Childhood at Court, 1819-1914 (9 page)

Theatrical performances at Windsor Castle were an important part of the children’s education, in addition to Prince Albert’s efforts to establish some kind of court theatre in England parallel to that which he had known and enjoyed at Coburg. A small theatre was constructed in the castle, and all performances were given during the Christmas season. Initially the theatre was in the Rubens Room (later the King’s Drawing-Room), but later moved to the adjacent, more spacious St George’s Hall.

The children regularly joined guests and household in the audience, once they were considered old enough to find the plays of benefit. Occasionally they were quite carried away and almost forgot themselves. At a performance of
Henry IV, Part I
in November 1853, Bertie found Falstaff’s soliloquy so hilarious that, ‘as tears of laughter rolled down his cheeks in his ecstasy, he rolled up his tartan [kilt] and at the same time rubbed his knees with great gusto’. Sitting next to him, Vicky glanced in terror round the room, was relieved that nobody else appeared to have noticed, and swiftly gave the kilt a vigorous tug, ‘which restored propriety and brought the happy boy to a sense of the situation’.
⁴⁰

*Lady Flora Hastings was a spinster lady-in-waiting of the Duchess of Kent, a close friend of Conroy and bitter enemy of Lehzen. In 1839 the Queen suspected that she had become pregnant by Conroy and cold-shouldered her. A medical examination proved that she was a virgin, and that the swelling in her stomach was caused by cancer. She died a few months later, but not before her family had made considerable capital out of the incident, and the Queen’s popularity had plummeted accordingly.

*Baroness Lehzen died in 1870, aged eighty-six.

I
n April 1849 the next step of the Prince of Wales’s education began. Henry Birch, aged thirty, a former captain of Eton who had gone on to become a master there for four years, after taking four university prizes at King’s College, Cambridge, was engaged as the Prince’s principal tutor, at a salary of £800 per annum.

The Prince had already been taught languages – English, French and German – by three mistresses who reported progress daily through Lady Lyttelton. Birch taught him English, geography, and calculating; assistant tutors were responsible for handwriting, drawing, religion, music, German, French, archaeology, science and history. Under this regime, it was said, the Prince enjoyed shorter holidays, and worked under greater pressure than any other schoolboy in the kingdom. Every weekday, including Saturday, was divided into five hourly or half-hourly periods. Lessons were never discontinued for more than a few days at a time. Family birthdays, however, were treated as holidays, and some relaxation occurred whenever the court moved from London or from Windsor.

Birch was warned about the Prince’s rages, and took the news in his stride. He had, however, been used to dealing with normal boys at Eton. Almost at once, the Prince began to show the same signs of aversion to learning that he had in the nursery, becoming excitable and easily distracted. For a time, Birch was almost in despair of ever being able to teach him anything, and felt tempted to resign his post. But he became increasingly attached to his wayward pupil, who acquired considerable respect for him, and eventually found he was making progress.

Birch also had the heart to modify the severity of the regime. Riding and rowing on the lake were permitted, but for the most part ‘recreation’ consisted of afternoon walks, amateur theatricals and recitations. Birch was careful to restrict any teaching element during the walks, and had the forethought to introduce games calculated to appeal to the boy’s imagination.

He stayed for nearly three years. In November 1849 he told the Queen and Prince Albert that he intended to take Holy Orders. The Queen assured him that it would not matter, as long as he promised not to be ‘aggressive’ – in other words, take to preaching fire and brimstone to his young pupil – and if he also promised to attend Presbyterian services while they were in Scotland, and to continue to participate in ‘innocent amusements’, like shooting, dancing and theatricals on Sundays. However, Prince Albert asked him to defer taking Holy Orders, in case he was tempted to attach greater importance to what he might consider that he owed to his cloth than to what the royal parents might consider best for the Prince of Wales’s education.

