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

by David Cohen

  As he assumed the crown, Bertie was determined to avoid a crucial mistake his mother had made and at once gave George access to all state papers. It was a sign of respect and his son appreciated that, but his father’s respect did not change George’s attitude towards his own children.

  Derby was not the only courtier to worry about George and Mary’s less-than-loving attitude as parents. Lord Esher sent Mary a copy of Gosse’s Father and Son, a famous memoir of the often difficult relationship Gosse had with his father. In a deferential society, it must have taken some courage to suggest to the future King and Queen that they needed to change the way they treated their children. One of George’s private secretaries, Alec Hardinge, was also very aware of the problem. He said, ‘they trample on their young’ and was baffled by this because George, ‘who was such a kind man, was such a brute to his children’. The royals were still seen as Hanoverians and George V’s librarian, Owen Morshead, told Harold Nicolson that ‘The House of Hanover like ducks produces bad parents.’ George and Mary’s ducklings were in trouble.

  Bad parenting often makes children anxious. In 1900, a year after Freud published his seminal The Interpretation of Dreams, young David had a series of anxiety dreams. Then, when his third son Henry was born, George noted that David asked funny questions: ‘I told him the baby had flown in at the window during the night and he at once asked where his wings were and I said they had been cut off.’ David claimed that he had a vision of his baby brother, whose wings bled after being snipped off, and this image had distressed him for some weeks. Freud would have interpreted David’s account simply: the boy was unconsciously afraid that his intimidating father meant to castrate him.

  Eventually, David wrote A King’s Story, a memoir in which one of the key themes is his relationship with his father. He loves him, he fears him, he wants him to understand that they are not alike and he never quite manages to do so. David even used the language of psychoanalysis and, at one point, admitted that he was in ‘unconscious rebellion’ against his father. He said of his parents: ‘If anything can be said to have come between us, it was the relentless formality of their lives, never wholly relaxed.’ David accused his parents of many shortcomings. His father was obsessed with punctuality and never lost the habit of checking the barometer first thing in the morning. Royal duties meant that his parents were rarely present and, ‘for better or worse, royalty is excluded from the more settled forms of domesticity’.

  David was given a servant, Frederick Finch. Once, when the Prince kicked up a fuss, Lalla Bill stormed in to Finch and said, ‘That boy is impossible! If you don’t give him a thrashing, I will.’ Finch marched the Prince off to the bedroom and, ‘while I kicked and yelled, applied a large hand to that part of the anatomy which nature has conveniently provided for the harassment of young boys’. David shouted that he would tell Papa what he had done. After being ‘summoned’ to see his mother, David was not ‘embraced or mollified’ as he expected to be. After all, Finch was just a servant. Instead, he was told that he had behaved badly and was sent to apologise to Finch. David claimed he could not remember the incident, but added that the servant was ‘a man of probity’ so he accepted his version. Finch stayed with him for years, becoming his valet later on.

  When David was eight, his father introduced him to Mr Hansell, who was to be his tutor. In the past, the royals had chosen teachers with care but Hansell was just a very ordinary local schoolmaster, who really never managed to control his royal pupils.

  Ironically, David noted Sandringham, where he spent most of his childhood, ‘had most of the ingredients for a boyhood idyll’. They could ride on bicycles, play energetic games of golf and, eventually, shoot all the game they wanted, but they always had to be in by 7 p.m. The question of when David and his brother George learned to shoot also suggests their father did not have much faith in them. Often, the sons of aristocrats went hunting with their fathers and uncles from a young age. The future George V, however, only taught his sons how to handle a gun when they were thirteen years old. Perhaps he did not trust the boys to shoot properly when they were younger.

