It was possible to make light of this particular display of the Princess’s obsessional abhorrence of all things Prussian; but when the party arrived at the house which had been rented for them at Wiesbaden and their behaviour was open to public inspection it was more difficult to conceal the Princess’s embarrassing sentiments. For at Wiesbaden a telegram arrived from the King of Prussia offering to call upon the Princess at a time convenient to her that evening or the next day. The Prince of Wales being away at the time, the telegram was handed to her by an apprehensive Sir William Knollys. He had already had a foretaste of the troubles to come at the Castle of Rumpenheim where he had found ‘a most rabid anti-Prussian feeling, where everyone seemed to have been bit by some Prussian mad dog, and the slightest allusion set the whole party — … thirty-six at dinner — into agitation’. The Princess glanced at the telegram and dictated so rude a reply that Knollys declined to write it down.
On his return to Wiesbaden the Prince of Wales failed to persuade his wife to see the King; so he sent a telegram regretting that she was not yet well enough to receive visitors but that he himself would pay his Majesty a visit at any time convenient to him. This excuse having been provided for her, the Princess then insisted on demonstrating that she was not really as ill as all that by travelling to Rumpenheim for her grandfather’s funeral.
Deeply resentful of the insult offered to her husband, Queen Augusta complained to Queen Victoria, whose doubts as to the propriety of her daughter-in-law’s conduct in Germany — not to mention her son’s — were only too amply confirmed. She was already annoyed with the Prince of Wales for having disobeyed her instructions by attending the races at Baden, a most notorious town, a ‘little Paris’, whose society was such — so she had been informed by the Queen of Prussia — that ‘no one [could] mix in it without loss of character’. Yet not only had the Prince gone there and spent a great deal of money on betting and jewellery, he had protested against its being considered necessary to give him such advice on the subject at his age: one might imagine that he were ‘ten or twelve years old, and not nearly twenty-six’. The Prince’s protest had been followed by a letter of apology and explanation from Sir William Knollys; he lamented the failure of his efforts to prevent the Prince’s going to the races, but thought he owed it to himself to add that ‘in no points [would] his Royal Highness brook Sir William’s interference less than in any matter connected with his plans and intentions’.
Now there was all this trouble over Princess Alexandra and the Prussians. The Prince wrote in attempted exculpation of his wife’s conduct:
I myself should have been glad if she had seen the King, but a lady may have feelings which she cannot repress, while a man must overcome them. If Coburg had been taken away as [other territories have been by the Prussians] I don’t think you would much care to see the King either. You will not, I hope, be angry, dear Mama, at my last sentence; but it is the only way that I can express what dear Alix really feels.
The Queen, however, was not prepared to be so tolerant of the Princess’s personal feelings. Nor were her daughters. The Crown Princess stigmatized her sister-in-law’s behaviour as ‘neither wise nor kind’, and Princess Alice of Hesse tried to persuade her brother to order his wife to see the King. The Prince of Wales enlisted the help of Queen Louise of Denmark, who came over to the house at Wiesbaden to say that she herself would see the King but that she was not prepared to distress her daughter by trying to persuade her to do so. So it was left to the Prince, who had by now seen both the King and Queen of Prussia on his own, to talk to her again himself. He ‘used every argument, but in vain, to persuade the Princess … She would not listen to reason of any kind. After a long discussion the Princess ended it by getting up and walking out of the room by the aid of her stick.’
The Prince then decided that he would precipitate a meeting whether or not the Princess agreed. So he wrote a telegram inviting the King of Prussia to breakfast the next morning, took it to his wife’s room and then handed it to Knollys and asked him to send it off. Eventually, after the Princess had done her utmost to prevent the threatened meeting and further telegrams had been dispatched and received, the King of Prussia accepted an invitation to breakfast at Wiesbaden on 11 October.
