THE RAKES OF THE ROYAL FAMILY.
ENGLAND has been singularly unfortunate in her Royal Families.
York and Lancaster, Plantagenet and Tudor, Stuarts or Hanoverians,
they have been, with here and there an odd exception, a very bad lot,
morally speaking.
It is a curious history of crime and bloodshed, of dishonor, perjury,
and harlotry, this history of the Monarchs of England, since the
days of William the Norman, who had three illegitimate children, and
massacred thousands of his Saxon subjects every year, down to the days
of George IV, the most gentlemanly blackguard of his time and of Europe.
[Sidenote: VAGABONDS IN KINGLY ROBES.]
Roll back the hoary gates of the past, and look at Richard Crookback,
who reveled in blood, and died in Bosworth Ditch, a death only a little
better than that of Edward IV, whose children Richard basely murdered,
and we find succeeding him a scoundrel like the Eighth Henry, a brutal
fiend, with his six successive wives, all of whom perished miserably,
but the first and last wives, Catharine of Arragon and Catharine Parr;
and then we find his two children--Mary, an honest fanatic, burning
human beings for the honor of God; and next comes Elizabeth, who has
been facetiously styled the Virgin Queen--with her paramours and
favorites. Follow this hideous old spinster to the yawning verge of
the tomb, and she is still to be seen with her parchment visage and
grey hairs, seeking new lovers, or butchering the unfortunate Queen
of Scots, until at last the dread moment of all approaches, when she
tells her horrified chaplain that she will give millions of money for
a moment of time. Then we have a pusillanimous monarch, James I, who
spends his best years discovering witches and writing fantastical
and forgotten treatises against tobacco, or permitting a man like
Bacon--whose life was worth that of a thousand Kings, to be degraded
and made miserable, till at last his great, far seeing eyes are closed
in a final sleep--his heart having broken to pieces in the meridian of
his genius.
Then comes Charles I, a good man in his mild way, a patron of the arts,
a good husband and father, but withal he is doomed to the block.
Vainly he endeavors, in battle and statecraft, to stem the onward march
of the people who are determined to hurl all obstacles from their path
which stand in the way of their new ideas.
And now comes up the Brewer, Oliver Cromwell, one of Carlyle's heroes,
(and by the way, all of Carlyle's heroes are dripping with blood,) a
most accomplished and unrelenting butcher, one who thanks God for his
"precious mercies" when a thousand men, women, and children are driven
over a bridge into a deep river beneath, impelled by the pikes of his
ruffianly soldiery. Then he dies, and Charles II, a dissolute royal
scamp succeeds, and he of course has to dig up the crumbling skeleton
of Cromwell to hang it on Tyburn tree, that all men may see what manner
of divinity it is that should hedge around a King.
Think of this royal vagabond, who has for his mistress a Stewart,
a Duchess of Cleveland, a Louise de Queroailles, who also becomes
a Duchess of Portsmouth, and last but not least, poor simple, soft
hearted Mistress Nelly Gwynne, who left to the nation Greenwich
Hospital to atone for her lost soul.
It might be expected that in these days of the daily newspapers and
telegraph wires, of railroads, female suffrage and personal journalism,
that royalty, and notably, English royalty, would improve, from a
slight sense of decency and a proper regard for public opinion, if for
no other cause. Let us see.
Ten years ago I vainly endeavored to penetrate the dense masses who
lined Broadway, New York, and filled the air with their shouts, as an
open barouche, containing the then Mayor of the chief city of America,
sitting on the back seat, and a fair faced youth with flabby skin and
retreating chin, clad in a scarlet uniform and having an Order of the
Garter pendant from his breast, passed up the thronged thoroughfare
between two lines of citizen soldiery, whose bayonets, bright as
silver, reflected back the many hues of the excited and surging masses.
Five hundred thousand people of both sexes had turned out in holiday
attire, that ever memorable day, to do honor to a foreign prince,
whose government, since that thoughtless hour, sought during the
terrible confusion of a civil war, by every means in its power, by
money, influence, by Alabama pirates, by unceasing and bitterly hostile
journalistic attacks, by speeches in and out of Parliament--through the
pulpit and the rostrum, to destroy the Republic of the West. In fact
that government moved Heaven and Earth to annihilate and obliterate the
liberty, union, and might of the American people.
Such a reception had not been given, twenty-five years before, to
the gallant, noble-minded, and chivalric Lafayette, the companion of
George Washington, one of the finest characters in all history, or the
unwritten records of mankind.
