Bringing Them Up Royal: How the Royals Raised their Children from 1066 to the Present Day Read online

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Bringing Them Up Royal

  1

  The Thousand-Year Case History

  2

  Four Medieval Relationships (1066–1400)

  3

  The Humble Origins of Henry VII (1400–1603)

  4

  The Stuarts (1603–1714)

  5

  The Hanoverians (1714–1821)

  6

  Victoria, Albert and the Dangers of Great Expectations (1821–63)

  7

  The Dangers of Too Little Discipline: Edward VII and His Eldest Son (1864–1910)

  8

  The Royal Bully

  9

  The Queen Mother and Woodrow Wilson

  10

  ‘Crawfie’ and the Little Princesses

  11

  Prince Philip’s Turbulent Childhood

  12

  Prince Charles – and Separation Anxiety

  13

  Princess Diana as a Mother

  Bibliography, Letters and Other Sources

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  David Cohen is an author, publisher, editor, documentary filmmaker, writer and producer, and has credits and accolades longer than both arms.

  He holds a BA (First Class Hons.) in Philosophy and Psychology from Oxford University and a Doctorate in Psychology from the University of London for his thesis The Development of Laughter. He is also the founder and owner of Psychology News and elected fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine. David is also a member of the British Psychological Society and is frequently recommended by them as a spokesperson on fatherhood, hostages and, occasionally, on cults.

  He has written over 40 books and made over a hundred films for television and the cinema. Many of his films have dealt with trauma and mental health, but others have tackled current affairs. His 1987 film about mental health, Forgotten Millions, won the Red Ribbon Award at the American International Film and Video Festival and, in 1989, Gorbachev's Asylums was praised by the Guardian as 'one of the documentaries of the decade'. It was the first film to report from the inside on the conditions in the Serbsky and Arsenalya asylums where Soviets kept their dissidents. His ITV film about child abuse investigations in Yorkshire, Acceptable Risks, won an award at the 1991 Columbus Film Festival, while The Madness of Children (Channel 4, 1998) was part of the season that won the Royal Television Society award for best campaign. The film was based on the children's psychiatric ward at Salford Hospital.

  David has been equally successful with his books. Psychologists on Psychology was nominated by Psychology Today as one of the best books of the year and, in 1990, Being a Man was called the best book on male responses to feminism by the New Statesman. He has also written extensively on child psychology and has written three biographical studies of 20th Century psychologists, including the definitive biographies of John B. Watson, the founder of behaviourism, and of Carl Rogers, founder of counselling and humanistic therapy.

  He continues to enjoy critical acclaim for everything he writes and films, even when he ventures into other more commercial but no less significant areas. David's book Diana: Death of a Goddess was on the bestseller list for six weeks; his film When Holly Went Missing – the inside story of the murder of two young girls in the small English town of Soham – was nominated by BAFTA for the best current affairs programme in 2005.

  David continues to write and run his publishing company, and his recent books, The Escape of Sigmund Freud and Freud on Coke, were published in 2009 and 2011. He has just published Broadmoor, a book written by a former head of the high-security psychiatric hospital.

  Bringing Them Up Royal combines two of his specialist subjects: the royals and child psychology.

  Bringing Them Up Royal

  Henry VIII played his daughters off against each other, alternately exiling and honouring one and then the other; George I cut his children off from their mother when he had her imprisoned; George III violently attacked his son; George V allowed one of his sons to be starved by a nanny.

  When he was just five years old, Prince Charles was reunited with his mother, who had been away for months touring the Empire and Commonwealth. Newsreels show him waiting for her at Victoria station. Immaculately dressed, as a trophy child should be, he was expected not to act his age. When his mother gets off the train, she does not rush towards him, kiss him or hug him. Instead, she shakes her son's hand. In a nice display of 'spurious maturity', he shakes her hand back. Achingly formal, it is an almost perfect example of protocol taking precedence over love.

  When Princess Diana became a mother, many were surprised by her parenting style – warm and nurturing. She stood in stark contrast to the generations of aloof, insensitive royal parents who had gone before her. Stories abound of Prince Philip reducing a young Charles to tears with his bullying – yet by royal standards he was a model of parental indulgence.

  As a new generation of princes and princesses comes of age, Bringing Them Up Royal reveals the truth about what it's like to be raised as a member of the royal family. Tracing hundreds of years of British history, David Cohen weaves a compelling and sometimes shocking tale, full of arresting psychoanalytic insights and twists. Intertwining history with child psychology, this unique study maps the changing face of royal parenting from 1066 to the present day – and suggests how it might develop in the twenty-first century.

  Bringing Them Up Royal is the first case study of its kind, and with it comes an unexpected story of violence, sex, betrayal, cruelty – and the occasional gem of kindness and wisdom.

  BRINGING THEM UP ROYAL

  How the royals raised their children from 1066 to the present day

  David Cohen

  Copyright © David Cohen 2012

  The moral right of David Cohen to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  ISBN 978-1-78036-160-4

  Front cover images © Press Association Images

  Published by

  Peach Publishing

  People talk about a normal upbringing. What is a normal upbringing? What you really mean – was I insisting that they go through all the disadvantages of being brought up in the way other children are brought up? Precisely that – disadvantages.

  Prince Philip, on being a father

  If you prick us, do we not bleed!

  If you tickle us, do we not laugh?

  If you poison us, do we not die?

  And if you wrong us, do we not revenge?

  If we are like you in the rest

  We will resemble you in that.

  William Shakespeare,

  The Merchant of Venice

  I dedicate this book to Adele La Tourette, with love.

  1

  The Thousand-Year Case History

  ‘The Queen, like all young mothers, is exigeante and never thinks the baby makes progress enough or is good enough,’ wrote Lady Sarah Lyttelton, the royal governess and great-great-grandmother of the late Princess Diana, on 6 October 1843. The inadequate infant was Queen Victoria and Prince Albert’s first child, Princess Victoria.


  When Lady Diana Spencer married Prince Charles on 29 July 1981 she was thought a suitable bride for the most medieval of reasons: she was a virgin. Her duty was to produce an irreproachable heir to the throne and, as she later put it, a ‘back up’. No member of the royal family asked whether Diana would be a good mother. When it became clear she was a devoted and intelligent one, many were amazed. With some exceptions, the royals have not distinguished themselves as parents over the last 1,000 years.

  A small example of imperfect parenting: when Prince William was hit by a golf club and badly injured just before his tenth birthday, Diana rushed to his school and took him to hospital for a brain scan. Prince Charles came too, but there was no question of him lingering by his son’s bedside, as he was scheduled to attend an opera. The press pilloried the Prince of Wales, though through history royal fathers were often much crueler; they have imprisoned, beaten and in some cases even killed their sons.

  Today, the ideal royal parent would be loving, intelligent and emotionally intelligent, and would bring up their children to possess all those qualities as well as being heroic, as kings have always been expected to be. Shakespeare understood that a Prince also needed the common touch. In his Henry V, the King wanders incognito among his troops on the eve of the battle of Agincourt to find out what they really think. To be ordinary, and yet also extraordinary, is asking a great deal. The royal ‘child’ who now best delivers both the ‘common’ and heroic is perhaps the ‘back up’: Prince Harry. He has served in Afghanistan, got plastered with his fellow soldiers, been snapped in the nude and risked his life on the front line; he has also become involved in charity work for Help for Heroes and Walking with the Wounded.

  E. M. Forster wrote, ‘How do I know what I think till I see what I say?’ – and that has been true of my experience in writing this book. It was not until I was some way into my research that I realised the British royal family offers one of the longest, if not the longest, case history of an extended family. Using the phrase ‘case history’ does not imply that every individual royal since 1066 required the services of a therapist; however, some did, and many more might have benefited from such services.

  On their father’s side, the Princes William and Harry can trace their descent to William the Conqueror, who won the Battle of Hastings in 1066. On their mother’s side, the DNA spools back to Charles II, who enjoyed at least twelve mistresses. Among others, the ‘merry monarch’ fathered Henry FitzRoy, Duke of Grafton, and Charles Lennox, Duke of Richmond. Beyond Charles II, Princes William and Harry can trace their maternal ancestry back to the Despenser family. Relations between that family and the monarchs were not always harmonious, though: in 1326, for example, Queen Isabella, the wife of Edward II, had Hugh Despenser executed for treason. When Lady Diana Spencer wed Prince Charles, she was marrying the descendant of a woman who had had one of her ancestors killed.

  We cannot begin to construct a similar ten-centuries-long case history for the families of George Washington, Mozart, Einstein, Freud, Marx, Stalin or even the Kennedys – few details exist as to how they brought up their children. No one cared about the Mozarts in 1500 and no one knows where the Freuds lived, though many analytic zealots have tried to trace Sigmund’s family back to Noah’s Ark. We cannot begin to write a similar history for Mafia families, who, like the royals, fascinate because they are so different from normal families – and yet so similar.

  Despite hundreds of biographies of kings and queens, which range through the obsequious to the considered to the gloriously bitchy, there does not seem to have been any attempt to study the ways in which royal parents have brought up their children, and to trace how these early experiences affected their later lives. In this book, I shall do just that, interweaving history with the infinitely younger discipline of child psychology, which is not even 150 years old. The discipline owes much to Charles Darwin. In 1877, he wrote A Biographical Sketch of an Infant, in which he recorded observations of his son. Darwin was not quite objective, referring to William as ‘a prodigy of beauty & intellect’, but the great naturalist was, as ever, an acute observer. In a daily diary, he noted William’s gestures and facial expressions and compared his child’s behaviour with that of the apes in London Zoo. Darwin’s sketches inspired a number of psychologists to study their own children. Over the next fifty years, these often charming observations became more ambitious as psychologists tried to identify how the young were affected, even ‘shaped’, by early experiences. Some of those who tried – Freud, Jean Piaget, John B. Watson and B. F. Skinner – were among the most influential psychologists of the twentieth century.

  There are a number of reasons that may explain the dearth of studies into royal upbringings. First, most historians know little psychology and most psychologists know even less history. Second, historians mainly study documents and, until the fifteenth century, there is usually insufficient evidence as to how any royal child was raised. There are some important exceptions, though, as we shall see in Chapter 2.

  Then, F. A. Mumby’s The Girlhood of Queen Elizabeth (1909) offers a wealth of information on the Virgin Queen from British, French and Venetian archives, while Queen Victoria’s diary describes many aspects of her childhood and that of her children. Prince Philip’s grandmother, Princess Victoria, wrote 308 pages of recollections that have never been published. Marion Crawford’s The Little Princesses deals with the childhood of the present Queen and her sister, Princess Margaret, and is peppered with astute observations. Precisely because the children of royals were expected to inherit the throne, material is also scattered in chronicles, letters and diaries. I have tried to make sense of this scatter, and this has led me to observe some profound changes in royal parenting over the last 1,000 years.

  For four centuries after 1066, any would-be king had to be a good fighter, and parenting royal boys was an intensely physical business. Fathers often taught their sons how to handle swords, maces and even bows and arrows; they regularly fought side by side in battle. Every English king commanded forces in combat at some point in his life, and a few were even good generals.

  By the mid-sixteenth century, monarchs had to be wily politicians rather than military leaders. Razor-sharp wit mattered more than rapiers and, for 150 years, royal parents ensured their offspring had the best teachers in Europe. These princes and princesses made the most of their stellar education and, without ghostwriters, produced a number of learned tracts, translations and even a few decent poems.

  James I (and VI) had a superb education and was probably the best writer ever to sit on the throne. He admired his great-grandfather, James IV, who had conducted one of the first psychological experiments when he arranged for two children to live with a mute woman on a Scottish island to discover whether they had to hear language being spoken in order to speak themselves. The question posed by James I’s great-grandfather – is language innate or learned? – is still debated. James wrote a number of decent poems and books, including a book for his eldest son, Prince Henry, giving him fatherly advice on how to be King.

  After James I, there was much less emphasis on the education of royal sons and daughters, however. The intellectual calibre of the monarchy declined in 1714 when George I, the Elector of Hanover, took the throne. George I not only spoke dreadful English and lacked any intellectual curiosity, but also his appalling behaviour to his oldest son set the pattern for the next four generations. Between 1714 and 1820, royal fathers and their eldest sons were permanently hostile to each other. (Indeed, George III tried to kill his heir.) The next change in pattern concerns Queen Victoria, who was born in 1819 – a year before George III died. She was a victim of emotional abuse, the consequences of which are still with us.

  Emotional abuse and Queen Victoria

  Victoria’s father died when she was still a baby. Her widowed mother, the Duchess of Kent, and her adviser, John Conroy, controlled every aspect of the Princess’s life. This obsessive control left its mark. Victoria’s granddaughter recalled her
own mother saying that Queen Victoria once snapped, ‘I detest this room’, while in the tapestry room at Windsor Castle. When she was fifteen, Victoria’s mother had scolded her furiously there, accusing her ‘of making up to the King [William IV] at dinner’. The Duchess was furious because ‘the King had drunk her [Victoria’s] health and insulted her mother’. Though so many years had passed, Victoria remembered her mother’s anger vividly.

  Conroy encouraged the writing of a pamphlet to explain what he grandly called ‘The Kensington System’, after the family’s Kensington Palace residence. The System had rigid rules. One was that Victoria was not allowed to meet anyone without her mother, Conroy or her governess present. There were endless confrontations between the Duchess and King William IV because she would not let him see his niece very often. As a result, Victoria felt bullied and unloved. When she became Queen, she turned against her mother and Conroy, but those who have been abused often abuse in turn. Victoria tried to control her own children, but she felt their experiences would be very different because she loved them, as did her husband, Prince Albert.

  Victoria and Albert were so neurotic about their eldest son, Bertie, that they became the first royal parents to seek professional psychiatric help for one of their offspring. They tried to improve their unsatisfactory son by having his skull analysed by George Combe, Britain’s leading authority on phrenology – a then fashionable theory which claimed one could understand a person’s character by mapping the bumps on their skull. Combe devised a programme of remedial education for Bertie, whose bumps left much to be desired. The child loathed the whole humiliating business and reacted against it when he himself became a father in 1864. He tried not to repeat the mistakes that he felt his parents had made with him. His second son – the future George V – saw that his father’s lenience had disastrous consequences, and in turn became as demanding a parent as Prince Albert and Queen Victoria had ever been. George’s eldest son, David, the future Edward VIII, was the victim of this severity and wrote that he was ‘in unconscious rebellion against my father’. It would seem someone had introduced David to Freud’s writings. And Freud figures more in recent royal history than one might imagine. It is no accident that, when the Freud Museum was opened in London, Princess Alexandra performed the ceremony.