In writing to her daughter, the Queen was more open. Contact with her son was ‘more than ever unbearable’ to her, she admitted. She had decided it would be best if he left the country again for a time. His father had planned that his education ought to be completed by a tour of Palestine and the Near East, and now was a suitable time for him to embark upon it. ‘Many wished to shake my resolution and to keep him here,’ she wrote, but she would not change her mind. And on 11 January 1862 she reported, ‘Bertie’s journey is all settled.’
The next month, accompanied as usual by General Bruce, he set out for Venice by way of Vienna. The ‘poor Boy’ was ‘low and upset’ when he wished his mother good-bye. So was she; and he returned for a moment after he had left her room, close to tears. He had felt his father’s death far more deeply than she had supposed, and was distressed to leave her, knowing that in her misery she had almost grown to hate him. Still, he was thankful to get away; time might heal the wound.
4
The Bridegroom
Alix looked so sweet and lovely … and Bertie so brightened up.
The Prince embarked upon his tour looking ‘very gloomy’. He had been instructed by his mother to travel in ‘the very strictest incognito’, to visit sovereigns in ‘strict privacy’, to accept no invitations which did not accord with his ‘present very deep mourning’, and then only from persons of ‘royal or high official or personal rank or [of] superior character and attainments’. At the same time Bruce had been told to bring his charge’s mind constantly to bear upon the path of duty which had been marked out for him by his father.
In Vienna the Emperor Franz Joseph, who was with difficulty dissuaded from holding a military parade and state dinner, visited the Prince in his hotel and conducted him round the city. In Venice he was entertained by the Empress Elizabeth of Austria; and in Trieste by the Archduke Maximilian, the Emperor’s brother. At Trieste he went aboard the royal yacht, Osborne, which had been sent out to meet him there, seeming quite as despondent as he had been on leaving England. But as he sailed down the Dalmatian coast, calling in at Corfu and Albania, he began, for the first time since his father’s death, to display some of his former cheerful spirits. He wrote home to Charles Wynn-Carrington, thanking him for news of Nellie Clifden, whom he ‘had not heard about for a long time’, trusting that he would ‘occasionally look at a book’, and telling him of the charms of Vienna, a city ‘especially well adapted to a gay fellow like you’.
On 1 March the Osborne docked at Alexandria where Canon Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford — an indefatigable sightseer and an expert on the Holy Land, about which he had written a book — joined the party as the Prince’s chaplain and guide. Canon Stanley had not in the least wanted to leave Oxford for such a purpose, and the more he saw of the Prince the more he regretted having given way to the Queen’s pressing request that he should do so. The young man appeared not only to be exasperatingly conscious of his own importance but not in the least interested in sightseeing, admitting to the Canon that he would much rather go out shooting crocodiles than be taken round a lot of ‘tumble-down’ old temples. After a fortnight, however, Stanley began to change his mind. Admittedly the boy was on occasions rather frivolous, insisting, for example, on riding a donkey through the streets of Cairo to the horror of an elderly pasha who had been deputized to look after him; seeming more anxious to climb to the top of the Great Pyramid than in learning about its history; and affecting to find in the features of the relief of Queen Cleopatra in the temple of Dendera an uncanny resemblance to those of Samuel Wilberforce, the eloquent, diplomatic Bishop of Oxford. Yet there was more in the Prince than he had at first thought, decided Stanley, who was particularly gratified by the obliging manner in which the young man agreed to give up shooting on Sundays; and towards the end of March this more favourable opinion was confirmed when news arrived in Egypt that the Canon’s mother had died during their absence from England and the Prince’s sympathy was touchingly sincere. ‘It is impossible not to like him,’ Stanley concluded; ‘and to be constantly with him brings out his astonishing memory of names and persons.’
From Cairo, where they stayed in a splendid palace provided for them by the Viceroy of Egypt, Said Pasha — whose hospitality, the Prince reckoned, cost him £8,000 — the party steamed up the Nile to Karnak, then back to Cairo where they embarked on the Osborne for Jaffa. From Jaffa, escorted by a troop of Turkish cavalry and attended by a caravan of fifty servants, they rode down to Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Jericho and Hebron. Here, on being asked by the local governor not to enter the mosque for fear of provoking an outbreak of Muslim fanaticism, General Bruce loftily informed the Governor-General of Palestine that the Prince of Wales’s ‘extreme displeasure’ would be aroused were he to be denied entrance to a building beneath which Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were supposed to be buried — even though it had been sealed to Christian travellers since before the Third Crusade almost seven centuries ago. The local governor being overborne by Bruce’s domineering manner, a regiment of cavalry was detailed to stand by while the Christians entered the mosque.
‘Well, you see,’ the Prince commented to Stanley, ‘exalted rank has some advantages, after all.’ ‘Yes, Sir,’ the Canon replied gravely, ‘and I hope that you will always make good use of them.’
After spending Good Friday at Nazareth and Easter Sunday at Tiberias on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, the Prince arrived, towards the end of April, at Damascus. Here, on entering the bazaar, he was watched in resentful silence by Muslim traders who remained seated as he passed, despite the attempts by some members of his party to make them pay ‘more proper respect’. At Damascus was the former Lady Ellenborough, the notorious, old but still beautiful adventuress, who, having been divorced by Ellenborough for her adultery with Felix von Schwarzenberg, was now married to a Bedouin sheikh. More intrigued by this exotic old lady than by many of the other sights he had seen, the Prince, to Canon Stanley’s distress, was also more happy with his guns than his guide-books. As well as gazelles and hares, he shot vultures and larks, partridges, quails, geese, crows, owls and even lizards when nothing more suitable came within his sights. With markedly less enthusiasm he collected flowers and the leaves of strange trees and plants, which he pressed in a book for his sister Victoria.
On 6 May he rode into Beirut and from there sailed in the Osborne for Tyre and Sidon, Tripoli and Rhodes, Patmos and Smyrna. Anchoring off the Dardanelles where the British Ambassador came aboard with various Turkish officials, he arrived at Constantinople on 20 May; and, after a long and rather awkward audience with the Sultan — whom the British Ambassador thought that he nevertheless handled with precocious tact — he had a pleasant week’s stay at the British Embassy before departing for Athens. His stay in Greece being cut short by the threat of riots against the unpopular King Otto, the Prince sailed for home on the last day of May. He stepped ashore on his way at various Ionian islands, and arrived at Marseilles on 10 June. Four days later, having bought some presents in Paris and visited the Emperor at Fontainebleau, he was home again with his mother at Windsor after an absence of just over four months. He looked well and sunburned and had begun to grow the beard that he never afterwards shaved.