Childhood at Court, 1819-1914 (13 page)

P
rincess Beatrice, the baby of Queen Victoria’s family, remained ‘Baby’ in name for many years to come. She was christened Beatrice Mary Victoria Feodore in the chapel at Buckingham Palace on 16 June, with Vicky and Fritz among the godparents. As Vicky had remarked with sadness, she would never have the chance of knowing her youngest sister as well as the others, but once settled in Germany after her marriage she was kept informed in detail on the little girl’s development and activities in the Queen’s letters. One of the first great landmarks was her first birthday, when the Duchess of Kent came to breakfast, and the table was decorated with a giant ‘B’ in flowers, surrounded by candles. Gifts were piled high, among them Vicky’s woolly lamb and a rose set in stones. Beatrice made it obvious that she preferred the lamb.

The differences between the Duchess of Kent and her daughter had long since faded into history. One of Prince Albert’s first missions after marriage was to restore harmony between them, and soon the Queen – if she ever looked back to the old days – would rue how ‘two people’ (Conroy and Lehzen) had ‘wickedly estranged us’. Grandmama indulged the children to her heart’s content. It distressed her, she told the Queen, to hear a child being scolded and cry. ‘Not when you have nine, Mamma!’ was the brisk retort.

For the first four years, Beatrice enjoyed a privileged position. The rules which had kept the others in their place to a greater or lesser extent were relaxed for her. She was allowed to stay up late at night, come down and join her parents for dessert, and say virtually what she liked to her elders. ‘Baby mustn’t have that, it’s not good for Baby,’ the Queen would say at table as her daughter helped herself to food. ‘But she likes it, my dear,’
¹
was the three-year-old’s reply, as she continued to help herself. ‘I was very naughty last night,’ she confessed when she was four. ‘I would not speak to Papa, but it doesn’t signify much.’
²
Another time, she was playing on the floor while the Queen was sitting at her desk writing. The nurse took her out, and in due course the Queen tried to get up from her chair – only to find that the little girl had taken advantage of her intense concentration on the letters by tying her securely by her apron strings. A maid had to be summoned to release her.
³

Thoroughly spoilt, but good-natured and full of charm, nobody ever had the heart to scold her. Her father, created Prince Consort two months after her birth, was ageing beyond his years. Worn out by years of driving himself too hard, tired and careworn, it seemed at times that his youngest daughter was the only person who could bring him solace. He loved to sit her on his knee while he played the piano or organ, help her to sing nursery rhymes, and invite her to his dressing-room in the morning, watching him shave and feeding the little caged bird which he had taught to say ‘
Guten Morgen
’. He read to her, taught her to draw, and strapped her on to Tommy, her first pony. The Queen noticed how the worry left her husband’s face when he watched the little girl playing. As a result, she was showed more leniency and freedom from discipline than the others before her.

Although Beatrice only knew him for the first four years of her life, she never lost her German accent. Significantly, Queen Victoria never had more than a trace of it – noticeable, for instance, when she said ‘tzo’ instead of ‘so’. Meeting Beatrice as a widow when she was in her seventies, the writer J.B. Priestley ‘was astonished to discover what a thick German accent she had’.
⁴

Beatrice was also something of a companion for the over-protected Leopold. Between his bouts of illness he was allowed to ride, join in amateur theatricals, and take part in country walks to hunt for geological specimens for the collection his father had encouraged him to make. Unfortunately, with his daring, strong-willed character, ‘accidents’ occurred, and he would have to rest in bed, a doctor in constant attendance. It was almost impossible to explain to him that his haemophilia prevented him from doing things which other boys could.

Arthur never gave his parents a moment’s trouble. The Duke of Wellington’s godson continued to give promise of wishing to follow a military career. There was often a military flavour to his presents. At Christmas 1855 he was given a replica of a Guards uniform, with bearskin hat and sword, as well as another box of lead soldiers to augment his collection of British army regiments. Once his elder sister was married, he began a collection of soldiers from Prussian regiments, and eagerly read up all he could about their history.

