Darling Georgie Page 16
Despite his travels and the warmth of his reception throughout the Empire, however, Prince George remained diffident and self-conscious. His father did what he could to coach him in his royal duties, but his years at sea, his lonely pastimes and his clinging attachment to his mother had not prepared him psychologically for the role that he would have one day to play. It was hardly surprising that King Edward’s life-threatening illness provoked anxiety in him, and it was with great relief that he welcomed his father’s recovery. Princess May’s concern for her father-in-law equalled that of her husband. ‘Oh, do pray that Uncle Wales may get well,’ she commented to Mademoiselle Bricka and in an understatement went on to say: ‘George says he isn’t ready yet to reign.’
The death of Queen Victoria, the turn of the century and the Coronation of King Edward VII heralded a change in the country’s perception of the monarchy. The King’s expansive, outgoing personality contrasted sharply with the mystique, the privacy and the essential propriety of the Victorian era, a period which almost within weeks of Queen Victoria’s death was confined to a past that few regretted. The Queen’s depression had cast a gloom over the country which had lifted completed only with her demise. Although her mourning for Prince Albert was unnaturally prolonged, there had been occasions on which she had been distracted from it. Her friendship for her favourite Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, in the 1870s did much to bring her out of her seclusion, as did the Golden Jubilee celebrations of 1887. King Edward, however, was expected to raise up his subjects’ spirits and he did not fail to live up to their expectations. The country was ready for a physical and social spring-cleaning. Only Prince George and Princess May, the last of the eminent Victorians, were opposed to the proposed changes. Prince George was more in tune with his introspective grandmother than with his socially extrovert father. Shy and often inarticulate, he was to have only another eight years in which to prepare himself for the ordeal ahead that he dreaded.
Princess May had no such anxieties. She had already had eight years since their marriage to prepare herself for Coronation. She was ready. Drawing herself up to her exaggerated height, bedecked with the jewels of her status, she stood in the wings and impatiently awaited her cue.
• 13 •
Wake up, England
THE BLACK VEIL of mourning that had obscured the monarchy during much of Queen Victoria’s reign was about to be lifted. The Edwardians emerged from their palaces, hobnobbed with their subjects, swept aside sexual taboos, endowed the accumulation of wealth with respectability and cast a festive spirit over the land. This did not please everyone. Lord Salisbury and the ascetic Arthur Balfour, his successor as Prime Minister, were cast in a very different mould from the fun-loving, sexually promiscuous King Edward VII. They disapproved of the King and the King disapproved of them. Having caught a whiff of his own mortality during his recent illness, at the age of sixty-one the King threw himself whole-heartedly (social engagements permitting) into grooming his anxiously awaiting son for the succession.
Prince George, at the age of thirty-six a Victorian among Edwardians, was still haunted by the anxiety he had felt when he thought that his father might not recover from the removal of his appendix. He feared that he would too soon be flung into kingship for which he was unprepared. Realizing that there was much work to be done before he could confidently step into his father’s shoes, he made every effort to understand the protocols and procedures appropriate to his future status. During his trip to Australia he had already had a taste of international diplomacy. On his return he wrote a statesman-like (although, as ever, grandiose) letter to the Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain – whose concern for the colonies equalled his own – telling him of his conviction that in Australia there existed a strong feeling of loyalty to the Crown and a deep attachment to the mother country. The Prince went on to point out that this was due to ‘our having paid them a visit’ and that the time was fast approaching when the mother country could profit by it. With the ordeal of Australia behind him the Prince felt himself ready to benefit from his recent foray into diplomatic flag-waving by taking a further step along an unfamiliar road. He was deeply conscious that he was not a ‘man born to be King’ but a stand-in for his late lamented older brother. If he hoped to be able to join in the euphoria which followed the end of Queen Victoria’s reign, and celebrate the beginning of an era of prosperity, his hopes were dashed. There were changes but they were not changes of which either he or the Conservative government of the day had any experience. The beginning of the twentieth century concerned itself not with the interests of the landed gentry but with the growing political representation of the working classes. The problems of poverty, unemployment and ill health – barely acknowledged by nineteenth-century governments – were concerns that in the general election of 1906 caused the Conservatives to be swept out of power and a Liberal government to be voted in.
The prosperity to which everyone had looked forward at the end of the Boer War had not materialized. The cost of the war to the Empire had been immense. Twenty thousand lives had been lost and £200 million had been spent. Trade was in recession, industry was depressed and in the first budget of King Edward VII’s reign taxation had been increased to one shilling and two pence in the pound. In addition King Edward VII (and indirectly Prince George) was becoming increasingly disturbed by rumours that his ill health made him unfit to hold office. The King, however, managed to convince himself that it was rather the conflict with his parents, which had resulted in his mother’s refusal to allow him access to state papers until 1892, than his ill health which had left him unprepared for his monarchical role. Queen Victoria’s responsibility in the matter, however, had to do with his exclusion from the family circle, more or less from the moment of his birth, rather than with his exclusion from governmental information. A worried man since his illness, King Edward was determined that his heir be better prepared for kingship than he.
Against a setting of social unrest, an upsurge in republicanism and a general lack of understanding by the public of the role of the monarchy in the affairs of state, Prince George and Princess May struggled to prepare themselves for the part they believed the nation expected them to play. As King Edward’s health went slowly downhill, Prince George’s sense of purpose visibly strengthened. Until his illness the King, although only five feet seven inches tall, weighed sixteen stone and had a waist measurement of forty-eight inches. His appetite was voracious – he ate five meals a day – and he smoked twelve large cigars and at least twenty cigarettes a day (Souhami, 1997). Prince George, the ‘sardine’ rather than the ‘whale’, had always been both impressed and overwhelmed by size. His childhood had been spent in the shadow of a dominant, boisterous, powerful and intolerant father and as his father shrank physically the Prince expanded intellectually.
King Edward was determined that Prince George be given every opportunity to fulfil his future role. To this end, immediately before the Australia tour began he appointed Sir Arthur Bigge (formerly Private Secretary to Queen Victoria since the death of Sir Henry Ponsonby in 1895) as the Prince’s Secretary. In many respects he was similar to Prince George. Like the Prince he was conscientious, meticulous and regimental, honest and loyal, qualities that were to keep him by the side of his pupil for the next thirty years.
Sir Arthur Bigge was a teacher such as the Prince had became accustomed to in Canon Dalton. Like Canon Dalton he was the son of a vicar, but unlike Dalton he did not follow his father into Holy Orders but joined the army, where he was commissioned in the Royal Artillery. As with his former tutor, Prince George was to display the same bouts of rage and impatience that had been a feature of his boyhood. Bigge was undeterred both by this and by his pupil’s royal status. He dealt with whatever problems arose in a straightforward, man-to-man manner. He told the Prince that he felt it no longer appropriate for him and Princess May to continue living in York Cottage because of its unsuitability for entertaining. On another occasion he expressed disapprova
l to King Edward for deferring the investiture of his son as Prince of Wales until after the Ophir cruise.
Sir Arthur Bigge was the prompter should Prince George forget his lines, and it was probably also his talents in promoting the interests of the Prince that were responsible for putting him on the front pages of the newspapers on 6 December 1901, a few weeks after his return from his world tour. In an emotional speech at the Guildhall, Prince George, summing up his experiences, caught the imagination of the people, probably for the first time. He spoke with emotion of the welcome he had received in the colonies. ‘I appeal to my fellow countrymen at home to prove the strength of the attachment of the Motherland to her children by sending to them of her best.’ He concluded his speech by addressing the businessmen in the audience, reminding them of the ‘commercial needs of the Empire’ and pointing out that the ‘mother country must wake up if she intends to maintain her old position of pre-eminence in the Colonial trade against foreign competitors’. The Prince’s ‘wake up, England’ speech came across as a rallying call to a nation in danger of sliding into a despondency felt all the more after the heady expectations that followed the successful conclusion to the Boer War. The King furthermore made the point that in the future trade and commerce would be the only real connection between the mother country and the colonies.
A few months later Prince George successfully passed another test. In January 1902 he was invited to visit Germany to congratulate the Kaiser on his forty-third birthday. This visit came at a time when Anglo-German relations, hitherto reasonably amicable, were at an all-time low. The British Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, always an advocate of an alliance with Germany, made a plain-spoken reference in a speech at Edinburgh to the behaviour of the German Army during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, to which the German Chancellor, Prince von Bülow, had taken offence. A few days later, during the Budget debate in the Reichstag, several deputies retaliated by criticizing the behaviour of the British Army during the South African war. Earlier statements made by the German Chancellor were recalled, notably his ominous and prescient comment in 1899 that ‘in the coming century, the German people will be either the hammer or the anvil’. Against a background of political and diplomatic tensions and increasing Anglo-German hostility King Edward decided that it would be unwise for Prince George to visit Germany. The Prince was disappointed that his father intended cancelling his visit. Recalling similar anti-British hostility on the part of the Germans two years earlier, when he attended the Crown Prince’s coming of age, he was not put off. He liked his cousin the Kaiser and did not share his father’s resentment of all things German. In the event the visit did take place and the German Chancellor and Prince George found themselves in harmony. The Kaiser was pleased to see his cousin and sent a telegram to King Edward to tell him so. ‘Georgie left this morning for Strelitz all safe and sound and we were very sorry to part so soon from such a merry and genial guest. I think he has amused himself well here.’
In the years that lead up to the Great War Prince George did his best to interest himself in international affairs. Despite every effort, however, he found himself unable to compete with his far more socially extrovert, worldly-wise and cosmopolitan father. He was particularly impressed with his father’s visit to France in 1903, which laid the foundations for a Franco-British entente to counter German aggression in Europe. Prince George envied the King’s role in helping to stage a dramatic display of friendship between the two countries and in encouraging the exchange of visits between the two fleets, notwithstanding the fact that following the ratification of the entente in 1904 Germany had scared France by threatening war. The arrival of the British Atlantic Fleet at Brest in July 1904, and the return visit of the French Fleet to Portsmouth a month later, was welcomed with such enthusiasm by the people of France and England that the alliance, far from breaking down as the Germans had hoped, was further cemented. Germany’s intention of demonstrating that the Fatherland and not Britain was the master of Europe had failed.
Prince George appreciated the help given him by Sir Arthur Bigge to prepare for the time when he would take over the affairs of state from his father, but his heart was in the country rather than in the field of international affairs. He wrote many letters to Bigge on whom he was becoming not only dependent but almost child-like in his devotion to him. He looked on Bigge as a father, firm and benevolent – as indeed his own father had been and continued to be – but, unlike his father, Bigge, who dedicated virtually twenty-four hours a day to Prince George’s well-being, was always available for help and advice. With Bigge the Prince avoided the flat and somewhat colourless style that he used in communicating with his father, with whom he was always conscious of a need both to please him and to reassure himself of his love. His letters to Bigge were franker, much warmer and in some respects not unlike the carefree style he adopted in his letters to his mother. In a letter to his mentor from York Cottage, dated 1 January 1902, Prince George writes:
My Dear Bigge, – First let me thank you for your most kind letter receivd. this morning & for all yr good wishes to us for the New Year. The one that is now over has indeed been an eventful one for me and mine; it has been a sad one and a happy one & there is much to be thankful for, as you say. I must again repeat how grateful I am to you for all you have done for me during this past year. I thank you for yr kind help & advice & for yr great loyalty. I feel that I can always rely on you to tell me the truth however disagreeable & that you are entirely in my confidence. To a person in my position it is of enormous help to me. I thank you again for it from the bottom of my heart.
Prince George’s easy relationship with Bigge is also illustrated in a letter written a few days later, again from York Cottage. No formal phraseology and careful editing here.
A Colonial Office Box has just arrived but I had no key to open it with, I sent it up to Sidney Greville to unlock it; it only contained a telegram from Hely-Hutchinson expressing thanks from officers & men of Cape Peninsular regiment to me for becoming their Col.in Chief. You had better get a key for me if they are going to send me boxes, otherwise I cant open them. I am returning you all the letters and papers you sent me & have written on them all. I am sending this pouche by the messenger. I hope you will have some decent weather & get some good hunting. Believe me, Your sincere friend, George.
Throughout 1905 the Prince’s diary was full. In January he visited Ireland to shoot with Lord Ardilaun, in February he attended debates in the House and visited the Motor Show for the first time. While waiting for Princess May to give birth to Prince John, their sixth and last child, at York Cottage the Prince played golf. He also played cricket on the lawn at Sandringham with the two older boys. None of this was particularly stressful, yet he had made a note in his diary in April that he had not seen his younger children for three months. The birth of the Waleses’ youngest son, on 12 July 1905, had as ever brought Prince George and Princess May closer to one another. Although they lived side by side it was in harmonious isolation. Their interests seldom overlapped and, other than on state occasions, when circumstances brought them together, each was content just to know that the other was there. When either of them was ‘unavailable’ through illness, or in Princess May’s case following childbirth, their need for one another drew them close. Illness in the other worried them both. Each felt safe only when the other was well. Prince George was content to sit by his wife’s bedside and read to her for much of the day. His touching vigil was understandable. In the event the Princess made her usual rapid recovery from childbirth. The attending doctor, Sir John Williams, left after eight days, and as ever the baby was handed over to a nurse. Preparations for the royal tour of India began. On 19 October 1905 Prince George and Princess May left London for Bombay via Genoa, where they embarked on HMS Renown. Barely four years after their eight-month voyage to Australia they were once again separated from their children, this time for six months.
The visit to India had a profound effect on Prince Geo
rge and Princess May. Both were moved by the awesome responsibility undertaken by the mother country for the welfare of the sub-continent. They were struck not only by lives far removed from their own but by a religious faith that allowed for hope and salvation for a people who had little other than spiritual assets on which to fall back. If either of them were to consider the importance of feelings rather than possessions in their own lives, India would have been the catalyst. In keeping with the received wisdom of the time and to maintain colonial rule, the needs of the governed were emphasized by Whitehall at the expense of those of the governors. The Prince and Princess were in accord with this attitude but possibly for different reasons.
As HMS Renown docked in Bombay the Prince in particular would have been struck by the ubiquitous poverty, which was emphasized not so much by the contrasting splendours of the royal visit but by the extravagant pageantry of the welcome provided by the Indian Princes. Politely, if somewhat patronizingly, Prince George asked his wealthy hosts how he might help them with whatever problems they might be facing. The Maharajah’s main problems of course were how to maintain their lavish life-styles in the presence of increasing calls for social reform. To his credit the Prince also took an interest in the social and health problems of the impoverished population. In 1905, apart from the usual endemic tropical diseases and famine, India was experiencing an outbreak of bubonic plague. Conscious of the great suffering of the hungry the Prince provided for a great feast to be attended by thousands. Finally, after further lavish entertainments, the tour came to an end in Calcutta, the capital of British India.