Edward VII: The Last Victorian King

by Christopher Hibbert

  A few months later, at the beginning of 1858, the Prince had to go down to Gravesend to say good-bye to his seventeen-year-old sister, Victoria, who was sailing for Potsdam with her husband, Prince Frederick William of Prussia, whom she had married a week before. He loved Victoria, though he knew that she had always been their father’s favourite and he had had to suffer constant comparisons with her intelligence, grace and dignity. She was, he reported, ‘in a terrible state when she took leave of her beloved Papa’; and the Prince of Wales, taking pity on her sorrow, felt all the more deeply his own, weeping when it was time to kiss her good-bye. She wrote to him regularly thereafter and, though he hated writing letters, he replied to her almost as often.

  It was decided that year that the Prince’s educational system should be modified. At the beginning of April he was dispatched to White Lodge in Richmond Park where, in the care of Mr Gibbs and the Revd Charle Feral Tarver, his Latin tutor and personal chaplain, he was to be kept ‘away from the world’ for some months and turned into the ‘first gentleman of the country’ in respect of ‘outward deportment and manners’. To assist them in this task Gibbs and Tarver were to have ‘three very distinguished young men of from twenty-three to twenty-six years of age’ who were to occupy, in monthly rotation, a kind of equerry’s place about the Prince from whose ‘more intimate intercourse’ the Prince Consort anticipated ‘no small benefit to Bertie’. These three men were Major Christopher Teesdale, Major Robert Lindsay (both of whom had won the V.C. in the Crimea) and Lord Valletort, ‘a thoroughly good, moral and accomplished’ young man who had foregone a public-school education to pass his youth in attendance on his invalid father, the Earl of Mount Edgecumbe.

  These three young nonpareils were reminded by the Prince Consort in a lengthy private memorandum that

  a gentleman does not indulge in careless self-indulgent lounging ways, such as lolling in armchairs or on sofas, slouching in his chair, or placing himself in unbecoming attitudes with his hands in his pockets … He must borrow nothing from the fashions of the groom or the gamekeeper, and whilst avoiding the frivolity and foolish vanity of dandyism, will take care that his clothes are of the best quality … well made and suitable to his rank and position.

  The Prince of Wales must always be made to remember that ‘the manners and conduct of a gentleman towards others are founded on the basis of kindness, consideration and the absence of selfishness’ and must avoid ‘anything approaching to a practical joke’. ‘The most scrupulous civility’ should characterize his ‘manner and conduct towards others’, and he must never indulge in ‘satirical or bantering expressions’. He must have ‘some knowledge of those studies and pursuits which adorn society’ while shunning gossip, cards and billiards. In conversation he must be trained to ‘take the lead and should be able to find something to say beyond mere questions as to health and the weather’. He must ‘devote some of his leisure time to music, to fine arts, either drawing or looking over drawings, engravings, etc., to hearing poetry, amusing books or good plays read aloud’.

  Within three months, however, it became clear that the White Lodge experiment was not proving a success, that the Prince of Wales was bored to death by the ‘amusing books’ which he was required to read, such as the novels of Walter Scott and the memoirs of Saint-Simon; and that he made very heavy weather of the dinner parties at which it was hoped the conversation of such eminent men as Lord John Russell and Professor Richard Owen, the naturalist, would stir his lazy mind. It was obvious, in fact, that the Prince’s educational system, as supervised by Mr Gibbs, could no longer be continued.

  ‘Poor Mr Gibbs certainly failed during the last two years entirely, incredibly, and did Bertie no good,’ the Queen wrote to her daughter, Princess Frederick William, in Berlin. He had ‘no influence’, Robert Lindsay, gentleman-in-waiting to the Prince of Wales’s Household, confirmed to the Prince Consort’s private secretary.

  He and the Prince are so much out of sympathy with one another that a wish expressed by Mr Gibbs is sure to meet with opposition on the part of the Prince … Mr Gibbs has devoted himself to the boy, but no affection is given him in return, nor do I wonder at it, for they are by nature thoroughly unsuited to one another. I confess I quite understand the Prince’s feeling towards Mr Gibbs, for tho’ I respect his uprightness and devotion, I could not [myself] give him sympathy, confidence or friendship.

  It was decided, therefore, that Mr Gibbs would have to retire, and that Lord Elgin’s rather dour and strict but fundamentally goodnatured brother, Colonel the Hon. Robert Bruce, would be appointed the Prince’s governor, with the Revd Charles Tarver, whom the Prince quite liked, as director of studies. In a letter explaining to the Prince what this would mean to him, his parents made it clear that, although the governor would report on his progress, the reports would not be the kind of communications submitted by Mr Birch: the Prince was now to be responsible directly to his parents and to learn to be responsible for himself. He was to have rooms allotted to his ‘sole use in order to give [him] an opportunity of learning how to occupy [himself] unaided by others and to utilize [his] time in the best manner’. Although he was solemnly reminded that life was ‘composed of duties, and that in the due, punctual, and cheerful performance of them the true Christian, true soldier and true gentleman [was] recognized’, the Prince was touched both by the generally sympathetic tone of the letter and by the relative freedom which it seemed to promise. He showed the letter to Gerald Wellesley, the Dean of Windsor, and burst into ‘floods of tears’.

  He was already seventeen and his life up to now seemed to him to have been peculiarly uneventful. His few adventures had been very modest: he had been on a pheasant shoot in 1849 when his father had told him and Lord Grey to leave the line and capture a wounded bird, and when — despite Prince Albert’s assurances to the Queen that no one would shoot in that direction — Lord Canning had wounded Grey in the head and had himself immediately fainted. The next year the Prince of Wales had been in the Queen’s carriage in the Park when a retired lieutenant of the Tenth Hussars had pressed forward through the crowd and hit her as hard as he could over the eye; the colour, the Queen noted, had rushed into ‘poor Bertie’s’ face. There had also been the time when his pony had run away with him, and the Queen had thought it advisable not to tell his father anything about it for fear of upsetting him. But nothing else very dramatic had ever happened to him.

  Nor had his occasional holidays been particularly amusing. In 1856, travelling incognito as Lord Renfrew, he had gone on a walking tour in Dorset with the uncongenial Mr Gibbs and another man, Colonel Cavendish, a groom-in-waiting to Prince Albert, even older than Gibbs. The next year there had been another walking tour, this time in the Lake District and with four carefully selected young companions and the Revd Charles Tarver. But although he had quite enjoyed himself from time to time, particularly when he and one of the other boys had chased a flock of sheep into Lake Windermere, the tour was rather blighted from the outset by his being required to write an essay entitled ‘Friends and Flatterers’. Also in 1857, he had been sent to the Continent, to Germany, Switzerland and France, in the company of his father’s secretary, Major-General Charles Grey, Colonel Henry Ponsonby, Gibbs, Tarver and a doctor. But this tour had been specifically described as being ‘for the purposes of study’, and he had had to keep a diary which had been sent home in instalments to his father, who objected to his setting down the ‘mere bare facts’ instead of giving his impressions and opinions. The Prince had also been asked to contribute to a notebook entitled ‘Wit and Whoppers’ in which were recorded, amongst other things, the atrocious puns concocted by his companions on their travels; and this, too, had to be shown to his father, who could have derived as little satisfaction from its perusal as from the Prince’s diary.

  The Prince was considered likeable enough by his fellow-tourists. Even the aged and discriminating Prince Metternich, with whom the party dined in his castle at Niederwald, found him ‘pleasant to ev
eryone’. The Prince, in turn, described Metternich in his journal as ‘a very nice old gentleman and very like the late Duke of Wellington’. But his companions noted that the Prince of Wales seemed rather uneasy, if not bored by their host’s conversation and recollections; and Metternich was forced to conclude that there was after all about the young man an ‘air embarrasse et très triste’.

  For the Prince of Wales the highlight of the tour was an evening at Königswinter where he got a little drunk and kissed a pretty girl. The Chancellor of the Exchequer’s sixteen-year-old son, William Henry Gladstone, who was a member of the party, wrote home to describe the incident which his father categorized as a ‘little squalid debauch’. It confirmed the Chancellor in his belief ‘that the Prince of Wales has not been educated up to his position. This sort of unworthy little indulgence is the compensation. Kept in childhood beyond his time, he is allowed to make that childhood what it should never be in a prince, or anyone else, namely wanton.’

  But now, so the Prince happily supposed when he heard that Colonel Bruce was to be his governor, he was not ‘to be kept in childhood’ any longer. He gathered from his parents’ letter which had moved him to such floods of tears that he was going to have much more independence, and much more money. The year before he had been given an annual allowance of £100 and granted permission to choose his own clothes, payment for which did not have to come out of the allowance. Yet while he had been assured that his parents did not wish to control his tastes and fancies, he had at the same time been warned that they did expect him never to wear anything ‘extravagant or slang’ or to identify himself with the ‘foolish and worthless persons’ who dressed ‘loudly’, because this would ‘prove a want of self-respect and be an offence against decency, leading — as it has often done in others — to an indifference to what is morally wrong’. His new allowance was to be £500, and he gathered that he would be able to exercise far greater freedom of choice in the manner of his spending it. Also, he was to be allowed to achieve a long-felt ambition and join the army.

  For as long as he could remember he had wanted to do this, and had been encouraged in his ambition by his mother’s cousin, the Commander-in-Chief of the army, the Duke of Cambridge, of whom he had always been fond and who, in turn, considered his nephew ‘really a charming and unaffected lad’. When the Prince had been given his first Windsor uniform he had blushed with pleasure. And he had shown equal pleasure when the former French King, Louis Philippe, after a visit to Windsor, had given him a toy gun as a replacement for one he had told the King he had lost. It had been noticed with what pride and awe he had looked upon the regiments marching past at Aldershot after the Crimean War and with what rapt attention he had listened to young officers describing their exploits at the front. His admiration was boundless for such military monarchs as the King of Sardinia, that ‘great, strong, burly, athletic man’, who had shown him a sword that could slice off an ox’s head at a blow, the only Knight of the Garter that the Duchess of Sutherland had ever seen ‘who looked as if he would have the best of it with the dragon’.

  The Prince had told his mother of his military ambitions on a walk with her soon after his fifteenth birthday. He had been ‘very sensible and amiable on that occasion’, although she had had to tell him that, as heir to the throne, he could never serve in the army, though he ‘might learn in it’. He had not minded that so much at the time, but he was now distressed to discover that he was not even to be allowed to learn in it as others did. He was to be gazetted a lieutenant-colonel without taking any of the usual examinations, which it was feared he might not pass. At the same time he found that the freedom to which he had so eagerly been looking forward under his new governor was to be severely curtailed. He was not even to be permitted to leave the house without seeking the approval of Colonel Bruce, who was reminded that in the execution of his ‘momentous trust’ he was strictly to ‘regulate all the Prince’s movements, the distribution and employment of his time, and the occupation and details of his daily life’. Bruce was furthermore to instil into his charge ‘habits of reflection and self-denial, the strictest truthfulness and honour, above all the conscientious discharge of his duty towards God and man’.

  The truth was that his parents had no more confidence in the Prince’s ability to regulate his own life properly than they had in the likelihood of his passing the army examination. They both continued to criticize him severely, to compare him unfavourably with his brothers and sisters, and to dread the thought of what might happen to the monarchy if he were to succeed to the throne in his present lamentable state of development.

  ‘Bertie continues such an anxiety,’ the Queen wrote to her eldest daughter in Germany in April 1859.

  I tremble at the thought of only three years and a half before us — when he will be of age and we can’t hold him except by moral power! I try to shut my eyes to that terrible moment! He is improving very decidedly — but Oh! it is the improvement of such a poor or still more idle intellect. Oh! dear, what would happen if I were to die next winter. It is too awful a contemplation. His journal is worse a great deal than Affie’s [Prince Alfred’s] letters. And all from laziness! Still we must hope for improvement in essentials; but the greatest improvement I fear, will never make him fit for his position. His only safety — and the country’s — is his implicit reliance in everything, on dearest Papa, that perfection of human beings!

  ‘I feel very sad about him,’ she told her daughter on another occasion, ‘he is so idle and so weak. God grant that he may take things more to heart and be more serious for the future.’ He was such ‘a very dull companion’ compared with his brothers, who were ‘all so amusing and communicative’. ‘When I see [Affie] and Arthur and look at … ! (You know what I mean!) I am in utter despair! The systematic idleness, laziness — disregard of everything is enough to break one’s heart, and fills me with indignation.’ Even his physique depressed her. She had thought him ‘growing so handsome’ when he had returned from his continental tour; but now, in reply to his sister’s commendation of his good looks, she complained of his small head, his big Coburg nose, his protuberant Hanoverian eyes, his shortness, his receding chin, his tendency to fat, ‘the effeminate and girlish’ way he wore his hair. ‘His nose and mouth are too enormous,’ she wrote when he was eighteen, and ‘he pastes his hair down to his head and wears his clothes frightfully … That coiffure is really too hideous with his small head and enormous features.’ As for his voice, it sometimes made her ‘so nervous’ she ‘could hardly bear it’. When he was created a Knight of the Garter in November 1858 she noticed how knock-kneed his legs appeared in court dress. Later she commented disapprovingly upon his ‘pallor, dull, heavy, blas? look’. His heart was warm and affectionate, she had to admit; but ‘O, dear!’

  Part of the trouble was that she considered him to be a ‘caricature’ of herself; she saw her own failings magnified in him. So, in fact, had Baron Stockmar, who confided in Gibbs that the boy was ‘an exaggerated copy of his mother’. But whereas she had tried to improve herself, he appeared incapable of the effort. ‘It is such a difficult age,’ the Queen lamented. ‘I do pray God to protect, help and guide him.’ His father had had many evening discussions with him, as he had with his other children, but he had not appeared to profit very much even from these. ‘Oh! Bertie alas! alas!’ It was just ‘too sad a subject to enter on’.

  The Prince Consort expressed quite as deep a concern, particularly after receiving far from encouraging reports from Colonel Bruce, who had to admit that, while his charge could undoubtedly be charming, he was still far too prone to outbursts of temper, to egotism and to the adoption of domineering attitudes. He exaggerated the importance of etiquette and dress; had little or no respect for learning; possessed small powers of reflection and was ‘prone to listlessness and frivolous disputes’. After a time Bruce noticed an improvement in his behaviour: the boy undoubtedly had ‘a fund of natural good sense and feeling’, yet with this went a ‘considerable
share of wilfulness and constitutional irritability’; and while he seemed ‘really anxious to improve himself’, the progress was ‘but slow and uncertain’.

  In November 1858, when writing to his eldest daughter, to whom the Prince of Wales was to be allowed to make a short visit, the Prince Consort asked her urgently not to ‘miss any opportunity of urging him to hard work’; their ‘united efforts must be directed to this end’. She would find her brother ‘grown-up and improved’, but ‘unfortunately he [took] no interest in anything but clothes, and again clothes. Even when out shooting he [was] more occupied with his trousers than with the game!’ It was particularly important that he should have ‘mental occupation’ while he was in Berlin. The Prince Consort had already urged Bruce to ensure that the boy was kept fully occupied for several hours a day with ‘serious study’; and he now urged his daughter to try to arrange this, to suggest, perhaps, that he went to some lectures.

  The Prince did not go to any lectures, preferring dinners and balls. But he did sit patiently while his sister, in obedience to her father’s injunction, read aloud to him from improving books; and his visit was an undoubted success. The Germans found him charming and tactful, most bezaubernd; and he and his brother-in-law, who was ten years older than himself, got on together extremely well. Even the Prince Consort had to agree that Bertie had shown a ‘remarkable social talent’, and that ‘his manners [had] improved very much’. He was certainly