A PRINCE IN BONDAGE

“_Busch._ They live above the cloud of courtiers and other menials, separated by them from the ideas and feelings of other mortals, whose wishes and opinions only reach them in a mutilated or adapted form, and sometimes not at all.

“_Bismarck._ The comparison is a good one, gods and yet very human. They ought to be better educated, so that they should know how things look here below, how the real are not appearances but truth.”--_Moritz Busch: Bismarck, Some Secret Pages of his History._

“In Edinburgh next, thy poor noddle, perplext, The gauntlet must run of each science and study, Till the mixed streams of knowledge, turned on by the college, Through the fields of thy boy-brains run shallow and muddy. Dipped in grey Oxford mixture (lest _that_ prove a fixture), The poor lad’s to be plunged in less orthodox Cam, When dynamics and statics, and pure mathematics, Will be piled on his brain’s awful cargo of cram. Where next the boy may go, to swell the farrago, We haven’t yet heard, but the palace they’re plotting in; To Berlin, Jena, Bonn, he’ll no doubt be passed on, And drop in for a finishing touch, p’raps at Gottingen.” _Punch_, September 24, 1859.

Of late years the Prince of Wales had presented great difficulties to his parents, who did not know how to reconcile the position and claims of the heir to the throne with the anomalous position of his father. Victoria had been much agitated by this problem in 1857 when, as a safeguard, she decided to confer, by Royal Letters Patent, as Parliament would not do it for her, the title of Prince Consort upon her husband, writing about it as follows--

“The children may deny the position which their mother has given to their father as a usurpation over them, having the law on their side; or, if they waive their rights in his favour, he will hold a position granted by the forbearance of his children. In both cases this is a position most derogatory to the Queen as well as to her husband, and dangerous to the peace and well-being of her family. If the children resist, the Queen will have her husband pushed away from her side by her children, and they will take precedence over the man whom she is bound to obey; if they are dutiful she will owe her peace of mind to their continued generosity.”

But when the title was conferred the parental uneasiness did not quite disappear, and this led to the putting off as long as possible any step which would tend to recognize in the Prince of Wales a person of responsibility. They also had come to the conclusion that he was a disappointment, that he was far from reaching anywhere near the ideal which they had raised for him.

In their youth they had unquestioningly accepted Baron Stockmar’s dictum that from the very first--nay, from before his birth, their son must be trained for his high and kingly state; they thought unceasingly about him and his mental needs, consulted over every detail, mapped out every branch of knowledge which he was to acquire. His mind was to them the blank page upon which they were to imprint their own ideals. They never realized that the boy was born with a temperament and predilections of his own, and they felt injured and surprised when their impressions came out blurred and spoilt. They gave him history, science and languages to study, and there they stopped, and, in stopping, failed. Romance was rigidly barred; even the good and staid Sir Walter was accounted too frivolous for a young prince. In his childhood there had been no fairy tales, and in his youth poetry was banished, while none of the graces of literature were allowed to lighten and brighten the dry ways of history and science. His mind was kept in a prison, and his body was scarcely more free, for his actions and habits were strictly regulated through every minute of the day. Albert Edward, like the little Princess Victoria of an earlier generation, was never permitted to be alone, and very seldom allowed to enjoy the society of boys of his own age. Well might Prince Metternich say of him at sixteen--

“He is pleasant to every one, but he has an embarrassed and a very sad air.”

Any infringement of his parents’ rules was met with definite punishment, for reason had no great place in this iron system. The Prince Consort never spared the child by neglecting the rod, and it is on record that once when, as a little boy, the Prince behaved badly in the drawing-room, the Queen took him up and administered with her own hand the correction so dear to the hearts of the parents of that period.

As a young man Albert Edward had to sandwich visits abroad with educational experiments at Edinburgh, Oxford and Cambridge, each of which places furnished a story of him, two of which endeared him more to the less well-or ill-regulated public than to his father; the other pleased all. At Edinburgh he was studying under Lyon Playfair, and one day, after making the Prince wash his hands to get rid of any grease, the lecturer said--

“Now, sir, if you have any faith in science you will plunge your right hand into this cauldron of boiling lead and ladle it out into the cold water which is standing by.”

“Are you serious?” asked the Prince, and on being assured that he was, he said, “If you tell me to do it I will.”

“I do tell you,” answered Playfair, and the Prince ladled out the burning fluid without scald or hurt.

Wherever the youth went he was surrounded by men of a mature age. Sir Edward Dicey[4] tells how he saw him in Rome often, but “no one ever saw the Prince out of doors alone; he was always accompanied by one or both his tutors, General Grey or Mr. Frederick Gibbs, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Admirably qualified to explain monuments they may have been, but they were certainly not the companions that a young prince would have chosen.”

It was so until he was twenty-one, and it was the duty of the elderly gentleman at the moment responsible to send daily reports to the parents, giving a detailed narrative of his pupil’s life during the preceding day, telling where he had been, whom he had spoken to or seen.

Thus it was not to be wondered at that now and then the youth rebelled and tried to escape into a short freedom. A story goes that when at Oxford he rose quietly very early one morning and left the city of learning while his estimable tutors were still sleeping the sleep of the just. However, they soon found it out, and going to the station discovered that he had taken a ticket to London, whereupon they wired to his father, with the result that the truant was met at the terminus by two footmen in charge of a royal carriage. They asked him where he wished to be driven, and he replied, with quiet humour--

“To Exeter Hall.”

The Cambridge story is much the same, except that this time the footmen brought a letter from the Queen desiring his attendance at lunch at Buckingham Palace.

