QUEEN VICTORIA A Personal History

by Christopher Hibbert

  When the Prince went away with his parents, Birch went with them. In August 1849 he accompanied the Queen and Prince Albert on a visit to Ireland and, dressed in a sailor suit, he was driven about the streets with them; but as soon as he got back to Vice-Regal Lodge or aboard the royal yacht, Fairy, he had to settle down to his books again. When he went with his parents to Balmoral, he was quickly disabused of the hope that he was to have a short holiday. His tutor thought a little deer stalking or some other outdoor activity 'such as taking the heights of hills' would not come amiss. But Prince Albert said that 'it must not be supposed that [the visit to Balmoral] was to be taken as a holiday'. The tutor was required to send regular reports on his pupil's progress to the boy's father, who was rarely comforted by what he read. The boy's German was quite good: by the age of five he could read a German book without much difficulty and carry on a conversation in German without undue hesitation, though this ability seemed to interfere with his mastery of English. Despite all the efforts of the actor, George Bartley, who was employed to give him elocution lessons, the Prince never altogether lost his slight German accent and to the end of his life there was a noticeably Germanic guttural burr in his pronunciation of the letter 'r'. His French was not as good as his German, and it was not until later in life that he acquired the accent and vocabulary on which he was to pride himself.

  In his anxiety Prince Albert consulted the eminent phrenologist, George Combe, one of the seventeen children of a Scottish brewer, who, having examined the boy's cranium, 'pointed out the peculiarities of his temperament and brain'.

  'The organs of ostentativeness, destructiveness, self-esteem, combativeness and love of approbation are all large,' Combe gloomily concluded. 'Intellectual organs are only moderately well developed.'10

  'I wonder whence that Anglo-Saxon brain of his has come,' Prince Albert commented, on receiving Combe's report. 'It must have descended from the Stuarts, for the family has been purely German since their day.'

  As time passed the Prince became increasingly dissatisfied with Mr Birch, who, conscious of the disapproval and resentful at being required to spend 'morning, noon and night in the company of a child' without holidays, offered to resign at once if his employers 'knew of anyone who would be more likely to succeed in the management of so young a child'. Relations between Birch and the parents were further strained by his wish to become ordained. The Queen, who had so strongly disapproved of Lady Lyttelton's High-Church views, thought that Birch's 'Puseyism' might well render him an unsuitable tutor once he had taken Holy Orders. She agreed to his remaining on condition that he promise not to be 'aggressive' in his religion, that he attend Presbyterian services when the royal family were in Scotland, and that he did not forswear 'innocent amusements' such as dancing and shooting. Although assured that Birch was 'plain straightforward Church of England', Prince Albert could not agree to his retaining his appointment should he be ordained. It was settled, therefore, that he would not respond to his vocation for the time being. He continued as tutor until January 1852 when, having entered Holy Orders, he resigned."

  By then he had become attached to his charge and did his best to reassure the boy's father that his progress was not as disappointing as his parents were inclined to believe. Certainly his writing and spelling left much to be desired, but 'we must not forget', Birch reported, 'that there are few English boys who know so much French and German or know so much general information'. The pupil's regard for the tutor was reciprocated; and the Prince was much distressed by his father's refusal to keep him on. 'It has been a terrible sorrow to the Prince of Wales who has done no end of touching things since he heard he was to lose him,' wrote Lady Canning. 'He is such an affectionate dear little boy; his little notes and presents which Mr Birch used to find on his pillow were really too moving."2 Birch's successor was Frederick Waymouth Gibbs, a rather staid, unhumorous, unimaginative, fussy and opinionated barrister of twenty-nine who had been a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. His mother being insane and his father bankrupt, he had been brought up with the sons of his mother's friend, Sir James Stephen, Professor of Modern History at Cambridge and grandfather of Virginia Woolf. He was to receive a salary of £1,000 'with any addition to that sum which Baron Stockmar [might] decide to be just and reasonable', and to remain with the Prince until his seventeenth birthday.

