2

‘The Smart Set Had Come Into Their Own’

King Edward VII was a Victorian gentleman long before he became an Edwardian monarch. Royal dignity was inculcated in him; so, too, was a belief in performance, action and movement: he was never suited to be an idle onlooker. From boyhood he was surrounded by rulers and parliamentary chiefs whose techniques of leadership he came to emulate. He understood, however, that the Victorians preferred him to display social leadership rather than political initiative. They did not want Marlborough House to become a reversionary centre of power, as had Leicester House and Carlton House under the then Princes of Wales in the reigns of George II and George III. Young Bertie also understood that the hallmark of princes is to combine unconstraint in some spheres with punctual observance of trifling formalities. He became greedy and spoilt, restraint never suited him, but he could not endure a button being an eighth of an inch out of place. Members of his set called him ‘Tum Tum’ among themselves, but were chucked if they did so to his face.

The prince’s rents from the Duchy of Cornwall exceeded £50,000 a year, he had £40,000 granted by Parliament, with another £10,000 granted to his wife, and further income worth about £15,000; but was not allowed his own chequebook. From accumulated unspent revenues the prince before his marriage bought the 7,000-acre Sandringham estate for £225,000 (subsequently he added another 4,000 abutting acres). He had the house extended to the design of a workmanlike provincial architect. Unlike the rooms that his parents had lovingly assembled, hardly a painting or sculpture was worth notice, although framed photographs were massed on tables. Shelves of richly bound presentation books looked imposing in the library, but were unreadable. The acquisition of Sandringham and his own inclinations, as well as his counter-reaction to maternal carping, drove the prince into the company of the class whom Victoria and Albert had dreaded: the sporting aristocracy, who rode after hounds, owned racehorses, gambled, swaggered and fornicated.¹

Queen Victoria adjured her children never to be seen laughing outside of the family, for laughter meant loss of control, but the prince wanted companions who cut defiant capers. In 1868 Carrington held a party for him. Music-hall singers, including Alfred ‘the Great’ Vance and ‘Jolly’ John Nash, performed and some ‘choice spirits’ joined the larks. As Carrington recalled, ‘We had roaring fun, and ended in carrying the Prince of Wales in triumph round the house in my Grandmother’s sedan chair: one of the old poles snapped in two, and he had a tremendous spill, but fortunately was not in the least hurt. The party made a terrible noise in London, and The Times, in an article, denounced the iniquity of royal patronage being given to such people as Music Hall “Artistes”.’ In 1873 the prince and his brother Alfred attended a similar party thrown by Lord Wenlock’s son Francis Lawley, a gambler who had been disgraced when it was found that he used confidential knowledge garnered as private secretary to the Chancellor of the Exchequer to speculate on the Stock Exchange. Lawley’s guests simulated bear fights and cockfights, danced a can-can quadrille, and performed silly tricks with a candle and a pole.²

Prevented from playing football or cricket in boyhood, the prince as a heavy man of fifty was still donning skates for games of ice hockey. Forbidden practical jokes during his years of tutelage, as an adult he relished, it was said, the sort of ‘rough pleasantries popular with subalterns of a sporting regiment’. Mince pies were filled with mustard and hip flasks with vinegar and cayenne, laxative powders sprinkled into washing sponges, sugar castors poured over heads, chairs pulled away just as ample backsides descended on them. Christopher Sykes, an MP who had sponsored a law to halt the slaughter of seabirds for sport, often found a dead seagull between his bed-sheets. He became the scapegoat of the Set: the victimization of him by St Albans and others became incessant. Once he was shoved on all fours under a billiard table and prodded with cues. On another evening Charles Beresford rushed into his bedroom yelling, ‘I say, get up at once, Tum Tum wants to see you – hustle old cock, perhaps the Crown’s in danger.’ Sykes raced out of his bedroom, tripped over a rope stretched between the door jambs, and fell into the cold water of a tin bathtub.³

During the 1860s and 1870s the prince hunted on horseback. When he went fox-hunting, two or three thousand other horsemen turned out, and the congestion in lanes and fields was absurd. If fox-hunting made unsatisfactory royal sport, because meets were open to anyone, the Royal Buckhounds fared little better. This royal pack hunted a ‘carted stag’, that is a tame animal with blunted horns and a pet name, which was taken to the meet in a cart, released, chased and at the end of the day’s sport carted back to Windsor. It offered an insipid, Thames Valley version of Napoleon III’s great hunts at Fontainebleau and Compiègne. However, suburban developments were encroaching on the Buckhounds’ country, and Great Western excursion trains brought hundreds of trippers to disturb the sport with their cheers. Once, the hounds chased their quarry through Wormwood Scrubs into Paddington Station’s goods yard. This debasement dismayed the prince, who forsook the Buckhounds after 1878. They were abolished when he became king in 1901 so as to save £6,000 a year.

Instead of the free-for-all that accompanied horses and hounds, the prince and the Marlborough House Set preferred to engage in massacres of birds and animals on private land far from onlookers. Sandringham existed for battue shooting, that quintessentially Edwardian pastime. This involved beaters walking in line through a wood or covert, beating the trees and bushes to flush out game birds and send them flying over the guns positioned outside. Battue shoots were ritualized, as a court sport must be. The presence of the quarry was ensured. Men competed against one another for high tallies, and displayed warriors’ skills with their guns. Their sport was spectacular, for each shoot climaxed with a deafening fusillade bringing dead birds thudding from the sky. The introduction of the breech-loading gun with cartridge in the 1850s, and of hammerless breech-loaders and ejectors in the 1870s, meant that sportsmen with two guns and a loader could shoot without pause. The Marquess of Ripon, who perfected his foothold, shifting his feet as he followed an object round so that the barrels never tilted, once shot twenty-eight birds in a minute at Sandringham.⁴

When Edward VII taxed the Marquês de Soveral for staying indoors by a roaring fire rather than going out with the guns, the Portuguese envoy replied, ‘Pas enragé, votre Majesté, pas enragé.’ Others, though, reckoned the indiscriminate slaughter as virile and somehow patriotic. Since the Crimean War ended in 1856, ‘sportsmen have settled more peacefully to country life, and have devoted more time and money to game-rearing,’ Edward’s fellow gun Lord Walsingham wrote in 1886. To those decrying colossal bags of game as barbarous, he retorted that ‘bearers of good English names, giants of sport, men trained to feats of endurance on foot and on horseback, cannot be dismissed as brutal, contemptible or un-English’. It should be a matter of national pride that they killed their prey in ‘the jungles of Africa, the precipices of the Himalayas or Rockies, the corries of Inverness-shire or the wolds of Yorkshire’.⁵

The prince, said Lord Suffield, with whom he shot at Gunton between 1869 and 1879, was ‘remarkably clever … in conveying his wishes without seeming to make a request’. When he shot away from home, his place would be marked by a red stick so that the beaters knew where to drive the game towards him. A clearing was often cut in the trees in front of the royal stand so the birds flew straight over his head. He would select his targets calmly, never fired at difficult birds and therefore seldom missed. At Sandringham he stood at the end of the line so that his guests could have the best shots. He kept the clocks there thirty minutes ahead of London time so as to allow more winter daylight for shooting. Wives attending shooting house parties joined the men for luncheon in a large tent pitched on the scene of action, with the Royal Standard flying. They had to change clothes for breakfast, luncheon, tea and dinner, and were allowed to smoke cigarettes but not to fire guns. Their presence made shooting parties social rather than political: party intrigues were discouraged even when parliamentary leaders were present.⁶

Queen Victoria detested the smell of tobacco-smoking. At Osborne, Windsor and Balmoral, smokers were exiled to remote and gaunt rooms in order to pursue their vice. The German ambassador was once discovered lying on his bedroom floor at Windsor exhaling tobacco smoke up the chimney. In filial rebellion Bertie smoked hard, and touted his drug: the more his companions smoked, the better he was pleased. His proselytizing had momentous consequences for the royal family: his death, like those of his son and grandsons George V, George VI and Edward VIII, was hastened by heavy tobacco use; even Alexandra smoked cigarettes in the evenings, while playing patience.

In 1866 the prince was elected an honorary member of White’s Club, but when a majority of its members voted against smoking in the drawing room, he stopped attending. Instead, in 1868, he instigated the establishment of a new club, the Marlborough, where smoking was permitted, even encouraged, everywhere except the dining room. Always a ruthless freeloader who knew how to get toadies to pay for his pleasures, he got the Marlborough financed by a social climber called James Mackenzie, whose fortune derived from indigo. The club’s premises at 52 Pall Mall were a minute’s walk from Marlborough House. The prince visited it daily when in London: his taste for boisterous games was served by installing a noisy bowling alley on the ground floor; he chose its 400 founding members, and dragooned subsequent recruits (including Tsar Nicholas II). In 1885, as part of his belief in mollifying potential antagonists by socializing with them, the prince proposed the German Chancellor’s son, Herbert von Bismarck, for honorary membership of the Marlborough. Bismarck’s first intimation of this proposal was an invoice for £52 in election and membership fees: he returned these with a curt refusal. Invitations to join the Marlborough were the prelude to royal favour. In 1897 the prince had Lionel Cust, Director of the National Portrait Gallery, proposed for membership. Cust demurred that as he already had two clubs, he could not afford additional costs, but friends in the royal household urged him to consent. Cust grumbled, but his appointment as Surveyor of the King’s Pictures and as Gentleman Usher to the King in 1901 would not have come without his joining the Marlborough.⁷

In the same year as the foundation of the Marlborough Club (1868), King Charles XV of Sweden arranged the induction of the visiting Prince of Wales as a freemason. This soon set the prince at the head of another network of influence and philanthropy, for in 1874 he was installed as Grand Master of the United Grand Lodge of England. Thereafter his support of the fraternity, at public events as well as private ceremonials, gave royal prestige and respectable renown to freemasonry. The number of lodges proliferated: there were 2,850 at the time of his resignation as Grand Master, after ascending the throne, in 1901. His younger brother Arthur, Duke of Connaught replaced him as Grand Master.

The prince’s social sovereignty enabled him to snub and dump members of his entourage. He was ready to forget his rank, as one courtier said, so long as everyone else remembered it. Sir Frederick Johnstone entertained him at his houses for over thirty years. On a fatal night in the billiards room at Sandringham, the prince put his hand on the boisterous baronet’s shoulder and said reproachfully, ‘Freddy, Freddy, you’re very drunk.’ Johnstone responded by pointing at the royal waist, and saying with a mocking Teutonic accent, ‘Tum Tum, you’re ver-r-y fat.’ Bertie stalked from the billiards room, Johnstone was told to leave Sandringham before breakfast, and was thereafter extruded from royal circles. By the end of his ex-friend’s reign Johnstone was sunk in debt and mental confusion: in 1911 the Master in Lunacy appointed Harry Chaplin as receiver of Johnstone’s estates, and his ancestral home was sold after nearly 700 years in the family.⁸

The prince’s exactions on his hosts were ruinous. The Duke of St Albans rebuilt Bestwood in 1862–5 to fit it for royal house parties: the result was a jarring, jumbled house with multicoloured bricks, Flemish dormer windows, servants’ quarters in an imitation chapel and a madcap roofline. By the 1880s St Albans had to shut Bestwood and economize by living on his yacht with a small crew in home waters, going ashore as a bargain-hunter in curiosity shops. A single house party at Packington sent the Earl of Aylesford’s family lurching financially for three generations.

The prince approached his mother’s subjects with a combination of arrogance and understanding. When he visited Norwich in 1866, its citizens were aggrieved because he ‘did not look graciously enough at them,’ the Norfolk magnate Lord Kimberley noted. ‘H. R. H. has not the talent of pretending to look pleased. When he is bored, he looks it. Not a good quality in a Prince.’ Royal subjects began to object to haughty indifference. Matthew Arnold, in Culture and Anarchy (1869), warned that the ‘strong feudal habits of subordination’ among the English working class had been destroyed by factory life: ‘men, all over the country, are beginning to assert … an Englishman’s rights to do what he likes; his right to march where he likes, meet where he likes, enter as he likes, hoot as he likes, threaten as he likes, smash as he likes’. In an era of masterly parliamentarians and democratic aspirations, both the royal family’s political clout and the deference of their subjects were ebbing. The prince saw the consequent need for royalty to make themselves visible among the citizenry and to be seen promoting its well-being. ‘We live in radical times,’ he warned his mother in 1869, ‘and the more the People see the Sovereign the better it is for the People and the Country.’ Hitherto charity visits had been discounted as women’s work, but the prince patronized good causes and attended fundraising events. In this he was a royal pioneer. When Irish terrorists exploded a bomb in Clerkenwell before Christmas 1867, killing twelve people and injuring 120, he made several morale-raising visits to the maimed and wounded in St Bartholomew’s Hospital.⁹

Society people in Victoria and Albert’s London were never ‘smart’. They thought it distinguished to be dull, and that it was impossible to be both modish and first-rate. The royal household seemed to emulate that of Louis Philippe, ‘Citizen King’ of the French until 1848, in affecting to be earnest and middle-class. ‘The taste of Louis Philippe was bourgeois beyond any taste except that of Queen Victoria,’ the American diplomat and historian Henry Adams recorded. ‘Speaking socially the Queen had no style … Nothing could be worse than the toilettes at Court unless it were the way they were worn. One’s eyes might be dazzled by jewels, but they were heirlooms, and if any lady appeared well-dressed, she was either a foreigner or “fast”. Fashion was not fashionable in London.’ During the eighteen years of the Second Empire from 1852 until 1870, Napoleon III held the most brilliant court in Europe. He used splendour as a form of political control and transformed Paris into the most modern and pleasurable of the continent’s capitals. His Spanish wife became Europe’s most hospitable nineteenth-century consort. The glamorous abundance of court life made the luxury trades of Paris flourish. Parisians reckoned that their city gave leadership to the world in the arts, sciences, medicine, finance, fashion and pleasure. ‘The boy of Blackfriars,’ wrote Victor Hugo in 1867, ‘copies the gamins of the rue Greneta.’ London’s architectural, retail and intellectual eminence never vied with that of Paris.¹⁰

Then Napoleon III self-destructed by an ill-prepared war against Prussia. In September 1870 the Second Empire fell at the Battle of Sedan. The imperial anthem Partant pour la Syrie, which was played as the emperor departed for exile in Chislehurst, was superseded by the republican La Marseillaise. The green and gold livery of the imperial household vanished from the streets. Paris became a capital without a court. London, under the Prince of Wales’s aegis, rose to cosmopolitan primacy on the social decay of dethroned Paris. ‘The Smart Set,’ wrote Henry Adams of London, ‘had come into their own.’ The prince stood, by the 1880s, at the head of an invigorated Society which wanted amusements, enjoyed opulent display and had no qualms about freshly minted money. No member of the royal family had been such a dominant social leader in his capital, or so familiar a sight, since the 1660s when Londoners hailed Charles II as ‘Old Rowley’.¹¹

The flourishing Smart Set engendered a new brand of journalism. Edmund Yates founded the weekly magazine The World in 1874, and Henry Labouchère followed with Truth in 1877. The London Season of 1877, which inaugurated the era of ‘Professional Beauties’, intensified this publicity squall. Several ‘P. B.s’ in Society, notably Lily Langtry and Patsy Cornwallis-West, became the prince’s paramours. Mass-produced postcards displayed them in alluring poses, their fashions were aped by dressmakers, and crowds ogled them in London’s parks and shopping streets. Beginning in the 1870s, wrote a commentator after Edward VII’s death, ‘to know all about the movements, the manners, the dress, the personal habits, and family relationships of those who formed the world of pleasure and leisure, of high politics and high birth, came to be the regular indulgence of thousands of hard-working, quiet-living people. For good or ill, the barrier that had been drawn round the innermost group of English aristocratic and wealthy society was broken down.’¹²

‘London is not the most beautiful, the most splendid, or even the most convenient city,’ wrote a social commentator in 1885, ‘but it is pre-eminently the smart metropolis of Europe.’ Its eastern financial districts controlled almost half the planet’s flow of capital in the quarter-century before 1914: foreign-born financiers including Baron Maurice de Hirsch, his associates Henri Bischoffsheim and Ernest Cassel, the ramified Rothschild and Stern cousinhood, the brothers Reuben and Arthur Sassoon, Alfred and Otto Beit, Sigmund Neumann, Edgar Speyer and Julius Wernher chose London as their base. Rich Americans flocked to London, where a few imitated the prince’s rolling Teutonic r-r-rs. Partly because of the money spent by rich Germans and Americans, the West End became a shopping Mecca, with a huge expansion in the 1880s of world-famous department stores. The prince’s friend George Cadogan (who was at his behest appointed Lord Privy Seal in 1886) transformed his Chelsea property from an old-fashioned riverside district, with narrow streets of cottages, into broad thoroughfares lined by tall terraced houses and mansion flats. The poor were shifted south of the river to Battersea, Sloane Street emulated Bond Street in providing shopping pleasures and Chelsea became London’s third fashionable district after Mayfair and Belgravia. ‘Of all the capitals of Europe there was never, except ancient Rome, a metropolis where the pulse of the whole world beat so distinctly as in London,’ wrote the Silesian nobleman Hermann von Eckardstein, who moved there in 1891. It was not only that London was the governing apex of the British Empire: ‘the West End’ became ‘the world’s centre of gravity’ because after 1871 it was the residential and shopping apogee of the most conspicuous court city.¹³

During the 1880s – a decade of falling agricultural incomes for landowners – the tight aristocratic hold on London Society was slackened by newly moneyed men. The prince’s Cambridge contemporary Nathaniel Rothschild received a barony in Gladstone’s dissolution honours of 1885. The brewer Allsopp and the banker Mills were transmuted into Lord Hindlip and Lord Hillingdon by the Salisbury government in 1886. The Jubilee Honours of 1887 gazetted a new Lord Cheylesmore, a broker of Chinese silks and landlord of White’s Club, who had once been a London bus driver. Thereafter 23 per cent of Salisbury-recommended peerages went to businessmen. Liberal governments emulated the Conservatives. Two hundred and forty-six new peerages were created between 1885 and 1914: only a quarter of the recipients had inherited country estates.

‘London,’ wrote Henry James in 1899, ‘doesn’t love the latent or the lurking, has neither time, nor taste, nor sense for anything less discernible than the red flag in front of the steamroller. It wants cash over the counter and letters ten feet high.’ Tradesmen who supplied the royal household knew that middle-class customers flocked to shops with the royal imprimatur, and thus applied in great numbers for royal warrants entitling them to display the royal coat of arms on their shopfronts. In acknowledgment of the increasing commercial importance of royal favour in the new court city, tradesmen incorporated themselves as Royal Warrant Holders Ltd in 1895. The list of royal warrant holders by the century’s end included purveyors of food and drink, embroiderers, gold lacemakers, picture restorers, goldsmiths, silversmiths, horologists, parquet manufacturers, gilders, hatters, a perruquier, a plumassier, confectioners, stationers and suppliers of wax, harps, decorated tin boxes, wine corks, snuff, tallow, garden seats, golf clubs, mustard, pheasant’s food, turtles, nitrophosphates, typewriters and starch. The reach of royal patronage in artistic matters was demonstrated in 1895 after Princess Alexandra bought work from the Parisian pastel artist Paul Helleu. Smart Londoners then flocked to Helleu, who enriched himself by painting portraits of ‘femmes de la high life’. In 1907 the process recurred with the Hungarian Philip de László: King Edward and Queen Alexandra visited his London show, had themselves and their daughter Victoria painted by him, and thereafter he was besought for lucrative Society portraits.¹⁴

At country house parties the prince bullied young men, who preferred to be dancing with pretty women, into gambling for higher stakes than they could afford. ‘He insisted on playing high,’ one of them recalled, ‘and on playing daily; so that, as he also played badly – contrary to repute – he usually lost.’ His losses may have been due less to bad play than to the stealthy insubordination of players who resented their time being commandeered by a spoilt prince, and therefore cheated. In September 1890, during Doncaster races, there was a royal house party at Tranby Croft, the Yorkshire house of Arthur Wilson, whose family had made a new fortune shipping Scandinavian timber and Russian immigrants through the port of Hull. Baccarat is a game which makes a good end to an evening of heavy eating. It requires no judgement or skill, only the ability to enjoy taking money off your friends and the strength to push counters across a line on the table (at Tranby Croft they used the prince’s leather counters stamped with £2 or £5 on one side, and engraved in gold on the reverse side with the Prince of Wales’s feathers). On the night of 8 September the prince acted as banker at the baccarat table set up in the smoking room: his racing crony Reuben Sassoon was croupier. The gamblers included a libidinous baronet called Sir William Gordon-Cumming who, after having the impudence to take £225 off the prince in two nights of baccarat, was denounced for cheating by a callow youngster. The men of the house party, with a fatal combination of pomposity and befuddled hangovers, so blundered in their handling of the accusation that Gordon-Cumming sued the Wilsons for slander. After calamitous publicity about Society gambling, which exposed the prince’s high play, Gordon-Cumming lost his action. This verdict, however, seemed unfair to the populace, which hooted the prince at Ascot.¹⁵

It is seldom recalled that the playboy prince was also an innovating philanthropist, who funded some of the infrastructure for the future National Health Service in London. Medicine had interested him since the early days of his marriage, when he sought instruction on women’s bodies from his physician. In a period when hospitals depended upon voluntary subscriptions and endowment income, and when the prince was set on providing non-political leadership to the capital, he was President of St Bartholomew’s Hospital from 1867, and a fundraiser for the London Hospital in Whitechapel and for Poplar Hospital. In 1881 he attended the inaugural International Medical Congress in London, where he gave the opening address and attended a private lunch with Charles Darwin, Sir George Paget, Louis Pasteur, the bacteriologist Robert Koch and Rudolf Virchow the public health campaigner. Pasteur and Koch explained the germ theory of disease to him: he visited the Pasteur Institute in Paris, supported bacteriology and advocated compulsory vaccination.