By 1861 Albert Edward was practically banished from home excepting for a very short time there in between college and travel. Thus, had his father lived, he would have spent at Windsor the days between the end of the term and the 28th of December, when a journey to the East would have begun. This sort of thing had been going on for some years, and people who watched events did not scruple to say that Albert-Victoria had no desire for the presence of their eldest son at the centre of affairs; that the Prince Consort was simply putting off the evil day as long as possible by labelling these perfunctory collegiate careers and these travels abroad as education.

There were whispers at Court about serious misdeeds on the young prince’s part, and after Albert’s death it was said that the Queen was bitterly angry with her son, as she blamed him for his father’s fatal illness, in that the Prince Consort had caught a chill when he went to Cambridge in November to extricate him from the effects of some escapade. Colour was given to this by the fact that she expressed no desire for his presence during the weeks that the Prince was ill; even on the Friday when Dr. Jenner told her that her husband’s state was most critical she did not send for him. He was left in Cambridge in disgrace, shut out from the family anxiety because, having been brought up on a starvation system, he had fallen into excess. Princess Alice sent him a telegram late on the Friday, and by starting at once he reached Windsor at three on Saturday morning, stricken with grief, and ready to do anything. But the suppression under which he had been brought up had destroyed his initiative, and it was Princess Alice who took the lead. Neither then nor later did he ever stand in the position of an adviser or helper to his mother.

Various explanations were given for this, the best accredited being the resentment mentioned above, which was so keen that Victoria preferred not to have her son near her. A totally different one was that she gave him the chance of retrieving himself, by asking him to become her private secretary, taking up as far as possible the work of his father. The Prince, knowing

what that work had been, aware of his own inexperience and his mother’s arbitrariness, was afraid of the task and begged her not to require so much of him at first. It was added that the Queen never forgave him his hesitation, and that when later he himself asked for the post she absolutely refused to let him associate himself in any way with State affairs.

The latter story is hardly credible. Victoria was a rigid little person, and the impressions on her mind at the date of Albert’s death seemed to remain there for about three decades. At that moment both she and her husband were disappointed that their son had not turned out as they expected, as they felt that their careful training ought to have turned him out; they were certain that the fault did not lie in their system, but in some abnormal strain of wickedness in the boy himself, therefore they could neither trust nor rely upon him; and therefore, also, Victoria was determined to carry out the final plans for his regeneration which had been made by her consort.

Reports of dissensions and differences between mother and son were spread abroad, varied by others that the Queen had refused to see or speak with Albert Edward at all, and the newspapers began to treat of the subject. Thus, ten days--pitiably soon--after the beginning of her Majesty’s widowhood a leader appeared in _The Times_ offering her some advice. Truly she was not to be allowed time for grief. There were whispers going about--probably quite unjustifiably--of influence inimical to the young prince being exercised by the old advisers, King Leopold and Stockmar, which perhaps explains the haste of _The Times_.

The article began by reminding the Queen that there had always been discord between the Brunswickian sovereigns and their heirs; that the duty of a parent was not terminated by change, and that implicit obedience should result in mutual confidence and affection.

“We sincerely trust that her Majesty, so superior in most respects to most sovereigns of her race, will also prove her superiority to them by regarding any influence which may interpose between her and the confidence of her son as a sinister and ill-omened intrusion, boding nothing but evil to her and to him. We are sure she will feel--what any mother in a private station would feel--that of all the counsels that are offered him there are none which it is so desirable that he should follow as her own. A young and active mind naturally seeks for employment, and it is in the power of the Queen to provide for the Prince the most profitable and dignified employment in which he can be engaged by associating him with her as much as possible in the cares and duties of government.”

A day or two later an attack was made on the Prince himself which had something of the revivalist twang about it. He was admonished that from living a most unusually restrained life, he was now the head of the family; that two paths lay before him, those of duty and pleasure; and that if he wished for public affection and esteem he must “choose now--the decision is to be made this very hour”--between frivolity, trouble and misery, and a reign of usefulness which would make his name blessed for ever!

Other papers followed suit, either preaching to Albert Edward or defending him, and _Reynolds’s Newspaper_ had the temerity to end with this flourish--

“So he will continue a new and better mode of reigning in England, one needed by the advance in power of the heir and the reserve imposed by that advance on the personal action of the Sovereign.”

We can imagine the stupendous anger of Queen Victoria at the hint that she, a ruler by right divine, was to delegate any scrap of her power to any one, son or otherwise. Such words entirely sealed the Prince’s fate, and four days later it was publicly announced that--

“The Prince of Wales will carry out the completion of his education and make a tour in the Eastern lands.”

The decision came as a blow to many people, for workers in various fields had been anticipating with pleasure the help of a young and gracious English prince between whom and them that strange Germanic superiority and stiffness would not lie as a barrier. To quote from the _Annual Register_, he was being sent away “at a time when his presence could ill be spared at the palace, and when the prospects of the Great Exhibition (of 1862) seemed almost to depend on his taking the place of the Prince Consort.”

So Prince Albert Edward went again on his travels with his little army of elderly restrainers, and saw many things, the most notable being the holy burial place of the Patriarchs, the Cave of Macpelah, where were buried Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah. No European or Christian was allowed within the tomb, but the Prince Consort, with true Germanic disregard of other nations’ susceptibilities, had ordered that this should be done, and so by dint of serious threats the English party gained admittance, guarded by a strong military escort, an army being sent by the cowed authorities so that soldiers should be stationed in every house and on every vacant spot in case some infuriated Mussulman attempted in his wrath to avenge the intrusion of an infidel prince into his Holy of Holies. By such incidents has Britain earned her reputation for arrogance.