Edward VII: The Last Victorian King

by Christopher Hibbert

  Guests arrived by special train at Wolferton. They were met at the station and driven through the immense wrought and cast iron gates, designed by Thomas Jeckell, which were a wedding present from the gentry of Norfolk. On either side of the drive they could usually see an assortment of the Princess’s innumerable dogs — pugs and spaniels, beagles and borzois, basset hounds, chows and terriers, Eskimo sledge-dogs and French bull-dogs — or a number of curiously unconcerned rabbits. They entered the hall, known as the saloon, which was also the living quarters of a white cockatoo, to be met there by their host. And, once settled in, they were almost certain to enjoy themselves, provided they were not the victim of one of those dreadful practical jokes which were enjoyed by host and hostess alike but which were fortunately not often as heartless as that played upon a young midshipman who, on accepting a mince pie at tea-time, found it full of mustard.

  Disraeli certainly enjoyed himself. He thought Sandringham ‘both wild and stately’ and fancied himself paying a visit to one of ‘the Dukes and Princes of the Baltic: a vigorous marine air, stunted fir forests … the roads and all the appurtenances on a great scale, and the splendour of Scandinavian sunsets’. The host was ‘very gracious and agreeable’; the hostess charming.

  The Gladstones were equally taken with both of them; and after one of their visits, Gladstone told his secretary, Edward Hamilton, that they had ‘enjoyed themselves greatly, that nothing could have exceeded the kindness of their Royal Highnesses as host and hostess’. Mrs Gladstone wrote warmly of their ‘wish to make their guests happy’ and the welcome ‘absence of much form or ceremony’. As she was undressing on the last night of one of her visits, the Princess put her head round the bedroom door ‘offering in fun to help [her] and in the end tucking [her] up in bed’.

  After a subsequent visit Mr Gladstone wrote of his reception being ‘kinder if possible even than heretofore’, and of the Prince’s ‘pleasant manners’: he was ‘far lighter in hand’ than his brother, Prince Alfred.

  Most people, indeed, were rather dismayed when Prince Alfred was one of the party, particularly when there was music in the evening as there often was. One evening the Prince of Wales and his former French tutor, Brasseur, were playing whist against Gladstone and the Queen’s private secretary, Henry Ponsonby. Gladstone, reluctant to gamble, had asked the Prince, ‘For love, Sir?’ The Prince had complaisantly replied, ‘Well, shillings and half-a-crown on the rubber’; and, Gladstone having submitted to this, all had gone well until Prince Alfred started accompanying the pianist on the fiddle. ‘Anything more execrable I never heard,’ Ponsonby complained. ‘They did not keep time. They or perhaps the fiddle was out of tune and the noise abominable. Even Wales once or twice broke out, “I don’t think you’re quite right.” This for an hour. I quite agreed with Gladstone that it was a relief when we got away from that appalling din.’

  Throughout their married life the Prince and Princess made a practice of coming to Sandringham for his birthday in November, for his wife’s birthday on 1 December and for the Christmas holidays. And on almost every occasion there was a large house party composed of guests from the most varied backgrounds, all of whom, on departure, were placed on a weighing-machine by the Prince, who recorded the readings in a note-book. One Christmas the Bishop of Peterborough arrived just as all the other guests were having tea in the entrance hall and he found the company ‘pleasant and civil’ but ‘a curious mixture’: ‘two Jews, Sir Anthony de Rothschild and his daughter; an ex-Jew, Disraeli; a Roman Catholic, Colonel Higgins; an Italian duchess who is an Englishwoman, and her daughter, brought up a Roman Catholic and now turning Protestant; a set of young Lords and a bishop’.

  The Prince’s most intimate friends were either rich or aristocratic and usually both. Out of a sense of duty he often asked to Sandringham his fellow East Anglian landowners, the Earl of Leicester of Holkham Hall, Lord Hastings of Melton Constable, Sir Somerville Gurney of North Runcton Hall and Sir William ffolkes of Congham Lodge. But although he frequently went to stay with them in turn, he became a close friend of none of them. He preferred the company of other rich men who were more original, more amusing and, usually, more raffish.

  Still one of his favourite companions was Henry Chaplin, his friend from Oxford days who, after a year at Christ Church, had decided that he had had enough of university life and had gone on an expedition to the Rocky Mountains of Canada where, encountering Blackfoot Indians on the warpath, he had prudently turned back to enjoy the more familiar excitements of the Burton hunt and the pleasures of life at Blankney Hall. Amusing, gregarious, extravagant and rumbustious, he was the subject of numerous scandalous stories set in the Midlands and in many of these stories the Prince of Wales appeared as a subsidiary character. It was, for instance, related how, returning together to Blankney after a drunken night with some local squire, Chaplin had driven his four-inhand full tilt into the closed iron gates at the end of his drive, killing the two leading horses outright; and how, coming across a fat old peasant woman in a lane on his estate one day, he and the Prince had pulled her skirt over her head and stuck a £5 note in her bloomers. Soon after the Prince’s marriage, Chaplin became engaged to the Marquess of Anglesey’s only daughter, who, within a few days of the date fixed for the wedding, eloped with the Marquess of Hastings. Eventually Chaplin married Lady Florence Sutherland-Leveson-Gower, elder daughter of the Duke of Sutherland.

  The Duke himself was also a close friend of the Prince. Thirteen years the Prince’s senior, the Duke was a man of liberal views and eccentric tastes whose great delight was to drive the steam engines on the Highland Railway, and to assist the men of the Metropolitan Fire Brigade in the exercise of their hazardous duties. More than once the Prince, given notice of a fire by the Brigade’s organizer, Captain Eyre Shaw, accompanied the Duke on these unconventional escapades; and frequently he went to stay with him at Trentham in Staffordshire, at Stafford House in London and at Dunrobin Castle in Sutherland where he enjoyed to the full the hospitality of a host who, as the owner of 1,358,000 acres — the biggest landed estate in the country — was well able to afford to entertain him in the grandest style.

  The Duke had been Member of Parliament for Sutherland until his father’s death in 1861; but he took little interest in politics, unlike many others of the Prince’s rich friends who combined public duty with private pleasure. Lord Cadogan, for example, was one of those Etonians who had been allowed to visit the Prince at Windsor when they were boys and who had accompanied him on his holiday in the Lake District; he accepted office under Disraeli, later joined the Cabinet as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and became the first mayor of Chelsea where, as lord of the manor, he owned an extremely valuable estate. Charles Wynn-Carrington, who succeeded his father as third Baron Carrington in 1868, became Governor of New South Wales and was later given a seat in the Cabinet. Lord Hartington, afterwards eighth Duke of Devonshire, another intimate friend, also distinguished himself in public life as well as in the world of sport, occupying important positions in various governments while remaining, as Lord Rosebery said, ‘the most magnificent of hosts’. Such, too, was the case with Lord Spencer, the Prince’s Groom of the Stole, who became Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, Lord President of the Council and subsequently First Lord of the Admiralty. Even Henry Chaplin, who was a Member of Parliament for thirty-eight years, joined the Cabinet as President of the Board of Agriculture.

  Yet much as he relished the company of rich sportsmen whose political ambitions he encouraged, the Prince never neglected those more staid friends and mentors who had claims upon his regard. Indeed, he prided himself, with justification, upon his loyalty, as he did upon his readiness to forgive those who had offended him or ruffled his quick temper. ‘I may and have many faults,’ he once wrote. ‘No one is more alive to them than I am; but I have held one great principle in life from which I will never waver, and that is loyalty to one’s friends, and defending them if possible when they get into trouble.’ Neither Dean Stanley nor D
ean Wellesley nor Canon Kingsley had need of his defence, but they all had cause to appreciate his continuing friendship throughout their lives. They were made to feel as welcome at his table as those aristocrats and actors, politicians and bankers, sportsmen and diplomatists, Scottish financiers, Frenchmen and Germans, Americans and Jews whom he was known to find so stimulating. They could expect to meet such wits and anecdotists as Lord Houghton, the charming dilettante and poet, friend of Carlyle and champion of Swinburne; Ralph Bernal Osborne, the brilliant orator who changed his constituency so often in his parliamentary career that his friend, Disraeli, claimed that he could never remember what place he represented; Dr Frederic Hervey Foster Quin, the eccentric homeopath, friend of Dickens and Thackeray and follower of the fashions set by Count d’Orsay, who, after going to Italy as travelling physician to the Duchess of Devonshire, had become the doctor of Prince Leopold and the Duchess of Cambridge; and Lord Granville, whose bons mots the Prince admitted he tried to palm off as his own.

  Many of the Prince’s friendships much distressed the Queen, who was equally disturbed by the Prince’s intimacy with such fast women as Lady Filmer and the Duchess of Manchester, a witty, beautiful Germanborn woman who enjoyed the attention of numerous distinguished admirers while her husband was alive and, when he was dead, married the most ardent and constant of her lovers, the Duke of Devonshire. The Queen did all she could to prevent her son and daughter-in-law entertaining, or being entertained by, these people and others like them. The Duchess of Manchester ‘is not a fit companion for you’, she warned Princess Alexandra. The Duchess of Sutherland was ‘a foolish, injudicious little woman’ whose husband did ‘not live as a Duke ought’. Yet the Prince — making excuses for the Duchess of Manchester and protesting that, ‘despite certain eccentricities and, formerly, faults’, the Duke of Sutherland was ‘a clever and most straightforward man’ — continued to ask them both to Marlborough House and Sandringham and to accept invitations to Kimbolton, to Trentham and to Stafford House, the Sutherlands’ London house, where, at a masked ball, he much amused Disraeli by walking up to the Duchess and addressing her, ‘How do you do, Mrs Sankey? How is Mr Moody?’

  Nor could the Queen dampen her son’s whole-hearted enthusiasms for the club life of London. His membership of White’s and the Turf Club was not entirely exceptionable; his recurrent visits to the Cosmopolitan Club might be excused on the grounds that he met many of the distinguished foreign visitors who were so often entertained there. But his patronage of the Garrick Club and, even worse, of the Savage Club was, the Queen considered, scarcely compatible with his position.

  ‘Bertie is not improved since I last saw him,’ the Queen complained to the Crown Princess a fortnight after he had moved into Marlborough House, ‘and his ways and manners are very unpleasant. Poor dear Alix! I feel so for her.’ A few weeks later she renewed her strictures:

  Bertie and Alix left Frogmore today, both looking as ill as possible. We are all seriously alarmed about her. For although Bertie says he is so anxious to take care of her, he goes on going out every night till she will become a Skeleton… Oh, how different poor foolish Bertie is to adored Papa, whose gentle, loving, wise motherly care of me, when he was not twenty-one, exceeded everything!

  What on earth, wondered the Queen, would become of the poor country when she died? She foresaw, if Bertie succeeded, ‘nothing but misery, and he would do anything he was asked and spend his life in one whirl of amusements’, as he did now. It made her ‘very sad and anxious’.

  He and the Princess really ‘should not go out to dinners and parties’ so much during the London season, she told Lord Granville. They ought to restrict themselves to occasional evening visits to senior members of the Cabinet such as the Prime Minister, the Lord President of the Council and ‘possibly Lord Derby’, and to such respectable houses as Apsley House, Grosvenor House and Spencer House, but ‘not to all these the same year’.

  She said as much to the Prince himself in a letter to General Knollys which she asked to be brought to her son’s attention. Society had become ‘so lax and so bad’ that the Prince and Princess of Wales had a duty to deny themselves amusement in order to keep up ‘that tone … which used to be the pride of England’. They must show their disapproval of its looser members by ‘not asking them to dinner, nor down to Sandringham — and, above all, not going to their houses’.

  To associate the Crown with such frivolous and worthless people was both disgraceful and dangerous, for not only was ‘every sort of vice’ tolerated in the aristocracy ‘whereas the poorer and working classes, who [had] far less education and [were] much more exposed, [were] abused for the tenth part less evil than their betters commit without the slightest blame’, but also ‘in the twinkling of an eye, the highest may find themselves at the feet of the poorest and lowest’.

