The Queen's Houses

by Alan Titchmarsh

The Queen attends a garden party at Balmoral, thrown to celebrate her Golden Jubilee, 2002

  Above left: The young Princess Elizabeth with her pet dog, London, 1936

  Above right: The young Princesses riding with their father George VI, 1938

  FOR MORE THAN a century, in the upper echelons of society in Britain, the way families brought up their children remained more or less the same. As the present Queen’s governess, Marion Crawford wrote, the nursery was ‘a world in miniature, a state within a state’. And the ‘Head of State was a nurse called nanny’, who had the entire upbringing and training of her charges until, for the boys, at aged eight they were torn from her to be sent away to boarding school. Nanny was ‘always there, a shoulder to weep on, a bosom to fall asleep on’. Most homesick little boys in their first weeks at boarding school, ‘wept not for their mummys, but for their nanny … she was their childhood’. Until after The Queen’s generation, girls were not usually given a formal education but tutored at home, with female accomplishments like dancing and music as important extra-curricular activities.

  Until the public schools began to dominate the education of the aristocracy and minor royalty in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, most boys had also been taught at home, or had been sent as pages to other great houses or to the court, where they would be trained for knighthood. This strengthened bonds of kinship, if their training was with a family that formed part of a web of interrelated kin (the future Henry VIII was brought up in the household of his uncle, The Earl of Pembroke); it also helped secure upward mobility if with a family of higher status, or reeducate if children came from a dependent but rebellious kingdom, as happened with the children of Irish chieftains in the sixteenth century. By the fifteenth century, knighthood had become associated with a code of conduct bound up with the concept of chivalry. This required a fledgling knight to learn the arts of war, particularly on horseback, and to hone his behaviour so that it aligned with the current understanding of the virtues of honour (virtuous conduct combined with personal integrity) and courtesy (which meant a blend of refined good manners, decorum in all things and the art of conversation backed by intellectual refinement), gaining an ‘effortless superiority’ that survived as the goal of all aristocrats well into the twentieth century.

  ‘THOUGH SHE WAS ONLY SIX YEARS OLD [SHE SPOKE]WITH AS MUCH ASSURANCE AS A WOMAN OVER FORTY’

  King Henry VIII’s Secretary of State

  To acquire the necessary intellectual apparatus, the curriculum of a royal or aristocratic child was based on arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music as well as French, the study of Greek and Latin texts, and contemporary poetry and prose. Physical development encompassed fencing, riding, hunting, hawking and dancing.

  Queen Elizabeth I as a child

  We know that the future Queen Elizabeth I was first tutored by Kate Champernowne who accustomed her to the ‘elaborate code of politeness and subservience to her elders’ then regarded as important attributes. Her education was rigorously supervised and she became a precocious child. In 1539 King Henry VIII’s Secretary of State said after an encounter with her, ‘though she was only six years old [she spoke] with as much assurance as a woman over forty’. She was taught by a stellar array of Cambridge scholars, including Roger Ascham, one of the best Greek scholars of his day, who would come to the royal palace at Hatfield. Ascham said of her intellectual attainments, ‘Yea, I believe, that beside her perfect readiness in Latin, Italian, French and Spanish, she readeth here now at Windsor more Greek every day than some prebendary of this church doth read Latin in a whole week.’ Elizabeth was also tutored in sewing, embroidery, music, archery, riding and hunting.

  The surviving children of James VI of Scotland, who would succeed Elizabeth I as James I of England in 1603, were all farmed out to guardians to be brought up, as was the custom in Scotland. His eldest son Prince Henry was given to The Earl of Mar – The Earl’s father and grandfather had served as Scottish royal guardians before him. Henry’s schooling took place with a number of aristocratic youths of the same age who together formed a sort of royal academy before he died of typhoid in 1612 at the age of 18. In due course his younger brother would succeed as Charles I. Charles had initially been given to the Seton family in Scotland, only making the journey to England a year after his father had succeeded, when he was four. He was then placed with Sir Robert Carey, a cousin of Elizabeth I who had first told James the news of Elizabeth’s death and that he was now King of England. Carey’s wife Elizabeth taught the weak, tiny (he grew eventually to be only 5 feet 4 inches), late-developing Charles to walk and talk at the age of three. Charles must have thought highly of his guardians – he made Carey 1st Earl of Monmouth on the day after his coronation in 1626. His son, Charles II, was also given over to a governess and then to a governor at the age of eight, when the Dean of Christ Church became his tutor.

