If more work had been found for the Prince to do, royalists almost universally agreed, the monarchy would never have come to such a pass. It was the emphatic opinion of Laurence Oliphant, the writer and traveller whom he had met in Austria, that the Prince’s defects of character were largely due to ‘a position which never allowed him responsibility or forced him into action’; while W.T. Stead, editor of the Review of Reviews, argued that ‘if the Prince of Wales had been saddled with his father’s duties, he might have developed somewhat more of his father’s virtues’.
Yet, even now that he was nearly thirty, the Prince was still excluded from the exercise of any real authority. For years he had had to content himself with such trivial employments as taking his mother’s place at levees at St James’s Palace, receiving foreign sovereigns, making visits to various provincial towns, laying foundation stones, opening buildings and exhibitions, accepting numerous governorships, colonelcies and presidencies of no very demanding nature, reviewing the troops at Aldershot, lending his support to such enterprises as the establishment of a College of Music and the erection of the Albert Hall, and driving to the opening of Parliament, to which he had been admitted a peer of the realm as Duke of Cornwall and in which he occasionally attended debates on non-controversial measures that interested him. He also delivered occasional public speeches which, with practice, he did very well, making up for any lack of originality of thought or expression by a relaxed, friendly manner and an easy fluency which were all that the circumstances normally required.
He was, of course, constantly in demand; and he rarely declined any important invitation which could be fitted in with his ‘social duties’ and which he felt he could accept without being regarded as ‘an advertisement and a puff to the object in view’.
The Prince told his mother in April 1871:
Besides our social duties, which are indeed very numerous in the Season, we have also many to do as your representatives. You have no conception of the quantity of applications we get, in the course of the year, to open this place, lay a stone, attend public dinners, luncheons, fêtes without end; and sometimes people will not take NO for an answer. I certainly think we must be made of wood or iron if we could go through all they ask, and all these things have increased tenfold since the last ten years.
Whenever he himself offered his services in the performance of more important duties in the diplomatic field — he was not really very much interested in any other work — he was still invariably rebuffed, either by the Queen or the government, mainly on the grounds that he was so indiscreet. At the time of the Franco–Prussian War, he had openly expressed the ill-founded belief that the Prussians would receive a thoroughly deserved hiding; and when his comments were reported to Count von Bernstorff, who complained about them to the government, he told his mother that Bernstorff was ‘an ill-conditioned man’ and that he longed for the day when he would be removed from London. At the same time he offered to act as a kind of roving diplomat between Paris and Berlin, giving the government unsolicited advice as to how a peace settlement might be reached. The advice was dismissed as ‘royal twaddle’; and soon after the French surrender of Metz and Strasbourg to the Prussians, the Foreign Secretary was once more obliged to complain of some fresh indiscretion by the Prince, who had been ‘more than usually unwise in his talk’.
The Princess of Wales was even more outspokenly anti-Prussian than her husband. She had been in Copenhagen with her three eldest children on her usual summer visit at the time of France’s declaration of war, and the Prince had gone out to fetch her home. She adopted quite as partisan an attitude towards the conflict as she had done during the fight for Schleswig and Holstein. ‘Alix is not clever,’ the Queen lamented yet again. ‘Her feelings are so anti-German and yet so little really English that she is no help.’ Nor was this her only fault. Although she was pregnant again, she continued with her social round as though she were still a young, irresponsible girl rather than the twenty-six-year-old mother of five children.
The Queen was not, therefore, surprised to learn that the Princess’s baby, the last child she was to have, was born prematurely on 6 April 1871 and died within two days. Both parents were heartbroken. The Princess cried bitterly, blaming herself for her poor little son’s death. The Prince cried, too, ‘the tears rolling down his cheeks’, so the Princess’s lady-in-waiting, Mrs Francis Stonor, recorded. He placed the body in the coffin himself, arranging the pall and the white flowers. Through her bedroom window the Princess saw him making his way sadly to the grave in the funeral procession, holding hands with his two sons, who walked beside him in grey kilts and black gloves.
The Queen blamed him more than the mother for what had happened, and Gerald Wellesley was told to speak to him about his care of his wife. The Prince was ‘evidently deeply attached to the Princess’, Wellesley reported after this talk, ‘despite all the flattering distractions that beset him in society; and the Dean hopes and believes that he will be more careful about her in future.’ The trouble was, as the Prince himself commented, Alix was ‘naturally very active in mind and body’ and he was sure that ‘a sedentary life would not suit her’.
She certainly did not lead a sedentary life thereafter. A few months after the death of her baby, she was on the Continent again with her husband. They went to the Passion Play at Oberammergau together, after he had tramped over the battlefields of the recent war. Then they paid another visit to Jugenheim. And from there the Prince went by himself to Homburg, a favorite haunt, where, so English readers of Reynolds’s Newspaper were informed, he staked ‘his gold upon the chances of a card or the roll of a ball — gold, be it remembered, that he obtained from the toil and sweat of the British working-man, without himself producing the value of a halfpenny.’
‘These things go from bad to worse,’ Gladstone remarked gloomily in a letter to the Foreign Secretary after reading the account of the Prince’s gambling in Reynolds’s Newspaper, whose guaranteed circulation of well over 300,000 copies was the largest in the world. ‘I saw What Does She Do With It? [a widely read publication by G.O. Trevelyan attacking the Queen’s alleged parsimony and hoarding of money] on the walls of the station at Birkenhead.’
Less than six months after this letter was written, however, both the Queen and the Prince, driving through the streets of London together, were accorded the most tumultuous reception. For this the credit was due not to a sudden change in the Prince’s way of life but to the noisome drains of Londesborough Lodge near Scarborough.
The Prince and Princess went to stay with Lord Londesborough at the end of October on their way back to Norfolk from Scotland. The Prince arrived home at Sandringham in time for his thirtieth birthday on 9 November 1871, and soon afterwards fell ill. On the 23 November it was announced that he had typhoid fever. Just over a week later one of his fellow guests at Londesborough Lodge, the Earl of Chesterfield, died of the disease; the Prince’s groom followed him; and it was feared that the Prince would die himself.
By 29 November, so Lady Macclesfield heard, his ravings had become ‘very dreadful, and for that cause the Princess was kept out of his room one day, all sorts of revelations and names of people mentioned’. When he was calmer and the Princess was allowed in to see him he called her ‘my good boy’. She reminded him that she was his wife. ‘That was once but is no more,’ he replied. ‘You have broken your vows.’ At other times he was filled with remorse, and he told his wife that he felt sure she would leave him now because he had neglected her so.