Sons, Servants and Statesmen (32 page)

On his return home the Queen and Albert were eager to impress on him that the success of his tour had been due mainly to the efforts of Bruce and to the fact that he was their representative, but even so the Queen could not conceal her admiration for the son who had formerly proved something of a disappointment. ‘He was immensely popular everywhere and really deserves the highest praise,’ she wrote to the Princess Royal, ‘which should be given him all the more as he was never spared any reproof.’
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Alfred was also playing a similar role in another part of the British Empire. He had joined the Royal Navy in 1858, and after passing his midshipman’s examination he set sail for South Africa. Though only fifteen at the time, he coped very well with the itinerary set out for him, whether it was taking part in hunting expeditions, releasing the first load of stones for a breakwater in the Table Bay or opening a public library at Cape Town. Already the Queen could see similarities between him and his father, as she wrote to King Leopold soon after his return home: ‘He is really such a dear, gifted, handsome child, that it makes one doubly anxious he should have as few failings as mortal men can have.’
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Unhappily, the Prince Consort would see little more of the development of these two sons in particular who would be so adept at representing the Queen abroad. It was unfortunate that the Prince of Wales’s liaison with the actress Nellie Clifden, or rather the fact that news of it should leak out to the courts of Europe and only after that back to his horrified parents at Windsor, should coincide with the onset of Albert’s final illness. In the first intense outburst of her grief, Queen Victoria blamed their eldest son for hastening his death. He and Crown Prince Frederick William of Prussia were chief mourners at the funeral at Windsor on 23 December. Alfred was away at sea at the time, but eleven-year-old Arthur attended the ceremony, the small boy sobbing as if his heart would break.

Queen Victoria spent the first few months of her widowhood in the more comforting surroundings of Osborne, which had been home more than their other dwellings. At first she was convinced that she too would die before long, and regarded her eldest son’s marriage as a matter of urgency. If a young, orphaned king was to succeed her, he should at least be married and have a settled home life. In September 1861 a meeting between the Prince of Wales and Princess Alexandra, eldest daughter of Prince Christian of Schleswig Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg, heir to the King of Denmark, had been carefully arranged at Speyer Cathedral in Germany. There were very few, if any, other unmarried princesses in Europe who were eligible and pretty enough for Bertie, and both the young people involved knew their duty.

In September 1862 the Prince proposed. Alexandra accepted him, and they were married on 10 March 1863 in St George’s Chapel, Windsor. Still resolutely in mourning, as she would remain for the rest of her days, the Queen took no part in the procession of royalties but instead walked from the Deanery, along a specially prepared route covered and hidden from the general gaze, to a gallery overlooking the Chapel. There she sat, in her mourning apparel and black widow’s cap, relieved only by the ribbon, badge and star of the Order of the Garter, and a diamond brooch containing a miniature of the Prince Consort. After the ceremony, thirty-six royals sat down to lunch with the bride and groom, but the Queen was not among them. After a week-long honeymoon at Osborne, they spent a few days at Windsor and at the end of the month went to the Prince’s country home at Sandringham, Norfolk. In April they moved into Marlborough House, which was to be their official London residence.

Bertie had not been the only one of Victoria’s sons to have a ‘fall’ from the path of virtue. In 1862 she learnt that Affie had also known the pleasures of a young lady on Malta. In view of the behaviour of his fellow-midshipmen, and a lack of any more becoming leisure facilities on the island, it might have given a more reasonable, less censorious, parent cause for concern if he had not indulged in what she called his ‘heartless and dishonourable behaviour’.

But the Queen was irritated and upset, not only because Affie had betrayed the moral code of his father, but also because he had been at the centre of a rather complicated political matter. The volatile Greeks had just deposed their unpopular and childless king, Otho, but instead of declaring a republic they wanted to install another European prince on the vacant throne. Prince Alfred of Great Britain was the most popular choice. Though he had made a brief visit to the country on one of his naval training voyages, he was hardly known there, but the Greeks recognised that there would be considerable political and territorial advantages if they chose a British prince as their king. Late in 1862 a plebiscite was held in which Alfred received over 95 per cent of votes cast. Little did the Greeks know at the time that under the terms of a protocol signed at London in 1830, a British prince could not be elected to the throne.

