Edward VII: The Last Victorian King

by Christopher Hibbert

  The Prince Consort was already ill when he wrote the letter. Suffering from neuralgia and toothache, insomnia and fits of shivering, he had been brought to a pitiable state by overwork and worry. It was not only that he was concerned about the Prince’s strange reluctance to marry; he was concerned, too, about the Queen, who had abandoned herself to grief upon her mother’s recent death with an alarming intensity, bewailing the ‘dreadful, dreadful … terrible calamity’, giving away to ‘fearful and unbearable … outbursts of grief’, eating her meals alone, sitting by herself in her mother’s ‘dear room’ at Frogmore, accusing the Prince of Wales of being heartless and selfish for not fully sympathizing with her sorrow and for writing to her on paper with insufficiently thick black borders. The Duchess of Kent’s death had been followed by that of the Prince Consort’s cousin, the young King Pedro V, a victim of a typhoid epidemic in Portugal. The Prince Consort had been extremely fond of this young man whom he had ‘loved like a son’; and, ‘shocked and startled’ by his death, he had felt overwhelmed by a growing lassitude and sense of desolation. Then came the blow which, so the Queen afterwards decided, proved too much to bear — the story of the Prince of Wales’s seduction by Nellie Clifden.

  The Prince’s liaison with this young woman — long discussed in London where Nellie was known as ‘the Princess of Wales’ — first reached Windsor in a letter from Baron Stockmar, who wondered if the rumours circulating on the Continent would endanger the Prince’s marriage to Princess Alexandra. These rumours were elaborated by that ‘arch gossip of all gossips’, Lord Torrington, who had recently come into waiting. Although Torrington’s stories were notoriously unreliable, ‘a searching enquiry’ had revealed the truth of this one. The Prince Consort was forced to recognize that there could be no doubt of the appalling fact that the Prince of Wales had had sexual experience with a woman who was a known habituée of the most vulgar dance halls in London. Sparing her the ‘disgusting details’, the Prince Consort broke the news to the Queen, then wrote an enormously long and anguished letter to his son in which he elaborated the likely consequences of his terrible sin, the possibility that the woman might have a child by him or get hold of a child and pretend that it was his.

  If you were to try and deny it, she can drag you into a Court of Law to force you to own it and there with you (the Prince of Wales) in the witness box, she will be able to give before a greedy Multitude disgusting details of your profligacy for the sake of convincing the Jury; yourself cross-examined by a railing indecent attorney and hooted and yelled at by a Lawless Mob!! Oh, horrible prospect, which this person has in her power, any day to realize! and to break your poor parents’ hearts!

  He was too heartbroken to see his son at present, he went on; but he assured him that he would do his best to protect him from the full consequences of his ‘evil deed’. The Prince must, therefore, confess everything, ‘even the most trifling circumstance’, to General Bruce, who would act as the channel of further communication between them.

  The Prince did confess everything in the most abjectly apologetic and contrite manner. He declined to name the officers responsible for his degradation; and his father accepted his refusal as right and proper, telling him that it would have been cowardly for him to have done so. But everything else was admitted and regretted: he had yielded to temptation, having tried to resist it. The affair, so far as he was concerned, was now at an end.

  The Prince Consort was thankful to recognize that the letter displayed a sincere repentance, and he was prepared to forgive his son for ‘the terrible pain’ which he had caused his parents. But forgiveness could not restore him to the state of innocence and purity which he had lost for ever, and the Prince must hide himself from the sight of God. An early marriage was now essential. Without that he would be lost; and he ‘must not, [he] dare not be lost. The consequences for this country and for the world would be too dreadful!’

