Bringing Them Up Royal: How the Royals Raised their Children from 1066 to the Present Day

by David Cohen

  In most cases, a well-fed, well-petted, well-potted baby becomes confident, while a child who is not held enough can easily lose what Winnicott called ‘the sense of being’ essential for developing ‘a true self’. Winnicott contrasted this with a false sense of self, which in turn led to ‘doing too much, being too little’.

  Playing was also vital. Winnicott stated ‘babies can be playful when they are cared for by people who respond to them warmly and playfully, like a mother who smiles and says, “Peek-a-boo!” When children – and indeed adults – play, they feel real, spontaneous and alive. Only in playing are they entirely their true selves, according to Winnicott. The infant with a ‘false-self disorder’ cannot play properly, hides her or his own self and pretends to be whatever she or he thinks others want or need him or her to be. The mite wears the mask. Winnicott slapped down the false self as ‘a rather ludicrous impersonation. Such incorporation of one person by another can account for that spurious maturity that we often meet with.’ He insisted ‘for maturity it is necessary the individuals shall not mature early (and have) passed through all the immature stages, all the stages of maturity at the younger ages’.

  Children are always the future but only royal children are the future of an entire country. Much is expected of them, and great expectations can lead to great problems. Royal children have sometimes been what we might call ‘trophy children’ and have had to perform – and not just to play the piano for doting aunts and uncles. When she was four, for example, Mary Tudor was asked to dance and sing for the Emperor Charles V. Her parents hoped she would dazzle him, as they wanted her to marry Charles. The future Queen Victoria was paraded by her mother in Kensington Gardens so that the public could see the girl was happy, when she was, in fact, a victim of emotional abuse.

  Trophy children may be made to suffer if they fail to act the way their parents expect them to. When he was just five years old, Prince Charles was reunited with his mother, who had been away for months touring the Empire and Commonwealth. Newsreels show him waiting for her at Victoria station. Immaculately dressed, as a trophy child should be, he was expected not to act his age. When his mother gets off the train, she does not rush towards him, kiss him or hug him. Instead, she shakes her son’s hand. In a nice display of ‘spurious maturity’, he shakes her hand back. Achingly formal, it is an almost perfect example of protocol taking precedence over love.

  Parents who demand spurious maturity might be said to be lacking in emotional intelligence. One can hardly blame historians for not using the concept, as psychologists did not ‘discover’ emotional intelligence till 1990, when the term appears in a paper published by Salovey and Mayer. For the next six years, only specialists knew of it until Daniel Goleman published his bestseller Emotional Intelligence. Princess Diana has sometimes been credited with being the first royal to show any signs of emotional intelligence. Across ten centuries, however, she is not unique. Eleanor of Aquitaine, Charles II, the allegedly mad George III (except when it came to his eldest son), Adelaide, wife of William IV and Victoria (except when it came to her eldest son) all displayed elements of emotional intelligence. Queen Victoria, for example, stressed the need for boys to experience ‘knocks’ as they grew up and admitted royal lads were often too isolated.

  Emotional intelligence suggests openness but British monarchs have usually been secretive and, when it comes to their behaviour as parents, with some reason. There has been much heartlessness and carelessness, precisely the kind of imperfections royals – who want to seem perfect – do not wish to reveal.

  All the revelations and arguments in this book must be viewed in the light of a statement made by genius-clown psychiatrist R. D. Laing, who fizzed to fame in the 1960s and 1970s with The Divided Self, a wonderful book on schizophrenia, and Knots, a work of perhaps less wonderful ‘poems’. Laing argued that schizophrenia was the result of dysfunctional parenting, but he was careful not to be judgemental. When one blames parents, he said, one should remember that they too had parents, who had parents themselves, and so on back down the generations to the Garden of Eden, which was, after all, rather dysfunctional. The Serpent seduced Eve and then, in the first recorded instance of sibling rivalry, Cain killed Abel.

  Most children expect to inherit money and a house from their parents but royal offspring will inherit the throne, the trappings of power and a place in history. Princes-in-waiting have often tried to influence the political process in order to establish their own identity. Prince Charles’s habit of bombarding ministers with memos against the ‘carbuncles’ of modern architecture and promoting alternative medicine is mild compared to the antics of previous Princes of Wales.

  When I made a television programme, The Madness of Prince Charles, in 2006, opinion polls reported that many Britons did not want him to inherit the throne. They preferred to skip a generation and have Prince William succeed Queen Elizabeth. Latest polls claim only 39 per cent of Britons want Charles to inherit. No one has dared to ask Prince Charles, who has spent sixty years waiting to inherit the throne, what he thinks. If he does succeed, he will have done very well.

  The Ten Commandments for Adults

  Before examining the long case history, it seems necessary to ask just what one can, and should, expect of royal parents – and how that differs from what we ask of ordinary good-enough parents. In 1979, a German professor of comparative education, Leonhard Froeze of the University of Marburg, wrote Ten Commandments for Adults and especially for parents. They were:

  Thou shalt regard the child as the highest good entrusted to you.

  Thou shalt not form the child in thine own image.

  Children need free space for the unfolding of their physical and spiritual powers.

  Thou shalt respect the child’s personality.

  Thou shalt not use force against the child.

  Thou shalt not destroy the confidence of the child.

  Thou shalt protect the child against death.

  Thou shalt not tempt the child to lie.

  Thou shalt recognise the child’s needs.

  Thou shalt give the child his and her rights.

  Since Froeze penned these ‘commandments’, child development has become a vibrant field of study. Psychiatrists, psychologists, doctors, nurses, nutritionists, social workers and teachers have all achieved some consensus on what parents should give children to be ‘good enough’. Apart from providing food, shelter and regular baths, good-enough parents must play, talk and bond with their children. They must be given enough confidence from birth and this includes the confidence that their parents will not abandon or betray them. Love is not enough; love must be practical and the child must feel the love. These ‘rules’ mean, essentially, putting the child’s needs first. The good-enough parent also eventually lets their child go, with love. That is not always easy in ordinary families, but it can be even harder in royal circles.

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  Four Medieval Relationships (1066–1400)

  The relationships between four mothers and their sons had a major impact on British history. Adela, one of William the Conqueror’s daughters, favoured her son Stephen and even allowed him to visit her when she retired to a nunnery. He became King in 1135. Stephen proved a less perfect parent and was willing to abandon his eldest son’s claim to the throne in order to bring peace to England.

  Eleanor of Aquitaine adored her third son, Richard, whom we know as ‘the Lionheart’. In 1193, she looted the kingdom in order to pay the ransom demanded when her son was taken prisoner as he made his way back from the Holy Land after failing to capture Jerusalem.

  The relationship of Edward III and his mother, Isabella, would have fascinated Freud, given his faith in the Oedipus complex. Isabella had her husband, Edward II, murdered in 1327. Though her son did briefly imprison her, he soon forgave her for her complicity in the killing. Freud would not have been surprised. Finally, the difficult childhood of Henry VII affected his behaviour for the rest of his life. One cannot understand the history
of the early Tudors without taking into account how his mother’s early abandonment of him impacted both Henry’s personality and the upbringing of his son, Henry VIII. When she gave birth to him, Margaret was a child herself – only thirteen years old.

  Before examining these relationships in detail, it is necessary to give a brief account of some of Freud’s ideas. He was not only interested in history, but in pre-history too. Well before Oedipus, the ancients had an Oedipus complex, he argued. In his bizarre Totem and Taboo (1913), Freud claimed Stone Age sons killed their fathers because they wanted to sleep with their mothers. The lusty young men were then crippled with guilt so they turned their dead father into an object of veneration, stuck his head on a totem pole and worshipped him. They then punished themselves more by creating the incest taboo, which prevented them from sleeping with their mothers – which had been the object of the exercise in the first place.

