Queen Victoria and Prince Albert had known little of each other when they became engaged, and although their love was intense and profound it developed through shared experience and difficulties into a marriage in which they attempted to balance the heavy responsibilities of Sovereign and Consort with those of parents of a rapidly growing young family. Almost, although not entirely, by chance they created a pattern of living that embraced the formalities of Buckingham Palace, the more relaxed atmosphere of Windsor, the peacefulness of Osborne – ‘the children catch butterflies, Victoria sits under the trees’ he wrote of one day – and the more bracing environment of Balmoral, but where they felt particularly happy, remote from the political and official world, and with their children. Above all, Osborne and Balmoral were their creations, not only physically but in atmosphere.
Prince Albert was a devoted, loving, and amusing husband and father, and although his patience was tried on several occasions by his wife’s variable temperament they were deeply happy together. In Gladstone’s noble phrase, ‘He was to her, in deed and truth, a second self’.
Victoria and Albert had nine children in seventeen years, and the regular arrivals of Royal babies were the topic of a certain popular ribaldry and political criticism, and it was a long time before the Queen’s intense dislike at ‘this occupation’, became known. Many years later she wrote to her eldest daughter:
What you say of the pride of giving life to an immortal soul is very fine, dear, but I own I cannot enter into that; I think much more of us being like a cow or a dog at such moments; when our poor nature becomes so very animal & unecstatic.
But these events gave immense pleasure to Albert, who doted on his children – and none more than the firstborn, Victoria (‘Vicky’). The others were Albert Edward (‘Bertie’) (born 1841), Alice (1843), Alfred (‘Affie’) (1844), Helena (‘Lenchen’) (1846), Louise (1848), Arthur (1850), Leopold (1853), and Beatrice (1857). To their parents’ dismay and distress Leopold was a haemophiliac, the Queen being the ‘carrier’ of this grievous affliction, but the others were healthy and lively children. Albert greatly enjoyed their company, ordered the special cottage for them at Osborne, and made Christmas – as he always did – a particular time of family enjoyment and happiness, his purpose being to provide, as far is was possible in their circumstances, a happy, well-ordered, and normal childhood. ‘The greatest maxim of all’, Queen Victoria wrote, ‘is that the Children should be brought up as simply and in as domestic a way as possible; that (not interfering with their lessons) they should be as much as possible with their Parents, share and place their greatest confidence in them in all things’. This memorandum, probably drafted by Albert, remained their policy.
The exception was, and perhaps had to be, the Prince of Wales, the Heir to the Throne, the future King, and the repository of Albert’s ambitions for the future of the Monarchy. The assassination attempts on them both gave to the task of raising and educating the future Sovereign an additional urgency, and one to which he applied himself with characteristic thought, resolution, and care. So much misunderstanding has arisen about what then happened that it is important to relate the story in considerable detail, as it throws much further light on the character of Prince Albert.
The genius of Stockmar and Prince Albert lay in their clear understanding not only of the political limitations, but the considerable political potentialities, of the British Monarchy. As Albert wrote to Stockmar in January 1846, ‘the exaltation of Royalty is possible only through the personal character of the Sovereign. When a person enjoys complete confidence, we desire for him more power and influence in the conduct of affairs. But confidence is of slow growth’. Stockmar had now played a brilliantly successful role twice – in the tragically ended education of Leopold, and in the development of Prince Albert into a cautious, serious, but intuitively skilful Consort and man of influence. In spite of the storms that often swirled about the Prince, and the continuing denigration of his alleged dullness, stiffness, and admitted German-ness, he had gradually established himself not only in the heart of his highly intelligent and volatile wife, but in the respect, however grudging, of most senior politicians. By them, he was becoming recognised as being himself a politician of the first rank, and most of them detected, as only politicians can, the ambition and sense of power that lurked under the courteous façade.
It is against this background of political success already achieved, and ambition for the future, that the eventually futile endeavour to mould the eldest son into the perfectly equipped heir to the Throne must be seen – a fundamental point which has eluded several biographers and historians.
Albert Edward – always called ‘Bertie’ in the family – had been born on November 9th 1841 after a particularly difficult con-finement; he was created Prince of Wales on December 4th, and christened amid great pomp in St. George’s Chapel on January 25th 1842, the Duke of Wellington carrying the Sword of State, and the service meticulously planned and organised by Albert. The event was not without its practical difficulties. Melbourne was anxious to avoid ‘the risk of cavil or motions of enquiry’ into the cost, and found that the resources of the department of the Lord Steward could assist with £2,500 or even £3,000, to which Albert wrote in reply that ‘even £2,000 will be very gratefully accepted’. In the event, the final bill was £4,991 16s. 5d., charged to the Lord Chamberlain’s department. Then, the Duke of Coburg was angry that the name Ernest did not find favour with the couple, and even angrier when the King of Prussia was invited to be a godfather. ‘He has reproached me severely’, Albert wrote to his brother, but on both points he and the Queen successfully resisted his father’s pressures, and the new Prince of Wales was christened in appropriate style. The young parents then took counsel about the upbringing of the future King.
There is something infinitely touching about the devotion with which they approached their task. Very mindful of the deficiencies of their own childhoods, and somewhat awed by the heavy responsibility of educating Queen Victoria’s eventual heir, they discussed the subject at great length, and often, and inevitably turned to Stockmar for guidance. He, for his part, advised them to take counsel from others. The results were somewhat unhelpful and sycophantic, the Bishop of Oxford portentously writing that ‘the great object in view is to make him the most perfect man’, although Melbourne was a characteristic refreshing exception, writing to the Queen: ‘Be not over solicitous about education. It may be able to do much, but it does not do as much as is expected from it. It may mould and direct the character, but it rarely alters it’.
This was emphatically not the view of Stockmar. ‘A man’s education begins the first day of his life’, he had written sternly to Albert on October 1st 1840, ‘and a lucky choice [of a governess] I regard as the greatest and finest gift which we can bestow on the expected stranger. Suffer me, apropos of this subject, my dear Prince, to pause a moment, and to ask you to consider, first, how much we have already gained step by step, and, secondly, to take courage from success, and to give to Providence the thanks that are due!’ Stockmar, as has been remarked, was not disposed to leave matters to Providence, and when the heir was born he hastened to write to Albert: ‘Sleep, Stillness, Rest, and the exclusion of many people from her room are now the essentials for the Queen. You cannot be too guarded on these points. Thus, be a very Cerberus’. It was due to his advice that Lady Lyttelton was appointed governess of the nursery, which was a very happy and successful choice. But, as Stockmar emphasised, this was only a first step. On September 18th 1843 he wrote to Prince Albert:
. . . Pray give renewed attention and serious reflection to what is necessary for the training and education of the Prince of Wales. The present nursery staff is no longer adequate. As the Swiss governess may take the special charge of the Princess Royal, so a German governess might take the Prince of Wales for a time under her special care, until perhaps an English one is found who might look after him till his 5th or 6th year, when he might be transferred to manly hands . . .