‘Prince Hal’ was Disraeli’s nickname for the Prince of Wales; and a country house visitor in 1883 reported the prince addressing fellow guests ‘in the big voice of Henry V – to whom I always mentally compare him – only he didn’t say such clever things’. Like Shakespeare’s Prince Hal, the Prince of Wales went ‘slumming’ – a practice copied by his grandson Edward VIII in some moods. He became interested in the provision of decent housing for the urban poor, and was appointed to the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes in 1884. Before its business got under way, Charles Carrington, who was Local Government Board spokesman for Gladstone’s government in the House of Lords, took the prince through some of the worst slums of Clerkenwell and St Pancras. ‘I thought it would be a great thing to see for himself what awful places some of his future subjects had to live in,’ Carrington recorded. ‘He jumped at the idea, but said it must be kept quite quiet as if the Government got hold of it, it would not be permitted.’ Carrington bought some coarse clothes, into which the prince changed, and they accompanied the medical officer of the Local Government Board to Clerkenwell. ‘The first room we went into had no fire, or furniture, and was inhabited by a gaunt, half-starved woman, with 3 little children practically naked lying on a heap of rags in the corner,’ Carrington recounted. ‘The landlord asked her where her fourth child was. She answered, “I don’t know: it went down into the Court some days ago, and I haven’t seen it since”.’ The prince made his only speech as a peer (as opposed to opening parliamentary sessions as king) in the House of Lords on this subject.¹⁶

In 1889 Henry Burdett, a statistician and hospital administrator who had reputedly broken the bank gambling at Monte Carlo casino, published a book entitled Prince, Princess and People which celebrated the philanthropy of the royal couple. Burdett was soon elected to the Marlborough Club, became the prince’s philanthropic and investment adviser, and was knighted at the Jubilee in 1897. Burdett’s cocksure ideas and organizational abilities turned the prince into the leading English philanthropist. By 1900 he was patron of seventy-five hospitals, and of another 125 charities. Under the hierarchical, emulative outlook of the period, royal patrons guaranteed prosperity to charities much as royal warrants did for shopkeepers. As one example, Guy’s Hospital suffered lowered income from agricultural rents in the 1880s, and by 1895 was closing wards. The prince became President of Guy’s in 1896, headed its fundraising appeal and was celebrity-in-chief at a dinner which raised the unprecedented sum of £150,000. Hundreds of organizations sought the prefixes ‘Royal’ or ‘King Edward’, from orphanages to the Lincolnshire grower of a popular new potato. Charities with royal patrons tended to attract more efficient, enterprising trustees: the Imperial Cancer Research Fund, for example, flourished after receiving royal patronage in 1904.¹⁷

Supremely the prince, at Burdett’s suggestion, and with nudges from Daisy Warwick, used his mother’s Jubilee celebrations in 1897 to launch The Prince of Wales’s Hospital Fund for London, which collected £227,551 in its first year. The prince proved an active chairman of its formative meetings at Marlborough House – to which he invited the Bishop of London, the Chief Rabbi, the Lord Mayor of London, the Governor of the Bank of England, the President of the Royal Society and Lord Rothschild. In its early years Burdett consulted the prince about all of the Fund’s major decisions. The prince was set on accumulating a sizeable endowment. Anyone who donated £5,000 or more received a personal letter of thanks from him. Big donors were remembered when lists for knighthoods or baronetcies were compiled.

The prince and Burdett knew that aristocrats maintained their position by primogeniture, and entailed their possessions to eldest sons, rather than dispersing assets in philanthropy: the bachelor Earl of Moray, who in 1895 bequeathed £170,000 to charities (including Edinburgh Royal Infirmary), was unique in his class for charitable munificence. The Prince’s Fund (which in 1902 was renamed King Edward’s Hospital Fund for London and raised £605,000 in coronation year) therefore solicited funds from new moneyed men and their businesses: the millionaire Beit brothers gave £125,000, Cassel £66,000, Lord Iveagh (of the Guinness brewery) £60,000, Edgar Speyer £25,000, Bischoffsheim £14,000. Julius Wernher bequeathed £390,000. Rothschild’s and other City finance houses were drawn by the prince into an unprecedented age of plutocratic philanthropy. The moneylender Samuel Lewis bequeathed £250,000 in 1901: his widow Ada, who was given a seat in Westminster Abbey for the coronation and received parcels of game from Sandringham, supplemented this fortune in 1906. The Canadian railway magnates Lord Mount Stephen and Lord Strathcona each gave £200,000 in coronation year: Mount Stephen added another £100,000 in 1908. By 1910 the Fund had assets of almost £2 million, and distributed £150,000 a year to the voluntary hospitals of London, which were envied across the developed world.

