Edward VII_The Last Victorian King

by Christopher Hibbert

  Yet, even now that he was nearly thirty, the Prince was still excluded from the exercise of any real authority. For years he had had to content himself with such trivial employments as taking his mother’s place at levees at St James’s Palace, receiving foreign sovereigns, making visits to various provincial towns, laying foundation stones, opening buildings and exhibitions, accepting numerous governorships, colonelcies and presidencies of no very demanding nature, reviewing the troops at Aldershot, lending his support to such enterprises as the establishment of a College of Music and the erection of the Albert Hall, and driving to the opening of Parliament, to which he had been admitted a peer of the realm as Duke of Cornwall and in which he occasionally attended debates on non-controversial measures that interested him. He also delivered occasional public speeches which, with practice, he did very well, making up for any lack of originality of thought or expression by a relaxed, friendly manner and an easy fluency which were all that the circumstances normally required.

  He was, of course, constantly in demand; and he rarely declined any important invitation which could be fitted in with his ‘social duties’ and which he felt he could accept without being regarded as ‘an advertisement and a puff to the object in view’.

  The Prince told his mother in April 1871:

  Besides our social duties, which are indeed very numerous in the Season, we have also many to do as your representatives. You have no conception of the quantity of applications we get, in the course of the year, to open this place, lay a stone, attend public dinners, luncheons, fêtes without end; and sometimes people will not take NO for an answer. I certainly think we must be made of wood or iron if we could go through all they ask, and all these things have increased tenfold since the last ten years.

  Whenever he himself offered his services in the performance of more important duties in the diplomatic field — he was not really very much interested in any other work — he was still invariably rebuffed, either by the Queen or the government, mainly on the grounds that he was so indiscreet. At the time of the Franco–Prussian War, he had openly expressed the ill-founded belief that the Prussians would receive a thoroughly deserved hiding; and when his comments were reported to Count von Bernstorff, who complained about them to the government, he told his mother that Bernstorff was ‘an ill-conditioned man’ and that he longed for the day when he would be removed from London. At the same time he offered to act as a kind of roving diplomat between Paris and Berlin, giving the government unsolicited advice as to how a peace settlement might be reached. The advice was dismissed as ‘royal twaddle’; and soon after the French surrender of Metz and Strasbourg to the Prussians, the Foreign Secretary was once more obliged to complain of some fresh indiscretion by the Prince, who had been ‘more than usually unwise in his talk’.

  The Princess of Wales was even more outspokenly anti-Prussian than her husband. She had been in Copenhagen with her three eldest children on her usual summer visit at the time of France’s declaration of war, and the Prince had gone out to fetch her home. She adopted quite as partisan an attitude towards the conflict as she had done during the fight for Schleswig and Holstein. ‘Alix is not clever,’ the Queen lamented yet again. ‘Her feelings are so anti-German and yet so little really English that she is no help.’ Nor was this her only fault. Although she was pregnant again, she continued with her social round as though she were still a young, irresponsible girl rather than the twenty-six-year-old mother of five children.

  The Queen was not, therefore, surprised to learn that the Princess’s baby, the last child she was to have, was born prematurely on 6 April 1871 and died within two days. Both parents were heartbroken. The Princess cried bitterly, blaming herself for her poor little son’s death. The Prince cried, too, ‘the tears rolling down his cheeks’, so the Princess’s lady-in-waiting, Mrs Francis Stonor, recorded. He placed the body in the coffin himself, arranging the pall and the white flowers. Through her bedroom window the Princess saw him making his way sadly to the grave in the funeral procession, holding hands with his two sons, who walked beside him in grey kilts and black gloves.

  The Queen blamed him more than the mother for what had happened, and Gerald Wellesley was told to speak to him about his care of his wife. The Prince was ‘evidently deeply attached to the Princess’, Wellesley reported after this talk, ‘despite all the flattering distractions that beset him in society; and the Dean hopes and believes that he will be more careful about her in future.’ The trouble was, as the Prince himself commented, Alix was ‘naturally very active in mind and body’ and he was sure that ‘a sedentary life would not suit her’.

