Edward VII: The Last Victorian King

by Christopher Hibbert

  There was further strain to endure at Windsor, where her carriage arrived in darkness and torrential rain; for although the Queen greeted her kindly, it was clear that the sad memories aroused by thoughts of the ceremony that was to take place in St George’s Chapel on 10 March were to cast their gloom over what she professed to be ‘the only ray of happiness in her life since her husband’s death’. She was too ‘desolate’ to come down to dinner, which she had served to her and a lady-in-waiting in a different room; and was ‘much moved’ when, to show her sympathy with the Queen’s distress, ‘Alix knocked at the door, peeped in and came and knelt before [her] with that sweet, loving expression which spoke volumes’. The Queen kissed her ‘again and again’.

  Princess Alexandra was ‘much moved’ herself, so the Queen recorded, when, the day before the wedding, she took the bride and bridegroom to the mausoleum at Frogmore where Prince Albert was buried: ‘I opened the shrine and took them in … I said, “He gives you his blessing!” and joined Alix’s and Bertie’s hands, taking them both in my arms. It was a very touching moment and we all felt it.’

  The Queen, ‘very low and depressed’, according to Lady Augusta Bruce, remained preoccupied with thoughts of her husband even on the day of the wedding. She had decided that she could not bring herself to take part in the procession to the chapel, nor to discard her mourning for the day. She would continue to wear the black streamers of widowhood and her black widow’s cap with a long white veil. She would put on the badge of the Order of the Garter that her ‘beloved one had worn’ and a miniature of his noble features. She would proceed to the chapel from the deanery by a specially constructed covered way and enter directly into the high oak closet on the north side of the altar which Henry VIII had built so that Catherine of Aragon could watch the ceremonies of the Order of the Garter. She would have herself photographed, sitting down in front of the bridal pair, looking at neither of them but gazing instead at a marble bust of the Prince Consort.

  Princess Alexandra, in happy contrast, looked radiant, ‘regular nailing’, in the opinion of an Eton boy. ‘She was a little pale but her eyes weren’t red.’ Her white dress was trimmed with Honiton lace and garlanded with orange blossom; and, as she prepared to enter the chapel, its enormously long silver train was held up by eight English bridesmaids, ‘eight as ugly girls,’ so Lady Geraldine Somerset thought, ‘as you could wish to see’. The Princess had cried earlier when she said goodbye to her mother, but now she appeared as content as she was assured and beautiful.

  The bridegroom seemed less assured but ‘very like a gentleman’, in Lord Clarendon’s opinion, ‘and more considerable than he [was] wont to do’. Disraeli felt sure that he had grown since he had last seen him two years before. ‘Sir Henry Holland says that he is five foot eight inches high, but, then, Sir Henry is not only a physician but a courtier,’ Disraeli told his friend, Mrs Brydges Willyams. ‘However, the Prince certainly looks taller than I ever expected he would turn out to be.’ He was, in fact, as A.J. Munby had estimated, five foot seven inches, though he appeared taller because of the high heels he had fixed to his size eight boots.

  He was wearing a uniform expertly made for him by Henry Poole of Savile Row and the insignia of a general, a rank to which he had been promoted on his twenty-first birthday. The cloak of the Order of the Garter hung from his shoulders and its gold collar round his neck. As he waited at the altar with his brother-in-law, the Crown prince of Prussia, on one side and his uncle, the somewhat mollified Duke of Coburg, on the other, he was seen to cast a series of nervous glances at the gallery where his mother sat with her ladies. She was ‘agitated and restless’, Lady Augusta recorded, moving her chair, putting back her long streamers, asking questions of the Duchess of Sutherland. Her expression was ‘profoundly melancholy’. When the organ played the first anthem and Jenny Lind sang in the chorale which had been composed by Prince Albert, Charles Kingsley, one of the Queen’s Chaplains in Ordinary, who was ‘exactly opposite to her the whole time’, saw her throw back her head and look ‘up and away with a most painful’ expression on her face. Norman McLeod, a Dean of the Chapel Royal, who was standing next to Kingsley, touched him on the arm, and, with tears in his eyes, whispered in his ‘broad Scotch’, ‘See, she is worshipping him in spirit!’

