Christopher Hibbert - Edward VII - The Last Victorian King

We profoundly regret that the Prince should have been in any way mixed up, not only in the case, but in the social circumstances which prepared the way for it. We make no comment upon his conduct towards Sir William Gordon Cumming. He believed Sir William had cheated; he wished to save him; he wished to avoid scandal; and he asked him to sign the paper. This may have been, and probably was, a breach of military rule; but with that the public at large does not concern itself. What does concern and indeed distress the public is the discovery that the Prince should have been at the baccarat table; that the game was apparently played to please him; that it was played with his counters [a set given him by Reuben Sassoon, marked from 5s. to £10, engraved with the Prince of Wales’s feathers and] specially taken down for the purpose; that his ‘set’ are a gambling, a baccarat-playing set… Sir William Gordon-Cumming was made to sign a declaration that ‘he would never touch a card again’. We almost wish, for the sake of English society in general, that we could learn that the result of this most unhappy case had been that the Prince of Wales had signed a similar declaration.

In an effort to allay these adverse comments, the government was approached with the suggestion that ‘some public utterance in defence or apology for the Prince should be made’. But Lord Salisbury, who had succeeded Gladstone as Prime Minister, expressed the opinion ‘very earnestly’ that it was not right that any minister of the Crown should make any such pronouncement.

We may be examined as to all matters that fall within the scope of our duties [Salisbury wrote to Hartington on 16 June] but the private morals of the Prince of Wales do not come within that scope; and we ought not to be questioned about them. If we are questioned we should refuse to discuss them. There is a further question in which I understand you have interested yourself. Whether the Prince of Wales himself should make any such pronouncement … I confess if I had the advising of him (which I am not likely to have) I should recommend him to sit still, and avoid baccarat for six months: and at the end of that time write a letter to some indiscreet person (who would publish it) saying that at the time of the Cumming case there had been a great deal of misunderstanding as to his views: but the circumstances of that case had so convinced him of the evil that was liable to be caused by that game, that since that time he had forbidden it to be played in his presence. Such a declaration — referring to what he had done would suffice to deodorize him of all the unpleasant aroma which this case has left upon him and his surroundings: but nothing else would be sufficient.

The Queen suggested that an open letter, expressing the Prince’s disapproval of gambling, might be written to the Archbishop of Canterbury. But the Prime Minister did not agree with this suggestion either. And when approached again by Lord Hartington on the Prince’s behalf, he clung to his opinion that ‘anything’ in the nature of a public statement or correspondence would not be judicious. So Francis Knollys, who had just been about to leave Marlborough House to catch the 12.29 train to Chenies to see the Archbishop, stayed in London. And two months later the Prince wrote a private letter to the Archbishop expressing a rather disingenuous ‘horror of gambling’, gambling being a term which, as he had already made clear in conversation with him, he did not apply to a little harmless flutter by those who could afford to lose their stakes, on either cards or horse-racing, ‘a manly sport’ which was ‘popular with Englishmen of all classes’.

Condemning the Press which had been ‘very severe and cruel, because,’ as he put it to his sister Victoria, ‘they know I cannot defend myself’, the Prince was equally displeased with the government for not protecting him from Sir Edward Clarke’s attacks as Gladstone had protected him during the Mordaunt case by taking, as Knollys put it, ‘all the indirect means in his power (and successfully) to prevent anything being brought out in the course of the trial that could be injurious to the Prince and the crown’. The Prince was also still angry with Sir William Gordon Cumming, a ‘damned blackguard’ who crowned his infamy, in the Prince’s eyes, by marrying, on the very day after the trial, ‘an American young lady, Miss Garner (sister to Mme de Breteuil), with money!’ The Prince hoped he would never have to see the man again; and, according to Gordon Cumming’s daughter, ‘said that anyone who spoke to him would never be asked to Marlborough House again, also no Army or Navy Officer was to accept invitations to shoot at [Gordon Cumming’s country estates] Altyre or Gordonstoun’. When he went down to Eastbourne that summer the Prince was seen to be in a ‘very bad temper’.

So was Lord Charles Beresford. In his cabin aboard the Undaunted, letters of complaint had reached him from his wife, who, still cold-shouldered by the Prince, had been outraged to hear that the Princess had publicly received Lady Brooke at Marlborough House. The continuing humiliation was too much for her, Lady Charles announced to her husband: she would sell her house in London and go to live on the Continent.

Angrier than ever now with the Prince, Lord Charles sat down on 12 July to write a letter to him in which he told him bluntly:

For some months I have received letters, not only from Lady Charles but from many of my friends, that you have systematically ranged yourself on the side of the other person against my wife … [in such an] ostentatious way … that some people believe [my wife] is entirely [in the] wrong … I have no intention of allowing my wife to suffer for any faults I may have committed in days gone by. Much less have I any intention of allowing any woman to wreak her vengeance on my wife because I would not accede to her entreaties to return to a friendship I repudiated.

I consider that from the beginning by your unasked interference and subsequent action you have deliberately used your high position to insult a humbler by doing all you can to elevate the person with whom she had a quarrel… The days of duelling are past, but there is a more just way of getting right done … and that is publicity … The first opportunity that occurs to me I shall give my opinion publicly of Y.R.H. and state that you have behaved like a blackguard and a coward, and that I am prepared to prove my words.

Lord Charles did not send this letter direct to the Prince of Wales, but to Lady Charles, with instructions to show it to the Prime Minister first with a warning of the ‘grave events’ now likely to follow unless a ‘public apology’ were forthcoming. Lady Charles accordingly sent her husband’s letter, together with her own detailed account of the whole business, to Lord Salisbury, who was warned not only that ‘the highest legal authority’ had advised her husband that he was in a position to force ‘damning’ publicity upon the Prince of Wales, but also that Lady Charles’s sister, Mrs Gerald Paget, had prepared for publication a pamphlet which had ‘already been shown, as an interesting episode in the Prince of Wales’s mode of life, to several people who want to make use of the story at the next General Election for purposes of their own’.

Unwillingly dragged once again into the Prince of Wales’s affairs, Lord Salisbury nevertheless at once accepted the fact that he must try to limit the reverberations of the quarrel. He urged Lady Charles not to send on her husband’s letter to the Prince; and he wrote himself to Lord Charles to point out that such a letter would, ‘if published’, do the sender ‘endless harm’, since, ‘according to our social laws’, no gentleman must ever be the means of bringing any lady ‘into disgrace because she yielded’ to him. Furthermore, Lord Salisbury continued,