Edward VII: The Last Victorian King

by Christopher Hibbert

  lively, quick and sharp when his mind [was] set on anything, which [was] seldom … But usually his intellect [was] of no more use than a pistol packed in the bottom of a trunk if one were attacked in the robber-infested Apennines… You would hardly believe it, but whilst he behaved so well and showed such tact under the restraint imposed by society, he tormented his new valet more than ever in every possible way, pouring wax on his livery, throwing water on his linen, rapping him on the nose, tearing his ties, and other gentilesses.

  The Queen was equally exasperated. ‘Poor Bertie! He vexes us much,’ she had written to her daughter before the visit. ‘There is not a particle of reflection, or even attention to anything but dress! Not the slightest interest to learn, on the contrary, il se bouche les oreilles, the moment anything of interest is being talked of.’ Now that he had arrived home he spoke endlessly about his visit, but it was all about parties and theatres and ‘what people said etc. Of the finer works of art etc., he [said] nothing, unless asked.’

  To encourage his appreciation of art and to acquire ‘knowledge and information’, the Prince was sent to Rome immediately on his return from Berlin. Colonel Bruce was once more in charge of the party and was provided by the Prince Consort with a detailed itinerary together with the most exact instructions as to the Prince’s behaviour and course of study. At the same time Bruce was instructed by the Queen to be present whenever the Prince talked to any ‘foreigner or stranger’. It was ‘indispensable that His Royal Highness should receive no foreigner or stranger alone, so that no report of pretended conversations with such persons could be circulated without immediate refutation.’

  Colonel Bruce’s duties were to be made less onerous by the presence in the party of his wife as well as Mr and Mrs Tarver, an equerry and a doctor; and in Rome he was also to be provided with the services of an Italian tutor, of Joseph Barclay Pentland as archaeological guide, and, as artistic adviser, John Gibson, the sculptor, who had lived in the city for several years and whose statue of Queen Victoria had recently been completed for the Palace of Westminster.

  The travellers sailed from Dover to Ostend on 10 January 1859 and, after a visit to King Leopold at Laeken, made a sightseeing tour of various German cities before crossing the Brenner Pass on their way to Verona and thence to Rome where, on 4 February, their luggage was unpacked in the Hôtel d’Angleterre. Here, early every morning, the Prince was set to work at his lessons. Before breakfast, so Bruce reported to his father, ‘he learns by heart and prepares for his Italian master who comes from 10 to 11 a.m. He reads with Mr Tarver from eleven to twelve, and translates French from 5 to 6 p.m., and has the next hour in the evening for private reading or music. He has a piano in his room.’ The afternoons were spent inspecting ancient remains and the contents of art galleries, none of which the Prince appeared to find as intriguing as the portraits of a lovely Italian woman in John Gibson’s studio. Sometimes in the evening he was taken to the opera; often he was required to give dinner parties at which Odo Russell, the diplomat, Frederic Leighton, the artist, the Duke of St Albans, Robert Browning, Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, the French writer Jean Jacques Ampère, and the American historian J.L. Motley were all occasional guests. Once he was allowed to watch the spring carnival and to join in the confetti-throwing in the Corso.

  Within a week of his arrival, the Prince was taken for an audience with the Pope by Colonel Bruce, who, remembering the Queen’s earnest injunction, sought and obtained permission to be present. The Pope spoke in French which the Prince appeared to understand quite well; and the audience progressed smoothly enough, despite Bruce’s nervous coughs, until His Holiness raised the delicate subject of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in England, which so alarmed Bruce that, in defiance of curial protocol, he hastily removed his charge from the papal presence and left the Vatican without calling upon the Secretary of State, Cardinal Antonelli, as customary etiquette required.

  The English travellers had already given offence to the Pope’s enemies in the north, to King Victor Emmanuel, and his minister, Count Cavour, by declining to visit them in Turin lest the Prince became involved in Italian politics or was corrupted by the vulgar King, who had behaved badly enough at Windsor and could be expected to be even more uncouth in his own palace. Undeterred by this rebuff, however, the King offered to confer upon the Prince the Order of the Annunciation; and this, it was decided after some hesitation, the Prince might accept, particularly as the investiture was to be performed by Massimo Taparelli, Marchese d’Azeglio, the much respected statesman and author who had once been Victor Emmanuel’s Prime Minister.

