Christopher Hibbert - Edward VII - The Last Victorian King

The Queen’s letters to the Crown Princess had of late been full of complaints about her daughter-in-law’s lack of intellectual attainments and her son’s thoughtlessness. ‘She never reads,’ the Queen lamented, ‘and I fear Bertie and she will soon be nothing but two puppets running about for show all day and night … I fear the learning has been much neglected and she cannot either write or I fear speak French well.’ Nor did she write English well, though she seemed to spend half her time writing letters. Even worse than this, she was deaf and everyone noticed it, which was a ‘sad misfortune’.

Then there was Prince Alfred’s unfortunate passion for going to Marlborough House. He was only nineteen and ‘far too épris of Alix to be allowed too much there without possibly ruining the happiness of all three’. It was ‘like playing with fire’, for Affie did not have the ‘strength of mind or rather of principle and character to resist the temptation’.

Nor did Bertie have the strength of character to resist rushing about with Alix from one entertainment to the next. He had even wanted to interrupt their autumn visit to Abergeldie, the castle near Balmoral which was lent him by the Queen, for a mad dash over to Rumpenheim for a week. She had had to refuse this, of course, since ‘really they ought to be quiet and that Rumpenheim party’ was ‘very mischievous’ for her ‘poor weak boy’s head’.

Now that the baby was born, there was further trouble over his name. The grandmother insisted that there could be no question of his not being called Albert, with Victor as a second name; and she told her youngest daughter, the six-year-old Princess Beatrice, who in turn told Lady Macclesfield, that this had been decided. When the news reached the father, he was much put out. ‘I felt rather annoyed,’ he complained to the Queen, ‘when … told … that you had settled what our little boy was to be called before I had spoken to you about it.’ Nor did the Prince altogether approve of the Queen’s suggestion that all his descendants must bear the names of either Albert or Victoria, generation after generation for ever, and that when he himself succeeded to the throne he should be known as King Albert Edward. He reluctantly agreed that there was ‘no absolute reason why it should not be so’, but felt constrained to point out that no English sovereign had borne a double name in the past.

In the end, however, the Queen had her way and the baby’s first two names were Albert Victor, with Christian added in compliment to his maternal grandfather and Edward after his other grandfather, the Duke of Kent. His parents thereafter knew him as Eddy, though the Queen did not. And as if distressed by the disagreements which his christening provoked, the baby ‘roared all through the ceremony’; while the mother, so the Queen noted, ‘looked very ill, thin and unhappy’ and was ‘sadly gone off’.

The Princess’s ‘altered appearance’ was the ‘observation of every one’, the Queen later informed the King of the Belgians. She was ‘quite worn out by the most unhealthy life they lead’. The Queen wanted King Leopold to speak to his great-nephew about it. ‘You must not mince the matter but speak strongly and frighten Bertie [who must also be made to] understand what a strong right I have to interfere in the management of the child or children, and that he should never do anything about the child without consulting me.’

Exasperated as she was about the behaviour of the young parents in England, she was even more exasperated when they insisted on visiting Denmark to see Princess Alexandra’s family. She had ‘not felt it safe’ to tell the Prince of the Cabinet’s decision that nothing could be done to help the Danes, who had to give up Schleswig and Holstein to Prussia and Austria; and, now that the war was over, she was ‘extremely reluctant’ to allow him and the Princess to visit Copenhagen where their reception was likely to give great offence to the Germans. Eventually she gave way to their insistent entreaties, but on three conditions: they must visit Germany as well as Denmark; they must travel in the strictest incognito; and the baby must be sent home after three weeks with Lord and Lady Spencer, who, with Sir William Knollys and two doctors, were to accompany them.

Agreeing to these conditions, the second two of which were to be broken, the Prince and Princess set sail from Dundee aboard the Osborne on 3 September 1864, docking at Elsinore four days later. They were given just such a tumultuous welcome in Copenhagen as the Queen had feared. But although the Princess was happy as always to be with her family once again, the Prince was bored with the humdrum routine of the Castle of Fredensborg where the meals were uninspired, the evenings were spent playing tiresome card games like loo, and the only member of his wife’s family whom he found remotely entertaining was the Crown Prince Frederick. His other brother-in-law, Princess Alexandra’s younger and favourite brother, William, had been elected King of Greece; her eldest sister, Dagmar, was completely preoccupied with the forthcoming visit to Copenhagen of Tsar Alexander II’s heir, to whom she was to become engaged; and the two younger children, Thyra and Waldemar, were in the schoolroom.

So the Prince was thankful when Grand Duke Nicholas arrived and he could escape with his wife from the dreary castle and, as had been arranged in England, pay a visit to King Charles XV of Sweden, grandson of Napoleon I’s marshal, Bernadotte, and a far more lively man than King Christian IX of Denmark. But what had not been arranged in England was that the Prince and Princess should stay in the royal palace at Stockholm rather than at a hotel or the British Legation; that they should attend a public reception; and that there should be an elk hunt, full details of which, and of the Prince of Wales’s presence and deportment, were reported in newspapers all over Europe.

Extremely angry with the Prince for having so flagrantly broken her rule about his incognito and for having failed to send the baby home despite repeated requests that he should do so, the Queen wrote a letter sternly reproaching him for past faults and warning him that he and Princess Alexandra must on no account stay with the Emperor and Empress on their way home through France, ‘the style of going on [at Compiègne and Fontainebleau] being quite unfit for a young and reputable Prince and Princess’.

The Prince replied that he had stayed at the royal palace in Stockholm only because Swedish hotels were dingy, the Legation was cramped and he had ‘no intention of letting Alix be uncomfortably lodged’ if he could help it. Besides, as he had said before, ‘the King was immensely gratified’ by their visit and ‘what would have been the good of annoying him by not going to the Palace?’ He had not sent the baby home before because the doctors had advised against it and Alix was naturally upset at having to part with ‘her little treasure’ for the first time. As General Knollys had already suggested, ‘the Queen’s kind consideration will perhaps make a little allowance for a young mother wishing to delay the first separation from her child as long as she could and hardly ever weighing the consequences likely to follow an infringement of the terms. You may be sure,’ the Prince concluded, ‘that I shall try to meet your wishes as much as possible, but … if I am not allowed to use my own discretion we had better give up travelling altogether.’

More angry than ever on receipt of this letter, the Queen dispatched a telegram ordering them to cancel altogether their journey through France: they were to come home instead through Belgium, where the Prince would be able to have the benefit of the wise counsels of the King of the Belgians, who, now ailing and nearly seventy-four, would not be spared much longer to give them. First of all, though, they would be required to visit the Prince’s German relations to show that he was not only the son-in-law of the King of Denmark, as the Queen put it to Lord Russell, but the child of his parents.