Edward VII: The Last Victorian King

by Christopher Hibbert

  While undergoing this rigorous cramming course, the Prince was also to acquire the social graces of an officer and a gentleman. He would dine twice a week in the Grenadier Guards’ mess; once a week in the messes of other regiments; twice a week he would give a dinner party himself to senior officers; and on the two remaining evenings he would dine quietly in his own quarters — which were to be close to General Brown’s — and afterwards devote himself to reading and writing. It was considered indispensably necessary that his relations with other officers would have to be placed on ‘a becoming and satisfactory footing, having regard to his position both as a Prince of the Blood and Heir to the throne, as well as a Field Officer in the Army’.

  It was naturally all too much for him. The most dedicated and proficient recruit would have found it extremely difficult to keep pace with the Prince Consort’s programme of training; the Prince of Wales found it impossible. After seven weeks’ training, the commanding officer of the battalion to which he was attached considered him totally inadequate to perform the duties of the rank to which his father had decided he ought by then to have risen. And during the visit that his parents and his ‘Uncle George’, the Duke of Cambridge, made to the camp on 23

  August he was humiliated by having to perform, while wearing his colonel’s uniform, the duties of a subaltern. He begged to be allowed to command, if not a battalion, at least a company; but his commanding officer would not hear of it. ‘You are imperfect in your drill, Sir. Your word of command is indistinct. I will not try to make the Duke of Cambridge think that you are more advanced than you are.’

  In fact, the Duke of Cambridge had already decided that the Prince was not likely to make a very good soldier; he had neither the will nor the energy. The Prince Consort was compelled to agree. After witnessing the review on the Curragh, he confessed to his host, the Lord-Lieutenant, that the Prince was not taking his duties seriously enough — not that many young gentlemen did, he added, lamenting the ‘idle tendencies of English youth’ and the disinclination of English army officers to discuss their profession on the grounds that it was ‘talking shop’. The Queen was almost equally discouraged. All she could find to record of Bertie’s part in the review was that when he marched past he did not look ‘so very small’.

  For the Prince, however, his time on the Curragh had its compensations. He had been allowed to have with him there Frederick Stanley, the Earl of Derby’s second son, one of those Etonians whom the headmaster had selected as a suitable companion for his walking tour in the Lake District. There were also other convivial young Guards officers at the camp; and one evening, after a noisy and rather drunken party in the mess, some of these persuaded a young actress to creep into his quarters and wait for him in his bed. This was Nellie Clifden, a vivacious, cheerfully promiscuous and amusing girl who was also unfortunately most indiscreet. The Prince was much taken with her. On his return to England, he continued seeing her when he could, evidently sharing her favours with Charles Wynn-Carrington; and, on one occasion at least, she seems to have gone down to Windsor. Delighting in her company, and in the pleasures of her body, the Prince felt more than ever disinclined to concentrate upon a subject to which his parents had urged him to lend his mind — his marriage.

  The subject had first been broached soon after the Prince’s return from America, when the difficulty that had faced King George III in similar circumstances now faced the Queen and the Prince Consort: a Protestant being required by law, and a princess by custom, there were extremely few young ladies available and, of those, even fewer who were in the least good looking and whose character would not, as the Queen put it, ‘knock under’ when subjected to the strain of having Bertie for a husband. Moreover, like George III’s heir, the Prince of Wales did not want to marry a princess anyway, not — as his parents had reason to be thankful — because he was secretly married already, which had been the case with his unfortunate predecessor, but because he was vociferously determined to marry only for love. When the Queen wrote to him about his duty to get married to a suitable bride, he replied to her, so she complained to Bruce, ‘in a confused way’. His sister, now Crown Princess of Prussia, when asked to help in the search for a suitable bride, thought that his problem might be solved when she produced photographs of Princess Elizabeth of Wied; but the Prince professed himself unmoved by the pictures of this nineteen-year-old girl and declined to give them a second glance. Persuaded that their son’s mind was quite made up on the subject of Princess Elizabeth, the parents began to reconsider other possible girls who could fulfil the Queen’s requirements of ‘good looks, health, education, character, intellect and good disposition’. There was Princess Anna of Hesse, of whom the Crown Princess gave ‘a very favourable report’; there was Princess Marie of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, who was certainly ‘quite lovely’ — but she was a Roman Catholic. There was Princess Marie of Altenburg, but she was ‘shockingly dressed and always with her most disagreeable mother’. There was Princess Alexandrine of Prussia, but she was ‘not clever or pretty’. There was the nice little Princess of Sweden, but she was ‘much too young’. And there were the Weimar girls, who were also nice, ‘but delicate and not pretty’. Indeed, the more the Queen and the Prince Consort thought about the problem, the more their minds kept returning to another young girl, Princess Alexandra of Schleswig-Holstein-SonderburgGlucksburg, whom they had at first firmly rejected.

  She was the daughter of Prince Christian of Denmark, a distant relative of the drunken, divorced King Frederick VII and recognized as his heir. Her mother was Princess Louise, daughter of the Landgrave William of Hesse-Cassel. There were thus two strong objections to this match which the Queen and Prince Consort had initially dismissed out of hand. In the first place, they much disapproved of the Hesse-Cassel family, whose castle at Rumpenheim near Frankfurt was said to be the scene of the wildest and most indecorous parties; and in the second place they were most reluctant to become entangled in the complicated question of the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, which had been ruled for years by the Kings of Denmark but which the Germans considered they had a good right to annex.

  As opposed to these objections, however, Princess Alexandra herself was wholly unexceptionable. Indeed, the reports of her from Copenhagen were enthusiastic. She was only just seventeen and still at school; but, though so young, she displayed a remarkable grace of movement and manner. And when the Queen saw the photographs sent to her by Walburga Paget, the German wife of the British Minister in Copenhagen, who had once been Crown Princess Frederick’s lady-in-waiting, she had to admit that Alexandra was, indeed, ‘unverschämt hübsch’, ‘outrageously beautiful’. The Princess was not in the least intellectual and had rather a quick temper, but few other faults could be found in her. If she occasionally displayed a lamentable ignorance, she was never tactless; and if she was sometimes a little stubborn, she was never unkind. When sending her parents another photograph of ‘Prince Christian’s lovely daughter’, the Crown Princess wrote, ‘I have seen several people who have seen her of late — and who give such accounts of her beauty, her charm, her amiability, her frank natural manner and many excellent qualities. I thought it right to tell you all this in Bertie’s interest, though I as a Prussian cannot wish Bertie should ever marry her … She is a good deal taller than I am,’ the Crown Princess added later, ‘has a lovely figure but very thin, a complexion as beautiful as possible. Very fine white regular teeth and very fine large [deep blue] eyes… She is as simple and natural and unaffected as possible — and seems exceedingly well brought up.’ The only physical blemish was a slight scar on her neck which might, the Crown Princess thought, have been the result of an attack of scrofula; but this, the Queen was subsequently assured, was not the cause of the mark which, in any case, could be concealed — as Princess Alexandra later did conceal it, thus setting a long-lasting fashion — by wearing a jewelled ‘dog-collar’.

  The Queen was rather sceptical of her daughter’s lavish praise of the girl, since the
Crown Princess was ‘perhaps a little inclined to be carried away’ when she liked someone. But the Crown Prince agreed with everything his wife said. So the Queen allowed herself to be convinced that Princess Alexandra must ‘be charming in every sense of the word’. She seemed all the more desirable because not only was the Russian court also interested in her as a bride for the Tsar Alexander’s heir, but so was the Queen of Holland on behalf of the Prince of Orange. Evidently she was a ‘pearl not to be lost’.

  ‘We dare not let her slip away,’ the Prince Consort wrote to his daughter. ‘If the match were more or less your work … it would open the way to friendly relations between you and the Danes which might later be a blessing and of use to Germany.’ At the same time the Prince Consort informed his son that, if Princess Alexandra appealed to him, the marriage would be considered more important than either the Schleswig-Holstein question or his parents’ disapproval of the Hesse-Cassel family. So eager for the match did the Prince Consort become, in fact, that when he heard that his brother, Ernest, Duke of Coburg, was raising objections to it on the grounds that it would not be in the best interests of Germany, he wrote him a furious letter: ‘What has that got to do with you? … Vicky has racked her brains to help us to find someone, but in vain … We have no choice.’ To his son, the Prince Consort wrote, ‘It would be a thousand pities if you were to lose her.’

  So, in September, without marked enthusiasm, the Prince of Wales embarked for the Continent with General Bruce to see the girl whom his sister, having contrived a meeting with her at Strelitz, now described as ‘the most fascinating creature in the world’. It was given out that the purpose of his visit was to continue his military studies by accompanying his brother-in-law, the Crown Prince, to the autumn manoeuvres of the Prussian army. But the German newspapers hinted that there might be other reasons for the Prince’s journey, particularly as, in the same week, Princess Alexandra left Copenhagen for her grandfather’s castle at Rumpenheim which was not far from the area selected for the forthcoming army manoeuvres. The Prince carried with him detailed instructions from his father as to how he must behave if his Uncle Ernest endeavoured to interfere with the proposed arrangements. He was warned:

  Your Uncle Ernest … is going to the Rhine, and will try his hand at this work. Your best defence will be … not to enter upon the subject, should he broach it. Saying nothing is not difficult … Should you be told that it is known that you will meet Princess A., your answer should be that you will be very glad to have an opportunity of seeing a young lady of whom you have heard so much good.

  ‘I am afraid that I shall have many difficulties,’ the Prince rather mournfully acknowledged. ‘But I feel sure that the best plan is not to be too precipitate. The newspapers I see have taken it up, and say that, if I marry a Danish princess, there will be immediate rupture between the British and Prussian courts.’ Anyway, he would keep his father’s letter in his pocket; and if there was trouble with Duke Ernest or anyone else he would talk to no one but General Bruce or the Crown Prince Frederick. Duke Ernest’s threats to prevent it having come to nothing, the meeting between the Prince and Alexandra took place at Speyer on 24 September. The place chosen for the meeting was the cathedral, and here Princess Alexandra with her parents and the Crown Princess all assembled during the morning of that day. The Prince and Bruce were travelling incognito but they were immediately recognized by the Bishop, who insisted upon conducting them around the cathedral, so that it was some time before the necessary introductions could take place. Having effected them before the altar, the Crown Princess took the Bishop away, ostensibly to look at the cathedral frescoes ‘but in reality’, as she reported to her parents, ‘to watch the course’ of her brother’s conversation with Princess Alexandra.

  The Crown Princess ‘felt very nervous the whole time’, she admitted; and her nervousness increased when she saw that her brother had evidently begun the conversation rather awkwardly.

  At first, I think, he was disappointed about her beauty and did not think her as pretty as he expected, but as … her beauty consists more in the sweetness of expression, grace of manner and extreme refinement of appearance, she grows upon one the more one sees her; and in a quarter of an hour he thought her lovely … He said that he had never seen a young lady who pleased him so much … [though] her nose was too long and her forehead too low. She talked to him at first, in her simple and unaffected way [speaking English fluently, though with a strong Danish accent]. She was not shy. I never saw a girl of sixteen so forward for her age; her manners are more like twenty-four … I see that [she] has made an impression on [him] though in his own funny and undemonstrative way.

