by David Cohen
In January 1852, Birch left Windsor because his mother had grown insane and he needed to look after her; he was replaced by Frederick Gibbs, who was offered the then very generous salary of £1,000 a year. Bertie came to detest Gibbs even more than he did Birch. His new tutor made him work six to seven hours a day, starting at eight every morning. After he had slaved at his books all day, Bertie had to ride, drill and do gymnastics. At the end of each day, the Queen saw that her son hung his head ‘and looks at his feet and invariably within a day or two has one of his fits of nervous and unmanageable temper’. Victoria, who had hated being controlled as a girl, was now allowing her own son to be controlled but she never doubted that she loved Bertie and that it was all for his own – and eventually the country’s – good. Albert had studied all the philosophers who preached the need for children to be free, but he was too consumed by anxiety – anxiety to do good, anxiety to impress his wife, anxiety to make sure England got a king who would be a credit to the family – to be sensible and moderate.
Three of Gibbs’s assistants dared to protest Bertie was being driven too hard, but their arguments made no impression. The librarian at Windsor – Dr Becker, who taught Bertie German – found the courage to warn Albert that Bertie’s angry outbursts were the result of frantic attempts to stuff his mind with facts, facts and more facts. Becker recommended a less intense approach and that everyone should respond to Bertie’s outbursts of temper with kindness. He said: ‘Encouragement of every kind is what the child wants to a high degree. The expression of too high expectations which he finds himself unable to meet discourages him instantly and makes him unhappy.’ He also urged Albert and Victoria not to mock their son when he failed. Becker failed in his task and a little sibling rivalry did not help. Princessy was ‘a child far above her age’ but she ‘puts him down by a word or a look’, the Queen said. She worried this was damaging ‘their mutual affection’.
Victoria and Albert ignored Becker’s recommendations and instead turned to Sir George Combe, then Britain’s leading phrenologist. The absurd ‘science’ of phrenology argued that, by studying the bumps on the skull, one could understand the brain within. Poor Bertie had his head shaved so that the specialist could feel every inch of his skull. Combe became pessimistic and told Bertie’s parents their boy needed special care to counteract his less-than-satisfactory bumps.
Unfortunately, Prince Albert also felt he had to produce perfect children and devised endless schedules and programmes of improvement for them. He was the first royal to have been very well educated since James I, but good education did not give him good judgement when it came to his family. His behaviour towards them was obsessive and neurotic. It might be argued that it resembled that of many immigrant parents, who are often eager to ensure their children do well in a society they do not quite understand.
In 1860, Queen Victoria wrote in her journal:
Bertie continues [to be] such an anxiety. 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. I try to shut my eyes to that terrible moment. He is improving very decidedly – but oh it is the improvement of such a poor or still more idle intellect.
The use of the word ‘anxiety’ by the Queen is again oddly modern.
Predictably, sometimes the most acute conflicts between royal parents and their offspring came when the children were teenagers and Bertie is a notable example. After being battered by this over-intense education, he was sent to Cambridge University, where he exasperated his tutors. The only lectures that he attended regularly were those given by Charles Kingsley, author of Westward Ho!
The irony was that Bertie was not without talent. Benjamin Disraeli, Victoria’s favourite Prime Minister, described him as informed, intelligent and of sweet manner. Bertie displayed not just charm but competence too in 1860 when he was in his late teens and his parents allowed him to visit North America. No Prince of Wales had set foot there since America had won its independence. Bertie went first to Canada. In Montreal, he opened the Victoria Bridge and laid the cornerstone of Parliament Hill, Ottawa. He then travelled to Washington and stayed for three days with the President, James Buchanan, at the White House. He met Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Bertie handled a delicate mission well, but his parents did not praise him lavishly when he returned home. To put his achievement into context, by the time he was seventeen, George IV had only run up debts. At a similar age, the rather more virtuous Princess Elizabeth had been allowed to make one radio broadcast for the children of Britain, while her son had never carried out one public engagement.
