Edward VII_The Last Victorian King

by Christopher Hibbert

  Declining to break with any of them, the Prince moved into the Esbekiah Palace in the highest spirits. The Palace had been specially furnished by the Khedive, who had provided solid silver beds and chairs of beaten gold in a bedroom a hundred and forty feet long. In the gardens illuminated fountains played all night long; and troupes of acrobats and dancers appeared from tents to perform against banks of exotic flowers.

  For the voyage up the Nile the Khedive had provided six blue and gold steamers each of which, gaudily decorated with scenes depicting incidents in the lives of Antony and Cleopatra, towed a barge packed with provisions including 3,000 bottles of champagne, 4,000 bottles of claret and 20,000 bottles of soda water. The Prince’s own steamer was equipped with thick carpets as well as an ample selection of English furniture which the enterprising Sir Samuel Baker had chosen for him on the Khedive’s behalf. The Prince and Princess had also been provided with horses, a white donkey, four French chefs and an unspecified number of laundrymen. ‘You will doubtless think that we have too many ships and too large an entourage,’ the Prince wrote in apologetic explanation to the Queen.

  ‘But … in the East so much is thought of show, that it becomes almost a necessity.’ As for Sir Samuel Baker, whatever his principles were, he was not only a good sportsman but a marvellous organizer: ‘He has really taken a great deal of trouble to make all the necessary arrangements for our comfort, in which he has most thoroughly succeeded … I cannot say how glad I am to have asked him to accompany us.’

  The Prince was particularly glad to have Sir Samuel Baker’s company because of his experience in the shooting of wild animals. The royal party visited all the usual sights which the Prince had already seen in 1862; and in a temple at Karnak near Luxor they drank champagne beneath exploding fireworks. But, as on his previous visit, it was the shooting which the Prince appeared to relish most, letting fly at all manner of wildfowl, at cranes and flamingoes, at cormorants and herons, merlins, pelicans and hawk owls. He could scarcely fail to hit a great number; and one day to his delight he shot twenty-eight flamingoes. Later he killed a crocodile; and in the tomb of Rameses IV he caught an ‘enormous rat’. Seeing her husband so happy, having forgiven him now for his selfishness at the time of her illness, finding the attentions of Oliver Montagu so pleasing and flattering, and surrounded by other congenial companions in a landscape that enchanted her, the Princess felt that she had never been so happy.

  On the way up to Wadi Halfa and on the voyage back to Cairo, she and the Prince collected a great variety of mementoes, including a huge sarcophagus and over thirty mummy cases. They also brought back with them a black ram which the Princess could not bear to see slaughtered by the butcher after it had taken food out of her hand and which was accordingly shipped home to Sandringham; and a ten-year-old Nubian orphan, a pretty, black, turbaned figure — or, in the opinion of the English servants, a horrid little light-fingered pest — later to be seen at Sandringham, by then a baptized member of the Church of England, serving coffee in his native costume and wearing a silver earring.

  From Cairo — where the Prince climbed to the top of the Great Pyramid and the Princess visited a harem and returned to the Esbekiah Palace in a yashmak to tell her husband of the gorgeous unveiled faces she had seen — the tourists went on to the Suez Canal. It was an ‘astounding work’, the Prince concluded, after listening to an account of its progress and potentialities by the Khedive, its chief shareholder, and Ferdinand de Lesseps, its designer. Leaving Egypt towards the end of March, the royal party arrived in Constantinople where the Sultan placed the Saleh Palace at their disposal. Hospitality here was as lavish as it had been in Cairo: an orchestra of eighty-four musicians played during every meal; cannon boomed in salute whenever the Prince and Princess left the Palace, even when they were intending to visit the bazaars in the character of Mr and Mrs Williams; guards turned out ready for inspection whenever they returned. At the Sultan’s Palace of Dolmabakshi a banquet was served ? l’Européenne; and the Sultan, who had previously never had a guest (except the Grand Vizier) sitting down at his table, broke with custom to dine with the Prince and Princess of Wales and their attendants. So this visit to Constantinople, as the Prince informed his mother, was not only ‘wonderfully happy’, it might even be called ‘historical’.

