Childhood at Court, 1819-1914 (14 page)

When Affie was eleven, Prince Albert decided with misgivings that his sons would have to be separated. The difference in their ages and ability, he concluded, was a problem for both of them. Bertie was undoubtedly holding back, and perhaps influencing, his industrious younger brother. He did not want to hurt either of them, as both were mutually devoted, and he had never forgotten the pain of his parting from his brother Ernest, but for their own good it had to be done. Lieutenant John Cowell of the Royal Engineers, aged twenty-three, was chosen to superintend Affie’s training for the Navy. He joined the royal household ‘to learn the working of our system’, and then took up quarters separately with Affie at Royal Lodge, Windsor Park. It proved too small and uncomfortable for the purpose, and they moved into larger premises at Alverbank, near Gosport. Affie studied under various tutors, learning geometry, mathematics, seamanship and navigation.

In August 1858 he sat his naval entrance examination, which he passed with very high marks. The Prince Consort was particularly proud, examining the written papers a few days later, to see that he solved the mathematical problems almost without any mistake, and did the translations without a dictionary. Lord Derby, the Prime Minister, commented obsequiously that he was grateful no such examination was necessary to qualify government ministers for office, ‘as it would very seriously increase the difficulty of forming an administration.’
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There were no such problems for the parents when it came to the Princesses’ education. Helena was happy left to her own devices. Not very artistic, though competent enough at music and copying drawings, and not interested in cooking in the Swiss cottage, she preferred being out in the open air. She would much rather help Affie in the workshop at Osborne, or play soldiers with Arthur in the fort. Horses were an abiding passion of hers, and she eagerly accepted the challenge of riding ‘difficult’ animals. She could calm a frightened or unmanageable horse, revealing a patience and sensitivity which she never did in the schoolroom. Queen Victoria was forever lamenting her unfeminine ways and lack of interest in her appearance, notably a readiness to get her hands dirty, and her love of food which made her put on weight. As far as Prince Albert was concerned, it did not matter in the slightest, and he readily encouraged her to spend as much time in the stables feeding and grooming the horses as she wanted.

Louise was only twenty-two months younger than Helena, and one might have expected a close bond to develop between them. It was not to be the case, for Louise, the child whom her mother had forecast at her birth would turn out to be ‘something peculiar’ was everything that Lenchen was not. ‘That delicious baby Louise’, as Lady Augusta Bruce called her, grew up to be the most attractive of the Princesses. She was never very practically minded, but extremely artistic, and had the temperament that went with it. She only joined in her sisters’ activities with reluctance, and was skilled at baking scones and cakes in the Swiss Cottage kitchens, cutting out pastry with a teapot lid.

Yet she preferred her own company, painting and sketching. At the age of three she was given her first lessons in drawing and painting by Corbould, and it was evident that she was extraordinarily gifted. While her sisters might write stories for their own amusement, she would draw and paint landscapes from memory, or illustrate stories from a book that had been read to her. While they were generally happy to copy slavishly the well-known pictures that Corbould suggested, he taught her to use her originality, and to paint directly from nature. Charming little letters, essays and hand-painted cards framed in paper lace were regular presents to her father.

As the ‘middle’ sister, Louise often felt neglected. When Beatrice was born and became the apple of everyone’s eye, she became jealous. Beatrice slept in the night nursery, and she felt excluded, with bad dreams and restless nights. When she was eleven, she gave Elphinstone ‘such a pretty chair watch-stand’ for his birthday, and when he tried to thank her she ran away shyly.

The wedding of Vicky and Fritz at St James’s Palace on 25 January 1858 was an emotional occasion for all the children. The bride’s brothers all wore Highland dress, while Alice, Louise and Helena were in pink satin trimmed with Newport lace, cornflowers and marguerites in their hair.