  Cliveden, childhood home of several British monarchs, c1750

  With the coming of George I in 1714, the custom of the Hanoverian court, similar to the Scottish system, continued. A royal child was removed from his parents at birth and brought up in a separate establishment ruled by nurses and governesses. When it was time to begin formal schooling this role was entrusted to a tutor, almost always a cleric, under the supervision of a governor, a nobleman or distinguished soldier, who now took over The Prince’s household. Prince Frederick, the eldest son of The Prince of Wales (later George II) was sent back to Hanover at the age of seven to be brought up as a German Prince. His two sons, including the future George III, were, in a break with tradition, brought up in England, at Cliveden House in Buckinghamshire and Norfolk House in London. At Cliveden they played early forms of cricket and baseball and were given their own plots in the garden to tend, but were also subjected to a rigorous timetable, six days a week, of academic work, which was leavened by classes in dancing, fencing, music and drama. Despite the best efforts of their tutors, one of their governors complained, ‘they had but little weight and influence. The mother and the nursery always prevailed.’ Nonetheless, despite a changing roster of governors and tutors, George III grew up to be the best schooled of the Hanoverians, leaving a considerable legacy to posterity. He helped found the Royal Academy, built the observatory at Kew and amassed a collection of over 1000 pieces of scientific apparatus now in the Science Museum in London and a vast collection of books, now the King’s Library at the British Library.

  Kensington Palace in 1900

  George IV, born in 1762, as a baby was put on display ‘for the gratification of the public’ for two hours every afternoon and gave his first, much rehearsed, speech aged three. He was placed in the care of the royal governess who was described as ‘a woman of remarkable sense’ and, as was the custom, established with a complement of staff, including both wet and dry nurses and two ‘rockers of the cradle’. When it was time for his more formal education he and his closest brother were subjected to a tough academic timetable, based at the Dutch House at Kew, which sanctioned being beaten for infringements. One of his sisters reported having seen the two brothers ‘held by the tutors to be flogged like dogs with a long whip’. Simplicity, punctuality, regularity, truthfulness and hard work were their precepts. Apart from a wide range of subjects George was also taught the cello, sang, drew, boxed and fenced, sowed and harvested from his own plot of land – to introduce him to the elements of agriculture, and baked his own bread.

  George’s brother William IV suffered from the strained relations between his father and his eldest brother – a Hanoverian trait – and he was sent to join the Royal Navy at the age of 13. Queen Victoria, born in 1819, was initially not considered to be William’s probable heir but once it seemed there would be no other royal princeling to supplant her she and her mother (her father, The Duke of Kent, having died unexpectedly before she was a year old) were granted an apartment at Kensington Palace. There, she was brought up under strict supervision by her mother and by her mother’s comptroller, Sir John Conroy.
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br />   Before she was four her formal education began, with her tutor coming daily to Kensington Palace – amongst many other services eradicating her German accent – and by the age of ten she was studying for five hours a day, six days a week. Alongside her academic curriculum she also studied music, learning the piano and singing, painting, drawing and dancing, all taught by highly accomplished practitioners.

