Childhood at Court, 1819-1914 (10 page)

Nevertheless Gibbs was convinced that he, Stockmar and Prince Albert were correct. The Queen thought that he was in every way more satisfactory and ‘agreeable’ than the well-meaning Mr Birch had ever been.

Only on one matter did the obsequious Gibbs beg to differ from his royal employers. The Prince of Wales’s isolation, he warned, was harmful. While Queen Victoria and Prince Albert had always sought to remind their children that they were no better than their subjects, merely luckier by an accident of birth, they hesitated to admit companions to Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle, because they had convinced themselves that companionship would lead to friendship, and thus into ‘an impermissible relationship of equality’. Gibbs persisted, adamant that the experiment would be of great educational value. In due course, from summer 1852 onwards, a few carefully selected companions were permitted to come from Eton to Windsor Castle to play or ride with the royal children.

One, Charles Wynne-Carrington, later looked back with some acerbity on the ‘experiment’. While Gibbs was careful to put on a display of kindness to the Princes, it was evident that both boys were very strictly treated and brought up. He could see that Prince Alfred was ‘the favourite’, but he always liked the Prince of Wales better, as he ‘had such an open generous disposition and the kindest heart imaginable. He was a very plucky boy and always ready for fun which often got him into scrapes. He was afraid of his father who seemed a proud, shy, stand-offish man, not calculated to make friends easily with children. I was frightened to death of him.’
⁹

Affie admired his elder brother, and was a good influence on him by drawing him into family games. Bertie only lost his temper and bullied the others when he was bored and frustrated. Unhappily, Bertie’s influence tended to lead Affie to copy him, so that on bad days Gibbs found himself with two rude, inattentive pupils instead of one. When Affie found himself being kicked, having his hair pulled, and even occasionally threatened with a paper knife, self-defence was the only answer. As he was bigger than his elder brother, if not physically tougher as well, he could look after himself.

From October 1851 to May 1855 Affie kept a journal, dictated to Birch and then to Gibbs. Like his mother’s childhood journal, it lacks spontaneity, but is not without its useful insights into royal childhood. One of the earliest entries, from November 1851, records his delight at being given ‘a most beautiful watch’, a present from the Duchess of Kent, from the Great Exhibition; ‘Mr Birch told me I make good use of my time, and that I had a watch which would show me how quickly minutes and hours fly away.’
¹⁰

At Christmas that year, spent at Windsor, he recorded various presents – ‘a sword, a Tyrolese hat and belt, some very pretty soldiers which I shared with Bertie’ – and a visit with Bertie and Mr Birch to the castle kitchens on Christmas Day, ‘and I saw the Baron of beef and boar’s head, and I went down to the larder where I saw hares, pheasants, grouse and a great quantity of fat meat; and we saw the pastry room and a model of Windsor Castle in sugar. In the evening Bertie and I supped with our sisters in the Oak Room and played with some of the presents. When I had finished playing I went to the great dinner and had a very happy evening.’
¹¹

In the following year he noted visits to the British Museum, Westminster Abbey, and an exhibition of lion hunter George Gordon-Cumming’s exploits from his travels in South Africa, a display which gave lifelong inspiration to the boy who would become the most widely travelled member of the family and set foot in all five continents by the age of twenty-five.

Who had the final word over more stringent aspects of the children’s upbringing? Prince Albert and Stockmar were not entirely to blame. As far as possible, the Prince tried to treat his children as equals. Although they were all a little in awe of him, except for the Princess Royal, they all appreciated how fond he was of them, and could penetrate the man behind the reserve. They knew that he loved them, appreciated and needed their company, more than the Queen herself.

As she admitted in a letter to Princess Augusta of Prussia (6 October 1856), a year after the Princess Royal had become engaged to Augusta’s son, Prince Frederick William, she found ‘no especial pleasure or compensation in the company of the elder children’. Only very rarely did she ‘find the rather intimate intercourse with them either agreeable or easy. . . . Firstly, I only feel properly à mon aise and quite happy when Albert is with me; secondly, I am used to carrying on my many affairs quite alone; and then I have grown up all alone, accustomed to the society of adult (and never with younger) people – lastly, I still cannot get used to the fact that Vicky is almost grown up. To me she still seems the same child, who had to be kept in order and therefore must not become too intimate.’
¹²

In conversation with Lord Clarendon in December 1858, the Prince expressed reservations over what he called the Queen’s ‘aggressive’ system: ‘he had always been embarrassed by the alarm which he felt lest the Q’s 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’.
¹³
The shadow of King George III, and the fear that too much ‘excitement’ if provoked could deprive his granddaughter of her reason, was sufficient to keep Prince Albert in check.

Did he disagree with Gibbs’s plan to allow their sons to fraternize with boys from Eton? He might not have approved, but the main opposition to Gibbs’s scheme certainly came from the Queen. She had ‘a great fear of young and carefully brought up Boys mixing with older Boys and indeed with any Boys in general, for the mischief done by bad boys and the things they may hear and learn from them cannot be overrated.’
¹⁴

Queen Victoria’s youngest son was born on 7 April 1853. The birth was made easier by chloroform, administered by the anaesthetist Dr John Snow of Edinburgh, under the supervision of Sir James Clark, and the Queen recovered rapidly. She decided to call him Leopold, after his great-uncle, King of the Belgians, whom she informed that following childbirth she had never been so well, and that the child was ‘a jolly fat little fellow, but no beauty’.

Unfortunately he did not thrive like the others. The ‘jolly fat little fellow’ quickly became thin, with a feeble cry and a frequent tendency to be sick. The Queen decided he should have a wet-nurse from the Highlands. When Mrs Macintosh arrived, not speaking a word of English, she was sure he would improve. Wet-nurses could be a problem; the one engaged for the Prince of Wales, Mary Ann Brough, had become morose and ‘stupid’, and a year after Prince Leopold’s birth, the Queen was horrified to hear that she had murdered her own six children.

Dr Clark attributed Leopold’s failure to thrive to a weak digestion, and suggested a change of wet-nurse, whose milk was less rich. A shipwright’s wife was found, appropriately, in Cowes. For a few weeks he improved. However when he began to walk, and fell down frequently, it was seen that he bruised much more easily than the others, and cried out in pain. ‘Little Leo’, it was discovered, suffered from haemophilia, the bleeding disease transferred from a female to a male, in which bleeding cannot be stopped.

The source of haemophilia in the royal family was thought to have been a spontaneous mutation in the genes inherited by Queen Victoria from her mother. No instances of it were traced in the Duchess of Kent’s relations. Prince Leopold was the only victim in her family and the only male transmitter. Two of her daughters, Alice and (the as yet unborn) Beatrice, were carriers, and through them it spread to several of the royal houses of Europe, with disastrous consequences for the royal and imperial families of Spain and Russia into which the princesses married.

Queen Victoria tried to protect her ‘child of anxiety’ from accidents by too much care. Not surprisingly, he reacted against this by resisting, behaving recklessly, and wanting to behave as normally as his brothers and sisters.

He made up for being delicate by an unquenchable spirit and an intellect which gave signs of being as marked as that of his eldest sister. He learned to read with ease, and was rarely to be seen with his nose out of a book. Like his eldest sister, he enjoyed confounding his elders with questions of an intellectual nature to which he knew the answers. At the age of five he wanted to know all about the paintings on the walls of his father’s study at Osborne, and showed a precocious knowledge of Italian art.

Prince Albert knew better than anyone else how to treat Leopold. Although just as perplexed and worried as the Queen about his haemophilia, he apparently assumed – or pretended to assume – that the boy would grow out of it, as he would out of the epilepsy which attacked him before he was a year old. He carried ‘little Leo’ in his arms, so he could see what the others were doing, but it was frustrating for both that he could not join in their games. Some days the boy had to lie on a sofa to recover from what would have been a minor accident in the others but a potential crisis in his case. To occupy his mind, Prince Albert would let him use his paintbox, and help to guide his hand as he discovered for himself the joy of creating his own watercolours.

He had a pronounced musical ear, and responded keenly to Mrs Anderson’s piano lessons. It soon became apparent that he had a passion for music, and had a strong singing voice. Father and son would in time sing duets with great enjoyment. When Leopold was confined to bed, Albert was careful not to show that he felt sorry for him, and as far as possible he always behaved as if there was nothing unusual in his being kept apart from the other children. It was the only way, he realized, to help the boy try and lead as normal a life as his condition would allow.

