ROYAL FAMILY STORIES

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22353, 29 August 1934, Page 16

ROYAL FAMILY STORIES

QUEEN VICTORIA AND SON

PRINCE IN LEADING STRINGS,

An amusing story of King George V as a boy is told in “Queen Victoria, the Wjdow, and her Son,” the new biographical study by Mr Hector Bolitho.

One day Prince George, as the present King was then, was taken with his elder brother to Westminster, where Dean Stanley had been asked to show them the treasures of the Abbey. “In spite of the charm of the dean’s stories, Prince George wandered away by himself. At last he was found in a dim little side chapel. He had scrambled on top of Queen Elizabeth’s tomb, and, looking down at the effigy, he was saying, ‘What an ugly old woman!’" The Prince of Wales—afterwards King Edward—was sometimes nervous, readers arc told, of his august mother’s plans for supervising the of net* grandchildren, on which they did not always see eye to eye. However, on a visit to Marlborough House she congratulated her son on the good behaviour of the young Princes, to which he replied significantly: “We were perhaps a little too much epoken to and at; at least we thought we could never do anything right, anyhow.”

The author’s declared object is to do impartial justice to both Queen Victoria and her sou. He quotes instances of how she kept him in leading strings. She refused toilet him have a house in Ireland: opposed his visit to India; urged that the Prince, aged 33, should be in bed by 10 o’clock each evening; and refused to admit him to knowledge of confidential State allairs until he was 44 years of age. This she did conscientiously, he says, because she “looked upon her Crown as a sacred trust,” which she believed would be endangered by the “ frivolities ” of Marlborough House,

Queen Victoria, in the author’s view, always needed a man’s help, and the years between 1861, when the Prince Consort died, and the time when Disraeli became her friend and counsellor, were the years “in which she made her greatest mistakes, as a mother and as a Queen.”

Mr Bolitho discusses the position of John Brown, the Highlander, who was the Queen’s favourite personal attendant. He deprecates the “foolish gossip” that was at one time current. He says that the late Archbishop Lord Davidson, whom Queen Victoria made her confidant when he was Dean of Windsor, spoke on the subject a year before Brown's death.

“In .talking of the relationship between the Queen and John Brown, Lord Davidson said that it was unwise and that it was a source of concern to all those who were close to the Queen, but that one had only to know the Queen personally to realise how innocent it was.” John Brown’s “unvarnished truths” were appreciated by the Queen, but not always by others. Of Queen Mary, the author recalls that Queen Victoria wrote: “Thank God, Georgic has got such an excellent, useful, and good wife!”