Despite the Queen’s intransigence, Gladstone considered that the Prince’s illness and recovery provided him with a new opportunity, perhaps a ‘last opportunity’, to settle the royalty question and to bring the matter of the Prince’s employment before the Queen once more. Already annoyed with Gladstone for repeatedly — and rather tactlessly — urging her either to emerge from her seclusion or to let the Prince enjoy more authority in her name, the Queen could not bring herself to give his advice a patient or sympathetic hearing. In fact, she went so far as to accuse him of trying to make use of her for his own political purposes, which so utterly exasperated him that the relationship between Prime Minister and Sovereign became more painfully strained than ever.
Discussions about the Prince’s future employment, nevertheless, continued. If he were not to be allowed to go to Ireland, what alternatives were there? Henry Ponsonby suggested philanthropy, arts and sciences, the army, foreign affairs or India, though he rather doubted that any of them would answer the problem. ‘Nothing can be more genial than [the Prince] is for a few minutes,’ Ponsonby told his wife. ‘But he does not endure. He cannot keep up the interest for any length of time and I don’t think he will ever settle down to business … To get [him] to enter into a subject or decide on it is most difficult. They have to catch snap answers from him as he goes out shooting, etc.’
Of all Ponsonby’s suggestions only one seemed possible to Francis Knollys, son of Sir William Knollys, whom the Prince had recently appointed his secretary. Francis Knollys did not think the Prince possessed the qualities to concern himself in any serious way with philanthropy.
‘The same objection applies to science and art,’ Knollys continued.
‘He has been connected, more or less, for several years with the South Kensington Museum, and with several exhibitions; but I cannot say that he has ever shown any special aptitude in that line.’ The trouble was that, ‘with his disposition’, he was always likely to ‘become irretrievably disgusted with business of every description’ unless his interest in it was fully involved. Nor was he suited for the army, even if it were considered an appropriate employment for the heir to the throne. He badly wanted to be appointed Colonel of the Scots Fusiliers. But this could not be approved: as General Knollys was informed by the master of the Queen’s Household, ‘a good deal of dissatisfaction would arise’ if he were to be appointed; besides, ‘a Prince of Wales cannot make the army a profession’. So, since the Queen’s mind seemed firmly shut against sending the Prince to Ireland, the only choice appeared to be foreign affairs, which had at least ‘afforded occupation to even the most indolent of Princes’.
But the Foreign Secretary could not agree:
The question is of urgent importance, the solution most difficult. The Queen desired me to put the Prince on committees in the Lords. I had him named on one of a non-political character. He attended the first day. He then came to me to ask whether the committee could not be adjourned for ten days. He had some engagements and so on. I am afraid the Foreign Affairs question would be treated in the same way. If the Queen really desired his opinion, sent for him and consulted him he would probably get amused and interested. But if he only gets a few bones after they have been to the Prime Minister and the Queen, and finds nothing but dispatches telling him only what he has skimmed a week before in the paper, he will cease reading them. If all the drafts are to be submitted to him, the delay will be intolerable. If he makes a suggestion on them, it will probably be snubbed by the Queen, or necessarily argued against by me, and he will make no more. And as to really confidential matters, will they remain secret? He asked me to keep him informed during the [Franco-Prussian] War. One evening I got four messages from different friends, telling me to be careful. One of my first notes to him had been handed round a dinner party.
So once more Gladstone returned to the solution of some appointment in Ireland. But it now transpired that the Prince himself had no wish to go there; and when, several years later, he was brought round to the idea again, the Queen, after seeming to yield to the plan, decided in the end that a place there would become ‘a great trouble and tie which [might] become inconvenient’. Lord Spencer, the Irish Viceroy, who had patiently attempted to reconcile the Queen to the Prince’s going to Ireland and who thought that he had succeeded, felt ‘inclined to throw up the sponge and retire to [his] plough in Northamptonshire’.
The Queen reluctantly agreed to the Prince’s visiting Ireland for short periods. He had done so in 1865, in 1868 and 1871 and was to do so again in 1885. And on each occasion the Queen was apprehensive that some part of her own authority would be usurped, that the Prince would be used for political purposes, that he would spend too much time on race-courses or that he would be assassinated. Yet every visit was a success. Only in 1885, when an angry mob attempted to break through a police cordon round Mallow station, and black flags painted with skulls and crossbones were waved beside the railway lines leading down to Cork, were there any really alarming hostile demonstrations. On his return home from this last visit, he was justified in supposing that he deserved both the Prime Minister’s congratulations on the ‘sound judgement, the admirable tact and feeling’ which he had displayed and the Irish Secretary’s assurance that his ‘great public service’ had earned the ‘admiration and gratitude’ of the House of Commons.
When the Prince of Wales returned to Marlborough House on 1 June 1872 after twelve weeks’ convalescence on the Continent, the problem of his future employment still remained unresolved. He had enjoyed his holiday and looked extremely fit, though he had put on a great deal of weight since his illness and was now a good deal stouter than a young man of thirty ought to have been. He and the Princess had stayed for a time at Cannes and, after a little cruising in the royal yacht in the Mediterranean, they had been to Rome and Florence, Milan and Venice, and then to Cadenabbia on Lake Como before returning home by way of Genoa and Paris. They had travelled incognito as the Earl and Countess of Chester and most of their time had been spent in quiet relaxation; but on more than one occasion the Prince had caused embarrassment at home by speaking indiscreetly to the various public figures upon whom he called during his travels. The Prime Minister felt obliged to get up in the House of Commons to deny a report in The Times that the Prince, on a visit to the Vatican, had been so injudicious as to raise with the Pope the controversial issue of his Holiness’s relations with the Italian government. Indeed, the Prince’s indiscretion continued to be a stumbling block to his employment in the kind of work which he would have enjoyed and to which he considered himself best suited.