Anxiously waiting his arrival in the drawing-room, Knollys stood up as the Princess came into the room, leaning on her stick and looking very pale. Knollys, who had done his best to avoid her during the past few days, was rather embarrassed and made some tactless remark about her pallor, expressing the fear that ‘she had caught cold’. ‘Maybe I am pale,’ she replied sharply, ‘but it is not from cold but from anger at being obliged to see the King of Prussia.’ And what she minded most, she added, was that she would not have been obliged to do so had it not been for the interference of ‘those two old women, the Prince of Wales’s sisters’ — the Crown Princess, who was twenty-six, and Princess Alice, who was twenty-four.
Princess Alexandra was still talking to Knollys when the King of Prussia was shown into the room. To everyone’s relief she controlled her feelings and greeted him much more gracefully than anyone had dared to hope. He, in turn, was almost effusively friendly, remaining at Wiesbaden for luncheon and, so Knollys heard subsequently, expressing himself as being ‘quite satisfied with his reception’.
The whole episode, however, had made Queen Victoria ‘extremely angry’. If only Princess Alexandra ‘understood her duties better’, she complained to the Crown Princess. ‘That makes me terribly anxious.’ She asked the Prime Minister to take an opportunity ‘of expressing both to the Prince and Princess of Wales the importance of not letting any private feelings interfere with what are their public duties. Unfortunately the Princess of Wales has never understood her duties of this nature … It is a great source of grief and anxiety to the Queen for the future.’
7
Rounds of Pleasure
You will, I fear, have incurred immense expenses.
The Queen not only criticized her daughter-in-law for not understanding her duties better, she also complained of her not even making her husband’s home life comfortable. She was notoriously unpunctual for one thing, never being ‘ready for breakfast, not being out of her room till eleven; and often Bertie [had his breakfast] alone, and then she alone’. Of course their whole way of life was ‘unsatisfactory’.
The Prince hated the sight of a blank page in his engagement book as much as he hated being kept waiting before he could fulfil any engagement that had been made. Needing little sleep, he got up early and went to bed late, and spent most days energetically hurrying about from house to house, club to theatre, hunting field to card table, spa to yacht, grouse-moor to race-course, persuading friends to drop anything else they might have arranged to do, and to join him at some impromptu party whenever any of his engagements had been cancelled. The letters of Lady Carrington, whose son Charles was frequently called for by the Prince to dine with him or to stay with him when he had arranged to go to his parents, are full of complaints about the ‘great disappointments’ caused by the Prince’s urgent summonses. ‘Oh dear!’ Lady Carrington lamented on hearing that her son had received yet another of these summonses. ‘What a bore the Prince is!’
In the London season there were banquets and balls, garden parties and dinner parties, evenings at Covent Garden and Drury Lane. There were more informal nights spent enjoying an evening of baccarat — or, as he called it, a ‘baccy’ at Marlborough House; going to the Cremorne Gardens in Vauxhall; watching, from a reserved, screened box, the performances at Evans’s Music Hall in Covent Garden; attending wild parties with chorus girls at Wynn-Carrington’s, where he was transported one night all over the house in a sedan chair, the pole of which broke and sent him crashing to the ground; or visiting a night-club where — to the dismay of the Archduke Rudolf of Austria, who ordered the waiters out of the room, since they ‘must not see their future King making such a fool of himself ’ — he once danced a can-can with the Duchess of Manchester.
There were race meetings at Epsom, Doncaster, Ascot, Newmarket and Goodwood, all of which he attended assiduously — despite repeated requests from his mother to reduce the time he devoted to them — arguing that it was much better to elevate a national sport by granting it royal patronage than ‘to win the approval of Lord Shaftesbury and the Low Church party’ by abstaining from it. After Goodwood there was yachting at Cowes. In the autumn there was grouse-shooting followed by deer-stalking at Abergeldie in Scotland. When the spring came round again there would be a visit to the French Riviera; after the summer, three weeks or so at a German or Austrian spa. Twice or sometimes three times a year he would slip away to Paris for a few days without his wife. Accompanied by the Princess he sometimes went to Denmark to see her relatives, and then he would go on to Germany to visit his. At the beginning of November he returned to Sandringham.
