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

by David Cohen

  After Eddy died, Queen Victoria wrote to one of her granddaughters of ‘the terrible calamity which has befallen us all as well as the country. The feeling of grief and sympathy is universal and great.’ Victoria believed the doctors, who said his death had involved ‘blood poisoning’. She sympathised with Mary of Teck, who ‘came to see him die – it is one of the most fearful tragedies one can imagine’. The Queen then added a touch of literary criticism, saying, ‘It would seem unnatural and overdrawn if it was put into a novel.’ Eddy’s younger brother George wrote: ‘how deeply I did love him; & I remember with pain nearly every hard word & little quarrel I ever had with him & I long to ask his forgiveness, but, alas, it is too late now!’

  The British press had not implicated Eddy directly in the Cleveland Street scandal and the obituaries were respectful. Gladstone, who was soon to be Prime Minister yet again though he was now in his eighties, wrote in his diary ‘a great loss to our party’. Hermann Adler, the Chief Rabbi of the British Empire, preached a sermon which reminded Jews that Eddy had been ‘reverential’ when attending Passover in Jerusalem and that ‘we all admired the modest, the amiable, the unassuming fashion in which he discharged his public duties’. (Adler was far too worried about the Jewish community trying to cope with thousands of refugees, who had fled from the pogroms in Russia, to be critical of the son of the Prince of Wales.)

  Alexandra never fully recovered from her son’s death and kept the room in which Eddy died as a shrine. At the funeral, Mary of Teck laid her bridal wreath of orange blossom on the coffin. She must have thought this was the end of her hope for a glittering match.

  Queen Victoria was less starry-eyed in private, writing to Princessy about Eddy’s ‘dissipated life’. Historians have been vitriolic in their assessment. James Pope-Hennessy and Harold Nicolson both portrayed Eddy as lazy, ill-educated and physically feeble.

  The Cleveland Street accusations pale into insignificance, however, when compared to the thesis proposed by Stephen Knight, who claimed Eddy committed, or at least had been involved in, the Jack the Ripper killings. Knight claims Eddy fathered a child with a woman in Whitechapel. The monarchy did not need another scandal so either Eddy or several high-ranking men committed the murders – both William Gull, Queen Victoria’s doctor, and James Stephen, Eddy’s tutor, have been suggested as the killers – to protect the crown. Historians have dismissed these claims as fantasies and pointed out that, on 30 September 1888, when Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes were murdered, Eddy was at Balmoral, dining with the Queen and some relatives from Germany.

  The accusations may have been far-fetched, but two years after Knight published his claims, Gladstone’s biographer, Philip Magnus, called Eddy’s death a ‘merciful act of providence’. After Bertie, the heir to the throne would now be the solid, stolid and sober George, whose grandmother had given him a watch when he was eight years old and told him to be an obedient boy. With Wilhelm a trial and Eddy a disgrace, no one had paid much attention to the boy Dalton had warned suffered from self-conceit.

  8

  The Royal Bully

  ‘I am damn well going to see to it that my children are frightened of me!’

  George V

  George V made this much-quoted remark to Lord Derby, who told it to Randolph Churchill, who in turn told Harold Nicolson: ‘Derby was distressed by the way King George bullied his children and he ventured one day at Knowsley when they were walking up and down a terrace to raise the subject.’ Derby added that his own children had become delightful companions and begged the King to realise that ‘he was missing a great deal by frightening them and continuing to treat them as if they were naughty children’.

  According to Nicolson, George was silent for four minutes and then replied: ‘My father was frightened of his mother, I was frightened of my father and I am damn well going to see to it that my children are frightened of me!’ Some historians question whether the King really did say this, let alone whether he paused for four minutes before doing so.

  George’s sometimes cruel behaviour to his children was partly a matter of reaction; in this case, a reaction against the way his parents had treated his older brother Eddy. Both his mother and father had indulged Eddy, as Bertie did not want to damage his son in the way the Queen and Prince Albert’s demands had damaged him, as he saw it. Bertie had not taken into account the fact that Eddy was both less intelligent and weaker than he himself had been, as well as somewhat muddled as to his sexuality. George, who never mentioned his brother’s sexuality, drew a simple lesson: children needed strict discipline and royal children needed that even more than they needed love. He was not about to mollycoddle his own.

  But, before becoming a father, George had to find a wife and he was not allowed to choose for himself. Queen Victoria had been impressed by Mary of Teck as a sensible and intelligent young woman. There was no point in wasting a good wife, so, after Eddy died, she decided the girl should marry George. There are two versions of what happened next. One is that George was simply ordered to marry her; the second is that he and Mary, who had both loved Eddy, started to love one another as they mourned. There is probably some truth in both theories.

  George and Mary of Teck married on 6 July 1893. One of her bridesmaids was Princess Alice, one of Queen Victoria’s many great-granddaughters. Alice had already showed herself to be a feisty girl. When she was four years old, her mother wrote that she had annoyed Queen Victoria by refusing to kiss her hand. The Queen snapped, ‘Naughty child!’ and slapped her. Alice slapped the Queen back and said, ‘Naughty Grandmama!’ ‘I had to remove the offender,’ Princess Victoria noted in her recollections. Grandmama did not tolerate dissent.

  Four years later, the outburst had been forgiven and, at the wedding, the Queen thought Alice looked ‘very sweet in white satin with a little pink and red rose on the shoulder’. Even in her seventies, she was sharp enough to realise something was wrong with the girl and sent her to an ear specialist (Bertie’s wife was also deaf and had responded by withdrawing into herself and her children). Princess Alice, on the other hand, became one of the most flamboyant, eccentric – and heroic – members of the British royal family. Her brothers, Louis and George, were also at the wedding; all three helped make the royal family what it is today.

  The wedding was also attended by Wilhelm, Princessy’s son. Princessy complained that her son was under the influence of Count Otto von Bismarck, the driving force in German politics as Disraeli and Gladstone had been in British politics. Bismarck made Wilhelm ‘have no respect or regard for his parents’. Princessy remained devoted to her second son, Henry, but was realistic about him: ‘Though Henry often provokes me, he had a good heart and, alas, Wilhelm has no heart at all.’ Yet another relationship between a royal child and his parents had foundered. It is interesting to speculate what the effect on world history would have been had Wilhelm not rejected his British mother.

  The Queen took Alice to Osborne on the Isle of Wight for Christmas 1893, where there was a dormitory for all the royal grandchildren. They drove through Cowes and the Queen wrote: ‘I love these darling children so, almost as much as their own parents.’ Victoria was not the only formidable royal relative Alice had, however. Her aunt, Ella, the Grand Duchess Elizabeth Fyodorovna of Russia, was the first member of the royal family to be canonised for nearly ten centuries.

  After the wedding, George and Mary settled down to a quiet domestic life. Their relationship had many silences, it seems. George adored his sentimental mother, who never had the least difficulty in expressing her feelings for anyone. He adored his father, who also rarely had trouble in expressing himself; Queen Victoria was similarly emotionally articulate. George, however, found it hard to express his feelings in person. He and Mary often exchanged loving letters and notes of endearment. It may have been that this reticence suited his wife because she too seems to have been inhibited. Early on in their engagement, she wrote to him, saying she wished she could tell him what she felt more easily.
He told her that he understood that reticence all too well.

  There is, unfortunately, no contemporary biography of Mary of Teck, which would shed some light on her relationship with her own parents, who were something of a trial to Queen Victoria. The most intimate account we have of Mary describes her as an old woman, when she was a wise and helpful grandmother. Marion Crawford taught the current Queen and Princess Margaret, and knew Queen Mary in the 1930s, when she seems to have been less diffident than in her youth.

  Marriage did not make George attractive as far as his official biographer, Harold Nicolson, was concerned. He despaired of his subject when George was in his twenties and carped: ‘He may be all right as a young midshipman and a wise old king, but when he was Duke of York, he did nothing at all but kill [i.e. shoot] animals and stick in stamps.’ In fact, George played a key part in making the Royal Philatelic Collection one of the best in the world.

