Sons, Servants and Statesmen (38 page)

Queen Victoria came to visit the Emperor and Empress in Berlin in April. The Empress noted sadly that it was the first time she had ever had her mother to stay under her roof – and now it was for the most poignant of reasons. As she left, the Queen kissed her son-inlaw goodbye, telling him with an aching heart that he must come and visit her in England when he was better. He was able to attend the wedding of his second son, Henry, to his cousin Irene, the third daughter of Alice and Louis of Hesse, on 24 May, though he leaned on a stick the whole time and every step he took caused him great agony. After this he declined rapidly, and on the morning of 15 June he passed away.

Queen Victoria was at Balmoral at the time. In the morning she had received a telegram to say Fritz could last only a few hours, and soon afterwards Beatrice brought her another, from the new sovereign, Emperor William II, saying it was all over. ‘Feel very miserable and upset,’ she wrote in her journal. ‘None of my own sons could be a greater loss. He was so good, so wise, and so fond of me! And now? To think of it all is such pain.’
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She and the old Emperor had had their minor differences. Occasionally she had criticised him and Vicky, albeit mildly, for arrogance. Nearly five years earlier, she had written to her granddaughter Princess Victoria of Hesse that the Crown Prince and Princess were ‘
not
pleasant in
Germany
’, and were too ‘high & mighty there’,
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and they had not seen eye to eye over the lineage of the Battenbergs, but she had rarely if ever been moved to exasperation by the gentle, mild son-in-law whom she and Albert had so admired since he and his parents had been guests at the Great Exhibition of 1851. She had always been ready to make allowances for her eldest grandson, William, much as she had been dismayed at his unfilial conduct during the last few years. On his accession, she telegraphed to him, asking him to ‘Help and do all you can for your poor dear mother and try to follow in your best noblest and kindest of father’s footsteps.’
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With his extra-marital affairs and unfortunate friendships, the Prince of Wales had given his mother considerable anxiety, but as he approached his fiftieth year, even worse was to come. In September 1890 he was invited to stay with the shipowner Arthur Wilson at Tranby Croft, near Doncaster, and every evening the guests played the very popular but illegal game of baccarat. During one game, Wilson’s son, also called Arthur, noticed one of their fellow-guests, the baronet Sir William Gordon-Cumming, was deliberately cheating by varying the size of his stake after looking at his cards. After being formally accused in private, he was panic-stricken and asked to discuss it with the Prince of Wales, who told him it was pointless to try to deny the charge. Gordon-Cumming signed a pledge never to play cards for money again, and the other players, including the heir to the throne himself, added their signatures as witnesses. He then left the house the following day as the price of their silence on the matter. That would have been the end of it, had Gordon-Cumming not decided to continue to protest his innocence and bring a civil action against his accusers in order to clear his name.

The Prince of Wales and Sir Francis Knollys, his secretary, tried in vain to have Gordon-Cumming brought before a military court which would look privately into the charge brought against his behaviour as an officer and a gentleman, on the grounds that once he had been found guilty, it would be virtually impossible for him to take any subsequent action in a civil court, where the Prince would be required to give evidence in public. The baronet’s solicitors insisted that only a civil action would do. A further attempt by the Prince of Wales and Knollys to institute a private inquiry held by the Guards Club Committee was defeated.

Aware that her son had become involved only in order to help his friends, Queen Victoria proved fully supportive of him, her full anger being reserved for those who had asked him to sign the document which urged Gordon-Cumming to desist from playing cards. She must have long since despaired of her eldest son’s way of life but realised that there was nothing to be done other than accept him as he was and stand by him for the sake of the monarchy. It was her hope that he would promise her never to play baccarat again, but he would not commit himself to do so, and he refused to go to Windsor unless she gave him her word not to raise the matter again. As a man of nearly fifty, he felt entitled to gamble if he wanted, and despite the trouble in which he found himself, he did not intend to change the habits of a lifetime.

Nevertheless the proceedings came to court in June 1891, and the Prince was called as a witness. To a casual observer, it might almost have looked as if the heir to the throne himself was on trial. The Solicitor-General, Sir Edward Clarke, representing Gordon-Cumming, remarked that it was not the first time honourable men had been known ‘to sacrifice themselves to support a tottering throne or prop a falling dynasty’. Gordon-Cumming was found guilty of cheating, expelled from the Army and his clubs, and shunned by society generally. Yet the Prince of Wales was himself the subject of strong criticism, and his gambling habits were severely censured.

The Queen’s greatest fear was that the Crown was becoming tarnished by the Prince’s behaviour. To the Empress Frederick she wrote that she feared the monarchy might be ‘almost in danger if he is lowered and despised’.
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The fact that light had been thrown on his habits had alarmed and shocked the country, and it was no example for the heir to the throne to set to the Queen’s subjects. In an attempt to restore public confidence, she invited the Prince of Wales to write a letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Edward White Benson, for publication, condemning the social evils of gambling. The Archbishop and Gladstone, then leader of the opposition, endorsed this scheme, but the Prince refused to take part on the grounds that it would be hypocritical of him.

If the government considered it necessary, he replied, he would not object to issuing a statement saying that he disapproved of gambling, but only if he would be allowed to explain what he meant by gambling. To him, small racing bets, or games of baccarat played by rich men for stakes which they could afford to lose, did not count, as they did the person responsible no harm. Though it was a somewhat convoluted argument, the Prince made it clear that he was not going to lecture others and warn them against habits which they could perfectly well afford, particularly if they were aware of the risks. He also knew that to take the moral high ground would be a gift to his critics.

Nobody, it seemed, relished the affair more than his sanctimonious nephew, Emperor William, who wrote to the Queen protesting against the impropriety of anyone holding the honorary rank of a colonel of Prussian Hussars becoming involved with men young enough to be his children in a mere gambling squabble.
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Much as she resented his intervention, she could not but feel that the Emperor’s indignation was justified.

Shortly after the case was over, the Prince of Wales found himself involved in another scandal. The Princess of Wales had tolerated most of his female companions and mistresses, but one she could not abide was the unscrupulous Frances, Lady Brooke, who had become involved in an affair with a married man – Lord Charles Beresford, a naval officer and friend of the Prince of Wales and Duke of Edinburgh. When the affair ended, she wrote Lord Beresford a presumptuous, almost hysterical letter, accusing him of infidelity (ironic, in view of the fact that he was returning to his own wife) and desertion. Lady Beresford opened the letter in her husband’s absence, as he had authorised her to do while he was away on active service. She deposited it with her solicitor, George Lewis, and threatened to prosecute Lady Brooke for libel if she continued to make a nuisance of herself. Lewis informed Lady Brooke, who then demanded the return of the letter, on the grounds that she wrote it and it was her property. He refused, saying that it belonged to the person to whom it was addressed.

In desperation she asked the Prince of Wales to use his influence to retrieve it for her. Though he would have been wiser not to get involved, he gallantly went to see Lewis, who showed him the letter. Agreeing it was the most shocking thing he had ever read, he asked the solicitor to destroy it, only to be told that this was impossible without Lady Beresford’s consent. By way of compromise, she asked for its return and sent it to her brother-in-law for safe-keeping.

As a punishment for not cooperating, Lady Beresford found herself ostracised by the Prince of Wales and the rest of society. She complained that the heir to the throne had taken up the cause of ‘an abandoned woman’ against that of ‘a blameless wife’. Lord Beresford angrily taxed the Prince with needless interference, accused him of trying to wreck their marriage and promised he would exact reparation or revenge. Eighteen months later, Lady Beresford put her London house up for sale, saying she would move abroad rather than face further humiliation at home.

This coincided with the height of the Tranby Croft case. Aware how vulnerable the Prince of Wales’s standing was, Lord Beresford threatened to publish all the details of their squalid argument in the press and asked his wife to inform the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, of their intentions. The Prime Minister persuaded them not to make the affair public, but he could not prevent circulation of three copies of a leaflet by Lady Beresford’s sister, Mrs Gerald Paget, telling the full story. These were distributed in Britain and the United States of America, and details did not remain secret for long.

Just as the Prince of Wales’s stock was in danger of falling lower than it ever had before, his second son, Prince George, fell seriously ill with typhoid fever. Though he was not so ill as his father had been exactly twenty years earlier, for two or three weeks the Prince and Princess were gravely concerned. At the same time as George was declared out of danger, in December 1891, their eldest son, Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence, was betrothed to Princess May of Teck. The backward, dissipated young Duke had been a major source of worry to his father and grandfather, sharing many of his father’s faults, not least his love of high living, but lacking in his personality and robust health.

In January 1892, five weeks after becoming engaged, the Duke of Clarence took to his bed at Sandringham with pneumonia. His constitution had been undermined by dissipation and perhaps venereal disease, and his death, just six days after his twenty-eighth birthday, may have been a providential one for the throne and also for his bride-to-be, who was dismayed by the young man’s lack of personality and had begun to doubt whether she could really ‘take this on’. But the family were heartbroken, and the country was united in mourning.

Happier times for the Prince of Wales were to come. Late in 1892 the Foreign Secretary, Lord Rosebery, sent him a gold key which had been made for the Prince Consort and used by him to open Foreign Office despatch boxes. Already he had been in the habit of receiving edited reports of cabinet meetings which were sent to the Queen. In future, while he was in Britain, he would be kept as well informed about official foreign business as the Queen herself. Informal conversations with Rosebery, ambassadors and others helped him to supplement the documents he read.

At around the same time, he accepted an invitation from Gladstone to become a member of a royal commission on the aged poor. This pleased him all the more as Lord Salisbury had rejected his offer, a year previously, to serve on an enquiry into the relations between employers and the working class. The new royal commission addressed itself to the problems of persons rendered destitute by age. At last the Prince had found a subject concerning the welfare of his mother’s subjects to which he could make a genuine contribution. A fellow-commissioner, James Stuart, Liberal member of parliament for Hoxton, said that the Prince of Wales asked very good questions. He thought at first that he had been prompted to raise them, until he found out that he had brought them up on his own initiative, proving that he had a considerable grasp of his subject. As expected, the commission’s final report proved a controversial one in terms of party politics. The Prince signed a statement to the effect that he was obliged to observe strict political neutrality, and it was not until the next century that state pensions were provided for by Act of Parliament.

All this was some consolation for what he perceived as persistent snubbing at the hands of his mother. When Gladstone became Prime Minister for the last time, he told his family in private that he thought the only remedy to ‘the royal problem’ would be for Her Majesty to abdicate in favour of her son. The Queen indignantly refused to hear of it; on the contrary, she refused to delegate any further responsibilities. During the summer season of 1892 on the Isle of Wight, Knollys sadly informed Ponsonby that the Prince of Wales had told him he believed there was no point in remaining at Cowes, though he was willing to do so. He felt that he was ‘not the slightest use to the Queen; that everything he says or suggests is pooh-poohed; and that his sisters and brother are much more listened to than he is’.
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His indiscretions of the previous year had reminded her that, notwithstanding all his good qualities, at heart he was the same Bertie with a weakness for unsuitable friends and gambling, who could still not be trusted as much as she would like.