Christopher Hibbert - Edward VII - The Last Victorian King

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:

None of you can everbe proud enough of being the childof such a Father who has not hisequal in this world — so great, so good, so faultless. Try… to follow in his footsteps and don’t be discouraged, for to be reallyin everything like him noneof you, I am sure, will ever be. Try, therefore, to be like him in somepoints, 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!’

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’.