Darling Georgie (19 page)

If the Prince believed that the friendly meetings which he had with the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Lord Cadogan, during his visit would serve as the model for an
entente cordiale
and divert the Irish from the idea of becoming independent from England, such a belief was doomed to failure. It was not the only time that the somewhat grandiose Prince was to be proved blind to a disaster in the making. More than a decade later, on the eve of the Great War, he thought that family ties and friendly discussion with his cousin Kaiser Wilhelm would be sufficient to enable him to change the course of history. The Kaiser had other ideas. The two cousins had grown up in similar backgrounds, had similarly neglectful parents and shared the same gene pool. Both tended to repress their anger. While George had found an acceptable outlet for his anger, Wilhelm had not.
Shooting animals for sport was preferable to shooting people, but the Kaiser’s withered arm denied him Prince George’s ‘legitimate’ outlet for the anger generated by his insensitive upbringing.

The excitement induced in Prince George and Princess May by their state visit to Ireland was to be short-lived. Soon after the couple’s return, it was dispelled by the news that Princess May’s mother, Princess Mary Adelaide, was seriously ill. Six months earlier she had been operated on for kidney stones since which time her health had gradually deteriorated. Her doctors finally diagnosed cancer, and on 27 October1897, two days after an exploratory operation, she died without regaining consciousness. Princess May was with her mother to the end, and Prince George, who had been at Elvedon shooting with Lord Iveagh, returned at once to White Lodge to be with his wife. At the funeral, although distressed by her mother’s death, Princess May remained in control of her feelings. With no socially sanctioned outlet for her anger, Princess May had made do with the admiration she received to suppress her rage, and in the absence of admiration she resorted to control. The interment took place in the royal vault at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, where the Duchess – as manipulative in death as she had been in life – had demanded to be buried. Two years later Princess May’s father, the Duke of Teck, already frail at the time of his wife’s death and living in seclusion at White Lodge, also died.

After her parents’ death, a change occurred in Princess May’s demeanour. Although she had loved her mother and grieved for her, the loss of her parents empowered her. For years she had lived in the shadow of the larger-than-life Duchess and, with her death, her daughter not only blossomed but adopted her mother’s persona. The mantle of a gregarious, demanding and dominant woman who had been denied the wealth to which she believed her royal birth had entitled her now fell on to Princess May’s shoulders. Unlike her mother, however, Princess May was reserved rather than gregarious and, if she was demanding, it was not apparent. Although since her marriage Princess May was no longer materially impoverished, she often felt the need to be reassured of her wealth. In reassuring others of it by her extravagant appearance she became
reassured herself. Her clothes were not only regal but sensational, her erect stature, her upswept hair made her tower over other women. She dressed in the most avant-garde clothes and her attention-seeking colours and her mother’s jewellery proclaimed her increasingly regal manner.

As the months passed Princess May’s new strength of purpose and resolve became more evident. It was as if she had looked into the future and liked what she saw there. In the past she and Prince George had experienced major losses. First with the death of Prince Eddy and now with the passing of Princess Mary Adelaide, both had been pushed one rung up a ladder on which they had not expected to find themselves. With the road ahead clear, a lifetime of service to Britain, the land of their birth, beckoned. Falling into step, the Prince and Princess began to march to a jingoistic drum, the beat of which obscured the territorial acquisitions, the new populations, the new spheres of interest on which British power had encroached. Cape Town and Cairo, Rhodesia and Nigeria, Kenya and Uganda, the Americas and the Indian Ocean, China and the Antipodes were now either partially or entirely controlled from Westminster. Prince George and his Princess had within their grasp an Empire on which the authority of
Pax Britannica
was imposed by Queen Victoria, Empress of India, from the throne room at Windsor Castle.

On 22 June 1898, anticipating the military demands that life was soon to make of him, Prince George took command of the first-class cruiser HMS Crescent. The main objective of the cruise, possibly disappointingly for the Prince, was target practice, a skill he did not lack. On 25 August 1898, however, his final spell of service on the high seas on which he had been educated, and on which he had grown to manhood, finally ended. He relinquished his command for the last time and returned to dry land. If he thought that he could now relax and devote himself to shooting birds he was mistaken. There would soon be other targets to aim at.

