Sons, Servants and Statesmen

by John Van der Kiste

  In desperation she asked the Prince of Wales to use his influence to retrieve it for her. Though he would have been wiser not to get involved, he gallantly went to see Lewis, who showed him the letter. Agreeing it was the most shocking thing he had ever read, he asked the solicitor to destroy it, only to be told that this was impossible without Lady Beresford’s consent. By way of compromise, she asked for its return and sent it to her brother-in-law for safe-keeping.

  As a punishment for not cooperating, Lady Beresford found herself ostracised by the Prince of Wales and the rest of society. She complained that the heir to the throne had taken up the cause of ‘an abandoned woman’ against that of ‘a blameless wife’. Lord Beresford angrily taxed the Prince with needless interference, accused him of trying to wreck their marriage and promised he would exact reparation or revenge. Eighteen months later, Lady Beresford put her London house up for sale, saying she would move abroad rather than face further humiliation at home.

  This coincided with the height of the Tranby Croft case. Aware how vulnerable the Prince of Wales’s standing was, Lord Beresford threatened to publish all the details of their squalid argument in the press and asked his wife to inform the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, of their intentions. The Prime Minister persuaded them not to make the affair public, but he could not prevent circulation of three copies of a leaflet by Lady Beresford’s sister, Mrs Gerald Paget, telling the full story. These were distributed in Britain and the United States of America, and details did not remain secret for long.

  Just as the Prince of Wales’s stock was in danger of falling lower than it ever had before, his second son, Prince George, fell seriously ill with typhoid fever. Though he was not so ill as his father had been exactly twenty years earlier, for two or three weeks the Prince and Princess were gravely concerned. At the same time as George was declared out of danger, in December 1891, their eldest son, Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence, was betrothed to Princess May of Teck. The backward, dissipated young Duke had been a major source of worry to his father and grandfather, sharing many of his father’s faults, not least his love of high living, but lacking in his personality and robust health.

  In January 1892, five weeks after becoming engaged, the Duke of Clarence took to his bed at Sandringham with pneumonia. His constitution had been undermined by dissipation and perhaps venereal disease, and his death, just six days after his twenty-eighth birthday, may have been a providential one for the throne and also for his bride-to-be, who was dismayed by the young man’s lack of personality and had begun to doubt whether she could really ‘take this on’. But the family were heartbroken, and the country was united in mourning.

  Happier times for the Prince of Wales were to come. Late in 1892 the Foreign Secretary, Lord Rosebery, sent him a gold key which had been made for the Prince Consort and used by him to open Foreign Office despatch boxes. Already he had been in the habit of receiving edited reports of cabinet meetings which were sent to the Queen. In future, while he was in Britain, he would be kept as well informed about official foreign business as the Queen herself. Informal conversations with Rosebery, ambassadors and others helped him to supplement the documents he read.

  At around the same time, he accepted an invitation from Gladstone to become a member of a royal commission on the aged poor. This pleased him all the more as Lord Salisbury had rejected his offer, a year previously, to serve on an enquiry into the relations between employers and the working class. The new royal commission addressed itself to the problems of persons rendered destitute by age. At last the Prince had found a subject concerning the welfare of his mother’s subjects to which he could make a genuine contribution. A fellow-commissioner, James Stuart, Liberal member of parliament for Hoxton, said that the Prince of Wales asked very good questions. He thought at first that he had been prompted to raise them, until he found out that he had brought them up on his own initiative, proving that he had a considerable grasp of his subject. As expected, the commission’s final report proved a controversial one in terms of party politics. The Prince signed a statement to the effect that he was obliged to observe strict political neutrality, and it was not until the next century that state pensions were provided for by Act of Parliament.

  All this was some consolation for what he perceived as persistent snubbing at the hands of his mother. When Gladstone became Prime Minister for the last time, he told his family in private that he thought the only remedy to ‘the royal problem’ would be for Her Majesty to abdicate in favour of her son. The Queen indignantly refused to hear of it; on the contrary, she refused to delegate any further responsibilities. During the summer season of 1892 on the Isle of Wight, Knollys sadly informed Ponsonby that the Prince of Wales had told him he believed there was no point in remaining at Cowes, though he was willing to do so. He felt that he was ‘not the slightest use to the Queen; that everything he says or suggests is pooh-poohed; and that his sisters and brother are much more listened to than he is’.9 His indiscretions of the previous year had reminded her that, notwithstanding all his good qualities, at heart he was the same Bertie with a weakness for unsuitable friends and gambling, who could still not be trusted as much as she would like.

  When the Prince of Wales suggested that Mrs Gladstone should be given a peerage and appointed Mistress of the Robes, he was indeed not taken seriously. Sometimes his interventions were more successful, though they might owe something to the Queen in the first place. Under Gladstone’s last administration in 1892 the Queen was particularly keen for Lord Rosebery to become Foreign Minister. The Prince spoke to him, and he accordingly informed Gladstone that His Royal Highness’s intervention had induced him to accept the post after all.

  Even so, the Prince was still generally not trusted. Only a few years earlier, the Queen had written to her granddaughter Princess Victoria of Hesse that he ‘cannot keep anything to himself – but lets everything out’.10 During her last years, when the Queen began to take annual spring holidays on the Riviera, Lord Rosebery suggested that her absence abroad should require somebody to undertake the Guardianship of the Realm, and that the Prince of Wales would be just the right person. Reluctantly, the Queen agreed to consider it, but informed Sir Arthur Bigge, her assistant secretary, that she had no intention of proposing it to the Prince herself. He might find the responsibility inconvenient, but he might find it difficult to decline if the offer came directly from her; and she did not want to prevent him from going abroad. Instead, she would rather appoint a committee, including the Dukes of Connaught and Cambridge, and the Lord Chief Justice.11 The Prince of Wales would surely have been piqued at his favourite brother yet again being given preference for a position which should have been his by right. In the end, nothing came of the idea.

  By this time, the Duke of Edinburgh’s duties in England were almost complete. Soon after the expiry of his Mediterranean command in 1889, he was appointed Commander-in-Chief at Devonport for three years, a post which he took up in August 1890. On the conclusion of his command in June 1893, he was promoted to the rank of Admiral of the Fleet. A month later he attended the wedding of his favourite nephew, George, only surviving son of the Prince and Princess of Wales and recently made Duke of York, to Princess May of Teck. George had followed his uncle into the Royal Navy, a service which he had had to leave with great regret as a result of his elder brother’s death and his new status as second in succession to the throne. He had also taken after the Duke of Edinburgh in his fascination for collecting stamps.

  One month after that, the Prince Consort’s renegade brother Ernest, Duke of Saxe-Coburg Gotha for forty-nine years, died of a chill, aged seventy-five. As second son of the Prince Consort, Alfred had been the heir of his uncle, who had had several illegitimate children but none by his lawful wife. With little enthusiasm, the Duke took up his inheritance as the new Duke of Coburg, to spend most of the rest of his life at the small German court. He was now officially retired from his beloved Royal Navy, and to be a German Duke, subservient to the bomba
stic Emperor William II, whom few of the family really liked and none really trusted, was a prospect which nobody envied.

  His next few months were not made any easier by unfounded rumours that he had secretly renounced the succession before Duke Ernest’s death in favour of his son Alfred, and then by unseemly wrangles in parliament at Westminster and in the Reichstag in Berlin as to whether the new Duke of Coburg was technically a British subject or not. If Britain and Germany should find themselves at war with each other, could he be indicted in England on a charge of high treason as a result of his acts and status as a German sovereign? There was also uncertainty as to whether he should still be allowed to sit or speak in the House of Lords, or retain his membership of the privy council.

  Only in the spring of 1894 was his nationality status officially confirmed. He was obliged to resign his privy councillorship and any rights pertaining to the House of Lords in England. He relinquished the annuity granted to him by parliament in 1866, but retained an allowance granted on his marriage for the upkeep of Clarence House, which remained his official residence in Britain for life. By British law, he retained his British nationality, modified ‘by his status as a German sovereign’.

