Beloved Albert, the Prince Consort, was, as Victoria frequently let Bertie know, ‘everything’ to her – ‘my father, my protector, my guide and adviser in all and everything, my mother (I might almost say) as well as my husband.’ Her intention was to model Bertie on his father. To mould him into a moral and intellectual paragon. ‘None of you,’ she told her children,
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.
Prince Albert read and studied avidly, disliked the company of women, never smoked and watered down his occasional glass of wine. He and Victoria ‘spent days and nights of worry and anxiety’ discussing every detail of Bertie’s physical, intellectual and moral training. He was to be ‘imbued with the indispensable necessity of practical morality’, keep company with ‘those who are good and pure’ and not mix with children because of ‘the mischief done by bad boys’. For six hours a day, six days a week and with scant holidays he was to be taught English, geography, calculating, handwriting, drawing, religion, music, German, French, archaeology, science, history, bricklaying, housekeeping, gymnastics, drill and more.
From the start Bertie was ‘markedly anti-studious’ and given to tantrums of stamping, screaming and throwing things around. His governess, Lady Lyttelton, reported when he was four that he was ‘uncommonly averse to learning’ and required ‘much patience’ for ‘wilful inattention’ and ‘constant interruptions’, such as getting under the table, upsetting his books and ‘sundry other anti-studious practices’.
His father responded with more demands. Male tutors worked on Bertie with a pressure that made him pathologically enraged. One, Henry Birch, was kind to him and Bertie used to leave presents and affectionate letters on his pillow. Birch, when he left, dared tell Prince Albert that Bertie’s
peculiarities arise from want of contact with boys of his own age, and from his being continually in the society of older persons, and from his finding himself the centre round which everything seems to move.
He was replaced in 1852 by Frederick Waymouth Gibbs who aspired to carry out Albert’s wishes in ‘exact obedience and subordination’. At the end of each day Victoria and Albert were given a report on Bertie’s ‘conduct and employment from hour to hour’. They read his essays and the journal he was compelled to keep.
Bertie passionately hated this tutor. An excerpt from Gibbs’s journal reads:
A very bad day. The P. of W. has been like a person half silly. I could not gain his attention. He was very rude, particularly in the afternoon, throwing stones in my face. During his lesson in the morning, he was running first in one place, then in another. He made faces and spat.
When Bertie was sixteen, Albert employed a rota of middle-aged tutors instructed to remember at all times ‘in deportment and dress’ that they were in attendance to the eldest son of the Queen. Their task was to fashion the man to wear the crown – the King, the first person in the land. Practical jokes, card games, billiards and gossip were forbidden. Even Bertie’s meals were prescribed: bread and butter and an egg for breakfast, meat, vegetables and Seltzer water for lunch and dinner. And no pudding.
Reform did not follow. Far from it. Bertie, sensing his parents and their henchmen had a nasty axe to grind, worked out a simple formula: however they exhorted him to behave he did the opposite, whatever they told him to remember he forgot. In adult life he loved practical jokes, parties, gambling, illicit sex, ten-course meals, fat cigars and claret with his cake at teatime. He liked the company of wayward men and shunned anything bookish. Even his handwriting was scarcely legible. His hedonism and philandering mirrored his parents’ passion to mould and control him. Victorian values led to Edwardian rebellion.
Victoria put it down to ‘tainted blood’ from her uncles in his veins. She said he was living proof of her ‘unregenerate Hanoverian self’. ‘I am in utter despair’ she wrote to her daughter Vicky in 1858 when Bertie was seventeen:
The systematic idleness, laziness – disregard of everything – is enough to break one’s heart and fills me with indignation … Handsome I cannot think him, with that painfully small and narrow head, those immense features and total want of chin.
She said there was nothing innately good in him and she feared for the country if ever he became king. ‘His only safety and the country’s is in his implicit reliance in every thing on dearest Papa that perfection of human beings.’
Sent to Oxford in 1859 Bertie made friends with the Marquis of Hastings, who breakfasted on claret and mackerel cooked in gin. Two years later he went to Cambridge to learn history. In September, on vacation from the university, he was attached to the Grenadier Guards at Curragh Camp near Dublin. Albert wanted him, in three months, to ‘learn the duties of every grade from ensign upwards’, ‘be competent to command a battalion’ and ‘to manoeuvre a Brigade in the Field’.
Bertie was hopeless at it, his orders indistinct, his grasp of drill negligible. In line with his genuine preoccupations he started an affair with Nellie Clifden, actress and camp favourite of the guardsmen. The story reached The Times, the Queen and Albert. ‘The agony and misery of this day’ Victoria wrote, ‘… broke my Angel’s heart.’
On 16 November her Angel wrote to his fallen son ‘in the greatest pain I have yet felt in this life’. Bertie, he said, was the talk of the town and Nellie Clifden already nicknamed the Princess of Wales.