  David told Charles Murphy, who helped him write A King’s Story, that what he remembered most about his childhood was ‘the miserableness I had to keep to myself’. He often felt his father ‘preferred children in the abstract’ and agreed with the view that his naval training had ‘caused him to look on his own children much as he regarded noisy midshipmen when he was captain of a cruiser – as young nuisances in constant need of correction’. He dreaded being summoned to his father’s study, which he thought of as the Captain’s cabin. Though sometimes it was to admire a precious new stamp, more often than not, ‘we would be called to account for some alleged act of misbehaviour.’ David came in for ‘a good deal of scolding’ because he had been late, looked dirty, made too much noise or wriggled in church. He concluded: ‘the mere circumstances of my father’s position interposed an impalpable barrier that inhibited the closer continuing intimacy of conventional family life.’ This sentence is very stiff, reflecting perhaps his father’s stiffness towards him.

  ‘Remember who you are,’ his father kept on reminding him. ‘That injunction was dinned into my ears many, many times. But who exactly was I?’ David observed. His experience taught him that he had the same interests as other people, ‘and that however hard I tried, my capacity was not appreciably above the standards demanded by the fiercely competitive world outside the palace walls’. Admittedly, his father insisted he should not think they were better than other people, but even then David had to partially retract what first appeared to be a compliment; he added that ‘by people he [his father] meant children of the well-born’.

  It has been suggested that David’s mother was different when away from her husband. There is evidence that her son would not have agreed. According to her daughter, Angela, David told his mistress, Freda Dudley Ward, she was lucky to have had a loving mother.

  Even before he was ten, David was beginning to display some of the character traits that would make his father disapprove of him. The astute Duchess of Fife noted that he ‘seems to have no aversion to girls. He was so from the first. I have a vivid and pleasing recollection of the only time I saw him this year, when he flirted with the nice Lady Collins.’

  Princess Alice – Victoria’s exotic great-granddaughter

  The royal family had not been that concerned by the wars of the 1860s and 1870s when children found they were on different sides. All those wars, however, had been relatively minor. This would change after 1910. The events of that decade prompt an unanswerable question: if Kaiser Wilhelm had not felt embittered about his English mother, would he have tried to stop Germany declaring war on Britain?

  By 1910, Princess Victoria’s husband, Louis of Battenberg, was an admiral in the British Navy. Victoria was unusual in many ways. When she and Louis moved to London as his naval career demanded, they lived in a small flat in St Ermin’s Mansions in Westminster and then took an unexceptional house in Eccleston Square. Edward VII had no idea that they had a limited income and could not understand why they chose to live in a square where ‘only pianists lived’. They were allowed, however, a key which let them into the gardens of Buckingham Palace. Victoria sent her children to local dancing classes and Alice attended a small private school. Victoria did not rely on nannies much and was very close to her children; she made them feel valued, which does not mean she was uncritical.

  Victoria was worried when in 1902 her eldest daughter Alice fell in love with Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark. They were too young, she felt. She swallowed her doubts, however, and the couple married a year later at Darmstadt. After the civil ceremony, there were two religious ones as Andrew was Greek Orthodox and Alice was Lutheran. We have seen that Leopold chose to be King of the Belgians rather than of the Greeks. Rejected, the Greeks turned to minor Danish nobility, who descended from the multi-titled Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg. The Greeks never
quite accepted their new monarchs, who tended to look down on their subjects, though. It did not help that King George I of the Hellenes spoke Greek with an accent that was abominable, just as George I’s English accent had been.

  Unlike his father and his four brothers, Andrew at least spoke Greek well and decided to enter the Greek army. Alice too learned Greek and, after a few years, was completely fluent – a real achievement since she was deaf and had to lip-read. Princess Marie Bonaparte visited Athens in 1907 and described Alice as ‘a beautiful blonde English woman with ample flesh, smiles a lot and says little since she is deaf’.

  The marriage between Alice and Andrew began well; they had two daughters. After they had been married five years, Alice visited Russia for a royal wedding. It would mark a turning point in her life. Her aunt, the Grand Duchess Elizabeth, was setting up a religious order of nurses and, to prepare herself for a more spiritual life, began giving away all her possessions. Most of Ella’s relatives treated her as an eccentric, but Alice did not. Her aunt’s religious fervour made a great impression on her.

