Darling Georgie (25 page)

On 11 November 1911 the King and Queen left for India on the recently launched 13,000-ton P&O ship
Medina.
They were accompanied by a large suite including, among others, Lord Crewe, the Secretary of State for India, the Duke of Teck, the King’s personal ADC, the King’s Private Secretary, Sir Arthur Bigge (Lord Stamfordham), the Chief of the Metropolitan Police, the ADC General, as well as five equerries all personally known to the King. The ship carried 210 marines, 360 petty officers and ratings and thirty-two officers. The
Medina
was escorted throughout the journey by four cruisers under the command of Admiral Sir Colin Keppel. Queen Alexandra and the King’s and Queen’s two older boys, Prince Edward (David) and Prince Albert (Bertie), came to Portsmouth to see them off. David expressed disappointment at once again being separated from his parents. His father, being reminded of earlier sad farewells (‘as horrible as ever’), probably felt the same. David wrote immediately to his mother: ‘I shall never forget that moment when I saw you waving from the window of the railway carriage as we slowly steamed away from you in the wind & rain.’

On 2 December 1911, after the month-long voyage, the last part of which was in the sweltering heat of the Indian Ocean, the
Medina
dropped
anchor at Bombay, the ‘gateway’ to India, The royal party disembarked on 5 December, a week before the Durbar ceremony, and were met by the Viceroy Lord Hardinge. Passing through streets lined by cheering crowds, they made for Government House. A triumphal Muslim-style arch on the Apollo Bundar was officially opened in 1924 in honour of King George’s visit and today is a popular meeting place.

The magnificent Delhi Durbar was described at the time as the most splendid spectacle in the history of India. Forty thousand tents to house 250,000 people had been erected over an area covering forty-five square miles on the plains alongside the Jumna River. The King, who was enthroned beneath a golden dome, towered over his subjects who came to pay homage to him.
The Times
summed up the day’s events in a style appropriate to the occasion. ‘The ceremony at its culminating point exactly typified the Oriental conception of the ultimate responsibilities of Imperial power. The Monarchs sat alone, remote but beneficent, raised far above the multitude but visible to all, clad in rich vestments, flanked by radiant emblems of authority, guarded by a glittering array of troops, the cynosure of the proudest Princes of India, the central figures in what was surely the most majestic assemblage ever seen in the East.’

At 12 noon on 12 December 1911, beneath the heat of the Indian sun, King George and Queen Mary felt that a moment had occurred in their lives that elevated them from the sphere of ordinary mortals. If they believed that the Coronation at Westminster Abbey was the climax of their lives, the Indian Durbar not only reinforced but enhanced this climax. No one at the Durbar could have failed to be moved by the pageantry of colour, the symbols of Empire and the fervour of a people who waited for a divine messenger to rescue them from a life they accepted because of the promise of happiness in the world to come. Had they imagined that they had been transported from squalor and poverty to the gates of Paradise by the spectacle before them it would have been understandable. King George himself was so moved by the ceremony that in a letter to his mother he wrote that ‘the Durbar yesterday was the most wonderful & beautiful sight I have ever seen & one I shall remember all my life. We wore
our robes & I the new crown made for the occasion. May had her best tiara on … I can only say it was most magnificent, the clothes & colours were marvellous … I had six pages & May had four to carry our robes, they were either young Maharajahs or sons of Maharajahs & all wore beautiful clothes of white & gold with gold turbans & they did look nice.’

King George was not only reliving a childhood fairy-tale but was acting it out. When the Durbar ended he removed his ‘dressing-up clothes’ to play another game. While Queen Mary travelled to Agra to visit the Taj Mahal he went shooting in Nepal. The Maharajah of Nepal provided 14,000 beaters and 600 elephants to facilitate the King’s favourite pastime in which thirty-nine tigers, eighteen rhino and one bear were shot, a record the King considered would be ‘hard to beat’. Although he and Queen Mary were apart for Christmas, they rejoined one another in Bombay to board the
Medina
for the voyage back to England. Overwhelmed by the events of the past few weeks, the King delivered his farewell speech and wept. When the
Medina
put into Malta he wrote to his mother: ‘What joy there are only 9 days before we meet. I shall then feel proud that our historical visit to India had been accomplished successfully I hope and that I have done my duty before God & this great Empire, & last but not least that I have gained the approval of my beloved Motherdear.’

T
HE YEARS THAT
led up to ‘the war to end all wars’ brought King George into conflict with a number of issues since the turn-of-the-century struggle had been developing between women demanding equal rights with men and a society intent on denying them these rights. The King’s views differed little from those of other Englishmen of the time, namely that women fell into two categories, those whom one married and who bore one’s children and those who inhabited the
demi-monde.
He soon became aware that a third category, representing all women, was vociferously demanding recognition.

The move towards women’s suffrage had begun in the second half of the nineteenth century. By 1913 it had gained considerable momentum when it was announced that a Reform Bill, launched by the Liberal Prime Minister H.H. Asquith, would be open to amendments relating to women’s suffrage. The speaker of the House of Commons vetoed the amendments on the grounds that they would alter the character of the original Bill too profoundly for it to proceed. This setback infuriated the militants in the suffrage movement. The suffragettes, under the leadership of Emmeline Pankhurst, had already invited Queen Mary’s disapproval by smashing plate-glass windows with hammers carried in their muffs, as well as by other acts of violence. King George’s attention was dramatically drawn to the cause when, on Derby Day 1913, a young militant, Emily Wilding Davidson, threw herself under the hooves of the King’s horse at Tattenham Corner and was killed. Queen Mary’s immediate reaction was that the jockey, ‘poor Jones’, had been ‘much knocked about’. The King, an opponent of every form of organized violence, must also have disapproved.

Five days before the Coronation about 40,000 supporters of the suffragette movement, mostly women, held a four-mile-long procession extending from Westminster to the Albert Hall. The purpose of the demonstration was to draw attention to their cause and to raise money to support it. Having already targeted the Royal Family on Derby Day, the militants in the movement had hoped that Queen Mary at least would understand the justice of their demands. They were disappointed. While the Queen had always been well aware of her own rights as a woman, she was now satisfied with her status and as the First Lady of the British Empire could feel only embarrassment at the importunity of her sisters. She had left far behind her the time when, as Princess May, she had considered herself less equal than other members of her family and clearly did not wish to be reminded of a struggle she had fought and won. Having overcome what she had experienced as ‘social discrimination’ in her upbringing, Queen Mary managed to delude herself that she was ‘to the manner born’. Uncertain of her past she resented the struggle of those less secure than herself, and she did not support the efforts of the suffragettes to right social wrongs. Her comments on the miners who were striking for an improvement in underground working conditions, and on the disruptive transport strike, applied equally to the suffragette movement. ‘Now we have a transport strike which may become very serious – really we have no luck, one tiresome thing after another.’ This echoed a similarly deprecatory comment, this time in a letter to her Aunt Augusta, following the burning down of the ‘little tea house’ in Kew Gardens by militants. Other protests by ‘unruly’ women to draw attention to their rights included shouting at the King at a performance at His Majesty’s Theatre and creating an explosion in Westminster Abbey, which slightly damaged the Coronation Chair and the Stone of Destiny. ‘There seems no end to their iniquities,’ wrote the Queen.

If social success and recognition of her regal status by a public almost unaware of her existence fifteen years earlier had been Queen Mary’s goal, she had achieved it. King George had other goals. Ever since he had been obliged to confront his social phobias at the State Opening of
Parliament on 6 February, at the Coronation on 22 June and at the Durbar in Delhi soon afterwards, he had discovered a new confidence in himself that had encouraged him to take a closer interest in political issues. The fears that he had confided to his diary on 6 February : ‘we walked in procession hand in hand to the House of Lords, it was indeed a terrible ordeal, as the House was crowded in every part & I felt horribly shy & nervous’ – a touching reminder of the frightened child still present in the adult King – were slowly beginning to fade.

Unlike Queen Mary, who was concerned only with the behaviour of women in so far as she considered they would bring her own status into disrepute, the King began to feel passionately about the women’s suffrage movement only when he feared it might blur the boundaries between the genders. When he was told of the forced feeding of women on hunger strike in Pentonville Prison, who had been charged with, and found guilty of, assault and damage, he was shocked. Having been brought up to idealize women and to put them on a pedestal in the belief that they could do no wrong, he was sufficiently distressed to order his Private Secretary, Lord Stamfordham (formerly Sir Arthur Bigge), to make his views known to the Home Secretary. The Home Secretary had already drafted his Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Health) Bill 1913, which allowed for the temporary discharge of prisoners who were on the point of death and for rearresting them when they had recovered their health. Since most of the women rearrested resumed their hunger strikes on their return to prison, the Bill became known as the ‘Cat and Mouse Act’. ‘The King desires me to write to you on the question of “forcible feeding”,’ wrote Lord Stamfordham. ‘His Majesty cannot help feeling that there is something shocking, if not almost cruel, in the operation to which these insensate women are subjected through their refusal to take necessary nourishment. His Majesty concludes that Miss Pankhurst’s description of what she endured when forcibly fed is more or less true. If so her story will horrify people otherwise not in sympathy with the Militant Suffragettes. The King asks whether, in your “Temporary Discharge of Prisoners Bill” it would not be possible to abolish forcible feeding.’

The concept of women behaving and being treated like men was repugnant to the King. If a woman was not a woman his sexual anxieties would not allow him to relate to her. His insistence that Queen Mary exaggerate her femininity by wearing a bustle and emphasizing her hair allowed him to set aside any idea of same-sex closeness, acceptable to him only in brotherly love as between comrades-in-arms.

The Queen needed little encouragement to wear the jewels for which she had acquired a reputation. A year after the King’s accession she was photographed adorned with the most dazzling of them, and she was never happier than when she was complimented on her appearance. In a photograph taken in 1912, among other self-appointed badges of rank she wore the massive Koh-i-noor diamond, the Star of Africa, a diamond crown, a collar of rows of diamonds, a diamond stomacher, the Garter and several other Stars and Orders. Her hair-style remained as it was when she was a young woman. The King is said to have insisted that his wife did not alter her coiffure (said by her critics to make her look like a poodle), his rationalization being that he wanted her to grow old looking as she had when he had asked her to marry him. Despite all the tiaras, all the crowns and all the coronets that she favoured, it was Queen Mary’s hair that remained her ‘crowning glory’ and as if she was aware of its sexual significance she rarely uncovered her head other than in the privacy of her home. As far as King George was concerned, failure to emphasize her hair would deprive his wife of her femininity, and a defeminized woman was perhaps too close to masculinity for comfort. Having shut his eyes to same-sex involvements while in the Navy, nothing had horrified him more than the revelation of his brother’s homosexuality at the time of the Cleveland Street scandal. His comment ‘Homosexuals shoot themselves, don’t they?’ reflected his fear that he might turn out to be like his brother: a fear so absolute that were he to be ‘contaminated’ by this ‘evil’ he would kill himself. There is no evidence to suggest that King George himself had homosexual tendencies, only that his interest in women was one of respectful admiration and filial love. As a married man with children it is more likely that King George was asexual rather than homosexual. In adolescence his
developing sexual interest was blunted by his ever-watchful guardians who forbade him appropriate sexual experimentation, and as an adult he put respectable women in a category similar to that of his mother, which encouraged feelings of exaggerated respect rather than sexual disinhibition.

In addition to the reverberations of the movement for the rights of women, other more violent events were developing in Europe. King George did his best to dissuade his ministers from involving Britain in any one of several conflicts – later described as the sparks that would sooner or later ignite the powder keg – which signalled the war of 1914.

Another issue threatened a civil war within the British Isles itself. The question of Home Rule for Ireland and the divisions within Britain may have given comfort to a Germany looking for an opportunity to break out of the ‘encirclement’ about which she had become increasingly concerned. Asquith’s Liberal government, under pressure from Irish Nationalist MPs, had introduced a Home Rule Bill intended to devolve limited powers from Westminster to Dublin. The Bill, not surprisingly, failed to gain the approval of the Conservative-dominated House of Lords which threw it out first in 1912 and again a year later. Since the delaying power of the House of Lords was limited to two years, by 1914 all that was required for the Bill to become law was the royal assent. King George, readily identifying with Conservative prejudice and aristocratic grandiosity, refused this on the grounds that to assent to the Bill would be to inflame the Protestants in Ulster who might violently resist any attempt to force them into a union with the rest of Ireland.