Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter by Diana Souhami

Author:Diana Souhami
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-12-18T16:00:00+00:00

THREE

When Bertie began his ‘small Mrs George dinners’ in 1898, his mother, Queen Victoria, had been on the throne for sixty-one years. She had two to go. Her fat and wayward son, though fifty-eight, was denied a role. She did not let him represent her. It would, she said, be ‘quite irregular and improper’ for him to have copies of Cabinet reports. She vetoed the proposal even that he should be President of the Society of Arts. The power was hers – crown, sceptre, orb, the lot – and she was not going to share them with her son and heir:

no one can represent the Sovereign but Her, or Her Consort … Her Majesty thinks it would be most undesirable to constitute the Heir to the Crown a general representative of Herself, and particularly to bring Him forward too frequently before the people. This would necessarily place the Prince of Wales in a position of competing as it were for popularity with the Queen. Nothing should be more carefully avoided.

Victoria’s relationship to her eldest son began badly. She ‘suffered severely’ giving birth to him. ‘I don’t know what I should have done but for the great comfort and support my beloved Albert was to me,’ she wrote in her journal. Breast feeding filled her with ‘insurmountable disgust’ and she described babies as ‘rather disgusting’.

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

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