Dreadnought

  Bertie, installed in the nursery with an English and a German governess, began to speak bilingually; later, a visitor observed that the royal children “spoke German like their native tongue.”18 Bertie’s first words were mocked by his precocious older sister, and the Queen worried that her son “had been injured by being with the Princess Royal19 who was very clever and a child far above her age. She puts him down by a word or a look.” Despite their squabbles, brother and sister were close.

  Queen Victoria gave birth four times in her first four years of marriage, six times in her first eight years, nine times in all. Surprisingly in that era, all of her children lived to adulthood. She did not enjoy the process of childbearing. “What you say of the pride20 of giving life to an immortal soul is very fine, dear, but I own I cannot enter into that,” she wrote eighteen years later when Vicky as Crown Princess of Prussia wrote rapturously about the birth of William, her own first child. “I think much more of our being like a cow or a dog at such moments when our poor nature becomes so very animal and unecstatic.”

  Prince Albert took primary charge of the children’s education. His best pupil was his bright, adoring daughter Vicky; his most difficult the genial, stammering Prince of Wales, Albert decreed that Bertie could not be brought up as other boys—even other royal sons. The Heir to the Throne must waste none of his precious youth. Every day, every hour was planned. A platoon of tutors, carefully selected and rigidly monitored by Prince Albert, administered the program, while Prince Albert drafted the syllabi. Six days a week were crammed with Latin, French, German, algebra, geometry, and history. Bertie was required to write historical essays in German and French as well as in English. Meal hours (nine A.M., two P.M., and seven P.M.) and diets (“Luncheon: meat and vegetables,21 pudding best avoided”) were established. Every night his tutors submitted a written report on his work. Unfortunately, the greater the effort invested, the smaller the apparent reward. Bertie did not learn; almost, it seemed, refused to learn. The result was redoubled effort, more syllabi, timetables more densely crammed—and a heavier flow of worried notes between tutors and royal parents. Bertie came to hate every book put in front of him. There were no other boys to play with. Prince Albert could find no hours in his son’s schedule to be set aside for romping; besides, there was always the danger, even from titled boys, of contamination by frivolity. When, on the rarest occasions, boys from Eton were invited across the river to Windsor Castle to play with Bertie, Prince Albert was present to oversee and intimidate.

  At the age of fifteen, Bertie was given a small allowance from which he was permitted to purchase his own ties and hats. The Queen used the occasion to deliver a lecture on dress: “Dress... [is] the one outward sign22 from which people in general judge upon the internal state of mind and feeling of a person.... We do not wish to control your own taste and fancies, which on the contrary, we wish you to indulge and develop, but we do expect that you will never wear anything extravagant or slang, not because we don’t like it but because it would prove a want of self-respect and be an offence against decency, leading—as it has often done before in others—to an indifference to what is morally wrong.” Prince Albert gave further advice two years later when Bertie reached seventeen and was appointed a Colonel in the British Army. “A gentleman,” said Prince Albert, “does not indulge23 in careless, self-indulgent lounging ways, such as lolling in armchairs or on sofas, slouching in his gait,” or standing about “with his hands in his pockets.” “Satirical or bantering expressions” were considered vulgar and “a practical joke should never be permitted.” In conversation, Bertie should be able to “take the lead and... find something to say beyond mere questions as to health and the weather.” The supreme example, constantly placed before Bertie by the Queen, was his father. Repeatedly, Queen Victoria urged her children to emulate this matchless being. “You may well join24 us in thanking God for joining to us all your dearest, perfect Father,” she wrote when Bertie was fifteen. “None of you 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, all of you, 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.”

  Bertie struggled to please, but usually disappointed. When he was seventeen, Queen Victoria wrote to Vicky, who had married Prince Frederick of Prussia, “I feel very sad about him.25 He is so idle and weak.” Not long after, she complained again: “Oh dear, what would happen if I were to die next winter! One trembles to think of it. It is too awful a contemplation.... The greatest improvement 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 being!” Prince Albert, sending Bertie to visit Vicky in Berlin, tried to look on the bright side. “You will find Bertie grown up26 and improved,” he wrote to his daughter. “Do not miss any opportunity of urging him to hard work. Our united effort must be directed to this end. Unfortunately, he takes no interest in anything but clothes, and again clothes. Even when out shooting, he is more occupied with his trousers than with the game.” During this visit, Prince Albert wrote again, describing his son to his daughter: “Bertie has a remarkable social talent.27 He is lively, quick and sharp when his mind is set on anything, which is seldom.... But usually his intellect is of no more use than a pistol packed in the bottom of a trunk if one were attacked in the robber-infested Apennines.”

  At seventeen, in October 1859, the Prince of Wales began the first of four terms at the college of Christ Church, Oxford, where his efforts provoked his father to sigh, “Bertie’s propensity is undescribable laziness.28 I never in my life met such a thorough and cunning lazybones.” Even Bertie’s dutiful handing over of his diary for inspection brought Albert’s criticism of its lack of analysis and reflection. Gamely, Bertie apologized. “I am very sorry29 that you were not pleased with my journal as I took pains with it, but I see the justice of your remarks and will try to profit by them.”

  Bertie’s first independent success came in North America. In July 1860, the Prince of Wales sailed on a tour of eastern Canada and the United States. At Niagara Falls, he stood on the Canadian side and saw the famous French acrobat Blondin cross from the American side on a tightrope, pushing a man in a wheelbarrow. Offered royal congratulations, Blondin proposed that the Prince come back with him in the wheelbarrow. Bertie eagerly accepted, but his advisors intervened and Blondin walked back across the falls on stilts. In the United States, then on the verge of civil war, the Heir to the British Throne traveled incognito as “Baron Renfrew.” No one was fooled and in Philadelphia, which he declared the handsomest American city he had seen, the audience stood spontaneously and sang “God Save the Queen.” He passed through Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and Richmond, and in Washington was greeted by President Buchanan, who escorted him to Mount Vernon. In New York City, after a parade down Broadway, the Prince was the guest of honor at a ball at the Academy of Music. Two thousand uninvited guests pushed their way in with the result that just as Bertie arrived, the floor sagged three feet. He visited Boston, met Longfellow, Emerson, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, and sailed from Portland, Maine, at the end of October. The Queen was proud of his success and wrote to Vicky, “He was immensely popular30 everywhere and really deserves the highest praise.”

  To channel this new maturity, the Prince’s parents decided that he should be married. Vicky eagerly undertook the assignment of Continental scout, compiling lists of eligible Protestant princesses who might meet her mother’s specifications: “good looks, health,31 education, character, intellect, and a good disposition.” Eventually, Vicky proposed a candidate: “She is a good deal taller32 than I am, has a lovely figure, but very thin, a complexion as beautiful as possible. Very fine, white, regular teeth and very fine large eyes... with extremely prettily marked eyebrow
s... as simple, natural, and unaffected as possible... graceful... bewitching... indescribably charming.” Queen Victoria, impressed by this torrent of adjectives, pronounced the young woman “a pearl not to be lost.”33

  The pearl was sixteen-year-old Princess Alexandra of Denmark, eldest daughter of Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein. A cousin of King Frederick VII of Denmark, Prince Christian had no money other than what he earned as an officer in the Danish Guards. He and his wife lived in an unpretentious house in Copenhagen with a front door opening directly onto a cobbled street. Nevertheless, despite modest circumstances, they managed to bring up six children, four of whom were to sit upon thrones: his eldest son Frederick as King Frederick VIII of Denmark, his daughter Alexandra as Queen of England, his son William as King George I of Greece, and his daughter Dagmar as Empress Marie Feodorovna of Russia. During their childhood, Alexandra and Dagmar (called Alix and Minny), three years separated in age, were rarely apart. They shared a small bedroom, studied English, German, and French side by side, and learned music from their mother and gymnastics from their father. In appearance and character, however, the two were quite different. Princess Dagmar was short, dark, clever, quick-witted, while Princess Alexandra, with her soft brown hair and deep blue eyes, was affectionate with everyone, sleepily uninterested in books and politics, and—as pronounced by Queen Victoria after seeing a photograph—“outrageously beautiful.”34

  Negotiations to acquire the Danish pearl began while the husband-to-be spent the summer in an Irish training camp with the Grenadier Guards. During this service, a group of sporting young officers spirited a young woman named Nellie Clifden into Bertie’s bed. Nellie, who had known a whole regiment of officers, could not help bragging about this particular conquest. In September, the Prince departed for Germany and, in company with Vicky, traveled incognito to meet Princess Alexandra “by chance” while strolling through a church. Vicky reported the results to Windsor: “Alix has made an impression35 on Bertie, though in his own funny and undemonstrative way. He said to me that he had never seen a young lady who pleased him so much.” For the moment, that was as far as the Prince was willing to go. Prince Albert wrote sternly to his son, stressing the importance of a marriage and the appeal of this exceptional candidate. Still, Bertie held back. The probable cause revealed itself in mid-November when rumors concerning Nellie Clifden, swirling through the clubs of London, reached Prince Albert’s ears. He wrote to Bertie “with a heavy heart36 on a subject which has caused me the greatest pain I have yet felt in this life.” The malefactor confessed and his father forgave him, encouraging him to “fight a valiant fight”37 and go ahead with an early marriage. “You must not, you dare not, be lost. The consequences for this country and for the world would be too dreadful!” Albert traveled to Cambridge, where Bertie was enrolled at Trinity College, took a long walk with his son, and came home pleased by Bertie’s contrition but physically exhausted. A few days later he wrote to his daughter: “I am at a very low ebb.38 Much worry and great sorrow (about which I beg you not to ask questions) have robbed me of sleep during the past fortnight. In this shattered state I had a heavy catarrh and for the past four days am suffering from headache and pains in my limbs which may develop into rheumatism.”

  In fact, Prince Albert had typhoid fever, the deadly killer of the nineteenth century. The Queen, in disbelieving horror, sat by Albert’s bed while he wavered between clarity and delirium. In lucid moments, the two whispered to each other in German. On December 14, with the Queen kneeling beside him and the Prince of Wales standing at the end of the bed, Prince Albert died. He was forty-two; Victoria, now alone, was also forty-two. “He was my life,” sobbed the Queen. “How am I alive39... I who prayed daily that we might die together and I never survive him! I who felt when in those blessed Arms clasped and held tight in the sacred Hours at night—when the world seemed only to be ourselves and that nothing could part us! I felt so very secure.”

  The Queen was convinced that what she called “Bertie’s fall” was at least in part responsible for Prince Albert’s death. “Oh, that Boy40—much as I pity, I never can or shall look at him without a shudder,” she wrote to Vicky. Nevertheless, the wedding project was not cancelled, and Queen Victoria asked Vicky to explain to Alexandra’s parents about Nellie Clifden: “that wicked wretches41 had led our poor innocent boy into a scrape which had caused his beloved father and myself the deepest pain... but that both of us had forgiven him the one sad mistake... and that I was very confident he would make a steady Husband....”

  In September Bertie met Alexandra at a palace in Belgium and there, walking in a garden, he proposed. He described the moment to his mother: “After a few commonplace remarks42... I asked how she liked our country and if she would some day come to England and how long she would remain. She said she hoped some time. I said that I hoped she would remain always there and offered her my hand and my heart. She immediately said Yes. But I told her not to answer too quickly but to consider over it. She said she had long ago. I then asked her if she liked me. She said Yes. I then kissed her hand and she kissed me.” Two days later, writing again to his mother, Bertie gave his feelings greater rein: “I frankly avow43 to you that I did not think it possible to love a person as I do her. She is so good and kind.”

