Royal Babylon (32 page)

         

George V didn't exist outside the time-consuming but utterly useless framework of royal etiquette. The King had an obsession with old rituals which was both comical and absurd. He got involved in bitter disputes with his sons over their choice of trousers and would personally scold government ministers for wearing the wrong type of hat. He once rebuked a U.S. ambassador for failing to wear knee breeches at evening court. A worried and confused official from the newly created Soviet Union heard about this and sent a telegram to the Kremlin asking whether he ought to wear knee breeches to Buckingham Palace. “If necessary,” the Kremlin wired back, “you will wear petticoats.” While Field Marshal Haig was planning the Battle of Paschendale, George V's advisers agonized over whether or not women workers in a Northern munitions factory should wear gloves when they shook hands with Queen Mary.

The King always wore his crown when he signed official papers to remind himself, he explained, of the importance of it all. Queen Mary always wore her tiara at mealtimes at home, even when she and the King dined alone. Every day the King and the Prince of Wales sat down to eat wearing the Windsor uniform, a costume designed by George III comprising a dark-blue tailcoat with red collar and cuffs, white breeches and a white tie and waistcoat. The meal was accompanied by music provided by a string orchestra, which was hidden out of view behind a grille. Originally they had been required to play from
inside a small cupboard, but this had resulted in some of them fainting in the middle of a selection from
No No Nanette
. The mealtime entertainment would always end with George V standing rigidly to attention for “God Save the King,” even though there was no one other than his own wife and children watching.

It is apt that a king who lived such a regimented and superficial life, dominated by court etiquette, should also have died at the convenience of the court almanac. Depending on whether you believe the official version or not, George V's last words were either “How is the Empire?” or, as is slightly more likely, “Bugger Bognor.” One fact concerning his death that is beyond dispute is that the King was killed by his doctor to meet a newspaper deadline.

Lord Dawson of Penn served as royal doctor to four sovereigns—Edward VII, George V, Edward VIII and George VI—and although he was the best-paid doctor in the country it didn't necessarily follow that he was the best at his job. One of the more vicious stories that circulated about his alleged incompetences was how he treated a man for jaundice for six weeks until he realized his patient was Chinese. On the evening of January 19, 1936, the King lay dying, having already lapsed into a coma. At his bedside were Lord Dawson, Archbishop of Canterbury Cosmo Lang, Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald and Queen Mary. In another room the King's two eldest sons and his private secretary were planning a royal funeral. The arrangements were already well advanced: all that was missing was a corpse.

According to the Duke of Windsor's autobiography, later that evening Lord Dawson took Queen Mary and him aside and asked them rhetorically, or so they believed, if they wished
the King “to suffer unduly.” The Queen and the Prince replied that they did not. Years later the King's eldest son said that it never for a moment occurred to him that Dawson was asking for permission to end his father's life. The doctor took pen and paper and composed the line “The King's life is drawing peacefully to its close.” Then, shortly before midnight, to make absolutely sure his prose wasn't premature, he slipped a hypodermic syringe containing a lethal injection of morphia into George V's jugular vein.

Dawson's medical notes confirm that he hadn't in fact terminated the King's life to end his suffering. The King was unconscious and therefore not in any pain. It was done for the sake of the morning papers. The moment of death was deliberately timed to ensure that the news, in Dawson's words, “received its first announcement in the respectable morning papers, such as
The Times
, rather than the rather less appropriate field of the evening journals.” Dawson even phoned
The Times
to warn them to hold the front page and to expect an important announcement shortly. “Effectively,” the Duke of Windsor reflected in his authorized biography, “Dawson murdered my father.” The regicidal doctor received a viscountcy in that year's Honours List for his troubles.

Gordon Winter, co-author of the book
Secrets of The Royals
, made a convincing case that Queen Mary was similarly killed. Winter was working as a Fleet Street journalist in 1953 when he interviewed a senior unnamed royal servant who accurately predicted that Queen Mary would die between 10
P
.
M
. and 11
P
.
M
. two days later. Queen Mary was at the time terminally ill, and both she and her family had expressed a desire that her death should not in any way impede Queen Elizabeth's forthcoming coronation ceremony, which had been
planned for June 2. According to the Palace insider, her death had been scheduled so that a decent mourning period could be observed and the coronation would go ahead as planned. The odds against this prediction coming true by accident, notes Winter, were about 2,000 to 1.

         

Between the Queen's collection of objets d'art and the King's stamp album there was little time for the royal offspring. George V and Queen Mary were disastrous parents, neither of them willing to show, or capable of showing, affection toward their children. The King's father, Edward VII, had seen little of his wife but even less of his children. George V was so frightened of him that he once fainted at the prospect of being told off, and his own philosophy on the subject of fatherhood was similarly enlightened. “I was terrified of my father,” he explained to a friend, “and I am determined that my children will be terrified of me.” While the King terrorized his children, bullying them into cowering wrecks, his wife believed she had an excuse for looking the other way. “I have to remember,” she said, “that my husband is also my sovereign.”

Queen Mary's emotional sterility was demonstrated most chillingly in her relationship with her youngest child, Prince John. Queen Elizabeth II's Uncle John was rarely mentioned by the royal family even when he was alive, because he was regarded as an embarrassment. Born in 1905, he displayed early signs of mental disability, and from the age of four he also suffered from epilepsy. When the fits grew worse it was decided that he should be segregated from his family, and at the age of
twelve he was removed from his home and exiled to Wood Farm, Wolferton, in the permanent care of a nurse. One day the young boy was informed that his mother and father were going to be crowned King and Queen. He understood, but was not allowed anywhere near the coronation festivities. Although he was only a short distance away, Queen Mary never once visited him and hardly ever spoke of him after he was taken away from his family. A final epileptic attack in January 1919 caused fatal heart damage and he died suddenly.

The death was greeted with relief by his parents and indifference by his brothers. Prince George, the future George VI, was in France and did not return home for the funeral. The Prince of Wales, according to his biographer Philip Ziegler, saw his youngest brother as “little more than a regrettable nuisance.” The fact that Prince John was handicapped and epileptic was not reported in any of his obituaries, nor was any explanation offered as to why Prince John was separated from his family.

         

In the 1920s and 1930s, thanks to a deferential British press, George V's sons were able to run amok in public with impunity. The Windsors have to this day declined to cooperate in any official biography of Queen Elizabeth II's Uncle George, the Duke of Kent. His papers are locked away in the Royal Archives at Windsor, closed to historians. Even after all the problems they have encountered in recent years, the royal family consider George just too embarrassing. Prince George was the fifth child born to George V and Queen Mary. He was bright, artistic and very effeminate, always drenched in strong
perfume. When he wasn't blowing his share of the Civil List on an expensive cocaine habit, the Prince indulged his bent for blond, blue-eyed Aryan-type German boys.

He spent much of his time in the seedier West End nightclubs, where he enjoyed the company of stage entertainers of either sex. In 1926 he began an affair with the black cabaret singer Florence Mills which continued well after his marriage to Princess Marina. He also had a string of affairs with the daughters of aristocrats, including the banking heiress Poppy Baring. Any hopes she may have had of marriage were dashed by her careless confession that she found the royal family unbearable. George even had at least one illegitimate son, who was adopted by a well-known American publisher of the day.

Although his scandals were unreported in the press, his bisexual conquests were well known in court circles. One night he was arrested by police in company with a known homosexual in a nightclub, the Nut House, and held in cells until his identity could be confirmed. In 1932 he wrote love letters to a young man in Paris: they eventually had to be bought back by a palace courtier for a large sum of money. There were also affairs with an Argentinian diplomat and an Italian aristocrat.

