Edward VII: The Last Victorian King Read online

  On 20 September, on the understanding that he was to stay in hotels rather than in houses and to travel in the character of a private student intent upon the private observation of American life, the Prince was permitted to enter the United States. Not being a party to his parents’ conditions, the Americans could hardly be expected to treat him as a private person. Special trains were placed at his disposal, and crowds gathered wherever he stopped on his way across the country — at Detroit and Chicago, at Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Harrisburg and Baltimore. He was required to shake hundreds of hands and to smile at thousands of people.

  There were a few insulting remarks from Americans of Irish descent; there were one or two newspaper editorials which advised their readers not to behave like flunkeys in welcoming royalty; there were occasional disparaging remarks about his diminutive size: one writer in the New York Daily Tribune rudely comparing him to ‘a dwarf at a country fair’, another writing of his having shaken ‘some of the gigantic hand’ of Chicago’s Mayor ‘Long John’ Wentworth and of his having addressed a few complimentary remarks to the Mayor’s ‘lower waistcoat button’. There was a nasty episode at Richmond, Virginia, which was included in the itinerary when Newcastle gave way to demands that the Prince should visit at least one of the Southern states to see for himself how humanely Negro slaves were treated. During this visit he was jeered and jostled for his supposed preference for the ways of the Yankee North. But, in general — despite the bustle of an electoral campaign which was to result in the return of Abraham Lincoln as President — the ‘whole land’, as the actress Fanny Kemble said, ‘was alive with excitement and interest’ in the progress of the Prince. In Washington he was met by the Secretary of State, General Cass, and taken to the White House to see President James Buchanan, to whom he gave portraits of his parents painted by Winterhalter. The President accepted them enthusiastically, but his niece, Harriet Lane, who acted as his hostess, took the portraits to be their personal property and was most reluctant when later she had to hand them over to President Lincoln. The Prince was introduced to members of the Cabinet and was the guest of honour at a luncheon at the Capitol; he was taken up the Potomac to see George Washington’s house and grave at Mount Vernon, where he planted a chestnut sapling. At Philadelphia, which he thought the ‘prettiest town’ he had seen in America, he went to the opera — where the audience stood up to sing ‘God Save the Queen’ — and he visited the big, modern penitentiary, where he met a former judge, Vandersmith, who was serving a sentence for forgery. He asked him if he would like to talk. ‘Talk away, Prince,’ Vandersmith replied breezily. ‘There’s time enough. I’m here for twenty years!’ At St Louis, closely followed by a wagon advertising a local clothing store, he had visited the Great Fair, where he was given a meal in a wooden shed and, although he could not overcome his disgust at the sight of his hosts ejecting streams of tobacco-coloured saliva into repulsive-looking spittoons, he was apparently less shocked than the Duke of Newcastle by the table manners of the St Louis citizens who, like ‘ravenous animals’, set upon the sides of beef and buffalo tongue with pocket knives.

  In New York, where he stayed in a suite at the Fifth Avenue Hotel — which, he said, was far more comfortable than any of his rooms at home — he was welcomed by a cheering, flag-waving crowd which, he was told, numbered 300,000. He also attended a ball in the old Academy of Music, where the floor gave way beneath the weight of 5,000 guests; and went to a breakfast given by the Mayor, who invited also the heads of twenty families, one of whom described his reception as ‘truly enthusiastic and genuine’. He was introduced to the Commander-in-Chief, General Winfield Scott, hero of the Mexican campaign of 1847, who took him to West Point to inspect a parade of cadets, and in Boston he met Longfellow, Emerson and Oliver Wendell Holmes. From Boston he went to Bunker Hill to survey the site of the first important engagement of the War of Independence; and to Harvard to see the university. Finally, the next week, on 20 October, he stepped once more aboard the Nero at Portland, Maine.

  Apart from a quiet expression of regret that he was expected to dance all the time with middle-aged ladies instead of young girls, a muttered protest about being hurried about from one place to the next was his only complaint during the whole of this American tour. He had found some of the long railroad journeys exceedingly tedious, and at both New York and Chicago, exhausted by the rush and commotion, he had had to go to bed with a fearful headache. Still, he afterwards agreed that he had enjoyed himself enormously; and the Americans had clearly enjoyed him. General Winfield Scott described him as ‘enchanting’; and the roar of cheering voices that greeted him as he drove down Broadway in a barouche with the Mayor, Fernando Wood, persuaded his suite that most Americans were prepared to agree.

  General Bruce told Sir Charles Phipps, Keeper of the Queen’s Privy Purse, that it was quite impossible to exaggerate the enthusiasm of the Prince’s reception in New York; he despaired of its ‘ever being understood in England’. He went on:

  This is the culminating point of our expedition and … with the exception of the Orange difficulty, the affair has been one continual triumph. No doubt the primary cause has been the veneration in which the Queen is held … but it is also true that, finding that sentiment in operation, the Prince of Wales has so comported himself as to turn it to the fullest account and to gain for himself no small share of interest and attraction. He has undergone no slight trial, and his patience, temper and good breeding have been severely taxed. There is no doubt that he has created everywhere a most favourable impression.

  His mother was delighted with these reports and, for once, gave him credit unreservedly. ‘He was immensely popular everywhere,’ she told Princess Frederick William as the Prince was on his way home through stormy seas, ‘and he really deserves the highest praise, which should be given him all the more as he was never spared any reproof.’ The Prince Consort, too, was prepared to recognize that much of the credit for the resounding success of what King Leopold called this ‘tremendous tour’ must rest with his son, though he had been more than usually pained by the letters addressed to him from North America which — containing such passages as ‘St John’s is a very picturesque seaport town, and its cod fisheries are its staple produce’ — might well have been copied out of some peculiarly boring guidebook. The Prince Consort was also sorry to note that Bruce’s praise was tempered by criticism of the Prince’s poor showing in conversation, his ‘growing sense of his own importance’ which was ‘stimulating a longing for independence of control’. But these reservations were exceptional. President Buchanan reported:

  In our domestic circle he won all hearts. His free and ingenuous intercourse with myself evinced both a kind heart and a good understanding … He has passed through a trying ordeal for a person of his years, and his conduct throughout has been such as becomes his age and station. Dignified, frank and affable, he has conciliated, wherever he has been, the kindness and respect of a sensitive and discriminating people.

  Lord Lyons, the British Minister in Washington, praised his ‘patience and good humour … his judgement … and tact’. Sir John Rose, the Canadian Minister, spoke warmly of his ‘kind and gentle demeanour’. All in all, the Prince Consort was driven, albeit ironically, to conclude, his son had been ‘generally pronounced “the most perfect production of nature”’.

  The young hero arrived home and was welcomed at Windsor with warm congratulations. Although he was ‘a little yellow and sallow’ and his hair looked so fair when he stood next to Affie (who was ‘very dark and very handsome’), the Queen thought that he looked well, had grown a little taller and was ‘decidedly improved’. Yet she felt constrained to add, with more than a hint of disapproval, that he had become ‘extremely talkative’. He had also taken, she later noticed, to lounging about with a cigar stuck in his mouth. There were soon to be complaints far more severe than these.

  3

  The Suitor

  I never can or shall look at him without a shudder.


