Edward VII_The Last Victorian King

by Christopher Hibbert

  That month King Kalakaua of Hawaii was in England on an official visit; and the Prince, hoping to persuade the King that the British would be more understanding and helpful friends than the Americans, had been unremitting in his attentions to him. He escorted him to banquets, invited him to luncheon at Marlborough House and to a ball where the Princess opened the royal quadrille with him. He urged his friends to give dinners for him, insisting on his taking precedence over the Crown Prince of Germany, and rejecting the Germans’ protests by observing, ‘Either the brute is a king or else he is an ordinary black nigger, and if he is not a king, why is he here?’ Dean Stanley’s death occurred in the middle of King Kalakaua’s visit, and the Prince rejected the Queen’s request that he should postpone his ball at Marlborough House because of it.

  Nor could the Prince be dissuaded from making such frequent trips abroad that it was sometimes suggested that he spent almost as much time on the Continent as he did at home. To be sure, many of these trips were to family weddings or funerals. In February 1881 he had gone to Berlin to the wedding of his nephew Prince William to Princess Augusta Victoria, a daughter of Duke Frederick of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg. The next month he was in St Petersburg attending the funeral of the Tsar Alexander II and investing his successor, Alexander III, with the Order of the Garter. Back in England for Disraeli’s funeral in April, he was off again in May, this time to Vienna for the wedding of Crown Prince Rudolph and Princess Stephanie of Belgium. In March 1883, after nearly two months in Cannes — preceded, the previous summer, by several weeks at Homburg — the Prince went to Berlin for the silver wedding celebrations of the Crown Prince and Princess, then back to Homburg, then to Baden, then to Homburg again, then to the autumn manoeuvres of the German army which, to the Princess of Wales’s distress, he watched in the uniform of a Colonel of the Fifth Pomeranian Hussars. Altogether he was away on the Continent for over two months that year, though he had to forego his usual visit to Paris because of French anger over the British intervention in Egypt. The next spring, however, he was back at Cannes faced with the melancholy task of bringing home the body of his brother, Prince Leopold, Duke of Albany, the Queen’s ‘dearest son’, who had died of a brain haemorrhage at the Villa Nevada, having fallen down in a club. Three weeks after his brother’s funeral he was in Darmstadt for the wedding of his niece, Princess Victoria of Hesse, to Prince Louis of Battenberg. He remained on the Continent for eight weeks, thankful to escape from an England in gloomy mourning for the Duke of Albany.

  Although she considered that the Prince spent too much time abroad, the Queen continued to deny him the satisfaction of knowing that she fully trusted him when he was at home. She was not blind to his virtues. He was generous and affectionate, she admitted; she was very fond of him and had more than once said so. ‘It gives me such pleasure to hear you speak so lovingly of dear Bertie,’ she had once written to his sister Victoria, ‘for he deserves it. He is such a good kind brother — a very loving son and true friend — and so kind to all below him, for which he is universally loved — which poor Affie [the Duke of Edinburgh] is not at all, either by high or low.’ Similarly, in the autumn of 1887, she praised his good nature in her journal after a visit he had made to Balmoral — ‘a most pleasant visit which I think he enjoyed and said so repeatedly … He is so kind and affectionate that it is a pleasure to be a little quietly together.’

  Yet in dealing with delicate affairs of state his judgement was not to be relied upon, so that whenever he offered to perform some important public duty he was more likely than not to be told that he was disqualified either by his rank, his inexperience, or his lack of the particular natural talents required. In 1870, for instance, his proposal to act as mediator between France and Prussia had elicited the dispiriting response that his position would make it quite impossible for him to undertake the mission even if he were ‘personally fitted for such a very difficult task’. And he certainly was not fitted, in the Queen’s opinion. He was still far too indiscreet and impressionable.