  After ten days in Turkey, the Prince and Princess set sail for Sebastopol, a tour of the Crimean battlefields, a visit to Yalta and to the Tsar’s palace at Livadia. A further ten days or so were spent at Athens and Corfu with the Princess’s brother King George and his Russian wife, Queen Olga; then, after a boar-hunt on the Albanian coast, the Ariadne sailed to Brindisi, where a special train awaited to take them to Paris for a few days at the Hôtel Bristol before returning home on 12 May.

  They had been away for seven months; and the Princess, pregnant again, looked as radiantly happy now that she was reunited with her children as she had done in Egypt. Hearing a few days after her return that an English friend was engaged, she wrote to her to say, ‘May you some day be as happy a wife as I am now with my darling husband and children. This is really the best wish I can give you for your future life.’ No sooner had he arrived home than the Prince immediately plunged into the crowded activities of the London season as though anxious to make up for having missed the first few weeks. Within three hours of his arrival he had been seen at the Royal Academy though due that evening to attend a court concert. The Queen, who had been deeply concerned about the propriety of his behaviour while he had been abroad, was even more worried about him now that he was back in London. ‘There is great fear,’ she told him on learning that he had taken the Duke of Devonshire’s house at Chiswick for week-end visits during the Season, ‘lest you should have gay parties at Chiswick instead of going there to pass the Sunday, a day which is rightly considered one of rest, quietly for your repose with your dear children.’

  Apart from the parties there was the matter of his expenses, a subject that had already cropped up in their correspondence, which was in itself a matter for further complaint. The Prince’s letters to his mother had been dispatched quite regularly, but they were neither long nor interesting. From Cairo he had written to impart the intelligence that Alix was ‘much struck with the Pyramids but disappointed with the Sphinx’; and from Russia he had written to say how the pleasure he had taken in going over the Crimean battlefields had been marred by his ‘sadness to think that over 80,000 men perished — for what? For a political object!’ He could write — though, as the Queen might well have expected, he did not write — ‘many pages more on the subject’. It was too late now, however, to complain about the quality of the Prince’s correspondence. But the Queen did feel it her duty to complain about his extravagance.

  She had written to him in Paris:

  You will, I fear, have incurred immense expenses and I don’t think you will find any disposition (except, perhaps, as regards those which were forced upon you at Constantinople) to give you any more money. I hope dear Alix will not spend much on dress in Paris. There is, besides, a very strong feeling against the luxuriousness, extravagance and frivolity of society; and everyone points to my simplicity. I am most anxious that every possible discouragement should be given to what, in these radical days, added to the many scandalous stories current in Society … reminds me of the Aristocracy before the French Revolution … Pray, dear children, let it be your earnest desire not to vie in dear Alix’s dressing with the fine London Ladies, but rather to be as different as possible by great simplicity which is more elegant.

  The Prince admitted:

  Our journey has been rather expensive, but it won’t ruin us; and I am much too proud to ask for money as the government don’t propose it. But I think it would be fair if the Foreign Office were to pay some of the expenses at Constantinople [where, so the Prince told the British Ambassador to Russia, he had been expected to disburse great quantities of jewelled snuff-boxes although no one there took snuff] … You need not be afraid, dear Mama, that Alix
will commit any extravagances with regard to dresses, etc. I have given her two simple ones, as they make them here better than in London; but if there is anything I dislike, it is extravagant or outré dresses — at any rate in my wife. Sad stories have indeed reached our ears from London of ‘scandals in high life’ which is, indeed, much to be deplored; and still more so the way in which (to use a common proverb) they wash their dirty linen in public.

  Deplorable as he professed to find these scandals and their public airing, however, the Prince himself was to be involved in a particularly unsavoury one not long after his return to England.

  8

  The Prince Under Fire

  I hear some speakers openly spoke of a Republic.

