Christopher Hibbert - Edward VII - The Last Victorian King

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 Dean 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: