She found it all ‘far worse than a funeral to witness’ and chastised her daughter for enjoying herself:
I wonder even how you can rejoice so much at witnessing what must I should think be to you, who loved Papa so dearly, so terribly sad a wedding!… Will you be able to rejoice when at every step you will miss that blessed guardian angel, that one calm great being that led all.
She avoided all celebrations, the cheering crowds, plumed horses, gilded carriages and choirs singing the Hallelujah Chorus. She took meals alone and commanded no ‘noise and joyousness’ in her presence. Three days before the wedding she took Bertie and Alexandra to what was left of Albert in the mausoleum at Frogmore: ‘I opened the shrine and took them in … I said “He gives you his blessing!”’ She then joined their hands.
* * *
Married, Bertie’s life changed. Freed from his mother’s oppressive scrutiny, he indulged in regal style. He had £600,000 capital and an annual income of £50,000 from rents in the Duchy of Cornwall. He spent all this and more. By 1874 he was £600,000 in debt. From the start his spending exceeded his income by over £40,000 a year. £100,000 went on furniture, carriages and jewellery. He bought Sandringham and its 7000 acres for £220,000 then rebuilt it with a billiard room, a bowling alley, a smoking room modelled on one he had seen in Turkey, gunroom, vast gamesroom, wine cellars, kennels, stables. Parliament voted him an additional £40,000 a year with £10,000 a year ‘pin money’ for Alexandra and £60,000 to refurbish Marlborough House in Pall Mall as his London home.
There were festivities every day for his first London season: fêtes, receptions, processions, balls, parties. Marlborough House, designed by Wren in 1710, became the lavish showpiece for ‘the Prince of Wales’s set’. Eighty-five servants worked there – uniformed and powdered footmen, pages, porters. The reception rooms were large enough to entertain the whole of smart London society at a single ball. Dapper and jaunty, Bertie constantly bought new clothes. Two valets and a brusher cared for them. He innovated side-creases in trousers because mother had criticized his bandy legs.
Tireless for fun he played bowls, billiards, baccarat, indulged practical jokes of the forbidden sort – like putting a dead seagull in the bed of a drunk friend, went to Evans’s Music Hall in Covent Garden, on trips to Paris, horse-racing at Epsom, Doncaster, Ascot, Newmarket and Goodwood, yachting at Cowes, grouse-shooting and deerstalking in Scotland.
At Sandringham his shooting parties were elaborate affairs of pomp and pageant. His game larder was said to be the biggest in the world. Three thousand birds were shot in a single day. Parades of gamekeepers and beaters wore velveteen suits and satin smocks. Bertie held elaborate picnics in the shooting fields. Animals introduced to the area for the doubtful privilege of his shoot caused great damage to crops. Mrs Louise Cresswell left her 900-acre farm after the Prince arrived because, she wrote in The Lady Farmer: Eighteen Years on the Sandringham Estate:
I could not remain unless I killed down the Prince’s game from Monday morning till Saturday night and reserved Sunday for lecturing the agent.
At first, to the Queen’s disdain, Alexandra partnered her husband in the social whirl. ‘She never reads and I fear Bertie and she will soon be nothing but two puppets running about for show all day and night.’ The Princess was not on show for long. Ten months after her marriage her first child was born, two months prematurely. The Queen chose the name – Albert Victor – without consulting Bertie or Alexandra. She felt ‘thoroughly shaken’ at the christening. ‘Alix looked very ill,’ she wrote to Vicky on 12 March 1864, ‘thin and unhappy. She is sadly gone off; the fraicheur is gone.’
Within three years the Princess had two more children which made her fraicheur go off even more. Pregnant with the third, Louise, in February 1867, she had rheumatic fever, was ill for months and racked with pain. Bertie found fraicheur elsewhere and seldom returned before the small hours. ‘The princess had another bad night,’ her lady-in-waiting wrote,
chiefly owing to the Prince promising to come in at 1 a.m.… 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.
In August one of Alexandra’s doctors spoke out ‘very forcibly’ to Sir William Knollys, Bertie’s Private Secretary, ‘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.’
Bertie was seen ‘spooning with Lady Filmer’ to whom he sent, via her husband, lots of photographs of himself, ‘she will be quite bored possessing so many of me – but the waste paper basket is always useful … I hope she won’t forget to send me one in her riding habit – as she promised.’ At Ascot he lunched with ‘fashionable female celebrities’. At night he met up with actresses. In Paris he kept a private suite at the Hotel Bristol. Knollys heard ‘very unsatisfactory’ accounts of ‘supper after opera with some of the female Paris notorieties etc., etc.’
On 2 July 1867 the Queen visited Princess Alexandra at Marlborough House. She found her ‘very lovely but altered.’ Alexandra was in a wheelchair. Thereafter she walked with a limp. She had also partially lost her hearing. Photographs of her and Bertie show him bulging in his clothes and her like a wraith. None
