Christopher Hibbert - Edward VII - The Last Victorian King

The Prince’s tact and organizational abilities were given more scope at the time of the Queen’s Golden Jubilee, when he was allowed to supervise the ceremonial details and the reception of the numerous foreign representatives. His talent for organization was equally appreciated that year, during the preparations for the Colonies and India Exhibition, as his chairmanship of the Executive Council of the Royal College of Music had been in 1883. ‘He makes an excellent chairman,’ Edward Hamilton had noted in his journal then, ‘businesslike, sensible and pleasant’. Also, while still inclined to lose interest in projects which ran into complicated difficulties or public apathy, he was much more conscientious than he had been in the past. As he had been abroad so often in 1884 he managed to attend no more than nineteen of the fifty-one meetings of the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes. But when in December 1892 he was asked to serve on a Royal Commission on the Aged Poor he accepted immediately, abandoned his usual visit to the South of France the next year, and missed few of the Commission’s sessions. He informed his son, without complaint, that he didn’t think he had ever been so busy in his life and impressed James Stuart, a radical fellow-member of the Commission, not only by his regular attendance at the proceedings — during which he doodled Union Jacks with red and blue pencils as he listened to the evidence — but also by asking ‘very good questions’. ‘I thought at first that he had probably been prompted to these,’ Stuart recalled in his Reminiscences, ‘but I soon found out that they were of his own initiative, and that he really had a very considerable grasp of the subjects he dealt with.’

Yet the opportunities allowed the Prince to demonstrate these capabilities were very few. He rarely made a direct protest to the Queen, although remarks about other heirs, such as Crown Prince Rudolph of Austria’s being treated ‘almost like a boy by his Parents’, were, no doubt, intended to convey allusions to his own predicament. He knew from experience how stubborn his mother could be, and was consequently disinclined to approach her again after an initial rebuff unless he could do so at Balmoral, where she was ‘always in a better way’. Elsewhere her wrathful displeasure was too high a price to pay for offending her. Baron von Eckardstein, the German diplomat, recalled how, owing to the Kaiser’s insistence that they finish a race at Cowes which had been interrupted by the wind suddenly dropping, they had all arrived at Osborne late for dinner. The Kaiser unconcernedly apologized; but the Prince ‘took cover for a moment behind a pillar, wiping the sweat from his forehead before he could summon up courage enough to come forward and make his bow. The Queen only gave him a stiff nod, and he retreated behind the pillar again.’ Everyone was afraid of his mother, the Prince once told Margot Asquith ‘with a charming smile’, everyone ‘with the exception of John Brown’. Henry Ponsonby agreed with him, but added, as the only other exception, Napoleon III’s son, the Prince Imperial. Nevertheless, the Prince did occasionally defy the Queen, as when, for instance, he acted as pall-bearer at Gladstone’s funeral. What advice had he taken? the Queen wanted to know. And what precedent had he followed for doing such a thing? The Prince replied that he had not taken any advice and knew of no precedent.

Also, towards the end of the Queen’s life, the Prince did sometimes persuade her to change her mind on matters of little importance. She reluctantly allowed him to receive the salute at her birthday parade on the retirement as Commander-in-Chief of her cousin, the Duke of Cambridge, who had formerly represented her. Also, after assuring her son that her decision against it was final, she eventually gave way to his suggestion that the Kaiser — who had delighted him by giving him a commission in the Prussian Dragoon Guards — should be granted an honorary colonelcy in a British regiment since it was well worth while paying a reciprocal compliment to the ‘finest army in the world’. But when, two years later, the Prince was so incensed by the Kaiser’s congratulatory telegram to President Kruger on the failure of Dr Jameson’s raid into the Transvaal that he proposed ‘a good snubbing’, she rebuked him sternly. ‘Those sharp, cutting answers and remarks only irritate and do harm, which one is sorry for,’ the Prince was informed. ‘Passion should be carefully guarded against. [The Kaiser’s] faults come from impulsiveness, as well as conceit. Calmness and firmness are the most powerful weapons in such cases.’

And calmness and firmness, she made it clear, were not to be expected of the Prince.

If the relationship between the Queen and the Prince of Wales continued to be imperfect, all differences between her and the Princess were now forgotten. They had come close together at the time of the Prince’s illness; and, after the death of Princess Alice, the Prince’s favourite sister, when ‘dear Alix’ proved to be a ‘real devoted sympathizing daughter’ to the Queen, they remained deeply attached to each other up till the day the Queen herself died.

The Princess was much affected by her mother-in-law’s death. She was the only woman seen to be in tears at the private funeral service at Frogmore. And afterwards she told Lady Downe how sad and strange Windsor Castle seemed without her: ‘I feel as if she were only gone abroad and I keeping house for her in her absence.’

The relationship between the Princess and her husband was more difficult to understand. Lady Antrim, who knew her well, thought that if she had loved him as much as he loved her he would have been more faithful to her. No one doubted, though, that she did love him. ‘I miss my little Man terribly,’ she told Lady Downe when he was abroad after the Mordaunt divorce case; and it was obvious that, although her children came first in her life, she did miss him terribly. It was obvious, too, that despite his affairs and many intimate female friendships, he loved her in return. ‘After all,’ she said of him when he was dead, ‘he always loved me the best.’

He seems, all the same, never to have found her particularly attractive sexually. Perhaps no man did so, not even Oliver Montagu, for she was evidently not in the least a sensual woman. She inspired admiration, respect, and, usually, affection in almost everyone who knew her, but never the passion aroused by those whom Lord Carrington referred to as ‘the Prince’s other ladies’. ‘Every time one sees her,’ wrote Edward Hamilton soon after her thirty-ninth birthday, ‘one is more struck by her refined beauty and her extraordinarily youthful appearance.’ Such comments were commonplace. So were tributes to her still ‘lovely figure’ and ‘straight back’, ‘her fresh red lips which were never painted and always moist’, her gaiety, her sense of fun and of the ridiculous. Charming stories were told of her suddenly exploding with irresistible laughter as, for instance, she did in St Petersburg when the Prince entered the Throne Room of the Anitchkoff Palace followed by five members of his staff, solemnly bearing on velvet cushions the insignia for the Tsar’s installation as a Knight of the Garter and looking ‘exactly like a row of wet-nurses carrying babies’. There was also that well-remembered occasion when, having asked Tennyson to read aloud the Ode of Welcome which he had written for her wedding, she could not contain her laughter, which proved so infectious that soon Tennyson, too, was laughing helplessly and dropped the book on the floor. Yet, even when romping about at Sandringham, making rather childish jokes, squirting her son with a soda-water syphon, or trying on everyone else’s shoes on the dance floor at Chatsworth, she never lost her poise and dignity. As Lady Frederick Cavendish said, she could gather up her stateliness at any moment.