A few months later, at the beginning of 1858, the Prince had to go down to Gravesend to say good-bye to his seventeen-year-old sister, Victoria, who was sailing for Potsdam with her husband, Prince Frederick William of Prussia, whom she had married a week before. He loved Victoria, though he knew that she had always been their father’s favourite and he had had to suffer constant comparisons with her intelligence, grace and dignity. She was, he reported, ‘in a terrible state when she took leave of her beloved Papa’; and the Prince of Wales, taking pity on her sorrow, felt all the more deeply his own, weeping when it was time to kiss her good-bye. She wrote to him regularly thereafter and, though he hated writing letters, he replied to her almost as often.
It was decided that year that the Prince’s educational system should be modified. At the beginning of April he was dispatched to White Lodge in Richmond Park where, in the care of Mr Gibbs and the Revd Charle Feral Tarver, his Latin tutor and personal chaplain, he was to be kept ‘away from the world’ for some months and turned into the ‘first gentleman of the country’ in respect of ‘outward deportment and manners’. To assist them in this task Gibbs and Tarver were to have ‘three very distinguished young men of from twenty-three to twenty-six years of age’ who were to occupy, in monthly rotation, a kind of equerry’s place about the Prince from whose ‘more intimate intercourse’ the Prince Consort anticipated ‘no small benefit to Bertie’. These three men were Major Christopher Teesdale, Major Robert Lindsay (both of whom had won the V.C. in the Crimea) and Lord Valletort, ‘a thoroughly good, moral and accomplished’ young man who had foregone a public-school education to pass his youth in attendance on his invalid father, the Earl of Mount Edgecumbe.
These three young nonpareils were reminded by the Prince Consort in a lengthy private memorandum that
a gentleman does not indulge in careless self-indulgent lounging ways, such as lolling in armchairs or on sofas, slouching in his chair, or placing himself in unbecoming attitudes with his hands in his pockets … He must borrow nothing from the fashions of the groom or the gamekeeper, and whilst avoiding the frivolity and foolish vanity of dandyism, will take care that his clothes are of the best quality … well made and suitable to his rank and position.
The Prince of Wales must always be made to remember that ‘the manners and conduct of a gentleman towards others are founded on the basis of kindness, consideration and the absence of selfishness’ and must avoid ‘anything approaching to a practical joke’. ‘The most scrupulous civility’ should characterize his ‘manner and conduct towards others’, and he must never indulge in ‘satirical or bantering expressions’. He must have ‘some knowledge of those studies and pursuits which adorn society’ while shunning gossip, cards and billiards. In conversation he must be trained to ‘take the lead and should be able to find something to say beyond mere questions as to health and the weather’. He must ‘devote some of his leisure time to music, to fine arts, either drawing or looking over drawings, engravings, etc., to hearing poetry, amusing books or good plays read aloud’.
Within three months, however, it became clear that the White Lodge experiment was not proving a success, that the Prince of Wales was bored to death by the ‘amusing books’ which he was required to read, such as the novels of Walter Scott and the memoirs of Saint-Simon; and that he made very heavy weather of the dinner parties at which it was hoped the conversation of such eminent men as Lord John Russell and Professor Richard Owen, the naturalist, would stir his lazy mind. It was obvious, in fact, that the Prince’s educational system, as supervised by Mr Gibbs, could no longer be continued.
‘Poor Mr Gibbs certainly failed during the last two years entirely, incredibly, and did Bertie no good,’ the Queen wrote to her daughter, Princess Frederick William, in Berlin. He had ‘no influence’, Robert Lindsay, gentleman-in-waiting to the Prince of Wales’s Household, confirmed to the Prince Consort’s private secretary.
He and the Prince are so much out of sympathy with one another that a wish expressed by Mr Gibbs is sure to meet with opposition on the part of the Prince … 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 to one another. I confess I quite understand the Prince’s feeling towards Mr Gibbs, for tho’ I respect his uprightness and devotion, I could not [myself] give him sympathy, confidence or friendship.
It was decided, therefore, that Mr Gibbs would have to retire, and that Lord Elgin’s rather dour and strict but fundamentally goodnatured brother, Colonel the Hon. Robert Bruce, would be appointed the Prince’s governor, with the Revd Charles Tarver, whom the Prince quite liked, as director of studies. In a letter explaining to the Prince what this would mean to him, his parents made it clear that, although the governor would report on his progress, the reports would not be the kind of communications submitted by Mr Birch: the Prince was now to be responsible directly to his parents and to learn to be responsible for himself. He was to have rooms allotted to his ‘sole use in order to give [him] an opportunity of learning how to occupy [himself] unaided by others and to utilize [his] time in the best manner’. Although he was solemnly reminded that life was ‘composed of duties, and that in the due, punctual, and cheerful performance of them the true Christian, true soldier and true gentleman [was] recognized’, the Prince was touched both by the generally sympathetic tone of the letter and by the relative freedom which it seemed to promise. He showed the letter to Gerald Wellesley, the Dean of Windsor, and burst into ‘floods of tears’.
He was already seventeen and his life up to now seemed to him to have been peculiarly uneventful. His few adventures had been very modest: he had been on a pheasant shoot in 1849 when his father had told him and Lord Grey to leave the line and capture a wounded bird, and when — despite Prince Albert’s assurances to the Queen that no one would shoot in that direction — Lord Canning had wounded Grey in the head and had himself immediately fainted. The next year the Prince of Wales had been in the Queen’s carriage in the Park when a retired lieutenant of the Tenth Hussars had pressed forward through the crowd and hit her as hard as he could over the eye; the colour, the Queen noted, had rushed into ‘poor Bertie’s’ face. There had also been the time when his pony had run away with him, and the Queen had thought it advisable not to tell his father anything about it for fear of upsetting him. But nothing else very dramatic had ever happened to him.