Authors: Dennis Friedman
The King was supported in his decision by his favourite author, the imperialist Rudyard Kipling, Edward Elgar who wrote ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ and Sir Edward Carson, a barrister and the leader of the Unionists who had won the King’s approval for his prosecution of Oscar Wilde. King George was not supported by the Prime Minister, who tried to allay his fear that the Army would mutiny if it were asked to force Ulster into a union with the rest of Ireland. When the Home Rule Bill was introduced for its third and last time in March 1914 the King’s refusal to assent to it
led to a compromise. Asquith proposed that Ulster be excluded for six years from the provisions of Home Rule to allow for a testing of national opinion on the issue and that the nine counties be allowed to ballot independently on whether they wished to be excluded from it. The Irish Nationalists reluctantly agreed, but the Ulster Unionists, led by Carson, vehemently disagreed. He told the House of Commons that ‘We do not want sentence of death with a stay of execution for six years.’ Arms began to pour into Ulster encouraged by a very few officers in the Cavalry Brigade, who did not in fact threaten mutiny but merely said that they would resign their commissions if called on to fight against the Unionists.
King George had been thrown into the deep end of a political situation which he had not only made worse but which was now virtually set in stone. Had he assented to the Home Rule Bill on the eve of the Great War (during which many other issues, including the women’s suffrage movement, were forced into abeyance for four years), the men of Ulster and the Catholic patriots might conceivably have achieved a
modus vivendi.
The two factions might perhaps have been able to coexist during peacetime, as had done those of them who fought alongside each other in British regiments in wartime. Had the King supported the Bill one more religious war might have been avoided.
The sense of power that King George brought back with him from India, the satisfaction of knowing that his visit was the first by a reigning British monarch and that millions of people had seen him as a God who could answer their prayers, soon started to wane. He began to realize that however powerful his status among his subjects in India his power to influence matters at home was almost non-existent. He was disappointed that his efforts to resolve the sectarian difficulties of the Irish had come to nothing. On 8 May 1914 he saw what he hoped might be an opportunity to avert problems in a different area of conflict.
Prince Henry of Prussia, the younger brother of Kaiser Wilhelm, had breakfasted at Buckingham Palace to discuss with the King the increasing rivalry between Austria and Russia. The discussions were amicable. King George’s strong sense of family encouraged him to believe that his closeness
to Prince Henry and the high regard the two cousins had for each other might allow them to rise above the rhetoric of politicians for whom the King had little regard. When Prince Henry came briefly to Buckingham Palace on 26 July 1914 to say goodbye before returning home, the King made it clear to him that England would not allow Russia to be overthrown in the event of an attack upon it by Germany. Two days later, when the Prince reached Kiel, he wrote to the Kaiser quoting a statement he claimed was made by the King: ‘We shall try all we can to keep out of this and shall remain neutral.’ King George’s alleged statement could not have come at a worse time. On 28 June Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, and his wife the Duchess of Hohenberg were assassinated at Sarejevo by a Serbian student. The assassination at first was thought to be another anarchist attack on the monarchy. Austria, however, took the view that its unfriendly neighbour Serbia was behind the affair and issued Serbia with an ultimatum so onerous that it would not have been possible for any government to comply with it. Two days later Austria declared war on the Serbs and the Emperor of Russia mobilized the Russian Army to defend its ally against the Austrian attack. The British Prime Minister Asquith insisted that a telegram be sent in the name of the King to his cousin Tsar Nicholas II urging restraint. It was too late. Within a few hours Germany, coming to the support of Austria, was at war with Russia and declared war on France, now Russia’s ally. After Germany invaded Belgium Great Britain, too, entered the war.
The year 1914 saw the values of Victorian England vanish for ever, the British class system begin to crumble and a misguided belief develop that the war would be over by Christmas. King George V who had been trained to be of service to his country and to do his duty, had done his best to help resolve the major problems of the day. He had not been trained in diplomacy or the arts and was unable to engage in small talk, but before his retirement from the Navy he had been briefly given his own command. He had learned how to handle a warship in a time of peace. He knew that he had no idea how to handle the ship of state in a time of war, and after the failure of his efforts in Ireland and Europe he did not, to his credit, pretend otherwise.
