No one, save those who have selfish interests to serve and who for latent purposes of their own may think it advisable to soothe or to flatter the King, will for a moment question the dangers and difficulties which surround our present Monarch at the opening of his reign. His worst foes are not rival nations, for he has inherited from his august Mother a certain fine and courteous tact which is rare to find even in the most accredited diplomat. It is a helpful endowment, and will of a certainty aid him to unknot many a perplexing tangle of dispute. He is undoubtedly regarded by all foreigners with respect and liking, and his broad-minded, liberal views are well known, so that as a leading Austrian newspaper says, “It is anticipated that he will prove a mild and wise ruler, under whom England will lose enemies and gain new friends.”
It can scarcely be considered then too much to say that the whole Continent is favourably disposed towards him, and that from this particular standpoint alone he is surrounded by friendly and prospering influences. In our own England he has long been regarded as the “popular” Prince, and so begins his reign as a “popular” King. He is full of kindness and generosity; and there are many who assert that to those who deserve it least he is too kind and too generous. But “a good heart never changes,” as Shakespeare makes his Henry V say, and we may hope that the King’s reputation for this “good heart,” which he won as Prince of Wales, will be the rock on which the Empire may rest secure. Yet, without assuming the rôle of a soothsayer crossing the pathway of a Cæsar, those who truly “fear God and honour the King,” and have neither favours to ask, nor interests to serve, cannot but entertain without undue foreboding certain fears for his well-being. Dark to him, personally speaking, must be this particular turn in his pathway, when he takes up the Imperial Crown, glistening more with tears than with jewels, and dons the heavy robes of ceremonious state, for he has already lived long and lost much. Sorrow has dealt hardly with him in many ways, and the dangerous condition of his dearly beloved sister, the Empress Frederick, is an additional pang to his already grieving heart. Between duty and love his spirit must be sadly exercised.
“A man is not as God,
But then most Godlike being most a man.”
Scores of nobodies have for years been in the habit of talking glib nonsense about “the Prince of Wales,” and of casually alluding to “Albert Edward” as if they knew him personally, or as if he were hail-fellow-well-met with every little “nouveau riche” that comes to the social scum-top for a moment like a minnow in a garden cistern; and the present writer has often been vastly entertained to hear persons who have never seen the Prince, much less spoken to him, jabbering about him very much after the fashion of monkeys discussing the habitat of the lion. There was never a great name but was not slandered by the envious,—never a high reputation that some coward did not strive to attack and tarnish—never a splendid fame that did not serve as a target for the arrows of the mean and the malicious. And the worst lies and slanders are always said and written of those whose position is too exalted to allow them either answer or self-defence. When persons are themselves ignoble they love nothing better than to defame nobility, and if they could force an answer from those whom they malign, they would be happy to have dragged down the higher than themselves to their own base level. Thus it chances that we have often heard male and female word-mongers mouthing idiot conversation concerning our present King which has marked them as altogether outside the pale of good manners, and has debarred them from every suspicion of either patriotism or loyalty. “The King can do no wrong” is, of course, too far-fetched a statement in any period or in any country, as has been proved over and over again, but until some wrong has been manifested, the King’s name should surely be set well beyond the limit of vulgar society jesting.
It may be asked, why should this be said now, and why should I say it? To which I would reply, that having had the honour of a personal acquaintance with his Majesty, when Prince of Wales (through the late Recorder of London, Sir Charles Hall), and having been treated by him with great courtesy and attention, I was and am still sufficiently impressed by his kindness to be conscious of gratitude. And that out of this, my sense of gratitude, I have, whenever I have heard people discussing the Prince, now the King, taken care to exercise those particular privileges belonging to the profession of Literature, which are, to hear, to observe, and to chronicle such things as may be useful to remember in the history of the time. And so it has chanced that I, being deemed altogether unimportant by that particular section of Society which judges Literature merely as a sort of bill-posting or press-reporting, which giggles foolishly at the names of Homer and Shakespeare, and can never be brought to realize that all day and every day, millions of pens are constantly at work, writing down such impressions of the hour as will outlast thrones, and be read by future generations,—even I, one of the least of these wielders of pens, have had the opportunity of seeing and noting much which it might be well and honest to set down. It can do no harm, and it may do good, to say that I have seen women of birth and position so lost to every sense of the true dignity of womanhood as to descend to the meanest tricks and subterfuges in the endeavour to secure the notice of, or an introduction to, the Prince of Wales, and that then, when such notice or introduction has been obtained, I have heard them vilify him behind his back with the fluency and choice diction common to the ladies of Billingsgate. It can do no harm, and it may do good, to say that a certain prominent American politician, professing to be a friend of the Prince’s and having been entertained at dinner by His Royal Highness on a certain evening in Homburg, met the present writer hard by Ritter’s Park Hotel next morning, and did then and there point to the Royal Standard flying above the door, with the remark,
“See that old rag! It ought to be rolled up and put away with all the racks, thumbscrews, and other useless rubbish of Royalty!”
And, on my replying that it was not customary in Europe to accept the hospitality of a Prince one evening, and attack his arms and insignia the next morning, that proud tall-talking son of the Stars and Stripes “cut” me from henceforth, for which I have ever since been thankful. From such men as these,—and there are, we know, Englishmen who are to the full as ill-mannered as any ill-mannered American,—and from such women as have in the past struggled and fought against each other to obtain the Prince of Wales’s kindly courtesies, merely to gain personal advantage out of them, and who may be trusted to pursue the same old campaign with regard to the King, may, and probably will come many vexations and difficulties, not directly from the actually offending persons, but from the pernicious influences such mischief-makers exercise on the weak minds of those who listen to their unwarranted and unwarrantable accounts of the doings of Royalty. Such irresponsible sources are the fountain-heads of all the foolish and erroneous statements which often appear in the press, and though Fleet Street knows “how things get into the papers,” the provinces are ignorant of Fleet Street mysteries, and provincial people have the unfortunate habit of accepting everything they see in the often brilliantly imaginative columns of the cheap London press as truer than Gospel. And though the cheap London press is a very useful institution, there are times when its zeal outruns its discretion. We have had several notable examples of this lately, and the shocking scene described by the Times Special Correspondent, as occurring outside the gates of Osborne House on the night of our great Queen’s death, was a disgrace to the very name of journalism.
“I cannot close,” wrote the correspondent in question, “without a description of a very painful scene witnessed last night, which is described only out of a sense of duty, and in obedience to an instinct of journalistic self-preservation. It happened that I was not at the gates of the lodge last evening when the news of the Queen’s death was announced by Mr. Fraser, nor was there any object in being there, since the news was certain to be received in London; in fact, it was received some minutes before it could be received at the gates. They are about a quarter of a mile from the house, and it was certain that the telegraph from the house to London would be quicker than human transmission from the house to the gate. But a few moments after the news had been made known at the gate I was driving up the York Avenue to Osborne in obedience to the summons, and in ignorance of the calamity which had befallen the nation, when I was apprised of it in a very shocking and unprecedented way. Loud shouts were heard in the distance, then came a crowd of carriages at the gallop, of bicycles careering down the hill at a breakneck speed, of runners bawling ‘Queen dead’ at the top of their voices. The sound suggested a babel of voices at a foxhunt rather than the very solemn occasion which had called them forth; and it has to be confessed with shame that they were emitted by persons connected with the Press, although not, of course, with any London paper of long standing. They were an outrage, and, taken in combination with a fictitious and disgraceful ‘interview’ with ‘the Queen’s physician,’ which has caused much pain and annoyance, they contribute a real danger to the better class of journalism, and, through it, to the public. How can journalists expect to be treated with consideration when, on an occasion so mournful, they behave in a manner so horribly contrary to common decency? Individual cases of misconduct one has seen before, but this yelling stampede established a record in bad taste and in humanity. I am told that there was ‘whooping’ at the gates themselves, but that is hearsay, and the evidence of my own eyes and ears is enough and to spare.”
We may unite to this account the very extraordinary statement made in a well-known theatrical journal, namely, that Mr. Charles Wyndham, the actor, convened a meeting of his confrères to put forth the proposition that “as vast crowds would be in London on the day of the Queen’s funeral, and as the procession would be over by three o’clock, would it not be advisable for all theatrical managers, especially those of the West End, to ask the Lord Chamberlain whether they might not be allowed to open on the Funeral night!” A more shocking, gross, and unpatriotic proposition was never set forth, and it is to be sincerely hoped for Mr. Wyndham’s own sake, that the journal which has so written him down has somehow been misled as to its information. The King has already (with a hasty officiousness which borders on excessively bad taste in the hour of his Majesty’s bereavement) been called by theatrical gossips a “promising patron of the drama,” but if he has been so in the past, the proposal of Mr. Wyndham to make profit out of his Mother’s funeral will scarcely commend the stage so much to his future consideration and favour. During the brief time that has elapsed since our late glorious Sovereign’s death, there has been far too much dragging-in of the King’s name to matters “theatrical and sporting,” in the Press,—and it is of far more interest to the nation to remember how ardently he, as Prince of Wales, has worked for good and charitable aims, how much he has helped to promote the cause of the poor, the weak and the aged, and how generously and promptly he has always given his personal aid and influence to relieve any immediate suffering. I do not think it is possible to appeal to the King for a good cause in vain; I have never heard that he turned a deaf or callous ear to the cry of suffering. Certain lines I wrote of him once I have now neither wish nor need to recall, and I venture to quote them here, not that they are worth quoting, but because many of my gentle enemies have taken much pains to pretend that I have written “against” our present Monarch, a disloyal task to which I have never bent my pen. The lines are these:—