Of all her nine children, none had caused the Queen as much consternation as her eldest son and heir. Compared throughout his childhood to his elder and more brilliant sister, Vicky, Bertie could not have been a greater disappointment to his parents. His lack of enthusiasm for study, his inability to learn, even his appearance distressed his mother to the extent that she feared that he had inherited the wayward characteristics of her degenerate Hanoverian uncles.
The Queen was haunted by the memory of those ‘terrible’ uncles who, a generation earlier, had brought the royal family into such disrepute. Since her accession both she and Prince Albert had worked hard to restore the reputation of the monarchy, presenting the nation with an ideal example of marital fidelity and domestic harmony that was beyond reproach. No one, least of all their eldest son, could be permitted to tarnish that image and, from his earliest years, Bertie’s parents aimed to mould him into their ideal of the perfect prince. To prevent the taint of any outside influence, he was isolated from boys of his own age and provided instead with strict tutors and even stricter regimes of study. The scheme was not a success. Bertie, criticised on all sides, struggled in the schoolroom while his natural gifts of diplomacy and congeniality were stifled and ignored. When his frustration exploded in rage, he was beaten.
Unsurprisingly, the young prince leaped at the first chance of freedom. Escaping from the ‘minders’ sent to protect him (or rather his morals) during his student days at Cambridge, he sought the kind of friends who were the antithesis of his parents and who encouraged his budding interest in drinking, gambling and fine cigars. During the university vacation in the summer of 1861, while he was attached to a regiment of guards stationed at the Curragh near Dublin, his companions managed to smuggle a pretty actress into his rooms. That night, the delighted prince embarked upon a womanising career that would continue for the rest of his life.
When word of his escapade reached Windsor, the pious Prince Consort was appalled. Although already exhausted and probably suffering from the typhoid• that finally killed him, he set out at once to Cambridge. On a wet November afternoon, father and son walked for hours in the rain, Prince Albert expressing his disappointment and disgust at Bertie’s foolishness and warning him that such scandals could pose a threat to the monarchy. Bertie was duly repentant but by the time his father returned to Windsor, his health was already failing.
The Queen refused to believed that her angelic husband was dying, and when the end came, less than a month after his visit to Cambridge, she was convinced his death was due to the shock of Bertie’s ‘fall.’ For months she could hardly bear to look at her son ‘without a shudder’ and found it virtually impossible to forgive him no matter how hard she tried. Nevertheless, he was ‘My dear Angel’s own child - our Firstborn’ and would one day be king so to deliver him from further temptation, he urgently needed a wife.
Even before Prince Albert’s death, Vicky had been entrusted with the difficult task of finding a suitable bride for her brother. Detailed with the necessary qualities - good health and looks, unsullied background and preferably a German - she had scoured the pages of the Almanac of Gotha, the bible of royal matchmakers, and made lists of all the available young princesses she had met in European courts. The Queen read her detailed reports with interest and, having rejected various others on the grounds of bad teeth, a frail constitution, or adherence to the wrong religion, she noted that one princess stood out above all - Alexandra, the attractive seventeen-year-old daughter of Crown Prince Christian of Denmark.
“She is the sweetest girl who ever lived,” Vicky informed her mother, “and full of life and spirits…She has always been strong and healthy as possible and has never ailed anything in her life except having the measles…I own Princess A. of Holstein is the only one of these princesses for whom I feel portée – it would be dreadful if this pearl went to the horrid Russians.”
Intrigued by Vicky’s effusive descriptions, the Queen decided that the princess was worth ‘looking over’ and arranged a meeting on neutral ground, the Laeken Palace in Brussels. From the first encounter, Queen Victoria was enchanted and wrote enthusiastically to Vicky assuring her that, though Alexandra suffered from a slight deafness, her recommendation was perfect - what a pity she wasn’t German! By the time that Bertie was introduced to her, his mother and sister had effectively decided that Alexandra was to be his bride. The wedding took place in March 1863 - an occasion marred only by the behaviour of four-year-old Willy of Prussia. who squealed throughout the service and bit and kicked his young uncles Arthur and Leopold when they tried to restrain him.
