Annoyed at tourists staring at him through the windows, Charles fled to a bar and, although he had never been in one before in his life, ordered a drink. “It seemed the most sensible thing,” he recalled later. While most boys his age would have gone for a beer or cider, he ordered a cherry brandy. And that might have been it, had it not been for a freelance journalist who was also in the bar and sent the story round the world. “I was all ready to pack my bags and head for Siberia,” he declared. Punishment awaited him on his return to school.
Charles, who also spent two terms at Timbertop School in the bush north-east of Melbourne, which was in many respects an Australian version of Gordonstoun, did respectably, if not brilliantly – achieving five GCE O levels and two A levels. He has said subsequently that the school helped him develop willpower and self-discipline – and also taught him curious habits he still follows, such as following a hot bath with a cold shower. He nevertheless claims not to have enjoyed his time there and when he left it was with apparent relief. Tellingly, he did not send either of his own sons to the school. They were educated instead at the prestigious, but rather far more conventional Eton College.
Before Charles, the heirs to the British throne had been educated at home. After early childhoods spent largely in the care of governesses, the royal children were entrusted to a variety of scholars selected from the universities, the army or the Church. The academic results were mixed, and they suffered from their deliberate isolation from other children. Matters were not helped during the eighteenth century by an almost uniformly hostile relationship between father and son.
The future Queen Victoria had an especially strange preparation for her role. The death of her father the Duke of Kent when she was just eight months old left her to be brought up by her German-born mother, Victoria, and Sir John Conroy, an army officer who became comptroller of the Duchess’s household and most probably the Duchess’s lover.
Together the pair developed a strict set of rules that became known as the “Kensington System”: it isolated the young Princess from other children and made her totally dependent on them. Victoria was never allowed to be apart from her mother, tutor or governess and was even obliged to sleep in the Duchess’s room. She and Conroy hoped to wield power through the young Princess if her uncle, King William IV, died before she came of age. They failed, however: when Victoria became Queen less than a month after her eighteenth birthday she swiftly turned against both of them. One of her first acts on becoming Queen was to remove her bed from her mother’s room. Conroy was banned from her apartments and relations with her mother became cool.
When it came to educating Victoria’s own nine children, it was her husband, Albert, who took charge, drawing up a plan outlined in a memorandum that he and the Queen signed in January 1847. His approach was motivated largely by his determination – bordering on obsession – that they should not grow up with the character defects of his wife’s uncles, George IV and William IV, whose wayward pasts haunted the royal family. Victoria just wanted them to be little replicas of her beloved Albert – especially when it came to her second-born child and first-born son, whom she christened Albert Edward and who was eventually to rule Britain as Edward VII.
They were to be sorely disappointed. The Prince of Wales – or “poor Bertie” as his mother used to refer to him – proved difficult to teach and was prone to fits of sulkiness and anger, during which he would throw objects around the room. As a result he was frequently beaten. Then, as he got older, it was his sex life that caused his strait-laced parents most concern. Matters came to head when the Prince was studying at Cambridge and invited Nellie Clifton, an actress, to spend the night with him in his rooms. Albert was so appalled at such debauchery that he went to Cambridge to lecture his son. Albert died several weeks later, apparently of typhoid fever, but the Queen blamed it on a cold he caught walking around the city with their son. “That boy – I never can or shall look at him without a shudder,” she wrote. Not surprisingly, Bertie was to take a more relaxed attitude to the upbringing of his own three girls and two boys.
Like her predecessors, Queen Elizabeth II did not enjoy anything like a normal childhood, even though she became heiress presumptive only in December 1936 at the age of ten, after her uncle Edward VIII abdicated and her father, Albert, took his place as George VI. Known in the family as “Lilibet” because of her inability as a small child to pronounce her own name, she was educated at home. Because she was a girl, though, the practice of the day dictated that the intellectual demands on her should be smaller.
This was made clear to Marion Crawford, the young Scottish woman who became governess to both Elizabeth and her younger sister, Margaret, during her first meeting with the girls’ grandfather, King George V. “For goodness’ sake, teach Margaret and Lilibet to write a decent hand, that’s all I ask you,” the King told her in his loud, booming voice. “Not one of my children can write properly. They all do it exactly the same way.”9
Later, after Crawford had started giving them lessons – which were held in a boudoir off the main drawing room of 145 Piccadilly, the tall narrow house just beyond Hyde Park Corner where they lived – Queen Mary, the young princesses’ grandmother, was to intervene more directly, asking for a copy of their timetables. The Queen came back with some suggestions: more history and geography – or at least the parts relating to Britain’s dominions and India – and learning poetry by heart, but Crawford could cut back on the arithmetic, on the grounds that “these two would probably never have to do even their own household books”.10
To counter the isolation suffered by previous royal children, Crawford tried to bring the princesses as much as she could in touch with the outside world, taking them out for walks in nearby Hyde Park. On one occasion, to Elizabeth and Margaret’s delight, they even went for a ride on the Underground to Tottenham Court Road and took tea at the YWCA. A plain-clothes detective travelled with them at the end of the carriage but, Crawford noted, “looked so very obviously a detective that people began to look round to try to discover what he was detecting.” Another time they went for a ride on the top deck of a bus. Such jaunts came to a sudden end, however, when the Irish Republican Army began a letter-bomb campaign to draw attention to their demands for full independence and an end to the country’s dominion status.
A further change came after their father became King George VI. For the children this meant leaving the cosiness of 145 Piccadilly for Buckingham Palace, with its vast rooms and long draughty corridors. Crawford likened it to “camping in a museum” and complained of the crumbling furniture and large mouse population. The sheer scale of the place made it a curious experience; outside there were often crowds, apparently waiting for something – although the girls never worked out what. On wet winter afternoons, they used to amuse themselves by staring back at them through the lace curtains. The enormous gardens were also a joy to the two young girls.
George was keen for his daughters to have as normal and happy a childhood as possible; as long as he was duke of York, with relatively light official duties, this had been easy. Nothing was allowed to stand in the way of various family sessions, which ended with the children’s bath hour and bedtime. This necessarily became more difficult after he became king, and official engagements intruded, but they would always begin the day with their girls and have lunch with them if they were at home. Even after they moved to Buckingham Palace, few restraints were put on them and they were allowed to race around its corridors.
By now it was becoming clear that the girls were not going to have a younger brother, which meant that Elizabeth would one day be queen. This, it was felt, meant more attention should be paid to her education in order to prepare her for her future role. And so twice a week, until the war started, her mother would take her to Eton College, where Sir Henry Marten, an eminent scholar and vice-provost of the school, would give her lessons in constitutional history.
Home schooling was also the norm elsewhere in Europe for roy
al children. Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, who became Queen at the age of ten in 1890 after the death of her elderly father Willem III, was given a bespoke education designed to prepare her for her future role. Under the guidance of her disciplinarian mother, Emma, who acted as regent until her eighteenth birthday, she was given private lessons in history, constitutional affairs and foreign languages by the country’s finest teachers. Admirals and generals came to the palace to teach her the basics of military science, while economic instructors taught her finance. The curriculum was rounded off with Bible study.
It was an extraordinarily lonely existence, in which Wilhelmina, the only surviving child of Willem III, was prevented from having even the most minimal contact with her future subjects. She later described it as “the Cage”. Dolls became a substitute for other children. “If you are naughty I shall make you into a princess and then you won’t have any other little children to play with,” the young Wilhelmina reportedly told them on one occasion.11 From the start, Emma tried to instil in her a sense of duty. When, aged ten, Wilhelmina looked down on the cheering ranks of her subjects, she asked her mother, “Mama, do all these people belong to me?” “No,” came the reply. “It is you who belong to all these people.”12
For all her loneliness, the result was an extraordinarily self-confident young woman. As a little girl she visited Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, one of the most powerful men in Europe. “See, my guards are seven feet tall and yours are only shoulder high to them,” the Kaiser told her.
