The Heir Apparent (6 page)

Albert’s whipping did not cure Bertie’s naughtiness for long. That summer he was spotted by a dancing teacher standing on a chair in the corner of the billiard room as a punishment for writing badly. “I’m in disgrace,” he wailed.
⁵²

Bertie took his lessons all alone. He saw no one except his tutors, apart from fifteen minutes with his parents at nine a.m. and again before bed. Birch found the isolation oppressive, and in his “Private Thoughts,” written for Stockmar’s eyes only (and which Stockmar, of course, promptly passed on to Albert), he complained that being confined day and night at Buckingham Palace was injurious to his own health and spirits.
⁵³
It was worse for his pupil, in whom “symptoms of evil” had once again “assumed an alarming appearance.” Birch decided that obedience must be enforced, however “painful” the task—Bertie must again be whipped.
⁵⁴

Birch was a grumbler. He babbled on about taking religious orders, encouraged by an offer of a fat living. This annoyed Albert, as one of the conditions of Birch’s appointment was that he should be a layman. To make matters worse, Birch was a High Church Puseyite and ostentatiously refused to obey Albert’s orders to attend the Presbyterian kirk while staying at Balmoral. Albert’s sympathy with the Church of Scotland made him unpopular, as it raised suspicion of his German Lutheran links; Birch’s scruples must have looked very much like disloyalty. Albert became convinced that the choice of Birch had been a mistake—he lacked judgment and thought too much of himself and too little of his pupil.

After about a year, though, Bertie began to improve. He kept a diary, which he dictated to Mr. Birch. On the birth of Prince Arthur in May 1850, he reflected: “I have long wished to have another brother, and at last I have got my wish. I mean to try to set a good example to him.” After a summer spent on the Isle of Wight, recommended by the doctors on account of the sea air, he claimed: “At Osborne this time I think that I have learned more than when I was in Scotland, and I hope that I have done better also.” As a reward, his brother Alfred
(Affie), eighteen months younger, was allowed to share a bedroom with him. “I think that Affie likes being with me and I like having him too, because it is a much better match for me than older persons.” At Christmas, Mr. Birch wrote a good report for Papa, which “pleased him very much,” and gave Bertie a history of Greece for good behavior. “He promised me a prize a long time ago if I was good up to Christmas.” Bertie was allowed to start Latin. Mr. Birch taught him some useful phrases:
“sum bonus puer, non ero malus puer, amo magistrum”
(I am a good boy, I will not be a bad boy, I love my tutor).
⁵⁵

These virtuous sentiments were no doubt dictated by Birch, not Bertie, but Birch believed that he had found the key to Bertie’s heart, and in November 1850 he implored Stockmar to let him stay.
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It was too late. By now, Prince Albert had lost faith in Birch. He called in the phrenologist George Combe.
^a
The brain of the Prince of Wales, reported Combe, was feeble and abnormal. The anterior lobe, devoted to intellect, was deficient in size, while the organs of “combativeness, destructiveness and self-esteem” were overdeveloped. This made him highly excitable and “liable to vehement fits of passion, opposition, self-will and obstinacy,” which were not acts of “voluntary disobedience” but the result of the physiology of the brain. The treatment was not punishment but a “soothing system” of kindness, avoiding all irritation as every fit of anger made the brain more feeble.
⁵⁷

“I wonder whence that Anglo-Saxon brain of his has come,” mused Albert. “It must have descended from the Stuarts, for the family have been purely German since their day.” Combe, however, was of the opinion that Bertie had inherited the brain of George III—and by implication his madness. “It will be vain to treat the Prince as a normal child,” he wrote.
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This sent a shiver down Albert’s spine. The Prince of Wales, he minuted, was not an ordinary boy but “a patient, who ought to be treated physiologically on principles arising out of a thorough knowledge of the faculties of the human mind.”
⁵⁹
By punishing him and speaking harshly to him, Mr. Birch was exacerbating his condition.
Combe then inspected Birch’s head and found the cerebral development to be inadequate. There was no doubt about it; Birch must go.

