The Edwardians

by Roy Hattersley

  It was, however, his temperament, not his lack of training, which made the nation fear that Edward VII would become a thoroughly unsatisfactory king. The Times could not wait to set out the country’s forebodings. On the day that the death of Queen Victoria was announced, it thundered its doubts about the character of the new monarch who had, in his youth, ‘been importuned by temptation in its most seductive forms’ and had no doubt prayed ‘lead us not into temptation [with] a feeling akin to hopelessness’. It conceded that it was his private, not his public, life that gave cause for concern. He had ‘never failed in his duty to the throne or to the nation’. The Times completed its strictures with a sanctimonious combination of praise and blame. ‘We shall not pretend that there is nothing in his long career which those who respect and admire him would wish otherwise.’

  The whole nation knew that, by temperament and conduct, the new King was quite the opposite of his mother, for whom reticence and propriety had been cardinal virtues. Edward loved pleasure and often found it in louche society. His inclinations had been revealed in a series of public scandals. On each occasion his involvement had been vicarious and he had escaped without anything being proved directly against him. But his reputation had suffered.

  During the early weeks of 1870, Sir Charles Mordaunt petitioned for divorce, citing two of the Prince of Wales’s friends, Lord Cole and Sir Frederic Johnstone, as co-respondents. Edward was subpoenaed as a witness at the trial and warned that his cross-examination would reveal that he had written to Lady Mordaunt and visited her on a number of occasions. The Queen’s private secretary was assured that the trial judge would not allow ‘any improper questions to be put by the Mordaunt counsel’5 and the Prince of Wales protested his innocence to his wife and to his mother. The Lord Chancellor, who read the letters which had been submitted in evidence, concluded that ‘no useful object’ could be served by the subpoena6 except to damage Edward with guilt by association. But the Prince, although certain that he must expect everything he said to be ‘twisted and turned’, decided that if he refused to appear it would be assumed that he ‘shrank from answering these imputations’.7 He decided to waive the royal prerogative and accept the subpoena.

  The Prince of Wales survived his seven minutes in the witness box with dignity. But the Queen – with admirable understanding of the moral superiority of the inferior orders of society – feared that his ‘intimate acquaintance with a young married woman being publicly proclaimed will show an amount of imprudence which cannot but damage him in the eyes of the middle and lower classes’.8 Her fears were justified. After the trial, the Prince of Wales became the subject of lewd broadsheets sold for a penny on the streets of London and, for some weeks, he was hissed and booed when he appeared in public. When Lady Mordaunt was certified insane and committed to an institution, the suspicion that there was a conspiracy to silence her – because there was more to her husband’s charges than His Royal Highness would admit – seemed, in many people’s minds, to be confirmed. Mr Gladstone, at his most tactless, wrote to the Prince of Wales and reminded him of the consequences of a previous royal scandal. George IV’s divorce from Queen Caroline had rocked the throne. ‘The revival of circumstances only half a century old must tend rapidly to impair [the monarchy’s strength] and might bring about its overthrow.’9

  The Prince of Wales did not learn discretion. Six years after the embarrassment of the Mordaunt affair, he once more flaunted his close association with the disreputable element in Victorian society. Lord Aylesford cited the Marquis of Blandford as co-respondent in his divorce action. The Marquis’s younger brother, Lord Randolph Churchill, asked Edward to use his influence to persuade Aylesford to drop the case on the grounds that His Royal Highness must take some responsibility for the situation. He had insisted on taking the wronged husband with him to India, even though he knew that the field would then be left clear for Blandford’s adultery. When Edward refused to intervene, Lady Aylesford gave Lord Randolph letters which the Prince had written to her years before.

  Randolph Churchill, never the subtlest of men, called upon the Prince of Wales with a not very cryptic message which amounted to the threat of blackmail. ‘Being aware of peculiar and most grave matters affecting the case [of Aylesford v. Aylesford] he was anxious that His Royal Highness should give such advice to Lord Aylesford as to induce him not to proceed against his wife.’ The Lord Chancellor was again consulted. His judgement was not much consolation. Even if the letters signified no more than a flirtation, they had been ‘Written in a strain of undue familiarity’ and ‘must, when displayed to the public, be injurious and lowering to the writer’. Total disgrace was only avoided by Lord Aylesford agreeing, after immense pressure from his peers, to drop his action for divorce and Lord Randolph Churchill temporarily leaving the country. But the idea that the heir to the throne kept squalid company had been confirmed. His constant companions achieved the notoriety of a nickname. They became known as the ‘Marlborough House Set’ because of the frequency with which they visited the Prince’s royal residence.

  That idea was reinforced in 1891 when Lady Charles Beresford, wife of the MP for York who had left the House of Commons to resume his career in the Royal Navy, discovered a letter written to her husband by his mistress, ‘Daisy’ Brooke, an unconventional aristocrat who was soon to become the ‘Red Countess’ of Warwick. Beresford had abandoned politics in favour of the sea on the advice of the Prince of Wales, who adjudged that only a period of active service would end an infatuation which was becoming an embarrassment to his friends. Daisy Brooke’s letter was written in such persuasive terms that Lady Charles feared that it would result in a resumption of the relationship and took legal advice about how its writer could be restrained.

  Meanwhile, Daisy Brooke – who certainly had been the Prince of Wales’s mistress and probably still was – asked Edward to retrieve the letter and return it to her. Foolishly he agreed. Lady Charles, a woman of spirit and independence, resented his intrusion into what she reasonably regarded as a private matter. And she told him so. The Prince retaliated by removing her from the Marlborough House visiting list, a penalty which so angered her husband that he demanded an explanation of the heir apparent’s conduct. Affronted by the almost literal lese-majesty, Edward stood on his dignity and asserted his rights. Beresford responded with a letter of such ambiguity that he must have realised some people would take it to mean that improper and unwelcome advances had been made towards his wife: ‘Sir, I cannot accept your letter as in any way an answer to my demand. Your Royal Highness’s behaviour to Lady Charles Beresford having been a matter of common talk in the two years I have been away from the country on duty. I am Your Royal Highness’s Obedient Servant Charles Beresford.’*

  No heir to the throne of a great empire – and certainly not one who anticipated following a monarch of such conspicuous propriety as Victoria – should have allowed himself to get into a position in which one of his future subjects thought such a letter appropriate. Once again, the Prince of Wales – although he had done nothing illegal or anything which could be proved to be in conflict with the canons of the Church of which he would one day be Supreme Governor – had associated himself with a tawdry dispute between dissolute aristocrats. Such squalid connections did his reputation far more damage than his much publicised association with Lillie Langtry. That affair was at least a liaison of the sort that was expected of the male members of the royal family.

  Most of his adventures with other men’s wives were kept from the wider British public, but in 1891, shortly after the Beresford affair had died down, a cause célèbre made so many headlines that there was hardly a family in England which did not realise that the Prince of Wales kept disreputable company. The scandal which revealed the unpalatable truth concerned gambling, not adultery, and came to be called the Tranby Croft Affair.

  Tranby Croft was the East Riding home of Arthur Wilson, a self-made shipping magnate whom the Prince of Wales cultivated and exploited. In Septe
mber 1890, Edward, at his own request, was Wilson’s guest during Doncaster race week. The whole house was redecorated in anticipation of the royal visit and the other guests were carefully selected to suit the Prince’s taste. Among them was Sir William Gordon-Cummings, a guards officer who had fought for Queen and country against the Zulus at Ulundi and the Egyptians at Tel-El-Kebir. After dinner, all the guests played baccarat – a card game described by the Attorney General during the litigation that followed as ‘about the most unintelligent way of losing your money or getting someone else’s I have ever heard of’. It was also illegal when played in public and, worse still in the eyes of many Englishmen, thought to be popular in France.

  Baccarat had, during the years since (oppressed by his obesity) he had given up dancing, become an obsession with the Prince of Wales. He played, or wished to play, each evening and carried with him, wherever he went, a set of counters which were engraved with the ‘Prince of Wales’s Feathers’. Naturally Arthur Wilson arranged a game at Tranby Croft. For the first couple of evenings, Edward was kept amused without incident. Then, on 8 September, Gordon-Cummings was discovered to be cheating. The Prince had not noticed any irregularities and, when the misdemeanour was reported to him, was assured by the accused that the accusations were unjust. However, the evidence of five unequivocal witnesses was too strong to ignore. The Prince sat in judgement and the verdict was guilty. Gordon-Cummings was required to sign a declaration that he would never play cards again. The house party broke up after all the participants vowed never to speak of the shameful incident.

  The secret was kept for almost four months. Then, on 27 December, Gordon-Cummings received a letter from Paris, telling him that he was forbidden to frequent the casino at Monte Carlo because he was regarded as a card sharp. He consulted the colonel of his regiment, who told him what he should have already known. Putting aside the evidence of the five witnesses, his agreement never to play cards again would be taken as proof of his guilt. Gordon-Cummings then made the crucial mistake of issuing a writ for slander against his accusers. They, of course, refused to retract their accusations.

  The case came to court in June 1891 and attracted all the attention which has been accorded to society scandals down the ages. The Pall Mall Gazette reported that ‘from an early hour, the gallery was besieged’. Sir Edward Clarke, QC (Solicitor-General but allowed, according to the practice in Victorian England, to take private briefs) represented Gordon-Cummings. His opening speech increased the prospect of massive press coverage. The plaintiff was a man whose sword had ‘never been stained except with the blood of his country’s foes’ and ‘had been a close friend of the Prince of Wales for twenty years’. To the consternation of the Queen and delight of the popular press, Edward himself was called as a witness for the defence. His evidence was not, in itself, helpful. He confirmed that, although he had seen nothing, he accepted the word of the plaintiff’s accusers. But it was his presence, not his opinions, which caused the sensation. There were suggestions in society that the Prince wanted to destroy Gordon-Cummings because of their rivalry for the affections of Daisy Brooke. And, before the case was concluded, Clarke was to imply that the accusations against his client had a sinister purpose. He spoke of ‘dishonourable deeds done by men of character and done by them because they gave their honour as freely as they gave their lives to save the interests of a tottering dynasty or to conceal the foibles of a Prince’. Nobody was sure what he meant. The likelihood is that it was a piece of barrister’s rhetoric which meant nothing. But it so alarmed the Queen that she complained to Lord Salisbury, the Prime Minister, about the conduct of his junior law officer.

  Whatever the implication of Clarke’s Delphic allegations, his speech failed to impress the jury, who found against Gordon-Cummings. The Times thundered that the plaintiff ‘must leave the army, must leave his clubs and must no longer think of himself as a member of that society in which he has lived so long’. It was almost equally censorious about Edward. ‘If the Prince of Wales is known to pursue on his private visits a certain round of questionable pleasures, the serious public who are, after all, the backbone of England, regret and resent it.’ It added that it wished, ‘for the sake of English society’, that the Prince had also sworn never to play cards again. The Daily Chronicle was far more direct. ‘It is enough to say that the readiness of the Prince of Wales to dispose of himself as a prize guest in rich but vulgar families where his tastes for the lowest form of gambling can be gratified even at the cost of dishonouring the proudest name in the country, has profoundly shocked, we may even say disgusted, the people who one day may be asked to submit to his rule.’

  The Chronicle’s implication that the succession was not secure was, of course, absurd. But the reputation which the Tranby Croft Affair established remained with Edward right up to his accession. And men and women who had been brought up to believe that Victoria epitomised England’s nineteenth-century greatness genuinely feared that her replacement by a man of such dubious character equally symbolised the end of English industrial and military supremacy.

  The forebodings were reinforced – at least for the more superstitious of His Majesty’s subjects – by what seemed to be an augury of doom. On 24 June 1902 Victor Cavendish wrote in his diary, ‘Charles Montague came in at about 12 and said that there was a report that the Coronation was to be postponed owing to the King’s illness. Announced at 12.30 that it was necessary to do an operation. Great consternation.’ Rowland Evans’s father had already condemned the anticipated extravagance. ‘He said that in Westminster Abbey on that day there will be millions and millions of pounds represented … And within half a mile’s radius from the Abbey there will be people starving and with nowhere to sleep.’ When the news of the postponement reached Bradford, Rowland Evans junior was at Park Avenue cricket ground watching the Australians beat Yorkshire by forty-four runs. He reacted calmly to both catastrophes and his comment on the King’s Coronation was surprisingly commercial. ‘Some millions will be lost on this. All decorations have been taken down and there will be no procession or anything else.’10

