Edward VII: The Last Victorian King

by Christopher Hibbert

  At the end of the day the bag was laid out neatly for the Prince’s inspection before being taken away to the game larder which, after Baron Hirsch’s, was believed to be the biggest in the world. And it had need to be; for as the years went by, the amount of game killed each year at Sandringham grew enormous: a day’s shooting would sometimes yield 3,000 birds or 6,000 rabbits.

  This was not achieved without constant irritation to the Prince’s tenant farmers. One of these was Mrs Louise Cresswell, who had decided to continue farming the nine-hundred-acre Appleton Hall farm after her husband’s death. Mrs Cresswell had cause to complain of her crops being ruined by the Prince’s shooting, which was ‘a perfect passion with him and nothing made him more angry than the slightest opposition to it’. His rabbits nibbled at her swedes and mangels; his hares ate her young wheat and barley; his pheasants and partridges settled on her fields like plagues of locusts; his beaters broke down her gates and fences; his game-keepers ordered her labourers to stay in the farmyard when the guns were out shooting, and forbade them to clear the weeds that grew around the game shelters for fear they disturb the nesting birds. Claims for damages were submitted only to be met with haggling or denials of responsibility by the Prince’s agent.

  The Prince himself was usually quite charming and friendly towards Mrs Cresswell except on those occasions when, having ‘listened to tales from any quarter without taking the trouble to inquire into the truth of them’, he scowled at her in his most intimidating manner. ‘No one,’ she decided, ‘can be more pleasant and agreeable than His Royal Highness, if you go with him in everything and do exactly what he likes; on the other hand, he can be very unpleasant indeed if you are compelled to do what he does not like.’ Eventually she made up her mind she could carry on no longer, answering someone who asked her at the local market why she was leaving a farm she loved with the words, ‘Because I could not remain unless I killed down the Prince’s game from Monday morning till Saturday night, and reserved Sunday for lecturing the agent.’ She wrote a book giving an account of her unequal struggle with the Prince, whose agent, her particular bête noire, bought up as many copies as he could lay hands on and burned them.

  But although Mrs Cresswell was not his only outspoken critic, although the Queen urged him to stop excessive game preservation at the expense of farmers’ crops, and although General Knollys feared that if he persisted in competing for the ‘largest game bag’ he would lose his ‘good name’, the Prince declined to alter his ways. In fact, he considered himself a fair and reasonable landlord: his tenants never suffered in sickness or old age; they were regularly invited to meals and dances at the house; their labourers were generously paid on shooting-days, and their houses and buildings were always kept in good repair.

  Concerned as the Queen often was by accounts of the goings-on at Sandringham, reports of the Prince’s behaviour elsewhere were much more worrying. There was, for instance, the matter of his gambling about which Lord Palmerston wrote to her in March 1865, warning her that the Prince was drawing large amounts of capital to pay for his losses and offering to speak to him about it privately. Sir William Knollys, it appeared, had already admonished the Prince ‘in writing, having ascertained on more than one occasion that that was the best, if not the only way of making a lasting impression’. In fact, the amounts which he lost on cards were never excessive compared with the losses frequently sustained by the rich men with whom he played. It very rarely happened that he had to pay out more than £100 for an evening’s whist, though he once lost a total of £700 in two nights’ play at White’s. Nor did he bet heavily on horses. He assured his mother that when he saw other young men betting he warned them ‘over and over again’ of the consequences. Yet the rumours persisted that he was losing far more than he could afford; and certainly his income was not large enough to bear any extra strain having regard to the money he was spending on the improvements at Sandringham, and on entertaining at Marlborough House, whose household numbered over a hundred persons.

  Visitors to Marlborough House were admitted to the entrance hall by a Scotch gillie in Highland dress. In the hall they were met by two scarlet-coated and powdered footmen, their hats and coats being passed to a hall-porter in a short red coat with a broad band of leather across his shoulders. A page in a dark blue coat and black trousers would then escort them to an ante-room on the first floor. As they passed upstairs they were ‘conscious of the flittings of many maids, all in a neat uniform, whose business it was to maintain the character of the Prince’s residence as the “best kept house in London”’.

  The ante-room into which they were shown was panelled in walnut, the walls being hung with swords and guns, a concealed door leading to the sitting-room where the Prince was waiting to receive them. The sitting-room was also panelled, and furnished with numerous easy chairs upholstered in leather of the same colour as the rich blue velvet curtains. A writing desk, the golden key to which the Prince always wore on his watch-chain, stood opposite the door, close to a large table strewn with documents, newspapers and reference books. A frame into whose face was set half a dozen knobs and tubes enabled the Prince to communicate with the various offices of his staff on the floor below. A shelf about five feet above the oriental carpet — on which dozed one or other of the Prince’s dogs — ran around the room and was filled, as were various brackets, occasional tables, ledges and cabinets, with china, bronzes, ornaments and photographs. The tall windows overlooked Pall Mall and the commodious premises of the Marlborough Club, which the Prince himself had founded with the help of a backer described by Charles Wynn-Carrington as ‘an old snob called Mackenzie, the son of an Aberdeenshire hatter who made a fortune in indigo and got a baronetcy’.

  The Queen had strongly disapproved of the Prince’s establishment of this club, whose members were allowed to smoke freely, which was not the case at White’s, and even to enjoy the pleasures of a bowling alley until the residents of Pall Mall protested about the noise and the space was covered over and converted into a billiard room. There were four hundred members of the club, all of them known personally to the Prince; and while the Queen would have considered most of them perfectly respectable, there were some who were certainly not so. The Prince himself was President. Lord Walden, afterwards Marquess of Tweeddale, was Chairman of the Committee. Other members were the Dukes of Sutherland, Manchester and St Albans; the Marquess of Ormonde; the Earls of Rosebery and Leicester; Lords Wharncliffe, Royston and Carrington; William Howard Russell, the war correspondent; Christopher Sykes, who was to bankrupt himself in trying to keep up with the Prince’s expensive habits; and Colonel Valentine Baker, commanding officer of the Prince’s regiment, the Tenth Hussars, who was to be cashiered and imprisoned for a year for allegedly assaulting a nervous governess in a railway carriage.

  With all these disparate men the Prince was on terms of easy friendship, enjoying good stories and jokes with them, occasionally getting drunk with them, yet always being quick to stifle the least hint of disrespect. Lord Carrington thought it advisable to warn his son, still one of the Prince’s closest friends, that once ‘boy and university days’ were over he had better ‘commence the proper style of Sir and your Royal Highness as royal people are touchy on such points when they are launched into life and have taken their place’. The Prince would cheerfully indulge a regrettable pleasure in practical jokes. According to Mrs Hwfa Williams, sister-in-law of the Prince’s friend, Colonel Owen Williams, he would place the hand of the blind Duke of Mecklenburg on the arm of the enormously fat Helen Henneker, observing, ‘Now, don’t you think Helen has a lovely little waist?’ And he would be delighted by the subsequent roar of laughter — ‘in which no one joined more heartily than Helen’. Similarly, he would pour a glass of brandy over Christopher Sykes’s head or down his neck or, while smoking a cigar, he would tell Sykes to gaze into his eyes to see the smoke coming out of them and then stab Sykes’s hand with the burning end. Shouts of laughter would also greet this often-repeated trick
as the grave and snobbish Sykes responded in his complaisantly lugubrious, inimitably long-suffering way, ‘As your Royal Highness pleases.’

  Yet the idea of anyone pouring a glass of brandy over the Prince’s head was unthinkable. Nor must anyone ever refer to him slightingly. A guest at Sandringham, a friend of the Duchess of Marlborough, who went so far as to call him ‘My good man’ was sharply asked to remember that he was not her ‘good man’. And once in the green-room of the Comédie Française, while in conversation with Sarah Bernhardt and the comedian, Frederick Febvre, the Prince was approached by a man who asked him what he thought of the play. The Prince turned his hooded, bluegrey eyes on the interloper and replied, ‘I don’t think I spoke to you.’

