The new baby was named Albert Edward: Albert after his father, and Edward in memory of Victoria’s father, the Duke of Kent. The name Albert pleased no one. Lord Melbourne politely harrumphed that although it was an Anglo-Saxon name, it had not been much in use since the Norman Conquest; while Albert’s dreadful father, Ernest of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, objected that the prince was not named after him.2 Victoria referred to the child as “the Boy.” When he was eighteen months old she wrote, “I do not think him worthy of being called Albert yet.”3 He never was. Instead, everyone called him Bertie.4
When Bertie was four weeks old, he was created Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester. At Albert’s behest, Bertie had been given the title of Duke of Saxony as well, which annoyed Englishmen but gave him the right to inherit German lands.*5 Victoria worried that, as heir to the throne, the baby would take precedence over his father, and she insisted that his name should come after Albert’s in the nation’s prayers.
She was troubled by depression. Bertie’s birth had been difficult. The doctors told her that “it was a mercy it had not been the first child as it would have been a very serious affair.”6 She was often tearful, and in letters to her uncle Leopold, she complained that she had been “suffering so much from lowness that it made me quite miserable.”7 Six weeks after the birth, she was still “much troubled” by lowness.8 Her misery dragged on for a whole year.9
Postnatal depression made it hard for Victoria to bond with her new son. She claimed to dislike all babies for the first six months; they were “mere little plants,” with that “terrible frog-like action.”10 She had a horror of breast-feeding, and Bertie was fed by a wet nurse, a woman named Mrs. Brough.†11 He was a fat, healthy baby, but Victoria thought him ugly—“too frightful,” she later wrote. He was also “sadly backward.”12 Never one to conceal her feelings, Victoria made no attempt to hide her boredom with the child.
Victoria blamed her depression on what she called the “shadow side” of marriage—pregnancy and the hormonal chaos that it caused.13 But the weeks after Bertie’s birth also saw a crisis in her relations with Albert. He forced a palace revolution, eliminating Victoria’s closest ally: Baroness Lehzen, her devoted governess.
A Lutheran pastor’s daughter with an unappealing habit of chewing caraway seeds (used as a carminative for expelling wind), Lehzen had remained close to Victoria after her marriage. A private passage linked her room to the Queen’s. As well as supervising the court and issuing much-prized invitations, she was in charge of the royal nursery. By the time Bertie was born, Albert had developed an obsessive hatred of her. The “old hag” was, he said, “a crazy, stupid intriguer, obsessed with the thirst of power, who regards herself as a demi-god.”14
The trouble with Victoria, thought Albert, was that Lehzen had warped her character by giving her the wrong sort of upbringing.15 Now, encouraged by his own political adviser, the wizened Baron Stockmar, he sought to promote the development of “proper moral and religious feelings” in his wife.16 She must be taught that, like the queen bee, her chief purpose in life was reproduction, while Albert did the work of a thousand worker bees. Victoria must be isolated from anyone who might seek to influence her ideas. Stockmar had already tried to put a stop to the correspondence between the Queen and Lord Melbourne, her ex–prime minister and father figure. Now he plotted to remove Lehzen, whom he accused of scheming against Albert.
In January 1842, Victoria and Albert were staying at Claremont, fifteen miles from Windsor, where the Queen had been sent to recover her health after Bertie’s birth. An urgent message arrived: Their daughter Vicky was dangerously ill. They rushed back and raced upstairs to the nursery, where they found the ailing Vicky. Albert flew into a rage, blamed Victoria for allowing Lehzen to neglect the nursery, and refused to speak to his wife for days. Victoria capitulated. She apologized, took the blame, and agreed to Lehzen’s removal. Albert and Stockmar had won.
The angry notes that Victoria and Albert wrote each other during this quarrel give a glimpse of a turbulent marriage. Albert is sometimes seen as a Hamlet figure, always waiting for a better moment, with “a hidden streak of wax,” but this hardly fits with his behavior over Lehzen.17 Bullying his wife at a time when depression made her vulnerable, and removing her closest friend, reveals a cold ruthlessness that some might say amounts to cruelty.
His motives were partly political. Lehzen was the obstacle blocking his plans to reform the court, which was anachronistic, uncomfortable, and wasteful. The responsibilities of the offices of lord chamberlain and lord steward overlapped, so that, for example, the latter found the wood for a fire, while the former lit it. Albert slashed perks at Windsor such as the “Red Room Wine,” a weekly allowance paid to a butler to buy alcohol, and the daily practice of installing fresh candles, which were sold off by servants if they were not used.18 Modernizing the court brought it into line with the age of reform; it was, Albert believed, a necessary process that Victoria could never have achieved while Lehzen remained in control.
