The Education of a Prince
I
THOUGH he reigned little more than nine years, King Edward VII was one of the most striking figures in the history of royalty. At a time when the tide of democracy was rising to the flood all over Europe, it was the singular good fortune of England’s king that he was able to popularize the monarchy and prepare it to weather the storm which was to sweep most of the crowned heads from their thrones. He was the last of those kings who were built in the heroic mould of a Louis XIV and a Henry VIII — and the first of the new breed which we see to-day in Albert of Belgium, and to-morrow, if you like, in King Magnus of The Apple Cart. It is the abiding interest of King Edward’s character that he stood thus successfully at the meeting place of civilizations.
The king who was to work this change delayed his appearance till nearly twenty-one months after the marriage of his parents—Princess Victoria, the first fruits of their union, having preceded him by a little less than a year. His arrival in the middle of the morning of November 9, 1841, coincided pleasantly with Lord Mayor’s Day, the sole occasion in the year when the City of London allows itself the diversion of processional pageantry. Three weeks after the future king had for the first time thus associated himself with pageantry and good cheer, his mother could describe him as a wonderfully strong and large child. Already the physical characteristics of those familiar features were discernible: the large blue eyes, darker then than afterward, which, like those of Louis XIV, became so expressive a means of conveying the royal displeasure; the Coburg nose, rather Semitic than aquiline; the mouth indicating character and a measure of willfulness in the finely moulded curves. The mother’s joy as she looked upon her son and heir was fortified by her hopes and prayers that he might be like ‘his dearest Papa’ — a wish that the prejudices of her subjects would have prevented them from sharing.
The old and worldly-wise Prime Minister shook his head when he learned that the Heir Apparent was to be called Albert Edward. Albert, Lord Melbourne sagely observed, was a good old English name with a certain degree of popularity attaching to it from ancient recollections, but Albert, even in its Anglo-Saxon form of Ethelred, had been little in use since the Conquest. His tactful hint that Edward should be the first name, though unheeded by the young parents, was adopted by the Prince when he came to the throne.
One may detect the Prime Minister’s distrust of the growing German influences at Court in the remarks he added upon a subject which Englishmen approach from an angle peculiar to themselves. They have no great faith in the power of instruction to form character. They believe that the young should as far as possible work out their own salvation, a belief upon which are built those unique institutions the public schools and the older universities. In such vigorous democracies, amid the clash of youth upon youth, has been formed the dominant English type,a type possessing qualities of leadership that is only now beginning to pass away. ’Be not over solicitous,’ Lord Melbourne wrote, under the impulse of these ideas, ’about education. It may be able to do much, but it does not do so much as is expected from it,’ and he went on to point out that George IV and the Duke of York, who were educated like English boys and upon the system of English schools, were, with all their faults, ‘quite Englishmen.’
Unfortunately for little Albert Edward, Prince Albert did not heed advice of which his German thoroughness made him disapprove; fortunately for the future of the monarchy, the influence of race on character proved stronger than the system to which the Prince’s boyhood and youth were sacrificed, and the only thing distinctively German which remained with King Edward was his lifelong inability to pronounce the English r. In any case the preparation for the profession, the delightful profession, in his case, of hereditary kingship, is bound to entail a hard novitiate, and he would be a foolish candidate who, having chosen his parents and safely reached the initial stage toward his vocation, would complain that the trouble of being born was the first and not, as is sometimes vulgarly supposed, the last of those that beset him.
Yet there was much happiness in the childhood of this scion of many kings. None of them, perhaps, grew amid such domestic felicity as prompted Queen Victoria to assert, ’Not only no royal ménage is to be found equal to ours, but no other ménage is to be compared to ours.’ If this atmosphere softened, it did not obliterate, the Prince’s native temper. At his christening his governess remarked the fierce, stout features of the royal baby. When he was little more than a year old the same shrewdly observant great lady described him as ‘passionate and determined enough for an autocrat,’though there shone in the intervals between these explosions ‘a lovely mildness of expression and calm temper.'
II
Almost as soon as he could speak, — the first lispings were in German,— the habit of asking questions showed itself, a Socratic method that remained with him through life, later strengthened by a Socratic belief in the superiority of the spoken to the written word. He could follow his bent the better since, so far as befits a small child, he was without shyness. At the christening of his brother, Prince Alfred, his three-year-old eyes, already observant of the niceties of dress, gazed with curiosity upon the wig of the Archbishop of Canterbury. When the company subsequently assembled in the grand corridor, Albert Edward, unable to make others heed his question about this relic of eighteenth-century fashion, went up to the periwigged Primate himself and asked: ’What is that you have got upon your head?' We are not told that the Prince was abashed at the great laugh caused by the Archbishop’s reply as ’he stooped down close to him and with great respect and gentleness answered: “It is called a wig.’” Since the laugh was against the Archbishop, all was well.
Sometimes Bertie’s questions were prompted by acquisitive motives, which must also be abnormally developed in him who would be a true king. ‘Where is my gun?' he asked of Louis Philippe when that monarch was visiting Windsor. Later the little prince received a fusil de munition from Paris, a modest gift which, as the bourgeois king wrote to his mother, was at any rate strong enough to withstand ‘the accidents that childhood likes to inflict upon its toys.’ The pride that the small boy took in the Grand Cross of St. Andrew, a present from the Tsar, was perhaps of a more professional kind. But the delight in his first sailor suit, a stage in every boy’s life, gave him a keener, if a more humble, pleasure as he swaggered about, crying, ‘Je suis un petit mousse!' to his French governess. No subsequent promotion in naval rank brought the same zest, we may be sure.
His royal blood, rather than any Highland strain, gave him the right to wear the dress which sets off so well the noble beauty of the male, and partiality for the kilt, developed on his first visit to Scotland, remained with him throughout life. What boy could fail to be thrilled by the skean dhubh worn in the stocking, what man remain insensible to the ‘ornaments,’ the jewels that set off the bonnet and sporan and plaid tartan? Yet it remains a blot on the justness of the Prince’s taste in dress that he never corrected the errors of Highland fashion committed by his father. Bare knees were rather shocking to the modesty of Victorian ladies, and to this day the incorrect tailoring of the royal kilts persists. They are worn too long, a tribute to decorum also reflected in the stockings’ being brought too near the knee.
During those early impressionable years the Prince Albert’s affection, not yet clamped to the terrible system which, under the inspiration of Baron Stockmar, he inflicted on the heir to the throne, was a beneficent sun shining in the royal nursery. Of him, rather than of the Queen, the children seem to have thought at the crises which occurred in their small world. Bertie regarded his father with the judicious mixture of love and fear upon which piety and religion are founded. The Prince Consort’s goodness was an ever-present example. It might breed priggishness, as in Bertie’s remark that he did not know how he could ever be naughty since he was so much happier when he was good. ‘Bless dear Papa and Mama and give them the comfort of seeing me grow up a good boy,’ the prayer he composed and wrote out himself, rings more true. In those populous Victorian nurseries, children were conscious that they were conceived in sin; the child of to-day, more aware of the sinfulness of his elders, if he composes prayers at all probably asks for the comfort of seeing his father and mother grow into good parents.
Well might Lady Lyttelton enjoy the task of governing such a nursery. They were passionate, high-spirited children, one moment melting her heart and the next trying to bite her in rage. Explosions were frequent. Smiles and tears chased one another as across a royal April sky. But Lady Lyttelton forgave the naughtinesses, for she saw the courage that is the foundation of character, and the kindness that is the prophylactic for egoism. At a review in Windsor Park, her ‘Princey’—a familiarity of address not permitted to the assistant governesses, who called him ‘Prince of Wales’ — sat on her lap in ecstasies until the firing began. Then his face fell. ‘I afraid! Soldiers go popping! No more! I cry!’ and Lady Lyttelton loved him for his ‘most, touching countenance and bursting heart,’ while the Princess Royal, a self-contained little girl of four, sat as unmoved as the Duke of Wellington a few paces away.
We get used to firearms. But there are few experiences more unpleasant than being upon a bolting horse. When this happened to the six-year-old Prince, who was strapped to the saddle, he kept tight hold of the reins and did not scream, though Miss Hildyard shrieked and the Princess Royal burst into tears. Lady Lyttelton relates the sequel: ‘Princey’s pony is called Arthur and is often thought slow. Yesterday, on the Prince taking his writing lesson. Miss Hildyard said: “Hold your thumb in the right place, Prince of Wales — so — you can do it right if you try, I’m sure.” “Oh, yes!” he answered with a sly smile at her, “ I can. Arthur can gallop, we know now! It was the only allusion he made to it — rather a clever one.’ The sly humor, parent of the sly smile, remained with him all his life.
Poor Lady Lyttelton! She venerated the Queen, adored the Prince Albert, found prosperity in uninterrupted lessons, and adversity in the failings of her assistants and in the children’s being called away on treats — for, despite the strictness of their upbringing, pageantry was in the air they breathed. And Princey found it infinitely congenial. At three this virtuoso could ‘bow and offer his hand beautifully,’ at seven he had a childish dignity very pretty to witness, characterizing all his movements in public.
III
Well might Lady Lyttelton be proud of him. Yet would all his promise ever come to fruition? Would he be a Prince in ten years’ time? Would there be any princes after the republicanism rampant in the Europe of 1848 had run its course? Lady Lyttelton’s forebodings were shared by many. The possibility of a revolutionary outbreak sent the Court hurriedly to Osborne and gave the future King Edward his first lesson on the instability of human things. It left its mark. To trace the fears that the King is said to have expressed for the future of his dynasty in the last months of his life to some knot tied in his boyish mind on this occasion would be to give undue importance to the presentiments of a sick man. Yet there can be little doubt that the events of 1848 helped to color the liberalism he owed to his father and eldest sister and had their share in shaping the technique of statecraft which led him, both as Prince of Wales and as King, to turn critics and potential enemies into allies and friends. Louis Blanc, to whom as an exile in London the Prince seemed ‘a fairy personage,’ was the first, but not the last, of his kind to succumb to that royal charm.
Thrones tottered in that year of unrest. Louis Philippe found himself a fugitive in the country he had visited as a king. Queen Victoria, as she surveyed the awful state of Europe, felt ‘grown old and serious.’ Prince Albert, viewing the situation more broadly, evinced a sympathy with the proletariat which the government was far from sharing. He wrote from Osborne to Lord John Russell, saying that his private inquiries showed the number of the unemployed in London to be ‘very large’ and criticizing the economies which led to the suspending of work upon the royal palaces and upon the ‘formation of Battersea Park’; he went so far as to advance the doctrine that ‘the government was bound to do what it could to help the working classes over the present moment of distress.’ With such enlightened sympathy did King Edward’s father regard the wicked Chartists.
The danger apprehended from the London mob soon passed. But it only strengthened the determination of Prince Albert, foreseeing the development of the industrial state, to equip his son for the task, the overwhelming task, that lay before him. Prince Albert’s own inclinations, the promptings of Baron Stockmar, who had fashioned two generations of royalty in Queen Victoria’s uncle and husband and now looked to fashion the third in the Queen’s son, the encouragement of the busybodies who find ingenuous youth less able than the maturer portions of mankind to defend itself against their interference — all pointed in the same direction.
‘Upon the good education of Princes, and especially of those who are destined to govern, the welfare of the world in these days greatly depends.’ So wrote Prince Albert in 1849. It was not simply a question of educating a future king. Since the Queen Regnant was only twenty-three years older than the Prince of Wales and seemed made of iron, her son would in all probability have to look forward to a long minority. Hanoverian precedents showed the tendency of the heir apparent, shut out from political power, to ally himself with the opposition and become a thorn in the side of his parent rather than a prop to the throne. Peculiar moral dangers also surrounded the position, as the last Prince of Wales, the Prince Regent whose memory so shocked the Victorians, only too clearly exemplified. The thought that history might repeat itself in this particular was as abhorrent to the parents of the Prince as to the English middle class, which felt that its advent to political preponderance was designed by Providence to coincide with the dawn of a more Christian age.
