The Heir Apparent (52 page)

In 1889, the Queen appealed to Parliament for royal grants for the children of the Prince of Wales, in the light of the impending marriage of his eldest daughter and the coming-of-age of his sons. Parliament grudgingly voted the prince £36,000 per annum in trust for his children,
as well as a capital sum of £60,000, but this came at a price: the most lengthy—and uninhibited—debate on the monarchy to take place during Victoria’s reign, with 134 voting against the grants.
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Bertie’s income was freely discussed, and some argued that from his £112,000 per annum he could well afford to pay for his children himself.
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Others declared that the Queen, whose Civil List income of £385,000 was topped up with £50,000 from the Duchy of Lancaster, ought to subsidize her son, as she had devolved upon him so many of the functions of the Crown.
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What exactly did the prince’s work consist of? asked Mr. Abraham, the radical MP for Glamorgan: On a typical day HRH held a levee, he unveiled a statue, he dined at the Mansion House, and he witnessed part of
Figaro
at Covent Garden—“And that, then, is a hard day’s work!”
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Rather than risk parliamentary criticism, Bertie’s solution was to borrow from financiers. “My dear Natty,” he wrote to Lord Rothschild in 1883, “I cannot find words too extreme [in] gratitude for your great kindness and liberality, which you may be convinced will never be forgotten by me.”
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Documents in the Rothschild archive evidence a private advance of £100,000 made to the prince in 1889, paid in cash and secured against title deeds. A further loan of £60,000 advanced on the Sandringham estates was made in 1893.
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Whether this money was ever repaid is not clear.

Another man who subsidized the Wales court was a self-made Scottish millionaire named James Mackenzie. The son of an Aberdeen stocking merchant who made one fortune in indigo in India and then another on Lombard Street, Mackenzie bought the Glenmuick estate (29,500 acres) bordering on Balmoral in 1869. Bertie and his sons nicknamed him MacTavish, and treated him as a cross between a factotum and a sugar daddy. The grouse shooting at Glenmuick was good, and
Mackenzie was generous with invitations to Bertie’s friends and relations.
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Bertie wrote asking him to place bets for him on racehorses.
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Mackenzie owned Sunningdale Park, which the prince borrowed for several years for Ascot races. An 1887 letter from Bertie to Mackenzie gives a sense of the relationship: “When I saw you a week ago did I understand you rightly when you said we might occupy Sunningdale Park for Ascot Races this year? as you did not intend entertaining. If so it would be
most
kind of you to lend it to us—as it is a charming house and such a pretty place, only pray do not hesitate to refuse if it is inconvenient to you.”
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Though not exactly a command, such a request was hardly possible to refuse. From at least 1884 Mackenzie lent the prince large amounts of money, secured against the title deeds of the Sandringham estate.
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There is a family story that when Mackenzie died in 1890, having been created a baronet in the nick of time, Knollys appeared at his house, and the deeds were hastily handed over.
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The money owed to Mackenzie was rumored to be a staggering £250,000, and the trustees were obliged to call in the debt, causing consternation at Marlborough House. Enter the Austrian Jewish financier Baron Maurice de Hirsch. According to Lord Derby: “Hirsch seized the opportunity to pay off the debt, make the Prince his debtor, and so secure for himself a social position.”
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Hirsch was much richer than Mackenzie, whose will was proved at £694,731. No one knew for sure
how
rich Hirsch was, but his wealth was estimated at well over £20 million. Descended from a family of Bavarian court bankers, “Turkish Hirsch” had joined the Brussels banking house of Bischoffsheim, married the boss’s daughter, and then made another fortune out of the Orient Express, punching a railway through the Balkans from Vienna to Istanbul.
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Throughout 1890 Baron Hirsch, with his waxed Hercule Poirot–like mustaches, was constantly at Bertie’s side. His influence over the Prince of Wales, wrote Derby, “was a puzzle to society, since he is neither a gentleman, nor reputed altogether honest.”
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Hirsch rented luxurious Bath House in Piccadilly, as well as a country house near Sandringham, and Grafton House near Newmarket. Egged on by the prince, he bought the
racehorse La Fleche from the Royal Stud for a record price of 5,500 guineas. La Fleche went on to win £34,700 in prize money, all of which Hirsch gave to hospitals (Bertie, by contrast, tended to give his racing winnings to mistresses).
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Bertie was “
dreadfully
annoyed” when Victoria refused to invite Hirsch to a state concert at Buckingham Palace, and the Queen remained suspicious of the baron, complaining that Bertie accepted too much of his hospitality.
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Hirsch entertained Bertie at St. Johann, his vast shooting estate in the sandy plains of Hungary. The anti-Semitic Austrian archdukes gasped when the prince became the guest of a Jew. Bertie thought St. Johann “an unpretentious house but most comfortable”—the more so as Jennie Churchill was among the guests.
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The shooting was spectacular, though Bertie was as usual dissatisfied with his own performance. “I never saw so much game in my life,” he wrote, “but there is nothing the least tame about it.”
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Six hundred beaters formed a circle seven miles in circumference, converging on the shooters, who stood sixty yards apart, each gun stationed in a box walled in with fir branches to ensure that shots were fired safely into the air.
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The party killed an obscene total of twenty thousand head of game in ten days, mainly partridges. This, Bertie told Georgie, “certainly beats everything on record and will quite spoil one for any shooting at home.”
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At Sandringham, Bertie copied the design of Hirsch’s game larder, which was the biggest in the world, capable of holding seven thousand birds.
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“We resented the introduction of Jews into the social set of the Prince of Wales,” wrote Daisy Brooke, “not because we disliked them … but because they had brains and understood finance. As a class we did not like brains. As for money, our only understanding of it lay in the spending, not the making of it.”
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Reactionaries sneered at the prince’s Jewish court, while Bertie’s defenders praised his broad-mindedness. But for Bertie, the munificence of men such as Rothschild and Hirsch was as much a matter of financial survival as social inclusiveness. Rewarding them with recognition was the very least he could do. These men had saved Marlborough House from disaster.

