King Edward VIII
King Edward VIII
Philip Ziegler
The authorised life story of the king who gave up his throne for love, by one of our most distinguished biographers.In this masterly authorized biography, Philip Ziegler reveals the complex personality of Edward VIII, the only British monarch to have voluntarily renounced the throne.With unique access to the Royal Archives, Ziegler overturns many myths about Edward and tells his side of the story – from his glamorous existence as Prince of Wales to his long decline in semi-exile in France. At the heart of the book is an unflinchingly honest examination of Edward’s all-consuming passion for Wallis Simpson, which led to his dramatic abdication.Elegant and devastating, this is the most convincing portrait of Edward ever published.
King Edward VIII
Philip Ziegler
Contents
Cover (#u33d46cd3-1746-5a65-ba7a-ad021ecf5fbf)
Title Page (#u1db53768-5a85-583d-96be-8bc4ccd8ffde)
List of Illustrations (#uc8ad0a12-0f1a-58f6-abf1-9dabb3088a2f)
Preface (#u6080163c-582f-5da3-937f-cd39b5f0033f)
Family Tree (#u2af46e65-1fd3-5fde-a95b-32ce12f2ce53)
1 The Child (#u8ba07f6f-2993-5ae8-b4bd-4d6550111174)
2 The Youth (#ufe4f9218-4fe3-5c40-9d86-74789265e2e3)
3 ‘Oh!! That I Had a Job’ (#u870a6f0c-c025-5310-bc36-e868d7792d3b)
4 The Captain (#uafee4621-b5a1-5969-a854-9fa7bf65bc47)
5 L’Éducation Sentimentale (#u67910de1-515d-583b-966b-3c4ae1d20ce2)
6 The Role of the Prince (#u09bee9d2-dd8b-5c65-89f6-c3a0802d49cb)
7 The First Tours (#ubdffee5e-6f14-50ef-a111-71604e3047fb)
8 India (#u43d092c1-61bc-54d4-8724-1d2ce2768897)
9 ‘The Ambassador of Empire’ (#ud182f9d6-7f93-55e2-9b99-236450beec35)
10 ‘Half Child, Half Genius’ (#litres_trial_promo)
11 ‘A Steady Decline’ (#litres_trial_promo)
12 The Last Years as Prince (#litres_trial_promo)
13 Mrs Simpson (#litres_trial_promo)
14 Accession (#litres_trial_promo)
15 ‘The Most Modernistic Man in England’ (#litres_trial_promo)
16 The King and Mrs Simpson (#litres_trial_promo)
17 The Last Weeks (#litres_trial_promo)
18 Abdication (#litres_trial_promo)
19 Exile (#litres_trial_promo)
20 Married Life (#litres_trial_promo)
21 The Duke in Germany (#litres_trial_promo)
22 Second World War (#litres_trial_promo)
23 Spain and Portugal (#litres_trial_promo)
24 The Bahamas (#litres_trial_promo)
25 The American Connection (#litres_trial_promo)
26 What Comes Next? (#litres_trial_promo)
27 ‘Some Sort of Official Status’ (#litres_trial_promo)
28 The Duke as Author (#litres_trial_promo)
29 The Final Years (#litres_trial_promo)
Nomenclature (#litres_trial_promo)
Notes (#litres_trial_promo)
Bibliographical Notes (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
Footnotes (#litres_trial_promo)
Picture Section (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
From the reviews of King Edward VIII (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
List of Illustrations
Princes Albert and Edward bathing at Cowes (Pasteur Institute)
The Princess of Wales with Prince Edward (Al Fayed Archives)
The Prince in formal dress (Sir Michael Thomas)
Punting at Oxford (Sir Michael Thomas)
The Prince on a route march (Al Fayed Archives)
With the King’s Guard (Pasteur Institute)
Portia Cadogan (Al Fayed Archives)
Rosemary Leveson-Gower (Imperial War Museum)
The Prince as Chief Morning Star (The Royal Collection © 2012)
Freda Dudley Ward (Lady Laycock)
Taking a jump successfully (Al Fayed Archives)
Falling at the last fence (Al Fayed Archives)
With Audrey Coates at Drummond Castle (Lady Alexandra Metcalfe)
With the Duchess of York (Al Fayed Archives)
Skiing with Prince George (Lady Alexandra Metcalfe)
Mrs Simpson (Michael Bloch)
The Duchess’s bedside snapshot of the Duke (Al Fayed Archives)
Wedding photograph (Lady Alexandra Metcalfe)
The Windsors in German (The Royal Collection © 2012)
Dignitaries in Nassau (Al Fayed Archives)
A visit to the United Seamen’s Service (Al Fayed Archives)
In dressing gown, photographed by the Duchess (Al Fayed Archives)
Preface
It is now more than twenty years since my biography of King Edward VIII appeared and three-quarters of a century since the abdication. To most contemporary readers Edward VIII’s father and grandfather – King George V and King Edward VII – are shadowy figures. Even George VI is remembered, except perhaps by those who experienced him as a wartime monarch, more for being the father of the present Queen than as a figure in his own right. Yet Edward VIII, who was on the throne for less than a year, remains vividly in the popular imagination. Within the last two decades there have been more than twenty further books dealing with his life or certain aspects of it, not to mention newspaper articles galore, plays, television documentaries, even a musical comedy. The Duchess of Windsor has been quite as prominent. There have been several recent biographical studies – the latest of which quotes letters suggesting that Mrs Simpson, as she then was, was still in love with, or at least anxious to keep her lines open to, her estranged husband, even when her courtship by the King was at its fiercest. But neither Duke nor Duchess in isolation is the principal focus of this intense attention; it is above all their relationship which has captured the public’s interest and is almost as potent an attraction now as it was in 1936. ‘The king who gave up his throne for love’ is a cliché of romantic fiction, but it is also an accurate rendering of that extraordinary event. Nothing can diminish its potency.
The fact that the Prince of Wales has now married Camilla Parker Bowles, both parties with a divorce behind them, inevitably makes one wonder whether there might have been no abdication if contemporary morality had stood then where it does today. The question whether the present Duchess of Cornwall might one day become Queen has, of course, not yet finally been resolved but, in the closing days of the abdication crisis, Edward VIII seemed ready to contemplate a morganatic marriage. The problem might therefore not have arisen. Would Mrs Simpson be acceptable today as consort of the King? Probably not. She had been divorced not once but twice, with both husbands still living. She was an American – not in itself a reason for rejecting her, but reinforcing the uneasy conviction that she did not belong so close to the throne. She was seen, fairly or unfairly, as being a smart, hard-boiled, wise-cracking society figure – an image which did not and does not fit happily with what the British people expect of their royal court. But the moral certainties of 1936 have been diminished if not extinguished in 2012 – the issue would be more keenly debated and the answer might possibly be different.
It may be for his marriage that Edward VIII is particularly remembered, but in a way he seems much closer to contemporary society than his far more considerable father, brother and niece. This is the age of celebrity, when, perhaps more than ever before, people are celebrated not for what they have done but for what they appear to be. Nobody would ever have described George V and George VI or indeed Elizabeth II as ‘celebrities’; Edward VIII would have rejoiced in the title, or at least accepted it with equanimity. He saw himself as a thoroughly modern monarch, a reformer, rejecting the outdated pomposities of the past, adopting a style which was less formal, less bound by protocol, more relevant to the needs of the day, than the creaky old court he had inherited. This was not all fantasy. He had some good ideas and, if he had had the energy and determination to carry them through, he might indeed have made a valuable contribution to the British monarchy. But it is in the nature of celebrities that they shine only fitfully and leave little mark in the pages of history. Edward VIII’s intentions were often excellent; his ability to carry them through to fulfilment was sadly lacking.
This sounds, indeed is, severely critical. It is no more than he deserves but, over the last twenty years, he has been subjected to attacks far more violent than his performance in fact merits. Most of the emphasis has been on his alleged sympathy for the German cause before and during the Second World War. As Prince of Wales, it is claimed, he had condoned, indeed applauded, the rise of National Socialism. As King he was an arch-appeaser, energetically intervening to ensure that his ministers did not react robustly to the German occupation of the Rhineland. As Duke of Windsor he wittingly betrayed secrets of military importance to the Germans in 1939 and 1940, while in Spain and Portugal he flirted with German emissaries who suggested that he remain in Europe and hold himself in readiness for his return to an occupied Britain. Until well on into the war he maintained that Britain must inevitably be defeated and that a negotiated peace was the only sane way forward. At any time, it was suggested, he would have been ready to supplant his brother and take back the throne if the opportunity had arisen. Such attacks reached a peak with a television programme entitled Edward, the Traitor King, without even the courtesy of a question mark. His great-nephew, Prince Edward, in 1996 made a valiant effort to retrieve the situation with another television programme showing the Duke in a rather more positive light. But, as is usually the case, the spreading of muck proved more effective than the subsequent sponging operation.
I would not pretend that the Foreign Office papers that have been released in recent years show the Duke in a particularly flattering light. They deal mainly with the period when he was in France in 1939 and 1940 with a Military Mission charged vaguely with liaison with the French; his escapades in Spain and Portugal after the fall of France; his time as Governor of the Bahamas; and his financial problems during that period and after the war was over. It was my study of these papers that convinced me that he was often, though by no means invariably, silly, indiscreet and egotistical, and that by 1936 he was unfit to occupy the throne. In particular, in Spain and Portugal, his behaviour was such as to give German agents – anxious to feed their superiors in Berlin the news that they wanted to hear – some reason for hoping that he might rally to the Axis cause if the circumstances were right. But German official documents published since the war show that this was mere supposition, and that there is no hard evidence to support the thesis of treachery, be it actual or potential.
Ah yes, say the Duke’s detractors, but the published documents do not tell the whole story. King George VI sent the royal librarian, Owen Moreshead, and the art historian (and, as it later transpired, Communist spy) Anthony Blunt on a secret mission to secure the papers that would have proved the Duke’s guilt and bring them back for destruction or incarceration in some inaccessible vault at Windsor. The fact that the mission was far from secret; that its task was to bring back certain nineteenth-century family papers – mainly letters from Queen Victoria to her eldest daughter, the Empress Frederick; that all these papers were eventually returned to Germany; and that a complete inventory exists of everything that was brought back has not been allowed to spoil a good story.
To reach the conclusion that the Duke of Windsor was a traitor it is necessary to credit every surmise of those who wanted him to be so and to ignore the testimony of all those who worked with him and who knew him best. Even then there would be no proof. It is a cardinal principle of British law that an accused is assumed innocent until proved guilty. In the case of the Duke of Windsor the reverse has been true; he has been assumed guilty because he cannot positively be proved innocent. And yet to prove that somebody did not do something is notoriously difficult: for a single crime an alibi can with luck be established, but if a pattern of behaviour or of thought is in question it is generally impossible to do more than establish a balance of probabilities, based on one’s knowledge of the person concerned. I make no claim to omniscience, but I probably know more about the Duke of Windsor than anyone else alive. I am absolutely certain that, with all his faults, he was a patriot who would never have wished his country to be defeated or have contemplated returning to an occupied Britain as a puppet king. I accept that I cannot prove my contention, but I have much better grounds for maintaining it than any of those who have asserted the contrary over the last twenty years. Nothing that they have said or written has caused me to change my mind.
1
The Child
EVEN IN THE TWILIGHT OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY TO BE one of the 540 or so
living and legitimate descendants of Queen Victoria is a matter of some moment. To have been born in 1894, eldest son of the eldest surviving son of the eldest son of the Queen Empress, was to be heir to an almost intolerable burden of rights and responsibilities.
Queen Victoria had then been on the throne for fifty-seven years. The great majority of her subjects had no recollection of another monarch. She had weathered the unpopularity which had grown up when she retreated into protracted seclusion after the death of the Prince Consort and now enjoyed unique renown. The Widow of Windsor, ruler of a vast empire and grandmother to half the crowned heads of Europe, was a bewitching figure; her obstinate refusal to play to the gallery had eventually won her the reverent respect of all but a tiny republican minority among her people. She had become a myth in her own lifetime.
To have a myth as a mother is not necessarily a prescription for a happy family life. In 1894 the future King Edward VII had already been Prince of Wales for more than fifty years. The role is never an easy one to fill, and in Edward’s case was made almost impossible by the carping censoriousness of his parents. The Prince of Wales gave them something to censure – he was self-indulgent, indolent and licentious – but he was also uncommonly shrewd and well able to do a useful job of work if given the chance. The Queen gave him as few chances as possible. She treated him as an irresponsible delinquent, and in doing so ensured that his irresponsibility and delinquency became more marked. It was not until he at last succeeded to the throne that his qualities as a statesman were given a proper chance to flourish.
In 1863 he married Princess Alexandra of Denmark – ‘Sea-King’s daughter from over the sea’ – radiantly beautiful and with a sweetness of nature which enabled her to endure her husband’s infidelity with generosity and dignity. She was capable of great obstinacy and occasional selfishness but she was still one of the most endearing figures to have sat upon the British throne. She rarely read, her handwriting would have disgraced an intoxicated spider, increasing deafness cut her off from society, but she enjoyed a vast and justified popularity until the day she died.
The first duty of an heir to the throne is to ensure the succession. The Prince and Princess of Wales did their best, producing two sons, three daughters, and then another short-lived son. Unhappily, however, their eldest son, Prince Albert Victor, always known as Eddy, proved an unhopeful heir for the throne of England. Languid and lymphatic – ‘si peu de chose, though as you say a “Dear Boy”’, the Grand Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz brutally dismissed him
– he deplored the strident jollity of his family and preferred to trail wistfully in the wake of whatever unsuitable woman had attracted his attention. A determined and reliable wife seemed the only hope for his redemption, and a paragon was found in Princess Victoria Mary – May to the family – only daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Teck.
The Tecks were professional poor relations. The Duke was haunted by the fact that his father’s morganatic marriage had deprived him of his claim to the throne of Württemberg, and all his life attached to the rituals of rank and precedence an importance which seemed extravagant even to the courtiers who surrounded him. His mountainous wife Mary Adelaide, ‘Fat Mary’, was by no means unaware that she was a granddaughter of King George III, but she bore her royal blood more lightly. She devoted her energies to entertaining lavishly beyond her means and then recouping the family finances by ferocious economies and periods of exile in the relative cheapness of Florence. There Princess May spent some of her most formative years, learning the value of money the hard way, but also learning to appreciate beauty and acquiring a range of aesthetic interests which to her English cousins seemed odd if not actively undesirable. From her parents she inherited a respect for the blood royal which led her to regard the occupant of the British throne with something close to reverence.
The Tecks were protégés of the British royal family, who let them occupy rooms in Kensington Palace and make their home in the pleasant, rambling grace-and-favour White Lodge, in the heart of Richmond Park. The Princess of Wales was particularly fond of the Duchess, and it was hardly surprising that May’s name should have come to the fore when the quest began for a wife for Prince Eddy. It was not a spectacular match but it was respectable, and Queen Victoria considered that a future King of England needed no extra réclame in his bride to secure his immortality. To the Tecks the marriage was all that they had dreamed of; May’s morganatic blood would have proved an impediment to an alliance with any of the grander continental royal families, while the upper reaches of the British aristocracy had shown little eagerness to embrace this peripherally royal and penniless princess. Only May hesitated. ‘Do you think I can really take this on?’ she asked her mother. ‘Of course you can,’ was the robust reply, and of course she did.
Her future husband was given equally little opportunity to object. ‘I do not anticipate any real opposition on Prince Eddy’s part if he is properly managed and told he must do it,’ wrote the Prince of Wales’s private secretary, Francis Knollys, ‘– that it is for the good of the country etc. etc.’
May was spared what must have seemed an unappealing match. The engagement was announced at the end of 1891; the wedding fixed for February; early in January 1892 Prince Eddy contracted influenza, pneumonia developed, within a few days he was dead. His place in the line of succession was taken by his brother George. The change was in every way to the benefit of the country. In 1873 Queen Victoria had sent Prince George a watch, ‘hoping that it will serve to remind you to be very punctual in everything and very exact in all your duties … I hope you will be a good, obedient, truthful boy, kind to all, humble-minded, dutiful and always trying to be of use to others!’
Few precepts can have been taken more earnestly to heart. Prince George had been conscientious, hard-working and responsible as a boy; he was no different as a man. The Royal Navy, for which he had been trained, can claim many men of cultivation and even a few eccentrics and intellectuals among the officers, but it takes considerable independence of mind to maintain such characteristics in a mainly unsympathetic environment. Prince George had neither the wish nor the ability to stand apart. He was an arch-conformist; bored by books, pictures, music; wholly without intellectual curiosity or imagination; suspicious of new ideas; entertained only by his stamp collection and the slaughter of ever greater quantities of pheasants, partridges and the like.
Yet his bluff and phlegmatic exterior was to some extent illusory. He was a worrier, an insomniac, a man whose sense of duty often stood between him and the enjoyment of his role in life. In 1892 his duty was to marry quickly and to provide heirs to a crown which would otherwise eventually fall into the unpromising hands of his sister Louise, Duchess of Fife. With a suitable bride for a future British monarch already selected, the solution seemed obvious to the Tecks and to his parents. The wedding planned for Prince Eddy should take place, only the date and the bridegroom would be changed. Prince George took little convincing that this was his destiny; May felt slightly greater qualms, but she too was soon persuaded. In May 1893 the Duke of York, as Prince George had been created the previous year, dutifully proposed to his late brother’s fiancée. He was as dutifully accepted. On 6 July the couple, by now very much, if undemonstratively, in love, were married in the Chapel Royal. A year later, on 23 June 1894, their first child, a boy, was born at the Tecks’ home in Richmond Park. He was not Victoria’s first great-grandchild but in her eyes he was beyond measure the most important.
The original plan had been for the baby to be born in Buckingham Palace but an early heatwave drove the couple to the comparative cool of White Lodge. The Duke of York was in the library, pretending to read Pilgrim’s Progress, when the birth took place at 10 p.m.; his father, the Prince of Wales, was holding an Ascot Week ball in the Fishing Temple at Virginia Water. The telephone that had recently been installed to link White Lodge to East Sheen was used to give him the news and enable him to propose a toast to the new prince.
‘My darling May was not conscious of pain during those last 2½ terrible hours,’ the Duke of York wrote to Victoria; in terms that sound as if the end of the operation had been not so much the cradle as the grave. ‘The baby weighed 8 lbs when he was born, and both grandmothers … pronounce him to be a most beautiful, strong and healthy child.’
Fifteen hundred people signed their names on the following day in the book which had been placed in a marquee for the occasion, and the Duchess of Teck’s sister, the Grand Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, announced that she ‘went – mentally – on my knees, tears of gratitude and happiness flowing, streaming, and the hugging followed’.
The bickering that normally accompanied the naming of a royal child now ensued. The Queen took it for granted that a daughter would be called Victoria and a son Albert. The Duke of York said it had long been decided ‘that if it was a boy, we should call him Edward after darling Eddy. This is the dearest wish of our hearts, dearest Grandmama, for Edward is indeed a sacred name to us, and one which I know would have pleased him beyond anything.’
‘You write as if Edward was the real name of dear Eddy,’ retorted the Queen severely; everyone knew that he had in fact been christened Victor Albert.
The Duke proved unusually obstinate and the baby was called Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David. Christian was the name of the baby’s godfather, the King of Denmark; the other four names represented England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales. Some reports state that David was an afterthought, introduced to gratify the aged and moribund Marchioness of Waterford. There are differing views about her motives: that assiduous and well-informed courtier Lord Esher said it was because ‘she had some fad about restoring the Jews to the Holy City’;
the Prince of Wales’s friend the Marquis de Breteuil recorded that the old lady had dreamed of an ancient Irish legend according to which there would be a great king over the water and his name would be David.
The christening took place with all the pomp befitting a baby who stood third in line to the British throne. Twelve godparents, mainly German, attended; as well as the Prime Minister, Lord Rosebery. The gold bowl used as a font was brought from Windsor Castle. The cake, thirty inches high and five feet in circumference, was made by McVitie and Price in Edinburgh. ‘I have two bottles of Jordan water,’ the Duke proudly told his old tutor, Canon Dalton, and both were lavished on the occasion.
The only discordant note was struck by the first socialist member of parliament, Keir Hardie. When it was proposed that the House of Commons should congratulate the Queen on the happy event, Hardie opposed the motion. ‘From his childhood onward,’ he said, with what to some will seem dreadful prescience, ‘this boy will be surrounded by sycophants and flatterers by the score … A line will be drawn between him and the people he is to be called upon some day to reign over. In due course … he will be sent on a tour round the world, and probably rumours of a morganatic alliance will follow, and the end of it will be the country will be called upon to pay the bill.’
Prince Edward, who from birth was always known to his family as David, was followed eighteen months later by a brother, Albert George, who was in due course to become Duke of York and, less predictably, King George VI. Edward attended his sibling’s christening and behaved impeccably until Prince Albert, in the arms of the Bishop of Norwich, began to yell. Edward, evidently seeing this as a challenge to his primacy, yelled louder and was removed. ‘Of course he is very young to come to church,’ the Duke of York told the Queen, ‘but we thought that in years to come it would give him pleasure to know that he had been present at his brother’s christening.’
A daughter, Mary, was born in 1897; then came a gap of three years, after which Henry – future Duke of Gloucester – was born in 1900 and George – future Duke of Kent – in 1902. The youngest child, John, born in 1905, was an epileptic who lived in seclusion and was to die at the age of fourteen.
The three elder children were close enough in age to be much together; Princes Edward and Albert – David and Bertie – being in particular inseparable. Lord Esher, visiting Sandringham, played with the children in the garden and noted that: ‘The second boy is the sharpest – but there is something rather taking about Prince Edward.’
Most other observers agree it was Edward who was the sharper and who habitually took the lead – ‘because as the eldest son he had the highest status in the family,’ explained the Duchess of York’s close friend, Lady Airlie.
He found that he could easily manage his tractable and worshipping younger brother, but that Princess Mary was an independent-minded tomboy who was disinclined to do the bidding of any mere boy.
It has often been alleged – not least by the subject of this biography – that the Duke and Duchess of York were cold and distant parents. It would be foolish to pretend that the relationship between the future King George V and his sons, in particular his eldest son, was a happy one. When they were babies, however, all the evidence is that he was a doting father; far more ready to take an interest in his children than was true of most English parents of the upper and upper middle classes. ‘I have got those two photographs of you and darling Baby on my table before me now,’ he wrote to his wife from Cowes in August 1894. ‘… I like looking at my Tootsums little wife and my sweet child, it makes me happy when they are far away.’
‘Baby is very flourishing. He walks about all over the house, he has 14 teeth,’ he boasted to Canon Dalton. A month later Prince Edward still walked about all over the house but had sixteen teeth.
The Duchess was more critical in her attitude. Her baby, she told her brother, was ‘exactly what I looked like as a baby, consequently plain. This is a pity and rather disturbs me.’
She does not seem to have had much idea of what was to be expected from a small child: ‘David was “jumpy” yesterday morning,’ she wrote when he was a little over two years old, ‘however he got quieter after being out, what a curious child he is.’
When Edward began to get letters from his parents, the Duke of York was always the more demonstratively affectionate. He was coming to Sandringham on Saturday, he told his three-year-old son, and would be ‘so pleased to see our darling little chicks again’. When the chicks had chickenpox; ‘I hope none of you have grown wings and become little chickens and tried to fly away, that would be dreadful and we should have to go up in a balloon to catch you.’
The trouble began when his children reached an age at which mature conduct might reasonably – or unreasonably – be expected of them. Admiral Fisher, at Balmoral in 1903, noted: ‘The two little Princes are splendid little boys and chattered away the whole of their lunch-time, not the faintest shyness.’
The comment is notable as marking one of the last occasions on which father and sons were observed together without something being said about the constraint and fear which dominated the atmosphere. Kenneth Rose has convincingly challenged the story by which King George V is supposed to have told Lord Derby: ‘My father was frightened of his mother, I was frightened of my father, and I’m damned well going to see that my children are frightened of me!’
But though the tale may well be apocryphal, like most apocryphal tales it contains an essential truth. The Duke of York loved and wanted the best for his children but he was a bad-tempered and often frightening man; he was never cruel, but he was a harsh disciplinarian who believed that a bit of bullying never did a child any harm; he shouted, ranted, struck out both verbally and physically to express his displeasure. A summons to the library almost always heralded a rebuke, and a rebuke induced terror in the recipient. His banter was well-intentioned but it could also be brutal. On the birth of Prince Henry: ‘David of course asked some very funny questions. I told him the baby had flown in at the window during the night, and he at once asked where his wings were and I said they had been cut off.’
Prince Edward was six at the time, and he claimed the vision of his brother’s bleeding wings disturbed his sleep for weeks afterwards.
The Duke of York had rigid ideas, invested with almost totemic significance, about punctuality, deportment, above all dress. The children were treated as midshipmen, perpetually on parade. Any deviation from the approved ritual was a fall from grace to be punished for the sake of the offender. ‘I hope your kilts fit well, take care and don’t spoil them at once as they are new,’ wrote the Duke to his eldest son. ‘Wear the Balmoral kilt and grey jacket on week days and green kilt and black jacket on Sundays. Do not wear the red kilt till I come.’
Inevitably they got things wrong, wore a grey jacket with a green kilt or a Balmoral kilt on Sundays. Retribution was swift and fearful. ‘The House of Hanover, like ducks, produce bad parents,’ the royal librarian, Owen Morshead, told Harold Nicolson. ‘They trample on their young.’ ‘It was a mystery,’ said a royal private secretary, Alec Hardinge, ‘why George V, who was such a kind man, was such a brute to his children.’
Prince Albert, more nervous and slow-witted than his elder brother, suffered as much, but Edward, both because of his status and his tendency to carelessness, came in for the most censorious attention. His father took due pride in his achievements. David recited a poem ‘quite extraordinarily well’, he noted in his diary. ‘He said Wolseley’s farewell (Shakespeare) without a mistake.’
But he felt correspondingly sharp dismay at his son’s backslidings. ‘The real difficulty had been with the Duke of Windsor, never with the present King,’ Queen Mary told Nicolson many years later.
She deluded herself if she thought that Prince Bertie had escaped unscathed, but she was right in her belief that her elder son, from whom so much was expected and who found acquiescence in his father’s shibboleths so much more uncongenial, was the principal victim in the generation war. Prince Edward certainly saw himself as such, a conviction that was fortified as his childhood slipped farther into the past. He told Freda Dudley Ward’s daughter Angela how lucky she was to have a loving mother. His own childhood had been dreadful, he said; he had received no love and no appreciation for his achievements.
‘I had a wretched childhood!’ he told his authorial assistant, Charles Murphy. ‘Of course there were short periods of happiness but I remember it chiefly for the miserableness I had to keep to myself.’
That this misery was exaggerated in retrospect seems evident, that it was real and painful at the time is hardly less so.
His mother did her best to provide a refuge from the Duke’s harshness. ‘We used to have a most lovely time with her alone – always laughing and joking,’ Edward remembered, ‘… she was a different human being away from him.’
But though she made manifest her sympathy for her children, she did little to protect them from their father’s wrath, or to try to change his attitude. Though to later generations she appeared the quintessence of intractable strong-mindedness, she held her husband in awe, as an individual and still more as a future monarch. ‘I always have to remember that their father is also their King,’
she was later to pronounce, and the King-to-be deserved almost the same reverence. She saw her role as that of loyal support; to argue with, or still more, criticize her husband was something to be done rarely, and then only with extreme caution.
The Duke and Duchess were not the only people of significance in the children’s lives. It is curious that almost all the nannies who feature in the pages of childhood memoirs are either saints or sadists. Edward had one of each. The sadist delighted in pinching him or twisting his arm just before his evening visit to his parents’ drawing room; as a result he would cry and find himself peremptorily banished.
The saint, Charlotte ‘Lalla’ (or, to Edward, ‘Lala’) Bill, came later as nurse to Princess Mary and extended her attention to the boys. Neither had any great importance in Edward’s upbringing. More influential was the stalwart Finch, a nursery footman whose father had been in the service of the great Duke of Wellington and who shared some of that dignitary’s resolution and resourcefulness. From male nanny he stayed on to serve his master as valet and then butler, dependable, devoted, totally loyal, always respectful yet blunt sometimes to the point of rudeness. He allowed his youthful charge to take no liberties and on one occasion spanked him for teasing Lalla Bill. Edward threatened to denounce him to his father, but Lalla Bill got her story in first and insult was added to injury when the Prince was made to apologize to Finch for being such a nuisance.
But it was his grandparents who provided the most striking contrast to his father’s stern regime. The Prince of Wales could be quite as bad-tempered and as much a stickler for protocol as his son, and possessed a streak of meanness which was missing in the Duke of York, but to his grandchildren he was almost as indulgent as he was to himself. Edward basked in his obvious affection and endured with equanimity outbursts that would have terrified him in his father. Once he infuriated his grandfather by fidgeting at luncheon and finally knocking something off the table. ‘Damn you, boy!’ roared the Prince, smashing a melon to the floor. ‘David surveyed the debris in silence and then turned to his grandfather with an irresistibly funny expression of polite enquiry. Then the two burst out laughing.’
His grandmother was still less alarming. ‘We saw dear Grannie yesterday,’ Edward wrote in 1897, in a letter presumably dictated to a nursemaid, ‘and she had a funny cock and an owl which she blowed out of a pipe.’
With Queen Alexandra, as she was shortly to become, it was always cocks and owls and laughs and demonstrative affection.
It amused the Waleses to subvert their son’s austerity. In August 1900 the Yorks set off on an extensive imperial tour. The grandparents were left in charge, and reports were soon reaching the royal tourists of the way the children were being pampered and their education neglected. The last straw came when the woman supposed to be teaching Edward French was left behind when the family moved to Sandringham. The Duchess protested, but got little satisfaction. ‘The reason we did not take her,’ wrote Queen Alexandra, ‘was that [Doctor] Laking particularly asked that he might be left more with his brothers and sister – for a little while – as we all noticed how precautious [sic – “precocious” is presumably what she had in mind] and old-fashioned he was getting – and quite the ways of a “single child”! which will make him ultimately a “tiresome child” – laying down the law and thinking himself far superior to the younger ones. It did him a great deal of good – to be treated the same as Bertie …’
The charge that Edward was being brought up as an only child does not seem well founded. The three elder children were much together, and, in spite of their father’s insistence on correct clothing on every occasion, enjoyed a freedom to roam the countryside on foot or bicycle which would seem enviable to contemporary princes. Edward felt protective towards his siblings; it is said that once, when he heard that his father was on the way to inspect the flower beds that they were encouraged to look after at Windsor, he covered up for his sister’s inadequacy as a gardener by running ahead and transplanting some flowers from his plot to hers.
Lord Esher spent some time with them in 1904 and noted: ‘The youngest is the most riotous. The eldest a sort of head nurse.’ Looking through a magazine together the children chanced on a picture of Prince Edward labelled ‘Our Future King’. ‘Prince Albert at once drew attention to it – but the elder hastily brushed his brother’s finger away and turned the page. Evidently he thought it bad taste.’
But outside the family his social horizons were severely limited. Occasional visits to cousins of his age was the utmost permitted him. The children of the Duke and Duchess of Fife were favoured companions. ‘He was so pleased to be with them,’ reported a governess. ‘They wanted to take his hand and he wanted to take their ball’ – an exchange which he must have felt greatly to his advantage.
But he seems to have had no aversion to girls. ‘So dear David is precocious,’ wrote his great-aunt Augusta. ‘He was so from the first. I have a vivid and pleasing recollection of the only time I saw him this year at White Lodge, when he flirted with the nice Lady Cousins.’
The Duke of York was a man of habit and, imperial tours apart, he liked the year to unroll to an unchanging pattern. In January the whole family was at York Cottage, Sandringham, the children staying on there in February and March while their parents were in London. At Easter they were reunited at York Cottage or Frogmore House, Windsor. They stayed together in London for May and June, and then in July and August the children with their mother would retreat to Frogmore while the Duke shot or yachted. September and the first half of October were spent near Balmoral; then it was back to York Cottage for the rest of the year.
York Cottage was thus as near to a permanent home as the children knew. It had been built by the Prince of Wales to hold the overflow from his vaster shooting parties and given to the Duke of York as a wedding present. The word ‘Cottage’ hardly conveys a true picture. Harold Nicolson, who must have visited it on a cold, wet day, described it as ‘a glum little villa … separated by an abrupt rim of lawn from a pond at the edge of which a leaden pelican gazes in dejection upon the water lilies and bamboos’.
In sunnier circumstances the pond is a more than respectable lake and the life-size pelican looks contented if not exuberant. As for the glum little villa – villa perhaps, but large enough to provide today spacious estate offices, storage rooms for the Sandringham shop and five decent-sized flats. The rooms were small – the nursery being barely large enough to accommodate a medium-sized rocking horse – but the Duke liked small rooms, which reminded him of naval cabins. ‘Very nice to be in this dear wee house again,’ he wrote in his diary, and when his father offered to rent for him Lord Cholmondeley’s palace at nearby Houghton, he rejected the proposal with alacrity. As a child Edward was fond enough of its cosy and suburban comfort, as he grew older it came more and more to symbolize all that he disliked about family life.
His education was at first desultory. Reading, writing and a little history were given priority; Latin, mathematics and the sciences were eschewed; French and German were deemed essential, with enforced recitations of poems in both languages on his parents’ birthdays, turning these festivals into nightmares. ‘I am a good boy. I know a lot of German,’ Edward proudly told his father in 1901.
He was less good when it came to French, mainly from dislike of his teacher, a podgy Alsatian lady called Hélène Bricka whom he described as ‘a dreadful old person’.
Religious instruction, such as it was, came from Canon Dalton; it failed to enthral the young prince. Cecil Sharp, expert in folklore, song and dancing, was supposed to have taken charge of Edward’s ‘social education’ and first inspired in him a passion for ‘physical jerks’ and other forms of violent and uncomfortable exercise.
Geography was picked up largely as a by-product of the Yorks’ travels. ‘I am very pleased to get a present from Christchurch and a whip from Tasmania,’ he wrote when his parents were in the Antipodes. ‘I know where these places are … Fancy Papa shooting peacocks.’
He learned the art of crochet from his mother and picked up some general knowledge from forays into the royal palaces. ‘There are such a lot of books,’ he remarked in awe after a visit to the library at Windsor. ‘I saw the first book Caxton printed. I read all about him in Arthur’s History.’
It was not a bad beginning, but it did not add up to the formal education required by a future king. His father knew that something more was called for, but could not convince himself that the matter was of any urgency, until January 1901 when Queen Victoria died. The Prince of Wales succeeded as King Edward VII; the Duke of York became Duke of Cornwall and ten months later added the title of Prince of Wales.
Prince Edward, aged six, was now second in line to the throne. The event meant little to him; he was dimly aware that something of vast significance had occurred, an era had ended, hushed and reverent mourning was in order, but he had hardly known his great-grandmother and felt no personal grief at her disappearance. Of the funeral he remembered only ‘the piercing cold, the interminable waits, and of feeling very lost’.
He made a clearer impression on others than the ceremony did on him. His aunt Maud, Princess Charles of Denmark and later Queen of Norway, remembered that ‘Sweet little David behaved so well during the service and was supported by the little Hesse girl who took him under her protection and held him most of the time round his neck. They looked such a delightful little couple!’
King Edward’s Coronation the following year meant little more to him. Edward remembered only the longueurs of the service in the Abbey, mitigated by the clatter when one of the great-aunts dropped her book programme over the edge of her box into a gold cup below. Once only did the ceremony come alive, when his mother whispered to him, ‘Now Papa will do homage to Grandpapa.’
For a moment the relevance of what was going on to himself and to his country became dramatically apparent.
Grumbling, the Duke of Cornwall – or Prince of Wales, as it is easier to style him without more ado – moved from his modest apartments in St James’s Palace to the massive grandeur of Marlborough House. He took over Frogmore House at Windsor and Abergeldie near Balmoral. These changes made little difference to his son’s way of life. But a far more significant event had already occurred. In the spring of 1902 the Prince of Wales engaged as tutor to his elder sons Henry Hansell, a thirty-nine-year-old schoolmaster and son of a Norfolk country gentleman, who had taken his degree at Magdalen College, Oxford, and had recently been tutor to the Duke of Connaught’s son, Prince Arthur.
There were a lot of good things about Hansell. Six foot three inches tall and strikingly handsome, he had played football for Oxford and was an excellent shot. Shane Leslie, who was taught by him, describes him as uproariously funny, to small boys at least, convulsing all around him by the comical goose step with which he would advance from his goal in a football match.
He liked his charges and served them with loyalty and devotion. The Princess of Wales thought he taught history well and managed to engage the boys’ interest: ‘This pleases me immensely as you know how devoted I am to history.’
He made an excellent impression on many people who should have been competent judges. Lord Derby said of him: ‘Never have I found a man who understands boys better. Admirably straight, but very broadminded. I can imagine no man better able to guide rather than drive a boy.’
‘Mon impression sur M. Hansell fut excellente du premier coup,’ wrote the Marquis de Breteuil. ‘Je le jugeai de suite un homme intelligent, plein de tact, bon et complètement devoué a son élève.’
And yet it is impossible to doubt that this good, honest, conscientious man had a disastrous effect on the intellectual development of his pupils. Without imagination, with only the most rudimentary sense of humour, pedestrian in mind, aesthetically unaware, Hansell represented everything that was most philistine and blinkered about the English upper middle classes. Whatever adventurous instincts Edward might have had were blanketed by his tutor’s smug and unquestioning self-assurance. Harry Verney worked with Hansell during the First World War and told Edward that what had struck him was ‘his commanding presence … his savoir faire coupled with the most incredible stupidity in dealing with the business of the office … I am amazed to read that he got a Second in history at Oxford, but I expect you are right. With it all what a very charming man he was, and devoted to you.’
Edward’s final view was not dissimilar. He told Harold Nicolson in 1953 that Hansell had been ‘melancholy and inefficient’. ‘He never taught us anything at all,’ he went on. ‘I am completely self-educated.’
Prince Edward had a naturally enquiring mind. He was ready to question any dogma and investigate any phenomenon which he did not immediately comprehend. He was hungry for exact information, and wanted to know not only how things worked, but why, and whether they could work better. He did not lose this freshness of approach but, thanks in part at least to Hansell, it was never harnessed to an intellectual apparatus which would have made it an effective instrument. It was the mark of Hansell’s tuition that the Duke of Windsor could admit fifty years later that he had ‘always preferred learning history from pictures than from script, and it’s amazing how much one can learn from pictures’.
That his father should think his progress under Hansell all that could be desired was perhaps to be expected; that his mother was equally approving is more surprising. Yet she appears to have had no qualms. ‘I do so hope our children will turn out common-sense people, which is so important in this world,’ she told her aunt Augusta early in 1907. ‘We have taken no end of trouble with their education and they have very nice people round them so one feels all is being done to help them.’
To be fair to Hansell, he saw the claustrophobic limitations in the system of education imposed upon his charges. He wanted them sent to a preparatory school, preferably Ludgrove where he himself had taught. When this proposal was brusquely vetoed by the Prince of Wales, he at least tried to open their social horizons a little way by organizing football matches in which the princes and boys from the local village played against teams from nearby schools. Edward enjoyed both the games and the conviviality which accompanied them. His father was dubious, not so much over the principle as over the choice of sport. He complained to Hansell that the Prince much preferred ‘football to golf, which is a pity, and dislikes playing golf now, probably because his brother beats him, but I want you to encourage him all you can. I have already told him he will have more opportunities of playing golf when he grows up than football or cricket.’
But Edward was always hesitant about fresh experiences: ‘How funny he is about trying anything new like hockey,’ remarked his father. ‘We must try to get him over it.’
You’ll be glad to hear
That the Cuckoo is hear!
That is poetry.
wrote Edward proudly from Frogmore in April 1904. It was a solitary foray into an art form that was to hold little appeal for him in later life. But in some ways his education was less inadequate. He took a keen interest in the 1906 general election, which Hansell turned into a game. Edward backed Campbell-Bannerman, the Liberal leader; Prince Albert favoured the Conservative Balfour. When Campbell-Bannerman, duly elected Prime Minister, visited Windsor, the eleven-year-old Prince asked whether being at the top of the ladder would not make him feel giddy. ‘Is this not delightful and promising for his future!’ exclaimed his doting great-aunt Augusta.
His memory for names and faces was trained from a very early age – after going into a room with some fifty people in it he was rigorously grilled on the identity of every one he had met. He was encouraged to take an interest in any part of the world visited by his parents. When the Prince of Wales was in India: ‘Mr Holland Hibbert came to lecture to us. The part that interested me most was when he told us about the holy men of Benares. He said that some of them hold their arms up all their lives. I think it must be rather tiresome.’ Some of them also lie on a bed of nails, replied his father. ‘I thought them rather nasty kind of people.’
But the Prince never learned to read for pleasure or acquired even a superficial knowledge of the English classics. Tommy Lascelles, then his private secretary, speculated many years later about what Hansell could have taught his charge. ‘I recollect the Prince of Wales years ago, coming back from a weekend at Panshanger and saying to me, “Look at this extraordinary little book wh. Lady Desborough says I ought to read. Have you ever heard of it?”’ The extraordinary little book was Jane Eyre. Another time he asked Hardy to settle an argument he had had with his mother about whether the novelist had written a book called Tess of the D’Urbervilles; ‘I said I was sure it was by somebody else.’ Hardy answered politely that it had indeed been one of his earlier books.
A working knowledge of English literature is perhaps unnecessary to a monarch, but to be totally ignorant of its greatest monuments is surely undesirable.
In the many accounts that survive of Edward at this period, it is his quickness, brightness and anxiety to please which are most often remarked on. ‘A delightful child, so intelligent, nice and friendly,’ said Queen Victoria;
‘a sweet little person’ was Esher’s judgment;
‘he had a look of both intelligence and kindness, and a limpid clarity of expression,’ observed the Aga Khan.
His formal courtesy and consideration for others were unusual in one so young, as also ‘the look of Weltschmerz in his eyes’ which Lord Esher detected when he was only eleven years old. He was softhearted, telling Lord Roberts that when he was King he would pass a law against cutting puppy dogs’ tails and forbid the use of bearing reins on horses. ‘Those two things are very cruel.’
When he caught his first fish he danced for joy, then handed it to the boatman and said: ‘You must not kill him, throw him back into the water again!’
(Such sensibilities did not endure. Only a year later he was recording in triumph, ‘We caught such a lot of fishes! and had them for breakfast this morning.’
) But his benevolence, though sincere, was sometimes remote from the realities of human existence. The first recorded story that he told his brothers was about an extremely poor couple living on a deserted moor. They were starving. One day the man heard his wife moan, ‘I’m so hungry.’ ‘“Very well,” said her husband. “I’ll see to it.” So he rang the bell and, when the footman came, ordered a plate of bread and butter.’
In June 1904 Prince Edward’s skull was inspected by Bernard Holländer, an eminent phrenologist. Most of the comments could have been made by anyone of a sycophantic nature without reference to the cranium, but there are some interesting points. The Prince, said Holländer, was eager to acquire knowledge and a keen observer, but ‘he would show his talents to greater advantage were he possessed of power of concentration and greater self-confidence’. He had a good eye for painting and would like music, though mainly of the lighter kind, ‘for example songs and dancing tunes’. He would have little use for organized religion himself but would respect the views of others. ‘Persons with the Prince’s type of head are never guilty of either a mean or dishonest action; they are just-minded, kindly disposed and faithful to their word.’ He had strong ‘feelings of humanity and sympathy for the welfare of others … He will seek to alleviate the sufferings of the poor.’ He would be uneasy in company, dislike public appearances, accept responsibilities with reluctance. He would not, it was clear, find it easy to be King.
Even at the age of ten he seemed to cherish doubts about his fitness for the role that his birth had thrust on him. More than thirty-two years later, after the abdication, Lalla Bill wrote in high emotion to Queen Mary. ‘Do you remember, Your Majesty, when he was quite young, how he didn’t wish to live, and he never wanted to become King?’
2
The Youth
THERE WERE GOOD REASONS FOR CHOOSING THE ROYAL Navy as a training ground for future monarchs. Careers open to princes at the beginning of the twentieth century were rare indeed, and the armed services provided one of the few in which they could find employment. The Navy, as the senior, was the obvious choice. It was a cherished national institution, its officers were recruited largely from the gentry or aristocracy, it offered less opportunities for debauchery or any kind of escapade than its land-based counterpart, it inculcated those virtues which it was felt were above all needed in a future king: sobriety, self-reliance, punctuality, a respect for authority and instinct to conform. A few years at sea would do harm to few and most people a lot of good. But to thrust a boy into the Navy at the age of twelve and leave him there until he was nineteen or twenty, if not longer, was unlikely to produce the rounded personality and breadth of mind needed to cope with the plethora of problems which afflict the constitutional monarch. When Edward’s father and uncle went to sea, Queen Victoria complained that the ‘very rough sort of life to which boys are exposed on board ship is the very thing not calculated to make a refined and amiable Prince’.
The risk seemed more that the Navy would blinker rather than brutalize a prince. The curious thing was that the Prince of Wales himself was aware of the limitations of a naval education. He knew that he had grown up without any understanding of international affairs, any knowledge of society or politics, any facility for languages. He deplored these handicaps. And yet when it came to his own sons, he condemned them to the same sterile routine. At least when he had joined the Navy it had not seemed likely that he would become King. Prince Edward was destined for the throne, yet still the same formula was applied. It was almost as if the Prince of Wales was determined that, as he had himself been deprived of proper training for his life work, his son should suffer equally; and yet in fact no thought could have been further from his mind.
The best hope for Edward seemed to be that he would fail to pass the entrance examination. Everyone agreed that he should be subjected to the same ordeal as any other candidate, though he was to be medically inspected by the royal doctors – ‘I may perhaps add that he is a particularly strong, healthy boy,’ wrote Hansell.
He had no Latin, but at a pinch could have offered German as an alternative. No one doubted that he was intelligent enough, but his spelling was appalling and his knowledge of mathematics exiguous. The Prince of Wales was apprehensive, then delighted and relieved to be told his son had passed the viva voce examination with flying colours. ‘Palpably above the average,’ said Sir Arthur Fanshawe,
while another examiner, Lord Hampton, said that of the three hundred boys he had seen, Edward had been equal to the best.
‘This has pleased us immensely,’ wrote the Princess of Wales proudly.
But the overall results of the written examination were not so flattering. In fact he ‘failed by a few marks to pass the qualifying examination, an Admiralty official reported in 1936. ‘Prince Edward obtained 291 marks out of 600 … but I notice that 5 candidates with lower marks were entered.’
At all events, he did well enough to be admitted without imposing too great a strain on the examiners’ consciences. In May 1907 his father took him to the Naval College at Osborne in the Isle of Wight. ‘I felt the parting from you very much,’ the Prince of Wales wrote two days later, ‘and we all at home miss you greatly. But I saw enough … to assure me that you would get on capitally and be very happy with all the other boys. Of course at first it will all seem a bit strange to you but you will soon settle down … and have a very jolly time of it.’
It seems unlikely that Prince Edward saw jolly times ahead when he received this letter. For any small boy the first exile to boarding school must be a scarifying experience; for Edward the ordeal was worse since he had been evicted abruptly from a cloistered family circle in which the existence of other children was hardly known. He shared a dormitory with thirty others, adjusting himself painfully to the fact that the day began at six, discipline was rigid, all work and play were conducted in a hectic bustle. He slept between the sons of Lord Spencer and Admiral Curzon-Howe. They had been chosen because their parents were well known to the Prince of Wales, but to Edward they seemed at first as alien as if they had been visitors from Mars. He had no idea how to relate to his contemporaries and had to learn not only new manners but almost a new language. It was much to his credit that he managed to look cheerful when his father left and to write proudly a few days later: ‘I am getting on very well here now … I think nothing of going up the mast as I am quite used to it.’
His mother gratefully took his protestations at face value. ‘He has fallen into his new life very quickly,’ she told her aunt Augusta, ‘which is such a blessing.’
The Prince of Wales’s instructions were that his son was to be treated exactly like any other naval cadet. Edward asked for nothing better, his ruling desire was to conform and to be accepted by his peers. But there was no chance that he would be able to escape altogether from his identity. He was subjected to mild bullying by small boys determined to show that he was not anything very special; red ink was poured down his neck, his hands were tied behind his back and he was guillotined in the sash window of his classroom. But his inoffensiveness and obvious determination not to trade on his rank soon led to his acceptance. Within a few weeks he had won through, was given a nickname – ‘Sardines’, presumably because he was the son of the Prince of W[h]ales – and became a tolerated if not leading member of society.
‘Perhaps the actual hours of work at Osborne are not excessive,’ the Prince of Wales wrote to Hansell, with greater perception than might have been expected, ‘but the whole life is a very strenuous one and they are never alone and therefore never quiet from the time they get up till the time they go to bed.’
Sociable by nature, Edward survived the hurly-burly well, but the gaps left by Hansell’s teaching quickly became apparent. He did well in French but even special coaching in mathematics failed to raise him from the bottom ten places in the Exmouth term of sixty or so cadets. On the whole he settled respectably, if without great distinction, a little above the halfway mark; more important, he worked steadily throughout his two years at Osborne, reaching his peak after eighteen months and then only slipping back because of ill health. His father applauded his achievements and was decently consolatory about his setbacks. ‘I am delighted with the good reports that were sent me about you and that you are now 24th in your term,’ he wrote at the end of 1907, ‘… that is splendid, and I am sure you must be very pleased about it too and it will make you more keen about your mark.’
Edward’s letters to his parents were short and uncommunicative even by the standards of schoolboys, consisting mainly of excuses for not having written before or at greater length: ‘I am in a bean-bag team and I had to practise every morning,’ was one explanation; ‘I have had to practise Swedish drill every morning,’ occurred a few weeks later; then, in desperation, ‘I have been doing such a lot of things lately that I have not had much time.’
His father tolerated brevity but not a failure to write at all. ‘You must be able to find time to write to me once a week,’ he protested, ‘… I am anxious to hear how you are getting on.’
Edward endured stoically the separation from his family, but felt it a bit hard when his mother announced that she intended to visit Germany during the first two weeks of his first holidays. The Princess of Wales was apologetic but unrelenting; Aunt Augusta was eighty-five and unable to travel. ‘I hope we shall have great fun when we do meet,’ she wrote.
In spite of the demands on their time the Waleses generally did manage to make the holidays fun. ‘We miss you most dreadfully,’ the Prince of Wales wrote when his son returned to Osborne. ‘I fear you felt very sad at leaving home. I know I did when I was a boy, it is only natural that you should, and it shows that you are fond of your home.’
By the time Prince Albert followed his brother to Osborne, Edward was in his last term and a figure of some consequence. ‘I hope you have “put him up to the ropes” as we say,’ wrote their father. ‘You must look after him all you can.’
Opportunities for such tutelage were limited, boys from different terms were not supposed to mix at Osborne and when the brothers wanted to talk together surreptitious assignations had to be made in the further reaches of the playing fields. Prince Edward was expected to do more than just give comfort to his sibling; the Prince of Wales frequently instructed him to make sure Bertie worked harder or to pass on complaints about his failure to concentrate. Edward seems to have relished the quasi-parental role, especially since his brother did conspicuously worse than him. ‘Bertie was 61st in the order which was not so bad,’ he wrote later from Dartmouth. ‘I really think he is trying to work a bit. This is an excellent thing …’
Though Edward had hardly been an outstanding success at Osborne, let alone a hero, he had profited by his time there. He had gained immeasurably in confidence and found that it was possible to get on well with his contemporaries. ‘He is wonderfully improved,’ noted Esher, ‘Osborne has made him unshy, and given him good manners.’
His father, after only one term, found him ‘more manly’ and much more able to look after himself.
It had been sink or swim; anyone who could not look after himself in the maelstrom of Osborne life would not have survived for long. But he had swum, and even got some pleasure out of doing so. When he got home to Frogmore at the beginning of his first holidays he had found the entrance beflagged and a large banner reading ‘Vive l’amiral!’ No banners flew on his final departure from Osborne but a sense of achievement possessed him just the same.
Dartmouth follows Osborne as the day the night, and giving something of the same impression of light following dark. Though the discipline seemed almost as harsh, the bullying as mindless, the tempo of life as relentless as at Osborne, the cadets were that much nearer to maturity and their troubles easier to endure. ‘This is a very nice place, much nicer than Osborne …’ wrote Edward in relief in May 1909. ‘There is a very nice Chapel here and I think I am going to join the Choir.’ But the pressure was still on. ‘There is an awful rush here and everything has to be done so quickly. We are allowed 3 minutes to undress in the evening.’
His mother was alarmed by this last piece of information. How could he do a proper job of cleaning his teeth in so short a time? ‘This is so important and I want to know. Don’t forget to answer this question.’
Edward’s reply was tinged with the exasperation that a boy of fifteen properly feels towards a fussing mother. The three minutes did not include time for brushing teeth. ‘We are allowed plenty of time for that. There is also plenty of time in the morning, and I am taking great care of my teeth.’
He had moved on to Dartmouth with his contemporaries from Osborne, so the process of adjustment was less painful than at the junior college. Stephen King-Hall, who was a cadet in the same year, recorded that he was ‘rather shy but generally liked’. In his first terms he was sometimes seen staggering back from the football fields with a load of boots, victim of the wish of some senior cadet to be able to say in later life: ‘The King once carried my boots.’
His academic strengths and weaknesses did not greatly change. In May 1909 he reported proudly that he was top in German, second in history, top in English, third in French, but only thirty-seventh in the overall order, still dragged down by his inability to manage any branch of mathematics.
In the exams in March 1910 he was forty-eighth in geometry and forty-fifth in trigonometry out of a term of fifty-nine: ‘That is quite good for me,’ he wrote defensively.
He found exams difficult and regularly produced worse results than he had in class. Lord Knutsford stayed at York Cottage early in 1911 and spoke to Edward about the examination system. The Prince praised it, in spite of his own inadequacy. As to the final exams, he said, ‘I dare say I shall take some time, as I am not at all clever, but I might pass.’ Knutsford found him ‘a really charming boy, very simple and keen’. He taught him card tricks and found that ‘he could do the “French drop” fairly well’.
The previous year his Easter holidays had been unexpectedly extended by the sudden illness of the King. During the night of 6 May 1910 Edward VII died. The first Edward knew of it was when Bertie saw from their window in Marlborough House that the Royal Standard over Buckingham Palace was at half mast. He mentioned this to his father who muttered, ‘That’s all wrong,’ and ordered the Standard to be transferred to Marlborough House and flown ‘close up’.
King Edward VII might be dead but the King lived.
With his father now King George V, Edward automatically inherited the Dukedom of Cornwall. Life at Dartmouth in theory was unchanged but the cadets would have been less than human if they had not recognized that only one life stood between their fifteen-year-old contemporary and the throne.
Perhaps in deference to his presence, the authorities at Dartmouth had introduced a course of Civics. He told his father that he was much enjoying it and discovering a great deal about the constitution: ‘It is such a useful subject for me to learn.’
He began to follow the daily papers, taking the Morning Post and the Westminster Gazette. It was ‘a very good thing, I think’, he told his mother. ‘It is about time I read the papers, as in years to come, when I am obliged to follow politics, I shall know something about it.’
The King saw this letter and at once wrote to insist that The Times be substituted for the Morning Post – ‘the views and opinions expressed are much sounder in every way’. The Westminster Gazette was excellent and moderate – ‘You should always try and form moderate opinions about things, and never extreme ones, especially in politics.’
He must have written with special feeling since Britain was involved in a constitutional crisis over the powers of the House of Lords in which moderate opinions were hard to find. ‘It must have been so very hard for Papa to say the right thing, and yet show at the same time that he was not partial to one party or the other,’ wrote Edward sympathetically.
The succession of his father to the throne with all the attendant ceremonies reduced the usefulness of Edward’s last term at Dartmouth. His parents were sorry that he should find himself thrust into the position of heir to the throne ‘without being older and having more preparation’. Still, the Queen told her aunt Augusta, ‘we have done our best for him and we can only hope and pray we may have succeeded and that he will ever uphold the honour and traditions of our house’.
The Rev. H. Dixon Wright, who prepared Edward for confirmation, had the same cause at heart. The Prince’s mind, he told Archbishop Davidson, was ‘absolutely innocent and uncontaminated’. With the consent of the King Wright had ‘warned him on the subject of “the sinful lusts of the flesh”, that he may be forearmed’.
The Archbishop was somewhat dismayed to find that the King expected him to ‘examine’ the Prince in the presence of his parents and suggested some relaxation of the procedure. ‘I have no wish whatever for the examination which my dear brother and I had to undergo in the presence of the Queen and my parents,’ wrote George V cheerfully. ‘I thought it a terrible ordeal, but was under the impression it was always done with the members of my family. Delighted to hear that it is not necessary.’
The confirmation passed off none the worse for this breach with precedent. ‘The impression made upon me by the quiet boyish simplicity, the clear and really thoughtful attitude, and the wistful keenness of the young Prince is one which can never be effaced,’ wrote the Archbishop, a tribute that would have been still more impressive if it had been written to anyone but the Queen.
The Coronation was fixed for 22 June 1911. Being still only sixteen Edward could not wear a peer’s robes, so his father created him a Knight of the Garter. For one who was soon to show an almost pathological dislike of dressing up, Edward donned the somewhat fanciful costume with striking calm, in his diary noting merely that it would ‘look very well when ready’ and that it was lucky that his father no longer needed his, since the expense would otherwise have been considerable.
The Queen told her aunt that he had carried off the ceremony with great sang-froid and dignity: ‘David wore the Garter dress white and silver with the cloak and big hat and feathers. He really looked too sweet.’
The Coronation followed a few days later. The children paid their usual morning visit to their parents and found the King brusque and conspicuously nervous. He showed Edward the Admiralty Order in The Times gazetting him a midshipman and handed him the dirk that went with the rank.
The children then processed together to the Abbey in one of the state coaches. Queen Alexandra had thought this a poor idea and was proved right when the younger princes began to giggle and play the fool. George tried to tickle Mary and fell on the floor. On the return journey things got so bad that only Edward’s threats to hit his brothers maintained any sort of order.
In the Abbey, however, all was decorous. Edward was conducted to his stall, his brothers bowed as they filed in front of him, Princess Mary curtsied deeply ‘and the Prince rose and gravely bowed to her’.
When the moment came for him to do homage he was consumed by nerves; if he blundered or behaved clumsily, he believed his father would feel that he had failed him.
He did not blunder. That night George V wrote in his diary: ‘I nearly broke down when dear David came to do homage to me, as it reminded me so much [of] when I did the same thing to beloved Papa. He did it so well.’
By then Edward was already Prince of Wales, given the title on his sixteenth birthday. There had been no formal investiture of a Prince of Wales for more than three hundred years, but the Empress Frederick had suggested the ceremony should be revived; the Bishop of St Asaph espoused the idea; and Lloyd George, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Constable of Caernarvon Castle, saw a chance to gratify Welsh national pride and win political support.
Some time-honoured traditions were hurriedly invented, Caernarvon Castle refurbished, gold quarried from the Merionethshire hills to make the Prince’s regalia, and a quaint costume of white satin breeches and purple velvet surcoat devised for the occasion. At this point Edward struck. What, he asked, ‘would my Navy friends say if they saw me in this preposterous rig?’
The Queen talked him into grudging acquiescence and Lloyd George taught him some Welsh phrases for the occasion. He practised in the garden at Frogmore, bellowing ‘Mor o gan yw Cymru i gyd’ – all Wales is a sea of song – to Hansell fifty yards away. He could hear every word, reported Hansell.
The ceremony was a great success; the only people who recorded their displeasure were the Mayor and Aldermen of Chester, who felt that since Prince Edward was among other things Earl of Chester, the investiture should have happened there. The leading man earned himself a crop of compliments. Winston Churchill, the Home Secretary, congratulated him on possessing a voice ‘which carries well and is capable of being raised without losing expressiveness’.
Lloyd George assured him that he had forged a lasting bond of affection with the Welsh ‘and won the admiration of all those who witnessed the spectacle’.
Queen Mary told Aunt Augusta that he had played his part to perfection, ‘It was very émouvant for George and me.’
To the youthful Harry Luke he seemed ‘the incarnation of all the Fairy Princes who have ever been imagined’.
The last description encapsulated everything that disquieted Edward about the ceremony. He was not sure he wanted to be a prince at all, certainly he did not wish to be a fairy prince. He hated anything which made him a man apart, which set him on a pedestal for his fellows to goggle at and worship. If to be Prince of Wales meant to put on fancy dress and strike attitudes in remote Welsh castles, then it was not a job for him.
There were good points about the position too. As Duke of Cornwall, he now enjoyed the revenues of the Duchy of Cornwall, derived from much valuable property in London and huge estates in the West Country. These amounted to some £90,000 a year, far more than he could possibly require before he came of age and set up his own establishment. The Treasurer of the Duchy of Cornwall, Walter Peacock, estimated that by the end of his minority savings would probably amount to £400,000; say, very roughly, £10 million at current values.
With new wealth and consequence came new responsibilities. J. C. Davidson, some time in 1912, was summoned from his work in the Colonial Office to St James’s Palace to be looked over as a prospective private secretary. He quickly decided it was no job for him: ‘I would have made a very poor courtier, nor did I quite like the character of the Prince of Wales, charming in some ways as he was.’
The Prince possibly reciprocated the mild dislike; certainly no job was offered to Davidson, nor any private secretary appointed.
Meanwhile his naval career was running to its close. His last term at Dartmouth had been truncated by a fierce attack of measles. He retreated to Newquay to convalesce and to pay a few perfunctory visits to his recently acquired estates in the vicinity. On 29 March 1911 he returned briefly to Dartmouth to give presents and signed photographs to the officers, masters and a few particularly close friends. On the same day he presented to the town of Dartmouth the silver oar which symbolized the ancient rights of the Duke of Cornwall over the adjoining waters: ‘This was my first function, and I think it went off very well,’ he noted in his diary.
Neither he nor his father appeared to have any doubts about the value of the education he had received. ‘I certainly think the College is the best school in England,’ wrote the King.
The Prince echoed the sentiment when he visited Winchester in 1913. ‘I believe it is a very good school,’ he told his father. ‘… It is amusing to see the difference between an ordinary school and Dartmouth. The boys talk of discomfort, but in the dormitories they have cubicles and they sit about in studies all day. Their life is not half as strenuous as it is at Dartmouth and we were more contented. There can be no better education than a naval one.’
The Dartmouth course ended with a training cruise. The Coronation made it impossible for the Prince to take part, but as a consolation in the autumn of 1911 he was sent on a three-month tour in the battleship Hindustan. The Prince served as a midshipman as the ship sailed along the south coast to Portland, Plymouth and Torbay, then for a month to Queensferry and back to Portland for the final weeks. The Captain, Henry Campbell, was a shining example of those bluff sailor men who maintain a conspicuous independence of attitude while keeping a weather eye always open to the wishes of those likely to further their careers. ‘Not the smallest exception or discrimination has been made in his favour,’ he wrote in his final report on the Prince.
Up to a point it was true. The Prince did work hard, get up at 6 a.m. to do rifle drill or P.T., receive the same pay – 1/9d (9p) a day – as the other midshipmen, keep his watches, do a stint in the coal bunkers – ‘the atmosphere is thick with coal dust and how the wretched stokers who have to remain down there can stand it, I do not know’.
But not many midshipmen ate regularly with their captain, went for walks ashore with him when the ship was near land, lunched in their stately homes with Lord Mar, Lord Rosebery and Lord Mount Edgcumbe. He was always the Prince of Wales and though he seems to have been genuinely welcome in the gunroom by the other midshipmen, he was there as a guest, not as a member.
‘I like the Captain very much indeed, he is always so interesting,’ wrote the Prince in his diary. ‘The Chaplain had a talk with me … and gave me some tracts to read.’
The Chaplain, one suspects, was found less interesting than the Captain. Campbell reciprocated the boy’s affection, and, though he was not above flattery, his letter to Queen Mary has the ring of sincerity:
We in the Navy rate a man for what he does, not for what he is; from the highest to the lowest he was looked upon with affection and respect. His character has formed; it is strong but very gentle and is best described in the old Scotch words ‘Ye can break but ye canna bend me.’ In spite of his very happy nature he thinks a great deal and he one day made it quite clear to me that he was fully alive to the fact that false speech and fond hopes do not alter facts … The Prince said to me one day; ‘If I have learnt nothing else since I have been with you, I have learnt what inconvenience is and what it means to be really tired.’ I thought of my promise to you and felt that it had been fulfilled.
When he went ashore for the last time the ship’s company sang ‘God Bless the Prince of Wales’ and ‘Auld lang syne’. The Prince knew it was the end of his naval life. ‘I only wish it was possible for you to continue serving in what I consider the finest service in the world,’ his father had written to him.
But it was not possible. The first year of his reign had finally convinced George V that life aboard a ship could not equip a prince to be King. Edward must travel, he must learn languages, he must study history and the constitution, he must serve in the Army, he must become the very model of a modern monarch. The Prince of Wales was disconsolate, but he knew his father was right.
‘You know, I think father now is quite a nice man,’ Edward had said in apparent surprise to his mother in the summer of 1910.
That George V was in fact quite a nice man is hardly in question; that his son continued to think him quite a nice father is more doubtful. The trouble was partly that the King tried too hard. ‘Now that you are leaving home, David, and going out into the world,’ he said when he deposited his son for the first time at Osborne, ‘always remember that I am your best friend.’
The same refrain reverberated down the years: in 1908, ‘I wish you always to look upon me as your best friend, when in doubt and want advice, come to me’; in 1913, ‘I want you always to look upon me as your best friend’; in 1914, ‘I want you to treat me as your best friend.’
It is possible that some boys may indeed regard their fathers as their best friends, but even if they did it is unlikely that they would relish being constantly reminded of the fact.
There was a sententiousness about the King’s approach which must have grated on its victim. ‘I trust that you will always remember …’ wrote George V just after his accession, ‘that now you must always set a good example to the others by being very obedient, respectful to your seniors and kind to everyone.’
‘May God spare you for many, many years and may you grow up to be a happiness and a credit to your parents and your Country,’ was the message for the Prince’s thirteenth birthday.
The sentiments were unexceptionable, but no teenage boy could be expected to pay much attention to such exhortations. In later life Edward was apt to say that his father never said anything nice about him, always it was carping criticism and rebuke. This is not altogether fair. The King did sometimes congratulate his son on his manners, his letter-writing or some new achievement. But such occasions were the exception. ‘Papa has been so nice to me since my return …’ wrote the Prince in his diary in 1913. ‘No faults have been found … Such a change!!’ It was too good to last. Within a few days there was ‘an awful row’ when the King took exception to his sons going out for a walk with small rifles and shooting rabbits. ‘Those things are always a great bore,’ noted the Prince wearily.
His recreations were a frequent source of recrimination: ‘You seem to be having too much shooting and not enough riding or hunting. I can’t understand why you didn’t hunt when Sir G. Fitzwilliam came expressly for that … What on earth were you doing? … I must say I am disappointed.’
A less sensitive or more self-confident boy might have recognized the genuine solicitude which lay behind the King’s captiousness and have responded to the spirit rather than the manner. The Prince did not. His health provided grounds for constant skirmishes. ‘Do smoke less, take less exercise, eat more and rest more,’ wrote the King, in despair at his eighteen-year-old son’s increasingly eccentric train of life. ‘You are just at the critical age from now till you are 21 and it is most necessary that you should develop properly, both in mind and body. It all depends … whether you develop into a strong, healthy man or remain a sort of puny, half grown boy.’
The Prince paid little attention. He had, for reasons difficult to follow, concluded that he was teetering always on the verge of fatness, and to avoid such a fate submitted his body to much violent physical exercise and ate with ill-judged frugality. He considered his parents’ efforts to modify this regime to be fussy and interfering, and dismissed the injunctions of the royal doctors as the vapourings of the King’s hired lackeys. He found it hard to credit what to the outsider seems the patent sincerity of his father’s heartcry: ‘I am only telling you these things for your own good and because I am so devoted to you and take such an interest in everything.’
There were interludes of harmony: ‘We now understand each other so well,’ wrote the Prince of Wales in July 1913;
a conversation with the King at York Cottage a few months later ‘made a difference to my life and made me look on everything in a totally different light’;
but soon there would be more grumbles and recriminations and all the good would be undone.
Queen Mary’s role in the relationship was curiously remote. In the future mother and son were to develop a close rapport, but though there are occasional references in these years to ‘charming talks’ or ‘wise advice’, she played very much a secondary role. When the Prince’s equerry, William Cadogan, urged her to use her influence with the King to ensure that he sometimes addressed a word of encouragement to his son, she accepted that such advice was badly needed but could not bring herself to proffer it.
One of the few fields where she seemed ready to take an initiative was in the selection of Christmas or birthday presents. Here she avoided any possible disappointment by acting both as donor and recipient. ‘I must just tell you,’ she wrote in May 1912, ‘that I have got for you to give me as a birthday present 2 charming old Chinese cloisonné cups (price £12) for my Chinese Chippendale room.’ The King adopted the same somewhat curious practice. For Christmas the same year he wanted a gold soup bowl. It was ‘awfully expensive, £150’, the Queen told her son, ‘but Papa is very anxious to have it and has ordered it, and I only hope you won’t mind’.
Prince Albert remained Edward’s closest ally. At Osborne and Dartmouth Edward’s role had been that of protector or occasional critic, but with the Navy behind him the Prince of Wales was able to develop a close companionship with his younger brother. ‘Bertie is a delightful creature and we have so many interests in common,’ wrote the Prince in his diary in 1913, and then a fortnight later, ‘I am so miserable it is dear old Bertie’s last night; we have been so much together of late and I shall miss him terribly.’
Prince George too, though eight years younger, was now becoming a friend. At first the relationship was very much de haut en bas; the Prince of Wales rather patronizingly explained to his brother about the Royal Navy or made him exercise – ‘George got stitches all the time … he is too fat for running.’
By 1914 he had become ‘a capital boy’,
they spent much time together and chatted freely. Bertie was still the real support, however, with whom the Prince of Wales formed a common front against the assaults of unreasonable parents. At dinner with Queen Alexandra, ‘Bertie and I did our best to be funny and we succeeded’;
at Christmas in York Cottage, ‘it is hard work keeping 3 wild brothers in order; well I should say two, as my 2nd brother helps me. He is nearly as tall as I am and weighs more.’
Oxford in the autumn of 1912 was to be the next phase of the Prince’s education, but before he went up it was decided he should spend a few months in France. He was reasonably fluent in French but had picked up ‘a very John Bull intonation’ while at Dartmouth, and this called for improvement.
The Marquis de Breteuil, an anglophile French aristocrat with an American wife and two sons of the Prince’s age, somewhat reluctantly allowed himself to be selected as host. He was summoned to Buckingham Palace to inspect his future charge and found him ‘very thin, younger in appearance than his years, puny [chétif], timid but most attractive’. He insisted that Hansell, by whom he was much impressed, should accompany the Prince. George V emphasized that the visit must be entirely informal; the Marquis pointed out that his guest could hardly fail to call on the President. ‘You’re right,’ said the King. ‘I can’t get used to the idea that in a few months he will be eighteen, and that he’s already the Prince of Wales.’
He had some excuse for his failure. Everyone agrees that both physically and mentally the Prince was slow to develop. The image of the slight, shy, wistful figure which was to become imprinted in the public consciousness over the next twenty years was already well established. In 1912 he still seemed conspicuously ill-equipped to grapple with the demands imposed on him by his position. Any boy of his age would have been discomfited by the ‘huge and most alarming’ luncheon given by the prefect of police, Louis-Jean Lépine – ‘it was rather trying and the food was nasty,’ but most would have coped better with the informal dance which the Breteuils held in his honour: ‘They were mostly young folk who went on to a ball. I danced once or twice but it bores me to a degree. I went to bed at 10.15.’
There is no evidence from his diary that he met any girl in France who engaged his attention for more than a few minutes.
How much French he learnt is another matter. An amiable French scholar, Maurice Escoffier, had been engaged to conduct the Prince around France and supervise his studies; not surprisingly he reported on his protégé’s amazing progress. To judge, however, from the Prince’s dislike of the language and reluctance to speak it, an aversion which persisted even after he had lived in France for many years, the progress must have been limited, or at least not maintained. The most that can be said of his three months in France was that he mildly enjoyed them and learnt quite a lot about the country’s history and political structure. More important still, he made himself well liked. ‘He charmed everyone during his stay,’ read a letter which was the more convincing for not being intended for the eyes of his parents. ‘Old and young, rich and poor, were equally impressed by his frankness. The Breteuils could not say enough about his generous and open [belle et franche] nature.’
‘French customs are very curious, but I suppose I shall get used to them in time,’ wrote the Prince resignedly.
He was happiest at the Breteuil château in the valley of the Chevreuse, shooting, bathing in the lake, and generally behaving as if he was at home. ‘We hope you will treat him exactly like your own son,’ the King had written. ‘He is a good boy and I know he will always do at once what you tell him.’
The Marquis’s real sons may not have been best pleased by the imposition on them of this unexpected extra brother but they played their part gallantly. The Prince liked both of them: ‘Even the eldest who likes music is very nice.’
Fortunately François made up for this aberrant taste by liking tennis too. In Paris the Prince saw the sights; watched Sarah Bernhardt play L’Aiglon – ‘she is about 70 and takes the part of a boy of 18. I think she ought to stop acting now’;
visited the Jardin d’Acclimatation – ‘a rotten kind of zoo’;
was received by President Fallières and presented with the grand cordon of the Légion d’honneur – ‘Nothing could have been better or more self-possessed and tactful than the Prince’s manner,’ wrote the British Ambassador. ‘He did not hesitate at all in his French’; and visited the studio of the painter Monsieur Gillot – ‘The Yacht’s foremast is about half the height it ought to be,’ he told the King. ‘I think M. Gillot is one of these impressionist artists, but I know that you hate that sort of painting.’
He was not greatly impressed by the capital, telling the Aga Khan that he could not imagine what his grandfather had seen in it.
The press did not make it more agreeable for him. For the first time he found himself assailed by importunate photographers, and he did not relish the experience. His father sympathized. Unless the reporters behaved better, he decreed, ‘drastic steps must be taken to get rid of them’.
It would be interesting to know what he had in mind. The Premier and future President, Raymond Poincaré, met him several times during his stay in Paris and was struck by his ‘thoughtful character, eagerness to learn, interest in practical problems, and a real knowledge of industrial possibilities’. He was a poor trencherman, however, ‘the choicest menus being treated by him with complete indifference’.
What the Prince enjoyed most of all was the week he spent with the French Mediterranean fleet: he had a passion for the sea, wrote the Marquis de Breteuil, and would happily have made this part of his visit twice as long.
And so it was back to England and the final preparations for his life at Oxford. It seems to have been Hansell and Lord Derby who urged the merits of a university education on the King, probably with some encouragement from Lord Esher. Not everyone approved. ‘Surely this cannot be true,’ expostulated his great-aunt Augusta. ‘It is too democratic.’
That was one of the reasons that the King favoured it: ‘I have always been told that one can have the best time of one’s life at College if one makes up one’s mind,’
he told his son. The Prince was sceptical. He accepted that the time would probably pass well enough, at least provided Hansell came along, but he remained unenthusiastic.
When his mother tried to get him to make some choices about the furnishing of his rooms, he noted gloomily in his diary, ‘I am afraid it does not interest me much. I am just about fed up with the whole affair.’
The root of his woe became apparent when his brother Bertie remarked how much he envied him and the Prince retorted that the feeling was mutual. Oxford might be tolerable in its own way but it was not where he wished to be: ‘It is an awful situation and I only wish I was back quietly in the only service – the navy.’
As a Magdalen man himself, Hansell naturally urged its merits as a haven for the Prince. George V appealed to Lord Derby for advice. Starting from the very reasonable hypothesis that only three colleges were worth consideration, Derby dismissed New College as being at that moment beset by troubles and Christ Church as the haunt of nouveaux riches. That left Magdalen.
The King concurred. An additional argument was that Derby was ready to send his own son, Edward Stanley, to the same college. ‘David is certainly a most loyal boy and I am sure would always do his best to be keen and get on wherever he was,’ the King told Hansell.
In fact Magdalen does not seem to have been a bad choice. It had a reputation for independence of mind, the eschewing of anything that seemed smart or extravagant and a robust indifference to rank.
It was well suited for the somewhat special needs of an undergraduate who was also heir to the throne.
With Oxford as with Dartmouth, George V decreed that his son should be treated exactly like his contemporaries and then took steps to ensure that this would be impossible. The Prince was to be attended at Oxford not merely by Hansell and his valet Finch but also by an equerry. This last appointment caused some cogitation. Esher commented how difficult it would be to find somebody who would be ‘watchful but not seem to be so; instructive and not a bore; moral and not a prig; high spirited and not reckless. It would be an interesting task for a young man with imagination.’
The King preferred horses to imagination. He chose William Cadogan, a gallant and honourable soldier who was almost wholly without intellectual interests and whose chief function was to persuade his charge to hunt. ‘Not a very exciting sort of chap,’ commented the Prince when they first met.
As if this entourage did not sufficiently separate him from the common herd, the Prince was settled in his own suite of rooms, furnished by the Queen with Sheraton pieces of furniture and good watercolours. Odder still for Oxford, he had his own bathroom. It may not have been very luxurious – ‘a cold, converted torture chamber’ one of his contemporaries described it
– but it still set its owner apart from his fellows.
The real problem, however, was summed up by Cosmo Lang, then Archbishop of York. The object of the Prince going to Oxford, he assumed, was that he should enter ‘naturally and simply’ into college life. His life might be simple but would never be natural if his friends were selected for him. Yet if something of the sort was not done, the best men in college would hang back in the fear that they might seem royal toadies, while less desirable companions, ‘often agreeable and plausible enough’, would thrust themselves forward. The solution must be to persuade a few of the ‘leading and best men’ to ease the Prince’s passage into college society.
Derby’s son Stanley should obviously be a member of any such group.
On the whole the system worked. The Prince was still shy. Lord Grantley remembered his ‘characteristic way of coming into a room, jerking forward from the hips and fingering his tie the whole time … It looked as if it was torture to him to meet strangers.’
He was further handicapped by the fact that most of his contemporaries had moved on in a group from their respective public schools, while there were few if any naval cadets at Oxford. ‘The junior common room is something like a gunroom,’ he noted nostalgically in his diary. ‘At 7.00 I dined in hall … I got on fairly well, only my drawback is not knowing anyone. It lasted 1⁄2 hour and then Stanley and a chap called Higham sat in my room till 9.45. They are very nice and we talked about many things.’
It was not easy at first, but he was friendly and ready to become sociable. He forced himself out of his shell, attending the celebrated entertainments in the common room and marvelling at the amount people drank. ‘We were all pretty dead at the end and I had almost a drop too much. However, I managed all right … It is a good thing to do as one gets to know people.’
After the first few nights he spent almost every evening in the rooms of one of his friends, smoking, singing, talking or playing cards. Barrington-Ward, a future editor of The Times, remembered him calling in on his rooms when an impromptu concert was in progress. A number of cardboard trumpets were lying around. ‘The Prince promptly took one and made as much noise as anyone. He said he liked a “good row”. So we had a ragtime, comic songs and choruses, and he joined in merrily like a man … It was impossible not to like him. He is clean-looking and jolly, with no side at all.’
The friends he made, however, were not necessarily those whom his father or Hansell would have chosen. His opinion of Stanley varied from day to day, but his considered judgment in 1916, by which time they had become close friends, was that Stanley had greatly improved but that he had never really liked him as an undergraduate. ‘I wish you had rooms opposite mine, it would be great,’ he wrote to an old naval friend. ‘As it is, I have that chap Stanley, who I don’t know very well, and who is coshy!! That is the worst of all crimes!!’
Coshy meant stuck-up, putting on airs. Lord Cranborne was ‘very nice’ but Lord Ednam – who, as the Earl of Dudley, was in time to become one of his closest friends – was undoubtedly coshy; a period in a gunroom would have done him good.
The Prince’s friends tended to be more home-spun, people who would have fitted naturally into the Royal Navy. One or two were intellectuals; in February 1913 he dined for the first time with a man who was to play a critical role in his life, ‘the President of the Union debating society, W. Monckton, a very nice man’.
A few were deemed unsuitable. Hansell and Cadogan warned him against one in particular: ‘They say that Ronnie is a bad lot, he is a gt friend of mine and of course this is a gt blow to me. However I shall in no way chuck him but merely not be seen about with him.’
Unfortunately he made the mistake of inviting the delinquent Ronnie to meet his brother Prince Harry when the latter visited Oxford. Hansell ‘was very sick with me … I am an awful failure in this life and always do the most idiotic things.’
Such moods of contrition became more frequent after his first few months at Oxford. The Prince did nothing very wicked but for the first time in his life he found it possible to slip his leash, and it would have been surprising if he had not celebrated the fact with mild excess. Many years later he told the American journalist Cy Sulzberger that he had found Oxford quite agreeable ‘because we were drunk all the time’.
He exaggerated, but though not drunk all the time, he managed it not infrequently. On 10 November 1912 he drank too much port, fell, made his nose bleed, and had to be put to bed by two friends who distracted Hansell while he got undressed. But he had the resilience of youth. He was walking round the garden by 7.30 the following morning and apologizing to his friends not long afterwards – ‘They were awfully nice about it.’
Usually there was more noise than alcohol: ‘There were 25 of us and we went up to Somerville’s rooms where we danced and made a row … It was a great evening.’
He eschewed the chic world of Evelyn Waugh’s Bollinger Club baying for broken glass. He was elected to the Bullingdon – in its own eyes at least the most elite of Oxford dining clubs – went to a dinner, was made to drink too much, and retired furious and the worse for wear: ‘I will have nothing more to do with the filthy riding men, they are a beastly set.’
He never joined the set, but within a few months of making this entry in his diary he had become a riding man himself. His father considered that this was a part of his education quite as important as learning French or studying the constitution. ‘If you can’t ride, you know, I’m afraid people will call you a duffer,’ he told his son. Hunting was the only way to learn properly. ‘The English people like riding and it would make you very unpopular if you couldn’t do so.’
Cadogan was in charge of the training and found his pupil at first recalcitrant. A year before, the Prince had hunted near Sandringham and had stood about all day ‘soaked through and petrified with cold. And then they wonder why one does not like hunting!’
Now he grumblingly let himself be dragged off to ride in the neighbourhood but showed plainly that he thought it a bore – ‘deadly as usual’.
To his surprise he found that he was beginning to enjoy the riding more and more. He went out with the South Oxfordshire hunt, was in the saddle for seven hours without falling off, was awarded the brush and enjoyed his day.
‘Until a few months ago I was terrified of riding and loathed the sight of a horse,’ he told a friend, ‘but it suddenly came to me, and under Cadogan’s instruction and tuition, I have now plenty of confidence and jump everything!!’
Some time that spring he graduated to that horseman’s nirvana, the Pytchley hunt. The King’s private secretary, Lord Stamfordham, congratulated him with all the gravity befitting so august an occasion. ‘I solemnly believe that few things will tend more to endear you to the people who some day by God’s will will be your subjects.’
Riding was only one of the Prince’s sporting pursuits. He golfed, played squash and went for gruelling runs. He played cricket at Radley, made a duck, and commented sourly: ‘It’s a poor game.’
He was a regular member of the Magdalen football second XI, and appeared occasionally in the first. He shot from time to time on estates near Oxford. Lord Crawford met him in October 1913 with the Wantages at Lockinge. ‘The Prince of Wales seems overburdened with his duties which he performs with meticulous precision,’ he noted. ‘Poor boy, somehow he made me feel very sorry for him … If only he would bolt with a ballet girl, say for twenty-four hours!’
The poor boy still found time to gamble several evenings a week, though he rarely lost or won more than £10 or so; to acquire and drive a 39-horse-power touring model blue Daimler; to learn the bagpipes with Pipe-Major Ross of the Scots Guards. He joined the Officers’ Training Corps, whose adjutant was the future Field Marshal Jumbo Wilson, and scored 96 out of 100 shooting at a static target and 86 at a moving. Fifty would have earned a pass, and 75 been enough for qualification as a marksman. He took part in night manoeuvres in Blenheim Park and spent a hectic few days in the annual camp, rising at 5 a.m. to act as breakfast orderly and having a ride in an airship. ‘It was the first time I had ever flown and the sensation is wonderful.’
Into the interstices of these activities he fitted his academic life. Some further education was badly needed; his mind in 1912 was a ragbag of miscellaneous information and his power of expressing what he knew was limited. He spelt deplorably; in one letter alone writing ‘chaplin’ for chaplain, ‘chapple’ for chapel, ‘colision’, ‘dammaged’ and ‘explaned’. He was supposed to go regularly to lectures and follow a programme of special studies with tutors. The lectures he frequently eschewed. He went once to hear Walter Raleigh on English literature and complained, ‘It was very hard to understand and I do not think I shall go to any more.’
The Rev. Lancelot Phelps on political economy proved more attractive: ‘Political Economy interests me more the more that I do it and I think I have quite got hold of the line of thought.’
But the individual tuition was more important. The Prince studied history with Charles Grant Robertson, French with Monsieur Berthon, German with Professor Fiedler and constitutional law with Sir William Anson, the Warden of All Souls. Anson probably taught the Prince almost everything of importance which he retained from his time at Oxford; a brilliant expositor, a man of charm, humour and generosity, he was liked as well as admired by the Prince – ‘a remarkable and distinguished little man,’ he called him affectionately.
Unfortunately, the central figure, to whom the Prince had to read an essay every week, was the President of Magdalen, Sir Herbert Warren. Warren had a good mind and no doubt many other redeeming features, but what most struck the undergraduates was that he was a bore and a snob. The Prince loathed him – ‘an awful old man’ he described him.
Reading an essay to a critical and often supercilious pedagogue is always an ordeal; it is made worse if one dislikes one’s auditor. The Prince dreaded his weekly session. He knew, with reason, that essay-writing was not his forte and rarely got any pleasure from their composition. Most of his efforts survive;
on St Anselm, Beaconsfield, Chatham, Nelson, ‘The Relation of Democracy to War’, Tennyson. They were conscientious, superficial and unimaginative. Cromwell was ‘one of England’s greatest statesmen and generals’; on ‘Ambition’ he commented: ‘The most ideal form of ambition is when it is used for the sake of one’s country. That patriotism should be the genuine motive is the most perfect thing conceivable.’
His best essay, and the subject which he most cared about, dealt with the explorer Scott. He had read Scott’s Last Expedition while on holiday at York Cottage, a laborious process, since he read slowly and it kept him up until 1 a.m. for almost a month, but a rewarding one: ‘It is a most fascinating book and a wonderful story of pluck in the face of ghastly hardship and suffering.’
His essay reflected this enthusiasm; Warren thought well enough of it to send it to the King, who passed it on to the historian and former prime minister, Lord Rosebery. Rosebery was predictably enthusiastic: ‘It was really admirable … a clear, sympathetic and vigorous narrative through which one can see the author’s heart. I am quite astonished at it …’ He wrote more as courtier than critic, but the essay did deserve praise. The Prince’s final comment was characteristic: ‘It bears out the fact that Englishmen can endure hardships and face death as it should be faced.’
It cannot be said that Oxford widened his cultural horizons. ‘We listened to classical music till 10.00. It was very dull,’ he wrote gloomily in his diary; and again after the Russian ballet, ‘That form of entertainment, like most stage things, leaves me stone cold.’
Nor did he become a reading man. His tutors constantly praised his efforts but pointed out that his knowledge was too superficial; ‘he must read more and think more for himself which is most necessary in his position,’ was his mother’s verdict.
‘Bookish he will never be,’ wrote Warren in an otherwise unctuous article in The Times. Unsurprisingly, he went on: ‘The Prince of Wales will not want for power of ready and forcible presentation, either in speech or writing.’
Lord Esher had long talks with the Prince at Balmoral and found: ‘His memory is excellent and his vocabulary unusual, and above all things, he thinks his own thoughts.’
(The compliments were not returned. The Prince wrote of Esher: ‘That man has a finger in every pie and one cannot trust him.’
) A quick mind, a retentive memory, considerable curiosity, facility for self-expression: they were not everything but they were a lot.
The Prince admitted he owed something to Oxford but he was never fond of it nor ceased to think he would be better off in the Navy. His diary is pitted with groans about the awfulness of his life, increasing in violence as his second year wore on: ‘I’m absolutely fed up with the place and it has got on my nerves’; ‘It is pretty rotten to be back here’; ‘Back again in this hole!’
Warren pressed him to stay on for another term and get a degree. ‘The answer to the 1st is NO and the second doesn’t interest me at all!!’
At least in the spring and summer vacations of 1913 he escaped, both from Oxford and from his parents, to visit Germany. In later life he said that he had felt more at home in Germany than in France, ‘because there I stayed mostly among relations’.
His diary suggests that he enjoyed himself more because he was that much older and had correspondingly greater liberty. Cadogan replaced Hansell and saw himself more as companion than as tutor, while Professor Fiedler, who was also in the entourage, was a ‘jolly old chap’ who was easily disposed of. Once in Berlin the Prince locked the professor in the bathroom and escaped with a friend to sample the night life, giving the porter the key and saying that something seemed to be wrong with the lock.
His two longest stays were in Württemberg and Strelitz. He arrived at Württemberg in travelling clothes to find the King and his staff in full dress uniform, but soon settled in comfortably to this slow, sleepy court. Every day after a heavy lunch he and the King would drive around the city and adjoining countryside. At first the King would acknowledge the salutes of his subjects but ‘gradually movements of hand became shorter – eyes closed – all stopped – King sound asleep until horses pulled up at home and groom said “Majestät, ist zu Hause.”
There was no golf, no tennis, no fishing, one day shooting capercaillie – ‘It is a curious sport … but I am glad to have seen it’ – too much sightseeing and too many visits to the opera. ‘I am getting fed up with life here to say the least of it.’ He was taken to Das Rheingold – ‘such a waste of time’; Siegfried – ‘appallingly dull’; Der Freischutz – ‘not exciting’.
The King perhaps took in more than his young guest realized. The Prince had enjoyed his visits to an officers’ mess and to the Daimler factory, he told Queen Mary, ‘but visiting Museums he did not seem to like quite so much’.
Possibly word of this visit got through to Neustrelitz, for the Grand Duchess Augusta wrote in some alarm to say that she feared the Prince would be bored, ‘there being no sports nor Games of any kind’.
There was no reason to fear anything of the sort, replied Queen Mary firmly: ‘He is quite a contented person and never rushes about after amusement.’
Her brother Alge, future Earl of Athlone, who was there for the visit, was less confident: ‘Strelitz, as you can imagine, after a short time is more than a young person can stand. A week is enough for Alice and me.’ He found his nephew ‘a mixture of extreme youth and boyishness with the ways of a man over forty … We both, as everyone, liked him extremely. He is so liebenswürdig [lovable] and simple, too much so, he should now realize he is “The Prince” and not require so much pushing forward.’
Berlin proved the most enjoyable of his visits, mainly because he was entrusted for his entertainment to a young attaché at the British Embassy, Godfrey Thomas, who took him to funfairs, night clubs and the Palais de Danse, ‘where we remained till 2.00. It is a large public place frequented by very doubtful women with whom you go and dance, but it is devoid of all coarseness and vulgarity. I danced a good deal …’
He spent one night with Kaiser Wilhelm II and was startled to find him seated behind his desk on a military saddle mounted on a wooden block. The Emperor ‘explained condescendingly that he was so accustomed to sitting on a horse he found a saddle more conducive to clear, concise thinking’.
The Prince found his host unexpectedly easy to talk to and quite enjoyed his visit;
the Emperor, according to the Prince’s future biographer, Hector Bolitho, considered his guest charming and unassuming but ‘a young eagle, likely to play a big part in European affairs because he is far from being a pacifist’.
The Prince must have been uneasily aware that wherever he went in Germany he would be sized up as a potential husband for unmarried daughters. The courts of Germany had provided so many spouses for the British royal family that it was reasonable to assume the precedent would again be followed. He had experienced his first taste of what he could expect when the Emperor’s daughter, Victoria Louise, visited London in 1911. The press reported rumours that an engagement was imminent.
Dynastically it would have been most suitable and Princess Victoria Louise had many good points. A young maid of honour, Katherine Villiers, pronounced her wholly without good looks but with much sweetness and joie de vivre.
The Prince himself found her ‘most easy to get on with’.
But there is no reason to think that he or his parents gave any serious thought to marriage. Nor did Victoria Louise; she found the Prince ‘very nice’ but ‘terribly young, younger than he actually was’.
More real was the putative romance with Princess May, or more formally Caroline Matilda, of Schleswig-Holstein. The couple got on particularly well when they were staying together at Gotha. May was ‘such a nice girl’, Alge’s wife Alice reported, ‘much like the others only taller and very slim’.
Her brother-in-law August Wilhelm, son of Kaiser Wilhelm II, was sufficiently encouraged to write directly to the Prince in June 1914 to suggest that a match should be made. The nineteen-year-old Prince consulted his mother and with some difficulty constructed a reply – ‘an awkward job’.
His letter does not survive, probably he pleaded that he was too young to contemplate matrimony at the moment. The war put an end to the possibility but in 1915 he remarked rather wistfully to Godfrey Thomas, ‘Well, I could very easily have done worse.’ Thomas commented that, though Princess May’s teeth needed attention and her nose was too red, a dentist and a little powder would soon have put things to rights. ‘HRH was really very much attracted to her, and I am perfectly certain that if the War hadn’t come, it would have been brought off. It is difficult to see now who he will marry or when, but whoever it is, I know that he will often think with affectionate regret of Princess May as the might have been.’
It has been said that the sympathy for Germany which the Prince of Wales showed in the 1930s stemmed from the success of his pre-war visits. All the evidence is that, though he enjoyed his stay there and liked some of his relations, he was not particularly struck by the country or its people. ‘The Germans as a race,’ he told a friend, ‘are fat, stolid, unsympathetic, intensely military, and all the men have huge cigars sticking out of their faces at all times.’
‘The trip was very interesting,’ he reflected when he got back to London, ‘but I don’t care much about the Germans.’
Of the countries which he visited before the First World War, the one that pleased him most was Norway, where he loved the skiing, the open-air existence and the informality of court life – ‘a lovely country with a charming people,’ he found it. ‘It was just like home.’
This last comment betrayed his real priorities. Far though he might wander, and much pleasure though he might derive from his wanderings, whether as Prince, as King, or as Duke of Windsor, there was always for him to be no place like home.
By the summer of 1914 the King had agreed that his son should spend the last few months of the year travelling and should join the Grenadier Guards the following year. The prospect was pleasing enough, but already shades of the prison house were beginning to close upon the growing Prince. The first dread intimation of what was to come had struck him in June 1912, when he got back at lunch time from his stay in France to find that the same afternoon he had to go with the King and Queen to a St John’s Ambulance Parade – ‘rather, if not very dull’; at 6.30 p.m. he was receiving the Khedive of Egypt and at 8.30 he was taking the wife of the Bishop of Winchester in to dinner.
From then on public functions multiplied. He quickly decided that the more formal and decorous they were, the more he would dislike them. He attended his first court in March 1914 and found it ‘mighty poor fun … I went in with the parents to the ballroom and stood till 11.00 while hundreds of women went by, each one plainer than the last … I don’t mind if I never go to one again.’ He did go, of course, and resented it even more: ‘a bum show. This court etiquette is intolerable.’ As for the state visit of the King and Queen of Denmark: ‘What rot and a waste of time, money and energy all these state visits are.’
When he had a proper job to do, however, he did it conscientiously and well. He was sent by the King to greet Poincaré, now President of the Republic, on his arrival at Portsmouth. The French statesman was impressed by his ‘charm of manner and vivacity’. The Prince had ‘lost none of his former delightful simplicity’ but had ‘“come on” a good deal’.
The King was delighted by the reports he was given of his son’s performance: ‘It gave both Mama and me great pleasure … I may sometimes find fault with you but I assure you it is only for your own good and because I am so devoted to you.’
The Prince’s first important solo performance came in June 1914 when he opened the new church of St Anselm on the Duchy of Cornwall estates in south London. He took endless trouble with his speech and carried it off well: ‘I had a wonderful sense of confidence in the audience, who I felt would make allowances for it being my 1st public function.’
At present, he told his audience, he knew little of the difficulties which beset those who were concerned with housing for the working classes, ‘but by studying the comfort and happiness of my tenants I hope to gain experience’. Congratulations flowed in, on his diction, his pace, his obvious sincerity; the one that would have pleased him most because it was not intended for his eyes was sent to one of the ladies-in-waiting, Lady Fortescue. ‘It was a wonderful success. He did it quite beautifully. At first he seemed a little nervous but it wore off and his speech was quite charming. He said it as if he really meant it … and in such a firm, charming voice. Everyone was tremendously enthusiastic … He looked so young among all those elderly prelates, but so dignified.’
For the first time he began to talk seriously to politicians and form opinions of them. Churchill was his hero, mainly because he was now First Lord of the Admiralty and arch advocate of a larger Navy: ‘He is a wonderful man and has a great power of work.’ Asquith, the Prime Minister, he liked, though he found Mrs Asquith ‘rather tiring and never stops talking’; Esher and Lulu Harcourt (the Colonial Secretary) were particularly tiresome.
If he had any preference between the parties he did not confide it to his diary, though on certain issues he feared the Liberal government would be insufficiently firm. He had strong views about the suffragettes and told his father that he hoped ‘the woman suffrage bill will never be passed. It is curious how divided the present cabinet is on the subject.’
To his relief Asquith held firm. ‘I really think that at last some drastic measures are to be taken as regards those bl-d- suffragettes, whose conduct is becoming more and more infamous every day,’ he told Godfrey Thomas in the summer of 1914.
He was as strongly opposed to Home Rule for Ireland. ‘I hope it will not pass,’ he wrote in his diary when the Home Rule Bill was introduced in 1912.
His parents shared his views on the future of Ulster. Queen Mary wrote him outspoken letters in March and April 1914 about the weakness of the government and the deplorable way they had treated the Army.
‘Although we aren’t supposed to have any politics,’ the Prince responded, ‘there does come a time when all that outward nonsense must be put aside, and that time has come.’
Socially his life was transformed in that last summer before the war. His parents had had a party for him at Buckingham Palace in March 1913. ‘I had to dance, a thing I hate,’ he wrote forlornly in his diary: ‘The whole thing was a great strain.’ He did not change his views for a year at least; then in July 1914 as a twenty-year-old he went to the Londesboroughs’ ball. ‘I stuck out to the bitter end and got back at 2 a.m. It was really great fun,’ he recorded in mild astonishment. Next night it was the turn of the Portlands: ‘The floor was perfect and my dancing is improving.’ He stayed till 3.45, and did the same the following night at the Salisburys’.
A looker-on at the Salisburys’ dance who did not know about his change of heart commiserated on his sad plight: ‘The Prince is no dancer … It was something of an ordeal for so young a boy and of so retiring a disposition.’
The sympathy was uncalled for: ‘I have now become fond of dancing and love going out!’
But he was still discriminating. Baroness Orczy saw him at a court ball in mid-July, dancing the quadrille d’honneur with one of his aunts and looking ‘moody and somewhat bored’.
Nor did he allow his new-found enthusiasm in any other way to change his train of life. He was up at 6 a.m. after the Londesborough ball, rose at 7 a.m. for a swim after the Portlands’ and was playing squash by 7 a.m. after the Salisburys’: ‘I’ve had only 8 hours sleep in the last 72 hours.’
The ferocious social round was combined with a course with the Life Guards – riding school, sword drill, care of horses and equipment, marching. ‘Not very exciting but anyhow a definite job which is the gt thing!!’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Military life and ways are curious.’
He still pined for the Navy. Halfway through his cavalry course he went with the King to Portsmouth for the naval review and visited old friends aboard HMS Collingwood. It was ‘glorious. God what a life this is compared to my attachment.’
But he knew that it was a paradise not to be regained. The plan was that he should spend 1915 with the Grenadier Guards, 1916 with the Royal Horse Artillery, and then join the 10th Hussars on their return from South Africa. Meanwhile he danced the summer away and made plans for another grand tour of Europe in the autumn. A break in the routine came at the end of June when he spent a week with the Officers’ Training Corps and manoeuvred vigorously about the plains near Aldershot. ‘When in camp I make it a rule never to open a newspaper,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘so am completely ignorant of all happenings in the outer World, except that the Austrian Archduke and his wife have been assassinated. I expect it has caused a stir in Germany.’
3
‘Oh!! That I Had a Job’
THAT IN 1914 THE YOUTH OF BRITAIN WENT EXULTANTLY to war is one of the stranger features of that agonizing conflict. The Prince of Wales had even less reason than most to share in this exultation. For one thing, many of his close relations, whom he had grown to know and like over the past few years, were now numbered among the enemy. For another, his position as heir to the throne set him apart from his contemporaries: they set off with armour shining to defeat the Huns and be home by Christmas, he knew that his armour was likely to be more ornamental than useful and that he had only a slim chance of wearing it in battle. Yet when he heard that he was to join the Army in France, he wrote to Sir George Arthur of this ‘wonderful and joyous surprise’. Twenty-five years later he was shown this letter and commented how terrifying he found it, coming as it did from an average boy of twenty. He had conceived war almost as a holiday, ‘a glorious adventure’. ‘How disillusioned we all were at the end of it,’ he commented ruefully. ‘One wonders if the generation of that age today feel as we did, or are they conscious of the appalling consequences of another World war and its futility? No! far worse than that how it would utterly destroy civilization.’
The run-up to war found the Prince incredulous and baffled. The murder of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo embroiled first Austria and Serbia, then Germany and Russia, finally France and Britain. The Prince was inclined to believe that Russia and Germany were behaving reasonably and that Austria was the prime offender, but admitted, ‘I must stop talking all this rot, for I know nothing about it.’
As war between France and Germany became inevitable, his chief fear was lest the government should stay neutral. ‘That will be the end of us; we shall never be trusted by any power again.’
The decision to stand by our allies came as a great relief but ‘Oh!! God; the whole thing is too big to comprehend!! Oh!! That I had a job.’
That last expostulation was to be his constant refrain for the next four years. He went on to the balcony with his parents at Buckingham Palace to acknowledge the cheers of the crowd. The King wrote in his diary that night that he prayed to God he would protect dear Bertie’s life.
It never occurred to him that his eldest son might be exposed to danger. How could he be? He was the Prince of Wales.
The Prince poured out his woes to his closest confidant, his brother Bertie:
Well, this is just about the mightiest calamity that has ever or will ever befall mankind … To think that but 17 days ago we were together with everything working peacefully in Europe, and now we are at the commencement of a most hideous and appalling war, the duration or issue of which are impossible to predict … ‘England at war with Germany!!’ that seems a sentence which would appear nowhere but in a mad novel.
The Germans could never have chosen a worse moment, and serve them right too if they are absolutely crushed, as I can but think they will be. The way they have behaved will go down to history as about the worst and most infamous action of any govt!! Don’t you agree? I bet you do.
I am as good as heartbroken to think I am totally devoid of any job whatsoever and have not the faintest chance of being able to serve my country. I have to stay at home with the women and children, a passenger of the worst description!! Here I am in this bloody gt palace, doing absolutely nothing but attend meals … Surely a man of 20 has higher things to hope for? But I haven’t apparently! Oh God it is becoming unbearable to live this usual life of ease and comfort at home, when you my dear old boy, and all naval and army officers, are toiling under unpleasant conditions, suffering hardships and running gt risks with your lives, for the defence and honour of England … At such a time you will picture me here, depressed and miserable and taking no more part in this huge undertaking than Harry and George, 2 irresponsible kids who run about playing inane games in the passage. However, enough about my rotten self, for I am a most bum specimen of humanity, and so must not be considered.
The self-disparagement in the last sentence is a constant feature of his letters and his diary; consciously overstated, yet nonetheless sincere. He knew that it was not his fault that he was not among the first of the volunteers to fight for King and country, but he still condemned himself for being left behind. In fact his period of misery hanging around ‘this awful palace where I have had the worst weeks of my life’
was quickly over. On 6 August 1914, only the day after he had written in such anguish to his brother, he asked for and was given a commission in the Grenadier Guards. He was only 5 feet 7 inches tall instead of the regulation 6 feet, but recorded in triumph: ‘I am to go to the King’s Company but shall be treated just like an ordinary officer, thank goodness, and am to share a room in barracks.’
In fact his treatment for the first fortnight was far worse than the ordinary officer, let alone the ordinary Guards officer, would have expected while serving at home. The 1st Battalion was training at Warley Barracks in Brentwood. The officers’ mess was a ‘filthy hole’, the rooms were garrets, there was no furniture and no carpet. ‘But what does one care when living under war conditions? I am so glad to have joined up and to have escaped from the palace!!’
When the battalion moved back to London his euphoric mood persisted. He established that he was the first Prince of Wales ever to carry the colours on the King’s Guard at Buckingham Palace, and accepted with relish what in peacetime he would have dismissed as a piece of pompous ritual, as well as positively welcoming the long, boring route marches from Wellington Barracks through Kensington and Fulham returning down the King’s Road. ‘It is pretty rotten in London,’ he told Godfrey Thomas, ‘and we can’t do any training. But anyhow we are on the spot and feel that this is a stepping stone to getting out!! How we long for it.’
He deluded himself that he would continue to be treated ‘just like an ordinary officer’ and would soon go to France and the front with his fellow officers. His delusion was quickly dispelled. On 8 September, a week before the 1st Battalion sailed, his father told him that he would not accompany it. Instead he would join the 3rd Battalion and remain in London. ‘This is a bitter disappointment,’ he wrote in his diary.
When the time came for him to watch the battalion march off from the barracks, his bitterness was still greater. ‘I am a broken man,’ he told his friend Jack Lawrence. ‘It is terrible being left behind!!’
His closest friend in the Grenadiers, Lord Desmond Fitzgerald – one of the very few contemporaries who was invited to call him ‘Eddie’ – wrote to console him and tell him how much he had admired ‘the way you have borne your disappointment … However, it is not the fact of going to war, when thousands are doing so, that needs bravery; but to cheerfully accept the unpleasant things of life needs the greatest strength of character. And thus you have been able to set a wonderful example of how to do one’s duty.’
The Prince was unconvinced. In public he put a good face on it, but his misery was too acute to conceal from his friends. Indeed, he was anxious to advertise it; he would have been less than human if he had not wanted everyone to know that he was eager to share the dangers of war and stayed behind against his will. How real those dangers were became rapidly apparent; by 2 November only six officers of his beloved 1st Battalion remained unwounded.
He appealed to the Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener, and called on him with his father’s assistant private secretary, Clive Wigram. ‘He is now a gt fat bloated man,’ he wrote vengefully in his diary, who put forward what seemed to the Prince most unconvincing reasons for refusing him leave to return to the 1st Battalion, but held out vague hopes of his joining the staff of the Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force, Sir John French, in a few months when the line had been stabilized. ‘A pretty rotten contrast to my gt wish,’ commented the Prince, adding grudgingly: ‘He is a rough customer but mighty strong, and is just the man to boss these politicians at such a time!!’
The King told Esher that his son had argued that he was expendable; if he were killed there were four brothers to take his place. ‘What if you were not killed, but taken prisoner?’ Kitchener asked drily.
While eating his heart out in London with the 3rd Battalion of the Grenadiers – ‘strictly entre nous,’ he told Lady Glenusk, ‘there are not many really nice people in the 3rd Batt … The junior ensigns are a poor lot!!’
– he made himself useful in other ways. Shortly before the outbreak of war he had become President of a National Fund for providing food for the poor, and had published an appeal in the daily papers. A quarter of a million pounds came in on the first day and within a week the total was more than £1 million. Most of the work was done by a Liberal member of parliament, Ernest Benn – future Lord Stansgate – whom the Prince judged ‘a nice, capable little man’.
Public relations were entrusted to a Mr Pearson, who wanted the Prince to be painted by the military artist Caton Woodville at the head of his regiment, and the resultant poster to be exhibited on every available hoarding. This idea was quashed (as also was a still more eccentric suggestion that a certain celebrated music hall artist should be drawn in a cart to Trafalgar Square where he would delight the populace by playing patriotic airs on a piano with his nose).
The King approved the principle of the Fund, but insisted that whatever publicity there was should stress that his son had nothing to do with its administration. Otherwise he foresaw the disgruntled poor blaming the Prince if their applications for relief were rejected.
The Prince took the point and fully shared his father’s apprehension. All his life he disliked the role of patron, lending his name to some enterprise over which he had no real control. At the end of 1915 he became Chairman of the Statutory Committee of the Patriotic Fund, a body set up to concern itself with the care of sailors and soldiers who had suffered during the war. ‘Its work will, alas!, be carried into long years to come …’ explained Lord Stamfordham. ‘It will indeed be a vast machine of National Relief.’
Few projects could have appealed more strongly to the Prince, but after the inaugural meeting he still wrote gloomily: ‘It’s such a rotten show for me; just a mere figurehead with the name of P of Wales as usual!!’
Major Cadogan had rejoined his regiment when war broke out, and to help him with the Fund and his other duties the Prince persuaded Godfrey Thomas to take time off from the Foreign Office and join him as part-time equerry. His chief function, in Stamfordham’s eyes at any rate, was to persuade his master to eat more and take less exercise. Thomas tried dutifully but soon admitted defeat. He won the King’s confidence, however, and was held to be a healthy influence on his employer. Towards the end of 1914 he spent a weekend with the royal family at York Cottage. After dinner everyone sat around while the King, in big tortoiseshell spectacles, read extracts from the newspapers, ‘generally adding explosive comments about the Germans’. When the Queen and Princess Mary had gone to bed, the party adjourned to the billiard room, where the Prince of Wales and Prince Albert played while the King read his telegrams. Next day they went for a long walk. On the way back they met the epileptic Prince John and his nurse. ‘The Prince of Wales took him for a run in a kind of push-cart he had, and they both disappeared from view.’
The Prince’s initial distaste for the idea of a job on French’s staff lessened as other possibilities faded, and when the King finally told him the time had come he was ecstatic: ‘This seems almost too good to be true, for once across the Channel lots of things are possible.’
Stamfordham told French that the King wanted his son ‘to gain practical experience of the vast machinery employed in the conduct of a Campaign’. He was to be attached to the various sections of the headquarters and to attend talks with the Chief of Staff – ‘You will find him an attentive, silent listener, absolutely reticent and discreet.’
This was not at all how the Prince saw his future, and Thomas observed that he was in a notably bad temper when he had to put aside his normal regimental kit and don the staff uniform with red tabs and cap to match;
but he comforted himself with the thought that once in France it would surely be possible to get to the front. The most serious danger seemed to be that the fighting would be over before he could be in the thick of it. His comments on the progress of the war were resolutely optimistic. ‘Those bloody Germans are fairly getting it in the neck and no mistake,’ he told Jack Lawrence on 20 August,
and a month later assured his aunt Alice: ‘It really looks as if the allies were getting a proper grip of the situation and that the German downfall has commenced.’
With the declaration of war the Germans had become unequivocally ‘bloody’, guilty of ‘savage barbarism’
and ‘infamous conduct’; ‘As for the Emperor’s conduct, words fail me!!’
When words did fail him, he filled the gap with obscenities. Writing after gas had just been used he told his friend Houston-Boswell: ‘One can’t be surprised at anything those German buggers do. One really can’t believe we are fighting European christians … I am a great advocate of the principle of taking no prisoners or as few as possible!!’
Godfrey Thomas commented on the Prince’s propensity at this time to use bad language and tell filthy stories: ‘It is a phase that most people go through at their public school and I hope that it has merely come a bit late in his case and that he’ll soon get out of it.’
He did, but in the years that followed his escape from the Palace he felt bound to emphasize his independence by larding his diary and letters to his contemporaries with the more conventional expletives.
The Prince’s arrival in France, General Lambton told the King, had given universal pleasure: ‘I will try to keep him well occupied and as far from shells as possible.’
In this sentence were encapsulated the Prince’s two principal causes for woe over the next eighteen months – indeed, for the duration of the war; he was kept far from shells, he was not well occupied. The latter was not the fault of French or Lambton. A stray and untrained second lieutenant in supreme headquarters will inevitably be at a loose end and overworked senior officers cannot always be inventing tasks for him. If he had not been the Prince of Wales he might have been of modest use at the most menial level; if he had possessed a forceful personality and administrative skills he might have worked himself into a position unjustified by his rank; but he was the Prince, he was far from forceful, his skills were limited. ‘It’s a pretty rotten life for me,’ he complained to Thomas. ‘I feel I’m the only man out here without a job, and it’s true; thus I am but an onlooker in uniform, and become less like an officer every day.’
To have been an orthodox ADC to French would at least have involved regular duties, but the King felt it was improper for the Prince of Wales to act in such a role.
Instead he was in attendance but with no real function: ‘I merely sloped along astern, looking a bloody fool and very much in the way.’
Occasionally he was given some proper work to do. Once he was allowed to use his German in the interrogation of prisoners. The peasants were the most ready to talk, and, even if taciturn originally, could usually be persuaded to tell all they knew by a show of amazement at their ignorance. The more educated prisoners he found ‘all lie, and one can’t blame them’. In such a case the approved technique was to give the prisoner a good meal with plenty of wine. This loosened his tongue. ‘Rather a beastly idea, perhaps, but still it is necessary.’
He hoped that similar work would follow, but it never did. When, very occasionally, he found himself doing something useful, his gratification was obvious. In March 1915 he reconnoitred the defences around Le Quesnoy. ‘The work is really rather responsible,’ he told his father proudly, ‘as it is v. necessary that the staff should have detailed information …’
Stamfordham urged him not to admit to the King that he was bored and under-employed lest he found himself called back to England. ‘You are so terribly keen and full of “go” that you wish always to be doing something …’
More cheeringly, Desmond Fitzgerald insisted that he was always doing something: ‘You have little idea what an enormous amount of good you do and how much everyone admires and loves you.’
But it was not the sort of love and admiration the Prince wanted. Shortly after his arrival he was made to inspect some Indian troops. He accepted that his visit had done wonders for their morale but, ‘I hated this, as I haven’t come out for that sort of thing.’
French was restrained in his use of the Prince as popular figurehead, but he knew well that ‘that sort of thing’ was what the Army wanted.
Hospital visiting was another valuable service. ‘It pleases the men and shows you take a sympathetic interest in their welfare,’ George V told his son.
The sympathy was real, and though the Prince felt he should be playing a more valiant role, the warmth and generosity of his nature ensured that the memory of his visits was cherished by all those who experienced them. There is a story, often recounted, of the occasion when the Prince noticed that one patient had been segregated behind curtains. He asked why, and was told that the man had been so fearfully mutilated that it was thought better to keep him out of the way. The Prince insisted on seeing him, stood by his bed, then leant over and kissed him. Lady Donaldson in her admirable biography, properly sceptical of such picturesque but unsubstantiated anecdotes, dismissed it as apocryphal.
It does sound too good to be true. But many years later Gordon Selwyn, the chaplain of the hospital and later Dean of Winchester, told Shane Leslie how well he recalled the scene. ‘Remember,’ the Dean said, ‘men have gone to heaven for less. Never can we forget that action.’
Keeping on good terms with the French was another way the Prince could help significantly. He was frequently despatched on liaison visits to French headquarters. The reports which he drafted on his return were of slight value. The cavalry were ‘not bad riders … but they are about the worst horse masters in the world!!’; the officers were markedly inferior to their British counterparts: ‘They are brave enough and some of them very capable, but they don’t possess that personality or refineness [sic] which the British officer does, giving the latter complete control over his men, who will generally respect him and follow him anywhere!! How can this ideal state of affairs be reached when frequently the officer is of much lower birth than some of his men?’ In spite of this, he concluded in some surprise, ‘discipline in the French army is good one would say’.
But what mattered was not his somewhat jejune judgment of the French Army but the impression he left behind him. ‘I only hope I did some good,’ the Prince wrote to his father … ‘I went out of my way to be civil and always called on any general or senior officer at any place I passed.’
Staunch republicans usually make the most fervent royalists and the French military warmed to their shy, friendly and unassuming visitor. ‘Il a su ravir tout le monde par sa simplicité, sa bonne grace et sa belle jeunesse,’ wrote General Huguet. ‘Il sait par ses charmantes qualités gagner les coeurs autour de lui.’
Huguet was an anglophile; more remarkable was the notoriously rebarbative and anti-British general who, after a visit by the Prince, admitted reluctantly: ‘Il parait que parmi vous autres, il y a quand même des gens civilisés.’
But this was not why he had come to France. Endlessly he reproached himself for the comfort and ease of his existence, compared with the rigours of ‘the poor people in the trenches. I fear this is going to be a very soft life.’
His initial impression of Sir John French was good – ‘he seems a charming man, so human’ – but he could not say as much for the rest of the staff; ‘a d—d uninteresting crowd and no mistake’.
In a less atrabilious mood he would admit that it was not so much that the staff were boring as that they were twenty years older than him. At GHQ a colonel was small fry; young men of twenty were unheard of. Osbert Sitwell, who sometimes found himself similarly out of place at large gatherings of dignitaries, remembered ‘the very young, slight figure of the Prince of Wales … with his extreme charm, his melancholy smile and angry eyes, trying like myself, I expect, to pretend he was enjoying himself’.
The Prince was lonely, and the loneliness was only exacerbated by the constant presence of the officer charged with his day-to-day wellbeing, the middle-aged and portly Colonel Barry. Only when Barry was joined in January 1915 by a young Grenadier captain, Lord Claud Hamilton, was the Prince’s desolation mitigated: ‘He is such a good chap and has done very well in the 1st batt and got a DSO. It is very nice for me having him here.’
The sharpest pain lay in the knowledge that his contemporaries, in particular in the Grenadiers, were dying in their tens of thousands while he sat safely behind the line. Thirty-five Grenadier officers were killed in the fighting at Neuve Chapelle in March 1915: ‘Isn’t it too ghastly to think of …’ he wrote to his closest confidante, Lady Coke. ‘But of course I never went near the fighting; kept right away as usual!!’
Godfrey Thomas got the same complaint: ‘I do hate being a prince and not allowed to fight!!’
On his birthday Desmond Fitzgerald said that he could not think of any suitable present: ‘The only thing I know of that you would really like, I cannot give you, and that is that you would become an ordinary person.’
He strove endlessly to get permission to join his regiment, or to serve even for a few days in the front line. Briefly he was posted to General Charles Monro’s divisional headquarters near Bethune, only to be moved back promptly when an attack was imminent. But he did win at least half his point. In February 1915 the King agreed that he might visit the trenches ‘provided that you are with responsible people … I want you to do exactly what other young officers on the Staff do, but not to run unnecessary risks, no “joy-rides” or looking for adventure … I want you to gain an insight into the life they lead in the trenches. I hope now your mind will be at rest and that you will not be depressed any more. You can do anything within reason except actually fighting in the trenches.’
It was something, a great deal indeed, but opportunities for a young officer at GHQ to approach the front line were still few and far between. There are plenty of accounts which describe his hair-breadth ’scapes i’ the imminent deadly breach. The future Lord Lee wrote that ‘his main desire appeared to be to get either killed or wounded. At intervals he had to be retrieved from advanced trenches and dugouts, whither he had escaped by one subterfuge or another.’
A fellow officer described him complaining he had never seen a shell burst within a hundred yards of him. Claud Hamilton remarked that one had burst nearer than that. ‘Yes, but dash it, I never saw it!’ exclaimed the Prince.
‘He loved danger,’ said the Rev. Tubby Clayton.
Clayton’s comment, at least, is nonsense. The Prince never courted danger, still less loved it. He found shelling terrifying and freely admitted as much. General Sir Ian Hamilton denied that he ever flouted his instructions or took unnecessary risks. ‘He did take risks, but they were always in the line of duty. We did worry about him … but not because of any insubordination on his part.’
Whenever he left the trenches to return to headquarters, he did so with relief. But he did so with shame as well. The ferocious battering to which he subjected his body, with a regime of endless walks and runs, a minimum of food and sleep, must have been in part a mortification of the flesh to assuage this conviction of his inadequacy. If he had been able to change places with a subaltern in the most exposed part of the line he would have done so with alacrity, though also with dismay and trepidation. The moans that fill his diary and letters to his friends about his unlucky lot are wearisome to read and seem sometimes overdone. Their constant refrain, however, was that he was being denied the chance to do as his friends and contemporaries were doing and risk his life for his country. He never stopped trying and it is impossible not to feel respect for his efforts.
His brief sojourn with Monro and the 2nd Division at Bethune included a visit to the Guards Brigade – ‘The best day I have had since I’ve been out, for it was a real treat to be with my brother officers and away from the staff.’ The treat was cut short when Monro decided he was too close to the line and sent him back: ‘It did bring it home to me how wretched it is to be the Prince of Wales!! I almost broke down.’
Shortly after his father’s new dispensation, he got within a hundred yards of the German lines, but heard only a few snipers’ shots. Then, at Givenchy in March 1915, he came under shellfire for the first time and saw the aftermath of a fierce battle: ‘It was a marvellous 2 hrs for me; in my wildest dreams I never thought I sh’d see so much. There are masses of corpses in the open swampy space; a terrible sight.’
His excitement was tempered by the horror of the battle. Six officers of the 1st Battalion of the Grenadier Guards were killed in a single day and he felt only relief when a halt was called: ‘The operations of the last two days have seemed madness to me. Just sheer murder to attack now.’
For him it was back to GHQ. ‘I am in the depths of depression, realizing at last that there is no job I can take on out here, so am really the only man who has nothing to do, or anything to work for.’
He was inevitably a prime exhibit for visitors to GHQ. Churchill was one of the more regular. Like most immature young men of twenty, the Prince tended to take his opinions from those around him. Regular Army officers viewed Churchill with mingled distrust and distaste. The Prince followed suit. His initially mild complaints at the frequency of Churchill’s visits when he had ‘other and more important work to perform’
became more splenetic and the Minister was categorized as an ‘interfering politician’, bothering the overworked naval and military authorities.
By the time the First Lord resigned in 1915 he had become an ‘intriguing swine’;
‘Thank God both Winston and Fisher have gone;’ he exclaimed to Godfrey Thomas, ‘the former is nothing short of a national danger.’
On the whole he thought it a good thing that politicians should come out to France ‘to see a few realities’,
but the visits renewed his sense of grievance: ‘Mr Bonar Law arrived last night … and of course went out today with the express purpose of visiting a trench; he will have seen more of the actual fighting than I have in three months!!’
In May 1915 his ceaseless efforts to get closer to the front met with some success when he was transferred to the HQ of 1st Army Corps, to whose command Sir Charles Monro had been promoted. It was still staff work but, at least, he told Thomas, ‘now I am out a gt deal and never get into a car if I can possibly help it, doing all my work riding, biking or on foot. That keeps me fairly fit …’
The luxury was less oppressive than at GHQ: ‘No tap, no pump, the only source of [water] is from a v. deep open well and it takes 3 mins to draw a small tub!!’
Best of all, the work was more satisfying. He was now on the administrative side, concerned mainly with the supply of ammunition. ‘I like this so much better than on the Intelligence branch where I was before as one is dealing with facts and not theories; I’m not a theorist and what I am doing now interests me.’
His new job made him particularly resentful of the shortage of ammunition and other resources caused by the Dardanelles campaign. ‘It makes me sick to think of 10 ruddy DIVS killing old Turks instead of Boches!!’ he told Thomas. ‘That won’t help us.’ The campaign had been a mistake, he told the Marquis de Breteuil, though he reluctantly accepted that ‘une fois commencée, il faut la finir, et vaincre les Turcs.’
Oliver Lyttelton met the Prince at 1st Army Corps HQ. ‘He was,’ wrote Lyttelton, ‘the most charming and delightful being that I had ever known.’ The two men were invited by Desmond Fitzgerald to dine with the Irish Guards about four miles away. Lyttelton was relieved at the thought that the Prince’s car would be available but instead found he was expected to bicycle. Worse still: ‘“I never get off,” said HRH, as we faced a mile or two of hilly road. “It is one of the ways that I keep fit.” I was in good training, but after a mile I had sweated through my Sam Browne belt and had begun to entertain some republican inclinations. However, we had a gay and delightful evening: the Prince was happy and in the highest spirits; we replaced our lost tissue with some old brandy, and free-wheeled home to our cage like school-boys.’
‘The prince eats little and walks much,’ Lyttelton told his mother. ‘We eat much and walk little.’
On 23 June 1915 the Prince of Wales came of age. The two trustees of his minority, Lord Balfour of Burleigh and Lord Revel-stoke, retired; so also did the Treasurer of the Duchy of Cornwall, Walter Peacock. Sydney Greville was appointed Treasurer and the Prince’s Comptroller. But no festivities marked what would normally have been an occasion for fastuous celebration. ‘It was a sad and depressing occasion,’ the Prince told Lady Coke, ‘with this ghastly war on and so many of one’s best friends killed. In fact I did my utmost to forget it altogether.’
His gloom was alleviated but far from dispelled by his new posting. He had barely arrived at Monro’s HQ before the 1st Army attacked and was repelled. ‘It is bloody when there is any fighting,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘as everyone is too busy to bother about a … useless ullage like myself and the result is that I’m the only man in N France who is unemployed and has no job!!’
In July 1915 he spent his first night in the trenches. ‘My impressions that night were of constant close proximity to death, repugnance from the stink of the unburied corpses … and general gloom and apprehension,’ he told his father. ‘It was all a real eye opener to me, now I have some slight conception of all that our officers and men have to go thro!! The whole life is horrible and ghastly beyond conception.’ And this was an uneventful summer night. ‘Think what it must have been like during a night of fighting in the winter? It does make one think.’
The King first heard of his son’s adventures at second hand and was indignant, then received a letter from the Prince himself and decided all was in order; ‘which shows,’ concluded Stamfordham, ‘that so long as the King hears of your doings direct from yourself it is all right’.
He rarely had cause to complain; the Prince wrote to his father regularly and at inordinate length, sometimes spending two or three hours a night over these compositions before moving on to the rest of his extensive correspondence. ‘Your letters are capital and everything very well described,’ the King complimented him, going on to complain about the number of words omitted or misspelt.
Stamfordham took up the point: ‘I know you will curse me as an interfering old ass,’ he told the Prince; ‘but realizing how devoted you are to the King, and how strongly these feelings are reciprocated … I want to put to rights a small matter which causes a slight, tho’ of course only temporary annoyance.’
The Prince did take more care after this rebuke but his spelling remained disastrous; it improved gradually over the years but was shaky till the day he died.
Kitchener came out in the same month. ‘He is fatter than ever and as red as usual, but seemed pleased with everything,’ the Prince noted in his diary – adding rather cryptically, ‘Wow!! Wow!!’
Troops lined the road for the visit, a mark of grandeur which the Prince felt should have been reserved for his father – ‘Unless you looked inside the car it might have been you driving round, which I thought absolutely wrong.’ Still, the troops did not cheer as vigorously as they had for the King, ‘and I happen to know that they were all v. bored at being turned out to line the roads’.
He thought both Kitchener and French were to be criticized for the embittered bickering between them which made so difficult the conduct of the war – ‘It does seem a disgrace that people in high positions can’t put away all thoughts for themselves at such a time!!’ – but put most of the blame on French: ‘an odd little man and far from clever’.
When the King visited France, the Prince of Wales was in attendance. He would have preferred to be with his battalion, but it was a welcome break from GHQ. George V was delighted with his son’s performance. ‘I am glad to say he is very popular with everyone and is tremendously keen to do anything he can,’ he told the Queen.
The Prince had told his father that one of the worst features of life in France was the ignorance of and hostility to the Navy shown by most senior officers. He was often asked whether the Navy was doing anything at all. ‘Although I am now serving in the army, I never forget that I was brought up in the Navy … So it grieves … me much to hear these things said of my beloved service.’
Every time he saw the King he pleaded that he should be allowed to visit the fleet at Scapa Flow. The King, for some reason that neither Stamfordham nor the Queen could understand, at first took strong exception to the idea. Queen Mary was stirred to unwonted activity on the subject: ‘There can be no possible objection to your going now … You may certainly count on my support.’
They won the day. In August 1915 the visit took place. Godfrey Thomas accompanied the Prince and recorded his delight and child-like enthusiasm for all he saw.
On the return journey they were cajoled into breaking their journey at Dunrobin, home of the Duke of Sutherland. They had insisted the visit should be informal, but when the train arrived, wrote Thomas, there were ‘rows and rows of people in kilts. I don’t wonder the Prince was rather annoyed. He couldn’t find his cap or his cigarettes or anything and eventually rushed down the corridor to the carriage door using such fearful language that I’m almost certain the Duke and Duchess … must have had the benefit of the end of it.’ The drive to the castle was lined with troops; the Prince travelled with the Duke ‘looking perfectly furious and hardly uttering’. This visit over, the Prince and Thomas spent a few days stalking at Abergeldie where Princes Harry and George were also staying. On the last day they all packed into a car to go to the railway station. ‘I can’t say we behaved very well en route, as any female passing us was waved and yelled at, and they sang loudly most of the way … By the time we reached Ballater, one of the strings of HRH’s deerstalker had broken, and the flap was hanging down in a drunken way. We were all dirty, sweaty and dishevelled, and must have looked like a lot of tramps.’
It had been a marvellous break from France, but it left the Prince dejected: ‘How I long to be back at sea again and infinitely prefer being a sailor to a soldier!!’
George V used his son as a source of information on the senior generals. ‘I want to know privately if the C in C has had a row with Genl Smith-Dorrien,’ he asked in March 1915. ‘You might find out and let me know.’
The Prince had little useful information on this point but he did not spare Sir John French in his correspondence and his testimony must have contributed to the strong support George V gave Kitchener against the Commander-in-Chief. When Monro was succeeded by Sir Hubert Gough, the Prince was cautiously enthusiastic. At first he was dismayed by the new Corps Commander’s reluctance to let him visit the front line, then he became more approving as the rules were relaxed. ‘There is no doubt he is an able tactician and a good “pushing” general,’ he wrote in July. ‘He talks too much; that is his gt fault to my mind.’
His views on most matters were orthodox and strident. He was strongly in favour of conscription, feeling that the whole nation must be mobilized if the war was ever to be won.
He welcomed as irresistible the call to arms which his father delivered in October 1915. Who would have the heart to ignore such an appeal? ‘But no doubt there are thousands of these foul unpatriotic brutes about!! One almost begins not to think so highly of one’s country as one did!!’
Conscientious objectors were ‘loathsome’; he had twelve hundred of them working in the Duchy, ‘Disgusting looking men with long hair and they never wear hats; they loaf about the place and look at one with a very contemptible air!!’
Miners who struck for higher pay were still more loathsome, they should be put ‘straight into the trenches and send the whole crowd out patrolling, the first night they go in!!’
As for Roger Casement, the Irishman who sought to lead a German-inspired rising, he deserved least sympathy of all: ‘He should be publicly hung in Hyde Park or some open space where there is room for a large crowd.’
His father and brothers would have echoed these views, as indeed would 90 per cent of the officers of the British Army. On most issues, though his parents might from time to time irritate him, he differed from his family very little. Increasingly it seemed to him that he had most in common with Prince Albert. The two had grown particularly close; ‘more so perhaps than most brothers, as our interests are the same,’ wrote the Prince of Wales early in 1915. ‘I am sure he will always do very well in the future; in fact I often feel that if I do as well as he does I shall be all right!!’
Prince Albert’s naval career was suffering from his ill health and he had been forced to work in the Admiralty, a dreary job which he performed uncomplainingly. ‘I must say I admire him tremendously for this and don’t hesitate to tell you he’s one of the best,’ the Prince wrote to Godfrey Thomas, knowing well that uncomplaining acceptance of ill fortune was not his own forte.
Prince Albert, however, was not so uncomplaining when it came to the conduct of his parents. The two Princes united in a chorus of criticism. Prince Albert wailed about the ‘awful prison’ of Buckingham Palace: ‘The parents have got funny ideas about us, thinking we are still boys at school or something of that sort, instead of what we are.’
The Prince of Wales was no more enthusiastic about life in the Palace, especially after the King imposed a teetotal regime for the duration of the war: ‘Awful balls the whole thing. I don’t think it will have much effect on the drinking community. Lloyd George forced it on Papa.’
As he grew older he became more adept at avoiding the sombre dignity of the family circle. By 1917 he was able to come and go more or less at pleasure. He was summoned for two weeks to Sandringham. ‘This little boy somehow says NO,’ he told Lady Coke. ‘He might possibly spend two or three days there, but not more, not for nobody, and he knows a bit too much for that!!!!’
– a point so close to his heart as to demand even more than his usual allotment of two exclamation marks. In London he still stayed always at Buckingham Palace, but tried to time his periods of leave so that he had at least a few days there without his parents. This did not always work out. ‘I am sorry your style was rather cramped during your leave in London,’ Lord Burghersh wrote sympathetically. ‘It’s exactly the same with me. Family so inquisitive.’
But it would be wrong to attach too much significance to such flights from the family nest. The Prince was far from rejecting his parents or demanding total independence. On his twenty-first birthday his father wrote to tell him: ‘You will have about £246,000 which … is a splendid sum of money which will go on increasing until you marry and set up house. Until then, I hope you will consider my home as your home.’ The Queen echoed her husband’s words: ‘I hope that for some years to come you, my darling Son, will continue to live under our roof, where you are and ever will be “le bienvenu”.’
The Prince in his reply told his mother how pleased he would be to remain with his parents ‘until the fateful day arrives when I shall have to think about finding me a wife, and I trust that day is as yet afar off!!’
Privately he had probably made up his mind that he must set up on his own once the war was over, but he had no wish to confront his parents on such an issue while the war was still raging and long-term plans seemed impossible to make.
In June 1915 the Prince had first speculated about the possibility that a Guards division might be formed under the command of Lord Cavan, ‘an ideal state of things’.
A month later the ideal became reality; ‘It ought to be the finest division in the world,’ the King wrote proudly.
The Prince had no doubt that this was where he belonged. In his eyes the Guards were as far above the other line regiments as the Navy was above the Army. He admitted to the King that he and the other Guards officers were apt to think that their men were the only ones of any use, ‘which is v. wrong and which one must avoid above all things, but it’s not an unnatural point of view to take really!!’
But though his transfer to this martial empyrean brought some relief and moved him a little closer to the fighting, it did not prove entirely satisfactory. Life at Cavan’s headquarters was no less sybaritic than in his previous postings; Raymond Asquith visited the headquarters in November 1915 and was given ‘a good dinner and an excellent bottle of champagne … the Prince of Wales was there and gave me a long and fragrant cigar’.
Nor was the work more enlivening; a typical day in December had him devoting the morning to pursuing a missing consignment of gum boots and the afternoon to bargaining for the use of a piece of land on which to build bathing huts: ‘Heavens, the unparalleled monotony of this life!! … I shall go mad soon!!’
Worst of all, though he liked and admired ‘Fatty’ Cavan, he deplored the General’s reluctance to let him get near the trenches: ‘I think Fatty is going to shut me up in my glasshouse more than ever.’
Only a week after this entry he escaped from his glasshouse and visited the front line during a lull in the battle of Loos. The 1st Guards Brigade had charged three hundred yards across open ground towards the enemy line and had been massacred by machine-gun fire as they reached the final wire, ‘too cruel to be killed within a few yards of yr. objective … This was my first real sight of war and it moved and impressed me most enormously.’ On the way back the party had to jump into a trench to avoid a storm of shrapnel, fifty yards away the Prince’s car was damaged and his driver killed: ‘He was an exceptionally nice man, a beautiful driver and a 1st rate mechanic; it’s an absolute tragedy and I can’t yet realize that it has happened.’
The Commander-in-Chief, told that the Prince had been in the car beside his driver, promptly ordered that he should return to Corps headquarters. The Prince wrote in dismay to his father. ‘What did you have me appointed to Guards DIV for? That I should be removed as soon as there is any fighting? … I can assure you it is one of the biggest blows I have ever had … My dearest Papa, I implore of you to have this most unfortunate and deplorable order from GHQ cancelled as soon as possible.’
French reconsidered his decision and the Prince stayed with the Guards. The King ruled, however, that his son should only go up to the front if it was ‘absolutely necessary’, otherwise Cavan would be placed in an impossible position.
It all depended on what was meant by ‘necessary’, and the Prince eventually saw his interpretation of the word accepted: if it was necessary for the General to go to the front line it must be necessary for his staff officers to accompany him. But he was not content with what he had gained. ‘If only I could spend 48 hours in the line;’ he told his father, ‘… I should get an idea of what trench life is like, which it is absolutely impossible to do otherwise … I suppose you wouldn’t like to make permission for me to do this a form of Xmas present to me?’
It had not needed the sight of the mounds of dead in front of the German lines at Loos to make the Prince doubtful of the allied strategy. The endless, hideously costly attacks, achieving nothing except at the best the occupation of a few trenches, seemed to him futile. The commanders had promised great advances, the breaking of the German line: ‘When is all this? Ask of the winds, and I call it sheer murder!!’ He had lost all confidence in French. ‘The sooner we get a new C in C the better.’
But when a new Commander-in-Chief was appointed it was Douglas Haig, a man as wedded to the policy of bloody attrition as ever French had been. ‘He is very unpopular,’ the Prince told Stamfordham. ‘I can’t stand the man myself, so hard and unsympathetic.’
Towards the end of the war he was to revise his views, and even find Haig ‘human and sympathetic’,
but at the end of 1915 it seemed to him that the new C.-in-C. treated men ‘as mere fighting tools’,
and that, in the Prince’s eyes, was almost the ultimate accusation.
Shortly before French departed George V came to France for one of his periodic visits to his troops. Startled by the cheering of the men the King’s horse reared, threw its rider and fell heavily on top of him. The Prince rushed to his father’s side, to find him winded and unable to breathe. Doctors arrived and pronounced that there were no internal injuries, only shock and severe bruising. It had been a lucky escape; the ground where the King fell was soft, otherwise he would have been crushed beyond recognition.
The Prince hurried back to London with Claud Hamilton to reassure the Queen. ‘Thank God Papa is all right,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good, and little did Claudie and I think in the morning that we shd be on our way home in less than 12 hrs.’
Before this episode the Prince had been in slightly bad odour at court because of his reluctance to wear some foreign medals which he had been awarded. He apologized to the King, ‘but you know how distasteful it is to me to wear these war decorations having never done any fighting and having always been kept well out of danger’.
The sense of inferiority which he felt in the presence of fighting men was redoubled when he was flaunting honours which they had been denied. His discomfort was redoubled in mid-1916 when he was awarded the Military Cross. Lady Coke wrote to congratulate him. ‘I don’t feel I deserve it in the least,’ the Prince replied crossly. ‘There are so many gallant yet undecorated officers who should have MCs long before me.’
He was promoted Captain at about the same time but got no pleasure from it ‘as I have no command’. ‘You’ll be saying to yourself “What a gloomy view of life he does take”,’ he admitted to Stamfordham. ‘Well, I fear that is the case …’
He was craving for change, and when it became clear that he could not expect to stay with the Guards division when it went into the line at Ypres, he concluded that he had much better leave France altogether. He conceived the idea of visiting the allied forces in the Middle East and Kitchener agreed that a report on the defences in the Canal Zone would be of use. The King initially opposed the idea on the grounds that the danger from submarines in the Mediterranean was too great. His reluctance made the Prince’s wish to go become almost overpowering. ‘D—n the risk of … torpedoes,’ he wrote to Stamfordham, ‘it is such rot, isn’t it? But all these family fears have to be considered!’
The King relented, and at once the Prince began to wonder whether he was doing the right thing. ‘I do feel such a miserable worm,’ he told his uncle. ‘Of course it will be very interesting and pleasant in Egypt, but I shan’t be able to enjoy it in the least, when I know where I ought to be and where my friends are.’
He suggested that Desmond Fitzgerald should accompany him as equerry. The proposal was rejected, Fitzgerald was too junior for such a role. A week before the Prince sailed, Fitzgerald was training with his regiment near Calais. The padre took a turn at throwing a hand grenade and somehow bungled it. Fitzgerald was fatally injured. It was the worst experience the Prince had suffered during the war. ‘It is a fearful blow to lose one’s greatest friend, and he was that to me.’
In wartime those whose friends are in daily danger must either learn to accept their loss with relative equanimity or themselves break under the strain. The Prince had built a carapace of resignation with which to confront the awful massacre of his contemporaries. Fitzgerald’s death, though, broke down his guard. He left for Egypt in a mood as depressed as he had ever known, and the tragedy was to cast a blight over what would otherwise have been a pleasant escapade.
4
The Captain
THE PRINCE OF WALES’S EXPEDITION TO THE MIDDLE EAST proved a welcome break in the four black years that he spent on the Western Front. He would not have been the man he was if he had not striven to diminish his pleasure by endless doubts and self-accusations. ‘I feel such a swine having a soft comfortable time out here while the Guards Division is up at Ypres,’ he told Lady Coke;
and he found little comfort in the knowledge that he would never have been allowed near the battle himself and that his presence with the allied forces in the Canal Zone was a badly needed boost to the morale of those who felt themselves to be members of a forgotten army.
His last days in London had been hectic. He called on Kitchener to get his instructions – ‘He talked a lot, quite interesting in a way, but I’m frightened of the man’
– acquired the mountain of impedimenta thought necessary for such a journey, and spent the last night in mingled work and revelry. He, Prince Albert and Godfrey Thomas, recorded the latter, ‘played the gramophone till the small hours and when we thought it was time for some song that we hadn’t got among the records, we were obliged to sing it. After a lot of exercise dancing round and round the room, Prince Bertie proceeded to go to bed, but his brother got into his bed with all his clothes on, so by the time he’d been pulled out by us, there wasn’t much left of the bed … So we turned the gramophone on again. I got away just before two. HRH was starting at 9 the next morning, and had done practically no packing as usual, and also had about 20 letters to write. The result, as I heard afterwards, was that he had exactly 1¼ hours sleep that night and went off without any breakfast, which is entirely typical.’ Thomas got this last information in a letter from Prince Albert, who added: ‘A wonderful chap. I don’t know how he does it, do you?’
The King had been convinced that even in comparatively temperate March the Prince would find the heat in the Canal Zone intolerable, but his son relished hot weather and was inspired by it to undertake still more strenuous physical exercise. He enjoyed the life in Ismalia, ‘strafing up and down the Canal’, visiting the troops and preparing a report on the supply system. On his first day at GHQ he went to hear General Birdwood address the Australian and New Zealand Brigades. His presence was announced to the men, ‘at which they gave 3 cheers, bloody fools!!’
At first he had been slightly deterred by their reputation for drunkenness and indiscipline but he was quickly overwhelmed by their exuberance; they had committed undreamt-of atrocities in the red-light districts of Cairo and Alexandria, but ‘they have fought so d—d hard and are so keen, that it is hard to deal severely with them’. What moved him most was the ‘marvellous imperial spirit’ that had called them up, ‘for they aren’t fighting for themselves or their own country either; only for the Empire’. ‘As you know,’ he told his friend Captain Bailey, ‘I’m not often given to these highflown ideas, but really these Anzacs have impressed me so much!!’
On the banks of the Suez Canal the Prince conceived a reverence for the idea of Empire that was to sustain him during the rigorous tours that lay ahead.
Not everyone reciprocated his enthusiasm. Among the many men he spoke to when he visited the Anzac troops at Tel-el-Kebir, was John Monash, a Brigadier General who had been one of the heroes of Gallipoli and was to become the most prominent Australian soldier of the First World War. ‘What he said to me was “M-m-m-m”,’ wrote Monash. ‘The fact was the youngster was completely bewildered, and most evidently ill at ease.’
His was a minority voice, however; every other account of the visit was lyrical in tone. Birdwood maintained that the men took him to their hearts; the Prince’s equerry, Malcolm Murray, spoke of the warmth of their reception – ‘They would rush across to wherever the Prince was coming up, make a line for him and cheer time after time.’
One eye-witness account was passed on at third hand to Queen Mary: ‘… the enthusiasm knew no bounds, and the cheering was perfectly overwhelming. Our friend said that men looked at him so intently that they forgot to salute! and added “I’m not exaggerating when I say that some of them gazed at him with tears rolling down their cheeks.”’
The Prince of Wales had been in crowds many times before, but this was the first time that he had experienced the adulation that was so often to be his lot over the next twenty years. It could be argued that any young, personable and smiling prince would have had the same effect. The contrary can hardly be proved, but so many reports by men and women who prided themselves on being not easily impressed testify to the extraordinary potency of his personality that it is impossible to dismiss them all. To the seasoned veterans of Gallipoli his youth, charm, simplicity and friendliness, his patent sincerity and concern for their wellbeing, proved irresistible. Many millions were to find the same combination as effective in the future.
For the Prince it was exhilarating, disconcerting and slightly alarming. He for his part had no doubt that it was his royal blood and not his personal qualities which won him such applause. The idea displeased him. ‘Oh!! to be out here privately and not as the P of W,’ he moaned to Godfrey Thomas. ‘That’s what ruins my life and ever will!!!!’ This particular complaint was provoked by a projected visit to Khartoum. He had pleaded to be allowed to go there but typically at once began to have doubts once permission had been conceded. If he could have gone as a common tourist he would have been delighted, but he was travelling officially as heir to the throne: ‘You know how I hate all those bulls at any time, so think how odious it is to me in wartime!!’
In the Governor – the Sirdar – Reginald Wingate, he found a man determined to milk the situation to the last drop: ‘A little snob,’ he called him in his diary; ‘He is HRHing the whole time and never relaxes a moment.’
Yet he had to admit that Wingate knew his job superlatively well and that the pomp was well deployed to make the greatest possible impression on the Sudanese. ‘I am throwing my heart and soul into it all to make it a success, though it goes against the grain,’ he told his father.
To Malcolm Murray it sometimes seemed that heart and soul were not as energetically deployed as might have been hoped for. The Prince, he complained to Stamfordham, ‘always wanted to efface himself, and hates any kind of formal thing. This is exactly what he wants practice in – he is rather naughty about going up to speak to people etc.’
The Prince’s always weak stomach for sightseeing was quickly over-taxed. Even before he reached Luxor on his return journey down the Nile he was confessing in his diary: ‘I’m utterly fed up with visiting temples and never want to see another one again.’ He found an itinerant snake-charmer decidedly more interesting than Karnak by moonlight. The ancient and eminent Egyptologist Professor Le Grain lavished his learning on the young visitor but gained little gratitude for his pains. ‘I wasn’t sorry to see him go, for he … nearly killed me with his detailed descriptions.’
It is unlikely, however, that the professor guessed how little pleasure he had given; the Prince’s manners rarely fell below excellence and he would have gone to great pains to put a good face on his sufferings. When Ronald Storrs conducted the Prince round Cairo a few days later, he wrote that he had never met a visitor ‘who entered more swiftly into the spirit of the place … I have met none with equal vitality or with more appreciation of Eastern life’.
Perhaps Storrs was a more congenial cicerone than the professor, certainly the Prince found Cairo much jollier than the Upper Nile and agitated to be allowed to pay it a second visit. The King for some reason objected and the Prince wrote in injured innocence: ‘I don’t want to go galivanting about in Cairo, far from it. I’m not even going to ask you for a night there … just a few hours so that I may go to the bazaars and do some shopping for you and Mama.’
In Cairo he met Lord Edward Cecil, a fellow Grenadier, shrewd judge of character and author of the exquisitely witty The Leisure of an Egyptian Official. ‘He is a nice boy of fifteen, rather immature for that age,’ Lord Edward wrote to his wife. ‘He cannot get in or out of a room except sideways and he has the nervous smile of one accustomed to float. I hope he will grow up, but he is leaving it till late. He is curiously decided, even obstinate, and happily there is no sign of weakness of character. His main terror is getting fat. He adores the Regiment and would talk all day about it, but beyond love of all military matters, an outspoken hatred of politicians and a very fine English accent when he speaks French, he has no apparent special characteristics. I think one day he will fall in love and then he will suddenly grow up.’
He never got back to Cairo nor was he allowed to stay on in the Middle East after the onset of the hot season. Malcolm Murray direly prophesied sunstroke and probably enteric fever if he lingered on, and the King ordered his return: ‘You have had a nice change and have enjoyed some nice warm weather; think of the many thousands of poor fellows who are obliged to remain in France without a break …’
The Prince might justifiably have retorted that he thought constantly about them, that he had done all he could to be treated like them, and that his return to a job on the staff would not improve their lot by an iota. Instead, he accepted his recall with moderately good grace. On the way back, in May 1916, he called on King Victor Emmanuel at his headquarters near the Italian front at Udine. He found the King a ‘dear and charming little man’ but it was the same story as in France; as soon as the royal party got anywhere near any scene of possible action, the cars would turn round and speed back to a safer section of the line.
