Edward VII_The Last Victorian King

by Christopher Hibbert

  The Queen was not alone in her disapproval of the Prince’s friends. After another member of the Marlborough Club turned out to be an American swindler wanted by the police, The Times condemned his patronage of ‘American cattle-drovers and prize-fighters’, while other critics spoke harshly of his intimate friendships with men distinguished by riches rather than birth. They condemned, for example, his intimacy with Sir Thomas Lipton, who had begun work at the age of nine in his Irish father’s grocery shop in Glasgow; with Sir John Blundell Maple, proprietor of a furniture store in Tottenham Court Road; and with the ruthless, self-made adventurer Cecil Rhodes, whose blackballing by the Travellers’ Club induced the Prince to resign from it himself. Most of all they disapproved of his close friendships with affluent Jews. ‘We resented the introduction of the Jews into the social set of the Prince of Wales,’ Lady Warwick said; ‘not because we disliked them individually … but because they had brains and understood finance. As a class, we did not like brains. As for money, our only understanding of it lay in the spending, not in the making of it.’ The Prince, on the contrary, was fascinated by the operations of capitalists and talk of high finance. And he delighted in the company of rich Jews like the Sassoons, whose ancestors had been settled in Mesopotamia for many centuries and whose immense wealth was derived from the profits of the great merchant house of David Sassoon & Company of Bombay. Arthur Sassoon lived in great splendour at 8 King’s Gardens, Hove, waited upon by forty servants. His half-brothers Reuben and Alfred had almost equally sumptuous houses nearby. Arthur also had a large house, Tulchan Lodge, in Inverness-shire; and at all these places the Prince was welcome to stay for as long as he liked.

  The Prince was on quite as intimate terms with the Rothschilds. He had known the gruff and despotic Nathan Meyer Rothschild at Cambridge, and had subsequently often gone to stay with him at Tring Park. He was also a frequent guest of Nathan’s brothers, the extravagant and urbane bachelor, Alfred, who lived in sybaritic luxury at Halton House; and the kindly Leopold of Ascott and Palace House, Newmarket. Their uncle, Sir Anthony de Rothschild, the first baronet, advised the Prince on his finances and, on occasions, arranged for the family bank to advance him money when he was in difficulties. Similar services were offered to the Prince by Baron Maurice von Hirsch auf Gereuth, an enormously rich Jewish financier known as ‘Turkish Hirsch’ because a large part of his fortune had been derived from the building of railways for the Sultan. Hirsch’s social ambitions in Germany and Austria had been thwarted by racial prejudice despite his lavish gifts to charity. Knowing that the Prince of Wales was afflicted by no such prejudice, and that the company of millionaires was highly congenial to him, Hirsch had approached the Crown Prince Rudolph of Austria for an introduction. Having obtained one in exchange for a loan of 100,000 gulden, Hirsch, who had a house in Paris as well as an estate at St Johann, called at the Hôtel Bristol one day when the Prince was staying there. The Prince took to him, understood his predicament, accepted an invitation to luncheon at his house and agreed to stay with him at St Johann. And when Hirsch came to England and rented a house in London, a country house near Sandringham and a shoot near New-market, the Prince undertook to sponsor his entrée into English society, becoming ‘dreadfully annoyed’ when the Queen declined to invite his protégé to a state concert at Buckingham Palace and sharing the Baron’s pleasure when a yearling filly, La Flèche, which Hirsch had bought on the recommendation of Lord Marcus Beresford, won the One Thousand Guineas and the Cambridgeshire as well as the Oaks and the St Leger in the single season of 1892. Before long, however, the Prince began to find Hirsch’s company rather tiresome, and after the Baron’s death in 1896 he was glad to recognize in his executor another multi-millionaire whom he could not only trust as a financial adviser but also value as a close personal friend.