  The Prince’s gratification at receiving so imposing an order from ‘so distinguished a personage’ was expressed in an unusually long entry in his diary. This, for the most part, unfortunately continued to distress his father, who, reading the extracts regularly posted home to him, noted with regret that there was as little improvement in the style of the jejune entries as evidence of a mature mind at work in their composition. Nor was the Prince Consort comforted by the reports he received from Colonel Bruce, who was unable to record any improvement in the Prince’s ‘learning and mental qualities’ and had cause to complain of his continued outbursts of temper. ‘His thoughts are centred on matters of ceremony, on physical qualities, manners, social standing, and dress,’ Bruce wrote. ‘And these are the distinctions which command his esteem.’

  Other reports were more favourable. Robert Browning, who had been told by Bruce to ‘eschew compliments and keep to Italian politics’, found the Prince ‘a gentle refined boy’ who listened politely even if he did not say much. And J.L. Motley was much taken with him. ‘His smile is very ready and genuine,’ Motley wrote, ‘his manners are extremely good … His eyes are bluish-grey, rather large and very frank in expression … I have not had much to do with royal personages, but of those I have known I know none whose address is more winning, and with whom one feels more at one’s ease.’

  ‘Nobody could have nicer and better manners,’ wrote Edward Lear, to whose lodgings the Prince was taken by Colonel Bruce.

  I was afraid of telling or shewing him too much, but I soon found he was interested in what he saw, both by his attention and by his intelligent few remarks. Yet I shewed him the Greek pictures, and all the Palestine oils, and the whole of the sketches, and when I said, — ‘please tell me to stop, Sir, if you are tired by so many’ — he said — ‘O dear no!’ in the naturalest way.

  Indeed, it was generally admitted that the Prince was an attractive boy. Disraeli, who had sat next to him at dinner the evening before he went to see his sister in Berlin, found him ‘intelligent, informed and with a singularly sweet manner’. And even his father had to admit that he showed quite a ‘turn’ for social functions. Yet the prince Consort could not find much else to be said in his favour. Certainly he had displayed markedly little enthusiasm for the wonders of Rome. And when his intended tour of northern Italy was cut short by the outbreak of war, he seemed happy enough to sail to Gibraltar, where there was ‘plenty of larking’, and to travel from there to Lisbon to see his cousin, King Pedro V, son of the late Queen Maria da Gloria, who had married Prince Ferdinand of SaxeCoburg. It had also to be regretted that the journal entries he sent home to his father from Italy were as flat, brief and unilluminating as all the others he had written. His father begged him to write in a less stilted, more reflective, manner; but the reply was not very encouraging: ‘I am sorry you were not pleased with my Journal as I took pains with it, but I see the justice of your remarks and will try to profit by them.’

  Having failed to derive much profit from Rome, he was now sent up to Edinburgh for three months’ intensive work before embarking on the next stage of his education, a period of study first at Oxford, then at Cambridge. He arrived at the Palace of Holyroodhouse in June 1858 with Colonel Bruce and the Revd Charles Tarver, and was required to settle down immediately to a course of lectures on all manner of subjects from chemistry to Roman history. He was allowed little
time off from his work, and then not to go shooting with the Duke of Atholl as he wanted, but to make excursions to admire the scenic beauty of the Trossachs and the Scottish lakes, and to give dinners to the local worthies and his various instructors. His time in Edinburgh over, he went up to Oxford in October 1858. He was still not yet eighteen.

  The Prince, who would rather have gone straight into the army than to Oxford, had hoped that his father would at least allow him to live in a college. But the Prince Consort had been adamant that he must live in a private house where his activities could continue to be supervised by Robert Bruce, now a major-general, and Major Teesdale. Ideally the Prince Consort would have liked his son not to be attached to any particular college at all. He had only consented to his being admitted to Christ Church when informed by the Vice-Chancellor that such an arrangement was essential, and then on the strict understanding that General Bruce was ‘entirely master of the choice of society which he might encounter’. ‘The more I think of it,’ the Prince Consort wrote to the Dean of Christ Church, ‘the more I see the difficulties of the Prince being thrown together with other young men and having to make his selection of acquaintances when so thrown together with them.’