Ten months later, Alexandra did her duty by providing the country with an heir, Prince Albert Victor, (‘Eddy’) - “a perfect bijou,” in the Queen’s opinion, “ –very fairy-like but quite healthy, very wise-looking and good…He is very placid almost melancholy-looking.”
The following year a second son, George, was born but the lure of a beautiful wife and the responsibilities of fatherhood did little to quell Bertie’s love of the high life. Unable to win the Queen’s confidence and consequently denied any serious role in constitutional affairs, he passed his time in an endless round of parties, race going and shooting with the ‘Marlborough House Set’ of fast living, wealthy and fashionable cronies who shared his taste for eating, drinking, gambling and womanising.
Reports of the goings on at Marlborough House irritated and worried the Queen. While she could not deny that the beautiful Alexandra had undoubtedly won the hearts of her people, she had turned out to be a naïve and rather empty-headed young woman whose persistent unpunctuality drove Bertie to such despair that he eventually ordered all the clocks in Sandringham to be set half-an-hour fast.
“I am sorry too for Bertie;” Queen Victoria complained to Vicky, “I don’t think she makes his home comfortable; she is never ready for breakfast - not being out of her room till 11 often, and Bertie breakfasts alone and then she alone.”
Still worse, in her mother-in-law’s opinion, Alexandra shared her husband’s love of entertaining to the extent that the Queen felt obliged to warn her that such frivolous behaviour would not only ruin the reputation of the royal family but the late nights would ruin her health and that of her ‘frail puny’ babies who lacked the robust constitutions of their German cousins.
Bertie and Alexandra paid little heed to the warnings, and in the winter of 1866-7 the Queen’s predictions proved accurate. During the course of her third pregnancy, the princess contracted rheumatic fever and lay for several days in a critical condition. While the country anxiously awaited news, Bertie ignored the telegrams urging him to return to London and remained instead at the Windsor races. Even when he did eventually arrive at Marlborough House and made the token gesture of moving his desk to his wife’s bedside, he continued to entertain his rowdy friends while she lay on her sickbed upstairs.
On 20th February 1867, after a tortuous labour unrelieved by chloroform, Alexandra gave birth to a daughter, Louise (whom the Queen believed should have been named Victoria - ‘but upon those subjects Bertie and Alix do not understand the right thing.’). Three months later the baby was christened by the Archbishop of Canterbury at Marlborough House where her godparents included three of her aunts - Alice, Lenchen and Beatrice.
Though the Princess of Wales gradually regained her strength, the illness had accentuated her deafness and left her with a permanent limp•. Throughout her protracted convalescence, Bertie embarked on numerous affairs so openly that even the Queen was to comment that her daughter-in-law’s lot was not an easy one. As rumours of his neglect became known, his reputation plummeted, reaching its nadir when he was cited in the infamous Mordaunt case. While suffering from post-natal depression Lady Harriet Mordaunt, a close friend of the prince, confessed to her husband that the child’s father could have been one of several highly placed men including the Prince of Wales. Her outraged husband immediately began divorce proceedings and Bertie was called to court. Though he acquitted himself well and Lady Mordaunt was declared insane, his standing in the eyes of the public seemed irreparably damaged. Hissed in the theatre and jeered in the street, he seemed very much in danger of doing precisely what his mother had feared and destroying the image of the monarchy. Yet, neither public outcry nor family criticism could curtail his pleasure seeking.
By a strange freak of fortune it took a near-disaster to restore his tarnished image. In the winter of 1871 he contracted typhoid and for several days his life was despaired of. His sister Alice, who been staying at Balmoral with the Queen, was soon at his bedside playing the same role as she had played during her father’s fatal illness a decade before. On the 14th December - the tenth anniversary of the Prince Consort’s death, it appeared that Bertie was dying when quite unexpectedly in the evening he began to rally. The country rejoiced at his recovery and the Queen forced herself from her seclusion to attend a thanksgiving service at St. Paul’s Cathedral after which she appeared in public on the balcony of Buckingham Palace for the first time since her widowhood. When at last the Queen returned home satisfied that the monarchy was secure and certain that Bertie’s brush with death would lead him to adopt a less frivolous lifestyle. It was a vain hope. With so few responsibilities to occupy him it was not long before he returned to his old routine of gambling, shooting and womanising.