Queen Victoria and Prince Albert both disliked London. The crowds, polluted air, and for the Queen the city’s constant associations with the unhappiness of her childhood, and for Albert the sweeter memories of rural tranquillity in the Coburg he had left behind, led them to seek retreats further afield.

Though Windsor Castle was something of a retreat from London, they found nothing homely about the vast building. They had continued to use the Royal Pavilion at Brighton, King George IV’s exotic creation which had also been stayed in, less willingly, by King William IV. Neither of them liked it, and the last straw came one day in 1845 when a crowd of two hundred pursued them as they walked from the pavilion to the chain pier. Some people even ran alongside the Queen and peered under her bonnet. They never returned to the pavilion, which was sold to the Brighton Corporation in 1850.

At the suggestion of Sir Robert Peel, who had heard of an estate on the Isle of Wight for sale, in 1845 they purchased a new ‘Marine Residence’, Osborne House, with an estate of 1,000 acres. The existing house was too small, and it was demolished to make way for a new mansion, designed by Prince Albert and the London builder Thomas Cubitt. The foundation stone of the Pavilion Wing, the first part they would occupy, was laid in June 1845. Fifteen months later they took up residence there, and within five years, the two eastern wings (accommodation for the household) were completed.

Osborne was designed very much with the children in mind. More than anywhere else, its arrangement and facilities still retain the flavour, the essence of childhood at the Victorian court. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert had their private apartments on the first floor. Below were the official audience and reception rooms, in which a homely atmosphere was added by Mary Thornycroft’s statues of the children dressed as characters from Thomson’s
The Seasons
; above, on the second floor, were the nursery quarters.

The children generally remained in the nursery until they were six, when they graduated to the schoolroom on the first floor. Two rooms in the nursery suite were the governess’s sitting-room and bedroom respectively, divided by folding doors. The children each had their own individual high-backed chair, topped with a shield inlaid with its royal owner’s initials, while there were also smaller chairs with Berlin wool-work seats embroidered by the Queen’s aunt Mary, Duchess of Gloucester, last surviving child of King George III. Next door was the nursery bedroom, containing cots with hinged canework sides and upholstered pads to protect the children. They were perhaps designed partly by their father. There was plenty of room for toys as well, most of which – rocking horses, dolls’ houses and clockwork mechanical devices from Germany – it can be assumed were loved, and worn to bits, by grandchildren and great-grandchildren. A wicker trug owned by Louise, who was destined never to have children of her own to pass it down to, still survives on display in the nursery.

Osborne was relatively close to London, but secluded, and close to the sea with a private beach for bathing and boating. It was thus ideal for bringing up a young family. With its wooded views, spacious grounds and views across the Solent, it was an excellent holiday home for them all. The children learned to swim in the bay, using either the small pier or, later, the swimming bath, made from pontoons, with a wooden grating floor open to the sea. Each fine summer day would find parents and children aboard the royal yacht
Victoria and Albert
, or the smaller steam yacht
Fairy
. There was always something to keep everyone on board occupied, whether looking out to sea through their father’s telescope, sketching on deck, or pretending to steer.

Affie, who adored anything to do with the sea, was particularly in his element at Osborne. An excellent swimmer, he revelled in the outdoor life and, being naturally darker in colouring than the rest, tanned easily. With his mechanical mind, he quickly mastered the essentials of the
Fairy
, and was more effective than his father at fixing any minor faults. So did Helena, the tomboy of the girls, who also had a knack with machinery. She and Affie both studied the motors and machinery with interest, never minding how dirty or greasy their hands became in the process.

Princess Helena, or ‘Lenchen’, as she was always to be known
en famille
, was a placid, even-tempered child. She had none of the obstinacy or tendency to answer back of her eldest sister Victoria, the precocious, self-willed Princess Royal, and none of Alice’s tendency to be easily crushed. Bertie and Affie were quick to realize that any attempts at teasing or bullying her would result in a short sharp blow where it hurt. Lady Augusta Bruce, lady-in-waiting, noted that at six years of age the Princess ‘resented much being called a Baby by her eldest brother and threatened to slap his face if he persisted!’
¹⁵