She was the loveliest creature … But I do not think that anyone amongst the people around me in 1900, including those who must have seen her at her most moving, said, ‘A terrible thing happened to that woman. She was raped of her youth.’
Alexandra did not speak of this rape. If she felt marginalized, dispirited and used, she could not say. Her role declined to that of royal dignitary, present at formal functions, excluded from the life her husband lived.
Bertie’s power was hereditary. He was born to be King and to secure the royal succession. He proved his virility, lived in splendour and exacted ceremonial respect. And though his philandering became public knowledge and his rakishness a way of life, trappings were what mattered, not the inner man.
FOUR
The pursuit of sex preoccupied Bertie, whatever his marriage vows. To avoid public scrutiny he called himself Baron Renfrew or the Duke of Lancaster and used public carriages when visiting unkingly parts of town. But before he settled in late middle age for staid infidelity with Mrs Keppel, his and his friends’ behaviour provoked comment in the papers and led to brushes with the law.
Soon after the royal marriage his Oxford friend the Marquis of Hastings eloped with Lady Florence Paget who was engaged to marry Henry Chaplin. Colonel Valentine Baker was sent to prison for a year for assaulting a woman in a railway carriage. ‘If ever you become king’ the Queen told Bertie in 1868, ‘you will find all these friends most inconvenient and you will have to break with them all.’ They were, she said, pleasure-seeking and immoral, the women fast and imprudent. One of his set, Lord Carrington, told her that not only was Bertie leading ‘a very dissolute life, but far from concealing it his wish seems to be to earn himself the reputation of a roué’.
This dissolute life brought scandal and questions about fidelity and what being kingly meant. In February 1869 Harriet Mordaunt, wife of Sir Charles Mordaunt, Conservative MP for Warwickshire, gave birth to a son. The date of conception precluded Sir Charles as the father – he was fishing in Norway at the time. Harriet, aged twenty, eleven years younger than her husband, confessed that she had had sex ‘often and in open day’ with the Prince of Wales and two of his philandering friends, Lord Cole and Sir Frederick Johnstone. Sir Charles broke the lock on his wife’s writing desk, found her diary and incriminating letters and sued for divorce.
The Times published Bertie’s letters to Lady Harriet before the case came to court. The tone and content of these was light:
I am sorry I shall not be able to pay you a visit today, to which I had been looking forward with so much pleasure … but if you are still in town, may I come to see you about five on Sunday afternoon?
The paper thought them uncompromising and ‘not such as to entitle the writer to a place in the next edition of Royal and Noble Authors’. But they were just the sort of letters that decades later, often and in open day, Bertie wrote to Little Mrs George. Five was the hour for his teatime assignations. ‘I am so looking forward to Monday when I shall hope to our next meeting between 5 & 6,’ he wrote to Mrs Keppel from Sandringham. ‘I shall motor over from here.’
Sir Charles’s petition for divorce went before a special jury on 23 February 1870. Bertie was called as a witness. Though not obliged to appear he feared that if he did not ‘the public may suppose that I shrink from answering these imputations which have been cast upon me.’ The Lord Chief Justice, Sir Alexander Cockburn, gave him advice on the wisdom of testifying:
The matter appears to me to depend entirely, first on how far Your Royal Highness can with a clear and safe conscience deny the main fact in issue, so far as you are concerned and, secondly, how far you may be constrained, when pressed, to admit circumstances calculated to detract from the credit which would otherwise be due to your denial … I would not, for the world, that Your Royal Highness should go into the witness box and that your evidence should fail to command the credit and respect which ought to attach to it. I am sure that the country would be more ready to look with indulgence on what might be thought only a youthful transgression, especially with a lady apparently of such fragile virtue, than on a supposed disregard of truth in one who will one day be the fountain of justice and in whose name the law will be administered. It must not be forgotten that a man, no matter what his station, comes forward on such an occasion under very disadvantageous circumstances, arising out of the notion that one to whom a woman has given herself up, is bound, even at the cost of committing perjury, to protect her honour.
Bertie’s circumstances were not entirely disadvantageous. His Private Secretary, William Knollys, recorded that Gladstone, the prime minister, ‘took all the indirect means in his power (and successfully)’ to prevent anything coming out in the course of the trial that might harm Bertie or the Crown. Nor was Harriet Mordaunt’s fragile virtue and honour protected. Her punishment was to be declared insane. She was diagnosed as suffering from ‘puerperal mania’, deemed unfit to plead and put in an asylum. Far from finding her frail and fascinating, it proved expedient to call her mad and bad. The confessions her husband used as evidence were dismissed as insane ramblings. Servants from the Mordaunt household testified to her nervousness and weeping, to how she ‘was hardly better than
