We Two: Victoria and Albert (91 page)

325
A few weeks after
Hibbert,
Queen Victoria in Her Letters and Journals
, p. 93.

325
Two years later, even more ominously
Martin, vol. I, p. 193.

325
Instead Bertie turned out
This is what Stockmar confided to Frederick Gibbs (“The Education of a Prince,” p. 110). Queen Victoria, ever self-deprecating, told her daughter Vicky that Bertie “is my caricature, and that is the misfortune, and in a man—this is so much worse. You are quite your dear beloved Papa’s child!”
(Dearest Child
p. 187).

326
When Bertie was seventeen
Dearest Child
p. 147.

326
In 1861 she found him
Woodham-Smith, p. 414.

326
Fed, according to his father’s instructions
A Welsh nurse hired by the prince was surprised to find that her little brothers and sisters were better fed than the royal children.

327
He wrote to his own
Bolitho,
Albert, Prince Consort
, p. 109. Bolitho dates this quotation to 1846, but it must be later if the reference to six children is correct. Louise, the sixth child, was born in March 1848.

327
This last statement
From the account given by Cecil Woodham-Smith, Queen Victoria and Lady Lyttelton had a good understanding, and both saw the need not to pressure or overwork the Prince of Wales. However, once Birch was appointed, Prince Albert had total supervision of his son, and the Queen ceased to intervene.

328
“I seem,” Birch told Baron Stockmar
St. Aubyn, p. 28. Himself a master at Eton, the Hon. Giles St. Aubyn thoroughly detests both Prince Albert and Baron Stockmar, considering them sanctimonious humbugs. He is quite clear that Henry Birch was dismissed because he had managed to win the affection of his pupil.

328
He was realistic about the Prince
This is what St. Aubyn writes, p. 28. Unfortunately he sloppily conflates reports on the Prince of Wales contributed by Birch and by Gibbs. Philip Magnus’s 1964 biography of Edward VII is less class obsessed and more scholarly than St.
Aubyn’s, but he has little to say about his subject’s youth, apart from noting: “The treadmill devised for the future Edward VII was a vicarious atonement for the wickedness of George IV” The fullest account of Henry Birch’s relationship with Bertie comes in Hector Bolitho’s biography of the prince consort. By his own account, Bolitho had unrivaled access not only to the material in the Windsor Archives but to stories about Prince Albert passed down in the royal family. He claims that Prince Albert at first liked the “young, good-looking, amiable” master from Eton, and thought Bertie was likely to become “attached” to him. But when the boy did become attached, Prince Albert decided “that the degree of attachment was dangerous … The kind sympathetic tutor became a symbol of romantic fondness that the boy did not seem to feel for his parents. The young Prince wrote affectionate letters to Birch, and, stealing into his bedroom, placed them on his pillow. Sometimes there was a present to prove his devotion” (Bolitho,
Albert, Prince Consort
, p. 110).

329
Gibbs, he wrote, was “exempt from reproach”
Ibid, p. 29.

329
The baron’s historical anecdotes
Until quite recently, the diaries of royal servants have been rare. However, in spring 1951, an article entitled “The Education of a Prince: Extracts from the Diaries of Frederick Weymouth Gibbs, 1851–1856,” was published in
Cornhill
. The magazine did not divulge who had submitted the article and, presumably, owned or found the diaries.

329
He was deeply affected
Lady Canning, an intelligent woman at the court, watched the parting and wrote, “It has been a trouble and sorrow to the Prince of Wales, who has done no end of touching things since he heard he was to lose [Birch]” (Bolitho
Albert, Prince Consort
, p. 110).

330
He developed a passion for sticks
“The Queen & Prince sent to ask me if the Prince of Wales was unwell. He had behaved rudely to his sister in their presence,” wrote Frederick Gibbs in his diary. “I told them he had been so to me—that he had thrown dirt and swung a large stick at me, and had struck me with a stick in a passion. The Prince told me not to allow this—that if he did so I must box his ears or take the same stick and rap his knuckles sharply” (“The Education of a Prince,” p. 111).

330
Tens of thousands of boys
Lord Shaftesbury’s brother, a scion of one of England’s oldest families, got into a fight at Eton with an older boy, was beaten, knocked out, and died before anyone thought to intervene.

332
It was only when Bertie approached
Longford, quoting an archival document, p. 348.

332
Lord Valletort was chosen
Fulford,
The Prince Consort
, p. 258.

332
In his leisure, the Prince of Wales
Woodham-Smith, p. 404.

332
The Queen and her beloved doctor
Longford, p. 345.

332
Colonel Lindsay, one of the equerries
St. Aubyn, p. 30.

332
Queen Victoria reported to Vicky
Dearest Child
, p. 144.

333
“The only use for Oxford
St. Aubyn, p. 45.

335
“It is very difficult
Letter of June 4, 1861
(Dearest Child
, pp. 337–338). The future Queen Alexandra was indeed one of the great beauties of the age and a fashion plate. Her one blemish was a scar on her neck, and she became famous for her high chokers as well as her legendary wasp waist. Her three daughters disciplined their bodies to produce the waist, but did not inherit their mother’s beauty.

335
When reports came in
Princess Dagmar, Alexandra’s younger sister, married Tsar Alexander III and became known as Tsaritsa Maria Fedorovna. Much against her will, since she hated Germans with a passion, her son, Tsar Nicholas II, married Princess Alix of Hesse.

335
He did, however, repair immediately
Dearest Child
p. 353.

336
Usually a loyal defender
Ibid, p. 356.

336
It would, in his view
Sandringham was acquired by Queen Victoria for her son Bertie in 1862, soon after the prince consort’s death. In the end, both the Prince and the Princess of Wales loved Sandringham, which they remodeled to suit themselves.

Chapter 26:
PROBLEMS IN A MARRIAGE

327
Victoria began to write
In preparation for his biography of the Empress Frederick
(The English Empress
, English edition, 1957), Count Egon Corti apparently counted the letters that had been preserved in the Windsor and Kronberg archives from the mother (3,707) and the daughter (4,161) (Woodham-Smith, p. 389). Roger Fulford, in
Dearest Child
, the first volume of his edition of the letters between the Queen and the princess, says that the bound volumes of the letters numbered eight from Vicky to her mother, four from Vicky to her father, and thirteen from Queen Victoria to her daughter. Fulford does not say how many volumes there are of letters from Prince Albert to his daughter. Fulford says that he chose to publish about a fifth of the Queen’s letters. Even in the published selection of the correspondence, the number of letters passed between the mother in England and the daughter in Berlin just from January to May of 1858 is astonishing.

338
“I wish you for the future
Dearest Child
, p. 35.

338
At once, the Queen was all
Ibid, p. 96.

338
She wrote to Vicky in June
Ibid, p. 120. “Annoyance” does not begin to describe the birth of Vicky’s first child. Almost pathologically modest, Vicky refused any physical examinations during her pregnancy, and thus no one was able to establish that her baby was in the breech position. Queen Victoria longed to attend her daughter’s first delivery but could not leave England when parliament was in session. However, the Queen sent from England her personal physician Sir James Clark, a trusted nurse, and a supply of chloroform. The princess went into labor on schedule one evening, but after some twelve hours of increasing agony, the baby remained stuck in the birth canal. The lives of the princess and her baby were in jeopardy, and Clark begged the Prussian physicians in attendance to intervene with forceps or at least dull the young mother’s pain. They refused, preferring to begin writing the official death notice. Finally, Dr. Eduard Martin, the competent obstetrician expected to preside over the birth, received word that the princess was in labor. Mysteriously, the message to Martin had been delivered to the wrong address. When Martin got to the palace, he insisted on doing a vaginal examination, directed Clark to administer the chloroform, and pulled out the baby with forceps. The facts surrounding the birth of future Kaiser Wilhelm II were long shrouded in mystery, and, as one reads the version that emerged decades later, it is hard not to think that a faction in the Prussian court would have been happy to see the English princess die in childbirth. The princess’s husband failed lamentably to protect the wife he adored by taking control of the birth as his father-in-law, Prince Albert, had done in similar circumstances. Vicky’s own reaction was strange. She acknowledged that Martin had saved her but was still repulsed by the liberty he had taken by thrusting his hand into her vagina, and in her subsequent, and fortunately uneventful pregnancies, she continued to use Dr. Wegner, the court-appointed doctor who had stood by while she and her first baby fought for life.

Unsurprisingly, the baby who emerged after this birth trauma was not breathing, and it took great efforts to revive him. None of the attending doctors reported that there was anything wrong with the child. However, some days later, the English nurse sent by Queen Victoria reported that the baby’s left arm had been torn out of its socket and was dangling and useless. It proved that his ear had also been permanently injured and the hours in the birth canal probably damaged his brain. As an adult, the emperor of Germany had a left arm some eight inches shorter than the right and virtually useless, and was psychopathic. History might have been different and Vicky’s life less tragic if Dr. Martin had arrived in time to save her but failed to resuscitate the child.

339
As the Queen told her daughter
Dearest Child
p. 184.

339
“My heart requires sympathy”
Pakula, p. 133.

339
On her return to Berlin
Dearest Child
p. 181.

339
The Queen and her daughter became
Mother and daughter died within months of each other. In her final years, Vicky, by this time the dowager Empress Frederick, had inoperable breast cancer and lived in an agony of pain for which her German doctors, on her son the emperor’s instructions, refused to give her more than tiny doses of opium. Vicky held on to life in part to save her mother sorrow. When Queen Victoria died, ironically in Kaiser Wilhelm’s arms, Vicky set all her affairs in order, got her personal papers out of the country, and died. See Sir Frederick Ponsonby,
Letters of the Empress Frederick
, London: Macmillan, 1928.

340
“Dear Papa has always been
Dearest Child
, pp. 45–46.

341
The prince consort at once planned
It was on this occasion that Prince Albert told his brother that he would be traveling with “only Colonel Ponsonby, and Dr. Becker [his German librarian], besides one courier, a valet de chamber, and three men servants” (Bolitho,
The Prince Consort and His Brother
, p. 185). This was Albert’s idea of a minimal staff.

341
Victoria told Vicky
Ibid, p. 91.

341
“I assure you dear
Ibid, p. 104.

341
Writing of the disappointment
Ibid, p. 123.

341
Queen Victoria liked Louis of Hesse
Prince Louis of Hesse and Prince Frederick William of Prussia were not dissimilar in looks, but Alice was not nearly as happy with her Louis as Vicky was with her Fritz. Alice, like her older sister, thought that her father was the ideal man and wanted to marry someone just like him. She soon discovered that her husband was a vain, stupid, and sensual man.

342
On October 4, 1858
Dearest Child
p. 135.