Matriarch Page 4

  Prince Eddy stood on the sidelines and watched the dancers whirling about in the gilt and mirrored ballroom. When Princess May, flushed and laughing and looking quite lovely, stepped off the dance floor with Arthur Somerset, he asked her to come with him. He then led her away from the sound of the Viennese waltz music and through the winding upstairs corridors of the large house, coming to a stiff halt at the door of Mme. de Falbe’s boudoir, which he opened and then stepped back for his flustered cousin to enter first. Obviously the moment had been prearranged, for the door was unlocked, the stuffy, over-decorated room deserted, and a fire burned in the grate.

  Prince Eddy closed the door and faced Princess May. For the first time the two of them were alone. He stood staring at her for a long time in the flickering light from the fire, and her shyness returned. Nervously, she began to edge back to the door, but he took her hand and began what sounded like a short, memorised speech. “To my surprise, Eddy proposed to me during the evening in Mme. de Falbe’s boudoir—of course I said yes,” adding to her observations in her diary that she and Prince Eddy “flitted about in suppressed excitement,” and that later, when she told the other young ladies in her party about the engagement, she had picked up her skirts and “waltzed round and round” her bedroom. No comment exists in her diary of any fond feelings for Prince Eddy or mention of her own happiness. Instead, there is a sense of gloating, of a competition won.

  The ten days at Balmoral had reached their final outcome. The Queen had approved the match, Prince Eddy had accepted the Royal dictum and Princess May his proposal. The news of the engagement did not heighten the gaiety of the weekend. Prince Eddy occupied himself with shooting most of the next day. That evening he and Princess May played bezique together, but not alone. The following morning they were photographed standing in the garden at Luton Hoo, a winter sun casting a harsh light that pointed up the reserved expressions on both their faces. Prince Eddy departed for London and Windsor immediately after the picture was taken, to tell his parents of the engagement and to seek the final approval of Queen Victoria, a necessary bit of protocol. The newly engaged couple could hardly have come to know one another well, for they were alone only once.

  By that evening, when the newspapers all carried the engagement picture and were filled with romantic stories about the Royal couple, Lady Geraldine Somerset recorded in her diary: “The newspapers are twaddling and asinine over this desperate love match and the attachment of years triumphing over all obstacles! Columns of rot. How Princess Hélène must laugh in her sleeve as she reads of this long devotion! And P. Alix of Hesse, too!”

  On that same day Princess May returned to London by train and was greeted at Euston Station by a lustily cheering crowd. Radiant, dressed elegantly in a blue velvet suit trimmed in the finest lace,* and accompanied by a protective Prince Dolly, Princess May waved to the public as confidently and exuberantly as her mother had done in the past. The Tecks—mother, father, Princess May and her three brothers—lunched at Marlborough House with the Prince and Princess of Wales and Prince Eddy. Later, the Queen, making one of her infrequent journeys into London, was ushered in to congratulate the affianced couple. As Princess May curtsied and kissed Queen Victoria’s hand, she could easily have had a moment of speculation as to how it might one day feel to receive such obeisance and to wear the Crown.

  Footnotes

  *Duke of Fife (1849–1912). Created Duke of Fife 1889.

  †Robert Arthur Salisbury (1830–1903), 3rd Marquess of, Prime Minister 1885–1886, 1887–1892, and 1895–1902. In each of his three ministries he acted as his own foreign minister.

  *The very elderly Duchess of Cambridge was Princess Mary Adelaide’s mother and Queen Victoria’s aunt. The Queen went to very few other funerals in the years after Prince Albert’s death—her son Leopold’s, and those of Lady Augusta Stanley and one of her maids (who died in the South of France). Later she was to attend Princess Mary Adelaide’s funeral.

  *Several diamond stars were added to the widow’s cap in the dress she adopted for a dinner party or a formal function.

  *Lady Geraldine Somerset (1832–1915). Well known for her Journal. She was closely related to the Sitwell family.

  *Throughout most of her life Queen Mary was to keep a record of the clothes and jewels she wore on special occasions.

