She admits that she imagined herself becoming a long-term royal mistress, like Henri IV’s Diane de Poitiers or Louis XIV’s Madame de Maintenon, and that she is devastated when Napoléon doesn’t come to her room on the second night. Worse, he then takes another woman for the same walk in the gardens, and helps her on to the same seat on the carousel. Irène realizes that she has been used as a quick imperial fix. So she sneaks to the carousel, partially unbolts the seat, and is delighted when the following day, the new favourite (who has lasted longer than a one-night stand) is thrown off the carousel flat on her face. Everyone, including Napoléon, laughs, and it is the end of the new affair, because, as Irène comments in a typically French flash of courtly wit, ‘One recovers from an illness, but dies of ridicule.’
This tragi-comedy ends with Irène leaving Compiègne in a huff, but having the final word. A few months later, she bumps into Napoléon, who actually recognizes her and enquires whether she will be returning to court. Definitely not, she tells him.
‘Even if I ask you to?’ Napoléon says.
‘Especially if you ask me to,’ she replies. Touché.
III
All in all, Bertie’s short stay at Fontainebleau in June 1862 would have been an unbelievably liberating experience. He had only just arrived in manhood, and already the loveliest, wittiest women in Europe were his for the taking.
This explains why, as soon as he became independent of his mother, Bertie would imitate almost everything about Napoléon and Eugénie’s lifestyle – the easy switching from pomp to informality (as long as rank was respected, of course); the mix of people at court – not just stuffy dignitaries but achievers from very different walks of life (though Bertie himself would not be quite as keen as Napoléon on the literary set); and, of course, the virtual obligation for women to indulge in adultery at any house party, especially with the alpha male.
It is no exaggeration to say that on leaving Fontainebleau, Bertie was ready to mutate into a young Napoléon III, a process he would quickly begin to fine-tune by revisiting France as often as possible and by using the French model when he set up his own household.
When Bertie arrived home after his oriental voyage and its French finale, it was hardly surprising that Victoria found him looking ‘bright and healthy’. Even better, her sinful son was now, she noted with satisfaction, willing ‘to do whatever his Mother and Father wished’ – Bertie was obviously feeling very pleased with himself, and was behaving so diplomatically that he even impressed the late Albert from beyond the grave.
What Bertie’s parents, both dead and alive, wanted most of all was a wedding. A few months earlier, he hadn’t been keen, but after his week in Fontainebleau, marriage must have held few fears for the twenty-year-old Prince. He had seen for himself, and no doubt been assured in a fatherly pep talk from Napoléon, that marriage was no barrier to fun and games.
On the contrary, to a man in Bertie’s position, a wedding certificate would be a passport to unfettered philandering.
* * *
1 His first abdication, that is. He was of course to return from Elba and retake power, only to lose it for the last time after Waterloo in 1815.
2 For more details of Louis XIV’s absurdly ordered daily routine, see 1,000 Years of Annoying the French.
3 In French: ‘plaisirs et jouissances’. They are almost synonymous, but the second word is derived from the verb jouir, one of the meanings of which is to have an orgasm.
4
AN ANGLO-DANISH WEDDING AND A FRENCH MARRIAGE
‘A solemn holy act not to be classed with amusements.’
Queen Victoria’s idea of a good wedding reception
I
IN MARRIAGE AS in everything else, Bertie was to find it almost impossible to please Victoria, who, like all interfering mothers worth their salt, sent out a barrage of contradictory messages concerning her son’s wedding. The only consistent thing about the Queen was that everything she did was motivated by her own self-interest.
On the one hand, she campaigned in Bertie’s favour with his future in-laws. She wrote to Princess Alexandra’s mother referring to Bertie’s ‘fall’ as ‘this (one) sad mistake’, and claiming that ‘wicked wretches had led our poor innocent Boy into a scrape’. In all her writings, Victoria was very fond of underlining words (usually represented in a printed text, including this one, as italics), but for her letter to Bertie’s intended mother-in-law she resorted to capital letters to insist that she would look to Bertie’s future wife ‘as being HIS SALVATION’. Victoria even went so far as to assure the Danes that Bertie was ‘very domestic and longed to be at home’, which was either a white lie or a spectacular piece of denial.
