Darling Georgie Read online

  After her parents’ death, a change occurred in Princess May’s demeanour. Although she had loved her mother and grieved for her, the loss of her parents empowered her. For years she had lived in the shadow of the larger-than-life Duchess and, with her death, her daughter not only blossomed but adopted her mother’s persona. The mantle of a gregarious, demanding and dominant woman who had been denied the wealth to which she believed her royal birth had entitled her now fell on to Princess May’s shoulders. Unlike her mother, however, Princess May was reserved rather than gregarious and, if she was demanding, it was not apparent. Although since her marriage Princess May was no longer materially impoverished, she often felt the need to be reassured of her wealth. In reassuring others of it by her extravagant appearance she became reassured herself. Her clothes were not only regal but sensational, her erect stature, her upswept hair made her tower over other women. She dressed in the most avant-garde clothes and her attention-seeking colours and her mother’s jewellery proclaimed her increasingly regal manner.

  As the months passed Princess May’s new strength of purpose and resolve became more evident. It was as if she had looked into the future and liked what she saw there. In the past she and Prince George had experienced major losses. First with the death of Prince Eddy and now with the passing of Princess Mary Adelaide, both had been pushed one rung up a ladder on which they had not expected to find themselves. With the road ahead clear, a lifetime of service to Britain, the land of their birth, beckoned. Falling into step, the Prince and Princess began to march to a jingoistic drum, the beat of which obscured the territorial acquisitions, the new populations, the new spheres of interest on which British power had encroached. Cape Town and Cairo, Rhodesia and Nigeria, Kenya and Uganda, the Americas and the Indian Ocean, China and the Antipodes were now either partially or entirely controlled from Westminster. Prince George and his Princess had within their grasp an Empire on which the authority of Pax Britannica was imposed by Queen Victoria, Empress of India, from the throne room at Windsor Castle.

  On 22 June 1898, anticipating the military demands that life was soon to make of him, Prince George took command of the first-class cruiser HMS Crescent. The main objective of the cruise, possibly disappointingly for the Prince, was target practice, a skill he did not lack. On 25 August 1898, however, his final spell of service on the high seas on which he had been educated, and on which he had grown to manhood, finally ended. He relinquished his command for the last time and returned to dry land. If he thought that he could now relax and devote himself to shooting birds he was mistaken. There would soon be other targets to aim at.

  On 10 October 1899 the two Afrikaner republics, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal, declared war on the English. Almost at once a series of major defeats were inflicted on the garrisons at Mafeking, Kimberley and Ladysmith, and British interests became seriously under threat. The Boers were well prepared for battle and knew the terrain well. They were an amateur army of not more than 45,000, but they were trained in commando methods by Germany, which had also armed them. It took three years and 450,000 men from all corners of the British Empire for Britain to achieve its main objective, which was to control the vast wealth of the region.

  Believing that they had right on their side, the British were both baffled and angry when almost all continental Europe, particularly Germany and including France (which had resented the criticism in the British press of its handling of the Dreyfus affair) and Belgium (which was offended by Britain’s attitude to its behaviour in the Congo), took the side of the Boers. The war eventually took a turn for the better after popular opinion, both at home and in the British Colonies, rallied the armies of the Empire behind the British soldiers. Winston Churchill, war correspondent of The Times, having recently returned from the battlefronts, used a characteristic rhetoric that was to remain with him throughout his life as he thundered: ‘Imperial troops must curb the insolence of the Boers … For the sake of the Empire, for the sake of our honour, for the sake of our race, we must fight the Boers.’

  The war in South Africa touched directly on the Royal Family. Much to Princess May’s distress, all three of her brothers were sent to the front. Had Prince George been allowed to do so he would have joined them. He had not forgotten that in March 1881, while on his world cruise aboard the Bacchante, he had visited Cape Town and met the Zulu King Ketchewayo, then a prisoner of war. The Prince had expressed sympathy both for the captive King and for his cause. In 1899, however, he believed with his fellow countrymen that Britain had a duty to ‘civilize’ Africa. It was a need to exercise control over Africa’s economy, however, rather than a wish to bring Western customs to the natives, that drove many to seek their fortunes in Africa. Others believed that it was the duty of the British to civilize Africa, even at the point of a bayonet. The aims of those who convinced themselves of the morality of colonialization were reflected in the poetry of Rudyard Kipling. The Prince’s lifelong admiration for Kipling’s fervent nationalism reflected his ability to express political opinions which confirmed the Prince’s own prejudices.

  We broke a King, and we built a road,

  A court-house stands where the regiment go’ed

  And the river’s clean where the red blood flowed.

  Patriotic to a degree, Prince George had a keen sense of justice. Not only had he been taught the importance of obedience to orders while in the Navy but he had learned also to be fair. Had his children blindly obeyed their father’s orders he would no doubt also have been fair to them; had they been old enough to understand his commands doubtless they would have obeyed them.

  Prince George and Princess May had six children in all. After the traumas inflicted upon them by their nanny, Mary Peters, the two older boys were compensated by a period of quiet neglect in the hope that they would overcome the abuse they had suffered. Lala Bill was as kind and permissive as Mary Peters had been sadistic and controlling, but despite her efforts the consequences of Mary Peters’s treatment were to affect the boys’ lives. From 1897, after the birth of Princess Mary, all three children were brought up simply and without ostentation at Marlborough House and Sandringham. Their attendants were instructed to instil in their charges the ideals that had been given to their parents by their own parents. The children were quietly encouraged to fulfil the duties imposed upon them by their position and status in the monarchical hierarchy.

  On 23 April 1900 Prince George was invited by his cousin, Kaiser Wilhelm, to attend the eighteen-year-old Crown Prince’s coming-of-age party. Despite the anti-British hysteria that prevailed in Germany as a result of the South African war, the Prince accepted the invitation. He was fond of his cousin Wilhelm and, being largely uninstructed in the intricacies and protocols of European politics, believed – as he had believed in Ireland three years earlier – that his charm and status were sufficient to overcome these hostile attitudes. Queen Victoria’s two grandsons got on well enough socially, but Prince George’s hopes that family ties and a gala opera performance would unite the two nations were never to be realized. Just as Queen Victoria had kept her son Prince Edward in the dark over affairs of state, Prince Edward in his turn had denied Prince George any information on political matters, only changing his attitutude later when he acceded the throne. Had Prince George possessed the necessary data he might conceivably have used it to advantage. By maintaining a family network, a royal mafia might have evolved concerned not only with maintaining family harmony but harmony in the countries over which they ruled. But Queen Victoria had not been forthcoming. Had she seen fit to enlighten her family, some of the power struggles of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century might conceivably have been – if not avoided – at least the subject of informed debate. Time instead was frittered away with days at the races, visits to Lords for the test match with Australia (where to his joy the Prince met Dr W.G. Grace) and everlasting shooting parties.

  It was shortly after the birth of their fourth child, Prince Henry (known as Harry),
in 1900 that Prince George and Princess May learned that they were to be entrusted with a visit to the Colonies and Australia and New Zealand the following spring. Queen Victoria gave her blessing to the tour that had been under consideration for the past two years. The visit was to express the gratitude of the mother country to the Overseas Dominions for rallying behind England during the Boer War. It also entailed the opening, on behalf of Queen Victoria, of the First Federal Parliament of the newly created Commonwealth of Australia by Her Majesty’s favourite grandson, HRH Prince George the Duke of York. Other parts of the Empire also scheduled to be visited included Natal, Cape Colony, Canada and Newfoundland.

  The arrangements had scarcely been finalized when Queen Victoria’s long life began slowly to come to an end. The Queen died in her bed at Osborne House on 22 January 1901 in the arms of the Kaiser and surrounded by almost her entire family. On his mother’s death Prince Edward succeeded to the throne as King Edward VII, Prince George became the direct heir and he and Princess May became known as the Duke and Duchess not only of York but also of Cornwall. Eventually, on King Edward’s sixtieth birthday in November 1901, they were given the title of Prince and Princess of Wales.

  In the interests of safeguarding the monarchy, King Edward VII, having lost one son in Prince Eddy, was at first reluctant to permit Prince George to tour the Colonies and asked Lord Salisbury if the journey might be delayed. The Prime Minister refused to sanction any postponement on the grounds that the people of Australia were expecting the Prince and Princess and would be very disappointed if they did not arrive in Canberra in time to open the Parliament. Prince George’s feelings about the tour were mixed. Never at ease with those of higher intellectual status than his own, he complained, with good reason, that he found it difficult to discuss issues of government policy with Dominion statesmen because he had not been properly briefed.

  On 16 March 1901 the dazzling, white-painted, twin-screw, 6,910-ton, 10,000-horse-power Orient Line SS Ophir sailed from Portsmouth with a complement of 550 passengers and crew. The ship’s company included a hundred Marines, thirty-seven bandsmen of the Royal Marines, Chatham, twenty boys, various cooks, barbers, butchers and bakers, three ladies-in-waiting and Canon Dalton, aged sixty (still in the service of his former pupil), as Chaplain. The crew consisted entirely of men on the active list of the Royal Navy. The Royal Yacht was accompanied throughout the voyage by HMS Juno and HMS St George, which formed the royal escort squadron. Splendour once again was on the march.

  On the day of departure on a journey that was to encompass the globe and last for eight months Prince George wrote in his diary: ‘Papa proposed our healths & wished us God speed and I answered in a few words & proposed the King and Queen. I was very much affected & could hardly speak. The leave taking was terrible. I went back with them to the yacht when I said goodbye & broke down quite.’

  This was not the first time that the highly strung Prince George had said goodbye to his parents and gone to sea. He was as affected on this occasion as he was when he enrolled on the Britannia at the age of twelve, and he wanted his parents to know what it had been like. He wept then and he wept now. He wrote to them from Gibraltar, the Ophir’s first port of call, to explain how sad he had felt when they had parted from one another a few days earlier: ‘May and I came down to our cabins and had a good cry and tried to comfort each other.’ What he did not say in his letter was that at least on this occasion he had someone who felt as he did and who was able to comfort him. Having been brought up to experience all partings as painful, he was reluctant as an adult to stray far from Sandringham unless obliged by affairs of state to do so. He was particularly averse to travelling abroad, about which he is said to have commented: ‘I’ve been there and I don’t like it.’

  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.