Christopher Hibbert - Edward VII - The Last Victorian King

The disagreement with the Queen over the Prince’s going out to Egypt was but one of several differences he had recently had with her. There had been trouble over his being required to relinquish his appointment as Colonel-in-Chief of the Rifle Brigade to his brother, the Duke of Connaught, when being made Colonel-in-Chief of the Household Cavalry. The Queen had asked him to say nothing about this, as she wanted to give the good news to Arthur herself; but the prince had forestalled her by making an arrangement with his brother so that he could retain the right to wear the black buttons of the Rifle Brigade, which no true rifleman ever willingly surrenders. The Queen had been cross about this arrangement’s being made without her knowledge; and the Prince had been equally cross when he had replied to her letter of remonstrance: ‘I do not think that I am prone to “let the cat out of the bag” as a rule, or to betray confidences; but I own it is often with great regret that I either learn first from others or see in the newspapers, hints or facts stated with regard to members of our Family.’

The trouble was that the Queen continued to believe that he was, in fact, still far too prone to let the cat out of the bag. She had been warned by Disraeli that the Prince ought not to see confidential papers as he was still far too inclined to ‘let them out and talk to his friends about them’. So that when war with Russia had appeared imminent in 1877, she had seen to it that he was shown no secret papers, though he had been at that time as strongly anti-Russian as herself, and though a key to the Cabinet boxes had been made available to Prince Leopold. He complained, without avail, to Lord Granville about the Queen’s ban and further annoyed her by frequently inviting to Marlborough House and Sandringham Granville’s Undersecretary of State, Sir Charles Dilke, whose republican views had been modified since meeting the Prince in 1880 at a dinner at Lord Fife’s where, so Dilke said, ‘the Prince laid himself out to be pleasant, and talked to me nearly all the evening — chiefly about the Greek question and French politics’, his knowledge of which, Dilke thought, suffered from believing everything he read in the Figaro.

Irritated as she was by the Prince’s familiarity with Dilke — who, she felt sure, was being plied with hospitality in return for information he ought not to divulge — the Queen had been even more exasperated to learn that, after the defeat of the Conservatives at the General Election of March 1880 and her consequent loss of Disraeli, her son had taken it upon himself to consult his friend, Lord Hartington. The Prince, so he had informed his mother through Henry Ponsonby, had more than one ‘long conversation’ with Hartington, who had been ‘more anxious than ever that the Queen should send for Mr Gladstone to form a government instead of sending for Lord Granville or himself … Far better that she should take the initiative than that it should be forced on her.’

Infuriated that her son should presume to tell her how to act and, in particular, to advise her to appoint Gladstone — which, in the end, she had been obliged to do — the Queen had reminded him ‘very shortly’ what the constitutional position was. It was, in fact, ‘quite clear’: The Prince of Wales ‘has no right to meddle and never has done so before. Lord Hartington must be told … that the Queen cannot allow any private and intimate communications to go on between them, or all confidence will be impossible.’

Even this rebuff was less severe than that delivered to the Prince in 1884 when he wrote to thank the Queen for an advance copy of her More Leaves from a Journal of Our Life in the Highlands, adding tactlessly that he entertained grave doubts as to the propriety of her exposing her private life to the world, meaning, in particular, her association with the tiresome gillie, John Brown. She would not agree, he knew, but he held ‘very strong views on the subject’, and urged her to restrict the book to private circulation. The Queen passed the letter on to her secretary with a cross note to the effect that she thought it ‘very strange that objections shd come from that quarter where grt strictness of conduct [was] not generally much cared for [and where there was so] much talk and want of reticence’. As for her son’s advice that she should restrict the book to private circulation, to do so would be to limit the readership to members of society, who were just the very people least qualified to appreciate it. Changing tack, the Prince again wrote to protest that, although he was well aware that the main purpose of the book was to describe her life in the Highlands, it might create surprise that the name of her eldest son never occurred in it.

To this the Queen riposted by asking if he had actually read the volume in question or asked his ‘so-called friends’ to do so for him. If he had been kind enough to read it himself, he would have found that his name was mentioned on pages 1, 5, 8, 331 and 378. It would have been mentioned more often, the Queen did not forbear to add, if he had come to Balmoral more frequently.

But then, as she complained on other occasions, he was far too preoccupied with the pleasures of his social round to spare much time for that. Even when her dear friend Dean Stanley died, still mourning the loss, five years before, of his beloved wife, Lady Augusta, and arrangements were made to bury him in Westminster Abbey, the Prince felt obliged to point out that on the date proposed for the funeral there was racing at Goodwood and that it would be better, therefore, if the ceremony were held a day earlier. The Queen was deeply shocked that such a consideration should have interfered with the arrangements for the funeral of a man who had earned an ‘immortal name for himself’, who was ‘more than any Bishop or Archbishop’, who had shown himself worthy both of the Prince’s high regard and of his deep affection. Nor was this the only reprimand which the Queen felt compelled to administer at the time of Dean Stanley’s death.

That month King Kalakaua of Hawaii was in England on an official visit; and the Prince, hoping to persuade the King that the British would be more understanding and helpful friends than the Americans, had been unremitting in his attentions to him. He escorted him to banquets, invited him to luncheon at Marlborough House and to a ball where the Princess opened the royal quadrille with him. He urged his friends to give dinners for him, insisting on his taking precedence over the Crown Prince of Germany, and rejecting the Germans’ protests by observing, ‘Either the brute is a king or else he is an ordinary black nigger, and if he is not a king, why is he here?’ Dean Stanley’s death occurred in the middle of King Kalakaua’s visit, and the Prince rejected the Queen’s request that he should postpone his ball at Marlborough House because of it.

Nor could the Prince be dissuaded from making such frequent trips abroad that it was sometimes suggested that he spent almost as much time on the Continent as he did at home. To be sure, many of these trips were to family weddings or funerals. In February 1881 he had gone to Berlin to the wedding of his nephew Prince William to Princess Augusta Victoria, a daughter of Duke Frederick of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg. The next month he was in St Petersburg attending the funeral of the Tsar Alexander II and investing his successor, Alexander III, with the Order of the Garter. Back in England for Disraeli’s funeral in April, he was off again in May, this time to Vienna for the wedding of Crown Prince Rudolph and Princess Stephanie of Belgium. In March 1883, after nearly two months in Cannes — preceded, the previous summer, by several weeks at Homburg — the Prince went to Berlin for the silver wedding celebrations of the Crown Prince and Princess, then back to Homburg, then to Baden, then to Homburg again, then to the autumn manoeuvres of the German army which, to the Princess of Wales’s distress, he watched in the uniform of a Colonel of the Fifth Pomeranian Hussars. Altogether he was away on the Continent for over two months that year, though he had to forego his usual visit to Paris because of French anger over the British intervention in Egypt. The next spring, however, he was back at Cannes faced with the melancholy task of bringing home the body of his brother, Prince Leopold, Duke of Albany, the Queen’s ‘dearest son’, who had died of a brain haemorrhage at the Villa Nevada, having fallen down in a club. Three weeks after his brother’s funeral he was in Darmstadt for the wedding of his niece, Princess Victoria of Hesse, to Prince Louis of Battenberg. He remained on the Continent for eight weeks, thankful to escape from an England in gloomy mourning for the Duke of Albany.