A year earlier, Bertie had been cited in a divorce case. This scandalous event had been provoked by Sir Charles Mordaunt (the man who shot ponies on his lawn) after his wife confessed that her new baby wasn’t his. She had done this in a panic because she was terrified that the infant was showing symptoms of syphilis. Breaking the high-society rule whereby marital problems were dealt with by discreet separation, gritted teeth or executing pets, Sir Charles had sued for divorce on the grounds of infidelity, creating a paper-chase of names with his accusations. Issued with a summons, Bertie had actually been forced to go to court to deny, Clinton-style, that he had had sex with this woman. The judge believed him but the press, predictably, reported all the lurid details.
Then, around the same time as Susan Vane-Tempest went into exile, Bertie had to deal with the Barucci letters1 – the notes he had sent to the Parisian cocotte. The fact that he was willing to make a huge blackmail payment showed how keen he was to keep his sullied name out of the papers.
Bertie was also under fire from the press for wild spending on more pleasurable luxuries. Deprived of France, he had indulged that summer in some heavy gambling at a German spa, Bad Homburg (so much for his sympathies in the Franco-Prussian conflict), and it was rumoured that he had suffered heavy losses. Reynolds’s Newspaper, a scandal-hungry English weekly founded by an anti-privilege campaigner called, predictably, Reynolds, pilloried Bertie for throwing away gold ‘that he obtained from the toil and sweat of the British working man, without himself producing the value of a half-penny’. Headlines about ‘royals throwing away our money while we starve’ are strong arguments for republicanism at any time, and the nineteenth century was no exception.
Calls for a French-style republic in Britain were being led by the radical Liberal activist Joseph Chamberlain (father of the future Prime Minister Neville, who would sign the infamous agreement with Hitler in 1938) and the Liberal MP Charles Dilke, whose favourite speech around this period was a call for an end to what he called the ‘political corruption that hangs about the monarchy’. These battling young politicians and their party were determined to reform conservative England, and royal-bashing was an effective campaign tool, especially when Bertie was the target.
As rumours of his adultery and German gambling were repeated and embroidered upon, Bertie got himself into even more trouble by inviting a boxer to Sandringham. Today, when we live in a celebritocracy, this might not sound very shocking, but in 1871 prize-fighting was illegal in England. Even so, the word was that the Prince of Wales and his society friends were frequent spectators at bloody, bare-knuckle bouts, and were betting small fortunes on the outcome. So by inviting a boxer, a soldier called Charley Buller, on a rural retreat, Bertie was confirming the rumours and proving – to republican eyes, at least – that he thought he was above the law of the land.
Perhaps it was because France, his comfort blanket since his teenage years, had been taken away. Perhaps it was the news that Alexandra was also going to be unavailable, and the loss of their baby. Either way, Bertie had been walking a tightrope across the Niagara of public opinion, and in the autumn of 1871 he was wobbling dangerously.
II
Plumbing is like the soundtrack of a film – if things are running smoothly, you hardly notice it’s there. When it gets too noticeable, however, things become unbearable. This was exactly what happened in November 1871 when Bertie, Alexandra and twenty-odd friends went to Scarborough in Yorkshire to help control that county’s exploding grouse population. In between doing their bit to redress the balance of nature, the guests were constantly twitching their nostrils at the fetid smells seeping out of the pipes at Londesborough Lodge,2 the home of the Lord of the same name where they were all staying. The house’s fragile plumbing had apparently failed to cope with the number of visitors, and there must have been overflows of dirty water into clean, because almost as soon as the shooting party left the house, some of its members began to shiver and feel sick. Bertie developed a fever and a pink rash and took to his bed, where he was soon singing, throwing pillows at his doctors and raving so scandalously that women had to be rushed from the room.