Bertie’s admission of Jewish plutocrats to court was unique. In no other Western country were Jews accepted as leaders of society.
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On 27 July 1889 Bertie gave away his eldest daughter, Louise, who married his friend Lord Fife in the private chapel at Buckingham Palace. Marie Adeane, one of Queen Victoria’s maids of honor, noted that Alix “looked as usual much younger than the bride, but rather tired.” Lord Fife lost his way in the “Have and to hold” sentence so the archbishop had to repeat it, and there was “a good deal of fumbling with the ring but there were no tears and very little agitation.”
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When his sister Louise had married Lord Lorne in 1871, Bertie had objected that marriage with a subject was “lowering to the royal family,” but he was delighted with his daughter’s match, telling Vicky that “they have been devoted to one another for two years but he was too shy to propose.”
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The issues of protocol, however, caused Bertie concern, and at his insistence, Victoria reluctantly agreed to promote Fife from earl to duke.
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Fife was well known to the Paris demimonde, who dubbed him
“le petit Ecossais roux qui a toujours la queue en l’air.”
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That the twenty-two-year-old Louise, a shy, plain girl who had led a secluded life, was being married off to a dissipated man eighteen years her senior seemed not to weigh upon the prince’s mind.

Bertie’s concern that autumn was his son Eddy, now twenty-five. After leaving Cambridge, Eddy joined the fashionable cavalry regiment the 10th Hussars, but his military career was a farce. He was ignorant
of the history of battles, and he detested drill and cavalry riding. (“One has to go jogging round and round the riding school in a very tight and uncomfortable garment called a stable jacket and very hot work it is I can assure you.”)
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His instructor at Aldershot found that Dalton had taught him “
absolutely nothing
!!” But, according to Lady Geraldine Somerset, the instructor was “equally astonished how much he has got on with him, and thinks, under the circumstances his papers are infinitely better than he dared to expect. He has his father’s dislike for a book and never looks into one, but learns all orally, and retains what he thus learns.”
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The chain-smoking Eddy was aimless and lackadaisical and distressingly prone to put his foot in it. He was remarkably sweet-natured, however, and Alix’s favorite. Bertie, though, was infuriated, and teased him for his dandified clothes and the tall “masher” collars he wore to hide his abnormally long neck (“Eddy-Collar-and-Cuffs”). To stiffen his son and keep him out of trouble, he resolved to send Eddy on a six-month tour of India.
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Bertie had a meeting with his equerry Lord Arthur Somerset, the superintendent of his stables, and instructed him to see that Eddy was properly equipped with saddlery for his Indian tour, arranging for him to meet the prince on 30 September 1889.
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At the last minute, Somerset wired to excuse himself from the meeting, as he was obliged to leave “on urgent private affairs” for Dieppe.
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Lord Arthur Somerset was the third son of the Duke of Beaufort. Known as “Podge,” he was a major in the Royal Horse Guards (the Blues), a tall bachelor with luxuriant ginger facial hair. “He was inclined to fat; his small eyes were on the watch.”
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No one would have guessed that he was in the habit of visiting a homosexual brothel on Cleveland Street. Podge’s vice had come to the attention of the authorities in July 1889, when a postboy apprehended for theft had been found with the princely sum of eighteen shillings in his pocket. Questioned by police, the boy confessed that he and two others had received the money as payment for “indecent acts” with men at number 19, Cleveland Street, near Fitzroy Square. Under Section 11 of the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act, “gross indecency” between two men,