  In between the shooting and adding to his stamp albums, George did manage his first essential duty – providing an heir. He was still young, only twenty-nine years old, when he became a father. When his first son was born on 23 June 1894, he was in the library reading Pilgrim’s Progress. ‘My darling May was not conscious during those last terrible two-and-a-half hours,’ he wrote to Queen Victoria. The baby weighed 8lb and was ‘most beautiful, healthy and strong’. The baby David was the future Edward VIII.

  David’s christening on 16 July 1894 in the White Lodge at Richmond Park was a splendid occasion. The Prince had twelve godparents, and the Prime Minister, Lord Rosebery, was also present. George wrote to his old tutor, Canon Dalton, that he used two bottles of Jordan water, which he had saved from his trip on the Bacchante, to bless his son. The only sour note came from Keir Hardie, the first Labour MP; who warned Parliament that the child would be surrounded by sycophants and at the end of the day, ‘the country will be called on to pay the bill’.

  Historians of the royal family have been puzzled by George and Mary of Teck’s behaviour as parents. After David, they had four more sons and one daughter. David’s memoirs and other evidence suggest the couple were distant and cold to their children. George was more than able to be warm on paper, however. In August 1894, for example, he told his wife that he had a picture of her and ‘darling Baby on my table before me now’. In person, he would find it hard to be so affectionate.

  It would be wrong to suggest that the future George V was never a kind father. In some of his letters to his sons, he could be quite playful when the ‘chicks’, as he called them, were young. When the children had chickenpox, he wrote to David that he hoped neither of them sprouted wings as then ‘we should have to go up in a balloon to catch you’.

  George and Mary’s second son was born on the same day, 14 December, that Queen Victoria’s beloved Prince Albert and her daughter Alice had died. She again insisted the boy should be named after her dead husband. Names matter and can cause psychological confusion. His parents did not want to call the boy Albert and always used ‘George’ or ‘Bertie’. It was the beginning of a number of troubles. He was a sickly child and was described as ‘easily frightened and somewhat prone to tears’. Albert or George was not allowed to use the hand he wanted to use when he learned to write. He was naturally left-handed, but it was considered bad – indeed sinister – to be left-handed so he was forced to use his right hand. His father always complained that his son’s handwriting was poor. George was bullied not just by his father, but also by his first nurse and, to some extent, by his older brother when they were young. Forcing a naturally left-handed child to write with his right hand is now recognised as a classic cause of stammering and George did indeed develop a stammer. He also suffered from chronic stomach problems, as well as knock knees, for which he was forced to wear painful corrective splints. He was, as we shall see, eventually obliged to seek not just speech therapy, but also psychiatric help.

  Mary of Teck was no gushing mother, as Alexandra had been. She was not besotted by her babies and found them ‘plain’. While she admitted they were ‘very nice’, the business of having them seemed really unpleasant; it suggests she did not enjoy the sexual side of marriage much and, after she had three children, she negotiated a pause in child bearing with her husband, it seems. Their next child was born two-and-a-half years later after they had gone on one of the many cruises the royals made to show the flag round the Empire.

  George’s difficulties as a father began when his children stopped being babies. He expected them to behave maturely, or with ‘spurious maturity’ to use the psychoanalyst D. W Winnicott’s phrase. (Winnicott was a good friend of Marie Bonaparte and invented the idea of the transitional object.) They had to dress as sailors and were often made to drill and parade. It is tempting to compare him with that other Navy man Captain von Trapp in The Sound of Music, but Mary of Teck was no Sister Maria, at least as Julie Andrews played her in the film. Even when she was just their governess, Maria reminded Captain von Trapp that his children were children and stopped him barking commands as if they were on an imaginary battleship. George, however, yelled if his children wore the wrong colour kilts, or their uniforms were not up to scratch, or they did not march in step. Philip Ziegler argues Mary held her husband in awe and was frightened of contradicting him, whatever his behaviour as a father. ‘I always have to remember that their father is also their King,’ she wrote. She had been brought up all too aware of her parents’ inferior position and their poverty.

