Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires (86 page)

I was
very
sad leaving “Home” and you
all
, but I was
so
delighted to have been present at the Jubilee, I
loved
the enthusiasm and devotion which the people have for dear George and you, it is
so
touching—and in no other country I am sure it is like that! One is
proud
to be
British
. I was glad to have been in London for G[eorge]’s birthday and could see you
all
once more.—I do hope both you and George are not
too
tired, with all you have to do. It
is
wonderful, all you have got through.
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The excitement that followed the king and queen’s Silver Jubilee was followed by one encouraging event after another. The birth of Mary’s fourth grandchild, Princess Margaret, to the Duke of York meant the continuation of the British royal family.

Two family marriages took place between 1930 and 1935. Mary’s son George, Duke of Kent—who became the first member of the royal family to work in the civil service when he took up a post at the Foreign Office—married, as did his brother Harry, Duke of Gloucester. George was the only one of Queen Mary’s children to marry a royal—Princess Marina of Greece. Consequently, she was the last foreign princess to marry into the British royal family. Marina was a granddaughter of the king’s uncle George I of Greece, making her and the Duke of Kent second cousins. They first met in 1923 when Marina came to Buckingham Palace for a visit with her mother, who had been evacuated from Greece in 1922. “She has not a cent,” King George remarked of Marina, but this was quickly forgiven because of her “charm and beauty.”
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The queen had hoped Marina would hit it off with the Prince of Wales, but she and the Duke of Kent became smitten with one another. The queen wrote to her husband before the wedding, “I am sure we shall like Marina & that she will be a charming addition to the family.”
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At their wedding reception, the queen had a seemingly innocuous meeting with a young woman who was a friend of David’s named Wallis Simpson. “I want to introduce a great friend of mine,” he told his mother.
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Mary shook Wallis’s hand graciously, thinking nothing of it. At the time, she could not have fathomed that Wallis would soon threaten to destabilize the entire British monarchy.

On November 6, 1935, Harry followed in his brother Bertie’s footsteps by marrying a British woman—Lady Alice Montagu-Douglas-Scott, daughter of the Seventh Duke of Buccleuch, an old friend of the king’s. The duke died shortly before the wedding, so it was celebrated very quietly in the chapel at Buckingham Palace. The princesses Elizabeth and Margaret were bridesmaids. The queen was greatly pleased by the match, since Alice possessed a suitably grand lineage. She was a descendant of King Charles II through his illegitimate son the Duke of Monmouth; her father had served with King George when he was a cadet in the Royal Navy; her paternal grandmother had been Mistress of the Robes to Queen Alexandra; and her maternal grandmother had been one of Queen Mary’s own ladies-in-waiting during her days as Duchess of York. “Now all the children are married but David,” the king wrote.
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A few days later, the queen’s sister-in-law Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone, wrote to Mary, “This is indeed good news & I congratulate you on settling another son & upon getting what I know to be a really splendid daughter-in-law. If only David would follow suit. He seems to have missed his best chances. But never mind, one must look on the blessings one has & be thankful for them.”
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Within two months, a new tragedy struck, cutting straight to the heart of the British royal family.

Never again healthy after his brush with death in 1928, King George V was plagued by failing health in the last decade of his life. In January 1936, the king and queen moved to Sandringham for a brief rest, but Mary was disconcerted to see that her husband was a shadow of his former self. Suffering from emphysema, bronchitis, and congestive lung disease, the king was slowly suffocating. Within a few weeks, it was obvious that he was dying. Mary almost became a prisoner at Sandringham because of the numerous reporters and photographers that had descended on the country estate. Between George’s bouts of consciousness, his children kept their mother occupied. “G. about the same, sat with him from time to time,” she wrote in her diary. “Did not go to Church as the place was surrounded by reporters & photographers, too heartless—Walked with Mary morning & afternoon … Georgie arrived at 7—also Archbishop of Canterbury—David and Bertie left but will return tomorrow—”
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These opportunities gave Mary the chance to reflect on her forty-two-year marriage to her beloved George. She thought about everything they had gone through together—their accession to the throne, the outbreak of the First World War, and the numerous political crises they had weathered—and could not bear to think that their life together was over. Queen Mary was not ready to see her husband relinquish the crown to the forty-one-year-old Prince of Wales. Leaving the throne to David at this stage, when he had still failed to prove his worthiness to take on the royal mantle, would surely spell trouble for the nation. The Labour Party, with its socialist ideas on governing, might be tempted to call for abolishing the monarchy once and for all. On January 18, the king’s Privy Counsellors arrived at Sandringham to gain his imprimatur on the formation of a Council of State, comprised of the queen and their four sons. After sitting in the king’s bedroom in silence for about ten minutes, George faintly whispered his approval. Lord Dawson, the king’s doctor, handed him the official document for his signature. Exhausted, George took a pen in his hand and, accompanied by Lord Dawson, marked two little crosses for his signature. As he did this, “[t]ears filled King George’s eyes,” because he “understood that this effort would be his last act as King.”
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Many of the Privy Counsellors also had tears in their eyes.

It pleased the queen greatly that her husband was able to spend his last days at Sandringham, the place he loved most. He cherished the estate where he had spent many happy years as a child with his parents and siblings. For a man such as the king, who enjoyed peace, quiet, and simplicity in life, Sandringham was ideal with its rolling hillsides, snow-covered trees, and picturesque waterways. It therefore seemed appropriate that it was here that he died on January 20, 1936, surrounded by his family. Just before the end, according to Lord Wigram, David “became hysterical, cried loudly and kept on embracing the Queen.”
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To ease the king’s suffering in his final hours, he was given a lethal dose of cocaine and morphine. After the king breathed for the last time, Mary, her face bathed in tears, took David’s hand in hers. Kneeling, she kissed it and hailed him as king in a strong, resolute voice, followed by each of her children. “I could not bring myself to believe that the members of my own family or indeed anyone else, should be expected to humble themselves before me in this way,” David later wrote.
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In her diary that night, Mary wrote, “
Am brokenhearted …
at 5 to 12 my darling husband passed peacefully away—my children were angelic.”
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Later, in a rare outpouring of grief, she admitted about her husband, “The sunset of his death tinged the whole world’s sky.”
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The death of the man she loved was a feeling that was all too familiar to Mary. King George died in the same bed as his brother Eddy had nearly forty-five years earlier. She admitted in her typical calm fashion, “Such a sad day. It is curious my having been present in this house at the death beds of 2 brothers Eddy & George.”
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When the news of the king’s death was announced, the demonstrations of grief were sincere not only across the British Empire but the whole world. King George V had been a bastion of strength throughout the long, difficult years of the Great War, and the people of the world mourned his loss. For a week before the funeral, Queen Mary appeared throughout London to show her gratitude to the people for their heartfelt condolences. Dressed in black with a long veil covering her face, she was surrounded by the women of the royal family. Witnesses stood in awe of Queen Mary, the Princess Royal, the duchesses of York and Kent, her sister-in-law Queen Maud of Norway, and George’s aunt Princess Beatrice as they moved through the city in an ethereal mixture of mourning and dignity. The draped coffin containing the king’s body was laid in the church at Sandringham, resting beneath the bas-relief gold altar and stained glass window that extended nearly the entire height of the church. Queen Mary’s sons took turns holding an almost round-the-clock vigil over their father’s coffin. The queen’s memory was forever ingrained with that sight. “Went to the Church after luncheon,” she wrote. “It all looked very peaceful—but so sad—My sons returned also Harry & Alice & Elizabeth. Did business with David who was most helpful and kind.”
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From the Wolferton train station near Sandringham in Norfolk, King George V’s body was taken to London on Thursday, January 23. Upon arrival, the new king and his brothers followed their father’s coffin on foot to the Palace of Westminster for the lying in state. During the procession, the Maltese cross on top of the diamond-covered Imperial State Crown, which had been sitting on the coffin, came loose and crashed on the ground. Everyone saw it as a bad omen for the new reign. They would not be mistaken.

During the lying in state at Westminster, more than a million souls gathered to pay their last respects to the man who had ruled the British Empire for twenty-five years. For all his unflinching traditionalism, George also demonstrated an ability to be forward thinking. He had been “the first British sovereign to recognize that the royal family needed to be popular to survive. He was the first King to hire a public-relations officer, the first to make use of the talking cinema newsreel, the first to make use of the Christmas radio broadcast to the nation, and the first to insist that his relatives do something to make themselves look slightly more useful to help justify their gilded existences.”
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Coupled with his legacy of stability for the institution of monarchy was the fact that he was also the longest-reigning king of England since George III, who reigned from 1760 to 1820—though from 1811 his eldest son acted as regent. In
Life
magazine’s special 2010 royalty issue, the king received an apt epitaph describing the challenges he faced in his long reign.

[King George V] was suited like his father for a Victorian or an Edwardian time, but that’s not what the world would offer. He was a man of stamp collecting and game hunting, but socialism was on the rise—communism and fascism too—during his relatively long reign from 1910 to 1936. Meantime, the Great War ensued, the Great Depression hit, and the world was altered mightily. During World War I, he was the one who was compelled to shed his family’s Germanic name (Saxe-Coburg and Gotha) and adopt a British-sounding one (Windsor). He coped as he could, but when he died, his country—and the world—was on the verge of an Armageddon like no other.
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The emotional funeral was held at Windsor Castle on the damp, misty morning of January 28. Chips Channon noted that the queen looked “more magnificent than ever.”
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Her four sons walked behind the gun carriage bearing the king’s body to Westminster Hall. The silence in the streets was overwhelming. The whole of London seemed to come to a standstill.

The funeral for King George V marked the final gathering in history of Old Europe’s royals, most of whom had reigned or been deposed during the First World War. Along with the kings of Norway, Denmark, Bulgaria, and Belgium were royal representatives of Italy, Yugoslavia, Sweden, Greece, Egypt, Luxembourg, France, Spain, Albania, and Russia. In a surprise move that suggested a decline in anti-German sentiments in Britain, the funeral also brought together a number of deposed German royals, including the Grand Duke of Hesse, the Duke of Brunswick, and perhaps most poignantly the middle-aged, arthritic, English-born Duke of Coburg who arrived wearing a German military helmet. The funeral was also the last time that the ex-emperor Wilhelm contacted his British cousins. He penned a note of condolence to Mary, and sent his grandson Fritzi—Crown Prince Willy’s fourth son—to the funeral. Afterward, the queen gave Fritzi—who would later marry a British woman and become a naturalized citizen—a gold box from George’s writing desk as a gift for Wilhelm. “Deeply moved by the kind thought that prompted you to send me this gift as a souvenir,” he wrote to Mary, signing the letter as her “devoted cousin.”
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After King George V was laid to rest, Queen Mary wrote: “We left him sadly, lying with his ancestors in the vault. We returned to London by train & got home by 3.30.”
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