Ample as this sum appeared to several advanced Liberal members of the House of Commons, it was paltry compared to the £125,000 a year which, in addition to the revenues of the Duchy of Cornwall, had been granted to King George III’s heir on his marriage to Queen Caroline, and even more paltry in comparison with the fortunes owned by various leading figures in the society over which the Prince was now required to preside. So Parliament agreed to provide another £40,000 for the Prince and £10,000 as ‘pin money’ for the Princess, who was at the same time promised £30,000 a year in the event of her widowhood. But even so, the Prince’s income was much less than half that enjoyed by the Marquess of Westminster. And there were several other landowners, including the Dukes of Sutherland, Buccleuch, Devonshire and Northumberland, and the Marquess of Bute and the Earl of Derby, who received rents from their estates far in excess of the whole of the Prince’s income. There were still others who, with landed estates far more profitable than Sandringham, augmented their great fortunes by marrying the daughters of multi-millionaires.
The Princess of Wales had no money of her own at all. Indeed, when her father heard that she was to receive £10,000 a year from the English government, he could not refrain from remarking that it was five times as much as he had himself. But although the Prince had married a Princess without any money, and although Lord Palmerston, the Prime Minister, was not alone in thinking that his income, even when increased by Parliament, was wholly inadequate to his needs, he was able, by spending some £20,000 of capital a year, to live more or less as comfortably as he wished for the time being. He was also able to turn Sandringham into a model country estate, building new roads, planting trees, redesigning the garden with the help of the head gardener from Balmoral, establishing working-men’s clubs, schools and a hospital, improving the farms and cottages, extending the sporting facilities, buying an additional 4,000 acres and completely reconstructing the house.
The Prince and Princess went to stay at Sandringham together for the first time the week after their return from honeymoon, on 28 March 1864. They were both completely happy there, as Disraeli discovered when invited to dinner at Windsor the next month. Disraeli wrote of that occasion:
The Prince proposed that he should present me to Her Royal Highness and I went up accordingly. I had therefore, at last, a good opportunity of forming an opinion of her appearance, which was highly favourable. Her face was delicate and refined; her features regular; her brow well moulded; her mouth beautiful; her hair good and her ears small. She was very thin. She had the accomplishment of being gracious without smiling. She had repose. She spoke English, but not with the fluency I had expected, and I don’t think she always comprehended what was said. The Prince hovered about her.
The Princess told Disraeli that they were ‘delighted with their London residence’ and that when they awoke in the morning they looked out into the garden together and listened to the birds singing. They spoke of nightingales, and Disraeli asked the Princess if she knew what they fed upon:
She addressed the question to the Prince, which he could not answer. I told them — upon glow worms; exactly the food which nightingales should require. The Prince was interested by this and exclaimed: ‘Is that a fact, or is it a myth?’
‘Quite a fact, Sir; for my woodman is my authority, for we have a great many nightingales at Hughenden, and a great many glow worms’.
‘We have got one nightingale at Sandringham,’ said the Prince, smiling.
Both he and the Princess were as pleased with Sandringham as they were with Marlborough House. The Prince was delighted to have a place of his own where he could do as he liked, the Princess as charmed with the room which had been specially decorated for her as a private sitting-room as with the flat surrounding countryside that reminded her of Denmark. Not all their attendants were so taken with Sandringham, however. The Princess’s lady-of-the-bedchamber, Lady Macclesfield, lamented the fact that there were
no fine trees, no water, no hills, in fact no attraction of any sort. There are numerous coverts but no fine woods, large enclosed turnip fields, with an occasional haystack to break the line of the horizon. It would be difficult to find a more ugly or desolate-looking place … The wind blows keen up from the Wash and the spring is said to be unendurable in that part of Norfolk. It is of course a wretched hunting country and it is dangerous riding as the banks are honeycombed with rabbit-holes. As there was all England to choose from I do wish they had had a finer house in a more picturesque and cheerful situation.
But even though the countryside was rather bleak and the alterations to the house had not yet been finished, most of the Prince’s first guests enjoyed themselves. Lord Granville sent ‘great reports’ to the Queen; and Canon Stanley, who was also there, had a very pleasant time and was deeply touched when the Princess, ‘so winning and so graceful, and yet so fresh and free and full of life’, brought her new English prayer-book to the drawing-room on Easter Saturday evening and asked him to explain the English Communion Service to her.
Alterations to the house continued intermittently for months. A billiard room was built, the conservatory was converted into a bowling alley, and then, in 1870, the house was entirely reconstructed at enormous expense in an Elizabethan style by A.J. Humbert, an undistinguished architect who had helped to design the mausoleum at Frog-more. Filled with contemporary furniture and pictures, with trophies and mementoes brought back by the Prince from his travels, with paintings of Danish castles and Highland cattle, with weapons and armour, palms and statuary, display cabinets full of china, masses of photographs on tables, and with all manner of ornaments including models of the owners’ animals and a big stuffed baboon with paws outstretched for visitors’ cards beside the front door, it was as cluttered as any house of its period. The main rooms were large and light with tall bay windows; but some of the upstairs rooms were extraordinarily poky, though for a Victorian house unusually well supplied with bathrooms.
Guests arrived by special train at Wolferton. They were met at the station and driven through the immense wrought and cast iron gates, designed by Thomas Jeckell, which were a wedding present from the gentry of Norfolk. On either side of the drive they could usually see an assortment of the Princess’s innumerable dogs — pugs and spaniels, beagles and borzois, basset hounds, chows and terriers, Eskimo sledge-dogs and French bull-dogs — or a number of curiously unconcerned rabbits. They entered the hall, known as the saloon, which was also the living quarters of a white cockatoo, to be met there by their host. And, once settled in, they were almost certain to enjoy themselves, provided they were not the victim of one of those dreadful practical jokes which were enjoyed by host and hostess alike but which were fortunately not often as heartless as that played upon a young midshipman who, on accepting a mince pie at tea-time, found it full of mustard.