The Prince’s letters to his friend Sir Edmund Filmer, provide a commentary on his restless social life in the middle of the 1860s. They refer to days of ‘wonderfully good shooting’, on one of which the Prince himself accounted for ‘229 head of which 175 were pheasants’; to successful bets placed at Goodwood and Ascot; to ‘very pleasant’ afternoons sailing off the coast of the Isle of Wight in his ‘little yacht (only thirty-seven tons)’; to expeditions to Scotland with two new rifles provided for him by James Purdey & Sons; to the ‘gaieties and frivolities of the great city of London’ where, Filmer was advised, it was quite right for an ‘homme Mari? ’ to amuse himself occasionally ‘on a tack by himself ’; and to numerous weekends in country houses which were invariably followed by exchanges of photographs:
The groups that were taken have now come but the photos might have been better — however, such as they are, I suppose your better half would like to have them … I am having them mounted and will send them to her … I enclose some more photos for Lady Filmer — for which I must almost apologise — as she will be quite bored possessing so many of me — but the waste paper basket is always useful … I send the new photos … of course, the ladies moved … please thank Lady Filmer for hers and I hope she won’t forget to send me one in her riding habit — as she promised.
At Sandringham the Prince’s daily routine varied little from day to day, except on Sundays when the guests were expected to attend the church in the park, the ladies arriving at the beginning of the service, the gentlemen, having left their walking-sticks against a tombstone, often not appearing before the sermon as the Prince could not bear to sit still for so long. He eventually took to placing his watch on the back of the pew in front of him so that the rector should not be tempted to prolong his sermon for more than the prescribed ten minutes, and he was obviously relieved when the time came to stand up and sing the hymn in which he invariably joined in his loud and powerful voice.
Sunday was also the day for the guests to be conducted over the estate; to be shown the farm and the stables where, as Gladstone’s secretary noticed, the Princess liked to feed ‘almost all the horses severally with her own hands’; to walk round the kitchen gardens and the hothouses, the Italian garden, the Alpine garden and the lavender walk, the small menagerie, the joss-house, brought back from China and given to the Prince by Admiral Sir Henry Keppel, the kennels where the Princess’s dogs were kept, and the nearby cemetery where they would be buried when they died. The ladies would then be taken over the house and into the Princess’s private rooms with their clutter of small tables and photographs in silver and tortoiseshell frames; of ornaments and boxes in glass-fronted display cases; of dressing-tables so crowded with miniatures and bibelots that, as Lady Randolph Churchill was to notice, there was no room for brushes or toilet things; of wardrobes and cupboards containing those exquisite, simple dresses which she accumulated in such numbers and with which she could never bear to part. On a perch in the centre of the room was a rather fierce-looking white parrot which made disconcerting pecks at ladies who got too close.
The inspection over, guests would assemble for tea at five o’clock, either in the Princess’s special tea-room next to the farm dairy or, more usually, in the hall, the ladies having discarded the clothes they had worn at luncheon for elaborate tea-gowns. They would change again for dinner and, with the men in full evening dress with decorations, would come downstairs to await their Royal Highnesses before proceeding in pairs to the dining-room, ‘each lady in turn having the privilege of being taken in by her royal host’. ‘The Prince arranged the list himself,’ Lady Randolph Churchill recorded, ‘and was very particular that there should be no hitch as to people finding their places at once. An equerry with a plan of the dining-table would explain to each man who was to be his partner and where he was to sit.’
After dinner on Sundays, party games like ‘General Post’ were played and commonly went on until two or three o’clock in the morning with occasional breaks for a game of bowls, but not before midnight, it being considered an unseemly game for the Sabbath. On weekday evenings there were card games and dancing which often continued quite as late. The Prince was an extremely energetic dancer, urging his partner to let herself go if she seemed too stiff and inhibited, declaring, ‘I like to dance to the tune’. At the three annual balls, the County, the Farmers’ and — most enjoyable of all — the Servants’ Ball, the jigs and reels continued almost until dawn. On other evenings, when the ladies had gone up to bed, the Prince and his cronies might retire to the bowling alley or to the billiard room, where they would light cigars beside the screen upon which the likenesses of such eminent Victorians as Lord Salisbury and Matthew Arnold were displayed in ‘very dubious attitudes’ in the company of naked women.
Yet the Prince never neglected his staider guests. Edward Hamilton, who felt it was ‘a little shy work going in’ to the entrance hall on his arrival, was soon made to feel completely at home. The Prince was ‘a model of hosts’, and nearly always went upstairs with the new arrivals on their first visit to make sure that they had everything they wanted before they went to bed, even putting more coals on the fire and making sure that the water in the jugs was hot enough.
On most weekday mornings, accompanied by about eight or ten of his male guests, the Prince would go out shooting, an occupation to which he devoted a great deal of time and money. The day’s sport began promptly at 10.15 a.m. by the Sandringham clocks, that was to say at a quarter to ten. The Prince’s clocks in Norfolk were always kept half an hour fast, a practice — also adopted at Holkham Hall — which the Prince followed partly to economize daylight, so that he could spend more time in the open air, but also, it was said, in the vain hope that the Princess might be induced to become more punctual.
The Prince enjoyed few activities more than a grand battue; and once, after shooting as a guest of the Bavarian financier, Baron von Hirsch auf Gereuth, at St Johann, where 20,000 partridges were killed by about ten guns in ten days, he declared that that certainly beat ‘everything on record’ and would ‘quite spoil’ him for ‘any shooting at home’.
All the same he managed very well at Sandringham where the light and sandy soil was particularly suited to the rearing of partridges and pheasants; where there were also woodcock and wild duck to be had; where hares and rabbits abounded; and where his game-keepers were as efficient and smartly dressed as any in Germany. They turned out on shooting-days wearing green velveteen coats and bowler hats with gold cords, accompanied by regiments of beaters in smocks and black felt hats decorated with blue and red ribbons. Formed up in a vast semicircle, the beaters advanced, driving the birds into the air towards the fence behind which the guns were concealed. Behind them, rows of boys waving blue and pink flags prevented the birds from flying back. A farmer who used to watch them wrote: