Darling Georgie Read Online Free

Napoleon III gave him a glimpse of the glamorous life that he later believed could be found only in France. His nose-to-the-grindstone education in England had prepared him neither for the comeliness of French ladies nor for the grandeur of the French capital. On a drive through the streets of Paris with the Emperor he whispered, in a damning indictment of his father: ‘I should like to be your son.’
    By the time Prince Edward was fifteen his mother was bored with his company. In a letter to the Queen of Prussia she admitted that ‘only very occasionally do I find the rather intimate intercourse with them [the elder children] either agreeable or easy’. Her attitude to her son was one of total indifference. When she did refer to him it was often to complain of his poor intellect. One of many who disagreed with the Queen was the Prince’s tutor at Oxford, who found that ‘his powers of application were greatly underrated’ (Lee, 1925–7).
    When Prince Edward was seventeen his birthday present from his parents was a memorandum reminding (and also infuriating) him that ‘life is composed of duties’ and ‘that you will have to be taught what to do and what not to do’ (Magus, 1964). As a final insult to his psychological well-being, Mr Gibbs, to whom he had gradually become attached, was summarily dismissed. Because (according to Prince Edward’s parents) of Gibb’s apparent lack of success in furthering their son’s education, he was replaced by the Honourable Robert Bruce, the brother of Lord Elgin, a dour Scot, a strict Presbyterian and a colonel in a Guards regiment. If Prince Edward thought that with the dismissal of his tutor he could at last put his childhood behind him he was mistaken. Colonel Bruce had been ordered ‘to regulate all the Prince’s movements, the distribution and employment of his time, and the occupation and details of his daily life’ (Hibbert, 1976). Despite his parents’ ongoing dislike of almost everything about their son – the Queen complained of ‘his small head, his big Coburg nose, his protuberant Hanoverian eyes, his shortness, his receding hair, his tendency to fat, the effeminate and girlish way he wore his hair’ – otherssuch as Robert Browning and Edward Lear saw Prince Edward as ‘gentle and refined’, ‘well mannered and nice’. In July 1860 Prince Edward embarked on a state visit to Canada and the United States. Not yet nineteen, he was representing his parents for whom the long sea journey would have been too exhausting. To his great delight and probably surprise, he was received enthusiastically, not only by diplomats but also by crowds of young women who clearly found him attractive. On his return to England, the Queen (as ever giving with one hand and taking away with the other), having thanked him for the success of his tour, told him that the credit for it was due to Colonel (now Major-General) Bruce. Having convinced herself of her son’s unwillingness to ‘settle down’ to further study, the Queen and her Consort decided reluctantly that the time had come for a wife to be chosen for him.
    Although willing to discuss this matter, the Prince had other ideas. He had recently met Nellie Clifden, an actress (prostitute), with whom he was having an affair. He would probably have been totally overwhelmed by this encounter, having hitherto had no experience with which to compare it. A selfish concern for one’s own gratification, an essential ingredient of commercial sex, would have been an entirely new concept for him, since, like other members of his family, he had been trained to put the interests of others first, with duty taking precedence over pleasure.
    The horror with which the news of the Prince’s sexual dalliance was received was, in the moral climate of Victorian England, understandable, although many in the royal circle might secretly have envied him. The timing was not auspicious. The Prince’s maternal grandmother, the Duchess of Kent, had