Princes Will Be Princes... Queen Victoria's Children

Queen Victoria and her husband, Prince Albert, had a dream for the

monarchy - a dream that would depend for its success on their four sons.

They saw their court as a new Camelot

and what they were doing in rearing these sons, in particular,

was creating a new order of chivalry.

Princes must be raised to look as if they deserve their position,

princes must be better than anyone else

Bertie and Affie, Leopold and Arthur -

they would be standard-bearers of a new moral monarchy.

But princes rarely turn out that way.

Bertie is a throwback -

he has a nicely old-fashioned aristocratic attitude towards sex,

which is that you get as much of it as you can with whoever you can.

Affie is like a kind of second-rate version of Bertie, you know,

he's really not very bright.

And he's constantly having affairs with other people.

The relationship between Victoria

and her sons would be an epic drama of sex

and defiance...

..a battle of wills the Queen was determined to win.

Really one could only call her a control freak.

Her behaviour was that of a domestic dictator.

"Every inch of liberty is taken away from one, and one is watched,

"and everything one says or does is reported".

Then there was this kind of sense that, you know, you may be able

to defy a mother but how dare you even consider defying a sovereign.

The battle with the Queen would dominate - and scar - her sons.

But it would have a surprising outcome - and from it, the monarchy

would emerge re-invigorated in ways Victoria could never have foreseen.

On November 25th 1861 the Queen's husband, Prince Albert,

dashed to Cambridge for a meeting with their oldest son, Bertie,

who would later rule as King Edward VII.

The 20-year-old Prince of Wales, who was at university,

had committed what his parents believed to be a mortal sin -

he'd had sex, with a woman, while staying at an army base in Ireland.

The problem with Bertie's escapade

with Nellie Clifden, who was a good-time girl-cum-actress

was that it was pretty average rites of passage for any young

Victorian gentleman, they all went off

and had a night with a prostitute or went to a brothel.

But Albert's response was absolutely hysterical,

he had this pathological fear about the power of sex

and what it could do in terms of bringing scandal and dishonour

on the British Royal Family and he went into complete meltdown.

Victoria and Albert were engaged in a project to rescue

the monarchy,

to convert it into a model family which ordinary

people could look up to and admire.

At the heart of the project was a romantic fantasy -

that at Windsor Castle they had recreated the court of Camelot.

Queen Victoria's favourite painting of Albert was of him

wearing medieval armour, and I think she did think of him

as a sort of pure medieval knight, a kind of King Arthur figure.

And I think she thought she was handing on to her sons

ideals of purity and chivalry.

The aim was to bury the memory of the debauched House of Hanover

who had ruled Britain before Victoria -

and so insulate the monarchy from the revolutions sweeping Europe.

Theirs would be a new dynasty for a new age - pure and virtuous.

Their sons - latter-day knights.

It was a fantasy that had sexual morality -

personified by the saintly Albert - at its core.

But Bertie had let the side down.

As he and his father walked in the countryside near Cambridge,

they were caught in a downpour.

Albert returned to Windsor with a fever...

and was dead within three weeks.

The Queen was inconsolable.

He was her world.

He arranged, controlled, organised every aspect of her life

and the family's life.

She said it was like tearing the flesh from her bones.

She was utterly rudderless.

A single mother of 42 - she would now have to cope alone, not just

with Bertie, but three other boys -

Alfred, always known as Affie, who was 17,

Arthur, who was 11,

and the youngest, Leopold, who was eight.

As they approached manhood, the prospect filled Victoria with dread.

Sex was an area that she couldn't control.

The Queen was no prude, but when it came to telling her boys how

to behave in that area, she was at a loss, all at sea,

because in that area, in particular, she needed her husband.

Victoria had no doubt whom she held responsible for her loss -

the Prince of Wales.

Basically, Victoria blamed Bertie for Albert's death.

She decided that it was the shock of the Nellie Clifden affair that

had sort of tipped Albert over

and she decided that it was Bertie's terrible, terrible behaviour

and character that had killed her beloved husband.

In letters, Victoria made her feelings plain.

"I never can or shall look at him without a shudder.

"This dreadful, dreadful cross kills me."

The terrifying thing about that line in the letter is not,

"I never can," it's "I never SHALL look at him,"

as if she's preparing for the rest of her life to reject her son.

Victoria's relationship with her eldest son had been

difficult from the first.

From earliest infancy, Bertie was a disappointment to both

of his parents.

The problem with Bertie is that he is temperamentally

very different from Prince Albert, and that is unforgivable.

Victoria's letters

when Bertie was a child suggest an almost physical distaste.

"Handsome I cannot think him, with that painfully small

"and narrow head, those immense features and total want of chin."

Even his voice annoyed her, making her...

"So nervous I could hardly bear it."

To help create the perfect knight of their fantasy, Victoria

and Albert had imposed on Bertie an intense educational regime,

which overwhelmed him.

His parents' disapproval crushed him.

Bertie didn't realise that he was going to become King of England

because he assumed it would be his older sister, Vicky,

and it had to be pointed out to him by a tutor that he would be

King, because he was just convinced that Vicky was

so much cleverer than he was that she would automatically be Queen.

"I had no boyhood," Bertie would lament in later life.

Now his misdemeanour with Nellie Clifden meant that,

for Victoria, her son, christened Albert after his father,

was not just a disappointment, but a disgrace.

She had one Albert being replaced by another Albert

and it was like some horrible joke.

This dreadful, kind of, parody of

her husband suddenly sitting there smirking at her.

Her life just fell apart.

Victoria was forced to confront a dreadful truth -

her oldest son had not inherited his father's personality -

he'd inherited hers.

Queen Victoria, is a Hanoverian, you know,

her father was a Hanoverian, and she has many of the characteristics.

She loves sex.

She has a terrible temper, and a huge amount of common sense,

basically, and her son, Bertie, is a copy of her, but more extreme.

For Victoria, sex outside marriage was a threat to the dynasty -

and in letters to Bertie she piled on the guilt.

"Let it be your constant admonition to make up,

"by a future spotless life, for that which, alas,

"can never be undone."

Her relationship with her second son, Prince Alfred,

was initially less complex.

Two and a half years younger than Bertie, Affie had

been his father's favourite son.

He was mechanically minded, he was intelligent, certainly more

intelligent than Bertie, and he seemed to have a lot of promise.

From a young age, Affie displayed a love for the Royal Navy -

and the image of the sailor prince captured the public imagination,

spawning a spate of patriotic ditties.

# God bless our sailor prince

# God bless our sailor prince

# Long may his name be... #

For a time, Prince Alfred

and the Prince of Wales were educated together.

But it was not to last.

When Affie was 11 and Bertie 14,

the two boys were caught smoking together.

Fearful Affie would be contaminated by Bertie's poor behaviour,

their parents separated them.

For the next three years Affie lived alone with his tutor,

away from his family, while Bertie stayed at home.

Affie taught himself the violin, in secret, to impress his parents.

He was not a natural musician.

At the age of 14 he joined the Navy.

He was at sea when his beloved father died, three years later.

You can imagine the loneliness,

the grief of this, really, still young boy - just 17 - on active

service, serving his country...

far away from the father

that he'd loved and never being able to finally say goodbye.

In the spring of 1862, Prince Alfred returned to a court in mourning -

and a Queen incapacitated with grief.

As if losing his father wasn't bad enough,

Affie was faced with a mother who frankly couldn't communicate,

couldn't operate effectively for a number of years.

In other words, in some senses, he'd lost not one parent, but two.

A grieving Affie returned to sea.

A few months later the Queen discovered he'd had sex with

a young woman in Malta.

She was horrified.

"Affie has dealt a heavy blow to my weak and shattered frame

"and I feel quite bowed down with it.

"There is not a particle of excuse.

"His conduct was both heartless and dishonourable."

Sailors might indulge themselves in port. Princes couldn't.

Like Bertie, Affie's behaviour threatened the Queen's

cherished vision of a virtuous, pure monarchy.

And he would suffer the same fate.

Subsequently, Queen Victoria expresses deep distrust

and dislike and real horror, sometimes, at the presence

of Affie and says that she can't bear to be with him.

Certainly the Queen never forgave him for that and their

relationship from this point onwards was fractured almost beyond repair.

Victoria's two oldest boys had failed her.

Rather than Knights of the Round Table, they'd proven all too

susceptible to the temptations placed in the way of princes.

The Queen now shifted her attention to her third son - Arthur.

Nine years younger than Bertie, Prince Arthur was always Victoria's

favourite - as she made quite clear in letters to her husband.

"This child is dear, dearer than the rest put together, thus after

"you he is the dearest and most precious object to me on earth."

Arthur could do no wrong.

The other sons suffered as a result of their being frozen

out of their mother's love and interests.

And when your mother's the Queen of England

it's going to have a very real impact on your life.

From a young age, Arthur was fascinated by the army -

he helped build a toy fort at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight.

Here at last was a prince who might truly live up to his father's

chivalric ideals.

