Darling Georgie (4 page)

When Princess Alexandra and Prince Edward returned from their one-week honeymoon to an enthusiastic society welcome, the Princess believed that a glittering life lay ahead of her. She and her husband were attracted to one another and shared a love of ‘fun’. This often took the form of practical jokes. Such jokes were a cover for deep-seated feelings of hostility and were played at the expense of their house guests who were
often humiliated by them. While the jokes may in fact have been ‘fun’ for the perpetrators, it was not always so for the victims of them who were forbidden by the social mores of the Court from retaliating in kind.

Prince Edward could hardly have been more pleased with the Princess his mother had chosen for him. He found her beautiful, charming, sympathetic and understanding. With few inner resources of his own he needed a great deal of input from those around him. Since his upbringing had failed to put him in touch with his own assets (it had in fact successfully suppressed them), he needed to draw upon the assets of others. His new wife, however, was able to provide him with neither stimulating conversation nor with wit, and after her first child was born could not rely upon her looks either to maintain her husband’s attention. Prince Edward saw to it that he was always surrounded by beautiful women. His emotional deficits as a child, the vacuum left within him by his parents’ lack of love and understanding, made it impossible for any one person to satisfy him, and as an adult it was only natural that he should turn to married women (other ‘mothers’) whom he often then rejected.

Within a year of her marriage Princess Alexandra had herself become a mother, but for Prince Edward even a live-in and loving mother could not compensate for the wrongs of his past. Although Princess Alexandra was loving towards her overly dependent husband, when he ceased to be her only ‘child’ he became disenchanted with her. He not only began to find fault with, among other things, his wife’s lack of intellect but he envied the attention she was giving to their rapidly increasing family. A downward spiral developed. The more Princess Alexandra was involved with her children, the more Prince Edward felt justified in looking outside the marriage for comfort. The more he did so, the more the Princess relied upon her sons to make up for the love that her husband withheld from her. Their mother’s smothering and their father’s frequent absences began to sow the seeds of the dysfunctional background in which their sons and daughters were to grow up.

In the latter stages of her third pregnancy Princess Alexandra became seriously ill. She complained of severe joint pains and, after she had been
diagnosed as having rheumatic fever, took to her bed. Prince Edward who had only just returned from St Petersburg, where he had attended the marriage of his sister-in law Princess Dagmar to Tsar Alexander III, had difficulty in putting aside thoughts of the Russian women he had left behind. Despite his wife’s suffering, and the fact that her pregnancy was virtually at full term, he insisted on leaving London to attend a steeplechase in the country. Three telegrams later he returned anxious and irritated and acting like a dependent child whose mother is ill. Unreasonably, he resented the fact that his sick wife was unable to fulfil his needs and night after night left the marital home to seek comfort in the arms of others who were able, and sometimes paid, to do so. While protesting his love for Princess Alexandra, the Prince was none the less becoming increasingly addicted to the more immediate gratifications of illicit sex, lavish banquets and the excitement generated by gambling, all of which were allowed to take precedence over his family responsibilities.

After her illness Princess Alexandra was left with a swollen, stiff and painful knee. While still beautiful, she was temporarily unable to dance either with her husband or to his tune. Gradually she became aware of a second disorder, a form of deafness such as had afflicted her mother, Princess Louise. Increasingly isolated by her inability to hear what was going on, particularly at state and on other social occasions, the Princess withdrew into herself and devoted more and more time to her children and the simple pleasures of the country.

The effect on Princess Alexandra’s and Prince Edward’s children of their parents’ behaviour towards them cannot be over-emphasized. As a child King George V was indoctrinated with the belief that his mother was in love with him. This later prevented him, out of misplaced loyalty, from making an absolute commitment to any other woman, including his wife.

Had Prince Edward and Princess Alexandra been able to look into the future, they might have realized that they had introduced into the Royal Family a pattern of behaviour which, four generations later, was to change its image for ever.

Q
UEEN
V
ICTORIA LIVED
the life of a recluse at Windsor Castle and refused to appear in public. The British people resented the fact that for four years, since the death of her mother, the Duchess of Kent, and her Consort Prince Albert, she had turned her back on the country which nationally, politically, socially and economically was in turmoil. Princess Alexandra had not expected much from the grieving Queen when her first grandson, Prince Albert Victor Christian Edward, was born. When, eighteen months later, a new royal baby arrived, it was hoped that his birth would win back the devotion of Queen Victoria’s subjects, restore her popularity and have a stabilizing effect on the country.

The future King George V made his appearance on 3 June 1865 at Marlborough House, London, only two hours after his mother Alexandra, Princess of Wales had bade goodbye to the last of her dinner guests. Within a few moments of birth Prince George experienced a second separation from his mother. As was the custom, the midwife showed the young Prince briefly to his mother then handed him over to one of the attendants who was responsible for his physical (and, albeit unknowingly, for his emotional) well-being. This parting sowed the first seeds of the clinging dependency, first on his mother and later on his wife, Princess May of Teck, which would persist throughout King George V’s life.

Four weeks after Prince George’s birth a fire broke out in the Marlborough House nursery. Although the infant Prince was quickly removed by his father to another part of the building, Prince Edward at once returned to help the fire brigade cope with the fire. The noise and disruption could hardly have been beneficial to a baby barely four weeks old. Throughout his life Prince George’s father derived almost as much
pleasure from ‘big blazes’ as he did from the smaller conflagrations of his extra-marital affairs.

Princess Alexandra was aware of her husband’s distant treatment as a child at the hands of Queen Victoria, and she was anxious not to expose her own children to a similar experience. For this reason she was reluctant to allow their grandmother anything other than minimal involvement in their lives. Because of Princess Alexandra’s desire to bring up her children according to her maternal intuition rather than according to royal protocol, Queen Victoria found it difficult to show unconditional approval of her daughter-in-law. In occasional letters of complaint to her daughter, Crown Princess Victoria, which were similar in tone to those she had written almost twenty-five years earlier about the behaviour of Prince Edward, she accused Princess Alexandra of being ‘haughty and frivolous’ and complained that ‘Alix shows me no confidence whatsoever especially about the children.’

While the honeymoon period between Princess Alexandra and Queen Victoria seemed to be over, the honeymoon between the Queen’s recalcitrant son and his wife had barely begun. The gradual onset of coldness which reflected Prince Edward’s need to scapegoat Princess Alexandra after she had become a mother for his own mother’s coldness had yet to show itself. Both of them, however, provoked angry reactions in Queen Victoria. Her hostility to her son and heir was never far from the surface and it was exacerbated by his flamboyant life-style of which she may have been jealous. Princess Alexandra appeared to have everything she herself might have had, had she not married the pathologically obsessional and moralistic Prince Albert.

Despite Queen Victoria’s misgivings about Prince Edward and Princess Alexandra, both the general public and fashionable society had had enough of the austerity and the gloom cast by Queen Victoria’s years of mourning, and they welcomed on the scene the arrival of the glamorous and charismatic young couple.

Princess Alexandra, ‘the people’s Princess’, was encouraged by them in her giddy round of balls and banquets, in her obsession with lavish ball-gowns
and jewellery and in her vivacious sense of fun. They were yet to appreciate her love for the country and her pleasure in making homes for her family at Sandringham and Marlborough House, two cold and concrete symbols of her husband’s inheritance. Prince Edward’s insatiable appetites, his gambling and flamboyant extravagances also fascinated the ‘royal watchers’.

A little over a year after her return from honeymoon Princess Alexandra became pregnant. The social whirl continued, however, much to the annoyance of Queen Victoria. Reticent perhaps about discussing the pregnancy, either with her daughter-in-law or her son, she found an alternative way to voice her dissatisfaction with the Princess. She complained to the Waleses about the continuing presence in Marlborough House of her youngest son Prince Alfred, who had become one of his sister-in-law’s most ardent admirers. Sensitive to any hint of impropriety, the Queen focused her disapproval on the nineteen-year-old, although Prince Edward welcomed his brother’s innocuous company.

