Christopher Hibbert - Edward VII - The Last Victorian King

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 entirely 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.’

She categorically informed Lord Granville that the Prince should ‘upon no account be put at the head of any of those Societies or Commissions, or preside at any of those scientific proceedings in which his beloved Father took so prominent a part’. And when the Prince was offered the post of President of the Society of Arts, she vetoed the proposal on the grounds that he was too young and inexperienced. Nor would she hear of his being allowed to represent her in public. She was ‘very much opposed’ to the system of putting the Prince of Wales forward as the representative of the sovereign. She told the Home Secretary:

Properly speaking, no one can represent the Sovereign but Her, or Her Consort. There are certain duties and forms which … as the Queen is unable to perform them she can and does depute someone else to perform … but her Majesty thinks it would be most undesirable to constitute the Heir to the Crown a general representative of Herself, and particularly to bring Him forward too frequently before the people. This would necessarily place the Prince of Wales in a position of competing as it were, for popularity with the Queen. Nothing … should be more carefully avoided.

On the grounds that he was not as discreet as he ought to have been, the Queen also refused to allow the Prince to receive copies of the Foreign Office dispatches which were sent to her and to members of the Cabinet. He must be content with ‘a précis made of such dispatches’ as she thought it proper for the Prince to see. He protested; and the Foreign Secretary, Lord Russell, supported his protest; but the Queen was adamant, and the Prince had to glean what information he could from unofficial correspondence, newspapers and conversations with ministers and diplomats. Year after year passed; the position was still the same; and the Prince felt obliged to complain to his mother that he was less trusted with official information than were the private secretaries of government ministers. He was not even allowed to know what went on in the Cabinet, and was driven to writing rather apologetic letters to friendly ministers for any information they might feel able to give him. ‘Would you consider it very indiscreet if I asked you to let me know what steps the government are going to take since the meeting of the Cabinet,’ he wrote in one characteristic letter dated 12 March 1873 to his friend Lord Hartington, at that time Chief Secretary for Ireland in Gladstone’s Cabinet.

The Prime Minister was sympathetic and asked the Queen if he might be allowed to know ‘anything of importance’ that took place in the Cabinet. But no, the Queen decided, he was no less imprudent in his conversation than he had ever been. It would be ‘quite irregular and improper’ for him to have copies of Cabinet reports, which were, by precedent, for her eyes alone.

The Queen’s determination not to let the Prince have access to confidential papers had been reinforced at the outset of the dispute by his attitude towards the invasion of Denmark by German armies intent on wresting from King Christian IX the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. The Prince’s sympathies were naturally with his father-in-law and he made no secret of them. They were shared by the British people. But the Queen warmly, not to say heatedly, supported the claims of Duke Frederick of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg; and she strongly criticized her son for his outspoken comments, his refusal to recognize that there were faults on both sides, his unconcealed championship of the Danes and his denigration of the government’s refusal to help them. ‘This horrible war will be a stain for ever on Prussian history,’ the Prince wrote to Mrs Bruce after listening very attentively, ‘with his hat on all the while’, to a declaration of the government’s neutrality in the House of Lords, ‘and I think it is very wrong of our government not to have interfered before now. As to Lord Russell’s everlasting Notes, nobody cares two-pence about them on the Continent, and the Foreign Ministers to whom they are addressed probably only light their cigars with them.’ The British would have ‘cut a much better figure in Europe’ if instead of sending notes, they had sent their fleet to the Baltic; and then ‘all this bloodshed might possibly have been avoided’.

‘This dreadful war in Denmark causes both the Princess and myself great anxiety,’ he told Lord Spencer, ‘and the conduct of the Prussians and the Austrians is really quite scandalous.’ Such remarks were not only addressed to his friends. The Prussian Ambassador, the disagreeable Count Bernstorff, one of the very few foreign diplomats in London whom the Prince did not like, felt constrained to register a formal complaint about the Prince’s behaviour, which was matched by that of the Princess, who pointedly refused to speak to Bernstorff after she had observed him declining to raise his glass in a toast to the King of Denmark. Even the French Ambassador, Prince de la Tour d’Auvergne, whom the Prince did like, disapprovingly reported to Paris that he had been taxed by him at Marlborough House and bluntly asked in a most undiplomatic manner whether or not there was any truth in the reports that the Emperor Napoleon intended to try to bring about a settlement not entirely in Denmark’s favour.