by David Cohen
In terms of parenting, the evidence since 1066 shows profound changes have sometimes occurred very quickly under the pressure of personalities and events. Between 1066 and 1485, princes had to be taught practical warfare above all else. I have argued that, partly due to the influence of Margaret Beaufort from 1485 onwards, royal children had an elite education and were often taught by the best minds in Europe. After James I’s death, the Stuarts were more interested in pleasure and, to some extent, in religion than in any kind of scholarship. Education was infinitely less important to the Hanoverians and, from 1714 to 1837, the relationship between royal parents and their children became not just unloving but hostile. Queen Victoria was a victim of this emotional abuse when she was a girl and she did not behave as her mother had done, yet she allowed Prince Albert to try to turn their eldest son, Bertie, into an obedient pedant. Many children would have been crushed by such expectations, but he proved resilient and reacted against his draconian upbringing.
Since the end of the nineteenth century, each generation has reacted against the way it was brought up. There is an exception to this, though. Once Bertie became King Edward VII, he gave his son access to all state papers. George V, in turn, gave his son George access to many papers and even let David – who provoked so many anxieties – see some of them. We do not know the extent to which the Queen has done this with Prince Charles but it seems likely that she has not been so open, once it became clear that Charles was trying to intervene in political matters far more than convention allowed.
The long case history also shows how wise it was of George III’s wife to warn against relying too much on royal servants when bringing up children: the most devoted nurse is not quite the same as one’s own parents and children often know it. Princess Diana was in no sense an absentee mother, though Prince Charles was often an absentee father – and that persisted to some extent even after the death of Diana. Even good-enough parenting needs parents to devote much time to their children; Diana complained Charles was too often distracted.
Some radical suggestions are perhaps worth making in terms of the future. The present government is making great play of ‘parenting classes’. It would be a magnificent symbol for Prince William and his wife Kate to attend such classes when they have children; it would show that everyone has something to learn when it comes to bringing up children. A second radical suggestion concerns schooling. Prince Charles and Diana sent their sons to Eton, as Charles clearly had little fondness for Gordonstoun. The Provost of Eton is now Lord Waldegrave, a descendant of the doctor who attended a number of Stuart births in the 1680s. Today’s Waldegrave is a very clever man as he is a Fellow of All Souls, but Eton remains elitist and now attracts a growing number of pupils from very rich families in Russia and the Far East. Since royal children started to go to school, it has been assumed they must attend an elite public school. It might benefit both the children and the monarchy if the next generation spent a little time in an ordinary state primary school. Small children are less conscious of status and so Princes and Princesses might be able to mix with ordinary children more or less normally, at least as small children.
The philosopher John Locke and, over two hundred years later, the psychologist John B. Watson argued that parents need to talk to their children about problems at the end of every day and on as equal a footing as possible. That remains sensible advice – for every parent.
At the end of this book, it seems fitting to return to Froeze’s Ten Commandments for Parents, which are now over fifty years old. Having studied ten centuries of royal parenting and, I hope, learning from the experience, I now take the liberty of revising them:
See your child as the most precious responsibility entrusted to you.
Do not try to mould your child in your own image.
Children need space to develop physically and playfully. Let them have it.
Get to know and respect your child’s personality.
Do not push your child too hard.
Do not use force against your child.
Encourage your child to be confident even if sometimes they are bound to annoy you.
Protect your child.
Do not lie to your child and do not tempt the child to lie to you.
Most important of all,
Enjoy your child.
One of the sad truths is that, all too often, for all the reasons explored in this book, royal parents have not enjoyed their children as much as they could have done, or as much as they should have done. When Prince William and Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge have a child, I hope they will enjoy him or her. Diana would certainly want her son to hug, play and lark about with her grandchildren.
Bibliography, Letters and Other Sources
Many biographies of the kings and queens of England have examined their childhoods with less of a psychological perspective than one might expect. Writing this book has made me more familiar with the long and varied tradition of royal biographies, which range from the gossipy to the soberly academic. Some monarchs, like Elizabeth I, have been written and re-written about; others, such as James I, attracted far fewer biographers. I have found the following useful and often entertaining.
Ashley, Maurice, The Life and Times of William I (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973).
Bradbury, Jim, Stephen and Matilda: The Civil War of 1139-53 (Stroud: Sutton, 2005).
Doherty, P. C., Isabella and the Strange Death of Edward II (London: Constable & Robinson, 2004).
Flori, Jean, Richard the Lionheart: King and Knight (Greenwood: Praeger Publishers Inc, 2007).
Mortimer, Ian, The Perfect King: The Life of Edward III, Father of the English Nation (London: Vintage, 2008).
Warren W L., King John (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).
As well as these biographies, She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth by Helen Castor (London: Faber & Faber, 2011) offers an insight into the powerful medieval women who had enormous influence. Winter King: The Dawn of Tudor England by Thomas Penn (London: Penguin, 2011) is an excellent recent work on Henry VII; David Starkey has written splendidly on both Henry VIII and the young Henry. The Six Wives of Henry VIII by Alison Weir (London: Vintage, 2007) offers a good account of that half dozen, as does David Starkey again. Mary Tudor: England’s First Queen by Anna Whitelock (London: Bloomsbury, 2010) provides a sober account of a troubled girl, who became a troubled Queen.
