Edward VII_The Last Victorian King

by Christopher Hibbert

  Princess Alexandra, having misheard her servant’s message and consequently expecting a visit from Lady Ailesbury, was very much surprised to see Lady Aylesford enter the room and profoundly shocked to hear Lord Randolph Churchill tell her that he was ‘determined by every means in his power to prevent the case coming before the public and that he had those means at his disposal’ in the shape of letters of the ‘most compromising character’. These letters, if published, would ensure that the Prince ‘would never sit on the throne of England’.

  Distressed beyond measure by this painful interview, Princess Alexandra sent for Sir William Knollys; but while she was telling him what had happened, her cousin, the Duchess of Teck, called to see her. She could not very well refuse to admit her, nor could she give the real reason for her unmistakable agitation. So she told the Duchess that her deafness had just led her to receive the notorious Lady Aylesford, and what on earth ought she to do to rectify her mistake?

  ‘Order your carriage at once,’ the Duchess advised; ‘go straight to the Queen and tell her exactly what has happened. She will understand and entirely excuse you from any indiscretion. It will be in the Court Circular that you were with the Queen today and any comment will be silenced.’

  Knollys agreed that this was the best course to follow; so the Princess left immediately to see the Queen, who — as she had been at the time of the Mordaunt case — was understanding and sympathetic, regretting that Alix’s ‘dear name’ should ever ‘have been mixed up with such people’ and telegraphing to India to assure the Prince of Wales that she had perfect confidence in his innocence.

  Innocent though the Prince may have been, ‘any letter from a person in high position, written in a strain of undue familiarity and containing many foolish and somewhat stupid expressions, must, when displayed to the public,’ as the Lord Chancellor wrote to Lord Hartington, ‘be injurious and lowering to the writer’. The Queen, therefore, regretted that ‘such a correspondence harmless as it [was] should be in existence’. But she did not think that the Prince need delay his homecoming — as he had offered to do — since it was to be hoped that there was no prospect ‘of a public scandal into which his name could be dragged by these villains’.

  The prospect of a public scandal nonetheless continued to worry the Prince, who, outraged by Lord Randolph Churchill’s unforgivable approach to the Princess, had sent Lord Charles Beresford ahead of him to England with instructions to make arrangements for a duel with pistols between the Prince and Churchill somewhere on the north coast of France. Churchill briefly, dismissively and insultingly replied that the idea of a duel between himself and the Prince of Wales was quite ridiculous and that the Prince was obviously aware of this when he issued the challenge.

  Thus the matter stood when the Prince arrived home on 11 May 1876 to face rumours, which had reached the Queen’s ears, that it was Lady Aylesford the Prince admired ‘as Ld A. was too gt a fool to be really agreeable to the P. of W.’ Before his arrival the Prince had written to the Princess — ‘a very dear letter from my Bertie’, as she described it — asking her to come aboard the Serapis ‘first and alone’, leaving the rest of the family at Portsmouth where a special train would be waiting to take them all back to London. After driving home in an open carriage from the station to Marlborough House, the Prince and Princess went out again that same evening to see a Verdi opera at Covent Garden. The Queen had advised them not to do so; but as the Prince told her, though he himself would ‘infinitely’ have preferred to be alone with his wife on their first evening together again, he believed it would be better, in view of all the gossip in society about the Aylesford scandal, to show themselves in public as a happy, united family. The decision was justified. The audience stood up to clap them not only before the performance began, but also at the beginning of every act and after the final curtain. ‘The shouts, the cheers, the “bravos” were as vociferous and long-continued as they were hearty and spontaneous,’ The Times reported. ‘The whole assembly rose; and it seemed as if the demonstrations of welcome would never cease. The Prince bowed and bowed repeatedly, till he must have been fatigued with bowing; but the cheering went on.’

