Neither marriage nor children nor royal decorum could divert the future King from pursuing his favorite pastime at the Paris brothel of Le Chabanais. There did come a point when the aging Prince's ever-expanding girth threatened to put an end to such pursuits, but as necessity is the mother of invention, an ingenious French furniture designer came up with the inspired siege d'amour , or "love-chair." Resembling something out of a medieval torture chamber, the contraption allowed the corpulent Prince to indulge in his fantasy of having sex with two ladies while protecting them from being crushed by his weight. We may forgive the petite mademoiselles of Le Chabanais for possibly having concerns about the sturdiness of the device while the Prince was in the throes of royal passion.
The precise function of the "chair" remains a matter of conjecture but any mental imagery of the rotund Prince/King in action on his love-chair may not be for the faint of heart. History in any case records no untoward incidents and the chair itself, n ow owned by the Soubrier furniture-making family who originally custom-built the chair for Bertie, has never been on public display.
Queen Victoria blamed her eldest son (wrongly) for the premature death of her beloved Albert, the Prince Consort, and complained bitterly to family relations about the Prince's pleasure forays in London and Paris, sexual and otherwise, and grew increasingly disillusioned. The Prince's philandering and his fixation on trivial pursuits such as horse-racing and baccarat confirmed the image of an irresponsible playboy in his mother's eyes. Of course, it was not uncommon for crowned heads to have doubts and fears about the ability of their offspring to carry out their weighty responsibilities, but a decadent lifestyle alone does not explain the extreme strictures imposed on the Prince by his mother and we must look elsewhere for an explanation.
The deep political divide between mother and son was first revealed in January of 1864 when Prussian and Austrian armies invaded Denmark. Aside from the relative merits of the opposing sides, the Prince joined his Danish wife in passionate condemnation of Prussia while Queen Victoria was just as adamant in support. The Prince, increasingly frustrated by his mother's steadfast refusal to allow his participation in the affairs of State, now demanded that he be accorded access to Foreign Office despatches. The Queen refused citing his lack of discretion. When informed of the refusal, the Prince wrote a letter of protest to which the Queen replied that " you could not well have a Government key which only Ministers, and those immediately connected with them, or with me, have." [4] While the Prussian-Danish war was causing his wife sleepless nights, the Prince again defied his mother's explicit wishes and triggered another exchange of letters when he met (on April 22, 1864) with the Italian revolutionary leader, Giuseppe Garibaldi.
In June of 1866, when a dispute about the status of Holstein led to war between Prussia and Austria, anti-Prussian sentiment of the Prince and Princess of Wales rose to a fever-pitch. In fact, "the Prince of Wales 's abuse of Prussia was robust and indiscreet, while the hatred for everything Prussian felt thereafter by the Princess of Wales became personal and, for that reason, embarrassing." [5] Already on 6 June, ten days before the war had broken out, Bertie told the French Ambassador in London, Prince de la Tour d'Auvergne, that he was praying for an Austrian victory and that the best way to contain Prussian militarism was for France and England to join hands in an alliance. A seven week campaign resulted in the annexation of Schleswig-Holstein by Prussia to the undisguised consternation of the Prince and Princess, but much worse was to come. On July 19, 1870, the French Emperor, Napoleon III, declared war on Prussia. The much-disputed cause was accurately summarized by the Oxford historian, Michael Howard:
"There can be no doubt that France was the immediate aggressor, and none that the immediate provocation to her aggression was contrived by Bismarck ; but the explanation that the conflict was planned by Bismarck as the necessary climax to a long-matured scheme for the unification of Germany - an explanation to which Bismarck's own boasting in old age was to give wide currency - is one which does not today command general assent. The truth is more complex. War between France and Prussia was widely foreseen when, after Austria 's defeat in 1866, the North German Federation was formed. The resulting change in the European balance of power could be made acceptable to France only if her own position was guaranteed by those compensations on the left bank of the Rhine and in Belgium which Napoleon instantly demanded and which Bismarck point-blank refused. After 1866 the French were in that most dangerous of all moods; that of a great power which sees itself declining to the second rank. In all ranks of French society war with Prussia was considered inevitable." [6]
World sympathy was almost unanimous in favor of Prussia, Queen Victoria wrote "We must be neutral as long as we can, but no one here conceals their opinion as to the extreme iniquity of the war and the unjustifiable conduct of the French!" [7] Poincare, Clemenceau, and even Napoleon III himself admitted culpability, but Princess Alexandra had a different opinion. She hoped from the bottom of her heart that Prussia would be annihilated and the Prince of Wales shared that opinion. Having expressed to the Austrian Ambassador, Count Apponyi, his fervent hope that Prussia would be taught a lesson at last, the Prince was vexed and dismayed to learn of the calamitous French defeat at Sedan on 2 September and the astonishing surrender of the French Emperor and the proclamation of a Republic in Paris. This bad news was crowned by the official proclamation of the 2nd German Reich on 18 December at France's venerable Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. To reassure his mother, the Prince was obliged to concede that "Of course I consider the French quite in the wrong, and, as all our relations are in Germany , it is not likely that I should go against them . . . I am afraid that Alix's feelings are strongly against Prussia. They have always been so since that unfortunate Danish war." [8]
In 1894, France broke out of the diplomatic ring which had been constructed by Bismarck with the purpose of isolating a resolutely hostile France when Russia, after four years of intensive negotiations, agreed to affix the royal Russian signature to the Franco-Russian Alliance. On that momentous occasion, the following conversation took place between Czar Alexander III and his Foreign Minister, N. K. Giers, which revealed the purpose of the new alliance:
"We really do have to come to an agreement with the French," he said. "We must be prepared to attack the Germans at once, in order not to give them time to defeat France first and then to turn upon us . . . We must correct the mistakes of the past and destroy Germany at the first possible moment."
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