It was not only Prince George who found the separation hard. Although Princess Alexandra may well have had confidence in the Royal Navy, its ships and its officers, she knew that life at sea was not without its dangers. When the boys had left home two years earlier for the Britannia, in a letter to Queen Victoria she spoke of their departure as ‘a great wrench but must be got through … I trust to God that all may go well with them – and that their first step in the world by themselves won’t be a too difficult or hard one – poor little boys, they cried so bitterly.’ She knew how difficult it had been for the boys when they were on a shore-based training school not far from home and how Prince George suffered dreadfully from homesickness. It must have been all the more worrying for her to see her boys off for a cruise which in its later stages was to take them away from her for two years.
Although Princess Alexandra loved Eddy, it was not with the intensity of emotion that she felt for her second son of whom she was particularly fond. Her endearments, recorded in so much detail in her letters, imply an attachment that would now be considered excessive. At a time, however, when the main form of communication was by letter, Princess Alexandra and her second son would have had to confide all their feelings to paper. The permanency of the written word has a power that the spoken word has not. Read and reread, the often long-awaited letters with their messages of affection assumed an importance that was never forgotten. The central theme within them was clear. Mother and son loved one another and found no impediment in saying so. For a male adolescent any physical expression of love for the opposite sex parent is usually experienced as embarrassing and uncomfortable and is generally avoided. This leaves the way clear for him later to transfer his loving feelings on to a more appropriate partner. The so-called ‘incest barrier’ never seemed to get in the way at least of ‘Georgie dear’s’ verbal caresses. His pre-pubertal language implied a reluctance to grow up and leave his mother. Even when he had reached adulthood he wrote: ‘think sometimes of your poor boy so far away but always your most devoted and loving little Georgie’.
With regard to Prince George’s emotional immaturity vis-à-vis his mother, it may have been that mother and son colluded to enable him to remain faithful to her. Perhaps the incest barrier had been suppressed by their need for one another in Prince George’s childhood, and it may be that it reappeared later to mar his marriage to Princess May of Teck. If this was the case, sexual contact between Prince George and the ‘mother’ his wife became when their first child was born would have been at best distasteful and at worst almost impossible. Whatever were his reasons for wanting to remain a child in relation to his mother, the effect of this on his subsequent relationships with women was in no doubt.
An interesting aspect of Prince George’s closeness to his mother is reflected in Princess Alexandra’s daily hair-brushing routine. Although it was his mother’s hair that drew them together, neither of them would have thought of her ‘crowning glory’ as the symbol of her femininity and her sexuality. Nevertheless her long hair, worn as was the custom dressed on the top of her head, needed a great deal of attention and Prince George always read aloud to his mother at this time. They both enjoyed their hair-brushing/reading interaction. It reassured them both of their love for one another.
It was not only Prince George to whom Princess Alexandra remained close. She had difficulty in allowing any of her children to grow up. Typically she celebrated her daughter Princess Louise’s nineteenth birthday with a children’s party. She was at her most happy when her children were babies. Her husband was in love with her and attentive to her needs. She was a beautiful icon representing the spirit of a Britain anxious to have done with the Victorian era, and above all it was before the episode of rheumatic fever during her third pregnancy, which was not only permanently to affect her health but also to change her husband’s attitude towards her. From that time on, the couple’s boisterous and playful relationship with one another was to be replaced by Prince Edward’s exaggerated respect for, and sometimes resentment of, his wife’s invalid status.
The departure (in tears) of the two boys from their sheltered and privileged home for a life for which neither of them was psychologically prepared was marked with the pomp and circumstance peculiar to royal ceremonial. The Very Reverend Canon Dalton commented that: ‘When HRH the Prince of Wales determined to send his sons to sea, it was chiefly with a view to the mental and moral training they would receive as midshipmen in Her Majesty’s Navy.’ There were 450 men aboard the steamship Bacchante and, of the six naval cadets, two were the Princes. Their mental training was directed towards teaching them to control their feelings and learning the importance of the monarchical stiff upper lip. Nothing is known of the outcome of their moral training. Had Queen Victoria been aware that, years later, Winston Churchill was to describe life in the Navy as little more than ‘rum, buggery and the lash’, she would not only have been shocked but there would have been little likelihood of the two boys being educated at sea.
One can only speculate as to the effect a different system of education might have had on King George V and on the future of the monarchy. Had he not been a bullied adolescent, and abandoned – as he thought – by a mother whom he adored, he might have grown up to have been a more tolerant father. His heir, the Duke of Windsor, may not have needed to look for illicit love to compensate him for the absence of love in his childhood and may thus have avoided setting a trend, the ripples from which were to influence the sexual behaviour of some members of the Royal Family two generations later.
The rigorous training the two royal cadets received would certainly have reinforced any obsessional character traits which they already possessed. Prince Eddy, passive and lazy, was indifferent to routine of any sort and, like his mother, unconcerned with the passage of time which in the Navy was of the essence. Prince George had been brought up to be particularly conscious of the importance of time. His grandmother had impressed it upon him (and also given him a watch for his birthday), and his mother’s lack of punctuality, which had made him so anxious, led to an intolerance of being kept waiting. The importance of punctuality in the Navy was emphasized in the punishing daily routine. ‘Rouse out mids’ at 6 a.m., breakfast at 6.45, 7.30 cutlass or rifle drill, 9.00 prayers, 9.30 school and regular drills until 11.00 and then lunch at noon exactly. The drills continued, depending on the watch, on the half-hour, for an hour until 3.30 p.m. The next watch fell in at 4.00, supper at 4.45, more drill at 5.00 and the hammocks slung at 7.30 ready for lights out at 8.30. It was a programme well suited to the anxious and insecure who take comfort in structure imposed upon them by others. Prince George took readily to the restraints of discipline.
Princess Alexandra infuriated her Sandringham house guests by seldom appearing for breakfast before 11 a.m. She infuriated her husband even more. On one occasion, shortly after King Edward VII’s accession, when he had engagements of state to attend to, Queen Alexandra was to help him receive deputations and addresses at noon precisely. ‘The King sat in the Equerries room drumming on the table and looking out of the window with the face of a Christian martyr. Finally at 1.50 the Queen came down looking lovely and quite unconcerned. All she said was: “Am I late?” The King swallowed and walked gravely out of the room’ (Battiscombe, 1969). As a child, even before he had been taught to tell the time, Prince George would have known emotionally when the gratification of his needs by his mother was unnecessarily delayed. His cruise to the furthest outposts of his grandmother’s Empire (in 1876 Queen Victoria had been declared Empress of India), which separated him from his parents for two years, might have made him ask himself whether despite her protestations to the contrary his deaf mother had not only failed to listen to him but whether she had also had no time for him.
Prince George took after his father, Prince Edward, whose reluctance to be kept waiting caused him to seek refuge in eating and sex and to make sure that he never had to wait for the gratification of either appetite. King George V satisfied
his needs through an autocratic insistence on deference, obedience and service. In July 1899, in a lecture to cadets on the training ship Conway, he said: ‘I think I am entitled, from personal experience of twenty years at sea, to impress upon you three simple qualities which I am sure, if conscientiously acted up to, will go a long way towards ensuring you success. The qualities to which I would refer [qualities which he attempted to instil in all those around him, including his children] are truthfulness, obedience and zeal. Truthfulness will give those placed under you confidence in you; obedience will give those placed over you confidence in you; and although I have mentioned zeal last, it is by no means the least important, for without zeal no sailor can ever be worth his salt.’ In other words his own need for instant gratification would be satisfied, provided he received from others an immediate response to his orders.