  And so the Prince moved into Frewin Hall, a gloomy house off Cornmarket Street; and there he and six Christ Church undergraduates, selected as his companions, listened to lectures specially composed for his benefit. In the dining-room he attended lessons in English history given by the Regius Professor of Modern History, Goldwin Smith, who was more interested in academic reform than in teaching and seems to have directed the attention of his royal pupil almost exclusively to the tedious pages of W.E. Flaherty’s Annals of England. The Prince, polite but bored, learned little, and Smith felt driven to suggest that he might well have acquired more knowledge of history from reading the novels of Walter Scott.

  Occasionally the Prince could be glimpsed in the town, a slight, boyish figure with curly hair and a fresh complexion, wearing the gold-tasselled mortar-board with which all undergraduates of noble birth were then privileged to adorn themselves, walking to a lecture in the Divinity Schools, a service in the Cathedral, or a debate — the quality of which he usually condemned unreservedly — in the Union where, upon his arrival, the assembled undergraduates would immediately rise to their feet. Sometimes he was allowed out hunting or to play racquets or tennis, at which he was a ‘poor hand’. Sometimes he was allowed to attend dinners with such respectable people as Lord and Lady Harcourt at Nuneham Courtenay, or the Bishop of Oxford at Cuddesdon. Often he was obliged to give dinners himself to various senior members of the University interspersed with one or two undergraduates, all of whose names were suggested to him by General Bruce in consultation with the Vice-Chancellor and the Dean of Christ Church. He succeeded in making friends with two extravagant, amusing members of the Bullingdon Club, whose company he found congenial: Sir Frederick Johnstone, already a notorious philanderer, and Henry Chaplin, a clergyman’s son. Chaplin, an exceptionally good-looking young man, had been brought up after his father’s death at Blankney Hall in Cambridgeshire by a rich uncle who had made him his heir, sent him to Harrow, then to Christ Church, and enabled him to keep four hunters. But most of the Prince’s time was allotted to study. ‘The only use of Oxford is that it is a place for study, a refuge from the world and its claims,’ General Bruce was reminded by the Prince Consort, who, possessed by a terrible anxiety that ‘time was being wasted in pleasure’, was — after restless nights of worry — a frequent visitor to Frewin Hall where he complained that recreations, especially hunting, were encroaching too much upon the Prince’s intellectual pursuits.

  ‘Bertie’s propensity is indescribable laziness,’ the Prince Consort wrote to his daughter in Germany. ‘I never in my life met such a thorough and cunning lazybones … It does grieve me when it is my own son, and when one considers that he might be called upon at any moment to take over the reins of government in a country where the sun never sets.’

  As well as being more interested in clothes than in government, the Prince far preferred ‘good food’ to ‘mental effort’. There had been trouble over this particular propensity already. On his fifteenth birthday he had been given permission to choose his own food ‘in accordance with what the physicians say is good for you’. But the experiment had not been a success. Eighteen months later, strict diet sheets had been prepared for him, authorizing three meals a day — a light breakfast of bread and butter, tea, coffee or cocoa and an egg; a luncheon of meat and vegetables with seltzer water to drink and preferably no pudding; a rather more substantial dinner, but still as light as possible. Claret was to be mixed with seltzer water in hot weather, and sherry with tap water in cold. There was to be no coffee after dinner, but at half past nine a cup of tea might be taken or a glass of seltzer water. It was not practicable to keep to this diet at Frewin Hall, but he was urged to be much more moderate. He was already too fat, and if he were not careful his excellent chef would make him fatter. And as well as eating too much he was dressing far too sloppily. He must give up wearing slippers and ‘loose long jackets’ which were ‘so slang’. He was also smoking too much, though his parents did not know this, tobacco being strictly prohibited by General Bruce.

  Having so much to condemn and criticize, the Queen and Prince Consort were all the more surprised to learn that their son had done quite well in the first of the examinations which he was required to undergo at the end of each term. The Dean, who thought the Prince ‘the nicest fellow possible, so simple, naïf, ingenuous and modest’, was ‘quite satisfied’ with the results, Princess Frederick William was informed. And her father was thankful to be able to assure her that Bertie, ‘a very good-natured’ boy at heart, had at least done what he had to do ‘very well’.

  The Prince Consort received further favourable reports about his son from Germany, where he was sent for part of his Easter holidays in 1860 and where the ageing Baron Stockmar was much impressed by the great improvement he detected in him. ‘That you see so many signs of improvement in the young gentleman is a great joy to us,’ his father replied to Stockmar’s letter of commendation. ‘For parents who watch their son with anxiety, and set their hopes for him high, are in some measure incapable of forming a clear estimate, and are apt at the same time to be impatient if their wishes are not fulfilled.’

