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The Child

EVEN IN THE TWILIGHT OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY TO BE one of the 540 or so^*1 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 him¹ – 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.² 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.’³

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!’⁴ 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.⁵ ‘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.’⁶ 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’.⁷

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.’⁸ ‘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.⁹ 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’;¹⁰ 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.¹¹

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.¹² 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.’¹³

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.’¹⁴ 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.’¹⁵ 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.¹⁶ 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.’^17*2 ‘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.¹⁸ 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.’¹⁹ 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.’²⁰ 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.’²¹

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.’²² 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!’²³ 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.’²⁴ 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.’²⁵ 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.’²⁶