Prince George was never allowed to forget either the trauma of his separation from his parents or their expectations of him. The portraits of Prince Edward and Princess Alexandra, which looked down at him from the walls of the Bacchante’s gunroom, not only reminded him of his duty towards his parents but also towards their subjects, whose enthusiastic farewells at Spithead saw him off on his journey round the world as well as his journey into adulthood. The demands of duty and obligation, leadership and example were all to feed into Prince George’s increasingly punishing conscience. As a monarch, his highly developed sense of duty led him to meet his obligations and to honour his debts to society. He interpreted the role literally. Like his grandmother Queen Victoria, he neither shared his feelings with his children nor the secrets of the dispatch box with his spouse. He did what he was obliged to do, no more and no less. Trained always to do his best, King George V satisfied the demands of his conscience, although it would occasionally make claims on him he would have difficulty in fulfilling. His harsh conscience found fault with everything. He held himself responsible for mistakes and became depressed or blamed others for them which made him anxious and those around him resentful.
On 6 August 1879, after the tears of the two Princes on boarding the Bacchante had dried, the first stage of the three-year cruise began agreeably enough. Two months earlier Prince George had celebrated his fourteenth birthday aboard the Britannia, but he had not been allowed shore leave because he was studying for his passing-out examination. On the day before his birthday his mother wrote to him from Paris:
My own dear little Georgie, – Fancy my writing from Paris to wish you joy on your dear birthday, your 14th too. [Princess] Victoria says ‘so old and so small’!! Oh my! You will have to make haste to grow, or I shall have that sad disgrace of being the mother of a dwarf!!! But let me wish you many happy returns of that dear day, which we ought to spend together always. My thoughts will be so much with you to-morrow, and I pray to God to bless you and make you grow up a real good boy who will be the pride and pleasure of us all who know you. I hope and trust you will do your utmost to pass a good examination, too. Already 14 and I can hardly believe it yet. Now you are both so big and old boys already.
Prince George was already being taught that discipline and regulations must take precedence over love.
The Prince was certainly small for his age (in an entry in his diary four months late, he notes his weight as being six stone four pounds and his height as four feet ten and five-eighths inches, but even so he could hardly have been happy about his mother’s comments. He was to wonder not for the first time quite what it was that his mother had meant by her birthday letter to him and whether he should take her remarks seriously. She had written to him using the endearments to which he had by now become accustomed. He thought he understood why she had not been there for him on his birthday (the reason had been explained to him by Mr Dalton), but he could not understand why she was not even in England! She had told him furthermore what a disgrace it would be for her to be a mother of a dwarf! Not only was his birthday disregarded, but the first years of his manhood, like the months following his birth, were spent apart from his mother. Prince George was not the only one who was troubled. It was equally hard for Princess Alexandra to see her favourite son growing up without her. Unable to face the loss of her loved one, she devalued him in her letters by making him smaller and therefore easier to let go. Failing to understand her reasoning, Prince George was determined to impress her with his size and, if that was not possible, with his power. From the moment of his departure from his mother and his motherland, his ambition was to command others, to climb the heights of the career ladder and so to impress Princess Alexandra that she would be proud of him and continue to love him. By the time he was twenty-six Prince George had attained the rank of Commander in the Royal Navy by merit alone, but he left his mother in no doubt that he was doing it for her. The Naval Commander was still signing his letters to his mother from ‘your darling little Georgie dear’.
When the two boys began to count their blessings, they realized that their surrogate mother, Mr Dalton, was to remain with them (as was Charles Fuller, the valet they had known from birth) and be responsible for their general education (the Admiralty appointed him acting Chaplain for temporary service) during the entire time they were under his care. Shore leave made a welcome break from shipboard routine. On Prince George’s arrival at Bridgetown, their first port of call, an elderly woman threw a spade guinea of George III wrapped in paper inscribed ‘A souvenir of Barbados’ into his carriage (Smith, 1932). He attached the George III coin to his watch chain, and the link with value and being valued, with time past and with time present, no doubt pleased him. The gold coin remained on his watch chain for the rest of his life. When the Bacchante reachedTrinidad, the next port of call, Prince George sent his mother some orchids, blissfully unaware that the name for this traditional floral offering by a male to a loved one is derived from the Greek orchis (testicle) because of the shape of its tuberous root.
By the time the Bacchante’s first cruise ended in May 1880 both Princes had adapted to life away from home, although Prince Eddy’s educational progress continued to worry Mr Dalton. The two boys worked hard not only at their naval duties but in the tasks set them in the humanities and history by their tutor, their ‘guide, philosopher and friend’. Mr Dalton was insistent that the boys keep fully written-up diaries, which occupied much of their leisure time. At the various ports of call sightseeing was obligatory and, as the boys became older, riding and shooting were also on the itinerary.
At the end of nine months Prince Eddy and Prince George were pleased to return to Spithead, where they were met by their parents and their three sisters who came aboard for a brief visit. Their shore leave, involving a return to Marlborough House, was taken up with several visits to the dentist, after which Prince Edward, wary of Queen Victoria’s concern about the ‘contaminating’ effect of Marlborough House on their morals, took the family to spend a month at Sandringham. Although Prince Edward tried from time to time to reassure Queen Victoria on the subject of her grandsons’ morals, his mother – who had had a taste of her son’s cavalier attitude to ‘morality’ – was not so easily reassured.
On 22 May 1880 Prince Edward wrote to Queen Victoria, who was in residence at Balmoral, in an effort to placate her. ‘We entirely agree with all you say about our two boys. Our greatest wish is to keep them simple, pure and childlike as long as possible … All you say, that they should avoid being mixed up with those of the so-called fashionable society, we also entirely agree in and try our utmost not to let them be with them.’ Despite his further reassurances the Queen wrote to Prince Edward again on 6 July reinforcing the message in her earlier letter: ‘I must also return most seriously and strongly to the absolute necessity of the children, all of them, not mixing with the society you are constantly having. They must either take their meals together alone, or you must breakfast and lunch alone with them and to this a room must be given up wherever you are.’
Hovering over the family, like a cloud, was the knowledge that in a few short weeks the boys’ lea
ve would be over and the long two-year cruise begun. Despite Princess Alexandra’s feelings in the matter she did nothing to prevent their departure, although there must have been moments when she would have longed to do so. When the time arrived, the Princess’s two little boys, as she continued to refer to them (despite the fact that they were now fifteen and sixteen years old), prepared themselves for their longest separation yet. Prince George was crying when he wrote his farewell letter to his mother. ‘So goodbye once more my darling Motherdear please give darling Papa and sisters my very best love and kisses and much love to dear Uncle Hans. So goodbye darling Motherdear, dearest papa and sister.’
The two boys returned once more to sea, but this time they found themselves sailing into a war zone. The Bacchante had received a message to sail at once to the Cape of Good Hope in case she was needed in the dispute with the Boers over the Transvaal, an independent Republic annexed by Great Britain during the premiership of Benjamin Disraeli. The Boers, who saw their expectations for self-government being frustrated, rose in rebellion. The British were defeated and Gladstone, who believed that the Boers should have self-government, fully accepted the independence of the Transvaal three years later. It was agreed that Britain would be free to veto any treaty with foreign powers, that there would be free trade throughout Africa and also freedom for all Europeans to reside there if they so wished. It was this last clause which was to lead to further trouble. In January 1881, as the Boers began their revolt, the Bacchante was anchored in the Falkland Islands. Orders were given for the entire Detached Squadron, including the Bacchante, to sail at once for the Cape. She arrived at her destination on 16 February 1881, with the two Princes on board, and anchored at Simon’s Bay. Prince George had found time to write another goodbye letter to his mother. Thanking her for giving him a hymnbook, he told her: ‘As we sung the hymns I could not help thinking of you. I think this last parting was horrid & I think it was true that it made it much worse, us having to wait in the hall until dear Papa came, because none of us could speak we were all crying so much.’
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