The Heir Apparent
Page 6
This was, of course, exactly what Albert was subjecting Victoria to. Few people are happy when they are scolded, and Queen Victoria was no exception.
The previous summer, Vicky had become engaged to the Prussian Crown Prince, Frederick William. Victoria tried desperately to convince herself that her fifteen-year-old daughter was, in fact, a grown woman. Albert was miserable at the thought of losing the person he cared about most in the world, but as usual succeeded in convincing himself that doing the thing that gave real unhappiness was for the greater good: Vicky’s marriage was part of his long-term dynastic plan. She was to be launched on a one-woman mission to bring liberalism to Germany. He gave Vicky daily tutorials on being a well-informed monarch, and she now ate dinner with her parents when they were alone. If he could not reform Victoria, at least Albert could create his ideal woman in his daughter.
* * *
* At birth the prince was also given the titles of Duke of Cornwall and Rothesay, Earl of Carrick, Baron of Renfrew, and Great Steward of Scotland.
† The Queen was delighted by Mrs. Brough, whom she thought a simple countrywoman; she was horrified to learn thirteen years later that Mrs. Brough was in fact “depraved” and in a fit of madness had murdered her own six children. (RA VIC/Y99/23, QV to King Leopold, 13 June 1854.) Mary Ann Brough was tried for murder, acquitted on plea of insanity, and died in Bethlem in 1861.
‡ The remaining five children were too young to feature in Bertie’s nursery life. They were Helena, born 25 May 1846; Louise, born 18 March 1848; Arthur, born 1 May 1850; Leopold, born 7 April 1853; and Beatrice, born 14 April 1857.
§ No known sound recording of his voice survives.
‖ The doctor Frederick Treves observed Bertie at age sixty cutting his cigars with the blade of a heavy pearl-handled pocketknife. “Now I have never known anyone more clumsy with his fingers than the King and to see him use this great weapon for this small purpose was really alarming,” wrote Treves. (RA VIC/Add U/28, Sir Frederick Treves, “An Account of the Illness of King Edward VII in June 1902” [typescript], p. 9.)
a George Combe, the older brother of Andrew Combe, was the leader of the phrenological movement in Britain and founder of the Edinburgh Phrenological Society.
b Bertie never forgot Birch. Nearly thirty years later, he was still pressing Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli to find his old tutor a job. “With regard to Mr. Birch,” wrote Disraeli, “he is not unknown to me as, ten years ago, at Your Royal Highness’s request, I submitted his name to the Queen for the canonry he now holds.” (RA VIC/T8/1, Lord Beaconsfield to B, 5 February 1880.)
c Virginia Woolf remembered Gibbs as an old man: “He wore a tie ring; had a bald, benevolent head; was dry; neat; precise; and had folds of skin under his chin.” (Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being [Sussex University Press, 1976], p. 74.)
d After Christmas at Windsor, the family visited Osborne before settling at Buckingham Palace. They returned to Osborne in the spring for the Queen’s birthday (24 May); the early summer was divided between Buckingham Palace and Windsor, before escaping to Osborne. Balmoral was booked for August and September, leaving some children behind at Osborne; October was spent at Windsor, and Osborne was visited again early in December.
e Some of the deer Albert recorded killing in his game book were young stags weighing only 70 to 80 pounds, well below the size of a full-grown beast, which weighs 180 to 200 pounds. There could be two possible explanations for this. Either Albert “made such a bad shot that he hit a beast at which he was not aiming, or he ignored the advice of his stalker (who would have been pointing out the best stag to shoot) and blazed away at anything he could. Neither explanation does the Prince much credit.” (Hart-Davis, Monarchs of the Glen, p. 119.)
f One of Albert’s pet projects at this time was a plan to move Westminster School to the country, pulling down the old buildings and throwing open the ground adjoining Westminster Abbey as a park for the public. Fortunately perhaps, this particular act of architectural vandalism was frustrated.
g Tilla was the children’s name for Miss Hildyard, the governess.
CHAPTER 3
“Neither Fish nor Flesh”1
1856–60
In November 1856, Bertie was fifteen. That Christmas he attended the lectures on attraction delivered by Professor Faraday at the Royal Institution. His notes, carefully penned in a neat copperplate hand (“The meaning of attraction is that one body draws another body to itself and keeps it there”) are preserved in a leather-bound volume in the Royal Archives—testimony, one might think, to the industry of the royal pupil.2 The reality was different. Bertie was laboriously prepared before the lectures by his tutor Mr. Gibbs and afterward supplied with notes; but the result, as Prince Albert noted with despair, was “an inaccurate stringing together of the notes!”3
A note of panic crept into Albert and Victoria’s dealings with Bertie. Victoria insisted on giving Albert the title of Prince Consort, which would give him precedence over the Prince of Wales, meaning that Albert himself, and not his teenage son, became second to the Queen. Victoria often bemoaned the inconsistency that as a married woman she had sworn to obey her lord and master, while as a queen her husband was her subject—a German prince with neither rank nor defined position. Albert worried about the political risks involved in allowing his wife to promote him, which she did by an Order in Council (25 June 1857); but, as he explained to his brother, the question had become urgent because of the fear that “wicked people might succeed in bringing up the Prince of Wales against his father, and tell him that he should not allow a foreign prince to take a place before him.”4 Already, Albert saw his eldest son as a potential enemy.
In January 1857, Albert consulted his friend Lord Granville about Bertie’s education. Granville strongly recommended that Bertie should be allowed to mix with other boys. After a meeting with Gibbs, who discussed the pros and cons of being Prince of Wales in a very frank and “uncourtierlike” manner, a new policy was decided.5 Bertie was no longer to be educated in seclusion; instead, he was to be sent abroad to Germany, accompanied by a group of companions, carefully picked from the best aristocratic families.
Queen Victoria held the somewhat strange view that a king of England should not be too English. She considered that George III and William IV failed as monarchs because they were narrowly patriotic. England’s greatest king, Victoria believed, was William III, who was a foreigner, as indeed was Albert; being foreign “gave them a freedom from all national prejudices which is very important in Princes.”6 “Dear Germany” had a special place in Victoria’s affections. She told Bertie that he must learn to love it, as “it is in fact also your country—being your dear father’s and yourself being a German as well as an English Prince.”7
Foreign travel had another advantage: It removed the adolescent prince, whom Albert described as “neither fish nor flesh,” from London and the pollution of aristocratic society. Both Victoria and Albert feared and loathed “the independent, haughty faultfinding fashionable set” of society.8 Neither of them had grown up in splendor—indeed, the Queen considered that she was “brought up almost as a private individual, in very restricted circumstances, for which I have ever felt thankful.”9
In July 1857, Bertie, his tutors, and a select party of four young companions, including Willie Gladstone, son of the politician William Gladstone, set off for Königswinter, near Bonn.* Before he left, Bertie wrote an essay for his tutors on how to spot the difference between friends, who “tell you of your faults,” and flatterers, who please you with false compliments, and “make you despised and hated in society, and lead you into any imaginable vice.”10 Gibbs sent daily bulletins back to Albert, noting Bertie’s improvement under the influence of his new friends. The level of conversation can be seen from the book of schoolboy puns titled “Wit and Whoppers” that the friends compiled: “The Prince of Wales on hearing that an insulting caricature had appeared in a popular periodical said that the Editor should be ‘punched’
for it.”11 According to Gibbs, Bertie’s companions taught him not to be idle, and they shamed him out of his dictatorial manner of saying, “But I wish so and so.” This, said Gibbs, “is just what is wanted, and what none of us can do.”12
Gibbs complained that Bertie ordered about the equerry Henry Ponsonby as though he were a servant.13 When Bertie managed to kiss a girl, the episode was not reported to Albert, but it reached the ears of Mr. Gladstone, who pursed his lips at the prince’s “squalid little debauch.”14 The truth was, Bertie was exceptionally immature. Victoria told him that she expected to find him “grown quite a Child and quite a companion to us,” having heard from everyone how improved he was.15 But she didn’t hear the whole story. In Switzerland, where the party traveled after Königswinter, Bertie stayed at a house in Interlaken, and the people there thought him “young and childish for his age.” They noticed that his suite talked among themselves, seldom addressing Bertie when serious issues were discussed, but “treating him as a boy.” He behaved like a child, too: One day he was nowhere to be found at dinnertime, and when everyone had tired of looking, he suddenly appeared from beneath the table.16 This was regressive behavior for a fifteen-year-old, but Bertie had never been allowed to be a child at home.
