Christopher Hibbert - Edward VII - The Last Victorian King

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.

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.’