Inside the traditional upbringing of royal children including Prince known for screaming fits and pranks
FOR as long as the British Royal Family has existed, royal children have been brought up in ways that seem bizarre and eccentric to the rest of us.
One anecdote, told about Edward VII, epitomises the lives of royal children and their parents.
King from 1901 to 1910, he was wandering through his palace one day and comes across a maid pushing a baby in a pram.
“What on earth is that baby doing here?” asks the king.
“Whose baby is it?” The maid replies, “It’s your baby, sir.”
Royal childrearing methods are very slow to change, and this means that generation after generation of royal children have been forced to endure what might very reasonably be described as dysfunctional parenting based on long outmoded traditions that centre on emotional coldness and detachment, toughness and duty.
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Elizabeth II is a rare example of how the age-old system of royal childrearing can be spectacularly successful, producing a woman with an almost inhuman devotion to duty.
But because her own childhood had been happy — largely thanks to the devotion of her nanny, Bobo MacDonald — Elizabeth saw no reason to change the childrearing regime that had always been part of the Royal Family’s world.
When her children were born, they too were left to nurses and nannies.
But, as we will see, there was no Bobo MacDonald for the next generation, and the consequences of that were perhaps beyond anything the Royal Family might have imagined.
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- Extracted from Gilded Youth: An Intimate History Of Growing Up In The Royal Family, by Tom Quinn (Biteback) out on February 28.
'Unemotional approach was so hard on Charles'
PHILIP, banned from the royal bedchamber when his wife was giving birth, had just finished playing squash when news reached him that a son had been born.
Elizabeth, in a significant break with tradition, decided to breastfeed her new son, but only for a month.
After that Charles was handed over to a succession of nannies and governesses.
The fact that nannies and nurse- maids had produced the Prince Regent, Edward VII and Edward VIII — to name just three immensely damaged royal men — seems to have gone unnoticed.
Like generations before him, Charles was taken to see his parents — more usually just his mother — in the morning and in the evening.
Contact amounted to little more than one hour each day and Charles himself was later to complain that his mother had been almost entirely absent from his earliest years.
Queen Elizabeth, like Prince Philip, had learned as a child that hugs and kisses were slightly embarrassing.
They weren’t known to ever hug or kiss their eldest son or the children they had later on.
Even the most sympathetic royalist would have noticed a remarkable and rather sad incident that occurred when, during one of his parents’ lengthy overseas tours, Charles flew out to Tobruk in Libya to meet them.
The world’s cameras were there to record the meeting between mother and son, a meeting that took place after several months apart, and rather than hug the little boy, Elizabeth shook his hand.
This unemotional approach to parenting was especially hard on Charles, a boy who was probably born genetically predisposed to shyness and over-sensitivity.
But when the children were small, there were lighter moments.
The Queen gave Charles piggybacks and at Sandringham the family played football and rode together around the estate.
The Queen always insisted on being the goalkeeper and she was surprisingly good at it, recalled one of her gamekeepers.
'Anne behaved like she would be next monarch'
AS is the way in so many families, Anne, the second child, was determined to be different.
She quickly identified with her tough, no-nonsense father.
Philip still went out of his way to avoid any physical affection with his daughter, but he liked her sarcasm and dismissive tone; she quickly adopted many of his sayings and mannerisms.
Even as a child, she tended to tell Charles to stop complaining, pull his socks up and just get on with it.
She stole his toys, she clouted him, she was rude to her nanny and she threw tantrums when she was told not to do something.
She also disliked the corgis and, according to royal page William Tallon, regularly booted them out of the way.
The footmen and maids would joke about the need to run past her to avoid being clouted.
One of Anne’s stable hands later remarked: “I’m not surprised Charles was frightened of Anne — even her bloody horses were terrified of her!
"She behaved as if she had every intention of being the next monarch rather than her brother.”
But Anne was a girl and Philip tended to be automatically dismissive of girls, however tough they might seem.
He spoiled her as a child but tended to be dismissive of her when she grew up.
Rather than praise her brilliant horsemanship, for example, he couldn’t resist sarcastic remarks that belittled her.
He once said of Anne, “If it doesn’t fart and eat hay, she’s not interested.”
'Andrew was adored so got away with acting up'
ANDREW began life the way he meant to continue, by being demanding and impatient and “roaring when he did not get his way” as a former nursemaid recalled.
Elizabeth was determined to stay out of nappy changing and feeding, but she was equally determined to see a great deal more of this baby than she ever had of Charles and Anne.
She walked him around the grounds of Buckingham Palace in a pram, joking it was “bearable” because she could take the corgis, and would ask his nanny to deliver Andrew to her study or sitting room and allow him to play on the floor.
But she could never quite bring herself to get down on the floor with him, and, as one nurserymaid explained, she would “no more have come to the nursery than come to the kitchen”.
From the very earliest, Andrew seems to have imbibed a sense of his own importance that outweighed that of any of his siblings, partly, no doubt, this was simply innate, but perhaps too it was the extra attention he received from his mother.
A former Buckingham Palace maid recalled: “I knew Andrew when he was out of the nursery but still fairly young.
"It’s very difficult to be fair to him because he was so horrible.
"He treated the staff as if they were dirt.
“Imagine a little boy walking up to a middle-aged man who had worked for the Queen for decades and saying, ‘Bring me that horse’, referring to a toy on the other side of the room, and the poor man would have to fetch it.
“His manner was always like this. He had screaming fits if he didn’t get his way in everything.
"He would walk past the sentries again and again to force them to present arms.
“He teased the corgis mercilessly, smashed things when he didn’t get his way and often tried to hit his nanny or the nurserymaid.
"He put porridge in the footmen’s pockets and would stand in front of them again and again knowing that when he did it, they had to bow.
“The odd thing was that Philip adored him and would put up with bad behaviour that would have made him roar if it had been Charles or even Anne.
“I remember once Andrew threw a valuable toy out of a window and Philip just laughed.
"Everyone said Andrew got away with almost any amount of bad behaviour because both his mother and his father adored him.”
Andrew’s tendency to act like a spoilt brat only got worse as he got older.
But occasionally the staff got the better of him.
When he was five he was staying at Windsor and bored, so he wandered into the stables and began to tease the grooms and stable lads, even going so far as to hit the legs of the horses with a stick.
After the stable staff politely suggested that perhaps he should go elsewhere, his behaviour became so awful that they threw him on a dung heap and shovelled horse manure on top of him.
Enraged, he ran off shouting that he would tell his mother.
The Queen, always an excellent judge in matters such as this, told Andrew it served him right and nothing was ever said to the stable staff.
Andrew was furious they were not punished.
'Teen Edward could be horribly self-important'
IF Andrew and Anne were like their father, Edward was far closer in character to his mother and Charles.
Even as a baby he was quiet.
“He was like the child who gets left behind in the classroom when everyone goes home and no one notices or remembers him,” recalled a Buckingham Palace maid.
Edward was also the only one of the children at whose birth Philip was present.
As a teen, Edward, relatively quiet and unassuming as he was as a child, could be horribly self-important if he felt he was not being treated by those around him with the deference he felt he deserved; and this was especially true if the people around him were perceived as being beneath him.
One chauffeur described how Edward insisted that on no account should he, the driver, turn and look at the prince.
Both Andrew and Edward learned to be imperious, and at various stages in their lives, this would lead to unkindness.
In an interview with the present author, a palace official explained how a staff member was moved to other duties for wearing a loud tie made from nylon and a member of the domestic staff was transferred for what was considered an unsightly mole.
Philip pushed his son into the Armed Forces, a world to which he was temperamentally and physically unsuited.
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Edward ended up quitting before he had even completed his training.
- Extracted from by Tom Quinn (Biteback) out on February 28.