Bertie returned in October. The whole family assembled on the staircase at Windsor to welcome him. Victoria noted in her journal that he looked “extremely well, bronzed, and bright, and is a good deal grown.”17 She wrote a letter for his sixteenth birthday in November, giving permission for him to choose his own clothes; however, “we do expect that you will never wear anything extravagant or slang.”18
Ever since the Crimean War, Bertie had hankered after a military career, and he now prepared for the army examination, but his mother forbade him from joining the army as a profession. Politically, this was no doubt wise; the army was considered an inappropriate career for the heir to a constitutional monarchy. On the other hand, Affie was allowed to join the navy. “This is a passion which we as parents have not the right to subdue,” Albert explained; but the same logic did not apparently apply to Bertie.19 The unfairness of this must surely have made the examinations a somewhat pointless exercise. Bertie’s history paper shows no evidence of reading, but a certain common sense. To the question whether kings should be elected, he answered: “It is better than hereditary right because you have more chance of having a good sovereign, if it goes by hereditary right if you have a bad or weak sovereign, you cannot prevent him reigning.” Asked to trace his mama’s descent from King James I, however, he managed to muddle even his own pedigree.20
Vicky, the Princess Royal, married Prince Frederick William (Fritz), heir to the throne of Prussia, on 25 January 1858. It was a dynastic match of great importance, the keystone of Albert’s project to create a liberal Germany united under Prussia, but the celebrations were muted. At the pre-wedding ball, Buckingham Palace’s grand new ballroom was only half full, and Benjamin Disraeli noted that the princes and princesses danced only with one another and looked tired. Vicky cried all the time at the thought of leaving home; but then (Disraeli again), “they say she is very childish and always cries.”21 On the morning of the wedding, the Queen was so nervous that she shook as she posed for the pre-wedding daguerreotype, which shows her as a dumpy blur beside her daughter.
At the wedding in the Chapel Royal at St. James’s, Bertie wore Highland dress and acted as Vicky’s supporter. The next day, Vicky wrote: “You were so good to me yesterday, dear Bertie, I shall not forget the kind affectionate way in which you said goodbye to me.”22
Vicky was a child bride, just seventeen; Albert certainly did not see his daughter as a woman, describing her as having “a man’s head and a child’s heart.”23 Countess Walburga (“Wally”) Hohenthal, her new German lady-in-waiting, who was only a year older, noted that “her childish roundness still clung to her and made her look shorter than she really was.”24 Vicky had a bewitching smile, which showed her small and beautiful teeth, and she was soft-voiced and gentle; but she had a will of steel. She was intellectual, stunningly tactless (“I can never say what I do not think”), and a poor judge of character, prone to taking violent likes and dislikes.25
Fritz was eleven years her senior. Over six feet tall, he was a Saxon chieftain with glittering blue eyes, a mane of blond hair, and thick leonine whiskers. He seemed the ideal husband, but he was indecisive and lacking in confidence. Since his first visit to England at age nineteen, he had been schooled in liberal politics by Albert, who sent him reading lists and signed his autograph book: “May Prussia be merged in Germany, and not Germany in Prussia.” Fritz brought to the altar what Victoria called “the white flower of a blameless life,” just as Albert had done.26 And Vicky fell in love with him, just as Victoria had with Albert.
