by D M Potts
The birth of their first son brought great joy and Victoria felt that he looked especially like Prince Albert. ‘I hope and pray he may be like his dearest papa’, she wrote to uncle Leopold. Sadly for both mother and son the prayer went unanswered. The royal nursery distanced the infant Edward from the affection he needed and his parents doted on his elder sister. Edward was soon perceived as dull and ‘anti-studious’, and began to stammer and to have temper tantrums. Albert and Victoria responded by setting up a strict, detailed, obsessive plan of control and education. Even Princess Alice, who was born eighteen months after the Prince of Wales, received ‘a real punishment by whipping’ when she was only four. To make matters worse for Edward, his sisters at least managed to keep up with their tedious and inappropriate tutoring. When he was six the queen’s obsession with making the future king into ‘the most perfect man’ found expression in taking him ‘entirely away from the women’ and handing him over to a personal tutor with the threateningly appropriate name of Mr Birch.
A succession of children followed Edward at eighteen to thirty-six month intervals: Alfred in 1844, Helena in 1846, Louise in 1848, Arthur in 1850, Leopold in 1853 and the ninth and last, Beatrice in 1857. The numerous pregnancies were uncomfortable and the deliveries painful. As the children matured Victoria and Albert set about marrying them off to fulfil their own dynastic agenda. Her eldest daughter was married to the German Crown Prince Frederick William (Fritz). In a repetition of her mother’s life, Vicky was introduced to her future husband when she was ten, betrothed when she was seventeen and had two children by the time she was twenty. Three other daughters, Alice, Helena and Louise were all married in their late teens, but the youngest, Beatrice, was kept at home as a companion to Mama, and only broke loose at the age of twenty-eight. ‘I hope and pray there may be no results!’ wrote Victoria icily, ‘that would aggravate everything and besides make me terribly anxious.’
But there were to be ‘results’ and Beatrice, along with Alice, was one of the two daughters who were to carry the gene for haemophilia. The only one of Victoria’s four boys to suffer from the disease, and therefore the first in the family to display the symptoms, was Leopold, born on 7 April 1853. His birth was remarkable because the queen was given chloroform by Dr John Snow.9 Until that moment, relief of pain in childbirth had been highly controversial, ‘a decoy of Satan’, in the words of one clergyman, ‘apparently offering to bless women; but in the end it will harden society and rob God of the deep earnest cries which arise in time of trouble for help.’ Victoria, however, found anaesthesia in childbirth, ‘soothing, quieting and delightful beyond measure’.
At first, ‘little Leo’ seemed a ‘jolly fat little fellow, but no beauty’. The birth was followed by a worse than usual depression. Trifling disputes sometimes burgeoned, in Albert’s words, into ‘a continuance of hysterics for more than an hour . . . traces of which remained for more than 24 hours more’. The queen went literally for months without seeing her baby and he was left to the total care of a wet-nurse from the Scottish Highlands. When he began to walk it was noticed that he bruised easily and cried a lot. Haemophilia was diagnosed. Inevitably those who believed with the Bible that ‘in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children’ blamed the anaesthetic.
Victoria’s attitudes, particularly to members of her own family, were extreme to the point of being unbalanced. This was particularly the case with Leopold, who was treated with contempt throughout his childhood but became his mother’s confidential adviser in state affairs in early manhood. This was in contrast to her attitude towards her eldest son, the Prince of Wales, who came to be regarded as retarded and was disliked by his mother in his youth, but was positively hated by her after Albert’s death.