  Two days after writing this letter of forgiveness and exhortation, the Prince Consort went to Sandhurst to inspect the buildings for the new Staff College and the Royal Military Academy. It was a cold wet day and he returned to Windsor tired out and racked by rheumatic pains. The next day he caught a cold and this, combined with his continuing anxiety over his son, aggravated his insomnia. ‘Albert has such nights since that great worry,’ the Queen wrote anxiously. ‘It makes him weak and tired.’ Ill as he was, however, he felt he must go up to Madingley Hall to talk to his son, to try to make him understand the disgrace he had brought upon himself and his family, and the urgent need to get married. He left on 25 November, feeling ‘greatly out of sorts’, having scarcely closed his eyes at night for the last fortnight. It was another cold, wet day; but he went out for a long walk with his son, who lost the way in his unhappiness and embarrassment so that when they arrived back at the Hall the Prince Consort, though comforted and consoled by their conversation, was utterly exhausted. ‘I am at a very low ebb,’ he told his daughter, the Crown Princess, a few days later. ‘Much worry and great sorrow (about which I beg you not to ask questions) have robbed me of sleep during the past fortnight. In this shattered state I had a very heavy catarrh and for the past four days am suffering from headache and pains in my limbs which may develop into rheumatism.’ In fact, they were developing into a complaint far more serious. By the beginning of the next month the Prince Consort was dying of typhoid fever.

  The Queen had no doubt that Bertie was to blame, and she did not want to have him in the Castle. Her ‘dearest Albert’ grew weaker and weaker, shivering and sleepless, listless and resigned to death, his mind wandering from time to time, asking repeatedly for General Bruce. His doctor considered him ‘very ill’ and reported that it was ‘impossible not to be very anxious’. Yet the Queen refused to send for the Prince of Wales, who was taking examinations at Cambridge, and it was without her knowledge that Princess Alice summoned him by telegram. But the telegram was so worded that he still had no idea of the gravity of his father’s condition, particularly as a letter he had just had from Princess Alice had informed him that his father continued to improve. He kept a dinner engagement, caught the last train and arrived at three o’clock on the morning of 14 December, talking cheerfully.

  Later that day he went into his father’s room. The dying man smiled at him but did not seem to recognize him and could not speak. Watching over the bed, Princess Alice whispered calmly to General Bruce’s sister, Lady Augusta, ‘This is the death rattle’; and then went out to fetch her mother. The Queen hurried into the room and knelt down beside the bed. The Prince of Wales and the other children knelt down too.

  I bent over him and said to him, ‘Es ist Kleines Fräuchen’ (it is your little wife) and he bowed his head; I asked him if he would give me ‘ein Kuss’ (a kiss) and he did so. He seemed half dozing, quite quiet … I left the room for a moment and sat down on the floor in utter despair. Attempts at consolation from others only made me worse … Alice told me to come in … and I took his dear left hand which was already cold, tho’ the breathing was quite gentle and I knelt down by him … Alice was on the other side, Bertie and Lenchen [Helena] … kneeling at the foot of the bed … Two or three long but perfectly gentle breaths were drawn, the hand clasping mine, & (Oh! it turns me sick to write it) all, all, was over … I stood up, kissed his dear heavenly forehead and called out in a bitter and agonizing cry, ‘Oh! My dear Darling!’ and then dropped on my knees in mute, distracted despair, unable to utter a word or shed a tear.

  She was led out of the room and lay down on a sofa in the Red Room. Princess Alice knelt down beside her, putting her arms round her. Princess Helena stood behind the sofa ‘sobbing violently’. The Prince of Wales was at the foot of the sofa, ‘deeply affected’, so Major Howard Elphinstone, Prince Arthur’s governor, thought, ‘but quiet’.

  ‘Indeed, Mama, I will be all I can to you,’ he had said to her.

  ‘I am sure, my dear boy, you will,’ she had replied and kissed him time and again.

  But she co
uld not forgive him. She told the Crown Princess a fortnight later:

  I never can or shall look at him without a shudder, as you may imagine. [He] does not know that I know all — Beloved Papa told him that I could not be told all the disgusting details … Tell him [the Crown Prince, who had made an appeal to the Queen on his brother-in-law’s behalf] that I try to employ him, but I am not hopeful. I believe firmly in all Papa foresaw. I am very fond of Lord Granville [Lord President of the Council] and Lord Clarendon [the former Foreign Secretary], but I should not like them to be his Moral Guides; for dearest Papa said to me that neither of them would understand what we felt about Bertie’s ‘fall’. Lord Russell [Clarendon’s successor as Foreign Secretary], Sir G[eorge] Lewis [Secretary of War], Mr Gladstone [Chancellor of the Exchequer], the Duke of Argyll and Sir G[eorge] Grey [Home Secretary] might. Hardly any of the others.

  The Prince Consort’s friend, Colonel Francis Seymour, encouraged the Queen to believe that the Prince of Wales’s ‘fall’ was, in reality, no more than ‘a youthful error that very few young men escape’, that it was ‘almost impossible’ to hope that the Prince would be one of them, and that the father’s ‘extraordinary pureness of mind’ had led him to exaggerate the seriousness of what most other men would consider a venial fault. But the Queen would not be persuaded, and when the Crown Princess urged her not to be so hard upon the boy, she replied:

  All you say about poor Bertie is right and affectionate in you; but if you had seen what I saw, if you had seen Fritz [your husband] struck down, day by day get worse and finally die, I doubt if you could bear the sight of the one who was the cause; or if you would not feel as I do, a shudder. Still more, if you saw what little deep feeling about anything there is … I feel daily, hourly, something which is too dreadful to describe. Pity him, I do … But more you cannot ask. This dreadful, dreadful cross kills me!

  The Prince did what he could to heal the breach, writing letters for his mother, doing what little he could to comfort her, letting her know that he shared her grief for the loss of ‘one of the best and kindest of fathers’. But it was all to no avail. And relations between mother and son became so bad that the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, came to see the Queen to tell her that the country was ‘fearful [they] were not on good terms’. The Prince was so much away from home there was talk of a serious estrangement. The Queen protested that this was not so and the Prince was ‘a very good and dutiful son’. Certainly he was much away from home, but this was ‘unavoidable, as Bertie’s living in the house, doing nothing, was not a good thing’.

  In writing to her daughter, the Queen was more open. Contact with her son was ‘more than ever unbearable’ to her, she admitted. She had decided it would be best if he left the country again for a time. His father had planned that his education ought to be completed by a tour of Palestine and the Near East, and now was a suitable time for him to embark upon it. ‘Many wished to shake my resolution and to keep him here,’ she wrote, but she would not change her mind. And on 11 January 1862 she reported, ‘Bertie’s journey is all settled.’

  The next month, accompanied as usual by General Bruce, he set out for Venice by way of Vienna. The ‘poor Boy’ was ‘low and upset’ when he wished his mother good-bye. So was she; and he returned for a moment after he had left her room, close to tears. He had felt his father’s death far more deeply than she had supposed, and was distressed to leave her, knowing that in her misery she had almost grown to hate him. Still, he was thankful to get away; time might heal the wound.

  4

  The Bridegroom

  Alix looked so sweet and lovely … and Bertie so brightened up.

  The Prince embarked upon his tour looking ‘very gloomy’. He had been instructed by his mother to travel in ‘the very strictest incognito’, to visit sovereigns in ‘strict privacy’, to accept no invitations which did not accord with his ‘present very deep mourning’, and then only from persons of ‘royal or high official or personal rank or [of] superior character and attainments’. At the same time Bruce had been told to bring his charge’s mind constantly to bear upon the path of duty which had been marked out for him by his father.

  In Vienna the Emperor Franz Joseph, who was with difficulty dissuaded from holding a military parade and state dinner, visited the Prince in his hotel and conducted him round the city. In Venice he was entertained by the Empress Elizabeth of Austria; and in Trieste by the Archduke Maximilian, the Emperor’s brother. At Trieste he went aboard the royal yacht, Osborne, which had been sent out to meet him there, seeming quite as despondent as he had been on leaving England. But as he sailed down the Dalmatian coast, calling in at Corfu and Albania, he began, for the first time since his father’s death, to display some of his former cheerful spirits. He wrote home to Charles Wynn-Carrington, thanking him for news of Nellie Clifden, whom he ‘had not heard about for a long time’, trusting that he would ‘occasionally look at a book’, and telling him of the charms of Vienna, a city ‘especially well adapted to a gay fellow like you’.

  On 1 March the Osborne docked at Alexandria where Canon Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford — an indefatigable sightseer and an expert on the Holy Land, about which he had written a book — joined the party as the Prince’s chaplain and guide. Canon Stanley had not in the least wanted to leave Oxford for such a purpose, and the more he saw of the Prince the more he regretted having given way to the Queen’s pressing request that he should do so. The young man appeared not only to be exasperatingly conscious of his own importance but not in the least interested in sightseeing, admitting to the Canon that he would much rather go out shooting crocodiles than be taken round a lot of ‘tumble-down’ old temples. After a fortnight, however, Stanley began to change his mind. Admittedly the boy was on occasions rather frivolous, insisting, for example, on riding a donkey through the streets of Cairo to the horror of an elderly pasha who had been deputized to look after him; seeming more anxious to climb to the top of the Great Pyramid than in learning about its history; and affecting to find in the features of the relief of Queen Cleopatra in the temple of Dendera an uncanny resemblance to those of Samuel Wilberforce, the eloquent, diplomatic Bishop of Oxford. Yet there was more in the Prince than he had at first thought, decided Stanley, who was particularly gratified by the obliging manner in which the young man agreed to give up shooting on Sundays; and towards the end of March this more favourable opinion was confirmed when news arrived in Egypt that the Canon’s mother had died during their absence from England and the Prince’s sympathy was touchingly sincere. ‘It is impossible not to like him,’ Stanley concluded; ‘and to be constantly with him brings out his astonishing memory of names and persons.’

  From Cairo, where they stayed in a splendid palace provided for them by the Viceroy of Egypt, Said Pasha — whose hospitality, the Prince reckoned, cost him £8,000 — the party steamed up the Nile to Karnak, then back to Cairo where they embarked on the Osborne for Jaffa. From Jaffa, escorted by a troop of Turkish cavalry and attended by a caravan of fifty servants, they rode down to Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Jericho and Hebron. Here, on being asked by the local governor not to enter the mosque for fear of provoking an outbreak of Muslim fanaticism, General Bruce loftily informed the Governor-General of Palestine that the Prince of Wales’s ‘extreme displeasure’ would be aroused were he to be denied entrance to a building beneath which Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were supposed to be buried — even though it had been sealed to Christian travellers since before the Third Crusade almost seven centuries ago. The local governor being overborne by Bruce’s domineering manner, a regiment of cavalry was detailed to stand by while the Christians entered the mosque.

  ‘Well, you see,’ the Prince commented to Stanley, ‘exalted rank has some advantages, after all.’ ‘Yes, Sir,’ the Canon replied gravely, ‘and I hope that you will always make good use of them.’

  After spending Good Friday at Nazareth and Easter Sunday at Tiberias on the shore of the Sea of
Galilee, the Prince arrived, towards the end of April, at Damascus. Here, on entering the bazaar, he was watched in resentful silence by Muslim traders who remained seated as he passed, despite the attempts by some members of his party to make them pay ‘more proper respect’. At Damascus was the former Lady Ellenborough, the notorious, old but still beautiful adventuress, who, having been divorced by Ellenborough for her adultery with Felix von Schwarzenberg, was now married to a Bedouin sheikh. More intrigued by this exotic old lady than by many of the other sights he had seen, the Prince, to Canon Stanley’s distress, was also more happy with his guns than his guide-books. As well as gazelles and hares, he shot vultures and larks, partridges, quails, geese, crows, owls and even lizards when nothing more suitable came within his sights. With markedly less enthusiasm he collected flowers and the leaves of strange trees and plants, which he pressed in a book for his sister Victoria.

  On 6 May he rode into Beirut and from there sailed in the Osborne for Tyre and Sidon, Tripoli and Rhodes, Patmos and Smyrna. Anchoring off the Dardanelles where the British Ambassador came aboard with various Turkish officials, he arrived at Constantinople on 20 May; and, after a long and rather awkward audience with the Sultan — whom the British Ambassador thought that he nevertheless handled with precocious tact — he had a pleasant week’s stay at the British Embassy before departing for Athens. His stay in Greece being cut short by the threat of riots against the unpopular King Otto, the Prince sailed for home on the last day of May. He stepped ashore on his way at various Ionian islands, and arrived at Marseilles on 10 June. Four days later, having bought some presents in Paris and visited the Emperor at Fontainebleau, he was home again with his mother at Windsor after an absence of just over four months. He looked well and sunburned and had begun to grow the beard that he never afterwards shaved.