The Prince of Wales longed for independence, to know more of life beyond the walls of Buckingham Palace and the terraces of Windsor, to escape from the suffocating confines of his parents’ court. When he was thirteen, in August 1855, he went to Paris with them on a state visit to Napoleon III. Lord Clarenton, the Foreign Secretary, who was instructed to keep an eye on him and to tell him how to behave, thought that the Queen’s severity was “very injudicious”.

For his own part, the Prince had never enjoyed himself more than he did in Paris; and he left it with obvious regret, looking intently all around him, “as though anxious to lose nothing” of his last moments there. He had been intoxicated by the excitement of their welcome. He never forgot the fireworks at the Versailles ball; nor kneeling down in his Highland dress beside his mother to say a prayer at the tomb of Napoleon I; nor how he had hero-worshipped the romantic and mysterious Emperor to whom he had confided one afternoon as they drove round Paris together, “I should like to be your son”.

He adored the Empress Eugénie, and he pleaded with her to let him and his sister stay behind for a few days on their own. The Empress replied that she was afraid that the Queen and Prince Albert could not do without them. “Not do without us!” the Prince protested. “Don’t fancy that, for there are six more of us at home, and they don’t want us”.

He really felt it to be true. When they got home he was sent away immediately to Osborne with his tutors to make up for the lessons he had missed while he had been in France. “Pooor Bertie” was “pale and trembling” when his mother and father took leave of him, the Wueen recorded in her journal. “The poor dear child” was “much affected” at the prospect of this “first long separation”.

But whether the Prince’s emotion was due, as the Queen thought, to his sadness at parting from his parents, or, as we may suppose more likely, to his dread of returning to the unremitting grind of his lessons, it was certain that once he had gone the Queen did not much miss him.

As he confessed to the Queen of Prussia that autumn, “Even here (at Balmoral) when Albert is often away all day long, I find no special pleasure in the company of the elder children… and only very occasionally do I find the rather intimate intercourse with them either easy or agreeable”. When they were naughty she found them intolerable, and was insistent that they be punished even more severely than their father would have approved.