Behind the Palace Doors (36 page)

“Even as a child I was struck by the ugliness of the house, which has been described as ‘a family necropolis,’ ” wrote Victoria’s great-grandson King Edward VIII. “The floors of the corridors and passages were inlaid with mosaic; set into the walls were numerous alcoves each displaying in life size a white marble statue of a dead or living member of ‘Gangan’s’ large family.”

Victoria spent her last Christmas at Osborne in 1900. It was not a joyous occasion for the queen, now eighty-one and in failing health. Looking up at the family Christmas tree (a holiday adornment Prince Albert had popularized in Britain), she could barely see the candles lighting it. “I feel so melancholy,” she wrote, “as I see so very badly.” Adding to her distress on Christmas Day was the news that her dear friend Lady Churchill had died the night before. “The loss to me is not to be told,” she lamented, “and that it should happen here is too sad.”

On January 22, 1901, at half past six in the evening, the long reign of Queen Victoria came to a close when she breathed her last in her bedroom at Osborne. Her coffin, stuffed by her order with mementos of Albert—including his dressing gown and a plaster cast of his hand—was taken down to the dining room. There the queen rested for a week before leaving the Isle of Wight for the last time.

House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor

EDWARD VII

(
reigned 1901–1910
)

GEORGE V

(
r. 1910–1936
)

EDWARD VIII

(
r. 1936
)

GEORGE VI

(
r. 1936–1952
)

ELIZABETH II

(
r. 1952–present
)

Upon the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, her eldest son succeeded her as Edward VII. He was fifty-nine. The name Saxe-Coburg-Gotha had come to the royal family in 1840, when Victoria married Prince Albert, and was thus adopted by the new king upon his accession. Although Edward’s reign was relatively short, only nine years, he did lend his name to that era of aristocratic splendor that preceded the horrors of World War I
.

They called him Edward the Peacemaker for his valiant attempts to keep Europe out of war at the dawn of the twentieth century. But when it came to the ladies, Edward the Maker might have been a more fitting sobriquet. A seemingly endless succession of mistresses—from actresses to aristocrats—shared the royal bed. “He was stimulated by their company,” wrote Margot Asquith, “intrigued by their entanglements, flattered by their confidence, and valued their counsel.”

Yet given the trauma surrounding his first encounter with the opposite sex, it’s a wonder Edward VII wasn’t celibate. Scarring doesn’t begin to describe the experience.

From earliest childhood poor Edward
^*
received very little
approbation from his parents, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. The boy’s very appearance made his mother shudder. “Handsome I cannot think him,” the queen sniffed, “with that painfully small and narrow head, those immense features and total want of a chin.” But it was the prince’s natural gregariousness that repelled his parents most.

Both Victoria and Albert were terrified of the genetic specter of her wicked Hanoverian uncles like George IV and Ernest, Duke of Cumberland (see previous chapters), and they were determined that the future king would be raised as a model of probity. What resulted was a rigidly proscribed education and deportment program that kept the boy in a cocoon, utterly deprived of joy or youthful companionship. The stringent rules and regulations that governed every aspect of the prince’s life, Lord Redesdale wryly noted, might have been composed “for the use and guidance of a seminary for young ladies.”

Queen Victoria essentially wanted her heir to be a clone of her beloved husband. “You will understand
how
fervent my prayers and I am sure everybody’s must be, to see him resemble his angelic dearest Father in
every, every
respect, both in body and mind,” she wrote to her uncle King Leopold I of Belgium.

Alas, the prince was nothing like his rigid and repressed father—a defect that irked his parents no end. He “takes no interest in anything but clothes and again clothes,” Prince Albert wrote despairingly of his son. “Even when out shooting he is more occupied with his trousers than with the game!” Soon enough, the young man’s sartorial interests would be the least of his father’s worries.

Although Victoria and Albert were adamant that their son be isolated from the pernicious influences of his contemporaries, they did allow him a ten-week stint training with a battalion of the Grenadier Guards in Ireland. The prince received quite an education there, courtesy of an actress named Nellie Clifden.

Prince Albert was horrified when he heard about the affair. Ever the prude, he could not have reacted more vehemently had his son “butchered his brothers and sisters and scattered their remains in the lake at Buckingham Palace,” wrote historian Giles St. Aubyn.

In a frenzied letter Albert informed his son that the affair had caused him “the greatest pain I have yet felt in this life,” and warned him of the potentially devastating consequences. Nellie was already being called “the Princess of Wales,” Albert wrote, and, if she became pregnant, she would claim the child was the prince’s. “If you were to try to deny it, she can drag you into a Court of Law to force you to own it & 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, and any day to realize! and to break your poor parents’ hearts.”

Two months after composing this agonized screed, Prince Albert was dead. Queen Victoria blamed her son, refusing to acknowledge that typhoid had carried her adored husband away. The affair, she wrote to her daughter Vicky, was what made “beloved Papa so ill—for there must be no illusion about that—it was so; he was struck down—and I never can see [the prince]—without a shudder! Oh! that bitterness—oh! that cross!”

For the next forty years, until her own death in 1901, Victoria exacted her revenge. She was singularly determined to control every aspect of her heir’s life, while at the same time depriving him of any real responsibility or training for his future role. Sir Lionel Cust, a servant of Edward’s after he became king, wrote that “the great misfortune” of his life “was that his mother had lived too long … for the welfare of her son and successor.”

The years immediately following Prince Albert’s death were the worst. The very presence of the Prince of Wales seemed to
revolt his mother, even as he tried to be solicitous toward her feelings. King Leopold of Belgium, Victoria’s uncle and confidant, told the Earl of Clarendon “that the relations between the Queen and the Prince of Wales are as bad as ever, if not worse, and that his efforts to improve them had been fruitless—it seems to be an antipathy that is incurable but quite unjustifiable—it is entirely her fault as the poor boy asks nothing better than to devote himself to comforting his Mother and with that object would be delighted to give up his foreign expedition [planned before Prince Albert’s death] but she would not hear of it and seems only to wish to get rid of him.”

Despite the fact that his presence greatly disturbed her, the queen was nevertheless keen to interfere with his life—even after his marriage to Alexandra of Denmark in 1863, when the prince was twenty-one. Lord Stanley noted that year how all London was gossiping about the “extraordinary way” in which the queen insisted on directing “the Prince and Princess of Wales in every detail of their lives. They may not dine out, except with previous approval.… In addition, a daily and minute report of what passes at Marlborough House [their London residence] has to be sent to Windsor.”

Victoria seemed convinced that her son was unworthy to succeed her. “What would happen if I were to die next winter!” she wrote to her daughter. “One shudders to think of it: it is too awful a contemplation.… The greatest improvement I fear will never make him fit for his position.” On another occasion she declared, “I often pray he will never survive me, for I know not what would happen.”

Even as she withdrew from many of her public duties as sovereign after Albert’s death, the perpetually black-clad queen refused Edward the opportunity to fill the void she left. He was kept completely idle, which led Victoria to sharply criticize his lifestyle and, in a cruel twist, convinced her that he was too irresponsible to ably serve her.

“I am not of the slightest use to the Queen,” the prince lamented. “Everything I say or suggest is pooh-poohed and my brothers and sisters are more listened to than I am.”

Indeed, the queen put infinitely more faith in her son Leopold, twelve years the future king’s junior. On one occasion Prince Leopold pulled a key from his pocket and told his companion: “It is the Queen’s Cabinet key, which opens all the secret dispatch boxes. Dizzy [Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli] gave it to me, but my brother the Prince of Wales is not allowed to have one.”