The English travellers had already given offence to the Pope’s enemies in the north, to King Victor Emmanuel, and his minister, Count Cavour, by declining to visit them in Turin lest the Prince became involved in Italian politics or was corrupted by the vulgar King, who had behaved badly enough at Windsor and could be expected to be even more uncouth in his own palace. Undeterred by this rebuff, however, the King offered to confer upon the Prince the Order of the Annunciation; and this, it was decided after some hesitation, the Prince might accept, particularly as the investiture was to be performed by Massimo Taparelli, Marchese d’Azeglio, the much respected statesman and author who had once been Victor Emmanuel’s Prime Minister.
The Prince’s gratification at receiving so imposing an order from ‘so distinguished a personage’ was expressed in an unusually long entry in his diary. This, for the most part, unfortunately continued to distress his father, who, reading the extracts regularly posted home to him, noted with regret that there was as little improvement in the style of the jejune entries as evidence of a mature mind at work in their composition. Nor was the Prince Consort comforted by the reports he received from Colonel Bruce, who was unable to record any improvement in the Prince’s ‘learning and mental qualities’ and had cause to complain of his continued outbursts of temper. ‘His thoughts are centred on matters of ceremony, on physical qualities, manners, social standing, and dress,’ Bruce wrote. ‘And these are the distinctions which command his esteem.’
Other reports were more favourable. Robert Browning, who had been told by Bruce to ‘eschew compliments and keep to Italian politics’, found the Prince ‘a gentle refined boy’ who listened politely even if he did not say much. And J.L. Motley was much taken with him. ‘His smile is very ready and genuine,’ Motley wrote, ‘his manners are extremely good … His eyes are bluish-grey, rather large and very frank in expression … I have not had much to do with royal personages, but of those I have known I know none whose address is more winning, and with whom one feels more at one’s ease.’
‘Nobody could have nicer and better manners,’ wrote Edward Lear, to whose lodgings the Prince was taken by Colonel Bruce.
I was afraid of telling or shewing him too much, but I soon found he was interested in what he saw, both by his attention and by his intelligent few remarks. Yet I shewed him the Greek pictures, and all the Palestine oils, and the whole of the sketches, and when I said, — ‘please tell me to stop, Sir, if you are tired by so many’ — he said — ‘O dear no!’ in the naturalest way.
Indeed, it was generally admitted that the Prince was an attractive boy. Disraeli, who had sat next to him at dinner the evening before he went to see his sister in Berlin, found him ‘intelligent, informed and with a singularly sweet manner’. And even his father had to admit that he showed quite a ‘turn’ for social functions. Yet the prince Consort could not find much else to be said in his favour. Certainly he had displayed markedly little enthusiasm for the wonders of Rome. And when his intended tour of northern Italy was cut short by the outbreak of war, he seemed happy enough to sail to Gibraltar, where there was ‘plenty of larking’, and to travel from there to Lisbon to see his cousin, King Pedro V, son of the late Queen Maria da Gloria, who had married Prince Ferdinand of SaxeCoburg. It had also to be regretted that the journal entries he sent home to his father from Italy were as flat, brief and unilluminating as all the others he had written. His father begged him to write in a less stilted, more reflective, manner; but the reply was not very encouraging: ‘I am sorry you were not pleased with my Journal as I took pains with it, but I see the justice of your remarks and will try to profit by them.’
Having failed to derive much profit from Rome, he was now sent up to Edinburgh for three months’ intensive work before embarking on the next stage of his education, a period of study first at Oxford, then at Cambridge. He arrived at the Palace of Holyroodhouse in June 1858 with Colonel Bruce and the Revd Charles Tarver, and was required to settle down immediately to a course of lectures on all manner of subjects from chemistry to Roman history. He was allowed little time off from his work, and then not to go shooting with the Duke of Atholl as he wanted, but to make excursions to admire the scenic beauty of the Trossachs and the Scottish lakes, and to give dinners to the local worthies and his various instructors. His time in Edinburgh over, he went up to Oxford in October 1858. He was still not yet eighteen.
The Prince, who would rather have gone straight into the army than to Oxford, had hoped that his father would at least allow him to live in a college. But the Prince Consort had been adamant that he must live in a private house where his activities could continue to be supervised by Robert Bruce, now a major-general, and Major Teesdale. Ideally the Prince Consort would have liked his son not to be attached to any particular college at all. He had only consented to his being admitted to Christ Church when informed by the Vice-Chancellor that such an arrangement was essential, and then on the strict understanding that General Bruce was ‘entirely master of the choice of society which he might encounter’. ‘The more I think of it,’ the Prince Consort wrote to the Dean of Christ Church, ‘the more I see the difficulties of the Prince being thrown together with other young men and having to make his selection of acquaintances when so thrown together with them.’
And so the Prince moved into Frewin Hall, a gloomy house off Cornmarket Street; and there he and six Christ Church undergraduates, selected as his companions, listened to lectures specially composed for his benefit. In the dining-room he attended lessons in English history given by the Regius Professor of Modern History, Goldwin Smith, who was more interested in academic reform than in teaching and seems to have directed the attention of his royal pupil almost exclusively to the tedious pages of W.E. Flaherty’s Annals of England. The Prince, polite but bored, learned little, and Smith felt driven to suggest that he might well have acquired more knowledge of history from reading the novels of Walter Scott.
Occasionally the Prince could be glimpsed in the town, a slight, boyish figure with curly hair and a fresh complexion, wearing the gold-tasselled mortar-board with which all undergraduates of noble birth were then privileged to adorn themselves, walking to a lecture in the Divinity Schools, a service in the Cathedral, or a debate — the quality of which he usually condemned unreservedly — in the Union where, upon his arrival, the assembled undergraduates would immediately rise to their feet. Sometimes he was allowed out hunting or to play racquets or tennis, at which he was a ‘poor hand’. Sometimes he was allowed to attend dinners with such respectable people as Lord and Lady Harcourt at Nuneham Courtenay, or the Bishop of Oxford at Cuddesdon. Often he was obliged to give dinners himself to various senior members of the University interspersed with one or two undergraduates, all of whose names were suggested to him by General Bruce in consultation with the Vice-Chancellor and the Dean of Christ Church. He succeeded in making friends with two extravagant, amusing members of the Bullingdon Club, whose company he found congeniaclass="underline" Sir Frederick Johnstone, already a notorious philanderer, and Henry Chaplin, a clergyman’s son. Chaplin, an exceptionally good-looking young man, had been brought up after his father’s death at Blankney Hall in Cambridgeshire by a rich uncle who had made him his heir, sent him to Harrow, then to Christ Church, and enabled him to keep four hunters. But most of the Prince’s time was allotted to study. ‘The only use of Oxford is that it is a place for study, a refuge from the world and its claims,’ General Bruce was reminded by the Prince Consort, who, possessed by a terrible anxiety that ‘time was being wasted in pleasure’, was — after restless nights of worry — a frequent visitor to Frewin Hall where he complained that recreations, especially hunting, were encroaching too much upon the Prince’s intellectual pursuits.