As the German armies advanced through Belgium and northern France on the way to the Channel ports the King, who hitherto had been only able to cope with his underlying violence through sublimating it, had now to confront it. He found himself becoming increasingly distressed by the vast number of British soldiers who died in their efforts to halt the German advance. With his self-importance deflated by the horrors of a war that, despite his best efforts, he had failed to abort, he felt restless and anxious. His pessimistic mood echoed the gloomy prognostication of the Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Gray, as he watched the gaslights dim in Whitehall: ‘The lights are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.’ Years later, in September 1935, just three months before his death, the King, when informed of Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia, replied: ‘I’ve been through one war and I can’t stand another one.’
The King’s two eldest sons were already in the Services. Prince Edward (David) had been gazetted to the 1st Battalion Grenadier Guards and as a special honour had been detailed to the King’s Company. At five feet seven inches he described himself as ‘a pygmy among giants’. He was, however, prevented from taking an active role at the front by Lord Kitchener. The Secretary of State for War had told him that ‘If I were sure you would be killed, I do not know if I should be right to restrain you. But I cannot take the chance, which always exists until we have a settled line, of the enemy taking you prisoner’ (Windsor, 1951). His younger brother Prince Albert (Bertie), a midshipman on HMS
Collingwood,
was on sick leave soon after war broke out owing to what had been put down to complications following surgery for appendicitis. Bertie had complained of severe abdominal pain and sickness in September 1914 while at sea. His pain persisted long after the operation, leading to the eventual realization that his symptoms were due not to the increasingly popular diagnosis of appendicitis but to the peptic ulceration to which he had been prone since childhood. Bertie was ill for more than a year, recovering just in time to take part in the Battle of Jutland in 1916.
The King’s opportunity for more personal involvement came in
November 1914 when he paid his first visit to the Western Front. He and the Queen were parted for the first time. In a letter dated 29 November 1914, interesting principally for demonstrating how much his wife had taken over the role of his mother, Queen Mary wrote: ‘My own darling Georgie dear, I felt very sad at seeing you go today on your important mission, without me, for all these years I have thank God been able to accompany you on all important journeys during our married life, so I feel it rather having to stay at home.’ She went on to warn her husband to take care and avoid becoming overtired and hoped the weather would not be too cold. She ended her letter with: ‘God bless & protect you my own darling Georgie dear ever your very loving wife – May.’
The war was slow to strike home and most people – other than the families of sons who had been killed or wounded – did their best to carry on as if nothing had happened. This state of denial, understandable in the face of a danger no one wished to acknowledge, was shared by the King and Queen. In the early days of the war King George, certain that his German family could wish him no harm, was slow to abandon friendships with their emissaries. Count Albert Mensdorff, the Austrian ambassador, was connected to the British Royal Family through his relationship to Queen Victoria’s mother, the Duchess of Kent, and also to Prince Albert’s father, the Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. The King wrote to the Count assuring him that he would be welcomed back to London after the war, ending his letter with ‘ever your devoted friends and cousins George and Mary’.
It was some time before the King was able to accept that war was not merely a misunderstanding between members of his family but a fight to the death between European alliances. Hatred of all things German by most Britons extended even to the Royal Family. The First Sea Lord, Prince Louis of Battenberg (father of the late Lord Louis Mountbatten of Burma), had been a naturalized British subject since he was fourteen years old. Although he was married to a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, he had been born in Germany and was therefore obliged to resign his post. Others with even the vaguest of German connections shared the same
fate. The Lord Chancellor, Lord Haldane, felt it incumbent upon him to resign because he had in the past expressed pro-German sentiments. Violence broke out in the streets and was directed at British citizens with German-sounding names. There was, understandably, an embargo on all German imports. Even those who drank German wine were suspected of disloyalty, although Winston Churchill refused to give up Hock, explaining that he was merely ‘interning’ it. For a while more anti-German activity seemed to be taking place at home than on the war fronts. British victories were few and far between, and by the end of 1915, with trench warfare showing no sign of achieving any result for either side, the British Commander-in-Chief, Sir John French, was forced to resign. He was replaced by Sir Douglas Haig (of the whisky family), a friend of King George.