On 10 October 1899 the two Afrikaner republics, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal, declared war on the English. Almost at once a series of major defeats were inflicted on the garrisons at Mafeking, Kimberley and Ladysmith, and British interests became seriously under
threat. The Boers were well prepared for battle and knew the terrain well. They were an amateur army of not more than 45,000, but they were trained in commando methods by Germany, which had also armed them. It took three years and 450,000 men from all corners of the British Empire for Britain to achieve its main objective, which was to control the vast wealth of the region.

Believing that they had right on their side, the British were both baffled and angry when almost all continental Europe, particularly Germany and including France (which had resented the criticism in the British press of its handling of the Dreyfus affair) and Belgium (which was offended by Britain’s attitude to its behaviour in the Congo), took the side of the Boers. The war eventually took a turn for the better after popular opinion, both at home and in the British Colonies, rallied the armies of the Empire behind the British soldiers. Winston Churchill, war correspondent of
The Times,
having recently returned from the battlefronts, used a characteristic rhetoric that was to remain with him throughout his life as he thundered: ‘Imperial troops must curb the insolence of the Boers … For the sake of the Empire, for the sake of our honour, for the sake of our race, we must fight the Boers.’

The war in South Africa touched directly on the Royal Family. Much to Princess May’s distress, all three of her brothers were sent to the front. Had Prince George been allowed to do so he would have joined them. He had not forgotten that in March 1881, while on his world cruise aboard the
Bacchante,
he had visited Cape Town and met the Zulu King Ketchewayo, then a prisoner of war. The Prince had expressed sympathy both for the captive King and for his cause. In 1899, however, he believed with his fellow countrymen that Britain had a duty to ‘civilize’ Africa. It was a need to exercise control over Africa’s economy, however, rather than a wish to bring Western customs to the natives, that drove many to seek their fortunes in Africa. Others believed that it was the duty of the British to civilize Africa, even at the point of a bayonet. The aims of those who convinced themselves of the morality of colonialization were reflected in the poetry of Rudyard Kipling. The Prince’s lifelong admiration for Kipling’s fervent
nationalism reflected his ability to express political opinions which confirmed the Prince’s own prejudices.

We broke a King, and we built a road,

A court-house stands where the regiment go’ed

And the river’s clean where the red blood flowed.

Patriotic to a degree, Prince George had a keen sense of justice. Not only had he been taught the importance of obedience to orders while in the Navy but he had learned also to be fair. Had his children blindly obeyed their father’s orders he would no doubt also have been fair to them; had they been old enough to understand his commands doubtless they would have obeyed them.

Prince George and Princess May had six children in all. After the traumas inflicted upon them by their nanny, Mary Peters, the two older boys were compensated by a period of quiet neglect in the hope that they would overcome the abuse they had suffered. Lala Bill was as kind and permissive as Mary Peters had been sadistic and controlling, but despite her efforts the consequences of Mary Peters’s treatment were to affect the boys’ lives. From 1897, after the birth of Princess Mary, all three children were brought up simply and without ostentation at Marlborough House and Sandringham. Their attendants were instructed to instil in their charges the ideals that had been given to their parents by their own parents. The children were quietly encouraged to fulfil the duties imposed upon them by their position and status in the monarchical hierarchy.

On 23 April 1900 Prince George was invited by his cousin, Kaiser Wilhelm, to attend the eighteen-year-old Crown Prince’s coming-of-age party. Despite the anti-British hysteria that prevailed in Germany as a result of the South African war, the Prince accepted the invitation. He was fond of his cousin Wilhelm and, being largely uninstructed in the intricacies and protocols of European politics, believed – as he had believed in Ireland three years earlier – that his charm and status were sufficient to
overcome these hostile attitudes. Queen Victoria’s two grandsons got on well enough socially, but Prince George’s hopes that family ties and a gala opera performance would unite the two nations were never to be realized. Just as Queen Victoria had kept her son Prince Edward in the dark over affairs of state, Prince Edward in his turn had denied Prince George any information on political matters, only changing his attitutude later when he acceded the throne. Had Prince George possessed the necessary data he might conceivably have used it to advantage. By maintaining a family network, a royal mafia might have evolved concerned not only with maintaining family harmony but harmony in the countries over which they ruled. But Queen Victoria had not been forthcoming. Had she seen fit to enlighten her family, some of the power struggles of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century might conceivably have been – if not avoided – at least the subject of informed debate. Time instead was frittered away with days at the races, visits to Lords for the test match with Australia (where to his joy the Prince met Dr W.G. Grace) and everlasting shooting parties.