  McLeod drew Kingsley’s attention also to the bridegroom’s sisters, for ‘the blessed creatures’ were all crying. As Kingsley’s daughter, Rose, reported on her parents’ evidence, the Princess Royal had burst out crying ‘as soon as the Prince of Wales came up to the Altar’. And this ‘set Princess Alice (who looked quite beautiful) and all her sisters off crying and blubbering too: but it was only from affection and they soon recovered themselves’.

  The bride, on the other hand, was still quite controlled and ‘perfectly lovely’, walking demurely down the chapel on her father’s arm, casting her eyes down shyly when — twenty minutes late — she reached the altar, but raising them from time to time to look at the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishops of London, Oxford, Winchester and Chester, who were assisting him in the service. Mrs Kingsley thought it rather absurd that the Archbishop considered it necessary to repeat the bride’s names in groups, as though the Prince had ‘not known the Princess long enough to say all her six names off at a breath’. Other guests were rather shocked by the way the Knights of the Garter hurried down the aisle in a kind of gaggle instead of proceeding decorously two by two. There was only one really embarrassing moment, however; and that was when the bridegroom’s four-year-old nephew, the future Kaiser Wilhelm II, who was wearing Highland dress, decided to enliven the proceedings by trying to throw the cairngorm from the head of his dirk across the choir. He had already caused great consternation by hurling his aunt’s muff out of the carriage window and by addressing the Queen familiarly as ‘Duck’. He now created further disturbance by turning on his uncles, Prince Alfred and Prince Leopold, who tried to restrain his bad behaviour in the chapel, and by biting them both as hard as he could on their legs.

  Yet everyone agreed that, although the nine hundred guests were excessively cramped and the ceremonial might have been better rehearsed, the wedding was a great success. William Powell Frith, who had been asked to paint the scene, found the colour of the uniforms, the glitter of the diamonds, the mediaeval costumes of the heralds and the Yeomen of the Guard an inspiration. The Bishop of Oxford professed that he had never seen a more moving sight. And Disraeli, who had been seated immediately opposite Gladstone and had been further discomfited by having received a frigid glance from the Queen for raising his eye-glass in the direction of her closet, thought it ‘a fine affair, a thing to remember, a perfect pageant’, the only pageant, in fact, which had not disappointed him — ‘the beautiful chapel, the glittering dresses, the various processions … the heralds, the announcing trumpets, the suspense before the procession appeared, the magnificent music …’

  After the ceremony a luncheon was held for the royal guests, but the Queen did not attend it, preferring still to eat alone. Afterwards, at about four o’clock, from a window in the Grand Corridor, she watched the bridal carriage set off for Windsor Station. Disraeli told Mrs Willyams that the Queen had been

  very anxious that an old shoe should be thrown at the royal pair on their departure, and the Lord Chamberlain showed me in confidence the weapon with which he had furnished himself. He took out of his pocket a beautiful white satin slipper which had been given him, for the occasion, by the Duchess of Brabant. Alas! When the hour arrived, his courage failed him, and he hustled the fairy slipper into the carriage. This is a genuine anecdote which you will not find in the Illustrated News.

  The carriage halted for a moment below the Queen’s window. The Prince of Wales stood up, and both he and his bride looked up at her ‘lovingly’. She hoped that perhaps all would now go well with Bertie though she felt compelled to confess to King Leopold that she had of late found her son ‘a very unpleasant element in the house’ and was ‘very anxious for the re
sult of the marriage’. When the bride and bridegroom and the guests had all gone she walked down the path to the mausoleum at Frogmore, to pray alone, ‘by that blessed resting-place’, and felt ‘soothed and calmed’.

  The drive of the bridal carriage through streets thronged with Eton boys was, in contrast, far from calm. One of these excited boys, Lord Randolph Churchill, told his father:

  Nothing stood before us. The policemen charged in a body, but they were knocked down. There was a chain put across the road, but we broke that; several old genteel ladies tried to stop me, but I snapped my fingers in their face and cried, “Hurrah!” and “What larks!” I frightened some of them horribly. There was a wooden palisade put up at the station but we broke it down… I got right down to the door of the carriage where the Prince of Wales was, wildly shouting, “Hurrah!” He bowed to me, I am perfectly certain; but I shrieked louder.