So when the Prince of Wales was seven he found himself launched on the most portentously thorough system of education ever devised by a conscientious father. Lady Lyttelton handed over her authority to a tutor, and the little Prince’s solemn preparation began. Every moment of the day had its allotted task. No minute was to be wasted, nothing left to chance. So far as human foresight could secure it, there should be no chink in the plan through which Satan might squeeze. The austere moral and intellectual edifice envisaged by the Prince Albert allowed his son no egress into any garden of the imagination, no safety valve for boyish spirits, no room for the spontaneous development of his faculties. Even storybooks were banned, and Scott’s novels, commended in princely German homes for their propriety, were not allowed in the royal schoolroom. And every day the tutor submitted a written report to the Prince’s parents upon their son’s progress.
Henry Birch, the young cleric of eminent academic distinction chosen by the Prince Consort for the responsible task, soon won the affections of his warm-hearted little charge. A wiser parent would have been satisfied with this and, remembering that slowgrowing fruit has the best flavor, left the small boy’s attainments to ripen gradually. But few fathers are magnanimous enough not to wish to follow the primordial example and to make their children after their own image. Prince Albert ardently desired his eldest son to grow up studious, reserved, discreet, showing a Teutonic geniality toward ideas, a Teutonic jealousy for the barriers of rank — in short, another Albert. As the young father saw that the boy gave no signs of fulfilling this ideal, he fussed and worried. In the mistaken belief that his son would equip himself to handle men by learning to handle words, Prince Albert laid special stress on the diary which the Prince of Wales kept under his tutor’s supervision, and he was pained when the bald, childish style betrayed none of the literary facility that the precocious Vicky had at her command fortunately for her brother, since we have it on the authority of the greatest master of European kingcraft that a king should write as little as possible.
Prince Albert, even had he known of this dictum, would hardly have paid attention to anything Louis XIV might have said — a monarch whose religious opinions were based on the distrust of human nature inevitable for those who rather stress the supernatural portions of Christianity than regard ‘the pure and comprehensive Christian morality’ as the solid foundation on which the supernatural elements of the religion rest. Baron Stockmar had drawn this distinction in one of his educational theses, and with it Prince Albert fully concurred. It seemed, indeed, possible that the Prince of Wales was failing to fit into the mould owing to Mr. Birch’s theological views, for he paid special attention to the Catechism, a statement of Anglican doctrine so nicely balanced that it could easily be made to incline to the Romanist views of the High Church Party. When Mr. Birch found it expedient to resign, his charge was disconsolate. The boy’s trouble and sorrow were remarked by the ladies of the Court, who related how ‘the affectionate dear little fellow’ used to leave notes and presents on Mr. Birch’s pillow ‘which were really too moving.’
IV
The new tutor was a layman. But in spite of a precise manner and the legal training which narrows, while it strengthens, the mind, Mr. Gibbes soon saw that the parental system must be shattered against the native exuberance and restlessness under restraint of the ten-year-old Prince. He warned the parents. He did not tell them, following the example of another royal tutor, that royalty consists almost entirely in action and that it might be an advantage, as it proved to the Roi Soleil, if the Prince showed himself indifferent and nonchalant toward purely scholastic exercises. The diagnosis of Louis XIV’s preceptors, that while neither learned, intellectual, nor artistic, he was immediately interested in affairs and bombarded everyone with questions, might be applied to King Edward’s own youth.