It was shortly after the birth of their fourth child, Prince Henry (known as Harry), in 1900 that Prince George and Princess May learned that they were to be entrusted with a visit to the Colonies and Australia and New Zealand the following spring. Queen Victoria gave her blessing to the tour that had been under consideration for the past two years. The visit was to express the gratitude of the mother country to the Overseas Dominions for rallying behind England during the Boer War. It also entailed the opening, on behalf of Queen Victoria, of the First Federal Parliament of the newly created Commonwealth of Australia by Her Majesty’s favourite grandson, HRH Prince George the Duke of York. Other parts of the Empire also scheduled to be visited included Natal, Cape Colony, Canada and Newfoundland.

The arrangements had scarcely been finalized when Queen Victoria’s long life began slowly to come to an end. The Queen died in her bed at Osborne House on 22 January 1901 in the arms of the Kaiser and surrounded by almost her entire family. On his mother’s death Prince
Edward succeeded to the throne as King Edward VII, Prince George became the direct heir and he and Princess May became known as the Duke and Duchess not only of York but also of Cornwall. Eventually, on King Edward’s sixtieth birthday in November 1901, they were given the title of Prince and Princess of Wales.

In the interests of safeguarding the monarchy, King Edward VII, having lost one son in Prince Eddy, was at first reluctant to permit Prince George to tour the Colonies and asked Lord Salisbury if the journey might be delayed. The Prime Minister refused to sanction any postponement on the grounds that the people of Australia were expecting the Prince and Princess and would be very disappointed if they did not arrive in Canberra in time to open the Parliament. Prince George’s feelings about the tour were mixed. Never at ease with those of higher intellectual status than his own, he complained, with good reason, that he found it difficult to discuss issues of government policy with Dominion statesmen because he had not been properly briefed.

On 16 March 1901 the dazzling, white-painted, twin-screw, 6,910-ton, 10,000-horse-power Orient Line SS
Ophir
sailed from Portsmouth with a complement of 550 passengers and crew. The ship’s company included a hundred Marines, thirty-seven bandsmen of the Royal Marines, Chatham, twenty boys, various cooks, barbers, butchers and bakers, three ladies-in-waiting and Canon Dalton, aged sixty (still in the service of his former pupil), as Chaplain. The crew consisted entirely of men on the active list of the Royal Navy. The Royal Yacht was accompanied throughout the voyage by HMS
Juno
and HMS
St George,
which formed the royal escort squadron. Splendour once again was on the march.

On the day of departure on a journey that was to encompass the globe and last for eight months Prince George wrote in his diary: ‘Papa proposed our healths & wished us God speed and I answered in a few words & proposed the King and Queen. I was very much affected & could hardly speak. The leave taking was terrible. I went back with them to the yacht when I said goodbye & broke down quite.’

This was not the first time that the highly strung Prince George had
said goodbye to his parents and gone to sea. He was as affected on this occasion as he was when he enrolled on the
Britannia
at the age of twelve, and he wanted his parents to know what it had been like. He wept then and he wept now. He wrote to them from Gibraltar, the
Ophir’s
first port of call, to explain how sad he had felt when they had parted from one another a few days earlier: ‘May and I came down to our cabins and had a good cry and tried to comfort each other.’ What he did not say in his letter was that at least on this occasion he had someone who felt as he did and who was able to comfort him. Having been brought up to experience all partings as painful, he was reluctant as an adult to stray far from Sandringham unless obliged by affairs of state to do so. He was particularly averse to travelling abroad, about which he is said to have commented: ‘I’ve been there and I don’t like it.’