Alexandra endured Bertie’s infidelities with a dignified silence, and bore him two more daughters - Victoria (Toria) on July 6th 1868, and Maud a year later. A third son, Alexander, was born at Sandringham in 1871 but died within hours of his birth.
If her husband failed to give Alexandra the attention she craved she was determined to receive it from her children. Jealously overprotective, she virtually smothered them with affection. No aspect of their lives escaped the notice of ‘Motherdear’ leaving Queen Victoria to complain that she spoiled them terribly. For all her glamorous lifestyle, she was in constant attendance in the nursery, bathing the babies and tucking them into bed each evening before donning her jewels and ball gowns to entrance her guests at dinner.
To the young German princesses, dazzled by the glamour of the Marlborough House Set, it must have come as a surprise to find their Wales cousins so insipid. Of the three girls, only Maud, whose love of the outdoor life and manner of speaking in schoolboy slang earned her the nickname ‘Harry’, showed any of the spirit common to her cousins. The ‘frail puny babies’ grew into frail puny children, constantly prone to colds, toothache, abscesses, sciatica and a myriad of other real or imaginary ailments. So fearful was Louise for her health that she took her physician on holiday with her, while ‘precious’ Toria collapsed at the slightest provocation.
“The children are very dear and pretty,” observed Alice, “but my boy is as tall as little Louise, and of course much bigger.”
Even when they were well, they were hardly the most scintillating companions for their highly-educated cousins. Unlike her sisters-in-law, the Princess of Wales saw little need to tax her daughters with learning and Bertie’s recollection of his own miserable years in the schoolroom made him loath to inflict the same torture on his children. Maud was an able linguist and Louise a talented musician, but their education was so haphazard that Queen Victoria despaired of their ignorance and lack of serious interest in anything.
“Alix and I never will or can be intimate;” she wrote in exasperation, “she shows me no confidence whatsoever especially about the children...”
Occasionally the girls accompanied their mother to hospitals and the homes of their Sandringham tenants but, for the most part, life beyond the narrow confines of their nursery remained a mystery to them. They lived and played in their own sheltered world, innocently delighting in each other’s company to the extent that Queen Victoria complained that Alexandra was ‘unfortunately most unreasonable and injudicious about her children.’ On one point, however, Alexandra satisfied the Queen by insisting on raising her with “…great simplicity and an absence of all pride.”
Unfortunately, the ‘absence of all pride’ was coupled with a complete lack of confidence. With the exception of Maud, who had inherited her mother’s fine features, they were not pretty girls and, overshadowed by their charismatic parents, they found few occasions to shine. Unused to the company of strangers, their diffidence left them tongue-tied in social gatherings and warranted the cruel if apt epithets ‘the whispering Waleses’ and ‘their Royal Shynesses.’
“They always, if I can so express it,” wrote their cousin Marie of Edinburgh, “spoke in a minor key en sourdine. It gave a special quality to all talks with them, and gave me a strange sensation, as though life would have been very wonderful and everything very beautiful, if it had not been so sad.”
Even as they grew into their late teens, Alexandra was determined to keep them as little children, making them emotionally and intellectually far younger than their years. Princess May of Teck, who would eventually marry their brother, George, was astonished to attend a birthday party for nineteen-year-old Louise only to discover that it was to be a children’s tea party. Their ‘sweet and prettily arranged’ rooms, cluttered with ornaments, shells and souvenirs, resembled nurseries and they continued to refer to each other by childish nicknames - Toots, Gawks and Snipey. They found their greatest enjoyment in games and giddy pranks, which doubtless bored the more serious Hessians and were treated with contempt by the proud Hohenzollerns.
Not that the Germans’ opinion was of any consequence to the Danish Princess of Wales. Since Bismarck’s seizure of Schleswig-Holstein from Denmark she made no secret of her hatred of all things German - and more especially Prussian. That in itself was sufficient to alienate her from other members of the family and causing the Queen to moan that ‘her feelings are so anti-German and yet so little really English that she is no real help – good, kind, dear as she is and much as I love her.’
For Vicky, whom she liked, Alexandra made an exception, but her prejudice was never more in evidence than when it came to the wedding of Bertie’s younger sister, Lenchen.
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