With undeviating insistence continued the pathetic efforts of a well-meaning father and of a mother who, though an authoritarian as a queen and a parent, showed a wifely submissiveness to her husband. Queen Victoria’s personal impulse was toward a more English freedom. Her own Spartan virtues might even have counseled her to send the Prince to Eton. The Prince Consort mistrusted the Spartan virtues, and feared the Spartan vices of the public schools. He wished to shield his son behind the same prickly etiquette that hedged himself against the criticism and unpopularity of which he was the victim. Since the Prince of Wales could not be brought up in complete seclusion, he was sometimes allowed to entertain a few Etonians to tea at Windsor Castle. But lest he should suffer in any way from contact with these carefully chosen scions of well-known families, his father took tea with them, and not even his son’s lightness of social touch could dispel the awe which Prince Albert shed upon these harmless boyish functions.
As the Prince of Wales grew older, as he approached adolescence with its dangers and temptations, the father’s sense of responsibility made him tighten the régime. He was less than ever willing to allow his son the freedom that the boy instinctively craved, the freedom sometimes to run wild, to be boisterous and do forbidden things, to indulge the nostalgia for the lost pleasures of savagery from which the young suffer. Such variety as came into his life was the result of the restlessness characteristic of Courts. He never stayed long enough in one spot to attain that familiarity with places and things which should form the background to every childhood, while the state functions which he attended with his parents were no safety valve, but an additional cause for unrest in an excitable boy. His taste for the color and movement of life was more satisfactorily indulged by the drama. The command performances at Windsor Castle at Christmastide, his visits to London theatres in the season, and the private theatricals in which the royal children occupied their rare leisure, were probably the most valuable and enduring lessons he received — more valuable than his excursions into music, that nursery governess of the Muses, or into art, a world in which he was never at home.
Life, not art, is a king’s business, and the stage at least held up a mirror to it. Paris did more. It was life itself, and the visit paid by the Prince, now nearly fourteen years old, to the city which expresses the European spirit with such incomparable grace and verve left an indelible mark. The boy succumbed. Paris dazzled him, as his exotic kilted figure dazzled the Parisians. In the brilliancy of the French Court, the dark shadow of his father’s tutelage momentarily disappeared. Napoleon III, who understood at any rate the superficialities of the technique of kingship, seemed a fascinating person, the more so since his manner toward the Prince was that of one man to another.
To the charms of the Empress Eugénie the susceptible boy easily yielded. It was all wonderful — a revelation of how delightful the profession might be made. For a week he basked in the unaccustomed radiance. Everyone’s heart was at his feet. Elderly generals cried as the handsome boy, always in kilts, knelt at his mother’s command at the tomb of Napoleon while an August thunderstorm burst overhead. Beautiful ladies remarked how well he danced. When the week’s visit came to an end and his parents made ready to turn homeward, the Prince, fledging his Cherubino’s wings, suggested to the Empress that he and Vicky should stay behind. She doubted whether Mama would be able to do without him. ‘Don’t you believe it,’ he stoutly replied. ‘There are six of us at home and they don’t want us at all.’
Naturally the wish remained unfulfilled, but there is a symbolical fitness in it. It declared at once his love for Paris that remained a lifelong passion and was the first of those gropings toward an entente with France which his government was to reach half a century later.
V
Back in England, the Prince returned to his books and the endless tasks under his tutor with ill grace. He was no young Alexander, sleeping with an Iliad and a sword under his pillow. But then neither Mr. Gibbes nor Mr. Tarver, who taught him theology and the classics, was an Aristotle; nor was Prince Albert a King Philip. Yet the son of Albert resembled the son of Philip in his bursts of choler, and, like him, looked forward to a manhood under arms, an ambition that the stirring events of the Crimea and the Mutiny quickened, though no companies of youth submitted to his young generalship as they did to Alexander of Macedon and Louis of France, those two paragons of kingship in the ancient and modern world.
Prince Albert, distressed at his son’s indolent waywardness, put the blame, fatherlike, on his son and not on himself. Everyone saw the errors of the system except the Queen and Baron Stockmar, and failure eventually grew so patent that some concession had to be made. Prince Albert consented to a temporary relaxation of his personal surveillance and the boy started off on a walking tour through Dorset with the precise Mr. Gibbes and one of Prince Albert’s gentlemen at Court.