This fair-faced, flabby-skinned youth, in the lobster colored and laced
coat, who stood up in the open carriage, (hired from the New York
Corporation hack-driver-in-chief, and charged for in the bill afterward
rendered, at five times the real price,) was no less a personage than
Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, Duke of Cornwall, Fellow of Trinity
House, Colonel of a Regiment of Foot, a General in the British Army,
(like Captain Jinks,) Baron Renfrew, Duke of Rothesay, Earl of Dublin,
and eldest son of Queen Victoria that is, and in the future to be King
of England and Defender of the Faith, by the Grace of God and the
permission of the Radical English Trades Unions.
[Sidenote: A CHANGE FOR THE WORSE.]
He was not a very bad looking lad of nineteen or twenty, that
sunny afternoon, as he bowed repeatedly and raised his Generals'
chapeau, with its plume of feathers, and doffed it to the radiant
republican female faces, and curtesied like a backward school boy,
in acknowledgement of the wild shouts which pealed upward in the
clear atmosphere, although no spectator there could have accused
him of having an intellectual or cultured face. How well we can all
now remember, to our shame, the manner in which he was petted, and
caressed, and toadied, and dined, and wined, until in the estimation
of his toadies he had almost attained the stature of a God, this boy
with the retreating chin and imbecile face--this hope and pride of the
Guelph family.
Still with all the marked and inherent imbecility of a descendant of
George III in his features, the young scion of royalty had not, at that
time when I first saw him, developed the seeds of immorality, want of
honor, meanness, and utter sottishness which have since made his name
infamous among his subjects, and despised by the princes of Europe.
The young lad for whom America could not do too much honor in feteing
and feasting, has since surrounded himself with pimps, panders,
parasites, and blackguards, of the lowest kind.
His name is a bye word of scorn in the British metropolis, and for a
lady of rank or position to be seen three times in his neighborhood, is
certain dishonor to her and her relatives.
It was nearly ten years after that bright sunny day, in Broadway, with
its shouting multitudes and noisy cheers, before I again saw His Royal
Highness Albert-Edward Prince of Wales.
One night, in going through High Holborn, and being without any settled
purpose as to where and how I should spend the evening, I accidentally
noticed the blazing gas lamps of the "Casino," a well-known dancing
hall, frequented by the loose livers and aristocratic idlers of the
English Capital.
After a moment's hesitation I entered and found the place--as is
usual on summer evenings at all the London dancing halls--pretty well
crowded.
Scores of couples, of both sexes, were whirling frantically in the
Old-World Teutonic waltz, and in the flushed faces and excited gestures
of the gyrating dancers I could notice a total forgetfulness of modesty
and decorum.
From the alcoves came the sounds of the clinking of wine-glasses, the
rattle of Moselle bottles, the pop, pop, of champagne corks, and songs,
choruses, and loud shouts of laughter, together with a Babel-jabber of
many confused tongues.
My attention was attracted while listening to the music from the fine
band, to a group that occupied a position which partially screened them
from the glances of the larger portion of the audience and dancers,
sitting and standing back as they did in an alcove.
[Illustration: PRINCE OF WALES.]
There were a dozen persons, perhaps, in the party, of both sexes, five
or six men fashionably attired, and as many women, in all the grandeur
and magnificence of harlotry--open and defiant--but well-bred harlotry.
There were two central figures conversing in this group, and I could
see that they were listened to with attention while speaking, one of
them, particularly, a slightly bald-headed man, having secured the ears
of his audience.
The other central figure was a woman, beautiful, but of that beauty
which is leprous to the sight, and fatal to those who encounter it as
the shade of the Upas Tree.
"Who is that man?" said I to an usher, nodding in the direction of the
bald-headed person.
[Sidenote: THE PRINCE AND HIS FRIENDS.]
"That _man_" said the flunkey, "why, that's not a _man_, that's His
Royal 'Ighness the Prince of Wales,--and long may he reign over us."
And this worn, blase, sottish and almost brutally stupid-looking person
in the Scotch tweed suit, with drooping eye-lids and sore eyes,--as if
he seldom went to bed, and then did not stay long in it, looking to be
forty-five years of age; prematurely bald, and without a particle of
that apparent divinity which, it is said, doth hedge a monarch, was the
self-same young lad of twenty, whom I had seen environed by bayonets in
Broadway, ten years before.
But how changed he was! Long nights of dissipation and debauchery
had seamed the once youthful and unwrinkled features, and the under
part of the face hung in heavy, adipose folds, like the dewlaps of a
bullock. His figure was stout and without grace, and to me he seemed
like a beer-drinking bagman or commercial peddler, half John Bull, half
Hanoverian. The tweed suit, a material which he affects very much, was
not at all calculated to set off or adorn his figure, and the great
grandson of George III looked very undignified indeed as he leaned over
the painted harlot resplendent in silks, and glistening with jewels,
who is known to all wild London scapegraces, and young men about town,
by the name of Mabel Gray, a name assumed for a purpose--to hide her
identity with the gutters from which she has sprung.
The Prince of Wales, despite all the counsels and admonitions of the
Queen (of whom whatever may be said, the merit cannot be denied her of
being a good mother), has, I regret to say, the reputation of being a
very sorry scamp.
His intimates are, generally, the worst and most abandoned roues of the
Clubs, the lowest turf blackguards and swindlers, and when he chooses
a companion who is not a swindler or a blackguard, a debauchee, or a
decoy, he is sure to be a fool.
The young man standing by the side of the Prince of Wales when I
entered the dancing hall, was Charles, Lord Carington, whose mother was
of the great family of d'Eresby, the head of which is Lord Willoughby
d'Eresby, Lord High Chamberlain of England, to whom is entrusted the
duty of looking after the morals of the English people and the sanctity
of the British drama. It is he who gives passes to the House of Lords
on Saturdays, on slips of blue paper which the unwashed are very eager
to obtain; and it is also the duty of the Lord High Chamberlain to
watch every new burlesque when produced, in order that the skirts of
the ballet girls and blondes may be of the proper length, and not too
short for the proprieties.
Lord Carington's grandfather was a rich man named Smith, who was
ennobled for some reason or another, and his large fortune and title
has descended to the present possessor, who is known to be one of the
wildest and most rakehelly young noblemen in London. He is a lieutenant
in the Guards of the Queen's Household Brigade, and one of the boon
companions of the Prince of Wales. The latter is constantly to be found
in company with this "Charley Carington," as he is called, who was the
perpetrator of a most cowardly outrage upon the person of Mr. Grenville
Murray, an aged gentleman who was supposed to be proprietor and editor
of the "Queen's Messenger," a satirical weekly journal, in which Mr.
Murray was said to have written several scathing articles upon the
"Hereditary Legislators" of England. In one of these articles a sketch
was given of Lord Carington, under the title of "Bob Coachington, Lord
Jarvey," in which the practice of driving a mail coach and four horses
to and fro between London and its environs and taking up passengers for
money, a favorite pastime of Lord Carington, was referred to in no very
flattering terms. For this supposed affront, without any positive proof
to warrant the outrage, the gallant Lord Carington, aged 25 years,
set upon Mr. Murray, as he was coming out of the Conservative Club,
of which he was a member, and beat him badly. Mr. Murray is about 60
years of age, and was of course not able to defend himself, and when
he sought justice in the usual way at the Marlborough Street Police
Station, of the magistrate, Mr. Knox, he found the Prince of Wales and
a number of titled ruffians sitting on the bench along side of the
dispenser of justice!
[Sidenote: TWO IMBECILES.]
Of course Mr. Murray received no justice in that Court, and not only
was he refused satisfaction, but in addition an attack was made upon
the person of his counsel, when a libel suit had been preferred against
the "Queen's Messenger," by the aristocratic friends of Lord Carington
and the Prince of Wales, who did this to intimidate him from writing
farther in his journal of the scandalous conduct of the Queen's
relations and the rottenness of the higher nobility.
In addition to this Mr. Murray was expelled from the Conservative Club
by a ballot of one hundred and ninety votes, only ten members of the
Club having the personal courage to withstand the influence and threats
brought to bear against them by the Prince of Wales, Lord Carington,
and their minor satellites.
Lord Carington is fond of driving his coach and four and taking up
passengers in the outskirts of London, charging them a nominal fare.
While sitting on the box or seat of the coach he usually holds to his
lips a huge horn, which he toots like a raving maniac, much to his own
satisfaction and the edification of the floating community, who with
the fondness of all Englishmen for a live Lord, smile benignantly if
not affectionately upon this imbecile young nobleman.
In the words of the song, the "Prince of Wales goes everywhere to see
the sights of town" with Carington, and at the Dramatic fete at the
Crystal Palace in 1869, while his beautiful, good, and neglected wife
sat on a dais and received the donations for the Dramatic College, the
Prince manifested in public his intimacy with Carington by laughing
and conversing with him, arm-in-arm, much to the horror of all the
pious old dowagers who were present and had heard wild stories of Lord
Carington.
Mabel Grey, who has ruined scores of young aristocrats and brought
them to beggary, is the reputed mistress of Lord Carington, and has
made several visits with him to Paris, Baden, and other places on the
Continent. It is said that he has already squandered twenty thousand
pounds upon this well-bred harlot, and it is the current talk in London
that the Prince of Wales has also been on terms of an improper intimacy
with Mabel Grey. At all events he is not ashamed to be seen speaking
to her in Casinos or addressing her in public places, and the dear
Prince has on several occasions been seen drinking champagne with her
in the music halls and dancing rooms of the English capital. This is a
very bad business for a bald-headed father of five children.
[Illustration: PRINCE AND CABMAN.]
The Prince of Wales, with all his immense riches, is mean and very
penurious in money matters. He will argue for fifteen minutes with a
cabman in the street about an over-charge of a sixpence, and has been
known to get into an altercation with ticket sellers in the box offices
of places of amusement for the sake of a shilling or half a crown, in a
most undignified way. One night when getting out of a cab at Cremorne
the driver attempted to charge the Prince four shillings for a ride
when he should have charged him but two-and-sixpence. The Prince, who
was a little intoxicated, refused to pay the over-charge. The London
cabbies are the most impudent, brassy set of fellows I ever saw, and
this cabman was more than usually pugnacious. The Prince attempted to
go into the Garden, and had presented his ticket, when the cabman with
a yell clutched his coat, and tore away the skirt in the struggle to
get more fare. The Prince was recognized by some of the attendants of
the place, and the horrified cabman was handed over to the police for
assault on the blood royal. Fearing the ridicule of the London press,
the Prince told the policeman to release poor Cabby, who was only too
happy to escape transportation for life.
[Sidenote: INFAMY OF THE PRINCE.]
For the past seven years the Prince of Wales has been a prominent
actor in almost every scene of aristocratic dissipation and debauchery
which has been enacted in the English metropolis. He is well known
in the coulisses of the Opera, and has openly maintained scandalous
relations with ballet dancers and chorus singers. Even the shame of
the thing would not restrain him from loudly and familiarly applauding
and clapping his hands, whenever any of these female favorites of his
came on the stage, while the strains of Beethoven or Rossini could not
elicit from him as much as a smile of gratified approbation. The taste
of the Prince for music may be imagined from the fact that "Champagne
Charley," and "Not for Joseph," are his two most cherished melodies.
His relations with Mademoiselle Helena Schneider, the opera bouffe
singer, were most notorious, and he has been known to leave the bed
side of his wife in her illness to hasten to Paris at the summons of
this notorious woman of Darkness, and Sin, and Shame.
Among his special female favorites, are many of the better known
soubrettes of the London and Parisian theatres, and notably he was an
admirer of Finette, the famous Can-can danseuse of the Alhambra.
He is flippant, shallow, and heartless, and the record of his life thus
far has caused many a scalding tear to fall from the eyes of his royal
mother.
The London _Lancet_, the highest medical authority in England, found
it necessary, some eighteen months ago, to deny the charge that was
made openly against the Prince, which if true, would stamp him with
infamy. The Princess of Wales, who is a good and noble lady in every
sense--and a long suffering one in some respects--during the summer of
1869, visited the baths of Wildbad, in Germany, for the benefit of her
health, which had been sadly impaired. I dare not in these pages insult
my readers by giving the cause of her ill-health, which is more than
whispered about in English society.
The Prince has, I believe, five handsome children--their good looks
coming to them from their vigorous Norse mother, but it will not be
from any precaution taken by their father, if they do not hereafter
suffer from the results of his early indiscretions and follies, in the
Haymarket and the purlieus of Paris.
In a good many respects the Prince of Wales resembles another Prince
of Wales--one who succeeded his father as King. I mean George IV. Like
him, Albert Edward is already a broken debauchee, and like George IV
Albert Edward has a vicious way of making his wife suffer through his
follies and disgraceful behaviour. Unless the Prince is predestined to
experience a sudden and speedy conversion, it is more than probable
that the next King of England will excel and put to shame the open acts
of profligacy which made George IV so notorious.
One thing could be said for George IV which cannot be said for the
Prince of Wales. The former was a gentleman in manner if not one at
heart--but this Prince, while being thoroughly heartless and "stingy,"
has the breeding of a waiter in a lager beer saloon. He is heavy, slow,
unready, hesitating, and flabby, without a spark of culture or a trace
of the refinement which belongs to his station.
[Sidenote: PRINCE AND BREWER AS FIREMEN.]
His Royal Highness has a great passion for running with the "masheen,"
as a New York rowdy would term it, and Captain Shaw, of the London Fire
Brigade, is greatly admired by the Prince for his gallant management
of that very efficient Corps. The latter has often taken a ride on a
fire engine through the London streets. The Prince, while on a visit
to Brighton some years ago, made the acquaintance of a rich young
London brewer, who had more money than brains. This was just the sort
of a man to suit the Prince, being very fond of rich young men, who in
many cases are only too happy to have the honor of paying the bills
contracted by his Royal Highness. This eminent young brewer had, with
the Prince, a similar taste for fire engines, and it was suggested by
the future King of England that the brewer, who had a fund of good
nature, should send to London for a fire engine, at his own expense,
and have it transported to Brighton, where in course of time the
Prince hoped it might afford them much amusement. The brewer of course
complied with the Prince's request, and before long one of those
grotesque looking fire machines, that are every now and then to be seen
darting through the London streets, made its appearance at Brighton.
Night after night the Prince and the brewer made the quiet villas and
the Parade of Brighton resound with their shrieks and howls, as they
drove at headlong speed through the watering place, the two maniacs
sitting astride of the apparatus which was drawn by two horses; and
finally the thing became such a nuisance to the residents of Brighton,
and so many complaints reached the Queen's ears of the Prince's riotous
conduct, that at last he was sent for and severely reprimanded by her
Majesty, and for a few days he kept on his good behavior, to relapse
again like a fever patient.
It is useless to conjecture as to the probability of the Prince
succeeding to the throne, but if ever he does, he will no doubt revive
the days of Charles II and his dissolute court. His beautiful and
virtuous wife will perhaps fall into the place which Catharine, of
Braganza, was compelled to accept as the consort of that rakehelly
monarch, and Albert Edward will, no doubt, find in Lord Carington
material for a successor to Sir Charles Sedley, and in the Duke of
Hamilton a scamp, worthy of the reputation borne by the Earl of
Rochester.
It is a mistake to think, moreover, that the Prince of Wales is alone
among his family, in his vicious course, or that he has not numerous
imitators among the nobles bearing some of the proudest names in
England. Although he is yet but a young man of thirty years of age, he
has those around him who ape his immorality and copy his disregard for
the usages of society.
Still, the Prince cannot be blamed for the follies of his relations.
The Duke of Cambridge, cousin to the Queen, and old enough to be the
father of the Prince, has as bad if not a worse reputation, than the
Prince of Wales.
George Frederick William Charles, Duke of Cambridge, Earl of Tipperary,
and Baron of Culloden, is a first cousin of Queen Victoria, a Field
Marshal and Commander-in-Chief of the English Army.
This Prince is about fifty years of age, and lives in an unlawful
way with a Miss Fairbrother, by whom he has had several children, I
believe. It might be expected, of a prince so closely related to the
Queen, and occupying such a high position as chief of the British Army,
that he would set a good example to the younger branches of the royal
family. On the contrary, the Duke is well known, everywhere, as a royal
rake, and his shameless amours are beyond number. The old prince is
slightly bald from his course of early piety, and suffers so dreadfully
from the gout, the result of early dissipation, that he is nothing but
a wreck, being compelled annually to pay a visit to the mineral baths
of Germany, and American travelers upon the continent at Baden, Ems,
and Hombourg, will occasionally encounter an old, broken, and bloated
personage, limping on a stick, who will quarrel with a waiter, in
Hanoverian Deutsch, for the sake of a kreutzer, and when once excited
it is very difficult to calm his rage, which, sometimes, degenerates
into a helpless imbecility. This is the Duke of Cambridge.
[Sidenote: A MAD KING.]
From his illicit connection with the lady to whom I have referred, the
mock-title of "Duke of Fairbrother," has been given to this illustrious
Commander-in-Chief of the Army. Fancy such a Duke of Cambridge holding
the baton of Wellington, and leading such soldiers as Havelock, Outram,
Colin Campbell, and Napier of Magdala. And this very same imbecile Duke
has had command of the English Army, and notably at the Alma, in the
Crimean campaign, his conduct was such as to make the spectators doubt
whether he was a madman or a coward. In the heat of the fight, the Duke
lost all management of him self, and began to make strange noises,
and to act in a strange manner, until he was carried from the field,
kicking and biting in a maniacal fashion.
For the taint is in the blood of the English Royal Family, and may
never be eradicated. The Duke of Cambridge is a lineal descendant of
George III, who, by his inherent madness, lost half of the British
Empire, and who was in the habit of answering reasonable questions,
with such replies as,--
"What, what, who, who, where, where, why, why--BLIM!" Should the Prince
of Wales hereafter behave himself in an unseemly fashion, his tainted
blood may, to a certain extent, be blamed for the outbreak.
[Illustration]