Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter, Diana Souhami [the ebook reader TXT] 📗

If you were to try to deny it she can drag you into a Court of Law to force you to own it and there, with you in the witness box, she will be able to give before a greedy multitude disgusting details of your profligacy … Oh horrible prospect, which this person has in her power any day to realize! and to break your poor parents’ hearts.

A week later, on 22 November, Albert got soaked to the skin inspecting new buildings at Sandhurst. He wrote in his diary of feeling ‘thoroughly unwell and full of rheumatic pains’. None the less three days later he went to Cambridge to confront his profligate son. Bertie apologized for all the grief he had caused and told him he had ‘yielded to temptation’ with Nellie. Albert said he forgave him but that God would not.

On 7 December Albert came out in a rash which his doctor, Sir James Clark, thought was typhoid. William Jenner, Professor of Clinical Medicine at University College, London, who was called in to confirm the diagnosis and to treat him, blamed the drains at Windsor. Victoria blamed Bertie.

On 13 December Bertie, struggling with examinations at Cambridge, received a telegram summoning him to Windsor. His father, aged forty-two, died the next day. Victoria, unhinged with grief, confirmed to her daughter Vicky that the Curragh affair had killed her Angel,

for there must be no illusion about that – it was so; he was struck down – and I can never see B. – without a shudder! Oh! that bitterness – oh! that cross!

Albert, she said, had tried to protect her from ‘the disgusting details’ but she knew all. She referred to Bertie’s ‘fall’ and ‘all Papa foresaw’ in terms of consequences for the country and world of a debauched heir to the throne.

She was too distraught to go to the funeral. Bertie, representing her, wept with his face in his hands.

Victoria thereafter looked forward to nothing but ‘future reunion with Him [Albert]’. ‘To work for Him, to honour His memory more and more, to have memorials raised in His name – here is my consolation.’

She could not set eyes on her murderous, chinless son. He was to tour Egypt and Palestine to spare her ‘a constant contact which is more than ever unbearable to me’. He was told to travel incognito, avoid all society except royalty and people of superior character, listen to a sermon every Sunday, visit ancient monuments, read serious books.

Away five months, he grew a beard to hide his want of chin, enjoyed shooting crocodiles, quails and vultures and resisted pressure to visit the ruins at Thebes. ‘Why,’ he asked his equerry, ‘should we go and see the tumbledown old Temple? There will be nothing to see when we get there.’

Back home, his sister set about finding him a wife. As he was ‘too weak to keep from sin for virtue’s sake’, there had to be some practical prompt ‘and surely a wife will be the strongest’. The Queen wanted someone young, pretty, quiet, clever, sensible and of good education, character, intellect and disposition:

I feel it is the sacred duty he, our darling angel, left us to perform … If Bertie turns obstinate I will withdraw myself altogether and wash my hands of him.

Princess Alexandra, daughter of Prince Christian Schleswig-Holstein, heir to the Danish throne, was found. A share of intrigue and impecunity was accorded to the Danish royal dynasty but Alexandra herself was beyond stain. Vicky judged her diffident, humble, shy, placatory, tactful, well-educated, not very clever. She was fluent in English and German, pretty and young, ‘her walk, manner and carriage are perfect, she has a lovely figure but very thin, a complexion as beautiful as possible’.

The Queen gave her the highest accolade: Albert would have approved. Bertie, polite about the prospect of marrying her, vacillated between acceptance and panic. He thought her nose too long, her forehead too low. His mother lamented to Vicky that he was probably not in love: ‘I don’t think he can be or that he is capable of enthusiasm about anything in the world.’ Vicky wrote, ‘If she fails to kindle a flame no one will ever succeed in doing so … I do not envy his future wife.’ The Queen agreed: ‘What you say about Bertie and that lovely princess is so true – so sad, and the prospect a melancholy one.’ But plenty of women were to succeed in kindling Bertie’s flame – prostitutes in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, actresses, society beauties, dancers wearing two oyster shells and a five-franc piece, other men’s wives.

On 8 September 1862 Bertie sought permission from her father Prince Christian to marry Alexandra. The next day he proposed. In all he had seen her for a few hours. ‘I still feel as if I was in a dream,’ he wrote to his mother:

I frankly avow to you that I did not think it possible to love a person as I do her … If only I can prove to dear Alix that I am not unworthy of her love and make her future a happy one, I think I shall have every reason to be content.

The marriage took place on 10 March 1863 at St George’s Chapel, Windsor. Alexandra was eighteen, Bertie twenty-two. The nation celebrated with banners, bunting, fireworks. This was the marriage of the heir to the throne, the prospective head of state, church and the royal family. Marriage was the constitutional basis for the monarchy, the context for procreation and the family. No other sexual relationship could be ordained, authenticated or admitted, as the daughter of Bertie’s most favoured mistress would, decades later, find out.

The Archbishop of Canterbury conducted the service assisted by four bishops and the Dean of Windsor. Bertie wore a general’s uniform and Garter robes: symbols of rank, power and glory. He vowed to God that he would love, comfort, honour and keep her, in sickness and health,