  The little Princes could at least put on a good show for their grandmother. In May 1898, they visited Queen Victoria, who noted: ‘David is a delightful child, so intelligent. The baby is a sweet little thing.’ The Queen said nothing about George, now the middle child.

  In the day-to-day business of bringing up the children, the royal parents relied heavily on a nanny, Lalla Bill, and a nursery footman, whose father had served with the Duke of Wellington. The footman was no respecter of Princes and sometimes spanked David for being rude to Lalla Bill. The third person in charge of the children was a nurse, who turned out to be a very poor choice.

  The identity of this nurse has never been revealed. She had worked for the Duke and Duchess of Newcastle, who had given her a good reference, but the woman either changed when she came to Sandringham, or the Newcastles had been blind to her failings. She preferred David to George, but that did not make her treat David kindly; she would twist and pinch his arm before she took him in to see his parents. David seems never to have told his parents what she was doing but he did scream sometimes, which his mother disliked as it was ‘jumpy’. The nurse also seems to have deprived George of food, snatching bowls and plates away from him. Lalla Bill finally told the housekeeper what was going on, but the nurse was not sacked until an investigation was carried out. It emerged she had not had a day off for three years, that she had a difficult husband and she was bitter as she herself had been unable to have children.

  When George was five years old, his father, whose ‘self-conceit’ had worried Dalton, told his son: ‘Now that you are five years old, I hope you will always try to be obedient and do at once what you are told, as you will find it will come much easier to you the sooner you begin.’

  John Wheeler-Bennett wrote the official biography of the future George VI and made revelations about his childhood which ‘have led a number of commentators to suggest that George’s early upbringing was bound to induce nervous disorders which would remain with him in later life’, according to later biographer Patrick Howarth. Howarth dismissed these ideas as impertinent, but seems to have ignored the role that three doctors played in George’s life. The first was Sir Frederick Treves, who is now best known for his care of the ‘Elephant Man’, the second was Louis Greig, who first met George when the Prince was thirteen years old and a midshipman – Greig was the ship’s doctor – and the third was Maurice Craig, then a leading psychiatrist. George did not just stammer: when frustrated, he was prone to violent outbursts of temper, which worried his family.

 
By the end of Queen Victoria’s reign, she had finally been obliged to let Bertie assume some responsibility. She arranged for his son to set off on an imperial tour to show off the royal family to their colonial subjects; the grandparents were left in charge of the children. Alexandra and Bertie indulged David, George and the others far more than they had ever been before. Bertie allowed the children to skip lessons and played funny games, in which the children chased pats of butter. Mary was distressed by her father-in-law’s rather sweet behaviour but dared do nothing about it. Bertie teased his grandchildren by saying that when their parents came back, they would be black all over because they had been under the tropical sun. In his own book, A King’s Story, David recalls being both frightened and curious about this prediction.

  A year before she died, Queen Victoria became godmother to Louis, Princess Victoria’s son. In her recollections, the Princess said her son caused his great-grandmother some trouble a few months later as ‘he waved his little arms so violently, he knocked her spectacles off’. The Queen did not reprimand her last godson.

  The royal family saw the new century in at Sandringham, where they argued about whether 1900 was the last year of the new century or the first year of the next.

  Queen Victoria finally died in 1901 after sixty-three years on the throne. Her granddaughter Victoria mourned her, saying, ‘She had taken a special interest in her beloved daughter’s children as they had lost their mother young.’ The Queen made Victoria’s father, Louis, one of the executors of her will, showing she had forgiven him the episode with the disreputable Countess. Princess Victoria also highlighted a fact that shows the tentacles of the long case history, There was only one member of the family still alive who had been present when the Queen had come to the throne, back in 1837, This aunt was herself a niece of George III’s wife and was ‘now much appealed to’. She knew all the secrets of the family.