It was over the management of the nursery that, as has been already related, Albert and Victoria had had their first notable, and most vehement, quarrel, but the issue of nursery management had been subordinate to the deeper differences between them over the character and role of Lehzen. Nonetheless, the future of the heir to the throne was a major factor, and one on which Albert fought and won his most important victory over his wife. Also of significance was the question of security, and Lady Lyttelton was to write of ‘various intense precautions, suggesting the most hideous dangers, which I fear are not altogether imaginary, and make one shudder’. Chief among these apprehensions was that of the Princess Royal and the Prince being kidnapped, and although such fears may have been exaggerated by the young parents and their advisers, their concerns can be appreciated. The result, inevitably, was a degree of supervision and segregation for the Royal Children that was only gradually, and then only moderately, relaxed.
Stockmar’s essential purpose, as he emphasised to the Royal parents, was to produce ‘a man of calm, profound, comprehensive understanding, with a deep conviction of the indispensable necessity of practical morality to the welfare of the Sovereign and People’. While the parents enthusiastically agreed, the difficulty was that Bertie, even as a small child, was proving difficult and temperamental, with fits of frustrated anger and temper that left him limp and exhausted, ‘as though he were asleep with his eyes open’, as Albert reported to Stockmar with some concern. Lady Lyttelton described him, at the age of four, as ‘uncommonly adverse to learning and requires much patience from wilful inattention and constant interruptions’.
It was also evident that he was less intelligent and pleasing to the parents than Princess Victoria, on whom Albert’s complete devotion was bestowed early and never faded. This love is one of the most moving events in his life, but it inevitably had some effect upon the small boy who was the recipient of the immensely detailed and thorough plans of his parents and Stockmar. Lady Lyttelton was immensely struck by Albert’s devotion to his children, and his ‘patience and kindness’ to them, and some of Victoria’s most warm Journal entries describe him ‘noisily and eagerly managing a new kite with his two elder sons’, playing hide and seek with Vicky and Bertie with the gusto of a boy, and teaching Bertie how to turn somersaults. ‘He is so kind to them and romps with them so delightfully, and manages them so beautifully and firmly’. ‘There is certainly a great charm, as well as deep interest in watching the development of feelings and faculties in a little child’, he wrote on February 16th 1843, ‘and nothing is more instructive for the knowledge of our own nature than to observe in a little creature the stages of development which, when we were ourselves passing through them, seemed scarcely to have an existence for us. I feel this daily in watching our young offspring, whose characters are quite different, and who both show many loveable qualities.’
But although Albert loved his son dearly, he saw him also as the future King on whom would fall immense responsibilities and powers, and his determination to ensure that nothing should be spared nor overlooked in his preparation for his great destiny inevitably made Bertie ‘different’ from his sister and his subsequent brothers and sisters. As Lady Lyttelton wrote, he was, after all, ‘l’infant d’Angleterre’.
. . . Your Royal Highness can never rate too highly the importance of the life of the Prince of Wales, or of his good education; for your own interests – political, moral, mental & material are so intimately and inseparably bound up with those of the Prince that every neglect in his training and culture is certain to be avenged upon his father . . .
Thus Stockmar wrote, perhaps unnecessarily, on November 27th 1843 to Prince Albert, while adding his concern at the lack of firm supervision when Lady Lyttelton was absent: ‘The great thing to be looked to is not the learning of a foreign language but the moral and physical superintendence which ought not to be entrusted to uneducated persons’.
It was Stockmar who drew up the Nursery Regulations and who, after interview, had recommended Lady Lyttelton, while also advising special facilities at Buckingham Palace and Windsor for herself and her daughters, a special carriage for her, and a footman to assist her and accompany her carriage. It was also Stockmar who drew up the overall Plan on March 6th 1842:
The Child is born with natural dispositions to good and to evil.
The object of Education is to develop and strengthen the good, and subdue or diminish the evil disposition of our Nature.
Good Education cannot begin too soon.
‘To neglect beginnings’, says Locke, ‘is the fundamental error into which most Parents fall . . .’
The beginnings of Education must therefore be directed to the regulation of the child’s natural Instincts, to give them the right direction and above all to keep its Mind pure . . .
Emphasising the need for early teachers of ‘good, of virtuous, and intelligent Persons’, Stockmar continued:
Good Education is very rare, because it is difficult, and the higher the Rank of the Parents the more difficult it is. Notwithstanding, good Education may be accomplished, and to be deferred from attempting it, merely because it is difficult, would be a dereliction of the most sacred Duties. This can neither be the intention of our good and right minded Queen nor the Prince, but it is quite evident that on account of their Youth, they must lack that knowledge, maturity of judgement and experience, which are requisite to a successful Guidance of the Education of the Royal Infants. It becomes therefore their sacred Duty to consult upon this important subject honest, intelligent, and experienced Persons and not only to consult them but to follow their advice.
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. Because the Royal Children ought not only to be brought up to the moral character, but also fitted to discharge successfully the arduous duties which may eventually devolve upon them as future Sovereigns. Hence the magnitude of the parental responsibility of Sovereigns to their Children; for upon the conscientious discharge of this responsibility will depend hereafter the peace of mind and happiness of themselves and their family, and as far as the prosperity and happiness of a Nation depends upon the personal character of its Sovereign the welfare of England . . .
After a somewhat unnecessarily bleak appraisal of the deficiencies of George III as a parent, and the lamentable consequences, Stockmar went on to warn Victoria and Albert about the ‘delusion’ that they could actually superintend the education of their children. It was essential that this task should be delegated fully to ‘a person of rank’, as ‘the English, so aristocratic in their notions, feelings, and habits would not relish a deviation from the established rule’.
This description certainly covered Lady Lyttelton, who reported daily on the children’s progress, but plans were laid early for the next stage, when the Prince of Wales could be moved from the nursery to the attentions of a male tutor. Again, as Stockmar urged, there must be full delegation, and no parental interference once the choice of tutor was made. Again, the parents fully complied.
One may note at this point a certain dichotomy in Stockmar’s approach. While urging delegation, he was also writing to Albert that the Governor of the Prince of Wales was ‘the man of the highest rank in the Kingdom – His Royal Highness the Prince Albert’, a view warmly shared by the Queen, who wrote that ‘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 sixteen or seventeen he may be a real companion to his father’. Thus, Stockmar saw Albert as the overseer with the ultimate responsibility, but without responsibility for the actual teaching. By the beginning of 1846, with Bertie only five years of age, his parents and Stockmar were seriously disappointed by his physical and mental progress. Although he detected some advance, Stockmar submitted a somewhat sombre analysis of the boy in an undated memorandum to Albert early in 1846, which glumly observes that ‘I must perceive that the Prince remains up to this hour essentially a nervous and excitable child with little power of endurance or sustained action in any direction, and that the utmost care and judgement will be required in his physical and mental training to improve his stamina and develop his faculties to their full extent’. Fortified by the opinion of a Doctor Combe to the effect that Bertie needed ‘a dry bracing air . . . to give tone to the nervous system and also to the nutritive functions’, Stockmar urged ‘well regulated exercise with an appropriate regimen’, while ‘taking care not to go so far at any time as to weaken by fatigue, nor to stop short too soon, so as not to admit the attainment of any increase of strength. In this respect Harm may result equally from pushing mental stimulus too far and from applying it too sparingly or in a wrong direction . . .’
Stockmar’s principal concern, however, was ‘the judicious moral management of the Prince’.
. . . it follows that every irregularity of mental action, every excitement of temper or impatience, every minute of fretting or repressed feeling, every attempt to gratify curiosity or effect a purpose, and even every exhibition of right and amiable feeling too strongly excited, all tend to act more or less injuriously on a brain already so susceptible . . .
The one thing needful above all others with the Prince of Wales at present is as far as possible to promote the uniform, equable, and sustained action of his feelings, affections, moral sentiments and intellectual processes. To do this requires a very favourable combination of good sense, kindliness, firmness, readiness and activity of mind, great tact, thorough control of temper and unwearied patience. A real interest in the trust must also be felt . . .
The search for a suitable tutor to this complex and affectionate, if temperamental, child was conducted with immense seriousness by Stockmar and the parents. In a refreshingly candid memorandum by Stockmar on July 28th 1846 he denounced ‘Utopian’ plans of arduous study drawn up on the mistaken assumption that ‘the Prince is to be a paragon – a youth of universal genius, in whom the highest moral activity and the greatest powers of application will be combined, with the best endowment of every physical, moral and intellectual quality’. It was already clear that any such expectations were unlikely of fulfilment, and Stockmar not only cautioned flexibility but also made the significant point that national and social circumstances would change so considerably before he ascended the throne that an upbringing based on the contemporary status quo could easily create prejudices and anomalies which, in the words of Lord Mahon, would be ‘at variance with the reason and moral perception of enlightened men’. In one of his most deeply interesting analyses of the contemporary social scene, Stockmar continued:
The extraordinary wealth and luxury of a comparative small proportion of the inhabitants of the British Isles, and the appalling poverty and wretchedness of many among the labouring classes, is another ‘anomaly’ which is at variance with our natural sentiments of humanity and justice, and finds its chief precedents in the history of ancient Rome, when she was tottering to her fall. Can this condition of things permanently endure in Great Britain?
Stockmar accordingly urged that the Prince’s education should ‘prepare him for approaching events’ rather than educate him to resist change, while avoiding the other extreme of making him ‘a demagogue or a moral enthusiast, but a man of calm, profound, comprehensive understanding, imbued with a deep conviction of the indispensable necessity of practical morality to the welfare of both Sovereign and People.
‘The proper duty of the Sovereigns of this Country is not to take the lead in change, but to act as a balance wheel on the movement of the social body . . .’ Thus, the Prince must be trained to have ‘freedom of thought, and a firm reliance on the inherent power of sound principles – political, moral, and religious, to sustain themselves and produce practical good, when left in possession of a fair field of development’. The Prince should steer a careful course between religious bigotry and ‘conventional hypocrisy’, and all should beware of ‘the sexual passion (which) is very often the source of innumerable evils to young men’ until ‘the proper time of life’, and emphasised his view that the Prince’s tutor should not be a clergyman, a point to which he often returned. Eventually the Queen and Prince Albert prepared a joint Memorandum on January 3rd 1847 which opened with the words ‘It is necessary to lay down a positive plan for the future management of the Children’s education’, and which was devoted to the different problems and requirements of the four stages of their childhood ‘from the first month after their appearance in this world’ until the final one which would require ‘a person to introduce him into life & the world’.
This is not a solemn nor at all an unsympathetic or unkind document. The couple warmly agreed that for the first six years of life ‘The chief objects here are their physical development, the actual rearing up, the training to obedience. They are too little for real instruction, but they are taught their language & the two principal foreign languages, French & German, as well to speak as to read . . . Children at this age have the greatest facility in acquiring languages’. It should not be thought that Vicky was an easy or docile child. After her marriage she received this letter from her mother: ‘A more insubordinate and unequal-tempered child and girl I think I never saw! The trouble you gave us all was indeed very great. Comparatively speaking, we have none whatever with the others. You and Bertie (in very different ways) were indeed great difficulties’.57
The actual programme for the Prince of Wales can be seen from one entry by his governess, Miss Hildyard, for a day in January 1848:
From 20 minutes after 8 until 9 – Arithmetic, Dictation, Writing
¼ past 11 to ¼ past 12 – French
1 to 5 minutes before 2 – German
4 to 5 – Reading, Geography, Writing on the Slate
5 to 6 – Dancing
On other days Chronology & History read aloud Poetry
After 6 read some story book
Play with the map of History or with counters.
The search for the Tutor was eventually resolved by the appointment of Henry Birch, a Cambridge graduate and Eton tutor, but only after much anguish and difficulty.
Birch was recommended by Sir James Clark, to whom he wrote with a certain smugness on May 30th 1848 that ‘I boast of no other place of Education but Eton, where I came from home at about 10 years of age and rose to be Captain of the School’, but both Prince Albert and Stockmar were concerned – and rightly, as it transpired – by Birch’s evident ecclesiastical ambitions. Albert was particularly worried that he might have been ‘contaminated’ by the teachings of Pusey, and received assurances from the Bishops of Ely and Chester, to whom he referred the point. Peel, after discreet enquiries, endorsed Clark’s recommendation, and Stockmar, after interviewing Birch, was satisfied, and the latter added that no false economies should be made in salaries or holidays for the staff attending the Royal children, and particularly the Prince of Wales.
Albert had been contemplating a high salary for the Prince’s tutor, which was a very handsome emolument, but Birch proved a hard bargainer. The moment it was clear to him that he would receive the appointment he informed Prince Albert that his fees at Eton were substantially greater, and Albert hastily revised the proposed fee to equal this very considerable amount. In the event, Birch received even more than this and it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the Prince had taken Stockmar’s strictures about excessive economy rather too much to heart, and that Birch was selling his services at a singularly high level.
But this was not all. Birch’s personal ambitions went beyond money. On April 12th 1849 Albert set out the Prince’s programme of tuition and added that ‘Sunday is to be kept as a day of recreation & amusement in which the Prince will be glad to see a little more of his brother & sisters than the occupation of the week will allow’, but Birch saw his role as something more than a temporal tutor. He was courteously indignant about Royal comment on his attendance at services and obvious indications of his remorseless movement towards Holy Orders. He demanded an assistant ‘taken from a comparatively humble station in life’ and enquired of Stockmar (December 13th 1849) ‘If the Prince of Wales is to become eventually the Head of the English Church, how is he to be trained, but in the plain unadulterated scriptural teaching of that Church?’
Birch’s letters to Stockmar and Albert obviously gave them concern, and Queen Victoria became so worried that she set out a detailed memorandum about the Prince’s education to Birch, which included the point that ‘no corporal punishment without report to the decision of the Prince Albert’ would be permitted, and eventually a formal ‘Final Agreement’ between the Royal parents and Birch was prepared by them and revised by Stockmar on the issue of religious instruction and influence.
From this voluminous correspondence it is clear that the parents felt that they had little choice but to accept the recommendations concerning Birch, but that they were increasingly perturbed by Birch’s evident ambition and religiosity. These concerns did not go as far as challenging the universal recommendation, and the couple were loyal to Birch, in spite of their added dismay when he insisted upon his intention of eventually taking Holy Orders.
Birch instituted a firm regime of six day a week tutoring, with limited holidays, and a daily report to the parents. He found Bertie ‘extremely disobedient, impertinent to his masters, and unwilling to submit to discipline’, selfish, short-tempered, and extremely sensitive. He considered that the boy’s temperament was uneven, that he was naturally rebellious, and often refused to answer questions which he knew perfectly well. Some indication of Birch’s character can be gleaned from a note to himself in April 1849 in his papers about the Prince of Wales:
He must obey – I must command – His temper must yield – His affection must be won. How one and the same hand is to effect this, I know not. I must see Baron Stockmar.
In an undated letter, but probably of the same time, he wrote to Prince Albert:
Sir,
The conduct of the Prince of Wales begins to frighten me. I begin to search myself and see if my ingenuity can devise any other mode of dealing with him, but I seem to have tried every expedient, and I do hope that no feeling of delicacy towards myself will prevent Her Majesty and Your Royal Highness from asking me to resign my charge into other hands, if you think that a change would produce any better result at any time.
The moment that one attempts to teach anything arises the difficulty – an unwillingness to give himself the slightest trouble or exertion . . .
I will continue to do my best, but it seems of little avail.
Albert hastened to write to say that Birch had the full confidence of himself and the Queen, but whether it was the result of the advice of Stockmar or Birch, or, more probably, Clark, the parents resorted to the extraordinary measure of asking the very fashionable phrenologist Dr. George Combe to whom reference has already been made, to examine the unruly and difficult patient. On June 22nd 1850 he submitted his report on the boy, not yet nine years old:
. . . The Prince of Wales appears to me to have improved very considerably since I saw him three years ago. He is in better health, his head has grown in all the regions, and the indications of excitability, through feebleness in the nervous constitution, generally have diminished. The intellectual organs have become larger absolutely, although perhaps not relatively to those situated in the posterior region of the brain. There are still, however, signs of a delicate constitution of the brain, the effects of which will probably be a degree of inaptitude for mental labour, and an aversion to it at particular times; and, on other occasions, an excess of activity, especially in the emotional faculties . . .
It is a fundamental principle in Phrenology that no organs are in themselves bad. God, who instituted the brain and organised to every part of it certain functions, provided a legitimate sphere of action for each. It is, therefore, only activity in excess, or ill-directed, that leads to evil.
In the Prince of Wales, the organs of Combativeness, Destructiveness, Self-Esteem, Concentrativeness and Firmness are all large. The intellectual organs are only moderately developed; and in a child, one of the effects of this combination will be a strong self-will, amounting at times to obstinacy; a tendency to anger and opposition, and a temporary apparent insensibility to the influence of reason and the requirements of duty . . .
The dismayed parents, reading this appalling analysis, could at least console themselves that, in the judgement of Dr. Combe, the Organs of Conscientiousness, Benevolence, and Veneration were impressively large, although that of Cautiousness was ‘only moderately developed’. It was also open to question whether Dr. Combe was being particularly helpful when he observed that ‘Every fit of obstinacy or passion should be viewed not as an act of voluntary disobedience, but as a physiological manifestation or indication of a certain cerebral condition’. Moreover, Dr. Combe recommended the appointment of a tutor whose own cranium had been exposed to the same ruthless examination, and who would be prepared ‘to study Phrenology and to submit to be trained to apply it . . . The public sentiment in favour of Phrenology is advanc-ing: In twenty or thirty years hence, a new generation may ask why was the Prince of Wales denied the advantages of its application? And it may be difficult to find a satisfactory answer . . .’ One would like to think that the parents saw through this pseudo-scientific nonsense; in any event, the prattlings of Dr. Combe blessedly and abruptly disappear from the voluminous archives on the Prince of Wales’ upbringing that Albert meticulously filed and preserved.
To Stockmar he confided his concerns, who replied on August 4th 1849:
A letter received yesterday from the Queen again depresses my hopes in reference to the progress of the Prince of Wales. I therefore beg you will from time to time let me hear from you with the results of your own observation on the state of things. There can be no theorising as to what it may be necessary, possible, and therefore judicious, to do in this business. Nothing but experience, acquired by close observation of actual facts, can give us indications how to proceed, and form a sure guide to the course to be persevered in . . .
Albert’s observations were, simply, that the Prince of Wales remained highly strung, emotional, warm-hearted and devoted to his parents, and – to modern eyes strangely – fond of the tedious and sanctimonious Birch, but also rebellious, irritable, and clearly very unhappy. His parents were baffled and troubled, particularly when Bertie was compared with the adored Vicky, but they faithfully followed Stockmar’s instructions of not interfering with Birch and his tutors, while hovering very uneasily around what was clearly a major breakdown of the grandiose Plan. Birch had the great quality that Bertie deeply liked him, and the feeling was wholly returned. The Queen wrote that ‘I never felt at my ease with Birch. There always seemed to be something between us’, and one difference may be seen in Birch’s final report, which condemned the boy’s enforced segregation from his contemporaries, blamed his ‘peculiarities’ on this fact, and concluded that Bertie ‘will eventually turn out a good and, in my humble opinion, a great man’.
Unhappily, matters deteriorated when Birch was replaced in 1852 by Frederick Gibbs, a lawyer and former Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Birch’s schedule of work had been formidable enough, but Gibbs immediately increased it, and added lessons in riding, drill, and gymnastics. Not altogether surprisingly, the condition of the subject did not improve.
By this stage Albert and Victoria were becoming seriously troubled by the evident failure of the Plan. Their affection for Bertie was considerable, and he was to them a delightful, amusing, and charming son. In other circumstances they might have realised that his particular quality – and one not to be under-estimated – was a remarkable ability to get on with people, and a questing intelligence and understanding of humanity that marked him out as a truly precocious and exceptionally sensitive boy. But they could never forget that he was the future King of England, and while Prince Albert was tolerant and patient, the Queen kept comparing her young son unfavourably with her husband. And, in the Coburg background, there was the constant drum-beat of Stockmar’s high-flown estimates of what a Prince and future King should be. And thus, with the very best of intentions, and with an earnestness and love that is usually underestimated, the young parents laid the foundations of a grievous tragedy for themselves and their son.
The greatest problem of all was Victoria’s ardent desire to see Bertie develop as a second Albert, and the realisation that the boy’s personality and intelligence were very different from those of his father was the principal cause of her acute disappointment. Immediately after his birth she had written to Leopold that ‘I hope and pray he may be like his dearest Papa’, and her impatience with him, which developed early and which was to endure throughout her life, were in contrast to Albert’s immense patience and care for his son. She never really deviated from the ambition expressed at Bertie’s birth that ‘You will understand how fervent my prayers and I am sure everybody’s must be, to see him resemble his angelic father in every, every respect, both in body and mind. Oh! my dearest Uncle, I am sure if you knew how happy, how blessed I feel, and how proud I feel in possessing such a perfect being as my husband, as he is, and if you think that you have been instrumental in bringing about this union, it must gladden your heart! How happy should I be to see our child grow up like him!’
The father, despite many disappointments, became more realistic, and was evidently very pleased by a favourable report from Stockmar in 1860:
That you see so many signs of improvement in the young gentleman is a great joy and comfort to us; for parents who watch their son with anxiety and set their hopes for him high are in some measure incapable of forming a clear estimate, and are at the same time apt to be impatient if their hopes are not fulfilled.
Greville came to the view that the Queen ‘does not much like the child’, and there is strong supporting evidence for this view from other observers. Of Prince Albert’s devotion and determination to fulfil his view that education was the finest legacy a father could bequeath to his children – a remark which explains his devotion to his wayward father – there is no doubt, and throughout his life his son spoke of him with a love and respect that is evidence in itself. But Albert never wrote to his son as he did to Vicky when she married:
I am not of a demonstrative nature and therefore you can hardly know how dear you have always been to me, and what a void you have left behind in my heart: yet not in my heart for there assuredly you will abide henceforth, as till now you have done, but in my daily life, which is evermore reminding my heart of your absence.
By now the Prince of Wales had been joined in his education by Alfred, and Victoria noticed with concern that there were clear signs of exhaustion in her sons as a result of Gibbs’ regime. Dr. Becker, who taught the Princes German, was so worried that he sent Albert a long memorandum in January 1852, pointing out that Bertie’s fits of rage and surliness were a perfectly natural reaction to such a regime. ‘To anyone who knows the functions performed by the nerves in the human body’, he wrote, ‘it is quite superflous to demonstrate that these outbreaks of passion, especially with so tender a child as the Prince of Wales in his moments of greatest mental exhaustion, must be destructive to the child’. Unfortunately, Becker then, no doubt remembering the stern work ethic of his master, somewhat qualified his strictures, but added that what the Prince needed most of all was encouragement, and certainly not irony or mockery from his parents when he failed to meet their impossibly high standards. Thus, Gibbs, whom the Princes keenly hated, was permitted to continue on his course, and the wise warnings of Becker went wholly unheeded.
That Prince Albert loved his son deeply is absolutely without question, as is his concern for his welfare and future. But there is also no doubt that Bertie had become a severe disappointment, and it is very significant that Becker protested at Albert’s use of irony or mockery in reprimanding him. Victoria wrote in her Journal that her son ‘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’. Many years later she took up this matter again with Vicky, when she wrote (April 10th 1861) that ‘you did not quite set about making matters better, for you kept telling me all his most stupid and silly remarks (said as he too often does – without thinking – partly to tease you and partly to give vent to his temper) and enraged me, low and wretched as I was – greatly. If one wishes to pour oil and not to “keep the kettle boiling” one must not repeat everything another who irritates has said – else it of course makes matters much worse. He left on Monday. His voice made me so nervous I could hardly bear it’.
The fact that his elder sister was clearly his father’s favourite, and that he was often the victim of his rebukes and sarcasm, clearly left its mark on his already faltering self-confidence.
There was also the fact that the children could not fail to notice the occasional – but violent – explosions of anger between their parents, all the more frightening because they occurred so seldom but were so intense. Indeed, by selection of their sparse correspondence when in anger the wholly false portrait would be conveyed of an unhappy and indeed embittered marriage in which harsh accusations of selfishness and worse were exchanged with an alarming vehemence and passion. The reality was that they loved each other deeply – ‘My love and sympathy are limitless and inexhaustible’ Albert wrote to her after a particularly fierce difference in 1857 – but there were storms in which Victoria seemed to lose all self-control and would turn on Albert with a ferocity which made him write on one occasion to her that ‘Neither will I play the part of Greatheart and forgive, that is not at all how I feel, but I am ready to ignore all that has happened and take a new departure’ after another unhappy episode, and, after another, undated, but probably in 1861:
You have again lost your self-control quite unnecessarily. I did not say a word which could wound you, and I did not begin the conversation, but you have followed me about and continued it from room to room. There is no need for me to promise to trust you, for it was not a question of trust, but of your fidgety nature, which makes you insist on entering, with feverish eagerness, into details about orders and wishes which, in the case of a Queen, are commands, to whomever they may be given. This is your nature; it is not against Vicky, but is the same with everyone and has been the cause of much unpleasant-ness for you. It is the dearest wish of my heart to save you from these and worse consequences, but the only result of my efforts is that I am accused of want of feeling, hard heartedness, injustice, hatred, jealousy, distrust, etc. etc. I do my duty towards you even though it means that life is embittered by ‘scenes’ when it should be governed by love and harmony. I look upon this with patience as a test which has to be undergone, but you hurt me desperately and at the same time do not help yourself.
The Prince brought to his task of Bertie’s education a remarkable enthusiasm and dedication. Throughout his eldest son’s childhood he was himself immensely busy, impressing everyone by his prodigious appetite for work and the extraordinary width of his interests and knowledge. And yet, every day, he would carefully study the daily report from Gibbs on his sons’ progress – or notable lack thereof – and discuss the problems earnestly with his wife. At no point that I can discover did he entertain serious doubts about his methods, although Stockmar did. In a fascinating comment to Gibbs, Stockmar described the Prince of Wales as ‘an exaggerated copy of his mother’, but that ‘you must make it the business of your life to do the best you can. And if you cannot make anything of the eldest you must try with the younger one’. In the event, Alfred was to prove an even worse candidate for the Stockmar-Albert experiment. Stockmar, indeed, began to harbour suspicions that the bad blood on the mother’s side was coming out in the sons, and particularly noted how the bad Dukes had taken ‘the greatest pleasure in making mischief – in giving pain to people and in setting them one against the other’. An effort to acquaint the boys with contemporaries at Eton was a dismal failure. Starved of companionship all their young lives, with virtually no friends, their bewildered shyness and lack of confidence manifested itself in such rudeness that the Provost of Eton complained strongly to Gibbs about their conduct. In later life the Prince of Wales admitted that he had been intolerant and suspicious in his youth, and too willing to make use of his position.
One becomes very conscious of the fact that by the time he was in his early teens his father’s concern for him had developed into impatience and disappointment, although love – deeply reciprocated – never faded. All the early plans that he and the Queen had discussed for giving her heir a significant role in government and giving him their confidence had long been abandoned. Victoria did have her doubts. ‘You say no one is perfect but Papa’, she wrote to Vicky in 1861, ‘but he has his faults, too. He is often very trying in his hastiness and over-love of business, and I think you would find it trying if Fritz [Vicky’s husband] was as hasty and harsh (momentarily and unintentionally as it is) as he can be!’ One of his few permitted companions – the future Marquess of Lincolnshire – wrote that ‘he was afraid of his father, who seemed a proud, shy, stand-offish man, not calculated to make friends easily with children. I was frightened to death of him’. And Queen Victoria did not exactly help with her repeated admonitions to her son to live up to the standards of a father ‘so great, so good, so faultless’.
But in spite of all disappointments and frustrations, the father never stopped trying. He took his son to important occasions, introduced him to eminent men, taught him to shoot and fish, instilled in him Bertie’s lifelong love of the Turf, and took him frequently to the theatre. Science, literature, music and art were drawn to the boy’s attention and interest, and with permanent good effects. On this aspect, Albert’s consideration and concern for his son were seen at their very best, and although they were deliberately undertaken to broaden the Prince’s knowledge and understanding as part of the great programme, they were by far the most successful, and explain why the son, although often unhappy and resentful of his father’s severity of standards, so revered and loved him. If there had been more emphasis on attracting the boy’s interests and genuine talents, and less on subjecting him to relentless intellectual pressure that was far beyond his capacities, the results must have been very different.
In this sad story Prince Albert must bear the principal respon-sibility, but not the only one. Queen Victoria, although a totally adoring wife, was basically uninterested in her children until they became adults, whereas her husband, despite his attitude to his two elder sons, was genuinely devoted and sympathetic to all his children, and especially to Vicky. It is not without significance that the most intense strains in their marriage involved, either directly or indirectly, the health and problems of their children. ‘It is indeed a pity’, Albert wrote to her on October 1st 1856, ‘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. It is not possible to be on happy friendly terms with people you have just been scolding’.
It is not at all unusual for a parent to have favourites among children, just as it is not at all uncommon for children to have a particular favourite in their parents, and the fact that Albert failed to understand his elder son and became progressively exasperated by him is quite understandable. It was the son’s deep misfortune that, being the Heir, he was to be systematically moulded into near-perfection by methods that were wholly inappropriate to his essentially warm, relaxed, and affectionate personality. In retrospect, and not only in retrospect when one reads his tutors’ daily reports, it is evident that even as a child there was no hope of bringing him remotely to the intellectual level that his father desired. His mind, although good, lacked any spark of that urgent thirst for knowledge and understanding of its practical applications that made Albert such an extraordinary man. Indeed, it is clear that Stockmar was absolutely right when he described Bertie as ‘an exaggerated copy of his mother’, but she, besotted by Albert, despite their frequent and sometimes violent, differences, had at this stage little real interest in her children, as she frankly recognised with characteristic honesty in a letter she wrote to the Queen of Prussia on October 6th 1856:
Even here, when Albert is often away all day long, I find no especial pleasure or compensation in the company of the elder children . . . and only very occasionally do I find the rather intimate intercourse with them either easy or agreeable. You will not understand this, but it is caused by various factors.
Firstly, I only feel properly à mon aise and quite happy when Albert is with me; secondly, I am used to carrying on my many affairs quite alone; and then I have grown up all alone, accustomed to the society of adult (and never with younger) people – lastly I cannot get used to the fact that Vicky is almost grown up. To me she still seems the same child, who had to be kept in order and therefore must not become too intimate. Here are my sincere feelings in contrast to yours.
Here was the real problem. As Sir Philip Magnus has shrewdly, and rightly, observed: ‘Unlike the Queen, the Prince Consort tried to treat his children as equals; and they were able to penetrate his stiffness and reserve because they realised instinctively not only that he loved them but that he enjoyed and needed their company. All, except the Princess Royal, were afraid of him, but in a very interesting conversation with Lord Clarendon in December 1858, Prince Albert expressed “something like regret or doubt” at what he termed the “aggressive” system that the Queen had followed. He explained that “he had always been embarrassed by the alarm which he felt lest the Q’s mind should be excited by any opposition to her will; and that, in regard to the children, the disagreeable office of punishment had always fallen on him”.’58
The more one examines the correspondence, the detailed reports, and the stern admonitions, the more one realises how deeply Prince Albert cared for his children.
So far as his relationship with Bertie is concerned, the more one is struck by the remarkable similarities between that relationship and that which subsequently existed between Lord Randolph Churchill and his son, Winston, who only subsequently appreciated how deeply his father had cared for him, and how remote and selfish had his mother been. Churchill’s poignant remark, ‘I loved her dearly – but at a distance’, could have been uttered with equal fervour by the Prince of Wales about his mother. There is a certain significant coldness in her Journal comment on August 27th 1856:
We took leave of poor Bertie, who was pale and trembling for some time before, and much affected, poor dear child, at the prospect of this first long separation, for he feels very deeply. Though it is sad, I am sure it will be for his own good.
Prince Albert’s mounting uneasiness about the effects on his son of the regime which he had so enthusiastically endorsed, and had planned so carefully, now became gradually apparent. There was a marked relaxation, manifested in approval for a European tour – admittedly carefully controlled and monitored – and also in matters such as his personal allowance and freedom to buy his own clothes, a privilege marred for him by his mother’s admonition not to ‘wear anything extravagant or slang, not because we don’t like it, but because it would prove a want of self-respect and be an offence against decency, leading – as it has often done in others – to an indifference to what is morally wrong’. The more one reads Queen Victoria’s letters to her son the more does one appreciate why his reverence for her was never really translated into love. ‘I feel very sad about him’, she wrote bluntly and coldly in March 1858. ‘He is so idle and weak. God grant that he may take things more to heart and be more serious for the future and get more power. The heart is good, warm and affectionate’.
But his backwardness emerges very clearly from his letters to his parents, although there is a particularly sad one written on August 25th 1859:
My dear Papa,
I hope you will accept my best wishes for many happy returns of your birthday. May you live to see me grow up a good son, and very grateful for all your kindness. I will try to be a better boy, and not to give Mama and you so much trouble. Very many happy returns of the day.
I am, my dear Papa,
Your most affectionate son,
Albert.
When he went on an unofficial, and largely incognito, tour of the country in 1857, his reports were noticeably superficial (thus, on Leeds: ‘it is a very dirty town, & the inhabitants are very low people’), and those he sent to his father on trips to Europe in 1858 and 1859 drew pained and rather scathing letters and comments from his father. When Bertie met Metternich his report was simply that he was ‘a very nice old gentleman and very like the late Duke of Wellington’ (Metternich wrote of Bertie: ‘Il avait l’air embarrassé et très triste’). Albert wrote that he was ‘not pleased’ with his son’s letters, nor with the standard of the Journal that he instructed his son to keep. On reading them, one appreciates his concern. Thus, a letter from Nuremburg, January 15th 1859:
My dear Papa,
The ball at Brussells went off very well & was very pretty, I enjoyed it very much. Uncle Leopold spoke a great deal about the affairs in Italy, & the probability of a war, he was very much alarmed about it. We left Brussells last Thursday at 9.30 & arrived at Cologne after a prosperous journey at 4 o’clock . . .
