Christopher Hibbert - Edward VII - The Last Victorian King

Relieved as he must have been that, immediately after this painful scene, Lord Charles left England to go to sea again in the armoured cruiser Undaunted, the Prince’s peace of mind was not restored. For another and even more disquieting problem had yet to be resolved.

In September the year before, the Prince had gone to Yorkshire for Doncaster races; but instead of staying as usual at Brantingham Thorpe with Christopher Sykes, who could no longer afford to entertain him there, he went to Tranby Croft, the country house of Arthur Wilson, a rich shipowner. Lieutenant-Colonel Sir William Gordon Cumming, a baronet in the Scots Guards who enjoyed a private income of £80,000 a year, was also of the party. After dinner the first evening, while several of the guests, including the Prince, were playing baccarat, two of them suspected Sir William of cheating, a suspicion which had been entertained in various other houses in the past. The next night he was watched by other guests, who confirmed that he was, indeed, manipulating his counters dishonestly. Sir William was confronted with their accusation; and on the understanding that all those who knew of his conduct would ‘preserve silence’, he was asked to sign a document agreeing never to play cards again so long as he lived. Sir William, protesting his innocence, objected that to sign the document would be tantamount to an admission of guilt. But, under pressure, he did sign it; and the Prince added his signature to those of the nine other men who had played baccarat with him.

The next day the Prince left Tranby Croft for York where, on the day after that, Lord and Lady Brooke, who had been prevented from joining the party by the death of Lady Brooke’s step-father, joined him at the railway station on their way to Abergeldie.

It was widely supposed afterwards that the Prince told the Brookes in confidence what had happened at Tranby Croft; and that Lady Brooke, known to irreverent journalists as ‘the Babbling Brook’, could not keep the fascinating story to herself. She denied the charge; and George Lewis, now acting for the Prince’s friends, the Brookes, rather than for the out-of-favour Beresfords, was instructed to issue an announcement to the effect that proceedings would be taken against anyone repeating the lie. What could not be denied, however, was that someone had revealed the Tranby Croft secret; and, hearing that this was so, Gordon Cumming told his solicitors to bring an action against his accusers. In an effort to spare the Prince the ignominy of appearing in a civil court, attempts were made to have a military court inquire privately into the affair and thus render a civil action much more difficult to bring. But the Judge Advocate-General advised that this would be unfair to Sir William; and, to the prince’s dismay, the Adjutant-General, Sir Redvers Buller, accepted that advice.

‘It is enough to make the great Duke of Wellington rise from his tomb,’ the Prince protested to the Duke of Cambridge, ‘and point his finger of scorn at the Horse Guards … The conduct of the A[djutant] G[eneral] is inexplicable but he cannot have the interests of the Army at heart, acting in the way he has. I always knew he was a born soldier — and equally imagined he was a gentleman, but from henceforth I can never look upon him in the latter category.’

An attempt by the Prince and his friends to avoid a public scandal by a private inquiry at the Guards Club also failed. A civil action was, therefore, inevitable.

Waiting for it to be brought, the Prince grew more and more anxious and irritable, deciding not to go to France that year, ‘not knowing what might turn up’, refusing to go to Windsor unless his mother promised not to talk about baccarat, constantly talking to his friends about the impending action and asking for their advice as to what he ought to do, if anything, in the meantime. Both Lord Hartington, a recognized arbiter of social questions, and Francis Knollys were against any attempt at compromise since ‘a great number of people [would] think and say that it [had] been arranged to screen the Prince of Wales’. Knollys gave it as their opinion, therefore, that it was in the Prince’s interest that the action ‘should be allowed to take its course’. The Queen also thought that the action ought to go ahead as, although it was ‘a sad thing [that] Bertie [was] dragged into it’, people thought good might come of it and it would be a ‘shock to Society and to gambling’.

So the Prince could do nothing but await the trial, which he did in extreme trepidation, condemning the conduct of Gordon Cumming, who had been reported as having been seen playing baccarat in France, as ‘simply scandalous throughout’. Gordon Cumming’s version of the affair ‘was false from beginning to end’. He did not have ‘a leg to stand on and his protestations of innocence were useless’. The Prince’s certainty about the man’s guilt did not, however, make it any easier for him to face the prospect of the forthcoming trial with equanimity. The Princess — who loyally castigated Gordon Cumming as ‘a brute’, a ‘vile snob’ and ‘a worthless creature’ whom she had always thoroughly disliked and who was now behaving ‘too abominably’ — said that her husband was making himself ‘quite ill’ with worry.

This was obvious when he appeared at last in court at the beginning of June looking tired and tense and increasingly nervous as the proceedings dragged on. He listened with evident anxiety as Sir Edward Clarke, representing Gordon Cumming, skilfully made it appear not only that his client had been unjustly condemned on bad evidence but that he was also the victim of a conspiracy to save the Prince from exposure in a public scandal. And the Prince looked dismayed as Sir Edward also maintained that he had deliberately ignored army regulations which, applying to him as a field marshal as they did to every other officer, required all cases of alleged dishonourable conduct to be submitted to the accused’s superior officer.

In contrast to Gordon Cumming, who responded to all the questions asked him in a firm, clear voice, the Prince, when it came to his turn, gave his answers in so low a tone that only a few of them could be heard. This, as the editor of the Daily News said, caused an unfavourable impression.

There had been a murmur of disapproval in court when Gordon Cumming ostentatiously turned his back on the Prince as he took his place in the box. But the spectators generally were on Gordon Cumming’s side; and when, on the seventh day of the trial — taking their cue from a four-hour summing up by the Lord Chief Justice in the defendants’ favour — the jury brought in a verdict against him, there was an angry outburst of prolonged hissing.

The demonstrations in court were an accurate reflection of the feelings of the people outside, many of whom wrote to the Gordon Cumming family to express their sympathy with them. The Prince was loudly booed that month at Ascot; and the attacks upon him in the Press were quite as vituperative as they had been at the time of the Mordaunt divorce case. According to the Review of Reviews, the various country gentlemen whom the editor interviewed gave it as their unanimous opinion that the Prince ought to be condemned as ‘a wastrel and whoremonger’ as well as a gambler, it being not so much baccarat as ‘the kind of life of which this was an illustration that was the cause of their disgust’.

The Queen well understood this feeling. It was not just ‘this special case — though his signing the paper was wrong (and turns out to have been contrary to military regulations),’ she told her eldest daughter, ‘but the light which has been thrown on his habits which alarms and shocks people so much, for the example is so bad … The monarchy almost is in danger if he is lowered and despised.’ American as well as English newspapers agreed with her. ‘The scandal cannot fail to add,’ the New York Times advised its readers, ‘to the growing conviction that “royalty” is a burden to the British taxpayer for which he fails to receive any equivalent.’ The Times ended a long article on the case on 10 June: