Queen's House (33 page)

At the beginning of the new reign in 1910, David was fifteen and Bertie fourteen. Their siblings were Princess Mary, thirteen, and Princes Harry, ten, George, seven, and John, the youngest, four. It has often been said that their childhood was not happy: in the words of Mabell, Countess of Airlie, Queen Mary's devoted Lady of the Bedchamber, the King and Queen ‘have often been depicted as stern unloving parents, but this they most certainly were not… I believe that they were more conscientious and more truly devoted to their children than the majority of parents in that era.'
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No one can read the memoirs of Edward VIII, as Duke of Windsor, without seeing that there was truth in her judgement, but certainly the King and Queen found it difficult to express their feelings to their children. That they were undemonstrative, even withdrawn, might be because both had, in their early days, trailed in the wake of exuberant parents, Edward VII and Mary Adelaide, Duchess of Teck. It is a familiar pattern. Their children led restricted lives. ‘I never saw them run along the corridors; they walked sedately, generally shepherded by nurses and tutors,' wrote Lady Airlie.
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It is also true that when very young they were left a great deal in the charge of their nannies, one of whom was extremely cruel. The Duke of Windsor described in his memoirs how, when he was brought down to join his parents in the drawing room at teatime, ‘this dreadful nanny would pinch and twist my arm to make me yell'; causing him to be removed peremptorily from the room. But eventually she was removed and replaced by Frederick Finch, a stalwart footman who was first

a sort of nanny; then a valet who travelled with me … concocted the pitiless remedy of my first hangover, never hesitated to address unsolicited advice when, in his opinion, the developing interests of his young master required it. Later still he became my butler.
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Finch was a splendid example of those devoted and indispensable servants who throughout history have made bearable the loneliness that so often is the lot of royalty.

Another of the unsung characters who had such an important influence on the young lives was the Sandringham village schoolmaster, Walter
Jones. ‘Something of a philosopher and sage, he was a self-taught naturalist with an unsurpassed knowledge of the botany and animal lore of Norfolk,' remembered the Duke of Windsor. He filled ‘an important if unobtrusive place in the closed world of Sandringham'. King George V respected and was fond of him, and took him with him when he went on his Empire tour in 1901. Jones even tried, not very successfully, to introduce his royal charges to the children of the village school for football matches. Looking back, the exiled Duke remembered with nostalgia that ‘there were older and lovelier places in the country, but for my grandfather [Sandringham] summed up his idea of the good life … a uniquely English way of life centred around the great estates: an elegant, undoubtedly paternalistic, and self-contained existence'.
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The King and Queen were often absent or occupied. Nevertheless they spent time with the children. There was, too, a bond between Prince Edward and his mother that was to survive all the traumatic later events when he was the errant King Edward VIII. Looking back in later life, he would remember her resting on the sofa in her negligee and the family gathered around her on little chairs.

She would read and talk to us … I am sure that my cultural interests began at my mother's knee. The years she had lived abroad had mellowed her outlook and reading and observation had equipped her with a prodigious knowledge of Royal history. Her soft voice, her cultivated mind, the cosy room overflowing with personal treasures were all inseparable ingredients of the happiness associated with this last hour of a child's day.
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Later the exiled Duke of Windsor remembered with a sense of loss the security and love of his Edwardian childhood.

Sandringham, the Duke of Windsor remembered, ‘possessed most of the ingredients for a boyhood idyll'. There, ‘free hours were spent mostly on our bicycles when we would face downhill, crouched over the handlebars with Finch bringing up the rear shouting hoarse warnings that I could not hear'. The ‘woodland trails of the great estate became … an enchanted forest … The lake was in our imaginations infested with pirates.' It was said that you could not understand King George V unless you understood what Sandringham meant to him. It is also true,
though perhaps not so often realized, that to understand the sad end of King Edward VIII, one should remember, as he did, this childhood idyll. When Edward VII and his Court descended on Sandringham ‘the great house on the hill would spring into life with a bonfire blaze of lights … In my gallery of childhood memories, the portrait of my grandfather seems bathed in perpetual sunlight…'
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Edward VII was his role model. When he became King, David would choose to be called Edward VIII.

But there was a dark corner in that idyllic scene, which the Duke of Windsor had completely pushed out of his mind. There is only the briefest mention in his autobiography of his youngest brother, Prince John, the poor little epileptic boy who lived separately with his nurse on the estate and died on 18 January 1919 at the age of fourteen. Throughout his life, as Prince of Wales, King and Duke of Windsor, David would always be able to blot the unpleasant out of his mind.

But shades of the prison house were closing in. When their parents, the Prince and Princess of Wales, returned from their tour of India in 1906, a new tutor, Hansell, was appointed to prepare the two eldest boys for the Navy, to which their father determined to send them. The Navy, he believed, would teach the heir to the throne all he needed to know.

In May 1909 Prince Edward was transferred from the naval college at Osborne to that at Dartmouth, where he completed his two years' naval training. His brother followed him through the same rough waters. Bertie, unlike the Prince of Wales, was to remain with the Navy. On his grandfather's death, Prince Edward became Duke of Cornwall, a fourteenth-century title given to the King's eldest son. The income from the Duchy, as he explained,

serves to make him financially independent. Its holdings include valuable London property and thousands of acres in the West Country. The greater part of the not inconsiderable income is reinvested in the estate and the rest passes to the Duke of Cornwall… for the maintenance of his household and establishment.
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If, in her first days there, Buckingham Palace seemed unfriendly to Queen Mary, it was doubly so to the family. From the beginning, to the young Prince Edward, it smelt of death.

My grandfather's body lay in the Throne Room at Buckingham Palace, with the massive bejewelled crown upon the coffin. Four tall Grenadier guardsmen of the King's Company stood rigidly at each corner, resting on their arms reversed, their bearskin-capped heads inclined in respect. My grandmother could not stay out of the Throne Room: she returned there constantly to rearrange the flowers or to show a foreign relative or old friend the scene.
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In 2 June 1910, three weeks before his sixteenth birthday, Prince Edward was created Prince of Wales (a title which is not automatically conferred but is bestowed at the monarch's discretion).

In December 1910 the Prince of Wales moved with his parents into Buckingham Palace.

My room was on the 3rd floor overlooking the Mall. The Palace seemed enormous, with its stately rooms and endless corridors and passages. It was something of a walk to reach my mother's room; we used to say we visited her only by appointment. And the vast building seemed pervaded by a curious musty smell that still assails me whenever I enter its portals. I was never happy there.
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It had been difficult to persuade Queen Alexandra to move into Buckingham Palace; now it was even more difficult to get her to move out. Cocooned in her deafness, spoilt by universal respect and affection, she seemed blissfully unaware that she was making life difficult for the new King and Queen. Her sister, Marie, now the widow of the Russian Tsar Alexander III, was with her in England and insisted that she should follow rigid Russian rules of protocol, which gave her precedence over Queen Mary, who showed exemplary patience. Finally, however, in December 1910 Queen Alexandra's rooms at the Palace were dismantled and wagonloads of her possessions transferred to Marlborough House or Sandringham. She continued to live in the big house at Sandringham for the rest of her life, while the King, Queen and family remained in the cramped York Cottage. This suited the King, who loved it, and Queen Mary suffered it for his sake. Here he could relax
and indulge his two passions, stamp collecting and shooting. His skill with a gun was legendary: on one day it was reported that he ‘fired 1,700 cartridges and killed 1,000 pheasants'. He needed relaxation and banging away at pheasants seems to have given him what he needed.

In those first months Queen Mary often felt lonely. She had always been so close to King George V but now he was continually preoccupied. She moved into the Palace a few days before her husband, and in the dark February days, when the wind whistled through the windows, she felt bleak and alone. The Palace at first seemed cold and unfriendly, not as
gemütlichh
as Marlborough House. She wrote to her husband:

without you and the children I feel rather lost … Oh! how I regret our dear belov'd Marl. Hse, the most perfect of houses and so compact. Here everything is so straggly, such distances to go and so fatiguing. But I ought not to grumble for they have been very anxious to make me as comfortable as possible.
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King George V replied briskly, ‘The distances are great, but it is good exercise for you as you never walk a yard in London.'
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But even he had to admit to Esher that he would be happy to pull down Buckingham Palace, sell off its thirty-nine-acre garden and use the money to rebuild Kensington Palace.

But by February 1911 the ‘great eruption' was at an end and Queen Mary could begin to think of other things, though, as she wrote, there was still much to be done:

so much has been removed and must be replaced – I am trying to rehang the pictures in the various rooms according to family, date etc – not an easy task when one has miles of corridors to cover to find anything – however I hope to do it in time if my legs hold out.
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Queen Mary was not one to wallow in self-pity. She called in Ministry of Works officials and the decorators, White Allom, with whose advice she transferred from Marlborough House her furniture and furnishings and even the green silk wall coverings. Soon, with her great satinwood
bookcase filled with her books and papers, her precious ornaments and photographs arranged on her tables and shelves, and the rooms full of the scent of her favourite carnations, Queen Mary was almost as at home as she had been at Marlborough House.

Queen Mary had inherited from her father, the Duke of Teck, a real delight in interior decoration, so rearranging the private rooms was a pleasure. She brought with her full-length portraits of her maternal grandparents, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. In the spring of 1911 she still found the sitting room with its pretty bow windows very cold and draughty, but soon she could report that she had dinner ‘in my green room which looks charming'.
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It is not surprising that at the Coronation on 22 June 1911 both King and Queen looked strained. As one observer noted, the Queen

was almost shrinking as she walked up the aisle … the contrast, on her return, crowned, was magnetic as if she had undergone some marvellous transformation. Instead of the shy creature for whom one had felt pity one saw her emerge … with a bearing of dignity, and a quiet confidence, signifying that she really felt that she was Queen of this great Empire, and that she derived strength and legitimate pride from the knowledge of it.
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The profound effect of the Coronation ceremony on Queen Mary, as on the King and most of England's monarchs, must never be underestimated. Even the Prince of Wales was deeply impressed. As the Duke of Windsor he later wrote, ‘There is no occasion that rivals the solemn magnificence of a Coronation, when Church and State unite in the glorification of Kingship.' His diary for that ‘auspicious day, as he wrote,

hardly does justice to the impressive, colourful scene … We arrived in the Abby [sic] at 10.30 and then walked up the Nave and Choir to my seat in front of the peers. All the relatives and people were most civil and bowed to me as they passed. Then Mama and Papa came in and the ceremony commenced. There was the recognition, the anointing and then the crowning of Papa and then I put on my coronet with the peers. Then I had to go and do hommage [sic] to Papa at his throne and I was very nervous: kneeling at my father's feet, I swore Edward, Prince of Wales, do become your liegeman of life and limb, and of earthly worship; and faith and truth I will bear unto you, to live and
die, against all manner of folks. So help me God.' When my father kissed my cheeks his emotion was great, as was mine.

The entry finished, Then Mama was crowned … We got into our carriage and had a long drive back. My coronet felt very heavy, as we had to bow to the people as we went along.'
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When King George V came to the throne he inherited two immediate problems: the front of the Palace, which needed urgent attention, and the stormy passage of the Liberal government's Parliament Bill, aimed at curbing the power of the Lords. The first was to be quickly and competently dealt with; the second was to give the King sleepless nights for years to come and still has not been resolved. The King must have wished that his political problems could be solved as smartly as the architectural.

The news of the vote which passed the Parliament Bill
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reached the
King after an absurd delay. His Private Secretary immediately telephoned the news to the Palace, but the message, handed from footman to footman, finally landed with an equerry who, thinking the King already knew, carried on with his work. When he went to report to the King for the night he said, ‘“I am so thankful, sir.” He said, ‘What for?” and I told him … I was the first to bring the news. The Queen jumped off the sofa and the King made a few just remarks.'
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