by Gillian Gill
Albert, like many parents, made the mistake of giving his children what he liked, or remembered liking, as a child, and then censuring them if they were unhappy and ungrateful. And he had one obsession not shared by many fathers: He was determined that his sons, especially his oldest son, should be great men, and in his view, sexual purity was the prerequisite for true greatness. This was the code that the prince consort lived by, and it made his relationship with the Prince of Wales increasingly difficult as the boy reached adolescence.
WHEN BERTIE TURNED sixteen, he was confirmed and, though not yet of age, officially ceased to be a child. The prince consort was now on high alert. Since Bertie, unlike his “angelic dearest Father,” was observably open to the temptations of the flesh, he had to be kept out of the company not just of women but of unworthy young men. It was only when Bertie approached his seventeenth birthday and pronounced himself puzzled by certain things that Gibbs was authorized to explain to him “the purpose and abuse of the union of the sexes.”
Bertie was allowed to undertake some walking trips with four carefully selected Etonians his own age. Despite Gibbs, who never left them alone, the youths managed to have fun. Heavily supervised, Bertie visited his sister in Berlin and his uncle in Coburg. He went to Italy, where he saw the new Pope, and Austria, where he met the legendary Austrian statesman Count Clemens Metternich. People abroad found Bertie charming.
Prince Albert gave his son a rather meager allowance and his own residence at Windsor. He handpicked a few young aristocratic men of exemplary morals to be the members of the Prince of Wales’s household. Lord Valletort was chosen not only because he was moral and accomplished but because “he never was at public school, but passed his youth in attendance on an invalid father.”
The prince consort wrote a memorandum detailing the manner of life he expected to see followed at his son’s house: no silly humor, no gambling, no billiards, no lolling in chairs or on sofas, no practical jokes. In his leisure, the Prince of Wales should devote himself to “music, to the fine arts, either drawing, or looking over drawings, engravings, etc., to hearing poetry … or good plays read aloud.” The Queen and her beloved doctor Sir James Clark, perhaps finding the Prince of Wales to be gaining in weight, devised a diet low in red meat and red wine, strong on seltzer water.
The young men of the household were expected to report on the Prince of Wales to his father, but they rallied to his side against Gibbs. Apparently, instead of bullying his peers as he had as a boy, Bertie was now using his charm and status to win them over. Colonel Lindsay, one of the equerries, wrote to the prince consort: “Mr. Gibbs has no influence. He and the Prince are so much out of sympathy with one another that a wish expressed by Mr. Gibbs is sure to meet with opposition on the part of the Prince … I confess I quite understand the Prince’s feelings towards Mr. Gibbs, for tho’ I respect his uprightness and devotion, I could not give him sympathy, confidence or friendship.” Gibbs was dismissed when the Prince of Wales turned seventeen.
Queen Victoria reported to Vicky on November 10, 1858: “Bertie vexes us much. There is not a particle of reflection, or even attention to anything but dress! Not the slightest desire to learn, on the contrary, il se bouche les oreilles [he stops up his ears], the moment anything of interest is talked of … Poor Mr. Gibbs certainly failed during the last 2 years entirely, incredibly.” Colonel Bruce, a stern, straitlaced military man, took over the supervision of the Prince of Wales’s life. The Queen and the prince promoted the colonel to general and hoped that he would prove more successful than his predecessor.
Bertie’s great wish was to pursue an army career, but his parents dismissed this idea offhand. They conceded that as a kind of reward, he would be made an officer and allowed to do some military training, but that was all. His father intended him to complete an intensive course of studies at the great universities that would properly prepare him for his life as king. Science and technology, the prince consort decreed, were to form an important part of the prince’s studies. In his spare time, the Prince of Wales was instructed to tour mines and factories. When he could find time in his increasingly busy schedule, the prince consort himself would instruct his eldest son in European history and political theory.
