by Theo Aronson
The two young men had met before. Alfred Fripp was related to, and a godson of, Prince Eddy’s old tutor, Canon Dalton. While Dalton had been at Cambridge with the Prince, the tutor had twice been visited by his godson, then nineteen years of age and about to enter medical school. Fripp, like Prince Eddy’s Cambridge mentor, Jim Stephen, was one of those notable Victorian scholar-sportsmen. Described as a ‘broad-shouldered young giant’, he had captained the Cricket XI at Merchant Taylors’ School and was to captain the Rugby XV at Guy’s Hospital. He was also a powerful swimmer and oarsman. To his sporting and scholastic achievements, young Fripp brought an open and affable manner: ‘his cheerfulness’, wrote one companion, ‘was ever a most marked characteristic.’ That Prince Eddy, in his gauche Cambridge period, should be attracted to this charming young giant was only to be expected. ‘Dined and spent the evening in HRH’s room – tête-à-tête for two hours with him,’ noted Fripp in his diary during his second visit to Cambridge.25
Now, six years later, the two young men were again thrown together. If anything, the passing years had improved Alfred Fripp’s looks and personality. The recently qualified doctor was, says one observer, ‘tall, robust, tanned, with an infectious smile, a ready laugh, and a great fund of common sense. His whole manner suggested confidence, his voice and smile brought hope …’26 Understandably, Prince Eddy professed himself to be ‘delighted to be in his hands’.27
The delight was mutual. It was not every day that a young locum, accustomed to slaving in the out-patients department of a crowded London hospital, found himself in sole charge of the Heir Presumptive to the throne. Fripp’s letters home reflect his barely concealed satisfaction. ‘HRH seems to take kindly to me,’ he wrote. ‘We get on very well together, but my ingenuity is sorely taxed to exhibit the right mixture of firmness and politeness. You would be amused to see Colonel This and the Hon. That dancing around and asking me the most minute directions – what time is he to take his meals; then the menu for each meal is submitted for me. I have to have long talks with each, and then again with HRH who pours out all his little woes and always makes me smoke in his room. He smokes himself until he is stupid. I have knocked him down to three cigarettes and one cigar a day …
‘Don’t mention HRH’s illness outside our house as the Prince of Wales particularly wants it not to get into the papers. He is afraid the public will get the impression that his son is a chronic invalid.’28
By the second week of August 1890, Prince Eddy had recovered and was able to set off, as arranged, for Scotland where he was to spend the autumn, first with his sister, the Duchess of Fife, at Mar Lodge; and then with the Prince and Princess of Wales, at Abergeldie, near Balmoral. He was seen off at the station by Alfred Fripp. This by no means, however, meant the end of their association, for so taken with Fripp was Prince Eddy that he had invited him to Scotland. Just as soon as Dr Jallard returned from leave, three days later, Fripp travelled north to spend what he afterwards described as ‘those wonderful weeks’.29 The friendship, as Fripp’s biographer puts it, ‘had begun in earnest’.30
Because Alfred Fripp’s visit coincided with that of the Comte and Comtesse de Paris and their daughter to Mar Lodge that August, he was accommodated at the Fife Arms Hotel until they left. But once the French royal family had gone, Fripp moved into Mar Lodge. Here the two friends spent most of the time in each other’s company: going for long walks over the heathery hillsides, playing lawn tennis, attending the Highland Games at Braemar. When Prince Eddy shot his first stag, he made the customary presentation of the head to Fripp. Obliged to pay a four-day-long official visit to Wales, Prince Eddy insisted that Fripp accompany him. Throughout the crowded programme of speech-making, foundation stone-laying, tree-planting and bridge-opening, the young doctor acted as the Prince’s equerry.
As so often before, the gentle Prince Eddy was bringing out the protective instincts in this big, genial, self-assured young man. But Fripp’s concern for his royal friend was not entirely disinterested. Alfred Fripp was an ambitious person and time and again he mentions his hopes of this royal friendship opening up doors, in both a social and a professional sense. Already, apparently, this unusual relationship between the relatively humbly-born doctor and the Heir Presumptive was causing puzzlement and resentment among Fripp’s colleagues.
