The next day the Prince was told that Lord Aylesford had decided not to divorce his wife after all. He later separated from her privately, while Lady Blandford also obtained a deed of separation from her husband. The Prince was thus saved any further embarrassment. He could not, however, bring himself to forgive Lord Randolph Churchill for his behaviour during the sad affair. And Churchill, for his part, refused to make an acceptable apology to the Prince. He wrote to the Princess ‘unreservedly to offer’ his ‘most humble and sincere apologies’ if it were felt that he had been ‘guilty of the slightest disrespect … by approaching her on so painful a subject’. But this, he added, was ‘the only apology’ which circumstances warranted his offering.
Churchill, accompanied by his wife, left for a tour of the United States in July, sending beforehand a curt letter of apology which the Prince did not deign to acknowledge. And it was not until pressed to do so by the Queen and the Prime Minister that the Prince agreed to accept a more humble letter of apology drafted by the Lord Chancellor. Even then he declined to do more than send in reply a formal acknowledgement, since Churchill — who, with ostentatious irony, had signed the letter at Saratoga — had added a postscript to the effect that it was only ‘as a gentleman’ that he had been obliged to accept the Lord Chancellor’s wording of the document.
The Prince let it be known that he would never again set foot in any house that offered hospitality to Lord and Lady Randolph Churchill; that he would not meet anyone who chose to accept invitations from them; and that, should he be forced into contact with him at court, he would merely bow to him without speaking. People who continued to entertain him in defiance of the Prince’s wishes were severely reprimanded.
Churchill’s father, the Duke of Marlborough, thought it advisable to withdraw his family from English life altogether; and when Disraeli suggested that he might like to go to Ireland as Viceroy, the Duke agreed to accept the appointment although the salary covered only half the expenses and he had to sell some of the contents of Blenheim to meet them.
Sorry for the Duke but implacable in his attitude towards Lord Randolph, the Prince refused to have anything to do with him for several years. In the summer of 1880 Sir Stafford Northcote, a prominent member of the Conservative Opposition, asked Lord Beaconsfield, as Benjamin Disraeli had by then become, ‘whether Randolph Churchill was forgiven yet in high quarters’. Beaconsfield ‘said he was all right so far as the Queen was concerned,’ Northcote recorded in his diary,
but that the Prince of Wales had not yet made it up with him; which Lord Beaconsfield thought very unfair, as Randolph [had made] an apology … under the full impression that the matter was to end there, but the Prince having got the apology kept up the grievance. But nothing, said the Chief, will help Randolph into favour again so much as success in Parliament. The Prince is always taken by success.
So it was not until 1883, when Lord Randolph had established himself as one of the dominant figures in the Conservative party, that the feud was settled. On 11 March that year the Prince and Princess went to dine with the Churchills at their London house; and their two little boys, Winston, aged eight, and John, aged three, were brought down before dinner to be given a present by the Prince. Three days later Lady Randolph attended a drawing-room given by the Queen; and in March 1884 it was announced that ‘a full and formal reconciliation’ had been effected between the Prince and Lord Randolph at a dinner given by Sir Henry James.
After the excitement of India, and the gratifying sense he had had there of doing something both pleasurable and worth while, the Prince found it more frustrating than ever on his return home to be once more relegated to performing those public engagements at schools and hospitals, exhibitions and dinners, which might just as well have been carried out by any other person in the public eye or even by some local dignitary. Dutifully he held levees, attended drawing-rooms and state concerts; and occasionally he went to the House of Lords. Once he spoke briefly in the Lords in favour of a bill to legalize marriage with a deceased wife’s sister — a measure which appeared to him all the more desirable since it would enable princess Beatrice to marry the Grand Duke of Hesse, whose wife, their sister Princess Alice, had died of diphtheria in December 1878. And another day he spoke at rather greater length, and with considerably more force, of the appalling conditions which he had witnessed in the slums of St Pancras, comparing them, rather inappropriately it was considered in some quarters, with the housing provided for his own work-people at Sandringham.
The expedition to St Pancras and other London slums had been undertaken at the suggestion of Lord Carrington, a fellow-member of a Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes. He, Carrington and the Chief Medical Officer of Health in the Local Government Board, all of them dressed in workmen’s clothes, had left Carrington’s house in a four-wheeler escorted by a police cab. The Prince had wandered about the narrow streets, dismayed and sickened by the appalling poverty, squalor and misery to which he was introduced, the background to so many thousands of Londoners’ lives. He found a shivering, half-starved woman with three ragged, torpid children lying on a heap of rags in a room bereft of furniture. Asked by her landlord where her fourth child was, she replied, ‘I don’t know. It went down into the court some days ago and I haven’t seen it since.’ Distressed by her plight, the Prince took a handful of gold coins from his pocket and would have handed them over to her had not Carrington and the doctor warned him that such a display of wealth might lead to his being attacked by the woman’s neighbours.
On their way back to Marlborough House, they were joined by one of the doctor’s subordinate medical officers. Not recognizing the Prince, and supposing him to be some rich man out for a morning’s slumming, and evidently irritated by his reflective silence and aloof demeanour, he slapped him on the back with some such familiar jocularity as ‘What do you think of that, old Buck!’ The Prince ‘kept his temper and behaved very well’, Carrington recorded. ‘We visited some very bad places in Holborn and Clerkenwell, but we got him back safe and sound to Marlborough House in time for luncheon.’
Although the Prince was moved by this experience to speak out in favour of housing reform, his friend Lord Hartington, who was appointed Secretary of State for War in 1882, found it difficult to persuade the Prince that army reform was equally urgent. Devoted to the Duke of Cambridge, to whom all change was for the worse, the Prince found it impossible to sympathize with the reformist zeal of the Quartermaster-General, Sir Garnet Wolseley, a clever, ambitious officer who had served with distinction in China and Ashanti, had fallen foul of the Prince’s friend, Sir Bartle Frere, in South Africa, and was now the Duke of Cambridge’s main bugbear in London. The Prince, to whom loyalty to his friends was more a way of life than a virtue, owed his appointment as Colonel-in-Chief of the Household Cavalry to the Duke of Cambridge, who in May 1880 had at long last overcome the Queen’s objection to the fulfilment of one of the Prince’s principal ambitions. And the Prince, as he often protested, could scarcely be expected to do anything to upset a dear old uncle who had always been so kind to him. The Duke of Cambridge, however, was quite unable to persuade the Queen or the government to allow the Prince to go out to Egypt in 1882 to serve with the British army which had been sent there to suppress a nationalist revolt. Exasperated by taunts that his passion for uniforms was as excessive as his dread of cannon, and that, though a field marshal, his experience of war began and ended with the Battle of Flowers at Cannes, the Prince did all he could to obtain permission to go out to join the forces in Egypt. But the Cabinet was adamant and so was the Queen, who ‘conclusively’ decided that it was necessary to ask him ‘to abandon the idea’. So the Prince had to be content with presiding at various dinners in honour of the generals and admirals who had been allowed to fight, and with opening an exhibition of war photographs in Bond Street and a panorama of the battle of Tel-el-Kebir.