Christopher Hibbert - Edward VII - The Last Victorian King

Although she considered that the Prince spent too much time abroad, the Queen continued to deny him the satisfaction of knowing that she fully trusted him when he was at home. She was not blind to his virtues. He was generous and affectionate, she admitted; she was very fond of him and had more than once said so. ‘It gives me such pleasure to hear you speak so lovingly of dear Bertie,’ she had once written to his sister Victoria, ‘for he deserves it. He is such a good kind brother — a very loving son and true friend — and so kind to all below him, for which he is universally loved — which poor Affie [the Duke of Edinburgh] is not at all, either by high or low.’ Similarly, in the autumn of 1887, she praised his good nature in her journal after a visit he had made to Balmoral — ‘a most pleasant visit which I think he enjoyed and said so repeatedly … He is so kind and affectionate that it is a pleasure to be a little quietly together.’

Yet in dealing with delicate affairs of state his judgement was not to be relied upon, so that whenever he offered to perform some important public duty he was more likely than not to be told that he was disqualified either by his rank, his inexperience, or his lack of the particular natural talents required. In 1870, for instance, his proposal to act as mediator between France and Prussia had elicited the dispiriting response that his position would make it quite impossible for him to undertake the mission even if he were ‘personally fitted for such a very difficult task’. And he certainly was not fitted, in the Queen’s opinion. He was still far too indiscreet and impressionable.

The Queen was not alone in considering him so. Both Lord Granville and Lord Hartington thought so, too. And in 1885 Charles Hardinge, at that time Third Secretary at the British Embassy in Berlin, was ‘shocked by the indiscreet language of the Prince of Wales to the Russian military attach? in the hearing of a crowd of diplomatists’. Charles Dilke, commenting on his impressionability, and of his being ‘a good deal under the influence of the last person who [talked] to him’, said of him,

He is very sharp in a way … with more sense and more usage of the modem world than his mother, whose long retirement has cut her off from that world, but less real brain power … It is worth talking seriously to the Prince. One seems to make no impression at the time … for he seems not to listen and to talk incessantly except when he is digesting [his food] … but he does listen all the same, and afterwards, when he is talking to somebody else, brings out everything you have said.

Dilke himself never found it too difficult to change the Prince’s mind. When, for instance, work began on a Channel tunnel in 1881, the Prince was most enthusiastic and inspected the early workings near Dover. But Dilke persuaded him that the proposed tunnel might endanger the safety of the country in time of war, and the Prince was soon as strongly opposed to the idea as he had previously been in favour of it.

Denied the Queen’s confidence, the Prince complained in vain about the continuing ban on important information being supplied to him.

‘Needless to say’ he was ‘kept in perfect ignorance as to what [was] going on,’ he wrote resentfully when trouble in Afghanistan almost led to war between Russia and England in the spring of 1885. His position was much the same as it had been ten years before when he had been left completely in the dark about the intention to proclaim the Queen Empress of India. He had been certain on that occasion, so he told Disraeli, ‘that in no other country in the world would the next Heir to the Throne have been treated under similar circumstances in such a manner’. The Prime Minister sympathized with the Prince’s attitude. ‘He certainly has great quickness of perception and a happy knack of always saying the right thing,’ Gladstone told Edward Hamilton in April 1885. ‘He would make an excellent sovereign. He is far more fitted for that high place than her present Majesty now is. He would see both sides. He would always be open to argument. He would never domineer or dictate.’ But, as Hamilton said, Gladstone did not like to act behind the Queen’s back in releasing information to him. Francis Knollys told Hamilton that Disraeli had occasionally let the Prince have ‘tit bits of Cabinet secrets’. So as to keep on good terms with both his sovereign and the heir apparent, he had, however, done so without telling the Queen, who subsequently declined to believe that Disraeli had ‘ever made such communications’. And, as Hamilton had to admit, Disraeli ‘could do a good many things connected with the Queen which Mr Gladstone could not do and certainly would not do’.

So it was not until 1886, when his friend Rosebery became Foreign Secretary, that the Prince received copies of various secret Foreign Office dispatches. Even then, Rosebery acted on his own initiative without the Queen’s specific authority. Indeed, it was not until 1892 that the Prince was at last given the Prince Consort’s gold key which opened the Foreign Office boxes and received from the Prime Minister’s private secretary reports of Cabinet meetings of much the same character as those that were sent to the sovereign.

But the Queen still refused to allow him to exercise any real authority. Thus, in September 1896, when the Tsar came to Balmoral for important conversations with the Queen and Lord Salisbury, the Prince had been ‘so anxious,’ as he told the Queen’s private secretary, Sir Arthur Bigge, ‘that the arrival should be marked with every possible compliment’ that he had returned from Homburg to supervise personally all the arrangements for the visit. He had stood on the dockside at Leith to welcome the Tsar to Scotland in the pouring rain and had put himself out, as the Queen’s lady-in-waiting, Lady Lytton, said, to be ‘very nice to everyone … and the greatest help all the time’. But he had not been invited to join any of the conversations.

Even his repeated attempts to give advice on diplomatic and other appointments were as likely as ever to be ignored. In 1896, for instance, his nominee for the appointment of British Minister in Stockholm was not only rejected in favour of another man but he was not even told to whom the post had been given. His views on a suitable successor to Sir Edward Malet as Ambassador in Berlin were not so much as sounded, while his proposal that Lord Pembroke should be promoted Lord Chamberlain was followed almost immediately by the appointment to that post of the Earl of Hopetoun.

He was no more influential with regard to appointments to the Cabinet. He was not the slightest use to the Queen, he unhappily told Francis Knollys when Gladstone was forming his last administration. Everything he said or did was ‘pooh-poohed’; his sisters and brothers were ‘much more listened to’ than he was.

Yet when he was given work to do, he showed that he could offer more than charm, tact, influence and a wide range of acquaintance. In the first place he was an excellent organizer, as he had shown in a minor way at an appallingly haphazard City ball held in honour of the Sultan of Turkey in 1867.

It was enormously overcrowded and the authorities were quite ignorant of West End ways [reported Henry Ponsonby, normally no great admirer of the Prince]. At the chief supper Lord Raglan was not included [although he was] the lord-in-waiting representing the Queen with the Sultan. Raglan gave it to one of the aldermen pretty freely afterwards. The Duke of Beaufort tried to get in. They wouldn’t let him in — another row. On the dais they tried [unsuccessfully] to clear a place for dancing. The Duke of Beaufort saw Djemil Bey struggling with a policeman — he remonstrated with an alderman who was giving the order and at last Djemil Bey was allowed in. Immediately afterwards came Apponyi. Beaufort said, ‘You must let him in.’ Alderman wouldn’t, at last did sulkily and said, ‘There you’d better take my place and do duty here.’ ‘If I did,’ said the Duke, ‘my first duty would be to throw you out.’ So you see the amenities were numerous … Of course, the Lord Mayor read an interminable address. The Sultan then spoke … in Turkish, and Musurus [the Turkish Ambassador] read [a speech] in fearful English. If it had not been for the Prince of Wales the civic authorities would have done all sorts of absurdities, but he kept them in order very well indeed.