  She certainly did not lead a sedentary life thereafter. A few months after the death of her baby, she was on the Continent again with her husband. They went to the Passion Play at Oberammergau together, after he had tramped over the battlefields of the recent war. Then they paid another visit to Jugenheim. And from there the Prince went by himself to Homburg, a favorite haunt, where, so English readers of Reynolds’s Newspaper were informed, he staked ‘his gold upon the chances of a card or the roll of a ball — gold, be it remembered, that he obtained from the toil and sweat of the British working-man, without himself producing the value of a halfpenny.’

  ‘These things go from bad to worse,’ Gladstone remarked gloomily in a letter to the Foreign Secretary after reading the account of the Prince’s gambling in Reynolds’s Newspaper, whose guaranteed circulation of well over 300,000 copies was the largest in the world. ‘I saw What Does She Do With It? [a widely read publication by G.O. Trevelyan attacking the Queen’s alleged parsimony and hoarding of money] on the walls of the station at Birkenhead.’

  Less than six months after this letter was written, however, both the Queen and the Prince, driving through the streets of London together, were accorded the most tumultuous reception. For this the credit was due not to a sudden change in the Prince’s way of life but to the noisome drains of Londesborough Lodge near Scarborough.

  The Prince and Princess went to stay with Lord Londesborough at the end of October on their way back to Norfolk from Scotland. The Prince arrived home at Sandringham in time for his thirtieth birthday on 9 November 1871, and soon afterwards fell ill. On the 23 November it was announced that he had typhoid fever. Just over a week later one of his fellow guests at Londesborough Lodge, the Earl of Chesterfield, died of the disease; the Prince’s groom followed him; and it was feared that the Prince would die himself.

  By 29 November, so Lady Macclesfield heard, his ravings had become ‘very dreadful, and for that cause the Princess was kept out of his room one day, all sorts of revelations and names of people mentioned’. When he was calmer and the Princess was allowed in to see him he called her ‘my good boy’. She reminded him that she was his wife. ‘That was once but is no more,’ he replied. ‘You have broken your vows.’ At other times he was filled with remorse, and he told his wife that he felt sure she would leave him now because he had neglected her so.

  The Princess’s distress was piteous; yet she behaved admirably, Lady Macclesfield thought, composed and self-controlled, never thinking of herself but ‘as gentle and considerate to everyone as ever’. She had naturally been much upset by the Mordaunt trial and very cross with her ‘naughty little man’ for getting himself involved with it. But that was all over now. She scarcely ever left the house except to pray in the church in the park or when the doctors insisted that she get a breath of fresh air. At night she lay down sleepless in her husband’s dressing-room. Her sister-in-law, Princess Alice, who had come to Sandringham for the Prince’s birthday, was there to help her; but she found Alice a bossy woman, more of a trial than a comfort. Prince Alfred was there, too, though Prince Leopold, who was ‘dreadfully anxious’ to come as he believed he could comfort his sister-in-law, was told to keep away.

  The Queen arrived on 29 November. And the next day the Prince grew suddenly worse. For the first time the Princess broke down, ‘almost distracted with grief and alarm’. On 1 De
cember, however, he seemed sufficiently recovered for the Queen to leave Sandringham; and by 7 December the Princess felt able to leave the house with Princess Alice for a drive in a sledge drawn over the snow by two ponies. But that day the fever ‘lighted up’ and began all over again, ‘as bad as ever or worse,’ Lady Macclesfield reported to her husband, adding later, ‘worse and worse; the doctors say that if he does not rally within the next hour a very few more must see the end.’ Lord Granville informed the Queen that there did not seem any hope left. She hurried back to Sandringham.

  That Sunday, a day appointed by the Church as one of national prayer for his recovery, he seemed slightly better. Yet as The Times reported in a leading article next morning: ‘The Prince still lives, and we may still therefore hope; but the strength of the patient is terribly diminished, and all who watch his bedside — as, indeed, all England watches it — must acknowledge that their minds are heavy with apprehension.’

