At the instigation of the Foreign Secretary the Prince had made a formal call upon M. Thiers, the President of the recently established Third Republic, while he was in Paris, though it ‘went very much against the grain to do so’, as he chose to believe that republicanism was only a passing phase in France and some form of monarchy would soon take its place. This meeting had gone off well enough; but a subsequent chance meeting at Trouville, where the Prince had landed with his friend the Duke of St Albans while enjoying a short cruise in the Duke’s yacht Xantha, had had serious repercussions. The Prince’s long talk with Thiers on this second occasion was observed by a German spy, who reported it to Berlin, where Bismarck expressed deep concern as to its likely content.
Yet while he annoyed the Germans by his evidently close relationship with Thiers, the Prince exasperated many French republicans by his intimate friendships with both the old French aristocracy and the family of the ex-Emperor Napoleon III. When Napoleon died at Chislehurst in Kent, where he had been living in exile, the Prince was with difficulty dissuaded from attending the funeral, which the Bonapartists intended to use as an excuse for a demonstration against both the French Republic and Germany. He could not, however, be prevented from asking several leading Bonapartists to come to stay at Sandringham after the funeral, which prompted Gladstone to lament that, while the Prince was undeniably good-natured, his ‘total want of political judgement, either inherited or acquired’, was a matter for grave concern.
Nor could the Prince be prevented from setting out the following year upon a tour of the Loire Valley where he intended to stay in the châteaux of various prominent members of the old aristocracy, calling on his way at Esclimont near Rambouillet, the home of the Duc de la Rochefoucauld-Bisaccia, who had recently been relieved as French Ambassador in London for having supported the Comte de Paris in his claims to the French throne. The Queen did all she could to prevent the Prince from going on this holiday. He was already on the Continent, having gone to Potsdam with the Princess to attend the confirmation of his nephew Wilhelm, the son of the Crown Princess. From Potsdam, Princess Alexandra had gone to stay with her parents in Copenhagen, leaving the Prince to go on by himself to Baden where once again he provided newspapers with stories about his addiction to gambling which, combined with rumours that he was now over half a million pounds in debt, made it necessary to issue a formal denial of his financial difficulties.
It could not be denied, though, that he was excessively fond of gambling, and for this reason Sir William Knollys had deprecated the Prince’s going to Baden at all. It was impossible to say what the Prince’s betting habits might lead to, Sir William solemnly told the Queen. ‘And, as your Majesty was once pleased to observe to him, the Country could never bear to have George IV as Prince of Wales over again.’ As for Paris, why that was
the most dangerous place in Europe, and it would be well if it were never revisited. In fact, remaining on the Continent, whenever it involves a separation of the Prince and Princess of Wales — whether Her Royal Highness is in Denmark or elsewhere — cannot be otherwise than most undesirable, and in the interests of both would be better limited to the shortest period.
But the Prince would brook no interference from either Knollys or the Queen; and when the Queen asked Disraeli, who had become Prime Minister for the second time, to stop the Prince from going to France en garçon, Disraeli thought it as well merely to ask the Prince to be prudent, fearing that if he attempted to prevent the Prince from carrying out any private plans he had set his heart on he would destroy what ‘little influence’ he already possessed.
So the Prince set off to France to visit those friends of his whose company he was beginning to find so alluring, to Mouchy-le-Chatel to see the Duc de Mouchy and his beautiful half-American wife, who was a granddaughter of Napoleon’s brother-in-law, Marshal Joachim Murat, once King of Naples; to Mello to stay with the lovely and lascivious Princesse de Sagan, a banker’s daughter who was supposed to have admitted the Prince of Wales to her ever-expanding train of lovers; to the Duc de la Tremouille at Serrant; to the Duchesse de Luynes at Dampierre; to the Duc d’Aumfile at Chantilly; and then to Paris where he spent many happy hours at the Avenue d’Ifina house of Henry Standish, grandson of the Duc de Mouchy and of an Englishman who had made his home in France after inheriting a fortune, and husband of the delightful, ingenuous Hélène Standish, whose extraordinary resemblance to her admired and beloved friend the Princess of Wales she emphasized with all the means at her disposal in a manner less touching than absurd. The Prince enjoyed himself enormously, and was alleged to have made love to several obliging Frenchwomen, though not to the Marquise d’Harcourt, who claimed to have promised to place a rose on the latch of her bedroom door, so that the Prince could find his way to her in the night, and then planted in her bed the ugliest kitchenmaid in the château.
The month before he embarked on his continental holiday, the Prince had given a huge party which rivalled in extravagance those splendid fêtes presided over by the Prince Regent at Carlton House. Sir Frederic Leighton had been called in to supervise the decorations at Marlborough House where, on 21 July, over fourteen hundred guests had been invited to appear in fancy dress. The Prince, in the improbable and elaborate guise of Charles I with a black felt white-plumed hat blazing with diamonds and a wig of trailing curls much fairer than the Blessed Martyr’s, opened the ball with a Venetian quadrille partnered by the Duchess of Sutherland — ‘as usual’, according to Lord Ronald Gower, ‘the most beautiful and graceful woman in the place’. The music played on until dawn with a break for supper, which was served in two enormous, tapestry-hung scarlet marquees. Disraeli, who arrived rather late and not in fancy dress, having had to make a speech at the Mansion House, thought the whole affair was ‘gorgeous, brilliant, fantastic’.
Less gorgeous and brilliant but more to the taste of his quieter friends were the garden parties which the Prince and Princess held in the grounds of Chiswick House. And infinitely more to the taste of the Prince’s young raffish friends were those parties occasionally held in houses borrowed for the night where the Prince entertained what Francis Knollys called his ‘actress friends’, and where cockfights were staged for the benefit of those who preferred gambling to girls.
The Queen valiantly endeavoured to turn her son’s mind to more intellectual pursuits, but with less and less hope of success. While he was still Prime Minister, Gladstone had urged her Majesty to try to persuade the Prince to ‘adopt the habit of reading’ since the ‘regular application of but a small portion of time would enable him to master many of the able and valuable works which bear upon royal and public duty’. But the Queen had replied irritably, ‘She has only to say that the P of W has never been fond of reading, and that from his earliest years it was impossible to get him to do so. Newspapers and, very rarely, a novel, are all he ever reads.’
Gladstone had been invited down to Sandringham to talk to the Prince, who, though strongly opposed now to the Prime Minister’s Irish plans, had expressed himself as being ‘very glad to have an opportunity of discussing with Mr Gladstone the subject of some useful employment’. But the Prime Minister had not so much as mentioned the subject; and, since the Prince made no reference to it either, the opportunity had been lost.
So the months passed and the few duties found for the Prince remained either social, ceremonial or civic. He acted as host and guide to the Shah of Persia, who arrived in England to stay at Buckingham Palace in June 1873; he also entertained the Tsarevich, his wife and children at Marlborough House that same summer. In January the next year he went to St Petersburg to attend the wedding of his brother Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, to the Tsar’s daughter, the Grand Duchess Marie; and in the spring he busied himself with arrangements for the Tsar’s state visit to England. From time to time he would leave London to open a building or exhibition in the provinces, to make a speech in some guildhall or assembly room, to inspect a factory at Birmingham, to walk round a building estate at Coventry, or to make a tour of the docks and pierhead, the Free Library and Museum, the Assize Courts and St George’s Hall at Liverpool. He performed such duties conscientiously, but without undue solemnity, sometimes adding zest to a rather tedious day’s work by playing one of those jokes he found so entertaining upon a member of his entourage. For instance, in Coventry, which he visited in company with the Marquess of Hartington and Hartington’s mistress, the Duchess of Manchester, he laid plans for the discomfiture of the somewhat pompous Hartington, who had recently extricated himself from an expensive affair with the delectable courtesan Catherine Walters, known as ‘Skittles’, a former employee in a bowling alley in Liverpool. The Prince asked for a bowling alley to be included in his tour of Coventry and arranged for the innocent Mayor to tell Lord Hartington, who could be relied upon to display little interest in it, that this unusual item had been included in the itinerary at the special request of his Royal Highness in tribute to his Lordship’s love of skittles.