Other tutors, while acknowledging that their pupil was amiable, that he was, in Kingsley’s phrase, a ‘jolly boy’, had to admit, however, that he would never make a scholar; and certainly his mind turned constantly from his studies to the army. The dinner parties he gave at Madingley Hall — at which the frivolous Duke of St Albans and Lord Pollington, both undergraduates at Trinity, were amongst the very few guests prepared to have with him the sort of gossipy conversation he most enjoyed — seemed to the Prince very boring affairs compared to what he supposed to be the merry dinners in a Guards officers’ mess.
At length, in the middle of March 1861, when his son was nineteen, the Prince Consort decided, on one of those regular visits he made to Madingley Hall to ensure that his rules and memoranda were being observed, that his son might profit after all from a break in his studies. General Bruce had changed his mind about the possible effects of the army on the Prince’s character and had now decided that he might well find camp life ‘a good field for social instruction’. It was accordingly settled that during the summer vacation he should spend ten weeks attached to the Grenadier Guards at the Curragh military camp near Dublin.
The Prince’s excitement at the prospect of this escape into military life was somewhat dampened when he learned of the severe restrictions which were to be imposed upon him in Ireland. For, from a memorandum which was drawn up with meticulous care by his father — and which the Prince of Wales, the Duke of Cambridge, as commander-in-chief, and General Sir George Brown, as general officer commanding in Ireland, were all required to sign — he learned that, while he was to wear the uniform of a staff colonel, he was to undergo a most exacting training in the duties of every rank from ensign upwards. As soon as he had thoroughly mastered the duties of one grade he was to proceed to master those of the next, until by the end of the ten weeks’ course he might, ‘with some exertion, arrive … at the command of a Battalion … and [be rendered competent] to manoeuvre a Brigade in the Field’.
While undergoing this rigorous cramming course, the Prince was also to acquire the social graces of an officer and a gentleman. He would dine twice a week in the Grenadier Guards’ mess; once a week in the messes of other regiments; twice a week he would give a dinner party himself to senior officers; and on the two remaining evenings he would dine quietly in his own quarters — which were to be close to General Brown’s — and afterwards devote himself to reading and writing. It was considered indispensably necessary that his relations with other officers would have to be placed on ‘a becoming and satisfactory footing, having regard to his position both as a Prince of the Blood and Heir to the throne, as well as a Field Officer in the Army’.
It was naturally all too much for him. The most dedicated and proficient recruit would have found it extremely difficult to keep pace with the Prince Consort’s programme of training; the Prince of Wales found it impossible. After seven weeks’ training, the commanding officer of the battalion to which he was attached considered him totally inadequate to perform the duties of the rank to which his father had decided he ought by then to have risen. And during the visit that his parents and his ‘Uncle George’, the Duke of Cambridge, made to the camp on 23
August he was humiliated by having to perform, while wearing his colonel’s uniform, the duties of a subaltern. He begged to be allowed to command, if not a battalion, at least a company; but his commanding officer would not hear of it. ‘You are imperfect in your drill, Sir. Your word of command is indistinct. I will not try to make the Duke of Cambridge think that you are more advanced than you are.’
In fact, the Duke of Cambridge had already decided that the Prince was not likely to make a very good soldier; he had neither the will nor the energy. The Prince Consort was compelled to agree. After witnessing the review on the Curragh, he confessed to his host, the Lord-Lieutenant, that the Prince was not taking his duties seriously enough — not that many young gentlemen did, he added, lamenting the ‘idle tendencies of English youth’ and the disinclination of English army officers to discuss their profession on the grounds that it was ‘talking shop’. The Queen was almost equally discouraged. All she could find to record of Bertie’s part in the review was that when he marched past he did not look ‘so very small’.
For the Prince, however, his time on the Curragh had its compensations. He had been allowed to have with him there Frederick Stanley, the Earl of Derby’s second son, one of those Etonians whom the headmaster had selected as a suitable companion for his walking tour in the Lake District. There were also other convivial young Guards officers at the camp; and one evening, after a noisy and rather drunken party in the mess, some of these persuaded a young actress to creep into his quarters and wait for him in his bed. This was Nellie Clifden, a vivacious, cheerfully promiscuous and amusing girl who was also unfortunately most indiscreet. The Prince was much taken with her. On his return to England, he continued seeing her when he could, evidently sharing her favours with Charles Wynn-Carrington; and, on one occasion at least, she seems to have gone down to Windsor. Delighting in her company, and in the pleasures of her body, the Prince felt more than ever disinclined to concentrate upon a subject to which his parents had urged him to lend his mind — his marriage.
The subject had first been broached soon after the Prince’s return from America, when the difficulty that had faced King George III in similar circumstances now faced the Queen and the Prince Consort: a Protestant being required by law, and a princess by custom, there were extremely few young ladies available and, of those, even fewer who were in the least good looking and whose character would not, as the Queen put it, ‘knock under’ when subjected to the strain of having Bertie for a husband. Moreover, like George III’s heir, the Prince of Wales did not want to marry a princess anyway, not — as his parents had reason to be thankful — because he was secretly married already, which had been the case with his unfortunate predecessor, but because he was vociferously determined to marry only for love. When the Queen wrote to him about his duty to get married to a suitable bride, he replied to her, so she complained to Bruce, ‘in a confused way’. His sister, now Crown Princess of Prussia, when asked to help in the search for a suitable bride, thought that his problem might be solved when she produced photographs of Princess Elizabeth of Wied; but the Prince professed himself unmoved by the pictures of this nineteen-year-old girl and declined to give them a second glance. Persuaded that their son’s mind was quite made up on the subject of Princess Elizabeth, the parents began to reconsider other possible girls who could fulfil the Queen’s requirements of ‘good looks, health, education, character, intellect and good disposition’. There was Princess Anna of Hesse, of whom the Crown Princess gave ‘a very favourable report’; there was Princess Marie of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, who was certainly ‘quite lovely’ — but she was a Roman Catholic. There was Princess Marie of Altenburg, but she was ‘shockingly dressed and always with her most disagreeable mother’. There was Princess Alexandrine of Prussia, but she was ‘not clever or pretty’. There was the nice little Princess of Sweden, but she was ‘much too young’. And there were the Weimar girls, who were also nice, ‘but delicate and not pretty’. Indeed, the more the Queen and the Prince Consort thought about the problem, the more their minds kept returning to another young girl, Princess Alexandra of Schleswig-Holstein-SonderburgGlucksburg, whom they had at first firmly rejected.