As soon as he learned that he could not avoid being dragged into the case, the Prince told his wife that he would have to appear in court. She loyally stood by him, appearing with him in public, cancelling none of her engagements, making it clear to the world that, whatever others might think of her husband’s behaviour, she would steadfastly support him.
As soon as he informed her of his predicament, the Queen assured him by telegram that she would support him, too, though she could not forbear advising him to be more circumspect in future. But comforted as he was by his family’s loyalty, by the view of the Lord Chancellor who read the letters he had written to Lady Mordaunt and thought them ‘unexceptionable in every way’, and by the assurances that the judge would protect him in the event of any ‘improper questions’ being put to him, the Prince could not but await the trial in a state of extreme agitation. He wrote apprehensively:
I shall be subject to a most rigid cross examination by [Mordaunt’s counsel] who will naturally try to turn and twist everything that I say in order to compromise me. On the other hand, if I do not appear, the public may suppose that I shrink from answering these imputations which have been cast upon me. Under either circumstance I am in a very awkward position.
The Prince — already accused in Reynolds’s Newspaper of being ‘an accomplice in bringing dishonour to the homestead of an English gentleman’ — was called to give evidence before Lord Penzance and a special jury on 23 February 1870. It had been decided not to cite him as a co-respondent, but, a counter-petition having been filed to the effect that Lady Mordaunt — by this time in a lunatic asylum — was, in fact, insane, the Prince had been subpoenaed by her counsel to appear as a witness on her behalf.
When he appeared in the witness box, he showed none of the nervousness he confessed to feeling. He answered the questions put to him by Lady Mordaunt’s counsel unhesitatingly, and when asked the blunt question, ‘Has there ever been any improper familiarity or criminal act between yourself and Lady Mordaunt?’ he replied loudly and firmly, ‘No never!’ to applause from the spectators in the public gallery. After seven minutes he was allowed to sit down. There was no cross-examination, and Sir Charles’s petition was dismissed on the grounds that since his wife was insane she could not be a party to the suit.
‘I trust by what I have said today,’ the Prince wrote to his mother before setting out to dinner with the Prime Minister, ‘that the public at large will be satisfied that the gross imputations which have been so wantonly cast upon me are now cleared up.’
The public, however, were not satisfied; and they made it only too plain to the Prince that they thoroughly disapproved of his conduct. Reynolds’s Newspaper suggested:
Even the staunchest supporters of monarchy shake their heads and express anxiety as to whether the Queen’s successor will have the tact and talent to keep royalty upon its legs and out of the gutter. When, therefore, the people of England read one year in their journals of the future King appearing prominently in the divorce court and in another of his being the centre of attraction at a German gaming-table, or public hell, it is not at all surprising that rumours concerning the Queen’s health have occasioned much anxiety and apprehension.
The Princess of Wales — who looked ‘lovely but very sad’, according to Mrs Gladstone’s niece, on the evening of the Prince’s ordeal in the witness box — was cheered and applauded when she appeared alone. Yet when her husband was with her she was subjected to those jeers, hisses and catcalls that all too often greeted him in the streets and in the theatres. On their appearance at the Olympic Theatre with the Duchess of Manchester and Oliver Montagu a week after the Mordaunt trial, the scattered cheers of a claque placed in the gallery by ‘that ass Newry’, the owner, provoked an almost deafening roar of booing from the surrounding audience. And at a public dinner in the City the toastmaster’s summons to the guests to raise their glasses to the Prince of Wales was greeted with shouts of ‘To the Princess!’ Feelings were still running strongly against the Prince over three months later when he was loudly booed as he drove up Ascot race-course, though, after the last race had been won by a horse in which he was believed to have an interest, he pleased the crowd that cheered him in the royal stand by raising his hat to them and calling out jocularly, ‘You seem to be in a better temper now than you were this morning, damn you!’
But he could not accept the people’s attitude towards him as lightheartedly as he sometimes liked to pretend. Nor could the government. Nor could the Queen. The temper of the jeering crowds was matched by caricatures in magazines, by articles in the Press, by scurrilous pamphlets and by publications such as Letter from a Freemason by Charles Bradlaugh, the radical atheist, who expressed the hope that the Prince of Wales would ‘never dishonour his country by becoming its King’.
The Queen, who, at the time of the Mordaunt trial, had confessed to the Lord Chancellor her concern that public knowledge of the Prince’s ‘intimate acquaintance with a young married woman’ could not but ‘damage him in the eyes of the middle and lower classes’, continued to reprimand her son for spending so much of his time in the company of the ‘frivolous, selfish and pleasure-seeking’ rich. The Queen herself, however, was far from blameless for the sad state of the royal family’s reputation. While he was abroad the Prince had countered the Queen’s criticisms of his own conduct by tentatively admonishing her for hers.
‘If you sometimes ever came to London from Windsor,’ he had written to her from Egypt, ‘and then drove for an hour in the Park (where there is no noise) and then returned to Windsor, the people would be overjoyed … we live in radical times, and the more the People see the Sovereign the better it is for the People and the Country.’
The government supported this view. The fund of the monarch’s credit, ‘greatly augmented by good husbandry in the early and middle part of this reign’, was ‘diminishing’, Gladstone privately commented to the Foreign Secretary. ‘And I do not see from whence it is to be replenished as matters now go. To speak in rude and general terms, the Queen is invisible and the Prince of Wales is not respected.’
Indeed, the very existence of the monarchy appeared to be threatened. ‘I hear some speakers openly spoke of a Republic!’ the Prince wrote apprehensively to his sister, reporting the meeting of a ‘tremendous crowd’ in Hyde Park. ‘The Government really ought to have prevented it … The more the Government allow the lower classes to get the upper hand, the more the democratic feeling of the present day will increase.’
There was little the government could effectively do, however, to suppress the republican feeling that had grown up in England. They could not very well silence Charles Bradlaugh, whose speeches virulently condemned the royal family; nor could they prevent the formation of numerous republican clubs, more than fifty of which were established all over England, Wales and Scotland after the fall of the French monarchy. They were powerless to interfere with Charles Dilke, one of the Members of Parliament for Chelsea and an outspoken critic of royalty, who suggested that the enormous cost to the nation of the British royal family was ‘chiefly not waste but mischief’ and that even the middle classes would welcome a republic if it were to be ‘free from the political corruption that [hung] about the monarchy’. When, referring to the extravagant number of officials at court, Dilke said in a speech at Manchester that one of them was a court undertaker, a man in his crowded audience shouted out that it was a pity there was not more work for him to do.