When Bertie was ten weeks old, he was christened at Windsor. For the baptism, Victoria dressed in her Garter robes adorned with a large diamond diadem. St. George’s Chapel, with its banners and music, filled her with peaceful feelings; she found it “calming” to reflect that so many of her relations, in fact the entire family of George III—including her father, whom she had never known—were buried in the vault beneath the flagstones upon which she stood. “The Child” behaved well, and his mother offered earnest prayers that he might become a true and virtuous Christian and grow up “like his beloved Father!”19
After Lehzen was sacked, Lady Lyttelton was appointed royal governess. A well-meaning, intelligent woman in her fifties, she was, as Victoria wrote, “a Lady of Rank.” Her role was to supervise the nursery and give occasional lessons.20 Sarah Lyttelton, or “Lally” as the children called her, worshipped Prince Albert, sentimentalized the royal marriage, and wrote syrupy letters about the “babes.”
In the nursery, Bertie’s companion was his sister Victoria, the Princess Royal, known as Vicky. Barely a year older than Bertie, she was a paragon. At three she spoke French and could already read. At four a governess was engaged, and soon Vicky learned Latin, later reading Gibbon’s Decline and Fall and Shakespeare for relaxation.21
Albert doted on Vicky. The relationship between father and daughter was so close that Victoria already felt excluded. The arrival of a younger sibling did not lead, as it often does, to the dethronement of the eldest child. On the contrary, Albert made no attempt to conceal his preference for Vicky. Bertie by comparison seemed backward; few children would not.
It was soon recognized that he was less gifted than his sister. Lady Lyttelton wrote reports on the children for the royal parents. She judged two-year-old Bertie “just as forward as the generality of the children and no more—but with every promise I think as to disposition and intellect.”22 At three, “he is not articulate like his sister, but rather babyish in accent.” He “understands a little French,” but “is altogether backward in language, very intelligent and generous, and good-tempered, with a few passions and stampings occasionally.”23
The stamping and tantrums grew worse. Bertie developed a stammer. At three and a half, he refused to do his lessons, upset his books, and sat under the table.24 His anxious parents concluded that there could be only one explanation: Bertie was retarded. What they could or would not see was that his naughtiness was attention-seeking behavior typical of a less loved second child. Albert has often been praised for stimulating Vicky’s mind; it has been rightly pointed out that he must equally bear responsibility for the slow development of his son.25 Victoria was also to blame for ignoring Bertie.
Lady Lyttelton perceived something of this. “Princey,” as she called Bertie, was her favorite. She wrote encouraging reports about his “kindness and nobleness of mind.”26 But to Bertie she seems to have been little more than an affectionate presence.
Bertie unquestioningly deferred to Vicky’s superiority. When he was four, he was overheard having a heated argument with her as to which of them owned the Scilly Islands. “Princess Royal said they were hers, and the Prince of Wales was equally sure they belonged to him; and another day the Princess was heard telling her brother all the things she would do when she was Queen, and he quite acquiesced in it, and it never seemed to strike either of them that it would be otherwise.”27 The nursery dynamic shifted with the arrival of a third child: Alice, born on 25 April 1843, eighteen months younger than Bertie. Vicky, as the eldest sibling, protected and mothered Alice, who was the prettiest daughter, neither as clever nor as rebellious as Vicky but more manipulative. But the tightest bond was between Bertie and Alice. “Bertie and Alice are the greatest friends and always playing together,” wrote Victoria when Bertie was three.28 The pattern of Bertie and Vicky competing for the affections of Alice endured into adulthood. In the nursery, she was Bertie’s devoted slave and loyal friend. Fourteen months after Alice, on 6 August 1844, a second boy, Alfred (Affie) was born. Because of his physical resemblance to Albert and his cleverness at lessons, he became (briefly) Victoria’s favorite, which did not endear him to Bertie.‡
Vicky made Bertie feel inadequate. How could he compete with a precocious six-year-old who could declare, when her governess momentarily forgot the name of some minor poet: “Oh yes, I dare say you did know all about him, only you have forgotten it. Réfléchissez. [Think.] Go back to your youngness, and you will soon remember.”29 Little wonder that, at age eight, Bertie was firmly convinced that the monarchy was a matriarchy. “You see,” he explained, “Vicky will be Mama’s successor. Mama is now the Queen, and Vicky will have her crown, and you see Vicky will be Victoria the second.”30
Even Queen Victoria perceived that Bertie had been “injured” by being with the clever Vicky, who “put him down by a look—or a word—and their natural affection had been … impaired by this state of things.”31 Because Bertie could not possibly do better than Vicky, his reaction was to rebel and refuse to do anything at all.
The education of their children was a matter of great concern to Victoria and Albert. Because Bertie was the eldest prince, his education was especially important. Ever since the Renaissance, Protestant tradition had taught that little princes must be protected from flattery by early training in moral toughness, hard work, and strict duty. (Catholic rulers, by contrast, were said to spoil their heirs from early childhood, hoping by overindulgence to make them immune to temptation.)32 Months after Bertie’s birth, Stockmar addressed a memorandum to Victoria and Albert. “The first truth by which the Queen and the Prince ought to be thoroughly penetrated is, that their position is a much more difficult one, than that of any other parents in the kingdom.” The bad education provided by George III, warned Stockmar, had caused the errors of the Queen’s wicked uncles, whose conduct had “contributed more than any other circumstance to weaken the respect and influence of Royalty in this country.”33 The very survival of the monarchy depended upon the education of the Prince of Wales.
