Edward VII_The Last Victorian King

by Christopher Hibbert

  ‘It is enough to make the great Duke of Wellington rise from his tomb,’ the Prince protested to the Duke of Cambridge, ‘and point his finger of scorn at the Horse Guards … The conduct of the A[djutant] G[eneral] is inexplicable but he cannot have the interests of the Army at heart, acting in the way he has. I always knew he was a born soldier — and equally imagined he was a gentleman, but from henceforth I can never look upon him in the latter category.’

  An attempt by the Prince and his friends to avoid a public scandal by a private inquiry at the Guards Club also failed. A civil action was, therefore, inevitable.

  Waiting for it to be brought, the Prince grew more and more anxious and irritable, deciding not to go to France that year, ‘not knowing what might turn up’, refusing to go to Windsor unless his mother promised not to talk about baccarat, constantly talking to his friends about the impending action and asking for their advice as to what he ought to do, if anything, in the meantime. Both Lord Hartington, a recognized arbiter of social questions, and Francis Knollys were against any attempt at compromise since ‘a great number of people [would] think and say that it [had] been arranged to screen the Prince of Wales’. Knollys gave it as their opinion, therefore, that it was in the Prince’s interest that the action ‘should be allowed to take its course’. The Queen also thought that the action ought to go ahead as, although it was ‘a sad thing [that] Bertie [was] dragged into it’, people thought good might come of it and it would be a ‘shock to Society and to gambling’.

  So the Prince could do nothing but await the trial, which he did in extreme trepidation, condemning the conduct of Gordon Cumming, who had been reported as having been seen playing baccarat in France, as ‘simply scandalous throughout’. Gordon Cumming’s version of the affair ‘was false from beginning to end’. He did not have ‘a leg to stand on and his protestations of innocence were useless’. The Prince’s certainty about the man’s guilt did not, however, make it any easier for him to face the prospect of the forthcoming trial with equanimity. The Princess — who loyally castigated Gordon Cumming as ‘a brute’, a ‘vile snob’ and ‘a worthless creature’ whom she had always thoroughly disliked and who was now behaving ‘too abominably’ — said that her husband was making himself ‘quite ill’ with worry.

  This was obvious when he appeared at last in court at the beginning of June looking tired and tense and increasingly nervous as the proceedings dragged on. He listened with evident anxiety as Sir Edward Clarke, representing Gordon Cumming, skilfully made it appear not only that his client had been unjustly condemned on bad evidence but that he was also the victim of a conspiracy to save the Prince from exposure in a public scandal. And the Prince looked dismayed as Sir Edward also maintained that he had deliberately ignored army regulations which, applying to him as a field marshal as they did to every other officer, required all cases of alleged dishonourable conduct to be submitted to the accused’s superior officer.

  In contrast to Gordon Cumming, who responded to all the questions asked him in a firm, clear voice, the Prince, when it came to his turn, gave his answers in so low a tone that only a few of them could be heard. This, as the editor of the Daily News said, caused an unfavourable impression.

  There had been a murmur of disapproval in court when Gordon Cumming ostentatiously turned his back on the Prince as he took his place in the box. But the spectators generally were on Gordon Cumming’s side; and when, on the seventh day of the trial — taking their cue from a four-hour summing up by the Lord Chief Justice in the defendants’ favour — the jury brought in a verdict against him, there was an angry outburst of prolonged hissing.

  The demonstrations in court were an accurate reflection of the feelings of the people outside, many of whom wrote to the Gordon Cumming family to express their sympathy with them. The Prince was loudly booed that month at Ascot; and the attacks upon him in the Press were quite as vituperative as they had been at the time of the Mordaunt divorce case. According to the Review of Reviews, the various country gentlemen whom the editor interviewed gave it as their unanimous opinion that the Prince ought to be condemned as ‘a wastrel and whoremonger’ as well as a gambler, it being not so much baccarat as ‘the kind of life of which this was an illustration that was the cause of their disgust’.

  The Queen well understood this feeling. It was not just ‘this special case — though his signing the paper was wrong (and turns out to have been contrary to military regulations),’ she told her eldest daughter, ‘but the light which has been thrown on his habits which alarms and shocks people so much, for the example is so bad … The monarchy almost is in danger if he is lowered and despised.’ American as well as English newspapers agreed with her. ‘The scandal cannot fail to add,’ the New York Times advised its readers, ‘to the growing conviction that “royalty” is a burden to the British taxpayer for which he fails to receive any equivalent.’ The Times ended a long article on the case on 10 June:

  We profoundly regret that the Prince should have been in any way mixed up, not only in the case, but in the social circumstances which prepared the way for it. We make no comment upon his conduct towards Sir William Gordon Cumming. He believed Sir William had cheated; he wished to save him; he wished to avoid scandal; and he asked him to sign the paper. This may have been, and probably was, a breach of military rule; but with that the public at large does not concern itself. What does concern and indeed distress the public is the discovery that the Prince should have been at the baccarat table; that the game was apparently played to please him; that it was played with his counters [a set given him by Reuben Sassoon, marked from 5s. to £10, engraved with the Prince of Wales’s feathers and] specially taken down for the purpose; that his ‘set’ are a gambling, a baccarat-playing set… Sir William Gordon-Cumming was made to sign a declaration that ‘he would never touch a card again’. We almost wish, for the sake of English society in general, that we could learn that the result of this most unhappy case had been that the Prince of Wales had signed a similar declaration.