Leopold’s childhood was particularly unfortunate. A chronic invalid with an awkward stance, due to haemorrhages into his joints, he was, according to his mother, a bad speaker and generally unattractive, although later in life he was evidently an excellent public speaker. Perhaps the immediate separation of all the children from their mother the moment they were born produced an emotional distance. Victoria’s comments on the poor child are often brutal. Vicky married soon after Leopold’s birth and when he was five the queen wrote to her daughter in Berlin, ‘He bruises as much as ever but unberufen10 1,000 times – is free from any at present; but he holds himself still as badly as ever and is very ugly, I think uglier than he ever was.’11
A few months later she wrote again in a similar vein, ‘As for Leopold he still bruises as much as ever, but he has (unberufen) not had any accidents of late. He is tall, but holds himself worse than ever, and is a very common looking child, very pale in face, clever but an oddity – and not an engaging child though amusing.’ When the Crown Princess had a baby, grandmother dreaded that it might resemble its unfortunate uncle: ‘If you remember what Leopold was! I hope, dear, he won’t be like the ugliest and least pleasing of the whole family. Leopold was not an ugly baby, only as he grew older he grew plainer, and so excessively quizzical; that is so vexatious.’12
Two months later, discussing the heights of her children, Victoria commented, ‘Leopold was the smallest when born . . . and he is the tallest (certainly of the boys) of his age of any of you, and the ugliest’, adding a few lines later, ‘. . . an ugly baby is a very nasty object.’13 The queen was so ashamed of the unhappy invalid that she left him behind when the rest of the family went on holiday to Balmoral, explaining: ‘Leopold still has such constant bad accidents that it would be very troublesome indeed to have him here. He walks shockingly – and is dreadfully awkward – holds himself badly as ever and his manners are despairing, – as well as his speech – which is quite dreadful.’14
However, by the time he was six even his hypercritical mother was beginning to recognize his intelligence. ‘It is so provoking as he learns well and reads fluently’. The little praise that came was nearly always mixed with derogatory remarks, ‘but his French is more like Chinese’, and ‘He is very clever and amusing but very absurd child’.
Leopold came much closer to his mother after the disgrace of his elder brother. Just as Victoria considered Leopold ugly and awkward, so she later bewailed Prince Edward’s perceived stupidity. One of the odd medical fashions of the mid-nineteenth century was that of phrenology, the ‘science’ of predicting a person’s moral and intellectual character by feeling the shape of the skull. The Prince Consort brought in Sir George Coombe who confirmed Victoria and Albert’s worst fears by describing Edward’s brain as ‘feeble’, ‘the organs of ostentativeness, destructiveness, self esteem, etc. are all large, intellectual organs only moderately developed’. In fact Edward seems to have been a normal affectionate child saddled with inhuman and unachievable goals by his parents, where timetables filled their son’s life with lessons from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m., six days a week. One lesson he never received was that on human reproduction. With no elder brothers, and deprived of friendship with boys of his own age, puberty must have been a particularly painful time.
When he was a student at Cambridge and aged twenty Edward was sent one summer vacation to an army training camp at the Curragh of Kildare, near Dublin. At the end of the ten-week course one of his fellow officers, a great-uncle of the present Lord Carrington, deposited a vivacious young actress, Nellie Clifden, in his bed. The prince enjoyed the experience and made sure Nellie came back with him to Windsor. The liaison became the gossip of the London clubs and eventually Stockmar, now Albert’s private secretary, told his father. Albert became literally sick with concern. He may have feared that Edward would come to behave like Albert’s own father or, worse, like Albert’s brother Ernst. Certainly, Albert knew all about the sexual behaviour of the Duke of Kent’s generation and perhaps he knew even more than we do today. Something must have sparked the hysterical letter he wrote his son, ‘with a heavy heart upon a subject which has caused me the greatest pain I have yet felt in this life. . . . You must not, you dare not be lost! The consequences for this country, and for
the world would be too dreadful.’15 Suffering from inflamed gums and ‘greatly out of sorts’ Albert followed up his long letter with a train ride to Cambridge. While Prince Edward was a student at Trinity College he was forced to reside at Madingley Hall under the keen eye of General Bruce. Albert spent two hours remonstrating with his son while they walked in the cold and the rain. A contemporary record at Madingley Hall records, ‘The P[rince] C[onsort] slept here on Monday Nov. 25 and he had a bad cold and cough and felt so tired after walking with his son to Dry Drayton and back by the St Neots rd (the Prince of Wales’ invariable Sunday walk) that General Bruce found HRH lying on his bed when he went in to see him on his return.’ Back at Windsor Albert grew sicker. Then, just as he was at his worst, a serious political crisis suddenly demanded his attention.
The first shots of the American Civil War had been fired at Charleston in January 1861. The Union forces had established a blockade and in November of the same year they forcibly boarded a British ship, the Trent. Passions ran high and the Foreign Secretary, Lord John Russell, drafted an inflammatory despatch that might well have brought Britain to war with the northern states, had not Prince Albert diplomatically toned it down. ‘I am so weak, I have hardly been able to hold the pen’, he told his wife.
