Christopher Hibbert - Edward VII - The Last Victorian King

The Queen was not alone in her disapproval of the Prince’s friends. After another member of the Marlborough Club turned out to be an American swindler wanted by the police, The Times condemned his patronage of ‘American cattle-drovers and prize-fighters’, while other critics spoke harshly of his intimate friendships with men distinguished by riches rather than birth. They condemned, for example, his intimacy with Sir Thomas Lipton, who had begun work at the age of nine in his Irish father’s grocery shop in Glasgow; with Sir John Blundell Maple, proprietor of a furniture store in Tottenham Court Road; and with the ruthless, self-made adventurer Cecil Rhodes, whose blackballing by the Travellers’ Club induced the Prince to resign from it himself. Most of all they disapproved of his close friendships with affluent Jews. ‘We resented the introduction of the Jews into the social set of the Prince of Wales,’ Lady Warwick said; ‘not because we disliked them individually … but because they had brains and understood finance. As a class, we did not like brains. As for money, our only understanding of it lay in the spending, not in the making of it.’ The Prince, on the contrary, was fascinated by the operations of capitalists and talk of high finance. And he delighted in the company of rich Jews like the Sassoons, whose ancestors had been settled in Mesopotamia for many centuries and whose immense wealth was derived from the profits of the great merchant house of David Sassoon & Company of Bombay. Arthur Sassoon lived in great splendour at 8 King’s Gardens, Hove, waited upon by forty servants. His half-brothers Reuben and Alfred had almost equally sumptuous houses nearby. Arthur also had a large house, Tulchan Lodge, in Inverness-shire; and at all these places the Prince was welcome to stay for as long as he liked.

The Prince was on quite as intimate terms with the Rothschilds. He had known the gruff and despotic Nathan Meyer Rothschild at Cambridge, and had subsequently often gone to stay with him at Tring Park. He was also a frequent guest of Nathan’s brothers, the extravagant and urbane bachelor, Alfred, who lived in sybaritic luxury at Halton House; and the kindly Leopold of Ascott and Palace House, Newmarket. Their uncle, Sir Anthony de Rothschild, the first baronet, advised the Prince on his finances and, on occasions, arranged for the family bank to advance him money when he was in difficulties. Similar services were offered to the Prince by Baron Maurice von Hirsch auf Gereuth, an enormously rich Jewish financier known as ‘Turkish Hirsch’ because a large part of his fortune had been derived from the building of railways for the Sultan. Hirsch’s social ambitions in Germany and Austria had been thwarted by racial prejudice despite his lavish gifts to charity. Knowing that the Prince of Wales was afflicted by no such prejudice, and that the company of millionaires was highly congenial to him, Hirsch had approached the Crown Prince Rudolph of Austria for an introduction. Having obtained one in exchange for a loan of 100,000 gulden, Hirsch, who had a house in Paris as well as an estate at St Johann, called at the Hôtel Bristol one day when the Prince was staying there. The Prince took to him, understood his predicament, accepted an invitation to luncheon at his house and agreed to stay with him at St Johann. And when Hirsch came to England and rented a house in London, a country house near Sandringham and a shoot near New-market, the Prince undertook to sponsor his entrée into English society, becoming ‘dreadfully annoyed’ when the Queen declined to invite his protégé to a state concert at Buckingham Palace and sharing the Baron’s pleasure when a yearling filly, La Flèche, which Hirsch had bought on the recommendation of Lord Marcus Beresford, won the One Thousand Guineas and the Cambridgeshire as well as the Oaks and the St Leger in the single season of 1892. Before long, however, the Prince began to find Hirsch’s company rather tiresome, and after the Baron’s death in 1896 he was glad to recognize in his executor another multi-millionaire whom he could not only trust as a financial adviser but also value as a close personal friend.

Ernest Cassel was ten years younger than the Prince, to whom he bore a marked resemblance. Born in Cologne, the youngest son of a Jewish banker in a modest way of business, he had left for England at the age of sixteen and obtained employment with a firm in Liverpool. A few months later he moved to Paris as a clerk in the Anglo–Egyptian Bank; and, on the outbreak of the Franco–Prussian War, returned to England, where he joined the staff of the financial house of Bischoffsheim and Goldschmidt, one of whose partners, Louis Bischoffsheim, was Hirsch’s brother-in-law. By the time he was twenty-two, Cassel was manager of the firm at a salary of £5,000 a year. Before he was thirty, by industry, acumen, and a deserved reputation for unassailable integrity, he had accumulated capital of £150,000. He had also married an English girl, becoming a British subject himself on the day of the wedding and being received into the Roman Catholic Church three years later in obedience to his beloved wife’s dying wish. Cautious and reticent in human relations, Cassel was more interested in power than in people. He was a well-known figure in society; he was careful to join the right clubs; and he was as indefatigable in his pursuit of British as he was of foreign decorations, once coolly informing Francis Knollys, who passed the message on to the Prime Minister’s Private Secretary, that he was ‘anxious to have the G.C.B. conferred upon him without loss of time’.

It was felt that, except when he was in the hunting field, or inspecting his horses in the stud or on the race-course, Cassel’s attention never wandered far from the world of finance, of international loans, of percentages and profits. Yet, unlike most men of comparable riches, he derived as much pleasure from spending money as in amassing it. Though his own tastes were restrained, he was the most generous of hosts both at Moulton Paddocks, Newmarket, and at his London houses in Grosvenor Square and Park Lane, both of which were filled with old masters, with all kinds of objects d’art from Renaissance bronzes to English silver and Chinese jade, and with equally decorative women whose company Cassel, like the Prince, preferred to that of men.

Finding Cassel on occasions a trifle dispiriting, the Prince never tired of the Marquis de Soveral, the lively, stimulating Portuguese Minister in London whose charming presence was welcome at every party. Known as the ‘Blue Monkey’ because of his animated manner, blue-black hair and dark complexion, Luis de Soveral was recognized, indeed, as being ‘the most popular man in London’, except at the German Embassy, where he was known as ‘Soveral-Überall’ and strongly disliked for his known anti-German sentiments. The Princess of Pless, the former Daisy Cornwallis-West, treated him as a rather distasteful joke.

He imagines himself to be a great intellectual and political force and the wise adviser of all the heads of the government and, of course, the greatest danger to women! … [But surely] even those stupid people who believe that every man who talks to a woman must be her lover, could not take his Don Juanesque pretensions seriously. Yet I am told that all women do not judge him so severely and some even find him très seduisant. How disgusting!

The Princess of Pless apart, virtually everyone in London, even the husbands of his mistresses, and both the Princess of Wales and Alice Keppel, delighted in the sight of his tall figure approaching, a white flower in his buttonhole, a monocle firmly fixed in one glittering eye, his large moustache neatly brushed, his regular teeth revealed in a warm and happy smile, ready to greet an old friend with enthusiasm or to charm a new acquaintance. ‘As a talker he was quite wonderful in keeping the ball rolling,’ Henry Ponsonby’s son, Frederick, thought.