But his most famous homosexual affair was with the actor and playwright Noel Coward. The latter's extraordinary private life, in the context of his friendship with the royals, is described in Kenneth Rose's
Kings, Queens and Courtiers
as “unorthodox though discreet,” with the additional twinkling observation that “Coward's romantic devotion to the royal family was lifelong.” They met in 1923 when the Prince was twenty and Coward was three years older. According to the actor, he seduced the Prince in the dressing room at the Duke of York's theater in St. Martin's Lane, London. Years later, Coward would boast about his “little
dalliance,” proud that he had made a sexual conquest of a member of the royal family. His acquaintances noted that he even became something of a bore on the subject.

Drug abuse was fairly commonplace in the circles inhabited by the young British royals. When the Prince of Wales visited the Muthaiga Club in 1929, cocaine was openly offered around under his nose at dinner. His younger brother George was a serious cocaine addict. George had been introduced to cocaine and morphine in 1932 by an American girlfriend named Kiki Preston, known as “the girl with the silver syringe.” His addiction was also fed by another dealer, a young South American man, whom the Prince of Wales later personally had kicked out of the country. Friends noted that one of the few truly useful things that the Prince of Wales ever did was to try to wean his brother George off drugs. He even had the young Prince kept under house arrest in an attempt to cure him of his problem.

However, Prince George was still a drug addict at the time of his engagement to Princess Marina of Greece in November 1934. The arranged marriage of the pink sheep of the family, hailed publicly as an ideal love match, came as a huge relief to the Windsors, but it didn't signal any notable change in his lifestyle.

George died in August 1942, when the plane in which he was flying crashed in mountains in northern Scotland, killing fifteen passengers. His death, even sixty years after the crash, remains a royal mystery. The official report of events, read to the House of Commons, placed the blame squarely upon the plane's captain for taking the wrong flight path. Others have claimed, however, that the Prince himself was at the controls that day, drunk after a heavy session with crew members. The
lack of evidence concerning the crash and the failure to make the report public fueled darker rumors that the Prince had been assassinated because of his debauched lifestyle.

Curiously, Noel Coward went on to establish a long friendship with Princess Marina. It was, insiders noted, a strange relationship: they became so close that after Prince George's death a friend joked that Coward was trying to become the Dowager Duke of Kent.

         

As a cadet at Osborne, Lord Louis Mountbatten was branded a German spy, but in his lifetime came to be popularly regarded as the royal family's most heroic figure—a fearless destroyer captain, a Supreme Allied Commander in World War II, a statesman in India, and later a benign, wise old father figure to the nation. He was also promiscuously bisexual, although you won't find any mention of it in Philip Ziegler's 786-page official biography,
Mountbatten
—other than a terse four-paragraph dismissal of rumors that he was gay.

Mountbatten's marriage was arranged, a cynical pact designed to make the most of the combined assets of his royal connections and his wife's money. In 1921 he suddenly announced his engagement to the incredibly wealthy heiress Edwina Ashley, granddaughter of Sir Ernest Cassell, the son of a Jewish moneylender in Cologne who had gone on to make a fortune in banking. Cassell was a financial adviser to Edward VII and one of the richest men in Europe, and on his death his granddaughter inherited
£
2 million. For Mountbatten, ostensibly surviving
on a naval salary of about
£
350 a year, it was love at first sight. His new wife was dazzled by the fact that he was a minor royal. Mountbatten admitted later that the couple had spent their entire married lives hopping in and out of other people's beds.

Polite society was scandalized by their complicated affairs. What little time Edwina had left over from her extravagant shopping excursions she spent alone with her lesbian sister-in-law, or pursuing her much sensationalized interest in black men. The revelation in
The People
that she had been “caught in compromising circumstances” with the singer Paul Robeson was one of the great tabloid scandals of the day. The idea of a white, titled lady sharing a bed with a black man was, in the 1920s, too shocking for words, and Buckingham Palace advised her to sue. For the first time since Edward VII, a member of the British royal family took the witness stand and brazenly lied in a court of law. Edwina Mountbatten completely denied that she had ever met the singer and, to Robeson's astonishment and everlasting hurt, convinced the jury.
The People
was ordered to pay damages of
£
25,000.