Concerned by what to him appeared the extraordinary political naïveté of his son, Albert wrote to him at length an analysis of the European situation, and with particular reference to the crisis in Italy. All he received in return was a letter from Rome, on March 14th 1859, in which Bertie simply remarked: ‘Many thanks for your long & interesting letter which I received this morning by Post. It is very kind of you to explain to me the politics of the different nations, which certainly seem very complicated’.
Meanwhile, Albert, having vetoed Bertie’s desire to join the Army, agreed that he should sit for the military examination, and organised his preparation under Gibbs at White Lodge, in Richmond Park. A trio of supervisors – two of whom had won the Victoria Cross in the Crimea – was appointed after careful vetting, and given detailed instructions about how he was to be brought into manhood. The care and detail of Prince Albert’s advice, covering ‘Appearance, Deportment and Dress’, ‘Manners of Conduct towards Others’, and ‘The Power to Acquit Himself Creditably in Conversation, or whatever May Be the Occupation of Society’ appear at first glance to be insufferably earnest and glum, but bear a second look. Admonitions about dress (‘he will borrow nothing from the fashions of the groom or the gamekeeper, and whilst avoiding the frivolity and foolish vanity of dandyism, will take care that his clothes are of the best quality’) are balanced by the recognition of the fact that whereas trivia such as gossip, cards, and billiards are deplorable ‘some knowledge of those studies and pursuits which adorn society and make it interesting’ was essential. Furthermore, ‘The manners and conduct of a gentleman towards others are founded on the basis of kindness, consideration, and the absence of selfishness’ has an authentic ring, and certainly left its mark. Albert’s chronic shyness, nervousness, and sense of duty often effectively concealed – but not to his family and closest associates – a genuine kindness and gentleness. Throughout this apparently tedious memorandum there shines a deep concern for his son, and an absolutely sincere desire to help him.
To the immense relief of Bertie, Gibbs was removed from his arduous and singularly ill-conducted responsibilities in November 1858. The mother took comfort in ‘his implicit reliance in everything on dearest Papa, that perfection of human beings!’ while the father, although considering ‘Bertie grown up and improved’, was troubled by his increasing fascination with clothes, and his lack of ‘mental occupation’. Thus, while the Queen continued to lament his deficiencies and his inability to match up to the qualities of his father, Albert was becoming more realistic. ‘His manners have improved very much and the best school for him is the external stress of life’, he wrote to his beloved elder daughter, while expressing dismay at his son’s continued erratic behaviour – at one moment charming and impressive, and yet treating his servants so badly. Unconsciously echoing Stockmar’s comment, the Queen wrote to Vicky that ‘Bertie . . . is my caricature. That is the misfortune, and, in a man, this is so much worse. You are quite your dear, beloved Papa’s child’.
These events have immense significance in comprehending the complex characters both of Albert and Victoria, and their marriage. As the sad saga of Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, gradually unfolds the observer is struck less by the imperfections of the father than by the inadequacies of the mother. One can easily lament, and criticise, what he and Stockmar tried to accomplish, but one can understand why they attempted it just as easily as it is easy, with all the benefits of hindsight, to realise why they failed. But it is remarkable that a mother could have remained so indifferent to the obvious distress of a child, and could have so freely accepted, over many years, a regime that was obviously so unsuited to him. Her adoration of her husband cannot be regarded as an adequate explanation, nor her reverence for Stockmar. Thus, while she condemned her son as ‘a thorough and cunning lazybones’ (January 1860), the Prince was delighted when Stockmar or anyone else reported favourably upon him, and there is a certain humour when he wrote of his son that ‘usually his intellect is of no more use than a pistol packed at the bottom of a trunk if one were attacked in the robber-infested Appennines.
One is reminded again of Winston Churchill’s relations with his father, and his account of how that relationship ended:
To me he seemed to own the key to everything or almost everything worth having. But if ever I began to show the slightest idea of comradeship, he was immediately offended . . . Just as friendly relations were ripening into an Entente, and an alliance or least a military agreement seemed to my mind not beyond the realms of reasonable endeavour, he vanished for ever.59
The removal of Gibbs was long overdue, and this delay may be regarded as a major error. Major Robert Lindsay, equerry to the Prince of Wales, wrote to Phipps that he considered that ‘a continuance of the present system will not be beneficial to the Prince . . . Mr. Gibbs has no influence. He and the Prince are so much out of sympathy with one another that a wish expressed by Mr. Gibbs is sure to meet with opposition on the part of the Prince . . . Mr. Gibbs has devoted himself to the boy, but no affection is given him in return, nor do I wonder at it, for they are by nature thoroughly unsuited to one another. I confess I quite understand the Prince’s feelings towards Mr. Gibbs, for tho’ I respect his uprightness and devotion, I could not give him sympathy, confidence or friendship’ (July 27th 1858). Action was taken, belatedly, and Gibbs was retired. ‘Mr. Gibbs certainly failed during the last 2 years entirely, incredibly’, the Queen wrote to the Princess Royal. But although the Prince of Wales had proved a terrible disappointment to his mother, Prince Albert emphasised that ‘Bertie has remarkable social talent’, which he demonstrated in Berlin and on a highly successful and greatly praised official visit to Canada and the United States in 1859. Gibbs was replaced by Colonel Robert Bruce, brother of Lord Elgin, who received the formal title of ‘Governor’ to the Prince of Wales.
Meanwhile, however, the Prince of Wales’s desire to enter the Army and make a career had been frustrated, he had been ‘bored to death’ at White Lodge, and his brief periods at Edinburgh, Oxford, and Cambridge Universities, where he was strictly segregated, were not happy. This segregation from his contemporaries was made even worse by his father’s insistence that his son gave select dinner parties for eminent senior members of the Universities, and on being given the lists of guests. Not surprisingly, these were sombre and worthy, and one’s heart aches for a young man presiding over dinners such as one he gave at Madingley Hall, where the guests were the Vice Chancellor, ‘the aged Prof. Sedgwick’, the Senior Tutor of Trinity, the Masters of two colleges, and the Public Orator, and one is not surprised to read Bruce writing of ‘the poignant contrast between the portly grey-haired guests and the faintly epicene beauty of their adolescent host’. Even as a child, Bertie had given clear evidence of what proved to be a lifelong facility to become quickly bored, and his heroism, both at Oxford and Cambridge, in presiding over such glum and intellectual feasts to please his father deserved more praise than it received. His father greatly enjoyed the company of such men, and it was one of the reasons for his success at Cambridge as Chancellor. He found it impossible to comprehend that his son did not, and the latter’s enduring distaste for intellectuals was perhaps the only real result of his brief and unhappy sojourns at these ancient Universities.
Bruce, having noted his success and social talent, counselled the parents that an early marriage was highly desirable. It was evident that the Prince, in spite of his closetted and unhappy education, had a natural and infectious charm, and as he emerged from his isolation and boredom into young manhood was increasingly – and understandably – attracted by the many pleasures which suddenly opened before him. While Albert lamented his son’s fascination for clothes and taste, Bruce was more worried about other aspects of Bertie’s developing hedonism. The only contemporaries he had truly appreciated at Oxford were a notably hard-drinking, hard-living, and hard-riding group of flamboyantly rich young aristocrats, and there had been an incident on the European tour when Bertie had much too much to drink and had embraced a lady (an event sonorously described by Gladstone as ‘a squalid little debauch’). Prince Albert had detected the good side, that his son had ‘remarkable social talent’ and could be ‘lively, quick and sharp when his mind is set on anything, which is seldom’, but he returned from one visit to Oxford ‘terribly anxious for the future’. Meanwhile, the subject of these earnest conclaves was in miserable isolation at Madingley Hall, five miles out of Cambridge, gloomy and frustrated, still appealing to his parents to be allowed to have a military career, and at least a period of service with the Guards.
But the sudden and unexpected flowering of their difficult, volatile, and temperamental son into a young man of great popularity and with a real personal style considerably disconcerted his parents, and made them very receptive to Bruce’s arguments. Thus, the hurried search for a suitable bride began.
Having agreed that the Heir could only marry a Royal wife, the parents were startled by the discovery of how limited the field was. Vicky, pressed into service on behalf of her parents and brother, was struck (December 21st 1860) by the ‘great dearth of nice princesses at present’, and on April 20th 1861 wrote again to her mother:
What are we to do? Unfortunately, princesses do not spring up like mushrooms out of the earth or grow on trees . . . I sit continually with the Gotha Almanack in my hands turning the leaves over in hopes to discover someone who has not come to light!
The facts that the future Queen must be a Protestant, a Princess, and from a country with whom Britain was in political amity gravely reduced the options. There was also the factor of Bertie himself, who, when he was informed of the industry being conducted on his behalf, protested strongly, and declared emphatically that he would marry only for love. While Albert’s concern was for suitability, he appreciated that an arranged marriage with a plain and undesirable princess would hardly resolve Bertie’s problems nor avoid the difficulties to which Bruce had so tactfully alluded. The Queen, while insisting on Royalty, was also very sympathetic on this point.
Vicky, after suggesting the beautiful and intelligent Princess Elizabeth of Wied (later Queen of Romania), to which proposal her brother did not respond favourably, came up with the sixteen-year-old Danish Princess Alexandra, a girl of great beauty, but whose family was unfortunately involved in the interminable Schleswig-Holstein question. An Anglo-Danish marriage to the daughter of the heir to the throne of Denmark would be regarded with great coldness in Prussia and Germany, with which Prince Albert had strong personal sympathies. To add to the already considerable complications, the Queen and the Prince disapproved of the Hesse-Cassel family of which Princess Alexandra’s mother was a member.
Nonetheless, there was virtually no available alternative, as the Prince unenthusiastically remarked when he was presented with the photographs of the possible candidates, and his father was now so eager to see his son safely married that the German objections rapidly assumed a lower place in his considerations, and when he heard that the Tsar of Russia was also very interested in Alexandra for his own heir, his remaining reservations vanished. ‘It would be a thousand pities if you were to lose her’, he told his son, and wrote anxiously to Vicky that ‘We dare not let her slip away’.
‘What a pity she is who she is!’ the Queen wrote on December 8th 1860, and, on February 25th 1861: ‘The mother’s family are bad – the father’s foolish’. But these grave disadvantages were overwhelmed by Vicky’s enthusiasm for her when she met Alexandra in May: ‘Oh if she only was not a Dane and not related to the Hesses I should say yes – she is the one a thousand times over’.
Thus the matter was settled so far as the Royal parents were concerned. To Vicky the Queen wrote on June 19th:
Dear Papa and I are both so grateful to you about all the trouble you have taken about Princess Alix. May he only be worthy of such a jewel! There is the rub! When I look at Louis60 and at the charming, sweet, bright, lively expression of the one – and at the sallow, dull, blasé and heavy look of the other I own I feel very sad . . . The contrast pains me very deeply. Let us hope that certain prospects may make a great change.
Vicky and Fritz ardently promoted the match, in defiance of German nationalist feelings, and the protests of Stockmar and Duke Ernest were rejected with surprising brusqueness, Ernest being bluntly told by Albert to mind his own business and keep out of the matter. Bertie, who received a somewhat precise, but not unsympathetic, memorandum from his father on the subject of matrimony before his departure, went to Germany on the pretext of attending military manoeuvres, and met Princess Alexandra in the romantic context of a rendezvous in front of the altar in the cathedral at Speyer on September 24th. On the following day they met again, and Fritz reported that ‘the reverse of indifference on both sides’ had been demonstrated. On his return to Balmoral he spoke very approvingly to his mother of Alexandra. ‘Bertie is extremely pleased with her’, she wrote to Vicky, ‘but as for being in love, I don’t think he can be or that he is capable of enthusiasm about anything in the world’. As Bertie had met Alexandra only twice, very briefly, and was being propelled very reluctantly into matrimony at the age of nineteen, this comment may be justifiably regarded as both unfeeling and unfair. ‘As for B’s affair’, his mother reported to Vicky on October 10th, ‘it is not very prosperous. A sudden fear of marrying and above all of having children (which for so young a man is so strange a fear) seems to have got hold of him – but I hope he will see this in its right light ere long’.
Prince Albert was more understanding, although he wished the match to succeed, and wrote to his son about his desire for delay:
That is quite reasonable and proper, and it would, unless you had actually fallen in love (which after this apparent hesitation can hardly be supposed to be the case) have been imprudent on your part to go further in the matter without due reflection.
Thus matters stood at the middle of 1861, with the Royal parents relieved at the prospects of a reasonably suitable marriage for their difficult and errant eldest son. The Princess Royal was happily married, Princess Alice was engaged, and their other children were thriving, with the sad exception of little Leopold when it became apparent that he was a haemophiliac, and thus an additional centre of the parents’ concern.
With this exception, and after all the difficulties they had jointly experienced in their sincere and dedicated endeavours to achieve the best possible upbringing for their children, the Queen and the Prince could justifiably feel that they could be reasonably confident about the future of their large and growing family.
57 28th July 1858 Kronberg Papers, quoted in Andrew Sinclair: The Other Victoria (1982).
58 Magnus: King Edward VII, p. 20.
59 Winston Churchill: My Early Life, p. 46.
60 Prince Louis, eldest son of Prince Charles of Hesse, and later Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt, who married Princess Alice in July 1862.