That month King Kalakaua of Hawaii was in England on an official visit; and the Prince, hoping to persuade the King that the British would be more understanding and helpful friends than the Americans, had been unremitting in his attentions to him. He escorted him to banquets, invited him to luncheon at Marlborough House and to a ball where the Princess opened the royal quadrille with him. He urged his friends to give dinners for him, insisting on his taking precedence over the Crown Prince of Germany, and rejecting the Germans’ protests by observing, ‘Either the brute is a king or else he is an ordinary black nigger, and if he is not a king, why is he here?’ Dean Stanley’s death occurred in the middle of King Kalakaua’s visit, and the Prince rejected the Queen’s request that he should postpone his ball at Marlborough House because of it.
Nor could the Prince be dissuaded from making such frequent trips abroad that it was sometimes suggested that he spent almost as much time on the Continent as he did at home. To be sure, many of these trips were to family weddings or funerals. In February 1881 he had gone to Berlin to the wedding of his nephew Prince William to Princess Augusta Victoria, a daughter of Duke Frederick of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg. The next month he was in St Petersburg attending the funeral of the Tsar Alexander II and investing his successor, Alexander III, with the Order of the Garter. Back in England for Disraeli’s funeral in April, he was off again in May, this time to Vienna for the wedding of Crown Prince Rudolph and Princess Stephanie of Belgium. In March 1883, after nearly two months in Cannes — preceded, the previous summer, by several weeks at Homburg — the Prince went to Berlin for the silver wedding celebrations of the Crown Prince and Princess, then back to Homburg, then to Baden, then to Homburg again, then to the autumn manoeuvres of the German army which, to the Princess of Wales’s distress, he watched in the uniform of a Colonel of the Fifth Pomeranian Hussars. Altogether he was away on the Continent for over two months that year, though he had to forego his usual visit to Paris because of French anger over the British intervention in Egypt. The next spring, however, he was back at Cannes faced with the melancholy task of bringing home the body of his brother, Prince Leopold, Duke of Albany, the Queen’s ‘dearest son’, who had died of a brain haemorrhage at the Villa Nevada, having fallen down in a club. Three weeks after his brother’s funeral he was in Darmstadt for the wedding of his niece, Princess Victoria of Hesse, to Prince Louis of Battenberg. He remained on the Continent for eight weeks, thankful to escape from an England in gloomy mourning for the Duke of Albany.
Although she considered that the Prince spent too much time abroad, the Queen continued to deny him the satisfaction of knowing that she fully trusted him when he was at home. She was not blind to his virtues. He was generous and affectionate, she admitted; she was very fond of him and had more than once said so. ‘It gives me such pleasure to hear you speak so lovingly of dear Bertie,’ she had once written to his sister Victoria, ‘for he deserves it. He is such a good kind brother — a very loving son and true friend — and so kind to all below him, for which he is universally loved — which poor Affie [the Duke of Edinburgh] is not at all, either by high or low.’ Similarly, in the autumn of 1887, she praised his good nature in her journal after a visit he had made to Balmoral — ‘a most pleasant visit which I think he enjoyed and said so repeatedly … He is so kind and affectionate that it is a pleasure to be a little quietly together.’
Yet in dealing with delicate affairs of state his judgement was not to be relied upon, so that whenever he offered to perform some important public duty he was more likely than not to be told that he was disqualified either by his rank, his inexperience, or his lack of the particular natural talents required. In 1870, for instance, his proposal to act as mediator between France and Prussia had elicited the dispiriting response that his position would make it quite impossible for him to undertake the mission even if he were ‘personally fitted for such a very difficult task’. And he certainly was not fitted, in the Queen’s opinion. He was still far too indiscreet and impressionable.
The Queen was not alone in considering him so. Both Lord Granville and Lord Hartington thought so, too. And in 1885 Charles Hardinge, at that time Third Secretary at the British Embassy in Berlin, was ‘shocked by the indiscreet language of the Prince of Wales to the Russian military attach? in the hearing of a crowd of diplomatists’. Charles Dilke, commenting on his impressionability, and of his being ‘a good deal under the influence of the last person who [talked] to him’, said of him,
He is very sharp in a way … with more sense and more usage of the modem world than his mother, whose long retirement has cut her off from that world, but less real brain power … It is worth talking seriously to the Prince. One seems to make no impression at the time … for he seems not to listen and to talk incessantly except when he is digesting [his food] … but he does listen all the same, and afterwards, when he is talking to somebody else, brings out everything you have said.
Dilke himself never found it too difficult to change the Prince’s mind. When, for instance, work began on a Channel tunnel in 1881, the Prince was most enthusiastic and inspected the early workings near Dover. But Dilke persuaded him that the proposed tunnel might endanger the safety of the country in time of war, and the Prince was soon as strongly opposed to the idea as he had previously been in favour of it.
Denied the Queen’s confidence, the Prince complained in vain about the continuing ban on important information being supplied to him.
‘Needless to say’ he was ‘kept in perfect ignorance as to what [was] going on,’ he wrote resentfully when trouble in Afghanistan almost led to war between Russia and England in the spring of 1885. His position was much the same as it had been ten years before when he had been left completely in the dark about the intention to proclaim the Queen Empress of India. He had been certain on that occasion, so he told Disraeli, ‘that in no other country in the world would the next Heir to the Throne have been treated under similar circumstances in such a manner’. The Prime Minister sympathized with the Prince’s attitude. ‘He certainly has great quickness of perception and a happy knack of always saying the right thing,’ Gladstone told Edward Hamilton in April 1885. ‘He would make an excellent sovereign. He is far more fitted for that high place than her present Majesty now is. He would see both sides. He would always be open to argument. He would never domineer or dictate.’ But, as Hamilton said, Gladstone did not like to act behind the Queen’s back in releasing information to him. Francis Knollys told Hamilton that Disraeli had occasionally let the Prince have ‘tit bits of Cabinet secrets’. So as to keep on good terms with both his sovereign and the heir apparent, he had, however, done so without telling the Queen, who subsequently declined to believe that Disraeli had ‘ever made such communications’. And, as Hamilton had to admit, Disraeli ‘could do a good many things connected with the Queen which Mr Gladstone could not do and certainly would not do’.
So it was not until 1886, when his friend Rosebery became Foreign Secretary, that the Prince received copies of various secret Foreign Office dispatches. Even then, Rosebery acted on his own initiative without the Queen’s specific authority. Indeed, it was not until 1892 that the Prince was at last given the Prince Consort’s gold key which opened the Foreign Office boxes and received from the Prime Minister’s private secretary reports of Cabinet meetings of much the same character as those that were sent to the sovereign.