The Prince as Heir Apparent

The Heir to a Throne such as that of Great Britain has an exceptionally difficult place to fill. He has to have the broad sympathies and knowledge and training of a statesman without the right to express himself upon any of the political problems and issues of his time; he has to live in a never-ending blaze of publicity and be liable to unscrupulous, or too scrupulous, criticism without the power of direct reply; he has, perhaps, to suffer in private life and character from the caustic shafts of men at home or abroad who do not like the institution which he represents; he has to officiate in a ceaseless round of functions and public ceremonial; he has to travel constantly from Court to Court in Europe and, in the case of the Prince of Wales, he had to act for several decades the part of the Sovereign in public life without the resources or responsibilities which the actual ruler would naturally possess.

There are, of course, important compensations. He has the foremost place in every leading national event, the privilege of knowing as intimately as he pleases the great men of his own and other countries, in every line of statecraft and human attainment, the pleasure of travel in many lands and amongst varied scenes and people, the opportunity of taking up any matter of a non-political character which he deems useful to the state, the people, or the Empire, with a reasonable certainty of substantial backing. To succeed, however, in the position as did Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, demands a peculiar combination of qualities which very few men possess in any rank of life. Tact, self-restraint, self-reliance, knowledge of human nature, energy, dignity, good intentions earnest patriotism, are more or less necessary.

How seldom these qualities have all been possessed by Heirs to the British Throne is plain upon the pages of history. There have been amongst them seventeen Princes of Wales of whom the best, before the chief of the line, was the Black Prince, and of whom only four have reached the Throne since the time of Edward VI. They were Charles I, Charles II, George II, and George IV., and the careers of the last two consisted in the establishment of rival Courts, continuous disagreements with their fathers, the headship of political factions, and the possession of characters about which the least said the better. The Prince who became Edward VII. may be said to have created the position of Heir Apparent, as his Royal mother created that of a modern constitutional Monarch.

NEW DEVELOPMENTS IN THE POSITION

He established himself as a sort of advisory statesman to the nation, an absolutely impartial leader in questions of high, as distinct from party politics, the first gentleman in the land in society, sports and manners, the leader of philanthropic projects and social reforms. He became the busiest man in England, the most popular personality in the three kingdoms, the head and front of many important public undertakings. Such a development was new to British institutions, but it came about so gradually that only when he ascended the Throne did people fully realize how large a place the Prince of Wales had held in public affairs as well as in their affections. Mr. Chauncey M. Depew, the eloquent American Senator, expressed the personal side of the matter very well when he said, with some surprise, after first meeting His Royal Highness: "I met a thoughtful dignitary filling to the brim the requirements of his exalted position. In fact, a practical as well as a theoretical student of the mighty forces which control the government of all great countries and make their best history."

There were many sides to this career, and in some of them the Prince never received the credit which he deserved. One was the essentially business-like management of his financial affairs. From the time of attaining his majority the Heir Apparent received £40,000 a year by grant of Parliament; at his marriage a special grant of £10,000 was given the Princess of Wales; when their children grew up the Prince was given £36,000 to apportion amongst them as he saw fit. During his minority the wise management of the revenues of the Duchy of Cornwall—which is an hereditary appurtenance of the Prince of Wales—by the late Prince Consort, gave the Heir Apparent a total of £600,000, of which £220,000 were expended upon the purchase of Sandringham, and a considerable sum upon improvements there. On the Prince's marriage he was voted £23,455 to defray expenses and his allowance for the Indian tour of 1875 was £142,000 of which £69,000 was for presents. Marlborough House was given him by the nation, though he paid taxes upon it like any other citizen. The Duchy of Cornwall was so well managed after it came under his control that it yielded in 1897 a total income of nearly £74,000, or almost double the value of the returns received forty years before. Birk Hall, an estate inherited from the Prince Consort, was sold to the Queen for £120,000. The total public income of the Prince of Wales during many years was about £180,000, or nearly a million dollars, and the management of his finances was always careful. The stories of extravagance and indebtedness were absolutely without foundation. Yet these tales of poverty were always widespread and were probably believed by many millions of people.

