Sons, Servants and Statesmen (34 page)

I
n November 1871 the Prince of Wales fell ill at Sandringham with typhoid fever, the disease which had claimed the life of his father ten years earlier. Before that, Queen Victoria had never visited her son’s Norfolk country house, but as soon as she was advised of the seriousness of his condition, she quickly joined the rest of the family who had gathered there. Naturally, she took charge, frequently guarding his bedroom door, it was said, like a sentry. At other times she sat by his bed, holding his hand and willing him to pull through. For a few days, he hovered between life and death, and at one stage his mother, wife and sister Alice turned to each other with tears in their eyes, all but convinced that his case was hopeless as he raved deliriously between fearful fits of coughing. The illness reached its crisis on the eve of 14 December, the tenth anniversary of the Prince Consort’s death. To the astonishment of family and doctors alike, he rallied, and from the dreaded fourteenth onwards, he began to recover.

It was probably during this time that one small but amusing episode occurred, proving that while the Queen’s male relatives might be grown men, she could still quite unintentionally strike fear into their hearts. Sir Henry Ponsonby recalled with great relish the day when he and Lieutenant-Colonel Arthur Haig, equerry to the Duke of Edinburgh, were going out into the garden at Sandringham by a side door when they were almost knocked down by a stampede of royals, with the Queen’s cousin George, Duke of Cambridge, two months her senior, in the front, and Prince Leopold bringing up the rear. They were running so fast that Ponsonby and Haig thought there must have been a mad bull pursuing them. Instead, they cried out, ‘The Queen, the Queen,’ and all of them dashed, either from fright or because it was obviously the done thing, until the diminutive figure in black bombazine walked past. Once the cowed royals had slunk off, secretary and equerry ‘laughed immensely’.
¹

Prime Minister Gladstone suggested that the Queen should take advantage of the national mood by proclaiming 27 February 1872 Thanksgiving Day, and that the royal family should attend a service at St Paul’s to mark the Prince of Wales’s restoration to health. The Queen had little enthusiasm for the idea and objected particularly to the length of the planned service, but the Prime Minister would not be deflected. Eager crowds, cheering the royals as they made their way to the cathedral, bore evidence to the lack of any deep-rooted republican sympathies. As the press noted, ‘an extraordinary reversion of feeling towards the Prince has taken place during the last few months, and he has suddenly come to be one of the most popular men in the country’.
²

The Queen was particularly struck by the apparent transformation in her son. A few days before the service, while he was recuperating at Osborne, she wrote to Vicky, the Crown Princess of Prussia, describing him as very weak and drawn, but ‘quite himself, only gentler and kinder than ever; and there is something different, which I can’t exactly express’. Even the trees and flowers ‘gave him pleasure’, which they had never done before, and he was ‘quite pathetic over his small wheelbarrow and little tools at the Swiss cottage’.
³
The most encouraging sign of all was that he was spending so much time with Alix, and they seemed rarely apart. Victoria must have nursed hopes that at last he was about to become a model of family domesticity like his father.

Gladstone braved the wrath of his sovereign by choosing what seemed to him an opportune moment to propose a new role for the Prince. He advised that the heir and his wife ought to reside in Ireland for four or five months of the year, where he could undertake some form of administrative business, to be mutually agreed between the sovereign, her heir and the government. This, he argued, would give the Prince the advantage of some political training which he had not yet had. Moreover, if Her Majesty was to decide that she could no longer perform ‘the social and visible functions of the monarchy’, perhaps she would consider inviting the Prince and Princess to stay at Buckingham Palace in her absence for two or three months annually and perform them on her behalf.

Needless to say, such proposals were instantly dismissed. Queen Victoria was never likely to entertain such a proposal from Gladstone. Ireland was the least loyal of her dominions, she informed him coldly; it would mean exile for the Prince and do his health much harm; and he was not of sufficiently independent character to stand against the pressures that would be exerted on him to lean towards one political party or the other. The emerald isle, she declared, was ‘in no fit state to be experimented upon’. As for the Buckingham Palace suggestion, the ‘fashionable set’ had already exercised a most harmful influence on her heir and his wife, and it would never do to encourage them still further. Experience was no prerequisite, she went on, for a successful monarch, as she could never take the slightest interest in public affairs before her own accession to the throne.

She was not alone in her view. Sir Henry Ponsonby, who did not always agree wholeheartedly with the Queen, shared her doubts about the heir to the throne and his readiness to work hard enough in any position of responsibility. He admitted that the Prince was extremely genial and pleasant, but rarely for more than a few minutes at a time, and lacked his father’s sense of application to hard work. ‘But he does not endure. He cannot keep up the interest for any length of time and I don’t think he will ever settle down to business.’
⁴

By the end of 1872 he had been thrown back onto his old habits, a life devoid of serious responsibility, relieved of necessity by the social round and distractions of his City and society companions. Now back in England after his cruises on
Galatea
, his brother, the Duke of Edinburgh, was more than happy to become one of this pleasure-loving set. Queen Victoria was determined that her second son – who as a boy had shown such promising signs of taking after his father – should also be married and settle down as soon as possible.

Fortunately for all, Alfred had already met the woman who was to become his wife on one of his family visits to Germany. Grand Duchess Marie Alexandrovna of Russia, the only surviving daughter of Tsar Alexander II, had been part of a gathering at Jugenheim with Alice, Louis and several of their relatives in the summer of 1868. After a difficult courtship, and despite the problems of the Queen having a daughter-in-law who belonged to the Greek Orthodox Church, Alfred and Marie were betrothed in July 1873 and married at St Petersburg in January 1874 at a double ceremony, one in the Anglican faith, the other according to the Russian Orthodox Church. This was the only wedding of one of her children which did not take place in England, and which the Queen did not attend in person. She had to content herself with sending Arthur Stanley, Dean of Westminster, to perform the English service.

In certain aspects, the Duke of Edinburgh was very like his father, but Queen Victoria never really understood this versatile and knowledgeable, yet shy and often morose, second son. Those who did not know him well found him bad-tempered and avaricious. It did not help matters that the Duchess was a haughty woman who never let an opportunity slip of reminding her in-laws that she was a Russian Grand Duchess while they were mere Princesses, and that the jewellery her imperial father had given her as a wedding present was much finer than any of theirs. Beside the more affable, outgoing Prince of Wales and his elegant, if sadly deaf, wife, the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh did not make an attractive couple. When Alfred returned to England after his betrothal in the summer of 1873, the Queen looked for a change in his personality for the better, but in vain. It saddened her, she wrote to Vicky in Berlin, to find no improvement in him – only ‘the same ungracious, reserved manner which makes him so little liked’.
⁵

Though still largely unemployed in an official capacity, the Prince of Wales was given several opportunities to exercise his considerable diplomatic skills at home and abroad. In November 1874 he and the Princess of Wales paid an official visit to Birmingham, a city which had a reputation for radicalism with a staunch republican, Joseph Chamberlain, as Lord Mayor. The tact of his royal visitors soon won Chamberlain over completely, and in years to come he would be a fervent royalist and welcome guest at Marlborough House, along with Charles Dilke, a member of parliament who had been a particularly vociferous spokesman for the republican movement of some four or five years previously.

In October 1875 the Prince of Wales set out on a seven-month state visit to India. Queen Victoria had initially been against such a long separation from his family, but at length she was persuaded to give her approval, though she supported him in not allowing the indignant Princess to accompany him and the party. Before his departure, she urged him to take care that he did not eat too much, to ensure that he attended divine services every Sunday and to be in bed by 10 p.m. every night. As he was by now in his mid-thirties and had long since paid scant regard to such rules, he probably took little notice.

On their progress, the heir and his entourage were extravagantly entertained by Indian heads of state and generously showered with jewels and trophies. Yet it was not one great round of merry-making and big-game hunting. Like his mother, the Prince had enlightened views on racial prejudice that were well in advance of their time and at odds with many of their contemporaries’. He was displeased by the arrogance of English civilian and military officers; as a result of what he had seen, he wrote to the Queen deploring the widespread brutality and contempt shown to the Indian population, and the British governors in India were accordingly instructed to put their house in order. During his homeward journey he was irritated to learn not through the Court but from the newspapers that legislation had been passed creating the Queen Empress of India, an oversight for which she and Disraeli gracefully apologised.

Soon after returning from India, the Prince accepted the presidency of the British section of an international exhibition to be opened in Paris in May 1878. It was no mere honorary position, for he did much to organise Britain’s role in the display. Two days after the opening of the exhibition, he attended a banquet at which he proposed the health of President Marshal MacMahon, after the Queen’s health was toasted. It was the first time he had publicly honoured the head of the republican government, and he declared that the entente cordiale between both countries was unlikely to change. The British ambassador in Paris informed Lord Salisbury, the Foreign Secretary, that the Prince of Wales’s visit and genial behaviour had made England very popular in France. His talents as an ambassador for Britain had already been recognised, and they would have no little effect on his role – indeed, Britain’s role – in Europe over the following thirty years.

Though the years which followed the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–1 were relatively free of armed conflict in Europe on the scale of that which had divided Queen Victoria’s family during the 1860s, the threat of another major conflict was never far away. France recovered quickly from her defeat at the hands of Germany in 1871, and nobody was willing to underestimate the danger posed by the volatile situation in the Balkan countries, ‘the powder-keg of Europe’. In 1877 Russia declared war on Turkey, and the Duke of Edinburgh was put in command of HMS
Sultan
, attached to the Mediterranean Fleet, which was required to be close to Constantinople in order to protect the lives and property of British subjects in the area.

Within a year, the Turks were forced to surrender and sue for peace, and the Treaty of San Stefano, signed in March 1878, justified Europe’s worst fears in seeing substantial Russian territorial gains. For weeks the threat of war between Britain and Russia hung in the balance, much to the discomfort of the Duke, Tsar Alexander’s son-in-law. A well-intentioned but tactless act of his underlined the precarious nature of family loyalties.

One of his officers on board
Sultan
was Prince Louis of Battenberg, whose younger brother, Alexander (‘Sandro’), was
aidede-camp
to the Russian Commander-in-Chief, Tsar Alexander II’s brother, Grand Duke Nicholas. When Louis heard from the German ambassador and his wife that Sandro was in Constantinople, he wanted to go and see him, and the Duke granted him permission to go ashore. Having been apart for so long, the brothers were overjoyed to meet again, and Louis invited Sandro on board
Sultan
. Later they went on board the flagship together, and then to
Temeraire
, a modern battleship equipped with several new devices. The Commander-in-Chief, Vice-Admiral Phipps-Hornby, was embarrassed that a foreign officer should be present on board one of his ships at such an inopportune time, though he was reluctant to spoil what was really no more than a brotherly reunion. However, as he was an officer, Prince Alexander had to be accorded certain privileges, such as being invited to watch a demonstration of fleet exercises, and then asked if he would like to dine on board the flagship. The brothers later went ashore and visited Russian Army headquarters, where they were received cordially by Grand Duke Nicholas and shown round the camp where Turkish soldiers were imprisoned and captured armaments kept.