  Thirty years before he wrote Totem and Taboo, Freud won a school prize for translating some of Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex. Sophocles tells how Oedipus arrives in Thebes just after the murder of its ruler, King Laius. Plague is ravaging the city and will not cease until someone solves the riddle of the Sphinx, the oracles say. The question is: what walks on four legs, then on two, then on three? The answer is a human being. A baby crawls on all fours, an adult stands on two legs. When we are old, we use three legs because we need a stick. Oedipus solves the riddle, wins the crown and the King’s widow, Jocasta. Twelve years later, the plague returns and the blind seer, Tiresias, reveals that it was Oedipus himself who killed Laius. Jocasta now admits to Oedipus that the oracles predicted her baby son would kill his father and have children by his mother. To avoid the curse-prophecy being fulfilled, Jocasta gave the baby to a shepherd and ordered him to kill the child, but the shepherd was soft-hearted and brought Oedipus up as his own son. So, when Oedipus killed his real biological father ‘where three roads meet’ on the way to the famous oracle at Delphi, he did not know what he was doing, any more than he knew that the woman he then married was his mother. The end is fearful: Jocasta hangs herself while Oedipus stabs out his eyes and goes into exile.

  The start of the case history

  In the Middle Ages, the history of the royal family was nearly as gruesome, though British kings did not usually wallow in guilt, being less advanced than Freud’s imagined Neanderthals. To understand the long case history, one must start at the familiar date of 1066, when William the Conqueror won the Battle of Hastings and conquered England. William had four sons and no one is sure quite how many daughters. One of them, Adela, turned out to be remarkably astute. William the Conqueror died in 1087 and split his lands between his two eldest sons, but it was the second son, William Rufus, who was given England. In August 1100, William Rufus became the first of a number of English kings who were probably murdered on the orders of a brother. There is, of course, no better example of sibling rivalry.

  While hunting in the New Forest, William was killed by a stray arrow. The Normans hunted all the time; accidents did happen, but Walter Tirel was a good archer and unlikely to have fired a wild shot at his King by mistake. There is no evidence that Tirel was ever punished. William was childless. William’s younger brother, Henry, was among the hunting party and had every interest in seeing his brother dead, as he would inherit the throne. Once he had made certain that his brother was dead, Henry rushed to secure the royal treasury and then went on to London, where he was crowned within days.

  For a woman of her time, Henry I’s sister Adela achieved an amazing amount of influence. She was instrumental in bringing about a treaty between her brother and the King of France. Adela had six sons by Count Stephen Henry of Blois, but the eldest was a disappointment as he was ‘deficient in intelligence and second rate’, according to the chronicler William of Newburgh. Her third son, Stephen, on the other hand, impressed her and became her favourite. She taught him to read, and saw that he had a good education. Stephen also showed proper manly prowess on the battlefield. After having helped conclude the treaty, Adela retired to a nunnery, where she allowed her favoured son to visit her. Stephen was a much-loved royal child, fortunate in that as in other things.

  In 1120, Stephen was among 300 knights and soldiers who assembled at the port of Barfleur in Normandy to set sail for England in the White Ship. However, he decided not to travel. Two reasons are given for this: the first is that he thought the vessel was overcrowded, the second is that he was suffering from diarrhoea. Whichever of these was true, Stephen said he would travel some time later.

  Soon after the White Ship set sail in the dark, its port side struck a submerged rock, which can still be seen today. The ship sank. It was said later that no one spotted the rock because the crew had been drinking and no priest had blessed the vessel. William of Nangis added the unlikely fantasy that all the men aboard were sodomites and God had decided to inflict a marine version of Sodom and Gomorrah. The only survivor was a butcher from Rouen, who wore thick ram skins that saved him when he fell into the freezing-cold water. This disaster decimated the Anglo-Norman nobility. William of Malmesbury listed the dead, who included some of Henry’s illegitimate children, and lamented: ‘No ship ever brought so much misery to England.’

  Stephen’s uncle, King Henry I, now had only one surviving child: his daughter Matilda. There had never been a queen who ruled alone, but Henry had seen over the years how capable his sister Adela was. There was no reason why his daughter could not rule, so long as she had loyal advisers. The King’s strategy also depended on Stephen supporting her, so Henry heaped honours and huge estates on him. In return, Stephen seems to have promised to support Matilda in her attempt to become the first queen to reign in her own name.

  When Henry died in 1135, however, Stephen ignored any promises he had made, and the sea once more came to his aid. Stephen was near Boulogne when he heard of the King’s death, while Matilda was in southern France. He set sail at once, and within weeks had himself crowned at Winchester; usefully, his brother happened to be the local bishop. Matilda disputed Stephen’s claim and a long civil war ensued between the two cousins. Chroniclers called it ‘the Anarchy’. It lasted for eighteen years and exhausted everyone, as well as being ruinously expensive.

  By rights, Stephen, who married Matilda, Countess of Boulogne in 1125, ought to have been succeeded by his eldest son. Eustace’s mother wanted him to inherit, but Stephen was willing to betray his son in order to bring England the peace it desperately needed. He put the interests of the state before those of his son and made peace with Matilda and her son Henry. The terms were simple: the war would cease and Stephen would remain King until he died, but then Matilda’s son would assume the throne.

  Stephen tried to justify his decision to himself, to Eustace and to Eustace’s mother. He suggested Eustace was not fit to succeed, claiming the young man was brutal and exacted excessive taxes. Eustace did not survive his father’s betrayal long and died in his early twenties, apparently of natural causes. Stephen’s sacrifice paid off for the country: Henry II reigned for twenty years in relative peace, which allowed him to organise the government of England better than ever before.

  Eleanor and Richard – an Oedipal relationship

  Two years before Matilda’s son, Henry II, was crowned, he married Eleanor of Aquitaine, a lively woman who made a habit of marrying monarchs. Her first royal husband was Louis VII of France, though she did not find him very satisfactory. She complained that she had thought she was marrying a king and discovered she had married a monk. Louis was not entirely monkish: he did manage to father two daughters. With a rare degree of maturity, Louis and Eleanor ended their marriage relatively amicably, though Louis probably did not realise Eleanor already had a second husband in mind. Two months after she was free, she married Henry.

  Contemporary sources praised Eleanor as perpulchra – more than beautiful. When she was around thirty years old, the troubadour Bernard de Ventadour called her ‘gracious, lovely, the embodiment of ch
arm’, as she had ‘lovely eyes and noble countenance’ and was ‘one meet to crown the state of any king’. Even when she was old – and she lived to be eighty-two – Richard of Devizes described her as beautiful.

  Eleanor bore Henry five sons and three daughters. Their marriage was passionate, and often passionately angry. They were fortunate in that all but one of their children lived. Henry also fathered children with other women but Eleanor could be tolerant. She raised one of his bastards at court, even though the child’s mother was a prostitute.

  Eleanor and Henry’s second son (the first did not survive) was born in 1155. The King wanted his child to have a good education and so he fostered him out to his friend and Lord Chancellor, Thomas Becket. Henry and Becket saw each other often as they hunted deer and chased women together, so Henry also saw much of his son but the fostering would have unforeseen consequences.

  Henry’s third son was born in 1157. We have been left a nice detail about the future Richard Lionheart as a baby: he was wet-nursed by a certain Hodierna and remembered her fondly, as he gave her a generous pension. The wet nurse did not replace his mother in his affections and Eleanor did not hide that, of all her sons, Richard was her favourite. Their relationship became one of the most trusting and practical alliances in British history. Freud famously said that his mother’s love had made him a conquistador. Eleanor’s love also made Richard something of a conquistador, but she had to do rather more than Amalia Freud. Feisty though she was, Amalia did not take charge of Freud’s kingdom when he was away, or raise one of the largest ransoms in history to save her son.