The Heir Apparent (9 page)
Authors: Jane Ridley
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Nonfiction, #Retail, #Royalty
At the wedding in the Chapel Royal at St. James’s, Bertie wore Highland dress and acted as Vicky’s supporter. The next day, Vicky wrote: “You were so good to me yesterday, dear Bertie, I shall not forget the kind affectionate way in which you said goodbye to me.”
22
Vicky was a child bride, just seventeen; Albert certainly did not see his daughter as a woman, describing her as having “a man’s head and a child’s heart.”
23
Countess Walburga (“Wally”) Hohenthal, her new German lady-in-waiting, who was only a year older, noted that “her childish roundness still clung to her and made her look shorter than she really was.”
24
Vicky had a bewitching smile, which showed her small and beautiful teeth, and she was soft-voiced and gentle; but she had a will of steel. She was intellectual, stunningly tactless (“I can never say what I do not think”), and a poor judge of character, prone to taking violent likes and dislikes.
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Fritz was eleven years her senior. Over six feet tall, he was a Saxon chieftain with glittering blue eyes, a mane of blond hair, and thick leonine whiskers. He seemed the ideal husband, but he was indecisive and lacking in confidence. Since his first visit to England at age nineteen, he had been schooled in liberal politics by Albert, who sent him reading lists and signed his autograph book: “May Prussia be merged in Germany, and not Germany in Prussia.” Fritz brought to the altar what Victoria called “the white flower of a blameless life,” just as Albert had done.
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And Vicky fell in love with him, just as Victoria had with Albert.
At Windsor, where Vicky and Fritz spent their so-called honeymoon, the ladies shivered in their evening dresses with their backs to an open window, while the Queen and her daughters toasted themselves before the fire. Fritz was invested with the Order of the Garter, looking absurd in stockings and knee breeches beneath his Prussian military tunic. When the Garter Knights retired backward out of St.
George’s Hall, they stumbled over their long cloaks, which twisted round their legs, and Bertie giggled.
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Vicky and Fritz left England for good. Albert accompanied the couple to Gravesend. When they parted, Vicky buried her head in her father’s breast in floods of tears. “I thought my heart was going to break when you shut the cabin door and you were gone,” she wrote. “I miss you so dreadfully, dear Papa, more than I can say; your dear picture stood near me all night.”
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For Vicky, who idolized her father and thought him a perfect being, his decision to exile her from paradise must have seemed strangely confusing. She never resolved her ambivalence about her identity; she was an Englishwoman in Germany, and in England she seemed distinctly foreign.
Albert wrote Vicky what was probably the saddest letter of his life. “I am not of a demonstrative nature, and therefore you can hardly know how dear you have been to me, and what a void you have left behind in my heart.”
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He had lost his favorite child, the brainiest member of the English royal family since George II’s wife Queen Caroline and the only one of his children with an academic mind like his.
Victoria wept more than anyone when Vicky left, but her tears were mixed with remorse. For months she had scolded Vicky, telling her that she was thankful to be rid of her. Once Vicky was married, however, and Victoria had Albert to herself, the Queen bombarded her daughter with letters. Vicky in Germany became Victoria’s confidante; the frank and candid letters she poured out to her Dearest Child reveal the intimate feelings of an impulsive, emotional woman who never worried what posterity might think of her.
Vicky’s marriage shifted the family dynamic. Hitherto, Victoria had had little to do with Bertie, concentrating her scolding on Vicky. Now, all the anger she had once vented on her daughter rained down on Bertie. “Oh! Bertie alas! That is too sad a subject to enter on,” wrote the Queen; but enter upon it she did, and in letter after letter to Vicky she bemoaned Bertie’s shortcomings. He was lazy, he was weak, he was dull. “Handsome I cannot think him, with that painfully small and narrow head, those immense features and total want of chin.” “You
cannot imagine the sorrow and bitter disappointment and the awful anxiety for the future which [Bertie] causes us!”
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Vicky annoyed Victoria by remaining silent on the subject of Bertie in her replies. To Bertie, however, she wrote preachy letters, telling him that “we all ought to help one another [prove] ourselves worthy to be the children of our parents.”
