by Gillian Gill
Part of the problem was Vicky, Bertie’s older sister by a single year. The birth of Victoria, Princess Royal, was initially a disappointment to her parents, but even as a very small baby Vicky was remarkable. Before she was one, she had managed to secure her father’s interest and affection. His eldest child, the prince felt, was like himself. She was precocious, she did the wonderful things that, reportedly, he himself had done as a little child.
Within months of her first confinement, the Queen was again pregnant and extremely unhappy about it. The second confinement was far more difficult and painful, but at least the child was male. The Queen later remembered the doctors telling her that things could easily have taken a very bad turn when Bertie was born, and it took her many weeks to recover. Separated from birth, mother and son failed to bond, but the mother had all too much time to think and plan. A few weeks after the Prince of Wales’s birth, Victoria wrote to her uncle Leopold: “I have been suffering so from lowness that it made me quite miserable, and I know how hard it is to fight against it. I wonder very much who our little boy will be like. You will understand how fervent my prayers and I am [sure] everybody’s must be, to see him resemble his angelic dearest Father in every, every, respect. Both in body and mind.” Two years later, even more ominously, the Queen wrote: “I wish that [the Prince of Wales] should grow up entirely under his Father’s eye and every step be guided by him, that when he has attained the age of sixteen or seventeen he may be a real companion to his father.”
Victoria had wanted and needed a son, and the pain and depression the birth of the Prince of Wales caused her would have been forgiven if he had proved to be as remarkable as his elder sister. But he was not. He was merely a normal boy. He walked and talked later than his sister, and he had a speech impediment. Before his second birthday, he was already being described as slow and stupid. Vicky could run rings around him. As he got older, it became plain even to those who loved him that the Prince of Wales was unable or unwilling to become what his father and mother had set their hearts on: a youthful replica of his father and thus an angel.
Instead Bertie turned out to be what Stockmar ungraciously called an “exaggerated copy” of his mother. By this the baron meant that Bertie was a Guelph, not a Coburg, cast in the idle, sybaritic, profligate mold of the sons of George III. That Queen Victoria was as much a Coburg as Prince Albert, that the Prince of Wales’s Saxe-Coburg uncle, grandfather, and great-grandfather were also idle, sybaritic, and profligate was something Stock-mar chose to forget.
Bertie was a large, fat, beautiful baby, but it soon became plain that he was physically much more like his mother than his father. His receding chin and blue saucer eyes were seen as Hanoverian, but the Hanoverian males were at least tall and imposing. Bertie was unusually small and delicately made. He matured late. Even as a late teenager, it would have been easy for him to pass as a girl. Bertie’s appearance alone predisposed his mother against him. Queen Victoria placed extreme importance on the beauty and height she herself lacked, and she took ugliness in her children as a personal insult. Legs, the Queen felt, were the great physical defect in Coburg males (with the exception of Albert, of course!), and as a little boy, Bertie had legs that satisfied her. But by the time he was ten, the Queen was lamenting how horridly knock-kneed he looked in court breeches. When Bertie was seventeen, Queen Victoria confessed to her daughter Vicky: “Handsome I cannot think him with that painfully small and narrow head, those immense features, and total want of a chin.” In 1861 she found him somewhat improved: In a colonel’s uniform at a military parade, the Prince of Wales did not look “at all so very small.” Damning her children with faint praise was one of Queen Victoria’s specialties in letters to family.
Both Vicky and Bertie were as little children willful and temperamental, hard to discipline. Both were subjected to physical punishment almost as soon as they could walk. Vicky, before she turned five, was largely cured of her temper tantrums when Miss Sarah Hildyard was hired to start the princess’s formal education. Vicky, who taught herself to read at age four, had been bored in the nursery, her parents concluded. Miss Hildyard was a remarkable woman who managed to satisfy two exceptionally exigent parents and to win the confidence of her precocious charge. She made her job her life and was a reliable and beloved influence on the oldest princesses until their marriages.
Bertie, by contrast, got more difficult when the lessons started. Food and nice clothes, not the alphabet and sums, interested the little prince. Fed, according to his father’s instructions, on meager rations of bread and milk with almost no meat, he was always hungry. The cold baths and open bedroom windows his mother thought salutary did not suit him. Told of the poor little children who lived on crusts in ice-cold tenements, he was un-mollified.
Bertie was often a bad boy, but he loved Lady Lyttelton, the superintendent of the royal nurseries, affectionately known by her charges as Laddle. She in turn adored the Prince of Wales, finding him unusually affectionate, loyal, and truthful. Of all the royal children, he was her favorite. As far as possible, Lady Lyttelton downplayed Bertie’s naughtiness in her daily reports to the Queen and the prince. When Vicky raged that Bertie had spoiled her game or Alice cried because Bertie pulled her hair, they got little sympathy from their governess. Such was life for most sisters in Victorian nurseries. But even indulgent Lady Lyttelton had to admit failure when it came to teaching the four-year-old Bertie his letters. By the time Bertie was five, his little sister Alice was taller and more advanced than he.
Miss Hildyard taught the Prince of Wales to read and write at a perfectly normal age, and the little boy, for all his pronunciation problems, spoke three languages fluently. But Prince Albert was not satisfied with his son’s academic progress or his behavior. Albert had no confidence in women. He wrote to his own old tutor Christoph Florschütz: “The education of six such different children … is a difficult task. They are a great deal with their parents and are very fond of them. I don’t interfere in the details of their upbringing, but only superintend the principles, which are difficult to uphold in the face of so many women and I give the final judgment. From my verdict there is no appeal.” This last statement at least was quite true.
By the age of seven, Bertie was a disruptive influence in the schoolroom, resistant to learning, and responding to mild reproof and punishment by lashing out at his sisters or even his teachers. Watching the Prince of Wales in one of these “fits,” the astonished Baron Stockmar decreed that the boy should never be left alone with one of his siblings.
A firm male hand and a serious program of study were clearly needed, and Prince Albert hired Henry Birch as preceptor to head up a team of tutors. Both he and Baron Stockmar intended to monitor the Prince of Wales’s progress minutely. Vicky loved the baron. Bertie did not.
Birch was a young gentleman of exemplary reputation who had enjoyed brilliant academic success at King’s College, Cambridge, and gone on to become a junior master at Eton. He was heir to a fortune and had taken Holy Orders, since a rich family living was being held for him. Birch did not especially need the eight hundred pounds in salary Prince Albert offered, and he was taken by surprise to discover that the prince and the Queen expected him to give all his time unreservedly to his young charge. They, in turn, were surprised by his protests: Lehzen and Florschütz a generation before had never found it necessary to take a holiday or have friends outside the palace. Birch protested his lack of freedom in vain to Baron Stockmar, but he had contracted with Prince Albert to stay until January 1852 and was a man of his word.
At first Bertie was extremely resistant to the new educational regime. He had disobeyed dear Laddle, given Miss Hildyard a hard time, and made his sisters cry, but now he missed them all. Suddenly he found himself doing five or six hours of study every day, six days a week—even when at Osborne and Balmoral— one-on-one with Mr. Birch or another master. Prince Albert insisted that his son should be so tired at the end of every day that he would fall asleep immediately. Th
erefore when the lessons were over, Bertie was sent off for hours of physical exercise: riding, nature walks, calisthenics, again on his own. In his leisure time, he was expected to keep a diary detailing the events of his day for his parents and his tutor to read.
Such a schedule was a stiff challenge to the preceptor as well as the boy, but little by little Birch made it work. Despite his name, he was a gifted, caring teacher and an attractive, interesting young man. He saw that his young pupil was extremely sensitive to criticism and could not bear to be “chaffed.” He saw that the boy was lonely so he suggested to Prince Albert that the younger son, Alfred, a more obedient and studious child, should be included in the lessons. After a year or so, Bertie decided that he could trust Birch and opened up. “I seem,” Birch told Baron Stockmar, “to have found the key to his heart.” Though Bertie was considered too backward to start Latin until he was ten, he began to be more tractable, make progress with his lessons, and to receive praise.
Given the exceptionally close and long-term affection he supposedly enjoyed with his own tutor as a boy, Prince Albert might have been expected to rejoice at the warm relationship developing between his ten-year-old son and Mr. Birch. But he was not. Bertie, though deeply affectionate, was, in his father’s eyes, still distressingly idle, superficial, sensual, and rebellious. The boy had developed a crush—what the Germans called a Schwarm—for the tutor, and Birch was beginning to express his opinions as if he were in charge of the boy’s education. Though Birch offered to extend his contract beyond the January 1852 deadline, Prince Albert refused. He had already found a new tutor far more to his taste.
Birch was not unhappy to shake the dust of Windsor Castle off his feet, but in his final report he did his best for his pupil. He was realistic about the Prince of Wales’s faults of conduct and academic limitations, but he insisted that the boy’s principal problem was that he was always with adults and “deprived of all normal society with other boys.” Eton, Birch opined, would do Bertie good. Other men charged with teaching the Prince of Wales dared to observe in their reports to the prince that the boy was under unremitting pressure to perform in the classroom and frequently so exhausted that he could not think straight. Perhaps, just perhaps, what he needed was less pressure?
Prince Albert thanked the gentlemen for their contributions, but he knew they were wrong. He had no faith at all in the English public schools, where masters, not parents, held sway, and young boys often came under the evil influence of older boys. He was sure that the Prince of Wales needed to remain safe within his family circle if he were to fulfill his royal destiny. Bertie’s persistent academic slowness and continuing discipline problems could be solved by more structure and longer hours.
Prince Albert found the man willing to carry out his educational precepts to the letter in Frederick Weymouth Gibbs. Gibbs came of humble, dissenter (non-Church of England) stock. Orphaned as a child, he had been brought up by Sir James Stephens, regius professor of history at Cambridge University. Gibbs read law at Cambridge, did very well, and was made a fellow of Trinity College. He was then called to the bar but did not succeed in his new profession. Sir James warmly recommended his adopted son to Prince Albert. Gibbs, he wrote, was “exempt from reproach,” a model of “Truth, Honour, Sobriety, and Chastity who … never quailed before the face of any human being.” Stephens admitted that his protégé was “self-confident and has a strength of will which occasionally degenerates into obstinacy.”
Austere, scholarly, self-righteous, devoid of charm, Gibbs was almost a caricature of his employer. He was also a poor man with his way to make in life. To be head preceptor to the Prince of Wales was a golden opportunity, especially since the salary had been raised to one thousand pounds a year. Gibbs had no intention of being dismissed after two years like Birch. He aspired be the second Florschütz, companion to a prince until he left the university, and winning his lifelong devotion and gratitude.
Gibbs handled the royal parents and Baron Stockmar far more astutely than Birch had. He was not a man of the cloth and, unlike Birch, could not be suspected of the high church sympathies that the Queen disliked. He enlisted Stockmar’s unconditional support. The baron’s historical anecdotes and words of wisdom were reverently entered in Gibbs’s diary. With his employer and supervisor, Prince Albert, Gibbs claimed to see eye to eye on all points. Bertie must be made to attend and learn out of respect and duty, not boyish admiration. The Prince of Wales’s hours of schooling must be increased from six to seven every day. The treadmill must be set to run faster and longer.
Gibbs had every incentive to produce some striking results in the classroom. He was not a cruel or stupid man, and he did his best. But the relationship between teacher and student was doomed from the start. Gibbs—unlike Lehzen and Birch—gave his allegiance to the father, not to the son. For a handsome salary and future expectations, Gibbs undertook to implement an educational regimen that his pupil found overwhelming and humiliating. Gibbs was confident that, in a battle of wills with a ten-year-old boy, he would win. He was proved wrong.
Bertie had showed from the outset that he had no taste for book learning and would learn only from those he loved, on his own terms. He was deeply affected by the departure of Mr. Birch. It seemed that every adult he liked and trusted was taken away from him. He did not like Gibbs at the start, and he soon learned to hate him. As he would amply prove in adult life, the Prince of Wales was far from stupid or incompetent, and he had prodigious energy for things he liked. But as a child, refusing to compete with his sisters, unable to express any of his resentments to his distant mother or his sainted father, he alternated between apathy and rage.
The preeminent fact for Bertie from birth was that he was the Prince of Wales, heir apparent. This had not been true for his mother. He was also male in a culture where mere maleness counted. Humility and consideration for others were virtues preached to the Prince of Wales every day, but they did not take. Protocol ruled even in the palace nursery. Every governess, tutor, servant, and courtier the Prince of Wales met made it clear that he, not his smarty-pants sister Vicky or goody-two-shoes little brother Affie, was the child who counted. On the rare occasions that Bertie appeared in public, walking by his mother’s side, holding her hand as if he did so every day, he was almost mobbed. He loved London, the court, parties, excitement, people, being the center of attention.
Back in the classroom, he was the dunce. The loneliness, sensual deprivation, and constant grind of his life were incomprehensible to him. He hated to feel stupid, he hated to be told what to do. He missed his sisters. He wanted friends. All the fury and frustration that Bertie felt about his treatment at the hands of his “angelic dearest Father” and could not express were directed toward the new preceptor.
When asked to do something he did not like, which was most days, the Prince of Wales dug in his heels. When coerced, he erupted in frightening rages and became mildly psychopathic, screaming, biting, spitting, kicking, and tearing up his books. It sometimes took two people to restrain him. He developed a passion for sticks and riding crops, swinging them alarmingly at his siblings and attendants. Knives and scissors had to be carefully kept away from him. He would deliberately get dirt on the servants’ uniforms, and once he spilled ink on a dress that a maid had laid out on her bed in preparation for her wedding.
Life for the young Prince of Wales was not all lessons and lectures. His lot was, in fact, easy by the standards of the day. Life at an English public school was far from a lark, and occasionally boys of England’s oldest families died of neglect at public school. Tens of thousands of boys working in the mines and brickworks and chimneys of England died before they were eighteen. Royal family life could be warm and affectionate, especially at Christmas and birthdays, and there was far more active intergenerational play than in most families at the time. Prince Albert taught his sons to swim, skate, and shoot, all sports at which he excelled and which they enjoyed. The boys played ice hockey in winter and sailed in summer. Th
ey were put on the back of a pony as soon as they could waddle and became ex-pert and enthusiastic riders. There were excursions along the seashore at Osborne, expeditions straight uphill at Balmoral, and hunts at Windsor.
But for Bertie, family life and the company of his brothers and sisters— with whom he was never permitted to be alone—were not enough. The lectures and fact-finding tours that his father specialized in bored him. When he had nothing to say about them in his diary, he was condemned for being dull and stupid. He longed for friends, but even when boys were sent up to Windsor Castle from nearby Eton to play with him and Affie, their father always hovered, watching for who knew what, ready to intervene. The reaction of both princes to such obsessive supervision was to behave like louts, confident that the other boys would not dare resist or fight back. When Affie started to behave as badly as Bertie, the two boys were again separated, and Affie was given his own establishment at Royal Lodge on the grounds of Windsor Castle. The Prince of Wales was bereft.
In comparison with his own father, Prince Albert was a loving and caring parent. He tried always to be there for his children, and he listened to them more carefully and indulgently than their mother. Child abuse by servants was endemic in great Victorian nurseries, but there is no report that any servant abused the prince’s children. Lady Lyttelton, who adored the prince consort, found him unusually affectionate and understanding. What other father would rock a baby in his arms, demonstrate to a toddler how to turn somersaults, or stoop down to tie up a small daughter’s shoe? Albert’s eldest daughters, Vicky and Alice, who, like their brothers, were taught to swim, skate, and ride by their father and received an unusually good education, adored him unconditionally to the end of their lives.