The truth is that he was a first-rate business man in money affairs, knew how to make his income go to its furthest extent, and had an established system on his estates and in his palaces which combined comfort and luxury with judicious economy. A few words upon this point may be quoted, in passing, from an article in the well-known Ladies Home Journal of Philadelphia, written in July, 1897, by Mr. George W. Smalley, an American critic of authority who lived in London for many years: "It is not a subject which I care to touch upon, but I may refer to the stories about the Prince of Wales' financial position. It is a matter with which the American public has absolutely no concern. Nevertheless all sorts of stories are printed here about his debts to this person or that. Such stories were circulated when Baron Hirsch died—so circumstantial that they must have either been based upon minute knowledge or have been pure fabrications. They were not based upon knowledge, minute or otherwise, because they were not true." These stories were rendered more absurd by the fact that a rough calculation of his receipts during forty years of public life would indicate a sum of between thirty and forty millions of dollars.

CHARITIES OF THE PRINCE

Of course the expenses of the Heir Apparent were very great even when those are excepted which the nation paid. His personal gifts to benevolent institutions, educational concerns, religious interests, objects of social, moral and physical improvement, hospitals and infirmaries, asylums, orphanages, commercial and agricultural organizations, the relief of children and foreigners in distress, deaf and dumb and blind institutions, memorials and statues, Indian famines, war funds, calamity funds of various kinds at home, in the Colonies, and abroad, have been reckoned by an English student of statistics at £3,200 a year, or £128,000 in forty years—$640,000 spent in response to public appeals alone without reference to the many private charities about which little was known except that a very large amount of assistance was given yearly by the Prince and Princess in response to all kinds of private and authenticated requests. In this general connection Mr. Gladstone, when Prime Minister, spoke very warmly during the Parliamentary discussion of 1889 upon the Royal grants of that year. "It will be admitted," he said in the course of his somewhat famous speech, "that circumstances have tended to throw upon the Prince of Wales an amount of public work in connection with institutions as well as with ceremonials, which was larger than could reasonably have been expected, and with regard to which every call has been honourably and devotedly met from a sense of public duty."

Reference has been made in the preceding pages to the infinitely varied public functions of His Royal Highness and the aid thus given to charities and benevolent objects. A few instances only were quoted in which many thousands of pounds were obtained for worthy objects through his patronage. The fact is that the Heir Apparent gave his position a rather unique characteristic in this respect by becoming a sort of Grand Almoner of the nation. Almost any charity which he patronized or which the Princess supported with his approval, became a success, and it is probable that every thousand pounds which he gave away became a hundred thousand pounds through the prestige of his example and his often vigorous and effective personal exertions. One of the interests to which he was most devoted was that of the London and other hospitals. Attendance at the festivals, or annual dinners, was frequent, and the consequent subscription to their funds from time to time considerable. During the Diamond Jubilee the Prince thought he saw in this cause a way to fittingly commemorate that great event—as he had already marked that of 1887 by the Imperial Institute.

Under date of February 5th, 1897, therefore, an elaborate statement and earnest appeal appeared in the London Times and other great papers signed by the Prince of Wales, and asking for organized help in making up the existing deficits of £100,000 in London hospitals. The Royal writer pointed out that the efforts of individual institutions, praiseworthy as they had been, failed to obtain more than a small number of subscriptions from the great population of the metropolis; that the reasons for this was partly the difficulty of choosing amongst so many useful charities, partly the lack of definite opportunity for giving annual subscriptions to the cause as a whole, partly a feeling that small sums were not worth contributing; that it was proposed to establish this "Prince of Wales Hospital Fund" in order to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Queen's reign by obtaining permanent annual subscriptions of from £100,000 to £150,000. He also announced that Lord Rothschild had accepted the post of Treasurer, that a commencement in subscriptions had been made, and that the Lord Mayor had promised his active assistance.

The success of the movement thus inaugurated by the Heir Apparent was pronounced. The annual Report of the Council of the Fund, which was issued on May 2nd, 1899, stated that during the past two years £89,000 had been distributed, and that the hospitals had been enabled to re-open and maintain two hundred and forty-two beds. It had, however, not come up yet to the requirements and, on March 1st, of this year, the Prince made another effort to help the hospitals. He called a large and representative meeting at Marlborough House, and placed before it a plan for the establishment of an Order to be called the League of Mercy. Its object would be to reach locally persons who did not subscribe to minor Funds, or individual institutions, and to do this by offering an honour in the form of this decoration, "as a reward for gratuitous personal services rendered in the relief of sickness, suffering, poverty or distress." These services would be apart, altogether, from gifts of money, (although the latter would be gladly accepted) and must be continued during five years. The Queen was to be head of the Order and the Heir Apparent its Grand President. All names were to be submitted to Her Majesty and the honour itself was not to confer any rank, dignity or social precedence. The plan was approved, and its success marked despite some caustic and unjust criticisms in certain Radical papers. On December 1st (1899), following, the annual meeting of the Hospital Fund was held at Marlborough House, with His Royal Highness in the chair, and attended by Lord Rowton, Lord Iveagh, Cardinal Vaughan, Lord Lister, Lord Reay, the Chief Rabbi and others. Lord Rothschild submitted a statement which showed the year's receipts to be £47,000, the first distribution from the League of Mercy to be £1,000, and the total amount of the Fund to be £217,000. The meeting of December 18th, in the following year, showed receipts of £49,468; of which £6,000 came from the League of Mercy. In his speech upon this occasion Lord Rothschild heartily congratulated the Royal chairman upon his "wisdom and foresight" in forming this League. In passing, it may be said that Grey's Hospital, London, was one of the individual institutions which the Prince undertook personally to help, and at one special banquet, at which he presided for this purpose, he was enabled to announce total subscriptions to the extraordinary amount of £151,000.

THE PRINCE AND THE WORKINGMEN

There was no part of his public career more creditable to the Prince of Wales than his sincere, unforced friendship and sympathy with the workingman. Like his philanthropic work, it was the natural product of a generous disposition, and won the honest liking of men who had always looked with suspicion upon aristocratic, to say nothing of Royal, efforts in their behalf. This was another illustration of the difference between Heirs Apparent to the Throne. Imagination fails to grasp the thought of the Stuarts or the Georges, when holding that position, trying to help the poor or uplift the labourer! Speaking at a meeting in London on January 12th, 1887, Lord Mayor, Sir Reginald Hanson, said: "All those who have been engaged in this scheme (the Imperial Institute) know that the Prince of Wales is one of the first in this country who looks to the interests of the working classes." For many years, indeed, he had been an annual subscriber to the Workingmen's Club and Institute Union and to the Workingmen's College in Great Ormond Street. In the Alexandra Trust, founded by Sir Thomas Lipton, at the instance of the Princess, much interest was taken by the Heir Apparent as well as his wife, and, on March 15th, 1900, they privately and unexpectedly visited the Restaurant in City Road and inspected this praiseworthy effort to supply wholesome food at low prices to the poor. After walking about and speaking to many of the people, they enjoyed a "three-course dinner" costing four pence half-penny, and left amid a scene of great enthusiasm.

More than once the Prince aided workingmen's institutions by visiting them. On one occasion he heard that an Exhibition in South London, promoted by workingmen, was languishing for want of patronage and at once arranged to visit it unofficially. He went through it carefully, buying a number of articles and expressing much interest in the project. There was no further neglect of the institution by the general public. There was, perhaps, no single work in which he more appreciated the opportunity of doing good than that connected with the Housing of the Poor Commission to which he was appointed in 1884. He more than once presided at its meetings and took an active part in the investigations which were necessary. He attended every sitting and studied quietly and privately the whole condition of the poor in the poorest quarters of London and other cities. The Prince never hesitated to criticize those who neglected their charitable duties, or to praise those who lived up to the level of their opportunities, and in connection with an institution which he opened at Deptford, in 1898, his condemnation of the wealthy people in that neighbourhood was severe.

On March 4th, 1900, the working-class dwellings built in Shoreditch by the City Council were opened by the Prince of Wales. They were largely the product of the Royal Commission in which he had taken such interest and whose proposals were the basis of so much progress in this direction. His Royal Highness was accompanied on this occasion by the Princess and Lord Suffield and was surrounded on the platform by Lord Welby, the Earl of Rosebery, the Bishops of London and Stepney, the Earl and Countess Carrington and others. In his speech the Prince was expressive and vigorous upon the necessity of better housing for the poor. "I am satisfied, not only that the public conscience is awakened on the subject but that the public demands, and will demand, vigorous action in cleansing the slums which disgrace our civilization and the erection of good and wholesome dwellings such as those around us, and in meeting the difficulties of providing house-room for the working-classes, at reasonable rates, by easy and cheap carriage to not distant districts where rents are reasonable." He concluded an elaborate speech upon the question generally by expressing the hope that the Legislature would deal with and punish those who were responsible for insanitary property. Speaking at a banquet of the London County Council on December 3rd of the same year, the Prince again urged attention to the improvement of dwellings in various city areas. A part of this generous desire to aid the poor was the Princess of Wales' dinner to three hundred thousand persons in London at the Jubilee of 1897. Contributions poured in unceasingly to the project and amongst others was the gift of twenty thousand sheep from the pastoralists of New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria. The organization of the dinner was in the hands of the Lord Mayor of London and it proved a great success.

The gifts of a statesman were cultivated by the Prince of Wales upon every proper opportunity. His Empire unity ideas and projects were abundant evidence of this while a not less distinct proof of statecraft was the apparent absence of it—the absolute non-partisan position of the Heir Apparent. No one was ever able to say that he held political views of any particular type. His delicate tact was particularly shown in his kindness and courtesy to Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone. When the aged statesman finally retired from politics the Prince visited him again at Hawarden Castle and was photographed in a family group. He and the Princess attended his funeral and showed the greatest respect for his memory and services. When the time came, in 1900, for Mrs. Gladstone to be laid beside her husband in Westminster Abbey one of the incidents of a sad occasion was the wreath sent in by their Royal Highnesses with the following inscription:

In preparing a national memorial to the eminent Liberal leader the Prince of Wales accepted the post of President of the General Committee with the Duke of Westminster as Chairman of the Executive. With Mr. Cecil Rhodes, he was long upon terms of intimacy and never concealed his admiration for the great Imperialist's career and objects. There can be no doubt that he knew much of South African affairs and was instrumental in the Duke of Fife taking a place on the Directorate of the South African Chartered Company. The only occasion upon which the Prince ever withdrew from a prominent Club was his retirement from the Traveller's because they had black-balled Mr. Rhodes. Not the smallest evidence of statecraft which the Prince of Wales showed, in a semi-personal way, was his warm sympathy with the emancipation of the Jews and his belief in their absorption into the life and interests of England. His presence at the marriage of Mr. Leopold de Rothschild caused, long since, a sensation in Jewish circles but it was only the first of many compliments which the Heir Apparent bestowed upon the "chosen people" up to the days when one of them became Prime Minister and a daughter of the House of Rothschild married a future Premier—the Earl of Rosebery. The late Baron Hirsch, the present Lord Rothschild. Sir Reuben Sassoon and Sir Moses Montefiore were amongst his personal friends and he made a thorough study of the position of the Russian Jews—showing them practical sympathy in various indirect ways. Of course, this partiality was open to misconstruction and the rumour of indebtedness to Jewish financial interests was so prevalent at one time that Sir Francis Knollys had to write a correspondent, who directly asked the question, an official statement as Private Secretary to the Prince, that the latter had no debts worth speaking of and could pay every farthing he owed at a moment's notice.

There is no question, however, that this friendship with a powerful financial class, ruling great interests in every nation, gave the Prince of Wales a much enhanced influence abroad. In the same way his obvious liking for American men and women of standing and ability was marked and did undoubted service in promoting good feeling between the two countries—where it was not grossly and untruthfully misrepresented by sensational journals. Really distinguished visitors from the United States, whether rich or poor, always found a welcome at the hands of His Royal Highness and amongst those whom he appears to have especially liked were James Russell Lowell, Thomas F. Bayard, Whitelaw Reid and Chauncey M. Depew. American women who have been absorbed into English life and society like Lady Harcourt, Mrs. Chamberlain and the Duchess of Marlborough were always treated with marked courtesy by both the Princess and himself. His visit to the United States in 1860 had also taught him something of conditions there which those around him were not always fully aware of. Hence the value of the message which was sent to the New York World in the name of the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York during the Venezuelan crisis. If it be true that a private letter, a word spoken in season, or a brief drawing-room conversation, is often more influential than a cloud of newspaper writing, then the Prince of Wales was for years a potent force in promoting good-will between the Empire and the Republic.

