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

by David Cohen

  But Leopold had not abandoned his plans for Victoria’s marriage and now demanded an up-to-date report on Albert. Stockmar had to accompany the Prince on a walking tour of Switzerland and northern Italy and reported that Albert had ‘great powers of observation, was prudent and showed self-control’. The nineteen-year-old was fit to marry Victoria, but, before anything could be done, there was another drama which further soured relations between the Queen and her mother.

  Early in 1839, the companion who had been foisted on Victoria – Lady Flora Hastings – complained of pain in her lower abdomen. Sir James Clark, the Queen’s physician, said he could not diagnose what was wrong without examining her. When Flora refused to allow him to do so, he assumed she was pregnant. Lehzen, who was now so influential that she discussed Flora with the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, told him that Flora was ‘with child’. On 2 February, the Queen wrote that she suspected Conroy to be the father. When Flora finally let the royal doctors examine her, they discovered she had cancer of the liver. Conroy and Flora’s brother attacked the Queen and her ‘fellow conspirator’ Lehzen for besmirching Flora’s good name. Meanwhile, Leopold saw the crisis as an opportunity: he instructed Albert to go to England without waiting to be invited.

  Three years had passed since the cousins had first seen one another. Parton described a classic example of love at not quite first sight; when Albert arrived at Windsor on 10 October 1839, Victoria met him. She was dressed ‘in evening attire, and invested with the dignity which the very title of Queen seems to carry with it. Nor was the change in him less striking in a maiden’s eyes. The Prince had grown tall, symmetrical, and handsome.’ ‘Symmetrical’ meant that Albert had become less stout; he had also grown a becoming moustache.

  Albert had ‘a gentleness of expression, and a smile of peculiar sweetness, with a look of thought and intelligence in his clear blue eye, and fair, broad forehead, which conciliated everyone who looked upon him’. Parton finished with a flourish: ‘He was the very Prince of romance – just the hero wanted for the dazzling fiction of which Victoria was the gentle heroine.’

  Though still angry with her mother, Victoria took Albert to visit her the night he arrived, but there was a comic hitch. Albert did not have the proper clothes to attend a formal dinner and etiquette ‘could not be dispensed with’, Parton added. We do not know where Albert ate that night.

  Four days later, Victoria told Lord Melbourne that she had made up her mind to marry Albert. ‘You will be much more comfortable,’ he said somewhat patronisingly, ‘for a woman cannot stand alone for any time in whatever position she may be.’ Melbourne seems to have forgotten that Elizabeth I managed perfectly well without a man by her side or in her bed.

  Albert was very much the social inferior and was not told of Victoria’s decision until the next day, when he got back from hunting. He gave his grandmother, who was, of course, also Victoria’s grandmother, a romantic description:

  The Queen sent for me alone to her room and declared to me in a genuine outburst of love and affection that I had gained her whole heart, and would make her intensely happy if I would make her the sacrifice of sharing her life with her, for she said she looked on it as a sacrifice. The only thing which troubled her was that she did not think that she was worthy of me. The joyous openness of manner in which she told me this quite enchanted me, and I was quite carried away by it. She is really most good and amiable, and I am quite sure Heaven has not given me into evil hands, and that we shall be happy together. Since that moment Victoria does whatever she fancies I should wish or like, and we talk together a great deal about our future life, which she promises me to make as happy as possible.

  As soon as Albert left, Victoria recorded her feelings in her diary: ‘How I will strive to make him feel as little as possible the great sacrifice he has made! I told him it was a great sacrifice on his part, but he would not allow it.’

  That afternoon, she wrote to her uncle Leopold, who had engineered the match after all:

  My mind is quite made up. The warm affection he showed me on learning this gave me great pleasure. He seems perfection, and I think that I have the prospect of very great happiness before me. I love him more than I can say, and shall do everything in my power to render this sacrifice (for such in my opinion it is) as small as I can. He seems to have great tact – a very necessary thing in his position. These last few days have passed like a dream to me, and I am so much bewildered by it all that I know hardly how to write; but I do feel very happy.

  Had she not had a country to reign over, Victoria might have made a successful romantic novelist. Naturally, Uncle Leopold was delighted.

  On 10 February 1840, the couple married at the Chapel Royal in St James’s. Victoria wore a white satin dress trimmed with orange blossoms, very large diamond earrings and a diamond necklace. Albert was in the uniform of a British field-marshal – promotion was rapid if you married the Queen – and wore the collar and star of the Order of the Garter. They went to Windsor Castle for their honeymoon.

  The marriage worked well, both emotionally and sexually, though Victoria would often complain that women were not to be regarded as ‘breeding rabbits’. When she was four months pregnant, an eighteen-year-old barman, Edward Oxford, fired two pistols at her carriage while she was driving with Albert. On 11 June 1840, The Times reported:

  The Prince who, it would seem, had heard the whistling of the ball, turned his head in the direction from which the report came, and Her Majesty at the same instant rose up in the carriage, but Prince Albert as suddenly pulled her down by his side. The man then drew from behind his back a second pistol, which he discharged after the carriage.

  Oxford was charged with High Treason. His attempt was the first of seven on Victoria’s life. She was sturdy, however, and nine months and eleven days after her wedding, she gave birth to her first child, a girl who was called Victoria and nicknamed ‘Princessy’. Two days later, Albert wrote to his father that his wife ‘is as well as if nothing had happened. She sleeps well, has a good appetite, and is extremely quiet and cheerful,’

  Victoria was enchanted by her husband’s tender loving care, which she compared somewhat remarkably to that of a good mother – the mother she felt she had not had. There could not have been ‘a kinder, wiser, or more judicious nurse’, she added. When Princessy was born, Albert persuaded his wife to make peace with her own mother, though the relationship always remained strained. In 1842, he also persuaded her to send Lehzen away with a generous pension. His real opinion of the governess was vitriolic; he called her a ‘crazy, stupid intriguer with a lust for power’. Once she was out of the way, Albert had no rival for Victoria’s attention.

  His education had made Albert a formidable reader. He studied what the best minds in Europe had said about how to bring up children. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Froebel and Pestalozzi all emphasised the need for children to have freedom. Victoria ought to have been in favour of this after her own experiences, but it turned out to be not quite so simple.

  Rousseau and mother’s milk

  In Emile (1762), Rousseau provided ideas on every aspect of childcare. He argued against swaddling and that mothers should not farm their own children out to wet nurses. No one has ever made greater claims for the magic of a mother’s milk. According to Rousseau, if mothers fed their own children, ‘morals will reform themselves, nature’s sentiments will be awakened in every heart, the state will be re-peopled.’ Victoria, however, had wet nurses for her family.

  Rousseau praised Locke’s ideas of toughening children ‘against the intemperance of season, climates, elements; against hunger, thirst, fatigue’. They needed to learn from experience. Rousseau gave an example of a father who took his son out to fly kites and immediately turned what should have been fun into a test. The father asked his boy to work out where the kite was by looking only at its shadow.

  ‘We have made an active and thinking being,’ Rousseau said, before adding: ‘It remains for us, in order to complete the m
an, only to make a loving and feeling being – that is to say, to perfect reason by sentiment.’ Without any evidence, he then argued that children could not understand complex human emotions or abstract concepts until they reached their teenage years. The leading child psychologist of the mid-twentieth century, Jean Piaget, who headed up an institute in Geneva named after Rousseau, made the same claims but with some evidence at least. Rousseau’s theories could be published in Calvinist Geneva, but not in Catholic France because Rome made children recite the Catechism. Rousseau argued this was mere parroting since the child had no idea what abstract concepts such as God meant.

  Albert also read the radical Swiss Pestalozzi, whose most famous work was How Gertrude Teaches Her Children, and Froebel, who developed the first kindergarten. Both stressed the need for children to feel free and freedom meant not being constantly badgered by their over-anxious parents. Victoria felt she had been controlled by a mother who had not really loved her, and also by Conroy. She did not react by letting her children run wild and free, however, but by providing them with, as she saw it, love as well as control. Victoria had never been convinced that her mother truly loved her and wanted the best for her, but she and Albert did love and want the best for their children. That changed everything.

