Dilke (19 page)

During this period Dilke saw a great deal of the Prince of Wales and moved freely in what was known as the Marlborough House set. Their acquaintanceship began at a dinner party given by Lord Fife in March, 1880, just before the change of Government. “The Prince laid himself out to be pleasant, and talked to me nearly all the evening—chiefly about French politics and the Greek question,” Dilke noted. Thereafter they met frequently—at Sandringham, at Marlborough House, at Chiswick, in Paris and at various English country houses. The Prince cultivated Dilke partly because of a genuine social affinity, partly because of a perverse desire to know those of whom his mother disapproved, and partly because, disliking Granville, he wished to maintain a Foreign Office contact. This last aspect of their relationship was of considerable value to an Heir Apparent, hungry for inside knowledge, who was ordinarily frozen out of all public business. “Throughout Dilke's official life,” the Prince's official biographer has stated, “. . . the Prince privately derived from him a fuller knowledge than he enjoyed before of the inner processes of government.”
²⁶

Not all of Dilke's endeavours to keep the Prince informed ended in success. In the spring of 1882 an arrangement was sought by which the latter might see copies of the secret Foreign Office telegrams (of which the secrecy was not such as to prevent their being seen by the private secretaries to all members of the Cabinet), but the Queen stamped upon the plan. The incident closed with a sharp exchange of letters between the private secretaries of the monarch and her son. “When the Prince of Wales desired me to write to you about the F.O. telegrams, etc.,” Francis Knollys wrote, sending a copy to Dilke, “he was under the impression (an erroneous one it appears) that the Queen was anxious he should be behind the scenes of what was going on as much as possible, provided that this did not interfere with her own authority.”
²⁷

There were other, less official, ways in which Dilke could
provide information and contacts for the heir to the throne. Thus in 1882 he was summoned to travel down to Dover with the Prince for a brief inspection of the Channel Tunnel works and to bring with him a map (not of the works but of central Asia) for study and explanation in the saloon of the special train. In the preceding year, Dilke had undertaken a more delicate enterprise with the Prince and had arranged a “breakfast” at the shortly to be demolished
Moulin Rouge
restaurant in Paris for him to meet Gambetta. The occasion was apparently a success, and Knollys wrote in enthusiastic terms: “The Prince of Wales desires me to say how much he was interested by the breakfast which you were good enough to give to him yesterday and how well he thought it went off. H.R.H. would be much obliged if you would kindly let M. Gambetta know that it would give him great pleasure to possess his photograph. . . .”
²⁸
Inscribed “
au plus aimable des princes
,– the photograph was duly delivered. Later the Prince arranged, on his own initiative, another luncheon with Gambetta.

Both because he had a taste for fashionable life as such, and because his popularity at Marlborough House provided something of a counter-balance to the ill-favour with which he was viewed at Windsor, Dilke was far from discouraging the Prince's attentions. But he allowed them neither to weaken his views about the Civil List nor to lead him towards an excessively favourable judgment of the Prince as an individual. “The Prince is, of course, in fact, a strong Conservative, and a still stronger Jingo, really agreeing in the Queen's politics, and wanting to take everything everywhere in the world . . .” he wrote of him. “He has more sense and more usage of the modern world than his mother . . . but less real brain power,”
²⁹
he added. On another occasion he noted: “The only two subjects on which the Prince of Wales agrees with any Liberals are (1) Randolph Churchill (2) the government of London. But then, as I personally, though assaulted by Randolph, do not hate him—there remains only the government of London, which becomes well worn. He began it again last night at the Harcourts!”
³⁰
Dilke was even
capable of making a somewhat adverse comparison between the Prince and his mother. In 1883, after a visit to Windsor, he wrote to Mrs. Pattison: “The Queen's court is singularly dowdy by the side of the Prince of Wales's, but on the other hand, though the servants are shabby, the people about the Queen are more
uniformly
gentlemen and ladies than those about the Prince.”
³¹
Nor did he always find that the Prince's guests compensated by the brilliance of their conversation for their doubtful respectability.