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One person who dared to speak to the Queen about her relations with Bertie was her half sister, Feodora, safely ensconced in a distant palace in provincial Germany. “Do show him love, dearest Victoria,” she begged, “I know that he thinks you are not fond of him.”
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But showing love to her eldest son was something that Victoria was quite unable to do. So emotionally dependent was she on Albert that she wanted only to be the “child” of her husband. Bertie was despised for his failure to resemble his father in looks, character, or ability. Only Affie and Arthur, who both had a physical likeness to Albert, were adored; but Affie fell from grace on account of his distressing habit of telling lies.
Bertie’s confirmation in April 1858 was an important rite of passage, marking his transition to adult life and independence. He prepared by reading sermons aloud to the Queen, and he was examined on the catechism for more than an hour by the Dean of Windsor in front of the Archbishop of Canterbury. The next day, wearing his Windsor uniform of blue and red, he was confirmed by the archbishop in St. George’s Chapel. The Queen wore a “blue moiré antique” and prayed fervently for her son. Afterward he dined alone with his parents, and Albert gave him a fatherly talk about the dangers to which he was now exposed, warning him not to be led astray. Bertie took this in good heart, probably because he had no idea what Albert was referring to; as Victoria wrote, “
thank God
he is
still
too
innocent
and
pure
to understand, for he is
as
innocent as a little child.”
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The sixteen-year-old prince knew nothing of the facts of life.
Queen Victoria kept a notebook of her private thoughts entitled “Remarks Conversations Reflections,” in which she poured out her anxiety about her children, Bertie especially:
He has a good heart and is very affte [
sic
], and at bottom very truthful, but his intellect alas! is weak which is
not
his fault but, what
is
his fault
is
his shocking laziness, which I fear has been far too much indulged, and which goes so far that he listens to nothing you tell him or teach him or what is said before him, but seems in a sort of dreaminess, which alarms
us
for his
brain
. He profits by nothing he learns, gives way to temper, very bad
manners
and great insubordination, all
most dangerous
qualities for his position.
And
poor Mr. Gibbs … has been far too indulgent and I fear has no authority over him, which is very sad … From his idleness, which extends to his
thinking
as well as
acting
, he leans entirely upon others and therefore will always be led more or less, the danger of which is enormous.
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Victoria thought the answer was to tighten the discipline, but Albert disagreed. By now he had begun to doubt the wisdom of what he called the “aggressive system” that the Queen followed toward her children. But he was powerless to stop her. Stockmar found him “completely cowed” by Victoria, who was “so excitable that the Prince lived in perpetual terror of bringing on the hereditary malady.” When Lord Clarendon ventured to advise Albert to treat his children more kindly, Albert replied that he dare not confront Victoria for fear of exciting her mind, adding that “the disagreeable office of punishment had always fallen upon him.” Clarendon thought that in spite of his natural good sense, Albert had been “very injudicious” in the way he treated his children, “and that the Prince of Wales resented very much the severity which he had experienced.”
35
Shortly after his confirmation, Bertie was given an establishment of his own at White Lodge, a Palladian villa built by George II in Richmond Park. Sending his teenage sons away to grace-and-favor houses to be force-fed knowledge by their tutors in seclusion formed the next stage of Albert’s curriculum. At White Lodge, Bertie was accompanied
by Gibbs; the Rev. Charles Tarver, his Latin tutor and chaplain; and three equerries, carefully picked young men in their twenties of the “very
highest
character,” who were charged with giving him a good example. They received strict instructions from the Queen not to “indulge in careless self-indulgent lounging ways” such as slouching with their hands in their pockets. “Anything approaching a
practical joke
… should never be permitted.”
36
White Lodge was a dismal failure. Bertie continued to be addicted to practical jokes. On a trip to Ireland, he fired a rifle loaded with blanks at a group of boatmen and accidentally cut a man in the cheek. Victoria noted that “he was dreadfully frightened and distressed at the time—but when his father spoke to him he did not take it in that contrite spirit which one would have wished.”