Privately, though, Victoria was set firmly against Alexandra – she wanted a German daughter-in-law, not a Dane. Bertie’s elder sister Vicky had married the heir to the Prussian crown, sealing for the foreseeable future (or so Victoria thought) England’s friendship with the Germans. Ideally, Bertie would add a second link to this Anglo-Prussian family chain. The Danes, on the contrary, were in direct conflict with Prussia over the possession of the tiny border states of Schleswig and Holstein, which at the time were like two irritating grains of sand in the salami sandwich of northern European politics.
In Alexandra’s favour, she was part German – her mother was from Hesse-Kassel, a small duchy that had provided Britain with soldiers (at a price) during the American War of Independence. But this pedigree didn’t satisfy Victoria, mainly because the court of Hesse-Kassel was notorious for being too dissolute, too frivolous – too French. Exactly like Bertie, in fact.
Politically, then, Alexandra was a disaster. But even Prussia’s English princess, Vicky, was all for the marriage because she astutely felt that the only hope of forcing Bertie to become anything like a stable husband was to find him a beautiful wife, and the eligible German girls she had met were all a bit too Kaiser-like. Alexandra was not as stunning as some of the French ladies Bertie had encountered, but she had natural poise and a delicate beauty that might, Vicky suggested, keep him interested.
Victoria’s moral mentor, Uncle Leopold, King of the Belgians, was also in favour of Alexandra, but for a much more masculine reason. He thought her a good choice as a wife because, he wrote to Victoria, ‘there is something frank and cheerful in Alex’s character, which will greatly assist her to take things without being too much overpowered or alarmed’. His meaning was clear: Bertie was always going to be a womanizer, and Alexandra seemed to have what it took to survive the humiliation. In this, Leopold was something of an expert – he had an official mistress who was thirty-five years his junior, and who had borne him two illegitimate sons.
As it happened, Alexandra’s mother was not at all reassured by Victoria’s lobbying. Princess Christian of Denmark had heard about the tempestuous relationship between Victoria and Bertie, and was terrified that the bad feeling between them would ruin Alexandra’s chances of a happy marriage.
With so many conflicting opinions surrounding the Anglo-Danish match, it was left to seventeen-year-old Alexandra herself to sort things out. First there was a short introduction to Victoria in Belgium in September 1862, at which the Queen decided that Alexandra seemed ‘dignified’ and ‘distinguished’, even if her parents were not.
Then in November, Victoria summoned Alexandra to a meeting in England to be inspected more closely, without the support of her mother this time, and with her father banished to a nearby hotel. Petrified as she was at the prospect of a solo audience with the gorgon mother-in-law, Alexandra had the good sense to present herself to the mourning Victoria in a plain black dress, without any jewellery, and to put up with hours of lectures about Albert. She was a model of sobriety, piety and healthy melancholy.
The ruse worked. Victoria wrote to Vicky, saying, ‘How beloved Albert would have loved her.’ From beyond the grave, Papa had given his approval. ‘She is so good, so simple, unaffected,’ Victoria went on, unwittingly spelling out that poor Alexandra
was the complete opposite of the French beauties that Bertie was so fond of.
He, meanwhile, was trying his best to reassure his mother that he would do his marital duty. After Alexandra had accepted his proposal, which was little more than a formality, Bertie wrote a letter to Victoria in his confusing style – half German, half Yoda from Star Wars – promising that: ‘Love and cherish her you may be sure I will to the end of my life.’
Luckily, Alexandra was quite smitten with her jovial, impeccably mannered English Prince. She told Vicky: ‘You perhaps think that I like marrying your Brother for his position but if he was a cowboy I should love him the same and would marry no-one else.’ It should be noted that, at the time, a cowboy was not someone who rode the prairies in search of buffalo, whisky and good-time girls – he was simply the cattle equivalent of a shepherd boy.
