His father neither now nor later troubled to conceal the fact that Victoria, the Princess Royal, was his favourite child. When he came into the nursery his eye alighted upon her with pleasure. He loved to play bricks with her and to put her on his knee while he played the organ; but in the contemplation of his son his countenance became troubled and apprehensive. The Queen also seemed to prefer her daughter to her son and spent far more time with her, always helping her with her Sunday lesson which the little boy was left to do on his own. One day he asked her ‘to do his little Sunday lesson with him sometimes’; and the Queen admitted to having been ‘much touched’ by this, as though she had previously been quite unaware of his need of her attention.
He began to stammer; and his sister teased him for it, imitating him, driving him to fury. One afternoon they had ‘a tremendous fight’ when brought down to their parents’ room; so the next day they were brought down separately but, the one being taken into the room before the other had been led away, they fell to quarrelling again.
It was worse when other children were born; and when they, too, proved to be brighter than the Prince of Wales, who was now known as ‘Bertie’ rather than ‘the Boy’. Princess Alice was born in 1843, Prince Alfred the following year, Princess Helena in 1846. And Bertie — still a pretty boy ‘but delicate looking’ in Lord Macaulay’s opinion — found it quite impossible to maintain the intellectual lead he ought to have had over them. By the time he was six he had already been overtaken by Princess Alice, who was not only more than eighteen months younger than himself but who was ‘neither studious nor so clever as the Princess Royal’.
The Queen could but hope that in time the child would improve; and, for the moment, she comforted herself with the discovery that once they were out of the distasteful ‘frog stage’, as she called it, children could be good company. She enjoyed playing games with them, rowdy games like blind-man’s-buff and fox-and-geese, and quieter ones like beggar-my-neighbour. She danced quadrilles with the Prince of Wales as her partner, and on summer evenings she went for little walks with him and helped him to catch moths. She watched him rehearse plays with his brothers and sisters under the direction of their conscientious father, who made them ‘say their parts over and over again’. ‘Children,’ she decided, ‘though often a source of anxiety and difficulty are a great blessing and cheer and brighten up life.’
By the time she made this entry in her journal, a detailed plan of education for the children had been drawn up by their father and set down by him and the Queen in a memorandum dated 3 January 1847. The younger children were to be placed in a separate class from the two elder, who were to begin their more advanced lessons in February. Particular attention was to be paid in these lessons to English, arithmetic and geography; and an hour each day was to be devoted to both German and French. The Queen herself was to give religious instruction to the Princess Royal; but the Prince’s education in this subject was to be entrusted to Lady Lyttelton and her assistant governess, Miss Hildyard. Miss Hildyard was also to supervise the children’s daily prayers which they were required to repeat kneeling down. If the governesses wished to make any alterations in the syllabus, or to propose outings, rewards or punishments, the Queen must always be consulted in such matters.
Lady Lyttelton herself did not believe in the severe punishment of young children as one was ‘never sure’ that it was fully understood by the culprits ‘as belonging to the naughtiness’. But Prince Albert believed that physical chastisement was on occasions necessary to secure obedience. Even the girls were whipped and required to listen to lengthy admonishments with their hands tied together. At the age of four Princess Alice received ‘a real punishment by whipping’ for telling a lie and ‘roaring’. The Prince of Wales, of course, received even harsher treatment; but there was no improvement in his behaviour. His stammer did not improve, his sudden rages grew more violent and prolonged.
Occasional doubts were expressed about the suitability of so strict and unvarying a regime for a child of the Prince’s temperament. Even his parents’ influential and masterful friend and adviser, Baron Stockmar, who joined their anxious discussions and submitted a series of memoranda on the Prince’s education while supporting the view that the strictest discipline was necessary, gave it as the opinion of one who had been trained as a doctor that a system of continuous study and organized pursuits ‘if fully carried into effect and especially in the earlier years of the Prince’s life would, if he were a sprightly boy, speedily lead to a cerebral disease, and if he was constitutionally slow, induce inevitable disgust’.
The parents were not convinced. The ghosts of King George IV and his brothers seemed to hang continually about the room where the worried discussions between the parents and their advisers took place. Not many years before, members of the government had been harassed by fears that the discontent of the English people might well break out into revolution. Republicanism was still an active political force. Any future king would have to be a most exceptional man if the monarchy were to survive; and he could not hope to survive were he not to receive an education of unremitting rigour, rigidly supervised, and kept under constant surveillance. Baron Stockmar, who had already increased Prince Albert’s anxiety by warning him that he and the Queen ought to be ‘thoroughly permeated’ with the truth that their position was a more difficult one than that of any other parents in the kingdom, now told the Queen that the errors in the education of her uncles — who had, in fact, been given a far sounder training than her grandfather, King George III — had ‘contributed more than any other circumstance to weaken the respect and influence of royalty in this country’. Both the Queen and Prince Albert were persuaded that this was so, and neither was impressed when Lord Melbourne advised them not to set too much store by education which might ‘mould and direct the character’ but rarely altered it. They preferred to believe that discipline must continue to be harsh and that the syllabus must remain exacting so that the grand object of the Prince of Wales’s education might be fulfilled. This object, declared the Bishop of Oxford, one of those numerous experts consulted by the parents, must be none other than to turn the Prince of Wales into ‘the most perfect man’.
When the Prince was two years old the Queen had already made up her mind that before he was six at the latest he ‘ought to be given entirely over to the Tutors and taken entirely away from the women’. And early in 1848 a careful search began for a man who could be entrusted to take over from Lady Lyttelton the duties of creating a Prince ‘of calm, profound, comprehensive understanding, with a deep conviction of the indispensable necessity of practical morality to the welfare of the Sovereign and People’.
The choice eventually fell upon Mr Henry Birch, a handsome, thirty-year-old master at Eton where he had formerly been captain of the school. Birch took up his duties, at a salary of £800 a year, in April 1849 and immediately began to regret that he had done so. He found his charge ‘extremely disobedient, impertinent to his masters and unwilling to submit to discipline’. It was ‘almost impossible to follow out any thoroughly systematic plan of management or thoroughly regular course of study’ because ‘the Prince of Wales was so different on different days’, sometimes cooperative but more often refusing to answer questions to which he knew the answers perfectly well. The Prince was also extremely selfish and unable even ‘to play at any game for five minutes, or attempt anything new or difficult without losing his temper’. When he did lose his temper his rage was uncontrollable; and after the fury had subsided he was left far too drained and exhausted to bring his mind to bear on his work. He could not bear to be teased or criticized; and though he flew into a tantrum or sulked whenever he was teased, Birch thought it best, ‘notwithstanding his sensitiveness, to laugh at him … and to treat him as boys would have treated him in an English public school’. His parents thought so, too; and they caused him anguish by mocking him when he had done something wrong or stupid. ‘Poor Prince,’ commented Lady Lyttelton one day when he was derided for asking, ‘Mama, is not a pink the female of a carnation?’ The Queen also considered it essential to put him sharply to silence when, as children will, he made up stories about himself. Charles Greville heard from Lord Melbourne’s sister-in-law, Lady Beauvais, that any ‘incipient propensity to that sort of romancing which distinguished his [great] uncle, George IV’, was instantaneously checked. ‘The child told Lady Beauvais that during their cruise he was very nearly thrown overboard, and was proceeding to tell her how, when the Queen overheard him, sent him off with a flea in his ear, and told her it was totally untrue.’