At Windsor, where Vicky and Fritz spent their so-called honeymoon, the ladies shivered in their evening dresses with their backs to an open window, while the Queen and her daughters toasted themselves before the fire. Fritz was invested with the Order of the Garter, looking absurd in stockings and knee breeches beneath his Prussian military tunic. When the Garter Knights retired backward out of St. George’s Hall, they stumbled over their long cloaks, which twisted round their legs, and Bertie giggled.27
Vicky and Fritz left England for good. Albert accompanied the couple to Gravesend. When they parted, Vicky buried her head in her father’s breast in floods of tears. “I thought my heart was going to break when you shut the cabin door and you were gone,” she wrote. “I miss you so dreadfully, dear Papa, more than I can say; your dear picture stood near me all night.”28 For Vicky, who idolized her father and thought him a perfect being, his decision to exile her from paradise must have seemed strangely confusing. She never resolved her ambivalence about her identity; she was an Englishwoman in Germany, and in England she seemed distinctly foreign.
Albert wrote Vicky what was probably the saddest letter of his life. “I am not of a demonstrative nature, and therefore you can hardly know how dear you have been to me, and what a void you have left behind in my heart.”29 He had lost his favorite child, the brainiest member of the English royal family since George II’s wife Queen Caroline and the only one of his children with an academic mind like his.
Victoria wept more than anyone when Vicky left, but her tears were mixed with remorse. For months she had scolded Vicky, telling her that she was thankful to be rid of her. Once Vicky was married, however, and Victoria had Albert to herself, the Queen bombarded her daughter with letters. Vicky in Germany became Victoria’s confidante; the frank and candid letters she poured out to her Dearest Child reveal the intimate feelings of an impulsive, emotional woman who never worried what posterity might think of her.
Vicky’s marriage shifted the family dynamic. Hitherto, Victoria had had little to do with Bertie, concentrating her scolding on Vicky. Now, all the anger she had once vented on her daughter rained down on Bertie. “Oh! Bertie alas! That is too sad a subject to enter on,” wrote the Queen; but enter upon it she did, and in letter after letter to Vicky she bemoaned Bertie’s shortcomings. He was lazy, he was weak, he was dull. “Handsome I cannot think him, with that painfully small and narrow head, those immense features and total want of chin.” “You cannot imagine the sorrow and bitter disappointment and the awful anxiety for the future which [Bertie] causes us!”30 Vicky annoyed Victoria by remaining silent on the subject of Bertie in her replies. To Bertie, however, she wrote preachy letters, telling him that “we all ought to help one another [prove] ourselves worthy to be the children of our parents.”31
One person who dared to speak to the Queen about her relations with Bertie was her half sister, Feodora, safely ensconced in a distant palace in provincial Germany. “Do show him love, dearest Victoria,” she begged, “I know that he thinks you are not fond of him.”32 But showing love to her eldest son was something that Victoria was quite unable to do. So emotionally dependent was she on Albert that she wanted only to be the “child” of her husband. Bertie
was despised for his failure to resemble his father in looks, character, or ability. Only Affie and Arthur, who both had a physical likeness to Albert, were adored; but Affie fell from grace on account of his distressing habit of telling lies.
Bertie’s confirmation in April 1858 was an important rite of passage, marking his transition to adult life and independence. He prepared by reading sermons aloud to the Queen, and he was examined on the catechism for more than an hour by the Dean of Windsor in front of the Archbishop of Canterbury. The next day, wearing his Windsor uniform of blue and red, he was confirmed by the archbishop in St. George’s Chapel. The Queen wore a “blue moiré antique” and prayed fervently for her son. Afterward he dined alone with his parents, and Albert gave him a fatherly talk about the dangers to which he was now exposed, warning him not to be led astray. Bertie took this in good heart, probably because he had no idea what Albert was referring to; as Victoria wrote, “thank God he is still too innocent and pure to understand, for he is as innocent as a little child.”33 The sixteen-year-old prince knew nothing of the facts of life.
Queen Victoria kept a notebook of her private thoughts entitled “Remarks Conversations Reflections,” in which she poured out her anxiety about her children, Bertie especially: