We Two: Victoria and Albert (65 page)

Gibbs handled the royal parents and Baron Stockmar far more astutely than Birch had. He was not a man of the cloth and, unlike Birch, could not be suspected of the high church sympathies that the Queen disliked. He enlisted Stockmar’s unconditional support. The baron’s historical anecdotes and words of wisdom were reverently entered in Gibbs’s diary. With his employer and supervisor, Prince Albert, Gibbs claimed to see eye to eye on all points. Bertie must be made to attend and learn out of respect and duty, not boyish admiration. The Prince of Wales’s hours of schooling must be increased from six to seven every day. The treadmill must be set to run faster and longer.

Gibbs had every incentive to produce some striking results in the classroom. He was not a cruel or stupid man, and he did his best. But the relationship between teacher and student was doomed from the start. Gibbs—unlike Lehzen and Birch—gave his allegiance to the father, not to the son. For a handsome salary and future expectations, Gibbs undertook to implement an educational regimen that his pupil found overwhelming and humiliating. Gibbs was confident that, in a battle of wills with a ten-year-old boy, he would win. He was proved wrong.

Bertie had showed from the outset that he had no taste for book learning and would learn only from those he loved, on his own terms. He was deeply affected by the departure of Mr. Birch. It seemed that every adult he liked and trusted was taken away from him. He did not like Gibbs at the start, and he soon learned to hate him. As he would amply prove in adult life, the Prince of Wales was far from stupid or incompetent, and he had prodigious energy for things he liked. But as a child, refusing to compete
with his sisters, unable to express any of his resentments to his distant mother or his sainted father, he alternated between apathy and rage.

The preeminent fact for Bertie from birth was that he was the Prince of Wales, heir apparent. This had not been true for his mother. He was also male in a culture where mere maleness counted. Humility and consideration for others were virtues preached to the Prince of Wales every day, but they did not take. Protocol ruled even in the palace nursery. Every governess, tutor, servant, and courtier the Prince of Wales met made it clear that he, not his smarty-pants sister Vicky or goody-two-shoes little brother Affie, was the child who counted. On the rare occasions that Bertie appeared in public, walking by his mother’s side, holding her hand as if he did so every day, he was almost mobbed. He loved London, the court, parties, excitement, people, being the center of attention.

Back in the classroom, he was the dunce. The loneliness, sensual deprivation, and constant grind of his life were incomprehensible to him. He hated to feel stupid, he hated to be told what to do. He missed his sisters. He wanted friends. All the fury and frustration that Bertie felt about his treatment at the hands of his “angelic dearest Father” and could not express were directed toward the new preceptor.

When asked to do something he did not like, which was most days, the Prince of Wales dug in his heels. When coerced, he erupted in frightening rages and became mildly psychopathic, screaming, biting, spitting, kicking, and tearing up his books. It sometimes took two people to restrain him. He developed a passion for sticks and riding crops, swinging them alarmingly at his siblings and attendants. Knives and scissors had to be carefully kept away from him. He would deliberately get dirt on the servants’ uniforms, and once he spilled ink on a dress that a maid had laid out on her bed in preparation for her wedding.

Life for the young Prince of Wales was not all lessons and lectures. His lot was, in fact, easy by the standards of the day. Life at an English public school was far from a lark, and occasionally boys of England’s oldest families died of neglect at public school. Tens of thousands of boys working in the mines and brickworks and chimneys of England died before they were eighteen. Royal family life could be warm and affectionate, especially at Christmas and birthdays, and there was far more active intergenerational play than in most families at the time. Prince Albert taught his sons to swim, skate, and shoot, all sports at which he excelled and which they enjoyed. The boys played ice hockey in winter and sailed in summer. They were put on the back of a pony as soon as they could waddle and became ex-pert
and enthusiastic riders. There were excursions along the seashore at Osborne, expeditions straight uphill at Balmoral, and hunts at Windsor.

But for Bertie, family life and the company of his brothers and sisters— with whom he was never permitted to be alone—were not enough. The lectures and fact-finding tours that his father specialized in bored him. When he had nothing to say about them in his diary, he was condemned for being dull and stupid. He longed for friends, but even when boys were sent up to Windsor Castle from nearby Eton to play with him and Affie, their father always hovered, watching for who knew what, ready to intervene. The reaction of both princes to such obsessive supervision was to behave like louts, confident that the other boys would not dare resist or fight back. When Affie started to behave as badly as Bertie, the two boys were again separated, and Affie was given his own establishment at Royal Lodge on the grounds of Windsor Castle. The Prince of Wales was bereft.

In comparison with his own father, Prince Albert was a loving and caring parent. He tried always to be there for his children, and he listened to them more carefully and indulgently than their mother. Child abuse by servants was endemic in great Victorian nurseries, but there is no report that any servant abused the prince’s children. Lady Lyttelton, who adored the prince consort, found him unusually affectionate and understanding. What other father would rock a baby in his arms, demonstrate to a toddler how to turn somersaults, or stoop down to tie up a small daughter’s shoe? Albert’s eldest daughters, Vicky and Alice, who, like their brothers, were taught to swim, skate, and ride by their father and received an unusually good education, adored him unconditionally to the end of their lives.

Albert, like many parents, made the mistake of giving his children what he liked, or remembered liking, as a child, and then censuring them if they were unhappy and ungrateful. And he had one obsession not shared by many fathers: He was determined that his sons, especially his oldest son, should be great men, and in his view, sexual purity was the prerequisite for true greatness. This was the code that the prince consort lived by, and it made his relationship with the Prince of Wales increasingly difficult as the boy reached adolescence.

WHEN BERTIE TURNED
sixteen, he was confirmed and, though not yet of age, officially ceased to be a child. The prince consort was now on high alert. Since Bertie, unlike his “angelic dearest Father,” was observably open to the temptations of the flesh, he had to be kept out of the company not just of
women but of unworthy young men. It was only when Bertie approached his seventeenth birthday and pronounced himself puzzled by certain things that Gibbs was authorized to explain to him “the purpose and abuse of the union of the sexes.”

Bertie was allowed to undertake some walking trips with four carefully selected Etonians his own age. Despite Gibbs, who never left them alone, the youths managed to have fun. Heavily supervised, Bertie visited his sister in Berlin and his uncle in Coburg. He went to Italy, where he saw the new Pope, and Austria, where he met the legendary Austrian statesman Count Clemens Metternich. People abroad found Bertie charming.

Prince Albert gave his son a rather meager allowance and his own residence at Windsor. He handpicked a few young aristocratic men of exemplary morals to be the members of the Prince of Wales’s household. Lord Valletort was chosen not only because he was moral and accomplished but because “he never was at public school, but passed his youth in attendance on an invalid father.”

The prince consort wrote a memorandum detailing the manner of life he expected to see followed at his son’s house: no silly humor, no gambling, no billiards, no lolling in chairs or on sofas, no practical jokes. In his leisure, the Prince of Wales should devote himself to “music, to the fine arts, either drawing, or looking over drawings, engravings, etc., to hearing poetry … or good plays read aloud.” The Queen and her beloved doctor Sir James Clark, perhaps finding the Prince of Wales to be gaining in weight, devised a diet low in red meat and red wine, strong on seltzer water.

The young men of the household were expected to report on the Prince of Wales to his father, but they rallied to his side against Gibbs. Apparently, instead of bullying his peers as he had as a boy, Bertie was now using his charm and status to win them over. Colonel Lindsay, one of the equerries, wrote to the prince consort: “Mr. Gibbs has
no
influence. He and the Prince are so much out of sympathy with one another that a wish expressed by Mr. Gibbs is sure to meet with opposition on the part of the Prince … I confess I quite understand the Prince’s feelings towards Mr. Gibbs, for tho’ I respect his uprightness and devotion, I could not give him sympathy, confidence or friendship.” Gibbs was dismissed when the Prince of Wales turned seventeen.

