Darling Georgie (20 page)

Twenty-four years later he was to inflict on his children the pain that his parents had inflicted on him by sending his two older boys to a naval academy. He would have rationalized this behaviour by reassuring himself that life in the Navy had made ‘a man of him’, when in reality it had kept him as a child. Still self-conscious, timid and anxious in social situations, years later King George V was to describe the State Opening of Parliament in February 1911 as ‘the most terrible ordeal I have ever gone through’.

In the absence of Prince George and Princess May, Queen Alexandra and King Edward VII seemed pleased to have been given a second chance to take care of children. Queen Alexandra did her best to compensate for her intermittent neglect of her own two sons by allowing her grand-children to miss lessons and insisting that they should have ‘fun’. Both grandparents seemed determined to expiate whatever guilt they may have felt at sending Eddy and George to sea at too early an age. The Queen neglected to write to Princess May to tell her of David’s and Bertie’s change in routine, but their governess, Mademoiselle Bricka, wrote to the Princess to say how upset she was that David’s education was being neglected. When the indignant Princess May complained to her mother-in-law, the Queen replied defensively that she thought it ‘the only thing that could be done as
we all
noticed how precocious and
old fashioned
he
[David] was getting – and quite the ways of a
single child!
– which would make him ultimately “a tiresome child”.’

The Queen, who had still not forgiven Princess May for taking her ‘darling Georgie dear’ away from her, now seemed to be getting her revenge by taking ‘David darling’ away from his mother. The free and easy relationship between grandparents and grandchildren sometimes fulfils a need in both. It gives an opportunity to grandparents to right the wrongs they may have perpetrated on their own children and to prove what good parents they could have been, and it provides the children of repressive parents with a chance to experience a form of (grand)parenting that would otherwise be denied them.

By the time Prince George and Princess May returned from their world tour on 1 November 1901 David, Bertie, Mary and Harry had become so detached that the youngest of them, who was only a few months old when his parents left, failed to recognize them. The other children also demonstrated their disapproval. Mary clung to her grandmother’s skirts and within six months Bertie developed a stammer. It was only the seven-year-old David who allowed his parents to embrace him. Prince George was relieved to be home. There is an account in his diary of the enthusiastic reception he was given the following day on the state drive through the streets of London. ‘Most touching, got back to York House at 3.30. We do indeed feel grateful that it has pleased God to bring us back home again safe and sound.’

Neither Queen Alexandra and King Edward nor Prince George and Princess May, and certainly not the four children, thought that there was anything unusual about leaving small and dependent children for eight months. One of the earliest memories of David, Duke of Windsor, is his recollection of being cared for as a seven-year-old by his grandmother while his parents were on the
Ophir.
He writes:

If the superimposition of four noisy children upon the Royal Household during my parents’ absence was ever a nuisance, my grandparents never let us know it … If my grandparents were not entertaining distinguished
company at lunch, they liked to have us romping around in the dining-room. In this congenial atmosphere it was easy to forget that our governess was waiting for us upstairs with her French and German primers. If we were too long in going, she would enter the dining room timidly to warn us that we were already late for our afternoon lesson. Usually my grandmother would wave her away, and my grandfather, puffing at his cigar, might add reassuringly to the governess, ‘It’s alright. Let the children stay with us a little longer. We shall send them upstairs presently.’ So unconcerned were my grandparents over the lapses from the schoolroom routine that on taking us to Sandringham for a two weeks’ stay, they left poor Mlle Bricka behind in London lest she should spoil our fun.

(Windsor, 1951)

David’s somewhat idealized recollections only thinly obscure his contempt for the governess who was
in loco parentis
and his pleasure at her discomfiture. His memories of his benevolent, unconditionally loving grandparents are distorted by wishful thinking which enables him to compare his parents’ behaviour towards him unfavourably with theirs. Carrying on the tradition in which he had been brought up, Prince George thought it high time for the two older boys to be educated in the same way as he had been. Ignoring the misery he had endured at being parted from his parents with only his brother as a confidant, he engaged Henry Peter Hansell as tutor for his two sons until the time came for them to enrol as naval cadets.