At one stage, the Greeks seemed so Anglophile that it was said they had even contemplated offering the crown to Gladstone. (In later years, the Queen must have felt that her life would have been easier if the latter had indeed been chosen.) The impasse was resolved some weeks later when Prince William of Schleswig-Holstein, Alexandra’s brother, was chosen instead.

Alfred, who was promoted to the rank of captain in the Royal Navy and created Duke of Edinburgh, and Earl of Ulster and of Kent, in 1866, was destined to travel far more widely throughout the world than any of his siblings. That same year he was appointed to the command of HMS
Galatea
, with orders to take her on a world cruise which would include Gibraltar, South America, the remote colony of Tristan da Cunha, Australia, New Zealand, India and Ceylon. Ostensibly it was a continuation of Alfred’s duties as the Queen’s representative in the further territories of the British Empire, begun during his South African travels as a midshipman.

As far as Queen Victoria was concerned, there was another purpose – to separate Alfred from his London ‘flatterers’. Society was turning him into the kind of fun-loving prince, ready to indulge in the life of pleasure, of which she did not approve. Moreover, he seemed a little too infatuated with his sister-in-law, Alexandra. Unlike her husband, she took her marriage vows seriously, and she would never have made the cardinal error of leading her brother-in-law on, but the Queen thought it prudent to minimise the risk of putting temptation in anyone’s way.

The world tour proved a mixed blessing for all concerned. The Duke set sail in June 1867, with by far the greater part of his itinerary embracing Australia. A round of pomp and ceremony, civic receptions and mediocre concerts soon palled for him, and he did not hesitate to voice openly his occasional boredom with the tedious routine and excessively long speeches at the functions he was required to attend. There were ugly demonstrations between Catholic and Protestant communities, fuelled by expatriate Irish republican sympathisers and exacerbated when news reached the continent early in 1868 of the execution of three members of the Fenian Brotherhood in Manchester for shooting a policeman dead. In March the Duke was attending a picnic in Sydney to raise funds for a sailors’ rest home when James O’Farrell, the son of an Irish immigrant butcher, shot him in the back. Initially there were grave fears for the Duke’s life, but the bullet was deflected from his spine by his heavy leather braces, and within a few days he was pronounced out of danger. However, never before had an assassination attempt on a member of Queen Victoria’s family come so near to succeeding.

The programme was immediately curtailed. It had been arranged that the Duke would sail to New Zealand next, but in view of Fenian demonstrations on South Island, the authorities could not guarantee his safety.
Galatea
therefore returned home and arrived at Portsmouth in June 1868. Having got over her shock at the news of the attempt on Alfred’s life, the Queen hoped fervently that her second son would return ‘an altered being’. When he visited her at Windsor she was disappointed to find him unbearably conceited, receiving ovations as if he had done something extraordinary, ‘instead of God’s mercy having spared his life’.
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She was relieved to see him depart again after a few months of respite, visiting family and relations in England and Germany, before resuming a more informal cruise in 1869 (with heightened police protection) which included a return to Australia, New Zealand, India, Japan and the Falkland Islands. He came home in May 1871.