Victoria, though, was terrified that Bertie might have something of the wandering ranch-hand about him, and insisted that, even though the young couple were engaged, they should never be left alone together unless someone was sitting outside the room next to an open door. There would be no pre-marital rodeo-riding on Victoria’s watch.
While arrangements were finalized, Bertie was exiled to the royal yacht Osborne (the renamed Victoria and Albert) for a short cruise in the Med. It was a stormy November, and almost everyone on board was seasick. One of the steamer’s paddle wheels was damaged, and it was forced to moor in the Bay of Naples, where Bertie held a low-key twenty-first birthday party. This coming-of-age in exile looks very much like a deliberate ploy on Victoria’s part, a punishment for Bertie’s premature assertion of his adulthood with Nellie Clifden.
However, Victoria seems to have let her political and emotional manoeuvrings distract her, because she made a grave mistake in planning her son’s short Mediterranean exile. On the way home, Bertie had to make an overnight stop in Paris to change trains.
Since poor General Bruce had died of fever just two weeks after the Orient tour, Bertie now had a new moral guardian – an aged veteran of the Napoleonic Wars called General Sir William Knollys. Nominally he was Bertie’s ‘comptroller and treasurer’, the idea being that preventing the Prince of Wales’s financial excesses would also limit his moral overindulgences. But Knollys was more lenient than Bruce, and would become loyal to the Prince rather than the Queen, so Bertie was able to escape from his base at the British Embassy and visit Eugénie, who was in Paris.
Eugénie was, as usual, surrounded by her charm school, and Bertie was introduced to yet another young married beauty, the dusky Anne-Alexandrine-Jeanne-Marguerite Seillière de Sagan, who immediately set about confiding in him that her husband was cheating on her (quelle surprise). For the moment, Bertie could only console the unhappily married French lady verbally, but it was a heavy hint that he filed away for later use. When he eventually acted on it, it would lead to a paternity scandal.
II
Bertie’s wedding, like his engagement, was a mixture of youthful geniality and maternal gloom. The date, chosen by Victoria, was 10 March 1863, during Lent, the season of self-denial. When the Archbishop of Canterbury complained about the inappropriate timing, he was rebuked by the Queen, who reminded him that marriage was ‘a solemn holy act not to be classed with amusements’. In short, Bertie was lucky he wasn’t getting married on Good Friday – crucifixion day.
The British public, though, had no such negative thoughts. They were wholeheartedly in favour of a royal wedding, whatever the date. Just as in 1981, when Prince Charles married his own carefully selected virgin bride, the nation erupted in a frenzy of capitalistic monarchism. Streets were decorated with flags and bunting, and shop windows were suddenly overflowing with souvenirs. There were photos, marriage medals, even commemorative Princess Alexandra hair curlers. New celebratory songs were written, and the sheet music was published so that every household with a piano (and in those days there were many) could bash out a patriotic tune in their front room.
One of these songs was called ‘Oh Take Her But Be Faithful Still’, which, judging by the way the royal marriage would turn out, was one tune that Bertie didn’t get to hear.
The official celebrations were set to begin three days before the wedding, when Bertie was to escort Alexandra through London after her arrival in England on the royal yacht. As soon as the route of the procession was announced, strategic windows and balconies were put up for rent at exorbitant prices. An American biographer, Stanley Weintraub, quotes one of the many small ads that appeared in The Times, which was offering a viewpoint for the procession with what must surely have been a deliberate spelling mistake and double entendre:
Royal Procession: First floor, with two large widows, to be let, in the best part of Cockspur Street, with entrance accessible behind.
If Bertie saw the ad – and it became famous – he would probably have laughed. And asked to meet the two widows.
The procession attracted immense crowds – the biggest ever seen in London, it was said – but The Times reported that the royal carriages were ‘old and shabby, and the horses very poor, with no trappings, not even rosettes’. Victoria had put her usual damper on the celebrations. Even so, for four long hours the crowd cheered a tumultuous welcome to Alexandra, who was looking beautiful and composed in an open carriage despite the cold March wind and her first exposure to public hysteria.