  Ernest Cassel was ten years younger than the Prince, to whom he bore a marked resemblance. Born in Cologne, the youngest son of a Jewish banker in a modest way of business, he had left for England at the age of sixteen and obtained employment with a firm in Liverpool. A few months later he moved to Paris as a clerk in the Anglo–Egyptian Bank; and, on the outbreak of the Franco–Prussian War, returned to England, where he joined the staff of the financial house of Bischoffsheim and Goldschmidt, one of whose partners, Louis Bischoffsheim, was Hirsch’s brother-in-law. By the time he was twenty-two, Cassel was manager of the firm at a salary of £5,000 a year. Before he was thirty, by industry, acumen, and a deserved reputation for unassailable integrity, he had accumulated capital of £150,000. He had also married an English girl, becoming a British subject himself on the day of the wedding and being received into the Roman Catholic Church three years later in obedience to his beloved wife’s dying wish. Cautious and reticent in human relations, Cassel was more interested in power than in people. He was a well-known figure in society; he was careful to join the right clubs; and he was as indefatigable in his pursuit of British as he was of foreign decorations, once coolly informing Francis Knollys, who passed the message on to the Prime Minister’s Private Secretary, that he was ‘anxious to have the G.C.B. conferred upon him without loss of time’.

  It was felt that, except when he was in the hunting field, or inspecting his horses in the stud or on the race-course, Cassel’s attention never wandered far from the world of finance, of international loans, of percentages and profits. Yet, unlike most men of comparable riches, he derived as much pleasure from spending money as in amassing it. Though his own tastes were restrained, he was the most generous of hosts both at Moulton Paddocks, Newmarket, and at his London houses in Grosvenor Square and Park Lane, both of which were filled with old masters, with all kinds of objects d’art from Renaissance bronzes to English silver and Chinese jade, and with equally decorative women whose company Cassel, like the Prince, preferred to that of men.

  Finding Cassel on occasions a trifle dispiriting, the Prince never tired of the Marquis de Soveral, the lively, stimulating Portuguese Minister in London whose charming presence was welcome at every party. Known as the ‘Blue Monkey’ because of his animated manner, blue-black hair and dark complexion, Luis de Soveral was recognized, indeed, as being ‘the most popular man in London’, except at the German Embassy, where he was known as ‘Soveral-Überall’ and strongly disliked for his known anti-German sentiments. The Princess of Pless, the former Daisy Cornwallis-West, treated him as a rather distasteful joke.

  He imagines himself to be a great intellectual and political force and the wise adviser of all the heads of the government and, of course, the greatest danger to women! … [But surely] even those stupid people who believe that every man who talks to a woman must be her lover, could not take his Don Juanesque pretensions seriously. Yet I am told that all women do not judge him so severely and some even find him très seduisant. How disgusting!

  The Princess of Pless apart, virtually everyone in London, even the husbands of his mistresses, and both the Princess of Wales and Alice Keppel, delighted in the sight of his tall figure approaching, a white flower in his buttonhole, a monocle firmly fixed in one glittering eye, his large moustache neatly brushed, his regular teeth revealed in a warm and happy smile, ready to greet an old friend with enthusiasm or to charm a new acquaintance. ‘As a talker he was quite wonderful in keeping the ball rolling,’ Henry Ponsonby’s son, Frederick, thought.

  ‘And without being exactly witty his conversation was always sparkling and amusing. It was only when he had to talk seriously that one realised how clever he was.’ Yet he did all he could to disguise his cleverness, having found by experience that ‘both men and women fight shy of a clever man’.

  Certainly the Prince fought shy of clever men whose intelligence was on permanent display. He preferred the company of actors to authors; and authors as a rule did not regard him highly. To Rudyard Kipling he was a corpulent voluptuary; to Max Beerbohm a fat little boy kept in a corner by a domineering mother; to Henry James an ‘ugly’ omen for ‘the dignity of things’. He was once prevailed up
on by Sir Sidney Lee to give a dinner at Marlborough House to celebrate the publication of the Dictionary of National Biography. He had evidently not been very keen to do so; and at the dinner was not in his brightest mood, ‘embarrassed by the effusive learning of Lord Acton on one side and the impenetrable shyness of Sir Leslie Stephen on the other’. It is said that on looking round the table his eye fell on Canon Ainger, who had written the entries on Charles and Mary Lamb. ‘Who is the little parson?’ he asked.