  Princessy was unlikely to inherit the throne and so she was put under less pressure than her eldest brother, Bertie. The Queen was often amused by her. On 6 October 1841, Sarah Lyttelton noted, ‘The Princess hid her head under her nurse’s arm yesterday and that the Queen peeped round to see why she did it’ – ‘HRH was detected in that safe corner sucking her necklace which is forbidden. Then the Queen said “Oh fie naughty! Naughty!” Upon which the child looked slyly at her and held up her mouth to be kissed. It is lucky another is coming.’ Lady Sarah then added the immortal phrase quoted at the beginning of this book: ‘The Queen is like all young mothers, exigeante.’

  Princessy could have perfect toddler tantrums. She kept on shouting, ‘Wipe my eyes!’ all the time when she was ‘roaring’, which presumably means when she was crying. The baby also showed ‘morbid love of one nursery maid’. Lady Sarah told her daughter-in-law that Madame de Maintenon said that mothers who complained about the slow progress of their daughters ‘should always be sweet to the children and pray for them. God would see the rest.’

  Princessy was clever, though rarely placid. On 7 May 1842, when her daughter was just over seventeen months old, the Queen came into Lady Sarah’s bedroom just in her dressing gown because she wanted the governess to look at ‘the most lovely of rainbows’. Lady Sarah was delighted but the small Princess howled and seemed to have ‘unconquerable horror’.

  A few months later, Lady Sarah noted:

  My little Princess is all gracefulness and prettiness, very fat and active, running about and talking a great deal. She is oversensitive and affectionate and rather irritable in temper at present. But it looks like a pretty mind only very unfit for roughing it through a hard life which hers may be.

  When Lady Sarah’s daughter-in-law wrote to ask how to cope with her own baby’s crying fits, Lady Sarah was sympathetic:

  I can’t wonder you’re uneasy about them – j’ai passé par là. But there is no occasion, believe me, to suppose they mean bad temper at her age. As to checking them I fancy taking very little notice of them is not a bad thing. I own I am somewhat against punishments; they wear out so soon and one is never sure they are understood by the child as belonging to the naughtiness.

  It is a pity Lady Sarah never dared say that to the Queen and Prince Albert.

  Naughtiness was always a danger in the nursery. On 10 October 1842, Lady Sarah told her daughter-in-law: ‘The Queen said to Princessy, “Two little girls are coming to see baby tomorrow.”’ The ‘two little girls’ were the daughters of Lady Dunmore. When Princessy heard that:

  She got upon tiptoe put her head down on one side and with the most extreme slyness of manner answered, ‘Naughty.’

  ‘No, no,’ said the Queen, ‘they are very good little girls.’

  ‘Kying,’ persisted Princessy.

  ‘No, no, they never cry,’ the Queen said.

  Lady Sarah was struck by the ‘drollery’ of Princessy’s questions, ‘so meant to be joking and malicious’. She felt the two-year-old Princess was more like a four-year-old child. Later that week, when the six-year-old Charley Edgecumbe came to see her, Princessy was all ‘coquetterie, hiding behind the curtain for him to find her – holding out her frock and dancing up and down before him’.

  Albert’s way with the children enchanted his wife. Lady Sarah wrote that it was not every ‘Papa who would have such patience and kindness’ and that patience often got ‘a flashing look of gratitude from the Queen’.

  The couple’s next child was born on 9 November 1841. Bertie would test their patience, but neither his father nor his mother could ever see that they made unreasonable demands of him because they never doubted either that they loved him or that they wanted the best for him. Albert drew up complex rotas specifying the duties of every servant who came near the children.

  On 10 February 1843, when Bertie was only fifteen months old, Lady Sarah noted that he ‘talks much more English than he did though he is not articulate like his sister. He understands a little French and says a few words but is altogether backward in language.’ She thought him very intelligent, though there were a ‘few passions and stampings occasionally’. But Bertie soon learned his manners at least, as he ‘bows and offers his hand beautifully besides saluting à la militaire’. He was supposed to be fluent in at least three languages – German, English and French – by the time he was four, but, while ‘Princessy gets on very well’, Lady Sarah noted, Bertie was still not perfectly trilingual.

  Bertie hated the way he had been treated and treated his own sons very differently. This, in turn, would affect the way George V treated his own children, which contributed to Edward VIII’s decision to abdicate.

  Albert and Victoria’s third child, Alice, was born in April 1843. Her birth made up the royal couple’s mind to buy a larger palace as they felt Buckingham Palace did not have enough room for nurseries. In 1845, they bought Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, which Albert inevitably improved. There, the children could have sufficient space, though their bedrooms were furnished very sparsely and had little heating. They were taught unprincely skills, such as cooking, gardening and carpentry.

  As she grew up, the outside world fascinated Alice. She visited tenants on the Balmoral estate and once escaped from her governess at the chapel at Windsor to sit in a public pew (she later explained that she wanted to understand ordinary people). In 1854, her mother took her on a tour of London hospitals, where soldiers who had been wounded in the Crimean War were being treated. Alice became fascinated by Florence Nightingale’s work and this would have effects a century later.

  Bertie and his bumps

  Victoria and Albert had six more children, all but one of whom married kings, princes and princesses, so that they were linked with every European royal family. The Queen and Albert spent time with their family – they had breakfast with them nearly every day and were always involved in planning their activities. When one governess wanted to resign because her mother was seriously ill, Grace Greenwood wrote:

  The Queen, who had been much pleased with her, would not hear of her making this sacrifice, but said, in a tone of the most gentle sympathy, ‘Go at once to your mother, child; stay with her as long as she needs you, and then come back to us. I will keep your place for you. Prince Albert and I will hear the children’s lessons; so in any event let your mind be at rest in regard to your pupils.’

  Victoria loved her eldest daughter but that did not mean she let her get away with much as Princessy grew older. Greenwood explained that when Princessy was ‘a wilful girl of about thirteen, sitting on the front seat, [she] seemed disposed to be rather familiar and coquettish with some young officers of the escort’. Victoria gave her daughter disapproving looks bu
t Princessy deliberately dropped her handkerchief over the side of the carriage. When ‘two or three young heroes sprang from their saddles to return it to her fair hand, the awful voice of royalty stayed them. “Stop, gentlemen!” exclaimed the Queen, “leave it just where it lies. Now, my daughter, get down from the carriage and pick up your handkerchief.”’ The Queen was not about to allow her daughter to become too grand or too wilful – ‘It was hard, but it was wholesome.’ Greenwood then added a cultural quip. ‘How many American mothers would be equal to such a piece of Spartan discipline?’ Despite this, Princessy had a far easier time than her brother.

  Spartan discipline did not improve Bertie, and Albert made the mistake of seeking advice from Stockmar, who wrote pompous memos in which he recommended the boy ‘should be the repository of all the moral and intellectual qualities by which the [state] is held together and under the guidance of which it advances in the great path of civilisation’. For a year, Albert and Victoria searched anxiously for the paragon who would turn their son into this splendid repository. When Bertie was eight, they finally chose Henry Birch, who had been captain of the school at Eton and won four university prizes at Cambridge.

  Birch was aptly named because he was a disciplinarian and insisted Bertie even had to study on Saturdays. He taught mathematics, geography and English, and appointed suitable experts to give the young Prince lessons in religion, German, French, music, drawing and writing. No child in the land was driven harder than poor Bertie.

  It is a sign of the obsessive pressure that Albert placed on his son and tutor that Birch had to send him a report every day. Birch complained that Bertie was ‘extremely disobedient, impertinent to his masters and unwilling to submit to discipline’. The child could not concentrate on playing or ‘attempt anything new or difficult without losing his temper’. The anxious Birch was trying to please anxious parents and tried both ‘severe punishment’ – beating Bertie – and also laughing at him. Neither approach worked. At Eton, Birch said, boys ‘were formed as much by contact with others as by the precepts of their tutors’ but Bertie spent far too much time with adults and found himself ‘the centre round which everything seems to move’. He hardly knew any children his own age, apart from Alice and Princessy. His relationship with Alice was especially close.