When one of the other Scarborough guests, Lord Chesterfield, died of typhoid, a chill passed over Bertie’s whole family – it was almost ten years to the day since Prince Albert had gone the same way. For the first time ever, Victoria came to Sandringham, and Bertie’s country house was turned into a giant nineteenth-century sick room, with all the horrors that that entailed. Windows were sealed to keep out the cold, the air became stale, and the entire royal family – the Queen, the Waleses and various princes and princesses – were almost wiped out by a gas leak that was only discovered thanks to the persistence of Bertie’s uncle George, the Duke of Cambridge, who complained so repeatedly about an ominous smell that the gas company was called in to investigate.
On 13 December, the day before the anniversary of Prince Albert’s death, it looked as though Bertie would die, thereby following in his father’s footsteps for the first and last time in his life. A coughing fit almost cut off his breathing entirely and carried him away. Things looked so bad that the doctors, obeying nineteenth-century logic, asked Alexandra to leave Bertie’s bedside for fear that her presence would ‘excite’ him. She was forced to creep back in on hands and knees to be near her dying husband.
Finally, though, Albert’s ghost seems to have decided that it didn’t want to be reunited with its lost son just yet, because the next day Bertie began to rally. He asked to see his mother and greeted her not with a thrown pillow but with a polite ‘so kind of you to come’. His fever was down and the coughing was, like Scarborough’s grouse population, under control. If Victoria whispered a prayer of thanks, we can guess whose name she evoked.
Before this near-death experience, the press had been extremely cruel to Bertie. The worst example was another article in Reynolds’s Newspaper, which had greeted the death of the royal baby John with morbid glee: ‘We have much satisfaction in announcing that the newly born child of the Prince and Princess of Wales died shortly after its birth, thus relieving the working men of England from having to support hereafter another addition to the long roll of state beggars they at present maintain.’ Politics at its most personal.
By association the reclusive Queen was also tainted, mainly for not managing her son more strictly. In her biography of Bertie, Jane Ridley quotes a damning attack on Victoria by the previously loyal Economist: ‘The Queen has done almost as much injury to the popularity of the monarchy by her long retirement from public life as the most unworthy of her predecessors did by his profligacy and frivolity.’ This last jibe was at the previous Prince of Wales, later King George IV, who was remembered by Victorians as an infamous moral degenerate. The inference was clear – Bertie was sliding down the same amoral slope. The monarchy was under attack on all fronts.
Bertie’s illness changed all that. While he was at death’s door, the doctors’ pessimistic bulletins kept newspaper readers on the edge of their seats for fresh news, especially after the Associated Press agency issued a false report of his demise. The real prospect of Bertie’s death erased the past and swung public opinion back on his and the monarchy’s side. Papers called for public prayer, and when it was apparently answered, there was huge relief. Cannily, Prime Minister Gladstone suggested that Bertie stage a procession through London and a thanksgiving service at St Paul’s. Victoria objected (of course) but was overruled, and on 27 February 1872 the streets of London were thronged with cheering crowds who were so enthusiastic that one poor baby was suffocated in the crush and a tree collapsed under the weight of the people who had climbed up to get a better view. The Queen had changed her mind and came out to wave from an open carriage, while Bertie, frail but happy, raised his hat to his new fans.
He was, everyone noticed, looking very bald, and chubby-faced – at the age of only thirty, any youthful slimness that he had hung on to was gone forever. And when he walked up the aisle of the cathedral on Victoria’s arm, he limp
ed. Rather like Alexandra, in fact. But the sight of his suffering, his evident closeness to his wife and family, and his pious determination to give thanks to heaven for his salvation, thawed public hearts. Calls for a London Commune were effectively at an end.
Even better news for Bertie was that France was also getting back on its feet after its recent troubles.
Time for a little visit, perhaps?
III
Bertie’s convalescence had brought him closer to Alexandra, who enjoyed having her husband at home for once. She gave him wifely rubdowns to ease his aches and pains, one thing led to another, and for a while she was afraid that she was pregnant again – Bertie clearly wasn’t the kind to abstain from sex on doctor’s orders.