  At Windsor and Osborne, Prince Henry of Battenberg was becoming more and more frustrated by his dull existence. His official appointments as Governor of the Isle of Wight and Honorary Colonel of the Isle of Wight Rifles did not give him much scope for activity. When he joined his elder brother Louis in Corsica while Beatrice and the Queen were on holiday in Cannes, his wife had him fetched back smartly. Rumour had it that the Battenberg princes had gone to the carnival at Ajaccio for some ‘low company’, and the censorious Beatrice was not prepared to sit by patiently while her husband was willingly being led into temptation. Later he joined a regiment of the volunteer battalion in Hampshire, and was delighted to find himself following his true vocation once again – sharing the camaraderie of a soldier’s life.

  This may have been a convenient escape from the attentions of a certain lady at Court. It was believed that Princess Louise, now unofficially separated from Lord Lorne, was flirting with Henry, and Beatrice found the situation distinctly uncomfortable. Henry found a way out of it through an opportunity for which he had long thirsted. In the autumn of 1895 an expeditionary force of West African troops and British Army officers was assembled to restore order in the kingdom of Ashanti, north of the Gold Coast Protectorate [Ghana]. Princess Helena’s elder son Christian Victor, who was commissioned in the King’s Royal Rifles, was invited to join the force, and a few days later Henry told the Queen that he also wanted to go to Ashanti.

  Remembering the Prince Imperial’s death in the Zulu War in 1879, and stressing the additional dangers he would face from tropical disease, the Queen tried hard to dissuade Henry. But Beatrice proved fully supportive of her husband’s intentions, insisting that as all his brothers had seen active service he could hardly be denied such a chance himself. She also saw how desperately bored he had become with a life at home of enforced inactivity, and she may have felt it wise to remove him from her flirtatious elder sister. These reasons, and Henry’s determination to volunteer in a national cause to prove his devotion to his adopted country, persuaded the Queen. On 6 December 1895 he took farewell of his mother-in-law at Windsor, as he and Beatrice left for Bagshot to stay the night with the Duke and Duchess of Connaught on his way to Africa.

  From the continent Henry wrote enthusiastically to Beatrice that he was ‘really happy and pleased to have received permission to see all that is going on’. However, in fact almost nothing was happening. The Ashanti chiefs had decided not to fight, instead submitting gracefully to British protection. Even so, the futile expedition continued through the tropical heat, with several men dying from fever on the way. Henry was among those to contract malaria, and the doctors ordered that he should be carried back to the coast at once. On 18 January 1896 Beatrice and the Queen received a telegram to say that he had been feverish but was improving and was about to leave for Madeira. Four days later another telegram arrived. They expected it to tell them that he had arrived safely at Madeira to convalesce and that he wanted Beatrice to go and join him. Instead it contained the news of his death.

  A very few losses had affected the Queen deeply since the death of the Prince Consort, notably those of John Brown in 1883 and Emperor Frederick five years later. This came as a terrible shock. Henry had entered her life at a time when she was mourning John Brown and Leopold, Duke of Albany. His sense of humour and obvious enjoyment of life had rejuvenated her, introducing a breath of fresh air into the old-fashioned Court. He had given her another four grandchildren and thus reminded her how it felt to have a young family around – as well as a family to which she could be, and was, far more indulgent than she had ever been towards her own children.

  Beatrice bore her sudden bereavement with tremendous patience and fortitude. In February she left Osborne to recuperate for a while at Cimiez. She returned to a home life which had become dull and drab without Henry. After his death, there would be no more amateur theatricals at Court. Not only was the Queen losing her eyesight and her former enthusiasm for the diversion, but Beatrice, who had been such an enthusiastic participant, no longer had the heart to return to an activity which reminded her so much of those brief, happy years with her husband.

  Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee celebrations in June 1897, to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of her accession, would be the last time that many of the family would be together. This time, it was stipulated that no crowned heads would be invited to take part in the procession and service of thanksgiving at St Paul’s Cathedral, although fifteen prime ministers from the colonies would be there. However, all the Queen’s surviving children and children-in-law were also present.