  Harriet Mordaunt was an attractive young woman of twenty-one occasionally to be seen at the Prince’s parties at Abergeldie and Marlborough House, ‘so much liked in society,’ according to Lord Carrington, ‘such a pretty, pleasant, nice woman; everybody had a good word for her’. But she had always been excitable and highly strung; and after the birth of her first child, whose threatened blindness she attributed to a ‘fearful disease’, she began to display symptoms of eccentricity verging on madness. Yet when she confessed to her husband, Sir Charles Mordaunt, that she had committed adultery ‘often and in open day’ with Lord Cole, Sir Frederick Johnstone and several other men, including the Prince of Wales, he chose to believe her; and, having found a compromising diary in her locked desk, he filed a petition for divorce, adopting towards all her supposed lovers an attitude of bitter distaste. The Prince of Wales strongly protested his innocence. He could not deny that he had written several letters to Lady Mordaunt, nor that he had paid her various visits; but he did deny that he had ever made love to her and that the letters were other than harmless. And when they were published this was certainly seen to be the case. ‘They were not such as to entitle the writer to a place in the next edition of Walpole’s Royal and Noble Authors,’ The Times commented; but they were in no sense compromising.

  As soon as he learned that he could not avoid being dragged into the case, the Prince told his wife that he would have to appear in court. She loyally stood by him, appearing with him in public, cancelling none of her engagements, making it clear to the world that, whatever others might think of her husband’s behaviour, she would steadfastly support him.

  As soon as he informed her of his predicament, the Queen assured him by telegram that she would support him, too, though she could not forbear advising him to be more circumspect in future. But comforted as he was by his family’s loyalty, by the view of the Lord Chancellor who read the letters he had written to Lady Mordaunt and thought them ‘unexceptionable in every way’, and by the assurances that the judge would protect him in the event of any ‘improper questions’ being put to him, the Prince could not but await the trial in a state of extreme agitation. He wrote apprehensively:

  I shall be subject to a most rigid cross examination by [Mordaunt’s counsel] who will naturally try to turn and twist everything that I say in order to compromise me. On the other hand, if I do not appear, the public may suppose that I shrink from answering these imputations which have been cast upon me. Under either circumstance I am in a very awkward position.

  The Prince — already accused in Reynolds’s Newspaper of being ‘an accomplice in bringing dishonour to the homestead of an English gentleman’ — was called to give evidence before Lord Penzance and a special jury on 23 February 1870. It had been decided not to cite him as a co-respondent, but, a counter-petition having been filed to the effect that Lady Mordaunt — by this time in a lunatic asylum — was, in fact, insane, the Prince had been subpoenaed by her counsel to appear as a witness on her behalf.

  When he appeared in the witness box, he showed none of the nervousness he confessed to feeling. He answered the questions put to him by Lady Mordaunt’s counsel unhesitatingly, and when asked the blunt question, ‘Has there ever been any improper familiarity or criminal act between yourself and Lady Mordaunt?’ he replied loudly and firmly, ‘No never!’ to applause from the spectators in the public gallery. After seven minutes he was allowed to sit down. There was no cross-examination, and Sir Charles’s petition was dismissed on the grounds that since his wife was insane she could not be a party to the suit.

  ‘I trust by what I have said today,’ the Prince wrote to his mother before setting out to dinner with the Prime Minister, ‘that the public at large will be satisfied that the gross imputations which have been so wantonly cast upon me are now cleared up.’

  The public, however, were not satisfied; and they made it only too plain to the Prince that they thoroughly disapproved of his conduct. Reynolds’s Newspaper suggested:

  Even the staunchest supporters of monarchy shake their heads and express anxiety as to whether the Queen’s successor will have the tact and talent to keep royalty upon its legs and out of the gutter. When, therefore, the people of England read one year in their journals of the future King appearing prominently in the divorce court and in another of his being the centre of attraction at a German gaming-table, or public hell, it is not at all surprising that rumours concerning the Queen’s health have occasioned much anxiety and apprehension.

  The Princess of Wales — who looked ‘lovely but very sad’, according to Mrs Gladstone’s niece, on the evening of the Prince’s ordeal in the witness box — was cheered and applauded when she appeared alone. Yet when her husband was with her she was subjected to those jeers, hisses and catcalls that all too often greeted him in the streets and in the theatres. On their appearance at the Olympic Theatre with the Duchess of Manchester and Oliver Montagu a week after the Mordaunt trial, the scattered cheers of a claque placed in the gallery by ‘that ass Newry’, the owner, provoked an almost deafening roar of booing from the surrounding audience. And at a public dinner in the City the toastmaster’s summons to the guests to raise their glasses to the Prince of Wales was greeted with shouts of ‘To the Princess!’ Feelings were still running strongly against the Prince over three months later when he was loudly booed as he drove up Ascot race-course, though, after the last race had been won by a horse in which he was believed to have an interest, he pleased the crowd that cheered him in the royal stand by raising his hat to them and calling out jocularly, ‘You seem to be in a better temper now than you were this morning, damn you!’

  But he could not accept the people’s attitude towards him as lightheartedly as he sometimes liked to pretend. Nor could the government. Nor could the Queen. The temper of the jeering crowds was matched by caricatures in magazines, by articles in the Press, by scurrilous pamphlets and by publications such as Letter from a Freemason by Charles Bradlaugh, the radical atheist, who expressed the hope that the Prince of Wales would ‘never dishonour his country by becoming its King’.

  The Queen, who, at the time of the Mordaunt trial, had confessed to the Lord Chancellor her concern that public knowledge of the Prince’s ‘intimate acquaintance with a young married woman’ could not but ‘damage him in the eyes of the middle and lower classes’, continued to reprimand her son for spending so much of his time in the company of the ‘frivolous, selfish and pleasure-seeking’ rich. The Queen herself, however, was far from blameless for the sad state of the royal family’s reputation. While he was abroad the Prince had countered the Queen’s criticisms of his own conduct by tentatively admonishing her for hers.

  ‘If you sometimes ever came to London from Windsor,’ he had written to her from Egypt, ‘and then drove for an hour in the Park (where there is no noise) and then returned to Windsor, the people would be overjoyed … we live in radical times, and the more the People see the Sovereign the better it is for the People and the Country.’

  The government supported this view. The fund of the monarch’s credit, ‘greatly augmented by good husbandry in the early and middle part of this reign’, was ‘diminishing’, Gladstone privately commented to the Foreign Secretary. ‘And I do not see from whence it is to be replenished as matt
ers now go. To speak in rude and general terms, the Queen is invisible and the Prince of Wales is not respected.’

  Indeed, the very existence of the monarchy appeared to be threatened. ‘I hear some speakers openly spoke of a Republic!’ the Prince wrote apprehensively to his sister, reporting the meeting of a ‘tremendous crowd’ in Hyde Park. ‘The Government really ought to have prevented it … The more the Government allow the lower classes to get the upper hand, the more the democratic feeling of the present day will increase.’

  There was little the government could effectively do, however, to suppress the republican feeling that had grown up in England. They could not very well silence Charles Bradlaugh, whose speeches virulently condemned the royal family; nor could they prevent the formation of numerous republican clubs, more than fifty of which were established all over England, Wales and Scotland after the fall of the French monarchy. They were powerless to interfere with Charles Dilke, one of the Members of Parliament for Chelsea and an outspoken critic of royalty, who suggested that the enormous cost to the nation of the British royal family was ‘chiefly not waste but mischief’ and that even the middle classes would welcome a republic if it were to be ‘free from the political corruption that [hung] about the monarchy’. When, referring to the extravagant number of officials at court, Dilke said in a speech at Manchester that one of them was a court undertaker, a man in his crowded audience shouted out that it was a pity there was not more work for him to do.

  If more work had been found for the Prince to do, royalists almost universally agreed, the monarchy would never have come to such a pass. It was the emphatic opinion of Laurence Oliphant, the writer and traveller whom he had met in Austria, that the Prince’s defects of character were largely due to ‘a position which never allowed him responsibility or forced him into action’; while W.T. Stead, editor of the Review of Reviews, argued that ‘if the Prince of Wales had been saddled with his father’s duties, he might have developed somewhat more of his father’s virtues’.