  ‘Why is he here? He is not a writer.’ It was explained to him that Ainger was ‘a very great authority on Lamb’. At this the Prince put down his knife and fork, crying out in bewilderment, ‘On lamb!’

  Actors viewed the Prince more kindly, for he took the trouble to gain their regard. One evening in 1882, for example, after Lillie Langtry’s appearance on the stage of the Haymarket Theatre, the Prince, as a gesture of thanks to the kind cooperation of her more experienced colleagues, gave a large dinner party at Marlborough House where a number of actors were, so Lord Carrington told his wife, ‘sandwiched between ordinary mortals with more or less success’. The only regrettable incident occurred when William Kendal, ‘a good-looking bounder’, ‘distinguished himself’ late in the evening by singing ‘a very vulgar song which was not favourably received in high quarters, after which the party rather collapsed’.

  The Prince might well have let the vulgarity pass unremarked in other circumstances, but he evidently considered Marlborough House an unsuitable stage for the comedian’s performance. Yet, while he was ever careful to remind the forgetful that he was regal as well as rouè, few people ever accused the Prince of being a snob. Certainly he preferred the company of the rich to the poor, judged riches as useful a method of grading people as any other, and obviously chose to associate with those who could entertain him in the comfortable surroundings to which he had grown accustomed. But although newly established millionaires such as J.B. Robinson were invited to Sandringham almost as a matter of course, the Prince also offered hospitality to men who would never be in a position to return it. One of these was Henry Broadhurst, a former stonemason and trade union leader who was Liberal Member of Parliament for Stoke on Trent and who had served with the Prince on the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes. Broadhurst had no evening clothes and was relieved when the Prince, ‘in order to meet the difficulties in the matter of dress’, made arrangements for him to have dinner served in his bedroom. Yet he did not feel neglected or deprived. He had several long conversations with his host and his family, and left Sandringham ‘with a feeling of one who had spent a week-end with an old chum of his own rank in society’.

  As few people ever accused the Prince of being a snob, so everyone agreed that his eagerness to help his friends was one of the most pleasing traits of his personality. It often took him a long time to forgive those who had offended him; but most of them were forgiven in the end, as was Sir Frederick Johnstone, who had insulted him when drunk in the billiardroom at Sandringham. He was sometimes slow to realize that the financial ruin of certain men was due to their attempts to keep up with him and to fulfil the kind of obligations placed upon Christopher Sykes, who was constantly being told to arrange a dinner or a party for the Prince and his friends. Lord Hardwicke, known as ‘Glossy Top’ from his habit of brushing his beaver hat until he could see his face in it, ruined himself like Christopher Sykes. So did the charming Charles Buller, who was obliged to resign his commission in the Household Cavalry when he could no longer pay his mess bills and was eventually sent to prison for issuing a worthless cheque. But when told of such friends’ distress, the Prince did what he could to help them. On the appearance of Christopher Sykes’s forthright sister-in-law at Marlborough House with the sad news of Sykes’s imminent bankruptcy, arrangements were made for the most pressing debts to be paid. And on Lord Arthur Somerset’s fleeing the country rather than face a charge of ‘gross indecency’, the Prince wrote to the Prime Minister asking that the poor ‘unfortunate Lunatic’ might be allowed to return to England to see his family without fear of arrest.

