Prince Albert

by Robert Rhodes James

  There is something infinitely touching about the devotion with which they approached their task. Very mindful of the deficiencies of their own childhoods, and somewhat awed by the heavy responsibility of educating Queen Victoria’s eventual heir, they discussed the subject at great length, and often, and inevitably turned to Stockmar for guidance. He, for his part, advised them to take counsel from others. The results were somewhat unhelpful and sycophantic, the Bishop of Oxford portentously writing that ‘the great object in view is to make him the most perfect man’, although Melbourne was a characteristic refreshing exception, writing to the Queen: ‘Be not over solicitous about education. It may be able to do much, but it does not do as much as is expected from it. It may mould and direct the character, but it rarely alters it’.

  This was emphatically not the view of Stockmar. ‘A man’s education begins the first day of his life’, he had written sternly to Albert on October 1st 1840, ‘and a lucky choice [of a governess] I regard as the greatest and finest gift which we can bestow on the expected stranger. Suffer me, apropos of this subject, my dear Prince, to pause a moment, and to ask you to consider, first, how much we have already gained step by step, and, secondly, to take courage from success, and to give to Providence the thanks that are due!’ Stockmar, as has been remarked, was not disposed to leave matters to Providence, and when the heir was born he hastened to write to Albert: ‘Sleep, Stillness, Rest, and the exclusion of many people from her room are now the essentials for the Queen. You cannot be too guarded on these points. Thus, be a very Cerberus’. It was due to his advice that Lady Lyttelton was appointed governess of the nursery, which was a very happy and successful choice. But, as Stockmar emphasised, this was only a first step. On September 18th 1843 he wrote to Prince Albert:

  . . . Pray give renewed attention and serious reflection to what is necessary for the training and education of the Prince of Wales. The present nursery staff is no longer adequate. As the Swiss governess may take the special charge of the Princess Royal, so a German governess might take the Prince of Wales for a time under her special care, until perhaps an English one is found who might look after him till his 5th or 6th year, when he might be transferred to manly hands . . .

  It was over the management of the nursery that, as has been already related, Albert and Victoria had had their first notable, and most vehement, quarrel, but the issue of nursery management had been subordinate to the deeper differences between them over the character and role of Lehzen. Nonetheless, the future of the heir to the throne was a major factor, and one on which Albert fought and won his most important victory over his wife. Also of significance was the question of security, and Lady Lyttelton was to write of ‘various intense precautions, suggesting the most hideous dangers, which I fear are not altogether imaginary, and make one shudder’. Chief among these apprehensions was that of the Princess Royal and the Prince being kidnapped, and although such fears may have been exaggerated by the young parents and their advisers, their concerns can be appreciated. The result, inevitably, was a degree of supervision and segregation for the Royal Children that was only gradually, and then only moderately, relaxed.

  Stockmar’s essential purpose, as he emphasised to the Royal parents, was to produce ‘a man of calm, profound, comprehensive understanding, with a deep conviction of the indispensable necessity of practical morality to the welfare of the Sovereign and People’. While the parents enthusiastically agreed, the difficulty was that Bertie, even as a small child, was proving difficult and temperamental, with fits of frustrated anger and temper that left him limp and exhausted, ‘as though he were asleep with his eyes open’, as Albert reported to Stockmar with some concern. Lady Lyttelton described him, at the age of four, as ‘uncommonly adverse to learning and requires much patience from wilful inattention and constant interruptions’.

  It was also evident that he was less intelligent and pleasing to the parents than Princess Victoria, on whom Albert’s complete devotion was bestowed early and never faded. This love is one of the most moving events in his life, but it inevitably had some effect upon the small boy who was the recipient of the immensely detailed and thorough plans of his parents and Stockmar. Lady Lyttelton was immensely struck by Albert’s devotion to his children, and his ‘patience and kindness’ to them, and some of Victoria’s most warm Journal entries describe him ‘noisily and eagerly managing a new kite with his two elder sons’, playing hide and seek with Vicky and Bertie with the gusto of a boy, and teaching Bertie how to turn somersaults. ‘He is so kind to them and romps with them so delightfully, and manages them so beautifully and firmly’. ‘There is certainly a great charm, as well as deep interest in watching the development of feelings and faculties in a little child’, he wrote on February 16th 1843, ‘and nothing is more instructive for the knowledge of our own nature than to observe in a little creature the stages of development which, when we were ourselves passing through them, seemed scarcely to have an existence for us. I feel this daily in watching our young offspring, whose characters are quite different, and who both show many loveable qualities.’

  But although Albert loved his son dearly, he saw him also as the future King on whom would fall immense responsibilities and powers, and his determination to ensure that nothing should be spared nor overlooked in his preparation for his great destiny inevitably made Bertie ‘different’ from his sister and his subsequent brothers and sisters. As Lady Lyttelton wrote, he was, after all, ‘l’infant d’Angleterre’.

  . . . Your Royal Highness can never rate too highly the importance of the life of the Prince of Wales, or of his good education; for your own interests – political, moral, mental & material are so intimately and inseparably bound up with those of the Prince that every neglect in his training and culture is certain to be avenged upon his father . . .

  Thus Stockmar wrote, perhaps unnecessarily, on November 27th 1843 to Prince Albert, while adding his concern at the lack of firm supervision when Lady Lyttelton was absent: ‘The great thing to be looked to is not the learning of a foreign language but the moral and physical superintendence which ought not to be entrusted to uneducated persons’.

  It was Stockmar who drew up the Nursery Regulations and who, after interview, had recommended Lady Lyttelton, while also advising special facilities at Buckingham Palace and Windsor for herself and her daughters, a special carriage for her, and a footman to assist her and accompany her carriage. It was also Stockmar who drew up the overall Plan on March 6th 1842:

  The Child is born with natural dispositions to good and to evil.

  The object of Education is to develop and strengthen the good, and subdue or diminish the evil disposition of our Nature.

  Good Education cannot begin too soon.

  ‘To neglect beginnings’, says Locke, ‘is the fundamental error into which most Parents fall . . .’

  The beginnings of Education must therefore be directed to the regulation of the child’s natural Instincts, to give them the right direction and above all to keep its Mind pure . . .

  Emphasising the need for early teachers of ‘good, of virtuous, and intelligent Persons’, Stockmar continued:

  Good Education is very rare, because it is difficult, and the higher the Rank of the Parents the more difficult it is. Notwithstanding, good Education may be accomplished, and to be deferred from attempting it, merely because it is difficult, would be a dereliction of the most sacred Duties. This can neither be the intention of our good and right minded Queen nor the Prince, but it is quite evident that on account of their Youth, they must lack that knowledge, maturity of judgement and experience, which are requisite to a successful Guidance of the Education of the Royal Infants. It becomes therefore their sacred Duty to consult upon this important subject honest, intelligent, and experienced Persons and not only to consult them but to follow their advice.

  The first truth by which the Queen and the Prince ought to be thoroughly penetrated is that their
position is a much more difficult one than that of any other Parents in the Kingdom. Because the Royal Children ought not only to be brought up to the moral character, but also fitted to discharge successfully the arduous duties which may eventually devolve upon them as future Sovereigns. Hence the magnitude of the parental responsibility of Sovereigns to their Children; for upon the conscientious discharge of this responsibility will depend hereafter the peace of mind and happiness of themselves and their family, and as far as the prosperity and happiness of a Nation depends upon the personal character of its Sovereign the welfare of England . . .

  After a somewhat unnecessarily bleak appraisal of the deficiencies of George III as a parent, and the lamentable consequences, Stockmar went on to warn Victoria and Albert about the ‘delusion’ that they could actually superintend the education of their children. It was essential that this task should be delegated fully to ‘a person of rank’, as ‘the English, so aristocratic in their notions, feelings, and habits would not relish a deviation from the established rule’.

  This description certainly covered Lady Lyttelton, who reported daily on the children’s progress, but plans were laid early for the next stage, when the Prince of Wales could be moved from the nursery to the attentions of a male tutor. Again, as Stockmar urged, there must be full delegation, and no parental interference once the choice of tutor was made. Again, the parents fully complied.

  One may note at this point a certain dichotomy in Stockmar’s approach. While urging delegation, he was also writing to Albert that the Governor of the Prince of Wales was ‘the man of the highest rank in the Kingdom – His Royal Highness the Prince Albert’, a view warmly shared by the Queen, who wrote that ‘I wish that he should grow up entirely under his Father’s eye, and every step be guided by him, so that when he has attained the age of sixteen or seventeen he may be a real companion to his father’. Thus, Stockmar saw Albert as the overseer with the ultimate responsibility, but without responsibility for the actual teaching. By the beginning of 1846, with Bertie only five years of age, his parents and Stockmar were seriously disappointed by his physical and mental progress. Although he detected some advance, Stockmar submitted a somewhat sombre analysis of the boy in an undated memorandum to Albert early in 1846, which glumly observes that ‘I must perceive that the Prince remains up to this hour essentially a nervous and excitable child with little power of endurance or sustained action in any direction, and that the utmost care and judgement will be required in his physical and mental training to improve his stamina and develop his faculties to their full extent’. Fortified by the opinion of a Doctor Combe to the effect that Bertie needed ‘a dry bracing air . . . to give tone to the nervous system and also to the nutritive functions’, Stockmar urged ‘well regulated exercise with an appropriate regimen’, while ‘taking care not to go so far at any time as to weaken by fatigue, nor to stop short too soon, so as not to admit the attainment of any increase of strength. In this respect Harm may result equally from pushing mental stimulus too far and from applying it too sparingly or in a wrong direction . . .’

  Stockmar’s principal concern, however, was ‘the judicious moral management of the Prince’.

  . . . it follows that every irregularity of mental action, every excitement of temper or impatience, every minute of fretting or repressed feeling, every attempt to gratify curiosity or effect a purpose, and even every exhibition of right and amiable feeling too strongly excited, all tend to act more or less injuriously on a brain already so susceptible . . .

  The one thing needful above all others with the Prince of Wales at present is as far as possible to promote the uniform, equable, and sustained action of his feelings, affections, moral sentiments and intellectual processes. To do this requires a very favourable combination of good sense, kindliness, firmness, readiness and activity of mind, great tact, thorough control of temper and unwearied patience. A real interest in the trust must also be felt . . .

  The search for a suitable tutor to this complex and affectionate, if temperamental, child was conducted with immense seriousness by Stockmar and the parents. In a refreshingly candid memorandum by Stockmar on July 28th 1846 he denounced ‘Utopian’ plans of arduous study drawn up on the mistaken assumption that ‘the Prince is to be a paragon – a youth of universal genius, in whom the highest moral activity and the greatest powers of application will be combined, with the best endowment of every physical, moral and intellectual quality’. It was already clear that any such expectations were unlikely of fulfilment, and Stockmar not only cautioned flexibility but also made the significant point that national and social circumstances would change so considerably before he ascended the throne that an upbringing based on the contemporary status quo could easily create prejudices and anomalies which, in the words of Lord Mahon, would be ‘at variance with the reason and moral perception of enlightened men’. In one of his most deeply interesting analyses of the contemporary social scene, Stockmar continued:

  The extraordinary wealth and luxury of a comparative small proportion of the inhabitants of the British Isles, and the appalling poverty and wretchedness of many among the labouring classes, is another ‘anomaly’ which is at variance with our natural sentiments of humanity and justice, and finds its chief precedents in the history of ancient Rome, when she was tottering to her fall. Can this condition of things permanently endure in Great Britain?

  Stockmar accordingly urged that the Prince’s education should ‘prepare him for approaching events’ rather than educate him to resist change, while avoiding the other extreme of making him ‘a demagogue or a moral enthusiast, but a man of calm, profound, comprehensive understanding, imbued with a deep conviction of the indispensable necessity of practical morality to the welfare of both Sovereign and People.

  ‘The proper duty of the Sovereigns of this Country is not to take the lead in change, but to act as a balance wheel on the movement of the social body . . .’ Thus, the Prince must be trained to have ‘freedom of thought, and a firm reliance on the inherent power of sound principles – political, moral, and religious, to sustain themselves and produce practical good, when left in possession of a fair field of development’. The Prince should steer a careful course between religious bigotry and ‘conventional hypocrisy’, and all should beware of ‘the sexual passion (which) is very often the source of innumerable evils to young men’ until ‘the proper time of life’, and emphasised his view that the Prince’s tutor should not be a clergyman, a point to which he often returned. Eventually the Queen and Prince Albert prepared a joint Memorandum on January 3rd 1847 which opened with the words ‘It is necessary to lay down a positive plan for the future management of the Children’s education’, and which was devoted to the different problems and requirements of the four stages of their childhood ‘from the first month after their appearance in this world’ until the final one which would require ‘a person to introduce him into life & the world’.

  This is not a solemn nor at all an unsympathetic or unkind document. The couple warmly agreed that for the first six years of life ‘The chief objects here are their physical development, the actual rearing up, the training to obedience. They are too little for real instruction, but they are taught their language & the two principal foreign languages, French & German, as well to speak as to read . . . Children at this age have the greatest facility in acquiring languages’. It should not be thought that Vicky was an easy or docile child. After her marriage she received this letter from her mother: ‘A more insubordinate and unequal-tempered child and girl I think I never saw! The trouble you gave us all was indeed very great. Comparatively speaking, we have none whatever with the others. You and Bertie (in very different ways) were indeed great difficulties’.57

  The actual programme for the Prince of Wales can be seen from one entry by his governess, Miss Hildyard, for a day in January 1848:

  From 20 minutes after 8 until 9 – Arithmetic, Dictation, Writing

  ¼ p
ast 11 to ¼ past 12 – French

  1 to 5 minutes before 2 – German

  4 to 5 – Reading, Geography, Writing on the Slate

  5 to 6 – Dancing

  On other days Chronology & History read aloud Poetry

  After 6 read some story book

  Play with the map of History or with counters.

  The search for the Tutor was eventually resolved by the appointment of Henry Birch, a Cambridge graduate and Eton tutor, but only after much anguish and difficulty.

  Birch was recommended by Sir James Clark, to whom he wrote with a certain smugness on May 30th 1848 that ‘I boast of no other place of Education but Eton, where I came from home at about 10 years of age and rose to be Captain of the School’, but both Prince Albert and Stockmar were concerned – and rightly, as it transpired – by Birch’s evident ecclesiastical ambitions. Albert was particularly worried that he might have been ‘contaminated’ by the teachings of Pusey, and received assurances from the Bishops of Ely and Chester, to whom he referred the point. Peel, after discreet enquiries, endorsed Clark’s recommendation, and Stockmar, after interviewing Birch, was satisfied, and the latter added that no false economies should be made in salaries or holidays for the staff attending the Royal children, and particularly the Prince of Wales.