  The Prince, too, was concerned about this and — worried, also, by the bomb outrages committed by Irish revolutionaries in England — he wrote to the Queen to advise her to urge the government to ‘use the high hand, be firm and deal with these rebels’ most summarily. ‘If they do not,’ he went on, ‘the lower classes who already have a much greater power than they, I think, have any idea of, will be very difficult to manage; and then it will cause bloodshed.’

  The Queen, however, saw the danger in a different light: the rebels were just a few ruffians; the country as a whole ‘never was so loyal or so devoted to their Sovereign as now’. But there certainly was a danger, a ‘great danger’, and one which it was the duty of all to try to avert. As the Queen informed her son:

  This danger lies not in the power given to the lower orders, who are daily becoming more well-informed and more intelligent, and who will deservedly work themselves up to the top by their own merits, labour and good conduct, but in the conduct of the Higher Classes and of the Aristocracy.

  Many, many with whom I have conversed, tell me that at no time for the last sixty or seventy years was frivolity, the love of pleasure, self-indulgence, and idleness (producing ignorance) carried to such excess as now in the Higher Classes, and that it resembles the time before the first French Revolution; and I must — alas! — admit that this is true. Believe me! It is most alarming, although you do not observe it, nor will you hear it; but those who do not live in the gay circle of fashion, and who view it calmly, are greatly, seriously alarmed. And in THIS lies the REAL danger.

  The Prince took leave to disagree. He granted the truth of what his mother said about the ‘really hardworking labouring classes’; but there were many ‘toughs’ outside these classes, and they were getting ‘a greater power … to a much greater extent than people [were] aware of’. As for the aristocracy, he thought it ‘hard to say that all’ were as given over to ‘amusement and self indulgence’ as she had suggested. He continued:

  In every country a great proportion of the aristocracy will be idle and fond of amusement, and have always been so; but I think that in no country more than ours do the Higher Classes occupy themselves, which is certainly not the case in other countries. We have always been an Aristocratic Country, and I hope we shall always remain so, as they are the mainstay of this Country, unless we become so Americanized that they are swept away.

  Although he insisted that in no country did the higher classes occupy themselves more than they did in England, the Prince himself found very little useful work to do. When the Prince Consort was alive the Queen had dreaded the thought that her son might usurp the place which she considered her husband ought to fill; and the government had had to appeal to Stockmar to dissuade her from insisting that a bill should be introduced into Parliament giving Prince Albert legal precedence over the Prince of Wales. After her husband’s death she was even more determined to exclude her son from any position of authority. She reluctantly admitted on occasions that he ought to become ‘more and more acquainted with affairs and the way in which they [were] conducted’; yet she shrank from actually bringing him closer to matters which she wanted to deal with en
tirely by herself. ‘No human power,’ she assured her uncle, King Leopold, ‘will make me swerve from what he decided and wished … I apply this particularly as regards our children — Bertie, etc. — for whose future he had traced everything so carefully. I am also determined that no one person, may he be ever so good, ever so devoted … is to lead or guide or dictate to me.’ As she recorded in her diary, she could ‘hardly bear the thought of anyone helping [her] or standing where [her] dearest had always stood’.

  As the months went by the Queen continued to remark from time to time that the Prince ought to ‘prepare himself more and more for that position’ which she could not help thinking he might not be as far removed from ‘as many wished to think’. But at the same time she continued to rebuff all attempts to gain for the Prince that experience which she agreed to be essential, preferring to call upon the younger children, especially the rather sickly Prince Leopold, when she needed any help with her paper work, and treating with scorn any suggestion that, in view of the seclusion in which she had chosen to live since the first day of her widowhood, she might consider abdicating in favour of her eldest son. When Lord Clarendon was heard to remark that even the Prince Consort would have found for his son, now that he was of age, some sort of regular work which would keep him out of harm’s way, the Queen let it be known that she was much offended. As Prince Arthur’s tutor, Major Elphinstone, observed, ‘I fear the Queen is not disposed to let him interfere in public.’