For some time after he was off the danger list, he suffered from painful swelling in his left leg, as well as the occasional bout of fever. But soon he was feeling strong enough to go to France again – albeit with his wife. The idea was to spend the spring cruising on the Mediterranean, which, as always, was an excuse for a stopover in Paris on the way there and back. As his train pulled into the city, Bertie must have felt a mixture of nostalgia and fear. His beloved mistress had taken a beating. Would she have lost all her charms? Would she remember him? Or even recognize him after his rapid bout of ageing?
Bertie’s first impressions of post-Commune Paris can be gauged from an account given by Robert Lytton, the Secretary of the British Embassy, who arrived there in 1872 to find that the city was suddenly full of ‘petits bourgeois’, that the ‘cupids of the Second Empire have disappeared’ and that Paris had become ‘dowdy and almost respectable . . . like a battered and tired dandy in reduced circumstances’ – which could have described Bertie himself.
Having little energy to go out on the town, Bertie took the opportunity to do some politicking, no doubt wanting to see whether the Third Republic would welcome the occasional visit from an English royal. He must have been reassured that the President was still Adolphe Thiers, the man who had suppressed the Commune, and who was seen by royalists as a convenient stopgap until a king returned to reign over France.
However, Bertie didn’t want to wait until the next French monarch emerged. Much better to go along to the Palais de l’Élysée, just a couple of doors down from the British Embassy, and declare his enduring empathy with France, whoever was leading it. His meeting with Thiers had to be secret – Bertie was still under orders not to show any public support for France – and it apparently went well, despite the fact that according to one English observer, the President’s wife sat there all the while looking like a ‘dragon watching over the new republic’.
Bertie also hooked up with his old friends at the Jockey Club, and although he wasn’t yet fit enough to join any of their escapades, he was pleased to see that their premises had been refurbished, and to hear their reassurances that the good life was just around the corner. After all, whatever change came would come peacefully, seeing that all the revolutionary troublemakers had been either shot or sent to the tropics.
In short, Bertie’s personal espionage mission would have been a complete success if he hadn’t bumped into the Thiers family again in Trouville on the Normandy coast shortly afterwards, and been spotted fraternizing with les Français by a German agent. The spy informed Bismarck, who complained to Victoria, and Bertie was in trouble yet again for his political indiscretions.
Things got even worse for Bertie when poor Napoléon III was killed by an English doctor.3 It wasn’t quite as straightforward as strangulation by stethoscope, but it might as well have been for all the problems it caused Bertie.
Napoléon and Eugénie had been living happily in a mansion called Camden Place in Chislehurst, a few miles southeast of London, plotting the Emperor’s return to power in France (at the time, almost every Frenchman in England was plotting his own return to power in France). Napoléon wanted to follow the example of his uncle who had come back from his Italian exile on Elba in 1815 to a rapturous welcome from his people. But his health had not been improved by his imprisonment in Prussia, or by his time in Chislehurst, which was no Italian island, and his old stomach pains were getting stronger than ever. Diagnosed with bladder stones, he was operated on by a British expert on the condition, a certain Henry Thompson, but died on the operating table on 9 January 1873 of complications that Thompson and his anaesthetist quickly attributed to kidney failure.
Bertie was determined to go to the funeral, but his mother and Gladstone forbade it, even though they had been willing in the past to visit the imperial couple discreetly at Chislehurst. The difference between private visits and public occasions was one that Bertie still had to master, except where most of his mistresses were concerned.
He was a faithful friend, though, and Napoléon had been his mentor in the aspect of his life that was most important to him, so he defiantly went to the lying-in-state of the coffin, and spent some time commiserating with Eugénie, who now knew that she would definitely not be returning to France as an empress. Bertie also invited some of Napoléon’s exiled friends and supporters to Sandringham to reminisce about the good old days and, all in all, did just about everything that a Prince of Wales could do to embarrass a British government that was trying to stay on good diplomatic terms with republican France, short of putting on a wig and going to a fancy-dress party as Marie-Antoinette.