First the Prince of Wales was sent to Edinburgh to cram under the great chemist (then) Sir Lyon Playfair, who reported that the prince showed interest and ability. Next Bertie was sent to Oxford. The prince consort was forced by university regulations to enroll his son in a college, but he refused to allow him to live in college or to attend lectures with other young men. He installed the Prince of Wales and his large entourage in a house in town. In the evenings, when not hitting the books, Bertie was instructed to entertain elderly academics at dinner. Hearing that Bertie was still managing to make some disreputable friends among the Oxford fast set, the prince consort was indignant. “The only use for Oxford is that it is a place for study, a refuge from the world and its claims,” he wrote memorably to his son. Queen Victoria, who found Oxford a horrid, boring place, was inclined to see Bertie’s point of view.
Once the Prince of Wales began to make solo public appearances, the ugly duckling was discovered to be a swan. Charming and engaged, a deft conversationalist, Bertie remembered everyone’s name and seemed fascinated by everyone he met. He loved to dance, which pleased the ladies, and he was a keen and skilled shot, which pleased the men. His large appetite for food and wine coincided very well with the mores of the English upper classes in that supremely gastronomic era. Society people noticed approvingly that, except for the way he pronounced his r’s, he was not at all like his father. The Prince of Wales’s incomplete grasp of classical languages and engineering was not held against him.
Bertie, like his mother as a teenager, proved perfectly at ease on ceremonial occasions, and in the summer of 1860 his parents sent him on a state visit to Canada. This was followed by a private visit to the United States at the invitation of President James Buchanan. The Prince of Wales was a sensation in North America, on one occasion volunteering to be wheeled across the Niagara Falls on a tight rope in a wheelbarrow. He shook hands with democratic abandon, and danced every dance at balls—to the despair of his elderly handlers, who were keen to get to bed. His marked attentions to Miss B. of Natchez and Miss G. of Cincinnati did not go unreported. “His Royal Highness looks as if he might have a very susceptible nature, and has already yielded to several twinges in the region of his midriff,” reported the New York Herald enigmatically. Apart from his successes at the dinners and balls, the Prince of Wales was also given the highest marks for diplomatic tact and presence of mind by foreign secretary the Duke of Newcastle, who was a member of the prince’s party.
Queen Victoria was delighted with her son’s success, noting to Vicky that he deserved plaudits, since he was so often criticized. Prince Albert, who rarely got mobbed by enthusiastic admirers or received rave reviews in the foreign press, wrote sternly to his son that he should not take his success in the New World as a testament to his own merit. All the adulation had been laid upon him as the representative of his august mother.
Bertie’s susceptibility to the charms of pretty girls had not gone unnoticed by his family. One of the first things that the Princess Royal was asked by her mother to do when she moved to Germany in February 1858 was to find a suitable princess for Bertie to marry. Bertie was then sixteen, but both his parents were convinced that he must marry young, perhaps even younger than his father. The prospective bride must, for reasons of politics and family tradition, be a Protestant German princess. She must be very well brought up, very sensible, and very self-possessed to please her future in-laws. She must be very attractive to win and, it was hoped, keep the affections of her husband.
But, though poor busy, harassed, pregnant Vicky pored over the Almanach de Gotha and even visited freezing castles to interview teenage girls, she could find no eligible German princess. The only known beauties in the right age group were Alexandra and Dagmar, the older dau
ghters of Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg—the heir presumptive to the failing king of Denmark—and of his wife, Princess Louise, originally of Hesse-Kassel.
For some time, Victoria and Albert were convinced that a match between the Prince of Wales and a Danish princess was out of the question. Prussia and Denmark were on the brink of war over the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, Prince Christian’s ancestral estates. For the heir to the British throne to marry this prince’s daughter would be perceived as a massive insult by Prussia. Vicky’s position at the Prussian court, already so difficult, would be severely compromised if she were even rumored to be seeking a Danish sister-in-law. Queen Victoria had also heard unpleasant rumors that Princess Louise, a sister of her aunt-in-law the Duchess of Cambridge, was not at all comme il faut. Queen Victoria, it may be recalled, was seriously on the outs with the women of the Cambridge family.