  The next day the Prince was told that Lord Aylesford had decided not to divorce his wife after all. He later separated from her privately, while Lady Blandford also obtained a deed of separation from her husband. The Prince was thus saved any further embarrassment. He could not, however, bring himself to forgive Lord Randolph Churchill for his behaviour during the sad affair. And Churchill, for his part, refused to make an acceptable apology to the Prince. He wrote to the Princess ‘unreservedly to offer’ his ‘most humble and sincere apologies’ if it were felt that he had been ‘guilty of the slightest disrespect … by approaching her on so painful a subject’. But this, he added, was ‘the only apology’ which circumstances warranted his offering.

  Churchill, accompanied by his wife, left for a tour of the United States in July, sending beforehand a curt letter of apology which the Prince did not deign to acknowledge. And it was not until pressed to do so by the Queen and the Prime Minister that the Prince agreed to accept a more humble letter of apology drafted by the Lord Chancellor. Even then he declined to do more than send in reply a formal acknowledgement, since Churchill — who, with ostentatious irony, had signed the letter at Saratoga — had added a postscript to the effect that it was only ‘as a gentleman’ that he had been obliged to accept the Lord Chancellor’s wording of the document.

  The Prince let it be known that he would never again set foot in any house that offered hospitality to Lord and Lady Randolph Churchill; that he would not meet anyone who chose to accept invitations from them; and that, should he be forced into contact with him at court, he would merely bow to him without speaking. People who continued to entertain him in defiance of the Prince’s wishes were severely reprimanded.

  Churchill’s father, the Duke of Marlborough, thought it advisable to withdraw his family from English life altogether; and when Disraeli suggested that he might like to go to Ireland as Viceroy, the Duke agreed to accept the appointment although the salary covered only half the expenses and he had to sell some of the contents of Blenheim to meet them.

  Sorry for the Duke but implacable in his attitude towards Lord Randolph, the Prince refused to have anything to do with him for several years. In the summer of 1880 Sir Stafford Northcote, a prominent member of the Conservative Opposition, asked Lord Beaconsfield, as Benjamin Disraeli had by then become, ‘whether Randolph Churchill was forgiven yet in high quarters’. Beaconsfield ‘said he was all right so far as the Queen was concerned,’ Northcote recorded in his diary,

  but that the Prince of Wales had not yet made it up with him; which Lord Beaconsfield thought very unfair, as Randolph [had made] an apology … under the full impression that the matter was to end there, but the Prince having got the apology kept up the grievance. But nothing, said the Chief, will help Randolph into favour again so much as success in Parliament. The Prince is always taken by success.

  So it was not until 1883, when Lord Randolph had established himself as one of the dominant figures in the Conservative party, that the feud was settled. On 11 March that year the Prince and Princess went to dine with the Churchills at their London house; and their two little boys, Winston, aged eight, and John, aged three, were brought down before dinner to be given a present by the Prince. Three days later Lady Randolph attended a drawing-room given by the Queen; and in March 1884 it was announced that ‘a full and formal reconciliation’ had been effected between the Prince and Lord Randolph at a dinner given by Sir Henry James.

  After the excitement of India, and the gratifying sense he had had there of doing something both pleasurable and worth while, the Prince found it more frustrating than ever on his return home to be once more relegated to performing those public engagements at schools and hospitals, exhibitions and dinners, which might just as well have been carried out by any other person in the public eye or even by some local di
gnitary. Dutifully he held levees, attended drawing-rooms and state concerts; and occasionally he went to the House of Lords. Once he spoke briefly in the Lords in favour of a bill to legalize marriage with a deceased wife’s sister — a measure which appeared to him all the more desirable since it would enable princess Beatrice to marry the Grand Duke of Hesse, whose wife, their sister Princess Alice, had died of diphtheria in December 1878. And another day he spoke at rather greater length, and with considerably more force, of the appalling conditions which he had witnessed in the slums of St Pancras, comparing them, rather inappropriately it was considered in some quarters, with the housing provided for his own work-people at Sandringham.

