The Prince’s personal report was as flat and unrevealing as his parents had come to expect:
We met Prince and Princess Christian, and the young lady of whom I had heard so much; and I can now candidly say that I thought her charming and very pretty. I must ask you to wait till I see you, and then I will give you my impressions about her. Princess Christian seems a very nice person, but is, unfortunately, very deaf. The Prince is a most gentlemanlike agreeable person. After having thoroughly seen over the cathedral we lunched at the hotel and then proceeded here [Heidelberg] … The Prince and Princess accompanied us and are living at the same hotel.
The Prince of Wales was little more forthcoming when he arrived home and reported in person to his parents at Balmoral. The Queen gathered that he was ‘decidedly pleased with Pcss. Alix’ and thought her face and figure pretty. But he ‘seemed nervous about deciding anything yet’. ‘A sudden fear of marriage, and, above all, of having children which for so young a man [was] so strange a fear [seemed] to have got hold of him.’ And ‘as for being in love,’ she added in a letter to her daughter, ‘I don’t think he can be, or that he is capable of enthusiasm about anything in the world … Poor boy — he does mean well — but he is so different to darling Affie!’ The Crown Princess had rallied to the Prince of Wales’s defence when their mother had been particularly critical of him before the meeting with Princess Alexandra. She had been brave enough to write then:
Only one thing pains me, and that is the relation between you and Bertie! … His heart is very capable of affection, of warmth of feeling and I am sure that it will come out with time and by degrees. He loves his home and feels happy there and those feelings must be nurtured … I admire dear Papa’s patience and kindness and gentleness to him so much that I can only hope and pray that there may never be an estrangement between him and you.
But now she felt compelled to agree with what her mother had said about his being incapable of true affection:
What you say about Bertie is true … His head will not allow of feelings so warm and deep, or of an imagination which would kindle these feelings which would last for a long time! I own it gives me a feeling of great sadness when I think of that sweet lovely flower [Princess Alexandra] — young and beautiful — that even makes my heart beat when I look at her — which would make most men fire and flames — not even producing an impression enough to last from Baden to England … Bertie may look far before he finds another like her. If she fails to kindle a flame — none will ever succeed in doing so. Still there is this to be said for him — he is young [for] his age … I love him with all my heart and soul but I do not envy his future wife.
The Prince Consort considered the whole situation thoroughly unsatisfactory; and, as was his habit on such occasions, he decided to put the whole problem down on paper in an effort to bring some clarity into his son’s mind which, at the moment, appeared to be ‘a little confused’. He reminded his son of the trouble and inconvenience his family had been put to on his behalf, of the great difficulty there had been in procuring an interview with Princess Alexandra ‘without causing political alarm in Germany and more or less compromising the parties concerned’. He thought it ‘quite reasonable and proper’ that, although he had given a most favourable report of his feelings towards the Princess, the Prince still refused to commit himself or go further in the matter without due reflection. Indeed, it would have been imprudent of him to have done so unless he had actually fallen in love, ‘which, after this apparent hesitation, [could] hardly be supposed to be the case’. But the Prince must clearly understand that if the Princess and her parents were to be invited to England before he made up his mind, he must ‘thoroughly understand’ that this would be in order that he might propose to the young lady if she pleased him on further acquaintance as much as she did at first; and if she did not please him he must say at once that the matter was at an end so as to avert further mischief, though a great deal of mischief had been done already. Any delay would be ‘most ungentlemanlike and insulting to the lady and her parents and would bring public disgrace’ upon both the Prince and his parents.
The Prince assured his father that he understood the position perfectly well, and agreed to do as he suggested. But he remained as unenthusiastic as ever; and the Prince Consort was quite baffled by the ‘unsolved riddle’ of his son’s reluctance to marry since his time on the Curragh, having earlier expressed a ‘desire to contract an early marriage’ as soon as he was of age. The next month, however, the Prince Consort did solve the riddle at last; and he sat down to write to his son ‘with a heavy heart upon a subject which [had] caused him the greatest pain’ he had ever felt in his life.
The Prince Consort was already ill when he wrote the letter. Suffering from neuralgia and toothache, insomnia and fits of shivering, he had been brought to a pitiable state by overwork and worry. It was not only that he was concerned about the Prince’s strange reluctance to marry; he was concerned, too, about the Queen, who had abandoned herself to grief upon her mother’s recent death with an alarming intensity, bewailing the ‘dreadful, dreadful … terrible calamity’, giving away to ‘fearful and unbearable … outbursts of grief’, eating her meals alone, sitting by herself in her mother’s ‘dear room’ at Frogmore, accusing the Prince of Wales of being heartless and selfish for not fully sympathizing with her sorrow and for writing to her on paper with insufficiently thick black borders. The Duchess of Kent’s death had been followed by that of the Prince Consort’s cousin, the young King Pedro V, a victim of a typhoid epidemic in Portugal. The Prince Consort had been extremely fond of this young man whom he had ‘loved like a son’; and, ‘shocked and startled’ by his death, he had felt overwhelmed by a growing lassitude and sense of desolation. Then came the blow which, so the Queen afterwards decided, proved too much to bear — the story of the Prince of Wales’s seduction by Nellie Clifden.
The Prince’s liaison with this young woman — long discussed in London where Nellie was known as ‘the Princess of Wales’ — first reached Windsor in a letter from Baron Stockmar, who wondered if the rumours circulating on the Continent would endanger the Prince’s marriage to Princess Alexandra. These rumours were elaborated by that ‘arch gossip of all gossips’, Lord Torrington, who had recently come into waiting. Although Torrington’s stories were notoriously unreliable, ‘a searching enquiry’ had revealed the truth of this one. The Prince Consort was forced to recognize that there could be no doubt of the appalling fact that the Prince of Wales had had sexual experience with a woman who was a known habituée of the most vulgar dance halls in London. Sparing her the ‘disgusting details’, the Prince Consort broke the news to the Queen, then wrote an enormously long and anguished letter to his son in which he elaborated the likely consequences of his terrible sin, the possibility that the woman might have a child by him or get hold of a child and pretend that it was his.
If you were to try and deny it, she can drag you into a Court of Law to force you to own it and there with you (the Prince of Wales) in the witness box, she will be able to give before a greedy Multitude disgusting details of your profligacy for the sake of convincing the Jury; yourself cross-examined by a railing indecent attorney and hooted and yelled at by a Lawless Mob!! Oh, horrible prospect, which this person has in her power, any day to realize! and to break your poor parents’ hearts!
He was too heartbroken to see his son at present, he went on; but he assured him that he would do his best to protect him from the full consequences of his ‘evil deed’. The Prince must, therefore, confess everything, ‘even the most trifling circumstance’, to General Bruce, who would act as the channel of further communication between them.