But the young German princesses did not improve with age and, while he seemed happy to obey his parents and marry, Bertie declared that he would marry only for love. Since this was the family tradition established by Victoria and Albert and continued by Vicky and Fritz, Bertie was on solid ground here. The reports from Copenhagen were increasingly glowing. On behalf of her parents, Vicky met with Alexandra and wasted no time in sending a rave review to her mother. “It is very difficult to be impartial when one is captivated, and I own I never was more so—I never set eyes on a sweeter creature than Princess Alix. She is lovely! … She is a good deal taller than I am, has a lovely figure but very thin, a complexion as beautiful as possible … Her voice, her walk, carriage and manners are perfect …” And so on for three pages.
When Prince Albert was shown a portrait of Princess Alexandra, he remarked, rather unexpectedly, that if he were a young man, he would fall in love with her. When reports came in that the Russian court had also sent for Princess Alexandra’s portrait as a possible bride for the tsarevitch, the prince consort decided that there was not a moment to lose.
Bertie was now informed about Princess Alexandra, given her picture, and told by his father that all political reservations about her had been set aside. Would he consent to go to Germany to meet the young lady with a view to marriage? Bertie agreed, but without much enthusiasm. He no longer seemed keen on an early marriage. Nonetheless, in September 1861, the Prince of Wales set out for Germany, supposedly on military matters. He had spent his summer in Ireland at a military camp, learning to conduct drills, and he was now a colonel. Vicky, disregarding the implacable hatred of all things Danish that prevailed at the court of her parents-in-law, arranged a supposedly secret meeting between her brother and the Princess Alexandra at the cathedral at Speyer. This was close to Rumpenheim, the private estate of the Hesse-Kassel family near Frankfurt, where Alexandra and her parents spent their summers. No court in Europe was deceived.
The Prince of Wales’s response to meeting Princess Alix for the first time, while courteous, was far less ecstatic than his sister’s had been. He did, however, repair immediately to Balmoral to give his parents an account of the meeting, whence Queen Victoria reported to her daughter in Prussia. “Bertie is certainly much pleased with her [Alexandra],” wrote the Queen, “but as for being in love I don’t think he can be, or that he is capable of enthusiasm about anything in the world.” This depressed the Princess Royal. Usually a loyal defender of her oldest brother, Vicky wrote to their mother: “I own it gives me a feeling of great sadness when I think that sweet lovely flower—young and beautiful—that makes my heart beat when I look at her—which would make most men fire and flames—not even producing an impression enough to last from Baden to England.”
Despite the Prince of Wales’s lukewarm response to Princess Alix’s charms, the marriage was assumed to be on. Both sets of parents were in agreement. An actual proposal was being planned. Prince Albert, who would maintain control of his son’s private income and his revenues under the civil list until November 9, had managed to find time to locate a country property for the newlyweds. He had 600,000 pounds of his son’s money in hand and planned to spend it on the acquisition of Sandringham, a large estate in a windswept, isolated part of Norfolk. It would, in his view, suit Bertie and Alix admirably.
Neither the Queen and the prince in England nor their eldest daughter in Germany had heard the gossip that was making the rounds in the courts of Europe. The Prince of Wales had picked up a mistress in Ireland and had brought her back to England.
Problems in a Marriage
…
O SOONER HAD VICKY DRIVEN OFF WITH HER NEW HUSBAND TO take the boat from Gravesend than her mother discovered that she missed her extravagantly. This was something of a surprise to the Queen, the prince, and their daughter. Victoria had once cheerfully admitted to her friend the then Princess Augusta, Vicky’s new Prussian mother-in-law, that she did not much enjoy her daughter’s company and did not expect to miss her much once she married and moved away.
Victoria began to write to her daughter in Berlin every day, sometimes several times a day, and once the relationship between mother and daughter became largely epistolary, it blossomed. Ever since childhood, the Queen had been obliged to conduct many important relationships by letter. She had a deep and faithful love for members of her extended family—notably her half sister Feodora von Hohenlohe, her half brother Charles Leiningen, and her uncle Leopold—and she saw them whenever possible. But these people all settled abroad when the Queen was still a little girl, so their relationship was kept alive by the written word. As a girl, Victoria’s letters had been subject to censorship. One of the great pleasures of her accession to the throne had been that she was at last free to write what she wanted to whom she pleased and to receive and keep all the letters written to her.