The illness worsened and on 14 December Albert died among his family. ‘I bent over him & said to him, “Es ist Kleines Frauchen”16 and he bowed his head; I asked him if he would give “ein Kuss” & he did’, Victoria told her diary. Edward’s escapade had coincided with the beginning of Albert’s last illness and he was blamed for his father’s death.
It is usually said that Albert died of typhoid spread by the ancient drains of Windsor Castle17 but an alternative diagnosis is that he had stomach cancer, and he had certainly been ill for a long time prior to his death. No post-mortem was performed.
Victoria was forty-two. Had Albert not died she might have had at least one more child. Her devotion to him, despite the frequent quarrels, was total: ‘I who felt, when those blessed Arms clasped and held tight in the sacred Hours of the night, the world seemed only to be ourselves, that nothing could part us. I felt so v[er]y secure.’ England ran out of supplies of black drapery for mourning. The queen refused even to open parliament for five years. She forced her daughter Alice to select a black trousseau for her marriage to Prince Louis of Hesse in July 1862. Each night Victoria placed a grisly deathbed picture of Albert on the pillow next to her and slept clutching his nightshirt in her arms. In the morning she had hot shaving water brought to Albert’s old room and his chamber pot had to be scoured daily for years after his death.
Victoria was stricken and blamed poor Bertie. Writing to her eldest daughter on 27 December, she wrote, ‘Tell him [the Prussian Crown Prince] that Bertie (oh, that boy – much as I pity, I never can or shall look at him without a shudder, as you may imagine) does not know that I know all. Beloved Papa told him that I could not be told all the disgusting details (concerning Nellie Clifden) – that I try to employ and use him but I am not hopeful.’ She never forgave him till the day she died. She never consulted the heir apparent on matters of state or gave him useful employment, although he had made an extremely successful visit to Canada and the USA before the Clifden affair. Deprived of significant work, he pursued women, horses and pleasure, thus fulfilling his mother’s expectations. He turned to all things French in contrast to his mother’s German interests. This was one of the factors which led to the ‘Entente Cordiale’ and the First World War.
When the Prince Consort died the young Prince Leopold was in the French Riviera, having been sent there to avoid the English winter. He had been closer to his father than the other sons and was deeply upset. Confined to bed for months at a time, Leopold read widely – Sir Walter Scott and Shakespeare were his favourite authors – becoming the intellectual of the family.
Leopold was a little boy of nine when his eldest brother, the Prince of Wales, married. Victoria wore her widow’s weeds to the wedding. ‘Marry early Bertie must,’ pleaded Vicky in a letter to her mother, ‘if he married a nice wife that he likes, she will keep him straight.’ The young lady chosen for Edward – before he could get into bed with any more actresses – was the beautiful nineteen-year-old Danish princess, Alexandra. She first visited London in 1862 – ‘on approval’, her parents complained. Leopold and Helen were sent to meet her boat at the docks. ‘The children were greatly excited,’ wrote the queen, ‘Lenchen and Leopold went down, the only representatives of our family, and that poor little boy the only Prince of our family.’ Alexandra gathered the nine-year-old boy up in her arms and kissed him. When Edward and Alexandra were married Edward’s four-year-old nephew, Wilhelm, the future kaiser, was among the guests. When Wilhelm began to throw things across the stately choir of Westminster Abbey Leopold and his brother Alfred tried to restrain him. Wilhelm retaliated by biting both Alfred and Leopold on their legs. It must have been an occasion when Leopold’s clotting factors were not grossly abnormal, and his clothing thick, as no haemorrhage or haematoma was reported. Like several of Victoria’s children, Leopold was a prankster. He called his terrier bitch Vic and joked about his own disease. He was the favourite in-law of his brother Alfred’s lonely wife Marie, grand duchess and daughter of Alexander II of Russia. One morning at breakfast, to gain Marie’s sympathy, Leopold appeared with red-stained handkerchief and said he had had a tooth pulled. After being duly fussed over he revealed it was red paint. A vivid glimpse of his misery, and that of most haemophiliacs before Factor VIII became available, is revealed in his letters to his sister Louise:18
6 June 1870: I am mad with pain, so I must stop. I am in such agonies at this moment.
Four days later: I go on as usual suffering frightfully, at this moment I am in agonies of pain; my knee gets worse daily and I get more desperate daily. If this continues long I shall soon be driven to Bedlam or to Hanwell, where I shall be fortunately able to terminate a wretched existence by knocking out my brains (if I have any) on the walls; that is the brightest vision that I can picture to myself as a future. But I must stop on account of the awful pain, which is torturing me. Your wretched brother Leopold.
As Leopold matured he became known as the Scholar Prince, but his mother continued to treat him as an invalid child. Even in his early twenties, after he had come down from Oxford, she would send him to his sparsely furnished room when dancing or other entertainments occurred in case he injured himself. When he was twenty-five he eventually stood up for himself and refused to travel to Mama’s beloved Highland home at Balmoral. What was once forbidden had become obligatory. Victoria saw her son’s independence as a threat to ‘the whole authority of the Sovereign and the Throne’ and if he wouldn’t go to Scotland then she intended to order him to his ‘room upstairs’ in Buckingham Palace. In fact, he went to Paris where he neither suffered a haemorrhage nor succumbed to any other dangers of what his mother called ‘that sinful city’.
Leopold busied himself with good works, supporting the Royal Institution for the Deaf and Dumb, and, ever-musical like his father, became the friend of Arthur Sullivan of the Savoy Opera, and of Charles Gounod. He was also a friend of the painter Millais and it was in Millais’s studio that he met Lillie Langtry, who was shortly to become the mistress of his elder brother, the Prince of Wales. The prince hung a sketch of the famous beauty over his bed but when he had his next episode of bleeding and his mother visited him, she was furious to see Lillie’s picture and, in an unregal gesture, climbed on to the bed to remove the offending portrait.19
When the Prince of Wales contracted typhoid and nearly died in 1871, Victoria appreciated Leopold’s sympathy: ‘Dined with Leopold and Beatrice. He behaves so well and shows so much feeling.’ Sadly, Leopold was never long without some new bleeding episode. In January 1875 Victoria writes again: ‘. . . and our dear Leopold ill. But God has been merciful to him, and may continue to be so. . . . Went with Beatrice to wish dear Leopold a happy new year and God knows a different one from to t
he one that is past, nearly eight months of which he has spent unable to walk and a great part a complete invalid.’
In fact, the new year did not bring relief. Leopold also had typhoid but recovered quickly. ‘Leopold doing so well that Dr Marshall said he had nothing to report! Alas! unlucky words, which often precede a new illness. After lunch much upset at hearing from Dr Marshall that Leopold had a haemorrhage from bowels which is most distressing. He had sent for Dr Hoffmeister and Sir William Jenner. Leopold himself was in terrible distress about it. Went to see poor Leopold who was lying flat on his back, very quiet, very pale, and looking very sad. It upset me very much to see him like that.’20
Another account of the same episode occurs in a letter to the prime minister: ‘The Queen must thank Mr Gladstone for his kind letter of the 21st and for his enquiries after poor Prince Leopold, who has been a cause of great anxiety to her ever since the 21st December. But he passed through the typhoid fever most easily, and withstood one bad symptom so that the terrible attack of haemorrhage coming on just when he was considered quite convalescent was doubly distressing. Thank God, he is now going on very favourably, and has shown his usual great vitality.’21
This seems to have been the low point in his life and over the following years attacks were rare. In 1877 he became one of the queen’s private secretaries and obtained a Foreign Office cabinet key giving access to state papers. This was the more remarkable because the queen never allowed the disgraced Prince of Wales, heir to the throne, to see state papers until the day she died. In 1879 it was suggested that Leopold should represent the queen at the Centenary Exhibition in Australia but the queen vetoed the proposal, writing to the then prime minister the Earl of Beaconsfield (Disraeli), ‘. . . she cannot bring herself to consent to send her very delicate son, who has been four or five times at death’s door, who is never hardly a few months without being laid up, so great a distance.’ For once Victoria’s control of her children’s affairs was justified. In 1880 he did visit Canada and the USA. Canadian opinion favoured his appointment as governor-general and he was keen to accept the post, but the boy who hadn’t been allowed to go to Balmoral was now too valuable to be allowed to leave his mother’s side. He was now a trusted adviser and intermediary between Victoria and leading politicians of the day, advising on the creation of new governments and on religious appointments: ‘Leopold had previously seen Lord Hartington and had brought to the Queen intelligence of the impossibility of forming a Government with Mr Gladstone. . . . We are now playing into the hands of the Russians. The Queen feels particularly aggrieved as Mr Gladstone assured Prince Leopold on coming into office, that the Queen need be under no apprehension as to foreign affairs.’22