Sons, Servants and Statesmen

by John Van der Kiste

  In November 1886 Beatrice gave birth to a son, whom they named Alexander. Two more sons and a daughter followed during the next five years. Henry was apparently happy and contented in his life at home, even if under the watchful eye of his mother-inlaw. She gave orders that the old nursery quarters on the top floor at Osborne should be turned into a special suite for the Battenberg children, and the sovereign who normally so loved peace and quiet in her own home said that nothing made her feel so happy as the sounds of these youngest grandchildren playing around noisily in the rooms directly above her suite.

  TWELVE

  ‘A great three-decker ship sinking’

  As the youngest son-in-law of Queen Victoria, Prince Henry of Battenberg could indeed count his blessings. Not the least of these was that he never shared the fate of his brother Alexander, who had reigned for three troubled years as sovereign Prince of Bulgaria, a tenure brought to a violent end in August 1886 when a gang of drunken officers acting under Russian orders broke into his palace at Sofia and ordered him at gunpoint to sign a deed of abdication. He arrived in England a few weeks later, prematurely aged and broken by his experiences.

  Alexander’s tragedy was soon to be bound up with that of another of Queen Victoria’s daughters and sons-in-law. He had become unofficially betrothed to Princess Victoria of Prussia, eldest un-married daughter of the German Crown Prince Frederick William and Princess Victoria (Vicky). The match was warmly endorsed by the Crown Princess and by Queen Victoria, as well as the British royal family. Most of the German imperial family, and Bismarck, the German Chancellor, resolutely opposed it for political reasons, while the Crown Prince himself gave his approval only with reluctance. Prince Frederick William could not but share the view of his parents that a Battenberg, no matter how good his character, was still the child of a morganatic marriage (see note 9, chapter 7) and therefore hardly a suitable son-in-law for a Hohenzollern princess. He had already viewed the announcement of Henry’s betrothal to his sister-in-law Beatrice with reservations. ‘Dear Fritz speaks of Liko as not being of Geblüt [stock], a little like about animals’,1 the Queen wrote disapprovingly to the Crown Princess.

  All the same, the Queen and her daughter hoped they would eventually persuade the Crown Prince to agree to accepting a Battenberg in his family. After he was forced to abdicate, Prince Alexander found that his importance as a political figure dwindled accordingly. When the time came for the Crown Prince to succeed his father Emperor William on the throne, it was assumed that he would readily give his approval to the marriage. The Emperor celebrated his ninetieth birthday in March 1887; by then he was increasingly frail and feeble, and it would surely be only a matter of months before he passed away.

  While every member of the royal family in Britain was looking forward with excitement to the celebrations for Queen Victoria’s jubilee that summer, her eldest daughter had an additional cause for concern. Throughout the winter Crown Prince Frederick William had been unable to shake off a severe cold and cough, and remained unusually hoarse. In the spring he was examined by the German physicians, who, fearing he might have something more serious than a persistent sore throat and cough, decided to seek another opinion from a specialist outside Germany. A major operation could prove fatal, and it would be as well for the cause of German science if a foreign doctor was left to take any crucial decisions, and therefore all the blame, should anything go wrong.

  For political reasons, given Prussia’s conquests in war during Bismarck’s period of power, it was inadvisable to consider a specialist from Austria or France. The name of Dr Morell Mackenzie, a Scottish laryngologist who had a thriving practice in Harley Street, seemed the most obvious. He was a renowned expert on diseases of the nose and throat, spoke fluent German and already knew Professor Gerhardt, one of the Germans on the case, on a professional basis. Above all, as he was British, it would prove to be something of a triumph for the anglophobe element at court in Berlin if one of their unpopular Crown Princess’s fellow countrymen could be held responsible for the death of her husband.

