Childhood at Court, 1819-1914 (19 page)

Young Alfred, as he was always known, was separated from the family at an early age to be educated in Coburg, where it was assumed he would succeed his father as Duke. The girls had their lessons at home, in England, later in Malta (when the Duke was stationed there as Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet) and finally in Coburg. Alfred had the misfortune to be placed under the care of a tyrannical tutor, cryptically named ‘Dr X’ in Marie’s memoirs. An arrogant, tyrannical German, he hated everything English, and did his best to uproot the young Edinburghs’ Anglophile affections. He could be an excellent companion, tell stories well, and talk with authority on any subject from history, geography and botany, to art and social questions. But he was impatient, intolerant, and could never resist ridiculing Prince Alfred before others. His bullying behaviour was calculated to destroy any self-confidence the boy might have had, and his sisters fiercely resented this callous treatment.

When they followed him out to Coburg, they ran up not only against him but also their governess, ‘Fraülein’, who later became betrothed and married to Dr X. They were two of a kind; she was outwardly charming and friendly, but determined to do as much harm as she could. She persuaded the Duchess that it would be as well to counter any signs of vanity in the girls by forcing them to wear ugly clothes, harsh linen, coarse calico, badly-shaped shoes, and ugly gowns, hats and cloaks. She would encourage them to ask her about ‘the hidden mysteries of life’, and then show them up to their mother as ‘nasty little girls with unhealthy minds’.

In the rebellious Victoria Melita, or ‘Ducky’, they met their match one day. A large silver cup, filled with flowers or a plant, always stood in the centre of the dining table. When the Duchess was away Fraülein sat at the head, Dr X at the foot. This cup prevented the adoring couple from gazing fondly into each other’s eyes at meals. After putting up with this obstacle for some time, Dr X high-handedly ordered a servant to take it away. The girls immediately protested; Mama had put it there, she alone had the right to order its removal, and as they were her children they could not allow it to be touched. Dr X tried to laugh away their objections, but finding they would not give way, he exclaimed with contempt, ‘Well, it is either I or the pot!’ Ducky stretched out her arms, clasped the cup to her chest, and glared at him. ‘We prefer the pot!’ she shouted. With as much dignity as he could muster, the defeated tutor left the table, and the rest of the meal was passed in silence.

Not all those placed in authority above them were so hateful. A particular favourite was Miss Butler, their music mistress. None of the girls had inherited their parents’ musical talent and her efforts to teach them the piano were marked with limited success, but she became and remained a firm friend until after they were married with their own families. Miss Butler was too indulgent and too fond of them ‘to be an efficient instructor to a trio of unruly children not overblessed with musical aptitude’.

At Coburg the girls had several tutors who attempted to teach them different subjects with varying degrees of success. The Princesses evidently shared their grandmother’s aversion to the finer (or not so fine) points of human and animal biology. This was rather a disadvantage to Dr Heim, who taught them natural history and botany. ‘We had an instinctive horror of anything describing inner organs, we thought it had an air of butchery about it that was not quite decent,’ Missy recalled, ‘and we were nearly sick when one day, full of enthusiasm, he brought us an ox’s eye so as to demonstrate the marvels of the optic organzation. No, decidedly we were not of the modern school which unblushingly inquires into every detail of the human mechanism.’
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The Duchess of Edinburgh spoke perfect English, but reluctantly. She preferred French, saying that it was by far the most elegant language and that a beautiful letter could only be written in French. Most of her daughters’ early thank-you letters to Queen Victoria for birthday and Christmas presents were in French. It was typical of the Duchess’s hard-to-satisfy nature that she did not like France as a nation. Her daughters hated speaking French, which they they thought ‘an affected language, a language for grownups, not for children, and we wilfully threw away all the good opportunities of absorbing the language properly’.
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Prince Alfred of Edinburgh was always delicate, but his sisters were lively, attractive and healthy. They compared favourably with their Wales cousins, unkindly if not inaccurately dubbed ‘their royal shynesses’. Apart from Maud, the Wales Princesses had little of their mother’s beauty or zest for life. They were regarded as a mutual admiration society in their own exclusive world at Sandringham. They believed that they had been poured directly from the salt cellar of God. To their closest friends, Louise was ‘Toots’, Victoria ‘Gawks’ and Maud ‘Snipey’. The family nickname for Maud was ‘little Harry’, after Admiral Harry Keppel, a friend of the Prince of Wales. They relished visits to their mother’s parents in Copenhagen, where they were spoiled outrageously, but not the prospect of their sterner Grandmama at home. Once as they were getting ready with great reluctance to leave Sandringham for Balmoral, Louise and Victoria were in floods of tears, while the less easily intimidated Maud stamped her foot and declared, ‘I won’t go!’