Prince George and Princess May had returned from their travels to a monarchy with different values from those of Queen Victoria. She had taught King Edward VII little of his duties as a constitutional monarch, had been more preoccupied with her son’s shortcomings than with his assets and had never forgiven him for his role in his father’s last illness. The Prince had hoped, more or less from the time of Prince Albert’s death, to play a greater role in the stewardship of the country, but as long as Queen Victoria lived this was not to be. It was only with great reluctance that in 1892, by which time her son was fifty-one, the Queen allowed him limited access to state papers.

Because of his mother’s unwillingness to trust him, the King insisted
belatedly that he would not treat his son in the same way. His decision not to withhold official secrets from his heir might well have been prompted by his near-fatal illness on 14 June 1901, twelve days before his Coronation. A diagnosis of appendicitis was made by the Royal Surgeon Sir Frederick Treves ten days after the King had complained of abdominal pain. Sir Frederick reluctantly removed the appendix but not before a life-threatening abscess had developed. The Coronation eventually took place on 9 August 1901 after a prolonged convalescence. For almost two months Prince George remained in a state of acute anxiety. Not only was he concerned that his father might die but, should that unhappy event occur, he knew that he was in no way ready to take on the role of monarch. King Edward, realizing that at the age of sixty he had outlived his father by almost twenty years, more conscious than ever of his mortality, now spared no effort to prepare Prince George for the task that lay ahead.

Despite his travels and the warmth of his reception throughout the Empire, however, Prince George remained diffident and self-conscious. His father did what he could to coach him in his royal duties, but his years at sea, his lonely pastimes and his clinging attachment to his mother had not prepared him psychologically for the role that he would have one day to play. It was hardly surprising that King Edward’s life-threatening illness provoked anxiety in him, and it was with great relief that he welcomed his father’s recovery. Princess May’s concern for her father-in-law equalled that of her husband. ‘Oh, do pray that Uncle Wales may get well,’ she commented to Mademoiselle Bricka and in an understatement went on to say: ‘George says he isn’t ready yet to reign.’

The death of Queen Victoria, the turn of the century and the Coronation of King Edward VII heralded a change in the country’s perception of the monarchy. The King’s expansive, outgoing personality contrasted sharply with the mystique, the privacy and the essential propriety of the Victorian era, a period which almost within weeks of Queen Victoria’s death was confined to a past that few regretted. The Queen’s depression had cast a gloom over the country which had lifted completed only with her demise. Although her mourning for Prince Albert was
unnaturally prolonged, there had been occasions on which she had been distracted from it. Her friendship for her favourite Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, in the 1870s did much to bring her out of her seclusion, as did the Golden Jubilee celebrations of 1887. King Edward, however, was expected to raise up his subjects’ spirits and he did not fail to live up to their expectations. The country was ready for a physical and social spring-cleaning. Only Prince George and Princess May, the last of the eminent Victorians, were opposed to the proposed changes. Prince George was more in tune with his introspective grandmother than with his socially extrovert father. Shy and often inarticulate, he was to have only another eight years in which to prepare himself for the ordeal ahead that he dreaded.

Princess May had no such anxieties. She had already had eight years since their marriage to prepare herself for Coronation. She was ready. Drawing herself up to her exaggerated height, bedecked with the jewels of her status, she stood in the wings and impatiently awaited her cue.

T
HE BLACK VEIL
of mourning that had obscured the monarchy during much of Queen Victoria’s reign was about to be lifted. The Edwardians emerged from their palaces, hobnobbed with their subjects, swept aside sexual taboos, endowed the accumulation of wealth with respectability and cast a festive spirit over the land. This did not please everyone. Lord Salisbury and the ascetic Arthur Balfour, his successor as Prime Minister, were cast in a very different mould from the fun-loving, sexually promiscuous King Edward VII. They disapproved of the King and the King disapproved of them. Having caught a whiff of his own mortality during his recent illness, at the age of sixty-one the King threw himself whole-heartedly (social engagements permitting) into grooming his anxiously awaiting son for the succession.

Prince George, at the age of thirty-six a Victorian among Edwardians, was still haunted by the anxiety he had felt when he thought that his father might not recover from the removal of his appendix. He feared that he would too soon be flung into kingship for which he was unprepared. Realizing that there was much work to be done before he could confidently step into his father’s shoes, he made every effort to understand the protocols and procedures appropriate to his future status. During his trip to Australia he had already had a taste of international diplomacy. On his return he wrote a statesman-like (although, as ever, grandiose) letter to the Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain – whose concern for the colonies equalled his own – telling him of his conviction that in Australia there existed a strong feeling of loyalty to the Crown and a deep attachment to the mother country. The Prince went on to point out that this was due to ‘our having paid them a visit’ and that the time was fast approaching
when the mother country could profit by it. With the ordeal of Australia behind him the Prince felt himself ready to benefit from his recent foray into diplomatic flag-waving by taking a further step along an unfamiliar road. He was deeply conscious that he was not a ‘man born to be King’ but a stand-in for his late lamented older brother. If he hoped to be able to join in the euphoria which followed the end of Queen Victoria’s reign, and celebrate the beginning of an era of prosperity, his hopes were dashed. There were changes but they were not changes of which either he or the Conservative government of the day had any experience. The beginning of the twentieth century concerned itself not with the interests of the landed gentry but with the growing political representation of the working classes. The problems of poverty, unemployment and ill health – barely acknowledged by nineteenth-century governments – were concerns that in the general election of 1906 caused the Conservatives to be swept out of power and a Liberal government to be voted in.

The prosperity to which everyone had looked forward at the end of the Boer War had not materialized. The cost of the war to the Empire had been immense. Twenty thousand lives had been lost and £200 million had been spent. Trade was in recession, industry was depressed and in the first budget of King Edward VII’s reign taxation had been increased to one shilling and two pence in the pound. In addition King Edward VII (and indirectly Prince George) was becoming increasingly disturbed by rumours that his ill health made him unfit to hold office. The King, however, managed to convince himself that it was rather the conflict with his parents, which had resulted in his mother’s refusal to allow him access to state papers until 1892, than his ill health which had left him unprepared for his monarchical role. Queen Victoria’s responsibility in the matter, however, had to do with his exclusion from the family circle, more or less from the moment of his birth, rather than with his exclusion from governmental information. A worried man since his illness, King Edward was determined that his heir be better prepared for kingship than he.

Against a setting of social unrest, an upsurge in republicanism and a general lack of understanding by the public of the role of the monarchy in the
affairs of state, Prince George and Princess May struggled to prepare themselves for the part they believed the nation expected them to play. As King Edward’s health went slowly downhill, Prince George’s sense of purpose visibly strengthened. Until his illness the King, although only five feet seven inches tall, weighed sixteen stone and had a waist measurement of forty-eight inches. His appetite was voracious – he ate five meals a day – and he smoked twelve large cigars and at least twenty cigarettes a day (Souhami, 1997). Prince George, the ‘sardine’ rather than the ‘whale’, had always been both impressed and overwhelmed by size. His childhood had been spent in the shadow of a dominant, boisterous, powerful and intolerant father and as his father shrank physically the Prince expanded intellectually.

King Edward was determined that Prince George be given every opportunity to fulfil his future role. To this end, immediately before the Australia tour began he appointed Sir Arthur Bigge (formerly Private Secretary to Queen Victoria since the death of Sir Henry Ponsonby in 1895) as the Prince’s Secretary. In many respects he was similar to Prince George. Like the Prince he was conscientious, meticulous and regimental, honest and loyal, qualities that were to keep him by the side of his pupil for the next thirty years.