by David Cohen
Arthur then crossed the mountains of Persia on a pony and took a boat to Bombay. Meanwhile, his outraged mother cut off his letters of credit. Circumstances forced Kavanagh and his mother to reconcile a year later after his fully limbed brothers had died – one of consumption, another in a fire. Kavanagh inherited huge estates and was elected to the House of Commons in 1866. He is the most disabled person ever to sit in Parliament and one of the least recognised heroes of British history.
Queen Victoria used the same tactic as Lady Harriet had but, for decades, there was no reconciliation between herself and her eldest son. The Queen arranged for Bertie to tour the Middle East and he visited Egypt, Jerusalem, Damascus, Beirut and Constantinople. She was still just as angry with him when he returned and punished him by refusing to allow him the slightest role in running the country. Instead, she decided to find him a wife. In March 1863, Bertie married Alexandra, daughter of the future King of Denmark. He was twenty-one: she was eighteen. She was a beautiful young woman and Tennyson wrote some routinely rhapsodic lines for her:
Sea king’s daughter from over the sea,
Alexandra
Saxon and Norman and Dane are we
But all of us Danes in our welcome of thee,
Alexandra
The birth of Bertie and Alexandra’s first child ten months after they married did not lift Victoria’s depression, but, as ever, she summoned up enough energy to meddle in the couple’s affairs. She wrote: ‘Bertie should understand what a strong right I have to interfere in the management of the child or children.’ Victoria wanted the boy to be called Albert in memory of her own beloved Albert. Bertie and Alexandra did not wish to do so, but they complied with this request, although they themselves always called him ‘Eddy’. Alexandra did not have the strength of character to stand up to Victoria. Ironically, Bertie’s first son turned out to need far more control than his father had done, and that was precisely what Bertie refused to provide as a result of his own unhappy experiences.
Seventeen months after Prince Albert Victor (or ‘Eddy’) was born, Victoria received a telegram in the early morning to say Bertie had a second son. Again, the Queen wanted to call him Albert, but this time the family used the name George.
In dealing with his children, Bertie had no problems in controlling his temper. He rarely became angry because of anything that they did. Alexandra made a profound impression on her second son: George later recalled that he grew up around two extremely beautiful women and one was his mother. Alexandra worked at it; she had an educated sense of style and summoned drapers and dressmakers to create splendidly fashionable clothes. ‘I know better than all the milliners and antiquaries,’ she wrote. ‘I shall wear exactly what I like and so shall my ladies. Basta.’ This early fashionista had to survive in a court still dominated by her formidable mother-in-law, who continued to oppress the family with her depression. For consolation, Alexandra turned to her children, and especially to her sons.
Alexandra spent far more time with her children than most upper-class women of her time. She tended to baby them, partly to compensate for Bertie’s eternal absences. After two or three years, the marriage became formal and decently mannered but distant. If Bertie wasn’t at the races, he was at the casino and, wherever he was, he was likely to be with other women. He often came back home at 3 a.m. Alexandra complained of his taste for ‘female Paris notorieties’ and ‘various Russian beauties’.
Alexandra’s children were her only source of fun and joy: she liked to play hide-and-seek with them, or to toboggan down the palace stairs on silver trays. She told her friend, Annie de Rothschild, that the Princes were ‘dreadfully wild, but I was just as bad’.
Shortly before Bertie and Alexandra had Eddy, his sister Alice had had her first daughter: Princess Victoria of Hesse, who became Prince Philip’s grandmother. The young Princess would soon find herself on the move, however, because of a war that pitted sister against sister. When the Prussians invaded Hesse in 1866, soldiers loyal to Princessy and her husband fought with those who owed loyalty to Alice and her husband. Princessy did not have to worry about her children but Alice’s daughters, Victoria and Ella, were sent to England to live with their grandmother until the war ended.