In 1898, at a Marlborough House meeting, the prince launched a fundraising body to support voluntary hospitals, the League of Mercy. Subsequently he held fundraising garden parties and receptions. The League was organized in sixty-five districts based on parliamentary constituencies, each headed by grandees who enrolled middle-class volunteers to collect subscriptions – sometimes only a shilling a year from servants and tradespeople. It raised £600,000 for London hospitals, and £250,000 for ‘cottage hospitals’ in rural districts before closing in 1947 when the National Health Service superseded voluntary hospitals. A further initiative came in 1899 when the prince solicited funds from rich Londoners, including Bischoffsheim, Cassel, Edward Levy-Lawson, ‘Natty’ Rothschild and Arthur Sassoon, for a reception hospital for officers returning wounded from the Boer War. He became patron of the hospital, which in 1904 was renamed King Edward VII Hospital for Officers and later received a royal charter.¹⁸

The philanthropic prince needed Jewish cosmopolitans as charitable benefactors, and appreciated the other amenities that they provided. Their trans-European contacts were useful to his journeys, their confidential advance news interested him, and from the 1880s they gave him lavish hospitality in England at a time when the old guard were feeling pinched. That decade’s agricultural depression and falling rents meant that fewer of the territorial aristocracy could afford to hold house parties for him in their ancestral seats (it was joked that the fire that destroyed Gunton in 1882 was raised so that Suffield could avoid further ruinous royal hospitality). The declension in the old landed interest was marked by the Settled Land Act of 1882, which permitted landowners to sell land held under family settlements so long as the cash accrual was kept in the family. This legislation confirmed earlier signals that there were better ways to make money than from land.

There was a familiar tale about a poor Jew from a Galician ghetto who went to see the sumptuous Rothschild mausoleum in Frankfurt and said in envy, ‘These people certainly know how to live.’ Often the prince greeted Natty Rothschild with this catchphrase, which set them both laughing: the Galician’s remark encapsulated the prince’s liking for the princely opulence of Rothschild houses. He attended the inaugural party in 1883 at Alfred de Rothschild’s palatial Halton, where tea was served in Sèvres china with gold teaspoons, the circus ring was carpeted in Aubusson rugs and the kitchens plated a delicacy called Poussins Haltonais, consisting of illegally strangled young pheasants. Of all the clan, the prince was closest to Paris-born Ferdinand de Rothschild, holder of an Austrian barony, whom he visited each July at that most lavish of Rothschild palaces, Waddesdon (also completed in 1883). ‘Ferdy’ was a morose, whining and self-obsessed perfectionist who did everything in anxious haste: he gobbled his food, waited for no one. His book Personal Characteristics from French History (1896) expressed not only the rococo ostentation of the goût Rothschild, but a fascination with the glamour and vulnerability of royal prestige. In order to protect the pride of cash-strapped European noblemen who had discreetly sold him art treasures for Waddesdon, Baron Ferdinand destroyed the receipts and provenances of his abundant purchases. A Habsburg subject, he grew super-patriotic about his adopted country, and proclaimed that he wanted the Union Jack to fly over every Polynesian island, every Himalayan crag and every eastern minaret. The prince attended his obsequies in 1898: no one in England grudged this royal attention to Jewish rites in a synagogue.

By the late 1880s the prince’s finances were in a critical state. He had a parliamentary grant of £39,000 a year, and revenues of £64,500 from the Duchy of Cornwall, but his gross income had fallen since 1881. Rather than raise parliamentary controversy or republican sentiments by soliciting a larger grant, he borrowed money from the Rothschilds, including £100,000 in 1889 and £60,000 in 1893 (possibly neither sum was repaid). He met another financial saviour, during a journey from Vienna to Bucharest, at the Hungarian shooting lodge of Crown Prince Rudolf in 1888. In return for having some debts paid, his host presented to him Baron Maurice de Hirsch, a Bavarian-born financier who had taken Belgian nationality, and controlled the railway linking Vienna to Constantinople. Hirsch’s passions were blood sports, litigation, tax avoidance and ladling out millions to save persecuted Jews from Russian violence. He owned a medieval castle in Moravia but was shunned by the Habsburg nobility and found small consolation in Paris, where he built a luxurious house, gave lavishly to fighting funds seeking a royalist restoration in France but was blackballed at the Jockey Club. Now, after Rudolf’s introduction, the Prince of Wales cultivated rather than rejected him. The snob James Mackenzie, in addition to financing the Marlborough Club, had loaned the prince £250,000 (secured on Sandringham’s title deeds) and was rewarded with a baronetcy in 1890, but died a few months later, whereupon his trustees sought repayment of outstanding sums. By liquidating the Mackenzie debt, Hirsch won his entrée into the Marlborough House Set. He leased a great house overlooking Green Park, caused a sensation by renting Merton Hall and its shooting from Lord Walsingham at £800 a week, and gave crucial help in improving the prince’s finances during the 1890s.

