The Heir Apparent (8 page)
Authors: Jane Ridley
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Nonfiction, #Retail, #Royalty
At Balmoral the rain never ceased, and Albert struggled up the sodden hills for six hours each day in pursuit of stags that eluded him—for one whole week he shot nothing. Victoria, resenting her pregnancy and torn by conflicting emotions as she watched her daughter Vicky monopolize Albert’s attention, was more impossible than ever. She confided in her friend Augusta, the liberal queen of Prussia, that she found no especial pleasure in the company of her elder children, and she was only really happy when Albert was with her. But when he
was
with her they quarreled, and Albert, desperate to avoid a scene, was reduced to communicating by sending letters to her room. “It is indeed a pity,” he
wrote, “that you find no consolation in the company of your children.… The root of the trouble lies in the mistaken notion that the function of a mother is to be always correcting, scolding, ordering them about and organising their activities.”
98
This was, of course, exactly what Albert was subjecting Victoria to. Few people are happy when they are scolded, and Queen Victoria was no exception.
The previous summer, Vicky had become engaged to the Prussian Crown Prince, Frederick William. Victoria tried desperately to convince herself that her fifteen-year-old daughter was, in fact, a grown woman. Albert was miserable at the thought of losing the person he cared about most in the world, but as usual succeeded in convincing himself that doing the thing that gave real unhappiness was for the greater good: Vicky’s marriage was part of his long-term dynastic plan. She was to be launched on a one-woman mission to bring liberalism to Germany. He gave Vicky daily tutorials on being a well-informed monarch, and she now ate dinner with her parents when they were alone. If he could not reform Victoria, at least Albert could create his ideal woman in his daughter.
*
At birth the prince was also given the titles of Duke of Cornwall and Rothesay, Earl of Carrick, Baron of Renfrew, and Great Steward of Scotland.
†
The Queen was delighted by Mrs. Brough, whom she thought a simple countrywoman; she was horrified to learn thirteen years later that Mrs. Brough was in fact “depraved” and in a fit of madness had murdered her own six children. (RA VIC/Y99/23, QV to King Leopold, 13 June 1854.) Mary Ann Brough was tried for murder, acquitted on plea of insanity, and died in Bethlem in 1861.
‡
The remaining five children were too young to feature in Bertie’s nursery life. They were Helena, born 25 May 1846; Louise, born 18 March 1848; Arthur, born 1 May 1850; Leopold, born 7 April 1853; and Beatrice, born 14 April 1857.
§
No known sound recording of his voice survives.
‖
The doctor Frederick Treves observed Bertie at age sixty cutting his cigars with the blade of a heavy pearl-handled pocketknife. “Now I have never known anyone more clumsy with his fingers than the King and to see him use this great weapon for this small purpose was really alarming,” wrote Treves. (RA VIC/Add U/28, Sir Frederick Treves, “An Account of the Illness of King Edward VII in June 1902” [typescript], p. 9.)
a
George Combe, the older brother of Andrew Combe, was the leader of the phrenological movement in Britain and founder of the Edinburgh Phrenological Society.
b
Bertie never forgot Birch. Nearly thirty years later, he was still pressing Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli to find his old tutor a job. “With regard to Mr. Birch,” wrote Disraeli, “he is not unknown to me as, ten years ago, at Your Royal Highness’s request, I submitted his name to the Queen for the canonry he now holds.” (RA VIC/T8/1, Lord Beaconsfield to B, 5 February 1880.)
c
Virginia Woolf remembered Gibbs as an old man: “He wore a tie ring; had a bald, benevolent head; was dry; neat; precise; and had folds of skin under his chin.” (Virginia Woolf,
Moments of Being
[Sussex University Press, 1976], p. 74.)
d
After Christmas at Windsor, the family visited Osborne before settling at Buckingham Palace. They returned to Osborne in the spring for the Queen’s birthday (24 May); the early summer was divided between Buckingham Palace and Windsor, before escaping to Osborne. Balmoral was booked for August and September, leaving some children behind at Osborne; October was spent at Windsor, and Osborne was visited again early in December.
e
Some of the deer Albert recorded killing in his game book were young stags weighing only 70 to 80 pounds, well below the size of a full-grown beast, which weighs 180 to 200 pounds. There could be two possible explanations for this. Either Albert “made such a bad shot that he hit a beast at which he was not aiming, or he ignored the advice of his stalker (who would have been pointing out the best stag to shoot) and blazed away at anything he could. Neither explanation does the Prince much credit.” (Hart-Davis,
Monarchs of the Glen,
p. 119.)
f
One of Albert’s pet projects at this time was a plan to move Westminster School to the country, pulling down the old buildings and throwing open the ground adjoining Westminster Abbey as a park for the public. Fortunately perhaps, this particular act of architectural vandalism was frustrated.
g
Tilla was the children’s name for Miss Hildyard, the governess.
“Neither Fish nor Flesh”
1
1856–60
In November 1856, Bertie was fifteen. That Christmas he attended the lectures on attraction delivered by Professor Faraday at the Royal Institution. His notes, carefully penned in a neat copperplate hand (“The meaning of attraction is that one body draws another body to itself and keeps it there”) are preserved in a leather-bound volume in the Royal Archives—testimony, one might think, to the industry of the royal pupil.
2
The reality was different. Bertie was laboriously prepared before the lectures by his tutor Mr. Gibbs and afterward supplied with notes; but the result, as Prince Albert noted with despair, was “
an inaccurate stringing together of the notes
!”