When Princess Alexandra went into labour prematurely with her firstborn son, Prince Albert Victor Christian Edward (subsequently known as Eddy), to her amusement (but to their mortification) all six of her medical consultants arrived too late for the birth. Eddy caused anxiety from the beginning. Small and delicate, his parents were concerned about him, not only because he was their first-born but because he was the heir apparent. His grandmother was always on the look-out for an opportunity to blame her son and daughter-in-law for perceived or imagined wrong-doing. She attributed the child’s fragile health to the boisterous social life led by his mother during her pregnancy, although Prince Eddy’s fragility was more likely due to his premature birth and – in the absence of the
accoucheurs
– to his precipitate delivery. In a letter to her daughter, Vicky, Queen Victoria described Eddy as ‘fairy-like, placid and melancholy’. She also told Vicky that unlike her own children ‘all with your fine chests’, he is ‘rather pigeon-breasted which is like Alix’s build’.

Princess Alexandra’s possessive style of mothering was probably exacerbated by the fact that Eddy closely resembled her. She felt a sense of
familiarity which made her even more attached to him. Because of Eddy’s prematurity, she was obliged to breast-feed him until a suitable wet nurse could be found. Since the close bond between an infant and his mother centres on his relationship to the breast, Eddy’s later difficulties in committing himself to any one woman would have replicated his early struggle to bond with two women (one a wet nurse) rather than with just one, his mother.

When, eighteen month’s later, Eddy’s brother, Prince George was born he also attracted his grandmother’s concern. Queen Victoria referred to the two boys as ‘poor frail little
fairies’
and to one of them as being ‘puny and pale’. If both were to survive their tenuous start in life they were going to need a considerable amount of maternal input which in fact they later received, if only intermittently. The birth of Prince George in no way reduced his mother’s involvement with Prince Eddy. She made herself equally available to them both. Queen Victoria, however, made herself even more unpopular by insisting that she wanted a major say in the upbringing of her grandchildren. She had written to her Uncle Leopold that her son ‘should understand what a strong right I have to interfere in the management of the child or children’. She complained, not to her daughter-in-law but to her son, that she had not been informed early enough to have been present at their birth. ‘It seems that it is not to be that I am to be present at the birth of your children, which I am very sorry for.’ It was some time before the Queen would acknowledge that her lack of intimacy with Princess Alexandra, to which the Princess could not help but react, was more political than personal. In view of the ongoing hostility between Denmark and Germany, she would have preferred her son to have married a nice German girl.

Princess Alexandra, unlike her mother-in-law, who had a hands-off relationship with her children, was totally involved with the day-to-day welfare of her two sons, although such involvement as there was must be understood in the context of mid-nineteenth-century nursery life as it applied to upper-class families. Whenever Princess Alexandra could be spared from the onerous duties incumbent upon a Royal Princess, the two
boys had their mother’s company. They took breakfast each morning with their parents, after which their ‘training’ was discussed with their attendants. This training emphasized the common courtesies, but attention was also paid to familiarizing the children with the French and German languages. Bi-lingual governesses were employed, virtually on a daily basis, solely for this purpose. Queen Victoria was in fact far less concerned with her grandchildren’s education than were their parents. She had never forgotten Lord Melbourne’s comment about her eldest son, that she should not be ‘over solicitous about education as it may mould and direct the character but it rarely alters it’.

Prince Edward was not indifferent to his children. Like their mother, he also adored them and in the absence of more pressing engagements played boisterous games with them. While Prince George was in awe of Prince Edward whom, according to his father’s mood, he either respected or feared, he remained passionately in love with his mother until the end of her life in 1925. He always addressed her in his many letters, both as a small child and as an adult, as ‘Darling Motherdear’.