Childhood at Court, 1819-1914 (8 page)

The royal children of the 1840s were comparatively lucky. Regular references in the Queen’s journal to her small sons and daughters quarrelling, fighting, and pulling each others’ hair, are ample testimony to the fact that they had their full share of childish mischief which was checked as appropriate, if never entirely eliminated.

All of them were devoted to Lady Lyttelton, as a governess, with her forward-thinking attitude to punishment. As a small girl, Vicky – as the Princess Royal became, ‘Pussy’ evidently being thought too winsome and undignified for a growing child – started telling ‘deliberate untruths’ which was ‘a very serious offence indeed’. She told her French governess Mlle Charrier that ‘Laddle’ had given her permission to wear her pink bonnet for an outing. When found out, she was ‘imprisoned with tied hands and very seriously admonished and I trust was aware of her fault in the right way’.
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Vicky did not seem unduly concerned when her solitary confinement ended, and her hands had not been tightly tied, but the punishment was enough to impress on her the error of her ways.

Every night Lady Lyttelton wrote a detailed report on the children, their diet, general health and mental progress. It was sent early next morning to the Queen, who read it at once. Much of it was taken up with details about the children’s health. True to the fashion of the day, Dr Clark’s recommendation was always the same, prompted by the local apothecary – ‘a dose’. Lady Lyttelton ordered castor oil for the medicine cupboard every week, and packets of Gray’s powder for soothing upset stomachs.

Diet was the subject of great attention. There was a fallacy that meat was dangerous and overheated the blood. If one of the children became too unruly, she cut out red meat for a day ‘to cool them down’. Bertie and Alice were always hungry and rarely satisfied with first helpings, while Vicky’s appetite was fitful. Easily distracted or upset, if unwell as a child she lost interest in food altogether. Dr Clark was blamed in the reports for interfering too much, and altering the diet so much that the children when small never got used to any taste in particular. Chicken broth, or mutton broth with a little meat, was given according to his whims, rather than the children’s digestion.

Later they progressed to boiled beef and carrots, followed by plain rice or semolina pudding. Although this was typical Victorian child fare, some of the nursery maids were astonished at how simply the royal children ate. They declared that their families at home had far better, and they would never have believed their diet if they had not seen it at first hand for themselves. Or had they expected more for the great-nephews and great-nieces of that legendary glutton King George IV?

Queen Victoria and Prince Albert felt it was their duty to influence their children’s religious beliefs. They had no patience with the fashionable theory which let children decide for themselves when they grew up. It was their responsibility, they considered, to present their opinions in a careful and straightforward way which would neither puzzle nor alarm young minds. According to the Queen’s memorandum on the religious upbringing of her eldest daughter – to be followed by all of them in turn,

It is quite certain she should have a great reverence for God and for religion but that she should have the feeling of devotion and love which our heavenly Father encourages His earthly children to have for Him, and not one of fear and trembling, and the thought of death and an after life should not be represented in a forbidding and alarming way, and that she should be made to know as yet no difference of creeds, and not think that she can only pray on her knees and that those who do not kneel are less fervent or devout in their prayers.
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She believed that it was the duty of a mother to give her children their first lesson in religion, which was ‘best given to a child day by day at its mother’s knee’. However, soon after Vicky’s birth, she realized that other duties made this impossible. She regretted with some bitterness that she could not be with her daughter when she said her prayers at bedtime.

Queen Victoria’s religious views were ‘simple and straightforward’. In practice, she was a Low Church Anglican with a leaning towards Presbyterianism. Her favourite preacher was the Scottish Presbyterian divine Dr Macleod, whose sermons she kept by her and often quoted.

Prince Albert had been brought up as a Lutheran, though unlike most Lutherans with tolerance towards all faiths. He brought from Germany the custom of taking Holy Communion only three times a year, at Christmas, Easter and Whitsun. The English habit of kneeling in prayer seemed strange to him, but he taught his children that there was no significance in the posture they adopted, so long as they prayed with sincerity for strength to live according to the principles in which they believed. He allowed his children to kneel with Lady Lyttelton when they said their prayers with her.

Queen Victoria had always been brought up to take for granted the English custom of Sunday being a day not only of rest, but devoid of amusements altogether. Prince Albert changed all that in the family. On the first Sunday after his honeymoon, he had played chess with Stockmar, as usual, and he kept the habit up. Once, with a twinkle in his eye, he gave the Sabbatarian Archdeacon Wilberforce a crisis of conscience by inviting him to take part in a game of chess after he had preached the sermon at Windsor. However, all his efforts to enliven Sunday for the people at large were coldly received. Even though Queen Victoria supported her husband, public opinion would not allow brass bands to play in the London parks, or museums to be opened on Sundays. It savoured too much of foreign influence.

At least it was within his power to make sure his own family enjoyed Sundays. After Morning Service at Windsor, they would relax by playing games in the long corridor at the castle, or skating in winter, skittles on the lawn in summer, or taking the dogs for a walk.

In Novembr 1844 Wilberforce gave the Queen a booklet, Scripture Reading Lessons for Little Children, in which he had produced simplified adaptations of Bible readings to be read to the royal children. In his Preface, he remarked that the pages therein were ‘intended to tell Children about Jesus Christ. To do this it was necessary to give a short account of man’s creation in innocence, and of his fall into sin.’
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Lady Lyttelton was given a fairly free hand in bringing up the children. One great proviso was made; any sign of pride in the children must always be checked at once. The children must never think that because of their exalted birth they were better than others. Haughtiness was dealt with at once, and rudeness to servants was always punished. Good manners and consideration for all were paramount. If the children grumbled about having to wash their faces in cold water, they were reminded that the poor never washed in anything else. Complaints about having no bedroom of their own brought the retort that they were lucky not to live in slums where brothers and sisters shared the tiniest of rooms.

The Princesses were taught to take care of their clothes and keep them tidy. Kid gloves had to be blown into after being taken off, so they would not lose their shape. Bonnet ribbons were neatly rolled so they would be uncreased when next worn. Ribbons from the Queen’s discarded hats were ironed out, and used to tie round the sleeves of her daughters’ dresses. Domestic recycling had its place even in the nineteenth century.

The Queen and Prince Albert were full of ideas for the upbringing of their children, and never lacked advice from others. A few months after their marriage they composed a joint memorandum on the education and development of princes, full of lofty phrases about the ‘moral and intellectual faculties of man’, and strict instructions on hours of work, exercise and relaxation. Stockmar read it and declared gravely that any child subjected to such a regime would surely succumb to brain fever. Though German himself, he appreciated that much of the unpopularity of the education of King George III’s sons had been as a result of their foreign education. These children, he insisted, must be educated in England.

On the other hand, Lord Melbourne maintained that King George IV and the Duke of York had been educated like English boys, by English schoolmasters, and according to the system of English schools. Whatever their faults, he declared, they were quite Englishmen; the others, who went abroad earlier and were schooled at European universities, were more foreign in their manner.

‘Be not over solicitous about education,’ he had advised the Queen (1 December 1841). ‘It may be able to do much, but it does not do so much as is expected from it. It may mould and direct the character, but it rarely alters it.’
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His wise words were not heeded. Thanks to Stockmar’s lofty memoranda, the Prince of Wales was to have an education which should ‘in no wise tend to make him a demagogue, but 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’.
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The unfortunate fact of the matter was that Bertie was a comparatively normal boy. Vicky, a precocious, gifted intellectual, took after her father. Her brother, as the Queen admitted, was her ‘caricature’. Although he quickly outgrew a tendency to stutter, he evidently disliked his lessons, and thus compared unfavourably with his sister. Only the most brilliant of boys could have done otherwise.

Such frustration drove him to outbursts of childish anger. On occasion it needed two people to hold him down in case he did any harm to himself or one of the other children, either with his fists, a knife, or a pair of scissors from the nurse’s workbox.
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As he grew older, the ‘fits’ lasted longer and took more out of him. He would scream, stamp his feet, tear his books, and bite or scratch his sisters, kicking them and pulling their hair. When exhausted, he would lie down pale and panting for hours. Dr Clark assured the parents blandly that there was nothing to be alarmed about, but the less phlegmatic Stockmar warned Prince Albert that he should not leave Bertie alone with the younger children.

Lady Lyttelton was particularly fond of him. She appreciated that, beside his clever sister, he had been cast in the role of ugly duckling, and knew that he needed sympathy as well as understanding. When he was about a year old, she described him looking ‘through his large clear blue eyes with a frequent very sweet smile’. At nearly two years of age, he was ‘just as forward as the majority of children of his age, and no more’. But in August 1845, when he was three months away from his fourth birthday, she reported that he was ‘uncommonly averse to learning and requires much patience from wilful inattention and constant interruptions, getting under the table, upsetting the books and sundry anti-studious practices’.
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Thirteen months later, she noted with sadness that he had only reached the same standard of learning as four-year-old Princess Alice, who was ‘neither studious nor so clever’ as their elder sister.

The Princess Royal, whom she called ‘Princessy’, was ‘all gracefulness and prettiness, very fat and active, running about and talking a great deal’ but ‘
over
sensitive’ and inclined to be temperamental. At eighteen months Prince Alfred showed signs of having ‘a very good manly temper; much more like that of most children than that of the Princess Royal or Prince of Wales’. When he was four and a half, she wrote of his ‘very uncommon abilities; and a mind which will make the task of instructing him most smooth and delightful’.
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Vicky was charmingly precocious. At the age of six, ‘she begins to try one’s depth, and talk blue,’ Lady Lyttelton wrote (29 July 1847). ‘Poor Roger Bacon! so hard upon him to have been thought wicked because he was so clever as to invent gunpowder!’ Mention in lessons of the Caledonian Canal prompted the question – did Her Royal Highness understand the meaning of Caledonian? ‘Oh yes; Caledonia meant formerly Scotland, so it is only a more
elegant
way of saying
Scotch
.’
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A year later, when Bertie was showing Affie a picture book, he explained to the tutor Sarah Hildyard that his younger brother (then not quite four) did not know the story of Samson. Vicky broke in; ‘Oh, you are quite right, dear Bertie – don’t explain that to him. We must never do too much with young minds.’
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At first, the elder children shared the same teachers. Sarah Anne Hildyard, a clergyman’s daughter, known to the children as ‘Tilla’, joined the nursery shortly before Vicky’s fourth birthday. She saw that Vicky, like Bertie, was subject to rages and general insubordination out of sheer boredom. Lessons were therefore made a little more advanced. She devised a simulated schoolroom with a blackboard and maps.

A timetable was introduced for Vicky, starting at 8.20 a.m. with ‘Arithmetic, Dictation, Poetry or Questions in History’, and ending at 6 p.m. with ‘Geography, history or Work Chronology as far as Edward 6th.’ The final class was replaced twice a week by dancing lessons. Scripture was studied three times weekly, usually with the Queen, and reading, writing, French and German each day.
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Miss Hildyard and Vicky read Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
together and, as each volume was published, Macaulay’s
History of England
. The old precept of Princess Victoria of Kent’s young days – that fiction was too frivolous – was disregarded. The ‘improving’ books of Mrs Sarah Trimmer, Maria Edgeworth and Hannah Moore, were banished, and popular novels of the day by Charles Dickens and others were introduced. Vicky had seen some of Shakespeare’s plays with great enjoyment, full of praise for the acting of Macready, and she became a keen student of the printed texts. Miss Hildyard had always been interested in botany, and taught all the children how to recognize wild flowers.

Music was taught by Mrs Anderson, a gifted widow who had formerly been a concert pianist. Vicky made a fair pupil, though she disliked the drudgery of scales and five-finger exercises. Bertie had piano lessons, but never showed any musical talent.