THE ART OF BEING A KING. A MONG the innumerable respects
in which English- men are happy in their relations with the Royal Family, we would attach much importance to the wise habit which the late King had, and which the present King has evidently adopted, of taking the nation, as it were, into his confidence. The head of our crowned Republic cannot expect to live a private life free from the scrutiny of his people, and the Royal Family most wisely recognise this, and never make the least difficulty about the publication, within reason, of details which jealous or too formal minds might prefer to keep in impenetrable privacy. The Royal Family, by their practice, give to the country a most valuable guarantee of their good faith. Men and women trust a family who are willing to show their hand, who never stand on absurd points of punctilio, and never betray pettiness. A very good example of what we mean is to be seen in the new number of the Quarterly Review, where a study of the character of King Edward is founded by permission of the King on private papers at Windsor Castle. Here we have an extraordinarily interest- ing revelation of the pains taken by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert to school the late King, when he was a boy, in the art of kingship.
Never, we suppose, was the responsibility for the education of a son more deeply, we might say more painfully, appreciated by parents, and never was a. more complete apparatus invented for moulding him in the desired form. We should have expected something of this sort from Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, but we could not have guessed the minuteness of the process. Let us remember the frame of mind. in which Queen Victoria set about the preparation of her son for his duties. She herself was the successor of the Georges, of whom England was tired., and of William IV., who, for all his good temper, did not inspire enough respect for the Monarchy, or any great personal attachment to it. She had to look away from home for her exemplar. She looked to her cousin by marriage, the King of the Belgians, whom she used to call her " uncle," and whom in moments of strong emotion she addressed as her father. From him she learned many of her expedients in ruling, such as insisting on having every communication from her Ministers put in writing in order that the excuses for the sometimes reckless decisions of oral dis- cussion might be beyond her reach. But, above all, she learned from him what her heart and mind were naturally ready to absorb, the lessons of moderation, truthfulness, and reasonableness. She recognised, in brief, that Great Britain had not had the Monarchy it desired or deserved, and she herself introduced a new era. If that era was to have any permanent value to the country, the spirit of it must be deliberately planted in the youthful imagination of her son. He must grow up in the very atmosphere of it. In this desire she was equalled in enthusiasm by Prince Albert, who brought to bear the extreme orderliness, the almost ponderous thoroughness, of his own training. From those forces the resultant was the singular training described in the Quarterly article, from which we can give only a few extracts, but which should be read in full.
The writer points out how the trust committed to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert of delivering over to the country a Prince properly trained to his high duties was " a terrible and a haunting thought." Not a day, not an hour in the early life of the Prince of Wales but had its suitable task assigned to it. Other boys might run wild, as a deliberate piece of relaxation designed for them by their parents, or might have jolly books of adventure thrown in their way, but this young Prince " must con- centrate, ever concentrate upon modern languages,' upon history,' upon the sciences.' " " The pages even of Sir Walter Scott were closed." When he was fifteen he was given a moderate allowance—" which would probably be thought mean by many an Eton boy "—to train him in thinking about the control of money. This allowance was only to be expended on small articles of dress. Next be was given the right to choose his clothes, but the bills still came to the Queen :— "Dress [she writes] is a trifling matter which ought not to be raised to too much importance in our own eyes. But it gives also the one outward sign from which people in general can and often do judge upon the internal state of mind and feeling of a person, for this they all see, whilst the other they cannot see. On that account it is of some importance, particularly in persons of high rank. I must now say that we do not wish to control your own taste and fancies, which, on the contrary, we wish you to indulge and develop, but we do expect that you will never wear anything extravagant or slang, not because we don't like it, but because it would prove a want of self-respect and be an offence against decency, leading—as it has often done before in others—to an indifference to what is morally wrong. It would do you much harm by giving the impression to others that you belonged to the foolish and worthless persons who are distinguished and known by such dresses. Don't believe that I say this because we do not trust your doing what is right in this respect, but to show you at the outset where the right and wrong lies, in order that you may clearly see it and never be in doubt about your choice."
Taste in clothes is not a thing which can be imparted ; all instruction can do is to prevent obvious outrages against taste. But in this respect the late King needed no instruction. It is a familiar fact that what we have ourselves called the peculiar tidiness of his mind was exemplified in his scrupulous care about minute details in dress.
When the late King was seventeen he received as a birthday present from the Queen and the Prince Consort a memorandum on his education. One cannot help seeing in this document the impress of the Prince Consort's style. It is too formal, too little feminine, to be wholly or even mainly the Queen's writing ; and there is a rigour of the German school about it which the Queen of her own motion would probably have softened with more tender touches. We quote only a small part of it :— " What has been asked hitherto from you to be done for your education by the tutor to whom you were responsible will be demanded henceforth as a duty, for the due performance of which you will be answerable to yourself and to your parents, whose express wishes will be indicated and interpreted to you by the Governor. Life is composed of duties, and in the due, punctual and cheerful performance of them the true Christian, true soldier, and true gentleman is recognised. You will in future have rooms allotted to your sole use, in order to give you an opportunity of learning how to occupy yourself unaided by others and to utilise your time in the best manner, viz. : such time as may not be otherwise occupied by lessons, by the different tasks which will be given to you by your director of studies, or reserved for exer- cise and recreation. A new sphere of life will open for you, in which you will have to be taught what to do and what not to do, a subject requiring study more important than any in which you have hitherto been engaged. For it is a subject of study and the most difficult one of your life, how to become a good man and a thorough gentleman.'
The wisest sentence in this document, on the substantial excellence of which we need not insist, is perhaps the last sentence we have quoted. It is wise because the late King, as the writer of the Quarterly article very truly points out, was most successfully built up in his character not by books but by observation, not by subjective but by objective lessons. He was really more usefully employed in what may be called the diplomacy of social life—in profitable conversation which was always at his disposal—than in certain auxiliary studies which were forced upon him. The care of the Royal parents did not stop at the personal admonitions of the memorandum. They prepared a ready-made " set " of young men to act as companions of the Prince of Wales. The long and precise instructions to the members of the " set " is an imperishable document. Granted that a young man is better kept quite remote from " bad sets " than so fertified with powers of resistance in himself that - he is able to rub shoulders with the whole world without becoming stained, the document is unexceptionable. We ourselves prefer the second course—indeed, we think the " cotton-wool " alternative most dangerous—and are much interested to learn that later, when the Prince of Wales went to Oxford and Cambridge, he considered that the deliberate aloofness in which he was kept from the ordinary life of undergraduates was a mistake. He thought that he should have become a real undergraduate (just as his grandson is now a real cadet at Osborne), or not have gone to Oxford and Cambridge at all. The " good. set " provided for the Prince of Wales were commanded to guide him in gentlemanlike ways, which were comprehended under such headings as deportment and dress, treatment of others, and the power to acquit oneself creditably in conversation. The writer says of the working of this scheme It is no mere phrase, but a sober fact, to say that every day of the boy's life a report of his progress was sent up to his parents." We are not surprised that the Prince of Wales resisted passively the " high tension" of the system which sought to improve him out of all acquaintanceships on natural lines. But the Prince Consort never failed. to think otherwise. " The more I think of it," he wrote, " the more I see the difficulties of the Prince of Wales being thrown together with the other young men, and having to make his selection of acquaintances when so thrown together with them ; an entirely separate establishment would. alone enable him to do so with safety." Probably under this regime the Prince of Wales sus- pected that all motives were manipulated—for his good, of course, but none the less manipulated—and this feeling may have led him to suspect that he was the object of a kind of educational plot. Suspicion, for a short time, clouded his mind. One of his tutors wrote of his character at this time that it betrayed " want of generosity, not simply generosity in giving, but generosity of sentiment and judgment, a want of toleration of difference of opinion and of imputation of honourable motives, a want of un- suspicion of mean ones, and of a readiness to give rather than to take advantage, his position enabling him to do the former with grace and dignity whilst he may yet do the latter with impunity." One rubs one's eyes at this. Could anything be more preposterously unlike the generosity, the tolerance, the open-handedness of the King whom we mourn ?
We cannot quote more. English fashions of thought about the education of boys have changed much in half-a- century. But they have changed in manner infinitely more than in substance. We can now look back upon the methods of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert and admire without stint, even while we differ strongly from the means in several respects, the noble and prodigal thought- fulness with which they provided for the main object of carrying on through posterity the new era of British kingship inaugurated in their reign. The results are now proverbial. Before Queen Victoria's reign the Heir-Apparent was an unemployed functionary. The late King as Prince of Wales never spared himself in performing ceremonies and helping good causes ; there were services which he invented. No one with only the example of George IV. to go by would have dreamed of expecting him to do these things if he had not shown a generous readiness to be useful. Thus Queen Victoria was justified in the event, and the continuance of the new era was guaranteed, even before she died. And when the Prince of Wales became King, he became such a Grand. Chairman of the Nation as revealed all the gracious sympathies of his experience. His parents intended him to be a man of breeding, and he was. Breeding proves itself in its liberties. He entered into familiar relations with his friends, but never in such a way as would end. in contempt. He had the undefinable air of always being pleased among his people without suggesting that applause was a novelty or more than the rightful tribute to the Throne. In all that we grate- fully recognise that he had learned the " objective lessons " of his training
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