Sons, Servants and Statesmen (31 page)

At first known simply as ‘the boy’, he was christened Albert Edward after his father and maternal grandfather. Within a few years he was always ‘Bertie’ to the family. Sixteen months later came a third child, Alice, followed on 6 August 1844 by Alfred, or ‘Affie’. Two daughters came next, at two-yearly intervals, Helena and Louise, then the two youngest sons, Arthur on 1 May 1850 and Leopold on 7 April 1853, before the family was completed with the birth of Beatrice in 1857.

Despite her brood of nine, Queen Victoria resented this regular child-bearing. Temperamentally she was not an ideal parent; she was not particularly maternal by nature, found the concept of breast-feeding utterly revolting, and thought babies frightful and ugly. Two years after the birth of the last, she confessed that she hated the thought of having children and had ‘no adoration for little babies (particularly not in their baths till they are past 3 or 4 months, when they really become very lovely)’.
¹
It was therefore ironic that she had such a large family. While she was keen to help provide a secure and loving environment for the children, she found it difficult to reconcile the demands of being their Queen with those of being their mother. It was the dictum of those days that children were to be seen and not heard, and in this sense she was a true Victorian. The more disagreeable aspects of motherhood were to be left to wet-nurses and governesses.

When her eldest daughter had been married for two months, the Queen admitted to some forthright beliefs on the comparative liberties, or lack of them, of married and unmarried women. From a physical point of view, she maintained, the former certainly had no freedom. She herself had suffered severely for the first two years of her marriage, and for several more thereafter, from ‘aches – and sufferings and miseries and plagues – which you must struggle against – and enjoyments etc, to give up – constant precautions to take’. She had to put up nine times ‘with those above-named enemies and real misery (besides many duties) and I own it tried me sorely; one feels so pinned down’. Their sex, she proclaimed, was ‘a most unenviable one’.
²

Albert was a more devoted parent than his wife. To him it was a great pity, he wrote to her in 1856, that she found no consolation in the company of their 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.’
³

He adored and always had a special relationship with Vicky, but with Bertie there was never to be such a close bond. It was his eldest son’s misfortune to be overshadowed by his clever elder sister, and also to some extent by their mother’s resentment of two pregnancies in quick succession. Initially she called him ‘the Boy’, which suggests a certain emotional detachment. She was left exhausted at the end of her confinement, and her pride at having produced the heir the country had expected did nothing to alleviate her postnatal depression. It was with some relief that she handed him over to the wet-nurse, Mrs Roberts.

Almost from birth, the young prince was to be moulded into a paragon of virtue and the supreme example of a perfect education, as much like his father as possible. Baron Stockmar had blamed the shortcomings of George III’s sons on their education, which had ‘contributed more than any other circumstance to weaken the respect and influence of Royalty in this country’.
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Rather patronisingly, he warned the Queen and Prince Albert that they were too young to direct their eldest son and heir’s studies, and it was their duty to seek the advice of those more experienced. As for the latter, he doubtless had himself in mind. The exalted, yet young and sadly inexperienced, parents obediently did as the Baron told them and consulted others, including the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, who suggested that the object of the exercise was to make the future King into ‘the most perfect man’. It took Lord Melbourne to give the best advice of all, namely that they should 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.’
⁵

From his first years, it seemed that Bertie would be difficult to educate. As a small child he stammered and was inclined to be apathetic and backward, and given to tantrums in the nursery. When frustrated or scolded for bad behaviour he screamed, stamped his feet and threw things around the room until he was exhausted. Fortunately for him, the governess, Lady Lyttelton, was quick to appreciate his good qualities. At two years of age he was not nearly so articulate as his sister, having a rather babyish accent, yet even so he was ‘very intelligent, and generous and good-tempered, with a few passions and stampings occasionally; most exemplary in politeness and manner, bows and offers his hand beautifully’.
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She considered he had a particularly sweet nature and charming smile, as well as a readiness to tell the truth, unlike his elder sister, and she also appreciated the fact that he would be one of those people who learnt more from people than from books. Maybe she understood that the small boy had suffered from being aware that Vicky was their father’s favourite, and that his mother gave the impression she was indifferent to him.

Any child who could follow simple conversations in three languages by the age of six was certainly not stupid. On Bertie’s ninth birthday, the Queen noted in her journal, there was ‘much good in him’, and he had ‘such affectionate feeling – great truthfulness and great simplicity of character’.
⁷
Yet he was not the paragon of wisdom and learning that his parents had fondly hoped he would be. There was more of the hearty Hanoverian than the earnest Coburger in him, and the Queen commented ruefully that he was her caricature. He had his dear father’s name, even if he was to be ‘Bertie’ rather than Albert
en famille
, but neither his father’s delicate looks nor his industrious nature. It was ironic that the son who was burdened by his destiny as the future King, the one of whom so much was expected, should in some senses be the son probably least fitted for it. With hindsight, though, none of his brothers had the demeanour of the born diplomat, coupled with the genial outgoing personality that he did, qualities which supremely equipped him for the burdens of state during his nine years as king.