  Lord Randolph was sure that if the Princess had not possessed ‘very strong nerves she would have been frightened’. But, as when the crowds had got out of hand during her drive through the City three days before, ‘all she did was to smile blandly’.

  She continued to smile during the week’s honeymoon at Osborne. ‘It does one good to see people so thoroughly happy as this dear young couple are,’ the Crown Princess reported to the Queen. ‘Darling Alix looks charming and lovely and they both seem so comfortable and at home together. Love has certainly shed its sunshine on these two dear young hearts and lends its unmistakable brightness to both their countenances … As for Bertie he looks blissful. I never saw such a change, his whole face looks beaming and radiant.’

  On their return to Windsor the Queen was equally pleased with the look of them both. ‘Alix looked so sweet and lovely at luncheon,’ she recorded the day they arrived back in the castle, ‘and Bertie so brightened up.’ Two days later, as bright as ever, he left Windsor for Buckingham Palace where he and his bride were to stay until their own London house was ready for them.

  5

  Marlborough House and Sandringham

  I fear the Queen is not disposed to let him interfere in public.

  The Prince’s London home, Marlborough House in Pall Mall, had been built by Christopher Wren for the first Duke of Marlborough in 1709–10. Reverting to the Crown on the expiry of the lease in 1817 it had been allotted to Princess Charlotte and Prince Leopold. On Princess Charlotte’s death, Prince Leopold, who had continued to live there, had angered King George IV by entering into negotiations for the sale of the lease to Queen Caroline. This had fortunately been prevented and the house had eventually been handed over to Queen Adelaide, who had lived there until her death in 1849. The next year Queen Victoria had asked for an Act of Parliament to be passed assigning the house for the use of the Prince of Wales on his nineteenth birthday; and since then the government had spent £60,000 on modernization and additions which had been carried out under the direction of Sir James Pennethorne.

  The Prince had also acquired a country house, and this had been bought for him with his own money. Thanks to his father, who had administered the estates of the Duchy of Cornwall with characteristic efficiency, there was plenty of money available. At the time of his birth the income from the Duchy’s properties in Cornwall and in London, which traditionally belonged to the heir apparent when he came of age, was no more than £16,000 a year. But by 1860 this had been increased to almost £60,000 a year; and, the income being allowed to accumulate, the Prince had come into a capital sum of about £600,000, ‘a very large capital’, as the Keeper of the Queen’s Privy Purse, Sir Charles Phipps, reminded General Knollys when pressing for a larger contribution towards the cost of the building of the mausoleum at Frogmore than the Prince, who had not been much consulted about it, at first felt disposed to pay. So, after £100,000 had been spent on furniture for Marlborough House, on jewellery and carriages, and £10,000 had been contributed to the mausoleum, there had still been more than enough for the purchase of an estate in the country; £220,000 had therefore been offered for an estate at Sandringham in Norfolk owned by the Hon. Charles Spencer Cowper, Lord Palmerston’s stepson who had gone to live abroad after marrying his mistress, Lady Harriet d’Orsay, and was only too pleased to accept so generous a sum for his English property. The house at Sandringham was rather small and much neglected; but there were over 7,000 acres of land abounding in all sorts of game and bringing in rents worth about £6,000 a year. And this, added to the interest on his remaining £270,000 invested capital, brought the Prince’s annual income to about £65,000 a year.

  Ample as this sum appeared to several advanced Liberal members of the House of Commons, it was paltry compared to the £125,000 a year which, in addition to the revenues of the Duchy of Cornwall, had been granted to King George III’s heir on his marriage to Queen Caroline, and even more paltry in comparison with the fortunes owned by various leading figures in the society over which the Prince was now required to preside. So Parliament agreed to provide another £40,000 for the Prince and £10,000 as ‘pin money’ for the Princess, who was at the same time promised £30,000 a year in the event of her widowhood. But even so, the Prince’s income was much less than half that enjoyed by the Marquess of Westminster. And there were several other landowners, including the Dukes of Sutherland, Buccleuch, Devonshire and Northumberland, and the Marquess of Bute and the Earl of Derby, who received rents from their estates far in excess of the whole of the Prince’s income. There were still others who, with landed estates far more profitable than Sandringham, augmented their great fortunes by marrying the daughters of multi-millionaires.

  The Princess of Wales had no money of her own at all. Indeed, when her father heard that she was to receive £10,000 a year from the English government, he could not refrain from remarking that it was five times as much as he had himself. But although the Prince had married a Princess without any money, and although Lord Palmerston, the Prime Minister, was not alone in thinking that his income, even when increased by Parliament, was wholly inadequate to his needs, he was able, by spending some £20,000 of capital a year, to live more or less as comfortably as he wished for the time being. He was also able to turn Sandringham into a model country estate, building new roads, planting trees, redesigning the garden with the help of the head gardener from Balmoral, establishing working-men’s clubs, schools and a hospital, improving the farms and cottages, extending the sporting facilities, buying an additional 4,000 acres and completely reconstructing the house.

  The Prince and Princess went to stay at Sandringham together for the first time the week after their return from honeymoon, on 28 March 1864. They were both completely happy there, as Disraeli discovered when invited to dinner at Windsor the next month. Disraeli wrote of that occasion:

  The Prince proposed that he should present me to Her Royal Highness and I went up accordingly. I had therefore, at last, a good opportunity of forming an opinion of her appearance, which was highly favourable. Her face was delicate and refined; her features regular; her brow well moulded; her mouth beautiful; her hair good and her ears small. She was very thin. She had the accomplishment of being gracious without smiling. She had repose. She spoke English, but not with the fluency I had expected, and I don’t think she always comprehended what was said. The Prince hovered about her.

  The Princess told Disraeli that they were ‘delighted with their London residence’ and that when they awoke in the morning they looked out into the garden together and listened to the birds singing. They spoke of nightingales, and Disraeli asked the Princess if she knew what they fed upon:

  She addressed the question to the Prince, which he could not answer. I told them — upon glow worms; exactly the food which nightingales should require. The Prince was interested by this and exclaimed: ‘Is that a fact, or is it a myth?’

  ‘Quite a fact, Sir; for my woodman is my authority, for we have a great many nightingales at Hughenden, and a great many glow worms’.

  ‘We have got one nightingale at Sandringham,’ said th
e Prince, smiling.

  Both he and the Princess were as pleased with Sandringham as they were with Marlborough House. The Prince was delighted to have a place of his own where he could do as he liked, the Princess as charmed with the room which had been specially decorated for her as a private sitting-room as with the flat surrounding countryside that reminded her of Denmark. Not all their attendants were so taken with Sandringham, however. The Princess’s lady-of-the-bedchamber, Lady Macclesfield, lamented the fact that there were

  no fine trees, no water, no hills, in fact no attraction of any sort. There are numerous coverts but no fine woods, large enclosed turnip fields, with an occasional haystack to break the line of the horizon. It would be difficult to find a more ugly or desolate-looking place … The wind blows keen up from the Wash and the spring is said to be unendurable in that part of Norfolk. It is of course a wretched hunting country and it is dangerous riding as the banks are honeycombed with rabbit-holes. As there was all England to choose from I do wish they had had a finer house in a more picturesque and cheerful situation.

  But even though the countryside was rather bleak and the alterations to the house had not yet been finished, most of the Prince’s first guests enjoyed themselves. Lord Granville sent ‘great reports’ to the Queen; and Canon Stanley, who was also there, had a very pleasant time and was deeply touched when the Princess, ‘so winning and so graceful, and yet so fresh and free and full of life’, brought her new English prayer-book to the drawing-room on Easter Saturday evening and asked him to explain the English Communion Service to her.

  Alterations to the house continued intermittently for months. A billiard room was built, the conservatory was converted into a bowling alley, and then, in 1870, the house was entirely reconstructed at enormous expense in an Elizabethan style by A.J. Humbert, an undistinguished architect who had helped to design the mausoleum at Frog-more. Filled with contemporary furniture and pictures, with trophies and mementoes brought back by the Prince from his travels, with paintings of Danish castles and Highland cattle, with weapons and armour, palms and statuary, display cabinets full of china, masses of photographs on tables, and with all manner of ornaments including models of the owners’ animals and a big stuffed baboon with paws outstretched for visitors’ cards beside the front door, it was as cluttered as any house of its period. The main rooms were large and light with tall bay windows; but some of the upstairs rooms were extraordinarily poky, though for a Victorian house unusually well supplied with bathrooms.