Exactly a month after his birthday, the King started on a Continental tour, travelling more or less incognito as Lord Renfrew. He was accompanied by Mr. Tarver, who had just been appointed his chaplain and director of studies. The King stayed some time in Rome and visited the Pope, but on 29th April 1859 the Prince Consort wrote to Baron Stockmar: “We have sent orders to the Prince of Wales to leave Rome and to repair to Gibraltar.” For it was very properly considered, that owing to the Franco-Italian and Austrian imbroglio, it was far better that the heir to the British throne should be well out of the way of international dissensions.
The King reached Gibraltar on 7th May, and visited the south of Spain and Lisbon, returning home in the middle of the next month; and then, after having seen something of the world, he again took up a very serious course of study, this time at Edinburgh. Meanwhile the education and training of the Heir-Apparent was being watched very carefully by the British public, and a good many people began to consider that their future King was being over-educated; indeed Punch, in some lines entitled “A Prince at High Pressure,” undoubtedly summed up the popular feeling, not only describing the past, but prophesying, with a great deal of shrewd insight, the future course of the Prince of Wales’s studies:—
To the south from the north, from the shores of the Forth,
Where at hands Presbyterian pure science is quaffed,
The Prince, in a trice, is whipped to the Isis,
Where Oxford keeps springs mediæval on draught.
Dipped in grey Oxford mixture (lest that prove a fixture),
The poor lad’s to be plunged in less orthodox Cam.,
Where dynamics and statics, and pure mathematics,
Will be piled on his brain’s awful cargo of cram.