Edward VII: The Last Victorian King

by Christopher Hibbert

  In the opinion of Dr Becker, Prince Albert’s librarian, who taught the Prince German, the principal reason for these fits of violent rage was the excessively demanding nature of his pupil’s time-table. The Prince was not obstinately perverse by nature; any child might be expected to react in the same way if his mind and body were overtaxed so continuously. ‘To anyone who knows the functions performed by the nerves in the human body,’ Becker concluded, ‘it is quite superfluous to demonstrate that these outbursts of passion, especially with so tender a child as the Prince of Wales in his moments of greatest mental exhaustion, must be destructive to the child.’ Becker had tried kindness in such moments, but this had elicited no response; he had tried severity, but this had led to another outburst of violence.

  Although he diagnosed the reasons for the Prince’s alarming behaviour outspokenly enough, Becker shrank from suggesting a radical cure. He did not really think it ‘necessary y’ to stop the lessons ‘altogether for a sufficiently long period whenever such a state of weakness’ occurred. All that was required was ‘to make the instruction interesting and then to afford it in convenient intervals of time … After every exertion of at most one hour, a short interruption of, perhaps, a quarter of an hour ought to be made to give rest to the brain.’

  The Prince’s other tutors ventured to express similar opinions. The Revd Gerald Wellesley, for instance, who gave him religious instruction, told Gibbs that the boy was being overworked. So did Dr Voisin, the French tutor. ‘You will wear him out early,’ Dr Voisin said. ‘Make him climb trees! Run! Leap! Row! Ride! … In many things savages are much better educated than we are.’

  But Prince Albert did not agree. Nor did Stockmar. Nor did the Queen. ‘There is much good in him,’ she had recorded in her diary on his ninth birthday during the time of Mr Birch and in one of her rare moments of hope in a satisfactory future. ‘He has such affectionate feelings — great truthfulness and great simplicity of character.’ She and Prince Albert had decided that he ‘ought to be accustomed early to work with [them], to have great confidence shewn him, that he should early be initiated into the affairs of state.’ But now she was not so sure that this was a sensible plan. Bertie’s behaviour since the departure of Mr Birch had been so disturbing that there could be no question of his undergoing any kind of initiation into public affairs until there had been a marked improvement in his conduct. To bring about this improvement it would be necessary to ‘put down very decidedly’ the Prince’s temper. As Prince Albert had decreed, the only satisfactory methods of overcoming this temper were physical ones, a sound boxing of the ears or a few sharp raps across the knuckles with a stick. In the meantime there could be no relaxation in the length and frequency of the Prince’s lessons.

  With all this Mr Gibbs professed his wholehearted agreement. So the chastisements continued, and the pressure of the lessons was not abated. The lessons began at eight o’clock in the morning and ended at seven o’clock at night. For six hours every day, including Saturday, he was instructed in the subjects commonly taught in public schools with such modifications as were appropriate to the education of an English prince. In addition to the subjects which he had already begun, he was now taught social economy, chemistry ‘and its kindred sciences with the Arts dependent upon them’, algebra and geometry with direct reference to ‘their applications to Gunnery, Fortifications and the Mechanical Arts’. He was required to read the acknowledged masterpieces of English, French and German literature; to write essays in these three languages on historical and biographical themes; to learn how to play — though he never did learn how to play — the piano; to draw maps; to master Latin; to talk to the famous scientists whom his father asked to come to Windsor especially for this purpose; to attend Michael Faraday’s lectures on metals at the Royal Institution (which he professed to find interesting as they were at least a relief from his usual studies); to grasp the essentials of political economy as expounded by William Ellis (who found him far less responsive than his bright elder sister); in general to store up in his mind a deep fund of ‘extensive and accurate knowledge’. Between these intellectual pursuits he was taught riding, gymnastics and dancing, and — under the instruction of a drill sergeant — military exercises. In winter he was taught to skate; in summer to swim and play croquet. He learned about forestry and farming, carpentry and bricklaying. He learned about housekeeping in the children’s kitchen in the chalet at Osborne; and at Osborne, too, he learned about gardening and, like his brothers and sisters, he had his own little plot of land and his own initialled tools. He went for walks, and he ran.

  At the end of each day, when a report upon his progress and conduct was submitted to his parents, his tutors were instructed to ensure that he was exhausted.

  The product of this regimen was not an appealing child. His sense of frustration and inferiority, combined with the strain of exhaustion, led him not only to seek relief in outbursts of furious violence, but also to be aggressively rude to those few boys of his own age whom he was ever allowed to meet. The Provost of Eton felt obliged to complain about this to Gibbs; and Gibbs, in turn, spoke to Stockmar, who, characteristically, made gloomy comparisons with George IV and hinted that the streak of madness in the mother’s family was manifesting itself again. The Prince of Wales’s impulses were far from kindly, Gibbs subsequently reported to the Queen.

  They lead him to speak rudely and unamiably to his companions… and in consequence his playfulness… constantly degenerates into roughness and rudeness… The impulse to oppose is very strong… The Prince is conscious of not being so amiable as… he desires to be, or so forward as is expected for his age… In consequence he looks out for reproof and fancies advice even conveys a reproof beyond its mere words.

  Although he rarely questioned Prince Albert’s rules for the Prince’s education — and the Queen, in consequence, considered him a far more satisfactory tutor than Birch — Gibbs did occasionally feel constrained to suggest some modification in their application. But apart from his success in having a few Etonians of impeccable character and family background admitted to the Castle to share one or other of the Prince’s organized pursuits, he was unable to shake Prince Albert’s confidence in the system so rigidly prescribed and practised. On one occasion at least he appealed to the Queen; but although the Queen admitted in confidence to her eldest daughter that ‘Papa … momentarily and unintentionally [could sometimes be] hasty and harsh’, she did not question the necessity for severity with the Prince of Wales.

  The Prince responded to this severity with fear as well as violence. One of those few Etonians allowed into Windsor Castle, Charles WynnCarrington — who ‘always liked the Prince of Wales’ and thought that behind the aggression and intolerance lay an ‘open generous disposition and the kindest heart imaginable’ — was made aware of this fear.

  ‘He was afraid of his father,’ Wynn-Carrington wrote; and he did not find it surprising that this was so, for Prince Albert seemed to him ‘a proud, shy, stand-offish man, not calculated to make friends easily with children. Individually I was frightened to death of him so much so that on one occasion [when] he suddenly appeared from behind some bushes, I fell off the see-saw from sheer alarm at seeing him, and nearly broke my neck.’ Whenever other boys came over to Windsor, Prince Albert never left them alone with his son; and whenever the Prince of Wales went to Eton, as, for instance, to listen to the speeches on the annual celebrations of the Fourth of June, his father went with him. He also went with him to the annual speech days at Harrow. It seemed impossible to escape from his influence. And the Prince was never allowed to forget that he was being constantly and anxiously watched by him; and that by others he was for ever being compared — of course, unfavourably compared — with him. The Queen once informed her son in one of many similar letters:

  Noneof you can ever be proud enough of being the child of such a Father who has not his equal in this world — so great, so good, so faultless. Try… to follow in his footsteps and don’t
be discouraged, for to be really in everything like him none of you, I am sure, will ever be. Try, therefore, to be like him in some points, and you will have acquired a great deal.

