Edward VII: The Last Victorian King by Christopher Hibbert

Author:Christopher Hibbert
Language: eng
Format: epub

12

‘Inconvenient’ Friends and ‘Ill-bred’ Children

It is the greatest bane in one’s life saying good-bye, especially to one’s children, relations and friends.

‘If you ever become King,’ the Queen had warned the Prince of Wales in 1868, ‘you will find all these friends most inconvenient, and you will have to break with them all.’ He had long since become used to such criticisms and had grown tired of rebutting the allegation that almost all his friends were the ‘fashionable bad set and betting people’. It could not be denied, though, that a good many of them were. There was, for instance, a certain handsome young man who called himself Count Miecislas Jaraczewski, whose scarcely pronounceable surname was translated into English by his cronies at the Turf Club as ‘Sherry and Whiskers’. Jaraczewski had been admitted to the Marlborough Club by the Prince, who entertained him frequently at Sandringham and was often to be seen with him in Paris where the police described Jaraczewski as the Prince’s ‘faithful and inseparable friend and one who, incidentally, never had a good reputation for honesty as a gambler’. The Queen must have been distressed to learn that this young friend of her son, after giving a splendid supper party one evening at the Turf Club, had returned home to take a lethal dose of prussic acid rather than face arrest and ruin.

The Queen was not alone in her disapproval of the Prince’s friends. After another member of the Marlborough Club turned out to be an American swindler wanted by the police, The Times condemned his patronage of ‘American cattle-drovers and prize-fighters’, while other critics spoke harshly of his intimate friendships with men distinguished by riches rather than birth. They condemned, for example, his intimacy with Sir Thomas Lipton, who had begun work at the age of nine in his Irish father’s grocery shop in Glasgow; with Sir John Blundell Maple, proprietor of a furniture store in Tottenham Court Road; and with the ruthless, self-made adventurer Cecil Rhodes, whose blackballing by the Travellers’ Club induced the Prince to resign from it himself. Most of all they disapproved of his close friendships with affluent Jews. ‘We resented the introduction of the Jews into the social set of the Prince of Wales,’ Lady Warwick said; ‘not because we disliked them individually … but because they had brains and understood finance. As a class, we did not like brains. As for money, our only understanding of it lay in the spending, not in the making of it.’ The Prince, on the contrary, was fascinated by the operations of capitalists and talk of high finance. And he delighted in the company of rich Jews like the Sassoons, whose ancestors had been settled in Mesopotamia for many centuries and whose immense wealth was derived from the profits of the great merchant house of David Sassoon & Company of Bombay. Arthur Sassoon lived in great splendour at 8 King’s Gardens, Hove, waited upon by forty servants. His half-brothers Reuben and Alfred had almost equally sumptuous houses nearby.

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