Christopher Hibbert - Edward VII - The Last Victorian King

She was already pregnant again; and, to her great disappointment, had not been able to go to St Petersburg to attend the wedding of her sister Dagmar, who was to marry the Grand Duke Alexander at the Winter Palace on 9 November 1866, the Prince of Wales’s twenty-fifth birthday. The Prince had gone without her, ‘only too happy to be the means in any way of promoting the Entente Cordiale between Russia and our own country,’ as he assured the Prime Minister, Lord Derby; and, as he afterwards told his mother, who had thought it sufficient for him to be represented ‘by one of his gentlemen’, not only wanting to be present personally at his sister-in-law’s wedding but also in the expectation that ‘it would interest [him] beyond anything to see Russia’. He was not disappointed. Indeed, he enjoyed himself enormously, being splendidly entertained in Moscow as well as St Petersburg, where he was provided with apartments in the Hermitage. He attended banquets, fêtes and military parades, going on a wolf hunt at Gatchina and to a ball at the British Embassy where the Imperial family watched him dancing in his Highland dress.

The British government had feared that he would give the Tsar a wrong impression of the British attitude to Turkey by voicing those ‘strong anti-Turkish opinions’ which he had openly entertained ever since his brother-in-law, the King of Greece, had discovered what a tiresome neighbour the Sultan could be. And, gratified that he had not, the government granted £1,000 towards his expenses, though it had to be admitted that, while he may well have carried home with him ‘the goodwill and affection of every one with whom he had been thrown in contact’ — as his equerry, Major Teesdale, assured the Queen — the visit had not really done much to ensure that the improved relations between Russia and England would be permanent.

On his return home, the Prince found that his wife was not at all well. She had a slight fever and was suffering from pains in her limbs. He did not take her complaints too seriously, however, and he left her at Marlborough House to go to a steeplechase and a dinner at Windsor. The Princess grew worse, and a telegram was dispatched to the Prince to call him home. He did not return. Two further telegrams were dispatched, but it was not until noon the next day that he arrived back in London. By then it was clear that the Princess was seriously ill with rheumatic fever. She had dreadful pains in her leg and hip which, on 20 February, were greatly aggravated by the pangs she suffered in giving birth to her third child, a daughter, without the anodyne of chloroform, her doctors believing that in her already weak condition it would be dangerous to administer it.

For days she lingered ‘in a most pitiable state’, according to the Queen, who often came up from Windsor to see her, while the doctors’ bulletins continued — in the usual manner of such announcements — to be blandly reassuring. The Prince of Wales appeared to share the doctors’ unconcern. His wife could not eat because her mouth was so painfully inflamed, she could not sleep without heavy doses of drugs, and she turned almost pleadingly for comfort to Lady Macclesfield, ‘dearest old Mac’, who wept herself to hear her crying so piteously from the dreadful pain in her knee. Yet the Prince, ‘childish as ever’, did not seem to ‘see anything serious about it’. Most nights he went out as though his wife’s complaint were nothing more serious than a slight chill. He had his desk brought into her room so that he could be with her while he wrote his letters, but he would soon grow bored and restless and, evidently irritated by the fussing anxiety of Lady Macclesfield and the mournful face of Sir William Knollys, he would march out of the house to a club or a more congenial sitting-room. Even when he told his wife he would be back at a certain time, it was frequently much later. ‘The Princess had another bad night,’ Lady Macclesfield reported one day, ‘chiefly owing to the Prince promising to come in at 1 a.m. and keeping her in a perpetual fret, refusing to take her opiate for fear she should be asleep when he came! And he never came till 3 a.m.! The Duke of Cambridge is quite furious at his indifference to her and his devotion to his own amusements.’ Lady Macclesfield was equally furious when the Prince, who had been warned to break the news of his wife’s grandmother’s death very gently to her, chose to do so one evening after the Princess had had an exceptionally trying and painful day. Hearing the Princess sobbing helplessly, Lady Macclesfield sharply observed, ‘He really is a child about such things and will not listen to advice.’

When the Princess slowly began to improve in the late spring, her husband’s neglect became even more insensitive and obvious. Already there had been rumours that the Prince had been unduly attentive to various pretty young Russian women in St Petersburg and Moscow. Now, after a visit paid by the Prince to France, where he had attended the opening of the Paris Exhibition, Sir William Knollys received ‘very unsatisfactory’ accounts of his conduct, his going to ‘supper after opera with some of the female Paris notorieties, etc. etc.’ The next month at Ascot — where he received ‘a very flat reception as the Princess was not there but suffering at home’ — he invited to luncheon various other ‘fashionable female celebrities’. There were reports, too, that he had been seen ‘spooning with Lady Filmer’, and riding about in a public cab on his way to supper with young actresses. And one day in August Sir William Knollys was ‘greatly concerned’ by a conversation with one of Princess Alexandra’s doctors who ‘spoke out very forcibly’ and, Knollys feared, ‘truly, on the tone people in his own class of society now used with respect to the Prince, and on his neglect of the Princess, and how one exaggeration led to another’.

Although the Princess always preferred to ignore what accounts she ever heard of her husband’s peccadilloes, it was much more difficult to overlook his thoughtless neglect of her when she had been so ill. It was all very well for Lady Macclesfield to lament his immaturity — he certainly was immature — but his inconsiderate disregard of her need for his comfort and sympathy had been publicly flaunted and that was a wound that she could not find it easy to forget.

On the day of her marriage she had gaily remarked to the Crown Princess of Prussia, ‘You may think that I like marrying Bertie for his position; but if he were a cowboy I would love him just the same and would marry no one else.’ More recently she had confessed to her other, favourite sister-in-law, the eighteen-year-old Princess Louise, that the six weeks her ‘beloved one’ had spent in Russia the year before had seemed to her an endless time. But there were, in the immediate future, to be few other such remarks as these.

On 2 July the Queen called at Marlborough House and found the Princess sitting in a wheel chair. She described her as ‘looking very lovely’ but ‘altered’. As well as being changed in character, she was also permanently impaired physically. Her leg was so stiff that she ever afterwards walked with a limp — the ‘Alexandra limp’ which some ladies thought so fetching that they adopted it themselves. She was also much more deaf, the otosclerosis which she had inherited from her mother being liable to be accentuated by both serious illness and by pregnancy. For the moment the Princess’s deafness was not a serious liability; but, as the years went by, it grew increasingly worse until her whole social life was moulded by it.

By the middle of August, however, the Princess was sufficiently recovered to leave England to undergo a cure in the baths at Wiesbaden. Her two little boys went with her; so did the new baby, Princess Louise; so did her husband, two doctors, and a household including twenty-five servants. The trip was not a success. On the way the Princess horrified Sir William Knollys by insisting on listening to the songs the sailors sang aboard the royal yacht, Osborne, of which one in particular was ‘a very objectionable one to be sung before modest women’. Knollys tried to stop the sailors singing. It was a Sunday, he protested, and the singing would ‘scandalise Protestant Dordrecht’ where the yacht was anchored.