  At the German doctors’ request, the Crown Princess asked Queen Victoria to send Mackenzie to Germany as soon as possible. This the Queen did, adding a caveat that he was clever but had a reputation in England for greed and self-advertisement. He arrived in Germany on 20 May and, after a consultation with his colleagues, examined the Crown Prince’s throat. A small portion of the swelling was removed and passed to Professor Rudolf Virchow at the Berlin Institute of Pathology for diagnosis. It was deemed too small, and on request Mackenzie removed a larger sample two days later. Gerhardt insisted that Mackenzie had injured the previously healthy right vocal cord and made it bleed. He and his German doctors maintained that the only possible course of action was for them to operate on the Crown Prince at once. Mackenzie declared that if they did, the Prince would surely die.

  The Crown Prince and Princess had been invited to London for Queen Victoria’s jubilee celebrations, for both personal and political reasons. As the Queen’s eldest daughter, and as her son-in-law who expected to ascend the throne of the most powerful empire on mainland Europe before long, they had every right to be there. Dr Mackenzie suggested that they should be in England so they could combine participation in the festivities with the Crown Prince’s regular attendance as a private patient at his London surgery. The German doctors accepted this course of action, largely as they were relieved that the responsibility for their illustrious patient’s health would no longer be theirs.

  In June the Crown Prince and Princess came to England and stayed at a hotel in Norwood, sufficiently near the centre of London for convenience, but far enough from the worst of the heat and dust. They moved to Buckingham Palace on 18 June, so the Crown Prince could rest for a couple of days before the procession to Westminster Abbey and the service of thanksgiving.

  ‘The day has come,’ the Queen wrote in her journal that evening, happy though exhausted, ‘and I am alone, though surrounded by many dear children.’2 She was alone in the sense that the Prince Consort was long since departed, but all surviving seven children and their spouses were present, as were the widowed partners of the two deceased children, the Grand Duke of Hesse and Duchess of Albany. The Duke of Edinburgh was now a Rear-Admiral and Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet, based at Malta, while the Duke of Connaught was a serving officer in India, but both had obtained leave without much difficulty.

  The climax of the jubilee celebrations was the procession to Westminster Abbey and the thanksgiving service on 21 June. Huge crowds lined the route and were rewarded by seeing almost every member of the royal family passing by, whether riding in carriages or on horseback. The Prince of Wales was resplendent in the scarlet tunic and plumed helmet of a British field-marshal, but everyone agreed that none looked more magnificent than Crown Prince Frederick William, in his white cuirassier uniform and silver helmet surmounted with the imperial eagle. Towering above his relations on every side, it was said that he looked like ‘one of the legendary heroes embodied in the creations of Wagner’. Very few of those who stood on the streets of London to cheer him with such enthusiasm were aware of his illness.

  The Crown Prince and Princess stayed in Britain for the rest of the summer, spending part of their time at Osborne and the rest at Braemar, near Balmoral. As Dr Mackenzie advised them to avoid the bitter weather of Berlin over the winter, on leaving Britain they went first to Toblach in the Austrian Tyrol, then to Venice and Baveno, and finally to San Remo on the Riviera.

  It was here in November that the seriousness of the Crown Prince’s illness became apparent. For some weeks it had been rumoured that he was suffering from cancer of the larynx, and at last Mackenzie had to admit that this was almost certainly the case. For some time, the Crown Prince and Princess had had another cross to bear, the growing estrangement from their eldest son and heir, William. ‘Willy’ shared none of his parents’ liberal leanings but revered the ultra-conservative politics of his grandfather and Prince Bismar
ck, the Chancellor whose wars had elevated Prussia from the humble status of one of several German kingdoms to the leading military and political state in the new German Empire, created in January 1871 after the victorious war against France. Endlessly fawned on and flattered by the reactionary elements at court and the military clique, William became more arrogant and dismissive of his parents’ ways than ever. Though he undoubtedly felt some sympathy for his seriously ill father, he concealed it well.

  In February 1888 the Crown Prince was operated on for a tracheotomy, the operation against which he, his wife and Mackenzie had held out for so long. Without it he would have suffocated and died almost immediately, but by this stage it was realised that his life could only be prolonged by a matter of weeks. Since late the previous year he had been in constant pain, unable to speak at all except in a hoarse whisper and reduced to writing everything he wished to say on a pad of paper which he always kept within reach.