  Alexandra came to England to become acquainted with the Queen while Bertie set off on a Mediterranean cruise with Vicky and her husband, Frederick of Prussia. By day, the seventeen-year-old Alexandra wrote letters to her twenty-two-year-old fiancé; at night she sat with Queen Victoria and listened to stories about Prince Albert. Her charm captivated the Queen, who wrote her ultimate approval in her diary: “How beloved Albert44 would have loved her!” The wedding took place at Windsor Castle on March 10, 1863. During a dinner earlier that week, the queen, “feeling desolate,” remained in her rooms. But immediately before the meal, “dear, gentle Alix45 knocked at the door, peeped in, and came and knelt before me with that sweet, loving expression which spoke volumes. I was much moved and kissed her again.” The day before the ceremony, Queen Victoria took the engaged couple to the Frogmore mausoleum, where Albert lay enshrined. She placed Alix’s hand in Bertie’s, took both of them in her arms, and declared, “He gives you his blessing!”46 Alexandra already considered herself fortunate. The morning of the wedding she said to Vicky, “You may think that I like47 marrying Bertie for his position; but if he were a cowboy I would love him just the same and would marry no one else.”

  Ten months after her marriage, the Princess of Wales rose abruptly from watching her husband play ice hockey, rushed home, and delivered a son. Conforming to Queen Victoria’s wish that all of her male descendants should be named Albert and all of her female descendants Victoria, the child was formally named Albert Victor Christian Edward (in the family, he was Eddy). The birth coincided with a dramatic and painful political event. On November 15, 1863, Princess Alexandra’s father had succeeded to the Danish throne as King Christian IX. Ignoring an international treaty, he immediately annexed the partially independent duchies of Schleswig and Holstein into the Danish kingdom. The German Confederation objected and Prussia sent troops against the Danes, resulting in the first foreign victory of the Prussian minister-president, Otto von Bismarck. This war divided the British royal family. The Queen and her daughter Vicky, now Crown Princess of Prussia, were pro-German; Princess Alexandra, weeping bitterly for her own “poor Papa,” along with Bertie, the government, and most of the press, strongly supported Denmark. Eventually, the Queen enforced domestic peace at Windsor by decreeing that the subject of Schleswig-Holstein not be discussed. Two years later, when Prussia itself annexed the duchies, Alexandra was permanently embittered. Years later, when Kaiser William II made her second son, Prince George, an honorary Colonel in a Prussian regiment, Alexandra spluttered: “So, my Georgie boy48 has become a real life, filthy, blue-coated, Picklehaube German soldier!!! Well, I never thought to have lived to see that!”

  In 1867, twenty-two-year-old Alexandr
a came down with rheumatic fever. The attack began in February and it was July before she could be wheeled into the garden. Bertie, at first solicitous, soon grew bored. “The Princess had another bad night,”49 wrote an indignant lady-in-waiting, “chiefly owing to the Prince promising to come in at 1 A.M., and keeping her in a perpetual fret, refusing to take her opiate for fear she should be asleep when he came! And he never came until 3 A.M.!” The illness left Alexandra with a permanently stiff knee and a limp. It also triggered a form of hereditary deafness, which worsened as the years passed.

  For many years after Prince Albert’s death, Queen Victoria withdrew, dividing her time between Windsor Castle and two houses which Albert had designed, Balmoral in the Scottish Highlands and Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. Her ministers, when they wished and needed to see her, traveled. She refused to accept the Prince Consort’s absence. His rooms were left for forty years as if he were alive and might walk in. Every evening, his clothes were laid out with warm water and a fresh towel. His coats and trousers, hanging in his closets, were rigorously brushed and pressed. In their bedrooms, the Queen hung his portrait over the empty pillow. She fell asleep clutching his nightshirt and kept a cast of his hand on her night table so that she might reach out and hold it. As, in the Queen’s mind, Albert still lived, she must be the messenger who could interpret his wishes and be certain that his commands were carried out. On this, Victoria was grimly determined. “I am anxious to repeat50... that my firm resolve, my irrevocable decision, [is] that his wishes—his plans—about everything, his views about everything are to be my law. And no human power will make me swerve from what he decided and wished! I am also determined that no one person—may he be ever so good, ever so devoted... is to lead or guide or dictate to me. I know how he would disapprove it.”