Darling Georgie (30 page)

K
ING
G
EORGE
V’s death was peaceful. His family were at his bedside. Queen Mary turned to her eldest son and, bowing, took his hand and kissed it. In a clear voice she uttered ‘God save the King’, words that had ensured the continuity of the monarchy for a thousand years. The following day the Prince of Wales acceded to the throne and the day after that he was officially proclaimed King Edward VIII. On 24 January the coffin of the late King George V was taken by train from Sandringham to London. From there it was carried on a gun-carriage to Westminster Hall for the four-day lying in state before the burial in the chapel of the Knights of the Garter at Windsor Castle. The Imperial Crown, made especially for King George V for the Coronation Durbar in India, had been secured to the lid of the coffin, but as the cortège turned into New Palace Yard the jewelled Maltese Cross which was attached to the coffin fell to the ground. It was quickly retrieved by one of the escorting guardsmen, but King Edward VIII, who had seen the incident, gloomily, and in the event presciently, declared it a ‘most terrible omen’. Whether the new King thought of the omen as foretelling the fall of the Empire or his own downfall is a matter for speculation.

In the five generations that have passed since the reign of Queen Victoria it is highly possible that in at least four of them the failure of male heirs to the throne to have bonded with the parent of the opposite sex has been in part responsible for the emotional crises that have befallen the Royal Family. This failure to bond causes boys to seek often inappropriate compensation for the absence of this love from other women in later life. Because it has long been the custom for those born to royal parents to be cared for from birth by attendants other than their mothers, such children
grow up feeling not only excluded from the family circle but also excluded from what they believe to be their parents’ love for them. The essential love affair with the opposite-sex parent, for both boys and girls, in early childhood is often ignored by parents who confuse the physical needs of their children with their emotional needs. ‘It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father’ (Freud, 1900). Royal heirs may even have ‘denied’ this oedipal wish to kill their fathers and marry their mothers, because their ‘god-like’ fathers were essentially too remote. Their patricidal impulses may instead have been turned inwards upon themselves or unwittingly directed at other ‘fathers’, like the husbands of the married women with whom they sometimes seek out affairs. Such ‘fathers’ are also to be found in religion (‘our Father which art in heaven’), in respected tutors and advisers (in the case of King George V) or in same-sex encounters (as in the case of Prince Eddy).

The reign of King George V, midway between that of Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth II, played a pivotal role in reinforcing this mode of behaviour. Changes in royal child-rearing methods, however – such as can be observed in the case of Prince William and Prince Harry – could bring the faulty pattern to an end.

Queen Victoria’s life may have been a model of sexual propriety, but it was marred by her unfulfilled dependent needs which she handed on to her children. Brought up without a father (the Duke of Kent had died from pneumonia when Princess Victoria was a baby of nine months), as a young woman the Princess had suffered from long periods of depression. An ageing uncle, King Leopold, and a Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, did what they could with their advice and support to help her, but it was not until as Queen she met and married her cousin Prince Albert that her loss was assuaged. Eager to have the comfort and compensation of a large family the Queen bore nine children over the course of seventeen years. For much of her life a ‘child’ in search of a father, Queen Victoria had little time for other children, including her own. She pronounced her heir
Prince Edward unattractive from the moment of his birth, handed him over to a wet nurse at the earliest possible moment and did not set eyes on him again for six weeks. Her consort Prince Albert was the only male in her life. Believing that she had found in her husband the father she had lost, she was inconsolable when Prince Albert died from typhoid fever in 1861, and she unjustly blamed Prince Edward’s ‘scandalous’ behaviour with the actress Nellie Clifden and the aftermath of it for his father’s death.

Disapproved of by both his parents, but particularly by his mother, Prince Edward grew up insistent upon righting the wrongs of his childhood. He sought illusory compensations for the absence of his mother’s love in food, drink, gambling and sex. Not having a father to whom he could direct his murderous rage, King Edward VII forced the cuckolded husbands of his mistresses into the role. His continuing urge to satisfy his own need for love and attention allowed him little time to satisfy similar needs in his children.

King Edward VII’s heir, Prince Eddy, and his younger son, Prince George, were apparently happy and carefree in their early days on the Sandringham estate. Their idyllic childhood came to an abrupt end at the ages of eight and six with the arrival of their new tutor, Mr Dalton. Prince George, the brighter and more intelligent of the two boys, was frustrated by being taught at the slow pace of his intellectually slow older brother. Five years later he was shocked once again by his banishment from home to the draconian Naval Academy at Dartmouth where he was told by his father that ‘a man would be made of him’.

Boys generally metamorphose into men through emulating the behaviour of their fathers. Since for much of his childhood Prince George’s male role model was unavailable to him (which in view of King Edward VII’s philandering may have been all to the good), he was forced to seek alternatives in authoritarian men, while his brother Eddy found father substitutes in sexually promiscuous ones. King George V consequently grew up to be as rigid and unbending as the senior naval officers on whom he modelled himself.

As a cadet, Prince George soon realized that once again he would not
be allowed to develop at a pace suited to his temperament but one that suited the officers in the institution in which he had been incarcerated. While it is true that many of the other cadets came from a similar background, few, if any, would have stepped straight from the sheltered environment of a school with only two pupils to a far stricter school in which they were surrounded not only by fellow cadets but also by midshipmen, officers and crew older and bigger than them. It is unlikely that any would have been brought up to believe himself so special that his overwhelmingly doting mother would want to keep him by her side for ever. Prince George never became reconciled to the pain of parting. The once good-natured and sensitive boy eventually became so indoctrinated by the life-style into which he had been forced – believing it to be for the best, otherwise his loving mother would not have permitted it – that in the course of time he insisted upon a similar life-style for his children.

Satisfied with the love that his mother had impressed upon him, the Prince, unlike his father, was not forced to seek compensatory love from women. Because of his mother’s many absences he sought compensatory love instead, first from his dreamy and effeminate brother and later from his spouse who neglected her children in order to attend to his dependent needs. Prince George’s adolescence was spent in a claustrophobic, all-male institution in which he was indoctrinated with the importance of obedience and duty. In company with other graduates from the naval college, he offloaded on to other victims, including his children, the violent practices he had been taught.

King George’s personality was well suited to the rigid training he received. From the age of six his upbringing had been over-structured and over-disciplined. He had sensed his mother’s persistent unhappiness, owing both to her ill health and the indifferent attitude of her husband. Prince George tried to comfort her, but because she often left him for prolonged periods it must have appeared to ‘darling Georgie’ that his efforts to please her had failed. He became angry both with his mother and with himself; angry with his mother because of her unavailability and the fact that she had allowed him to be sent away from home, and angry
with himself because he had not pleased her sufficiently. Like other children in the same predicament he was unable to express his anger because he feared that one day his mother might leave him for ever.

Prince George was trained to perform for his instructors, but his ambivalence towards them led him to join in with the practical ‘jokes’ which allowed for a respectable acting-out of hostility to authority. Prone to angry outbursts, he later learned to control his feelings lest he damaged those he loved. His bullying tactics towards his sons, who were unable to leave him, turned one of them against him and the other into a timid and depressed adult.

When he was well into his career as a naval officer and had begun to settle into the passive role of gentleman landowner, with only his guns to reflect his slowly awakening sexuality, the 25-year-old Prince George was plunged once again into a role for which he was unprepared when, on Eddy’s death, he unexpectedly found himself heir to the throne. While King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra mourned their son, Prince George grieved for the loss of his big brother.

A generation later, against a background of the social changes of the inter-war years, King George V’s eldest son Prince Edward (David) rebelled against the blind obedience to orders demanded of him by a father who, when he was a child, had come between him and his mother. Had King George been able to find it in him to exercise tolerance during his son’s prolonged adolescence, the course of royal history might have been changed. In the event, he came down heavily against David’s insubordination and found scapegoats for the anger which should have been directed at his neglectful but affable father, King Edward VII, in his sons. David and Bertie may not have been rivals for the love of the King’s doting mother Queen Alexandra but they were certainly rivals for the love of his wife Queen Mary.

Disapproving of almost every aspect of David’s life, from his dress to his choice of friends, King George converted a foolish, fun-loving ‘child’ into an angry and ultimately subversive adult. He only became a more caring father when, after a lifetime of service to the mother country his
people gave him the unconditional love that he had lacked as a child. He may have had shortcomings as a father but as a son to his people he was without fault.

David, King George V’s heir, resembled his self-indulgent grand-father. He had a better relationship with King Edward VII than with his father who appeared to him to be not only bigoted but constantly disapproving. David’s naturally ebullient feelings were suppressed by his parents in the interests of training him for kingship. As a young adult, like his grandfather and much to his parents’ disgust, he formed liaisons with a number of women. Although unable to admit it, he admired his father’s genuine patriotism, but as King Edward VIII he directed this admiration towards the distorted nationalistic ‘patriotism’ of Nazi Germany. In the shadow of the Second World War the British establishment became increasingly suspicious of his fascination with Nazi ideology and particularly with his relationship with Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German envoy in Britain.

King Edward VIII reigned for only 326 days after the death of his father. Forced out of the country by the leaders of both Church and state, he was secretly suspected of becoming a security risk. The stratagem of banning his marriage to the American divorcée Mrs Wallis Simpson was used to banish him. The King had refused to end his relationship with Mrs Simpson after his proclamation. When she was granted a decree nisi at Ipswich Assizes on 27 October 1936 he announced to Stanley Baldwin, the Prime Minister, that he intended marrying Mrs Simpson as soon as her divorce was made absolute. The Church, Queen Mary and the Cabinet (the latter invoking various precedents) refused to consider a marriage which would result in Mrs Simpson becoming Queen Consort. The King insisted that he was unable to live without the woman he loved, and on 10 December 1936 he was forced to sign the Instrument of Abdication, leaving the throne to his brother Bertie, the Duke of York. Kept in the dark about King Edward VIII’s enchantment with the enemy, the British people were sorry to see him go.

Like his father before him, Bertie, Duke of York, was second choice for
King. Like his father, he was anxious, inarticulate and unprepared for the role. He had greatness thrust upon him by a war that gave him a status he had never sought. He and his wife Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, crowned King George VI and Queen Elizabeth in May 1937, helped to restore to the monarchy a popularity not seen since the reign of King George V and Queen Mary.

By the time of her death in 1953, the Dowager Queen Mary had lost her parents, her brother Prince Frank, her husband, her sons Prince John, Prince George, Duke of Kent (in an air crash in 1942) and Bertie (from cancer in 1952). She had thus lost most of the ‘jewels’ in her crown but not the monarchical role that she had craved. Her attachment to the monarchy remained firm and she neither condemned nor criticized it. She had known that Prince Eddy was unsuited to be King, but she had agreed to marry him. She had accepted Prince George’s hand in marriage despite her realization that she would be marrying her intellectual inferior. She had even supported her son David whose morality she deplored. She would certainly support her son Bertie, knowing his weaknesses but appreciating his strengths. She accepted the psychological difficulties of Bertie’s younger brother Prince Henry, later the Duke of Gloucester, and the homosexuality and drug abuse of the youngest of all, Prince George, later the Duke of Kent. As far as she was concerned her heirs were free to behave as badly as they wished as long as such behaviour was in private and did not bring the monarchy into disrepute. Queen Mary lived long enough to see the new King and Queen, in their wartime role, bring fresh honours to the House of Windsor.