Two good biographies of Elizabeth I are by J. N. Neale and by the more modern champion of the Tudors, David Starkey. The long rivalry between the Virgin Queen and Mary, Queen of Scots is well charted in Jane Dunn’s Elizabeth & Mary: Cousins, Rivals, Queens (London: Harper Perennial, 2004). Like Elizabeth, Mary, Queen of Scots has been lucky in her biographers, who include Lady Antonia Fraser and John Guy. The title of his book has a Mills & Boon touch – My Heart is my Own (London: Harper Perennial, 2004).
James I, the best writer ever to occupy the throne, offers considerable insight into his own personality. The classic biography by Carla and H. Steeholm, The Wisest Fool in Christendom, was published back in 1938. More recent biographies have tended to be rather short. The reason for the neglect of the scholarly King who gave us the King James Bible eludes me. Richard Cust’s Charles I (London: Longmans, 2007) covers the latest research on James’s stubborn son, who has had much more study devoted to him than his father did. The essentially Marxist Christopher Hill offers a measured but admiring account of Oliver Cromwell in God’s Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (London: Penguin, 1999), while Lady Antonia Fraser, though no Marxist, evidently also admires much about him in Cromwell, Our Chief of Men (London: Phoenix, 2008). Curiously, there is no proper biography of Richard Cromwell, Oliver’s son who ruled briefly, fled the Kingdom, returned after some twenty years and settled down to the life of a country gentleman. Antonia Fraser’s King Charles II (London: Phoenix, 2002) remains an excellent account of the monarch who was not merely ‘merry’ but also a great survivor.
&
nbsp; The relationship of the House of Orange to the English throne merits a case history of its own as the Oranges were always trying to marry first the Stuarts, then the Hanoverians, and then Victoria’s children. There seems to be no book on this relationship.
Edward Gregg provides a decent account of Queen Anne (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), though he is much less detailed on her obstetric tragedies than Jack Dewhurst in his Royal Confinements (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980).
J. H. Plumb’s England in the Eighteenth Century (London: Penguin, 1951) provides a good account of the four Georges. Frederick, George II’s eldest son who became Prince of Wales, never made it to the throne. Sir George Young’s Poor Fred (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937) traces his tragicomic career. The most useful biography of George II is Andrew Thompson’s George II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 20II).
As a psychologist, I am curious that the question of whether George III was mad or whether he was suffering from porphyra or arsenic poisoning during two periods of his reign is still not quite resolved. Alan Bennett’s witty play The Madness of George III pokes fun at the pretensions of the royal doctors but modern experts differ as much as the eighteenth-century physicians. Nesta Pain’s book, George III At Home (London: Methuen, 1975), makes clear how domestic he and Queen Charlotte were. Some forty years ago, J. H. Plumb, that doyen of eighteenth-century historians, published a nice pamphlet, New Light on the Tyrant George III, after giving a talk in America – and asked the good folk of Cincinnati to revise their view of the allegedly despotic King who, of course, never visited America. Jeremy Black has published a biography that embraces the latest research (George III· Americas Last King, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).
On George IV, J. B. Priestley’s The Prince of Pleasure and His Regency, 1811-20 (London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1969) is both partisan and surprisingly sweet, given that George IV maddened (I choose the word advisedly) his father and runs Henry VIII a close second in the royal narcissism stakes.
There have been many fine biographies of Queen Victoria, including Elizabeth Longford’s Queen Victoria (Stroud: The History Press, 2009), Cecil Woodham-Smith’s Queen Victoria: Her Life and Times, 1819-61 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1972) and Christopher Hibbert’s Queen Victoria: A Personal History (London: HarperCollins, 2001).
Sir Philip Magnus’s biography of Gladstone (London: John Murray, 1954) did not have access to the Grand Old Man’s diaries, in which he detailed his many encounters with prostitutes. In his King Edward the Seventh (London: John Murray, 1964), Magnus was also a shade reserved.
Philip Ziegler has written good biographies of King William IV, the sailor King (London: Fontana Books, 1973) and of the less amiable Edward VIII (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2001). Kenneth Rose’s biography of George V (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000) gives a sound, if traditional account. Edward VIII wrote his own – A King’s Story – long after he had abdicated. Hidden Agenda: How the Duke of Windsor Betrayed the Allies (London: Macmillan, 2000) by Martin Allen also offers a good account of his career.
William Shawcross’s authorised biography of Elizabeth, the Queen Mother (London: Pan, 2010) manages to be both entertaining and tactful. There is no proper biography of the current Queen as too many sources have to be careful and certain topics remain off limits while she and Prince Philip are alive.
The literature on Charles, Diana and Camilla will one day be the subject of a PhD as it illustrates how hard it is for authors to remain unbiased when dealing with current historical figures. My own book, Diana: Death of a Goddess (London: Arrow, 2005), has been seen as more hostile to the Prince, while Penny Junor in Charles: Victim or Villain? (London: Harper Collins, 1999) and Caroline Graham in Camilla: The King’s Mistress (London: John Blake, 1995) are clearly more hostile towards the Princess.
Among many useful sources, the excellent series of the letters of monarchs, covering from Queen Elizabeth I onwards (Kila, MT: Kessinger, 2007), have been key. The diaries of Queen Victoria, which were heavily edited by her daughter, Princess Beatrice, provided invaluable material, though Princess Beatrice did not allow anything to be published of which her formidable mother might have disapproved. The Dictionary of National Biography has proved valuable, though by its nature the entries tend not to push a particular thesis.
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