Christopher Hibbert - Edward VII - The Last Victorian King

‘And without being exactly witty his conversation was always sparkling and amusing. It was only when he had to talk seriously that one realised how clever he was.’ Yet he did all he could to disguise his cleverness, having found by experience that ‘both men and women fight shy of a clever man’.

Certainly the Prince fought shy of clever men whose intelligence was on permanent display. He preferred the company of actors to authors; and authors as a rule did not regard him highly. To Rudyard Kipling he was a corpulent voluptuary; to Max Beerbohm a fat little boy kept in a corner by a domineering mother; to Henry James an ‘ugly’ omen for ‘the dignity of things’. He was once prevailed upon by Sir Sidney Lee to give a dinner at Marlborough House to celebrate the publication of the Dictionary of National Biography. He had evidently not been very keen to do so; and at the dinner was not in his brightest mood, ‘embarrassed by the effusive learning of Lord Acton on one side and the impenetrable shyness of Sir Leslie Stephen on the other’. It is said that on looking round the table his eye fell on Canon Ainger, who had written the entries on Charles and Mary Lamb. ‘Who is the little parson?’ he asked.

‘Why is he here? He is not a writer.’ It was explained to him that Ainger was ‘a very great authority on Lamb’. At this the Prince put down his knife and fork, crying out in bewilderment, ‘On lamb!’

Actors viewed the Prince more kindly, for he took the trouble to gain their regard. One evening in 1882, for example, after Lillie Langtry’s appearance on the stage of the Haymarket Theatre, the Prince, as a gesture of thanks to the kind cooperation of her more experienced colleagues, gave a large dinner party at Marlborough House where a number of actors were, so Lord Carrington told his wife, ‘sandwiched between ordinary mortals with more or less success’. The only regrettable incident occurred when William Kendal, ‘a good-looking bounder’, ‘distinguished himself’ late in the evening by singing ‘a very vulgar song which was not favourably received in high quarters, after which the party rather collapsed’.

The Prince might well have let the vulgarity pass unremarked in other circumstances, but he evidently considered Marlborough House an unsuitable stage for the comedian’s performance. Yet, while he was ever careful to remind the forgetful that he was regal as well as rouè, few people ever accused the Prince of being a snob. Certainly he preferred the company of the rich to the poor, judged riches as useful a method of grading people as any other, and obviously chose to associate with those who could entertain him in the comfortable surroundings to which he had grown accustomed. But although newly established millionaires such as J.B. Robinson were invited to Sandringham almost as a matter of course, the Prince also offered hospitality to men who would never be in a position to return it. One of these was Henry Broadhurst, a former stonemason and trade union leader who was Liberal Member of Parliament for Stoke on Trent and who had served with the Prince on the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes. Broadhurst had no evening clothes and was relieved when the Prince, ‘in order to meet the difficulties in the matter of dress’, made arrangements for him to have dinner served in his bedroom. Yet he did not feel neglected or deprived. He had several long conversations with his host and his family, and left Sandringham ‘with a feeling of one who had spent a week-end with an old chum of his own rank in society’.

As few people ever accused the Prince of being a snob, so everyone agreed that his eagerness to help his friends was one of the most pleasing traits of his personality. It often took him a long time to forgive those who had offended him; but most of them were forgiven in the end, as was Sir Frederick Johnstone, who had insulted him when drunk in the billiardroom at Sandringham. He was sometimes slow to realize that the financial ruin of certain men was due to their attempts to keep up with him and to fulfil the kind of obligations placed upon Christopher Sykes, who was constantly being told to arrange a dinner or a party for the Prince and his friends. Lord Hardwicke, known as ‘Glossy Top’ from his habit of brushing his beaver hat until he could see his face in it, ruined himself like Christopher Sykes. So did the charming Charles Buller, who was obliged to resign his commission in the Household Cavalry when he could no longer pay his mess bills and was eventually sent to prison for issuing a worthless cheque. But when told of such friends’ distress, the Prince did what he could to help them. On the appearance of Christopher Sykes’s forthright sister-in-law at Marlborough House with the sad news of Sykes’s imminent bankruptcy, arrangements were made for the most pressing debts to be paid. And on Lord Arthur Somerset’s fleeing the country rather than face a charge of ‘gross indecency’, the Prince wrote to the Prime Minister asking that the poor ‘unfortunate Lunatic’ might be allowed to return to England to see his family without fear of arrest.

The Prince’s correspondence is replete with requests that desirable political and diplomatic appointments should be offered to friends of his or to men to whom he had cause to feel obliged, and with recommendations for promotions, preferments, honours, titles and decorations. A whole series of letters were addressed to three separate prime ministers on behalf of the Revd Charles Tarver, his former tutor, who was living in poverty in a small parish in Kent. He was almost equally importunate on behalf of a Norfolk neighbour who had once acted as his agent and who, in the Prince’s opinion, ought to be knighted, having been six times Mayor of King’s Lynn. And he ardently pressed the claims of Dean Liddell of Christ Church to be considered a worthy successor to Arthur Stanley as Dean of Westminster. He was determined that a diplomat whom he much admired, Sir Robert Morier, should be appointed British Ambassador in Berlin despite the objections of Bismarck; that Mrs Gladstone ought to receive a peerage and become Mistress of the Robes, though this could hardly be expected to meet with his mother’s approval; that, since he was ‘a good fellow’ and his family owned half the county, Lord Rothschild ought to succeed the Duke of Buckingham as Lord Lieutenant of Buckinghamshire whatever other local notables might have to say on the subject; and that Sir Ernest Cassel ought to be elected to the Jockey Club, which did not want to admit him. He pressed for the appointment of Charles Dilke as President of the Local Government Board; of Lord Carrington as Viceroy of India; of Canon Dalton as Dean of Exeter; of Ferdinand Rothschild as a Trustee of the British Museum; of Valentine Baker as Wolseley’s chief intelligence officer in Egypt; and of Rosebery — whom he later successfully persuaded to go to the Foreign Office and to whom, in retirement, he gave the memorable advice, ‘to rise like a Sphinx from your ashes’ — as Secretary of State for Scotland.

To the Prince’s chagrin, his recommendations were more often disregarded than not. And to the government they were sometimes embarrassing, even suspect. In February 1881 Gladstone was worried by an approach from the Prince, who wished to recommend for baronetcies four men, not one of whom was considered worthy of the honour. Gladstone’s secretary, Edward Hamilton, noted in his journal:

It is perhaps hardly fair to say so, but these recommendations have rather an ugly look about them. A respectable clergyman [the Revd H.W. Bellairs] wrote not long since to say that he was in possession of information, to which he could swear, that there were certain persons scheming for hereditary honours in consideration of bribes, and bribes to people in very high life … that a gentleman had told him that he had been offered a baronetcy by the Prince of Wales … on condition that he would pay £70,000 to the Prince’s agent on receiving the title.