Assassination: The Royal Family's 1000-Year Curse (53 page)

There were problems with the first child, Albert Victor, who was the heir to the throne after his father. He seemed to have a weak mind, his lifestyle became dissolute and he was heavily linked with the Cleveland Street homosexual brothel scandal. Finding a wife for him would not be easy. He rejected Princess Margaret of Germany, and was himself rejected by his cousin Princess Alix of Hesse – a mistake for her, as she later married her second cousin the son of the Tsar, and Alix (by then called Alexandra) was murdered with her husband Tsar Nicholas II and their children in the Bolshevik Revolution. It was an escape for Britain, as she was a carrier of haemophilia (which she gave to her son and probably to some of her daughters as carriers), and she would have reintroduced the disease to the British Royal Family had she married Albert Victor. Later, Albert Victor fell in love with Princess Hélène d’Orléans (daughter of the Pretender to the French throne), and the marriage was agreed. She undertook to become a Protestant, but her father and the Pope objected, so the wedding was called off.

Finally, it was arranged for Albert Victor to marry his second cousin once removed, Princess Mary of Teck. Six weeks later, Albert Victor died of pneumonia in an influenza pandemic. The following year, Edward’s second son, George, married his late brother’s former fiancée. Strangely, the same thing had happened to Queen Alexandra’s sister, Dagmar. She was betrothed to the oldest son of Tsar Alexander II; after her fiancé died of meningitis, Dagmar instead married his brother, the future Tsar Alexander III (it was their son, Nicholas, who later married Alix of Hesse).

By 1900, Britain’s reputation in the world was at its lowest level in centuries, hardly a friend in Europe. The problem was the Second Boer War. It was not just that it was the war of a major power against a weaker opponent, there was another issue. Britain adopted a scorched earth policy, burning Boer homes. To house the refugees, a series of camps was established. Under General Kitchener, a new method of denying the Boer fighters food and assistance was adopted; Boer women and children were seized and put in the camps. They were called concentration camps, earlier introduced by the Spanish in Cuba and the Americans in the Philipines to imprison families of enemy soldiers and their supporters. These were not the camps of sadism and mass murder later to be established by the Germans. However, conditions quickly deteriorated.Thetreatmentoftheprisonerswashorrific.They were given little food (women and children whose husbands or fathers were still fighting got even less as punishment) and there was virtually no hygiene or medical assistance. The prisoners were left to rot. As a result of typhoid, dysentery and starvation, over 28,000 prisoners died. Camps for natives, who did not even support the Boers, saw 14,000 deaths.

Despite the anti-British sentiment, Edward and his wife decided to pay a visit to Denmark to attend the 82nd birthday celebrations of Alexandra’s father, King Christian IX. The route was via Belgium, and Edward was to change trains in Brussels at the Gare du Nord on 4th April 1900. A young Belgian boy, named Jean-Baptiste Sipido, was one of many enraged at reports of British atrocities in the Second Boer War.

Sipido was a tinsmith’s apprentice, and was described as a socialist and an anarchist. He made his way to the station and walked on to the platform where Edward’s train was waiting. Sipido watched Edward board the train. Edward sat down in the compartment with Alexandra and one male attendant.

At 5.35pm, with flag waved and whistle blown, the train moved off. Sipido drew a revolver, ran forward, jumped on to the footboard of the carriage and fired twice at Edward through the window. Both shots missed. Sipido pulled the trigger twice more, but the cartridges misfired. As he was about to shoot again, a law student, Louis van Mol, rushed forward and snatched the revolver from Sipido’s grasp. The stationmaster then knocked Sipido down from the footboard, and two railway employees wrestled him to the ground.

Hearing the shots, the engineer applied the brakes and brought the train to a halt. When Edward was found to be unhurt, the waiting crowd cheered him loudly. Edward asked if the assassin had been arrested. When this was confirmed, Edward decided to continue with his journey.

The only person to be hurt was the blameless law student Louis van Mol. Seeing him holding the revolver, some of the crowd thought that he was the assassin. He was grabbed and heavily beaten.

On being questioned, Sipido said, “When I learned from the papers that the Prince was going to pass through Brussels I immediately resolved to become the avenger of humanity and to kill this assassin… I regret that I have not accomplished it as I desired.”

The facts that Sipido’s pockets were stuffed with anarchist literature and that he had given what sounded like a strange speech for a poorly educated 15-year-old suggested that he had learned the words and had been put up to it by others.

Following Sipido’s interrogation, the authorities arrested three men from the extreme wing of the Socialist Party: Peuchot, Meire and Meert. In court, sympathy was with Sipido and his colleagues. Sipido said that the assassination attempt was not his idea; he had been encouraged by another person. It was widely assumed that this person was Meert. Then Sipido told his story. He had gone to the Old Market on Sunday and had bought a second-hand revolver and cartridges for three francs. On the Tuesday, Sipido had put on his best clothes and borrowed some money from his father, saying that he was going out to look for a job. Instead, he went to meet the unnamed person at the Maison du Peuple (the socialist meeting-house), where they had drinks. Then they moved on to a wine shop to drink some more.

The two of them later made their way to the Gare du Nord. They went to a café in the station, and Sipido had gone to the toilet where he loaded his revolver. He then bought a platform ticket, and walked on to the platform where the Prince of Wales’ train was waiting.

Evidence of the many witnesses at the station described exactly what had happened once Sipido was on the platform. Then Meert gave evidence that Sipido was the one who had said that someone should kill the Prince of Wales because he was responsible for the Transvaal War, Meert adding that he and his colleagues had thought it was a joke. Other witnesses who had been at the Maison du Peuple testified that Sipido had announced that if Edward came to Brussels, he ought to have a bullet in his head, and that he had offered to bet anyone five francs that he would do it.

The jury retired to consider the verdicts. After one and a half hours of deliberation, they returned and announced that they found Peuchot, Meire and Meert not guilty because they had thought it was a joke. They found that Sipido had shot at the Prince of Wales, but that by reason of his age he could not be considered
doli capaux
– that is, legally responsible for a crime. He was therefore not guilty. Sipido was released to the cheers of the crowd.

But Sipido had been mistakenly released, because the Court had not yet handed down the written order. The Court later reconvened and ordered that Sipido should be confined in a reformatory until he was twenty-one. However, Sipido had three days in which to appeal the decision and according to the Belgian Government he could not be arrested during that three-day period. He immediately ran off to France.

The Belgian authorities did little or nothing to obtain Sipido’s return, causing considerable anger in Britain. In the end, the Belgians reluctantly had Sipido extradited.

On his release from reformatory in December 1905, Sipido enrolled in the army ambulance corps. He later became technical and commercial director of the General Society of Belgian Socialist Cooperatives, eventually retiring to Cagnes in southern France where he died in 1959.

Finally, after waiting over half a century, Edward succeeded to the throne. He announced that the name Albert (his first name) should forever be reserved for his father, and declared that he would reign under his second name, Edward, even though he had always been called ‘Bertie’ by his family.

Peace came to South Africa when the Boers surrendered in May 1902, so ending the Second Boer War. Transvaal and Orange Free State were incorporated within the Empire into what later became the Union of South Africa.

Back in England there was a problem for the new king because he was an autocrat at heart. Edward struggled to adapt, and his conversion to the role of constitutional monarch was made more difficult when Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, with whom Edward had a good relationship, was succeeded by his nephew, Arthur Balfour.

On the other hand, in foreign matters Edward was useful to the Government as he had instant access to most heads of state. At some stage, his nephews included the Kaiser, the Tsar, the Grand Duke of Hesse, the Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha and the Prince of Brunswick-Luneburg; his nieces included the Queen of Spain, the Crown Princesses of Sweden, Romania and Greece and the Tsarina; the King of Norway was his wife’s nephew and Edward’s son-in-law; the Kings of Greece and Denmark were his brothers-in-law; and second cousins included the Kings of the Belgians, Portugal and Romania.

Europe was now divided into four: first, the Dual Alliance of France and Russia; second, the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria and Italy; third, Britain; and fourth, everyone else. For a time, Britain revelled in its ‘splendid isolation’, but it was soon time to find allies. The first choice was Germany. Edward went there twice and met with the Kaiser, but he just complained endlessly about Britain’s dishonesty and Edward’s ignorance. So Edward gave up.

Maud Gonne was born near Farnham in southern England, her father being an officer in the 17th Lancers. Maud fell in love with married French right-wing politician Lucien Millevoye, and they dedicated themselves to fighting for the recovery of Alsace-Lorraine by France and independence for Ireland (Maud had been partly brought up in Ireland when her father was stationed there). She then fell in love with the poet William Butler Yeats, but before long she returned to Millevoye, and had two children with him. Their son died after a year; their daughter was conceived in the son’s mausoleum in the hope of reincarnating his spirit.

Leaving Millevoye, Maud went to Ireland where she discovered that the Irish nationalists did not welcome women members, so she founded ‘The Daughters of Ireland’. Next, she converted to Catholicism. She rejected Yeats’s proposal of marriage, as he refused to convert (Yeats later proposed to Maud’s daughter, but was rejected again). Maud then took up with Major John MacBride, an Irishman who had fought with the Boers against the British.

They decided to assassinate Edward. The problem was that they did not dare go to England, fearing that MacBride would be arrested as a traitor. Then, in early 1903, they learned that Edward was planning a visit to Gibraltar. Maud married MacBride; she later said that it was so that they could travel to Gibraltar using their honeymoon as cover. The two of them made their way south through France and Spain. Their plan was that once they were in Gibraltar, Maud would act as a decoy while MacBride met up with his co-conspirators, who would assist him in killing Edward.

Having taken lodgings in Gibraltar, MacBride went off as Maud waited patiently in their rooms. Hour after hour passed, until finally late at night there was a knocking on the door. Maud opened the door, only to watch as MacBride staggered into the room totally drunk. Nothing had been done. It was the opposite of Sipido: criminal intent without action rather than action without criminal intent.

Maud and MacBride returned to France the next day. In time they separated, Maud having accused MacBride of molesting her daughter. He was executed by a British firing squad in 1916 after taking part in the Easter Rising. Maud lived in Ireland until she died in 1953, her son with MacBride becoming Chief of Staff of the IRA, Irish foreign minister and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for his campaigns against other peoples and countries who had used military force.