  On 9 March, while walking in the garden at San Remo, he was handed a telegram from Berlin. It brought him the news that his father, Emperor William, had passed away, within two weeks of what would have been his ninety-first birthday.

  ‘My own dear Empress Victoria it does seem an impossible dream, may God bless her!’ the Queen wrote to her daughter when she learnt of her son-in-law’s accession. ‘You know how little I care for rank or Titles – but I cannot deny that after all that has been done & said, I am thankful & proud that dear Fritz & you shd have come to the throne.’3 Like many others, not least the newly elevated Empress Victoria herself, she had often feared that Fritz might not survive his father. Now that he had come into his inheritance, and was unlikely to enjoy it for long, she begged her daughter to be firm, put her foot down and remind her elder children – particularly William, now Crown Prince – that in the previous reign they had always spoken of the Emperor and Empress with great respect and ‘to remember who they are now’.

  The new sovereign announced that he intended to reign as Emperor Frederick III. He, the Empress and their entourage returned to Berlin that same week, but it was evident to all that the disease was too far advanced for there to be any hope of recovery. Their existence was made worse still by the tactless behaviour of William, surrounded by toadies who already had an eye on their own advancement during the next reign.

  Queen Victoria came to visit the Emperor and Empress in Berlin in April. The Empress noted sadly that it was the first time she had ever had her mother to stay under her roof – and now it was for the most poignant of reasons. As she left, the Queen kissed her son-inlaw goodbye, telling him with an aching heart that he must come and visit her in England when he was better. He was able to attend the wedding of his second son, Henry, to his cousin Irene, the third daughter of Alice and Louis of Hesse, on 24 May, though he leaned on a stick the whole time and every step he took caused him great agony. After this he declined rapidly, and on the morning of 15 June he passed away.

  Queen Victoria was at Balmoral at the time. In the morning she had received a telegram to say Fritz could last only a few hours, and soon afterwards Beatrice brought her another, from the new sovereign, Emperor William II, saying it was all over. ‘Feel very miserable and upset,’ she wrote in her journal. ‘None of my own sons could be a greater loss. He was so good, so wise, and so fond of me! And now? To think of it all is such pain.’4

  She and the old Emperor had had their minor differences. Occasionally she had criticised him and Vicky, albeit mildly, for arrogance. Nearly five years earlier, she had written to her granddaughter Princess Victoria of Hesse that the Crown Prince and Princess were ‘not pleasant in Germany’, and were too ‘high & mighty there’,5 and they had not seen eye to eye over the lineage of the Battenbergs, but she had rarely if ever been moved to exasperation by the gentle, mild son-in-law whom she and Albert had so admired since he and his parents had been guests at the Great Exhibition of 1851. She had always been ready to make allowances for her eldest grandson, William, much as she had been dismayed at his unfilial conduct during the last few years. On his accession, she telegraphed to him, asking him to ‘Help and do all you can for your poor dear mother and try to follow in your best noblest and kindest of father’s footsteps.’6

  With his extra-marital affairs and unfortunate friendships, the Prince of Wales had given his mother considerable anxiety, but as he approached his fiftieth year, even worse was to come. In September 1890 he was invited to stay with the shipowner Arthur Wilson at Tranby Croft, near Doncaster, and every evening the guests played the very popular but illegal game of baccarat. During one game, Wilson’s son, also called Arthur, noticed one of their fellow-guests, the baronet Sir William Gordon-Cumming, was deliberately cheating by varying the size of his stake after looking at his cards. After being formally accused in private, he was panic-stricken and asked to discuss it with the Prince of Wales, who told him it was pointless to try to deny the charge. Gordon-Cumming signed a pledge never to play cards for money again, and the other players, including the heir to the throne himself, added their signatures as witnesses. He then left the house the following day as the price of their silence on the matter. That would have been the end of it, had Gordon-Cumming not decided to continue to protest his innocence and bring a civil action against his accusers in order to clear his name.