One morning, while he was still quite small, Arthur was taking his small terrier for a run in the grounds. A stable cat attacked the dog and threatened to maul it quite badly. Arthur came to the rescue, but was severely scratched in the process. On carrying the dog back to the house, his governess greeted him with horror. He explained the cause of his scratches briefly: ‘Wounded in the execution of my duty!’
⁵

When they were at Osborne, he was always happiest playing at the Royal Albert Barracks. The Prince Consort could recall having seen his uncle Leopold, now King of the Belgians, direct manoeuvres on the plains outside Brussels. He enjoyed helping Arthur to reconstruct these movements at the barracks with his growing collection of soldiers, and the boy would also enjoy devising his own battles and manoeuvres, lying on his stomach behind one of the miniature cannon standing at the four corners of the fort. Occasionally there were real-life battles of a less welcome sort, if an elder (and bigger) brother wanted to come and take charge, but very rarely. Bertie doubtless felt too grown-up to want to play such games with a brother eight years younger, while Affie was generally too occupied with maritime matters.

Without his beloved fort, at Balmoral Arthur found comfort in his imagination. Ancient struggles between the Picts and Scots could be readily conjured up mentally in the wild Deeside landscape, and in the evenings he could generally be found with his nose in a book, reading about the tribes, their feuds and conflicts. Sometimes he would try to reconstruct ancient skirmishes and battles, or work them out as true to the customs of those days as he could. With his vivid imagination, he was much quieter than the others, much better-behaved and less inclined to talk out of turn or try to attract his parents’ attention. As a result, the Queen indulged him more than the others, especially when it came to small favours like being allowed to stay up late at Balmoral for a ghillies’ dance.

In January 1859 the Prince Consort appointed Captain Elphinstone, an officer who had served in the Crimean war (and lost the sight of one eye during enemy action), as governor to Prince Arthur. That the Queen and Prince Consort had probably realized the excesses of the educational regime devised for Birch and Gibbs to carry out with the Prince of Wales is implicit from an entry in Elphinstone’s diary in October 1858, while his appointment was being discussed. After lunching with the equerries and meeting Prince Arthur for the first time,

The Prince [Consort] then gave his views as regards education. ‘How much may be learnt out of doors, by teaching a boy birds, the different plants, botany, geology, even the formation and variety of pebbles, it fixes the mind early. The time of learning ought to be regulated according to the capacity of the boy on that particular day, at times 3 hours or more would not distress, at other times one hour would be too much. That music had been too much forgotten with the elder Princes, that the Queen did not wish him to be taught too much at first, as he was still a boy, that one defect of private education is the want of emulation which stirs up the boy’s energies; the only way that one can now adopt to make him do a thing would be to say that he ought to do it.’
⁶

Admittedly, as a third son who was most unlikely to succeed to the British throne, or the duchy of Saxe-Coburg Gotha, Arthur’s education was less important than those of his elder brothers. Nevertheless, their father’s references to ‘the capacity of the boy on that particular day’, indicating a degree of licence not afforded to Bertie and Affie, suggest that he had modified his views.

Already Queen Victoria had privately admitted that Arthur was her favourite child. In a memorandum to her husband, also written in October 1858, she had spoken effusively of him: ‘This Child is dear,
dearer
than any of the others put together, thus
after you
he is the
dearest
and
most precious
object to me on Earth.’
⁷

Elphinstone may have found the parents rather more liberal with their third son than Birch and Gibbs had found them with Bertie, but his own duties were just as exacting. A large part of his work was taken up with tasks his daughter Mary (subsequently his biographer) described as ‘the nursery-governess description’, dealing not only with the routine of lessons, but also matters of discipline, health, and even clothing; hardly inspiring work for a military officer of twenty-eight. The Queen’s letters, or rather written orders, to Elphinstone dealt with details such as eight to ten minutes being ‘more than enough time for him to dress in’, people to whom the Prince must write thank-you letters after his birthday, lists of what clothes and underclothes he was to wear, and the names and ages of boys whom he may have to play with in the afternoons.