Surrounded by a family weeping with emotion, the bride and groom left Buckingham Palace on the morning of 2 February, braving the cold and snow in an open carriage, for Gravesend docks, where they were to sail across the North Sea to Germany. Only an hour after they left, the Queen sat down and wrote a long emotional letter in which she lamented her daughter’s break with her childhood home; it was hard for parents to give up their children,

and to see them go away from the happy peaceful home – where you used all to be around us! That is broken in, and you, though always our own dear child, and always able to be at home in your parents’ house, are no longer one of the many, merry children who used to gather so fondly round us!
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So began the voluminous mother–daughter correspondence which lasted until within a few weeks of the Queen’s death, almost forty-three years later. To her unmarried sisters’ regular instructions to bake for sick people in the neighbourhood in the kitchens at the Swiss Cottage was added a regular order ‘for export’. Each week they cooked pies and cakes to send to Princess Frederick William of Prussia, taken by Queen’s Messenger to Berlin, together with letters and other more conventional packages.

The elder children were growing up. As Vicky’s childhood had ended officially with her confirmation in March 1856, so did Bertie’s on 1 April 1858, although the nearest he came to adolescent emancipation was on his seventeenth birthday on 9 November that year. He received a rather portentous letter from his parents, informing him that he would be answerable in future not to his governor but to himself and his parents. His annual income was increased to £500, and he was told to free himself ‘from the thraldom of abject dependence’ upon servants, to learn to follow the precept of loving his neighbour as himself and to ‘do unto men as you would they should do unto you’, and to become a good man and a thorough gentleman. Life, he was warned (as if it was necessary to remind him), was ‘composed of duties, and in the due, punctual and cheerful performance of them, the true Christian, true soldier and true gentleman is recognized.’
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Much pleased and moved by the letter, apparently, he showed it to the Dean of Windsor and burst into tears.

On the following day Gibbs resigned his post at tutor. Not only Bertie was relieved to see him depart, with an annual pension of £800, the Order of Companion of the Bath and a lucrative practice on the Northern Circuit. To the Queen, the tutor had ‘certainly failed during the last 2 years entirely, incredibly, and did Bertie no good’.
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He was replaced by Colonel the Hon. Robert Bruce, brother of Lady Augusta, and a former Grenadier Guardsman, who was formally gazetted as the Prince of Wales’s governor.

It had been a year of one upheaval after another. Soon after passing his naval entrance examination, fourteen-year-old Affie went to sea. Bitterly, the Queen told Vicky after his departure that ‘it is much better to have no children than to have them only to give them up!’
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By this time, the Queen was looking forward – with very mixed feelings – to being a grandmother. Vicky was expecting her first child, but not all her brothers and sisters were allowed to share the news. Not even twelve-year-old Lenchen was to know, as the Queen said (27 October): ‘those things are not proper to be told to children, as it initiates them into things which they ought not to know of, till they are older.’
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The news was broken to the children in January 1859 that, in the triumphant words of Louise, they were no longer mere royal children, ‘we are uncles and aunts’. Sometimes lacking in over-confidence, and keen for attention, Louise tended to react with over-enthusiasm. That Princess Frederick William of Prussia had had a dangerous confinement in which both mother and baby would have died but for the timely intervention of a Scottish doctor who helped them when the German doctors had given up hope, and that the baby Prince William was left with a withered left arm, was not revealed to the young uncles and aunts for some time.

Despite her gruesome first experience of childbirth, the Princess had seven more children during the next thirteen years. In July 1860 she produced a daughter, named Charlotte. To celebrate, the uncles and aunts at Osborne were allowed a half holiday and spent it cooking in the Swiss Cottage. The Prince Consort used the opportunity to explain the facts of life to Alice, and at Osborne healths were drunk to the new child, who arrived in the world with none of the complications or horrors that had beset her elder brother’s birth. With a touch of his old humour which was seen but rarely by now, the Prince Consort wrote to Vicky to suggest that the baby should model herself on her aunt Beatrice. The latter, aged only three, would readily excuse herself from less congenial tasks, saying that she had no time because she must write letters to her niece.

Alice was confirmed in April 1859, a couple of days before her sixteenth birthday. To mark this transition to adult life, she was presented with a large quantity of jewellery, including a diamond necklace and earrings. Her matrimonial future was already under review, though her self-confidence was not helped when her first prospective suitor, the Prince of Orange, was invited to a dinnerparty at Buckingham Palace and put himself out of the running by his boorish behaviour towards her. A few months later Prince Louis of Hesse and the Rhine, heir presumptive to the dukedom, was chosen. An unintelligent man whose manners and morals were, however, beyond reproach, he was warmly endorsed by the Queen and Prince Consort, and they were betrothed in November 1860.

