The Heir Apparent (5 page)

The angry notes that Victoria and Albert wrote each other during this quarrel give a glimpse of a turbulent marriage. Albert is sometimes seen as a Hamlet figure, always waiting for a better moment, with “a hidden streak of wax,” but this hardly fits with his behavior over Lehzen.
¹⁷
Bullying his wife at a time when depression made her vulnerable, and removing her closest friend, reveals a cold ruthlessness that some might say amounts to cruelty.

His motives were partly political. Lehzen was the obstacle blocking his plans to reform the court, which was anachronistic, uncomfortable, and wasteful. The responsibilities of the offices of lord chamberlain and lord steward overlapped, so that, for example, the latter found the wood for a fire, while the former lit it. Albert slashed perks at Windsor such as the “Red Room Wine,” a weekly allowance paid to a butler to buy alcohol, and the daily practice of installing fresh candles, which were sold off by servants if they were not used.
¹⁸
Modernizing
the court brought it into line with the age of reform; it was, Albert believed, a necessary process that Victoria could never have achieved while Lehzen remained in control.

When Bertie was ten weeks old, he was christened at Windsor. For the baptism, Victoria dressed in her Garter robes adorned with a large diamond diadem. St. George’s Chapel, with its banners and music, filled her with peaceful feelings; she found it “calming” to reflect that so many of her relations, in fact the entire family of George III—including her father, whom she had never known—were buried in the vault beneath the flagstones upon which she stood. “The Child” behaved well, and his mother offered earnest prayers that he might become a true and virtuous Christian and grow up “like his beloved Father!”
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After Lehzen was sacked, Lady Lyttelton was appointed royal governess. A well-meaning, intelligent woman in her fifties, she was, as Victoria wrote, “a Lady of Rank.” Her role was to supervise the nursery and give occasional lessons.
²⁰
Sarah Lyttelton, or “Lally” as the children called her, worshipped Prince Albert, sentimentalized the royal marriage, and wrote syrupy letters about the “babes.”

In the nursery, Bertie’s companion was his sister Victoria, the Princess Royal, known as Vicky. Barely a year older than Bertie, she was a paragon. At three she spoke French and could already read. At four a governess was engaged, and soon Vicky learned Latin, later reading Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall
and Shakespeare for relaxation.
²¹

Albert doted on Vicky. The relationship between father and daughter was so close that Victoria already felt excluded. The arrival of a younger sibling did not lead, as it often does, to the dethronement of the eldest child. On the contrary, Albert made no attempt to conceal his preference for Vicky. Bertie by comparison seemed backward; few children would not.

It was soon recognized that he was less gifted than his sister. Lady Lyttelton wrote reports on the children for the royal parents. She
judged two-year-old Bertie “just as forward as the generality of the children and no more—but with every
promise
I think as to disposition and intellect.”
²²
At three, “he is not articulate like his sister, but rather babyish in accent.” He “understands a little French,” but “is altogether backward in language, very intelligent and generous, and good-tempered, with a few passions and
stampings
occasionally.”
²³

The stamping and tantrums grew worse. Bertie developed a stammer. At three and a half, he refused to do his lessons, upset his books, and sat under the table.
²⁴
His anxious parents concluded that there could be only one explanation: Bertie was retarded. What they could or would not see was that his naughtiness was attention-seeking behavior typical of a less loved second child. Albert has often been praised for stimulating Vicky’s mind; it has been rightly pointed out that he must equally bear responsibility for the slow development of his son.
²⁵
Victoria was also to blame for ignoring Bertie.

Lady Lyttelton perceived something of this. “Princey,” as she called Bertie, was her favorite. She wrote encouraging reports about his “kindness and nobleness of mind.”
²⁶
But to Bertie she seems to have been little more than an affectionate presence.