  When he came to the throne in 1910, George V faced personal pressures. His youngest son, John, has been largely forgotten, though Stephen Poliakoff made a film about him. John’s fate affected the royal family more than they cared to admit. In 1909, when he was four years old, he had an epileptic seizure. It frightened the family, who decided not to let him attend his father’s Coronation.

  Prince John’s epilepsy became very difficult to cope with and his parents sent him to live at Wood Farm on the Sandringham estate. There, he was looked after by Lalla Bill, who had wanted to thrash David, and also cared for by a coachman from Windsor Castle (Thomas Haverly took John on outings and sometimes to the ‘big house’ at Sandringham). In between fits, John seems to have been normal, as photos show him riding a bicycle. Once he had been eased out from the royal circle, he was the first royal child since Prince William in 1694 to have a close friend who was not an aristocrat. At Wood Farm, he spent much time with Winifred Thomas, a Yorkshire girl who suffered from chronic asthma and had been sent to the country, where the air was much cleaner. The two sick children went on walks together and worked on a small garden John had been given to look after. When John was very ill, Winifred sat by his bed, as Lalla Bill read to both of them.

  When she was older, Winifred remembered John was excited when her father, who was a sergeant in the army, came to Wood Farm; John was delighted to meet ‘a real, live soldier’. This makes it clear that neither of his brothers who were serving in the forces ever bothered to visit Wood Farm. David himself mentions John only once and noted that his parents only went to visit him at most twice a year. To be fair to Mary of Teck, Winifred remembered her as a loving and interested mother, who spent much time with her son but she may have been being tactful about the woman who was then her Queen. Nothing seemed to help John, however, and his seizures became more severe and more frequent. Of Mary’s children, one stammered and was clearly pathologically nervous and one had epilepsy. The royal family seems to have turned to neurologists and psychiatrists for help.

  Fashionable analysis

  Today, mental illness is still surrounded by a certain stigma but there have been periods when it has been less so and one of these was around 1914. Freud had become famous and nearly everyone he treated was well-off, well connected and functioning well. He was influencing European culture and that influence became even stronger when it became clear how many soldiers suffered from the horrors of the trenches and developed shell shock. The military, whether British, American or German, had little sympathy for the victims, but some doctors realised that many of those who could no longer fight were not cowards. The Germans had a hospital at Pasewalk that dealt with soldiers who broke down; Hitler was treated there when he suffered from hysterical blindness in 1917. There were also asylums in Scotland, like Craiglockhart, which housed many well-educated patients. As early as 1916, a French psychiatrist, Léri, published a book on shell shock. Even comic authors such as P. G. Wodehouse wrote about psychiatrists in their books, though anyone treated by his creations was likely to go madder than Hamlet ever did. In these conditions to seek or even just to discuss help was not considered such a disgrace.

  Much has been made of the fact that George V bullied his second son but for some of the war at least the King was impressed by him. Like his father, George joined the Navy. His fellow officers nicknamed him ‘Mr Johnson’ but they were not deferential because George was a Prince. The King had been a midshipman himself so he knew how to sympathise when his son fell out of a hammock ‘with the help of someone else’ and got a black eye. ‘I should do the same to the other fellow if I got the chance,’ his father suggested. To his delight, the Prince was mentioned in dispatches for his bravery as a turret officer during the Battle of Jutland in 1916. The King wrote in his diary that he hoped that God ‘will protect dear Bertie’s life’.

  Then, however, there was a major drama. George suffered a duodenal ulcer. Louis Greig, who had become something of a mentor, recommended an operation to remove the ulcer as it was causing the Prince so much pain and that pain was making him very depressed. Treves and a number of other doctors were nervous. It was only after months of debate and indecision that the King allowed them to perform the operation his son wanted and needed. By then, the King had been very impressed by Greig and arranged for him to become attached to the Prince’s staff. The two men became close friends – and Greig was, in fact, giving the Prince a kind of perpetual therapy. The King even invited Greig to a family Christmas in 1916, which obliged Greig to apologise to his wife for not spending the holiday with her.

