But the Queen still refused to allow him to exercise any real authority. Thus, in September 1896, when the Tsar came to Balmoral for important conversations with the Queen and Lord Salisbury, the Prince had been ‘so anxious,’ as he told the Queen’s private secretary, Sir Arthur Bigge, ‘that the arrival should be marked with every possible compliment’ that he had returned from Homburg to supervise personally all the arrangements for the visit. He had stood on the dockside at Leith to welcome the Tsar to Scotland in the pouring rain and had put himself out, as the Queen’s lady-in-waiting, Lady Lytton, said, to be ‘very nice to everyone … and the greatest help all the time’. But he had not been invited to join any of the conversations.
Even his repeated attempts to give advice on diplomatic and other appointments were as likely as ever to be ignored. In 1896, for instance, his nominee for the appointment of British Minister in Stockholm was not only rejected in favour of another man but he was not even told to whom the post had been given. His views on a suitable successor to Sir Edward Malet as Ambassador in Berlin were not so much as sounded, while his proposal that Lord Pembroke should be promoted Lord Chamberlain was followed almost immediately by the appointment to that post of the Earl of Hopetoun.
He was no more influential with regard to appointments to the Cabinet. He was not the slightest use to the Queen, he unhappily told Francis Knollys when Gladstone was forming his last administration. Everything he said or did was ‘pooh-poohed’; his sisters and brothers were ‘much more listened to’ than he was.
Yet when he was given work to do, he showed that he could offer more than charm, tact, influence and a wide range of acquaintance. In the first place he was an excellent organizer, as he had shown in a minor way at an appallingly haphazard City ball held in honour of the Sultan of Turkey in 1867.
It was enormously overcrowded and the authorities were quite ignorant of West End ways [reported Henry Ponsonby, normally no great admirer of the Prince]. At the chief supper Lord Raglan was not included [although he was] the lord-in-waiting representing the Queen with the Sultan. Raglan gave it to one of the aldermen pretty freely afterwards. The Duke of Beaufort tried to get in. They wouldn’t let him in — another row. On the dais they tried [unsuccessfully] to clear a place for dancing. The Duke of Beaufort saw Djemil Bey struggling with a policeman — he remonstrated with an alderman who was giving the order and at last Djemil Bey was allowed in. Immediately afterwards came Apponyi. Beaufort said, ‘You must let him in.’ Alderman wouldn’t, at last did sulkily and said, ‘There you’d better take my place and do duty here.’ ‘If I did,’ said the Duke, ‘my first duty would be to throw you out.’ So you see the amenities were numerous … Of course, the Lord Mayor read an interminable address. The Sultan then spoke … in Turkish, and Musurus [the Turkish Ambassador] read [a speech] in fearful English. If it had not been for the Prince of Wales the civic authorities would have done all sorts of absurdities, but he kept them in order very well indeed.
The Prince’s tact and organizational abilities were given more scope at the time of the Queen’s Golden Jubilee, when he was allowed to supervise the ceremonial details and the reception of the numerous foreign representatives. His talent for organization was equally appreciated that year, during the preparations for the Colonies and India Exhibition, as his chairmanship of the Executive Council of the Royal College of Music had been in 1883. ‘He makes an excellent chairman,’ Edward Hamilton had noted in his journal then, ‘businesslike, sensible and pleasant’. Also, while still inclined to lose interest in projects which ran into complicated difficulties or public apathy, he was much more conscientious than he had been in the past. As he had been abroad so often in 1884 he managed to attend no more than nineteen of the fifty-one meetings of the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes. But when in December 1892 he was asked to serve on a Royal Commission on the Aged Poor he accepted immediately, abandoned his usual visit to the South of France the next year, and missed few of the Commission’s sessions. He informed his son, without complaint, that he didn’t think he had ever been so busy in his life and impressed James Stuart, a radical fellow-member of the Commission, not only by his regular attendance at the proceedings — during which he doodled Union Jacks with red and blue pencils as he listened to the evidence — but also by asking ‘very good questions’. ‘I thought at first that he had probably been prompted to these,’ Stuart recalled in his Reminiscences, ‘but I soon found out that they were of his own initiative, and that he really had a very considerable grasp of the subjects he dealt with.’
Yet the opportunities allowed the Prince to demonstrate these capabilities were very few. He rarely made a direct protest to the Queen, although remarks about other heirs, such as Crown Prince Rudolph of Austria’s being treated ‘almost like a boy by his Parents’, were, no doubt, intended to convey allusions to his own predicament. He knew from experience how stubborn his mother could be, and was consequently disinclined to approach her again after an initial rebuff unless he could do so at Balmoral, where she was ‘always in a better way’. Elsewhere her wrathful displeasure was too high a price to pay for offending her. Baron von Eckardstein, the German diplomat, recalled how, owing to the Kaiser’s insistence that they finish a race at Cowes which had been interrupted by the wind suddenly dropping, they had all arrived at Osborne late for dinner. The Kaiser unconcernedly apologized; but the Prince ‘took cover for a moment behind a pillar, wiping the sweat from his forehead before he could summon up courage enough to come forward and make his bow. The Queen only gave him a stiff nod, and he retreated behind the pillar again.’ Everyone was afraid of his mother, the Prince once told Margot Asquith ‘with a charming smile’, everyone ‘with the exception of John Brown’. Henry Ponsonby agreed with him, but added, as the only other exception, Napoleon III’s son, the Prince Imperial. Nevertheless, the Prince did occasionally defy the Queen, as when, for instance, he acted as pall-bearer at Gladstone’s funeral. What advice had he taken? the Queen wanted to know. And what precedent had he followed for doing such a thing? The Prince replied that he had not taken any advice and knew of no precedent.
Also, towards the end of the Queen’s life, the Prince did sometimes persuade her to change her mind on matters of little importance. She reluctantly allowed him to receive the salute at her birthday parade on the retirement as Commander-in-Chief of her cousin, the Duke of Cambridge, who had formerly represented her. Also, after assuring her son that her decision against it was final, she eventually gave way to his suggestion that the Kaiser — who had delighted him by giving him a commission in the Prussian Dragoon Guards — should be granted an honorary colonelcy in a British regiment since it was well worth while paying a reciprocal compliment to the ‘finest army in the world’. But when, two years later, the Prince was so incensed by the Kaiser’s congratulatory telegram to President Kruger on the failure of Dr Jameson’s raid into the Transvaal that he proposed ‘a good snubbing’, she rebuked him sternly. ‘Those sharp, cutting answers and remarks only irritate and do harm, which one is sorry for,’ the Prince was informed. ‘Passion should be carefully guarded against. [The Kaiser’s] faults come from impulsiveness, as well as conceit. Calmness and firmness are the most powerful weapons in such cases.’
And calmness and firmness, she made it clear, were not to be expected of the Prince.
11
‘Other Ladies’
Suddenly I saw him looking at me in a way all women understand.