  When a newcomer to his circle mistook the nature of its atmosphere for a tolerance of familiarity and called across the billiard table after a bad shot, ‘Pull yourself together, Wales!’ he was curtly and coldly informed that his carriage was at the door. Similarly, when another of his guests, Sir Frederick Johnstone, was behaving obstreperously late at night in the billiard room at Sandringham and the Prince felt obliged to admonish him with a gently reproachful, ‘Freddy, Freddy, you’re very drunk!’, Johnstone’s reply — made as he pointed to the Prince’s stomach, rolled his r’s in imitation of his host’s way of speaking and addressed him by a nickname not to be used in his presence — ‘Tum-Tum, you’re verrrry fat!’ induced the Prince to turn sharply away and to instruct an equerry that Sir Frederick’s bags were to be packed before breakfast.

  The Queen was deeply distressed that he laid himself open to such impertinent banter. She learned with dismay that he had introduced the vulgar practice of smoking immediately after dinner and that he seemed increasingly drawn to what she described as the ‘fast racing set’ from which she and his father had always ‘kept at a distance’.

  Whenever the Prince came to see his mother he was always kind, considerate and affectionate, anxious to smooth over any difficulties and disagreements between them. And after he had gone she almost invariably wrote to tell the Crown Princess how ‘nice’, ‘affectionate’, ‘simple’ or ‘unassuming’ he was, how all his ‘good and amiable qualities’ made ‘one forget and overlook much that one would wish different’. But then there would come reports of his galloping through London in a pink coat with the Royal Buckhounds like an unruly schoolboy, chasing a deer from the Queen’s herd known as ‘the Doctor’ from Harrow through Wormwood Scrubs to Paddington Station where, in the Goods Yard, it was cornered in front of the staff of the Great Western Railway. Or he would give offence by not writing to her when some member of the Household or family died. On the death of Sir Charles Phipps, ‘the second gone of those who knelt with her in that room of death’ in December 1861, she received ‘many affectionate letters but not one line from her own son who owed so much to Sir Charles’. He merely sent a telegram. She felt this ‘acutely’. Or the Queen would receive accounts of the Prince’s being seen in the company of some well-known actress or notorious courtesan. In 1868 his favourite companion was Hortense Schneider; and for her, so it was said, he was neglecting his wife though she was again pregnant.

  The Queen suggested to him that he might forsake the pleasures of the London season that year and bring the Princess into the country for a change. But he replied that he had ‘certain duties to fulfil’ in London and raised the sore point of her continued seclusion, which made it all the more necessary for him and his wife to do all they could ‘for society, trade and public matters’.

  Well, then, the Queen replied, could he not at least miss the Derby and go up to Balmoral for a few nights instead, to spend her ‘sad birthday’ with her and ‘shed a little sunshine’ over her life? So he went to Balmoral in the early summer of 1868, and all was well for a time. But that autumn there was more trouble when the Prince and Princess made plans to go abroad for several months. It was to be a holiday that would afford a rest from social engagements, an opportunity for the builders to get on with their work at Sandringham, a tonic for the Princess, whose fourth child, Victoria, had been born on 6 July, and a means of escape for the Prince from the scandalous stories connected with Hortense Schneider and what Lady Geraldine Somerset referred to as ‘his troop of fine ladies’.

  The trouble began with the Princess’s determination to take her three eldest children with her as far as Copenhagen. She wrote a long letter to the Queen seeking permission to do so, telling her that it would break her heart if she could not take the children with her and how she had been praying daily to God that ‘nothing should arise which would hinder this hoped-for happiness’.

  The Queen was not at all disposed to agree. Eventually she consented to the two boys going with their parents; but Princess Louise, who had not been well and was not yet two years old, ought certainly to be left behind. It was selfish of her mother to consider taking her.

  On receipt of this reply, Princess Alexandra burst into tears, while her husband replied to the Queen in warm support of his wife:

  I regret very much that you should still oppose our wishes but as you throw responsibility entirely on Alix if we take Louise, I naturally shall share it and have not the slightest hesitation or fear in doing so. Alix has made herself nearly quite ill with the worry about this but what she felt most are the words which you have used concerning her. Ever since she has been your daughter-in-law she has tried to meet your wishes in every way … You can therefore imagine how hurt and pained she has been by your accusing her of being ‘very selfish’ and ‘unreasonable’, in fact, risking her own child’s life. None of us are perfect — she may have her faults — but she certainly is not selfish — and her whole life is wrapt up in her children — and it seems hard that because she wishes (with a natural mother’s pride) to take her eldest children with her to her parents’ home every difficulty should be thrown in her way, and enough to mar the prospect of her journey, and when Vicky and Alice come here nearly every year with their children (and I maintain that ours are quite as strong as theirs) it seems rather inconsistent not to accord to the one what is accorded to the others.