  The expedition to St Pancras and other London slums had been undertaken at the suggestion of Lord Carrington, a fellow-member of a Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes. He, Carrington and the Chief Medical Officer of Health in the Local Government Board, all of them dressed in workmen’s clothes, had left Carrington’s house in a four-wheeler escorted by a police cab. The Prince had wandered about the narrow streets, dismayed and sickened by the appalling poverty, squalor and misery to which he was introduced, the background to so many thousands of Londoners’ lives. He found a shivering, half-starved woman with three ragged, torpid children lying on a heap of rags in a room bereft of furniture. Asked by her landlord where her fourth child was, she replied, ‘I don’t know. It went down into the court some days ago and I haven’t seen it since.’ Distressed by her plight, the Prince took a handful of gold coins from his pocket and would have handed them over to her had not Carrington and the doctor warned him that such a display of wealth might lead to his being attacked by the woman’s neighbours.

  On their way back to Marlborough House, they were joined by one of the doctor’s subordinate medical officers. Not recognizing the Prince, and supposing him to be some rich man out for a morning’s slumming, and evidently irritated by his reflective silence and aloof demeanour, he slapped him on the back with some such familiar jocularity as ‘What do you think of that, old Buck!’ The Prince ‘kept his temper and behaved very well’, Carrington recorded. ‘We visited some very bad places in Holborn and Clerkenwell, but we got him back safe and sound to Marlborough House in time for luncheon.’

  Although the Prince was moved by this experience to speak out in favour of housing reform, his friend Lord Hartington, who was appointed Secretary of State for War in 1882, found it difficult to persuade the Prince that army reform was equally urgent. Devoted to the Duke of Cambridge, to whom all change was for the worse, the Prince found it impossible to sympathize with the reformist zeal of the Quartermaster-General, Sir Garnet Wolseley, a clever, ambitious officer who had served with distinction in China and Ashanti, had fallen foul of the Prince’s friend, Sir Bartle Frere, in South Africa, and was now the Duke of Cambridge’s main bugbear in London. The Prince, to whom loyalty to his friends was more a way of life than a virtue, owed his appointment as Colonel-in-Chief of the Household Cavalry to the Duke of Cambridge, who in May 1880 had at long last overcome the Queen’s objection to the fulfilment of one of the Prince’s principal ambitions. And the Prince, as he often protested, could scarcely be expected to do anything to upset a dear old uncle who had always been so kind to him. The Duke of Cambridge, however, was quite unable to persuade the Queen or the government to allow the Prince to go out to Egypt in 1882 to serve with the British army which had been sent there to suppress a nationalist revolt. Exasperated by taunts that his passion for uniforms was as excessive as his dread of cannon, and that, though a field marshal, his experience of war began and ended with the Battle of Flowers at Cannes, the Prince did all he could to obtain permission to go out to join the forces in Egypt. But the Cabinet was adamant and so was the Queen, who ‘conclusively’ decided that it was necessary to ask him ‘to abandon the idea’. So the Prince had to be content with presiding at various dinners in honour of the generals and admirals who had been allowed to fight, and with opening an exhibition of war photographs in Bond Street and a panorama of the battle of Tel-el-Kebir.

  Like his efforts to be present on that battlefield, his subsequent attempts to have his old friend Valentine Baker appointed Commander in-Chief of the new Egyptian army met with implacable opposition from the Cabinet, which followed the British public in supposing that this was an entirely inappropriate post for an officer who, seven years before, had been sentenced to twelve months’ imprisonment and dismissed from the army for his indecent activities in a railway carriage.

  The disagreement with the Queen over the Prince’s going out to Egypt was but one of several differences he had recently had with her. There had been trouble over his being required to relinquish his appointment as Colonel-in-Chief of the Rifle Brigade to his brother, the Duke of Connaught, when being made Colonel-in-Chief of the Household Cavalry. The Queen had asked him to say nothing about this, as she wanted to give the good news to Arthur herself; but the prince had forestalled her by making an arrangement with his brother so that he could retain the right to wear the black buttons of the Rifle Brigade, which no true rifleman ever willingly surrenders. The Queen had been cross about this arrangement’s being made without her knowledge; and the Prince had been equally cross when he had replied to her letter of remonstrance: ‘I do not think that I am prone to “let the cat out of the bag” as a rule, or to betray confidences; but I own it is often with great regret that I either learn first from others or see in the newspapers, hints or facts stated with regard to members of our Family.’

