Edward VII_The Last Victorian King

by Christopher Hibbert

  Republicanism as a significant force in British politics, already damaged by the excesses of the Paris Commune, had suffered a blow from which it was never completely to recover.

  A few months before, even so convinced a royalist as Munby had been expressing doubts about the Prince of Wales, whom he had seen looking ‘sleek and thoughtless’ at the Botanical Gardens in June. A Norfolk friend of Munby, Joseph Scott-Chad, had been to a ball at Sandringham and, while confirming that the Prince was always ‘judiciously kind and hospitable to everyone’, had spoken also of his ‘ill habits and gross practical jokes’. But now such talk was hushed in thankfulness at his recovery. One day before Christmas, Munby was talking to Mrs Theodore Martin at her house in Onslow Square when J.A. Froude, the historian, called with Charles Kingsley:

  They began to talk about the Prince of Wales … and the wide and profound interest which his illness has caused. The silent multitudes, said Froude, have had a chance of showing what the real feeling of the country is; and the few malcontents have been cowed … Kingsley expressed great hope and confidence in the Prince of Wales’s character; and Mrs Martin exclaimed, ‘After such a burst of enthusiasm, and from such a nation, what a King he ought to be!’

  The enthusiasm had spread to all classes. Charles Dilke no longer found receptive audiences for his anti-monarchical speeches, which were now received with far less enthusiasm and interrupted by royalist demonstrators singing ‘Rule Britannia’ and ‘God Save the Queen’. The Prince was not, of course, thenceforward free from attack. The Coming K — : A Set of Idyll Lays, which lampooned him in the character of Guelpho, appeared in 1873 and enjoyed a wide circulation, as did many other less amusing and cruder satirical pieces. There were to be times enough in the future when the Prince was forced to face the jeers of hostile crowds. But, as Lord Carrington observed, the worst was over, and the monarchy was safe.

  While the Prince embarked with the Princess for three months’ convalescence in the Mediterranean, the government set their mind to the problem of establishing a more permanently healthy relationship ‘between the monarchy and the nation by framing a worthy and manly mode of life [with regard to] public duties for the Prince of Wales’.

  For years the form which this worthy mode of life might take had been the subject of inconclusive debate. Every suggestion that had been put forward had been set aside in face of the Queen’s objections. The Prince himself would have liked to have been given some employment in the army, but the Queen considered that he would not take enough interest in the troops. Gladstone thought that the Prince might be useful on the Indian Council, but the Queen doubted that there was really enough for him to do on the Indian Council. Might he not, another minister proposed, be employed in the office of the President of the Local Government Board? The Queen could not suppose that he would perform any useful function there either. Should he then be attached in succession to various government offices ‘so that he might be taught the business of the different departments’? The Queen did not think he should. In fact, the Queen, so Princess Alice said, saw no point in planning for the Prince of Wales.

  ‘She thinks the monarchy will last her time,’ Princess Alice wrote, ‘and it is no use thinking what will come after if the principal person himself does not, and so she lets the torrent come on.’

  Some years before, Disraeli had suggested that the Prince might be bought a house in Ireland in a good hunting country where he could ‘combine the fulfilment of public duties with pastime, a combination which befits a princely life’. The Queen, however, would not hear of it; it was ‘quite out of the question’; once a royal residence had been established in Ireland, other parts of her dominions, such as Wales and even the Colonies, would demand why they had been neglected. Besides, ‘any encouragement of [the Prince’s] constant love of running about and not keeping at home or near the Queen [was] earnestly and seriously to be deprecated’. Nevertheless, the proposal had been repeated by Gladstone two years later when it was hoped that the purchase of a royal residence in Ireland might be combined with the Prince’s appointment as a kind of non-political Lord Lieutenant, spending all his winters in Ireland and performing ceremonial duties there while all official responsibility remained with the Irish Secretary in London. After all, Gladstone added in a letter to Lord Granville, the Prince ‘possessed that average stock of energy which enables men to do that which they cannot well avoid doing, or that which is made ready to their hands’. Besides, the Prince would obtain ‘a very valuable political education’. But the Queen was even more adamant in her opposition to this suggestion than she had been to the earlier one. She would welcome her son’s removal from London for the Season, but he was not fitted for the exercise of high functions of state. If a member of her family were to be appointed to the proposed office, a younger son, Prince Arthur, had superior qualifications.