However, Arthur's behaviour in the classroom was not much better

than that of his eldest brother,

as his tutor made clear in a letter to the Queen.

"Prince Arthur has not even on any single one occasion done

"anything which was recommended to him kindly.

"By firmness alone and that of an unintermittent

"and most trying kind, has any improvement ever been obtained."

The Queen, though, was determined her angel could do no wrong.

"Dear boy, he is so innocent, so amiable and affectionate that

"I tremble to think to what his pure heart and mind may be exposed.

"There is no blemish, no fault like there was in poor Affie -

"no falsehoods and want of principle, nothing but real goodness".

For the rest of his youth, Victoria would have one

goal for Arthur above all others - to keep him

as far away as possible from his libidinous older brothers.

The heir, the sailor,

the soldier - the first three sons had their roles clearly outlined.

But what of the fourth - Prince Leopold?

Twelve years younger than Bertie, Leopold was the cleverest and most

intellectually curious of the boys, as Victoria herself recognised.

"His mind and head are far the most like of any of the boys

"to his dear Father."

But he was not a child she warmed to.

As with Bertie, her criticisms focused on his appearance.

"A very common looking child, very plain in the face,

"clever but an oddity, and not an engaging child.

"The ugliest and least pleasing of the whole family."

If we look back on the letters Queen Victoria wrote, describing

Leopold as a small child, there are moments which strike

horror into one's heart, she is overwhelmed by his physical

ugliness, she describes him as common-looking.

Leopold had haemophilia - a disease which prevents

the blood from clotting.

Potentially fatal, he had inherited it from his mother -

although she was not a sufferer.

From Victoria and her children,

the disease would flow into the royal bloodlines

of Europe, afflicting the monarchies of Spain, Germany and Russia.

Leopold's illness was diagnosed when he was six years old.

She punishes both herself and Leopold for his illness.

At the same time, she turns him into an emblem of Victorian popular

culture, which is this figure of the saintly suffering invalid.

It was a sentimental image, familiar to the readers of Dickens.

Like the little boy in Dombey and Son, who is ever so sweet

and saintly, and close to heaven, and he might die at any moment,

but that's OK, because God will take him.

She's trying to cast Leopold in that mould,

which is really rather unfortunate, because what she has is not

a saintly child, it's a very feisty, sort of, quick-tempered child,

who is determined he's going to overcome his illness.

Prince Leopold was abroad convalescing when his father died.

Ever self-absorbed, his mother wrote him an anguished letter.

"Poor Mama is more wretched,

"more miserable than any being in this world can be!

"I pine and long for your dearly beloved Papa so dreadfully!"

When Leopold returned to Britain, Victoria sent his tutor firm

instructions.

"Take care and make poor little Leopold understand

"that his return will be a very sad one, that he

"comes back to a house of mourning and that his poor,

"broken-hearted mother cannot bear noise, excitement, etc."

Not yet nine, the walls were closing in on Leopold.

In time, his home would become a prison.

Victoria, meanwhile,

was still wrestling with the morals of her eldest son

and heir - rumoured - in the wake of the Nellie Clifden affair - to have

developed an insatiable appetite for the pleasures of the flesh.

Because of Bertie getting into all these scrapes and Victoria

and Albert both having no sense of humour

and no sense of proportion about it at all, it became essential...

once Victoria was widowed, to marry Bertie off, in a hurry.

To keep him out of mischief, Bertie was packed off on a trip to

the Holy Land, with a middle-aged clergyman.

They had to send him

abroad in such a way as he couldn't pick up prostitutes everywhere

between Paris, Vienna, Jerusalem, wherever he was travelling.

So they sent him on a tour of the Levant with the future

Dean Stanley -

it's a ridiculous...

holiday that they sent him on, I mean, totally inappropriate.

While Bertie toured the monasteries of the Middle East,

his mother set in train plans for a wedding with

Princess Alexandra of Denmark, known as Alex.

Alex was rather like Bertie, not particularly well educated.

She was very beautiful and she was very good natured.

I don't think she was particularly bright

and she certainly wasn't interested in any intellectual pursuits.

Perfect for Bertie, in other words.

And the prince was happy to do as he was told.

One of the things that his parents had managed to school him in was

the fact that you would marry the person that you were told to marry.

And I think he decided that that was fine, you know,

that was his fate and actually, thank god, you know,

they'd chosen somebody who was pretty and fun.

TRUMPET VOLUNTARY

The young couple were married at Windsor in March 1863.

The Queen, still dressed in mourning,

a somewhat gloomy presence.

After the ceremony Bertie and his bride were obliged to share

the wedding photo with the groom's mother, who resolutely

ignored them, staring instead at a bust of her dead husband.

The Queen installed the newlyweds at Marlborough House,

just a few hundred yards from Buckingham Palace.

It quickly became clear she expected to exert the same control

over Bertie's adult life, as she had over his childhood.

Victoria, right from the beginning of the marriage, tries to set

a timetable, she tries to dictate how much time

they are allowed out, how much time Alexandra is allowed, for

example, riding in the park, which I think, initially, is not at all.

Victoria recruited the household servants as spies - including the

doctor who was required to pass on details of Alex's menstrual cycle.

Really, one could only call her a control freak.

She went on and on and on.

And she felt that, as Queen, she had the right to go on and on.

But Bertie was showing surprising resourcefulness.

Bertie was very good at somehow slipping through these nooses.

He reacted to her by being incredibly polite

You never see in his letters, or in his behaviour, that he's exactly

scared of her, but he works out ways of, sort of, skirting her.

And very quickly, he and Alexandra managed to establish, actually,

a very, very sociable circle at Marlborough House.

Gradually, Bertie dismissed the servants the Queen had

imposed on him and began to display qualities his mother lacked.

I think he realises the one thing he has, that his parents don't

have, is he can make people like him.

I think his parents had no use for charm.

Marlborough House was the opposite of the Queen's gloomy court -

open, inclusive, glamorous.

It reflected Bertie's extrovert personality

and provided an alternative vision of monarchy - one where the stress

was not on morality and sexual purity, but on theatre and show.

The Queen, though, could see only danger in the prince's

lifestyle and his aristocratic friends.

"At no time for the last 60 or 70 years was frivolity,

"the love of pleasure, self-indulgence

"and idleness carried to such excess as now in the higher classes.

"It resembles the time before the first French Revolution.

"It is most alarming, although you do not observe it,

"nor will you hear it."

Victoria now devoted her efforts to keeping her remaining

sons as far away as possible from the den of upper class

iniquity that was Marlborough House.

Where Affie and Arthur were concerned,

she had the ideal solution.

What Victoria's reign coincides with is the most extraordinary

expansion of Empire.

And it was genius, in a sense, for Albert

and later Victoria to set up a system which is still in play

today, of sending young princes out into the world to somehow bind

the mother country to these far-flung colonies.

The princes would be ambassadors of Empire - binding colonies,

not just to the mother country, but to the crown.

But for Affie - the second son -

it was a role that did not come naturally.

Affie does seem to have been rather boring,

the kind of man who would start an anecdote about something that

had doubtless happened to him a very long way away, on some voyage,

on some trip, and everybody would quietly edge out of the room.

His violin playing hadn't improved, either.

It came to epitomise a grating, discordant personality.

"Fiddle out of tune and noise abominable,"

complained one unwilling listener.

Deprived of his beloved father, distant from his mother, by

his mid-20s, Affie had a reputation as a drinker and a womanizer.

He is a kind of second-rate version of Bertie, you know,

he's really not very bright, he's really not very interesting.

and he's constantly having affairs with other people.

In 1867, Affie was dispatched to Australia.

His limitations were cruelly exposed.

Affie proved to be the most incompetent

ambassador for Britain that you could possibly imagine, really.

He wasn't a particularly tactful figure.

I mean, there he was, scooting through Australia, waiting to be

received by all of these local dignitaries.

If he didn't fancy meeting them, he would just drive the coach

straight past and leave them all standing there.

What he was really interested in doing was shooting things.

He shot possums,

wombats.

He had no restraint, at all, when it came to massacring animals.

GUNSHOTS AND SCREAMING

But the tour ended in high drama.

On March 12, 1868, at a picnic in Sydney, Prince Alfred

suddenly found himself at the other end of the barrel.

This character comes up and shoots him in the back,

almost from point blank range.

Now, very luckily, the bullet just misses his spine,

passes through his chest cavity and lodges in his ribs at the front.

And this is a shot, frankly, that easily could have killed him.

The would-be assassin was an Irish republican.

The Prince made a swift recovery.

But the Queen was unsympathetic - seeming almost to resent

the attention her son was receiving.

"I am not as proud of Affie as you might think, for he is

"so conceited himself, and at the present moment receives ovations as

"if he had done something, instead of God's mercy having spared his life."

Prince Arthur - Victoria's favourite - proved rather more

successful as a colonial ambassador.

He also delighted his mother by managing to steer

clear of sexual scandal.

"I have excellent accounts of Arthur. He at least follows

"in his beloved father's footsteps as regards character and sense of duty."

But for the fourth son - Leopold -

watching his brothers travel the world, there was only frustration.

Battling his haemophilia,

Prince Leopold had grown into an intelligent, thoughtful teenager.

A talented pianist,

he yearned to escape the stifling atmosphere at court.

But for him there could be no knightly role.

Instead, his mother continued to treat him as a saintly invalid.

"All the essentially English notions of manliness must be

"put out of the question."

"He must be constantly watched.

I do not wish that any attempt should be made to

remove him from me."

Victoria compounded Leopold's problems by placing him

in the care of Archie Brown, younger brother of her

unpopular highland servant, John Brown.

What the Queen had done was to put a bully in charge of her son.

And there are no two ways about it, Archie Brown bullied him.

Leopold described his treatment in letters.

"He is fearfully insolent to me.

Hitting me on the face with spoons for fun.

He does nothing but jeer at and be impertinent to me every day.

I could tear him limb from limb... I loathe him so."

Archie taunts and teases him.

And he's completely at the mercy of this.

And the gentlemen of the household knew this.

And were on Leopold's side, and tried very, very hard

to suggest to the Queen that Archie Brown was not the right person.

And of course all the Queen saw was English prejudice,

and she didn't listen.

And this went on for years.

Leopold was now approaching the age Victoria feared most in her sons.

But where sex was concerned, she felt his haemophilia

made him different, as she told one of her daughters.

"But oh! The illness of a good child is so far less trying

than the sinfulness of one's sons, like your elder brothers.

Oh! Then one feels that death in purity

is so far preferable to life in sin and degradation!"

She's talking about a boy of 13 here.

And the one thing Leopold very definitely doesn't want

is to die in purity or any other way.

He'd rather have the life in sin and degradation.

In letters to friends, Leopold poured out his anger.

"The life here is becoming daily more odious and intolerable.

"Every inch of liberty is taken away from one, and one is watched,

"and everything one says or does is reported.

"Oh, how I do wish I could escape from this detestable house.

"I am looking forward to the day I shall be able to burst

"the bars of my iron cage and fly away for ever."

The battle of wills was also intensifying between the Queen

and the Prince of Wales.

Everything Victoria, disapproved of, Bertie does.

Victoria was really down on smoking,

Bertie is never without a cigar in his hand.

Victoria disapproved of dining out with the aristocracy.

Bertie is constantly dining out with the aristocracy.

It is a rebellion.

Um, against um, what Victoria's court stands for.

The Prince of Wales was now in his late 20s.

He was a father of three.

But his sociability was beginning to tip over into a voracious hedonism.

'Bertie was in every sense a very greedy person.

I suppose if you were a psychiatrist you would say that was

a sign that he was a very needy person, emotionally.'

And so I think he looked, as he grew up,

for emotional satisfaction from physical appetites.

As Bertie's waistline spread, the image of a pure,

chivalric knight fitted ever less comfortably.

Bertie is a throwback.

He has an old-fashioned aristocratic attitude towards sex,

which is that you get as much of it as you can with whoever you can,

you try not to get caught and if you do you pay people off.

Freed of parental constraint,

Bertie plunged himself into a world of pleasure...

CORK POPS

..regularly visiting brothels and keeping a string of high-society mistresses.

Behaviour that may also have had its roots in his unhappy childhood.

Many people would think he was a scarred human being.

Freud says the reason men go to prostitutes is to take

revenge on their mother.

His long-suffering wife, Alex, had little alternative

but to tolerate Bertie's philandering.

But then in 1870, Bertie's scandalous private life

burst into the open when he was named in a high-profile divorce case.

It's tremendously humiliating and it's extremely shocking and he

is certainly seen as having pulled the Royal Family into disrepute.

This was a direct threat to the Queen's vision of a pure

and virtuous monarchy.

But when the prince appeared in court something strange happened.

He was asked just a handful of questions

and allowed to leave the witness box.

Someone in the background, it seems, had pulled strings.

Whenever there's a crisis this happens, Victoria stands by him.

And that was very important to his survival in the case.

Because it meant the government, Gladstone, the Prime Minister, also backed Bertie.

And that meant that he wasn't... He was given an easy ride in court,

he wasn't given a tough cross-examination.

I mean, I don't think for a moment she believed

that Bertie was innocent, in these various divorce cases.

I think that she felt she had to say so,

for the good name of the Royal Family.

Mother and son had closed ranks.

And by 1870, the Queen had good reason to feel the monarchy was under threat.

She had been in mourning for almost a decade, effectively a recluse,

and the sympathy of the British people was beginning to wear thin.

William Gladstone, a Liberal Prime Minister Victoria loathed,

expressed the problem bluntly.

"To speak in rude and general terms, the Queen is invisible

and the Prince of Wales is not respected."

One wag placed a sign on the railings at Buckingham Palace

declaring the premises vacant,

the late occupant having retired from business.

With republican sentiment growing, the Prince of Wales

found himself with a rare opportunity to lecture his mother.

"If you sometimes came to London from Windsor

"and then drove for an hour in the Park, the people would be overjoyed.

"We live in radical times, and the more the people see

"the Sovereign the better it is for the people and the country".

But the Queen refused to budge.

And Bertie, along with the rest of his siblings,

knew that a direct confrontation with her was out of the question.

She let them know at all times that she wasn't just their mother,

she was their Queen, and they had no chance to disobey her.

They know that she can get you a job,

she can dish out a nice house, and she can certainly dish out...

..money, you know, from the civil list.

The family was at an impasse, the Queen refusing to end her seclusion,

the children terrified to challenge her.

It was the greatest crisis of Victoria's reign.

Then, in November 1871, the Prince of Wales fell ill

at his newly-acquired country estate of Sandringham in Norfolk.

The diagnosis typhoid.

The very illness from which his father was believed to have died from precisely ten years before.

Queen Victoria comes up to Sandringham.

It's all slightly embarrassing, because Bertie with his typhoid, is raving away.

He's got terrible dementia and raving away mentioning the names

of various mistresses that he shouldn't mention, and Alex

has to be sent out of the room because he's saying such unmentionable things.

And all the Royal princes are sort of giggling, you know,

all his brothers are giggling downstairs at the things that he's saying.

So, on the one hand it's quite funny, but on the other hand,

nobody...You know, there was a real danger that he might die.

The illness reached its climax on December 14th, the anniversary of Albert's death.

The newspapers carried regular bulletins.

And the prince's life hung in the balance.

And then amazingly, he turns the corner and recovers.

And this has the extraordinary effect of causing a complete sort of flip-flop in public opinion.

CROWDS CHEERING

A few months later, huge crowds turned out

for a service of thanksgiving at St Paul's Cathedral.

CHOIR SINGS

By almost dying, Bertie had established an emotional bond with the people.

His infidelities and his philandering, it seemed,

didn't matter, despite the Queen's fears.

And she too, persuaded to come out of seclusion for a day at least,

was rapturously received.

The threat to the monarchy had evaporated.

CROWD CHEERING

But the conflict between Victoria and her youngest son,

was now reaching crisis point.

By the start of the 1870s, Leopold was plotting an escape route...

..Oxford University.

He is an intelligent and intellectually curious man,

in a way that a number of his brothers weren't.

But he also longs for the chance to live anywhere

but under his mother's roof and this is what Oxford represents to him.

BELLS TOLL

He sees it as a place where he can fit in.

It won't matter if he's not that strong, or if he's sometimes ill.

He's clever.

BELLS TOLL

But, as ever, there was an obstacle.

Her policy is one of silence.

When Prince Leopold asks to go to university at Oxford,

Queen Victoria didn't speak to him about it for seven months.

Why couldn't he be content to sit at home and read books,

or play the piano with his sister?

She makes it a health argument, but it isn't, really.

It's a keeping him at home argument.

Leopold was persistent.

Finally the Queen gave in.

But she did so grudgingly.

"The inconvenience that it will entail on me

"in not having a grown-up child in the house will be considerable.

"I have consented on the condition that it is merely for study,

"and not for amusement that you go there."

She insisted the Prince live at a house in North Oxford with hand-picked minders

and that any friends be restricted to young men -

"marked out either by birth

"or by their quiet and steady qualities as fit acquaintances."

Really, the whole idea was,

"If you're going to Oxford, I'm still in charge."

"And you will have as much of Oxford as I say you will have."

"You can go to lectures but I don't want you to enjoy yourself,"

is the bottom line.

But enjoy himself, Leopold did.

Oxford would be a dream-like interlude in his life,

during which he moved into the orbit of the Liddell family,

whose daughter, Alice, had provided the inspiration

for Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland .

Alice was now a young woman,

and Leopold was even rumoured to be in love with her.

But it was another character in the story

who would have been most familiar to him.

The Queen... you don't have to squint very hard at

to realise is a parody of his mother

losing her temper all over the place,

um, stomping around, being wildly unpredictable.

Here at last was a world of ideas,

of intellectual stimulation, of freedom.

But in 1876, Leopold's time at Oxford came to an end.

He was 23

and still desperate to find a useful and fulfilling role in life

as far away as possible from his mother.

It was a problem his oldest brother, now in his mid-30s,

was also wrestling with.

For all his hedonism,

the Prince of Wales yearned to be treated as a grown-up.

I think Victoria does infantilise him,

she doesn't give him a chance to grow up, certainly.

You know, she criticises him for not being responsible, not working

and yet she doesn't allow him any responsibility,

it's a no-win situation for him.

Bertie pleaded to be given a key

to the Queen's government dispatch boxes,

so that he could share in her official duties,

and learn the profession of monarch.

He was refused.

Victoria's reason for not giving him access

is saying that he's indiscreet and she tells everybody that,

"Bertie, if you tell him a secret, he'll tell everybody at a dinner party

"and the secret will no longer be a secret."

Bertie deeply resented this

and was angry that he was often kept out of the family business.

"I do not think that I am prone to 'let the cat out of the bag'

"as a rule, or to betray confidences.

"It is often with great regret that I either learn first from others

"or see in the newspapers,

"hints or facts stated with regard to members of our family."

In 1875 the Prince of Wales took matters into his own hands,

and organised for himself a trip to Britain's richest possession -

India.

The Queen, so keen to see her younger sons

act as ambassadors of empire, was furious.

Victoria didn't want Bertie to go to India

because she thought there would be a scrape.

She had visions of him climbing on rope ladders up,

up the walls of Indian harems.

But Bertie surprised her. He was charming, he was gracious.

He remembered names and faces

and played the part of an imperial prince to perfection.

Like Prince Alfred, he carried out a wholesale slaughter of wildlife.

But these hunting trips with the maharajas

were all part of the performance.

He grasps the theatre of empire -

he knew how to dress, he knew how to present himself,

he knew how to put himself on display.

He believed in ostentation and this was part of the role of monarchy.

Indian princes, were incorporated into the whole royal mystique,

and their loyalty was partly generated

by the spectacle that he created, going past on his elephant,

looking the part of a kind of living god.

India proved the perfect stage

for Bertie's ceremonial, theatrical Vision of monarchy.

It would be a template for all royal tours that followed.

The Prince also revealed himself to be more enlightened

than most colonial officers.

He told one:

"Because a man has a black face and a different religion

"from our own, there is no reason why he should be treated as a brute."

The Queen, who loved India and Indians, agreed.

But Bertie's ceremonial vision of monarchy left her unmoved.

She complained her son's letters were boring.

"Bertie's progresses lose a little interest

"and are very wearing as there is such a constant repetition

"of elephants, trappings, jewels illuminations and fireworks."

Queen Victoria was jealous of the success

of her eldest son in India,

she thought that the key thing was her imperial position

not his vulgar jaunts to the ends of the earth.

While the Prince of Wales was on his way home,

Victoria stole his thunder, accepting a proposal

from her favourite prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli,

that she be crowned Empress of India.

She didn't even tell Bertie

who found out from the press and was furious.

"In no other country in the world, would the next heir to the throne

"have been treated under similar circumstances in such a manner."

I think it's very interesting that Victoria really conforms

to the Hanoverian tradition of being poisonous to your heir,

treating the heir, really, almost as an enemy

and yet Bertie doesn't respond in the conventional Hanoverian fashion,

he never intrigues against her,

so, he in a way is the one way who understands

the way in which politics are changing and Victoria doesn't.

William Gladstone - the leading statesman of the day -

could see Bertie's qualities.

"He would make an excellent sovereign.

"He is far more fitted for that high place

"than her present Majesty now is.

"He would see both sides. He would always be open to argument.

"He would never domineer or dictate."

But the Queen's own comments on her son remained chilling.

"I often pray he may never survive me,

"for I know not what would happen."

Victoria continued to exclude her oldest son from all state business.

Her youngest, meanwhile, was launching another bid

to escape her clutches.

In 1882, Leopold married Princess Helen of Waldeck in Germany.

The Queen accepted the match

but was embarrassed by the sight of Leopold

leaning on a walking stick at the wedding...

"It is a sad exhibition and I fear everyone must be shocked at it.

"I pity her but she seems only to think of him

"with love and affection."

The couple quickly produced a child and Leopold then put himself forward

for the role of governor of Victoria, in Australia.

About as far away from his mother as he could get.

But the Queen blocked the move.

"His first duty is to me, but this he has never understood.

"Sad and suffering as I am, I was made quite ill

"by this new and totally unexpected shock."

Leopold pleaded with his mother.

"My brothers have been given appointment after appointment,

"and though the many sad disappointments of my life

"have not led me to expect much, it would indeed be bitter to lose this,

"the last thing I shall ever beg of you."

Not for the first time,

the stress of conflict with his mother

undermined Prince Leopold's health.

Mental health, emotional health can affect bleeding in haemophilia,

and certainly, this seems to be borne out with Leopold.

Throughout his life, it's very striking that

when he clashes with his mother, his health declines.

Leopold went to the south of France to recuperate.

There, on March 27, 1884, he banged his knee

while climbing the stairs at the Yacht Club in Cannes.

The accident caused severe internal bleeding

and he was carried back to his hotel.

He wrote to this wife, actually it's a heart breaking letter,

because it ends, "Darling, the pain is struggling so with me,

"I cannot write more".

And the signature physically tails off.

And this is his last letter.

Leopold died in the night from what were described as "convulsions".

He was only 30 - his short life blighted not just by illness,

but also, it seems, by his mother's mania to control.

Victoria mourned Leopold's death -

but lamented his refusal to resign himself to the life of an invalid.

"For dear Leopold, there was such a restless longing

"for what he could not have,

"that seemed to increase, rather than lessen."

Victoria - now an old woman -

had lost the one son who genuinely resembled his sainted father.

The other three were now well into corpulent middle age.

Only Prince Arthur, now commander of the British army in Bombay,

was on good terms with his mother.

She remained determined to view Bertie as a disappointment.

While Affie - the other black sheep -

was about to bring the story of Victoria's family full circle.

In 1893, Affie became Duke of Saxe-Coburg in Germany,

a title he had inherited from his father's family.

He moved into the Palace of Rosenau,

where Prince Albert had been born 74 years before.

It was not a happy homecoming.

This character who's been used to roaming the high seas

all of a sudden is placed in this landlocked, relatively insignificant

little German principality, where things don't go terribly well.

We have a sense at the end of Affie's life of a man

who is isolated by disappointment and unhappiness.

He had become commander-in-chief of the British Navy,

but when he became Duke of Saxe-Coburg had to give that up.

Victoria and Albert had dreamed of a Europe

united in peace and harmony through their family.

But Affie now found himself a dynastic relic,

an English prince stranded in the newly united Germany,

subordinate to his overbearing and erratic nephew, Kaiser Wilhelm.

Estranged from his wife and drinking heavily,

the Sailor Prince died of cancer in 1900.

He was 55.

Six months later, the remaining family

gathered at Osborne around the death bed of the Queen herself.

Of her nine children, three were now dead

and the oldest, Vicky, lay dying in Berlin, also of cancer.

For all of them, life had been a struggle to survive

the extraordinary personality of their mother.

I feel that none of her children doubted their love for her.

What they may have questioned is the nature of that love

and there are certainly occasions when all nine of her children

had reason to consider Victoria's love rather a selfish thing.

I think they did a very good job, actually,

of what could have been quite a crippling emotional experience,

being endlessly harangued about how imperfect they were,

in comparison with their perfect father.

Really it was not until after Victoria's death

that they could really, really live their own lives.

None had felt the weight of her disapproval more than Bertie.

On her deathbed, his mother asked him to kiss her and he wept.

A kind of reconciliation.

She died the next day,

her body laid out beneath the death portrait of her beloved husband,

who had died 40 years before.

Victoria was buried amidst grandeur

befitting the queen of the world's greatest imperial power.

She was the grandmother of Europe.

Five reigning monarchs and seven grand princes

escorted her to her grave - most of them related to her.

But within 14 years, they would be in conflict

as the dynastic web Victoria had woven across Europe

unravelled in war and revolution.

Of the great imperial dynasties of Europe,

only Victoria's would survive,

in no small part because of the abilities of her son,

now King Edward VII, who would reign for nine years

with tact, charm and diplomacy.

Bertie is the great survivor.

He comes to the throne, and he makes a huge, huge success of being king,

within relatively limited tramlines I suppose,

but he is a very, very successful king.

Victoria and Albert had believed in a monarchy

that reigned by moral example. A new Camelot.

But morality has never sat easily with princes.

Bertie offered an alternative.

A monarchy providing ceremony and theatre,

ranking public duty above domestic virtue.

In the century since -

as media scrutiny has grown ever more intense

Bertie's vision has generally proved a safer option for the Royal family.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd