Darling Georgie (15 page)

Prince George, a true Victorian, did not neglect the philanthropy which was a characteristic feature of the landed gentry in Britain. The social ills of Britain in the nineteenth century, in the absence of a welfare state, could hardly be remedied by individual effort. Charitable endeavour, while doing little to mitigate the plight of the poor, at least relieved
the consciences of the rich. Prince George was concerned especially with child welfare and, in particular, supported disadvantaged children with whom he could readily identify. Although as a child he had not himself been materially deprived, his concern for those emotionally in need suggests that he had much in common with them. One of his favourite charities was the Gordon Boys’ Home, opened in memory of one of his heroes, Charles Gordon, who fell defending Khartoum against the Mahdi in 1885.

Presiding at the festival dinner of the home in 1897, Prince George was struck by the number of sick and impoverished boys who were resident there. He was moved to congratulate all concerned with the excellent ‘discipline’ of the home, perhaps seeing it as the remedy for childhood ills and a sad reflection of his own experiences. Discipline and duty, instilled in him from birth and reinforced by his tutor Mr Dalton, were the guiding principles of his life

Queen Mary, like her husband, was also a collector of images, although she was less interested in postage stamps than in other forms of royal iconography. Her understanding and knowledge of art, which had begun in Italy, had been further encouraged by her friendship with Gian Tufnell, the niece of Lady Wolverton, in whose Cannes villa she and her mother had taken refuge in the months following Prince Eddy’s death. Gian Tufnell had been Princess Mary Adelaide’s second lady-in-waiting from 1895 until her marriage to Lord Mount Stephen, an elderly Canadian railroad millionaire, two years later. Queen Mary and Lady Mount Stephen shared common memories and, with Lady Mount Stephen’s expert help, Queen Mary began to accumulate mementoes and became as well known in Bond Street as she was in the small antiques shops of King’s Lynn and Cambridge.

In touch perhaps with her own fragility, she was attracted to Chinese snuff boxes, Battersea enamels, porcelains and miniatures. Each piece had to have a provenance, preferably one which connected it with her family. She was disappointed when after the death of the second Duke of Cambridge, Queen Victoria’s cousin, in 1904 his sons sold their father’s
uncatalogued effects in various sale rooms. In a letter to her Aunt Augusta in 1909 Princess May wrote: ‘If only I could find the history of all these things, how interesting it wld be, but alas there is no inventory, nothing.’ She told her aunt how busy she was making sure that her own possessions were carefully listed, together with their histories. She made the point that she had acquired a wonderful collection of family things since her marriage ‘without spending much money over it’. An
objet
is often more valued by a collector when it is a ‘bargain’ or a gift. While children are entitled to something for nothing and no child should be expected to reward his parents for the love that is his by right, adults are usually expected to pay for the acquisitions they amass in an attempt to compensate for missed parental love. The ‘child’ in Queen Mary clearly took precedence over the adult.

Queen Mary and King George were no more or less influenced by the past than those with similar upbringings. What made them unique was their ability to surround themselves with artefacts denied to those with less leisure and fewer financial resources. It was through these unique collections that they were able to categorize, classify, replicate, react to and unconsciously memorialize their past experiences.

Queen Mary’s re-creation of her emotionally minimalist past was the Doll’s House designed for her in 1920 by Sir Edwin Lutyens, the architect of New Delhi. Lutyens had just completed the Cenotaph in Whitehall when he was commissioned by some friends of Queen Mary to build a doll’s house in the style of a Palladian country house in which all the objects, including the royal occupants, were to be one-twelfth of life size. Menkes (1991) points out that as much space was given to the strong-room which housed the Queen’s jewels as to the nursery for the children. The diminutive garden was designed by Gertrude Jekyll, and the two hundred miniature books for the King’s library – many of which were written specially – were contributed by, among others, Arnold Bennett, A.E. Houseman, Aldous Huxley, Robert Graves and Rudyard Kipling, who wrote ‘If’ specially for the project. Sir Alfred Munnings, Heath Robinson, Mark Gertler and ‘Fougasse’ were among the artists who
painted or drew the seven hundred tiny prints and watercolours. The vintage wines in the cellars included an 1874 Château d’YQuem. The Doll’s House, which was completed in 1924 in time for the Wembley Exhibition, was eventually relocated in Windsor Castle.

