Christopher Hibbert - Edward VII - The Last Victorian King

Only one of the men recommended by the Prince was ‘known to ordinary fame’, Hamilton added. This was a rich building contractor, C.J. Freake, and for him a knighthood would have been quite sufficient, ‘having regard to the reported wild habits of Freake fils and the political proclivities of Freake père’. Yet the Prince ‘persistently and somewhat questionably (if not fishily)’ pressed Freake’s name upon Gladstone; and his baronetcy was, in fact, approved by the Queen a few months later.

Then, in 1884, there was the case of

Mr Francis Cook who gave such a huge sum … towards the Alexandra Home for Female Art Students [and] got the Prince of Wales to back his claim for a baronetcy [which he received in 1886]. How is it possible to advise the favourable consideration of such a claim? It is munificence, given with every sort of [assurance], of disinterestedness, but really intended as a bribe.

Just as the Queen was highly critical of the kind of people with whom the Prince associated, so she was critical of the way he brought up his children.

‘They are such ill-bred, ill-trained children,’ she wrote in a spasm of irritation when they were young. ‘I can’t fancy them at all.’

Others, more predisposed to like children generally, agreed with her. Lady Geraldine Somerset thought them ‘wild as hawks’. The daughters — though the eldest was ‘very sharp, quick, merry and amusing’ — were ‘rampaging little girls’, while the boys were ‘past all management’. Certainly guests at Sandringham were never for long unaware that there were children in the house. A game of croquet or even a tea-party was likely to be interrupted by excited screams and running boots which, in most other country houses, would have led to a severe reprimand for the governess. When they were taken to other houses — which they rarely were — their unwilling infant hosts and hostesses were well advised to put away their best toys in the nursery cupboard, as the Duchess of Teck’s children always did.

There were five of them in all, ranging in age, on their father’s thirtieth birthday, from seven to three, the three girls, Louise, Victoria and Maud, being the youngest. They appeared to be devoted to each other and to their parents, hating to be parted, and disliking in particular having to go to stay with their grandmother at Balmoral. A proposed visit there once reduced all the girls to tears and induced a fit of defiance in the youngest, who stamped her foot and declared that she wouldn’t go.

Their mother adored them, though even she had occasion to complain to the boys’ tutor of their ‘using strong language to each other’ and of their habit of ‘breaking into everybody’s conversation’ so that it became ‘impossible to speak to anyone before them’. She took the greatest delight in giving them their baths — and inviting favoured guests at Sandringham to watch her doing so — reading undemanding books to them, saying their prayers with them, then tucking them up and kissing them goodnight. She hated to be parted from them as much as they disliked leaving her, treating them as children, and writing childish letters to them, long after they had become adult.

Apart from insisting that they did not quarrel with each other or assume attitudes of superiority with anyone else, Princess Alexandra paid little attention to the way her daughters were educated. They were taught music; but those who knew them well in later years could find little evidence of their having been given any other formal instruction or even of their having many other interests, apart from the various country pursuits in which most of their leisure hours were spent. They were all rather shy and gave the impression, despite their high spirits when young, of being rather apathetic and unimaginative women. None of them was good looking, although they all had pleasant features and did not deserve the nickname by which they were widely known, ‘The Hags’. Their mother, who did not want to lose them, gave them no encouragement to marry and, of course, actively discouraged all possible suitors from Germany. Her selfish possessiveness worried Queen Victoria, who spoke to her son about it; but the Prince of Wales explained that he was ‘powerless’ in the matter, that ‘Alix found them such companions that she would not encourage their marrying, and that they themselves had no inclination for it’. When she was twenty-two the eldest, shyest and most uncommunicative of them all, Princess Louise, did, however, get married. The husband selected was the sixth Earl of Fife, a Scottish landowner and businessman, eighteen years older than herself, one of those few of her father’s friends of whom her grandmother approved, though the Queen — who needed some persuasion when it was proposed to create Fife a Duke — would have been more severe had she known that, amongst the Parisian demimonde, he was known as ‘le petit Écossais roux qui a toujours la queue en l’air.’ After her marriage, Princess Louise retired to the fastness of her husband’s estates where she indulged a passion for salmon-fishing, at which she was said to have developed exceptional skill.

It was not until seven years after Princess Louise’s marriage that a husband was found for her sister Maud, whom Queen Victoria had long supposed would have liked one much earlier. Princess Maud was then in her late twenties; and, although she had been the most lively and venturesome of the Prince’s daughters as a child — when she had been nicknamed ‘Harry’ after her father’s friend, Admiral Harry Keppel, whose courageous conduct in the Crimean War was legendary — she had become rather gloomy and disgruntled. Marriage made her more so. Her husband, a first cousin, Prince Charles of Denmark, who was crowned King Haakon VII of Norway in 1905, was ‘a very nice young fellow’, in Lord Esher’s opinion; but Princess Maud did not like living abroad and strongly resented being left alone when her husband, who was a naval officer, had to go to sea. Making no secret of her grievances, she returned to England every year to stay near Sandringham at Appleton House which her father gave to her. Then, after this annual visit, she would return reluctantly to Bygdo Kongsgaard where she laid out an English garden which, apart from her horses, dogs and only son, was one of her few real interests.

Princess Victoria, the middle daughter, never married. There were two men she would have liked but both, being commoners, were forbidden her. Lord Rosebery, broken by the death of his wife, also intimated in a rather uncertain way that he and Princess Victoria might find happiness together. But this proposal was not to be considered either, to the infinite regret of Victoria, who, years later, lamented, ‘We could have been so happy.’ So Victoria was kept at home, following her parents about from one country house to the next, at the beck and call of a far less intelligent mother who, as a Russian cousin, the Grand Duchess Olga, said, treated her just like ‘a glorified maid’, ringing a bell to summon her and then, as her daughter ran to her side, forgetting what it was she had wanted. Often unwell and constantly concerned about her health, she grew increasingly resentful of her lot and prone to making waspish comments about her dull relatives and those friends of her parents in whose restricting society she felt herself confined.

The Prince had left his daughters’ upbringing entirely to their governesses and their mother, maintaining that a child was ‘always best looked after under its mother’s eye’ and that if children were too severely treated they became shy and fearful of those whom they ought to love. And though he was extremely fond of his three girls, as he was fond of children generally, taking them on his ample knee and allowing them to pull at his beard and play with his watch-chain and cigar-case, he never formed with any of them the kind of emotional attachment that his father had formed with the Empress Frederick. In many ways he was closer to his sons.