The system devised by Stockmar followed the typical German model of princely education in the generation after 1815.34 This was the method that had succeeded so brilliantly with Albert. As was the custom with princes, Bertie was to be educated in seclusion. His days were to be organized like formal schooling and strictly time-tabled.
In Bertie’s case, education was also meant to be a form of treatment. He had special needs. When he was two and a half, an expert was summoned. Dr. Andrew Combe was a leading practitioner of the fashionable quack science of phrenology, the Victorian answer to a child psychiatrist. He calibrated the bumps on Bertie’s head and reported that “the development of the brain was in some respects defective.” When Bertie was four, Dr. Combe reported improvement, but Stockmar still judged him “essentially a nervous and excitable child with little power of endurance or sustained action in any direction.”35 The therapy prescribed by Stockmar in consequence was regular, systematic exercise of the brain. A detailed timetable was drawn up for Bertie’s lessons under the direction of the governess, Miss Hildyard. From eight a.m. until six p.m., every half hour of the six-year-old prince’s day was time-tabled, parceled into lessons in French, German, geography, reading, and writing on the slate and also dancing, history, and poetry.36
It soon became apparent that Stockmar’s system was a failure. Bertie’s French teacher expressed “the greatest concern” at his want of progress. When he was six, he was reading the same French book as Alice, who was neither studious nor as clever as Vicky. Lady Lyttelton, who had up till now staunchly defended Bertie’s “quickness and power of learning,” was compelled to report that he was “a very difficult pupil in some respects, besides his being not at all in advance of his age.”37 By the time Bertie was seven, Lady Lyttelton could no longer control the Prince of Wales.
Bertie’s first language was English, and his early words, as recorded by his governess Lady Lyttelton (“Dear Mama gone! Flag should be taken away!”), were all in English.38 He learned German in the nursery, where at an early age the children “spoke German like their native tongue, even to one another.”39 At three, he had lessons with a German governess, and by the age of five he could read German books.40 His fluency in German interfered with his speaking of English. An actor, George Bartley, was employed to teach him elocution.41 At sixteen, his “foreign mode of pronunciation” was very noticeable.42 Some thought that he never lost the traces of a German accent, rolling his r’s in a manner that was unmistakably Teutonic. Others claimed that he spoke English in a beautifully modulated voice—no doubt the legacy of those early elocution lessons.§
Bertie was promoted from the nursery to a tutor when he was seven and a half. This was the age when Victorian boys were considered ready to be removed from the care of women and given over to men for their education. Victoria was more than happy to opt out. When he was two and a half she had declared: “I wish that he should grow up entirely under his Father’s eye, and every step be guided by him, so that when he has attained the age of 16 or 17 he may be a real companion to his Father.”43 From now on, Bertie’s education was directed by Albert.
On the recommendation of Sir James Clark, the royal physician, Albert engaged a tutor named Henry Birch.44 A good-looking thirty-year-old bachelor, he was an Eton master with a string of Cambridge prizes and no experience of teaching small boys. He was installed next door to Bertie’s room at Buckingham Palace, and Albert drew up a syllabus and timetable. The first few weeks were disastrous. Bertie was rude, disobedient, and rebellious. He refused to take his hat off when people bowed. He stayed in bed until late in the morning; he lost his temper whenever he attempted anything difficult. He was excitable and tyrannical when other little boys came to play, and unkind to his brothers and sisters. “There was at first the very greatest difficulty in fixing his attention,” wrote Birch. “He had more than usual difficulty in writing, spelling, calculating and composing sentences, or doing grammatical exercises.”45
Birch thought that Bertie was too young to leave the nursery. Some biographers have suggested that he was dyslexic, but there is little evidence for this. Certainly he found writing difficult, and it is possible that he was mildly dyspraxic. Albert thought Bertie’s handwriting at age seven was “very feeble and unsteady.”46 In Bertie’s teens, his tutors noticed that “his slowness of manipulation makes writing laborious to him.”47 The careful copperplate he inscribed in youth ballooned in careless middle age into a paleographic nightmare, suggesting that the fault lay with his motor skills rather than his unwillingness to learn.‖
Victoria kept a disgusted distance from her son. The waspish diarist Charles Greville picked up rumors that “the hereditary and unfailing antipathy of our sovereigns to their Heir Apparent seems … early to be taking root, and the Queen does not much like the child.”48 No one wondered whether the mother’s dislike was cause, as well as consequence, of Bertie’s bad behavior. But then Victoria was herself a patient, undergoing a course of moral improvement under Albert’s supervision. It was as if poor, bad Bertie was a lightning conductor, articulating buried family tensions.