This grim experiment — the Prince was never much of a walker — ended after a week because the interest aroused among the unimpressionable people of Wessex by the young Prince’s staying at country inns on his road had no place in his father’s scheme. But it slightly deflected the course of the royal education. The next year the boy undertook the first real tour that afforded him the solace of boyish companionship — Lord Halifax, one of the four contemporaries who accompanied him, is still alive — and of escape from the paternal eye. At last high spirits had an outlet — even to the chasing of a flock of sheep into the shallows of Windermere, for which he suffered rebuke from a farmer’s wife more merited than that meted out to his ancestor Alfred by a woman of similar degree. The Prince, in fact, enjoyed himself thoroughly, though his father found fault with the literary inadequacy of the diary, which was as dry as this kernel of a dry system deserved to be.
Another milestone on the long road to independence came when his parents allowed him to choose his own clothes. With the jealousy of power natural to a reigning sovereign whose power comes from above, his mother had misgivings, and to impress her son with the importance of t he privilege she explained her views on dress in writing. ‘I must now say that 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 in others — to an indifference to what is morally wrong.’
The influence of clothes on morals has exercised many acute minds. Maybe the Prince’s parents exaggerated the evils of dandyism. In any case they need have had no fear that the extravagance of their son’s taste in dress might be the exciting cause for extravagance in conduct. For if he was not the first to secure a sartorial primacy for Savile Row, he consolidated it into an empire to whose sway the males of both hemispheres pay a loyalty not less sincere, if less costly, than that of their womenkind to the shrines of fashion in the Rue de la Paix. Over a side of life so important that it has fascinated the seers of all ages, including our own, he exercised a lifelong kindly influence. He may not have emancipated the male from the stiffness of starch, but he undermined the supremacy of the top hat; the Norfolk jacket launched from Sandringham a covert attack on the waistcoat that almost succeeded in releasing mankind from a bourgeois encumbrance; late in life he courageously attempted to grapple with the tyranny of the trouser crease by wearing this at the side of the leg — an innovation which unhappily proved in advance of public opinion. His was a kindly and a kingly influence — for he never underrated by a button the part dress played in the ritual that goes to make up an ordered social life.
This, however, lay in the future. For the moment the adolescent found all his energies absorbed in withstanding the pressure of his educational régime. Sometimes it damped his resiliency of spirit ; we catch perhaps a glimpse of such a phase in Prince Metternich’s description of the boy as ‘having an embarrassed and sad air’ when he visited that former enemy of Napoleon at the famous Schloss Johannisberg. There was reason for it, since the Prince Albert had insisted on his son’s occupying a month of his first summer vacation abroad in the study of German literature at Bonn. More often storms of passion showed the strain of the system. They passed quickly and left no resentment behind. Probably they would have occurred anyhow, for the ruler of men must be able to lose his temper; the ‘damn your eyes’ attitude is as valuable a weapon in the armory of leadership as the sulkiness of an Achilles is the reverse.
If the father’s omniscience — how dangerous a quality in a king his grandson Wilhelm II was later to show — imparted to the son an intellectual diffidence that never wholly left him, Prince Albert’s goodness prevented Albert Edward from harboring any rancor against a paternal care that was more prone to blame than praise. Yet praise came sometimes. When the Prince, at the impressionable age of sixteen and a half, received the sacrament of confirmation, the Queen recorded with appreciation his ‘gentle, good and proper’ bearing, and the royal parents were gratified too with their son’s replies to the ’long and difficult’ oral examination by his catechist, the alarming Dr. Wellesley, which lasted for a whole hour.
VI
Decidedly the novitiate for the delightful profession was no joke. A memorandum drawn up for gentlemen of the Prince’s household at White Lodge laid dowm the most meticulous rules of conduct. From their example the Prince was to learn how to avoid the frivolity of dandyism, not to loll in armchairs or slouch with his hands in his pockets, to be polite with dignity and punctilious without familiarity, to satirize follies but not to couple these with individuals, and never, never by any chance to countenance anything approaching to a practical joke. And they were to use every occasion, even to the extent of looking over drawings and books of engravings, to amuse and at the same time gently exercise the Prince’s mind, an allimportant end to which, the Prince Consort was careful to point out, ‘mere games of cards and billiards and idle gossiping talk’ would never conduce. In this morally pasteurized atmosphere, with Mr. Gibbes and Mr. Tarver and the future Lord Wantage, whose religious devotions he had wished to emulate, the Prince of Wales approached his seventeenth birthday.
Yet the Prince Consort felt dissatisfied. His son was far from reaching the standard considered necessary by this conscientious man to whom duty was a fetish, and he planned, therefore, a more intensive application of pressure on both the moral and the intellectual front. For this purpose, on the Prince’s seventeenth birthday Mr. Gibbes gave way to a Governor, who had the advantages of being the younger son of an earl, a Scotch Presbyterian, and the Colonel of a Guards Regiment, the most rigorously disciplined corps in the British Army. Colonel Bruce held no nominal office. Written instructions from the Queen herself armed him with the power to regulate all her son’s movements, ‘the distribution and employment of his time and the occupations and details of his daily life.’
This silent and mysterious man at once gained the full confidence of the Prince’s parents, and the Governor’s reports on his charge’s shortcomings, the youth’s exaggerated interest in dress and etiquette, his considerable share of ‘willfulness and constitutional irritability,’ his partiality for ‘frivolous disputes,’ seemed to them proof that the mild and amiable Colonel, as he appeared to the Prince Consort, rightly judged their son’s character. In the hope that its inequalities might now be smoothed out and a young paragon emerge who would understand that ‘life was composed of duties in the due, punctual and cheerful performance of which the true Christian, true soldier and true gentleman was recognized,’the Prince’s father and mother sent him a Memorandum among his seventeenth-birthday presents in which this aphorism was suitably elaborated. It reminded him also that the knighthood of the Garter, another birthday present, — which a cynical statesman has commended for there being no d—d merit about it, — meant the joining of a confraternity of the selected few who wear the St. George’s Cross on their shoulder in token ‘of the Christian fight which they mean to sustain with the temptations and difficulties of this transient life.’
The lofty literary style of the Memorandum was the gossip of the Court, and it was related how the Prince of Wales shed tears as he read it. But if fine sentiments are well, action is better. So the Prince put on his new Colonel’s uniform, surely admiring himself meanwhile, while possibly regretting the three or four inches which would have set off his royal beauty, and went to report at the Horse Guards to the Commander in Chief, his cousin, jolly ‘Uncle’ George of Cambridge. The knightly career could not begin too soon. ‘Really a charming and unaffected lad ’ was how he appeared to this chip of the old Hanoverian block. But when the young Colonel on the unattached list, finding his wishes hanging fire, put in a request that, he should undergo training at Aldershot, his father, instead of encouraging this ambition to become a truly professional soldier, agreed with his Governor on the ‘temptations and unprofitable companionship of the military life.’ Preparation for the Christian fight, in the Prince Consort’s opinion, could be better made amid the archæological and artistic treasures of Rome than on Laffan’s Plain and in the lax atmosphere of the mess.
To Rome, therefore, it was decided that the Prince should go. So tautly stretched was the System that a brief visit paid to his sister in Berlin, now a bride and the wife of the future German Emperor, was not allowed to interfere with the daily curriculum of studies. The Prince Consort insisted that only slender courtesies were to be offered to the Prince and persuaded his daughter, when she found herself alone with her brother, to read improving German books aloud to him. No Richard Feverel of fiction ever submitted to such strenuous preparation for the great race of life. No artist ever forgot to better effect the lessons he had learned in the schools than did the Prince of Wales when the time came for him to play the part he had designed for himself.