Nor had his occasional holidays been particularly amusing. In 1856, travelling incognito as Lord Renfrew, he had gone on a walking tour in Dorset with the uncongenial Mr Gibbs and another man, Colonel Cavendish, a groom-in-waiting to Prince Albert, even older than Gibbs. The next year there had been another walking tour, this time in the Lake District and with four carefully selected young companions and the Revd Charles Tarver. But although he had quite enjoyed himself from time to time, particularly when he and one of the other boys had chased a flock of sheep into Lake Windermere, the tour was rather blighted from the outset by his being required to write an essay entitled ‘Friends and Flatterers’. Also in 1857, he had been sent to the Continent, to Germany, Switzerland and France, in the company of his father’s secretary, Major-General Charles Grey, Colonel Henry Ponsonby, Gibbs, Tarver and a doctor. But this tour had been specifically described as being ‘for the purposes of study’, and he had had to keep a diary which had been sent home in instalments to his father, who objected to his setting down the ‘mere bare facts’ instead of giving his impressions and opinions. The Prince had also been asked to contribute to a notebook entitled ‘Wit and Whoppers’ in which were recorded, amongst other things, the atrocious puns concocted by his companions on their travels; and this, too, had to be shown to his father, who could have derived as little satisfaction from its perusal as from the Prince’s diary.
The Prince was considered likeable enough by his fellow-tourists. Even the aged and discriminating Prince Metternich, with whom the party dined in his castle at Niederwald, found him ‘pleasant to everyone’. The Prince, in turn, described Metternich in his journal as ‘a very nice old gentleman and very like the late Duke of Wellington’. But his companions noted that the Prince of Wales seemed rather uneasy, if not bored by their host’s conversation and recollections; and Metternich was forced to conclude that there was after all about the young man an ‘air embarrasse et très triste’.
For the Prince of Wales the highlight of the tour was an evening at Königswinter where he got a little drunk and kissed a pretty girl. The Chancellor of the Exchequer’s sixteen-year-old son, William Henry Gladstone, who was a member of the party, wrote home to describe the incident which his father categorized as a ‘little squalid debauch’. It confirmed the Chancellor in his belief ‘that the Prince of Wales has not been educated up to his position. This sort of unworthy little indulgence is the compensation. Kept in childhood beyond his time, he is allowed to make that childhood what it should never be in a prince, or anyone else, namely wanton.’
But now, so the Prince happily supposed when he heard that Colonel Bruce was to be his governor, he was not ‘to be kept in childhood’ any longer. He gathered from his parents’ letter which had moved him to such floods of tears that he was going to have much more independence, and much more money. The year before he had been given an annual allowance of £100 and granted permission to choose his own clothes, payment for which did not have to come out of the allowance. Yet while he had been assured that his parents did not wish to control his tastes and fancies, he had at the same time been warned that they did expect him never to wear anything ‘extravagant or slang’ or to identify himself with the ‘foolish and worthless persons’ who dressed ‘loudly’, because this would ‘prove a want of self-respect and be an offence against decency, leading — as it has often done in others — to an indifference to what is morally wrong’. His new allowance was to be £500, and he gathered that he would be able to exercise far greater freedom of choice in the manner of his spending it. Also, he was to be allowed to achieve a long-felt ambition and join the army.
For as long as he could remember he had wanted to do this, and had been encouraged in his ambition by his mother’s cousin, the Commander-in-Chief of the army, the Duke of Cambridge, of whom he had always been fond and who, in turn, considered his nephew ‘really a charming and unaffected lad’. When the Prince had been given his first Windsor uniform he had blushed with pleasure. And he had shown equal pleasure when the former French King, Louis Philippe, after a visit to Windsor, had given him a toy gun as a replacement for one he had told the King he had lost. It had been noticed with what pride and awe he had looked upon the regiments marching past at Aldershot after the Crimean War and with what rapt attention he had listened to young officers describing their exploits at the front. His admiration was boundless for such military monarchs as the King of Sardinia, that ‘great, strong, burly, athletic man’, who had shown him a sword that could slice off an ox’s head at a blow, the only Knight of the Garter that the Duchess of Sutherland had ever seen ‘who looked as if he would have the best of it with the dragon’.
The Prince had told his mother of his military ambitions on a walk with her soon after his fifteenth birthday. He had been ‘very sensible and amiable on that occasion’, although she had had to tell him that, as heir to the throne, he could never serve in the army, though he ‘might learn in it’. He had not minded that so much at the time, but he was now distressed to discover that he was not even to be allowed to learn in it as others did. He was to be gazetted a lieutenant-colonel without taking any of the usual examinations, which it was feared he might not pass. At the same time he found that the freedom to which he had so eagerly been looking forward under his new governor was to be severely curtailed. He was not even to be permitted to leave the house without seeking the approval of Colonel Bruce, who was reminded that in the execution of his ‘momentous trust’ he was strictly to ‘regulate all the Prince’s movements, the distribution and employment of his time, and the occupation and details of his daily life’. Bruce was furthermore to instil into his charge ‘habits of reflection and self-denial, the strictest truthfulness and honour, above all the conscientious discharge of his duty towards God and man’.
The truth was that his parents had no more confidence in the Prince’s ability to regulate his own life properly than they had in the likelihood of his passing the army examination. They both continued to criticize him severely, to compare him unfavourably with his brothers and sisters, and to dread the thought of what might happen to the monarchy if he were to succeed to the throne in his present lamentable state of development.
‘Bertie continues such an anxiety,’ the Queen wrote to her eldest daughter in Germany in April 1859.
I tremble at the thought of only three years and a half before us — when he will be of age and we can’t hold him except by moral power! I try to shut my eyes to that terrible moment! He is improving very decidedly — but Oh! it is the improvement of such a poor or still more idle intellect. Oh! dear, what would happen if I were to die next winter. It is too awful a contemplation. His journal is worse a great deal than Affie’s [Prince Alfred’s] letters. And all from laziness! Still we must hope for improvement in essentials; but the greatest improvement I fear, will never make him fit for his position. His only safety — and the country’s — is his implicit reliance in everything, on dearest Papa, that perfection of human beings!
‘I feel very sad about him,’ she told her daughter on another occasion, ‘he is so idle and so weak. God grant that he may take things more to heart and be more serious for the future.’ He was such ‘a very dull companion’ compared with his brothers, who were ‘all so amusing and communicative’. ‘When I see [Affie] and Arthur and look at … ! (You know what I mean!) I am in utter despair! The systematic idleness, laziness — disregard of everything is enough to break one’s heart, and fills me with indignation.’ Even his physique depressed her. She had thought him ‘growing so handsome’ when he had returned from his continental tour; but now, in reply to his sister’s commendation of his good looks, she complained of his small head, his big Coburg nose, his protuberant Hanoverian eyes, his shortness, his receding chin, his tendency to fat, ‘the effeminate and girlish’ way he wore his hair. ‘His nose and mouth are too enormous,’ she wrote when he was eighteen, and ‘he pastes his hair down to his head and wears his clothes frightfully … That coiffure is really too hideous with his small head and enormous features.’ As for his voice, it sometimes made her ‘so nervous’ she ‘could hardly bear it’. When he was created a Knight of the Garter in November 1858 she noticed how knock-kneed his legs appeared in court dress. Later she commented disapprovingly upon his ‘pallor, dull, heavy, blas? look’. His heart was warm and affectionate, she had to admit; but ‘O, dear!’