  The Queen was not alone in considering him so. Both Lord Granville and Lord Hartington thought so, too. And in 1885 Charles Hardinge, at that time Third Secretary at the British Embassy in Berlin, was ‘shocked by the indiscreet language of the Prince of Wales to the Russian military attach? in the hearing of a crowd of diplomatists’. Charles Dilke, commenting on his impressionability, and of his being ‘a good deal under the influence of the last person who [talked] to him’, said of him,

  He is very sharp in a way … with more sense and more usage of the modem world than his mother, whose long retirement has cut her off from that world, but less real brain power … It is worth talking seriously to the Prince. One seems to make no impression at the time … for he seems not to listen and to talk incessantly except when he is digesting [his food] … but he does listen all the same, and afterwards, when he is talking to somebody else, brings out everything you have said.

  Dilke himself never found it too difficult to change the Prince’s mind. When, for instance, work began on a Channel tunnel in 1881, the Prince was most enthusiastic and inspected the early workings near Dover. But Dilke persuaded him that the proposed tunnel might endanger the safety of the country in time of war, and the Prince was soon as strongly opposed to the idea as he had previously been in favour of it.

  Denied the Queen’s confidence, the Prince complained in vain about the continuing ban on important information being supplied to him.

  ‘Needless to say’ he was ‘kept in perfect ignorance as to what [was] going on,’ he wrote resentfully when trouble in Afghanistan almost led to war between Russia and England in the spring of 1885. His position was much the same as it had been ten years before when he had been left completely in the dark about the intention to proclaim the Queen Empress of India. He had been certain on that occasion, so he told Disraeli, ‘that in no other country in the world would the next Heir to the Throne have been treated under similar circumstances in such a manner’. The Prime Minister sympathized with the Prince’s attitude. ‘He certainly has great quickness of perception and a happy knack of always saying the right thing,’ Gladstone told Edward Hamilton in April 1885. ‘He would make an excellent sovereign. He is far more fitted for that high place than her present Majesty now is. He would see both sides. He would always be open to argument. He would never domineer or dictate.’ But, as Hamilton said, Gladstone did not like to act behind the Queen’s back in releasing information to him. Francis Knollys told Hamilton that Disraeli had occasionally let the Prince have ‘tit bits of Cabinet secrets’. So as to keep on good terms with both his sovereign and the heir apparent, he had, however, done so without telling the Queen, who subsequently declined to believe that Disraeli had ‘ever made such communications’. And, as Hamilton had to admit, Disraeli ‘could do a good many things connected with the Queen which Mr Gladstone could not do and certainly would not do’.

  So it was not until 1886, when his friend Rosebery became Foreign Secretary, that the Prince received copies of various secret Foreign Office dispatches. Even then, Rosebery acted on his own initiative without the Queen’s specific authority. Indeed, it was not until 1892 that the Prince was at last given the Prince Consort’s gold key which opened the Foreign Office boxes and received from the Prime Minister’s private secretary reports of Cabinet meetings of much the same character as those that were sent to the sovereign.

  But the Queen still refused to allow him to exercise any real authority. Thus, in September 1896, when the Tsar came to Balmoral for important conversations with the Queen and Lord Salisbury, the Prince had been ‘so anxious,’ as he told the Queen’s private secretary, Sir Arthur Bigge, ‘that the arrival should be marked with every possible compliment’ that he had returned from Homburg to supervise personally all the arrangements for the visit. He had stood on the dockside at Leith to welcome the Tsar to Scotland in the pouring rain and had put himself out, as the Queen’s lady-in-waiting, Lady Lytton, said, to be ‘very n
ice to everyone … and the greatest help all the time’. But he had not been invited to join any of the conversations.

  Even his repeated attempts to give advice on diplomatic and other appointments were as likely as ever to be ignored. In 1896, for instance, his nominee for the appointment of British Minister in Stockholm was not only rejected in favour of another man but he was not even told to whom the post had been given. His views on a suitable successor to Sir Edward Malet as Ambassador in Berlin were not so much as sounded, while his proposal that Lord Pembroke should be promoted Lord Chamberlain was followed almost immediately by the appointment to that post of the Earl of Hopetoun.

  He was no more influential with regard to appointments to the Cabinet. He was not the slightest use to the Queen, he unhappily told Francis Knollys when Gladstone was forming his last administration. Everything he said or did was ‘pooh-poohed’; his sisters and brothers were ‘much more listened to’ than he was.