  In an effort to allay these adverse comments, the government was approached with the suggestion that ‘some public utterance in defence or apology for the Prince should be made’. But Lord Salisbury, who had succeeded Gladstone as Prime Minister, expressed the opinion ‘very earnestly’ that it was not right that any minister of the Crown should make any such pronouncement.

  We may be examined as to all matters that fall within the scope of our duties [Salisbury wrote to Hartington on 16 June] but the private morals of the Prince of Wales do not come within that scope; and we ought not to be questioned about them. If we are questioned we should refuse to discuss them. There is a further question in which I understand you have interested yourself. Whether the Prince of Wales himself should make any such pronouncement … I confess if I had the advising of him (which I am not likely to have) I should recommend him to sit still, and avoid baccarat for six months: and at the end of that time write a letter to some indiscreet person (who would publish it) saying that at the time of the Cumming case there had been a great deal of misunderstanding as to his views: but the circumstances of that case had so convinced him of the evil that was liable to be caused by that game, that since that time he had forbidden it to be played in his presence. Such a declaration — referring to what he had done would suffice to deodorize him of all the unpleasant aroma which this case has left upon him and his surroundings: but nothing else would be sufficient.

  The Queen suggested that an open letter, expressing the Prince’s disapproval of gambling, might be written to the Archbishop of Canterbury. But the Prime Minister did not agree with this suggestion either. And when approached again by Lord Hartington on the Prince’s behalf, he clung to his opinion that ‘anything’ in the nature of a public statement or correspondence would not be judicious. So Francis Knollys, who had just been about to leave Marlborough House to catch the 12.29 train to Chenies to see the Archbishop, stayed in London. And two months later the Prince wrote a private letter t
o the Archbishop expressing a rather disingenuous ‘horror of gambling’, gambling being a term which, as he had already made clear in conversation with him, he did not apply to a little harmless flutter by those who could afford to lose their stakes, on either cards or horse-racing, ‘a manly sport’ which was ‘popular with Englishmen of all classes’.

  Condemning the Press which had been ‘very severe and cruel, because,’ as he put it to his sister Victoria, ‘they know I cannot defend myself’, the Prince was equally displeased with the government for not protecting him from Sir Edward Clarke’s attacks as Gladstone had protected him during the Mordaunt case by taking, as Knollys put it, ‘all the indirect means in his power (and successfully) to prevent anything being brought out in the course of the trial that could be injurious to the Prince and the crown’. The Prince was also still angry with Sir William Gordon Cumming, a ‘damned blackguard’ who crowned his infamy, in the Prince’s eyes, by marrying, on the very day after the trial, ‘an American young lady, Miss Garner (sister to Mme de Breteuil), with money!’ The Prince hoped he would never have to see the man again; and, according to Gordon Cumming’s daughter, ‘said that anyone who spoke to him would never be asked to Marlborough House again, also no Army or Navy Officer was to accept invitations to shoot at [Gordon Cumming’s country estates] Altyre or Gordonstoun’. When he went down to Eastbourne that summer the Prince was seen to be in a ‘very bad temper’.

  So was Lord Charles Beresford. In his cabin aboard the Undaunted, letters of complaint had reached him from his wife, who, still cold-shouldered by the Prince, had been outraged to hear that the Princess had publicly received Lady Brooke at Marlborough House. The continuing humiliation was too much for her, Lady Charles announced to her husband: she would sell her house in London and go to live on the Continent.

  Angrier than ever now with the Prince, Lord Charles sat down on 12 July to write a letter to him in which he told him bluntly:

  For some months I have received letters, not only from Lady Charles but from many of my friends, that you have systematically ranged yourself on the side of the other person against my wife … [in such an] ostentatious way … that some people believe [my wife] is entirely [in the] wrong … I have no intention of allowing my wife to suffer for any faults I may have committed in days gone by. Much less have I any intention of allowing any woman to wreak her vengeance on my wife because I would not accede to her entreaties to return to a friendship I repudiated.

  I consider that from the beginning by your unasked interference and subsequent action you have deliberately used your high position to insult a humbler by doing all you can to elevate the person with whom she had a quarrel… The days of duelling are past, but there is a more just way of getting right done … and that is publicity … The first opportunity that occurs to me I shall give my opinion publicly of Y.R.H. and state that you have behaved like a blackguard and a coward, and that I am prepared to prove my words.

  Lord Charles did not send this letter direct to the Prince of Wales, but to Lady Charles, with instructions to show it to the Prime Minister first with a warning of the ‘grave events’ now likely to follow unless a ‘public apology’ were forthcoming. Lady Charles accordingly sent her husband’s letter, together with her own detailed account of the whole business, to Lord Salisbury, who was warned not only that ‘the highest legal authority’ had advised her husband that he was in a position to force ‘damning’ publicity upon the Prince of Wales, but also that Lady Charles’s sister, Mrs Gerald Paget, had prepared for publication a pamphlet which had ‘already been shown, as an interesting episode in the Prince of Wales’s mode of life, to several people who want to make use of the story at the next General Election for purposes of their own’.