The sensible Fripp, who never allowed himself to be overawed by the unaccustomed grandeur of his new milieu, had an amusing anecdote to tell about the parsimony of his host, the coarse-mannered but immensely rich Duke of Fife. With almost every day spent in the slaughter of game, the larders at Mar Lodge were crammed with venison, far more than the household could possibly cope with. ‘Send some of it to Fripp’s nurses at Guy’s,’ suggested the ever considerate Prince Eddy. On being asked by the Duke of Fife how much venison should be sent, Fripp explained that there were four separate messes for the nursing staff, to say nothing of the rest of the staff and the servants. After a great deal of discussion, it was decided that, of the over fifty haunches in the larders, six should be sent to the hospital. A servant was duly summoned and instructed to despatch the six haunches. But as he was leaving the room, the Duke followed him. ‘John,’ Fripp heard Fife whisper to the man, ‘three will do.’ And then, just as the servant was about to close the door, the Duke gave another whispered command. ‘Oh, John,’ he said, ‘one will do.’
The story had a sequel. Two days later, when Fripp was seated beside the visiting Princess Alexandra at luncheon, a telegram was handed to him. Politely, without opening it, he put it in his pocket. But the Princess insisted that he read it. As Fripp seemed amused by its contents, she asked to see the telegram herself. It had been sent by the matron of Guy’s Hospital and read, ‘Venison returned as carriage not paid.’31
At the end of September Fripp accompanied Prince Eddy to Abergeldie, Scottish home of the Prince and Princess of Wales. ‘This is a charming place,’ he wrote to his parents, ‘a genuine old Scotch castle with gates and portcullis and turrets and battlements and the River Dee tumbling just under the walls and the salmon jumping merrily …’32 Life at Abergeldie was both more formal and more extravagant than it had been at Mar Lodge. In one of his ecstatic letters home, the young man gives a picture of a typical evening at the castle.
‘Presently enter the Princess of Wales and Princess Victoria. All bow very low – though perhaps you were all smoking together in the garden an hour ago. Then enter the Prince of Wales, low bow again – the Duke of Clarence always last. The two princes wear full dress kilts, the ladies much dressed, jewels etc. Mr Cross (the House Steward, old, respectable, plain evening-dress) announces dinner. Dinner very good, good cook, splendidly served, but of inordinate length. Many red-coated, monstrous, overfed men. Mr Cross bosses the wine, which is very good. There is one other functionary in plain clothes, the head page, all the others in royal scarlet.
‘Conversation general and lively and loud, so that the Princess may hear. Prince tells many anecdotes, has a marvellous memory and active brain. A grand host, polite to everyone. Princess charming. When she does not like a dish she says it is “German” and laughs. She explains that she hates the Germans. We do not sit long with the fruit. Then time for two cigarettes before joining the ladies … talking till about 12. Ladies to bed. All the men to the Equerries’ Room. Smoking, letter-writing, talking, whiskey or any conceivable drink you like.’33
One morning, while Fripp was in his bath, the valet whom Prince Eddy had assigned as his personal servant came to tell him that the Queen had arrived and had asked for him to be presented to her. Scrambling into his clothes he hurried downstairs and was ushered into the presence of the remarkably tiny old lady in black. Accustomed to bellowing to Princess Alexandra, the giant Fripp automatically raised his voice to the Queen.
‘I am not deaf,’ said Queen Victoria sharply.