Gladstone tiredly declared that gaffe-master Bertie had a ‘good nature and sympathy’ but suffered from a ‘total want of political judgement, either inherited or acquired’. The answer, Gladstone belatedly suggested, was an education in political matters – Bertie needed to ‘adopt the habit of reading’. Victoria had no illusions about her eldest son, though, and replied that Bertie had ‘never been fond of reading . . . From his earliest years it was impossible to get him to do so. Newspapers and, very rarely, a novel, are all he ever reads.’ Which was unfair. As we’ve seen, Bertie absolutely devoured the Parisian theatre listings.
As any hope of useful employment faded thanks to his political incompetence, Bertie occupied himself as best he could in England. He began affairs with a married Canadian woman called Mrs Sloane-Stanley, and a teenaged Irish beauty, Patsy Cornwallis-West, who was only sixteen when she began sleeping with him. She was hurriedly married off as soon as her family heard about her precarious situation. Marriage, though, only made it easier for Bertie to continue the affair and he remained close to Patsy long enough to help her daughter marry into the English aristocracy, which in turn only increased rumours that at least one of her three children was of royal descent.
His health was improving rapidly, and he also began ‘seeing’ a French cocotte. She was in fact a Liverpudlian called Catherine Walters who had set up shop in Paris in the 1860s, and had returned to England when the Commune spoilt her business. Catherine was nicknamed Skittles, either because of her ability to bowl men over or because of her figure. There is a photo of her on horseback, sporting a jacket so tight that she could have worn a dog collar as a belt.4 The slenderness of her waist only emphasizes the curvaceousness of the portions of her that are perched upon the saddle.
Taking up with a former Parisian prostitute must have reminded Bertie fondly of his recent past and given him yearnings to get back to the city, because in 1874 he started campaigning for another cross-Channel expedition. He had been invited to France by an eminently respectable man, the Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Bisaccia (the respectability of a Frenchman was often judged by the impossibility of fitting his whole name on the front of an envelope) who until very recently had been France’s Ambassador in London. The fact that Rochefoucauld had been recalled to Paris (in other words, fired) because of his outspoken royalist declarations did nothing in Bertie’s eyes to make him less respectable, even though it would have been clear to anyone with more political sense that the Duc was a very hot pomme de terre.
Bertie was emboldened by the fact that the moralist Gladstone had lost a general election and been replaced by the worldlier Benjamin Disraeli, s
o that it looked as if his mother had been deprived of an ally in her war against her son’s French indiscretions. And when Victoria appealed to Disraeli to forbid the trip to Paris, Bertie’s optimism was confirmed – the new Prime Minister’s letter of disapproval said only that he was unsure ‘whether a visit to France at all is, at this moment, desirable’, which was a little like putting a chocolate cake on the table and telling a child that it might not be a good idea to take a slice. Disraeli also showed that he was either a weak psychologist or that he had one eye on Bertie’s future succession to the throne, because he told the Prince of Wales that only he could decide whether it was advisable to go to France: ‘No living man is more competent to form a correct judgement . . . than Your Royal Highness.’
That decided it – the cake was to be consumed at once.
What was more, Bertie wanted to eat it undisturbed by his wife. He decided to use the old stopover excuse, and announced that he intended to spend some time in Paris on his way back from attending the confirmation of his nephew, the future Kaiser Wilhelm II, in Germany.
Everyone knew what this implied, and some serious disapproval was expressed. Bertie’s comptroller and treasurer, Sir William Knollys, wrote a letter to Victoria decrying Paris as ‘the most dangerous place in Europe, and it would be well if it were never revisited. In fact, remaining on the Continent, whenever it involves a separation of the Prince and Princess of Wales – cannot be otherwise than most undesirable.’
But if Bertie knew about the letter, he took as much notice of Knollys as if he had been a grouse begging for mercy on the moors. Paris? Without the wife? He was off.
IV
After a short stay in Baden to lose some money, which provoked another flurry of reports at home about his excessive gambling, Bertie was in Paris in October, obliging London to reassure the world via The Times that this was not a state visit, and that Bertie was neither expressing anti-German sympathies nor trying to put a king on the French throne.