  Unwillingly dragged once again into the Prince of Wales’s affairs, Lord Salisbury nevertheless at once accepted the fact that he must try to limit the reverberations of the quarrel. He urged Lady Charles not to send on her husband’s letter to the Prince; and he wrote himself to Lord Charles to point out that such a letter would, ‘if published’, do the sender ‘endless harm’, since, ‘according to our social laws’, no gentleman must ever be the means of bringing any lady ‘into disgrace because she yielded’ to him. Furthermore, Lord Salisbury continued,

  I do not think the letter was fair to H.R.H. So very grave a charge as that of insulting your wife should — if made at all — have been expressed in clear detail, so that H.R.H. might either show you that you were mistaken as to some matter of fact or apologise if his action had been misunderstood … Of course, if he actually insulted Lady Charles, there is nothing to be said in his defence; but I gather that you complain of a sudden cessation of acquaintance … [after the] stormy interview you had with him, in which your language to say the least was very plain, I quite understand why the Prince has fought shy of any meeting with Lady Charles. If any person had addressed you in similar language I think you would from that time forth have abstained from speaking to the third person or the third person’s wife. If I may give advice … the acquaintance of no illustrious person is necessary to one’s happiness … Your position in society is in your profession and not affected by the friendship of anyone however highly placed … Ill-considered publicity would be of no possible service to Lady Charles: it would do you most serious harm… I strongly advise you to … do nothing.

  Thus warned of the harm he might do himself, and of his obligation to protect Lady Brooke, Lord Charles agreed that his letter should not be sent to the Prince, and that he would write instead a less inflammatory one, not involving Lady Brooke and giving the Prince an opportunity to apologize. But although this might have settled the matter quietly, Lord Salisbury could not prevent the circulation that autumn of Mrs Gerald Paget’s type-written pamphlet which, under the title Lady River, gave details of Lady Brooke’s intimacy with the Prince and provided a copy of her letter to Lord Charles which had precipitated the whole unpleasant affair.

  Copies of this pamphlet were passed excitedly from hand to hand. According to the magazine Truth, it caused so much interest that hostesses who managed to get hold of a copy had but to announce a reading from it to find their drawing-rooms more crowded than if a dozen prima-donnas were on the bill of fare. The Duchess of Manchester was evidently one of these hostesses; and the Prince was so offended that he refused to talk to her for more than ten years, being reconciled only when the Duchess’s son, on meeting him by chance in Portman Square after his accession, knelt down, kissed his hand and afterwards invited him to meet the Duchess again at dinner.

  Warned by her brother-in-law, Lord Marcus, and others, that the pamphlet would do much more harm to her than to Lady Brooke, Lady Charles sent a telegram to her husband asking him to come back to protect her. Lord Charles had already warned Lord Salisbury that it might be imperative for him to come home for this purpose as he was ‘determined not to allow Lady Charles to be annoyed and made unhappy in his absence by anyone no matter how high their position’. So he packed his bags and arrived home just before Christmas to find his wife demanding that Lady Brooke should withdraw from London for at least a year and his brother complaining of the disgrace that was being brought upon the family name. Lord Marcus asked:

  Can anything be more terrible or damning to you, to your family and to your children, than this pamphlet being circulated high and low by your wife and your sister-in-law? … You expressed no horror at the letter being published — but you … utter threats about what you intend to do against a man who has been the greatest friend to you in the world, because people had written and told you that he says and does things which I can swear he never has said or done.

  Undeterred, Lord Charles demanded an apology from the Prince, failing which he would ‘no longer intervene to prevent these matters becoming public’.

  ‘I am at a loss to understand how Lady Charles can imagine that I have in any way slighted or ignored her,’ the Prince protested. ‘Lady Charles was invited to the garden party at Marlborough Ho
use this last summer … and … I have made a point on all occasions of shaking hands with her, or of bowing to her, as the opportunity presented.’

  The reply to this was sharp and short: ‘I cannot accept your Royal Highness’s letter as in any way an answer to my demand, Your Royal Highness’s behaviour to Lady Charles having been a matter of common talk for the two years that I have been away from England.’

  Having delivered himself of this retort, Lord Charles then announced that he would call a Press conference at his house, and that, after giving details of the Prince’s private life, he would resign his commission and go to live in France with his wife.

  The Prime Minister, who had previously been told that Lady Brooke was willing to withdraw from court for a time but that the Prince would not allow anyone to approach her on the subject, was now informed that a temporary withdrawal had after all been approved. He was, therefore, able to draft letters which both the Prince and Beresford felt able to accept, Beresford merely placing on record that ‘circumstances had occurred which led Lady Charles Beresford and her friends to believe it was [His] Royal Highness’s intention publicly to wound her feelings’; the Prince putting his signature to a denial that he ‘had ever had any such intention’, and to a regret that ‘she should have been led to conceive an erroneous impression upon the point’.