When Prince Charles and Princess Diana were expecting their first child in 1982, in the pages of The Weekly’s Royal Baby Special we asked if Charles and Diana would break from tradition to raise the child we now know as Prince William.
The birth of Prince and Princess of Wales’ baby will be an event in which a nation rejoices. The royal child is already in the thoughts of more than half the world. Yet there is an added interest in this baby of the Heir Apparent to the Throne because the way the Princess of Wales raises the child may change the whole pattern of the upbringing of future royal children.
Royal children are, traditionally, in the charge of old retainers who exert their own authoritarianism. But this child is expected to be the first baby born to the Heir to the Throne who is allowed to grow up in a totally relaxed way, with firm but gentle discipline — much the same as any well-brought-up child.
The Princess is determined to bring up the baby largely by herself. She is breaking with many outmoded methods and there will be no nanny-dominated nursery at Highgrove, Charles and Diana’s Gloucestershire home.
Diana will have a nanny — Miss Mabel Anderson who, at one stage, had charge of Prince Charles, Princess Anne and later Prince Andrew and Prince Edward. But Miss Anderson will not take control. Diana will need a backstop. The Princess of Wales’ official programme will resume as soon as possible after the birth, for she is popular and much in demand, but she will arrange her life so that the baby will come first.
In fact, so determined is the Princess to be with her baby whenever possible that she is reported to have stated she will not undertake any royal tours unless the child goes along, too.
As Lady Diana Spencer, the mother-to-be did not have a particularly happy childhood following the traumatic experience of her parents’ divorce when she was eight. She knows the effect of upheaval on children. The Princess of Wales’ school, West Health, however, was exactly right for her, and there she gained confidence because she was not pushed academically.
Diana is an affectionate girl with a warm heart. However, she has a cool head when it comes to dealing with children. Before her marriage, the Princess worked in a London day-nursery and adores children. Her own baby will have maternal love and care lavished on it.
Said one of Diana’s friends: “The Princes knows that it is the quality of time we give our children that counts. She believes that love and discipline are most important in bringing up a child — right from an early age. Routine is very important and, as Princess of Wales, she knows she will be preparing her child for the life in public service to which it is born.”
It is only 30 years since a royal biographer, Lady Peacock, pronounced that the young royal Heir, Prince Charles, had to be “schooled from an early age to subordinate his own desires because the royal child is destined to live his life in the public interest”.
Prince Charles’ young mother, the Queen, did her utmost to ensure that the rigours of duty did not distance her any more than necessary from her children. She rearranged appointments with prime ministers to allow herself the simple pleasures of bathing her youngsters and putting them to bed in the evening.
Happy as his childhood was, however, Prince Charles’ early life was still ruled by the old retainers and a no-nonsense nanny, Mrs Lightbody (who was followed on her retirement by Miss Anderson). A shy boy, Prince Charles was further inhibited by being expected to live up to this father’s image and was sent to Gordonstoun, Prince Philip’s old school, where the Spartan life so suited to his father was at times excruciatingly hard on the sensitive boy.
Nothing like this will happen to Charles and Diana’s children.
“The new trend is to choose the school to suit the child rather than sending a child to a school because one or other of the parents was there,” said a close friend of the Prince.
Neither the Prince of Wales nor his young wife has forgotten his or her unhappy moments and how acute was the suffering.
But Prince Charles’ upbringing was on a very broad base compared with other young royals. Prince Charles and his father have always had an easy relationship and the Queen and Prince Philip’s decision to send their son to school at Timbertop in Australia and from then on to leave him to choose his own university, service career, his many girlfriends and a wife, gave Charles freedom that no Heir to the Throne before him had known.
And, most rewarding of all, Prince Charles at no time stood in awe of his father or the Queen.
But there was a time when there was thought to be a basic difference between the upbringing of royal children and others, which often resulted in the child knowing little of love and affection.
Queen Victoria had breakfast every day with her children when they were at their beloved Balmoral. She took her children everywhere, joined in their games, chatted with them over meals, played musical duets with them or heard their lessons. But, although it was later generations of royalty who banished children to their nurseries, those Victorian royal children mixed with no others outside their immediate family.
King George V and Queen Mary, the present Queen’s grandparents, would appear briefly as Olympian figures in the royal nursery “to note with gravely hopeful interest, the progress of their firstborn”, recalled the Duke of Windsor, their eldest child, in his memoirs.
The Duke, who was himself a Prince of Wales, succeeded to the Throne as Edward VIII, and abdicated to marry Mrs Wallis Simpson. As a child he was terrified of his father. When a footman would deliver a summons, “His Royal Highness wishes to see you in the library,” the young Prince would tremble at the knees.
As Duke of Windsor he recalled: “No words that I was ever to hear could be so disconcerting to the spirit.”
And, although the King may have only wished to show his young son his stamp collection and had not, as was usual, called him to account for some misdemeanour, the boy was terrified.
The children of King George V and Queen Mary were left almost entirely to nurses. There are horrendous stories of how some behaved. One monster would pinch and twist the young Prince of Wales’ arm at the precise moment he was being ushered into tea with his parents, resulting in his being led away sobbing in despair.
Why the nurse did it, he could only assume, was to demonstrate her power over him. Such scenes, almost Dickensian, were not infrequent in the houses of the upper-classes where children were handed over to nannies and servants to be brought up.
Instances of young royals being cut off from other non-royals during their childhood by no means ended with the Victorian era. Private education from governess Miss Marion Crawford and tutors from Eton College may have been just right for the young Princess Elizabeth, our Present Queen. However at times the sad and unfulfilled life of her sister Princess Margaret may have been happier and smoother if she had gone to school with other children and learned to share.
As recently as in the case of Prince Edward, no 18, the youngest of the Queen’s four children, young royals depended on cousins or other royal relatives for companionship. Prince Edward was fortunate — a wealth of royal births the year he was born meant he had no shortage of playmates.
At the age of four, Prince Edward along with his cousins Lady Sarah Armstrong-Jones and James Ogilvy, began lessons in the Buckingham Palace schoolroom. They learned reading and writing in the morning, a little French and, in the afternoons, they were taught dancing.
How differently will the go-ahead Prince and Princess of Wales’ child be brought up!
Some of the baby’s life will be spent in London at the couple’s quarters in Kensington Palace, where many royal babies have lived. It will have a super nursery.
When the child is two years old, Diana plans to send him or her to morning play-school where children learn to share and are often discipline for the first time by a stranger.
There will be endless teas and open house at bath time so that godparents can drop in for a chat and see the baby to bed. This will be the most happy and sacred hour of the day.
There was a suggestion that the Princess of Wales would have a small playschool of her own for the baby and a few friends. But the responsibility of her official royal programme makes this quite impractical.
Also, neither Charles nor Diana wants to bring up their child along these lines. It is too much in the old royal pattern of a schoolroom at home, a governess and, perhaps, one or two friends to share the lessons.
Their child will, instead, grow up with others and learn to be a mixer.
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