  Gibbs soon learned that his task would not be an easy one. On his arrival the Queen summoned him for an interview at which, so he recorded in his diary,

  She spoke a good deal about the Princes and bade me notice two peculiarities in the Prince of Wales. First, at times he hangs his head and looks at his feet, and invariably within a day or two has one of his fits of nervous and unmanageable temper. Secondly, riding hard, or after he has become fatigued, has been invariably followed by outburst of temper.13

  He had been 'injured by being with the Princess Royal who was very clever and a child far above her age,' the Queen continued. 'She puts him down by a look - or a word - and their natural affection [has been] impaired by this state of things.'

  The new tutor's early contacts with the Prince himself, however, were pleasant enough. The day after his predecessor's departure he went for a walk with both the Prince of Wales and Prince Alfred, and the elder boy, now ten years of age, politely apologized for their silence. 'You cannot wonder if we are somewhat dull today,' he said. 'We are sorry Mr Birch has gone. It is very natural, is it not?' Mr Gibbs could not deny that it was, indeed, very natural. Gibbs no doubt expected in his self-satisfied way that in time the Prince would develop the same kind of affection and respect for himself. But the Prince never did. On the contrary, he grew to detest him, and was soon as unruly and unpredictable as he had ever been in the worst days of Mr Birch.

  The Prince's other tutors ventured to express the opinion that the boy was being overworked. On the orders of his father, who continued to believe in the efficacy of a sound boxing of the ears or a few sharp raps across the knuckles with a stick, there was no relaxation in the length and frequency of the boy's lessons which began at eight o'clock in the morning and ended at six o'clock at night, seven days a week.

  Between his intellectual pursuits he was taught riding, gymnastics and dancing, and - under the instruction of a drill sergeant - military exercises. In winter he was taught to skate; in summer to swim and play croquet. He learned about forestry and farming, carpentry and bricklaying.

  His tutors were instructed to ensure that he was exhausted by the end of each day, when a report upon his progress and conduct was submitted to his parents.

  The product of this regimen was not an appealing child. The Prince of Wales's sense of frustration and inferiority, combined with the strain of exhaustion, led him not only to seek relief in outbursts of furious violence, but also to be aggressively rude to those few boys of his own age whom he was ever allowed to meet.

  The Queen admitted in confidence to her eldest daughter that 'Papa ... momentarily and unintentionally [could sometimes be] hasty and harsh', but she did not question the necessity for severity with the Prince of Wales.

  The Prince responded to this severity with fear as well as with violence. 'He was afraid of his father,' wrote Charles Wynn-Carrington, one of those few Etonians allowed into Windsor Castle, who did not find it surprising that this was so, for Prince Albert seemed to him 'a proud, shy, stand-offish man, not calculated to make friends easily with children. Individually I was frightened to death of him, so much so that on one occasion [when] he suddenly appeared from behind some bushes, I fell off the see-saw from sheer alarm at seeing him, and nearly broke my neck.'14 The Prince was never allowed to forget that he was being constantly and anxiously watched by his father, and that by others he was for ever being compared - of course, unfavourably compared - with him. The Queen once informed her son in one of many similar letters:

  None of you can ever be proud enough of being the child of such a Father who has not his equal in this world - so great, so good, so faultless. Try .
.. to follow in his footsteps and don't be discouraged, for to be really in everything like him none of you, I am sure, will ever be. Try, therefore, to be like him in some points, and you will have acquired a great deal.15

  Hard as he was kept at his lessons, there were occasional days of pleasure for the Prince. He afterwards remembered how much he had enjoyed going out hunting and deer stalking, fishing and shooting with his father, though hard as he practised he never learned to shoot very well. He remembered, too, the delight he had experienced at being taken with his brothers and sisters to the zoo and the pantomime, to Astley's Circus, and the opera at Covent Garden; the excitement when Wombwell's menagerie visited Windsor Castle, when General Tom Thumb, the American dwarf from Barnum's 'Greatest Show on Earth', came to Buckingham Palace; and when Albert Smith, who related so vividly his adventures while climbing Mont Blanc, gave a lecture at Osborne. He remembered also the plays which Charles Kean and Samuel Phelps put on at Windsor before presenting them in London at the Princess's Theatre and Sadler's Wells; and the performances at Balmoral of the marvellous conjuror, John Henry Anderson, the 'Wizard of the North' - of course, so the Prince confided to one of his father's guests, 'Papa [knew] how all these things [were] done'.16

  The more practical part of the children's education, including the making of bricks and the erection of tents, took place at Osborne where their father, a knowledgeable gardener himself, arranged for them to have their own gardens, complete with shed and tools marked with their initials and suitable for their respective sizes. Here in neat rows in individual plots they grew vegetables as well as flowers; and nearby were shrubs, planted by the four eldest children, all with labels bearing their names painted by the Prince of Wales on outlines pencilled for him by one of his mother's ladies-in-waiting.17

  Facing these gardens was a Swiss cottage similar to one in the grounds of the Rosenau, a wooden structure made from prefabricated parts and looking so authentic, as the Queen said, that one could 'fancy oneself suddenly transported to another country'. The foundation stone was laid on 5 May 1853 in one of those family celebrations dear to Prince Albert's heart, with all the children, including his third son and seventh child, the three-year-old Prince Arthur, heaping on mortar with a trowel and tapping the stone with a hammer. The two elder boys helped with the construction of the stone plinth, their father paying them wages and their mother - while not mentioning the handiwork of the Prince of Wales commending his younger brother, Alfred, who 'worked as hard and steadily as a regular labourer'.

  In this cottage the girls learned to cook on the range in the brightly tiled kitchen, using a great variety of pans and utensils which, after use, were hung in neat, shining rows on the dresser. Upstairs, as well as a dressing room and a dining room, in which stood a piano, there was a small museum containing all manner of objects - shells, butterflies, pressed flowers, fossils - collected by the children, with the help of their father, and supplemented by donations (such as the scorpions, tarantulas and stick insects) presented by Lady Canning, their mother's former lady-in-waiting, by then Vicereine of India.18

  Outside, there was a miniature earthworks constructed by the two elder boys under the direction of a young officer in the Royal Engineers, Lieutenant John Cowell, who was later to spend twenty-eight years as Master of the Household, even though he was 'rather too much of a John Bull', with 'unreasonable likes and dislikes', for the Queen's taste, and despite the fact that soon after his appointment he had earned her profound displeasure by presuming to criticize one of her Highland servants, Archie Brown.[xxxi]19

  Chapter 24

  PALMERSTON

  [He felt] 'Like a man restored to life after his funeral sermon had been preached'.

  'My relations with Her Majesty are most satisfactory,' wrote Sir Robert Peel soon after his appointment as Prime Minister in September 1841. 'The Queen has acted towards me not merely (as everyone who knew Her Majesty's character must have anticipated) with perfect fidelity and honour, but with great kindness and consideration. There is every facility for the despatch of public business, a scrupulous and most punctual discharge of every public duty and an exact understanding of the relation of a constitutional Sovereign to her advisers.'1

  For her part, the Queen could scarcely have been more content with Sir Robert's subsequent behaviour. She warmly supported his policies and strongly condemned those who opposed them. His decision to increase the grant to Maynooth, the training college for Roman Catholic clergy in Ireland, was eminently sensible, 'one of the greatest measures ever proposed'; and she blushed for the narrow-minded, bigoted Protestants who opposed it, 'so void of all right feeling, & so wanting in Charity'.2 As for Mr Gladstone, who felt that he must resign over the grant since he had once written a book condemning subsidies to Roman Catholics, she quite agreed with the Foreign Secretary, Lord Aberdeen, who was alleged to have said to Gladstone, 'No one reads your book and those who do, don't understand it.'3

  She also shared Peel's belief that the time had come to reform the Corn Laws, and was outraged by those in his own party, including the Duke of Wellington, Lord Stanley and Benjamin Disraeli, who would not support him. 'Oh,' she cried, 'for a little true, disinterested patriotism.' She well understood the truth that lay behind the popular riddle:

  'Why are the Tories like walnuts?'

  'Because they are troublesome to Peel.'4

  They were troublesome to Prince Albert, too; and when the Prince appeared in the House of Commons to hear Peel speak, Lord George Bentinck rose to attack him for having been 'seduced by the First Minister of the Crown to come down to this House to usher in, to give eclat, and, as it were, by reflection from the Queen, to give the semblance of a personal sanction of Her Majesty to a measure which ... a great majority at least of the landed aristocracy of England, of Scotland and of Ireland, imagine fraught with deep injury, if not ruin to them'. The Prince never appeared in the House of Commons again, while the Queen expressed her fury with these diehard Tory gentlemen who 'did nothing but hunt all day, drink Claret or Port wine in the evening, & never studied or read about any of these questions.'5

  Lord Melbourne, who condemned Peel's support of the free trade he had once opposed as being 'damned dishonest', was, the Queen thought, quite as bad as these gentlemen on the opposite side of the House. Indeed, Melbourne, in the Queen's opinion, had become rather tiresome of late, eating enormous dinners after breakfasts of grouse and mutton chops, living in a dirty house staffed by sixteen servants, talking to himself more loudly than ever and 'making fierce faces', upsetting himself with thoughts that filled his eyes with tears, believing himself to be on the verge of bankruptcy, though his fortune was still considerable, and applying to the Queen for money which she advanced to him and for a pension which she was advised not to grant. In October 1842 he had a stroke from which he never completely recovered.

  Under the influence of Prince Albert, who entertained a low opinion of Whigs and was not a man to overlook the failings of Lord Melbourne, the Queen's attitude to her former much-admired mentor had already begun to change. Although no longer in office, Melbourne was reluctant to withdraw from her life; and an attempt by Stockmar and Anson to put a stop to his continuing correspondence with the Queen, and his offering of unsolicited advice, met with but little success.

  While Melbourne described his time as the Queen's Prime Minister as the 'happiest part of his life', she wrote of the dream being past. She was sure she 'did not wish those times back' in the way that he did.

  Earl Granville's son, Frederick Leveson-Gower, a fellow-guest at Chatsworth in 1843, was grieved to see them together: 'Lord Melbourne was so much broken in health that he was nearly in a state of second childhood. I believe he had not met Her Majesty since he ceased to be her Minister. Her manner to him was kind; still, he bitterly felt the change in the situation, and it was sad to see him with tears frequently in his eyes.6

  Scarcely aware, as a young woman in her new-found happiness, of the depth of the grief which Melbourn
e, as an ill and lonely man, felt at his exclusion from her life, Victoria was not deeply moved by his death in November 1848. Certainly, as she said, she 'sincerely regretted' it, 'for he was truly attached to [her] and was a noble kind-hearted generous being', 'tho' not a good or firm Minister'.

  Rereading parts of her journal which covered those years when she had been in thrall to him, she wrote, 'I cannot forbear remarking what an artificial sort of happiness mine was then, and what a blessing it is that I have now in my beloved Husband real and solid happiness, which no Politics, no worldly reverses can change.'7

  Three years before Lord Melbourne's death, to the Queen's great distress, Peel had been forced to resign over a contentious Irish Bill, and, with a reluctance she took no trouble to conceal, she had had to send for Lord John Russell.

  Peel had gone to Osborne to tender his resignation. He was 'visibly much moved', Prince Albert wrote, 'and said to me it was one of the most painful moments of his life, to separate himself from us'.8 To his friend, Sir Thomas Fremantle, however, two days after his secretary had been shot in the back by Daniel MacNaghten, a mad Scotsman, Peel declared that 'on every personal and private ground' he 'rejoiced at being released from the thankless and dangerous post of having the responsibility of public affairs'.9 Nevertheless, when Lord John Russell failed in his first attempt to form a government and Peel was asked by the Queen to withdraw his resignation, he did so without hesitation, feeling, as he told Princess Lieven, 'like a man restored to life after his funeral service had been preached'. The Queen had been suitably grateful to her 'worthy Peel' who, by agreeing to continue as Prime Minister, had shown himself 'a man of unbounded loyalty, courage, patriotism and high-mindedness'.10 Peel, however, did not survive for long: defeated in the House of Commons in the summer of 1846, he tendered his resignation for the second time and was succeeded as Prime Minister by Lord John Russell, who appointed Lord Palmerston Foreign Secretary.