  The Prince’s correspondence is replete with requests that desirable political and diplomatic appointments should be offered to friends of his or to men to whom he had cause to feel obliged, and with recommendations for promotions, preferments, honours, titles and decorations. A whole series of letters were addressed to three separate prime ministers on behalf of the Revd Charles Tarver, his former tutor, who was living in poverty in a small parish in Kent. He was almost equally importunate on behalf of a Norfolk neighbour who had once acted as his agent and who, in the Prince’s opinion, ought to be knighted, having been six times Mayor of King’s Lynn. And he ardently pressed the claims of Dean Liddell of Christ Church to be considered a worthy successor to Arthur Stanley as Dean of Westminster. He was determined that a diplomat whom he much admired, Sir Robert Morier, should be appointed British Ambassador in Berlin despite the objections of Bismarck; that Mrs Gladstone ought to receive a peerage and become Mistress of the Robes, though this could hardly be expected to meet with his mother’s approval; that, since he was ‘a good fellow’ and his family owned half the county, Lord Rothschild ought to succeed the Duke of Buckingham as Lord Lieutenant of Buckinghamshire whatever other local notables might have to say on the subject; and that Sir Ernest Cassel ought to be elected to the Jockey Club, which did not want to admit him. He pressed for the appointment of Charles Dilke as President of the Local Government Board; of Lord Carrington as Viceroy of India; of Canon Dalton as Dean of Exeter; of Ferdinand Rothschild as a Trustee of the British Museum; of Valentine Baker as Wolseley’s chief intelligence officer in Egypt; and of Rosebery — whom he later successfully persuaded to go to the Foreign Office and to whom, in retirement, he gave the memorable advice, ‘to rise like a Sphinx from your ashes’ — as Secretary of State for Scotland.

  To the Prince’s chagrin, his recommendations were more often disregarded than not. And to the government they were sometimes embarrassing, even suspect. In February 1881 Gladstone was worried by an approach from the Prince, who wished to recommend for baronetcies four men, not one of whom was considered worthy of the honour. Gladstone’s secretary, Edward Hamilton, noted in his journal:

  It is perhaps hardly fair to say so, but these recommendations have rather an ugly look about them. A respectable clergyman [the Revd H.W. Bellairs] wrote not long since to say that he was in possession of information, to which he could swear, that there were certain persons scheming for hereditary honours in consideration of bribes, and bribes to people in very high life … that a gentleman had told him that he had been offered a baronetcy by the Prince of Wales … on condition that he would pay £70,000 to the Prince’s agent on receiving the title.

  Only one of the men recommended by the Prince was ‘known to ordinary fame’, Hamilton added. This was a rich building contractor, C.J. Freake, and for him a knighthood would have been quite sufficient, ‘having regard to the reported wild habits of Freake fils and the political proclivities of Freake père’. Yet the Prince ‘persistently and somewhat questionably (if not fishily)’ pressed Freake’s name upon Gladstone; and his baronetcy was, in fact, approved by the Queen a few months later.

  Then, in 1884, there was the case of

  Mr Francis Cook who gave such a huge sum … towards the Alexandra Home for Female Art Students [and] got the Prince of Wales to back his claim for a baronetcy [which he received in 1886]. How is it possible to advise the favourable consideration of such a claim? It is munificence, given with every sort of [assurance], of disinterestedness, but really intended as a bribe.

  Just as the Queen was highly critical of the kind of people with whom the Prince associated, so she was critical of the way he brought up his children.

  ‘They are such ill-bred, ill-trained children,’ she wrote in a spasm of irritation when they were young. ‘I can’t fancy them at all.’

  Others, more predisposed to like children generally, agreed with her. Lady Ger
aldine Somerset thought them ‘wild as hawks’. The daughters — though the eldest was ‘very sharp, quick, merry and amusing’ — were ‘rampaging little girls’, while the boys were ‘past all management’. Certainly guests at Sandringham were never for long unaware that there were children in the house. A game of croquet or even a tea-party was likely to be interrupted by excited screams and running boots which, in most other country houses, would have led to a severe reprimand for the governess. When they were taken to other houses — which they rarely were — their unwilling infant hosts and hostesses were well advised to put away their best toys in the nursery cupboard, as the Duchess of Teck’s children always did.

  There were five of them in all, ranging in age, on their father’s thirtieth birthday, from seven to three, the three girls, Louise, Victoria and Maud, being the youngest. They appeared to be devoted to each other and to their parents, hating to be parted, and disliking in particular having to go to stay with their grandmother at Balmoral. A proposed visit there once reduced all the girls to tears and induced a fit of defiance in the youngest, who stamped her foot and declared that she wouldn’t go.