In February 1873, the family had another shock. Alice’s two-year-old son Friedrich was diagnosed with haemophilia. He cut his ear and it bled for three days – bandages could not stop the flow of blood. In late May, Friedrich and his brother Ernst were playing in their mother’s bedroom. Friedrich was too young to know he had to be eternally careful. He climbed onto a chair by an open window. The chair tipped over and Friedrich fell. He survived the fall and would almost certainly have lived if he had not been a haemophiliac. A few hours later, he died of a brain haemorrhage. It was twenty years since the Queen had given birth to her haemophiliac son, Leopold, and the new victim showed the bleeding disorder in the royal family was hereditary.
In terms of life events, Victoria enjoyed and endured a real panoply. She certainly had a full life and one that affected the royal family for generations. The childhood of Bertie’s first son would be deeply influenced by the excessive expectations Victoria and Albert had had for their children. For his part, Bertie was determined not to make the same mistakes that his parents had made with him. He was indulgent with his children – and far too indulgent with his eldest son.
7
The Dangers of Too Little Discipline: Edward VII and His Eldest Son (1864–1910)
Victoria was not impressed by the way her grandchildren were being brought up. She nagged Princessy about Wilhelm, and Bertie about Eddy and George. Victoria had noted that Wilhelm was arrogant and this worried her. She also warned Princessy of the danger of being too close to her son because ‘I often think too great care, too much constant watching leads to the very dangers hereafter which one wishes to avoid.’ Princes, she added, were at risk because they were flattered and no one had ‘the courage to tell them the truth or to accustom them to those rubs and knocks which are so necessary to boys and young men’.
The Queen was especially concerned about Bertie’s children. When Eddy was six, and George was five, she complained: ‘They are such ill-bred, ill-trained children I can’t fancy them at all.’ Bertie might well have replied that he knew far too much about the rubs and knocks that the Queen recommended for boys. He became more and more frustrated as she still excluded him from any role in government and consoled himself with mistresses and gambling. He seduced, and was seduced, by Lady Randolph Churchill, Alice Keppel (the great-grandmother of the Duchess of Cornwall) and the actress Lillie Langtry. He was even forced to appear as a witness in the 1870 divorce case brought by Sir Charles Mordaunt against his wife, who had a succession of lovers. Bertie had spent hours alone with Mrs Mordaunt and few believed their encounters to be innocent.
The Mordaunt case was the first of three scandals that threatened the reputation of the royal family between 1870 and 1890. To have her son give evidence in a divorce case appalled Victoria and confirmed her view that Bertie was hopelessly debauched and unfit for any responsibility. Time after time, he begged her to change her mind but to no avail. Yet again the relationship of a monarch to a Prince of Wales was unhappy and destructive.
Even if Bertie had been a saint, Victoria would probably have insisted on choosing the tutors for his children. John Neale Dalton, a curate in the church at Osborne on the Isle of Wight, had impressed her and she sent for him. But Dalton turned out to be far more complicated than the Queen knew: his closest friend from Cambridge was Edward Carpenter, who became a pioneer of the rights of gay men. Whether the two men were lovers is uncertain but they were certainly close. Carpenter dabbled in the Victorian homosexual underworld, a world where, in discreet houses, rich men could meet what we would now call ‘rent boys’. Dalton knew Carpenter visited such houses.
In 1873, Queen Victoria gave Eddy’s brother, George, a watch for his birthday and, as so often, it became an occasion for stressing what was expe
cted of him, though he was only eight years old. She hoped: ‘that it will serve to remind you to be very punctual in everything and very exact in all your duties. I hope you will be a good, obedient, truthful boy.’ I have been unable to find out if she gave Eddy a watch too but he certainly did not grow up to be good or obedient.