By the time he was seventeen, the Queen was increasingly worried about him. ‘Bertie continues such an anxiety,’ she wrote to the Princess Royal in April 1859. ‘I tremble at the thought of only three years and a half being before us – when he will be of age and we can’t hold him except by moral power!’ Most alarming was the thought of what would become of the kingdom if anything was to happen suddenly to her, as a vision of King Albert Edward aged about twenty with a widowed father trying to hold the reins of power as Prince Regent rose before her. ‘One shudders to think of it: it is too awful a contemplation.’
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Affie was much more like his father. Less extroverted than Bertie, he could be just as badly behaved and disobedient, but made up for it by his readiness to learn. He adored geography, the sciences and anything to do with ships and the Royal Navy. When left to his own devices, he was happy to play with toys and mechanical devices, experimenting with them and trying to build his own. Both parents sometimes found themselves wishing that this lively, yet studious and conscientious, boy would inherit the throne one day instead of his elder brother.

From infancy, Arthur was and would always remain Queen Victoria’s favourite son. A strong, healthy baby, he was even-tempered, with none of the irritability or rebellious spirits of the elder children. As the third son, with no likelihood of succeeding to his mother’s throne or his childless uncle’s duchy, he was free from the pressures and expectations placed on the elder two. Appropriately for the son who had been named after the Duke of Wellington, he was spellbound by anything to do with the Army, whether the sight of a military uniform, the sound of a band or just watching the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace.

‘This Child is dear,
dearer
than any of the others put together, thus
after you
he is the
dearest
and
most precious
object to
me
on
Earth
,’ Victoria wrote to the Prince Consort when their son was aged eight. ‘It gives me a pang if any fault is found in his looks and character, and the bare thought of his growing out of my hands and being exposed to danger – makes the tears come to my eyes.’
⁹
Soon afterwards she told Arthur’s governor, Major Howard Elphinstone, that he was ‘an easily managed child’ as he was so well-tempered and ‘so very obedient’.
¹⁰

Although he was the first of Queen Victoria’s children whose birth was eased by chloroform, Leopold was a sickly baby with a poor appetite and digestion, and a feeble cry. When learning to walk, he fell over and bruised badly, crying out as if in severe pain. Before long the doctors diagnosed in him the grave condition of haemophilia, a hereditary bleeding disease which prevents blood from clotting properly and bringing with it the risk of severe, even fatal, haemorrhage.

The condition was not properly recognised for several years. Leopold appeared perfectly healthy for long spells at a time, and he was quite tall, well-built for his age, with the usual share of a small boy’s energy. But the signs of trouble were there, if not fully appreciated. He was inclined to stand awkwardly and sometimes screamed in agony. All this irritated Queen Victoria, who thought he was being lazy, holding himself badly and having fits of temper like his eldest brother, when the trouble was probably stiffness and severe pain in his joints. By his fifth birthday, he was also incurring her displeasure because of his lack of good looks: she thought him ‘the ugliest and least pleasing of the whole family’. She admitted that he was ‘not an ugly little baby, only as he grew older he grew plainer’.
¹¹

That summer, they learnt – probably from one of the royal doctors – that Leopold was suffering from some unusual condition. Writing to King Leopold that his ‘poor little namesake’ was laid up with a bad knee after a fall, the Queen made reference to ‘this unfortunate defect’ which would prevent him from being able to enter any of the active (or armed) services; it was ‘
often not
outgrown – & no remedy or medicine does it any good’.
¹²
Leopold was left behind at Osborne with Beatrice and the ladies-in-waiting while the rest of the family went to Balmoral a few days later. As he was proving so accident-prone, the Queen wrote, ‘it would be very troublesome indeed to have him here’. That a mother could write with such lack of concern about her youngest son shows a degree of coldness which is hard to comprehend. ‘He walks shockingly – and is dreadfully awkward – holds himself as badly as ever and his manners are despairing, as well as his speech – which is quite dreadful.’ She admitted that he learnt well and read fluently, but these achievements seemed to count for little against his other shortcomings; ‘he is really very unfortunate.’
¹³

By this time, Leopold already had a brother-in-law, for he was only two years old when his eldest sister became betrothed. Prince Frederick William of Prussia (‘Fritz’) and his parents, Prince William and Princess Augusta, had been guests at the opening of the Great Exhibition in 1851, and he had made more than a passing impression on ten-year-old Vicky. In September 1855 he was invited – without his parents – as a guest at Balmoral. Though Vicky was not yet fifteen years old, it was clear that a friendship which had been sustained fitfully by letter over the intervening period of time was ripening into something stronger, and within a few days the Prince had asked her, and then her parents, for her hand in marriage. On 25 January 1858 the family were present at St James’s Palace as they became husband and wife.

Though the Prince of Wales never attained any great scholastic feats, he was sent to study at Oxford and made an effort which his parents appreciated. Partly as a reward, and partly in order to initiate him into public life, in 1860 they decided to send him on a tour of Canada and the United States of America. His itinerary was set to include opening the St Lawrence Bridge at Montreal, lay a foundation stone for the Federal Parliament building at Ottawa and pay a courtesy call on the American President, James Buchanan.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the academic shortcomings he had shown at home, at last he had the chance to prove that he had the charm and social talent required for a future king. Though he had been instructed that he was to travel incognito in the States as ‘Baron Renfrew’, it was too much to hope that the cheering crowds which greeted him everywhere would acknowledge him as anything other than heir to the world’s greatest empire. He had been unprepared for such adulation, but he relished every moment to the full. For him the highlight was a ball at the New York Academy of Music, to which 3,000 guests had been invited but 5,000 turned up. Just before the guest of honour was due to arrive the floor gave way, but luckily nobody was hurt, and everyone waited patiently as carpenters and workmen hurried to the rescue. His governor, General Bruce, wrote rather censoriously that during the trip the Prince had been ‘somewhat persecuted by attentions not in strict accordance with good breeding’, but the Prince did not object.