Christopher Hibbert - Edward VII - The Last Victorian King

On hearing of his wife’s intentions Lord Aylesford had left for England immediately, ‘broken hearted at the disgrace’, according to Lord Carrington, but comforted by the Prince’s sympathy and his outspoken denunciation of Blandford as ‘the greatest blackguard alive’.

It was natural that the Prince should support his friend. But Aylesford, though he had written perfectly friendly letters to his wife from India, had long since ceased to display much affection for her; and his mother, so the Duke of Marlborough was informed, seemed ‘to impute some at least of the blame to her son’. His reputation according to Lady Aylesford’s brother, Owen Williams, was most ‘unsavoury’.

Lord Blandford’s reputation, in fact, was not much better. His sister-in-law, Lady Randolph Churchill, considered him ‘worthless’; while Churchill himself, though he came to his elder brother’s defence at once, reached the conclusion before the affair was over that Blandford, clever and eloquent as he was, was nevertheless ‘a horrid bore’.

On his arrival home, Lord Aylesford, who was determined to divorce his wife and was dissuaded with difficulty from challenging his rival to a duel, let it be known in society exactly what the Prince of Wales’s opinion of Blandford was. Provoked by these reports, Lord Randolph insisted that the Prince was nothing but a hypocrite: he had known all about his brother’s love for Lady Aylesford but this had not prevented him from issuing a pressing invitation to Lord Aylesford to accompany him on the Indian tour despite Lady Aylesford’s pleas that her husband should stay behind for fear of what she might be tempted to do in his absence. Lady Aylesford, in fact, had offered no objection to her husband’s accompanying the Prince but was now alarmed by the consequences of her passion for Blandford and recoiled from the prospect of a scandalous divorce. So she gave Blandford a bundle of extremely imprudent letters, ‘containing improper proposals’, which she had received from the Prince of Wales when he himself had been flirting with her in a relatively light-hearted way a few years before. Blandford, ‘wildly infatuated’ with Lady Aylesford, passed them on to his brother, Lord Randolph, who threatened to make them public if the Prince of Wales did not use his influence with Lord Aylesford to stop his divorce proceedings. Lord Randolph, accompanied by Lady Aylesford and Lord Alington, ‘an excitable man worked on by Lady Aylesford’s sisters’, went so far as to call upon Princess Alexandra to warn her what would happen if the Prince refused to cooperate.

Princess Alexandra, having misheard her servant’s message and consequently expecting a visit from Lady Ailesbury, was very much surprised to see Lady Aylesford enter the room and profoundly shocked to hear Lord Randolph Churchill tell her that he was ‘determined by every means in his power to prevent the case coming before the public and that he had those means at his disposal’ in the shape of letters of the ‘most compromising character’. These letters, if published, would ensure that the Prince ‘would never sit on the throne of England’.

Distressed beyond measure by this painful interview, Princess Alexandra sent for Sir William Knollys; but while she was telling him what had happened, her cousin, the Duchess of Teck, called to see her. She could not very well refuse to admit her, nor could she give the real reason for her unmistakable agitation. So she told the Duchess that her deafness had just led her to receive the notorious Lady Aylesford, and what on earth ought she to do to rectify her mistake?

‘Order your carriage at once,’ the Duchess advised; ‘go straight to the Queen and tell her exactly what has happened. She will understand and entirely excuse you from any indiscretion. It will be in the Court Circular that you were with the Queen today and any comment will be silenced.’

Knollys agreed that this was the best course to follow; so the Princess left immediately to see the Queen, who — as she had been at the time of the Mordaunt case — was understanding and sympathetic, regretting that Alix’s ‘dear name’ should ever ‘have been mixed up with such people’ and telegraphing to India to assure the Prince of Wales that she had perfect confidence in his innocence.

Innocent though the Prince may have been, ‘any letter from a person in high position, written in a strain of undue familiarity and containing many foolish and somewhat stupid expressions, must, when displayed to the public,’ as the Lord Chancellor wrote to Lord Hartington, ‘be injurious and lowering to the writer’. The Queen, therefore, regretted that ‘such a correspondence harmless as it [was] should be in existence’. But she did not think that the Prince need delay his homecoming — as he had offered to do — since it was to be hoped that there was no prospect ‘of a public scandal into which his name could be dragged by these villains’.

The prospect of a public scandal nonetheless continued to worry the Prince, who, outraged by Lord Randolph Churchill’s unforgivable approach to the Princess, had sent Lord Charles Beresford ahead of him to England with instructions to make arrangements for a duel with pistols between the Prince and Churchill somewhere on the north coast of France. Churchill briefly, dismissively and insultingly replied that the idea of a duel between himself and the Prince of Wales was quite ridiculous and that the Prince was obviously aware of this when he issued the challenge.

Thus the matter stood when the Prince arrived home on 11 May 1876 to face rumours, which had reached the Queen’s ears, that it was Lady Aylesford the Prince admired ‘as Ld A. was too gt a fool to be really agreeable to the P. of W.’ Before his arrival the Prince had written to the Princess — ‘a very dear letter from my Bertie’, as she described it — asking her to come aboard the Serapis ‘first and alone’, leaving the rest of the family at Portsmouth where a special train would be waiting to take them all back to London. After driving home in an open carriage from the station to Marlborough House, the Prince and Princess went out again that same evening to see a Verdi opera at Covent Garden. The Queen had advised them not to do so; but as the Prince told her, though he himself would ‘infinitely’ have preferred to be alone with his wife on their first evening together again, he believed it would be better, in view of all the gossip in society about the Aylesford scandal, to show themselves in public as a happy, united family. The decision was justified. The audience stood up to clap them not only before the performance began, but also at the beginning of every act and after the final curtain. ‘The shouts, the cheers, the “bravos” were as vociferous and long-continued as they were hearty and spontaneous,’ The Times reported. ‘The whole assembly rose; and it seemed as if the demonstrations of welcome would never cease. The Prince bowed and bowed repeatedly, till he must have been fatigued with bowing; but the cheering went on.’

The next day the Prince was told that Lord Aylesford had decided not to divorce his wife after all. He later separated from her privately, while Lady Blandford also obtained a deed of separation from her husband. The Prince was thus saved any further embarrassment. He could not, however, bring himself to forgive Lord Randolph Churchill for his behaviour during the sad affair. And Churchill, for his part, refused to make an acceptable apology to the Prince. He wrote to the Princess ‘unreservedly to offer’ his ‘most humble and sincere apologies’ if it were felt that he had been ‘guilty of the slightest disrespect … by approaching her on so painful a subject’. But this, he added, was ‘the only apology’ which circumstances warranted his offering.