by Theo Aronson
Just before nine o’clock that evening the Princess gave birth to a two-months’ premature boy weighing only three and three-quarter pounds. But he was strong and healthy. ‘The dear little baby … has a very pretty, well-shaped, round head, with very good features, a nice forehead, a very marked nose, beautiful little ears and pretty little hands,’ reported the Queen, who had come hurrying over from Osborne.12
One of the Queen’s chief concerns was the matter of the baby’s names. She decided that he was to be called Albert Victor, after his paternal grandparents, Albert and Victoria. The first the parents heard of this decision was when the Prince of Wales’s little sister, the six-year-old Princess Beatrice, happened to mention it to Lady Macclesfield. The Prince was understandably annoyed. To his protestations, the Queen blandly answered that the naming of the Heir Presumptive was a dynastic rather than a personal matter. It was her intention for all future British monarchs to bear the name Albert. Just as she wished the Prince of Wales to be one day known as King Albert I, so she wanted his new-born son to become King Albert II.
Accordingly, the child was christened Albert Victor Christian Edward: Christian being the name of Princess Alexandra’s father, King Christian IX of Denmark, and Edward that of the Queen’s late father Edward, Duke of Kent. In view of the fact that he had been born so soon after the Princess’s return from a skating party, Society wags dubbed him a ‘N-ice baby’ or ‘Prince All-but-on-the-ice’. But to everyone in the family, other than Queen Victoria – and eventually, even to her – the boy was to be known as ‘Eddy’. He liked to be known, officially, as Prince Edward.
The christening ceremony was held in the private chapel at Buckingham Palace on 10 March 1864, the first anniversary of the Wales’s wedding day. Wearing what she called her ‘poor sad dress’13 and ‘a sort of Mary Stuart cap decorated with diamonds’,14 Queen Victoria behaved, says the watching Henry Greville, gentleman usher at court, with her ‘usual composure’. To her daughter, the Crown Princess, the Queen gave her customary doleful account of the occasion but, according to Greville, she laughed heartily when ‘the Royal baby began howling, which it did lustily throughout the service’.
‘I am told this is considered to be a lucky omen,’ continued Greville. ‘If so, the Prince should be the most fortunate of men.’15
An even more optimistic wish was made by the Crown Princess. She hoped that the baby would grow up to be ‘dear Papa’s own grandson in all that is good and great’.16
Prince Eddy was raised in two homes: Marlborough House in London and Sandringham House in Norfolk. Marlborough House, facing on to the Mall, was the Prince of Wales’s London home for almost forty years, from the time of his marriage until his accession to the throne, as King Edward VII, in 1901. He became so closely associated with it that his circle of rich, raffish, pleasure-loving friends were known as the Marlborough House set. It was one of the great social centres of Victorian London.
To an even greater extent and for an even longer period – from before his marriage until his death in 1910 – Sandringham House reflected the Prince of Wales’s way of life. That it was set in flat, featureless countryside, rebuilt in a hideous neo-Elizabethan style and furnished in the worst contemporary taste, bothered the frankly philistine Prince not at all. He felt more at home here than anywhere else. His Sandringham house parties, with their kaleidoscopic guest lists and day-long shoots were a source of immense pleasure to him.
Princess Alexandra, too, was devoted to Sandringham. The marshy surroundings, invariably scoured by the salt wind off the Wash, reminded her of her native Denmark. Indeed, within both Sandringham House and Marlborough House, the Princess was able to recreate something of the flavour of her Danish girlhood. Her private apartments mirrored her taste for a homely, domestic life. Little islands of intimacy were formed by the arrangement of screens and curtains and banks of flowering plants. These were crowded with small sofas, love-seats and pouffes. At every turn stood yet another what-not or occasional table loaded with silver-framed family photographs and assorted bric-à-brac. ‘Cosy’ was a word of the highest praise in the Princess of Wales’s vocabulary. These rooms perfectly encapsulated the warm, affectionate, slightly cloying atmosphere in which Prince Eddy spent much of his early years.
The little boy, wrote Queen Victoria when he was a year old, was ‘a perfect bijou – very fairy-like but quite healthy, very wise-looking and good. He lets all the family carry him and play with him – and Alix likes him to be accustomed to it. He is very placid, almost melancholy-looking sometimes. What is not pretty is his very narrow chest (rather pigeon-chested) which is like Alix’s build and that of her family … He is decisively like her; everyone is struck by it.’17
By this time Princess Alexandra was again pregnant and on 3 June 1865 she gave birth to a second son. Moving fast, the parents denied Queen Victoria the opportunity of once again choosing the baby’s name. To her considerable disappointment, they decided on George as the first name (‘as we like the name and it is an English one’) and Frederick – a Danish royal name – as a second. Thwarted, the Queen had to be content with insisting that ‘of course, you will add Albert at the end’.18
During the following six years, Princess Alexandra gave birth to four more children: three girls, and a boy who lived a few hours only. Louise was born in 1867, Victoria in 1868 and Maud in 1869. The birth of Princess Louise, the first of the three girls, was complicated by a severe attack of rheumatic fever and for weeks Princess Alexandra was confined to bed in great pain. The attack left her with a permanent limp. So gracefully, though, did the Princess cope with her stiff knee that in time Society women began to imitate ‘the Alexandra limp’. A more serious consequence was the worsening of her deafness. In time, it was to be total.
Princess Alexandra’s prolonged illness accelerated the steady drift apart of husband and wife. Incapable of sitting still for hours on end, wanting always to be surrounded by amusing people, too immature to face up to anything painful or unpleasant, the Prince of Wales, still in his twenties, avoided his wife’s sickroom as much as possible. He could hardly wait to get away to more congenial company. That such company was often female was only too apparent. The Princess would have heard of his involvement with ‘various Russian beauties’ when he was in St Petersburg just before her illness, and of his suppers with ‘female Paris notorieties’ during the course of it.19 She must certainly have suspected the worst when he stayed out night after night, often not coming home until three in the morning.
Although the Prince and Princess of Wales were to remain fond enough of each other and he would always treat her with great respect and courtesy, their relationship was never to be particularly close or loving.
On the children, and particularly on Prince Eddy, this estrangement between their parents would have had a pronounced effect. The young princes and princesses spent far more time with their mother than was usual in upper-class Victorian households and the Prince’s neglect of his wife tended to make her even more possessive. This is not to claim that the Prince of Wales was in any way unkind to his children; on the contrary, he was a very indulgent father. Determined that his own children should not be subjected to the sort of merciless discipline which had blighted his own youth, he favoured as free and easy an upbringing as possible.
‘If children are too strictly or perhaps too severely treated,’ he once wrote to his mother, ‘they get shy and only fear those whom they ought to love.’ He was not, however, prepared to spend too much time in their company. A child, he claimed, ‘is always best looked after under its mother’s eye’.20 But whenever he could spare the time from his relentless social round, the Prince of Wales revealed himself to his children as a sympathetic, jocular, uncensorious figure.
Their mother they adored. The Princess of Wales no more encouraged her children to engage or expand their intellects than did their father. With no interest in reading and with her deafness cutting her off from intelligent or enlightening conversation, she
retained the mind of an adolescent. To her five children, Princess Alexandra seemed hardly more grown-up than themselves. They called her ‘darling Motherdear’: a gay, spontaneous, impractical, unpunctual creature, ready enough to toboggan down the stairs on silver trays or to crouch behind sofas in a game of hide-and-seek. ‘We are to have blind man’s buff, tapping hands, snapdragon etc,’ wrote one long-suffering guest. ‘The Princess is as wild as she can be and delights in games.’21 She once dressed one of her nephews in the crinoline and bonnet which Queen Victoria had worn during her state visit to Paris in 1855 and solemnly led him into the sickroom of her equally fun-loving sister Dagmar, Empress of All the Russias. The bizarre sight is said to have considerably hastened the invalid’s recovery.
One result of this undisciplined upbringing was that the Wales children ran very wild indeed. ‘A fearful romp with the little Princes,’ reported Annie de Rothschild in December 1869; ‘we taught them blind man’s buff, and ran races with them. The eldest is a beautiful child, the image of the Princess, the second has a jolly little face and looks the cleverest. The Princess said to me: “They are dreadfully wild, but I was just as bad.” ’22
Queen Victoria was not nearly as tolerant. ‘They are such ill-bred, ill-trained children I can’t fancy them at all,’ she once complained. They were as ‘wild as hawks’. Lady Geraldine Somerset described the three Wales princesses as ‘rampaging little girls’.23 At other times the Queen would maintain that the over-active social life which the Prince of Wales was obliging his wife to lead was making the children ‘puny and pale’; ‘poor frail little fairies’, she called them.24 Of one aspect only of the Princess’s upbringing of her children did Queen Victoria approve. Her daughter-in-law insisted on ‘great simplicity and an absence of all pride, and in that respect she has my fullest support’.25
With each passing year Prince Eddy revealed himself, ever more markedly, as the odd-one-out in this rumbustious Wales brood. His nurse, Mary Blackburn, testified to his ‘gentleness of heart’, and another observer claims that his ‘habit of forgiveness, his instinctive desire to be forgiven, had their origins in the affectionate disposition which was the most beautiful point in the Prince’s character’.26 By the age of seven, in 1871, he was a beautiful boy but with a dreamy, wistful, curiously vulnerable expression and a decidedly lethargic manner. That the Prince of Wales was disappointed in his sensitive eldest son was becoming increasingly apparent.
In his authorized life of Prince Eddy’s younger brother George, afterwards King George V, Sir George Arthur claims that the Prince of Wales’s ‘own robust constitution and tireless energy contrasted sharply with the delicacy alike of physique and demeanour, the shrinking from anything approaching the boisterous, which marked his elder son and might at times act as something of an irritant: the love of fun and frolic, the eagerness and élan with which the younger [Prince George] was so fully endued, were dear in his father’s eyes and served to forge a bond between them from which Prince Eddy – the idol from his birth of his mother – could not but be a little withdrawn.’27
This merely led to the Princess of Wales becoming even more protective of her eldest son. The only occasions on which she is known to have spoken sharply to Prince George was when he bickered with his elder brother. ‘Above all,’ she once admonished, ‘don’t ever quarrel with your brother.’ And on another occasion she wrote that ‘in particular, do not quarrel with or irritate your brother.’28
During these early years a bond was formed between Princess Alexandra and Prince Eddy that was to be broken only by his death. ‘A fearless, open-hearted converse grew up between the mother and her elder son from childhood, and which nothing afterwards ever came to spoil,’ claims one observer. ‘Nothing that gave pleasure to him ever seemed too insignificant to be communicated to her. The mother and the sisters seemed ever to recur again and again in his thoughts; not only in his boyhood, but in his youth and manhood was this constantly the case, and all who were intimate with him, either while he was in the navy, or at college, or in the army, have alike remarked how often he would revert artlessly and almost unconsciously, if only by a passing reference, to the one topic that seemed ever uppermost in his mind.’29
Time and again, Prince Eddy would tell friends of his ‘devotion’ to his sympathetic and elegant mother.30
CHAPTER FOUR
‘A carefully brought-up boy’
In the year 1871, when Prince Eddy was seven and Prince George almost six, the Prince and Princess of Wales decided that their formal education must begin. The parents’ first choice as tutor was, in the light of his future career, a singular one. For it was Edward Carpenter – later to develop into that ardent socialist and campaigner for homosexual recognition. But in 1871, Carpenter was a young clergyman and Cambridge graduate. He was invited to spend a couple of days at Windsor Castle to be inspected by Queen Victoria. Here he professed himself delighted by the ‘gracious way’ in which he was treated by Princess Alexandra.1 But he refused the position. Already, apparently, Carpenter was undergoing some sort of identity crisis: not long after the Windsor interview he suffered a nervous breakdown and left the ministry. Instead of spending his life among the highest in the land, Carpenter made the decision that ‘I would and must somehow go and make my life with the mass of the people and the manual workers.’2
The rest of Carpenter’s long career was devoted to those two causes which would have rendered him, in the eyes of the Prince of Wales, a highly inappropriate choice as tutor to his sons: socialism and homosexuality. Carpenter developed into a leading exponent of the ‘New Thought’ – a vegetable-growing, sandal-making proclaimer of ‘William Morris Socialism, Hindu mysticism, neo-paganism and sexual reform’.3 His sexual tastes were for ‘the thick-thighed hot coarse-fleshed young bricklayer with a strap around his waist’ and for ‘the grimy and oil-besmeared figure of a stoker’.4 What would Queen Victoria have said about that?