  The trouble was that the Queen continued to believe that he was, in fact, still far too prone to let the cat out of the bag. She had been warned by Disraeli that the Prince ought not to see confidential papers as he was still far too inclined to ‘let them out and talk to his friends about them’. So that when war with Russia had appeared imminent in 1877, she had seen to it that he was shown no secret papers, though he had been at that time as strongly anti-Russian as herself, and though a key to the Cabinet boxes had been made available to Prince Leopold. He complained, without avail, to Lord Granville about the Queen’s ban and further annoyed her by frequently inviting to Marlborough House and Sandringham Granville’s Undersecretary of State, Sir Charles Dilke, whose republican views had been modified since meeting the Prince in 1880 at a dinner at Lord Fife’s where, so Dilke said, ‘the Prince laid himself out to be pleasant, and talked to me nearly all the evening — chiefly about the Greek question and French politics’, his knowledge of which, Dilke thought, suffered from believing everything he read in the Figaro.

  Irritated as she was by the Prince’s familiarity with Dilke — who, she felt sure, was being plied with hospitality in return for information he ought not to divulge — the Queen had been even more exasperated to learn that, after the defeat of the Conservatives at the General Election of March 1880 and her consequent loss of Disraeli, her son had taken it upon himself to consult his friend, Lord Hartington. The Prince, so he had informed his mother through Henry Ponsonby, had more than one ‘long conversation’ with Hartington, who had been ‘more anxious than ever that the Queen should send for Mr Gladstone to form a government instead of sending for Lord Granville or himself … Far better that she should take the initiative than that it should be forced on her.’

  Infuriated that her son should presume to tell her how to act and, in particular, to advise her to appoint Gladstone — which, in the end, she had been obliged to do — the Queen had reminded him ‘very shortly’ what the constitutional position was. It was, in fact, ‘quite clear’: The Prince of Wales ‘has no right to meddle and never has done so before. Lord Hartington must be told … that the Queen cannot allow any private and intimate communications to go on between them, or all confidence will be impossible.’

  Even this rebuff was less severe than that delivered to the Prince in 1884 when he wrote to thank the Queen for an advance copy of her More Leaves from a Journal of Our Life in the Highlands, adding tactlessly that he entertained grave doubt
s as to the propriety of her exposing her private life to the world, meaning, in particular, her association with the tiresome gillie, John Brown. She would not agree, he knew, but he held ‘very strong views on the subject’, and urged her to restrict the book to private circulation. The Queen passed the letter on to her secretary with a cross note to the effect that she thought it ‘very strange that objections shd come from that quarter where grt strictness of conduct [was] not generally much cared for [and where there was so] much talk and want of reticence’. As for her son’s advice that she should restrict the book to private circulation, to do so would be to limit the readership to members of society, who were just the very people least qualified to appreciate it. Changing tack, the Prince again wrote to protest that, although he was well aware that the main purpose of the book was to describe her life in the Highlands, it might create surprise that the name of her eldest son never occurred in it.

  To this the Queen riposted by asking if he had actually read the volume in question or asked his ‘so-called friends’ to do so for him. If he had been kind enough to read it himself, he would have found that his name was mentioned on pages 1, 5, 8, 331 and 378. It would have been mentioned more often, the Queen did not forbear to add, if he had come to Balmoral more frequently.

  But then, as she complained on other occasions, he was far too preoccupied with the pleasures of his social round to spare much time for that. Even when her dear friend Dean Stanley died, still mourning the loss, five years before, of his beloved wife, Lady Augusta, and arrangements were made to bury him in Westminster Abbey, the Prince felt obliged to point out that on the date proposed for the funeral there was racing at Goodwood and that it would be better, therefore, if the ceremony were held a day earlier. The Queen was deeply shocked that such a consideration should have interfered with the arrangements for the funeral of a man who had earned an ‘immortal name for himself’, who was ‘more than any Bishop or Archbishop’, who had shown himself worthy both of the Prince’s high regard and of his deep affection. Nor was this the only reprimand which the Queen felt compelled to administer at the time of Dean Stanley’s death.