Any child who could follow simple conversations in three languages by the age of six was certainly not stupid. On Bertie’s ninth birthday, the Queen noted in her journal, there was ‘much good in him’, and he had ‘such affectionate feeling – great truthfulness and great simplicity of character’.7 Yet he was not the paragon of wisdom and learning that his parents had fondly hoped he would be. There was more of the hearty Hanoverian than the earnest Coburger in him, and the Queen commented ruefully that he was her caricature. He had his dear father’s name, even if he was to be ‘Bertie’ rather than Albert en famille, but neither his father’s delicate looks nor his industrious nature. It was ironic that the son who was burdened by his destiny as the future King, the one of whom so much was expected, should in some senses be the son probably least fitted for it. With hindsight, though, none of his brothers had the demeanour of the born diplomat, coupled with the genial outgoing personality that he did, qualities which supremely equipped him for the burdens of state during his nine years as king.
By the time he was seventeen, the Queen was increasingly worried about him. ‘Bertie continues such an anxiety,’ she wrote to the Princess Royal in April 1859. ‘I tremble at the thought of only three years and a half being before us – when he will be of age and we can’t hold him except by moral power!’ Most alarming was the thought of what would become of the kingdom if anything was to happen suddenly to her, as a vision of King Albert Edward aged about twenty with a widowed father trying to hold the reins of power as Prince Regent rose before her. ‘One shudders to think of it: it is too awful a contemplation.’8
Affie was much more like his father. Less extroverted than Bertie, he could be just as badly behaved and disobedient, but made up for it by his readiness to learn. He adored geography, the sciences and anything to do with ships and the Royal Navy. When left to his own devices, he was happy to play with toys and mechanical devices, experimenting with them and trying to build his own. Both parents sometimes found themselves wishing that this lively, yet studious and conscientious, boy would inherit the throne one day instead of his elder brother.
From infancy, Arthur was and would always remain Queen Victoria’s favourite son. A strong, healthy baby, he was even-tempered, with none of the irritability or rebellious spirits of the elder children. As the third son, with no likelihood of succeeding to his mother’s throne or his childless uncle’s duchy, he was free from the pressures and expectations placed on the elder two. Appropriately for the son who had been named after the Duke of Wellington, he was spellbound by anything to do with the Army, whether the sight of a military uniform, the sound of a band or just watching the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace.
‘This Child is dear, dearer than any of the others put together, thus after you he is the dearest and most precious object to me on Earth,’ Victoria wrote to the Prince Consort when their son was aged eight. ‘It gives me a pang if any fault is found in his looks and character, and the bare thought of his growing out of my hands and being exposed to danger – makes the tears come to my eyes.’9 Soon afterwards she told Arthur’s governor, Major Howard Elphinstone, that he was ‘an easily managed child’ as he was so well-tempered and ‘so very obedient’.10
Although he was the first of Queen Victoria’s children whose birth was eased by chloroform, Leopold was a sickly baby with a poor appetite and digestion, and a feeble cry. When learning to walk, he fell over and bruised badly, crying out as if in severe pain. Before long the doctors diagnosed in him the grave condition of haemophilia, a hereditary bleeding disease which prevents blood from clotting properly and bringing with it the risk of severe, even fatal, haemorrhage.
