Childhood at Court, 1819-1914 (22 page)

Ena was a bright, lively child, with a tendency to answer back that irked her grandmother. Before the Duke of York’s wedding in June 1893, she was warned to be quiet in church, as nobody was meant to talk through. Everything was fine until the Archbishop began to read the service, only to be interrupted by a shrill five-year-old voice calling out, ‘But, Mummy, that man is talking.’
¹³
Queen Victoria, she thought, never seemed to understand children, and asked them so many questions that they became confused. She resented the fact that she and her brothers, being family residents, were nearly always given ‘dull nursery meals’, while visiting children were treated to eclairs and ices. Once she was moved to make her own defiant protest, saying clearly as her grace, ‘Thank God for my dull dinner’, much to the Queen’s anger.
¹⁴

At the age of six Ena had an accident when her pony fell and rolled on top of her. Beatrice saw the groom leading her back by the hand, noticed she was crying, and soon had her safely in bed. The first doctor summoned suggested that their might have been some indication of suffusion of blood on the brain, and a second doctor was called for. Fortunately, there was no injury to the spine.

Nevertheless, it was a time of grave anxiety. ‘You will be glad to hear that dear little Ena is nearly quite herself again,’ Beatrice wrote to a friend at court (6 March 1894), ‘& I hope soon every trace of the terrible accident will have disappeared. We can never be thankful enough for her merciful perseverance, but we passed through terrible days of suspense and adversity.’
¹⁵

Even more suspense and adversity was to touch the Battenbergs less than two years later. Chafing at the emptiness of life in his new home, Henry volunteered to serve in the Ashanti campaign in Africa in 1895. Only with the greatest reluctance did his wife and mother-in-law let him go. They never saw him again, for in January 1896 he contracted malaria and died on his way home. To preserve his body on its last sad journey through the tropical heat, it was placed in a tank made from biscuit tins and filled with rum. When his children heard about it, Prince Alexander recalled in later life, they all suffered from nightmares for weeks.

The children attended the funeral at Whippingham Church, near Osborne. Alexander walked between his uncles, the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Connaught, while the other three rode in the Queen’s carriage with their mother and grandmother.

It was not the only shadow they had to face. Leopold, named after the short-lived haemophiliac uncle whom he had never known, suffered from the same condition. He too was a source of endless cosseting and anxiety to the elder generation, who feared correctly that he too would not live to a great age. Beatrice, wrote Marie Mallet, ‘tries to cultivate the maternal instinct – she loses so much. Leopold is an angel child, so sweet and attractive. He pines for someone to cling to – he wants petting and spoiling.’
¹⁶
Beatrice found it difficult to pet and spoil her children, and the gap was filled to some extent by ladies-in-waiting, Marie Mallet herself and Louisa, Countess of Antrim.

For the first few years, the children were educated by nannies. In March 1899 Mr Theobald was employed as tutor to teach the boys. He gained their confidence quickly, and he soon established a ready rapport with them. Maurice was a mischievous youngster, and his first surviving letter, written to Mr Theobald after he had accompanied Beatrice, Leopold and the Queen to Nice that spring, remarked, ‘I hope you were very sick on the ship and I hope Leopold has bullied you as much as he can on the train. I want to know if you have given Leopold a lot of arithmetic. I am glad you are not here as I miss your smacks much.’ It was signed ‘your noisy Maurice’.
¹⁷

Queen Victoria’s first great-grandchild, Princess Feodora of Saxe-Meiningen, was born in May 1879, the only child of her eldest granddaughter Princess Charlotte of Prussia. Though she always took a keen interest in her numerous descendants, the greatgrandchildren to whom she was closest and most interested were inevitably the grandchildren of her son and heir, the Prince of Wales.