The Prince’s letters to his friend Sir Edmund Filmer, provide a commentary on his restless social life in the middle of the 1860s. They refer to days of ‘wonderfully good shooting’, on one of which the Prince himself accounted for ‘229 head of which 175 were pheasants’; to successful bets placed at Goodwood and Ascot; to ‘very pleasant’ afternoons sailing off the coast of the Isle of Wight in his ‘little yacht (only thirty-seven tons)’; to expeditions to Scotland with two new rifles provided for him by James Purdey & Sons; to the ‘gaieties and frivolities of the great city of London’ where, Filmer was advised, it was quite right for an ‘homme Mari? ’ to amuse himself occasionally ‘on a tack by himself ’; and to numerous weekends in country houses which were invariably followed by exchanges of photographs:
The groups that were taken have now come but the photos might have been better — however, such as they are, I suppose your better half would like to have them … I am having them mounted and will send them to her … I enclose some more photos for Lady Filmer — for which I must almost apologise — as she will be quite bored possessing so many of me — but the waste paper basket is always useful … I send the new photos … of course, the ladies moved … please thank Lady Filmer for hers and I hope she won’t forget to send me one in her riding habit — as she promised.
At Sandringham the Prince’s daily routine varied little from day to day, except on Sundays when the guests were expected to attend the church in the park, the ladies arriving at the beginning of the service, the gentlemen, having left their walking-sticks against a tombstone, often not appearing before the sermon as the Prince could not bear to sit still for so long. He eventually took to placing his watch on the back of the pew in front of him so that the rector should not be tempted to prolong his sermon for more than the prescribed ten minutes, and he was obviously relieved when the time came to stand up and sing the hymn in which he invariably joined in his loud and powerful voice.
Sunday was also the day for the guests to be conducted over the estate; to be shown the farm and the stables where, as Gladstone’s secretary noticed, the Princess liked to feed ‘almost all the horses severally with her own hands’; to walk round the kitchen gardens and the hothouses, the Italian garden, the Alpine garden and the lavender walk, the small menagerie, the joss-house, brought back from China and given to the Prince by Admiral Sir Henry Keppel, the kennels where the Princess’s dogs were kept, and the nearby cemetery where they would be buried when they died. The ladies would then be taken over the house and into the Princess’s private rooms with their clutter of small tables and photographs in silver and tortoiseshell frames; of ornaments and boxes in glass-fronted display cases; of dressing-tables so crowded with miniatures and bibelots that, as Lady Randolph Churchill was to notice, there was no room for brushes or toilet things; of wardrobes and cupboards containing those exquisite, simple dresses which she accumulated in such numbers and with which she could never bear to part. On a perch in the centre of the room was a rather fierce-looking white parrot which made disconcerting pecks at ladies who got too close.
The inspection over, guests would assemble for tea at five o’clock, either in the Princess’s special tea-room next to the farm dairy or, more usually, in the hall, the ladies having discarded the clothes they had worn at luncheon for elaborate tea-gowns. They would change again for dinner and, with the men in full evening dress with decorations, would come downstairs to await their Royal Highnesses before proceeding in pairs to the dining-room, ‘each lady in turn having the privilege of being taken in by her royal host’. ‘The Prince arranged the list himself,’ Lady Randolph Churchill recorded, ‘and was very particular that there should be no hitch as to people finding their places at once. An equerry with a plan of the dining-table would explain to each man who was to be his partner and where he was to sit.’
After dinner on Sundays, party games like ‘General Post’ were played and commonly went on until two or three o’clock in the morning with occasional breaks for a game of bowls, but not before midnight, it being considered an unseemly game for the Sabbath. On weekday evenings there were card games and dancing which often continued quite as late. The Prince was an extremely energetic dancer, urging his partner to let herself go if she seemed too stiff and inhibited, declaring, ‘I like to dance to the tune’. At the three annual balls, the County, the Farmers’ and — most enjoyable of all — the Servants’ Ball, the jigs and reels continued almost until dawn. On other evenings, when the ladies had gone up to bed, the Prince and his cronies might retire to the bowling alley or to the billiard room, where they would light cigars beside the screen upon which the likenesses of such eminent Victorians as Lord Salisbury and Matthew Arnold were displayed in ‘very dubious attitudes’ in the company of naked women.
