Darling Georgie (3 page)

By the age of six, when his formal education began, Prince Edward had grown up to be ever more distant from his mother. He was to become more directly under the influence of his father who thought nothing of beating him if he was ‘noisy’ and of Baron Stockmar. Having given responsibility to Lady Lyttleton for her son’s care in the nursery, Queen Victoria now decided that the time had come for him ‘to be given over
entirely
to the Tutors’ and ‘taken
entirely away
from the women’. Lady Beauvais, a sister-in-law of Lord Melbourne, the Prime Minister, is quoted in the diaries of Charles Greville on January 1848 as having overheard the Queen commenting that ‘[Edward] is a stupid boy’. Greville, clerk of the Privy Council from 1821 to 1859 and very much involved in the day-to-day events of the royal household, elaborated on this gossip by adding ‘that the hereditary and unfailing antipathy of our Sovereign to their Heirs Apparent seems thus early to be taking root, and the Queen does not much like the child’ (Cowles, 1956). Another entry in Greville’s diary, five years later, on 4 April 1853, quotes the eleven-year-old Prince’s governess, Lady Lyttleton, now the Queen’s Lady-of-the-Bedchamber and well placed to know, reporting to Greville that the Queen was ‘severe in her manner, and a strict disciplinarian in the family’. The Queen may have been ‘ecstatic’ when her son was born but her interest in him seemed steadily to be waning.

If Prince Edward felt unloved at home, this was reinforced by his fear of the highly critical Baron Stockmar. By the time Edward was seven, Stockmar advised his parents that Henry Birch, formerly an assistant master at Eton, be appointed as his tutor. Despite his unfortunate name, Mr Birch was a humane and just man. He and his pupil got on well with one another; too well perhaps, because after two years Stockmar persuaded
Prince Albert to replace him with the unsmiling and far more strict Frederick Gibbs, who remained responsible for the Prince’s education for the next eight years. Prince Edward, sad at the loss of the man to whom he had grown close, did not take to his new tutor. Soon after his appointment Gibbs noted in his diaries (Cowles, 1956) that Edward was becoming prone to outbursts of uncontrolled rage and that the Queen had drawn his attention to his habit of spending much of his time staring gloomily at his feet.

The once happy infant was developing into a sad and angry child. His hangdog expression could well have been one of the first signs of a depressive mood that was later to cause him to seek inappropriate compensation, not only in his demands for approval from women but also for approval from his sons. While Stockmar’s aim might well have been the restoration of the morals of the monarchy, he was in fact undermining them.

Frederick Waymouth Gibbs, Prince Edward’s new tutor, was thoroughly approved of by Stockmar, not least because he kept the Baron informed on a daily basis as to the Prince of Wales’s educational progress. Mr Gibbs’s diaries, however, recorded the gradual deterioration of his pupil’s mental state and, when frustrated, his worrying outbursts of anger which he could only take out on his tutor. Gibbs’s hope was that in time the Prince would take to him, but he never did. The over-strict regime advised by Stockmar led to bottled-up rage in the Prince. Had this not been relieved from time to time by his outbursts of temper it would certainly have exacerbated his depression, some of the signs of which – apathy and lack of enthusiasm – were already beginning to become apparent. Mr Gibbs may well have been Prince Edward’s tutor, but the ‘headmaster’ of the school for two (Prince Edward was educated with his younger brother Prince Alfred) was undoubtedly Baron Stockmar.

For the next eight years intense pressure was put upon Prince Edward. There was no let-up from the overwhelmingly dull and intensive teaching regime proposed by the Baron and faithfully carried out by his tutor. Although sympathetically commented upon by the courtiers, Prince Edward’s ordeal was completely ignored by his parents, other than when his father expressed his dissatisfaction at his son’s lack of progress.

Prince Edward was thirteen when he was taken on his first holiday. Accompanying his parents on a state visit to the Court of Napoleon III gave him a glimpse of the glamorous life that he later believed could be found only in France. His nose-to-the-grindstone education in England had prepared him neither for the comeliness of French ladies nor for the grandeur of the French capital. On a drive through the streets of Paris with the Emperor he whispered, in a damning indictment of his father: ‘I should like to be your son.’