On his return he submitted a report on the supply and transport arrangements in the Canal Zone which Kitchener forwarded to the King; it did the Prince great credit, commented Kitchener, ‘and shows his grasp of details, and military knowledge’.
‘A really excellent report,’ George Arthur, then an official in the War Office, described it.
The praise seems high for a somewhat cursory statement of the existing position, in twelve hundred words, with little detail and no recommendations, but it showed at least that he had kept his eyes open and not treated the expedition as a joy ride. The King had good reason to be pleased with his son’s performance. Wingate had written that the Prince’s visit had done enormous good in the Sudan; the GOC reported that the morale of the troops in the Canal Zone had been notably improved; it was not the sort of war the Prince wanted to wage, but this time even he had to admit that he had been of use.
Back in France the Prince rejoined Lord Cavan’s staff with the 14th Army Corps. He was no nearer having a proper job. ‘He holds a very junior appointment of course,’ commented the future Field Marshal Montgomery loftily, ‘and I can’t imagine that he does much real work.’
Lord Newton, then a junior minister at the Foreign Office, found him ‘an undeveloped youth with pleasant and unassuming manners’ and ascribed his lack of any important staff job to the fact that he could not be induced to read.
The charge of immaturity was certainly justified, but when the Prince was given something to do, he did it conscientiously. His complaint was that he was left in idleness or burdened with unnecessary and clearly improvised duties. After less than a week back in headquarters he was exclaiming bitterly that he was ‘thoroughly fed up’. ‘God knows how long the Lord Claud and I will be stuck here,’ he wrote to Captain Bailey; ‘it couldn’t be very long as I sh’d go mad after a few months … How I do grouse … !!’
Claud Hamilton was at first his only real friend at Corps HQ. The Prince recognized that Hamilton’s military career was jeopardized by his absence from his regiment and readily agreed to make up his pay to the level it might have reached in other circumstances. ‘Of course I should hate not to help him as I ought to,’ he wrote to Stamfordham, ‘and am only wondering whether £150 is sufficient.’
Hamilton repaid this generosity with loyalty and an unflinching readiness to tell his master the truth, however unpalatable it might be. One of the Prince’s more attractive characteristics was his readiness to accept any amount of criticism from those whom he liked and who, he believed, had his interests at heart. In May 1918 he ran foul of Hamilton over some unspecified matter, probably relating to an escapade with some women from the Voluntary Aid Detachment. ‘I have had a straight talk and said it must stop or I shall go,’ Claud Hamilton told Lady Coke. ‘He thoroughly realized he was in the wrong and promised to turn over a new leaf. Now it is much better.’
Some months later he was still gossiping to his friends about ‘the Prince and the VADs, which, if known, would cause some trouble’, but the offence seems to have been in the past.
Hamilton remained with the Prince for several more years, though in the end the two men decided they could not work together.
Early in 1917 Hamilton was reinforced by the arrival of Piers ‘Joey’ Legh, another Grenadier and a son of Lord Newton. Legh was to remain with the Prince for twenty years and accompany him into exile after the abdication. More than ten years again after that he was still talking of the man ‘whom he had loved and whose charm was so great that he would thrill with emotion if the Duke entered the room just now’.
As with Claud Hamilton, the Prince accepted from him rebukes which a vainer or more touchy man would have resented. In June 1917 General Cavan told him off for devoting too much time to his interminable runs, neglecting the newspapers and paying no attention to world affairs. ‘Of course he is right really and I don’t attempt to be a P of W or prepare for being so,’ the culprit admitted ruefully, ‘but how I hate all that sort of thing and how unsuited I am for the job!!’ Yet he persisted with his runs. Legh spoke to him ‘like a father’, and threatened to report him to Cavan. The Prince continued to offend, whereupon Legh did report him and Cavan categorically forbade further runs. ‘That old shit Joey,’ the Prince wrote in his diary, ‘but I’m none the less fond of him and forgive him all as he’s only done it for my good …’
Hamilton and Legh, the Prince told his mother, were ‘my 2 great friends who are and have been real friends to me; I’m devoted to them!!’
Without their companionship he would have found intolerable the gloom and, as he saw it, uselessness of his life in Cavan’s headquarters; even with them his depression sometimes almost overcame him. One day when he had been refused a visit to the front line, he remained in his room, writing letters till 1 a.m. ‘I could not face … any company. I wanted to be alone in my misery!! I feel quite ready to commit suicide and would if I didn’t think it unfair on Papa.’
He no doubt over-dramatized his misery, but he was an unhappy and frustrated man. More and more he dreaded the next ‘push’, when he knew there would be yet further massacres, more friends killed, more shame for him. He went to a staff meeting at which an attack was ordered on a certain hill. The General involved protested, but Cavan insisted the hill must be taken. ‘He must have hated doing this as I could see he was worried. Several people have told me that the whole plan of attack seems to them impossible and mad. Of course Haig doesn’t think of the poor buggers who will have to pay the price for this …’
He tried to convince himself that a war of bloody attrition held the only hope of victory, but signally failed. ‘These continuous heavy casualty lists make me sick,’ he wrote during the battle of the Somme, ‘it all seems such a waste for of course it doesn’t matter if we don’t push on another few miles as regards the end of the war, we only push to kill Huns and help our allies. I’m afraid I can’t bring myself to look on the situation in such a big way; I can’t keep the wretched infantry being slaughtered out of my thoughts.’
It was just before this battle that the Prince went with Cavan’s deputy, General Morland, to see the first ‘tanks’, a code word for ‘these new land submarines’. He was impressed by their ingenuity, admired the bravery of their crews, but was sceptical of their value: ‘They are good toys but I don’t have much faith in their success.’
He told his father of his doubts and was duly crushed: ‘With regard to the “Tanks” which you scoffed at when you first saw them …’ retorted the King, reports were so good that several hundred had been ordered.
The King was proved right in the end, but the performance of the tank in the First World War, at least before the battle of Cambrai more than a year later, did something to support the Prince’s scepticism.
The progress of the war over its last two years is marked by his ever growing respect for the fighting men; not just for the officers or the Guardsmen but ‘for the British conscript … for he hates the whole thing and isn’t fired with the same spirit as were the first hundred thousand’. And yet they managed to keep ‘so marvellously cheery’ and to prepare for each new scene of carnage with renewed determination. They were marvels, ‘it does make one feel so proud of being an Englishman’. More was being asked of them than had ever been asked of British troops before. And he felt humble as well as proud: ‘No one can realize what these … battles are like till they’ve been in one, and I don’t, as I never have.’
He never stopped trying to get forward to the front line, never stopped hating it when he was there. In June 1917 he rose at 4 a.m. to go to the trenches: ‘and how I loathed it!! But frightened tho’ I am, I should honestly loathe it still more if I never went forward!!’
Shortly before that he told Lady Coke that in recent months he had only once been within range of enemy shellfire since his return, ‘so you need have no thoughts for my safety’.
The worst danger he had confronted was in October 1916, when he was at the front with General Gathorne Hardy. A shell fell forty yards in front, then one thirty yards behind. Fortunately the German gunners did not complete the bracket: ‘I’ve never been so near becoming a casualty before, though it did me worlds of good, frightening me properly.’
Four days later they were still more comprehensively shelled. ‘That strafing we got has taught me more than anything ever has during my 2 years out here; it gives me a slight impression of what our men have to go through these days.’
Gathorne Hardy was the last person with whom the Prince would have chosen to die; ‘he is so unfair to all his subordinates that I feel ashamed to be out with him!!’
The Prince’s dislike for Gathorne Hardy had started one particularly cold and wet night when the Grenadiers were moving up to the front. A staff officer remarked, ‘Lord, I’m sorry for those poor devils going up.’ ‘Oh well, they’ve got their ground sheets,’ retorted Gathorne Hardy. ‘Pass the port.’
The remark probably signified little, but to the Prince it showed unforgivable callousness. His respect for the fighting men would never have allowed him to speak of them so indifferently. Indeed he would never have made a First World War general; he was too soft-hearted, too squeamish, too concerned about the safety and comfort of the men. ‘I’m v keen on the fighting troops being made as comfortable as possible always …’ he told Wigram. ‘Poor devils, they have a bloody enough time in the trenches … they are absolutely marvellous and I’d do anything for them.’
As a weapon of war, he rated the aeroplane far ahead of the tank. Early in September 1917 he visited the Cigognes, the crack French squadron which included Guinemeyer, the ace who had shot down over fifty German planes. ‘They are fine fellows,’ he told Lady Coke, ‘and all gentlemen, to put it snobbishly, which makes such a difference really.’ The visit was of particular interest to him because a few weeks before he had been given permission by the King to go up in an aeroplane himself, provided it was nowhere near the line. He had had his first flight on 17 July: ‘It’s a wonderful feeling up there,’ he wrote, ‘but I don’t feel I ever want to learn to fly.’
In fact he was soon eager to do so, and though he took no steps to learn until long after the war, he went up quite frequently over the next two years. One account says that his permission to fly was withdrawn because he flew with a Canadian war ace who was photographed piloting the aircraft with one arm in a sling.
There is nothing in the Prince’s diary about this, though in September 1918 he did fly up to 10,000 feet with a Canadian called Barker. ‘It is really the safest thing in the world, far safer than motoring!!’ he told his mother.
After the exhilaration of flying, he found little to thrill him in the course he did with the Royal Artillery. It seems to have been a pointless exercise; the course was designed for officers who had done a year or more with an artillery battery, and, since he hardly knew one end of a gun from another, he understood nothing of what was going on. The drills were incessant and tedious, the other students uninspiring, the food disastrous. This last at least he could put right, with a weekly hamper from Fortnum and Mason containing a ham, two tongues and a Stilton. ‘You know I attach very little importance to my food,’ he told his mother, ‘and I have always taken the view that most people eat too much … But I must confess that I like the small amount of food that I eat to be good.’
The contents of the hamper were shared out around the mess and the Prince’s departure was a cause for sincere regret.
At the end of 1916 Asquith fell and Lloyd George succeeded him as Prime Minister. Only six months before, the Prince had told his father that he did not care for Lloyd George ‘as a man, a statesman or anything’ but by December 1916 he had concluded that ‘everyone has gt confidence in him and feels that he is really out to win the war and that he has no thought for himself’.
He welcomed the change, believing that a strong government was essential and that ‘old Squiff’ could never have provided the necessary leadership.
He was particularly gratified that Churchill was not in the reformed government and disgusted when he reappeared as Minister of Munitions six months later – ‘I suppose he has silently wormed his way in again.’
Grudgingly he admitted to the King that Churchill would probably do the job well and ‘perhaps it is safer to give him a job than to have him hanging around unemployed’.
By this time hopes of a rapid victory had been dashed by the collapse of the Russian empire. ‘Let us hope that the new Govt will get the upper hand and smash the socialists,’ the King wrote to his son in April 1917. ‘I should imagine that a republic in Russia is an impossibility.’
To the Prince the blow struck at the allied war effort by the defection of the Russians seemed more catastrophic than the murder of his relatives whom he had hardly met. ‘Oh! this —— war … I feel as if we are in for at least another 10 years of it!!’ The Russian revolution, followed by the crumbling of the monarchies at the end of the war, caused him to think about the future of the British royal family. ‘Ours is by far the most solid,’ he told his father, ‘tho of course it must be kept so and I more than realize that this can only be done by keeping in the closest possible touch with the people and I can promise you that this point is always at the back of [my] mind and that I am and always will make every effort to carry it out … I also feel that we have good reason to be confident of the good sense and calmness of our race, anyhow just now, tho of course one knows there are many and great dangers, and one mustn’t shut one’s eyes to them even if they don’t really become formidable till 2 or 3 years after the declaration of peace when the race will have got over the joy and novelty of “no war on”.’
His relationship with his father had been better since his visit to the Middle East, and he wrote in his diary in March 1917 that ‘the parents are more charming to me than ever, and seem glad to see me again’.
But though he was getting on well with his father, it was his mother with whom he felt closest. His letters and diary abound in references to cosy and confidential talks about every aspect of his life: ‘It’s so wonderful to feel that we can really talk things over now, and vital and intime things, and I can assure you, darling Mama, that this makes all the difference to me.’
The Queen responded warmly: ‘I think I do understand and can enter into other people’s feelings,’ she wrote in mingled gratification and surprise.
She seemed to relish the fact that she was closer than the King to her sons, and was not beyond making a little mischief to emphasize the difference. She complained to the Prince that she had not been present when important decisions were made about his future, ‘such a pity, as first of all I ought to know and secondly it makes it more difficult for me just to hear in a cursory way from Papa’. She urged her son to write his ‘secret and intimate views’ on a separate sheet of paper, so that the King should not realize he was being kept in the dark. She evolved an elaborate plot to get the Prince back on leave for Christmas: ‘I cannot help laughing to myself at the mystery which surrounds any new plan which … we have to put before Papa, it all requires such a lot of thought, writing, choosing the right moment etc, really comical in a way but so tiresome.’
Yet though she would enter into conspiracy with her sons, an open confrontation with the King was still out of the question. Never did she doubt that his will must prevail.
One issue on which she consulted her son without reference to the King was the future of Princess Mary. The Prince constantly pressed the Queen to allow his sister friends of her own age and greater liberty to move around outside the palaces. Princess Mary bravely insisted that life at Buckingham Palace was not too bad: ‘You need not feel so sorry for me … The only things I object to are those rather silent dinners you know so well, when Papa will read the paper.’
Her brother knew that she was lonely and, in everything except material terms, underprivileged. He joined eagerly in what his mother called the ‘all important matter’ of finding the Princess a husband who would be both socially acceptable and tolerable to live with.
Hopefully he put forward the names of friend after friend, only to find that his mother always shrank from proposing them to the King. Princess Mary did not find a husband until 1922 and then it was by no doing of the Prince of Wales.
Early in 1919 his epileptic brother, Prince John, finally died. The young invalid’s always frail grasp on reason had been failing rapidly and it had been obvious for some months that he could not survive for long. The Prince of Wales hardly knew him; saw him as little more than a regrettable nuisance. He wrote to his mother a letter of chilling insensitivity. She did not reply but he heard from others how much he had hurt her. He was conscience-stricken. ‘I feel such a cold hearted and unsympathetic swine for writing all that I did …’ he told the Queen. ‘No one can realize more than you how little poor Johnnie meant to me who hardly knew him … I can feel so much for you, darling Mama, who was his mother.’
His overture was gratefully received. At first she had thought his attitude a little hard-hearted, she confessed, but now felt that he was only taking the common-sense view.
The King fully shared his attitude: ‘the greatest mercy possible,’ he called John’s death, his youngest son had been spared endless suffering.
Stamfordham had urged the King to bring the Prince back to London in the winter of 1917. ‘Time is slipping away and these years are valuable and important ones in His Royal Highness’s life. He should be mixing with leading men other than soldiers, doing some useful reading and gradually getting accustomed to speaking in public.’
Cavan concurred. Then suddenly the Italian line collapsed. German troops, set free by the collapse of Russian resistance, had come to the aid of their Austrian allies and quickly turned the tide of the campaign. It seemed that Italy might be knocked out of the war if British and French reinforcements were not rushed south. The 14th Army Corps was chosen for the task. Cavan pleaded that if the Prince of Wales accompanied the Corps the moral effect in Italy would be great. Against this, he had to admit that the Corps might arrive too late to save the Italians, in which case anything might happen and the risk to the Prince be considerable.
The King decided the risk must be run and by 8 November the Prince had joined the Corps HQ at Mantua. ‘… and here we stay indefinitely,’ he told Lady Coke. ‘The whole show is the vaguest thing on record and we know nothing of our future … as it all depends on where the Italians stop the Huns.’
At first it was uncertain whether the Italians would stop the Huns at all. The Prince arrived in time to see the wreckage of the Italian 2nd Army retreating by way of Treviso and Padua. It was a kind of mobile warfare which he had never witnessed, and even though the allied forces were patently coming off worst, he found it irresistibly exciting: ‘This is real campaigning, not the stale old warfare in Flanders, and it’s all a great experience for me.’
His initial opinion of the Italian armies could hardly have been less favourable: ‘contemptible soldiers,’ he described them, who didn’t understand the elements of modern warfare and retreated so fast that the enemy was unable to keep contact with them.
Inevitably his opinion changed when the Italians made a stand: ‘fine stout-hearted fellows’ they then became, though of course ‘one mustn’t forget that they are a Latin race!!’
He complained about those French and British officers who criticized the Italians too overtly, and though he referred to them privately as ‘Ice-creamers’, was at pains to speak of them politely in public. But a constant refrain of his diary and letters was the superiority of the French, Britain’s leading and natural ally. ‘They are a grand people, the French, and I’m more fond of them than ever now,’ he told the King; ‘what a far finer and nicer nation than the Italians. If only they had a monarchy!!!!’
His views of Italian cuisine and culture were as jaundiced as of their military prowess. He could not stand macaroni, spaghetti or Chianti and hadn’t seen a single pretty woman, he told Lady Coke, so ‘I’m rather off Italy just now’.
The monuments were little better: Mantua was ‘a deadly dull and antiquated little town’, Bologna had lots of picturesque buildings ‘tho I can’t say that I spent much time looking at them’; the Veronese paintings in the Villa Giacometti were ‘interesting as being over 300 years old … but I can’t say that actually they appeal to me enormously, and are, of course, typically Italian’.
He was more impressed by Rome, which he visited in May 1918 to attend the celebrations of the third anniversary of the Italian declaration of war (a cause for jollification which the Prince was not alone in thinking somewhat far-fetched). The main function took place in the Augusteum, and in the course of his speech the Italian President, Orlando, spoke of the Prince as having come to Italy to share their dangers and defend their country. ‘The whole audience rose, faced the Prince and cheered madly,’ Henry Lygon told the Queen.
The Prince’s speech from the royal box was delivered, wrote the Ambassador, Sir James Rodd, ‘in a clear voice which carried well, with just a little touch of boyish shyness that went straight to the hearts of his audience’.
Claud Hamilton told Lady Coke that he had done it very well, ‘everybody could easily hear him, he received a great ovation’.
It was a period at which Hamilton was inclined to be critical of his employer so his judgment that the Prince ‘played his part better than I have ever seen him do before’ can be taken seriously. The Prince was no less ready to judge his own performances harshly but he told the King that he felt his visit had done some good and had helped cement the alliance with Italy; ‘it has been rather a trying week but very interesting and it has taught me a lot’.
His parents were delighted by his achievements: the King told him how much he appreciated the excellent way he had carried out the visit, while the Queen wrote of his ‘wonderful success … I feel prouder of my dearest son than ever.’
The King had objected to the proposal that the visit to Rome should include a call on the Pope but Balfour, the Foreign Secretary, insisted that this was essential.
Dutifully, the Prince paraded at the Vatican. He was not greatly struck by what he saw: he found Pope Benedict XV unprepossessing in his appearance, ‘tho intelligent and well informed and he talks fairly decent French’. The Prince kept the conversation to generalities; ‘and I most certainly did not kiss his ring,’ he told the Queen proudly. ‘Nothing would have induced me to!!’
This sturdy independence availed nothing with the Daily Express, who reported that the Prince ‘appeared to be greatly gratified by his visit’. Under the headline ‘Visit which should not have been made’, the Express condemned the King for not having stepped in to veto it.
George V considered the report a direct attack on the Crown, all the worse because the proprietor, Lord Beaverbrook, was a member of the government.
‘Much tho one loathes the —— Huns, one can’t help admiring the way they are sticking out the war,’ the Prince wrote to King George V in October 1917.
Their first offensive subsided, but there were signs that it was about to be renewed when the time came to celebrate the royal Silver Wedding in London. The last thing the Prince wanted was to become involved in what promised to be wearisome festivities. He persuaded Cavan to cable the King arguing that it would make a bad impression in Italy if the Prince left at so critical a moment.
The King agreed, but little in the way of a German attack ensued, indeed, within a few weeks the enemy lines were crumbling all across Europe.
The war was clearly ending. The plan had been for the Prince to spend three months at the end of 1918 taking a staff course at Cambridge, but with time running out Haig pleaded that he should instead visit the Dominion and American troops in France. The King left the final decision to his son, who had been looking forward to three relatively easy months at home. ‘Of course I never hesitated as to what was the right thing,’ the Prince wrote. ‘… one has to sink one’s personal feelings and wishes on these occasions.’
He was being disingenuous as well as priggish; Cambridge might have been enjoyable but nothing would have induced him to leave the continent with final victory so close.
He hoped that he would be able to visit the Dominion forces with a minimum of fuss. He was quickly disabused by Lord Stamfordham. The Prince of Wales could not visit Canadian or Anzac troops un-officially: ‘On the contrary these visits … have an undoubted political significance and may have far-reaching effects upon the Empire and Crown. You will be there as … Heir to the Throne and every word and deed will have its own particular influence.’ Pressmen would follow him everywhere and the coverage they gave him would affect the reception he received when he visited the Dominions after the war. He would be constantly in the public eye.
It was a melancholy reminder to the Prince that with the armistice a new form of penal servitude would begin and that this time the sentence would be for life.
The Canadians were the first on whom he called. He was euphoric about his reception. ‘They are great lads these old “Knucks”,’ he told Joey Legh, ‘real, husky stout-hearted fellows for whom I’ve a great admiration.’
He was overwhelmed by their cheerfulness and friendly informality: ‘How I wish I had been across to Canada, and living amongst them makes me just long to go there.’
His only complaint was that they tended to assume that they had done all the serious fighting and to speak with some disdain of the ‘Imperial’ or British troops. ‘Still, I just don’t listen when they talk like that, it’s only really a pose and the best fellows never talk like that.’
A report from an unidentified Canadian colonel somehow found its way into the Windsor archives. The Prince, it read, ‘had been the best force in real Empire building that it was possible for Great Britain to have, because he absolutely won the hearts of the many he came in contact with. As they put it, he was every inch the gentleman and sportsman, so simple, so charming and so genuine …’
Even allowing for hyperbole, he seems to have made himself uncommonly well liked.
The armistice was signed while the Prince was with the Canadian Corps. ‘I feel it can’t be more than a marvellous dream and I still feel in a sort of trance,’ he told the Queen. ‘But I suppose I shall soon wake up to the fact that it all really is true.’
It was soon time for him to move on. ‘I don’t think my month with the Australians will be so pleasant somehow,’ the Prince had written, when his love of all things Canadian was at its height. ‘These Canadians are so much more English and refined.’
His first reaction, indeed, was to find the Australian troops somewhat shy and rough, but ‘that’s because they live so far from England’, he concluded charitably.
It did not take him long to decide that he liked them enormously, and they seem to have responded quite as warmly. ‘The Prince has won the hearts of the Australians,’ General Rawlinson told Wigram. His stay had been an unqualified success; he would be fervently welcomed in Australia; not just because he was Prince of Wales ‘but as a personal matter between the soldiers and himself’. The Prince was nervous about his forthcoming visit to General Pershing, Rawlinson went on, ‘but it is both right and necessary for him to be with the Americans for a period’.
The Prince had in fact long been anxious to see something of Pershing and the 2nd US Army. In common with most British he had been quick to denounce the ‘rotten Americans’ who sat back and let the allies do the fighting. ‘They said they were “too proud to fight”; I have never heard such rot!! Of course it is their game to keep out of it.’
But once they were in the war, his enthusiasm for their efficiency and fighting qualities rapidly grew. They welcomed him rapturously at their headquarters at Coblenz and put twenty thousand men on parade to honour him, making some of them march twenty-five miles for this privilege. The Prince professed mild surprise: ‘How far more democratic we really are, and the American discipline is really fearfully strict.’
Yet the spirit of the men, the quality of the drill and turnout, the immense vitality and exuberance, impressed him profoundly. ‘They are a big power in the world now,’ he told his father, ‘I might say the next biggest after ourselves, and they are worth while making real friends with … I’m just crammed full of American ideas just now, and they want me to “go over to them” as soon as possible, which is another item for consideration and one that should not be “pigeon-holed”.’
His time with the Australians and Americans took him into occupied Germany. He found himself billeted at Bonn in the home of the Kaiser’s sister, Vicky, Princess of Schaumburg-Lippe, and was outraged to find photographs of his family displayed in the principal rooms – ‘I feel so ashamed, however one is consoled by the thought that we’ve “cut them right out” for ever!!’ He was still more annoyed when the Princess addressed him as ‘dear’ and told him that the Germans would have been able to continue the war for several years but for the revolution. Rather grudgingly he admitted that she seemed ‘a nice enough woman for a Hun’, no doubt because she was ‘one third English’.
He had no doubt that the Germans must be ruthlessly crushed and complained to the King about the ‘idiotically mild and lenient treatment of this —— Hun population. No one,’ he claimed, with more justice than usually accompanies such a boast, ‘is more against a bullying spirit than I am, as that would only place us on the same level as the Huns … But we are not making these Huns feel that they are beaten … There is no danger of serious fraternization as, thank goodness, the infantry and in fact all the men, still loathe the Huns and despise them. Of course, as regards the women, well all women in the world are made the same way, whether German or Japanese or any race you like, so that isn’t fraternization, it’s medicinal …’
The spirit behind these words was neither magnanimous nor far-sighted. It was, however, shared by almost every junior officer, indeed by every soldier, in the allied armies. They read curiously in the light of later charges that he had been pro-German from his childhood and thus an easy convert to Nazi doctrines.
‘I just don’t know what’s happened to me since “this ’ere armistice”,’ the Prince told Joey Legh in mid-December. ‘I’m so mad and restless that I can’t sit down to think and write.’
Sitting down and thinking was never to be one of his favoured activities, but the end of the war found him exceptionally agitated. He knew that what he was doing was of value, and did not dislike doing it, but at the same time he itched to escape from his military harness and address himself to his real profession. ‘I know that there is an enormous amount of work waiting for me in England, that is really why I’m so anxious to return and to “get down to it”,’ he told his father. Whether he would find the work tolerable once he had embarked on it, he did not know, but it was his future and he had better confront it now than later. He was more than ready for a change: ‘This makes the 6th Division I’ve visited in under a fortnight and it is wearing work.’
He felt qualms about his ability to do the job ahead of him but also believed that he had qualifications lacking in any previous Prince of Wales and, still more, in King George V. There can be few sons in the same line of business as their father who do not from time to time believe that they have a monopoly of prescience and the spirit of progressiveness. The Prince was convinced that his father had failed to come to terms with the realities of the post-war world. In this belief he was fortified by the Queen. ‘I sadly fear Papa does not yet realize how many changes this war will have brought about,’ his mother wrote apprehensively.
She did less than justice to the King, who could hardly have failed to notice the maelstrom which threatened to consume the heartlands of Europe. Bolshevik revolution had triumphed in Russia and was now rampant in Germany. ‘It all makes one feel anxious about the future,’ wrote the King; ‘all this sort of thing is very infectious, although thank God everything seems to be all right in this dear old country.’
The Prince was very doubtful whether all was right in Britain, or at least whether all would continue to be right once the euphoria of victory had subsided.
He was certain that he understood the fears and aspirations of his future people far better than his father ever would and at least as well as any from the despised legion of politicians. His years with the Army had given him an opportunity denied to any other prince of getting to know the common man. This knowledge was, in part at least, illusory. He could never shed the prejudices of his caste and generation. When he heard that two of his closest friends had been transferred to the front line, he wrote that he hoped it was not true, ‘as we must have a few “gentlemen” left after the war … I’m afraid that’s rather a snobbish thing to say, tho’ I mean it, and so I suppose I’m a snob!!!!’
He never doubted that, by training as well as breeding, ‘gentlemen’ were best qualified to run the country.
But unlike many of his contemporaries, he did not believe that the country was made for gentlemen. He knew that the men who had fought for Britain deserved more from society than they had enjoyed in the years before the war: better pay, better houses, better education for their children and treatment for their sicknesses. If their rulers failed to provide such treatment then they were not worthy to be rulers, were indeed not worthy of the title of ‘gentlemen’. His creed was simpliste perhaps, but it was generous and sincerely held. The war had left him a more thoughtful, socially conscious and open-minded man. At the end of May 1919 he received the Freedom of the City of London. Talking of his life as a soldier he told his audience:
The part I played was, I fear, a very insignificant one, but from one point of view I shall never regret my periods of service overseas. In those four years I mixed with men. In those four years I found my manhood. When I think of the future, and the heavy responsibilities which may fall to my lot, I feel that the experience gained since 1914 will stand me in good stead.
On the whole, it did.
5
L’Éducation Sentimentale
IT IS A TRUTH UNIVERSALLY ACKNOWLEDGED, THAT A SINGLE man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. When that man is not only in possession of a good fortune but is heir to the throne of Great Britain, the want becomes imperious necessity. From the moment the Prince of Wales advanced into adolescence, the need to find him a suitable wife began to preoccupy the King and Queen, their advisers, and increasingly the Prince himself.
Traditionally, spouses for the royal children were drawn from the courts of Europe, most of which were intricately bound together in a great web of cousinship that was the delight of genealogists and the despair of less well-equipped historians. This avoided not only adulteration of the blood royal but also the embarrassment involved in raising any individual noble family above the others by admitting it to relationship with the throne. When Queen Victoria’s daughter, Princess Louise, married the future Duke of Argyll, the precedent was felt by many to be a dangerous one. Certainly such a match would never have done for a likely occupant of the throne. If the Prince of Wales, when young, did not share this view, he kept his doubts to himself. Whether he would have married Princess May must be uncertain, but that he would in the end have married some European princess is highly probable.
Then came the First World War, and in an instant many of the possible brides were transformed into enemy aliens. An already difficult problem became almost insoluble. ‘I hope some day you will find the woman who will make you happy!’ Queen Mary wrote to her eldest son, ‘but I fear this will not be easy as so much will have to be considered.’
The Prince was not over-worried by the inevitable delays. Physically slow to mature, he enjoyed the companionship of women but felt no strong urge to consummate the relationship. ‘I hope you are home by now,’ he wrote to a Grenadier friend in May 1916, ‘and having a jolly good time and are appeasing your sexual hunger, which I more than understand, tho’ don’t actually experience it myself, strange to say.’
With some fellow officers he visited a brothel in Calais and watched naked prostitutes striking a series of what were considered to be erotic attitudes. ‘A perfectly filthy and revolting sight,’ he called it, ‘but interesting for me as it was my first insight into these things!!’
A little later all was changed. Towards the end of 1916 his equerries, Claud Hamilton and Joey Legh, decided that his virginity had been unhealthily protracted, took him to Amiens, gave him an excellent dinner with much wine, and entrusted him to the experienced hands of a French prostitute called Paulette. ‘She brushed aside his extraordinary shyness,’ recorded Lord Esher, to whom the Prince recounted a censored version of his experience.
Paulette herself was permanently attached to an officer of the Royal Flying Corps and only on loan to the Prince for that and a few subsequent evenings, but she did her job with tact and skill. ‘A heavenly little woman of the kind,’ the Prince described her.
From that moment, sex became one of the Prince’s most urgent preoccupations. ‘Oh! to set eyes on one of the darlings again,’ he wrote in anguish from the front in France, ‘how one does miss them, and I don’t think of anything but women now, tho what’s the use?’
At Sandringham, in January 1917, they sang in the drawing room after dinner and the Prince then settled down to his crochet work. ‘What an occupation for a fellow on leave!!’ he complained in his diary. Shooting pheasants was as empty a pastime as patience or crocheting: ‘I can’t raise much enthusiasm over … anything except women!!’
His new pursuit sometimes proved hazardous. In Paris, in July 1917, he spent ‘3 days bliss’ which disturbed him so profoundly that he was quite unable to settle down and write letters for several days afterwards: ‘It’s fearful what a change in my habits 48 hours of the married life in Paris has wrought.’
Unfortunately his inability to write letters did not extend to Maggy, the object of his passions, and when he tried to disentangle himself he found that his emotional effusions were held against him. ‘I got a regular stinker from her this evening …’ he ruefully told Joey Legh. ‘Oh! those bloody letters, and what a fool I was not to take your advice over a year ago!! How I curse myself now, tho’ if only I can square this case it will be the last one, as she’s the only pol I’ve really written to and the last!! … I’m afraid she’s the £100,000 or nothing type, tho’ I must say I’m disappointed and didn’t think she’d turn nasty: of course the whole trouble is my letters and she’s not burnt one!!’
The Prince never lost his touching belief that if one asked a woman to burn a letter, she would infallibly do so. Some of his correspondents seem to have done so, more did not. Maggy, however, proved that he had been right in his first judgment of her; having given her delinquent lover a nasty fright she let the matter drop.
Paulette and Maggy were excellent fun for a night or two. He was long in losing his taste for these diversions and planned to continue them once the war was over. But he did not delude himself that such affairs had anything to do with love, still less with matrimony. Until Mrs Simpson entered and monopolized his life he never found casual sex incompatible with a grand passion; indeed the first seemed sometimes positively to enhance the second. From the age of twenty-two or so until the day he died he was never out of love, occasionally with two women at the same time, far more often obsessively with one.
His first great love, almost certainly unconsummated, was for Marion Coke, wife of Viscount ‘Tommy’ Coke, heir to the Earl of Leicester. Small and vivacious, fond of much laughter, song and dance, she provided a delectable relief after the sombre splendours of the Palace. At first it was ‘Marion is a little dear’, always ready for a ‘delightful talk’; then she became ‘a little darling and I’m afraid I love her’; then, ‘Marion is heavenly and I love her more and more’.
In 1917, by which time he had discovered that women were not solely for delightful talks, he became more ardent. ‘Dear Lady Coke’ had long given way to ‘Dear Marion’, now she became ‘My dearest Marion’. (‘By the way, of course I burn all your letters as I’m sure you do mine,’ he concluded one such letter,
though Marion proved as unreliable as Maggy when it came to this searching test.) ‘How can I express to you all I feel about it or thank you for everything?’ he asked after his leave in London had proved particularly enjoyable. ‘C’est impossible, tho’ you know how much I long to and do in my thoughts. You have been too angelically kind to me for words and have absolutely changed my life; it is so wonderful to feel I have someone I can really confide in as you have let me do!! In your own words, “You now have your little M C” absolutely expresses my feelings and it does make all the difference as you may imagine.’
The 5th Earl of Leicester told Frances Donaldson that his father had once warned the Prince of Wales not to see so much of his wife.
Certainly if Lady Coke had fallen in with the Prince’s lunatic scheme to join him and Claud Hamilton in Paris, her husband would have had good cause to complain. She was far too sensible, however. Twelve years older than the Prince, she knew that her role was principally that of confidante and comforter.
When he visited Bombay some years later his equerry, Bruce Ogilvy, noted his failure to flirt with any of the half dozen attractive girls provided to entertain him, and wrote in his diary, ‘I think that what he liked was being “Mothered”.’
‘Liked’ is too weak a word, he craved for it, could hardly live without it. That a young man unable to establish a warm relationship with his own mother should seek a substitute elsewhere is so much a psychological cliché as to deserve to be treated with grave suspicion. At the end of the war he had in fact grown close to the Queen. But whether because of deprivation as a child or for some other reason, it was not enough. He looked for maternal qualities in every woman he knew well, and Marion Coke dutifully mothered him. She remained a prominent figure in his life until the advent of Freda Dudley Ward in the spring of 1918 drove all other women temporarily from his mind.
She did not reign alone, however. The Prince of Wales, in the last years of war, came closer to marriage than he was to for another fifteen years. Even with the memory of his Parisian idyll fresh in his mind he wrote in his diary, ‘How I long for some leave to see Marion again and P!!!!’ Before he left London in May 1917 he bade ‘tender farewells’ to Lady Coke, and ‘fond farewells’ to P.
P was Portia – Lady Sybil – Cadogan, one of the five daughters of Earl Cadogan. She was unlike most of the women he loved in that she was a large and clumsy girl; handsome rather than pretty, a powerful personality, as enthusiastic a dancer as Marion Coke but with less of her charm and spontaneous gaiety. She was a close friend of and later a maid of honour to Princess Mary and the Prince first got to know her at Windsor in the spring of 1915. They played golf together and talked endlessly; within a few days he was writing in his diary, ‘She was looking more lovely and attractive than ever and we had a delightful talk; I am really smitten now!!’
They began to correspond (Portia Cadogan was one of those who seems to have heeded his injunction to burn his letters) and Princess Mary, who was delighted to act as go-between, sent her brother a signed photograph of his beloved. Prince Albert, who seems also to have been attracted by her,
lent a hand in the romance as well. ‘I am enclosing a letter from the “Angel” Portia … ’ he wrote. ‘I am always going to forward her letters on to you now.’
The romance came to a peak early in 1916. While in London in January he contrived to see her most days and nights. On 5 January, after driving half a dozen times round St James’s Park and enjoying a protracted farewell at her house, he recorded that he had had ‘the best night I have had since the war began’. A fortnight later it was, without qualification, ‘the best night I have ever had’. They dined at the Carlton, went to a musical at the Gaiety, and then danced for two hours to the gramophone. ‘It was divine, particularly as I’m madly in love with her!! Oh, if only – But I must be careful even in a diary.’ A fortnight later again they ‘fixed up certain things’ and the following night the Prince returned surreptitiously to Portia’s house after formally dropping her off at the front door. ‘She let me in and we sat talking till after 1.30. What a joyous 2 hours alone with my “angel”. How the time did fly; we talked about every sort of thing; better not to mention what!! … What it is to be in love!!’
That matrimony was one of the ‘things’ discussed cannot be proved but seems more than likely. What happened then is hard to establish. The romance continued in full fury and even at the beginning of 1917 he could still remark that ‘it was wonderful to see HER again’. But on that same wonderful night he and Claud Hamilton dropped Portia off at her home at 12.30 and then went on to a party where Marion Coke was awaiting them: ‘I took sweet little Marion home and she bid me a tender farewell.’
Whether Portia Cadogan took offence at having to share her admirer’s affections, whether she despaired of bringing him to the point, or whether she just got bored of him: in June 1917 she abruptly became engaged to the Prince’s old friend from Oxford days, Edward Stanley. The news came as a surprise to everyone, not least her parents, who received a telegram reading ‘Engaged to Edward’ and at once assumed that they would eventually have a daughter on the throne.
The Prince had discussed Portia Cadogan and the possibility of marriage with his mother only a few days before, but nothing had been concluded. The Queen, however, made it clear that nobody was going to bring pressure on him to make an early marriage, still less to someone he did not love. This did something to relieve his disappointment, but: ‘How depressed I am,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘I suppose it’s Portia having gone West, for of course that talk with Mama has cheered me up and taken a big weight off my mind.’
The affair had been conducted with remarkable discretion. Godfrey Thomas, who always felt the Prince should not marry a commoner, welcomed Portia’s engagement, ‘if only for the reason that a lot of people in London were beginning to talk about her and the Prince himself, people I mean who might have been thought to know, not just the usual gossipers’.
The ‘usual gossipers’ never seem to have mentioned Portia Cadogan’s name, and the survivors among those ‘who might have been thought to know’ were often equally in the dark. Many other names, however, were mentioned in connection with the Prince: Claud Hamilton’s sister Cynthia; Irene Lawley; Diana Manners; Rachel Cavendish – ‘a very pretty girl, and sensible too,’ noted George V approvingly;
and, most frequently of all, Rosemary Leveson-Gower. There was ‘wild excitement’ during the Prince of Wales’s leave in March 1918, recorded Cynthia Asquith. ‘No girl is allowed to leave London … and every mother’s heart beats high. So far, he dances most with Rosemary and also motors with her in the daytime.’
Rosemary Leveson-Gower was indeed a natural subject for such gossip. Her father had been the 4th Duke of Sutherland; her mother, born Lady Millicent St Clair-Erskine, was one of the great beauties of her generation; she herself was strikingly attractive, charming and, by all accounts, generous and kind as well. There is, however, no evidence in the Prince’s diaries or correspondence that he ever thought of her as more than pleasant company. To Lady Coke, perhaps unsurprisingly, he described her without great enthusiasm as ‘quite attractive and pretty … tho’ she is rather spoilt’.
In September 1917 he had mentioned to his mother that he had seen her when visiting the Duchess of Sutherland’s hospital and had thought her ‘attractive tho’ very cold’.
The Queen took mild alarm, presumably lest her son might view the coldness as a challenge. ‘I agree Rosemary is attractive,’ she wrote, ‘but pray don’t think of her, there is a taint in the blood of her mother’s family.’
Her comment related, presumably, to an alleged strain of madness in the St Clair-Erskine family which was much gossiped about at the time, rather than to the somewhat chequered career of Rosemary’s uncle, Lord Rosslyn. ‘I didn’t mean I was really struck,’ the Prince hurriedly protested. ‘You need have no fear of my having any designs on her!!’
Probably he protested a little too much; he certainly paid Rosemary marked attentions during the first months of 1918. Lady Rosemary does not seem to have been overwhelmed by these enticing prospects. ‘What a good thing I never contemplated marrying the Prince of Wales merely for the sake of the glamour,’ she wrote to her mother after her own marriage to the future Lord Dudley. Now she had ‘got all that as well as Eric’.
At all events, any incipient romance was checked when that February he met the first of the two great loves of his life, Freda Dudley Ward.
They met by chance some time in February 1918, when the Prince was at a dance in Belgrave Square and Mrs Dudley Ward, with her escort of the evening, took shelter in the doorway when an air raid warning sounded. The couple were invited in, the Prince was immediately attracted to the interloper and danced with her for the rest of the evening. Next day he wrote to ‘Mrs Dudley Ward’ to suggest a further meeting. Freda’s mother-in-law, with whom she was staying, first assumed that the letter must be for her, then that it referred to her unmarried daughter. She invited the Prince to tea and tried to send Freda out for the occasion, but her well-meaning efforts were thwarted and the happy couple were soon reunited. The association was to last some fifteen years.
Freda – Winifred, to give her the full name by which she was never known – Dudley Ward was small, elegant and exceptionally pretty. Some people underestimated her, but no one seems to have disliked her. She was intelligent and no worse educated than most British ladies of the time, funny, lively, a passionate and accomplished dancer, a good golfer and tennis player. A strong personality, she contrived to appear feminine and frail; Cynthia Asquith’s somewhat contemptuous description, ‘a pretty little fluff’,
was a complete misjudgment of a woman whose independence of mind was no less striking than her tact and discretion.
A few weeks younger than the Prince of Wales, she was of bourgeois stock; her father, Colonel Charles Birkin, was a prosperous lace-manufacturer from Nottingham. When only nineteen she married William Dudley Ward, ‘Duddie’, a Liberal member of parliament and kinsman of the Earl of Dudley. Dudley Ward was sixteen years older than his wife; no doubt he had loved Freda when he married her but by 1918 the couple led largely separate lives. An affair between his wife and the heir to the throne, provided it was conducted with due decorum, would have seemed to him acceptable, even commendable. He could be confident that, with Freda in charge of the liaison, it would never be less than decorous.
Though the Prince quickly made it obvious that he was over-whelmingly attracted by Freda, the relationship had little chance to burgeon until he came back to London early in 1919. For the next four years or so it was all-consuming. No letters survive from this early period but the Prince had a compulsive need to pour out his heart on paper and in 1921 and 1922 he was writing to her at least once a day whenever they were separated, and often when they were not. One day in August 1922 he wrote to her at 9 a.m., noon, 6 p.m. and 11.30 p.m., also fitting in a long telephone call just before dinner. The first surviving letter is dated 18 November 1920. ‘Fredie darling, beloved à moi,’ it read, ‘I feel ever, ever so much better since our little talk on the phone this evening, sweetheart; you just can’t think what a huge comfort it was to your little David just to hear your divine little voice again which I wanted to hear so much this morning. I’m terribly lonely tonight my Fredie darling and it maddens me to be away from TOI; it seems all wrong somehow when we love each other as we do.’ At 2 a.m., before he went to bed, he dashed off another brief note: ‘I must tell you once again how far more crazily and madly and overwhelmingly I love you love you my Fredie darling, and how utterly down and out I am tonight at the thought of not seeing you for 12 bloody days.’
These letters strike the notes which would become familiar to anyone who studied the correspondence in full: genuine and passionate devotion marred by a strident self-pity that bores and sometimes repels. In almost every letter he bemoans his uniquely unhappy lot: the miseries of being Prince of Wales, trapped in a routine that was wearisome and futile, surrounded by hostile relations and treacherous servants, starved of the company of the one person who could have made him happy. It is indeed an unhappy condition to be in love with a married woman, and still more so when there seems no possible way by which the situation can be improved; but it must have taken all Freda Dudley Ward’s resolution to provide the constant consolation and reassurance that was demanded by her lover. Endlessly he poured out to her his fears and woes. ‘Fredie darling, I love you love you now beyond all understanding and all I can say is bless you, bless you, for being so sweet and divine and tender and sympathique to your David last night and for saving him, mon amour. And you know that the truth is I was on the verge of a mental disaster or whatever you like to call it … that might have been permanent.’
He knew that his insatiable demands for reassurance were unreasonably taxing and apologized constantly for his weakness – ‘You have made me feel so terribly badly as regards my foul grousing and unpardonable glooms’
– but he could no more have cut off the flow of desolation than he could have ended the relationship.
Freda Dudley Ward, as nobody else was able to do before the advent of Mrs Simpson, gave him the strength he needed. She alone could cheer him up when he was in the blackest depression, could cajole or bully him back to the path of duty. Without her he could manage, but at a fearful cost to his nerves and to conspicuously less good effect. When on his foreign tours, he constantly inveighed against the cruel fate that separated them and agonized over the strain of keeping going without her support. His tone was sometimes hysterical, but essentially he wrote no more than the truth.
She was an excellent influence on him. She made him drink and smoke less – though herself a chain smoker; she encouraged him to do what he was best at; she laughed him out of his occasional absurdities. She fostered his genuine concern for the injustices of society and tried, to less good effect, to broaden his intellectual horizons. Once she gave him a copy of Wuthering Heights to read. ‘Who is this woman Bront?’ he asked dubiously.’
She told him home truths in a way nobody else did, yet never forfeited his total confidence. ‘Self-pity is a most degrading thing,’ he wrote, ‘and you’ve driven all mine right away and about time too. I know I’m hopelessly spoilt and therefore discontented … I’m so grateful to you for showing me myself … and it’s the first time I had a look at “the brute” for months!! But now I can see how utterly ridiculous and futile he is, and I’ll try and reform him a bit in Canada.’ And then a cry of pain: ‘If only I didn’t feel so lonely nowadays.’
Great though her influence was, she was reticent in using it and never did so to her own advantage. The Prince’s Comptroller, Sydney Greville, once reported a scare over the Prince ‘rushing off to appoint a nominee of Mrs Dudley Ward’ as equerry,’
but there is no other suggestion that she interfered in the running of the royal household. On the contrary, all the Prince’s staff liked her and welcomed her; ‘one of the best friends he ever had in his life,’ Bruce Ogilvy described her.
As she was to discover herself in due course, there was only room for one great love in the Prince’s life. Any previous claimant to the title was ruthlessly discarded. Portia Stanley appeared at a shooting party at Sandringham. ‘I stood no rot from her,’ reported the Prince. ‘She only stood with me at one drive and that was because she asked to and it was tricky to say NO. I loathe that woman, and it maddens me her showing herself in here like this.’
He was fiercely jealous of any rival. Freda’s admirer of long standing was Lord Pembroke’s younger brother, Michael Herbert. The Prince was in torment whenever he knew that the two were likely to meet. She wrote to him from Lady Desborough’s home to report that, though Herbert was in the house party, she had seen little of him. ‘Good! good! and more! more!’ applauded the Prince. ‘I do love to hear that and I bet he tried hard enough to get you alone and he must have been furious too!! I’m so so glad and happy darling.’
In return he constantly assured her that he found all other women dull and unattractive, and she professed to be upset if he seemed to favour one or other of them. She wrote crossly when he was seen at the Grafton Galleries with Edwina Mountbatten. ‘I’m sorry if I annoyed you …’ he wrote penitently, ‘though I hate your putting it that Edwina took me. Darling, no bloody woman takes me anywhere and it was Dickie who suggested it and I couldn’t see any harm … But I’m sorry my sweetheart, though please don’t think that I’m led around by other women.’
In these first hectic years, indeed, to all effects there was no other woman. His intimates continued to hope otherwise. In Canada at the end of 1919 Claud Hamilton believed he might propose to the lady who was subsequently to marry Joey Legh – ‘if only “it” would happen, it would be the most wonderful thing in the world and save the British Empire’.
But such hopes were illusory. When he visited Kyoto during his tour of Japan the geishas wanted to take the rings off his hand. He let them remove the signet ring ‘but naturally not yours my sweetheart and it took me quite a time to assure them that I wasn’t engaged!! If only they knew how very heavily married I am, darling angel.’
He found in Freda Dudley Ward’s home the family life that was lacking – or that he convinced himself was lacking – at court. He loved her two daughters, and would call in to see them even when their mother was away. ‘The babies were in marvellous shape,’ he wrote after one such visit, ‘and I can never tell you what they didn’t do to me, from binding me up on the floor with ribbands and pulling my hair etc etc. I do adore those divine little girls of yours, sweetheart, and love playing with 2 wee editions of Fredie!!’
They for their part treated him as a much-loved uncle and pined for his visits. Towards the end of the Second World War the elder daughter, Angela Laycock, wrote to him: ‘It is so many years since I last saw you that I suppose I can no longer start my letters “Darling Little Prince” though that is how I should like to begin … You can’t imagine how much I miss you still, after all this time. You see, my childhood is so full of happy, happy memories and you are bound up in all of them.’
His own siblings abetted the romance. Princess Mary forwarded the letters which he wrote to Freda almost every day from France, slipping out to post them when her French governess had her back turned.
Prince Albert kept the home fires burning when his brother was on tour: ‘She is miserable now without you and feels quite lost … I will look after Freda for you to the best of my ability.’
Not surprisingly, the King and Queen were less enthusiastic about their son’s liaison. The King had never met Mrs Dudley Ward and considered her social background made her inappropriate as a friend for his eldest son, let alone anything more intimate. Though time modified his attitude, his first assumption was that she was a pernicious influence and should be cut out of the Prince’s life. ‘Papa seems to think that anything you do which he doesn’t like has been influenced by Fredie,’ warned Prince Albert. ‘This of course is due to the great popularity which you have everywhere, and Papa is merely jealous.’
The Queen was quick to indignation if she thought that her son was allowing his mistress to distract him from the course of duty. On one occasion he asked if he might miss a court function. Queen Mary knew that he wanted instead to go to a dance which Freda Dudley Ward was attending. ‘I was aghast when I read your letter,’ she wrote. ‘It would be very rude to us were you not to come tonight.’ ‘A pretty hot letter!!’ was the Prince’s rueful comment when he passed it on to Mrs Dudley Ward.
Such rebukes did not shake his affection for the Queen. ‘My mother is sweet to me and so sensible,’ he told Freda; ‘there’s really no rot about her although she is a martinette. But that is her upbringing and no fault of hers, and she really is a wonderful woman.’
But inevitably this new, all-important association eroded the relationship which had been built up between mother and son. ‘Curious David does not confide in you any more,’ commented the King in 1922. ‘I suppose he only does so to her.’
What evidence there is suggests that, for the first eighteen months or so of their affair, Freda Dudley Ward cared as deeply for the Prince as he for her. It could not endure at such intensity. Mrs Dudley Ward needed someone who was more regularly in her life than the itinerant Prince, whose friendship posed less social problems, who was more sophisticated and less doting. He was made miserable when, in the summer of 1920, Freda tried to cool down his ardour and to put the relationship on to a new, more platonic basis. ‘So you have heard from Fredie at last,’ the recently created Duke of York wrote to him. ‘It must have depressed you and worried you a good deal, I know, but whatever she says I know you will listen to.’
Michael Herbert remained a threat. For a time Mrs Dudley Ward kept her two admirers in uneasy balance; each grudgingly acquiescing in the claims of the other. Then in 1922, when the Prince was in the Far East, there was talk of divorce. ‘What I can’t get at is when you intend to divorce Duddie, my beloved,’ wrote the puzzled Prince. ‘Will it all be going on when I return or do you intend to wait till we can discuss it all, or what? Also, are you going to divorce him or is he going to divorce you?’ The thought that disturbed him most was that, once free, Freda might marry Herbert or somebody else. ‘I can’t bear the thought that our lives should have to be in any way different to what they’ve been for the last 4 years.’ If the divorce was to go through, then it would obviously be essential that he keep well out of the limelight: ‘… if I’m in the way for the present you will tell me, won’t you? … I’m making the very biggest sacrifice that I’ll ever make in my whole life by writing to you what I am tonight my sweet Freda, and I’m crying a bit, though as I love you love you I do want so to help you too. It is so so terribly hard and cruel to be away from you at a time of crisis.’
Talk of a divorce blew over and by the time he had reached Japan he had reassured himself that their love affair would survive unimpaired. He wrote from Kyoto to tell her ‘how I’ve missed you and pined for TOI my precious beloved, and how I’m always wanting TOI and yearning for you!! And I know from your letters that you’ve felt the same, Fredie, and the fact that both still feel as mad as we ever did is a real test, isn’t it, darling angel?’
He deluded himself. She was devoted to him, loyal to him, but she no longer loved him madly. When he got back to England later that year, it was to find that the reputation of her children was advanced as a reason for their seeing less of each other. Reluctantly he accepted the excuse: ‘We are indeed a hunted and pathetic little couple, aren’t we, Fredie, but nobody can stop us loving each other.’
The unhappiness and frustration caused by Freda Dudley Ward’s coolness towards him drove him to seek solace in drink, night clubs and the ostentatious pursuit of other women. Many of the accounts of the Prince of Wales misbehaving in public stem from this period. In the spring of 1923 it seems to have come to a head. Freda must have stated bluntly that their relationship could never be what it had been and that he would have to content himself with friendship. ‘I’m at last beginning to realize what I’ve lost through going quite quite mad … in April,’ he wrote despairingly, ‘though I suppose it’s too late now … Oh! Fredie – I just don’t understand a thing about life except that it’s all d—d hard and foul and cruel, and I’m so depressed and puzzled about it all.’
To solace his woes he indulged in a brief fling with Audrey Coats, a girl who as Audrey James had played havoc with a wide swathe of London society. Mr Coats, however, was evidently less complaisant than Mr Dudley Ward. ‘Never have I had such an exciting week as this,’ the Prince told Freda from a house party at Drummond Castle, in which the Coatses were among the guests, ‘and the air is electric and it’s all too tricky for words. I’m quite exhausted and shall be lucky if I escape without the hell of a row …’ But though he found Mrs Coats attractive and enjoyed his affair with her, he was being entirely sincere when he told his true love: ‘I’m not madly in love and never will be again, and she’ll never mean a fraction to me of what you do.’
There were to be many such meaner beauties of the night but the moon of Freda Dudley Ward reigned supreme, and was to continue to do so until all other luminaries were dimmed by the solar splendour of Mrs Simpson.
Freda was sometimes painfully honest in her efforts to keep the Prince at bay. ‘I can’t help hating and loathing the fact that you are in love with somebody else and it was a big blow when you told me the other day,’ he wrote to her. ‘It’s a horrid thought for me that I really mean nothing whatever to you now, though you mean the hell of a lot to me, bless you.’
He did, of course, mean a great deal to her, and was to do so for many years. He for his part continued to treat her as confidante and friend; she remained the lodestar of his life, he reported back to her faithfully after every new amatory or other escapade. To the outside world – or at least those parts of the outside world which were near enough to the inside to know of Mrs Dudley Ward’s existence – they remained inextricably linked. In 1927 Churchill travelled in the same train as they to Nottingham – ‘It was quite pathetic to see the Prince and Freda. His love is so obvious and undisguisable’; the following year Brian Howard refused to let his seaside house to the Prince – ‘He’d only break all the furniture to pieces playing Blind Man’s Buff with Mrs Dudley Ward’; a year later again the Prince’s equerry, John Aird, was relieved to find that his employer wanted to leave Epsom as soon as the Derby was over. Then Freda Dudley Ward appeared on the scene. ‘The result being that we now waited to see the next race and in consequence the car was blocked all the way back.’
Though the Prince’s devotion to Mrs Dudley Ward continued unabated throughout the 1920s and well into the next decade, it was for him in some ways an unfulfilling, even sterile relationship. He craved total mutual devotion and dependence; deprived of it, he thrashed about aimlessly, causing pain to many in so doing and most notably to himself. The relationship was not close enough to satisfy him, yet it was too close to permit any more permanent liaison. While Mrs Dudley Ward reigned, there could be no Princess of Wales. In 1922 he described to Freda his feelings towards her younger sister Vera: ‘I love Verie a tiny bit for herself, though more because she is your sister and still more because you love her so!! You will remember our discussing her as a possible wife for me, darling, but each day longer that I live, the more certain I am that I’ll never never ever love anyone else again. And I would never marry any woman I liked unless I loved her!!’
Seven years later nothing had changed. ‘I know our two lives aren’t absolutely satisfactory and I’m afraid they won’t ever be now, but I do know this, my angel: that I love you too much to ever be able to love anybody else ever again. I’m always comparing and they can’t any of them compare and I’m so glad. I lost my head once over a crazy physical attraction. Look at the result. Just made a fool of myself, that’s all. Nothing left of it but nausea.’
One page survives from a reproachful letter written to him by one of the women with whom he tried to solace the pain of Freda Dudley Ward’s inaccessibility. ‘I only hope,’ the page concludes, ‘that as you love her so much, Freda will marry you and make you very happy.’
The words were presumably ironic; the writer must have known that the idea of marriage with the Prince of Wales never entered the head of Mrs Dudley Ward. How far it entered the head of the Prince is harder to decide. He said often that Freda was the solitary woman whom he could marry; yet the only person who stated positively that he had proposed to her and been rejected was Lord Brownlow.
Brownlow knew the Prince well but it is curious that there is no reference to any such démarche in the Prince’s many surviving letters. The implication in his correspondence, indeed, is that he had never contemplated any such possibility. His lament was always that he had not known her before 1913, the year of her marriage;
once she had become Mrs Dudley Ward she had put herself for ever out of his reach.
If he had known her before 1913 he would have been too immature to pay her any serious attention. It is tempting to speculate, however, on what would have happened if Dudley Ward had died in battle and Freda, when he met her in 1918, had been not an estranged wife but a decorously merry widow. Could he and would he have married her, and if so, what difference would it have made?
The fact that she was a commoner would have created difficulties but would not have made the match impossible. As late as 1932 the Prince of Wales told his father that he had never realized he might be allowed to marry ‘a suitable well-born English girl’. No one had ever suggested the possibility to him before, he said, ‘There was only one lady he had ever wished to marry and that was Mrs Dudley Ward – and he would still like to marry her. But the King said he didn’t think that would do.’
The Prince’s ignorance is extraordinary; the matter had constantly been debated over the previous fifteen years. All the evidence suggests that if he did not know that he might be allowed to marry a British commoner it was because he had not asked. And if he did not ask, it was because he did not wish to know; he was determined not to marry anyone except Freda and preferred to keep in his mind this half-imaginary barrier in the way of matrimony. In fact as early as 1917 George V recorded that he had told the Privy Council his children would be allowed to marry into British families: ‘It was quite a historical occasion.’
The fact that Edward was Prince of Wales would have made the King more cautious about the suitability of any candidate, but nothing was said to indicate that the eldest son was to be treated differently from his siblings. The objection to Rosemary Leveson-Gower had been not that she was a commoner but that there was ‘a taint in the blood’. If the Prince did not know this then he wilfully blinded himself to reality.
A widowed Mrs Dudley Ward would certainly not have seemed suitable to the King and Queen. There would have been strong opposition, possibly too strong to overcome. For one thing the previous marriage, with the problems it would have posed, such as semi-royal stepchildren, would have been a serious obstacle. For another, a lace-manufacturer’s daughter, however respectable, would not have seemed the right sort of match for a British prince, let alone the heir to the throne. But beneath his testiness George V was a kindly and susceptible man, sincerely anxious that his son should find happiness and security. There was at least a chance that the obstinacy of the Prince and the charms of Mrs Dudley Ward would in the end have worn down his resistance. Queen Freda would have seemed a surprising concept to the British people, but so great was the popularity of the Prince of Wales in the years after the war that public opinion would undoubtedly have supported him. It could have happened.
It is also possible to argue that though it could, it would not have happened. The Prince, it has been said, loved Freda Dudley Ward just because she was inaccessible. If she had been free to marry him, he would not have wanted to marry her. Whether he was aware of it or not, the argument goes, he was resolved never to marry; by falling in love with a married woman he was providing himself with an alibi against having to marry anyone else. He was temperamentally unable to accept such a commitment, or perhaps he sought to leave open a route by which he might one day escape the throne.
It is impossible to prove the contrary; where motives are in question it must always be a matter for surmise. The theory, however, does not seem to be supported by what facts there are. He had once been anxious to marry Portia Cadogan; when the time came he was resolved to marry Mrs Simpson; everything he said or did indicated that he would have liked nothing better than to make Freda Dudley Ward his wife. Far from seeking to avoid commitments he sought them with relentless fervour. The lesson to be learnt from the last thirty-five years of his life is surely that, though he might not have been particularly happy as a married man, he was far unhappier as a bachelor.
And if he had been allowed to marry Freda Dudley Ward, or Portia Cadogan, or any other strong woman whom he could have loved; if, like his luckier brother, he had found his own version of Elizabeth Bowes Lyon; would it have made any difference? Might he have become, to use the simpliste but by no means valueless terminology of 1066 and All That, a ‘good king’? One has, of course, not the remotest idea. All that can be said with certainty is that in 1919 the potential was there: the charm, the good will, the enthusiasm, the readiness to learn, the enquiring mind. So too, of course, were the corroding weaknesses; but with the support and encouragement of the right wife the weaknesses might have been overcome and potential become reality. At the least, the reign of King Edward VIII would have taken a very different course.
6
The Role of the Prince
DON’T THINK YOU CAN ACT LIKE OTHER PEOPLE, THE KING warned his son at the end of the war. ‘You must always remember your position and who you are.’ But, the Prince asked himself, ‘who exactly was I?’
He was a man apart, that much was clear, and he loathed it. He did what he could to mitigate his isolation, to treat others and to be treated himself as if he were a normal human being; but though a normal human being was what he was, he would never win acceptance of the fact. Even by those who knew him best he was treated with gingerly deference, as a freak with a touch of the divine, an improbably animated refugee from Madame Tussaud’s. His jokes would be greeted with sycophantic fervour by those who were amazed a prince could joke at all; his peccadilloes were met with extravagant censure by those who did not believe a prince should be vulnerable to the weaknesses of the flesh. Part at least of the sympathy he felt towards Americans came from his conviction – rarely justified – that they would not view him with the curious compound of reverence and resentment that the average Briton adopts towards its monarchy.
That veteran courtier Fritz Ponsonby placed all the Prince’s qualms firmly into focus when he remonstrated with him for making himself too accessible. ‘The Monarchy must always retain an element of mystery,’ he maintained. ‘A Prince should not show himself too much. The Monarchy must remain on a pedestal.’ The Prince flatly disagreed. The last place he wished to be was on a pedestal, he wanted to be down among the people, getting to know them and letting them know him.
There was more truth in both points of view than either party was ready to concede. But the argument was anyway academic. Every time the Prince of Wales tried to descend from his pedestal the British people put him back again. Wherever he went, whatever he did, he was walled around by deferential affection, a barrier imperceptible sometimes but inexorably setting him apart. Even when he first went out with the Pytchley hunt, six stalwart followers were secretly deputed to escort him and to ensure that he returned unharmed.
If he could not be treated as an equal on the hunting field, where a man is traditionally worth no more than his courage, his prowess as a rider and the quality of his horse, then where could he hope to find the sort of acceptance that he craved?
To be isolated was bad enough, to be isolated in inactivity was insupportable. The designated successor to the leadership of some great company or institution will be fully occupied with the specialist duties that fall to him while he is waiting to take over. The heir to some great estate, even in 1919, could busy himself in whatever career he chose until the title and the land became his. The Prince had no specialist duties, yet the tasks that were imposed upon him effectively prevented him pursuing any serious career. His life was divided between furious bouts of what he described as ‘princing’ – opening hospitals, addressing dinners, receiving addresses, smiling, smiling, smiling – and tracts of emptiness which it was up to him to fill as best he could. Geddes, the British Ambassador in Washington, suggested that the Prince would make an ideal Governor General of Canada.
The King insisted that he was needed nearer home. The Queen said that he must ‘learn how to govern’.
Yet little indeed was done to teach him. He was denied access to all but a limited range of state papers, never encouraged to talk to politicians or civil servants. He told Lady Airlie that he realized he must work to keep his job, but was given no work and was not even sure he had a job.
In the middle of the nineteenth century Bagehot had written perceptively of what was now the Prince’s problem: ‘Whatever is most attractive, whatever is most seductive, has always been offered to the Prince of Wales of the day, and always will be. It is not rational to expect the best virtue where temptation is applied in the most trying form at the frailest time of human life.’
The Prince had done no more than taste the flavour of the fleshpots before the war, there had followed four years of dour privation, now everything was his for the taking. If his life had developed as had been expected in 1914 he would have had time to adjust to the heady and dangerous delights of liberty. As it was, he was almost entirely inexperienced. In 1921 he told Freda Dudley Ward that he had been reading Max Beerbohm’s essay on King George IV.
‘I’ve found a sentence in it that I think must be amazingly suitable and applicable to me and somewhat an apology for my doings and behaviour … “He was indeed still a child, for royalties not being ever brought into contact with the realities of life, remain young far longer than other people.” No one realizes how desperately true that is in my case [more] than I do.’
When he surveyed the monstrous banquet of pleasures which the world laid in front of him, and the unsubstantial restraints placed upon his capacity to gratify himself, he might have been inclined to cry with Clive that he stood astonished at his own moderation.
‘I think David ought to return home before very long,’ wrote Queen Mary to the King three weeks after the armistice, ‘as he must help us in these difficult days.’
In a letter that must have chilled the Prince’s heart, Lord Stamfordham sketched out the sort of help that was in question. The King had decreed he should take over the Presidency of the King Edward VII’s Hospital Fund. ‘Then there is the Royal College of Music. The University of Wales is the most pressing as the King really constitutionally ought not to be the Chancellor. Then Your Royal Highness is to be elected a Trustee of the British Museum.’
And so the dismal catalogue went on.
The first essential was to find him a private secretary. Lord Cromer, a former diplomat and banker turned courtier, was the Prince’s original choice, but the King ruled that he could not be spared from his present duties. Next to be canvassed was a former journalist and much-decorated officer in the Brigade of Guards, Edward Grigg, who seemed to accord admirably with Stamfordham’s prescription: ‘someone with brains, with some Colonial knowledge: a facile pen – a nice fellow …’
Grigg, however, hankered after a career less restricted than he would find in royal service. Eventually the job went to Godfrey Thomas, whose diplomatic career had already been interrupted by the Prince’s demands on his time. In his diary the Prince described Thomas as a ‘topper’ and a ‘ripper’ and he wrote to him as ‘my greatest friend and the one man I can trust and who really understands me’.
It was perhaps a feeling that the two men were too close to each other that led the King to question the wisdom of the appointment. The Prince stuck to his guns. Thomas was ‘very able, full of tact, and popular with everyone … in addition to never hesitating to point out or tell me of any failings he may think I am guilty of’.
It proved a good choice. A stronger personality than Thomas might possibly have curbed some of the Prince’s excesses, but more probably the two men would have quarrelled and greater mischief been done than good. Thomas served his master with loyalty and devotion until the abdication.
With a private secretary came an independent household. The Prince insisted that, at twenty-five, he could no longer live under his parents’ roof. ‘I must be free to live my own life,’ he told Lady Airlie.
The King took the line that the roof of Buckingham Palace was quite large enough for two – or twenty for that matter – but he grudgingly gave way and in July 1919 the Prince moved into York House, not so much a house in fact as a fragment of the great complex of St James’s Palace, which grew or shrank according to the needs and pretensions of the occupant. It was not ideal, few good rooms and those north-facing, dark, antiquated, but it suited the new owner’s needs and gave him the privacy and independence he so much desired.
And so, in his new premises, he set up in business as Prince of Wales. Lloyd George still presided over a coalition government elected with a large majority at the end of 1918, but though his personal prestige was high the overwhelming Conservative preponderance in the alliance meant that his position was far less strong than it seemed. The Prince’s views at the time of the election were much as might have been expected from a serving officer: ‘One dreads to think of the Labour people returning a greater number of members … and then all these crazy women candidates; however Lloyd George seems to be all right just now, tho’ one can’t trust him a yard.’ Wigram had been sending him the Scotland Yard reports on the state of opinion among the working classes and he read them with alarm: ‘I’m afraid I’m always a pessimist but the situation looks pretty black just now, tho’ it’s not half as black as it will be in a year’s time, perhaps less than that.’
The problems were going to start when the soldiers were demobilized and expected employment and a decent standard of living. Only radical action could avert disaster: ‘Oh! we’ve got funny, or, rather, serious times before us, but they’ve got to be faced and in the right and proper way and to hell with precedents!! They won’t wash nowadays!!’
He agreed wholeheartedly with his mother when she rejoiced at the defeat of the more extreme socialists in the general election and concluded her letter: ‘If only the Coalition Govt will now hurry up and get the much needed reforms (which the working classes need) passed, they can take the wind out of the sails of the extremists, and I trust they will be wise enough to realize it.’
He returned to a Britain that was riven by class antipathies and violent industrial disputes. ‘One can’t help seeing the work people’s point of view,’ he told the Queen, ‘and in a way it’s only human nature to get as much as one can out of one’s employer.’
He soon found that he sympathized with Lloyd George and the more radical wing of the government and resented the intransigent callousness of the hard-faced men who had done well out of the war. ‘I look on [Lloyd George] as the only possible man living to be PM and feel that if he goes a Labour govt is bound to come in. I have the greatest confidence in him now, tho’ I didn’t use to!!’
That the accession to power of a Labour government would be an evil seemed as obvious to him as it did to 99 per cent of the upper classes, but that the injustices of society required drastic redress and that, if nobody else would do it, it would have to be done by the socialists, seemed quite as evident. ‘It is a very sad and depressing thought that there are so many desperately sad and sordid homes this Christmas,’ he wrote in 1921, ‘destitute men (thousands of them ex-service men) and consequently still more starving women and children.’
Such sentiments are easily voiced, but less easily acted on. The Prince of Wales was no crusader and was disinclined to concern himself with any problem which was not thrust forcibly on his attention. But the unemployment and destitution among so large a part of the population were thrust on his attention, and the issues preoccupied him for many years.
In June 1919 he made the first of the provincial tours which were to be so conspicuous a feature of his public life and were to give him a deeper understanding of British industry and working men than any monarch or heir to the throne had enjoyed before him. He spent four days in south Wales, was taken through the least salubrious slums, and in his speeches laboured constantly ‘the welfare of our ex-service men and the improvement of housing conditions, both of which I have very much at heart’. He went down Cymmr pit in the Rhondda Valley and found chalked on a wall a thousand feet down: ‘Welcome to our soldier Prince. Long may he live.’ He borrowed a piece of chalk and wrote below the slogan: ‘Thank you. Edward, Prince.’
Until his Commonwealth tours were behind him he was not to be put to the task of doing something practical to implement his sincere but vague benevolence. He did, however, manage to fit other provincial visits into the gaps between his voyages abroad. Glasgow, traditionally the most republican and fiercely left-wing of British cities, was a tough assignment. The first day he met with boos or sullen silence, but his patent good will, humility and charm gradually prevailed. ‘It’s with the greatest possible relief and gratitude to the people of Glasgow that I can tell you that I’m more welcome here now than I was yesterday,’ he wrote proudly to Freda Dudley Ward. ‘I’ve driven miles through the streets of this vast city today and the people … have been divine to me and were very kind and enthusiastic. Even the men cheered and far more took off their caps than yesterday and there were only 1⁄2 dozen boos.’ Next day was even better; ‘a large crowd gave me a marvellous send off tonight. To TOI, and TOI only, I say that I do feel I’ve been able to do just a little good propaganda up there and given Communism a knock.’ But he did not delude himself that the royal touch could miraculously cure economic ills: ‘I’m afraid the effect of my visit won’t last very long. Things have gone too far, darling, on the Clyde and I take a very gloomy view of the whole situation.’
In Cardiff three months later he was flabbergasted by the warmth of his reception. ‘They’ve all been divine to me today,’ he told Freda, ‘and I’ve seen hundreds of ex-service men and they were the nicest of the lot. Christ only knows why, for they are all having a real bad time and one is so terribly sorry for them.’
One of his problems was that the local dignitaries sought to swaddle him in pompous formalities, while his pre-occupation was to meet and be seen by as many people as possible. In Lancashire in 1921, for example: ‘Old Lord Derby has organized this tour marvellously, and I’m able to put in an occasional human touch or stunt of my own, so that I think it’s going well, though I’m afraid my ultra-democratic spirit has annoyed him a few times.’ He had his own way over the programme: ‘No waste of time, such as laying foundation stones and opening things, it was all just driving through miles and miles of crowded streets and stopping at groups of ex-service men and schoolchildren.’ But, as he found still more markedly on his tours abroad, the strain of constantly giving himself to the people, exuding warmth and enthusiastic interest for eight or nine hours on end, was sometimes cripplingly oppressive: ‘I’m down to bedrock, my angel, and Christ only knows how I’m going to scrape through the next 2 days.’
Painfully, he acquired the art of public speaking. Churchill appointed himself his coach. Don’t be ashamed to read a speech, he wrote, but in that case ‘do it quite openly, reading it very slowly and deliberately’. Of course it was better to memorize a text or talk from notes. To accommodate the notes, he advised, take a tumbler, put a finger bowl on top of it, put a plate on top of that, and then arrange the notes on top of the plate, ‘but one has to be very careful not to knock it all over, as once happened to me’. This advice was given before a banquet for the allied leaders in July 1919. Whether the Prince followed Churchill’s somewhat alarming system is uncertain. He memorized the speech, however, and evidently delivered it well. ‘You are absolutely right to take trouble about these things,’ wrote Churchill approvingly. ‘With perseverance you might speak as well as anybody in the land, and naturally and gracefully besides.’
The Prince never learned to speak as well as that but he mastered the technique of seeming sincere and spontaneous: ‘He talks very simply,’ wrote Frances Stevenson, Lloyd George’s personal secretary and future wife, ‘just like a schoolboy – saying little things that come into his head as he goes along, and then coming back again to the prepared speech. He charms everyone.’
But he never enjoyed making speeches. On another occasion Frances Stevenson congratulated him on his success. ‘He told me he would never get used to speaking in public – he was far too nervous. “My trouble is that I have not a ready pen,” he said. “I find it so difficult even to prepare a speech …” He is a dear thing, with beautiful eyes, but such a boy.’
The vast estates of the Duchy of Cornwall in London and the West Country gave him a chance to do something practical to help the unemployed and the homeless. He invested a large amount of money in new machinery for the Cornish tin mines, set up a farming concern run on cooperative lines and planted 250 acres of forest on the eastern side of Dartmoor. In London he regularly visited his estates in Kennington and the areas of the borough which he owned were conspicuously better furnished with houses than the parts for which the Council was responsible. At a public meeting the Mayor tried to blame his Council’s shortcomings on the policies of the Duchy. ‘Thereupon the whole Labour party who were in the hall rose and practically hissed the Mayor off the platform.’ The socialist leader in the borough later told Sydney Greville that the Prince, after the interview which he had given them, could do anything he liked with the Labour Party.
His public life directly after the war was not restricted to the University of Wales, the Royal College of Music and the other pressing calls on his time that Stamfordham had enumerated. ‘Other men might be chained to their desks,’ he wrote wryly in his memoirs. ‘I was metaphorically chained to the banquet table.’
A typical day in July 1919 saw him receiving Indian army and navy officers, attending a meeting of the Duchy Council, visiting the Australian YMCA, spending the evening at the Royal College of Music, moving on to a boxing display and ending up at the Embassy night club. In March he was initiated by the Duke of Connaught into the Household Brigade Lodge of the Freemasons. For once it seemed he might be spared a speech, since replies to toasts were traditionally limited to five words, ‘Worshipful Master, I thank you,’ but the rule was waived for the heir to the throne and the Prince had to hold forth about his ‘ardent desire to do his utmost to promote the principles of duty, loyalty and benevolence, on which Freemasonry rested’.
Closer to his heart was his appointment the following year to be Honorary Colonel of the newly formed Welsh Guards. For one who was often to claim that this was the office which meant more to him than any other, his initial reaction was, however, hardly ecstatic. ‘Of course it is inevitable and is only right I suppose and I more than appreciate the honour etc. etc.!!’ he wrote to a friend. ‘But once a Grenadier always a Grenadier!!’
But such diversions were no more than aperitifs to the daunting meal that was to come. It was Lloyd George who first conceived the idea that the Prince should embark on a series of tours around the Empire, ostensibly to visit the soldiers he had met during the war in Europe and the Middle East and to thank their governments and peoples for all they had contributed to the final victory. Lloyd George knew that demands for reform in the structure of the Empire, pent up during the years of fighting, would now be vigorously put forward. Difficult and probably acrimonious negotiations were inevitable. Anything that could be done to ensure that they were conducted in a spirit of unity, and against a background of harmony, would be of the greatest value. Otherwise the strains might prove too great and the Empire disintegrate. ‘The appearance of the popular Prince of Wales,’ Lloyd George maintained, ‘might do more to calm the discord than half a dozen solemn Imperial Conferences.’
The King was not convinced that his son’s apparition would thus magically still the tempest, but he felt that at least it would be a useful stage in the education of a future monarch. Canada had asked first for a visit from the Prince, so Canada would start the series, the other Dominions and parts of the Empire would follow in the next few years. It was a prospect that exhilarated and alarmed the Prince. He longed to travel, but though he had no concept yet of how gruelling his tours would be, he knew well that they would be no joy ride. He would be constantly on parade, scrutinized in every detail of his behaviour, blamed if he were too solemn or too frivolous, criticized for his formality, rebuked for his informality. ‘Your visits to the Dominions will be made or marred according as you do and say the right thing,’ Lord Stamfordham sternly warned him. ‘The Throne is the pivot upon which the Empire will more than ever hinge. Its strength and stability will depend entirely on its occupant.’
The Prince found it troublesome enough always to do and say the right thing in the restricted periods during which he was on duty in the United Kingdom; to have to do so for months at a time under the microscope that is trained upon a royal visitor would test him unreasonably hard. It was with grave qualms that he sailed from Portsmouth on 5 August 1919, on his way to the New World.
7
The First Tours
THE PRINCE’S HAPPINESS, ALMOST HIS SURVIVAL, ON HIS gargantuan tours depended as much as anything on the people who accompanied him. For the trip to Canada Stamfordham recommended a man who, like Thomas and Legh, was to serve him until his reign was over. Admiral Halsey – ‘the Old Salt’ as he was derisively but affectionately nicknamed – was something of a Hansell; sound, honourable, humourless, unimaginative. He was ‘the ideal Chief of Staff’, the Prince told his mother, ‘and I know we are going to be a very happy family’. Needless to say they were not; friction in such a party was almost inevitable, and became completely so when Halsey was matched by a political adviser with unspecified responsibilities, the energetic and somewhat impatient Edward Grigg. Grigg, by family background as well as predilection, was destined to devote the greater part of his life to the service of the British Empire. He was ‘a very exceptional man’, the Prince went on, ‘so clever and able and he has such splendidly broad-minded and far seeing ideas, a great imperialist …’
He was all that, but also assertive, suffered fools badly, and considered Halsey something of a fool. The prospects for harmony were not bright.
In a memorandum which Grigg prepared for the Colonial Secretary, Milner, he observed that the main object of the Prince’s visit was ‘to create an atmosphere. He will do this largely by natural tact and charm.’ But he would have to overcome the feeling in North America that the monarchy was no more than an ‘interesting feudal anachronism’. His speeches should emphasize his ‘appreciation of the political institutions of the Empire and of the very vital place which the Crown takes as the nodus of the whole web. That line is, I think, good for the Canadian as well as the American market.’ Lloyd George minuted dubiously: ‘There must be nothing that would look in USA like a challenge to republican institutions’; an indication of the many tightropes the Prince was going to be required to walk over the next few years as he teetered between America and Canada; Westminster and Dominion governments; federal capital and state capitals; French Canadian and Anglo-Canadian; Boer and rooinek.
When he left Portsmouth, however, the Prince was looking not forward to such problems but backward towards Mrs Dudley Ward. At one point he had tried to persuade her to accompany him to Canada, or at least to meet him there. She had taken the possibility seriously enough to consult Piers Legh’s fiancée about it, but had wisely decided to stay behind.
The Prince was disconsolate and only began to regain his spirits when the battle cruiser, HMS Renown, arrived at St John’s and the demands of the tour left less time for brooding.
‘No enthusiastic mob – seems a dead place on the whole,’ commented Sub-Lieutenant Hutchinson gloomily. ‘Went ashore, but the only thing they seem to sell here is ice-cream.’
He failed to note the Prince’s favourite feature of his arrival, the triumphal arch composed largely of drums of cod-liver oil and festooned with the carcasses of dried codfish.
Nor was the Prince disturbed by the relatively meagre crowds, proudly describing his ‘rapturous reception’ to the King: ‘The fact that my first day in the Dominion was a success has given me confidence for the future.’
What gave him greatest confidence was that he was performing well in public. Godfrey Thomas, who was also in the party, told the Queen, ‘I cannot describe … how well the Prince is speaking.’ The Canadian Prime Minister, Sir Robert Bordern, had been ‘immensely struck and talked of nothing else after the St John visit’.
The Prince was less struck by Sir Robert Bordern. ‘Quite pleasant, but rather a dull old stick,’ he described him to the Queen.
Sometimes the Prime Minister was worse than that. When the Prince was about to make the most important speech of his Canadian visit, Bordern noted that he was nervous and distrait: ‘I endeavoured to divert his attention by recounting some amusing anecdotes, but he quite frequently consulted his notes.’ In spite of his no doubt well-intentioned sabotage, the speech, Bordern concluded, was ‘admirable in every way’.
The Prince’s next important stop, Quebec, introduced him to what he had been told would prove the greatest impediment to a successful tour, the hostility between anglophone and francophone Canada. Expecting the worst, he was pleasantly surprised. ‘They are a curious people and very touchy, but they seemed quite pleased and certainly gave me a good welcome,’ he wrote of the French Canadians to the King.
In Montreal, speaking half in French and half in English, he claimed that the union of the two races was more than a matter of political convenience, ‘it was, and will always remain, an example of the highest political wisdom’.
The French Canadians, an anonymous lady assured the King, likened the Prince to ‘L’Enfant Jésus’.
One may doubt whether many French Canadians spotted the similarity but the Prince went down well with a public disposed to be critical and captious.
It was Toronto which offered the most turbulent welcome. The Prince’s stay there, Thomas told the Queen, ‘were the most extraordinary days I have ever seen’. Things began relatively quietly, enthusiasm mounted by the hour, and the scenes when he drove through the city on his final day made Thomas think ‘that half the people had taken leave of their senses’.
To the Prince it was overwhelming. For the first time he tasted the heady, dangerous wine of mass adulation. ‘The most wonderful days of my life,’ he described them, ‘… amazingly marvellous. People seemed to go quite mad.’
An unidentified lady in Toronto wrote to a friend in England and at third hand her letter came to the Queen. ‘He has won all hearts, and the demonstration here was personal love for him,’ wrote the lady. She had been to hear him speak: ‘He was very boyishly shy and very pink, but the dearest, sweetest and most bewitching creature. He really looked as if he were going to cry and bit his lip, but imagine, he faced a crowd of 50,000 people, who rose of course and yelled and screamed and cheered, never was there such a greeting. He spoke beautifully and to the point and looked sweet, his lovely complexion and blue eyes are the admiration of everyone.’
There was a physical price to pay for this glorification, beyond the exhaustion that followed a day among the crowds. He was jostled and buffeted, his right hand so bruised by constant shaking that he had to use his left. The King saw photographs of his son being mobbed and deprecated the loss of dignity. ‘It isn’t my fault,’ protested the Prince. ‘You just can’t think how enthusiastic the crowds have been, and they just go mad and one is powerless!!’
Grigg described ‘his happy way of making crowds no less than individuals feel that he meets them half way. It is always quite obvious somehow that the huge masses of people who have thronged his movements everywhere feel that his heart goes out to them as much as theirs to him, and the effect is (I use the word literally) indescribable.’
By the time that the Prince had visited all the main centres of the east, he was close to collapse. ‘HRH really does work very very hard,’ Halsey reported. What tired him most were visits to hospitals, ‘especially as he talks to practically every soldier who is bedridden, and his sympathy with them is so genuine that of course he finds it extremely hard to go on for any length of time’.
Some at least of his exhaustion was brought on by his refusal to rest when he had a chance. As he grew more tired, so he would insist on staying up later and later, talking, smoking, feverishly restless. No one else could have stood the strain so wonderfully, said Thomas, ‘but he could give himself much more chance if he would only be sensible and occasionally sit down in a chair or go to bed at a normal hour’.
The strain was not eased by interminable official banquets without even a solitary glass of wine to ease his nerves or dull the pain of other people’s orating. The Prince deplored prohibition, not just because of the personal inconvenience it caused him, but as being ‘the very worst form of class legislation’. There was plenty of liquor to be had, but only for those who were prepared to pay the exorbitant prices. ‘It’s the women’s vote which is the trouble, otherwise prohibition couldn’t last.’
On those occasions when liquor was available, things were bad in a different way. Thomas described a dinner at Calgary where he knew things were beginning to warm up when a Justice of the Supreme Court tottered to his feet and sang ‘Another little drink couldn’t do us any harm’. ‘It is a very remarkable thing now that the country has gone dry, the appalling effect of liquor on everybody when they manage to get some.’
The Prince would certainly have preferred an orgy like the one in Calgary to the more formal functions of eastern Canada. He thought the Governor General, the Duke of Devonshire, though in a ‘hopelessly narrow groove’, was at least ‘a d—d good fellow and has no side’, but the Duchess was ‘hopelessly pompous … she plays the ‘Queen stunt’ far more than Mama would, and that doesn’t go down on this side’.
The Duke gallantly did his best to be one of the boys, but found the effort uncongenial. ‘There is a good deal of regard for what is called ‘a real sport’,’ he told Stamfordham. ‘It is an odious term. After I had been to a hockey match I was described as ‘a real sport in spite of his white hair’.’
The Prince, he recognized, was ‘a real sport’ par excellence; he refrained from criticism but contrived to leave the impression that he felt the performance hardly becoming the heir to the throne.
It was with some relief that the battered and enervated Prince escaped from all this to the space and relative tranquillity of the west. ‘I came to Canada as a Canadian in mind and spirit,’ he declared in Calgary, ‘I am now rapidly becoming a Westerner.’
He was impressed by the immense potential of the prairies and saw the west as the ‘country of the future … It is up to the Empire and particularly to the UK to see that its population is British and not alien!!’
He told his mother that he would love to work on a ranch for a few months – ‘That’s a real life.’
Such wishes are habitually voiced by those who know there is no risk that they will become reality, but the Prince did something to forward his ambition when for £10,000 or so he bought a small ranch in Alberta. The King was doubtful about the purchase as an investment and feared too that his son would be under pressure to do the same when he visited the other Dominions.
He left it to the Prince to decide, however, and he went ahead – to the great pleasure of the Canadians. In spite of the King’s fears, there is no record of the Prince being asked to buy a farm in the Australian outback or the South African platteland.
In all his major speeches, the Prince hammered home his creed that he was not primarily a Briton and only secondarily a Canadian: ‘On the contrary, I regard myself as belonging to Great Britain and to Canada in exactly the same way.’
This was not just rhetoric reserved for public consumption. He told the Queen that the royal family must keep closely in touch with Canada and pay regular visits. ‘We belong to Canada and the other dominions just as much as we do to the UK.’
The King warned him that if he called himself a Canadian in Canada then he would have to be an Australian in Australia and a New Zealander in New Zealand. And why not? asked the Prince. ‘Of course in India there would be no question of it as I happen to have been born a white man and not a native.’
‘I do like all these Canadians so much,’ the Prince wrote after a few weeks. ‘They are charming and so kind and hospitable if one takes them the right way and if they take to you, and the latter means success or total failure.’
No one can doubt that the Canadians had taken to him and that his first tour abroad had been not merely a success but a triumph. ‘It almost takes one’s breath away,’ a Canadian wrote to Grigg. ‘It is not mere loyalty to the Crown, but the expression of a deep, spontaneous affection for the young man who is heir to the oldest throne in the world … The Prince has something to offer that can come from no other human being. He symbolizes the unity of the whole Empire, and does it with the joyousness and courage that belongs to youth.’
Even courtiers as loyal as Stamfordham admitted that George V offended by his constant carping at the Prince and decrying of his accomplishments. Sometimes the complaint was justified but on this occasion his praise could hardly have been more generous. ‘I offer you my warmest congratulations on the splendid success of your tour,’ he wrote in mid-October, ‘which is due in a great measure to your own personality and the wonderful way you have played up. It makes me very proud of you.’
‘When I go down to the United States next week,’ said the Prince on his way back through Toronto, ‘I shall regard myself as going there not only as … a Britisher, but also as a Canadian.’
He almost missed going in any capacity. The King had been against the visit from the start – mainly, believed the Prince, because of his anti-American views.
When the President, Woodrow Wilson, fell seriously ill, King George V at once insisted that the tour must be called off.
The Prince, supported strongly by Grigg, felt that the cancellation of the visit would give the Americans the impression that he had leapt at any excuse not to go: ‘I realize the spirit in which the American public has welcomed the proposed visit too highly not to regard any such possibility with deep dislike.’
The King held to his view, but left the matter to the government to decide, and the Foreign Secretary felt the visit should take place.
The Prince went to Washington and dutifully visited the President on his sickbed. He also managed to attend a dance or two which Grigg had arranged: ‘He holds very strongly that he can influence American feeling even better by dancing with Senators’ daughters than by talking to Senators, and I am sure he is right.’
There was still greater doubt whether the tour should be extended to New York. Godfrey Thomas felt that the risk of a hostile reception from the Irish more than outweighed any possible advantage, and the King fully shared his doubts.
The Prince, though, was determined to go, the American Ambassador in London supported him, and the Cabinet concluded that ‘a good deal of the magnificent results to be expected from the visit might be thrown away’ if it seemed he was avoiding contact with ‘the real American people’.
The American press then published stories announcing that the Prince was planning to stay at notoriously opulent Newport, with the still more notoriously opulent Mrs Vanderbilt, and that lavish entertainments were being planned. The Secretary of the Interior took the rumours seriously enough to raise the matter with the British Ambassador, and the Acting Counsellor urged that the Prince should steer clear of the Newport crowd which was synonymous with ‘all that is most extravagant and frivolous in American life’.
‘There never was the faintest intention of the Prince going to Newport,’ Stamfordham reassured the Counsellor. ‘It was a pity that the American press almost exceeded itself in concocting absolutely fabulous stories of what HRH was going to do and of the different young women that were to be submitted to his choice as his future wife!! It is difficult to conceive how newspapers can give way to such vulgarity.’
The Prince nevertheless contrived to see something of New York’s young women; at least one ball was given in his honour and he never returned to the ship before two or three in the morning.
New York gave him the same almost hysterical welcome as he had received in Toronto. ‘It was not crowd psychology that swept him into instant popularity but the subtle something that is personality,’ wrote the New York World.
Whether New York’s love – traditionally fleeting – would matter in the long run, was a difficult question to answer. Edward Grey, then British Ambassador in Washington, believed it would. ‘It has done more good than any number of political speeches,’ he reported to the Foreign Office. ‘His Royal Highness has created in New York a feeling of personal affection so strong that, though it may have no direct influence on politics, it must do something to create kindly feeling in New York itself.’
British Ambassadors must be expected to laud the prowess of their future monarch; M. Jusserand, the French Ambassador, had no such axe to grind. ‘Son succès a été complet auprès des gens les plus divers,’ he wrote to the Quai d’Orsay, ‘les Anglais n’ont jamais rien fait qui ait pu si utilement servir à effacer les anciennes animosités.’
Sub-Lieutenant Hutchinson was amazed when he saw the size of the crowd that assembled to see the Prince depart. ‘The Yanks seem quite enthusiastic about him,’ he wrote in his diary, a laconic understatement that did not conceal the immense pride the crew of Renown took in the Prince’s triumph.
The Prince was to spend only three months in England before he set off on his next, still longer, tour to Australia. He was exhausted and flat after his efforts, and distraught at the thought that he would so soon be separated again from Freda Dudley Ward. The last straw was that he found himself expected to sacrifice three weeks of this precious interval to stay with his parents at Sandringham. On Christmas Day 1919 he wrote in desperation to Godfrey Thomas:
A sort of hopelessly lost feeling has come over me and I think I’m going kind of mad!! … I’m simply not capable of even thinking, let alone make a decision or settle anything!! I’ve never felt like this in my life before, and I’m rather worried about it and feel incapable of pulling myself together … How I loathe my job now and all this press ‘puffed’ empty ‘succès’. I feel I’m through with it and long and long to die … You’ll probably think from this that I ought to be in a mad house already, tho’ this isn’t necessary yet: I’m still quite sane and very much in earnest, but I don’t know for how much longer!! Of course I’m going to make a gt effort to pull myself together, and it may only be that I never realized how brain weary I returned from the ‘Other Side’ … But my brain has gone and I can hardly think any more … What you must think of me, and you and all the staff have been and are working so desperately hard for me … How can I even try to thank you, my dear Godfrey?
Thomas had received many such cris du coeur in the past, but this struck him as worryingly unbalanced. He replied with a dose of robust common sense. The Prince was not destined for a mad house, but he would find himself in a nursing home if he did not change his idiotic train of life. ‘It is inconceivable to me that anyone who has got such sound, if perhaps somewhat exaggerated ideas about health from the point of view of exercise … should be so utterly insane and unreasonable about the elementary rules of health as regards other things. How you survived Canada I cannot imagine … You are highly strung and nervy to begin with. You never allowed yourself a moment’s rest the whole time. You sat up every night, often quite unnecessarily, till godless hours … You smoked far too much and you drink a great deal too much whiskey.’ Only a change of heart would ‘stop you being thoroughly bloody minded, irritable and impossible when you start for Australia (a nice prospect for your Staff) and [you] will crack up by the time you reach the Panama Canal’. He would do better if he sometimes let off steam ‘and got cross and irritable instead of pathetic’. Of course his was bound to be ‘a more or less bloody life, but give it a chance. It’s certainly a life worth fighting through, not one to chuck away.’
This letter, which the Prince described as ‘marvellous’, and the enforced tranquillity of Sandringham, together worked wonders. ‘I’m feeling a new and completely sane man,’ he told Thomas. ‘I promise to take things easily and not make a B F of myself any more.’
Rest, and the attentions of those who cared for him, almost always sufficed to rescue the Prince from the blackest of his depressions. But Thomas recognized his extreme fragility and was alarmed by it; under the stresses of the Australian tour, with Freda Dudley Ward ten thousand miles away, might he not crack more seriously, perhaps even irrecoverably? It was a distant but daunting menace.
Back in London, the Prince first tried to defer the tour by three weeks on the plea that Renown could not be ready in time – an argument which the Under Secretary at the Colonial Office, Leo Amery, disposed of with alacrity
– and then engaged in a wrangle with Amery and the Prime Minister over the composition of his staff. Halsey, said Amery, was incompetent to handle the most important aspects of the tour, he was ‘difficult to deal with, indifferent to political considerations and indeed incapable of appreciating them. He upset the Press badly on the Canadian tour.’
The Prince liked Halsey and had serious reservations about Grigg, whom Amery wanted to put in charge: ‘We are not in any way kindred spirits and for this reason I do not regard his presence on my staff [as being] of any value whatsoever.’
He argued that, since his was not a political tour, there was no need for it to be managed by an expert in politics. ‘Its consequences are of the highest political importance both to the Throne and the Empire,’ retorted Lloyd George. Grigg must have complete control over the programme and relations with the press.
In the end the Prince and the Prime Minister met in Downing Street, with Stamfordham, Halsey and Grigg to act as referee and seconds. ‘If you are one day to be a constitutional King,’ said Lloyd George, ‘you must first be a constitutional Prince of Wales.’
The Prince swallowed his medicine, but it did not make him any the more cheerful about the prospects for the tour.
One other important change was made to the staff which had accompanied him to Canada. The Prince’s young cousin, Louis Mountbatten, was added; in theory as Flag Lieutenant to Halsey, in practice as companion and confidant to the Prince. ‘Such a charming boy, and he cheers me up,’ the Prince told the Queen.
Cheering up the Prince was, indeed, Mountbatten’s main function. He got some idea of what was in store for him when he found his cousin in tears just before the formal departure. ‘Have you ever seen a Post Captain cry?’ the Prince asked. Mountbatten admitted that he had not. ‘Well, you’d better get used to it, you may see it again.’
But few except his intimates realized the strain that he was under. He dined with the Asquiths in January. ‘The Prince has excellent manners, and has come on immensely in ease and savoir faire,’ wrote his host. ‘He talked quite amusingly of his experiences in America, and I think is not sorry to be off again in March, even to so dismal a goal as Australia.’
And so the pompous ritual of departure was enacted once again, the Prince forlorn among the beribboned dignitaries – ‘In a little tight naval uniform which clung close to his figure he did not look above 15,’ wrote Curzon, ‘quite a pathetic little person.’
Mountbatten was quickly set to his principal duty. ‘Poor chap, with all these hundreds of people round him he’s as lonely and homesick as he can be and is at present HATING this trip!’ he told his mother. ‘He says he’ll cheer up later. But then he is very, very badly smitten, I think.’
Of those aboard, only Mountbatten understood the extent of his gloom; the Prince joined in the traditional shipboard romps with good will, and gave every appearance of enjoying himself as he inadvertently flooded Halsey’s cabin with a power hose. The hose was too powerful for Grigg’s peace of mind: ‘I had visions of HRH, who does not weigh much in a state of nature, being projected into the Atlantic by a sudden jet of salt water.’
The Renown travelled by the Panama Canal, with stops in the West Indies on the way. In Barbados he found the inhabitants disturbed by rumours that some of the islands were to be sold to the United States. ‘I need hardly say that the King’s subjects are not for sale to other governments,’ the Prince reassured them loftily. ‘Their destiny as free men is in their own hands.’
At Bridgetown the Governor’s lady had prepared an immense ball of flowers which was supposed to disintegrate and shower the Prince with blossoms as he passed. Fortunately she lost her nerve and pulled the string too soon; the ball, welded into a congealed mass, fell heavily into the road and would have reduced the Prince to pulp if released at the proper time.
It soon became obvious that the Prince was not going to allow his pining for Mrs Dudley Ward to deprive him of all diversions. At a ball in Balboa he danced almost exclusively with a particularly pretty girl, who turned out to be the daughter of the local storekeeper – ‘and a very good thing too,’ commented Grigg, ‘but the local dignitaries felt mournful that their more patrician daughters had not been preferred.’
Swimming at midnight, Sub-Lieutenant Hutchinson approached a raft crewed by three nubile American girls. ‘Is that you, Teddy?’ one enquired. Hutchinson denied the charge but boarded the raft nevertheless, to be joined a few minutes later by the Prince of Wales. They returned to Renown at 2 a.m. and tiptoed to the Prince’s cabin for a whisky. ‘Don’t wake the baby,’ whispered the Prince, pointing to Halsey’s adjoining cabin.
There was much junketing at San Diego, including a Mayoral Ball. Among those present was an American air force officer, Earl Winfield Spencer, and his wife Wallis. No doubt gatherings of this kind were enjoyed by the locals, wrote Halsey disdainfully to the King, ‘but one has to be extremely careful at these sorts of places where one meets all sorts of conditions of people’.
The Australian Prime Minister, William Hughes, had originally insisted that the Prince must visit Australia before New Zealand, even though the opposite would obviously have been more sensible: ‘To ask the poor Prince to imagine glorious Alpine views in a howling blizzard, and to spend days tossing about in Antarctic gales looking for noble fjords hidden in rain and mist, is really a little too much,’ wrote Amery.
Lloyd George agreed, and Australia was told that it would have to wait its turn. The visit to New Zealand had been envisaged as an important but relatively relaxed rehearsal for the main task ahead. The authorities of both Dominions had been told that the Prince wanted no ceremonies before 10 a.m., three half-days a week for recuperation, and at least one large public reception in every city to allow him to meet the people.
However, when the representatives of the two governments joined the ship at Suva it was found that they had ignored their instructions. Programmes of impossible complexity and arduousness had been prepared – ‘I do not believe any human being could go through with all that was proposed,’ wrote Halsey.
He and Grigg set to work and managed to cut back the Australian programme to something physically possible, but it was too late to do more than nibble at the edges of what had been planned for New Zealand. ‘I cannot understand the Governor General having passed it,’ Godfrey Thomas told the Queen, ‘unless the object was to break the Prince down and make it impossible for him to do justice to himself in Australia.’
Lord Liverpool, the Governor General in question, was to be held responsible for almost everything that went wrong in New Zealand. ‘A pompous, interfering ass who has been dogging not only my own footsteps but also never leaves the Admiral and Grigg alone,’ the Prince described him to his father. ‘He rubs everybody up the wrong way and … is most unpopular throughout the dominion.’
The Prince was habitually quick to denounce British governors, ambassadors, or others in positions of authority, but on this occasion Halsey, Grigg and Thomas all echoed his views. Liverpool could hardly be blamed for the railway strike which threatened to disrupt the visit, but even this, Grigg complained, he handled with notable incompetence, behaving ‘one minute as if the end of the world had come, the next as if there was nothing to worry about’.
The strike had been fomented by a group of Sinn Fein supporters who dominated the union executive. Fortunately for the royal party the most prominent of the Irishmen found the strain too much and suffered a nervous breakdown. Without his leadership the strike collapsed. Grigg’s preoccupation had been to keep the Prince out of the dispute, whether he were presented as taking the side of the management or the strikers. He succeeded, though the Prince could not resist one bland remark in a speech in Wellington: ‘Somehow or other the trains were not running very well last week, but mine could not have run better.’
In spite of the taxing programme, the tour of New Zealand went extremely well. Neither the nature of the people nor the size of the population made possible the sort of mass hysteria the Prince had witnessed in Toronto or New York, but his reception was never less than enthusiastic. He remained downcast, however. Grigg found him reading, ‘with an air of profound dejection’, an article in the Wanganui newspaper which referred to him as ‘the coping stone of Imperial federation’. ‘I never saw a coping stone in worse condition,’ Grigg commented drily.
New Zealand might have its striking railwaymen, but Australia traditionally possessed the most left-wing and militant working class in the British Empire. The Prime Minister had broken with most of his Labour colleagues in 1916 to form a national government, and his action had caused as much bitterness among those who felt themselves deserted as Ramsay MacDonald was to experience in Britain ten years later. The Prince had to step gingerly between these rancorous groups. But this was not the only Australian problem which required diplomatic handling. The federal and state governments were perpetually at loggerheads; the relationship between the state Governors and the Governor General was little more harmonious. The Prince found himself a particularly savoury bone of contention between the warring elements; anything he did to please one was certain to offend another. ‘One Governor suggests that the destiny of the Empire depends on HRH spending three extra days in his State,’ wrote the Governor General, Munro-Ferguson. ‘Another deprecates the Prince enjoying a kangaroo hunt … and the masterful little Prime Minister has decided views on all questions and never forgets he is the supreme authority.’
Any fears that the Australians might receive the Prince with less exuberance than he had found elsewhere were quickly dispelled. ‘I can’t begin to tell you how amazingly enthusiastic the Melbourne people are,’ he told his mother, ‘and they’ve kept it up ever since I landed and it’s really frightfully touching, and I do appreciate it all so much. It beats anywhere in Canada.’
Always it was the ex-service men who were to the fore; even when he was in the comparative safety of a car he might find himself plucked from the back seat and ‘tossed cheerfully about the streets’ by the excited ‘diggers’.
It was gratifying, it was exhilarating, but it was also alarming. One drive to the Town Hall, scheduled to take five minutes, lasted an hour. The folded hood was torn off the back of the car and the running boards trampled away by a crowd determined to get near its Prince.
To see him from close quarters was desirable, to touch him best of all; he was prodded, patted, slapped on the back, shaken by the hand, so that by the end of each day his body was covered with bruises and his hands swollen and aching. The Prince had worked like a slave, Halsey told the King, and had been totally successful. ‘On every hand I hear most wonderful things as a result, such as people who, before his arrival, refused to have anything to do with his reception or allow their children to take part in the various functions, completely coming round and being, if possible, more enthusiastic than any of the others.’
Such experiences were as emotionally draining as they were physically demanding. When coming on top of the endless formal banquets, receptions, parades, receiving of addresses, hospital visits, balls and relentless speechifying, it is small wonder that the Prince should have been worn out by the time he had finished at Melbourne. Things were a little easier when he left the great city centres and travelled by train thousands of miles across the Australian plains, but even there he could rarely relax for long since at every suggestion of a station scores or hundreds of locals would gather, some of them having travelled thirty or forty miles by cart to see the Prince pass. They could not be disappointed. When he occasionally failed to appear, as at Gilgandra, he was ‘counted out’ by the indignant crowd, who chanted from one to ten and ended with a resounding ‘OUT!’, a traditional Australian way of registering disapproval. On the return journey he made sure to present himself and the forgiving inhabitants counted him in again.
He never slept well in a train and the lack of sleep added to his cumulative exhaustion. His morale was not improved when the royal train was derailed in the depths of Western Australia. The only casualties were the Prince’s doctor, who cut his leg, and the pride of the Minister of Works, who was trapped in the lavatory, but if the accident had occurred a hundred yards further on, where the embankment was steeper, it could have been far more serious. The Prince preserved admirable sang-froid; as he clambered from the wreckage he remarked cheerfully: ‘Well, anyway, at last we have done something which was not on the official programme.’
But though his entourage thought that he was unscathed by the incident, he admitted to his mother that he had been badly shaken: ‘I live so much on my nerves nowadays that they get very easily upset and I just loathe a train now and have “the wind up me” the whole time!!’
Brisbane was the city the Prince most dreaded visiting, for Queensland was ‘bolshie or rather full of Sinn Feiners and the Labour premier is a hot Irish RC’.
In the event, not a red flag was to be seen and the crowds were as welcoming as any in Australia. The Acting Premier, who at one point had threatened to boycott the visit, became almost embarrassingly fond of his visitor and in his determination to say goodbye chartered a special aircraft to pursue the Prince to the frontier and, missing him there, continued the chase many miles into New South Wales.
For Grigg, the most memorable feature of the stay at Brisbane was the Shakespearean Ball, at which a gentleman dressed as Shakespeare presented a series of his characters to the Prince: ‘It was a very mixed show, and Shakespeare himself became somewhat confused at times, introducing Othello as Julius Caesar until corrected by the indignant Moor in question.’
It is unlikely that the Prince would have been much the wiser if Othello had been presented as Ancient Pistol or one of the witches from Macbeth.
Adelaide should have been something of a rest cure, since the programme was less onerous than elsewhere and the Governor’s wife, Lady Weigall, was a woman of common sense and great kindness as well as a close friend of Freda Dudley Ward. ‘It cheered him up no end,’ Godfrey Thomas wrote thirty years later, ‘to have found in Australia someone with whom he could talk freely about his lady-love.’
Lady Weigall mothered and cosseted him, at a time when he craved for such treatment; when he left Adelaide he wrote to thank her for having done so much to boost the morale of ‘a very worn out little boy, who really was beginning to think the whole show too big for him and too much to go thro with’.
But though the therapy was effective she undid much of the good by encouraging him to stay up every night until 3 or 4 a.m. cooking buttered eggs in her boudoir.
The Prince left Adelaide more cheerful but little more rested than he had been on his arrival.
As a result he teetered permanently on the edge of extreme depression. ‘I feel fit enough,’ he told Philip Sassoon in early August, ‘but mentally I’m absolutely worn out. Thank God it’s all over bar the shouting now as I really don’t think I could carry on much longer without the top of my head cracking like an egg and making a mad house my only possible [word omitted] for the remainder of my natural life.’
In such a state of mind, trials which normally he would have borne lightly seemed intolerably burdensome, pleasures became pains, inoffensive companions were categorized as the lowest of the low. He had hardly seen a pretty woman yet, he told Sassoon, they were ‘a hen-faced crowd and make me tired’.
He confused cause and effect; it was because he was tired that they seemed hen-faced. Similarly, the journalists who accompanied the party were not ‘virulent scum’, ‘absolutely spoilt’ and ‘bloody rude to my staff’;
they were, as he would have agreed when in sounder mind, professionals doing a difficult job with considerable competence – and on the whole giving a most favourable account of all his doings.
Certainly they were sympathetic when, in mid-July, the Prince had something close to a complete breakdown. He lost his voice, rambled off the point in speeches, appeared wan and disconsolate even to those who did not know him well. ‘Renewed sign of nerve strain … very disturbing,’ cabled The Times correspondent; ‘Use utmost influence to save Prince continuance of the terrible strain imposed by many months of public appearances,’ the Morning Post representative urged his editor. ‘Situation at any moment may become serious … He is game to the backbone, but there are limits within sight.’
His staff were at one point so alarmed that they insisted the programme be postponed by a week, allowing the Prince a chance to recuperate.
Such messages, suspiciously similar in phrasing, may have been inspired as part of an orchestrated campaign to change the dates of the Prince’s next tour abroad. One of the most pressing causes of his gloom was the knowledge that he would hardly be back in Britain again before he had to set out on an even longer tour of India and Japan. His separation from Freda Dudley Ward would have lasted nearly a year. Even before he left for Australia he had suggested to Lloyd George that Prince Albert should replace him on the Indian tour. The King was displeased when he heard that the matter had been discussed in Downing Street before his son had raised it with him; Frances Stevenson noted with some amusement that he treated Lloyd George coldly at the station when the Prince departed.
The Prince was mainly alarmed lest he be ‘unconsciously drawn into a conflict between “monarch and premier”. Of course that’s the last thing I want as it w’d probably end in a row between father and son.’
The question was temporarily dropped.
When reports began to come in of the strain the Prince was under, the King was unsympathetic. ‘Papa naturally said it was all your fault doing too much,’ wrote Prince Albert, or as he had recently become, the Duke of York, ‘but he doesn’t understand how difficult things are now.’
Grigg and Halsey also argued the perils of sticking to the original schedule – ‘The Prince … is only a human being and not a machine,’ wrote Halsey, ‘and he cannot continue at high pitch indefinitely.’
The King began to feel alarm. From Adelaide Weigall wrote to say that the Prince was ‘weary in mind and body’. Milner saw the letter and told Lloyd George that he had not mentioned it at court ‘because I happen to know that the King is very touchy about the Prince’s possibly not going to India’. His own view was that unless the Prince were given a decent rest at home before his next tour, ‘we shall have a disaster’.
Lloyd George braved the wrath of the King and found that his opposition had already crumbled. At the end of July, to his immense relief, the Prince was told that his visit to India was postponed until the autumn of 1921.
The King made it plain he expected a quid pro quo. In the period between the tours the Prince should lead a ‘strictly normal life’, rest, more food, more sleep, less exercise; otherwise ‘you will give cause to numbers of people who are disappointed, to say that the plea of health is not genuine’.
To this not unreasonable condition the Prince responded with an indignation which showed how overwrought he must have been. ‘The lecture you gave me in your last letter made me rather sad,’ he told his father. His health was perfectly good, the strain was only mental. ‘You may find it very difficult to see my point of view, perhaps you never will, but such is my case.’ What he needed was a normal life, but not the normality that the King envisaged; his life must include much sport and exercise, ‘and after a month or two lots of work, which every man should have!!’
To Philip Sassoon he ranted about his father’s ‘foul’ letter. ‘It’s odd how inhuman a lot of people (and big people) are, and I haven’t much use for them.’ The King was determined to treat him like an invalid but ‘You know just as well as I do that invalids don’t go down with the British public, there’s no room for them nowadays so forget them!! Nobody is going to make me play the invalid!!’
The Prince reacted with the same intemperance to relatively mild rebukes from home. The King deplored a photograph of his son and Mountbatten in a swimming pool – ‘You might as well be photographed naked, no doubt it would please the public.’ He objected to the wearing of a turned-down collar in white uniform with a black tie, ‘anything more unsmart I never saw’.
‘His father’s letters might be the letters of a Director of some business to his Assistant,’ commented Mountbatten.
The remark was not wholly unjustified, George V did find it hard to communicate affection. But the affection was there, and the Prince must have known it was. Nor did the letters contain only criticism. Three weeks before Mountbatten made his comment, the King had written to say how the Queen and he rejoiced ‘at the splendid success of your tour and the way in which you have won all hearts by your hard work and your own personality. I must say we are very proud of you. You are doing untold good for the Empire.’
Not everything went to plan on the tour, nor was the Prince’s behaviour always impeccable. He caused offence to several ladies of eminence by preferring to dance with the prettier of the – evidently not so hen-faced – Australian girls. He upset one family who had taken endless pains to prepare for his reception by brusquely cancelling a visit at the last moment on the flimsy pretext that the roads were impassable.
He sometimes looked bored at the stuffier public performances or snapped angrily at slow or incompetent servants. But these were minor blemishes on an otherwise almost flawless performance. The visit had been a tumultuous success.
There had been moments when his staff had doubted whether he could carry it through. Grigg told Lord Cromer what an immense relief it was to have reached the end of the Australian programme: ‘HRH has done splendidly from first to last, though working hard against the collar for the better part of the time.’
Any minor complaints were forgotten in the paean of praise that greeted the accomplishment of his mission. More important than the views of his own staff were the feelings of the Australians. Billy Hughes, the Prime Minister, had been determined not to be impressed by any mere princeling. The fact that the princeling was English was an additional reason for suspicion. Yet he had succumbed totally to his visitor’s charm and simplicity. His valedictory letter to the Prince of Wales might be ascribed to politeness, if almost on the same day he had not spoken to Grigg ‘most touchingly of the Prince’.
There is no reason to doubt that he meant what he wrote:
When you first came amongst us we welcomed you as a Prince who is one day to be our King; but we part from you as a dear friend who has won our affections and whom we love. Your visit has provoked demonstrations that in their spontaneous enthusiasm are unique in our history.
The Australian people see in you all that our glorious Empire stands for, that deathless spirit of liberty, of progress, that distinguishes it from all other Empires, ancient or modern …
Come back to us, Prince, as soon and as often as you can.
8
India
‘I AM DELIGHTED AT THE PROSPECT OF AN UNINTERRUPTED twelve months in the Old Country,’ declared the Prince of Walesat a Guildhall luncheon shortly after his return from Australia; ‘– a treat I have not had for several years.’
His parents’ view was that he should now have a badly needed rest, ‘free from functions and photographers’ and occupied by ‘ordinary country pursuits’.
The Prince was delighted to dispense with functions and photographers and by no means averse to country pursuits – with the emphasis on hunting and steeplechasing; but nothing was going to make him go early to bed, or away from London if that was where Freda Dudley Ward was to be found. In fact his freedom from functions proved illusory; the Guildhall luncheon was only one of many such occasions. It was also typical in that it involved an acrimonious exchange with the King, who wanted his son to drive to the City in cocked hat and scarlet tunic. The Prince argued that, with fifteen thousand men still unemployed, this was the wrong moment for a display of military pomp.
He carried his point. Lloyd George was due to speak at the same occasion. Grigg noted that his draft speech contained no reference to the King and, knowing how sensitive things were between father and son, urged that one be included: ‘As the happiness of the Prince does depend a great deal on keeping all well between the King and him, I feel you will forgive this reminder.’
This year at home was an unhappy one for the Prince’s relationship with his father. It was tolerable in London, where they met only occasionally, but cooped up in Balmoral or Sandringham and cut off from Mrs Dudley Ward the Prince found the court routine more than he could endure. ‘It’s all terribly irksome and it’s such a gloomy atmosphere.’
There was an explosion at Balmoral in October 1921. ‘I’ve turned Bolshie tonight,’ he told Freda, ‘as H M has been the absolute limit, snubbing me and finding fault sarcastically on every possible occasion. It really isn’t fair, darling, particularly as I’ve been playing up to him all I can since I arrived.’
The Prince’s doubts about the forthcoming tour of India provided an extra cause for wrangling between the two. Once the Prince threatened to ask Lloyd George whether he really felt the visit essential. ‘I don’t care whether the Prime Minister wants you to go or not,’ retorted the King. ‘I wish you to go and you are going.’
The Prince was not alone in wondering whether his visit was necessary or desirable. India was in disarray. The Montagu-Chelmsford Report, which had reiterated that the aim of the British government was to establish India as an independent democracy within the Empire, had signally failed to convince the Indian National Congress Party that British intentions were honourable. The unrest that followed led to the introduction of trial without jury for those accused of political crimes, and, in April 1919, to the massacre at Amritsar. Peaceful non-cooperation was Gandhi’s formula for India’s dealings with the British, but non-violence frequently led to violence, and Congress’s decision to boycott the Prince’s visit carried with it the threat of disorder and much personal risk for the visitor. Almost all the provincial governors, led by the experienced Lord Willingdon, concluded that the tour was unwise,
while from a different point of view the private secretary to the Maharaja of Dewas, E. M. Forster, felt that to the educated Indian ‘this ill-omened visit does seem an impertinence. You can’t solve real, complicated and ancient troubles by sending out a good-tempered boy; besides, this naive slap-on-the-back method, though the very thing for our colonies, scarcely goes down in the East.’
Indeed, almost the only champion of the tour was Lord Reading, who was unshakeable in his conviction that the visit would pass off well, serve British interests in India and, above all, consolidate Britain’s relationship with the Indian princes. Since Reading was the Viceroy and Montagu, the Secretary of State for India, was his faithful ally, planning for the tour continued.
Montagu’s original idea, indeed, had been that the functions of executive ruler and Viceroy should be divided and the Prince himself serve for a few months as Viceroy.
Lloyd George vetoed the idea, no doubt to the Prince’s considerable relief.
But the project that survived seemed little better. ‘How I’m loathing and hating the thought of India …’ he told his mother. ‘But as I have to go, I must try and make the most of it.’
Till the last moment he hoped that something would turn up to prevent the tour. ‘I’m afraid the trouble in India seems to be subsiding,’ he wrote to Freda, ‘and that there isn’t a chance of it stopping my going, damn it.’
Against the wishes of most members of his staff, he insisted that Louis Mountbatten should once more be in the party – ‘to look after my private and personal comfort and do small and unimportant jobs for me,’ as he explained to Godfrey Thomas.
Thomas was not pleased, nor was Lord Cromer, who was to perform in India the part played by Grigg in Australia. ‘We all deplore his inclusion in the Staff,’ Cromer wrote to another colleague, Colonel Worgan. The Prince had ruled that Mountbatten was always to have a room, however small, near his own. ‘You need have no scruples about a very literal interpretation of the Prince’s own words “however small”,’ instructed Cromer grimly.
The real significance of the appointment lay in the light it threw on the Prince’s alienation from his regular staff. He told Grigg that he wanted Mountbatten to come along since ‘he now has no friends on his own staff except perhaps Legh’. ‘I gather that Halsey is no longer a friend!!’ commented Stamfordham.
In fact the Prince was still close to Godfrey Thomas as well as Legh, and fond of a new recruit, Bruce Ogilvy, but in his black mood as he prepared to leave he could see nothing but enemies around him.
The Prince was convinced that the style which had worked so triumphantly in Canada and Australia would serve in India as well. If he was only allowed to be himself, then he could get through to the people and win their hearts. He was appalled by the dense thickets of ceremony with which the authorities seemed determined to hedge him round. Even before he landed, he told Mrs Dudley Ward, he was convinced ‘that all the official rot and pompousness is overdone and is quite unnecessary’. He was determined to break it down, ‘even though I’ll risk getting into trouble with the officials and powers that be’.
And it was not just the stuffy British officials who were at fault; the semi-independent Indian princes were equally out of touch with the real people, ‘their ceremonies are so irritating and ridiculous’.
The King was quite as certain that the sort of informality which had been so successful in the white Dominions would prove disastrous in India.
Stamfordham rubbed in the argument – ‘I have impressed upon him the absolute necessity for a maintenance of strict dignity on all official occasions’
– and Cromer battled valiantly to hold the line, complaining ruefully to Wigram that ‘it is not always easy to get HRH to adjust his mind as to what is suitable to certain occasions’.
The old brigade was not wholly wrong. The Prince’s style did give offence to many British and a few Indians, some of them of real importance. But he won many more friends by his behaviour. Professor Rushbrook Williams, Director of Public Information at the time and official historian of the visit, told Frances Donaldson many years later that he ‘never knew an Indian who had met HRH who was not charmed by him – he was human, informal and genuinely interested in them. Again and again I heard the remark: “If only all you Europeans were like him!” … Above all, he wanted to meet and get to know Indians.’
Professor Williams gives the Prince credit for more enthusiasm towards the Indians than in fact existed. As usual it was the serving soldiers and ex-service men who most appealed to him.
He was quite as colour conscious as any of the British rulers of India; when Mountbatten reported a conversation with Mrs Besant in which that formidable lady revealed that the the Prince was a reincarnation of Akbar, his cousin was disgruntled at the idea of having been a ‘black man’ in a previous life.
He had no doubt that the Indians and Burmese were wholly incompetent to run their own affairs and would be lost without the benevolent supervision of their colonial masters.
And yet he did do his best, often in spite of the authorities, to get through to them. ‘I want to know you and I want you to know me,’ was a personal note that he grafted on to the formal message from the King Emperor which he delivered in Bombay. At Poona he horrified officials by walking around the stands after laying the foundation stone so that people could see him. They rose to their feet and cheered themselves hoarse.
In Lucknow he went to see four thousand poor being fed. ‘I insisted on walking about amongst them despite the ruses of the officials and police to prevent me stopping and getting out of the car. I feel that I’m one up on them all for once!’
He learned enough Hindi to exchange a few words with the many thousands of military pensioners whom he inspected: ‘It’s worth it every time, as these Indians do appreciate it and it makes it far more interesting for me too. And it’s a heart-breaking job going round these poor devils, many of them maimed and limbless, whose govt pensions are hopelessly inadequate and for whom I can do so little.’
And when the Indians were there and he was allowed to move among them, he could work the same magic as in Canada or Australia. At a People’s Fair near Delhi he was mobbed by five or six thousand natives who surged round him, reported the military commander, General Rawlinson, ‘cheering him to the echo, salaaming and almost worshipping him. He was perfectly delighted …’
The Prince believed that the police were overdoing his protection and cutting him off from the people who were ready to acclaim him. ‘Surely they can trust me not to make a BF of myself and do anything idiotic?’ he enquired indignantly of Freda Dudley Ward. The police always retorted that they were doing no more than they did for the Viceroy – ‘All I say is “God help the Viceroy”!!’ Everyone was working loyally and diligently but, ‘alas they are working in the wrong way and completely preventing this tour being of the slightest use as far as the natives are concerned, which is after all the real reason for my coming’.
But it was not primarily the British authorities who thwarted his efforts to get through to the Indians; Gandhi and the Congress Party ensured that the crowds were rarely there to succumb to his blandishments. He was disappointed and dismayed when, in Allahabad, less than a thousand Indians were on the streets out of a total of 120,000 – ‘we go from cold to frost,’ commented Halsey.
He was infuriated when, at Benares, the university authorities tried to cover up for a student boycott by filling the empty seats ‘with high school boys, boy scouts and Europeans; I suppose they hoped I would never get to hear … what a BF they had made of me’.
He was outraged when the Chief Commissioner of the North West Frontier Province, Sir John Maffey, took alarm at threats to assassinate the Prince and redirected his procession through the back streets of Peshawar. Convinced that everyone would believe him a coward, he returned to Government House in what Mountbatten described as ‘the blackest rage I ever hope to see him in’.
The Prince described the incident to Mrs Dudley Ward as ‘the worst thing that has happened to me in India’, and blamed himself for not overruling Maffey – ‘but then you know I’m not very good in a crisis, Fredie darling, and do lose my head all too easily’.
Maffey, in a different sense, would have lost his head if he had stuck to the original plan and the Prince had been murdered. The police can hardly be blamed for their vigilance. There was real danger; the Prince’s staff knew of at least two cases in which people had been offered more than a thousand rupees to throw a bomb at the royal visitor.
The Prince had no sympathy for the independence movement and blamed Edwin Montagu for fomenting it. His letters home are filled with denunciations of ‘that despicable man’ who had ‘given in and pandered to the natives’. Naturally the Indians wanted more, ‘which they can’t possibly have so long as we maintain the policy of governing and running India’. The result was ‘hopeless unrest’ and growing support for Gandhi: ‘It’s all very disgusting and very depressing.’
He rejoiced when Gandhi was arrested and Montagu resigned, but feared it was too late. Montagu’s reforms had so far changed the atmosphere in India that ‘most Englishmen of Indian experience are dissuading their sons or any good fellow from coming out’. As a result the standards in the Indian Civil Service were slipping, ‘and, as you know, the natives are the quickest to size up a white man and can always recognize a gent, or anyway a “nature’s gent” which is even better’.
Given what he saw as the incipient collapse of British rule in India, he felt that his own presence was a mere palliative, as irrelevant as applying a piece of sticking plaster to a gaping and mortal wound. His visit was unwanted by the Indians and of doubtful value to the British. His speeches, which were written for him by a member of the Indian Civil Service attached to his staff, struck Piers Legh as ‘really lamentable … claptrap of the worst description’.
The Prince read them conscientiously but loathed them. The men who composed them, he considered, were ‘bureaucratic and behind the times. They can’t help it, poor brutes, as the Indian Govt is the same.’
By mid-December he was in such despair that he contemplated abandoning the tour. He wrote to the Viceroy, bemoaning the fact that he was achieving nothing, meeting almost no Indians, strengthening support for the independence movement rather than diminishing it, causing the expenditure of vast sums of money to no good end.
The letter exudes pessimism, but his true frame of mind is portrayed more vividly in the letter he wrote to Freda Dudley Ward a few days later:
My beloved, I couldn’t be more gloomy or depressed than I am tonight, and I’m oh! so desperately sad and lonely and missing and oh! wanting you and wanting oh! so badly my precious little Fredie!! I naturally want you most when I’m up against it all as I am now, sweetheart, as I do love you love you so, and although I loathe Xmas as a festival, yet it does somehow suggest happiness, and it’s so ironical everyone wishing me a happy Xmas … Surely they must know that I can’t possibly ever be in the teeniest way happy when I’m away from my Fredie?
This was his blackest moment of the tour. Reading’s robust re-assurance that the visit was of immense importance and was ‘doing real good – infinitely more than you think’,
came at a moment when the crowds had been responding more enthusiastically and the Prince’s morale was in some measure restored. The Viceroy reported in February that the Prince ‘really does feel that his trip has done and is going good’.
He overstated his case. The Prince really did feel, and continued to feel, that the trip had been, on the whole, a futile enterprise. But he was ready to accept that some Indians had been favourably impressed, some British heartened. He even began to feel a modest measure of pride in his achievements.
As in Australia, physical exhaustion contributed to his depression. He slept badly during the interminable journeys by train, stayed up too late, ate too little, drank and smoked too much, as always overdid the exercise. ‘HRH’s present method of life,’ reported his doctor, ‘is such as may involve a complete breakdown of his whole nervous system.’
One trouble was that, deprived of Freda Dudley Ward’s companionship, he got very little fun out of the tour. Confronted by the great archaeological finds at Taxila, he remarked gloomily to Lady Birdwood: ‘This place ought never to have been dug up.’
The famous Buddha’s tooth at Kandy in Ceylon ‘isn’t a tooth at all, merely a sordid, dirty piece of bone. Then there was a ghastly procession of elephants which included native dancing and hideous noises, which was really native music.’
Almost the only exception was the Taj Mahal. After the statutory visit by moonlight he told Queen Mary that it had ‘gripped me and I shall never forget what I’ve seen tonight’. He even paid a second visit – ‘a contingency,’ Thomas remarked, ‘against which I should have betted heavily’.
‘One of the tragic things about this Tour,’ wrote Lord Cromer, ‘is that HRH is not really keen on big-game shooting or shooting of any kind.’
Tragic is perhaps too strong a word, but to the Indian princes, who invested shooting with an almost mystic significance, the Prince’s indifference seemed inexplicable. In Nepal fortunes were squandered in setting up a big-game camp; the Prince preferred to wander around with a shotgun looking for jungle fowl, or better still, to exercise his polo pony in a nearby clearing. It was a great disappointment to the Maharaja, Piers Legh told his father. It was a great disappointment to Legh too. ‘Everything is sacrificed to polo, which the Prince is mad about,’ he wrote resentfully. ‘We consequently don’t get as much shooting as we should.’
Polo, pig-sticking and steeplechasing were indeed the Prince’s greatest pleasures in India. Yet even on the polo ground he could not escape from his role: in Jodhpur the young players had been told to treat him gently and only on his insistence did they relax and ride roughly against him; in Mandalay his team won a competition, ‘though it’s become such a farce this cup business as somehow it’s always arranged that I should win … and I do loathe it!!’
His morale was not improved by periodic carping from Buckingham Palace. George V was disconcerted to see photographs of the Prince wearing blue overalls with white tunic – ‘A most extraordinarily ugly uniform … The regulations ought never to have been altered without my approval.’
He felt ‘little short of despair’ when he read that, at Lucknow, the Prince had taken over the drums in the band playing at a dance at Government House – ‘What will the natives think of the Heir Apparent assuming such a role?’ asked a shocked Lord Stamfordham.
The band was playing in a gallery, invisible to the dancers, answered Cromer. The journalist who reported the news had been grossly indiscreet. ‘I have spoken to HRH about this and he quite understands the point.’
‘The whole crux is whether the Prince of Wales makes the Indians feel he likes them,’ Lord Riddell told Cromer. ‘They are extraordinarily sensitive and they know intuitively, past belief.’
The Prince did not like them; least of all did he like those to whom he came closest, the Indian rulers. He disapproved of the pomposity and lavishness of their way of life; their propensity to ape all the most unattractive features of European civilization; their determination to ingratiate themselves with the son of the King Emperor. In Nepal tigers were paraded before him so that it was almost impossible for him to miss them; in Mysore the Maharaja let him win at squash. After this last offence he raged vengefully against those ignoble potentates and cannot have left the Maharaja himself in much doubt about his feelings.
Since the Prince at the time was suffering from insomnia, indigestion and what he described as ‘smoker’s heart’, his bile is perhaps explicable. His staff should have been able to jolly him out of such excesses. Unfortunately only Mountbatten was close enough to him to understand his moods, and Mountbatten was preoccupied with his own courtship of Edwina Ashley. The Prince luxuriated in his sense of isolation. His staff, he told Freda Dudley Ward, was ‘the finest ground possible for foul and bloody gossip and scandal!! … They do their utmost to make life hell for me instead of helping me.’
Before the tour was over Halsey offered his resignation on the grounds that he felt he had lost the Prince’s confidence. ‘How right he is, isn’t he, my precious angel, though I said it was all rot … He knows better now than to say a word to me about TOI or anything private as he knows I would fire him on the spot.’
Already the Prince’s reluctance to allow even the most trusted members of his staff to talk to him about what he considered his private life was becoming more marked. Godfrey Thomas no longer dared speak with the freedom he had enjoyed in the past, Claud Hamilton was to lose his job when he trespassed on forbidden territory. The Prince’s attitude, strengthened to the point of paranoia, was to make it impossible for those who worked for him to do their duty properly in the years before the abdication.
His alienation from his regular staff became more complete when Captain Edward ‘Fruity’ Metcalfe was recruited to look after the Prince’s polo and other equine diversions. Metcalfe was charming and impecunious; an Irishman who had won a good MC in the war and held important posts in three princely states. He was ‘very nice and irresponsible’, Thomas told the Queen.
Halsey was still more censorious: ‘Metcalfe is not at all a good thing for HRH,’ he wrote. ‘He is an excellent fellow, always cheery and full of fun, but far, far too weak and hopelessly irresponsible. He is a wild, wild Irishman and’ – crowning horror – ‘no one knows anything about his family.’
The Prince was seduced by his charm, his friendliness and his endearing habit of treating his new employer as an ordinary human being: ‘He always referred to me as “The Little Man”. People were sometimes shocked by the familiarity of his attitude towards me.’
He became the nearest approach the Prince ever had to an intimate male friend. ‘Honestly, and you must know it by now,’ the Prince wrote to him a year or so after they first met, ‘I miss you terribly when you are away, and … I’m ever so grateful to you for being the marvellous friend to me you always have been.’
Against his dulcet blandishments the stern voice of duty as enunciated by Halsey or Thomas seemed still less appealing. His coming placed a barrier between the Prince and those who should have been closest to him.
This catalogue of lamentations may make it sound as if the tour of India had been a total disaster. This would not be true. In the first port of call, Bombay, he achieved something close to triumph. The Viceroy rhapsodized about his ‘wonderful success’. ‘It represents solid truth,’ he told Montagu, ‘when I tell you that the Prince did receive a splendid reception … and by his unaffected manner and simple heartiness and friendliness to the people, won his way right into their hearts.’
The Governor, Sir George Lloyd, told Cromer that the success was due ‘entirely to the chief actor, whose personality is amazing and whose gift of keen appreciation of every situation in a flash, of the perfect word to say and the perfect way to say it in, struck me tremendously’.
Even the Prince, always first to doubt his own capabilities, told Freda Dudley Ward that he would have been driven mad by the tedium of the official receptions ‘except for the fact that I am having a real success here, my beloved, and I think I’ve managed to get these natives’.
Gandhi’s campaign ensured that he was not usually so successful, but the Congress Party did not achieve as much as it had hoped. In Delhi, in particular, all went well for the visitor. ‘I feel as if I had lived a life time these last two days,’ Lady Reading told her family. ‘Such processing of troops, booming of guns. Royal salutes … acres of red carpet, hundreds of scarlet coats, thousands of decorations.’ The Vicereine did not realize it, but she was describing everything her visitor most disliked. Still, ‘the Prince was splendid and played up nobly’.
By this stage in the tour, Reading believed that the Prince was much more satisfied with his visit and taking a real interest in India. ‘I … am glad to find that he is willing to take trouble to understand the difficulties of the situation here. He has, undoubtedly, shrewd perceptions and is not misled by the outward glamour …’
He was not misled, either, by the Viceroy’s accomplished line in flattery. Proposing the royal visitor’s health at a banquet in Delhi, Reading ascribed every conceivable virtue to the Prince and spoke of the tour as if it had transformed the future of India. ‘You just can’t think how much that man has deteriorated,’ commented the Prince.
Yet the Viceroy was not just being sycophantic. It was no smooth-tongued statesman, but the police officer attached to the Prince, Mr Stead, who said that he had at first been opposed to the tour but by the time it had finished he was convinced he had been wrong. ‘It had gone infinitely better than he had thought possible, and … the good that it had done was incalculable.’
A question was put down in the House of Commons suggesting that the Prince should have conferred on him the title of ‘Prince of India’. The King opposed the idea and it was dropped.
If he had not done so, his son would have proved even more reluctant. But the idea was not altogether foolish.
The rest of the trip, though longer than the Prince wished, was less taxing. For one thing, he did not have to cope with a hostile independence movement; for another, he was on the way home. He had badly wanted to visit China. ‘It does seem very hard,’ he told the King, ‘that when one has come all this long way to the Far East … I shouldn’t be able to go to Pekin, Shanghai, and other places of interest, all far more interesting than Japan, and the Chinks are much nicer people too.’
The Foreign Secretary, Curzon, vetoed the idea however, and the Prince got no nearer than Hong Kong.
His determination not to find Japan interesting lasted throughout his stay there. The Ambassador, Sir Charles Eliot, noted with regret that he showed no curiosity in the institutions or government of the country and seemed bored by any discussion of the issues of the moment – ‘I think that really he was mentally fatigued and that his mind and nerves had not recovered from the strain of his journey in India.’
Eliot also realized how dull everything must appear on a royal tour: ‘Princes must think that red carpets and flags are a kind of vegetation that grows everywhere like grass or trees. It certainly makes all places look the same, and the welcome organized by the police was also monotonous.’
But even allowing for the bland and homogenized aspect of the country which was offered him – royalty’s equivalent of the tourist proceeding from Hilton Hotel to Hilton Hotel – the Prince does seem to have been over-ready to transmute Japanese gold to lead. Even the famed scenery he despised: ‘I don’t take much interest in it at any time and none at all sans TOI,’ he told Freda Dudley Ward, ‘and having been to Lake Louise and the Canadian Rockies with Scotland thrown in, I can’t ever hope to see anything better.’
His indifference to the charms of Japan did not blind him to the fact that the Japanese were ‘a very great power in the World and their navy and their infantry is amazingly efficient’.
He told the King that the Japanese navy was copied from the British, the army from the Germans and the press from the Americans. ‘And how wise they are from the viewpoint of a young nation, which can never hope to emulate ourselves, but who are rapidly, if they haven’t done it already, coming up to the level of a continental power!! And I should add the Yanks!!’
This greatness, he considered, had been achieved in spite of rather than because of the imperial family. The Prince surveyed his hosts with bilious disapproval. The Emperor he never met, since he was insane and confined to his palace; with the Empress conversation was conducted through an interpreter and confined exclusively to the weather and the cherry blossom.
In the absence of the Emperor, he was entertained most frequently by the young Prince Regent, Hirohito, who would try to talk French though he had no understanding of the language. The journalists tried to depict the two young princes as bosom friends but Eliot reported ‘the idea that he felt any real friendship for the Prince Regent is a pure myth, though perhaps the latter felt a sort of timid affection for him’.
‘My God, one has to be careful what one says unless one can be quite quite sure one is alone,’ the Prince told Freda Dudley Ward.
He managed generally to keep his feelings under control. He ‘got on excellent terms with all those with whom he could converse,’ wrote Thomas, ‘and generally gave the impression that Tokyo was the one place he had set out from England to see’.
Eliot clearly felt him hypercritical, yet admitted ‘he never failed in charm and courtesy when brought face to face with any Japanese’.
He was equally successful with the press. Incensed by the plethora of restrictions imposed upon them by the Japanese authorities, the journalists accompanying the tour decided in future to boycott it. The Prince called them together and talked them round. One correspondent who had been most active in advocating a press boycott ‘rose and said that after hearing HRH’s remarks he had entirely changed his views. He was now in favour of giving a full and favourable account of the Prince’s doings.’
The Japanese courtiers were much struck by the way the Prince mixed informally with mere commoners. There was debate as to whether Hirohito should do the same and tremendous excitement was caused when the Prince Regent was observed personally to thank the landlord of the hotel where the Prince of Wales was staying at Hakone. So very condescending a gesture was unprecedented in the history of the imperial family. Eliot noted how the Prince’s presence breathed life into the atrophied court, ‘even the Empress became slightly skittish’.
Informality could, however, become indiscretion. The Prince forgot his own remarks about the keen hearing of the Japanese, and though he kept his opinion of his hosts to himself, he aired his views on other subjects with disconcerting freedom. Lord Reading, he told Eliot, was clever but not at all the man to be Viceroy. Aware of the attentiveness of those around him, the Ambassador had to beg the Prince to remember that many Japanese spoke English.
He was apt too to change plans at the last moment or cancel expeditions for which elaborate and expensive arrangements had been made. When called to order by the senior members of his staff he would be penitent for a while, but soon transgressed again. Eliot remembered one occasion aboard Renown when he and Halsey together tried to persuade the Prince to mend his ways. ‘HRH was sitting in a large high-backed chair close to the wall and as the sermon proceeded gradually wriggled upwards until he squatted on the top of the back and from that elevation regarded his two elderly monitors with a most impish and incredulous smile.’
Eliot and Halsey might note his imperfections, a few of his hosts might have suffered from his whims and unpunctuality, but to the vast majority of the Japanese who encountered him or followed his doings he seemed little short of perfection. Piers Legh told his father that the Prince had ‘made as great an impression here as he had ever done before. His reception everywhere has been nothing short of marvellous, and he has apparently completely captured the country by storm. People who live here say they have never seen anything to compare with it. I know it is going to do an enormous amount of good here.’
In spite of his reservations about some aspects of the Prince’s behaviour, Sir Charles Eliot would not have dissented from that opinion.
And so it was home again at last. ‘How splendidly HRH has done – a true Ambassador of Empire,’ Sir Reginald Wingate wrote to Cromer. ‘I do hope the Public will now let him take a rest and holiday from these endless functions which must be terribly wearing.’
9
‘The Ambassador of Empire’
THE PRINCE OF WALES GOT BACK FROM THE FAR EAST IN July 1922. It was not until April 1925 that he completed his imperial tours with a visit to South Africa. Between those dates, however, he twice visited Canada and once the United States. The second of those two voyages was to prove something of a turning point in his life.
‘I always feel that I have a right to call myself a Canadian because I am, in a small way, a rancher,’ he told the Canadian Club at the end of 1922.
To the Prince the ranch was more than just a plaything, as her dairy was to Marie Antoinette; it was the only piece of land which he actually owned himself and it represented reality in a world which he found increasingly artificial. He corresponded regularly with the ranch manager, took an intelligent interest in the building up of the stock and prided himself in particular on the excellence of his shorthorns. When he visited Canada in the autumn of 1923 it was above all to inspect his ranch and spend some weeks there.
He could not escape without some junketing in the great cities. ‘The Prince gets here on Tuesday,’ Ernest Hemingway told Ezra Pound from Toronto. ‘Prince Charming, the Ambassador of Empire, the fair haired bugger.’
There was an awful sameness about the ceremonies, so much so that when a provincial mayor lost a page of his speech and yammered helplessly after: ‘Not only do we welcome Your Royal Highness as the representative of His Majesty the King, but we …’, the Prince obligingly completed the hallowed phrase, ‘also welcome you for yourself’.
But some events were unscripted. In Quebec he danced all night with an attractive woman, only to discover next morning that she was a journalist from New York. ‘I was had for a mug,’ he told Freda Dudley Ward, ‘but she was quite nice about it and said she wouldn’t say too much despite the fact that she had got off with me. I think she’s a sport.’
She was, but the Prince was to discover a year later that not all journalists were equally sporting.
There were no journalists on the ranch, and the general public, or what little there was of it in rural Alberta, left the Prince in peace. He threw himself with zest into his role as rancher, riding around the fences of his four thousand acres, inspecting the stock, ordering new equipment. ‘I’ve even helped to muck out the cow house,’ he told the King, ‘and I chop and saw up wood and I can assure you that it’s very hard work indeed.’
His staff were delighted to see him so contented and harmlessly employed, though less enthusiastic about the nature of their occupations – ‘Our conversation is largely of sheep-dips, shorthorns and stallions,’ Godfrey Thomas reported gloomily.
Nor did the Prince pretend that it was more than a temporary role: ‘It’s a fine healthy life and a real rest for the brain … But of course one couldn’t stick it for very long.’
It had been an honour and a joy to entertain him, wrote the Governor General, Lord Byng of Vimy, and the thought that the Prince planned to come again the following year filled him ‘with the pleasantest anticipations’.
He might have revised his views a year later. In mid-1924 the Prince announced he would visit his ranch again in the autumn, stopping in New York for a few days to watch the international polo. In the event he spent nearly three weeks in New York and less than a week on the ranch. The King had originally wanted Halsey to go on the tour, but the Prince insisted that on a holiday of this kind the Admiral would be superfluous.
He told his mother that Halsey’s illness prevented him joining the tour, but the Admiral assured the King that he was perfectly fit. ‘What a pity the dear boy should invent a story like that simply because he didn’t want to take him and tell you a regular untruth,’ the King commented to Queen Mary.
Instead, the Prince was accompanied by Metcalfe and a new recruit to the household, Brigadier G. F. Trotter, known to everyone as ‘G’. Trotter was ‘a wonderful friend and so understanding and sound too’, the Prince told Godfrey Thomas. ‘Thank God I didn’t bring the Admiral. He would have sent me dippy on the voyage, let alone in the States.’
‘Sound’ was the last word to describe Trotter. He was, said Bruce Ogilvy, ‘a right old rip’, an amiable roué whose function was to facilitate the Prince’s pursuit of pleasure.
Everybody liked him; nobody, except perhaps the Prince, trusted him. He and Metcalfe together acted as siren voices leading their master on to ever more perilous rocks. The only voice in the party suggesting that the Prince would do well to plug his ears to their dulcet chorus, or at least bind himself to the mast, was that of the assistant private secretary, Alan ‘Tommy’ Lascelles – and Lascelles, as the British Ambassador, Esmé Howard, told the King, was ‘excellent in every way but … too young to have any great authority’.
Long before the visit began there had been suggestions that all would not go easily. Having set up the Prince as an immaculate hero in 1919, the American press was more than ready to redress the balance. In the intervening years the papers had been filled with gossip, linking his name with various women of the demi-monde and, more convincingly, with Mrs Dudley Ward. ‘Quite regardless of the looseness of its own sexual standards,’ wrote the British Ambassador to Curzon in 1922, ‘this country loves to be shocked and pained by what it is pleased to regard as the peculiar licentiousness of Princes, and the Prince was so successful on his visit here that he has naturally made our enemies desirous of showing that he is not what he was thought to be.’ In 1919 society women had gushed about the Prince as a ‘charming boy’, now he had sunk, or perhaps graduated, to the status of ‘a gay young man’.
Some at least of the journalists who accompanied him when he sailed to New York in the Berengaria seemed intent on reducing him yet further to ‘reckless libertine’. ‘These Yank pressmen are b – s,’ the Prince told Thomas. ‘… one does resent their d – d spying so and they get so tight!! It seems a mean shame having them around when one is on a holiday trip.’
Unfortunately he gave them plenty of material to work with; beginning with his departure, when he boarded the liner at 2.30 a.m. and kept everybody up awaiting him: ‘a most undignified proceeding,’ the King dubbed it, ‘and then refusing to come on deck or see anyone until she sailed, although thousands of people had come to the docks to see him off, was very rude.’
Once arrived, he took up residence in the palatial home of Mr James Burden and settled down to divert himself in the intervals of watching polo. There was no shortage of hostesses eager to oblige him; his visit, wrote the columnist Cholly Knickerbocker, became an endurance test, ‘with the bank balances of the refulgent chieftains of the Long Island set pitted against His Royal Highness’s health … Never before in the history of metropolitan society has any visitor to these shores been so persistently and so extravagantly fêted.’
Over-excited newspaper reports did more than justice to the Prince’s train of life and were forwarded to Buckingham Palace for gloomy perusal.
Nor was it only journalists. An English businessman, unnamed but described by the Prime Minister’s private secretary as ‘an important source in America’, wrote to Downing Street to complain that Metcalfe had arranged for the Prince to be entertained by ‘social outcasts and parvenus’ like Cosden, the oil speculator, and Fleishman, the yeast king. He had insulted one eminent hostess by asking that the Dolly Sisters – ‘notorious little Jewish actresses who have never been received anywhere’ – should be invited to a ball given in his honour, and by failing to attend himself when his request was refused. Twice he had been so drunk in public that he had had to be taken home. The impression he gave ‘was that of a desperately unhappy, wilful, dissipated boy without much brain, who could be very charming when he chose, but who was always seeking to avoid the duties of his position’.
The businessman was probably Frederick Cunliffe-Owen, who wrote in very similar terms to Lord Stamfordham and was described by the British Ambassador as ‘a tiresome busy-body who cuts no ice’.
Thomas was shown his letter and replied in fury that it was ‘a tissue of malicious and probably deliberate falsehoods’. Metcalfe had made no arrangements for the visit; the Prince had hardly met Fleishman; he had only made a brief appearance at Cosden’s dance because Mountbatten and the organizer of the British polo team, Lord Wimborne, had asked him to; he had not even known the Dolly Sisters were in New York. The writer of the letter had clearly been affronted because he had himself not been invited to some party.
Certainly the charges were grossly exaggerated, but the Prince’s hectic hedonism caused some concern to Tommy Lascelles.
[Troubles are beginning,] he told Thomas we hadn’t been in the house two hours before a new comet blazed across our sky and Honey’s wagon was firmly hitched to it. Since then we haven’t seen much of him. The comet, unluckily, is not in the best Long Island constellation; the lorgnettes of the other stars are already fixed on its activities with strong disapproval, and it is of course only a question of time for the telescopes of Hearst to pick it up …
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Philip Ziegler
The authorised life story of the king who gave up his throne for love, by one of our most distinguished biographers.In this masterly authorized biography, Philip Ziegler reveals the complex personality of Edward VIII, the only British monarch to have voluntarily renounced the throne.With unique access to the Royal Archives, Ziegler overturns many myths about Edward and tells his side of the story – from his glamorous existence as Prince of Wales to his long decline in semi-exile in France. At the heart of the book is an unflinchingly honest examination of Edward’s all-consuming passion for Wallis Simpson, which led to his dramatic abdication.Elegant and devastating, this is the most convincing portrait of Edward ever published.
King Edward VIII
Philip Ziegler
Contents
Cover (#u33d46cd3-1746-5a65-ba7a-ad021ecf5fbf)
Title Page (#u1db53768-5a85-583d-96be-8bc4ccd8ffde)
List of Illustrations (#uc8ad0a12-0f1a-58f6-abf1-9dabb3088a2f)
Preface (#u6080163c-582f-5da3-937f-cd39b5f0033f)
Family Tree (#u2af46e65-1fd3-5fde-a95b-32ce12f2ce53)
1 The Child (#u8ba07f6f-2993-5ae8-b4bd-4d6550111174)
2 The Youth (#ufe4f9218-4fe3-5c40-9d86-74789265e2e3)
3 ‘Oh!! That I Had a Job’ (#u870a6f0c-c025-5310-bc36-e868d7792d3b)
4 The Captain (#uafee4621-b5a1-5969-a854-9fa7bf65bc47)
5 L’Éducation Sentimentale (#u67910de1-515d-583b-966b-3c4ae1d20ce2)
6 The Role of the Prince (#u09bee9d2-dd8b-5c65-89f6-c3a0802d49cb)
7 The First Tours (#ubdffee5e-6f14-50ef-a111-71604e3047fb)
8 India (#u43d092c1-61bc-54d4-8724-1d2ce2768897)
9 ‘The Ambassador of Empire’ (#ud182f9d6-7f93-55e2-9b99-236450beec35)
10 ‘Half Child, Half Genius’ (#litres_trial_promo)
11 ‘A Steady Decline’ (#litres_trial_promo)
12 The Last Years as Prince (#litres_trial_promo)
13 Mrs Simpson (#litres_trial_promo)
14 Accession (#litres_trial_promo)
15 ‘The Most Modernistic Man in England’ (#litres_trial_promo)
16 The King and Mrs Simpson (#litres_trial_promo)
17 The Last Weeks (#litres_trial_promo)
18 Abdication (#litres_trial_promo)
19 Exile (#litres_trial_promo)
20 Married Life (#litres_trial_promo)
21 The Duke in Germany (#litres_trial_promo)
22 Second World War (#litres_trial_promo)
23 Spain and Portugal (#litres_trial_promo)
24 The Bahamas (#litres_trial_promo)
25 The American Connection (#litres_trial_promo)
26 What Comes Next? (#litres_trial_promo)
27 ‘Some Sort of Official Status’ (#litres_trial_promo)
28 The Duke as Author (#litres_trial_promo)
29 The Final Years (#litres_trial_promo)
Nomenclature (#litres_trial_promo)
Notes (#litres_trial_promo)
Bibliographical Notes (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
Footnotes (#litres_trial_promo)
Picture Section (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
From the reviews of King Edward VIII (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
List of Illustrations
Princes Albert and Edward bathing at Cowes (Pasteur Institute)
The Princess of Wales with Prince Edward (Al Fayed Archives)
The Prince in formal dress (Sir Michael Thomas)
Punting at Oxford (Sir Michael Thomas)
The Prince on a route march (Al Fayed Archives)
With the King’s Guard (Pasteur Institute)
Portia Cadogan (Al Fayed Archives)
Rosemary Leveson-Gower (Imperial War Museum)
The Prince as Chief Morning Star (The Royal Collection © 2012)
Freda Dudley Ward (Lady Laycock)
Taking a jump successfully (Al Fayed Archives)
Falling at the last fence (Al Fayed Archives)
With Audrey Coates at Drummond Castle (Lady Alexandra Metcalfe)
With the Duchess of York (Al Fayed Archives)
Skiing with Prince George (Lady Alexandra Metcalfe)
Mrs Simpson (Michael Bloch)
The Duchess’s bedside snapshot of the Duke (Al Fayed Archives)
Wedding photograph (Lady Alexandra Metcalfe)
The Windsors in German (The Royal Collection © 2012)
Dignitaries in Nassau (Al Fayed Archives)
A visit to the United Seamen’s Service (Al Fayed Archives)
In dressing gown, photographed by the Duchess (Al Fayed Archives)
Preface
It is now more than twenty years since my biography of King Edward VIII appeared and three-quarters of a century since the abdication. To most contemporary readers Edward VIII’s father and grandfather – King George V and King Edward VII – are shadowy figures. Even George VI is remembered, except perhaps by those who experienced him as a wartime monarch, more for being the father of the present Queen than as a figure in his own right. Yet Edward VIII, who was on the throne for less than a year, remains vividly in the popular imagination. Within the last two decades there have been more than twenty further books dealing with his life or certain aspects of it, not to mention newspaper articles galore, plays, television documentaries, even a musical comedy. The Duchess of Windsor has been quite as prominent. There have been several recent biographical studies – the latest of which quotes letters suggesting that Mrs Simpson, as she then was, was still in love with, or at least anxious to keep her lines open to, her estranged husband, even when her courtship by the King was at its fiercest. But neither Duke nor Duchess in isolation is the principal focus of this intense attention; it is above all their relationship which has captured the public’s interest and is almost as potent an attraction now as it was in 1936. ‘The king who gave up his throne for love’ is a cliché of romantic fiction, but it is also an accurate rendering of that extraordinary event. Nothing can diminish its potency.
The fact that the Prince of Wales has now married Camilla Parker Bowles, both parties with a divorce behind them, inevitably makes one wonder whether there might have been no abdication if contemporary morality had stood then where it does today. The question whether the present Duchess of Cornwall might one day become Queen has, of course, not yet finally been resolved but, in the closing days of the abdication crisis, Edward VIII seemed ready to contemplate a morganatic marriage. The problem might therefore not have arisen. Would Mrs Simpson be acceptable today as consort of the King? Probably not. She had been divorced not once but twice, with both husbands still living. She was an American – not in itself a reason for rejecting her, but reinforcing the uneasy conviction that she did not belong so close to the throne. She was seen, fairly or unfairly, as being a smart, hard-boiled, wise-cracking society figure – an image which did not and does not fit happily with what the British people expect of their royal court. But the moral certainties of 1936 have been diminished if not extinguished in 2012 – the issue would be more keenly debated and the answer might possibly be different.
It may be for his marriage that Edward VIII is particularly remembered, but in a way he seems much closer to contemporary society than his far more considerable father, brother and niece. This is the age of celebrity, when, perhaps more than ever before, people are celebrated not for what they have done but for what they appear to be. Nobody would ever have described George V and George VI or indeed Elizabeth II as ‘celebrities’; Edward VIII would have rejoiced in the title, or at least accepted it with equanimity. He saw himself as a thoroughly modern monarch, a reformer, rejecting the outdated pomposities of the past, adopting a style which was less formal, less bound by protocol, more relevant to the needs of the day, than the creaky old court he had inherited. This was not all fantasy. He had some good ideas and, if he had had the energy and determination to carry them through, he might indeed have made a valuable contribution to the British monarchy. But it is in the nature of celebrities that they shine only fitfully and leave little mark in the pages of history. Edward VIII’s intentions were often excellent; his ability to carry them through to fulfilment was sadly lacking.
This sounds, indeed is, severely critical. It is no more than he deserves but, over the last twenty years, he has been subjected to attacks far more violent than his performance in fact merits. Most of the emphasis has been on his alleged sympathy for the German cause before and during the Second World War. As Prince of Wales, it is claimed, he had condoned, indeed applauded, the rise of National Socialism. As King he was an arch-appeaser, energetically intervening to ensure that his ministers did not react robustly to the German occupation of the Rhineland. As Duke of Windsor he wittingly betrayed secrets of military importance to the Germans in 1939 and 1940, while in Spain and Portugal he flirted with German emissaries who suggested that he remain in Europe and hold himself in readiness for his return to an occupied Britain. Until well on into the war he maintained that Britain must inevitably be defeated and that a negotiated peace was the only sane way forward. At any time, it was suggested, he would have been ready to supplant his brother and take back the throne if the opportunity had arisen. Such attacks reached a peak with a television programme entitled Edward, the Traitor King, without even the courtesy of a question mark. His great-nephew, Prince Edward, in 1996 made a valiant effort to retrieve the situation with another television programme showing the Duke in a rather more positive light. But, as is usually the case, the spreading of muck proved more effective than the subsequent sponging operation.
I would not pretend that the Foreign Office papers that have been released in recent years show the Duke in a particularly flattering light. They deal mainly with the period when he was in France in 1939 and 1940 with a Military Mission charged vaguely with liaison with the French; his escapades in Spain and Portugal after the fall of France; his time as Governor of the Bahamas; and his financial problems during that period and after the war was over. It was my study of these papers that convinced me that he was often, though by no means invariably, silly, indiscreet and egotistical, and that by 1936 he was unfit to occupy the throne. In particular, in Spain and Portugal, his behaviour was such as to give German agents – anxious to feed their superiors in Berlin the news that they wanted to hear – some reason for hoping that he might rally to the Axis cause if the circumstances were right. But German official documents published since the war show that this was mere supposition, and that there is no hard evidence to support the thesis of treachery, be it actual or potential.
Ah yes, say the Duke’s detractors, but the published documents do not tell the whole story. King George VI sent the royal librarian, Owen Moreshead, and the art historian (and, as it later transpired, Communist spy) Anthony Blunt on a secret mission to secure the papers that would have proved the Duke’s guilt and bring them back for destruction or incarceration in some inaccessible vault at Windsor. The fact that the mission was far from secret; that its task was to bring back certain nineteenth-century family papers – mainly letters from Queen Victoria to her eldest daughter, the Empress Frederick; that all these papers were eventually returned to Germany; and that a complete inventory exists of everything that was brought back has not been allowed to spoil a good story.
To reach the conclusion that the Duke of Windsor was a traitor it is necessary to credit every surmise of those who wanted him to be so and to ignore the testimony of all those who worked with him and who knew him best. Even then there would be no proof. It is a cardinal principle of British law that an accused is assumed innocent until proved guilty. In the case of the Duke of Windsor the reverse has been true; he has been assumed guilty because he cannot positively be proved innocent. And yet to prove that somebody did not do something is notoriously difficult: for a single crime an alibi can with luck be established, but if a pattern of behaviour or of thought is in question it is generally impossible to do more than establish a balance of probabilities, based on one’s knowledge of the person concerned. I make no claim to omniscience, but I probably know more about the Duke of Windsor than anyone else alive. I am absolutely certain that, with all his faults, he was a patriot who would never have wished his country to be defeated or have contemplated returning to an occupied Britain as a puppet king. I accept that I cannot prove my contention, but I have much better grounds for maintaining it than any of those who have asserted the contrary over the last twenty years. Nothing that they have said or written has caused me to change my mind.
1
The Child
EVEN IN THE TWILIGHT OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY TO BE one of the 540 or so
living and legitimate descendants of Queen Victoria is a matter of some moment. To have been born in 1894, eldest son of the eldest surviving son of the eldest son of the Queen Empress, was to be heir to an almost intolerable burden of rights and responsibilities.
Queen Victoria had then been on the throne for fifty-seven years. The great majority of her subjects had no recollection of another monarch. She had weathered the unpopularity which had grown up when she retreated into protracted seclusion after the death of the Prince Consort and now enjoyed unique renown. The Widow of Windsor, ruler of a vast empire and grandmother to half the crowned heads of Europe, was a bewitching figure; her obstinate refusal to play to the gallery had eventually won her the reverent respect of all but a tiny republican minority among her people. She had become a myth in her own lifetime.
To have a myth as a mother is not necessarily a prescription for a happy family life. In 1894 the future King Edward VII had already been Prince of Wales for more than fifty years. The role is never an easy one to fill, and in Edward’s case was made almost impossible by the carping censoriousness of his parents. The Prince of Wales gave them something to censure – he was self-indulgent, indolent and licentious – but he was also uncommonly shrewd and well able to do a useful job of work if given the chance. The Queen gave him as few chances as possible. She treated him as an irresponsible delinquent, and in doing so ensured that his irresponsibility and delinquency became more marked. It was not until he at last succeeded to the throne that his qualities as a statesman were given a proper chance to flourish.
In 1863 he married Princess Alexandra of Denmark – ‘Sea-King’s daughter from over the sea’ – radiantly beautiful and with a sweetness of nature which enabled her to endure her husband’s infidelity with generosity and dignity. She was capable of great obstinacy and occasional selfishness but she was still one of the most endearing figures to have sat upon the British throne. She rarely read, her handwriting would have disgraced an intoxicated spider, increasing deafness cut her off from society, but she enjoyed a vast and justified popularity until the day she died.
The first duty of an heir to the throne is to ensure the succession. The Prince and Princess of Wales did their best, producing two sons, three daughters, and then another short-lived son. Unhappily, however, their eldest son, Prince Albert Victor, always known as Eddy, proved an unhopeful heir for the throne of England. Languid and lymphatic – ‘si peu de chose, though as you say a “Dear Boy”’, the Grand Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz brutally dismissed him
– he deplored the strident jollity of his family and preferred to trail wistfully in the wake of whatever unsuitable woman had attracted his attention. A determined and reliable wife seemed the only hope for his redemption, and a paragon was found in Princess Victoria Mary – May to the family – only daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Teck.
The Tecks were professional poor relations. The Duke was haunted by the fact that his father’s morganatic marriage had deprived him of his claim to the throne of Württemberg, and all his life attached to the rituals of rank and precedence an importance which seemed extravagant even to the courtiers who surrounded him. His mountainous wife Mary Adelaide, ‘Fat Mary’, was by no means unaware that she was a granddaughter of King George III, but she bore her royal blood more lightly. She devoted her energies to entertaining lavishly beyond her means and then recouping the family finances by ferocious economies and periods of exile in the relative cheapness of Florence. There Princess May spent some of her most formative years, learning the value of money the hard way, but also learning to appreciate beauty and acquiring a range of aesthetic interests which to her English cousins seemed odd if not actively undesirable. From her parents she inherited a respect for the blood royal which led her to regard the occupant of the British throne with something close to reverence.
The Tecks were protégés of the British royal family, who let them occupy rooms in Kensington Palace and make their home in the pleasant, rambling grace-and-favour White Lodge, in the heart of Richmond Park. The Princess of Wales was particularly fond of the Duchess, and it was hardly surprising that May’s name should have come to the fore when the quest began for a wife for Prince Eddy. It was not a spectacular match but it was respectable, and Queen Victoria considered that a future King of England needed no extra réclame in his bride to secure his immortality. To the Tecks the marriage was all that they had dreamed of; May’s morganatic blood would have proved an impediment to an alliance with any of the grander continental royal families, while the upper reaches of the British aristocracy had shown little eagerness to embrace this peripherally royal and penniless princess. Only May hesitated. ‘Do you think I can really take this on?’ she asked her mother. ‘Of course you can,’ was the robust reply, and of course she did.
Her future husband was given equally little opportunity to object. ‘I do not anticipate any real opposition on Prince Eddy’s part if he is properly managed and told he must do it,’ wrote the Prince of Wales’s private secretary, Francis Knollys, ‘– that it is for the good of the country etc. etc.’
May was spared what must have seemed an unappealing match. The engagement was announced at the end of 1891; the wedding fixed for February; early in January 1892 Prince Eddy contracted influenza, pneumonia developed, within a few days he was dead. His place in the line of succession was taken by his brother George. The change was in every way to the benefit of the country. In 1873 Queen Victoria had sent Prince George a watch, ‘hoping that it will serve to remind you to be very punctual in everything and very exact in all your duties … I hope you will be a good, obedient, truthful boy, kind to all, humble-minded, dutiful and always trying to be of use to others!’
Few precepts can have been taken more earnestly to heart. Prince George had been conscientious, hard-working and responsible as a boy; he was no different as a man. The Royal Navy, for which he had been trained, can claim many men of cultivation and even a few eccentrics and intellectuals among the officers, but it takes considerable independence of mind to maintain such characteristics in a mainly unsympathetic environment. Prince George had neither the wish nor the ability to stand apart. He was an arch-conformist; bored by books, pictures, music; wholly without intellectual curiosity or imagination; suspicious of new ideas; entertained only by his stamp collection and the slaughter of ever greater quantities of pheasants, partridges and the like.
Yet his bluff and phlegmatic exterior was to some extent illusory. He was a worrier, an insomniac, a man whose sense of duty often stood between him and the enjoyment of his role in life. In 1892 his duty was to marry quickly and to provide heirs to a crown which would otherwise eventually fall into the unpromising hands of his sister Louise, Duchess of Fife. With a suitable bride for a future British monarch already selected, the solution seemed obvious to the Tecks and to his parents. The wedding planned for Prince Eddy should take place, only the date and the bridegroom would be changed. Prince George took little convincing that this was his destiny; May felt slightly greater qualms, but she too was soon persuaded. In May 1893 the Duke of York, as Prince George had been created the previous year, dutifully proposed to his late brother’s fiancée. He was as dutifully accepted. On 6 July the couple, by now very much, if undemonstratively, in love, were married in the Chapel Royal. A year later, on 23 June 1894, their first child, a boy, was born at the Tecks’ home in Richmond Park. He was not Victoria’s first great-grandchild but in her eyes he was beyond measure the most important.
The original plan had been for the baby to be born in Buckingham Palace but an early heatwave drove the couple to the comparative cool of White Lodge. The Duke of York was in the library, pretending to read Pilgrim’s Progress, when the birth took place at 10 p.m.; his father, the Prince of Wales, was holding an Ascot Week ball in the Fishing Temple at Virginia Water. The telephone that had recently been installed to link White Lodge to East Sheen was used to give him the news and enable him to propose a toast to the new prince.
‘My darling May was not conscious of pain during those last 2½ terrible hours,’ the Duke of York wrote to Victoria; in terms that sound as if the end of the operation had been not so much the cradle as the grave. ‘The baby weighed 8 lbs when he was born, and both grandmothers … pronounce him to be a most beautiful, strong and healthy child.’
Fifteen hundred people signed their names on the following day in the book which had been placed in a marquee for the occasion, and the Duchess of Teck’s sister, the Grand Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, announced that she ‘went – mentally – on my knees, tears of gratitude and happiness flowing, streaming, and the hugging followed’.
The bickering that normally accompanied the naming of a royal child now ensued. The Queen took it for granted that a daughter would be called Victoria and a son Albert. The Duke of York said it had long been decided ‘that if it was a boy, we should call him Edward after darling Eddy. This is the dearest wish of our hearts, dearest Grandmama, for Edward is indeed a sacred name to us, and one which I know would have pleased him beyond anything.’
‘You write as if Edward was the real name of dear Eddy,’ retorted the Queen severely; everyone knew that he had in fact been christened Victor Albert.
The Duke proved unusually obstinate and the baby was called Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David. Christian was the name of the baby’s godfather, the King of Denmark; the other four names represented England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales. Some reports state that David was an afterthought, introduced to gratify the aged and moribund Marchioness of Waterford. There are differing views about her motives: that assiduous and well-informed courtier Lord Esher said it was because ‘she had some fad about restoring the Jews to the Holy City’;
the Prince of Wales’s friend the Marquis de Breteuil recorded that the old lady had dreamed of an ancient Irish legend according to which there would be a great king over the water and his name would be David.
The christening took place with all the pomp befitting a baby who stood third in line to the British throne. Twelve godparents, mainly German, attended; as well as the Prime Minister, Lord Rosebery. The gold bowl used as a font was brought from Windsor Castle. The cake, thirty inches high and five feet in circumference, was made by McVitie and Price in Edinburgh. ‘I have two bottles of Jordan water,’ the Duke proudly told his old tutor, Canon Dalton, and both were lavished on the occasion.
The only discordant note was struck by the first socialist member of parliament, Keir Hardie. When it was proposed that the House of Commons should congratulate the Queen on the happy event, Hardie opposed the motion. ‘From his childhood onward,’ he said, with what to some will seem dreadful prescience, ‘this boy will be surrounded by sycophants and flatterers by the score … A line will be drawn between him and the people he is to be called upon some day to reign over. In due course … he will be sent on a tour round the world, and probably rumours of a morganatic alliance will follow, and the end of it will be the country will be called upon to pay the bill.’
Prince Edward, who from birth was always known to his family as David, was followed eighteen months later by a brother, Albert George, who was in due course to become Duke of York and, less predictably, King George VI. Edward attended his sibling’s christening and behaved impeccably until Prince Albert, in the arms of the Bishop of Norwich, began to yell. Edward, evidently seeing this as a challenge to his primacy, yelled louder and was removed. ‘Of course he is very young to come to church,’ the Duke of York told the Queen, ‘but we thought that in years to come it would give him pleasure to know that he had been present at his brother’s christening.’
A daughter, Mary, was born in 1897; then came a gap of three years, after which Henry – future Duke of Gloucester – was born in 1900 and George – future Duke of Kent – in 1902. The youngest child, John, born in 1905, was an epileptic who lived in seclusion and was to die at the age of fourteen.
The three elder children were close enough in age to be much together; Princes Edward and Albert – David and Bertie – being in particular inseparable. Lord Esher, visiting Sandringham, played with the children in the garden and noted that: ‘The second boy is the sharpest – but there is something rather taking about Prince Edward.’
Most other observers agree it was Edward who was the sharper and who habitually took the lead – ‘because as the eldest son he had the highest status in the family,’ explained the Duchess of York’s close friend, Lady Airlie.
He found that he could easily manage his tractable and worshipping younger brother, but that Princess Mary was an independent-minded tomboy who was disinclined to do the bidding of any mere boy.
It has often been alleged – not least by the subject of this biography – that the Duke and Duchess of York were cold and distant parents. It would be foolish to pretend that the relationship between the future King George V and his sons, in particular his eldest son, was a happy one. When they were babies, however, all the evidence is that he was a doting father; far more ready to take an interest in his children than was true of most English parents of the upper and upper middle classes. ‘I have got those two photographs of you and darling Baby on my table before me now,’ he wrote to his wife from Cowes in August 1894. ‘… I like looking at my Tootsums little wife and my sweet child, it makes me happy when they are far away.’
‘Baby is very flourishing. He walks about all over the house, he has 14 teeth,’ he boasted to Canon Dalton. A month later Prince Edward still walked about all over the house but had sixteen teeth.
The Duchess was more critical in her attitude. Her baby, she told her brother, was ‘exactly what I looked like as a baby, consequently plain. This is a pity and rather disturbs me.’
She does not seem to have had much idea of what was to be expected from a small child: ‘David was “jumpy” yesterday morning,’ she wrote when he was a little over two years old, ‘however he got quieter after being out, what a curious child he is.’
When Edward began to get letters from his parents, the Duke of York was always the more demonstratively affectionate. He was coming to Sandringham on Saturday, he told his three-year-old son, and would be ‘so pleased to see our darling little chicks again’. When the chicks had chickenpox; ‘I hope none of you have grown wings and become little chickens and tried to fly away, that would be dreadful and we should have to go up in a balloon to catch you.’
The trouble began when his children reached an age at which mature conduct might reasonably – or unreasonably – be expected of them. Admiral Fisher, at Balmoral in 1903, noted: ‘The two little Princes are splendid little boys and chattered away the whole of their lunch-time, not the faintest shyness.’
The comment is notable as marking one of the last occasions on which father and sons were observed together without something being said about the constraint and fear which dominated the atmosphere. Kenneth Rose has convincingly challenged the story by which King George V is supposed to have told Lord Derby: ‘My father was frightened of his mother, I was frightened of my father, and I’m damned well going to see that my children are frightened of me!’
But though the tale may well be apocryphal, like most apocryphal tales it contains an essential truth. The Duke of York loved and wanted the best for his children but he was a bad-tempered and often frightening man; he was never cruel, but he was a harsh disciplinarian who believed that a bit of bullying never did a child any harm; he shouted, ranted, struck out both verbally and physically to express his displeasure. A summons to the library almost always heralded a rebuke, and a rebuke induced terror in the recipient. His banter was well-intentioned but it could also be brutal. On the birth of Prince Henry: ‘David of course asked some very funny questions. I told him the baby had flown in at the window during the night, and he at once asked where his wings were and I said they had been cut off.’
Prince Edward was six at the time, and he claimed the vision of his brother’s bleeding wings disturbed his sleep for weeks afterwards.
The Duke of York had rigid ideas, invested with almost totemic significance, about punctuality, deportment, above all dress. The children were treated as midshipmen, perpetually on parade. Any deviation from the approved ritual was a fall from grace to be punished for the sake of the offender. ‘I hope your kilts fit well, take care and don’t spoil them at once as they are new,’ wrote the Duke to his eldest son. ‘Wear the Balmoral kilt and grey jacket on week days and green kilt and black jacket on Sundays. Do not wear the red kilt till I come.’
Inevitably they got things wrong, wore a grey jacket with a green kilt or a Balmoral kilt on Sundays. Retribution was swift and fearful. ‘The House of Hanover, like ducks, produce bad parents,’ the royal librarian, Owen Morshead, told Harold Nicolson. ‘They trample on their young.’ ‘It was a mystery,’ said a royal private secretary, Alec Hardinge, ‘why George V, who was such a kind man, was such a brute to his children.’
Prince Albert, more nervous and slow-witted than his elder brother, suffered as much, but Edward, both because of his status and his tendency to carelessness, came in for the most censorious attention. His father took due pride in his achievements. David recited a poem ‘quite extraordinarily well’, he noted in his diary. ‘He said Wolseley’s farewell (Shakespeare) without a mistake.’
But he felt correspondingly sharp dismay at his son’s backslidings. ‘The real difficulty had been with the Duke of Windsor, never with the present King,’ Queen Mary told Nicolson many years later.
She deluded herself if she thought that Prince Bertie had escaped unscathed, but she was right in her belief that her elder son, from whom so much was expected and who found acquiescence in his father’s shibboleths so much more uncongenial, was the principal victim in the generation war. Prince Edward certainly saw himself as such, a conviction that was fortified as his childhood slipped farther into the past. He told Freda Dudley Ward’s daughter Angela how lucky she was to have a loving mother. His own childhood had been dreadful, he said; he had received no love and no appreciation for his achievements.
‘I had a wretched childhood!’ he told his authorial assistant, Charles Murphy. ‘Of course there were short periods of happiness but I remember it chiefly for the miserableness I had to keep to myself.’
That this misery was exaggerated in retrospect seems evident, that it was real and painful at the time is hardly less so.
His mother did her best to provide a refuge from the Duke’s harshness. ‘We used to have a most lovely time with her alone – always laughing and joking,’ Edward remembered, ‘… she was a different human being away from him.’
But though she made manifest her sympathy for her children, she did little to protect them from their father’s wrath, or to try to change his attitude. Though to later generations she appeared the quintessence of intractable strong-mindedness, she held her husband in awe, as an individual and still more as a future monarch. ‘I always have to remember that their father is also their King,’
she was later to pronounce, and the King-to-be deserved almost the same reverence. She saw her role as that of loyal support; to argue with, or still more, criticize her husband was something to be done rarely, and then only with extreme caution.
The Duke and Duchess were not the only people of significance in the children’s lives. It is curious that almost all the nannies who feature in the pages of childhood memoirs are either saints or sadists. Edward had one of each. The sadist delighted in pinching him or twisting his arm just before his evening visit to his parents’ drawing room; as a result he would cry and find himself peremptorily banished.
The saint, Charlotte ‘Lalla’ (or, to Edward, ‘Lala’) Bill, came later as nurse to Princess Mary and extended her attention to the boys. Neither had any great importance in Edward’s upbringing. More influential was the stalwart Finch, a nursery footman whose father had been in the service of the great Duke of Wellington and who shared some of that dignitary’s resolution and resourcefulness. From male nanny he stayed on to serve his master as valet and then butler, dependable, devoted, totally loyal, always respectful yet blunt sometimes to the point of rudeness. He allowed his youthful charge to take no liberties and on one occasion spanked him for teasing Lalla Bill. Edward threatened to denounce him to his father, but Lalla Bill got her story in first and insult was added to injury when the Prince was made to apologize to Finch for being such a nuisance.
But it was his grandparents who provided the most striking contrast to his father’s stern regime. The Prince of Wales could be quite as bad-tempered and as much a stickler for protocol as his son, and possessed a streak of meanness which was missing in the Duke of York, but to his grandchildren he was almost as indulgent as he was to himself. Edward basked in his obvious affection and endured with equanimity outbursts that would have terrified him in his father. Once he infuriated his grandfather by fidgeting at luncheon and finally knocking something off the table. ‘Damn you, boy!’ roared the Prince, smashing a melon to the floor. ‘David surveyed the debris in silence and then turned to his grandfather with an irresistibly funny expression of polite enquiry. Then the two burst out laughing.’
His grandmother was still less alarming. ‘We saw dear Grannie yesterday,’ Edward wrote in 1897, in a letter presumably dictated to a nursemaid, ‘and she had a funny cock and an owl which she blowed out of a pipe.’
With Queen Alexandra, as she was shortly to become, it was always cocks and owls and laughs and demonstrative affection.
It amused the Waleses to subvert their son’s austerity. In August 1900 the Yorks set off on an extensive imperial tour. The grandparents were left in charge, and reports were soon reaching the royal tourists of the way the children were being pampered and their education neglected. The last straw came when the woman supposed to be teaching Edward French was left behind when the family moved to Sandringham. The Duchess protested, but got little satisfaction. ‘The reason we did not take her,’ wrote Queen Alexandra, ‘was that [Doctor] Laking particularly asked that he might be left more with his brothers and sister – for a little while – as we all noticed how precautious [sic – “precocious” is presumably what she had in mind] and old-fashioned he was getting – and quite the ways of a “single child”! which will make him ultimately a “tiresome child” – laying down the law and thinking himself far superior to the younger ones. It did him a great deal of good – to be treated the same as Bertie …’
The charge that Edward was being brought up as an only child does not seem well founded. The three elder children were much together, and, in spite of their father’s insistence on correct clothing on every occasion, enjoyed a freedom to roam the countryside on foot or bicycle which would seem enviable to contemporary princes. Edward felt protective towards his siblings; it is said that once, when he heard that his father was on the way to inspect the flower beds that they were encouraged to look after at Windsor, he covered up for his sister’s inadequacy as a gardener by running ahead and transplanting some flowers from his plot to hers.
Lord Esher spent some time with them in 1904 and noted: ‘The youngest is the most riotous. The eldest a sort of head nurse.’ Looking through a magazine together the children chanced on a picture of Prince Edward labelled ‘Our Future King’. ‘Prince Albert at once drew attention to it – but the elder hastily brushed his brother’s finger away and turned the page. Evidently he thought it bad taste.’
But outside the family his social horizons were severely limited. Occasional visits to cousins of his age was the utmost permitted him. The children of the Duke and Duchess of Fife were favoured companions. ‘He was so pleased to be with them,’ reported a governess. ‘They wanted to take his hand and he wanted to take their ball’ – an exchange which he must have felt greatly to his advantage.
But he seems to have had no aversion to girls. ‘So dear David is precocious,’ wrote his great-aunt Augusta. ‘He was so from the first. I have a vivid and pleasing recollection of the only time I saw him this year at White Lodge, when he flirted with the nice Lady Cousins.’
The Duke of York was a man of habit and, imperial tours apart, he liked the year to unroll to an unchanging pattern. In January the whole family was at York Cottage, Sandringham, the children staying on there in February and March while their parents were in London. At Easter they were reunited at York Cottage or Frogmore House, Windsor. They stayed together in London for May and June, and then in July and August the children with their mother would retreat to Frogmore while the Duke shot or yachted. September and the first half of October were spent near Balmoral; then it was back to York Cottage for the rest of the year.
York Cottage was thus as near to a permanent home as the children knew. It had been built by the Prince of Wales to hold the overflow from his vaster shooting parties and given to the Duke of York as a wedding present. The word ‘Cottage’ hardly conveys a true picture. Harold Nicolson, who must have visited it on a cold, wet day, described it as ‘a glum little villa … separated by an abrupt rim of lawn from a pond at the edge of which a leaden pelican gazes in dejection upon the water lilies and bamboos’.
In sunnier circumstances the pond is a more than respectable lake and the life-size pelican looks contented if not exuberant. As for the glum little villa – villa perhaps, but large enough to provide today spacious estate offices, storage rooms for the Sandringham shop and five decent-sized flats. The rooms were small – the nursery being barely large enough to accommodate a medium-sized rocking horse – but the Duke liked small rooms, which reminded him of naval cabins. ‘Very nice to be in this dear wee house again,’ he wrote in his diary, and when his father offered to rent for him Lord Cholmondeley’s palace at nearby Houghton, he rejected the proposal with alacrity. As a child Edward was fond enough of its cosy and suburban comfort, as he grew older it came more and more to symbolize all that he disliked about family life.
His education was at first desultory. Reading, writing and a little history were given priority; Latin, mathematics and the sciences were eschewed; French and German were deemed essential, with enforced recitations of poems in both languages on his parents’ birthdays, turning these festivals into nightmares. ‘I am a good boy. I know a lot of German,’ Edward proudly told his father in 1901.
He was less good when it came to French, mainly from dislike of his teacher, a podgy Alsatian lady called Hélène Bricka whom he described as ‘a dreadful old person’.
Religious instruction, such as it was, came from Canon Dalton; it failed to enthral the young prince. Cecil Sharp, expert in folklore, song and dancing, was supposed to have taken charge of Edward’s ‘social education’ and first inspired in him a passion for ‘physical jerks’ and other forms of violent and uncomfortable exercise.
Geography was picked up largely as a by-product of the Yorks’ travels. ‘I am very pleased to get a present from Christchurch and a whip from Tasmania,’ he wrote when his parents were in the Antipodes. ‘I know where these places are … Fancy Papa shooting peacocks.’
He learned the art of crochet from his mother and picked up some general knowledge from forays into the royal palaces. ‘There are such a lot of books,’ he remarked in awe after a visit to the library at Windsor. ‘I saw the first book Caxton printed. I read all about him in Arthur’s History.’
It was not a bad beginning, but it did not add up to the formal education required by a future king. His father knew that something more was called for, but could not convince himself that the matter was of any urgency, until January 1901 when Queen Victoria died. The Prince of Wales succeeded as King Edward VII; the Duke of York became Duke of Cornwall and ten months later added the title of Prince of Wales.
Prince Edward, aged six, was now second in line to the throne. The event meant little to him; he was dimly aware that something of vast significance had occurred, an era had ended, hushed and reverent mourning was in order, but he had hardly known his great-grandmother and felt no personal grief at her disappearance. Of the funeral he remembered only ‘the piercing cold, the interminable waits, and of feeling very lost’.
He made a clearer impression on others than the ceremony did on him. His aunt Maud, Princess Charles of Denmark and later Queen of Norway, remembered that ‘Sweet little David behaved so well during the service and was supported by the little Hesse girl who took him under her protection and held him most of the time round his neck. They looked such a delightful little couple!’
King Edward’s Coronation the following year meant little more to him. Edward remembered only the longueurs of the service in the Abbey, mitigated by the clatter when one of the great-aunts dropped her book programme over the edge of her box into a gold cup below. Once only did the ceremony come alive, when his mother whispered to him, ‘Now Papa will do homage to Grandpapa.’
For a moment the relevance of what was going on to himself and to his country became dramatically apparent.
Grumbling, the Duke of Cornwall – or Prince of Wales, as it is easier to style him without more ado – moved from his modest apartments in St James’s Palace to the massive grandeur of Marlborough House. He took over Frogmore House at Windsor and Abergeldie near Balmoral. These changes made little difference to his son’s way of life. But a far more significant event had already occurred. In the spring of 1902 the Prince of Wales engaged as tutor to his elder sons Henry Hansell, a thirty-nine-year-old schoolmaster and son of a Norfolk country gentleman, who had taken his degree at Magdalen College, Oxford, and had recently been tutor to the Duke of Connaught’s son, Prince Arthur.
There were a lot of good things about Hansell. Six foot three inches tall and strikingly handsome, he had played football for Oxford and was an excellent shot. Shane Leslie, who was taught by him, describes him as uproariously funny, to small boys at least, convulsing all around him by the comical goose step with which he would advance from his goal in a football match.
He liked his charges and served them with loyalty and devotion. The Princess of Wales thought he taught history well and managed to engage the boys’ interest: ‘This pleases me immensely as you know how devoted I am to history.’
He made an excellent impression on many people who should have been competent judges. Lord Derby said of him: ‘Never have I found a man who understands boys better. Admirably straight, but very broadminded. I can imagine no man better able to guide rather than drive a boy.’
‘Mon impression sur M. Hansell fut excellente du premier coup,’ wrote the Marquis de Breteuil. ‘Je le jugeai de suite un homme intelligent, plein de tact, bon et complètement devoué a son élève.’
And yet it is impossible to doubt that this good, honest, conscientious man had a disastrous effect on the intellectual development of his pupils. Without imagination, with only the most rudimentary sense of humour, pedestrian in mind, aesthetically unaware, Hansell represented everything that was most philistine and blinkered about the English upper middle classes. Whatever adventurous instincts Edward might have had were blanketed by his tutor’s smug and unquestioning self-assurance. Harry Verney worked with Hansell during the First World War and told Edward that what had struck him was ‘his commanding presence … his savoir faire coupled with the most incredible stupidity in dealing with the business of the office … I am amazed to read that he got a Second in history at Oxford, but I expect you are right. With it all what a very charming man he was, and devoted to you.’
Edward’s final view was not dissimilar. He told Harold Nicolson in 1953 that Hansell had been ‘melancholy and inefficient’. ‘He never taught us anything at all,’ he went on. ‘I am completely self-educated.’
Prince Edward had a naturally enquiring mind. He was ready to question any dogma and investigate any phenomenon which he did not immediately comprehend. He was hungry for exact information, and wanted to know not only how things worked, but why, and whether they could work better. He did not lose this freshness of approach but, thanks in part at least to Hansell, it was never harnessed to an intellectual apparatus which would have made it an effective instrument. It was the mark of Hansell’s tuition that the Duke of Windsor could admit fifty years later that he had ‘always preferred learning history from pictures than from script, and it’s amazing how much one can learn from pictures’.
That his father should think his progress under Hansell all that could be desired was perhaps to be expected; that his mother was equally approving is more surprising. Yet she appears to have had no qualms. ‘I do so hope our children will turn out common-sense people, which is so important in this world,’ she told her aunt Augusta early in 1907. ‘We have taken no end of trouble with their education and they have very nice people round them so one feels all is being done to help them.’
To be fair to Hansell, he saw the claustrophobic limitations in the system of education imposed upon his charges. He wanted them sent to a preparatory school, preferably Ludgrove where he himself had taught. When this proposal was brusquely vetoed by the Prince of Wales, he at least tried to open their social horizons a little way by organizing football matches in which the princes and boys from the local village played against teams from nearby schools. Edward enjoyed both the games and the conviviality which accompanied them. His father was dubious, not so much over the principle as over the choice of sport. He complained to Hansell that the Prince much preferred ‘football to golf, which is a pity, and dislikes playing golf now, probably because his brother beats him, but I want you to encourage him all you can. I have already told him he will have more opportunities of playing golf when he grows up than football or cricket.’
But Edward was always hesitant about fresh experiences: ‘How funny he is about trying anything new like hockey,’ remarked his father. ‘We must try to get him over it.’
You’ll be glad to hear
That the Cuckoo is hear!
That is poetry.
wrote Edward proudly from Frogmore in April 1904. It was a solitary foray into an art form that was to hold little appeal for him in later life. But in some ways his education was less inadequate. He took a keen interest in the 1906 general election, which Hansell turned into a game. Edward backed Campbell-Bannerman, the Liberal leader; Prince Albert favoured the Conservative Balfour. When Campbell-Bannerman, duly elected Prime Minister, visited Windsor, the eleven-year-old Prince asked whether being at the top of the ladder would not make him feel giddy. ‘Is this not delightful and promising for his future!’ exclaimed his doting great-aunt Augusta.
His memory for names and faces was trained from a very early age – after going into a room with some fifty people in it he was rigorously grilled on the identity of every one he had met. He was encouraged to take an interest in any part of the world visited by his parents. When the Prince of Wales was in India: ‘Mr Holland Hibbert came to lecture to us. The part that interested me most was when he told us about the holy men of Benares. He said that some of them hold their arms up all their lives. I think it must be rather tiresome.’ Some of them also lie on a bed of nails, replied his father. ‘I thought them rather nasty kind of people.’
But the Prince never learned to read for pleasure or acquired even a superficial knowledge of the English classics. Tommy Lascelles, then his private secretary, speculated many years later about what Hansell could have taught his charge. ‘I recollect the Prince of Wales years ago, coming back from a weekend at Panshanger and saying to me, “Look at this extraordinary little book wh. Lady Desborough says I ought to read. Have you ever heard of it?”’ The extraordinary little book was Jane Eyre. Another time he asked Hardy to settle an argument he had had with his mother about whether the novelist had written a book called Tess of the D’Urbervilles; ‘I said I was sure it was by somebody else.’ Hardy answered politely that it had indeed been one of his earlier books.
A working knowledge of English literature is perhaps unnecessary to a monarch, but to be totally ignorant of its greatest monuments is surely undesirable.
In the many accounts that survive of Edward at this period, it is his quickness, brightness and anxiety to please which are most often remarked on. ‘A delightful child, so intelligent, nice and friendly,’ said Queen Victoria;
‘a sweet little person’ was Esher’s judgment;
‘he had a look of both intelligence and kindness, and a limpid clarity of expression,’ observed the Aga Khan.
His formal courtesy and consideration for others were unusual in one so young, as also ‘the look of Weltschmerz in his eyes’ which Lord Esher detected when he was only eleven years old. He was softhearted, telling Lord Roberts that when he was King he would pass a law against cutting puppy dogs’ tails and forbid the use of bearing reins on horses. ‘Those two things are very cruel.’
When he caught his first fish he danced for joy, then handed it to the boatman and said: ‘You must not kill him, throw him back into the water again!’
(Such sensibilities did not endure. Only a year later he was recording in triumph, ‘We caught such a lot of fishes! and had them for breakfast this morning.’
) But his benevolence, though sincere, was sometimes remote from the realities of human existence. The first recorded story that he told his brothers was about an extremely poor couple living on a deserted moor. They were starving. One day the man heard his wife moan, ‘I’m so hungry.’ ‘“Very well,” said her husband. “I’ll see to it.” So he rang the bell and, when the footman came, ordered a plate of bread and butter.’
In June 1904 Prince Edward’s skull was inspected by Bernard Holländer, an eminent phrenologist. Most of the comments could have been made by anyone of a sycophantic nature without reference to the cranium, but there are some interesting points. The Prince, said Holländer, was eager to acquire knowledge and a keen observer, but ‘he would show his talents to greater advantage were he possessed of power of concentration and greater self-confidence’. He had a good eye for painting and would like music, though mainly of the lighter kind, ‘for example songs and dancing tunes’. He would have little use for organized religion himself but would respect the views of others. ‘Persons with the Prince’s type of head are never guilty of either a mean or dishonest action; they are just-minded, kindly disposed and faithful to their word.’ He had strong ‘feelings of humanity and sympathy for the welfare of others … He will seek to alleviate the sufferings of the poor.’ He would be uneasy in company, dislike public appearances, accept responsibilities with reluctance. He would not, it was clear, find it easy to be King.
Even at the age of ten he seemed to cherish doubts about his fitness for the role that his birth had thrust on him. More than thirty-two years later, after the abdication, Lalla Bill wrote in high emotion to Queen Mary. ‘Do you remember, Your Majesty, when he was quite young, how he didn’t wish to live, and he never wanted to become King?’
2
The Youth
THERE WERE GOOD REASONS FOR CHOOSING THE ROYAL Navy as a training ground for future monarchs. Careers open to princes at the beginning of the twentieth century were rare indeed, and the armed services provided one of the few in which they could find employment. The Navy, as the senior, was the obvious choice. It was a cherished national institution, its officers were recruited largely from the gentry or aristocracy, it offered less opportunities for debauchery or any kind of escapade than its land-based counterpart, it inculcated those virtues which it was felt were above all needed in a future king: sobriety, self-reliance, punctuality, a respect for authority and instinct to conform. A few years at sea would do harm to few and most people a lot of good. But to thrust a boy into the Navy at the age of twelve and leave him there until he was nineteen or twenty, if not longer, was unlikely to produce the rounded personality and breadth of mind needed to cope with the plethora of problems which afflict the constitutional monarch. When Edward’s father and uncle went to sea, Queen Victoria complained that the ‘very rough sort of life to which boys are exposed on board ship is the very thing not calculated to make a refined and amiable Prince’.
The risk seemed more that the Navy would blinker rather than brutalize a prince. The curious thing was that the Prince of Wales himself was aware of the limitations of a naval education. He knew that he had grown up without any understanding of international affairs, any knowledge of society or politics, any facility for languages. He deplored these handicaps. And yet when it came to his own sons, he condemned them to the same sterile routine. At least when he had joined the Navy it had not seemed likely that he would become King. Prince Edward was destined for the throne, yet still the same formula was applied. It was almost as if the Prince of Wales was determined that, as he had himself been deprived of proper training for his life work, his son should suffer equally; and yet in fact no thought could have been further from his mind.
The best hope for Edward seemed to be that he would fail to pass the entrance examination. Everyone agreed that he should be subjected to the same ordeal as any other candidate, though he was to be medically inspected by the royal doctors – ‘I may perhaps add that he is a particularly strong, healthy boy,’ wrote Hansell.
He had no Latin, but at a pinch could have offered German as an alternative. No one doubted that he was intelligent enough, but his spelling was appalling and his knowledge of mathematics exiguous. The Prince of Wales was apprehensive, then delighted and relieved to be told his son had passed the viva voce examination with flying colours. ‘Palpably above the average,’ said Sir Arthur Fanshawe,
while another examiner, Lord Hampton, said that of the three hundred boys he had seen, Edward had been equal to the best.
‘This has pleased us immensely,’ wrote the Princess of Wales proudly.
But the overall results of the written examination were not so flattering. In fact he ‘failed by a few marks to pass the qualifying examination, an Admiralty official reported in 1936. ‘Prince Edward obtained 291 marks out of 600 … but I notice that 5 candidates with lower marks were entered.’
At all events, he did well enough to be admitted without imposing too great a strain on the examiners’ consciences. In May 1907 his father took him to the Naval College at Osborne in the Isle of Wight. ‘I felt the parting from you very much,’ the Prince of Wales wrote two days later, ‘and we all at home miss you greatly. But I saw enough … to assure me that you would get on capitally and be very happy with all the other boys. Of course at first it will all seem a bit strange to you but you will soon settle down … and have a very jolly time of it.’
It seems unlikely that Prince Edward saw jolly times ahead when he received this letter. For any small boy the first exile to boarding school must be a scarifying experience; for Edward the ordeal was worse since he had been evicted abruptly from a cloistered family circle in which the existence of other children was hardly known. He shared a dormitory with thirty others, adjusting himself painfully to the fact that the day began at six, discipline was rigid, all work and play were conducted in a hectic bustle. He slept between the sons of Lord Spencer and Admiral Curzon-Howe. They had been chosen because their parents were well known to the Prince of Wales, but to Edward they seemed at first as alien as if they had been visitors from Mars. He had no idea how to relate to his contemporaries and had to learn not only new manners but almost a new language. It was much to his credit that he managed to look cheerful when his father left and to write proudly a few days later: ‘I am getting on very well here now … I think nothing of going up the mast as I am quite used to it.’
His mother gratefully took his protestations at face value. ‘He has fallen into his new life very quickly,’ she told her aunt Augusta, ‘which is such a blessing.’
The Prince of Wales’s instructions were that his son was to be treated exactly like any other naval cadet. Edward asked for nothing better, his ruling desire was to conform and to be accepted by his peers. But there was no chance that he would be able to escape altogether from his identity. He was subjected to mild bullying by small boys determined to show that he was not anything very special; red ink was poured down his neck, his hands were tied behind his back and he was guillotined in the sash window of his classroom. But his inoffensiveness and obvious determination not to trade on his rank soon led to his acceptance. Within a few weeks he had won through, was given a nickname – ‘Sardines’, presumably because he was the son of the Prince of W[h]ales – and became a tolerated if not leading member of society.
‘Perhaps the actual hours of work at Osborne are not excessive,’ the Prince of Wales wrote to Hansell, with greater perception than might have been expected, ‘but the whole life is a very strenuous one and they are never alone and therefore never quiet from the time they get up till the time they go to bed.’
Sociable by nature, Edward survived the hurly-burly well, but the gaps left by Hansell’s teaching quickly became apparent. He did well in French but even special coaching in mathematics failed to raise him from the bottom ten places in the Exmouth term of sixty or so cadets. On the whole he settled respectably, if without great distinction, a little above the halfway mark; more important, he worked steadily throughout his two years at Osborne, reaching his peak after eighteen months and then only slipping back because of ill health. His father applauded his achievements and was decently consolatory about his setbacks. ‘I am delighted with the good reports that were sent me about you and that you are now 24th in your term,’ he wrote at the end of 1907, ‘… that is splendid, and I am sure you must be very pleased about it too and it will make you more keen about your mark.’
Edward’s letters to his parents were short and uncommunicative even by the standards of schoolboys, consisting mainly of excuses for not having written before or at greater length: ‘I am in a bean-bag team and I had to practise every morning,’ was one explanation; ‘I have had to practise Swedish drill every morning,’ occurred a few weeks later; then, in desperation, ‘I have been doing such a lot of things lately that I have not had much time.’
His father tolerated brevity but not a failure to write at all. ‘You must be able to find time to write to me once a week,’ he protested, ‘… I am anxious to hear how you are getting on.’
Edward endured stoically the separation from his family, but felt it a bit hard when his mother announced that she intended to visit Germany during the first two weeks of his first holidays. The Princess of Wales was apologetic but unrelenting; Aunt Augusta was eighty-five and unable to travel. ‘I hope we shall have great fun when we do meet,’ she wrote.
In spite of the demands on their time the Waleses generally did manage to make the holidays fun. ‘We miss you most dreadfully,’ the Prince of Wales wrote when his son returned to Osborne. ‘I fear you felt very sad at leaving home. I know I did when I was a boy, it is only natural that you should, and it shows that you are fond of your home.’
By the time Prince Albert followed his brother to Osborne, Edward was in his last term and a figure of some consequence. ‘I hope you have “put him up to the ropes” as we say,’ wrote their father. ‘You must look after him all you can.’
Opportunities for such tutelage were limited, boys from different terms were not supposed to mix at Osborne and when the brothers wanted to talk together surreptitious assignations had to be made in the further reaches of the playing fields. Prince Edward was expected to do more than just give comfort to his sibling; the Prince of Wales frequently instructed him to make sure Bertie worked harder or to pass on complaints about his failure to concentrate. Edward seems to have relished the quasi-parental role, especially since his brother did conspicuously worse than him. ‘Bertie was 61st in the order which was not so bad,’ he wrote later from Dartmouth. ‘I really think he is trying to work a bit. This is an excellent thing …’
Though Edward had hardly been an outstanding success at Osborne, let alone a hero, he had profited by his time there. He had gained immeasurably in confidence and found that it was possible to get on well with his contemporaries. ‘He is wonderfully improved,’ noted Esher, ‘Osborne has made him unshy, and given him good manners.’
His father, after only one term, found him ‘more manly’ and much more able to look after himself.
It had been sink or swim; anyone who could not look after himself in the maelstrom of Osborne life would not have survived for long. But he had swum, and even got some pleasure out of doing so. When he got home to Frogmore at the beginning of his first holidays he had found the entrance beflagged and a large banner reading ‘Vive l’amiral!’ No banners flew on his final departure from Osborne but a sense of achievement possessed him just the same.
Dartmouth follows Osborne as the day the night, and giving something of the same impression of light following dark. Though the discipline seemed almost as harsh, the bullying as mindless, the tempo of life as relentless as at Osborne, the cadets were that much nearer to maturity and their troubles easier to endure. ‘This is a very nice place, much nicer than Osborne …’ wrote Edward in relief in May 1909. ‘There is a very nice Chapel here and I think I am going to join the Choir.’ But the pressure was still on. ‘There is an awful rush here and everything has to be done so quickly. We are allowed 3 minutes to undress in the evening.’
His mother was alarmed by this last piece of information. How could he do a proper job of cleaning his teeth in so short a time? ‘This is so important and I want to know. Don’t forget to answer this question.’
Edward’s reply was tinged with the exasperation that a boy of fifteen properly feels towards a fussing mother. The three minutes did not include time for brushing teeth. ‘We are allowed plenty of time for that. There is also plenty of time in the morning, and I am taking great care of my teeth.’
He had moved on to Dartmouth with his contemporaries from Osborne, so the process of adjustment was less painful than at the junior college. Stephen King-Hall, who was a cadet in the same year, recorded that he was ‘rather shy but generally liked’. In his first terms he was sometimes seen staggering back from the football fields with a load of boots, victim of the wish of some senior cadet to be able to say in later life: ‘The King once carried my boots.’
His academic strengths and weaknesses did not greatly change. In May 1909 he reported proudly that he was top in German, second in history, top in English, third in French, but only thirty-seventh in the overall order, still dragged down by his inability to manage any branch of mathematics.
In the exams in March 1910 he was forty-eighth in geometry and forty-fifth in trigonometry out of a term of fifty-nine: ‘That is quite good for me,’ he wrote defensively.
He found exams difficult and regularly produced worse results than he had in class. Lord Knutsford stayed at York Cottage early in 1911 and spoke to Edward about the examination system. The Prince praised it, in spite of his own inadequacy. As to the final exams, he said, ‘I dare say I shall take some time, as I am not at all clever, but I might pass.’ Knutsford found him ‘a really charming boy, very simple and keen’. He taught him card tricks and found that ‘he could do the “French drop” fairly well’.
The previous year his Easter holidays had been unexpectedly extended by the sudden illness of the King. During the night of 6 May 1910 Edward VII died. The first Edward knew of it was when Bertie saw from their window in Marlborough House that the Royal Standard over Buckingham Palace was at half mast. He mentioned this to his father who muttered, ‘That’s all wrong,’ and ordered the Standard to be transferred to Marlborough House and flown ‘close up’.
King Edward VII might be dead but the King lived.
With his father now King George V, Edward automatically inherited the Dukedom of Cornwall. Life at Dartmouth in theory was unchanged but the cadets would have been less than human if they had not recognized that only one life stood between their fifteen-year-old contemporary and the throne.
Perhaps in deference to his presence, the authorities at Dartmouth had introduced a course of Civics. He told his father that he was much enjoying it and discovering a great deal about the constitution: ‘It is such a useful subject for me to learn.’
He began to follow the daily papers, taking the Morning Post and the Westminster Gazette. It was ‘a very good thing, I think’, he told his mother. ‘It is about time I read the papers, as in years to come, when I am obliged to follow politics, I shall know something about it.’
The King saw this letter and at once wrote to insist that The Times be substituted for the Morning Post – ‘the views and opinions expressed are much sounder in every way’. The Westminster Gazette was excellent and moderate – ‘You should always try and form moderate opinions about things, and never extreme ones, especially in politics.’
He must have written with special feeling since Britain was involved in a constitutional crisis over the powers of the House of Lords in which moderate opinions were hard to find. ‘It must have been so very hard for Papa to say the right thing, and yet show at the same time that he was not partial to one party or the other,’ wrote Edward sympathetically.
The succession of his father to the throne with all the attendant ceremonies reduced the usefulness of Edward’s last term at Dartmouth. His parents were sorry that he should find himself thrust into the position of heir to the throne ‘without being older and having more preparation’. Still, the Queen told her aunt Augusta, ‘we have done our best for him and we can only hope and pray we may have succeeded and that he will ever uphold the honour and traditions of our house’.
The Rev. H. Dixon Wright, who prepared Edward for confirmation, had the same cause at heart. The Prince’s mind, he told Archbishop Davidson, was ‘absolutely innocent and uncontaminated’. With the consent of the King Wright had ‘warned him on the subject of “the sinful lusts of the flesh”, that he may be forearmed’.
The Archbishop was somewhat dismayed to find that the King expected him to ‘examine’ the Prince in the presence of his parents and suggested some relaxation of the procedure. ‘I have no wish whatever for the examination which my dear brother and I had to undergo in the presence of the Queen and my parents,’ wrote George V cheerfully. ‘I thought it a terrible ordeal, but was under the impression it was always done with the members of my family. Delighted to hear that it is not necessary.’
The confirmation passed off none the worse for this breach with precedent. ‘The impression made upon me by the quiet boyish simplicity, the clear and really thoughtful attitude, and the wistful keenness of the young Prince is one which can never be effaced,’ wrote the Archbishop, a tribute that would have been still more impressive if it had been written to anyone but the Queen.
The Coronation was fixed for 22 June 1911. Being still only sixteen Edward could not wear a peer’s robes, so his father created him a Knight of the Garter. For one who was soon to show an almost pathological dislike of dressing up, Edward donned the somewhat fanciful costume with striking calm, in his diary noting merely that it would ‘look very well when ready’ and that it was lucky that his father no longer needed his, since the expense would otherwise have been considerable.
The Queen told her aunt that he had carried off the ceremony with great sang-froid and dignity: ‘David wore the Garter dress white and silver with the cloak and big hat and feathers. He really looked too sweet.’
The Coronation followed a few days later. The children paid their usual morning visit to their parents and found the King brusque and conspicuously nervous. He showed Edward the Admiralty Order in The Times gazetting him a midshipman and handed him the dirk that went with the rank.
The children then processed together to the Abbey in one of the state coaches. Queen Alexandra had thought this a poor idea and was proved right when the younger princes began to giggle and play the fool. George tried to tickle Mary and fell on the floor. On the return journey things got so bad that only Edward’s threats to hit his brothers maintained any sort of order.
In the Abbey, however, all was decorous. Edward was conducted to his stall, his brothers bowed as they filed in front of him, Princess Mary curtsied deeply ‘and the Prince rose and gravely bowed to her’.
When the moment came for him to do homage he was consumed by nerves; if he blundered or behaved clumsily, he believed his father would feel that he had failed him.
He did not blunder. That night George V wrote in his diary: ‘I nearly broke down when dear David came to do homage to me, as it reminded me so much [of] when I did the same thing to beloved Papa. He did it so well.’
By then Edward was already Prince of Wales, given the title on his sixteenth birthday. There had been no formal investiture of a Prince of Wales for more than three hundred years, but the Empress Frederick had suggested the ceremony should be revived; the Bishop of St Asaph espoused the idea; and Lloyd George, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Constable of Caernarvon Castle, saw a chance to gratify Welsh national pride and win political support.
Some time-honoured traditions were hurriedly invented, Caernarvon Castle refurbished, gold quarried from the Merionethshire hills to make the Prince’s regalia, and a quaint costume of white satin breeches and purple velvet surcoat devised for the occasion. At this point Edward struck. What, he asked, ‘would my Navy friends say if they saw me in this preposterous rig?’
The Queen talked him into grudging acquiescence and Lloyd George taught him some Welsh phrases for the occasion. He practised in the garden at Frogmore, bellowing ‘Mor o gan yw Cymru i gyd’ – all Wales is a sea of song – to Hansell fifty yards away. He could hear every word, reported Hansell.
The ceremony was a great success; the only people who recorded their displeasure were the Mayor and Aldermen of Chester, who felt that since Prince Edward was among other things Earl of Chester, the investiture should have happened there. The leading man earned himself a crop of compliments. Winston Churchill, the Home Secretary, congratulated him on possessing a voice ‘which carries well and is capable of being raised without losing expressiveness’.
Lloyd George assured him that he had forged a lasting bond of affection with the Welsh ‘and won the admiration of all those who witnessed the spectacle’.
Queen Mary told Aunt Augusta that he had played his part to perfection, ‘It was very émouvant for George and me.’
To the youthful Harry Luke he seemed ‘the incarnation of all the Fairy Princes who have ever been imagined’.
The last description encapsulated everything that disquieted Edward about the ceremony. He was not sure he wanted to be a prince at all, certainly he did not wish to be a fairy prince. He hated anything which made him a man apart, which set him on a pedestal for his fellows to goggle at and worship. If to be Prince of Wales meant to put on fancy dress and strike attitudes in remote Welsh castles, then it was not a job for him.
There were good points about the position too. As Duke of Cornwall, he now enjoyed the revenues of the Duchy of Cornwall, derived from much valuable property in London and huge estates in the West Country. These amounted to some £90,000 a year, far more than he could possibly require before he came of age and set up his own establishment. The Treasurer of the Duchy of Cornwall, Walter Peacock, estimated that by the end of his minority savings would probably amount to £400,000; say, very roughly, £10 million at current values.
With new wealth and consequence came new responsibilities. J. C. Davidson, some time in 1912, was summoned from his work in the Colonial Office to St James’s Palace to be looked over as a prospective private secretary. He quickly decided it was no job for him: ‘I would have made a very poor courtier, nor did I quite like the character of the Prince of Wales, charming in some ways as he was.’
The Prince possibly reciprocated the mild dislike; certainly no job was offered to Davidson, nor any private secretary appointed.
Meanwhile his naval career was running to its close. His last term at Dartmouth had been truncated by a fierce attack of measles. He retreated to Newquay to convalesce and to pay a few perfunctory visits to his recently acquired estates in the vicinity. On 29 March 1911 he returned briefly to Dartmouth to give presents and signed photographs to the officers, masters and a few particularly close friends. On the same day he presented to the town of Dartmouth the silver oar which symbolized the ancient rights of the Duke of Cornwall over the adjoining waters: ‘This was my first function, and I think it went off very well,’ he noted in his diary.
Neither he nor his father appeared to have any doubts about the value of the education he had received. ‘I certainly think the College is the best school in England,’ wrote the King.
The Prince echoed the sentiment when he visited Winchester in 1913. ‘I believe it is a very good school,’ he told his father. ‘… It is amusing to see the difference between an ordinary school and Dartmouth. The boys talk of discomfort, but in the dormitories they have cubicles and they sit about in studies all day. Their life is not half as strenuous as it is at Dartmouth and we were more contented. There can be no better education than a naval one.’
The Dartmouth course ended with a training cruise. The Coronation made it impossible for the Prince to take part, but as a consolation in the autumn of 1911 he was sent on a three-month tour in the battleship Hindustan. The Prince served as a midshipman as the ship sailed along the south coast to Portland, Plymouth and Torbay, then for a month to Queensferry and back to Portland for the final weeks. The Captain, Henry Campbell, was a shining example of those bluff sailor men who maintain a conspicuous independence of attitude while keeping a weather eye always open to the wishes of those likely to further their careers. ‘Not the smallest exception or discrimination has been made in his favour,’ he wrote in his final report on the Prince.
Up to a point it was true. The Prince did work hard, get up at 6 a.m. to do rifle drill or P.T., receive the same pay – 1/9d (9p) a day – as the other midshipmen, keep his watches, do a stint in the coal bunkers – ‘the atmosphere is thick with coal dust and how the wretched stokers who have to remain down there can stand it, I do not know’.
But not many midshipmen ate regularly with their captain, went for walks ashore with him when the ship was near land, lunched in their stately homes with Lord Mar, Lord Rosebery and Lord Mount Edgcumbe. He was always the Prince of Wales and though he seems to have been genuinely welcome in the gunroom by the other midshipmen, he was there as a guest, not as a member.
‘I like the Captain very much indeed, he is always so interesting,’ wrote the Prince in his diary. ‘The Chaplain had a talk with me … and gave me some tracts to read.’
The Chaplain, one suspects, was found less interesting than the Captain. Campbell reciprocated the boy’s affection, and, though he was not above flattery, his letter to Queen Mary has the ring of sincerity:
We in the Navy rate a man for what he does, not for what he is; from the highest to the lowest he was looked upon with affection and respect. His character has formed; it is strong but very gentle and is best described in the old Scotch words ‘Ye can break but ye canna bend me.’ In spite of his very happy nature he thinks a great deal and he one day made it quite clear to me that he was fully alive to the fact that false speech and fond hopes do not alter facts … The Prince said to me one day; ‘If I have learnt nothing else since I have been with you, I have learnt what inconvenience is and what it means to be really tired.’ I thought of my promise to you and felt that it had been fulfilled.
When he went ashore for the last time the ship’s company sang ‘God Bless the Prince of Wales’ and ‘Auld lang syne’. The Prince knew it was the end of his naval life. ‘I only wish it was possible for you to continue serving in what I consider the finest service in the world,’ his father had written to him.
But it was not possible. The first year of his reign had finally convinced George V that life aboard a ship could not equip a prince to be King. Edward must travel, he must learn languages, he must study history and the constitution, he must serve in the Army, he must become the very model of a modern monarch. The Prince of Wales was disconsolate, but he knew his father was right.
‘You know, I think father now is quite a nice man,’ Edward had said in apparent surprise to his mother in the summer of 1910.
That George V was in fact quite a nice man is hardly in question; that his son continued to think him quite a nice father is more doubtful. The trouble was partly that the King tried too hard. ‘Now that you are leaving home, David, and going out into the world,’ he said when he deposited his son for the first time at Osborne, ‘always remember that I am your best friend.’
The same refrain reverberated down the years: in 1908, ‘I wish you always to look upon me as your best friend, when in doubt and want advice, come to me’; in 1913, ‘I want you always to look upon me as your best friend’; in 1914, ‘I want you to treat me as your best friend.’
It is possible that some boys may indeed regard their fathers as their best friends, but even if they did it is unlikely that they would relish being constantly reminded of the fact.
There was a sententiousness about the King’s approach which must have grated on its victim. ‘I trust that you will always remember …’ wrote George V just after his accession, ‘that now you must always set a good example to the others by being very obedient, respectful to your seniors and kind to everyone.’
‘May God spare you for many, many years and may you grow up to be a happiness and a credit to your parents and your Country,’ was the message for the Prince’s thirteenth birthday.
The sentiments were unexceptionable, but no teenage boy could be expected to pay much attention to such exhortations. In later life Edward was apt to say that his father never said anything nice about him, always it was carping criticism and rebuke. This is not altogether fair. The King did sometimes congratulate his son on his manners, his letter-writing or some new achievement. But such occasions were the exception. ‘Papa has been so nice to me since my return …’ wrote the Prince in his diary in 1913. ‘No faults have been found … Such a change!!’ It was too good to last. Within a few days there was ‘an awful row’ when the King took exception to his sons going out for a walk with small rifles and shooting rabbits. ‘Those things are always a great bore,’ noted the Prince wearily.
His recreations were a frequent source of recrimination: ‘You seem to be having too much shooting and not enough riding or hunting. I can’t understand why you didn’t hunt when Sir G. Fitzwilliam came expressly for that … What on earth were you doing? … I must say I am disappointed.’
A less sensitive or more self-confident boy might have recognized the genuine solicitude which lay behind the King’s captiousness and have responded to the spirit rather than the manner. The Prince did not. His health provided grounds for constant skirmishes. ‘Do smoke less, take less exercise, eat more and rest more,’ wrote the King, in despair at his eighteen-year-old son’s increasingly eccentric train of life. ‘You are just at the critical age from now till you are 21 and it is most necessary that you should develop properly, both in mind and body. It all depends … whether you develop into a strong, healthy man or remain a sort of puny, half grown boy.’
The Prince paid little attention. He had, for reasons difficult to follow, concluded that he was teetering always on the verge of fatness, and to avoid such a fate submitted his body to much violent physical exercise and ate with ill-judged frugality. He considered his parents’ efforts to modify this regime to be fussy and interfering, and dismissed the injunctions of the royal doctors as the vapourings of the King’s hired lackeys. He found it hard to credit what to the outsider seems the patent sincerity of his father’s heartcry: ‘I am only telling you these things for your own good and because I am so devoted to you and take such an interest in everything.’
There were interludes of harmony: ‘We now understand each other so well,’ wrote the Prince of Wales in July 1913;
a conversation with the King at York Cottage a few months later ‘made a difference to my life and made me look on everything in a totally different light’;
but soon there would be more grumbles and recriminations and all the good would be undone.
Queen Mary’s role in the relationship was curiously remote. In the future mother and son were to develop a close rapport, but though there are occasional references in these years to ‘charming talks’ or ‘wise advice’, she played very much a secondary role. When the Prince’s equerry, William Cadogan, urged her to use her influence with the King to ensure that he sometimes addressed a word of encouragement to his son, she accepted that such advice was badly needed but could not bring herself to proffer it.
One of the few fields where she seemed ready to take an initiative was in the selection of Christmas or birthday presents. Here she avoided any possible disappointment by acting both as donor and recipient. ‘I must just tell you,’ she wrote in May 1912, ‘that I have got for you to give me as a birthday present 2 charming old Chinese cloisonné cups (price £12) for my Chinese Chippendale room.’ The King adopted the same somewhat curious practice. For Christmas the same year he wanted a gold soup bowl. It was ‘awfully expensive, £150’, the Queen told her son, ‘but Papa is very anxious to have it and has ordered it, and I only hope you won’t mind’.
Prince Albert remained Edward’s closest ally. At Osborne and Dartmouth Edward’s role had been that of protector or occasional critic, but with the Navy behind him the Prince of Wales was able to develop a close companionship with his younger brother. ‘Bertie is a delightful creature and we have so many interests in common,’ wrote the Prince in his diary in 1913, and then a fortnight later, ‘I am so miserable it is dear old Bertie’s last night; we have been so much together of late and I shall miss him terribly.’
Prince George too, though eight years younger, was now becoming a friend. At first the relationship was very much de haut en bas; the Prince of Wales rather patronizingly explained to his brother about the Royal Navy or made him exercise – ‘George got stitches all the time … he is too fat for running.’
By 1914 he had become ‘a capital boy’,
they spent much time together and chatted freely. Bertie was still the real support, however, with whom the Prince of Wales formed a common front against the assaults of unreasonable parents. At dinner with Queen Alexandra, ‘Bertie and I did our best to be funny and we succeeded’;
at Christmas in York Cottage, ‘it is hard work keeping 3 wild brothers in order; well I should say two, as my 2nd brother helps me. He is nearly as tall as I am and weighs more.’
Oxford in the autumn of 1912 was to be the next phase of the Prince’s education, but before he went up it was decided he should spend a few months in France. He was reasonably fluent in French but had picked up ‘a very John Bull intonation’ while at Dartmouth, and this called for improvement.
The Marquis de Breteuil, an anglophile French aristocrat with an American wife and two sons of the Prince’s age, somewhat reluctantly allowed himself to be selected as host. He was summoned to Buckingham Palace to inspect his future charge and found him ‘very thin, younger in appearance than his years, puny [chétif], timid but most attractive’. He insisted that Hansell, by whom he was much impressed, should accompany the Prince. George V emphasized that the visit must be entirely informal; the Marquis pointed out that his guest could hardly fail to call on the President. ‘You’re right,’ said the King. ‘I can’t get used to the idea that in a few months he will be eighteen, and that he’s already the Prince of Wales.’
He had some excuse for his failure. Everyone agrees that both physically and mentally the Prince was slow to develop. The image of the slight, shy, wistful figure which was to become imprinted in the public consciousness over the next twenty years was already well established. In 1912 he still seemed conspicuously ill-equipped to grapple with the demands imposed on him by his position. Any boy of his age would have been discomfited by the ‘huge and most alarming’ luncheon given by the prefect of police, Louis-Jean Lépine – ‘it was rather trying and the food was nasty,’ but most would have coped better with the informal dance which the Breteuils held in his honour: ‘They were mostly young folk who went on to a ball. I danced once or twice but it bores me to a degree. I went to bed at 10.15.’
There is no evidence from his diary that he met any girl in France who engaged his attention for more than a few minutes.
How much French he learnt is another matter. An amiable French scholar, Maurice Escoffier, had been engaged to conduct the Prince around France and supervise his studies; not surprisingly he reported on his protégé’s amazing progress. To judge, however, from the Prince’s dislike of the language and reluctance to speak it, an aversion which persisted even after he had lived in France for many years, the progress must have been limited, or at least not maintained. The most that can be said of his three months in France was that he mildly enjoyed them and learnt quite a lot about the country’s history and political structure. More important still, he made himself well liked. ‘He charmed everyone during his stay,’ read a letter which was the more convincing for not being intended for the eyes of his parents. ‘Old and young, rich and poor, were equally impressed by his frankness. The Breteuils could not say enough about his generous and open [belle et franche] nature.’
‘French customs are very curious, but I suppose I shall get used to them in time,’ wrote the Prince resignedly.
He was happiest at the Breteuil château in the valley of the Chevreuse, shooting, bathing in the lake, and generally behaving as if he was at home. ‘We hope you will treat him exactly like your own son,’ the King had written. ‘He is a good boy and I know he will always do at once what you tell him.’
The Marquis’s real sons may not have been best pleased by the imposition on them of this unexpected extra brother but they played their part gallantly. The Prince liked both of them: ‘Even the eldest who likes music is very nice.’
Fortunately François made up for this aberrant taste by liking tennis too. In Paris the Prince saw the sights; watched Sarah Bernhardt play L’Aiglon – ‘she is about 70 and takes the part of a boy of 18. I think she ought to stop acting now’;
visited the Jardin d’Acclimatation – ‘a rotten kind of zoo’;
was received by President Fallières and presented with the grand cordon of the Légion d’honneur – ‘Nothing could have been better or more self-possessed and tactful than the Prince’s manner,’ wrote the British Ambassador. ‘He did not hesitate at all in his French’; and visited the studio of the painter Monsieur Gillot – ‘The Yacht’s foremast is about half the height it ought to be,’ he told the King. ‘I think M. Gillot is one of these impressionist artists, but I know that you hate that sort of painting.’
He was not greatly impressed by the capital, telling the Aga Khan that he could not imagine what his grandfather had seen in it.
The press did not make it more agreeable for him. For the first time he found himself assailed by importunate photographers, and he did not relish the experience. His father sympathized. Unless the reporters behaved better, he decreed, ‘drastic steps must be taken to get rid of them’.
It would be interesting to know what he had in mind. The Premier and future President, Raymond Poincaré, met him several times during his stay in Paris and was struck by his ‘thoughtful character, eagerness to learn, interest in practical problems, and a real knowledge of industrial possibilities’. He was a poor trencherman, however, ‘the choicest menus being treated by him with complete indifference’.
What the Prince enjoyed most of all was the week he spent with the French Mediterranean fleet: he had a passion for the sea, wrote the Marquis de Breteuil, and would happily have made this part of his visit twice as long.
And so it was back to England and the final preparations for his life at Oxford. It seems to have been Hansell and Lord Derby who urged the merits of a university education on the King, probably with some encouragement from Lord Esher. Not everyone approved. ‘Surely this cannot be true,’ expostulated his great-aunt Augusta. ‘It is too democratic.’
That was one of the reasons that the King favoured it: ‘I have always been told that one can have the best time of one’s life at College if one makes up one’s mind,’
he told his son. The Prince was sceptical. He accepted that the time would probably pass well enough, at least provided Hansell came along, but he remained unenthusiastic.
When his mother tried to get him to make some choices about the furnishing of his rooms, he noted gloomily in his diary, ‘I am afraid it does not interest me much. I am just about fed up with the whole affair.’
The root of his woe became apparent when his brother Bertie remarked how much he envied him and the Prince retorted that the feeling was mutual. Oxford might be tolerable in its own way but it was not where he wished to be: ‘It is an awful situation and I only wish I was back quietly in the only service – the navy.’
As a Magdalen man himself, Hansell naturally urged its merits as a haven for the Prince. George V appealed to Lord Derby for advice. Starting from the very reasonable hypothesis that only three colleges were worth consideration, Derby dismissed New College as being at that moment beset by troubles and Christ Church as the haunt of nouveaux riches. That left Magdalen.
The King concurred. An additional argument was that Derby was ready to send his own son, Edward Stanley, to the same college. ‘David is certainly a most loyal boy and I am sure would always do his best to be keen and get on wherever he was,’ the King told Hansell.
In fact Magdalen does not seem to have been a bad choice. It had a reputation for independence of mind, the eschewing of anything that seemed smart or extravagant and a robust indifference to rank.
It was well suited for the somewhat special needs of an undergraduate who was also heir to the throne.
With Oxford as with Dartmouth, George V decreed that his son should be treated exactly like his contemporaries and then took steps to ensure that this would be impossible. The Prince was to be attended at Oxford not merely by Hansell and his valet Finch but also by an equerry. This last appointment caused some cogitation. Esher commented how difficult it would be to find somebody who would be ‘watchful but not seem to be so; instructive and not a bore; moral and not a prig; high spirited and not reckless. It would be an interesting task for a young man with imagination.’
The King preferred horses to imagination. He chose William Cadogan, a gallant and honourable soldier who was almost wholly without intellectual interests and whose chief function was to persuade his charge to hunt. ‘Not a very exciting sort of chap,’ commented the Prince when they first met.
As if this entourage did not sufficiently separate him from the common herd, the Prince was settled in his own suite of rooms, furnished by the Queen with Sheraton pieces of furniture and good watercolours. Odder still for Oxford, he had his own bathroom. It may not have been very luxurious – ‘a cold, converted torture chamber’ one of his contemporaries described it
– but it still set its owner apart from his fellows.
The real problem, however, was summed up by Cosmo Lang, then Archbishop of York. The object of the Prince going to Oxford, he assumed, was that he should enter ‘naturally and simply’ into college life. His life might be simple but would never be natural if his friends were selected for him. Yet if something of the sort was not done, the best men in college would hang back in the fear that they might seem royal toadies, while less desirable companions, ‘often agreeable and plausible enough’, would thrust themselves forward. The solution must be to persuade a few of the ‘leading and best men’ to ease the Prince’s passage into college society.
Derby’s son Stanley should obviously be a member of any such group.
On the whole the system worked. The Prince was still shy. Lord Grantley remembered his ‘characteristic way of coming into a room, jerking forward from the hips and fingering his tie the whole time … It looked as if it was torture to him to meet strangers.’
He was further handicapped by the fact that most of his contemporaries had moved on in a group from their respective public schools, while there were few if any naval cadets at Oxford. ‘The junior common room is something like a gunroom,’ he noted nostalgically in his diary. ‘At 7.00 I dined in hall … I got on fairly well, only my drawback is not knowing anyone. It lasted 1⁄2 hour and then Stanley and a chap called Higham sat in my room till 9.45. They are very nice and we talked about many things.’
It was not easy at first, but he was friendly and ready to become sociable. He forced himself out of his shell, attending the celebrated entertainments in the common room and marvelling at the amount people drank. ‘We were all pretty dead at the end and I had almost a drop too much. However, I managed all right … It is a good thing to do as one gets to know people.’
After the first few nights he spent almost every evening in the rooms of one of his friends, smoking, singing, talking or playing cards. Barrington-Ward, a future editor of The Times, remembered him calling in on his rooms when an impromptu concert was in progress. A number of cardboard trumpets were lying around. ‘The Prince promptly took one and made as much noise as anyone. He said he liked a “good row”. So we had a ragtime, comic songs and choruses, and he joined in merrily like a man … It was impossible not to like him. He is clean-looking and jolly, with no side at all.’
The friends he made, however, were not necessarily those whom his father or Hansell would have chosen. His opinion of Stanley varied from day to day, but his considered judgment in 1916, by which time they had become close friends, was that Stanley had greatly improved but that he had never really liked him as an undergraduate. ‘I wish you had rooms opposite mine, it would be great,’ he wrote to an old naval friend. ‘As it is, I have that chap Stanley, who I don’t know very well, and who is coshy!! That is the worst of all crimes!!’
Coshy meant stuck-up, putting on airs. Lord Cranborne was ‘very nice’ but Lord Ednam – who, as the Earl of Dudley, was in time to become one of his closest friends – was undoubtedly coshy; a period in a gunroom would have done him good.
The Prince’s friends tended to be more home-spun, people who would have fitted naturally into the Royal Navy. One or two were intellectuals; in February 1913 he dined for the first time with a man who was to play a critical role in his life, ‘the President of the Union debating society, W. Monckton, a very nice man’.
A few were deemed unsuitable. Hansell and Cadogan warned him against one in particular: ‘They say that Ronnie is a bad lot, he is a gt friend of mine and of course this is a gt blow to me. However I shall in no way chuck him but merely not be seen about with him.’
Unfortunately he made the mistake of inviting the delinquent Ronnie to meet his brother Prince Harry when the latter visited Oxford. Hansell ‘was very sick with me … I am an awful failure in this life and always do the most idiotic things.’
Such moods of contrition became more frequent after his first few months at Oxford. The Prince did nothing very wicked but for the first time in his life he found it possible to slip his leash, and it would have been surprising if he had not celebrated the fact with mild excess. Many years later he told the American journalist Cy Sulzberger that he had found Oxford quite agreeable ‘because we were drunk all the time’.
He exaggerated, but though not drunk all the time, he managed it not infrequently. On 10 November 1912 he drank too much port, fell, made his nose bleed, and had to be put to bed by two friends who distracted Hansell while he got undressed. But he had the resilience of youth. He was walking round the garden by 7.30 the following morning and apologizing to his friends not long afterwards – ‘They were awfully nice about it.’
Usually there was more noise than alcohol: ‘There were 25 of us and we went up to Somerville’s rooms where we danced and made a row … It was a great evening.’
He eschewed the chic world of Evelyn Waugh’s Bollinger Club baying for broken glass. He was elected to the Bullingdon – in its own eyes at least the most elite of Oxford dining clubs – went to a dinner, was made to drink too much, and retired furious and the worse for wear: ‘I will have nothing more to do with the filthy riding men, they are a beastly set.’
He never joined the set, but within a few months of making this entry in his diary he had become a riding man himself. His father considered that this was a part of his education quite as important as learning French or studying the constitution. ‘If you can’t ride, you know, I’m afraid people will call you a duffer,’ he told his son. Hunting was the only way to learn properly. ‘The English people like riding and it would make you very unpopular if you couldn’t do so.’
Cadogan was in charge of the training and found his pupil at first recalcitrant. A year before, the Prince had hunted near Sandringham and had stood about all day ‘soaked through and petrified with cold. And then they wonder why one does not like hunting!’
Now he grumblingly let himself be dragged off to ride in the neighbourhood but showed plainly that he thought it a bore – ‘deadly as usual’.
To his surprise he found that he was beginning to enjoy the riding more and more. He went out with the South Oxfordshire hunt, was in the saddle for seven hours without falling off, was awarded the brush and enjoyed his day.
‘Until a few months ago I was terrified of riding and loathed the sight of a horse,’ he told a friend, ‘but it suddenly came to me, and under Cadogan’s instruction and tuition, I have now plenty of confidence and jump everything!!’
Some time that spring he graduated to that horseman’s nirvana, the Pytchley hunt. The King’s private secretary, Lord Stamfordham, congratulated him with all the gravity befitting so august an occasion. ‘I solemnly believe that few things will tend more to endear you to the people who some day by God’s will will be your subjects.’
Riding was only one of the Prince’s sporting pursuits. He golfed, played squash and went for gruelling runs. He played cricket at Radley, made a duck, and commented sourly: ‘It’s a poor game.’
He was a regular member of the Magdalen football second XI, and appeared occasionally in the first. He shot from time to time on estates near Oxford. Lord Crawford met him in October 1913 with the Wantages at Lockinge. ‘The Prince of Wales seems overburdened with his duties which he performs with meticulous precision,’ he noted. ‘Poor boy, somehow he made me feel very sorry for him … If only he would bolt with a ballet girl, say for twenty-four hours!’
The poor boy still found time to gamble several evenings a week, though he rarely lost or won more than £10 or so; to acquire and drive a 39-horse-power touring model blue Daimler; to learn the bagpipes with Pipe-Major Ross of the Scots Guards. He joined the Officers’ Training Corps, whose adjutant was the future Field Marshal Jumbo Wilson, and scored 96 out of 100 shooting at a static target and 86 at a moving. Fifty would have earned a pass, and 75 been enough for qualification as a marksman. He took part in night manoeuvres in Blenheim Park and spent a hectic few days in the annual camp, rising at 5 a.m. to act as breakfast orderly and having a ride in an airship. ‘It was the first time I had ever flown and the sensation is wonderful.’
Into the interstices of these activities he fitted his academic life. Some further education was badly needed; his mind in 1912 was a ragbag of miscellaneous information and his power of expressing what he knew was limited. He spelt deplorably; in one letter alone writing ‘chaplin’ for chaplain, ‘chapple’ for chapel, ‘colision’, ‘dammaged’ and ‘explaned’. He was supposed to go regularly to lectures and follow a programme of special studies with tutors. The lectures he frequently eschewed. He went once to hear Walter Raleigh on English literature and complained, ‘It was very hard to understand and I do not think I shall go to any more.’
The Rev. Lancelot Phelps on political economy proved more attractive: ‘Political Economy interests me more the more that I do it and I think I have quite got hold of the line of thought.’
But the individual tuition was more important. The Prince studied history with Charles Grant Robertson, French with Monsieur Berthon, German with Professor Fiedler and constitutional law with Sir William Anson, the Warden of All Souls. Anson probably taught the Prince almost everything of importance which he retained from his time at Oxford; a brilliant expositor, a man of charm, humour and generosity, he was liked as well as admired by the Prince – ‘a remarkable and distinguished little man,’ he called him affectionately.
Unfortunately, the central figure, to whom the Prince had to read an essay every week, was the President of Magdalen, Sir Herbert Warren. Warren had a good mind and no doubt many other redeeming features, but what most struck the undergraduates was that he was a bore and a snob. The Prince loathed him – ‘an awful old man’ he described him.
Reading an essay to a critical and often supercilious pedagogue is always an ordeal; it is made worse if one dislikes one’s auditor. The Prince dreaded his weekly session. He knew, with reason, that essay-writing was not his forte and rarely got any pleasure from their composition. Most of his efforts survive;
on St Anselm, Beaconsfield, Chatham, Nelson, ‘The Relation of Democracy to War’, Tennyson. They were conscientious, superficial and unimaginative. Cromwell was ‘one of England’s greatest statesmen and generals’; on ‘Ambition’ he commented: ‘The most ideal form of ambition is when it is used for the sake of one’s country. That patriotism should be the genuine motive is the most perfect thing conceivable.’
His best essay, and the subject which he most cared about, dealt with the explorer Scott. He had read Scott’s Last Expedition while on holiday at York Cottage, a laborious process, since he read slowly and it kept him up until 1 a.m. for almost a month, but a rewarding one: ‘It is a most fascinating book and a wonderful story of pluck in the face of ghastly hardship and suffering.’
His essay reflected this enthusiasm; Warren thought well enough of it to send it to the King, who passed it on to the historian and former prime minister, Lord Rosebery. Rosebery was predictably enthusiastic: ‘It was really admirable … a clear, sympathetic and vigorous narrative through which one can see the author’s heart. I am quite astonished at it …’ He wrote more as courtier than critic, but the essay did deserve praise. The Prince’s final comment was characteristic: ‘It bears out the fact that Englishmen can endure hardships and face death as it should be faced.’
It cannot be said that Oxford widened his cultural horizons. ‘We listened to classical music till 10.00. It was very dull,’ he wrote gloomily in his diary; and again after the Russian ballet, ‘That form of entertainment, like most stage things, leaves me stone cold.’
Nor did he become a reading man. His tutors constantly praised his efforts but pointed out that his knowledge was too superficial; ‘he must read more and think more for himself which is most necessary in his position,’ was his mother’s verdict.
‘Bookish he will never be,’ wrote Warren in an otherwise unctuous article in The Times. Unsurprisingly, he went on: ‘The Prince of Wales will not want for power of ready and forcible presentation, either in speech or writing.’
Lord Esher had long talks with the Prince at Balmoral and found: ‘His memory is excellent and his vocabulary unusual, and above all things, he thinks his own thoughts.’
(The compliments were not returned. The Prince wrote of Esher: ‘That man has a finger in every pie and one cannot trust him.’
) A quick mind, a retentive memory, considerable curiosity, facility for self-expression: they were not everything but they were a lot.
The Prince admitted he owed something to Oxford but he was never fond of it nor ceased to think he would be better off in the Navy. His diary is pitted with groans about the awfulness of his life, increasing in violence as his second year wore on: ‘I’m absolutely fed up with the place and it has got on my nerves’; ‘It is pretty rotten to be back here’; ‘Back again in this hole!’
Warren pressed him to stay on for another term and get a degree. ‘The answer to the 1st is NO and the second doesn’t interest me at all!!’
At least in the spring and summer vacations of 1913 he escaped, both from Oxford and from his parents, to visit Germany. In later life he said that he had felt more at home in Germany than in France, ‘because there I stayed mostly among relations’.
His diary suggests that he enjoyed himself more because he was that much older and had correspondingly greater liberty. Cadogan replaced Hansell and saw himself more as companion than as tutor, while Professor Fiedler, who was also in the entourage, was a ‘jolly old chap’ who was easily disposed of. Once in Berlin the Prince locked the professor in the bathroom and escaped with a friend to sample the night life, giving the porter the key and saying that something seemed to be wrong with the lock.
His two longest stays were in Württemberg and Strelitz. He arrived at Württemberg in travelling clothes to find the King and his staff in full dress uniform, but soon settled in comfortably to this slow, sleepy court. Every day after a heavy lunch he and the King would drive around the city and adjoining countryside. At first the King would acknowledge the salutes of his subjects but ‘gradually movements of hand became shorter – eyes closed – all stopped – King sound asleep until horses pulled up at home and groom said “Majestät, ist zu Hause.”
There was no golf, no tennis, no fishing, one day shooting capercaillie – ‘It is a curious sport … but I am glad to have seen it’ – too much sightseeing and too many visits to the opera. ‘I am getting fed up with life here to say the least of it.’ He was taken to Das Rheingold – ‘such a waste of time’; Siegfried – ‘appallingly dull’; Der Freischutz – ‘not exciting’.
The King perhaps took in more than his young guest realized. The Prince had enjoyed his visits to an officers’ mess and to the Daimler factory, he told Queen Mary, ‘but visiting Museums he did not seem to like quite so much’.
Possibly word of this visit got through to Neustrelitz, for the Grand Duchess Augusta wrote in some alarm to say that she feared the Prince would be bored, ‘there being no sports nor Games of any kind’.
There was no reason to fear anything of the sort, replied Queen Mary firmly: ‘He is quite a contented person and never rushes about after amusement.’
Her brother Alge, future Earl of Athlone, who was there for the visit, was less confident: ‘Strelitz, as you can imagine, after a short time is more than a young person can stand. A week is enough for Alice and me.’ He found his nephew ‘a mixture of extreme youth and boyishness with the ways of a man over forty … We both, as everyone, liked him extremely. He is so liebenswürdig [lovable] and simple, too much so, he should now realize he is “The Prince” and not require so much pushing forward.’
Berlin proved the most enjoyable of his visits, mainly because he was entrusted for his entertainment to a young attaché at the British Embassy, Godfrey Thomas, who took him to funfairs, night clubs and the Palais de Danse, ‘where we remained till 2.00. It is a large public place frequented by very doubtful women with whom you go and dance, but it is devoid of all coarseness and vulgarity. I danced a good deal …’
He spent one night with Kaiser Wilhelm II and was startled to find him seated behind his desk on a military saddle mounted on a wooden block. The Emperor ‘explained condescendingly that he was so accustomed to sitting on a horse he found a saddle more conducive to clear, concise thinking’.
The Prince found his host unexpectedly easy to talk to and quite enjoyed his visit;
the Emperor, according to the Prince’s future biographer, Hector Bolitho, considered his guest charming and unassuming but ‘a young eagle, likely to play a big part in European affairs because he is far from being a pacifist’.
The Prince must have been uneasily aware that wherever he went in Germany he would be sized up as a potential husband for unmarried daughters. The courts of Germany had provided so many spouses for the British royal family that it was reasonable to assume the precedent would again be followed. He had experienced his first taste of what he could expect when the Emperor’s daughter, Victoria Louise, visited London in 1911. The press reported rumours that an engagement was imminent.
Dynastically it would have been most suitable and Princess Victoria Louise had many good points. A young maid of honour, Katherine Villiers, pronounced her wholly without good looks but with much sweetness and joie de vivre.
The Prince himself found her ‘most easy to get on with’.
But there is no reason to think that he or his parents gave any serious thought to marriage. Nor did Victoria Louise; she found the Prince ‘very nice’ but ‘terribly young, younger than he actually was’.
More real was the putative romance with Princess May, or more formally Caroline Matilda, of Schleswig-Holstein. The couple got on particularly well when they were staying together at Gotha. May was ‘such a nice girl’, Alge’s wife Alice reported, ‘much like the others only taller and very slim’.
Her brother-in-law August Wilhelm, son of Kaiser Wilhelm II, was sufficiently encouraged to write directly to the Prince in June 1914 to suggest that a match should be made. The nineteen-year-old Prince consulted his mother and with some difficulty constructed a reply – ‘an awkward job’.
His letter does not survive, probably he pleaded that he was too young to contemplate matrimony at the moment. The war put an end to the possibility but in 1915 he remarked rather wistfully to Godfrey Thomas, ‘Well, I could very easily have done worse.’ Thomas commented that, though Princess May’s teeth needed attention and her nose was too red, a dentist and a little powder would soon have put things to rights. ‘HRH was really very much attracted to her, and I am perfectly certain that if the War hadn’t come, it would have been brought off. It is difficult to see now who he will marry or when, but whoever it is, I know that he will often think with affectionate regret of Princess May as the might have been.’
It has been said that the sympathy for Germany which the Prince of Wales showed in the 1930s stemmed from the success of his pre-war visits. All the evidence is that, though he enjoyed his stay there and liked some of his relations, he was not particularly struck by the country or its people. ‘The Germans as a race,’ he told a friend, ‘are fat, stolid, unsympathetic, intensely military, and all the men have huge cigars sticking out of their faces at all times.’
‘The trip was very interesting,’ he reflected when he got back to London, ‘but I don’t care much about the Germans.’
Of the countries which he visited before the First World War, the one that pleased him most was Norway, where he loved the skiing, the open-air existence and the informality of court life – ‘a lovely country with a charming people,’ he found it. ‘It was just like home.’
This last comment betrayed his real priorities. Far though he might wander, and much pleasure though he might derive from his wanderings, whether as Prince, as King, or as Duke of Windsor, there was always for him to be no place like home.
By the summer of 1914 the King had agreed that his son should spend the last few months of the year travelling and should join the Grenadier Guards the following year. The prospect was pleasing enough, but already shades of the prison house were beginning to close upon the growing Prince. The first dread intimation of what was to come had struck him in June 1912, when he got back at lunch time from his stay in France to find that the same afternoon he had to go with the King and Queen to a St John’s Ambulance Parade – ‘rather, if not very dull’; at 6.30 p.m. he was receiving the Khedive of Egypt and at 8.30 he was taking the wife of the Bishop of Winchester in to dinner.
From then on public functions multiplied. He quickly decided that the more formal and decorous they were, the more he would dislike them. He attended his first court in March 1914 and found it ‘mighty poor fun … I went in with the parents to the ballroom and stood till 11.00 while hundreds of women went by, each one plainer than the last … I don’t mind if I never go to one again.’ He did go, of course, and resented it even more: ‘a bum show. This court etiquette is intolerable.’ As for the state visit of the King and Queen of Denmark: ‘What rot and a waste of time, money and energy all these state visits are.’
When he had a proper job to do, however, he did it conscientiously and well. He was sent by the King to greet Poincaré, now President of the Republic, on his arrival at Portsmouth. The French statesman was impressed by his ‘charm of manner and vivacity’. The Prince had ‘lost none of his former delightful simplicity’ but had ‘“come on” a good deal’.
The King was delighted by the reports he was given of his son’s performance: ‘It gave both Mama and me great pleasure … I may sometimes find fault with you but I assure you it is only for your own good and because I am so devoted to you.’
The Prince’s first important solo performance came in June 1914 when he opened the new church of St Anselm on the Duchy of Cornwall estates in south London. He took endless trouble with his speech and carried it off well: ‘I had a wonderful sense of confidence in the audience, who I felt would make allowances for it being my 1st public function.’
At present, he told his audience, he knew little of the difficulties which beset those who were concerned with housing for the working classes, ‘but by studying the comfort and happiness of my tenants I hope to gain experience’. Congratulations flowed in, on his diction, his pace, his obvious sincerity; the one that would have pleased him most because it was not intended for his eyes was sent to one of the ladies-in-waiting, Lady Fortescue. ‘It was a wonderful success. He did it quite beautifully. At first he seemed a little nervous but it wore off and his speech was quite charming. He said it as if he really meant it … and in such a firm, charming voice. Everyone was tremendously enthusiastic … He looked so young among all those elderly prelates, but so dignified.’
For the first time he began to talk seriously to politicians and form opinions of them. Churchill was his hero, mainly because he was now First Lord of the Admiralty and arch advocate of a larger Navy: ‘He is a wonderful man and has a great power of work.’ Asquith, the Prime Minister, he liked, though he found Mrs Asquith ‘rather tiring and never stops talking’; Esher and Lulu Harcourt (the Colonial Secretary) were particularly tiresome.
If he had any preference between the parties he did not confide it to his diary, though on certain issues he feared the Liberal government would be insufficiently firm. He had strong views about the suffragettes and told his father that he hoped ‘the woman suffrage bill will never be passed. It is curious how divided the present cabinet is on the subject.’
To his relief Asquith held firm. ‘I really think that at last some drastic measures are to be taken as regards those bl-d- suffragettes, whose conduct is becoming more and more infamous every day,’ he told Godfrey Thomas in the summer of 1914.
He was as strongly opposed to Home Rule for Ireland. ‘I hope it will not pass,’ he wrote in his diary when the Home Rule Bill was introduced in 1912.
His parents shared his views on the future of Ulster. Queen Mary wrote him outspoken letters in March and April 1914 about the weakness of the government and the deplorable way they had treated the Army.
‘Although we aren’t supposed to have any politics,’ the Prince responded, ‘there does come a time when all that outward nonsense must be put aside, and that time has come.’
Socially his life was transformed in that last summer before the war. His parents had had a party for him at Buckingham Palace in March 1913. ‘I had to dance, a thing I hate,’ he wrote forlornly in his diary: ‘The whole thing was a great strain.’ He did not change his views for a year at least; then in July 1914 as a twenty-year-old he went to the Londesboroughs’ ball. ‘I stuck out to the bitter end and got back at 2 a.m. It was really great fun,’ he recorded in mild astonishment. Next night it was the turn of the Portlands: ‘The floor was perfect and my dancing is improving.’ He stayed till 3.45, and did the same the following night at the Salisburys’.
A looker-on at the Salisburys’ dance who did not know about his change of heart commiserated on his sad plight: ‘The Prince is no dancer … It was something of an ordeal for so young a boy and of so retiring a disposition.’
The sympathy was uncalled for: ‘I have now become fond of dancing and love going out!’
But he was still discriminating. Baroness Orczy saw him at a court ball in mid-July, dancing the quadrille d’honneur with one of his aunts and looking ‘moody and somewhat bored’.
Nor did he allow his new-found enthusiasm in any other way to change his train of life. He was up at 6 a.m. after the Londesborough ball, rose at 7 a.m. for a swim after the Portlands’ and was playing squash by 7 a.m. after the Salisburys’: ‘I’ve had only 8 hours sleep in the last 72 hours.’
The ferocious social round was combined with a course with the Life Guards – riding school, sword drill, care of horses and equipment, marching. ‘Not very exciting but anyhow a definite job which is the gt thing!!’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Military life and ways are curious.’
He still pined for the Navy. Halfway through his cavalry course he went with the King to Portsmouth for the naval review and visited old friends aboard HMS Collingwood. It was ‘glorious. God what a life this is compared to my attachment.’
But he knew that it was a paradise not to be regained. The plan was that he should spend 1915 with the Grenadier Guards, 1916 with the Royal Horse Artillery, and then join the 10th Hussars on their return from South Africa. Meanwhile he danced the summer away and made plans for another grand tour of Europe in the autumn. A break in the routine came at the end of June when he spent a week with the Officers’ Training Corps and manoeuvred vigorously about the plains near Aldershot. ‘When in camp I make it a rule never to open a newspaper,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘so am completely ignorant of all happenings in the outer World, except that the Austrian Archduke and his wife have been assassinated. I expect it has caused a stir in Germany.’
3
‘Oh!! That I Had a Job’
THAT IN 1914 THE YOUTH OF BRITAIN WENT EXULTANTLY to war is one of the stranger features of that agonizing conflict. The Prince of Wales had even less reason than most to share in this exultation. For one thing, many of his close relations, whom he had grown to know and like over the past few years, were now numbered among the enemy. For another, his position as heir to the throne set him apart from his contemporaries: they set off with armour shining to defeat the Huns and be home by Christmas, he knew that his armour was likely to be more ornamental than useful and that he had only a slim chance of wearing it in battle. Yet when he heard that he was to join the Army in France, he wrote to Sir George Arthur of this ‘wonderful and joyous surprise’. Twenty-five years later he was shown this letter and commented how terrifying he found it, coming as it did from an average boy of twenty. He had conceived war almost as a holiday, ‘a glorious adventure’. ‘How disillusioned we all were at the end of it,’ he commented ruefully. ‘One wonders if the generation of that age today feel as we did, or are they conscious of the appalling consequences of another World war and its futility? No! far worse than that how it would utterly destroy civilization.’
The run-up to war found the Prince incredulous and baffled. The murder of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo embroiled first Austria and Serbia, then Germany and Russia, finally France and Britain. The Prince was inclined to believe that Russia and Germany were behaving reasonably and that Austria was the prime offender, but admitted, ‘I must stop talking all this rot, for I know nothing about it.’
As war between France and Germany became inevitable, his chief fear was lest the government should stay neutral. ‘That will be the end of us; we shall never be trusted by any power again.’
The decision to stand by our allies came as a great relief but ‘Oh!! God; the whole thing is too big to comprehend!! Oh!! That I had a job.’
That last expostulation was to be his constant refrain for the next four years. He went on to the balcony with his parents at Buckingham Palace to acknowledge the cheers of the crowd. The King wrote in his diary that night that he prayed to God he would protect dear Bertie’s life.
It never occurred to him that his eldest son might be exposed to danger. How could he be? He was the Prince of Wales.
The Prince poured out his woes to his closest confidant, his brother Bertie:
Well, this is just about the mightiest calamity that has ever or will ever befall mankind … To think that but 17 days ago we were together with everything working peacefully in Europe, and now we are at the commencement of a most hideous and appalling war, the duration or issue of which are impossible to predict … ‘England at war with Germany!!’ that seems a sentence which would appear nowhere but in a mad novel.
The Germans could never have chosen a worse moment, and serve them right too if they are absolutely crushed, as I can but think they will be. The way they have behaved will go down to history as about the worst and most infamous action of any govt!! Don’t you agree? I bet you do.
I am as good as heartbroken to think I am totally devoid of any job whatsoever and have not the faintest chance of being able to serve my country. I have to stay at home with the women and children, a passenger of the worst description!! Here I am in this bloody gt palace, doing absolutely nothing but attend meals … Surely a man of 20 has higher things to hope for? But I haven’t apparently! Oh God it is becoming unbearable to live this usual life of ease and comfort at home, when you my dear old boy, and all naval and army officers, are toiling under unpleasant conditions, suffering hardships and running gt risks with your lives, for the defence and honour of England … At such a time you will picture me here, depressed and miserable and taking no more part in this huge undertaking than Harry and George, 2 irresponsible kids who run about playing inane games in the passage. However, enough about my rotten self, for I am a most bum specimen of humanity, and so must not be considered.
The self-disparagement in the last sentence is a constant feature of his letters and his diary; consciously overstated, yet nonetheless sincere. He knew that it was not his fault that he was not among the first of the volunteers to fight for King and country, but he still condemned himself for being left behind. In fact his period of misery hanging around ‘this awful palace where I have had the worst weeks of my life’
was quickly over. On 6 August 1914, only the day after he had written in such anguish to his brother, he asked for and was given a commission in the Grenadier Guards. He was only 5 feet 7 inches tall instead of the regulation 6 feet, but recorded in triumph: ‘I am to go to the King’s Company but shall be treated just like an ordinary officer, thank goodness, and am to share a room in barracks.’
In fact his treatment for the first fortnight was far worse than the ordinary officer, let alone the ordinary Guards officer, would have expected while serving at home. The 1st Battalion was training at Warley Barracks in Brentwood. The officers’ mess was a ‘filthy hole’, the rooms were garrets, there was no furniture and no carpet. ‘But what does one care when living under war conditions? I am so glad to have joined up and to have escaped from the palace!!’
When the battalion moved back to London his euphoric mood persisted. He established that he was the first Prince of Wales ever to carry the colours on the King’s Guard at Buckingham Palace, and accepted with relish what in peacetime he would have dismissed as a piece of pompous ritual, as well as positively welcoming the long, boring route marches from Wellington Barracks through Kensington and Fulham returning down the King’s Road. ‘It is pretty rotten in London,’ he told Godfrey Thomas, ‘and we can’t do any training. But anyhow we are on the spot and feel that this is a stepping stone to getting out!! How we long for it.’
He deluded himself that he would continue to be treated ‘just like an ordinary officer’ and would soon go to France and the front with his fellow officers. His delusion was quickly dispelled. On 8 September, a week before the 1st Battalion sailed, his father told him that he would not accompany it. Instead he would join the 3rd Battalion and remain in London. ‘This is a bitter disappointment,’ he wrote in his diary.
When the time came for him to watch the battalion march off from the barracks, his bitterness was still greater. ‘I am a broken man,’ he told his friend Jack Lawrence. ‘It is terrible being left behind!!’
His closest friend in the Grenadiers, Lord Desmond Fitzgerald – one of the very few contemporaries who was invited to call him ‘Eddie’ – wrote to console him and tell him how much he had admired ‘the way you have borne your disappointment … However, it is not the fact of going to war, when thousands are doing so, that needs bravery; but to cheerfully accept the unpleasant things of life needs the greatest strength of character. And thus you have been able to set a wonderful example of how to do one’s duty.’
The Prince was unconvinced. In public he put a good face on it, but his misery was too acute to conceal from his friends. Indeed, he was anxious to advertise it; he would have been less than human if he had not wanted everyone to know that he was eager to share the dangers of war and stayed behind against his will. How real those dangers were became rapidly apparent; by 2 November only six officers of his beloved 1st Battalion remained unwounded.
He appealed to the Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener, and called on him with his father’s assistant private secretary, Clive Wigram. ‘He is now a gt fat bloated man,’ he wrote vengefully in his diary, who put forward what seemed to the Prince most unconvincing reasons for refusing him leave to return to the 1st Battalion, but held out vague hopes of his joining the staff of the Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force, Sir John French, in a few months when the line had been stabilized. ‘A pretty rotten contrast to my gt wish,’ commented the Prince, adding grudgingly: ‘He is a rough customer but mighty strong, and is just the man to boss these politicians at such a time!!’
The King told Esher that his son had argued that he was expendable; if he were killed there were four brothers to take his place. ‘What if you were not killed, but taken prisoner?’ Kitchener asked drily.
While eating his heart out in London with the 3rd Battalion of the Grenadiers – ‘strictly entre nous,’ he told Lady Glenusk, ‘there are not many really nice people in the 3rd Batt … The junior ensigns are a poor lot!!’
– he made himself useful in other ways. Shortly before the outbreak of war he had become President of a National Fund for providing food for the poor, and had published an appeal in the daily papers. A quarter of a million pounds came in on the first day and within a week the total was more than £1 million. Most of the work was done by a Liberal member of parliament, Ernest Benn – future Lord Stansgate – whom the Prince judged ‘a nice, capable little man’.
Public relations were entrusted to a Mr Pearson, who wanted the Prince to be painted by the military artist Caton Woodville at the head of his regiment, and the resultant poster to be exhibited on every available hoarding. This idea was quashed (as also was a still more eccentric suggestion that a certain celebrated music hall artist should be drawn in a cart to Trafalgar Square where he would delight the populace by playing patriotic airs on a piano with his nose).
The King approved the principle of the Fund, but insisted that whatever publicity there was should stress that his son had nothing to do with its administration. Otherwise he foresaw the disgruntled poor blaming the Prince if their applications for relief were rejected.
The Prince took the point and fully shared his father’s apprehension. All his life he disliked the role of patron, lending his name to some enterprise over which he had no real control. At the end of 1915 he became Chairman of the Statutory Committee of the Patriotic Fund, a body set up to concern itself with the care of sailors and soldiers who had suffered during the war. ‘Its work will, alas!, be carried into long years to come …’ explained Lord Stamfordham. ‘It will indeed be a vast machine of National Relief.’
Few projects could have appealed more strongly to the Prince, but after the inaugural meeting he still wrote gloomily: ‘It’s such a rotten show for me; just a mere figurehead with the name of P of Wales as usual!!’
Major Cadogan had rejoined his regiment when war broke out, and to help him with the Fund and his other duties the Prince persuaded Godfrey Thomas to take time off from the Foreign Office and join him as part-time equerry. His chief function, in Stamfordham’s eyes at any rate, was to persuade his master to eat more and take less exercise. Thomas tried dutifully but soon admitted defeat. He won the King’s confidence, however, and was held to be a healthy influence on his employer. Towards the end of 1914 he spent a weekend with the royal family at York Cottage. After dinner everyone sat around while the King, in big tortoiseshell spectacles, read extracts from the newspapers, ‘generally adding explosive comments about the Germans’. When the Queen and Princess Mary had gone to bed, the party adjourned to the billiard room, where the Prince of Wales and Prince Albert played while the King read his telegrams. Next day they went for a long walk. On the way back they met the epileptic Prince John and his nurse. ‘The Prince of Wales took him for a run in a kind of push-cart he had, and they both disappeared from view.’
The Prince’s initial distaste for the idea of a job on French’s staff lessened as other possibilities faded, and when the King finally told him the time had come he was ecstatic: ‘This seems almost too good to be true, for once across the Channel lots of things are possible.’
Stamfordham told French that the King wanted his son ‘to gain practical experience of the vast machinery employed in the conduct of a Campaign’. He was to be attached to the various sections of the headquarters and to attend talks with the Chief of Staff – ‘You will find him an attentive, silent listener, absolutely reticent and discreet.’
This was not at all how the Prince saw his future, and Thomas observed that he was in a notably bad temper when he had to put aside his normal regimental kit and don the staff uniform with red tabs and cap to match;
but he comforted himself with the thought that once in France it would surely be possible to get to the front. The most serious danger seemed to be that the fighting would be over before he could be in the thick of it. His comments on the progress of the war were resolutely optimistic. ‘Those bloody Germans are fairly getting it in the neck and no mistake,’ he told Jack Lawrence on 20 August,
and a month later assured his aunt Alice: ‘It really looks as if the allies were getting a proper grip of the situation and that the German downfall has commenced.’
With the declaration of war the Germans had become unequivocally ‘bloody’, guilty of ‘savage barbarism’
and ‘infamous conduct’; ‘As for the Emperor’s conduct, words fail me!!’
When words did fail him, he filled the gap with obscenities. Writing after gas had just been used he told his friend Houston-Boswell: ‘One can’t be surprised at anything those German buggers do. One really can’t believe we are fighting European christians … I am a great advocate of the principle of taking no prisoners or as few as possible!!’
Godfrey Thomas commented on the Prince’s propensity at this time to use bad language and tell filthy stories: ‘It is a phase that most people go through at their public school and I hope that it has merely come a bit late in his case and that he’ll soon get out of it.’
He did, but in the years that followed his escape from the Palace he felt bound to emphasize his independence by larding his diary and letters to his contemporaries with the more conventional expletives.
The Prince’s arrival in France, General Lambton told the King, had given universal pleasure: ‘I will try to keep him well occupied and as far from shells as possible.’
In this sentence were encapsulated the Prince’s two principal causes for woe over the next eighteen months – indeed, for the duration of the war; he was kept far from shells, he was not well occupied. The latter was not the fault of French or Lambton. A stray and untrained second lieutenant in supreme headquarters will inevitably be at a loose end and overworked senior officers cannot always be inventing tasks for him. If he had not been the Prince of Wales he might have been of modest use at the most menial level; if he had possessed a forceful personality and administrative skills he might have worked himself into a position unjustified by his rank; but he was the Prince, he was far from forceful, his skills were limited. ‘It’s a pretty rotten life for me,’ he complained to Thomas. ‘I feel I’m the only man out here without a job, and it’s true; thus I am but an onlooker in uniform, and become less like an officer every day.’
To have been an orthodox ADC to French would at least have involved regular duties, but the King felt it was improper for the Prince of Wales to act in such a role.
Instead he was in attendance but with no real function: ‘I merely sloped along astern, looking a bloody fool and very much in the way.’
Occasionally he was given some proper work to do. Once he was allowed to use his German in the interrogation of prisoners. The peasants were the most ready to talk, and, even if taciturn originally, could usually be persuaded to tell all they knew by a show of amazement at their ignorance. The more educated prisoners he found ‘all lie, and one can’t blame them’. In such a case the approved technique was to give the prisoner a good meal with plenty of wine. This loosened his tongue. ‘Rather a beastly idea, perhaps, but still it is necessary.’
He hoped that similar work would follow, but it never did. When, very occasionally, he found himself doing something useful, his gratification was obvious. In March 1915 he reconnoitred the defences around Le Quesnoy. ‘The work is really rather responsible,’ he told his father proudly, ‘as it is v. necessary that the staff should have detailed information …’
Stamfordham urged him not to admit to the King that he was bored and under-employed lest he found himself called back to England. ‘You are so terribly keen and full of “go” that you wish always to be doing something …’
More cheeringly, Desmond Fitzgerald insisted that he was always doing something: ‘You have little idea what an enormous amount of good you do and how much everyone admires and loves you.’
But it was not the sort of love and admiration the Prince wanted. Shortly after his arrival he was made to inspect some Indian troops. He accepted that his visit had done wonders for their morale but, ‘I hated this, as I haven’t come out for that sort of thing.’
French was restrained in his use of the Prince as popular figurehead, but he knew well that ‘that sort of thing’ was what the Army wanted.
Hospital visiting was another valuable service. ‘It pleases the men and shows you take a sympathetic interest in their welfare,’ George V told his son.
The sympathy was real, and though the Prince felt he should be playing a more valiant role, the warmth and generosity of his nature ensured that the memory of his visits was cherished by all those who experienced them. There is a story, often recounted, of the occasion when the Prince noticed that one patient had been segregated behind curtains. He asked why, and was told that the man had been so fearfully mutilated that it was thought better to keep him out of the way. The Prince insisted on seeing him, stood by his bed, then leant over and kissed him. Lady Donaldson in her admirable biography, properly sceptical of such picturesque but unsubstantiated anecdotes, dismissed it as apocryphal.
It does sound too good to be true. But many years later Gordon Selwyn, the chaplain of the hospital and later Dean of Winchester, told Shane Leslie how well he recalled the scene. ‘Remember,’ the Dean said, ‘men have gone to heaven for less. Never can we forget that action.’
Keeping on good terms with the French was another way the Prince could help significantly. He was frequently despatched on liaison visits to French headquarters. The reports which he drafted on his return were of slight value. The cavalry were ‘not bad riders … but they are about the worst horse masters in the world!!’; the officers were markedly inferior to their British counterparts: ‘They are brave enough and some of them very capable, but they don’t possess that personality or refineness [sic] which the British officer does, giving the latter complete control over his men, who will generally respect him and follow him anywhere!! How can this ideal state of affairs be reached when frequently the officer is of much lower birth than some of his men?’ In spite of this, he concluded in some surprise, ‘discipline in the French army is good one would say’.
But what mattered was not his somewhat jejune judgment of the French Army but the impression he left behind him. ‘I only hope I did some good,’ the Prince wrote to his father … ‘I went out of my way to be civil and always called on any general or senior officer at any place I passed.’
Staunch republicans usually make the most fervent royalists and the French military warmed to their shy, friendly and unassuming visitor. ‘Il a su ravir tout le monde par sa simplicité, sa bonne grace et sa belle jeunesse,’ wrote General Huguet. ‘Il sait par ses charmantes qualités gagner les coeurs autour de lui.’
Huguet was an anglophile; more remarkable was the notoriously rebarbative and anti-British general who, after a visit by the Prince, admitted reluctantly: ‘Il parait que parmi vous autres, il y a quand même des gens civilisés.’
But this was not why he had come to France. Endlessly he reproached himself for the comfort and ease of his existence, compared with the rigours of ‘the poor people in the trenches. I fear this is going to be a very soft life.’
His initial impression of Sir John French was good – ‘he seems a charming man, so human’ – but he could not say as much for the rest of the staff; ‘a d—d uninteresting crowd and no mistake’.
In a less atrabilious mood he would admit that it was not so much that the staff were boring as that they were twenty years older than him. At GHQ a colonel was small fry; young men of twenty were unheard of. Osbert Sitwell, who sometimes found himself similarly out of place at large gatherings of dignitaries, remembered ‘the very young, slight figure of the Prince of Wales … with his extreme charm, his melancholy smile and angry eyes, trying like myself, I expect, to pretend he was enjoying himself’.
The Prince was lonely, and the loneliness was only exacerbated by the constant presence of the officer charged with his day-to-day wellbeing, the middle-aged and portly Colonel Barry. Only when Barry was joined in January 1915 by a young Grenadier captain, Lord Claud Hamilton, was the Prince’s desolation mitigated: ‘He is such a good chap and has done very well in the 1st batt and got a DSO. It is very nice for me having him here.’
The sharpest pain lay in the knowledge that his contemporaries, in particular in the Grenadiers, were dying in their tens of thousands while he sat safely behind the line. Thirty-five Grenadier officers were killed in the fighting at Neuve Chapelle in March 1915: ‘Isn’t it too ghastly to think of …’ he wrote to his closest confidante, Lady Coke. ‘But of course I never went near the fighting; kept right away as usual!!’
Godfrey Thomas got the same complaint: ‘I do hate being a prince and not allowed to fight!!’
On his birthday Desmond Fitzgerald said that he could not think of any suitable present: ‘The only thing I know of that you would really like, I cannot give you, and that is that you would become an ordinary person.’
He strove endlessly to get permission to join his regiment, or to serve even for a few days in the front line. Briefly he was posted to General Charles Monro’s divisional headquarters near Bethune, only to be moved back promptly when an attack was imminent. But he did win at least half his point. In February 1915 the King agreed that he might visit the trenches ‘provided that you are with responsible people … I want you to do exactly what other young officers on the Staff do, but not to run unnecessary risks, no “joy-rides” or looking for adventure … I want you to gain an insight into the life they lead in the trenches. I hope now your mind will be at rest and that you will not be depressed any more. You can do anything within reason except actually fighting in the trenches.’
It was something, a great deal indeed, but opportunities for a young officer at GHQ to approach the front line were still few and far between. There are plenty of accounts which describe his hair-breadth ’scapes i’ the imminent deadly breach. The future Lord Lee wrote that ‘his main desire appeared to be to get either killed or wounded. At intervals he had to be retrieved from advanced trenches and dugouts, whither he had escaped by one subterfuge or another.’
A fellow officer described him complaining he had never seen a shell burst within a hundred yards of him. Claud Hamilton remarked that one had burst nearer than that. ‘Yes, but dash it, I never saw it!’ exclaimed the Prince.
‘He loved danger,’ said the Rev. Tubby Clayton.
Clayton’s comment, at least, is nonsense. The Prince never courted danger, still less loved it. He found shelling terrifying and freely admitted as much. General Sir Ian Hamilton denied that he ever flouted his instructions or took unnecessary risks. ‘He did take risks, but they were always in the line of duty. We did worry about him … but not because of any insubordination on his part.’
Whenever he left the trenches to return to headquarters, he did so with relief. But he did so with shame as well. The ferocious battering to which he subjected his body, with a regime of endless walks and runs, a minimum of food and sleep, must have been in part a mortification of the flesh to assuage this conviction of his inadequacy. If he had been able to change places with a subaltern in the most exposed part of the line he would have done so with alacrity, though also with dismay and trepidation. The moans that fill his diary and letters to his friends about his unlucky lot are wearisome to read and seem sometimes overdone. Their constant refrain, however, was that he was being denied the chance to do as his friends and contemporaries were doing and risk his life for his country. He never stopped trying and it is impossible not to feel respect for his efforts.
His brief sojourn with Monro and the 2nd Division at Bethune included a visit to the Guards Brigade – ‘The best day I have had since I’ve been out, for it was a real treat to be with my brother officers and away from the staff.’ The treat was cut short when Monro decided he was too close to the line and sent him back: ‘It did bring it home to me how wretched it is to be the Prince of Wales!! I almost broke down.’
Shortly after his father’s new dispensation, he got within a hundred yards of the German lines, but heard only a few snipers’ shots. Then, at Givenchy in March 1915, he came under shellfire for the first time and saw the aftermath of a fierce battle: ‘It was a marvellous 2 hrs for me; in my wildest dreams I never thought I sh’d see so much. There are masses of corpses in the open swampy space; a terrible sight.’
His excitement was tempered by the horror of the battle. Six officers of the 1st Battalion of the Grenadier Guards were killed in a single day and he felt only relief when a halt was called: ‘The operations of the last two days have seemed madness to me. Just sheer murder to attack now.’
For him it was back to GHQ. ‘I am in the depths of depression, realizing at last that there is no job I can take on out here, so am really the only man who has nothing to do, or anything to work for.’
He was inevitably a prime exhibit for visitors to GHQ. Churchill was one of the more regular. Like most immature young men of twenty, the Prince tended to take his opinions from those around him. Regular Army officers viewed Churchill with mingled distrust and distaste. The Prince followed suit. His initially mild complaints at the frequency of Churchill’s visits when he had ‘other and more important work to perform’
became more splenetic and the Minister was categorized as an ‘interfering politician’, bothering the overworked naval and military authorities.
By the time the First Lord resigned in 1915 he had become an ‘intriguing swine’;
‘Thank God both Winston and Fisher have gone;’ he exclaimed to Godfrey Thomas, ‘the former is nothing short of a national danger.’
On the whole he thought it a good thing that politicians should come out to France ‘to see a few realities’,
but the visits renewed his sense of grievance: ‘Mr Bonar Law arrived last night … and of course went out today with the express purpose of visiting a trench; he will have seen more of the actual fighting than I have in three months!!’
In May 1915 his ceaseless efforts to get closer to the front met with some success when he was transferred to the HQ of 1st Army Corps, to whose command Sir Charles Monro had been promoted. It was still staff work but, at least, he told Thomas, ‘now I am out a gt deal and never get into a car if I can possibly help it, doing all my work riding, biking or on foot. That keeps me fairly fit …’
The luxury was less oppressive than at GHQ: ‘No tap, no pump, the only source of [water] is from a v. deep open well and it takes 3 mins to draw a small tub!!’
Best of all, the work was more satisfying. He was now on the administrative side, concerned mainly with the supply of ammunition. ‘I like this so much better than on the Intelligence branch where I was before as one is dealing with facts and not theories; I’m not a theorist and what I am doing now interests me.’
His new job made him particularly resentful of the shortage of ammunition and other resources caused by the Dardanelles campaign. ‘It makes me sick to think of 10 ruddy DIVS killing old Turks instead of Boches!!’ he told Thomas. ‘That won’t help us.’ The campaign had been a mistake, he told the Marquis de Breteuil, though he reluctantly accepted that ‘une fois commencée, il faut la finir, et vaincre les Turcs.’
Oliver Lyttelton met the Prince at 1st Army Corps HQ. ‘He was,’ wrote Lyttelton, ‘the most charming and delightful being that I had ever known.’ The two men were invited by Desmond Fitzgerald to dine with the Irish Guards about four miles away. Lyttelton was relieved at the thought that the Prince’s car would be available but instead found he was expected to bicycle. Worse still: ‘“I never get off,” said HRH, as we faced a mile or two of hilly road. “It is one of the ways that I keep fit.” I was in good training, but after a mile I had sweated through my Sam Browne belt and had begun to entertain some republican inclinations. However, we had a gay and delightful evening: the Prince was happy and in the highest spirits; we replaced our lost tissue with some old brandy, and free-wheeled home to our cage like school-boys.’
‘The prince eats little and walks much,’ Lyttelton told his mother. ‘We eat much and walk little.’
On 23 June 1915 the Prince of Wales came of age. The two trustees of his minority, Lord Balfour of Burleigh and Lord Revel-stoke, retired; so also did the Treasurer of the Duchy of Cornwall, Walter Peacock. Sydney Greville was appointed Treasurer and the Prince’s Comptroller. But no festivities marked what would normally have been an occasion for fastuous celebration. ‘It was a sad and depressing occasion,’ the Prince told Lady Coke, ‘with this ghastly war on and so many of one’s best friends killed. In fact I did my utmost to forget it altogether.’
His gloom was alleviated but far from dispelled by his new posting. He had barely arrived at Monro’s HQ before the 1st Army attacked and was repelled. ‘It is bloody when there is any fighting,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘as everyone is too busy to bother about a … useless ullage like myself and the result is that I’m the only man in N France who is unemployed and has no job!!’
In July 1915 he spent his first night in the trenches. ‘My impressions that night were of constant close proximity to death, repugnance from the stink of the unburied corpses … and general gloom and apprehension,’ he told his father. ‘It was all a real eye opener to me, now I have some slight conception of all that our officers and men have to go thro!! The whole life is horrible and ghastly beyond conception.’ And this was an uneventful summer night. ‘Think what it must have been like during a night of fighting in the winter? It does make one think.’
The King first heard of his son’s adventures at second hand and was indignant, then received a letter from the Prince himself and decided all was in order; ‘which shows,’ concluded Stamfordham, ‘that so long as the King hears of your doings direct from yourself it is all right’.
He rarely had cause to complain; the Prince wrote to his father regularly and at inordinate length, sometimes spending two or three hours a night over these compositions before moving on to the rest of his extensive correspondence. ‘Your letters are capital and everything very well described,’ the King complimented him, going on to complain about the number of words omitted or misspelt.
Stamfordham took up the point: ‘I know you will curse me as an interfering old ass,’ he told the Prince; ‘but realizing how devoted you are to the King, and how strongly these feelings are reciprocated … I want to put to rights a small matter which causes a slight, tho’ of course only temporary annoyance.’
The Prince did take more care after this rebuke but his spelling remained disastrous; it improved gradually over the years but was shaky till the day he died.
Kitchener came out in the same month. ‘He is fatter than ever and as red as usual, but seemed pleased with everything,’ the Prince noted in his diary – adding rather cryptically, ‘Wow!! Wow!!’
Troops lined the road for the visit, a mark of grandeur which the Prince felt should have been reserved for his father – ‘Unless you looked inside the car it might have been you driving round, which I thought absolutely wrong.’ Still, the troops did not cheer as vigorously as they had for the King, ‘and I happen to know that they were all v. bored at being turned out to line the roads’.
He thought both Kitchener and French were to be criticized for the embittered bickering between them which made so difficult the conduct of the war – ‘It does seem a disgrace that people in high positions can’t put away all thoughts for themselves at such a time!!’ – but put most of the blame on French: ‘an odd little man and far from clever’.
When the King visited France, the Prince of Wales was in attendance. He would have preferred to be with his battalion, but it was a welcome break from GHQ. George V was delighted with his son’s performance. ‘I am glad to say he is very popular with everyone and is tremendously keen to do anything he can,’ he told the Queen.
The Prince had told his father that one of the worst features of life in France was the ignorance of and hostility to the Navy shown by most senior officers. He was often asked whether the Navy was doing anything at all. ‘Although I am now serving in the army, I never forget that I was brought up in the Navy … So it grieves … me much to hear these things said of my beloved service.’
Every time he saw the King he pleaded that he should be allowed to visit the fleet at Scapa Flow. The King, for some reason that neither Stamfordham nor the Queen could understand, at first took strong exception to the idea. Queen Mary was stirred to unwonted activity on the subject: ‘There can be no possible objection to your going now … You may certainly count on my support.’
They won the day. In August 1915 the visit took place. Godfrey Thomas accompanied the Prince and recorded his delight and child-like enthusiasm for all he saw.
On the return journey they were cajoled into breaking their journey at Dunrobin, home of the Duke of Sutherland. They had insisted the visit should be informal, but when the train arrived, wrote Thomas, there were ‘rows and rows of people in kilts. I don’t wonder the Prince was rather annoyed. He couldn’t find his cap or his cigarettes or anything and eventually rushed down the corridor to the carriage door using such fearful language that I’m almost certain the Duke and Duchess … must have had the benefit of the end of it.’ The drive to the castle was lined with troops; the Prince travelled with the Duke ‘looking perfectly furious and hardly uttering’. This visit over, the Prince and Thomas spent a few days stalking at Abergeldie where Princes Harry and George were also staying. On the last day they all packed into a car to go to the railway station. ‘I can’t say we behaved very well en route, as any female passing us was waved and yelled at, and they sang loudly most of the way … By the time we reached Ballater, one of the strings of HRH’s deerstalker had broken, and the flap was hanging down in a drunken way. We were all dirty, sweaty and dishevelled, and must have looked like a lot of tramps.’
It had been a marvellous break from France, but it left the Prince dejected: ‘How I long to be back at sea again and infinitely prefer being a sailor to a soldier!!’
George V used his son as a source of information on the senior generals. ‘I want to know privately if the C in C has had a row with Genl Smith-Dorrien,’ he asked in March 1915. ‘You might find out and let me know.’
The Prince had little useful information on this point but he did not spare Sir John French in his correspondence and his testimony must have contributed to the strong support George V gave Kitchener against the Commander-in-Chief. When Monro was succeeded by Sir Hubert Gough, the Prince was cautiously enthusiastic. At first he was dismayed by the new Corps Commander’s reluctance to let him visit the front line, then he became more approving as the rules were relaxed. ‘There is no doubt he is an able tactician and a good “pushing” general,’ he wrote in July. ‘He talks too much; that is his gt fault to my mind.’
His views on most matters were orthodox and strident. He was strongly in favour of conscription, feeling that the whole nation must be mobilized if the war was ever to be won.
He welcomed as irresistible the call to arms which his father delivered in October 1915. Who would have the heart to ignore such an appeal? ‘But no doubt there are thousands of these foul unpatriotic brutes about!! One almost begins not to think so highly of one’s country as one did!!’
Conscientious objectors were ‘loathsome’; he had twelve hundred of them working in the Duchy, ‘Disgusting looking men with long hair and they never wear hats; they loaf about the place and look at one with a very contemptible air!!’
Miners who struck for higher pay were still more loathsome, they should be put ‘straight into the trenches and send the whole crowd out patrolling, the first night they go in!!’
As for Roger Casement, the Irishman who sought to lead a German-inspired rising, he deserved least sympathy of all: ‘He should be publicly hung in Hyde Park or some open space where there is room for a large crowd.’
His father and brothers would have echoed these views, as indeed would 90 per cent of the officers of the British Army. On most issues, though his parents might from time to time irritate him, he differed from his family very little. Increasingly it seemed to him that he had most in common with Prince Albert. The two had grown particularly close; ‘more so perhaps than most brothers, as our interests are the same,’ wrote the Prince of Wales early in 1915. ‘I am sure he will always do very well in the future; in fact I often feel that if I do as well as he does I shall be all right!!’
Prince Albert’s naval career was suffering from his ill health and he had been forced to work in the Admiralty, a dreary job which he performed uncomplainingly. ‘I must say I admire him tremendously for this and don’t hesitate to tell you he’s one of the best,’ the Prince wrote to Godfrey Thomas, knowing well that uncomplaining acceptance of ill fortune was not his own forte.
Prince Albert, however, was not so uncomplaining when it came to the conduct of his parents. The two Princes united in a chorus of criticism. Prince Albert wailed about the ‘awful prison’ of Buckingham Palace: ‘The parents have got funny ideas about us, thinking we are still boys at school or something of that sort, instead of what we are.’
The Prince of Wales was no more enthusiastic about life in the Palace, especially after the King imposed a teetotal regime for the duration of the war: ‘Awful balls the whole thing. I don’t think it will have much effect on the drinking community. Lloyd George forced it on Papa.’
As he grew older he became more adept at avoiding the sombre dignity of the family circle. By 1917 he was able to come and go more or less at pleasure. He was summoned for two weeks to Sandringham. ‘This little boy somehow says NO,’ he told Lady Coke. ‘He might possibly spend two or three days there, but not more, not for nobody, and he knows a bit too much for that!!!!’
– a point so close to his heart as to demand even more than his usual allotment of two exclamation marks. In London he still stayed always at Buckingham Palace, but tried to time his periods of leave so that he had at least a few days there without his parents. This did not always work out. ‘I am sorry your style was rather cramped during your leave in London,’ Lord Burghersh wrote sympathetically. ‘It’s exactly the same with me. Family so inquisitive.’
But it would be wrong to attach too much significance to such flights from the family nest. The Prince was far from rejecting his parents or demanding total independence. On his twenty-first birthday his father wrote to tell him: ‘You will have about £246,000 which … is a splendid sum of money which will go on increasing until you marry and set up house. Until then, I hope you will consider my home as your home.’ The Queen echoed her husband’s words: ‘I hope that for some years to come you, my darling Son, will continue to live under our roof, where you are and ever will be “le bienvenu”.’
The Prince in his reply told his mother how pleased he would be to remain with his parents ‘until the fateful day arrives when I shall have to think about finding me a wife, and I trust that day is as yet afar off!!’
Privately he had probably made up his mind that he must set up on his own once the war was over, but he had no wish to confront his parents on such an issue while the war was still raging and long-term plans seemed impossible to make.
In June 1915 the Prince had first speculated about the possibility that a Guards division might be formed under the command of Lord Cavan, ‘an ideal state of things’.
A month later the ideal became reality; ‘It ought to be the finest division in the world,’ the King wrote proudly.
The Prince had no doubt that this was where he belonged. In his eyes the Guards were as far above the other line regiments as the Navy was above the Army. He admitted to the King that he and the other Guards officers were apt to think that their men were the only ones of any use, ‘which is v. wrong and which one must avoid above all things, but it’s not an unnatural point of view to take really!!’
But though his transfer to this martial empyrean brought some relief and moved him a little closer to the fighting, it did not prove entirely satisfactory. Life at Cavan’s headquarters was no less sybaritic than in his previous postings; Raymond Asquith visited the headquarters in November 1915 and was given ‘a good dinner and an excellent bottle of champagne … the Prince of Wales was there and gave me a long and fragrant cigar’.
Nor was the work more enlivening; a typical day in December had him devoting the morning to pursuing a missing consignment of gum boots and the afternoon to bargaining for the use of a piece of land on which to build bathing huts: ‘Heavens, the unparalleled monotony of this life!! … I shall go mad soon!!’
Worst of all, though he liked and admired ‘Fatty’ Cavan, he deplored the General’s reluctance to let him get near the trenches: ‘I think Fatty is going to shut me up in my glasshouse more than ever.’
Only a week after this entry he escaped from his glasshouse and visited the front line during a lull in the battle of Loos. The 1st Guards Brigade had charged three hundred yards across open ground towards the enemy line and had been massacred by machine-gun fire as they reached the final wire, ‘too cruel to be killed within a few yards of yr. objective … This was my first real sight of war and it moved and impressed me most enormously.’ On the way back the party had to jump into a trench to avoid a storm of shrapnel, fifty yards away the Prince’s car was damaged and his driver killed: ‘He was an exceptionally nice man, a beautiful driver and a 1st rate mechanic; it’s an absolute tragedy and I can’t yet realize that it has happened.’
The Commander-in-Chief, told that the Prince had been in the car beside his driver, promptly ordered that he should return to Corps headquarters. The Prince wrote in dismay to his father. ‘What did you have me appointed to Guards DIV for? That I should be removed as soon as there is any fighting? … I can assure you it is one of the biggest blows I have ever had … My dearest Papa, I implore of you to have this most unfortunate and deplorable order from GHQ cancelled as soon as possible.’
French reconsidered his decision and the Prince stayed with the Guards. The King ruled, however, that his son should only go up to the front if it was ‘absolutely necessary’, otherwise Cavan would be placed in an impossible position.
It all depended on what was meant by ‘necessary’, and the Prince eventually saw his interpretation of the word accepted: if it was necessary for the General to go to the front line it must be necessary for his staff officers to accompany him. But he was not content with what he had gained. ‘If only I could spend 48 hours in the line;’ he told his father, ‘… I should get an idea of what trench life is like, which it is absolutely impossible to do otherwise … I suppose you wouldn’t like to make permission for me to do this a form of Xmas present to me?’
It had not needed the sight of the mounds of dead in front of the German lines at Loos to make the Prince doubtful of the allied strategy. The endless, hideously costly attacks, achieving nothing except at the best the occupation of a few trenches, seemed to him futile. The commanders had promised great advances, the breaking of the German line: ‘When is all this? Ask of the winds, and I call it sheer murder!!’ He had lost all confidence in French. ‘The sooner we get a new C in C the better.’
But when a new Commander-in-Chief was appointed it was Douglas Haig, a man as wedded to the policy of bloody attrition as ever French had been. ‘He is very unpopular,’ the Prince told Stamfordham. ‘I can’t stand the man myself, so hard and unsympathetic.’
Towards the end of the war he was to revise his views, and even find Haig ‘human and sympathetic’,
but at the end of 1915 it seemed to him that the new C.-in-C. treated men ‘as mere fighting tools’,
and that, in the Prince’s eyes, was almost the ultimate accusation.
Shortly before French departed George V came to France for one of his periodic visits to his troops. Startled by the cheering of the men the King’s horse reared, threw its rider and fell heavily on top of him. The Prince rushed to his father’s side, to find him winded and unable to breathe. Doctors arrived and pronounced that there were no internal injuries, only shock and severe bruising. It had been a lucky escape; the ground where the King fell was soft, otherwise he would have been crushed beyond recognition.
The Prince hurried back to London with Claud Hamilton to reassure the Queen. ‘Thank God Papa is all right,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good, and little did Claudie and I think in the morning that we shd be on our way home in less than 12 hrs.’
Before this episode the Prince had been in slightly bad odour at court because of his reluctance to wear some foreign medals which he had been awarded. He apologized to the King, ‘but you know how distasteful it is to me to wear these war decorations having never done any fighting and having always been kept well out of danger’.
The sense of inferiority which he felt in the presence of fighting men was redoubled when he was flaunting honours which they had been denied. His discomfort was redoubled in mid-1916 when he was awarded the Military Cross. Lady Coke wrote to congratulate him. ‘I don’t feel I deserve it in the least,’ the Prince replied crossly. ‘There are so many gallant yet undecorated officers who should have MCs long before me.’
He was promoted Captain at about the same time but got no pleasure from it ‘as I have no command’. ‘You’ll be saying to yourself “What a gloomy view of life he does take”,’ he admitted to Stamfordham. ‘Well, I fear that is the case …’
He was craving for change, and when it became clear that he could not expect to stay with the Guards division when it went into the line at Ypres, he concluded that he had much better leave France altogether. He conceived the idea of visiting the allied forces in the Middle East and Kitchener agreed that a report on the defences in the Canal Zone would be of use. The King initially opposed the idea on the grounds that the danger from submarines in the Mediterranean was too great. His reluctance made the Prince’s wish to go become almost overpowering. ‘D—n the risk of … torpedoes,’ he wrote to Stamfordham, ‘it is such rot, isn’t it? But all these family fears have to be considered!’
The King relented, and at once the Prince began to wonder whether he was doing the right thing. ‘I do feel such a miserable worm,’ he told his uncle. ‘Of course it will be very interesting and pleasant in Egypt, but I shan’t be able to enjoy it in the least, when I know where I ought to be and where my friends are.’
He suggested that Desmond Fitzgerald should accompany him as equerry. The proposal was rejected, Fitzgerald was too junior for such a role. A week before the Prince sailed, Fitzgerald was training with his regiment near Calais. The padre took a turn at throwing a hand grenade and somehow bungled it. Fitzgerald was fatally injured. It was the worst experience the Prince had suffered during the war. ‘It is a fearful blow to lose one’s greatest friend, and he was that to me.’
In wartime those whose friends are in daily danger must either learn to accept their loss with relative equanimity or themselves break under the strain. The Prince had built a carapace of resignation with which to confront the awful massacre of his contemporaries. Fitzgerald’s death, though, broke down his guard. He left for Egypt in a mood as depressed as he had ever known, and the tragedy was to cast a blight over what would otherwise have been a pleasant escapade.
4
The Captain
THE PRINCE OF WALES’S EXPEDITION TO THE MIDDLE EAST proved a welcome break in the four black years that he spent on the Western Front. He would not have been the man he was if he had not striven to diminish his pleasure by endless doubts and self-accusations. ‘I feel such a swine having a soft comfortable time out here while the Guards Division is up at Ypres,’ he told Lady Coke;
and he found little comfort in the knowledge that he would never have been allowed near the battle himself and that his presence with the allied forces in the Canal Zone was a badly needed boost to the morale of those who felt themselves to be members of a forgotten army.
His last days in London had been hectic. He called on Kitchener to get his instructions – ‘He talked a lot, quite interesting in a way, but I’m frightened of the man’
– acquired the mountain of impedimenta thought necessary for such a journey, and spent the last night in mingled work and revelry. He, Prince Albert and Godfrey Thomas, recorded the latter, ‘played the gramophone till the small hours and when we thought it was time for some song that we hadn’t got among the records, we were obliged to sing it. After a lot of exercise dancing round and round the room, Prince Bertie proceeded to go to bed, but his brother got into his bed with all his clothes on, so by the time he’d been pulled out by us, there wasn’t much left of the bed … So we turned the gramophone on again. I got away just before two. HRH was starting at 9 the next morning, and had done practically no packing as usual, and also had about 20 letters to write. The result, as I heard afterwards, was that he had exactly 1¼ hours sleep that night and went off without any breakfast, which is entirely typical.’ Thomas got this last information in a letter from Prince Albert, who added: ‘A wonderful chap. I don’t know how he does it, do you?’
The King had been convinced that even in comparatively temperate March the Prince would find the heat in the Canal Zone intolerable, but his son relished hot weather and was inspired by it to undertake still more strenuous physical exercise. He enjoyed the life in Ismalia, ‘strafing up and down the Canal’, visiting the troops and preparing a report on the supply system. On his first day at GHQ he went to hear General Birdwood address the Australian and New Zealand Brigades. His presence was announced to the men, ‘at which they gave 3 cheers, bloody fools!!’
At first he had been slightly deterred by their reputation for drunkenness and indiscipline but he was quickly overwhelmed by their exuberance; they had committed undreamt-of atrocities in the red-light districts of Cairo and Alexandria, but ‘they have fought so d—d hard and are so keen, that it is hard to deal severely with them’. What moved him most was the ‘marvellous imperial spirit’ that had called them up, ‘for they aren’t fighting for themselves or their own country either; only for the Empire’. ‘As you know,’ he told his friend Captain Bailey, ‘I’m not often given to these highflown ideas, but really these Anzacs have impressed me so much!!’
On the banks of the Suez Canal the Prince conceived a reverence for the idea of Empire that was to sustain him during the rigorous tours that lay ahead.
Not everyone reciprocated his enthusiasm. Among the many men he spoke to when he visited the Anzac troops at Tel-el-Kebir, was John Monash, a Brigadier General who had been one of the heroes of Gallipoli and was to become the most prominent Australian soldier of the First World War. ‘What he said to me was “M-m-m-m”,’ wrote Monash. ‘The fact was the youngster was completely bewildered, and most evidently ill at ease.’
His was a minority voice, however; every other account of the visit was lyrical in tone. Birdwood maintained that the men took him to their hearts; the Prince’s equerry, Malcolm Murray, spoke of the warmth of their reception – ‘They would rush across to wherever the Prince was coming up, make a line for him and cheer time after time.’
One eye-witness account was passed on at third hand to Queen Mary: ‘… the enthusiasm knew no bounds, and the cheering was perfectly overwhelming. Our friend said that men looked at him so intently that they forgot to salute! and added “I’m not exaggerating when I say that some of them gazed at him with tears rolling down their cheeks.”’
The Prince of Wales had been in crowds many times before, but this was the first time that he had experienced the adulation that was so often to be his lot over the next twenty years. It could be argued that any young, personable and smiling prince would have had the same effect. The contrary can hardly be proved, but so many reports by men and women who prided themselves on being not easily impressed testify to the extraordinary potency of his personality that it is impossible to dismiss them all. To the seasoned veterans of Gallipoli his youth, charm, simplicity and friendliness, his patent sincerity and concern for their wellbeing, proved irresistible. Many millions were to find the same combination as effective in the future.
For the Prince it was exhilarating, disconcerting and slightly alarming. He for his part had no doubt that it was his royal blood and not his personal qualities which won him such applause. The idea displeased him. ‘Oh!! to be out here privately and not as the P of W,’ he moaned to Godfrey Thomas. ‘That’s what ruins my life and ever will!!!!’ This particular complaint was provoked by a projected visit to Khartoum. He had pleaded to be allowed to go there but typically at once began to have doubts once permission had been conceded. If he could have gone as a common tourist he would have been delighted, but he was travelling officially as heir to the throne: ‘You know how I hate all those bulls at any time, so think how odious it is to me in wartime!!’
In the Governor – the Sirdar – Reginald Wingate, he found a man determined to milk the situation to the last drop: ‘A little snob,’ he called him in his diary; ‘He is HRHing the whole time and never relaxes a moment.’
Yet he had to admit that Wingate knew his job superlatively well and that the pomp was well deployed to make the greatest possible impression on the Sudanese. ‘I am throwing my heart and soul into it all to make it a success, though it goes against the grain,’ he told his father.
To Malcolm Murray it sometimes seemed that heart and soul were not as energetically deployed as might have been hoped for. The Prince, he complained to Stamfordham, ‘always wanted to efface himself, and hates any kind of formal thing. This is exactly what he wants practice in – he is rather naughty about going up to speak to people etc.’
The Prince’s always weak stomach for sightseeing was quickly over-taxed. Even before he reached Luxor on his return journey down the Nile he was confessing in his diary: ‘I’m utterly fed up with visiting temples and never want to see another one again.’ He found an itinerant snake-charmer decidedly more interesting than Karnak by moonlight. The ancient and eminent Egyptologist Professor Le Grain lavished his learning on the young visitor but gained little gratitude for his pains. ‘I wasn’t sorry to see him go, for he … nearly killed me with his detailed descriptions.’
It is unlikely, however, that the professor guessed how little pleasure he had given; the Prince’s manners rarely fell below excellence and he would have gone to great pains to put a good face on his sufferings. When Ronald Storrs conducted the Prince round Cairo a few days later, he wrote that he had never met a visitor ‘who entered more swiftly into the spirit of the place … I have met none with equal vitality or with more appreciation of Eastern life’.
Perhaps Storrs was a more congenial cicerone than the professor, certainly the Prince found Cairo much jollier than the Upper Nile and agitated to be allowed to pay it a second visit. The King for some reason objected and the Prince wrote in injured innocence: ‘I don’t want to go galivanting about in Cairo, far from it. I’m not even going to ask you for a night there … just a few hours so that I may go to the bazaars and do some shopping for you and Mama.’
In Cairo he met Lord Edward Cecil, a fellow Grenadier, shrewd judge of character and author of the exquisitely witty The Leisure of an Egyptian Official. ‘He is a nice boy of fifteen, rather immature for that age,’ Lord Edward wrote to his wife. ‘He cannot get in or out of a room except sideways and he has the nervous smile of one accustomed to float. I hope he will grow up, but he is leaving it till late. He is curiously decided, even obstinate, and happily there is no sign of weakness of character. His main terror is getting fat. He adores the Regiment and would talk all day about it, but beyond love of all military matters, an outspoken hatred of politicians and a very fine English accent when he speaks French, he has no apparent special characteristics. I think one day he will fall in love and then he will suddenly grow up.’
He never got back to Cairo nor was he allowed to stay on in the Middle East after the onset of the hot season. Malcolm Murray direly prophesied sunstroke and probably enteric fever if he lingered on, and the King ordered his return: ‘You have had a nice change and have enjoyed some nice warm weather; think of the many thousands of poor fellows who are obliged to remain in France without a break …’
The Prince might justifiably have retorted that he thought constantly about them, that he had done all he could to be treated like them, and that his return to a job on the staff would not improve their lot by an iota. Instead, he accepted his recall with moderately good grace. On the way back, in May 1916, he called on King Victor Emmanuel at his headquarters near the Italian front at Udine. He found the King a ‘dear and charming little man’ but it was the same story as in France; as soon as the royal party got anywhere near any scene of possible action, the cars would turn round and speed back to a safer section of the line.
On his return he submitted a report on the supply and transport arrangements in the Canal Zone which Kitchener forwarded to the King; it did the Prince great credit, commented Kitchener, ‘and shows his grasp of details, and military knowledge’.
‘A really excellent report,’ George Arthur, then an official in the War Office, described it.
The praise seems high for a somewhat cursory statement of the existing position, in twelve hundred words, with little detail and no recommendations, but it showed at least that he had kept his eyes open and not treated the expedition as a joy ride. The King had good reason to be pleased with his son’s performance. Wingate had written that the Prince’s visit had done enormous good in the Sudan; the GOC reported that the morale of the troops in the Canal Zone had been notably improved; it was not the sort of war the Prince wanted to wage, but this time even he had to admit that he had been of use.
Back in France the Prince rejoined Lord Cavan’s staff with the 14th Army Corps. He was no nearer having a proper job. ‘He holds a very junior appointment of course,’ commented the future Field Marshal Montgomery loftily, ‘and I can’t imagine that he does much real work.’
Lord Newton, then a junior minister at the Foreign Office, found him ‘an undeveloped youth with pleasant and unassuming manners’ and ascribed his lack of any important staff job to the fact that he could not be induced to read.
The charge of immaturity was certainly justified, but when the Prince was given something to do, he did it conscientiously. His complaint was that he was left in idleness or burdened with unnecessary and clearly improvised duties. After less than a week back in headquarters he was exclaiming bitterly that he was ‘thoroughly fed up’. ‘God knows how long the Lord Claud and I will be stuck here,’ he wrote to Captain Bailey; ‘it couldn’t be very long as I sh’d go mad after a few months … How I do grouse … !!’
Claud Hamilton was at first his only real friend at Corps HQ. The Prince recognized that Hamilton’s military career was jeopardized by his absence from his regiment and readily agreed to make up his pay to the level it might have reached in other circumstances. ‘Of course I should hate not to help him as I ought to,’ he wrote to Stamfordham, ‘and am only wondering whether £150 is sufficient.’
Hamilton repaid this generosity with loyalty and an unflinching readiness to tell his master the truth, however unpalatable it might be. One of the Prince’s more attractive characteristics was his readiness to accept any amount of criticism from those whom he liked and who, he believed, had his interests at heart. In May 1918 he ran foul of Hamilton over some unspecified matter, probably relating to an escapade with some women from the Voluntary Aid Detachment. ‘I have had a straight talk and said it must stop or I shall go,’ Claud Hamilton told Lady Coke. ‘He thoroughly realized he was in the wrong and promised to turn over a new leaf. Now it is much better.’
Some months later he was still gossiping to his friends about ‘the Prince and the VADs, which, if known, would cause some trouble’, but the offence seems to have been in the past.
Hamilton remained with the Prince for several more years, though in the end the two men decided they could not work together.
Early in 1917 Hamilton was reinforced by the arrival of Piers ‘Joey’ Legh, another Grenadier and a son of Lord Newton. Legh was to remain with the Prince for twenty years and accompany him into exile after the abdication. More than ten years again after that he was still talking of the man ‘whom he had loved and whose charm was so great that he would thrill with emotion if the Duke entered the room just now’.
As with Claud Hamilton, the Prince accepted from him rebukes which a vainer or more touchy man would have resented. In June 1917 General Cavan told him off for devoting too much time to his interminable runs, neglecting the newspapers and paying no attention to world affairs. ‘Of course he is right really and I don’t attempt to be a P of W or prepare for being so,’ the culprit admitted ruefully, ‘but how I hate all that sort of thing and how unsuited I am for the job!!’ Yet he persisted with his runs. Legh spoke to him ‘like a father’, and threatened to report him to Cavan. The Prince continued to offend, whereupon Legh did report him and Cavan categorically forbade further runs. ‘That old shit Joey,’ the Prince wrote in his diary, ‘but I’m none the less fond of him and forgive him all as he’s only done it for my good …’
Hamilton and Legh, the Prince told his mother, were ‘my 2 great friends who are and have been real friends to me; I’m devoted to them!!’
Without their companionship he would have found intolerable the gloom and, as he saw it, uselessness of his life in Cavan’s headquarters; even with them his depression sometimes almost overcame him. One day when he had been refused a visit to the front line, he remained in his room, writing letters till 1 a.m. ‘I could not face … any company. I wanted to be alone in my misery!! I feel quite ready to commit suicide and would if I didn’t think it unfair on Papa.’
He no doubt over-dramatized his misery, but he was an unhappy and frustrated man. More and more he dreaded the next ‘push’, when he knew there would be yet further massacres, more friends killed, more shame for him. He went to a staff meeting at which an attack was ordered on a certain hill. The General involved protested, but Cavan insisted the hill must be taken. ‘He must have hated doing this as I could see he was worried. Several people have told me that the whole plan of attack seems to them impossible and mad. Of course Haig doesn’t think of the poor buggers who will have to pay the price for this …’
He tried to convince himself that a war of bloody attrition held the only hope of victory, but signally failed. ‘These continuous heavy casualty lists make me sick,’ he wrote during the battle of the Somme, ‘it all seems such a waste for of course it doesn’t matter if we don’t push on another few miles as regards the end of the war, we only push to kill Huns and help our allies. I’m afraid I can’t bring myself to look on the situation in such a big way; I can’t keep the wretched infantry being slaughtered out of my thoughts.’
It was just before this battle that the Prince went with Cavan’s deputy, General Morland, to see the first ‘tanks’, a code word for ‘these new land submarines’. He was impressed by their ingenuity, admired the bravery of their crews, but was sceptical of their value: ‘They are good toys but I don’t have much faith in their success.’
He told his father of his doubts and was duly crushed: ‘With regard to the “Tanks” which you scoffed at when you first saw them …’ retorted the King, reports were so good that several hundred had been ordered.
The King was proved right in the end, but the performance of the tank in the First World War, at least before the battle of Cambrai more than a year later, did something to support the Prince’s scepticism.
The progress of the war over its last two years is marked by his ever growing respect for the fighting men; not just for the officers or the Guardsmen but ‘for the British conscript … for he hates the whole thing and isn’t fired with the same spirit as were the first hundred thousand’. And yet they managed to keep ‘so marvellously cheery’ and to prepare for each new scene of carnage with renewed determination. They were marvels, ‘it does make one feel so proud of being an Englishman’. More was being asked of them than had ever been asked of British troops before. And he felt humble as well as proud: ‘No one can realize what these … battles are like till they’ve been in one, and I don’t, as I never have.’
He never stopped trying to get forward to the front line, never stopped hating it when he was there. In June 1917 he rose at 4 a.m. to go to the trenches: ‘and how I loathed it!! But frightened tho’ I am, I should honestly loathe it still more if I never went forward!!’
Shortly before that he told Lady Coke that in recent months he had only once been within range of enemy shellfire since his return, ‘so you need have no thoughts for my safety’.
The worst danger he had confronted was in October 1916, when he was at the front with General Gathorne Hardy. A shell fell forty yards in front, then one thirty yards behind. Fortunately the German gunners did not complete the bracket: ‘I’ve never been so near becoming a casualty before, though it did me worlds of good, frightening me properly.’
Four days later they were still more comprehensively shelled. ‘That strafing we got has taught me more than anything ever has during my 2 years out here; it gives me a slight impression of what our men have to go through these days.’
Gathorne Hardy was the last person with whom the Prince would have chosen to die; ‘he is so unfair to all his subordinates that I feel ashamed to be out with him!!’
The Prince’s dislike for Gathorne Hardy had started one particularly cold and wet night when the Grenadiers were moving up to the front. A staff officer remarked, ‘Lord, I’m sorry for those poor devils going up.’ ‘Oh well, they’ve got their ground sheets,’ retorted Gathorne Hardy. ‘Pass the port.’
The remark probably signified little, but to the Prince it showed unforgivable callousness. His respect for the fighting men would never have allowed him to speak of them so indifferently. Indeed he would never have made a First World War general; he was too soft-hearted, too squeamish, too concerned about the safety and comfort of the men. ‘I’m v keen on the fighting troops being made as comfortable as possible always …’ he told Wigram. ‘Poor devils, they have a bloody enough time in the trenches … they are absolutely marvellous and I’d do anything for them.’
As a weapon of war, he rated the aeroplane far ahead of the tank. Early in September 1917 he visited the Cigognes, the crack French squadron which included Guinemeyer, the ace who had shot down over fifty German planes. ‘They are fine fellows,’ he told Lady Coke, ‘and all gentlemen, to put it snobbishly, which makes such a difference really.’ The visit was of particular interest to him because a few weeks before he had been given permission by the King to go up in an aeroplane himself, provided it was nowhere near the line. He had had his first flight on 17 July: ‘It’s a wonderful feeling up there,’ he wrote, ‘but I don’t feel I ever want to learn to fly.’
In fact he was soon eager to do so, and though he took no steps to learn until long after the war, he went up quite frequently over the next two years. One account says that his permission to fly was withdrawn because he flew with a Canadian war ace who was photographed piloting the aircraft with one arm in a sling.
There is nothing in the Prince’s diary about this, though in September 1918 he did fly up to 10,000 feet with a Canadian called Barker. ‘It is really the safest thing in the world, far safer than motoring!!’ he told his mother.
After the exhilaration of flying, he found little to thrill him in the course he did with the Royal Artillery. It seems to have been a pointless exercise; the course was designed for officers who had done a year or more with an artillery battery, and, since he hardly knew one end of a gun from another, he understood nothing of what was going on. The drills were incessant and tedious, the other students uninspiring, the food disastrous. This last at least he could put right, with a weekly hamper from Fortnum and Mason containing a ham, two tongues and a Stilton. ‘You know I attach very little importance to my food,’ he told his mother, ‘and I have always taken the view that most people eat too much … But I must confess that I like the small amount of food that I eat to be good.’
The contents of the hamper were shared out around the mess and the Prince’s departure was a cause for sincere regret.
At the end of 1916 Asquith fell and Lloyd George succeeded him as Prime Minister. Only six months before, the Prince had told his father that he did not care for Lloyd George ‘as a man, a statesman or anything’ but by December 1916 he had concluded that ‘everyone has gt confidence in him and feels that he is really out to win the war and that he has no thought for himself’.
He welcomed the change, believing that a strong government was essential and that ‘old Squiff’ could never have provided the necessary leadership.
He was particularly gratified that Churchill was not in the reformed government and disgusted when he reappeared as Minister of Munitions six months later – ‘I suppose he has silently wormed his way in again.’
Grudgingly he admitted to the King that Churchill would probably do the job well and ‘perhaps it is safer to give him a job than to have him hanging around unemployed’.
By this time hopes of a rapid victory had been dashed by the collapse of the Russian empire. ‘Let us hope that the new Govt will get the upper hand and smash the socialists,’ the King wrote to his son in April 1917. ‘I should imagine that a republic in Russia is an impossibility.’
To the Prince the blow struck at the allied war effort by the defection of the Russians seemed more catastrophic than the murder of his relatives whom he had hardly met. ‘Oh! this —— war … I feel as if we are in for at least another 10 years of it!!’ The Russian revolution, followed by the crumbling of the monarchies at the end of the war, caused him to think about the future of the British royal family. ‘Ours is by far the most solid,’ he told his father, ‘tho of course it must be kept so and I more than realize that this can only be done by keeping in the closest possible touch with the people and I can promise you that this point is always at the back of [my] mind and that I am and always will make every effort to carry it out … I also feel that we have good reason to be confident of the good sense and calmness of our race, anyhow just now, tho of course one knows there are many and great dangers, and one mustn’t shut one’s eyes to them even if they don’t really become formidable till 2 or 3 years after the declaration of peace when the race will have got over the joy and novelty of “no war on”.’
His relationship with his father had been better since his visit to the Middle East, and he wrote in his diary in March 1917 that ‘the parents are more charming to me than ever, and seem glad to see me again’.
But though he was getting on well with his father, it was his mother with whom he felt closest. His letters and diary abound in references to cosy and confidential talks about every aspect of his life: ‘It’s so wonderful to feel that we can really talk things over now, and vital and intime things, and I can assure you, darling Mama, that this makes all the difference to me.’
The Queen responded warmly: ‘I think I do understand and can enter into other people’s feelings,’ she wrote in mingled gratification and surprise.
She seemed to relish the fact that she was closer than the King to her sons, and was not beyond making a little mischief to emphasize the difference. She complained to the Prince that she had not been present when important decisions were made about his future, ‘such a pity, as first of all I ought to know and secondly it makes it more difficult for me just to hear in a cursory way from Papa’. She urged her son to write his ‘secret and intimate views’ on a separate sheet of paper, so that the King should not realize he was being kept in the dark. She evolved an elaborate plot to get the Prince back on leave for Christmas: ‘I cannot help laughing to myself at the mystery which surrounds any new plan which … we have to put before Papa, it all requires such a lot of thought, writing, choosing the right moment etc, really comical in a way but so tiresome.’
Yet though she would enter into conspiracy with her sons, an open confrontation with the King was still out of the question. Never did she doubt that his will must prevail.
One issue on which she consulted her son without reference to the King was the future of Princess Mary. The Prince constantly pressed the Queen to allow his sister friends of her own age and greater liberty to move around outside the palaces. Princess Mary bravely insisted that life at Buckingham Palace was not too bad: ‘You need not feel so sorry for me … The only things I object to are those rather silent dinners you know so well, when Papa will read the paper.’
Her brother knew that she was lonely and, in everything except material terms, underprivileged. He joined eagerly in what his mother called the ‘all important matter’ of finding the Princess a husband who would be both socially acceptable and tolerable to live with.
Hopefully he put forward the names of friend after friend, only to find that his mother always shrank from proposing them to the King. Princess Mary did not find a husband until 1922 and then it was by no doing of the Prince of Wales.
Early in 1919 his epileptic brother, Prince John, finally died. The young invalid’s always frail grasp on reason had been failing rapidly and it had been obvious for some months that he could not survive for long. The Prince of Wales hardly knew him; saw him as little more than a regrettable nuisance. He wrote to his mother a letter of chilling insensitivity. She did not reply but he heard from others how much he had hurt her. He was conscience-stricken. ‘I feel such a cold hearted and unsympathetic swine for writing all that I did …’ he told the Queen. ‘No one can realize more than you how little poor Johnnie meant to me who hardly knew him … I can feel so much for you, darling Mama, who was his mother.’
His overture was gratefully received. At first she had thought his attitude a little hard-hearted, she confessed, but now felt that he was only taking the common-sense view.
The King fully shared his attitude: ‘the greatest mercy possible,’ he called John’s death, his youngest son had been spared endless suffering.
Stamfordham had urged the King to bring the Prince back to London in the winter of 1917. ‘Time is slipping away and these years are valuable and important ones in His Royal Highness’s life. He should be mixing with leading men other than soldiers, doing some useful reading and gradually getting accustomed to speaking in public.’
Cavan concurred. Then suddenly the Italian line collapsed. German troops, set free by the collapse of Russian resistance, had come to the aid of their Austrian allies and quickly turned the tide of the campaign. It seemed that Italy might be knocked out of the war if British and French reinforcements were not rushed south. The 14th Army Corps was chosen for the task. Cavan pleaded that if the Prince of Wales accompanied the Corps the moral effect in Italy would be great. Against this, he had to admit that the Corps might arrive too late to save the Italians, in which case anything might happen and the risk to the Prince be considerable.
The King decided the risk must be run and by 8 November the Prince had joined the Corps HQ at Mantua. ‘… and here we stay indefinitely,’ he told Lady Coke. ‘The whole show is the vaguest thing on record and we know nothing of our future … as it all depends on where the Italians stop the Huns.’
At first it was uncertain whether the Italians would stop the Huns at all. The Prince arrived in time to see the wreckage of the Italian 2nd Army retreating by way of Treviso and Padua. It was a kind of mobile warfare which he had never witnessed, and even though the allied forces were patently coming off worst, he found it irresistibly exciting: ‘This is real campaigning, not the stale old warfare in Flanders, and it’s all a great experience for me.’
His initial opinion of the Italian armies could hardly have been less favourable: ‘contemptible soldiers,’ he described them, who didn’t understand the elements of modern warfare and retreated so fast that the enemy was unable to keep contact with them.
Inevitably his opinion changed when the Italians made a stand: ‘fine stout-hearted fellows’ they then became, though of course ‘one mustn’t forget that they are a Latin race!!’
He complained about those French and British officers who criticized the Italians too overtly, and though he referred to them privately as ‘Ice-creamers’, was at pains to speak of them politely in public. But a constant refrain of his diary and letters was the superiority of the French, Britain’s leading and natural ally. ‘They are a grand people, the French, and I’m more fond of them than ever now,’ he told the King; ‘what a far finer and nicer nation than the Italians. If only they had a monarchy!!!!’
His views of Italian cuisine and culture were as jaundiced as of their military prowess. He could not stand macaroni, spaghetti or Chianti and hadn’t seen a single pretty woman, he told Lady Coke, so ‘I’m rather off Italy just now’.
The monuments were little better: Mantua was ‘a deadly dull and antiquated little town’, Bologna had lots of picturesque buildings ‘tho I can’t say that I spent much time looking at them’; the Veronese paintings in the Villa Giacometti were ‘interesting as being over 300 years old … but I can’t say that actually they appeal to me enormously, and are, of course, typically Italian’.
He was more impressed by Rome, which he visited in May 1918 to attend the celebrations of the third anniversary of the Italian declaration of war (a cause for jollification which the Prince was not alone in thinking somewhat far-fetched). The main function took place in the Augusteum, and in the course of his speech the Italian President, Orlando, spoke of the Prince as having come to Italy to share their dangers and defend their country. ‘The whole audience rose, faced the Prince and cheered madly,’ Henry Lygon told the Queen.
The Prince’s speech from the royal box was delivered, wrote the Ambassador, Sir James Rodd, ‘in a clear voice which carried well, with just a little touch of boyish shyness that went straight to the hearts of his audience’.
Claud Hamilton told Lady Coke that he had done it very well, ‘everybody could easily hear him, he received a great ovation’.
It was a period at which Hamilton was inclined to be critical of his employer so his judgment that the Prince ‘played his part better than I have ever seen him do before’ can be taken seriously. The Prince was no less ready to judge his own performances harshly but he told the King that he felt his visit had done some good and had helped cement the alliance with Italy; ‘it has been rather a trying week but very interesting and it has taught me a lot’.
His parents were delighted by his achievements: the King told him how much he appreciated the excellent way he had carried out the visit, while the Queen wrote of his ‘wonderful success … I feel prouder of my dearest son than ever.’
The King had objected to the proposal that the visit to Rome should include a call on the Pope but Balfour, the Foreign Secretary, insisted that this was essential.
Dutifully, the Prince paraded at the Vatican. He was not greatly struck by what he saw: he found Pope Benedict XV unprepossessing in his appearance, ‘tho intelligent and well informed and he talks fairly decent French’. The Prince kept the conversation to generalities; ‘and I most certainly did not kiss his ring,’ he told the Queen proudly. ‘Nothing would have induced me to!!’
This sturdy independence availed nothing with the Daily Express, who reported that the Prince ‘appeared to be greatly gratified by his visit’. Under the headline ‘Visit which should not have been made’, the Express condemned the King for not having stepped in to veto it.
George V considered the report a direct attack on the Crown, all the worse because the proprietor, Lord Beaverbrook, was a member of the government.
‘Much tho one loathes the —— Huns, one can’t help admiring the way they are sticking out the war,’ the Prince wrote to King George V in October 1917.
Their first offensive subsided, but there were signs that it was about to be renewed when the time came to celebrate the royal Silver Wedding in London. The last thing the Prince wanted was to become involved in what promised to be wearisome festivities. He persuaded Cavan to cable the King arguing that it would make a bad impression in Italy if the Prince left at so critical a moment.
The King agreed, but little in the way of a German attack ensued, indeed, within a few weeks the enemy lines were crumbling all across Europe.
The war was clearly ending. The plan had been for the Prince to spend three months at the end of 1918 taking a staff course at Cambridge, but with time running out Haig pleaded that he should instead visit the Dominion and American troops in France. The King left the final decision to his son, who had been looking forward to three relatively easy months at home. ‘Of course I never hesitated as to what was the right thing,’ the Prince wrote. ‘… one has to sink one’s personal feelings and wishes on these occasions.’
He was being disingenuous as well as priggish; Cambridge might have been enjoyable but nothing would have induced him to leave the continent with final victory so close.
He hoped that he would be able to visit the Dominion forces with a minimum of fuss. He was quickly disabused by Lord Stamfordham. The Prince of Wales could not visit Canadian or Anzac troops un-officially: ‘On the contrary these visits … have an undoubted political significance and may have far-reaching effects upon the Empire and Crown. You will be there as … Heir to the Throne and every word and deed will have its own particular influence.’ Pressmen would follow him everywhere and the coverage they gave him would affect the reception he received when he visited the Dominions after the war. He would be constantly in the public eye.
It was a melancholy reminder to the Prince that with the armistice a new form of penal servitude would begin and that this time the sentence would be for life.
The Canadians were the first on whom he called. He was euphoric about his reception. ‘They are great lads these old “Knucks”,’ he told Joey Legh, ‘real, husky stout-hearted fellows for whom I’ve a great admiration.’
He was overwhelmed by their cheerfulness and friendly informality: ‘How I wish I had been across to Canada, and living amongst them makes me just long to go there.’
His only complaint was that they tended to assume that they had done all the serious fighting and to speak with some disdain of the ‘Imperial’ or British troops. ‘Still, I just don’t listen when they talk like that, it’s only really a pose and the best fellows never talk like that.’
A report from an unidentified Canadian colonel somehow found its way into the Windsor archives. The Prince, it read, ‘had been the best force in real Empire building that it was possible for Great Britain to have, because he absolutely won the hearts of the many he came in contact with. As they put it, he was every inch the gentleman and sportsman, so simple, so charming and so genuine …’
Even allowing for hyperbole, he seems to have made himself uncommonly well liked.
The armistice was signed while the Prince was with the Canadian Corps. ‘I feel it can’t be more than a marvellous dream and I still feel in a sort of trance,’ he told the Queen. ‘But I suppose I shall soon wake up to the fact that it all really is true.’
It was soon time for him to move on. ‘I don’t think my month with the Australians will be so pleasant somehow,’ the Prince had written, when his love of all things Canadian was at its height. ‘These Canadians are so much more English and refined.’
His first reaction, indeed, was to find the Australian troops somewhat shy and rough, but ‘that’s because they live so far from England’, he concluded charitably.
It did not take him long to decide that he liked them enormously, and they seem to have responded quite as warmly. ‘The Prince has won the hearts of the Australians,’ General Rawlinson told Wigram. His stay had been an unqualified success; he would be fervently welcomed in Australia; not just because he was Prince of Wales ‘but as a personal matter between the soldiers and himself’. The Prince was nervous about his forthcoming visit to General Pershing, Rawlinson went on, ‘but it is both right and necessary for him to be with the Americans for a period’.
The Prince had in fact long been anxious to see something of Pershing and the 2nd US Army. In common with most British he had been quick to denounce the ‘rotten Americans’ who sat back and let the allies do the fighting. ‘They said they were “too proud to fight”; I have never heard such rot!! Of course it is their game to keep out of it.’
But once they were in the war, his enthusiasm for their efficiency and fighting qualities rapidly grew. They welcomed him rapturously at their headquarters at Coblenz and put twenty thousand men on parade to honour him, making some of them march twenty-five miles for this privilege. The Prince professed mild surprise: ‘How far more democratic we really are, and the American discipline is really fearfully strict.’
Yet the spirit of the men, the quality of the drill and turnout, the immense vitality and exuberance, impressed him profoundly. ‘They are a big power in the world now,’ he told his father, ‘I might say the next biggest after ourselves, and they are worth while making real friends with … I’m just crammed full of American ideas just now, and they want me to “go over to them” as soon as possible, which is another item for consideration and one that should not be “pigeon-holed”.’
His time with the Australians and Americans took him into occupied Germany. He found himself billeted at Bonn in the home of the Kaiser’s sister, Vicky, Princess of Schaumburg-Lippe, and was outraged to find photographs of his family displayed in the principal rooms – ‘I feel so ashamed, however one is consoled by the thought that we’ve “cut them right out” for ever!!’ He was still more annoyed when the Princess addressed him as ‘dear’ and told him that the Germans would have been able to continue the war for several years but for the revolution. Rather grudgingly he admitted that she seemed ‘a nice enough woman for a Hun’, no doubt because she was ‘one third English’.
He had no doubt that the Germans must be ruthlessly crushed and complained to the King about the ‘idiotically mild and lenient treatment of this —— Hun population. No one,’ he claimed, with more justice than usually accompanies such a boast, ‘is more against a bullying spirit than I am, as that would only place us on the same level as the Huns … But we are not making these Huns feel that they are beaten … There is no danger of serious fraternization as, thank goodness, the infantry and in fact all the men, still loathe the Huns and despise them. Of course, as regards the women, well all women in the world are made the same way, whether German or Japanese or any race you like, so that isn’t fraternization, it’s medicinal …’
The spirit behind these words was neither magnanimous nor far-sighted. It was, however, shared by almost every junior officer, indeed by every soldier, in the allied armies. They read curiously in the light of later charges that he had been pro-German from his childhood and thus an easy convert to Nazi doctrines.
‘I just don’t know what’s happened to me since “this ’ere armistice”,’ the Prince told Joey Legh in mid-December. ‘I’m so mad and restless that I can’t sit down to think and write.’
Sitting down and thinking was never to be one of his favoured activities, but the end of the war found him exceptionally agitated. He knew that what he was doing was of value, and did not dislike doing it, but at the same time he itched to escape from his military harness and address himself to his real profession. ‘I know that there is an enormous amount of work waiting for me in England, that is really why I’m so anxious to return and to “get down to it”,’ he told his father. Whether he would find the work tolerable once he had embarked on it, he did not know, but it was his future and he had better confront it now than later. He was more than ready for a change: ‘This makes the 6th Division I’ve visited in under a fortnight and it is wearing work.’
He felt qualms about his ability to do the job ahead of him but also believed that he had qualifications lacking in any previous Prince of Wales and, still more, in King George V. There can be few sons in the same line of business as their father who do not from time to time believe that they have a monopoly of prescience and the spirit of progressiveness. The Prince was convinced that his father had failed to come to terms with the realities of the post-war world. In this belief he was fortified by the Queen. ‘I sadly fear Papa does not yet realize how many changes this war will have brought about,’ his mother wrote apprehensively.
She did less than justice to the King, who could hardly have failed to notice the maelstrom which threatened to consume the heartlands of Europe. Bolshevik revolution had triumphed in Russia and was now rampant in Germany. ‘It all makes one feel anxious about the future,’ wrote the King; ‘all this sort of thing is very infectious, although thank God everything seems to be all right in this dear old country.’
The Prince was very doubtful whether all was right in Britain, or at least whether all would continue to be right once the euphoria of victory had subsided.
He was certain that he understood the fears and aspirations of his future people far better than his father ever would and at least as well as any from the despised legion of politicians. His years with the Army had given him an opportunity denied to any other prince of getting to know the common man. This knowledge was, in part at least, illusory. He could never shed the prejudices of his caste and generation. When he heard that two of his closest friends had been transferred to the front line, he wrote that he hoped it was not true, ‘as we must have a few “gentlemen” left after the war … I’m afraid that’s rather a snobbish thing to say, tho’ I mean it, and so I suppose I’m a snob!!!!’
He never doubted that, by training as well as breeding, ‘gentlemen’ were best qualified to run the country.
But unlike many of his contemporaries, he did not believe that the country was made for gentlemen. He knew that the men who had fought for Britain deserved more from society than they had enjoyed in the years before the war: better pay, better houses, better education for their children and treatment for their sicknesses. If their rulers failed to provide such treatment then they were not worthy to be rulers, were indeed not worthy of the title of ‘gentlemen’. His creed was simpliste perhaps, but it was generous and sincerely held. The war had left him a more thoughtful, socially conscious and open-minded man. At the end of May 1919 he received the Freedom of the City of London. Talking of his life as a soldier he told his audience:
The part I played was, I fear, a very insignificant one, but from one point of view I shall never regret my periods of service overseas. In those four years I mixed with men. In those four years I found my manhood. When I think of the future, and the heavy responsibilities which may fall to my lot, I feel that the experience gained since 1914 will stand me in good stead.
On the whole, it did.
5
L’Éducation Sentimentale
IT IS A TRUTH UNIVERSALLY ACKNOWLEDGED, THAT A SINGLE man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. When that man is not only in possession of a good fortune but is heir to the throne of Great Britain, the want becomes imperious necessity. From the moment the Prince of Wales advanced into adolescence, the need to find him a suitable wife began to preoccupy the King and Queen, their advisers, and increasingly the Prince himself.
Traditionally, spouses for the royal children were drawn from the courts of Europe, most of which were intricately bound together in a great web of cousinship that was the delight of genealogists and the despair of less well-equipped historians. This avoided not only adulteration of the blood royal but also the embarrassment involved in raising any individual noble family above the others by admitting it to relationship with the throne. When Queen Victoria’s daughter, Princess Louise, married the future Duke of Argyll, the precedent was felt by many to be a dangerous one. Certainly such a match would never have done for a likely occupant of the throne. If the Prince of Wales, when young, did not share this view, he kept his doubts to himself. Whether he would have married Princess May must be uncertain, but that he would in the end have married some European princess is highly probable.
Then came the First World War, and in an instant many of the possible brides were transformed into enemy aliens. An already difficult problem became almost insoluble. ‘I hope some day you will find the woman who will make you happy!’ Queen Mary wrote to her eldest son, ‘but I fear this will not be easy as so much will have to be considered.’
The Prince was not over-worried by the inevitable delays. Physically slow to mature, he enjoyed the companionship of women but felt no strong urge to consummate the relationship. ‘I hope you are home by now,’ he wrote to a Grenadier friend in May 1916, ‘and having a jolly good time and are appeasing your sexual hunger, which I more than understand, tho’ don’t actually experience it myself, strange to say.’
With some fellow officers he visited a brothel in Calais and watched naked prostitutes striking a series of what were considered to be erotic attitudes. ‘A perfectly filthy and revolting sight,’ he called it, ‘but interesting for me as it was my first insight into these things!!’
A little later all was changed. Towards the end of 1916 his equerries, Claud Hamilton and Joey Legh, decided that his virginity had been unhealthily protracted, took him to Amiens, gave him an excellent dinner with much wine, and entrusted him to the experienced hands of a French prostitute called Paulette. ‘She brushed aside his extraordinary shyness,’ recorded Lord Esher, to whom the Prince recounted a censored version of his experience.
Paulette herself was permanently attached to an officer of the Royal Flying Corps and only on loan to the Prince for that and a few subsequent evenings, but she did her job with tact and skill. ‘A heavenly little woman of the kind,’ the Prince described her.
From that moment, sex became one of the Prince’s most urgent preoccupations. ‘Oh! to set eyes on one of the darlings again,’ he wrote in anguish from the front in France, ‘how one does miss them, and I don’t think of anything but women now, tho what’s the use?’
At Sandringham, in January 1917, they sang in the drawing room after dinner and the Prince then settled down to his crochet work. ‘What an occupation for a fellow on leave!!’ he complained in his diary. Shooting pheasants was as empty a pastime as patience or crocheting: ‘I can’t raise much enthusiasm over … anything except women!!’
His new pursuit sometimes proved hazardous. In Paris, in July 1917, he spent ‘3 days bliss’ which disturbed him so profoundly that he was quite unable to settle down and write letters for several days afterwards: ‘It’s fearful what a change in my habits 48 hours of the married life in Paris has wrought.’
Unfortunately his inability to write letters did not extend to Maggy, the object of his passions, and when he tried to disentangle himself he found that his emotional effusions were held against him. ‘I got a regular stinker from her this evening …’ he ruefully told Joey Legh. ‘Oh! those bloody letters, and what a fool I was not to take your advice over a year ago!! How I curse myself now, tho’ if only I can square this case it will be the last one, as she’s the only pol I’ve really written to and the last!! … I’m afraid she’s the £100,000 or nothing type, tho’ I must say I’m disappointed and didn’t think she’d turn nasty: of course the whole trouble is my letters and she’s not burnt one!!’
The Prince never lost his touching belief that if one asked a woman to burn a letter, she would infallibly do so. Some of his correspondents seem to have done so, more did not. Maggy, however, proved that he had been right in his first judgment of her; having given her delinquent lover a nasty fright she let the matter drop.
Paulette and Maggy were excellent fun for a night or two. He was long in losing his taste for these diversions and planned to continue them once the war was over. But he did not delude himself that such affairs had anything to do with love, still less with matrimony. Until Mrs Simpson entered and monopolized his life he never found casual sex incompatible with a grand passion; indeed the first seemed sometimes positively to enhance the second. From the age of twenty-two or so until the day he died he was never out of love, occasionally with two women at the same time, far more often obsessively with one.
His first great love, almost certainly unconsummated, was for Marion Coke, wife of Viscount ‘Tommy’ Coke, heir to the Earl of Leicester. Small and vivacious, fond of much laughter, song and dance, she provided a delectable relief after the sombre splendours of the Palace. At first it was ‘Marion is a little dear’, always ready for a ‘delightful talk’; then she became ‘a little darling and I’m afraid I love her’; then, ‘Marion is heavenly and I love her more and more’.
In 1917, by which time he had discovered that women were not solely for delightful talks, he became more ardent. ‘Dear Lady Coke’ had long given way to ‘Dear Marion’, now she became ‘My dearest Marion’. (‘By the way, of course I burn all your letters as I’m sure you do mine,’ he concluded one such letter,
though Marion proved as unreliable as Maggy when it came to this searching test.) ‘How can I express to you all I feel about it or thank you for everything?’ he asked after his leave in London had proved particularly enjoyable. ‘C’est impossible, tho’ you know how much I long to and do in my thoughts. You have been too angelically kind to me for words and have absolutely changed my life; it is so wonderful to feel I have someone I can really confide in as you have let me do!! In your own words, “You now have your little M C” absolutely expresses my feelings and it does make all the difference as you may imagine.’
The 5th Earl of Leicester told Frances Donaldson that his father had once warned the Prince of Wales not to see so much of his wife.
Certainly if Lady Coke had fallen in with the Prince’s lunatic scheme to join him and Claud Hamilton in Paris, her husband would have had good cause to complain. She was far too sensible, however. Twelve years older than the Prince, she knew that her role was principally that of confidante and comforter.
When he visited Bombay some years later his equerry, Bruce Ogilvy, noted his failure to flirt with any of the half dozen attractive girls provided to entertain him, and wrote in his diary, ‘I think that what he liked was being “Mothered”.’
‘Liked’ is too weak a word, he craved for it, could hardly live without it. That a young man unable to establish a warm relationship with his own mother should seek a substitute elsewhere is so much a psychological cliché as to deserve to be treated with grave suspicion. At the end of the war he had in fact grown close to the Queen. But whether because of deprivation as a child or for some other reason, it was not enough. He looked for maternal qualities in every woman he knew well, and Marion Coke dutifully mothered him. She remained a prominent figure in his life until the advent of Freda Dudley Ward in the spring of 1918 drove all other women temporarily from his mind.
She did not reign alone, however. The Prince of Wales, in the last years of war, came closer to marriage than he was to for another fifteen years. Even with the memory of his Parisian idyll fresh in his mind he wrote in his diary, ‘How I long for some leave to see Marion again and P!!!!’ Before he left London in May 1917 he bade ‘tender farewells’ to Lady Coke, and ‘fond farewells’ to P.
P was Portia – Lady Sybil – Cadogan, one of the five daughters of Earl Cadogan. She was unlike most of the women he loved in that she was a large and clumsy girl; handsome rather than pretty, a powerful personality, as enthusiastic a dancer as Marion Coke but with less of her charm and spontaneous gaiety. She was a close friend of and later a maid of honour to Princess Mary and the Prince first got to know her at Windsor in the spring of 1915. They played golf together and talked endlessly; within a few days he was writing in his diary, ‘She was looking more lovely and attractive than ever and we had a delightful talk; I am really smitten now!!’
They began to correspond (Portia Cadogan was one of those who seems to have heeded his injunction to burn his letters) and Princess Mary, who was delighted to act as go-between, sent her brother a signed photograph of his beloved. Prince Albert, who seems also to have been attracted by her,
lent a hand in the romance as well. ‘I am enclosing a letter from the “Angel” Portia … ’ he wrote. ‘I am always going to forward her letters on to you now.’
The romance came to a peak early in 1916. While in London in January he contrived to see her most days and nights. On 5 January, after driving half a dozen times round St James’s Park and enjoying a protracted farewell at her house, he recorded that he had had ‘the best night I have had since the war began’. A fortnight later it was, without qualification, ‘the best night I have ever had’. They dined at the Carlton, went to a musical at the Gaiety, and then danced for two hours to the gramophone. ‘It was divine, particularly as I’m madly in love with her!! Oh, if only – But I must be careful even in a diary.’ A fortnight later again they ‘fixed up certain things’ and the following night the Prince returned surreptitiously to Portia’s house after formally dropping her off at the front door. ‘She let me in and we sat talking till after 1.30. What a joyous 2 hours alone with my “angel”. How the time did fly; we talked about every sort of thing; better not to mention what!! … What it is to be in love!!’
That matrimony was one of the ‘things’ discussed cannot be proved but seems more than likely. What happened then is hard to establish. The romance continued in full fury and even at the beginning of 1917 he could still remark that ‘it was wonderful to see HER again’. But on that same wonderful night he and Claud Hamilton dropped Portia off at her home at 12.30 and then went on to a party where Marion Coke was awaiting them: ‘I took sweet little Marion home and she bid me a tender farewell.’
Whether Portia Cadogan took offence at having to share her admirer’s affections, whether she despaired of bringing him to the point, or whether she just got bored of him: in June 1917 she abruptly became engaged to the Prince’s old friend from Oxford days, Edward Stanley. The news came as a surprise to everyone, not least her parents, who received a telegram reading ‘Engaged to Edward’ and at once assumed that they would eventually have a daughter on the throne.
The Prince had discussed Portia Cadogan and the possibility of marriage with his mother only a few days before, but nothing had been concluded. The Queen, however, made it clear that nobody was going to bring pressure on him to make an early marriage, still less to someone he did not love. This did something to relieve his disappointment, but: ‘How depressed I am,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘I suppose it’s Portia having gone West, for of course that talk with Mama has cheered me up and taken a big weight off my mind.’
The affair had been conducted with remarkable discretion. Godfrey Thomas, who always felt the Prince should not marry a commoner, welcomed Portia’s engagement, ‘if only for the reason that a lot of people in London were beginning to talk about her and the Prince himself, people I mean who might have been thought to know, not just the usual gossipers’.
The ‘usual gossipers’ never seem to have mentioned Portia Cadogan’s name, and the survivors among those ‘who might have been thought to know’ were often equally in the dark. Many other names, however, were mentioned in connection with the Prince: Claud Hamilton’s sister Cynthia; Irene Lawley; Diana Manners; Rachel Cavendish – ‘a very pretty girl, and sensible too,’ noted George V approvingly;
and, most frequently of all, Rosemary Leveson-Gower. There was ‘wild excitement’ during the Prince of Wales’s leave in March 1918, recorded Cynthia Asquith. ‘No girl is allowed to leave London … and every mother’s heart beats high. So far, he dances most with Rosemary and also motors with her in the daytime.’
Rosemary Leveson-Gower was indeed a natural subject for such gossip. Her father had been the 4th Duke of Sutherland; her mother, born Lady Millicent St Clair-Erskine, was one of the great beauties of her generation; she herself was strikingly attractive, charming and, by all accounts, generous and kind as well. There is, however, no evidence in the Prince’s diaries or correspondence that he ever thought of her as more than pleasant company. To Lady Coke, perhaps unsurprisingly, he described her without great enthusiasm as ‘quite attractive and pretty … tho’ she is rather spoilt’.
In September 1917 he had mentioned to his mother that he had seen her when visiting the Duchess of Sutherland’s hospital and had thought her ‘attractive tho’ very cold’.
The Queen took mild alarm, presumably lest her son might view the coldness as a challenge. ‘I agree Rosemary is attractive,’ she wrote, ‘but pray don’t think of her, there is a taint in the blood of her mother’s family.’
Her comment related, presumably, to an alleged strain of madness in the St Clair-Erskine family which was much gossiped about at the time, rather than to the somewhat chequered career of Rosemary’s uncle, Lord Rosslyn. ‘I didn’t mean I was really struck,’ the Prince hurriedly protested. ‘You need have no fear of my having any designs on her!!’
Probably he protested a little too much; he certainly paid Rosemary marked attentions during the first months of 1918. Lady Rosemary does not seem to have been overwhelmed by these enticing prospects. ‘What a good thing I never contemplated marrying the Prince of Wales merely for the sake of the glamour,’ she wrote to her mother after her own marriage to the future Lord Dudley. Now she had ‘got all that as well as Eric’.
At all events, any incipient romance was checked when that February he met the first of the two great loves of his life, Freda Dudley Ward.
They met by chance some time in February 1918, when the Prince was at a dance in Belgrave Square and Mrs Dudley Ward, with her escort of the evening, took shelter in the doorway when an air raid warning sounded. The couple were invited in, the Prince was immediately attracted to the interloper and danced with her for the rest of the evening. Next day he wrote to ‘Mrs Dudley Ward’ to suggest a further meeting. Freda’s mother-in-law, with whom she was staying, first assumed that the letter must be for her, then that it referred to her unmarried daughter. She invited the Prince to tea and tried to send Freda out for the occasion, but her well-meaning efforts were thwarted and the happy couple were soon reunited. The association was to last some fifteen years.
Freda – Winifred, to give her the full name by which she was never known – Dudley Ward was small, elegant and exceptionally pretty. Some people underestimated her, but no one seems to have disliked her. She was intelligent and no worse educated than most British ladies of the time, funny, lively, a passionate and accomplished dancer, a good golfer and tennis player. A strong personality, she contrived to appear feminine and frail; Cynthia Asquith’s somewhat contemptuous description, ‘a pretty little fluff’,
was a complete misjudgment of a woman whose independence of mind was no less striking than her tact and discretion.
A few weeks younger than the Prince of Wales, she was of bourgeois stock; her father, Colonel Charles Birkin, was a prosperous lace-manufacturer from Nottingham. When only nineteen she married William Dudley Ward, ‘Duddie’, a Liberal member of parliament and kinsman of the Earl of Dudley. Dudley Ward was sixteen years older than his wife; no doubt he had loved Freda when he married her but by 1918 the couple led largely separate lives. An affair between his wife and the heir to the throne, provided it was conducted with due decorum, would have seemed to him acceptable, even commendable. He could be confident that, with Freda in charge of the liaison, it would never be less than decorous.
Though the Prince quickly made it obvious that he was over-whelmingly attracted by Freda, the relationship had little chance to burgeon until he came back to London early in 1919. For the next four years or so it was all-consuming. No letters survive from this early period but the Prince had a compulsive need to pour out his heart on paper and in 1921 and 1922 he was writing to her at least once a day whenever they were separated, and often when they were not. One day in August 1922 he wrote to her at 9 a.m., noon, 6 p.m. and 11.30 p.m., also fitting in a long telephone call just before dinner. The first surviving letter is dated 18 November 1920. ‘Fredie darling, beloved à moi,’ it read, ‘I feel ever, ever so much better since our little talk on the phone this evening, sweetheart; you just can’t think what a huge comfort it was to your little David just to hear your divine little voice again which I wanted to hear so much this morning. I’m terribly lonely tonight my Fredie darling and it maddens me to be away from TOI; it seems all wrong somehow when we love each other as we do.’ At 2 a.m., before he went to bed, he dashed off another brief note: ‘I must tell you once again how far more crazily and madly and overwhelmingly I love you love you my Fredie darling, and how utterly down and out I am tonight at the thought of not seeing you for 12 bloody days.’
These letters strike the notes which would become familiar to anyone who studied the correspondence in full: genuine and passionate devotion marred by a strident self-pity that bores and sometimes repels. In almost every letter he bemoans his uniquely unhappy lot: the miseries of being Prince of Wales, trapped in a routine that was wearisome and futile, surrounded by hostile relations and treacherous servants, starved of the company of the one person who could have made him happy. It is indeed an unhappy condition to be in love with a married woman, and still more so when there seems no possible way by which the situation can be improved; but it must have taken all Freda Dudley Ward’s resolution to provide the constant consolation and reassurance that was demanded by her lover. Endlessly he poured out to her his fears and woes. ‘Fredie darling, I love you love you now beyond all understanding and all I can say is bless you, bless you, for being so sweet and divine and tender and sympathique to your David last night and for saving him, mon amour. And you know that the truth is I was on the verge of a mental disaster or whatever you like to call it … that might have been permanent.’
He knew that his insatiable demands for reassurance were unreasonably taxing and apologized constantly for his weakness – ‘You have made me feel so terribly badly as regards my foul grousing and unpardonable glooms’
– but he could no more have cut off the flow of desolation than he could have ended the relationship.
Freda Dudley Ward, as nobody else was able to do before the advent of Mrs Simpson, gave him the strength he needed. She alone could cheer him up when he was in the blackest depression, could cajole or bully him back to the path of duty. Without her he could manage, but at a fearful cost to his nerves and to conspicuously less good effect. When on his foreign tours, he constantly inveighed against the cruel fate that separated them and agonized over the strain of keeping going without her support. His tone was sometimes hysterical, but essentially he wrote no more than the truth.
She was an excellent influence on him. She made him drink and smoke less – though herself a chain smoker; she encouraged him to do what he was best at; she laughed him out of his occasional absurdities. She fostered his genuine concern for the injustices of society and tried, to less good effect, to broaden his intellectual horizons. Once she gave him a copy of Wuthering Heights to read. ‘Who is this woman Bront?’ he asked dubiously.’
She told him home truths in a way nobody else did, yet never forfeited his total confidence. ‘Self-pity is a most degrading thing,’ he wrote, ‘and you’ve driven all mine right away and about time too. I know I’m hopelessly spoilt and therefore discontented … I’m so grateful to you for showing me myself … and it’s the first time I had a look at “the brute” for months!! But now I can see how utterly ridiculous and futile he is, and I’ll try and reform him a bit in Canada.’ And then a cry of pain: ‘If only I didn’t feel so lonely nowadays.’
Great though her influence was, she was reticent in using it and never did so to her own advantage. The Prince’s Comptroller, Sydney Greville, once reported a scare over the Prince ‘rushing off to appoint a nominee of Mrs Dudley Ward’ as equerry,’
but there is no other suggestion that she interfered in the running of the royal household. On the contrary, all the Prince’s staff liked her and welcomed her; ‘one of the best friends he ever had in his life,’ Bruce Ogilvy described her.
As she was to discover herself in due course, there was only room for one great love in the Prince’s life. Any previous claimant to the title was ruthlessly discarded. Portia Stanley appeared at a shooting party at Sandringham. ‘I stood no rot from her,’ reported the Prince. ‘She only stood with me at one drive and that was because she asked to and it was tricky to say NO. I loathe that woman, and it maddens me her showing herself in here like this.’
He was fiercely jealous of any rival. Freda’s admirer of long standing was Lord Pembroke’s younger brother, Michael Herbert. The Prince was in torment whenever he knew that the two were likely to meet. She wrote to him from Lady Desborough’s home to report that, though Herbert was in the house party, she had seen little of him. ‘Good! good! and more! more!’ applauded the Prince. ‘I do love to hear that and I bet he tried hard enough to get you alone and he must have been furious too!! I’m so so glad and happy darling.’
In return he constantly assured her that he found all other women dull and unattractive, and she professed to be upset if he seemed to favour one or other of them. She wrote crossly when he was seen at the Grafton Galleries with Edwina Mountbatten. ‘I’m sorry if I annoyed you …’ he wrote penitently, ‘though I hate your putting it that Edwina took me. Darling, no bloody woman takes me anywhere and it was Dickie who suggested it and I couldn’t see any harm … But I’m sorry my sweetheart, though please don’t think that I’m led around by other women.’
In these first hectic years, indeed, to all effects there was no other woman. His intimates continued to hope otherwise. In Canada at the end of 1919 Claud Hamilton believed he might propose to the lady who was subsequently to marry Joey Legh – ‘if only “it” would happen, it would be the most wonderful thing in the world and save the British Empire’.
But such hopes were illusory. When he visited Kyoto during his tour of Japan the geishas wanted to take the rings off his hand. He let them remove the signet ring ‘but naturally not yours my sweetheart and it took me quite a time to assure them that I wasn’t engaged!! If only they knew how very heavily married I am, darling angel.’
He found in Freda Dudley Ward’s home the family life that was lacking – or that he convinced himself was lacking – at court. He loved her two daughters, and would call in to see them even when their mother was away. ‘The babies were in marvellous shape,’ he wrote after one such visit, ‘and I can never tell you what they didn’t do to me, from binding me up on the floor with ribbands and pulling my hair etc etc. I do adore those divine little girls of yours, sweetheart, and love playing with 2 wee editions of Fredie!!’
They for their part treated him as a much-loved uncle and pined for his visits. Towards the end of the Second World War the elder daughter, Angela Laycock, wrote to him: ‘It is so many years since I last saw you that I suppose I can no longer start my letters “Darling Little Prince” though that is how I should like to begin … You can’t imagine how much I miss you still, after all this time. You see, my childhood is so full of happy, happy memories and you are bound up in all of them.’
His own siblings abetted the romance. Princess Mary forwarded the letters which he wrote to Freda almost every day from France, slipping out to post them when her French governess had her back turned.
Prince Albert kept the home fires burning when his brother was on tour: ‘She is miserable now without you and feels quite lost … I will look after Freda for you to the best of my ability.’
Not surprisingly, the King and Queen were less enthusiastic about their son’s liaison. The King had never met Mrs Dudley Ward and considered her social background made her inappropriate as a friend for his eldest son, let alone anything more intimate. Though time modified his attitude, his first assumption was that she was a pernicious influence and should be cut out of the Prince’s life. ‘Papa seems to think that anything you do which he doesn’t like has been influenced by Fredie,’ warned Prince Albert. ‘This of course is due to the great popularity which you have everywhere, and Papa is merely jealous.’
The Queen was quick to indignation if she thought that her son was allowing his mistress to distract him from the course of duty. On one occasion he asked if he might miss a court function. Queen Mary knew that he wanted instead to go to a dance which Freda Dudley Ward was attending. ‘I was aghast when I read your letter,’ she wrote. ‘It would be very rude to us were you not to come tonight.’ ‘A pretty hot letter!!’ was the Prince’s rueful comment when he passed it on to Mrs Dudley Ward.
Such rebukes did not shake his affection for the Queen. ‘My mother is sweet to me and so sensible,’ he told Freda; ‘there’s really no rot about her although she is a martinette. But that is her upbringing and no fault of hers, and she really is a wonderful woman.’
But inevitably this new, all-important association eroded the relationship which had been built up between mother and son. ‘Curious David does not confide in you any more,’ commented the King in 1922. ‘I suppose he only does so to her.’
What evidence there is suggests that, for the first eighteen months or so of their affair, Freda Dudley Ward cared as deeply for the Prince as he for her. It could not endure at such intensity. Mrs Dudley Ward needed someone who was more regularly in her life than the itinerant Prince, whose friendship posed less social problems, who was more sophisticated and less doting. He was made miserable when, in the summer of 1920, Freda tried to cool down his ardour and to put the relationship on to a new, more platonic basis. ‘So you have heard from Fredie at last,’ the recently created Duke of York wrote to him. ‘It must have depressed you and worried you a good deal, I know, but whatever she says I know you will listen to.’
Michael Herbert remained a threat. For a time Mrs Dudley Ward kept her two admirers in uneasy balance; each grudgingly acquiescing in the claims of the other. Then in 1922, when the Prince was in the Far East, there was talk of divorce. ‘What I can’t get at is when you intend to divorce Duddie, my beloved,’ wrote the puzzled Prince. ‘Will it all be going on when I return or do you intend to wait till we can discuss it all, or what? Also, are you going to divorce him or is he going to divorce you?’ The thought that disturbed him most was that, once free, Freda might marry Herbert or somebody else. ‘I can’t bear the thought that our lives should have to be in any way different to what they’ve been for the last 4 years.’ If the divorce was to go through, then it would obviously be essential that he keep well out of the limelight: ‘… if I’m in the way for the present you will tell me, won’t you? … I’m making the very biggest sacrifice that I’ll ever make in my whole life by writing to you what I am tonight my sweet Freda, and I’m crying a bit, though as I love you love you I do want so to help you too. It is so so terribly hard and cruel to be away from you at a time of crisis.’
Talk of a divorce blew over and by the time he had reached Japan he had reassured himself that their love affair would survive unimpaired. He wrote from Kyoto to tell her ‘how I’ve missed you and pined for TOI my precious beloved, and how I’m always wanting TOI and yearning for you!! And I know from your letters that you’ve felt the same, Fredie, and the fact that both still feel as mad as we ever did is a real test, isn’t it, darling angel?’
He deluded himself. She was devoted to him, loyal to him, but she no longer loved him madly. When he got back to England later that year, it was to find that the reputation of her children was advanced as a reason for their seeing less of each other. Reluctantly he accepted the excuse: ‘We are indeed a hunted and pathetic little couple, aren’t we, Fredie, but nobody can stop us loving each other.’
The unhappiness and frustration caused by Freda Dudley Ward’s coolness towards him drove him to seek solace in drink, night clubs and the ostentatious pursuit of other women. Many of the accounts of the Prince of Wales misbehaving in public stem from this period. In the spring of 1923 it seems to have come to a head. Freda must have stated bluntly that their relationship could never be what it had been and that he would have to content himself with friendship. ‘I’m at last beginning to realize what I’ve lost through going quite quite mad … in April,’ he wrote despairingly, ‘though I suppose it’s too late now … Oh! Fredie – I just don’t understand a thing about life except that it’s all d—d hard and foul and cruel, and I’m so depressed and puzzled about it all.’
To solace his woes he indulged in a brief fling with Audrey Coats, a girl who as Audrey James had played havoc with a wide swathe of London society. Mr Coats, however, was evidently less complaisant than Mr Dudley Ward. ‘Never have I had such an exciting week as this,’ the Prince told Freda from a house party at Drummond Castle, in which the Coatses were among the guests, ‘and the air is electric and it’s all too tricky for words. I’m quite exhausted and shall be lucky if I escape without the hell of a row …’ But though he found Mrs Coats attractive and enjoyed his affair with her, he was being entirely sincere when he told his true love: ‘I’m not madly in love and never will be again, and she’ll never mean a fraction to me of what you do.’
There were to be many such meaner beauties of the night but the moon of Freda Dudley Ward reigned supreme, and was to continue to do so until all other luminaries were dimmed by the solar splendour of Mrs Simpson.
Freda was sometimes painfully honest in her efforts to keep the Prince at bay. ‘I can’t help hating and loathing the fact that you are in love with somebody else and it was a big blow when you told me the other day,’ he wrote to her. ‘It’s a horrid thought for me that I really mean nothing whatever to you now, though you mean the hell of a lot to me, bless you.’
He did, of course, mean a great deal to her, and was to do so for many years. He for his part continued to treat her as confidante and friend; she remained the lodestar of his life, he reported back to her faithfully after every new amatory or other escapade. To the outside world – or at least those parts of the outside world which were near enough to the inside to know of Mrs Dudley Ward’s existence – they remained inextricably linked. In 1927 Churchill travelled in the same train as they to Nottingham – ‘It was quite pathetic to see the Prince and Freda. His love is so obvious and undisguisable’; the following year Brian Howard refused to let his seaside house to the Prince – ‘He’d only break all the furniture to pieces playing Blind Man’s Buff with Mrs Dudley Ward’; a year later again the Prince’s equerry, John Aird, was relieved to find that his employer wanted to leave Epsom as soon as the Derby was over. Then Freda Dudley Ward appeared on the scene. ‘The result being that we now waited to see the next race and in consequence the car was blocked all the way back.’
Though the Prince’s devotion to Mrs Dudley Ward continued unabated throughout the 1920s and well into the next decade, it was for him in some ways an unfulfilling, even sterile relationship. He craved total mutual devotion and dependence; deprived of it, he thrashed about aimlessly, causing pain to many in so doing and most notably to himself. The relationship was not close enough to satisfy him, yet it was too close to permit any more permanent liaison. While Mrs Dudley Ward reigned, there could be no Princess of Wales. In 1922 he described to Freda his feelings towards her younger sister Vera: ‘I love Verie a tiny bit for herself, though more because she is your sister and still more because you love her so!! You will remember our discussing her as a possible wife for me, darling, but each day longer that I live, the more certain I am that I’ll never never ever love anyone else again. And I would never marry any woman I liked unless I loved her!!’
Seven years later nothing had changed. ‘I know our two lives aren’t absolutely satisfactory and I’m afraid they won’t ever be now, but I do know this, my angel: that I love you too much to ever be able to love anybody else ever again. I’m always comparing and they can’t any of them compare and I’m so glad. I lost my head once over a crazy physical attraction. Look at the result. Just made a fool of myself, that’s all. Nothing left of it but nausea.’
One page survives from a reproachful letter written to him by one of the women with whom he tried to solace the pain of Freda Dudley Ward’s inaccessibility. ‘I only hope,’ the page concludes, ‘that as you love her so much, Freda will marry you and make you very happy.’
The words were presumably ironic; the writer must have known that the idea of marriage with the Prince of Wales never entered the head of Mrs Dudley Ward. How far it entered the head of the Prince is harder to decide. He said often that Freda was the solitary woman whom he could marry; yet the only person who stated positively that he had proposed to her and been rejected was Lord Brownlow.
Brownlow knew the Prince well but it is curious that there is no reference to any such démarche in the Prince’s many surviving letters. The implication in his correspondence, indeed, is that he had never contemplated any such possibility. His lament was always that he had not known her before 1913, the year of her marriage;
once she had become Mrs Dudley Ward she had put herself for ever out of his reach.
If he had known her before 1913 he would have been too immature to pay her any serious attention. It is tempting to speculate, however, on what would have happened if Dudley Ward had died in battle and Freda, when he met her in 1918, had been not an estranged wife but a decorously merry widow. Could he and would he have married her, and if so, what difference would it have made?
The fact that she was a commoner would have created difficulties but would not have made the match impossible. As late as 1932 the Prince of Wales told his father that he had never realized he might be allowed to marry ‘a suitable well-born English girl’. No one had ever suggested the possibility to him before, he said, ‘There was only one lady he had ever wished to marry and that was Mrs Dudley Ward – and he would still like to marry her. But the King said he didn’t think that would do.’
The Prince’s ignorance is extraordinary; the matter had constantly been debated over the previous fifteen years. All the evidence suggests that if he did not know that he might be allowed to marry a British commoner it was because he had not asked. And if he did not ask, it was because he did not wish to know; he was determined not to marry anyone except Freda and preferred to keep in his mind this half-imaginary barrier in the way of matrimony. In fact as early as 1917 George V recorded that he had told the Privy Council his children would be allowed to marry into British families: ‘It was quite a historical occasion.’
The fact that Edward was Prince of Wales would have made the King more cautious about the suitability of any candidate, but nothing was said to indicate that the eldest son was to be treated differently from his siblings. The objection to Rosemary Leveson-Gower had been not that she was a commoner but that there was ‘a taint in the blood’. If the Prince did not know this then he wilfully blinded himself to reality.
A widowed Mrs Dudley Ward would certainly not have seemed suitable to the King and Queen. There would have been strong opposition, possibly too strong to overcome. For one thing the previous marriage, with the problems it would have posed, such as semi-royal stepchildren, would have been a serious obstacle. For another, a lace-manufacturer’s daughter, however respectable, would not have seemed the right sort of match for a British prince, let alone the heir to the throne. But beneath his testiness George V was a kindly and susceptible man, sincerely anxious that his son should find happiness and security. There was at least a chance that the obstinacy of the Prince and the charms of Mrs Dudley Ward would in the end have worn down his resistance. Queen Freda would have seemed a surprising concept to the British people, but so great was the popularity of the Prince of Wales in the years after the war that public opinion would undoubtedly have supported him. It could have happened.
It is also possible to argue that though it could, it would not have happened. The Prince, it has been said, loved Freda Dudley Ward just because she was inaccessible. If she had been free to marry him, he would not have wanted to marry her. Whether he was aware of it or not, the argument goes, he was resolved never to marry; by falling in love with a married woman he was providing himself with an alibi against having to marry anyone else. He was temperamentally unable to accept such a commitment, or perhaps he sought to leave open a route by which he might one day escape the throne.
It is impossible to prove the contrary; where motives are in question it must always be a matter for surmise. The theory, however, does not seem to be supported by what facts there are. He had once been anxious to marry Portia Cadogan; when the time came he was resolved to marry Mrs Simpson; everything he said or did indicated that he would have liked nothing better than to make Freda Dudley Ward his wife. Far from seeking to avoid commitments he sought them with relentless fervour. The lesson to be learnt from the last thirty-five years of his life is surely that, though he might not have been particularly happy as a married man, he was far unhappier as a bachelor.
And if he had been allowed to marry Freda Dudley Ward, or Portia Cadogan, or any other strong woman whom he could have loved; if, like his luckier brother, he had found his own version of Elizabeth Bowes Lyon; would it have made any difference? Might he have become, to use the simpliste but by no means valueless terminology of 1066 and All That, a ‘good king’? One has, of course, not the remotest idea. All that can be said with certainty is that in 1919 the potential was there: the charm, the good will, the enthusiasm, the readiness to learn, the enquiring mind. So too, of course, were the corroding weaknesses; but with the support and encouragement of the right wife the weaknesses might have been overcome and potential become reality. At the least, the reign of King Edward VIII would have taken a very different course.
6
The Role of the Prince
DON’T THINK YOU CAN ACT LIKE OTHER PEOPLE, THE KING warned his son at the end of the war. ‘You must always remember your position and who you are.’ But, the Prince asked himself, ‘who exactly was I?’
He was a man apart, that much was clear, and he loathed it. He did what he could to mitigate his isolation, to treat others and to be treated himself as if he were a normal human being; but though a normal human being was what he was, he would never win acceptance of the fact. Even by those who knew him best he was treated with gingerly deference, as a freak with a touch of the divine, an improbably animated refugee from Madame Tussaud’s. His jokes would be greeted with sycophantic fervour by those who were amazed a prince could joke at all; his peccadilloes were met with extravagant censure by those who did not believe a prince should be vulnerable to the weaknesses of the flesh. Part at least of the sympathy he felt towards Americans came from his conviction – rarely justified – that they would not view him with the curious compound of reverence and resentment that the average Briton adopts towards its monarchy.
That veteran courtier Fritz Ponsonby placed all the Prince’s qualms firmly into focus when he remonstrated with him for making himself too accessible. ‘The Monarchy must always retain an element of mystery,’ he maintained. ‘A Prince should not show himself too much. The Monarchy must remain on a pedestal.’ The Prince flatly disagreed. The last place he wished to be was on a pedestal, he wanted to be down among the people, getting to know them and letting them know him.
There was more truth in both points of view than either party was ready to concede. But the argument was anyway academic. Every time the Prince of Wales tried to descend from his pedestal the British people put him back again. Wherever he went, whatever he did, he was walled around by deferential affection, a barrier imperceptible sometimes but inexorably setting him apart. Even when he first went out with the Pytchley hunt, six stalwart followers were secretly deputed to escort him and to ensure that he returned unharmed.
If he could not be treated as an equal on the hunting field, where a man is traditionally worth no more than his courage, his prowess as a rider and the quality of his horse, then where could he hope to find the sort of acceptance that he craved?
To be isolated was bad enough, to be isolated in inactivity was insupportable. The designated successor to the leadership of some great company or institution will be fully occupied with the specialist duties that fall to him while he is waiting to take over. The heir to some great estate, even in 1919, could busy himself in whatever career he chose until the title and the land became his. The Prince had no specialist duties, yet the tasks that were imposed upon him effectively prevented him pursuing any serious career. His life was divided between furious bouts of what he described as ‘princing’ – opening hospitals, addressing dinners, receiving addresses, smiling, smiling, smiling – and tracts of emptiness which it was up to him to fill as best he could. Geddes, the British Ambassador in Washington, suggested that the Prince would make an ideal Governor General of Canada.
The King insisted that he was needed nearer home. The Queen said that he must ‘learn how to govern’.
Yet little indeed was done to teach him. He was denied access to all but a limited range of state papers, never encouraged to talk to politicians or civil servants. He told Lady Airlie that he realized he must work to keep his job, but was given no work and was not even sure he had a job.
In the middle of the nineteenth century Bagehot had written perceptively of what was now the Prince’s problem: ‘Whatever is most attractive, whatever is most seductive, has always been offered to the Prince of Wales of the day, and always will be. It is not rational to expect the best virtue where temptation is applied in the most trying form at the frailest time of human life.’
The Prince had done no more than taste the flavour of the fleshpots before the war, there had followed four years of dour privation, now everything was his for the taking. If his life had developed as had been expected in 1914 he would have had time to adjust to the heady and dangerous delights of liberty. As it was, he was almost entirely inexperienced. In 1921 he told Freda Dudley Ward that he had been reading Max Beerbohm’s essay on King George IV.
‘I’ve found a sentence in it that I think must be amazingly suitable and applicable to me and somewhat an apology for my doings and behaviour … “He was indeed still a child, for royalties not being ever brought into contact with the realities of life, remain young far longer than other people.” No one realizes how desperately true that is in my case [more] than I do.’
When he surveyed the monstrous banquet of pleasures which the world laid in front of him, and the unsubstantial restraints placed upon his capacity to gratify himself, he might have been inclined to cry with Clive that he stood astonished at his own moderation.
‘I think David ought to return home before very long,’ wrote Queen Mary to the King three weeks after the armistice, ‘as he must help us in these difficult days.’
In a letter that must have chilled the Prince’s heart, Lord Stamfordham sketched out the sort of help that was in question. The King had decreed he should take over the Presidency of the King Edward VII’s Hospital Fund. ‘Then there is the Royal College of Music. The University of Wales is the most pressing as the King really constitutionally ought not to be the Chancellor. Then Your Royal Highness is to be elected a Trustee of the British Museum.’
And so the dismal catalogue went on.
The first essential was to find him a private secretary. Lord Cromer, a former diplomat and banker turned courtier, was the Prince’s original choice, but the King ruled that he could not be spared from his present duties. Next to be canvassed was a former journalist and much-decorated officer in the Brigade of Guards, Edward Grigg, who seemed to accord admirably with Stamfordham’s prescription: ‘someone with brains, with some Colonial knowledge: a facile pen – a nice fellow …’
Grigg, however, hankered after a career less restricted than he would find in royal service. Eventually the job went to Godfrey Thomas, whose diplomatic career had already been interrupted by the Prince’s demands on his time. In his diary the Prince described Thomas as a ‘topper’ and a ‘ripper’ and he wrote to him as ‘my greatest friend and the one man I can trust and who really understands me’.
It was perhaps a feeling that the two men were too close to each other that led the King to question the wisdom of the appointment. The Prince stuck to his guns. Thomas was ‘very able, full of tact, and popular with everyone … in addition to never hesitating to point out or tell me of any failings he may think I am guilty of’.
It proved a good choice. A stronger personality than Thomas might possibly have curbed some of the Prince’s excesses, but more probably the two men would have quarrelled and greater mischief been done than good. Thomas served his master with loyalty and devotion until the abdication.
With a private secretary came an independent household. The Prince insisted that, at twenty-five, he could no longer live under his parents’ roof. ‘I must be free to live my own life,’ he told Lady Airlie.
The King took the line that the roof of Buckingham Palace was quite large enough for two – or twenty for that matter – but he grudgingly gave way and in July 1919 the Prince moved into York House, not so much a house in fact as a fragment of the great complex of St James’s Palace, which grew or shrank according to the needs and pretensions of the occupant. It was not ideal, few good rooms and those north-facing, dark, antiquated, but it suited the new owner’s needs and gave him the privacy and independence he so much desired.
And so, in his new premises, he set up in business as Prince of Wales. Lloyd George still presided over a coalition government elected with a large majority at the end of 1918, but though his personal prestige was high the overwhelming Conservative preponderance in the alliance meant that his position was far less strong than it seemed. The Prince’s views at the time of the election were much as might have been expected from a serving officer: ‘One dreads to think of the Labour people returning a greater number of members … and then all these crazy women candidates; however Lloyd George seems to be all right just now, tho’ one can’t trust him a yard.’ Wigram had been sending him the Scotland Yard reports on the state of opinion among the working classes and he read them with alarm: ‘I’m afraid I’m always a pessimist but the situation looks pretty black just now, tho’ it’s not half as black as it will be in a year’s time, perhaps less than that.’
The problems were going to start when the soldiers were demobilized and expected employment and a decent standard of living. Only radical action could avert disaster: ‘Oh! we’ve got funny, or, rather, serious times before us, but they’ve got to be faced and in the right and proper way and to hell with precedents!! They won’t wash nowadays!!’
He agreed wholeheartedly with his mother when she rejoiced at the defeat of the more extreme socialists in the general election and concluded her letter: ‘If only the Coalition Govt will now hurry up and get the much needed reforms (which the working classes need) passed, they can take the wind out of the sails of the extremists, and I trust they will be wise enough to realize it.’
He returned to a Britain that was riven by class antipathies and violent industrial disputes. ‘One can’t help seeing the work people’s point of view,’ he told the Queen, ‘and in a way it’s only human nature to get as much as one can out of one’s employer.’
He soon found that he sympathized with Lloyd George and the more radical wing of the government and resented the intransigent callousness of the hard-faced men who had done well out of the war. ‘I look on [Lloyd George] as the only possible man living to be PM and feel that if he goes a Labour govt is bound to come in. I have the greatest confidence in him now, tho’ I didn’t use to!!’
That the accession to power of a Labour government would be an evil seemed as obvious to him as it did to 99 per cent of the upper classes, but that the injustices of society required drastic redress and that, if nobody else would do it, it would have to be done by the socialists, seemed quite as evident. ‘It is a very sad and depressing thought that there are so many desperately sad and sordid homes this Christmas,’ he wrote in 1921, ‘destitute men (thousands of them ex-service men) and consequently still more starving women and children.’
Such sentiments are easily voiced, but less easily acted on. The Prince of Wales was no crusader and was disinclined to concern himself with any problem which was not thrust forcibly on his attention. But the unemployment and destitution among so large a part of the population were thrust on his attention, and the issues preoccupied him for many years.
In June 1919 he made the first of the provincial tours which were to be so conspicuous a feature of his public life and were to give him a deeper understanding of British industry and working men than any monarch or heir to the throne had enjoyed before him. He spent four days in south Wales, was taken through the least salubrious slums, and in his speeches laboured constantly ‘the welfare of our ex-service men and the improvement of housing conditions, both of which I have very much at heart’. He went down Cymmr pit in the Rhondda Valley and found chalked on a wall a thousand feet down: ‘Welcome to our soldier Prince. Long may he live.’ He borrowed a piece of chalk and wrote below the slogan: ‘Thank you. Edward, Prince.’
Until his Commonwealth tours were behind him he was not to be put to the task of doing something practical to implement his sincere but vague benevolence. He did, however, manage to fit other provincial visits into the gaps between his voyages abroad. Glasgow, traditionally the most republican and fiercely left-wing of British cities, was a tough assignment. The first day he met with boos or sullen silence, but his patent good will, humility and charm gradually prevailed. ‘It’s with the greatest possible relief and gratitude to the people of Glasgow that I can tell you that I’m more welcome here now than I was yesterday,’ he wrote proudly to Freda Dudley Ward. ‘I’ve driven miles through the streets of this vast city today and the people … have been divine to me and were very kind and enthusiastic. Even the men cheered and far more took off their caps than yesterday and there were only 1⁄2 dozen boos.’ Next day was even better; ‘a large crowd gave me a marvellous send off tonight. To TOI, and TOI only, I say that I do feel I’ve been able to do just a little good propaganda up there and given Communism a knock.’ But he did not delude himself that the royal touch could miraculously cure economic ills: ‘I’m afraid the effect of my visit won’t last very long. Things have gone too far, darling, on the Clyde and I take a very gloomy view of the whole situation.’
In Cardiff three months later he was flabbergasted by the warmth of his reception. ‘They’ve all been divine to me today,’ he told Freda, ‘and I’ve seen hundreds of ex-service men and they were the nicest of the lot. Christ only knows why, for they are all having a real bad time and one is so terribly sorry for them.’
One of his problems was that the local dignitaries sought to swaddle him in pompous formalities, while his pre-occupation was to meet and be seen by as many people as possible. In Lancashire in 1921, for example: ‘Old Lord Derby has organized this tour marvellously, and I’m able to put in an occasional human touch or stunt of my own, so that I think it’s going well, though I’m afraid my ultra-democratic spirit has annoyed him a few times.’ He had his own way over the programme: ‘No waste of time, such as laying foundation stones and opening things, it was all just driving through miles and miles of crowded streets and stopping at groups of ex-service men and schoolchildren.’ But, as he found still more markedly on his tours abroad, the strain of constantly giving himself to the people, exuding warmth and enthusiastic interest for eight or nine hours on end, was sometimes cripplingly oppressive: ‘I’m down to bedrock, my angel, and Christ only knows how I’m going to scrape through the next 2 days.’
Painfully, he acquired the art of public speaking. Churchill appointed himself his coach. Don’t be ashamed to read a speech, he wrote, but in that case ‘do it quite openly, reading it very slowly and deliberately’. Of course it was better to memorize a text or talk from notes. To accommodate the notes, he advised, take a tumbler, put a finger bowl on top of it, put a plate on top of that, and then arrange the notes on top of the plate, ‘but one has to be very careful not to knock it all over, as once happened to me’. This advice was given before a banquet for the allied leaders in July 1919. Whether the Prince followed Churchill’s somewhat alarming system is uncertain. He memorized the speech, however, and evidently delivered it well. ‘You are absolutely right to take trouble about these things,’ wrote Churchill approvingly. ‘With perseverance you might speak as well as anybody in the land, and naturally and gracefully besides.’
The Prince never learned to speak as well as that but he mastered the technique of seeming sincere and spontaneous: ‘He talks very simply,’ wrote Frances Stevenson, Lloyd George’s personal secretary and future wife, ‘just like a schoolboy – saying little things that come into his head as he goes along, and then coming back again to the prepared speech. He charms everyone.’
But he never enjoyed making speeches. On another occasion Frances Stevenson congratulated him on his success. ‘He told me he would never get used to speaking in public – he was far too nervous. “My trouble is that I have not a ready pen,” he said. “I find it so difficult even to prepare a speech …” He is a dear thing, with beautiful eyes, but such a boy.’
The vast estates of the Duchy of Cornwall in London and the West Country gave him a chance to do something practical to help the unemployed and the homeless. He invested a large amount of money in new machinery for the Cornish tin mines, set up a farming concern run on cooperative lines and planted 250 acres of forest on the eastern side of Dartmoor. In London he regularly visited his estates in Kennington and the areas of the borough which he owned were conspicuously better furnished with houses than the parts for which the Council was responsible. At a public meeting the Mayor tried to blame his Council’s shortcomings on the policies of the Duchy. ‘Thereupon the whole Labour party who were in the hall rose and practically hissed the Mayor off the platform.’ The socialist leader in the borough later told Sydney Greville that the Prince, after the interview which he had given them, could do anything he liked with the Labour Party.
His public life directly after the war was not restricted to the University of Wales, the Royal College of Music and the other pressing calls on his time that Stamfordham had enumerated. ‘Other men might be chained to their desks,’ he wrote wryly in his memoirs. ‘I was metaphorically chained to the banquet table.’
A typical day in July 1919 saw him receiving Indian army and navy officers, attending a meeting of the Duchy Council, visiting the Australian YMCA, spending the evening at the Royal College of Music, moving on to a boxing display and ending up at the Embassy night club. In March he was initiated by the Duke of Connaught into the Household Brigade Lodge of the Freemasons. For once it seemed he might be spared a speech, since replies to toasts were traditionally limited to five words, ‘Worshipful Master, I thank you,’ but the rule was waived for the heir to the throne and the Prince had to hold forth about his ‘ardent desire to do his utmost to promote the principles of duty, loyalty and benevolence, on which Freemasonry rested’.
Closer to his heart was his appointment the following year to be Honorary Colonel of the newly formed Welsh Guards. For one who was often to claim that this was the office which meant more to him than any other, his initial reaction was, however, hardly ecstatic. ‘Of course it is inevitable and is only right I suppose and I more than appreciate the honour etc. etc.!!’ he wrote to a friend. ‘But once a Grenadier always a Grenadier!!’
But such diversions were no more than aperitifs to the daunting meal that was to come. It was Lloyd George who first conceived the idea that the Prince should embark on a series of tours around the Empire, ostensibly to visit the soldiers he had met during the war in Europe and the Middle East and to thank their governments and peoples for all they had contributed to the final victory. Lloyd George knew that demands for reform in the structure of the Empire, pent up during the years of fighting, would now be vigorously put forward. Difficult and probably acrimonious negotiations were inevitable. Anything that could be done to ensure that they were conducted in a spirit of unity, and against a background of harmony, would be of the greatest value. Otherwise the strains might prove too great and the Empire disintegrate. ‘The appearance of the popular Prince of Wales,’ Lloyd George maintained, ‘might do more to calm the discord than half a dozen solemn Imperial Conferences.’
The King was not convinced that his son’s apparition would thus magically still the tempest, but he felt that at least it would be a useful stage in the education of a future monarch. Canada had asked first for a visit from the Prince, so Canada would start the series, the other Dominions and parts of the Empire would follow in the next few years. It was a prospect that exhilarated and alarmed the Prince. He longed to travel, but though he had no concept yet of how gruelling his tours would be, he knew well that they would be no joy ride. He would be constantly on parade, scrutinized in every detail of his behaviour, blamed if he were too solemn or too frivolous, criticized for his formality, rebuked for his informality. ‘Your visits to the Dominions will be made or marred according as you do and say the right thing,’ Lord Stamfordham sternly warned him. ‘The Throne is the pivot upon which the Empire will more than ever hinge. Its strength and stability will depend entirely on its occupant.’
The Prince found it troublesome enough always to do and say the right thing in the restricted periods during which he was on duty in the United Kingdom; to have to do so for months at a time under the microscope that is trained upon a royal visitor would test him unreasonably hard. It was with grave qualms that he sailed from Portsmouth on 5 August 1919, on his way to the New World.
7
The First Tours
THE PRINCE’S HAPPINESS, ALMOST HIS SURVIVAL, ON HIS gargantuan tours depended as much as anything on the people who accompanied him. For the trip to Canada Stamfordham recommended a man who, like Thomas and Legh, was to serve him until his reign was over. Admiral Halsey – ‘the Old Salt’ as he was derisively but affectionately nicknamed – was something of a Hansell; sound, honourable, humourless, unimaginative. He was ‘the ideal Chief of Staff’, the Prince told his mother, ‘and I know we are going to be a very happy family’. Needless to say they were not; friction in such a party was almost inevitable, and became completely so when Halsey was matched by a political adviser with unspecified responsibilities, the energetic and somewhat impatient Edward Grigg. Grigg, by family background as well as predilection, was destined to devote the greater part of his life to the service of the British Empire. He was ‘a very exceptional man’, the Prince went on, ‘so clever and able and he has such splendidly broad-minded and far seeing ideas, a great imperialist …’
He was all that, but also assertive, suffered fools badly, and considered Halsey something of a fool. The prospects for harmony were not bright.
In a memorandum which Grigg prepared for the Colonial Secretary, Milner, he observed that the main object of the Prince’s visit was ‘to create an atmosphere. He will do this largely by natural tact and charm.’ But he would have to overcome the feeling in North America that the monarchy was no more than an ‘interesting feudal anachronism’. His speeches should emphasize his ‘appreciation of the political institutions of the Empire and of the very vital place which the Crown takes as the nodus of the whole web. That line is, I think, good for the Canadian as well as the American market.’ Lloyd George minuted dubiously: ‘There must be nothing that would look in USA like a challenge to republican institutions’; an indication of the many tightropes the Prince was going to be required to walk over the next few years as he teetered between America and Canada; Westminster and Dominion governments; federal capital and state capitals; French Canadian and Anglo-Canadian; Boer and rooinek.
When he left Portsmouth, however, the Prince was looking not forward to such problems but backward towards Mrs Dudley Ward. At one point he had tried to persuade her to accompany him to Canada, or at least to meet him there. She had taken the possibility seriously enough to consult Piers Legh’s fiancée about it, but had wisely decided to stay behind.
The Prince was disconsolate and only began to regain his spirits when the battle cruiser, HMS Renown, arrived at St John’s and the demands of the tour left less time for brooding.
‘No enthusiastic mob – seems a dead place on the whole,’ commented Sub-Lieutenant Hutchinson gloomily. ‘Went ashore, but the only thing they seem to sell here is ice-cream.’
He failed to note the Prince’s favourite feature of his arrival, the triumphal arch composed largely of drums of cod-liver oil and festooned with the carcasses of dried codfish.
Nor was the Prince disturbed by the relatively meagre crowds, proudly describing his ‘rapturous reception’ to the King: ‘The fact that my first day in the Dominion was a success has given me confidence for the future.’
What gave him greatest confidence was that he was performing well in public. Godfrey Thomas, who was also in the party, told the Queen, ‘I cannot describe … how well the Prince is speaking.’ The Canadian Prime Minister, Sir Robert Bordern, had been ‘immensely struck and talked of nothing else after the St John visit’.
The Prince was less struck by Sir Robert Bordern. ‘Quite pleasant, but rather a dull old stick,’ he described him to the Queen.
Sometimes the Prime Minister was worse than that. When the Prince was about to make the most important speech of his Canadian visit, Bordern noted that he was nervous and distrait: ‘I endeavoured to divert his attention by recounting some amusing anecdotes, but he quite frequently consulted his notes.’ In spite of his no doubt well-intentioned sabotage, the speech, Bordern concluded, was ‘admirable in every way’.
The Prince’s next important stop, Quebec, introduced him to what he had been told would prove the greatest impediment to a successful tour, the hostility between anglophone and francophone Canada. Expecting the worst, he was pleasantly surprised. ‘They are a curious people and very touchy, but they seemed quite pleased and certainly gave me a good welcome,’ he wrote of the French Canadians to the King.
In Montreal, speaking half in French and half in English, he claimed that the union of the two races was more than a matter of political convenience, ‘it was, and will always remain, an example of the highest political wisdom’.
The French Canadians, an anonymous lady assured the King, likened the Prince to ‘L’Enfant Jésus’.
One may doubt whether many French Canadians spotted the similarity but the Prince went down well with a public disposed to be critical and captious.
It was Toronto which offered the most turbulent welcome. The Prince’s stay there, Thomas told the Queen, ‘were the most extraordinary days I have ever seen’. Things began relatively quietly, enthusiasm mounted by the hour, and the scenes when he drove through the city on his final day made Thomas think ‘that half the people had taken leave of their senses’.
To the Prince it was overwhelming. For the first time he tasted the heady, dangerous wine of mass adulation. ‘The most wonderful days of my life,’ he described them, ‘… amazingly marvellous. People seemed to go quite mad.’
An unidentified lady in Toronto wrote to a friend in England and at third hand her letter came to the Queen. ‘He has won all hearts, and the demonstration here was personal love for him,’ wrote the lady. She had been to hear him speak: ‘He was very boyishly shy and very pink, but the dearest, sweetest and most bewitching creature. He really looked as if he were going to cry and bit his lip, but imagine, he faced a crowd of 50,000 people, who rose of course and yelled and screamed and cheered, never was there such a greeting. He spoke beautifully and to the point and looked sweet, his lovely complexion and blue eyes are the admiration of everyone.’
There was a physical price to pay for this glorification, beyond the exhaustion that followed a day among the crowds. He was jostled and buffeted, his right hand so bruised by constant shaking that he had to use his left. The King saw photographs of his son being mobbed and deprecated the loss of dignity. ‘It isn’t my fault,’ protested the Prince. ‘You just can’t think how enthusiastic the crowds have been, and they just go mad and one is powerless!!’
Grigg described ‘his happy way of making crowds no less than individuals feel that he meets them half way. It is always quite obvious somehow that the huge masses of people who have thronged his movements everywhere feel that his heart goes out to them as much as theirs to him, and the effect is (I use the word literally) indescribable.’
By the time that the Prince had visited all the main centres of the east, he was close to collapse. ‘HRH really does work very very hard,’ Halsey reported. What tired him most were visits to hospitals, ‘especially as he talks to practically every soldier who is bedridden, and his sympathy with them is so genuine that of course he finds it extremely hard to go on for any length of time’.
Some at least of his exhaustion was brought on by his refusal to rest when he had a chance. As he grew more tired, so he would insist on staying up later and later, talking, smoking, feverishly restless. No one else could have stood the strain so wonderfully, said Thomas, ‘but he could give himself much more chance if he would only be sensible and occasionally sit down in a chair or go to bed at a normal hour’.
The strain was not eased by interminable official banquets without even a solitary glass of wine to ease his nerves or dull the pain of other people’s orating. The Prince deplored prohibition, not just because of the personal inconvenience it caused him, but as being ‘the very worst form of class legislation’. There was plenty of liquor to be had, but only for those who were prepared to pay the exorbitant prices. ‘It’s the women’s vote which is the trouble, otherwise prohibition couldn’t last.’
On those occasions when liquor was available, things were bad in a different way. Thomas described a dinner at Calgary where he knew things were beginning to warm up when a Justice of the Supreme Court tottered to his feet and sang ‘Another little drink couldn’t do us any harm’. ‘It is a very remarkable thing now that the country has gone dry, the appalling effect of liquor on everybody when they manage to get some.’
The Prince would certainly have preferred an orgy like the one in Calgary to the more formal functions of eastern Canada. He thought the Governor General, the Duke of Devonshire, though in a ‘hopelessly narrow groove’, was at least ‘a d—d good fellow and has no side’, but the Duchess was ‘hopelessly pompous … she plays the ‘Queen stunt’ far more than Mama would, and that doesn’t go down on this side’.
The Duke gallantly did his best to be one of the boys, but found the effort uncongenial. ‘There is a good deal of regard for what is called ‘a real sport’,’ he told Stamfordham. ‘It is an odious term. After I had been to a hockey match I was described as ‘a real sport in spite of his white hair’.’
The Prince, he recognized, was ‘a real sport’ par excellence; he refrained from criticism but contrived to leave the impression that he felt the performance hardly becoming the heir to the throne.
It was with some relief that the battered and enervated Prince escaped from all this to the space and relative tranquillity of the west. ‘I came to Canada as a Canadian in mind and spirit,’ he declared in Calgary, ‘I am now rapidly becoming a Westerner.’
He was impressed by the immense potential of the prairies and saw the west as the ‘country of the future … It is up to the Empire and particularly to the UK to see that its population is British and not alien!!’
He told his mother that he would love to work on a ranch for a few months – ‘That’s a real life.’
Such wishes are habitually voiced by those who know there is no risk that they will become reality, but the Prince did something to forward his ambition when for £10,000 or so he bought a small ranch in Alberta. The King was doubtful about the purchase as an investment and feared too that his son would be under pressure to do the same when he visited the other Dominions.
He left it to the Prince to decide, however, and he went ahead – to the great pleasure of the Canadians. In spite of the King’s fears, there is no record of the Prince being asked to buy a farm in the Australian outback or the South African platteland.
In all his major speeches, the Prince hammered home his creed that he was not primarily a Briton and only secondarily a Canadian: ‘On the contrary, I regard myself as belonging to Great Britain and to Canada in exactly the same way.’
This was not just rhetoric reserved for public consumption. He told the Queen that the royal family must keep closely in touch with Canada and pay regular visits. ‘We belong to Canada and the other dominions just as much as we do to the UK.’
The King warned him that if he called himself a Canadian in Canada then he would have to be an Australian in Australia and a New Zealander in New Zealand. And why not? asked the Prince. ‘Of course in India there would be no question of it as I happen to have been born a white man and not a native.’
‘I do like all these Canadians so much,’ the Prince wrote after a few weeks. ‘They are charming and so kind and hospitable if one takes them the right way and if they take to you, and the latter means success or total failure.’
No one can doubt that the Canadians had taken to him and that his first tour abroad had been not merely a success but a triumph. ‘It almost takes one’s breath away,’ a Canadian wrote to Grigg. ‘It is not mere loyalty to the Crown, but the expression of a deep, spontaneous affection for the young man who is heir to the oldest throne in the world … The Prince has something to offer that can come from no other human being. He symbolizes the unity of the whole Empire, and does it with the joyousness and courage that belongs to youth.’
Even courtiers as loyal as Stamfordham admitted that George V offended by his constant carping at the Prince and decrying of his accomplishments. Sometimes the complaint was justified but on this occasion his praise could hardly have been more generous. ‘I offer you my warmest congratulations on the splendid success of your tour,’ he wrote in mid-October, ‘which is due in a great measure to your own personality and the wonderful way you have played up. It makes me very proud of you.’
‘When I go down to the United States next week,’ said the Prince on his way back through Toronto, ‘I shall regard myself as going there not only as … a Britisher, but also as a Canadian.’
He almost missed going in any capacity. The King had been against the visit from the start – mainly, believed the Prince, because of his anti-American views.
When the President, Woodrow Wilson, fell seriously ill, King George V at once insisted that the tour must be called off.
The Prince, supported strongly by Grigg, felt that the cancellation of the visit would give the Americans the impression that he had leapt at any excuse not to go: ‘I realize the spirit in which the American public has welcomed the proposed visit too highly not to regard any such possibility with deep dislike.’
The King held to his view, but left the matter to the government to decide, and the Foreign Secretary felt the visit should take place.
The Prince went to Washington and dutifully visited the President on his sickbed. He also managed to attend a dance or two which Grigg had arranged: ‘He holds very strongly that he can influence American feeling even better by dancing with Senators’ daughters than by talking to Senators, and I am sure he is right.’
There was still greater doubt whether the tour should be extended to New York. Godfrey Thomas felt that the risk of a hostile reception from the Irish more than outweighed any possible advantage, and the King fully shared his doubts.
The Prince, though, was determined to go, the American Ambassador in London supported him, and the Cabinet concluded that ‘a good deal of the magnificent results to be expected from the visit might be thrown away’ if it seemed he was avoiding contact with ‘the real American people’.
The American press then published stories announcing that the Prince was planning to stay at notoriously opulent Newport, with the still more notoriously opulent Mrs Vanderbilt, and that lavish entertainments were being planned. The Secretary of the Interior took the rumours seriously enough to raise the matter with the British Ambassador, and the Acting Counsellor urged that the Prince should steer clear of the Newport crowd which was synonymous with ‘all that is most extravagant and frivolous in American life’.
‘There never was the faintest intention of the Prince going to Newport,’ Stamfordham reassured the Counsellor. ‘It was a pity that the American press almost exceeded itself in concocting absolutely fabulous stories of what HRH was going to do and of the different young women that were to be submitted to his choice as his future wife!! It is difficult to conceive how newspapers can give way to such vulgarity.’
The Prince nevertheless contrived to see something of New York’s young women; at least one ball was given in his honour and he never returned to the ship before two or three in the morning.
New York gave him the same almost hysterical welcome as he had received in Toronto. ‘It was not crowd psychology that swept him into instant popularity but the subtle something that is personality,’ wrote the New York World.
Whether New York’s love – traditionally fleeting – would matter in the long run, was a difficult question to answer. Edward Grey, then British Ambassador in Washington, believed it would. ‘It has done more good than any number of political speeches,’ he reported to the Foreign Office. ‘His Royal Highness has created in New York a feeling of personal affection so strong that, though it may have no direct influence on politics, it must do something to create kindly feeling in New York itself.’
British Ambassadors must be expected to laud the prowess of their future monarch; M. Jusserand, the French Ambassador, had no such axe to grind. ‘Son succès a été complet auprès des gens les plus divers,’ he wrote to the Quai d’Orsay, ‘les Anglais n’ont jamais rien fait qui ait pu si utilement servir à effacer les anciennes animosités.’
Sub-Lieutenant Hutchinson was amazed when he saw the size of the crowd that assembled to see the Prince depart. ‘The Yanks seem quite enthusiastic about him,’ he wrote in his diary, a laconic understatement that did not conceal the immense pride the crew of Renown took in the Prince’s triumph.
The Prince was to spend only three months in England before he set off on his next, still longer, tour to Australia. He was exhausted and flat after his efforts, and distraught at the thought that he would so soon be separated again from Freda Dudley Ward. The last straw was that he found himself expected to sacrifice three weeks of this precious interval to stay with his parents at Sandringham. On Christmas Day 1919 he wrote in desperation to Godfrey Thomas:
A sort of hopelessly lost feeling has come over me and I think I’m going kind of mad!! … I’m simply not capable of even thinking, let alone make a decision or settle anything!! I’ve never felt like this in my life before, and I’m rather worried about it and feel incapable of pulling myself together … How I loathe my job now and all this press ‘puffed’ empty ‘succès’. I feel I’m through with it and long and long to die … You’ll probably think from this that I ought to be in a mad house already, tho’ this isn’t necessary yet: I’m still quite sane and very much in earnest, but I don’t know for how much longer!! Of course I’m going to make a gt effort to pull myself together, and it may only be that I never realized how brain weary I returned from the ‘Other Side’ … But my brain has gone and I can hardly think any more … What you must think of me, and you and all the staff have been and are working so desperately hard for me … How can I even try to thank you, my dear Godfrey?
Thomas had received many such cris du coeur in the past, but this struck him as worryingly unbalanced. He replied with a dose of robust common sense. The Prince was not destined for a mad house, but he would find himself in a nursing home if he did not change his idiotic train of life. ‘It is inconceivable to me that anyone who has got such sound, if perhaps somewhat exaggerated ideas about health from the point of view of exercise … should be so utterly insane and unreasonable about the elementary rules of health as regards other things. How you survived Canada I cannot imagine … You are highly strung and nervy to begin with. You never allowed yourself a moment’s rest the whole time. You sat up every night, often quite unnecessarily, till godless hours … You smoked far too much and you drink a great deal too much whiskey.’ Only a change of heart would ‘stop you being thoroughly bloody minded, irritable and impossible when you start for Australia (a nice prospect for your Staff) and [you] will crack up by the time you reach the Panama Canal’. He would do better if he sometimes let off steam ‘and got cross and irritable instead of pathetic’. Of course his was bound to be ‘a more or less bloody life, but give it a chance. It’s certainly a life worth fighting through, not one to chuck away.’
This letter, which the Prince described as ‘marvellous’, and the enforced tranquillity of Sandringham, together worked wonders. ‘I’m feeling a new and completely sane man,’ he told Thomas. ‘I promise to take things easily and not make a B F of myself any more.’
Rest, and the attentions of those who cared for him, almost always sufficed to rescue the Prince from the blackest of his depressions. But Thomas recognized his extreme fragility and was alarmed by it; under the stresses of the Australian tour, with Freda Dudley Ward ten thousand miles away, might he not crack more seriously, perhaps even irrecoverably? It was a distant but daunting menace.
Back in London, the Prince first tried to defer the tour by three weeks on the plea that Renown could not be ready in time – an argument which the Under Secretary at the Colonial Office, Leo Amery, disposed of with alacrity
– and then engaged in a wrangle with Amery and the Prime Minister over the composition of his staff. Halsey, said Amery, was incompetent to handle the most important aspects of the tour, he was ‘difficult to deal with, indifferent to political considerations and indeed incapable of appreciating them. He upset the Press badly on the Canadian tour.’
The Prince liked Halsey and had serious reservations about Grigg, whom Amery wanted to put in charge: ‘We are not in any way kindred spirits and for this reason I do not regard his presence on my staff [as being] of any value whatsoever.’
He argued that, since his was not a political tour, there was no need for it to be managed by an expert in politics. ‘Its consequences are of the highest political importance both to the Throne and the Empire,’ retorted Lloyd George. Grigg must have complete control over the programme and relations with the press.
In the end the Prince and the Prime Minister met in Downing Street, with Stamfordham, Halsey and Grigg to act as referee and seconds. ‘If you are one day to be a constitutional King,’ said Lloyd George, ‘you must first be a constitutional Prince of Wales.’
The Prince swallowed his medicine, but it did not make him any the more cheerful about the prospects for the tour.
One other important change was made to the staff which had accompanied him to Canada. The Prince’s young cousin, Louis Mountbatten, was added; in theory as Flag Lieutenant to Halsey, in practice as companion and confidant to the Prince. ‘Such a charming boy, and he cheers me up,’ the Prince told the Queen.
Cheering up the Prince was, indeed, Mountbatten’s main function. He got some idea of what was in store for him when he found his cousin in tears just before the formal departure. ‘Have you ever seen a Post Captain cry?’ the Prince asked. Mountbatten admitted that he had not. ‘Well, you’d better get used to it, you may see it again.’
But few except his intimates realized the strain that he was under. He dined with the Asquiths in January. ‘The Prince has excellent manners, and has come on immensely in ease and savoir faire,’ wrote his host. ‘He talked quite amusingly of his experiences in America, and I think is not sorry to be off again in March, even to so dismal a goal as Australia.’
And so the pompous ritual of departure was enacted once again, the Prince forlorn among the beribboned dignitaries – ‘In a little tight naval uniform which clung close to his figure he did not look above 15,’ wrote Curzon, ‘quite a pathetic little person.’
Mountbatten was quickly set to his principal duty. ‘Poor chap, with all these hundreds of people round him he’s as lonely and homesick as he can be and is at present HATING this trip!’ he told his mother. ‘He says he’ll cheer up later. But then he is very, very badly smitten, I think.’
Of those aboard, only Mountbatten understood the extent of his gloom; the Prince joined in the traditional shipboard romps with good will, and gave every appearance of enjoying himself as he inadvertently flooded Halsey’s cabin with a power hose. The hose was too powerful for Grigg’s peace of mind: ‘I had visions of HRH, who does not weigh much in a state of nature, being projected into the Atlantic by a sudden jet of salt water.’
The Renown travelled by the Panama Canal, with stops in the West Indies on the way. In Barbados he found the inhabitants disturbed by rumours that some of the islands were to be sold to the United States. ‘I need hardly say that the King’s subjects are not for sale to other governments,’ the Prince reassured them loftily. ‘Their destiny as free men is in their own hands.’
At Bridgetown the Governor’s lady had prepared an immense ball of flowers which was supposed to disintegrate and shower the Prince with blossoms as he passed. Fortunately she lost her nerve and pulled the string too soon; the ball, welded into a congealed mass, fell heavily into the road and would have reduced the Prince to pulp if released at the proper time.
It soon became obvious that the Prince was not going to allow his pining for Mrs Dudley Ward to deprive him of all diversions. At a ball in Balboa he danced almost exclusively with a particularly pretty girl, who turned out to be the daughter of the local storekeeper – ‘and a very good thing too,’ commented Grigg, ‘but the local dignitaries felt mournful that their more patrician daughters had not been preferred.’
Swimming at midnight, Sub-Lieutenant Hutchinson approached a raft crewed by three nubile American girls. ‘Is that you, Teddy?’ one enquired. Hutchinson denied the charge but boarded the raft nevertheless, to be joined a few minutes later by the Prince of Wales. They returned to Renown at 2 a.m. and tiptoed to the Prince’s cabin for a whisky. ‘Don’t wake the baby,’ whispered the Prince, pointing to Halsey’s adjoining cabin.
There was much junketing at San Diego, including a Mayoral Ball. Among those present was an American air force officer, Earl Winfield Spencer, and his wife Wallis. No doubt gatherings of this kind were enjoyed by the locals, wrote Halsey disdainfully to the King, ‘but one has to be extremely careful at these sorts of places where one meets all sorts of conditions of people’.
The Australian Prime Minister, William Hughes, had originally insisted that the Prince must visit Australia before New Zealand, even though the opposite would obviously have been more sensible: ‘To ask the poor Prince to imagine glorious Alpine views in a howling blizzard, and to spend days tossing about in Antarctic gales looking for noble fjords hidden in rain and mist, is really a little too much,’ wrote Amery.
Lloyd George agreed, and Australia was told that it would have to wait its turn. The visit to New Zealand had been envisaged as an important but relatively relaxed rehearsal for the main task ahead. The authorities of both Dominions had been told that the Prince wanted no ceremonies before 10 a.m., three half-days a week for recuperation, and at least one large public reception in every city to allow him to meet the people.
However, when the representatives of the two governments joined the ship at Suva it was found that they had ignored their instructions. Programmes of impossible complexity and arduousness had been prepared – ‘I do not believe any human being could go through with all that was proposed,’ wrote Halsey.
He and Grigg set to work and managed to cut back the Australian programme to something physically possible, but it was too late to do more than nibble at the edges of what had been planned for New Zealand. ‘I cannot understand the Governor General having passed it,’ Godfrey Thomas told the Queen, ‘unless the object was to break the Prince down and make it impossible for him to do justice to himself in Australia.’
Lord Liverpool, the Governor General in question, was to be held responsible for almost everything that went wrong in New Zealand. ‘A pompous, interfering ass who has been dogging not only my own footsteps but also never leaves the Admiral and Grigg alone,’ the Prince described him to his father. ‘He rubs everybody up the wrong way and … is most unpopular throughout the dominion.’
The Prince was habitually quick to denounce British governors, ambassadors, or others in positions of authority, but on this occasion Halsey, Grigg and Thomas all echoed his views. Liverpool could hardly be blamed for the railway strike which threatened to disrupt the visit, but even this, Grigg complained, he handled with notable incompetence, behaving ‘one minute as if the end of the world had come, the next as if there was nothing to worry about’.
The strike had been fomented by a group of Sinn Fein supporters who dominated the union executive. Fortunately for the royal party the most prominent of the Irishmen found the strain too much and suffered a nervous breakdown. Without his leadership the strike collapsed. Grigg’s preoccupation had been to keep the Prince out of the dispute, whether he were presented as taking the side of the management or the strikers. He succeeded, though the Prince could not resist one bland remark in a speech in Wellington: ‘Somehow or other the trains were not running very well last week, but mine could not have run better.’
In spite of the taxing programme, the tour of New Zealand went extremely well. Neither the nature of the people nor the size of the population made possible the sort of mass hysteria the Prince had witnessed in Toronto or New York, but his reception was never less than enthusiastic. He remained downcast, however. Grigg found him reading, ‘with an air of profound dejection’, an article in the Wanganui newspaper which referred to him as ‘the coping stone of Imperial federation’. ‘I never saw a coping stone in worse condition,’ Grigg commented drily.
New Zealand might have its striking railwaymen, but Australia traditionally possessed the most left-wing and militant working class in the British Empire. The Prime Minister had broken with most of his Labour colleagues in 1916 to form a national government, and his action had caused as much bitterness among those who felt themselves deserted as Ramsay MacDonald was to experience in Britain ten years later. The Prince had to step gingerly between these rancorous groups. But this was not the only Australian problem which required diplomatic handling. The federal and state governments were perpetually at loggerheads; the relationship between the state Governors and the Governor General was little more harmonious. The Prince found himself a particularly savoury bone of contention between the warring elements; anything he did to please one was certain to offend another. ‘One Governor suggests that the destiny of the Empire depends on HRH spending three extra days in his State,’ wrote the Governor General, Munro-Ferguson. ‘Another deprecates the Prince enjoying a kangaroo hunt … and the masterful little Prime Minister has decided views on all questions and never forgets he is the supreme authority.’
Any fears that the Australians might receive the Prince with less exuberance than he had found elsewhere were quickly dispelled. ‘I can’t begin to tell you how amazingly enthusiastic the Melbourne people are,’ he told his mother, ‘and they’ve kept it up ever since I landed and it’s really frightfully touching, and I do appreciate it all so much. It beats anywhere in Canada.’
Always it was the ex-service men who were to the fore; even when he was in the comparative safety of a car he might find himself plucked from the back seat and ‘tossed cheerfully about the streets’ by the excited ‘diggers’.
It was gratifying, it was exhilarating, but it was also alarming. One drive to the Town Hall, scheduled to take five minutes, lasted an hour. The folded hood was torn off the back of the car and the running boards trampled away by a crowd determined to get near its Prince.
To see him from close quarters was desirable, to touch him best of all; he was prodded, patted, slapped on the back, shaken by the hand, so that by the end of each day his body was covered with bruises and his hands swollen and aching. The Prince had worked like a slave, Halsey told the King, and had been totally successful. ‘On every hand I hear most wonderful things as a result, such as people who, before his arrival, refused to have anything to do with his reception or allow their children to take part in the various functions, completely coming round and being, if possible, more enthusiastic than any of the others.’
Such experiences were as emotionally draining as they were physically demanding. When coming on top of the endless formal banquets, receptions, parades, receiving of addresses, hospital visits, balls and relentless speechifying, it is small wonder that the Prince should have been worn out by the time he had finished at Melbourne. Things were a little easier when he left the great city centres and travelled by train thousands of miles across the Australian plains, but even there he could rarely relax for long since at every suggestion of a station scores or hundreds of locals would gather, some of them having travelled thirty or forty miles by cart to see the Prince pass. They could not be disappointed. When he occasionally failed to appear, as at Gilgandra, he was ‘counted out’ by the indignant crowd, who chanted from one to ten and ended with a resounding ‘OUT!’, a traditional Australian way of registering disapproval. On the return journey he made sure to present himself and the forgiving inhabitants counted him in again.
He never slept well in a train and the lack of sleep added to his cumulative exhaustion. His morale was not improved when the royal train was derailed in the depths of Western Australia. The only casualties were the Prince’s doctor, who cut his leg, and the pride of the Minister of Works, who was trapped in the lavatory, but if the accident had occurred a hundred yards further on, where the embankment was steeper, it could have been far more serious. The Prince preserved admirable sang-froid; as he clambered from the wreckage he remarked cheerfully: ‘Well, anyway, at last we have done something which was not on the official programme.’
But though his entourage thought that he was unscathed by the incident, he admitted to his mother that he had been badly shaken: ‘I live so much on my nerves nowadays that they get very easily upset and I just loathe a train now and have “the wind up me” the whole time!!’
Brisbane was the city the Prince most dreaded visiting, for Queensland was ‘bolshie or rather full of Sinn Feiners and the Labour premier is a hot Irish RC’.
In the event, not a red flag was to be seen and the crowds were as welcoming as any in Australia. The Acting Premier, who at one point had threatened to boycott the visit, became almost embarrassingly fond of his visitor and in his determination to say goodbye chartered a special aircraft to pursue the Prince to the frontier and, missing him there, continued the chase many miles into New South Wales.
For Grigg, the most memorable feature of the stay at Brisbane was the Shakespearean Ball, at which a gentleman dressed as Shakespeare presented a series of his characters to the Prince: ‘It was a very mixed show, and Shakespeare himself became somewhat confused at times, introducing Othello as Julius Caesar until corrected by the indignant Moor in question.’
It is unlikely that the Prince would have been much the wiser if Othello had been presented as Ancient Pistol or one of the witches from Macbeth.
Adelaide should have been something of a rest cure, since the programme was less onerous than elsewhere and the Governor’s wife, Lady Weigall, was a woman of common sense and great kindness as well as a close friend of Freda Dudley Ward. ‘It cheered him up no end,’ Godfrey Thomas wrote thirty years later, ‘to have found in Australia someone with whom he could talk freely about his lady-love.’
Lady Weigall mothered and cosseted him, at a time when he craved for such treatment; when he left Adelaide he wrote to thank her for having done so much to boost the morale of ‘a very worn out little boy, who really was beginning to think the whole show too big for him and too much to go thro with’.
But though the therapy was effective she undid much of the good by encouraging him to stay up every night until 3 or 4 a.m. cooking buttered eggs in her boudoir.
The Prince left Adelaide more cheerful but little more rested than he had been on his arrival.
As a result he teetered permanently on the edge of extreme depression. ‘I feel fit enough,’ he told Philip Sassoon in early August, ‘but mentally I’m absolutely worn out. Thank God it’s all over bar the shouting now as I really don’t think I could carry on much longer without the top of my head cracking like an egg and making a mad house my only possible [word omitted] for the remainder of my natural life.’
In such a state of mind, trials which normally he would have borne lightly seemed intolerably burdensome, pleasures became pains, inoffensive companions were categorized as the lowest of the low. He had hardly seen a pretty woman yet, he told Sassoon, they were ‘a hen-faced crowd and make me tired’.
He confused cause and effect; it was because he was tired that they seemed hen-faced. Similarly, the journalists who accompanied the party were not ‘virulent scum’, ‘absolutely spoilt’ and ‘bloody rude to my staff’;
they were, as he would have agreed when in sounder mind, professionals doing a difficult job with considerable competence – and on the whole giving a most favourable account of all his doings.
Certainly they were sympathetic when, in mid-July, the Prince had something close to a complete breakdown. He lost his voice, rambled off the point in speeches, appeared wan and disconsolate even to those who did not know him well. ‘Renewed sign of nerve strain … very disturbing,’ cabled The Times correspondent; ‘Use utmost influence to save Prince continuance of the terrible strain imposed by many months of public appearances,’ the Morning Post representative urged his editor. ‘Situation at any moment may become serious … He is game to the backbone, but there are limits within sight.’
His staff were at one point so alarmed that they insisted the programme be postponed by a week, allowing the Prince a chance to recuperate.
Such messages, suspiciously similar in phrasing, may have been inspired as part of an orchestrated campaign to change the dates of the Prince’s next tour abroad. One of the most pressing causes of his gloom was the knowledge that he would hardly be back in Britain again before he had to set out on an even longer tour of India and Japan. His separation from Freda Dudley Ward would have lasted nearly a year. Even before he left for Australia he had suggested to Lloyd George that Prince Albert should replace him on the Indian tour. The King was displeased when he heard that the matter had been discussed in Downing Street before his son had raised it with him; Frances Stevenson noted with some amusement that he treated Lloyd George coldly at the station when the Prince departed.
The Prince was mainly alarmed lest he be ‘unconsciously drawn into a conflict between “monarch and premier”. Of course that’s the last thing I want as it w’d probably end in a row between father and son.’
The question was temporarily dropped.
When reports began to come in of the strain the Prince was under, the King was unsympathetic. ‘Papa naturally said it was all your fault doing too much,’ wrote Prince Albert, or as he had recently become, the Duke of York, ‘but he doesn’t understand how difficult things are now.’
Grigg and Halsey also argued the perils of sticking to the original schedule – ‘The Prince … is only a human being and not a machine,’ wrote Halsey, ‘and he cannot continue at high pitch indefinitely.’
The King began to feel alarm. From Adelaide Weigall wrote to say that the Prince was ‘weary in mind and body’. Milner saw the letter and told Lloyd George that he had not mentioned it at court ‘because I happen to know that the King is very touchy about the Prince’s possibly not going to India’. His own view was that unless the Prince were given a decent rest at home before his next tour, ‘we shall have a disaster’.
Lloyd George braved the wrath of the King and found that his opposition had already crumbled. At the end of July, to his immense relief, the Prince was told that his visit to India was postponed until the autumn of 1921.
The King made it plain he expected a quid pro quo. In the period between the tours the Prince should lead a ‘strictly normal life’, rest, more food, more sleep, less exercise; otherwise ‘you will give cause to numbers of people who are disappointed, to say that the plea of health is not genuine’.
To this not unreasonable condition the Prince responded with an indignation which showed how overwrought he must have been. ‘The lecture you gave me in your last letter made me rather sad,’ he told his father. His health was perfectly good, the strain was only mental. ‘You may find it very difficult to see my point of view, perhaps you never will, but such is my case.’ What he needed was a normal life, but not the normality that the King envisaged; his life must include much sport and exercise, ‘and after a month or two lots of work, which every man should have!!’
To Philip Sassoon he ranted about his father’s ‘foul’ letter. ‘It’s odd how inhuman a lot of people (and big people) are, and I haven’t much use for them.’ The King was determined to treat him like an invalid but ‘You know just as well as I do that invalids don’t go down with the British public, there’s no room for them nowadays so forget them!! Nobody is going to make me play the invalid!!’
The Prince reacted with the same intemperance to relatively mild rebukes from home. The King deplored a photograph of his son and Mountbatten in a swimming pool – ‘You might as well be photographed naked, no doubt it would please the public.’ He objected to the wearing of a turned-down collar in white uniform with a black tie, ‘anything more unsmart I never saw’.
‘His father’s letters might be the letters of a Director of some business to his Assistant,’ commented Mountbatten.
The remark was not wholly unjustified, George V did find it hard to communicate affection. But the affection was there, and the Prince must have known it was. Nor did the letters contain only criticism. Three weeks before Mountbatten made his comment, the King had written to say how the Queen and he rejoiced ‘at the splendid success of your tour and the way in which you have won all hearts by your hard work and your own personality. I must say we are very proud of you. You are doing untold good for the Empire.’
Not everything went to plan on the tour, nor was the Prince’s behaviour always impeccable. He caused offence to several ladies of eminence by preferring to dance with the prettier of the – evidently not so hen-faced – Australian girls. He upset one family who had taken endless pains to prepare for his reception by brusquely cancelling a visit at the last moment on the flimsy pretext that the roads were impassable.
He sometimes looked bored at the stuffier public performances or snapped angrily at slow or incompetent servants. But these were minor blemishes on an otherwise almost flawless performance. The visit had been a tumultuous success.
There had been moments when his staff had doubted whether he could carry it through. Grigg told Lord Cromer what an immense relief it was to have reached the end of the Australian programme: ‘HRH has done splendidly from first to last, though working hard against the collar for the better part of the time.’
Any minor complaints were forgotten in the paean of praise that greeted the accomplishment of his mission. More important than the views of his own staff were the feelings of the Australians. Billy Hughes, the Prime Minister, had been determined not to be impressed by any mere princeling. The fact that the princeling was English was an additional reason for suspicion. Yet he had succumbed totally to his visitor’s charm and simplicity. His valedictory letter to the Prince of Wales might be ascribed to politeness, if almost on the same day he had not spoken to Grigg ‘most touchingly of the Prince’.
There is no reason to doubt that he meant what he wrote:
When you first came amongst us we welcomed you as a Prince who is one day to be our King; but we part from you as a dear friend who has won our affections and whom we love. Your visit has provoked demonstrations that in their spontaneous enthusiasm are unique in our history.
The Australian people see in you all that our glorious Empire stands for, that deathless spirit of liberty, of progress, that distinguishes it from all other Empires, ancient or modern …
Come back to us, Prince, as soon and as often as you can.
8
India
‘I AM DELIGHTED AT THE PROSPECT OF AN UNINTERRUPTED twelve months in the Old Country,’ declared the Prince of Walesat a Guildhall luncheon shortly after his return from Australia; ‘– a treat I have not had for several years.’
His parents’ view was that he should now have a badly needed rest, ‘free from functions and photographers’ and occupied by ‘ordinary country pursuits’.
The Prince was delighted to dispense with functions and photographers and by no means averse to country pursuits – with the emphasis on hunting and steeplechasing; but nothing was going to make him go early to bed, or away from London if that was where Freda Dudley Ward was to be found. In fact his freedom from functions proved illusory; the Guildhall luncheon was only one of many such occasions. It was also typical in that it involved an acrimonious exchange with the King, who wanted his son to drive to the City in cocked hat and scarlet tunic. The Prince argued that, with fifteen thousand men still unemployed, this was the wrong moment for a display of military pomp.
He carried his point. Lloyd George was due to speak at the same occasion. Grigg noted that his draft speech contained no reference to the King and, knowing how sensitive things were between father and son, urged that one be included: ‘As the happiness of the Prince does depend a great deal on keeping all well between the King and him, I feel you will forgive this reminder.’
This year at home was an unhappy one for the Prince’s relationship with his father. It was tolerable in London, where they met only occasionally, but cooped up in Balmoral or Sandringham and cut off from Mrs Dudley Ward the Prince found the court routine more than he could endure. ‘It’s all terribly irksome and it’s such a gloomy atmosphere.’
There was an explosion at Balmoral in October 1921. ‘I’ve turned Bolshie tonight,’ he told Freda, ‘as H M has been the absolute limit, snubbing me and finding fault sarcastically on every possible occasion. It really isn’t fair, darling, particularly as I’ve been playing up to him all I can since I arrived.’
The Prince’s doubts about the forthcoming tour of India provided an extra cause for wrangling between the two. Once the Prince threatened to ask Lloyd George whether he really felt the visit essential. ‘I don’t care whether the Prime Minister wants you to go or not,’ retorted the King. ‘I wish you to go and you are going.’
The Prince was not alone in wondering whether his visit was necessary or desirable. India was in disarray. The Montagu-Chelmsford Report, which had reiterated that the aim of the British government was to establish India as an independent democracy within the Empire, had signally failed to convince the Indian National Congress Party that British intentions were honourable. The unrest that followed led to the introduction of trial without jury for those accused of political crimes, and, in April 1919, to the massacre at Amritsar. Peaceful non-cooperation was Gandhi’s formula for India’s dealings with the British, but non-violence frequently led to violence, and Congress’s decision to boycott the Prince’s visit carried with it the threat of disorder and much personal risk for the visitor. Almost all the provincial governors, led by the experienced Lord Willingdon, concluded that the tour was unwise,
while from a different point of view the private secretary to the Maharaja of Dewas, E. M. Forster, felt that to the educated Indian ‘this ill-omened visit does seem an impertinence. You can’t solve real, complicated and ancient troubles by sending out a good-tempered boy; besides, this naive slap-on-the-back method, though the very thing for our colonies, scarcely goes down in the East.’
Indeed, almost the only champion of the tour was Lord Reading, who was unshakeable in his conviction that the visit would pass off well, serve British interests in India and, above all, consolidate Britain’s relationship with the Indian princes. Since Reading was the Viceroy and Montagu, the Secretary of State for India, was his faithful ally, planning for the tour continued.
Montagu’s original idea, indeed, had been that the functions of executive ruler and Viceroy should be divided and the Prince himself serve for a few months as Viceroy.
Lloyd George vetoed the idea, no doubt to the Prince’s considerable relief.
But the project that survived seemed little better. ‘How I’m loathing and hating the thought of India …’ he told his mother. ‘But as I have to go, I must try and make the most of it.’
Till the last moment he hoped that something would turn up to prevent the tour. ‘I’m afraid the trouble in India seems to be subsiding,’ he wrote to Freda, ‘and that there isn’t a chance of it stopping my going, damn it.’
Against the wishes of most members of his staff, he insisted that Louis Mountbatten should once more be in the party – ‘to look after my private and personal comfort and do small and unimportant jobs for me,’ as he explained to Godfrey Thomas.
Thomas was not pleased, nor was Lord Cromer, who was to perform in India the part played by Grigg in Australia. ‘We all deplore his inclusion in the Staff,’ Cromer wrote to another colleague, Colonel Worgan. The Prince had ruled that Mountbatten was always to have a room, however small, near his own. ‘You need have no scruples about a very literal interpretation of the Prince’s own words “however small”,’ instructed Cromer grimly.
The real significance of the appointment lay in the light it threw on the Prince’s alienation from his regular staff. He told Grigg that he wanted Mountbatten to come along since ‘he now has no friends on his own staff except perhaps Legh’. ‘I gather that Halsey is no longer a friend!!’ commented Stamfordham.
In fact the Prince was still close to Godfrey Thomas as well as Legh, and fond of a new recruit, Bruce Ogilvy, but in his black mood as he prepared to leave he could see nothing but enemies around him.
The Prince was convinced that the style which had worked so triumphantly in Canada and Australia would serve in India as well. If he was only allowed to be himself, then he could get through to the people and win their hearts. He was appalled by the dense thickets of ceremony with which the authorities seemed determined to hedge him round. Even before he landed, he told Mrs Dudley Ward, he was convinced ‘that all the official rot and pompousness is overdone and is quite unnecessary’. He was determined to break it down, ‘even though I’ll risk getting into trouble with the officials and powers that be’.
And it was not just the stuffy British officials who were at fault; the semi-independent Indian princes were equally out of touch with the real people, ‘their ceremonies are so irritating and ridiculous’.
The King was quite as certain that the sort of informality which had been so successful in the white Dominions would prove disastrous in India.
Stamfordham rubbed in the argument – ‘I have impressed upon him the absolute necessity for a maintenance of strict dignity on all official occasions’
– and Cromer battled valiantly to hold the line, complaining ruefully to Wigram that ‘it is not always easy to get HRH to adjust his mind as to what is suitable to certain occasions’.
The old brigade was not wholly wrong. The Prince’s style did give offence to many British and a few Indians, some of them of real importance. But he won many more friends by his behaviour. Professor Rushbrook Williams, Director of Public Information at the time and official historian of the visit, told Frances Donaldson many years later that he ‘never knew an Indian who had met HRH who was not charmed by him – he was human, informal and genuinely interested in them. Again and again I heard the remark: “If only all you Europeans were like him!” … Above all, he wanted to meet and get to know Indians.’
Professor Williams gives the Prince credit for more enthusiasm towards the Indians than in fact existed. As usual it was the serving soldiers and ex-service men who most appealed to him.
He was quite as colour conscious as any of the British rulers of India; when Mountbatten reported a conversation with Mrs Besant in which that formidable lady revealed that the the Prince was a reincarnation of Akbar, his cousin was disgruntled at the idea of having been a ‘black man’ in a previous life.
He had no doubt that the Indians and Burmese were wholly incompetent to run their own affairs and would be lost without the benevolent supervision of their colonial masters.
And yet he did do his best, often in spite of the authorities, to get through to them. ‘I want to know you and I want you to know me,’ was a personal note that he grafted on to the formal message from the King Emperor which he delivered in Bombay. At Poona he horrified officials by walking around the stands after laying the foundation stone so that people could see him. They rose to their feet and cheered themselves hoarse.
In Lucknow he went to see four thousand poor being fed. ‘I insisted on walking about amongst them despite the ruses of the officials and police to prevent me stopping and getting out of the car. I feel that I’m one up on them all for once!’
He learned enough Hindi to exchange a few words with the many thousands of military pensioners whom he inspected: ‘It’s worth it every time, as these Indians do appreciate it and it makes it far more interesting for me too. And it’s a heart-breaking job going round these poor devils, many of them maimed and limbless, whose govt pensions are hopelessly inadequate and for whom I can do so little.’
And when the Indians were there and he was allowed to move among them, he could work the same magic as in Canada or Australia. At a People’s Fair near Delhi he was mobbed by five or six thousand natives who surged round him, reported the military commander, General Rawlinson, ‘cheering him to the echo, salaaming and almost worshipping him. He was perfectly delighted …’
The Prince believed that the police were overdoing his protection and cutting him off from the people who were ready to acclaim him. ‘Surely they can trust me not to make a BF of myself and do anything idiotic?’ he enquired indignantly of Freda Dudley Ward. The police always retorted that they were doing no more than they did for the Viceroy – ‘All I say is “God help the Viceroy”!!’ Everyone was working loyally and diligently but, ‘alas they are working in the wrong way and completely preventing this tour being of the slightest use as far as the natives are concerned, which is after all the real reason for my coming’.
But it was not primarily the British authorities who thwarted his efforts to get through to the Indians; Gandhi and the Congress Party ensured that the crowds were rarely there to succumb to his blandishments. He was disappointed and dismayed when, in Allahabad, less than a thousand Indians were on the streets out of a total of 120,000 – ‘we go from cold to frost,’ commented Halsey.
He was infuriated when, at Benares, the university authorities tried to cover up for a student boycott by filling the empty seats ‘with high school boys, boy scouts and Europeans; I suppose they hoped I would never get to hear … what a BF they had made of me’.
He was outraged when the Chief Commissioner of the North West Frontier Province, Sir John Maffey, took alarm at threats to assassinate the Prince and redirected his procession through the back streets of Peshawar. Convinced that everyone would believe him a coward, he returned to Government House in what Mountbatten described as ‘the blackest rage I ever hope to see him in’.
The Prince described the incident to Mrs Dudley Ward as ‘the worst thing that has happened to me in India’, and blamed himself for not overruling Maffey – ‘but then you know I’m not very good in a crisis, Fredie darling, and do lose my head all too easily’.
Maffey, in a different sense, would have lost his head if he had stuck to the original plan and the Prince had been murdered. The police can hardly be blamed for their vigilance. There was real danger; the Prince’s staff knew of at least two cases in which people had been offered more than a thousand rupees to throw a bomb at the royal visitor.
The Prince had no sympathy for the independence movement and blamed Edwin Montagu for fomenting it. His letters home are filled with denunciations of ‘that despicable man’ who had ‘given in and pandered to the natives’. Naturally the Indians wanted more, ‘which they can’t possibly have so long as we maintain the policy of governing and running India’. The result was ‘hopeless unrest’ and growing support for Gandhi: ‘It’s all very disgusting and very depressing.’
He rejoiced when Gandhi was arrested and Montagu resigned, but feared it was too late. Montagu’s reforms had so far changed the atmosphere in India that ‘most Englishmen of Indian experience are dissuading their sons or any good fellow from coming out’. As a result the standards in the Indian Civil Service were slipping, ‘and, as you know, the natives are the quickest to size up a white man and can always recognize a gent, or anyway a “nature’s gent” which is even better’.
Given what he saw as the incipient collapse of British rule in India, he felt that his own presence was a mere palliative, as irrelevant as applying a piece of sticking plaster to a gaping and mortal wound. His visit was unwanted by the Indians and of doubtful value to the British. His speeches, which were written for him by a member of the Indian Civil Service attached to his staff, struck Piers Legh as ‘really lamentable … claptrap of the worst description’.
The Prince read them conscientiously but loathed them. The men who composed them, he considered, were ‘bureaucratic and behind the times. They can’t help it, poor brutes, as the Indian Govt is the same.’
By mid-December he was in such despair that he contemplated abandoning the tour. He wrote to the Viceroy, bemoaning the fact that he was achieving nothing, meeting almost no Indians, strengthening support for the independence movement rather than diminishing it, causing the expenditure of vast sums of money to no good end.
The letter exudes pessimism, but his true frame of mind is portrayed more vividly in the letter he wrote to Freda Dudley Ward a few days later:
My beloved, I couldn’t be more gloomy or depressed than I am tonight, and I’m oh! so desperately sad and lonely and missing and oh! wanting you and wanting oh! so badly my precious little Fredie!! I naturally want you most when I’m up against it all as I am now, sweetheart, as I do love you love you so, and although I loathe Xmas as a festival, yet it does somehow suggest happiness, and it’s so ironical everyone wishing me a happy Xmas … Surely they must know that I can’t possibly ever be in the teeniest way happy when I’m away from my Fredie?
This was his blackest moment of the tour. Reading’s robust re-assurance that the visit was of immense importance and was ‘doing real good – infinitely more than you think’,
came at a moment when the crowds had been responding more enthusiastically and the Prince’s morale was in some measure restored. The Viceroy reported in February that the Prince ‘really does feel that his trip has done and is going good’.
He overstated his case. The Prince really did feel, and continued to feel, that the trip had been, on the whole, a futile enterprise. But he was ready to accept that some Indians had been favourably impressed, some British heartened. He even began to feel a modest measure of pride in his achievements.
As in Australia, physical exhaustion contributed to his depression. He slept badly during the interminable journeys by train, stayed up too late, ate too little, drank and smoked too much, as always overdid the exercise. ‘HRH’s present method of life,’ reported his doctor, ‘is such as may involve a complete breakdown of his whole nervous system.’
One trouble was that, deprived of Freda Dudley Ward’s companionship, he got very little fun out of the tour. Confronted by the great archaeological finds at Taxila, he remarked gloomily to Lady Birdwood: ‘This place ought never to have been dug up.’
The famous Buddha’s tooth at Kandy in Ceylon ‘isn’t a tooth at all, merely a sordid, dirty piece of bone. Then there was a ghastly procession of elephants which included native dancing and hideous noises, which was really native music.’
Almost the only exception was the Taj Mahal. After the statutory visit by moonlight he told Queen Mary that it had ‘gripped me and I shall never forget what I’ve seen tonight’. He even paid a second visit – ‘a contingency,’ Thomas remarked, ‘against which I should have betted heavily’.
‘One of the tragic things about this Tour,’ wrote Lord Cromer, ‘is that HRH is not really keen on big-game shooting or shooting of any kind.’
Tragic is perhaps too strong a word, but to the Indian princes, who invested shooting with an almost mystic significance, the Prince’s indifference seemed inexplicable. In Nepal fortunes were squandered in setting up a big-game camp; the Prince preferred to wander around with a shotgun looking for jungle fowl, or better still, to exercise his polo pony in a nearby clearing. It was a great disappointment to the Maharaja, Piers Legh told his father. It was a great disappointment to Legh too. ‘Everything is sacrificed to polo, which the Prince is mad about,’ he wrote resentfully. ‘We consequently don’t get as much shooting as we should.’
Polo, pig-sticking and steeplechasing were indeed the Prince’s greatest pleasures in India. Yet even on the polo ground he could not escape from his role: in Jodhpur the young players had been told to treat him gently and only on his insistence did they relax and ride roughly against him; in Mandalay his team won a competition, ‘though it’s become such a farce this cup business as somehow it’s always arranged that I should win … and I do loathe it!!’
His morale was not improved by periodic carping from Buckingham Palace. George V was disconcerted to see photographs of the Prince wearing blue overalls with white tunic – ‘A most extraordinarily ugly uniform … The regulations ought never to have been altered without my approval.’
He felt ‘little short of despair’ when he read that, at Lucknow, the Prince had taken over the drums in the band playing at a dance at Government House – ‘What will the natives think of the Heir Apparent assuming such a role?’ asked a shocked Lord Stamfordham.
The band was playing in a gallery, invisible to the dancers, answered Cromer. The journalist who reported the news had been grossly indiscreet. ‘I have spoken to HRH about this and he quite understands the point.’
‘The whole crux is whether the Prince of Wales makes the Indians feel he likes them,’ Lord Riddell told Cromer. ‘They are extraordinarily sensitive and they know intuitively, past belief.’
The Prince did not like them; least of all did he like those to whom he came closest, the Indian rulers. He disapproved of the pomposity and lavishness of their way of life; their propensity to ape all the most unattractive features of European civilization; their determination to ingratiate themselves with the son of the King Emperor. In Nepal tigers were paraded before him so that it was almost impossible for him to miss them; in Mysore the Maharaja let him win at squash. After this last offence he raged vengefully against those ignoble potentates and cannot have left the Maharaja himself in much doubt about his feelings.
Since the Prince at the time was suffering from insomnia, indigestion and what he described as ‘smoker’s heart’, his bile is perhaps explicable. His staff should have been able to jolly him out of such excesses. Unfortunately only Mountbatten was close enough to him to understand his moods, and Mountbatten was preoccupied with his own courtship of Edwina Ashley. The Prince luxuriated in his sense of isolation. His staff, he told Freda Dudley Ward, was ‘the finest ground possible for foul and bloody gossip and scandal!! … They do their utmost to make life hell for me instead of helping me.’
Before the tour was over Halsey offered his resignation on the grounds that he felt he had lost the Prince’s confidence. ‘How right he is, isn’t he, my precious angel, though I said it was all rot … He knows better now than to say a word to me about TOI or anything private as he knows I would fire him on the spot.’
Already the Prince’s reluctance to allow even the most trusted members of his staff to talk to him about what he considered his private life was becoming more marked. Godfrey Thomas no longer dared speak with the freedom he had enjoyed in the past, Claud Hamilton was to lose his job when he trespassed on forbidden territory. The Prince’s attitude, strengthened to the point of paranoia, was to make it impossible for those who worked for him to do their duty properly in the years before the abdication.
His alienation from his regular staff became more complete when Captain Edward ‘Fruity’ Metcalfe was recruited to look after the Prince’s polo and other equine diversions. Metcalfe was charming and impecunious; an Irishman who had won a good MC in the war and held important posts in three princely states. He was ‘very nice and irresponsible’, Thomas told the Queen.
Halsey was still more censorious: ‘Metcalfe is not at all a good thing for HRH,’ he wrote. ‘He is an excellent fellow, always cheery and full of fun, but far, far too weak and hopelessly irresponsible. He is a wild, wild Irishman and’ – crowning horror – ‘no one knows anything about his family.’
The Prince was seduced by his charm, his friendliness and his endearing habit of treating his new employer as an ordinary human being: ‘He always referred to me as “The Little Man”. People were sometimes shocked by the familiarity of his attitude towards me.’
He became the nearest approach the Prince ever had to an intimate male friend. ‘Honestly, and you must know it by now,’ the Prince wrote to him a year or so after they first met, ‘I miss you terribly when you are away, and … I’m ever so grateful to you for being the marvellous friend to me you always have been.’
Against his dulcet blandishments the stern voice of duty as enunciated by Halsey or Thomas seemed still less appealing. His coming placed a barrier between the Prince and those who should have been closest to him.
This catalogue of lamentations may make it sound as if the tour of India had been a total disaster. This would not be true. In the first port of call, Bombay, he achieved something close to triumph. The Viceroy rhapsodized about his ‘wonderful success’. ‘It represents solid truth,’ he told Montagu, ‘when I tell you that the Prince did receive a splendid reception … and by his unaffected manner and simple heartiness and friendliness to the people, won his way right into their hearts.’
The Governor, Sir George Lloyd, told Cromer that the success was due ‘entirely to the chief actor, whose personality is amazing and whose gift of keen appreciation of every situation in a flash, of the perfect word to say and the perfect way to say it in, struck me tremendously’.
Even the Prince, always first to doubt his own capabilities, told Freda Dudley Ward that he would have been driven mad by the tedium of the official receptions ‘except for the fact that I am having a real success here, my beloved, and I think I’ve managed to get these natives’.
Gandhi’s campaign ensured that he was not usually so successful, but the Congress Party did not achieve as much as it had hoped. In Delhi, in particular, all went well for the visitor. ‘I feel as if I had lived a life time these last two days,’ Lady Reading told her family. ‘Such processing of troops, booming of guns. Royal salutes … acres of red carpet, hundreds of scarlet coats, thousands of decorations.’ The Vicereine did not realize it, but she was describing everything her visitor most disliked. Still, ‘the Prince was splendid and played up nobly’.
By this stage in the tour, Reading believed that the Prince was much more satisfied with his visit and taking a real interest in India. ‘I … am glad to find that he is willing to take trouble to understand the difficulties of the situation here. He has, undoubtedly, shrewd perceptions and is not misled by the outward glamour …’
He was not misled, either, by the Viceroy’s accomplished line in flattery. Proposing the royal visitor’s health at a banquet in Delhi, Reading ascribed every conceivable virtue to the Prince and spoke of the tour as if it had transformed the future of India. ‘You just can’t think how much that man has deteriorated,’ commented the Prince.
Yet the Viceroy was not just being sycophantic. It was no smooth-tongued statesman, but the police officer attached to the Prince, Mr Stead, who said that he had at first been opposed to the tour but by the time it had finished he was convinced he had been wrong. ‘It had gone infinitely better than he had thought possible, and … the good that it had done was incalculable.’
A question was put down in the House of Commons suggesting that the Prince should have conferred on him the title of ‘Prince of India’. The King opposed the idea and it was dropped.
If he had not done so, his son would have proved even more reluctant. But the idea was not altogether foolish.
The rest of the trip, though longer than the Prince wished, was less taxing. For one thing, he did not have to cope with a hostile independence movement; for another, he was on the way home. He had badly wanted to visit China. ‘It does seem very hard,’ he told the King, ‘that when one has come all this long way to the Far East … I shouldn’t be able to go to Pekin, Shanghai, and other places of interest, all far more interesting than Japan, and the Chinks are much nicer people too.’
The Foreign Secretary, Curzon, vetoed the idea however, and the Prince got no nearer than Hong Kong.
His determination not to find Japan interesting lasted throughout his stay there. The Ambassador, Sir Charles Eliot, noted with regret that he showed no curiosity in the institutions or government of the country and seemed bored by any discussion of the issues of the moment – ‘I think that really he was mentally fatigued and that his mind and nerves had not recovered from the strain of his journey in India.’
Eliot also realized how dull everything must appear on a royal tour: ‘Princes must think that red carpets and flags are a kind of vegetation that grows everywhere like grass or trees. It certainly makes all places look the same, and the welcome organized by the police was also monotonous.’
But even allowing for the bland and homogenized aspect of the country which was offered him – royalty’s equivalent of the tourist proceeding from Hilton Hotel to Hilton Hotel – the Prince does seem to have been over-ready to transmute Japanese gold to lead. Even the famed scenery he despised: ‘I don’t take much interest in it at any time and none at all sans TOI,’ he told Freda Dudley Ward, ‘and having been to Lake Louise and the Canadian Rockies with Scotland thrown in, I can’t ever hope to see anything better.’
His indifference to the charms of Japan did not blind him to the fact that the Japanese were ‘a very great power in the World and their navy and their infantry is amazingly efficient’.
He told the King that the Japanese navy was copied from the British, the army from the Germans and the press from the Americans. ‘And how wise they are from the viewpoint of a young nation, which can never hope to emulate ourselves, but who are rapidly, if they haven’t done it already, coming up to the level of a continental power!! And I should add the Yanks!!’
This greatness, he considered, had been achieved in spite of rather than because of the imperial family. The Prince surveyed his hosts with bilious disapproval. The Emperor he never met, since he was insane and confined to his palace; with the Empress conversation was conducted through an interpreter and confined exclusively to the weather and the cherry blossom.
In the absence of the Emperor, he was entertained most frequently by the young Prince Regent, Hirohito, who would try to talk French though he had no understanding of the language. The journalists tried to depict the two young princes as bosom friends but Eliot reported ‘the idea that he felt any real friendship for the Prince Regent is a pure myth, though perhaps the latter felt a sort of timid affection for him’.
‘My God, one has to be careful what one says unless one can be quite quite sure one is alone,’ the Prince told Freda Dudley Ward.
He managed generally to keep his feelings under control. He ‘got on excellent terms with all those with whom he could converse,’ wrote Thomas, ‘and generally gave the impression that Tokyo was the one place he had set out from England to see’.
Eliot clearly felt him hypercritical, yet admitted ‘he never failed in charm and courtesy when brought face to face with any Japanese’.
He was equally successful with the press. Incensed by the plethora of restrictions imposed upon them by the Japanese authorities, the journalists accompanying the tour decided in future to boycott it. The Prince called them together and talked them round. One correspondent who had been most active in advocating a press boycott ‘rose and said that after hearing HRH’s remarks he had entirely changed his views. He was now in favour of giving a full and favourable account of the Prince’s doings.’
The Japanese courtiers were much struck by the way the Prince mixed informally with mere commoners. There was debate as to whether Hirohito should do the same and tremendous excitement was caused when the Prince Regent was observed personally to thank the landlord of the hotel where the Prince of Wales was staying at Hakone. So very condescending a gesture was unprecedented in the history of the imperial family. Eliot noted how the Prince’s presence breathed life into the atrophied court, ‘even the Empress became slightly skittish’.
Informality could, however, become indiscretion. The Prince forgot his own remarks about the keen hearing of the Japanese, and though he kept his opinion of his hosts to himself, he aired his views on other subjects with disconcerting freedom. Lord Reading, he told Eliot, was clever but not at all the man to be Viceroy. Aware of the attentiveness of those around him, the Ambassador had to beg the Prince to remember that many Japanese spoke English.
He was apt too to change plans at the last moment or cancel expeditions for which elaborate and expensive arrangements had been made. When called to order by the senior members of his staff he would be penitent for a while, but soon transgressed again. Eliot remembered one occasion aboard Renown when he and Halsey together tried to persuade the Prince to mend his ways. ‘HRH was sitting in a large high-backed chair close to the wall and as the sermon proceeded gradually wriggled upwards until he squatted on the top of the back and from that elevation regarded his two elderly monitors with a most impish and incredulous smile.’
Eliot and Halsey might note his imperfections, a few of his hosts might have suffered from his whims and unpunctuality, but to the vast majority of the Japanese who encountered him or followed his doings he seemed little short of perfection. Piers Legh told his father that the Prince had ‘made as great an impression here as he had ever done before. His reception everywhere has been nothing short of marvellous, and he has apparently completely captured the country by storm. People who live here say they have never seen anything to compare with it. I know it is going to do an enormous amount of good here.’
In spite of his reservations about some aspects of the Prince’s behaviour, Sir Charles Eliot would not have dissented from that opinion.
And so it was home again at last. ‘How splendidly HRH has done – a true Ambassador of Empire,’ Sir Reginald Wingate wrote to Cromer. ‘I do hope the Public will now let him take a rest and holiday from these endless functions which must be terribly wearing.’
9
‘The Ambassador of Empire’
THE PRINCE OF WALES GOT BACK FROM THE FAR EAST IN July 1922. It was not until April 1925 that he completed his imperial tours with a visit to South Africa. Between those dates, however, he twice visited Canada and once the United States. The second of those two voyages was to prove something of a turning point in his life.
‘I always feel that I have a right to call myself a Canadian because I am, in a small way, a rancher,’ he told the Canadian Club at the end of 1922.
To the Prince the ranch was more than just a plaything, as her dairy was to Marie Antoinette; it was the only piece of land which he actually owned himself and it represented reality in a world which he found increasingly artificial. He corresponded regularly with the ranch manager, took an intelligent interest in the building up of the stock and prided himself in particular on the excellence of his shorthorns. When he visited Canada in the autumn of 1923 it was above all to inspect his ranch and spend some weeks there.
He could not escape without some junketing in the great cities. ‘The Prince gets here on Tuesday,’ Ernest Hemingway told Ezra Pound from Toronto. ‘Prince Charming, the Ambassador of Empire, the fair haired bugger.’
There was an awful sameness about the ceremonies, so much so that when a provincial mayor lost a page of his speech and yammered helplessly after: ‘Not only do we welcome Your Royal Highness as the representative of His Majesty the King, but we …’, the Prince obligingly completed the hallowed phrase, ‘also welcome you for yourself’.
But some events were unscripted. In Quebec he danced all night with an attractive woman, only to discover next morning that she was a journalist from New York. ‘I was had for a mug,’ he told Freda Dudley Ward, ‘but she was quite nice about it and said she wouldn’t say too much despite the fact that she had got off with me. I think she’s a sport.’
She was, but the Prince was to discover a year later that not all journalists were equally sporting.
There were no journalists on the ranch, and the general public, or what little there was of it in rural Alberta, left the Prince in peace. He threw himself with zest into his role as rancher, riding around the fences of his four thousand acres, inspecting the stock, ordering new equipment. ‘I’ve even helped to muck out the cow house,’ he told the King, ‘and I chop and saw up wood and I can assure you that it’s very hard work indeed.’
His staff were delighted to see him so contented and harmlessly employed, though less enthusiastic about the nature of their occupations – ‘Our conversation is largely of sheep-dips, shorthorns and stallions,’ Godfrey Thomas reported gloomily.
Nor did the Prince pretend that it was more than a temporary role: ‘It’s a fine healthy life and a real rest for the brain … But of course one couldn’t stick it for very long.’
It had been an honour and a joy to entertain him, wrote the Governor General, Lord Byng of Vimy, and the thought that the Prince planned to come again the following year filled him ‘with the pleasantest anticipations’.
He might have revised his views a year later. In mid-1924 the Prince announced he would visit his ranch again in the autumn, stopping in New York for a few days to watch the international polo. In the event he spent nearly three weeks in New York and less than a week on the ranch. The King had originally wanted Halsey to go on the tour, but the Prince insisted that on a holiday of this kind the Admiral would be superfluous.
He told his mother that Halsey’s illness prevented him joining the tour, but the Admiral assured the King that he was perfectly fit. ‘What a pity the dear boy should invent a story like that simply because he didn’t want to take him and tell you a regular untruth,’ the King commented to Queen Mary.
Instead, the Prince was accompanied by Metcalfe and a new recruit to the household, Brigadier G. F. Trotter, known to everyone as ‘G’. Trotter was ‘a wonderful friend and so understanding and sound too’, the Prince told Godfrey Thomas. ‘Thank God I didn’t bring the Admiral. He would have sent me dippy on the voyage, let alone in the States.’
‘Sound’ was the last word to describe Trotter. He was, said Bruce Ogilvy, ‘a right old rip’, an amiable roué whose function was to facilitate the Prince’s pursuit of pleasure.
Everybody liked him; nobody, except perhaps the Prince, trusted him. He and Metcalfe together acted as siren voices leading their master on to ever more perilous rocks. The only voice in the party suggesting that the Prince would do well to plug his ears to their dulcet chorus, or at least bind himself to the mast, was that of the assistant private secretary, Alan ‘Tommy’ Lascelles – and Lascelles, as the British Ambassador, Esmé Howard, told the King, was ‘excellent in every way but … too young to have any great authority’.
Long before the visit began there had been suggestions that all would not go easily. Having set up the Prince as an immaculate hero in 1919, the American press was more than ready to redress the balance. In the intervening years the papers had been filled with gossip, linking his name with various women of the demi-monde and, more convincingly, with Mrs Dudley Ward. ‘Quite regardless of the looseness of its own sexual standards,’ wrote the British Ambassador to Curzon in 1922, ‘this country loves to be shocked and pained by what it is pleased to regard as the peculiar licentiousness of Princes, and the Prince was so successful on his visit here that he has naturally made our enemies desirous of showing that he is not what he was thought to be.’ In 1919 society women had gushed about the Prince as a ‘charming boy’, now he had sunk, or perhaps graduated, to the status of ‘a gay young man’.
Some at least of the journalists who accompanied him when he sailed to New York in the Berengaria seemed intent on reducing him yet further to ‘reckless libertine’. ‘These Yank pressmen are b – s,’ the Prince told Thomas. ‘… one does resent their d – d spying so and they get so tight!! It seems a mean shame having them around when one is on a holiday trip.’
Unfortunately he gave them plenty of material to work with; beginning with his departure, when he boarded the liner at 2.30 a.m. and kept everybody up awaiting him: ‘a most undignified proceeding,’ the King dubbed it, ‘and then refusing to come on deck or see anyone until she sailed, although thousands of people had come to the docks to see him off, was very rude.’
Once arrived, he took up residence in the palatial home of Mr James Burden and settled down to divert himself in the intervals of watching polo. There was no shortage of hostesses eager to oblige him; his visit, wrote the columnist Cholly Knickerbocker, became an endurance test, ‘with the bank balances of the refulgent chieftains of the Long Island set pitted against His Royal Highness’s health … Never before in the history of metropolitan society has any visitor to these shores been so persistently and so extravagantly fêted.’
Over-excited newspaper reports did more than justice to the Prince’s train of life and were forwarded to Buckingham Palace for gloomy perusal.
Nor was it only journalists. An English businessman, unnamed but described by the Prime Minister’s private secretary as ‘an important source in America’, wrote to Downing Street to complain that Metcalfe had arranged for the Prince to be entertained by ‘social outcasts and parvenus’ like Cosden, the oil speculator, and Fleishman, the yeast king. He had insulted one eminent hostess by asking that the Dolly Sisters – ‘notorious little Jewish actresses who have never been received anywhere’ – should be invited to a ball given in his honour, and by failing to attend himself when his request was refused. Twice he had been so drunk in public that he had had to be taken home. The impression he gave ‘was that of a desperately unhappy, wilful, dissipated boy without much brain, who could be very charming when he chose, but who was always seeking to avoid the duties of his position’.
The businessman was probably Frederick Cunliffe-Owen, who wrote in very similar terms to Lord Stamfordham and was described by the British Ambassador as ‘a tiresome busy-body who cuts no ice’.
Thomas was shown his letter and replied in fury that it was ‘a tissue of malicious and probably deliberate falsehoods’. Metcalfe had made no arrangements for the visit; the Prince had hardly met Fleishman; he had only made a brief appearance at Cosden’s dance because Mountbatten and the organizer of the British polo team, Lord Wimborne, had asked him to; he had not even known the Dolly Sisters were in New York. The writer of the letter had clearly been affronted because he had himself not been invited to some party.
Certainly the charges were grossly exaggerated, but the Prince’s hectic hedonism caused some concern to Tommy Lascelles.
[Troubles are beginning,] he told Thomas we hadn’t been in the house two hours before a new comet blazed across our sky and Honey’s wagon was firmly hitched to it. Since then we haven’t seen much of him. The comet, unluckily, is not in the best Long Island constellation; the lorgnettes of the other stars are already fixed on its activities with strong disapproval, and it is of course only a question of time for the telescopes of Hearst to pick it up …
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Philip Ziegler
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Биографии и мемуары
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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