’; he appreciated order; his chief delight was his stamp collection. He was a creature of habit: carefully, he checked the barometer, every morning and every night. When his wife, Queen Mary (as Princess May was known after the Accession), attempted to shorten her skirts in line with the fashion of the day, the King would have none of it. As their eldest son recalled, ‘He disapproved of Soviet Russia, painted finger-nails, women who smoked in public, cocktails, frivolous hats, American jazz and the growing habit of going away for weekends.’