  This time, none among the family accompanying her that day made a greater impression than the Prince of Wales. Short of stature, overweight and hardly particularly handsome in his fifty-sixth year, he nevertheless cut a dignified, striking figure in his fieldmarshal’s uniform as he rode by his mother’s side in the procession from Buckingham Palace to the cathedral. For once, they took a route not merely through the city by the shortest possible way, but also across London Bridge and through some of the capital’s poorer districts.

  ‘No one ever, I believe, has met with such an ovation,’ the Queen noted in her journal afterwards. ‘The crowds were quite indescribable, and their enthusiasm truly marvellous and deeply touching.’12

  Yet the absence of those who had died since the golden jubilee ten years earlier was noticed and sorely missed. Emperor Frederick, Henry of Battenberg, Grand Duke Louis of Hesse (who had followed his wife Alice to the grave in 1892 after a bout of pneumonia) and her eldest grandson born in England, the Duke of Clarence, had all gone. At seventy-eight, Queen Victoria was paying the common penalty of a long life, in having outlived too many members of her own family.

  She may have had a presentiment that the festivities would be her own swan-song. Already one of her surviving sons, Alfred, was in poor health. As Marie Mallet, one of her ladies-in-waiting, remarked somewhat bluntly, the Duke of Coburg’s life was not one likely to be accepted at any insurance office. For some years, his heavy drinking had concerned the family. For at least three years, his private secretary, Stephen Condie, had been warning Dr Reid, who passed the information on to the Queen, that unless he cut back on his alcohol consumption the consequences could be serious.

  The reluctant Duke of Coburg had little to look forward to. In his German duchy he found life increasingly dull, as he missed the responsibilities of service life and the camaraderie of his naval colleagues and London society friends, whom he came to England to visit whenever he could. His marriage had never been happy. His wife, Marie, who never ceased to remind her in-laws that she was a Russian Grand Duchess and considered herself superior to them, revelled in her position as ‘No. 1, and reigning Duchess’, as her sister-in-law, Vicky, the Dowager German Empress, had predi
cted. Husband and wife had long since drifted apart, though they never officially separated and for the sake of form presented the picture of a united couple to the outside world.

  The Queen was saddened that this gifted son had become almost a stranger to her, and that as a person this withdrawn, surly, over-bibulous man (or ‘imprudent’, as she discreetly put it) was clearly less liked than his brothers. Yet she was glad to welcome him home at the time of the diamond jubilee, and again in May 1899 when he joined the rest of the family at Windsor for celebrations in the town and at the Castle to mark her eightieth birthday.

  By this time, however, he was a broken man. The Duke and Duchess’s silver wedding celebrations in January, at which they put on their usual display of family unity, were marred by the plight of their only son, Alfred. He had shot himself after an unhappy love affair with a commoner, Mabel Fitzgerald, whom some sources say he had married in defiance of the Royal Marriages Act; sent to convalesce at Meran in the Tyrol, he died of his injuries a week later. For years, the official cause of his death was said to be consumption or, as an official correspondent told The Times, ‘chronic cerebral affection’.13 The next heir to the duchy of Coburg was Charles, the fifteen-year-old son of the Duke and Duchess of Albany who had been born three months after his father’s death.

  Alfred took to drinking even more heavily after his son’s tragic death but managed to distance himself so much from his family that none of them had any idea how ill he was. In June 1900 a group of specialists at Vienna held a consultation and discovered a carcinomatous growth at the root of his tongue, in such an advanced stage that any operation would have been useless. He had six months to live at the most, but in his case there was nothing much left to live for. On 25 July the Queen received a telegram from the physicians, telling her that the Duke of Edinburgh’s condition was hopeless. Initially it was withheld from her on the instructions of Beatrice, who wished to spare her any more upsetting news. Britain was at war with the Boers in South Africa, and the Queen was already thoroughly depressed at the news of military reverses suffered by her Army.