It must have been hard for Willy and some of the other children if Vicky was forever harping on about their perfect dead siblings. Not that that excuses the way he behaved, because it sounds as though he had some fairly significant problems, but you can feel sorry for someone forever being compared unfavourably with an impossible ideal.
Somewhere I've got a biography of Vicky, which I must pull out and read.
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Nicky is the one you feel for the most. The climate in Russia was horrible and he was sheltered in ways the other two were not. I think all three sets of parents went out of their way to give these children too spartan an upbringing, thinking to protect them from the flatterers and sycophants they would eventually encounter, but in no way preparing them to deal with it.
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I think this is a really good point. Somehow I don't see how an artificially simple upbringing was supposed to prepare those boys for a lifetime of being sucked up to and indulged by people on the make. Isolating them as youngsters would only make it worse. It doesn't sound as though Willy's parents made a really wise choice of tutor either, and from some of George V's biographies, I don't think Canon Dalton was an exactly inspired choice.