That established, the two ‘chatted for a long time, chiefly about water-colour art and about the Duke of Clarence’s health’.34
In
spite of the stories about Prince Eddy’s ‘dissipations’, of which one imagines Queen Victoria did not know the precise nature, she remained very fond of her grandson. His good points were those which she especially prized: politeness, attentiveness, tranquillity. With her, he was always on his best behaviour. Although an ardent theatregoer (a passion which he shared with his new friend, Alfred Fripp) the Prince never complained about the ‘tiresome theatricals’ – those amateur productions – which the Queen obliged her family to sit through. ‘It is extraordinary how pleased Grandmama is with such small things,’ he wrote to Prince George in February 1891, ‘for she is quite childish in some ways about them. It was the same thing with the tableaux in Scotland this autumn. But I suppose it is because she has no other amusement, that she takes such interest and pleasure in these performances.’35
‘There!’ the Queen would exclaim at some obvious twist in the plot of one of these amateurishly acted productions, ‘you didn’t expect that did you?’36
In the Queen’s Journal for that autumn of 1890 there is a charming vignette of an evening at Balmoral. ‘After dinner’, she noted, ‘the other ladies and gentlemen joined us in the Drawing Room and we pushed the furniture back and had a nice little impromptu dance, Curtis’s band being so entraînant. We had a quadrille, in which I danced with Eddy!! It did quite well, then followed some waltzes and polkas.’37
She had loved Prince Eddy, the heartbroken old Queen said after his death, ‘like a son’; and his devotion to her ‘was as great as that of a son’.38
Young Dr Fripp was again presented to the Queen the following summer, when he attended a garden party at Marlborough House. For his friendship with Prince Eddy had outlasted – if perhaps on a less intense level – ‘those wonderful weeks’ spent together in Scotland. Back in London the two young men would lunch or dine together, go for long walks through the gaslit streets or the leafy parks, visit the theatre or take Turkish baths. The Marlborough House garden party was made what Fripp calls ‘even more memorable’ by the fact that Prince Eddy drew him into the house to give him a souvenir of their friendship: it was ‘a black pearl pin’ which he cherished for the rest of his life.39
The fact that Queen Victoria had questioned Alfred Fripp about her grandson’s health is significant. For although the Prince had apparently been cured of that ‘sharpish attack of fever’ at Scarborough, his family remained concerned. The Prince had never been robust (he already suffered from, among other things, gout) and his illness at Scarborough had caused considerable alarm. Royal illnesses tend to be kept secret; it would never do for the public to discover that the Heir Presumptive was anything other than strong and healthy. This is why Fripp had warned his parents not to mention Prince Eddy’s indisposition.
But, inevitably, word leaked out. Alfred Fripp had hardly arrived in Scotland before the correspondent of a London newspaper reported that ‘There is a young doctor at the Fife Arms, named Fripp, who goes over to Mar Lodge once or twice a day ostensibly to play lawn tennis with Prince Albert Victor. The real fact, however, is that he is here at the instance of a well-known Court Surgeon, and is in constant attendance on HRH who, driving through to Sir James Mackenzie’s funeral, certainly looked very ill.’40
This was not strictly true. Fripp had been invited to Scotland as a friend and not a doctor; there was no shortage of doctors in attendance on the royal family. Nevertheless, the Prince’s relations were ready to make use of the friendship to check up on his condition. From Homburg, in August 1890, the Prince of Wales wrote to Sir Dighton Probyn, who had travelled up from Sandringham to Scarborough to see the ailing Prince Eddy. ‘So you had a long conversation with Mr Fripp about my son,’ wrote the Prince, ‘and I am glad he told you his candid opinion about his health, which I regret to hear is not satisfactory, and the future will have to be considered very carefully … I want you to write and tell Dr Fripp to ask to have an interview with the Princess, and tell her candidly what he has said you, so that she may know how matters are, which are far more serious than she has any idea of.’41
Probyn promptly wrote to Fripp, by now with Prince Eddy at Mar Lodge, quoting the Prince of Wales’s letter. ‘I am sure’, added Probyn, ‘it is best that the Parents should know exactly what you think about their son. Hide nothing from the Princess. The young Prince may be improving. I hope he is, but what we want, and you, I am sure, as much as anybody, is a thorough and permanent restoration to health, no mere tinkering up for a few years, but a lasting cure. The gout and every other ailment must be completely eradicated from his system, and until that is done, the young Prince must be prepared to submit to any system of dieting or what he may think discomfort ordered by his medical advisers.’42
