On the way up to Wadi Halfa and on the voyage back to Cairo, she and the Prince collected a great variety of mementoes, including a huge sarcophagus and over thirty mummy cases. They also brought back with them a black ram which the Princess could not bear to see slaughtered by the butcher after it had taken food out of her hand and which was accordingly shipped home to Sandringham; and a ten-year-old Nubian orphan, a pretty, black, turbaned figure — or, in the opinion of the English servants, a horrid little light-fingered pest — later to be seen at Sandringham, by then a baptized member of the Church of England, serving coffee in his native costume and wearing a silver earring.
From Cairo — where the Prince climbed to the top of the Great Pyramid and the Princess visited a harem and returned to the Esbekiah Palace in a yashmak to tell her husband of the gorgeous unveiled faces she had seen — the tourists went on to the Suez Canal. It was an ‘astounding work’, the Prince concluded, after listening to an account of its progress and potentialities by the Khedive, its chief shareholder, and Ferdinand de Lesseps, its designer. Leaving Egypt towards the end of March, the royal party arrived in Constantinople where the Sultan placed the Saleh Palace at their disposal. Hospitality here was as lavish as it had been in Cairo: an orchestra of eighty-four musicians played during every meal; cannon boomed in salute whenever the Prince and Princess left the Palace, even when they were intending to visit the bazaars in the character of Mr and Mrs Williams; guards turned out ready for inspection whenever they returned. At the Sultan’s Palace of Dolmabakshi a banquet was served ? l’Européenne; and the Sultan, who had previously never had a guest (except the Grand Vizier) sitting down at his table, broke with custom to dine with the Prince and Princess of Wales and their attendants. So this visit to Constantinople, as the Prince informed his mother, was not only ‘wonderfully happy’, it might even be called ‘historical’.
After ten days in Turkey, the Prince and Princess set sail for Sebastopol, a tour of the Crimean battlefields, a visit to Yalta and to the Tsar’s palace at Livadia. A further ten days or so were spent at Athens and Corfu with the Princess’s brother King George and his Russian wife, Queen Olga; then, after a boar-hunt on the Albanian coast, the Ariadne sailed to Brindisi, where a special train awaited to take them to Paris for a few days at the Hôtel Bristol before returning home on 12 May.
They had been away for seven months; and the Princess, pregnant again, looked as radiantly happy now that she was reunited with her children as she had done in Egypt. Hearing a few days after her return that an English friend was engaged, she wrote to her to say, ‘May you some day be as happy a wife as I am now with my darling husband and children. This is really the best wish I can give you for your future life.’ No sooner had he arrived home than the Prince immediately plunged into the crowded activities of the London season as though anxious to make up for having missed the first few weeks. Within three hours of his arrival he had been seen at the Royal Academy though due that evening to attend a court concert. The Queen, who had been deeply concerned about the propriety of his behaviour while he had been abroad, was even more worried about him now that he was back in London. ‘There is great fear,’ she told him on learning that he had taken the Duke of Devonshire’s house at Chiswick for week-end visits during the Season, ‘lest you should have gay parties at Chiswick instead of going there to pass the Sunday, a day which is rightly considered one of rest, quietly for your repose with your dear children.’
Apart from the parties there was the matter of his expenses, a subject that had already cropped up in their correspondence, which was in itself a matter for further complaint. The Prince’s letters to his mother had been dispatched quite regularly, but they were neither long nor interesting. From Cairo he had written to impart the intelligence that Alix was ‘much struck with the Pyramids but disappointed with the Sphinx’; and from Russia he had written to say how the pleasure he had taken in going over the Crimean battlefields had been marred by his ‘sadness to think that over 80,000 men perished — for what? For a political object!’ He could write — though, as the Queen might well have expected, he did not write — ‘many pages more on the subject’. It was too late now, however, to complain about the quality of the Prince’s correspondence. But the Queen did feel it her duty to complain about his extravagance.
She had written to him in Paris:
You will, I fear, have incurred immense expenses and I don’t think you will find any disposition (except, perhaps, as regards those which were forced upon you at Constantinople) to give you any more money. I hope dear Alix will not spend much on dress in Paris. There is, besides, a very strong feeling against the luxuriousness, extravagance and frivolity of society; and everyone points to my simplicity. I am most anxious that every possible discouragement should be given to what, in these radical days, added to the many scandalous stories current in Society … reminds me of the Aristocracy before the French Revolution … Pray, dear children, let it be your earnest desire not to vie in dear Alix’s dressing with the fine London Ladies, but rather to be as different as possible by great simplicity which is more elegant.
The Prince admitted:
Our journey has been rather expensive, but it won’t ruin us; and I am much too proud to ask for money as the government don’t propose it. But I think it would be fair if the Foreign Office were to pay some of the expenses at Constantinople [where, so the Prince told the British Ambassador to Russia, he had been expected to disburse great quantities of jewelled snuff-boxes although no one there took snuff] … You need not be afraid, dear Mama, that Alix will commit any extravagances with regard to dresses, etc. I have given her two simple ones, as they make them here better than in London; but if there is anything I dislike, it is extravagant or outré dresses — at any rate in my wife. Sad stories have indeed reached our ears from London of ‘scandals in high life’ which is, indeed, much to be deplored; and still more so the way in which (to use a common proverb) they wash their dirty linen in public.
Deplorable as he professed to find these scandals and their public airing, however, the Prince himself was to be involved in a particularly unsavoury one not long after his return to England.
8
The Prince Under Fire
I hear some speakers openly spoke of a Republic.
Harriet Mordaunt was an attractive young woman of twenty-one occasionally to be seen at the Prince’s parties at Abergeldie and Marlborough House, ‘so much liked in society,’ according to Lord Carrington, ‘such a pretty, pleasant, nice woman; everybody had a good word for her’. But she had always been excitable and highly strung; and after the birth of her first child, whose threatened blindness she attributed to a ‘fearful disease’, she began to display symptoms of eccentricity verging on madness. Yet when she confessed to her husband, Sir Charles Mordaunt, that she had committed adultery ‘often and in open day’ with Lord Cole, Sir Frederick Johnstone and several other men, including the Prince of Wales, he chose to believe her; and, having found a compromising diary in her locked desk, he filed a petition for divorce, adopting towards all her supposed lovers an attitude of bitter distaste. The Prince of Wales strongly protested his innocence. He could not deny that he had written several letters to Lady Mordaunt, nor that he had paid her various visits; but he did deny that he had ever made love to her and that the letters were other than harmless. And when they were published this was certainly seen to be the case. ‘They were not such as to entitle the writer to a place in the next edition of Walpole’s Royal and Noble Authors,’ The Times commented; but they were in no sense compromising.