Yet the Prince never neglected his staider guests. Edward Hamilton, who felt it was ‘a little shy work going in’ to the entrance hall on his arrival, was soon made to feel completely at home. The Prince was ‘a model of hosts’, and nearly always went upstairs with the new arrivals on their first visit to make sure that they had everything they wanted before they went to bed, even putting more coals on the fire and making sure that the water in the jugs was hot enough.
On most weekday mornings, accompanied by about eight or ten of his male guests, the Prince would go out shooting, an occupation to which he devoted a great deal of time and money. The day’s sport began promptly at 10.15 a.m. by the Sandringham clocks, that was to say at a quarter to ten. The Prince’s clocks in Norfolk were always kept half an hour fast, a practice — also adopted at Holkham Hall — which the Prince followed partly to economize daylight, so that he could spend more time in the open air, but also, it was said, in the vain hope that the Princess might be induced to become more punctual.
The Prince enjoyed few activities more than a grand battue; and once, after shooting as a guest of the Bavarian financier, Baron von Hirsch auf Gereuth, at St Johann, where 20,000 partridges were killed by about ten guns in ten days, he declared that that certainly beat ‘everything on record’ and would ‘quite spoil’ him for ‘any shooting at home’.
All the same he managed very well at Sandringham where the light and sandy soil was particularly suited to the rearing of partridges and pheasants; where there were also woodcock and wild duck to be had; where hares and rabbits abounded; and where his game-keepers were as efficient and smartly dressed as any in Germany. They turned out on shooting-days wearing green velveteen coats and bowler hats with gold cords, accompanied by regiments of beaters in smocks and black felt hats decorated with blue and red ribbons. Formed up in a vast semicircle, the beaters advanced, driving the birds into the air towards the fence behind which the guns were concealed. Behind them, rows of boys waving blue and pink flags prevented the birds from flying back. A farmer who used to watch them wrote:
On they come in ever increasing numbers, until they burst in a cloud over the fence … This is the exciting moment, a terrific fusillade ensues, birds dropping down in all directions, wheeling about in confusion between the flags and the guns, the survivors gathering themselves together and escaping into the fields beyond.
The shooters then retire to another line of fencing, making themselves comfortable with camp-stools and cigars until the birds are driven up as before, and so through the day, only leaving off for luncheon in a tent brought down from Sandringham.
Servants carried out the food to the tent in a portable stove; and the ladies, some on foot, others in carriages, would join the party and listen to the Prince reading out the morning’s scores, pausing for applause when a gun was credited with a good bag, looking with mock severity at one whose tally was embarrassingly low. He was not a particularly good shot himself, being, so Lord Walsingham said, rather erratic and journalier; but he often gave the impression of being better than he was for he usually had the best position, never fired at a difficult bird, and was always equipped with a magnificent gun. Yet his critics had to admit that even when masses of pheasants were being driven over his head, he was never flustered by the number of them, or by the people who were watching him, and that he was particularly adept at killing birds behind him at an angle which most men find difficult. He was sometimes rather careless, though. George Cornwallis-West used to relate the story of a shooting-party at which the Prince, ‘enjoying an animated conversation with a lady friend who unwisely pointed out a hare to him’, swung round suddenly and shot an old beater in the knee.
Although the food was plentiful and excellent at these shooting-day luncheons many of the ladies did not much enjoy them, for the Prince, in his passion for fresh air, insisted that the flaps of the tent should be folded up; and, despite the straw which was scattered over the ground, it was often dreadfully cold. In the afternoons the ladies were expected to remain outside to watch the shooting and to sit behind hedges, as the Duchess of Marlborough once complained, ‘with the north winds blowing straight from the sea’.
Edward VII_The Last Victorian King Page 14