When finally, at Abergeldie, the Prince of Wales and Fripp met face to face, the Prince lost no time in tackling the doctor about his son’s health. ‘He knew all about Prince Eddy and his illness and progress,’ reported Fripp to his parents, ‘but he extracted a detailed account from me, questioned me on every point, said he was very pleased with the way the Prince had got on and with the good control I had over him …’43
But for what ailment, exactly, had Fripp been treating his patient during those three weeks at the Royal Hotel, Scarborough? What had been the nature of that ‘sharpish attack of fever’? Probyn’s underlining of the phrase ‘every other ailment must be completely eradicated’ gives one clue. A prescription found among Fripp’s papers after his death gives another: Prince Eddy was suffering from a gonorrhoeal infection. Whether this had been contracted from vaginal or anal sex there is no indication.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Death and the Legend
His series of matrimonial flurries over, Prince Eddy resumed his unsatisfactory way of life: his half-hearted military career and those public duties for which he showed neither taste nor talent. ‘I would chuck it all up for five thousand a year,’ he once admitted to a Cambridge friend.1 He also resumed – or rather, continued – his far more pleasurable activities: his sexual adventuring. Indeed, so outrageous, so reckless was the Prince’s behaviour that, by the summer of 1891, the Prince of Wales decided that his son must again be sent out of the country. That July the Prince of Wales wrote to Queen Victoria to say that he thought Prince Eddy should be despatched on a prolonged tour of the colonies. Not mentioning his real reason for wanting to get his son out of England, the Prince referred grandiloquently to Prince Eddy being taught to ‘take an interest and appreciate the importance which our great Colonies are in connection with the great Empire over which you rule’.2
Queen Victoria was not impressed. Although she agreed that Prince Eddy should travel, she could not agree that it should be to the colonies. Continental Europe was where he should be sent. ‘He ought to be able to take his place amongst all the European Princes and how can he, if he knows nothing of European courts and countries?’ she argued. Both he and his brother George, although charming boys, were far too English; their only visits had been to English-speaking dependencies. ‘These colonies offer no opportunities for the cultivation of art or of any historical interest whatever … You know yourself, who are so fond of going abroad, how it enlarges one’s views and rubs off that angular insular view of things which is not good for a Prince.’3
To this eminently sensible letter, the Prince of Wales had to admit that ‘the real reason why we thought visits to certain colonies were desirable was because the voyages would be longer.’4 It is difficult, he went on to say, ‘to explain to you the reasons why we do not consider it desirable for him to make lengthened stays in foreign capitals’.5
But the Queen knew – or imagined she knew – exactly what these reasons were. There were just as many ‘designing pretty women in the colonies’ as anywhere else, she argued; Prince Eddy, she repeated, would acquire more polish by visiting the courts of Europe.6
As usual the Prime Minister, the long-suffering Lord Salisbury, was drawn into the argument. The Prince of Wales, wrote Sir Francis Knollys to Lord Salisbu
ry’s private secretary, ‘dare not tell [the Queen] his real reason for sending Prince Eddy away, which is intended as a punishment, and as a means of keeping him out of harm’s way; and I am afraid that neither of those objects would be attained by simply travelling about Europe.’7
But why was it so important for Prince Eddy to be kept away from the capitals of Europe? And what was he being punished for? Surely not for womanizing? In the society in which the Prince moved, there would have been nothing unusual or shocking about a young unmarried man consorting with prostitutes, mistresses or even married women. Such behaviour would have been considered perfectly acceptable, even expected, in royal and aristocratic circles. The Prince of Wales was hardly priggish about such matters; nor was he in any position to criticize. His own behaviour, during this period, was anything but circumspect. In June 1891, he was obliged to give evidence in the famous Baccarat Case: the libel action brought by a guest at a house party against a group of fellow guests – the Prince of Wales chief amongst them – who had accused him of cheating at baccarat. The trial, unmasking what to the public looked like a sybaritic and dissolute way of life, caused a sensation. Queen Victoria was appalled. ‘I feel it a terrible humiliation and so do all the people,’ she wrote to the Empress Frederick. ‘It is very painful and must do his prestige great harm.’8
The Prince of Wales’s continuing love affair with Daisy Brooke (his ‘own adored little Daisy wife’) led, in turn, to yet another public humiliation. A pamphlet entitled Lady River, which everyone knew meant Lady Brooke, in which Daisy Brooke’s various scandalous activities, including her affair with the Prince of Wales, were exposed, was widely distributed in aristocratic circles. A hostess had only to announce a public reading from the pamphlet for her drawing-room to be crowded out. Once again, the personal intervention of Lord Salisbury was needed before the matter could be satisfactorily cleared up.