Almost as soon as the happy young couple arrived in Windsor, where the wedding itself was to take place, Victoria took them to Albert’s brand-new mausoleum, finished just the day before. The Queen led Bertie and Alexandra into the shrine and joined their hands before the late Prince Consort’s tomb. ‘He gives you his blessing,’ Victoria declared. Alexandra would have been forgiven for thinking she was marrying into the Dracula family.
Victoria insisted on holding the wedding ceremony in St George’s Chapel at Windsor, which until then had been better known as a venue for royal funerals.1 Within its walls were the tombs of Kings Edward IV, Henry VI, Henry VIII, Charles I, Georges III and IV and William IV, and its East Choir was being rebuilt as a chapel in honour of Bertie’s father. A place of unbridled joy it was not.
Victoria had taken care to fill the church with her own guests, so that there was hardly any room for Alexandra’s family. Even the King of Denmark had not been invited. Victoria herself was not amongst the congregation, either, and remained almost completely hidden from view throughout the ceremony. She watched proceedings from on high in Catherine of Aragon’s Closet. This sounds like a wardrobe but is in fact a private recess on a balcony above the altar, built so that Catherine could observe the ceremonies of the Order of the Garter that were held in St George’s. (After she was estranged from Henry VIII, titillations in Catherine’s life must have been few and far between.)
So, up in her closet, in a black dress with a white veil, wearing a miniature of Albert in a brooch, Victoria gazed down like an avenging angel. The first piece of music to be played, chosen by Victoria of course, was an oratorio written by her husband, and she was seen to sigh and raise her face to heaven as it was sung. It was a relief that she hadn’t asked for Alexandra and Bertie to be brought to the altar in coffins.
The guests and the bridal couple did their best to jolly up the occasion – many of the men sported brightly coloured uniforms; the women were resplendent in their jewels and silks. Alexandra arrived (twenty minutes late) in a white-and-silver satin dress embroidered with orange blossoms that hung in clusters like mistletoe, as if to remind everyone that she was expecting a kiss on this funereal day. Bertie was looking elegant, if a little plump, in a general’s uniform with the velvet cloak of the Order of the Garter wrapped around his shoulders. In a photograph taken just after the ceremony, the cloak’s bulbously tasselled cord hangs down over his crotch like an historic fertility symbol.
When it came to the vows, Bertie showed himself up. He had to have Alexandra’s six first names (Alexandra Caroline Marie Charlotte Louise Julia) read out in groups – he was apparently incapable of rec
iting them all from memory.
There were moments of lightness, though – Bertie’s nephew, the four-year-old Wilhelm, future Kaiser of Germany, who was wearing Highland dress, pulled the large gemstone from the handle of his dirk and had to be restrained from throwing it across the aisle.
Many members of the congregation were also distracted by the ample cleavage of the 65-year-old Duchess of Cambridge, a great-granddaughter of George II and now Princess of that frivolous court of Hesse-Kassel. And when the Archbishop’s sermon droned on for what the orchestra considered too long, the musicians began loudly tuning their instruments.
After the ceremony, at the wedding lunch (which the Queen did not attend), the future Kaiser misbehaved again, crawling under the table to bite the exposed leg of his uncle Prince Arthur, who was wearing the uniform of a Scottish soldier – tunic and kilt. It was, of course, not Wilhelm’s last attack on the British military.
During the lunch, the happy couple were called away from the celebrations to pose for a family photo that must have confirmed in the bride’s mind that she had just married into some kind of ghost-worshipping sect. There are four characters in the picture. To the left is the white-veiled Alexandra, the only person gazing frankly into the camera. To the rear is Bertie, pouting morosely and looking away. In front of him, sitting rigidly at right angles to the camera, is Victoria, who is swathed in a voluminous black habit that makes her look like a cross between a nun and a hearse. She is ignoring the young couple, and staring up at a life-size head-and-shoulders bust of Albert on a plinth. If the photographer actually did say ‘cheese’, no one heard him.