  The Prince of Wales and Sir Francis Knollys, his secretary, tried in vain to have Gordon-Cumming brought before a military court which would look privately into the charge brought against his behaviour as an officer and a gentleman, on the grounds that once he had been found guilty, it would be virtually impossible for him to take any subsequent action in a civil court, where the Prince would be required to give evidence in public. The baronet’s solicitors insisted that only a civil action would do. A further attempt by the Prince of Wales and Knollys to institute a private inquiry held by the Guards Club Committee was defeated.

  Aware that her son had become involved only in order to help his friends, Queen Victoria proved fully supportive of him, her full anger being reserved for those who had asked him to sign the document which urged Gordon-Cumming to desist from playing cards. She must have long since despaired of her eldest son’s way of life but realised that there was nothing to be done other than accept him as he was and stand by him for the sake of the monarchy. It was her hope that he would promise her never to play baccarat again, but he would not commit himself to do so, and he refused to go to Windsor unless she gave him her word not to raise the matter again. As a man of nearly fifty, he felt entitled to gamble if he wanted, and despite the trouble in which he found himself, he did not intend to change the habits of a lifetime.

  Nevertheless the proceedings came to court in June 1891, and the Prince was called as a witness. To a casual observer, it might almost have looked as if the heir to the throne himself was on trial. The Solicitor-General, Sir Edward Clarke, representing Gordon-Cumming, remarked that it was not the first time honourable men had been known ‘to sacrifice themselves to support a tottering throne or prop a falling dynasty’. Gordon-Cumming was found guilty of cheating, expelled from the Army and his clubs, and shunned by society generally. Yet the Prince of Wales was himself the subject of strong criticism, and his gambling habits were severely censured.

  The Queen’s greatest fear was that the Crown was becoming tarnished by the Prince’s behaviour. To the Empress Frederick she wrote that she feared the monarchy might be ‘almost in danger if he is lowered and despised’.7 The fact that light had been thrown on his habits had alarmed and shocked the country, and it was no example for the heir to the throne to set to the Queen’s subjects. In an attempt to restore public confidence, she invited the Prince of Wales to write a letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Edward White Benson, for publication, condemning the social evils of gambling. The Archbishop and Gladstone, then leader of the opposition, endorsed this scheme, but the Prince refused to take part on the grounds that it would be hypocritical of him.

  If the government considered it necessa
ry, he replied, he would not object to issuing a statement saying that he disapproved of gambling, but only if he would be allowed to explain what he meant by gambling. To him, small racing bets, or games of baccarat played by rich men for stakes which they could afford to lose, did not count, as they did the person responsible no harm. Though it was a somewhat convoluted argument, the Prince made it clear that he was not going to lecture others and warn them against habits which they could perfectly well afford, particularly if they were aware of the risks. He also knew that to take the moral high ground would be a gift to his critics.

  Nobody, it seemed, relished the affair more than his sanctimonious nephew, Emperor William, who wrote to the Queen protesting against the impropriety of anyone holding the honorary rank of a colonel of Prussian Hussars becoming involved with men young enough to be his children in a mere gambling squabble.8 Much as she resented his intervention, she could not but feel that the Emperor’s indignation was justified.

  Shortly after the case was over, the Prince of Wales found himself involved in another scandal. The Princess of Wales had tolerated most of his female companions and mistresses, but one she could not abide was the unscrupulous Frances, Lady Brooke, who had become involved in an affair with a married man – Lord Charles Beresford, a naval officer and friend of the Prince of Wales and Duke of Edinburgh. When the affair ended, she wrote Lord Beresford a presumptuous, almost hysterical letter, accusing him of infidelity (ironic, in view of the fact that he was returning to his own wife) and desertion. Lady Beresford opened the letter in her husband’s absence, as he had authorised her to do while he was away on active service. She deposited it with her solicitor, George Lewis, and threatened to prosecute Lady Brooke for libel if she continued to make a nuisance of herself. Lewis informed Lady Brooke, who then demanded the return of the letter, on the grounds that she wrote it and it was her property. He refused, saying that it belonged to the person to whom it was addressed.