The Princess of Wales was ill at ease in her husband’s circle. Though they were more compatible as personalities than the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh, the future King Edward VII’s infidelities, his boredom at home, and his wife’s deafness, rheumatism, and subsequent disenchantment with society life drove a wedge between them. As a result she turned more towards her children and animals for companionship. Her sons having left, or ‘escaped’ to a life on the ocean wave, she dominated her daughters. Before leaving home, Prince George had always read to her during the ritual of hair-brushing, and every evening he would say his prayers with her like a little child. From her he learnt the simple direct religious faith and practice that characterized him throughout life, daily Bible-reading, regular attendance at church and at Communion. Her letters to him were artless, full of expressions as ‘What a bad old Motherdear not to write and you were quite right to say “naughty, naughty!”’
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Such letters could never have been written by Queen Victoria to her sons.

The Princess did not encourage her children to grow up. Even when he was nineteen, she wrote to Prince George, hoping to find him ‘the same and unchanged in every respect’, which he appeared to regard as entirely natural. Louise wrote to their father’s secretary, Francis Knollys, when he was in Ireland, that she was ‘practising her steps for the tiresome court ball, that Gawks is going to bed instead like Cinderella, and that Snipey is trying to console herself with a song instead of singing her hymns in Church as she ought to do. . . . We are afraid you won’t be at all glad to see us
country bumpkins
again, as we shall have nothing to talk about but cows and cowslips!’
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Hardly the kind of letter to be expected from somebody of eighteen.

Other people’s children could expect the same kindly but embarrassing prolonged childhood from the future Queen Alexandra. Some years later, when she was Queen, she sent her niece Princess Patricia of Connaught presents suitable for a girl of ten, in a parcel delivered by a footman (well-conditioned by years of royal service to keep a straight face in situations bordering on the farcical) with the verbal message, ‘To darling little Patsy from her silly old Aunt Alix’. ‘Darling little Patsy’ was in her early twenties and almost six foot tall.
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The Wales Princesses were born collectors. They loved to show others their vast accumulations of neatly arranged animals in bronze, china, and stone, rows of miniature vases, tiny photograph frames, watercolours of gardens and ‘sweet-faced ladies’. There were pictures of daffodils, of Windsor Castle in a mist, portraits of favourites horses, dogs and friends, and photographs in which the face of ‘Motherdear’ was ever dominant.

In 1879 Prince Christian Victor of Schleswig-Holstein became a boarder at school at Bracknell. The following year he passed his entrance examination for Wellington College. As the Prince and Princess of Wales had rejected the Queen’s suggestion that their sons should go to the school in the founding of which the Prince Consort had taken such an interest, she was gratified that at least one of her grandsons would be enrolled there.

Christian Victor was the first member of the royal family to attend public school. Entering the college on 25 January 1881, it was made clear from the start that he was to be treated as an ordinary boy, with no privileges. His housemaster, the Revd Charles William Penny, left an amusing record in his diary of the upheaval his illustrious pupil’s arrival inadvertently caused that day:

HRH Prince Christian arrived suddenly at 2.30: front hall full of the —’s luggage; drawing-room full of —s and —’s tutor. Hustled them out. All my nice little plans disarranged for a formal reception with Mellon (the manservant) full dressed. As soon as I could I hustled the —s into my study, and was as polite as I could be to the Prince; we went upstairs and saw the valet unpack his clothes and put them into his drawers. Fortunately Speer (the carpenter) was in the house, and I got him at once to hang up the pictures and put up the Prince’s own bookcase in place of the one I had put up for him. Then we went and saw Wickham, and then we returned and I gave them tea in the drawing-room. Then the Prince went upstairs and was alone with his son for a little while. At a quarter to four Prince Christian departed and I promised to write on Sundays to say how the boy was getting on. I particularly asked if I should write to him or to Colonel Gordon, and he said to himself.
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Predictably, the schoolmasters were effusive about the progress of their new pupil. A few weeks later, Prince Christian asked for a report about his son, and they wrote back glowingly that he had ‘made a most favourable impression upon us all by his simple, unaffected demeanour and his desire to identify himself with the life of his school-fellows’.
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On 26 February he was granted his first exeat. Mr Penny took him to Wokingham to see him off in the train to join his family at Cumberland Lodge.

At the end of his first term the report mentioned that he was good at divinity, fair in Latin, much better in German (his father had evidently prepared the ground thoroughly), and poor in French, with ‘defective knowledge of grammar due to want of concentrated attention during lessons’. Taking advantage of the chance to expand his musical education, he took violin and organ lessons. After giving some thought to a future career, which he considered lay in the army, his parents and masters decided that he should study for Woolwich or Sandhurst, and give up Latin in favour of science.

In March 1882, after an epidemic of measles (which he escaped) at school, the three-week holiday at Easter was extended, as the whole College had to be disinfected and whitewashed, and the sanatorium needed to be free of boys for a full fortnight before school could reopen.

At Wellington, it was considered, he first began to find his royal status somewhat irksome. Teachers had noted from the start that he was anxious to be ‘one of the crowd’ and identify himself in every way with his schoolfellows. One evening he was watching the professional coaching of the school cricket XI, one of whom allowed him to go in and bat. After ten minutes at the crease the professional, not recognizing his small pupil, judged him ‘a most promising youngster’. Cricket soon became an abiding passion. It had always been a favourite game from childhood, and friends believed he enjoyed it particularly because it depended on skill alone.

In other spheres, he found that being royal was a hindrance. Any success he achieved would be attributed to his rank; yet because of this rank, those in authority above him were always keen to protect him, denying him freedom of action. Cricket was different, a great leveller, and by the time he began his third year at Wellington, the game was taking up so much of his time that his father complained he was too keen on getting into the XI that he was neglecting his academic studies, becoming careless at spelling, and not reading enough books for amusement: ‘it is my constant complaint during the holidays that I never see him read a book’.
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The masters tactfully but firmly defended him, pointing out that he was working very hard, and indeed he achieved his ambition of getting into the XI.

From a series of letters to ‘Raphael’, presumably a friend who had recently left, cricket was the first love of his schooldays.

You must think me a brute for not having written before but cricket has taken up all my time, Midge has got his 2nd XI [the Prince wrote towards the end of the summer term, 20 July 1884]. I get horribly humbuged about it because I am always waking with him & going up to the house on Sundays. But I don’t give a d— what the fellows say. Every one in the XI voted when we made up the 2nd XI . . . Please excuse the Coll[ege] paper & the writing but I am writing this in the Algebra Exam, & as you know I always had a more intimate acquaintance with ‘square leg’ than ‘
square root
’. Also the curve I am most acquainted with is that ‘peculiar’ one which is often followed by a fall of the stumps. Excuse these bad puns but I am awfully on the spot . . . You must come over one of these days & see us here we are having the deuce of a spree here this term, & I am half fused today for I was drinking claret cup with the Midge yesterday & after that Toze collared me up & he is simply mad about it.
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He passed his preliminary examination for Sandhurst in 1884, and left Wellington at Christmas the following year. Mr Penny’s final reports of him were glowing. In his half-term report, he wrote, he had ‘never had a Prefect who more earnestly tried to help me or who more regularly and considerately discharged his various duties,’
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and at the end of term, he noted that the Prince had endeared himself to all the staff ‘by his uniform sweetness of temper, his unfailing courtesy and unaffected modesty and simplicity of character. During the whole five years that he has been as it were a member of my family, we have never had the least trouble or anxiety. And to every member of our household the Prince has been a courteous gentleman.’
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