  After the excitement of the American tour, the Prince found it more difficult than ever to settle down to study. He renewed persistently his pleas to be allowed to join the army, to go on a military course to Aldershot. But General Bruce warned his parents of the dangers of such a plan, of ‘the temptation and unprofitable companionship of military life’. He was still too immature to resist temptation. He had been almost seventeen before he had made enquiries about the meaning of certain words and had revealed his ignorance about the facts of life which — no one having spoken to him of such matters before — one of his tutors had discreetly explained in a lecture on the ‘purpose and the abuse of the union of the sexes’. The Prince had ‘never experienced to their full extent those checks and restraints, and those practical lessons in what is due to others, and ourselves, which belong to the ordinary social intercourse of equals’. He was still inclined to be intolerant, to form ‘hasty and mistaken judgements’; while his love of excitement carried him ‘almost unconsciously into the company of the idle and the frivolous’. It would be far better, Bruce concluded, if he returned to university.

  So it was decided that the Prince’s initiation into military life would be postponed and that, having completed his courses at Oxford, he should go to Cambridge, where he was to be entered on the books of Trinity College. He was not, however, to be allowed any more intimate acquaintance with undergraduate life there than he had been permitted at Frewin Hall. A set of rooms at Trinity was to be allocated to him for his occasional use, but he was never to be allowed to sleep there or to join in any of the social activities of the College without supervision. Much against his wishes, he was to be installed, with General and Mrs Bruce and various other custodians and attendants, in a big country house, Madingley Hall, four miles outside Cambridge. There were, he was assured, ‘capital stables’ there, and he would be able to ride or drive in his phaeton to the university every morning.

  On the last day of 1860 the Prince Consort went over to inspect Madingley Hall and, as General Bruce informed the owner, Lady King, ‘his Royal Highness, on the whole, was much pleased with the place’, though it was considered that she had not cleared enough space in the library for the Prince’s books and that a larger fireplace would have to be installed in the drawing-room. Money would also have to be spent on the stables; but, on the whole, the £1,200 asked for a year’s tenancy was considered ‘a fair demand’.

  The Prince of Wales arrived at Madingley Hall on 18 January 1861, and the next morning presented himself at Trinity College, where he was formally welcomed to Cambridge by the Vice-Chancellor and by other senior members of the University, as well as by the Mayor and representatives of the town. He was then escorted to Magdalene College, where the Registrar made a short speech and he was handed a copy of the University statutes. The Registrar, Joseph Romilly, thought that the Prince behaved well, ‘graciously’ acknowledging the complimentary remarks that were addressed to him, though making no reply, and penning ‘a good, clear signature’ in the admission book. One of Romilly’s more critical colleagues, however, dismissed the Prince slightingly as ‘an effeminate youth with no colour in his cheeks’.

  The Prince admitted afterwards to having felt rather nervous and apprehensive that first day. Despite the unwelcome restrictions imposed upon him, however, he settled down after a few weeks and even began to enjoy himself. His American tour had increased his self-confidence and he made friends much more easily, growing especially attached to Charles Wynn-Carrington, whom he had met briefly in his Eton days and who was now a fellow-undergraduate at Trinity.

  The Prince became a familiar figure in the streets of the town, where he was pointed out as ‘one of the principal sights’. He was often cheered by the crowd when he went to watch a game of football or a review of the University Corps on Parker’s Piece.

  A.J. Munby, the poet, who had himself been an undergraduate at Trinity some years before, went to dine in the College Hall one evening in May 1861 when, while waiting for grace to be said, he suddenly realized that the ‘manly sunburnt face of the youth in [a nobleman’s full dress gown of] purple and gold’ standing next to him belonged to the Prince of Wales. Munby, an ardent royalist, recorded in his diary:

  He stands apparently about five feet seven, is manly and well made; and his frank intelligent face (with a good deal of fun and animal vigour in it too) has a pure rich sunbrown tint, which his soft gold hair and large blue eyes make all the more artistic. The full underlip, receding chin and prominent eyes are Brunswick all over. His hands, I observed, are square and strong, and neither white nor delicate; but suggestive of healthy outdoor use … He spoke to the dons he knew and shook hands; and was treated with respect, but no ceremonial whatever … Presently the Master [William Whewell] came up, his bearish old face warped into a courtly grin; and shook hands with the Prince, and led him to his own right hand.

  The Prince’s neighbours at dinner usually found him a pleasant companion, though his conversation, in the opinion of one of them, was limited to ‘subjects of amusement’ and he was prone to ask rather thoughtless questions — as, for instance, of the Master of St John’s, a learned mathematician whose friends doubted that he had ever so much as been astride a horse, if he was fond of hunting. ‘The Prince talks agreeably,’ the Vice-Chancellor told Romilly, the Registrar, who suspected that by this was meant ‘he listens agreeably’. And Romilly himself, having been to dinner at Madingley Hall, could afterwards think of no more than one small scrap of conversation worth recording in his journal: ‘I ventured to talk to the Prince about his gigantic black Newfoundland dog [Cabot] (which he brought from Canada), saying that I had heard of his upsetting a railway porter. The Prince said that he was, indeed, most powerful: this grand dog on first landing was bitten by another dog, but he “killed his assailant off hand”.’

  But if the Prince was not a gifted conversationalist, his various tutors found him well-mannered and attentive. Charles Kingsley, the newly appointed Regius Professor of Modern History, gave him lectures in company with eleven other undergraduates at the Kingsleys’ house in Fitzwilliam Street and once a week went over the work with him on his own. The professor, ‘the ugliest man’ Romilly had ever seen in his life, seemed ‘rather nervous and uncomfortable at having to see the Prince by himself ’. He had already confessed to a friend that he had been reduced to ‘fear and trembling’ by a letter from the Prince Consort which stated the exact way in which the Prince of Wales was to be taught and the period of history which was to be covered, ‘a totally different period’ from that which Kingsley had intended to deal with in his lectures. But after some experience of teaching the Prince, Kingsley told Romilly that he was ‘much pleased with his attention to his lectures’ and that he asked ‘very intelligent questions’. ‘The Prince is very interesting, putting me in mind of his mother in voice, manner, face and everything,’ Kingsley later decided. ‘I had him in private today, and we had a very interesting talk on politics, old and new, a free press, and so forth. I confess I tremble at my responsibility: but I have made up my mind to speak plain truth as far as I know it.’

  Other tutors, while acknowledging that their pupil was amiable, that he was, in Kingsley’s phrase, a ‘jolly boy’, had to admit, however, that he would never make a scholar; and certainly his mind turned constantly from his studies to the army. The dinner parties he gave at Madingley Hall — at which the frivolous Duke of St Albans and Lord Pollington, both undergraduates at Trinity, were amongst the very few guests prepared to have with him the sort of gossipy conversation he most enjoyed — seemed to the Prince very boring affairs compared to what he supposed to be the merry dinners in a Guards officers’ mess.

  At length, in the middle of March 1861, when his son was nineteen, the Prince Consort decided, on one of those regular visits he made to Madingley Hall to ensure that his rules and memoranda were being observed, that his son might profit after all from a break in his studies. General Bruce had changed his mind about the possible effec
ts of the army on the Prince’s character and had now decided that he might well find camp life ‘a good field for social instruction’. It was accordingly settled that during the summer vacation he should spend ten weeks attached to the Grenadier Guards at the Curragh military camp near Dublin.

  The Prince’s excitement at the prospect of this escape into military life was somewhat dampened when he learned of the severe restrictions which were to be imposed upon him in Ireland. For, from a memorandum which was drawn up with meticulous care by his father — and which the Prince of Wales, the Duke of Cambridge, as commander-in-chief, and General Sir George Brown, as general officer commanding in Ireland, were all required to sign — he learned that, while he was to wear the uniform of a staff colonel, he was to undergo a most exacting training in the duties of every rank from ensign upwards. As soon as he had thoroughly mastered the duties of one grade he was to proceed to master those of the next, until by the end of the ten weeks’ course he might, ‘with some exertion, arrive … at the command of a Battalion … and [be rendered competent] to manoeuvre a Brigade in the Field’.