Instead, the post of tutor went to the thirty-two-year-old Reverend John Neale Dalton. As a curate to Canon Prothero, rector of Whippingham near Osborne House, the young clergyman had caught the eye, and won the approval, of Queen Victoria.
Dalton was everything the Queen could have wished for: unmarried, well-educated, conscientious and orderly. His pupils’ days were divided into neat compartments, from the time that they rose at seven in the morning until they were put to bed at eight in the evening. He strongly disapproved of the interruption of lessons by the princes’ convivial father and scatterbrained mother and never hesitated to air this disapproval in his booming voice. Still less did he approve of the parents’ restless, luxurious, frivolous way of life.
But Dalton was not quite as censorious as he appeared. Even he, who could be so ponderous, was not above employing the sort of extravagantly sentimental language to which the Princess of Wales had accustomed her sons. ‘I thought much of my darling little Georgie,’ he once wrote to Prince George, who was by then eighteen years old and serving in the Navy, and he always signed his letters to ‘dearest boy with much love’.5 After Prince Eddy’s death, Dalton spoke lyrically of ‘the infinite sweetness of nature’ shown by his otherwise unrewarding pupil.6
There was, indeed, something equivocal about Dalton’s sexual orientation. His closest friend was none other than Edward Carpenter. The two men had been students together at Cambridge and their relationship has been described as one of ‘the greatest intimacy, affection and concern’.7 They remained close friends throughout their lives in spite of Carpenter’s openly homosexual way of living. Dalton apparently read ‘all’ Carpenter’s increasingly outspoken books on social and sexual subjects. ‘Though our paths in life have been divergent …’ wrote Dalton to Carpenter in 1920, ‘yet still I can’t help thinking that our outlook on life and its problems is not so wholly dissimilar as one might imagine it would be.’ Carpenter’s tireless campaigning for some sort of socialist-homosexual brotherhood had left, admitted Dalton, ‘an enduring influence on my mental and moral outlook�
�.8
The friends would often visit one another. Towards the end of his life Carpenter one day unearthed some photographs of Prince Eddy and Prince George and of the two princes with Princess Alexandra. They had given him the photographs, on different occasions, during his visits to their tutor.
The Reverend Dalton was to remain with both princes for eleven years and with Prince Eddy for three more. Although the lively Prince George responded well enough to Dalton’s tutoring, Prince Eddy did not. Try as he might, the tutor was seldom able to catch, and certainly never to hold, Prince Eddy’s attention. The boy was a dreamer, sadly deficient, as the despairing Dalton reported, ‘in any habits of promptitude and method, of manliness and self-reliance’. He lacked all ‘physical and mental tone’. Only the company of the younger and brighter Prince George encouraged Prince Eddy to work at all. ‘Difficult as the education of [Prince Eddy] is now,’ claimed Dalton, ‘it would be doubly or trebly so’ without Prince George as ‘his mainstay and chief incentive to exertion’.9
This was why when, in 1877, the twelve-year-old Prince George was due to start a naval career by joining the training ship Britannia as a cadet, it was decided that Prince Eddy must accompany him. It would be the only way, Dalton assured Queen Victoria, of improving ‘His Royal Highness’s moral, mental and physical development’. The Queen was not so sure. The future positions of the two princes, she explained to Dalton, ‘will be totally different and it is not intended that they should both enter the navy … The very rough sort of life to which boys are exposed on board ship is the very thing not calculated to make a refined and amiable Prince, who in after years (if God spares him) is to ascend the throne.’ What Queen Victoria was hoping for was another man like her late husband, the Prince Consort, not another like her son, the Prince of Wales.