  The Prince’s personal report was as flat and unrevealing as his parents had come to expect:

  We met Prince and Princess Christian, and the young lady of whom I had heard so much; and I can now candidly say that I thought her charming and very pretty. I must ask you to wait till I see you, and then I will give you my impressions about her. Princess Christian seems a very nice person, but is, unfortunately, very deaf. The Prince is a most gentlemanlike agreeable person. After having thoroughly seen over the cathedral we lunched at the hotel and then proceeded here [Heidelberg] … The Prince and Princess accompanied us and are living at the same hotel.

  The Prince of Wales was little more forthcoming when he arrived home and reported in person to his parents at Balmoral. The Queen gathered that he was ‘decidedly pleased with Pcss. Alix’ and thought her face and figure pretty. But he ‘seemed nervous about deciding anything yet’. ‘A sudden fear of marriage, and, above all, of having children which for so young a man [was] so strange a fear [seemed] to have got hold of him.’ And ‘as for being in love,’ she added in a letter to her daughter, ‘I don’t think he can be, or that he is capable of enthusiasm about anything in the world … Poor boy — he does mean well — but he is so different to darling Affie!’ The Crown Princess had rallied to the Prince of Wales’s defence when their mother had been particularly critical of him before the meeting with Princess Alexandra. She had been brave enough to write then:

  Only one thing pains me, and that is the relation between you and Bertie! … His heart is very capable of affection, of warmth of feeling and I am sure that it will come out with time and by degrees. He loves his home and feels happy there and those feelings must be nurtured … I admire dear Papa’s patience and kindness and gentleness to him so much that I can only hope and pray that there may never be an estrangement between him and you.

  But now she felt compelled to agree with what her mother had said about his being incapable of true affection:

  What you say about Bertie is true … His head will not allow of feelings so warm and deep, or of an imagination which would kindle these feelings which would last for a long time! I own it gives me a feeling of great sadness when I think of that sweet lovely flower [Princess Alexandra] — young and beautiful — that even makes my heart beat when I look at her — which would make most men fire and flames — not even producing an impression enough to last from Baden to England … Bertie may look far before he finds another like her. If she fails to kindle a flame — none will ever succeed in doing so. Still there is this to be said for him — he is young [for] his age … I love him with all my heart and soul but I do not envy his future wife.

  The Prince Consort considered the whole situation thoroughly unsatisfactory; and, as was his habit on such occasions, he decided to put the whole problem down on paper in an effort to bring some clarity into his son’s mind which, at the moment, appeared to be ‘a little confused’. He reminded his son of the trouble and inconvenience his family had been put to on his behalf, of the great difficulty there had been in procuring an interview with Princess Alexandra ‘without causing political alarm in Germany and more or less compromising the parties concerned’. He thought it ‘quite reasonable and proper’ that, although he had given a most favourable report of his feelings towards the Princess, the Prince still refused to commit him
self or go further in the matter without due reflection. Indeed, it would have been imprudent of him to have done so unless he had actually fallen in love, ‘which, after this apparent hesitation, [could] hardly be supposed to be the case’. But the Prince must clearly understand that if the Princess and her parents were to be invited to England before he made up his mind, he must ‘thoroughly understand’ that this would be in order that he might propose to the young lady if she pleased him on further acquaintance as much as she did at first; and if she did not please him he must say at once that the matter was at an end so as to avert further mischief, though a great deal of mischief had been done already. Any delay would be ‘most ungentlemanlike and insulting to the lady and her parents and would bring public disgrace’ upon both the Prince and his parents.

  The Prince assured his father that he understood the position perfectly well, and agreed to do as he suggested. But he remained as unenthusiastic as ever; and the Prince Consort was quite baffled by the ‘unsolved riddle’ of his son’s reluctance to marry since his time on the Curragh, having earlier expressed a ‘desire to contract an early marriage’ as soon as he was of age. The next month, however, the Prince Consort did solve the riddle at last; and he sat down to write to his son ‘with a heavy heart upon a subject which [had] caused him the greatest pain’ he had ever felt in his life.