Princessy as a mother
By the time Bertie came back from America, Princessy had married Fritz, the Crown Prince of Prussia. Some of the most touching examples of Victoria’s love for her daughter are to be found in the letters they exchanged. Princessy wrote that she had never imagined she could be as happy as she was with her husband. When their first son was born, Fritz would bring him to his wife every morning in his basket. He telegraphed England that ‘my baby is lovely and improved every hour’. Four days after Wilhelm was born, the proud parents sent Queen Victoria a lock of his hair. Princessy told her mother that she thought the baby took after her brothers, Bertie and Leopold. ‘You need not be afraid I shall be injudiciously fond of him,’ Princessy wrote, ‘although I do worship him as I do Fritz, Papa and you, though of course all and each in a different way then I feel he is my own and he owes me so much and has cost me so much.’
When Princessy came back to visit England in 1859, she wrote to Fritz: ‘I have left my homeland to find paradise with you.’ But there was a blot on their paradise: their son, Wilhelm, had a withered arm and would soon become a troubled boy.
It may be useful to compare Wilhelm’s childhood with that of a minor, but far more disabled Anglo-Irish aristocrat, Arthur Kavanagh. He was born in 1831 with severely underdeveloped arms and legs. His umbilical cord had somehow become wrapped around his limbs and cut them off, so Arthur was just a ‘torso’, as he would put it later. His mother Harriet was lucky in that her doctor, Boxwell, was not just familiar with the theories of Pestalozzi but, unlike Prince Albert, he also heeded them. If children were encouraged, they could conquer their handicaps.
Princessy behaved much as one imagines her father would have done had one of his children been handicapped: intensely. She and her husband commissioned the building of a machine which was supposed to straighten Wilhelm’s back and improve his bad arm. By the time he was two, the servants were finding it difficult to bring him up properly and the child developed tantrums as bad as Bertie’s. Princessy told her mother that she was concerned because her son screamed for hours, making everyone around him tense and distressed.
In England, Princessy and her mother also discussed the more pleasant matter of whom Alice should marry. Victoria said she wanted her children to marry for love, but in practice that meant they had to find a spouse from among the small pool of European royalty who were also Protestants. The Queen asked Princessy to produce a list of eligible princes. Inevitably, this included an Orange but he was obsessed with a Catholic arch-duchess. Princessy also suggested Albert of Russia, but Fritz said his cousin would not do for ‘one who deserves the very best’, as Alice did.
As a last resort, Princessy suggested Prince Louis of Hesse. He had no money but seemed to be a promising young man. Victoria sent Princessy to inspect the ‘goods’, as she put it, and to decide whether Louis or his brother Henry was more suitable. The brothers were invited to Windsor in 1860, ostensibly so they could watch the Ascot Races with the royal family; while they were watching the races, the Queen could be watching them. Both Princes cantered well enough, but Victoria saw how well Louis and Alice got along. They became engaged in April 1861. The Queen persuaded the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, to vote Alice a dowry of £30,000. Prince Albert worried about the lack of a decent palace in Hesse and want
ed a new one built to his specifications, but the ungrateful Hessians did not wish to pay for this. Alice was unpopular even before she arrived in her new country.
Princessy was not very popular in nearby Prussia either. The Germans saw her as an Englishwoman who did not understand their country, just as the English viewed Albert as a German who did not understand them. Princessy did not endear herself by becoming furious when she found that a Prussian nanny had covered her children with German eiderdowns instead of softer English blankets. The Kaiser got to hear of this and was not pleased.
These cultural clashes came to a head over the question of breastfeeding. The Kaiser ordered Princessy not to breastfeed Wilhelm and her first two children. When finally she was allowed to breastfeed some of her younger children, she loved the experience. ‘To have a baby at the breast is the greatest joy of womanhood,’ she wrote to her mother. ‘I am always overjoyed when she stretches out her little arms to me and shows me in every way how content she feels at my breast.’ The Kaiser was opposed to breastfeeding, and once decreed Princessy could only go on holiday if she left her three children behind, ‘and turn the baby over to a wet nurse immediately’. Royal children sometimes did not ‘belong’ to their parents, but to the head of the family.
A year of deaths
With the death of Queen Anne’s only son, 1700 had been a year of calamities for the royal family and 1861 would be just as tragic. The Queen Mother had never made up with her daughter but had been allowed to live at Frogmore, a royal residence rarely visited by Victoria. When Victoria’s mother fell ill early in 1861, it was young Alice who went to look after her. She played the piano and nursed her grandmother through the final illness. When her mother died, she and Victoria had not really reconciled and the Queen broke down with grief. She relied heavily on Alice, to whom Albert said: ‘Go and comfort Mama.’ The Queen wrote to Leopold that ‘dear good Alice was full of intense tenderness, affection and distress for me’. It is tempting to suggest that Victoria, who had ruled since 1837, felt guilty because she had more or less abandoned her mother who, as far as she was concerned, had failed her in letting Conroy impose the Kensington System.
After his successful trip to America, Bertie wanted to join the army but his parents denied him this, even though the Crimean War had ended and England was at peace. Visiting America had made Bertie more confident. He travelled to Ireland with his parents’ permission, but took part in army exercises without telling them that he was doing so. Bertie did not just learn about military manoeuvres, though. While there, some officers smuggled a very willing actress into his tent. Nellie Clifden became the first of Bertie’s many lovers.
Unfortunately, a rather stuffy colonel reported the affair to Victoria and Albert. Albert was ill when the news of Bertie’s disgraceful behaviour reached Windsor. Nevertheless, he felt that he must rush up to confront his son, who was by then in Cambridge, because it was such a serious crisis: the Prince of Wales could not jolly in bed with trollops. Albert told his son that he was not only breaking his mother’s heart but also endangering the monarchy. Already there had been three attempts to assassinate Victoria, Marx and Engels had published The Communist Manifesto, and there were agitations in France and Germany. The French royal family had fled to England for safety; England had seen the Chartist riots. Bertie managed to keep his temper, apologised to his father and promised to have nothing more to do with actresses and to reform.
By the time Albert got home to Windsor Castle, he was seriously ill. Over the next three weeks, his condition grew critical and he became so weak that he could hardly talk. On 10 December, Victoria wrote to Princessy, ‘Papa had an excellent night’ but ‘it was very trying to watch and witness’ his illness. She was being optimistic. A day later, Albert took a turn for the worse. During her father’s illness, Alice remained by his bedside. She sent for Bertie by telegram, without their mother’s knowledge, for Victoria had refused to tell her son anything as she blamed him for Albert’s illness.
On the morning of 14 December, the Queen asked if Albert was strong enough to give her a kiss. He did so and then fell into a sleep. She left the room ‘and sat down on the floor in utter despair’. When she went back, Albert was comatose – ‘I took his dear left hand which was already cold though the breathing was quite gentle and I knelt down by him.’ Albert took two or three more breaths, ‘the hand clasping mine and all, all was over’. The Queen stood up, kissed his forehead and ‘called out in a bitter and agonising cry, “Oh my dear Darling!”’
Victoria and Albert each had troubled childhoods and had created a close, cocoon-like marriage to give each other emotional security. Albert’s death robbed Victoria of that essential stability and it would have taken a formidable maturity for her to face the pain of his loss calmly, especially perhaps as he had died only a few months after her mother. Now, true sorrow followed on from the guilt when her mother died, shattering her.
In the family, Victoria could still function and dominate, however. Seven months after Albert died, the marriage Princessy had arranged for her sister Alice took place. It was a sombre, very private occasion, in the shadow of their father’s death. Alice married Louis of Hesse in the dining room at Osborne House. She was allowed to wear white during the wedding, but, before and after the ceremony, she had to wear mourning black. Ushered in by her four sons, the Queen was screened from the other guests by them. Victoria struggled to hold back the tears, Bertie remained composed, but Arthur and Leopold cried throughout. The Queen wrote to Princessy that the ceremony was ‘more of a funeral than a wedding’ and told the poet laureate Tennyson that it was ‘the saddest day I can remember’.