Birch, by now desperate, consulted the royal parents. What a comfort it was, he reflected, to be able to “open one’s mind fully both to the Queen and Prince, on any subject connected with the management of their child.”49 He decided to take a stand; the prince’s naughtiness must be met with “severity.”50 Precisely what he meant by the word was not spelled out, but the answer is to be found in the diary of the royal physician, Sir James Clark. He records that in May 1849 the prince’s “perverseness was such that the father decided on whipping him. The effect was excellent.”51
Albert’s whipping did not cure Bertie’s naughtiness for long. That summer he was spotted by a dancing teacher standing on a chair in the corner of the billiard room as a punishment for writing badly. “I’m in disgrace,” he wailed.52
Bertie took his lessons all alone. He saw no one except his tutors, apart from fifteen minutes with his parents at nine a.m. and again before bed. Birch found the isolation oppressive, and in his “Private Thoughts,” written for Stockmar’s eyes only (and which Stockmar, of course, promptly passed on to Albert), he complained that being confined day and night at Buckingham Palace was injurious to his own health and spirits.53 It was worse for his pupil, in whom “symptoms of evil” had once again “assumed an alarming appearance.” Birch decided that obedience must be enforced, however “painful” the task—Bertie must again be whipped.54
Birch was a grumbler. He babbled on about taking religious orders, encouraged by an offer of a fat living. This annoyed Albert, as one of the conditions of Birch’s appointment was that he should be a layman. To make matters worse, Birch was a High Church Puseyite and ostentatiously refused to obey Albert’s orders to attend the Presbyterian kirk while staying at Balmoral. Albert’s sympathy with the Church of Scotland made him unpopular, as it raised suspicion of his German Lutheran links; Birch’s scruples must have looked very much like disloyalty. Albert became convinced that the choice of Birch had been a mistake—he lacked judgment and thought too much of himself and too little of his pupil.
After about a year, though, Bertie began to improve. He kept a diary, which he dictated to Mr. Birch. On the birth of Prince Arthur in May 1850, he reflected: “I have long wished to have another brother, and at last I have got my wish. I mean to try to set a good example to him.” After a summer spent on the Isle of Wight, recommended by the doctors on account of the sea air, he claimed: “At Osborne this time I think that I have learned more than when I was in Scotland, and I hope that I have done better also.” As a reward, his brother Alfred (Affie), eighteen months younger, was allowed to share a bedroom with him. “I think that Affie likes being with me and I like having him too, because it is a much better match for me than older persons.” At Christmas, Mr. Birch wrote a good report for Papa, which “pleased him very much,” and gave Bertie a history of Greece for good behavior. “He promised me a prize a long time ago if I was good up to Christmas.” Bertie was allowed to start Latin. Mr. Birch taught him some useful phrases: “sum bonus puer, non ero malus puer, amo magistrum” (I am a good boy, I will not be a bad boy, I love my tutor).55
These virtuous sentiments were no doubt dictated by Birch, not Bertie, but Birch believed that he had found the key to Bertie’s heart, and in November 1850 he implored Stockmar to let him stay.56 It was too late. By now, Prince Albert had lost faith in Birch. He called in the phrenologist George Combe.a The brain of the Prince of Wales, reported Combe, was feeble and abnormal. The anterior lobe, devoted to intellect, was deficient in size, while the organs of “combativeness, destructiveness and self-esteem” were overdeveloped. This made him highly excitable and “liable to vehement fits of passion, opposition, self-will and obstinacy,” which were not acts of “voluntary disobedience” but the result of the physiology of the brain. The treatment was not punishment but a “soothing system” of kindness, avoiding all irritation as every fit of anger made the brain more feeble.57
“I wonder whence that Anglo-Saxon brain of his has come,” mused Albert. “It must have descended from the Stuarts, for the family have been purely German since their day.” Combe, however, was of the opinion that Bertie had inherited the brain of George III—and by implication his madness. “It will be vain to treat the Prince as a normal child,” he wrote.58 This sent a shiver down Albert’s spine. The Prince of Wales, he minuted, was not an ordinary boy but “a patient, who ought to be treated physiologically on principles arising out of a thorough knowledge of the faculties of the human mind.”59 By punishing him and speaking harshly to him, Mr. Birch was exacerbating his condition. Combe then inspected Birch’s head and found the cerebral development to be inadequate. There was no doubt about it; Birch must go.
Unfortunately, Albert failed to realize that by now Birch was giving his son precisely what he craved—affection—and Bertie was thriving on it.
The Times worried that Albert was tinkering with the religious education of the Prince of Wales. Little did they know. By today’s standards at least, Albert’s interference was truly damaging. The public could on no account suspect that the heir to the throne was abnormal, so Albert, persuaded by Combe, arranged for surveillance of Bertie’s schoolroom by phrenological spies. He appointed a librarian named Dr. Becker, who also acted as Bertie’s German tutor. Becker was sent under an assumed name to Edinburgh, where he trained undercover in phrenology with Combe.60
That summer, the nine-year-old Bertie at last discovered that he was heir to the throne, after examining a genealogical table in his room. Becker reported that the prince’s self-esteem had swollen, his intellectual organs had shrunk, and his combativeness had become un-controllable.61 With Birch, however, Bertie continued to be good. It was 1851, the summer of the Great Exhibition, and Bertie visited almost daily with Birch, writing notes on the exhibits. When Affie fell on his head running downstairs, Bertie noted primly in his diary: “He is so disobedient and heedless that I should not be surprised if he kills himself one of these days.” On Christmas Eve at Windsor, Albert led Bertie into a room where, on a table, stood a tree surrounded by presents. Bertie oozed virtue from every pore. “Mr. Birch tells me that I am quite an altered boy in all of my dealing with him and this makes me happy.”62
Albert must have read this, but to no avail; he was determined to sack the tutor. On 7 January 1852, Bertie wrote sadly in his private diary in his spiky handwriting: “A very unhappy day because Papa had told me that Mr. Birch must soon go away.” Next day, “I was still very unhappy. Mr. Birch was so very kind as to console me and give me good advice which made me a little happier.” On 20 January: “The last evening and day that I passed with dear Mr. Birch.”63
Albert’s brutal dismissal of Birch echoes his sacking of Victoria’s governess Lehzen ten years before. In both cases he convinced himself that a devoted servant and confidant was a malign influence who must be removed in the interest of the “patient,” his wife or son. He shut his eyes to the unhappiness this caused. He believed that both Victoria and Bertie had to be treated on moral and scientific principles for their own good. It was as if the intimacy of his wife or his son with anyone but himself represented a threat to his control over them.
Birch left a verdict on his pupil. Progress in writing and spelling was slow, he conceded, but few English boys knew so much French and German. As for Bertie’s character, Birch reported: “He has a very keen perception of right and wrong, a very good memory, very singular powers of observation, and for the last year and a half I saw numerous traits of a very amiable and affectionate disposition.” Bertie’s problems, thought Birch, were due to lack of contact with boys of his own age, and “from himself being the centre round which everything seems to move.… He has no standard by which to measure his own powers.” The tutor’s prognosis was optimistic: “There is every reason to hope that the Prince of Wales will eventually turn out a good, and in my humble opinion a great man.”b64
Bertie’s new tutor was named Frederick Gibbs. He came on the recommendation of Sir James Stephen, the professor of modern history at Cambridge, where Albert was chancellor. Gibbs was a barrister and a fellow of Trinity College, and Stephen tried to impress Albert by describing him as a typical member of the middle class; this was hardly true, as Gibbs had been brought up by Stephen.c Dry, humorless, and lacking in both imagination and experience, he was a strange choice of tutor for the difficult Bertie.
Gibbs started badly. On his first day, he went for a walk with the two morose little boys, Bertie and Affie. “You can’t wonder if we are rather dull today,” Bertie told Gibbs. “We are very sorry Mr. Birch is gone. It is very natural is it not?”65 Acting on instructions from Prince Albert, Gibbs increased Bertie’s schooling to six hourly lesson periods a day, time-tabled from eight a.m. to seven p.m., six days a week. In the intervals between lessons, he was ordered to make the princes do riding, drill, and gymnastics, ensuring that they were tired out by the end of each day. Exactly why Albert decided to reject the “soothing system” of light work recommended by George Combe in favor of a program of intensive study is not clear, but it rapidly undid all the good that Birch had achieved.
Some of the more distressing papers relating to Bertie’s education were destroyed on his instructions when he became king, but Gibbs kept a diary that survived.66 He recorded little about the content of Bertie’s lessons but, worried perhaps that he might be held to account, wrote detailed notes of Bertie’s bad behavior. Day after day, Bertie was rude, had fits of ungovernable temper, and refused to fix his attention on lessons. He fought with Affie and pulled his hair. One day in February 1852, Gibbs wrote:
I had to do some arithmetic with the Prince of Wales. Immediately he became passionate, the pencil was flung to the end of the room, the stool was kicked away, and he was hardly able to apply at all. That night he woke twice. Next day he became very passionate because I told him he must not take out a walking stick, and in consequence of something crossing him when dressing. Later in the day he became violently angry because I wanted some Latin done. He flung things about—made grimaces—called me names, and would not do anything for a long time.67
When Bertie swung a stick and hit Mr. Gibbs in a passion, Albert advised him to box the prince’s ears or rap his knuckles sharply. Gibbs shut Bertie in his room. “His Father also spoke to him, and it had a good effect.”
These methods won the confidence of the Queen, who thought Gibbs a “real treasure.” “Our poor strange boy has improved greatly since he came,” she told Uncle Leopold.68 Victoria was deluding herself. The more Gibbs tightened the screw, the worse Bertie became. Photographs from this time show a boy small for his age, hanging his head, looking down sulkily at his feet. When his German teacher, Becker, told him off for being rude, Bertie replied: “Other children are not always good, why should I always be good? Nobody is always good.”69 Florence Nightingale met the Prince of Wales and thought him simple, unaffected, and shy, but “a little cowed, as if he had been overtaught.”70
Becker addressed a memorandum to Prince Albert, pointing out that Bertie’s rages (“He stands in the corner stamping with his legs and screaming in the most dreadful manner”) were caused by exhaustion owing to overwork.71 This was only common sense, but Becker’s pleas were ignored by Albert, who by now had lost patience with the phrenologists and their prescription of a “soothing system.” He seems to have lost faith in Bertie, too. Stockmar certainly had. He told Gibbs that the prince was “an exaggerated copy of his mother.” He despaired of Bertie and his Hanoverian inheritance, preferring Affie. “If you cannot make anything of the eldest, you must try with the younger one,” he told Gibbs.72 When Bertie was taken to meet the Eton boys, he was rude and aggressive, and the headmaster complained. Stockmar gave his medical opinion that the madness of George III was reappearing; according to him, one of the symptoms displayed by Bertie’s grandfather, the Duke of Kent, and his wicked great-uncles had been the pleasure they took in giving pain.
Bertie’s solitary lessons and the long days spent alone with Gibbs were a form of psychological cruelty; but they took place against a background of luxury and opulence, as his schoolroom moved with the peripatetic royal family on its stately progress between Windsor, Buckingham Palace, Balmoral, and Osborne.d Home for Bertie was Windsor. With its towers and battlements crowning a hilltop above the Thames, it was less a castle than a miniature city state—an enclosed world. The men of the household dressed in the Windsor uniform of red and blue designed by George III. In the lower ward, toy-town guardsmen in scarlet uniforms marched to the tunes of drums and fifes.
Osborne on the Isle of Wight, where Bertie spent most summers, was the Italianate seaside fantasy that Albert had designed with the help of Thomas Cubitt—a retreat from the grand spaces of Windsor and Buckingham Palace. At Osborne, the Queen and Albert could play at gemütlich domesticity. The sparkling blue of the Solent reminded Albert of the Bay of Naples, and the sculpture gallery, which he wrapped round Cubitt’s square stuccoed blocks, shimmered with light, which bathed the classical sculptures he and Victoria gave each other as presents. Often mildly erotic, they hinted at the sexual dynamic of the royal marriage. Franz Xaver Winterhalter painted a giant formal canvas of the royal family, which had as its focal point the hands of Victoria and Albert forever engaged in sensuous flirtation.
Albert’s dressing room was fitted with bath and cutting-edge shower, filled by running water. The German fresco on the wall showed Hercules laying aside his power and becoming a slave to the Queen of Lydia. Next door to his writing room was the Queen’s bow-windowed sitting room, furnished with twin writing desks—Victoria’s on the left nearest the window and Albert’s on the right—and dotted with white marble casts of their children’s hands. On the wall hung Winterhalter’s startling painting of the nude Florinda and her ladies undressing as they prepared to bathe.
Directly above the royal suite was the children’s floor. The babies and toddlers all slept together with a nurse in the night nursery, lying in padded wicker cots specially designed by Albert. Bertie slept close by. Light poured into the nursery from the top-lit central staircase; but the parental supervision emanating from below was oppressively claustrophobic.
In May 1853, when Bertie was twelve, the seven royal children solemnly laid the first stone of the Swiss Cottage. This Alpine chalet was Albert’s attempt to relive his German childhood and instill habits of work and craftsmanship into his children. “Affie and I worked very diligently at the Swiss Cottage and Papa paid us wages,” Bertie dictated to Gibbs in his journal. A week or so later he wrote: “We are getting on beautifully with our brick laying.”73
The prefabricated Swiss Cottage, shipped over in pieces and completed by workmen on the Osborne estate, was the children’s space, one of the few places where Bertie could escape the snooping Gibbs. Albert provided each child with a garden plot and tools, stamped with their initials—Pss L (Louise), P L (Leopold), and so forth—and the girls were taught to cook in the miniature kitchen; but for Bertie the Swiss Cottage was not a Petit Trianon for playing in the manner of Marie Antoinette, but a den of sin. Here he practiced secret smoking with Affie and Alice. Alice wrote from Osborne to Bertie, her “poor forsaken darling” who had been left behind at Windsor: “We went after dinner immediately to the Swiss Cottage (as you can guess) for it is generally the first place we go on arriving here.” How she missed her “dearest dear”: “I can’t smoke paper cigars here for I have no one to smoke with you know what I mean.”74
Eleanor Stanley, one of the ladies at court, commented on the remarkable physical likeness between Bertie and Alice. She thought them “not alike in character at all; he is retiring, shy, a little inclined to be overbearing, and rather obstinate; but with a sweet, kind expression about his eyes; she, not apparently knowing what shyness means, very sweet-tempered and not at all obstinate.”75 All the adults were taken in by Alice. She seemed so docile and lovable; but in reality she was (as Vicky wrote) a “smart little lady,” skilled at dissembling and “almost never getting into trouble,” even though she was Bertie’s partner in crime.76
Osborne was followed in the autumn by Balmoral, the castle in the mountain solitude of the Scottish Highlands, which reminded Albert of his native Thuringian Forest. By 1855, the modest house that Albert had first leased in 1848 had been replaced by a new schloss in the Scots baronial style. Albert designed a Balmoral tartan in gray and purple and a white “Victorian” tartan, and there were tartan-covered chairs and tartan curtains and even tartan linoleum. Bertie spent more time with Albert at Balmoral than anywhere else, accompanying him on stalking expeditions. Stalking was Albert’s passion, but he was an unorthodox sportsman. The eight-year-old Bertie described a day on the hill with his father:
We walked on through some bogs, and we were obliged to stoop quite low, or else the deer would have seen us. Then we sat down on a rock, and Grant [stalker] looked again through his glass and said that the deer had seen us.… We soon saw a stag.… Papa shot 4 times and then he gave the two rifles to Macdonald [stalker] and then took a small one himself and ordered the dogs to be let loose.… For a long time we looked about for Papa, and could not find him, but at last we heard him calling Macdonald.… and we saw a fine stag half dead.77
As Bertie’s account makes clear, Albert was an erratic shot.e78
At Balmoral when Bertie was twelve, Albert forbade him from taking a holiday, but ordered him to continue lessons as normal. Even Gibbs thought this too harsh, and he told the Queen so. Gibbs was also critical of Albert’s system of seclusion, and suggested that Bertie should be allowed to meet other boys. Very occasionally a few noblemen’s sons from Eton came to tea. Charles Carrington, who was to become Bertie’s lifelong friend and devoted follower, a clever courtier who kept a diary, first met the prince at Buckingham Palace in 1854. He recalled that Prince Alfred was the favorite, “but I always liked the Prince of Wales far the best. He had such a kind and generous disposition and the kindest heart imaginable.” But Bertie was often getting into scrapes, and he was afraid of his father, “who seemed a proud, shy, stand-offish sort of man, not calculated to make friends with children.”79
Albert was always there, watching from the undergrowth; once he suddenly appeared from behind a bush, and Carrington fell off the seesaw from sheer fright.
Albert reinvented the “royal family” as a beacon of bourgeois domesticity. Using the new medium of photography, he projected an image of queen and consort as an adoring couple, surrounded by obedient, subdued children. The contrast with Victoria’s wicked uncles could hardly be starker. But within this narrative, Albert’s role as father was by no means clear. He had no model to follow. His own father, the lecherous Duke Ernest, gave an example of what not to do, but Albert had no experience of the English aristocratic paterfamilias—the dominant male who offered a benevolent example of self-assured manhood.80 When Bertie, his difficult son, failed in his lessons and threatened to rebel, Albert was at a loss. He spied on Bertie, he whipped him, he treated him as a patient. He never tried to engage his sympathy or initiate him into the world of English manhood—but that was a world that was closed to Albert, too. Little wonder that Bertie later recalled, “I had no boyhood.”81
The Crimean War intervened. Bertie watched his mother pin medals on to the returning soldiers and allow wounded men into the garden at Buckingham Palace, where they walked about or sat on benches listening to the band of the marines. Albert, meanwhile, was wearing himself out. Victoria and Albert’s diplomatic correspondence on the war fills thirty-five folio volumes, and as Albert exhausted himself on the treadmill of duty, his popularity evaporated. He was hated for being German, and for meddling in the army, and his response was to meddle even more.f Key to Albert’s diplomacy was a rapprochement with the French emperor, Napoléon III. With the Empress Eugénie, Louis-Napoléon paid a state visit in April 1855. “The Emperor is a short person,” wrote Bertie. “He has very long moustachios but short hair, fair. The Empress is very pretty.”82 In August, Victoria and Albert returned the visit, taking with them Vicky and Bertie. They sailed from Osborne, serenaded by the two-year-old Leopold, who wailed (Affie told Bertie): “Ma gone in the boot to Fa, meaning mama is gone in the boat to France, also one buder [brother] why not two buder.”83
It was the first visit of a British monarch to Paris since Henry VI in 1431, and for Bertie, the ten-day trip was a revelation. Victoria for once was in a state of euphoria. Not only was she welcomed by rapturous Paris crowds, but Albert was given equal rank, which soothed his edgy ego, while his frigid shyness was melted by the willowy Empress Eugénie. “Altogether I am delighted to see how much he likes her and admires her,” wrote Victoria artlessly, “as it is so seldom that I see him do so with any woman.”84 As for Victoria, she was charmed and flattered by the emperor, who kissed and squeezed her hand, and whispered affectionate words into her ear. Lord Clarendon, the urbane courtier whose letters give a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern commentary on the court, observed that this was male attention of a sort the Queen had never known before: “She never had been made love to in her life, and never had conversed with a man of the world on a footing of equality; and as his love-making was of a character to flatter her vanity without alarming her virtue and modesty, she enjoyed the novelty of it without scruple or fear.”85 Even the dumpy Queen’s homely gowns pleased the emperor, who especially admired the full white dress bursting with red geraniums that she wore with the Koh-i-Noor diamond.
The emperor made a point of paying attention to Bertie, driving him around Paris in his curricle. “You have a nice country, I would like to be your son,” said Bertie.86 Wearing Highland dress, the British boy won the heart of the crowd. When he visited the tomb of Napoléon I in a thunderstorm and the band played “God Save the Queen,” Victoria, moved at the thought of leaning on the arm of Napoléon III before the coffin of his uncle and namesake, Britain’s bitterest foe, gestured Bertie to kneel, and the crowd went wild. Vicky cried when they left, and Bertie asked Eugénie if they could stay longer. “Your parents can’t do without you,” she replied. “Not do without us!” exclaimed Bertie. “Don’t fancy that, for there are six more of us at home, and they don’t want us.”87
In Paris, Bertie was put in the charge of Lord Clarendon. “[Clarendon] thinks the Queen’s severe way of treating her children very injudicious,” reported Greville, “and that the Prince will be difficult to manage, as he has evidently a will of his own and is rather positive and opinionated, and inclined to lay down the law; but he is clever and his manners are good.”88
Back home, the system of seclusion was tightened, and the children grew ever more rebellious and conspiratorial. The royal schoolroom was a hotbed of subversion. “Write your letters as well as you can,” Affie told Bertie, “because Papa wishes to see them.”89 Alice managed to slip through the parental censorship and write Bertie letters that breathe naughtiness:
Only think what I did yesterday evening with Mr. Affie we smoked paper cigars as we were alone and the room smelled so strong of it that Tillag found it out and scolded me dreadfully for it not Affie mind you. I was so wretched the first day without you my own darling Brother I did nothing but cry when I got to bed: I put your hair in the pretty little glass locket I generally wear for I have taken the others off and even when I go in a low dress in the evening I do not take it off I treasure it so, being the only thing I have of you whom I so so dearly love and cherish.90
Already the fourteen-year-old prince was learning to live a secret life. With Alice he was wicked and adored. With Gibbs he was no longer openly rebellious, but tame and dull. “We are glad to have continued good accounts of you,” wrote Victoria, who hoped to find her son “decidedly improved, and very quiet, and amiable and not contradictory.”91 To Uncle Leopold she wrote, “seclusion has it seems done him good.”92
Victoria spoke too soon. A few months later, Bertie and Affie were caught smoking. The smoking itself was harmless, Gibbs thought, but the boys had used deceit to conceal it. Prince Albert intervened and punished his sons with three days’ solitary confinement. He then announced that he had decided to separate them. The real reason for this was not the smoking, but because in lessons Alfred was ahead of Bertie, who was “almost stationary and his knowledge only half mastered.” Being behind his younger brother irritated Bertie, whose “love of rule bore down” on Alfred, and “the result was that the Prince of Wales domineered and Prince Alfred lost his sense of independence.”93
At eleven, Affie was sent away and given a separate establishment at Royal Lodge in Windsor Park, with an officer of the Royal Engineers as his tutor and sole companion. Bertie, meanwhile, was kept at home under the watchful eye of his father. He penned a contrite letter of apology, to which Albert sternly replied: “Our confidence can of course at present not be restored to you, but you can earn it,” which seems somewhat hypocritical, considering that the smoking was not the real reason for separating the brothers.94
Bertie sobbed bitterly when Affie moved to Royal Lodge. “His devotion to Affie is very great and pleasing to see,” wrote his mother; but she allowed Albert to deny her the pleasure of seeing it.95 Albert had been brought up with his brother Ernest as his chief companion; but this seemed to make him all the more determined to separate his own sons, convincing himself that it was for their own good. Bertie, by contrast, was later to insist on his two sons being educated together, even though the elder, Prince Albert Victor, was woefully backward by comparison with his younger brother, Prince George.
Albert’s relations with his wife were reaching a crisis point. Early in 1856, Victoria’s doctor, Sir James Clark, expressed concern about her mental state. He warned that another pregnancy would endanger her mind. Albert must avoid confrontation when she was angry, as this would cause long-term damage to the Queen’s brain.96 (Much the same advice had been given by doctors about Bertie’s tantrums.) By July, however, whether by accident or design, the Queen was once again pregnant, this time with Beatrice, and Albert was circling around her, petrified lest she scream—her rages upset him so.
When the family migrated to Balmoral in September 1856, Bertie was left behind at Osborne with his tutors. As an experiment, he was sent on a walking tour in the West Country under the name of Baron Renfrew; it was abruptly called off when he was recognized at Dorchester and cheered. “I do miss you so,” wrote Alice from Buckingham Palace, “each time the door opens and I see Affiechaps come in I always think it is you.” She had treasured up all his presents to her: “Your little drum [a charm] I mean always to wear and I have not taken it off since you gave it to me for it is fastened to my bracelet: your paintbrush is in my bag, and [I] even took it out in the railroad carriage to see that it was safe: your book on tournaments is also in my bag.… So think sometimes of your poor little Alice who is so so fond of you.”97
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.