Prince Albert wrote to the Duchess of Kent: “Your great-grandson is a very pretty, clever child—a compound of both parents, just as it should be.”
Mrs. Georgina Hobbs, the nurse mentioned above, first went to Germany as a maid in the service of the Princess Royal on her marriage, and was afterwards promoted to be chief nurse to the Royal children. Prince William and his brother and sisters were devotedly attached to “Hobbsy,” as they called her, and it was from “Hobbsy” that they learnt English, for their parents always talked German to one another.
The Princess Royal, perhaps naturally, preferred to have her children’s nursery arranged and conducted on the English rather than on the German model, but who can doubt that in this, as in other matters of even less importance, she would have done better to have studied the susceptibilities of her adopted country? Indeed, Dr. Hinzpeter, who was afterwards appointed the tutor of her sons, bears witness that her nursery management became a great subject of gossip among the Berliners, and stories were even current of corporal punishment administered before the Court to princes with dirty faces. It is true that Dr. Hinzpeter describes these stories as mythical, but the fact that they were circulated and believed helps to account for the Princess’s growing unpopularity.
At this period Prince Albert was seriously disturbed by the attacks which the Times was constantly making on Prussia and everything Prussian. In an article in the Saturday Review, recommended by him to his daughter, it was said: “The only reason the Times ever gives for its dislike of Prussia, is that the Prussian and English Courts are connected by personal ties, and that British independence demands that everything proceeding from the Court should be watched with the most jealous suspicion.”
The Prince was honestly indifferent to the insinuations against himself by which these attacks were frequently pointed, but he was reasonably anxious about the bad effect they would have in Germany. Writing to his daughter on October 24, after his return to England, he refers to the Macdonald affair, which had already become acute:
“What abominable articles the Times has against Prussia! That of yesterday upon Warsaw and Schleinitz is positively too wicked. It is the Bonn story which continues to operate, and a total estrangement between the two countries may ensue, if a newspaper war be kept up for some time between the two nations. Feelings, and not arguments, constitute the basis for actions. An embitterment of feeling between England and Prussia would be a great misfortune, and yet they are content in Berlin to make no move in the Bonn affair.”
It was only too true that the Prussian Government was in no hurry to settle the Macdonald affair. The bitterness which it engendered did not die out till long after its formal termination in May of the following year, and undoubtedly it contributed far more than was suspected at the time to increase the delicacy and difficulty of the Princess Royal’s position. It was actually thought in Germany that she inspired the attacks in the British Press. “This attitude of the English newspapers preys upon the Princess Royal’s spirits and materially affects her position in Prussia,” so wrote Lord Clarendon.
This autumn and winter Prince Albert, in spite of many political and other anxieties and a sharp attack of illness, faithfully continued to instruct his daughter in the art of government.
It does not seem ever to have crossed his mind that such instruction, though admirable in itself, was ill-advised in view of his pupil’s position. The ideal woman in Prussia was then, and still is to a large extent, one who, conscious of her intellectual inferiority, contents herself with managing her household and children. If this view obtained with regard to women in private stations, much more was it considered to be the duty of princesses of the Royal House to abstain from any active interest in public affairs. But either Prince Albert did not appreciate this, or it is possible that he thought his daughter to be freed by her exceptional ability from the ordinary restrictions and limitations of her rank. There is yet a third possibility—that he did not altogether trust his son-in-law’s political judgment, and was anxious to give him, in the troublous times that seemed impending, an help-meet who could influence him in the right, that is in the Coburg, direction. Whatever may have been the reason, the Prince certainly continued to the end of his life to cultivate his daughter’s knowledge and grasp of public affairs.
In December, 1860, the Prince Consort received from Berlin a memorandum upon the advantages of a law of Ministerial responsibility. Its object was to remove the apprehensions entertained in high quarters at the Prussian Court as to the expediency of a measure of this kind. This memorandum was the work of the Princess Royal, and it is easy to imagine what a storm of indignation would have arisen in Prussia if by any accident or indiscretion the knowledge that the Princess had written such a paper had leaked out.