37
Sir James Clark, the Queen’s doctor, was consulted, and prescribed a lowering diet. Luncheon: meat and vegetables, pudding best avoided, seltzer water to drink. Dinner: as light as possible, but a little heavier than luncheon, claret and seltzer in hot weather, sherry and water in cold.
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Lonely and bored by the reading he was made to do, Bertie made no progress. One of Bertie’s gentlemen thought the problem was Gibbs, who had no influence over him. “Mr. Gibbs has devoted himself to the boy, but no affection is given him in return, nor do I wonder at it, for they are by nature thoroughly unsuited.… I confess I quite understand the Prince’s feelings towards Mr. Gibbs.”
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Bertie got on far better with Mr. Tarver. Shortly before he turned seventeen, he asked Tarver to explain some words “which it was impossible to make clear to him without entering somewhat fully on the subject of the purpose and the abuse of the union of the sexes.”
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Tarver did his best, and then made a hurried and embarrassed confession to Albert, whose fatherly duty he worried that he had usurped.
On Bertie’s seventeenth birthday, Albert penned him a memorandum. Gibbs was to leave. (“He has failed completely over the last year and a half,” said the Queen, “and Bertie did what he liked!”)
41
Instead, Bertie was to have a governor. He must now embark on a study more important than any he had undertaken so far: “How to become a good man and a thorough gentleman.”
42
He was to receive the Order of the
Garter and the rank of colonel. So overcome was Bertie at the prospect of liberation from Gibbs that he brought the letter to the Dean of Windsor, Gerald Wellesley, in floods of tears.
The governor was Colonel (later General) Robert Bruce, the son of Lord Elgin of the Elgin Marbles; his sister, Lady Augusta Bruce, was a close friend of the Queen, and he was in almost daily contact with Prince Albert. Bruce was a strict disciplinarian, who ruled the prince as if he were an unruly colony. Bertie was held under virtual house arrest, and it was Bruce who settled the plans for each day.
Bertie was thrilled with his new uniform, but he later recalled that he detested being made a lieutenant colonel straight away, rather than beginning at the bottom of the ladder as he had hoped. It meant that his army career was aborted.
43
He was to be a mere play soldier; a tailor’s dummy in uniforms with no real military experience. Instead, he was to study at Oxford. Meanwhile, rather than stay in London (“It would not be good for him,” said Albert), he was to spend his gap year in foreign travel.
44
Bertie arrived in Rome in January 1859. Colonel Bruce’s reports to Prince Albert make depressing reading. Bertie frittered away his time, showed no interest in art or classical history and, in spite of the little dinners that Bruce arranged for him to meet distinguished men, he seemed only interested in gossip, dress, and society.
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This was not how the outside world saw him, however. One of Bertie’s guests was the poet Robert Browning. To his surprise, Browning was impressed. “The prince did not talk much, but listened intelligently and asked several questions on Italian politics.”
46
From England, Albert exercised strict supervision, returning Bertie’s letters with corrections to the English and grammar.
47
Bertie was made to keep a journal, which was sent back to Albert and later bound. It is a bald account of his doings—“I went with Colonel Bruce here and there”—and Albert rightly complained that it was disappointing.
Bertie was granted an audience with Pope Pius IX—the first member of the English royal family to meet the pontiff since Henry VIII broke with Rome. When Albert met Pope Gregory XVI twenty years before as a young German prince, he had conversed in Italian on the
influence of the Egyptians on Greek and Roman art.
48
Bertie, by contrast, described his encounter thus:
The staircase was lined by the Swiss Guards, who looked very picturesque in their peculiar and handsome dress; we had to pass through many rooms, before we reached that in which the Pope was; he came to his door and received me very kindly, I remained about ten minutes conversing with him, and then took my departure.
49
In light of his later openness toward Roman Catholicism, it is possible that Bertie was more affected by the meeting than he admitted to his Lutheran father. “I was sorry that you were not pleased with my journal,” he told Albert, “as I took pains about it, but I see the justice of your remarks and will try to profit by them.”
50
His tutors dictated a new version: “Whilst standing before the Pope many thoughts crowded into my mind.…” Tarver was stung to defend himself. The prince could hardly be expected to do better, he wrote, considering how small were his “reflective and inductive powers”; he never asked questions or read books.
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