“Quite true, Your Majesty,” she replied, “your guards are seven feet tall. But when we open our dykes the water is ten feet deep.”
At the age of thirteen she travelled to England to meet Queen Victoria, a formidable figure then in her seventies. The young Wilhelmina returned impressed by the policemen, the pipers at Windsor, but most of all by Victoria herself. “She took me for a drive and I’ve never seen anyone sit so straight. I couldn’t believe she was smaller than me.” Five years later, when she was invested as Queen – the first in the history of the Netherlands – she seemed remarkably unfazed by the whole affair and even apparently insisted on writing her own speech.
Wilhelmina was determined that her only child, the future Queen Juliana, should not suffer the same isolation. And so she arranged for a small, carefully selected group of children to be brought to the Huis ten Bosch, the magnificent summer palace just outside The Hague that was Juliana’s home for most of her childhood. Wilhelmina may not have been quite as stern as her own mother, but the court in which Juliana grew up was strict and humourless – and one in which she was made aware of her own status from an early age. “Even when I was a tiny girl, if I came into a room old ladies would leap to their feet and give me a tottering curtsy,” she remembered. “It was so embarrassing I almost died.”13 It was also deeply spiritual. Wilhelmina took charge of her daughter’s religious education, instilling in her from an early age the notion that a good earthly ruler was merely an agent of God’s will.
Juliana tried to be more liberal with her own children – a determination apparently reinforced by the time they spent in exile in Canada during the Second World War – even though this brought her into conflict with her more conservative-minded husband. Bernhard was appalled by what he saw when they sat down for their first family dinner together at Soestdijk Palace after returning to the Netherlands in August 1945. Two-year-old Margriet beat a spoon on her plate, Irene sat with a leg curled underneath her and Beatrix, seven, talked incessantly with her mouth full and said she would prefer the steak and ice cream her mother had given her in Canada to the Dutch food on their plate.
The war also had an impact on the lives of others of the current generation of rulers. Like the future Queen Beatrix, the then Prince Harald of Norway was still a child when he fled his native country with his parents after the Germans invaded, going first to Sweden and then to Washington DC with his mothers and sisters, while his father, Crown Prince Olav, and his grandfather, King Haakon, stayed in London with the Norwegian government-in-exile. After the war he was enrolled in the third grade of Smestad Skole, the first member of the Norwegian royal family to attend a public school.
The Danish royal family, by contrast, remained in Copenhagen – although the future Queen Margrethe, born in 1940, would have been too young to understand much of what was going on. She had a mixture of private lessons at the Amalienborg Palace and public schooling, which included a year at a boarding school in Hampshire, something that helps explain her excellent English. Sweden’s Carl XVI Gustaf, born six years later, missed the war completely but suffered tragedy of a very personal kind with the death of his father, Prince Gustaf Adolf, in an air crash when he was just nine months old.
It was not until he was seven that his German mother, Princess Sibylla, told him what had happened. Decades later, the King’s sister Princess Birgitta, who was nine years his senior and so had felt the loss of her father more keenly, gave an interview in which she bemoaned the way their mother had handled the accident. “Children’s questions were met with silence, children’s anxiety and fear with the same silence,” she said. “It was Mother’s way of handling the situation, to handle living her life. Of course it was not good for us children. It would have been much better to be able to speak about Father’s death.”14
Born more than a decade before Carl XVI Gustaf, King Albert of Belgium and his elder brother, Baudouin, who ruled the country before him, had an especially tough childhood. First came the death of their mother, Queen Astrid, in the car crash in Switzerland in 1935; then came the Second World War, and a form of house arrest in Brussels; and then, following the Allied landings, deportation to Germany. For the last few months of the year, the boys were held together with their father and elder sister, Joséphine Charlotte, at a fort in Hirschstein in Saxony and then at Strobl in Austria. The presence of their father’s new wife, Lilian Baels, who had had the first of three children by Léopold in 1942, further complicated matters. The end of the war meant their release – but not their return home. Faced with controversy over his role in the war, Léopold went into exile in Switzerland, where his three children continued their education in Geneva. Then, a few months before Baudouin’s twenty-first birthday, his father abdicated and he became King – the youngest to ascend the throne in Europe since Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands more than half a century earlier.
