The Three Emperors Page 6
In fact, Bertie was by no means stupid. Nor was he only frivolous—though his mother conspired to make him so by refusing him any serious occupation. He was an odd combination: he could be impressively far-seeing, then absurdly trivial-minded. He was selfish, he was generous; he had such a fear of boredom he couldn’t bear to be alone or unoccupied for a minute; he was affectionate, courteous and tactful, and despite his mother’s endless criticism, extremely patient and polite to her. He was also prone to sudden terrifying rages prompted by the most banal things—a spot of food on his shirt, a child’s fidget. These were manifestations of long-suppressed frustrations. He was quick to learn, when he could be bothered, and had an excellent memory. By the time he was six, he could speak three languages. But his misery in his father’s classroom had turned him off books, education and culture; he felt he didn’t need them. Despite his rather unappealing, popping, pale Hanoverian eyes, he had12 real, bona fide charm. “He had a capacity for enjoying life, which is always attractive,” one British aristocrat observed, “but which is specially so when it is combined with a positive and strong desire that everyone else should enjoy life too.” The combination of his crushing childhood and the early realization that charm could be powerful had produced a very unroyal desire to please and make people like him—qualities his parents, famous for their own charmlessness, saw little use for. Royalty should be sufficient unto itself, Queen Victoria believed, and she told her children they should never be seen laughing in public.
Bertie and Alexandra’s first child and the heir, Albert Victor, was born in 1864. George—inevitably Georgie, European royalty seemed obsessed with diminutives—arrived eighteen months later, on 3 June 1865 at 1:30 in the morning, a couple of hours after Alexandra had held a dinner party. “Very small13 and not very pretty,” was Queen Victoria’s comment. She had got over her initial excitement at grandchildren, and now found them “dismayingly numerous.” Her main preoccupation was ensuring that all her male grandchildren were called Albert. Bertie and Alexandra had developed strategies for obliquely heading off his mother’s interference. Albert Victor was known by everyone as “Eddy.” Bertie insisted on “George Frederick” for his second son. “I cannot admire14 the names you propose,” the queen answered. “… Of course you will add Albert at the end.” Four more siblings followed over the next six years: three daughters—Louise, Victoria and Maud—and a son, who died shortly after birth in 1871. Having children inevitably slowed Alexandra down, while Bertie’s appetites remained undiminished. Within a year of Georgie’s birth there were rumours that he was seeing an actress called Hortense Schneider, and that on a trip to St. Petersburg he had “admired” various women. Then in 1867, in the course of giving birth to her first daughter, Alexandra came down with rheumatic fever. For several hours she was thought to be near death. Bertie, out late at the Windsor races, had to be summoned three times before he finally came to her sickbed. In fear or boredom, he found it hard to stay. Alexandra took months to recover, and one of the after-effects was the onset of deafness that made it difficult for her to function in large groups—or to keep up with Bertie. Elegantly and discreetly she retired into her family. Her dignified silence made it far easier for society to accept Bertie’s string of more or less public liaisons; her life as a quiet-living, rural matriarch provided an impeccably respectable counterpoint to his involvement in a series of public scandals. An unspoken dynamic evolved: she punished him in small ways—by always being blithely and chaotically late for everything, while he was obsessively punctual (as his son would later be). He in turn was both gallant and neglectful, never losing his temper with her, loyal except where women or sex was concerned.
