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."