In May 1890 the Queen created his elder son, Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale. As the next sovereign but one, he did not look like a promising future King. He had inherited his father’s vices (and perhaps more) without his abilities or strength of character. Easy-going to the point of imbecility, chronically slow, prematurely deaf like his mother, he was probably dyslexic, and perhaps also a sufferer from porphyria, a more virulent form of which was mistakenly diagnosed as insanity in its most famous and unfortunate victim, his great-great-grandfather King George III. He was said to have been involved in various scandals, including a homosexual brothel in Cleveland Place which was raided by the police, and in the Jack the Ripper murders in 1888. Though such rumours were based on hearsay, it was evident to the elder generation that his salvation lay in a steady wife who would hopefully be the making of him. An engagement between him and the obedient Princess May of Teck was carefully arranged in December 1891. Six weeks later he succumbed to a severe epidemic of influenza which had ravaged the country that Christmas.

The following year his sole surviving brother George, recently created Duke of York, proposed to May, and they were married in July 1893. Eleven months later, on 23 June 1894, the Duchess of York gave birth to the first of six children. Queen Victoria made a special visit to White Lodge, Richmond, to see her great-grandson. With pride she wrote to Vicky, now the widowed Empress Frederick, that ‘it has never happened in this country that there should be three direct heirs as well as the sovereign alive’.
¹⁸

To the public the child was always known as Prince Edward, though
en famille
called by the last of his seven Christian names, David. His brother was born at York Cottage on the Sandringham estate on 14 December 1895, the anniversary of double tragedy – the deaths of the Prince Consort and Princess Alice. ‘Grandmama was rather distressed,’ the Prince of Wales told his son, but he himself trusted that the young prince’s birth would ‘break the spell’ of the unlucky date. It would be tactful, he suggested, to invite Queen Victoria to be the baby’s godmother, and to call him Albert.*

The Duke of York and his elder brother had experienced the swing of the pendulum. Notwithstanding their exalted rank, they had enjoyed an upbringing which was in some respects very carefree – considerably more so than that of their father. For the two Princes born in 1894 and 1895, the pendulum swung back again, and they suffered the customary fate of most upper-class children of the time. Their existence was supervised by nurses, and much depended not on their parents so much as on the character and temperament of their nannies, whom they saw much more frequently. Busy as they had been with state matters, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert had always made time to keep a careful eye on their eldest children and the women appointed to look after them, in addition to having the additional counsel of Baron Stockmar, and the Prince and Princess of Wales had likewise been the most devoted of mothers and fathers.

Most Victorian children were less fortunate, and the young Yorks were no exception. Like so many of their contemporaries, their parents were at first sadly unaware of what went on out of sight. The children were kept in the nursery, brought down, washed, brushed, and dressed in their best everyday clothes at teatime for perhaps one hour of the twenty-four. For the rest of their waking hours, they were at the mercy of their nurses or governesses. The Yorks’ first nurse was dismissed for being rude to the Duchess of Teck. The second was sadistic and incompetent. She showed a marked preference for Edward, to whom her devotion was so fanatical that, in order to demonstrate the superiority of her power over him to that of his parents, she would twist and pinch his arm before bringing him into the drawing-room. As a result a sobbing, bawling infant was quickly removed from the room before further embarrassment was inflicted upon them.

By way of contrast, Albert was ignored to a degree which bordered on neglect. He was usually given his afternoon bottle while being driven around in a C-spring victoria, which gave a notoriously bumpy ride comparable to a rough Channel crossing. Soon he developed chronic stomach trouble, resulting in the gastric problems which plagued him as a young man. The under-nurse Mrs Charlotte Bill, known as ‘Lalla’ by the children, was shocked when the nurse snatched the bowl away from him at meals, declaring that he had had enough for one day.

At length Mrs Bill could take this woman’s ill-treatment of the infants no longer. Although worried that if she spoke out the nurse would vent her anger on them, she told the housekeeper everything. On investigation, it was established that the woman had not had a day off for three years, that she was unable to have children and had been deserted by her husband, and was suffering from frustrated and warped maternal instincts. She was dismissed, and her place was taken by the more understanding Mrs Bill.

Albert’s birth was followed by that of a sister, born on 25 April 1897, named Mary. She was something of a tomboy and, as the only girl among an eventual crowd of boys, inclined to be spoilt. Her disciplinarian father treated her far more leniently than her brothers, though she was easily embarrassed and his teasing often made her blush. Even so, fortunate was the only Princess in a gang of brothers. The future Crown Prince William of Germany would recall that his sister, Victoria Louise, was the only one of the family of seven who succeeded during childhood in winning a place in the heart of their father, Emperor William II. He and his brothers were treated with severity. For example, when they entered his study, they had to hold their hands behind them lest they knock anything off the tables.

The Duke and Duchess of York were evidently happy to accept the principle that children should never be heard and only seen on appropriate and carefully regulated occasions. A swing door was put across the passage on the first floor beyond the Duke and Duchess’s bedrooms and those of the household, and beyond it two small, simply furnished rooms were designated for the children. One was the ‘day nursery’, where the children ate, played and had their first lessons. In her old age, Mrs Bill reminisced on her days of employment at York Cottage. The day nursery, she declared, was only about half the size of what Prince Edward – by then Duke of Windsor – called ‘her modest suburban living-room’. ‘There was very little room for toys in it,’ she told him. ‘You had only one small-sized rocking horse. Perhaps it was a good thing your sister didn’t go for dolls. They would have cluttered up the place terribly.’
¹⁹

The ‘night nursery’ was slightly larger. Here the children slept with a nurse, and had their baths in round tin tubs filled with hot water from cans brought by servants from the cellar. Through the windows they could look out over the pond at Sandringham, with its small island almost smothered with brambles reached by a bridge, to the park where small web-antlered Japanese deer grazed. They would lie in bed listening to the wild duck on the pond at dawn and at dusk, the cooing of the wood pigeons in the trees of the park, and sometimes the call of their grandfather’s cock-pheasants in the woods.

As babies the children had to wear very thick clothing. Their first clothes were ‘layers of long flowing robes of cambric and muslin and lace’.
²⁰
The weight of such garments was tiring to the right arm, however strong, of the nurse who had to carry them, as well as to the babies themselves. At that time it was the rule that a nurse had to carry the baby in her arms for the first three months of his or her life, and if she did not or could not do so, she was adjudged not fit to do her job. Edward put this down to a superstition that the jolting of a perambulator would be harmful to the baby.

Prince George, Duke of York and later Prince of Wales, was never the devoted, free and easy father that his own father had been. He claimed that he was devoted to children, and ‘get on with them like a house on fire’. In practice, this generally meant other people’s children, not least his nephews and nieces. With his own youngsters, he was a model father – to a point. When they were babies, he sometimes helped to bathe them – ‘I make a very good lap’ – and when they were old enough he taught them to handle a gun or a fishing rod.

None the less, once they were past the baby stage he was something of a martinet. According to his first biographer, John Gore, ‘his banter embarrassed and silenced them and he had a way of asking what they had been doing and then supplying chaffing answers before the little boys could supply their own words’.
²¹

‘Now that you are five years old,’ he wrote to Prince Albert on the latter’s birthday in December 1900, ‘I hope you will always try & be obedient & do at once what you are told, as you will find it will come much easier to you the sooner you begin. I always tried to do this when I was your age & found it made me much happier.’
²²
Even the Prince Consort, so long regarded as the personification of pedantic fatherhood, never subjected his eldest son to such lofty missives at such an early age.

When they were older the Duchess of York would sit in the drawing-room entertaining the children. Sometimes she would summon them round the card table to play an educational game, for example one with the counties of England. With a lady-in-waiting at the piano, she would teach the two elder boys songs from an old community song book, like ‘Swanee River’, ‘Funiculi, Funicula’, ‘The Camptown Races’, and ‘Clementine’.

It was part of the Duchess’s routine to rest in her boudoir for the hour before dinner. At 6.30 every evening, the children were called in from the schoolroom. She would be in her negligée resting on the sofa, with her workbox on the lower shelf of a two-tiered table beside her, the top of which was covered with miniature trinkets. They would come and sit near her while she read to them, often royal history. In his later years, Edward looked on this domestic scene with fond affection. ‘Her soft voice, her cultivated mind, the cosy room overflowing with personal treasures were all inseparable ingredients of the happiness associated with this last hour of a child’s day.’
²³
The Duke never lingered over his tea in the drawing-room, preferring to retire to his study (rather grandly known as ‘the library’), where he would read
The Times
, catch up with his correspondence, write up his game book or occupy himself with his stamp collection until dinner was ready.