me, and I like having him too, because it as a much better match for me than older persons’,10 Edward said, and each endured the same arduous education six days a week, chafed under the royal regime, and yearned for more fun. Occasionally boys were brought in from Eton College for them to play with, but Alfred and Edward shared a special bond as they each paid the dues of destiny, and tried to look out for each other to avoid punishment. Albert occasionally meted out a whipping and when 11-year-old Alfred was caught smoking he was separated from Edward and ordered to endure three days solitary confinement at Royal Lodge, south of the castle in Windsor Park. He did occasionally play with the boys but Victoria, herself brought up in an exclusively adult environment, was not a frequent visitor to the nursery, and the young princes were known to careen down palace corridors screaming out ‘The Queen! The Queen!’ if they sensed her approach.
Albert chastised Victoria over the lack of joy she gained from her children. ‘The trouble lies in the mistaken notion the function of a mother is to be always correcting, scolding and ordering them about’, he wrote. Edward later said that for he and Alfred ‘there was no boyhood’. They both evidenced irritability. Edward complained ‘other children are not always good…why should I always be good?…nobody is always good’11 and when Alfred did not want to do something he petulantly declared, ‘boys never!’12
Their upbringing was regimented and repressive. Alfred’s formal education began alongside Edward with Henry Birch, a young Eton graduate who focused on English, geography and mathematics, while others came in to teach religion, writing, French, German, drawing and music. But after Edward’s negative phrenology assessment Albert lost faith in Birch and replaced him with Frederick Gibbs, a dour barrister and fellow of Trinity College. He was told by Albert‘s long-time friend and advisor from Coburg, Baron Christian Frederick Stockmar: ‘If you cannot make anything of the eldest, you must try with the younger one.’13
Beyond the heavy education agenda, for eight-year-old Alfred there was aristocratic instruction on ‘manners of conduct towards others in appearance, deportment and dress’ and ‘acquitting oneself credibly in conversation, on whatever maybe the occupation of Society’, and riding, military drill and gymnastics. His day was royally filled from 8am to 7pm six days a week.
Alfred’s escape was to spend as much time as he could playing with toy ships in imaginary naval voyages and battles. His imagination matured into a desire to be free to steer his own life course, not one strictly directed by his parents. He could sense his brother struggling with the parental judgment of being unworthy of a mandated role he did not savour but had to spend his life in waiting. They could be forgiven for a shared feeling they were on an unwinnable quest. The Queen bluntly told her children: ‘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.’14
Alfred pleaded with his father. ‘Please papa’, let me join the Navy, he repeatedly asked. Albert was disappointed he had failed to persuade his son to follow his own interests to become an engineer, but warmed to the boy’s persistent pleas to join the Blue Jackets. He was also concerned that Alfred’s teenage years would come under the corrupting influence of his brother.
Albert allowed him to be coached in mathematics and geometry by a retired Naval chaplain, William Jolley, and seamanship on a training ship at Portsmouth, under Captain Robert Harris.
Albert came to think it a good idea for his son to gain life experience and competencies away from the influence of his ‘idle’ brother, and he rationalised it as something parents could not prevent.
As regards his wish to enter the Navy, this is a passion which we, as his parents, believe not to have a right to subdue…it is certainly not right to break the spontaneous wish of a young spirit…we gave him an engineering officer as instructor, hoping to interest him in this branch, but his love for the Blue Jackets always turned up again, and always with greater force…with the remarkable perseverance which this child possesses, it is not to be expected that he will give up the idea easily.15
Queen Victoria was not amused. She felt Affie was ‘a good, dear promising child’, and daughter Victoria had just left to marry Prince Frederick William of Prussia (to whom she had become engaged three years before when she was only 14 and he was 24). It was ‘too wretched…horrible!’ for her two favourite children to leave ‘tame, dull, formal England’ and what even she called ‘the prison life of Windsor.’16
She felt ‘papa is most cruel’ but Albert was convinced the distance and discipline afforded by the Navy, and some modest exposure to Royal life in European ports, would stand Alfred in good stead, whether he would only ever inherit his German Duchy of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, or circumstances meant he had to take the English throne. Alfred would ‘become more generally competent’ and be more ready to be a King than by staying at home under his brother’s influence, or moving to Bavaria and becoming more ‘German’ which would make any English prospects more problematic.
The Queen acknowledged the ‘sad contrast’17 between the heir and spare heir, and reluctantly agreed. It was necessary because ‘he is really such a dear, gifted and handsome child that it makes one doubly anxious that he should have as few failings as mortal man can have.’18
Her hope for Alfred was in proportion to the trepidation she felt about Edward succeeding her. When he turned 17 Victoria wrote:
I tremble at the thought of only three years and a half before…he will be of age and we can’t hold him except by moral power! I try to shut my eyes at that terrible moment!…oh! dear, what would happen if I were to die next winter. It is too awful a contemplation.19
A year later she and Albert sent him a stern 18th birthday message full of exhortations about moral duties and how only through punctual and cheerful performance of those duties ‘the true Christian and the true Gentleman is recognised’.20 Edward burst into tears.
While Edward would be denied any escape into military service, Alfred’s wish was granted just two weeks after his 14th birthday. After passing entrance exams at the Britannia Royal Naval College in Dartmouth he could enter Her Majesty’s service in August 1858 as a naval cadet on HMS Euralyus.
Alfred was excited, but leaving all that was familiar was still a big step and he sobbed when farewelling his parents.
Two years later, in a novel but strategic move, Victoria sent both the teenage princes abroad as part of their Royal training and separation. Alfred was sent to South Africa, where he laid the foundation stone of the breakwater at Table Bay, opened a library and enjoyed a hunting party which shot between 600 and 1000 animals. Edward went to Ireland, Canada and the United States—a land still seen as one full of revolutionary republicans and democrats—where he was seen to have acquitted himself well, although it was felt he looked with too much pleasure on the ‘vast array of beauties lined up for him’ at a dance in Cincinnati, and the New York Herald reported he ‘whispered sweet nothings’ to his dance partners.21
The following year saw a more negative episode, a life-changing affair which would come to shape the whole family forever.
Edward, who had been attending Cambridge University, was despatched to a 10-week military training camp at Curragh, 30 miles from Dublin in County Kildare, accompanied by his governor, Robert Bruce, whose task was to fulfil Albert’s wish that his son become ‘a good man and a thorough gentleman’.
The Queen wasn’t confident. Her instincts told her Edward was more his mother’s son when it came to sexual appetite, and not his father’s son when it came to strict propriety. She told her uncle, Prince Leopold Franz Julius of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha: ‘Alas! Sons are like their mothers—at least the eldest are supposed to be…and so I think Bertie has avoided all likeness to his beloved father.’ That was to become all too clear at Curragh.