The youngest children were coming to an age when they could benefit from their father’s close interest and encouragement. It goes without saying that he was gratified by the developing artistic skills of Louise and the precocious intellect of Leopold, while Arthur’s dedication to military interest was a similar source of pleasure.

Yet 1861 was to be a tragic year for the whole family. The Duchess of Kent was suffering from erysipelas, and by the beginning of the year her life was despaired of. She died on 16 March, aged seventy-four, and the grief-stricken Queen verged on a nervous breakdown for several months. Beatrice touched her mother when she spoke continually of Grandmama, ‘how she is in heaven, but hopes she will return’.
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It increased the burdens on the Prince Consort. Unrecognized by the family, he was chronically sick and, as he admitted, he would not struggle against severe illness but give up at once. At the end of November he caught a severe chill, and a few days later he retired to his bed.

Alice took on herself much of the duty of nursing him. He asked her if she had told Vicky in Berlin – recovering from a severe bout of pneumonia, expecting a third child, and not deemed well enough to make the journey – that he was ill. Alice told him that she had. He replied with resignation, ‘You should have told her I was dying.’ The doctors, including Sir James Clark, who was scornfully pronounced by some of his contemporaries as not fit to tend a sick cat, seemed unprepared to admit to the Queen how little hope there was.

On the afternoon and evening of 14 December, as he lay in bed at Windsor Castle, most of the children who were present were brought in for a last look at him. Apart from Vicky, Affie (at sea), Leopold (who had been sent with a governor to convalesce from measles in the south of France) and Louise and Beatrice (considered too young), they all came to take their last fond farewell of him. Arthur was brought in and escorted out, white with horror. The Prince of Wales, Alice and Helena were among the company kneeling round the bed when he passed away at 10.50 that evening.

Temporarily numb with shock as she was helped out of the room, it is said, the Queen visited the nursery, took Beatrice out of her cot without waking her and held her in her arms. The so-called eyewitness accounts of Queen Victoria’s actions in the first two or three hours of her widowhood are often at variance with one another, but if this one is true, it was a most symbolic gesture.

Louise was only told the following morning. ‘Oh, why did not God take me. I am so stupid and useless,’
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was her lament.

The Queen and her daughters withdrew to Osborne early the following week, while the male members of the family represented them at the Prince Consort’s funeral on 23 December at St George’s Chapel, Windsor. It was noted by a reporter that the Prince of Wales ‘bore up bravely . . . but his closely-drawn lips, and from time to time a convulsive twitching of the shoulders, showed how much he was enduring’. The Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Prince Louis of Hesse were less restrained in their emotion, while ten-year-old Arthur, ‘in a black dress of Highland fashion, walked by his brother’s side, and the poor little boy sobbed and wept as though his heart would break. It is good for children to weep thus.’
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Mrs Thurston described the deathbed scene to her daughter, Elizabeth Bryan (24 December):

I will try to answer your questions respecting the last hours of our ever to be lamented Prince Consort, but as he was unconscious nearly all Friday & Saturday I do not think he knew any of those around him altho the Queen & Princess Alice both feel, he knew them nearly at the last – I hear he scarcely moved, but remained, with his eyes closed, when his dear children were taken in, each separately, by Sir Jas Clarke & the Princess Leiningen – he did not speak to either of them, dear little Beatrice had not seen him for many days previous to his death. (& I feel astonished she does not speak more of him).
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Perhaps Beatrice had inferred from her mother that it was as well not to ask when Papa was coming home. Only gradually did it dawn on the girl of four that she would never see him again. Even Vicky, who came to England three months later, once she was considered well enough to make the journey, heartbroken at the loss of the father to whom she had perhaps been closer than anybody else, was preoccupied primarily with trying to help her mother find the resolution to ‘still endure’, and thought that her youngest sister was too young to understand. The little girl who had been so cheerful became quiet and withdrawn. Her childish giggle was heard less, and the comical sayings which had so delighted the grown-ups tailed off.