This was especially apparent over foreign loyalties—sometimes to dramatically divisive effect. In 1864, barely a year into their marriage, Prussia bullied Denmark into handing over the duchy of Schleswig-Holstein by massing its army on the Danish border. The liberal British press demanded naval intervention on plucky little Denmark’s side. Victoria and Vicky’s allegiances were with Prussia. Bertie, who found Alexandra weeping each night over her country’s humiliation, came out publicly for Denmark. He offered to liaise between his Danish father-in-law and England, and even ill-advisedly contacted the Liberal opposition to show his support, an act that so enraged his mother, who was exercising every ounce of her influence to prevent Britain from intervening, that she used it as an excuse to deprive him of any political experience or influence for the next twenty years. “Oh! if Bertie’s15 wife was only a good German and not a Dane! … It is terrible to have the poor boy on the wrong side,” she wrote to Vicky. Schleswig-Holstein left Alexandra with a lasting animus against Prussia. “How I hate16 the hated Germans and most of all the Prussians, who are the most unreliable, false and disgusting people who exist,” she wrote to her sister Dagmar in 1864. She took every opportunity to make her resentment clear: cutting the Prussian ambassador and refusing to speak to her sister-in-law Helena’s new German husband in 1865;* refusing to leave her compartment when the Queen of Prussia arrived to meet her train on a stop at Koblenz in 1866; insulting the Prussian king in 1867 when he offered to visit the couple at Wiesbaden. The queen was furious and issued a reprimand. Thereafter Alexandra was more circumspect about expressing her dislike.
Despite his deep fondness for Vicky, Bertie’s sympathy for Bismarck’s Prussia was increasingly tested. He wanted to support his wife, and the Prussian press regularly criticized him. It was a useful way for Bismarck to smear Vicky and the German liberals who took their inspiration from British democracy, as dangerous and potentially treasonous. The prince was impressively cool about his treatment in public; he recognized that Germany was a traditional ally, and even cultivated Bismarck’s ambitious son Herbert. But underneath he smarted, and sometimes he invited criticism During the Franco-Prussian War, with Alexandra willing the French to win, Bertie unwisely told the Prussian ambassador that he hoped Prussia would be taught a lesson; the ambassador made a formal complaint and Bertie was forced, humiliatingly, to write to the British prime minister, Gladstone, explaining himself.
As a consequence of Alexandra’s abiding resentment of Prussia—and the fact that Queen Victoria avoided having more than one set of grandchildren staying at any one time—George and his siblings did not get to know their older Prussian cousins, particularly Willy, as well as they might. By the time Vicky was visiting regularly with her younger children, Willy was off at school and, one suspects, felt himself a little too important for his younger cousins. Marie of Romania, a first cousin to both George and Wilhelm, wrote irritatedly of “the rough, off-hand17 manner with which [Wilhelm] liked to treat us, as though we were not really worthy of his attention.”
By contrast, Alexandra vigorously encouraged friendship between her children and their Russian cousins—the children of her sister Dagmar, now renamed Marie, but called Minny in the family, and the heir to the Russian throne, Tsarevitch Alexander—even though England and Russia were arch-rivals and absolutely hated each other. Alexandra and Minny remained very close, kept up a regular and intense correspondence, and were determined to bring their families closer together. Both women trod a fine line between being familial and political. Both presented themselves as domestic and uninterested in politics. But in 1873, when Minny, the tsarevitch and their five-year-old son, Nicholas, came to London, the sisters made intricate arrangements to wear identical outfits all the way through the visit, a startling image that made front pages everywhere. In 1874 they encouraged and brought about the unlikely marriage between the tsar’s only daughter, Grand Duchess Marie, reputed to be the richest woman in the world, and Bertie’s boorish younger brother Alfred (known, naturally, as Affie), in the hope that it might improve relations between Britain and Russia. It didn’t. They also took every opportunity to meet on visits to the Danish king and queen—known to all their grandchildren as “Apapa” and “Amama”—on their estates at Fredensborg and Bernstorff in Denmark. Bertie, who found his Danish in-laws unbearab
ly dull, tried not to look bored. (The English entourage, taking their cue from him, sniggeringly referred to Alexandra’s mother as “droning Louise”—dronning is Danish for queen.) He also went out of his way to be accommodating to his Russian brother-in-law, despite the two countries’ mutual antipathy and the fact that he had almost nothing in common with the wilfully taciturn and rough-round-the-edges Alexander. He even wrote regular18—if rather banally domestic—letters to his sister-in-law Minny. George, meanwhile, became special friends with his eldest cousin, Nicholas, who was three years younger than he.
Despite the huge span of their grandmother’s interests and their father’s international social life, the childhood of George and his siblings—unlike that of their cousin Wilhelm—was quiet, isolated and unworldly. They were raised on the remote 7,000-acre north Norfolk estate of Sandringham, which Bertie had bought in 1862 and modernized at enormous cost. Sandringham was the height of modern British aristocratic comfort and everything was new: the furniture, the pictures, the books (which, according to his private secretary, were mostly “trash”19) and the thirty flushing lavatories ordered from Thomas Crapper and Co. It was there that Alexandra established herself, punctuating her time with long trips with the children to her parents’ house parties in Denmark, while Bertie was in Paris or London. The children grew up simply and relatively informally—as Alexandra had herself—under big East Anglian skies, surrounded by nature, lots of servants and a menagerie of dogs, monkeys, parrots, horses, cattle and sheep, but far away from other children, their father’s social set and national events. They were unaware of how their grandmother’s reclusiveness and their father’s rackety lifestyle and large debts had combined to make the monarchy unpopular, sparking a brief flurry of republicanism in the late 1860s and early 1870s (which, however, was largely stilled by Bertie’s dramatic bout of near-fatal typhoid in 1871).
The queen, who liked to repeat that her grandchildren should not grow up arrogant or grand—traits she did not check in herself—approved. “They are dear20 intelligent and most thoroughly unpretending children, who are never allowed to be ‘great Princes’ than which there is no greater mistake,” she wrote to Vicky. Alexandra was an enthusiastic mother, who unlike most aristocratic parents enjoyed playing boisterously with her children, and like plenty of royals encouraged interminable practical jokes. Practical jokes were a pan-European royal habit, perhaps a consequence of not being allowed to laugh in public, and predicated on the usually unconscious acknowledgement that those below them in rank couldn’t complain. There were apple-pie beds and soda-siphon squirting; Alexandra would even allow them on occasion to disappear under the lunch table to pinch the legs of unsuspecting guests—Benjamin Disraeli was one victim. Later, when the children’s education began, their parents were only too keen to disrupt lessons with impromptu breakouts from the schoolroom. The result was that as young children the Waleses were known for being rather over-boisterous. Constance de Rothschild, cousin of Bertie’s friend Nathan de Rothschild, meeting them at Sandringham one Christmas, recalled their appetite for “romping” and blind man’s buff. “The Princess said to me: ‘They are dreadfully wild. But I was just as bad.’” In 1872, when George was seven, the queen observed, “They are such ill-bred, ill-trained children, I can’t fancy them at all.”21 George was by common consent the most physically robust and jolly of the Wales children when they were little: the queen noted when he was three that Bertie’s children looked “most wretched22—excepting Georgie who is always merry and rosy.” There was a story that as a small boy,23 after being reprimanded by the queen for some small piece of naughtiness at lunch and having been sent to sit under the table in punishment, George emerged at her summons, entirely naked. Constance de Rothschild reported that he had “a jolly little face” and “looked the cleverest.”24 By comparison, Eddy, the heir, was fragile: when he was a baby, the queen had described him as “fairy-like,25 placid and melancholy.” More worryingly, by the age of six he was generally regarded as languid and listless.
It wasn’t all a country idyll. “The house of26 Hanover,” a courtier who knew George very well told his biographer Harold Nicolson, “like ducks, produce bad parents. They trample on their young.” (That remark did not make it into the biography.) Alexandra was a very intense and loving parent but also an erratic and selfish one. For all her graceful acceptance of her husband’s systematic unfaithfulness, Bertie’s behaviour had actually been a horrible shock. (Years later she admitted to Margot Asquith how totally surprised she had been to be supplanted. “But I thought27 I was so-o-o beautiful,” she sighed.) Whether or not she loved Bertie, she was deprived of the exciting life she had enjoyed so much and of Bertie’s attention; and her increasing deafness made all social interaction much harder.* In textbook style, she turned to her children for compensation. Deafness and her retirement into the family seemed to halt her maturity—fixing her for ever at twenty-two, with an ever-youthful face to match. She was a charming, kind, not especially self-aware, slightly superficial girl who never really grew up—another way in which she and Bertie, who slowly did achieve a measure of maturity, grew apart. She and the children became a tight-knit group, a mutual admiration society, resistant to outsiders, the children intensely dependent upon her. Even George’s irreproachably correct first biographer concluded that the intensity of Alexandra’s demands retarded her boys’ development “to maturity and29 self confidence.” “I shall always find my little Georgie quite the same and unchanged in every respect,” she insisted when he was nineteen, and sent him “a great big kiss for your lovely little face”30 when he was twenty-five.