The condition was not properly recognised for several years. Leopold appeared perfectly healthy for long spells at a time, and he was quite tall, well-built for his age, with the usual share of a small boy’s energy. But the signs of trouble were there, if not fully appreciated. He was inclined to stand awkwardly and sometimes screamed in agony. All this irritated Queen Victoria, who thought he was being lazy, holding himself badly and having fits of temper like his eldest brother, when the trouble was probably stiffness and severe pain in his joints. By his fifth birthday, he was also incurring her displeasure because of his lack of good looks: she thought him ‘the ugliest and least pleasing of the whole family’. She admitted that he was ‘not an ugly little baby, only as he grew older he grew plainer’.11
That summer, they learnt – probably from one of the royal doctors – that Leopold was suffering from some unusual condition. Writing to King Leopold that his ‘poor little namesake’ was laid up with a bad knee after a fall, the Queen made reference to ‘this unfortunate defect’ which would prevent him from being able to enter any of the active (or armed) services; it was ‘often not outgrown – & no remedy or medicine does it any good’.12 Leopold was left behind at Osborne with Beatrice and the ladies-in-waiting while the rest of the family went to Balmoral a few days later. As he was proving so accident-prone, the Queen wrote, ‘it would be very troublesome indeed to have him here’. That a mother could write with such lack of concern about her youngest son shows a degree of coldness which is hard to comprehend. ‘He walks shockingly – and is dreadfully awkward – holds himself as badly as ever and his manners are despairing, as well as his speech – which is quite dreadful.’ She admitted that he learnt well and read fluently, but these achievements seemed to count for little against his other shortcomings; ‘he is really very unfortunate.’13
By this time, Leopold already had a brother-in-law, for he was only two years old when his eldest sister became betrothed. Prince Frederick William of Prussia (‘Fritz’) and his parents, Prince William and Princess Augusta, had been guests at the opening of the Great Exhibition in 1851, and he had made more than a passing impression on ten-year-old Vicky. In September 1855 he was invited – without his parents – as a guest at Balmoral. Though Vicky was not yet fifteen years old, it was clear that a friendship which had been sustained fitfully by letter over the intervening period of time was ripening into something stronger, and within a few days the Prince had asked her, and then her parents, for her hand in marriage. On 25 January 1858 the family were present at St James’s Palace as they became husband and wife.
Though the Prince of Wales never attained any great scholastic feats, he was sent to study at Oxford and made an effort which his parents appreciated. Partly as a reward, and partly in order to initiate him into public life, in 1860 they decided to send him on a tour of Canada and the United States of America. His itinerary was set to include opening the St Lawrence Bridge at Montreal, lay a foundation stone for the Federal Parliament building at Ottawa and pay a courtesy call on the American President, James Buchanan.
Despite, or perhaps because of, the academic shortcomings he had shown at home, at last he had the chance to prove that he had the charm and social talent required for a future king. Though he had been instructed that he was to travel incognito in the States as ‘Baron Renfrew’, it was too much to hope that the cheering crowds which greeted him everywhere would acknowledge him as anything other than heir to the world’s greatest empire. He had been unprepared for such adulation, but he relished every moment to the full. For him the highlight was a ball at the New York Academy of Music, to which 3,000 guests had been invited but 5,000 turned up. Just before the guest of honour was due to arrive the floor gave way, but luckily nobody was hurt, and everyone waited patiently as carpenters and workmen hurried to the rescue. His governor, General Bruce, wrote rather censoriously that during the trip the Prince had been ‘somewhat persecuted by attentions not in strict accordance with good breeding’, but the Prince did not object.
On his return home the Queen and Albert were eager to impress on him that the success of his tour had been due mainly to the efforts of Bruce and to the fact that he was their representative, but even so the Queen could not conceal her admiration for the son who had formerly proved something of a disappointment. ‘He was immensely popular eve
rywhere and really deserves the highest praise,’ she wrote to the Princess Royal, ‘which should be given him all the more as he was never spared any reproof.’14
Alfred was also playing a similar role in another part of the British Empire. He had joined the Royal Navy in 1858, and after passing his midshipman’s examination he set sail for South Africa. Though only fifteen at the time, he coped very well with the itinerary set out for him, whether it was taking part in hunting expeditions, releasing the first load of stones for a breakwater in the Table Bay or opening a public library at Cape Town. Already the Queen could see similarities between him and his father, as she wrote to King Leopold soon after his return home: ‘He is really such a dear, gifted, handsome child, that it makes one doubly anxious he should have as few failings as mortal men can have.’15
Unhappily, the Prince Consort would see little more of the development of these two sons in particular who would be so adept at representing the Queen abroad. It was unfortunate that the Prince of Wales’s liaison with the actress Nellie Clifden, or rather the fact that news of it should leak out to the courts of Europe and only after that back to his horrified parents at Windsor, should coincide with the onset of Albert’s final illness. In the first intense outburst of her grief, Queen Victoria blamed their eldest son for hastening his death. He and Crown Prince Frederick William of Prussia were chief mourners at the funeral at Windsor on 23 December. Alfred was away at sea at the time, but eleven-year-old Arthur attended the ceremony, the small boy sobbing as if his heart would break.