  Queen Victoria’s pet dog Jeannie

  After 1830, when Victoria was 11, Conroy instituted what became known as the ‘Kensington System’, which controlled the way she was brought up and which was intended to prepare her, as heir presumptive, for the throne, well away from the contamination and dubious morals of her Uncle William’s court and totally dependent on her mother and Conroy. She was even prevented from going to William’s coronation. The plan was if William IV died before she was 18 her mother would be created regent and Conroy as her private secretary would be made a peer. Isolating her from other children – even her two cousins were kept away – she was constantly in adult company, whether walking in Kensington Palace or even in bed, which she shared with her mother until she was 18. She made do with a fantasy world of dolls and animals, being given her first pet, a King Charles spaniel called Dash, when she was 14 (it was this beloved pet she came back from her coronation to bathe before receiving her courtiers at a formal dinner later that evening). She was even taken on semi-royal ‘progresses’ around the country, so she could be exposed to her future subjects, much to the annoyance of William IV who eventually forbade them.

  Her greatest influence was a strict Hanoverian lady, Baroness Louise Lehzen, who had been appointed her governess when she was five. A despiser of weakness, she instilled in the young Victoria a powerful streak of independence, a firm sense of her position and a strong work ethic, which was to stand her in good stead when she became Queen at the age of 18. The story goes that she had no idea she was the heir presumptive until a genealogical table of the royal succession was slipped into one of her history books: ‘I see I am nearer the throne than I thought … I cried much on learning it.’

  Victoria’s children with Prince Albert suffered from several disadvantages. The first was that, being fatherless herself, she saw Albert as a surrogate father to her, and so she was jealous of the attention he gave the children. She worshipped, even idolized, him and after his death her dependence had grown to such proportions she was quite simply devastated. She poured out her grief; she ‘had leant on him for all and everything – without whom I did nothing, moved not a finger, arranged not a print or photograph, didn’t put on a gown or bonnet if he didn’t approve it’. When he was away she felt ‘quite paralysed’. During the years their children were growing up that dependence demanded his exclusive attention, and their children distracted him.

  A childhood portrait of Bertie, later Edward VII

  The second disadvantage was her dislike of pregnancy and the post-natal depression that seemed to be the inevitable consequence of giving birth. Finding herself pregnant again four months after the birth of her first child, Albert reported, ‘she was not very happy about it’. In 1841, after the birth of her second child, Albert Edward, known as Bertie, she complained to her Uncle Leopold that she had been ‘suffering so much from lowness that it made me quite miserable’. Her depression did not lift until a year after Bertie’s birth.

  The third disadvantage suffered by her children was simply that she didn’t much like babies and found it hard to bond with them, a situation not helped by her post-natal depression. She described the infant Bertie as ‘too frightful’ and babies in general as ‘mere little plants’ with a ‘terrible frog-like action’. She was also appalled by the notion of breast-feeding and all the children were given to wet-nurses. ‘We princesses have other duties to perform,’ she admonished her eldest daughter Victoria when she was breast-feeding the future Kaiser Wilhelm II. When she heard that Princess Alice was also breast-feeding, she delighted in telling her she had named one of her dairy cows ‘Princess Alice’.

  The Swiss Cottage at Osborne House

  Despite these early disadvantages, her nine children had in many ways what would appear an idyllic childhood at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight where Victoria would spend up to five months a year. There a Swiss chalet was built for them (it has been recently restored) near their own private beach, with child-sized furniture, a working kitchen and wheelbarrows painted with their initials together with sets of gardening tools. They helped build it and were paid wages for doing so. The girls learnt to cook – serving biscuits and cake to their parents – and all the children cultivated their own plots, arranged in rows by age, and sold vegetables to their father at market prices. Nearby a miniature brick fort was built, sunk behind its own redoubt and defended by a working drawbridge and a number of cannon. However, for Albert, the Swiss cottage was meant to instil a certain competitiveness, an understanding of market forces and an introduction to hard work. The cottage was built when Bertie was 12 and typically, always the rebel, he used it as a place to have an illicit smoke, safe from constant scrutiny.

  A postcard of the garden tools used by royal children at the Swiss Cottage at Osborne House

  The idyll was somewhat diluted, particularly for Bertie, when the children reached the age of seven and the female-dominated nursery gave way to the schoolroom, tutors and a strict academic timetable. Albert, with his strong work ethic and highly ordered ways, had been a model pupil at home, at the University of Bonn and on the Grand Tour. He absorbed information like a sponge and preferred work to socializing. Bertie, by contrast, had none of his father’s traits and under the harsh regimen, alone with his tutor apart from 15 minutes with his parents at 9 a.m. and again before bed, he rebelled. He was rude and disobedient, and was whipped for his pains. His schooling continued during the annual round of house visits between Buckingham Palace, Osborne, Balmoral and Windsor, and he worked from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. seven days a week. Tellingly, after accompanying his parents and elder sister on a state visit to Paris in 1855 aged 13, he asked if he could stay on. The Empress Eugenie replied, ‘Your parents can’t do without you.’ Bertie’s response was: ‘Can’t do without us! Don’t fancy that, for there are six more of us at home, and they don’t want us.’ Later he was to say, ‘I had no boyhood.’

  Bertie (later Edward VII) as a schoolboy

  It is no wonder Bertie eschewed the harsh, over-pressured educational methods of his youth when it came to his own children. Despite the efforts of his mother – ‘Bertie should understand what a strong right I have to interfere in the management of the child or children’ – the children of the future King Edward VII experienced a remarkable degree of freedom and informality. Bertie was 23 and Alexandra 20 when the first of their five surviving children was born. Albert Victor (known as Eddy) and George (or Georgy, later George V) were born a year apart in 1864–5 and grew up together. The three girls, Louise, Victoria and Maud (known as Toots, Gawks and Snipey), followed at yearly intervals after a short break. Bertie was a much more indulgent and affectionate father than his own cold and distant father and fostered a close-knit and happy, high-spirited family circle, devoted to each other and with a penchant for practical jokes. Throughout Alexandra’s life the children addressed her as ‘Motherdear’, even if her uncritical adoration could be at times suffocating.

  The family’s London base was at Marlborough House but a great deal of time was spent at Sandringham House in Norfolk and from those early years George V retained a life-long affection for Sandringham and the rhythms and ways of the countryside. From 1871, when George was six, a tutor was appointed to school the boys. He was to remain with them for the next 14 years. Three years later, when the boys were nine and ten, he wrote to their grandmother:

  ‘They are living a very regular and quiet life in the country at Sandringham, and keeping early hours, both as to rising in the morning and retiring to rest at night; they ride on their ponies an hour each alternate morning, and take a walk the other three
days in the week; in the afternoon they take exercise on foot; whilst as regards their studies, writing, reading and arithmetic are all progressing favourably …’

  Top: Edward VII, Princess Alexandra and young Prince Albert Victor

  Above: Edward VII (far right) Queen Alexandra (third from left) and their five children in 1889. From left, Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence; Maud, future Queen of Norway; Louise, The Princess Royal, future Duchess of Fife. In front, George, Duke of York, the future King George V and Princess Victoria

  The two boys were diametrically opposed. Eddy’s mind, by contrast to the lively Georgy, was described as being in ‘an abnormally dormant condition’. Georgy was always destined for the Royal Navy but after a brief flirtation with Wellington College it was decided that Eddy should accompany him as he found life without his brother’s company difficult. Both boys began at Dartmouth when Eddy was 12 and Georgy 11. They slung their hammocks in HMS Britannia, an old wooden training ship moored in the River Dart. The idea was they should share the privations of the other cadets, except that they slept behind a bulkhead instead of in serried rows, had their own footman and were accompanied by their tutor who dined with the captain. Like most of the royal children through the recent generations, they were brought up without prejudice as to class, colour or race. Princess Alexandra wrote to their tutor that they should learn obedience, and be ‘civil to everybody, high and low, and not get grand now they are by themselves, and please take particular care they are not toadied by … any of those around them’. It was during his time in the navy that Prince George learnt his lifelong habits of regularity, punctuality and smartness of dress, as well as his brusque quarterdeck manner that became such a feature of his personality.