by Theo Aronson
And it was at Tranby Croft that the Prince became embroiled in a gambling scandal that was to cause him some of the greatest unhappiness he had ever known.
The country, Queen Victoria once said, 'could never bear to have George IV as Prince of Wales over again.'27 The particular profligacy of that profligate Prince and King to which the Queen was referring was gambling. But alas, in this matter, as in so many others, Queen Victoria's heir fulfilled her apprehensions: Bertie was an enthusiastic gambler. He bet heavily on horses and played cards for high stakes, with baccarat having recently become his favourite game. Wherever he went, he took his own set of baccarat counters, engraved with the Prince of Wales's feathers and varying in denomination from five shillings to ten pounds: ten pounds being equivalent to five months' wages for an agricultural labourer on Daisy Brooke's estates, or two hundred and fifty pounds today.
This fondness for baccarat was to lead, directly, to one of the most celebrated trials of the Victorian age; a trial in which the Prince, and to a lesser extent Lady Brooke, were involved.
The Wilsons of Tranby Croft, in their ecstacy at having landed the Prince of Wales as their guest for the Doncaster races, quite naturally invited his friends as well. Chief amongst these were Lord and Lady Brooke. But unhappily, the death of Daisy's step-father, the cultivated Lord Rosslyn, on 6 September 1980, prevented them from accepting the invitation. Another of the guests, who was able to accept, was Sir William Gordon-Cummings, of the Scots Guards, a man whom Daisy describes as 'the smartest of men about town'.28
Sir William was not quite smart enough, apparently, to conceal the fact that he was cheating at baccarat on the first evening of the Prince's stay. The next evening he was again caught cheating and, on being accused, agreed to sign a document to the effect that he would never again play cards as long as he lived. He was signing it, he made clear, without admitting guilt and on the understanding that the affair would be kept strictly secret. This somewhat schoolboyish pact having been concluded, the house party broke up.
To expect a dozen or so guests at a house party to keep their mouths shut on such a matter was being very optimistic, particularly when one of the guests was prone, as Queen Victoria put it, 'to let everything out'.29 Indeed, no sooner had the Prince of Wales met Lord and Lady Brooke at York station, on their way north to her step-father's funeral in Scotland, than he was telling Daisy all about it. Daisy, in turn, passed the story on to her relations at the funeral. Or so rumour has it. But true or not – and Daisy always vigorously denied having spread the story – everyone believed that it was Lady Brooke who let this particularly vicious cat out of the bag. For the rest of her days, Daisy was to be branded as 'The Babbling Brook'.
Once the pact of secrecy had been broken, Sir William Gordon-Cumming instructed his solicitors to bring an action for libel against his accusers. Chief among them, of course, was the Prince of Wales. Frantic efforts were made to keep the Prince out of court – some suggested a private military inquiry, others an inquiry at the Guards Club – but, in the end, a civil action became inevitable.
The trial, which opened on 1 June 1891 and lasted for nine days, was sensational: it was almost as though the Prince of Wales were on trial. For all nine days he sat in court under the critical gaze of a huge crowd who listened avidly to the description of what sounded to them like very dissolute goings-on; when he did finally give evidence, he cut a very poor figure. And although in fact Gordon-Cumming lost his action, it was the Prince who emerged, in the eyes of the public, as the guilty party. The jury, who had declared against Gordon-Cumming, was hissed; the Prince was loudly booed at that month's Ascot; and the newspapers gave themselves over to an orgy of pious moralising.
The Review of Reviews – reflecting, it claimed, the opinions of various country gentlemen – condemned the Prince not only as a gambler but 'as a wastrel and whoremonger'.30 The Times 'profoundly regretted that the Prince should have been in any way mixed up, not only in the case, but in the social circumstances which prepared the way for it.'31
Queen Victoria, needless to say, was appalled. 'It is a fearful humiliation to see the future King of this country dragged through the dirt . . .' she wailed to her eldest daughter, now the Empress Frederick. 'I feel it a terrible humiliation, and so do all the people. It is very painful and must do his prestige great harm. Oh! if only it is a lesson for the future.'32
In an attempt to limit the damage to the Prince's reputation, various courses of action were proposed. Could not the government make some sort of pronouncement in the Prince's favour? This suggestion was scotched, very firmly, by Lord Salisbury, who had by now succeeded Gladstone as Prime Minister. The private morals of the Prince of Wales were not the concern of the British government, he said. His worldly advice was for the Prince to avoid baccarat for six months and for him then to write a letter to some indiscreet friend – who would immediately publish it – to the effect that the trial had shown him the error of his ways and that he no longer allowed baccarat to be played in his presence.
The Queen had a less devious proposal. The Prince should write an open letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury, expressing his strong disapproval of gambling. This ingenuous idea was rejected by both the Prime Minister and the Prince of Wales.
In the end, Bertie wrote a private letter to the Archbishop in which he blandly expressed his 'horror of gambling' which he considered to be, along with intemperance, 'one of the greatest curses that a country can be afflicted with'.33
And from then on, instead of playing baccarat for money, His Royal Highness played bridge for money.
The Tranby Croft trial finished poor Gordon-Cumming. He was dismissed from the army, expelled from all his clubs and socially ostracised. He lived on, in unhappy seclusion, until 1930. Daisy Brooke, whose babbling was said to have led directly to the trial, afterwards claimed that she considered him 'more sinned against than sinning' and that 'after he had cut us all off in his retirement', she 'often had sad thoughts of him' but that she 'always kept a warm corner in my heart for him'.34
As a refuge from the storms of public opinion there was always Sandringham. Nowhere did the Prince of Wales feel more at home than on his Norfolk estate. He had bought the property at the time of his marriage and, until his death almost fifty years later, he remained devoted to it. Indeed, for almost a century it was the royal family's favourite country home. George V and his son, George VI – who died at Sandringham in 1952 – both loved the estate; the entire royal family would gather there for Christmas. But Queen Elizabeth II, who spent her wartime girlhood in Windsor Castle, tends to regard that ancient fortress-castle as home, with the result that Sandringham has slipped in popularity and importance as a royal residence. The great royal Christmas jamboree now takes place at Windsor.
But in its heyday – during the Prince of Wales's years as king-in-waiting and his reign as Edward VII – Sandringham was one of the country's great social centres. No home better mirrored Bertie's particular lifestyle; it was here that he was seen at his most typical.
Not everyone, though, shared the Prince's uncritical devotion to Sandringham. Many of his guests found the Norfolk countryside flat and featureless. Victorians dearly loved a dramatic, romantic landscape; Swiss scenery, with its mountains and its lakes and its waterfalls, was their ideal. But failing that, they liked rolling, pretty, heavily wooded countryside, with a glitter of water between the trees.
There was, sighed one of Princess Alexandra's ladies, 'no attraction of any sort or kind. There are numerous coverts but no fine woods, large unclosed 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 . . .'35 The wind off the Wash was like a knife. The house, too, was hideous. The original Georgian mansion had been completely reconstructed in what was loosely termed the 'Elizabethan style': the result was a vast, sprawling, many-gabled pile of dark orange brick, looking more like a station hotel or the home of some nouveau riche industriali
st than the country seat of a future king. 'As there was all England to choose from,' wailed the same lady-in-waiting, 'I do wish they had had a finer house in a more picturesque and cheerful situation.'36
Even Disraeli, who could usually be relied upon to make some flattering comment, confined himself to saying that visiting the Prince at Sandringham was rather like visiting one of 'the Dukes and Princes of the Baltic: a vigorous marine air, stunted fir forests . . .'37 But then, as much as Queen Victoria hated the heat, Disraeli hated the cold.
The interior of the house was, if anything, worse. There were no really impressive rooms; arriving guests would be led directly into the main hall in which, more often than not, the royal family would be sitting down to tea. The house was furnished in the worst contemporary taste: the rooms were a cheerful clutter of sentimental paintings, plush-covered furniture, mounted animals' heads, suits of armour, display cabinets stuffed with china, tables crammed with ornaments and photographs, what-nots loaded with bric-à-brac. One had to look very closely, claims one of the Prince's biographers, to appreciate 'that those toy figures of animals were not trinkets from a parish bazaar but Fabergé creations sent by the Tsar of all the Russias'.38 There was even a big stuffed baboon standing beside the front door supporting, on its outstretched paws, a silver salver for visitors' cards.
But what Sandringham might have lacked in elegance it made up for in warmth. Its atmosphere was welcoming, cheerful and relatively informal; one was always made to feel at home. 'While a very spacious house, Sandringham is not palatial,' wrote Lillie Langtry, 'but, what is far better, it gives one the idea of being thoroughly liveable and comfortable . . . '39 And Daisy Brooke claimed that guests, no matter how illustrious, were always treated as personal friends. The Prince 'would impose no restraint upon those who came to visit him in his capacity as a country gentleman.'40
Quite often, guests would be shown to their rooms by the Prince or the Princess themselves. On one occasion Lord Fisher, wanting to avoid the other arrivals in the hall, slipped upstairs and started unpacking. As he stood with a boot in each hand, he heard someone fumbling with the door handle. Assuming it to be a footman, he shouted, 'Come in, don't go humbugging with the door handle!' But in walked his host, 'with a cigar about a yard long in his mouth'.
'What on earth are you doing?' he asked.
'Unpacking, Sir,' answered Fisher.
'Where's your servant?'
'Haven't got one, Sir.'
'Where is he?'
'Never had one, Sir; couldn't afford it.'
'Put those boots down; sit in that armchair.'41
So the two of them sat, one on each side of the fire, chatting so animatedly that they were almost late for dinner.
The kaleidoscopic nature of the company never ceased to amaze the Prince's more conventional guests. He flung them all together: aristocrats, clergymen, politicians, sportsmen, diplomats, financiers, soldiers, industrialists. The young Tsarevich, afterwards Tsar Nicholas II, visiting Sandringham at this time, wrote home to St Petersburg to complain about the composition of the house party. 'Most of them were horse dealers, among others a Baron Hirsch [to meet a Jew socially was regarded as unthinkable in the Russian imperial family]. I tried to keep away as much as I could, and not to talk.'42
Sandringham saw the introduction of other social changes as well. Lady Brooke says that it was the Prince, with his preference for female company, who set the example of leaving the table almost immediately after dinner to join the ladies. His introduction of cigarette smoking after the meal 'killed the claret habit'. After the first whiff or two it was difficult, she says, 'to tell a good wine from bad, and champagne speedily took the place of Bordeaux'.43 Yet when a newspaper once castigated the Prince for giving champagne suppers to his lady friends, his scathing comment was that champagne was for the demi-monde; what he gave his ladies at night was whisky and soda.
Bridge was another of the things he helped popularise. 'Your brother Rosslyn is trying to introduce a new form of whist, called Bridge,' the Prince once wrote to Daisy. 'It does not appear to be particularly interesting, and I do not think it will be popular.'44 Yet, within a few years, he had developed into an enthusiastic and skilful bridge player.
Life at Sandringham was permeated, above all, by the Prince's undiminished sense of fun. Few people, noted Daisy's half-sister, Lady Angela Forbes, had more joie de vivre than the Prince of Wales. 'He enjoyed himself with the infectious gaiety of a schoolboy. That indefinable, but undeniable, gift of youth remained with him all his life.'45 It remained, to an even greater extent, with the Princess of Wales. Not only did Princess Alexandra look untouched by time, she acted as though she were still a young bride. The rooms rang with laughter as the company, led by their host and hostess, played their childish games: tobogganing down the carpeted stairs on silver trays, racing their tricycles round the ballroom, crouching behind sofas for hide-and-seek.
Practical jokes were especially popular; humour was always of the slap-stick variety. 'If anyone caught his foot in a mat, or nearly fell into the fire or out of the window,' sighs one long-suffering observer, 'the mirth of the royal family knew no bounds.'46 Why bother thinking up a witty remark when a finger caught in the door will bring forth gales of laughter?
The Prince was particularly fond of dancing. (And so, more surprisingly, was Queen Victoria; the public would have been astonished at the vigour with which the Widow of Windsor danced with John Brown at the Gillies' Ball at Balmoral.) At the three annual Sandringham balls – the County, the Farmers' and the Servants' – Bertie enjoyed himself immensely. 'He was his own Master of Ceremonies,' noted one guest, 'signalling and sending messages to the band, arranging every dance and when to begin and when to leave off. . . he looked as if he could have gone on all night and into the middle of next week.'47
But it was for its shooting that the Prince of Wales enjoyed Sandringham most. It was a sport which, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was practised to an extent which seems hardly credible today. For most Victorian and Edwardian gentlemen, not least among them Lord Brooke, shooting was almost a raison d'être; their lives were organised around the shooting seasons. The 'glorious twelfth' of August, which marked the opening of the grouse season, was regarded as almost sacrosanct. Fortunes were spent on improving the game on the great estates; records were solemnly kept and achievements endlessly discussed; the daily 'bags' of slaughtered birds and animals could be enormous; gun rooms were like shrines.
The Prince of Wales's brother, Prince Alfred, on a colonial tour, once took part in a hunt of wild animals which an officer in attendance describes as 'that glorious day when we killed six hundred head of game, all larger than horses'. Firing into the bewildered and stampeding herds, Prince Alfred alone shot over twenty-five head of game. 'Most of the sportsmen looked more like butchers than sportsmen, from being so covered in blood,' wrote the same exhilarated officer. 'His Royal Highness was red up to the shoulders from using the spear . . .'48
That there might be something distasteful about this wholesale killing would never have occurred to them as they stood there, blazing away for all they were worth. 'What my friends and I were doing,' remembered Lord Brooke in a more enlightened age, 'we thought our children would do after us, and the only possible alteration in conditions appeared to lie in the direction of higher birds and new sporting powders.'49 Yet a man like the Prince of Wales's son, the future George V, who was as dedicated a shot as the rest of them, could dissolve into tears at the sight of a dead garden bird.
Almost every weekday morning at Sandringham, the Prince of Wales would set out, correctly dressed in tweed suit, flat cap, heavy boots and swinging cape, with half a dozen or more of his male guests, to devote his day to shooting partridge, pheasant, woodcock and wild duck or rabbits. He was particularly fond of the battue: the Continental concept of a vast semi-circle of beaters driving the birds towards the sportsmen. The Prince spent tens of thousands of pounds improving the shooting at Sandringh
am. By the 1890s the amount of game killed each year was enormous: a single day's shooting could add up to 3000 birds or 6000 rabbits. 'At Sandringham,' wrote the Prince's eldest grandson, afterwards Duke of Windsor, 'everything, including, I regret to say, the interests of the farmer, was subordinated to the shooting.'50
At the time, though, very few members of the public would have been any more offended by this mass slaughter than the sportsmen themselves. It is true that some voices of protest were being raised. Even aristocrats like Lady Florence Dixie, daughter of the 7th Marquess of Queensbury, an enthusiastic shot in her time, were beginning to campaign against the barbarism of blood sports. For this she was dismissed as, at least, eccentric and, at worst, mad. In the eyes of the majority of the Prince's countrymen, he had every right to shoot as much as he pleased. It all helped confirm his image as a country squire.
For, in spite of his cosmopolitanism and his hedonism, it was as an English country gentleman that the Prince of Wales was generally regarded. He might have suffered periodic bouts of unpopularity but, for most of the time, he was admired for his quintessentially British qualities. With his love of sport – hunting, shooting and racing – and his interest in the land – the crops, forests, pigs and horses of his Sandringham estate – the Prince of Wales was looked upon as the very personification of that 'Merrie England' of so many of his countrymen's imaginations. He was, in many ways, a John Bull figure.
The day's sport at Sandringham over, the Prince's guests would assemble for tea at five o'clock in the hall. For this, the ladies would have changed, for the third or fourth time that day, into tea-gowns. They would then change again, into elaborate evening dresses with trains, while the gentlemen would wear full evening dress with decorations. As they waited downstairs for the arrival of the Prince and Princess, an equerry would move among them with a plan of the dinner table, to explain to each gentleman which lady he would be leading in to dinner and where exactly they would be sitting. The punctilious Prince disliked any hesitation in the finding of seats. The wait for their hosts might be a long one, as Princess Alexandra was invariably late, but as soon as she arrived, looking her usual soignée, charming and unflustered self, the Prince would lead the company in, 'each lady in turn having the privilege of being taken in by her royal host'.51