  The apprehension was not relieved by the doctors’ bulletins, five of which were issued during the course of that day, inspiring a poet — usually supposed, though perhaps mistakenly, to be Alfred Austin — to write those lines that were to confer upon him an immortality which all Austin’s later writings would certainly have denied him:

  Across the wires, the electric message came:

  ‘He is no better; he is much the same.’

  At seven o’clock that evening Queen Victoria was woken from a brief slumber and warned that her son was not expected to live through the night. The next morning, however, he was again a little improved, strong enough to talk and sing, to whistle and laugh in raving delirium before falling back breathless against the pillows. For thirty-six hours he continued in this state, shouting at his attendants, ordering alarming reforms in his Household now that he had — as he supposed — succeeded to the throne, calling out to Dr William Gull, ‘That’s right old Gull — one more teaspoonful’, hurling his pillows into the air and once knocking over the Princess, who had been advised not to enter the room as her presence excited him dreadfully but who attempted to circumvent the danger by crawling through the door on her hands and knees. The Queen came into the room to watch her son from behind a screen.

  By now numerous other members of the family, including Prince Leopold, had been summoned to Sandringham, which was soon so overcrowded that Princess Louise and Princess Beatrice had to sleep in the same bed. Outside it was bitterly cold. All the windows had to be kept shut, and this led to the air inside becoming so stale that the Duke of Cambridge detected what he described as an ominous smell of drains in the atmosphere. He rushed about the house, sniffing in corners, and jumping up with a startled cry of ‘By George, I won’t sit here!’ when Knollys said that he, too, had noticed a bad smell in the library. Henry Ponsonby suggested that with so many people sitting about all day in rooms hermetically sealed there was bound to be a fusty smell. But the Duke remained ‘wild on the subject’ and continued to create alarm by examining ‘all the drains of the house’ until a man came from the gas company and discovered a leaking pipe.

  Although Lady Macclesfield thought her ‘charming, so tender and quiet’, the Queen seemed to cause the Duke quite as much alarm as the prospect of catching typhoid. One day Henry Ponsonby was taking a stroll in the garden with Prince Alfred’s equerry when they ‘were suddenly nearly carried away by a stampede of royalties, headed by the Duke of Cambridge and brought up by Leopold, going as fast as they could’. Ponsonby thought that a mad bull must be on the rampage. But the stampeding royalties ‘cried out: “The Queen! the Queen!” and [everyone] dashed into the house again and waited behind the door till the road was clear’.

  They certainly were an ‘extraordinary family’, decided Lady Macclesfield, who found it ‘quite impossible to keep a house quiet as long as it is swarming with people and really the way in which they all squabble and wrangle and abuse each other destroys one’s peace’. Some of them were despondent, others optimistic. The Queen, obsessed by memories of ‘ten years ago’ when the Prince Consort died at this very same time of the year, did not have much confidence, so she confessed in her journal: ‘Somehow I always look for bad news.’ Prince Alfred and Prince Arthur, on the other hand, talked as if their brother ‘were fit to go out shooting tomorrow’.

  On 13 December it seemed for a time that he would never go out shooting again, but the ‘dreadful moment passed,’ the Queen recorded.

  ‘Poor Alix was in the greatest alarm and despair, and I supported her as best I could. Alice and I said to one another in tears, “There can be no hope”.’ Later the Queen sat by his bed, hardly knowing ‘how to pray aright, only asking God if possible to spare [her] Beloved Child’.

  Her prayers were answered. The next day he was brought back from the ‘very verge of the grave’; and on 15 December when she went into the room he smiled, kissed her hand in ‘his old way’, and said, ‘Oh! dear Mama, I am so glad to see you. Have you been here all this time?’ Soon afterwards he asked for a glass of Bass’s beer.

  From that day onwards, sleeping for much of the time, the Prince gradually recovered his strength. He and his wife were ‘never apart’, the Princess contentedly told Princess Louise. ‘Never, never’ could she thank God enough for all His Mercy when He listened to her prayers and gave her back her ‘life’s happiness’. All her time was devoted to her ‘darling husband who thank God [was] really getting on wonderfully’, she wrote to Lady Macclesfield: ‘This quiet time we two have spent here together now has been the happiest days of my life, my full reward after all my sorrow and despair. It has been our second honeymoon and we are both so happy to be left alone by ourselves.’

