Sons, Servants and Statesmen (39 page)

When the Prince of Wales suggested that Mrs Gladstone should be given a peerage and appointed Mistress of the Robes, he was indeed not taken seriously. Sometimes his interventions were more successful, though they might owe something to the Queen in the first place. Under Gladstone’s last administration in 1892 the Queen was particularly keen for Lord Rosebery to become Foreign Minister. The Prince spoke to him, and he accordingly informed Gladstone that His Royal Highness’s intervention had induced him to accept the post after all.

Even so, the Prince was still generally not trusted. Only a few years earlier, the Queen had written to her granddaughter Princess Victoria of Hesse that he ‘cannot keep anything to himself – but lets everything
out
’.
¹⁰
During her last years, when the Queen began to take annual spring holidays on the Riviera, Lord Rosebery suggested that her absence abroad should require somebody to undertake the Guardianship of the Realm, and that the Prince of Wales would be just the right person. Reluctantly, the Queen agreed to consider it, but informed Sir Arthur Bigge, her assistant secretary, that she had no intention of proposing it to the Prince herself. He might find the responsibility inconvenient, but he might find it difficult to decline if the offer came directly from her; and she did not want to prevent him from going abroad. Instead, she would rather appoint a committee, including the Dukes of Connaught and Cambridge, and the Lord Chief Justice.
¹¹
The Prince of Wales would surely have been piqued at his favourite brother yet again being given preference for a position which should have been his by right. In the end, nothing came of the idea.

By this time, the Duke of Edinburgh’s duties in England were almost complete. Soon after the expiry of his Mediterranean command in 1889, he was appointed Commander-in-Chief at Devonport for three years, a post which he took up in August 1890. On the conclusion of his command in June 1893, he was promoted to the rank of Admiral of the Fleet. A month later he attended the wedding of his favourite nephew, George, only surviving son of the Prince and Princess of Wales and recently made Duke of York, to Princess May of Teck. George had followed his uncle into the Royal Navy, a service which he had had to leave with great regret as a result of his elder brother’s death and his new status as second in succession to the throne. He had also taken after the Duke of Edinburgh in his fascination for collecting stamps.

One month after that, the Prince Consort’s renegade brother Ernest, Duke of Saxe-Coburg Gotha for forty-nine years, died of a chill, aged seventy-five. As second son of the Prince Consort, Alfred had been the heir of his uncle, who had had several illegitimate children but none by his lawful wife. With little enthusiasm, the Duke took up his inheritance as the new Duke of Coburg, to spend most of the rest of his life at the small German court. He was now officially retired from his beloved Royal Navy, and to be a German Duke, subservient to the bombastic Emperor William II, whom few of the family really liked and none really trusted, was a prospect which nobody envied.

His next few months were not made any easier by unfounded rumours that he had secretly renounced the succession before Duke Ernest’s death in favour of his son Alfred, and then by unseemly wrangles in parliament at Westminster and in the
Reichstag
in Berlin as to whether the new Duke of Coburg was technically a British subject or not. If Britain and Germany should find themselves at war with each other, could he be indicted in England on a charge of high treason as a result of his acts and status as a German sovereign? There was also uncertainty as to whether he should still be allowed to sit or speak in the House of Lords, or retain his membership of the privy council.

Only in the spring of 1894 was his nationality status officially confirmed. He was obliged to resign his privy councillorship and any rights pertaining to the House of Lords in England. He relinquished the annuity granted to him by parliament in 1866, but retained an allowance granted on his marriage for the upkeep of Clarence House, which remained his official residence in Britain for life. By British law, he retained his British nationality, modified ‘by his status as a German sovereign’.

At Windsor and Osborne, Prince Henry of Battenberg was becoming more and more frustrated by his dull existence. His official appointments as Governor of the Isle of Wight and Honorary Colonel of the Isle of Wight Rifles did not give him much scope for activity. When he joined his elder brother Louis in Corsica while Beatrice and the Queen were on holiday in Cannes, his wife had him fetched back smartly. Rumour had it that the Battenberg princes had gone to the carnival at Ajaccio for some ‘low company’, and the censorious Beatrice was not prepared to sit by patiently while her husband was willingly being led into temptation. Later he joined a regiment of the volunteer battalion in Hampshire, and was delighted to find himself following his true vocation once again – sharing the camaraderie of a soldier’s life.

This may have been a convenient escape from the attentions of a certain lady at Court. It was believed that Princess Louise, now unofficially separated from Lord Lorne, was flirting with Henry, and Beatrice found the situation distinctly uncomfortable. Henry found a way out of it through an opportunity for which he had long thirsted. In the autumn of 1895 an expeditionary force of West African troops and British Army officers was assembled to restore order in the kingdom of Ashanti, north of the Gold Coast Protectorate [Ghana]. Princess Helena’s elder son Christian Victor, who was commissioned in the King’s Royal Rifles, was invited to join the force, and a few days later Henry told the Queen that he also wanted to go to Ashanti.

Remembering the Prince Imperial’s death in the Zulu War in 1879, and stressing the additional dangers he would face from tropical disease, the Queen tried hard to dissuade Henry. But Beatrice proved fully supportive of her husband’s intentions, insisting that as all his brothers had seen active service he could hardly be denied such a chance himself. She also saw how desperately bored he had become with a life at home of enforced inactivity, and she may have felt it wise to remove him from her flirtatious elder sister. These reasons, and Henry’s determination to volunteer in a national cause to prove his devotion to his adopted country, persuaded the Queen. On 6 December 1895 he took farewell of his mother-in-law at Windsor, as he and Beatrice left for Bagshot to stay the night with the Duke and Duchess of Connaught on his way to Africa.

From the continent Henry wrote enthusiastically to Beatrice that he was ‘really happy and pleased to have received permission to see all that is going on’. However, in fact almost nothing was happening. The Ashanti chiefs had decided not to fight, instead submitting gracefully to British protection. Even so, the futile expedition continued through the tropical heat, with several men dying from fever on the way. Henry was among those to contract malaria, and the doctors ordered that he should be carried back to the coast at once. On 18 January 1896 Beatrice and the Queen received a telegram to say that he had been feverish but was improving and was about to leave for Madeira. Four days later another telegram arrived. They expected it to tell them that he had arrived safely at Madeira to convalesce and that he wanted Beatrice to go and join him. Instead it contained the news of his death.

A very few losses had affected the Queen deeply since the death of the Prince Consort, notably those of John Brown in 1883 and Emperor Frederick five years later. This came as a terrible shock. Henry had entered her life at a time when she was mourning John Brown and Leopold, Duke of Albany. His sense of humour and obvious enjoyment of life had rejuvenated her, introducing a breath of fresh air into the old-fashioned Court. He had given her another four grandchildren and thus reminded her how it felt to have a young family around – as well as a family to which she could be, and was, far more indulgent than she had ever been towards her own children.

Beatrice bore her sudden bereavement with tremendous patience and fortitude. In February she left Osborne to recuperate for a while at Cimiez. She returned to a home life which had become dull and drab without Henry. After his death, there would be no more amateur theatricals at Court. Not only was the Queen losing her eyesight and her former enthusiasm for the diversion, but Beatrice, who had been such an enthusiastic participant, no longer had the heart to return to an activity which reminded her so much of those brief, happy years with her husband.

Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee celebrations in June 1897, to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of her accession, would be the last time that many of the family would be together. This time, it was stipulated that no crowned heads would be invited to take part in the procession and service of thanksgiving at St Paul’s Cathedral, although fifteen prime ministers from the colonies would be there. However, all the Queen’s surviving children and children-in-law were also present.

This time, none among the family accompanying her that day made a greater impression than the Prince of Wales. Short of stature, overweight and hardly particularly handsome in his fifty-sixth year, he nevertheless cut a dignified, striking figure in his fieldmarshal’s uniform as he rode by his mother’s side in the procession from Buckingham Palace to the cathedral. For once, they took a route not merely through the city by the shortest possible way, but also across London Bridge and through some of the capital’s poorer districts.

‘No one ever, I believe, has met with such an ovation,’ the Queen noted in her journal afterwards. ‘The crowds were quite indescribable, and their enthusiasm truly marvellous and deeply touching.’
¹²

Yet the absence of those who had died since the golden jubilee ten years earlier was noticed and sorely missed. Emperor Frederick, Henry of Battenberg, Grand Duke Louis of Hesse (who had followed his wife Alice to the grave in 1892 after a bout of pneumonia) and her eldest grandson born in England, the Duke of Clarence, had all gone. At seventy-eight, Queen Victoria was paying the common penalty of a long life, in having outlived too many members of her own family.

She may have had a presentiment that the festivities would be her own swan-song. Already one of her surviving sons, Alfred, was in poor health. As Marie Mallet, one of her ladies-in-waiting, remarked somewhat bluntly, the Duke of Coburg’s life was not one likely to be accepted at any insurance office. For some years, his heavy drinking had concerned the family. For at least three years, his private secretary, Stephen Condie, had been warning Dr Reid, who passed the information on to the Queen, that unless he cut back on his alcohol consumption the consequences could be serious.

The reluctant Duke of Coburg had little to look forward to. In his German duchy he found life increasingly dull, as he missed the responsibilities of service life and the camaraderie of his naval colleagues and London society friends, whom he came to England to visit whenever he could. His marriage had never been happy. His wife, Marie, who never ceased to remind her in-laws that she was a Russian Grand Duchess and considered herself superior to them, revelled in her position as ‘No. 1, and reigning Duchess’, as her sister-in-law, Vicky, the Dowager German Empress, had predicted. Husband and wife had long since drifted apart, though they never officially separated and for the sake of form presented the picture of a united couple to the outside world.