  In the summer of that year the Prince of Wales was sent out to represent his parents in Canada and on that occasion they acknowledged the compliments paid to him with less grudging satisfaction. It was a long and demanding journey. He left Plymouth in the battleship Nero on 10 July 1860 with a large suite including the Duke of Newcastle, Secretary of State for the Colonies, and General Bruce; and a fortnight later, the first heir apparent to the British throne ever to cross the Atlantic, he landed in Newfoundland, wearing his colonel’s uniform with the ribbon of the Order of the Garter. From St John’s — where he ‘acquitted himself admirably,’ so Bruce reported, ‘and seemed pleased with everything, including himself’ — he travelled to Halifax, then to Quebec, then up the St Lawrence in a steamer to Montreal to drive the last rivet into the new Victoria railway bridge and to open the Industrial Exhibition. From Montreal he went on to Ottawa, where he laid the cornerstone of the Federal Parliament building and rode a timber shoot down the Ottawa River; then on, past Kingston, to Toronto and across Lake Ontario to the Niagara Falls, where he saw Charles Blondin, the French acrobat, walk across the Falls on a tightrope, pushing a man in front of him in a wheelbarrow. Blondin offered to put the Prince into the wheelbarrow for the return journey across the tightrope to the United States. The Prince accepted the offer, but was naturally prevented from going. So Blondin went back by himself, this time on stilts, leaving the Prince to travel on to Hamilton, where he opened the annual Agricultural Exhibition.

  Almost everywhere he went the Prince was greeted with the most enthusiastic welcome from enormous crowds. He received countless addresses, inspected parade after parade of volunteers,
made numerous speeches written out for him by the Duke of Newcastle, held levee after levee, shook countless people by the hand, went from one public engagement to another, waved to a cheering crowd of 50,000 people at Toronto, acknowledged the acclamations of another vast crowd at Montreal, attended lengthy banquets and nightlong balls, dancing tirelessly, cheerfully humming his favourite tunes; and at one particular ball, held in a specially constructed ballroom at the foot of Mont Royal, where champagne as well as claret gushed from the fountains and newly transplanted trees surrounded an artificial lake, he never sat out once until five o’clock in the morning. The newspapers were full of talk about him; his features appeared in advertisements for cider and tins of pork and beans; his name was used to sell all manner of goods from boots to umbrellas; the Prince of Wales’s feathers sprouted everywhere.

  He behaved himself admirably. To be sure, at Montreal he blushed deeply and looked rather annoyed as his fellow guests crowded round him, staring. But afterwards, he ‘became all gaiety and animation,’ the New York Herald reported. He entered into the spirit of the occasion ‘with all the zest and lightheartedness of an ardent temperament, and with a spirit truly democratic’. So it was at Hamilton, where the Prince had never ‘seemed more manly or in better spirits. He talked away to his partner … He whispered soft nothings to the ladies as he passed them in the dance, directed them now to go right, and shook his finger at those who missed the figures … in short he was the life of the party.’

  There was but one serious misfortune: in a speech delivered at the French University of Laval, the Prince gave offence to the Roman Catholic members of his audience by addressing their bishops as ‘Gentlemen’ instead of ‘My Lords’, while the Duke of Newcastle offended the violently antipapist Protestant Orangemen by the placatory tone of his published explanation. This explanation led to unpleasant demonstrations by Orangemen shouting slogans and waving placards on the quay at Kingston. The Duke of Newcastle having insisted that the Prince should not go ashore, their steamer departed to hisses and shouts of derision and to the sound of the Orangemen’s bands playing their provocative tunes. In Toronto arches bearing Protestant slogans and colours and portraits of King William III were erected across the route which the Prince was to take to Government House. The Duke of Newcastle obtained an undertaking from the Mayor that all these arches would be removed; but, finding that one of them had been left standing, he sent for the Mayor to come to him at Government House, upbraided him in the strongest terms and told him that his invitation to the Prince’s levee would be cancelled. The Mayor, thoroughly disgruntled by this treatment and protesting that he had done all he could to get the offending arch taken down, at first refused to apologize, but later relented and was invited to attend a subsequent levee with his Corporation. At this levee he declined to shake hands with the Duke of Newcastle; but when the Prince told him that all was forgiven and that the Queen would be assured of his loyalty and sincerity, the Mayor broke down and could scarcely get through his reply.