As a treat Arthur was allowed the company of young Albert Grey, son of the Queen’s secretary. Both apparently enjoyed playing Red Indians up and down the castle slopes. The sons of other members of the household, including young Lord Ely, whose mother was one of the Queen’s ladies, were also allowed to join in his games.

Like the other tutors, Elphinstone recommended meeting boys at Eton – and on their own territory: ‘mixing with boys of all kinds would “rub off” little eccentricities and softness of character which a home education must invariably produce. At the castle . . . other boys will give way to him and show him an amount of deference which must be injurious. This would not occur at Eton, where he meets boys on their own ground and where
he
is the stranger.’
⁸
This suggestion was apparently ignored.

The Prince Consort had a deep-seated opposition to public schools, which he regarded as ‘barbarous, degrading and seminaries of vice’. In particular he deplored the idleness of cricket matches, in which an Etonian in the out-field could spend almost three hours doing nothing more strenuous than throwing the ball back if it came in his direction, or languidly sucking a blade of grass. When a plan was mooted to found a public school in honour of the Duke of Wellington, his first concern was that it ‘should in
no way
become an Eton or Harrow.’
⁹

Bertie was still studying under Gibbs, but his field of experience had been broadened somewhat. Gibbs had recommended a loosening of controls, such as travel, at home and abroad, which ‘would remedy in some degree the disadvantages he labours from under a want of companions’.
¹⁰
On his fifteenth birthday, the Prince was allowed to choose his own food, his own ties, hats and similar trifles, but without any fixed allowance to pay for them. For all personal expenditure he remained dependent upon his parents.

That same autumn, 1856, he was allowed to go on a walking tour in Dorset, and the following year, with four boys of his own age hand-picked by the headmaster of Eton, and three tutors, he went on a walking tour of the Lake District. One of the boys, a year his senior, was William Henry Gladstone, elder son of the then Chancellor of the Exchequer and future Prime Minister.

It proved successful, and in July the Prince was sent on a study tour to Königswinter, near Bonn. The Prince Consort requested him to ‘write to us a little more at length and give us your impressions of things, and not the mere bare facts’. Excursions were made into Switzerland and France, and the Prince was accompanied by his father’s private secretary, General Charles Grey, Gibbs, and his father’s equerry, Colonel Henry Ponsonby, who later became the Queen’s private secretary after Grey’s death. On the first evening after his arrival at Königswinter the Prince of Wales was treated to an excellent dinner, and presumably after a few glasses of wine, kissed a girl, and was scolded. William Gladstone described the incident in a letter to his mother, who told her husband. In reply, the latter called it ‘this little squalid debauch’, adding that it ‘makes one feel what we should, I think, have suspected, viz. – that the Prince of Wales has not been educated up to his position. This sort of unworthy little indulgence is his compensation.’
¹¹

On his return home the Prince of Wales was given an annual allowance of £100, and granted permission to choose his own clothes, for which his parents would continue to pay. The Queen told him that neither she nor his father wanted ‘to control your own tastes and fancies, which, on the contrary, we wish you to indulge and develop, but we do
expect
that you will never wear anything
extravagant
or
slang
, not because we don’t like it, but because it 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.’
¹²

Although Bertie still gave cause for disappointment, Affie’s excellent progress was some compensation. As a boy he was never bored, and could always be relied on to find something to interest him. It might be taking the dogs for a walk, or teaching them tricks; working at the carpenter’s bench in the Swiss Cottage at Osborne, making a primitive musical box which played
Rule Britannia
, albeit after a fashion; or secretly learning to play the violin, as a surprise for his parents. Another lifelong passion had begun when he and Bertie were presented with a special advance sheet of the 6d lilac postage stamp on a visit in April 1856 to the official printers De La Rue in London. This was the start of the royal philatelic collection, destined to become the finest in the world – thanks largely to the boy’s fascination with the infant hobby of philately.