3
A note of panic crept into Albert and Victoria’s dealings with Bertie. Victoria insisted on giving Albert the title of Prince Consort, which would give him precedence over the Prince of Wales, meaning that Albert himself, and not his teenage son, became second to the Queen. Victoria often bemoaned the inconsistency that as a married woman
she had sworn to obey her lord and master, while as a queen her husband was her subject—a German prince with neither rank nor defined position. Albert worried about the political risks involved in allowing his wife to promote him, which she did by an Order in Council (25 June 1857); but, as he explained to his brother, the question had become urgent because of the fear that “wicked people might succeed in bringing up the Prince of Wales against his father, and tell him that he should not allow a
foreign
prince to take a place before him.”
4
Already, Albert saw his eldest son as a potential enemy.
In January 1857, Albert consulted his friend Lord Granville about Bertie’s education. Granville strongly recommended that Bertie should be allowed to mix with other boys. After a meeting with Gibbs, who discussed the pros and cons of being Prince of Wales in a very frank and “uncourtierlike” manner, a new policy was decided.
5
Bertie was no longer to be educated in seclusion; instead, he was to be sent abroad to Germany, accompanied by a group of companions, carefully picked from the best aristocratic families.
Queen Victoria held the somewhat strange view that a king of England should not be
too
English. She considered that George III and William IV failed as monarchs because they were narrowly patriotic. England’s greatest king, Victoria believed, was William III, who was a foreigner, as indeed was Albert; being foreign “gave them a freedom from all national prejudices which is very important in Princes.”
6
“Dear Germany” had a special place in Victoria’s affections. She told Bertie that he must learn to love it, as “it is in fact
also your country
—being your dear father’s and yourself being a German as well as an English Prince.”
7
Foreign travel had another advantage: It removed the adolescent prince, whom Albert described as “neither fish nor flesh,” from London and the pollution of aristocratic society. Both Victoria and Albert feared and loathed “the independent, haughty faultfinding fashionable set” of society.
8
Neither of them had grown up in splendor—indeed, the Queen considered that she was “brought up almost as a private individual, in very restricted circumstances, for which I have ever felt thankful.”
9
In July 1857, Bertie, his tutors, and a select party of four young companions, including Willie Gladstone, son of the politician William Gladstone, set off for Königswinter, near Bonn.
*
Before he left, Bertie wrote an essay for his tutors on how to spot the difference between friends, who “tell you of your faults,” and flatterers, who please you with false compliments, and “make you despised and hated in society, and lead you into any imaginable vice.”
10
Gibbs sent daily bulletins back to Albert, noting Bertie’s improvement under the influence of his new friends. The level of conversation can be seen from the book of schoolboy puns titled “Wit and Whoppers” that the friends compiled: “The Prince of Wales on hearing that an insulting caricature had appeared in a popular periodical said that the Editor should be ‘punched’ for it.”
11
According to Gibbs, Bertie’s companions taught him not to be idle, and they shamed him out of his dictatorial manner of saying, “But I wish so and so.” This, said Gibbs, “is just what is wanted, and what none of us can do.”
12
Gibbs complained that Bertie ordered about the equerry Henry Ponsonby as though he were a servant.
13
When Bertie managed to kiss a girl, the episode was not reported to Albert, but it reached the ears of Mr. Gladstone, who pursed his lips at the prince’s “squalid little debauch.”
14
The truth was, Bertie was exceptionally immature. Victoria told him that she expected to find him “grown quite a
Child
and quite a companion to us,” having heard from everyone how improved he was.
15
But she didn’t hear the whole story. In Switzerland, where the party traveled after Königswinter, Bertie stayed at a house in Interlaken, and the people there thought him “young and childish for his age.” They noticed that his suite talked among themselves, seldom addressing Bertie when serious issues were discussed, but “treating him as a boy.” He behaved like a child, too: One day he was nowhere to be found at dinnertime, and when everyone had tired of looking, he suddenly
appeared from beneath the table.
16
This was regressive behavior for a fifteen-year-old, but Bertie had never been allowed to be a child at home.
Bertie returned in October. The whole family assembled on the staircase at Windsor to welcome him. Victoria noted in her journal that he looked “extremely well, bronzed, and bright, and is a good deal grown.”
17
She wrote a letter for his sixteenth birthday in November, giving permission for him to choose his own clothes; however, “we do
expect
that you will never wear anything
extravagant
or
slang
.”
18
Ever since the Crimean War, Bertie had hankered after a military career, and he now prepared for the army examination, but his mother forbade him from joining the army as a profession. Politically, this was no doubt wise; the army was considered an inappropriate career for the heir to a constitutional monarchy. On the other hand, Affie was allowed to join the navy. “This is a passion which we as parents have not the right to subdue,” Albert explained; but the same logic did not apparently apply to Bertie.
19
The unfairness of this must surely have made the examinations a somewhat pointless exercise. Bertie’s history paper shows no evidence of reading, but a certain common sense. To the question whether kings should be elected, he answered: “It is better than hereditary right because you have more chance of having a good sovereign, if it goes by hereditary right if you have a bad or weak sovereign, you cannot prevent him reigning.” Asked to trace his mama’s descent from King James I, however, he managed to muddle even his own pedigree.
20
Vicky, the Princess Royal, married Prince Frederick William (Fritz), heir to the throne of Prussia, on 25 January 1858. It was a dynastic match of great importance, the keystone of Albert’s project to create a liberal Germany united under Prussia, but the celebrations were muted. At the pre-wedding ball, Buckingham Palace’s grand new ballroom was only half full, and Benjamin Disraeli noted that the princes and princesses danced only with one another and looked tired. Vicky cried all the time at the thought of leaving home; but then (Disraeli
again), “they say she is very childish and always cries.”
21
On the morning of the wedding, the Queen was so nervous that she shook as she posed for the pre-wedding daguerreotype, which shows her as a dumpy blur beside her daughter.