  Yet when he was given work to do, he showed that he could offer more than charm, tact, influence and a wide range of acquaintance. In the first place he was an excellent organizer, as he had shown in a minor way at an appallingly haphazard City ball held in honour of the Sultan of Turkey in 1867.

  It was enormously overcrowded and the authorities were quite ignorant of West End ways [reported Henry Ponsonby, normally no great admirer of the Prince]. At the chief supper Lord Raglan was not included [although he was] the lord-in-waiting representing the Queen with the Sultan. Raglan gave it to one of the aldermen pretty freely afterwards. The Duke of Beaufort tried to get in. They wouldn’t let him in — another row. On the dais they tried [unsuccessfully] to clear a place for dancing. The Duke of Beaufort saw Djemil Bey struggling with a policeman — he remonstrated with an alderman who was giving the order and at last Djemil Bey was allowed in. Immediately afterwards came Apponyi. Beaufort said, ‘You must let him in.’ Alderman wouldn’t, at last did sulkily and said, ‘There you’d better take my place and do duty here.’ ‘If I did,’ said the Duke, ‘my first duty would be to throw you out.’ So you see the amenities were numerous … Of course, the Lord Mayor read an interminable address. The Sultan then spoke … in Turkish, and Musurus [the Turkish Ambassador] read [a speech] in fearful English. If it had not been for the Prince of Wales the civic authorities would have done all sorts of absurdities, but he kept them in order very well indeed.

  The Prince’s tact and organizational abilities were given more scope at the time of the Queen’s Golden Jubilee, when he was allowed to supervise the ceremonial details and the reception of the numerous foreign representatives. His talent for organization was equally appreciated that year, during the preparations for the Colonies and India Exhibition, as his chairmanship of the Executive Council of the Royal College of Music had been in 1883. ‘He makes an excellent chairman,’ Edward Hamilton had noted in his journal then, ‘businesslike, sensible and pleasant’. Also, while still inclined to lose interest in projects which ran into complicated difficulties or public apathy, he was much more conscientious than he had been in the past. As he had been abroad so often in 1884 he managed to attend no more than nineteen of the fifty-one meetings of the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes. But when in December 1892 he was asked to serve on a Royal Commission on the Aged Poor he accepted immediately, abandoned his usual visit to the South of France the next year, and missed few of the Commission’s sessions. He informed his son, without complaint, that he didn’t think he had ever been so busy in his life and impressed James Stuart, a radical fellow-member of the Commission, not only by his regular attendance at the proceedings — during which he doodled Union Jacks with red and blue pencils as he listened to the evidence — but also by asking ‘very good questions’. ‘I thought at first that he had probably been prompted to these,’ Stuart recalled in his Reminiscences, ‘but I soon found out that they were of his own initiative, and that he really had a very considerable grasp of the subjects he dealt with.’

  Yet the opportunities allowed the Prince to demonstrate these capabilities were very few. He rarely made a direct protest to the Queen, although remarks about other heirs, such as Crown Prince Rudolph of Austria’s being treated ‘almost like a boy by his Parents’, were, no doubt, intended to convey allusions to his own predicament. He knew from experience how stubborn his mother could be, and was consequently disinclined to approach her again after an initial rebuff unless he could do so at Balmoral, where she was ‘always in a better way’. Elsewhere her wrathful displeasure was too high a price to pay for offending her. Baron von Eckardstein, the German diplomat, recalled how, owing to the Kaiser’s insistence that they finish a race at Cowes which had been interrupted by the wind suddenly dropping, they had all arrived at Osborne late for dinner. The Kaiser unconcernedly apologized; but the Prince ‘took cover for a moment behind a pillar, wiping the sweat from his forehead before he could summon up courage enough to come forward and make his bow. The Queen only gave him a stiff nod, and he retreated behind the pillar again.’ Everyone was afraid of his mother, the Prince once told Margot Asquith ‘with a charming smile’, everyone ‘with the exception of John Brown’. Henry Ponsonby agreed with him, but added, as the only other exception, Napoleon III’s son, the Prince Imperial. Nevertheless, the Prince did occasionally defy the Queen, as when, for instance, he acted as pall-bearer at Gladstone’s funeral. What advice had he taken? the Queen wanted to know. And what precedent had he followed for doing such a thing? The Prince replied that he had not taken any advice and knew of no precedent.