  Despite the Queen’s intransigence, Gladstone considered that the Prince’s illness and recovery provided him with a new opportunity, perhaps a ‘last opportunity’, to settle the royalty question and to bring the matter of the Prince’s employment before the Queen once more. Already annoyed with Gladstone for repeatedly — and rather tactlessly — urging her either to emerge from her seclusion or to let the Prince enjoy more authority in her name, the Queen could not bring herself to give his advice a patient or sympathetic hearing. In fact, she went so far as to accuse him of trying to make use of her for his own political purposes, which so utterly exasperated him that the relationship between Prime Minister and Sovereign became more painfully strained than ever.

  Discussions about the Prince’s future employment, nevertheless, continued. If he were not to be allowed to go to Ireland, what alternatives were there? Henry Ponsonby suggested philanthropy, arts and sciences, the army, foreign affairs or India, though he rather doubted that any of them would answer the problem. ‘Nothing can be more genial than [the Prince] is for a few minutes,’ Ponsonby told his wife. ‘But he does not endure. He cannot keep up the interest for any length of time and I don’t think he will ever settle down to business … To get [him] to enter into a subject or decide on it is most difficult. They have to catch snap answers from him as he goes out shooting, etc.’

  Of all Ponsonby’s suggestions only one seemed possible to Francis Knollys, son of Sir William Knollys, whom the Prince had recently appointed his secretary. Francis Knollys did not think the Prince possessed the qualities to concern himself in any serious way with philanthropy.

  ‘The same objection applies to science and art,’ Knollys continued.

  ‘He has been connected, more or less, for several years with the South Kensington Museum, and with several exhibitions; but I cannot say that he has ever shown any special aptitude in that line.’ The trouble was that, ‘with his disposition’, he was always likely to ‘become irretrievably disgusted with business of every description’ unless his interest in it was fully involved. Nor was he suited for the army, even if it were considered an appropriate employment for the heir to the throne. He badly wanted to be appointed Colonel of the Scots Fusiliers. But this could not be approved: as General Knollys was informed by the master of the Queen’s Household, ‘a good deal of dissatisfaction would arise’ if he were to be appointed; besides, ‘a Prince of Wales cannot make the army a profession’. So, since the Queen’s mind seemed firmly shut against sending the Prince to Ireland, the only choice appeared to be foreign affairs, which had at least ‘afforded occupation to even the most indolent of Princes’.

  But the Foreign Secretary could not agree:

  The question is of urgent importance, the solution most difficult. The Queen desired me to put the Prince on committees in the Lords. I had him named on one of a non-political character. He attended the first day. He then came to me to ask whether the committee could not be adjourned for ten days. He had some engagements and so on. I am afraid the Foreign Affairs question would be treated in the same way. If the Queen really desired his opinion, sent for him and consulted him he
would probably get amused and interested. But if he only gets a few bones after they have been to the Prime Minister and the Queen, and finds nothing but dispatches telling him only what he has skimmed a week before in the paper, he will cease reading them. If all the drafts are to be submitted to him, the delay will be intolerable. If he makes a suggestion on them, it will probably be snubbed by the Queen, or necessarily argued against by me, and he will make no more. And as to really confidential matters, will they remain secret? He asked me to keep him informed during the [Franco-Prussian] War. One evening I got four messages from different friends, telling me to be careful. One of my first notes to him had been handed round a dinner party.

  So once more Gladstone returned to the solution of some appointment in Ireland. But it now transpired that the Prince himself had no wish to go there; and when, several years later, he was brought round to the idea again, the Queen, after seeming to yield to the plan, decided in the end that a place there would become ‘a great trouble and tie which [might] become inconvenient’. Lord Spencer, the Irish Viceroy, who had patiently attempted to reconcile the Queen to the Prince’s going to Ireland and who thought that he had succeeded, felt ‘inclined to throw up the sponge and retire to [his] plough in Northamptonshire’.

  The Queen reluctantly agreed to the Prince’s visiting Ireland for short periods. He had done so in 1865, in 1868 and 1871 and was to do so again in 1885. And on each occasion the Queen was apprehensive that some part of her own authority would be usurped, that the Prince would be used for political purposes, that he would spend too much time on race-courses or that he would be assassinated. Yet every visit was a success. Only in 1885, when an angry mob attempted to break through a police cordon round Mallow station, and black flags painted with skulls and crossbones were waved beside the railway lines leading down to Cork, were there any really alarming hostile demonstrations. On his return home from this last visit, he was justified in supposing that he deserved both the Prime Minister’s congratulations on the ‘sound judgement, the admirable tact and feeling’ which he had displayed and the Irish Secretary’s assurance that his ‘great public service’ had earned the ‘admiration and gratitude’ of the House of Commons.

  When the Prince of Wales returned to Marlborough House on 1 June 1872 after twelve weeks’ convalescence on the Continent, the problem of his future employment still remained unresolved. He had enjoyed his holiday and looked extremely fit, though he had put on a great deal of weight since his illness and was now a good deal stouter than a young man of thirty ought to have been. He and the Princess had stayed for a time at Cannes and, after a little cruising in the royal yacht in the Mediterranean, they had been to Rome and Florence, Milan and Venice, and then to Cadenabbia on Lake Como before returning home by way of Genoa and Paris. They had travelled incognito as the Earl and Countess of Chester and most of their time had been spent in quiet relaxation; but on more than one occasion the Prince had caused embarrassment at home by speaking indiscreetly to the various public figures upon whom he called during his travels. The Prime Minister felt obliged to get up in the House of Commons to deny a report in The Times that the Prince, on a visit to the Vatican, had been so injudicious as to raise with the Pope the controversial issue of his Holiness’s relations with the Italian government. Indeed, the Prince’s indiscretion continued to be a stumbling block to his employment in the kind of work which he would have enjoyed and to which he considered himself best suited.

  At the instigation of the Foreign Secretary the Prince had made a formal call upon M. Thiers, the President of the recently established Third Republic, while he was in Paris, though it ‘went very much against the grain to do so’, as he chose to believe that republicanism was only a passing phase in France and some form of monarchy would soon take its place. This meeting had gone off well enough; but a subsequent chance meeting at Trouville, where the Prince had landed with his friend the Duke of St Albans while enjoying a short cruise in the Duke’s yacht Xantha, had had serious repercussions. The Prince’s long talk with Thiers on this second occasion was observed by a German spy, who reported it to Berlin, where Bismarck expressed deep concern as to its likely content.

  Yet while he annoyed the Germans by his evidently close relationship with Thiers, the Prince exasperated many French republicans by his intimate friendships with both the old French aristocracy and the family of the ex-Emperor Napoleon III. When Napoleon died at Chislehurst in Kent, where he had been living in exile, the Prince was with difficulty dissuaded from attending the funeral, which the Bonapartists intended to use as an excuse for a demonstration against both the French Republic and Germany. He could not, however, be prevented from asking several leading Bonapartists to come to stay at Sandringham after the funeral, which prompted Gladstone to lament that, while the Prince was undeniably good-natured, his ‘total want of political judgement, either inherited or acquired’, was a matter for grave concern.

  Nor could the Prince be prevented from setting out the following year upon a tour of the Loire Valley where he intended to stay in the châteaux of various prominent members of the old aristocracy, calling on his way at Esclimont near Rambouillet, the home of the Duc de la Rochefoucauld-Bisaccia, who had recently been relieved as French Ambassador in London for having supported the Comte de Paris in his claims to the French throne. The Queen did all she could to prevent the Prince from going on this holiday. He was already on the Continent, having gone to Potsdam with the Princess to attend the confirmation of his nephew Wilhelm, the son of the Crown Princess. From Potsdam, Princess Alexandra had gone to stay with her parents in Copenhagen, leaving the Prince to go on by himself to Baden where once again he provided newspapers with stories about his addiction to gambling which, combined with rumours that he was now over half a million pounds in debt, made it necessary to issue a formal denial of his financial difficulties.