Though the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Edinburgh always remained close, sharing a similar taste for society and social life, in personality they were very different. Bertie was more outgoing, while Affie was inclined to be shy, with a reserve which was often taken for rudeness. Though her first words on the matter while still in shock at her husband’s death suggested that she would never forgive her eldest son, the Queen’s aversion to him proved but temporary. On his twenty-sixth birthday she was writing to the Princess Royal that he was ‘so full of good and amiable qualities, that it makes one forget and overlook much that one would wish different’.
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Less than two years later, she said she was ‘sure no Heir Apparent was ever so nice and unpretending as dear Bertie is’.
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For all his faults, the Prince of Wales always fulfilled his childhood promise of being an affectionate and dutiful son to Victoria. Even so, she still thought him far too indiscreet to be trusted to carry out state duties, apart from strictly ceremonial engagements. She had grave misgivings about his friends in the ‘Marlborough House set’, with their preoccupation with gambling, racing, heavy drinking and smoking. When Prussia and Denmark were at war in 1864 the Prince asked his mother to let him see Foreign Office despatches instead of mere summaries from his mother’s secretaries. Through General Grey she informed Lord Russell, then Foreign Secretary, that her government was forbidden to send him any such ‘separate and independent communication with the Government’, on the grounds that he was liable to let the wrong people be privy to such information; His Royal Highness was ‘not at all times as discreet as He should be’. ‘If you ever become King,’ the Queen warned him five years later (note her use of the word ‘if’), ‘you will find all these friends
most
inconvenient, and you will have to break with them
all
.’
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Not long afterwards, she told Gladstone in a moment of despair that she doubted her son’s ‘fitness for high functions of State’. Ironically, this was at the time when general disquiet over her seclusion and her reluctance or downright refusal to be seen carrying out ‘high functions of State’ herself was at its greatest. Under the circumstances, Gladstone might have considered her strictures rather ironic.

Another constant bone of contention between the Queen and her heir was their differing attitude towards public appearances in order to keep the monarchy in the public eye. He appreciated, as she did not, that the public would like and respect their royal family more if they saw them regularly. When she told him that he ought to spend more time quietly in the country with his wife, especially when she was with child, he retorted that not only did they have certain duties to fulfil, but ‘your absence from London makes it more necessary that we should do all we can for society, trade, and public matters’.
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In the end they compromised, and she asked him to forgo the Derby for once; perhaps he would like to come to Balmoral for a night or two, and ‘spend my sad birthday with me’.

Yet less than a year later he found it necessary to admonish her again for remaining in seclusion so much, willingly admitting that her appearance in public would be far better for public relations than the regular spectacle of himself and Alexandra (‘Alix’). If his mother would only sometimes come from Windsor to London for luncheon, he suggested tactfully, then drove for an hour in the Park, where there was no noise, the people would be ‘overjoyed’. It was all very well for him and Alix to do so, she replied, but it did not have the same effect when she did. They lived in radical times, he reminded her, ‘and the more the
People see the Sovereign
the better it is for the
People
and the
Country
.’
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Not only were the Prince’s friends and way of life criticised, but his and Alix’s more liberal attitude towards parenthood also incurred maternal disapproval. By March 1869 they had two sons and two daughters, with a third daughter on the way. While they were visiting Alix’s family in Denmark, the Queen asked her son why no governess had yet been appointed to discipline them. The Prince replied that they would be considering one on their return, adding that if children of that age ‘are too strictly, or perhaps too severely treated, they get shy, and only fear those whom they ought to love; and we should naturally wish them to be very fond of you’.
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Though the Queen was generally much more indulgent to her grandchildren than she had been to her own children when small, she did not always welcome new additions to the new generation. For her, the novelty of ‘happy events’ wore off all too soon. When her seventh granddaughter and fourteenth grandchild, the Prince and Princess of Wales’s daughter Victoria, was born in July 1868, the matriarch commented to her eldest child, Vicky, the Crown Princess of Prussia, that it ‘becomes a very uninteresting thing – for it seems to me to go on like the rabbits in Windsor Park!’
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In late middle age, the Queen was saddened at the way her sons changed as they became adults. ‘Alas!’ she wrote to Sir Howard Elphinstone, ‘she feels more and more
how
her children become strangers to her and no longer seem to fit in with her ways and habits (which she thinks are simple and good) when they once go out a great deal into Society.’
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