As queen, Victoria came to understand that even in her private correspondence, she needed to keep up a certain vigilance. On the continent of Europe, it was customary for the letters of important persons to be intercepted and opened before they were delivered. This meant that expensive private couriers were necessary if a member of the family had something confidential to impart. Even when exhausted and scribbling away late at night, Victoria always had to be aware that, in the short term, anything she wrote could get into the wrong hands, and, in the long term, might be quoted in the history books. Despite these constraints, she spent hours of every day on her private correspondence. Her style was plain and seemed artless, but she was a highly sophisticated and effective correspondent. She knew how to stamp her personality on the page and keep the flame of friendship burning.
The epistolary relationship between mother and daughter took a year or so to settle down. At first the Queen was bossy and annoying. She demanded to know every tiny detail of her daughter’s new life, and she got cross when the details were not forthcoming. “I wish you for the future to adopt a plan of beginning your letters with the following sort of headings,” wrote Victoria three weeks after her daughter had sailed from England. “Yesterday—or the day before, we did so and so; dined here or there and then where you spent the evening. If once you omit for days what you do— I shall be quite at sea—and it makes me sad, and feel the separation painfully. You must promise me, my dearest … This won’t give you any trouble.”
There was a week in April of the first year in which the Queen wrote some very personal letters to her daughter and heard nothing in reply. She became frantic and reproached Vicky harshly. She reported that rumors were going around the European capitals that both she and her daughter were pregnant, and begged Vicky to deny the rumors as she did. Queen Victoria was being selfish, and a male rebuke was not long in coming—not from Vicky’s husband but her own. Prince Albert earnestly chastised his wife for asking Vicky to spend so much time writing to her and for criticizing Vicky so unjustly. At once, the Queen was all contrition. “Never, pray, fatigue yourself writing to me—pray don’t. I dare not tell papa that I did scold you, for he always fears you exhaust yourself writing to me.”
It t
urned out that the princess had replied to her mother but that her letters had been delayed. Vicky had discovered that all her English correspondence was being opened by the spies her new Prussian in-laws had appointed to her household, so she was forced to arrange for letters to be routed via the network of couriers run by the Rothschild banking house. All the same, Queen Victoria had been right to suspect something important was up in Berlin. The rumor that Vicky was pregnant was true. The princess was anxious to hide her condition from her mother until it was absolutely confirmed, knowing that the Queen would be terribly upset.
When Prince Frederick William, Vicky’s husband, wrote to inform his mother-in-law officially of the pregnancy, Queen Victoria replied instantly on May 26, declaring it “horrid news.” She had wanted her daughter to have at least a year of happiness before entering what she called the shadow side of marriage. But Vicky’s pregnancy was now a fact that had to be dealt with, and Victoria soon took a new approach. She wrote to Vicky in June: “I delight in the idea of being a grandmamma; to be that at 39 (DV) [deo volente, God willing] and to look and feel young is great fun, only I wish I could go through it for you, dear, and save you all the annoyance.”
Gradually, as the correspondence continued, Victoria’s letters revealed a woman Vicky as a girl had not known. The distant, disapproving mother whose hand must be ritually kissed and whose temper was uncertain metamorphosed into a down-to-earth, sentimental, limited, sharp-tongued but lovable mama who, by a trick of fate, found herself on a throne and was desperately in need of a good friend.
For her part, Vicky had realized within months of moving to Germany that her mother had not been wrong to weep at her wedding and call her a lamb for the slaughter. In her husband, Fritz, Vicky had indeed found the ideal lover and life companion. Theirs was to be one of the great tragic love affairs of the nineteenth century. But love was not enough for happiness, and Vicky’s girlish confidence in having her way in Berlin was soon dispelled. Realizing her father’s political blueprint was far harder than either of them had ever imagined in their delightful tutorials, surrounded by spies, disliked and distrusted by the members of her husband’s family, finding an implacable enemy in Otto von Bismarck, Vicky too needed a friend who could fully enter into her situation and be trusted absolutely. She found that friend in her mother.