In January 1874, Bertie and Alexandra visited St Petersburg for the wedding of his brother, the Duke of Edinburgh, and the Grand Duchess Maria of Russia. Dalton stayed behind with the Princes at Osborne. He spent as much time riding ponies with them as giving them any proper lessons. Dalton had a reckless streak as he allowed the Princes to shoot at him while he pretended to be a deer. Whether anyone could have made Eddy learn much is doubtful, though: he was lazy, astonishingly so. Dalton complained that the Prince’s mind was ‘abnormally dormant’. Alexandra worried about her eldest boy and nagged George not to be bad-tempered with his tutor. In a leather-bound volume recording the Princes’ progress, Dalton noted that George suffered from ‘fretfulness of temper’ and ‘self-approbation’. That did not stop his tutor writing, ‘I thought much of my darling little Georgie’ and signing his letters to ‘dearest boy with much love’. He also wrote very affectionately to Eddy.
When Eddy was nine, Bertie thought it might make sense to split the brothers up, but Dalton argued against this, as Eddy required ‘the stimulus of Prince George’s company to induce him to work at all’. Dalton’s memo was sent in the first instance, of course, not to Eddy’s parents, but to Queen Victoria. The tutor added, ‘the mutual influence of their characters’ which were totally different ‘in many ways is very beneficial’. It would be even harder to educate Eddy if he were away from his brother. Dalton also believed Eddy was of some use to George ‘as a check against that tendency to self-conceit which is apt at times to show itself in him’. Clergymen of the time were perhaps inclined to watch for pride but, from a psychological point of view, Dalton’s assessment is intriguing. George brimmed with ‘self-conceit’ at times. The obvious explanation for Freud at least would have been that George’s mother adored him, as Alexandra manifestly did. Her adoration made her second son at times arrogant.
By the time the Princes neared their teens, Dalton thought they should be sent off to sea together. Queen Victoria had some doubts: ‘I have a great fear of young and carefully brought up boys mixing with older boys and indeed with boys in general and the things they may hear and learn from them cannot be over-rated.’ Despite these anxieties, she finally allowed her grandsons to join the Navy. In 1877, when Eddy was thirteen and George was twelve, they were sent to the Royal Navy’s training ship, HMS Britannia. For some years, the boys would be separated from their parents. Dalton accompanied them as chaplain and eventually published the sermons he preached on the high seas.
When George was an old man, he told his librarian, Sir Owen Morshead, that HMS Britannia ‘was a pretty tough place and, so far from making any allowances for us for our disadvantages the other boys made a point of taking it out on us on the grounds that they’d never be able to do it later on’. Clearly, neither of the Princes dared turn to Dalton for protection because the other midshipmen would have thought this pathetic. There was a lot of fighting between the cadets, as well as an unofficial hierarchy. George complained: ‘They used to make me go up and challenge the bigger boys – I was awfully small at the time – and got a hiding, time and again.’ The persecution stopped, however, when one of the big boys landed a formidable blow on the princely nose and the ship’s doctor forbade any more fighting.
After the ban on fighting the cadets found another way to bully George. They were not allowed to bring any food on board and ‘the big boys used to fag me to bring back a whole lot of stuff’. Perhaps due to a lack of cunning, George could never conceal his contraband so he would get into trouble, but, worst of all, ‘it was always my money and they never paid me back’. He told Morshead that he supposed his fellow cadets thought ‘there was plenty more where that came from’, although in fact he only received a shilling pocket money a week. Strangely, his indulgent father who frittered thousands away kept his son short.
After their spell on the Britannia, the boys were sent to sail on the HMS Bacchante on a three-year world tour. Many writers and a few psychiatrists have mused on the effects of an English boarding-school education, which promoted separation anxiety. During the days of Empire, it was quite common for Anglo-Indian families especially to send their boys to England and sometimes the parents did not see them for years.
Churchill described the Navy that the Princes entered as an institution that ran on rum, sodomy and the lash. There were a few cases of captains punishing their men for ‘uncleanness’, such as the gay sailor James Jones in the early nineteenth century, but, in general, homosexuality was not openly admitted though even Princes may have been at some risk of becoming involved in homosexual activities. An anonymous naval officer wrote of the secrecy surrounding what the Irish writer and poet Oscar Wilde would describe as ‘the love that dare not speak its name’.