Unfortunately, Albert failed to realize that by now Birch was giving his son precisely what he craved—affection—and Bertie was thriving on it.

The Times
worried that Albert was tinkering with the religious education of the Prince of Wales. Little did they know. By today’s standards at least, Albert’s interference was truly damaging. The public could on no account suspect that the heir to the throne was abnormal, so Albert, persuaded by Combe, arranged for surveillance of Bertie’s schoolroom by phrenological spies. He appointed a librarian named Dr. Becker, who also acted as Bertie’s German tutor. Becker was sent under an assumed name to Edinburgh, where he trained undercover in phrenology with Combe.
⁶⁰

That summer, the nine-year-old Bertie at last discovered that he was heir to the throne, after examining a genealogical table in his room. Becker reported that the prince’s self-esteem had swollen, his intellectual organs had shrunk, and his combativeness had become un-controllable.
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With Birch, however, Bertie continued to be good. It was 1851, the summer of the Great Exhibition, and Bertie visited almost daily with Birch, writing notes on the exhibits. When Affie fell on his head running downstairs, Bertie noted primly in his diary: “He is so disobedient and heedless that I should not be surprised if he kills himself one of these days.” On Christmas Eve at Windsor, Albert led Bertie into a room where, on a table, stood a tree surrounded by presents. Bertie oozed virtue from every pore. “Mr. Birch tells me that I am quite an altered boy in all of my dealing with him and this makes me happy.”
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Albert must have read this, but to no avail; he was determined to sack the tutor. On 7 January 1852, Bertie wrote sadly in his private diary in his spiky handwriting: “A very unhappy day because Papa had told me that Mr. Birch must soon go away.” Next day, “I was still very unhappy. Mr. Birch was so very kind as to console me and give me good advice which made me a little happier.” On 20 January: “The last evening and day that I passed with dear Mr. Birch.”
⁶³

Albert’s brutal dismissal of Birch echoes his sacking of Victoria’s governess Lehzen ten years before. In both cases he convinced himself that a devoted servant and confidant was a malign influence who must be removed in the interest of the “patient,” his wife or son. He shut his eyes to the unhappiness this caused. He believed that both Victoria and Bertie had to be treated on moral and scientific principles for their own good. It was as if the intimacy of his wife or his son with anyone but himself represented a threat to his control over them.

Birch left a verdict on his pupil. Progress in writing and spelling was slow, he conceded, but few English boys knew so much French and German. As for Bertie’s character, Birch reported: “He has a very keen perception of right and wrong, a very good memory, very singular powers of observation, and for the last year and a half I saw
numerous
traits of a very amiable and affectionate disposition.” Bertie’s problems, thought Birch, were due to lack of contact with boys of his own age, and “from himself being the centre round which everything seems to move.… He has no standard by which to measure his own powers.” The tutor’s prognosis was optimistic: “There is every reason to hope that the Prince of Wales will eventually turn out a
good
, and
in my humble opinion
a
great man
.”
^b
64

Bertie’s new tutor was named Frederick Gibbs. He came on the recommendation of Sir James Stephen, the professor of modern history at Cambridge, where Albert was chancellor. Gibbs was a barrister and a fellow of Trinity College, and Stephen tried to impress Albert by describing him as a typical member of the middle class; this was hardly true, as Gibbs had been brought up by Stephen.
^c
Dry, humorless, and
lacking in both imagination and experience, he was a strange choice of tutor for the difficult Bertie.

Gibbs started badly. On his first day, he went for a walk with the two morose little boys, Bertie and Affie. “You can’t wonder if we are rather dull today,” Bertie told Gibbs. “We are very sorry Mr. Birch is gone. It is very natural is it not?”
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Acting on instructions from Prince Albert, Gibbs increased Bertie’s schooling to six hourly lesson periods a day, time-tabled from eight a.m. to seven p.m., six days a week. In the intervals between lessons, he was ordered to make the princes do riding, drill, and gymnastics, ensuring that they were tired out by the end of each day. Exactly why Albert decided to reject the “soothing system” of light work recommended by George Combe in favor of a program of intensive study is not clear, but it rapidly undid all the good that Birch had achieved.

Some of the more distressing papers relating to Bertie’s education were destroyed on his instructions when he became king, but Gibbs kept a diary that survived.
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He recorded little about the content of Bertie’s lessons but, worried perhaps that he might be held to account, wrote detailed notes of Bertie’s bad behavior. Day after day, Bertie was rude, had fits of ungovernable temper, and refused to fix his attention on lessons. He fought with Affie and pulled his hair. One day in February 1852, Gibbs wrote:

When Bertie swung a stick and hit Mr. Gibbs in a passion, Albert advised him to box the prince’s ears or rap his knuckles sharply. Gibbs
shut Bertie in his room. “His Father also spoke to him, and it had a good effect.”

These methods won the confidence of the Queen, who thought Gibbs a “real treasure.” “Our poor strange boy has improved greatly since he came,” she told Uncle Leopold.
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Victoria was deluding herself. The more Gibbs tightened the screw, the worse Bertie became. Photographs from this time show a boy small for his age, hanging his head, looking down sulkily at his feet. When his German teacher, Becker, told him off for being rude, Bertie replied: “
Other children are not always good, why should I always be good? Nobody is always good
.”
⁶⁹
Florence Nightingale met the Prince of Wales and thought him simple, unaffected, and shy, but “a little cowed, as if he had been overtaught.”
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Becker addressed a memorandum to Prince Albert, pointing out that Bertie’s rages (“He stands in the corner stamping with his legs and screaming in the most dreadful manner”) were caused by exhaustion owing to overwork.
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This was only common sense, but Becker’s pleas were ignored by Albert, who by now had lost patience with the phrenologists and their prescription of a “soothing system.” He seems to have lost faith in Bertie, too. Stockmar certainly had. He told Gibbs that the prince was “an exaggerated copy of his mother.” He despaired of Bertie and his Hanoverian inheritance, preferring Affie. “If you cannot make anything of the eldest, you must try with the younger one,” he told Gibbs.
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When Bertie was taken to meet the Eton boys, he was rude and aggressive, and the headmaster complained. Stockmar gave his medical opinion that the madness of George III was reappearing; according to him, one of the symptoms displayed by Bertie’s grandfather, the Duke of Kent, and his wicked great-uncles had been the pleasure they took in giving pain.

Bertie’s solitary lessons and the long days spent alone with Gibbs were a form of psychological cruelty; but they took place against a background of luxury and opulence, as his schoolroom moved with the peripatetic royal family on its stately progress between Windsor, Buckingham
Palace, Balmoral, and Osborne.
^d
Home for Bertie was Windsor. With its towers and battlements crowning a hilltop above the Thames, it was less a castle than a miniature city state—an enclosed world. The men of the household dressed in the Windsor uniform of red and blue designed by George III. In the lower ward, toy-town guardsmen in scarlet uniforms marched to the tunes of drums and fifes.

Osborne on the Isle of Wight, where Bertie spent most summers, was the Italianate seaside fantasy that Albert had designed with the help of Thomas Cubitt—a retreat from the grand spaces of Windsor and Buckingham Palace. At Osborne, the Queen and Albert could play at
gemütlich
domesticity. The sparkling blue of the Solent reminded Albert of the Bay of Naples, and the sculpture gallery, which he wrapped round Cubitt’s square stuccoed blocks, shimmered with light, which bathed the classical sculptures he and Victoria gave each other as presents. Often mildly erotic, they hinted at the sexual dynamic of the royal marriage. Franz Xaver Winterhalter painted a giant formal canvas of the royal family, which had as its focal point the hands of Victoria and Albert forever engaged in sensuous flirtation.

Albert’s dressing room was fitted with bath and cutting-edge shower, filled by running water. The German fresco on the wall showed Hercules laying aside his power and becoming a slave to the Queen of Lydia. Next door to his writing room was the Queen’s bow-windowed sitting room, furnished with twin writing desks—Victoria’s on the left nearest the window and Albert’s on the right—and dotted with white marble casts of their children’s hands. On the wall hung Winterhalter’s startling painting of the nude Florinda and her ladies undressing as they prepared to bathe.