By the time the Queen and Prince Albert celebrated their thirtieth birthdays in May and August 1849 respectively, they had six children. Three more were to follow. On 1 May 1850 Prince Arthur Patrick Albert was born. ‘The children are all wild about “new brother,” who has regular features and a fine complexion,’ Lady Lyttelton wrote six days later. ‘So here is another yet of the numberless instances of
perfect awful
, spotless prosperity which has been bestowed on this house. May it all turn to good!’
¹

This strong, healthy baby entered the world on the eighty-first birthday of the Duke of Wellington. Appropriately, the Duke stood as his godfather, and coincidentally it soon seemed likely that the boy would follow a military career. From the moment he could sit up and take notice he would clap his hands at the sight of a red coat, while the sound of a military band made him shriek with delight. Whenever they were at Windsor his nurse had to take him to the terrace every day to see the sentries marching backwards and forwards, and he could never bear to miss watching the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace. On his first birthday he was thrilled to be given a toy drum, and his announcement that ‘Arta is going to be a soldier’ caused no surprise.

In November 1850 Lady Lyttelton retired. The four elder children had formed a close bond with her, and she was greatly moved by their childish farewells. The Prince of Wales, ‘who has seen so little of me lately, cried and seemed to feel most’. She had been his most constant defender. The Princess Royal said ‘many striking, feeling and clever things’. Princess Alice gave her a ‘look of soft tenderness [which] I never shall forget; nor Prince Alfred with his manly face in tears, looking so pretty’.
²
Her successor was Lady Caroline Barrington, sister of Earl Grey.

In February 1852 Birch left his appointment as tutor to the Prince of Wales and took up Holy Orders. He felt he had ‘found the Key to his heart’. He wrote of the Prince to Baron Stockmar (20 November 1850):

Taking into consideration the nature and disposition evinced by the Prince of Wales, will a change of tutor within a year be good or bad for him? . . . If his parents are dissatisfied with my treatment of him, as sometimes I have feared that they may be, and if they think that a fresh tutor would do the work better, well and good . . . If, on the contrary, they or you feel I can be of any service to the Prince of Wales by remaining with him beyond January 1852 I wish you would so far act out the part of a private friend as to tell me so.
³

Stockmar and Prince Albert were less than pleased by this letter. It confirmed their intention to find another tutor at the end of the three years originally agreed, but as Birch was already committed to a new career, he had nothing to lose by plain speaking.

The Prince of Wales was greatly upset. Lady Canning, one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting, noted: ‘It has been a trouble and sorrow to the Prince of Wales, who has done no end of touching things since he heard that he was to lose him, three weeks ago. He is such an affectionate dear little fellow; his notes and presents which Mr Birch used to find on his pillow were really too moving.’
⁴

In February 1852 Birch wrote a final report for Prince Albert. His pupil had been ‘extremely disobedient, impertinent to his masters and unwilling to submit to discipline’. Extraordinarily selfish and unable to play at any game for five minutes, or attempt anything new or difficult, without losing his temper, he could not endure ‘chaff’, of any kind, ‘but I thought it better, notwithstanding his sensitiveness, to laugh at him . . . and to treat him, as I know that boys would have treated him at an English public school, and as I was treated myself’. In time, he saw ‘
numerous
traits of a very amiable and affectionate disposition’, but it was difficult to follow a systematic plan of management or regular course of study because he was ‘so different on different days’. He continued to display symptoms of dumb insolence or mental collapse, during which he refused to answer questions to which he knew the answers perfectly well, but ‘always evinced a most forgiving disposition after I had occasion to complain of him to his parents, or to punish him. He has a very keen perception of right and wrong, a very good memory, very singular powers of observation.’

Birch had been one of the first people to see that the Prince of Wales would learn from people, rather than from books. No intellectual, he would be a keen judge of character. The real problem, Birch underlined, was that he lacked contact with boys of his own age, and suffered from ‘being continually in the society of older persons’. He had no standard by which to measure his own powers; ‘nothing that a tutor can say, or even a parent, has such influence as intercourse with sensible boys of the same age, or a little older, unconsciously teaching by example. I always found that boys’ characters at Eton were formed as much by contact with others as by the precepts of their tutors.’
⁵
Moreover, the Prince was being completely deprived, not to say starved, of the encouragement and comradeship which a boy of his character desperately longed for.

The next tutor was Frederick Waymouth Gibbs, a Fellow of Trinity College and a barrister on the Northern Circuit. As Chancellor of Cambridge University, Prince Albert had consulted Sir James Stephen, Professor of Modern History at Cambridge (and grandfather of the novelist Virginia Woolf), about possible tutors for his two eldest sons. Gibbs had been brought up with Sir James’s sons, his own mother being hopelessly insane and his father financially ruined. He was engaged to become tutor to the two elder Princes, at an annual salary of £1,000, ‘with any addition to that sum which Baron Stockmar may decide to be just and reasonable.’

On their first walk, the Prince of Wales apologized to Gibbs for the low spirits of himself and Prince Alfred. ‘The Prince of Wales thought it necessary to make a sort of apology in his walk for his sorrow: “You cannot wonder if we are somewhat dull to-day. We are sorry Mr Birch is gone. It is very natural, is it not?” The Prince is conscious of owing a great deal to Mr Birch and really loves and respects him,’
⁶
Gibbs noted woodenly in his diary.

One of the first tasks which fell to Gibbs was to tell the Prince of Wales his destiny. As the son of a Queen regnant, and younger than his formidably clever and much-admired sister, it was perhaps natural that he should assume Vicky would be their mother’s heir. The tutor evidently did not explain the succession very clearly to the puzzled young boy, who was so confused that he went and asked the Queen. ‘He generally lets out to me, when he walks with me, something or other, that is occupying his mind,’ she noted in her journal (12 February 1852). He told her that he had always believed Vicky would succeed her. ‘I explained to him the different successions . . . He took it all in, very naturally.’
⁷

Unlike Birch, Gibbs placed less value on the affection of his charges than on making a good impression on his employers. Under instructions from Prince Albert, he extended the Prince of Wales’s lessons to cover six or seven hourly periods between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m., six days a week. These periods were divided so as not to exceed more than two hours’ continuous application at a time. The Princes learnt Latin, acted in French and German plays, and were instructed to read selected classics from English, French and German literature. Arithmetic, algebra and geometry were taught, with direct reference to ‘their applications to Gunnery, Fortifications and the Mechanical Arts’.

In addition, the Prince of Wales was also made to study chemistry ‘and its kindred sciences, with the Arts dependent upon them’. He also composed essays on ancient and modern historical problems, in English, French and German. He prepared maps to illustrate his reading, and studied the principles of ‘Social Economy’. Finally, he was required to study music and drawing as both arts were vital to the education of a prince. As if that was not enough, Gibbs was ordered to ensure that the boys were physically exhausted at the end of every day through riding, drill, and gymnastics.

Within a few days it was obvious that the system was asking too much of the Prince. Entries in Gibbs’s diary to his young charge throwing stones in his face, running about during lessons, making faces and spitting, and ‘a great deal of bad words’, became commonplace. Queen Victoria was puzzled to notice symptoms of acute exhaustion in her son, and called Gibbs’s attention to his hanging his head and looking at his feet, and ‘fits of nervous and unmanageable temper’. She thought that he had been ‘injured by being with the Princess Royal, who was very clever and a child far above her age. She puts him down by a word or a look, and their mutual affection had been, she feared, impaired by this state of things.’
⁸

The three men who worked under Gibbs all protested that the Prince was being driven too hard. Gerald Wellesley, the domestic chaplain responsible for the Princes’ religious education, and later Dean of Windsor, warned Gibbs that Prince Albert’s system had overtaxed the boy’s strength; their object should be ‘to instruct him without overworking him’. Dr Voisin, the French master, warned that the Prince would be worn out too early. ‘Make him climb trees! Run! Leap! Row! Ride!’ In many aspects, he thought, ‘savages are much better educated than we are’. If left to himself, the Prince would be ‘a splendid boy’. Dr Becker, Prince Albert’s librarian, bravely warned the Prince that his son’s regular fits of blind destructive rage were a natural reaction to a system of education which placed too great and continuous a strain on a young mind and body. More breaks in his study, more encouragement and less in the way of high expectations, and no irony or mockery when his parents had to correct the Prince of Wales, were the answer.