  The children had been sent to Osborne, and, at the beginning of February 1872, the Prince was well enough to join them there. Just before he left, all the tenants on the estate put their signatures to a ‘very respectful and affectionate address’ which the Rector, the Revd Lake Onslow, read out at a little ceremony, expressing the pleasure they all felt at his recovery. The Princess ‘broke down in the speech she made in return,’ one of the tenants recorded, ‘and Mr Onslow nearly did the same’. The Prince was ‘quite himself’ again, the Queen told the Crown Princess, ‘only gentler and kinder than ever; and there is something different which I can’t exactly express. It is like a new life — all the trees and flowers give him pleasure, as they never used to do, and he was quite pathetic over his small wheelbarrow and little tools at the Swiss cottage. He is constantly with Alix, and they seem hardly ever apart!!!’

  The possibility of some sort of public thanksgiving for the Prince’s recovery had already been raised before Christmas. But Gladstone’s suggestion of a public procession through London and a service in St Paul’s Cathedral did not find much favour with the Queen. She considered that it would not only be too tiring for the Prince but would also make a ‘public show’ of feelings that would be better expressed in private. The Princess of Wales ‘quite understood’ the Queen’s attitude; ‘but then on the other hand’ she also considered that the people, having taken ‘such a public share’ in the family’s sorrow, had a ‘kind of claim to join with [them] now in a public and universal thanksgiving’. This being also the government’s view, it was arranged that there should be a thanksgiving ceremony in St Paul’s on 27 February.

  There was as much excitement in London that day as there had been when Princess Alexandra had arrived for her wedding. There were also even more accidents: numerous people were knocked down by the crowds and trampled on; several others were kicked by horses and thrown from cabs or carts; a baby was crushed to death in the arms of its parents; three women fell out of windows; two had epileptic fits; a stand collapsed opposite Marlborough House, injuring many of its occupants; and a branch of one of the tall elm trees in St James’s Park, where, according to The Times, ‘the eye of official propriety was outraged by the sight of ragged dirty youths calmly enjoying positions so conspicuous’, snapped off, sending twenty of them hurtling to the ground.

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p; Yet, despite these and other calamities, the royal carriage was greeted by deafening cheers all along the route. Having once overcome her reluctance to appear in public, the Queen was determined that ‘the people — for whom the show’ was being put on — should be enabled to see it properly. So she insisted on an open carriage. And as soon as the procession was on the move she obviously enjoyed herself, waving and nodding to the spectators, raising her son’s hand up in her own at Temple Bar and, to their noisy delight, kissing it. He himself, the Times correspondent thought, looked pale and drawn; and, as he raised his hat from his head in acknowledgement of the cheers, he ‘revealed an extent of caducity ill-suited to his youth’. Yet he was obviously ‘deeply moved by the enthusiasm of the dense masses’.

  On his return to Marlborough House after the service the Prince wrote to his mother to tell her that he could not find words to express ‘how gratified and touched’ he was ‘by the feeling that was displayed in those crowded streets’ towards her and himself. The Queen also heard from Gladstone, who thought that the celebration was perhaps the most satisfactory that the City of London had ever witnessed. It was a quite ‘extraordinary manifestation of loyalty and affection’. That evening in London the streets were crowded with people looking at the illuminations and the flags, the brilliantly lit shop windows and the banners festooned across the house fronts bearing legends such as ‘Te Deum’ and ‘God bless the Prince of Wales’. A.J. Munby recorded:

  And amidst all this the working folk, men and women, boys and girls, merrily moving along; sometimes half a dozen decent lasses arm in arm, dancing in a row, and singing, while their prentice swains danced by them, playing the flute or the accordion. I never saw such a crowd, nor a sight so striking in England: it was like a scene out of one of Sir Walter’s novels of ancient English life.