  The King, much to his credit, had done his best to avoid the postponement. An appendicitis had been suspected almost a fortnight earlier but, perhaps foolishly, he had insisted on struggling on. His temporary absence from the public and social scene had been explained away by an announcement that he was suffering from lumbago. But when the pain intensified, his physician, Sir Francis Laking, concluded that it was time to take the advice of Sir Frederick Treves, Sergeant Surgeon to the King.

  Treves had no doubt that the appendicitis, which he had confirmed twenty-four hours earlier, was at what he called ‘an acute’ stage. An immediate operation was essential. The alternative was peritonitis and almost certain death. But surgery – as well as requiring a postponement of the Coronation – carried its own risk. The uncrowned King might die under Sir Frederick’s knife. Three Sergeant Surgeons served the monarch. Treves suggested that, before the lot was finally cast, another opinion should be obtained. He was particularly anxious to hear the diagnosis of the most senior of his colleagues. ‘The King objected. He did not see the necessity of any further consultation. He said that he was ready and wished for the operation to be done at once. I pressed the need for such a consultation on public grounds and grounds of policy. He consented, whereupon I at once sent my carriage for the two gentlemen named. They were awaiting my message and came at once.’11

  The Senior Sergeant was the seventy-five-year-old Lord Lister, the leader of the ‘antiseptic revolution’ which, he claimed, had transformed the prospect of a patient surviving surgery. In fact, the dramatic improvement in morbidity was the result of many causes – improved hospital sanitation, better nursing and new surgical techniques. But Lister received the credit and became a Victorian hero. To have operated on the King without him being consulted would have been a scandal. If the King had died during surgery, failure even to ask Lister’s opinion would have been regarded as something approach
ing treason.

  When the postponed Coronation was eventually held, the King celebrated his accession with the creation of the Order of Merit. Lister was one of the original recipients in an award ceremony which was held less than two months after the royal operation. His Majesty found some difficulty in getting the ribbon over Lord Lister’s head. In the embarrassing moment which followed, the King said, ‘Lord Lister, I know that if it had not been for you and your work I would not have been here today.’12

  The King was overgenerous. Sir Frederick Treves recorded that during the consultation which preceded the operation, ‘Lord Lister hesitated. While he did not oppose the operation, he said that the other alternative was to wait and to apply fomentation. I did not discuss this point with him but pressed him to say if he was prepared to advise delay and fomentation. He hesitated and at last said that he would not go to the length of advising that course.’13

  Medicine had moved on since Lord Lister had begun to develop his theory of aseptic and antiseptic surgery. By 24 June 1902, he was part of a world which was past. The way in which his colleagues behaved at Buckingham Palace on that day was an early symbol of the new age’s impatience with the old.

  To loyal subjects who thought of the monarchy in mystical terms, the postponement of the Coronation – and the possibility that Edward VII would die without his anointment symbolising God’s endorsement of his reign – was a spiritual catastrophe. For men and women of a more cynical persuasion, an illness related to the bowels seemed the inevitable result of the King’s eating habits, to which they attributed his unusual size and shape. Both his chest and waist measured forty-eight inches.

  Edward VII was not a great drinker. He enjoyed champagne and the occasional glass of port but preferred to ‘join the ladies’ in the drawing room rather than stay at table with the men. But he both smoked and ate to excess. The extent of his addiction to tobacco can be judged by his decision to ‘ration’ himself to one cigar and two cigarettes before breakfast. His gluttony was compounded, at least in so far as it affected his health, by the nature of the food that he enjoyed. Roast beef and Yorkshire pudding was his occasional light relief from richer and heavier food. His dinner (private as well as official) normally consisted of twelve courses. A typical entrée was Cotelettes de bécassines à la Souvaroff – snipe, boned and halved, stuffed with pâté de foie gras and mincemeat and served with truffles and Madeira sauce.14