By the time Prince Edward was fifteen his mother was bored with his company. In a letter to the Queen of Prussia she admitted that ‘only very occasionally do I find the rather intimate intercourse with them [the elder children] either agreeable or easy’. Her attitude to her son was one of total indifference. When she did refer to him it was often to complain of his poor intellect. One of many who disagreed with the Queen was the Prince’s tutor at Oxford, who found that ‘his powers of application were greatly underrated’ (Lee, 1925–7).

When Prince Edward was seventeen his birthday present from his parents was a memorandum reminding (and also infuriating) him that ‘life is composed of duties’ and ‘that you will have to be taught what to do and what not to do’ (Magus, 1964). As a final insult to his psychological well-being, Mr Gibbs, to whom he had gradually become attached, was summarily dismissed. Because (according to Prince Edward’s parents) of Gibb’s apparent lack of success in furthering their son’s education, he was replaced by the Honourable Robert Bruce, the brother of Lord Elgin, a dour Scot, a strict Presbyterian and a colonel in a Guards regiment. If Prince Edward thought that with the dismissal of his tutor he could at last put his childhood behind him he was mistaken. Colonel Bruce had been ordered ‘to regulate all the Prince’s movements, the distribution and employment of his time, and the occupation and details of his daily life’ (Hibbert, 1976). Despite his parents’ ongoing dislike of almost everything about their son – the Queen complained of ‘his small head, his big Coburg nose, his protuberant Hanoverian eyes, his shortness, his receding hair, his tendency to fat, the effeminate and girlish way he wore his hair’ – others
such as Robert Browning and Edward Lear saw Prince Edward as ‘gentle and refined’, ‘well mannered and nice’. In July 1860 Prince Edward embarked on a state visit to Canada and the United States. Not yet nineteen, he was representing his parents for whom the long sea journey would have been too exhausting. To his great delight and probably surprise, he was received enthusiastically, not only by diplomats but also by crowds of young women who clearly found him attractive. On his return to England, the Queen (as ever giving with one hand and taking away with the other), having thanked him for the success of his tour, told him that the credit for it was due to Colonel (now Major-General) Bruce. Having convinced herself of her son’s unwillingness to ‘settle down’ to further study, the Queen and her Consort decided reluctantly that the time had come for a wife to be chosen for him.

Although willing to discuss this matter, the Prince had other ideas. He had recently met Nellie Clifden, an actress (prostitute), with whom he was having an affair. He would probably have been totally overwhelmed by this encounter, having hitherto had no experience with which to compare it. A selfish concern for one’s own gratification, an essential ingredient of commercial sex, would have been an entirely new concept for him, since, like other members of his family, he had been trained to put the interests of others first, with duty taking precedence over pleasure.

The horror with which the news of the Prince’s sexual dalliance was received was, in the moral climate of Victorian England, understandable, although many in the royal circle might secretly have envied him. The timing was not auspicious. The Prince’s maternal grandmother, the Duchess of Kent, had recently died, and his mother was still in mourning, his father was ill with a fever and his parents were afraid that his untoward behaviour would put off any prospective bride. The fearful Prince Edward was forced to confess first to General Bruce, who had been appointed an intermediary by the palace, then told he must apologize to Prince Albert in writing. His father’s response was that he was prepared to forgive his son, but he made it clear that forgiveness could not restore him to the state of ‘innocence and purity’ which he had ‘lost for ever’. He also warned Prince
Edward that because of his ‘sin’ he should now ‘hide himself from the sight of God’.

A few days after delivering this homily, and in the grip of a worsening fever, Prince Albert insisted on going up to Cambridge where, since the beginning of the year, Prince Edward had been enrolled as a student. Prince Albert’s intention was to discuss his son’s folly further. Father and son walked and talked for hours in the rain. Finally, when Prince Edward had expressed himself sufficiently contrite, Prince Albert returned to London.Within three weeks he was dead. The diagnosis was typhoid fever. His so-called ‘chill’ was misdiagnosed by Sir James Clarke, physician to the Royal Family, who, paranoid and grandiose, refused to allow a second opinion until it was too late. The Queen blamed Prince Edward for his father’s death. In a letter to her married daughter two weeks later she wrote: ‘I can never look at him without a shudder, as you may imagine. – Beloved Papa told him that I could not be told all the disgusting details.’ Queen Victoria was never to forgive her son. This was hardly comforting to an adolescent who had been brought up to believe that his parents had never loved him and who was now accused of ‘killing’ one of them. He might also have wondered why it was a casual sexual liaison with a prostitute that had provoked his father for the first time into taking a personal interest not only in him but in the intimate details of his affair.

King George V’s mother’s family was as democratic as his father’s was autocratic, as open as his father’s was closed. When the renowned Danish beauty, Princess Alexandra, was informed soon after her seventeenth birthday that she was being considered for the role of Prince Edward’s wife, she was thrilled at the idea of becoming an English Princess. She was told that provided the audition with Queen Victoria, her prospective mother-in-law, went well there was no obstacle between her and the throne of England. She met Queen Victoria six months after the death of Prince Albert. It was a difficult time for the monarch who was so affected by her husband’s death that no smiling was permitted in the royal presence. Unable to show off her radiant happiness at being short-listed for the role of Prince Edward’s wife, the most beautiful Princess in Europe felt
herself at a serious disadvantage. Despite the gloomy atmosphere, however, and the natural tensions present, an obviously distressed Queen Victoria expressed conditional satisfaction with what she saw. She decided that she would give her full consent only after further in-house assessment of Princess Alexandra, scheduled to take place at Windsor and at Osborne, her home on the Isle of Wight.

Princess Alexandra survived her ordeal. Although at the time a Danish marriage was not politically expedient, after several weeks the Queen reluctantly professed herself satisfied. Prince Edward not only fell in love with Princess Alexandra but saw in the marriage a way out of the gilded cage of his childhood. He proposed to the Princess immediately and was immediately accepted. Because the bereaved Queen Victoria was unable to face the crowds of well-wishers, the nineteen-year-old Princess Alexandra, who had been looking forward to her new status, was denied both a state procession and a London wedding. The marriage ceremony took place on a cold March day in 1863 in a cold St George’s Chapel, Windsor. The chilly atmosphere at the wedding was to be a foretaste of the marriage itself.

During the ceremony Queen Victoria, dressed in black, sat almost completely hidden from view. Her son’s reaction to her behaviour is not recorded. The 22-year-old Prince Edward had to balance the gloomy send-off against the freedom from his mother for which he had wished for so long. Princess Alexandra’s feelings while she was undergoing the weeks of positive vetting that her mother-in-law had insisted on are not recorded either, but her sense of self-worth can hardly have been enhanced. Had she known her husband better she might have wondered whether the ‘great escape’ from his family, in which she had played a part, would be replaced by a happy family life.

Princess Alexandra readily accepted the responsibilities of marriage. She could hardly have been a more attentive mother or a ‘less attentive’ wife. Despite the machinations with which she was surrounded at Court, she saw no evil in anyone and seemed to have made a conscious decision to ignore her husband’s philandering. Like many other Victorian wives, she
may indeed have regarded her husband’s sexual indiscretions as proof of his virility. After his marriage, having survived the death of his father and the disapproval of his mother over the Nellie Clifden affair, Prince Edward continued to enjoy life amongst the
demi-mondaine
in London, Paris, on the French Riviera and in Germany.

Between 1864 and 1870 Princess Alexandra gave birth to six children. the last of whom died immediately after birth. While her husband dedicated himself to a life which sought to rectify the wrongs of his childhood, the popular Princess was never lonely. Prince Edward was not short of company either, but it was company that existed not only outside his home but outside his marriage. The envy of his peers and his rich friends for his sartorial elegance, for his fabulous parties and his success with women fulfilled his need for admiration. Even his vast gambling debts struck awe in his companions at the card table, the race track and the casino. Larger than life in every sense, Prince Edward’s appetites were gargantuan and his need for sex and food insatiable. In the 1870s he insisted that the custom of leisurely eating and of polite conversation at his table should come to an end. He decreed that at the Marlborough House dinner parties no meal should last for more than one hour. Delayed pleasures did not appeal to him. His appetites had to be gratified immediately. The unseemly haste with which he fulfilled his need both for food and for sex pleased neither the chefs who provided him with lavish gastronomy, nor the women who, with equal attention to detail, attempted to satisfy his (possibly equally short-lived) sexual appetite. In indulging his needs in this peremptory manner, Prince Edward was repeating the pattern of his dysfunctional childhood, when moments of pleasure were few and had to be seized upon before they were spirited away.