Queen Victoria spent the first few months of her widowhood in the more comforting surroundings of Osborne, which had been home more than their other dwellings. At first she was convinced that she too would die before long, and regarded her eldest son’s marriage as a matter of urgency. If a young, orphaned king was to succeed her, he should at least be married and have a settled home life. In September 1861 a meeting between the Prince of Wales and Princess Alexandra, eldest daughter of Prince Christian of Schleswig Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg, heir to the King of Denmark, had been carefully arranged at Speyer Cathedral in Germany. There were very few, if any, other unmarried princesses in Europe who were eligible and pretty enough for Bertie, and both the young people involved knew their duty.
In September 1862 the Prince proposed. Alexandra accepted him, and they were married on 10 March 1863 in St George’s Chapel, Windsor. Still resolutely in mourning, as she would remain for the rest of her days, the Queen took no part in the procession of royalties but instead walked from the Deanery, along a specially prepared route covered and hidden from the general gaze, to a gallery overlooking the Chapel. There she sat, in her mourning apparel and black widow’s cap, relieved only by the ribbon, badge and star of the Order of the Garter, and a diamond brooch containing a miniature of the Prince Consort. After the ceremony, thirty-six royals sat down to lunch with the bride and groom, but the Queen was not among them. After a week-long honeymoon at Osborne, they spent a few days at Windsor and at the end of the month went to the Prince’s country home at Sandringham, Norfolk. In April they moved into Marlborough House, which was to be their official London residence.
Bertie had not been the only one of Victoria’s sons to have a ‘fall’ from the path of virtue. In 1862 she learnt that Affie had also known the pleasures of a young lady on Malta. In view of the behaviour of his fellow-midshipmen, and a lack of any more becoming leisure facilities on the island, it might have given a more reasonable, less censorious, parent cause for concern if he had not indulged in what she called his ‘heartless and dishonourable behaviour’.
But the Queen was irritated and upset, not only because Affie had betrayed the moral code of his father, but also because he had been at the centre of a rather complicated political matter. The volatile Greeks had just deposed their unpopular and childless king, Otho, but instead of declaring a republic they wanted to install another European prince on the vacant throne. Prince Alfred of Great Britain was the most popular choice. Though he had made a brief visit to the country on one of his naval training voyages, he was hardly known there, but the Greeks recognised that there would be considerable political and territorial advantages if they chose a British prince as their king. Late in 1862 a plebiscite was held in which Alfred received over 95 per cent of votes cast. Little did the Greeks know at the time that under the terms of a protocol signed at London in 1830, a British prince could not be elected to the throne.
At one stage, the Greeks seemed so Anglophile that it was said they had even contemplated offering the crown to Gladstone. (In later years, the Queen must have felt that her life would have been easier if the latter had indeed been chosen.) The impasse was resolved some weeks later when Prince William of Schleswig-Holstein, Alexandra’s brother, was chosen instead.
Alfred, who was promoted to the rank of captain in the Royal Navy and created Duke of Edinburgh, and Earl of Ulster and of Kent, in 1866, was destined to travel far more widely throughout the world than any of his siblings. That same year he was appointed to the command of HMS Galatea, with orders to take her on a world cruise which would include Gibraltar, South America, the remote colony of Tristan da Cunha, Australia, New Zealand, India and Ceylon. Ostensibly it was a continuation of Alfred’s duties as the Queen’s representative in the further territories of the British Empire, begun during his South African travels as a midshipman.