Queen Victoria reported to Vicky on November 10, 1858: “Bertie vexes us much. There is not a particle of reflection, or even attention to anything but dress! Not the slightest desire to learn, on the contrary, il se bouche les oreilles [he stops up his ears], the moment anything of interest is talked of … Poor Mr. Gibbs certainly failed during the last 2 years entirely, incredibly.”
Colonel Bruce, a stern, straitlaced military man, took over the supervision of the Prince of Wales’s life. The Queen and the prince promoted the colonel to general and hoped that he would prove more successful than his predecessor.

Bertie’s great wish was to pursue an army career, but his parents dismissed this idea offhand. They conceded that as a kind of reward, he would be made an officer and allowed to do some military training, but that was all. His father intended him to complete an intensive course of studies at the great universities that would properly prepare him for his life as king. Science and technology, the prince consort decreed, were to form an important part of the prince’s studies. In his spare time, the Prince of Wales was instructed to tour mines and factories. When he could find time in his increasingly busy schedule, the prince consort himself would instruct his eldest son in European history and political theory.

First the Prince of Wales was sent to Edinburgh to cram under the great chemist (then) Sir Lyon Playfair, who reported that the prince showed interest and ability. Next Bertie was sent to Oxford. The prince consort was forced by university regulations to enroll his son in a college, but he refused to allow him to live in college or to attend lectures with other young men. He installed the Prince of Wales and his large entourage in a house in town. In the evenings, when not hitting the books, Bertie was instructed to entertain elderly academics at dinner. Hearing that Bertie was still managing to make some disreputable friends among the Oxford fast set, the prince consort was indignant. “The only use for Oxford is that it is a place for study, a refuge from the world and its claims,” he wrote memorably to his son. Queen Victoria, who found Oxford a horrid, boring place, was inclined to see Bertie’s point of view.

Once the Prince of Wales began to make solo public appearances, the ugly duckling was discovered to be a swan. Charming and engaged, a deft conversationalist, Bertie remembered everyone’s name and seemed fascinated by everyone he met. He loved to dance, which pleased the ladies, and he was a keen and skilled shot, which pleased the men. His large appetite for food and wine coincided very well with the mores of the English upper classes in that supremely gastronomic era. Society people noticed approvingly that, except for the way he pronounced his
r
’s, he was not at all like his father. The Prince of Wales’s incomplete grasp of classical languages and engineering was not held against him.

Bertie, like his mother as a teenager, proved perfectly at ease on ceremonial occasions, and in the summer of 1860 his parents sent him on a state visit to Canada. This was followed by a private visit to the United States at
the invitation of President James Buchanan. The Prince of Wales was a sensation in North America, on one occasion volunteering to be wheeled across the Niagara Falls on a tight rope in a wheelbarrow. He shook hands with democratic abandon, and danced every dance at balls—to the despair of his elderly handlers, who were keen to get to bed. His marked attentions to Miss B. of Natchez and Miss G. of Cincinnati did not go unreported. “His Royal Highness looks as if he might have a very susceptible nature, and has already yielded to several twinges in the region of his midriff,” reported the
New York Herald
enigmatically. Apart from his successes at the dinners and balls, the Prince of Wales was also given the highest marks for diplomatic tact and presence of mind by foreign secretary the Duke of Newcastle, who was a member of the prince’s party.

Queen Victoria was delighted with her son’s success, noting to Vicky that he deserved plaudits, since he was so often criticized. Prince Albert, who rarely got mobbed by enthusiastic admirers or received rave reviews in the foreign press, wrote sternly to his son that he should not take his success in the New World as a testament to his own merit. All the adulation had been laid upon him as the representative of his august mother.