The Queen had strongly disapproved of the Prince’s establishment of this club, whose members were allowed to smoke freely, which was not the case at White’s, and even to enjoy the pleasures of a bowling alley until the residents of Pall Mall protested about the noise and the space was covered over and converted into a billiard room. There were four hundred members of the club, all of them known personally to the Prince; and while the Queen would have considered most of them perfectly respectable, there were some who were certainly not so. The Prince himself was President. Lord Walden, afterwards Marquess of Tweeddale, was Chairman of the Committee. Other members were the Dukes of Sutherland, Manchester and St Albans; the Marquess of Ormonde; the Earls of Rosebery and Leicester; Lords Wharncliffe, Royston and Carrington; William Howard Russell, the war correspondent; Christopher Sykes, who was to bankrupt himself in trying to keep up with the Prince’s expensive habits; and Colonel Valentine Baker, commanding officer of the Prince’s regiment, the Tenth Hussars, who was to be cashiered and imprisoned for a year for allegedly assaulting a nervous governess in a railway carriage.
With all these disparate men the Prince was on terms of easy friendship, enjoying good stories and jokes with them, occasionally getting drunk with them, yet always being quick to stifle the least hint of disrespect. Lord Carrington thought it advisable to warn his son, still one of the Prince’s closest friends, that once ‘boy and university days’ were over he had better ‘commence the proper style of Sir and your Royal Highness as royal people are touchy on such points when they are launched into life and have taken their place’. The Prince would cheerfully indulge a regrettable pleasure in practical jokes. According to Mrs Hwfa Williams, sister-in-law of the Prince’s friend, Colonel Owen Williams, he would place the hand of the blind Duke of Mecklenburg on the arm of the enormously fat Helen Henneker, observing, ‘Now, don’t you think Helen has a lovely little waist?’ And he would be delighted by the subsequent roar of laughter — ‘in which no one joined more heartily than Helen’. Similarly, he would pour a glass of brandy over Christopher Sykes’s head or down his neck or, while smoking a cigar, he would tell Sykes to gaze into his eyes to see the smoke coming out of them and then stab Sykes’s hand with the burning end. Shouts of laughter would also greet this often-repeated trick as the grave and snobbish Sykes responded in his complaisantly lugubrious, inimitably long-suffering way, ‘As your Royal Highness pleases.’
Yet the idea of anyone pouring a glass of brandy over the Prince’s head was unthinkable. Nor must anyone ever refer to him slightingly. A guest at Sandringham, a friend of the Duchess of Marlborough, who went so far as to call him ‘My good man’ was sharply asked to remember that he was not her ‘good man’. And once in the green-room of the Comédie Française, while in conversation with Sarah Bernhardt and the comedian, Frederick Febvre, the Prince was approached by a man who asked him what he thought of the play. The Prince turned his hooded, bluegrey eyes on the interloper and replied, ‘I don’t think I spoke to you.’
When a newcomer to his circle mistook the nature of its atmosphere for a tolerance of familiarity and called across the billiard table after a bad shot, ‘Pull yourself together, Wales!’ he was curtly and coldly informed that his carriage was at the door. Similarly, when another of his guests, Sir Frederick Johnstone, was behaving obstreperously late at night in the billiard room at Sandringham and the Prince felt obliged to admonish him with a gently reproachful, ‘Freddy, Freddy, you’re very drunk!’, Johnstone’s reply — made as he pointed to the Prince’s stomach, rolled his r’s in imitation of his host’s way of speaking and addressed him by a nickname not to be used in his presence — ‘Tum-Tum, you’re verrrry fat!’ induced the Prince to turn sharply away and to instruct an equerry that Sir Frederick’s bags were to be packed before breakfast.
The Queen was deeply distressed that he laid himself open to such impertinent banter. She learned with dismay that he had introduced the vulgar practice of smoking immediately after dinner and that he seemed increasingly drawn to what she described as the ‘fast racing set’ from which she and his father had always ‘kept at a distance’.
Whenever the Prince came to see his mother he was always kind, considerate and affectionate, anxious to smooth over any difficulties and disagreements between them. And after he had gone she almost invariably wrote to tell the Crown Princess how ‘nice’, ‘affectionate’, ‘simple’ or ‘unassuming’ he was, how all his ‘good and amiable qualities’ made ‘one forget and overlook much that one would wish different’. But then there would come reports of his galloping through London in a pink coat with the Royal Buckhounds like an unruly schoolboy, chasing a deer from the Queen’s herd known as ‘the Doctor’ from Harrow through Wormwood Scrubs to Paddington Station where, in the Goods Yard, it was cornered in front of the staff of the Great Western Railway. Or he would give offence by not writing to her when some member of the Household or family died. On the death of Sir Charles Phipps, ‘the second gone of those who knelt with her in that room of death’ in December 1861, she received ‘many affectionate letters but not one line from her own son who owed so much to Sir Charles’. He merely sent a telegram. She felt this ‘acutely’. Or the Queen would receive accounts of the Prince’s being seen in the company of some well-known actress or notorious courtesan. In 1868 his favourite companion was Hortense Schneider; and for her, so it was said, he was neglecting his wife though she was again pregnant.
The Queen suggested to him that he might forsake the pleasures of the London season that year and bring the Princess into the country for a change. But he replied that he had ‘certain duties to fulfil’ in London and raised the sore point of her continued seclusion, which made it all the more necessary for him and his wife to do all they could ‘for society, trade and public matters’.
Well, then, the Queen replied, could he not at least miss the Derby and go up to Balmoral for a few nights instead, to spend her ‘sad birthday’ with her and ‘shed a little sunshine’ over her life? So he went to Balmoral in the early summer of 1868, and all was well for a time. But that autumn there was more trouble when the Prince and Princess made plans to go abroad for several months. It was to be a holiday that would afford a rest from social engagements, an opportunity for the builders to get on with their work at Sandringham, a tonic for the Princess, whose fourth child, Victoria, had been born on 6 July, and a means of escape for the Prince from the scandalous stories connected with Hortense Schneider and what Lady Geraldine Somerset referred to as ‘his troop of fine ladies’.
The trouble began with the Princess’s determination to take her three eldest children with her as far as Copenhagen. She wrote a long letter to the Queen seeking permission to do so, telling her that it would break her heart if she could not take the children with her and how she had been praying daily to God that ‘nothing should arise which would hinder this hoped-for happiness’.