Royal Childhood: “Like Being a Tiny Lieutenant in a Very Well-Heeled Navy”
At the Atlantic, a historical account of royal childhood in the UK, or the regular renewal of the British taxpayers’ extended parasitic nightmare:
Once, a young son of King George V arrived for his daily meeting with his dad wearing a knickerbocker suit — the kind with baggy-kneed trousers — and was ordered out of the room to change into a more appropriate outfit.
The young Princess Victoria:
[She] “was a skillful horsewoman, a good musician, and a singularly keen dancer.” She was taught Greek and Latin at home and had the occasional dancing lesson from a famous ballerina. But at the same time, she was deliberately isolated from any outside influences, bombarded with a great deal of “devotional literature, moral tales, and sermons,” and her playmates consisted primarily of her dolls and her half-sister. She reportedly later described her childhood as “rather melancholy.” As an adult, she became harsh and seemingly disdainful of her own offspring, calling them “ugly,” “nasty,” and “frog-like.”
Largely because she was not raised as a successor to the throne, Queen Elizabeth II had a childhood that here is described as “normal” and “modest.” She was in the Girl Guides and learned first aid and “home welfare.” But by the time she was a parent she’d come around:
Elizabeth stuck to tradition when it came to raising her own children, spending just an hour or two with them each day when they were infants. Instead, Charles and his siblings were primarily attended to by a nanny, Mabel Anderson, “whose job it was each morning to inform Her Majesty by direct phone just when the little prince will be ready for his bath,” Time wrote in 1960.
Prince William and Prince Harry were the first royal children to experience pedestrian activities like getting bathed by their mother and venturing out in public on non-ceremonial occasions. This new royal baby, who knows; already, as one of our own royal children once immortalized in her glittery birdsong, this is exhausting. Supposedly (and, debatably) Yung England is going to bring in $380 million in economic stimulus, and according to Tina Brown, his gender is already proof that his family is committed to maintaining the most important tradition of all:
I mean, although there’s the constitutional change that we can now have a girl as the first born to be the monarch, nonetheless, she does the traditional thing, and she gives us a prince. She gives a king. I mean, let’s face it, the Queen will be thrilled. She and the Duke of Edinburgh, much as they would have said they would have been fine with a girl first born, they really did want a boy and they got one.