The Heir Apparent (7 page)

Directly above the royal suite was the children’s floor. The babies and toddlers all slept together with a nurse in the night nursery, lying
in padded wicker cots specially designed by Albert. Bertie slept close by. Light poured into the nursery from the top-lit central staircase; but the parental supervision emanating from below was oppressively claustrophobic.

In May 1853, when Bertie was twelve, the seven royal children solemnly laid the first stone of the Swiss Cottage. This Alpine chalet was Albert’s attempt to relive his German childhood and instill habits of work and craftsmanship into his children. “Affie and I worked very diligently at the Swiss Cottage and Papa paid us wages,” Bertie dictated to Gibbs in his journal. A week or so later he wrote: “We are getting on beautifully with our brick laying.”
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The prefabricated Swiss Cottage, shipped over in pieces and completed by workmen on the Osborne estate, was the children’s space, one of the few places where Bertie could escape the snooping Gibbs. Albert provided each child with a garden plot and tools, stamped with their initials—Pss L (Louise), P L (Leopold), and so forth—and the girls were taught to cook in the miniature kitchen; but for Bertie the Swiss Cottage was not a Petit Trianon for playing in the manner of Marie Antoinette, but a den of sin. Here he practiced secret smoking with Affie and Alice. Alice wrote from Osborne to Bertie, her “poor forsaken darling” who had been left behind at Windsor: “We went after dinner immediately to the Swiss Cottage (as you can guess) for it is generally the first place we go on arriving here.” How she missed her “
dearest dear
”: “I can’t smoke paper cigars here for I have no one to smoke with you know what I mean.”
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Eleanor Stanley, one of the ladies at court, commented on the remarkable physical likeness between Bertie and Alice. She thought them “not alike in character at all; he is retiring, shy, a little inclined to be overbearing, and rather obstinate; but with a sweet, kind expression about his eyes; she, not apparently knowing what shyness means, very sweet-tempered and not at all obstinate.”
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All the adults were taken in by Alice. She seemed so docile and lovable; but in reality she was (as Vicky wrote) a “smart little lady,” skilled at dissembling and “almost never getting into trouble,” even though she was Bertie’s partner in crime.
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Osborne was followed in the autumn by Balmoral, the castle in the mountain solitude of the Scottish Highlands, which reminded Albert of his native Thuringian Forest. By 1855, the modest house that Albert had first leased in 1848 had been replaced by a new schloss in the Scots baronial style. Albert designed a Balmoral tartan in gray and purple and a white “Victorian” tartan, and there were tartan-covered chairs and tartan curtains and even tartan linoleum. Bertie spent more time with Albert at Balmoral than anywhere else, accompanying him on stalking expeditions. Stalking was Albert’s passion, but he was an unorthodox sportsman. The eight-year-old Bertie described a day on the hill with his father:

As Bertie’s account makes clear, Albert was an erratic shot.
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At Balmoral when Bertie was twelve, Albert forbade him from taking a holiday, but ordered him to continue lessons as normal. Even Gibbs thought this too harsh, and he told the Queen so. Gibbs was also critical of Albert’s system of seclusion, and suggested that Bertie should be allowed to meet other boys. Very occasionally a few noblemen’s sons from Eton came to tea. Charles Carrington, who was to
become Bertie’s lifelong friend and devoted follower, a clever courtier who kept a diary, first met the prince at Buckingham Palace in 1854. He recalled that Prince Alfred was the favorite, “but I always liked the Prince of Wales far the best. He had such a kind and generous disposition and the kindest heart imaginable.” But Bertie was often getting into scrapes, and he was afraid of his father, “who seemed a proud, shy, stand-offish sort of man, not calculated to make friends with children.”
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Albert was always there, watching from the undergrowth; once he suddenly appeared from behind a bush, and Carrington fell off the seesaw from sheer fright.

Albert reinvented the “royal family” as a beacon of bourgeois domesticity. Using the new medium of photography, he projected an image of queen and consort as an adoring couple, surrounded by obedient, subdued children. The contrast with Victoria’s wicked uncles could hardly be starker. But within this narrative, Albert’s role as father was by no means clear. He had no model to follow. His own father, the lecherous Duke Ernest, gave an example of what not to do, but Albert had no experience of the English aristocratic paterfamilias—the dominant male who offered a benevolent example of self-assured manhood.
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When Bertie, his difficult son, failed in his lessons and threatened to rebel, Albert was at a loss. He spied on Bertie, he whipped him, he treated him as a patient. He never tried to engage his sympathy or initiate him into the world of English manhood—but that was a world that was closed to Albert, too. Little wonder that Bertie later recalled, “I had no boyhood.”
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The Crimean War intervened. Bertie watched his mother pin medals on to the returning soldiers and allow wounded men into the garden at Buckingham Palace, where they walked about or sat on benches listening to the band of the marines. Albert, meanwhile, was wearing himself out. Victoria and Albert’s diplomatic correspondence on the war fills thirty-five folio volumes, and as Albert exhausted himself on the treadmill of duty, his popularity evaporated. He was hated for
being German, and for meddling in the army, and his response was to meddle even more.
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Key to Albert’s diplomacy was a rapprochement with the French emperor, Napoléon III. With the Empress Eugénie, Louis-Napoléon paid a state visit in April 1855. “The Emperor is a short person,” wrote Bertie. “He has very long moustachios but short hair, fair. The Empress is very pretty.”
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In August, Victoria and Albert returned the visit, taking with them Vicky and Bertie. They sailed from Osborne, serenaded by the two-year-old Leopold, who wailed (Affie told Bertie): “Ma gone in the boot to Fa, meaning mama is gone in the boat to France, also one buder [brother] why not two buder.”
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It was the first visit of a British monarch to Paris since Henry VI in 1431, and for Bertie, the ten-day trip was a revelation. Victoria for once was in a state of euphoria. Not only was she welcomed by rapturous Paris crowds, but Albert was given equal rank, which soothed his edgy ego, while his frigid shyness was melted by the willowy Empress Eugénie. “Altogether I am delighted to see how much he likes her and admires her,” wrote Victoria artlessly, “as it is so seldom that I see him do so with any woman.”
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As for Victoria, she was charmed and flattered by the emperor, who kissed and squeezed her hand, and whispered affectionate words into her ear. Lord Clarendon, the urbane courtier whose letters give a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern commentary on the court, observed that this was male attention of a sort the Queen had never known before: “She never had been made love to in her life, and never had conversed with a man of the world on a footing of equality; and as his love-making was of a character to flatter her vanity without alarming her virtue and modesty, she enjoyed the novelty of it without scruple or fear.”
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Even the dumpy Queen’s homely gowns pleased the emperor, who especially admired the full white dress bursting with red geraniums that she wore with the Koh-i-Noor diamond.

The emperor made a point of paying attention to Bertie, driving
him around Paris in his curricle. “You have a nice country, I would like to be your son,” said Bertie.
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Wearing Highland dress, the British boy won the heart of the crowd. When he visited the tomb of Napoléon I in a thunderstorm and the band played “God Save the Queen,” Victoria, moved at the thought of leaning on the arm of Napoléon III before the coffin of his uncle and namesake, Britain’s bitterest foe, gestured Bertie to kneel, and the crowd went wild. Vicky cried when they left, and Bertie asked Eugénie if they could stay longer. “Your parents can’t do without you,” she replied. “Not do without us!” exclaimed Bertie. “Don’t fancy that, for there are six more of us at home, and they don’t want us.”
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In Paris, Bertie was put in the charge of Lord Clarendon. “[Clarendon] thinks the Queen’s severe way of treating her children very injudicious,” reported Greville, “and that the Prince will be difficult to manage, as he has evidently a will of his own and is rather positive and opinionated, and inclined to lay down the law; but he is clever and his manners are good.”
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Back home, the system of seclusion was tightened, and the children grew ever more rebellious and conspiratorial. The royal schoolroom was a hotbed of subversion. “Write your letters as well as you can,” Affie told Bertie, “because Papa wishes to see them.”
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Alice managed to slip through the parental censorship and write Bertie letters that breathe naughtiness:

Already the fourteen-year-old prince was learning to live a secret life. With Alice he was wicked and adored. With Gibbs he was no longer openly rebellious, but tame and dull. “We are glad to have
continued
good accounts of you,” wrote Victoria, who hoped to find her son “
decidedly
improved, and very
quiet
, and amiable and
not
contradictory.”
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To Uncle Leopold she wrote, “seclusion has
it seems
done him good.”
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Victoria spoke too soon. A few months later, Bertie and Affie were caught smoking. The smoking itself was harmless, Gibbs thought, but the boys had used deceit to conceal it. Prince Albert intervened and punished his sons with three days’ solitary confinement. He then announced that he had decided to separate them. The real reason for this was not the smoking, but because in lessons Alfred was ahead of Bertie, who was “almost stationary and his knowledge only half mastered.” Being behind his younger brother irritated Bertie, whose “love of rule bore down” on Alfred, and “the result was that the Prince of Wales domineered and Prince Alfred lost his sense of independence.”
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At eleven, Affie was sent away and given a separate establishment at Royal Lodge in Windsor Park, with an officer of the Royal Engineers as his tutor and sole companion. Bertie, meanwhile, was kept at home under the watchful eye of his father. He penned a contrite letter of apology, to which Albert sternly replied: “Our confidence can of course at present not be restored to you, but you can earn it,” which seems somewhat hypocritical, considering that the smoking was not the real reason for separating the brothers.
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Bertie sobbed bitterly when Affie moved to Royal Lodge. “His devotion to Affie is very great and pleasing to see,” wrote his mother; but she allowed Albert to deny her the pleasure of seeing it.
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Albert had been brought up with his brother Ernest as his chief companion; but this seemed to make him all the more determined to separate his own sons, convincing himself that it was for their own good. Bertie, by contrast, was later to insist on his two sons being educated together,
even though the elder, Prince Albert Victor, was woefully backward by comparison with his younger brother, Prince George.

Albert’s relations with his wife were reaching a crisis point. Early in 1856, Victoria’s doctor, Sir James Clark, expressed concern about her mental state. He warned that another pregnancy would endanger her mind. Albert must avoid confrontation when she was angry, as this would cause long-term damage to the Queen’s brain.
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(Much the same advice had been given by doctors about Bertie’s tantrums.) By July, however, whether by accident or design, the Queen was once again pregnant, this time with Beatrice, and Albert was circling around her, petrified lest she scream—her rages upset him so.

When the family migrated to Balmoral in September 1856, Bertie was left behind at Osborne with his tutors. As an experiment, he was sent on a walking tour in the West Country under the name of Baron Renfrew; it was abruptly called off when he was recognized at Dorchester and cheered. “I do miss you so,” wrote Alice from Buckingham Palace, “each time the door opens and I see Affiechaps come in I always think it is you.” She had treasured up all his presents to her: “Your little drum [a charm] I mean always to wear and I have not taken it off since you gave it to me for it is fastened to my bracelet: your paintbrush is in my bag, and [I] even took it out in the railroad carriage to see that it was safe: your book on tournaments is also in my bag.… So think sometimes of your poor little Alice who is
so so
fond of you.”
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