What we know is less sensational. The Princes got into trouble because they got themselves tattooed on their noses. ‘How could you have had your impudent snout tattooed,’ their mother wrote and went on to mock fondly, ‘What an object you must look and won’t everybody stare at the ridiculous boy with an anchor on his nose.’ Sensibly, she asked why her sons could not have chosen to be tattooed on less visible parts of their bodies. Dalton was drawn into the debate and promised the parents that ‘the Princes’ noses are without any fleck, mark or scratch or spot of any kind’. The Princes may have been unmarked when Dalton wrote but they then got themselves tattooed in Tokyo, Kyoto and even Jerusalem, where they attended a Passover service. Eddy, for once, must have been impressed for he listened attentively to the Jewish prayers.
In his biography of George V, Philip Ziegler argues that, after being taught by Dalton for years, the Princes were less well educated than the average public schoolboy of the time. George often made spelling mistakes, while Victoria complained to Bertie that at least he ‘spoke German and French when you were five or six’ but his own children were not even much good at English. Alexandra seems to have discouraged George from learning German, as she described the language as ‘that old Sauerkraut’.
For six years, Eddy, who had not been disciplined with any consistency by his father, was in the Navy. We know surprisingly little about this period but he does not seem to have learned the kind of self-control most young aristocratic sailors did. He was eighteen when the Bacchante returned to the UK. What one can learn of his subsequent history suggests that he was weak and, to be charitable, easily tempted.
George had enjoyed his time on the Bacchante and decided to make the sea his career. Since he was not the heir to the throne, there was no reason why he should not go into the Navy. He attended the Royal Naval College at Greenwich, where his best subject was practical navigation; he also achieved first-class honours in gunnery. At the age of twenty-one, George was sent to serve on HMS Thunderer. His father wrote to the captain: ‘I feel that in entrusting him to your care I cannot place him in safer hands, only don’t spoil him please.’
Bertie had picked up some of Dalton’s concerns about George’s self-conceit. He begged Captain Henry Stephenson to treat the Prince just like any other officer and added: ‘I hope he will become one of your smartest and most efficient officers.’ The Prince would only fail if he were allowed to be lazy. In a rather sweet way, Bertie told his son not to eat too much meat and not to smoke too much. Then, in a fine show of hypocrisy, he also warned him against spending too much time in the disreputable coffee houses of Malta. By contrast, George’s sentimental mother ignored the fact that her son was now a lieutenant and wrote to him as if he were still a small boy, and gave him ‘a great big kiss for your lovely face’.
In 1889, Bertie was proud when his son got his first command: Torpedo Boat no. 79. Queen Victoria was worried because, as far as she was concerned, torpedo boats were dangero
us. George, however, distinguished himself by rescuing a ship whose engines had failed. Meanwhile, as he became older, Bertie kept in touch with his favourite sister Alice and often complained to her that their mother still excluded him from any serious political role.
Alice had never forgotten her visit to the wounded soldiers tended by Florence Nightingale. When Hesse became involved in the Austro-Prussian War, she was heavily pregnant, but that did not stop her from running field hospitals. Like her father Albert, she was intellectual and enjoyed metaphysical speculation. She became friends with the theologian David Friedrich Strauss, who criticised the traditional sentimentality of Victorian religion.
In 1878, Alice travelled to England to spend a holiday in Eastbourne accompanied by her daughters, Victoria and Ella. The girls were treated to a tour of the House of Lords and charmed their grandmother. Princess Alice was a healthy woman of thirty-four and could not have imagined this would be the last time she saw her mother. At the end of the year, the Hesse court was hit by diphtheria. Alice nursed her family for a month before falling ill herself. She died on the seventeenth anniversary of her father’s death, 14 December 1878, in Darmstadt. Her eldest daughter Victoria wrote: ‘My mother’s death was an irreparable loss. My childhood ended with her death, for I became the eldest and most responsible.’ Alice’s death had one unexpected effect, though. Her daughter Victoria wrote: ‘My mother’s death broke through many of the outward barriers’ and the Queen offered Alice’s children ‘consistent signs of affectionate pity and interest’.
