Childhood at Court, 1819-1914 (27 page)

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Authors: John Van der Kiste

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BOOK: Childhood at Court, 1819-1914

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In the summer term of 1912 George accompanied Henry on his return to St Peter’s Court. George was the least shy of the brothers, also the most talented and intellectually gifted. Academically, musically and culturally he outshone them all. Nearly three years younger than Henry, he quickly rivalled the elder boy’s performance.

Henry’s progress at schoolwork was pedestrian, particularly at classics. Mathematics still proved his best subject, and he came top of the form in the first term. He preferred sports and became an enthusiastic cricketer, taking three wickets and scoring sixty runs not out in one match. The King was unimpressed: ‘the bowling couldn’t have been very famous’. His soccer and squash rackets found more favour with his father, both being ‘capital games’. This time it was the Queen’s turn to complain (2 November 1912): ‘Do for goodness sake wake up and work harder and use the brains God has given you. All you write about is your everlasting football of which I am heartily sick.’
⁹

Henry finished at St Peter’s Court at the end of the summer term 1913, and in the autumn term started at Eton, where he was put in the same house as Prince Leopold, later King of the Belgians. Apart from being met by a royal brougham at Slough on arriving for his first day, he was treated with very little privilege. One minor modification was made to his curriculum. The King asked that he should not be taught Latin, but French and German instead, as both modern languages would be far more practical value to a prince of the royal house than a classical one. He never ceased to rue the deficiencies in his own lamentable linguistic education.

Henry’s masters wrote on his reports that he was ‘thoroughly cheerful modest & obedient’, throwing himself into the life of the school very willingly. Several other boys asked for photographs of him, as they had done of his elder brothers at college. They had been given unlimited supplies of prints, but he was not similarly favoured. The Queen told him to order some more, warning him that they cost one shilling each.

Even at Eton, he was aware of the unsettling times in which they lived. Queen Mary had written to him describing how she had seen the police arresting suffragettes trying to get past the gates at Buckingham Palace. Information came from Scotland Yard that a suffragette plan was being hatched in Liverpool to ‘molest’ Henry at Eton, and a policeman was posted to keep a discreet eye on him at school just in case. The Ulster Home Rule crisis, which dominated domestic politics early in 1914, so distracted the King that he was too busy to write his usual birthday letter to Henry in March, so the Queen sent his good wishes with hers. In addition there was some difficulty, albeit less so than in a later age, of protecting the Prince from journalists and photographers. At least one October afternoon on the games field was spoilt, he wrote, by ‘a beastly photographer . . . trying to take photos of me playing footer which would not have been much of a sight’.
¹⁰

Prince John was now left alone in the nursery and schoolroom, a source of great anxiety to parents and nurse. Mrs Bill disliked him living at the palace, particularly as the gardens were so large that he would play dangerous tricks with his bicycle when out of sight. Moreover, the fits were becoming more frequent and more severe, and the doctors warned that he would not live to adulthood. He was given a basic education; he could read, and wrote well, but his parents and tutors decided that it would be only kind to tax him as little as possible during the few years left. He was kept increasingly isolated from his brothers and sister, as they found the attacks so distressing. At the back of the adults’ minds was a fear that he could easily have a fatal fit in front of his family.

The widowed Queen Alexandra was particularly fond of him. She had always been attached to her children when they were young, and increasing deafness had cut her off more and more from people other than family and long-standing friends. In her own childlike, unsophisticated way, she seemed more hopeful that the boy might be cured than his more down-to-earth parents ever were. Yet the fact that he seemed unlikely to grow up gave her comfort, as she could ‘baby’ him to her heart’s content without being reproached. Most of her widowhood was spent at Sandringham, and she often asked for the ‘precious and dear little boy’ to join her for tea, games, jigsaw puzzles, or listen to music together. Grandmother and grandchild were a great mutual comfort.*

In May 1910, the first month of the new reign, Dickie Battenberg was driven to Locker’s Park School near Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire. The other boys were not particularly impressed by the fact that he was a Serene Highness. At first he was homesick and missed his family and pets, but he persevered, and two years later he was top of his class in Latin and English. Encouraged never to forget his royal origins yet not boast about them, he was warned not to get so excited about going to Windsor for the funeral of King Edward VII in May 1910 that he neglected his work. He was anxious to attend the Coronation the following year, not least as it would mean missing a few lessons, but was told he was too young to attend the ceremony and had to be content with an invitation to Buckingham Palace where he could watch the King and Queen leaving in the gold coach. In May 1913, six weeks before his thirteenth birthday, he followed his cousins and entered the Royal Naval College at Osborne.

How much the younger royal children were aware of the gathering storms throughout Europe in the summer of 1914 is a matter for conjecture. Henry knew from his mother’s letters that there were grave crises looming, although matters seemed less serious on the Continent than at home. The King and Queen could barely appear in public – particularly at the races, or the theatre – without a suffragette demonstration. The rejection of the Irish Home Rule bill in the House of Lords made civil war between Catholics and Protestants likely, and the situation in Europe looked ever more uneasy after the assassination of the Austrian heir, Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his wife, at Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. ‘I was so sad about the assassination of the Austrian heir,’
¹¹Henry wrote dutifully (5 July 1914).

To some, including the King and most of his ministers, it was a ‘terrible shock for the dear old Emperor’, Francis Joseph, and another deeply regrettable anarchist outrage but perhaps no more. Others saw it differently. On the following morning Fraülein Kuebler, German governess to the children of the Earl of Strathmore, came down to breakfast at their London house, St James’s Square, to be met by a sea of gloomy faces at the table. Lord Strathmore thrust a copy of the
Morning Post
at her, with its front page news about the assassinations. ‘This means war!’ he exclaimed. Even so, when the governess went on holiday two weeks later to visit her German home for her parents’ silver wedding, Lady Strathmore embraced her emotionally, begging her to promise that she would be back.

Many other governesses in England faced the same dilemma. At Buckingham Palace, Princess Mary’s devoted maid, Else Korsukawitz, also looked at the news with mounting concern.*

Prince Louis could not fail to appreciate that his father, as First Sea Lord, was increasingly preoccupied with ensuring the naval state of readiness, should the worst come to the worst. By the end of July the situation looked bleak.

On 4 August Lady Elizabeth Lyon, youngest daughter of the Earl of Strathmore, celebrated her fourteenth birthday. As a treat that evening, her mother had booked a box at the Coliseum in the West End to see a variety show. Their journey to the theatre by car was reduced to a crawl by crowds mad with excitement, frantically cheering as they waved Union Jacks. Every topical reference to events delivered on stage was received with cheering and prolonged clapping. The minutes were slowly ticking away, as Great Britain’a ultimatum to Germany came closer to expiry. No answer was received, and many a child within earshot of Buckingham Palace at midnight heard the hysterical enthusiasm of the crowds as the chimes of midnight struck. Great Britain was at war with Germany. Between the birth of Princess Victoria of Kent at Kensington Palace, and the outbreak of war between Britain and Germany ninety-five years later, the world had changed beyond recognition. At the age of seventeen, the Princess had been captivated by her first sight of a railway train; some eighty years later, her small great-grandsons thought it the height of adventure to be riding at thirty miles per hour in a car, or travelling in an aeroplane. The future Queen had played with dolls and mechanical toys; her descendants would grow up with the motion picture and the phonograph.

The world, wrote French poet Charles Péguy in 1913, had changed less since Jesus Christ than it had in the last thirty years.
¹²In the words of historian Arthur Bryant some twenty years later, it was the age of great parks with their noble trees, slumbering in the sunlight of distant summers, while ‘children born heirs to the securest and happiest lot humankind had ever known, rode and played in their shade never guessing that in their old age they would see the classic groves felled by the estate breaker and the stately halls pulled down or sold to make convalescent homes for miners or county asylums’.
¹³

Such was not the fate of royal children born in the Victorian era, though most of them who lived to middle age or more would become increasingly perplexed at the changes wrought on their country by the twentieth century. They had been brought up in what Meriel Buchanan, daughter of a former Ambassador to the court of St Petersburg and the friend of many a prince or princess, fondly described as the England of ‘sleepy little villages, with no strident discord of the radio or of television echoing out of the windows, no chain-stores to oust the quaint little shops kept by elderly ladies’.
¹⁴

Throughout these years, childhood at court had been very different for most of its illustrious personages. From Princess Victoria, who grew up an only child, almost completely in isolation from her peers; from her closely knit nine children, some of whom grew up under the shadow of Baron Stockmar and a succession of tutors; to the children of the Prince of Wales, ‘undisciplined, wild as hawks’, and the children of his son, ‘a regiment, not a family’. It was a life of privilege, but not untramelled luxury; a life of duty and responsibility towards others. Life, the Prince Consort had warned his eldest son on the latter’s seventeenth birthday, was ‘composed of duties’. One might almost imagine the saying, embroidered on a needlework sampler, framed and hung up above every royal child’s bed.

‘One hates parting, even from an imaginary bit of a past so precious, and one loves not beginning a new phase and embarking on the unknown.’
¹⁵The Empress Frederick wrote these words on the first day of the twentieth century, but although she was referring to the century just gone, she might equally have been referring to her happy childhood. While her mother had known loneliness, and while some – thankfully only a very few – from succeeding generations had endured misery or torture at the hands of unsympathetic tutors or nurses, for most of the children at court in the nineteenth century, childhood had indeed been the happiest days of their lives.

*He was initially called Alexander, but given the more Norwegian name of Olav when his parents became King and Queen.

*In 1917, when Prince John was twelve, the decision was taken to isolate him. He and Mrs Bill lived at Wood Farm on the Sandringham estate, where in January 1919 he had a particularly bad seizure and died peacefully in his sleep.

*Else Korsukawitz left royal service a few weeks after the outbreak of war. She was as reluctant to return to Germany as the King and Queen were to see her go, but if she stayed with them she would have risked internment as an enemy alien.

THE ANCESTRY AND IMMEDIATE DESCENDANTS OF QUEEN VICTORIA AND PRINCE ALBERT