Historians are callous to Prince Albert Victor of Wales (‘Eddy’), a docile youth dazed by his situation, whose modesty and dawdling did not sit well with those who wanted their princes to be hustling men of action. He had the affectionate soubriquet of ‘Collars and Cuffs’ because he shared his father’s sartorial interests. In 1890, as second in line to the throne, he was created Duke of Clarence and Avondale, and began seeking a wife. He proposed marriage to his cousin Alexandra of Hesse, who rejected him and instead married Czar Nicholas II, bringing haemophilia, Rasputin and neurosis to the Romanovs. He next tried Princess Hélène d’Orléans, daughter of the Comte de Paris, the Orléanist claimant to the French throne. His parents favoured this match as consolidating anti-Hohenzollern dynastic alliances, but Lord Salisbury squashed their scheme with a hammer-blow memorandum giving seventeen reasons why the marriage must be prevented: English public opinion had reviled the French for centuries; the only French consort of an English monarch since Henry V had been ill-starred Charles I’s wife in 1625; the Act of Settlement would disqualify Clarence from the succession if he married a Catholic, even if she had converted to the Church of England, unless she had been previously excommunicated by the Pope. Ultimately Clarence was engaged to marry Princess Mary of Teck, although her plainness made the Prince of Wales flinch; catty Princess Victoria exclaimed, ‘Poor May! with her ugly Württemberg hands!’¹⁹

In the event Clarence caught pneumonia, and died in January 1892. His father wept throughout the Windsor funeral. Thereafter, a portrait of his beloved dead son was hung above his bedhead. The sudden bereavement proved to be the hinge on which his adult life turned. Grief did more to subdue him, and to make him less wayward, than inheriting the throne nine years later. As mentioned before, it increased his neediness of Daisy Warwick and Alice Keppel; but more than that, his son’s death chastened his spirits and outlook for the remaining eighteen years of his life. He wept when bidding goodbye to his surviving son, the Duke of York turned Prince of Wales, embarking on a colonial tour in 1901.

The prince was less fond of his daughters: the eldest, Louise, married the Duke of Fife in 1889; seven years later the youngest, Maud, married a man who was elected King of Norway in 1905; while the middle one, Victoria, whom Lord Rosebery wished to marry in the late 1890s, was kept on emotional leading-strings by her selfish mother, condemned to spinsterhood, and became spiteful and foolish. When Clarence died, the Duchess of Fife became next in line to inherit after the Duke of York, who was hurriedly married to his dead brother’s fiancée in order to provide heirs and forestall a Fife succession: the Fifes were mistrusted because they were peculiarly reclusive, and because his dabbling in high finance needed deodorizing.

After 1880 nihilists, anarchists and nationalists exploded, shot, stabbed and defenestrated heads of state and their families: Alexander II of Russia (1881), President Carnot of France (1894), Empress Elisabeth of Austria (1898), Umberto I of Italy (1900), President William McKinley (1901), Alexander I of Serbia (1903), Carlos I of Portugal (1908) and George I of Greece (1913). Alfonso XIII of Spain narrowly escaped assassination on his wedding day in 1906. In 1912, too, Victor Emmanuel III of Italy nearly lost his life. However, the seven attacks – not all of them attempted assassinations – on Queen Victoria were the work of crackpots rather than politically motivated regicides. When the prince went shooting at Sandringham, there was always a detective on the lookout for deranged intruders. Before he opened Tower Bridge in 1894, the police feared that ‘evilly disposed persons’ might drop a bomb as his steamer passed under one of the other London bridges. More seriously, in April 1900, at Brussels Nord station, a fifteen-year-old tin-maker’s apprentice named Jean-Baptiste Sipido (protesting at Britain’s colonial war in South Africa) jumped on the footboard and fired two shots, at a distance of four feet, through the open window of a train that was carrying the prince and princess to Copenhagen. The princess looked Sipido in the face as he fired. One bullet went inches over the prince’s head as he bent towards her. The other passed through the hair of her lady-in-waiting, Charlotte Knollys.²⁰

Within six months the balance between the prince’s worthiness and self-indulgence was to be weighed. In the autumn of 1900 his mother became drowsy and confused, and on 22 January 1901 she died at Osborne. The Duke of Argyll, her son-in-law, said that her last hours resembled a three-decker ship sinking.