While King George and Queen Mary were happy to lead parallel lives, neither of them lived emotionally in the present. It could not be said of King George V, as was said of his father, that his life was spent in the pursuit of pleasure or the avoidance of boredom. His dislike of society turned him in on himself, but with his stamp collection for company he was never lonely, and when he found it necessary to give vent to his ever-present and explosive rage there was always his gun.

O
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3 M
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1893, at the home of the Duke and Duchess of Fife at Sheen Lodge in Richmond Park, the 27-year-old Prince George proposed marriage to the 26-year-old Princess May and was accepted by her. On the following day the official announcement appeared in the newspapers: ‘Her Majesty received this evening the news of the betrothal of her beloved grandson, the Duke of York, to Princess Victoria Mary of Teck, to which union the Queen has gladly given her consent.’

A shadow was cast over the day by a surprising announcement in the
Star,
a London newspaper, which reported that Prince George was already married to the daughter of a British naval officer in Malta. The Prince was at first amused to think that there were some who thought of him as being a sexual adventurer, but as time passed the joke, such as it was, turned sour. It was not until 1910, however, after years of being haunted by allegations of bigamy, that legal steps were taken to quash the rumour. After an article in a French republican newspaper stated that the King ‘foully abandoned his true wife and entered into a sham and shameful marriage with a daughter of the Duke of Teck’, the editor, E.F. Mylius, was immediately arrested. He was successfully prosecuted for criminal libel and sentenced to twelve months’ imprisonment. There was no evidence to support the slur on the King’s character, but it was not until the trial ended that his honour was finally vindicated (Rose, 1987).

On 3 May 1893 the nation’s only concern was with the news of the royal engagement, and preparations were immediately put in hand for the pageant that was to make Princess May’s and Prince George’s wedding day the century’s most colourful event. In honour of the occasion the
Princess’s portrait was painted, and because she was slim-waisted and tall she looked particularly becoming in her court dress. An editorial in
The Times,
however, struck a pragmatic note. Referring to the recent death of Prince Eddy (Duke of Clarence), it conceded that the ‘betrothal accords with the fitness of things, and, so far from offending any legitimate sentiment, is the most appropriate and delicate medicament for a wound in its nature never wholly effaceable’. Queen Victoria was entirely delighted, not least because the heir of the heir apparent had chosen for his bride the first consort of English birth since James, Duke of York, married Anne Hyde, daughter of the first Earl of Clarendon in 1659.

Princess Alexandra wrote to her son from Malta two days after the announcement of the engagement. The message the letter bore was ambivalent. ‘With what mixed feelings I read your telegram! Well all I can say is that I pray God to give you both a long and happy life together, and that you will make up to dear May all that she lost in darling Eddy and that you will be a mutual happiness to each other, a comfort to us, and a blessing to the nation.’

The leader in
The Times
and the letter from his mother brought home to Prince George that he was Princess May’s second choice. It was a difficult role for any man, but it was too soon to expect the shadow of Prince Eddy to disappear and unreasonable to expect it to do so.

Prince George and Princess May had been close companions since childhood, and since the death of Prince Eddy they had been drawn closer to each other and understood each other’s feelings. Although the marriage might in a sense have been arranged, this was only because there was no other suitable candidate for either of them. From the time of Prince Eddy’s death both of them knew that they were being considered for one another and were happy with how events turned out. Although either one of them could have refused the match, neither of them did so.

Prince George in reality had little or no experience of women other than his sisters and his mother, all of whom, in their different ways, had mixed feelings about the marriage. His mother never denied that she
found it difficult to let him go, and his sisters had previously championed the cause of Princess Helénè. Only Queen Victoria knew where her duty lay. She had to secure the accession and had a thousand years of royal ancestry and a compliant grandson to back her up. Prince George had been trained to obey all orders that came from above, and when the Queen informed him of his duty he had no problem with accepting her command. He might even have felt relieved that a decision had been taken for him in a matter of which he had no previous experience.

Princess May also knew her duty. She was pressed to accept Prince George’s proposal not only by her ambitious and financially impoverished mother but also by her sense of destiny. Her disappointing childhood, the nagging realization that she was cut out for better things than always to be a poor relation of the Royal Family and her conviction that fate had demanded that she would marry the younger brother were sufficient to make up her mind. It was unlikely that either Prince George or Princess May was ‘in love’, but they certainly liked one another and were happy that it should be so.

It soon became apparent that the Prince and Princess were opposites in almost every way. Princess May, brought up with nothing, had been taught to expect everything; Prince George, brought up with everything, had learned to expect nothing. The Princess had an importunate, greedy and grossly overweight mother who adored material possessions and who envied the wealth of others. She had led her daughter to believe that a person’s worth was represented by their degree of personal adornment. Prince George, on the other hand, had been brought up to believe in simplicity and hardship, in duty and obedience, in the unavailability of women other than his mother and in the written rather than the spoken word.

By the time his father, King Edward VII, died in May 1910 Prince George had been married to Princess May for almost seventeen years. Five months later, shortly after his accession to the throne, the young couple, now King George V and Queen Mary, exchanged letters with
each other. The King, who was at Sandringham, had, perhaps belatedly, become aware that his wife was beginning to wonder whether he really liked her. He wrote: ‘Fancy this is the first letter I have written to you since our lives have been entirely changed by darling Papa having been taken away from us. You have never left me for a single day since that sad event.’

Aware that his relatively carefree days had ended, King George seems to have realized his need for a strong replacement for his father. He explained to his wife that, although he had never been able to show his feelings for her, he loved her dearly. He told her also that her strength and support following the death of his father had been an enormous comfort to him: ‘My love grows stronger for you every day mixed with admiration & I thank God every day that he has given me such a darling devoted wife as you are. God bless you my sweet Angel May, who I know will always stick to me as I need your love & help more than ever now.’

Perhaps only partly reassured by her husband’s declaration, Queen Mary replied: ‘What a pity it is you cannot tell me what you write for I should appreciate it so enormously – It is such a blessing to know that I am a help to you.’ King George’s response the next day was only one of many letters written over the years protesting feelings for his wife that he was able to express (not surprisingly) only in writing. ‘I am glad my letter pleased. I really am full of feeling and sentiment & am very sympathetic but somehow I always find it difficult to express what I feel except in a letter, especially to the person I love & am always with like you darling.’

King George and Queen Mary had both been brought up to devote themselves to public ceremonial at the expense of devotion to family. If either of them had realized that they had themselves been cheated, and were now in turn cheating on their own families, their strong sense of occasion – at least in the run-up to their marriage – would have obscured this realization. King George had his early spontaneity dampened by too rigid a work schedule from the time that Mr Dalton had entered his life,
and Queen Mary learned belatedly to suppress her own feelings in the face of positive feedback from her husband.

The wedding took place at the Chapel Royal, St James’s Palace, on 6 July 1893. Prince George and Princess May were married by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishops of London and Rochester in the presence of the Royal Family and most of the crowned heads of Europe. After the ceremony the royals returned to Buckingham Palace for the signing of the marriage register. At five o’clock, with the wedding breakfast concluded, the Prince and Princess drove in their carriage through the streets packed with cheering Londoners to Liverpool Street Station where they took the train to Sandringham where they were to spend their honeymoon.

Prince George and Princess May were given two homes by Prince Edward and Princess Alexandra: York House in St James’s Palace and York Cottage at Sandringham. It was at York Cottage that the couple, now the Duke and Duchess of York, were to live for more than thirty years, and it was here that Princess May came to realize that she and her husband were unequal partners in the marriage. York Cottage had previously been known as Bachelors’ Cottage. A few hundred yards from Sandringham House, it had been built by the side of a pond to accommodate male guests for whom there was no room in the main house. The cottage had very little to commend it. Its neo-Gothic appearance was unattractive and it reflected a variety of architectural styles. Colonel Ellis, who claimed to be an architect but who turned out in fact not to be one, was hired by Prince Edward to refurbish it and make it habitable for the young married couple. He failed miserably.