Bertie unquestioningly deferred to Vicky’s superiority. When he was four, he was overheard having a heated argument with her as to which of them owned the Scilly Islands. “Princess Royal said they were hers, and the Prince of Wales was equally sure they belonged to him; and another day the Princess was heard telling her brother all the things she would do when she was Queen, and he quite acquiesced in it, and it never seemed to strike either of them that it would be otherwise.”
²⁷
The nursery dynamic shifted with the arrival of a third child: Alice, born on 25 April 1843, eighteen months younger than Bertie. Vicky, as the eldest sibling, protected and mothered Alice, who was the prettiest daughter, neither as clever nor as rebellious as Vicky but more manipulative. But the tightest bond was between Bertie and Alice. “Bertie and Alice are the greatest friends and always playing together,” wrote Victoria when Bertie was three.
²⁸
The pattern of Bertie and Vicky competing for the affections of Alice endured into adulthood. In the nursery, she was Bertie’s devoted slave and loyal friend. Fourteen
months after Alice, on 6 August 1844, a second boy, Alfred (Affie) was born. Because of his physical resemblance to Albert and his cleverness at lessons, he became (briefly) Victoria’s favorite, which did not endear him to Bertie.
^‡

Vicky made Bertie feel inadequate. How could he compete with a precocious six-year-old who could declare, when her governess momentarily forgot the name of some minor poet: “Oh yes, I dare say you did know all about him, only you have forgotten it.
Réfléchissez.
[Think.] Go back to your
youngness,
and you will soon remember.”
²⁹
Little wonder that, at age eight, Bertie was firmly convinced that the monarchy was a matriarchy. “You see,” he explained, “Vicky will be Mama’s successor. Mama is now the Queen, and Vicky will have her crown, and you see Vicky will be Victoria the second.”
³⁰

Even Queen Victoria perceived that Bertie had been “injured” by being with the clever Vicky, who “put him down by a look—or a word—and their natural affection had been … impaired by this state of things.”
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Because Bertie could not possibly do better than Vicky, his reaction was to rebel and refuse to do anything at all.

The education of their children was a matter of great concern to Victoria and Albert. Because Bertie was the eldest prince, his education was especially important. Ever since the Renaissance, Protestant tradition had taught that little princes must be protected from flattery by early training in moral toughness, hard work, and strict duty. (Catholic rulers, by contrast, were said to spoil their heirs from early childhood, hoping by overindulgence to make them immune to temptation.)
³²
Months after Bertie’s birth, Stockmar addressed a memorandum to Victoria and Albert. “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.”
The bad education provided by George III, warned Stockmar, had caused the errors of the Queen’s wicked uncles, whose conduct had “contributed more than any other circumstance to weaken the respect and influence of Royalty in this country.”
³³
The very survival of the monarchy depended upon the education of the Prince of Wales.

The system devised by Stockmar followed the typical German model of princely education in the generation after 1815.
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This was the method that had succeeded so brilliantly with Albert. As was the custom with princes, Bertie was to be educated in seclusion. His days were to be organized like formal schooling and strictly time-tabled.

In Bertie’s case, education was also meant to be a form of treatment. He had special needs. When he was two and a half, an expert was summoned. Dr. Andrew Combe was a leading practitioner of the fashionable quack science of phrenology, the Victorian answer to a child psychiatrist. He calibrated the bumps on Bertie’s head and reported that “the development of the brain was in some respects defective.” When Bertie was four, Dr. Combe reported improvement, but Stockmar still judged him “essentially a nervous and excitable child with little power of endurance or sustained action in any direction.”
³⁵
The therapy prescribed by Stockmar in consequence was regular, systematic exercise of the brain. A detailed timetable was drawn up for Bertie’s lessons under the direction of the governess, Miss Hildyard. From eight a.m. until six p.m., every half hour of the six-year-old prince’s day was time-tabled, parceled into lessons in French, German, geography, reading, and writing on the slate and also dancing, history, and poetry.
³⁶

It soon became apparent that Stockmar’s system was a failure. Bertie’s French teacher expressed “the greatest concern” at his want of progress. When he was six, he was reading the same French book as Alice, who was neither studious nor as clever as Vicky. Lady Lyttelton, who had up till now staunchly defended Bertie’s “quickness and power of learning,” was compelled to report that he was “a very difficult pupil in some respects, besides his being not at all in advance of his age.”
³⁷
By the time Bertie was seven, Lady Lyttelton could no longer control the Prince of Wales.

Bertie’s first language was English, and his early words, as recorded by his governess Lady Lyttelton (“Dear Mama gone! Flag should be taken away!”), were all in English.
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He learned German in the nursery, where at an early age the children “spoke German like their native tongue, even to one another.”
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At three, he had lessons with a German governess, and by the age of five he could read German books.
⁴⁰
His fluency in German interfered with his speaking of English. An actor, George Bartley, was employed to teach him elocution.
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At sixteen, his “foreign mode of pronunciation” was very noticeable.
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Some thought that he never lost the traces of a German accent, rolling his
r
’s in a manner that was unmistakably Teutonic. Others claimed that he spoke English in a beautifully modulated voice—no doubt the legacy of those early elocution lessons.
^§

Bertie was promoted from the nursery to a tutor when he was seven and a half. This was the age when Victorian boys were considered ready to be removed from the care of women and given over to men for their education. Victoria was more than happy to opt out. When he was two and a half she had declared: “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 16 or 17 he may be a real companion to his Father.”
⁴³
From now on, Bertie’s education was directed by Albert.

On the recommendation of Sir James Clark, the royal physician, Albert engaged a tutor named Henry Birch.
⁴⁴
A good-looking thirty-year-old bachelor, he was an Eton master with a string of Cambridge prizes and no experience of teaching small boys. He was installed next door to Bertie’s room at Buckingham Palace, and Albert drew up a syllabus and timetable. The first few weeks were disastrous. Bertie was rude, disobedient, and rebellious. He refused to take his hat off when people bowed. He stayed in bed until late in the morning; he lost his temper whenever he attempted anything difficult. He was excitable
and tyrannical when other little boys came to play, and unkind to his brothers and sisters. “There was at first
the very greatest difficulty
in fixing his attention,” wrote Birch. “He had more than usual difficulty in writing, spelling, calculating and composing sentences, or doing grammatical exercises.”
⁴⁵

Birch thought that Bertie was too young to leave the nursery. Some biographers have suggested that he was dyslexic, but there is little evidence for this. Certainly he found writing difficult, and it is possible that he was mildly dyspraxic. Albert thought Bertie’s handwriting at age seven was “very feeble and unsteady.”
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In Bertie’s teens, his tutors noticed that “his slowness of manipulation makes writing laborious to him.”
⁴⁷
The careful copperplate he inscribed in youth ballooned in careless middle age into a paleographic nightmare, suggesting that the fault lay with his motor skills rather than his unwillingness to learn.
^‖

Victoria kept a disgusted distance from her son. The waspish diarist Charles Greville picked up rumors that “the hereditary and unfailing antipathy of our sovereigns to their Heir Apparent seems … early to be taking root, and the Queen does not much like the child.”
⁴⁸
No one wondered whether the mother’s dislike was cause, as well as consequence, of Bertie’s bad behavior. But then Victoria was herself a patient, undergoing a course of moral improvement under Albert’s supervision. It was as if poor, bad Bertie was a lightning conductor, articulating buried family tensions.

Birch, by now desperate, consulted the royal parents. What a comfort it was, he reflected, to be able to “open one’s mind fully both to the Queen and Prince, on
any
subject connected with the management of their child.”
⁴⁹
He decided to take a stand; the prince’s naughtiness must be met with “severity.”
⁵⁰
Precisely what he meant by the word was not spelled out, but the answer is to be found in the diary of the royal physician, Sir James Clark. He records that in May 1849 the
prince’s “perverseness was such that the father decided on whipping him. The effect was excellent.”
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