  Also, towards the end of the Queen’s life, the Prince did sometimes persuade her to change her mind on matters of little importance. She reluctantly allowed him to receive the salute at her birthday parade on the retirement as Commander-in-Chief of her cousin, the Duke of Cambridge, who had formerly represented her. Also, after assuring her son that her decision against it was final, she eventually gave way to his suggestion that the Kaiser — who had delighted him by giving him a commission in the Prussian Dragoon Guards — should be granted an honorary colonelcy in a British regiment since it was well worth while paying a reciprocal compliment to the ‘finest army in the world’. But when, two years later, the Prince was so incensed by the Kaiser’s congratulatory telegram to President Kruger on the failure of Dr Jameson’s raid into the Transvaal that he proposed ‘a good snubbing’, she rebuked him sternly. ‘Those sharp, cutting answers and remarks only irritate and do harm, which one is sorry for,’ the Prince was informed. ‘Passion should be carefully guarded against. [The Kaiser’s] faults come from impulsiveness, as well as conceit. Calmness and firmness are the most powerful weapons in such cases.’

  And calmness and firmness, she made it clear, were not to be expected of the Prince.

  11

  ‘Other Ladies’

  Suddenly I saw him looking at me in a way all women understand.

  If the relationship between the Queen and the Prince of Wales continued to be imperfect, all differences between her and the Princess were now forgotten. They had come close together at the time of the Prince’s illness; and, after the death of Princess Alice, the Prince’s favourite sister, when ‘dear Alix’ proved to be a ‘real devoted sympathizing daughter’ to the Queen, they remained deeply attached to each other up till the day the Queen herself died.

  The Princess was much affected by her mother-in-law’s death. She was the only woman seen to be in tears at the private funeral service at Frogmore. And afterwards she told Lady Downe how sad and strange Windsor Castle seemed without her: ‘I feel as if she were only gone abroad and I keeping house for her in her absence.’

  The relationship between the Princess and her husband was more difficult to understand. Lady Antrim, who knew her well, thought that if she had loved him as much as he loved her he would have been more faithful to her. No one doubted, though, that she did love him. ‘I miss my little Man terribly,’ she told Lady Downe when he was abroad after the Mordaunt divorce case; and it was obvious t
hat, although her children came first in her life, she did miss him terribly. It was obvious, too, that despite his affairs and many intimate female friendships, he loved her in return. ‘After all,’ she said of him when he was dead, ‘he always loved me the best.’

  He seems, all the same, never to have found her particularly attractive sexually. Perhaps no man did so, not even Oliver Montagu, for she was evidently not in the least a sensual woman. She inspired admiration, respect, and, usually, affection in almost everyone who knew her, but never the passion aroused by those whom Lord Carrington referred to as ‘the Prince’s other ladies’. ‘Every time one sees her,’ wrote Edward Hamilton soon after her thirty-ninth birthday, ‘one is more struck by her refined beauty and her extraordinarily youthful appearance.’ Such comments were commonplace. So were tributes to her still ‘lovely figure’ and ‘straight back’, ‘her fresh red lips which were never painted and always moist’, her gaiety, her sense of fun and of the ridiculous. Charming stories were told of her suddenly exploding with irresistible laughter as, for instance, she did in St Petersburg when the Prince entered the Throne Room of the Anitchkoff Palace followed by five members of his staff, solemnly bearing on velvet cushions the insignia for the Tsar’s installation as a Knight of the Garter and looking ‘exactly like a row of wet-nurses carrying babies’. There was also that well-remembered occasion when, having asked Tennyson to read aloud the Ode of Welcome which he had written for her wedding, she could not contain her laughter, which proved so infectious that soon Tennyson, too, was laughing helplessly and dropped the book on the floor. Yet, even when romping about at Sandringham, making rather childish jokes, squirting her son with a soda-water syphon, or trying on everyone else’s shoes on the dance floor at Chatsworth, she never lost her poise and dignity. As Lady Frederick Cavendish said, she could gather up her stateliness at any moment.