  The problems David faced during the war were psychological too, but less debilitating. They highlighted the question he had raised, ‘Who am I?’ He was not allowed to fight at the front line and it took him a long time to become reconciled to this. ‘Manifestly, I was being kept so to speak on ice against the day my father died,’ he wrote. As he witnessed the slaughter, David bristled at being so protected. This provoked a row with his father. George V nagged him about it being ‘very silly of you not doing what I told you to do at Easter’ – he had failed to wear all the decorations he was entitled to wear. He tried to explain to his father that he was very aware of the many brave officers who had not been decorated when they had risked their lives. As he was not allowed to do so, it felt a little insulting to wear medals he had not earned. ‘Oh , not to be a Prince!’ he moaned. His stickler father was not persuaded.

  The Battenburg saga

  Princess Alice’s daughter, Victoria, had married Louis of Hesse, whose family name was Battenberg. By 1914, Louis had risen to be the First Sea Lord but his name was floridly German. Victoria wrote later, and bitterly, that the British government saw him as a ‘Jonah’ because he was German. After forty-six years in the Navy, Louis was angry but he ‘decided to jump overboard’ before he was made to resign. One of those who agitated against him was Winston Churchill, who was First Lord of the Admiralty. Churchill insisted the 74-year-old Lord Fisher come out of retirement to take over. Meanwhile, George V did nothing to support Louis.

  Victoria complained that the King ‘is a nobody’ and ‘few men trusted the government’. She did not think much of Fisher either, who had once told her: ‘I love hating.’ He had the bad manners, she noted, of sometimes cutting in when one of his midshipmen was dancing with a pretty woman and taking over. Victoria distrusted Churchill, too, because he had once borrowed a book from her and never bothered to return it. She did not forgive the many insults to her husband – nor did his children.

  Princess Victoria was, in some ways, as methodical as the first cousin she despised: George V. She was interested in science and kept meticulous records of the books she had read, which covered a wide range of interests. Unlike George, however, she was fascinated by new ideas and even studied some socialist philosophy. She taught her children herself instead of relying on a tutor. Her younger son, Louis, said that she was:


  a walking encyclopedia. All through her life she stored up knowledge on all sorts of subjects, and she had the great gift of being able to make it all interesting when she taught it to me. She was completely methodical; we had time-tables for each subject, and I had to do preparation, and so forth. She taught me to enjoy working hard, and to be thorough. She was outspoken and open-minded to a degree quite unusual in members of the royal family.

  In December 1916, David wrote a more accommodating letter to his father. Trench life was dull. For most men, a tour of duty consisted of two days in a ditch, followed by two days in a dirty French cottage. ‘What must be the effect on their brains?’ he told his father. He wondered why some of them did not go mad. Seven months later, he wrote to his father that he was thankful to be sitting in comfort in the HQ of the 14th Corps: ‘One does appreciate this comfort when one has been forward and seen what it’s like in the line now. The nearest thing possible to hell, whatever that is.’

  Since 1714, the royal family had been German. Now Germany was the enemy. The King and his children bore the titles Prince and Princess of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha and Duke and Duchess of Saxony; even Queen Mary was a descendant of the German Dukes of Württemberg. Public opinion was hostile towards what seemed to be the foreign royals. H. G. Wells wrote of England’s ‘alien and uninspiring court’ and suggested the monarchy had had its day. The King responded furiously: ‘I may be uninspiring, but I’ll be damned if I’m alien!’ In July 1917, he issued a proclamation changing the name of the royal family from the Germanic House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to the über-English House of Windsor. George insisted all his British relatives should give up their German titles and assume far more English-sounding surnames. It was his secretary who suggested they should be called ‘Windsor’.