Authors: Dennis Friedman
Her comment that she felt she had been married to (had known) Prince George for years is an illusion common to all those who fall in love. The feeling of partners that they have known one another ‘for ever’ is thought to be a reminder of their first, not altogether satisfactory, infantile ‘love affair’ they had with the mother. Since it was the custom for infants to be removed from their mothers immediately after birth, neither Princess May nor Prince George had been given the opportunity to bond with theirs. If the primary love affair is as unsatisfactory as this, the need to bond with ‘a mother’ remains and may be acted out in adult life. It says much for the genuine love that Prince George and Princess May had for one another, as well as for the Princess’s instinctive realization that she would always have to play a maternal role with her mother-fixated husband, that throughout the forty-three years of their marriage they remained loyal to each other. It is an interesting footnote that when Queen Victoria first saw her eldest son, Prince Edward, she told the nurse to take him away because he was so ugly. Prince Edward did not bond with his mother but he did spend his life searching for the love she had denied him. Princess Alexandra in her wisdom, however, unlike Princess May, preferred to mother her children rather than her husband.
Prince George had always enjoyed reading aloud. He had read to his mother every evening during the hair-combing ritual and he quickly experienced a similar closeness with his bride. It says much for the success
of their marriage that the possibility of another damaging mother—child relationship, such as he had with his mother, was at first not an issue. It did, however, become a problem after their first child was born. Prince George then placed his wife on a pedestal (where she remained until his death in 1936) and worshipped at her feet, as he had once worshipped his mother. Queen Mary was happy to play the role of mother. It suited her as much as it did Prince George. She would become a mother figure as often as he wished. She would be a mother to her husband and a mother to her people, but she did not believe that her duties as a royal mother included being a mother to her children. Her ‘jewels’ were in her crown, rather than in her nursery.
Events now moved quickly for the newly-weds. At the end of July 1893 they were invited by Queen Victoria to spend Cowes Week at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. Princess May’s spirits, already high, lifted further as she realized that, as Duchess of York, doors were beginning to open for her. Kaiser Wilhelm (son of Princess Victoria – the Princess Royal – Queen Victoria’s grandson and Prince George’s first cousin) was placed next to her at dinner on her first night at Osborne. Princess May liked Wilhelm, an arrogant and quarrelsome man who seemed never to have recovered mentally from a birth injury that had left one arm twelve inches shorter than the other. Prince George’s parents, firmly on the side of the Danes, disliked the man – and his Napoleonic reaction to his disability – intensely, and their daughter-in-law’s pleasure at being in the place of honour next to him did not endear Princess May to them. Princess May, however, was beginning to enjoy her new role. One month later she passed another milestone. She discovered that she was pregnant.
P
RINCESS
M
AY DID
not enjoy her first pregnancy. She disliked the changes in her body, believed she looked unattractive and began to withdraw from social life. She was comforted to find that she had an ally in Queen Victoria who had also never liked being pregnant. ‘Having children is the only thing I
dread’
was the Queen’s comment during her first pregnancy. In a letter to her Uncle Leopold, the King of the Belgians, she wrote: ‘Men never think, at least seldom think, what a hard task it is for us women to go through this very often.’ Queen Victoria’s views had not changed when, fifty-four years later, seven months into Princess May’s first pregnancy, she wrote in similar vein to her eldest daughter Princess Victoria: ‘It is really
too dreadful
to have the first year of one’s married life & happiness spoilt by
discomfort & misery;
I have a most lively recollection of what it was before you were born—All sort of fuss & precautions of all kinds and sorts – displaying every thing & being talked abt & worried to death of wh. I think
with
perfect horror – in addition to wh.
I
was furious at being in that position.’
Queen Victoria’s non-maternal views did little to comfort Princess May. She continued to resent the gradual disappearance of her waistline and saw herself in appearance becoming more and more like her obese mother. The changes in her body were entirely outside her control and she did not like it. Her chaotic upbringing with a mother whose ‘can’t afford it’ responses to her daughter’s needs but ‘can afford it’ responses to her own had taught Princess May to play controlling role-play games in order to get what she wanted. Now no amount of control would change the course of events.
Princess May’s mother had brought her daughter up to believe that it was how you looked that was important, rather than who you were. Since Princess Mary Adelaide was not happy with her ‘poor relation’ perception of herself, she used her appearance to compensate for her lack of financial status. Princess May soon began to realize that what might have been true for her mother (who probably had little going for her until her daughter married Prince George) was also true for her. She was able to reassure herself that, as Duke of York and particularly as Duke of Cornwall, Prince George enjoyed an income from the vast ducal estates such that whatever future worries she might have they would never be financial ones. None the less, she was not comforted. With her swollen body she felt that no matter what her financial status she would be judged on her appearance. Resenting the child within her, she thought of how her mother had tried to compensate for her semi-illusory poverty by overeating. Princess Mary Adelaide had made obesity a feature of her life, had taken pleasure in the affectionate name ‘Fat Mary’ given to her and had presumably been untroubled by physical changes during her pregnancies. Princess May knew that her mother had not been happy, either as Queen Victoria’s impoverished cousin or as an overweight woman. Her mother was greedy and had not been satisfied with the love of her husband and children, her only genuine assets. She was, in addition, shameless and believed that the world owed her whatever she could lay her hands on. Although she loved her mother, Princess May also resented her and had no wish to become ‘Fat May’, greedy not for food, like her mother, but for love and approval.
Essentially a shy and private person, and feeling that she had been thrust into a central role on the royal stage before she was ready for it, Princess May disliked the attention her pregnancy attracted and she was unaccustomed to being fussed over. While for many women pregnancy fulfils compelling biological imperatives, Princess May’s material imperatives far outweighed her biological ones. To make matters worse, her mother-in-law used the pregnancy as an excuse to interfere in Princess May’s personal life. For this reason, Prince George and Princess May
decided to escape temporarily from York Cottage to their London home, a wing at St James’s Palace which they had named York House. There they would wait until the baby was due, at which time they would install themselves, as planned, at Buckingham Palace for the delivery.
Princess May disliked York House. Despite the sunny spring of 1894, the house seemed as dark and depressing as York Cottage and, like the cottage, it was full of tiny rooms which had also been furnished by Prince George and his mother before the wedding. The Princess felt enclosed and trapped by the gloom, the minuscule rooms and the reminders of Princess Alexandra’s intrusion into her marriage with which she was surrounded. No happier there than she had been at Sandringham, she decided to make a second move to White Lodge, Richmond Park, her old home. Her doctors forestalled any further upheavals by ‘suggesting’ that she remain there to deliver her baby. Princess May seemed to be panicking. She had gone home to her mother and her familiar bedroom to escape from the swollen body which she found so unattractive. Possibly trying to make up for her own deficiencies as a mother, Princess Mary Adelaide was over-attentive to a daughter who wanted to be ignored, and she and Prince George fell out over it. Although the Prince might have been pleased that he had at last found a ‘mother’ on whom he could justifiably vent his anger, Princess May was distressed because she did not want any family divisions. On 23 June 1894 her first child, a boy (later to become King Edward VIII), was born at White Lodge.
During her pregnancy the Princess’s female cousins complained that May never wanted to discuss pregnancy or babies, and they labelled her unmaternal. Since she also found breast-feeding, body odours, incontinence and even handling the baby repugnant she was unlikely to have bonded with her son. She seldom took him into her arms and could not wait to place him into the care of the nanny, Mary Peters, a young woman of twenty-seven with impeccable references. Peters had been taken on shortly before the baby’s birth on the recommendation of Lady Eva Dugdale, the Princess’s Lady-in-Waiting, for whose family she had worked. It seems clear now but was probably less so then that, agitated
and distressed as she had been during her pregnancy, Princess May had become depressed after her confinement.
As the time for the christening approached, Queen Victoria voiced her disapproval of her son’s and daughter-in-law’s choice of names. As was expected, she wanted to name the baby after her beloved Albert, a name she continued to insist upon for all her male grandchildren. The baby’s parents, however (probably more so his father), wanted him to be named in memory of his uncle Eddy. Queen Victoria pointed out that Eddy’s real name was Victor Albert, and a compromise was reached. The child was christened Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David. Because ‘Eddy’ had such sad connotations for his grandparents, however, it was decided that the boy would henceforth be known as David.
Queen Victoria was particularly delighted with the arrival of her great-grandson. His birth ensured that the direct succession to her crown was established for three generations. Fifteen hundred callers to White Lodge signed their names in the visitors’ book and the country rejoiced that both mother and baby were apparently well and making good progress.
Six weeks after her son’s birth Princess May went to St Moritz for a month with her mother and brother, in the hope that the bracing alpine air would improve her mood. Prince George went to Cowes for the sailing, and the baby remained at White Lodge with Mary Peters. Any opportunity for the infant David to bond with his mother had long since passed.
Princess Alexandra wrote to Prince George to let him know that she did not approve of Princess May leaving on his own not the baby but her son. It did not occur to her that the baby had been abandoned by both his parents. ‘I was sure you wld miss yr sweet
May
& tutsoms baby very much & it was a pity she had to leave you for St Moritz, but never mind once in a way does not matter so much.’ Princess Alexandra’s scarcely concealed message – that she would never have left Prince George so soon after he had been born – was a reminder to the Prince that she would miss no opportunity to denigrate the woman who had taken her son from her. Mary Peters now came into her own. She had become inordinately
attached to the baby and, in the absence of any evidence of maternal interest on the part of his mother, saw herself not just as a surrogate but as David’s actual mother. Unlike Princess May, who had belatedly recognized that she was not cut out for motherhood and was happy to leave the day-to-day management of her child to a nanny, Mary Peters never left her charge for a moment.
On his return from Cowes Prince George immediately resumed his royal duties. He laid a number of foundation stones: the Cripplegate Institute in London; the New General Hospital in St Mary’s Square, Birmingham, and the new Post Office building in Liverpool. Although Princess May was probably not fit enough to accompany her husband on these occasions, she did attend the weddings and funerals that occurred during the following months.
In August 1894, while Prince George and Princess May were apart, he wrote to his wife to complain how irritating he had found Princess Mary Adelaide while her daughter was pregnant: ‘I am very fond of Dear Maria, but I assure you I wouldn’t go through the six weeks I spent at White Lodge again for anything she used to come in & disturb us & then her unpunctuality used to annoy me too dreadfully. She was always most kind to me & therefore it made it impossible for me to say anything.’ Prince George also pointed out to Princess May that her mother had, in addition, come between them in London because of her too frequent visits to St James’s, ‘so that I saw you very little & it used to make me angry’. Prince George was beginning to realize that when someone’s bad behaviour is masked by tender expressions of concern it makes it difficult to express anger towards them. Was he also wondering whether ‘darling Motherdear’ had so anaesthetized his true feelings, with her sentimental expressions of love for him, that in his eyes she could do no wrong? Was he prevented, for the same reason, from voicing his disapproval of his mother-in-law’s unacceptable behaviour?
Prince George’s and Princess May’s courtship had been virtually nonexistent, and there had not been sufficient time for them to get to know
one another before Princess May became pregnant. Other events were also to come between them. Princess May’s pregnancy was not a comfortable one. She was distressed by the birth and depressed after it, and when she felt physically well enough her mother had taken her away to Switzerland. Her note from St Moritz was sad and to the point. ‘I well know how true it is & it used to fidget me dreadfully when I was laid up to feel that we could hardly ever be alone without being interrupted.’ Prince George’s reply was equally frank. ‘It is one of the small things in life which can just prevent one being absolutely happy & if it could be altered my happiness would be perfect; you know what I mean.’ Both Prince George’s and Princess May’s mothers professed to have loved their children when they were babies, but, like other mothers from their social background, when their children needed them most they had left them in the care of surrogates. Now, when the two mothers were no longer needed, they interfered with unsolicited help and advice and came between the newly-weds.