Sir Douglas’s first blunder was in October 1915. During the King’s second visit to France he lent the King his charger, having reassured him that the horse was crowd trained. As King George inspected the First Wing of the Royal Flying Corps, the call for ‘Three cheers for the King’ frightened the horse which reared and threw him. He was pinned to the ground and suffered massive bruising and a fractured pelvis which kept him confined to bed for about a month. The King never completely recovered his health and Queen Mary’s concern for her husband’s welfare, so vividly described in her letter to him during his first visit to the front, was well justified. Sir Douglas Haig’s second blunder was of a much greater magnitude and concerned his conduct of the war during the latter half of 1916. Between July and November 1916 Haig’s massive Somme offensive, which was aimed at smashing through the German lines, resulted in 420,000 British losses, 76,000 of which were sustained on the first day. By the end of 1916 scarcely a mile had been conceded by either side and Haig’s reputation was in shreds. The fact that these terrible losses had been suffered by soldiers, many of them mere boys, aroused less anger in the King than when civilians were targeted. While he had been informed that there could be some indiscriminate ‘bomb throwing’ by Zeppelins flying over London, he insisted on watching them from the
balcony of Buckingham Palace. These acts of violence, this intrusion, this invasion of his ‘space’ taking place so near his home so enraged him that, following a visit to Charing Cross Hospital to comfort the casualities caused by the raids, he wrote in his diary ‘the Germans are murderers and proud of it’.
The 74-year-old Admiral Lord Fisher, who had replaced Prince Louis of Battenberg as First Sea Lord, was so incensed that he suggested that batches of German prisoners be shot for every Zeppelin raid. The King was as horrified by Lord Fisher’s suggestion as he was by the Cabinet’s recommendation that captured German submarine crews should be executed as ‘pirates’. This was despite his personal view that the submarine crews’ behaviour in sinking unarmed merchant vessels at night was ‘brutal and inhumane’. In a letter to his son Bertie the King wrote that ‘It is simply disgusting that Naval Officers could do such things’.
Another act of violence against civilians, this time by British soldiers, aroused far less indignation. On Easter Monday 24 April 1916 the extremist Irish Volunteer Movement had, with the help of rifles and other weapons landed by the German ship
Aud,
seized the main Post Office in Dublin as well as other buildings in the surrounding area. British soldiers were murdered on the streets, and in the ensuing fighting over the four days which it took to restore order 100 British soldiers and 450 Irish civilians were killed. Fifteen ringleaders were executed and two thousand other rebels were brought to England and imprisoned. The Easter Rising, seen in England as a disgraceful act of wartime treason by the King’s Irish subjects and in Ireland as a successful political statement by Catholic Ireland, signalled the end of debate and the beginning of a belief, principally by Catholic Ulstermen at first, that only violence would be listened to by the British. The King now realized that by having withheld his assent to the final reading of the Home Rule Bill he had missed an opportunity to reconcile the needs of the Irish nationalists with those of the minority Protestant unionists. He was saddened and confused. It was not only the hated Germans who had brought violence to his homeland but the Irish whom he loved.
King George V was no stranger to violence. He had lived with it as a child, been punished for it as a growing boy, taught to suppress it in the Navy and found a sociably acceptable outlet for it as an adult. Shooting animals was a passion. He neither wished to understand the nature of his passion nor saw any reason to relinquish it. The shooting now taking place in France was another matter. At first fascinated and compelled to visit the Western Front as often as possible, the King now became sickened by the violence, and echoes of his impotent rage as a child resonated with the death and destruction. As the war drew closer the King, at first ‘protective’ of his ‘enemy’ relations and friends, now found it more difficult to justify this stance. He rationalized his heavily defended identification with the killing by the use of patriotic phraseology: ‘laying down one’s life for one’s country’ and the emotive use of words like ‘sacrifice’ and ‘valour’ enabled violence to become acceptable both to society and, to a lesser extent, to the King.