Eddy was spared, too, the roles of marriage and kingship and the nation was spared a perhaps homosexual king. He died of pneumonia in January 1892 when he was twenty-eight, a month before his marriage to Princess Mary of Teck. Two years later she married his brother George and they became Queen and King after Bertie’s death.
Harold Nicolson writing to Vita Sackville-West on 17 February 1949 recounted a conversation over dinner with Lord Goddard, Lord Chief Justice from 1946–58. According to Goddard, a solicitor committed perjury to clear Prince Albert Victor, was then struck off the rolls, and later reinstated. ‘It is one of God’s mercies to us that that horrible young man died,’ Goddard said.
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Eddy’s father was unswervingly heterosexual. In 1891 Daisy Countess of Warwick replaced the Jersey Lily as his official mistress. Twenty years younger than he, good-looking, feisty, rich, she lived in Carlton Gardens, London and Easton Lodge, Essex. She indulged in the usual social round of balls, hunting, house parties, adultery. She had married Lord Brooke ten years previously in Westminster Abbey. Bertie and Alexandra were at her wedding.
One of her lovers, Lord Charles Beresford, had accompanied Bertie on his Indian trip in 1878. In 1891 he had sex with his wife who became pregnant. Daisy’s revisionist ideas on fidelity were confounded. She wrote him a letter saying he had no right to behave in such a way, he must live with her, Daisy, on the Riviera, one of her children was his and ‘more to that effect’. Lady Beresford opened the letter and took it to a solicitor. Daisy turned to Bertie for help. He invited her to Marlborough House. ‘He was more than kind and suddenly I saw him looking at me in a way all women understand. I knew I had won so I asked him to tea.’
He called her ‘my own darling Daisy wife’, gave her the gold ring inscribed ‘V & A’ that his parents had given him at his confirmation, and swept her into his life. All of which meant social death for Lady Beresford whose husband penned a letter – which he did not send – to Bertie:
you have systematically ranged yourself on the side of the other person against my wife … I consider that from the beginning by your unasked interference and subsequent action you have deliberately used your high position to insult a humbler by doing all you can to elevate the person with whom she had a quarrel …
The days of duelling are past but there is a more just way of getting right done and that is publicity. The first opportunity that occurs to me I shall give my opinion publicly of YRH and state that you have behaved like a blackguard and a coward, and that I am prepared to prove my words.
YRH had reason to avoid such publicity. That year he was again in court giving evidence in what became known as The Baccarat Scandal. At a house called Tranby Croft in Yorkshire in September 1890 he and eight others played baccarat for high stakes. Sir William Gordon Cumming, ship-owner, lieutenant-colonel with the Scots Guards and worth £80,000 a year, was thought to cheat. In exchange for ‘preserving silence’, his accusers requested him to sign a document agreeing never to play cards again. All involved signed it including Bertie.
The story reached the papers. Daisy was thought to be the mole. Sir William brought action against his accusers. In court his counsel said it was anyway against regulations for Bertie, a Field Marshal in the army, to have signed the paper because all cases of alleged dishonourable conduct had to be put to the accused’s superior officer.
The verdict went against Sir William but Bertie was hissed from the spectators’ gallery and neither the Queen nor his nephew the Kaiser, nor The Times were amused. ‘His signing the paper was wrong (and turns out to have been contrary to military regulations),’ Victoria wrote to Vicky. More than that she deplored
the light which has been thrown on his habits … alarms and shocks people so much, for the example is so bad … The monarchy almost is in danger if he is lowered and despised.
The Kaiser wrote to her protesting at ‘a Colonel of the Prussian Hussars embroiling himself in a gambling squabble’. The New York Times mooted that royalty had become an uneconomic proposition for the British taxpayer and The Times wrote:
We profoundly regret that the Prince should have been in any way mixed up, not only in the case, but in the social circumstances which prepared the way for it. We make no comment upon his conduct toward Sir William Gordon Cumming. He believed Sir William had cheated; he wished to save him; he wished to avoid scandal; and he asked him to sign the paper. This may have been, and probably was, a breach of military rule; but with that the public at large does not concern itself. What does concern and indeed distress the public is the discovery that the Prince should have been at the baccarat table; that the game was apparently played to please him; that it was played with his counters specially taken down for the purpose; that his ‘set’ are a gambling, a baccarat-playing set … Sir William Gordon Cumming was made to sign a declaration that ‘he would never touch a card again’. We almost wish, for the sake of English society in general, that we could learn that the result of this most unhappy case had been that the Prince of Wales had signed a similar declaration.
Bertie took lessons in virtue from no one. He did, though, part from Daisy in 1898 when she espoused socialism. She took to talking and writing about nationalization as a solution to ‘the great land problem’, said
