Christopher Hibbert - Edward VII - The Last Victorian King

The Prince enjoyed few activities more than a grand battue; and once, after shooting as a guest of the Bavarian financier, Baron von Hirsch auf Gereuth, at St Johann, where 20,000 partridges were killed by about ten guns in ten days, he declared that that certainly beat ‘everything on record’ and would ‘quite spoil’ him for ‘any shooting at home’.

All the same he managed very well at Sandringham where the light and sandy soil was particularly suited to the rearing of partridges and pheasants; where there were also woodcock and wild duck to be had; where hares and rabbits abounded; and where his game-keepers were as efficient and smartly dressed as any in Germany. They turned out on shooting-days wearing green velveteen coats and bowler hats with gold cords, accompanied by regiments of beaters in smocks and black felt hats decorated with blue and red ribbons. Formed up in a vast semicircle, the beaters advanced, driving the birds into the air towards the fence behind which the guns were concealed. Behind them, rows of boys waving blue and pink flags prevented the birds from flying back. A farmer who used to watch them wrote:

On they come in ever increasing numbers, until they burst in a cloud over the fence … This is the exciting moment, a terrific fusillade ensues, birds dropping down in all directions, wheeling about in confusion between the flags and the guns, the survivors gathering themselves together and escaping into the fields beyond. The shooters then retire to another line of fencing, making themselves comfortable with camp-stools and cigars until the birds are driven up as before, and so through the day, only leaving off for luncheon in a tent brought down from Sandringham.

Servants carried out the food to the tent in a portable stove; and the ladies, some on foot, others in carriages, would join the party and listen to the Prince reading out the morning’s scores, pausing for applause when a gun was credited with a good bag, looking with mock severity at one whose tally was embarrassingly low. He was not a particularly good shot himself, being, so Lord Walsingham said, rather erratic and journalier; but he often gave the impression of being better than he was for he usually had the best position, never fired at a difficult bird, and was always equipped with a magnificent gun. Yet his critics had to admit that even when masses of pheasants were being driven over his head, he was never flustered by the number of them, or by the people who were watching him, and that he was particularly adept at killing birds behind him at an angle which most men find difficult. He was sometimes rather careless, though. George Cornwallis-West used to relate the story of a shooting-party at which the Prince, ‘enjoying an animated conversation with a lady friend who unwisely pointed out a hare to him’, swung round suddenly and shot an old beater in the knee.

Although the food was plentiful and excellent at these shooting-day luncheons many of the ladies did not much enjoy them, for the Prince, in his passion for fresh air, insisted that the flaps of the tent should be folded up; and, despite the straw which was scattered over the ground, it was often dreadfully cold. In the afternoons the ladies were expected to remain outside to watch the shooting and to sit behind hedges, as the Duchess of Marlborough once complained, ‘with the north winds blowing straight from the sea’.

At the end of the day the bag was laid out neatly for the Prince’s inspection before being taken away to the game larder which, after Baron Hirsch’s, was believed to be the biggest in the world. And it had need to be; for as the years went by, the amount of game killed each year at Sandringham grew enormous: a day’s shooting would sometimes yield 3,000 birds or 6,000 rabbits.

This was not achieved without constant irritation to the Prince’s tenant farmers. One of these was Mrs Louise Cresswell, who had decided to continue farming the nine-hundred-acre Appleton Hall farm after her husband’s death. Mrs Cresswell had cause to complain of her crops being ruined by the Prince’s shooting, which was ‘a perfect passion with him and nothing made him more angry than the slightest opposition to it’. His rabbits nibbled at her swedes and mangels; his hares ate her young wheat and barley; his pheasants and partridges settled on her fields like plagues of locusts; his beaters broke down her gates and fences; his game-keepers ordered her labourers to stay in the farmyard when the guns were out shooting, and forbade them to clear the weeds that grew around the game shelters for fear they disturb the nesting birds. Claims for damages were submitted only to be met with haggling or denials of responsibility by the Prince’s agent.

The Prince himself was usually quite charming and friendly towards Mrs Cresswell except on those occasions when, having ‘listened to tales from any quarter without taking the trouble to inquire into the truth of them’, he scowled at her in his most intimidating manner. ‘No one,’ she decided, ‘can be more pleasant and agreeable than His Royal Highness, if you go with him in everything and do exactly what he likes; on the other hand, he can be very unpleasant indeed if you are compelled to do what he does not like.’ Eventually she made up her mind she could carry on no longer, answering someone who asked her at the local market why she was leaving a farm she loved with the words, ‘Because I could not remain unless I killed down the Prince’s game from Monday morning till Saturday night, and reserved Sunday for lecturing the agent.’ She wrote a book giving an account of her unequal struggle with the Prince, whose agent, her particular bête noire, bought up as many copies as he could lay hands on and burned them.

But although Mrs Cresswell was not his only outspoken critic, although the Queen urged him to stop excessive game preservation at the expense of farmers’ crops, and although General Knollys feared that if he persisted in competing for the ‘largest game bag’ he would lose his ‘good name’, the Prince declined to alter his ways. In fact, he considered himself a fair and reasonable landlord: his tenants never suffered in sickness or old age; they were regularly invited to meals and dances at the house; their labourers were generously paid on shooting-days, and their houses and buildings were always kept in good repair.

Concerned as the Queen often was by accounts of the goings-on at Sandringham, reports of the Prince’s behaviour elsewhere were much more worrying. There was, for instance, the matter of his gambling about which Lord Palmerston wrote to her in March 1865, warning her that the Prince was drawing large amounts of capital to pay for his losses and offering to speak to him about it privately. Sir William Knollys, it appeared, had already admonished the Prince ‘in writing, having ascertained on more than one occasion that that was the best, if not the only way of making a lasting impression’. In fact, the amounts which he lost on cards were never excessive compared with the losses frequently sustained by the rich men with whom he played. It very rarely happened that he had to pay out more than £100 for an evening’s whist, though he once lost a total of £700 in two nights’ play at White’s. Nor did he bet heavily on horses. He assured his mother that when he saw other young men betting he warned them ‘over and over again’ of the consequences. Yet the rumours persisted that he was losing far more than he could afford; and certainly his income was not large enough to bear any extra strain having regard to the money he was spending on the improvements at Sandringham, and on entertaining at Marlborough House, whose household numbered over a hundred persons.

Visitors to Marlborough House were admitted to the entrance hall by a Scotch gillie in Highland dress. In the hall they were met by two scarlet-coated and powdered footmen, their hats and coats being passed to a hall-porter in a short red coat with a broad band of leather across his shoulders. A page in a dark blue coat and black trousers would then escort them to an ante-room on the first floor. As they passed upstairs they were ‘conscious of the flittings of many maids, all in a neat uniform, whose business it was to maintain the character of the Prince’s residence as the “best kept house in London”’.