  But to be like his father even in some points appeared to the Prince a quite impossible aspiration. He knew that his father read the daily reports of his progress with anxiety and concern. He knew that he studied his essays and exercises with dismay, and that the entries in the Prince’s unwillingly kept diary were perused with profound dissatisfaction because they were so carelessly written and so ungrammatical, because the handwriting was not neat enough, because they were full of boring facts and contained no noble reflections or, indeed, any reflections at all. His historical essays were even worse. When writing on modern English history he was fairly reliable, but when he turned to ancient history his compositions were lamentable. One of them, limited to less than seven lines, began in utter confusion: ‘The war of Tarrentum, it was between Hannibal the Carthaginian General and the Romans, Hannibal was engaged in a war with it, for some time …’ The Prince knew only too well, in fact, that he was a failure and a disappointment to both his parents — ‘poor Bertie!’ Sir James Stephen was called in to examine him, and it was found that he could not even spell properly; so he was advised to master the etymologies of all Latin words basic to English and ‘scrupulously’ to consult a dictionary which ought to form part of the ‘furniture’ of his desk. But it was no good. His spelling remained bad, and his Latin was worse. He was taken to see the boys of Westminster School perform a Latin play, but he ‘understood not a word of it’ — ’poor Bertie!’

  Even so, there were occasional days of pleasure. He afterwards remembered how much he had enjoyed going out hunting and deerstalking, fishing and shooting with his father, though hard as he practised he never learned to shoot very well. He remembered, too, the pride he had felt at being allowed to attend the naval review off Spithead and the funeral of the Duke of Wellington; to stand on the balcony at Buckingham Palace and wave good-bye to the soldiers marching to Portsmouth to fight in the war against Russia; to watch from the deck of the Fairy, as the huge fleet sailed for the Baltic; to accompany his mother on an inspection of the new military camp at Aldershot; to stand by her as she distributed medals to returning soldiers at the Horse Guards; and to sit on his pony beside her in Hyde Park while she gave out the first Victoria Crosses. He recalled the delight he had experienced at being taken with his brothers and sisters to the zoo and the pantomime, to Astley’s circus, and the opera at Covent Garden; the excitement when Wombwell’s menagerie visited Windsor Castle, when General Tom Thumb, the American dwarf from Barnum’s ‘Greatest Show on Earth’, came to Buckingham Palace; and when Albert Smith, who related so vividly his adventures while climbing Mont Blanc, gave a lecture at Osborne. He remembered also the plays which Charles Kean and Samuel Phelps put on at Windsor Castle before presenting them in London at the Princess’s Theatre and Sadler’s Wells; the performances at Balmoral of the marvellous conjuror, John Henry Anderson, the ‘Wizard of the North’ — of course, so the Prince confided to one of his father’s guests, ‘Papa [knew] how all these things [were] done’ — and the visits to the waxworks at the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, particularly the representations of the dreadful Thugs of India — though his enthusiasm for these was rather dampened when Baron Stockmar sternly reminded him that he was ‘born in a Christian and enlightened age in which such atrocious acts are not even dreamt of’.

  The Prince also recalled with pleasure his first trip across the Channel to spend six days with his great-uncle, King Leopold of the Belgians, at the royal palace of Laeken; the excursions from Cowes in the royal yacht; and the exciting races for the America’s Cup. But he longed for independence, to know more of life beyond the walls of Buckingham Palace and the terraces of Windsor, to escape from the suffocating confines of his parents’ court. When he was thirteen in August 1855, he went to Paris with them on a state visit to Napoleon III. Lord Clarendon, the Foreign Secretary, who was instructed to keep an eye on him and to tell him how to behave, thought that the Queen’s severity was ‘very injudicious’. Certainly the boy was constantly asking questions while rarely giving his full attention to the answers. But the Prince’s manners and behaviour were perfectly respectable. Lord Clarendon had to admit, though, that there might well be trouble with him later on: he would probably be ‘difficult to manage, as he evidently [had] a will of his own and [was] rather positive and opinionated.’ In his carriage one day Clarendon had been obliged to contradict something that the Prince had said; but the Prince, quite unabashed, had riposted, ‘At all events, that is my opinion.’ To this Clarendon had sharply replied, ‘Then your Royal Highness’s opinion is quite wrong.’ The rebuke had seemed to surprise the Prince a good deal.

  For his own part, the Prince had never enjoyed himself more than he did in Paris; and he left it with obvious regret, looking intently all around him, the Countess d’Armaille noticed at the Gare de Strasbourg, ‘as though anxious to lose nothing’ of his last moments there. He had been intoxicated by the excitement of their welcome; the ‘roar of cannon, bands and drums and cheers’; his first glimpses of a city he was to grow to love; the pretty, beautifully dressed ladies in the Tuileries. He never forgot the fireworks at the Versailles ball; nor kneeling down in his Highland dress beside his mother to say a prayer at the tomb of Napoleon I while the thunder rolled above them in the stormy sky and the French generals wept; nor how he had hero-worshipped the romantic and mysterious Emperor to whom he had confided one afternoon as they drove round Paris together, ‘I should like to be your son.’

  He adored the Empress Eugenie, from whom next year he was much excited to receive a lock of her hair entwined with a hair of the Emperor’s and a wisp of her baby son’s; and he pleaded with her to let him and his sister stay behind for a few days on their own. The Empress replied that she was afraid that the Queen and Prince Albert could not do without them. ‘Not do without us!’ the Prince protested. ‘Don’t fancy that, for there are six more of us at home, and they don’t want us.’

  He really felt it to be true. When they got home he was sent away immediately to Osborne with his tutors to make up for the lessons he had missed while he had been in France. ‘Poor Bertie’ was ‘pale and trembling’ when his mother and father took leave of him, the Queen recorded in her journal. ‘The poor dear child’ was ‘much affected’ at the prospect of this ‘first long separation’. But whether the Prince’s emotion was due, as the Queen thought, to his sadness at parting from his parents, or, as we may suppose more likely, to his dread of returning to the unremitting grind of his lessons, it was certain that once he had gone the Queen did not much miss him. As she confessed to the Queen of Prussia that autumn, ‘Even here [at Balmoral] when Albert is often away all day long, I find no special pleasure in the company of the elder children … and only very occasionally do I find the rather intimate intercourse with them either easy or agreeable.’ When they were naughty she found them intolerable, and was insistent that they be punished even more severely than their father would have approved. Two years after the state visit to Paris, Prince Albert confided in Lord Clarendon that he regretted this ‘aggressive’ behaviour of the Queen, that he ‘had always been embarrassed by the alarm which he felt lest [her] mind should be excited by any opposition to her will; and that, in regard to the children, the disagreeable office of punishment had always fallen on him’. But Clarendon thought that Prince Albert himself had always been quite as severe with the Prince of Wales as the Queen had asked him to be with the Princess Royal.

  2

  ‘A Private Student’

  The more I think of it, the more I see the difficulties of the Prince being thrown together with other young men.

  After the unsettling excitement of Paris, the Prince felt more frustrated than ever by the restraints imposed upon him in England. He teased and harangued the younger children until the sound of his voice jangled the Queen’s nerves unbearably; he exasp
erated the footmen by jumping out at them and throwing dust on their clean uniforms; he continued to lose his temper and scream at the slightest provocation. An essentially affectionate child, he had no one to lavish his affections on. He could not get close to his father; he strongly felt the disapproval of his mother; he had been parted from his brother Alfred, to whom, so their mother said, his ‘devotion was great and very pleasing to see’, because it was felt that separation would be good for them both. He felt ‘very low’ after this parting and was allowed to sit with his mother while she had her dinner though she could do but little to comfort him. He was always well behaved on these occasions, and did his best to talk in a sensible, grown-up way. Indeed, guests at Windsor could scarcely believe what a trial he was to his family. Colonel Henry Ponsonby, who joined the household in 1857 as Prince Albert’s equerry, thought the fifteen year-old Prince of Wales ‘very lively and pleasant’. He was taken up to the Prince’s room — ‘such a comfortable room and very full of ship models’ — and afterwards wrote to tell his mother, Lady Emily Ponsonby, that the Prince was ‘one of the nicest boys’ he had ever seen.