Ernest Cassel was ten years younger than the Prince, to whom he bore a marked resemblance. Born in Cologne, the youngest son of a Jewish banker in a modest way of business, he had left for England at the age of sixteen and obtained employment with a firm in Liverpool. A few months later he moved to Paris as a clerk in the Anglo–Egyptian Bank; and, on the outbreak of the Franco–Prussian War, returned to England, where he joined the staff of the financial house of Bischoffsheim and Goldschmidt, one of whose partners, Louis Bischoffsheim, was Hirsch’s brother-in-law. By the time he was twenty-two, Cassel was manager of the firm at a salary of £5,000 a year. Before he was thirty, by industry, acumen, and a deserved reputation for unassailable integrity, he had accumulated capital of £150,000. He had also married an English girl, becoming a British subject himself on the day of the wedding and being received into the Roman Catholic Church three years later in obedience to his beloved wife’s dying wish. Cautious and reticent in human relations, Cassel was more interested in power than in people. He was a well-known figure in society; he was careful to join the right clubs; and he was as indefatigable in his pursuit of British as he was of foreign decorations, once coolly informing Francis Knollys, who passed the message on to the Prime Minister’s Private Secretary, that he was ‘anxious to have the G.C.B. conferred upon him without loss of time’.
It was felt that, except when he was in the hunting field, or inspecting his horses in the stud or on the race-course, Cassel’s attention never wandered far from the world of finance, of international loans, of percentages and profits. Yet, unlike most men of comparable riches, he derived as much pleasure from spending money as in amassing it. Though his own tastes were restrained, he was the most generous of hosts both at Moulton Paddocks, Newmarket, and at his London houses in Grosvenor Square and Park Lane, both of which were filled with old masters, with all kinds of objects d’art from Renaissance bronzes to English silver and Chinese jade, and with equally decorative women whose company Cassel, like the Prince, preferred to that of men.
Finding Cassel on occasions a trifle dispiriting, the Prince never tired of the Marquis de Soveral, the lively, stimulating Portuguese Minister in London whose charming presence was welcome at every party. Known as the ‘Blue Monkey’ because of his animated manner, blue-black hair and dark complexion, Luis de Soveral was recognized, indeed, as being ‘the most popular man in London’, except at the German Embassy, where he was known as ‘Soveral-Überall’ and strongly disliked for his known anti-German sentiments. The Princess of Pless, the former Daisy Cornwallis-West, treated him as a rather distasteful joke.
He imagines himself to be a great intellectual and political force and the wise adviser of all the heads of the government and, of course, the greatest danger to women! … [But surely] even those stupid people who believe that every man who talks to a woman must be her lover, could not take his Don Juanesque pretensions seriously. Yet I am told that all women do not judge him so severely and some even find him très seduisant. How disgusting!
The Princess of Pless apart, virtually everyone in London, even the husbands of his mistresses, and both the Princess of Wales and Alice Keppel, delighted in the sight of his tall figure approaching, a white flower in his buttonhole, a monocle firmly fixed in one glittering eye, his large moustache neatly brushed, his regular teeth revealed in a warm and happy smile, ready to greet an old friend with enthusiasm or to charm a new acquaintance. ‘As a talker he was quite wonderful in keeping the ball rolling,’ Henry Ponsonby’s son, Frederick, thought.
‘And without being exactly witty his conversation was always sparkling and amusing. It was only when he had to talk seriously that one realised how clever he was.’ Yet he did all he could to disguise his cleverness, having found by experience that ‘both men and women fight shy of a clever man’.
Certainly the Prince fought shy of clever men whose intelligence was on permanent display. He preferred the company of actors to authors; and authors as a rule did not regard him highly. To Rudyard Kipling he was a corpulent voluptuary; to Max Beerbohm a fat little boy kept in a corner by a domineering mother; to Henry James an ‘ugly’ omen for ‘the dignity of things’. He was once prevailed upon by Sir Sidney Lee to give a dinner at Marlborough House to celebrate the publication of the Dictionary of National Biography. He had evidently not been very keen to do so; and at the dinner was not in his brightest mood, ‘embarrassed by the effusive learning of Lord Acton on one side and the impenetrable shyness of Sir Leslie Stephen on the other’. It is said that on looking round the table his eye fell on Canon Ainger, who had written the entries on Charles and Mary Lamb. ‘Who is the little parson?’ he asked.
‘Why is he here? He is not a writer.’ It was explained to him that Ainger was ‘a very great authority on Lamb’. At this the Prince put down his knife and fork, crying out in bewilderment, ‘On lamb!’
Actors viewed the Prince more kindly, for he took the trouble to gain their regard. One evening in 1882, for example, after Lillie Langtry’s appearance on the stage of the Haymarket Theatre, the Prince, as a gesture of thanks to the kind cooperation of her more experienced colleagues, gave a large dinner party at Marlborough House where a number of actors were, so Lord Carrington told his wife, ‘sandwiched between ordinary mortals with more or less success’. The only regrettable incident occurred when William Kendal, ‘a good-looking bounder’, ‘distinguished himself’ late in the evening by singing ‘a very vulgar song which was not favourably received in high quarters, after which the party rather collapsed’.
The Prince might well have let the vulgarity pass unremarked in other circumstances, but he evidently considered Marlborough House an unsuitable stage for the comedian’s performance. Yet, while he was ever careful to remind the forgetful that he was regal as well as rouè, few people ever accused the Prince of being a snob. Certainly he preferred the company of the rich to the poor, judged riches as useful a method of grading people as any other, and obviously chose to associate with those who could entertain him in the comfortable surroundings to which he had grown accustomed. But although newly established millionaires such as J.B. Robinson were invited to Sandringham almost as a matter of course, the Prince also offered hospitality to men who would never be in a position to return it. One of these was Henry Broadhurst, a former stonemason and trade union leader who was Liberal Member of Parliament for Stoke on Trent and who had served with the Prince on the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes. Broadhurst had no evening clothes and was relieved when the Prince, ‘in order to meet the difficulties in the matter of dress’, made arrangements for him to have dinner served in his bedroom. Yet he did not feel neglected or deprived. He had several long conversations with his host and his family, and left Sandringham ‘with a feeling of one who had spent a week-end with an old chum of his own rank in society’.