The honeymoon at Ryde on the Isle of Wight could hardly be jolly in the circumstances and matters grew worse when Victoria decided to visit the couple. In order not to upset her mother, Alice tried not to seem ‘too happy’. In this, she failed and her obvious happiness made the Queen jealous of her daughter.
The normal healing process of time did not help Victoria: she could not accept Albert’s death and blamed the son she saw as inadequate for it. In her mind, if Bertie’s debaucheries had not forced Albert to rush to see him, he would not have died and her life would not have been ruined. She wrote to Princessy that she could never forgive Bertie and ‘I never can, or shall, look at him without a shudder’. Naturally, the personal and political consequences of all this were profound. The monarch was never as unpopular as Victoria became in the 1860s when she simply refused to perform what the public saw as her duties.
It is also worth looking at this period in Bertie’s life in terms of the life-events theory. He had great success in America; he then lost his virginity and had to cope yet again with his father’s recriminations. His grandmother had died shortly before; his father soon followed, and then his mother blamed him for his father’s death. Victoria kept a diary in which she wrote up to 2,500 words a day and kept up a correspondence with Princessy. It was a safety valve in which she would have recorded her feelings in great depth. In 1893, however, she told her youngest daughter, Beatrice, to burn many of her letters and diaries. In fact, Beatrice copied all the diaries and edited them while doing so, ‘deleting all the bits she knew Grandmama would not have wished preserved. Beatrice then burned the originals. This work occupied her for thirty-nine years,’ Alice’s daughter, Princess Victoria, wrote in her unpublished recollections.
Beatrice really proved herself a dutiful daughter. It is plausible to imagine the sections Grandmama did not wish to be preserved were full of bitterness, much of it directed towards the unfortunate Bertie. When he finally ascended to the throne in 1901, he recovered the letters his mother had written to Disraeli. Edward VII then had these destroyed also.
There is again a curious parallel with Sigmund Freud, who burned his diaries and letters at least twice in his lifetime and made sure many surviving letters and documents would never be read. The Library of Congress in Washington DC houses nineteen boxes of Freud’s papers, which are closed in pe
rpetuity. At least we know how many of his boxes are sealed, however. When it comes to the Royal Archives, we do not even know what documents cannot be read. It is reasonable to suppose some are less-than-loving letters from kings and queens, scolding their children.
Soon after Albert died, Queen Victoria appointed William Gull as one of her physicians. Gull is best known for having identified the condition of anorexia nervosa, but he had previously been in charge of the psychiatric wards at Guy’s Hospital. Though he knew about depression, he failed to help the Queen to cope with her own, which lasted for over ten years. Both Disraeli and Gladstone urged her to come out of what could almost be called hibernation and to resume her duties, but she refused. The Queen was lucky, however, as the Victorian press was somewhat willing to respect her privacy.
Eventually, Victoria was persuaded to give her people some trifle to show that she still cared for them. The trifle was that she permitted the publication of her Highland Journals in 1868. The diary, Greenwood noted naïvely, ‘exhibits to us the picture of a happy family, always delighted to escape from the trammelling etiquette and absurd splendors of their rank, and capable of being pleased with those natural pleasures which are accessible to most of mankind’. The Queen’s relationship with Bertie was anything but happy, of course.
Bertie’s exile
Bertie was not the first dissolute Victorian aristocrat whose mother could not bear to have him near her after a traumatic episode. In 1849, Arthur Kavanagh was caught making love to one of the servant girls on the family estate. His mother was apoplectic: the idea that a cripple with no arms and no legs should have sex appalled her, so Lady Harriet sent him off with his brother and a sour young clergyman to tour Sweden and Russia. Arthur got into a fight in Moscow and had to flee the city, taking a boat down the Volga. He landed in Baku, on the Caspian Sea, where he outraged his clerical tutor by spending Christmas in a harem. The local sheik thought a man with no arms and no legs was hardly likely to appeal to his concubines, but he was deluded.