As far as Queen Victoria was concerned, there was another purpose – to separate Alfred from his London ‘flatterers’. Society was turning him into the kind of fun-loving prince, ready to indulge in the life of pleasure, of which she did not approve. Moreover, he seemed a little too infatuated with his sister-in-law, Alexandra. Unlike her husband, she took her marriage vows seriously, and she would never have made the cardinal error of leading her brother-in-law on, but the Queen thought it prudent to minimise the risk of putting temptation in anyone’s way.
The world tour proved a mixed blessing for all concerned. The Duke set sail in June 1867, with by far the greater part of his itinerary embracing Australia. A round of pomp and ceremony, civic receptions and mediocre concerts soon palled for him, and he did not hesitate to voice openly his occasional boredom with the tedious routine and excessively long speeches at the functions he was required to attend. There were ugly demonstrations between Catholic and Protestant communities, fuelled by expatriate Irish republican sympathisers and exacerbated when news reached the continent early in 1868 of the execution of three members of the Fenian Brotherhood in Manchester for shooting a policeman dead. In March the Duke was attending a picnic in Sydney to raise funds for a sailors’ rest home when James O’Farrell, the son of an Irish immigrant butcher, shot him in the back. Initially there were grave fears for the Duke’s life, but the bullet was deflected from his spine by his heavy leather braces, and within a few days he was pronounced out of danger. However, never before had an assassination attempt on a member of Queen Victoria’s family come so near to succeeding.
The programme was immediately curtailed. It had been arranged that the Duke would sail to New Zealand next, but in view of Fenian demonstrations on South Island, the authorities could not guarantee his safety. Galatea therefore returned home and arrived at Portsmouth in June 1868. Having got over her shock at the news of the attempt on Alfred’s life, the Queen hoped fervently that her second son would return ‘an altered being’. When he visited her at Windsor she was disappointed to find him unbearably conceited, receiving ovations as if he had done something extraordinary, ‘instead of God’s mercy having spared his life’.16 She was relieved to see him depart again after a few months of respite, visiting family and relations in England and Germany, before resuming a more informal cruise in 1869 (with heightened police protection) which included a return to Australia, New Zealand, India, Japan and the Falkland Islands. He came home in May 1871.
Though the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Edinburgh always remained close, sharing a similar taste for society and social life, in persona
lity they were very different. Bertie was more outgoing, while Affie was inclined to be shy, with a reserve which was often taken for rudeness. Though her first words on the matter while still in shock at her husband’s death suggested that she would never forgive her eldest son, the Queen’s aversion to him proved but temporary. On his twenty-sixth birthday she was writing to the Princess Royal that he was ‘so full of good and amiable qualities, that it makes one forget and overlook much that one would wish different’.17 Less than two years later, she said she was ‘sure no Heir Apparent was ever so nice and unpretending as dear Bertie is’.18
For all his faults, the Prince of Wales always fulfilled his childhood promise of being an affectionate and dutiful son to Victoria. Even so, she still thought him far too indiscreet to be trusted to carry out state duties, apart from strictly ceremonial engagements. She had grave misgivings about his friends in the ‘Marlborough House set’, with their preoccupation with gambling, racing, heavy drinking and smoking. When Prussia and Denmark were at war in 1864 the Prince asked his mother to let him see Foreign Office despatches instead of mere summaries from his mother’s secretaries. Through General Grey she informed Lord Russell, then Foreign Secretary, that her government was forbidden to send him any such ‘separate and independent communication with the Government’, on the grounds that he was liable to let the wrong people be privy to such information; His Royal Highness was ‘not at all times as discreet as He should be’. ‘If you ever become King,’ the Queen warned him five years later (note her use of the word ‘if’), ‘you will find all these friends most inconvenient, and you will have to break with them all.’19
Not long afterwards, she told Gladstone in a moment of despair that she doubted her son’s ‘fitness for high functions of State’. Ironically, this was at the time when general disquiet over her seclusion and her reluctance or downright refusal to be seen carrying out ‘high functions of State’ herself was at its greatest. Under the circumstances, Gladstone might have considered her strictures rather ironic.
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