Even so, there were occasional days of pleasure. He afterwards remembered how much he had enjoyed going out hunting and deerstalking, fishing and shooting with his father, though hard as he practised he never learned to shoot very well. He remembered, too, the pride he had felt at being allowed to attend the naval review off Spithead and the funeral of the Duke of Wellington; to stand on the balcony at Buckingham Palace and wave good-bye to the soldiers marching to Portsmouth to fight in the war against Russia; to watch from the deck of the Fairy, as the huge fleet sailed for the Baltic; to accompany his mother on an inspection of the new military camp at Aldershot; to stand by her as she distributed medals to returning soldiers at the Horse Guards; and to sit on his pony beside her in Hyde Park while she gave out the first Victoria Crosses. He recalled the delight he had experienced at being taken with his brothers and sisters to the zoo and the pantomime, to Astley’s circus, and the opera at Covent Garden; the excitement when Wombwell’s menagerie visited Windsor Castle, when General Tom Thumb, the American dwarf from Barnum’s ‘Greatest Show on Earth’, came to Buckingham Palace; and when Albert Smith, who related so vividly his adventures while climbing Mont Blanc, gave a lecture at Osborne. He remembered also the plays which Charles Kean and Samuel Phelps put on at Windsor Castle before presenting them in London at the Princess’s Theatre and Sadler’s Wells; the performances at Balmoral of the marvellous conjuror, John Henry Anderson, the ‘Wizard of the North’ — of course, so the Prince confided to one of his father’s guests, ‘Papa [knew] how all these things [were] done’ — and the visits to the waxworks at the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, particularly the representations of the dreadful Thugs of India — though his enthusiasm for these was rather dampened when Baron Stockmar sternly reminded him that he was ‘born in a Christian and enlightened age in which such atrocious acts are not even dreamt of’.
The Prince also recalled with pleasure his first trip across the Channel to spend six days with his great-uncle, King Leopold of the Belgians, at the royal palace of Laeken; the excursions from Cowes in the royal yacht; and the exciting races for the America’s Cup. But he longed for independence, to know more of life beyond the walls of Buckingham Palace and the terraces of Windsor, to escape from the suffocating confines of his parents’ court. When he was thirteen in August 1855, he went to Paris with them on a state visit to Napoleon III. Lord Clarendon, the Foreign Secretary, who was instructed to keep an eye on him and to tell him how to behave, thought that the Queen’s severity was ‘very injudicious’. Certainly the boy was constantly asking questions while rarely giving his full attention to the answers. But the Prince’s manners and behaviour were perfectly respectable. Lord Clarendon had to admit, though, that there might well be trouble with him later on: he would probably be ‘difficult to manage, as he evidently [had] a will of his own and [was] rather positive and opinionated.’ In his carriage one day Clarendon had been obliged to contradict something that the Prince had said; but the Prince, quite unabashed, had riposted, ‘At all events, that is my opinion.’ To this Clarendon had sharply replied, ‘Then your Royal Highness’s opinion is quite wrong.’ The rebuke had seemed to surprise the Prince a good deal.
For his own part, the Prince had never enjoyed himself more than he did in Paris; and he left it with obvious regret, looking intently all around him, the Countess d’Armaille noticed at the Gare de Strasbourg, ‘as though anxious to lose nothing’ of his last moments there. He had been intoxicated by the excitement of their welcome; the ‘roar of cannon, bands and drums and cheers’; his first glimpses of a city he was to grow to love; the pretty, beautifully dressed ladies in the Tuileries. He never forgot the fireworks at the Versailles ball; nor kneeling down in his Highland dress beside his mother to say a prayer at the tomb of Napoleon I while the thunder rolled above them in the stormy sky and the French generals wept; nor how he had hero-worshipped the romantic and mysterious Emperor to whom he had confided one afternoon as they drove round Paris together, ‘I should like to be your son.’
He adored the Empress Eugenie, from whom next year he was much excited to receive a lock of her hair entwined with a hair of the Emperor’s and a wisp of her baby son’s; and he pleaded with her to let him and his sister stay behind for a few days on their own. The Empress replied that she was afraid that the Queen and Prince Albert could not do without them. ‘Not do without us!’ the Prince protested. ‘Don’t fancy that, for there are six more of us at home, and they don’t want us.’
He really felt it to be true. When they got home he was sent away immediately to Osborne with his tutors to make up for the lessons he had missed while he had been in France. ‘Poor Bertie’ was ‘pale and trembling’ when his mother and father took leave of him, the Queen recorded in her journal. ‘The poor dear child’ was ‘much affected’ at the prospect of this ‘first long separation’. But whether the Prince’s emotion was due, as the Queen thought, to his sadness at parting from his parents, or, as we may suppose more likely, to his dread of returning to the unremitting grind of his lessons, it was certain that once he had gone the Queen did not much miss him. As she confessed to the Queen of Prussia that autumn, ‘Even here [at Balmoral] when Albert is often away all day long, I find no special pleasure in the company of the elder children … and only very occasionally do I find the rather intimate intercourse with them either easy or agreeable.’ When they were naughty she found them intolerable, and was insistent that they be punished even more severely than their father would have approved. Two years after the state visit to Paris, Prince Albert confided in Lord Clarendon that he regretted this ‘aggressive’ behaviour of the Queen, that he ‘had always been embarrassed by the alarm which he felt lest [her] mind should be excited by any opposition to her will; and that, in regard to the children, the disagreeable office of punishment had always fallen on him’. But Clarendon thought that Prince Albert himself had always been quite as severe with the Prince of Wales as the Queen had asked him to be with the Princess Royal.
2
‘A Private Student’
The more I think of it, the more I see the difficulties of the Prince being thrown together with other young men.
After the unsettling excitement of Paris, the Prince felt more frustrated than ever by the restraints imposed upon him in England. He teased and harangued the younger children until the sound of his voice jangled the Queen’s nerves unbearably; he exasperated the footmen by jumping out at them and throwing dust on their clean uniforms; he continued to lose his temper and scream at the slightest provocation. An essentially affectionate child, he had no one to lavish his affections on. He could not get close to his father; he strongly felt the disapproval of his mother; he had been parted from his brother Alfred, to whom, so their mother said, his ‘devotion was great and very pleasing to see’, because it was felt that separation would be good for them both. He felt ‘very low’ after this parting and was allowed to sit with his mother while she had her dinner though she could do but little to comfort him. He was always well behaved on these occasions, and did his best to talk in a sensible, grown-up way. Indeed, guests at Windsor could scarcely believe what a trial he was to his family. Colonel Henry Ponsonby, who joined the household in 1857 as Prince Albert’s equerry, thought the fifteen year-old Prince of Wales ‘very lively and pleasant’. He was taken up to the Prince’s room — ‘such a comfortable room and very full of ship models’ — and afterwards wrote to tell his mother, Lady Emily Ponsonby, that the Prince was ‘one of the nicest boys’ he had ever seen.