  The Queen reluctantly gave way about Princess Louise. But there were other matters on which she was adamant. The itinerary of the holiday must be approved by her as the Prince’s every movement abroad ‘or indeed anywhere [was] of political importance’; a strict incognito must be preserved at all times; Sundays must be days of rest and worship, not amusement; invitations could be accepted only from close relations; and a strict eye must be kept on expenses.

  Knowing that these conditions would not be too rigorously observed, the Prince readily consented to them. On 17 November 1868, the day before Mr Gladstone became Prime Minister for the first time, he left London accompanied by his wife, his three children, a doctor, thirty-three servants and a large suite including Colonel Teesdale, Lord Carrington, Captain Arthur Ellis, the Hon. Mrs William Grey, a woman of Swedish birth who was one of the Princess’s favourite attendants, and the Hon. Oliver Montagu, a younger son of Lord Sandwich, an amusing, animated officer in the Household Cavalry, described by the Prince affectionately as ‘a wicked boy’ and well known to nurse a romantic, idealistic passion for the Princess, to whom he remained devoted for the rest of his life.

  From Paris the royal party travelled through Germany by way of Cologne and Düsseldorf to Lübeck, where they embarked for Copenhagen. Just before Christmas the Prince went to Stockholm to spend a few days with King Charles XV, who, to the Queen’s horror, initiated him into the Order of Freemasons. On 16 January 1869 the three children were sent home to England while their parents went on to Hamburg and thence to Berlin, where they stayed with the Crown Princess and where the Prince was delighted to be invested with the collar and mantle of the Order of the Black Eagle. Though the King of Prussia and the Prince of Wales got on well enough together, relations between the Queen and the Princess were far less cordial, the Queen scarcely deigning to notice the Princess and the Princess retaliating by addressing the Queen as ‘
Your Majesty’ instead of ‘Aunt Augusta’ as she had been asked to do. The Queen rebuked the Princess at a ball, then haughtily walked off; and the Princess was not much mollified to receive a dinner service from the Queen by way of apology.

  Apparently Queen Victoria did not hear about these embarrassing scenes in Berlin; but she was annoyed when told by the wife of the Ambassador to the Austrian Emperor that the incognito nature of the Prince’s visit had not been observed in Vienna, that the Prince had spent a whole day being escorted round the town from one Habsburg household to another and that, as there were ‘twenty-seven Archdukes now at Vienna, it was hard work to get through the list’.

  Leaving Vienna for Trieste, the royal party embarked for Alexandria aboard the frigate H.M.S. Ariadne which had been specially fitted up as a yacht. And in Egypt the Prince gave further offence to his mother. In Cairo he was joined by friends whom she deemed wholly unsuitable companions for a voyage up the Nile or, indeed, anywhere else. First of all there was Colonel Valentine Baker’s brother, Sir Samuel Baker, who had recently discovered the lake which he named the Albert Nyanza. An intrepid explorer Sir Samuel might well be, but he was certainly not a suitable travelling companion. His principles were ‘not good’, and the Queen much regretted ‘that he should be associated for any length of time’ with her son and daughter-in-law. Then there was a party which had come out from England to witness the completion of the Suez Canal. This party included Richard Owen, the naturalist, to whom, as a friend of the Prince Consort, the Queen could, of course, have no objection; John Fowler, the engineer; and the outspoken and garrulous William Howard Russell. But it also included various relations, including two sons, of that most undesirable nobleman, the Duke of Sutherland, as well as the Duke himself. ‘If ever you become King,’ the Queen warned the Prince as soon as she learned who was to accompany him on the voyage, ‘you will find all these friends most inconvenient, and you will have to break with them all.’