The childhood of the future King Juan Carlos of Spain was also heavily influenced by his country’s complicated political situation. He was born in Rome in 1938, where his grandfather King Alfonso XIII, father Don Juan and other members of the Spanish royal family had settled following the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic seven year earlier. Juan Carlos’s upbringing was to prove not to be the usual one of a royal exile, however. Instead, for the first decades of his life, he was caught up in a trial of strength between the royal family and General Francisco Franco, who was head of state after his forces won the Civil War.
Although determined to cling to power for his own lifetime, Franco tantalized the Borbóns by holding out the prospect of a restoration of the monarchy after he died. Crucially, however, he made clear that he – rather than the royal family itself – would decide who the next king would be. And as the years passed it became increasingly certain that this would not be Don Juan – whom Franco had come to detest – but rather his son, whom the dictator considered still young enough to be brought up in the ways of his regime.
Don Juan, who by then had moved from Rome to Estoril in Portugal to be closer to his home country, realized his son’s claim to the throne would be strengthened considerably if he were educated in Spain. And so, in November 1948, a tearful Juanito, aged ten, was put on the overnight Lusitania Express, bound for a country in which he had not hitherto set foot. The discomfort he suffered was more than that of any small boy separated from his family. From the moment he arrived in Spain he was forced into a high-profile role that depended on fluctuating relations between
his father and Franco’s regime. While delegations of Royalists would come to fawn on him, he also had to come to terms with often savage attacks on his family in the official press. And then there were the meetings with Franco himself – and the fear of speaking out of turn. “When you meet Franco, listen to what he tells you, but say as little as possible,” his father had warned him. “Be polite and reply briefly to his questions. A mouth tight shut lets in no flies.”15
As Paul Preston, a biographer of Juan Carlos, has argued, the apparent equanimity with which the boy accepted that his father had effectively sold him into slavery for the sake of the dynasty was remarkable. “In a normal family, this act would be considered to be one of cruelty, or at best, of callous irresponsibility,” he said. “But the Borbón family was not ‘normal’ and the decision to send Juan Carlos away responded to a ‘higher’ dynastic logic.”16
It was just after celebrating his eighteenth birthday, during the time he was undergoing officer training at the Military Academy of Saragossa, that Juan Carlos was involved in a tragic episode that even today remains something of mystery. In March 1956, when the future king was back for the holidays at the family’s Villa Giralda in Estoril, his younger brother, Prince Alfonso, then aged fourteen, died after being shot dead with a single bullet from a revolver. The official version, put out by the Spanish embassy in a communiqué, was that “while His Highness Prince Alfonso was cleaning a revolver last evening with his brother, a shot was fired hitting his forehead and killing him in a few minutes.”
Rumours quickly began to circulate, however, that Juan Carlos had been holding the gun at the time it went off – although the various versions of what actually happened varied: Josefina Carolo, dressmaker to the future king’s mother, for example, claimed the Prince had playfully pointed the pistol at his brother, unaware that it was loaded, and then pulled the trigger – remarkably irresponsible behaviour for an eighteen-year-old well into his stint of officer training. Bernardo Arnoso, a Portuguese friend of Juan Carlos, was also quoted as saying the Prince fired the pistol not knowing that it was loaded, but that the bullet ricocheted off a wall before hitting Alfonso in the face. Helena Matheopoulos, a Greek author who spoke with Juan Carlos’s sister, Pilar, came up with a third and even more bizarre version of events: Alfonso, she claimed, had been out of the room and, when he returned, the opening of the door knocked Juan Carlos in the arm, causing him to fire the pistol.17 Ironically, the pistol itself was said to have been a gift from General Franco.
The Great Survivors Page 24