  It could not be denied, though, that he was excessively fond of gambling, and for this reason Sir William Knollys had deprecated the Prince’s going to Baden at all. It was impossible to say what the Prince’s betting habits might lead to, Sir William solemnly told the Queen. ‘And, as your Majesty was once pleased to observe to him, the Country could never bear to have George IV as Prince of Wales over again.’ As for Paris, why that was

  the most dangerous place in Europe, and it would be well if it were never revisited. In fact, remaining on the Continent, whenever it involves a separation of the Prince and Princess of Wales — whether Her Royal Highness is in Denmark or elsewhere — cannot be otherwise than most undesirable, and in the interests of both would be better limited to the shortest period.

  But the Prince would brook no interference from either Knollys or the Queen; and when the Queen asked Disraeli, who had become Prime Minister for the second time, to stop the Prince from going to France en garçon, Disraeli thought it as well merely to ask the Prince to be prudent, fearing that if he attempted to prevent the Prince from carrying out any private plans he had set his heart on he would destroy what ‘little influence’ he already possessed.

  So the Prince set off to France to visit those friends of his whose company he was beginning to find so alluring, to Mouchy-le-Chatel to see the Duc de Mouchy and his beautiful half-American wife, who was a granddaughter of Napoleon’s brother-in-law, Marshal Joachim Murat, once King of Naples; to Mello to stay with the lovely and lascivious Princesse de Sagan, a banker’s daughter who was supposed to have admitted the Prince of Wales to her ever-expanding train of lovers; to the Duc de la Tremouille at Serrant; to the Duchesse de Luynes at Dampierre; to the Duc d’Aumfile at Chantilly; and then to Paris where he spent many happy hours at the Avenue d’Ifina house of Henry Standish, grandson of the Duc de Mouchy and of an Englishman who had made his home in France after inheriting a fortune, and husband of the delightful, ingenuous Hélène Standish, whose extraordinary resemblance to her admired and beloved friend the Princess of Wales she emphasized with all the means at her disposal in a manner less touching than absurd.
The Prince enjoyed himself enormously, and was alleged to have made love to several obliging Frenchwomen, though not to the Marquise d’Harcourt, who claimed to have promised to place a rose on the latch of her bedroom door, so that the Prince could find his way to her in the night, and then planted in her bed the ugliest kitchenmaid in the château.

  The month before he embarked on his continental holiday, the Prince had given a huge party which rivalled in extravagance those splendid fêtes presided over by the Prince Regent at Carlton House. Sir Frederic Leighton had been called in to supervise the decorations at Marlborough House where, on 21 July, over fourteen hundred guests had been invited to appear in fancy dress. The Prince, in the improbable and elaborate guise of Charles I with a black felt white-plumed hat blazing with diamonds and a wig of trailing curls much fairer than the Blessed Martyr’s, opened the ball with a Venetian quadrille partnered by the Duchess of Sutherland — ‘as usual’, according to Lord Ronald Gower, ‘the most beautiful and graceful woman in the place’. The music played on until dawn with a break for supper, which was served in two enormous, tapestry-hung scarlet marquees. Disraeli, who arrived rather late and not in fancy dress, having had to make a speech at the Mansion House, thought the whole affair was ‘gorgeous, brilliant, fantastic’.

  Less gorgeous and brilliant but more to the taste of his quieter friends were the garden parties which the Prince and Princess held in the grounds of Chiswick House. And infinitely more to the taste of the Prince’s young raffish friends were those parties occasionally held in houses borrowed for the night where the Prince entertained what Francis Knollys called his ‘actress friends’, and where cockfights were staged for the benefit of those who preferred gambling to girls.