As a diplomatist there can be no doubt of the Heir Apparent's influence. He succeeded, in fact, to much of the power held in that respect by the Prince Consort. It was the post of an unofficial and secret personal mediator between the Sovereign of Great Britain and those of other countries. Thoroughly acquainted with the personality of foreign rulers, related to the majority of those in Europe, knowing their degrees of national influence and personal power, familiar with the statesmen's position in Court and Legislature, associated more and more closely as the years went on with Queen Victoria's personal view of foreign policy, the Prince's position was one of very great indirect power. Through his heirship to the British throne he was naturally upon terms of something like equality with those whom he met as rulers at Berlin or St. Petersburg, at Paris or Vienna, and more in sympathy with their point of view than men of less than Royal rank. To quote Mr. George W. Smalley in McClure's Magazine of March, 1901: "His is a strange nature. He has, very fully and strongly, the pride of Kings and what the pride of Kings is, a republican who has lived all his life in a republic can hardly conceive. He has behind him, moreover, the loyalty of an expectant nation." Upon the other hand he knew more about the people and was more of them than any other hereditary ruler or prospective ruler in the world. Hence the strength of his position when conferring with a German Emperor, or a Russian Czar, or talking quietly with some Foreign Minister at a time of crisis.

INCIDENTS OF DIPLOMATIC INFLUENCE

This personal influence of the Heir Apparent was a factor often ignored. "Again and again," says Mr. Smalley, from the point of view of one who watched for years at the source of power in London, "the Prince has gone abroad as—in effect, though of course never in name—an Ambassador from the Queen to some Sovereign on the Continent. He has laid her views at some critical moments before the German Emperor and carried home the Emperor's response." This sort of personal intercourse must, many a time, have solved vital and serious issues. When William II. visited Windsor in 1899 and the Queen, with the aid of the Prince of Wales, Lord Salisbury and Mr. Chamberlain, evolved the terms upon which the countries were to stand in regard to the coming South African war, can there be any doubt as to the place in these negotiations which the Heir Apparent held, or as to the advantage which his many earlier visits to Berlin in the days of Bismarck and the Kaiser's initiatory years of rule, must have been to him? The result of this intercourse was, in the end, the turning of a possible national enemy into a friend; the change of the Emperor who wrote the famous Transvaal cablegram into the ruler who took the first train and boat to Windsor and bowed his head at the death-bed of Queen Victoria.

Another interesting incident in this connection may be found in the friendship known to have existed between the Prince of Wales and the Czar of Russia. Nicholas II. bore the same relationship of nephew to him that was borne by William II. and, like the other Imperial ruler, came to bear a similar feeling of respect and regard for his uncle—sentiments not always felt between relations, royal or otherwise. It was on August 31st, 1894, that the Princess of Wales received a despatch from her sister, the Czarina, that Alexander III. was nearing his end in the far-away Palace of Livadia. As rapidly as train and ship could carry them the Royal couple travelled to Russia, but only in time for the prolonged and splendid ceremonial of a state funeral. In this great and solemn pageant, lasting a week, and extending from Livadia to St. Petersburg, the Czar and the Prince were constantly together, in the most intimate relations, at a moment when the former was just emerging—as yet a young and inexperienced man—into the responsibilities of perhaps the most difficult position in the world. It was little wonder if the youthful autocrat of ninety millions took counsel of his experienced and genial relative, and found in his society comfort and knowledge and the basis of a lasting friendship. Let Mr. W. T. Stead in the Review of Reviews, of January, 1895, describe the situation:

It was fortunate for every one that he stood where he did, as no one outside the Royal Castle could have been to the young Czar what the Prince was at Livadia, and afterwards. In the long and almost terrible pilgrimage to the tomb which followed, when the corpse of the dead Czar was carried in solemn state from the shores of the Black Sea to the tomb in the Cathedral that stands on the frozen Neva, the Prince was always at the right hand of the Czar. Alike in public or in private, the uncle and the nephew stood side by side. After the first gush of grief had passed, it was impossible but that thoughts of the relations between the two Empires should not have crossed the minds of both. These two men share between them the over lordship of Asia. To the Czar, the north from the Oural to the far Sagahlien; to the other, the south from the Straits of Babel Mandeb to Hong Kong. No two men on this planet ever represented so vast a range of Imperial power as the first mourners at the bier of Alexander the Third.