The Prince’s other tutors ventured to express similar opinions. The Revd Gerald Wellesley, for instance, who gave him religious instruction, told Gibbs that the boy was being overworked. So did Dr Voisin, the French tutor. ‘You will wear him out early,’ Dr Voisin said. ‘Make him climb trees! Run! Leap! Row! Ride! … In many things savages are much better educated than we are.’
But Prince Albert did not agree. Nor did Stockmar. Nor did the Queen. ‘There is much good in him,’ she had recorded in her diary on his ninth birthday during the time of Mr Birch and in one of her rare moments of hope in a satisfactory future. ‘He has such affectionate feelings — great truthfulness and great simplicity of character.’ She and Prince Albert had decided that he ‘ought to be accustomed early to work with [them], to have great confidence shewn him, that he should early be initiated into the affairs of state.’ But now she was not so sure that this was a sensible plan. Bertie’s behaviour since the departure of Mr Birch had been so disturbing that there could be no question of his undergoing any kind of initiation into public affairs until there had been a marked improvement in his conduct. To bring about this improvement it would be necessary to ‘put down very decidedly’ the Prince’s temper. As Prince Albert had decreed, the only satisfactory methods of overcoming this temper were physical ones, a sound boxing of the ears or a few sharp raps across the knuckles with a stick. In the meantime there could be no relaxation in the length and frequency of the Prince’s lessons.
With all this Mr Gibbs professed his wholehearted agreement. So the chastisements continued, and the pressure of the lessons was not abated. The lessons began at eight o’clock in the morning and ended at seven o’clock at night. For six hours every day, including Saturday, he was instructed in the subjects commonly taught in public schools with such modifications as were appropriate to the education of an English prince. In addition to the subjects which he had already begun, he was now taught social economy, chemistry ‘and its kindred sciences with the Arts dependent upon them’, algebra and geometry with direct reference to ‘their applications to Gunnery, Fortifications and the Mechanical Arts’. He was required to read the acknowledged masterpieces of English, French and German literature; to write essays in these three languages on historical and biographical themes; to learn how to play — though he never did learn how to play — the piano; to draw maps; to master Latin; to talk to the famous scientists whom his father asked to come to Windsor especially for this purpose; to attend Michael Faraday’s lectures on metals at the Royal Institution (which he professed to find interesting as they were at least a relief from his usual studies); to grasp the essentials of political economy as expounded by William Ellis (who found him far less responsive than his bright elder sister); in general to store up in his mind a deep fund of ‘extensive and accurate knowledge’. Between these intellectual pursuits he was taught riding, gymnastics and dancing, and — under the instruction of a drill sergeant — military exercises. In winter he was taught to skate; in summer to swim and play croquet. He learned about forestry and farming, carpentry and bricklaying. He learned about housekeeping in the children’s kitchen in the chalet at Osborne; and at Osborne, too, he learned about gardening and, like his brothers and sisters, he had his own little plot of land and his own initialled tools. He went for walks, and he ran.
At the end of each day, when a report upon his progress and conduct was submitted to his parents, his tutors were instructed to ensure that he was exhausted.
The product of this regimen was not an appealing child. His sense of frustration and inferiority, combined with the strain of exhaustion, led him not only to seek relief in outbursts of furious violence, but also to be aggressively rude to those few boys of his own age whom he was ever allowed to meet. The Provost of Eton felt obliged to complain about this to Gibbs; and Gibbs, in turn, spoke to Stockmar, who, characteristically, made gloomy comparisons with George IV and hinted that the streak of madness in the mother’s family was manifesting itself again. The Prince of Wales’s impulses were far from kindly, Gibbs subsequently reported to the Queen.
They lead him to speak rudely and unamiably to his companions… and in consequence his playfulness… constantly degenerates into roughness and rudeness… The impulse to oppose is very strong… The Prince is conscious of not being so amiable as… he desires to be, or so forward as is expected for his age… In consequence he looks out for reproof and fancies advice even conveys a reproof beyond its mere words.
Although he rarely questioned Prince Albert’s rules for the Prince’s education — and the Queen, in consequence, considered him a far more satisfactory tutor than Birch — Gibbs did occasionally feel constrained to suggest some modification in their application. But apart from his success in having a few Etonians of impeccable character and family background admitted to the Castle to share one or other of the Prince’s organized pursuits, he was unable to shake Prince Albert’s confidence in the system so rigidly prescribed and practised. On one occasion at least he appealed to the Queen; but although the Queen admitted in confidence to her eldest daughter that ‘Papa … momentarily and unintentionally [could sometimes be] hasty and harsh’, she did not question the necessity for severity with the Prince of Wales.
The Prince responded to this severity with fear as well as violence. One of those few Etonians allowed into Windsor Castle, Charles WynnCarrington — who ‘always liked the Prince of Wales’ and thought that behind the aggression and intolerance lay an ‘open generous disposition and the kindest heart imaginable’ — was made aware of this fear.
‘He was afraid of his father,’ Wynn-Carrington wrote; and he did not find it surprising that this was so, for Prince Albert seemed to him ‘a proud, shy, stand-offish man, not calculated to make friends easily with children. Individually I was frightened to death of him so much so that on one occasion [when] he suddenly appeared from behind some bushes, I fell off the see-saw from sheer alarm at seeing him, and nearly broke my neck.’ Whenever other boys came over to Windsor, Prince Albert never left them alone with his son; and whenever the Prince of Wales went to Eton, as, for instance, to listen to the speeches on the annual celebrations of the Fourth of June, his father went with him. He also went with him to the annual speech days at Harrow. It seemed impossible to escape from his influence. And the Prince was never allowed to forget that he was being constantly and anxiously watched by him; and that by others he was for ever being compared — of course, unfavourably compared — with him. The Queen once informed her son in one of many similar letters:
Noneof you can ever be proud enough of being the child of such a Father who has not his equal in this world — so great, so good, so faultless. Try… to follow in his footsteps and don’t be discouraged, for to be really in everything like him none of you, I am sure, will ever be. Try, therefore, to be like him in some points, and you will have acquired a great deal.
But to be like his father even in some points appeared to the Prince a quite impossible aspiration. He knew that his father read the daily reports of his progress with anxiety and concern. He knew that he studied his essays and exercises with dismay, and that the entries in the Prince’s unwillingly kept diary were perused with profound dissatisfaction because they were so carelessly written and so ungrammatical, because the handwriting was not neat enough, because they were full of boring facts and contained no noble reflections or, indeed, any reflections at all. His historical essays were even worse. When writing on modern English history he was fairly reliable, but when he turned to ancient history his compositions were lamentable. One of them, limited to less than seven lines, began in utter confusion: ‘The war of Tarrentum, it was between Hannibal the Carthaginian General and the Romans, Hannibal was engaged in a war with it, for some time …’ The Prince knew only too well, in fact, that he was a failure and a disappointment to both his parents — ‘poor Bertie!’ Sir James Stephen was called in to examine him, and it was found that he could not even spell properly; so he was advised to master the etymologies of all Latin words basic to English and ‘scrupulously’ to consult a dictionary which ought to form part of the ‘furniture’ of his desk. But it was no good. His spelling remained bad, and his Latin was worse. He was taken to see the boys of Westminster School perform a Latin play, but he ‘understood not a word of it’ — ’poor Bertie!’