“Some of the parties to which the Prince of Wales virtually insisted that I should go were curious,” he wrote; “the oddest of them a supper which he directed to be given on July 1st, 1881, for Sarah Bernhardt, at the wish of the Duc d'Aumale, and at which all the other ladies present were English ladies who had been invited at the distinct request of the Prince of Wales. It was one thing to get them to go, and another thing to get them to talk when they were there; and the result was that, as they would not talk to Sarah Bernhardt and she would not talk to them, and as the Duc d'Aumale was deaf and disinclined to make conversation on his own account, nobody talked at all, and an absolute reign of the most dismal silence ensued. . .”
³²

All in all, indeed, the best thing that Dilke could find to say for the Prince was that, despite a somewhat discouraging reception at the time—“for he seems not to listen and to talk incessantly except when he is digesting”—it was often worth talking to him because he subsequently repeated, as his own remarks, what he had been told.

Another Liberal with whom the Prince was intimate, and whom Dilke, partly in consequence, came to know well, was Lord Rosebery. Rosebery in 1881 was a thirty-four-year-old Scottish earl who had been three years married to the principal Rothschild heiress of that generation. He had been Gladstone's host and sponsor in Midlothian, where he exercised great territorial influence, and he looked forward with some impatience to rapid political preferment. This impatience so impressed itself upon Dilke that, after a walk at Mentmore
(the Roseberys' Buckinghamshire house) one Sunday afternoon in May, 1880, he “came to the conclusion that Rosebery was the most ambitious man I had ever met.”
^[8]
But Gladstone, normally so ready to reward peers, was curiously unforth-coming towards Rosebery. He offered him junior office when the Government was formed, but this was refused, from a mixture of motives. Just over a year later another offer was made and Rosebery came in as under-secretary at the Home Office, with a special responsibility for Scottish affairs. There was some feeling, and none participated in it more strongly than Rosebery and his wife, that Rosebery should be in the Cabinet, particularly in view of the resignation of Argyll. This led to growing bitterness and to frequent scenes, many of them noted by Dilke in his diary or in his letters to Mrs. Pattison, between Lady Rosebery and the Gladstones.

Dilke was inclined to think that Rosebery had been treated badly. In the last years of the Beaconsfield Administration and in the early days of the new Gladstone Government he and Chamberlain had thought Rosebery might be a useful radical ally in the Lords. But Rosebery grew bored with radicalism; his wife noted that by the early summer of 1881 his political relations with the “two Ministers of the Left” had cooled; and Dilke's comments upon his character became sharper. In May of 1883 he wrote: “At the State Ball Rose-brry broke out to me against Mr. G. He swears he will resign, giving health as his reason. He is not a gendeman, for he reproaches Mr. G. with the benefits he has conferred upon him, but he has been ill-used.”
³³
Within a week Rosebery did resign and remained out of the Government for nearly two years. Throughout the early years of the Parliament he and his wife hovered over Dilke's life, as discontented half-friends, constantly inviting him to visit them at their various houses.

At Dilke's own house the pattern of life underwent several changes during this period. In the summer of 1880 his private secretary, H. G. Kennedy, who had been ill for some time, finally left, and was replaced by a young Oxford graduate,
J. E. C. Bodley. Bodley, who was later to become both a distinguished writer on France and one of Cardinal Manning's closest friends, was a man of considerable intellect and wide social contacts. At first Dilke found him insufficiently serious. “Bodley is not beginning very well,” he wrote to Mrs. Pattison. “Ought to be in bed by half past twelve—not sit up till five in the morning . . . to dance and flirt . . . Nothing on earth can get him up before 9-30.”
³⁴
Some time later the position had become still worse: “Bodley was not out of bed when I got back from the country at 10-15! “Dilke complained, and elsewhere he wrote despairingly: “
How
to get rid of Bodley?” These initial difficulties sorted themselves out, however, and from a little room at the turn of the staircase in 76, Sloane Street, Bodley played an important part in the remainder of Dilke's official life.

Another change came at the end of the same year when Dilke's grandmother, Mrs. Chatfield, and her niece, Miss Folkard, who had both lived in 76, Sloane Street since 1874, died within a few days of each other. Thereafter Dilke lived alone. But his house remained a centre of social activity. His dinner parties—exclusively male and consisting principally of politicians and diplomats, although with a sprinkling of literary and academic figures (one party was organised with especial care for the Rector of Lincoln)—continued with unabated frequency. From Saturday to Monday he was mostly away, sometimes at the houses of his friends and sometimes at riverside inns in order that he might scull or canoe upon the Thames. This last activity became of such importance that he began to think of building a riverside house to avoid “staying in the village pothouses.” He kept his house near Toulon and was able during most years to pay two or three visits there; and in London the morning fencing continued.

There were some family difficulties. Ashton Dilke, who had suffered from tuberculosis for some years, entered a final decline in the autumn of 1882 and retired to North Africa. He died there in March, 1883. The Eustace Smith connection continued to give trouble. “Maye's sister, Helen, lost her third and youngest child a few days ago,” Dilke informed
Mrs. Pattison in March, 1882. “Yesterday she took a dose of poison and very nearly killed herself. Ashton tells me this, and also that it is not to be known. Maye (Ashton's wife) and Mrs. Donald Crawford
^[9]
are watching her day and night.”
³⁵
And a month earlier, on February 25th, Dilke had confided cryptically to his diary: “What is one to do when vile letters containing abominable charges are sent to all one's friends?”
³⁶
But these were only clouds as big as a man's hand, appearing in a sky that was still otherwise clear and encouraging.

Dilke Had accepted his subordinate office with a reasonably good grace, but one of his most urgent desires was to improve upon it, provided that this could be done without abandoning his political power or principles. His ambition was in no way tempered by an excessive admiration for his rivals.

“Suppose we force the Whigs out and become the next Whigs ourselves,” he wrote to Mrs. Pattison in November, 1880, “whom (
sic
) are our men. Hartington is a man—but on the wrong side. Argyll is politically not a man, but a devil. Gladstone I thought an old man. Lord G. is old, and only about half of a man, tho' useful and ornamental. What remains? Chamberlain and (me)! Courtney is a radical devil to match that Whig devil. Fawcett is
a little
better than a windbag—but only a little better, and Mundella
no
better than a windbag. It seems to me that we shall be about as badly off as France (I think Bryce may make a good third-rate man some day).”
¹

Nor was this the end of his strictures. “Imagine!” he was writing a few weeks later, “Harcourt who says one thing one moment and the exact opposite the next, and Lord North-brook who is just a nice idiotic bankers' clerk.”
²
Occasionally, but not often, he could be a little less critical. Lord Spencer, the “red earl” from Northamptonshire (who was so-called on account of his beard not his politics), was a rather surprising exception whom Dilke designated as “one of my favourites.” And there was always Chamberlain, to whom Dilke's loyalty was almost complete. “Regd. Brett (later
Lord Esher, but at that time Hartington's private secretary) called just before the Cabinet to find out whether the offer of Chamberlain's place would tempt me to sell him”
³
, Dilke noted contemptuously in December, 1880, when they were contemplating a joint resignation. “The Duchess of Manchester sent him,” he added.

The next time that Dilke seemed near to promotion the prospect was more enticing but the result equally unrewarding. The winter of 1881-2 had been one of the most bitter in the history of Anglo-Irish relations. The Land Bill had become law by the autumn of 1881, but relations between Parnell and the chiefs of the Government were by then so embittered that there was no chance of its being allowed to work successfully. At Leeds in October Gladstone accused the Parnellites of preaching the doctrines of public plunder and warned them that “the resources of civilisation are not yet exhausted.” Parnell replied by denouncing the Prime Minister as “this masquerading knight-errant, this pretending champion of the rights of every nation except those of the Irish nation.” And the Prime Minister, on this occasion with the support of his whole Cabinet, responded by using the Coercion Act and putting Parnell into Kilmainham Jail. Dilke was a little doubtful, but Chamberlain was convinced that the working class in Birmingham did not like to see the law defied.