  THREE

  The morning following the luncheon at Marlborough House, a silent, brooding Prince Eddy accompanied Princess May and her parents down to Windsor Castle to spend a week as guests of the Queen. The engaged couple sat at the front of Prince Eddy’s private coach with Prince Franz, who kept up a lively conversation with his wife, seated—as was her habit—in the rear. Always the optimist, Princess Mary Adelaide attributed the sulky behaviour of her son-in-law-to-be to his irritation at not being able to be alone with his fiancée. In fact, Prince Eddy had just learned that his former teacher and close friend, James Kenneth Stephen, had been committed to a mental institution and suspected his engagement to Princess May could have been the cause.

  In forty-eight hours Princess May’s life had taken a dramatic and swift change. Though her disposition was inclined to the pragmatic and she had resignedly accepted her future, the now-altered attitudes of her parents and even the servants at White Lodge toward her were difficult for her to assimilate. She was not sure what to expect during her week at Windsor, but she had a suspicion she was to receive a short, intense course in the special requirements of her new status.

  The massive gates of Windsor swung open, and Prince Eddy’s carriage, emblazoned with his royal arms, moved toward the Sovereign’s entrance. Princess May sat stiffly, a fixed smile on her face, and when the door of the carriage was opened and the royal footmen stood on each side to assist her down, she looked every bit a Queen-to-be. Once inside, she was greeted with the special Windsor Castle smell—ancient furniture heavily polished and musk-scented flowers. An aura pervaded Windsor Castle that extended to the dignified pages, the housekeeper in black silk and lace cap, and the elegant equerry-in-waiting. The Queen’s private apartments were rich with gilded woodwork and plaster, elaborate carved doors, and sumptuous crimson and shimmering green silk brocaded walls. The wide, endless corridor, which connected one part of the castle to another, had been built by George IV to accommodate a vast and magnificent collection of paintings. As a child, Princess May had played hide-and-seek with her Wales cousins in this corridor, running in and out among the marble statuary that lined it.

  Windsor Castle held many childhood memories for Princess May. In the vast, dark-panelled library (William IV’s contribution) the visiting children had called to one another with shrieks of joy, up and down the austere Gothic corridors lined with bookshelves. Through the windows to one side were the gently sloping green lawns which spread away to the horizon and to the small hill that led down to Frogmore, the house that the Wales family occupied when at Windsor. Princess May had often had tea with the Wales sisters at Frogmore, while their brothers, Georgie and Eddy, played tag on the lawns. Bucolic as those activities were, Windsor was an ancient construction fraught with inconveniences and health hazards (Prince Albert’s premature death from typhoid could well have been caused by the antiquated drainage system at the castle). Food was impossible to keep hot because of the distance servants had to travel from basement kitchens to upstairs dining rooms. Spillage en route caused them many burns, and poor lighting resulted in frequent nasty falls.

  On this stay, Princess May would not visit the subterranean kitchens of Windsor which had been a wonderland to her when she was a child. The Queen never entered these rooms and, in fact, had no contact with the kitchen staff except for the Royal Chef, M. Menager, a tall, volatile Frenchman with a bushy grey moustache. The kitchens of Windsor were large, high-domed rooms with white-tiled walls reflecting the giant, well-scrubbed, and polished copper pots which, when not in use, hung on hooks in a vast half-circle about each of the two huge black coal stoves that were warm on the coldest days and fragrant wi
th the products of pastry chefs, roast cooks, bakers, confectioners, and sauciers. The kitchens had been a natural lure to the Royal children, who would sneak away from their nannies in small groups and, after a great deal of melodramatic cloak-and-dagger activity, wend their way through the castle’s circuitous corridors to end up giggling in the kitchens, where they would be given fresh sweets and asked to leave in mock reproof by M. Menager.

  The Royal Household for many years had had a permanent staff of three hundred; a kitchen staff of forty-five. In addition, the Queen employed four pages, the Scottish servants who rode on the box of her carriage, and the Indian servants whose sole duty was to prepare the curry that was served each day at luncheon whether the guests partook of it or not. The Indians were greatly resented by M. Menager and his kitchen staff, so that angry flurries of temper below stairs were frequent.

  Whereas the Queen began her day with a Spartan boiled egg, served, however, in a gold egg cup and eaten with a gold spoon and with an Indian servant in full regalia at each Royal elbow in the lavishly decorated private dining room, Princess May, the Tecks, and everyone else, including the staff at Windsor, were served a five-course breakfast. Luncheon never had fewer than ten courses, dinner a minimum of twelve. There were no parties during the Tecks’ stay at Windsor, but the intimate family, the Royal Entourage, and Princess May and her parents put the count at about twenty-four at every meal.

  The engaged couple was never left alone. Repeating the pattern formed at Balmoral, the Queen demanded a good portion of Princess May’s time. If family secrets involving Prince Eddy were discussed, the Princess gave no outward sign that she had been disturbed by them.

  The Queen’s approval of the match was obvious to all. The morning of her departure, Princess May and Prince Eddy accompanied her to the mausoleum, where she asked the posthumous blessing of her “dearly departed husband,” Albert, for the engaged couple. To the Queen, this was as binding a ceremony as the exchange of vows, and henceforth she regarded Princess May as her “Darling Child,” and as “My Granddaughter.”

  A letter bearing the Royal Seal awaited Princess May upon her return to White Lodge later that day (December 13, 1891). The Queen wrote that she rejoiced at Princess May becoming “My Grandchild” and assured her of “how much confidence I have in you to fill worthily the important position to which you are called by your marriage with Eddy.

  “Marriage is the most important step which can be taken & should not be looked upon lightly or as all roses. The trials of life in fact begin with marriage, & no one should forget that it is only by mutually giving to one another, & by mutual respect & confidence as well as love—that true happiness can be obtained. Dear Eddy is a dear, good boy ...”

  Princess May was now getting to know the “dear, good boy” a great deal better, and her enthusiasm and courage began to flag. Her fiancé was slow and dull-witted at times. “Keep Eddy up to the mark,” his father, the Prince of Wales, constantly reminded her. “See that Eddy does this, May,” or “May, please see that Eddy does that.” She soon found that she was answering a good portion of his correspondence and functioning—much as she had once done for her mother—as his private secretary.

  Prince Eddy spent two days at White Lodge as the guest of the Tecks after their return from Windsor, and during that time Princess May cried to her mother: “Do you think I can really take this on, Mama?” Her mother assured her she could, and in no uncertain language that she must.

  “Mary [Princess Mary Adelaide] is indeed a lucky person,” the Empress Frederick wrote her mother, the Queen, “the one wish of her heart has been fulfilled for her child.”

  Princess Mary Adelaide’s sister, the Grand Duchess Augusta of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, an autocratic woman who—though resident in her husband’s country for over thirty years—retained her matriarchal control of the Teck family, corroborates this: “It is an immense position and has ever been your heart’s desire, but it is a serious, great undertaking for poor May,” she wrote the day that Princess May returned from Luton Hoo. Aunt Augusta, who was the Queen’s contemporary, knew very well the limitations of Prince Eddy and had heard most of the rumours of his poor character. Yet, to her, “poor May” had no other recourse but to marry the future heir.

  In the week before Christmas, the young couple drove about London incognito in the Prince of Wales’s hansom, attended performances of Cavalleria Rusticana and the Pantomime Rehearsal, and glided in a gondola down a replica of the Grand Canal at an exhibition of “modern Venice” at Olympia. The Queen had given them rooms at St. James’s Palace (recently occupied by Princess May’s deceased grandmother, the Duchess of Cambridge), and Princess May and Prince Eddy selected new wallpapers. Their wedding day, February 27, was set so that the marriage could take place before Lent, and because, the Queen emphasised, “long engagements were very trying & not very good.” Quite possibly the Queen feared that given more time to think about it, Princess May would change her mind.

  On December 26, she and her betrothed attended a dance given by Prince Eddy’s eldest sister, Princess Louise, who was a childhood friend. The occasion was a happy one for Princess May. “We danced to a most lovely Viennese band which played several things out of the lovely Cavalleria Rusticana,” she wrote to her Aunt Augusta, to whom she had been devoted since childhood. “It was a charming little fete & we all thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.”

  The holidays were the gayest she had ever spent, and her head was filled with plans. They were to marry “at Windsor & afterwards we are to drive thro’ the principal streets of London on our way to St. Pancras to Sandringham for the honeymoon.”

  “Goodbye to 1891, a most eventful year to me,” wrote Princess May on the last day of her 1891 diary.

  Few unpleasantries had marred the excitement of the engagement. However, Prince George, recuperating from a serious case of typhoid (possibly ill-gotten at Windsor, for he had been a recent guest), had not been able to attend the festivities. At the funeral of Queen Victoria’s half-sister’s son (Prince Victor of Hohenlohe-Langenburg),* Prince Eddy had caught a slight cold, and a delicate situation had occurred the day of the Tecks’ luncheon at Marlborough House when Princess Helena, the Prince of Wales’s middle sister, had been “positively rude to Mary [Adelaide] & May ...”

  A family crisis now arose. Princess Helena, with her amber eyes and slim waist, was thought to be the most attractive of the Queen’s daughters. She was also a fine pianist and a talented artist, and was married to Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein. Nonetheless, she had always been jealous of Princess Mary Adelaide’s great public popularity. She also had an unmarried daughter, known to the family as “Tora,” whom she thought should have been selected as Prince Eddy’s fiancée.* Princess Helena obviously chose to disregard the risks her daughter might encounter should she marry her cousin and bear his children, and, even after his engagement to Princess May, she pressed on in anger at her daughter’s rebuff.

  A suspicion arises that the Queen would not have wanted her granddaughter to marry Prince Eddy. Much of his unstable character had come to light since she had approached her other granddaughter, Princess Alix of Hesse, on his behalf. The prospect of Prince Eddy as a future King of England was a bleak one. Intimate members of the Court were aware of his irrational behaviour. Some thought a plan was being hatched that Princess May must be party to—that perhaps Prince Eddy would be “committed” sometime in the future. Princess Helena, nonetheless, thought her daughter should have the dubious honour of becoming fiancée to the second heir. After much heated family correspondence, she withdrew her objections. On December 30, the Queen wrote to Princess Mary Adelaide:

  “I am glad to say H[elena] speaks most affectionately of dear May, & Eddy—& that the little cloud at M[arlborough] House—was a little inexplicable moment d’humeur, who I hope you will quite dismiss from mind & forget.”

  Princess Mary Adelaide did not forget, but the matter paled when an invitation was received to spend ten days with the
Prince and Princess of Wales at Sandringham to celebrate Prince Eddy’s twenty-eighth birthday on January 8. For the first time, Princess May was to be an intimate part of the Wales household, quite different from being a luncheon guest at Marlborough House.

  The Royal Family, including distant relatives, knew all was not well between the Prince and Princess of Wales. In fact, the Prince of Wales’s transgressions were constantly being reported in English and foreign newspapers. While the Prince of Wales —in the long wait for his reign to begin—indulged himself with food, gambling, and beautiful women, Princess Alexandra had been majestically forebearing. The daughter of an impoverished Danish Prince (now Christian IX of Denmark), she had risen from obscurity to marry the Prince of Wales when she was just eighteen. Years of an unhappy marriage in a foreign land, where her lack of education and difficulty with the language and customs had made her feel the outsider, had turned what was originally a natural charm into a defensive façade.

  At forty-seven, Princess Alexandra remained a great beauty. Her colouring was spectacular—deep blue eyes, soft brown hair, and skin that was like fine ivory. The one thing she and the Prince of Wales did share was a love of fashion, and each was an innovator in this sphere. A small scar on her neck caused by a childhood injury had impelled her to design a wide jewelled collar, somewhat like a dog collar, to hide the unsightly mark. These dog collars became the rage, and for over fifty years or more every fashionable woman wore one when in evening dress. She had a slim, exquisite figure, and her clothes were cut to emphasise the narrowness of her waist, a fact that caused women around the world to suffer beneath cruel whalebone stays.