George adored her. His letters to her were by far the most expressive and open he ever wrote—not least perhaps because she couldn’t hear his words. But Alexandra also conjured anxiety. Passionate avowals of love alternated with periods of neglect, which did little for George’s confidence. By the habits of the time and the milieu, her absences—to Egypt when George was three, for example—weren’t perhaps that remarkable. But this contrasted with her insistence that her children provide her with love and attention. When George was ten, in 1875, she took her daughters to Denmark for three months, while Bertie went on a six-month trip to India. She failed to write to Eddy and Georgie once, and on the night of her return wrote them a self-serving letter:
My own Darling31 little Georgie,
Mother-dear was so delighted to get so many nice dear little letters from her little boys, and I should certainly have answered these long ago but you told me not to do so if I could not find the time—which really was the case; and I was much touched by my little Georgie remembering how busy his Mother-dear very often is … I have just received your dear last letter and I too nearly cried that I should not see my darling boys tonight to give them a kiss each before going to bed.
A member of the royal household told George’s biographer that Alexandra had “bullied the whole32 family.” She certainly ensured that George’s sister Toria never married, and became, as her friend and Russian cousin Olga (sister of the future Nicholas II) observed, “just a glorified33 maid” to her mother. “Mama,”34 George told his wife years later, “as I have always said, is one of the most selfish people I know.”
As for Bertie, he loved his sons (though he neglected his rather plain daughters), but he was frequently absent, and when he was present, his personality threatened to swamp theirs. George behaved with almost slavish devotion to his father—it was often noted how “constantly he35 subordinated not only his inclinations but his whole nature to his father’s”—seeking his judgement and opinion on the smallest things. They never argued. George held a special place in his father’s affections. Bertie’s friend Lord Esher noted how when he spoke of George it was “with a softening36 of the voice and a look—half smile and half pathos, which he reserved for those he loved”—though one nephew claimed that his affection derived from George’s willingness to “be his slave.”37
George’s feelings about his father wer
e not straightforward, though, however much he wanted them to be. His letters to Bertie were the diametric opposite of those to his mother—stiff, correct and unrevealing; even his biographer described them as “stilted and38 colourless.” As an adult he freely admitted that he had been frightened of his father, adding approvingly that his own sons ought to be scared of him—and they were. According to the Prince of Wales’s wry and perceptive private secretary, Frederick Ponsonby, who liked his master—he described him as “lovable,39 wayward and human”—everyone was scared of Bertie, except his mother and his wife. George’s sister Louise once fainted on the way to Buckingham Palace to see him. Eddy told a friend at university that he was “rather afraid of40 his father, and aware that he was not quite up to what his father expected of him.” Bertie didn’t see himself as a scary father—he recalled his own miserable childhood and wrote: “if children41 are too strictly or perhaps, too severely treated, they get shy and only fear those whom they ought to love.” But he could be insensitive. He would “chaff”—tease—a little too hard, and then a bit harder still, and his victims felt unable to answer back. His unhappy childhood had left him with a tendency for sudden, unpredictable rages, as well as periods of profound depression and moments of brusqueness, when an almost panicky fear of boredom suddenly surfaced. Overshadowing the relationship between father and son was Bertie’s public and constant betrayal of George’s adored mother—a subject that could never be discussed. Bertie would even write to George about his women—a letter from42 1881 shows him telling his teenage son about his mistress Lillie Langtry’s projected stage debut. His involvement in various public scandals—usually about women or gambling—was everything George’s moral education condemned.