whether public or private, was a criminal offense. Policemen kept watch on the house in Cleveland Street and spotted Lord Arthur, who was identified by the postboys and then interviewed by detectives. Podge waited uneasily during the summer, as the case against two men who had procured the boys came to court. He attempted to bribe a young male prostitute, a waiter from the Marlborough Club, but this led him straight into a police trap. By the end of September, the case against him was complete, but the government hesitated to issue a warrant. A homosexual scandal at Marlborough House was the last thing Lord Salisbury wanted.

Lord Arthur Somerset’s movements and conversations are documented in the letters he wrote to his friend Reginald (Regy) Brett, later Lord Esher, a married man and closet homosexual. Brett preserved these letters and bound them into a volume he entitled “The Case of Lord Arthur Somerset.” This forms one of the chief sources for the tangled events that ensued.
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In London on 5 October, Lord Arthur saw his commanding officer, Oliver Montagu. They agreed that the prince must be told, and Podge wrote a letter confessing his sins. Montagu undertook to go to Fredensborg, where Bertie was on holiday with Alix’s extended family, to see the prince, “so as he may hear the right story first.”
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“I don’t believe it,” Bertie told Dighton Probyn, the eccentrically bearded comptroller and treasurer of his household. “I won’t believe it any more than if they had accused the Archbishop of Canterbury.”
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80

From Fredensborg, Bertie ordered Probyn in London to clear up Lord Arthur’s case. “Go and see Monro [the police commissioner], go to the Treasury, see Lord Salisbury if necessary.”
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On the evening of 18 October, Probyn saw Lord Salisbury for a few minutes on King’s Cross station before he caught the 7:30 train home to Hatfield. On the same night, Lord Arthur Somerset fled the country.

Later, in the House of Commons debate on 28 February 1890, Salisbury was accused of entering into a criminal conspiracy to pervert the
course of justice. The case against him turned on the fact that Arthur Somerset escaped to France on the same night as the King’s Cross meeting.
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Salisbury denied the charge, but doubts have always lingered. Might Probyn have hurried around to the Marlborough Club, where Somerset was staying, and tipped him off?
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Salisbury’s biographer considers that the prime minister felt justified in warning Somerset, out of a sense of class loyalty to his father the Duke of Beaufort.
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Bertie wrote to the PM to say how glad he was to learn that “no warrant is likely to be issued against the ‘unfortunate Lunatic’ (I can call him nothing else) as, for the sake of the Family and Society, the less one hears of such a filthy scandal the better.”
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On 12 November, however, the warrant was issued at last, charging Lord Arthur Somerset with “gross indecency” with other male persons contrary to the Criminal Law Amendment Act. By then, he was living in a villa in Monaco. He never returned to face charges.

Lord Arthur Somerset always maintained that his refusal to stand trial was more than a mere matter of saving his own skin. His real reason he explained in the letters he wrote from abroad to Brett. These documents reveal a sensational story: that Arthur Somerset was a scapegoat who went into exile in order to shield the name of Prince Eddy, who had also visited the Cleveland Street brothel.